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

by Michael C. Bender

  “There were a couple of occasions I felt Joe was going off the cliff, and you saved him,” Giuliani told Trump.

  Trump didn’t react. Giuliani could never tell whether the president agreed.

  Their meeting ended, and fifteen minutes later, Trump was walking across the South Lawn headed out for a two-stop swing through Minnesota.

  At the airport in Minneapolis, Trump was greeted by a group that included U.S. Senate candidate Jason Lewis, state senate Republican leader Paul Gazelka, and state house Republican leader Kurt Daudt. They’d all been tested for coronavirus and told not to shake hands with Trump or get close to him, in order to comply with pandemic protocols.

  Trump descended the stairs from the plane, and immediately offered to take photos with the group. The greeters stood less than a foot from Trump. None wore a mask.

  “You’ve been tested, right?” Trump asked.

  After the fundraiser, on the flight from Minneapolis to Duluth, Hope fell ill. She’d been fine on the flight from Washington, sitting with other aides and typing on her laptop. But she sought out Conley, who recognized the symptoms of Covid. He recommended she put on a mask, isolate herself on the flight, and rest.

  Trump spoke for just forty-five minutes that night in Duluth, about half as long as one of his typical rally speeches. Some White House officials thought he seemed unusually tired. Others chalked up the brief speech to the chilly temperatures and the icy gusts that swept over the event that night. Trump noted within the first two minutes of his speech that “Minnesota is a little on the windy side.” He blamed the cold for his refusal to introduce a handful of Democratic mayors from the state’s Iron Range who had endorsed him.

  “I’m not introducing you,” Trump said. “It’s freezing out here.”

  On the flight back to Washington, Meadows walked back to the press cabin to brief reporters on Trump’s plans to sign the temporary spending measure from Congress that had arrived at the White House earlier that day.

  Meadows was aware that Hope had been sick enough to have self-isolated inside the plane for the past three hours. But he spoke to reporters without a mask, and gave no indication that one of Trump’s closest aides had quarantined just a couple of cabins away on the plane.

  Hope usually arrived at the White House every day around 7:30 a.m., but the morning after Minnesota she still felt like hell. She canceled her early meeting, skipped Meadows’s senior staff meeting, and instead stayed home to rest. When she didn’t feel any better around 11:00 a.m., she dragged herself to the medical office in the White House where Covid tests were administered.

  Under White House protocols, staffers were first administered a rapid test, which provided results in ten to fifteen minutes. The rapid test was faster and less intrusive than the “PCR” test, which collected a genetic sample from deeper in the nasal passage and generally took about an hour to get back. But the rapid test was also much less reliable. It occasionally produced false positive tests and, at a much higher rate, false negatives.

  To account for some of that volatility, staffers who received a positive result from a rapid test were given a second rapid test. Two positive rapid tests required a more extensive—but much more reliable—PCR test.

  Hope returned home, and received the finals results after noon.

  Positive.

  She told almost no one. The White House tried to keep a lid on the news.

  Trump was scheduled to depart from the White House at 12:45 p.m. to attend a campaign fundraiser at his Bedminster golf club, and the White House scrambled to quietly remove Hope’s close contacts from the trip. Last-minute changes were made to the flight manifest but no one was told why they had been pulled or why they were added. One clue something was up: Staffers in Meadows’s office and outside the Oval Office were suddenly wearing face masks.

  But there were few aides who spent more time in closer contact with Hope than Trump—and vice versa. Trump went to Bedminster anyway.

  Trump had stopped taking daily Covid tests sometime in the summer based on the belief that it was enough that everyone around him was being tested. But the rapid tests were only about 80 percent accurate—and Trump’s doctor and his chief of staff were both aware the night before that Hope almost certainly had coronavirus. Given Hope’s status as one of the president’s closest aides, senior aides in the White House assumed her test results had been passed on to Trump. That information should have prompted the president to take a coronavirus test by the next morning.

  According to some aides, Trump did take a rapid test on the morning of October 1—and tested positive. But that scenario would make his decision to travel to Bedminster incomprehensible. Trump would have jeopardized the lives of staff traveling with him and just about everyone at Bedminster, as well as his own. Meadows and Tony Ornato, the deputy chief of staff for operations, didn’t weigh-in on contract-tracing or quarantine decisions and deferred to the medical team on when Trump could or couldn’t travel because of Covid, a spokesman for the two men said.

  One White House official with knowledge of the positive test said Trump believed it was a false positive, a result he had received before on the rapid test. As he had before, Trump took a second rapid test that morning, which came back negative.

  I asked why even a single positive rapid test for the president wouldn’t have prompted a more reliable PCR test. The official said there was no good answer.

  “What can I say? It’s just the way we operated,” the official told me. “It wasn’t dealt with in the appropriate way it should have been.”

  Trump told me later in an interview that he wasn’t sure what had happened.

  “I don’t know the exact timing,” he said. “At some point I was told I tested positive.”

  Trump would have discussed the trip with a White House doctor, who would have asked the president to describe his proximity to Hope, considered her test and the incubation period of the virus, and made a recommendation. Other White House officials who should have been notified about a positive test—and discussed the wisdom of traveling knowing Hope was sick—included Meadows, and Tony Ornato, the deputy chief of staff of operations who had been detailed to the White House from the U.S. Secret Service, where he’d been one of the agency’s top officials. There was no indication that either Meadows or Ornato objected to Trump’s trip to Bedminster.

  Meadows hadn’t spoken to Hope before Trump left the White House. He called after Marine One had lifted off.

  Inside Marine One, Trump sat in his usual captain’s chair behind the helicopter’s pilot as a skeleton White House crew piled into the seats around him. The others included Ornato, press secretary Judd Deere, personnel director Johnny McEntee, and political director Brian Jack.

  It wasn’t until Marine One had landed at Joint Base Andrews, Trump and his staff had boarded Air Force One, and the plane was on its way to New Jersey that lower-level staffers—including some who had been last-minute adds to the manifest—started to be notified about Hope’s positive test.

  Deere was among those who saw the note on his phone but never considered the possibility that Trump might be positive, too, and that now he might have been exposed.

  Air Force One landed at the Morristown, New Jersey, airport, and Tommy Hicks, a Dallas-based investor who was cochairman of the Republican National Committee, joined Trump on the second helicopter ride, this one from the airport to the golf club.

  Inside the second leg of Marine One, Brian Jack gave the president the usual briefing materials before a fundraiser—a rundown of the schedule, who was in attendance, some of the issues they’d want to talk about. But Trump barely bothered to look at it. It was unlike Trump. He would always at least flip through the packet.

  At the club, Trump was scheduled for forty pictures with donors, all of whom were required to stand at least six feet away from the president to comply with guidelines aimed at stemming the spread of coronavirus.

  After the clicks, Trump held a private meeting with a
dozen donors. He raised some eyebrows that afternoon when he repeatedly called on Jack to answer questions. It was unusual for Trump to cede the floor to any staffer during a roundtable. But Trump asked Jack to spell him on several questions about polling and the presidential battleground map.

  Trump then delivered remarks outside to the rest of his supporters, and cut the event short. He had been scheduled to spend more than two and a half hours at his property, but ended it more than forty-five minutes early. He seemed tired, but staff chalked it up to a travel schedule that had started to ramp up ahead of the election.

  Back at the White House, Trump sat for three “tele-rallies.” Trump and his team said little during the campaign about his tele-rallies. They were phone calls, typically about five minutes long, between the president and a Republican congressional candidate that were blasted out to landlines in a House district or Senate candidate’s state so that people could listen in. They were essentially spam calls, but instead of getting sold an exotic vacation, the pitch was about the Republican vision for a brighter future.

  “The president of the United States will soon be on the phone,” the operator would say.

  Regardless of how many voters picked up the phone, or bothered to hold the line, the real value was the recording of Trump’s endorsement for his fellow Republican. The candidate’s campaign would turn the president’s words into a short clip to use for advertisements and their own round of recorded robocalls later.

  That night, starting at 7:30 p.m., Trump dialed into a tele-rally with Burgess Owens of Utah, Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, and Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey.5

  He had finished by 8:09 p.m. when Jennifer Jacobs of Bloomberg News reported what he’d wanted to keep secret: Hope had tested positive.

  Sean Hannity, the prime-time Fox News host, immediately reached out and booked Trump for a last-minute interview on his show that night at 9:00 p.m. On the program, Trump said that he’d just learned of Hope’s positive test and was awaiting his own results.

  At 12:54 a.m., Trump tweeted that he and the first lady had tested positive.

  “Tonight, @FLOTUS and I tested positive for COVID-19. We will begin our quarantine and recovery process immediately. We will get through this TOGETHER!”

  Trump’s positive test triggered some of the most chaotic days of his four years as president, and on either of his two campaigns. West Wing officials were certain that no single location in the world performed more regular coronavirus tests than the Trump White House. Few places would have had similar access to that scale of testing. But even with that advantage, Trump had been unable to keep himself from getting infected. It was a devastating development barely forty-eight hours after his disastrous debate performance and just thirty-three days until the election.

  “There was definitely a sense that morning that it was all over,” one senior administration official said.

  No one had reached out to Stepien or the campaign to say Hope had tested positive the day before. On Friday morning, just hours after Trump tweeted about his own infection, Stepien canceled his regular campaign staff meeting so he and his colleagues could get tested. Within the next twenty-four hours, three members of the president’s debate prep team—Christie, Stepien, and Kellyanne—announced that they, too, had tested positive.

  Christie had to find out about Hope and Trump from the news, and he was livid.

  Giuliani woke up that morning to find several missed calls from the White House, including Meadows, to alert him about Trump’s positive test. But the former mayor had already scheduled a Covid test after reading on Twitter that Hope had tested positive.

  At the White House, any remaining credibility on the Covid issue was quickly evaporating. No one would say when Trump had last tested negative. There were conflicting internal briefings about what had happened. Meadows barked that it wasn’t his job to keep track of White House testing protocol. He told others that the White House had a rigorous contact tracing program that had been activated after Hope tested positive—a claim that was demonstrably false. Some officials who should have been notified said they received clandestine calls from an internal tipster who urged them to get tested. Anxiety was rising within the West Wing.

  “I’m glued to Twitter and TV because I have no official communication from anyone in the West Wing,” one administration official said.

  Ronna asked her staff, which had helped put on the New Jersey fundraiser, why the event hadn’t been canceled. But the White House hadn’t looped in the RNC.

  Meanwhile, Trump’s health had taken a turn for the worse. He called Ronna, who was just starting to feel better from her own Covid infection. She was alarmed to hear how congested he sounded. White House officials were alarmed, too.

  Trump was bedridden for hours on Friday in the White House residence. While he and Melania had both tested positive, they were instructed to remain away from each other since Trump was so much sicker than his wife. Meadows told reporters that morning that Trump had mild symptoms. Inside the White House, however, he was worried enough to suggest that other staffers say a prayer for the president.

  Ornato and Conley urged Trump to let them transport him to Walter Reed, where he would have access to better care than could be provided from inside the White House. Trump relented only after he was presented with the choice of walking out while he still could—or risk being wheeled out if he became too sick to decide for himself.

  Trump’s helicopter ride from the White House on the evening of Friday, October 2, may be remembered as the second most famous Marine One flight. It’s hard to think of any other that could compete, other than President Nixon’s final exit from the White House on August 9, 1974, when he flashed the victory sign with both hands just before ducking into the chopper.

  But even after being forced to resign or face impeachment, Nixon wore a wide smile as he walked across the South Lawn that sunny summer afternoon. Trump was in no mood to smile by the time he exited the Diplomatic Room doors.

  Waiting for him outside was a gaggle of White House reporters nervous about what was about to happen. The severity of Trump’s condition was still being concealed—a statement from McEnany announcing the departure repeated the fib that Trump had only “mild symptoms.” But Trump was clearly infected, probably contagious, and the White House’s record on health protocols was getting worse instead of better.

  Trump often addressed reporters before boarding Marine One, and if he was experiencing only mild symptoms, there was a chance he’d try to speak to them before leaving for the hospital. Plus, he’d been reluctant to wear a mask. Meadows, who had been with him all week, hadn’t worn a mask that morning while addressing reporters, and neither did Larry Kudlow, Trump’s economic adviser, when he spoke to the press.

  The group of reporters made a pact that if Trump did approach them, they would insist he maintain his distance from them. But at 6:16 p.m., Trump walked through the Dip Room doors in a dark suit, a light blue tie, and a black cloth mask over his face. He flashed a thumbs-up to reporters, walked past, and boarded Marine One. Meadows climbed in behind him. He arrived thirteen minutes later at the hospital’s landing zone, where a black SUV drove him to the hospital.

  At the hospital, Trump grabbed his small overnight bag and carried it inside. But he had been so weakened, the president dropped the bag after a few feet.

  When it fell to the floor, the doctors, aides, and law enforcement officers around Trump all seemed to take a step back. It appeared to Trump as if they were nervous about his infection and didn’t want to touch his belongings.

  But at that moment, Meadows stepped forward, picked it up, and carried it to his room.

  “That’s when I knew you’re my guy,” Trump would tell him later.

  Trump’s condition was being shrouded from the campaign, too. Amid the confusion, a decision had been quietly made inside campaign headquarters on Friday to play it safe until they had more information on the president’s health. The campaign paused parts of
its surrogate operation—the team that makes sure the president’s allies are equipped with talking points and booked for interviews on national TV, local radio, and with regional newspapers. The campaign also held off on scheduling surrogates on TV that weekend over uncertainty about what to say regarding the president’s illness.

  Meanwhile, Trump’s communications team saw, however briefly, a possible opportunity to seize the moment. At the campaign, Jason Miller told Stepien that the infection might be a chance to reset Trump’s message on the virus. Inside the White House, Alyssa Farah told Jared that this might be a potential turning point. Trump could speak about his firsthand experience with the tough and challenging virus, and urge the country to pull together to defeat it. The whole world was watching—and even rooting for Trump’s recovery—which presented the White House with the opportunity to get a new message quickly in front of Americans.

  “If we keep this tight and do it right, this could be a turning point for us,” Farah said.

  Jared asked her to start working up some language.

  On Saturday, Jared called his wife and her siblings, who hadn’t spoken to their father since he’d gotten sick Thursday night, and told them Trump was going to be fine.

  Conley delivered a similar message at a news conference outside the hospital, where he told reporters that Trump’s symptoms were improving. But since the president had tested positive, Conley had been directed by both Trump and Meadows to reveal nothing—about Trump’s condition or his testing regiment. The doctor, who had little experience speaking to reporters, came off as evasive and overly optimistic.