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

by Carol Leonnig

  “Listen, our president of the United States retweeted a post that claimed that the Navy SEALs didn’t actually kill bin Laden,” Obama had said. “Think about that. And we act like, ‘Well, okay . . . ’ It’s not okay. I mean, we’ve gotten so numb to what is bizarre behavior.”

  As Obama and Biden drove Democrats to the polls early, the Republicans were counting on a massive Election Day turnout, so Trump could lead substantially on Election Night and declare victory before all the early votes were counted. But as Trump jetted from one rally to the next, he and his advisers were so taken by the size and enthusiasm of his crowds that they began to dream big, thinking a real, lasting, and undeniable win might be in the cards. “You thought, damn, he might actually pull this off,” one adviser recalled.

  Trump and his team thought they were experiencing 2016 all over again. The president flew around the country at a grueling pace, traveling to eleven rallies in the final forty-eight hours. Massive crowds greeted him in such places as Hickory, North Carolina; Rome, Georgia; Scranton, Pennsylvania; Kenosha, Wisconsin; and Grand Rapids, Michigan.

  Trump’s optimism was reinforced by those traveling with him. Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel and Stepien, who were well informed about state-by-state data and early-vote trends, were circumspect about Trump’s path to 270 electoral votes. But Trump’s adult children and their spouses, as well as staffers Meadows, McEnany, Farah, Hope Hicks, Derek Lyons, and others, spoke in those final days as if they could already smell victory. They made up what another adviser described as a “traveling Greek chorus” that fed Trump’s ego by reveling in the crowd sizes and talking up the possibilities of a landslide win.

  In his final days on the stump, Trump decided to add a new name to the long list of foes he attacked at his rallies: Anthony Fauci. He first consulted his political brain trust about whether going after Fauci was a wise idea. Though the president would never admit it, polls soon after the pandemic hit and ever since had shown that Fauci was far more popular with voters than Trump. Before one of his rallies in late October, Trump asked Miller what he thought of going after Fauci from the lectern.

  “Say whatever you want to say,” Miller told him. “He’s out there campaigning against you. The guy’s been wrong. He’s moved the goalposts on masks. I think the guy’s full of shit. He doesn’t have to be treated with kid gloves.”

  As an apolitical public servant, Fauci did not campaign for or against any candidate, though that didn’t stop Trump and his aides from thinking of his interviews accurately describing the dangers of the virus as, effectively, the work of a Biden surrogate.

  Trump went for it. He started softly, calling Fauci “a Democrat” at a North Carolina rally. But he ratcheted up his attacks on Fauci in subsequent rallies, and by November 1, at a late-night rally in Miami, the crowd knew what was coming when the president started talking about the virus. A “Fire Fauci!” chant broke out. Trump lapped it up. In response, he told his supporters, “Don’t tell anybody, but let me wait until a little bit after the election.”

  But Fauci had a thick skin. As another doctor on the task force put it, “You got so numb to the outrageousness. One more level of outrageous, it barely registered.” Fauci was angrier about the White House blocking him from many media appearances. As for Trump, Fauci had all but given up on the president doing the honest or honorable thing some time earlier. So had most of the other doctors. He was a lost cause.

  Fabrizio couldn’t fathom why the president would choose to make a popular figure like Fauci his punching bag in the closing days of the campaign. It was politically stupid because it risked alienating the white independent voters Trump still needed to attract. As he watched Trump attack Fauci at one of these rallies, Fabrizio sent a text message to Short. He jokingly asked Short if it was safe to assume it had been his “strategic recommendation” to attack Fauci.

  “LOL,” Short wrote back. He, too, knew how foolish this was.

  In Washington, meanwhile, the triumvirate that had spent so much energy that summer and fall keeping Trump from deploying active-duty troops on the streets of American cities—Esper, Milley, and Barr—were tracking intelligence and social media chatter for any signs of unrest on Election Day. They and their deputies at the Pentagon, Justice Department, and FBI were monitoring the possibility of protests breaking out among supporters on both sides. The trio also were on guard for the possibility that Trump would invoke the Insurrection Act in some way to quell protests or to perpetuate his power by somehow intervening in the election. This scenario weighed heavily on Esper and Milley because they controlled the military and had sworn an oath to the Constitution. Their duty was to protect a free and fair election and to prevent the military from being used for political purposes of any kind.

  At around 5:30 p.m. on November 2, the night before the election, Barr called Esper to give the defense secretary a heads-up about something. Trump had told some of his advisers that he planned to contest the election on legal grounds should he fall behind Biden in the vote count. Before polls opened on Election Day, the president already was preparing to lose the official count in key states and to fight it in court.

  Barr also relayed to Esper the latest intelligence gathered by the FBI, which showed that if Trump won, significant civil unrest was expected in several cities. Esper thanked Barr for the information and shared it with Milley and other Pentagon officials. Esper, Milley, and Barr were ready for whatever might come the next day. And they knew one thing for certain: the biggest wild card on Election Night would be the commander in chief himself.

  Sixteen

  The Reckoning

  Finally, Election Day had arrived. The morning of November 3, President Trump was upbeat. The mood in the West Wing was good. Some aides talked giddily of a landslide. Several women who worked in the White House arrived wearing red sweaters in a show of optimism, while some Secret Service agents on the president’s detail sported red ties for the occasion. Trump’s voice was hoarse from his mad dash of rallies, but he thought his exhausting final sprint had sealed the deal. He considered Joe Biden to be a lot of things, but a winner most definitely was not one of them. “I can’t lose to this fucking guy,” Trump told aides.

  At around noon, his detail whisked Trump across the Potomac River to visit his campaign headquarters in Arlington, where Bill Stepien and the campaign’s high command gave Trump a briefing in the conference room. Jared Kushner, Mark Meadows, and Kayleigh McEnany joined the president. Stepien outlined what to expect that night—when polls closed in each battleground state, how quickly votes should be tallied, and which states would likely have the first projected winners. The campaign manager explained that due to the huge number of mail-in ballots in many states, it might take long into the night for votes to be counted. Patience was in order.

  Four years earlier, Stepien had given a similar Election Day briefing to Trump and told him that the early returns likely would favor Hillary Clinton. For instance, he said then, the first numbers to report out of Florida traditionally were in Democratic strongholds in South Florida, while precincts in the Panhandle, which strongly favored Republicans, reported an hour later because they are in a later time zone. “It’s going to be a long night,” Stepien had told him in 2016. “Don’t be discouraged.”

  This time, Stepien explained to Trump that the opposite could happen. In many battleground states, the first votes to be recorded were expected to be in-person Election Day votes, which could lean Trump, while mail-in votes, which were likely to heavily favor Biden, were added to the tally later as those ballots were processed. This meant the early vote totals could well show Trump ahead by solid margins.

  “It’s going to be good early,” Stepien told the boss. But, as he cautioned the president, those numbers would be incomplete and the margins likely would tighten later in the evening.

  Trump then stepped out of the conference room and into the big open
floor of cubicles to give a brief pep talk to scores of assembled staffers, who greeted him with raucous applause. A pool of journalists stood nearby to cover his remarks, and a reporter asked whether he had prepared an acceptance speech or concession speech to deliver that evening.

  “No, I’m not thinking about concession speech or acceptance speech yet,” Trump said. “Hopefully, we’ll be only doing one of those two. And, you know, winning is easy. Losing is never easy. Not for me, it’s not.”

  As Trump thought about winning or losing, the Pentagon brass was focused on keeping the peace. That morning, Mark Esper, Mark Milley, and other defense officials got a briefing on security concerns around the nation. If Trump won, officials expected large crowds of protesters to assemble in Washington, perhaps as many as ten thousand or fifteen thousand people. Law enforcement officials were monitoring cities, including Atlanta, Boston, Los Angeles, Norfolk, Philadelphia, and San Diego, for likely protests.

  Meanwhile, White House cooks and ushers were busy preparing to receive hundreds of guests for an Election Night viewing party. Trump’s original plan had been to stage his “victory” party at the Trump International Hotel a few blocks away on Pennsylvania Avenue. But that plan had been scotched a few days earlier, as the president’s wishes for a celebration at his luxury hotel ran headlong into the District of Columbia’s public health regulations for coronavirus. No more than fifty people could gather at an indoor venue in the city.

  Trump’s campaign and his White House political team had nearly four hundred people they wanted to invite for Election Night, so they moved the party to the White House, which was on federal property and therefore not subject to local ordinances. Trump decided to host his party in the East Room and other overflow rooms along the Cross Hall of the White House. The choice of location broke with a solemn tradition of never using the White House for overt political purposes, a norm Trump had already tossed aside in August by holding his Republican National Convention acceptance speech on the South Lawn.

  Trump also used the White House to house his political operation, setting up two “war rooms” with computers, large-screen televisions, and other equipment where campaign staffers would work monitoring election returns. The larger of the two war rooms was in government office space in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, which was next to the West Wing and part of the White House campus, where roughly sixty staffers would have work stations from which to receive up-to-the-minute information from battleground states and track precinct data. The smaller war room was in the Map Room, on the ground level of the White House residence. Steeped in history, the Map Room took its name from World War II, when President Franklin Roosevelt turned it into a situation room with maps to track troop movements and to receive classified information on the war’s progress. Trump’s seniormost aides planned to work through the night in the Map Room, now transformed into the campaign’s command center, where Stepien and his top deputies could analyze data and stay close to the president to brief him in person as needed.

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  Nancy Pelosi had been working toward this night for four years. For her, Election Night in 2016 had been a nightmare, and she was determined not to allow a repeat in 2020. “That night was like getting kicked in the back by a mule over and over again,” Pelosi said in an interview for this book. The House Speaker recalled thinking that night about Trump’s surprise victory, “It can’t be true. It can’t be happening to our country.”

  Pelosi added, “You understand that this is not a person of sound mind. You understand that. You know that. He’s not of sound mind. . . . When he first got elected, I was devastated because I thought Hillary Clinton was one of the best prepared people to be president—better than her husband, better than Obama, better than George W. Bush. Maybe not better than George Herbert Walker Bush, because he had been a vice president. I don’t think any of the people I just mentioned would deny that she was better qualified, experienced, all the rest of it. So, the idea that he would get elected was shocking. It was shocking.”

  Mitt Romney had been less shocked by Trump’s election—he had watched firsthand as the Republican Party was radicalized by the far right—but was just as determined to prevent a second Trump term. Romney said in an interview for this book that he watched the election returns in California together with his wife, Ann, son Craig, and other family members, and felt a pit in his stomach. The early numbers looked surprisingly good for Trump. Biden was struggling in the quadrennial bellwether of Florida, even in Democrat-rich Miami-Dade County.

  “I think he’s going to win,” Romney recalled telling his family. “Those polls were way off. I think he’s going to pull it out.”

  At the White House, people liked what they were seeing. There was a party atmosphere. Staff hung out in West Wing offices chatting at least until 9:00 p.m. National Security Council officials celebrated in the Roosevelt Room. Meadows served beer and food in the chief of staff’s corner office. Another group of aides lingered outside McEnany’s office, known as Upper Press. In the residence, scores of guests—Cabinet secretaries, members of Congress, television stars, and other dignitaries—were drinking and milling around, mostly without masks save for Alex Azar, who kept his on. After a few too many swigs of wine and beer, some guests became rather animated as the night progressed.

  Upstairs in the first family’s private quarters, Trump was glued to the television. He alternated between watching from his bedroom alone and from a family room with Melania, other family members, and some of his most trusted aides, including Hope Hicks. Stepien, Meadows, McEnany, Jason Miller, Stephen Miller, Ronna McDaniel, and other senior advisers were in the Map Room. Members of the president’s family—Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump, Kushner, Eric Trump and his wife, Lara, who worked on the campaign—came in and out much of the night, as did a pair of special party guests, Fox News stars Laura Ingraham and Jeanine Pirro.

  They all turned to Matt Oczkowski for updates, sometimes as often as every few minutes. As the campaign’s top data cruncher, Oczkowski sat in front of a computer and performed real-time analysis of precinct data to stay ahead of state calls and to spot any trouble on the horizon. Oczkowski liked what he saw early on. Florida offered the first good indicators. Trump was overperforming with Blacks and Latinos, especially among Cuban Americans in South Florida. Miami-Dade was going gangbusters for Trump. And turnout among the president’s base of rural whites was high. Meadows, meanwhile, paid close attention to precinct returns out of North Carolina, which he had represented in Congress, and he felt confident about Trump’s chances there. And early returns out of Pennsylvania were encouraging.

  At this point in the evening, Stepien tried to temper Trump’s optimism and keep the president’s mind from racing too far ahead of reality. “Stay calm,” the campaign manager told him. “We won’t know for some period of time.”

  One Trump confidant who mostly stayed out of the Map Room was Rudy Giuliani. That’s because he had set up his own command center upstairs on the party floor. Giuliani sat at a table in the Red Room with his son, Andrew, who worked at the White House in the Office of Public Liaison, staring intensely at a laptop watching vote tallies come in. The Giulianis made for an odd scene, as partygoers swirled around them. After a while, Rudy Giuliani started to cause a commotion. He was telling other guests that he had come up with a strategy for Trump and was trying to get into the president’s private quarters to tell him about it. Some people thought Giuliani might have been drinking too much and suggested to Stepien that he go talk to the former New York City mayor. Stepien, Meadows, and Jason Miller brought Giuliani down to a room just off the Map Room to hear him out.

  Giuliani went state by state asking Stepien, Miller, and Meadows what they were seeing and what their plan was.

  “What’s happening in Michigan?” he asked.

  They said it was too early to tell, votes were still being counted and they c
ouldn’t say.

  “Just say we won,” Giuliani told them.

  Same thing in Pennsylvania. “Just say we won Pennsylvania,” Giuliani said.

  Giuliani’s grand plan was to just say Trump won, state after state, based on nothing. Stepien, Miller, and Meadows thought his argument was both incoherent and irresponsible.

  “We can’t do that,” Meadows said, raising his voice. “We can’t.”

  Some competitive races were falling into place for Republicans. In South Carolina, Lindsey Graham faced a tough challenge from Democrat Jaime Harrison, an impressive candidate who had garnered national attention and raised $109 million, the most ever for a U.S. Senate campaign. But South Carolina, long a bastion of Republicanism, stayed true to form. The race was called early, with Graham winning 54 percent to Harrison’s 44 percent.

  Trump was watching TV as news networks projected Graham’s victory, and within minutes he called his friend.

  “You got yours,” Trump told Graham. “I’ve got a fight on my hands.”

  “Well, Mr. President, hang in there,” Graham said. “It’s looking pretty good for you.”

  As the night bore on, some of Trump’s advisers began to worry. Public polls, as well as the Trump campaign’s internal surveys, had long projected the race was Biden’s to lose, and that prediction was bearing out as more precincts reported votes from battleground states. Alyssa Farah stepped away from the party in the East Room and saw McDaniel pacing in the hallway.

  “Ronna, good to see you!” Farah said to the Republican National Committee chairwoman.

  “Hey, good to see you,” McDaniel said. Then, as she turned away, McDaniel said, “Things are not looking good.”

  Bill Barr had the same feeling. He had shown up for Trump’s Election Night party, even though he had thought for months that Trump was destined to become a one-term president. Trump didn’t seem able to get out of his own way and deliver a disciplined message, and Barr had warned him of exactly that in April. Barr hung around the party for a bit, but a little after 10:00 decided to call it a night. He went home to get some sleep.