The Republican Party, led by President Donald Trump, suffered a crushing blow in the 2026 midterm elections as the Democrats regained control of both the US House of Representatives and the US Senate.
Surveys conducted both before and after Tuesday’s polling revealed that the major driver of voters’ dissatisfaction with the Trump administration was inflation, partly triggered by the Iran war. On October 23, Reuters published a report citing insiders and officials in Tehran who suggested that Iran is dragging out the conflict to weaken Trump politically before the midterm elections.
As the results on Tuesday and Wednesday showed, Tehran’s strategy seems to have worked, with Trump and the GOP suffering a rout. And Tehran was quick to take a dig at the 80-year-old President after the results came in.
AI-generated Trump video shared by Iranian Embassy goes viral as real
After the Democrats’ victory in the US midterms, the Iranian Embassy in India shared an AI-generated video in which Trump could be seen fainted, purportedly after the midterm loss. It shows the 80-year-old being carried by Secret Service agents before being thrown in a dustbin, labeled “hazardous waste”.
The video went viral on social media, with many users misconstruing it as a real video of Trump fainting. The end of the video showing Trump being thrown into the dustbin makes it clear that it is AI-generated. But the claim that Trump fainted gained traction as social media pages used screengrabs from the video on thumbnails to mislead viewers.
What Trump said after the midterm loss
Trump reacted to the midterm election loss saying that he doesn’t view it as “a hit” on himself. “I don’t view it as a hit on me,” Trump said in a phone interview with CNN. “We’ve had the greatest two years in the history of the presidency in terms of the economy, in terms of all the things that we’ve done.”
In an interview with Fox News, Trump suggested that the Republican candidates are to blame for the Republican washout as they couldn’t “inspire the people.” “I thought they’d do better,” Trump said. “They just didn’t inspire the people to get out and vote,” he told Fox. “And I wasn’t on the ballot. If I was on the ballot, they would have got out.”
Trump, however, also acknowledged that the widespread polling against Republicans, especially those supported by him, was due to a “mood in the air.”