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

by Michael C. Bender

  Pottinger wanted a complete ban on travel from China, a full stop by the first week of February. At the time, Pottinger was far out in front of the rest of the administration on the issue, and it landed with Mulvaney like an absolutist position. What about the Americans who were still in Wuhan? The cruise ships that would become Covid incubators floating at sea? All the college exchange students? Mulvaney figured he better show up at the deputies meeting before Pottinger implemented a policy that left Americans stranded across the globe.

  Pottinger’s deputies meeting had been called so quickly that there was no seating chart, none of the usual name cards folded like pup tents along each side of the rectangular mahogany conference table. But word of the meeting had spread rapidly, and bodies were piling into the Situation Room. The first American had tested positive a few days before and the CDC had already warned Homeland Security and the Department of Transportation that inbound flights from Wuhan should be confined to only a handful of airports where passengers could be screened for the virus.

  In addition to Azar, Redfield, and Mulvaney, the room included Kellyanne, Dan Scavino, the president’s social media czar, and Joe Grogan, the head of the White House Domestic Policy Council. Elaine Chao, the transportation secretary, took a seat near the head of the table. Dr. Robert Kadlec, who oversaw preparedness and response as an assistant secretary of health and human services, sat down, too. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, joined via video conference. Peter Brown, the president’s homeland security adviser, silently observed the meeting from the back corner of the room. At more than thirty people, it was an absurdly large crowd for the Situation Room, a space designed to curtail leaks by keeping conversations to a small group. But coronavirus was on the verge of becoming a major issue, and one that seemed destined to touch nearly every agency. “I’ve never seen the Situation Room like that,” said one person involved at the meeting. “It was like all the deputies and their plus-ones.”

  The crowded room fell silent when Pence walked in. Mulvaney, having taken the head seat moments earlier, slid one to his right. The vice president sat down, surveyed the scene, and then, without saying a word, caught a glimpse over his shoulder of the presidential seal hanging on the wall. The insignia signaled the presence of the president, a formality that only Pence, an adherent to the pageantry of politics, had noticed. The room waited as Pence swiveled around, removed the seal, and leaned it against the wall on the floor. It was an act of deference from a vice president who had once during a 2017 trip to the Panama Canal likened Trump’s energy and focus to that of Theodore Roosevelt and favorably compared him to biblical figures during a 2018 speech at the Israeli embassy. It was sometimes difficult to tell with Pence where his loyalty ended and his subservience began.

  Azar, who sat just to the right of Pence and Mulvaney, dominated most of the first twenty minutes of the meeting. He informed the group they were free to debate policy decisions around the coronavirus outbreak, but that his agency would coordinate daily operations. No one signaled an appreciation for how deeply the virus was about to stress multiple agencies. There was obvious confusion over which agencies had jurisdiction over certain facets of the response.

  It was the barest of governmental coordination when a robust, streamlined strategy was imperative. The health secretary wasn’t thinking about the chain of command at Homeland Security that travel restrictions would set off to reach Customs and Border Patrol, which handled airport screening, or the Coast Guard to tighten down coastal ports. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Federal Emergency Management Agency would need to play key roles, too.

  Stephen Biegun, the No. 2 State Department official, mentioned that his agency planned to restrict travel to and from China, and within a day probably ramp it up to prohibiting travel. It took a few moments before the gravity sank in. Both CDC and State could issue travel advisories.

  “Wait,” Mulvaney said. “Who has the authority to restrict travel to China?”

  “We decide,” Biegun told him, but deferred when Mulvaney pressed him with additional questions.

  Chao warned about restricting travel, noting that passenger planes often contained commercial freight. Her concern came off to some in the room as callous, or too far down in the weeds considering the massive problem they were about to confront. They were talking about stopping air travel to China, and Chao was worried about cargo coming and going in the belly of a Delta flight? Chao would say later that she agreed with others in the meeting that the health and safety of Americans was paramount.

  “I don’t think this is working,” Ken Cuccinelli, the acting deputy secretary for Homeland Security, suddenly barked at the room. By that point, it was clear there was an immense amount of work in front of the administration and that Azar’s tone at the outset—that the situation was under control—was ill-informed, at best. For one, few people had been aware of the State Department’s pending travel advisory.

  “We are failing at both coordination and communication,” Cuccinelli said.

  Azar was furious. His face turned red, but he remained silent as Cuccinelli finished his rant. Azar then unleashed on Cuccinelli. The two were seated on the same side of the table, but Azar never turned toward him and kept his eyes instead on Mulvaney. Cuccinelli would be barred from the task force a month later.

  “This is the first I’m hearing of this,” Azar said, complaining that Cuccinelli was questioning his leadership in the meeting instead of seeking him out privately. “It’s not consistent with the facts.”

  Mulvaney saw it was time to break.

  “You know what? Let’s hold off,” Mulvaney said, turning to Biegun and the other State Department officials and asking them to pause any change to China travel advisories. “Let’s talk about this tomorrow. Same time, same place and talk through this. In the meantime, I’m going to pulse the president and see where his head is on this and we’ll reconvene tomorrow.”

  Mulvaney ended the meeting by noting that their internal discussion could impact financial markets, and asked for discretion from the two dozen officials in the room.

  “What we discussed here needs to stay here,” Mulvaney said.

  The details leaked the next day.

  At the same time, Peter Navarro, one of the president’s trade advisers, was also shooting off flares about the virus. He had spent the last few years leaning into internal White House fights, willingly disrupting meetings as he pushed for the tariffs Trump had wanted to impose, and then feuding over trade negotiations with China. Navarro was a seventy-year-old economics professor from California who rode a bicycle to work and changed in his office, which was a disaster zone of empty organic trail mix containers, soiled socks, and wrinkled pants strewn on tables and across the floor. He’d run for office in California five times, and lost each race. He found his way into Trump World during the 2016 race when he was recruited by Jared, who was researching trade policy and stumbled upon Navarro’s book Death by China. The book mixed fairly mainstream recommendations, like helping safeguard U.S. technology secrets, with inflammatory accusations, like calling Beijing “the planet’s most efficient assassin.”

  By the start of 2020, Mulvaney’s frustration with Navarro had been simmering for months. Mulvaney told aides he walked in on Navarro working in his boxer shorts, an undershirt, and white socks, and considered the possibility of having White House doctors evaluate the trade adviser’s mental stability. He’d already tried to get Navarro fired by having a White House attorney look into whether Navarro was harassing colleagues by yelling in meetings and pounding on tables. Staff complained that Navarro made aggressive, late-night calls to colleagues seeking status updates on his requests, and had called Mulvaney’s chief deputy, Emma Doyle, a “globalist bitch.” Doyle told her boss that she’d like to have that title memorialized across a coffee mug, which suggested she had taken the slight in stride, but Mulvaney still wanted to punish the bad behavior. The pro
blem was Trump usually protected Navarro—“my Peter,” he would call him—and then the report from the White House counsel’s office came back inconclusive: Some White House staff said Navarro might be harder on women, but others said he denigrated everyone equally. Mulvaney dropped the inquiry in part because no one wanted to be the one to tell Navarro he had to attend training on respect in the workplace. Still, if Mulvaney couldn’t get Navarro fired, he could at least keep him out of the coronavirus meetings.

  “Look,” Azar told Mulvaney. “I’ve got four or five people who won’t come to the meetings if Peter is there.”

  Navarro hadn’t heard about the Situation Room meeting until later and was furious. He was convinced the outbreak was bigger than China was letting on and that the administration around Trump wasn’t doing enough to prepare. Bannon, now on the outside of the White House, urged him to memorialize all of his predictions in a series of memos. But Navarro was hesitant, in part because Trump hated Navarro’s memos.

  “I’m not even really a part of this,” Navarro said.

  “Even better,” Bannon replied. “Just put ‘draft’ on it and send it to everybody and ask for their comments.”

  Navarro hammered out a memo that argued for shutting down travel to China. It estimated the virus could kill nearly 550,000 Americans. Shutting down travel to China might cost $35 billion, Navarro pointed out, but the cost of a pandemic could hit $5.7 trillion.

  When no one replied, Navarro removed “draft” from his memo, addressed it to the president, and circulated it again. The documents leaked to the New York Times and Axios in April.

  Trump would deny that he saw the memos, but the documents had been disseminated by the NSC. And it was O’Brien who had elevated Pottinger at the NSC and was close to Navarro—who ultimately helped convince the president to restrict travel from China.

  “This will be the largest national security crisis of your presidency,” O’Brien told Trump.

  Trump treated his decision to ban travel from China on January 31 as if he had all but solved the crisis.

  “We pretty much shut it down,” he’d say on February 2.

  But he knew that the virus was far more severe than he was letting on. In a private interview on February 7, two days after his impeachment acquittal—before his rally in New Hampshire, before his swing out West, where he held three more rallies, and before his trip to India—he’d told journalist Bob Woodward that the virus could be spread through the air—a fact that wasn’t widely known at the time.

  Trump’s campaign commenced its first major poll of 2020 at the end of February, just before he left for India. It was a comprehensive study of voters in the seventeen states viewed as most likely to decide the 2020 election. Nobody needed a poll to understand Trump was on a political tear. Still, the initial data that rolled in was red hot. Brad couldn’t help but keep Trump apprised of the progress. He phoned the president in India, and briefed him as soon as he returned. The final numbers hadn’t been crunched, and Fabrizio urged restraint. The request was denied.

  Trump and Brad were a pair of momentum junkies whose high-octane and hyperbolic sales pitches would make Billy Mays blush. They viewed themselves as political brawlers with little patience for the fine print. Trump’s five decades in real estate, reality television, and politics were guided by his idea of “truthful hyperbole,” a phrase he’d coined in his 1987 bestseller, The Art the Deal.

  Even Jared’s most valued trait around Trump World was his optimism. It certainly wasn’t his political compass. Jared hadn’t even registered as a Republican until his father-in-law had been in office for two years. His previous political experience was as a Democratic donor, spending more than $150,000 to help elect Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer, and other liberals in the fifteen years before his father-in-law sought the presidency. When he arrived in Washington in 2017, he claimed to be the brains behind the digital operation that had helped Trump unlock the set of post-industrial Midwestern states that Republicans hadn’t won since the 1980s. But he knew little about the mechanics of running a presidential campaign. When a Republican adviser asked him about the digital strategy during the final, frantic stretch of the 2020 race, Jared routed the call to Gary Coby, the campaign’s digital director.

  “Can you call Gary?” Jared said. “I don’t know anything about the digital stuff.”

  Still, whenever distress and disorder from whatever crisis-of-the-moment threatened to consume the White House or campaign, Kushner was the one who could be counted on to calm the troops.

  Truthful hyperbole was an organizing principle for Trump World, and it led to what, by 2020, had become a long tradition of rushing to deliver the boss any and every semblance of good news. Brad understood the dynamic, and he knew Trump would reward him with at least partial credit for the propitious if unpolished polling. The early data showed Trump surging with Hispanic voters, across blue-leaning battleground states, and against the entire lineup of potential Democratic challengers. Trump wouldn’t bother asking whether the data were incomplete. For bad polls, Jared told Trump to add five points to his ballot numbers, arguing that pollsters couldn’t measure Trump’s base. And Trump never questioned a good poll. Even Hope was known on occasion to invent positive polls during conversations in the Oval Office that would help reset the president’s mood. In 2018, she testified to Congress that she sometimes told “white lies” on behalf of the president. She also told them to the president.

  That was the way Trump wanted it. While some executives preferred administrative silos to provide direction and promote focus for the workforce, Trump assembled an extraordinary arrangement of delivery systems that incentivized his team to forage far and wide for bits and pieces of positivity—from news reports, gossip pages, social media posts—that they then fed directly to him. With certain exceptions, it ensured that the most obsequious and submissive staffers lasted the longest. By early 2020, it was widely understood that unquestioned agreement and alignment with Trump meant there were never any consequences for a staffer’s mistakes, misfires, or bad advice. But to be proven wrong after even a single disagreement with Trump was to risk forever being viewed as disloyal and labeled an idiot, or—in Trump’s sarcastic vernacular—“a genius.” The result was a constant reading of Good News from the Gospel according to Trump, and he had plenty of disciples eager to recite chapter and verse.

  This path to longevity didn’t necessarily run parallel with the road to success for Trump’s own political goals. In fact, it was often at cross-purposes with the objectives—and personal ambitions—of the senior staff in his White House. During the final stretch of the 2016 race, for instance, his campaign aides tried to keep him away from Twitter. In his first months as president, press secretary Sean Spicer and chief of staff Reince Priebus discussed shutting down his campaign-style mega-rallies. There was also a constant crusade by each of his four White House staff chiefs and all five managers of both presidential campaigns to sequester Trump from his “enablers,” a common classification that referred to the pack of troublemakers who would whisper in the president’s ear after everyone else had left the room to raise doubts in his mind and ultimately detonate any communication plans, political strategies, and policy goals that he’d agreed to just moments before. It was a surreal, kaleidoscopic corner of Trump World where the colors and shapes often remained the same but the exact scene depended on who looked through the eyepiece. For Brad, this demographic included two of his 2016 predecessors, Corey and Kellyanne. For Jared, it was Corey, Bannon, and Kellyanne. For Bannon, it was Jared and Ivanka.

  The laborious efforts to intercept enablers were viewed as rebellious acts of treachery in Trump World. The Obama, Bush, and Clinton White Houses all kept a narrow list of staffers who could walk into the Oval Office without an appointment. Yet it was free admission to come see Trump. Staffers who didn’t barge in would often loiter outside his open door, hoping to catch the president’s eye and be waved in for a chat or the chance to pitch a new idea. T
rump White House aides frequently tried to sneak in one final word during internal debates by leaving him printouts of unsourced and aggressively biased Breitbart News stories that backed up their own position. Any strategies to restrict access to Trump with the old ways of doing business invariably were solutions aimed at the symptoms instead of the cause and never achieved any long-term success. When John Kelly, a retired, four-star Marine general whom Trump had recruited into his administration, invoked his chief of staff authority to listen in on any call that was patched through to the president from the West Wing switchboard, Trump gave friends the number to Melania’s phone to circumvent this official channel.

  Information in Trump World obeyed two basic laws of physics: Kepler’s laws of planetary motion and Newton’s theory of gravity. The first held that every piece of hearsay and every nugget of news—no matter its size, shape, or significance—was effectively its own celestial body in a constant, elliptical orbit around a singular, magnificent Trumpian Sun. The second truth was that the giant orange star at the center of the universe was slowly pulling each object closer.

  “Sir,” Brad told Trump during one call about the still-unfinished February poll, “you’re winning Colorado, you’re winning New Mexico. You can win 400 electoral votes.”

  None of it was exactly true, not to mention highly unlikely. No presidential candidate, Republican or Democrat, had cleared the 400-vote threshold since George H. W. Bush drafted behind two Ronald Reagan landslides and lapped Democrats for a third consecutive GOP win.

  Still, Trump was ecstatic. As Brad had anticipated, he interpreted the raw data as proof of Brad’s prowess as a decision maker. Trump’s judgment was constantly questioned by the press and criticized by his skeptics, including his unusual move to put a website developer turned digital marketer in charge of a $1.5 billion presidential campaign. On the phone half a world away in India, Trump told Brad he might just be the best campaign manager ever.