Trump deflects blame and claims ‘abortion issue’ sunk GOP in midterms

Voters handed Democrats a 51-49 Senate majority and multiple governor’s mansions in last year’s midterms

Nearly two months after the Republican Party’s disappointing showing in the 2022 midterm elections, former president Donald Trump has claimed that he played no role in high-profile defeats for the GOP in numerous statewide races, despite having endorsed each of the losing candidates.

Mr Trump spent much of the last day of 2022 and first days of 2023 blasting out repeated defences of his political record in a series of statements issued through his presidential campaign, including a bizarre press release listing Republican senators and House members who chose to retire or were defeated in GOP primaries after crossing the ex-president in one way or another.

Included in that list were two retired senators, Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania and Jeff Flake of Arizona, whose seats are now represented by members of the Senate’s Democratic majority. Mr Toomey’s successor, Senator-elect John Fetterman, won the seat he will be sworn into on Tuesday by defeating Trump-endorsed ex-television host and former cardiothoratic surgeon Mehmet Oz.

Voters also rejected Trump-endorsed candidates in high-profile gubernatorial races in Arizona, Michigan and Wisconsin, as well as secretary of state races in key states such as Arizona and Michigan, where all of the ex-president’s endorsees lost their statewide races. In exit polls, voters overwhelmingly said their decision to support Democrats in those races was a response to the GOP candidates’ extremist views, as all of them had been prominent endorsers of lies Mr Trump and his allies have told about the conduct of the 2020 election.

Yet the twice-impeached ex-president is now claiming that voters rejected Republicans last year not because of the candidates’ decision to embrace his “big lie” about the election he lost more than two years ago, but because of the landmark ruling handed down by a Supreme Court majority that included three justices he nominated to the high court.

Writing on his Truth Social site on Sunday, Mr Trump said “it wasn’t [his] fault” that the GOP did not perform as well as expected last year, and suggested it was the “abortion issue” that turned off voters because it was “poorly handled by many Republicans, especially those that firmly insisted on No Exceptions, even in the case of Rape, Incest, or Life of the Mother, that lost large numbers of Voters”.

He also complained that the Republican voters who elected him in part thanks to his promise to appoint justices who would overturn a half-century of precedent which supported the right for a woman not to carry a pregnancy to term if she so chose “got their wish from the U.S. Supreme Court, [and] just plain disappeared, not to be seen again”.