Trump’s Midterms Nightmare

What does it look like for a president to morph into a lame duck in real time? Look no further than Donald Trump’s Truth Social account on election night, where, in the midst of ordering Cheesecake Factory delicacies for the White House, the portrait of a man coming to terms with his diminished standing in the world emerges.

Trump began his election night journey fuming at Fox News, blaming the network for the steep Republican losses reverberating around the country. “No wonder FoxNews Ratings are collapsing, and they’re going to go down a lot further,” he wrote. “They’re way down, not because of me, but because they are AGAINST me! This happened once before, and Fox almost collapsed. It’s happening again!”

Later in the night, after posting an image of a MAGA hat emblazoned with “VETO,” Trump claimed that “Fox News bears responsibility for these losses by constantly and consistently putting on the Dumocrat opposition, and worse.”

The president also attempted, unconvincingly, to distance himself from his very personal, much-repeated exhortations to voters to imagine that he was on the ballot this year as an incentive to get out and vote Republican. “I wasn’t on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!” Trump wrote.

Away from the furious posting, however, Trump appeared uncharacteristically willing to accept the reality of just how badly the GOP had performed. In fact, the Democratic Party’s historic wins on Tuesday—including in areas where a Democratic victory had long been considered unimaginable—were so resounding that Trump told the New York Times that he would work with Democrats in his new capacity as a lame-duck president. That same off-brand mix of resignation and acknowledgment of reality appeared again in a surprise call with Politico, where Trump repeated similar sentiments—though in both conversations Trump made a point of underscoring his veto power. As the evening came to a close, Trump even managed to make amends with Fox News. Or at least enough to appear on the network to congratulate Democrats.

But don’t take any of that to mean Trump isn’t melting down. Privately, the president reportedly lashed out at “lazy” Republicans and RINOs, even though the midterms were widely viewed as a referendum on his leadership. Stay tuned to see if the GOP’s anger with the president turns into something more public and substantive.