Trump seeks to shift blame but has 'nowhere to hide' after midterms defeat

We can now go across to Fraser Jackson standing by in D.C. Fraser, good morning to you. You heard there from the U.S. President Donald Trump saying Democrats, rather, fought a good fight. I'm curious, within the Republican Party, has the finger-pointing begun? On the record, no, but there is no getting away from the fact that this is a defeat of Donald Trump. Everything, every one of these seats, really, you can draw back to a direct decision that Donald Trump himself made. This was a pushback against him, and the fact that Donald Trump said that if he was on the ballot, things would have been different, it would have been a landslide, I think that is... Patently false, but, you know, if you look at some of the races that the Republicans lost last night, it was in South Carolina, Donald Trump, who... Hand-picked Darlene Graham to replace her brother, Lindsey Graham, in that Senate seat. In North Carolina, the reason that that seat was up for grabs was because Donald Trump had a spat with Tom Tillis, who decided to resign from the Senate and left that seat open. His choice of J.D. Vance as vice president left the seat in Ohio open, even tracing back to Georgia. His fight with Kemp back four years ago ultimately led to the situation we're in now with Ossoff. having to run against Collins there, who just basically failed to get going. So, you know, this is the problem that Donald Trump has now. He has spent the last four years especially saying that he effectively is the only person that can make great change. And since he's come into office, he has effectively gone around Congress and unilaterally decided to impose tariffs to start this war in Iran. The downside. of that is when things go awry there is nowhere to hide and Donald Trump is Despite that, has started to shift the blame elsewhere. He started to talk about the quality of the candidates that they were running, saying effectively that they just were uninspiring. And he even lashed out at Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, who's become something of a kind of stalwart in the Republican politics. He called him a rhino last night, a Republican in name only, and said that basically he'd reverted to his old policies and abandoned Trump's policies. why he'd lost. So Donald Trump is certainly pointing the finger at Republicans and shifting the blame elsewhere. But I think, you know, this is really a reckoning against Donald Trump. And I think it's hard to read it any other way. Frazier, I'm just curious, how is the US President Donald Trump likely to act and govern come January when he's going to have his hands tied, not just in the Senate, but also in the House? Well, I think this also ties into what we were just talking about. What we're looking at now is whether Republicans will kind of have the stomach to go against President Trump. This has been a significant swinging away from the Republicans that happened over the course of the last 12 or so hours. And it's whether the Republicans that are now still in Congress can see Thank you. That is some kind of movement away from the MAGA movement and whether they can see that the way forward is some kind of bipartisanship. To me, the results last night really speak to a country that is desperate for more cohesion and more working together. I don't think that last night was a kind of the electorate in America. Putting a rubber stamp on the Democrats, because if you look at opinion polling on the Democrats, it's about the same as it is for the Republican Party. So to me, what was really happening last night was people crying out. for less polarization in this country and for a Congress which actually works. This last Congress, the current Congress we're going through now, has been the least productive Congress in recent history. And I think Americans want a Congress that works for them and gets things done. So what's going to be interesting now is how Donald Trump deals with that. If the Senate and the House work together to actually craft legislation and then work with Donald Trump to get it over the line, Because of course Donald Trump Trump has threatened to veto everything that he doesn't like the look of. That means that there may be some deals that the Democrats have to make with the president. Otherwise, you're left with the Congress effectively deciding to use a supermajority to overrule the president's veto. For that to happen, they would need at least 60 votes in the Senate. So you're now looking at, you know, depending on how Mississippi and Alaska shakes out, Potentially for Four, five, six Republican senators who have the stomach to cross party lines, to cross the president and to vote with Democrats to get major legislation passed. That's the question we're going to be looking at now. And whatever happens, it's clear that the balance of power here in Washington has seismically shifted in the last few hours.