By the Time the House and Senate Had Been Called for Democrats on Tuesday
A consensus among members of both parties was forming: voters had rejected President Donald Trump's record in office, and he would face a starkly different political reality for the remainder of his term.
Trump, however, sees it differently.
“But I don’t view it as a hit on me,” Trump told Fox News in a live phone interview. “We’ve had the greatest two years in the history of the presidency in terms of the economy, in terms of all the things that we’ve done.”
The stunning results across America were not primarily the fault of the Iran war he began eight months ago, or the tariffs that drove up prices, or his fixation on topics distant from voters' minds, Trump insisted.
It was the candidates, he argued, helped along by favorable coverage of Democrats on his once-favorite channel, Fox News. The results were only a “little surprise,” he later told the network. The winds of history were always against him, he’d long warned. He neglected to mention that he had selected many of the candidates himself.
“I thought they’d do better,” he told Fox, referring to Republicans in the third person. Later, he attributed the losses to a “mood in the air.”
He also insisted Tuesday night that his governing agenda would continue apace, despite the dramatically altered political conditions in Washington.
The Election Results
The election results marked the end of a long and often frustrating campaign season for Trump, who spent the last month flying aboard Air Force One to red states, encouraging supporters to “pretend I’m on the ballot.”
The gambit failed, but Trump placed fault not in his own performance but in that of the people he was trying to help.
“They just didn’t inspire the people to get out and vote,” he told Fox. “And I wasn’t on the ballot. If I was on the ballot, they would have got out.”
Many of the candidates who lost on Tuesday—including Darline Graham in South Carolina, Ken Paxton in Texas, Michael Whatley in North Carolina, and Mike Collins in Georgia—were hand-selected by Trump himself, over the objections of other Republicans in some cases.
He did not mention this as he expressed blame on the candidates' inability to translate his support into votes.
“I had no choice,” he said of supporting Ken Paxton, the scandal-plagued candidate in Texas he endorsed over incumbent Sen. John Cornyn. “When it wasn’t fashionable, he kissed my ass.”
Trump's intensity in assigning blame to his party's candidates seemed to shift by the minute.
“I’m going to become a Political Pundit, both good and bad, on the reasons these Candidates won and lost!” he wrote on Truth Social a few minutes before midnight.
His first target was Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, the Republican incumbent who lost re-election to Democrat Gina Hinojosa. Trump deemed him a “Republican in name only” and claimed “He went back to his original formula, and it wasn’t pretty!”
But in a phone interview with Politico around the same time, he insisted he wasn’t interested in assigning blame.
“I don’t want to blame anybody,” he said. “I just want to say, you know, it was a very interesting period of time. I watched with great interest, learned from it.”
Trump sounded more conciliatory toward Democrats, with whom he will now be forced to work if he wants to pass anything through Congress. He made similar pledges after Republicans lost the House in the 2018 midterms, but those offers of bipartisanship did not materialize.
“You know, I have a lot of friends that are Democrats,” he said, without naming them.
He spoke vaguely of trying to find areas of compromise, but insisted he had no regrets about the Iran war, the issue many Republicans blame most for their party’s woes.