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

by Michael C. Bender

  At 10:50 a.m. in Washington, Tim Murtaugh, the campaign’s communications director, quickly texted a couple of dozen other reporters and me.

  “Having an all-staff call at 11:00 AM. POTUS will speak to the entire staff.”

  Stepien introduced Trump with his best attempt at positivity and assuredness. Yet his voice was shaky as he stumbled over his words.

  “I’ve never been more confident than we, every single one of us, is right now that we’re going to win this campaign in fifteen days—we are going to win this race,” Stepien said.

  Stepien sounded like he was trying to talk himself into his prediction. He handed the call over to Trump, who was off and running for the next twenty-five minutes.

  Trump immediately complained about a “false narrative” in the media. He denied any dissension in the ranks. He reaffirmed his support for Stepien, Miller, and Ronna. He denied a report that morning that he might fire Meadows after the campaign.

  And, oh yes, the campaign. Trump grumbled twice about the New York Times not calling him more often before finally getting to the supposed point of this meeting.

  “They said, ‘Would you like to be on the call?’” Trump said. “I said, ‘Yeah, I’d like to be on the call.’ And this is all I’m telling you: We’re gonna win. I wouldn’t have said that three weeks ago. Three weeks ago, two weeks ago. I don’t know. I wouldn’t have said it. It was tougher for me.”

  Trump’s enthusiasm was jarring. But he was just getting warmed up. He complained about a story from the Atlantic that at that point was forty-six days old. He said he had been losing the 2016 race until the very last day.

  Trump had mentioned earlier in the call that Hunter’s laptop was “a criminal enterprise” and complained that only the New York Post had written about it. He suggested that everyone in the media was pulling for the Democratic nominee, whom Trump compared to “a piece of wood.” And then he was off on another tangent.

  But when he returned to his obsession with the Biden family corruption, Trump seemed to remember something he’d been told.

  “Joe Biden has a scandal coming up that’s going to make him almost an impotent candidate,” he teased. “This scandal is so big.”

  Trump said he’d known about the Post’s Hunter story ahead of time and claimed responsibility for providing the information to the newspaper. He again complained that more news outlets hadn’t picked up the story. He complained again about the New York Times and said the corruption at that newspaper was rivaled only by that at the Washington Post—then recalled reading a Washington Post story that morning about Democrats “getting a little bit scared.”

  “And the Wall Street Journal,” Trump continued—my eyes widened at the mention of my employer—“is working on a very, very important piece, which should be very good, actually. But the Wall Street Journal, I never thought they treat us good. But the economy is good. We have built up our economy again. And it’s the biggest thing for us to discuss is the economy.”

  Then Trump was off on another stream-of-consciousness. Before the call was over, he would declare that Americans were tired of hearing about Covid, that Fauci was a disaster and an idiot, and that the only thing keeping him from raising more campaign cash was his reluctance to sell out the American people.

  To Trump, it was a casual, off-the-cuff mention about a story he’d heard we were reporting. And as I scrambled to track down what had happened, the answer seemed like a bad game of telephone: just about all of my sources blamed someone else for telling at least one fellow Trump World ally, who had then told at least one more person, until the breach finally reached the president himself.

  Later, the people who were in a position to tell Trump about our reporting would claim that someone, seeking to feed good news to the president at the moment with little consideration of the consequences, simply told Trump that the Wall Street Journal had something big on the Bidens almost ready for publication. Someone on his campaign had teased Trump, and now he was doing the same thing to the campaign staff and political reporters at every major news outlet in the country. In short, Trump had merely repeated out loud everything he knew.

  But Trump’s passing mention of the story was about to cause an enormous amount of trouble in my world. I had emailed our team as the words fell from Trump’s mouth, and editors phoned me before the campaign call was over. Senior officials from the White House blew up my phone, trying to connect the dots.

  But at the moment, I was less concerned about how it had leaked out than about what it meant: We were screwed.

  An already tricky story about the son of the Democratic presidential nominee just days before the election had suddenly become even more challenging. We’d be accused of carrying Trump’s water if we wrote it. We’d be accused of burying a kill shot on Biden if we spiked it. And neither accusation would be correct. The editors, to their credit, told the reporters to put the politics aside, continue reporting the story, and let the journalism stand on its own.

  The president blurting out the storyline had also increased pressure on Schwartz, Passantino, and Herschmann to deliver. My earlier warning about the Journal’s rigorous editing process no longer meant anything. By Tuesday, Herschmann was back digging through Bobulinski’s documents in search of a silver bullet. Passantino tried to calm Bobulinski, who was sure his life was in danger and had retreated to a safe house.

  On Wednesday, Trump’s team coordinated with Senate Republicans, who wrote emails to Bobulinski and the other business partners involved in Hunter’s project, referencing documents that had been released as part of the New York Post’s now ongoing series on Hunter’s laptop, and asking for copies of all records related to the business venture. Bobulinski was the only investor who responded.

  On Thursday, the morning of the second and final presidential debate in Nashville, Homeland Security Committee chairman Ron Johnson and Finance Committee chairman Chuck Grassley announced that they had received Bobulinski’s records and would speak with him for an informal interview on Friday.

  After all, Bobulinski couldn’t speak to them any sooner. He had an important date on Thursday.

  Trump arrived in Nashville more than six hours before his final debate with Joe Biden. But not for debate prep. Trump hadn’t bothered with much debate prep this time. Instead, it was for a fundraiser at the JW Marriott Nashville. The event attracted Kid Rock, country music singer Lee Greenwood, and former PGA champ John Daly, wearing jeans, a white golf shirt, and a blazer designed to look like an American flag. But after the fundraiser, Trump’s team planned a surprise press conference, featuring none other than Tony Bobulinski.3

  Ivanka and other family members wandered in and out of the fundraiser but mostly waited in a penthouse room with other White House and campaign staff, as well as Passantino and Herschmann.

  “This Hunter stuff we’ve got,” Passantino told some of the others in the room. “It’s a bombshell!”

  Bobulinski was still on his way in from California, and Trump aides found themselves troubleshooting a pair of only-in-Trump-World problems. The first was that Bobulinski had boarded the plane with a suit but no dress shirt.

  “What’s he wearing?” Jason Miller asked Passantino.

  “Well, he’s wearing his suit,” Passantino said.

  “Who the fuck puts on a suit but not a dress shirt?” Miller said.

  Miller was annoyed to be stuck with the supremely stupid task of figuring out Bobulinski’s neck size and sleeve length and then finding a field staffer to hustle to the department store to buy a button-down shirt. But that irritation was quickly eclipsed by a much more urgent issue as Meadows sauntered up to Miller.

  “Hey, so, um, do you know about a private plane flying in?” Meadows asked.

  The White House chief explained that Nashville was effectively a no-fly zone while Trump was on the ground. The military threatened to blast Bobulinski out of the sky if his plane didn’t immediately turn around.

  “So these guys are telling
the truth?” Meadows asked. “They’re coming to see you?”

  “Yes, it’s Bobulinski,” Miller said.

  “Uuuuugghhh,” Meadows said, rubbing his temples. “Let me go see what I can do.”

  The White House cleared the air restrictions. Bobulinski landed in Nashville and found two black Suburbans waiting to drive him and his entourage—including bodyguards and attorneys—back to the Marriott where a selection of dress shirts awaited Trump World’s hero of the moment. He picked a white shirt, which fit nicely. But the suit jacket he brought was too tight to button.

  Miller had pushed to have Trump join Bobulinski at the news conference, but no one could agree. Farah suggested a guerrilla-style news conference where Trump and Bobulinski would cross paths in front of the hotel, and the president could spend a few minutes with him before continuing on his way. No one knew what Bobulinski would say, so they decided not to put any campaign banners behind him for the news conference. The internal debate continued until thirty minutes before it was set to start. In the end, Bobulinski was sent into the media room mostly on his own.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, Tony Bobulinski!” Miller announced.

  Bobulinski walked into a conference room that looked like every other Marriott conference room across the country: beige walls, nylon carpet with a geometric pattern, and shades of blue and gray. What followed was equally lackluster. Bobulinski wore a confused look for much of it, his right eyebrow almost constantly raised, and his nose and mouth puckered like he’d just eaten something sour. He had three mobile phones, which contained all of the Hunter Biden messages and that he had carried into the hotel in a toiletry bag. Bobulinski had a statement to read, but with no lectern set up, he asked the media for a chair, which he used as a table on which to set down the iPhones and read his statement. Miller slid the chair into the shot, then retreated again to his seat in the corner.

  Bobulinski’s short statement was the Wikipedia version of his dealings with Hunter Biden. He said he’d had a dispute over money with Hunter, that Joe Biden knew more about his son’s business pursuits than he had admitted, and that he planned to tell everything he knew to a Senate committee the next day. Bobulinski answered two questions and then decided that was enough and left the room. CNN and MSNBC didn’t carry him live, and when Miller returned to the team’s penthouse suite, not one network was discussing the spectacle.

  “That was amazing,” Miller told the group.

  In 2008, by the time Barack Obama and John McCain met onstage for their second debate in the Curb Event Center at Belmont University, the economy was in free fall as bankruptcies threatened or had already taken down the nation’s largest banks and markets collapsed. Congress forked over $700 billion to let the Treasury bail out AIG and auto companies and restore credit markets. NBC’s Tom Brokaw opened the event by taking stock of what had happened since the previous debate.

  “Since you last met at Ole Miss twelve days ago, the world has changed a great deal, and not for the better,” Brokaw said. “We still don’t know where the bottom is at this time.”

  Twelve years later, Trump and Biden took the stage in the same arena at the same university for a debate hosted by the same network. A historic crisis was once again unfolding, and, just like back in 2008, it had escalated since the first debate. A few days before Nashville, on October 15, there were 60,000 new Covid cases reported in a single day in the United States.

  “The country is heading into a dangerous new phase,” NBC’s Kristen Welker said to open the debate. “And since the two of you last shared a stage, sixteen thousand Americans have died from Covid.”

  Trump didn’t want to talk about Covid. He was eager to go on the attack with the Bobulinski bombshell in his pocket, a pivot he was able to make before the two men had been onstage for twenty minutes. But Trump couldn’t quite land it. For one, he couldn’t remember Bobulinski’s name—he’d referred to him as “Bo” backstage. He hadn’t taken the time to understand the details, so his accusations ended up wildly off base and challenging for an average viewer to follow. Running against Hillary Clinton four years earlier had masked that shortcoming of Trump’s propensity to attack in tabloid headlines. She and Biden had spent about the same amount of time in public service, but Clinton’s controversies had been amplified and looped on repeat. Voters could follow Trump’s jumbled word association with Clinton much more readily.

  “You were getting a lot of money from Russia—they were paying you a lot of money, and they probably still are—but now, with what came out today, it’s even worse,” Trump said on the debate stage that night. “All of the emails—the emails, the horrible emails—and the kind of money that you were raking in, you and your family. And Joe, you were vice president when some of this was happening, and it should have never happened. And I think you owe an explanation to the American people. Why is it somebody just had a news conference a little while ago? Who was essentially supposed to work with you and your family? But what he said was damning. And regardless of me, I think you have to clean it up and talk to the American people.”

  The attack was muddled, at best, and still Trump wouldn’t let it go. He leveled another round of accusations against Biden over his son’s business dealings in Ukraine but missed the target again.

  In a holding room with other staffers watching the debate, Bossie stomped across the floor.

  “Fucking Jesus Christ!” he shouted.

  Time was ticking away.

  Back onstage, Biden insisted that he’d done nothing wrong concerning Ukraine.

  “The guy who got in trouble in Ukraine was this guy,” he said, extending his right index finger toward Trump without breaking eye contact with Welker. “Trying to bribe the Ukrainian government to say something negative about me, which they would not do, and did not do because it never ever, ever happened.”

  Trump opened his mouth to laugh but seemed to gasp for air instead. He slowly shook his head and gazed at the lectern in front of him. His mouth fell open. But he quickly closed it, then lifted his head and peered into the distance with an unfocused gaze.

  The next day, the Journal published its story on Bobulinski and the Bidens. Andy Duehren and James Areddy, a fellow reporter, had combed through all the text messages and documents. They reported that the venture—set up in 2017 after Joe Biden had left the vice presidency and before his presidential campaign—never received proposed funds from the Chinese company or completed any deals, according to people familiar with the matter.

  “Corporate records reviewed by the Wall Street Journal,” they wrote, “show no role for Joe Biden.”

  But Trump remained undeterred. After the Nashville debate—during the final eleven days of the campaign—Trump referenced Hunter Biden sixty-eight times at rallies, while giving interviews, and on Twitter.

  “Where’s Hunter?” Trump asked again and again. He posed that exact question to voters in nineteen cities across eight battleground states during that time.

  “It’s treason, or whatever you want to call it,” Trump said on the last day of the race. “We caught the whole thing. The son—where’s Hunter? Where’s Hunter?”

  Footnotes

  1 The Great Cornholio, of course, was the hyperactive alter ego of Beavis from the 1990s animated television show Beavis and Butt-Head. When Beavis turned into Cornholio, he would pull his shirt over his head and run around in spastic convulsions—and then afterward have no memory of the episode.

  2 Best was also one of the Trumpiest firms: Former Trump White House chief of staff Reince Priebus was president and chief strategist. Tory Maguire Sendek, a former White House director of scheduling, was managing director. Katie Hrkman, who oversaw White House fellows, was director of operations. Michael Ambrosini, a former chief’s office director, was a principal, as was Alex Angelson, a former White House legislative liaison. Olivia Imhoff, a former intergovernmental affairs deputy in the White House, was a legislative assistant.

  3 When Jason Miller told Trump about B
obulinski’s surprise appearance, the president immediately thought of the 2016 debate when he invited me and a few other reporters to watch a few minutes of debate prep—only to spring on us several women who had accused his opponent’s spouse, Bill Clinton, of sexual misconduct. “This is kinda like when you guys brought the women to debate in 2016?” Trump asked Miller in Nashville. “Kinda,” Miller told him. “Okay,” Trump said. “Go for it.”

  16

  Final Stretch

  “Are we going to win, Corey?…I’ll never speak to you again.”

  —Campaign rally, Londonderry, New Hampshire, October 25, 2020

  Days until Election: 37

  At the height of his twenty-nine-month run as campaign manager, Brad thought his unlikely ascendancy onto the mainstage of national politics would end with immortality in history books, or maybe at least a feature-length documentary. Instead, it was more like an episode of Cops when Brad—shirtless, shoeless, and hapless, with a beer in his hand—was tackled to the ground by police outside his Fort Lauderdale home and detained for a psychiatric evaluation.

  News accounts at the time reported that Brad’s wife, Candice, had called 911 in the midst of a days-long fight. They’d both been drinking, there were guns in the house, and the arguing had continued to escalate. Candice told dispatchers she thought Brad might hurt himself.

  What wasn’t known at the time was the source of the argument: Trump. Brad had been devastated by his demotion, and Candice thought her husband had been scapegoated. She was already furious at the Trumps for her husband’s sake. But the final straw came that last weekend in September, when Brad shared something even more stunning: Jared wanted to bring him back inside, and Brad was going to fly to Washington the next day.