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

by Carol Leonnig

  After a few moments, Giuliani conceded the poll-watching claims had been struck but said the Trump campaign would refile a third amended complaint to include them again.

  Giuliani did eventually articulate his side’s lone standing claim: that Republican voters’ rights had been violated because Democrat-leaning counties had invited voters to “cure” defective ballots. But then he misspoke when identifying the unfair advantage this gave Biden.

  “The Trump campaign has been treated totally differently than the Bush campaign,” Giuliani said.

  At times the discussion between the lawyers got heated, even though it transpired partially over teleconference. Mark Aronchick, an attorney representing several Pennsylvania counties, accused Giuliani of living in “some fantasy world,” making wild allegations that were “disgraceful in an American courtroom,” and worst of all, revealing his ignorance of the law.

  The hearing stretched for five hours and Brann and Giuliani went round and round on the definition of opacity, which Giuliani said probably meant things that could be easily seen. In a detailed discussion of legal review, Giuliani expressed confusion when the judge asked what legal standard Giuliani believed he should apply in considering the case. “The normal one,” Giuliani replied.

  “Dismiss this case,” opposing counsel Aronchick urged Brann. “Please, dismiss this case. So we can move on.”

  After the hearing ended, Aronchick told reporters he was “dumbfounded” that a president’s legal defense would appear so hapless. “When you’re in court, you have to talk about the facts, you have to talk about the law,” Aronchick said. He then added a sly reference to Giuliani’s Philadelphia news conference: “When you’re at Four Seasons Total Landscaping, I guess you can talk about anything.”

  Brann didn’t need many days to reach that precise decision that opposing counsel had suggested. Brann said the Trump campaign’s legal argument looked “like Frankenstein’s Monster, has been haphazardly stitched together from two distinct theories in an attempt to avoid controlling precedent.” He described Giuliani’s request to disqualify thousands of Pennsylvania voters’ ballots in Democratic-heavy precincts as “unhinged” from his claim that he was defending the basic right of all voters to be fairly counted. The judge said the Trump campaign’s request could ultimately disenfranchise millions of Pennsylvanians. “One might expect that when seeking such a startling outcome, a plaintiff would come formidably armed with compelling legal arguments and factual proof of rampant corruption,” Brann wrote. “That has not happened. This Court has been presented with strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations . . . unsupported by evidence.”

  After Giuliani’s loss, Clark told Trump, “We’re going to never win another case because this court decided I don’t want the fucking circus coming to town. Every other court has a path to follow.”

  Trump replied, “Maybe.”

  As a businessman, Trump had unrelentingly turned to the courts to duke it out with debtors, competitors, contractors, and former staff. Usually he had success wearing people down. But the same tactics did not work when it came to the 2020 election.

  Some of Trump’s advisers believed the president’s amped-up rhetoric gave the courts good reason to issue definitive rulings in short order rather than indulge his conspiracies for weeks on end by allowing his campaign to make lengthy pleadings that would ultimately fail. “Because the president was tweeting and naming names and saying it was stolen and there was fraud, it was too much pressure on the courts to say, ‘I don’t want to be the place that gives him quarter,’ ” one of them recalled. “There was no room at the inn.”

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  Trump and Giuliani wanted to get on offense after the defeats in court. They saw the president’s campaign to overturn the election as a communications battle as much as a legal one. Miller agreed and thought they needed to convince the public that Trump still had multiple pathways to victory. They decided that Giuliani would hold a news conference on November 19 at the Republican National Committee’s headquarters on Capitol Hill.

  Giuliani and Miller showed up early at the RNC and strategized in a back room while members of the media set up cameras and took their seats. Giuliani brought along many of the same people who had been with him in the putrid conference room a few days earlier: Ellis, DiGenova, Toensing, Epshteyn, Andrew Giuliani, and some of his young female associates. Powell was also there. Even Giuliani had confessed to others on the team, “Sidney is nuts. She’s crazy.” But he still wanted her around, in part because his client, the president, was so enamored with what she had to say. The group planned out how the news conference would go. Giuliani and Ellis would speak, and the others would stand beside them, with American flags arrayed behind them.

  “Let’s have Sidney Powell join us,” Giuliani proposed.

  “No, Mayor Giuliani, we have some really compelling evidence to go on, but the Sidney stuff is really far out there,” Ellis said.

  Miller agreed.

  “If we have Sidney join us then people are going to associate us with all of her crazy,” Miller said. “Why would we do that?”

  “No, no, no,” Giuliani said. “Look, I think she has some important things to say.”

  Trump had put Giuliani in charge. So, Powell would be speaking.

  As the legal team stepped into the lights, Miller hung back behind the TV cameras to watch from the same angle as people at home, including the president. For Trump, optics were paramount, and he ingrained this in his aides. Miller later told friends that his first reaction to watching Powell speak was, “Holy shit, what a strange ranger.”

  Trump’s attorneys launched a wholesale assault on the integrity of the election and alleged widespread fraud in Atlanta, Detroit, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and other cities in which Democratic votes helped Biden carry battleground states. They had no evidence to support their claims, but Giuliani nonetheless said, “We cannot allow these crooks—’cause that’s what they are—to steal an election from the American people.”

  Powell’s statement was even more extreme—and absurd. She claimed without evidence that there was a broad conspiracy with roots in Venezuela to rig the U.S. election.

  “What we are really dealing with here, and learning more by the day, is the massive influence of communist money through Venezuela, Cuba, and likely China, and the interference with our elections here in the United States,” Powell said.

  She argued that Dominion voting machines used in Georgia and many other states were programmed to “flip” votes cast for Trump and count them instead for Biden. She said the machines used software that was “created in Venezuela at the direction of Hugo Chavez to make sure he never lost an election.”

  Powell’s purported evidence for this was jaw-dropping, but not in the way she might have hoped. She said the campaign had “a very strong witness”—a Chavez associate who knew how the late Venezuelan leader had deployed Dominion machines to win reelection. Powell said the witness deduced from watching the news on November 3 that the same plot was unfolding in America.

  “As soon as he saw multiple states shut down the voting on the night of the election, he knew the same thing was happening here,” Powell said.

  The Dominion conspiracy theory had spread widely on right-wing websites and social media and had become an obsession of Trump’s, but there was not a shred of evidence to support it. In fact, Georgia’s hand recount of nearly five million paper ballots affirmed that the Dominion scanners accurately counted the votes.

  When reporters asked for evidence of the massive fraud that the legal team claimed, Ellis said they would produce it later. As the news conference rolled on, streaks of what appeared to be black hair dye mixed with sweat dripped down the sides of Giuliani’s face as he spoke.

  Miller had been glancing at messages on his phone and knew things had gone poorly. When they went back
to their hold room, Miller said to Giuliani, “Look, here’s the thing. Everything you said was fine. Everything Jenna said was fine. Sir, Sidney said some crazy shit and it’s making a lot of news.”

  “Oh?” a perplexed Giuliani asked. “What do you mean? But did Fox take it?”

  “Yeah, Fox took it, but she was talking about Hugo Chavez and Dominion and all these things,” Miller said. “People think we’re in fucking crazy town.”

  “We’ll be fine,” Giuliani said. “These are concerns. Dominion is a foreign company.”

  Dominion was founded in Canada, but maintained dual headquarters in Toronto and Denver, Colorado. It was not based in Venezuela and had no connection to communist operatives or Chavez, who died in 2013.

  Trump was riveted by his lawyers’ presentation, but once he heard commentators in the media ridiculing Powell’s claims as preposterous, he feared she may have gone a little overboard. He was also unsettled by Giuliani’s dripping hair dye.

  Some of his White House aides were humiliated. One West Wing staffer recalled watching the news conference with a handful of others and blurting out, “Oh, my God, this is just like a freak show. This is embarrassing.”

  For Lindsey Graham, who had stuck by Trump’s side through so many rough patches, the Giuliani-Ellis-Powell show was the lowest point of the year. Giuliani had assured Graham, “You know we’re going to make sure it doesn’t go too far.” Yet, as Graham told confidants, things undeniably had gone too far with this news conference. Graham thought the president’s fate was in the hands of a bunch of people who didn’t know what they were doing. He called Trump.

  “Mr. President, you need a theory of the case here in each state,” Graham said, rather than just alleging fraud “willy-nilly.”

  Trump told Graham he thought Powell was “over the top.”

  “It sounds bizarre,” Graham said. “You need to get some people who can focus on election law.”

  Larry Kudlow was worried for his old pal, Giuliani. The two men had served in the Reagan administration together, Kudlow as the number three official at the Office of Management and Budget and Giuliani as the number three at the Justice Department. They considered each other family friends. But Kudlow thought Giuliani was saying things about the election that would likely tarnish his legacy.

  Kudlow confided his concerns to several people, including Chris Christie, another longtime Giuliani friend, who was like-minded. Kudlow didn’t want to push Giuliani or make him uncomfortable, so he tried to pass messages to Andrew Giuliani. “Tell your dad to be careful,” Kudlow told the younger Giuliani. “Tell your dad this is a high-stakes game.”

  Giuliani disgusted Mitt Romney. The two had been rivals for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008, but both came up short to John McCain. In 2012, Giuliani campaigned for Romney when he was the GOP nominee, and while they were never friends, they respected one another.

  “Rudy has such a fine history as a mayor, and his book, Leadership, was a bestseller,” Romney said in an interview for this book. “I found his participation in something so bizarre and irregular to be virtually incomprehensible. I wondered, how in the world can someone of that stature do something of this nature. And I have to be honest. My concern was not so much with my party. . . . I was again thinking about the cause of democracy.”

  Romney talked about the diplomatic trips he had taken over the years to Afghanistan and other war-torn places promoting the cause of freedom. “I’m thinking about these places where our sons and daughters have laid down lives to promote freedom and democracy,” he said. “And then to see people who are respected globally, like Mayor Giuliani, shred that credibility . . . was extraordinarily disheartening.”

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  The next day, November 20, rivals Alex Azar and Seema Verma met at the White House to join the president for an announcement on a sweeping change in U.S. drug pricing. By executive order, Trump was forcing pharmaceutical companies to only charge the U.S. government the lowest price they charged any other country for prescription drugs. Known as the Most Favored Nation model, the plan was projected by the Trump White House to dramatically lower the prices of certain drugs and to save American taxpayers and Medicare clients more than $85 billion over seven years.

  Any other administration likely would have pursued this change methodically and the announcement would have been hailed as a bold achievement. But because this was the Trump White House, the president was scrambling to deliver on his campaign promise to cut drug prices in his final months in office. For lack of planning, the administration had short-circuited the process and skipped over some rule-making steps usually required to push through such a major change. Legal experts predicted the plan eventually would get overturned in the courts.

  Before the announcement, Azar and Verma arrived separately to join the president in his private dining room off the Oval Office, so they could brief him before the announcement. Verma arrived first and sat down with Trump at his table. As usual, he had the television on.

  “You know I won,” Trump said. “Seema, I won.”

  Verma later told others that she couldn’t believe that after all this Trump still thought he had won. But she knew better than to cross him, so she indulged the boss.

  “Well, you did really well with women,” Verma replied. “You’ve done better with women and minorities.”

  “We’re still fighting it,” Trump said. “We’ve got a really good argument. We won. Who knows if the Supreme Court will agree. But we won.”

  Trump looked up and noticed that Azar had entered the room and was still standing, silently waiting. He tried to engage both Azar and Verma with a new problem that was bothering him.

  “What the fuck was with that press conference the other day?” Trump asked. “That was terrible. Birx was just terrible.”

  On November 19, the same day Giuliani, Ellis, and Powell had been at the RNC, Pence had convened a coronavirus task-force briefing at the White House with Deborah Birx, Anthony Fauci, Robert Redfield, and Jerome Adams, as well as Azar and Verma. With Thanksgiving approaching, Birx had called on every American “to increase their vigilance” and warned against gathering indoors.

  “She’s a real Negative Nancy,” Verma told Trump.

  “Should I fire her?” he asked. “Should I get rid of her?”

  “At this late date, it’s probably not worth the trouble,” Verma said.

  Azar was silent.

  Trump began flipping through his prepared remarks for the drug-pricing order he would soon announce. He noticed a mention of Pfizer. He was still seething that Pfizer had announced that its coronavirus vaccine was ready for use almost immediately after the election. He held a Sharpie in his hand, which he used to edit his remarks.

  “Should I say they held back on the vaccine because we’re going with Most Favored Nation?” Trump asked. “Should I say that?”

  “I wish you wouldn’t,” Azar said. He counseled Trump to take credit for this major drug-pricing order rather than criticize Pfizer. Otherwise, he warned, “This will become the news, not the policy.”

  “Is it true they had the data and they didn’t look at it before the election?” Trump asked.

  The conversation was starting to feel déjà vu, with the president returning to the same points he had made in his meeting with Azar and other medical advisers one week earlier, as if he had completely forgotten the previous discussions about critical elements of his government’s coronavirus response.

  Azar explained, maybe for the fourth or fifth time, that the FDA guidance required sixty days of data from patients in trials after they received their second vaccine shot. He reminded Trump that Hahn had created this guidance.

  “So should I fire Hahn?” Trump asked the pair.

  “At this point, it’s a distraction,” Verma said.

  Trump noticed that Azar didn’t
answer either way. The health secretary just stood there looking off in the distance.

  It was time. Trump and Verma got up from their seats to prepare to go out to the press briefing room.

  “You gotta take those fucking masks off,” Trump told them.

  “I’m the health secretary,” Azar said. “I have to wear a mask.”

  “Once you’re at the podium, take it off,” Trump said. “Then you can put it back on.”

  They made a compromise. Azar and Verma would take their masks off when it was their turn to speak, keeping a safe distance at the lectern from each other and from the president.

  Azar noted that the masks were very good at preventing the virus from spreading.

  “What?” Trump asked as they moved toward the door. “They work?”

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  On November 22, Christie said on television what many in Trump World had been saying privately. Appearing that Sunday on ABC’s This Week, the longtime Trump confidant sized up the president’s representation.

  “If you’ve got the evidence of fraud, present it. And what’s happened here is, quite frankly . . . the president’s legal team has been a national embarrassment,” Christie told host George Stephanopoulos.

  Christie added, “They allege fraud outside the courtroom, but then they go inside the courtroom, they don’t plead fraud and they don’t argue fraud. This is what I was concerned about at two thirty in the morning on [election night]. Listen, I’ve been a supporter of the president’s. I voted for him twice. But elections have consequences, and we cannot continue to act as if something happened here that didn’t happen. You have an obligation to present the evidence. The evidence has not been presented.”

  Coming from one of Trump’s earliest 2016 endorsers, a former U.S. attorney whom the president had considered naming attorney general or White House chief of staff, this was significant. Christie calling Trump’s lawyers “a national embarrassment” generated news headlines. Giuliani had been close with Christie for decades, but was pissed off, feeling as if he had been stabbed in the back. He called him.