20 days of fantasy and failure: Inside Trump’s quest
to overturn the election
By
Josh
Dawsey and
November 28, 2020 at 6:08 p.m. CST
The
facts were indisputable: President Trump had lost.
But
Trump refused to see it that way. Sequestered in the White House and brooding
out of public view after his election defeat, rageful and at times delirious in
a torrent of private conversations, Trump was, in the telling of one close
adviser, like “Mad King George, muttering, ‘I won. I won. I won.’ ”
However
cleareyed Trump’s aides may have been about his loss to President-elect Joe
Biden, many of them nonetheless indulged their boss and encouraged him to keep
fighting with legal appeals. They were “happy to scratch his itch,” this
adviser said. “If he thinks he won, it’s like, ‘Shh . . . we won’t tell
him.’ ”
Trump
campaign pollster John McLaughlin, for instance, discussed with Trump a poll he
had conducted after the election that showed Trump with a positive approval
rating, a plurality of the country who thought the media had been “unfair and
biased against him” and a majority of voters who believed their lives were
better than four years earlier, according to two people familiar with the
conversation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private
conversations. As expected, Trump lapped it up.
The
result was an election aftermath without precedent in U.S. history. With his
denial of the outcome, despite a string of courtroom defeats, Trump endangered
America’s democracy, threatened to undermine national security and public
health, and duped millions of his supporters into believing, perhaps
permanently, that Biden was elected illegitimately.
Trump’s
allegations and the hostility of his rhetoric — and his singular power to
persuade and galvanize his followers — generated extraordinary pressure on
state and local election officials to embrace his fraud allegations and take
steps to block certification of the results. When some of them refused, they
accepted security details for protection from the threats they were receiving.
“It was
like a rumor Whac-A-Mole,” said Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.
Despite being a Republican who voted for Trump, Raffensperger said he refused
repeated attempts by Trump allies to get him to cross ethical lines. “I don’t
think I had a choice. My job is to follow the law. We’re not going to get
pushed off the needle on doing that. Integrity still matters.”
All the
while, Trump largely abdicated the responsibilities of the job he was fighting
so hard to keep, chief among them managing the coronavirus pandemic
as the numbers of infections and deaths soared across the country. In an ironic
twist, the Trump adviser tapped to coordinate the post-election legal and
communications campaign, David Bossie, tested positive for the virus a few days
into his assignment and was sidelined.
Only on
Nov. 23 did Trump reluctantly agree to initiate a peaceful transfer of
power by permitting the federal government to officially begin Biden’s
transition — yet still he protested that he was the true victor.
The 20
days between the election on Nov. 3 and the greenlighting of Biden’s transition
exemplified some of the hallmarks of life in Trump’s White House: a government
paralyzed by the president’s fragile emotional state; advisers nourishing his
fables; expletive-laden feuds between factions of aides and advisers; and a
pernicious blurring of truth and fantasy.
Though
Trump ultimately failed in his quest to steal the election, his weeks-long
jeremiad succeeded in undermining faith in elections and the legitimacy of
Biden’s victory.
This
account of one of the final chapters in Trump’s presidency is based on
interviews with 32 senior administration officials, campaign aides and other
advisers to the president, as well as other key figures in his legal fight,
many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to share details about private
discussions and to candidly assess the situation.
In the
days after the election, as Trump scrambled for an escape hatch from reality,
the president largely ignored his campaign staff and the professional lawyers
who had guided him through the Russia investigation and the impeachment trial,
as well as the army of attorneys who stood ready to file legitimate court
challenges.
Instead,
Trump empowered loyalists who were willing to tell him what he wanted to hear —
that he would have won in a landslide had the election not been rigged and
stolen — and then to sacrifice their reputations by waging a campaign in
courtrooms and in the media to convince the public of that delusion.
The
effort culminated Nov. 19, when lawyers Rudolph W. Giuliani, Jenna Ellis
and Sidney Powell spoke on the president’s behalf at the headquarters of the
Republican National Committee to allege a far-reaching and coordinated plot to
steal the election for Biden. They argued that Democratic leaders rigged the
vote in a number of majority-Black cities, and that voting machines were
tampered with by communist forces in Venezuela at the direction of Hugo Chávez,
the Venezuelan leader who died seven years ago.
There
was no evidence to support any of these claims.
The
Venezuelan tale was too fantastical even for Trump, a man predisposed to
conspiracy theories who for years has feverishly spread fiction. Advisers
described the president as unsure about the latest gambit — made worse by the
fact that what looked like black hair dye mixed with sweat had formed a trail
dripping down both sides of Giuliani’s face during the news conference. Trump
thought the presentation made him “look like a joke,” according to one campaign
official who discussed it with him.
“I,
like everyone else, have yet to see any evidence of it, but it’s a thriller —
you’ve got Chávez, seven years after his death, orchestrating this
international conspiracy that politicians in both parties are funding,” a
Republican official said facetiously. “It’s an insane story.”
Aides
said the president was especially disappointed in Powell when Tucker Carlson,
host of Fox News’s most-watched program, assailed her credibility on
the air after she declined to provide any evidence to support her fraud claims.
Trump
pushed Powell out. And, after days of prodding by advisers, he agreed to permit
the General Services Administration to formally initiate the Biden transition —
a procedural step that amounted to a surrender. Aides said this was the closest
Trump would probably come to conceding the election.
Yet
even that incomplete surrender was short-lived. Trump went on to falsely claim
that he “won,” that the election was “a total scam” and that his legal
challenges would continue “full speed ahead.” He spent part of Thanksgiving
calling advisers to ask if they believed he really had lost the election,
according to a person familiar with the calls. “Do you think it was stolen?”
the person said Trump asked on the holiday.
But,
his advisers acknowledged, that was largely noise from a president still coming
to terms with losing. As November was coming to a close, Biden rolled out his
Cabinet picks, states certified his wins, electors planned to make it official
when the electoral college meets
Dec. 14 and federal judges spoke out.
A
simple and clear refutation of the president came Friday from a Trump
appointee, when Judge Stephanos Bibas of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd
Circuit wrote a unanimous opinion rejecting the president’s request for
an emergency injunction to overturn the certification of Pennsylvania’s
election results.
“Free,
fair elections are the lifeblood of our democracy,” Bibas wrote. “Charges of
unfairness are serious. But calling an election unfair does not make it so.
Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here.”
For
Trump, it was over.
“Not
only did our institutions hold, but the most determined effort by a president
to overturn the people’s verdict in American history really didn’t get
anywhere,” said William A. Galston, chair of the governance studies program at
the Brookings Institution. “It’s not that it fell short. It didn’t get
anywhere. This, to me, is remarkable.”
'There
has to be a conspiracy'
Trump’s
devolution into disbelief of the results began on election night in the White
House, where he joined campaign manager Bill Stepien, senior advisers Jared
Kushner and Jason Miller, and other top aides in a makeshift war room to
monitor returns.
In the
run-up to the election, Trump was aware of the fact — or likelihood, according
to polls — that he could lose. He commented a number of times to aides, “Oh,
wouldn’t it be embarrassing to lose to this guy?”
But in
the final stretch of the campaign, nearly everyone — including the president —
believed he was going to win. And early on election night, Trump and his team
thought they were witnessing a repeat of 2016, when he defied polls and
expectations to build an insurmountable lead in the electoral college.
Then
Fox News called Arizona for Biden.
“He was
yelling at everyone,” a senior administration official recalled of Trump’s
reaction. “He was like, ‘What the hell? We were supposed to be winning Arizona.
What’s going on?’ He told Jared to call [News Corp. Executive Chairman Rupert]
Murdoch.”
Efforts
by Kushner and others on the Trump team to persuade Fox to take back its
Arizona call failed.
Trump
and his advisers were furious, in part because calling Arizona for Biden
undermined Trump’s scattershot plan to declare victory on election night if it
looked as though he had sizable leads in enough states.
With
Biden now just one state away from clinching a majority 270 votes in the
electoral college and the media narrative turned sharply against him, Trump
decided to claim fraud. And his team set out to try to prove it.
Throughout
the summer and fall, Trump had laid the groundwork for claiming a “rigged”
election, as he often termed it, warning of widespread fraud. Former chief of
staff John F. Kelly told others that Trump was “getting his excuse ready for
when he loses the election,” according to a person who heard his comments.
In
June, during an Oval Office meeting with political advisers and outside
consultants, Trump raised the prospect of suing state governments for how they
administer elections and said he could not believe they were allowed to change
the rules. All the states, he said, should follow the same rules. Advisers told
him that he did not want the federal government in charge of elections.
Trump
also was given several presentations by his campaign advisers about the likely
surge in mail-in ballots — in part because many Americans felt safer during the
pandemic voting by mail than in person — and was told they would go overwhelmingly
against him, according to a former campaign official.
Advisers
and allies, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.),
encouraged Trump to try to close the gap in mail-in voting, arguing that he
would need some of his voters, primarily seniors, to vote early by mail. But
Trump instead exhorted his supporters not to vote by mail, claiming they could
not trust that their ballots would be counted.
“It was
sort of insane,” the former campaign official said.
Ultimately,
it was the late count of mail-in ballots that erased Trump’s early leads in
Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and other battleground states and propelled
Biden to victory. As Trump watched his margins shrink and then reverse, he
became enraged, and he saw a conspiracy at play.
“You
really have to understand Trump’s psychology,” said Anthony Scaramucci, a
longtime Trump associate and former White House communications director who is
now estranged from the president. “The classic symptoms of an outsider is,
there has to be a conspiracy. It’s not my shortcomings, but there’s a cabal
against me. That’s why he’s prone to these conspiracy theories.”
This
fall, deputy campaign manager Justin Clark, Republican National Committee
counsel Justin Riemer and others laid plans for post-election litigation,
lining up law firms across the country for possible recounts and ballot
challenges, people familiar with the work said. This was the kind of
preparatory work presidential campaigns typically do before elections.
Giuliani, Ellis and Powell were not involved.
This
team had some wins in court against Democrats in a flurry of lawsuits in the
months leading up to the election, on issues ranging from absentee ballot
deadlines to signature-matching rules.
But
Trump’s success rate in court would change considerably after Nov. 3. The
arguments that began pouring in from Giuliani and others on Trump’s
post-election legal team left federal judges befuddled. In one Pennsylvania
case, some lawyers left the Trump team before Giuliani argued the case to a
judge. Giuliani had met with the lawyers and wanted to make arguments they were
uncomfortable making, campaign advisers said.
For
example, the Trump campaign argued in federal court in Philadelphia two days
after the election to stop the count because Republican observers had been
barred. Under sharp questioning from Judge Paul S. Diamond, however, campaign
lawyers conceded that Trump in fact had “a nonzero number of people in the
room,” leaving Diamond audibly exasperated.
“I’m
sorry, then what’s your problem?” Diamond asked.
'How do
we get to 270?'
In the
days following the election, few states drew Trump’s attention like Georgia, a
once-reliable bastion of Republican votes that he carried in 2016 but appeared
likely to lose narrowly to Biden as late-remaining votes were tallied.
And few
people attracted Trump’s anger like Gov. Brian Kemp, the state’s Republican
governor, who rode the president’s coattails to his own narrow victory in 2018.
A
number of Trump allies tried to pressure Raffensperger, the Republican
secretary of state, into putting his thumb on the scale. Republican Sens. David
Perdue and Kelly Loeffler — both forced into runoff elections on Jan. 5 —
demanded Raffensperger’s resignation. Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), a Trump
friend who chairs the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee, called Raffensperger
to seemingly encourage him to find a way to toss legal ballots.
But
Kemp, who preceded Raffensperger as secretary of state, would not do Trump’s
bidding. “He wouldn’t be governor if it wasn’t for me,” Trump fumed to advisers
earlier this month as he plotted out a call to scream at Kemp.
In the
call, Trump urged Kemp to do more to fight for him in Georgia, publicly echo
his claims of fraud and appear more regularly on television. Kemp was
noncommittal, a person familiar with the call said.
Raffensperger
said he knew Georgia was going to be thrust into the national spotlight on
Election Day, when dramatically fewer people turned out to vote in person than
the Trump campaign needed for a clear win following a surge of mail voting
dominated by Democratic voters.
But he
said it had never occurred to him to go along with Trump’s unproven allegations
because of his duty to administer elections. Raffensperger said his strategy
was to keep his head down and follow the law.
“People
made wild accusations about the voting systems that we have in Georgia,”
Raffensperger said. “They were asking, ‘How do we get to 270? How do you get it
to Congress so they can make a determination?’ ” But, he added, “I’m not supposed to put my thumb on the Republican side.”
Trump
fixated on a false conspiracy theory that the machines manufactured by Dominion
Voting Systems and used in Georgia and other states had been programmed to
count Trump votes as Biden votes. In myriad private conversations, the
president would find a way to come back to Dominion. He was obsessed.
“Do you
think there’s really something here? I’m hearing . . . ” Trump
would say, according to one senior official who discussed it with him.
Raffensperger
said Republicans were only harming themselves by questioning the integrity of
the Dominion machines. He warned that these kinds of baseless allegations could
discourage Republicans from voting in the Senate runoffs. “People need to get a
grip on reality,” he said.
More
troubling to Raffensperger were the many threats he and his wife, Tricia, have
received over the past few weeks — and a break-in at another family member’s
home. All of it has prompted him to accept a state security detail.
“If
Republicans don’t start condemning this stuff, then I think they’re really
complicit in it,” he said. “It’s time to stand up and be counted. Are you going
to stand for righteousness? Are you going to stand for integrity? Or are you
going to stand for the wild mob? You wanted to condemn the wild mob when it’s
on the left side. What are you going to do when it’s on our side?”
On
Nov. 20, after Raffensperger certified the state’s results, Kemp announced
that he would make a televised statement, stoking fears that the president
might have finally gotten to the governor.
“This
can’t be good,” Jordan Fuchs, a Raffensperger deputy, wrote in a text message.
But
Kemp held firm and formalized the certification.
“As
governor, I have a solemn responsibility to follow the law, and that is what I
will continue to do,” Kemp said. “We must all work together to ensure citizens
have confidence in future elections in our state.”
'A hostile
takeover'
On
Nov. 7, four days after the election, every major news organization
projected that Biden would win the presidency. At the same time, Giuliani stood
before news cameras in the parking lot of Four Seasons Total Landscaping in Philadelphia,
near an adult-video shop and a crematorium, to detail alleged examples of voter
fraud.
The
contrast that day between Giuliani’s humble, eccentric surroundings and Biden’s
and Vice President-elect Kamala D. Harris’s victory speeches on a grand,
blue-lit stage in Wilmington, Del., underscored the virtual impossibility of
Trump’s quest to overturn the results.
Also
that day, Stepien, Clark, Miller and Bossie briefed Trump on a potential legal
strategy for the president’s approval. They explained that prevailing would be
difficult and involve complicated plays in every state that could stretch into
December. They estimated a “5 to 10 percent chance of winning,” one person
involved in the meeting said.
Trump
signaled that he understood and agreed to the strategy.
Around
this time, some lawyers around Trump began to suddenly disappear from the
effort in what some aides characterized as an attempt to protect their
reputations.
Former
Florida attorney general Pam Bondi, who had appeared at a news conference with
Giuliani right after the election, ceased her involvement after the first week.
“Literally
only the fringy of the fringe are willing to do pressers, and that’s when it
became clear there was no ‘there’ there,” a senior administration official
said.
A
turning point for the Trump campaign’s legal efforts came on Nov. 13, when its
core team of professional lawyers saw the writing on the wall. The U.S. Court
of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit in Philadelphia delivered a stinging defeat to
Trump allies in a lawsuit trying to invalidate all Pennsylvania ballots
received after Election Day.
The
decision didn’t just reject the claim; it denied the plaintiffs standing in any
federal challenge under the Constitution’s electors clause — an outcome that Trump’s
legal team recognized as a potentially fatal blow to many of the campaign’s
challenges in the state.
That is
when a gulf emerged between the outlooks of most lawyers on the team and of
Giuliani, who many of the other lawyers thought seemed “deranged” and
ill-prepared to litigate, according to a person familiar with the campaign’s
legal team. Some of the Trump campaign and Republican Party lawyers sought to
even avoid meetings with Giuliani and his team. When asked for evidence
internally for their most explosive claims, Giuliani and Powell could not
provide it, the other advisers said.
Giuliani
and his protegee, Ellis, both striving to please the president, insisted
Trump’s fight was not over. Someone familiar with their strategy said they were
“performing for an audience of one,” and that Trump held Giuliani in high
regard as “a fighter” and as “his peer.”
Tensions
within Trump’s team came to a head that weekend, when Giuliani and Ellis staged
what the senior administration official called “a hostile takeover” of what
remained of the Trump campaign.
On the
afternoon of Nov. 13, a Friday, Trump called Giuliani from the Oval Office
while other advisers were present, including Vice President Pence; White House
counsel Pat Cipollone; Johnny McEntee, the director of presidential personnel;
and Clark.
Giuliani,
who was on speakerphone, told the president that he could win and that his
other advisers were lying to him about his chances. Clark called Giuliani an
expletive and said he was feeding the president bad information. The meeting
ended without a clear path, according to people familiar with the discussion.
The
next day, a Saturday, Trump tweeted out that Giuliani, Ellis, Powell and others
were now in charge of his legal strategy. Ellis startled aides by entering the
campaign’s Arlington headquarters and instructing staffers that they must now
listen to her and Giuliani.
“They
came in one day and were like, ‘We have the president’s direct order. Don’t
take an order if it doesn’t come from us,’ ” a senior administration official recalled.
Clark
and Miller pushed back, the official said. Ellis threatened to call Trump, to
which Miller replied, “Sure, let’s do this,” said a campaign adviser.
It was
a fiery altercation, not unlike the many that had played out over the past four
years in the corridors of the West Wing. The outcome was that Giuliani and
Ellis, as well as Powell — the “elite strike force,” as they dubbed themselves
— became the faces of the president’s increasingly unrealistic attempts to
subvert democracy.
The
strategy, according to a second senior administration official, was, “Anyone
who is willing to go out and say, ‘They stole it,’ roll them out. Rudy
Giuliani, Jenna Ellis, Sidney Powell. Send [former acting director of national intelligence]
Ric Grenell out West. Send [American Conservative Union Chairman] Matt Schlapp
somewhere. Just roll everybody up who is willing to do it into a clown car, and
when it’s time for a press conference, roll them out.”
Trump
and his allies made a series of brazen legal challenges, including in Nevada,
where conservative activist Sharron Angle asked a court to block certification
of the results in Clark County, by far the state’s most populous county, and
order a wholesale do-over of the election.
Clark
County Judge Gloria Sturman was incredulous.
“How do
you get to that’s sufficient to throw out an entire election?” she said. She
noted the practical implications of failing to certify the election, including
that every official elected on Nov. 3 would be unable to take office in
the new year, including herself.
Sturman
denied the request. Not only was there no evidence to support the claims of
widespread voter fraud, she said, but “as a matter of public policy, this is
just a bad idea.”
'A flavor
of the truth'
Trump delivers remarks at the White House on Nov. 20. (Jabin
Botsford/The Washington Post)
As
Trump’s legal challenges failed in court, he employed another tactic to try to
reverse the result: a public pressure campaign on
state and local Republican officials to manipulate the electoral system on his
behalf.
“As was
the case throughout his business career, he viewed the rules as instruments to
be manipulated to achieve his chosen ends,” said Galston of the Brookings
Institution.
Trump’s
highest-profile play came in Michigan, where Biden was the projected winner and
led by more than 150,000 votes. On Nov. 17, Trump called a Republican
member of the board of canvassers in Wayne County, which is where Detroit is
located and is the state’s most populous county. After speaking with the
president, the board member, Monica Palmer, attempted to rescind her vote to
certify Biden’s win in Wayne.
Then
Trump invited the leaders of Michigan’s Republican-controlled state Senate and
House to meet him at the White House, apparently hoping to coax them to block
certification of the results or perhaps even to ignore Biden’s popular-vote win
and seat Trump electors if the state’s canvassing board deadlocked. Such a move
was on shaky legal ground, but that didn’t stop the president from trying.
Republican
and Democratic leaders, including current and former governors and members of
Congress, immediately launched a full-court press to urge the legislative
leaders to resist Trump’s entreaties. The nonpartisan Voter Protection Program
was so worried that it commissioned a poll to find out how Michiganders felt
about his intervention. The survey found that a bipartisan majority did not
like Trump intervening and believed that Biden won the state.
House
Speaker Lee Chatfield and Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey said they
accepted the invitation as a courtesy and issued a joint statement immediately
after the meeting: “We have not yet been made aware of any information that
would change the outcome of the election in Michigan.”
A
person familiar with their thinking said they felt they could not decline the
president’s invitation — plus they saw an opportunity to deliver to Trump “a
flavor of the truth and what he wasn’t hearing in his own echo chamber,” as
well as to make a pitch for coronavirus relief for their state.
There
was never a moment when the lawmakers contemplated stepping in on Trump’s
behalf, because Michigan law does not allow it, this person said. Before the
trip, lawyers for the lawmakers told their colleagues in the legislature that
there was nothing feasible in what Trump was trying to do, and that it was
“absolute crazy talk” for the Michigan officials to contemplate defying the
will of the voters, this person added.
Trump
was scattered in the meeting, interrupting to talk about the coronavirus when
the lawmakers were talking about the election, and then talking about the
election when they were talking about the coronavirus, the person said. The
lawmakers left with the impression that the president understood little about
Michigan law, but also that his blinders had fallen off about his prospects for
reversing the outcome, the person added.
No
representatives from Trump’s campaign attended the meeting, and advisers talked
Trump out of scheduling a similar one with Pennsylvania officials.
The
weekend of Nov. 21 and on Monday, Nov. 23, Trump faced mounting pressure from
Republican senators and former national security officials — as well as from
some of his most trusted advisers — to end his stalemate with Biden and authorize the General Services
Administration to initiate the transition. The bureaucratic step would
allow Biden and his administration-in-waiting to tap public funds to run their
transition, receive security briefings and gain access to federal agencies to
prepare for the Jan. 20 takeover.
Trump
was reluctant, believing that by authorizing the transition, he would in effect
be conceding the election. Over multiple days, White House Chief of Staff Mark
Meadows, Cipollone and Jay Sekulow, one of the president’s personal attorneys,
explained to Trump that the transition had nothing to do with conceding and
that legitimate challenges could continue, according to someone familiar with
the conversations.
Late on
Nov. 23, Trump announced that he had allowed the transition to move forward
because it was “in the best interest of our Country,” but he kept up his fight
over the election results.
The
next day, after a conversation with Giuliani, Trump decided to visit Gettysburg,
Pa., on Nov. 25, the day before Thanksgiving, for a news conference at a
Wyndham Hotel to highlight alleged voter fraud. The plan caught many close to
the president by surprise, including RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, three
officials said. Some tried to talk Trump out of the trip, but he thought it was
a good idea to appear with Giuliani.
A few
hours before he was scheduled to depart, the trip was scuttled. “Bullet
dodged,” said one campaign adviser. “It would have been a total humiliation.”
That afternoon,
Trump called in to the meeting of GOP state senators at the Wyndham, where
Giuliani and Ellis were addressing attendees. He spoke via a scratchy
connection to Ellis’s cellphone, which she played on speaker. At one point, the
line beeped to signal another caller.
“If you
were a Republican poll watcher, you were treated like a dog,” Trump complained,
using one of his favorite put-downs, even though many people treat dogs well,
like members of their own families.
“This
election was lost by the Democrats,” he said, falsely. “They cheated.”
Trump
demanded that state officials overturn the results — but the count had already
been certified. Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral votes will be awarded to Biden.
Emma
Brown, Beth Reinhard and Michael Scherer in Washington and Tom Hamburger in
Detroit contributed to this report.
