I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final Year

by Carol Leonnig

  Kushner, Hope Hicks, and Dan Scavino were in the room and heard Trump’s end of the conversation. They were surprised.

  “Secretary Azar has just delivered you a vaccine and you just yelled at him,” Hicks told Trump. “Why did you do that?”

  “This is great news,” Scavino added. “We should be promoting this.”

  Kushner, too, tried to correct the president.

  “This is a really big advance,” he told his father-in-law. “That was not helpful.”

  PART TWO

  Seven

  Bunkers, Blasts, and Bibles

  Ah! They’ll kill me. They’ll kill me. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe.”

  Shortly after 8:00 p.m. on May 25, George Floyd, a forty-six-year-old Black man, was handcuffed and pinned against the pavement outside a south Minneapolis convenience store. He pleaded for his life. He cried out for his children and for his mother. He said, “I can’t breathe,” more than twenty times. A white officer, Derek Chauvin, knelt on Floyd’s neck for nine minutes. Floyd gasped, “They’ll kill me. They’ll kill me.” His pleas grew faint and then silent. His body went limp. Paramedics could not resuscitate him. Floyd, having struggled with addiction and unemployment, having contracted COVID-19 and survived, died under the knee of a police officer.

  That night the police had received a radio call about a man trying to pass a counterfeit $20 bill to buy cigarettes. Responding to the scene, a pair of officers noticed Floyd nearby with a friend inside his car, and suspected they were doing drugs. They handcuffed Floyd, who complained about being placed in a squad car, and two additional officers arrived. His arrest rapidly turned into a savage show of force and brutality, as Chauvin knelt on Floyd’s neck and Floyd cried out again and again, “I can’t breathe.” Horrified bystanders gathered, some recording video on their phones.

  The next morning, May 26, videos circulated widely online. People reacted with overwhelming revulsion. By that afternoon, the Minneapolis Police Department had fired all four officers involved. The city’s mayor, Jacob Frey, appeared near tears in a news conference. “It was malicious and it was unacceptable,” he said of Floyd’s death. “There is no gray there.”

  Video of Floyd’s final breaths played on a loop in the media, becoming indelible in the nation’s conscience. Another Black American who posed no threat had died at the hands of the police. Eric Garner. Tamir Rice. Walter Scott. Philando Castile. Alton Sterling. Stephon Clark. Breonna Taylor. And now, George Floyd.

  For many Americans, this unending cycle of police brutality was too much to bear.

  Breaking the normally inviolable solidarity of police, law enforcement leaders around the country condemned Chauvin’s knee hold on Floyd. “There is no need to put a knee on someone’s neck for NINE minutes. There IS a need to DO something,” Chattanooga police chief David Roddy tweeted. “If you wear a badge and you don’t have an issue with this . . . turn it in.”

  On May 26, President Trump had a relatively light schedule. In the Oval Office just after noon, he swore in his new director of national intelligence, Congressman John Ratcliffe, who was being rewarded with a plum administration post for having energetically and unconditionally defended Trump in the impeachment hearings. Trump had a meeting that afternoon with Mike Pompeo and made remarks in the Rose Garden about protecting seniors from diabetes.

  After Trump first saw the video of Floyd’s dying moments, he reacted with what aides described as rare, visceral emotion. The president had on occasion registered disgust and disapproval for what he considered police overreaction that led to a person’s death, whether the victim was Black or white. He reacted more strongly than his advisers might have expected given his embrace of the “Thin Blue Line” flag and frequent calls for “law and order,” including when in 2017 he suggested police rough up suspects when putting them in a “paddy wagon.”

  That evening, angry protesters took to the streets in Minneapolis to demand action for what they rightly called a police murder. Protests would erupt the next day in cities across the country, from Los Angeles to Chicago to Memphis. Before long, demonstrations were taking place practically everywhere.

  On May 27, Trump met with Bill Barr to review what had happened in Minneapolis. Barr told Trump the Justice Department was launching a civil rights investigation, following the local authorities’ own investigation, and went over the key questions the legal team would seek to answer in deciding whether to charge the officers. Trump was visibly disturbed by Floyd’s death. He exhibited more genuine empathy than his advisers had ever seen in him. The president was agitated about what he believed to be obvious abuse.

  “What the fuck? What happened here?” Trump asked.

  This was not a first for Trump. In July 2019, when Barr had decided that the Justice Department would not charge police in the killing by choke hold of Garner in Staten Island, New York, Trump had had a similar reaction. He had wanted to know why Barr wasn’t going after bad cops.

  “That was bad. That was really bad—that cop, you know,” Trump said at the time. “I grew up with guys like that in Queens.”

  Barr explained the officer’s actions looked bad but did not cause Garner’s death.

  “Mr. President, they were sent there to arrest the guy, and the guy was doing that,” Barr said. “But the bottom line is, he started off in an authorized hold, the guy was bucking around and his arm slipped into a position, but it was for seven seconds and it did not cause his death.”

  But Trump’s preeminent concern was typical: how to play Floyd’s death for the cameras. Kayleigh McEnany also joined the meeting to discuss what Trump would say publicly. Trump debated how much of his personal outrage to make public.

  “What should I say about this?” Trump asked his attorney general and press secretary. Some of his other advisers proposed a toned-down version of his disgust. That was fine with the president. He wasn’t pushing to make a big statement right away, and later that day Trump tweeted that Floyd’s death was “very sad and tragic.” He also proposed that the FBI and Justice Department investigate the police for a possible civil rights violation.

  On May 28, the third straight day of protests in Minneapolis, some of them violent, Minnesota governor Tim Walz activated the National Guard to restore peace to the Twin Cities. But protests continued. A large group of demonstrators surrounded the 3rd Precinct police station, forcing police to abandon the building, which was soon set ablaze by protesters. Crowds spilled into neighboring St. Paul, burning and vandalizing more storefronts and buildings in a commercial district. Not even the announcement that Chauvin had been arrested and charged with second- and third-degree murder could calm the unrest in the streets.

  At about 1:00 a.m. on May 29, after watching television footage of the precinct station fire, Trump tweeted that the Minneapolis mayor was “very weak” and that the protesters were “thugs who are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd.” Trump then tweeted, “when the looting starts, the shooting starts,” a phrase that echoed the brutal crackdown on civil rights protests in Black neighborhoods in Miami in the 1960s.

  Later that day, Trump spoke by phone with Floyd’s family. “I just expressed my sorrow,” Trump said of the call, adding that what happened in Minneapolis “should never happen” and that “the family of George is entitled to justice.” Aides later described the president as “gracious” and “sympathetic” in his conversation with Floyd’s brother Philonise Floyd and said he had invited the family to visit the White House. But Philonise Floyd offered a different interpretation. “It was so fast. He didn’t give me an opportunity to even speak,” Philonise Floyd said in an interview with civil rights leader Al Sharpton on MSNBC. “It was hard. I was trying to talk to him, but he just kept, like, pushing me off, like, ‘I don’t want to hear what you’re talking about.’ ” The brother added, “I just told him, ‘I want justice.’ I said, ‘I can’t believe that they committed a modern-d
ay lynching in broad daylight. I can’t stand for that.’ ”

  * * *

  —

  On May 28, as the Black Lives Matter movement was erupting, the nation reached a tragic milestone: one hundred thousand coronavirus deaths. Trump had claimed the death toll would never rise this high. On February 26, he had famously said that the number of coronavirus cases “within a couple of days is going to be down to zero,” and the next day had declared, “It’s going to disappear. One day—it’s like a miracle—it will disappear.”

  The president chose not to honor the occasion. There was no moment of silence or somber commemoration. There was no opportunity for Americans, frightened by the relentless power of the “invisible enemy,” as Trump had termed it, to grieve collectively.

  Instead Trump focused on other matters. In the days leading up to the milestone, he played golf at his private club in Virginia, at the entrance to which his motorcade zipped past a small group of protesters holding up a sign that read: “I care do U? 100,000 dead.” And he was especially active on social media, tweeting or retweeting messages mocking the weight of Georgia Democratic leader Stacey Abrams, calling Hillary Clinton a “skank,” and promoting a baseless conspiracy theory that former congressman and MSNBC host Joe Scarborough may have had an affair with and killed a former staffer.

  Then, finally, Trump directly addressed the death toll, refusing to take responsibility. He tweeted on May 26: “For all of the political hacks out there, if I hadn’t done my job well, & early, we would have lost 1 1/2 to 2 Million People, as opposed to the 100,000 plus that looks like will be the number. That’s 15 to 20 times more than we will lose.”

  Michael Gerson, President George W. Bush’s chief speechwriter on September 11, 2001, and during the crisis that followed, highlighted Trump’s lack of public statement. “There’s maybe a fundamental problem here in the ability to feel and express empathy, and that’s a serious problem in the aftermath of loss of life and a kind of crisis that involves the loss of American lives,” he said in an interview with The Washington Post’s Ashley Parker.

  * * *

  —

  Most of the protests of Floyd’s death and displays of solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement across the country were peaceful, but in some places there was unrest, violence, and looting. Between May 27 and May 29, police in forty-eight U.S. cities arrested more than fourteen thousand people during protest-related activities. During that time, Trump and his advisers warily monitored the situation and conferred with governors, mayors, and law enforcement leaders about how to quell the unrest. But on the evening of Friday, May 29, the demonstrations literally came to the president’s front yard.

  In anticipation of civil unrest in the nation’s capital, officials in Washington had taken some modest security precautions. The Justice Department brought in a few dozen U.S. marshals and Bureau of Prisons officers who had been trained in prison riots to protect the department’s Pennsylvania Avenue headquarters over the coming weekend. The U.S. Park Police, which has jurisdiction over the National Mall, monuments, and other federal lands in the city, and the Secret Service set up a temporary perimeter of waist-high sections of metal fencing, resembling bike racks, a few yards out from the White House’s northern fence line. This essentially created a buffer on Pennsylvania Avenue, the most exposed side of the eighteen-acre complex. Other than that, however, there was no planning for or expectation of the protests that would come that evening.

  The first crowds began gathering in small clusters throughout the city that Friday evening at about 5:00. At Fourteenth and U Streets NW, the epicenter of Black culture in Washington, which was scarred by the 1968 riots but had been reborn in the twenty-first century as a diverse, vibrant, gentrified neighborhood, roughly two hundred people assembled peacefully but noisily. Some in the group chanted “I can’t breathe,” and a speaker led the crowd in reciting a list of names of unarmed Black men and women killed by police. Then the crowd marched south on Fourteenth Street, toward the White House. As people flowed into Lafayette Square in front of the White House, a small skirmish ensued between protesters—many of them young people chanting “Black Lives Matter!”—and the Park Police and Secret Service officers. Some protesters tossed plastic bottles at the officers’ heads. Police surrounded one man.

  Shortly after 7:00 p.m., the crowd swelled considerably. To the surprise of officers, there were now as many as five hundred people. The protesters were no longer standing back and chanting, a routine the officers knew well from hundreds of protests outside the White House over the years. Now members of the crowd rushed to the perimeter of temporary fencing. Many tugged at the metal racks, hopped over them where they could, and in some spots, pushed them over entirely.

  Secret Service officers radioed an alert. A young man with dark hair and a yellow shirt had hopped over the fencing around the Treasury Building, adjoining the White House complex and officially part of its grounds. Though it was 350 yards from the East Wing of the White House, the Treasury fencing was a known weak spot that “jumpers” had used twice before to reach the White House grounds and approach the mansion. The suspected jumper was taken into custody by officers, and three more protesters believed to have jumped over police barricades were also arrested and charged with unlawful entry at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Additional demonstrators had scaled iron bars near the Treasury and scrawled “Fuck Trump” in large letters on the window behind the bars.

  The threats sent up a flare in the Secret Service’s Joint Operations Center. Protesters were overwhelming officers to the point that officers feared the arrival of more. The threat level at the White House was elevated from “Condition Yellow” to “Condition Red,” indicating a breach that put the president in potential danger. Members of the president’s security detail rushed up a flight of stairs to his private quarters and quickly guided Trump, along with Melania and Barron, down a narrow tunnel to the emergency shelter under the East Wing. The Secret Service decision reflected the real danger the Trumps faced.

  Secret Service officers would later remark that the forcefulness of the demonstrators that night was like nothing they had experienced before, calling to mind clashes between police and Vietnam War protesters in the 1960s. The night was so harrowing that Keith Kellogg later brought Georgetown Cupcakes from the specialty cupcake shop to the office to hand out to agents as a token of appreciation. When he commended a young female agent for her bravery and asked her what it was like that night, she told him, “We were standing there and people were spitting on us and telling us all kinds of names. All I’m trying to do is do my job and protect the White House.”

  The next morning, May 30, Trump also commended the Secret Service in a series of messages on Twitter. “I was inside, watched every move, and couldn’t have felt more safe,” he wrote. The president added, “Big crowd, professionally organized, but nobody came close to breaching the fence. If they had they would have been greeted with the most vicious dogs, and most ominous weapons, I have ever seen. That’s when people would have been really badly hurt, at least.” Trump also claimed that Secret Service agents wanted to engage the protesters. He wrote that he had been told, “We put the young ones on the front line, sir, they love it, and good practice.”

  Trump’s suggestion of siccing “vicious dogs” on Black Lives Matter protesters evoked ugly memories of police brutality and racism. This language, coupled with a later tweet blaming D.C. mayor Muriel Bowser for the unrest, prompted a scornful rebuttal from the Black Democrat. “There are no vicious dogs & ominous weapons,” Bowser wrote on Twitter. “There is just a scared man. Afraid/alone.”

  The protests continued in Washington all weekend, including in front of the White House, and though they were peaceful during the day, at night violence increased. Several dozen law enforcement officers were treated for injuries. Downtown stores and office buildings were vandalized, as was the Hay-Adams hotel on Lafayette Square. On
Sunday night, protesters set fire to the basement of St. John’s Episcopal Church, an historic place of worship on Lafayette Square attended at least once by every president since James Madison in the early 1800s.

  The nation was reeling from an unprecedented confluence of health, economic, and social crises and crying out for leadership. Pictures of shattered glass, charred vehicles, bruised bodies, and graffiti-tagged buildings told the story of America from coast to coast. Yet Trump seemed unwilling or unable to unite Americans. His political strategy was to pit groups of people against one another. Indeed some in the public arena suggested the president should simply stay in the background.

  “He should just stop talking,” Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, a Black Democrat, said on May 31 on CNN. Invoking Trump’s equivocal response to the deadly 2017 white supremacist rally, she continued, “This is like Charlottesville all over again. He speaks, and he makes it worse. There are times when you should just be quiet. And I wish that he would just be quiet.”

  That weekend, Tom Rath, a longtime Republican official in New Hampshire, also lamented Trump’s tendency toward conflict: “On his automatic transmission, there is one speed. It is not conciliate. It is not comfort. It is not forge consensus. It is attack. And the frustration right now is that nobody is in charge. Anarchy rules.”

  On May 31, as protesters took to the streets in Washington for the third day straight, The New York Times reported that Trump had been taken to the bunker two nights earlier. The report, which was confirmed by other outlets and replayed heavily on cable news, infuriated the president because he thought it made him appear scared and weak. Trump demanded to know who had leaked this news to Maggie Haberman and Peter Baker of the Times. He told Mark Meadows, “Mark, you have to catch whoever leaked that. They should be in prison. They should be tried for treason. This is treasonous!”