On the last day before the 2026 midterm elections, President Donald Trump gave a speech before the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, a site of considerable scandal in his second term. He joked it should be renamed after him and spent considerable time discussing Washington, D.C. construction projects and resurrecting conspiracy theories about monument vandals. When the president did turn to the elections, more than 23 minutes into an hour-long speech, he seemed to foreshadow major Republican losses in the House and Senate, describing it as “The most important midterm, I believe, in our lifetime.”
“When you vote, remember a party that hates America cannot be allowed to rule over the people who built our country,” Trump said, referring to Democrats, whom he said want to “blow all of this up by electing communist jihadists.”
