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

by Michael C. Bender

  “I came in second place,” Saundra said.

  Once inside, it was one final scurry along the arena’s gray cement floor to the bike racks serving as barricades about ten feet from the stage. Saundra was once again front row and center. She hoped that maybe the buffer zone between the fence and the stage would decrease her chances of catching Covid. She wouldn’t be as crowded as the people just behind her.

  No one beyond the president himself needed Tulsa to be a success more than Brad. He’d been taking the heat for Trump’s dismal poll numbers and had known for months that he was on borrowed time on the campaign, and the anxiety, combined with his enthusiasm, led him to make some interesting bets.

  Michael Glassner, the chief operating officer of the campaign, was a slight, bald, and curmudgeonly political operative who counted among the campaign’s original four hires in 2016 and who had for years been something of a Trump rally czar. Glassner had suggested returning to the 12,000-seat arena in Tulsa that the president had visited in the past. But Brad had eyed the newly renovated BOK Center, with more than 19,000 seats, as the best option. Instead of sending RSVPs to supporters living in a fifty-mile radius of the venue, as Glassner had done for previous rallies, Brad had blasted the RSVPs to the campaign’s nationwide list. The sign-ups started pouring in, but from unlikely corners of the country, including countless sign-ups thanks to a chaos campaign orchestrated by mischievous TikTok users and K-pop’s teenage fans who were hoping to overload the Trump system with requests so that actual supporters wouldn’t get tickets.

  Don Junior had noticed the prank happening in real time on social media and fired off a text to senior officials in the week before the rally.

  “Sending to Glassner,” one of the officials wrote back.

  The Republican Party’s data operation immediately started flagging the high number of fake RSVPs coming into the system. According to internal records, the campaign received 1.4 million ticket requests, but less than half were distinct sign-ups, and only one-fourth, or about 338,000, could be matched to the party’s voter file, which includes information on effectively every living American who has ever been registered to vote. Only 55,500 of the RSVPs were from Oklahomans.

  That data set off alarm bells in some corners of Trump World. It was already nearly impossible to travel. Campaign aides with friends and family interested in attending the rally bailed once they couldn’t find flights in and out of Tulsa. Few wanted to stay in hotels overnight, concerned about the spread of the virus, which reduced the distance people were willing to travel.

  But Brad hadn’t wanted to hear it. A little more than a week before the rally, he referenced the top-line number of a million RSVPs and said he wanted to announce it. The campaign had never before published the number of RSVPs.

  “If you say that number, then you better be able to deliver that number,” Hope told Brad. “And if you can’t, you don’t need to say it.”

  But afterward, Jared told Brad to call Trump and tell him the numbers. It would make him happy, Jared told him. Everyone wanted to make Trump happy.

  Brad reached Trump on his cell phone at the golf course. “Put it out,” Trump told him. Brad relayed some of the reluctance he’d heard on the campaign call that morning, but the president talked over him. “Get that out, Brad,” he told him. “Get it out wide.”

  At 9:30 a.m. on Monday, June 15, Trump tweeted that he’d received nearly 1 million requests for tickets to his Tulsa rally. Ninety minutes later, Brad followed with his own tweet that ticket requests had surpassed the 1-million mark. Expectations were growing out of control.

  Trump had told everyone who would listen that 1 million people were trying to get tickets to the mega-rally, four times the magnitude of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington, in 1963, and twice the size of the women’s march in the nation’s capital in 2017.

  “Almost One Million people request tickets for the Saturday Night Rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma!” Trump tweeted five days before the rally.

  Brad had taken the extraordinary step of constructing a second stage outside the arena to accommodate the crush of expected Trump junkies. He also considered paying for a third stage before canceling the contract the day before the rally. A plane was chartered to fly Trump campaign surrogates into Tulsa. Brad boasted about hiring a satellite company to snap pictures of the crowd from space.

  The morning before the rally, Brad went on to Fox News to continue raising expectations, pointing to “an outer perimeter fence that’s going to allow a much larger amount of people to come.”

  “This is more of a festival,” he said. “Almost like a convention.” That night, he tweeted a picture of the outdoor stage being built: “If you come to the rally and don’t get into the BOK Center before it’s full, you can still see the President in person!”

  That afternoon of the rally, the Trump campaign’s worst fears came true. Instead of testing staffers off-site before arriving at the arena, the campaign administered Covid tests inside the arena. That meant that when six staffers tested positive, it didn’t take long for word to spread, and then leak. NBC broke the news at 1:00 p.m., just hours before doors were set to open to the public. For Oklahomans on the fence about whether to attend the event, that was more than enough incentive to stay home and watch the speech on Fox News. If Trump couldn’t keep his own staff safe, how would he protect civilians? Testing the staffers on-site also meant the virus was already inside the arena. Ronna was in Jacksonville in a meeting with fellow convention planners when she saw the news alert on her phone and knew the rally was in trouble.

  But no one had yet told Trump. Back in Washington, the president stopped to speak to reporters before leaving the White House, telling them he was hearing “the crowds are unbelievable—they haven’t seen anything like it.”

  In Oklahoma, Trump’s staff already knew better. The crowds weren’t anything close to expectations. They would be lucky to fill half the arena. Realizing he had no other options, Brad abandoned the second stage and canceled the entertainment he had planned for outside—and knew he’d dodged a bullet by bailing on the third stage.

  “It is what it is,” he told some staffers, and then headed to lunch with his wife and some friends three blocks from the arena at the Daily Grill, connected to the Hyatt Regency Hotel in downtown Tulsa, which had shut down the back of its restaurant for the group of VIPs. Brad was on his phone almost the entire time. The group finished eating a couple hours later, just as Trump emerged from the White House on his way to Tulsa. On his way out of the restaurant, Brad crossed paths with a reporter who tried to ask a question about the rally. “No, no,” Brad said. “I’m too busy.”

  By the time Air Force One touched down, the second stage was being dismantled. The swarm of faithful, red-capped followers never materialized. Don Junior was right: The TikTokkers had been pranking the campaign, trying to drive up the estimated crowd size to scare off the real rallygoers. When Trump walked into the 19,000-seat arena, just 6,000 people were on hand. The most renowned audience member in the sparse crowd was arguably Herman Cain, the former CEO of Godfather’s Pizza, and the 2012 fly-by presidential candidate who famously supported a “nine-nine-nine” tax policy that seemed ripped from a commercial for a used car dealership.

  But still, no one had told Trump. On the flights to rallies, White House aides usually inflated crowd sizes for Trump once they were told a capacity crowd was inside—15,000-seat arenas always seemed to have at least that many fans waiting outside by the time the president landed in a rally city, or at least that’s what he was told. Now, no one knew how to break the disappointing news to Trump on the way to Tulsa. It wasn’t until he was backstage and turned on the television that he realized the arena was two-thirds empty. Trump was irate and only interested in finding one person in the building.

  “Braaaaaaaad!!!” a campaign aide called into the headset in a shrill voice that chilled other staffers on the feed. “Can you come backstage?”

  Brad had
hightailed it out of the backstage area a few minutes earlier when he saw Trump and the White House entourage approach, ducking into the arena where he grabbed one of the many available blue plastic seats. He stood from his seat once he’d been called, but before he could reach the aisle, Trump had scrapped the summoning. The campaign had cleared almost everyone from backstage after the staffers had tested positive for Covid-19 that morning, and they couldn’t be sure who else might have been infected. Brad sat back down.

  Onstage, Trump was unhinged. He abandoned plans to use the moment to commemorate Juneteenth. He abstained from offering a gesture toward the passing of Floyd. Instead, he railed about left-wing radicals, referred to the pandemic as the Kung Flu, and said he told his team to slow down Covid-19 testing—which he called “a double-edged sword”—in order to manipulate the case count.

  “Here’s the bad part: When you do testing to that extent, you’re going to find more people, you’re going to find more cases,” Trump told the rally crowd. “So I said to my people, ‘Slow the testing down, please!’”

  The cable networks, which broadcast the events live, hung it around his neck. Even the Drudge Report couldn’t resist chiding the president, featuring pictures of the empty rows inside the arena and stripping an all-caps headline across the website: MAGA LESS MEGA. Following the rally, Marine One deposited Trump at the White House at 1:00 a.m. He emerged from the Nighthawk helicopter disheveled and seemingly shell-shocked. If he was confident about reversing fortunes for the country and his campaign, he hid it well. His trademark red silk tie hung unknotted from a white shirt collar stained with makeup residue. He meandered across the South Lawn, raising his right hand to gingerly wave to a few reporters while his left clutched a crumpled red MAGA hat.

  Outside the Bank of Oklahoma Center, there was no Antifa waiting to harass Saundra after the rally. But there were angry neighbors back home in Sault Ste. Marie.

  In the days before the rally, the front of the line was a frequent target of news reporters seeking interviews with the people willing to brave a pandemic for a political rally. By the time the gate opened, Saundra’s interviews with Reuters, one of the world’s largest news agencies, and the Guardian, a British newspaper with one of the world’s most visited news websites, had hit the Internet. Saundra started receiving Facebook messages from neighbors accusing her of endangering their isolated town that, so far, had relatively few Covid cases. Emails from the local listserv—where the typical drama entailed snitching on drivers heading in the wrong direction around local roundabouts—questioned her decision to travel to Tulsa.

  She was unnerved by the social media messages and emails, but she told herself that she wasn’t the only person to have left Michigan since the start of the pandemic. She didn’t recall seeing any of the Black Lives Matter protesters being harassed like this. She wore her mask on the airplane and inside stores. She thought it was unfair to be talked about like a one-woman superspreader on her way home to Sault Ste. Marie.

  “I didn’t realize how awful this town is,” she said.

  Saundra flew into Detroit, drove to the Upper Peninsula, and headed straight into work. But instead of punching in, she went and found her boss. She’d been rehearsing her speech the entire drive north on Interstate 75. She’d called in sick precisely one time in the past three years, but now she needed some time. She feared for her safety and didn’t want to cause a scene in the lawn and garden department if her enemies tracked her into the store.

  “I’m not afraid of the virus,” she told her boss. “I’m afraid of the evil people on this planet.”

  Her boss told her not to worry, that she didn’t need to come in.

  She explained her theory that the hatred against her was probably coming from one nemesis in particular, whom she had blocked on Facebook months ago.

  “This is a guy who hasn’t accepted the results of the 2016 election,” Saundra said.

  “Yeah,” her boss said, offering a soft laugh and smile.

  After the rally, Parscale scratched himself from the Air Force One manifest and flew home to South Florida instead of back to Washington as he had planned. He told colleagues it was because he might have coronavirus. But he’d used that excuse to explain why he disappeared back in March, and other senior campaign staff was skeptical. Whatever the reason, it looked like Brad was trying to avoid the president and nurse his bruised ego in private. The change in travel plans fed into the growing narrative that Brad was spending too much time poolside at home, and not enough behind the desk.

  When he arrived back in Florida, he called Eric Trump. Political Twitter was on fire with speculation that Brad would be sacked, and he offered a halfhearted joke about how it might happen.

  “So which one of you is going to call me and fire me?” Brad asked Eric. “I’d really like to know how that’s going to go down.”

  Eric tried to reassure Brad, as he had dozens of times before.

  “No one is going to fuck you,” he told him.

  Back in Washington, the embarrassment arrived at a particularly difficult moment for Trump. The night after the rally, John Bolton, his former national security adviser who had stepped down the year before, pilloried the president during an ABC News prime-time special. Trump’s Justice Department was in full crisis mode, too, as they tried to remove the U.S. attorney in charge of the Southern District of New York—the nation’s most prominent federal prosecutor’s office—who had investigated many of the president’s allies. The Supreme Court had just delivered a trio of stinging defeats by blocking Trump’s attempt to reverse workplace protections for LGBTQ employees; rejecting the challenge to sanctuary-city laws in California; and halting a push to cancel legal protections for undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children. Civil rights protests rippled across the country.

  Underscoring all of that drama: Joe Biden’s lead over Trump in the national polls—which averaged around five points for most of the first six months of 2020—broke double digits for the first time that weekend.

  By Monday morning, two days after the Tulsa debacle, Trump sat alone in the White House with a toxic mix of frustration, anger, and anxiety brewing inside him. He was inconsolable. Father’s Day didn’t cheer him up. Nor did a round of golf. He couldn’t escape the headlines and wouldn’t turn off the television, so he dialed through a list of friends and advisers into the night and again the next morning. One topic consistently dominated the conversations: Who should take over his campaign?

  Trump dialed one adviser after the next. Ike Perlmutter, the former chairman of Marvel Entertainment. Home Depot cofounder Bernie Marcus. Blackstone Group CEO Steve Schwarzman. Casino magnate and longtime Republican backer Sheldon Adelson. Andrew Stein, the New York business consultant.

  The feedback fell mostly into two categories: The most obvious change was that Trump needed to show more discipline. These advisers urged him to forget about the campaign, because the voters he needed to convince didn’t care about another rally—they wanted him focused on the job in front of him. Others had simpler advice: Fire Brad.

  Never one to be too hard on himself, Trump started workshopping possible changes.

  He solicited opinions on Karl Rove, the strategist for former President George W. Bush whom Brad had been bringing around the White House. Trump was also trying to reel in Nick Ayers, the Georgia-based operative who had been Pence’s chief of staff and had refused Trump’s repeated offers at the end of 2018 to be his White House chief of staff.

  On the Monday after the Tulsa rally, Trump offered the job to Ronna.

  “You just run it all,” an exasperated Trump told her.

  It wasn’t clear how the party chairwoman would also serve as campaign manager. She’d almost certainly have to step down from the RNC. But the details were never discussed—she quickly rejected the offer out of hand.

  “Absolutely not,” Ronna told him.

  Trump got word to Steve Bannon, whom he had banished to the wilderness after a mu
ltitude of sins back in 2017, including stealing the boss’s spotlight and speaking ill of his family. Even Trump’s myriad triggers would never eclipse his desperate desire to win.

  But not even Bannon wanted the job.

  By the summer of 2020, Bannon had reestablished himself in the right-wing media landscape. When Trump exiled him, Bannon also lost his perch at Breitbart News, an aggressively right-wing news site he’d helped build and turn into one of the top conservative click-bait sites on the Internet. But now he was back with an equally popular podcast from which he’d been warning all year about the threat of coronavirus. The president’s fury with Bannon had faded with each TV hit where he defended Trump. Yes, the Goldman banker turned Hollywood filmmaker had publicly compared Ivanka’s brainpower to that of a brick and predicted Don Junior would be broken like an egg by federal prosecutors, but Trump liked how Bannon defended him on the shows. Evocative and energetic, Bannon articulated Trumpism in a way few others could—or would. He amplified the populism, nodded to its nationalism, and framed the movement in a global context with an existential importance. Trump had started trying to bring Bannon back into the fold after watching him rhapsodize about the president’s push to contain China during a Sunday morning on Maria Bartiromo’s show on Fox Business.

  “Donald Trump is the hammer,” Bannon said on the program. “And American capital and American technology is the anvil.”

  Trump had Jason Miller reach out to Bannon to gauge his interest in coming back inside the tent. Miller found Bannon on board the Lady May—a 151-foot, $28 million superyacht owned by Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui, a high-profile Communist Party dissenter and dues-paying member of Mar-a-Lago. The only thing Bannon had to do, Miller told him, was go on TV and publicly profess his desire to return to the campaign.