Trump shares post saying he was elected to do unpopular but ‘necessary’ things

President Donald Trump has stayed uncharacteristically quiet after Tuesday’s midterm elections, posting infrequently, mostly to rationalize and explain away the electoral losses.

He did just that around 5 a.m. Thursday in his only overnight Truth Social post: a screenshot of an X post by the conservative commentator Joel Pollak.

“Trump was elected to do politically difficult but necessary things,” reads the screenshot. “Securing the border is ugly. Fighting Iran is costly. Taking on special interests upsets donors. Backing AI scares people. Tonight, Republicans paid the costs. The benefits will be with us for many generations.”

Trump offered no commentary of his own.

The bulk of the president’s posts since the elections have focused on criticizing the media and other Republicans, and insisting that Trump was not responsible for the bloodbath in the midterms. Thursday’s post takes a slightly different tack, acknowledging that the president’s actions may have cost the Republicans electorally, but defending them as “necessary.”

Of all the issues listed by Pollak, the war in Iran appears to have been most salient to voters. Numerous postmortems by Republicans — including one by Vice President JD Vance on X — identified the war and its consequences as perhaps the defining issue of the election.

“The real reason we lost is obvious to almost everyone,” Vance wrote on Wednesday. “The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night. If you'd like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next 6 years was worth it, then do so. Argue it was a worthwhile cost to pay. Agree or disagree, that's at least honest.”

At an event celebrating the construction of the White House ballroom on Wednesday, Trump said he “would’ve done nothing different” about the war if given the choice.

“We’ve totally broken their military,” he said of Iran. “Their navy is gone, their air force is gone, their anti aircraft is gone.”