Donald Trump was so angry at his breathtaking midterm defeat that he holed himself up in the dark with his ever-present aide, Natalie Harp, as the results rolled in.
A White House insider told the Daily Mail that aides ordered platters of appetizers from the Cheesecake Factory in the “delusional” expectation that there’d be something to celebrate as the results of the nationwide contests poured in on Tuesday night.
But by 10 p.m. the uneaten trays of sliders and eggrolls were turning stale in the East Room as even top administration officials fled the building to drown their sorrows in the bars of D.C.
Within an hour of the first results, Trump was so furious that he briefly lost the ability to speak, holed up in his second-floor private residence with Harp, his executive assistant, and Chief of Staff Susie Wiles.
“He’s watching Fox News barely uttering a word and paralyzed into silence,” one insider told the Mail. “It’s very, very dark in the residence,” another added. “It’s a dark scene.”
The 80-year-old president rode into Tuesday’s polls with his approval at a miserable 32 percent and with Democrats enjoying a 9-point advantage on the generic congressional ballot.
The Democrats made good on that lead to sweep both the House and Senate in a blue tsunami that will leave Trump struggling to get his head above water for the remainder of his second term.
Ever eager to feed him good news, Trump’s advisers kept promising him a midterm victory right up until the polls opened.
Wiles in particular was telling White House staff that Republicans would come out on top as late as September, one source told the Mail.
And the insider has now also revealed that Trump’s former campaign manager Chris LaCivita had been delivering the same message to the president at weekly Thursday meetings.
That unfounded optimism apparently had West Wing staffers chattering about the GOP expanding their majority in both the House and Senate even as late as Tuesday morning.
“Delusional,” as the Mail’s source put it. “They were delusional right until the very end.”
Another insider recalled watching the president’s longtime comms strategist Jason Miller panicking and doused in sweat as newscasters announced one embarrassing Republican electoral defeat after another.
Trump’s paralyzing rage didn’t seem to keep him from making it known on Truth Social. “Fox News bears responsibility for these losses,” he wrote in one livid screed.
“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,” the president wrote in another.
“I wasn’t on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE,” he later added, despite spending months begging voters to imagine they’d be casting ballots for him personally.
And as the president’s fury found an outlet online, whiskey-soaked aides gathered in a bar three streets from the White House to huddle over who in the administration they expect to take the fall for the midterm drubbing.
“Tonight would have looked very different without the Iran War,” as one insider put it to the Mail. “I believe you’ll ultimately see POTUS hold Hegseth accountable.”
Others suggested the ax is equally likely to swing at the State Department. “[Marco] Rubio is over,” another person said. “Though that’s maybe also true for all Republicans who touched Trump’s foreign policy.”
Voters consistently ranked the president’s disastrous war of choice with Tehran and its devastating impact on the cost of living as chief concerns ahead of the polls, even as Trump dismissed unaffordability as a Democratic “hoax” and privately charted options for renewed attacks on Iran once the results were in.
There appears to be a general consensus that Trump’s fury will fall hardest on Wiles after the president was reported last month to have privately called allies to ask who ought to replace his powerful chief of staff.
But one aide warned that coming departures are just as likely reflect the scale at which voters have now expressed their own anger at the Trump administration.
“If the boss is smart he’ll purge everyone tomorrow to save his legacy,” the person said.
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment.
