WASHINGTON: Even with late US election results strongly favoring opposition Democrats, US President Donald Trump has again declared “a tremendous victory” and said it would have been even greater had his name been on the ballot.
“We had a tremendous set of victories,” Trump told “Fox News Sunday” journalist Chris Wallace in an interview recorded Friday.
Democrats have picked up at least 36 seats in the House of Representatives – possibly as many as 40 — giving them an overall majority, with notable strength in some of the Midwestern states that were key to Trump’s 2016 election.
When Republicans lost 30 seats in 2006, Republican President George Bush declared it a “thumping.”
Asked about that on Fox, Trump replied, “I won the Senate and that’s historic too” for a president’s party in a midterm election. “It’s almost never happened.”
Republicans have secured at least 52 seats in the 100-member Senate. An unexpectedly tight race in normally Republican Mississippi is headed to a run-off.
Trump said Republicans would have done better but “I wasn’t on the ballot.”
But as he campaigned for Republican candidates around the country, as Wallace pointed out, Trump had repeatedly urged voters to “pretend I’m on the ballot.”
Asked what grade he would give his presidency so far, Trump said, “I hate to do it, but I will do it: I give myself an A-plus… Can I go higher than that?”