“Frankly, We Did Win This Election”: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost

by Michael C. Bender

  “Come on, Fake News, follow me,” Trump said to the reporters.

  He then led about a dozen members of the press through the plane, announcing to his staff along the way, “The Fake News is coming back!”

  Don Junior and his girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle, shared a nervous glance from their perch in the room connected to his office.

  The reporters fell into the couches lining the wall, and photographers sat on the floor near the television.

  “Bring in some shrimp and meatballs for everybody,” Trump told his staff. “Put out the little tables.”

  The flight attendant said there wasn’t time for food, since it was a short flight back to Las Vegas. But Trump insisted on at least snacks for his guests, and the staff brought napkin-lined baskets filled with potato chips, which the president washed down with tomato juice and celery.

  Jared and Grisham came into the cabin, along with Scavino, who showed Trump the tweets he was posting. Don Junior and Kim stood in the doorway, simultaneously cuddling and commenting on the action.

  “I’m hurt they’re not talking about us,” Don Junior said.

  “What’s wrong with Chuck Todd’s hair?” Kim asked.

  While reporters were fixated on the debate, having missed it live while they were at the rally, Trump turned in his seat, facing Jared and Grisham.

  “Not as easy as it looks, right?” Trump asked them.

  “No, sir. You’re so good at it,” Jared told him.

  Trump then started offering his own color commentary: Bloomberg was smart, but not quick. Biden had an awful facelift. Bernie was sharp, and Warren was nasty but a good debater. He thought Buttigieg was articulate, and seemed to surprise himself with repeated praise for the former South Bend mayor.

  But the climax for Trump was Bloomberg melting down when rivals, led by Warren, skewered him over his history of sexual harassment allegations and past support for stop-and-frisk policing. Trump crowed at every stammer he saw on-screen.

  “He stutters like Biden!” Trump said.

  The flight, as promised, was short, and the plane was soon on the ground. But Trump didn’t want the fun to end. He offered to let the reporters walk down the front stairs instead of the back—a treat only Trump would think to offer—but the press had to return to the back of the plane to retrieve their bags. When someone mentioned that it was the sixtieth birthday for Doug Mills, the New York Times White House photographer, Trump laughed.

  “You mean I’m older than this fucker?” Trump said.

  Trump reluctantly let reporters return to their cabin, making them promise they’d finish watching the debate in their hotel rooms.

  The president was feeling emboldened. His approval ratings were at the highest point of his presidency, he’d removed or reassigned many of the administration officials who had testified against him during impeachment, and now Democrats were falling apart.

  “I’m the president, and I’m going to stay the president,” Trump shouted to the reporters as they walked away. “And you’re finally starting to realize that!”

  Trump returned to Washington before heading out again, this time on a whirlwind thirty-six hours in India, a diplomatic drop-in that was as intense as it was brief. He abhorred international travel and tried to avoid it, frequently sending Pence in his place. He had asked Jared to postpone this trip and tell Narendra Modi, the Indian prime minister, that they’d reschedule after the election. But Jared and O’Brien were eager to make it happen. “You’re not going to have time for anything else in your second term other than traveling if you keep postponing these trips,” Jared told Trump.

  Plus, Modi had taken personal interest in bringing Trump not just to India, but to his home state of Gujarat. It was there, Modi had promised Trump, he would host him for a campaign-style rally.

  The rally had initially been planned for New Delhi, but just two weeks before Trump was supposed to arrive, Modi phoned and told Trump he should instead come to Gujurat for a mega-rally inside the world’s biggest cricket stadium. There was just one problem. The stadium was still under construction. Trump weighed the risks, considered the optics of a rally inside a 110,000-seat stadium, and signed off.

  Nearly everyone in the stadium wore white “Namaste Trump” baseball caps, India’s twist on the MAGA campaign cap, which had a visual effect of making the crowd seem even bigger. The same classic rock music that greeted Trump rally crowds in the United States—the Rolling Stones’ “Play with Fire,” Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer,” the Beatles’ “Hey Jude”—serenaded Trump as he arrived. Trump spoke for about thirty minutes, and was interrupted with applause nearly sixty times. He was thrilled. He praised Modi and complimented the crowd.

  “From this day on, India will always hold a very special place in our hearts,” Trump said.

  After the rally, the Trump delegation departed for a private tour of the Taj Mahal. The ivory-white marble mausoleum built in the seventh century along the banks of the Yamuna River attracts 20,000 visitors a day, but Trump had never been among them. Modi closed it down for the day—and had his government chase off the monkeys known to harass tourists—so Trump could stroll through the gardens unmolested. A motorcade of electric golf carts ferried the president, his family, and his staff on a sunset tour.

  Jared snapped pictures on his iPhone of Ivanka, who posted them on Instagram. The president posed for pictures with Melania and asked reporters for questions, before quickly waving them off—a joke signaling he didn’t want to sully a memorable visit.

  But Trump’s victory tour, and the most favorable stretch of his presidency, was about to come to a screeching halt.

  For the first three years of his presidency, Trump fixated on two factors that he’d decided would determine whether he’d win another term: the enthusiasm inside his political base, and the strength of the economy. As he left Washington on Sunday, February 23, for India, both of his leading indicators were forecasting smooth sailing on the electoral waters. He had a 98 percent approval rating among core supporters, virtually unchanged during his first thirty-five months in office. The stock market—his preferred economic measure—had been on a steady upward trend during that same time, with gains of more than 40 percent in both the S&P 500 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Trump had plenty to boast about, and did. During his four years as president, he tweeted about the stock market more than 150 times, mostly to take credit for the gains. About 15 percent of those tweets came during the first two months of 2020.

  But as he boarded Air Force One for the eighteen-hour flight back to Washington on February 25, Dr. Nancy Messonnier, the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, had just issued a blunt warning at a news conference with reporters about the rapidly evolving and expanding coronavirus situation, warning that “the disruption to everyday life might be severe.”

  “It’s not so much a question of if this will happen anymore but rather more a question of exactly when this will happen, and how many people in this country will have severe illness,” she said. She spoke of sitting her children down that morning, to prepare them for “significant disruption to our lives.”

  The stock market plunged on Messonnier’s comments, capping a 1,900-point drop in the Dow, the largest two-day decline on record.

  Trump didn’t sleep the entire flight home.

  Footnotes

  1 Weld’s candidacy could be summed up in an anecdote relayed by Alex Leary, one of my oldest friends in the business and a colleague on the Wall Street Journal’s White House team for the final two years of Trump. Leary was working on a story about the state of the Never Trump movement, and planned to meet Weld for a campaign event at a New Hampshire college. Leary arrived to find Weld and an aide wearing confused looks while standing next to a dozen boxes of pizza inside an empty classroom. Class had been canceled, and no one had bothered to tell Weld.

  2 Brad played for the Roadrunners in the 1996–97 season and put up 26 points and 26 rebounds before g
etting injured.

  3 After leaving law, Dwight had an eclectic foray into the business world, including a 3-D animation software company, a scuba shop, and a Western-themed nightclub with a mechanical bull from Fort Worth.

  6

  Covid, Part One: Hyperbole in the Time of Pandemic

  “We’re prepared and we’re doing a great job with it and it will go away.”

  —Speaking to reporters, U.S. Capitol, March 10, 2020

  When Bill Stepien first entered Donald Trump’s reelection headquarters after the 2018 midterms, he had his choice of any office except for Brad’s. It was a drastic change from four years earlier, when he’d been stuffed into the same tiny office as Justin Clark, the deputy political director in 2016. With nearly $1 billion more to spend this time around, the reelection campaign had leased the entire fourteenth floor of the Arlington Tower, nearly 22,000 square feet of modern office space. Stepien looked around the brightly lit expanse, and this time chose to again cram himself into the same office as Clark.

  Almost everyone on the campaign who’d been around in 2016 wanted to re-create the same scrappy, underdog dynamic from that first race—and believed they could. But as 2019 came to a close, Stepien, just as he had four years earlier, sat in his shared office and grew troubled about what lay ahead. Stepien was a worrier by nature. The forty-two-year-old kept his sandy blond hair just long enough to part to the side. His fleece vest was always zipped to the top, and his lips seemed permanently pursed. His only opinions were strong ones, which he was careful about sharing and almost never did in a group. He was practically mute in meetings.

  But Stepien was spooked by the confidence some of his colleagues carried. He thought Brad outsourced too much responsibility to the Republican National Committee. And mostly he worried about how the White House would respond if a crisis confronted the country before the election and whether Trump could ever rise to the kind of “consoler in chief” approach emergencies required. Stepien had a sense of how it might look—and it wasn’t encouraging. He had worked for someone with a similar personality and a comparable political sensibility, and someone who was probably even more stubborn: former New Jersey governor Chris Christie.

  Stepien had been Christie’s campaign manager in 2009, and was his deputy chief of staff in the governor’s office in 2010 when a blizzard blew into New Jersey that year. The storm blanketed parts of the state with three feet of snow, but Christie wanted to keep his plans for a Disney vacation in Florida. Stepien urged him to stay and show voters that his priority was making sure they were safe and secure. Christie wouldn’t listen.

  “What? Do you want me to stay here and ride on the back of a snowplow?” Christie barked back at Stepien.

  Christie headed to Orlando, and the decision was a political disaster. But Christie learned his lesson, and when Hurricane Sandy made landfall in 2012, the governor was a constant presence in his blue fleece, zipped three-quarters of the way up. He left the presidential campaign trail in 2016 when another snowstorm arrived.

  “You have to make people be safe and secure,” Christie said.

  Stepien didn’t think Trump had internalized a similar moment. When Trump visited Puerto Rico in October 2017 after Hurricane Maria—after it was clear the administration had bungled the initial response to the Category 5 storm that had ravaged the region—Stepien was White House political director and watched as the boss made a bad situation worse. With power restored to just 7 percent of the island, and some remote corners in need of food and water, Trump landed in San Juan and declared that he deserved an A-plus for his team’s response.

  The enduring memory of Trump’s visit came when he started tossing paper towels into the crowd like T-shirts at a ball game. A few he tossed like he was standing on a free-throw line taking foul shots. Trump was playing for a laugh, but he came off as frivolous and sophomoric amid the emergency confronting 3 million Americans.

  “I was having fun, they were having fun,” Trump said at the time as he shrugged off the criticism.

  The image haunted Stepien, and for good reason.

  The crisis that awaited Trump proved more catastrophic than anything else the country had experienced in the previous hundred years. Coronavirus disease 2019 was more commonly known by its abbreviation of Covid-19, although Trump tried to rebrand it at various points as the “China Virus,” “Chinese Virus,” “Invisible Enemy,” “Wuhan Virus,” “The Plague,” “The Plague from China,” and even the “Kung Flu.”

  From the start of the outbreak, Trump had repeated opportunities to respond in a serious, reassuring, and empathetic way, becoming the sort of wartime commander in chief that some advisers told him would have increased his chances for a second term. But Trump didn’t have much interest in putting in the work for a fulsome response, just in how the response would reflect on him politically. Trump’s management style was well suited to sales and branding, less so to handling an actual crisis. He turned emergency news conferences on Covid into campaign rallies, and he interpreted the impressive ratings—Americans tuning in for information about a terrifying and rapidly changing disease—as successfully winning a popularity contest.

  When it came time to celebrate the Chinese New Year at the end of January 2020, Matt Pottinger had reason to rejoice. A former foreign correspondent who joined the Marines at age thirty-two, he’d been working for a Manhattan hedge fund investigating Chinese companies when in 2016, his old friend Michael Flynn, who was then Trump’s national security adviser, recruited him to the White House as the senior Asia policy director on the National Security Council. He and Flynn had served together in Afghanistan. Flynn lasted only twenty-four days on the job, but Pottinger flourished. In three years inside the Trump White House, Pottinger had served under four different national security advisers, record turnover for the seventy-three-year-old security council. Now he was entering the final year of Trump’s term as the top deputy at NSC, arguably the busiest job in the White House. The title of deputy might sound inherently junior, but in a massive political bureaucracy like the U.S. federal government, “deputies are the people who actually do all of the shit,” as one White House official once described it to me.

  Pottinger arrived at the Chinese New Year party well aware of the virus outbreak in China. He had covered the SARS epidemic in 2002 as a Beijing correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, and two weeks earlier, on January 13—just two days before a Chinese delegation would arrive at the White House for Trump’s trade deal extravaganza in the East Room—the NSC staff had held preliminary meetings on the outbreak. At the time, Pottinger didn’t have enough information to recommend any action. His team had pushed public health officials to be more proactive, and Pottinger told them that they would never receive any conclusive data on a silver spoon, especially from a country like China, which might be covering up a massive outbreak or a leak from a laboratory.

  Then, at the party on Saturday night, Pottinger heard more about the grim situation unfolding in Wuhan—new details from people who’d just returned from China, or had family living there. Pottinger wasn’t sure what to make of the frightening anecdotes. He returned home that night, dusted off the phone numbers for his SARS sources from almost two decades ago, and started making calls. He reached a doctor who had firsthand knowledge of the situation in Wuhan.

  “Should I be thinking about this in terms of SARS?” Pottinger asked.

  “No,” the doctor told him. “Think in terms of the flu of 1918.”

  Another source told him that as many as half the people being quarantined in China were asymptomatic. It was a rifle shot in his ear. Asymptomatic spread, he knew, would make the virus virtually unstoppable.

  Two days later, on Monday, January 27, Pottinger escalated the issue inside the White House.

  “I now have to be convinced as to why we would not immediately impose a travel ban on China,” Pottinger told Robert O’Brien, the president’s national security adviser. “These are firsthand accounts from citizens,
and China is not sharing any of this with us.”

  O’Brien told Pottinger to do what he needed, that he’d earned the trust to effectively act as White House national security adviser when it came to coronavirus. Pottinger enforced his own authority to summon an emergency meeting of the NSC’s deputies committee—a group that included the No. 2s from a dozen agencies, including the CIA’s deputy director, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the deputy attorney general, and others. Pottinger also made sure that Redfield, the CDC director, would be in attendance, as well as Alex Azar, Trump’s health secretary, whose agency encompassed the CDC and the National Institutes for Health.

  Inside the Situation Room, Pottinger sat at the head of the table. For about ten seconds. He slid over one seat to the left when Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s chief of staff, entered the room and commandeered the primary chair. Pottinger’s urgency irked Mulvaney, who could be inclusive to a fault, but also quick with a judgment. The administration was riddled with infighting and incompetence, which made it difficult for Mulvaney to recognize the strengths of the team around him. Pottinger and Mulvaney hadn’t worked much together, and the South Carolinian could never quite get past Pottinger’s former reporter bona fides.

  “He’s a journalist,” Mulvaney would say, turning the profession into a pejorative.

  That tone came from the top. Trump tried to solve issues—or at least sidestep them long enough to survive—with puffery, hyperbole, and salesmanship. It had largely worked, especially when it came to matters of political survival. When Pottinger—followed shortly by Peter Navarro, Trump’s anti-China trade adviser—started ringing the alarm bells that this was the one thing that could actually doom the Trump Administration, he and his allies were waved off as alarmists.