WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump would not say Tuesday that he will accept the Nov. 3 midterm results whatever happens. He will respect them, he said, only if the elections are honest.
The exchange came at Joint Base Andrews. Trump was on his way to Texas to campaign, with control of Congress on the ballot in seven days.
The question was direct — would he respect the outcome regardless? His answer came with a condition attached, according to USA Today.
“I will if they’re honest elections,”
Polling has pointed to a difficult night for Republicans. The House looks likely to flip to the Democrats. In the Senate, they have several routes to a majority.
Reporters pressed him on the possibility of losing both chambers, and on working with a Democratic Congress. He left the door open to it.
He said he would reach for his veto pen often in that case, and still try to cut deals. “I hope that that won’t be the case, but if it is, that’s happened before with many presidents,” he said.
The remark landed a day after Trump turned to Minnesota’s Senate race on Truth Social. He urged voters to back Michele Tafoya and warned, in his words, that the federal government is watching for fraud.
“Let’s all get behind Michele Tafoya in Minnesota. She’s running a great race. Don’t allow them to play with the Votes after the race is over,” he wrote. “The Federal Government will be watching closely.”
He added a claim about Tafoya’s race, without presenting evidence for it in the post. “The only way she can lose is if they cheat by playing games with the Ballots as they come in,” he wrote.
Sen. Tina Smith of Minnesota, a Democrat, answered on X. She accused the president of preparing the ground to overturn a result he does not like.
“He’s blatantly laying the groundwork to steal an election if his chosen candidate doesn’t win,” Smith wrote. “Minnesota will not take kindly to thinly veiled threats from a guy we’ve rejected three times (soon to be four).”
Election administration is not the only front. Over the weekend the Justice Department sued over Alaska’s Senate race, asking a court to block certification if Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan loses. The department pointed to another candidate on the ballot, Dan J. Sullivan, and said the shared name would confuse voters. Trump told reporters he directed the department to file the suit.
Attorney General Todd Blanche defended it on CNN on Sunday. “There could be a crime. But the real wrong here is that Alaskans are going to be confused and will not have their vote heard,” he said.
This week Trump also said his administration will pay $1 million to anyone who reports voter fraud in a past election or in the midterms, if the tip leads to an arrest and conviction.
For months the president has accused Democrats of cheating in elections, without presenting evidence. In a primetime address in July he alleged broad weaknesses in voting systems and raised the possibility of interference by other countries. USA Today noted two steps from this year. One, an executive order asserting federal control over mail ballots, ran into the Supreme Court, which stopped the Postal Service from putting the new rules into effect for this election. The other was a direction to the Department of Homeland Security: look for noncitizens on state voter rolls.
Nor has he taken two more drastic options off the table: declaring a national emergency around the midterms, or invoking the Insurrection Act, the law that lets a president send the military into action inside the United States during civil disorder. Democratic critics have called that possibility alarming.
The comments reach back to 2020. Trump lost that year and then tried to get the result thrown out.
His supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, at the end of that push. The stolen-election claim has stayed with him since, unsubstantiated.
In September 2020, then-Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany used almost the same formula: “The president will accept the results of a free and fair election.”
His Tuesday was spent in Texas. Republicans are fighting to keep a Senate seat there, and the campaign has a week left.
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