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

by Carol Leonnig

  Collins had gotten used to Meadows routinely calling to complain when Fauci made comments that he thought undermined Trump’s position. In another such instance that summer, Meadows had yelled to Collins, “Fauci’s out of control! He’s scaring everybody. He’s saying that we’re not managing this very well. This is doing political damage. He’s got to stop making everything always sound so awful.”

  Collins thought Meadows was generally wrong based on the science and overly sensitive to politics. In this case regarding 1918, however, Collins thought Meadows had a point. He called Fauci and suggested they find a delicate way for Fauci to dial back his 1918 comparison.

  “I think the way you said this made it sound like these are equivalent,” Collins told Fauci. “We’re not quite there yet.”

  Fauci said his comment was being misinterpreted and decided to try to revisit the topic in his next media appearance. Meanwhile, on July 16, Meadows went on Fox News and rebuked Fauci. He told anchor Martha MacCallum that with regard to Fauci’s 1918 comparison, “I can tell you that not only is that false, it is irresponsible to suggest so.”

  That same day, Fauci made his next appearance, a virtual conversation with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who asked him about his 1918 comments.

  “I’m glad you brought that up because I want to clarify that. I had used the word ‘comparable’ and I think that may have been taken out of context, because people would have thought, my goodness, we’re having this now, is it going to be the fifty to one hundred million people in 1918?” Fauci said. “No, they’re not comparable in that way at all in severity. They’re very, very different. I was just talking about . . . we haven’t had anything like this really for 102 years.”

  Fauci had endured his most personally trying week of the awful pandemic year of 2020. He was attacked publicly by his administration colleagues, privately undermined by the White House chief of staff, and had to walk back a public comment. What stung the most was the fact that Navarro could write an editorial attacking him with impunity. In most any corporation, this would be a fireable offense, but not in the Trump White House. Fauci thought to himself, What am I doing? I’m getting attacked by the people I’m working with? That’s crazy.

  Fauci’s closest confidante was his wife, Christine Grady, an NIH nurse and bioethicist. She said to him one night that week, as Fauci later told friends, “Tony, do you want to talk about the possibility of you just stepping down?” He did. Together, they weighed the pros and cons of his resigning from the coronavirus task force. Fauci’s position at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, where he was responsible for vaccine development, was a permanent civil service job, so he could not easily be fired and had no reason to resign. But he did contemplate removing himself from all things Trump by giving up his position on the task force.

  Fauci decided that if he pulled out, he would leave a significant vacuum at the White House. He would no longer be in the Situation Room or on television sharing facts and setting the record straight about science. Fauci proudly referred to himself as “the skunk at the picnic,” but if he disappeared, his role might be filled by somebody who instead delivered to the public Trump’s preferred happy talk. Ultimately, Fauci concluded that his presence improved things. So he stayed.

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  On July 14, about two weeks after Jared Kushner first told Brad Parscale he thought Trump would want to “make a change,” the presidential son-in-law paid the campaign manager a visit at the campaign’s Arlington headquarters. Kushner popped into Parscale’s office shortly before a big budget meeting and got right to the point.

  “We’re demoting you,” Kushner told Parscale. “We’d like you to stay in some capacity, to take care of digital infrastructure, but you’re out.

  “Look,” Kushner added, “you know this isn’t my decision. It’s the president’s campaign, and if he loses faith in you, you’ll have to make a change. You didn’t take this job for your ego. You took this job, hopefully, to help him win, and you need a comfortable candidate. If he’s not comfortable, then you can’t be in the job.”

  Kushner valued Parscale’s digital know-how and thought he was exceptional at targeting advertisements to subgroups of voters, using data to drive message.

  “You’re getting the shit kicked out of you all the time in the press,” Kushner told Parscale. “Go back to what you’re good at. Stay on the team. If Trump wins, you’ll be able to say you had a big part of it.”

  Parscale had known this moment might come, especially after the Tulsa debacle. With Trump mired in the polls behind Biden, Parscale was an easy fall guy, and changing the campaign leadership would, at a minimum, create the impression of change and theoretically give the president a chance to regain his footing.

  Still, Parscale panicked. Thoughts raced through his mind. Should he stay on as Kushner wanted, without the title of campaign manager and with a vastly smaller portfolio overseeing digital operations? Or should he resign in protest? He called his wife, Candice.

  “Fuck,” she told him. “Quit.”

  “I don’t know if I can do that,” Parscale said. “It’ll be very expensive for me to quit.”

  Leaving entirely meant Parscale would suddenly be out of the lucrative consulting arrangement he had with the campaign. Millions of dollars in compensation for himself and other campaign advisers—including payments to Kimberly Guilfoyle, the girlfriend of Donald Trump Jr., and to Lara Trump, the wife of Eric Trump—as well as expenses related to the campaign’s servers, website, data operation, and other digital infrastructure, flowed through Parscale’s private company. It was never disclosed how much Parscale personally pocketed in fees, but rivals in the president’s orbit assumed the campaign was funding his lavish lifestyle.

  Parscale then called Karl Rove, who had been informally advising Trump and his team. Rove advised Parscale, “Look, just say you’re with the man. Act loyal and say, ‘I’m still with you.’ He’s going to probably lose this election anyways and you’re going to look even better because it’ll look like his biggest mistake was firing you.”

  Rove also told Parscale, “How you handle this is going to speak volumes about you. If you go away angry, people, whether they like Trump or not, will make judgments about you. . . . But if you take whatever is given to you and handle it with dignity and restraint, people will make a different judgment. So don’t be angry. It’s unfair. He’s not treating you right. This is being done for the wrong reason. But that’s him. This isn’t about you.”

  Parscale stayed on as a senior adviser focused on digital and data strategies. Trump appointed Bill Stepien as campaign manager in his place. Stepien, forty-two, was a fixture in Trump World. A former campaign manager for Chris Christie’s gubernatorial runs in New Jersey and field director on Rudy Giuliani’s 2008 presidential run, he had joined the Trump campaign in 2016 as national field director. He went on to serve as White House political director, guiding the president’s strategy in the 2018 midterm elections, and then became an outside consultant on Trump’s reelection campaign.

  In many ways, Stepien was Parscale’s opposite. Whereas Parscale touted his background growing up in Kansas and living in Texas and Florida as putting him at home with Trump’s MAGA supporters, Stepien was raised in New Jersey and rose up in politics working in the northeast. Parscale was an imposing physical presence, at six foot eight with a scraggly red beard; Stepien was clean-cut, with a generic corporate look. Parscale styled himself as an expert in consumer behavior and digital branding; Stepien’s skills were in the nuts-and-bolts of running campaigns, from building field programs to tailoring budgets to analyzing data. Parscale strived to be a MAGA celebrity and loved mingling at rallies; Stepien preferred to remain anonymous, at home watching the New York Mets or listening to Bruce Springsteen.

  When Trump hired Stepien, he told his new charge that he was concerned about how much his cam
paign was spending and directed him to sort out the budget.

  “The most important thing I will do as your manager is to manage the budget, make sure I know where every dollar is coming in and know where every dollar is going out,” Stepien told Trump.

  Then he said his first move would be to cut his own salary. Stepien had been making fifteen thousand dollars a month and he told Trump he would cut it by one third, down to ten thousand dollars a month, to set the tone with the staff as they transitioned into a leaner and tighter operation. Trump, always mindful of dollars and cents, and stingy about where his money went—even when it was money he raised from others, as was the case with his campaign—was thrilled.

  Trump then got more direct about his worries over the budget.

  “Is Brad stealing from me?” Trump asked Stepien, a question he would raise repeatedly.

  This was perhaps the greatest transgression any employee could make in Trump’s eyes. Stepien resisted the urge to put the knife in Parscale.

  “I don’t think Brad was stealing from you,” Stepien told Trump. “I think Brad spent a lot of money. I think Brad wanted a lot of money. I’m pretty sure Brad can’t account for all the money. But was it going right into his pocket? I don’t think so.”

  Stepien was hired with just 111 days remaining until Election Day. Trump was at his lowest point in the campaign’s internal polling, running at about 40 percent in the ballot test. The president was at rock bottom. Stepien complained to other aides that the campaign had no formal budget or any document charting anticipated revenue and planned expenses, no metrics or accountability measures; Parscale insisted to allies that of course he kept a budget. There wasn’t much management, either. When Stepien called an all-staff meeting on his first day, it turned out to be the first time the staff had ever assembled together in one room.

  “In a nutshell, the audience of the campaign wasn’t a swing voter in Ohio. It really was the president,” a senior campaign official explained. “It was a campaign that was being managed to his expectation and to his audience and to his attention. And as such, the day-to-day management of the operation just wasn’t there.”

  Stepien’s first order of business was to elevate his longtime right hand, Justin Clark, to be deputy campaign manager and put him in charge of the budget. He put Clark, who was a lawyer and veteran Republican operative, in an office next door to his own and they met each morning and night to talk about finances. As Clark prepared a budget, he saw that the campaign had been spending millions of dollars on a massive advertising campaign in June and July that wasn’t moving the needle with voters. He calculated that if spending continued on the current trajectory, the campaign would be out of money by the first week of October—so broke it wouldn’t be able to afford to hold rallies and fly the president to and from them, let alone advertise in battleground states or mobilize voters to turn out.

  Money was supposed to give Trump a decisive advantage over Biden, as the president had spent years leveraging the power of incumbency to attract maximum donations from many wealthy supporters, as well as tapping his grassroots base for small-dollar gifts. But his financial lead over Biden had evaporated by the summer, both because of a surge of Democratic gifts to Biden’s campaign and because of the Trump campaign’s profligate spending. Based on an analysis of disclosures to the Federal Election Commission, The New York Times’s Shane Goldmacher and Maggie Haberman reported that the campaign under Parscale spent $800 million, including $350 million on fundraising operations and more than $100 million on television advertising before the stage in the campaign when most voters historically pay attention. A cascade of small expenses added up, including $156,000 for planes to pull aerial banners and $110,000 for magnetic pouches used at fundraising events to store cell phones and prevent donors from secretly recording Trump’s remarks.

  Clark walked into Stepien’s office and said, “Hey, man, I finished the budget. Good news is we have a budget and I’m pretty sure it’s right. Bad news is there’s a $115 million hole in it.”

  “Okay,” Stepien said. “What do we do?”

  Stepien and Clark instituted a series of cost-cutting measures designed to help stockpile resources they would need in the home stretch in September and October, as well as stringent new guidelines for approving expenses. They significantly pulled back the campaign’s planned television advertisements for the month of August and cut down on the number of staffers who traveled to events. And, in a move that saved $3 million at the risk of puncturing the president’s ego, they ditched a plan to sponsor and brand a NASCAR race car with Trump’s name.

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  As Trump’s new campaign leadership took charge, his pollsters were in the field in battleground states measuring voters’ sentiments about what was shaping up to be the key issue in the election: the president’s handling of the coronavirus.

  In mid- to late-July, Trump met with his political advisers in the Oval Office to hear the results. They were quite discouraging. Trump’s ratings had continued to slide downward, with just 40 percent of voters in the campaign’s targeted states approving of his handling of the coronavirus and 58 percent disapproving. Asked what issue Trump was more focused on, 65 percent said saving the economy and 7 percent said fighting the coronavirus. But when asked which issue he should be more focused on, 50 percent said fighting the coronavirus and 39 percent said saving the economy. As a result of that disconnect, a slim majority, 51 percent, said Trump was not taking the pandemic seriously.

  Central to these perceptions, the pollsters found, was Trump’s reluctance to wear a mask or to promote wearing them with the public. According to the poll, 70 percent of voters in targeted states supported mandating masks in public spaces, at least indoors. Just 24 percent said masks should not be mandatory. A clear majority of these voters, 59 percent, said they favored Trump issuing an executive order requiring people to wear a face mask in all indoor and outdoor public places. Kushner and Tony Fabrizio used this data to press Trump to change his position. They thought if Trump wore a mask more often in public and more forcefully advocated that his followers do the same, his job approval would rise among the white independent suburban voters he needed to win back to carry some of these battleground states where he trailed Biden.

  “To me, this is a no-brainer. Just do it,” Kushner told his father-in-law, an argument Fabrizio backed up. “Masks are about showing respect for others. That’s how people take them. Whether you believe they work or not, it makes other people more comfortable when people are wearing them.”

  Kushner’s wife had privately conveyed similar points to the president. Ivanka Trump was one of the few West Wing officials to regularly wear a mask and tried unsuccessfully to appeal to her father to lead by example.

  In part, Kushner and Fabrizio were trying to counter information Trump had been fed by other advisers over the previous few weeks. Meadows pressed this point strenuously in the Oval meeting. “He can’t do it,” the chief of staff said. “The base will go against him. He’ll lose his base if he does it.”

  This was the perpetual tension for Trump, who was stuck between fortifying his base with hard-line or controversial policies and rhetoric and appealing to a broader portion of the electorate with more moderate ideas and a more inclusive tone. Yet again, Trump opted to defend his base. His choice was easy and instinctive.

  “I’m not going to do it,” the president told his team, referring to an executive order mandating masks.

  Fabrizio said that even if the executive order idea was a no-go, Trump could still help himself politically by putting a mask on his face.

  “Wear a mask,” Fabrizio counseled the president. “Voters don’t think you take it seriously.”

  “People tell me it makes me look weak,” Trump replied. “People see Biden and he’s always wearing a mask and he looks weak. People tell me it doesn’t look presidential.”

 
Trump didn’t name the “people” telling him this. But the impression of weakness was certainly what he believed. The meeting ended without the change in strategy Kushner and Fabrizio sought.

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  Sometime in July, White House officials started noticing a new character hanging out in Kushner’s office suite: a slight, silver-haired man named Dr. Scott Atlas. Seemingly overnight, Atlas had become “a blue-badge fixture,” as one official described him, referring to the special blue-colored security badge needed for unfettered access throughout the West Wing.

  Atlas was a neuroradiologist and health policy expert from the Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank housed at Stanford University. He had attracted Trump’s attention during the spring and early summer with frequent appearances on Fox News, where he voiced skepticism of the public health consensus about protective steps needed to slow the virus’s spread, criticized lockdowns, advocated for the reopening of businesses and schools, and defended the president’s handling of the pandemic. Hope Hicks and Johnny McEntee were impressed by his TV appearances as well and helped bring him to the White House.

  Atlas ascended quickly. He was an informal adviser to Trump and Kushner on all things coronavirus. In early August, the president hired him as a special government employee, and by the third week of that month, Atlas appeared with Trump at coronavirus news conferences. He was the only doctor at the president’s side, as Fauci and others had largely been forced out of public view by the White House. His lack of experience in infectious diseases and public health did not much matter to Trump, who saw his national television profile and willingness to praise the president as more valuable.