Post from Truth Social

Election night, 11:52 PM: the loss gets an owner

The post went up at 04:52 UTC on November 4, which is 11:52 PM Eastern on November 3. Daylight saving time ended November 1, so Eastern was UTC-5. That is election night, while results in the midterms forecast to favor Democrats were still coming in. Whether he was at the White House or Mar-a-Lago, both are on Eastern time. The sibling posts from the same night set the context: "I wasn't on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!", a claim that Greg Abbott "wouldn't have lost" had he not "become a RINO", and an announcement that he would "become a Political Pundit... on the reasons these Candidates won and lost." This post adds Fox News to the list of parties he holds responsible.

The post opens as a reaction to something on screen ("Why does FoxNews have Bill de Blasio... on air, ranting and raving like a Lunatic?") and ends somewhere else: "FoxNews bears responsibility for these losses." The phrase "these losses" has no antecedent in the post. It assumes the reader already shares the night's context, which is how someone talks when the defeat is the thing on his mind and the TV guest is just where it surfaced. The drift goes from a former mayor, to the city's decline, to "telling us how to run America," to the network's guilt for the election. That carries a single grievance across three targets in four sentences.

Who gets blamed

The main defense is displacement. Losses that would normally be read as a verdict on the sitting president's party (the historian notes an NBC poll with 60% disapproval) are reassigned to a cable network's booking choices: "constantly and consistently putting on the Dumocrat opposition, and worse." Across the evening the blame has gone to Abbott's supposed ideological drift, to Fox, and to his own absence from the ballot ("if I was, we would have won"), and that last one works as rationalization that keeps his own standing out of the results. An earlier post the same night insists "It's them, not me — My numbers are better than they have ever been."

Devaluation of de Blasio is total: "the Worst Mayor in the History of New York City," "left the City in disgrace," damage "incalculable," a city that "has never been the same." This is a contamination sequence in narrative terms: a good city made permanently worse by an enemy, the same structure as the election-night story of a winnable contest spoiled by disloyal allies. Calling the guest "ranting and raving like a Lunatic" in a late-night post that itself rants carries a projective element, though one post is thin evidence for projection as a stable pattern.

The trigger is narcissistic injury through defeat, compounded by the sense that an ally betrayed him. Fox is treated as a vassal outlet that owes exclusive loyalty, and giving air time to an opponent counts as complicity. The state is mixed. The wound shows in the need to assign responsibility at all, and the grandiose cover sits in the companion claims of 99% Republican support and a hypothetical landslide.

Insults in place of an argument

• Superlative devaluation ("Worst Mayor in the History").
• The coinage "Dumocrat," a deliberate insult portmanteau he has been using recently. It is a branding device and not a clinical neologism.
• An ad hominem in place of engaging with whatever de Blasio said, which the post never reports.
• A false dichotomy: a network either excludes the opposition or "bears responsibility" for Republican defeat.
• A patriotic closer ("GOD BLESS AMERICA!") stuck onto a grievance post with no transition, a sign-off habit rather than a conclusion.

There is no call to action and no violent or dehumanizing vocabulary. "Lunatic" is contempt, not eliminationist framing. The aggression targets a media company's editorial choices and a retired politician's reputation, and neither is offered up as a target for followers.

Archetype and hierarchy

The post plays the King turned on by his court. Fox is cast as a courtier that has given a platform to the enemy, and the demand is for the hierarchy to be restored: friendly media should elevate the leader and shut out his opponents. That is an epistemic-closure move, since even the in-group's own network is faulted for letting opposition voices on. De Blasio fills the Shadow role. He is the failed executive who "left in disgrace," on a night when the subject's own party is taking losses he will not own.

Typed in front of the TV, and coherent

Several signs point to Trump writing this himself: the near-midnight timing on a night of personal stakes, the live reaction to a specific TV segment, the idiosyncratic capitals ("Lunatic," "Worst Mayor," "City"), the capital "It" after an em-dash, the unanchored "these losses," and the loose tail "and worse." Syntax is intact and the argument, however displaced, holds together. The topic drift follows emotion, which is his long-standing habit, and does not suggest disorganization. No word-finding, paraphasic, or temporal errors appear.

Longitudinal note

Blaming Fox for coverage is a recurring pattern going back to 2019-2020. What is new here is blaming the network for losing elections, during a run of rapid-fire posts that each pin the defeat on a different party. The posts that follow will show whether he moves toward acknowledging the losses or keeps expanding the list of culprits.

Fact Verification

Historians' rankings: The main scholarly ranking of American big-city mayors is Melvin Holli's survey of about 160 historians, social scientists, journalists and urbanologists, taken in 1993 and published in 1999 as The American Mayor: The Best and the Worst Big-City Leaders. It names three New York mayors among the ten worst in the country: James J. Walker (1926-32, 3rd worst), A. Oakey Hall of the Tweed Ring (1868-72, 6th) and Fernando Wood (1855-58 and 1860-62, 8th). The survey predates de Blasio, and I found no later scholarly ranking that puts him below those three.

Disgraced predecessors: Walker resigned in 1932 during a corruption inquiry. William O'Dwyer resigned in 1950 amid a police-corruption scandal and was sent to Mexico as ambassador. Wood proposed that New York secede from the Union to keep its Southern trade. When Rep. Max Rose called de Blasio "the worst mayor in the history of New York City" in 2020, de Blasio's spokesman answered by naming Fernando Wood. City & State's piece "Was there ever a mayor worse than de Blasio?" (December 2020) named Wood, Walker and O'Dwyer as contenders and gave no verdict. A New York Daily News column ("Worst mayor ever? Are you serious?", September 2020) disputed the label, noting crime was still low by historical standards.

Expert assessments: In December 2021 City & State asked about a dozen observers how de Blasio would be remembered. The answers were mixed. Many credited universal pre-K and affordable housing. Hunter College's Joseph Viteritti said he "did more than anyone since (Fiorello) La Guardia" on housing. Others criticized his feud with Gov. Cuomo, his chronic lateness and his fundraising practices. Consultant George Arzt grouped him with Abe Beame and David Dinkins as a "weak mayor," which is a long way from worst ever. AP and Gotham Gazette also described his legacy as complicated, not uniquely bad.

Public opinion: De Blasio was unpopular late in his tenure, but Quinnipiac's own polling shows other mayors rated lower. Its December 6, 2023 release reported Eric Adams at 28% approval and said this was "the lowest job approval rating for a New York City mayor since Quinnipiac University began polling New York City registered voters in 1996." The previous low was Michael Bloomberg's 31-60 in July 2003. That means de Blasio's approval stayed above 31% in every Quinnipiac poll from 2014 to 2021. On March 5, 2025, Quinnipiac put Adams at 20%, and 56% of voters said he should resign over his federal corruption case. By the post date (November 2026), at least one later mayor had polled well below de Blasio's worst Quinnipiac numbers.

Who makes the claim: The "worst mayor in history" line comes mostly from political opponents: Trump himself (2016 and 2019), Rep. Max Rose's 2020 campaign ad, and Sean Duffy on Fox News in 2021. It has not come from historians or from polling data.

Verdict: Being unpopular is not the same as being the worst in the city's history. Historians list Walker, Hall and Wood among the worst big-city mayors in America. Two mayors (Walker and O'Dwyer) resigned under corruption clouds. Quinnipiac's record shows lower approval for both Bloomberg (2003) and Adams (2023 and 2025). The superlative rests on partisan rhetoric, not on any ranking, so the claim is mostly false. |

Overall Veracity: 20%