FLUCTUATING

Jaw-Dropping Details of Trump’s Midterm Outbursts Revealed

The president’s rants leading up to the critical elections have been leaked.

Donald Trump’s odd behavior leading up to the midterms has been revealed.

The 80-year-old president, whose party took a historic beating on Tuesday, fluctuated between shrugging off the nationwide elections and emphasizing their importance, according to reports in The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.

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Trump’s Post-Election Ramblings Inside White House Leaks

Briana Charles

In the months before the contests that would ultimately mark a repudiation of his second term, Trump told aides he didn’t care about them, a senior administration official who spoke with him told the Journal. The official said Trump thought foreign policy and his legacy mattered more than domestic affairs.

Americans’ affordability concerns didn’t register with Trump, this same official said. When aides told him in the spring and summer that voters took issue with his handling of it, he called the polling fake and, in one meeting, mentioned that he won the 2016 election without commissioning any polls.

Around late summer, the Times reported, Trump seemed insistent that the midterms actually did matter.

“We’ve gotta win. Anything we gotta do,” he told advisers privately on some occasions.

Other times, his interest was distant.

“It says something very nice about me that they just can’t win without me,” he reportedly told aides.

Trump, in trying to sell Ohio Sen. Jon Husted, kept talking about his body. This, he told advisers, was making Husted more “interesting” to the electorate. Husted lost.

When reached for comment, the White House vaguely referred the Daily Beast to Trump’s comments to reporters while at the under-construction White House ballroom. Among the president’s comments at the time was his claim, “Our country is more successful now than at any time in history.”

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When not talking up the ballroom and other vanity projects, Trump has reportedly been trying to absolve himself of some responsibility for his party’s midterm disaster by saying he wasn’t on the ballot. Yet Trump emphasized many times to his supporters to pretend he was on the ballot.

In reference to the midterm results, Trump seems to have acknowledged that his preferred area of interest, foreign policy did, in fact, affect domestic affairs. He told the Journal on election night that his war against Iran “was a piece of it.”

The Times also reported that some White House staffers were getting fed up with how Trump was seemingly talking “more about his new ballroom than the border, golf courses than grocery prices, interior decorations than inflation.”

In late 2025, Trump called affordabilty a “hoax” issue created by Democrats. Polling over the subsequent months showed him continuing to lose ground on the issue. By Election Day, he hadn’t recovered, despite repeatedly talking up his hoax claim.

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