No wonder President Donald Trump is so worried about the midterm elections.

A tough day for some of his top officials and political priorities on Capitol Hill invoked a possibly miserable future for the White House.

If Democrats win back the House in November — or even the Senate, in a long-shot scenario — Trump will face a barrage of oversight and investigation that will turn the final two years of his term into an ugly slog.

A flurry of hearings on Tuesday showed what that might be like. Trump chose his lieutenants for their willingness to flatter, not their skill at deflecting scrutiny.

And it showed.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick arrived at a Senate subcommittee for what might have been a convivial chat about broadband. But he was ambushed over his trip to Jeffrey Epstein’s island years after an encounter he previously claimed left him disgusted and vowing they’d never meet again.

Suddenly, one of the most swaggering of all the president’s men became the latest focus of demands for accountability for the rich elites who once associated with the late sex offender — now happening on both sides of the Atlantic.

He was so obviously uncomfortable, the White House had to offer him a vote of confidence amid calls for Lutnick’s resignation.

Not surprisingly, Lutnick looked embarrassed to be asked about a lunchtime visit to Epstein’s island with his wife, children and nannies during a vacation. He served up an odd comment likely to feature in Democratic midterm ads.

“I have looked through the millions of documents for my name, just like everybody else,” Lutnick said. Democratic Sen. Chris Coons didn’t miss the opening. “No,” he said with a shake of his head. “Everyone isn’t worried about their names being in the Epstein files.”

Lutnick wasn’t the only Trump aide facing the heat Tuesday. Three top immigration and border officials got a rough ride in the House, especially over the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal agents in Minneapolis last month.

Senior ICE official Todd Lyons seemed to be trying to emulate the tone-deaf claim by then-Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino that federal officers facing protesters were the real victims in the city.

In one remarkable exchange, Rep. Eric Swalwell — no doubt with one eye on his run for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in California — asked Lyons about his previous pledge to make the deportation purge as efficient as Amazon Prime.

“Mr. Lyons, how many times has Amazon Prime shot a mom three times in the face?” Swalwell asked.

Lyons replied, “None, sir, but you’re also …”

He was cut off before he could argue that his Amazon allusion had been taken out of context. “It’s the square root of zero, that’s right,” Swalwell said.

Back in the Senate, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer was sending another message to Trump: Democrats will not let up on the Epstein scandal, despite Trump’s wish for the country to “move on to something else.”

“Justice should not expire,” Schumer said, surrounded by tearful survivors of Epstein’s abuse, as he backed Virginia’s Law, an attempt to end the statute of limitations on sex trafficking. The measure, named after Virginia Giuffre, an Epstein victim who reached a settlement with Britain’s former Prince Andrew and who took her own life last year, has poor prospects in the Republican-run Senate. But Schumer’s interest suggests that Democrats will pursue the Epstein matter vigorously if they win back any power in Washington.

Another sign of building pressure over Epstein came when Senate Republican Majority Leader John Thune failed to sweep the issue away.

“For people whose names appear or in some context might be in the Epstein files, they’re going to have to answer the questions around that, and I think the American people are going to have to make judgments about whether or not they think those answers are sufficient,” Thune said.

The temperature will rise on Capitol Hill Wednesday when Attorney General Pam Bondi testifies to the House Judiciary Committee. Bondi tends to arrive for such encounters armed with opposition research and scripted insults for her interrogators that will detonate on conservative media.

Lutnick was just the latest prominent figure to run the Epstein gauntlet.

He’s not accused of any offense, despite appearing in Epstein files released by the Justice Department. As he said himself, “Under no circumstances is there a single word that I’ve done anything remotely wrong in any possible regard.”

But he’s among many elites being asked to explain their contacts with Epstein, especially those following the disgraced financier’s emergence from prison in 2009 after serving 13 months for sex offenses.

Every time a high-profile figure — let alone a senior Cabinet member — faces such scrutiny, it’s bad news for Trump, who is also not accused of wrongdoing but has struggled to explain his own past friendship with Epstein.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s frustration was evident in her reaction to the new attention on the commerce secretary. “Secretary Lutnick remains a very important member of President Trump’s team and the president fully supports the secretary,” she told reporters. “I will just point out that there are a lot of wins in the news this week that people in this room have not asked about because you continue to ask questions about the same subject.”

Will checks and balances return to Washington?

Congressional hearings on their own won’t change much. Often, such sessions mostly serve members who bloviate and try to force their way onto partisan media shows with staged outrage. Officials often seem to be performing for an audience of one — their reality show president, who loves TV.

But the sharpness of Tuesday’s questioning conjured a possible alternative reality that could succeed a GOP Congress that ceded power to the executive and ignored its constitutional excesses. A strong election performance by Democrats in November would restore checks and balances to Washington.

Democrats could schedule endless hearings into the administration. They’d also have subpoena power, although as the last two years of Trump’s first term showed, the White House would play hardball. Constitutionally, things could get ugly fast. Last time around, two Trump loyalists, Peter Navarro and Steve Bannon, went to prison after refusing subpoenas to testify to Congress.

But new Democratic committee chairs would have perhaps the richest array of targets of any modern Congress.

Epstein would be just the start. They’d likely investigate Trump’s demolition of the East Wing of the White House; his obsession with seizing emergency powers; the Pentagon’s secrecy over possibly illegal boat strikes in the Caribbean and the Pacific; and the gift of a multimillion-dollar jumbo jet to Trump from Qatar. Democrats might also find rich pickings in ethical conflicts over the president’s family businesses, his regulation of cryptocurrencies and his use of executive power and the Justice Department to wage vengeance on his political foes.

Trump has said he fears that if Republicans don’t win the midterms, Democrats would impeach him for a third time. But would Democrats really go there — even when many believe he commits an impeachable offense every week?

Unless Trump did something so heinous that his approval ratings crashed into oblivion and Republicans wanted him gone, there’s almost no chance of a two-thirds Senate majority to convict. And no politician has weaponized victimhood so effectively as the author of the greatest political comeback in modern history.

And sometimes the political line is a fine one to walk. In the House hearing on the border, for example, Democratic Rep. Dan Goldman asked Lyons to identify 20th-century regimes that stopped people in the streets and asked for their papers.

“Is Nazi Germany one?” Goldman asked.

Many Americans view the behavior of federal agents as unconstitutional and threatening and perceive similarities with authoritarian states, especially following the killings of Good and Pretti. But analogies with the evils of Adolf Hitler’s regime are rarely wise or historically apt, as much as they might appeal to some progressives. Some moderate Republicans or independents might see such questioning as extreme.

Democrats have stumbled in the past when they’ve dived to the left in their hostility to law enforcement. And at times in Tuesday’s hearings, the immigration officials reminded the committee of Trump’s successes in cutting entries by undocumented migrants and of the Biden administration’s negligence in securing the border. Goldman, however, called ICE tactics “un-American and outright fascist,” saying they attracted justified comparisons.

And ICE’s extremism on the streets of Minneapolis has helped turned an issue that was once one of Trump’s best into a political liability.

That may explain the dip in his mood on Fox Business when he mused about the trend of presidents getting midterm election drubbings.

“I’m popular and I’ve done well,” the president insisted in an interview that aired Tuesday. Polls suggest that most voters disagree, and a wall of hurt may await in the last two years of his term.

Still, Democrats have to win first. An accident-prone party that has recently struggled with how to talk to Americans can take nothing for granted.