Trump says in interview that he will accept election results

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump said Tuesday night that he was “absolutely willing” to accept the results of the midterm elections and was prepared to work with Democrats.

“We’ll, you know, look forward to working with them,” he said in a phone interview with The New York Times. “We’ll probably work something out.”

Trump blamed Republican losses on the fact that he was not on the ballot, and called his decision to go to war with Iran a “very wise decision.”

He said he had no regrets about endorsing candidates such as Sen. Darline Graham, R-S.C., and Ken Paxton, the Republican attorney general of Texas, who both lost their Senate bids.

Trump spoke to the Times shortly before 10:30 p.m. Tuesday, while he was watching election results at the White House. Democrats were on track to take control of the House and the Senate.

“I’m just looking at these results as I’m talking,” he said. “I see that Darline lost. Wow, that’s amazing. How do you think Lindsey would have done if he ran?” he added, referring to Sen. Lindsey Graham, who died in July.

Trump added that he believed that Graham most likely would have prevailed in his race.

In the short conversation with the Times, the president sounded subdued as he absorbed decisive Democratic wins across the country.

But he insisted that he regretted nothing about the first two years of his second term, despite the widespread Republican defeats. “I consider it to be the most successful two-year period in the history of any president,” he said.

The president’s comments came after he huddled inside the White House’s East Room Tuesday night with some of his top aides, including Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Attorney General Todd Blanche and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, to watch the results come in. Some in attendance described it as a “dark” and “funereal” atmosphere.

Some guests started leaving before 10 p.m., according to people with knowledge of the departures. Other allies of Trump’s said privately that they were happy they were out of town.

Throughout the evening, Trump vented his frustration at political aides and accused them of giving him bad information about polling in the lead-up to the elections, according to people with knowledge of his remarks, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe the private conversations.

It was not clear what he meant: Aides to Trump had spoken openly about the difficult environment for Republicans.

A White House official disputed the idea that the president was frustrated with his advisers.

In his interview with the Times, the president said that he believed Republicans suffered losses because he was not on the ballot.

“I wasn’t on the ticket, and because I wasn’t on the ticket, we couldn’t get enough people out to vote,” he said.

He also said he did not regret the decision to go to war with Iran and “would do that again.” But he acknowledged that voters were unhappy about gas prices.

“They don’t mind the Iran, but they probably weren’t happy — they weren’t happy with the oil price,” Trump said. “So you know, it’s just one of those things. But I don’t regret that decision at all. In fact, you know, that’s a decision that was a very wise decision for the future of the country and the world.”

The bleak scene capped a day when the president remained out of public view, awaiting the results of a campaign that he insisted should be seen as a referendum on him.

Trump kicked off the day by making a final pitch to voters in a call to a friendly television program, “Fox & Friends,” promoting his administration’s immigration crackdown and claiming that his policies had boosted the economy.

“Inflation is solved,” Trump asserted, even though consumer prices had surged since he took office, rising 3.7% in September from a year earlier, driven in part by high energy costs stemming from the war with Iran.

The United States, he added, was “the hottest country in the world.”

The dissonance between the president’s rosy assessments and the affordability worries of many voters underscored Trump’s incongruous closing argument.

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He repeatedly mocked the concerns about affordability, blamed his predecessors for inflation and falsely claimed that grocery and gas prices were falling. He also said that rising gas prices were a negligible price to pay for the war with Iran, which he repeatedly claimed the U.S. had already won. (On Monday, Trump dismissed the idea that it was even a war.)

In one of the strangest turns of the campaign, Trump made his assessments of the male physique a mainstay of his stump speech, focusing in particular on the backside of Sen. Jon Husted, R-Ohio.

Rarely did Trump substantively address the issues that voters said were the most pressing in their lives, or acknowledge his own unpopularity. Heading into the election, views of his handling of the economy — one of his biggest strengths when he ran two years ago — were underwater. Majorities disapproved of his handling of tariffs, the economy, gas prices, the cost of living and the Iran war.

As he traveled the country, the president did promise giveaways, floating $500 Obamacare “refund” checks and $5,000 for every American adult — called the “Trump Dividend” — if Republicans retained control of Congress.

At the center of the president’s pitch was that Americans should think of their votes as going to him. While headlining 30 rallies across the country, Trump pleaded with his base. “Pretend I’m on the ballot,” he often said.

But in the waning days of the campaign, Trump openly complained about the grueling pace. At a rally Friday in Florida, he said that he thought it would be his last of the cycle, and that he would be able to relax afterward. “Twenty-eight days in a row of this crap is a lot,” the president said.

The day before the election, Trump chose to make his final public appearance at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, a troubled project that had become emblematic of his administration’s willingness to skirt laws and target dissent to further his efforts to remake the capital.

“We gave this a very strong shot,” he said of the election.

“America is ready to go,” Trump added. “They’re ready to vote. I hope they’re ready to do the right thing.”

Throughout Election Day, the White House sent out a flurry of news releases praising Trump’s accomplishments, including one about his “relentless travel schedule.”

But as the day wore on, Trump’s agitation burst through in sharply worded social media posts. He lashed out about coverage of his speech at the Reflecting Pool, lobbing insults at Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., and at The Daily Mail for allegedly misrepresenting a joke he had made about wanting to name the landmark after himself.

He appeared optimistic at one point in the day, when he called attention to results in Guam, where a Republican was poised to become governor. “Wow, hopefully that’s an indication for things to come!” he wrote.

By early evening, as the president prepared to host a watch party in the East Room, he turned his ire on Fox News, calling a commentator “DUMB AS A ROCK.” He said that he would change the channel until that “LOSER is off the air.” (He added that he would turn back later.)

Shortly afterward, he was back to railing about the cable channel, decrying its poll questions and complaining that its ratings were low because it spent “too much time covering the Trump Deranged Dumocrats!”