Here are some photos from Wednesday, just hours after the blue tsunami midterms. Donald Trump stepped outside the White House to check on the construction of his fakakta ballroom. He looked exhausted, unkempt and out of it. This was one of the worst losses he’s ever had, combined with the 2020 election. According to the Daily Beast and the Daily Mail, up until Election Night, Trump was living in a bubble of delusion that the midterms would be good for him and good for the Republicans. He was apparently catatonic watching the results come in on Tuesday night.

Donald Trump was so angry at his breathtaking midterm defeat that he holed himself up in the dark with his ever-present aide, Natalie Harp, as the results rolled in.

A White House insider told the Daily Mail that aides ordered platters of appetizers from the Cheesecake Factory in the “delusional” expectation that there’d be something to celebrate as the results of the nationwide contests poured in on Tuesday night. But by 10 p.m. the uneaten trays of sliders and eggrolls were turning stale in the East Room as even top administration officials fled the building to drown their sorrows in the bars of D.C.

Within an hour of the first results, Trump was so furious that he briefly lost the ability to speak, holed up in his second-floor private residence with Harp, his executive assistant, and Chief of Staff Susie Wiles.

“He’s watching Fox News barely uttering a word and paralyzed into silence,” one insider told the Mail. “It’s very, very dark in the residence,” another added. “It’s a dark scene.”

The 80-year-old president rode into Tuesday’s polls with his approval at a miserable 32 percent and with Democrats enjoying a 9-point advantage on the generic congressional ballot. The Democrats made good on that lead to sweep both the House and Senate in a blue tsunami that will leave Trump struggling to get his head above water for the remainder of his second term.

Ever eager to feed him good news, Trump’s advisers kept promising him a midterm victory right up until the polls opened. Wiles in particular was telling White House staff that Republicans would come out on top as late as September, one source told the Mail. And the insider has now also revealed that Trump’s former campaign manager Chris LaCivita had been delivering the same message to the president at weekly Thursday meetings.

That unfounded optimism apparently had West Wing staffers chattering about the GOP expanding their majority in both the House and Senate even as late as Tuesday morning.

“Delusional,” as the Mail’s source put it. “They were delusional right until the very end.”

Another insider recalled watching the president’s longtime comms strategist Jason Miller panicking and doused in sweat as newscasters announced one embarrassing Republican electoral defeat after another.

[From The Daily Beast]

The Cheesecake Factory apps!! LMAO. All of us who remember the Obama years clearly recall the infamous moment during Fox News’ Election Night 2012 coverage, when Karl Rove had an on-air meltdown over Obama’s landslide reelection. Megyn Kelly, the Fox News anchor at the time, had to go to Rove off-camera and ask him if his projections were just emotional-support numbers he made up to soothe his feelings (I’m paraphrasing). My point is that we should never underestimate Republicans’ ability to delude themselves, and when reality comes crashing down on them, they are known to freak out, loudly and publicly. It does not surprise me that Trump’s people lied to him, nor does it surprise me that his people were too stupid to understand which way the wind was blowing politically. Also: I would love it if the incoming Democratic Congress shut down this fakakta ballroom crap. Just raze it to the ground.

Photos courtesy of Backgrid.