Donald Trump has blamed the GOP’s astonishing midterm defeat on his supporters refusing to listen as he begged them to imagine that it was his name on the ballot.
Politico’s White House bureau chief Dasha Burns put a call in to the 80-year-old president late Tuesday night as the true scale of the Republican electoral massacre became clear.
He picked up.
“What’s your message? What do you think happened with your party tonight?” Burns asked him straight out of the gate.
“I wasn’t on the ballot, and, uh… we didn’t get the people out, but I wasn’t on the ballot, if I was on the ballot we would’ve won, we would’ve won it all very easily,” Trump replied.
But the Politico reporter wasn’t letting up. “But Mr. President, you told voters you were on the ballot, to go vote as if you were on the ballot,” she said.
“Yeah, I said say you’re on the ballot [sic], think about me being on the ballot, but they didn’t agree, and they didn’t like the candidates in most cases, so… it’s just one of those things,” he shot back.
Trump’s efforts to throw his own party under the bus came after his repeated assertions that his supporters were always more motivated to turn out when they were voting directly for him.
He pleaded with them to “Pretend I’m on the ballot” more than 75 times while stumping for various candidates across the country over the past several weeks, according to the nonprofit Republican Accountability Project.
His comments to Burns echoed a Truth Social post he put out around 10.30 p.m. on Tuesday to declare: “I wasn’t on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!”
But an alternative take on the results suggests voters in fact listened intently to the president’s pleas and took him at his word.
Trump went into the midterm elections with his approval rating at a miserable 32 percent.
That’s a record low for either of his administrations and below even where it stood after the Jan. 6 riots in January 2021.
Voters consistently ranked his disastrous war of choice with Iran and its devastating impact on already widespread unaffordability as chief concerns ahead of the polls.
Those anxieties helped Democrats gain a more-than-9-point lead on the generic congressional ballot as Trump baselessly pledged the conflict would end immediately after the vote and dismissed cost-of-living concerns as a “hoax” pushed by his political opponents.
Democrats have now swept control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate in a political earthquake that will rock the White House for the final two years of Trump’s term.
Controlling Congress will allow the president’s foes to launch sweeping investigations into his administration.
They have already pledged accountability on everything from the president’s family business dealings and the Justice Department’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files to Trump’s immigration crackdown and his war on Iran.
A House majority also hands Democrats the power to launch impeachment proceedings against members of his administration.
But party leaders remain wary of repeating their efforts to remove Trump from office during his first term after the backlash those earlier attempts sparked.
Control of the Senate gives Democrats another powerful weapon to block future presidential appointments, including federal judges, Cabinet officials, and ambassadors.
Majorities in both chambers grant the party broader opportunities to derail much of Trump’s remaining legislative agenda and demand concessions over government spending.
But the president’s veto powers mean they cannot simply force their own legislation into law, setting the stage for bitter congressional negotiations leading up to the 2028 presidential elections.
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment on this story.
