US President Trump said his strategy if the GOP loses control of the House and Senate would be to “become Mr. Veto,” The Hill reports.
“Well, if that happens, I guess I’ll become Mr. Veto. I’m not going to let them through,” Trump told the New York Post’s Miranda Devine during an interview on “Pod Force One” set to air Monday.
“And then at some point, we’ll probably make deals. That’s what’s happened to me. This wouldn’t be the first time you’ll have a president, and he won’t have the House or the Senate.”
“They’ll be sending stuff up. You veto it, and eventually, after a month or two of getting all vetoed,” the president continued. “Take them over and you make a deal. I think that probably would happen, but hopefully we don’t have to worry about them.”
This comes as Decision Desk HQ (DDHQ), The Hill’s polling partner, predicts Democrats will “likely” win the House, giving them an 83 percent chance of winning and Republicans a 17 percent chance.
In the Senate, DDHQ predicts Democrats have a 63 percent chance of regaining control, while Republicans were given a 37 percent chance.
Trump enjoyed a GOP-controlled Congress for the first two years of both of his terms, but Republicans lost control of the House in 2019. In that time, he threatened to veto multiple high-profile bills, including a Senate resolution blocking his declaration of a national emergency to build a wall on the Mexican border.
Other times the president used his veto pen was against previous war powers resolutions in 2020 related to the U.S. military’s assistance to Saudi Arabia in Yemen’s civil war and constraining his ability to take military action against Iran.
Democrats struggled to gain the two-thirds majority needed to override the president’s recent vetoes, with some suspecting that Trump rejected the bills in order to punish political enemies and act on his political grudges.
