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

by Michael C. Bender

  His meeting with bankers helped focus him on the health concerns and reinforced his inclination to deliver the address. The last few weeks had been a roller coaster for financial markets, and they appealed to Trump’s ego in a plea for stability.

  “Take care of the health care problem,” Bank of America chief executive Brian Moynihan told him. “Because solving the health care problem will help generate confidence.”

  White House advisers now had just five hours to craft the speech before Trump would return to the Resolute Desk and the cameras would click on. Still, it should have been plenty of time. It was a short speech—just ten minutes—and the administration had significant experience with travel bans, having approved more than two dozen orders that sought to restrict entry into the United States from Muslim-majority countries, from immigrants seeking asylum, from immigrants without health care, and now from multiple countries hit hardest by coronavirus. The task force had also discussed the European ban the day before, and Azar and Fauci both said they supported it. Fauci had urged the task force to go even further and cancel mass gatherings and urge Americans to telework.

  “Be drastic,” he said. “If we can be drastic and prevent the spike, we win.”

  Trump wouldn’t address those measures in his speech, but a memo later in the week from the White House would urge federal workers to work from home.

  When the task force meeting affirmed Trump’s decision to announce the new restrictions in a prime-time speech, hardly anyone remained to coordinate the new plan. Mulvaney had been fired. Meadows was in quarantine. Jared had, after three years, left the White House staff with the impression that while he outranked the chief of staff, he wasn’t to be bothered with the responsibilities of one. When a late appeal came in from the State Department to exclude Europeans with student and work visas in order to ensure strong diplomatic relations, aides inside the White House wondered aloud who even had the authority to make such a decision. Ultimately, it was Pence’s chief of staff, Marc Short, who decided to scotch the request.

  Jared, Lyons, and Stephen Miller took over speechwriting duties even though they hadn’t been involved in coronavirus strategy. Jared had yet to attend a single task force meeting. Pence joined a large group of aides huddled around Miller as he typed the speech, and while the vice president had been put in charge of the task force, he was far from a public health expert. The doctors were nowhere to be found, and the officials who had been working on the issues for the task force were cut out of the process, leaving them to frantically email in fixes to factual errors.

  Instead, however, the errors were fed into the teleprompter and read aloud by Trump, who inserted his own costly mistakes as well. In a prepared line that described how the restrictions would not apply to trade and cargo—the same as Trump’s first two Covid travel bans—Trump inserted an extra word, “only,” that completely changed the meaning of the sentence.

  “These prohibitions will not only apply to the tremendous amount of trade and cargo,” the president said, incorrectly.

  Trump also didn’t make clear that the ban only applied to foreign nationals or that there would be some exemptions for Americans who received health screenings.

  Trump hadn’t prepared for the speech or for the moment. He appeared uncomfortable as he spoke in a hushed monotone, and he offered no words of sympathy to Americans who were suffering from the disease or had lost loved ones. He stumbled over words and twiddled his thumbs. Futures for the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell with almost every word he uttered.

  The speech did seem to help change the way Americans viewed the disease, but not in the way Trump’s family had hoped. Ivanka and Jared had wanted the moment to reset how Americans viewed the president’s handling of the contagion; instead, it only underscored how ill-prepared he was for the job.

  Minutes after Trump had finished, actor Tom Hanks posted on social media that he and his wife, Rita Wilson, had contracted the virus while traveling in Australia and would isolate as long as needed. Fifteen minutes after that, the NBA announced it would suspend its season following the first positive test for a player, Rudy Gobert, a Utah Jazz center who a few days earlier had downplayed the disease by touching every reporter’s recorder during a news conference.

  No single night did more to focus the entire country on the crisis, including, at least temporarily, Trump.

  The White House immediately recognized the national address had been a disaster and scrambled to stem the damage. Earlier in the week, Jared had discussed with Short the complicated internal dynamic the vice president was now facing. After returning from India, Trump had asked Pence to take over the task force, which the ever-loyal Pence accepted over the objections of his top advisers and confidants, who didn’t want him to become the public face of a deadly virus. Even if Pence was successful, they told him, Trump would resent him for the success. But in trying to impose some order on the chaotic operation, Pence had already alienated some White House staff by cutting some officials out of meetings and usurping other responsibilities from the White House press office.

  After the national address, at Pence’s request, Jared started to assert himself more on coronavirus issues, a process that would take him out of the day-to-day operations of the campaign for several months. He began by cold-calling tech executives in search of solutions. The short-term answer was a Rose Garden news conference on Friday, two days after the national address, where Trump declared a national emergency over the pandemic, freed up $50 billion in financial assistance for states to address the issue and, with much more fanfare, announced a new partnership with Google to develop a website that would help Americans determine whether they needed a test and, if so, where to find one. The Dow jumped 2,000 points on the news. It showed a new seriousness from the White House, but was far from perfect—or even fully baked. Google executives, for example, were caught off guard by the announcement. There was a website in development, but it was far from finished and would only be available initially in the San Francisco area.

  Trump, meanwhile, had taken notice of the plaudits Pence had received for his handling of the task force. The vice president’s straightforward, calm approach was remarkable only for how unremarkable it was in contrast to Trump’s freewheeling, confrontational style. Pence had also helped to give Fauci a platform at the news conferences, and Fauci’s own direct approach was turning him into a star. Trump noted the “rave reviews” both had received, which in the Trump White House was a compliment immediately interpreted as a bad omen. On Saturday, the day after his Rose Garden news conference, Trump attended the task force’s news conference, where he announced that he’d finally taken a coronavirus test. On Sunday, he attended a private task force meeting, and then surprised the group’s members by saying he would come with them to the press briefing room to help update reporters. He initially said he’d just sit in the front row with the reporters and watch, but he quickly walked straight to the podium and took over the briefing.

  Trump was intent on remaining in the spotlight. He held thirty-seven news conferences with the task force in the forty-five days between March 14 and April 27. That stretch started auspiciously enough with Trump focused on combating the virus. Fauci and Deborah Birx had shown him horrific projections from Imperial College in London that estimated millions would die without any action, and Trump decided to back their push for drastic measures to try to get ahead of the contagion. At a news conference with the task force on March 16, the group announced a fifteen-day plan to “slow the spread” by avoiding groups of more than ten people, a move that effectively shut down the economy. The Dow dropped nearly 13 percent on the news, the worst single day for stocks since the Black Monday crash in 1987.

  The Front Row Joes stared sullenly through the rectangle boxes on their mobile phones and laptops. Coronavirus had claimed the life of the group’s first member the day before, on March 31. Campaign events had been suspended because of the pandemic, which meant their only chance to comfort one ano
ther was to click a link and join their virtual Zoom memorial. Libby DePiero sat in front of her favorite Trump placards, including the sign with a picture of Donald the dog, and logged in from Connecticut. Randal Thom, a sixty-year-old ex-Marine with a gray Fu Manchu mustache, strapped on red, white, and blue suspenders inside his tiny house on a dirt road bisecting soybean farms and cornfields in southwestern Minnesota. Saundra didn’t make it. She had been crushing overtime shifts at Walmart, trying to restock aisles of toilet paper and hand sanitizer that panicked shoppers had depleted. The death of Ben Hirschmann, who was just twenty-four years old, had shaken his friends. At the time, it remained unclear exactly how Covid spread and what all the symptoms entailed. Covid tests were still not widely available. Only 650 Americans had died at that point—and one of the Joes was among them.

  Ben was overweight, which significantly increased the risk of severe illness from Covid. But two months earlier, he had found a primary care doctor to help chart his path to physical fitness. He called that same doctor when he started feeling sick in mid-March, just as Trump had issued social distancing measures with his fifteen-day plan to slow the spread. Ben was told he probably had the flu during a telehealth appointment and that some over-the-counter elixirs should help.

  But the coughing and chills didn’t subside. Ben called the doctor’s office again a few days later. Another telehealth appointment. Another order for rest. Another assurance he wasn’t sick with Covid.

  Ben awoke before dawn the next morning, drenched in sweat and shaking. His mother, Denise, told him to get dressed. No more telehealth. They were going to the emergency room. Ben put on sweatpants, walked out of his room, and collapsed on his parents’ living room floor. Denise screamed for her husband and performed CPR on her youngest son. First responders didn’t bother transporting him to the hospital. The autopsy would show Ben’s lungs filled with the disease.

  An outpouring of condolences flooded Ben’s home in suburban Detroit. “Ben touched hearts,” Randal said on their Zoom memorial.

  Ben had met Randal and the other Front Row Joes in 2017 at a Trump rally in Iowa. He had carpooled from Grand Rapids to Cedar Rapids with Shane Doyle, another twenty-something Trump supporter whom he had met at the previous Trump rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The day Ben graduated from Grand Valley State University in 2018, he drove three hours east to meet the gang on the other side of the state. It was the night of the White House Correspondents’ Association black-tie dinner in Washington, D.C., which Trump was pointedly skipping to be with his base. Ben wore his commencement cap and gown to the bar afterward for the Front Row Joes’ own “Correspondents Day Dinner.” Their guests of honor that night: the Right Side Broadcasting Network crew that streamed every Trump rally online.

  “I talked to him more than my own daughter,” said Cindy Hoffman on the Zoom call, recounting her maternal relationship with Ben.

  Cindy ran a tool-sharpening business in southeastern Iowa, but the cantankerous and combative farm gal had walked to her car when she’d heard about Ben’s death, shut the door, and wept.

  “I’m sixty years old, and he’s just a baby,” Cindy said. “When Ben and I would talk—you know all my Trump paraphernalia that I got going on?—Ben would say, ‘Oh, you’re going to leave that in your will for me, right?’ I had that written down, and I was getting ready to redo the will. And then he died before I did. This is so fucking crazy.”

  “What about me?” Randal asked jokingly, in a voice so coarsened and gravelly it bordered on dysphonic. He and Cindy were the same age, but Randal’s years-long struggle to stay sober and out of jail had weathered him beyond his years.

  “What if I outlive you?”

  As the Front Row Joes gathered in cyberspace, they had—for a fleeting moment—faced the devastating consequences of coronavirus, and simply grieved. No attempts to blame a political rival. No dismissing the virus as just another flu. No mask mocking. They’d been floored by the sudden death of their friend and by the uncertainty ahead.

  “We pray that everybody in New York and all the hot spots around this country stay safe—we know it’s going to grow, and we know it’s going to get worse,” said Becky Gee, a dairy farmer from Ohio, in the prayer that closed the virtual gathering. “But we just trust that You have a plan, and You’re watching out for us. We also ask that You put a heavy hand of guidance over President Trump and his Coronavirus Task Force, and we pray this in Jesus’s name. Amen.”

  As Becky finished her appeal, the group began flicking off their Zoom links.

  The mosaic of tiny Front Row Joes faded back into darkness.

  Footnote

  1 The World Health Organization had just announced that the global death rate was 3.4 percent.

  7

  Covid, Part Two: Retooling the Reelect

  “The number one show on television.”

  —Phone call with the author, April 20, 2020

  That beautiful wave of political momentum Trump rode into the start of the new year had crested and rolled back by April. The death toll from Covid passed 10,000 Americans the first week of the month, a staggering total just five weeks after the country’s first reported fatality. By April 11, the death count exceeded 20,000. Unemployment was at 14.7 percent, up from 3.5 percent in February and the highest rate since the Great Depression. Ohio, Michigan, and other states announced that public schools wouldn’t reopen. His approval rating dropped again. And as eager as Trump had been for Democrats to give him a challenger, the one they offered up turned out to be the man he’d tried to convince foreign powers to smear and the one his pollsters had said would be the toughest to beat: Joseph Robinette Biden Jr.

  The panic was on, and Trump World fingers were pointing.

  Biden secured the nomination on April 8 when Sanders suspended his campaign. The Democrat had pulled off a stunning comeback by quickly coalescing centrist support, but Biden had also just switched campaign managers and was low on cash. His campaign and the Democratic National Committee had socked away just $20 million. Trump and the RNC, on the other hand, had $225 million in cash on hand. Brad wanted to strike before Biden had a chance to reload.

  Trump campaign polling showed that Biden wasn’t well defined in voters’ minds—Americans knew who he was, but not much about him—and Brad’s plan was an advertising blitz that aimed to leverage frustration among voters over China’s failure to contain the coronavirus by attacking Biden over positive comments the former vice president had made about Beijing. Brad told Trump the ad would appeal to both swing voters and Trump’s working-class base and pointed out that a series of Democratic super-PACs had already started attacking Trump. They needed to fire back.

  “We gotta be hitting the mick,” Brad said about Biden, using a derogatory term to refer to the Democrat’s Irish heritage.

  Kellyanne was so confident Brad was wrong that she went to both Trump and the press. Brad’s idea wasn’t unwise—it was unripe, she said. Americans were focused on the pandemic, not the presidential race, and she told Trump his best bet to close the gap was to use his bully pulpit to take on the virus, not Biden. She viewed the political fight over coronavirus as between Trump and Chinese president Xi Jinping. Injecting Biden into that equation risked elevating the former vice president, who was, for now, stuck on the sidelines of the debate.

  “Any campaign ads should show the commander in chief, the wartime president, signing $2 trillion in relief for Americans, deploying the USNS Comfort, working with Democratic governors and G-7 leaders, standing from the podium flanked by Drs. Fauci and Birx, mobilizing the private sector,” she told the Washington Post.

  But most of the reluctance came from Trump himself, who worried that a flurry of ads against Biden would give the impression that he was afraid of the presumptive Democratic nominee. And he obsessed over the images in the spots. He regularly asked the campaign to find pictures that made Biden look worse, and shots that made himself look better.

  “You just spent half the ad making
him look fifty years younger than he is,” Trump complained.

  Trump rejected the China spot three times for that very reason, sending the commercial back to Weitzner, his chief ad maker, because he didn’t think Biden looked unappealing enough. Weitzner explained that distasteful images, at a certain point, would make the ads ineffective, but Trump didn’t care.

  “Use shittier pictures,” Trump ordered him.

  By the end of the race, the campaign had a “bad Biden” highlight reel of unflattering images of the former vice president that they knew Trump would approve.

  Trump immediately viewed himself as a wartime president, but he was impatient for progress and frustrated that he was still blamed for not acting sooner. Three days after shutting down the economy, he riffed at a news conference about the possibility that hydroxychloroquine, an antimalarial drug, and remdesivir, an experimental antiviral, could help treat the virus, despite warnings from his administration’s doctors that there were still unanswered questions about the safety and effectiveness of both drugs. Shortly thereafter, Trump stopped attending the task force meetings, and he opted instead for a quick briefing from its members before heading into the daily news conference. But even those briefings were subject to the tyranny of the moment with Trump.

  On April 20, that moment belonged to Trump, Kellyanne, and me.

  I was in the parking lot of a Virginia strip mall, about an hour away from home, and cursing under my breath when my phone rang with a call from the White House.

  “Mr. Bender?” asked Molly Michaels, Trump’s assistant. “Please hold the line for President Trump.”

  I had ridden my Vespa out of the city to one of the few computer repair shops in the region that was open and, according to the online form I’d filled out for an appointment, willing to repair a recently cracked iPad—an urgent priority in the first months of lockdowns. But when I arrived, I was informed that the shop did not in fact repair iPads even though, yes, they were aware that that option was still included on their intake form. But now a bigger crisis: I couldn’t find my pen and wasn’t even sure if I had a notebook, and Trump was waiting on the line. I clicked on the tablet and frantically swiped to find the voice recorder without cutting my fingers on the screen’s broken glass.