Karoline Leavitt blamed Republicans' crushing midterm losses on voters who forgot Trump's good policy and listened to the lying media after Democrats flipped Congress.
As the scope of the defeat became clear Tuesday night, the former White House press secretary went on Fox News and refused to sugarcoat what she saw as the real problem. Democrats took control of both chambers of Congress. President Trump's handpicked Senate candidates went down in South Carolina, North Carolina, Michigan, and Texas. And Leavitt told viewers the public had tuned out results that once spoke for themselves.
She pointed straight at energy prices and the press coverage that followed the president's February operation in Iran. Before that mission, she reminded the audience, gasoline had been a bright spot of the Trump record.
"Before the president launched the operation in Iran, I remember being at the podium talking about how gasoline was $1.99 in states like Colorado,"
Leavitt said she had delivered that line from the White House podium herself. She tied the low price to the administration's energy dominance plan, not to anything Democrats had done, and then drew the hard conclusion about election night.
"And that was because of Trump's energy dominance plan, not the Democrats. So unfortunately, I think the American people forgot about the good policy, maybe listened to the lying media on the other side,"
That diagnosis landed as voters delivered painful Senate results in states the White House had treated as winnable. In Texas, Democrat James Talarico beat Trump-backed Ken Paxton by 12 points, giving the state its first blue senator since 1988. In South Carolina, Democrat Annie Andrews defeated Darlene Graham, the political novice and sister of the late Lindsey Graham whom Trump had backed after she was appointed to the seat.
Leavitt's focus on energy was not abstract. After the February operation, Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, a waterway that carries about 25 percent of the world's seaborne oil. The American Automobile Association put the national average for a gallon of gasoline at $4.12, up from $3.05 a year earlier. Those numbers sat in plain view while the former press secretary argued that earlier gains under Trump had been memory-holed.
Her appearance fit a larger post-White House profile that already included joining the network as an on-air voice after she joined Fox News as a contributor. She had previously wrapped a historic run as the youngest person to hold the press secretary job, and she carried that same blunt style into the election-night postmortem.
President Trump, for his part, did not run from the foreign-policy piece of the backlash. In an election-night interview with The Wall Street Journal, he acknowledged the Iran war was partly to blame for Republican losses. He also made clear he would not rewrite the decision.
"I did the right thing. I would have done it again."
That stance matched the promise-versus-reality tension that had followed him since he returned to office in 2025 vowing to tackle price spikes from the Biden years and pledging no new wars. The operation came anyway. The strait closed. Prices jumped. And Tuesday's map showed the political cost in real time.
Trump still drew a separate line about the ballot itself. On Truth Social on Tuesday evening he argued the night would have looked different if his name had been in front of voters, a theme he had previewed for months on the trail when he urged supporters to "pretend I'm on the ballot."
"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,"
The candidate choices gave Democrats additional openings. In Texas, Trump had backed Paxton over incumbent Sen. John Cornyn in the Republican primary over what the reporting described as perceived disloyalty. Paxton's 12-point loss then handed Democrats a seat that had stayed out of their column for nearly four decades. In South Carolina, the appointment-and-campaign path for Darlene Graham likewise ended in defeat at the hands of Andrews.
Fox News host Bret Baier pressed Trump on the quality of those Senate picks in Texas and South Carolina during their call. Trump also unloaded on the network's polling, calling the Fox polls "terrible" and telling Baier the pollster was "the worst." Baier pushed back on the air that night.
"But tonight actually the results are pretty close to what the Fox polls showed."
The exchange added another layer to long-running tension between the president and the network, including earlier stretches when Trump blamed Fox News while ratings drama swirled in the background. Leavitt's own move from the briefing room to the green room sat inside that same media ecosystem.
Leavitt was not a random surrogate. She had been the administration's daily voice on the very energy record she accused voters of forgetting, a tenure later marked when she closed out her historic press secretary run and eventually left the West Wing. Her election-night argument treated the midterms as a failure of memory and media incentives more than a failure of the underlying policy she had once sold from the podium.
Turnover around the press secretary post had already become a running subplot of the Trump years, including short stints that ended almost as soon as they began, such as when Katie Zacharia exited after seven days. Leavitt's return to the argument on Fox showed how former briefers still shape the first draft of a loss.
Trump, speaking to The New York Times, said he would accept the results and left the door open to dealing with the new Democratic majorities, saying he would "look forward to working with them" and that "we'll probably work something out." The practical reality remained that both chambers had flipped and several of his personal Senate bets had failed in public view.
Leavitt's charge put the press in the dock alongside forgetful voters. She described a country that had watched gasoline fall under an energy plan she had advertised in real time, then watched prices climb after a national-security move the president still defends, and still walked into the booth having absorbed the opposition narrative. The chamber flip and the Texas and South Carolina wipeouts gave that claim a hard scoreboard.
When a party loses the map, the easy move is to blame the messenger who told voters the record was better than the noise. The harder task is making sure the record is too loud to erase the next time.
