Two impeachments have already failed to drive President Donald Trump from the White House, and he does not expect the Democrats who just won Congress to try a third.
Trump told CBS News “60 Minutes” correspondent Ross Douthat that he doubts a third impeachment is coming, in an interview taped at the White House on Friday, Nov. 6, 2026, and broadcast Sunday, Nov. 8 — his first sit-down since the midterm elections on Nov. 3. Douthat asked whether Democrats would move against him once they run the House and the Senate. “I can’t imagine it, you know?” Trump said.
Trump raised the earlier impeachments himself, noting that Democrats “impeached me twice” and that some people think it “worked out to my advantage.”
“What have I done? I’ve had the best two years in the history of the presidency,” he said.
The House impeached him the first time in December 2019, and the Senate acquitted him in February 2020. The second impeachment followed the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riot, and the Senate acquitted him again in February 2021.
Democrats took both chambers on Nov. 3 and take control in January 2027. They also won statewide offices in reliably Republican states, among them Texas, Kansas and South Carolina, where the party had gone decades without such victories.
Douthat asked whether Trump could still work with Democrats while they investigate his administration. “Well, I did it for four years,” Trump said. He said cutting deals with the new majority would come “very easily,” and when Douthat followed up on whether he could manage it without insulting Democrats, Trump said he could.
Some Democrats have called for investigations and subpoenas of Trump administration officials. Kamala Harris, the former vice president, has urged the incoming Congress not to make impeachment its focus.
Seth McKee, a politics professor at Oklahoma State University, said in an emailed statement: “The best strategy for Trump and Republicans is to make nice with Democrats, given their leverage after the midterms.”
The A-Plus That Cost Votes
Trump named immigration as the area where he wants to work with the Democratic majority — and as the policy that “both helped and hurt” Republicans at the polls.
His deportation policy had been too tough, he told Douthat, and may have cost Republicans votes.
“I think I got an A-plus for closing up the border. I get very high marks for getting the bad ones out. But I get hurt because we also took people that had good jobs, that created one violation or breaking of the law, and that was that they came into the country illegally,” Trump said.
Blaming the Ballot and the Pump
Trump began his explanation of the defeat with his own absence from the ballot. He campaigned at about 30 rallies in roughly 28 days, he said, and said the result would have been different had his name been on it. His voters, he said, did not transfer to candidates they didn’t like.
Douthat pointed out that Trump picked many of those candidates, including Ken Paxton in Texas and Darline Graham in South Carolina, who lost a heavily Republican state to a liberal challenger. Trump answered that Graham fought hard. He also pointed to Ohio Republican Jon Husted, whom he described as 15 points down and ending up losing by about a point.
Gasoline sold for $1.85 a gallon in Iowa before climbing to $3.50 or $4, Trump said, and voters blamed the Iran war for the increase. He said he has settled eight wars.
Hostility toward Israel also cost Republicans, he said. “And there’s a great dislike, incredibly, for Israel,” Trump said. He added that “those countries that we’ve protected are going to pay us back any and all costs that we’ve had for the war, because without us, they wouldn’t exist.”
Vice President JD Vance pointed to the war as the reason Republicans lost in a post-election assessment on social media. Trump said he does not disagree.
The economy is strong, Trump said, blaming sour public sentiment on poor messaging, possibly his own. He stood by the decision to strike Iran and said it will look good historically even if it did not look good at the polls.
The Enemies He Won’t Forgive
The interview ranged well past the election, into corruption, Ukraine, artificial intelligence and Trump’s own mortality. Beating China in artificial intelligence justifies the risks, he said, and he sees no reason to escalate the war with Iran now, because Iran’s nuclear material is buried under thousands of tons of rock.
Douthat, a conservative Catholic writer and the author of the book “Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious,” pressed him on forgiveness and the afterlife, asking repeatedly in the Nov. 8 broadcast whether he could forgive enemies such as Nancy Pelosi and James Comey.
“I probably cannot do that, no, because I do hate some of my enemies, and I always will,” Trump said. Of those enemies, he added: “I found them to be extremely dishonest people, very bad people, very bad for our country. I love our country far more than I can love people and people like that.”
The Hire That Came an Hour Later
About an hour after the interview ended, Trump named Stephen Miller his White House chief of staff, replacing Susie Wiles, the outgoing chief of staff. He said he expects some turnover in his administration.
McKee said of the Miller pick that the president “doesn’t get it.”
Rice University political scientist Mark Jones described Miller as “much more of (a) wartime consigliere than a peacetime consigliere.”
