A discussion arose inside the White House about whether the president could prospectively pardon Giuliani and Trump Jr.—and perhaps even himself—to eliminate the risk of being charged. Cipollone told Meadows that was a step too far. It would smack of—and quite possibly constitute—obstruction of justice. Cipollone wouldn’t have any of it. He threatened to resign if the president issued any such pardons. Not only that, but he said he and many of his senior lawyers would resign en masse, and then he would hold a news conference announcing their strong objections. The news conference threat was the death knell for the discussion. The White House could not afford to take any more public shaming. Cipollone won, giving the White House counsel and his deputies the upper hand.
Still, Cipollone believed what Trump did on January 6 was galling and could damage his own reputation. He had faithfully supported the president but did not want to look like he was condoning this behavior. He called McConnell for advice about whether to resign.
“It’s a tough call,” McConnell said, “but I think your country needs you to stay where you are until January twentieth.”
Jared Kushner also pressed Cipollone to stay. Along with Ivanka Trump, Kushner had been a primary driver of the president granting clemency to people who were wrongfully convicted, had already served lengthy sentences, or had compelling personal stories. And the White House counsel’s office had taken charge of vetting and approving the pardons. If Cipollone and his deputies resigned with only two weeks remaining in the administration, the pardons Kushner wanted would likely fail to get through.
“You took an oath to the country,” Kushner told Cipollone. “This is your service. If you leave, do you think the country’s safer or not safer? Let’s stay to the end. You don’t run when it gets tough. It’s our job to see this through.”
Cipollone and his team stayed. He might have gotten a great headline in the media had he resigned on principle. But McConnell told him he was grateful to him for taking the reputational risk of staying. Friends said Cipollone dryly told them in the days after he decided to stay that his main job was to “make sure bad things don’t happen.” Cipollone’s decision seemed to elevate his internal stock. As another top Trump adviser explained, “People begged them to stay another two weeks to finish out the term. Once they stayed, they rightly believed they had a lot more power.”
“The president tells them something they don’t want to do—nope, they’re not doing it,” the adviser continued. “Pat was able to basically say no. He could dig his heels in where it really mattered to him. He felt they had veto power.”
Two Cabinet members decided to quit: Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, who is married to McConnell. Both had served from the start of the administration and had stuck by Trump through many scandals. Chao had literally stood at Trump’s side, dutifully smiling, during an August 2017 news conference in which he said “both sides” were to blame for the violence and a woman’s death at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. For both women, January 6 was the breaking point.
In her resignation letter to Trump, DeVos wrote, “We should be highlighting and celebrating your Administration’s many accomplishments on behalf of the American people. Instead, we are left to clean up the mess caused by violent protesters overrunning the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to undermine the people’s business. That behavior was unconscionable for our country. There is no mistaking the impact your rhetoric had on the situation, and it is the inflection point for me.”
The education secretary added, “Impressionable children are watching all of this, and they are learning from us. I believe we each have a moral obligation to exercise good judgement and model the behavior we hope they would emulate. They must know from us that America is greater than what transpired yesterday.”
Chao had discussed with McConnell what she should do. She felt the way many did. Trump had made working for him a liability to their professional reputations. Chao and others didn’t want to stain their résumés. McConnell had told both O’Brien and Cipollone that their respective jobs—overseeing the nation’s security and making sure the White House followed the law—were too critical to walk away from. But he thought his wife could leave the Department of Transportation without jeopardizing the country’s stability.
The other Cabinet secretaries stayed, as did most top West Wing staff. As one senior official remarked, “If we all left, there wouldn’t be any adults in the building, and that would make it worse.”
Trump had made the nation’s leaders choose. Not just whether to stay or go. But whether to preserve democracy or devolve toward authoritarian rule, whether the truth mattered or not, whether the end justifies the means. Tensions were running high. Congresswoman Liz Cheney, the number three–ranking House Republican who had close ties to several military and national security leaders, called Milley on January 7 to check in.
“How are you doing?” he asked her.
“That fucking guy Jim Jordan. That son of a bitch,” Cheney said, referring to one of Trump’s staunchest allies in the House. She described being together with Jordan during the siege. “While these maniacs are going through the place, I’m standing in the aisle and he said, ‘We need to get the ladies away from the aisle. Let me help you.’ I smacked his hand away and told him, ‘Get away from me. You fucking did this.’ ”
Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, who worked in Lyndon Johnson’s White House and closely studied many presidents, including Abraham Lincoln, said, “I have spent my entire career with presidents and there is nothing like this other than the 1850s, when events led inevitably to the Civil War.
“I do think that history will look back on this election and it will be a badge of dishonor for the people who objected without evidence,” Goodwin said. “And you have to measure, for what purpose are they doing that? Is it ambition to be on the side of Trump? Is it party identification? This is a critical moment in our history.”
On Capitol Hill, leaders in both parties were alarmed by Trump’s state of mind and fearful of what he might do in his remaining days as president. Nancy Pelosi felt Trump had lost his sanity yet had access to the nuclear launch codes. The morning of January 8, the House Speaker called Milley. It was mostly a one-way conversation, with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on the receiving end.
“This guy’s crazy,” Pelosi said of Trump. “He’s dangerous. He’s a maniac. We have deep concerns.”
Pelosi reminded Milley of the oath he swore to the Constitution and asked him to review precautions for preventing an unstable president from initiating war by ordering a nuclear strike.
“Ma’am, I guarantee you that we have checks and balances in the system,” Milley told her. He walked her through the process of nuclear release authorities. “Ma’am, I guarantee you these processes are very good,” he said. “There’s not going to be an accidental firing of nuclear weapons.”
“How can you guarantee me?” Pelosi asked.
“Ma’am, there’s a process,” he said. “We will only follow legal orders. We’ll only do things that are legal, ethical, and moral.”
This was something Pentagon and Justice Department officials had discussed several times. The president had the legal authority to launch a preemptive nuclear strike if nuclear missiles were heading, for instance, from Russia toward U.S. targets. But launching such a strike would not be legal—and the Pentagon could block it—if the risk were not imminent. The president would instead have to go to Congress to get authorization. Democratic lawmakers, however, were worried about a controversial legal opinion on military aggression authored by the Justice Department in 2018. It concluded the president had broad authority to bypass Congress to conduct limited strikes on foreign countries if he determined it was in the national interest and posed little risk of escalation, as Trump had done in Syria.
Speaking with Milley, Pelosi reiterated her asse
ssment of Trump as deranged and dangerous—she already had publicly called on Pence and the Cabinet to invoke the Twenty-fifth Amendment and warned that if they did not the House would try to impeach him—but he resisted chiming in. Milley tried to stay professional.
“I’m not going to characterize the president,” Milley told her. “That’s not my place. That’s not my duty.”
After their call ended, Pelosi informed Democratic House members about her conversation with Milley. “The situation of this unhinged President could not be more dangerous,” she wrote in a letter to her caucus.
At least a few senior Republican lawmakers privately shared Pelosi’s concerns, though they were afraid of saying so in public. One of them recalled thinking at the time that Trump had “reached a new level of almost derangement after he lost the election. You know, we had this bizarre behavior all along, sort of contained, but a lot of heroic people at various points over the four years—and then, boom! All of the guardrails were gone.”
* * *
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In the days following January 6, the president and vice president were not on speaking terms. On January 7, Pence worked from home at the Naval Observatory. On January 8, he went to the White House and worked out of his West Wing office. Pence typically would ask staff in the mornings if the president had come down from the residence yet, and if he had, head straight to the Oval Office to see him. But not on January 8. The two men stayed in their separate offices.
“God, this is a fracture,” Keith Kellogg, one of the few administration officials with loyalties to both Trump and Pence, told colleagues. “We’ve got to fix this.”
Not everyone around Pence was so eager to make amends. Marc Short was furious with the president for having left the vice president out to dry. Just about everything that had transpired over the past week disgusted Short—Trump’s irrational refusal to acknowledge that the Constitution did not grant a vice president the power to overturn election results; his threats to Pence at the Georgia rally and then at the Ellipse; his tweet saying Pence lacked the courage to do what was right; and, most of all, his delay in telling his supporters chanting “Hang Mike Pence” to stand down and go home.
Trump was in the wrong, clearly, but was not about to apologize to Pence. In Trump’s book, apologizing was a sin, an admission of weakness. So, Kellogg, O’Brien, and Kushner brainstormed how to bring the president and vice president back together, short of an apology. O’Brien proposed having Trump award Pence the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, one that President Obama had bestowed upon Vice President Biden in their final days in office. The others liked the idea. They thought the award could recognize Pence’s work chairing the coronavirus task force, though they knew it would be interpreted as a postinsurrection peace treaty. The three thought this could repair the relationship.
O’Brien broached the idea with Short. Short told him that if the president wanted to do this, that would be terrific, but that neither he nor the vice president would ask for the medal, and nor did they want to be seen as lobbying for it.
The plan was put on ice, and it was unclear whether Trump ever found out about it. Kushner and Ivanka Trump had another idea. Ivanka Trump felt strongly that her father and Pence needed to reconcile and asked the president if he would sit down with the vice president. He agreed and told her to have Pence come by the private dining room. Ivanka Trump, Kushner, and Short then met with Pence to make sure he was comfortable with the plan. He was ready to talk to Trump. Pence had surprised West Wing officials by his Reaganesque demeanor and sunny disposition around the office in the wake of the president’s betrayal.
On the afternoon of January 11, Pence went in to see Trump. Kushner joined them. They spoke for about ninety minutes. Advisers to both the president and vice president described the conversation as cordial but would not characterize it further.
At the same time Kushner was trying to broker peace between the president and vice president, he also was trying to convince his father-in-law to stop stewing and start celebrating. Specifically, he wanted Trump to maximize his final days in office by burnishing his legacy, what so many advisers had been recommending for months.
Kushner hadn’t been around the White House on January 6 or in the days leading up to the Capitol siege. He and his close adviser Avi Berkowitz had been in the Middle East negotiating another peace accord aimed at destabilizing Iran, this one between Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia had agreed to end a yearslong blockade and reopen its borders and air space to Qatar. On January 4, the breakthrough had been announced. On January 6, Kushner and Berkowitz had been flying over the Atlantic en route to Washington. They thought to themselves, We’re done. We were diplomats. We crushed it. We put a ton of wins on the board, we made peace deals to make the world safer and create new hope. Then they touched down in Washington and saw that all hell had broken loose, and Kushner went into what one colleague called “Mr. Fix-It mode.” Kushner wanted Trump to take Air Force One on the road and give speeches touting his accomplishments across a range of policy areas—to remind Americans that he was a president who did much more than just complain about losing the election.
“Let’s take a victory lap on all the things you’ve done and leave with your head held high,” Kushner told his father-in-law. He suggested he visit the southern border and talk about immigration enforcement and newly constructed portions of the border wall.
“Talk about how you’ve rebuilt the military, gotten us out of wars, made peace deals,” Kushner said, also suggesting an event to promote the coronavirus vaccines. “Look, I think this Warp Speed vaccine is one of your greatest accomplishments and one of the greatest accomplishments in our country in the last century.”
Lindsey Graham was encouraging the same thing. Despite his “count me out” declaration from the Senate floor the night of January 6, Graham had almost immediately sidled up next to Trump again. He called the president and said, “I like you. I don’t think you meant to incite a riot. You’re not stupid. What good comes from inciting a riot? I think it got out of hand. I think it’s going to be part of your legacy and you need to come to grips with this happening on your watch. You need to start repairing the damage.”
Graham then spent a full day at the White House working with Kushner and Meadows to sketch a series of “legacy” events to help Trump get out from under January 6 and to keep him focused and busy until Inauguration Day on January 20. The last thing they wanted was Trump holed up in front of a television brooding. Like Kushner, Graham encouraged Trump to make a visit to the border and show off the wall. “Mr. President, you need a plan here,” he said. “Just show people you’re not sitting in the corner. The border is a good thing. You should be proud of what you’ve accomplished there.”
Trump, however, was almost entirely fixated on the fallout from January 6. He was isolated and vengeful. With only days of his term left, many staffers were emptying out their offices in the West Wing and Trump lashed out at some of those who remained. Despite their tête-à-tête, he remained furious at Pence and was angry that Democrats were planning to impeach him. The president also was upset with Giuliani and instructed aides not to pay his lawyer’s legal fees.
One of Trump’s advisers tried to cast blame on Giuliani and others on the legal team for trying to take advantage of him at a moment of extreme weakness. “They capitalize on people’s vulnerabilities,” this adviser said. “A desperate person is the most vulnerable to falsehoods and willing to believe what people tell them if it’s something they want to hear.” Still, this adviser felt Trump allowed himself to be susceptible: “He’s not a victim. He’s an adult. He makes his own decisions. He knows the difference between right and wrong.”
This was one of the central characteristics of so many of Trump’s advisers, their readiness to find someone or something else to blame for Trump’s actions.
Trump agreed to get out of
town. After six days out of public view, on January 12, the president touched down in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, where he toured a new portion of wall in Alamo and gave a speech touting his immigration policy. Graham traveled with him. On the flight down, the president asked what January 6 felt like.
“It’s going to be one of those big days in American history,” Graham told him. “They’ll be talking about this after we’re all dead and gone.”
At the wall, Trump included a few paragraphs in his speech addressing the insurrection. He warned against the effort by Democrats in Congress to hold him accountable.
“The impeachment hoax is a continuation of the greatest and most vicious witch hunt in the history of our country and is causing tremendous anger and division and pain, far greater than most people will ever understand, which is very dangerous for the U.S.A., especially at this very tender time,” he said.
Also, during the trip Trump claimed his remarks at the Ellipse encouraging his supporters to march to the Capitol had been thoroughly analyzed and “everybody to the T thought it was totally appropriate.”
I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final Year Page 54
