Donald Trump has called last night's midterms results a "tremendous success" on Twitter, which is certainly one way of describing losing control of the House of Representatives to the Democrats.

Yet, the Republicans strengthened their hold on the Senate, and that was enough for the President to conclude that he is possessed of powers beyond the reach of mere mortals.

xView full post on X

Ignoring for a moment that Ben Stein is best known as the boring economics teacher from Ferris Bueller's Day Off and made a film about how intelligent design theory was scientifically valid - and that his book The Capitalist Code isn't the Dan Brown knock-off you'd hope it would be - there's something here. Trump did manage to pull a few rabbits out of his hat last night.

Making the Republican control of the House disappear

Even Dynamo would struggle to pull off evaporating the 23 Republican representatives in the House, and he did a trick where he put someone's phone in a water bottle once. Breaking the Republican hold on the House means the Democrats will be able to subpoena Trump and bombard him with investigations. Top of the list: those tax returns he definitely meant to get around to sharing.

Dabbling in the dark arts of voter suppression

As much as Trump likes chucking around unfounded accusations of voter fraud, one of the big themes of the midterms has been the oddly repetitive reports of broken-down polling machines, enormous queues and voters turned away for minor discrepancies on their ID.

Things have been particularly heated in Georgia, with Atlanta voters having to wait an average of three hours to vote according to democracy watchdogs Common Cause Georgia, and there have been similar complaints in Texas and Florida too. Everyone in Britain wants to know why you lot don't use just pencils and paper.

Summoning up a new generation of Democrat candidates

Beyond the rises of defeated Texas candidate Beto O'Rourke and triumphant New York socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who at 29 became the youngest woman ever elected to congress, there's been a surge of progressive new faces for the Democrats. Look at Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, the first Muslim women to be elected to Congress, for instance, or the emergence of Andrew Gillum in Florida. He lost to Trump ally Ron DeSantis, but he'll be back. Would these breakthroughs have seemed as vital without Trump in the White House? Absolutely not.

Hypnotising Sean Hannity into campaigning for him against his will

"To be clear, I will not be on stage campaigning with the President," Hannity tweeted on Monday, 24 hours before appearing on stage to campaign with the President. Hannity still seems to be suffering from the after-effects of being Paul McKenna'd, as he's still working out whether exactly he lied.

Who could have foreseen that Trump would ask a man who routinely praises him and was standing near a microphone to praise him into that microphone? He's not just magic, Trump's got second sight too.