Trump Wanted Americans To Vote Like He Was On The Ballot And They Eagerly Obliged

After two years of largely getting away with what he pleased without interference from a cowed Republican Congress, President Donald Trump faces a very different final two years of his term.

He almost certainly is going to hate them.

Democrats appear on track for perhaps a 70-seat margin of control in the House and have flipped the Senate as well, an outcome unimaginable just months ago, thanks to a president whose trade war against the planet and real war against Iran made him historically unpopular heading into the midterm elections.

The size of the Democratic sweep means the free pass he has received from a Republican-run Congress on his open corruption and his repeated flouting of laws is certain to end come January.

His grip on the Republican Party, which loosened briefly following his failed coup attempt on January 6, 2021, may finally end as well.

“Tonight is a total repudiation of Trump and Trumpism,” said Mac Stipanovich, a longtime Republican consultant in Florida who has pushed for the party to move beyond Trump. “There is a God.”

Trump, for his part, appears confused about exactly how he will handle things. Shortly before the polls closed, he suggested he was going to prepare for political combat with Democratic leaders.

“I have the ultimate power — it’s called ‘veto,’” he told CBS News, even saying he would welcome the nickname “Mr. Veto.”

A few hours later, after the defeat of the longtime Texas Governor Greg Abbott became official and it became clear the Republican Party was suffering a generational wipeout, his tone changed. 

“We’ll, you know, look forward to working with them,” he told the New York Times. “We’ll probably work something out.”

Not long after, he posted a photo on social media of a red Trump hat with the single word: “VETO.”

The president’s legislative agenda will likely grind to a halt, and his ability to get judges confirmed will essentially disappear.

Democrats appear likely to try to defund his war on Iran, likely setting up a clash between the legislative and executive branches over the unpopular conflict, which directly contributed to Republican losses on Tuesday night. 

And he and his allies are almost certain to face excruciating investigations from Democrats who will control the gavels ― and the subpoena power ― in both the House and Senate. 

Democratic Representative Robert Garcia, who will take over as chair of the House Oversight Committee in January and has already pledged to investigate the Epstein files, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the president’s self-dealing, delivered two words of advice to Trump and the GOP on Tuesday night: “Lawyer up.” 

But if Trump does end up having a horrible, no-good, very bad next two years, it’s largely due to problems of his own making. 

Notwithstanding his terrible approval ratings, Trump decided to use his presidential bully pulpit to make Tuesday’s elections all about himself — after already having inserted himself in Republican primaries with endorsements that leave him personally responsible for losing Republican Senate candidates in South Carolina, Texas, North Carolina and Georgia.

“Well, how’s that working out?” said Stuart Stevens, a Republican consultant who worked on both of George W. Bush’s winning presidential campaigns, adding that Republican officeholders were not blameless. “We still have free will in our politics. Any Republican could have called out Trump and criticised him. They didn’t. Character is still destiny.”

All year, Trump has professed a failure to understand why the party of an incumbent president has historically done poorly in midterm elections through the decades, even as he insisted it would be different for him because he has done such a fantastic job in his 21 months since returning to office.

He took it upon himself to stage a frenetic schedule of rallies across the country ahead of Election Day, thereby ensuring that any voter looking to send a message of disapproval about his tariffs, his Iran war, gas prices, grocery prices or anything else that displeased them could take it out on their local Republican candidate as a proxy.

“I really want you to pretend I’m on the ballot,” he said at his final rally on Sunday in Salina, Kansas.

It was a message he repeated dozens, if not hundreds, of times, as he embellished it with fictitious data points about how his presence on the ballot would increase turnout by 49% and how he had received more votes in pretty much every state than any other candidate ever.

Whether he actually believed his lies is impossible to know, but his insistence on ruling like an autocrat despite not even winning a simple majority of the votes cast in 2024 was bound to cause problems, especially if he failed to deliver on his major promises of that campaign.

And fail to deliver he did. Trump promised, repeatedly, that he would tackle rising grocery prices on Day One in office and that they would go down. He also promised, repeatedly, that he would slash energy costs — petrol, electricity, heating oil, and so on — by at least 50% in his first year in office, and told his audience to hold him to it.

Two years later, neither groceries nor energy got less expensive; instead, they kept getting costlier. Gasoline jumped more than a dollar a gallon after Trump began his war against Iran, while diesel fuel and heating oil have nearly doubled in cost.

Trump, meanwhile, publicly trivialised voters’ concerns.

Almost daily, he repeated lies that grocery prices were coming down, when Americans could tell from their personal shopping trips that they were not. Particularly after Democrat Zohran Mamdani became New York City mayor, hammering on “affordability,” Trump declared that it was a “fake” word and that the whole thing was a “hoax.”

As to petrol prices, Trump time after time told Americans that they should be happy to pay more at the pump because it meant Iran would not have a nuclear weapon ― even though the only reason Iran has any enriched uranium at all was that Trump had torn up the nuclear agreement that had been negotiated by former President Barack Obama and which Iran had been honouring.

On Tuesday night, Trump offered no public indication that he understood his role in creating the disaster for his party.

At about the same time that three-term Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott was conceding his reelection loss, Trump posted on social media: “I wasn’t on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE! Thank you for your attention to this matter.”