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

by Carol Leonnig

  Shortly after Dannehy’s resignation, Durham called Barr at headquarters. He told the attorney general there would be no report he would feel comfortable releasing before the election. They had lost important momentum on the part of the case that they had thought might result in charges against a second official. They had also hit a wall trying to ascertain whether any U.S. government officials had asked their British intelligence allies to begin gathering information on Page in the summer of 2016, before the FBI opened its Crossfire Hurricane investigation. Asking a U.S. asset or a foreign government to spy on an American would be a huge violation, but Durham hadn’t yet pieced together what happened. Durham explained to Barr that anything he said in a report now would just look partial and politically timed. Barr was disappointed but soon came to agree.

  When Barr updated the White House on these developments, the president was furious. First, he cursed Barr’s name. Then he fired off a barrage of tweets, starting late in the night on October 6 and continuing into the next day:

  “Can’t believe these con men are not yet being PROSECUTED. Pathetic!”

  “Where are all of the arrests? Can you imagine if the roles were reversed? Long term sentences would have started two years ago. Shameful!”

  “DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS, THE BIGGEST OF ALL POLITICAL SCANDALS (IN HISTORY)!!! BIDEN, OBAMA AND CROOKED HILLARY LED THIS TREASONOUS PLOT!!! BIDEN SHOULDN’T BE ALLOWED TO RUN—GOT CAUGHT!!!”

  Trump also retweeted criticisms of Barr from other Twitter users and shared a meme mocking Barr—a drawing of comedian Chris Farley, of Saturday Night Live fame, looming over an image of Barr and yelling: “For the love of God, arrest somebody!”

  The frequency, ferocity, and late-night timing of Trump’s tweets made people wonder if the president might be suffering some irritability and mania, common side effects of steroid usage. Among them was Nancy Pelosi, who speculated in an October 7 interview on ABC’s The View that “there’s something wrong.”

  “I said yesterday to my colleagues, I said, ‘There are those who say that steroids has an impact on people’s thinking,’ ” the House Speaker said. “I don’t know, but there are those health-care providers who say that. Also, if you have the coronavirus, it has an impact as well. So, the combination is something that should be viewed.”

  On October 8, Trump did an interview with Maria Bartiromo of Fox Business, one of the president’s favorite interviewers thanks to her softball questions and easy praise, in which he attacked Barr for not delivering to him the heads of his enemies.

  “Unless Bill Barr indicts these people for crimes—the greatest political crime in the history of our country—then we’re going to get little satisfaction, unless I win,” Trump told Bartiromo. He added, “Bill has got to move,” and it would likely go down in history as a “very sad situation.”

  Fifteen

  Somebody’s Crazy Uncle

  On October 12, just one week after being released from the hospital, President Trump returned to the campaign trail. Sean Conley issued a memorandum that afternoon stating that Trump had tested negative for the coronavirus “on consecutive days” using a rapid antigen test and was “not infectious to others.” Medical experts said that type of test was not accurate enough to ensure a patient was completely free of the virus. Nonetheless, Conley gave the president a green light to travel. Within a few hours Trump touched down in Florida, which his campaign increasingly considered the most important battleground state. As the sun set, Trump stepped off Air Force One at Orlando Sanford International Airport and strode down a catwalk to center stage. He wore his customary dark suit and red tie, his face heavy with makeup and sans mask, and pointed his finger at the sea of supporters spread across the tarmac. He punched his fist in the air and tossed red MAGA caps into the crowd. Trump was back.

  Determined to show strength and stamina, and to convince voters everywhere of his vitality, Trump spoke for sixty-five minutes, and though his voice sounded hoarse, his performance was energetic.

  “Now they say I’m immune. I feel so powerful. I’ll kiss everyone in that audience. I’ll kiss the guys and the beautiful women. Just give you a big, fat kiss,” Trump said. There was no reason to believe he was immune. In a veiled shot at Joe Biden, whom Trump had mocked for holding virtual campaign events from the basement of his Wilmington home, Trump added, “I don’t have to be locked in my basement, and I wouldn’t allow that to happen anyway. I wouldn’t allow it to happen. When you’re the president, you can’t lock yourself in a basement and say, ‘I’m not going to bother with the world.’ You got to get out, and it’s risky. It’s risky. But you got to get out.”

  Trump claimed he had fully recovered, but many of his aides remained in self-isolation. Kayleigh McEnany was one of them. In her time as press secretary, she had become a television fixture for Trump’s base, appearing practically daily on Fox News and other conservative platforms to promote and defend the president. In her absence, Mark Meadows and Jared Kushner enlisted Alyssa Farah to go on television. As communications director, Farah had been a behind-the-scenes player, devising strategies and crafting messages for McEnany and other officials to deliver. But now Farah was the face of Trump—and the president liked what he saw.

  “Alyssa, you’re doing great,” Trump told Farah during the Florida trip.

  Trump liked to give aides reason to doubt their standing with him and pit them against one another. Trump praised Farah in front of many staffers, and, sure enough, word got back to McEnany, who stopped speaking to Farah.

  Trump returned to Florida three days later, on October 15, to speak at a nationally televised town hall meeting in Miami moderated by Savannah Guthrie, the co-anchor of NBC’s Today show. It was the date originally scheduled for the second of three Trump-Biden debates, but the event was cancelled after the president was hospitalized with COVID. Instead, the candidates did simultaneous town hall meetings—Trump with Guthrie on NBC and Biden with George Stephanopoulos on ABC. Trump was especially combative under sharp and persistent questioning from Guthrie. When she pointed out his failure to denounce white supremacy in the first debate, Trump interrupted before she could state her question. “Oh, you always do this,” Trump said.

  Agitated, he snapped at her. “I denounce white supremacy, okay?”

  A few seconds later, he said it again: “Are you listening? I denounce white supremacy.”

  “It feels sometimes you’re hesitant to do so, like you wait a beat,” Guthrie said.

  “Hesitant?” he replied. “Here we go again. Every time . . . In fact, my people came, ‘I’m sure they’ll ask you the white supremacy question.’ I denounce white supremacy. . . . And frankly, you want to know something? I denounce Antifa, and I denounce these people on the left that are burning down our cities, that are run by Democrats who don’t know what they’re doing.”

  “While we’re denouncing, let me ask you about QAnon,” Guthrie said, referring to a far-right, pro-Trump internet community that spreads false conspiracies, and that the FBI had characterized as a domestic terrorism threat. “It is this theory that Democrats are a satanic pedophile ring and that you are the savior of that. Now can you just, once and for all, state that that is completely not true?”

  Trump professed ignorance. “I know nothing about QAnon,” he said.

  “I just told you,” Guthrie replied.

  “I know very little,” Trump said. “You told me, but what you tell me doesn’t necessarily make it fact. I hate to say that. I know nothing about it. I do know they are very much against pedophilia. They fight it very hard. But I know nothing about it.”

  They went back and forth like this for nearly two minutes, with Guthrie pressing Trump to reject QAnon’s most extreme, fringe conspiracies and the president refusing to do so by claiming he had no knowledge of the group.

  Guthrie then asked Trump why he had tweeted to his eighty-seven million followers a QAnon conspir
acy that President Obama and Biden had orchestrated to have members of the Navy SEALs Team killed to cover up the fake death of Osama bin Laden.

  “I know nothing about it,” Trump said.

  “You retweeted it,” Guthrie said.

  “That was a retweet,” Trump explained. “That was an opinion of somebody. And that was a retweet. I’ll put it out there. People can decide for themselves. I don’t take a position.”

  “I don’t get that,” Guthrie said. “You’re the president. You’re not, like, somebody’s crazy uncle who can just retweet whatever.”

  “That was a retweet, and I do a lot of retweets,” Trump said. “And frankly, because the media is so fake and so corrupt, if I didn’t have social media—I don’t call it Twitter; I call it social media—I wouldn’t be able to get the word out. And the word is—”

  “Well,” Guthrie interjected, “the word is false.”

  * * *

  —

  By the time Trump sparred with Guthrie over QAnon, more than fifteen million Americans already had voted in the election. Local election officials in states that allowed early voting reported record turnout, indicating that for the first time in U.S. history the majority of voters could cast ballots before Election Day.

  In Georgia, voters waited as long as ten hours to cast ballots on the first day of early voting, which was October 12. Nearly 130,000 people voted in person in Georgia that day, a 42 percent increase over the previous first-day record set in 2016. In Michigan, more than one million people had voted by October 14, either in person or by mail, which already was one fourth the total number of voters there in 2016.

  This was an extraordinary level of participation, some in person and some by mail, and much of it appeared to be driven by Democratic enthusiasm. In states that reported partisan breakdowns, participation by registered Democrats far outpaced that of registered Republicans. This bore out anecdotally, too. In media interviews, many voters said they cast ballots early because they were determined to seize their first possible opportunity to repudiate Trump.

  “Four years of Donald Trump is enough for me,” Victor Tellesco, a fifty-year-old suburbanite in Phoenix who voted for the first time, told reporter Jeremy Duda for The Washington Post. “Every time I see him on TV, my blood pressure goes up. It just made me feel like I needed to vote this year. I don’t know why I’ve never voted before. But this year, it feels like I needed to vote.”

  Trump’s aides watched the trend with considerable alarm. After hearing that Democrats had a thirty-percentage-point advantage on the first day of early voting in North Carolina, Kellyanne Conway remarked to an associate, “Oh, dear.” Bill Stepien and other campaign leaders worried about giving Biden such a huge advantage—not only with the mail vote, but the early vote overall—and leaving too much to chance. What if it rained on Election Day? What if there was snow? The worst-case-scenario line Stepien had repeatedly used with Trump was, “Mr. President, what if we have a hurricane in Florida or some awful storm and so many of our senior voters then can’t get out or don’t want to get out, but they also don’t think they can vote by mail because you say it’s a fraud? We’re screwed.”

  With early voting in Arizona well under way, Democrats were recording a massive lead in Maricopa County, which encompasses the Phoenix area and is by far the state’s most populous jurisdiction. During a discussion with some on the political team, Kushner observed, “The Republicans have hardly voted.”

  “Yeah, it’s a big gamble,” Stepien said. “But the president said, ‘Hold on to your ballots.’ ”

  The data coming in from county and state election officials contrasted with the anecdotes Trump and Vice President Pence were picking up as they crisscrossed the country. Their rallies were huge. The enthusiasm of their supporters seemed real. It felt contagious.

  On October 15, during a bus tour in Florida, Pence invited Tony Fabrizio on board to chat with him and Marc Short as they rode between stops in the Miami area. The vice president and his chief of staff wanted a personal briefing from the campaign pollster.

  “What do you think?” Pence asked.

  “Sir, in 2016 we had to draw an inside straight, and we did,” Fabrizio said, using a poker analogy. “In 2020, we’ve got to draw an inside straight flush, to be honest with you. Every one of these states is on the razor’s edge, and a little bit of wind and it goes against us.”

  “Really?” Pence replied.

  “Yes,” Fabrizio said.

  “But it feels so good out there on the ground,” Pence said.

  “I understand that, sir,” Fabrizio said. “But I’m just telling you what the data says.”

  They talked about how the still-raging coronavirus was affecting Trump’s standing in the polls. Fabrizio said the two states that most troubled him were Arizona and Georgia. Both were reliably Republican, and Trump had carried them comfortably in 2016, but Democrats had worked hard in recent years to register new voters—many of them Black in Georgia and Latino in Arizona—and Biden was bullish on turning both states blue. Fabrizio, who was polling for Senator Martha McSally’s reelection race in Arizona and for the National Republican Senatorial Committee’s independent expenditure in Georgia, told Pence his recent surveys in both states spelled trouble for Trump. The widespread belief that Trump was leading in both states by a few percentage points was belied by Fabrizio’s numbers. He had the presidential race in both states tied.

  * * *

  —

  Trump was desperate. His last chance to shake up the race was his second and final debate with Biden, scheduled for October 22. The president needed an October surprise, some shocking revelation that might sully his Democratic foe. Rudy Giuliani tried to engineer one. The New York Post published a cover story on October 14 headlined biden secret e-mails. The tabloid claimed to have reviewed “smoking gun” emails recovered from a laptop allegedly owned by Hunter Biden and obtained by Giuliani’s lawyer from a computer repair shop in Delaware where Hunter had dropped it off in April 2019. The story described Hunter’s business dealings in China and the large payments he received from Burisma, the Ukrainian energy firm where he was a board member. The so-called smoking gun was a lone email from April 2015 in which a Ukrainian adviser to Burisma appeared to thank Hunter for an offer to meet his father, then the vice president, who at the time had been helping shape U.S. policy on Ukraine.

  “Dear Hunter, thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together,” the adviser purportedly wrote in the email. “It’s realty [sic] an honor and pleasure.”

  If this was a legitimate email, it was hard to say what nefarious deeds it proved. It revealed a company official thanking a board member for offering to arrange or for arranging a meeting with his father. There was no doubt that Hunter was being paid handsomely in a foreign energy sector where he had little experience while his father served as vice president. Burisma had a sizable financial stake in U.S. policy in the region. Surely the company stood to benefit by ingratiating itself with the vice president. There was a long history of corporations, lobbying firms, universities, and other institutions hiring family members of elected officials to try to curry favor with powerful government officials. For all those reasons, Hunter’s board compensation created a significant appearance of a conflict of interest, even though Joe Biden said he never discussed his son’s foreign work with him.

  Still, Trump had hoped to make the Hunter laptop Exhibit A in the Biden corruption case he wanted to argue at the October 22 debate. He started laying the groundwork on the campaign trail. On October 16, Trump said at a campaign rally in Macon, Georgia, that “the Biden family is a criminal enterprise.” He added, “Sleepy Joe Biden is the living embodiment of the corrupt political class that enriched himself while draining the economic life and soul from our country.” Trump went on to allege—without any evidence—that Biden profited
from his son’s work with Burisma. “Plenty of it goes to Joe Biden, too,” Trump said. “Don’t kid yourself. It goes to Joe.”

  But Trump was disappointed. He and Giuliani had believed the New York Post story would be picked up widely in the media, generating big headlines in more credible mainstream outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post. But it did not.

  In fact, Ben Smith, the Times’s media columnist, reported that earlier in October a White House lawyer close to Kushner, Eric Herschmann, and two Trump allies, former deputy White House counsel Stefan Passantino and public relations consultant Arthur Schwartz, tried to pitch an exclusive on the Hunter emails to The Wall Street Journal. The three men even furnished a source: Tony Bobulinski, a former business partner of Hunter, who was willing to go on the record with his assertion that Biden had been aware of and profited from his son’s work in Ukraine. But the Journal did not publish the blockbuster piece the Trump team had envisioned. After doing its due diligence to report out the claims, the Journal eventually published a brief story stating that its review of corporate records showed Biden had no role in his son’s activities.

  Hunter never denied the laptop was his. But the story of the long road it had traveled, allegedly from Biden to Giuliani to the New York Post, seemed suspicious to reporters. The Post reported it got the material from Giuliani after being tipped off to the laptop’s existence by Steve Bannon, the former White House strategist who was then quietly advising Trump’s reelection campaign. John Paul Mac Isaac, the owner of a computer repair shop in Wilmington, said that Hunter had dropped off three laptops damaged by liquid and had sought to recover material on them. Mac Isaac would later say in court filings that Hunter neither paid for the repairs nor came to retrieve one of the laptops, making it abandoned property that his shop now owned. Mac Isaac said he shared the hard drive with Robert Costello, a lawyer for Giuliani, and gave a copy of its contents to the FBI.