Two years after his decisive popular-vote victory, Donald Trump suffered a major defeat on Election Night.

The President himself was not on the ballot, of course. Other candidates paid the political price instead. But the message was unmistakable: voters were rejecting Trump, and the exit polls conducted across the country made that clear.

Trump urged voters to treat the election as a referendum on his presidency. Yet only 16 percent told CNN they had voted to support him, while 43 percent said they were voting to oppose him.

Trump’s economic record was another serious liability for Republican candidates. Sixty-five percent of voters said his policies had made the economy worse.

Sixty-two percent disapproved of Trump’s job performance. Sixty-three percent said he was focused on the wrong priorities, and 55 percent questioned whether he had the mental capacity to serve effectively.

None of this had to happen.

Trump’s first term had been a political success until the pandemic struck, an event beyond his control. His administration oversaw a strong economy, low inflation, tax cuts and reduced regulatory burdens. It also tightened the border and avoided launching new foreign wars.

As the pandemic receded from voters’ memories, many Americans wanted a return to those conditions. Trump, however, appeared to lose sight of that lesson. Rather than seeing wages rise faster than living costs, consumers faced higher prices driven by tariffs and the war with Iran. The pressure was felt by households, businesses and, above all, drivers filling their cars at the gas pump.

Trump also tested the patience of anti-war voters through brief military interventions in Iran and Venezuela before overreaching with a prolonged conflict involving Iran. On immigration, he could have focused on closing the border and deporting criminals. Instead, ICE raids spread through city streets, resulting in deadly shootings involving American citizens.

The President also failed to maintain the cooperative relationship he had built with congressional Republicans during his first term. Despite their disagreements, Trump allowed House Speaker Paul Ryan to shape much of the 2017 tax-cut legislation and gave Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell the leading role in confirming conservative judges.

That partnership delivered results.

Congress can be frustratingly slow and frequently divided, but presidents benefit from listening to lawmakers who represent voters and understand their constituents’ concerns.

This time, Trump did not allow Congress to vote on his tariffs. Had lawmakers been given that opportunity, they might have curbed some of his most aggressive moves.

He also bypassed congressional approval before going to war in Iran. Congress could have required him to justify the conflict publicly and explain its goals to the nation.

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Trump became, in George W. Bush’s famous phrase, ‘the decider.’ He approved pardons, pressed for politically motivated prosecutions and picked unnecessary fights with Canada and Denmark over Greenland. He also devoted attention to vanity projects, including the Kennedy Center, a triumphal arch, a ballroom and the Gulf of America.

He gave ICE and DOGE broad latitude to push beyond reasonable limits, accumulated billions through a crooked cryptocurrency bill and clashed with Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Rather than rewarding Trump for governing without congressional consent, voters delivered a different verdict. Seventy-one percent told CNN that Congress was not doing enough to restrain the President.

Trump’s aggressive hostility toward dissent also helped drive Republican senators such as Thom Tillis into retirement, clearing the way for Democrats to take their seats.

He also backed weak Republican candidates, including South Carolina’s Darline Graham, North Carolina’s Mike Whatley and Georgia’s Mike Collins.

All of the schemes to redistrict House seats and battle illegal voting were for naught. It wasn’t close enough for alleged Democratic cheating to matter for Republican maps to save the day.

It was too perfect a metaphor that Trump spent his last speech of this 2026 midterm campaign at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, gazing at his renovation, entranced like the mythical Narcissus by his reflection in his own works.

So, what comes next?

Republicans ought to enter the wilderness but who leads the way out?

Vice President JD Vance may still have the inside track for Trump’s endorsement in 2028, but who thinks that association won’t be a liability in a general election?

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has emerged as the most respected figure in the administration, but he has suggested that he might not run if it requires fighting Vance for the nomination. Plus, Rubio is also closely associated with the Iran war.

One Republican who emerged on Tuesday unmarked by the defeat is outgoing Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.

The candidate he handpicked to take Rubio’s Senate seat when he joined the Trump administration, Ashley Moody, won re-election. And DeSantis left his state in strong enough condition that Byron Donalds, who wasn’t his preferred successor, was able to hold Republican control of the governorship.

The Florida gerrymander wasn’t a great success, but neither was it a huge failure. The governor’s pet cause, a ballot initiative to slash property taxes, appears to have passed. And in interviews, he sounds like a man free to criticize Trump’s foreign and domestic policies.

In 2024, DeSantis couldn’t compete with Trump’s outsized personality. But maybe right-leaning Americans are now ready for something different, more focused and more competent. Someone who can learn from the past.

WASHINGTON — Democrats captured both chambers of Congress in a sweeping “blue tsunami” Tuesday night, overturning once-secure Republican seats and immediately setting the stage for political blame, investigations and confrontation with the White House.

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In a remarkable string of victories, Democrats flipped Senate seats in Iowa, Kansas, Maine, North Carolina, Ohio, South Carolina and Texas, while making similarly dramatic gains in the House. The results put New Yorkers Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries in position to lead the Senate and House, respectively.

“America is back,” Jeffries declared. Schumer said Democrats had prevailed “against all odds” and promised that “relief was on the way.”

President Trump, who had urged Republicans to treat the election as a referendum on his presidency, suffered a major political setback. An Associated Press exit poll found that 62% of voters blamed his policies for rising prices, while 71% said Congress needed to do more to restrain the president’s power.

Speaking by phone with Fox News after the election, Trump acknowledged that Democrats had run an effective campaign. He pledged to cooperate across party lines during the lame-duck period and afterward, saying, “They fought hard.”

Trump attributed part of the defeat to Iran, arguing that the conflict’s impact on energy costs mattered more to voters than the administration’s decision to begin the war.

“People agree with what I’m doing on Iran, but they really probably weren’t willing to do the short-term consequence of paying more for gasoline,” Trump said. “I understand that. I don’t agree with it.”

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He also rejected the idea that he would remove additional administration officials, insisting that the election results “had nothing to do with my Cabinet.”

The Democratic takeover is expected to place Trump under intense scrutiny for the final two years of his presidency. Congressional investigations are likely to multiply, his legislative priorities face near-certain gridlock and confirming Cabinet nominees or judges — including potential Supreme Court nominees — could become exceptionally difficult.

Several Trump allies pointed to the Iran war and its fallout — including higher energy prices, inflation and interest rates — as key causes of the Republican losses. The White House, meanwhile, blamed “candidate quality,” despite Trump personally selecting or endorsing many of the nominees who lost.

It marked the first midterm election since 2006 in which the party out of power reclaimed both chambers of Congress.

The precise size of the Democratic victory remained uncertain early Wednesday as ballots continued to be counted slowly, particularly in Alaska’s Senate contest, which uses ranked-choice voting.

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The results also delivered several long-sought Democratic breakthroughs, including Senate victories in deeply Republican Texas and Kansas. Republicans additionally lost governorships in Ohio and Texas, where the defeat of three-term Gov. Greg Abbott ranked among the night’s biggest surprises.

Trump moved quickly to post on Truth Social, arguing that voters had not treated the election as a judgment on him.

“I wasn’t on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!” he wrote late Tuesday. The claim came despite his telling Iowa Republicans at a rally less than two weeks earlier to “pretend I’m on the ballot.”

Several of Trump’s preferred candidates, however, were directly on the ballot, including South Carolina Senate contender Darline Graham, the sister of the late Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), and Texas Senate candidate Ken Paxton, the state’s sitting attorney general.

“I had no choice,” Trump told Fox News, while criticizing Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), whom he said had “kissed my ass” when doing so was politically popular.

Before the election, Trump had told The Post’s “Pod Force One” podcast that he was prepared to embrace the role of “Mr. Veto” if Democrats sent legislation to his desk after 2026.

“They’ll be sending stuff up. You veto it,” he said.

“And eventually, after a month or two of getting all vetoed, they’re just wasting [time], they come over, and you make a deal. I think that probably would happen, but hopefully we don’t have to worry about that.”

But the incoming chairman of the House Oversight Committee had a two-word response to the GOP and Trump allies reeling from Tuesday’s losses: “LAWYER UP.”

The warning came as people close to Trump have been doing just that in preparation for planned investigations into alleged corruption and business dealings seen as favorable to the first family.

Trump entered the midterms with historically low approval ratings, fueled by cost-of-living concerns such as rising gas and food prices. Much of Americans’ frustration has been driven by perceptions of the Iran war.

The Middle East conflict also drove Republican infighting on Tuesday night, as party leaders looked for someone to blame for the Democratic drubbing.

“We got destroyed because of Iran,” said one top Republican strategist. “Iran is what caused gas prices and diesel prices to skyrocket — not tariffs.”

“Too many people sat silently, or even worse, misled the president into a war without a realistic exit,” added a Trump political adviser.

Others blamed the poor quality of candidates that had been recruited.

“Tbh most Republican candidates this cycle were uninspiring, lazy, and thoroughly ineffective communicators. I’m not all that surprised by some of these outcomes,” posted Trump adviser Alex Bruesewitz on X.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), who acknowledged the historic headwinds his party was facing before Nov. 3, told reporters as voting results came in Tuesday that “there’s a lot of reasons” for the Democratic victory with the GOP trifecta in place.

“From the first day of this election, we knew that to keep the House and sustain our majority, we would have to defy more than a century of midterm history,” Johnson said.

“It’s only happened twice in 90 years that a sitting president has picked up or held seats for his party in that first two-year cycle,” he added. “It’s very, very difficult to overcome, and it looks like history will be kept.”

Democrat Gina Hinojosa defeated three-term Republican Governor Greg Abbott in Texas, CNN projected, as a sweeping blue wave reshaped the state during the midterm elections.

Hinojosa, 52, becomes the first Democrat to win the Texas governor’s race since Ann Richards captured the office in 1990.

The contest proved far more competitive than expected for Abbott, who was first elected governor 12 years ago when Texas had been reliably Republican for decades.

Abbott appeared to suffer in the polls alongside fellow Republican Ken Paxton, the attorney general who was running for the Senate against young Democratic state Representative James Talarico. Talarico was projected to win his Senate race just minutes before Hinojosa’s victory was called.

Former President Donald Trump placed the responsibility for Abbott’s defeat squarely on the governor in a post on his Truth Social account.

He wrote: ‘If Greg Abbott, the Governor of Texas, hadn’t become a RINO in the last six months of his Political Life, he wouldn’t have lost. He went back to his original formula, and it wasn’t pretty!’

By late last week, Abbott held only a three-point advantage over Hinojosa, according to the RealClearPolitics polling average. The same group of surveys showed Talarico with a narrow lead in his Senate contest.

The Texas governor’s race also attracted a flood of campaign spending during its final weeks. Abbott raised $26 million between September 25 and October 24, The Texas Tribune reported.

Hinojosa generally trailed Talarico by several points, even as he defeated Paxton to turn Texas’ junior Senate seat blue. Still, she held on and defeated Trump-backed Abbott in the governor’s race.

Rather than allowing Abbott’s attacks over culture-war issues to define the campaign, Hinojosa shifted the focus toward personal freedoms. One central issue was her opposition to Flock cameras.

Concerns about the cameras and the lack of regulations governing them have spread across party lines. In Texas, Hinojosa successfully turned that unease into a central campaign issue.

In campaign advertisements and interviews, Hinojosa blamed Abbott for the spread of Flock cameras, citing state funding and the Texas Department of Public Safety’s use of the technology as evidence of his influence.

‘It’s the governor’s agencies that answer to him, who are sending out this money and paying for these Flock cameras across the state,’ Hinojosa said in a September interview with the Tribune prior to Flock’s extensions.

Hinojosa, who was first elected to the Texas House a decade ago and represents part of liberal Austin, also answered the culture-war attacks in a campaign advertisement.

‘They want to run an entire campaign saying I’m too woke. I plan to spend an entire campaign focused on the fact that working people are too broke,’ Hinojosa said in a spot released in September.

‘I’m Gina Hinojosa. My pronouns are mom, Texan and soon-to-be governor,’ she said.

She also called out Abbott for refusing to debate her. 

The Democrat has also criticized Abbott over his support for school vouchers, saying it impacts rural Texas public schools. 

Hinojosa’s rise also forced Abbott to pivot on his previous support for data centers. 

Abbott called for an audit on proposed data center projects and a pause on connecting them to the state’s electric grid.   

Ahead of Election Day, Hinojosa went to court in her capacity as a state legislator in an effort to unredact communications between Abbott and Elon Musk, whose businesses, including SpaceX, are based in the state. 

Since backing Trump in the 2024 election and his stint at the top of the Department of Government Efficiency, Musk has become a boogeyman for Democrats.

‘Greg Abbott is embarrassed that those emails are going to show that he sold us out,’ Hinojosa said on the campaign trail.  

Trump has name-dropped Abbott during his recent campaign stops in Texas, but has mainly focused on Paxton’s race, where the prospects looked more dire. 

Ahead of election day, Abbott traveled to all corners of Texas in an effort to boost turnout.

The tour was entitled ‘Let’s Roll,’ a clever play on the fact that the governor has used a wheelchair since he was in an accident in the 1980s. 

His campaign also handed out ‘Governor Hot Wheels’ bumper stickers after Democratic Texas Representative Jasmine Crockett gave him that nickname, which she said was not referring to his disability. 

On the trail, Abbott touted an ‘affordability agenda,’ promising policies would bring down the cost of living by more than $4,000 annually per Texas family. 

But he also beat up Hinojosa on social issues. 

‘She’s promoting young children changing their sex,’ he said at a campaign stop in Beaumont in mid-October. ‘That’s crazy.’ 

‘She even wanted to allow our public schools to transition the sex of our children behind their parents’ backs,’ he continued. 

More recently, Abbott claimed that children under the Democrats were being ‘transgendered’ at school.

An Indiana man has been arrested after authorities say he tried to punish a 7-year-old boy by putting a bar of soap in the child’s mouth for using a profanity.

Daniel Schergen, 34, allegedly forced the soap into the boy’s mouth during an August car trip after the child called him a “motherf—er,” according to an affidavit reviewed by People.

Schergen told police he was driving with his girlfriend and four children when the 7-year-old became upset and began acting out, the affidavit states.

While the group was heading to Dunkin’, authorities said the boy began hitting another child in the back seat.

Schergen reached toward the back of the vehicle in an effort to stop the child. The boy then allegedly directed the profanity at him, according to the document.

Schergen pulled into a Dollar General, asked his girlfriend to buy a bar of soap and then allegedly pushed it into the boy’s mouth. The affidavit says the bar also struck the child in the forehead.

The child was left with a bruise on his right ear and redness on the right side of his face. Schergen reportedly told investigators the injuries resulted from holding the boy’s head down against the car seat.

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When the 7-year-old began bleeding, Schergen’s girlfriend provided first aid, according to the affidavit.

During questioning by the LaPorte County Sheriff’s Office, Schergen said he did not know how the boy had suffered the bruise to his ear, the document states.

He also described the child as having a “temper” and told police the boy had recently been suspended from school for striking other students, according to the affidavit.

Court records show that Schergen faces a domestic battery charge and was released after posting a $750 bond.

He is scheduled to return to court on Jan. 6, court records indicate.

Authorities have not disclosed Schergen’s relationship to the child.

Information about an attorney representing Schergen was not immediately available.