Trump ‘a little bit surprised’ as Republicans turn on him over defeat
Donald Trump said he was “a little bit surprised” by the Democrats’ sweep of both houses of Congress, blaming high petrol prices from the Iran war and, in a string of posts, Fox News. “I wasn’t on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!” he wrote. Inside his party, shock turned to anger: “It’s on him. It’s not on anybody else,” a senior Texas Republican lobbyist told the BBC.
Bill Miller called the result “a total, complete rejection of President Trump” and “a disaster of the first magnitude”; a White House ally said the Iran war, tariffs and the immigration crackdown had created a “perfect storm”. Democrats took Senate seats in Kansas for the first time since 1932, in Texas since 1988 and in South Carolina since 1998; both chambers have changed hands together in a midterm only three times since the Second World War, in 1946, 1994 and 2006. Mr Trump told Fox News that voters “weren’t willing to do the short term consequences of paying more for gasoline”, told Politico that they “didn’t like the candidates in most cases”, and posted an image of a red cap bearing the word “VETO”. JD Vance went further in a statement on X, saying the war was the reason the party lost and that “any honest conversation about where we go from here must start there”. Before the results were in, Mr Trump had accused Fox of “constantly and consistently putting on the Dumocrat opposition”; its anchor Bret Baier noted on air that the network’s polls had been close to right.