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| Donald Trump in defeat IMAGE: www.afr.com, 8 November 2020 |
AXIOS, Off the rails: Behind Trump's post-election meltdown, 18 January 2020:
Beginning on election night 2020 and continuing through his final days in office, Donald Trump unraveled and dragged America with him, to the point that his followers sacked the U.S. Capitol with two weeks left in his term. This Axios series takes you inside the collapse of a president.
Episode 1: A premeditated lie lit the fire
Trump’s refusal to believe the election results was premeditated. He had heard about the “red mirage” — the likelihood that early vote counts would tip more Republican than the final tallies — and he decided to exploit it.
"Jared, you call the Murdochs! Jason, you call Sammon and Hemmer!”
President Trump was almost shouting. He directed his son-in-law and his senior strategist from his private quarters at the White House late on election night. He barked out the names of top Fox News executives and talent he expected to answer to him.
“And anyone else — anyone else who will take the call," he said. “Tell these guys they got to change it, they got it wrong. It’s way too early. Not even CNN is calling it.”
As the clock ticked over into the first minutes of Nov. 4, Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani ranted to top campaign aides: "There's no way he lost; this thing must have been stolen. Just say we won Michigan! Just say we won Georgia! Just say we won the election! He needs to go out and claim victory." Trump’s campaign manager Bill Stepien later told associates: "That was fucking crazy."
For weeks, Trump had been laying the groundwork to declare victory on election night — even if he lost. But the real-time results, punctuated by Fox’s shocking call, upended his plans and began his unraveling.
Trump had planned for Americans to go to bed on Nov. 3 celebrating — or resigned to — his re-election. The maps they saw on TV should be bathed in red. But at 11:20 p.m. that vision fell apart, as the nation’s leading news channel among conservatives became the first outlet to call Arizona for Joe Biden. Inside the White House, Trump's inner circle erupted in horror.
Over the next two months, Trump took the nation down with him as he descended into denial, despair and a reckless revenge streak that fueled a deadly siege on the U.S. Capitol by his backers seeking to overturn the election. This triggered a constitutional crisis and a bipartisan push to impeach Trump on his way out the door, to try to cast him out of American politics for good.
But in four years, Trump had remade the Republican Party in his own image, inspiring and activating tens of millions of Americans who weren’t abandoning him anytime soon. He’d once bragged he could shoot another person on Fifth Avenue and not lose his voters. In reality, many of them had eagerly lined up to commit violence on his behalf.
As Trump prepared for Election Day, he was focused on the so-called red mirage. This was the idea that early vote counts would look better for Republicans than the final tallies because Democrats feared COVID-19 more and would disproportionately cast absentee votes that would take longer to count. Trump intended to exploit this — to weaponize it for his vast base of followers.
His preparations were deliberate, strategic and deeply cynical. Trump wanted Americans to believe a falsehood that there were two elections — a legitimate election composed of in-person voting, and a separate, fraudulent election involving bogus mail-in ballots for Democrats.
In the initial hours after returns closed, it looked like his plan could work. Trump was on track for easy wins in Florida and Ohio, and held huge — though deceptive — early leads in Pennsylvania and Michigan.
But as Bill Hemmer narrated a live "what if" scenario on his election telestrator from Studio F of Fox’s gargantuan Manhattan headquarters, the anchor sounded confused. "What is this happening here? Why is Arizona blue?" he asked on camera, prodding the image of the state on the touch screen, unable to flip its color. "Did we just call it? Did we make a call in Arizona?" Because of a minor communication breakdown, Hemmer's screen had turned Arizona blue before he or the other anchors, Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum, found out that Fox’s Decision Desk had called it.
Trump was steaming and he wanted to see his top aides immediately. His son-in-law Jared Kushner, chief of staff Mark Meadows, campaign manager Stepien, senior strategist Jason Miller, and data cruncher Matt Oczkowski took the elevator up to the third floor of the residence at the White House. They met Trump and the first lady halfway between his bedroom and the living room at the end of the hall. Trump peppered them with questions. What happened? What the hell is going on at Fox?
Oczkowski told Trump that based on the campaign’s modeling he thought Fox was wrong and “we’re going to narrowly win” by maybe 10,000 votes or less, “razor close.” But the reality was, hundreds of thousands of votes were outstanding in Maricopa County and the picture was too cloudy to be sure. Then Trump told Kushner to call the Murdochs…..
Read the full segment here.
Episode 2: Barbarians at the Oval
President Trump plunked down in an armchair in the White House residence, still dressed from his golf game — navy fleece, black pants, white MAGA cap. It was Saturday, Nov. 7. The networks had just called the election for Joe Biden.
In the Yellow Oval Room, the same room where FDR learned of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, stewards brought hors d’oeuvres on trays while Trump gathered his closest political advisers to assess what options he had left.
Top aides including campaign manager Bill Stepien, senior adviser Jason Miller, conservative political activist and external Trump adviser David Bossie, and Justin Clark, the deputy campaign manager, leveled with him. As they saw it, he had one last long shot at victory. It would require them to win enough outstanding votes in Arizona and Georgia to squeak home in those two states, and to win a legal challenge to election practices in Wisconsin.
"You have a 5% to 10% chance of this happening," Clark told the president. "But all of these things have to go right.” Trump listened calmly and told them their plan was worth a shot.
But it would never get off the ground. Plan B, driven by Rudy Giuliani and a parallel track of conspiracists, was already coming together, unfolding before the original advisers' own eyes.
It would soon overtake the campaign's legal operation, feeding the president false claims including the idea that the election could be overturned.
On the day after the election, Nov. 4, top staff including Stepien, Clark, Miller, general counsel Matthew Morgan and Jared Kushner had gathered at Trump campaign headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. They believed this would be a serious search for a path to 270 electoral votes through credible legal challenges.
Then Giuliani, Sidney Powell and a swelling conspiracy crew marched into the room — literally.
These two groups — the professional staff and the Giuliani cabal — filled in around one long, rectangular table in a conference room walled in by frosted glass. The pattern repeated itself the day after that and the day after that….
Read the full segment here.
Episode 3: Descent into madness ... Trump: "Sometimes you need a little crazy"
The conspiracy goes too far. Trump's outside lawyers plot to seize voting machines and spin theories about communists, spies and computer software.
President Trump was sitting in the Oval Office one day in late November when a call came in from lawyer Sidney Powell. "Ugh, Sidney," he told the staff in the room before he picked up. "She's getting a little crazy, isn't she? She's really gotta tone it down. No one believes this stuff. It's just too much."
He put the call on speakerphone for the benefit of his audience. Powell was raving about a national security crisis involving the Iranians flipping votes in battleground states. Trump pressed mute and laughed mockingly.
"So what are we gonna do about it, Sidney?" Trump would say every few seconds, whipping Powell more and more into a frenzy. He was having fun with it. "She really is crazy, huh?" he said, again with his finger on the mute button.
It was clear that Trump recognized how unhinged his outside legal advisers were. But he was becoming increasingly desperate about losing to Joe Biden, and Powell and her crew were willing to keep feeding the grand lie that the election could be overturned….
Read the full segment here.
Episode 4: Trump turns on Barr
Trump torches what is arguably the most consequential relationship in his Cabinet.
Attorney General Bill Barr stood behind a chair in the private dining room next to the Oval Office, looming over Donald Trump. The president sat at the head of the table. It was Dec. 1, nearly a month after the election, and Barr had some sharp advice to get off his chest. The president's theories about a stolen election, Barr told Trump, were "bullshit."
White House counsel Pat Cipollone and a few other aides in the room were shocked Barr had come out and said it — although they knew it was true. For good measure, the attorney general threw in a warning that the new legal team Trump was betting his future on was "clownish."
Trump had angrily dragged Barr in to explain himself after seeing a breaking AP story all over Twitter, with the headline: "Disputing Trump, Barr says no widespread election fraud." But Barr was not backing down. Three weeks later, he would be gone.
The relationship between the president and his attorney general was arguably the most consequential in Trump's Cabinet. And in the six months leading up to this meeting, the relationship between the two men had quietly disintegrated. Nobody was more loyal than Bill Barr. But for Trump, it was never enough.
The president had become too manic for even his most loyal allies, listening increasingly to the conspiracy theorists who echoed his own views and offered an illusion, an alternate reality…..
Read the full segment here.
Episode 5: The secret CIA plan
Trump vs. Gina — The president becomes increasingly rash and devises a plan to tamper with the nation's intelligence command.
In his final weeks in office, after losing the election to Joe Biden, President Donald Trump embarked on a vengeful exit strategy that included a hasty and ill-thought-out plan to jam up CIA Director Gina Haspel by firing her top deputy and replacing him with a protege of Republican Congressman Devin Nunes.
The plan stunned national security officials and almost blew up the leadership of the world's most powerful spy agency. Only a series of coincidences — and last minute interventions from Vice President Mike Pence and White House counsel Pat Cipollone — stopped it.
The ploy to rattle Haspel and perhaps intentionally trigger her resignation unfolded in a lurching and incompetent way, like a bad Monty Python skit, on one chaotic day in early December.
White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows was ordered to fire — and then immediately unfire — the CIA's Deputy Director Vaughn Bishop.
In his place, Trump planned to install Kash Patel — a former top Intelligence Committee staffer to Nunes who had served on Trump's National Security Council but had no agency experience. In Trump's mind, this could potentially lead to Patel running the agency without needing to get Senate confirmation.
Trump had spent his last year in office ruminating over Haspel. Some of Trump's hardcore allies, including Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo, had been publicly raising doubts in his mind about her. He grew to distrust her and instead wanted a loyal ally at the top of the CIA.
She wasn't the only national security official the president wanted out…..
Read the full segment here.
