President Donald Trump, in a phone interview with Fox News' Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum on Election Night, said he was "a little bit surprised" by the Republican losses as Democrats prepared to take control of both the House and the Senate — and he laid out exactly how he intends to govern against them: veto what he calls their "insane" bills until Democrats come to the table and work with him.
"They'll send over things that are insane, and I'll veto them," Trump said. "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 also gave the Democrats their due on the night itself, saying, "I think the Democrats did a good job," and he ruled out changing his Cabinet in response to the results.
On why Republicans lost, Trump pointed in part to the war in Iran — his argument being that voters backed the action itself but felt its short-term cost at the pump. "I think a part of it was Iran, but at the same time people understood the importance of what I've done with Iran," he said. Gasoline prices, pushed up during the war, were the channel through which the conflict reached household budgets in the weeks before the vote.
The interview also turned on Fox's own numbers. Trump attacked the network's polling — "I read at Fox that I'm not popular. The Fox polls are terrible. You ought to get yourself a good pollster 'cause your polls are the worst" — and Baier answered on air that the night's results were actually pretty close to what the Fox polls had shown.
For American households, the path Trump described is concrete: a Democratic Congress can pass its bills, but nothing becomes law without his signature, and he has promised the veto pen until Democrats negotiate — while the team around him stays exactly as it is, with no Cabinet shake-up after the defeat. The first test of that standoff comes when the new Congress is seated in January.
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