In an interview with Reuters on Wednesday, President Donald Trump signaled he was upset that congressional elections will be taking place later this year, as they could potentially disrupt his agenda in the second half of his term.
In comments seeking to manage people’s expectations for the Republican Party in the midterms, Trump seemed to acknowledge a well-known pattern: that the party of an incumbent president tends to lose seats in Congress.
Trump described the phenomenon as a “deeply psychological thing,” adding, “When you win the presidency, you don’t win the midterms.”
According to Reuters, Trump held up a binder full of his supposed “achievements” while making these complaints. Although he said that his party would try “very hard” to win the midterms, he also questioned why they had to be held at all.
“When you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election,” he quipped.
The comments from Trump echoed complaints he made earlier this month while speaking at the Kennedy Center. Although he didn’t explicitly say the midterms should be canceled, he did complain about having to hold them at all, like he did during the Reuters interview.
“[Democrats] have the worst policy,” Trump claimed. “How we have to even run against these people—I won’t say cancel the election, they should cancel the election, because the fake news would say, ‘He wants the elections canceled. He’s a dictator.’ They always call me a dictator.”
During a press briefing at the White House on Wednesday, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt dismissed concerns about Trump’s remarks, deriding journalists for even bringing them up.
“President Trump has talked twice in recent days, once in the Kennedy Center, and then to Reuters again last night, about canceling the election. Why is he talking about this?” a reporter asked during the presser.
Leavitt claimed “the president was simply joking.”
“He was saying, we’re doing such a great job, we’re doing everything the American people thought, maybe we should just keep rolling. But he was speaking facetiously,” she added.
Another reporter chimed in, asking whether Trump “finds the idea of canceling elections funny.”
Leavitt, who claims she was a witness to the interview, went on the attack toward the reporter.
“I was in the room, I heard the conversation, and only someone like you would take that so seriously and pose a question that way,” she said.
It’s unsurprising that Trump’s comments raised eyebrows, as he has mused about disrupting the democratic process before, and even attempted to upend the results of the 2020 presidential election, which he lost to former President Joe Biden.
After that race, as Trump peddled false claims of election fraud, his campaign coordinated a “fake electors” scheme, hoping that then-Vice President Mike Pence would count illegitimate participants in the Electoral College as equal to real electors. When Pence refused to comply with that plan, Trump demanded that his loyalists march to the Capitol building during the counting of votes, resulting in the violent attack on Congress on January 6, 2021.
Trump also once called for “the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution,” two years into Biden’s term in office, so that he could return to the White House.
Trump’s comments on the midterms come as polling shows that the Republican Party is likely to perform poorly in those elections, which will be held less than 10 months from now. Indeed, the latest Economist/YouGov poll shows that voters prefer the Democratic candidate in their district over the Republican one by a 6-point difference. Those numbers are consistent with other polling, demonstrating that Democrats, at least for now, are in a better position than the GOP to take control of Congress this fall.
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