Donald Trump never came downstairs.
As Cabinet officials, political advisers and MAGA allies filed into the White House East Room on Tuesday evening—with trays of Cheesecake Factory finger food set out and screens tuned to the election returns—the president remained in his private residence upstairs.
Accompanied by his redoubtable chief of staff, Susie Wiles, and Natalie Harp, the aide who has enjoyed unusually direct access to Trump during his second term, the president watched the Blue Wave sweep in. The first lady was not watching alongside him.
As the scale of the night’s defeat became clearer, even Trump’s most loyal supporters began drifting away from the East Room watch party.
Senior staff left first, followed by members of the Cabinet. Secretary of State Marco Rubio had arrived early in the evening, but later he was nowhere to be seen.
By the time Democrats were projected to have won the House shortly before 10 p.m. Eastern, the room was largely empty. Staff were not merely leaving the party—they were leaving the building and heading to a nearby Washington watering hole to drown their disappointment. The Cheesecake Factory food sat untouched on the tables.
Two floors above them, the president was 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 came downstairs. As Cabinet officials, political advisers and MAGA allies gathered in the White House East Room on Tuesday evening, the president remained upstairs in his private residence.
Accompanied by his redoubtable chief of staff, Susie Wiles (right), and Natalie Harp (left), the aide who has enjoyed unusually direct access to Trump during his second term, the president watched the Blue Wave sweep in.
By 11 p.m., Trump had fallen silent in fury.
‘He’s watching Fox News, barely uttering a word and paralyzed into silence,’ a source close to the president told Our News Outlet.
On his social media platform, Truth Social, however, Trump was making his anger clear.
‘Fox News bears responsibility for these losses,’ he wrote in one of several uncharacteristic attacks on the conservative network during the evening.
‘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,’ Trump wrote soon after Republicans lost the Senate. Only hours earlier, he had warmly endorsed Abbott as ‘strong’, ‘highly respected’ and ‘exceptional’.
‘We would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!’ he declared, adding: ‘I wasn’t on the Ballot.’
In the weeks leading up to the elections, Trump had told MAGA supporters to act as though he was on the ballot.
Back in the White House, those who remained downstairs were also beginning to lose their composure.
One senior Trump official described Jason Miller, the longtime Trump communications strategist, as sweating and panicking while the humiliating results continued rolling across the ticker.
Other senior White House officials were already identifying the people they believed would pay for Tuesday’s defeat: Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
‘Tonight would have looked very different without the Iran War,’ one official told Our News Outlet. ‘I believe you’ll ultimately see POTUS hold Hegseth accountable.’
A second senior official blamed Rubio’s State Department.
A major Republican 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 prices stand at $4.15 per gallon, and a large majority of Americans have consistently said the conflict was a mistake.
Another well-placed White House source raised an even grimmer possibility: ‘If the boss is smart he’ll purge everyone tomorrow to save his legacy.’
Perhaps the most damaging account of the evening came from a source who said Trump’s chief of staff had continued promising a Republican victory until the very end.
As recently as September, the source said, Wiles was directly telling people that Republicans would win the midterms.
The source also described weekly Thursday briefings in which veteran Republican consultant Chris LaCivita, a key Wiles ally, assured the president that victory was his.
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On Tuesday morning, West Wing staff were still discussing the possibility of Republicans gaining seats in both chambers.
‘Delusional,’ the source said. ‘They were delusional right until the very end.’
Senior White House officials were already identifying the people they believed would pay for Tuesday’s defeat: Secretary of State Marco Rubio (center) and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth (left).
Three streets from the White House, mid-level staffers worked their way through the whiskey while trading rumors about who might—and might not—survive the week. Some even floated the idea of calling in sick the next morning.
‘Maybe that’s the booze talking,’ one senior official at the bar told Our News Outlet.
The conversation also turned to who they would rather see running the White House if Wiles finally departed.
Several said they wanted John McEntee, who ran Trump’s personnel operation during his first term, brought back. One person joked that the president should send Marine One to collect him overnight. More than anything, they wanted Wiles gone.
The challenge for anyone seeking a clean purge, however, is that there may be no one beneath Wiles to sacrifice.
‘The thing to remember is Susie took over the entire Trump apparatus,’ a senior administration official said of Wiles, who managed Trump’s 2024 re-election campaign and has served as his chief of staff ever since.
‘The Republican National Committee chair is hers—Wiles and Joe Gruters are longtime allies. The people running the PACs are hers, the Senate candidates are her friends, and the Cabinet is hers. She’s the conductor of this orchestra. Anyone she would try to scapegoat would be someone she brought in.’
A former administration official directed his anger instead at Wiles’ deputy, James Blair, the main architect of the nationwide mid-decade redistricting effort, including the Indiana initiative that collapsed after the state’s Republican senators refused to support 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 extended beyond the White House. ‘Republicans should stop letting [columnists] Mark Levin and Marc Thiessen dictate our foreign policy,’ said a veteran Republican operative involved in the elections. ‘This is 100% downstream from Iran.’
Two sources said Sergio Gor, the president’s former personnel chief who now serves as ambassador to India, was positioning himself for a move to the State Department.
One source predicted Gor would be nominated as secretary of state if Rubio resigned to run for president in 2028. Another source who spoke with staff at last week’s G20 meeting of foreign ministers said Gor had attended each of Rubio’s meetings in Atlanta.
Much now depends on what—and whom—Trump chooses to blame.
If he decides his political operation failed him, responsibility will likely reach Wiles and stop there. If he concludes that the war caused the defeat, the blame leads back to his own desk.
Not everyone was prepared to accept the loss. The official White House description of the mood was ‘somewhat defiant’.
Much now depends on what—and whom—Trump chooses to blame. If he decides his political operation failed him, responsibility will likely reach Wiles and stop there.
In reality, panic had spread throughout Republican Washington.
At Butterworths, the Capitol Hill restaurant co-owned by Republican strategist Raheem Kassam—one of the most prominent MAGA voices calling for Wiles’ removal in recent weeks—a watch party quickly soured as the results came in.
‘Wow, I’m about to lose my job,’ an aide to a Republican congressman said.
At Republican National Committee headquarters, one source said the silence was so complete that you could hear a pin drop.
Trump has faced a similar night before. In 2022, he watched the midterms from his Mar-a-Lago resort, with the press invited to observe what his advisers expected to be a landslide.
As MAGA-aligned candidates fell short, reporters were ushered out and the president turned his anger toward his staff.
Three weeks ago, Politico reported that Trump had privately sounded out allies about replacing Wiles. Trump denied the report on Truth Social, describing her as his loyal and longest-serving chief of staff and insisting that she had his complete confidence.
On Tuesday night, she was upstairs while everyone else had disappeared—avoiding Trump and worrying about their own futures in the days ahead.
