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

by Carol Leonnig

  The Pentagon’s top two leaders stayed away from Trump’s party, still hypervigilant about avoiding any suggestion that they were politicizing the military. Mark Esper and Mark Milley had learned that lesson back on June 1 in Lafayette Square. Milley watched the returns on TV from his home on Fort Myer in Arlington. A history buff, Milley memorialized the night by keeping his own scorecard of states in his journal. At around 10:30, with results from most key states still far too close to call, Milley received an interesting call from a retired military buddy who reminded him of his apolitical role as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

  “You are an island unto yourself right now,” the friend said, according to the account Milley shared with aides. “You are not tethered. Your loyalty is to the Constitution. You represent the stability of this republic.”

  Milley’s friend added, “There’s fourth-rate people at the Pentagon. And you have fifth-rate people at the White House. You’re surrounded by total incompetence. Hang in there. Hang tough.”

  Esper was at home in northern Virginia feeling at peace that he had survived this long without getting fired and without having acquiesced to Trump’s wishes to order troops to break up domestic protests. The defense secretary had had a target on his back all fall, but Trump had not axed him.

  Esper had a scare the night before, November 2, when NBC’s Courtney Kube planned to report that Esper was preparing to be fired the day after the election, had updated his resignation letter, and was quietly advising members of Congress about renaming army bases named for Confederate generals as a sort of mic drop to fortify his legacy. Esper believed that if NBC published the story, it would signal he was on the verge of resigning and prompt his premature firing—so he went into overdrive to stop it. He directed his aides to try to convince Kube that her information could be overhyped. It was true that Esper had been consulting with congressional committees about renaming the bases. It also was true that Esper had prepared a resignation letter, as many Trump appointees had, but he had no imminent plans to submit it. In truth, Esper expected Trump would fire him after the election, but was hoping to hold on if he could, at least for a few days after the election. He was worried about what Trump might try to do with the military if he were not at the helm. Esper warned Kube that publishing her story could result in a more compliant acting secretary of defense, which could have worrisome repercussions. The story was held as they tussled back and forth.

  Esper was a lifelong Republican and had worked at the conservative Heritage Foundation as well as for Republican senators Bill Frist and Chuck Hagel. But he told his closest colleagues that as he watched TV news anchors cover the election results, he found himself rooting for the Democrat. Esper had worked with Biden and his secretary of state in waiting, Antony Blinken, when he was a senior staffer on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He had confidence that they were serious, stable people who cared deeply about shoring up national security. Esper couldn’t say the same about Trump. In fact, Trump had privately indicated he would seek to withdraw from NATO and to blow up the U.S. alliance with South Korea, should he win reelection. When those alliances had come up in meetings with Esper and other top aides, some advisers warned Trump that shredding them before the election would be politically dangerous.

  “Yeah, the second term,” Trump had said. “We’ll do it in the second term.”

  Esper had known that Trump had wanted to fire him ever since their June 3 argument over the Insurrection Act, but had heard that Mike Pompeo, campaign officials, and other advisers had talked the president out of doing so before the election. They had argued that he couldn’t afford to rupture his relationship with a second defense secretary, not after Jim Mattis’s rocky departure and the sharp public criticism he later leveled at Trump.

  Esper had lived through the strain of the 2000 recounts and the Bush v. Gore case. He had repeatedly told his deputies that he wanted this election to be “clean and clear,” as in free of any suggestion of corruption and indisputably clear who had won. He had feared anything less might give Trump some shred of a reason to call out troops. Later into the evening, as returns posted in Biden’s favor, Esper told a friend, “It looks good.” The defense secretary went to bed comforted by signs the country would get a divided and stable government—a Democratic president and, he hoped, a Republican Senate.

  * * *

  —

  A t 11:20 p.m. on Fox News, Bill Hemmer was standing before his giant touchscreen in the network’s Studio F in New York, guiding viewers through electoral college scenarios when Arizona turned blue on his map. The sudden change in color caught Hemmer off guard. “What is this happening here? Why is Arizona blue? Did we just call it? Did we just make a call in Arizona? Let’s see,” Hemmer said.

  Co-anchor Martha MacCallum said indeed Fox had called Arizona, a hotly contested battleground state with eleven electoral college votes.

  Co-anchor Bret Baier chimed in. “Time out,” he said. “This is a big development. Fox News’s decision desk is calling Arizona for Joe Biden.” Baier added, “Biden picking up Arizona changes the math.”

  Trump, who had been watching Fox, was livid. He could not fathom that the conservative news network he had long considered an extension of his campaign was the first news organization to call Arizona for Biden. This was a betrayal. His top advisers, who had been in the Map Room at the time, rushed upstairs to see the president. Giuliani followed them up.

  “They’re calling it way too early,” Oczkowski told Trump. “This thing is close. We still think we’ll win narrowly—and not just us. Doug Ducey’s modeling people show us winning.” Ducey, Arizona’s Republican governor, and his political team had kept in close contact with Trump’s aides.

  That hardly reassured the president. “What the fuck is Fox doing?” Trump screamed. Then he barked orders to Kushner: “Call Rupert! Call James and Lachlan!” And to Miller: “Get Sammon. Get Hemmer. They’ve got to reverse this.” The president was referring to Fox owner Rupert Murdoch and his sons, James and Lachlan, as well as Bill Sammon, a top news executive at Fox.

  Trump’s tirade continued. “What the fuck?” he bellowed. “What the fuck are these guys doing? How could they call this this early?”

  Oczkowski again tried to soothe the president. “They’re calling this way too early,” he said. “This is unbelievable.”

  Giuliani pushed the president to forget about the Arizona call and just say he won—to step into the East Room and deliver a victory speech. Never mind that Meadows had earlier snapped at Giuliani and said the president couldn’t just declare himself the winner.

  “Just go declare victory right now,” Giuliani told Trump. “You’ve got to go declare victory now.”

  Giuliani’s interjection of his “just-say-you-won” strategy infuriated Trump’s campaign advisers.

  “It’s hard to be the responsible parent when there’s a cool uncle around taking the kid to the movies and driving him around in a Corvette,” one of these advisers recalled. “When we say the president can’t say that, being responsible is not the easiest place to be when you’ve got people telling the president what he wants to hear. It’s hard to tell the president no. It’s not an enviable place to be.”

  Once they got away from the president, Kushner called Rupert Murdoch. Miller tried Sammon but couldn’t reach him. Other Trump aides pitched in, too. Kellyanne Conway reached out to Baier and MacCallum, who were on the air. Hicks, who had worked under Lachlan Murdoch at the Fox Corporation between her White House stints, reached out to Fox Corporation senior vice president Raj Shah, a former Trump spokesman, to track down a number for Jay Wallace, the president of Fox News.

  Conway talked to Brian Seitchik, a longtime Trump adviser based in Arizona, who assured her, “This is irresponsible. Here in Arizona, we just have way too many votes left to count.”

  Ducey called the Trump team and was put on speakerphone. The governo
r told them that the Fox call was premature and that, according to his analysis, Trump still had a chance to win because so many votes remained to be counted.

  Typically, most news organizations call states around the same time because they tend to have similar standards for when it is safe to project winners and losers. But with Arizona, other major news organizations held back on joining Fox’s call. In fact, Miller received text messages from contacts at other networks. “I can’t believe Fox is doing you guys dirty,” one of them wrote.

  Trump and his family became apoplectic as the night ticked on and his early leads over Biden in Pennsylvania and other states kept shrinking. As additional votes were being counted, Biden inched closer to Trump. Pennsylvania was too close to call, as was Georgia. Trump decided to deliver remarks to his viewing party and came down into the Map Room, where he yelled at Justin Clark, the deputy campaign manager.

  “Why are they still counting votes?” Trump asked. “The election’s closed. Are they counting ballots that came in afterward? What the hell is going on?” Trump, through a spokesman, denied saying this.

  The president told Conway he thought something nefarious was at play.

  “They’re stealing this from us,” Trump said. “We have this thing won. I won in a landslide and they’re taking it back.”

  Of course, nobody was taking anything. Election officials were simply doing their duty, counting ballots. But Trump didn’t see it that way. He seemed to truly believe he had been winning. As one Trump adviser later explained, “The psychological impact of, he’s going to win, people were calling him saying he’s going to win, and then somehow these votes just keep showing up.”

  Eric Trump, who the night before had predicted to friends that his father would win with 322 electoral college votes, flipped out in the Map Room.

  “The election is being stolen,” the president’s thirty-six-year-old son said. “Where are these votes coming from? How is this legit?”

  Eric Trump yelled at the campaign’s data analysts, as if it were their fault that his father’s early leads over Biden were shrinking. “We pay you to do this,” he said. “How can this be happening?”

  Eric Trump, through a spokesperson, insisted that he did not berate campaign staff, as described by witnesses.

  Donald Trump Jr. said, “There’s no way we lose to this guy,” referring to Biden.

  Shortly after 2:00 a.m. on November 4, “Hail to the Chief” played at the East Room party. Out walked Trump, followed by Melania Trump, Vice President Pence, and Karen Pence. Stephen Miller and the speechwriting team had prepared remarks for Trump to deliver, but the president veered from his teleprompter script to instead deliver stream-of-consciousness thoughts.

  “We were winning everything and all of a sudden it was just called off,” Trump said. He added, “Literally we were just all set to get outside and just celebrate something that was so beautiful, so good.”

  Trump rattled off states he had won—Florida! Ohio! Texas!—and then claimed he had already won states that were too close to call, including Georgia and North Carolina. He bragged about his leads in some states—“Think of this: We’re up six hundred ninety thousand votes in Pennsylvania. Six hundred ninety thousand!”—and falsely claimed to be winning Michigan and Wisconsin.

  Neither Trump nor Biden was declared the overall winner because Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania remained too close to call. Yet Trump insisted that he was the actual winner, and that his sweet victory had been somehow snatched from him.

  “This is a fraud on the American public,” the president said. “This is an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election. We did win this election. So our goal now is to ensure the integrity for the good of this nation. This is a very big moment. This is a major fraud in our nation. We want the law to be used in a proper manner. So we’ll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court. We want all voting to stop. We don’t want them to find any ballots at four o’clock in the morning and add them to the list, okay? It’s a very sad moment. To me, this is a very sad moment, and we will win this. And as far as I’m concerned, we already have won it.”

  This was an extraordinary accusation for any political candidate to make about any election, much less for a sitting president to make about the country’s most consequential election. Trump was telling the seventy-four million people who voted for him not to trust the results.

  Watching from California, Romney was heartsick. “We’re in a global battle for the survival of liberal democracy in the face of autocracy and autocratic regimes attempting to dominate the world,” he recalled in the interview. “So saying something and doing things that would suggest that in the free nation of the United States of America and the model of democracy for the world, that we can’t have a free and fair election would have a destructive effect on democracy around the world, not just to mention here.”

  Pelosi watched Trump’s speech in horror. “It was just a complete, total manifestation [of] insanity,” she recalled in the interview.

  “It was clear over that four-year period that this was not a person who was on the level—on the level intellectually, on the level mentally, on the level emotionally, and certainly not on the level patriotically,” she said. “So for him to say what he said, I wouldn’t say was surprising as it might have been if we hadn’t seen the instability all along.”

  In that moment, Pelosi said she thought that if Trump were willing to claim victory when he had not won, there was no telling what he might do in the weeks ahead to try to hold on to power.

  “It was a sad night for our country patriotically, constitutionally—forget the politics; that’s minor. Patriotically and constitutionally that a president of the United States would say what he said and that there wouldn’t be an intervention from his side,” Pelosi said. “We knew there was real trouble ahead.”

  Following his speech, Trump hung around the Green Room next door to the East Room talking to some advisers and VIP guests, asking them what they thought. Ingraham, whose prime-time show was off the air that night because of Fox’s special election coverage, was overheard giving the president some advice. Ingraham expressed general doubt that the outcome would change in the days ahead given the historical reluctance of federal courts to intervene in elections, a contrast to what she considered unrealistic scenarios being painted by some others around the president.

  “Give up on Arizona,” Ingraham told him, apparently confident in her network’s decision to project Biden the winner there.

  Giving up wasn’t in Trump’s repertoire. “Fox shouldn’t have called it,” he told her.

  Karl Rove, the former George W. Bush strategist and Fox commentator, had just come off the air when he got a call from a Trump adviser. “He’s in a meltdown,” the adviser told Rove. “Can you call him and tell him that all is not lost?”

  Rove phoned the president and tried to give him a pep talk.

  “Hang in there,” Rove told Trump. “There’s a lot of ballots to be counted and it’s not going to be done for some time. You fought a good fight. . . . You’re not out yet.”

  Rove and Trump briefly discussed the state of the race in Arizona. “I know premature calls,” he said, reminding the president of the fiasco on Election Night in 2000, when some networks projected Al Gore would win Florida only to have to retract their call a couple of hours later. “Hang in there. You gave it your all. You came down to the end. You upset them in 2016. You can do it again. Just hold on.”

  Trump then retreated to the Map Room to talk to his campaign team. He stayed up until 4:00 a.m. chewing over the incoming results. The president was fixated on Pennsylvania, where Biden kept cutting into his lead. There were enough votes still to be counted in Philadelphia, which were sure to favor the Democrat, for Biden to overtake Trump. And indeed, Democrats were optimistic that once all the votes w
ere in, Biden would win the state.

  Conway and Meadows both preached patience.

  “Mr. President, you’re ahead in Pennsylvania by seven hundred thousand votes,” Conway told him. “We won Pennsylvania by forty-four thousand votes last time. Just let them count the votes. Let them get through the votes.”

  Meadows said, “Just count the votes, Mr. President. You probably have enough to keep those leads.”

  Trump wasn’t having any of it. He thought Democrats were rigging the vote totals.

  “If I wake up in the morning and they say Trump is ahead by a hundred thousand votes, they’ll find a hundred thousand and one votes in the backyard,” the president said.

  “Mr. President, it stings,” Conway said. “It just hurts to have lost Pennsylvania.”

  “Honey, we didn’t lose Pennsylvania,” Trump replied. “We won Pennsylvania.”

  Conway, who often was quick with a rejoinder to lighten the mood at tense moments, invoked the cheap security cameras that some homeowners install at their front doors to monitor for stolen packages or unwanted visitors. “Then your campaign should’ve invested in Ring and Nest cameras,” she quipped.

  PART FOUR

  Seventeen

  The Big Lie

  On November 4, the day after the election, President Trump surprised his aides. Joe Biden led handily in the electoral college as well as the popular vote. But with several key states, including Pennsylvania and Georgia, still too close to call, neither Biden nor Trump had been projected the winner. In his 2:00 a.m. speech, Trump had proclaimed that “we already have won it,” yet when the president spoke with advisers in private hours later, he suddenly sounded defeatist.