INSIDE THE S--TSHOW THAT WAS THE TRUMP-BIDEN TRANSITION
How could a transition commence when the outgoing president was unwilling to give up his office? The task would fall to a little-known White House staffer who worked steps away from the Oval. His success would depend on keeping everything a secret from Donald Trump.Chris Liddell was one of several assistants to the president—first in the so-called Office of American Innovation, then as deputy chief of staff for policy coordination. A New Zealander, age 61, he’d been CFO of Microsoft and vice chairman of General Motors. He spoke with a Kiwi accent, called everyone “mate,” and drove a bright red 1960 Corvette convertible that stood out like a Christmas ornament among the limos and SUVs in the West Wing parking lot. But unlike other wealthy members of Trump’s team—Betsy DeVos, Wilbur Ross, and Steve Mnuchin among them—Liddell kept an expressly low profile. His passion was for process: organizing, managing, hitting targets. In 2012, he’d run Republican nominee Mitt Romney’s transition so competently that it became known as “the most beautiful ark that never sailed.” In a West Wing full of acolytes and conspiracy theorists, Liddell was a rarity for a top aide: a rational human being.
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The 2020 transition became a sub rosa operation. The president, publicly and privately, raged about a rigged election and threw up roadblocks, but the wheels of the transition kept turning. Ted Kaufman was amazed. “I thought they'd never cooperate with us on anything,” he told me. But Liddell, an obscure staffer who’d only recently become an American citizen, helped make the transfer of power possible, becoming an unlikely leader of a plot to save democracy.
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Chris Liddell became a lifeline for the Biden team, their secret weapon. Except when he had to be there, Liddell began to avoid the Oval Office—fearing Trump would ask him what he was doing. “It was kind of like the eye of Sauron,” said a senior adviser. “As long as you stayed out of it, you were okay.” The West Wing was now home to a Star Wars bar ensemble that included Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s increasingly erratic and irrational personal lawyer; Sidney Powell, the peddler of an election fraud theory involving software created by a dead Venezuelan dictator; and Mike Lindell, the unhinged MyPillow CEO. Ironically, for Liddell, Trump’s obsession with the fiction of a stolen election was a useful distraction—"because then I could just get on with doing my job.”
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Discreetly, Liddell reached out to the energetic and conscientious Mary Gibert, the Federal Transition Coordinator of the General Services Administration (GSA). A 40-year veteran, she was responsible for ensuring that the law was followed, whether Trump liked it or not. Together Gibert and Liddell would orchestrate the transfer of power. “Liddell was our conduit to keep everything moving,” she told me, “very quietly, under the radar.”
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A few days later, Liddell called his confidants Marchick and Bolten. "Remember that dinner we had where we talked about ‘the nightmare scenario’?” Liddell asked. “That's what we have." The nightmare scenario was Trump losing the election, but not by enough to convince him that he’d lost. Marchick explained: “Clearly, Liddell was in meetings in the White House where Trump said, ‘We're going to fight this and we're going to overturn it.’” Marchick feared Liddell was near the end of his rope. “He thought about quitting many times---and we’d say, ‘Hey, you can't quit.’”
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As far as Chris Liddell knew, January 6, 2021, promised to be a quiet day. Biden’s victory was to be certified by Vice President Mike Pence in a routine count of electoral votes at the U.S. Capitol. Liddell, who was doing his best to stay inconspicuous, could hardly wait. “I woke up in the morning in a good mood, thinking: Finally, we're going to get some resolution,” he said. “The vote's going to happen.” Liddell looked at the president’s schedule and noticed a rally on the Washington Ellipse at noon. But he thought little of it. His focus was on the 14 days between then and the inauguration.
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The television was on in Chris Liddell’s West Wing office. “And the next thing I knew, I was watching the insurrection,” he said. Liddell was horrified, incredulous: “Oh my God,’ I thought, these images are being beamed around the world.’ And then, ‘My job—which I thought was going to finally get easier—just became ten times harder.’” Heading downstairs, Liddell ran into his colleague Matt Pottinger, who was equally stunned. They looked at each other. “It was like, ‘Holy hell, how are we going to deal with this? What does this mean? Do we stay or do we go?’”
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That night, Liddell’s phone lit up. Friends and family were calling from around the world, urging him to resign. Trump had incited a violent insurrection, and Liddell wanted no part of it. He already owned it because he was there, he told himself—but he would doubly own it if he stayed on. Mary Gibert, the GSA Transition Coordinator, was in a state of near panic. “My biggest fear was that Chris Liddell was going to resign,” she said. “I called Dave Marchick and said, ‘Chris is not going to resign, is he? If he goes, everything will come to a screeching halt.’"
Bolten and Marchick got through to Liddell by phone. He was weeping. “And he's not a weepy kind of guy,” Bolten observed. “But he was so outraged and despairing about what had happened.” They appealed to Liddell’s love of his adopted country. “We said, ‘Look, if you leave, there is no sane person there to throw a flag. And so it's really important that you stick it out.’" If Liddell left, who would ensure that command and control were transferred from Trump to Biden at noon on January 20?
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Early the next morning, in the West Wing, Liddell met with O’Brien and Cipollone. If they had been thinking about resigning the day before, they were all having second thoughts now. As Liddell remembered it, “The group of us basically said, ‘Look, it's even more critical that we stay than it was before. This is going to be tough. Our reputations are at risk if something worse happens. But it's even more important that we stay—and if we go, who the hell will replace us?’”
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On the morning of the inauguration, after an awkward farewell ceremony on the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews, Air Force One lifted off with Donald Trump aboard, bound for his Florida exile. But Trump’s shadow remained. His presidency had changed everything.
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Josh Bolten believed the country had come perilously close to disaster. And not just on January 6. The hours before noon on Inauguration Day had been a time of maximum vulnerability. “The entire White House staff turns over,” he said. “So if something happens, even if somebody recognizes they're in charge, they don't know how to pull the levers to do anything. We wouldn’t have survived an episode on January 20 or 21 if Liddell hadn’t stuck around—if he’d not been there to make sure that all the proper stuff, the decision-making apparatus, was turned over.”
At 11:59 am, in the West Wing parking lot, Chris Liddell climbed into his red Corvette convertible. For the first time in months, he was at peace: “We all went through our own version of hell between January 6 and January 20. But I had an unbelievable sense of fulfillment that it was worth it to have stayed. Because we landed the plane safely and nothing bad happened on January 20.”
