Republicans were so punch-drunk Tuesday night that they couldn’t even get off the mat to agree on who to blame for their electoral bloodbath.
The 2026 midterm elections saw the Democrats walk away with at least 54 seats in the Senate, in a night in which they won every single toss-up, barring Alaska, which as of 2 a.m. Eastern had not been called. They clinched the magic number of 218 needed to control the House of Representatives in the early hours of Wednesday morning.
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Before all the results were in, a very active President Donald Trump blamed the candidates and the war in Iran, while other Republicans apportioned responsibility to the president.
“I think a part of it was Iran,” Trump told Fox News early Wednesday morning. “They didn’t like the candidates, and some of the candidates that I endorsed fought me, and they didn’t like they fought me … the base would tell me — you know hundreds of thousands of people would just say, ‘Sir, they weren’t for you,’ and you know that this fellow has flaws. They knew more than I did about these people in some cases. In other cases, they just didn’t inspire the people to get out and vote. And I wasn’t on the ballot. If I was on the ballot, they would have gotten out.”
Not everyone saw it that way.
One Republican close to the White House told the Washington Examiner that “the wheels have come off, the driver is asleep, and the engine is on fire.”
At the same time, a Trump administration source described the results as a “bloodbath” for the president and the party.
Sarah Matthews, a White House deputy press secretary from Trump’s first term in office, told the Washington Examiner that “it seems like voters took Trump seriously when he told them to vote as if he were on the ballot.”
“Trump has no one to blame but himself. He started a war with Iran, imposed tariffs that drove up costs for Americans, unleashed ICE to carry out cruel mass deportations, and presided over rampant corruption within his administration,” she said. “These are all self-inflicted wounds that fueled voter anger, and tonight, that anger showed up at the ballot box. It certainly didn’t help that he handpicked weak candidates who only made matters worse. And it turns out that making your closing argument about Jon Husted’s ass and the Cheesecake Factory wasn’t exactly a winning political strategy.”
A White House official had told the Washington Examiner that Trump and his aides were “cautiously optimistic” before early returns started trickling in Tuesday evening. Staff, for example, had ordered takeout from the nearby Cheesecake Factory, an apparent dig at former President Barack Obama, who said in the closing days of campaigning that Trump’s updates to the White House decor looked as if Saddam Hussein had designed one of the aforementioned chains himself.
“The President has left it all out on the field and he’s done everything that was needed. Republicans are in a better spot now than they were four weeks ago,” the person said.
But the mood inside the White House quickly shifted as the numbers started looking better for Democrats throughout the night.
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Trump told Fox News that he had already spoken with Democrats, as the likes of now-House oversight committee ranking member Robert Garcia (D-CA) advised the president to “LAWYER UP” as congressional investigations loom.
Meanwhile, a senior White House official told the Washington Examiner shortly before 9 p.m. that the “White House mood is defiant.”
One aide indicated that the White House blamed the war in Iran for moving voters toward Democratic candidates, adding that “anyone who voted Democrat today is going to have a serious case of buyer’s remorse when gas prices come down quickly when the Iran conflict is solved.”
“Regardless of how today plays out, President Trump’s resolve to stop the Radical Left is only going to become stronger,” that adviser said. “Buckle up.”
Simultaneously, Trumpworld started to point fingers over the losses, which included stunning upset losses in South Carolina, Kansas, and the Democratic white whale of Texas.
One senior White House official suggested to the Washington Examiner that War Secretary Pete Hegseth was firmly in the crosshairs over his counseling of the president concerning the war in Iran.
“The polls were right. Were Pete Hegseth’s projections about this war right? I hope he’s ready to explain to Congress what he told the president would happen,” that person said.
Trump, however, downplayed the prospect of Hegseth being pushed out, telling Fox News host Bret Baier just after midnight Wednesday there were unlikely to be personnel changes.
“No, I don’t think so,” he said. “It had nothing to do with my Cabinet. It was just a point — honestly, look. I’ve been doing a lot of great things for a long time, and it’s just a point in time.”
Other people in Trump’s orbit similarly sought to insulate the wider team from political repercussions.
“Nobody’s to blame. It’s a f***ing wave,” one White House aide told the Washington Examiner.
A veteran Republican operative working with Trump’s outside political operation predicted that the news media would blame James Blair, Trump’s former White House deputy chief of staff who is leading the outside political shop, but insisted that Tuesday night was “not a matter of the minutiae of political operative decisions.”
For the operative, the results had a simple explanation.
“Clearly it is Iran and its consequences,” they said.
Matthews, Trump’s former spokeswoman, additionally questioned when Republicans would “start distancing themselves from Trump.”
“For years, they’ve tolerated behavior they privately knew was indefensible because they believed he was politically useful,” she said. “But when the very person you’ve spent years defending starts costing you elections, that loyalty becomes a whole lot harder to justify.”
Trump spent election night at the White House, including at an election watch party in the East Room from 7 p.m.
Before that he took to social media to complain about Fox News’s coverage and the cable news network’s polls, ceding potential blame for Tuesday’s results on the network itself. He criticized Jessica Tarlov, the Democratic pundit on The Five, writing on Truth Social that he “can’t stand” Tarlov’s voice and that she is “dumb as a rock.” He also texted co-host Greg Gutfeld additional complaints about Tarlov, which Gutfeld then read live on air.
The president continued to vent online well into the night, castigating “RINO” Greg Abbott for losing the Texas governor’s race and renewing attacks against Fox News, claiming that having Democratic pundits, including former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, on air means “FoxNews bears responsibility for these losses.”
Despite his lamentations, Trump said he wanted to work with the congressional majorities on immigration and other issues.
“Believe it or not, I’ve already spoken to some of them,” the president said during his Fox News interview. “Two senators and three congressmen, actually. So it’s a total of five, and I have three waiting to call me.”
“They obviously want to talk, but I have the power of veto, and the power of veto is, as you know, it’s impervious,” he went on.