How did we get here?

[Capernum]

This series is/is going to be a fantastic read:


"Jared, you call the Murdochs! Jason, you call Sammon and Hemmer!”

President Trump was almost shouting. He directed his son-in-law and his senior strategist from his private quarters at the White House late on election night. He barked out the names of top Fox News executives and talent he expected to answer to him.

“And anyone else — anyone else who will take the call," he said. “Tell these guys they got to change it, they got it wrong. It’s way too early. Not even CNN is calling it.”

As the clock ticked over into the first minutes of Nov. 4, Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani ranted to top campaign aides: "There's no way he lost; this thing must have been stolen. Just say we won Michigan! Just say we won Georgia! Just say we won the election! He needs to go out and claim victory." Trump’s campaign manager Bill Stepien later told associates: "That was ****ing crazy."

For weeks, Trump had been laying the groundwork to declare victory on election night — even if he lost. But the real-time results, punctuated by Fox’s shocking call, upended his plans and began his unraveling.

Trump had planned for Americans to go to bed on Nov. 3 celebrating — or resigned to — his re-election. The maps they saw on TV should be bathed in red. But at 11:20 p.m. that vision fell apart, as the nation’s leading news channel among conservatives became the first outlet to call Arizona for Joe Biden. Inside the White House, Trump's inner circle erupted in horror.

Over the next two months, Trump took the nation down with him as he descended into denial, despair and a reckless revenge streak that fueled a deadly siege on the U.S. Capitol by his backers seeking to overturn the election. This triggered a constitutional crisis and a bipartisan push to impeach Trump on his way out the door, to try to cast him out of American politics for good.

But in four years, Trump had remade the Republican Party in his own image, inspiring and activating tens of millions of Americans who weren’t abandoning him anytime soon. He’d once bragged he could shoot another person on Fifth Avenue and not lose his voters. In reality, many of them had eagerly lined up to commit violence on his behalf.

As Trump prepared for Election Day, he was focused on the so-called red mirage. This was the idea that early vote counts would look better for Republicans than the final tallies because Democrats feared COVID-19 more and would disproportionately cast absentee votes that would take longer to count. Trump intended to exploit this — to weaponize it for his vast base of followers.

His preparations were deliberate, strategic and deeply cynical. Trump wanted Americans to believe a falsehood that there were two elections — a legitimate election composed of in-person voting, and a separate, fraudulent election involving bogus mail-in ballots for Democrats.

In the initial hours after returns closed, it looked like his plan could work. Trump was on track for easy wins in Florida and Ohio, and held huge — though deceptive — early leads in Pennsylvania and Michigan.

But as Bill Hemmer narrated a live "what if" scenario on his election telestrator from Studio F of Fox’s gargantuan Manhattan headquarters, the anchor sounded confused. "What is this happening here? Why is Arizona blue?" he asked on camera, prodding the image of the state on the touch screen, unable to flip its color. "Did we just call it? Did we make a call in Arizona?" Because of a minor communication breakdown, Hemmer's screen had turned Arizona blue before he or the other anchors, Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum, found out that Fox’s Decision Desk had called it.

Trump was steaming and he wanted to see his top aides immediately. His son-in-law Jared Kushner, chief of staff Mark Meadows, campaign manager Stepien, senior strategist Jason Miller, and data cruncher Matt Oczkowski took the elevator up to the third floor of the residence at the White House. They met Trump and the first lady halfway between his bedroom and the living room at the end of the hall. Trump peppered them with questions. What happened? What the hell is going on at Fox?

Oczkowski told Trump that based on the campaign’s modeling he thought Fox was wrong and “we’re going to narrowly win” by maybe 10,000 votes or less, “razor close.” But the reality was, hundreds of thousands of votes were outstanding in Maricopa County and the picture was too cloudy to be sure. Then Trump told Kushner to call the Murdochs.

The team had been cautiously optimistic that they were watching a repeat of Trump’s poll-defying 2016 victory. In the West Wing, mid-level staffers congregated in the hallways buzzing with nervous excitement and anticipation. At the residence about 200 guests — donors, Cabinet secretaries, White House physician Sean Conley, TV boosters Diamond and Silk, and other VIPs — gathered for the official election night party. They munched on beef sliders. Most did not wear masks.

Giuliani was stationed at a table amid the party, laptop open, watching the results come in, as if he were Command Central. His son, White House official Andrew Giuliani, sat at his right. Trump's tight inner circle — children Don Jr., Eric, Ivanka, plus his long-time adviser Hope Hicks, White House deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino and a few others — gathered separately in the Old Family Dining Room to watch the returns on TV. Trump's core campaign team monitored precinct-level results from down in the Map Room on the ground floor, the same room where FDR had once tracked fighting during World War II.

Trump had spent a bellicose summer and early autumn railing against mail-in ballots. After a toxic Sept. 29 election debate with Biden, Trump's internal poll numbers nose-dived. He started choreographing election night in earnest during the second week of October, as he recovered from COVID-19.

His former chief of staff Reince Priebus told a friend he was stunned when Trump called him around that time and acted out his script, including walking up to a podium and prematurely declaring victory on election night if it looked like he was ahead.

White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller's speechwriting team had prepared three skeleton speeches for election night for all the possible scenarios: a clear victory, a clear loss, and an indeterminate result. But the speechwriters knew that if Trump was facing anything other than a resounding victory, the words would be his alone. This president would never admit defeat or urge patience.

The top officials tried to force Fox to retract its call. Kushner called Rupert Murdoch, who said he would see what was going on. Hicks, a former Fox executive, texted current Fox executive and ex-White House staffer Raj Shah. Hicks also gave Fox News president Jay Wallace's phone number to top Trump campaign officials. The Trump campaign's senior-most officials aggressively texted anchors MacCallum and Baier. Throughout the night, a number of Fox commentators friendly to Trump — including Tucker Carlson — questioned the Arizona call on the air. But the call stood.

Making the situation even more awkward, several high-profile Fox News personalities, including "Judge" Jeanine Pirro, were at the White House while their own network spoiled what was supposed to be a victory party.

It was shortly after 1 a.m. on Nov. 4 when Trump finally came down from his living quarters to the main corridor on the second floor of his private residence. His inner circle met him halfway. This was the first time most of them had seen the president that night. About a dozen aides and relatives huddled around Trump as he dictated an improvised speech. Stephen Miller sat on a couch furiously typing the president's stream-of-consciousness thoughts. Aides rushed to print out screenshots of cable news graphics showing Trump's illusory early leads in the key Midwest states. By 2 a.m., Trump wanted to know why he couldn't just say he had won and be done with it.

The speechwriters sent a draft to Trump’s longtime teleprompter operator, stationed at his laptop in a small room adjoining the East Room. The draft did not include the words that became the most infamous line of his speech: “Frankly, we did win this election.”

At 2:20 a.m., maskless aides and supporters in the East Room held up cellphones to record Trump, the first lady, Vice President Mike Pence and his wife walking out to waiting cameras as "Hail to the Chief" played. Dozens of American flags lined the backdrop behind them.

Trump declared victory — and announced that Democrats were perpetrating a giant fraud on the American people.

Both claims were lies.

Off the Rails: Trump's premeditated election lie lit the fire

Axios takes you inside the collapse with a special series.

www.axios.com

 

[Capernum]

Episode 2: Trump stops buying what his professional staff are telling him, and increasingly turns to radical voices telling him what he wants to hear. Read episode 1.

President Trump plunked down in an armchair in the White House residence, still dressed from his golf game — navy fleece, black pants, white MAGA cap. It was Saturday, Nov. 7. The networks had just called the election for Joe Biden.

In the Yellow Oval Room, the same room where FDR learned of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, stewards brought hors d’oeuvres on trays while Trump gathered his closest political advisers to assess what options he had left.

Top aides including campaign manager Bill Stepien, senior adviser Jason Miller, conservative political activist and external Trump adviser David Bossie, and Justin Clark, the deputy campaign manager, leveled with him. As they saw it, he had one last long shot at victory. It would require them to win enough outstanding votes in Arizona and Georgia to squeak home in those two states, and to win a legal challenge to election practices in Wisconsin.

"You have a 5% to 10% chance of this happening," Clark told the president. "But all of these things have to go right.” Trump listened calmly and told them their plan was worth a shot.

But it would never get off the ground. Plan B, driven by Rudy Giuliani and a parallel track of conspiracists, was already coming together, unfolding before the original advisers' own eyes.

It would soon overtake the campaign's legal operation, feeding the president false claims including the idea that the election could be overturned.

On the day after the election, Nov. 4, top staff including Stepien, Clark, Miller, general counsel Matthew Morgan and Jared Kushner had gathered at Trump campaign headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. They believed this would be a serious search for a path to 270 electoral votes through credible legal challenges.

Then Giuliani, Sidney Powell and a swelling conspiracy crew marched into the room — literally.

These two groups — the professional staff and the Giuliani cabal — filled in around one long, rectangular table in a conference room walled in by frosted glass. The pattern repeated itself the day after that and the day after that.

A bizarre routine set in. These meetings would begin with official staff raising plausible legal strategies. Then Giuliani and Powell, a lawyer with a history of floating “deep state” conspiracy theories, would take over, spewing wild allegations of a centralized plot by Democrats — and in Powell's view, international communists — to steal the election.

Bewildered campaign aides would look around the table at one another, silently asking what the hell was going on. One would invariably shuffle out of the room, followed by another a few minutes later. Then another. Then another. The professional staff would reconvene in Stepien's office, about 20 yards down the hall.

Eventually, Giuliani would realize that he and his crew were alone in the conference room. He'd walk down the hall and knock on the glass outside Stepien's office, where about eight aides had squeezed onto a pair of couches. "You guys, where did you go?" Giuliani would say. "This is serious!"

Asked to provide comment on this reporting, which was confirmed by two sources in the room, Powell said in an emailed statement to Axios: "Your story is materially false, but I'm sure the 'elitist and consultant class' that make millions of dollars lying to the American people are behind it and will push that propaganda." Giuliani did not respond to a request for comment.

Officials including Clark, Morgan and Bossie, who played a key role in Trump's 2016 victory, spent many hours trying to stop the former New York mayor from running to the press or the president and muddling the campaign's legal approach. But they were outmatched, and Trump was tweeting his own spiraling conspiracies.

The numbers in Pennsylvania and Georgia kept getting worse. Top officials knew the election was getting away from them. Even the Giuliani-free meetings were overcome with paralysis.

The White House became a strange ghost town in the days after the election. Trump's schedule — already unstructured — became more so. It was impossible to shift his focus from his grievances about the election to important policy matters. In conversations in the Oval Office, Trump would occasionally slip and seem to acknowledge he lost, saying, "Can you believe I lost to that ****ing guy? That ****ing corpse?"

Most in the West Wing, including chief of staff Mark Meadows, understood that Trump had lost. But nobody confronted him directly with that unpleasant news. Instead many on the staff chose to avoid him.

Some of the senior staff argued that Trump should spend this post-election period claiming credit for the GOP's strong congressional performances in the elections and to burnish his legacy, by talking about his achievements in office and the pace of the Operation Warp Speed vaccine development. But Trump wouldn't allow his team to move on. To be around him meant you had to accommodate some measure of denial.

Senior White House staff and health officials maintained a standing 9 a.m. “COVID huddle” in the Roosevelt Room. They talked through the vaccine rollout, which would continue into 2021. Left unsaid was that they had lost the election and wouldn’t be around to see it fully through. Aides could only discuss the reality of Trump's loss in more private settings.

Trump's closest aides said they wanted to give him space to experience all the stages of grief. But he rarely made it past the denial stage. And many of his aides made themselves scarce, worried that if they found themselves in the Oval Office they could be sucked into conversations that could force them to incur hefty legal bills down the track.

Trump's most devoted aides did whatever they could to buck up his spirits, even if it meant indulging his delusions. Sometimes it was hard to tell if they were humoring Trump or had tipped over into fantastical thinking themselves. In late November, the head of the Presidential Personnel Office, Trump's former body man John McEntee, told colleagues they ought to get together to discuss second-term priorities. Not many were enthusiastic.

Biden was declared the winner of Arizona on Nov. 12, by more than 11,000 votes, a margin that was uncatchable. At that point, the core campaign team told Trump his pathway was dead. In retaliation, Trump stopped listening to them. Giuliani was gaining influence, speaking directly with the president and demanding to be put in charge.

On Nov. 13, Clark was in the Cabinet room of the White House with Stepien, Miller and campaign aide Erin Perrine for a meeting on communications strategy when deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino summoned Clark into the Oval Office to settle a legal question.

Trump had Giuliani on speakerphone, and Giuliani, seemingly unaware of Clark’s arrival, was trashing the campaign staff's legal strategy in Georgia — and floating a debunked conspiracy theory about rigged Dominion voting machines.

"Hey, I've got Justin in here," Trump interrupted. "What do you think, Justin?" Clark laid out the legal process in Georgia and told the packed Oval Office that Georgia state law barred requesting a recount until after an election is certified.

"They're lying to you, sir!" Giuliani erupted.

"We're not lying," Clark shot back. "You're a f*cking a$$hole, Rudy."

The following night — without notifying his campaign staff — Trump tweeted that he was putting Giuliani in charge of his legal challenges, along with pro-Trump lawyers Powell, Joseph diGenova, Victoria Toensing and Jenna Ellis.

Republican National Committee officials were not happy about this. They rejected a request to fund TV commercials claiming the election was "stolen.” But they greenlit a press conference on Nov. 19, a debut for the new legal team.

It played like a B movie. Black sweat, apparently from hair dye, rolled down Giuliani's face as he rambled about a supposed Democratic conspiracy to rig the vote in major cities. Powell, once a respected federal prosecutor, alleged an international communist plot by Cuba, China, Venezuela, George Soros, and the Clinton Foundation.

Senior party officials were mortified but felt helpless. This was the Giuliani show now. The barbarians were in the Oval. The rest of the Republican Party was just along for the ride.

 

[Hawk It Up]

The tell-all books are going to have outrageous claims in them about his behavior in office.

The large majority of which will be true.

 

[billanole]

The tell-all books are going to have outrageous claims in them about his behavior in office.

The large majority of which will be true.

I belly laffed at your post and then had to reflect on how poorly this circus reflects on our America.
Wow, how the mighty have fallen.

 

[Hawk It Up]

I belly laffed at your post and then had to reflect on how poorly this circus reflects on our America.
Wow, how the mighty have fallen.

Yeah, that wasn’t intend to be taken as humor.