A president who has already been impeached twice is betting that the Democrats who just won Congress will not try it a third time.
President Donald Trump said he cannot imagine Democrats moving to impeach him again, telling CBS News “60 Minutes” correspondent Ross Douthat in an interview taped at the White House on Friday, Nov. 6, 2026, and broadcast Sunday, Nov. 8, that a third attempt strikes him as implausible.
Asked whether Democrats would try to impeach him once they run the House and Senate, Trump said, “I can’t imagine it, you know?” He added: “What have I done? I’ve had the best two years in the history of the presidency.”
The sit-down was his first since the midterm elections on Nov. 3, when Democrats took both chambers. The party also claimed statewide offices in reliably Republican states such as Texas, Kansas and South Carolina, where it had waited decades for such victories. Those new majorities are sworn in come January 2027.
Trump raised the earlier impeachments himself, noting that Democrats “impeached me twice” and that some people think it “worked out to my advantage.” His first impeachment came from the House in December 2019, and an acquittal followed in the Senate in February 2020. A second impeachment arrived in the House after the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riot, and the Senate acquitted him again in February 2021.
Working With the People Investigating Him
Douthat asked whether Trump could still work with Democrats while they investigate his administration. “Well, I did it for four years,” Trump said. Deals with the new majority would come “very easily,” he said, and Douthat then asked whether he could pull that off while sparing Democrats his insults. Trump said he could.
Some Democrats have demanded investigations and subpoenas of Trump administration officials. The incoming Congress should not make impeachment its focus, according to Kamala Harris, the former vice president.
Trump named immigration as one area where he wants to work with the Democratic majority. He said that same policy “both helped and hurt” Republicans at the polls, and he told Douthat his deportation policy had been too tough and may have cost his party votes.
“I think I got an A+ 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.
His Name Wasn’t on the Ballot
Trump’s explanation for the defeat started with his own absence from the ballot. He campaigned hard anyway, he said, holding about 30 rallies in roughly 28 days, and he argued the outcome would have looked different with his name in front of voters. The people who turn out for him, he said, do not transfer to candidates they did not like.
Many of those candidates were Trump’s own picks, Douthat pointed out, among them Ken Paxton in Texas and Darline Graham in South Carolina, who lost a heavily Republican state to a liberal challenger. Graham fought hard, Trump said. Ohio Republican Jon Husted, he said, was 15 points down and ended up losing by about a point.
Gasoline cost $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. “And there’s a great dislike, incredibly, for Israel,” he told Douthat, listing it among the reasons Republicans lost.
Vice President JD Vance posted a post-election assessment on social media naming the war as the reason Republicans lost. Trump said he does not disagree with him. The economy is strong, he said, blaming sour public sentiment on poor messaging, possibly his own.
The president defended his order to strike Iran, calling it one that will look good historically even if it did not look good at the polls. He saw no reason to escalate the war now, he said, because the country’s nuclear material lies buried under thousands of tons of rock. The Strait of Hormuz is effectively open, he said, even though the U.S. military is still policing maritime traffic there.
“And at the end of this whole thing, 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,” Trump said of Middle East allies.
The conversation ranged past the election to corruption, Ukraine, artificial intelligence and Trump’s own mortality. Beating China in artificial intelligence, he argued, justifies the risks.
No Forgiveness Before the Judgment Throne
Douthat, a conservative Catholic writer and the author of “Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious,” also pressed Trump on forgiveness and the afterlife. Asked repeatedly whether he could forgive enemies including Nancy Pelosi and former FBI Director James Comey, even “before the judgment throne of God,” Trump said: “I probably cannot do that, no, because I do hate some of my enemies and I always will.”
Trump Replaced Wiles an Hour Later
Stephen Miller became his White House chief of staff about an hour after the interview ended, when Trump named him to succeed Susie Wiles, the outgoing chief of staff. He said he expects some turnover in his administration.
The choice of Miller shows the president “doesn’t get it,” said Seth McKee, a politics professor at Oklahoma State University. In an email on Monday, Nov. 9, McKee wrote: “The best strategy for Trump and Republicans is to make nice with Democrats, given their leverage after the midterms.”