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

by Carol Leonnig

  “How did we lose to Joe Biden?” Trump asked. “What happened? What went wrong? Can we still win?”

  Most aides responded with variations of the affirmative. “Sure, we can still win,” some said. They did not want to dash Trump’s hopes, at least not until reality forced their hands. Kellyanne Conway, his adviser with the most experience on political campaigns, offered the president a theory for why he appeared to have come up short.

  “Mr. President, it’s a convergence of things,” she said. “It’s the virus, but it’s also the mail-in ballots. Your campaign had one and a half billion dollars and you ran out of money. You pulled ads down at the end. I think that’s incredibly unfair. I watched you run around the country. You raised so much money only for them to run out of it late in the game.”

  The president’s loss was not even official and already the recriminations had begun. So it went in Trump World. Conway also suggested a message for Trump to push on social media, assuming he would go to court to contest the outcome. “This is very simple,” she told him. “All you want to do is say, ‘We want to make sure every legal vote is counted and every illegal vote is not counted.’ That should be noncontroversial. Biden should retweet that. Ask Joe Biden to retweet it.”

  “That’s genius,” Trump said. “If we do that, I’ll win.”

  Conway told Trump that she had just spoken with a smart politico in Georgia who said the presidential race there could go either way by the slimmest of margins, three thousand or five thousand votes.

  “How can that be?” Trump asked. “We should be winning Georgia by a landslide.”

  “You should be, but you’re not,” Conway said.

  “This is crazy,” Trump said. “I’m calling the governor. He ruined it.”

  Georgia bewildered Trump. For the past three decades, the state had voted for Republicans for president. Its governor was Republican, as was its secretary of state, who administered elections. At Trump’s final rally there, on the night of November 1 in Rome, a small city in the Appalachian foothills, an estimated thirty thousand people showed up to see him. Their energy was electric. Georgia was MAGA country. Or so Trump thought. Demographic shifts coupled with a massive voter registration and mobilization drive led by Stacey Abrams and other Democrats had turned this red state purple. The story was similar in Arizona. Trump couldn’t fathom that Biden had more votes than him there. He asked Lindsey Graham what he thought had gone wrong in Arizona.

  “I think you lost Arizona because of John McCain,” Graham, who had been the late senator’s closest friend in Washington, told Trump. “Beating on McCain went too far and it probably hurt you in Arizona.”

  Despite Trump’s private flashes of realism on November 4, his campaign was defiant. That morning, Jared Kushner, Bill Stepien, Jason Miller, Hope Hicks, and other advisers gathered to strategize, some at campaign headquarters in Arlington and others by phone. Like every presidential campaign since Bush versus Gore in 2000, the Trump team had lined up scores of lawyers and staff on the ground in battleground states ready to mount legal challenges whenever headquarters sent the signal.

  In Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, the Trump campaign believed it had legitimate legal claims that could toss out some votes in Biden’s column. The margin in Georgia was close enough that a hand recount was likely, which could put Trump on top. And the campaign’s internal model on November 4 had predicted Trump ultimately would eke out a win in Arizona as well as North Carolina. They thought Biden’s leads in Michigan and Nevada were insurmountable, but Trump had a pathway to 270 electoral college votes without them.

  Miller moved quickly to control the messages emanating from Trump World. The president was preparing to contest the election in courtrooms across the country, and he didn’t want any surrogates saying anything detrimental to their efforts. He asked Hicks to hold back any election-related communications from the White House until the campaign got its ducks in a row. Alyssa Farah was booked for an appearance on Fox News the morning of November 4. She had planned to tout the Republican Party’s achievements, even though Trump appeared likely to lose, saying something along the lines of, “Results aren’t here yet. We’re still awaiting them. Republicans have a lot to be proud of. We picked up seats in the House, elected a record number of women, and brought in more Black and Hispanic votes.”

  But before her TV segment started, Farah got a call from Hicks. “Stand down,” Hicks told her. “The campaign’s running all messaging going forward. There’s a plan here. We appreciate you wanting to be out fighting, but we don’t need you.” Farah did not appear on the air that day.

  By November 5, as a handful of states, including Georgia and Pennsylvania, continued to count mail-in and other ballots, and Biden’s total inched up, Trump fired off a series of tweets. His strategy was clear. Shortly after 9:00 a.m., he wrote, “STOP THE COUNT!” Nearly an hour later, he wrote, “ANY VOTE THAT CAME IN AFTER ELECTION DAY WILL NOT BE COUNTED!” And a little over an hour after that, he wrote, “All of the recent Biden claimed States will be legally challenged by us for Voter Fraud and State Election Fraud. Plenty of proof—just check out the Media. WE WILL WIN! America First!”

  Trump had his comeback strategy. He would wage a brazen assault on the election, challenging late-counting ballots in courts and trying to pressure judges and state election officials and legislators to stop tabulations. The president believed this was as much a public relations task as a legal one. To be his battle commander, he tapped his deputy campaign manager from 2016, David Bossie, who ran Citizens United, a conservative advocacy group. Bossie was a three-decade veteran of partisan fights against the Clintons and other Democrats, and Trump admired his pugilism.

  Though Bossie was technically in charge, Rudy Giuliani asserted himself right away. He showed up at campaign headquarters to crash strategy meetings and spent significant time talking with Trump. Giuliani told the president repeatedly, “They stole this thing.” He played to Trump’s sense of victimhood and brought any anecdote of alleged voter fraud he could find straight to the president. Giuliani believed Trump’s team was ill prepared to go to battle.

  The professionals on Trump’s campaign thought Giuliani could damage Trump’s cause if he made himself the face of the president’s legal challenges. They knew Giuliani was undisciplined and that some of his comments sounded, frankly, crazy. They spent this week trying to control and restrain the former New York mayor. “We would sit with him and listen to him,” one campaign official recalled. “It was the only way to stop him from running to a TV camera. We assigned a staffer to him to try to contain him, because only bad things were going to come from that.”

  On November 6, several of Trump’s campaign advisers met with the president in the Oval Office to tell him they thought he was likely to lose the recounts he was pursuing. The vote tallies were not going his way. They put Matt Oczkowski on speakerphone to guide Trump through the data. Ticking through the key remaining battleground states, Oczkowski said, “You’re going to lose these places.”

  “I thought we were going to win,” Trump said. “Why are they still counting votes coming in after the election? What’s going on?”

  “We don’t know how many votes are left out there,” Oczkowski said.

  “No,” Trump said. “We’re winning this. This was stolen.”

  Then the president got Giuliani on the line.

  “You won,” Giuliani told him. “They stole this thing.”

  Trump’s campaign team was being realistic, but the president wanted them to keep up the charade that the election had been stolen. He directed his frustration at Justin Clark and Matt Morgan, the campaign’s general counsel.

  “Why aren’t you guys fighting harder? Where’s my Roy Cohn?” Trump asked, referring to the late New York lawyer and fixer, who rose to prominence as Senator Joseph McCarthy’s chief counsel during his investigations of suspected communists and was a mentor to T
rump. The president had earlier made the same appeal to his White House counsel, when seeking to quash the Russia investigation. “I need bulldogs. I need fighters. Democrats fight. We don’t fight.”

  The next day, November 7, Trump’s fight seemed all but over. One after another, news organizations declared Biden the winner of Pennsylvania, and with it, the election. It was a Saturday, and the calls rang in while Trump was golfing at his club in Virginia. Giuliani had just finished a bizarre news conference in the asphalt parking lot of Four Seasons Total Landscaping in northeast Philadelphia, near a crematorium and a sex shop, Fantasy Island Adult Bookstore, where he had trumpeted baseless claims of widespread voter fraud.

  When Trump returned to the White House, his campaign team was waiting for him in the residence: Stepien, Bossie, Clark, and Miller, as well as White House lawyer Eric Herschmann. They had decided to be straight with the boss about his miniscule chance of overturning the result, though they felt like they were about to be fed to the wolves. They all sat down in the Yellow Oval Room on the private second floor of the White House. The president was still in his golf clothes: dark pants, white polo shirt, black fleece, and white “Make America Great Again” hat. Stepien was the first to speak.

  “This is going to be hard,” he told Trump. “You have options to pursue. We think they are legitimate options to pursue.” But Stepien said the likelihood of success was small.

  Stepien and Clark walked through the narrow path to victory that remained. Trump would have to win enough of the few outstanding votes in Arizona and Georgia to pull ahead of Biden in the final counts. He also would have to win a legal challenge in Wisconsin and hope that enough Biden votes were thrown out to carry that state. Although the campaign had cases pending in Pennsylvania, Clark explained that they were unlikely to prevail there.

  “This is the path,” Clark said. “We have a five to ten percent chance of winning this thing on a straight edge.”

  Trump had to attend to another matter and left the room for about fifteen minutes. Stepien, Clark, and the others wanted to make sure Trump understood what they had told him, so when the president returned, they repeated themselves. Trump understood—and to their surprise, he didn’t show any anger. “He wasn’t even displeased, honestly,” one of the advisers later recalled. “His attitude was, we’ll give it a shot. We’ll see what happens. That’s what his attitude was. It wasn’t, let’s get these bastards, or anything like that.”

  Later that day, Trump spoke by phone with Chris Christie.

  “What do you think?” the president asked.

  “Look, Mr. President, losing is never easy,” Christie said. “It always hurts. I know what it felt like to lose when you’re running for the nomination for president and it hurt. I can imagine how much it hurts to have been president.”

  But, Christie added, “You’ve got races in Georgia that we’ve got to win and you’ve got a legacy of accomplishment to protect. And to the extent you continue to fight this, your behavior is going to obscure your accomplishments in office. For the good of your legacy, for the good of your record, you need to just put this behind you.”

  Christie agreed with Trump that there were likely some voting irregularities but acknowledged that they did not amount to widespread fraud. He had no doubt that the American people had selected Biden to be the next president.

  “You don’t have to concede in the normal way,” Christie told Trump. “You don’t have to admit that it was a fair and square loss if you don’t feel comfortable doing that. But you need to put an end to this.”

  “Bullshit,” Trump said. “I’m not doing it. Chris, if that’s all you got, I’m never doing it.”

  “Sir, that’s all I got because it’s all anybody has,” Christie replied. “Anybody who tells you they’ve got something more is lying to you. There’s nothing to be done here. I would love to have some kind of magic wand I could wave for you to help you through this and get you to the winning side, but we lost.”

  “No,” Trump said. “They stole it. They stole votes all over the country.”

  Christie then tried to talk some sense into Trump. He asked, “Mr. President, how do we add all these seats in the House [if] the election was being stolen? You tell me they just stole it from you? They allowed the votes to go through for the Republicans in the House?”

  “Yes,” Trump said.

  “Well, that doesn’t make any sense, sir,” Christie replied. “We don’t have any evidence of that.”

  “Chris, you and I disagree,” Trump said.

  “I understand that, Mr. President, but I felt like I needed to call you and tell you what I thought,” Christie said.

  They would not speak again for more than a month. Trump, through a spokesman, denied that he had this conversation.

  The next day, November 8, Bossie tested positive for COVID-19. Trump’s commander was out. He barely had a chance to start this work before having to self-isolate. Mark Meadows also tested positive that week and had to take a step back. Into the power vacuum around Trump stepped Giuliani.

  * * *

  —

  In the days following the election, the top deputies at the Pentagon, CIA, and FBI were on standby. Not for a terror attack, but for their bosses to get the ax. Trump had told several close allies in October that he wanted to fire immediately after the election the “losers” who weren’t sufficiently loyal. At the top of the president’s list was Chris Wray—always Wray—and then Mark Esper, Mark Milley, and Gina Haspel. Trump had been talked out of firing them before the election but said there was no reason to keep them around after it, win or lose. Like many retired generals, former White House chief of staff John Kelly had kept in touch with his friends inside the Pentagon and in other corners of the administration. Word of Trump’s grumblings had reached his ears. Kelly told Esper to stick to his guns.

  “You’ve got a choice to make,” Kelly told him. “Continue to do your job [and risk getting fired]. If you want to survive, you can become a complete sycophant and survive. But what good is life then?”

  Like Milley, Esper had decided long ago he had to set some boundaries with Trump. Both men expected there could be a cost: an unceremonious firing. Kelly understood this, too.

  “You’re already dead meat,” Kelly told Esper.

  He told Milley the same: “You’re going to get fired.”

  Both men assumed their ouster was coming.

  Meadows, Kushner, and Ivanka Trump knew Trump wanted Esper gone, but they warned him not to also fire Milley. Getting rid of both the civilian and military leaders at the same time would look bad, and removing Milley, the seniormost military officer, might leave the impression the president was threatening the nation’s stability. There could be hell to pay for that in the form of a public rejection by the senior brass. As one retired commander said, “Word on the street was: you fire Milley and there will be no one to take the job. You’d have uniform leadership saying they don’t want the job.”

  Speculation swirled in the media that Esper’s days were numbered, but there was one story in particular that the defense secretary thought would really tick off the president. On November 7, NBC published Courtney Kube’s story, albeit modified, that Esper had tried to have killed. The network reported that Esper had a letter of resignation ready to go, which suggested he was prepared to exit at any moment. Esper stressed he’d had a resignation letter typed up for a while, as did many other Trump appointees. But everybody knew Trump didn’t like people to quit on him. Esper was beyond frustrated. He’d hung on for this long. And now he might get axed over what he felt was an unnecessary story. To him, it was a stupid way to get fired.

  The morning of November 9, Esper joined a briefing he had requested for his leadership team on “ascertainment.” It was a word a lot of people were studying up on, two days after Biden had been pronounced the president-elect. The General Services Administratio
n was the entity that “ascertained” the next president, a determination that would allow Biden’s transition team to use government offices and to prepare for a smooth hand-off at the January 20 inauguration. But the GSA chief had not yet agreed to ascertain Biden as the presumed victor because Trump was contesting the election results.

  “Look, we’re not going to do anything until ascertainment happens,” Esper said. “But once it happens, and assuming the polls are right, I want this to be the best transition in history. We’re going to do everything we can to make the Biden administration successful.”

  The rest of the morning whisked by quickly. At around 1:00 p.m., Esper was back in his office when two things happened at once. His chief of staff, Jen Stewart, ran into his office and said, “I just got this email! The president is firing you!” And at precisely the same moment, the phone rang on his desk. Meadows was on the other end of the line.

  “I’m calling because, you know, the president’s not happy,” Meadows began. “He’s not happy with your performance.”

  Meadows continued: “And we don’t think you’re sufficiently loyal. You’re going to be replaced. He’s going to announce it this afternoon. You’ll be replaced by Chris Miller.”

  Esper thought to himself: Who?

  Still processing the “sufficiently loyal” line, Esper responded with words to the effect of, “That’s the president’s prerogative. My oath is to the Constitution, not to him.” With that, the two men hung up.

  Esper wondered how much time he had left on the job. Normally, it might have been a few hours. But Trump announced Esper’s dismissal with a tweet four minutes later. Milley heard the news and came up to the secretary’s suite. The vibe was gloomy. Esper acted professionally and was unemotional, but several staffers looked dazed.

  “This is a sad day,” Milley said to Esper. “I’m sorry about this.”