President Donald Trump criticized fellow Republicans and Fox News’ election coverage in a series of Truth Social posts Tuesday night as his party suffered defeats up and down the ballot. Had he been on the ballot, he lamented, Republicans would have won “IN A LANDSLIDE.”
Trump singled out Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who lost his re-election bid to Democrat Gina Hinojosa, calling him a “RINO,” short for “Republican in name only.”
Read more: Democrat Gina Hinojosa Ousts Gov. Greg Abbott in Texas, Ending Decades of Republican Leadership
“He went back to his original formula, and it wasn’t pretty,” said Trump, who had praised Abbott as “strong and highly respected” a day earlier.
In a phone interview with Fox News, Trump said he was “a little surprised” by the results but rejected the suggestion that they amounted to a repudiation of his leadership.
“We’ve had the greatest two years in the history of the presidency,” he added.
Trump had packed his final days before the election with back-to-back virtual rallies. During remarks in front of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool on Monday, the source of a recent troubled renovation, Trump lauded his Administration’s achievements while calling Democrats “extreme and dangerous.”
“For whatever reason, the sitting president doesn’t win the midterms, and we gave this a very strong shot,” Trump said.
His Monday schedule included at least nine virtual rallies for Republican candidates across the country. In October alone, he spoke at 27 campaign rallies.
But the last-ditch effort did little to stem Republicans’ losses, with Democrats taking control of both the House and the Senate. Republicans suffered some of their most unexpected defeats in South Carolina and Texas, two longtime Republican strongholds.
In Florida, Democrats overcame the GOP’s unusual mid-decade redistricting and were projected to win in redrawn districts where Republicans had hoped to gain an advantage.
“Democrats are showing up, they're energized. They hate, hate, hate Donald Trump,” Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, said Friday on his podcast.
For months, Trump has appeared to lay the groundwork to claim that voter fraud took place if Republicans perform poorly in the midterms, despite the fact that instances of voter fraud are exceedingly rare.
Last week, he claimed in a Truth Social post that the federal government is closely watching for any sign of voter fraud in Minnesota, and that the only way that the Republican candidate for the Senate will lose is through “playing games with the [B]allots.”
On Monday, the Supreme Court blocked the Department of Justice from setting aside 20,000 mail-in ballots that the administration claims have been provided to noncitizens. Federal judges in the lower courts have all rejected the DOJ’s request to do so.
Asked if he will respect the midterm election results, Trump told reporters last Tuesday that he will “if they are honest elections.”
