For months leading up to Tuesday’s election, President Donald Trump repeatedly delivered a simple ask in rally after rally: pretend I’m on the ballot.
Voters across the nation appeared to follow his guidance on Tuesday, but not in the way the president intended.
Democrats wrested control of the House and Senate in a stunning victory poised to shake up the balance of power in Washington and have an early impact on the 2028 elections.
Despite the president’s pleas on the campaign trail for people to vote as if he were running, by Tuesday night, Trump was dashing off Truth Social posts saying he had not been on the ballot — if he had been, he claimed, Republicans would have won “IN A LANDSLIDE.” His aides, acknowledging the resounding and widespread losses to Democrats, argued that MAGA voters didn’t show up at the polls because Trump wasn’t actually on the ticket.
“This is pretty much worst-case scenario,” one White House official said late Tuesday as the results rolled in. This person, granted anonymity to speak candidly about the mood inside the White House, said many Trump aides were “shocked” by the margins in numerous statewide races, which in many cases surpassed even the most pessimistic polls gauging Republican support.
But as White House officials tracked returns inside a downbeat East Room watch party Tuesday night, they sought to rewrite history and distance the president from his prior statements and decisions.
“President Trump was not on the ballot, and it’s proven that Trump voters show up when he is on the ballot,” another White House official said, requesting anonymity to talk candidly about the results. “Also, candidate quality matters, and President Trump did a better job promoting many of the candidates on the ballot than the candidates did themselves.”
Of course, Trump will never be on the ballot again, a reality that began to sink in for members of his party who were looking to pick up the pieces.
“Low-key the party deserves this,” said one staffer on a losing campaign that Trump backed, granted anonymity to talk candidly. “We took our victories for granted.”
“I hope the party learns the right lessons from this,” the aide added. “Time for a President Rubio and get back to trying to win elections instead of just owning the libs” they added referring to the Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a possible 2028 contender.
There is likely to be a reckoning for Republicans, whether or not Trump participates, given the apparent scale of the blue wave that washed over the country. Democrats appear to have picked up at least 30 House seats and flipped seven seats in red states to capture the Senate majority. The Democratic victories will shake up Washington and reverberate into the 2028 presidential campaign.
In fact, the Republican drubbing is on track to become one of the worst midterm losses for a party in power in modern history. The scale of the GOP’s defeat is certain to energize congressional investigations of the president, shake up the White House staff and seep through state governments in ways that could reshape Trump’s legacy during the last two years of his presidency.
White House aides had quickly started engaging in the blame game as the results poured in – privately attacking their own colleagues for strategic errors and blaming the Iran war for high gas prices, among other factors. But those who complained about the approach were initially careful not to blame Trump himself.
After it became clear Democrats would gain control of both the House and Senate, one White House official acknowledged: “There certainly was a lack of message discipline by the president.”
Trump himself appeared unapologetic in the immediate aftermath. Just after midnight, he spoke on Fox News and blamed some of the candidates for how they campaigned, while defending the war in Iran. He did acknowledge that gas prices played a key role in voters’ calculations.
“I think it’s the gasoline price. People agree with what I’m doing on Iran, but they really probably weren’t willing to do the short-term consequence of…paying more for gasoline, and that you know, I understand that. That’s, it’s like I don’t agree with it,” the president said on Fox.
Despite previous attempts to preemptively cast doubt on the results, Trump said he would accept them, even congratulating Democrats on their strong night. “They did a good job,” he said. “They’ve been looking for this one for 11 years and they finally got it, but I don’t view it as a hit on me. I think 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.”
Trump did put a lot of his political skin in the game.
Trump drove critical decisions that flipped the Senate. In Texas, he helped knock out a sitting four-term Republican senator in a primary for a candidate even Republicans saw as deeply flawed. In North Carolina, he attacked a sitting GOP senator and replaced him with a former Republican party chair who struggled throughout the race. In South Carolina, which hadn’t sent a Democrat to the Senate in nearly a century, he quickly backed a political novice – the sister of the late Sen. Lindsey Graham – and helped flip another reliably red seat.
Asked in May about his decision to endorse Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton — who faced numerous scandals and legal controversies — over incumbent Sen. John Cornyn and whether Senate leadership was on board with the strategy the president said, “they’ll be alright with it. They wanna win. I know how to win.”
Trump echoed that confidence on Truth Social writing about James Talarico, “I believe that any human being running against him, sick, incompetent, close to death or, even a child would win.”
In North Carolina the president threatened GOP Sen.Thom Tillis with a primary challenge after Tillis broke party lines to vote against the “One Big Beautiful Bill.” Tillis announced he would not seek re-election and Trump handpicked Michael Whatley, the former chair of the Republican National Committee to run for the seat. At a rally in the state last month, Trump told supporters, “And you know, I said, Michael, I’d love you to run for the Senate. I’m the one that got him into this. I hope, I hope it works.”
Following the sudden death of then-Sen. Lindsey Graham, the president said he personally asked his sister Darline to run for the seat during her visit to the Oval Office. Trump wrote on Truth Social, “During her visit, I asked Darline, for the Good of our Nation, to run for the U.S. Senate in the Special Republican Primary on Tuesday, August 11, 2026.”
As he personally intervened to select candidates to run, the president maintained the power of the Trump brand would propel his MAGA base to save his party.
Rallying in Mississippi the president told supporters last month, “So in this election, if you would, I’m asking you to pretend that I’m on the ballot.”
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