Trump says he will become 'Mr Veto' if Democrats win the midterms, vowing to block their bills until they negotiate
In a podcast interview on the eve of the 3 November midterm elections, Donald Trump said he would veto Democratic legislation again and again if Republicans lose Congress, until Democrats come to the table and make a deal.
United States President Donald Trump has said he will become “Mr Veto” if Democrats take control of Congress in Tuesday’s midterm elections, promising to reject Democratic legislation repeatedly until the two sides negotiate. The remarks, made in an interview with the New York Post’s Miranda Devine for her podcast Pod Force One, lay out the strategy Trump says he would follow if his Republican Party loses its majorities in the House of Representatives, the Senate, or both.
“I guess I’ll become Mr Veto. I’m not going to let them ruin it,” Trump said when asked how he would deal with a Democrat-controlled Congress. He described a standoff in which Democrats would send bills to the White House and he would send them back unsigned, again and again. “They’ll be sending stuff up. You veto it. And eventually, after a month or two of getting all vetoed, they’re just wasting [time], they come over, and you make a deal,” he said. In another version of the same exchange he added: “If we didn’t win, I think we’re going to do great, but if we didn’t win, I’d veto everything. I’ll be vetoing, vetoing.”
The interview excerpts were released on Sunday, two days before voters go to the polls on Tuesday 3 November. All 435 seats in the House of Representatives and 35 of the 100 Senate seats are on the ballot, and the results will decide whether Trump faces a hostile Congress for the remaining two years of his second term. Polls published over the weekend suggested Democrats are near certain to win the House majority and have a real chance of taking the Senate, where Republicans currently hold a narrow majority and Democrats need a net gain of three seats.
A veto is one of the most powerful tools a president holds against an opposition Congress. It allows the president to reject a bill passed by both chambers, sending it back to Congress. Lawmakers can override a veto, but only if two-thirds of both the House and the Senate vote in favour — a threshold that is very hard to reach when the president’s own party holds a substantial minority in either chamber. Trump has used the power sparingly so far in his second term, issuing only two vetoes, compared with ten during his first term in office.
Trump’s comments are not the only sign that the White House has been preparing for a possible Democratic takeover. According to reporting based on a White House official and two people familiar with the plans, senior officials including deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller and budget director Russell Vought have been working with the White House Counsel’s Office since April to identify executive actions on immigration, tariffs, housing costs and federal spending that Trump could pursue without congressional approval. White House counsel Will Scharf and his team have also been examining what Trump can legally do on his own, where he could push the limits of his authority, and how to defend those decisions in court.
The planning reflects a paradox of Tuesday’s election. Winning Congress would give Democrats the power to investigate the Trump administration, block its legislation and constrain its spending priorities. But Trump would still retain broad executive authority over trade, foreign policy and the federal bureaucracy, powers he has already used aggressively since returning to office in January 2025 — imposing sweeping tariffs, intensifying immigration enforcement, shrinking the federal workforce and pursuing foreign-policy goals, including the war against Iran, without new laws from Congress. He has repeatedly invoked national emergencies to expand that authority, and Congress can vote to end such emergencies only if it can muster the two-thirds majorities needed to override his veto.
The final days of the campaign have been bitter. Trump chose a speech at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in Washington for his closing argument on Sunday, telling supporters “we’re going to win,” while Democrats held final get-out-the-vote rallies across the country, including events for star Senate candidates James Talarico in Texas and Adam Hamilton in Kansas. An NBC News poll released on Sunday showed 60 per cent of voters disapprove of Trump’s performance, particularly over high prices, while the final New York Times/Siena poll showed Democratic candidates leading in all seven seats viewed as most competitive, though five remained within the margin of error. Early voting has already set records, with more than 54 million ballots cast before election day.
Trump also addressed the possibility of a third term in the same interview, saying he would love to run again if he had the chance but that the language of the 22nd Amendment, which bars anyone from being elected president more than twice, is “very exacting.” On the economy, he pointed to stock indexes setting dozens of record highs, while Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has argued that consumer behaviour remains strong even though consumer surveys look gloomy. Since January 2025, consumer prices and average hourly earnings have each risen about 5.5 per cent, leaving workers roughly no better or worse off than when Trump took office.
What happens next depends entirely on Tuesday’s results, and several paths are possible. If Republicans hold both chambers, the veto threat becomes irrelevant and Trump can pursue his agenda through legislation. If Democrats win the House but not the Senate, Trump’s veto would still matter, because bills would need his signature to become law and the Senate would be unlikely to override him. If Democrats win both chambers, the veto strategy Trump described — a month or two of blanket rejections followed by negotiation — would be tested directly, and the executive-action plans drawn up since April would become central to how his administration governs. A Democratic House could also open investigations into the administration, adding a further front to the confrontation.
Whatever the outcome, the veto remarks have set the tone for what a divided government would look like after Tuesday: not quiet compromise, but a public test of strength in which each side tries to force the other to the table. Trump’s own framing suggests he believes time is on his side in such a standoff, because a Congress that cannot pass laws eventually has to negotiate. Democrats, for their part, will argue that voters handed them a mandate to check the president. The first real answer will come when the ballots are counted on Tuesday night.
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