Donald Trump never came down.
While Cabinet officials, political advisers and MAGA allies diligently filed into the White House's East Room on Tuesday evening – trays of Cheesecake Factory finger food laid out, screens tuned in to the
returns – the President remained upstairs in his private residence.
Ensconced with his redoubtable Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and Natalie Harp, the aide who has enjoyed unusually direct access to Trump throughout this second term, the President watched as the Blue Wave swept in. His First Lady was not watching with him.
And as the magnitude of the night's drubbing started to come into focus, Trump's most loyal followers began to flee the East Room watch party.
First the senior staff, then some of the Cabinet. Secretary of State Marco Rubio was there early in the evening, but could not be found anywhere later on.
By the time the House was called for the Democrats at just before 10pm Eastern, the room had largely emptied – and the staff weren't just leaving the party, they were leaving the building, heading out to drown their troubles at a nearby DC watering hole. The Cheesecake Factory food was left on the tables, uneaten.
Two floors up, 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.'
While cabinet officials, political advisers and MAGA allies gathered in the White House's East Room to watch the midterm results come on Tuesday evening, the President remained upstairs in his private residence
Alone with only his Chief of Staff, Susie Wiles (right), and Natalie Harp (left), Trump watched as the Blue Wave swept in, but his wife, Melania, was not with him
By 11pm, Trump was mute with fury.
'He's watching Fox News, barely uttering a word and paralyzed into silence,' a source close to the President told the Daily Mail.
Over on his social media platform Truth Social, however, Trump was making his anger known.
'Fox News bears responsibility for these losses,' he blasted in one of several out-of-character screeds against the conservative TV network during the evening.
'If Greg Abbott, the Governor of Texas, hadn't become a RINO [Republican in Name Only] in the last six months of his Political Life, he wouldn't have lost,' he wrote soon after the GOP lost the Senate.
Only hours earlier, Trump had glowingly endorsed Abbott as 'strong', 'highly respected' and 'exceptional'.
'We would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!' he also declared, but 'I wasn't on the Ballot.'
In the weeks before these elections, he had told the MAGA faithful to pretend he was.
Downstairs, things weren't much better, as those who remained were also losing their composure.
One senior Trump official described Jason Miller, the longtime Trump communications strategist, as sweating and panicking as the humiliation kept rolling in on the ticker tape.
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Meanwhile, other senior White House officials were already naming the men they expect to 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 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 $47billion (£35billion). Gas costs $4.15 (£3.10) 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 (center) and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth (left)
Three streets away from the White House, as mid-level staffers were working through the whiskey, some floated the idea of calling in 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 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 no one suitable to step into her shoes.
'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 [Joe Gruters, a longtime Wiles ally] is hers, 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 ire 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 [conservative media commentators] Mark Levin and Marc Thiessen dictate our foreign policy,' a veteran GOP operative involved in the elections said. 'This is 100 per cent downstream from Iran.'
Two sources said Sergio Gor, the President's former personnel chief now serving as ambassador to India, is suddenly 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 in Atlanta said Gor had been present in every one of Rubio's meetings.
But a lot now comes down to what and who Trump chooses 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'.
If Trump concludes his political operation failed him, the blame surely runs to Susie Wiles
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But really, here 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 Republican National Committee 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, however, she was upstairs and everyone else was gone, avoiding Trump and fretting about their survival in the coming days.
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