In other words, Esper didn’t know the walk was staged as a presidential photo op and didn’t know officers had used force to clear the protesters. “Look, I do everything I can to try to stay apolitical and try and stay out of situations that may appear political,” Esper said. “And sometimes I’m successful at doing that, and sometimes I’m not as successful, but my aim is to keep the department out of politics, to stay apolitical.”
Esper also did Milley a favor, seeking to dispel the notion that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had donned his camouflage uniform to look tough for Trump. Esper noted that it was standard protocol for military leaders to wear their field uniforms when meeting with troops on location, as Milley had done when he visited National Guard members.
Milley joined Esper as he walked back to his office and told the secretary he thought the speech was great. He had stepped up to the plate and offered his views plainly. Milley didn’t say so, but he also knew Esper’s remarks would land like a turd in the White House. Within fifteen minutes, Mark Meadows called Esper, who put the White House chief of staff on speakerphone. Esper’s office filled with the sound of Meadows yelling.
“What the fuck?” Meadows said. “The president is apoplectic! He’s really pissed. He’s going to rip your face off.”
As luck would have it, Esper and Milley were both due at the White House shortly for an 11:30 a.m. briefing on Afghanistan with Trump. They were to be joined by Kenneth McKenzie, a Marine Corps general who headed up U.S. Central Command. Esper ended the call with Meadows without resolution. Esper was not looking forward to the meeting.
“I’m just going to get my face ripped off,” Esper said.
“Yeah, it’s true, you are,” Milley said, then tried to joke a little. “But you need to stare the dragon down. You need to just do it. Mr. Secretary, just pretend you’re back at West Point on the Plain and you just brace like a cadet.”
Esper paced in his office, thinking. He knew it would be better to let the president cool down, but that was no longer an option.
“Let’s go get this over with,” Esper told Milley. “If there’s going to be a showdown, let’s get it over with.”
Esper grabbed his suit jacket and they went out to the secretary’s waiting vehicle and rode across the Potomac River to the White House.
Esper and Milley headed into the Situation Room, where they planned to brief the president at 11:30 a.m. But an aide said, “The president wants to see you immediately.” So they went upstairs to the Oval Office. Chairs were arranged in a half-moon around the Resolute Desk, with Vice President Pence, Bill Barr, Robert O’Brien, Meadows, and a few others gathered around. Two chairs sat empty in front of the desk.
When Esper and Milley entered the room, the others facing the president put their heads down, as if praying in church. Milley told aides he thought to himself, Oh, boy, this is going to be classic. Esper took his seat, and as Milley put his hands on the back of his chair to begin to sit down, the nuclear bomb exploded.
“You betrayed me!” Trump screamed at Esper. “You’re fucking weak! What is this shit? I make the decisions on the Insurrection Act. I’m the president, not you. You’re taking options away from the president. This is about presidential authority. This is about presidential prerogative. And you’re not the fucking president!”
Trump continued his open-mouthed roar. “You took away my authority!” he said.
Esper, looking straight at the president, chose a calm, even tone.
“Mr. President, I didn’t take away your authority,” he said.
“That is not your position to do that,” Trump said.
“Mr. President, I didn’t say it was my position. I said it was my recommendation,” Esper said.
Several in the room were blown away by how viciously Trump tore into his defense secretary, but they had to give Esper credit. He sat there, leaning forward in his chair, and took it. The scene resembled a grunt in basic training getting laced by a drill sergeant. Esper didn’t flinch. He still held the dark-blue folder containing the Afghanistan briefing materials that he planned to present.
Once Trump’s tongue-lashing had slowed, Esper tried to push back with a few facts about the law.
“Mr. President, the Insurrection Act is . . .” Esper began.
But he didn’t get far. Trump went off again, this time at an even higher decibel.
Trump accused Esper of insubordination as well as several other apostasies, but the president was talking so fast it was hard to make out what they all were. He accused Esper of saying several things Esper remembered were not in the speech he himself had written.
“Mr. President, I did not say that. Here’s what I said,” Esper told him. He then began to repeat the correct phrases.
Trump interrupted: “No, you said it!”
Esper had brought a copy of the transcript of his remarks that morning and had highlighted key sentences. When the president again insisted, Esper pulled the transcript out of his jacket, reached over to the Resolute Desk, and slid the paper directly under his nose.
“Mr. President, here’s what I said,” Esper said.
Arms folded, Trump looked down at the paper. He didn’t appear to read it. But he fell silent for a moment. Then another complaint came to him.
“You did it during the hearing!” Trump said.
Esper looked confused. What hearing? He would later learn the president was talking about a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing that Chairman Lindsey Graham had held that morning to highlight the FBI’s alleged abuse of power for investigating Trump and his campaign in 2016. The president thought Esper had coordinated his news conference to distract from press coverage of the hearing, which Trump was counting on for good talking points for his reelection campaign.
Everyone in the room was silent. Once Trump’s latest explosion subsided, they went to the Situation Room for the Afghanistan briefing. As they left the White House that afternoon, Esper told Milley it was all over.
“I’m going to get fired,” Esper said. Then, a few moments later, he said, “I’m going to resign.”
“Hang in there,” Milley replied. “You did good. Hold your head high.”
It was easy for Milley to say; his face hadn’t been ripped off. Many in the Oval that day suspected that despite his anger, Trump would not actually fire Esper—not with his election only five months away, not when he needed to counter the narrative of his presidency as chaotic and dysfunctional in the midst of several crises. David Urban, an outside political adviser to Trump who was close to top Pentagon officials, and whom Trump had appointed to West Point’s board of visitors, called Milley that afternoon.
“Esper really fucked up today. He was trying to fix the situation and he made it far worse,” Urban said, noting that the defense secretary had angered Trump with his attempt to explain his Insurrection Act comments. But, Urban added, “Look, the president clearly can’t fire him right now because the world’s a tinderbox. Everything’s too volatile.”
* * *
—
Ever since Trump’s campaign ground to a halt in March because of the pandemic, the president had been itching to return to the trail. He missed his Make America Great Again rallies, which were rebranded “Keep America Great” for his reelection. He missed having the big stage all to himself, the bright lights on him, the sea of red-capped fans hanging on to his every word. MAGA rallies fed his soul.
Watching the coverage of thousands of people marching in cities across America, Trump thought this could be the green light to restart his rallies, irrespective of his own government’s recommendations against mass gatherings. So he called Brad Parscale.
“I see all these people out there,” Trump told his campaign manager. “Why can’t we do rallies if they do these protests?”
“We can get away with it if we do it outside,” Parscale said. “Let’s call them
protests.”
Staging a political rally during the pandemic carried significant risks. It would be fresh evidence that the president was not taking the virus seriously. Then there was the actual risk that he or his supporters might get infected. What if his rallies became superspreader events? But the president wanted to hold a rally, and Parscale knew he wouldn’t be able to stop him, so he got to work planning one. He thought first of Florida, a critical battleground state, where the Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, had some of the nation’s most lax coronavirus policies.
Parscale suggested an outdoor rally at the Florida State Fairgrounds in Tampa where some small measure of social distancing would be possible. “If you really want people, let’s do a tailgate in Tampa,” he told Trump. “Let’s do a giant tailgate with people having parties in the back of their cars, twelve feet apart.”
“No, I don’t want to do that,” Trump said. He wanted the image of a packed crowd, not people spread far apart.
Then Parscale proposed an outdoor rally in Pensacola, where the ocean breeze might help cut into Florida’s oppressive heat and humidity this time of year. He got an initial sign-off from DeSantis, but then the governor appealed directly to the president. DeSantis talked Trump out of holding his first rally during the pandemic in Pensacola by arguing that doing so would kill his chances of winning Florida. The governor suggested Trump and his team find another state to host them.
Parscale later ran into Pence in the hallway outside the Oval Office. Who better to advise on which state to hold a rally than the head of the coronavirus task force?
“Sir, what’s the most open state to have an indoor rally?” Parscale asked.
Pence’s answer was easy: “Oklahoma.”
Parscale called Governor Kevin Stitt, a Republican, who gave his blessing. “Yeah, come on,” Stitt said.
Parscale presented the plan to Trump in the Map Room of the White House. Pence was there, as were Meadows, Jared Kushner, and a handful of other advisers. Most of them pushed Trump to do the Oklahoma rally outdoors, where the virus spread much less easily. But the president was adamant about doing it indoors. He wanted to convince the country that the threat of the virus was gone, that it finally was safe to fully reopen, congregate en masse, and return to normal.
“This is a bad idea,” Parscale told Trump. “Sir, you don’t know if people will show up. I was in the airport this morning at DCA and was the only person there.”
He pulled out his cell phone to show Trump a photo he had taken of the nearly empty terminal at Washington’s Reagan National Airport. The president snapped.
“You don’t know that people won’t show up,” he said.
“I don’t know,” Parscale replied. “That’s the point.”
“They’ll show up for me,” Trump insisted. “They’re not going to believe this virus stuff.”
Nearly three months into the pandemic, Trump still did not appreciate the seriousness and endurance of the threat, nor the time it would take for life to return to normal. When campaign aides presented him polling data that showed his approval rating taking a hit because of his mismanagement of the pandemic, Trump would say, “Fucking virus!” He had become conspiratorial in his mindset about COVID-19, telling Parscale that the continuation of public health restrictions into the summer was in part an elaborate plot to keep him from holding rallies and therefore deny him a second term.
“People will show up,” Trump told Parscale.
“Okay, I’ll do it,” the campaign manager said. “I’ll have to go all-out.”
There was a curious presence in the Map Room that day. Mike Lindell, the founder and chief executive of MyPillow, was visiting from his home in Minnesota. MyPillow was one of the biggest advertisers on Fox News, and Lindell was the product’s on-camera pitchman. The jingle went, For the best night’s sleep in the whole wide world, visit MyPillow dot com. Over the years, Lindell had garnered a lot of facetime with Trump via the television screen. It didn’t hurt that he was an outspoken Trump booster and a minor celebrity at MAGA rallies.
Trump had come to believe that Parscale’s television advertising strategy was flawed. He didn’t think the campaign was placing ads smartly, and he thought MyPillow had great rates from Fox. In the Map Room meeting, Trump suggested that Lindell might do a superior job and asked him to take over the Trump campaign’s TV ads. Unwilling to cede control over the campaign’s ads, with millions of dollars at stake for himself and other consultants, Parscale said, “Let’s compete.”
Turning to Kushner, who controlled all major decisions on the campaign, Parscale said, “Jared, give us a hundred thousand dollars—fifty thousand dollars to my company and fifty thousand dollars to MyPillow’s company—and have the ads on Fox say, ‘If you’re going to support Donald Trump, grab your phone now and dial 88022 now.’ Prospecting commercials. See which one gets more sign-ups for less cost.”
Off they went. After the ads ran, it turned out Parscale’s ad generated more responses, by a large margin, and Kushner convinced the president to drop the idea of outsourcing ads to Lindell.
One of the president’s advisers remarked later, “Trump is so bad at marketing, you don’t understand. He’s great at marketing ideas, great at branding—unbelievable brander. Obviously great at messaging because he’s the best gaslighter in history. But horrible at how marketing works—how to buy TV ads, how digital works. He doesn’t understand.”
* * *
—
On June 8, Francis Collins was working at the NIH when he got a strange message from the White House summoning him to meet with Trump later that day. There was no agenda, and as Collins made his way downtown from his Bethesda offices, he could only wonder, What is this all about?
The subject on Trump’s mind was hydroxychloroquine, which had become a personal obsession and was then under review by the FDA. The antimalarial drug was untested as a treatment for COVID-19, the FDA had warned against its use outside of hospitals, and a study in The Journal of American Medical Association had shown it was ineffective against the virus and associated with cardiac problems. Still, Trump believed it to be a “game changer,” as he put it back in March—so much so that in mid-May, after the coronavirus outbreak at the White House, the president had announced he was taking hydroxychloroquine for two weeks as a prophylactic.
When Collins arrived in the Oval Office on June 8, Trump immediately set out to compel the NIH director to see hydroxychloroquine as he did: a magical cure-all. The president offered up firsthand evidence.
“Let me just get Jack Nicklaus on the phone,” Trump said. “He’ll tell you what happened.”
Nicklaus, eighty, a champion golfer nicknamed “The Golden Bear” who spent a lot of time in the Palm Beach area, was an old friend of Trump’s. Trump asked his assistant to get Nicklaus on the phone, and for half an hour or so the golfer talked on speakerphone to Trump and Collins about how he and his wife, Barbara, had had COVID-19 in March. He said the president had urged him to take hydroxychloroquine, which they did, and they had recovered. The conversation was surreal.
After the call with Nicklaus ended, Collins told Trump, “Anecdotes where people draw a cause-and-effect conclusion are dangerous. They have led us down the wrong path for medical issues for centuries. We don’t want to make that mistake here. I’m glad Jack Nicklaus got better. I’m glad his wife got better. I’m glad you think that this has been helpful. But Mr. President, the data, when you look at it in a rigorous way, does not support this.”
Trump was unpersuaded. He wasn’t completely sold on the scientific process already underway to assess the drug—not when his friend Jack had a story to tell.
A week later, on June 15, the FDA revoked its emergency use authorization of the drug. The FDA announced that, based on emerging scientific data, chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine were unlikely to be effective in treating COVID-19 and that there were potentially ser
ious side effects, including adverse cardiac events, associated with the drug.
* * *
—
As it did in many institutions, George Floyd’s killing forced an uncomfortable racial reckoning in the military. In early June, Pentagon leaders decided to do something about the use of Confederate symbols, which were seen as perpetuating racism. The Marine Corps became the first service to prohibit the Confederate battle flag from being hung, while the army considered renaming ten bases honoring Confederate generals. That list included three of the five most populous bases: Fort Bragg in North Carolina, Fort Hood in Texas, and Fort Benning in Georgia.
As momentum grew among advocacy groups to change the names of the bases, Trump called Milley at home one night. It was late, about 10:00, and Milley was in bed at the chairman’s official residence, high on a hilltop at Fort Myer in Arlington, Virginia, overlooking Washington’s monuments to democracy and valiant soldiers.
“General, what do you think about renaming these Confederate bases?” Trump asked.
“Mr. President, I think it’s absolutely the right thing to do,” Milley said, according to an account of the conversation he shared with aides.
“But my base, my base . . .” Trump said, referring to his political base and his assumption that his supporters would oppose the renaming.
“Mr. President, I don’t know anything about your base,” Milley replied. “But we should rename these bases.”
A few days later, in the Oval Office, Milley had an unrelated meeting with the president and a group of other advisers, including Pence, Esper, Meadows, O’Brien, Keith Kellogg, Pat Cipollone, and Stephen Miller. Trump shifted the topic to the debate, now raging in public. He put Milley on the spot.
I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final Year Page 20
