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

by Michael C. Bender

  But I had no time to quibble. More pressing was the question of why I had been so suddenly summoned. I’d interviewed Trump as a candidate in the corner office of his eponymous New York skyscraper, as president on Air Force One, and in multiple rooms of the White House. He knew me at that point, and we had a perfectly fine relationship. He liked that I worked for the Journal, a business-centered publication that has a reputation for playing with a straight bat in its news pages. During an exchange in the Oval Office during take-your-child-to-work day in 2017, Trump told my oldest daughter that I was an accurate reporter “about 80 percent of the time.” High praise from this president—though it perplexed my daughter, who later quizzed me about the other 20 percent of my work. But the key to my relationship with the president: He admired my hair.

  I first realized this during a flight on Air Force One to Washington after a rally in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, as I and a few other reporters chatted with Trump in the press cabin of the plane. He was in a good mood, as he usually is after ninety minutes of continuous affirmation, but still feeling his way through the new job and having a hard time hiring a press secretary.

  “I have ten people for every job,” he said. “Who wouldn’t want it?”

  I merely raised my eyebrows in doubt of his claim, but Trump seemed to possess a biological sonar that senses disapproval, like a bat bouncing high-frequency sound waves off nearby objects. The president picked up my subtle signal of skepticism and pivoted his six-foot-three frame to face me.

  “Would you take it?” he asked me.

  It seemed like a joke, but you could never be too sure with Trump. In either case, there was only one answer.

  “No,” I told him.

  Trump smiled.

  “You have that beautiful head of hair,” he said, ogling the unruly auburn mop atop my head, which I wore long enough that it confused my buttoned-up grandfather but delighted my more spirited and extroverted grandmother. My peers erupted in laughter.

  “You’d take it in two seconds,” the president said.

  That moment would define our relationship for the next four years. Even when he wanted to be upset with me, he’d remember he liked my hair and his internal conflict over those competing emotions would save me from some of the vicious takedowns other reporters suffered at his hand. He verbalized it most clearly during an event in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in 2019. His staff was trying to escort reporters out of the room, and I kept asking questions. Sarah Sanders, then the White House press secretary, snapped at me, but Trump interrupted her.

  “He’s one of the tough ones,” the president explained to the other administration officials in the room. “But such beautiful hair.”

  More than a year had passed since we last sat down. As McEnany and I walked to the Oval Office, she turned her head toward me.

  “Do you know what you want to ask?” she asked. “News of the day, or something? Just some general topics I can tell him beforehand?”

  What struck me was that her question answered my own: There was no particular message the president wanted to drive, or news his team wanted to break. There was no strategy for bringing the Wall Street Journal’s senior White House reporter into the West Wing. The output from the next hour would be completely determined by what questions I wanted to ask, and whatever was on the president’s mind.

  “Okay,” McEnany said as we entered an otherwise empty Oval Office. “We’ll be with you in sixty seconds.”

  I was then left alone, in the Oval Office, for the next thirty minutes.

  A few pages of tan-colored paper were stacked in the middle of the Resolute Desk. Ice cubes slowly melted in a half-filled glass of Diet Coke deserted on a shelf. Farah’s cell phone lay facedown, silent, on a chair near the desk.

  “Hey, Michael!” Vice President Pence punctured the silence as he entered the room from behind me.

  Pence earnestly asked about my family, remembering that my wife, Ashley, and I had had a baby a little over a year prior. He encouraged me to come travel with him on the campaign trail, and he ticked through his schedule for the next couple weeks.

  “There’s a lot of enthusiasm out there,” he said. He squinted his eyes and repeated the point in a hushed, distant whisper: “A lot.”

  And plenty of Covid, I thought to myself.

  “Anyway,” Pence said. He returned to a normal indoor voice that brought us back into the moment. “I saw you in here and just wanted to say ‘Hi.’”

  I thanked him, briefly considering asking him to shut the door on his way out, but thought better of the joke. Pence viewed himself as a serious person, and my dry attempts at humor had fallen flat with him before.

  “It was really nice to see you,” I told him.

  And I meant it. After a few months at home, it was nice to be out again with Pence, even if that meant enduring constant skepticism from his chief of staff, Marc Short.

  I sat back down.

  As soon as I opened up my notebook, Dan Scavino burst into the room. Scavino was a ubiquitous presence in Trump World. He’d known Trump since he caddied for him as a teenager in 1990, and had been continuously employed by Trump since 2004, when he took a job as assistant manager at the same course they’d first met. Scavino was now Trump’s chief social media strategist, which effectively meant traveling everywhere with the president and drafting posts for Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Scavino was the only man Trump trusted to tweet for him.

  “Bender!” he said as he glided through the room. “Enjoying the peace and quiet?”

  I joked I was just trying to get a little work done. A man of few words, Scavino didn’t break stride as he walked from Trump’s private dining room, across the Oval, and disappeared behind the lobby door.

  “One more minute,” Farah promised as she reappeared in the Oval. “I just need to grab my phone.”

  McEnany scrambled past.

  “He should be out in just a moment,” she said. Finally, at 6:00 p.m. on the dot, Trump emerged.

  “Hey, Michael, I’m sorry,” Trump said, sitting down. “How are you?”

  “I’m good,” I told him. “How are you?”

  “We’re doing good—I just got some good poll numbers,” he said.

  Where Pence and I had chatted about our families just a few minutes earlier, that kind of small talk—or curiosity about another human being’s personal life—rarely occurred to Trump as something to discuss. When it did, it mostly bored him. So it was no surprise he interpreted my initial question to him—How are you?—as a political one. What surprised me was that he wanted to start the conversation with his poll numbers. Every reputable public poll at that point showed a plurality of Americans, if not a majority, did not like him, and hadn’t for quite some time now. The four-point gap between him and Joe Biden a month earlier had swelled to more than eight points in national polls, and he’d fallen further behind in the biggest battlegrounds: Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

  But Trump ignored all of that. He was, in his view of the world, doing well against Biden. “I think,” he added.

  And really, if you thought about it, he continued, the campaign was only just beginning. You couldn’t spend too much time thinking about it, he seemed to be telling me, but if, even for just a minute, you could open your mind to consider unconventional possibilities and alternative facts, then you could maybe see how very few things that had happened in the past were relevant to the moment we’re in now, and where we’re about to go. Where we end up—the future—is, in a sense, all that truly matters.

  “I mean, we haven’t started campaigning, you know,” Trump said, inviting me into his vortex of logic, a space-time continuum where he could bend the fabric of truth to make whatever point he liked. “I have not, essentially, started.

  “I guess,” he added, “you could say it starts on Saturday.”

  Saturday?

  Trump was three days away from bringing thousands of people together for an indoor rally as the deadlie
st infectious disease in more than 100 years ripped through a nation defending itself with only cloth face masks, improvised hand sanitizer, and a rudimentary understanding of social distancing. But the president didn’t want to talk about the potential health consequences for his superfans. He thought about it as the kickoff for his reelection campaign.

  That state of mind required a certain suspension of disbelief. His campaign team had spent a half-billion dollars on the reelection effort at that point. Trump had effectively kicked off his reelection campaign in each of the first three years of his presidency. A year earlier, on June 18, 2019, I was at the rally that Trump and his campaign had billed as the official kickoff. Supporters traveled to Orlando, Florida, from all over the country for the event.

  “Tonight,” Trump said from his rally stage that night, “I stand before you to officially launch my campaign for a second term as president of the United States.”

  Two years earlier, on February 27, 2018, Trump had announced Brad would manage his reelection campaign. This was the moment Trump’s lawyers considered his campaign officially launched. Much to their chagrin—and more than a year earlier than they were hoping—Trump’s White House attorneys now had to be mindful of potential violations of the Hatch Act around the West Wing. The law prohibits federal workers—short of the president, vice president, and a few other technical exceptions—from engaging in most forms of political activity. If you had a campaign manager, you had a campaign, and having a campaign very clearly meant there would be political activity.

  But even earlier than Brad’s announcement—three years before the Tulsa pseudo-kickoff—Trump’s team had filed his initial reelection paperwork with the Federal Elections Commission. That was on January 20, 2017. The same day as his inauguration.

  So having a fourth annual kickoff to his presidential race made a certain sense. Even if only for the sake of symmetry, he would have to do it again.

  In a few days, Trump would tell his latest audience to forget everything that had come before. “So we begin, Oklahoma,” the president would tell them. “We begin. We begin our campaign.”

  But the truth was the campaign had begun long ago.

  What was actually beginning now, for Trump, was the end.

  Footnotes

  1 Lindell’s advertising company, LifeBrands, had multiple meetings with the Trump campaign during the first half of 2020 to compare marketing notes. Lindell attended one, but turned it into a planning session for a speaking tour of Minnesota fairgrounds he had wanted to piece together for the summer.

  2 Complicating matters, my partner, Ashley Parker, was also a competitor on the beat, covering Trump for the Washington Post. In full disclosure, I’m not totally sure she considers me a competitor. She’s won a Pulitzer Prize, moderated a presidential debate, and scooped me every time we chased the same tip.

  11

  The Last MAGA Rally

  “The event in Oklahoma is unbelievable—the crowds are unbelievable.”

  —Speaking with reporters, South Lawn, June 20, 2020

  By the time Trump announced his après-pandemic Tulsa rally—six months before the first American was vaccinated—the Front Row Joes had pinned the death of their friend Ben Hirschmann on Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer. Their justification was that Ben had been misdiagnosed with flu symptoms via a telehealth appointment—the kind of Zoom medicine that Whitmer, a Democrat, had encouraged by trimming some regulations in response to the pandemic.

  But an in-person visit also might not have caught Ben’s coronavirus, and Whitmer’s orders hadn’t shuttered hospitals—her actions were similar to steps the Trump Administration had taken. But by June, “that woman from Michigan,” as Trump referred to her, had evolved into one of the president’s chief foils in his abrupt pivot from social distancing to reopening the country, and the Joes were following his cues.

  By mid-June, the irreparable split between the president’s base and the rest of the country—including his fellow Republicans—was increasingly apparent, a fissure riven by what was fast becoming the central issue of the election. In a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll the first week of June, just 6 percent of Trump’s base said he deserved at least some of the blame for the spread of coronavirus, compared to 60 percent of the country as a whole.

  Masks had even started to split the Front Row Joes, just as the question of face coverings had divided Trump World. Brad had told Fox News that he would wear a mask to the Tulsa rally just hours before White House spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany said she wouldn’t. Randal Thom mocked masks as cowardly and weak even though his good friend Libby DePiero wanted to wear one to protect her husband, Brian, who was battling cancer. Ultimately, sixty-five-year-old Libby decided the risks were too significant and avoided Tulsa.

  “She wasn’t brave enough to come,” Randal said.

  For Randal, not even a deadly pandemic would stand between him and his idol. A heavy smoker who was significantly overweight, he had fallen severely ill earlier in the year with high fevers and debilitating congestion. He was convinced he had coronavirus but refused to go to the hospital; he didn’t want to take a Covid test and potentially increase the caseload on Trump’s watch.

  “I’m not going to add to the numbers,” he said by way of explanation.

  Early in the pandemic, Trump had said that he wanted Covid-stricken passengers to remain on cruise ships just off the coast of California because he didn’t want to increase the virus case count inside the United States. “I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn’t our fault,” the president said.

  And ardent supporters like Randal had internalized his concern.

  Now, just as Trump’s supporters trusted him as he knowingly underplayed the severity of the contagion, they also took him at his word as he overhyped predictions of the massive crowds that would greet him in Tulsa. So they adjusted their schedules to beat the traffic, and the first wave of Front Row Joes descended on Oklahoma’s second most populous city a full six days before Trump’s rally.

  They were also motivated by the prospect of a reunion. Three months had passed since the last rally, and they missed each other. They missed Trump. Randal was astonished when he rolled into town after a ten-hour drive from Minnesota in his Toyota Sienna minivan—more than three days before the rally—to find that others had been there for three days already. Randal, who arrived in black wraparound sunglasses and a red, white, and blue cowboy hat, was a bit embarrassed.

  “I guess I could have gotten here a little earlier,” he said.

  Saundra Kiczenski flew in from Detroit a little later Wednesday. She had been nervous about leaving the safety of her home but had given herself a pep talk.

  “I can’t live my life in fear,” she said.

  The fifty-six-year-old found her last will and testament and the instructions for her funeral and displayed the documents in plain sight for whoever might find them. She reassured herself that her affairs were in order. She would never let anyone think she’d left them a mess.

  “I hope I see you again,” she told friends before leaving. “But this might be it.”

  Covid didn’t scare Saundra. Antifa did.

  She was certain Tulsa would be crawling with members of the shadowy, radical group of antifascist militants whom Trump had obsessed about rounding up for the past year.

  “Maybe I’ll get back to the hotel from the venue,” she told her friends. “Or I may not.”

  The reality was that Saundra experienced an impressive display of hospitality from Oklahomans from the moment she arrived, a fitting welcome from the cradle of American congeniality. Locals brought coffee, donuts, and breakfast sandwiches every morning to the Front Row Joes camped out on the pavement around the arena. Pizzas arrived every night. A troop of Boy Scouts wheeled out coolers of water, ice, and a seemingly endless variety of sodas.

  On Thursday evening, Saundra returned from her daily stroll around the arena—a precautionary exercise she referred t
o as “taking my measurements” that entailed familiarizing herself with every potential entryway into the arena—and found law enforcement trying to move the Joes from the shadow of the arena. Tulsa mayor G. T. Bynum had imposed a 10:00 p.m. curfew at the urging of the Secret Service. But the cops and Joes struck a deal that they would line up on the sidewalk by the start of curfew and not wander around the city.

  On Friday, the Front Row Joes were moved farther away from the arena as security installed a “sterile zone,” a phrase no Trump supporters seemed able to repeat without a thick slathering of sarcasm. The sounds of crews installing nine-foot unclimbable fencing around the perimeter roused Saundra awake from inside her sleeping bag on the sidewalk at 3:00 a.m. that night. The boundary would be patrolled by the National Guard and serve as a barrier between rallygoers and protesters.

  Law enforcement slowly wheeled away a section of the security fencing at the front of the line around 11:00 a.m. Saturday. Officers barked at the Trump fans to stay in line. Rallygoers at the front shouted at the people behind them to stop pushing. Then the days-long wait was over, and the line surged forward. Inside the fence, Trump supporters zigzagged through a maze of barricades until they reached a group of nurses who greeted them from under white canopies with face masks and temperature checks. A successful health screening was rewarded with a green paper wristband that, once fastened, ensured entry to the next set of lines forming in front of a row of metal detectors. Through the security checkpoint, the first Front Row Joes immediately broke into a sprint for the final block to the area. Running was never one of Saundra’s specialties. She was in pain, and the block felt more like a mile. But she reminded herself that she was almost there and tried to stay positive and keep slugging it out. It was sunny and in the mid-80s, but Saundra would swear it was 100 degrees for that final stretch between the security sensors and the campaign aides awaiting them at the arena with more masks and hand sanitizer.