Trump blames Fox News and GOP after midterm election losses

President Donald Trump told Fox News in a live phone interview in the first hour of Wednesday morning that the midterm results were not a personal defeat. “I don’t view it as a hit on me,” he said, according to the channel description on a CNN YouTube video titled “Trump blames Fox News, GOP candidates for midterm losses.”

CNN’s Julia Benbrook reports in the video; Kate Bolduan discusses the night with a panel. The description marks the phone call at the open, then a social-media attack on Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a GOP strategist’s call for “a tough reckoning,” and a conservative radio host urging Trump to come to the table with Democrats.

Hours earlier, as Democratic wins rolled in on Tuesday night, Trump had already turned on the network in a string of Truth Social posts. One post, reported by CNBC’s Catriona Marangi, said Fox “bears responsibility for these losses by constantly and consistently putting on the Dumocrat opposition.” Another tied the results to the channel’s audience: “FoxNews Ratings are way down (27%!) because they’re spending too much time covering the Trump Deranged Dumocrats! All of those people who used to watch Fox, and no longer do, get it. It’s them, not me.”

Democrats took control of both the Senate and the House of Representatives. They flipped seats in Texas, South Carolina and Kansas, states usually favorable to Republicans. The Washington Post’s Meryl Kornfield reported that Trump said he would accept the victories and work with the new majorities while still distancing himself from the losses. The Guardian’s Jeremy Barr wrote that Trump had signaled for weeks he would place blame on Fox if the party did poorly, and that on election day he criticized the network for featuring Democratic pundit Jessica Tarlov and called Fox’s polls “always the worst.” He had appeared on Fox’s “Hannity” only the night before the vote.

Fox News reported 1.1 million average viewers for October. That was down about 27 percent from the same month a year earlier. Fox Corp. CEO Lachlan Murdoch addressed the drop on the company’s quarterly earnings call Monday. He called it “viewer fatigue” ahead of a midterm with a second-term president. “Those viewers are not going to any other news channel. They’re not switching to MS NOW or to CNN,” Murdoch said. “They’re just fatigued and watching slightly less television overall.” MS NOW had 588,000 average viewers in October across all day parts. CNN had 402,000. Both still trailed Fox’s total-day audience.