But the lasting takeaway from Trump’s Tulsa rally was not anything the president said. It was the empty seats. An image captured by Washington Post photographer Jabin Botsford of a lone man holding a red “Make America Great Again” sign in his lap as he watched Trump perform from a vast sea of empty blue seats in the upper bowl of the BOK Center went viral online. The conservative Drudge Report ran the all-caps headline: maga less mega.
It turned out the Trump campaign appeared to have been punked into believing it had one million RSVPs. Users of the social media platform TikTok, as well as Korean pop music fan accounts, claimed to have signed up for hundreds of thousands of tickets to the rally as a prank. Of course, they had no intention of showing up.
Trump was furious. He didn’t talk to Parscale for two days, and then exploded on his campaign manager. With Parscale on the phone, Trump delivered a vicious tirade from the Oval Office where other advisers were gathered to listen. He unfurled one presidential f-bomb after another.
“You fucked it up!”
“You fucked me!”
“You fucked up the whole campaign because of it!”
“The worst fucking mistake!”
Parscale sheepishly said, “Sir, there’s nothing else I could’ve done.”
The fallout was not merely political. Tulsa had experienced a sharp rise in coronavirus cases in the two days before the June 20 rally, but suffered a record-setting spike in the week that followed. Tulsa County racked up 902 new cases in the week after the event, gaining as many as 200 to 260 new cases each day. Before Trump’s visit, the daily count of new cases ranged from 76 to 96. Back at Trump campaign headquarters, staff expressed dismay and fear about having been exposed to the virus. The Trump campaign contracted a medical testing company in Virginia to administer new tests for everyone. Staff were told to keep the testing location a secret, however, to avoid more bad press.
The Secret Service’s field office in Tulsa, meanwhile, arranged with a local hospital to have a special testing session off-site on June 23. The session was both to determine if a slew of local agents who assisted with the rally had contracted the virus and to test some local officials who attended the event. In addition, several dozen Secret Service officers who traveled to Tulsa to help provide security and screening were instructed to self-isolate at home for two weeks because they had been exposed to coworkers who tested positive.
Among those who tested positive for coronavirus after attending the rally were Oklahoma governor Kevin Stitt and former presidential candidate Herman Cain. Stitt, who complained of feeling achy mostly, recovered. He insisted he had not contracted the virus at the president’s rally, although he, like most attendees, did not wear a mask at the rally. Cain, also maskless at the rally, fell ill a few days later. He was soon hospitalized with COVID-19 and died on July 30.
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Throughout the month of June, Trump grew angry and agitated watching Black Lives Matter protests take root across the country. Demonstrations in Seattle and Portland—a pair of Democrat-led cities in Democrat-led states—triggered the president, who complained that “terrorists” were allowed to run roughshod over law-abiding Americans. As he saw it, he needed to call up the cavalry as commander in chief and ride in to save the day. But neither Barr nor Pat Cipollone would green-light Trump’s wishes to deploy the military to quell the civil unrest. This sparked constant tension between Trump and his attorney general and White House counsel.
Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood was part progressive haven and part tony enclave, with a row of multimillion-dollar houses as well as a funky entertainment district of grunge bars and coffeehouses popular with partiers. In the early days of June, though, the area’s Cal Anderson Park and adjoining streets had been converted into an occupied, police-free zone by people protesting Floyd’s killing. Protesters named their new camp “CHAZ,” for Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, and later “CHOP,” for Capitol Hill Occupied Protest zone. CHOP started as a largely peaceful place, with speeches and music and even a group viewing of a film on systemic racism in the criminal justice system. Seattle mayor Jenny Durkan was concerned about police confronting protesters and someone getting killed, so the city monitored rather than uprooted the encampment. Police boarded up and abandoned a nearby station the week of June 8.
Watching this police retreat on television, Trump vented his disgust with the city’s local leaders. On June 10, he tweeted a message to Durkan and Washington governor Jay Inslee: “Take back your city NOW. If you don’t do it, I will. This is not a game. These ugly Anarchists must be stooped [sic] IMMEDIATELY. MOVE FAST!”
Barr had assured the president that he had a lot of faith in Seattle police chief Carmen Best, explaining to him that she was keeping a close watch on the situation, had plans to clear CHOP if necessary, and was keeping the Feds fully briefed. It’s not as if federal buildings were being occupied, Barr told Trump. The situation was fairly contained.
Trump’s interest in a military response flared, however, when he turned on Fox News. He brooded watching Tucker Carlson sound dire warnings on his nightly show about “the descent of our nation into chaos and craziness,” which prominently featured Seattle as Exhibit A. Carlson claimed invading hordes were overtaking the city and nobody was stopping them. During his June 11 program, Carlson took a moment to jab mockingly at Trump. He said the CHOP organizers were like conquistadors who smartly seized their six-block territory as their own country. Then, Carlson said, “They built a wall around the place just like Donald Trump once said he would do.”
Fox found that its reports and commentaries about unrest in Seattle and elsewhere drew sizable attention, especially when paired with ominous images of burning cars and looting rioters. On June 12, Fox’s homepage featured an image of a man carrying an assault rifle in front of a Seattle storefront with shattered glass. But the picture had been digitally altered by splicing together multiple photographic images and putting the man with the rifle—a volunteer working security, in fact—in front of a looted store. Another Fox story on Seattle unrest carried the headline Crazy Town and showed a man running through a street with a car on fire behind him. The image was in fact from a different city, Minneapolis, and had been taken on May 30. When contacted by journalists about the altered or misplaced images, Fox removed them.
Still, the network’s coverage—and especially Carlson’s hyperbolic warnings—became a significant irritant inside the Justice Department, in no small measure because of how they shaped Trump’s thinking. One top law enforcement official said Carlson “kept on waving the bloody shirt on this issue, and even when things were dying down completely, they’d find a cameraman on some street corner and put it as if the whole country was falling apart. And then Carlson started directly attacking [the Justice Department]. I couldn’t tell if he was actually parroting the president or the president was parroting him.”
Whether or not the images of violence were manufactured didn’t matter to Trump. His supporters watching Fox believed America was burning—and the president felt political pressure to show them he was taking care of it. On June 15, Trump talked to Barr in the wake of Carlson’s stinging critique. The president asked, wasn’t there something he could do to show he was the boss over the protesters? Barr explained to him the state leaders had the authority to call up the National Guard, not the president.
Trump also pushed Cipollone for legal justification for a federal response, including suing Antifa. He often vented to other advisers in June about how ineffective he found Cipollone. In one such gripe session, Trump asked his assistant, Molly Michael, to call Cipollone down to the Oval from his second-floor office. The White House counsel walked in as Trump was still meeting with campaign advisers.
“Yes, Mr. President?” he asked.
Trump looked at Cipollone and said, “What have you been doing all day?”
The other advisers in the room, who ha
d heard Trump getting himself spun up about Cipollone earlier, knew what was coming. Oh, shit! they thought to themselves.
“Cities are on fire,” Trump yelled. “People are protesting. I want to shut it down. What do you do all day? Why hasn’t this stopped. I want it stopped.”
Cipollone tried to respond without telling Trump “nothing” or “no.”
“Some things are going to happen. We’re trying to do some things,” Cipollone said, adding that he would leave and call the Justice Department.
Trump, knowing that was unlikely to get him what he wanted, just shook his head.
Over the weekend of June 20, the Capitol Hill district did in fact turn bloody. A nineteen-year-old man was shot there and died, and a thirty-three-year-old man was shot nearby and left in critical condition. For Trump, this was cause to deploy the military. For Carlson, this was an opportunity to crow. In his opening monologue on June 22, Carlson ripped into Trump for “sitting back” and watching the “catastrophe.” He compared Trump’s do-nothing approach to the parent of a troubled, runaway child making no effort to try to find or help them. At a moment of crisis, Carlson argued, a president needed to act.
Trump fumed at Carlson’s broadside. On June 23, the president tweeted a threat to any protesters who tried to occupy the nation’s capital as they had in Seattle. “There will never be an ‘Autonomous Zone’ in Washington, D.C., as long as I’m your President. If they try they will be met with serious force!” Twitter flagged Trump’s menacing tweet for violating its standards because it threatened physical harm.
The situation in Seattle steadily grew worse by the end of the next weekend. At about 3:00 a.m. on June 29, Seattle police responding to 911 calls found a white Jeep strafed with gunfire; two teenage boys inside were taken to nearby hospitals. A sixteen-year-old was declared dead soon after arrival, while a fourteen-year-old was in critical condition. The television coverage of the bullet-riddled Jeep in Seattle got the president’s attention. Over the next few days, Trump called Barr demanding a massive federal force—military or otherwise—to reclaim CHOP. The attorney general urged the president to hold off because local authorities already had assured him they soon would have the situation resolved.
On July 1, an estimated hundred police officers, wearing body armor and helmets and carrying batons, pushed into the protest zone around 5:00 a.m. Local FBI agents assisted. Soon after the park and nearby streets were fully cleared, Kayleigh McEnany strode into the press briefing room at the White House. “I am pleased to inform everyone that Seattle has been liberated,” the press secretary said. “President Trump compelled action.”
About a week later, Trump claimed to Fox viewers that the clearing of the CHOP zone was his doing. “One hundred percent,” the president told Sean Hannity. “We were going in. We were going in very soon. We let [local officials] know that, and all of a sudden, they didn’t want that, so they went in before we got there.”
At the Justice Department, Barr and his aides were stunned by the brazenness of the president’s claim. “It was bullshit,” recalled one official.
Indeed, Durkan denied that Trump had alerted her or other local officials of an imminent federal action. “It just never happened,” the mayor told The Washington Post. “I don’t know what world he’s living in.”
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By the end of June, the number of coronavirus cases and deaths had surged across the Sun Belt. Numbers were on the rise in so-called red states that had voted for Trump in 2016—chief among them, Arizona, Florida, and Texas. The evolving situation, coupled with his humiliating showing in Tulsa, conjured a mood of defeatism for the president as well as for those advising him.
Parscale tried to convince Trump to change course and follow the guidance of the task-force doctors. That way, if infections spread further or the death toll continued to rise, the president could shift blame to them.
“Let the doctors do the work,” Parscale advised Trump. “Do whatever Fauci fucking says. Let Fauci take the hit. Don’t own it.
“You’re going to lose if you don’t change,” Parscale argued. “You’re going to lose.”
But Trump wanted to be in charge. “I’m doing this my own way,” Trump told Parscale. “I’m going to win.”
Yet around this same time, in late June, Trump confided in Kellyanne Conway that the odds were stacked heavily against him. The president simply saw no way out of the pandemic. Plus, he had growing fears about Democrats gaining an edge in mail-in balloting, which had become a popular alternative to in-person voting in many states during the primary elections that spring and, with the pandemic still raging, was poised to be the way tens of millions of Americans voted in the general election.
“There’s no way we can win,” Trump told Conway. “With this virus and these mail-in ballots and these lockdowns, we can’t win.”
Conway argued that he still could win. The reason? His opponent was Joe Biden. She and Trump agreed that he could prevail by driving a sharp contrast with Biden, highlighting his nearly five-decade political career and, with the nickname “Sleepy Joe,” suggesting to voters that Biden was long past his prime.
Around this time, Chris Christie offered blunt advice to Trump about the state of the race. He told the president he was losing.
“Look, you’re running the 2016 campaign again and you can’t run the same campaign twice,” Christie said. “It just never works. Times are different. You’re different. The way people view you is different. Your opponent is different. This doesn’t make any logical sense to run the same campaign. You have to run a forward-looking campaign. Incumbents who win are the ones who are talking about tomorrow, not yesterday. All you’re doing is talking about yesterday and you’ve got to stop doing it.”
Christie told Trump about a voter he ran into on the boardwalk in Asbury Park in 2013, when he was running for reelection after helping rebuild the Jersey Shore following Hurricane Sandy.
“This guy comes up to me and he says, ‘So, Governor, if I vote for you, what are you going to do?’ ” Christie said. “And I said, ‘Well, you see what I’ve done. I’m rebuilding the Shore, rebuilding the state.’ He goes, ‘That’s what I got for voting for you last time. What do I get for voting for you this time?’ ”
Christie told Trump, “You know, that’s the way a lot of voters think. They want to know what you’re going to do next. They don’t want to hear what you did. They lived that and either benefited or not.”
Christie advised Trump to reorient his message to voters around the future, such as casting himself as the guy to rebuild America in his second term by expanding manufacturing and repairing infrastructure. He encouraged Trump to do a “thank-you tour” across the country of hospitals, small businesses, and manufacturing plants that made PPE and ventilators.
“The public won’t know what to do with Donald Trump running around saying ‘thank you’ to everybody—and, more importantly, Joe Biden won’t know what to do,” Christie said. “Right now, he’s just hiding in his basement because all you’re doing is insulting him. It’s the same old Trump playbook. He doesn’t have to respond to that, but if you start putting positive things out there, he’s going to feel the need to respond. Then he’s in trouble because America will not support the really left-wing Democratic agenda, and he’s keeping it under the covers right now because he can. You’ve got to let him get that out.”
Trump never ended up implementing Christie’s advice.
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Trump had been growing angry with the state of his campaign, and not only because he couldn’t draw a crowd in Tulsa. Every single national public poll since April showed Biden beating Trump, and the surveys in June showed Biden’s lead was increasing—up 10 points in a CNBC poll, up 12 in a Fox poll, up 14 points in a CNN poll.
As he often did at political low points, Trump searched for someone to
blame. The easiest target was Parscale, whose rivals had told Trump his campaign manager was in over his head and mismanaging the billion-dollar campaign.
Worse, Trump was coming to believe that Parscale had gotten rich and famous at his expense. The campaign manager had become a veritable MAGA celebrity, and the president was unwilling to share even a watt of his spotlight with others. Trump had also seen a provocative commercial released in May by the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump political action committee formed by a group of Republican Never Trump political strategists. In the ad, a woman says, “Brad is getting rich. How rich? Really rich. But don’t tell Donald. He’d wonder how Brad can afford so much. A $2.4 million waterfront house in Fort Lauderdale. Two Florida condos worth almost a million each. He even has his very own yacht, a gorgeous Ferrari, a sleek Range Rover. Brad brags about using private jets. Oh my, Brad’s a star! And why not? Brad’s worth every dollar. Just ask him.”
Trump playfully confronted Parscale about the ad. “Brad, you’ve got ass-slapping in your commercials,” the president told him, referring to a racy snippet of the Lincoln Project ad. But in conversations with other advisers, Trump revealed he was seething mad about the wealth and notoriety Parscale had attained.
A couple of weeks after the Tulsa rally, Parscale visited the White House and met with Jared Kushner in his small office down the hallway from the Oval. Kushner and Parscale had been friends since working closely on the 2016 campaign, and Parscale had always considered Kushner his closest ally in Trump World. They spoke on the phone daily, sometimes five or six times. They had each other’s backs.
This time, however, there was no sense of brotherhood between them. Kushner gave Parscale a cool, emotionless look and said matter-of-factly, “I think we’re going to have to make a change.”
I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final Year Page 23
