President Donald Trump cast doubt on the midterm election results Monday, just days after saying he would accept the outcome.
“Does anybody really believe that this ‘Election’ was honest. How could the Polls be so wrong???” Trump wrote on social media.
He questioned the surge in early vote totals that gave Democratic candidates substantial leads.
“Some early voting ‘dumps’ were so large that it was impossible to win, no matter how many people went to vote,” Trump added.
The president also challenged the reliability of electronic voting machines.
“It’s all about the machines, which are far more important than the voter!” he wrote.
Trump had told reporters the previous week that he would accept the midterm results, which dealt a severe blow to the Republican Party and delivered a harsh assessment of his first two years in office.
In an interview with The New York Times, Trump said he would “absolutely” accept the results.
President Donald Trump speaks with reporters before boarding Air Force One
President Donald Trump again questioned the security of US elections on social media, despite previously saying he would “absolutely” accept the results
But his message shifted sharply in the days following the election.
Trump has repeatedly promoted unsubstantiated allegations of election fraud, focusing in particular on early voting, mail-in ballots and voting machines, which he says could be vulnerable to intentional manipulation or technical mistakes.
On Friday, Trump declared that Republican Senator Dan Sullivan had won re-election in Alaska, even though roughly 25 percent of the ballots had yet to be counted.
Trump has also criticized Democratic efforts to place another candidate named Dan Sullivan in the Senate race, arguing that the move was intended to confuse voters. The so-called “decoy” candidate received more than 3,500 votes—ballots Republicans say should have gone to the senator.
During a Sunday interview with CBS “60 Minutes,” interviewer Ross Douthat, Trump said Republicans lost ground in the midterms partly because his immigration and deportation policies were “too tough.”
“I think ultimately… that hurt me,” Trump said.
He also acknowledged that the war in Iran damaged Republican prospects, while maintaining that he would still have authorized military action to prevent Tehran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.
“I can tell you if I had it to do again, this historically, for history, will go down as one of the best things we ever did because if they ever had a nuclear weapon, they would blow up the world,” he said.
Trump further linked the conflict to the party’s losses on Election Night.
“People agree with what I’m doing on Iran, but they probably weren’t willing to deal with the short term consequence of paying more for gasoline,” Trump said during a phone interview with Fox News as the results came in.
“You know, I understand that. I don’t agree with it and I would say to people, it’s a short term problem but for long term gain.”
The president argued that his name not appearing on the ballot was the primary reason Republicans lost, despite repeatedly asking supporters to treat the election as a referendum on his leadership, including during a Fox News appearance the night before voting.
“I wasn’t on the ballot, and if I was, we would have won in a landslide,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
“The reason we lost is the war,” Vice President JD Vance wrote in a lengthy social media post the previous week.
Vance added that “many people who voted for” Trump in 2024 had since abandoned him.
He also criticized those who supported the war, which has cost the United States billions of dollars.
“If you’d like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next six years was worth it, then do so,” Vance wrote.
