Donald Trump is now attacking the legitimacy of an election his party lost by more than 13 points nationally, a reversal that election officials call completely false and that legal experts say he has no power to act on.
President Donald Trump declared the midterm elections dishonest on Monday, six days after voters swept Republicans out of power in both chambers of Congress and days after he told The New York Times he was “absolutely willing” to accept the results.
“Does anybody really believe that this ‘Election’ was honest. How could the Polls be so wrong???” Trump wrote on Truth Social. He claimed without evidence that early voting “dumps” were so large that winning was impossible, then concluded, “It’s all about the machines, which are far more important than the voter!”
The president offered no proof for any of it. Election officials across the country reported a largely routine election, and no credible evidence of widespread fraud has surfaced in the week since polls closed.
A Complete Reversal In Under A Week
Trump spent weeks hedging before the election, saying on October 27 that he would respect the outcome only if the elections were honest, language that echoed the groundwork he laid before the 2020 vote.
Then the results came in, and he briefly sounded resigned to them. “I’m absolutely willing to accept those results,” he told The New York Times on election night, noting that he was not on the ballot. He even promised on Truth Social to become a “Political Pundit, both good and bad, on the reasons these Candidates won and lost.”
That acceptance lasted four days. Over the weekend, Trump began amplifying unsubstantiated fraud claims on Truth Social, including a post questioning how vote totals could swing so sharply toward Democrats. By Monday morning, the man who runs the federal government was openly telling Americans their election was rigged.
The Losses He Is Trying To Explain Away
The scale of the Republican defeat is historic. Democrats flipped Senate seats in Iowa, Kansas, Maine, North Carolina, Ohio, South Carolina, and Texas, giving the party at least 54 seats when the new Congress is seated in January. Democrats took back the House as well, and the Cook Political Report tally shows their House candidates winning the national vote 55.8% to 42.7%, a gap of more than 13 points.
Trump’s complaint about the polls gets the story backwards. Surveys for weeks showed Democrats positioned to flip the House and possibly the Senate; the Pew Research Center said pollsters captured the direction of the election, and to the extent the polls missed, they underestimated how badly Democrats would beat his party.
Election Officials Say The Claims Are Flatly False
Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar called Trump’s claims “completely false,” telling NBC News that “the systems worked” and that “the election was a massive rebuke of his leadership.” He added, “He’s upset because he lost and people are holding him accountable.” Aguilar’s office already spent this cycle knocking down the administration’s claim that noncitizens packed Nevada’s rolls, a state review that found exactly zero.
Charles Stewart III, an elections expert at MIT, told Forbes the post was “kind of pathetic,” noting that nothing unusual happened in how results were reported and that Democratic wins were consistent across the country regardless of which voting machines or methods were used. Jonathan Diaz of the Campaign Legal Center said calling early vote totals fraudulent is like claiming points scored in the first half of a football game should not count.
Legal experts also agree that Trump has no viable legal path to change a single result; states run their own elections, and Republican candidates across the country have accepted their losses.
The Same Playbook, Run Again
This is the third straight cycle in which Trump has attacked an election outcome he disliked. In August 2020 he told supporters the only way he could lose was if the election was rigged, then falsely declared victory and backed 62 lawsuits seeking to overturn Joe Biden’s win. This cycle, his administration tried to tilt the field before a single vote was counted, issuing executive orders on elections, demanding state voter rolls, and filing a preemptive lawsuit in Alaska, while the Supreme Court blocked his attempt to restrict mail ballots in September.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called the post a pathetic return to election denialism that he said was inevitable. Trump “can whine all he wants,” Schumer wrote on X, but for the final two years of his presidency he will face the largest Democratic congressional majorities in decades.
