The president feigned ignorance about a major Republican loss and the candidate he endorsed days before the election.
“In Texas, a Democrat won a special election in an area that you had won by 17 points. What is your reaction to that?” a reporter asked President Donald Trump, 79, during an address outside Mar-a-Lago on Sunday afternoon.
“I don’t know. I didn’t hear about it. Somebody ran—where?” the president responded, despite his endorsement of GOP candidate Leigh Wambsganss as “a highly successful Entrepreneur, and an incredible supporter of our Movement,” on Friday in a Truth Social post signed “President DJT.”
Democrat and first-time candidate Taylor Rehmet, 33, defeated Wambsganss in a special election for Texas’s 9th State Senate District after decades of GOP rule on Saturday. Trump won that district by 17 points in the 2024 presidential election.
As the reporter filled the president in on the lost seat, Trump simply shrugged and said, “I’m not involved in that. That’s a local Texas race. You mean I won by 17, and this person lost? Things like that happen. I’m not on the ballot.”
“Does it worry you—” the reporter began, before Trump interrupted and said, “You don’t know whether or not it’s transferable, you know, I’m not on the ballot, so you don’t know whether or not it’s transferable.”
The White House did not immediately respond to the Daily Beast’s request for comment.
Trump pivoted from the loss in Texas and diverted to the topic of crime, warning: “But, you know, if you put the Democrats in, you’ll end up with open borders again, you’ll end up with crime all over the place—there’s no crime anymore.”
“If you think of it, the country has the lowest crime it’s had in 125 years—in recorded history,” Trump continued. “The year 1900, that’s a long time ago. So, very good.”
The president’s mood dropped again as he jumped back to the original topic of discussion, once again pleading his lack of knowledge on the Texas special election before seemingly washing his hands of the matter altogether.
“No, I don’t know a thing about it. I didn’t know—I mean, I know there’s a race going there, and, uh, it’s too bad, what can I say? I have nothing to do with it,” he said.
Trump was one of several high-profile Republicans who threw their weight behind Wambsganss. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Sen. Ted Cruz were among other figures who endorsed the losing MAGA candidate.
Despite Trump’s distancing from the loss, Wambsganss herself said the special election shutout, which Rehmet won 57–43, was a “wake-up call” in a statement to the Texas Tribune.
The GOP loss in such a stronghold has been seen by many Democrats as a positive omen, with Democrat strategist Matt McDermott describing the win as a “huge political earthquake” on X.
The polls seem to agree ahead of midterms, with a New York Times/Siena survey from late last month finding that 56 percent of voters disapprove of Trump’s job performance, while 48 percent of respondents planned to support a Democratic candidate over 43 percent for the Republicans.
The post Trump, 79, Claims No Memory of Part in Humiliating GOP Defeat appeared first on The Daily Beast.
