I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final Year

by Carol Leonnig

  “What are you talking about?” Birx said. “The president has never said anything like that, nor has anybody in the White House.”

  In fact, Trump had on multiple occasions in August teased the possibility of a vaccine being tested and approved before the election on November 3. Caprara pulled up a news story about one such comment. The meeting soon ended, and Pritzker and his staff concluded they had wasted their time. They considered Birx’s visit to be nothing more than a political tour aimed at generating publicity for the administration. Birx was in fact trying to build support for public health guidelines, but she couldn’t escape the distrust sown by the president’s own words.

  Nor could Birx escape West Wing politics. Earlier in her tour, Birx thought she had a breakthrough with Florida governor Ron DeSantis, one of the laxest state executives when it came to coronavirus restrictions. During a visit to Tampa on July 2, Birx met with DeSantis, along with Vice President Pence and Alex Azar. Birx stressed to the governor the importance of younger people remaining vigilant about social distancing, wearing masks, and getting tested if they’ve been in large gatherings. At a news conference, DeSantis urged Floridians to avoid what he called the three Cs: closed spaces, crowds, and close contact. He and Birx seemed to be on the same page.

  But on August 31, DeSantis hosted Atlas for the day, jetting to Tallahassee, Tampa, and the Villages, a sprawling retirement community in Central Florida. Together the governor and Trump’s favorite new doctor argued that children were at low risk for COVID-19 and that schools in the state should reopen with in-person learning.

  Birx and Fauci had been far more circumspect about reopening schools, as well as resuming sporting events and other aspects of normal society that necessitated mass gatherings. They urged a cautious strategy of reopening in phases, only if states met certain data benchmarks to contain community spread and ensure public health and safety. But Atlas used his public statements in Florida to assert that he and the governor both shared Trump’s strategy to protect vulnerable and high-risk individuals while opening schools and other aspects of society.

  Already resentful of Atlas’s access to Trump, Birx was angry that Atlas had now cultivated his own ties to governors—and that some of them were listening to him over her. A colleague on the White House coronavirus task force explained why some Republican governors were loath to follow Birx’s advice. “They felt like she was gloom and doom and was scaring people,” this official said. “They were concerned about keeping the economy moving. That’s why a lot of governors didn’t want her there. They didn’t like her message.”

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  On August 29, John Ratcliffe wrote to the Senate and House intelligence committees announcing that his office would no longer provide in-person briefings about election interference. Since Ratcliffe had proven his loyalty to Trump by defending him during the impeachment hearings, many in the intelligence community widely viewed this new move as more of Ratcliffe’s blocking and tackling for the president. Just ten weeks before a presidential election in which U.S. intelligence agencies had concluded Russia was interfering to help Trump, Ratcliffe’s decision confirmed that assessment. Despite the intelligence community’s statutory duty to keep Congress informed about national security threats, briefers from now on would provide only written summaries. Ratcliffe wrote that this move would help ensure information “is not misunderstood nor politicized.”

  But as had often happened in his presidency, Trump dispensed with Ratcliffe’s summary and spoke plainly.

  “Director Ratcliffe brought information into the committee, and the information leaked,” Trump said. He invoked House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff and, without presenting any evidence, added, “Whether it was Shifty Schiff or somebody else, they leaked the information before it gets in. What’s even worse, they leak the wrong information. And he got tired of it. So, he wants to do it in a different form, because you have leakers on the committee, obviously, leakers that are doing bad things, probably not even legal to leak, but we’ll look into that separately.”

  Mark Meadows told reporters that information had leaked out of the most recent briefing on this subject and Ratcliffe had to protect sources and methods from being compromised. But officials in Ratcliffe’s office did not say what Meadows was referring to. After Bill Evanina’s announcement, there had been quite a few news stories in early August about Russia’s intelligence agencies using social media and surrogates to undermine Joe Biden’s candidacy. Trump had said he thought that information was wrong. Democratic leaders howled at Ratcliffe’s new restrictions and accused the executive branch of flouting its duty to the legislative branch.

  “This is a shocking abdication of its lawful responsibility to keep the Congress currently informed, and a betrayal of the public’s right to know how foreign powers are trying to subvert our democracy,” Nancy Pelosi and Schiff said in a joint statement. “This intelligence belongs to the American people, not the agencies which are its custodian. And the American people have both the right and the need to know that another nation, Russia, is trying to help decide who their president should be.”

  Senator Angus King, an independent from Maine who caucused with Democrats and sat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, was even more exercised. He said a question-and-answer session with intelligence officials was critical for lawmakers to understand the nuances of information, and that a dry written report was no substitute. “It is an outrage,” King told The New York Times. “It smacks of a cover-up of information about foreign interference in our elections.”

  James Clapper, the former Obama director of national intelligence, said on CNN that he suspected Ratcliffe was merely trying to avoid talking with Congress about Russian interference, a topic that enraged Trump. By engaging in such conversations, Clapper posited, Ratcliffe would risk “saying something that might incur the wrath of the president.”

  After twenty-five years in senior leadership roles in the spy game, Clapper had become persona non grata in the eyes of Trump and his acolytes, ever since early January 2017, when he had briefed President-elect Trump about intelligence showing that Russian president Vladimir Putin sought to help elect him. Clapper’s honesty was a cautionary tale to Ratcliffe. As another former senior intelligence official explained, “Ratcliffe didn’t want to share the Russia stuff. I think Ratcliffe and Republicans were concerned that what happened to Clapper would happen again.”

  But key career intelligence officials could not so easily avoid the topic with Trump. Beth Sanner, a deputy director of national intelligence who since April 2017 had personally briefed Trump on the highly classified secrets in the President’s Daily Brief, knew firsthand the president’s allergic reaction to any intelligence about Russian interference. No matter the context, Trump perceived the information to be some kind of personal accusation or insult. He remained embittered and disgusted by the suggestion that in 2016 he had not won the presidency on his own merit, but instead was lifted to victory by Putin and his nefarious forces.

  “Beth was subject to more pressure,” the former senior intelligence official said. “She knew what he would want and would not want.”

  Often when Sanner brought up intelligence about Russia, Trump would bristle. He sometimes would say, “What are the Chinese doing? What are the Iranians doing?” Even though the Russians were far more active during the campaign than the Chinese or Iranians, “He was so sensitive to ‘Russia, Russia, Russia,’ that he’d get mad at the start and never have a good discussion,” recalled one regular attendee.

  Some of Trump’s aides were worried about how to manage the president’s proclivities. Keith Kellogg told colleagues not to emphasize information about Russia at the top of briefings. His mantra was, “Start slow and scale fast.”

  “Here’s how you do it,” Kellogg said once. “When you brief the president, you balance it. You don’t lead off with something [about Russia] b
ecause that will set him off. If you want him to listen to you, you weave it into your story.

  “If you start off by throwing gasoline on the top of the fire, we’ll get nowhere in these briefings,” Kellogg added.

  Sanner helped to decide what Trump needed to hear with heavy input from Robert O’Brien and top military leaders. According to the White House, Sanner had decided not to brief Trump on early 2020 intelligence suggesting the Russian military intelligence had paid bounties to Taliban militias to kill U.S. soldiers. O’Brien later said Sanner made that choice because the intelligence hadn’t been fully verified; top national security leaders believed the intelligence was flawed and there was no bounty program. But a lot of other unconfirmed intelligence made it into the president’s briefings.

  The rule in the intelligence community was that if the president hadn’t been briefed on something, it couldn’t be shared with the broader government. So, the decision not to brief Trump limited the amount of analysis on that topic for national security decision-makers across the government.

  “It would put her in a box,” the former senior intelligence official said. “Beth would have to come back and say, ‘We won’t write this.’ ”

  For Sanner, this caused some professional strife. She had reason to have pride in the intelligence she was presenting to the president. She had previously been the vice-chair of the National Intelligence Council, the group that produced the PDB, so she knew the very officers who were providing the raw material. She also knew a good bit about Russia, having previously worked as a deputy for analysis for Russian and European affairs at the CIA. Briefers were trained to adapt to the president, and Sanner knew her best strategy was to provide the most critical information, but to stay alert to know when Trump had stopped listening. In a rare public speech at a July 2020 intelligence conference, Sanner had stressed the importance of shutting up when your customer stops paying attention.

  “Watch your audience and pivot,” she told aspiring intelligence analysts. “When they’re done, you’re done. Ultimately, it’s about listening to be heard. You have to really hear people and then adjust yourself.”

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  Labor Day is traditionally when the final stretch of the campaign kicks off in a presidential election, a two-month period after the party conventions during which nominees debate and undecided voters pay serious attention. To get a snapshot of where Trump stood, Tony Fabrizio surveyed voters in the seventeen states that Trump was targeting as major battlegrounds, or at least moderately competitive. He spent September 7, Labor Day, going over the findings with Bill Stepien and two other advisers who saw their influence expand after Brad Parscale’s demotion: Justin Clark, the deputy campaign manager who oversaw the budget, legal operations, and other areas; and Jason Miller, a top aide on Trump’s 2016 campaign who had returned to the fold as a senior adviser running communications and messaging strategy.

  It was not a pretty picture. Biden had the lead in the electoral college and Trump was behind in many key states. Several states that Trump had carried in 2016 were right on the edge, including Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. Trump’s vulnerabilities from earlier in the summer over managing the pandemic had not improved, and he had lost significant ground with independent voters, especially among those under forty-five years old. The president was in serious trouble. Worse still, his campaign was running low on money. Each set of polls across the seventeen states cost several hundred thousand dollars, and, to conserve resources, Stepien and his team had to cut back on future polling.

  Jared Kushner tightly controlled which pieces of data were included in slideshows presented to Trump. He told Fabrizio and John McLaughlin, who also was conducting polls for Trump’s campaign, “You can’t bring him fifty fucking slides because we’re not going to get through them. If you bring two or three things to a meeting, that’s a good meeting. Focus on the important things and hope he makes a change. You can only have ten slides to make your points.”

  At this final stage of the campaign, when the president most needed direct advice from the campaign professionals, Fabrizio’s access to Trump dried up considerably. Trump was tired of hearing bad news, and Fabrizio wasn’t one to sugarcoat what the data showed. He was a realist. Kushner confronted Fabrizio about his lack of positivity.

  “You’re coming in and giving him negativity, but you’re not helping him,” Kushner said. “It’s just going to make him not listen to you. I’d rather you come in and say, ‘This is what people are feeling based on the polls and this is what I’d recommend you do differently,’ and he can decide what to do or not. He’s got his own instincts and he’s a big boy. Your job is to come in and give him ideas and solutions.”

  Fabrizio summed up his mindset to McLaughlin, a longtime friend and former business partner. “John, our job is to be objective reporters of the data, not to be cheerleaders,” Fabrizio said. “That’s our first and foremost job. Lord knows, in this operation there are plenty of people that can be cheerleaders.”

  McLaughlin answered that “being negative without ideas how to move up on the ballot” was not productive, and that he and Fabrizio needed to focus on crafting messages that could help the president gain support.

  The polling data wasn’t the only setback for Trump. The president had been crusading against mail-in ballots, often making no distinction between absentee ballots proactively requested by voters—how he and members of his family voted—and ballots that some states offered to mail to all registered voters. He suggested all voting by mail was “a total fraud in the making,” as he put it in a September 10 tweet, and that the only secure way to vote was in person on Election Day.

  But Trump and other Republicans also needed their voters to be enthusiastic about casting ballots by any means necessary. The Trump campaign was spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on Facebook advertisements aimed at encouraging Republican voters to request absentee ballots, vote for Trump, and return them. The campaign had also invested in a robust ground operation in battleground states with teams of grassroots organizers and volunteers contacting voters, knocking on their front doors, and reminding them to fill out and return their ballots. This was a laborious, expensive, and, in Stepien’s mind, essential ingredient for the fall campaign.

  But campaign data showed that Trump’s attacks on mail-in ballots were sometimes confusing voters or dissuading them from voting by mail. The campaign saw a return rate of only 2 or 3 percent of the voters it had contacted, meaning that the overwhelming majority did not actually return mail-in ballots. A normal return rate would have been in double digits, at least.

  “Our parade was being rained on,” a senior campaign official recalled. “We had these great grassroots teams that were trying to execute that process, but we could have John Smith, local volunteer, knock on someone’s door, but if that voter’s president is saying, ‘Your vote is not going to count,’ it doesn’t matter a whole lot.”

  Republican leaders in Congress, who were fighting to maintain their Senate majority and win back the House majority, were also frustrated, believing that Trump’s attacks on mail-in ballots were hurting their candidates. In the most competitive states and congressional districts, many more Democratic than Republican voters were requesting and submitting mail-in ballots.

  Stepien and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy together set up a meeting around this time with Trump to discuss mail-in ballots specifically. They wanted to convince the president to change his message on the topic and to start encouraging his supporters to vote by mail. Stepien and McCarthy came armed with data and PowerPoint slides. But as they began talking in the Oval Office, Trump made clear that he strongly distrusted voting by mail. He said he had long believed Democrats would use mail-in ballots to steal the election from him, though there was no evidence to support that claim. Trump refused to change his tune.

  But Stepien and McCarthy convinced
the president at least to distinguish between the types of mail-in ballots. He agreed to attack only unsolicited ballots. But that discipline would not last, and soon enough the president would revert to wild generalizations. There was only so much they could do to wean Trump from promoting this conspiracy and likely depressing his own vote count.

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  The tension between Bill Barr and Trump had been steadily rising all summer over whether or not to deploy troops to suppress the George Floyd protests. In early September, the attorney general sought to create a healthy distance between the two of them. He set out on a nine-city tour, largely to promote a Justice Department program called Operation Legend, which had been launched in early July to provide federal resources to cities experiencing an uptick in violent crime. The program paired federal and local agents to put violent offenders behind bars. In two months’ time, the program had achieved a considerable number of arrests and put a modest dent in the murder rates in some cities.

  Barr’s fall road show, billed as a series of official rather than political events, would indirectly help the president make his case for reelection. Trump thought he was doing a great job already in his speeches and news conferences. Barr privately told his confidants he thought the president was hurting himself with rambling, undisciplined remarks at every outstretched microphone. In public remarks, Trump mostly vented about the injustices he believed he had suffered at the hands of the press, the FBI, and Democrats. When he finally got to talking about his policies, Trump jumbled a lot of topics together and didn’t explain how they had helped people. Barr had told Trump that the media were hostile to the president and inordinately emphasized any controversy he generated. He reiterated to Trump that his White House couldn’t wing it and needed a more disciplined message strategy in the run-up to the election.