Donald Trump never appeared downstairs.
As Cabinet officials, political advisers and MAGA allies gathered in the White House East Room on Tuesday night, plates of Cheesecake Factory snacks sat ready and television screens carried the election results. Trump, however, stayed in the private residence above them.
The President watched the growing Democratic surge alongside his formidable Chief of Staff, Susie Wiles, and Natalie Harp, the aide who has maintained unusually close access to him during his second term. The First Lady was not with them.
As the scale of the Republican losses became harder to ignore, even some of Trump’s most devoted allies began slipping away from the East Room election-night gathering.
Senior staff members left first, followed by several Cabinet officials. Secretary of State Marco Rubio had been present early in the evening, but later could no longer be seen.
Shortly before 10 p.m. Eastern, when Democrats were projected to win the House, the room was nearly deserted. Staff members were not simply abandoning the watch party; many were leaving the White House altogether, heading to a nearby Washington bar to drown their disappointment. The untouched Cheesecake Factory food remained scattered across the tables.
Two floors above, Trump was said to be seething.
‘It’s very, very dark in the residence,’ one senior official said of Trump’s mood. ‘It’s a dark scene.’
Donald Trump never appeared downstairs. While Cabinet officials, political advisers and MAGA allies gathered in the White House East Room on Tuesday night, the President remained in his private residence
Trump watched the Democratic surge with formidable Chief of Staff Susie Wiles (right) and Natalie Harp (left), the aide who has enjoyed unusually close access to him throughout his second term
By 11 p.m., Trump had retreated into furious silence.
‘He’s watching Fox News, barely saying a word and paralyzed into silence,’ a source close to the President told the Daily Mail.
On Truth Social, though, Trump made no effort to conceal his anger.
‘Fox News bears responsibility for these losses,’ he wrote in one of several unusually harsh attacks on the conservative network during the night.
After Republicans lost the Senate, Trump also blamed Texas Governor Greg Abbott. ‘If Greg Abbott, the Governor of Texas, hadn’t become a RINO in the last six months of his Political Life, he wouldn’t have lost,’ he posted. Just hours earlier, Trump had praised Abbott as ‘strong’, ‘highly respected’ and ‘exceptional’.
Trump insisted, ‘We would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!’ before adding, ‘I wasn’t on the Ballot.’
That claim contrasted with his message in the weeks leading up to the election, when he urged MAGA supporters to treat the contests as if he himself were on the ballot.
Downstairs, the officials who remained were also beginning to lose their composure.
One senior Trump official said Jason Miller, the longtime Trump communications strategist, appeared to be sweating and panicking as the damaging results continued to roll across the television ticker.
At the same time, senior White House officials were already identifying the figures they believed could be held responsible for Tuesday’s defeat: Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
‘Tonight would have looked very different without the Iran War,’ one official told the Daily Mail. ‘I believe you’ll ultimately see POTUS hold Hegseth accountable.’
A second top official laid it on Rubio’s state department.
And a top Republican Party donor agreed: ‘Rubio is over. Though that’s maybe also true for all Republicans who touched Trump’s foreign policy.’
The war in Iran has cost taxpayers at least $47 billion. Gas costs $4.15 per gallon. The vast majority of Americans consistently say the conflict has been a mistake.
Another well-placed White House source raised a grim specter: ‘If the boss is smart he’ll purge everyone tomorrow to save his legacy.’
But perhaps the most damaging account of the night came from a source who said that Trump’s chief of staff had been promising a win right up to the end.
As recently as September, the source said, Wiles was telling people directly that Republicans were going to take the midterms.
The source also described weekly Thursday briefings at which veteran GOP political consultant Chris LaCivita, a key Wiles ally, would promise the President that the win was his.
On Tuesday morning, staffers in the West Wing were still talking about picking up seats in both chambers.
‘Delusional,’ the source said. ‘They were delusional right until the very end.’
Senior White House officials are already naming the men they expect to pay for Tuesday’s defeat: Secretary of State Marco Rubio (middle) and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth (left)
Three streets from the White House, as mid-level staffers were working through the whiskey, some floated the idea of calling out sick in the morning, trading rumours about who would and wouldn’t survive the week.
‘Maybe that’s the booze talking,’ one senior official at the bar told the Daily Mail.
Talk also turned to who they’d rather have running the White House if Wiles now finally leaves.
Several said they wanted John McEntee, who ran Trump’s personnel operation in the first term, brought back. Someone joked the President should send Marine One for him overnight. What they wanted, more than anything, was Wiles gone.
But the problem facing anyone hoping for a clean purge is that there may be nobody beneath her to offer up.
‘The thing to remember is Susie took over the entire Trump apparatus,’ a senior administration official said of Wiles, who ran Trump’s re-election campaign in 2024 and has been his chief of staff ever since.
‘The Republican National Committee chair is hers [Wiles and Joe Gruters are longtime allies], people running the PACs are hers, senate candidates are her friends, the Cabinet is hers. She’s the conductor of this orchestra. Anyone she would try to scapegoat would be a person she brought in.’
A former administration official turned his fire instead on Wiles’ deputy, James Blair, the primary architect of the nationwide mid-decade redistricting push, including the Indiana effort that collapsed when the state’s own Republican senators refused to pass it.
‘Someone should reach out to James and ask him how he plans to redistrict his way out of this one, “Wonder Boy,”‘ the former official said. ‘The entire Cabinet is to blame, but JD [Vance] the least of them, and I’m not a sympathizer by any stretch of the imagination.’
The Iran theory was not confined to the building. ‘Republicans should stop letting [columnists] Mark Levin and Marc Thiessen dictate our foreign policy,’ a veteran GOP operative involved in the elections said. ‘This is 100% downstream from Iran.’
Two sources said Sergio Gor, the President’s former personnel chief now serving as Ambassador to India, is now positioning for a move into the State Department.
One of those sources predicted he would be nominated as secretary of state should Rubio resign to run for president in 2028. A source who spoke to staff at last week’s G20 gathering of foreign ministers said Gor had been present in every one of Rubio’s meetings in Atlanta.
But a lot now comes down to what and who Trump choses to blame.
If he concludes his political operation failed him, the blame surely runs to Wiles and stops there. If he concludes the war did it, the blame has nowhere to go but his own desk.
Not everyone could accept defeat. The mood, according to the official White House line, was ‘somewhat defiant’.
But a lot now comes down to what and who Trump choses to blame. If he concludes his political operation failed him, the blame surely runs to Wiles and stops there
But really, across in DC, the panic had seeped through all of Republican Washington.
At Butterworths, the Capitol Hill restaurant co-owned by GOP strategist Raheem Kassam, one of the loudest MAGA voices demanding Wiles’ removal in recent weeks, a watch party quickly soured as the numbers came in.
‘Wow, I’m about to lose my job,’ an aide to a Republican congressman said.
Over at the RNC headquarters, one source said you could hear a pin drop.
Trump has been here before. In 2022 he watched the midterms from his Mar-a-Lago resort with the press invited in to witness what his advisers expected to be a landslide.
As the MAGA-aligned candidates fell, reporters were hustled out and the president turned on his staff.
Three weeks ago Politico reported he had been privately canvassing allies about replacing Wiles. Trump denied it on Truth Social, calling her his loyal and longest serving chief of staff and insisting she had his complete confidence.
On Tuesday night, she was upstairs and everyone else was gone, avoiding Trump and fretting about their survival in the coming days.
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