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

by Peter Baker

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.

To some of his advisers, it seemed that Trump wavered in those first few days after his loss. There was a brief window when they thought that Trump understood he had genuinely fallen short. Sitting in his dining room at one point, he saw Biden on the television screen. “Can you believe I lost to this fucking guy?” he groused. When someone raised an issue during a national security meeting, Trump replied with something to the effect of, “We’re going to leave it to the next guy.” But the kind of advisers who might have steered him toward acceptance were no longer around the brooding president, who remained cloistered for days after the election and talked of little else.

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.

As November went on, no judge was buying it and, increasingly, establishment lawyers were dropping out of cases rather than represent the rapidly tarnishing Trump brand. On November 18, Giuliani had to go to court in Pennsylvania himself to argue a motion, his first time in a federal courtroom in twenty-eight years—and it showed. He seemed befuddled. He admitted that for all his public cries of fraud, none was actually alleged in the legal filings. “This is not a fraud case,” he said. 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]

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. “Meadows was basically a matador,” said one Republican involved in discussions with the White House at the time. “He sort of just let in anybody and everybody who wanted to come in.” Moreover, he was still playing both sides. “Meadows admitted to people privately…‘Trust me, I’m going to get the president there, he’s going to drop this issue. Just kind of give him time to mourn and grieve and then he’s going to come around,’ ” said a White House colleague who heard him say variations of this repeatedly. But then “he was bringing the crazies into the West Wing.”

“Just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen.”[17] Just say it was corrupt. Even though Rosen had told him there was no evidence that it was. 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.

Trump seemed to threaten the Georgia officials with prosecution for not going along. “It is more illegal for you than it is for them because you know what they did and you’re not reporting it,” he said. “That’s a criminal—that’s a criminal offense. And you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you and to Ryan, your lawyer.” Then Trump laid out his demand. “All I want to do is this: I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have, because we won the state,” he said, by which he meant one more than he needed to change the outcome.

Neither Trump nor Clark found any backup in the room. Cipollone made clear that he stood with the Justice team and would resign if they did. “I’m not going to stay around here for this,” the White House counsel said. Pointing to the letter that Clark wanted to send to Georgia, Cipollone said, “That letter is a murder-suicide pact. And it will damage anyone and anything that it touches.”

Eastman expanded his original memo into a six-page version marked “PRIVILEGED AND CONFIDENTIAL,” asserting that Pence could reverse the outcome of the American presidential election without having to prove any actual fraudulent votes. Eastman argued that Trump’s objections to various voting policies in key states would be enough to invalidate the results—not stolen votes, in other words, just practices that Trump’s team opposed or deemed illegal, like the use of drop boxes in response to the pandemic. Under a section titled “War Gaming the Alternatives,” Eastman outlined how the vice president could reject the certified results put forward by states and either accept the fake Trump electoral certificates orchestrated by his allies or simply negate votes from those states altogether.

“Our job is to convene, to open the ballots, and to count them. That’s it,” Mike Lee of Utah, a staunch Trump supporter and self-described legal nerd, said when debate resumed on the floor.[21] For two months, Lee had been secretly working with Mark Meadows and others advising Trump on how to contest the election results, even, at one point in November, plugging the services of Sidney Powell to Trump and sending along her contact information. Lee had, by his own account, spent hours and hours working the phones trying to convince state legislators in battleground states to disregard the will of voters and switch their electors to Trump.

Impeached again and just days from the end of his term, Trump was still entertaining allies urging him to find a way to stay in power. On January 15, he received Mike Lindell, the founder of MyPillow and an outspoken public defender of the president, in the Oval Office. Lindell, a mile-a-minute talker who marketed his crack-cocaine-addict-finds-God life story into a multimillion-dollar bedding business, arrived with what he called proof that the election had been rigged by China through corrupted computers. He also brought with him a two-page paper that he said a lawyer he refused to identify had asked him to pass along to Trump, prodding him once more to call in the military to seize voting machines. “Martial law if necessary,” said the paper, which was photographed by a Washington Post photographer as Lindell entered the White House, provoking an uproar when it was revealed late that Friday.

When we sat down with Donald Trump a year after his defeat, the first thing he told us was a lie.

A conversation with the former president was like a live-action reenactment of the Twitter feed he no longer had access to—rambling, bizarre, untruthful, and strikingly vituperative. Trump rarely answered a question directly, instead wandering off into some digressive riff, usually bringing the discussion back to the “rigged” election. He was jarringly incoherent, impossibly contradictory. There was rarely a noun, a verb, and a specific ending to a sentence.

It did not matter, to Trump or his followers, that not one independent authority, not one judge, not one prosecutor, not one election agency, not one official who was not a Trump partisan ever found widespread fraud. None. Even an audit in Arizona sponsored by Trump allies only confirmed the result. A federal judge described the effort to overturn the election as a “coup in search of a legal theory” and opined that Trump most likely committed conspiracy to defraud the United States and obstruct the work of Congress. A bipartisan House investigating committee concluded that Trump had committed a crime.