President blames election losses on the shutdown and on his own absence from the ballot.

Tuesday night, three Democrats won big races. Mikie Sherrill took New Jersey. Abigail Spanberger took Virginia. Zohran Mamdani took the City of New York. The President, who is the leader of the other party, who is in his second term, who has the bully pulpit and the executive branch and the Truth Social account, posted that the losses were because he was not on the ballot.

Buddy. You can’t be on the ballot. The Constitution says you have served two terms. The country is not allowed to vote for you again. That is not a campaign problem. That is a math problem with the Twenty-Second Amendment.

Also: it’s a midterm-adjacent off-year election. The President is never on the off-year ballot. Not Reagan. Not Clinton. Not Obama. Not the first Bush. None of them. They were all not on the ballot, and three of them lost the off-year, and none of them said the reason was their absence from the ballot, because all of them had read the calendar.

The other reason offered was the shutdown. The shutdown that closed federal offices for forty-three days. The shutdown caused by Senate Republicans refusing the same continuing resolution they could have passed in October. The shutdown the President spent the first three weeks of celebrating on Truth Social as a way to break the Democrats. That shutdown.

I have run a casino floor. When the slots are losing, I check the slots. I do not blame the players for not bringing me on a ride-along.

By Thursday the President was already saying he might “help a little” with the new mayor of New York, the same mayor he’d called a communist Marxist socialist all summer. That is what we call a tell. The man has noticed the room. He just hasn’t admitted it yet.

I’m arguing with the television again.