Hours after witnessing his party’s worst electoral drubbing in at least six years, President Donald Trump hosted Senate Republicans at the White House and demanded they ditch their chamber’s supermajority rules.

“If you don’t terminate the filibuster, you’ll be in bad shape,” he told them over breakfast in the State Dining Room.

It was classic Trump dominance theater, like many other occasions this year where he successfully muscled recalcitrant Republicans to confirm controversial nominees, support divisive policies and enact sweeping domestic policy legislation.

But upon returning to the Capitol, the senators made it very clear: They planned to blow Trump off. One GOP senator, Mike Rounds of South Dakota, laughed out loud when asked about the anti-filibuster push.

Welcome to the dawn of Trump’s lame duck era.

Don’t expect an immediate stampede away from the president, according to interviews with GOP lawmakers and aides Wednesday — he remains overwhelmingly popular with GOP voters and is the party’s most dominant leader in a generation. Trump’s top political aide signaled Monday that the White House is not worried about a messy “family conversation” about the filibuster.

But with Tuesday’s stunning election losses crystallizing the risks to downballot Republicans in 2026 and beyond, there are growing signs that lawmakers are contending with the facts of their political lives: He’ll be gone in just over three years, while they’ll still be around.

The danger for the president is that if Trump can’t run roughshod over the thin GOP congressional majorities, it would leave him few legislative options given his scant interest in compromising with Democrats.

One Republican already liberated from reelection concerns openly vocalized frustrations Wednesday as Trump pushed for the end of the filibuster — something many in the GOP fear would backfire soon enough once Democrats regain power.

Retiring Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) called Democrats’ victory margins Tuesday “a red flag to the GOP” and blasted Trump’s refusal to engage with the other party.

“He has zero ability to work across the aisle,” he added. “He needs to face reality and learn how to talk to Democrats he can reason with.”

Other House Republicans more quietly aired frustration with Trump’s approach to the record 37-day shutdown, which headed into the end of the congressional workweek with no clear end in sight.

Many are privately signaling they’re prepared to break with Trump if he doesn’t allow Republicans to negotiate on an extension of the Obamacare insurance subsidies Democrats are demanding. Others blamed the president and his top budget aide, Russ Vought, for favoring hardball moves such as canceling blue-state transportation projects and firing federal employees that only served to cause Democrats to dig in further.

One irate senior House Republican granted anonymity to speak candidly blamed Trump and Vought for spurring the shutdown with their unprecedented move to unilaterally rescind congressional funding over the summer through a so-called pocket rescission.

“That decision is why we’re in this mess,” the Republican said.

Democrats who on Wednesday finally found a bounce in their step after a year of infighting said it was no secret why Republicans were finally standing up to Trump over the filibuster after folding so many times before.

“Last night’s results look like a recipe for them to lose the House and the Senate next fall,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.). “And they’re going to hand us a 50-vote majority gift-wrapped when we show up Day 1?”

Trump on Wednesday night moved to buck up his faithful. “OUR MOVEMENT IS FAR FROM OVER — IN FACT, OUR FIGHT HAS ONLY JUST BEGUN!” he wrote in a Truth Social post with an upbeat video.

That followed a day on defense, where GOP leaders conspicuously split with Trump on the reasons for the stunning Republican losses.

Both Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune played down the Democratic victories, casting them as expected losses in blue states — never mind that the margins in New Jersey and Virginia far outstripped expectations and that Democrats also won big in Georgia, Mississippi and Pennsylvania.

Trump, on the other hand, told senators at the breakfast that the shutdown played a “big role” in the GOP losses. Asked about that assessment, Johnson replied, “I don’t think the loss last night was any reflection about Republicans at all.”

What GOP lawmakers do know is that there is a dramatic difference in their party’s performance in elections where Trump appears on the ballot versus the midterm and off-year contests where he’s not — no matter how many rallies he does or endorsements he doles out.

They also know, third-term musings of questionable constitutionality aside, Trump will never run for office again — which had many acknowledging that, if not fully reckoning with, the fact it might not be a great idea to hew so closely to Trump’s agenda.

“Trump drives turnout, and if he’s not on the ballot, the turnout is way down,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said.

Cornyn questioned whether the Tuesday elections “prove very much” and was one of the few GOP senators who said Wednesday he was newly open to considering changes to the filibuster after meeting with Trump. He could be considered the exception who proves the rule: Cornyn needs to stay in Trump’s good graces amid a fierce primary battle for reelection next year.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said voter dropoff in non-Trump years is “an issue for Republicans” and suggested the party should consider changing the filibuster to “do things that benefit the American public … secure the border, repair the damage done by Obamacare, transition to a system that works, secure elections.”

But with Thune making clear the Senate’s rules aren’t changing — “I just know where the math is on this issue,” the majority leader said — Johnson put the focus on GOP voter behavior.

“People need to understand: If you want to keep Trump’s agenda moving forward, you’ve got to come out in midterms,” he added.

Discussion has ramped up among senators about not only changing the filibuster but also trying to pass a new party-line reconciliation bill under the budget rules the GOP used to enact their megabill this summer. The suggestion came up at the White House breakfast, according to senators.

But there are huge obstacles to going down that road. The GOP still has a super-tight margin in the House, four senators can kill any party-line effort, Senate rules restrict what initiatives can be passed under budget rules and Republicans are far from united on what they would want to do with a reconciliation bill in the first place.

James Blair, political director for Trump’s 2024 campaign and the RNC who now serves as a deputy White House chief of staff, rejected the notion that lawmakers will treat Trump as a lame duck in an interview for Blue Light News’s “The Conversation.”

“I don’t think Republicans are going to do that at all,” he said. “The president, you know, sort of has his way of communicating, but the senators have their way, and it’s a family at the end of the day.”

Some GOP senators, he added, “have long relationships, and they hope somehow the Democrat fever will break one day. And I think the president’s view is, it’s not breaking.”

Dasha Burns, Mia McCarthy and Hailey Fuchs contributed to this report.