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

by Michael C. Bender

  “The mob was fed lies,” McConnell said on January 19. “They were provoked by the president and other powerful people.”

  Trump was impeached in the House on January 13 for inciting an insurrection—the only president to be impeached twice—in a bipartisan vote that included support from ten Republicans. A week later, on January 20, he boarded Air Force One for the last time as president and flew home to Florida.

  “We will be back in some form,” Trump said before climbing into the plane.

  One of the truisms in Trump World held that the constant chaos and plot twists were always surprising but never shocking. The absurdity of it all always seemed to make perfect sense. And Trump’s insurrection was the ultimate coda—a horrifying but inevitable finale. He’d spent four years insisting that the media was lying, that elected officials weren’t to be believed, and that the courts weren’t to be trusted. He’d spent his entire presidency gaslighting the country with a version of reality in which he’d never lost, he’d never be convicted, and he’d never really go away.

  And, true to form, the story continued to unfold back in Washington in ways that were surprising—but hardly shocking. Days after Trump left office, polls showed that he still maintained high levels of support from inside his party. House Republicans who had voted to impeach him suddenly found themselves the target of censure and primary challenges. Republican leaders made plans to visit him at Mar-a-Lago—a steady stream of supplicants bowing down before their exiled king.

  And on February 13, 2021, the Senate—along with McConnell—voted to acquit Trump of the impeachment charges against him for a second time. In an interview on Fox News before the end of the month, McConnell was asked if he’d support Trump if he was the Republican presidential nominee in 2024.

  “Absolutely,” McConnell said.

  Back in Mar-a-Lago, Trump celebrated the support from fellow Republicans who had, once again, protected him from impeachment, delivering yet another acquittal that would preserve his ability to run for president again. With his Twitter and Facebook accounts still suspended, he turned to his diminished staff to help him send out an email.

  He vowed to keep fighting to deliver “American greatness” across the country. He described the MAGA movement as “historic, patriotic and beautiful.”

  “There has never been anything like it!” Trump said, offering a rare understatement.

  Footnotes

  1 The FairVote project showed that the biggest races were the least affected by recounts. In recounts of races with more than 2 million ballots cast, the average shift was 0.018 percent, which was nearly fourteen times smaller than Biden’s margin. Almost 5 million Georgians voted in the state’s presidential contest.

  2 These totals double again if she counted Don Junior and Mike Pence rallies, but no proper Front Row Joe would ever try to pad numbers like that.

  Epilogue

  “Things have happened that nobody can believe.”

  —Interview with the author, Mar-a-Lago, March 11, 2021

  Donald Trump arrived at Mar-a-Lago unprepared for the post-presidency.

  “What am I going to do all day?” he asked one aide after stepping off Air Force One in West Palm Beach on January 20.

  Most of his inner circle had largely abandoned him after the insurrection, leaving many of the day-to-day duties in the final two weeks to Johnny McEntee, his thirty-year-old West Wing aide. McEntee spent those first few nights after the riots on a White House couch as Trump, barely able to sleep, roamed the halls into the early hours of the morning. But even McEntee needed some distance. After the government plane touched down in Florida, he jumped on one of the first flights back home to California.

  Nothing was ready at Mar-a-Lago. Trump’s office was embarrassingly cramped. His skeletal staff was brought to the resort’s bridal suite, where random mattresses were strewn on the floor. Staffers had to drive over the intercoastal bridge to buy desks and chairs. Without Twitter, and with no White House press corps assembled outside, there was initially confusion about how to put out a statement.

  Trump had grown so distrustful of everyone around him that he couldn’t even take solace in the $80 million sitting in his leadership PAC, a combination of unspent campaign cash and postelection fundraising—as much as $50 million of which had been raised before Election Day. He wasn’t even sure if it was really there. He wouldn’t sign paychecks, refused to approve budgets, and ignored requests to send out fundraising emails until he could see the bank account statement with his own eyes.

  He repeatedly asked friends if they blamed him for the riots at the Capitol. “You don’t think I wanted them to do that, do you?” he asked.

  He peppered club guests, friends, and political aides—those who started reemerging in February—if he should run for president again. He wanted to know which Republicans would run against him, and whom he should endorse in the 2022 midterms. But he seemed more interested in the idea of his political power than in actually putting together any plans to wield it in 2024. Few believed, in those first months after leaving the White House, that he would run again in four years.

  There seemed to be a new melancholy to the former president’s tone when he talked about the next phase of his life. Melania loved it at Mar-a-Lago, he told friends, and she looked more beautiful than ever. He acknowledged his own advanced age, mused about whether some of his health risks—he was overweight, adding “at least that’s what they say”—might catch up with him, and even acknowledged a power higher than himself for lasting as long as he had.

  “The Good Lord’s given me good health up to now—but you never know,” he said.

  For Trump, it was a shocking amount of self-reflection.

  But Trump slowly found relief in the new routine.

  He golfed every day, sometimes playing as many as thirty-six holes at a time, and lost a noticeable amount of weight. A warm tone had reappeared in his face, and his hair was shaded with a color that was at least a bit closer to something found in the natural world.

  His campaign aides had started to descend on Palm Beach again, along with other Republican leaders. The Republican National Committee spent hundreds of thousands on catering and rental fees for fundraisers.

  And based on what I saw at Mar-a-Lago one evening in March, Trump replaced the adulation from his once roaring arena rally crowds with nightly standing ovations from his dues-paying members during the dinner service outside on the resort’s terrace.

  The ex-president sauntered across the stone patio, through the arched doorway of intricately woven iron grillwork, and into the Grand Salon of Mar-a-Lago, where I waited for our interview in mid-March.

  His shoulders were slightly hunched and rolled forward inside his dark blue suit, and he walked with a slow, deep bend in his knees—the same fluid and carefree gait I had been struck by when I first interviewed him at his New York skyscraper early in the 2016 campaign cycle. Trump carried himself with the pace of a man who had somewhere to be, and assumed he’d get there soon enough—and on his own terms. He greeted me as if I’d spent the past six weeks of his post-presidency standing right there under the hundreds of gold-leaf sunburst squares carved across the forty-two-foot-ceiling in the main sitting room.

  “Good to see you, Michael. Everything all right?” Trump asked me.

  He motioned for me to sit on a gold-cushioned couch positioned beneath one of two massive imported crystal chandeliers. Each light fixture featured two tiers of candelabra bulbs snuggled in a tangled nest of twinkling crystal pendants that scattered the light across the Ming vases, marble tables, and centuries-old Venetian silk tapestries hung from the walls of the 1,800-square-foot room.

  Trump poured his long, bulky frame across a curved-back chair about an arm’s length away from me, and made himself comfortable. His shoulders tilted toward me and his excessively long, bright yellow tie slid off the side of his belly. He slung his right arm over the side of the chair at his armpit. The chair didn’t recline, but Trump
had found repose.

  “We have Rick Scott coming tonight,” he told me as soon as he sat down.1 “We have a lot of people coming down, a lot of politicians coming here.”

  It was less than two months since Trump had left office, and the seventy-four-year-old former president’s disposition matched his relaxed surroundings. It was still 75 degrees in the evening. Just outside the fifty-eight-bedroom, thirty-three-bathroom mansion, a groundskeeper stood on the edge of the croquet greensward and casually sprayed touch-up paint on one of the game’s six white wickets. The last bits of sunlight sparkled off the cresting Atlantic Ocean waves in the distance.

  He’d just finished a round of golf with Ernie Els, the former pro golfer and two-time U.S. Open champion. Sean Hannity, the Fox News anchor, called midway through our interview—and Trump took the call and put it on speakerphone so I could listen to them banter. Club members had to walk past us as they arrived for dinner. They would say hello to Trump and offer encouragement.

  “This is the Wall Street Journal!” he’d tell them.

  Once the guests walked past, Trump would lean in to gossip with me about who was who—what company this person used to manage, how much money that person once had, who had battled cancer but made a miraculous recovery.

  Trump was in transition. Weeks earlier he’d been leader of the free world. Now he was King of Mar-a-Lago.

  Perhaps the biggest change, somewhat stunningly, was that Trump told me that he was glad to be off Twitter. He said his prewritten statements, now issued via news release, were “much more elegant.”

  “It’s really better than Twitter because I don’t do the stupid retweets that people don’t like—the retweets are the ones that get you,” Trump said. “And I saved a lot of time. I didn’t realize you can spend a lot of time on this. Now I actually have time to make phone calls, and do other things and read papers that I wouldn’t read. And with me, if I put a comma out of place or I accidentally misspelled a word, it was like the world coming down.”2

  But the adjustment wasn’t complete. He maintained a list of grievances that was lengthy, personal, and bipartisan.

  Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell was “dumb as a rock” for not spending more money on Covid relief before the election. Representative Liz Cheney, the daughter of former vice president Dick Cheney who would be stripped of her House leadership position for contradicting Trump’s false claims of a stolen election, was a “sleazebag” for voting to impeach him. He hadn’t received enough credit for the strong performance House Republicans had in the November elections.

  He remained fixated on his own reelection results. He still insisted the election had been stolen, and repeatedly mentioned disproven conspiracy theories about precincts in battleground states where the number of votes exceeded the number of voters. But he also added slightly more nuance to his argument, complaining that his chances to win had been diminished in the rush to change voting rules so close to the election. It was a stretch to describe that as stealing an election, but at least it was a point about policy that could prompt a legitimate debate.

  Trump also remained conflicted about how to think about his former running mate.

  The two had spoken a half dozen times by phone in the two months since they’d been out of office, and Trump told me he liked Pence “very much.” But he continued to claim that the former vice president had made a mistake by not rejecting the election results. Trump said he was still disappointed in Pence about that. Pence had received bad advice—both legal and political—from his staff, and had shirked his constitutional duty to reject a fraudulent election, Trump said.

  But maybe, I suggested, Pence didn’t think the election had been stolen.

  “Did Pence think the vote was correct?” I asked Trump.

  “I didn’t even ask him that question,” he said.

  Trump repeatedly told me how disappointed he was in Pence, but he also acknowledged that the two had spoken several times since leaving office. I asked Trump if Pence had apologized for not following his orders, given how unhappy Trump had been about the vice president’s allegiance to the Constitution.

  Trump paused.

  “I don’t talk to him about it,” he said. “I don’t care if he apologies or not. He made a mistake.”

  As the interview stretched into the evening, Trump’s phone continued to ring, guests poured into the resort, and the former president said he wanted to watch his successor’s first prime-time address that night—a short speech that Biden used to mark the one-year anniversary of coronavirus lockdowns, and pledge that the vaccine would be available for all adults starting in May.

  Trump ended our interview, but he told his staff he wanted to continue our conversation over the phone at another time. Even though he’d replied to nearly every question I asked—no matter the topic—with an answer about election fraud, he told me he liked my questions, and he invited me to stay for dinner. He asked Margo Martin and Jason Miller, two members of his press team present for the interview, to sit with me on the terrace.

  “He’s not dating,” Trump said about Miller. “He’s got a wonderful wife at home, so what the hell?”

  More than 200 guests sat at iron tables on the terrace, where they were serenaded by violins and cellos playing slow orchestral music. It was high season in South Florida. The guests who had been walking around earlier in yellow swimsuits and pants with turtle prints were now in evening jackets and long dresses. The men seemed to all be pushing their eighties, and many of the women were considerably younger. I sat down, and when a waiter wearing a face mask approached, I ordered a glass of Bordeaux, with a filet mignon, “Mr. Trump’s Wedge” salad, and a side of glazed baby beets and roasted turnips. As I finished my meal, the waiter approached again to tell me dinner would be complimentary that night. This was welcome news for my dinner companions, but I tried to explain to the waiter that, as a journalist, I needed to pay my own bill. The waiter gave me a confused look.

  “Mr. Trump insists,” he told me, and after some back and forth, I let it drop.

  A little past 8:00 p.m., Trump approached the terrace from the covered walkway, which I only realized when all of the guests stood up and cheered for the owner of their club, the former president of the United States. The applause was sustained and loud as Trump arrived at the hostess stand, where he met Senator Scott.

  The two men were escorted to the president’s table, set up in the middle of the terrace, but separated from the crowd with a burgundy velvet rope and stanchion. Guests craned their necks to see if they recognized whom Trump had invited to dinner.

  Later, Trump sent the waiter to bring me over to his table. Scott, whom I had covered for the Tampa Bay Times when he was governor of Florida, seemed happy to see me and ran through a list of old staffers, wondering if I’d seen any lately and if I was still keeping up with his former team. Trump interrupted. He wanted to show me a poll that Scott, chairman of the Senate Republican campaign committee, had brought him. It wasn’t a poll as much as it was a graphic—a bar chart showing that 83 percent of Republicans wanted him to run again for president.

  Trump also told me that Republicans would have lost eight more Senate seats in 2020 had it not been for his help. It was only because of him that his party was tied, 50–50, with Democrats in the chamber. It was an interesting theory since most Republicans in Washington thought they’d have had a two-seat majority had Trump paid more attention to the Georgia runoffs instead of the election fraud conspiracies.

  Scott interjected this time. The Florida Republican said Trump had saved ten seats, not eight.

  “But do I get credit?” Trump said. “No.”

  Other guests finished their dinners, walked by Trump, and leaned into his roped-off area. They offered encouragement, and agreed that 2020 had been a sham. Trump, the unceasing host, welcomed the interruptions.

  “Did you have the meat or the fish?” he asked. “Was it good?”

  When he and Scott had finished and stood
, the remaining crowd rose in their seats, too. Their numbers were smaller than earlier in the night, but their applause sounded just as loud, amplified by some boozy yelling and screaming for Trump.

  The forty-fifth president of the United States smiled.

  “Thank you,” he mouthed melodramatically.

  Trump acknowledged the applause with a wave of his hand, and then he disappeared into the suite of his club.

  Footnotes

  1 Trump and Scott are a fascinating pair of Floridians—both controversial entrepreneurs and Republican outsiders whose initial victories shocked the political establishment. But Trump is a brash extrovert with a flair for tabloid drama, while Scott is a robotic introvert who has possibly never cursed. They first met in 2011 after Scott was elected Florida governor. After the meeting, Trump adviser Roger Stone called Scott strategist Tony Fabrizio. “Trump liked Scott but thought he was a little weird,” Stone said. “That’s funny,” Fabrizio said. “Scott said the exact same thing.”

  2 Trump’s stable of seven campaign managers, chairman, and chief executives, as well as four White House staff chiefs, seven communications directors, and four press secretaries—along with half the country—had begged him for years to stop tweeting.

  Acknowledgments

  “I was the one to get it done, and even the fake news media knows.”

  —News release, Mar-a-Lago, March 29, 2021

  The acknowledgments sections in books always struck me as a bit ridiculous. There’s no other industry where you finish a job and immediately stand up and start thanking everyone you’ve ever met. But after writing my first book, I feel, well, a little different. Though not for the reasons I thought. Maybe it’s my Midwestern Catholicism coming out here, but my instinct is to fill these next pages not with acknowledgments but with apologies.