Trump Self-Soothes With TV Ratings After Humiliating Election Defeats
The president failed his first major test of voters since returning to the White House.
Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post via Getty Images
Donald Trump assured himself that everything was fine by writing about TV ratings as the GOP and several of his endorsed candidates suffered an electoral wipeout.
Trump posted on Truth Social that his interview on CBS’s 60 Minutes had achieved the show’s highest ratings “in years,” as waves of results rolled in against him and the Republican Party.
The ratings-obsessed president shared the self-congratulatory post on Tuesday night, when elections widely viewed as a referendum on him and the GOP were won by Democrats across the country.
The New York mayoral race was declared for Zohran Mamdani just over 30 minutes after polls were closed.
Angele Weiss/AFP via Getty Images
Trump’s sit-down interview on 60 Minutes on Sunday drew more than 13 million viewers, the highest-rated episode since Jan. 10, 2021, which aired days after the Capitol riot, Axios reported, citing preliminary Nielsen data.
In New York, 34-year-old Democratic Zohran Mamdani won the race to become the city’s next mayor, defeating Trump-endorsed former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo by a near double-digit margin. Mamdani, who had trounced Cuomo in the Democratic primary, forcing him to run as an independent, will become the first Muslim mayor of New York, sending multiple Republican and MAGA figures into meltdown.
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In New Jersey, Congresswoman Mikie Sherrill defeated Trump-backed former state Assemblyman Jack Ciattarelli in the governor’s race.
Elsewhere, former Virginia Rep. Abigail Spanberger beat Republican Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears to become Virginia’s first-ever female governor, replacing the term-limited and Trump-endorsed Gov. Glenn Youngkin in a state heavily affected by the administration’s mass firing of federal employees.
Jay Jones defeated incumbent Attorney General Jason Miyares to become Virginia’s top law enforcement official, overcoming a text messaging scandal in which he was found to have gleefully written about shooting then–House Speaker Todd Gilbert in 2022.
Mikie Sherrill ran a staunchly anti-Trump campaign and won the New Jersey race for governor with 57 percent of the vote.
Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/Getty Images
The elections were widely viewed as a gauge of voter sentiment toward the Trump administration ahead of next year’s midterm elections. The Democrats will be hoping the sweeping victories on Tuesday are a sign that the party is finally getting revitalized after months of licking its wounds in the wake of the crushing 2024 election defeat.
The Democrats are looking to retake control of the House next November, where the GOP currently holds a razor-thin majority, and faces a tougher task in flipping the Senate.
Trump,79, also tried to self-soothe Tuesday night by suggesting he was not to blame for the GOP’s losses across the country.
“TRUMP WASN’T ON THE BALLOT, AND SHUTDOWN, WERE THE TWO REASONS THAT REPUBLICANS LOST ELECTIONS TONIGHT, according to Pollsters,” the president wrote in a desperate Truth Social post.
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