President Donald Trump’s election night watch party at the White House turned into a ghost town as Democrats swept to power in Congress, according to a new report.
Cabinet officials, political advisers and MAGA allies filed into the East Room on Tuesday evening, where trays of Cheesecake Factory finger food were laid out and screens were tuned to the returns, reported the Daily Mail.
But the 80-year-old president never came down.
Instead, the president stayed upstairs in the private residence with chief of staff Susie Wiles and Natalie Harp, the aide who has enjoyed unusually direct access to Trump throughout his second term. First lady Melania Trump, according to the report, was not watching with him.
As the scale of the losses came into focus, Trump’s loyalists began heading for the exits, first senior staff and then some Cabinet members. Secretary of State Marco Rubio was there early in the evening but later “could not be found anywhere,” the Daily Mail reported.
By the time the House was called for Democrats just before 10 p.m., the room had largely emptied. Staffers weren’t just leaving the party but the building, decamping to a nearby D.C. bar. The Cheesecake Factory spread was left on the tables, uneaten.
Upstairs, the president was fuming.
“It’s very, very dark in the residence,” one senior official said of Trump’s mood. “It’s a dark scene.”
By 11 p.m., Trump had gone quiet.
“He’s watching Fox News barely uttering a word and paralyzed into silence,” a source close to the president told the outlet.
Those who stayed downstairs weren’t faring much better. One senior official described longtime Trump communications strategist Jason Miller as sweating and panicking as the results rolled in.
At the bar three streets away, mid-level staffers working through the whiskey floated calling out sick Wednesday morning and swapped rumors about who would survive the week.
“Maybe that’s the booze talking,” one senior official told the Daily Mail.
At Butterworths, the Capitol Hill restaurant co-owned by GOP strategist Raheem Kassam, a watch party soured as the numbers 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, you could hear a pin drop.
The official White House line described the mood as “somewhat defiant.”
Trump has been here before. In 2022, he watched the midterms from Mar-a-Lago with reporters invited in to see what his advisers expected to be a landslide. As his hand-picked candidates fell, the press was hustled out, and Trump turned on his staff.
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