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

by Carol Leonnig

  Outside the Capitol, the pro-Trump protest was quickly morphing into a battle scene. Demonstrators so outnumbered law enforcement that hundreds of Capitol Police officers on the western front of the complex had no chance of holding the crowds away from the grounds. They retreated to create a tighter blockade around the Capitol’s grand external balconies and steps, all with the goal of keeping people away from the immediate building. This was no ordinary political protest. It was a riot. Many of those crashing through the outer barricades were wearing military gear, carrying Trump flags, and some were wielding pipes, batons, and cans of bear spray as weapons. A few had climbing gear, and some even brought night goggles and fire-retardant gloves. Some engaged in hand-to-hand combat with the police officers, who chose not to fire on the crowd for fear of triggering gruesome violence.

  By 12:58, Sund knew his officers were getting slammed and they wouldn’t be able to stop the onslaught shoving its way toward the halls of Congress. He needed to declare an emergency and call in reinforcements. He called the House Sergeant at Arms, Paul Irving, requesting he and the Senate Sergeant at Arms, Michael Stenger, approve the emergency declaration and call in the National Guard immediately. Irving said he would get back to him after “running it up the chain,” presumably getting approval from Pelosi and Mitch McConnell.

  By the time Trump finished his speech about 1:10, the police’s command over the escalating crisis on the Capitol grounds was rapidly breaking down; captains and commanders in charge of relaying instructions to officers abandoned their supervisor posts and rushed to lend a hand to their officers getting crushed on the battle lines. Captain Thomas Lloyd, stationed inside the Capitol, ran down the steps to help officers hold the waist-high fencing that rioters were trying to yank out of their hands. As he joined his compatriots, Lloyd landed a few punches on the faces of rioters on the opposite side. Sund had moments earlier called D.C. Metropolitan Police for emergency backup; D.C. Chief Robert Contee III dispatched two armed tactical teams to the scene and they arrived in their bright yellow vests at 1:13.

  Inside the Capitol, the joint session was under way in the House Chamber. Lawmakers from both chambers began considering electoral vote counts state by state, in alphabetical order, but were interrupted by a Republican objection to Arizona’s tally and soon disbanded. Senators returned to the Senate Chamber for debate, where at 1:35 McConnell rose to strenuously condemn the move by some of his Republican brethren to block certification.

  Reading from a carefully prepared text, McConnell said, “The Constitution gives us here in Congress a limited role. We cannot simply declare ourselves a National Board of Elections on steroids. The voters, the courts, and the states have all spoken. They’ve all spoken. If we overrule them, it would damage our republic forever. This election, actually, was not unusually close. Just in recent history, 1976, 2000 and 2004 were all closer than this one. The electoral college margin is almost identical to what it was in 2016. [If] this election were overturned by mere allegations from the losing side, our democracy would enter a death spiral. We’d never see the whole nation accept an election again. Every four years would be a scramble for power at any cost.”

  McConnell and most of his colleagues, who were seated at their desks on the Senate floor and engaged in the certification debate, did not know about the mayhem building outside. But Mitt Romney had been more attentive than others, after getting the tip-off from Angus King and being harassed on his flight to Washington. Romney’s phone buzzed with a text message from aide Chris Marroletti.

  “I’m not liking what’s happening outside the Capitol,” Marroletti wrote to his boss. “There are really big, violent demonstrations going on. I think you ought to leave.”

  “Let me know if they get inside the Capitol and I will go to my hideaway,” Romney texted back.

  Meanwhile, Sund called Irving four more times to check on the holdup in getting an emergency declaration. He was losing patience. At 1:50, with violent renegades on the cusp of breaking into the building, two momentous decisions came down in unison. A D.C. police commander on the scene officially declared a riot, and Sund called General William Walker, commander of the D.C. National Guard, and told him he needed his soldiers to come help immediately.

  Just outside the Capitol, the first fatality was recorded at 2:05. Kevin Greeson, a fifty-five-year-old Trump supporter from Alabama who had joined the protest, died after suffering a heart attack.

  Sund got the emergency declaration from his bosses at 2:07, after rioters were already at the Capitol’s windows and doors trying to beat them open. At 2:10 the first rioter, Dominic Pezzola, a forty-three-year-old member of the Proud Boys from upstate New York, entered the Capitol by breaking through a window and climbing inside. A stream of Trump warriors followed him.

  In the Senate Chamber, where Pence was presiding at the rostrum, Romney was the first to move. After Marroletti texted him, “They’re inside the Capitol,” Romney walked off the floor and started to make his way alone toward his small hideaway office in the Capitol. He ran into Capitol Police Officer Eugene Goodman, who was guarding the area outside the chamber. “Go back in,” Goodman instructed Romney. “There are people not far. You’ll be safer inside.” Romney turned around and returned to his desk on the Senate floor.

  Senator James Lankford was in the middle of arguing against certifying the vote given that the public had so many concerns about fraud, when officers rushed in, guns drawn, and began shutting the main doors to the chamber to protect the senators inside. At 2:13, Pence’s Secret Service detail removed the vice president from the Senate floor and took him through a side door to his ceremonial office nearby, along with his wife, Karen, their daughter Charlotte, and his brother, Greg, a congressman from Indiana. The Pences were hurried across one of the Capitol’s many ornate marble hallways to get there, but the path proved eerily close to danger. One or two minutes later, marauders chanting Pence’s name charged up the stairs to that precise landing in front of the hallway, and a quick-thinking Goodman led the rioters in a different direction, away from the Senate Chamber. Had Pence walked past any later, the intruders who called him a traitor would have spotted him.

  The Senate immediately went into recess. The C-SPAN feed providing live footage of the proceedings was shut off. The same was happening at the other end of the building, where plainclothes Capitol Police agents barricaded the door to the Speaker’s Lobby just off the House Chamber to keep the marauders from charging in. The House adjourned at 2:20. Pelosi had been presiding when her security team yanked her from the rostrum. “I thought they were just switching off because of mischief,” she later recalled. “I didn’t know it was because of real danger.”

  Capitol Police officers whisked away the leaders of both Houses of Congress to an undisclosed safe location in the Hart Senate Office Building. Other lawmakers were evacuated, too, although the process of getting to safety proved chaotic.

  “We’re walking down the tunnels and there happened to be two officers there and we said, ‘Where are we going?’ ” Romney recalled. “They said, ‘Well, I’m sure the senators know.’ I said, ‘Well, I’m a senator and I don’t know.’ We didn’t know where we were supposed to go.”

  At the White House, Trump was back in his private dining room watching everything unfold on television. Aides, including Dan Scavino and Kayleigh McEnany, popped in and out to join him. The president was riveted. His supporters had heeded his call to march on the Capitol with “pride and boldness.” For Trump, there was no more beautiful sight than thousands of energetic people waving Trump flags, wearing red MAGA caps, and fighting to keep Trump in power.

  “He thought, ‘This is cool.’ He was happy,” recalled one aide who was with him that afternoon. “Then when it turned violent, he thought, ‘Oh, crap.’ ”

  Lindsey Graham said, “It took him a while to appreciate the gravity of the situation. The president saw these people as allies in his journey
and sympathetic to the idea that the election was stolen.”

  As rioters marauded through the Capitol, it was clear who they were looking for. Some of them shouted “Hang Mike Pence!” Trump didn’t exactly throw them off the hunt. At 2:24, the president tweeted, “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution.”

  Trump also tried to call Senator Tommy Tuberville, a newly elected Alabama Republican who was helping lead the effort to block certification, but misdialed and reached Senator Mike Lee, a Utah Republican. Lee passed his phone to Tuberville. Trump was trying to urge Tuberville to continue making objections, but Tuberville was short with him. “Mr. President, they just took the vice president out,” Tuberville said. “I’ve got to go.”

  At this moment, Pence was still in his ceremonial office with his family and aides—protected by Secret Service, but vulnerable because the second-floor office had windows that could be breached and the intruding thugs had gained control of the building. Tim Giebels, the lead special agent in charge of the vice president’s protective detail, twice asked Pence to evacuate the Capitol, but Pence refused. “I’m not leaving the Capitol,” he told Giebels. The last thing the vice president wanted was the people attacking the Capitol to see his twenty-car motorcade fleeing. That would only vindicate their insurrection.

  The third time Giebels asked Pence to evacuate, it was more of an order than a request. “They’re in the building,” Giebels said. “The room you’re in is not secure. There are glass windows. I need to move you. We’re going.”

  At 2:26, after a team of agents scouted a safe path to ensure the Pences would not encounter trouble, Giebels and the rest of Pence’s detail agents guided them down a staircase to a secured subterranean area that rioters couldn’t reach, where Pence’s armored limousine awaited. Giebels asked Pence to get in one of the vehicles. “We can hold here,” he said.

  “I’m not getting in the car, Tim,” Pence replied. “I trust you, Tim, but you’re not driving the car. If I get in that vehicle, you guys are taking off. I’m not getting in the car.”

  The Pences then made their way to a secured underground area to wait out the riot.

  Back at the White House, Kellogg was worried about Pence’s safety and checked in with Zach Bauer, Pence’s body man, who said they were in the Capitol basement. Kellogg then went to find Trump.

  “Is Mike okay?” the president asked him.

  “The Secret Service has him under control,” Kellogg told Trump. “Karen is there with the daughter.”

  “Oh?” Trump asked.

  “They’re going to stay there until this thing gets sorted out,” Kellogg said.

  Trump said nothing more. He didn’t express any hope that Pence was okay. He didn’t try calling the vice president to check on him. He just stayed in the dining room watching television.

  Around this time, Kellogg ran into Tony Ornato in the West Wing. Ornato, who oversaw Secret Service movements, told him Pence’s detail was planning to move the vice president to Joint Base Andrews.

  “You can’t do that, Tony,” Kellogg said. “Leave him where he’s at. He’s got a job to do. I know you guys too well. You’ll fly him to Alaska if you have a chance. Don’t do it.”

  Pence had made clear to Giebels the level of his determination and Kellogg said there was no changing it.

  “He’s going to stay there,” Kellogg told Ornato. “If he has to wait there all night, he’s going to do it.”

  Ornato, through a spokesman, denied having this conversation.

  Once in his secure area, Pence kept in close contact with McConnell, Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and Kevin McCarthy, making sure the congressional leaders were safe. Later that afternoon, Marc Short, who was with Pence, called Meadows to let him know the vice president was protected and that it was their intention to stay put and finish their work that evening as soon as it was safe. Meadows said he thought it was appropriate for Pence to continue his work, though did not communicate any well wishes from Trump.

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  Sund’s effort to secure the Capitol with military reinforcements hit a major snag. Though the Capitol Police chief had received approval to ask the D.C. National Guard Commander for reinforcements, he was shocked to learn that, on that day, Walker didn’t have permission to dispatch them. Only the top official at the Pentagon could make that order. A few days earlier, Chris Miller, the acting defense secretary, had signed a memo instructing that only he could approve use of the D.C. National Guard, an apparent hangover from the intense criticism Defense Department leaders had received the previous June for the military’s role in the clearing of Lafayette Square.

  A little before 2:30, D.C. mayor muriel Bowser’s homeland security director launched an urgent conference call connecting the mayor, Contee, Sund, and Walker. Top staff working for Army secretary Ryan McCarthy dialed in from across the river. Sund joined the call in progress and told the two army lieutenant generals working under McCarthy that his officers were in a dire crisis and needed help immediately. But the McCarthy aides, Walter Piatt and Charles Flynn, who coincidentally was Michael Flynn’s brother, sounded reluctant. Piatt said he didn’t like the “visual” of National Guard members standing sentry in front of the Capitol, and he would prefer Guard soldiers take up posts elsewhere around the city to relieve D.C. police so police officers could instead respond to the Capitol. As they both stood over a desk phone set on speaker, Flynn concurred with Piatt, saying it would not be his military advice to McCarthy to deploy the Guard without a plan. Flynn would later seek to conceal that he was on the call; when he ultimately admitted he was part of the discussion, he said he could not recall exactly what he had said.

  Contee, who by that point had already sent more than one hundred of his officers to help the Capitol Police, was stunned. Sund was pleading for help. He had just told Piatt and Flynn that armed rioters had breached the Capitol and that shots had been fired inside the building. And they were talking about optics and planning duty assignments.

  “Wait, wait,” Contee said. “Steve, are you requesting National Guard assistance at the Capitol?”

  “I am making urgent, urgent, immediate request for National Guard assistance,” Sund said, his voice barely controlled.

  “And are you turning down the Chief’s request?” Contee asked the lieutenant generals on the other side of the Potomac River.

  Piatt said no, they weren’t rejecting Sund’s request, but rather explaining their objections and concerns. He said they would have to talk to McCarthy. They hung up.

  Elsewhere in the Pentagon, more senior leaders had rushed into Miller’s office suite to try to get a handle on the rapidly deteriorating situation. It was about 2:30. The acting secretary was there as were Army chief of staff James McConville; National Guard chief Dan Hokanson; Kash Patel; Bryan Fenton, the senior military adviser to Miller; and Milley, who had just been yanked out of a meeting with Christine Wormuth, a Biden transition team official. They stood around the room taking in the facts. The crowd outside the Capitol was estimated at twenty-five thousand, some of them armed and many of them violent.

  Just then, McCarthy entered the room breathing heavily; he had run from his own office. McCarthy gave Miller and the group a rapid update from the phone call his aides had just had with Sund and Contee. Police at the Capitol were badly outnumbered by rioters, engaged in hand-to-hand combat, and losing the fight to secure the Capitol. As many as eight thousand protesters had pounded their way through barricades and were streaming through the halls of Congress.

  The Pentagon leaders were aghast.

  “What do you think, Chairman?” Miller asked Milley.

  “Get on the phone with the A.G. right now and get every cop in D.C. down there to the Capitol this minute, all seven to eight thousand of them,” Milley said. He recommended Hokanson mobilize the entire D.C. Na
tional Guard and send out a call for National Guard reinforcements from the nearby states of Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.

  The discussion was briefly interrupted when, on a television in Miller’s office, a news flash reported that shots had been fired in the Capitol. At 2:44, Ashli Babbitt, a thirty-five-year-old Air Force veteran and Trump supporter from California, was shot by a Capitol Police officer as she tried to break into the Speaker’s Lobby and refused a command to stop.

  At the Maryland State House in Annapolis, Governor Larry Hogan was a step ahead of them. When protesters first breached the police line at the Capitol, an aide pulled Hogan out of a Zoom meeting he was having with Japan’s ambassador to the United States, and the governor quickly ordered the Maryland State Police superintendent to mobilize 280 troopers in its rapid-deployment force to grab their riot gear and drive immediately to the Capitol.

  Hogan then directed the adjutant general of the Maryland National Guard to begin calling up one thousand of its members. He knew they would not be able to cross state lines and enter the District of Columbia without approval from Miller, but he anticipated the ask would come, and wanted Guard forces ready at the border for a speedy deployment. “I don’t want to wait around,” Hogan said.

  Hogan soon got a call from Congressman Steny Hoyer, the number two House Democrat, who was from Maryland. Hoyer was in the Hart Building with Pelosi, Schumer, Kevin McCarthy, and other leaders. He spoke fast and his tone conveyed urgency.

  “Governor, we need your help right now,” Hoyer said. “The Capitol Police have been overrun. What can you do to help us? Can you send in the police? Can you send in the National Guard?”