Trump holds his first post election event at the White House ballroom site, and Vance says the war is the reason Republicans lost

The ceremony came first. After a morning of silence, Trump called reporters early on Wednesday afternoon to watch the final steel beam go up on the White House ballroom, and he talked for about 20 minutes about the construction before he said anything about an election his party had just lost in both chambers of Congress, Reuters reported.

When the questions came, Trump said he expected to work with the Democrats if they were not destructive about it, and he pointed to the veto he still holds. He repeated the line he posted on election night, that he was not on the ballot and that Republicans would have won if he had been. Asked about the causes of the defeat, he agreed with Vice President JD Vance that the war with Iran and the gasoline prices that came with it contributed to the result, an assessment USA Today reported he called largely true, while saying the war was worth it.

Vance had made the argument in public first. On Wednesday morning he wrote on X: "The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night." Arguing that the war was worth losing the Senate for six years was, he wrote, at least honest. He listed the reasons he said voters gave for turning on the party: ending the war, the cost of living and inflation, and changing the country's relationship with Israel.

The two statements land in the same place from different directions. Trump is presenting the loss as a midterm verdict on a war and on prices, not on his presidency, and he is keeping the door open to deals with the Democratic majorities that take over on January 3. Vance is saying the same thing more bluntly, and in a form that names the cost: a Senate his party may not hold again for six years. What neither man offered on Wednesday was a change of course on the war itself.