The book begins in the early days of the pandemic (March 2020) by recounting a discussion between President Trump and California Governor Gavin Newsome, who had been almost friends before Trump went into politics. The president wanted to make sure that the people on a cruise ship in San Francisco Bay whose passengers had been exposed to Covid did not land. If it did and the passengers went ashore, that would drive up the Covid infection numbers, something Donald Trump did not want. The authors cite this as an example of how Trump has a totally transactional worldview. He does not look at the big picture. He is almost exclusively focused on how immediate events would affect his personal standing. Even as president, Trump was essentially the leader of his own coalition, not of the country.
Up until the pandemic, that approach was very successful. Before Covid, the economy was in very good shape and there were no outstanding challenges facing the country. Many people disliked President Trump, but they were happy with their economic situations and the relative calmness in the world. Then the pandemic hit and changed everything. The economy effectively collapsed and our response to the virus was very disorganized and often wrong.
Unlike previous presidents, Donald Trump had no problem inserting politics, personal grievances, and public relations gimmicks into urgent matters of state. Pro-Trump governors were more likely to receive Covid help than those who weren’t totally with the president. Of course, previous presidents had their favorites, but when there was a true national crisis, politics was set aside. Donald Trump was consistent in that he favored people who toadied up to him. The book has examples of Democratic governors semi-groveling to get needed pandemic supplies to their states. It was a small price to pay to help citizens survive Covid.
Joe Biden took a different approach when he was running for president. Even after he effectively won the nomination, he had to placate the left-wingers in his party. He made nice with Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren in adopting some of their economic ideas as part of his campaign. Biden recognized that a lot of his party had gone hard left so he adopted policies that he really wasn’t comfortable with but needed to attract voters.
He kept a very low profile for most of the campaign. His theory was that enough people would vote against Donald Trump and that the bland and fairly non-offensive Joe Biden would win. That turned out to be right but his running out of his home in Delaware upset a lot of prominent Democrats. Biden had staff doing a lot of work to figure out how to handle the pandemic and he became knowledgeable about various aspects of the virus. That didn’t help him project the image of the confident leader that the country needed. Ron Klain, who would become Biden’s chief of staff, sent blunt notes to the candidate’s handlers: “GET HIM OUT OF THE BASEMENT. YOU ARE LOSING THE ELECTION.”
George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis changed the campaigns of both candidates. Biden’s Black advisors urged him to get out and respond to the incident and show people where his heart was. He finally hit the campaign trail.
Donald Trump responded differently. He was increasingly resentful that what was happening in the country was beyond his control. He prided himself on how good he was at controlling things. First there was the pandemic and then this incident in Minnesota. Trump referred to the people who protested Floyd’s killing as terrorists and urged governors to go to battle with them. Some protesters went off the rails, but the overwhelming number of people upset by Floyd’s death were just citizens who were upset by the horrendous actions of the police. Just after the death, Trump took his walk through Lafayette Square in Washington, carrying a Bible, as he made his way to St. John’s Church. He was accompanied by Defense Secretary Esper and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Miley, both of whom were blind-sided by the press stunt. Both almost resigned that night.
Against the advice of his advisors, throughout the summer, the president continued to encourage violent responses to street protests. He was back in charge. Mayors and other city officials had to step up their personal security that summer to make sure that no zealous Trump supporter would go after them.
During the summer of 2020, Joe Biden was looking for a running mate and Jill Biden was unhappy because the frontrunner was Kamala Harris. Many in Biden’s in inner circle were not happy with Senator Harris. Her presidential campaign had been a disaster, poorly run with lots of infighting. She had called out Joe Biden for not being wildly enthusiastic about massive forced busing in the 1970s as a key to improving urban schools. Kamala, like Joe, also said goofy things.
After George Floyd’s death, Biden was locked into selecting a Black woman. Apparently, that was a fairly limited pool and the other candidates had potential problems in their backgrounds. Kamala was a known commodity and the least problematic of the group. As a young, woke, bi-racial woman from California, she appealed to the hard -eft side of Biden’s base. Biden’s people really liked Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitman for VP but Biden decided that he had to go with a Black (or bi-racial in Kamala’s case) candidate.
In the summer of 2020, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and prominent Democrats were concerned that Donald Trump would not leave the White House even if he lost the election. He had said that if he lost, it was a rigged election. People close to Trump confirmed that he was planning on a second term no matter what.
Trump’s advisors had tried to convince him to run for reelection like a statesman, not a conspiracy theorist or a victim, but they were ignored. Trump resented the pandemic and consistently minimized its seriousness. There were certainly plenty of mistakes made by public health personnel during Covid, but it was very serious. It was not a good idea to have mass meetings like a 19,000-person nominating convention that Trump insisted on. He openly disdained any preventive measures like keeping your distance from people, and wearing masks in tight quarters. His White House reception for Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett was a classic super-spreader event that infected dozens of people who were following the lead of their leader – no masks; bunch up – who really didn’t seem to understand what a pandemic was.
Many Republican governors urged Trump to wear a mask in close quarters. He rejected their advice. Joe Biden wore a mask and it made him look weak. The Donald would never look weak. He even insisted that reporters on Air Force One could not wear masks when asking him questions.
Pandemic? What pandemic?
During the summer, crime, violent protesting, and demands for a lot of immediate social justice (“Defund the police! Now!”) increased in the cities, a situation Trump played brilliantly. The Democrats were soft on crime. Only he could protect us from the socialist do-gooders. That argument also spoke to incipient racists in the electorate. The violence was happening in the cities which were Democrat-dominated and largely Black and Brown.
Joe Biden was still relatively hunkered down, but he did respond to what was happening in the streets. even as Biden condemned violent protesters, He asked people if things would be less violent if Trump were reelected. His comments reflected the real Joe Biden, but a lot of the far-lefties in his party were upset that he wasn’t supporting all protesters, even the violent ones.
Trump was casting doubt on mail-in voting even though in rural areas that tended to vote Republican, mail-in balloting was big. He was setting the stage for his election result denialism. Even people in Trump’s White House were getting nervous that, unless he lost in a super-landslide (unlikely), Trump would not concede defeat. That would create a constitutional crisis.
Trump and Biden were scheduled for three debates. The first one went off reasonably well. Trump was Trump, but the candidates did discuss issue differences. The second debate was a mess. Trump went after Chris Wallace (a Fox News guy) and berated joe Biden and didn’t answer any questions. Trump’s family and his supporters in the audience flaunted the rules of the debate and did not wear masks or distance themselves in the seats. Biden’s people wondered if their guy had caught Covid because of Trump’s virus denialism.
In October, thirteen far-right activists were arrested for plotting to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. They, like their president, didn’t think Covid was a big deal and rejected Whitmer’s mask mandates. Whitmer squarely blamed Trump for setting the stage for such violence, and he retaliated by calling her names. Many of the elected officials across the country who urged people to mask up and take Covid seriously were threatened with violence.
Trump did get Covid and was seriously ill. After extraordinary medical intervention, he recovered. Trump’s people urged their guy to give a totally unexpected and noble speech about how we have to band together to defeat Covid. That would flip the campaign and make the president the lead Covid fighter. The advice was soundly rejected. That day Trump tweeted, “Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life.”
Election 2020 was a tale of two vote counts. As expected, Donald Trump led early, because Republican voters tended to vote on election day which is when their votes were counted. Many Democrats voted early or by mail, which meant that their ballots would not be counted until a day or two or three after the polls closed. As time went on Joe Biden would do better.
As in the 2016 election against Hillary Clinton, Trump's vote exceeded polling projections. He was running stronger than many pundits had predicted, especially in rural areas where he dominated. In the House, Republicans ended up picking up 14 seats including flipping 12 that Democrats had won in the previous election. Republicans lost one seat in the Senate. The election was a bit of a split. The Trump-Biden election was much closer than many had thought it would be. Had less than 100,000 votes changed in a few key states, Donald Trump would have won reelection. On the other hand, the big gains predicted for the Republicans in the House and Senate never materialized.
Trump did not accept the results of the election. He said that since he was ahead a few hours after the polls closed, he was the winner. Any other result would be because of Democratic voting fraud.
On the Saturday after the election, the networks called the election for Joe Biden. Most people knew a few days earlier what the outcome was, but in an abundance of caution the pundits held off on the call.
In post-election interviews, many Biden voters seemed more relieved that Trump had lost than that Biden had won. Joe wasn’t an inspirational leader but he was not Donald Trump, which is all that many voters wanted. Biden still lost big in rural areas in swing states but he didn’t lose as badly as Hillary Clinton had in 2016. That’s why he won.
Several of the president’s closest advisors, including Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, urged Trump to analyze the outcome and pursue voter fraud charges if there was evidence but not to go overboard without any proof or wrongdoing. Donald Trump did not take that advice. When former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie gave him similar advice, the once-and-future president said, “Chris, I’m never going to concede.”
In late November of 2020 Democratic insiders met to discuss Biden’s presidency. They had lost the House but retained the Senate, so it would be difficult to pass any meaningful legislation. Mainstream Democrats such as Congressman Jim Clyburn of South Carolina were getting ticked off at the far-left wing of his party that was threatening to give the Republicans lots of talking points to push back against Biden’s initiatives. Progressives such as Detroit Representative Rashida Talib played the race card and said that centrists were just against people of color, an interesting charge since Representative Jim Clyburn was Black. Perhaps he wasn’t Black enough.
Nancy Pelosi was still Speaker and she found ways to bring the various factions of the party together, at least for a while. She and Senate Leader Chuck Schumer kept their caucuses in line but they both realized that the days of working constructively with the other party were gone. The cult of Trump messed up the gears of government, which didn’t always run smoothly anyway.
President-elect Biden was announcing his leadership team. He had no Blacks in the top positions which, when your party is based on identity politics, is a problem. Uncle Joe had done what most people elected to the presidency had done – he put the people he knew and trusted in positions of power. As an old white guy, there weren’t too many Blacks in his inner circle. Later, Biden did pay attention to diversity in his picks to work in his administration.
Throughout December, Donald Trump convinced himself that he was the victim of outrageous voter fraud. None of his serious advisors believed that, but there was always Mike Lindell of My Pillow fame who was truly deranged in his assessment of the election. He offered $5 million to anyone who could prove that Mike’s people’s analysis of election rigging was bogus. A very conservative Republican mathematician did that and is trying to get Mr. Pillow to make good on his promise.
Republican Senate Leader McConnell was getting nervous about Trump. There were still two Senate seats up for grabs in early January elections in Georgia. The GOP was well positioned to take both. However, Trump’s behavior in saying that his defeat was rigged and that no matter who you voted for, elections were rigged. That probably depressed Republican turnout enough in the two special elections to give both seats to the Democrats. Senators Loeffler and Perdue, who supported Trump’s false claims, lost the seats they were expected to hold.
The fact that Trump’s son Eric, put the word out that the priority was getting Trump back into the White House and not winning the Senate seats certainly helped the Democrats. Eric was joined by Rudy Giuliani and Sydney Powell, two Trump attorneys who came up with literally crazy theories to prove that the election was stolen. All of this was a great distraction that helped the Democrats seal the deal in Georgia.
On January 2, 2021, Trump made his famous phone call to Georgia’s top election official, Brad Raffensperger, to tell him to find enough Trump votes to flip the state. That matter is under district attorney investigation in the Peach State.
Having lost their attempt to stop the Electoral College from certifying the election, extreme Republicans – and there were many of them – looked to January 6, the day that Vice President Mike Pence would conduct a pro forma ceremony of certifying the election results. We all know what happened then. Trump apologists insist that it was just a tourist excursion to the Capitol until radical left-week Antifa nuts attacked the good Trump supporters. Since hundreds of Trump supporters have been indicted, convicted, and sentenced to long prison terms, that argument doesn’t wash.
January 6 was a mess. Many Democratic congressional representatives were nervous about the vice president’s certification ceremony. There were big crowds in Washington early, and they weren’t there to cheer on a peaceful transition of power. The book provides a lot of anecdotes about how scary that day was for members of Congress who literally had to run away to escape harm. Republican Senate Leader McConnell was with several Democratic Senators in their secret escape place and he was livid at what Trump had encouraged.
There was a lot of violence around the country on January 6 as MAGA people tried to go after elected Democratic officials who had been part of the effort to steal the election for Joe Biden.
Back in Washington, Republicans like Lindsey Graham and Republican House Leader Kevin McCarthy said that they had had enough with Donald Trump and that January 6 was their breaking point. Unfortunately for the country, their courage quotient shrunk and they soon supported January 6 as just a peaceful expression of political opinion. Many others, including Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz, jumped onto the Trump train where they still have first-class seats. Some others like Senator John Thune and Mitch McConnell, thought that the excesses of January 6 would remove Donald Trump from the national picture. They were wrong.
Republican Kevin McCarthy, who is now Speaker of the House, initially tried to reason with Trump, who ignored him. The stonewalling worked. Soon, McCarthy gave up trying to do the right thing and became a Trump sycophant.
Many Trump supporters, when asked how Trump could stay in office after losing an election, went nuts about Hillary Clinton’s sins. (Bob’s note: I believe that her biggest sin was managing to lose to Donald Trump, but I digress.) Trump’s people brought up her personal server that had classified information on it and even went back to scandals in her husband’s administration. Rationality had left the building where many people lived.
On January 11, House Democrats introduced articles of impeachment. (Bob’s Note: I never understood how you could impeach a guy who would soon not be president, but I digress again.) After a lot of kerfuffle, it went nowhere in the Senate. Impeachment is a political process. Unless you have the votes, don’t do it, especially twice.
Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy was against impeachment but he thought that something should be done. He wanted a study committee, which in legislative politics is shoving something in a drawer that you will never again open. By the end of January, McCarthy was dining with Trump at Mar-a-Lago and all was forgiven as Kevin became a full-bore Trump supporter.
Mitch McConnell was still seething at the stunt that Trump had pulled on January 6 but Kentuckians who contacted him were ten to one in favor of acquitting Trump in any trial in the Senate. Mitch shut up.
In early January, as Joe Biden prepared to take office, 350,000 Americans had died of the virus. He wanted to enact a major Covid relief bill. Biden’s instinct was to sit down with Republican leadership and work something out. Democratic Senate Leader Chuck Schumer wanted to be more confrontational and accuse the other party of acting in bad faith if they tried to block Democratic legislation. The president-elect had never been a big Chuck Schumer fan. He thought that the senator from New York was too partisan.
Biden did reach out to Kevin McCarthy and Senator Lindsey Graham, who had been friendly with Joe before Lindsey went all-Trump, all of the time. Biden was disappointed by their reluctance to work with him on anything. The White House and Democratic leaders did come up with a big $1.9 trillion relief bill. By the time it was heading for a vote, public pressure from Americans desperate for help in getting beyond Covid forced some Republicans to back off in their opposition. The House passed the bill on February 27, 2021. West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin had taken exception to some of the provisions in the package that would make it easy for people to get federal help. He basically said that some of his constituents would game the system and get money they didn't deserve, but he did end up voting for the measure which became law.
After pandemic relief had passed, President Biden went on a charm offensive. He met with many Democrat and Republican members of Congress. He wanted to smooth out things with Republicans so that he could work with them at some point. Another problem was that he had to schmooze many progressive Democrats who were disappointed that the relief package wasn’t bigger and that Biden was not supporting wiping out all student debt instantly. While Republicans were united in their opposition to Biden and their reflexive fealty to Trump, there were clear fissures among Democrats.
Biden’s people were pulling together a massive infrastructure package that would give lots of money for states to fix their roads, bridges and other transportation assets. Despite his early win with the Covid relief bill, President Biden only had a 52% favorability rating. So, he had a lot of work to do, and giving elected officials from both parties money to fix long-standing problems seemed like a good idea.
Tensions were beginning to develop between Biden and Vice President Harris. At one big meeting with Republican leaders on infrastructure, she went off the agenda and touted a massive bill. Joe Biden immediately said that he wasn’t interested in that, making for an uncomfortable exchange.
The vice president also resented the fact that Biden’s people had to approve her hires. Kamala was not known in DC for having a sharp staff, and the president’s handlers didn’t want her to make poor hiring choices. It didn’t help the relationship when the president gave her a new job: outreach to the countries that were sending tens of thousands of immigrants across our border. The vice president had no experience with these Central American countries and she was pretty much adrift in her new work. She also came under fire from very progressive Democrats who really wanted open borders and thought that her assignment was to reduce the flow of migrants, which in fact it was.
Joe Biden had some sympathy for Kamala Harris. As a former vice president, he knew how unsatisfying the job was. But he also knew that his vice president was not the most organized person and that many of Biden’s staff had been less than impressed with the quality of Harris’s people. Despite the “Uncle Joe'' image of Biden, he was a taskmaster to his staff. He expected the best out of them and acted to get better employees when he didn't get that.
By the spring of 2021, Donald Trump had totally taken over the Republican party. Fawning candidates, seeking his support, flocked to Mar-a-Lago, which the authors describe as a “temporary fortress of a strongman plotting his return to power.” Trump lashed out at his enemies – defined as anyone who said that he lost the election. He made racist remarks about Senate Leader Mitch McConnell’s Asian wife who had been in the Trump cabinet. He accused Bill Belichick, a long-time friend, of “chickening out” by not allowing Trump to award him the Medal of Freedom. The coach may have had the good sense to realize that a prestigious award should not go to a football coach.
Congresswoman Liz Cheney was one of the handful of Republicans in the House who were openly critical of Trump’s support of the January 6 riot and of lying about the results of the 2020 election. Most of the few Republicans who had criticized Trump early in 2021 learned to shut up. Not Liz. She was ostracized by her party and removed from her House leadership position.
Republican House Leader Kevin McCarthy, who initially railed against Trump for January 6, continued to enable the former president as enthusiastically as possible. Senate Leader McConnell initially had been very direct in his criticism of Trump’s behavior but even he went silent. After having said he would vote for impeachment at Trump’s second Senate trial, McConnell voted to acquit.
January 6 was a very serious situation that deserved a non-partisan investigation. Senators Susan Collins of Maine and Joe Manchin of West Virginia worked diligently to set up such a bipartisan commission. For a few weeks, it looked possible to do that but Trump and his acolytes squashed it. That meant that we ended up with a mostly Democratic partisan committee that did not have much credibility with many Americans, even those who were disgusted by January 6. The group did do some good work that at least created a public record of the event.
The administration spent months negotiating with both Republicans and the moderate and progressive wings of the Democratic party to try to get an infrastructure bill passed, one of Biden’s campaign promises. Senators Krysten Sinema and Joe Manchin were technically Democrats but they each had problems with the big spending bill initially proposed. Most Republicans, fearing that Trump would put his candidate up to beat them in the 2022 primary if they voted for Biden’s bill, would not support anything. Of course, these same people were salivating at the thought of big bucks coming to their districts because of the law. Thirteen Republicans did vote for the legislation.
The hard-left wing of the congressional Democrats kept pushing Biden to implement their agenda - forgive student debt, extend the pandemic-based moratorium on evictions, go big on Green energy - as a requirement to get their votes on infrastructure. This really irritated Ron Klain, the president’s chief of staff. He realized that there were spending limits and that most of the nation did not support the far left’s wish list. Biden was elected as a centrist so he wasn’t wild about a lot of it either.
Finally, the $1.2 billion infrastructure legislation was passed in fall of 2021.
The battle for the infrastructure package had taken a toll on the Democrats. Both Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer lost some luster during the negotiations. Speaker Pelosi was particularly upset with the rigid views of the left wing of her party. They didn’t seem to be able to count votes.
President Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan in August of 2021 began a period that saw his popularity drop and stay low. One area where the public faulted the president was his failure to communicate effectively with the people. Vice President Harris was perceived less favorably than her boss. In mid-2021, many of her top staff people left her office which was not known as being well run.
The Republicans seemed to be in better shape. Once Trump took over the party, there was unity. The problem was that the ex-president called the shots when it came to recruiting House, Senate, and gubernatorial candidates for the 2022 election. While Donald Trump considers himself to be the smartest person in any room, he’s terrible at selecting candidates who can win a general election. As a result, his party greatly underperformed in the 2022 election, although the GOP did take the House narrowly.
As the book ends at the end of 2021 the authors are not optimistic about the political future of the country:
“The American two-party system cannot function well unless at least one party is politically powerful, internally coherent, and serious about governing, all at the same time. At the end of 2021, it was impossible to describe either the ruling Democrats or the Republican opposition in those terms.”
Bob’s Take The two authors work for the New York Times and CNN. Despite that left-of-center work environment, the authors are pretty relentless in their criticism of lots of people on both sides of the political aisle. The book has more to say about Donald Trump and his Republican congressional supporters than it does about Democrats, because by most objective standards, the Democrats weren’t trying to subvert a free and fair election.
Disunity. The Pandemic of 2020-23 was the first major crisis that did not unite the country. It further divided us. Trump’s non-stop obsession with restoring himself to the presidency also increased polarization.
Both parties are locked into where they are. The Republicans are in thrall to Donald Trump. That makes their political actions easy - just do what he wants. The downside is that their party had been whacked over the past two elections. As long as Trump rules the roost, the party may continue to lose elections. Democrats are split, with a small segment of very left-wing representatives and senators in Congress pulling the party to positions that are not shared by most Americans or even most Democrats. The downside is that Republican, with some validity, can attack Democrats as being soft on crime and immigration and for being runaway spenders.
Not much of a choice for most people. Right now, the 2024 election looks like it will be a Trump-Biden rematch. If that happens, voters will have to choose between the two most unpopular presidential candidates in history. Both Trump and Biden have unfavorability ratings in the low 50% range with their favorability numbers in the low 40% area (Source: FiveThirtyEight polling). Of major politicians today, only Kamala Harris has worse numbers. According to a new NBC poll, she is viewed favorably by only 32% of the voters with an unfavorability rating of 49%. That is not reassuring to people who are nervous about Joe Biden’s being able to complete a second four-year term. Few people want the vice president to become president.
I know that I’m an old guy but I do remember back in the 1960s when JFK was president. We know that he had all sorts of foibles, but people believed that he was a positive for the country. The same was true of LBJ before he got destroyed by his Vietnam policy. For the past fifty years, our presidential elections featured good candidates on both sides. You might not like their policy positions but most seemed to be decent people who had positive favorability ratings. That is not the case today.
The irony of Joe Biden. The authors write: “In less than a third of an average American lifetime, the country endured a contested presidential race in 2000; the terror attacks of September 11, 2001; the long and disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; the financial crisis of 2008 and the Great Recession; the election of Donald Trump in 2016; and the devastation of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020.”
“It is a great irony of this time that it has fallen to Joe Biden, a man implicated in some of these failures, to pull the country back from the brink.”
