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

by Michael C. Bender

  Meadows also reportedly connected Trump with Mark Martin, a former North Carolina Supreme Court justice with a radical interpretation of the Constitution. Pence, Martin told Trump, had the power to stop the certification of the Electoral College results on January 6.

  “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!” Trump tweeted on December 18.

  The pandemic proved a blessing for Saundra’s travel itinerary. She bought cheap airfare, repeatedly basked in the extravagance of an airplane aisle all to herself, and logged more flights in 2020 than at any point in her life—and certainly more than any other Front Row Joe. She attended twenty-five Trump rallies in 2020, which boosted her lifetime total to fifty-six.2 She spent seventy-nine nights of the year away from her own bed. Saundra traveled so often during the pandemic that when a Delta flight attendant thanked her for being a Silver Medallion member and upgraded her to first class, she had to ask someone what that meant.

  “It’s nice because it’s more comfortable and bigger seats up there,” Saundra said about the perks of her frequent flyer status. “This whole year has just been so wild.”

  Saundra started 2021 the same way she’d spent most of 2020: on a flight. She flew from Detroit to Atlanta on Saturday, January 2, and slept that night in the airport. On Sunday, she met friends and drove ninety miles north to Dalton, where they spent a freezing night outside waiting in line for Trump’s rally on Monday—ahead of the Georgia Senate runoffs. On Tuesday, as Republicans failed to turn out enough voters in both races and lost their majority in the U.S. Senate, she and her friends drove to Washington for the Save America rally on Wednesday, January 6.

  Saundra was convinced beyond a doubt that Trump had been reelected on November 3, only to have it stolen in what she described as “a takeover by the communist devils.”

  “If someone put a gun to my head and said, ‘Did Donald Trump win, yes or no? And if you’re wrong, we’re going to shoot your head off!’ I would say yes,” Saundra said. “I’m that confident that this stuff is not made up.”

  Part of her evidence was that Corey Lewandowski, a well-known high priest of Old Testament–style Trumpism, had foretold all that would happen way back in July when she’d come to Washington for the Republican National Convention, despite the fact she wasn’t a delegate and there were no public events due to the pandemic. She didn’t have much to do other than go to dinner at Trump International Hotel, the kind of temple where money changers and true believers were encouraged to interact. It was there that she ran into Corey.

  “How’s the election going to go?” Saundra asked him.

  “It’s going to be the most fraudulent election in the history of the country,” Corey said. “You just watch the television. There’s going to be a big red wave, and it’s going to look like Donald Trump won. Then, in the middle of the night, the mail ballots are going to come in. You’re going to wake up the next day, and you’re not going to know the results of the election. We’re going to have to settle this election in the court.”

  But her most significant data point was that Trump himself said he won. She hadn’t seen a single correction, clarification, or retraction that Fox Business’s Lou Dobbs, Newsmax’s John Tabacco, and Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo and Jeanine Pirro, among others, all had to issue after repeating those false allegations about Dominion Voting Systems machine cheating Trump out of votes.

  “No, I’m getting all my news from Facebook,” Saundra told me. “I turned all the news off after November 3.”

  When Saundra and her friends arrived in Washington on the evening of January 5, they checked into the Comfort Inn near the Washington Convention Center downtown and then went out for a walk. They strolled over to Harry’s bar and the Hotel Harrington, where a memorial had been held a month earlier for Randal. Saundra bought a souvenir lanyard from a Washington street vendor.

  They walked by the Ellipse on the National Mall, the site of Trump’s Save America rally the next day. More than twenty people had already lined up by midnight. Saundra and her friends decided to join them and stayed out all night.

  Earlier that day, Trump and Pence met to once again discuss the president’s request to block the certification of Biden’s victory. Pence had been a loyal lieutenant for Trump for four years—and was widely mocked for his subservience—but this was the ultimate test.

  They had gone round and round in the Oval Office. Trump believed Pence had the legal right to reject the election results. Pence thought Trump was getting bad legal advice.

  The president and vice president had labored through the same debate at least a dozen times since mid-November, when Pence allies said Trump first suggested blocking Congress from certifying the results. Earlier that week, John Eastman, an attorney who represented the president in some postelection legal battles, argued that election results had been rejected in 1801 and 1960. For the past several weeks, Giuliani and Peter Navarro, a top White House adviser, also supported that view. But Marc Short, Pence’s chief of staff, told them that those examples had no comparison to what Trump wanted Pence to do.

  The 1801 example was to correct a clerical error. And after the 1960 election, the vice president presiding over the vote was Richard Nixon, who had lost the presidential race that year to John F. Kennedy. Nixon had initially won the vote in Hawaii, but that state, too, after a recount, flipped to Kennedy. Nixon, acting against his own self-interest—and without objection from Congress—suggested awarding Hawaii’s Electoral College votes to Kennedy.

  But Pence wasn’t practiced in confronting Trump. The most heated Pence had ever gotten with Trump was in May 2018, when news broke that Pence’s super-PAC had hired Corey. Trump threw the article at Pence when they climbed into the presidential limousine on their way to the National Peace Officers’ Memorial Service. Trump thought the story made it seem like his team was bailing on him in the middle of the Russia probe.

  Trump gave Pence the silent treatment for the rest of the ride. He finally spoke to the vice president on the way back to the White House—just long enough to criticize his No. 2.

  “So disloyal,” Trump said.

  Pence had enough. His fundraising committee had hired Corey as a favor to Jared, who, months earlier, had asked Pence for help. Jared was about to have Brad installed as head of the reelection bid, and he wanted to find something with which to pacify Corey. Pence had spent almost an entire lunch with Trump discussing the plan.

  Pence picked up the article and threw it back at Trump. He leaned toward the president and pointed a finger a few inches from his chest.

  “We walked you through every detail of this,” Pence snarled. “We did this for you—as a favor. And this is how you respond? You need to get your facts straight.”

  Nearly three years later, the moment seemed to call for another get-your-facts-straight lesson from Pence. Some of Pence’s advisers urged him to confront Trump like he had back in 2018. But this time, the vice president remained measured. His team claimed he’d been crystal clear with Trump for weeks.

  “Anything you give us, we’ll review,” Pence told the president. “But I don’t see how it’s possible.”

  After Pence left, Trump heard commotion outside from the crowd already gathering at the Ellipse across the South Lawn for his Save America rally the next day. He summoned Scavino into the Oval Office, along with Judd Deere, the White House deputy press secretary. Trump had opened the door to the colonnade and wanted his aides to sit and listen to the celebration with him as he signed a stack of bills on his desk from Congress. Soon more staffers were pulled into the office. Trump was in a great mood as he bobbed his head to the beat of the classic rock blaring outside, exactly the kind of music he’d pick to play ahead of one of his own rallies.

  The music was so loud that staffers could feel the vibrations—as well as the chilly January air—inside the Oval. Trump noticed the noise from the crowd, too, and noted how much energy his supporters had. He asked his aides if they thought the crowd would b
e even bigger than at one of his mega-rallies. His supporters were fired up, he said.

  “They’re coming here because they want Congress to do the right thing,” he said. “Maybe Congress will do the right thing. Some members may not.”

  He asked if they thought the day would be peaceful.

  “Everyone who comes to your rallies is peaceful,” Deere told Trump. “Your supporters love law enforcement. Unless they interact with protesters, I wouldn’t suspect any problems with our folks.”

  “Well,” Trump ominously responded. “Don’t forget these people are fired up.”

  Trump turned to Scavino and said he wanted to send a tweet that made sure the Pentagon, Justice Department, and the military was prepared for tomorrow.

  “Antifa is a Terrorist Organization, stay out of Washington,” Trump wrote in the tweet. “Law enforcement is watching you.”

  The next morning, the temporary gates set up for the rally opened at 7:00 a.m., and the first speakers took the stage several hours later. A little after 1:00 p.m., Saundra was on her way to the Capitol.

  Mainstream media had reported for days that Pence planned to certify the election results. Trump called the reports fake news, but Pence never disputed them. Pence and his team viewed this as a show of respect for Trump—but some Trump supporters interpreted his silence as an indication that he might do Trump’s bidding after all.

  But as Trump was finishing his speech on the Ellipse, Pence released a formal statement that said he did not have the power to reject Electoral College votes.

  When news articles started to post about Pence’s plans to certify the election results in favor of Biden and Harris, Saundra’s sister back home texted her the headlines. Saundra shouted the Pence headlines to the massive, slow-moving crowd around her.

  “What do you mean?” someone yelled. “What’s going on?”

  “It’s not looking good,” Saundra said.

  Similar alerts buzzed the mobile phones of other marchers, and Saundra noticed a surge of energy in the crowd. The crowd that had been on the march around her now felt like a stampede.

  The anger turned palpable. Someone shouted about needing to find Pence at the Capitol. Someone else yelled that they should tear down the building. The crowd—many of whom had been chanting “Lock Her Up” just two days earlier at Trump’s rally in Georgia—broke out into shouts of “Gotta Get Pence!” and “Hang Mike Pence!”

  “If Mike Pence would have come out of that building, I guarantee he would have died,” Saundra said. “And if it wasn’t by gunfire, he would have been pummeled. They were going to kill him in the street.”

  The joint session of Congress had convened at 1:00 p.m. as the Trump crowd outside was clashing with police. Led by members of the Proud Boys who used earpieces and radios to communicate, they had broken through barriers and were marching through the Capitol grounds.

  The police were overrun.

  Trump had just finished his speech on the Ellipse. He’d urged his supporters to “fight like hell” and promised to walk with the crowd to the Capitol, but he returned to the White House instead.

  Within the hour, just as the mob was pressing up against the Capitol doors, District police declared a riot. Soon afterward, at a few minutes past 2:00 p.m., a piece of lumber smashed through a window and rioters started climbing through. Another Proud Boy, later identified by police as Dominic Pezzola, used a Capitol Police shield he had seized to smash through another window a few minutes later. More rioters flooded into the historic building.

  The initial intruders used pipes and flagpoles to shatter windows and break furniture. They broke into House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office, where they rifled through her belongings, sat in her office chair, and put their feet on her desk. One man stole her lectern, the same one she had stood behind more than a year earlier to announce the impeachment investigation into Trump’s dealings with Ukraine.

  The mob streamed through Statuary Hall, where they largely stayed between the red velvet stanchions—as if they were awestruck citizens on a group tour instead of violent rioters engaging in an insurrection. They took out their mobile phones and took pictures of the artwork and smiled for selfies.

  Pence was hustled off the Senate floor and into a nearby hideaway just one minute before a violent mob rushed up to the second floor, where the doors to the Senate chamber were. If the insurgents had arrived on the second-floor landing just seconds earlier, the man they had wanted to hang for treason would have been within eyesight—and reach.

  Initially, Trump seemed to be enjoying the melee, heartened to see his supporters fighting so vigorously on his behalf. He watched more as a passive spectator than as the president of the United States, who had helped incite the violence unfolding little more than two miles away.

  Trump also ignored the public and private pleas of his advisers, both current and former, who begged him to quell the riots. Terrified Republican lawmakers called White House aides and the president’s children, pleading for help. Kellyanne Conway—who had received calls from D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser’s office asking for her help in convincing Trump to call in the National Guard—phoned a close personal aide to the president, relaying the mayor’s request and adding that she, too, felt Trump needed to calm his supporters. The mayor twice personally implored Meadows for help.

  Trump didn’t call off the intruders until almost 4:30 p.m., about a half hour after Pence had called the Pentagon looking for support from the National Guard. Trump’s video, which he posted on social media, told his supporters to go home, but didn’t denounce the violence.

  “Go home—we love you, you’re very special,” Trump said.

  It would be hours before Capitol Police, with help from D.C. police officers, FBI SWAT team members, Secret Service officers, and National Guard soldiers were able to clear the Capitol of rioters and restore order.

  The riots would leave five people dead, including a Capitol Police officer.

  Pence, meanwhile, had repeatedly rejected Secret Service recommendations to evacuate him from the Capitol. He didn’t want to appear cowed, or give the rioters the satisfaction of delaying the certification any longer than they already had. By 8:00 p.m., he was back in the Senate chamber. The vote was certified that night.

  “Today was a dark day in the history of the United States Capitol,” Pence said once he was back in the Senate. “To those who wreaked havoc in our Capitol today, you did not win. Violence never wins. Freedom wins. And this is still the People’s House.”

  Outside, Saundra and her friends had made their way up the west side of the Capitol where the mob had pushed through police barricades and turned the steel bike racks on their sides, leaning them against stone walls like ladders. Some men helped Saundra climb up the rungs. People were everywhere, and it was difficult to move. Saundra and her friends scaled one more wall and were within about one hundred yards of the Capitol. But it had become so crowded—and they didn’t want to lose each other—that they decided to stop on the west terrace, take some pictures, and soak up the atmosphere.

  They paused in the same place where Trump and Pence were inaugurated in 2017 on a crisp, clear day amid a crowd of former presidents and against a Capitol decorated in red, white, and blue bunting. Four years later, Trump supporters swarmed marble terraces, walkways, and the steps of the west front of the same ornate building. Countless Trump flags flapped in the wind. Clouds of tear gas hung in the air against the purple twilight sky, and the orange light glowing from inside the Capitol’s windows gave the scene a surreal, apocalyptic feel.

  Saundra was inspired by a vista of Trumpian strength and patriotism: the Washington Monument off in the distance, the majestic Capitol in the foreground, and freedom-loving patriots fighting like hell to stop a stolen and fraudulent election, liberate their country, and save their president. She snapped pictures and recorded videos.

  “It just looked so neat,” she said. “We weren’t there to steal things. We weren’t there to do damage. We we
re just there to overthrow the government.”

  Saundra flew home to Michigan the next morning. In the twenty-four hours that had passed since the insurrection, she had become convinced that the violence around and inside the U.S. Capitol could never have come from fellow Trump supporters. She claimed to have watched a video that showed police escorting white vans full of Antifa into Washington. Another theory was that law enforcement was in on it the whole time—maybe they purposely didn’t secure the building, she said, because they wanted to blame an insurrection on Trump and then throw him out of office.

  Trump’s own video posted during the violence, in which he urged his people to go home, had depressed her.

  “We were supposed to be fighting until the end,” she said.

  But she reminded herself that he still hadn’t technically conceded. As soon as she got back to Sault Ste. Marie, she packed for the next Trump trip. Saundra trusted that something was coming and wanted a rally go-bag ready if she needed to leave at a moment’s notice.

  “We’re all on the edge of our seats waiting to hear about the next event,” she said. “Now we’re like an army, and it’s like boots on the ground. Tell us where we need to go! Tell us where we need to be, and we just drop everything and we go. Nobody cares about if they have to work. Nobody cares about anything.

  “The time is now,” she continued, sounding at once urgent and wistful. “It’s time to go.”

  The backlash against Trump was immediate. He was suspended from Twitter and Facebook the next day. A flood of White House officials resigned. Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao stepped down from Trump’s Cabinet, and her husband, Senator McConnell, told colleagues that he hoped never to speak to Trump again.