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

by Michael C. Bender

  Stepien projected confidence about winning Arizona, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. To bolster his argument, he dove into county-by-county-level data in the crucial battleground states, sometimes precinct by precinct, showing the statistical recall of political data that had impressed the political newcomers in Trump World. But Stepien’s data points that evening were mostly anecdotal, and he was still missing important pieces of the puzzle.

  “We love what we see in places like the Upper Peninsula of Michigan,” Stepien said that evening. Trump would go on to win those northern Michigan counties by 18.7 percentage points, but that was four points less than he did in 2016.

  In Pennsylvania, Stepien pointed reporters to Dauphin County, which the campaign had targeted in September with a campaign rally. “We see Republican precincts matching and exceeding 2016 turnout,” he said about Dauphin. “Democrat precincts are lagging behind, lagging behind greatly.”

  Biden would win the county by more than 12,000 votes.

  In Wisconsin, Stepien was right that the central Wisconsin counties he was watching—Juneau, Green Lake, Waushara, Wood, and Waupacca—were all about to turn more votes in for Trump than they had in 2016.

  “Turnout is very much matching our expectation of being, overwhelmingly, a Trump vote,” he said.

  But Biden won the state by more than 20,000 votes.

  Stepien and Miller walked back to the Map Room. Gary Coby and data guru Matt Oczkowski were seated around a table centered in the room, and four TVs were showing live updates from cable networks or data they wanted everyone to keep an eye on, including one with a spreadsheet that showed live results coming in compared to Trump’s performance in 2016.

  Ronna was there, along with Justin Riemer, her chief counsel at the RNC. Jared and Ivanka wandered in and out, as did Eric and Lara and Don Junior and Kim Guilfoyle. Pence would come in for updates a few times that night.

  As the networks started calling the first states—Vermont for Biden, Kentucky for Trump—the president breezed through the watch party. Trays of food were set out with sliders, chicken tenders, and pigs-in-a-blanket—all Trump favorites and each bite sealed under glass, one of the few acknowledgments that night of the pandemic raging through the rest of the country. Guests included Cabinet secretaries—Alex Azar, Bill Barr, David Bernhardt, Ben Carson—and senior White House staff, including Larry Kudlow, Avi Berkowitz, and Stephen Miller. Meadows, Scavino, Corey, and Bossie were there, as was Kellyanne, all of them coming in and out of the Map Room throughout the night.

  There were a handful of media personalities, too, including author Raymond Arroyo, Laura Ingraham, and Jeanine Pirro. Diamond. Silk. But most of the other 250 guests had been chosen by Don Junior, Ivanka, and Eric. Some White House officials had thought the evening would include campaign staffers, but it was mostly a party for the kids. Still, Trump worked his way through the crowd, soaking up congratulations and telling guests about the turnout at his rallies for the past week.

  By 7:30, West Virginia was in Trump’s column, followed by South Carolina a half hour later. Alabama went to Trump a few minutes after that. Biden kept his home state of Delaware.

  A swath of traditionally Democratic states in the Northeast fell into Biden’s column: Connecticut, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, as well as Maryland and Illinois. Trump picked up Tennessee and Oklahoma. Indiana and Arkansas followed in short order.

  The early results were no surprise, but the campaign was seeing data that helped feed their optimism. Some counties in northern Indiana were coming out strong for Trump, some by as much as 10 percent better than 2016. Obama had won Indiana in 2008, but there was never any doubt it was staying red in 2020. However, this kind of strong performance could mean good things in similar places across the upper Midwest.

  Coby pointed the numbers out to Matt. “We might pull this fucker off,” Coby told him.

  By 8:30 p.m., excitement was building in the Map Room, where returns from Florida were exceeding internal expectations. Trump World started projecting some of those demographic trends onto other battleground states.

  By 9:00 p.m., Trump returned to the residence, watching as Fox News called both Dakotas, Wyoming, Kansas, and Louisiana for him, while Biden picked up Colorado and New York.

  None of the major battlegrounds had been called by 11:00 p.m., but anticipation was building in the Map Room. They were pushing the networks to call Ohio, and believed they’d won Florida and North Carolina, too. They extrapolated trends they were seeing in North Carolina and Florida, and started telling reporters they were confident they’d won Georgia as well.

  At 11:04 p.m., the Associated Press moved a story that the biggest battlegrounds were still too close to call. At 11:07, the New York Times published a story that said the count could take days. Then, at 11:08 p.m., came the first major call of the night: Fox put Florida in Trump’s column. A huge roar went up in the East Room and, one floor down, inside the Map Room.

  In 2016, Florida had been called at about the same time. That was when a lot of staffers on that first campaign—including Stepien, Coby, and Clark—started to think Trump might actually beat Hillary. The same thing was happening again.

  “We can win this thing,” Clark muttered to Stepien.

  Four years earlier, the Florida victory was quickly followed a few minutes later by North Carolina and Georgia. By 11:30 p.m., Trump was leading Wisconsin with 70 percent of the vote in.

  But on November 3, 2020, at 11:29 p.m., the air rushed out of the room all at once as Fox called Arizona for Biden.

  “That is a big get for the Biden campaign,” Bret Baier told viewers.

  Time seemed to freeze inside the Map Room.

  Then, a sudden rush of people surged into the war room, and Stepien’s phone rang. The president was calling.

  “What the fuck?” Trump yelled into the phone.

  As quickly as everyone had appeared in the war room, they were back out the door in a stampede to the president’s private residence on the third floor.

  By 2:00 a.m., Trump was still in shock he hadn’t won. He still hadn’t decided what to tell the crowd downstairs, and to Americans watching on television. Trump stood near the piano in the Center Hall of the residence with a confused, dejected look as a bevy of more than a dozen campaign advisers, White House officials, and family members shouted around him like berserk investors on a Wall Street trading floor.

  Trump had been told for weeks that it looked like he could win. Stepien and McLaughlin had told him 66 million votes would probably be enough to win the second term. He was on his way to collecting more than 74 million, but now it looked like that still might not be enough.

  Trump wanted to know how he lost this state, and that state. How could it be that the race wasn’t over?

  White House advisers including Meadows, Stephen Miller, and Pat Cipollone offered opinions. Top campaign officials including Stepien, Clark, Jason Miller, and Oczkowski told him the numbers still might turn. Family members including Jared, Ivanka, Don Junior, Eric, and Lara gave suggestions.

  Giuliani went even further, and told Trump that he’d won. When campaign officials asked the former mayor how he knew that, Giuliani shrugged.

  “Just say we won,” Giuliani said.

  Trump never allowed so many people in the residence, mostly because it drove Melania nuts. But it didn’t matter now. No one could give Trump an answer he wanted to hear.

  “It was a shitshow,” one official said. “And the saddest thing I’ve ever seen.”

  Trump ordered the team to start calling Fox officials to figure out what had happened.

  Jared told Trump he’d already spoken to Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch, Jared said, wasn’t aware that Arizona had been called and would look into it. But Jared didn’t expect anything to change. He thought Fox had called the state too early, but that wasn’t on Murdoch. If the call turned out to be wrong, heads would roll at the cable network.

  “My guys feel very confident,” Murdoch told Jare
d a few minutes later.

  As Trump was still trying to make sense of the situation, Biden had taken the stage in Delaware.

  “We’re on track to win this election,” Biden said to supporters.

  Several aides had been telling Trump he needed to decide what he was going to tell his supporters. While Biden was still speaking from a stage set up outside the Chase Center in Wilmington, Trump sent his first tweet of the night.

  “We are up BIG,” Trump wrote in his post, promising to make a statement soon.

  But Trump was in shock. Much of his team was, too, and it took another ninety minutes to get the president out of the residence and over to the East Room, where a stage was set up. Some aides encouraged Trump to get in front of the cameras soon—most East Coast viewers had gone to bed, and he was about to lose the West Coast audience. Trump ignored the advice.

  “No, I’m not,” he said. “They’re going to watch me.”

  It was after 2:00 a.m. when Trump finally embarked with his team on a depressing parade toward the East Room.

  Trump rode the elevator down from the White House residence and ambled through the deserted State Dining Room. A row of televisions—installed for guests to watch election night returns—remained tuned to cable news. Trump paused in front of each screen and watched, as if the race might have flipped in his favor since he last looked.

  He eventually made it to the Green Room, which had been turned into a backstage operations center for the East Room event and where a dozen allies had gathered to give Trump some final words of advice.

  “Go out there and tell them you’re going to be president for the next four years!” shouted Boris Epshteyn, a friend of Eric’s who had worked in the White House and advised both of Trump’s campaigns.

  Laura Ingraham, the Fox News personality, shot Epshteyn a disapproving look.

  “You need to go out there and say it’s not over,” said Jeanine Pirro, host of the Fox show Justice with Judge Jeanine.

  At 2:21 a.m., Trump finally entered the East Room.

  From the stage, he falsely declared that he’d won Georgia. He asserted massive fraud without proof. He was still processing an emotional night in front of live network cameras: Results were looking phenomenal, he’d been preparing to celebrate something so beautiful, he was getting ready to win this election.

  “Frankly, we did win this election,” Trump said.

  In the Green Room after the speech, Trump asked his team how he did. Before anyone could answer, he asked for his election lawyers. He wanted to know where they could start fighting.

  Melania quietly returned to her room upstairs. Trump walked back to the Map Room.

  “What do we do tomorrow?” he asked his team.

  Clark ticked through possible legal challenges, and Trump advised him to be as aggressive as possible. Clark agreed with some suggestions, and disagreed with others. Oczkowski fed Trump updates on vote totals from the states. The president finally returned to the residence after 4:00 a.m. that night.

  He didn’t come down to the Oval Office at all the next day.

  Trump remained behind closed doors for most of the first week after the election, emerging briefly on November 5 to give a seventeen-minute statement in which he described himself as the victim of a widespread conspiracy to steal the election. Plotting against him were enemies real and imagined: Poll workers and tech companies, Democrats and the news media. His story had clear villians and heros, but no actual details. He offered no evidence, and he took no questions.

  “They’re trying to steal an election,” he said. “And we can’t let that happen.”

  Trump’s stream of falsehoods forced television networks to cut away from their live coverage of his statements. Chris Christie and former Senator Rick Santorum, two Trump allies, criticized his actions as dangerous and immoral. Even the New York Post, which had published the Hunter Biden laptop stories a few weeks earlier, ripped Trump’s claims as baseless.

  Trump’s postelection legal-stategy was proving an embarrassment for his allies, too. Reputable Republican lawyers had started to quit rather than carry conspiracy theories into court and the campaign was forced to send Don Junior and Eric to Pennslyvania and Georgia, where they held news conferences to criticize the ongoing vote count. In Pennslyvania, Eric was joined by Giuliani and Corey, who vowed to fight while ping ponging between unsubstantiated claims of wrongdoing and describing anecdotal disputes as evidence of widespread voter fraud.

  Less than forty-eight hours after polls had closed, Trump’s defense team was down to family members and his most devoted loyalists. Even Republican members of Congress had remained mostly mute—until Don Junior, Eric, and Brad launched a social media attack on the party for not quickly lining up behind the president’s distorted version of reality.

  “If you want to win in 2024 as a Republican, I would probably start saying something,” Brad posted on Twitter.

  The public shaming from Family Trump worked.

  Senator Lindsey Graham, whom Don Junior had specifically attacked, went on Hannity’s show that night, pledged a $500,000 donation to Trump’s legal defense, and disparaged Philadelphia’s election operation as “crooked as a snake.”

  Pence called for transparency in elections and for legal votes to be counted without addressing exactly how he believed the election was being stolen.

  Trump left the White House for the first time after the election on Saturday, November 7, when he golfed at his club in Sterling, Virginia. He hadn’t played for weeks.

  He arrived at the club at about 10:30 a.m. and sat at his usual table in the dining room with a clear view of the course. After a breakfast of scrambled eggs, bacon, and toast, Trump took a few swings on the driving range, then climbed into his personal golf cart—complete with a presidential seal embossed in the leather seats—and drove to the first tee box of the thirty-six-hole course.

  Trump was about to tee off at the seventh hole when Jared called to deliver the news: The Associated Press and major cable networks were about to call the election in Pennsylvania for Biden. The state’s twenty electoral votes would push the Democrat past the 270-vote threshold. Trump had lost.

  Trump took the call calmly. He nonchalantly strolled through the grass as he talked with his son-in-law for a few minutes, handed the phone back to an aide, and then finished the last twelve holes of the course as a motorcade of two dozen golf carts—filled with Secret Service agents, law enforcement, and White House aides—trailed behind him.

  As Trump finished the back nine, club members playing on adjacent holes shouted their encouragement to the president, telling him he won the election and to keep up the fight. When he finished his round and pulled back up to the clubhouse for lunch, two dozen members were waiting for him on the back patio. They encouraged him to forge ahead and said that he had their support.

  Trump loved the attention and spent a few moments chatting with the crowd under the clear blue skies of an otherwise perfectly pleasant fall afternoon.

  “Don’t worry,” Trump told the club members. “It’s not over yet.”

  18

  Acquittal, Part Two: The Insurrection

  “I don’t do rallies for other people. I do them for me.”

  —Senate campaign rally, Dalton, Georgia, January 4, 2021

  Trump returned to the White House on Saturday afternoon and found a stable of campaign advisers and lawyers waiting for him.

  Trump was wearing the dark slacks and white cap he’d worn golfing and brought his team up to White House residence, where just a few nights before he’d disregarded everyone’s advice—except for Giuliani—and declared himself the winner of the election. Trump sat in an armchair while Stepien, Clark, Jason Miller, Bossie, and Eric Herschmann—the White House attorney enamored with the Hunter Biden saga—pulled up seats around him. Their plan was not to tell Trump outright that he’d lost, as a round of major media outlets, including the Associated Press, CNN, and Fox News, had officially declared earlier
that day. Instead, they focused on the improbability of his remaining path to victory.

  “This has a 5 to 10 percent chance of success,” Clark told Trump.

  The others agreed.

  Trump has a peculiarly imprecise way of speaking so that two people in the same room can walk away with two different impressions. But he also has a unique way of listening in that he hears what few others do. And the odds of success his team had given him would have sounded much different to Stepien’s cautious, land-the-plane outlook than to Trump and his go-for-broke ethos. It had been almost exactly six years since Trump had sat in his New York office across from Corey, who told Trump he had a 5 percent shot of winning the 2016 presidential race—and Trump had countered that it was probably closer to 10 percent.

  Corey, as it turned out, had underestimated Trump’s chances. But the new “5 to 10 percent” plan from the 2020 campaign team seemed inflated from the start—a strategy in three acts that relied on lawsuits and recounts to reverse results in Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin. Trump—who had already lost—needed to hit the jackpot on each one to win. It was a nearly impossible task.

  The first play was in Georgia. Votes were still being counted, but the trend clearly favored Biden. On election night—before absentee ballots had been counted—Trump had been ahead by more than 103,700 votes. But as the count continued, the margin dwindled and by the time Trump sat down with his team that afternoon, Biden was ahead by 900 votes. Trump’s campaign had predicted a victory margin as wide as 290,000 votes in Georgia. He’d ultimately lose it by fewer than 11,800.

  Trump would request a recount, but the odds of overturning that result were already lower than 5 to 10 percent. According to data compiled by FairVote, a nonpartisan group that researches elections, there had been thirty-one recounts of statewide general election results in the previous twenty years. Of those, results had been overturned just three times. But in each of those instances, the race had been decided by the slimmest of margins: 0.009 percent, 0.014 percent, and 0.062 percent. Biden’s margin in Georgia was 0.24 percent, or about four times wider than even the largest margin that had been overturned in two decades of recounts.1