President Donald Trump has accepted the Democrats’ sweeping victories in the midterm elections — and, in his first extended response to the results, congratulated the party that just took Congress away from him.
“I think the Democrats did a good job. They fought hard,” Trump said in a 15-minute phone interview with Fox News, adding that they had “been fighting me for a long time.” He also told The New York Times he was “absolutely willing to accept those results” and would work with the Democrats who now control both chambers.
The scale of the defeat is hard to overstate. Democrats flipped Republican-held Senate seats in North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, Ohio, Kansas, Iowa and Maine, retook the House of Representatives, and won governor’s races in Georgia, Ohio and Texas. Representative Hakeem Jeffries is in line to become Speaker of the House — which would make him the first Black Speaker in American history — when the new Congress convenes on 3 January 2027.
But Trump refused to treat the result as a personal defeat. “I wasn’t on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!” he wrote on Truth Social on election night, a line he repeated to Fox News: “I don’t consider it a defeat — I wasn’t on the ballot.” He pointed to the size of his campaign rallies — “These were the biggest rallies ever. Nobody’s ever seen anything like it” — and said he was “a little bit surprised” his party’s candidates had done worse than he expected.
His acceptance marks a shift from a week earlier, when he had said he would accept the outcome “if they’re honest elections.” Asked by Fox News whether he would accept these results, he replied simply: “Yes, why wouldn’t we?” — though he also repeated his claim that election fraud was “rampant”, without presenting evidence.
Asked what went wrong for his party, Trump pointed to two things: the cost of filling a tank, and the war with Iran. “Part of it was Iran,” he said. “People agree with what I’m doing on Iran, but they really probably weren’t willing to do the short-term consequence of paying more for gasoline. I understand that. I don’t agree with it.” An NBC News exit poll cited in coverage of the results also showed Republicans winning just 35% of the Hispanic vote in House races, down from the 46% who voted for Trump in 2024.
He also turned on some of his own side’s losers, dismissing the defeated Texas governor Greg Abbott as a “RINO” — Republican in name only — while insisting there would be no shake-up of his own team. The results, he said, had “nothing to do with my cabinet.”
Looking ahead, Trump struck a selectively cooperative note. “We could work with them on immigration, I think,” he told Fox News anchors Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum, while drawing firm lines elsewhere: “Now, could I work with them on an open border? I don’t think so.”
Why this matters: For readers outside the United States, the result reshapes what Trump can do in his final two years in office. A Congress controlled by the opposition can block his legislation, constrain war spending, launch investigations and force fights over the government’s borrowing limit — the debt ceiling — that can rattle markets worldwide. The president keeps wide executive powers, including over tariffs and foreign policy, but the days when his party controlled both chambers, and could rubber-stamp his agenda, are over.
One caution: the results are still unofficial until states certify them, and several Senate races remained uncalled, including Alaska, Michigan and Mississippi — where the two candidates were separated by just 28 votes, with thousands of affidavit ballots still to be examined. The Democratic majorities will therefore keep shifting slightly in the coming days, even though control of both chambers is settled.
The next milestones are the certification of results, the election of the House Speaker in January, and the first real test of divided government: the lame-duck session, in which the outgoing Republican-led Congress must still pass spending bills before the new one takes over.
