President Donald Trump woke up to a new Washington on Wednesday. Republicans lost their grip on both the House and the Senate overnight. The president answered with a mix of olive branches and warnings that he can still block whatever a Democratic Congress sends him.

In a string of posts on Truth Social, Trump argued the night would have gone differently with his name on the ballot. He insisted Republicans would have won in a rout had he been running. He pinned part of the blame on his own party along with Fox News. He also announced he planned to become "a Political Pundit" who would break down why each candidate won or lost.

One post carried no words at all beyond a single one stitched across a red baseball cap: "VETO."

"I have total veto power"

Trump struck a softer note in an election night phone call with Robert Costa of CBS News. He offered Democrats his congratulations and said he hoped to work with them for the country's sake.

He quickly reminded the other side of the leverage he keeps. Trump said he has "total veto power" and expects Democrats to come to the table. If they refuse, he warned, he would "just veto everything."

Trump told CBS that some voters simply did not like the Republicans on offer. He claimed a few of them had never been friendly to him and that his base stayed home as a result. Asked whether he was upset, he said he gave the effort everything he had, calling the defeat "a point in time" that has happened to other presidents before.

He told Fox News that Democrats "did a good job" and could find common ground with him on "many things." Speaking with The New York Times as returns came in, he said he was "absolutely willing" to accept the outcome.

Black leaders call it the Blacklash

Democrats picked up Senate seats from Texas and Kansas to the Carolinas and Ohio. Several of the biggest gains came in states where Black turnout was expected to run high. Black organizers say that was no accident.

Terrance Woodbury, a Democratic pollster at HIT Strategies, has a name for it: the "Blacklash." He has argued for months that Black voters who sat out after 2024 were being pulled back to the polls by Republican redistricting fights along with a Supreme Court ruling in Louisiana v. Callais that weakened a key part of the Voting Rights Act.

On a unity call Tuesday night organized by the Coalition on Black Civic Participation, Black Voters Matter co-founder LaTosha Brown said Black communities had taken hits to their political power, their economic power and their culture. Her message to Republicans was blunt: the hits were coming back.

Activist Brittany Packnett Cunningham told the same call that everyday Black voters led the night by refusing to let their rights be stripped away. "We are rising," she said.

What a veto fight could look like

With the gavels changing hands in January, Trump faces two final years of congressional subpoenas and oversight hearings. Democrats are also expected to target some of his least popular moves, from the war with Iran to cuts in federal programs and health care. In exit surveys voters ranked prices and government corruption as the issues they cared about most.

Democratic strategist Antjuan Seawright, an adviser to House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries, said a president who blocks financial relief out of spite would only deepen the lasting harm to the Republican brand.

Seawright called the results a rejection of overreach and broken promises from the 2024 campaign. In his view, the back of the MAGA movement has been broken.