by Craig Unger
Which meant that for American democracy, the election was existential as well. We had already seen how Trump and Barr had stripped bare elemental institutions like the Department of Justice, the State Department, and FBI counterintelligence, and fired inspectors general in one sector after another—in the process all but destroying the checks and balances and congressional oversight that had kept the executive branch in line for more than two centuries. One more term, it seemed, and Trump’s authoritarianism would be irrevocable.
And so Trump’s whitewash continued. To that end, he granted clemency to Roger Stone, who had been convicted of no fewer than seven felony counts—of obstructing a congressional inquiry, of perjury, of witness tampering—all to cover up his effort to get information about Democrats’ emails hacked by Russians to help Trump win in 2016. Trump clearly benefited from Stone’s crimes, and for all we know, he may have ordered them.
But commuting Stone’s sentence was not merely an act of cronyism, of Trump doing a favor for a friend. Stone had the goods on Trump but didn’t talk. He had been convicted of lying to protect Trump. If Trump let him languish in jail, especially with the ongoing pandemic, he might talk. So in letting Stone walk, Trump was protecting himself.
And in the end, that’s what it was all about—keeping secrets. Keeping Roger Stone happy so that he wouldn’t talk. And that would help keep Trump in power, which was essential to Trump, because as a private citizen he could be prosecuted. That meant keeping any compromising materials—kompromat—out of the public eye. It meant keeping transcripts of Trump’s private conversations with Putin in the vault, on the top-secret White House server. It meant keeping Trump’s financial records secret. Keeping the Jeffrey Epstein files in safe hands.
As for the judiciary, when Ruth Bader Ginsburg died on September 18, the Supreme Court was very much in play, with Trump, Barr, Leonard Leo, and company not even waiting until she had lain in state before Trump announced the appointment of Amy Coney Barrett to take Ginsburg’s seat. This, of course, was the same Republican-controlled Senate that had blocked President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland in the last year of Obama’s final term.
Her appointment could guarantee the right control of the high court for the next generation, in which it would likely roll back Roe v. Wade and perhaps even decide the outcome of the 2020 election if it were contested. Although she was not a member of Opus Dei, Barrett, who had clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia, was both a member of the Federalist Society and a deeply conservative Catholic, a lifelong devotee of the charismatic, largely Catholic group People of Praise, another right-wing secret society with a highly authoritarian structure.
On September 27, in a major investigation into Trump’s finances, the New York Times revealed that Trump had paid no federal income taxes whatsoever in ten out of the last fifteen years, that he was disastrous as a businessman, and that he owed $421 million, most to Deutsche Bank, which, of course, had a long history of money laundering with Russia. How could Trump not be deeply compromised?32
Then, in his catastrophic September 30 debate with Biden, Trump, who interrupted the former vice president with a continuous stream of mockery and lies, made one thing abundantly clear: The bottom line was that he would not play by the rules. Refusing to rebuke white supremacists—specifically, the Proud Boys, a far-right, neofascist group that resorts to violence—he instead told them, “Stand back and stand by.” In doing so, he held on ever more tightly to his racist base—while not attracting the independents or converts he desperately needed.
Instead, it had become clear that he was running against the election itself. Trump’s message was that voting by mail was fraudulent, that the entire electoral system was rigged, and as a result, he refused to say he would accept the results if Biden won. His new plan was chaos and violence, disrupting and delegitimizing the election so that multiple states run by Republicans could conceivably refuse to certify their ballots with the Electoral College, thus moving the election to the House of Representatives and possibly the Supreme Court. So it was essential for Trump and Mitch McConnell to ram Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination through the Senate before the election so that the Republicans would have an extra vote on the court.
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On October 1, two days after Trump’s presidential debate with Joe Biden, came yet another October surprise: Donald tested positive for COVID-19. The man who mocked people wearing masks, who said the virus would disappear, who suggested injecting bleach to kill it, who flouted his own health agencies’ recommendations, and persuaded his own political base to indulge in such magical thinking had himself contracted the virus.
At the time, Democratic nominee Joe Biden had begun to open up a lead, which would gradually grow to more than ten points over Trump in the polls by the middle of the month. As for Trump, he went to Walter Reed hospital on Friday, October 2, was pumped full of the latest pharmaceutical cocktails designed to bring down the COVID-19 virus, and returned to the White House, where he made an appearance on the South Portico balcony, staged like a great cinematic spectacle, with the kind of lighting that wins Oscars, punctuated by President Trump dramatically removing his mask and giving onlookers a double thumbs-up, before returning into the White House, his mask stuffed into his pocket.
This is what has become known as Trump’s Mussolini moment. This was Donald Trump on steroids. Literally. Dexamethasone, to be precise.33 Whether Trump’s manic behavior over the next few weeks was steroid induced or just Trump being Trump is unclear. What was certain was that he could strut about as though he had fought the disease like a man and had triumphed. “Don’t be afraid of Covid,” he tweeted. “Don’t let it dominate your life. . . . I feel better than I did 20 years ago!”
He tweeted a video proclaiming, “Don’t let it dominate you. Don’t be afraid of it. You’re going to beat it. We have the best medical equipment, we have the best medicines—all developed recently.”
All of which were readily available—if you were president of the United States.
Fueled with steroids, Trump went back on the campaign trail. “I feel so powerful. I’ll walk in there, I’ll kiss everyone in that audience. I’ll kiss the guys and the beautiful women, just give you a big fat kiss,” he said, as his personal physician, Sean Conley, released dubious reports regarding whether Trump was still infectious.
Meanwhile, the White House, the most heavily protected building in America, had become a hot spot for the coronavirus. A week earlier, on September 26, Trump had hosted an event in the White House Rose Garden honoring Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett, who, it turned out, had tested positive for COVID-19 earlier in the summer. Though the event was outdoors, most of the more than two hundred people attending did not wear masks, and failed to observe pandemic protocols. According to Newsweek, at least thirty-seven cases of the new coronavirus were confirmed within twelve days after Barrett’s Rose Garden event. In addition to President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump, former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, California pastor Greg Laurie, University of Notre Dame president John Jenkins, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, former Trump counselor Kellyanne Conway, Utah senator Mike Lee, and North Carolina senator Thom Tillis tested positive.34 It was, perhaps, Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s revenge.
And so, with Biden seemingly pulling away in the polls, Trump had barnstormed Florida, Arizona, and Michigan, staging one superspreader rally after another, as if there were no risks. It was a death cult, of sorts, but Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, was more politic. “We’re all glad that the president of the United States did not suffer any significant consequences of it,” said Fauci. “But . . . because he is such a visible figure, it amplifies some of that misunderstanding that people have that it’s a benign disease and nobody has anything to worry about.”35
The coronavirus numbers surged. And with cold weather coming, epi
demiologists fear the worst. The rate of infection was rising in thirty-seven out of fifty states.
Meanwhile, in the Senate, Republican majority leader Mitch McConnell tried to ram through Barrett’s Supreme Court nomination before it was too late. The stakes were enormous. Her presence would create a 6–3 conservative court, and with vital votes looming, Roe v. Wade could be overturned. The Affordable Care Act was at risk—at a time when Americans needed health care more than ever. Gay marriage could be overturned. The Republicans had succeeded at court packing, and Federalist Society–approved justices might be ruling the Supreme Court for a generation unless the Democrats returned the favor.
And then there was the election itself, which, at this writing, was still not one hundred percent clear. What if Trump and company managed to tear the election out of the hands of the electorate and throw it into the courts. There was still the possibility that Amy Coney Barrett, Trump’s newly appointed associate justice of the United States Supreme Court, might cast a decisive vote in his favor.
Trump had made clear that there would be no transfer of power. That’s what Trump said. It meant the end of democracy. Dictatorship. Tyranny. The end of America as I knew it. Whether Trump would achieve that was another question.
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Given the magnitude of the pandemic, it was not surprising that Trump’s failed COVID response became such a huge part of Biden’s campaign. After all, the virus was a matter of life and death. As a result, Russia and Trump’s relationship was scarcely mentioned during the campaign, which meant that one of the greatest national security failures in American history—allowing a Russian asset to become president of the United States—was almost completely ignored.
For decades, Americans had almost always gotten final results at night, just hours after voting ended. This time, however, there would be a wait, and the suspense was heightened by the fact that for years Trump had said American elections were corrupted by massive voting fraud. During this campaign, he had insistently denounced mail-in voting as fraudulent. He had even admitted that he was undermining the United States Postal Service to make it harder to deliver mail-in votes36 and discouraged his supporters from using the mail. As a result, Democrats voted by mail far more than their Republican counterparts.
As the polls closed across the country on November 3, the initial results were far too close to comfort Democrats. In the crucial battleground state of Pennsylvania, for example, at midnight, four hours after the polls closed, Trump held a lead of around 550,000 votes over Biden, and it was hard to see how the Democratic nominee could catch up.37
As it happened, when Pennsylvania tallied its votes, it had begun counting mail-in votes only after other votes had been counted. As a result, the votes that came in late overwhelmingly favored the Democrats, and Biden gradually ate away at Trump’s lead.
Finally, late Saturday morning, November 7, after four days of vote counting and nail-biting suspense, Pennsylvania was called for Biden. In rapid succession, one news division after another finally called Joe Biden president-elect.
Astoundingly, in the end, Trump garnered over seventy-three million votes—almost eleven million more than he got in 2016. Nevertheless, the outcome was not nearly as close as it initially appeared. There had been a strong turnout for both sides. At this writing, with votes still being counted, Biden was leading Trump by nearly six million popular votes, and had won the electoral college 306 votes to Trump’s 232. He had flipped the crucial battleground states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan that Hillary Clinton had lost in 2016. By winning Georgia, Biden had established a beachhead in the Republicans’ “Solid South.” It was not the overwhelming landslide many Democrats had sought. But Biden had won a clear and decisive victory. It was indisputable.
And so, for one brief moment at least, on Saturday, November 7, after days of intense uncertainty and confusion, there was wisdom, light, hope, and all the rest. Millions of people took to the street spontaneously. With honking car horns, cowbells, and loud music, exuberant celebrations erupted all across the country and continued through the weekend.
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And yet.
Even before the election, Trump had said he would not concede. “People will not accept this Rigged Election!” he tweeted. “Nevada is turning out to be a cesspool of Fake Votes,” read another. Many such tweets were accompanied by warnings from Twitter: “This claim about election fraud is disputed.”
More than anything, Trump detested “losers,” and now that the election results were in and the American people had forced him to join that wretched tribe, an elaborate spectacle unfolded, a tragicomic clown show, really, starring an infantile narcissist whose shameless ability to deny reality had been weaponized.
For his part, Trump spent much of his time doing what he did best—tweeting and golfing. As Philip Bump reported in the Washington Post, in the two weeks after the election, Trump’s public calendar was virtually empty.38 At the time, the US led the world in COVID-19 deaths, having exceeded 250,000 fatalities. At least 130,000 of those deaths, according to a Columbia University study, could have been avoided if President Trump had taken more serious measures to prevent the spread of the disease.39 That was nearly four times as many fatalities as the US suffered in Vietnam. More than eleven million Americans had been infected. And as the rate of infections soared to more than a million40 a week, Trump said nothing. Instead, he went golfing four times, tweeted constantly, and filed numerous lawsuits and procedural motions in a desperate attempt to reverse the outcome of the election. For the most part, he stayed out of the limelight, the most famous person in the world, holed up at the White House, as if he were ashamed to show his face, branded as a loser.
As for Twitter, in the two weeks between the election and November 17, Trump sent forth no fewer than four hundred tweets,41 the vast majority of which asserted that he had won the election, that Biden’s victory and the entire election were racked by fraud. “In Detroit, there are FAR MORE VOTES THAN PEOPLE. Nothing can be done to cure that giant scam. I win Michigan!,” he tweeted. Many such tweets were again accompanied by warnings from Twitter: “This claim about election fraud is disputed.”
Similarly, when it came to his lawsuits, team Trump charged that poll watchers were not allowed to “meaningfully” monitor the vote count in Philadelphia. In Arizona, they alleged that the use of Sharpies on ballots somehow screwed up the vote count. In Nevada, they cited “lax procedures for authenticating mail-in ballots.”42
And so it went, in one lawsuit after another, mainly in battleground states where Biden had won and the vote was close, where Trump’s attorneys went to court with almost no evidence. By November 19, Trump had not won a single meaningful victory out of more than two dozen lawsuits and motions.43 Even with the Federalist Society, Opus Dei and the new Catholic Right, Leonard Leo, and William Barr on Team Trump, it seemed, the Republicans had not taken over the entire judiciary.
Nevertheless, Trump still had the support of almost the entire Republican Party. Two full weeks after Election Day, only five out of fifty-three Republican senators accepted Biden’s status as president-elect.44 Nor were such sentiments limited to the Senate. On November 10, when asked how the State Department would interact with the Biden transition team, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo puckishly declared, “There will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration.”45
Having lost, the Republican Party had, in effect, declared war on the election itself. The entire party was committed to fighting against democracy. Republican senator Mike Lee, of Utah, had said as much, even before the election. “Democracy isn’t the objective; liberty, peace, and prospefity [sic] are,” he tweeted. “We want the human condition to flourish. Rank democracy can thwart that.”
Headlines in the Washington Post, The Guardian, New York Magazine, and The Nation, among other media, referred to Trump’s battle t
o retain power as an attempted “coup,” a fight to overturn Biden’s victory. Others compared it to a second civil war. This was a season in which far-right militiamen took guns to state capitols and planned to kidnap and murder a governor—in this case, Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat who had taken strict measures in an effort to stem the spread of the COVID pandemic. It was a time when QAnon conspiracy theorists peddled theories that Democrats were Satan-worshipping pedophiles, and managed to get elected to Congress, as did Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican QAnon believer from Georgia.46 Subscribing to fantasies of paranoid conspiracies was no longer a hindrance to winning a Congressional seat.
And the Republicans were never more clown-like than on November 7, four days after the election, when Rudy Giuliani booked a press conference at the Four Seasons in Philadelphia in which he was to present a purported witness to voter fraud. But instead of booking the posh Four Seasons Hotel, Giuliani’s team staged the event at Four Seasons Total Landscaping, situated conveniently between a sex shop and a crematorium, with Giuliani presenting as his star witness a man who happened to be a convicted sex offender.47 All of which led the landscaping company to tout “Lawn and Order” merchandise and vow to “Make America Rake Again.”
Such farcicalities notwithstanding, the Trump administration still had more than two months in power, and continued to do what it could to thwart Biden. Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, said Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) asked him if he could throw out legally cast mail-in ballots in various counties.48 Trump invited Republican state legislators from Michigan to the White House in an effort to block the certification of Biden’s victory there.49 And when it came to the transition of power, Emily Murphy, the head of the General Services Administration, declined to accept Biden as president-elect even two weeks after his victory, thereby putting a hold on government resources and briefings for the transition of power to the incoming administration.
