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

by Peter Baker

As outrageous as his own theories had been, Powell and the rest considered him too timid.

“Why the fuck do you keep standing up and screaming at me?” Herschmann finally addressed the retired general. “If you want to come over here, come over here. If not, sit your ass down.”

The conversation grew more heated, and it was a mark of how out of control the discussion had become that Giuliani would be the one to urge everyone to calm down.

At 1:42 a.m., Trump sent a Twitter message beckoning his followers to descend on the capital to help him hold on to office. “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th,” he wrote. “Be there, will be wild!”

The middle-of-the-night tweet from a president who earlier that fall had called on extremist groups to “stand back and stand by” resonated loudly in the darker corners of Trump’s America. Members of far-right extremist groups like the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, the 1st Amendment Praetorian, and the Three Percenters saw the message as a call to arms and began mobilizing to flood Washington on January 6. “He called us all to the Capitol and wants us to make it wild!!!” Kelly Meggs, an Oath Keepers leader from Florida, wrote on Facebook. Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the group, declared that if Biden were inaugurated there would be “a massively bloody revolution.”[9]

Privately, Pence understood there was no evidence of fraud widespread enough to undercut Biden’s victory. But he had straddled a quintessentially Pence-ian line since November 3. “As our election contest continues, I’ll make you a promise,” he told a conservative gathering in West Palm Beach, Florida, the day after meeting with the lawmakers at the White House. “We’re going to keep fighting until every legal vote is counted. We’re going to keep fighting until every illegal vote is thrown out.”[12]

In early 2020, when Mike Pence advocated a strike, Milley asked why. “Because they are evil,” Pence said. Milley recalled replying, “Mr. Vice President, there’s a lot of evil in the world, but we don’t go to war against all of it.”

The Divider now saw the world in a new binary: those who were helping him to battle on and those who were not.

On the same day, one of Trump’s more extreme congressional allies took the vice president to court. The Texas congressman Louie Gohmert, who had attended the White House strategy session with Trump on December 21, filed a lawsuit asking a court to overrule the limits on the vice president’s role on January 6, in effect seeking to force Pence to take action to reject Biden electoral votes. It was a spurious claim and Trump’s Justice Department went to court to argue against it before a judge promptly tossed it out. But it indicated the rising pressure on Pence to claim powers he did not have to reverse the election. Trump was going to force his vice president to make a choice.

Much as with his campaign to get Ukraine to undermine Joe Biden, Trump was not looking for corruption, just someone to say there was so he could weaponize it.

That same day, Lin Wood, a far-right Georgia lawyer who had been waging his own battles on Trump’s behalf, sometimes with Sidney Powell, lashed out at Pence for resisting Gohmert’s suit, accusing the vice president of “treason” and predicting that he could “face execution by firing squad.”[24]

“Are you really saying, John, that Al Gore could have just declared himself the winner of Florida and moved along?” Jacob asked. “Well, no, no, there wasn’t enough evidence for that,” Eastman said, a remarkable assertion from someone telling the president that he did not need to cite any evidence at all of fraud to overturn the 2020 election.

Two people close to Pence said they heard that during the conversation the president even dangled the possibility that if Pence gave him a second term, Trump might not serve the entire four years, stepping down early and allowing Pence to become president. But neither heard that directly from Pence. The vice president remained mum.

“It was intensely personal. In another two years he would have been the longest majority leader in Senate history,” beating the legendary Mike Mansfield, “and Mitch cares about things like that.”

“It’s a primal skill of McConnell,” his adviser said. “He knows when people are inherently uncomfortable.”

If Pence did not do as he now demanded and block Biden’s victory, Trump said, “then I picked the wrong man four years ago.” “You can either go down in history as a patriot,” Trump told him, “or you can go down in history as a pussy.”[1]

To the end, she had not entirely given up the fantasy of managing Trump.

“So let’s have trial by combat,” Giuliani concluded with a flourish. “I’m willing to stake my reputation, the president is willing to stake his reputation on the fact that we’re going to find criminality there.”[3]

Guilfoyle, who later bragged that she had helped the rally organizers raise $3 million, without mentioning that she was paid $60,000 herself for a two-and-a-half-minute speech, mugged for the camera.

“This isn’t their Republican Party anymore! This is Donald Trump’s Republican Party!”

Trump, however, was deep in his alternate reality.

In the end, Trump did not bother to hide his decision to simply flout the Constitution.

“And thanks to your bullshit,” he wrote, “we are now under siege.”[7]

Outside, the situation had dramatically deteriorated. Police battling the rioters were outnumbered and could not prevent the mob from storming inside to do what Trump had wanted and stop the electoral count. At 2:28 p.m., only four minutes after Trump’s tweet denouncing Pence, a chilling message came over the police radio, from the Metropolitan Police Department commander on the scene. “We’ve lost the line!” he screamed. “We’ve lost the line! All MPD pull back!”[9] The Capitol was breached.

At the White House, the man who had spent months campaigning on “LAW & ORDER” did nothing but watch television.

“It’s not always like this,” Schiff deadpanned. “Someone really should have impeached that son of a bitch.”

He was not repudiating the mob. They were fighting for him. Informed of the threats to hang Mike Pence, Trump told aides, “Maybe our supporters have the right idea.” Pence, he said, “deserves” it.

They had not landed the plane, after all. It was crashing and burning.

Milley’s fears were even more acute. He worried that this truly was Trump’s “Reichstag moment,” the one he had been warning about since the election, the crisis that would cause the president to invoke martial law and try to hold on to power. But even he had never anticipated that Trump would unleash the mob on the Capitol itself.

Trump had not been on any of the calls with the Pentagon. He never called anyone seeking help for the besieged Capitol. Nor did he speak with Pence or Pelosi or McConnell. But Mark Meadows wanted to pretend Trump was taking action when he was not. He called Milley. “We have to kill the narrative that the vice president is making all the decisions,” Meadows said. “We need to establish the narrative that the president is still in charge.”

Ivanka had also enraged them with a tweet of her own, urging the “American patriots” who were not so patriotically storming their seat of government to stand down and go home, a message she later deleted when she saw it being interpreted as praise for the rioters.

The video Ivanka had urged Trump to make had been posted before Kushner made it there. “I know your pain. I know your hurt,” Trump said to the camera. “We had an election that was stolen from us. It was a landslide election and everyone knows it, especially the other side.” He repeated his lies about the “fraudulent election” and complained about enemies who were “so bad and so evil” and would use the riot against Trump and their cause. Only then did he add, “We have to have peace. We have to have law and order.” And finally, he said, “So go home. We love you, you’re very special.”[17]

“There is no question that the president formed the mob. The president incited the mob. The president addressed the mob. He lit the flames,” she told the network that had so often over the last four years given Trump a match and explained exactly where to strike it.[18]

Kudlow was close to signing a contract with Fox News and figured resigning early would only mess that up.

But he sounded flat, exhibiting none of the passion that he normally did when he was genuinely outraged. “The demonstrators who infiltrated the Capitol have defiled the seat of American democracy,” he said in a monotone.

To the historically minded chairman, the echo of Richard Nixon’s volatile final days, when Defense Secretary James Schlesinger warned his generals against executing any nuclear launch order from Nixon without checking with him or Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, must have been palpable.

So in the end the president who had repeatedly skirted accountability—in the Mueller investigation and the Ukraine scheme and his tax returns and every other scandal—would avoid a final reckoning during his presidency.

Notably not on the list were Trump himself, his family members, Giuliani, or other organizers of January 6. Trump became convinced that pardoning himself or those so close to him would be an admission that he did something wrong.

While he had been waging a war for power, Covid had been ravaging the country worse than ever, with daily deaths shooting up to four or five times what they were on Election Day, the equivalent of another September 11 attack every twenty-four hours.

“We’ve learned again that democracy is precious,” Biden said in his Inaugural Address. “Democracy is fragile. And at this hour, my friends, democracy has prevailed.” Taking over a country ravaged by disease, dislocation, and division, Biden sought to bring Americans together, using the word “unity” or some variation eleven times. “We must end this uncivil war that pits red against blue, rural versus urban, conservative versus liberal,” he said.[20]

“Our goal was to learn to speak Republican,” said one of their advisers. Counseled by several former Republican officials they dubbed their “jury consultants,” the managers excised words like “equality” and “dignity” from their speeches and instead embraced more GOP-friendly buzzwords like “honor” and “oath” and “patriotism.”

“Philadelphia’s foremost personal injury and dog-bite law firm.”

Castor’s speech was a rambling forty-seven-minute word salad of non sequiturs and head-scratchers, leaving senators in the chamber rolling their eyes and Trump down at Mar-a-Lago screaming at his television set. Castor called himself “the lead prosecutor” instead of defense counsel, talked about the violation of the “very subtle of democracy,” noted that he had gotten lost walking around the Capitol, and explained that a record album was “the thing you put the needle down on and you play it.”

There is no question that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of that day. The people who stormed this building believed they were acting on the wishes and instructions of their president. And their having that belief was a foreseeable consequence of the growing crescendo of false statements, conspiracy theories, and reckless hyperbole which the defeated president kept shouting into the largest megaphone on planet Earth….This

This was an intensifying crescendo of conspiracy theories, orchestrated by an outgoing president who seemed determined to either overturn the voters’ decision or else torch our institutions on the way out.[29]

Even Mitch McConnell, who hated Trump so much he had vowed never to speak to him again, who had called him crazy to the point of derangement, could never fully disavow him. Less than two weeks after the trial, which concluded with him denouncing Trump’s “disgraceful dereliction of duty,” McConnell was asked if he would support Trump for president again if he were the party’s nominee in 2024. McConnell did not hesitate for a second. “Absolutely,” he said.[32]

More than a million Americans would ultimately die in the pandemic, hundreds of thousands of them after a safe, effective vaccine was available. Yet Trump, who had been booed by his own fans at an Alabama rally that spring when he urged them to get the vaccine, had turned mostly quiet, reluctant to challenge his own base.

Trump today is both the avatar of Trumpism and its hostage.

There was rarely a noun, a verb, and a specific ending to a sentence.

The only regrets Trump expressed to us were that he was not able to push through all the tough policies he hoped to against America’s allies,