Trump’s one-word cap post reveals his sudden lame-duck role after losing Congress

With Democrats poised to take control of both the House and Senate and cement his status as a lame duck, President Donald Trump is threatening to respond by using the one remaining lever of power available to him by rejecting legislation presented to him by the new Democratic-led Congress en masse.As election results filtered in showing Republican candidates for the upper chamber losing to their Democratic challengers in Texas, Nebraska, Iowa, South Carolina and other traditional strongholds, Trump posted an image of one of his iconic red baseball caps to his Truth Social account.On the hat was just one word: “Veto.”The monosyllabic threat was a reference to the president’s power to reject legislation passed by both houses of Congress and presented to him for his signature, an authority Trump has exercised a total of 12 times across his two terms in the White House.He elaborated on the threat during a phone interview with Fox News just after midnight on Wednesday, telling anchor Brett Baier: “The power of veto is one of the stronger powers that a president has, and they'll send over things that are insane, and I'll veto them. And after a couple of months of vetoes, they'll call and they'll say, "How do we get this stuff done?" And we'll work together,” he said.Trump added that he has “a lot of friends who are Democrats” and suggested that members of the incoming majority “want to talk.”“That's the power of veto, and the power of veto is, you know, impervious,” he said.Should Trump exercise his veto power, Congress can still force bills into law by voting to override the veto by two-thirds majorities. Most attempts to override Trump’s vetos have failed, but Congress did successfully override a last-minute veto of the annual National Defense Authorization Act during Trump’s last weeks in office at the end of his first term.Trump’s threat to reject “insane” legislation passed by a Democratic-led Congress came on the heels of historically dismal midterm election results that saw voters deliver unprecedented rebukes to the president and his erstwhile allies on Capitol Hill.In state after state, his hand-picked candidates for House and Senate seats lost to a broad range of Democratic challengers, including in places where no Democrat had won a statewide election in decades.In Texas, Trump ally Ken Paxton lost decisively to Democratic state representative James Talarico despite an influx of millions upon millions of dollars from the world’s richest man, Elon Musk. Another close ally of the president, longtime Lone Star State Governor Greg Abbott, lost his bid for a fourth term to challenger Gina Hinojosa. In Kansas, where no Republican had been elected to the Senate in nearly a century, GOP Senator Roger Marshall lost to a Methodist pastor, Adam Hamilton.South Carolina Senator Darline Graham, the sister of the late senator Lindsey Graham, fell in her bid to fill the remainder of her brother’s term to physician Annie Andrews. And in the House of Representatives, a glut of GOP members running in districts drawn to make them almost impossible to lose still ended up losing to Democratic challengers who were boosted by record turnout among Black and Latino voters as well as young voters outraged by gas and diesel fuel prices driven higher and higher by the war Trump started against Iran nearly nine months ago. As he spoke to Fox News, Trump congratulated the Democrats for their victory but he declined to take any blame for the losses.Writing on Truth Social, he claimed that had he been on the ballot this year, Republicans “would have won IN A LANDSLIDE.”