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

by Carol Leonnig

  It was just like Trump’s “perfect phone call” with the Ukrainian president and the pandemic he had “totally under control.” Predictably, Trump’s comments about the siege became the headline that day. His aides threw their hands in the air. They could choreograph as many victory tour stops as they wanted, but it would be impossible for anyone to look at Trump without thinking of January 6.

  “The media’s not going to let us have, ‘Wow, last week was really terrible, but Trump went to Texas today to wrap up the presidency.’ It just wasn’t happening,” one aide remarked. “He could climb over that [border] fence himself and they are not taking the images of people at the Capitol off the TV.”

  The next day, January 13, the House voted to impeach Trump. It was a historic moment. Trump became the first president to be impeached twice. Yet it felt anticlimactic because there had been no doubt that the Democrat-controlled House would take this course.

  “He must go,” Pelosi said from the floor during the proceedings. “He is a clear and present danger to the nation that we all love.”

  Unlike in Trump’s first impeachment, which had almost no Republican support, ten House Republicans, including Cheney, voted with Democrats to impeach him for inciting a riot with false claims of a stolen election. The final margin was sizable, 232 to 197, but Trump was unlikely to be removed from office prematurely. He had just seven days remaining in his term, and the Senate trial was not expected to begin until right after the inauguration. It seemed unlikely that enough Republicans there would join with Democrats to convict Trump. Indeed, in February, forty-three of fifty Senate Republicans would vote to acquit him of those crimes, allowing Trump to avoid conviction.

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  Ahead of Biden’s inauguration, Washington was converted into a fortress city. A huge swath of the city was fenced off with tall metal barricades. Downtown businesses boarded their windows. Upwards of twenty thousand National Guard forces descended on the capital from across the country, on top of the massive patchwork of federal and local law enforcement personnel. Thousands of Trump supporters were organizing on social media to return to Washington for what some called “the week of siege.” Leaders across the city were determined to prevent a repeat of January 6.

  On January 14, dozens of military and law enforcement leaders gathered at Fort Myer for a drill exercise. They took over a large gymnasium and mapped out the city on the floor to imagine where people might congregate, where security forces would be staged, which buildings snipers would occupy, and which intersections would be accessible.

  Milley helped lead the drill and, in an initial smaller meeting with the more senior leaders, laid out the stakes.

  “Here’s the deal, guys: These guys are Nazis, they’re boogaloo boys, they’re Proud Boys. These are the same people we fought in World War II,” Milley told them. “Everyone in this room, whether you’re a cop, whether you’re a soldier, we’re going to stop these guys to make sure we have a peaceful transfer of power. We’re going to put a ring of steel around this city and the Nazis aren’t getting in.”

  He proceeded to pepper everyone with detailed questions. How many snipers would be here? How many there? What was their response time? What were their rules of engagement? How would they communicate with other forces? He posed a question to law enforcement leaders that, after January 6, was not entirely hypothetical: “So, if a guy shows up with horns, a painted face, wearing bear skins, and tries to take your weapon, what do you want our soldiers to do?”

  Milley’s point was to make everyone uncomfortable, to make them think through every possibility and plan for a worst-case scenario. One of the failings of January 6 was the lack of imagination on the part of the law enforcement and military agencies who shared responsibility for protecting the nation’s capital. Those officers and their intelligence units did not expect that Trump’s rally supporters would suddenly become violent, crazed rioters.

  “The pain of preparation is much less than the pain of regret,” Milley told the group.

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  As Trump was consumed by the insurrection and its aftermath, including his impeachment, criminal justice reform advocates and lawyers who had been trying unsuccessfully for weeks to get the president to focus on clemency applications started to panic. This group included Alice Johnson, a sixty-five-year-old Black woman and convicted drug offender, who had become the face of Trump’s criminal justice reform efforts after he commuted her life sentence in 2018. Johnson and other advocates represented people who had been sentenced to years in prison for petty drug crimes or who had been unfairly tried and convicted, locked up even after witnesses recanted or evidence used at trial had been proven unreliable or flawed. Although they had an advocate in Kushner, they had struggled to get Trump’s attention since the November election. Their clock was about to run out.

  Trump liked granting pardons. He had long relished this unchecked power of his office. Many of the pardons he had issued earlier in his presidency were for political allies, such as Joe Arpaio, the former sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona. Advisers said he genuinely looked forward to bestowing this “gift” of mercy upon deserving people, yet had done so mostly for people personally connected to him. In late December, Trump had delivered clemency to twenty-nine people, most of them well connected, including former Trump campaign advisers Paul Manafort and Roger Stone, as well as Kushner’s father, Charles Kushner.

  But the community that Johnson cared about—people who were neither famous nor fairly punished—still hadn’t received Trump’s mercy. Cipollone and other lawyers in his office were responsible for vetting clemency applications and had to sign off on and prepare the final paperwork for pardons. But after January 6, the White House lawyers had become fanatical about trying to fend off last-minute attempts by the president’s allies to get Trump to do anything—including issuing controversial pardons—that could embarrass him and the administration.

  “After January sixth, there is genuine panic almost nothing will happen, because Pat is furious with the president, fed up, and only wants to deal with the most solid, vetted, and noncontroversial cases,” a Trump adviser said.

  On January 13, Cipollone spread the word to the president’s staff and emissaries for pardon applicants that no more pardons would be granted after January 15. If they hadn’t made it to the White House counsel’s team for vetting and approval by that date, they weren’t going to happen. Johnson was near tears upon hearing this news. She told colleagues she had a list of dozens of people practically rotting in prison, totally deserving of their freedom, who now would never even get a look. Kushner and Ivanka Trump were also upset and resolved to get more applications vetted. The couple pressed Trump to prioritize pardons. Meanwhile, outside lawyers involved in the process were surprised by Cipollone’s deadline. They reminded him that in January 2001, President Clinton had issued pardons in the middle of the night before George W. Bush’s inauguration, up until 2:00 a.m. in fact. Why couldn’t Trump?

  Over the weekend of January 16 and 17, Trump dug in, spending numerous hours going over the highlights of nearly four hundred applicants. Cipollone, Kushner, and Ivanka Trump weighed in with pros and cons. The president vacillated between who should and should not get his mercy, and even offered to pardon people who hadn’t applied. He took phone calls from people advocating on behalf of a client or a friend. In some cases, once he decided to grant his mercy, Trump called the person’s relative or lawyer to share the good news ahead of time.

  Just before midnight on January 20, the White House announced that Trump would issue clemency to 143 candidates, a widely diverse group. Nonviolent drug offenders, one of Kushner’s priorities, made up nearly one third of the list. But politicians convicted of misconduct and corruption, as well as officials embroiled in the Mueller investigation and those with special ties to Trump, made up just as large a share.

  The mo
st controversial pardon went to Steve Bannon, Trump’s on-again, off-again adviser, who had been charged the previous year with defrauding donors to a charity that had been established to privately fund the wall on the southern border. Rapper Lil’ Wayne also received a pardon. A last-minute advocacy campaign by rapper Snoop Dogg convinced Trump to commute the sentence of Death Row Records cofounder Michael “Harry-O” Harris. Trump also extended a pardon to Republican megadonor Elliott Broidy, who had pleaded guilty to lobbying the Trump administration for foreign governments without registering as a foreign agent.

  The list was so hastily assembled that the paperwork bore multiple errors about the specific cases and key information was misspelled or missing altogether. Many of those winning Trump’s mercy never even filed a petition for consideration with the Department of Justice, which was the standard process for pardon applicants. The vast majority who succeeded had a powerful friend who knew someone they could call in the White House or were brought to the president’s attention by advocates like Johnson. Most of the fourteen thousand applicants who did follow the normal Justice Department process were sidelined and remained in limbo.

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  It has long been an American tradition that on Inauguration Day the outgoing president receives the incoming one, even if the departing leader has just lost a bruising campaign to his successor. Hands are shaken. Pleasantries are exchanged. When the new president swears his oath of office, his predecessor is sitting right beside him observing, approving. This is how power has been peacefully transferred over so many years. This was the beauty of democracy.

  On Inauguration Day 2017, Barack and Michelle Obama were disturbed to be turning over the White House—the people’s house—to Donald and Melania Trump. They had watched Trump’s campaign and feared his bleak vision for America. But they abided by tradition. The country deserved nothing less. As Michelle Obama wrote in her memoir, Becoming, “Sitting on the inaugural stage in front of the U.S. Capitol for the third time, I worked to contain my emotions. The vibrant diversity of the two previous inaugurations was gone, replaced by what felt like a dispiriting uniformity, the kind of overwhelmingly white and male tableau I’d encountered so many times in my life.” When she realized this wasn’t just bad optics, but perhaps the new reality, she wrote, “I made my own optic adjustment: I stopped even trying to smile.”

  On January 20, 2021, as Biden took office, the Trumps were nowhere to be seen. They didn’t even bother going through the motions as the Obamas had done four years earlier. Instead, they fled the capital before the festivities began. As he left the White House early that morning, the outgoing president told a small crowd, “We will be back in some form. Have a good life.”

  Trump then staged a farewell rally at Joint Base Andrews before boarding Air Force One en route to West Palm Beach. In his remarks, Trump never once uttered the names of Biden or Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, even though they were written into his prepared script. And he made clear that he did not intend to cede the political stage.

  “I will always fight for you,” Trump said. “I will be watching. I will be listening. And I will tell you that the future of this country has never been better. I wish the new administration great luck and great success. I think they’ll have great success. They have the foundation to do something really spectacular.”

  The Trumps then boarded Air Force One, and as the presidential jet taxied down the runway and took off, the loudspeakers at his rally blared Frank Sinatra’s “My Way.” During the flight to Florida, in his final minutes as president, Trump granted a full pardon for Albert Pirro, the ex-husband of his Fox News loyalist Jeanine Pirro. It was announced just as Trump’s motorcade deposited him at Mar-a-Lago.

  Trump’s Andrews event was sparsely attended. Many of his once-close Republican allies eschewed the farewell to attend Biden’s inauguration, including Pence and McConnell. Pence had said goodbye to Trump the day before, in the Oval Office. The scene was awkward.

  “Hey, Mike, are you flying away? Where are you going?” Trump asked.

  “I’m going to Indiana,” Pence said.

  “Okay, I’ll see you later,” Trump said.

  Trump then told Pence, “You did a good job,” and they shook hands.

  Aides watching could sense the frostiness between the two men. “There was a coolness,” one recalled. “They didn’t know whether to hug, shake hands, pat on the back, say, ‘See you later.’ That feeling when you don’t know what to say.”

  At the Capitol on January 20, Pence and his wife, Karen, sat respectfully at the platform as the ceremony got under way. They were the lone representatives of the outgoing administration. At 11:48 a.m., Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. raised his right hand and swore the oath to serve his nation and to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution. His wife, Jill Biden, in a striking peacock-green dress and matching coat, held a large family Bible from the late 1800s.

  The oath took less than two minutes and then came shouts of hurrah and applause. The Bidens embraced, and then the new president hugged his son Hunter and his daughter Ashley. The former presidents, former first ladies, congressional leaders, and other VIPs seated on the platform seemed to share a collective moment of pinch-me relief. The Trump era was over.

  A number of musical artists performed, and Amanda Gorman, the National Youth Poet Laureate of 2017, read “The Hill We Climb,” her paean to the nation’s triumph over a threatening four years of chaos and division:

  We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation

  rather than share it

  Would destroy our country if it meant delaying

  Democracy

  And this effort very nearly succeeded

  But while democracy can be periodically delayed

  it can never be permanently defeated.

  Soon the ceremony was over, and it was time for old friends to greet one another. Milley had been seated directly behind the Obamas and the three of them chatted, sharing a moment of levity. Michelle Obama asked Milley how he was feeling.

  “No one has a bigger smile today than I do,” he told her. “You can’t see it under my mask, but I do.”

  The “bad boy” that Milley, Pompeo, and Meadows had worried about landing finally was on the ground. The peaceful transfer of power had been completed.

  Harris, now the vice president, paused to thank Milley profusely. “We all know what you and some others did,” she said. “Thank you.”

  It was time for the Bidens to make their way down the parade route that now was practically a hermetically sealed street topped off by razor wire. Milley kept looking at his phone, receiving security updates. The city was a “ring of steel,” just as he had said it would be, and there were no signs of trouble.

  As Milley recounted to aides, he got home that night to his house high atop Fort Myer and took in his most perfect view. From his front lawn, he could stare down over the monuments to America’s great presidents—Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln—and to Martin Luther King Jr., as well as to the hard-fought wars that enshrined the country’s commitment to democracy. He saw the White House in the foreground and the Capitol off in the distance.

  Looking out over the capital city at peace, Milley thought to himself, Thank God Almighty, we landed the ship safely.

  Epilogue

  Seventy days had passed since Donald Trump left Washington against his will. On March 31, 2021, we ventured to Mar-a-Lago, where he still reigned as king of Republican politics. We arrived late that afternoon for our audience with the man who used to be president and were ushered into an ornate sixty-foot-long room that functioned as a kind of lobby leading to the club’s patio. A model of Air Force One painted in Trump’s proposed redesign—a flat red stripe across the middle, a navy belly, a white top, and a giant American flag on the tail—was proudly displayed on the coffee table facing the entrance. It was a
prop disconnected from reality. Trump’s vision never came to be; the fleet now in use by President Biden still bears the iconic baby blue–and–white livery designed by Jacqueline Kennedy.

  “Used to be” is not a phrase anyone dares use to describe the president inside his Palm Beach castle. Here, beneath the gold-leaf ceiling of winged griffins and crystal chandeliers, Trump still rules, surrounded day and night by applauding fans, obsequious courtiers, and dutiful servants. At the perfectly manicured Mar-a-Lago, none of the disgrace that marked the end of his presidency pierces Trump’s reality. Here, he and his aides work to maintain the gospel according to Trump, with the most important revelations being that Donald Trump was the greatest president of all time and was unjustly denied a second term.

  Trump had invited us to Mar-a-Lago to interview him for this book. He had declined an interview for our first book about his presidency, and when A Very Stable Genius was published in January 2020, attacked us personally and branded our reporting a work of fiction. But Trump was quick to agree to our request this time. He sought to curate history.

  As we sat for the interview, the former president’s press secretary presented us copies of a bound volume: 1,000 Accomplishments of President Donald J. Trump: Highlights of the First Term. On the back cover is an American flag, the presidential seal, and Trump’s thick, jagged signature. The book totals 92 pages and is organized with chapters dedicated to the economy, tax cuts, deregulation, trade, and so on.

  Trump walked into the room flanked by a couple of plainclothed Secret Service agents, a much smaller detail than he once had as president. He wore his customary dark suit and tie, his face covered with bronze makeup. He sat in his preferred position, a plush armchair of ivory brocade facing the entrance where guests arrive, with us on a sofa to his right. Behind him was a huge window looking out to the Atlantic Ocean; in front of him, the patio facing Lake Worth.