“Frankly, We Did Win This Election” The inside Story of How Trump Lost by Michael C. Bender.
Michael Bender is a Wall Street Journal reporter who covered Donald J. Trump for many years. Over time, Mr. Trump had developed respect for the straight-shooting and fair reporting on The Donald that Bender had done for the Journal. That pre-existing relationship gave the author good access to President Trump and his staff as he wrote the book.
The book opens by recounting the insurrection of January 6, 2021 that attempted to overturn the results of a free and fair presidential election. That was certainly an interesting event, and the author backtracks from then in the book.
Donald Trump’s presidential campaign brand - and he is totally about branding - was the live rally in front of thousands of adoring fans. Trump held more live rallies during his presidency - over 1,000 - than any other chief executive. He was always campaigning and he attracted a flock of acolytes, people would travel all over the country to get there early and be in the front rows for his shows. One person Bender followed was Saundra Kicemski of the Upper Peninsula in Michigan. She was one of 1,500 Trump diehards, known as Front Row Joes, who migrated around the country to follow their hero. She didn't seem to have a job but she did have a modest inheritance which funded her travels. Some of her fellow Joes had voted for Barack Obama but became disillusioned with his presidency and how their needs kept getting ignored by the Democrats who embrace identity politics. The groups the D’s were concerned about didn’t include Middle America.
Trump announced his candidacy for reelection a few days after he became president in 2017. His first impeachment in 2020 was a godsend and a huge benefit for his brand. It solidified his support with his base and set him up to be competitive in the election. It also helped fundraising. Trump 2020 raised twice as much as Trump 2016 did.
Bender reports that off-the-record many higher-up Trump administration staff were horrified that the president had essentially asked the Ukrainian president to find dirt on Joe Biden to help Trump get reelected. (That’s what the first impeachment trial was all about.) They wanted to keep their White House jobs so they shut up.
The book looks back at Trump as a developer who latched onto Roger Stone and Paul Mantafor’s lobbying firm for help in the1980s to get favorable treatment for his casinos. It worked. He used his connections with those two and with other consultants he had befriended to explore running for president in 1988, 1996, and 2012. He decided to run for real in 2016 but did little prep work. He didn’t know anything about the Iowa caucuses, the first test of any presidential candidate. In January of 2016 he sent his daughter, Ivanka, to “organize” the caucus vote but by then it was too late. He lost. To win a caucus, you need to be well organized. That wasn’t Trump’s style. He was a celebrity TV star; he could win an audience over, which is what he did in the New Hampshire primary, which he won a few weeks after Iowa. Trump instinctively knew that he was connecting with the voter he needed and that his no-nonsense – even coarse and offensive – style was winning over lots of disgruntled voters that each of the two major parties had left behind, The other thing he had going for him was that Hillary Clinton n was very unpopular. She had slightly worse favorability numbers than Trump in some polls, but people generally disliked both candidates.
For the 2020 election, Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, muscled others out of the way so he could have a big impact on the campaign. Brad Parscale was Jered’s choice for campaign manager. Brad organized the digital media campaign - Facebook, et al - for Trump in 2016 and it would give Trump the states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, which were key to his win. Hillary outspent Donald in those states and still lost.
In the 2020 campaign, factions quickly developed. Jared and Brad were running the campaign but Corey Lewandowski (from Trump 2016) and his crew scoffed at the new kids on the campaign block. Tensions ran high.
The president was great at fundraising. His contributors liked the fact that he was big and brash and said what he thought with no filters. Where in 2016 his campaign lagged behind Hillary Clinton’s effort, the 2020 contest was much more successful at generating dollars.
Trump was good at using events to boost his reelection campaign. He ordered the takeout of Qassem Soleimaini, the leader of an elite Iranian military force, and his fundraising effort was rewarded. Democrats railed against the execution, but the president’s base loved it and the campaign generated ads praising the move, ads that moved voters. That was the point. Right before his impeachment trial, his negative poll numbers had gone down as his positive rating went up. The impeachment would boost his favorable numbers.
In the 1980s, New York US Attorney Rudy Giuliani investigated Trump who was accused of using his casinos to launder shady money. The investigation went away. A few years later, Donald Trump raised $2 million for Rudy’s mayoral campaign. Giuliani became a loyal Trump supporter who would go on any TV show and say just about anything to promote his candidate for president. Trump constantly belittled Rudy who didn't get offered any job in the Trump administration despite his unwavering loyalty.
In 2019 when Joe Biden was the clear favorite to run against Trump, Rudy volunteered to get dirt on Joe because of his son Hunter’s sketchy involvement with businesses in Ukraine. Trump did his part by trying to get the Ukraine president Zelensky to find some dirt on the Bidens. That phone call led to Impeachment 1 which never had a chance of ousting the president but greatly motivated his supporters who agreed with Trump that the whole thing was unfair. In February after the failed impeachment effort, Trump had a 49% approval rating, among his highest ever, and 61% of Americans said they were better off than they had been three years earlier. The Democrats were in disarray. Michael Bloomberg was about to enter the race as a Democrat. On paper, he looked good. Had his campaign caught fire, as an outsider he might have posed a serious challenge to Trump, but his run was a disaster.
Things were lining up for reelection. Then, in late February, as the president was returning from a trip to India, Nancy Messonnier, the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, announced that an “expanding coronavirus situation” might severely disrupt everyday life.
Covid-19 was here. In early March, the president said, “we’re prepared and we’re doing a great job with it and it will go away.” As you recall from the spring of 2020, Donald Trump held 37 daily press conferences which were more like campaign rallies than serious attempts to provide accurate information on the virus. As always, he thought that he could beat Covid by using his branding skills to minimize the importance of the virus. For once, he was wrong.
Matt Pottinger, who was featured prominently in Lawrence Wright’s book on the pandemic, The Plague Year, (see Bob Liberated Day 142 for a summary) was a White House advisor who had experience with the SARS disease outbreak of 2002. He asked people in the infectious disease world what to expect, and they told him to think about the Pandemic of 1918 as a comparison. He was stunned and brought his concerns to Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s acting chief of staff, who brought it up in a meeting in the Situation Room that was attended by 30 people, about 20 more than usually meet there. It was your basic zoo, with no agreement developing in anything relating to beating Covid. Different health agencies tried to one-up each other about their capacity to minimize the virus’s impact. That first meeting set the stage for the lack of inter-agency coordination that would mark our country’s response to Covid. After attending a few meetings of the Covid task force led by VP Mike Pence, who reflected the president’s view that the virus was no big deal, Pottinger stopped going to meetings. He actually knew what he was doing so that was a loss.
Donald Trump stayed on message. In late February at a campaign rally in Charleston, SC, the president told his supporters what they wanted to hear, that the virus was his political enemies’ “new hoax.” One problem was that the stock market, which the president saw as a gauge of how well he was doing, was tanking, taking historic drops day-to-day. America’s major corporations were concerned about the pandemic.
Author Bender incorporates the Front Row Joes - the die-hard Trump supporters who went all over the country to attend his political rallies - into his narrative. In April of 2020, one of the youngest members of the group, a 24-year old man, died of Covid, the disease that the president said was no big deal. That unsettled some of them.
Michael Bender had written a piece for the Wall Street Journal that recounted that there were differences of opinion about how to respond to criticism of the White House’s response to the pandemic. The president called Bender up and told him that the chief executive had handled the crisis brilliantly and that his actions had saved thousands of lives. Trump used the TV ratings of his 37 late afternoon press conferences as evidence of what a great job he was doing. As always, Mr. Trump processed everything in life in terms of how it boosted his personal branding. As it turned out, the president was correct in stating that the daily TV shows had high ratings but many people who watched them shifted their votes from Trump to Biden, having little faith in the president's ability to contain the virus.
Brad Parscale was the campaign manager in the spring of 2020, although there were strong turf wars between Jared Kushner’s people and Brad’ s crew about who would do what. Tony Fabrizio was the pollster/strategist. He correctly figured out that a handful of states would decide the election - Florida, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania - if Trump held his “must win” states - Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, Ohio, Iowa, and Texas. The plan was to raise and spend $500 to $600 million in advertising, split between traditional TV/radio and digital media. They would have some positive spots on Trump’s accomplishments but they would also go after Joe Biden for being too old and too inept.
The author points out that alliances are often fleeting in Trump World. The Lincoln Project, a group of Republicans who were fed up with Trump, released a lot of interesting ads during the campaign. One that did have a major impact accused campaign manager Brad Parscale of spending too much money personally, and not on campaign activities. Many Trump loyalists formed companies to do various campaign activities that they would directly profit from. The president himself had no problem making money off his Washington hotel by having foreign dignitaries stay there, so it was OK for others to be creative in jumping on the gravy train.
Brad did have a side company that made money from the campaign, in addition to what he was paid. This wasn’t that unusual. The Lincoln project ad claimed that in a short time Brad’s company made $96 million off the Trump campaign. Trump eviscerated his campaign manager. Presidential adviser Kellyanne Conway pointed out to the president that the money was used to buy ads and digital media. Granted, ad agencies take a healthy cut off the top of media buys - usually 15% - but that is standard in the business and Brad was running the media purchases through his company. He was making more bucks than his $30,000 monthly fee (which was about right for what he did). Again, this was not unusual in Trump World. A lot of people made a lot of money from the campaign.
The George Floyd murder by police officers in Minneapolis stunned the country. The White House was scrambling for a response. One problem was that the president had little understanding of history, especially concerning Black Americans and Jim Crow and the fight for civil rights. The Floyd murder video led 15 million people to take to the streets to protest. The Minneapolis incident came at a bad time in that minorities were more likely to have more serious symptoms and to die from the virus. They were the most economically disadvantaged from the contracting Covid economy. The Black Lives Matter movement gained support as the protests unfolded, including a lot of street violence and arson. “The country had turned into a tinderbox,” the author writes.
Trump claimed that he was the “law and order” candidate and that meant that the angry protesters in the street had to be stopped so that order could be restored. To him and his supporters, the primary issue wasn’t that George Floyd had been killed by cops. It was that protesters were doing illegal and dangerous things.
There was some merit to Trump's point. Because of protests that routinely turned into riots, Portland, Oregon, became a Disney World for people who liked to burn buildings. Other cities had protests that often flared out of control. Ironically, a lot of Black-owned businesses were damaged or destroyed in the protests around Floyd’s murder.
A few days after Floyd’s death, it looked like the president would help the authorities bring justice to Floyd’s family. He was very moved after watching the video that showed Floyd’s death in excruciating detail. Jared thought that the president had an opportunity to reach out to Black voters, although chief of staff Mark Meadows dismissed the whole Floyd incident as something that would blow over in a few days.
Once Trump turned on Fox TV and saw the out-of-control protests in Memphis, New York City, Phoenix, and Portland, he flipped back to being the law and order candidate and tweeted that the protesting “THUGS” needed to be punished. He didn’t make a distinction between the peaceful protesters and the rioting protesters. They were all lumped together in his mind.
The Saturday night after Floyd’s death, Trump and his family hunkered down in the White House basement bunker because of wild protests in Washington. That was reported in the New York Times which drove Trump crazy. He was a tough guy and tough guys didn’t hunker down ever in the face of danger. Trump went into full law-and-order mode as a result of the Floyd protests.
At a White House strategy session to figure out how to boost the president’s tough-guy bona fides, Trump suggested invoking the Insurrection Act of 1807. Attorney General Barr said that the act could only be used in real insurrections, not to quash protests. The president then wanted General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to organize the US Army to stop the protests. The general pointed out that the army had no power to interfere with civilians. The military was to be used against bad actors who threatened us who were not Americans. Some of the president's more extreme staffers argued that the cities were burning and that the country was about to fall. General Milley went nuts and publicly told Stephen Miller, the most extreme partisan, to “shut the F up.” Milley pointed out that 6 out of 300 major metropolitan areas had extreme protests. That left 294 cities that were not seeing bad behavior. The country was safe.
Milley and Barr come across as the adults in the room. Trump kept coming up with military “solutions” like federalizing the national guard of states with heavy protests. Barr and Milley pushed back, causing Trump to go ballistic. One Trump coat catcher (Boston political slang for someone who is in the room because of a lucky circumstance, not because of any skill or merit) critiqued Milley for coming on too strong to the president. Milley shot back that he was legally responsible to advise the president on military matters and he did that the best way that he could. With Trump, that meant getting in his face. AG Barr told the coat catcher and the meeting participants that the general was right.
Right after this chaotic meeting, Trump held a press conference and listed all of the things he was going to do to counter the protesters, all of which had been rejected as illegal or really stupid at the meeting. He then decided to walk through the protesters to St. John’s Church, carrying a Bible. The protesters were forcibly moved out of the way and the president did his famous walk. General Milley and Defense Secretary Esper didn’t figure out what was going on until after they had been videotaped by news cameras. For Milley, being in his military uniform walking with the group through a crowd of civilians was a no-no. He was mortified and later apologized. Esper was also flummoxed. Defense secretaries weren’t supposed to participate in political walkabouts. Barr was ticked off. He got blamed for the violent way the protesters were moved out although he knew nothing about it. A good time was not had by all except President Trump, who was thrilled with the image of him at a church holding a Bible and refuting the protesters.
On June 20, 2020, the president held his first rally in over three months in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It was a very Covid-friendly city, with no mask mandates and a “business-as-usual” attitude. There was no problem scheduling a huge indoor political rally at a time when the virus was raging. The rally initially had been set for June 19th, Juneteenth, a major holiday in Black America. Trump’s people did push it back one day to get around that messy situation.
Saundra and the Front Row Joes, who hadn’t been able to go to a rally for over three months, were excited as they showed up days early to wait in line for good seats. The Trump campaign rented the biggest area in Tulsa to fit the 19,000 plus fans that would show up. It looked like there was a heavy demand for tickets but some sharp Trump staffers noticed that very few requests were coming in from Oklahoma. They got nervous that someone was playing games with the ticket demand. They were right. Tik-Tok hackers had created an artificial “demand” for tickets which gave the impression that it would be a sell-out.
Only 6,000 fans showed up, leaving 13,000 empty seats. Everyone was afraid to tell the president that the event was a bust. Once he got there, he noticed that the place was empty. He veered away from his prepared remarks, which were classy and referenced the George Floyd situation, and went nuts, attacking his enemies and lefties and the Kung Flu Chinese virus. He also pointed out that the more Covid testing you did, the more infections you would discover so he asked that the testing be slowed down. That of course was totally against a good public health response which would try to identify, isolate, and treat as many Covid cases as possible.
Trump got back to Washington and he and some of his advisors thought that campaign manager Brad should be removed. Most of the president’s staff saw his problems as mostly being self-created but he needed to blame someone else. They shunted Brad aside and put in Bill Stepien, a New Jersey political consultant who had been part of Chris Christie’s Bridgegate farce a few years earlier. Stepien was good at digital media, which Trump did better than anybody.
By July when campaign leadership changed, Trump’s numbers were dropping and something had to be done to get him reelected. One of the ironies of Stepien’s taking over the race was that he was a key architect of the Bridgegate scandal in New Jersey in 2013 that ultimately torpedoed Chris Christie’s presidential chances. Christie was a hardball pol and he slowed traffic down on key bridges to punish his political enemies. He escaped any legal problems, but he lost his reputation as a good government, effective leader and he never got it back. Christie was out of the race after the New Hampshire primary in February of 2020.
Stepien was a veteran political operative who sensed that a lot of what the campaign had done so far wasn’t working. He shifted gears and changed the ads and the media buys. He got rid of traditional things like billboards and did more digital marketing. He also didn’t think that the campaign’s polling was accurate so he went out and got new data and polling people. He started from scratch on voter research with just three months left until election day.
There also was a problem in the lack of coordination between the Republican National Committee and the Trump campaign. In 2016, the campaign was very disorganized and the RNC came in. They did a lot of things that Trump’s people could not do and he won. This time, Trump World wanted more control.
Trump wanted to have a glorious convention for his renomination. It had been scheduled in North Carolina but Governor Ray Cooper eventually pulled the plug due to Covid concerns. Florida Governor DeSantis offered to hold the convention in Jacksonville, Florida. It wasn’t a great site - not enough hotel rooms - but planning went ahead until wiser people stepped up and said that you can’t hold a convention anywhere with the virus all over the place, especially in Florida, with its high Covid case count. The typical Republican delegate was old and unvaccinated and wouldn’t wear a mask or do social distancing. Things would not end well with a big convention.
Trump decided to have most of the activities on TV since there would be no big gathering of delegates. He ended up going back to Charlotte, NC, for some scaled-down convention activities, including the roll call of delegates. Only 336 people were allowed to gather in an auditorium to cast ballots for renomination. Governor Cooper, who Trump regularly insulted for not allowing him to have a big convention, made an exception to state Covid rules to allow even a few hundred people to gather in one place. Trump gave a high-energy victory speech that was mostly negative, blasting Democrats for all of the ills of the world, accusing Barack Obama of spying on his campaign, and providing false information about the easing of the pandemic, which was in fact raging. His supporters love it.
On September 26, the day that the pandemic US death toll reached 200,000, the White House held a celebration of the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. The Rose Garden was packed for the event, with people sitting close together and largely unmasked. Afterwards, the president held a reception inside for the crowd. The event spawned dozens of Covid infections.
The first presidential debate occurred a few days after the Rose Garden fete. There were strict Covid rules which Team Trump ignored. Biden’s people followed the protocol. The debate was a farce. The president consistently talked over and fought with moderator Chris Wallace of Fox News. Trump answered many questions by attacking Hunter Biden and not responding to the inquiry.
Donald Trump and his family thought that he had been brilliant in the debate against Slow Joe. Trump’s campaign team was shocked at how badly their guy had done. In polling done after the debate, Trump dropped an average of six points as a result of his performance. Chris Christie, who was angling for a job in the next Trump administration, had the job of telling the president that he had hurt his election chances in the debate. Christie observed that the president interrupted Wallace or Biden 73 times in 90 minutes. Trump still thought he had been great. Eventually, Fox personality Tucker Carlson, a Trump TV toady, mildly criticized the president for his performance. That did get a little of Trump’s attention but he still thought that he had done well.
A few days after the debate, many of Trump’s inner circle tested positive for Covid, with the president soon joining them. Many of his supporters thought that the president would become empathetic after recovering from what was a very serious case of Covid. They were wrong. If anything, the fact that he recovered (with extraordinary medical interventions that none of us would ever get) reinforced his belief that the virus was no big deal.
Trump held 21 in-person rallies during the last three weeks of the campaign. He kept attacking Hunter Biden - and Joe by extension - for Ukraine deals and didn't highlight many of the good things his administration had done. He was playing to his crowd, people who loved combat and bombast, but they were already voting for him. The rallies gave undecided voters no reason to reelect the president. Trump was counting on a massive Wall Street Journal article that would publish the results of its investigation into the Hunter Biden-Ukraine sleazy businessmen connection. The good news was that the article came out in late October, before the vote. The bad news was that it found no smoking gun connecting Hunter to bad stuff. The piece did suggest that Hunter was trying to cozy up to shady Ukraine business tycoons by reminding them who his father was, but that Hunter was too incompetent to pull it off.
Former campaign manager Brad Parscale was removed from the campaign – he had been doing digital media – after he got drunk and attacked his wife, not a good look. A month out, Trump’s media buys were all over the place. They spent a lot of money in Washington, DC, which was 80% Democrat. That buy was for Trump to see and feel good about the campaign. They bought millions of dollars on Fox News nightly opinion programs, which were watched by fanatical Trump loyalists who didn't need persuading. The Republican National Committee was appalled at the poor selection of media markets and for the vitriolic content of the very negative ads. Those would not persuade suburban women, whose support was melting away from Trump, to vote for him. The turf war and lack of trust between the Trump campaign and the RNC really hurt his reelection chances.
For most of the campaign, Trump’s people thought that winning Georgia was a lock, but late polling showed an opportunity for Biden to win. Trump thought that was ridiculous but he did make one brief campaign stop over there.
A week before the election, the Trump campaign’s data team finally had figured out the battleground states where they needed to work to win the election and they had crafted the right messages that would persuade the voters. Better late than never, they say. Campaign manager Stepien was not happy that it had taken so long to figure things out and he railed against Tony Fabrizio, the strategy/polling consultant, for charging too much. Tony pointed out that it had taken so long because Trump inner-circle dwellers constantly second-guessed what his firm was doing. He had been in business for decades while members of Team Trump had never had substantial involvement in media campaigns. It turns out that Fabrizio’s firm had billed $4.5 million in total over 24 months. Those are reasonable charges, about $20,000 a month. Stepien brought in his own pollster because he didn’t trust Tony. Stepien’s guy charged the campaign $1.8 million for two months of work. Billing $900,000 a month is not reasonable.
Trump did close the gap with Biden over the last few weeks of the campaign. His last ad, a sixty-second epic, made two dozen attacks on Biden and was nasty in tone. It ended with Biden rising out of a swamp, like the Creature from the Black Lagoon, a B-movie from the 1950s. The RNC was once again appalled.
The president finished strong, with final rallies in North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Trump devoted some of his speeches to criticizing Dr. Fauci, Beyoncé, Jay-Z, Jon Bon Jovi, and Lady Gaga. He also complained about fake news, Barack Hussein Obama, the Deep State, Hunter Biden, and Sleepy Joe. During the final seventeen hours of the campaign, he covered 3,000 miles and gave over six hours of speeches. He certainly didn’t lack energy at the campaign's end.
On election night, the first few hours contained no surprises. Reliably Democratic and Republican states supported their party’s candidate. At 11:30 PM, Fox News called Arizona for Biden, a shocker to campaign manager Stepien and the Trump people at the White House. The president lashed out at his favorite network but the result held. Jared Kushner called Rupert Murdoch, the owner of Fox TV and a Trump supporter, to complain about the call. Murdoch said that heads would roll if they got it wrong but they always got it right in calling states in presidential elections. He was right.
At 2:20 AM on the day after the election, the president went on TV and said that he’d won Georgia (he hadn't) and that there was massive voter fraud in the election (there wasn’t). Two days after the election he stated that he was the victim of a widespread conspiracy to steal the election. The author points out that Donald Trump is consistent in naming villains and heroes but he never offers any evidence of anything.
After Joe Biden was declared the winner when Georgia came in for Biden, most of Trump’s advisors thought that after a few days to process the election, he would accept the results. They were wrong. Rudy Giuliani had bungled a news conference in Philadelphia where he charged massive voter fraud with no evidence presented. Rudy seemed deranged but he insisted that Trump had been cheated out of victory. The soon-to-be-ex-president liked that. While Trump’s senior staffers knew that he had lost, his sons disagreed. Eric and Don, Jr., rolled with the lie. Chris Christie came in to assure Trump that he had indeed lost, but the once and future president insisted that he could still win the election. Mike Pompeo, who had done his share of sycophantic, crazy stuff for his boss, said, “The crazies have taken over.” Of course, publicly Pompeo supported the lie. Campaign manager Stepien pleaded with Trump to back off the fraud charge, but Rudy assured The Donald that anyone who said that Trump lost was lying to him, which of course Trump bought.
Trump and his crazies, as Pompeo thought, kept making up arguments about how he had been cheated out of victory. One was that a supercomputer changed votes. No such computer was ever identified. Another argument was that Russia and China had stolen the election for Biden. Trump's own military and intelligence operatives assured him that did not happen, but he did not believe them. Trump went to AG Barr, who was getting sick of all of this, and demanded that he go after the Obama/ Biden administration and indict former FBI Director James Comey, former CIA Director John Brennan, and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper for crimes which were unspecified. Barr went nuts and stormed out of the meeting. (Bob’s Note: Going after James Comey is ironic in that many people - including me - believe that Hillary Clinton would have defeated Donald Trump in 2016 if Comey hadn’t released information about Clinton’s “secret emails” right before the election. I believe that Comey made Trump president.)
A few days after the meeting, Barr went to lunch with an Associated Press reporter and happened to mention that the Department of Justice had carefully investigated fraud allegations and “found no evidence of widespread voter fraud.” Trump loved that. Privately, Barr had told Trump that he had no case for fraud and that his legal team contesting the election was a “clown show.” Barr resigned a few days later before Trump could fire him.
I won’t go into detail about the next few weeks of the clown show’s work to prove fraud. Mike Lindell of My Pillow fame was brought into the White House as an expert on election fraud, with which he had no experience. Michael Flynn, who has the distinction of serving the shortest term ever as National Security Advisor – 22 days, resigning in disgrace after having lied about his cozy relationship with some bad Russian actors – was brought into the inner circle. He advised the president to declare martial law and stay in office.
Lots of crazy things happened, capped by the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol on the date Congress was to certify the results of the election. You know about that. Saundra, one of the Front Row Joe’s sprinkled throughout the book, of course was there. She became concerned about the tenor of the crowd. Later she admitted that if Mike Pence had come out to talk to the mob, he probably would have been killed for not stopping the certification. She said that she didn’t want to be violent; she just wanted to overthrow the government. She of course knew that Trump’s people did not start the rioting and storm the Capitol. It was Antifa, again an allegation with not one shred of evidence.
In February, 2021, Trump was impeached in the House for the second time - a record!- but not convicted in the Senate on a mostly party line vote.
In January Trump returned to Florida to become King of Mar-a-Lago where he held court every night with adoring, usually really old, fans. At the end of the evening, he would get a standing ovation which he acknowledged with a smile and wave.
Bob’s Take
Trump played chess while the Democrats played checkers. He directly connected to his base. He was crude and unapologetic. They loved that. He blew up Soleimani, the Iranian leader, without much justification. His people loved that. He was impeached - twice - and he defeated both efforts easily. His supporters really loved that. Trump’s popularity rose after the first Impeachment in 2020, which firmed up his base without giving Democrats a bounce.
Running for president has changed. Donald Trump lost the election but he rewrote the presidential campaign playbook. Celebrity was very important to winning. Getting noticed - even doing things that were gross - was very important. Dominating the news cycle was critical. Even when he did sketchy stuff, the media flocked to cover it. During his 2016 campaign, Trump seemed to be on CNN more than some of their on-air personalities. He sucked the oxygen out of the newsroom, smothered all other stories, and dominated the coverage. That left no room for anyone else to get noticed. Other candidates will no doubt copy this successful formula.
Trump almost won. This was a tight election. Trump came very close to winning it legitimately. If 60,000 votes out of 158,000,000 had switched to Trump, he would have flipped Arizona (12,000 vote margin), Georgia (13,000 votes), Nevada (34,000 votes), and Wisconsin (20,000 votes). That would have given him 274 electoral college votes and 264 for Joe Biden. You need 270 to win.
The virus did Trump in. In February of 2020, nine months before the election, the economy was humming, with low unemployment, rising wages, and a roaring stock market. A month later it was tanking as people got infected and died in overcrowded hospitals with not enough personal protective equipment or ventilators to treat people with Covid. The president desperately pushed back against the inexorable virus, insisting it was going away, refusing to wear a mask, organizing mass gatherings, and never taking it seriously even after he recovered from it. The virus got back at him for ignoring it. Covid killed the economy which is almost always the most important factor in determining a person's vote. Presidents get praise when it's good and get whacked when it’s bad. Donald Trump didn’t cause the virus which knocked him out of the White House. Joe Biden hasn’t done anything to extend the pandemic beyond when we thought it would be over, but he is getting the blame for inflation which is caused by the virus. There is a nice balance here. Covid is one of the few things in our lives that is non-partisan.
What happened to these people?
Rudy Giuliani, was a respected US Attorney and a successful mayor of New York City. I met him before the 1997 NYC Marathon as he was working the crowd of runners two days before he was up for reelection. He seemed sane then. He did a great job on 9/11 as America’s Mayor.
I don’t think that it’s unfair to say that Rudy has really lost his way. The book documents several of his press conferences that argued massive election fraud. His performances were awful, almost pathetic. He seemed to get confused easily and he said a lot of really nutty things. He is old and he may have some cognitive issues that get in the way of sound thinking. In any event, he is no longer America’s Mayor.
Michael Flynn was a Lieutenant Colonel in the US Army. He served in Iraq and held various positions in Army and US intelligence. In 2012 President Obama appointed Flynn Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency.
That didn’t work out and Flynn was forced out of that position and pressured to retire a year early from the Army. He was reportedly effectively forced out of the DIA after clashing with superiors over his allegedly chaotic management style. He was abusive to staff, and “exhibited a loose relationship with the truth” according to people who worked with him. While those attributes made him a good fit for the Trump administration (National Security Advisor for 22 days), how did Flynn achieve the rank of general? I have great respect for the Army but if someone as flawed as Flynn could move up the command chain, something is very wrong.
Elections may never be the same. Repeating patently false claims about having the election stolen is persuasive to a lot of people who should know better. No evidence has been presented by anybody in the year since we voted. But repeating the lie plays to some people’s sense of grievance and victimhood so it works.
The irony is that the Democratic party helped set up the situation where the lies work. FDR’s party has pretty much forgotten the forgotten people in the country - largely poor working-class whites, usually living in rural areas. These people are more likely to have substance use issues, be poorly educated, live in places that have experienced major job losses, and die younger than the rest of us. Donald Trump paid attention to these people and stoked their fears and grievances and dissatisfaction with the state of the country. They elected him president and many go along with his rants that the election was stolen.
Do elections matter? The Republican position today seems to be that any election they do not win was stolen. This is totally antithetical to the idea of nation of the United States, which is grounded on free and fair elections. The results count, even if you lose. Trump and his minions can raise tens of millions of dollars on the fantasy that the election was stolen so they’ll keep at it. It’s good for business and campaign accounts although it's toxic for the country. Unless we go back to believing in elections, we may be witnessing the beginning of the end of the American experiment in democratic governing.
I hope not.
