How We Watched the Midterms

Steve Kornacki and Hasan Piker went head-to-head, and Donald Trump called in.

On Tuesday night, millions of Americans tuned in to both television news and live webstreams as the midterm votes were tallied. Among those viewers was Donald Trump. At around midnight on Tuesday, not long after networks reported that the Democrats had flipped the Senate as well as the House of Representatives, Trump called in to Fox News to unleash a twenty-three-minute tirade in which he deflected responsibility for the Republican Party’s unfolding catastrophe. Soon after, Dasha Burns, Politico’s senior reporter and podcast host, called Trump mid-livestream. “I wasn’t on the ballot and we didn’t get the people out. If I was on the ballot, we would’ve won it all very easily,” he told her. As she told me after, “We decided to make that call during the show, and we didn’t know whether he’d pick up. The questions I had for him were ones I’d been thinking about all fall, and I pressed him in real time to get as much detail as I could for our audience on how he saw the results and what it means for his presidency going forward.”