Word is leaking about what Donald Trump really thinks of the GOP’s midterm wipeout.
Appearing on CNN’s The Lead with Jake Tapper on Wednesday, White House correspondent Kristen Holmes told Tapper what the president, 80, is saying in private.
According to Holmes, behind closed doors, Trump is insisting the midterm wipeout wasn’t because of where he was, but because of where he wasn’t: the ballot.
“Behind the scenes, we’ve seen an enormous amount of finger-pointing and blame-shifting,” Holmes told Tapper, reflecting on the mood in the White House.
“In terms of the president himself, he has continued to say, and that includes behind closed doors, that he believes the reason Republicans lost was not a rebuke on him, but because, in fact, he was not actually on the ballot,” Holmes said.
Trump spent weeks telling supporters to treat the midterms as his own race.
“MAGA, pretend I am on the ballot,” he posted on Truth Social on Sept. 28.
Once the results rolled in on Tuesday night, he ranted, “I wasn’t on the ballot, and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE.”
“And I do want to note one thing here, Jake. He keeps talking about the size of the rallies, saying, ‘I saw all these people, and they did not come out to vote for the candidate,’” she said, poking a hole in the president’s crowd-size excuse.
“But I went to a number of these rallies, and I interviewed those voters, and they were people who were already going to vote Republican. So it’s unclear that that’s really what happened here, that they didn’t transfer the love over to the candidates.”
Holmes had begun the segment by revealing the identity of one of the targets in the White House’s blame game.
“A lot of it... pointing towards the war in Iran and those who encouraged it, including Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense,” Holmes said.
According to Holmes, Hegseth has offered to take responsibility, but his critics in the party are taking the moment to call him out.
“Now, Pete Hegseth has told the White House he’s willing to answer for any decisions made. But there are Republicans, and a growing number of them, who are turning against the secretary of defense, essentially saying things out loud that they were unwilling to say several months ago, like he was the biggest cheerleader of getting President Trump to go into Iran, to strike Iran without any exit plan, that he misled the president, as well as lawmakers, when he was briefing them on just how quick this would take, what the timeline would look like.
“President Trump himself, he has defended Hegseth. He has said he’s his best guy—privately and publicly,” Holmes told Tapper. “But he’s also been asking quite a number of allies now what they think of Hegseth[‘s] performance.”
Trump has conceded one thing. “Iran was a piece of it,” he told The Wall Street Journal on election night.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House and the Pentagon for comment.
