President Donald Trump said Tuesday he would accept the results of US midterm elections, but quickly sought to shift the blame for the historic rout to his fellow Republicans.
Time and again on the campaign trail the 80-year-old told Republicans to "pretend I'm on the ballot." That may have been exactly the problem, as voters put Democrats in control of the House and Senate.
But Trump has never been one to take the blame, and in his first reaction to the election results Tuesday he insisted that the Republican Party would have won in a "landslide" if he had actually been running.
"I wasn't on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE! Thank you for your attention to this matter," Trump said in a post on his Truth Social platform.
Dismissing speculation about whether he would repeat his refusal to accept his 2020 presidential election loss to Joe Biden, Trump later took a conciliatory tone with the New York Times.
"I am absolutely willing to accept those results," he told The New York Times. "We'll work with the Democrats, and we'll, you know, look forward to working with them. We'll probably work something out."
But Trump later gave a hint of what he really intended to do to Democratic attempts at legislating, posting a picture of his trademark red MAGA baseball hat with the single word: "VETO."
There was a bunker mentality in the White House as Trump and his top cabinet members watched the bruising results come in at a reception in the lavish East Room.
"The White House mood is defiant," a White House official told AFP.
Some White House staffers dined on take-out from US chain restaurant The Cheesecake Factory -- a dig at Democratic former president Barack Obama, who had said Trump's White House renovations were "looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory."