“What do you mean a change?” Parscale asked. “With me?”
“I think the president’s going to want to demote you,” Kushner said.
Parscale said he refused to be demoted. He wanted to maintain his title as campaign manager.
“I either quit or get layered,” he said.
“Why can’t you be demoted?” Kushner asked.
“I can’t be demoted,” Parscale said.
The conversation ended without resolving Parscale’s future.
Ten
The Skunks at the Picnic
President Trump wanted to mark Independence Day with a grand military parade down Constitution Avenue in Washington. He imagined a showcase of American might to draw masses of people to the National Mall in celebration. It would be a signal that the war with the coronavirus—the “invisible enemy,” as Trump put it—had been won. A year earlier, he had hosted the “Salute to America” on July 4, 2019, which included tanks on the Mall, a flyover of fighter jets, a speech by Trump at the Lincoln Memorial, and a massive fireworks display. The event was highly controversial because of Trump’s use of military assets, but the president wanted to do it again—only much bigger and better.
Mark Esper and Mark Milley only found out about Trump’s 2020 plans a few weeks before July 4, fairly late in the planning stages. Mark Meadows and his staff had gone directly to the military’s Northern Command to call up more than 70 military aircraft, including fighter jets, as well as bombers and helicopters, to fly over the city and even the White House. The plan also included tanks and other armored vehicles on the White House’s South Lawn. Both Esper and Milley were dumbstruck. They strongly opposed using the military as props in Trump’s political show once again. It was a waste of money, for one, but it also smacked of authoritarianism. “It’s going to look like Berlin” in the 1930s, Esper remarked to associates. He complained to Milley that Trump and Meadows appeared to have learned nothing from the militarization of Lafayette Square on June 1. Milley and Esper were determined not to allow a repeat—certainly not in an election year.
“We cannot do this,” Milley said to Esper. “We can’t allow this. This is overt politicization of the military.”
Esper agreed and got to work brainstorming an alternative to satisfy the president’s desire to show off military hardware but without being a political salute to Trump or looking like an occupation of Washington. The defense secretary started doing the math on flight times. His plan, couched as a celebration of the Revolutionary War, was to fly military jets over the great cities of the American Revolution—Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington. In repeated conversations, some of them heated, Meadows pressed Milley and Esper to grant the president’s wishes for a military parade instead.
“I don’t understand why we can’t celebrate our own birthday,” Meadows told them. “The president wants this.”
“Look, I’m okay with a military parade,” Esper told Meadows. “It’s fine to celebrate our military, but it has to be done proportionally, tastefully.” He urged them to at least scale back the number of planes to fifty and eliminate what he considered the most egregious feature: military might and tanks on the White House lawn.
“Do you guys ever learn?” Milley said. “This is not what we do. This is what North Korea does. This is what Stalin does. We don’t do big military parades like this. This is not America. What Secretary Esper is proposing is a good idea, a celebration of the American Revolution.”
Meadows ultimately came around. Truth be told, Esper controlled military assets, so the White House would have to go through him to deploy the toys Trump wanted for July 4. The chief of staff backed Esper’s alternative and secured the president’s sign-off. Behind the scenes, though, Esper discreetly cut the July 4 roster. He got the number of military planes down to thirty from more than seventy. He replaced ominous fighter jets with a traditional airshow favorite, the Blue Angels. If someone at the White House was going to count planes in the sky and complain, Esper thought, let them.
Regardless, Trump had an additional celebration in store. On June 3, he flew to South Dakota to give a speech at the base of Mount Rushmore before a massive fireworks display over the mountain carved to memorialize four past presidents: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt.
Trump had long eyed Mount Rushmore. South Dakota governor Kristi Noem recalled in a 2018 interview that during her first meeting with Trump in the Oval Office, when she was a congresswoman and he was early in his presidency, “I shook his hand, and I said, ‘Mr. President, you should come to South Dakota sometime. We have Mount Rushmore.’ And he goes, ‘Do you know it’s my dream to have my face on Mount Rushmore?’ ”
“I started laughing,” Noem recalled. “He wasn’t laughing, so he was totally serious. . . . I said, ‘Come pick out a mountain.’ ”
On July 3, 2020, when Trump arrived before the packed amphitheater at the base of a floodlit Mount Rushmore, Noem introduced the president by stroking his ego. She commended the size of his crowd, at capacity with seventy-five hundred, and compared him to Roosevelt because he “braves the dangers of the arena.” When Trump spoke, he delivered an extraordinarily divisive speech to mark a holiday of national unity. He paid tribute to America’s legacy of white domination, harshly denounced the racial justice movement, and framed his reelection campaign as a battle to defeat a “new far-left fascism.”
“Our nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values, and indoctrinate our children,” Trump said. “Angry mobs are trying to tear down statues of our founders, deface our most sacred memorials, and unleash a wave of violent crime in our cities.
“Many of these people have no idea why they’re doing this,” he continued, “but some know what they are doing. They think the American people are weak and soft and submissive, but no, the American people are strong and proud, and they will not allow our country and all of its values, history, and culture to be taken from them.”
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On July 9, Trump sat down with his top campaign advisers to discuss an urgent concern: devising a messaging strategy for the general election. Trump had lost ground all spring and by now was trailing Joe Biden by a substantial margin in polls nationally as well as in many of the battleground states. The race had been framed by the media, and therefore in the minds of most voters, as a referendum on the president’s handling of the pandemic and his overall leadership. Trump needed to shake things up.
The advisers presented to Trump a slideshow with the latest internal polling. The snapshot was devastating. It showed Biden leading by solid margins in two states Trump had carried in 2016, Michigan and Wisconsin, while six other Trump states were now toss-ups: Arizona, Georgia, Iowa, North Carolina, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. Overall, Biden had 259 electoral college votes to Trump’s 193, putting the presumptive Democratic nominee just 11 votes shy of winning the presidency. The campaign’s surveys also showed Biden’s favorability with voters had improved by 10 percentage points since March, whereas Trump’s job approval rating declined by nine percentage points in the same period.
The advisers drilled down into the data. Trump’s support had eroded among white independent voters living in suburbs, as well as among nonwhite voters. The percentage declines in Trump’s ballot performance were substantial—down 32 points among Black males, 18 points among Black females, 19 points among Hispanic females, 16 points among Hispanic males, 20 points among white suburban independent females, and 13 points among white suburban independent males.
The president’s political brain trust tried to get him to focus on going after Biden. They tailored a few key messages aimed at gaining ground with white independent voters, whom the advisers believed Trump could win back with a deliberate and disciplined strategy. They teed up a series of attacks, or “contrasts,” in poli
tical parlance, that their polling showed would hurt Biden:
“Biden’s bad trade deals killed millions of American manufacturing jobs.”
“Biden’s support of the ‘Green New Deal’ will increase taxes and kill jobs.”
“Biden will protect criminal illegal aliens.”
“Biden supported cutting Social Security and Medicare.”
The advisers told Trump he should use these lines in every speech, media appearance, and social media post—to repeat them relentlessly as if trying to brainwash voters. But Trump had little patience for the presentation. All he wanted to talk about was Biden hiding in his basement. The president was fixated on the juvenile “Sleepy Joe” caricature of his opponent that he had helped concoct. Trump believed the most effective way to defeat Biden was to go after his stamina and his mental acuity, and to shame the former vice president for following health precautions and campaigning virtually from the safety of his home.
To Trump, Biden oozed weakness. But his political advisers knew that would not be enough to win. If only the president would listen.
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The U.S. Postal Service historically has been an apolitical institution, but the Trump administration slowly and quietly consolidated its control over the nation’s mail service and its board of governors, culminating in May 2020 with the appointment of Louis DeJoy, a longtime Republican donor who had supported Trump’s 2016 campaign, as postmaster general. On July 10, DeJoy took his first major operational actions when he announced a series of “immediate, lasting, and impactful changes” designed to cut costs.
DeJoy released a memo, with the headline “Pivoting For Our Future,” instructing all letter carriers to leave for their routes on time, even if it meant leaving mail behind at distribution centers. In another document, DeJoy said that sorting plants running behind should keep the mail for the next day rather than use overtime—a sea change for postal workers, who had been trained to gather every letter and work overtime or make multiple delivery trips to distribute letters and parcels on time. The new rules prioritized cost cutting and eliminating overtime at the expense of timely delivery, and raised early worries about the Postal Service’s ability to deliver and collect ballots from the tens of millions of Americans expected to vote by mail in the upcoming election.
DeJoy’s moves seemed to coordinate with Trump’s public attacks on the integrity of mail-in ballots. The pandemic had made mail-in balloting not just a last resort but an absolute necessity. Election officials responsible for overseeing the November general election in their counties and states promoted voting by mail in order to protect both election workers’ and voters’ health.
But Trump, who often saw conspiracies against him, insisted this was a plot by his enemies to defraud the vote and steal the election from him. On April 8, he tweeted that mail-in ballots are “RIPE for FRAUD.” On May 20, he falsely attacked mail-in balloting plans in Michigan and Nevada as “illegal” and incorrectly accused Michigan’s secretary of state of mailing ballots to every voter in the state; in fact, she sent applications to request mail-in ballots to all voters. And on May 26, in reference to California’s plans to help people vote from home, he tweeted, “There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent.” He added, “This will be a Rigged Election.” This prompted Twitter, for the first time, to tag one of the president’s tweets with a warning about its inaccuracy. The social media platform urged its users to “get the facts” about mail-in voting through credible news stories that covered the topic.
Trump’s assault on mail-in balloting escalated into the summer. On July 15, when he visited a United Parcel Service hub at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport to showcase his administration’s work relaxing environmental regulations for new construction projects, he went off script again about fraudulent ballots.
“Mail-in ballots, be careful. Be careful!” Trump said in his speech to employees of UPS, a private company not responsible for ballot delivery. He went on to level a baseless charge of corruption. “They’re going to be rigged,” he said, “and there’s been tremendous corruption—tremendous corruption on mail-in ballots.”
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On July 11, The Washington Post published a story about Anthony Fauci being sidelined by the White House, which included the following paragraph: “A White House official released a statement saying that ‘several White House officials are concerned about the number of times Dr. Fauci has been wrong on things’ and included a lengthy list of the scientist’s comments from early in the outbreak. Those included his early doubt that people with no symptoms could play a significant role in spreading the virus—a notion based on earlier outbreaks that the novel coronavirus would turn on its head. They also point to public reassurances Fauci made in late February, around the time of the first U.S. case of community transmission, that ‘at this moment, there is no need to change anything that you’re doing on a day-to-day basis.’ ”
This was remarkable because White House officials had anonymously shared with reporters Yasmeen Abutaleb, Josh Dawsey, and Laurie McGinley a lengthy, researched list of Fauci’s past comments just as they would have about a political opponent. Trump aides were undermining the nation’s leading infectious disease expert and the most trusted spokesman for the federal government’s pandemic response. This was only the beginning.
On July 12, Dan Scavino posted a cartoon mocking Fauci on Facebook. Scavino wasn’t just any White House staffer; he was one of Trump’s most loyal and trusted aides, the person the president turned to as a surrogate to push out his more controversial views. Earlier in the year Scavino had been promoted to deputy chief of staff for communications. The image likened Fauci to “Dr. Faucet,” with a Pinocchio-like nose drawn to resemble an oversized faucet running water into a sink to drown Uncle Sam, a stand-in for the economy. The temperature was set to “extra cold,” and the image included water drops with public health warnings labeled mockingly with exclamation points: “Indefinite lockdown!” “Schools stay closed this fall!” “Shut up and obey!” The cartoon was drawn by the artist Ben Garrison, whose past work had contained anti-Semitic messaging and was popular with the alt-right on social media. In a caption accompanying the cartoon, Scavino wrote, “Sorry, Dr. Faucet! At least you know if I’m going to disagree with a colleague, such as yourself, it’s done publicly—and not cowardly, behind journalists with leaks. See you tomorrow!”
Then on July 14, Peter Navarro, who that spring had accused Fauci and Stephen Hahn of having “blood on your hands,” published an op-ed in USA Today headlined anthony fauci has been wrong about everything i have interacted with him on. In it, Navarro accused Fauci of downplaying the risk of the virus and of “flip-flopping” on the efficacy of masks. “So when you ask me whether I listen to Dr. Fauci’s advice, my answer is: only with skepticism and caution.” This was a direct criticism of a colleague in one of the nation’s most-read newspapers.
The attacks on Fauci’s character and credibility were an unmistakable indication that the president himself wanted to see Fauci’s sterling public image tarnished. Trump was jealous that so many Americans trusted and admired Fauci to guide them through the pandemic. He was upset that this horrific catastrophe had produced as its national hero the doctor from Brooklyn and not the president from Queens. As Trump would later complain aloud to reporters at a July 28 news conference, “He’s got this high approval rating—so why don’t I have a high approval rating, and the administration, with respect to the virus?”
The Fauci-bashing underscored Trump’s hostility toward medical expertise and produced a chilling effect among government scientists and public health professionals. Most importantly, it hampered the nation’s efforts to combat the virus at the very moment the virus was spreading wildly across the Sun Belt. Thomas Frieden, a former CDC director, said at the time, “It seems that some
are more intent on fighting imagined enemies than the real enemy here, which is the virus. The virus doesn’t read talking points. The virus doesn’t watch news shows. The virus just waits for us to make mistakes. And when we make mistakes, as Texas and Florida and South Carolina and Arizona did, the virus wins. When we ignore science, the virus wins.”
On July 14, the same day Navarro’s op-ed published, Fauci spoke at a Georgetown University event and predicted the coronavirus pandemic could reach the level of the 1918 influenza, which infected roughly one third of the world’s population. “This is a pandemic of historic proportions,” Fauci said. “I think we can’t deny that fact. It’s something, I think, that when history looks back on it, it will be comparable to what we saw in 1918.”
Fauci added, “If you look at the magnitude of the 1918 pandemic, where anywhere from fifty to seventy-five to one hundred million people died, I mean that was the mother of all pandemics and truly historic. I hope we don’t even approach that with this, but it does have the makings of the possibility of . . . approaching that in seriousness, though I hope that the kinds of interventions that we’re going to be and are implementing would not allow that to happen.”
Fauci’s comments immediately generated news headlines, and Meadows reacted predictably. He called Francis Collins to scream.
“You’ve got to get Tony to back down on that,” Meadows told Collins. “That is not based on any facts. He’s extrapolating. He’s scaring people. You’re his boss. You’ve got to make him stop.”
It was one of those conversations where Collins had to let Meadows yell, holding the phone away from his ear until the furious chief of staff finished.
“I will certainly talk to Tony and let him know that this seems to cause a pretty strong reaction, and maybe induced a lot of fear, but I think Tony was telling you, from his perspective, what could happen,” Collins told Meadows.
I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final Year Page 24