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

by Michael C. Bender

  But Meadows, who had slept overnight in the hospital, was flustered. He was concerned that the doctor had set expectations too high. Trump had improved, but doctors told them inside that they needed more time to monitor the president.

  As Conley and his medical team walked back inside the hospital, Meadows walked over to reporters. He asked to speak to them off the record, told them that Trump’s symptoms had been “very concerning” just twenty-four hours earlier and that the president wasn’t out of the woods yet.

  Media outlets sent news alerts based off Meadows’s update, and sourced the information to a person familiar with the situation. When Trump saw the headline flash on the TV inside the hospital, he was furious and immediately started calling aides.

  “Who the fuck said that?” he shouted at one adviser.

  Some TV cameras—including an Associated Press cameraman—were still recording when Meadows walked over to the journalists and asked to go off the record. The AP was suddenly in the uncomfortable position of having a story on the wire citing an anonymous source, with its own video footage strongly suggesting that the source was Meadows. He realized his flub and let the wire service identify him on the record.

  Meanwhile, Trump connected with Ronna in Michigan to compare notes about their coronavirus infections. Like Farah and Jason Miller, she had a similar thought that Trump might be able to make up some lost ground with voters who had disapproved of his response to Covid. She urged him to commiserate with people who had to battle the infection without the same resources afforded to the president, and to acknowledge how scared he felt when he was at his sickest point.

  “Tell people we’ll get through this together,” Ronna said.

  “I love it,” Trump told her. “I think that’s great.”

  Trump was eager to clarify the conflicting reports, and noticed that afternoon that there had been a long gap on Fox News when none of his usual supporters were on the air. He closely tracked who defended him on television and seemed to have an internal radar for his surrogate operation’s activity.

  He was told that Jason Miller had effectively shut down the comms shop when the president and his campaign manager fell ill. Miller couldn’t get straight answers from the White House about Trump’s condition, and played it safe.

  Trump erupted when he learned one of his campaign’s biggest weapons had been holstered during his hospital stay. He was always concerned about whether he had enough air cover on TV, and was rarely satisfied with the support he received. Now confined to the hospital, almost literally unable to fight for himself, he viewed the surrogate operation as even more important. He wanted to see his killers on television.

  “I want my fucking surrogates out there,” Trump said. “Get everybody on the Sunday shows, and push back on this narrative that I’m not doing well.”

  Trump mouthpieces raced back to the airwaves. Losing patience over conflicting reports on his health—a discord that had been struck by his own team—Trump called Giuliani from the hospital and dictated a statement, declaring himself well enough to leave the hospital.

  “I’m going to beat this,” Trump told Giuliani to say.

  But the truth was, Trump also felt vulnerable. He tried to puzzle together Covid timelines with other staffers to figure out when different members of Trump World had gotten infected. On Saturday night from his hospital room, Trump called Christie, who was hospitalized with coronavirus in New Jersey.

  “Do you think I gave it to you?” Trump asked him.

  “I don’t know,” Christie told him. “At this point, who cares?”

  Trump’s doctors acknowledged on Sunday that he’d started a steroid treatment, which caught Ronna’s attention. She’d had a similar treatment for her case of coronavirus and didn’t like how agitated and aggressive it made her feel.

  But Trump continued to recover, and that evening he coordinated his own drive-by for supporters who had spent much of the weekend gathered outside the hospital. He waved and gave a thumbs-up as he drove past them wearing a mask with the windows up. His fans loved it, and his critics went crazy, insisting that for nothing more than his own narcissism he had jeopardized the health of the two Secret Service agents who wore head-to-toe personal protective equipment as they went along for the ride with him in the hermetically sealed presidential limo. (What no one knew at the time was that the Secret Service only sent agents with Trump that weekend who had already contracted coronavirus.)

  Trump’s doctors signed off on a plan to release him on Monday evening despite signs of pneumonia. An excited Trump phoned friends and planned a grand entrance at the White House, where he’d pretend to have been weakened—and then rip off his dress shirt to reveal a Superman T-shirt underneath. Aides hoped Trump was joking, but the message was clear: There would be no pivot to empathy.

  Instead, Trump arrived at the White House and climbed two flights of stairs to the balcony—gasping for breath as he went—before he gave a salute and disappeared inside. He returned with a camera crew to shoot the scene again, and released a video of his triumphant return. There was none of the compassion or sensitivity that Ronna, Stepien, and Jason Miller had urged him to demonstrate. Trump instead framed his illness as a result of his heroic leadership in a pandemic instead of the willful neglect of health protocols intended to keep people safe.

  “Don’t be afraid of it,” he said.

  Ronna called Jared and told him she was nervous the steroids were fueling Trump’s aggressiveness. “I’m worried about what these medicines are doing,” she said.

  The ten days that started with the Rose Garden superspreader event, included his hurricane of hectoring on the Cleveland debate stage, and ended with his self-satisfied discharge from the hospital presented Trump with the most politically devastating stretch of the election year—if not his entire presidency.

  When Trump’s week and a half of hell was filtered through the past four years of Wall Street Journal/NBC News polls, the result showed that each of the president’s missteps underscored—if not exacerbated—what voters had long identified as his chief vulnerabilities. When it came to his handling of coronavirus, a majority of voters from the start of the pandemic said Trump had not taken the contagion seriously enough. At least thirty-five cases of coronavirus were eventually linked back to the Rose Garden event, a significant enough spread that Fauci’s colleague on the White House coronavirus task force, Dr. Deborah Birx, told other senior officials there were probably multiple infected and contagious people at the event, instead of a single Patient Zero.

  Then, Trump’s debate performance—criticized by his own advisers as too angry and mean—went directly to the question of temperament. Just 21 percent of voters said Trump had the right temperament to be president on the eve of his inauguration in 2017. Almost four years later, when asked which candidate had the right temperament for the job, the president’s numbers had barely improved—just 26 percent of voters picked Trump.

  Finally, the contradictory accounts of both Trump’s Covid diagnosis and his treatment highlighted a concern voters long had about the president’s reliability that had never been adequately addressed. In January 2018, 29 percent of voters gave Mr. Trump a good or very good rating for honesty and trustworthiness. When asked in September which candidate was better at being honest and trustworthy, 30 percent said Mr. Trump while 47 percent said Mr. Biden.

  Inside the White House, Fauci told colleagues that a Covid outbreak in the West Wing had been inevitable since the spring, when Trump began pushing a message that the pandemic was almost over.

  “There was definitely a false sense of security about the testing,” Fauci said.

  The silver lining for Trump was that there was still a month left in the race. It would take a few more days until he would be cleared to travel, but several senior campaign aides thought it would be possible to close the gap. The voters who had drifted from him in the final days of September and early days of October were the kind of people who were still open to
Trump’s candidacy after three and a half years in office. If they were able to withstand the onslaught of controversies and chaos over that period, it stood to reason that he could win them back in the final days.

  “I’m strong again,” Trump told an aide after arriving back at the White House.

  Footnotes

  1 Trump had been scooped the day before by the New York Times , but the White House had still refused to confirm Barrett’s selection.

  2 Trump claimed the next morning that he didn’t know who the Proud Boys were, but it was impossible to know the truth. He denied hearing of David Duke in 2017, which was ridiculously false. But instead of correcting himself, he doubled down. And after four years of this, the media’s instinct wasn’t to give him the benefit of the doubt.

  3 Scully’s debate story didn’t end well. The president attacked him as a “Never Trumper,” and Scully panicked and sought advice from Anthony Scaramucci, a Trump ally turned critic. But Scully accidentally publicly posted his private message to the Mooch on Twitter. He claimed he’d been hacked, then fessed up, and was suspended by the network.

  4 When I started covering Trump during his first race, I was appalled by his over-the-top attacks. Or I thought I was, at least. But then I turned on my recorder after a rally to check quotes and heard my own barely stifled laughter in the background.

  5 In all, Trump participated in fifty-eight tele-rallies for fifty-four House candidates and four Senate candidates: Steve Daines in Montana, Bill Haggerty in Tennessee, Mitch McConnell in Kentucky, and Dan Sullivan in Alaska. Republicans won every race, including toss-up House races in California, Iowa, Minnesota, and New York.

  15

  Where’s Hunter?

  “The Wall Street Journal is working on a very, very important piece.”

  —Call with campaign staff, October 19, 2020

  Less than three weeks until Election Day, Covid cases were again on the rise, the economy had flatlined, and Donald Trump’s odds of winning a second term were plummeting.

  He was falling farther behind Joe Biden in public polls, and the internal campaign metrics were worse. The campaign’s most recent poll—an exhaustive survey in seventeen states that Trump’s brain trust viewed as the most competitive battlegrounds—showed that the self-described King of Ventilators was, politically speaking, gasping for air. The last few persuadable voters in America—a paltry but still pivotal cross-section of the country—overwhelmingly preferred Biden to handle the coronavirus pandemic. And Trump’s campaign, in the parlance of the pandemic, was riddled with comorbidities.

  He was shedding support from white suburban women, an indispensable bloc of voters, who were horrified by his leadership on law-and-order issues, which had been the organizing principle of both his 2016 and 2020 campaigns. His years-long advantage over Democrats on economic policy had evaporated. Eight months earlier, his team had shown Trump a map with him on the way to 330 electoral votes. Now he was losing to a man he’d described publicly as the worst presidential candidate in American political history. Privately, he was even more crude.

  “How am I losing in the polls to a mental retard?” Trump had said in June, interrupting a policy meeting in his office to vent about the race just weeks before his campaign staff shakeup.

  But that reset hadn’t worked. The Republican convention that had left the president feeling positive and confident was now just a distant memory. His first debate with Biden wasn’t just a letdown; it was an unmitigated disaster.

  Still, Trump thought he had one last play.

  The only rub: It had never worked before, he’d gotten himself impeached when he tried, and no one around him had any idea how to pull it off.

  It was a warm, early October evening in Washington. I was excited about a long Vespa ride across town but wary of my final destination: an off-the-books rendezvous in McLean, Virginia—a leafy suburb tucked along the southern banks of the Potomac River—with a handful of Trump World lawyers, fixers, and backroom operators.

  And I was already late.

  Time, however, was notional in Trump World. As a White House reporter, I felt like I was aging in dog years covering Trump, as he somehow managed to pack seven days’ worth of news into each one. But on this particular day—Friday, October 9—the pace was especially nuts. Trump was still confined to the White House with a Covid infection, but the news was metastasizing.

  On the Rush Limbaugh radio show that morning, for two whole hours, Trump had warned Iran not to “fuck around with us.” He’d designated Black Lives Matter to be “such a racist term.” He’d criticized Fox News for failing to be wholly and abjectly submissive. He’d attacked Barr and Pompeo, two of his top Cabinet secretaries.

  And that was all before lunch.

  By midday, the White House announced Trump would resume public events with a rally on the South Lawn in less than twenty-four hours. The Commission on Presidential Debates had canceled the second of the three Trump-Biden encounters, after Trump, the day before, had said he wouldn’t go. Mitch McConnell, the leader of the Senate Republican majority, said Congress had run out of time to pass the economic stimulus plan Trump wanted before Election Day.

  Senator Lindsey Graham refused to take a Covid test before a Senate debate in South Carolina, afraid that a positive result would force him to quarantine and jeopardize the confirmation process for Trump’s Supreme Court nominee. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, told CBS Radio during an interview that day that the ceremony where Trump had unveiled his Supreme Court pick turned out to be “a superspreader event at the White House.”

  I hurried to leave my house before Trump’s medical evaluation that night live on Fox News, which was precisely how the network was promoting Trump’s first on-camera interview since his coronavirus diagnosis.

  My phone buzzed with a text from one of my Trump World hosts: “ETA?”

  The siren song of a well-spun conspiracy is an alluring one, indeed. That night, the seductress crooning for me was a former captain of the Penn State wrestling team and ex-Navy lieutenant named Tony Bobulinski.

  I didn’t know Bobulinski’s name yet. I’d been lured to McLean with the promise of getting a glimpse of the proverbial holy grail in Trump World: undeniable proof that Joe Biden was profiteering off the predilection of his troubled son, Hunter, for monetizing the family name. To Trump, just one sip from this sacred chalice would miraculously clear the infections and heal the wounds of his damaged reelection campaign while simultaneously poisoning Biden’s bid to take him out.

  I was intrigued, but skeptical. Biden the Elder had long said he wasn’t involved in any of his son’s foreign deals. Officials in Trump’s own administration had testified, under oath, that Biden had been carrying out U.S. foreign policy when he threatened to withhold $1 billion in aid until Ukraine fired its top prosecutor. That threat, as Trump alleged, wasn’t because the prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, was investigating Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company on whose board Hunter sat. Shokin’s probe into Burisma had already been shelved. Instead, Biden’s push was because Shokin hadn’t seriously pursued political corruption in Ukraine, which the Obama administration viewed as key to Russia’s outsized influence in the country. Biden had done nothing obviously unethical—but Trump, however, had been so obsessed with having Biden investigated over the matter that he’d been impeached on a charge of abusing his power.

  But impeachment hadn’t chastened Trump, and failures had never slowed him down. Instead, the search for damaging information to hobble Biden’s campaign devoured a tremendous amount of energy, attention, and time during Trump’s last two years in office.

  What was different this time, my sources told me, was that there were receipts.

  Bobulinski had gone into business with Hunter Biden and kept all the text messages, emails, and signed corporate documents from an investment venture they’d created and had planned to seed with millions from Chinese investors. The documents, I was told, detailed specific p
ayouts for Joe Biden. The text messages warned the other partners to keep quiet about his involvement.

  “These are legitimate documents,” Arthur Schwartz, a bare-knuckles public relations brawler who helped coordinate the meeting, had assured me.

  Schwartz had trained as an attorney but instead found himself drawn to the emerging dark art of Internet trolling. Using the pen name “Cornholio Esquire,”1 he helped start a message board in the 1990s that gained a fair amount of renown in New York legal circles and was later replicated in other cities. Schwartz was combative and cruel, but I also had a soft spot for him. While he expressed it in unusual ways, he had a deep appreciation for the press and its power. And in small groups when he’d sheath his sword and emerge from his defensive crouch, Schwartz could reveal a certain amount of charm, even hints of kindness. He was a thoughtful host who would offer a beer even though he himself didn’t drink and fill bowls with various chocolates for his guests until he was completely out.

  “Going to order food,” he texted me earlier that Friday afternoon. “Burger okay with you?”

  The burgers were long gone by the time I arrived in McLean, but I wasn’t thinking about food. I was suspicious and excited to find what awaited me behind the heavy front door of Schwartz’s home, which was surrounded by tall, skinny pine trees and a lush, manicured lawn. I hadn’t foreclosed on any possibilities, particularly since Bobulinski had sent a pair of lawyers on his behalf.

  Sitting next to Schwartz at a circular dining room table was Eric Herschmann, the attorney on Trump’s impeachment team who had recently joined the West Wing formally as an adviser to the president; and Stefan Passantino, a former White House attorney who was business partners with Trump’s deputy campaign manager Justin Clark and represented Bobulinski from his perch as a partner at Michael Best & Friedrich, a Washington firm with extensive links to the Trump White House.2 No one would tell me who had referred Bobulinski to Passantino. From what I could gather, Bobulinski had been complaining to an associate that the Hunter story wasn’t being fully told. When the Senate Homeland Security Committee released the findings from its investigation into Hunter Biden in September, Bobulinski was furious to learn that a Chinese investor who had stiffed their startup out of $10 million had given $5 million to another of Hunter’s companies—one that Bobulinski didn’t know existed. Bobulinski was convinced that cash infusion was supposed to be money for their company, that he had been double-crossed, and that the Bidens were corrupt. The person to whom Bobulinski kept complaining about Hunter had ties to Trump World and had put him in touch with Passantino.