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

by Michael C. Bender

  “No fucking way,” Bannon said. “I’m not coming in and bailing out Jared Kushner at the last second again.”

  Bannon, who had spent seven months as Trump’s White House strategist, viewed the campaign as a sideshow. For him, reelection was always going to be won or lost from the West Wing, not whatever was being plotted from inside campaign headquarters. Bannon had been telling everyone from the very start that the path to victory was a laser-like focus on policy—plugging away, one at a time, week after week, month after month, at each and every campaign promise Trump had made in 2016. But no one listened. Jared buried him instead. The whiteboard in Bannon’s West Wing office where he had sketched out that battle plan had been wiped clean three years earlier. And now, with a little more than three months left in the race, Bannon saw no way to win.

  Based on how Trump and the West Wing were responding to Covid, Bannon was convinced the race was already over. Peter Navarro, one of Trump’s top advisers in the White House, had told Bannon that hardly anyone from the West Wing had worked a weekend since Memorial Day.1 Trump’s refusal to wear a mask showed he wasn’t taking the pandemic seriously, and the public’s exasperation would only get worse when parents realized there was no plan for their kids to return to school in the fall, Bannon said. In Bannon’s estimation, Trump was surrounded by the worst staff in the history of the White House.

  He saw no sense of urgency from Trump—or his team—to respond to what was a full-blown national crisis. And Bannon himself—as he sipped coffee amid the white marble and bleached oak interior of the Lady May and read his books out on the boat’s teak deck—certainly felt no call to help.

  “I’d rather fight Biden for the next four years,” Bannon said. “I can do that. But I’m not going to do this.”

  Trump also floated the idea of moving Kellyanne from the West Wing to campaign headquarters, offering her the same kind of chairman role he was considering for Bannon or Ayers to oversee strategy. The president had asked both Stepien, then the deputy campaign manager, and Jason Miller, his communications strategist, about the idea.

  “Stepien loves you,” Trump told the fifty-three-year-old Kellyanne. “They both want you over there, honey. But I don’t know. What do you think?”

  Kellyanne was noncommittal. Like Bannon, she viewed the White House as the center of power in a reelection campaign. And she wasn’t about to leave the president alone with Meadows, McEntee, and the other senior staffers she considered to be the West Wing’s “Covid deniers.”

  Jared had soured on Kellyanne during the 2016 campaign. He tried to limit her exposure to Trump and had the campaign lasted two more weeks, he told colleagues, he would have fired his fellow New Jersey native. But that was probably easier said than done. Kellyanne had established her own following among conservatives, and her own relationship with Trump. She had known Trump since 2001, when she and her husband, George Conway, were newlyweds and moved into a condo at Trump World Tower in Manhattan. Her knack for snappy quotes as she leaned into her role as most prominent female defender of Trump in 2016 only expanded her following.

  Trump’s victory made Kellyanne the first woman ever to manage a winning presidential campaign. She was stung that Jared had downplayed her role, and was furious when Brad launched a media tour in 2017 to promote the role he played as digital director, boasting that he had harnessed the power of Facebook and activated Trump voters in places like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. When Jared installed Brad as campaign manager so early without consulting her, let alone giving her first right of refusal, it ensured that their relationship would remain volatile for the entirety of Trump’s term.

  But after his father-in-law started thinking about putting Kellyanne back at the campaign, Jared was suddenly over-the-top nice to her. It was a disorienting turn of events for staff who witnessed the exchanges during White House meetings. Others described it as nauseating.

  “Oh, that’s brilliant,” Jared told her in one meeting.

  By their fourth year in the White House, Kellyanne was mostly fascinated by Jared’s about-face. But the steely-eyed brawler from New Jersey wasn’t going to miss an opportunity to turn the screws.

  “What I said was pretty basic and obvious,” Kellyanne deadpanned. “But I’ll give you a nudge when I say something brilliant.”

  Trump hadn’t directly consulted with Jared about bringing back Bannon or moving Kellyanne. He was doing everything he could to avoid his son-in-law at that point. He was furious with him. He knew it was Jared who had talked him into hiring Brad. And he still blamed Jared for the dismal public approval of his response to the civil unrest. Trump had privately told advisers in June that he wished his response to the protests had been stronger from the start.

  “I’ve done all this stuff for the Blacks—it’s always Jared telling me to do this,” Trump said to one confidante that weekend. “And they all fucking hate me and none of them are going to vote for me.”

  At the end of June, Trump canceled a trip to Bedminster at the last minute. Jared was already at the New Jersey golf course for the weekend, and Trump wanted to avoid him. The president also wanted to better understand what was going wrong with his campaign, and decided to hear what was going on without Jared’s filter. Trump would never push Jared out of the fold, but he didn’t need to consult with him on every move, either.

  Jared understood what was happening and gave his father-in-law space to get to the only choice he was ever going to make. It was clear to Jared now that he could no longer protect Brad.

  In campaign meetings, Jared was increasingly short with Brad and constantly snapped at him. He mocked his ideas, and even shushed him. It was another shocking twist. Aides who had been bewildered by the string of saccharine accolades Jared had suddenly showered on Kellyanne were now embarrassed by his shortness with Brad. Brad was well liked across Trump World, aside from Kellyanne and a few other exceptions, and to see him humiliated made everyone uncomfortable. It also sent a clear message about where things were headed.

  Trump’s constant questions about replacing a staffer or how his White House or campaign was being run sometimes signaled a change was coming, and sometimes it didn’t. While Trump’s reluctance to fire someone himself was well known, there was less appreciation for how long it took for him to make the decision—even if it was always going to be someone else who had to deliver the news. Sensing this, Jared proactively urged Brad to step down from the job in early July.

  Sitting in his West Wing office—a cramped space just on the other side of the president’s private dining room, where he kept a picture of Ivanka, another of his grandparents who had survived the Holocaust, and framed New York Times articles signed by his father-in-law in thick black Sharpie2—Jared told Brad that he probably had only three options.

  One, he said, was that Brad could try to keep the campaign manager’s job he’d already held down for the past twenty-eight months and stick out the last sixteen weeks. But that was a risky bet, Jared told him, and would almost certainly result in the second option, which was getting fired. But there was a third way, Jared explained. Brad could willingly take another job in the campaign. Jared’s suggestion was to return to his roots, which was digital marketing and advertising.

  “That’s the best option for you,” Jared said. “There are a lot of people trying to kill you right now for all kinds of reasons, and this gives you the opportunity to focus on what you’re best at.”

  Brad immediately objected. He didn’t want to lose his job, and he viewed a demotion to be on par with being fired. He also knew that he couldn’t be fired. The websites, the email system, the campaign app—it all ran on a system that he had designed. If they got rid of him, it would all disappear.

  “Layer me, just layer me,” Brad pleaded. “Put somebody over me that takes over the political role, and let me run the day-to-day operations.”

  Jared was noncommittal, but Brad had survived another day.

  As Jared tried to get Brad to fall
on his sword, the campaign’s pollsters were just coming out of the field with a fresh round of polling. The new survey showed Trump trailed Biden by one percentage point in a survey of seventeen battleground states, down from a five-point advantage for Trump in those same key states in February. But that gap would have been wider had it not been for lingering optimism over Trump’s handling of the economy. Even though a plurality of voters in battleground states said the economy was headed in the wrong direction, a majority of voters, 54 percent, still trusted Trump over Biden with the task of rebuilding.

  Trump had bet his political life on the economy, and it was the only issue keeping him in the race. But for how long? Brad and Jared believed the pandemic would peter out by the end of the year, at which point the economy would surge back and become the top priority for voters. But the race wasn’t playing out that way. Their new polling showed that coronavirus remained the issue that was confronting Americans most directly: By the summer of 2020, 60 percent of voters in battleground states told Trump’s pollsters in July that they knew someone who had tested positive, compared to just 38 percent in May.

  And Trump continued to test poorly when it came to the pandemic. The percentage of persuadable voters in battleground states who disapproved of Trump’s handling of coronavirus was seven percentage points higher than those who approved.

  But the most troubling number for the campaign in that summer poll: 65 percent of voters in Trump’s target states said the country was on the wrong track, more than double the 27 percent of voters who said the nation was headed in the right direction. In the campaign’s February poll, the question split voters almost directly down the middle.

  But by July, after the pandemic had killed 150,000 people, the poll showed that voter sentiment, when it came to Trump’s reelection bid, increasingly ranged somewhere between foul and hostile.

  Trump’s own mood fell somewhere on that spectrum, too.

  The tipping point for Brad came on Sunday, July 12, in a front-page story from the Washington Post. The article weaved together all of Brad’s troubles and succinctly articulated—in a way Trump never could—exactly what had the president tied in knots over his campaign manager. The story pointed out that Brad had been featured in a TV ad for the campaign and had paid for Facebook to promote digital ads on his Facebook page instead of Trump’s, which raised questions about whether he was purposefully raising his own public profile. There were embarrassing leaks from a private political meeting where Brad had struggled to answer questions about the campaign’s budget, which suggested he either didn’t know what was going on or perhaps was trying to hide something. Maybe the most devastating detail of all: Brad had flown home to Florida—again!—the week before while other senior aides, including, interestingly, a prominent mention of Stepien, had remained in Washington working on the campaign.

  Each paragraph was like a sledgehammer to every trigger point for Trumpian tantrums.

  TRUMP FRUSTRATED WITH CAMPAIGN MANAGER PARSCALE AMID FALLING POLLS, read the headline of the article.

  If it wasn’t true prepublication, it certainly was now.

  At a political meeting in the White House on Monday, July 13, Trump could barely bring himself to look at Brad. The president seemed willing to acknowledge his campaign manager only to belittle and embarrass him in front of colleagues. When Brad presented a digital rendering of the stage design for the Republican National Convention—usually one of Trump’s favorite things to discuss—the president shot him down.

  “Okay, sure, Brad—show me your picture,” Trump sneered. “And why don’t you explain to me how you’re going to make sure it’s not another Tulsa!”

  Tensions in the room were already high after Ronna had floated downsizing the convention. When Trump had moved the convention a month ago, Florida was averaging about 1,300 new Covid cases per day. Two weeks later, the seven-day rolling average had spiked to 6,300 new cases per day and Jacksonville officials had, just that morning, implemented a mask mandate. The spread in Florida was now worse than in North Carolina.

  Ronna pitched a plan that would move most of the convention outdoors and made Covid testing available. The biggest crowd would be 5,000 people at an outdoor venue for Trump—a huge reduction from the 20,000 Trump had expected—but Ronna pointed out that the plan had flexibility to allow for more people if caseloads started to fall.

  Trump seemed agreeable, and Brad quickly signed off. Pence raised no objections either, and Stepien, as usual, said nothing. But there was pushback again from Hope, Meadows, and Johnny McEntee.

  “I’ve just got to chime in here,” Hope said. “I don’t know why we’re even doing this if we can’t have 12,000 people in the room every day.”

  Hope equated downsizing the convention to caving to media pressure. Trump had been loudly calling for schools to reopen in the fall. The media would torch him for hypocrisy if he then went and limited participation at his own convention.

  “If you do this, you’re saying you can’t have rallies and you can’t do anything outdoors,” she said. “You can’t do any campaigning. You’re just conceding and giving in.”

  Ronna took the criticism, and worried that her plan was about to be derailed. She fought back, arguing that she’d rather endure a one-day story for doing the responsible thing than withstand months of coverage as delegates suffered the effects of Covid.

  That sounded like an argument to get rid of any testing, Hope shot back. “People should know what’s good for them,” she said. “If they’re that old and sick, then they shouldn’t be traveling.”

  Walters warned that daily coverage of Covid issues at a full convention could overshadow even the president’s speech—a similar dynamic to what had played out in Tulsa after campaign staffers who tested positive.

  “If we have 10 percent of people test positive every day, that’s a massive media story,” Walters said. “That will end up scaring people out of coming to the president’s speech on Thursday.”

  Meadows was skeptical of Walters’s numbers, and demanded to know his source. Walters and Ronna had been consulting regularly with both Deborah Birx and Anthony Fauci, the two top doctors on the White House’s coronavirus task force.

  “Oh,” Meadows said as sarcasm dripped from each syllable. “If it’s coming from Dr. Birx, it must be true.”

  “If it’s coming from an infectious disease expert, then I’m going to believe that individual over you,” Walters shot back.

  Unfortunately for Brad, the meeting turned back to convention programming. The programming had always been the campaign’s responsibility, but he was in full defense mode now and turned on one of his closest allies in Washington.

  “I thought Ronna was going to do that,” he said. “The RNC dropped the ball.”

  “If I would have picked the speakers and crafted their speeches, you would have been horrified,” Ronna said. “You have the polling. You’re the one who should know the message for your candidate. That is not what the RNC does.”

  Ronna was right. But Hope did a double take. The convention was six weeks away.

  “Nothing’s been done?” she asked.

  “We were always going to wait until we got a little closer,” Brad said.

  Trump had heard enough.

  “You don’t even know what you’re talking about,” he barked at Brad. “Just stop!”

  The following night, July 14, Stepien was summoned to the White House for a private meeting with Trump. The invitation made clear that Stepien needed to arrive as quickly as possible. The meeting, he was told, was to be off the books.

  When Stepien was offered Brad’s job, he immediately volunteered to cut his own salary to show the job was more important to him than the money. Trump asked about the other Republicans for whom he was working.

  “You’ve got a lot of clients,” Trump said.

  “The clients I have have been helpful to you,” Stepien replied.

  “I need your focus,” Trump said.

  “Yo
u have it,” Stepien assured him.

  The next morning, Wednesday, July 15, Brad was demoted.

  Jared arrived at campaign headquarters in the morning and asked Brad to come into his office.

  At 1:00 p.m. that day, Jared and Brad sat alone in his campaign office, the White House tranquil in plain view through the office window behind them.

  “Brad, you’re demoted,” Jared told him. “Bill is now the campaign manager, and you’re digital director.”

  Jared’s ice-cold approach crushed Brad. No one told him why he’d been replaced, and he took it personally. He blamed Trump, and he told friends that he’d been punished for following orders. He had wanted to have an outdoor rally in a swing state. Summoning his inner Trump, he insisted that he’d had no missteps. There was the tweet that wildly overestimated the crowd size of the Oklahoma rally, but like a true Trumpian, he blamed the media for amplifying his post.

  “Other than that, I have no other mistakes,” Brad told friends.

  Regardless, his fate was sealed. At least for the moment. A rapid rise in Covid cases put Oklahoma into the pandemic’s “red zone,” which forced reopening measures there to be reversed. Herman Cain was hospitalized with a Covid infection eleven days after the rally—an infection that even some campaign officials privately believed he’d contracted during the event—and died from the disease before the end of July.

  Brad decided to head home to Florida. He’d get some rest, punch the clock for a while at the campaign, and plot his way back to the top.

  Footnotes

  1 That fact both alarmed and delighted Navarro. With no one in the White House on the weekends, he was free to walk around shoeless in his running shorts and a T-shirt.

  2 “JARED GREAT JOB- THANKS- DONALD J. TRUMP.”