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

by Michael C. Bender

  From there, the sniping only intensified.

  On the next question, Biden interrupted Wallace. The subject was still the Supreme Court and health care, but somehow Trump and Biden were bickering over the margin of victory in the Democratic presidential primary.

  “Everybody knows he’s a liar,” Biden said.

  “You’re the liar,” Trump shot back.

  When Trump accused Biden of supporting a liberal “manifesto,” Biden sighed. “Folks, do you have any idea what this clown is doing?” he said into the camera.

  Wallace appealed to Trump, and asked him to stop interrupting so both candidates could receive equal time.

  But Trump couldn’t help himself. When Biden refused to answer a question from Wallace about whether he’d support expanding the number of Supreme Court justices—an issue favored by liberals but condemned by conservatives as court packing—Trump pounced.

  “Are you going to pack the court? Are you going to pack the court?” Trump said, just ten seconds into Biden’s answer. “He doesn’t want to answer the question!”

  “I’m not going to answer the question, because…” Biden attempted.

  “Why wouldn’t you answer that question?” Trump said.

  “Because the question is…” Biden said.

  “You want to put a lot of new Supreme Court justices, radical left…”

  Biden closed his eyes tight, like he was trying—and failing—to block out the aggressiveness of the fellow septuagenarian to his right.

  “Will you shut up, man!” he pleaded.

  And that was just the first fifteen minutes.

  After about an hour, Wallace asked Trump if he was willing to specifically condemn white supremacists and militia groups. He asked Trump if he would say those groups “need to stand down and not add to the violence” in places like Kenosha, Wisconsin, and Portland, Oregon.

  Trump said he was “willing to do anything.” But it took Wallace three more tries before Trump agreed—and during the back-and-forth with Wallace and Trump, Biden repeatedly chimed in from the other side of the stage.

  “Say it!” Biden said. “Do it! Say it!”

  “Well,” Wallace said to Trump. “Do it.”

  Trump paused. He looked at Biden from the side of his eye, and then back at Wallace.

  “What do you want to call them?” Trump asked. “Give me a name. Go ahead. Who would you like me to condemn?”

  “Proud Boys!” Biden interjected, naming the far-right group that had endorsed violence and agitated some of the civil rights protests in the Pacific Northwest.

  “White supremacists and right-wing militia,” Wallace said.

  Trump decided to answer Biden.

  “Proud Boys—stand back, and stand by,” Trump said, as much a call to action as a condemnation.

  Once again, Trump had flubbed a seemingly simple request to condemn white supremacy. He said the next day that he’d meant it as a condemnation, but the phrasing was imprecise and cryptic. Just like the violent white supremacists in Charlottesville, the conspiratorial wingnuts of QAnon, and the dictators and global strongmen he’d befriended, Trump couldn’t bring himself to renounce someone’s support no matter what they believed, or said, or did—regardless of the danger their words or actions presented to others. By the end of the debate, the leaders of the Proud Boys had interpreted Trump’s comment as an attestation and adopted the slogan as a rallying cry.2

  One of the most cringeworthy exchanges was still to come when, a few minutes later, Wallace asked a fairly simple question about how each of them viewed their own record in the White House, and why that made them the better candidate.

  Biden pointed out that he and Obama had taken office in 2008 amid an economic collapse. Since that Democratic ticket left office with the country in recovery, Biden said, that showed he could repair a country that Trump had made “weaker, sicker, poorer, more divided, and more violent.”

  Trump quickly interrupted.

  “Your son got three and a half million dollars!” he said.

  The jab seemed to come out of nowhere and was devoid of any context for the casual viewer.

  Trump was attempting to take aim at Hunter, and the consulting work he had done both domestically and overseas for years—including while his father was vice president. But it was unclear what point Trump was trying to make, other than to interrupt Biden.

  “Wait a minute, Mr. President,” Wallace said. “Your campaign agreed both sides would get two-minute answers, uninterrupted. Your side agreed to it and why don’t you observe what your campaign agreed to as a ground rule. Okay, sir?”

  “Because…” Trump started to say.

  “No, no, no!” Wallace shot back. “I’m not asking! That was a rhetorical question.”

  Biden concluded with a pledge of support to the military, which he underscored by mentioning his firstborn son, Beau, who had been awarded the Bronze Star for his service in Iraq before dying of cancer.

  Trump mystified members of his own team by turning the moment into another attack on Hunter.

  “I don’t know Beau—I know Hunter,” Trump said. “Hunter got thrown out of the military. He was thrown out—dishonorably discharged for cocaine use. And he didn’t have a job until you became vice president.”

  Hunter Biden was never dishonorably discharged, which is a punitive designation the military reserves for the most egregious conduct from its soldiers. But Hunter Biden had received an administrative discharge from the Naval Reserve after a positive drug test in 2014, for which he’d publicly apologized.

  Trump also accused Hunter Biden of making “a fortune” from jobs in Ukraine, China, and Moscow while Biden was in the White House. Biden, meanwhile, stole the moment back when he framed it in a way that plenty of Americans could understand.

  “My son, like a lot of people—like a lot of people you know at home—had a drug problem,” Biden said, looking directly into the camera. “He’s overtaking it. He’s fixed it. He’s worked on it. And I’m proud of him, I’m proud of my son.”

  “But why was he given tens of millions of dollars?” Trump interrupted.

  “He wasn’t given tens of millions of dollars,” Biden said. “That’s been totally discredited.”

  “All right! All right!” Wallace shouted. “We’ve already been through this. I think the American people would rather hear about more substantial subjects.”

  Inside the hall, the crowd sat in stunned silence. Guests for the two candidates were divided between two sections, like a church halved between the families of the bride and groom, but there was little difference in their reactions. Fear and loathing permeated both parties. Men and women in their seats exchanged quick glances and short whispers. At the very moment the bickering seemed to subside—just past the hour mark of the debate—the melee onstage suddenly and furiously whipped back up again.

  Trump roared at Biden.

  Biden yelled at Wallace for more time.

  Wallace shouted at Trump as he tried to impose some measure of order.

  “That was a shitshow,” Dana Bash, CNN’s chief political correspondent, said live on air moments after the debate ended.

  But no one was more distressed inside the hall than the man seated just to my right: Steve Scully, the veteran journalist from C-SPAN who was lined up to host the second debate scheduled for two weeks later.

  The sixty-year-old Scully was best known for his role as host of Washington Journal, a town-hall-style call-in show that provided separate phone numbers for Republicans, Democrats, and independents. The show was like a cross between a 1980s telephone party line and the Internet comments section on Breitbart.com. But what was unfolding onstage in front of us was far more than anyone would have bargained for. Scully’s eyes were like saucers after the first few minutes. If only he could have that trusty mute button from his call-in show…

  “How would you like to be the next debate moderator?” he asked me.

  I wasn’t sure how to respond.
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  “Sure!” I said.

  Scully cycled through all the stages of grief, and seemed to have found some measure of acceptance about halfway through. He laughed and showed me a meme on Twitter, which was a gif of NBC Late Night host Seth Myers scribbling furiously with the caption Steve Scully watching the debate right now.

  When the debate ended and the lights came on, I tried to offer Scully some encouragement. Trump’s strategy must have been to go after Wallace, who was a fighter himself, I told Scully. The format for Scully’s debate was supposed to be a town hall, and I suggested that Biden and Trump couldn’t possibly bicker like that in such a setting. But Scully wasn’t interested in chatting. He quickly packed up, forced a head nod in my direction as I talked, and scurried off the riser and out of the auditorium.3

  It was impossible to blame Scully for his reaction. I’d been covering Trump for five years, and even I struggled to square in my own mind what I had just witnessed.

  “That was the singular worst I’ve ever seen him—even privately,” one close adviser said after the debate. “I’ve been with him when he’s been pissed off privately—and he’s never been that big of a cocksucker.”

  To me, the most surprising aspect of Trump’s performance wasn’t what he’d done onstage—it was what he’d left out. Trump always escalated political fights. But he’d always battled his opponents with some measure of humor and wit—and that was a big part of his appeal.

  Whether Trump’s jocularity was more appropriate for a middle school playground than a presidential debate stage was a fair topic for discussion. But Trump was funny.4 Trump ran golf courses and hotels—he knew how to be charming. Trump, in his own unusual way, was likable. But none of that was on display in Cleveland.

  Trump’s prep team had urged him to be aggressive, but there had been little talk about what happened if that initial attack failed to flatten Biden. Trump had no second move. He’d spent months insisting that Biden was too old and feeble for the presidency, and now it became clear that Trump and his team believed their own spin. They thought Biden actually did have dementia. But Biden hadn’t just withstood the initial landfall of Hurricane Trump; he’d remained behind the lectern, unscathed.

  Trump’s style had changed from four years earlier, but so had he. This time, Trump had something to lose, and it rattled him.

  “No one wants to vote for somebody acting like an angry asshole,” one of Trump’s closest advisers said afterward.

  “One of the most incredible self-inflicted wounds of all time,” another said.

  “He shit the bed,” offered a third.

  Everyone seemed to understand how much damage Trump had just done to himself.

  But no one wanted to tell the one man who needed to hear it.

  Backstage after the debate in Cleveland, Don Junior looked around as his family and his father’s closest advisers high-fived, slapped each other’s backs, and told his father what a wonderful job he’d just done. Don Junior wondered if he had just dreamed the last ninety minutes.

  Don Junior had attended one of the country’s elite boarding schools, enrolled at the same Ivy League college as his father, and, after graduation, accepted an executive-level job waiting for him in his father’s company. He was in every way a child of privilege, but he was also deeply in touch with his own animal spirits—certainly more so than anyone traveling with his father to Cleveland that night.

  Don Junior spent many of his childhood summers living in rural Czechoslovakia with his maternal grandparents, where he learned to hunt and fish. It had instilled in him a different set of values than what he was used to in Manhattan. He often was more dialed into Trump World voters than even the president. He was also more like his father than any of his siblings, which was a complicating factor in their relationship. Trump’s own self-loathing could manifest itself into contempt for his firstborn son when it came to either politics or the family business. At times it seemed Trump would dismiss an idea from Don Junior based more on the source than the substance—a dynamic that distressed staff both on the campaign and in the company and limited the amount of input Don Junior could offer.

  Still, it frustrated the eldest Trump scion to watch the fawning and flattery that followed the debate. No one wanted to level with Trump, but that included Don Junior, too. He had a campaign event the next morning in Ohio, and didn’t speak to his father about the performance before he left or after. And the flight back to Washington looked more like a party cruise than a work trip. Some of the president’s children had seats on the plane, along with their spouses. Meadows brought his son and daughter-in-law, Blake and Phoebe Meadows. Chris Liddell, a deputy chief of staff, brought his wife, Renee Harbers, and their son, Luc Harbers Liddell. Rudy Giuliani tagged along, as did Alice Johnson, the leader of a cocaine ring whom Trump had freed from prison.

  As Air Force One departed from Burke Lakefront Airport that night, the president told his friends and family that he’d been perfect onstage. Everyone nodded. It wasn’t until he turned on the TV in his cabin that he got his first glimpse of the public reaction. Trump brushed it off and insisted that everything was fine.

  It was Chris Wallace, he said, who was to blame for the constant interruptions.

  Heading into the debate, Biden had maintained a decent lead over the incumbent in national polls. But Trump was still within striking distance, which was remarkable given all that had happened so far in 2020. For seven consecutive months, Biden’s lead in the national Wall Street Journal/NBCNews poll barely budged: eight points, nine points, seven points, seven points, nine points, nine points, eight points. The day after the debate, the same media pollsters conducted a two-day survey to measure reaction to the matchup. Biden’s lead had ballooned to fourteen points.

  For the first time in the poll, Trump’s support nationally fell below 40 percent. His twenty-point gap with women a month earlier widened to twenty-seven points. Support softened even among key voting blocs of his base, including working-class white men. For the first time since he’d taken office, more than 50 percent of the country said they had a negative view of Trump. Meanwhile, views of Biden were now net positive for the first time since 2018.

  Back in 2016, Jared similarly had to scramble to find friendly media personalities and other allies who would level with Trump about his troubling first debate with Clinton. When Jared called Christie and asked for his assessment, the former governor was blunt.

  “We lost,” Christie told him.

  “I think so, too,” Jared said. “But he thinks he won. You should call him and tell him that he lost.”

  Christie did, but Trump wouldn’t listen. He instead pointed to a poll on the Drudge Report that showed he had won. Christie told him that poll meant nothing, especially since roughly 100 percent of Drudge Report readers were already going to vote for him.

  Trump hung up on the former governor.

  But then Trump called back a few days later and asked Christie to take over debate prep from Stephen Miller.

  In 2020, Christie didn’t wait for a call from Jared. He phoned Trump after lunch on the day following the debate.

  “I won, right? I did great,” Trump told Christie.

  “No,” Christie said. “You did terribly. You interrupted him seventy-three times in ninety minutes. I didn’t think that was possible. We have to totally change our approach.”

  “You’re being too harsh,” Trump said. “You always say I don’t do well.”

  But privately, Jared was concerned that Christie and Kellyanne were at fault. The pair had come of age in New Jersey’s aggressive and pugilistic style of politics, and he worried that Trump’s pettiness and anger had been a result of their prep.

  He phoned Nick Ayers in Georgia and implored him to come back to Washington to talk sense into Trump and help with the next debate. Jared considered making changes to the debate prep team and asked colleagues about bringing in Pence or maybe some of Pence’s debate team.

  Others in Trump’s orbi
t reached out to Tucker Carlson to talk to Trump. Carlson had been blunt in his assessment of Trump’s performance—he thought the president came off as unappealing and rude.

  “When Biden told him to shut up, I agreed with him!” Carlson said.

  But Carlson declined the request to consult with Trump. He had crossed that line one time—to urge the president to take coronavirus more seriously—and didn’t want to do it again.

  But Trump decided to call Carlson himself. With several aides sitting with him in the Oval Office, the president called Carlson’s cell phone. Carlson sent it to voicemail. Trump called again. One ring, right to voicemail. Eventually, one of Trump’s aides called Carlson’s producer, who patched the Oval Office in with the prime-time Fox News personality.

  “Everyone says I did a good job,” Trump told Carlson when the two were finally connected.

  “I don’t know who told you that was good,” Carlson said. “It was not good.”

  Trump was taken aback. Carlson told Trump it had been a mistake to spend so much time ahead of the debate describing Biden as senile. The Democratic nominee had easily cleared that bar in Cleveland.

  Meanwhile, Ronna had been trying to reach the president that morning. She’d been rattled by Trump’s performance and knew it would be problematic when even her brother, one of Trump’s biggest fans, had been unnerved by the president’s answer about the Proud Boys. But she wasn’t calling about his debate performance. She’d tested positive for coronavirus. When she couldn’t get through, she left a message with the White House physician.

  Ronna had been with Trump five days earlier in Washington at a campaign fundraiser. She had been told by her doctors that she probably wasn’t infected until she got home that night to care for her son, who had contracted the virus in the three weeks she’d been away for work.

  Trump didn’t mention anything about Ronna’s positive test when he met with Giuliani that afternoon for forty-five minutes in the Oval Office. The two had planned to meet to review Trump’s debate performance, and Giuliani urged the president to give Biden more room to speak next time.