Copyright © 2021 by Michael C. Bender
Cover design by Milan Bozic. Front cover photograph © Getty Images: Drew Angerer (crowd), Scott Olson (Trump); back cover photograph by Shealah Craighead. Cover copyright © 2021 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
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ISBNs: 978-1-5387-3480-3 (hardcover), 978-1-5387-3481-0 (ebook)
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction
Prologue
1. Battle Creek
2. The Forty-Year Itch
3. Momentum
4. Acquittal, Part One: The Perfect Call
5. Victory Lap
6. Covid, Part One: Hyperbole in the Time of Pandemic
7. Covid, Part Two: Retooling the Reelect
8. Law and Order
9. Anarchy and Chaos
10. Juneteenth, Observed
11. The Last MAGA Rally
12. Stepien’s Shot
13. The Trump TV Convention
14. Hell Week and a Half
15. Where’s Hunter?
16. Final Stretch
17. Election Day
18. Acquittal, Part Two: The Insurrection
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Discover More
Source Notes
About the Author
For my family
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Introduction
“Today is not the end. It’s just the beginning.”
—Save America rally, Washington, January 6, 2021
Armed Secret Service agents guarded the secret hideaway inside the U.S. Capitol, where the vice president sheltered with his wife and eldest daughter. A swarm of rioters just outside the room had smashed windows and busted through doors, and now prowled across the waxed sandstone blocks floors beneath the iconic cast-iron dome. It was January 6, 2021, and the symbolic heart of the world’s longest-standing democracy was under siege for the first time since the War of 1812. But instead of British troops in red coats, the insurrection was led by an American mob of President Donald Trump’s supporters—and they wanted his running mate’s head.
Vice President Mike Pence’s offense: He had dared to defy Trump’s order to violate the U.S. Constitution in an attempt to overturn the results of the November election. The frenzied crowd had already overrun the U.S. Capitol Police and the Metropolitan Police Department. Now, Pence’s life—and the safety of just about everyone else in the Capitol that day—rested in the hands of the National Guard.
“I want them down here—and I want them down here now,” Pence firmly instructed during a private phone call with the nation’s top military and defense officials gathered at the Pentagon.
As this book chronicles, the storming of the Capitol was the culmination of one of the nation’s most intense and unnerving election cycles, one that tested the foundation of our democratic principles. I initially set out to write a traditional campaign book that would tell the story of how Trump marketed himself to a second term, or how the same traits that lifted him to victory in 2016 imperiled his reelection just four years later. I envisioned this as a deep look at cutting-edge electioneering techniques heading into the quarter mark of the twenty-first century. I anticipated explaining what those tactics told us about the cultural and socioeconomic dynamics that coursed through our politics. I wanted to document the political phenomenon of the Trump mega-rally—from the behind-the-scenes staging to the campaign’s collection of personal data from attendees to the motivations of the president’s supporters who waited for days outside arenas until he arrived.
But like nearly everything with Trump, there was nothing traditional about this campaign—and the story that revealed itself was far more chaotic and complicated. Without warning, a once-in-a-century pandemic forced millions of Americans to stop commuting to work, log into Zoom, and stay away from shops, restaurants, and even extended family members to avoid a mysterious and uncharted contagion. The electoral kinetics shifted just as quickly and significantly. Trump’s reelection bid suddenly hinged more on his response from inside the White House to a complex global health crisis than on how his top political operatives would promote his past successes from campaign headquarters across the Potomac River. My expectations changed, too. Instead of spending the year on the campaign trail with the candidate I’d covered for five years, attending rallies produced by members of his team I’d known for just as long, I only occasionally left my house once pandemic lockdowns started in March 2020.
The result is the story of the final year of Trump’s presidency, which opens with his historic first impeachment in December 2019 and extends just beyond his unprecedented second impeachment fourteen months later. It’s informed by hundreds of hours of interviews with more than 150 members of Trump’s White House, Cabinet, and campaign, as well as friends and outside advisers—and also by my own occasional run-ins, phone calls, and one-on-one interviews with Trump. I traveled to Florida twice after the election, where Trump welcomed me to his Mar-a-Lago resort for a pair of lengthy discussions about the campaign. Together these accounts reveal the calculations behind the administration’s response to the coronavirus pandemic; explain why top lieutenants in Trump World remained in a constant revolving door between exile and repatriation; offer inside-the-room details of the intense battles between Trump and his military advisers over whether to unleash soldiers on civil rights protests in the streets of American cities; and show how Trump spent more than twice as much money on a losing campaign as he had on a winning one. I also spent time with an eclectic group of Trump superfans who regularly slept outside for days to secure their place in the front row of his mega-rallies, and whose stories of how Trump changed their lives help explain his enduring appeal to his base.
The heart of the story, of course, is President Trump himself, whom I covered for the Wall Street Journal during the 2016 election, during all four years at the White House, and during the 2020 campaign. As part of my job for the newspaper, I’ve interviewed Trump inside his corporate office in Trump Tower, on Air Force One, and one-on-one in the Oval Office. Trump has praised my wavy hair as being worthy o
f a job in his administration. And he has complained about my reporting to my elementary-school-age daughter.
Many of my Trump World sources shared their firsthand accounts, internal campaign documents, text messages, emails, and calendars to help reconstruct critical moments during the campaign. Some spoke for the opportunity to share what they had witnessed from their front-row seat to history. Others spoke for protective purposes, concerned that if they didn’t tell their story, someone else would. And others still spoke for cathartic and almost therapeutic reasons, eager to try to process the surreal whirlwind through which they had just lived. Many spoke only on the condition of deep background, an agreement that meant I could share their stories without direct attribution.
I agreed to those conditions because my motivation to write this book was the same that compelled many of my sources to speak with me. I have had a remarkable opportunity to watch an astonishing chapter of our history unfurl, and I’ve been humbled by the chance I’ve had to speak regularly with the people who shaped it—and were shaped by it. I hope this book adds to our understanding of the people and events that have forever impacted our lives.
—Michael C. Bender, May 2021
November 9, 2016
“So, there’s good news and bad news,” said Mike Biundo, a New Hampshire–based Republican strategist for Donald J. Trump, the day Trump won the 2016 campaign.
“Oh yeah?” Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio asked. “What’s that, Mike?”
“The good news is we won,” Biundo said. “The bad news is these stupid fuckers are going to think this is the way you win a presidential election.”
Prologue
“I don’t think we’ve ever had an empty seat.”
—Merry Christmas rally, Battle Creek, Michigan, December 18, 2019
Saundra Kiczenski packed her Honda Accord before dawn on one of the final days of 2019 and drove five hours from her home in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, across the Mackinac Bridge, and south along the seam of interstate asphalt stitched down the middle of the giant geological mitten tugged over the Lower Peninsula. She arrived in Battle Creek at 1:00 p.m., two and a half days early for her thirty-first Trump rally.
The fifty-six-year-old worker in the Walmart patio and garden department preferred the familiar comfort of a Wawa or Sheetz convenience store for a quick bite to eat on the road. She wore her straight brown hair in bangs, and dressed in shirts and accessories adorned with Trump’s face. Saundra was also one of the founding members of the “Front Row Joes,” a group of more than 1,500 Trump diehards who routinely traveled to see the president perform and were almost always among the first few people in line for a rally. Many had attended at least ten Trump rallies by his fourth year in office—several had notched more than fifty.
Trump rallies formed the core of one of the most steadfast political movements in modern American political history, a dynamic that reordered the Republican Party. The president held nearly five rallies a week during his 2016 campaign and averaged one every ten days even after he was sworn in. That perpetual tour attracted a coterie of political pilgrims who traveled across the country and camped outside arenas for days at a time for the opportunity to stand in the front row and, for ninety blissfully frenzied minutes, cheer on the man they credited with changing the country and, in many cases, their own lives.
“You go to the rallies, and he basically tells you that you don’t have to put up with ‘the swamp’ and those kinds of people,” Saundra told me, standing outside a rally during Trump’s third year in office. “Because of him, I decided not to pay for Obamacare, not pay the fine. And what happened? Nothing. Before, the quiet me would have paid the fine. But Donald Trump told me that we have a voice, and now I stand up for myself.”
Saundra and her fellow Front Row Joes described, in different ways, a euphoric flow of emotions between themselves and the president, a sort of adrenaline-fueled, psychic cleansing that followed ninety minutes of chanting and cheering with 15,000 other like-minded Trump junkies. Saundra compared the energy inside a rally to the feelings she had as a teenage girl in 1980 watching the U.S. hockey team beat the Soviet Union, a victory still remembered as the “Miracle on Ice.”
“The whole place is erupting, everyone is screaming, and your heart is beating like, just, oh my God,” Saundra said. “It’s like nothing I’ve experienced in my lifetime.”
After her first rally in 2015, she stopped at a fast-food joint for dinner. Standing in line, she looked up at the wall-mounted television, amazed to see the back of her head on cable news clips from the event that had just ended. She was hooked.
Like Saundra, Trump’s relentless rallygoers were almost exclusively white. Many were recently retired and had time on their hands and little to tie them to home. A handful never had children. Others were estranged from their families. Several lived paycheck-to-paycheck yet always offered strangers a cold beverage, a prepacked sandwich, or their last cigarette.
Cynthia Barten, who lived in Missouri, relied on disability payments. Her husband, Ken Barten, cut lawns. Jon French sold secondhand items in Kentucky. Kevin Steele quit his job and financed his travels to Trump rallies with a $120,000 family inheritance. To help pay for her trips, Saundra logged into Wonolo or other mobile phone apps to find odd jobs washing dishes or clearing warehouses in whatever town to which she’d followed Trump’s traveling circus.
The group included Trump aficionados who had spent decades keeping tabs on his history of political flirtations, tabloid melodrama, and star turns on reality television. But a surprising number had also voted for Barack Obama at least once, attracted to the Democrat’s charisma and fed up with Republicans over foreign adventurism and the growing national debt.
Rally regulars stayed connected through Facebook and text messages, pinging one another to see who was attending the next event, who could carpool, and who wanted to split a hotel room. Two of them had already married and divorced by Trump’s second year in office.
Even I earned honorary Joe status after attending more than fifty rallies while working for the Wall Street Journal. Members of the group would tell me when they heard about the next rally location, almost always before the media had reported the news. Saundra once called me to ask if I’d go halfsies on a hotel room in the Hamptons. She had scraped together $2,800 for a Trump fundraiser ticket but didn’t have enough left for lodging. For numerous reasons—work-related ethical issues and likely objections on the marital front—I declined.
Saundra’s life had become bigger with Trump. She met new people like Ben Hirschmann, a Michigan legislative aide who posted on Facebook anytime he had an open seat in his car on the way to a Trump rally. She met Brendan Gutenschwager and flew with him to Hong Kong, where they spent twenty-four hours waving their red, white, and blue Trump flags during the protests over China’s extradition laws. She occasionally overnighted about an hour outside of Detroit with Judy Chiodo, a fellow Trump rally-trotter, rather than drive all the way home to Sault Ste. Marie.
In Battle Creek, Saundra waited for Judy at Fazoli’s, a restaurant chain founded by the Long John Silver’s owners and known for its Submarinos sandwiches and Meatball da Vinci. When they arrived at the rally after lunch, they spent their afternoon huddled in Saundra’s car near the arena’s entrance. It was too soon to get in line, but never too early to monitor for other early birds. Saundra was scrupulous about her campaign queueing.
“We’ll just be quiet, and we’ll keep an eye on the place,” Saundra explained to Judy, who had been to just two rallies before Battle Creek.
As twilight enveloped the small-town streets, they pulled into a nearby parking lot to leave their cars overnight. Snow started falling by the time they returned to the parking lot a few hours later. Undeterred, they unrolled their sleeping bags in their backseats and tried to sleep.
By 6:00 a.m., Saundra was shivering and awake and went for hot chocolate. And by 9:00 a.m., still more than thirty-six hours before Trump would set foot onstage, she
and Judy set down lawn chairs on the sidewalk. First in line again! Campaign staffers moved the line into a parking garage connected to the arena, and by that evening, as snow fell steadily along with the thermometer, the gang was all there. Brendan arrived and brought friends. Rick Frazier drove in from Ohio. Richard Snowden called to say he’d be late—typical Richard!—and blamed a snowstorm in Buffalo for his delay. They took turns thawing a block away at Griffin Grill & Pub while the others stayed behind and saved the spots in line. Locals passed out hand warmers, hot soup, and Little Caesars pizza. Saundra was delighted to be around friends and nostalgic for the 2016 campaign when so many of them had first met. That year marked the political awakening for her and other Front Row Joes. They had been among the first Americans to identify the resonance of Trump’s political appeal and reveled in the victory for years, recounting the blow-by-blow of that triumphant November evening—right along with Trump—at nearly every rally that followed.
Temperatures dipped below freezing the night before the Battle Creek rally, but the soothing nostalgia helped insulate Saundra as she unrolled her sleeping bag right there at the front of the line on the cement of the open-air parking garage. Others pitched tents. Some switched on their space heaters. A few Front Row Joes recalled how Michigan was the first Trump rally site after Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III released his report into Russian election interference just nine months earlier.
But Battle Creek was going to be bigger. Trump was getting impeached. And it was about to happen right onstage.
1
Battle Creek
“Are they really going to impeach me?”
—Conversation with staff, White House, December 18, 2019
“Frankly, We Did Win This Election”: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost Page 1
