White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt speaks with reporters in the James Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House, Thursday, Jan. 15, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said President Donald Trump was “simply joking” when he told an interviewer Wednesday: “We shouldn’t even have an election.”
“The president was simply joking,” Leavitt said at a Thursday press briefing in response to a reporter’s question about the comments. “He was saying: We’re doing such a great job, we’re doing everything the American people thought, maybe we should just keep rolling. But he was speaking facetiously.”
Trump’s comments came in an interview with Reuters, while venting about the long-standing reality that the party of a sitting president often loses seats in midterm elections.
“It’s some deep psychological thing, but when you win the presidency, you don’t win the midterms,” Trump said. He then boasted that he had accomplished so much that, “when you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.”
In a speech to House Republicans last month, Trump struck a similar note.
“How we have to even run against these people — I won’t say cancel the election, they should cancel the election,” Trump said. “The fake news would say, ‘He wants the elections canceled. He’s a dictator.’ They always call me a dictator.”
The Constitution and federal law give the president no power whatsoever to cancel an election.