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

by Carol Leonnig

Luttig drafted each thread and, at 9:53 a.m. Eastern time, hit the blue “Tweet” button.

  “The only responsibility and power of the Vice President under the Constitution is to faithfully count the electoral college votes as they have been cast,” Luttig wrote. “The Constitution does not empower the Vice President to alter in any way the votes that have been cast, either by rejecting certain of them or otherwise. How the Vice President discharges this constitutional obligation is not a question of his loyalty to the President.”

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  Later in the day on January 5, more danger warnings emerged about what was in store for Washington. The ever-watchful Milley got a call from Senator Dan Sullivan in the early afternoon. The Alaska Republican and former Marine said he had just finished a run on the National Mall, where he had seen groups of protesters gathering ahead of the next day’s demonstrations. Sullivan sensed trouble brewing.

  “What’s the plan for security?” Sullivan asked Milley. “I heard in the news that the D.C. National Guard is being called up. Crowd control is a difficult mission. And these are good people,” he said of the Trump supporters in town, some of whom had come all the way from Alaska. “The troops need to be prepared and we don’t need any Kent States,” Sullivan added, referring to the 1970 shooting of unarmed college students at an antiwar protest by members of the Ohio National Guard that left four dead.

  Later that day, Romney went to the Salt Lake City International Airport to catch a flight to Washington, despite his wife’s concerns for his safety. Two days earlier, Romney had issued a statement calling the push to block certification—a dozen Republican senators, led by Ted Cruz of Texas, had since joined Hawley in this gambit—an “egregious ploy” that “may enhance the political ambition of some, but dangerously threatens our Democratic Republic.” At the airport, Romney was working on his iPad as he waited in the terminal to board his flight when a maskless woman approached.

  “Why aren’t you supporting President Trump?” she asked, holding out her cell phone to record video of the interaction.

  “I do support President Trump in things I agree with,” Romney said.

  The woman asked if Romney was going to support Trump’s claims about the “fraudulent votes.”

  “No, I’m not,” Romney said. “We have a Constitution and the constitutional process is clear and I will follow the Constitution, and then I will explain all that when we meet in Congress.”

  Romney then stood up and walked away. A man told him, “Your legacy is nothing.” And the woman said, “You’re a joke. Absolute joke.”

  On board the plane, Romney discovered many of the other passengers were Trump supporters en route to Washington, presumably for the next day’s protests. At one point in the flight, a woman cried out to other passengers to tell the senator “what we think.” A large group of passengers then chanted, “Traitor! Traitor! Traitor!” One of them shouted, “Resign, Mitt!”

  Videos of Romney’s terminal interactions and of the onboard heckling were posted on Twitter and went viral.

  A little later that evening, the Georgia results came in. It was a bloodbath for Republicans. Warnock defeated Loeffler by 93,550 votes, and Ossoff defeated Perdue by 54,944 votes. The Democrats had taken the Senate. Too many Republican voters believed their vote wouldn’t count and stayed home. It was just as McConnell feared, and he was now the minority leader.

  Graham called Trump that night to let him know that he planned to vote the next day to certify the presidential election results. Trump was upset and appealed to Graham to join Cruz, Hawley, and the other rebels set on objecting. But Graham wouldn’t have it.

  “Mr. President, I’ve been very supportive of you challenging, but there’s no more asphalt on the highway,” Graham told him. “We’ve come to an end here.”

  Twenty-one

  The Insurrection

  As the sun rose over Washington on January 6, electricity hung in the air. The big day had come. Thousands of President Trump’s supporters began gathering at the Ellipse to stake out a good spot from which to see the president, who was scheduled to address the “Save America” rally around noon. Organizers had obtained a federal permit for thirty thousand people, but it looked as if the crowd would be even larger than that. Thousands more prepared to make their way toward the Capitol to protest the certification of Joe Biden’s election.

  At the White House, Trump set the tone for the day with an 8:17 a.m. tweet: “States want to correct their votes, which they now know were based on irregularities and fraud, plus corrupt process never received legislative approval. All Mike Pence has to do is send them back to the States, AND WE WIN. Do it Mike, this is a time for extreme courage!”

  Many of Trump’s advisers knew this would never actually happen. They chalked the president’s tweet up to theater. Vice President Pence could have the courage of a lion, but there was no doubt he would fulfill his constitutional duty and preside over the pro forma certification of Biden’s win. As one senior official recalled, “All of us knew this was the endgame. The clock had run out. By January sixth, it was game over. . . . We knew we would take the blows. This was date certain. The vice president knew this.”

  As Nancy Pelosi left her luxury condo building in Georgetown, she greeted her security agents who would drive her to the Capitol. “This is going to be quite a day,” the House Speaker said to them. She kept the rest of her thoughts to herself, but later recalled thinking, “I know the Republicans will try some stunts. But at the end of the day, Joe Biden will be the president of the United States—the ascertained future president.” She was prepared for Republicans to try some parliamentary shenanigans to slow down the certification.

  In the Oval Office later that morning, Trump huddled with some aides and family members. The president went in and out of the dining room to check on TV coverage, hoping to gauge the size of the crowd at the Ellipse. Stephen Miller was there going over the remarks he and his team had prepared for the president to deliver at the rally. Trump read some of the lines aloud. Mark Meadows, Keith Kellogg, and Eric Herschmann were there, too, as were Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump, Eric Trump, and Kimberly Guilfoyle. Trump talked about his rally as well as what he thought might happen at the Capitol when lawmakers convened. Some of those around him encouraged his fantasy of Pence the hero stepping in to overturn the election. Guilfoyle, referring to the growing crowd at the Ellipse, told the president, “They’re just reflecting the will of the people. This is the will of the people.”

  Ivanka Trump did not agree and was upset about what Rudy Giuliani and others had been advising her father. At one point that morning, she said, “This is not right. It’s not right.”

  Trump called Pence, who was spending the morning at his Naval Observatory residence before heading to the Capitol. Pence again explained to Trump the legal limits on his authority as vice president and said he planned to perform his ceremonial duty, as prescribed by the Constitution. But Trump showed him no mercy.

  “You don’t have the courage to make a hard decision,” Trump told Pence.

  Ivanka Trump, standing next to Kellogg near the grandfather clock in the back of the room, had a hard time listening to her father badger the vice president to do something she knew was not possible. “Mike Pence is a good man,” she said quietly to Kellogg.

  “I know that,” he replied. “Let this ride. Take a deep breath. We’ll come back at it.”

  After hanging up with Pence, Trump went back into the dining room to check on the crowd on TV. Kellogg subtly suggested to Ivanka Trump that she follow him. “Go back in there and talk to your dad,” he said.

  Ivanka Trump already had been thinking about how she might calm her father and convince him to see the situation rationally. She then spoke with the president but was unpersuasive. Trump had given Pence instructions and was hell-bent on getting him to follow through.

  Meanwhile, at the
U.S. Capitol Police headquarters near Union Station, Chief Steven Sund had gathered with some of his assistant chiefs, commanders, and other senior aides in their command center to monitor protests that day. They took their assigned stations around an enormous U-shaped desk, with the chief at the top of the U, facing a wall of screens playing live video feeds of protesters gathering around the city, including at various portions of the Capitol grounds and entrances. The images would help them coordinate with commanders on the ground.

  A twenty-five-year veteran of security planning for major D.C. events and protests, Sund suggested a technician pull up on the center screen the live broadcast of the crowds gathering at the Ellipse for the Save America rally. It was a chilly day in Washington, the temperature barely hitting 40 degrees, but at the Ellipse, Trump’s supporters were energetic and boisterous. Despite the permit for thirty thousand, police estimated there could be as many as forty thousand people assembling.

  Just before 11:00 a.m., the police commanders heard Giuliani onstage telling the crowd the many reasons Pence should not certify the election results that afternoon: “criminality” in the vote tallies; “corrupt” voting machines; states “begging” for a recount; the “unconstitutionality” of an 1800s election law. But then Giuliani said a phrase, best known from the HBO series Game of Thrones, that caught a few of the commanders’ attention: “Let’s have trial by combat.” Why was Giuliani suggesting a fight to the death?

  Standing onstage with Giuliani was John Eastman. He spoke next, but the two functioned as a tag team. Screaming into the microphone, Eastman alleged that election officials stored ballots “in a secret folder in the machines” until late on election night and, once polls closed and officials determined who had voted and who had not, could “match those unvoted ballots with an unvoted voter and put them together in the machine” to give Biden just enough votes to win. This was a new far-fetched theory for which the Trump team had no evidence, yet the crowd ate it up. So did Giuliani, who grinned widely and flashed a thumbs-up.

  Mo Brooks, the Alabama congressman who was among the first to say he would try to block certification, said from the stage, “Today is the day American patriots start taking down names and kicking ass!” The crowd roared with approval.

  Under a large tent backstage at the rally, Trump hung out with his entourage of family, aides, and Secret Service agents before stepping out to deliver his speech. There was a party atmosphere. Laura Branigan’s 1982 hit “Gloria” boomed over the loudspeakers. Trump Jr. filmed the scene with his cell phone to post on Instagram. “I think we’re T-minus a couple of seconds here, guys, so check it out. Tune in if you’re livestreaming,” the president’s son said. He turned the camera to Meadows and called him “an actual fighter,” then turned it to Guilfoyle. After realizing she was being filmed, she began dancing to the music and implored Trump’s supporters to “have the courage to do the right thing—fight!”

  Ivanka Trump was spotted in the tent, too, tending to her father. Melania Trump had chosen not to attend the Save America rally, telling aides she was not sure it was a good idea for her to participate. The first lady was busy that morning overseeing a scheduled photo shoot of rugs and other décor items in the residence for use by the White House Historical Association. Yet the first daughter, who typically was just as careful as the first lady about when and where she appeared in public, attended, which surprised other White House officials.

  “You who curates your image, you who looks down on many of the rest of us, what are you doing there? Honestly,” a Trump adviser remarked about Ivanka Trump’s presence.

  Ivanka Trump did not appear onstage, however. Rally organizers repeatedly had asked her to give a speech, but she declined. The first daughter told aides she had become increasingly uncomfortable with efforts to overturn the election results. Yet she told them she decided to attend because she had hoped to calm the president and help keep the event on an even keel.

  At noon, Trump took the stage. Sund and his team at Capitol Police headquarters turned up the volume a bit and heard the thundering applause. At the Pentagon, Mark Milley was watching on television from his office as well, deeply disturbed by the rhetoric. He told aides he thought the whole scene was a national embarrassment.

  Trump opened his speech as he often began campaign rallies, boasting about the throngs of people who had come to see him and complaining that the media didn’t fairly cover his immense popularity. Then he got into the reason they were all there.

  “Our country has had enough,” Trump said. “We will not take it anymore, and that’s what this is all about. To use a favorite term that all of you people really came up with, we will ‘stop the steal.’ Today I will lay out just some of the evidence proving that we won this election, and we won it by a landslide.”

  Trump repeated more lies about the election outcome and then paused to praise Giuliani and Eastman for both doing a “fantastic job. I watched. That’s a tough act to follow, those two.”

  Trump said of Giuliani, “He’s got guts, unlike a lot of people in the Republican Party. He’s got guts. He fights.” And of Eastman, he said, “John is one of the most brilliant lawyers in the country, and he looked at this and he said, ‘What an absolute disgrace that this could be happening to our Constitution.’ He looked at Mike Pence, and I hope Mike is going to do the right thing. I hope so. I hope so, because if Mike Pence does the right thing, we win the election.”

  Trump added, “States want to revote. The states got defrauded. They were given false information. They voted on it. Now they want to recertify. They want it back. All Vice President Pence has to do is send it back to the states to recertify and we become president, and you are the happiest people. I just spoke to Mike. I said, ‘Mike, that doesn’t take courage. What takes courage is to do nothing. That takes courage.’ And then we’re stuck with a president who lost the election by a lot, and we have to live with that for four more years. We’re not going to let that happen.”

  Trump concluded his speech by urging his supporters to march to the Capitol and suggesting he would join them. He said, “Mike Pence is going to have to come through for us,” and that “it is up to Congress to confront this egregious assault on our democracy.”

  “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women,” Trump said. He added, “We’re going to try and give our Republicans—the weak ones, because the strong ones don’t need any of our help—we’re going to try and give them the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country.”

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  At noon, the same time Trump began speaking at his rally, police reported that roughly three hundred members of the Proud Boys were outside the Capitol. About twenty minutes into the speech, Capitol Police received reports about suspected bombs in Capitol Hill: suspicious packages at the Supreme Court and near the Democratic National Committee headquarters as well as a pipe bomb with a timer found outside the Republican National Committee headquarters. Police in that area also soon after found an unoccupied red pickup truck with Alabama tags containing a handgun, an M4 Carbine assault rifle, loaded magazines of ammunition, and components to make eleven Molotov cocktails with mason jars, lighters, rags, and other ignitable substances.

  At the Capitol Police’s command center, Sund and his team had turned their attention to the bomb threats and muted Trump’s speech so commanders could confer with officers in the field. They did not hear Trump urge his supporters to march on the Capitol, but within a few minutes of his call, thousands of people started walking down Pennsylvania and Constitution avenues toward the Capitol.

  They were pouring into the streets to join the first pack of Trump’s supporters who had already hit the barricades hard on the Capitol’s western front. That first and more organized group had arrived at 12:45, while the president was still speaking at the Ellipse. They clearly intende
d to force their way up to the building. It was easy to do, as the outer barricades had very few officers stationed nearby, so the streaming crowds quickly knocked over the temporary fencing that resembled bike racks and stormed onward toward the foundation and series of outdoor steps and patios. Many rushed toward the raised platform that had been partially set up for Biden’s inauguration, just two weeks away.

  Even from their command center several blocks away from the Capitol, Sund and his team could sense a level of preparation on the part of the protesters. Some of the men leading the first charge and snaking their way up the hill were barking into walkie-talkies in their hands. Many wore backpacks, and some had on battle helmets and bulletproof vests.

  At around the same time, Pence arrived at the Capitol to begin the day’s proceedings, set to start at 1:00. Just as his motorcade deposited him on the building’s eastern front, the vice president’s office released a three-page letter to members of Congress signed by Pence outlining his interpretation of his legal duties and the limits of his power as presiding officer. In it, Pence wrote, “I share the concerns of millions of Americans about the integrity of this election” and that he would ensure they “receive a fair and open hearing.”

  But, Pence added, “As a student of history who loves the Constitution and reveres its Framers, I do not believe that the Founders of our country intended to invest the Vice President with unilateral authority to decide which electoral votes should be counted during the Joint Session of Congress, and no Vice President in American history has ever asserted such authority. Instead, Vice Presidents presiding over Joint Sessions have uniformly followed the Electoral Count Act, conducting the proceedings in an orderly manner even where the count resulted in the defeat of their party or their own candidacy.”

  Pence cited his own “careful study of our Constitution, our laws, and our history,” and quoted from Michael Luttig’s tweeted legal analysis in his letter. The vice president vowed to hear objections raised by senators and representatives, and then to count the votes of the electoral college “in a manner consistent with our Constitution, laws, and history.” His final words: “So Help Me God.”