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

by Michael C. Bender

  Instead, the compromise was to insert some lines into prewritten remarks that afternoon at Cape Canaveral, where SpaceX would make its second attempt at the rocket launch.

  Trump spent the morning conflating the protesters with the looters on Twitter. In the storm of tweets about how safe he had felt the night before, he threatened to unleash “vicious dogs” and “ominous weapons” on anyone who breached the White House fencing. Critics immediately complained that the violent imagery invoked civil rights era brutality from when police in the 1960s turned dogs and fire hoses against Black protesters. Trump also said he believed that the protests “had little to do with the memory of George Floyd” and called for his supporters to mass outside the White House.

  “Tonight, I understand, is MAGA NIGHT AT THE WHITE HOUSE???” Trump tweeted.

  Protests were in full bloom in Washington and around the country by the time the president arrived in Cape Canaveral. It was the first weekend since Floyd’s death, and the nation seemed to be losing its collective grip. A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll taken that weekend showed that an overwhelming majority, 80 percent, felt like the country was spiraling out of control.

  In Dallas that night, a man wielded a machete as he tried to ward off looters—but was instead beaten down by the mob. In Salt Lake City, fifty-seven-year-old Brandon McCormick arrived with a bow and arrow, which he aimed at demonstrators and shouted, “All lives matter.” The crowd mauled him, then flipped his car and set it on fire. By 1:00 p.m., Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey said the peaceful protests had been transformed into “domestic terrorism” and pleaded with residents to stay home. In Seattle, Mayor Jenny Durkan announced a 5:00 p.m. curfew as flames engulfed police cars and looters broke into downtown stores.

  The country watched the madness unfold on their television screens, and the protests completely drowned out Trump’s speech in Florida, where he struck a drastically softer and more measured tone.

  “I understand the pain that people are feeling,” Trump said.

  White House aides were furious that the cable networks didn’t carry the remarks live. But they—and Trump—had missed the moment. It was a rare instance in Trump’s four years on the political stage that he’d been overtaken by events instead of the other way around. For some in the White House, Trump’s reelection chances seemed to be collapsing in front of their eyes. Senior aides believed Trump’s tone-deaf response to Floyd—coupled with his eagerness to shed his responsibility for the pandemic response—fueled lasting doubts about his leadership among moderate voters, who until then had remained open to his economic policies. That same Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll showed that by a two-to-one margin, voters were more troubled by police’s actions in Floyd’s killing than by the violence at some protests.

  That night, Trump returned to Washington to a White House that looked like it was under siege. Blockades shut down traffic around the White House, where the National Guard, Secret Service, and the U.S. Park Police reinforced security barricades. Federal and local law enforcement wore reinforced helmets and full-length plastic shields as they patrolled the perimeter. Nearby businesses, like the historic Hay-Adams Hotel just off Lafayette Square, were boarded up.

  Bursts of violence erupted along with flash-bangs from law enforcement and firecrackers from demonstrators. Tear gas and pepper spray doused protesters, who set fires around the district and vandalized stores in Georgetown and CityCenter.

  The next day, Trump spent his Sunday behind closed doors. But just as the protests had settled in the daylight, Peter Baker and Maggie Haberman at the New York Times broke a story that Trump had spent part of Friday night hunkered down in the basement bunker. For Trump, the humiliation was deep.

  The story not only undercut the president’s strongman image but directly contradicted his tweets from a day earlier that his safety was never in question. Trump lashed out as aides did their best to avoid him. The White House was already relatively vacant due to Covid, and the protests emptied it further. Meadows had been out of town, too. He was on his way back from Georgia, where his daughter had held a large wedding in violation of the state’s social distancing guidelines.

  That night, protesters smashed basement windows and started a fire inside the historic St. John’s Episcopal Church, which was among the few remaining original buildings around Lafayette Square. The flames damaged just one room, but the moment took on outsize importance around Washington and beyond. The pale yellow church with a steeple that encased a 200-year-old bell cast by Paul Revere’s son was only about a quarter mile away from the White House, just on the other side of the park. Every president had worshipped inside its four walls since its doors opened during James Madison’s second term in 1816 when the nation’s fourth president wanted to be treated like a regular parishioner and chose to sit in Pew 54. The church reserved that pew for presidents for the next 200 years, even though Lincoln opted instead for Pew 89. That was the last pew in the back corner beside the door, and he could slip in and out unnoticed.

  There was some hope inside the White House and campaign that the violence would turn public opinion away from the protests. Brad and Jared discussed how frustration with the rioters might allow them to appeal to suburban women and seniors. Meadows added that he’d heard more concern about the damage at St. John’s than anything else during the protests.

  “He’s going to end up on the right side of these riots,” Brad told Jared. “They’ve gone too far, and there are too many Americans that want to get back to work. But he needs to pivot back to the economy and stop talking about protesters as Antifa.”

  But Trump wasn’t about to pivot. He was fixated on his image and furious about the bunker story. He was going to swing the law-and-order message like a hammer at anything that remotely looked like a nail.

  Footnotes

  1 Ja’Ron Smith, whom Kellyanne had struggled to recall, was two pay grades below the top ranks. After Kellyanne’s interview, Smith asked for a promotion to formalize his role as the West Wing’s seniormost Black official and close the $50,000 pay gap. Jared agreed, but then put him off for the next two years.

  2 Just eight states allow some felons to vote after completing their prison sentences: Alabama, Arizona, Delaware, Florida, Kentucky, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Wyoming.

  9

  Anarchy and Chaos

  “I wish we had an occupying force.”

  —Conference call, Situation Room, June 1, 2020

  By 3:00 a.m. on the morning of June 1, law enforcement had chased the last few protesters from Lafayette Square. Remnants of tear gas and pepper spray hung heavy in the air above the park as smoke scattered rays of light from police beacons, floodlights, and open flames. A block away, the powerful spotlights that typically illuminated the world’s predominant symbol of presidential power and American democracy had been switched off. The White House sat in darkness.

  Inside, Trump stewed over the bunker leak. But security concerns at the White House extended beyond the preventative trip to the underground safe house. Additional safety precautions included moving senior administration officials who lived in Washington into hotel rooms in Virginia and assigning security details to aides who needed to commute to the West Wing.

  Trump’s top military, law enforcement, and West Wing advisers knew he must have been upset when he summoned them to the Oval Office for a meeting first thing in the morning—several hours before he usually emerged from the residence.

  Those suspicions proved correct. Trump boiled over about the bunker story as soon as they arrived and shouted at them to smoke out whoever had leaked it. It was the most upset some aides had ever seen the president.

  “Whoever did that, they should be charged with treason!” Trump yelled. “They should be executed!”

  Meadows repeatedly tried to calm the president as startled aides avoided eye contact.

  “Okay,” he said, over and over. “I’m on it. We’re going to find out who did it.”1

  Trump’s
advisers told themselves he didn’t really want to execute an aide, and Trump told me later through a spokesman that he never made such a threat. But those who said they’d heard the president issue that warning had interpreted the outburst as a sign of a president in panic. Trump’s chief political worry was appearing weak. Yet while his team silently understood the problem, there was no clear agreement on a solution.

  Some White House aides mentioned a plan from Park Police to install unscalable fencing beyond Lafayette Park, which would push the perimeter even farther from the White House. There was no opposition to that plan in the room, which included officials from the Pentagon, Department of Justice, and Department of Homeland Security.

  But Trump wanted more. He didn’t think the administration had been tough enough with the protesters. Pence mentioned the Insurrection Act, an obscure federal law that enabled the commander in chief to deploy troops within U.S. borders. The act was passed in 1807 when President Jefferson feared rebellion brewing within the fledgling nation. But George Floyd wasn’t Aaron Burr, and the protesters weren’t Confederates. Pence’s casual advice unnerved others in the room.

  Are you freaking kidding me? one senior administration official thought.

  The Insurrection Act had been discussed a year earlier inside the White House when Stephen Miller proposed invoking it to enlist troops in his personal war against illegal immigration. Now that Pence had again broached the subject, Trump became fixated on it.

  Barr, Trump’s seventy-year-old attorney general, was George H. W. Bush’s forty-one-year-old attorney general the last time the Insurrection Act had been invoked—in 1992, when violence erupted after the acquittal of four police officers in the beating of Rodney King, a Black man brutalized during what should have been a routine traffic stop. Barr explained to Trump that Bush invoked the act only after consulting with California governor Pete Wilson, who supported the move. He cautioned Trump against taking such a step.

  “It’s not really necessary in this situation,” Barr told Trump. “It’s a break-glass-in-case-of-emergency option.”

  But Trump could still have a strong show of force, Barr said. He suggested a plan to put one law enforcement officer on the street for every two protesters—not to react to demonstrators but to control events. There were plenty of National Guard reserves to backfill where needed. Barr said that that sort of presence would “dominate the streets” and immediately reduce violence.

  Trump said he wanted to put the nation’s highest-ranking military officer in charge of the effort: Mark Milley, an Army general and the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman. But Milley was the president’s military adviser—he wasn’t in command of troops or the National Guard. Milley told the president that it would be highly inappropriate for him to lead the effort. The Pentagon could provide support to a civilian agency but wouldn’t oversee the response.

  “I can’t be in charge of this,” Milley told Trump.

  Barr backed him up.

  Milley had been alarmed by the talk of the Insurrection Act. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff understood the precise difference between sending active-duty troops into the protests instead of the National Guard: One group was trained to take land and kill the enemy, and the other had been taught riot control and quasi–law enforcement techniques.

  The sixty-two-year-old Milley viewed the unrest around Floyd’s death as a political problem, not a military one. He told the president there were more than enough reserves in the National Guard to support law enforcement responding to the protests. Milley told him that invoking the Insurrection Act would shift responsibility for the protests from local authorities directly to the president.

  Milley spotted President Lincoln’s portrait hanging just to the right of Trump and pointed directly at it.

  “That guy had an insurrection,” Milley said. “What we have, Mr. President, is a protest.”

  The same debate would play out repeatedly inside the Oval Office all summer as civil justice protests flared up across the country: Trump would push to deploy troops, while Milley, Barr, and Mark Esper, the defense secretary, would push back against the president and any other voices of support in the room.

  When protests in Seattle and Portland drew attention from cable networks—along with the so-called police-free zones in those cities—Stephen Miller chimed in during one Oval Office debate with an apocalyptic version of tumult tearing through the streets. He equated the scenes unfolding on his television to those in a third world country. Major American metropolises, he said, had been turned into war zones.

  “These cities are burning,” Miller warned.

  The comment infuriated Milley, who viewed Miller as not only wrong but out of his lane. The Army general who had commanded troops in Iraq and Afghanistan spun around in his seat and pointed a finger directly at Miller.

  “Shut the fuck up, Stephen,” Milley snapped.

  A Boston-area native who played hockey and had earned two Ivy League degrees, Milley understood the kind of hotshot attitude that permeated the ranks of Trump World, and he had no trouble keeping up. He also made it a point to arrive at every White House meeting armed with the kind of precise and straightforward data that often made a difference with Trump. As Miller nursed his wounds in the back of the room, Milley informed Trump that civil unrest was an issue in about a half dozen of roughly three hundred American cities with populations of more than 100,000 people. Among those half dozen cities, only a tiny fraction of the total population participated in the protests.

  “No, Mr. President, they’re not burning the cities,” Milley said.

  Milley represented the last career military man in the Trump World orbit, even though Trump had surrounded himself with highly decorated officers at the start of his term. He put John Kelly, a retired Marine general, in charge of the Department of Homeland Security before making him his second chief of staff. Army lieutenant general H. R. McMaster was White House national security adviser for most of Trump’s first fifteen months in office. James Mattis, another retired Marine general, had commanded Trump’s Department of Defense.

  But Trump didn’t know any of them when he asked them to join the administration. Where previous presidents arrived in office flush with contacts from their days in Congress, relationships from governors’ associations, and longtime donors eager to offer suggestions, Trump had always kept a tight circle around him of mostly friends and, by 2016, fellow septuagenarians whom he knew from real estate and marketing. Bannon, himself a former Navy officer, knew Mattis and Kelly by reputation and pushed for them. Trump liked the idea of military generals coming to work for him and spoke of them possessively, as if the stripes on their shoulders were transferable.

  “My generals,” he would say.

  But the idea of selfless service embedded into each military branch’s bedrock values was anathema to the solipsism at the center of Trumpism. Trump’s generals viewed the job as service to the country, not to him, and it frustrated Trump.

  Under President Obama, Milley had leaned into his Ivy League credentials—rattling off details from the deep cuts of military history as well as minutiae from the back pages of briefing books piled on his desk—and quickly rose in the administration. He was deputy commander in Afghanistan for about a year before Obama put him in charge of the U.S. Army Forces Command, the largest of the service’s four commands, with more than 750,000 soldiers. Nine months later, Obama promoted him to Army chief of staff. Milley was a sports fan who could sit at any bar with football or hockey on the TV and hold a conversation. He had a loud and bombastic side that gelled with Obama’s successor. And after serving two years with Trump, Milley was elevated to chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a panel of the nation’s top military leaders. Trump promoted Milley during a surreal Oval Office interview on December 7, 2018, that would set the tone for their final two years together.

  Just before that meeting, John Kelly, who was still White House chief of staff, told Milley that Mattis had pushed to ins
tall him in an overseas post—but Trump was inclined to give him the chairman job.

  Milley asked Kelly what he himself would do. But Kelly hated working for Trump and his departure had been rumored for months. The following day, Trump would announce that he and Kelly had finally agreed to part ways by the end of year.

  “I would get as far away from this fucking place as I fucking could,” Kelly told Milley.

  Kelly and Milley walked into the Oval Office, but Trump talked mostly to his chief of staff.

  “What’s that other job that Mattis wants me to give him?” Trump asked Kelly. “Something in Europe?”

  “That would be SACEUR,” Kelly said. “Supreme Allied Commander Europe.”

  “What’s that guy do?” Trump asked.

  “He is in charge of all the U.S. things in Europe,” Kelly said.

  “Which is the better job?” Trump asked.

  “Oh,” Kelly said. “Chairman is the better job.”

  “Well, what do you think?” Trump asked Kelly as Milley sat silently nearby.

  “Pick Mark,” Kelly told Trump. “He’s the best we got.”

  “Okay,” Trump said, turning to Milley. “I want you to be my chairman. What do you think?”

  “I’ll do whatever it takes,” Milley said.

  Even as the lone active service member surrounded by political strategists in Trump’s Oval Office, Milley was considered a savvy operator. He displayed that skill during his first White House meeting as Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman in October 2019.

  At that time, Trump faced a fraught decision about whether to leave American special operations forces in northern Syria amid a likely attack from Turkey—a NATO ally—or remove the troops and abandon the Kurds, a key partner for Washington in the fight against ISIS.