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Esper pulled a transcript of his press conference from his binder. He had highlighted his comments on the Act and slapped it on the Resolute Desk. He pushed it toward the president. “That’s what I said!” Trump glanced at it. “I don’t care a fuck about your fucking transcript.” Esper wasn’t sure Trump read the comments but felt he had at least called the president on it. Trump’s face steadily grew redder and Esper believed the president thought his ability to invoke the Insurrection Act was over. Esper was fine with that. Trump had been contained. “Who do you think you are?” Trump screamed at
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An avalanche of invective kept coming. When the president had fully vented to Esper, he turned to the others sitting in the Oval Office. “You’re all fucked up,” he yelled at them. “Everybody. You’re all fucked. Every one of you is fucked up!”
“Should I resign?” he asked Colin Powell, who had been the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1989 to 1993 under President George H. W. Bush. “Fuck no!” Powell said. “I told you never to take the job. You never should have taken the job. Trump’s a fucking maniac.”
“Why did you apologize?” the president asked again. “That’s a sign of weakness.” “Mr. President,” he said, looking directly at Trump, “not where I come from.” He was a Boston-area native. “Where I was born and how I was raised is when you make a mistake, you admit it.” Trump tilted his head to the side like the Victrola Dog, the small dog famously pictured staring at a windup phonograph and long used by RCA Records as a mascot. “Hmm,” he said. “Okay.”
Meadows said that the Confederate flags could not be banned. It was a freedom of speech issue, and the Pentagon lawyers agreed with him. Trump asked Milley, what do you think? “I’ve already told you twice, Mr. President. Are you sure you want to hear it again?” Yeah, go ahead, Trump said. “Mr. President,” Milley said, “I think you should ban the flags, change the names of bases, and take down the statues.” He continued, “I’m from Boston, these guys were traitors.” Someone asked, what about the Confederate dead buried at Arlington National Cemetery? “Interestingly,” Milley said of the nearly
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“This is a fucking layup,” Urban told Esper. “Did Meadows get like 800 dudes from the South to call the president and say they’re all heroes?”
“I have a rally tomorrow night in Oklahoma,” Trump said. “Over 1.2 million people have signed up. We can only take about 50, 60 thousand. Because, you know, it’s a big arena, right? But we can take 22,000 in one arena, 40,000 in another. We’re going to have two arenas loaded. But think of that. Nobody ever had rallies like that.” At the rally, the arena was only about half-filled, if that, with a sea of empty blue seats facing Trump, partly the result of a social media prank organized by teenage Trump critics. Thousands of them registered for a ticket, never intending to show up.
Then Fabrizio raised Biden, and Trump was immediately dismissive. “He’s old,” Trump said. “He’s not up to it. You know, he can’t even string together a sentence.” “You can’t make him into a crazy liberal,” Fabrizio said. “I don’t think people will buy it.”
Trump remained defiant amid the worldwide health crisis. On August 7, he decided on an apparent whim to hold a news conference at his New Jersey golf club. The pandemic “is disappearing,” he insisted. “It’s going to disappear.” Cases in the U.S. had reached nearly 4.9 million confirmed cases—and over 160,000 deaths. Schools were, for the most part, not scheduled to reopen.
“When I talked to him about the process we were using, he would mention that he worked for some consulting firm and was experienced in, you know, process and process improvement. And that we had gotten it all wrong and we had too many steps involved in this analysis. “He didn’t bother to ask questions about why certain steps were needed. He didn’t see that there was any validity to what I was saying with respect to our process.”
Hahn realized the president had no idea how the FDA operated and had made no effort to find out before sending the tweet. It was a classic tweet-burst, ignorant and disruptive. Trump did not understand the power of his words. Public faith in safety procedures was critical to convincing people to get vaccinated.
A Secret Service agent interrupted Trump and pulled him out of the room, into a waiting area for the White House press office. “There were shots fired outside,” the agent told the president. Trump scowled. “I’m not going in the fucking bunker,” he said.
Outside Trump adviser Dick Morris later emailed the president’s pollsters and campaign officials. He wondered if the Harris pick could be weaponized. “Is Biden easy to manipulate? We know he is weak and feeble, but does it follow that he can be unduly influenced by staff, consultants, and donors? Can we say that he chose Harris because the black leaders told him to do so? Can we cite his embrace of the radical agenda as a successful manipulation by Bernie’s people?”
In late September, the FDA submitted guidelines on its process for emergency approval of the coronavirus vaccines to the White House. For over two weeks, they waited for a sign-off. The holdup was Mark Meadows. He was concerned there were too many unnecessary steps in the FDA authorization process. It would take too long.
“It was stunning to me that Mark Meadows thought he knew more than Peter Marks, with respect to how to evaluate the safety and efficacy of a vaccine,” Hahn told others. “He thinks he knows things that he doesn’t know and has expertise that he doesn’t have.”
“We’re weeks away from a vaccine,” Trump claimed, insisting the companies “can go faster.” Despite all his rhetoric playing down the virus, Trump knew a vaccine before the election could help him politically.
Once hospitalized, Trump’s condition stabilized. Trump was given what his doctors called an “antibody cocktail,” including Regeneron, an antibody treatment that was still in its clinical trial phase. U.S. health officials went into a frenzy to secure FDA approval for Trump’s use of the drug and debated whether it was appropriate for him, with his obesity at age 74, to take the cocktail, according to the Washington Post’s Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta.
The White House remained a hot zone for infection. Meadows and other senior staffers eschewed masks and low-level staffers felt the office culture seemed to encourage ignoring public health guidelines. They sat through meeting after meeting where missives from Fauci and others were derided by Trump and his aides as preachy and liberal. At least “34 White House staffers and other contacts” had contracted the virus, noted an internal memo from FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, in October.
Inside the Republican cloakroom, one joke McConnell enjoyed telling was about Trump’s former secretary of state Rex Tillerson, a cabinet member he had liked. In 2017, the State Department had strongly denied Tillerson called Trump a “moron.” “Do you know why Tillerson was able to say he didn’t call the president a ‘moron’?” McConnell would dryly ask colleagues in his Kentucky drawl. “Because he called him a ‘fucking moron.’ ”
On Friday, October 30, four days before the election, Chairman Milley examined the latest sensitive intelligence. What he read was alarming: The Chinese believed the United States was going to attack them.
Trump was attacking China on the campaign trail at every turn, blaming them for the coronavirus. “I beat this crazy, horrible China virus,” he told Fox News on October 11. Milley knew the Chinese might not know where the politics ended and possible action began.
“I’ve buried 242 kids up here,” he later told others one Saturday morning. “I’m not really interested in having a war with anybody. “I’ll defend the country if it’s necessary. But war, the military instrument, must be a last resort, not a first resort.”
“If President Trump wins, then the street’s going to explode with riots and civil unrest. If President Trump loses, there’s going to be significant issues there about a contested election,” Milley said at a meeting.
“We need you to join ARMY FOR TRUMP’s election security operation!” read one official Trump campaign post at the end of September, with Donald Trump Jr. imploring “every able-bodied man, woman” to enlist in the president’s “security” effort. “Don’t let them steal it,” Trump Jr. said. “Enlist today.”
Election night at the Trump White House began like other Trump parties over the previous four years: with fast food orders. Pizzas and bags of Chick-fil-A piled up in the Roosevelt Room.
In the months before the election, Trump systematically claimed the outcome would be rigged. If he didn’t win, the election would be stolen. It was his unless there was massive fraud. On June 22, he had tweeted: “MILLIONS OF MAIL-IN BALLOTS WILL BE PRINTED BY FOREIGN COUNTRIES, AND OTHERS. IT WILL BE THE SCANDAL OF OUR TIMES!”
Three of Trump’s children—Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump and Ivanka Trump, his senior adviser—kept showing up and pestering aides. Eric asked for data his father could cite in a speech. He grew frustrated when told the numbers would continue to change. States were still counting.
“This is a fraud on the American public,” he said. Trump’s tone was dismissive, indignant. “This is an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election.” He added, “So we’ll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court.”
Some longtime allies then went on Fox News and kept up the drumbeat. Rigged. Fraud. One of them was Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor and Trump’s personal lawyer. Once the hero of the Big Apple after the 9/11 attacks, he was now a combative regular in Trump’s orbit who regularly smoked cigars. He told the president that he needed a better strategy. He offered to help. Trump stopped privately saying he lost the vote. And he gave Giuliani his blessing to start poking around.
Giuliani’s friends and Trump campaign officials were chatting excitedly, a frenzy of paper and memos and iPhones. Giuliani started in, speaking confidently about massive, late dumps of votes in Democratic states and blue cities. The numbers are impossible, he insisted. It had to be stolen. Morgan was silent. Any seasoned election lawyer knew some counties were infamous, decades-long late reporters of their results. Nothing new.
“Well, why don’t we just get up to the Supreme Court directly?” Trump wondered. “Like, why can’t we just go there right away?” There was a legal process to follow, the lawyers repeated.
“I have 27 affidavits!” Giuliani said, rattling off election claims in various states. Strange, Morgan thought. Just an hour earlier, Giuliani had claimed he had only eight affidavits. Trump soon called everyone back to the Oval Office. The group circled the president. Giuliani kept yelling, slamming Michigan about supposed fraud. Giuliani raised his hand. “If you just put me in charge,” he told Trump, we could fix this. “I have 80 affidavits,” Giuliani said with certainty.
Rudy Giuliani held a news conference in Northeast, a blue-collar Philadelphia neighborhood known for its auto shops and fair-priced cheesesteaks, in the parking lot of Four Seasons Total Landscaping.
Standing outside the small company’s garage and a building with faded green paint, and next to a self-proclaimed poll watcher who news reports later identified as a convicted sex offender, Giuliani rambled at length, with conspiratorial claims and one-liners.
From the steps, as dusk fell, he saw Giuliani and Sidney Powell. Powell, a stern, right-wing lawyer, had once been a well-regarded attorney. But she had recently been making bizarre claims about voting machines being rigged.
Urban ended the call. He told others that Miller and his allies would surely begin to try to assert more influence over national security policy. People he knew and trusted were no longer in position. “That was the day the fucking music died for me,” he said.
Kathrin Jansen, head of vaccine research and development at Pfizer, told The New York Times she learned of the results the day before, Sunday, at 1 p.m., and maintained the election had no influence on the release of the information. “We have always said that science is driving how we conduct ourselves,” she said, “no politics.” But Trump refused to believe it. “The @US_FDA and the Democrats didn’t want to have me get a Vaccine WIN, prior to the election,” he later tweeted, “so instead it came out five days later – As I’ve said all along!”
“The crazies are taking over,” Pompeo said. He was increasingly worried as he watched Trump meet with Giuliani’s traveling circus act. Now Sidney Powell, Michael Flynn and the My Pillow Guy—Mike Lindell, the outspoken former drug addict and millionaire CEO of My Pillow, a mattress and pillow company—had Oval Office access.
Milley vividly recalled a statement that Trump had made to Breitbart News in March of 2019: “I can tell you I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the bikers for Trump. I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad.” It seemed to be a warning. Milley thought of the military, the police, the FBI, the CIA and the other intelligence agencies as the power ministries. These power centers had often been the tools used by despots.
The next day, at a public State Department session with reporters, Pompeo was asked about the Biden transition. “There will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration,” Pompeo said. He then smiled and added with a smirk, “Right.”
“Yesterday was appalling,” Haspel told Milley. “We are on the way to a right-wing coup. The whole thing is insanity. He is acting out like a six-year-old with a tantrum.”
Later that day, Milley walked upstairs to Acting Secretary Miller’s office about 1 p.m. and sat down. They were joined by Miller’s chief of staff, Kash Patel, an attorney and a little known but highly controversial former congressional intelligence aide to California congressman Devin Nunes, one of Trump’s staunchest defenders.
Once, while talking with Barr, Mark Meadows floated the idea of having Trump name Patel deputy FBI director. Meadows, who was a fierce critic of the Russia probe and the FBI’s handling of it, felt Patel could be an ally inside a bureau whose leadership he believed was corrupt. “Over my dead body,” Barr said.
CIA director Gina Haspel told Barr that Meadows, apparently the de facto chief job placement officer for Patel, directed her to fire her current deputy, Vaughn Bishop, to make way for her new deputy. It was a fait accompli. She described her White House meeting with Meadows. “Okay, I need to go down the hall,” she told him. “Why?” asked Meadows. “I have to tell the president that I’m not going to tolerate that,” she said. “I would leave.”
On November 11, Patel slid a one-page memo across the table—whoosh—to Milley. It read: “November 11, 2020 Memorandum for the Acting Secretary of Defense: Withdrawal from Somalia and Afghanistan.” “I hereby direct you to withdraw all U.S. forces from the Federal Republic of Somalia no later than 31 December 2020 and from the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan no later than 15 January 2021. Inform all allied and partner forces of the directives. Please confirm receipt of this order.” It was signed “Donald Trump,” with large, thick strokes of his celebrated black marker.
Jonathan Swan and Zachary Basu of Axios later established in May 2021 that John McEntee, the president’s former body man and a former college quarterback now running personnel, and retired Army Colonel Douglas Macgregor, a senior adviser to Miller, played roles in the drafting and signing of the memo.
“All of the states with close results in the 2020 presidential race have paper records of each vote, allowing the ability to go back and count each ballot if necessary. This is an added benefit for security and resilience. This process allows for the identification and correction of any mistakes or errors.” In bold it added, “There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.” Trump soon fired Department of Homeland Security’s cyber chief, Chris Krebs, by tweet.
“We’re all good,” Milley said, emphasizing the importance of calm and piling on the metaphors. “Just steady. Breathe through our noses. Steady as a rock. We’re going to land this plane safely. We’ve got a plane with four engines and three of them are out. We’ve got no landing gear. But we’re going to land this plane and we’re going to land it safely.”
Rudy Giuliani, through his assistant, asked the Trump campaign for compensation. In a letter, the assistant wrote he and his team would need $20,000 per day. Several campaign officials went to Trump and asked, what do you want us to do? “No, no, no, no,” Trump told them. “Rudy bets on the win,” he said, using language from his days running the Trump Plaza casino in Atlantic City. He said it was all a contingency exercise. If Trump ended up winning, Rudy gets paid. The campaign told Giuliani it would reimburse him for expenses.
Giuliani was sweating and seemed almost like a cartoon caricature. “Did you all watch My Cousin Vinny?” he asked reporters, tying a legal reference to the 1992 comedy. At one point, a dark brown liquid mixed with beads of sweat rolled down his cheek. The headline in Vanity Fair: “Rudy Giuliani’s hair dye melting off his face was the least crazy part of his batshit-crazy press conference.”
