The US President has been quietly floating the idea of axing this year's congressional election, which polls suggest will see his Republican party get a pummelling from voters
16:58, 15 Jan 2026Updated 17:01, 15 Jan 2026
Donald Trump told a reporter "we shouldn't even have an election" this year, in the latest hint he plans to scrap November's midterms.
The US President has been quietly floating the idea of axing this year's congressional election, which polls suggest will see his Republican party get a pummelling from voters. He's made offhand comments in speeches and candid remarks, but today for the first time he proposed the idea in an interview with the Reuters news agency.
He told the reporter historically the party with control of the White House tends to lose seats in Congress in midterm elections, expressing frustration at the precedent.
"It's some deep psychological thing, but when you win the presidency, you don't win the midterms," Trump said. According to Reuters, he boasted that he had accomplished so much that "when you think of it, we shouldn't even have an election."
In a speech last week, five years to the day after the January 6th insurrection that saw his followers attempt to violently overturn an election he has consistently lied about losing, Trump complained that his party even has to bother running against Democrats.
"How we have to even run against these people," he said. "I won't say cancel the election, they should cancel the election, because the fake news with say, 'He wants the elections canceled. He's a dictator.' They always call me a dictator."
And during a visit to the Oval Office by Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine's leader answered a question about the difficulty of holding an election during Ukraine's war with Russia - and Trump openly speculated about how a similar circumstance could allow him to stay in power in the US past the expiration of his current term.
"So let me just say three and a half years from now - so you mean, if we happen to be in a war with somebody, no more elections, oh, I wonder what the fake news would say," Trump said.
Elsewhere in his speech to Republican leaders, Trump claimed he'd won Minnesota in all three elections he's run in. In fact, he lost Minnesota in every election.
And he said he was "not sure" if he's allowed to run in a 2028 election. "I'm not allowed to run. I'm not sure," he said. "Is there a little something out there that— I'm not allowed to run, but let's assume I was allowed to run. There's gonna be a constitutional movement."