Trump admits bitter midterms defeat: ‘I’m a little bit surprised. I thought they’d do better’

Donald Trump had a bad feeling at the start of the year. Last January he held a retreat for Republican members of Congress to rally them for the United States midterms. “You gotta win the midterms ‘cause, if we don’t win the midterms, it’s just gonna be - I mean, they’ll find a reason to impeach me. I’ll get impeached,” he warned his party colleagues to spur them into action for an election that still felt far off.“We can’t let them forget that we did an excellent job at the border,” he added, in remarks that now seem prescient. The blue wave that swept across the United States on Tuesday handed Democrats control of Congress and will allow them to shape the Republican president’s political agenda.“I’m a little bit surprised. I thought they’d do better. These were the biggest rallies ever,” Trump admitted in a conversation with Fox News, which he berated throughout the day.He was quick to react on Tuesday when he realized the blue wave would sweep the country and imperil his legacy. “I wasn’t on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!” he wrote on his social network, Truth, even though during the frantic tour he launched in early October to try to reverse the polls he urged Americans to vote as if he were running. In a matter of weeks he visited about 30 states convinced he could change the mood of the electorate, as he did in 2016 and 2020.But Americans’ anger over inflation and frustration with the cost of living, tariffs, and the war with Iran have hit the Republican magnate, dragging him to some of the lowest approval ratings in history for a president on the eve of the midterms.The Republican president did not attempt to hide his unease about election day. He behaved compulsively on Truth with nearly 200 posts backing Republican candidates and attacking Democrats. But his effort failed. Democrats wrested the Senate from the conservatives and secured a comfortable majority in the House of Representatives. Their victory thwarts Trump’s hopes of spending his final two years in office quietly, focused on reshaping Washington’s architecture — an activity that seems to be the only thing that truly interests him.A new Republican eraWith Trump reduced to a lame-duck — as politicians in the final stretch of their term with no prospect of running again are known in Washington jargon — defeat in the midterms opens the race to succeed him as the Republican nominee for the 2028 presidential election.“I’m going to become a Political Pundit, both good and bad, on the reasons these Candidates won and lost!” he later wrote on his social network after attacking Greg Abbott, the Texas Republican governor who has lost his post to Democrat Gina Hinojosa in a historic state contest.“If Greg Abbott, the Governor of Texas, hadn’t become a RINO [Republican in Name Only] in the last six months of his Political Life, he wouldn’t have lost. He went back to his original formula, and it wasn’t pretty!” Trump wrote, overlooking that it was his decision to back Ken Paxton — the controversial Texas attorney general entangled in various scandals — over John Corbyn. That decision ultimately dragged Abbott into the Republican debacle.One of the major concerns in these elections, crucial for the country’s future, was how Trump would react to the results. He tried to interfere in Alaska by urging the Department of Justice to block the result if the Republican candidate lost. However, unusually, he sounded conciliatory in a phone conversation with two reporters from The New York Times when the election outcome already appeared clear.“We’ll work with the Democrats, and we’ll, you know, look forward to working with them. We’ll probably work something out,” the president said.Trump also claimed he did not regret imposing candidates such as Darline Graham, who lost the Senate race in South Carolina — probably the night’s biggest surprise — and Paxton, the Texas candidate who suffered one of the evening’s major defeats.Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition