A red hat stamped with a single word is now the president’s answer to the Democrats who just took Congress away from him.
President Donald Trump promised to veto legislation he called “insane” after Democrats captured control of both the House and Senate in the midterm elections held Tuesday, Nov. 3, 2026, a pledge he delivered by phone to Fox News during the network’s live election-night coverage, “FOX News Democracy 26.” Late that night, he posted an image on Truth Social of a red hat stamped with the word “Veto.”
“They’ll send over things that are insane, and I’ll veto them,” Trump said.
As Trump framed it, his plan for the Democratic majorities heading to Capitol Hill fits on a red hat. The new Congress convenes in January 2027.
Trump predicted that after a couple of months of vetoes, Democrats will start asking how to get things done and the two sides will work together. Several Democratic lawmakers have already reached out to him, he said.
He was somewhat surprised by the number of races Democrats won, he said, adding that he maintains friendships across the aisle. He gave no ground on border policy or transgender ideology, and he said the results would not prompt any change to his Cabinet.
He Blames the Gasoline Price
Trump traced part of the Republican losses to Iran, arguing that voters grasped why he acted. Many Americans largely backed the war, he said, but balked at paying more at the pump.
“I don’t think it’s the war, Bret, I think it’s the gasoline price,” Trump told Bret Baier of Fox News.
Going to war, he argued, was the single option available for stopping the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism from obtaining a nuclear weapon. History, he added, will judge his policy toward Tehran as the more important story than anything the night’s results showed.
Vice President JD Vance reached a different conclusion in a postmortem posted on X on Nov. 4, blaming the Iran war for the GOP’s losses. “The reason we lost is the war,” Vance wrote, adding, “Any honest conversation about where we go from here must start there.”
Donald Trump Jr. endorsed that assessment on X, writing, “Every word of this is 100%.”
Reporters asked Trump about the Vance post. “I know how he feels about it. I think it was fine. I thought it was good,” he said. Trump acknowledged to reporters that the war and high gas and diesel prices hurt his party, but he did not back away from the decision itself. “If I had to do it again, I’d have to do it again,” he said. “As far as that war is concerned, I would have done nothing different.”
Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, in Tehran, said Americans had “said NO TO WAR.”
It Takes 290 Votes to Beat Him
The president draws his authority to reject bills passed by Congress from Article I, Section 7 of the U.S. Constitution, and Democrats have no way to simply vote around it. An override requires two-thirds of the members voting in each chamber. That works out to 290 votes should all 435 House members cast ballots, and 67 should all 100 senators do.
Whichever chamber a bill originated in votes first. Should the override fail there, the measure never comes up in the other chamber.
A quieter route exists as well. Any bill the president neither signs nor returns inside a window of 10 days, with Sundays excluded, becomes law without his signature.
The veto pen does not touch everything the new majorities can do. Congressional investigations, government oversight, federal spending and Senate confirmations all fall to Democrats. Trade, foreign policy and the federal bureaucracy remain under Trump’s executive authority, along with the power to sign executive orders.
Seven Senate Seats and the Lone Star State
Democrats flipped seven Republican-held Senate seats. Troy Jackson beat Sen. Susan Collins in Maine and James Talarico defeated Ken Paxton for the Texas Senate seat, while Abdul El-Sayed held Michigan’s open seat for Democrats and will become the nation’s first Muslim senator.
Democrat Gina Hinojosa unseated Gov. Greg Abbott in Texas. Keisha Lance Bottoms won the Georgia governor’s race and will be the state’s first Black governor and its first woman governor. Republican Byron Donalds, the Florida governor-elect, will be that state’s first Black governor.
Elon Musk spent hundreds of millions of dollars backing Republican congressional candidates.
Sen. Ted Cruz posted his own assessment. “2026 was not simply a blue wave; it was a blue tsunami. It was an a– kicking,” Cruz wrote. On his home state, he added: “In the Lone Star State, we lost every single statewide election…Texas is blue. That is a hard sentence to utter.”
Trump offered his own explanations for the losses. Some of the candidates he endorsed alienated his base by opposing him, he said, and Abbott lost to a Democrat because he behaved less like a conservative in recent months. Had his own name been on the ballot, Trump wrote in a Truth Social post, Republicans would have won in a landslide.
He praised Democrats for fighting hard, doing a good job and fighting him for a very long time. He stopped short of a full endorsement of House Speaker Mike Johnson continuing to lead House Republicans, saying only that Johnson “has done a very good job.”
“I don’t like to consider it a defeat,” Trump said.
A Thumbs-Up and Two Dodges
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer twice declined to answer Fox News Digital’s question about abolishing the filibuster at a news conference on Wednesday, Nov. 4. He said he will be “re-elected as majority leader.”
At the same news conference, a reporter asked House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries whether House Democrats would investigate Musk. Jeffries gave a thumbs-up and no response.
Democrats remain divided over who should lead them in each chamber.
