Making Daily Headlines · Page 2
Trump Awards Democrats a Good Job, Then Wins an Election He Wasn't In
· New York time
President Donald Trump said Democrats did a good job in the midterms while criticizing Republicans for their losses. On Truth Social, he also argued that Republicans would have won in a landslide if his own name had been on the ballot. He blamed others for losses in key races, NPR reported, even as Democrats gained control of Congress. That is a generous compliment paired with a very useful hypothetical. The actual Republican candidates faced actual voters, while the president's imagined landslide remains comfortably free of counting delays. A party can learn a great deal from defeat, but it is harder to examine the campaign when the most favorable result exists only on a ballot that nobody cast. Trump's assessment also puts Republican officeholders in a familiar position: they must respond to a loss while the party's most prominent figure explains why he would have produced a different one. Democrats, meanwhile, can enjoy praise from the president without accepting his account of the election that might have been. The post offers a complete system of political accounting. Credit can be assigned to an absent candidate, blame can travel to those who ran, and the winning party can be congratulated for a performance that supposedly would not have survived a different cast. The real tally remains inconveniently attached to the real ballot.
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