President Donald Trump's top strategists were already bracing for disaster on a private call nearly a week before Republicans' historic midterm collapse.
Six days before Election Day, more than two dozen of Trump's political advisers gathered on a video call where James Blair, who left the White House to run the president's midterm operation, told the group, "I'm getting my affairs in order. I suggest everybody else do the same," The New York Times reported Wednesday.
The roughly half-hour conversation was steeped in gallows humor, according to four people on the call who spoke to the Times. Participants riffed on funeral plans, prison meals, presidential pardons and even fleeing the country.
Trump's chief pollster Tony Fabrizio set the tone at the outset by asking whether the group wanted to hear "the white pill first, or the black pill first." Tim Saler, a top Republican data consultant, then walked through two scenarios, an optimistic one in which the $400 million MAGA Inc. super PAC was reaching the voters it expected, and a second that amounted to a wipeout.
Blair also invoked Trump ally Mike Lindell, the former MyPillow CEO who demanded a recount after losing his primary for Minnesota governor in a landslide.
"I think we'll just pull a Mike Lindell and demand a recount regardless of how many points we're down," Blair said sarcastically.
The grim forecast proved accurate. Democrats captured a large House majority and flipped the Senate. Blair had seen trouble coming for months. Over the summer, he shared a slide deck with West Wing officials tying Republicans' sagging poll numbers to the Iran war and warning that holding the House would require a lasting cease-fire, a reopened Strait of Hormuz and falling gas prices.
Trump had started second-guessing himself before polls closed Tuesday, at one point privately asking, "If we never went into Iran, what do you think would happen in the midterms?" according to a person who spoke with him.
On another call a week earlier, Blair offered a blunt assessment of his own side. "I have seen the enemy," he said. "And it is us." Fabrizio then responded, "In many places."
MAGA Inc. spokesman Alex Pfeiffer dismissed the reporting as "made up quotes and false gossip" and called the Times sources "cowards and losers." A White House official who declined to be named argued Trump was not on the ballot and blamed the GOP's losses on weak candidates.