President Donald Trump spent election night shut away in the White House residence as Democrats made sweeping gains in the midterms, according to a behind-the-scenes account published on Wednesday, while senior officials and Republican allies began discussing who should take responsibility for the defeat.
The president watched the results from upstairs with Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and aide Natalie Harp, rather than joining Cabinet officials, political advisers and MAGA supporters gathered in the East Room. As the scale of the losses became clear, the watch party rapidly emptied: Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who had been present earlier in the evening, was no longer there by the time the House was called for the Democrats shortly before 10 p.m. Eastern time, many staff had left the building altogether, some heading to a nearby bar, and food laid out for the gathering was reportedly left untouched.
A senior official described the mood in the residence as “very, very dark,” adding: “It’s a dark scene.” By 11 p.m., Trump was said to have stopped speaking while watching Fox News, and a source close to the president said he was “barely uttering a word and paralyzed into silence.”
His anger was more visible in public, on Truth Social, where he launched a series of attacks on Fox News and blamed the network for the Republican losses. He also turned on Texas Governor Greg Abbott after Republicans lost the Senate, writing that if Abbott “hadn’t become a RINO in the last six months of his Political Life, he wouldn’t have lost” — hours after he had endorsed Abbott as “strong,” “highly respected” and “exceptional.” “We would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!” Trump declared, adding: “I wasn’t on the Ballot.”
Inside the White House, the account says, attention quickly turned to who would carry the blame. Senior officials named Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth among those they expected to face consequences. “Tonight would have looked very different without the Iran War,” one official said. “I believe you’ll ultimately see POTUS hold Hegseth accountable.” A major Republican donor said of Rubio: “Rubio is over.” The account puts the war's cost to taxpayers at at least 47 billion dollars, with gasoline at 4.15 dollars a gallon.
One well-placed White House source suggested Trump could respond with a sweeping purge, saying: “If the boss is smart he’ll purge everyone tomorrow to save his legacy.” But the chief of staff herself was also facing scrutiny in the account: one source said Wiles had continued to predict a Republican victory as recently as September, veteran consultant Chris LaCivita was said to have assured Trump in weekly briefings that the election would go his way, and West Wing staff were reportedly still discussing gaining seats in both chambers on Tuesday morning — optimism one source dismissed as “delusional.”
The account rests on unnamed officials and sources, and the White House has issued no public response to it. The president's own posts that night are a matter of public record.
For Americans, what happens inside that building next is not palace gossip. If a purge comes, the people running the departments households deal with every day will change, and the questions the account raises — the cost of the war and the price at the pump, the very ground the election was fought on — are the ones the new Congress will now take up.
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