There’s a certain freedom in low expectations. Going in to Tuesday’s midterm elections, forecasts were so grim for the Republicans that poll watchers started trading a kind of knowing joke: that the results would either mean the end of the Trump era, or the end of the polling profession.

Amid those sorts of predictions, any Republican victories would have seemed like a minor miracle. The expectation was that Democrats would have a blowout; Republicans, counting on the final tally to be a bit more mixed, would therefore almost certainly have the freedom to claim that they’d done better than anyone had thought they would.

It will be difficult to credit those spins today. The electorate issued the president a message of dissatisfaction with the second Trump term, and voted decisively to curb his power.

Now, with a Senate majority, Democrats will be able to investigate the president and his cabinet members, draw public attention to their own agenda items, assert Congress’s constitutional prerogatives, and block Republican judicial appointments.

In the coming days and weeks, Trump will alternately say that the Republican losses were fake – the result of fraud by a nefarious but ill-defined conspiracy of Democrats and illegal immigrants – and that they were real, but somebody else’s fault.

His administration has signaled over the past weeks that it could make........

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