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

by Michael C. Bender

  Trump saw his senior military and law enforcement officials and motioned for the group to follow him.

  “Come on,” Trump said. “We’re all going.”

  “What are we doing?” Esper asked.

  No one answered Esper as Trump walked toward the North Portico door of the White House. Esper and Milley looked at each other.

  “Let’s go and see if we can find the troops,” Esper said.

  “Yeah, good,” Milley said. “Okay.”

  Trump emerged from the White House just as Mayor Bowser’s 7:00 p.m. curfew went into effect.

  Generally considered to be the White House’s main entrance, the North Portico door, crowned by an intricate stone carving of Double Scottish Roses, was rarely used. Instead, the West Wing’s main entrance was the usual entry for staff and White House guests. But on the night of June 1, a parade of two dozen Trump World palace squires and constables poured through the door behind their president: Milley, Barr, Esper, Jared, Ivanka, Hope, Meadows, Scavino, Farah, Cipollone, Ornato, Kayleigh McEnany, Robert O’Brien, Stephen Miller, staff secretary Derek Lyons, deputy press secretary Hogan Gidley, personnel director Johnny McEntee, the president’s personal assistant Nick Luna, and Keith Kellogg, who was Pence’s national security adviser.

  They trailed behind Trump for the one-block trek to the church, past a graffiti-covered building in the park, stepping over tattered signs and walking around days of detritus from demonstrators whom police had dispersed only moments earlier.

  At 7:08 p.m., the procession reached St. John’s, where plywood sheets covered the front door and windows. Trump stood alone in front of the chapel’s stone steps, his hands at his sides and a blank stare on his face. Ivanka reached inside her white Max Mara handbag and handed her father the Bible she’d carried with her from the White House.

  Milley had thought Trump wanted to speak with guardsmen as he had done earlier and only realized how wrong he’d been as he watched Ivanka pull that anonymous Bible out of her soft Italian leather handbag. With its adjustable strap and double zip, it was big enough to carry the Holy Scripture, but not to contain the shame of a four-star Army general.

  At the same time, Milley noticed that the White House press corps had rushed to the church to document the moment.

  “What the fuck?” Milley muttered as Ivanka stepped toward her father with the Bible.

  Milley grabbed his aide and they backed away from the church. They took a circuitous route back to the White House to avoid any more TV cameras, climbed into their car, and drove away.

  Trump initially held the Bible down at his side. After a few seconds, he started posing with it. He propped it up with two hands, the cover facing the cameras, just in front of his belly. He examined the spine and shook it a few times as if it might have been a secretly hollowed-out box. Finally, he gripped the bottom edge of the Bible in his right hand and raised it into the air.

  “That the family Bible?” asked Steve Holland, a veteran White House reporter for Reuters.

  Trump tried to ignore the question because the honest answer was that it was a fluke that this particular Bible ended up in his hand. Earlier that afternoon, an aide had scoured the West Wing, the East Wing, up and down the White House, and any other nearby offices gathering Bibles. The aide presented the prettiest versions to the president, and he picked the one Ivanka had carried in the $1,500 purse she brought to the tear gassing. Other than that, the only thing Trump knew about the version he had in his hand was that its dark navy-blue cover matched his suit; the gold embossed lettering on the spine spelled HOLY BIBLE; and it had a red ribbon bookmark bound with the pages. Not that Trump had ever absorbed much of the Good Word. In an interview with my then-colleagues at Bloomberg Politics in 2015, Trump had refused to reveal any of his favorite Bible verses.

  “I wouldn’t want to get into it because to me, that’s very personal,” Trump said at the time. “When I talk about the Bible, it’s very personal. So I don’t want to get into verses.”

  When he was asked if he was an Old Testament or New Testament guy, Trump punted again.

  “Probablyyyyyy, equal,” he said. “The whole Bible is incredible.”

  The crowd of college students at Liberty University laughed when he mispronounced a book of the Bible during a campaign stop there in 2016. Trump read the line on the page as “Two Corinthians,” instead of how the frequently referenced scripture was spoken in Christian churches across America, which was “Second Corinthians.”

  But the Bible was a powerful political symbol for Trump. He had carried his own copy to the Value Voters Summit in 2015, a political rally where he showed a rare, boyish exuberance as he told the crowd about the book his mother had given to him.

  “I brought my Bible!” Trump said.

  Trump opened the book to one of the front pages and recalled how his mother had written his name and address, almost seeming a little flushed at the memory, as if he couldn’t believe someone had cared enough about nine-year-old Donald to plan for a scenario in which he might lose the gift. He brought it again to his inauguration in 2016, where he made the very Trumpian move of being sworn in on double Bibles. Melania held the stack that included Mary Anne Trump’s gift for graduating from Sunday Church Primary School at First Presbyterian Church in 1955 and Abraham Lincoln’s Bible. The only other time someone other than Lincoln had used that Bible was to swear in the nation’s first Black president.

  Trump was also convinced that the Bible had been the common thread between his two closest competitors in the 2016 Republican primary. He was terrified of Ted Cruz’s appeal with evangelical voters and continuously attacked the Texas senator as a hypocrite, a pretender, and a prevaricator. “Lyin’ Ted,” Trump said about Cruz at almost every mention in early 2016.

  “He holds the Bible high, and then he lies,” Trump often quipped.

  Just two weeks before his walk to St. John’s, Trump insisted that Ben Carson—the Cabinet secretary who had briefly overtaken Trump in the 2016 Republican primary polls—had used the Bible the same way.

  “I had to run against him, and he was very tough,” Trump told Cabinet members seated on May 19 around a long mahogany table in the West Wing. “And he was even tougher when he’d run onto a stage holding a Bible up in the air. That was tough.”

  Neither Carson nor Cruz ever made a habit of holding up a Bible. The two Republicans enjoyed talking about the central role religion played in both their politics and private lives and would have jumped at the chance to discuss a Bible verse of their choosing. But they weren’t known to publicly flaunt a Bible—high in the air or otherwise—on the campaign trail. Aides to both men insisted such a thing never happened.

  After Trump ignored Holland’s question in front of St. John’s, NBC’s Kristen Welker immediately followed up.

  “Is that your Bible?” she asked.

  “It’s a Bible,” Trump said.

  On the walk back to the White House, Trump halted just before he reached Pennsylvania Avenue. He’d gotten out ahead of the press pool and wanted the cameras waiting at the gates to record his triumphant return home.

  Trump walked back into the White House, again through the North Portico door, and the rest of the team followed at 7:18 p.m.

  The whole scene had been exhilarating for Trump.

  “Pretty great,” he said after leaving the church.

  He told his team back at the White House that the administration had to do “more to reopen churches like that,” ignoring the fact that St. John’s remained as boarded up when he left as it was when he arrived.

  Still, he had a veritable choir of conservative supporters to back him up. Inside the White House, the digital video team went to work editing a thirty-second supercut of Trump’s fifteen minutes in the park to underscore the president’s narrative as an enforcer of law and order and a champion of religious freedom.

  “It was illustrative that rioters won’t prevail,” Kellyanne told me for a story in the Wall Street Journal t
hat day.

  But other supporters tempered their reactions.

  “I don’t know what the purpose of the trip was,” Senator Lindsey Graham told the Journal. “I mean, to show appreciation for the church? I don’t know. You’ll have to ask him.”

  “If your question is, ‘Should you use tear gas to clear a path so the president can go have a photo op?’ The answer is no,” Senator Tim Scott told Politico.

  Trump had walked to St. John’s as a show of strength. But the president had put as much planning into his walk as most people would put into taking a stroll to the corner store to pick up a few snacks. Trump had created a new moment for the networks to talk about, but it was backfiring. Cell phone videos recorded every possible angle of violence perpetrated on indisputably peaceful protesters for Trump’s benefit. There was also cause for concern in how Trump comported himself at the church, which some allies worried had hurt him with some evangelical voters. According to internal polling, Trump’s support among Republicans was already starting to soften.

  Had Trump consulted more closely with the evangelicals on his senior staff, including Meadows, McEnany, and Farah, they would have urged him to open the Bible and read a verse—or not carry it at all. Holding the Bible in the air like a trophy was politicizing the holy book and would be received like a slap in the face to many mainstream evangelicals. But to the extent that Trump bothered to consider the particulars of his walk—or what he would do when he got there—he had only consulted with Ivanka, Jared, and Hope. The three were trusted confidants who wanted the best for him—or at least more than many did in Trump World. But Hope was raised by Catholics in Connecticut. Jared and Ivanka were practicing Jews from New York who kept kosher and observed the Sabbath. They weren’t immersed in evangelical culture, nor did the Trump White House have a track record for successfully planning events to deliver a clear political message.

  Jared’s lack of familiarity with evangelicals had been pointed out recently in the West Wing by Meadows. A devout Christian who homeschooled his children, Meadows believed the Lord had called him to run for a western North Carolina congressional district in 2012 that, by the grace of God and the Republican majority in the state legislature, had just been redrawn to tilt so heavily in favor of Republicans that the incumbent Democrat, a famous college and professional quarterback named Heath Shuler, resigned. Meadows won the primary that year by fourteen points, in what would be his closest race during his seven years in office.

  “A Jew growing up in Manhattan, I never thought I would meet and be such great friends with so many evangelicals,” Jared said to Meadows during a West Wing chat. “You are just some of the best people. Paula White? She’s incredible.”

  “Whoa,” Meadows told Jared. “Never tell any mainstream evangelical that Paula White is your gold standard.”

  White was the thrice-married pastor of a prominent Florida megachurch but better known as a popular televangelist on whose show Trump occasionally appeared dating back to 2006. She had been condemned as a heretic by other Christian leaders and was a proponent of prosperity theology, which teaches that a believer can increase their material wealth by, among other things, increasing their donations to religious causes.

  If Trump’s messaging to evangelicals ultimately was a few teleportations short of a rapture, when it came to the military, his march to St. John’s was like planting political land mines along the path he’d spent four years clearing for veterans, troops, and their families to find their way back to his campaign.

  Milley was furious to be pulled into a political photo op without any warning. He channeled his rage Monday night by patrolling Washington’s streets with law enforcement. Esper joined him for part of the night, and the two men made a pact. They realized that things had changed that day, and that they had to recalibrate their political antenna so as not to get caught in that situation again. From now on, they would double-check the details behind every trip to the White House. Esper declined multiple invitations to the White House during the next five months.

  For Milley, who described the sequence of events to colleagues as “complete fucking bullshit,” the whole ordeal left him with the petrifying thought that everyone involved had thoroughly botched their role in the decision-making process. Two days after the march to St. John’s, turmoil permeated the administration.

  Barr was now enraged that the West Wing had effectively blamed him for the violent clashes in Lafayette Square and was furious that the Washington press corps wasn’t willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. He had been aware of the plan to expand the perimeter around the park. But that hadn’t been connected to Trump’s walk to the church.

  “The troops didn’t invade the Philippines just so fucking MacArthur could walk on the beach,” Barr complained to colleagues. “No. One thing happened, and then another thing happened.”

  Meanwhile, Trump was still fixated on the bunker, insisting that he’d only been examining the stronghold’s safety features.

  “I was there for a tiny little short period of time,” Trump said in a Fox News radio interview.

  At about the same time, Esper gathered defense reporters to the Pentagon for a news conference to give his version of events, which would send White House aides scrambling.

  Esper told reporters that he hadn’t been briefed on law enforcement’s plans to disperse demonstrators and that he had left the White House with Trump that evening with the impression that they were going to inspect damage in Lafayette Square and the park.

  “I was not aware a photo op was happening,” Esper told reporters. “And look, I do everything I can to try to stay apolitical and try and stay out of situations that may appear political.”

  Esper’s comments led every cable network. Trump was furious.

  West Wing aides privately referred to Esper as “Yes-per,” a nickname aimed at belittling the defense secretary as weak and unable to hold his ground. Now even that takedown seemed too soft “because he’s really more of a Nope-er,” one senior West Wing official said.

  Kellyanne told Trump that Esper’s most significant mistake was that he referred to the event at St. John’s as a “photo op,” which she viewed as parroting the media’s word-of-the-day.

  Meadows called over to the Pentagon and laid into Esper over the defense secretary’s news conference and warned that Trump was upset.

  “He’s infuriated, like foaming-at-the-mouth mad,” Meadows said.

  Esper and Milley were due in the Oval Office that morning to brief Trump on the situation in Afghanistan. Esper knew the president would rip his face from his skull as soon as he walked into the Oval Office. He had drafted a resignation letter. He wasn’t going to quit but he wanted to be ready if Trump asked him to step down.

  When Esper and Milley entered the Oval Office, Pence, Pompeo, Cipollone, and O’Brien were already seated in four of the six chairs arranged in a semicircle in front of the Resolute Desk. The others immediately looked away as soon as the two Pentagon officials walked into the room. They knew the bloodshed that awaited the two military leaders—they’d been given a sneak preview of the butchering a few minutes prior.

  Esper took his seat, and Trump didn’t bother waiting for Milley. The Army general was still pulling his chair away from the desk to sit down when Trump exploded on Esper with a verbal assault so brutal and intense it would have embarrassed the foul-mouthed drill sergeant from Full Metal Jacket.

  To the surprise and admiration of others in the room, Esper attempted to explain his thinking. But it just further fueled Trump’s overheating motor. When Esper interrupted again, Trump went nuclear. The velocity and volume of the president were both awe-inspiring and terrifying to others in the room.

  But then, as suddenly as he’d started, Trump stopped. It was over. He didn’t speak to Esper for the rest of the meeting—nor did Esper try to chime in—but just moved on to the Afghanistan briefing without another word about what had just happened.

  A day later, troops from th
e 82nd Airborne started returning to their base.

  Milley publicly split with the president the following week during his graduation speech at the National Defense University. The Army general apologized for his presence in the photo op, which, he said, “created a perception of the military involved in domestic politics.”

  “I should not have been there,” Milley said.

  Trump confronted Milley a few days later in front of other aides in the Oval Office.

  “Why did you apologize?” Trump asked him. “That’s weak.”

  “Not where I come from,” Milley said. “It had nothing to do with you. It had to do with me and the uniform and the apolitical tradition of the United States military.”

  “I don’t understand that,” Trump said. “It sounds like you’re ashamed of your president.”

  “I don’t expect you to understand,” Milley said.

  With Trump’s relationship with military leaders fraying, some in Trump World saw another opportunity for the president to display some racial sensitivity and leadership with a seemingly comfortable victory: renaming the ten military bases named in honor of Confederate officers.

  Trump had long resisted the change, including in the summer of 2017 when a similar issue sparked the racial violence in Charlottesville, Virginia. At the time, Trump said eliminating memorials to Confederate leaders risked the “history and culture of our great country being ripped apart.”

  In the aftermath of the St. John’s debacle, David Urban—a well-connected Washington lobbyist before Trump’s election and a bona fide K Street Sultan after the inauguration—urged Trump to reconsider his opposition.

  “It’s a ready-made campaign event,” Urban told him.

  The president didn’t always follow Urban’s guidance, but Trump almost always listened to his bull-necked, bald-headed, and blue-eyed adviser. The president credited the fifty-six-year-old Urban for the 2016 campaign victory in Pennsylvania.