The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021

by Peter Baker

The term “annexation,” for instance, was unacceptable to the Israelis because, in their view, it would imply a violation of international law, so they used the phrase “declaring sovereignty” instead.[24]

So in buying off Morocco on behalf of Israel, Trump could also take revenge against Inhofe. For Trump, even making peace involved some element of making war.

They would not be rushed by a president seeking to salvage his flailing election hopes.

In public, Trump was alternately incredulous and defiant. “I don’t see any reason why it should be delayed further,” he tweeted. He later hinted that he would personally block the FDA from adopting the sixty-day standard. “That has to be approved by the White House,” he said, adding, “We may or we may not approve it”—comments that further shook confidence at a time when the public was increasingly worried that Trump would rush the shots heedless of the risks.[7] Polls showed the number of Americans saying they were ready to take a vaccine had fallen from 72 percent in the spring to 51 percent in September.[8]

Hahn had gone rogue and won.

But if Trump could not win, he had no intention of losing either. He preemptively declared the election the most crooked in history—unless he won. For months, he had been laying the groundwork to dispute any result other than his own victory. He began calling the contest “rigged” in May, months before any votes were cast.

“Get rid of the ballots and you’ll have a very—we’ll have a very peaceful—there won’t be a transfer, frankly. There’ll be a continuation.”[12]

There would barely be time for hearings or even the pretense of a process in the Senate, where McConnell obligingly arranged a lightning-fast confirmation only four years after denying Obama’s final Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland, a hearing because the nomination came eight months before the 2016 presidential election.

Trump would eventually be extraordinarily blunt in admitting that he wanted to push Barrett’s nomination through so close to November 3 to ensure his own victory. “I think this will end up in the Supreme Court,” Trump said of the election, “and I think it’s very important that we have nine justices,” rather than risk a four-to-four tie. Trump appeared to believe that, with three of his appointees on the bench, they would surely swing the outcome his way if necessary.[17]

“Will you shut up, man? This is so unpresidential.”

Asked by Wallace if he would tell extremist groups like the Proud Boys to “stand down” and not stir violence in the streets, Trump said, “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by”—a twist of Wallace’s words that the radical group took as validation and a call to be ready. And the president foreshadowed what could come as he continued to undermine public confidence in the election. “This is not going to end well,” he said. He then repeated it, as if for emphasis. “This is not going to end well.”[19] It sure sounded like a threat.

On CNN, Jake Tapper called it a “hot mess inside a dumpster fire inside a train wreck.”

Within days, he would come down with Covid himself, as would some of the others who had participated in the debate prep. Christie became seriously ill and spent seven days in an intensive care unit in the hospital, coming closer to death than many realized. By the time he came out, he knew who was to blame and his years-long friendship with Trump was all but over.

Meadows, to Trump’s fury, acknowledged that the president had received his first positive test result on September 26, the same day as the Amy Coney Barrett “superspreader” event, but had nonetheless continued to travel around the country without quarantining or taking any real precautions to avoid infecting others.

Never in American history had a sitting president sought to use the power of the state to imprison his main political challenger a month before the election.

Trump was always a minority president, a leader for part of the country in opposition to the rest of it.

Despite what Trump and some advisers would later claim, the campaign’s final surveys tracked closely with the final results.

Even if his aides had been blunter with Trump, he might not have believed them. He had spent months attacking Biden in the starkest personal terms. He had hit Biden’s age, his mental competence, his family. Trump did not want to run against Democratic policies. He wanted to run against a person, to rip him down, to insult, belittle, and degrade him. By the end, Trump seemed to believe his own pitch—making losing to Biden all the more unacceptable, impossible even. “I am running against the worst candidate in the history of presidential politics,” Trump said as he closed out the campaign. “Can you even imagine losing to a guy like this?”[43]

In his final days as a candidate, Trump kept up the barrage questioning any election result that did not have him as the winner. Before any votes were counted, he called it a “Rigged Election!” Not once or twice, but nearly two hundred times since August and the closer to the election, the more he said i...

On the Sunday before the election, Benjamin Ginsberg, for a generation the leading Republican election attorney, whose former law firm had worked for Trump’s campaign four years earlier, took the extraordinary step of denouncing that strategy in an op-ed for The Washington Post. By Ginsberg’s count, the Trump campaign and the Republican Party had already filed more than forty lawsuits around the country in advance of the balloting, challenging various local and state-level voting and ballot measures, every single suit aiming to limit the vote in some way. Ginsberg said Trump’s claims of widespread fraud were being enabled by a compliant Republican Party pursuing a mythical “Loch Ness Monster” of a story. He did not make it public, but Ginsberg had even decided to retire from his law firm, Jones Day, earlier that year, in order to avoid advising the Trump campaign, which remained the firm’s client. “My party is destroying itself on the Altar of Trump,” he warned.[46]

By 12:44 a.m., Trump had chosen his course, the course he had spent months if not years preparing for. All fall, he had said quite clearly and openly that there was only one outcome for the election he would accept: his own victory. Any other result would be fake, false, and rigged. Trump could not lose, therefore Trump would not lose.

The worst-case scenarios were coming true. Trump had warned of a crisis of confidence in the political system. He was his own self-fulfilling prophecy.

While Trump had spent the hours since the polls closed complaining about imagined fraud in battleground states and plotting a strategy to hold on to power, his daughter and son-in-law were washing their hands of the Trump presidency.

In what remaining time they had in the White House, Kushner wanted to focus on expanding the Abraham Accords, which he felt validated his whole time in Washington—and would also help him cement contacts in the wealthy Gulf states that would prove lucrative in the private equity fund he would open after leaving Washington.

Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, a far-right political activist and wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, who would be one of those to decide the matter if it got to the high court, sent Meadows a passage circulating on right-wing websites talking about having the “Biden crime family” and “ballot fraud co-conspirators (elected officials, bureaucrats, social media censorship mongers, fake stream media reporters, etc)” arrested and thrown in prison and even sent to “barges off GITMO to face military tribunals for sedition.”[7]

Kushner had spent years by Trump’s side as he trampled one norm after another, but he had badly underestimated just how far his father-in-law was willing to go to keep power.

“I have eight affidavits,” he announced, which impressed some members of the campaign team. If he really did have eight witnesses to election misconduct, they thought, then maybe they had something. But Giuliani was blowing smoke. Later that day, he and some of the campaign advisers went to the White House to meet with Trump. While waiting in the Roosevelt Room, Giuliani restated his claim, only this time he declared, “I have twenty-seven affidavits.” Matt Morgan, who had served as Mike Pence’s lawyer and was now general counsel to the Trump campaign, was stunned. He had been with Giuliani the entire time. Where did he suddenly get nineteen more affidavits? By the time they sat down in the Oval Office with Trump a few minutes later, Giuliani had nearly tripled his alleged pile of evidence. “I have eighty affidavits,” he claimed.

Giuliani’s whole venture was a flim-flam scam.

Yet the leading news anchor for Fox was pushing not just to say Arizona was too close to call but to pretend that the president had won it.

Whatever they called it, Fox had decided that deference to Trump was more important than getting the story right.

Biden’s Electoral College victory with states totaling 306 votes to 232 was identical to Trump’s total over Hillary Clinton four years earlier, an outcome that Trump had labeled a “landslide.”[14]

While the president thought his legal representatives planned to hold forth at a prestigious five-star hotel, for reasons no one could explain even months later, Giuliani’s team had booked a lawn care company with the same name in an industrial section of northeast Philadelphia, across the street from a crematorium and just down the block from the Fantasy Island Adult Bookstore. If ever there were a metaphor for a flailing, amateur campaign refusing to accept reality, this would be it.

When it was Lewandowski’s turn at the microphone, he dramatically presented proof that the election was stolen. A woman named Denise Ondick had requested an absentee ballot but died, according to her obituary, nine days before her ballot arrived at her local election office. “This is hard evidence!” Lewandowski thundered, challenging reporters to “do your jobs” and find more examples.[16] Reporters did do their jobs. Ondick’s daughter, it turned out, had helped her fill out her ballot for her favorite candidate—Donald Trump. So the only actual example of an illegitimate vote cited by Trump’s team that day was cast for Trump.

Trump was largely checked out anyway, as were many of the aides who might have counseled him to give up on the election. Jared and Ivanka had decided not only to move to Florida but to explicitly step aside from the fight in the time that remained to them in Washington. Once they saw that the president was empowering Rudy Giuliani, the man they believed had gotten Trump impeached with his out-of-bounds adventurism, they surrendered the field. They had no appetite for waging what would probably be a losing battle to persuade a president who did not want to be persuaded on the folly of his chosen course.

The more Trump listened to them, the more he hardened around the notion that he had been robbed, and in the days following the election he would resolve to do what no other sitting president has done in the history of the United States—hold on to power despite the indisputable will of the voters. The next ten weeks would prove to be the most elaborate and extensive campaign to overturn a presidential election since the ratification of the Constitution, all orchestrated from the Oval Office.

There was no Kraken. The claims that Giuliani, Powell, and the others kept throwing out there were far-fetched, ever shifting, and sometimes contradictory. In the days that would follow, Giuliani claimed that more absentee ballots were cast in Pennsylvania than were requested by voters. But he was flat wrong, having apparently contrasted the number of absentee ballots sent out to voters during the lower-turnout spring primary election to the number of absentee ballots returned in the fall election, an apples-to-oranges comparison. The real numbers showed nothing suspicious: 3.1 million absentee ballots were sent out in the fall and 2.6 million were returned. One of Giuliani’s favorite claims was the charge that anywhere between 8,000 and 30,000 dead people voted in Philadelphia. In fact, investigations would show that it was exactly two. Similarly in Georgia, he variously claimed that 800 or 6,000 or 10,515 dead people voted. There, as well, it would eventually be determined that at most it was just four. But that did not deter Giuliani. He also asserted that 65,000 or 165,000 underage people voted in Georgia, when, in fact, the number was zero. In Arizona, he said at different points that “way more than 10,000” or “32,000” or “probably about 250,000” or “a few hundred thousand” undocumented immigrants had voted illegally in the state, but investigators found no evidence that any had.[22] Not hundreds of thousands, not tens of thousands, not any.

When the judge asked what legal standard of scrutiny should be applied to the government’s action, Giuliani had no clue and tried to get out of it by saying “the normal one.”[23]

It was the first time Stephanie Grisham had ever seen him irritated at Giuliani—not because of the bizarre assertions but because he looked so “sloppy” and “disgusting,” as she put it.

Was this an attempted coup or just another episode of the Trump clown show?

Milley’s study of history took him to a disturbing parallel. He feared that what he considered Trump’s “Hitler-like” embrace of the big lie about the election would prompt the president to seek out a “Reichstag moment,” in which, like Adolf Hitler and the burning of the German parliament in 1933, he would manufacture a crisis in order to swoop in and save the nation.

His concern increased in mid-November when a weekend “Stop the Steal” rally in Washington drew several thousand angry Trump supporters including members of the far-right extremist Proud Boys organization—and an approving drive-by from Trump himself in the presidential limousine—before ending up in hours of running street fights with counter-protesters. Was this a rehearsal for what would come next?

Undaunted, a week after his pardon, Flynn endorsed an ad calling on Trump to invoke martial law, “temporarily suspend the Constitution,” and authorize the military to conduct a national “re-vote” of the presidential election.[10]

All that mattered to Trump was himself, not his party or country.

Meadows was playing both sides, assuring establishment Republicans that he was trying to calm Trump down while encouraging the fervent Trumpists calling on him to burn down the system to preserve power.

The day after telling Barr that Trump was becoming more realistic about the hopeless fight, Meadows exchanged more texts with Ginni Thomas, who for nearly three weeks had been pelting Meadows with messages urging him to resist “the greatest Heist of our History,” as she put it at one point. In this latest exchange, he framed the battle in messianic terms.

“This is a fight of good versus evil,” he wrote. “Evil always looks like the victor until the King of Kings triumphs. Do not grow weary in well doing. The fight c...

Even now, he and others were still humoring Trump.

Meadows by this point was actively helping the conspiracy theorists who were filling Trump’s head with all sorts of fantasies, acting less as a gatekeeper than a door-opener.

But as he pressed his incoming attorney general, Trump simply spouted one rumor and conspiracy after another. With the integrity of American democracy at stake, all he had to offer was “people are telling me this” and “people are telling me that.”

For all of the wild meetings he had presided over there in the last four years, ranting about his enemies, lashing out at “shithole” countries, berating congressional leaders and cabinet officers, none of them would compare with the discussion he was about to have. For the first time in American history, a president would seriously entertain using the military to overturn an election he lost.