“Frankly, We Did Win This Election”: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost

by Michael C. Bender

  After his remote feed cut out after the explosion, Trump returned to the restaurant for a meatloaf dinner with Kevin McCarthy, the House Republican leader. The dining room of Mar-a-Lago during the Trump presidency was a who’s who of the conservative landscape—talk radio hosts, members of Congress, and the president. As he and McCarthy dined, Trump noticed conservative radio show host Howie Carr and motioned him over. Carr was based in Boston, but he bought a Mar-a-Lago membership after Trump was elected. Trump immediately wanted to talk about presidential politics.

  “Who’d be better to run against?” Trump asked. “Bernie or Biden?”

  “Bernie!” both Carr and McCarthy answered. Both men viewed the senator from Vermont as too liberal to win over moderate voters in battleground states.

  By the time the ice cream dessert arrived, news of the missile strike was breaking and Trump made the rounds to soak up the adulation. At one point, Trump brought another friend over to the table, Matt Gaetz, a Republican congressman from Florida. Gaetz was shaken by the strike and implored Trump not to get dragged into a war, warning that an escalation would cost him reelection.

  Trump looked at Gaetz for a moment.

  “Get Tucker on the phone,” the president said.

  Like Gaetz, Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson opposed American adventurism in the Middle East. Unlike Gaetz, he’d grown wary of Trump’s calls. Carlson wanted to be a TV show host, not one of Trump’s advisers. He was riding along in a golf cart in Florida when he saw Gaetz calling. He answered only to find Trump on the other end.

  Carlson was upset—both about the strike and that he’d been tricked into taking a call from the president. But Trump defended the decision to take out Soleimani and described his calculation as partly based impeachment considerations.

  “Sixteen Republican senators were calling me, demanding I do this,” Trump told Carlson, keeping Gaetz’s phone on speaker mode. “They want me to do this, and they’re running impeachment. And, you know, it’s really not the time to ignore Republican senators. I had to listen to them.”

  “Maybe that’s why they impeached you in the first place, to neuter your instincts,” Carlson told him.

  Within days Brad and Coby had pushed out digital ads that boasted about Trump’s move to eliminate Soleimani, making slight tweaks to the content as they tested which message attracted the most eyeballs. The best-performing spot, which relied on a loud electric guitar solo and an image of troops in military fatigues, was viewed more than 500,000 times, mostly in crucial battleground states like Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania.

  Meanwhile, a progressive group, Acronym, had pulled down its digital ads that attacked Trump over impeachment after finding that the spots had actually helped Trump instead of hurting him. The group replaced those spots with clips of Carlson, on his Fox show, criticizing Trump’s military action in the Middle East. That dented Trump’s approval rating by 4 percent among the key target group.

  Yet Trump himself was sure the decision would help his campaign. He mentioned killing Soleimani at almost every campaign rally for the rest of the year.

  Trump’s mood continued to improve on January 15, when he welcomed a Chinese delegation into the White House to formalize the agreement on phase one of his long-sought-after trade deal with Beijing. Some deputies in the White House raised concerns about the wisdom of bringing Beijing officials into the West Wing after China had just alerted the world to a coronavirus outbreak. Dr. Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, had repeatedly contacted his Chinese counterparts seeking more information on the new contagion and offering U.S. assistance, but had gotten nowhere. However, the question about whether to call off the meeting was never raised to Trump’s economic and trade advisers. Instead, the show would go on and it would be another week until reporters would ask Trump about the outbreak.

  Trump missed his moment on the rebranded NAFTA deal, but almost four weeks removed from the impeachment vote and after a long break in Mar-a-Lago, he was riding high and ready to celebrate. The result was a signature performance in the East Room of the White House, a seventy-five-minute tour-de-force of self-indulgence and back-patting. He ticked through the list of guests in the room—eighty-one different lawmakers, administration officials, and corporate executives—and regaled each one with compliments or by retelling a favorite story about them. The delegation of Chinese officials stood looking on for nearly an hour and a half.

  In a nod to history, Trump singled out Henry Kissinger, who, with President Nixon, helped open China to the world in the early 1970s and now sat at the front of Trump’s audience. Chinese vice premier Liu He, the chief negotiator for Beijing, and other Chinese officials applauded the mention.

  The president introduced Lou Dobbs, the Fox Business anchor, as “a man who always liked me, because he’s smart, so smart,” and noted that Dobbs had compared him favorably to President Reagan.

  At one point, Trump appeared irritated that the executives weren’t appreciative enough of all he had done to help them with his pro-business agenda. After praising a recent earnings report from JPMorgan Chase, he sniped at Mary Callahan Erdoes, the company’s chief executive and one of the few women he mentioned during the event.

  “Will you say, ‘Thank you, Mr. President,’ at least?” he asked. “I made a lot of bankers look very good.”

  He mentioned Sheldon and Miriam Adelson, the casino magnates and Republican mega-donors who privately wanted him to end the trade war, calling them “great people.” He joked that Stephen Schwarzman, the chief executive of the Blackstone Group, had been so interested in the deal that the president feigned shock that he merely sat in the audience.

  “I’m surprised you’re not actually sitting over here on the ledge of the stage,” Trump said.

  As White House aides ushered reporters out of the room, Trump left them with one parting thought on the relationship between Washington and Beijing.

  “The best it’s ever been,” Trump said.

  He could have applied the same verdict to his presidency: His negative approval rating was shrinking, he was neck-and-neck in reelection polls, and he was about to stand trial on impeachment charges the next day in the Senate, where the jury was packed with Republican friends.

  Footnote

  1 Brad was right about one thing: 100 million people tuned in to watch the Kansas City Chiefs win their first championship since Nixon—the most-watched television event of the year. The second-biggest TV audience in 2020 was 75 million viewers for the first presidential debate between Trump and Biden in October.

  4

  Acquittal, Part One: The Perfect Call

  “I have a 95 percent approval rating. Can you believe it?”

  —Campaign rally, Toledo, Ohio, January 20, 2020

  As Trump celebrated the China trade deal in the East Room, over in the West Wing, White House counsel Pat Cipollone was building the case for acquittal. The Senate trial was set to start the next day, on January 16, and the fifty-three-year-old Cipollone, the slight and bespectacled son of Italian immigrants, had taken charge of the process. Laura Ingraham, the Fox News anchor who had been a Cipollone client, had introduced him to Trump in 2016. Cipollone helped Trump during debate prep in 2016 and joined the White House as its top attorney when Don McGahn, Trump’s first White House counsel, departed after the midterms.

  Cipollone’s task at the start of 2020 was twofold. He had to win acquittal for Trump in the Senate impeachment trial, and he needed to keep Rudy Giuliani at arm’s length. The latter would prove infinitely more difficult than the former.

  Giuliani and Trump had known each other since the 1980s in New York when the former was a politically ambitious federal prosecutor. In 1988, Giuliani’s office had put the squeeze on a man named Robert Hopkins, who was running a gambling ring with mob connections. Hopkins said Trump was helping to launder the money and offered to wear a wire and give up the flashy young developer. Giuliani sent one of his
top prosecutors to visit Trump. Weeks later, Trump announced he planned to raise $2 million for Giuliani’s campaign for mayor and the investigation into Trump was over, according to Wayne Barrett, a New York journalist who covered both Giuliani and Trump for decades.

  Almost three decades later, Giuliani offered tepid support when Trump initially jumped into the presidential race. “Donald Trump is the epitome of American success,” he told Fox News in June 2015, while acknowledging that “people have different impressions of him.”

  It wasn’t until the following April, when Trump had the Republican nomination nearly in hand, that Giuliani formally endorsed him. But by then, much of Trump World had been populated by the Giuliani political family tree.

  One of the first additions was Trump’s New Hampshire campaign chairman, Stephen Stepanek, who had held the same position in Giuliani’s unsuccessful 2008 presidential bid. Jason Miller, the deputy communications director for Giuliani’s presidential campaign, was a key adviser for Trump in 2016 and 2020. Giuliani soon joined Trump’s campaign as well, where he often spoke ahead of him at rallies. Trump liked having “America’s Mayor” vouch for him, and equally enjoyed tormenting his longtime associate. He would needle the former mayor for falling asleep on flights and joke about Giuliani’s constant use of his iPad.

  “He’s looking at cartoons,” Trump would say.

  Giuliani rarely complained about the treatment. Instead, he seemed to crave the attention and would often physically jockey with other aides and advisers to sit next to Trump at dinner or on the plane.

  “Rudy never wanted to be left out,” one 2016 aide said. “If you were ever between Rudy and the president, look out. You were going to get trampled.”

  But Trump wasn’t always appreciative of Giuliani’s loyalty. When Trump’s 2016 campaign was rocked by the release of the Access Hollywood tape—a devastating hot-mic moment that captured Trump bragging about forcing himself on women—only Giuliani was willing to go on the Sunday talk shows two days later to defend the candidate. Giuliani did all five shows—the Full Ginsburg as it’s known in Washington political circles.1

  After the shows, Giuliani went directly to LaGuardia Airport, where Trump was waiting on his plane to fly to St. Louis for his second debate with Clinton. When Giuliani climbed up the stairs, he was greeted with huzzahs and high-fives from Trump’s aide Hope Hicks, Bossie, and Stephen Miller. When he walked to the front of the plane, Trump barely looked up from his newspaper.

  “Rudy, you sucked,” Trump said. “You were weak.”

  Giuliani looked like he’d simultaneously had the wind knocked out of him and taken a kick to the groin.

  “What the fuck do you want me to do?” Giuliani said.

  After the election, Giuliani was eager for an administration post and assumed he would get one. He privately told friends that he was a lock to be named secretary of state and publicly told reporters that he was being considered for several positions but wouldn’t say which ones.

  “You don’t want the person who’s chosen to feel like number two, or number three,” Giuliani told me during the transition between Trump’s electoral victory and his inauguration.

  Giuliani indeed had been considered for several Cabinet positions, but his chances fizzled after even a cursory round of vetting set off alarm bells. Jason Miller met with Giuliani about potential administration jobs and then asked Steven Cheung, one of the communications aides, to pepper Giuliani with questions. Afterward, Cheung spoke with Giuliani’s office assistant to check some of the former mayor’s answers, then asked Giuliani for a follow-up meeting.

  “You said you hadn’t been to the Middle East in more than a year,” Cheung reminded Giuliani the next day. “Are you sure there wasn’t something more recent?”

  Giuliani insisted there wasn’t. When Cheung said his assistant had relayed he was in the United Arab Emirates only a month earlier, Giuliani’s face went blank. He stared at Cheung for a moment, then nodded. Giuliani couldn’t remember whether he had traveled to the Middle East just weeks prior, Cheung thought.

  “This isn’t good at all,” Cheung told Jason Miller.

  Giuliani didn’t get a job.

  Once Trump took office, he continued belittling Giuliani. He berated him in front of others for spitting while he was talking at Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin’s wedding in June 2017.

  “Go stand somewhere else,” Trump told him.

  And Giuliani did.

  But Trump also made clear that only he could degrade the former mayor. In one staff meeting later in 2017, Trump’s team started complaining about Giuliani’s puzzling television appearances that often veered off-message and created more work for the press shop. Trump barked that at least Giuliani was out there fighting for him. Everyone shut up after that.

  In April 2018, Giuliani found a spot on Trump’s team of outside lawyers during the special counsel’s investigation into Russian election meddling and Trump’s potential obstruction of justice. Giuliani seemed to fill a role that was part spokesman, part litigator, and part bumbling strategist. He made contradictory statements to the press and was repeatedly upbraided by Trump.

  But Giuliani also had an important side hustle. By late 2018, he was involved in an effort to dig up dirt that might damage Joe Biden. His effort focused on Ukraine, where the former vice president had pressed for anti-corruption measures and his son, Hunter, had scored a high-paying job on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company. Giuliani was providing regular updates to Trump, who made little effort to clue in his own diplomats, national security advisers, or the reelection team.

  Hunter Biden’s drug problems and reputation for drafting off his dad’s political prestige had made him an object of obsession for Republican operatives. A year earlier, in 2018, Hunter had been featured in a book from conservative author Peter Schweizer, Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends. While Hunter’s Burisma job was well known—the company had issued a press release when he joined the board in 2015—Schweizer’s book offered some of the most extensive reporting on Hunter’s expanding portfolio in China. Schweizer hadn’t intended to focus on Hunter for the book—one of his assistants had come across Hunter’s work in China while researching Senator Mitch McConnell, who was a main target of the book.

  “It was just dumb luck,” said a person involved in the project. “It wasn’t intentional.”

  By 2019, when Trump’s polling indicated that Biden presented the biggest threat to Trump’s reelection, Giuliani understood there was no better way to stay in Trump’s good graces than drawing some blood from Biden.

  “Rudy was motivated by one thing: How do I fuck up Joe Biden?” a Trump political adviser said.

  Giuliani had assembled his own team, including Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing, married lawyers who were also close to the president, and Lev Parnas, a Ukrainian-born businessman living in Florida. Parnas had become a player in Trump World for no other reason than he started paying his way into fundraisers—a $50,000 check to Trump in 2016 got his foot in the door. There was little vetting before those events, and Parnas was soon working with Giuliani on political side projects in Ukraine.

  By the summer of 2019, Giuliani repeatedly appeared on television to single out Ukraine over corruption, which was infuriating both Trump and Zelensky, the Ukrainian president—but for different reasons. In mid-July, Trump ordered his staff chief, Mick Mulvaney, to put a hold on $391 million in military assistance for Ukraine at about the same time one of Zelensky’s top aides, Andriy Yermak, called Giuliani and asked him to tone it down. Giuliani’s response: Open an investigation into Hunter Biden’s relationship with Burisma.

  A few days after the Yermak-Giuliani call, Trump watched spellbound as the two-year Russia investigation drew to a close when Mueller testified before Congress on July 24. Washington was electric with anticipation over what the famously tight-lipped investigator might reveal. But the seventy-four-year-old Muel
ler struggled to answer questions about his report. He repeatedly misremembered his own findings. He stumbled through his answers.

  Trump tuned in from inside the White House, even scrapping an economic meeting so he wouldn’t miss anything. That night, he was elated when he sat down with campaign aides. He’d beaten Mueller and was confident that he was going to beat any challenger Democrats might nominate. They talked about the convention and went around the room gaming out the strengths and weaknesses of the Democratic field. Polling consistently showed Biden was Trump’s biggest threat, but the president always had an avalanche of caveats about why the former vice president couldn’t win.

  The next morning, a new survey from Quinnipiac University showed Biden ahead of Trump by eight points in Ohio, a must-win state for Trump. But the survey barely registered in Trump World. The president instead spent the morning tweeting that the witch hunt was over and quoting Fox News pundits who proclaimed—incorrectly—that Mueller’s testimony “really did clear the president.”

  “TRUTH IS A FORCE OF NATURE!” Trump tweeted.

  After two hours on social media, Trump picked up the phone in the White House at 9:03 a.m. on July 25 and was connected to Zelensky. Mueller’s testimony had convinced Trump and his team that they were in the clear, but the president plunged himself right back into the deep waters of legal jeopardy when he prodded the Ukrainain president for what Giuliani had been seeking all along—a little help knifing the Bidens.

  “I would like you to do us a favor,” Trump told the Ukrainian president.

  Trump’s phone call—just eighteen hours after Mueller’s testimony—would be memorialized months later in House impeachment “Article 1: Abuse of Power.”

  When Cipollone took over as White House counsel at the end of 2018, he formed a secret pact with Attorney General Bill Barr and their senior staff that if Trump tried to fire one of them for an unjust reason—or tried to force them into an unethical situation—they would all quit. The agreement was nearly invoked during a turf battle over impeachment strategy between Mulvaney, who wanted an outside legal team to run the defense, and Cipollone, who believed his office should handle it. Jay Sekulow, the president’s private attorney, told Trump that Cipollone wouldn’t work with the other group of lawyers. Within an hour, Trump pulled into his private dining room Cipollone, Mulvaney, other West Wing aides, and dialed in Barr on speakerphone.