The hat said one word.
Late Tuesday night, with the returns coming in and the map turning a color Republicans hadn’t braced for, President Trump posted a picture of a red cap to Truth Social. Not “Make America Great Again.” Just “VETO.”
That’s the message. That’s also the plan.
Democrats took the House and the Senate on Tuesday, flipping at least seven Republican Senate seats and more than two dozen House districts. It was a rough night for the GOP, and the president didn’t pretend otherwise. “I’m a little bit surprised,” he said. “I thought they’d do better.”
But he didn’t sound like a man who’d been knocked down. He sounded like a man who’d already counted his cards.
“They’ll send over things that are insane and I’ll veto them,” Trump told Fox News during Election Night coverage. “And after a couple of months of vetoes, they’ll go out and they’ll say, ‘How do we get this stuff done?’ And we’ll work together.”
A threat and an olive branch in the same breath. That’s the whole game for the next two years.
Here’s the math Democrats woke up to Wednesday. Winning Congress lets you pass bills. It doesn’t make them law. For that you need the president’s signature, or two-thirds of both chambers to override him. Democrats don’t have two-thirds of anything.
So the new majority can hold hearings. It can issue subpoenas and block nominees. What it can’t do is govern around the man in the Oval Office.
And Trump says some of them already know it. “You know, I have a lot of friends that are Democrats, believe it or not. I’ve already spoken to some of them,” he said. Others, he added, were still waiting to call.
On why the night went the way it did, he was blunt.
“I don’t think it’s the war, Bret, I think it’s the gasoline price,” he told “Special Report” anchor Bret Baier. Voters were with him on Iran, he argued. They just weren’t eager to pay more at the pump while it played out.
He didn’t apologize for it. Keeping the world’s leading state sponsor of terror from getting a nuclear weapon, he said, will matter more to history than one election night.
He may be right. Wars get judged over decades. Gas prices get judged on the drive to work.
He also put some of the blame where his base already had: on Republican candidates who fought him, then asked his voters to show up. About 30 rallies, big crowds, and the energy didn’t carry over. “I wasn’t on the ballot,” he said. “If I was on the ballot, they would have gotten out.”
Then he did something you don’t see much in politics anymore. He gave the other side its due.
“I think the Democrats did a good job, I really do,” Trump said. “They fought hard.”
He just won’t call it a defeat. “If you’re on the ballot, it’s different than if you’re not on the ballot.”
And from where he sits, with two years left, a veto in hand and an opposition that now owns the job of getting things done, maybe it isn’t one.
Democrats wanted power. They got it. Now they find out what it’s like to need Donald Trump’s signature.
