How
Trump’s erratic behavior and failure
on coronavirus doomed his reelection
The
same impulses that helped lift the president tovictory in 2016 contributed to his undoing four years later.
(Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
(Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post)
(Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
By
Ashley
Parker,
Josh
Dawsey,
Matt
Viser and
Michael
Scherer
Air Force One was descending into Detroit
when President Trump posed a question that would come to define his entire
approach to the deadly coronavirus pandemic: “Do you think I should wear a
mask?” he asked the aides and advisers gathered in the plane’s front cabin.
Trump was headed to visit a Ford Motor
plant in Ypsilanti, Mich., which by May was already a coronavirus hot zone,
with more
than 5,000 dead, thousands more sickened — and cases still spiking —
in the critical Midwest battleground state.
But the responses were nearly unanimous,
with senior White House officials arguing that wearing a mask was unnecessary
and would send a bad signal to the public about the magnitude of the crisis.
You’re the leader of the free world, they
told him, and the leader of the free world doesn’t need a mask.
The conclusion of the episode — like so
much of Trump’s presidency and reelection campaign — was a muddle. The
president donned a mask for his private tour of the Ford plant as required by
company rules, but took it off before appearing in public, telling the
assembled media, “I didn’t want to give the press the pleasure of seeing
it.”
Around the same time, on a Zoom call with
a core group of advisers, former vice president Joe Biden posed a similar
question — “Should I wear a mask when I go out?” — in preparation for a
Memorial Day visit with his wife, Jill, to a Delaware veterans park.
The occasion marked the first time Biden
would leave his house in 71 days, and his aides were unanimous in their
response: Of course he should wear a mask.
The group discussed whether he needed a
highly protective N95 mask or if a cloth one would suffice since he would be
outside, and decided on a cloth mask. His team specially procured black masks
from a local business for the somber occasion.
For the event, Biden emerged from a large
black SUV wearing aviator shades and a large black mask. He kept it on while
laying a wreath of cream roses. And he kept the mask on while talking — “It
feels good to be out of my house,” he said — only removing it when he was
safely back in the vehicle.
Trump and his allies were quick to mock
Biden and his mask, but the Democrat embraced the image, changing his social
media avatar to a picture of him staring into the camera while wearing dark
sunglasses and the black face covering.
“Wear a mask,” Biden tweeted.
President Trump made a mask less stance at
the White House upon returning from treatment for covid-19 at Walter Reed
National Military Medical Center. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
As Biden worked his way toward eventual
victory, the mask would become a symbol of his entire campaign — a durable
cloth representation of Biden’s caution and deliberation, his steady leadership
style, his adherence to science and facts, his reassuring vanilla decency.
The story of Biden’s victory is as much
the story of Trump’s defeat — a devastating coda for a leader who has long
feared weakness and losing above almost all else, but who became the first
one-term president in nearly 30 years.
Trump was the most unpopular president of modern
times: Divisive and alienating, he rarely sought to reach out to the middle and
his erratic behavior and harder-edged policies were strongly opposed by most
Americans. Even before this year, his reelection would have been difficult.
But the president finally lost, aides and
allies said, because of how he mismanaged the virus. He lost, they said, over
the summer, when the virus didn’t go away as he promised; when racial unrest
roiled the nation in the wake of George Floyd’s death and protesters ran
rampant through the streets; and when federal
and local authorities gassed largely peaceful demonstrators in
Lafayette Square across from the White House so Trump could stage a photo op.
And he lost, they said, during a roughly three-week stretch from late September
to mid-October, when an angry and brooding Trump heckled and interrupted his
way through the first debate and then, several days later, announced he had
tested positive for the coronavirus.
He also lost, aides added, after years of
confrontational and incendiary conduct turned off independent voters, who
finally said they had seen enough.
The same impulses that helped lift him to
victory in 2016 — the outsider ethos; the angry, burn-it-all-down cri de coeur;
the fiery and controversial rants; the false reality forged through untruths
and deception — contributed to his undoing just four years later. Exhausted
voters in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, who once gave Trump a shot,
turned on him Tuesday.
“If he loses, it’s going to be because of
covid,” Ronna McDaniel, chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, said
shortly before Election Day.
This portrait of how Biden defeated Trump
— and how Trump helped sabotage his own hopes for a second term — is the result
of interviews with 65 Trump and Biden aides, advisers, confidants, lawmakers
and political operatives, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to
share candid details of the 2020 campaign.
From the beginning, Trump and Biden made
wildly different bets on the path to victory in 2020, taking divergent routes
on nearly everything: from tone and message, to how to run their respective
campaigns — and whether to wear a mask.
Throughout his first term, Trump was a
leader who governed as he had first campaigned — freewheeling, chaotic, and as
an outsider — despite now being the incumbent. He was controversial, profane
and used racist rhetoric, offering up grievance-filled tirades that portrayed
himself as the victim.
Biden, who said his decision to run came
in the aftermath of the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville,
instead viewed the race as “a battle for the soul of the nation,” as he put it,
and tried not to deviate from the singular message that Trump was unfit to lead
the country.
But the most drastic gamble each of them
made was on how to address the deadly coronavirus pandemic, which choked the
economy, has killed more than 236,000 Americans, and upended the
presidential race.
For Trump, the coronavirus prompted a
shake-up of his already-dysfunctional campaign, turned the contest into a
referendum on his handling of the pandemic, and even sickened the president and
his inner circle.
Yet through it all, Trump kept returning
to a faulty strategy of trying to wish, tweet and riff away the deadly virus.
He forced his team to create an alternate reality in which he held massive
rallies — supporters packed together, few sporting masks — and said that the coronavirus
was only a modest threat and was going to disappear any day.
Biden, again, took a different tack. He
and his team focused on coronavirus precautions, going beyond the basic Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines. At first, the former vice
president rarely left his house, paring back his schedule and moving everything
to Zoom. In addition to protecting the 77-year-old Biden, the strategy conveyed
that, unlike Trump, 74, Biden took the virus seriously.
Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden,
Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D)
visited the 9/11 Memorial & Museum. (The Washington Post)
When Biden did appear, he rarely engaged
Trump, and almost never on the president’s terms. Instead, he used his
appearances to model good behavior — holding socially distanced events with a
limited number of supporters — and hammer home his core message: Trump was a
dangerous leader.
In the end, 82 percent of voters who said
the coronavirus was their most important issue in choosing a president
supported Biden, according to preliminary national exit polls.
But Democrats hoping for a repudiation of
Trump and Trumpism were sorely disappointed, with the presidential race closer
than many had hoped and with Republicans poised to gain in the House and
possibly hold onto the Senate. Decisions to curtail Biden’s campaign schedule
and halt in-person get-out-the-vote efforts for several months may have made
sense from a public-health perspective, some Democrats said, but might also
have limited the reach of his victory.
In the wee hours of Wednesday morning,
Trump falsely declared victory from the White House’s East Room — “Frankly, we
did win this election,” he said — and followed up several hours later with
tweets baselessly accusing Democrats of “trying to STEAL the Election” and
claiming victories in several states he had not won.
The 2020 race, much like coronavirus,
remained the rare challenge that Trump could not simply negotiate or spin to
his will; Biden was the winner — and the next president of the United States.
‘Covid, covid, covid’
By June, the country had been shuttered
for nearly three months when Trump decided he was officially ready to move on.
He wanted to hold a rally to show that the country was open again, and
instructed his campaign team to bring him three options — one indoor, one
outdoor and one more creative.
Brad Parscale, then the campaign manager,
presented Trump with several rally possibilities during a meeting in the Map
Room on the ground floor of the White House, but the winning option was
indoors.
Vice President Pence, head of the coronavirus
task force, suggested somewhere in Oklahoma, which he said was one of the most
open states at the time. Some, including Parscale, warned that voters still
worried about the virus might not show up for an indoor event. But Trump was
determined to prove to the media that his supporters would turn out and chose
Tulsa.
“You don’t know that people won’t show
up,” Trump bellowed in the Map Room. “You don’t know that.”
Parscale was cautiously optimistic.
Looking at the data, he saw that more than 100,000 Republicans within driving
distance had RSVPed yes, and believed that 20 to 30 percent of people who
RSVPed usually showed up — or 20,000 to 30,000, minimum. The campaign ordered
an extra stage outside, and Parscale hyped the rally on Twitter — claiming
organizers had received more than 1 million ticket requests.
The first release Parscale sent to Trump
for approval said masks would be required, but Trump told his campaign manager
to remove the word “required.” The next draft said masks were “highly
encouraged,” but Trump excised “highly.”
Ultimately masks were only recommended,
and all attendees had to sign a release saying that they “voluntarily assume all
risks related to exposure to COVID-19” and agree not to hold the campaign or
the venue liable should they fall ill.
On the day of the rally — moved back from
its initial date on Juneteenth after an
uproar — Parscale knew he was in trouble when he looked out and saw few
children and or elderly supporters. “I never considered just 4 percent of the
people who RSVPed would show up,” he said. “There were all these people who
wanted to come and then got scared at the last minute.”
Expectations had also been inflated by
thousands of young TikTok users and K-pop music fans, who
banded together to drive up online sign-ups for the event as a prank.
As soon as Trump landed, Parscale said he
called him to explain the bad news: “I told him, ‘Sir, I’ve let you down. I
can’t get people here. I spent everything I could. I did everything I could.’ ”
Trump delivered a grievance-filled speech to a sparse
crowd in an arena with a capacity of 19,000, calling for schools to
reopen in the fall and blaming an “unhinged left-wing mob” for destroying the
country’s heritage.
News reports at the time described the
president as livid, and he was angry. But advisers said Trump mostly seemed
deflated, as if confronting his own political limitations. He mainly stayed in
his private cabin on the flight back to Washington, a senior administration
official said.
The Tulsa rally was meant as a reset of
Trump’s campaign. But instead it was a stark example of how thoroughly the
virus would overtake the 2020 race, and how each of the candidates’ handling of
the pandemic would prove determinative.
Early in the year, Trump’s advisers were
riding high — and believed they had internal polling to back it up, though
public survey numbers for the president at the time were not nearly as rosy.
According to a Feb. 20 poll conducted by Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio and
reviewed by The Washington Post, Trump was ahead of Biden by eight percentage
points in Florida, four in Pennsylvania, six in North Carolina and 10 in
Arizona. His approval rating was above 50 percent in almost every key
battleground state, according to the internal campaign survey. Parscale, the
campaign manager, told Trump he would win 400 electoral college votes.
The administration was hindered by its
herky-jerky response to the virus. Pence officially oversaw the coronavirus
task force, but Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, began
working with his own virus response team, bringing in
overmatched consultants dismissively known as the “slim-suit crowd.” The
president, meanwhile, constantly undermined his own public health agencies and
medical experts in unbridled news briefings that were spectacles of
misinformation.
Advisers gave Trump polling information
that showed his numbers “cratering,” especially among seniors, in the words of
one top campaign official; and reports showing that voters overwhelming
supported wearing masks to help curb the pandemic.
Trump rarely encouraged mask-wearing and
often expressed skepticism about masks, and after a particularly dismal news
conference — in which the president suggested injecting disinfectant as
a cure for the virus — his regular briefings were put on hold. After
the disinfectant briefing, top political advisers begged the president to halt
them and showed him sliding poll numbers. Trump disagreed, said things were
going well and compared the briefings to a Mike Tyson boxing match, the
officials said.
Still, one senior campaign official said
the pandemic had two especially deleterious effects: The virus magnified some
of Trump’s worst qualities, while also allowing Biden to recede from the
spotlight.
“Back in February, he had this reelection
in his pocket. If it wasn’t for covid, he could have sat back on his laurels
and won,” said Tom Bossert, the president’s former homeland security adviser.
“He’s always been better at controlling the narrative than the levers of
government.”
Still, Trump allies believed their ground
game and get-out-the-vote operation could save them.
The Trump campaign organizers decided
early that President Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign would be their north star.
They would invest heavily in data, build a massive volunteer network
nationwide, and knock on millions of doors. A book about Obama’s 2012 campaign,
“Groundbreakers: How Obama’s 2.2 Million Volunteers Transformed Campaigning in
America,” was a must-read for senior organizers of the ground game. By the end,
the Trump operation said it had bested Obama by that metric, scoring more than
2.6 million “trained and activated” volunteers. The operation logged more than
182 million “voter contacts,” a measure that included voice-mail messages and
fliers, more than five times what the RNC had accomplished in 2016. For Team
Trump, it mattered more that the number was greater than the 150 million Obama
had claimed in 2012.
“We never stopped our get-out-the-vote
operation at all,” McDaniel said.
Down the stretch, the Trump campaign
placed enormous faith in its massive voter contact and mobilization effort, a
project that cost more than $350 million. All campaign events, including the
president’s rallies, were used as opportunities to mine for new data and bring
people into the political system.
In the closing weeks of the race, campaign
leadership also took comfort in the growing number of people who RSVPed to
Trump rallies and actually showed up, and kept track of the crowds attracted by
Trump’s three oldest children, Donald Jr., Ivanka and Eric. Events of theirs
that in 2016 drew just dozens of people now drew 1,500 or more, said one person
briefed on the internal deliberations.
“Biden has placed a pretty big bet that he
can run for president doing nothing other than buying television ads,” Trump
campaign spokesman Tim Murtaugh said shortly before Election Day.
Trump spent the final days of the campaign
racing across the country. In the last week, he charged through more than two
dozen rallies in more than a half-dozen battleground states, including 10 in
the final two days. But the problem wasn’t where he was; it was what he said
when he was there — offensive riffs, demeaning swipes, fantastical claims that
the coronavirus was nearly gone.
“With the fake news, everything is covid —
‘covid, covid, covid,’ ” Trump lamented one week before Election Day, in West
Salem, Wis. “I had it. Here I am, right?”
‘Leading by example’
On March 12, the day after Trump bungled a prime-time address from the Oval Office in a failed
attempt to reassure the nation about the coronavirus, Biden traveled to the
Hotel du Pont — the same location in Wilmington, Del., where Biden announced
his 1972 Senate campaign — to deliver a speech that would turn out to be one of
his final public campaign events for weeks.
His campaign continued to pay about
$70,000 each month in rent for its Philadelphia headquarters, but most of his
staffers would never return; their departure was so sudden that a leftover case
of Yuengling and a forgotten “Happy Birthday” sign still haunt the Biden space.
The staffers began spreading to various spots around the country — to suburban
Washington, Winston-Salem, N.C., Martha’s Vineyard or back home with their
parents.
Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden
criticized President Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.),
in Las Vegas on Oct. 9. (Photo: Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post)
Biden’s campaign determined early on that
the coronavirus would be the grounds on which the campaign would be fought. To
them, it highlighted all of the issues that they had talked about from the
outset.
So that March afternoon, his campaign
hastily organized a speech with all the trappings of a traditional presidential
address — flags flanking the podium, a big blue curtain draped behind. The
candidate wore an American flag pin and read from a teleprompter.
He focused on practical advice, urging
Americans to rethink handshaking and hugs and to avoid large crowds. He
unveiled a more comprehensive plan for what he believed the Trump
administration should be doing, calling for free and widely available testing, the
swift development of a vaccine and emergency paid leave for all
Americans affected by the outbreak.
Biden then departed to the safety of his
home.
Throughout the spring and into the summer,
Biden, like millions of other Americans, grew comfortable in his own
work-from-home routine. He aimed to get out of bed by 8 a.m. each day, then
exercise in a home gym stocked with a treadmill, weights and a Peloton bike.
He’d finish off the workout with a protein shake before retreating to a room
for briefings with his health and economic teams.
Those briefings, his advisers say, gave
the campaign a feeling of an administration in absentia. Though Biden was
powerless to implement policy, these sessions with a constellation of former
Obama administration officials helped put the campaign in the mind-set of
governing rather than campaigning — and later led to a restructured policy
platform.
He and Jill would walk their dogs,
occasionally sneaking over to the track next to their house. In the afternoons,
they would toss ice cream bars to their grandkids from their porch. Only a
handful of their closest aides were allowed in the home, along with their newly
assigned Secret Service detail.
The only public view of the candidate came
through a hastily built studio in Biden’s basement, with a backdrop filled with
books, family photos, an American flag and a football. There were embarrassing
technical glitches at times.
Initially, the decision to refrain from
in-person campaigning was an easy one. His team of a half-dozen health experts
around Biden were clear about the risks.
“Every expert was saying, ‘This is not
good,’ ” said Greg Schultz, a senior adviser. “Only in Trump’s America does the
fact that we listened to medical experts become some kind of shocking decision.”
Yet as new coronavirus cases began to
level off in the early summer, there was also second-guessing of the campaign’s
decision not to do any in-person events or canvassing. Although the Biden team
could reach large portion of voters virtually, their allies worried they might
struggle to motivate harder-to-reach segments of their base without knocking on
their doors.
“Elected officials, party structures,
other campaigns wanted guidance from us because they didn’t want to go around
us,” said one senior adviser. “But we were just kind of slow-walking. And we
knew all along there were parts of the base and part of our voters that are
never easy to get to, and particularly with covid.”
When House Majority Whip James E. Clyburn
(D-S.C.) saw a news report about the campaign’s plans to forgo door-knocking,
he was outraged. Clyburn had endorsed Biden before the South Carolina primary,
and perhaps more than any other person was responsible for Biden’s
come-from-behind win in the Democratic primaries. During that race, too,
Clyburn had told Biden he needed to be more effective with his ground
operation. And he was about to tell him the same thing again.
Though the two men spoke often, this was one
of the few times Clyburn initiated the call — and he minced no words about what
he saw as a grave mistake.
“This was somebody who had lost their
mind,” Clyburn recalled. “I don’t know what they hit their head on or what, but
this just wasn’t going to be.”
When Biden responded that the campaign was
increasing its television ad buy, Clyburn remained unconvinced. “These TV ads
are placed by a lot of White people making a lot of money,” he told the former
vice president, explaining that decisions like these were what “leads to this
notion that Black voters feel Democrats take them for granted.”
Besides, Clyburn added, crucial Black
voters needed a more personal connection to come to the polls.
“The Black vote does not respond to TV,”
he said he told Biden. “Black people respond to high touch, not high tech.
White people may respond to high tech. But if you don’t make the emotional
connection, you just aren’t going to get the Black vote.”
Anita Dunn, a senior adviser to the Biden
campaign, said the team received lots of criticism “from friends who felt that
we were making a huge mistake by leaving the playing field to Trump.”
Some people were especially worried about
Trump’s daily coronavirus briefings but, Dunn said, these people “fundamentally
misunderstood that it did not matter how many daily briefings Donald Trump did
if he actually wasn’t doing what a president should do, like fixing the
problem.”
“He’s good on social media and he knows
pictures go far,” Schultz said of Biden. “He understands the impact, and he
wanted to literally show leading by example.”
But Biden’s rigorous adherence to
mask-wearing also prompted some odd moments. During a roundtable discussion in
Philadelphia in early June, Biden partially removed his mask but for nearly an
hour left it dangling from his left ear. Trump noticed and mocked the image,
and some of Biden’s top advisers thought it looked strange, too.
Schultz texted one of Biden’s advance
workers inquiring about the droopy-eared look, and whether they intended to
have Biden leave the mask dangling.
“No,” came the response. “It was totally
the boss.”
‘A lot of blame’
As the Trump campaign faced a financial
shortage in the final months and began cutting back on its TV ads, McDaniel,
the RNC chairwoman, finally went to Trump directly in early September to
express her concern. The campaign had burned through more than $800 million of
the $1.1 billion it had raised, and Biden’s team now had more cash on hand for
the homestretch.
She wanted to know why the president’s
campaign was pulling down its TV ads.
Just weeks later, McDaniel delivered
unwelcome news yet again when Trump called her from his hospital bed at Walter
Reed National Military Medical Center, where he was recovering from
coronavirus, to ask what she was seeing and hearing out in the country,
especially in her home state of Michigan.
She mentioned a TV ad she had seen at her
home about the peace deal that he helped broker between Israel and the United
Arab Emirates. McDaniel was skeptical the ad would help Trump win a single vote
in Michigan, and told him as much.
Trump was furious, although he eventually
calmed down after an adviser explained that the peace deal spot was part of a
larger national buy.
The agita over the campaign’s TV strategy
— the differing opinions, the lack of communication, the anger and
recriminations — was indicative of the broader tumult and tension that long
plagued Trump’s reelection effort.
The campaign began historically early,
nearly as soon as Trump took office, and was riven by the chaos and infighting
that had come to define his entire presidency, prompting one ally to quip that
the Trump reelection effort was a veritable “Hunger Games, . . . an ecosystem
that fights themselves more than they fight the opponents.”
Tensions in the Biden operation were
comparatively tame, with some staffers griping over how Biden campaign manager
Jen O’Malley Dillon sometimes began senior staff meetings by recapping the
news, which everyone had already read. The main division was between
longtime staffers who had slogged through the primary with Biden — bonding in
defeat and then victory — clashing with some of the new staffers brought on by O’Malley
Dillon when she became campaign manager in March.
The Trump campaign, meanwhile, took in
aides Trumpworld wanted to keep around, like Hogan Gidley, a White House communications
official who joined the campaign in July as press secretary.
Another aide, Jenna Ellis, regularly showed the president
inaccurate information about voter fraud and encouraged his worst
instincts by phone, while booking her own television appearances and rarely
showing up at campaign headquarters. Parscale told others he had no control
over her.
“My role with the president involves
speaking with him directly often, as a personal attorney as well as the senior
legal adviser to the campaign, which everyone on our team is aware of,” Ellis
said in an email statement provided by the campaign. “This is nothing more than
a vapid attempt to break our ranks and is false.”
A mid-July shake-up, in which Parscale was replaced by one of his deputies, Bill
Stepien, brought a measure of discipline to the operation. When Stepien
took over as campaign manager, he proposed an all-staff meeting, and was
flummoxed when staffers told him there had never been one before. He asked
campaign officials to examine the budget and was told they could not find a
formal document.
But the overhaul also brought a new round
of challenges and blame, much of the enmity squarely directed at Kushner, who
had long been viewed as the campaign’s de facto manager, regardless of which
handpicked loyalist was installed as its titular head. One former senior
administration official in close contact with the campaign likened the
operation under Stepien to “a vase that’s been glued back together, and the
only question is when is the water going to start leaking out.”
Kushner, through a spokesman, declined to
be interviewed on the record for this story.
When Stepien took over, he began
frequently repeating to those around him — many of whom had been loyal to
Parscale — that the campaign was in distress. He also tried fruitlessly to
minimize the number of campaign advisers who spoke directly with the president.
People inside the campaign repeatedly described him as keeping a low profile —
or noncommunicative, in the view of his critics.
The Trump campaign and the RNC had worked
together on some key early decisions but never had a close relationship.
McDaniel and Stepien spoke less than a handful of times after he took control.
The campaign distrusted the RNC’s data,
the RNC distrusted the campaign’s budget, and at points the campaign distrusted
even some of its own pollsters, especially as their numbers seemed to quickly
leak to the media. Kushner grew frustrated with Fabrizio, whose polls he felt
were overly negative for Trump and who he felt often brought grim assessments
to the campaign without offering solutions. In the final weeks, the campaign
added another pollster.
“If he loses, there’s going to be a lot of
blame going around,” said a Trump ally close to the campaign.
One of the downsides of Trump and
Kushner’s decision to launch his reelection effort so early became fully
apparent in the final stretch of the campaign. By officially filing papers on
the day of his inauguration in 2017, Trump and his team immediately began
repeatedly asking their small-dollar online donors for money — failing to
realize that three years later, some of those donors would eventually max out,
or grow fatigued from months of giving.
Another frustration: The campaign never
set up a true bundling operation for high-dollar fundraisers. Kimberly Guilfoyle, a former Fox News star who is
dating Trump Jr. and took over the effort, “is not a bundling
program,” griped one Republican official. “She really is a Tasmanian devil
tsunami.”
Early on, McDaniel and her chief of staff
met with Eric Trump at the president’s Doral golf resort in Miami to raise
concerns about the bundling operation, but Parscale dismissed her worries,
arguing that their massive digital operation could compensate for the lack of
high-dollar donors.
At least three of the four original
regional directors left the bundling operation, in part because of what they
described as an abusive work environment and requests to do things they did not
find ethical, like promising meetings with Trump that they knew would not
materialize.
Guilfoyle’s behavior, too, raised concerns
among donors, who repeatedly complained to other fundraisers working in the
Trump effort about the sexual innuendo she would use at events. Witnesses
described Guilfoyle joking about how Trump Jr. had been “a bad boy” or “a
naughty boy,” and made other coquettish allusions to how they conducted their
private lives.
This behavior — along with her and Trump
Jr. often flying privately to fundraising events — led to grumblings among
Trump allies. A Guilfoyle ally said he didn’t recall all of the specific incidents,
but added that both she and Trump Jr. often joke openly about their
relationship and that most donors were not bothered by it.
At one event inside the Trump
International Hotel, a fundraiser working for Guilfoyle screamed at RNC
staffers, threatening that Guilfoyle would go into a dinner where McDaniel was
meeting with donors and yell at the RNC chairwoman if she did not soon vacate
the room, according to people familiar with the incident.
“Kimberly Guilfoyle is an excellent
fundraiser and was a highly valued asset to the president’s team,” Murtaugh
said. “There was nothing offensive about her presentations in context.”
The campaign, meanwhile, burned through
what money it did have like a “drunken maniac,” in the words of one ally. Under
Parscale, the team spent roughly $10 million on a splashy Super Bowl ad, as well
as smaller sums to fly pro-Trump aerial banners over beaches in swing states.
The operation even poured money into flattering TV ads in the D.C. area, a
decision intended to appease and flatter the president.
There was also disagreement over whether
the campaign should be running ads and pushing messaging to try to improve
Trump’s approval ratings, or simply trying to negatively define Biden the way
Trump had repeatedly hammered Clinton in 2016.
The campaign’s digital operation of about
200 people, led by Gary Coby, increasingly found itself in tense battles with
Google, Facebook and other social media platforms about their advertisements.
Democrats were busy painting a scathing
portrait of the president. In mid-March, after Trump had started daily
coronavirus briefings, the Democratic group Priorities USA began polling
possible attacks on Trump. The result was concerning: 49 percent of
battleground state voters approved of Trump’s handling of the outbreak,
compared to 45 percent who disapproved. A distant fear — that Trump would run
for reelection as a wartime president who had led the country in crisis —
seemed real.
On the second to last Sunday in March,
Democratic pollsters and ad-makers met to map out a response.
“There was a lot of internal debate about
obviously getting too far ahead of this and whether people would view it as a
political attack,” Priorities chairman Guy Cecil said.
The group decided on a spot that used
Trump’s own words against him — including his claim, “This is their new hoax” —
contrasted against a chart showing the rising number of cases, which then stood
at about 30,000 per day.
Cecil went hat in hand to organized labor,
which put up the money: $500,000 each from Service Employees International
Union, American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, and
American Federation of Teachers, and $200,000 from the Teamsters.
The Trump campaign sent cease-and-desist
letters to television stations demanding that the ad come down because it used
the “hoax” quote without the full context; Trump had been speaking of the
Democratic response to the virus, not the virus itself.
For weeks, the ads kept hammering Trump in
key states, without response. America First, Trump’s designated outside group,
did not get on television to defend him until April 16, three weeks later, as
the group waited for Biden to win the nomination and tried to pace its
spending. The Trump campaign only went up on the air with ads in May.
But by then the story line about Trump’s
handling of the pandemic had already begun to shift. By June, Priorities’
internal polls showed Trump’s approval on his handling of the pandemic had
fallen to 41 percent, with 56 percent disapproving, where it remained for the
rest of the cycle.
By late October, the nation was recording
more than 80,000 cases per day and had logged more than 9 million cumulatively.
Even some of Parscale’s critics said this
dynamic — America First being more focused on funding the final fall campaign
stretch — forced him and the campaign to put big money up early to defend the
president, bleeding the campaign in a way that proved devastating in the fall.
“I was in a Catch-22,” Parscale said. “If
I don’t run the ads, everyone would say, ‘Why are you leaving the airwaves
empty?’ And if I did run the ads, then everyone is mad I’m spending the money.”
By the time Stepien met with the campaign
fundraisers and finance team, he had decided that if the campaign kept spending
at the rate it was, and kept raising money at the rate it was, it would go
broke several weeks before Election Day. He privately told people that if the
campaign lost, it would be primarily because of money problems and secondarily
because of the pandemic.
Stepien and his team discussed three
choices: pull back on TV spending, make other cuts, or go into debt before
Election Day. The situation grew so dire that Coby pushed to include the
“88022” text message donation number in convention programming, but was
rebuffed by White House officials.
There were other tensions as well.
McDaniel and Stepien, for instance, got into a heated argument in August at the
campaign’s Virginia headquarters over Michigan and the candidacy of John James,
a failed 2018 Senate candidate in that state who had been recruited to run
again this year, according to several people briefed on the meeting.
Stepien said that if the president lost
Michigan, it would be because James — who would end up performing as well as
Trump — dragged the ticket down. The meeting grew so heated that Kushner
finally intervened, telling Stepien he was out of line. McDaniel abruptly left
the room and the building.
To many, however, Kushner bears the
ultimate responsibility for Trump’s defeat.
“The only constant in this campaign, from
Day One, to the very last day, was Kushner,” said one Trump ally who is close
with the campaign. “So if the president wins, Kushner deserves credit, but if
he loses, Kushner deserves the blame.”
Kushner made clear from the very beginning
that it was he and the president who had final sign-off on all major campaign
decisions. And critics say he was eager to install a loyalist, like Parscale,
who reported directly to him, and whom he believed he could control. Even once
it became clear Parscale was in a tailspin, and the president had soured on
him, Kushner was loath to remove him.
Parscale, who had been demoted in July,
remained on the campaign until a troubling incident in September, when he was
hospitalized for his own safety after threatening suicide with a handgun during
a confrontation with his wife at his Florida home, according to police. His
wife said he had been drinking heavily and had been physically abusive toward
her in previous days; police and a witness observed bruising on her arms.
Parscale pointed to a statement later from his wife disputing that he abused
her.
After the altercation, the campaign
announced Parscale was taking a leave of absence.
At times, critics say, Kushner was too
occupied with his White House portfolio — trying to secure a peace deal in the
Middle East, helping to manage the administration’s coronavirus response — to
devote the necessary time to overseeing the campaign.
“He was busy being president,” quipped one
Republican involved in the campaign.
One Republican close to the White House
said that he and others had approached Kushner over the summer to warn of a
coming loss and the need for a course correction. Kushner was polite but dismissive,
saying the president had a good message and a solid team, and that the polls
were overstating the potential for catastrophe.
Kushner calmly predicted that if Trump and
his campaign executed their strategy correctly, he would win, just as he had in
2016.
‘Science over fiction’
Compared to the drama inside the Trump campaign,
the Biden campaign was far calmer. If Trumpworld was a reality-TV show filled
with backstabbing, scheming and outsize characters, the Biden campaign was a
1960s sitcom, with occasional hurt feelings or personality clashes but rarely
episodes with a visible impact on the campaign or the candidate.
Biden was surrounded by a nucleus of
advisers who have been with him for decades. Their roles sometimes changed, but
the group rarely did. The tensions inside the campaign were largely driven by
clashes between those who had been with Biden for a long time — and who felt
they knew him and his brand of politics — and the newer hires who were brought
in for the general election.
Through the spring and the summer, they
began adjusting their message to the new coronavirus reality. But their core
argument still fit into their prior message: that Trump was an incompetent
steward of the American government.
Since the start of his campaign, Biden had
repeated a line in his stump speech about believing “truth over lies, science
over fiction.” Trump’s approach to the coronavirus, his advisers felt, offered
proof in real time of that argument.
Though his advisers faced outside pressure
to have Biden travel and speak out more frequently, the campaign’s ethos was
quality over quantity.
“The biggest strategic decision,” one
adviser said, “was to stick to our strategic decision.”
But Biden, who had previously considered
himself a transitional figure, began talking about himself as a
transformational one, along the lines of Franklin D. Roosevelt, saying he would
bring policies on the scale of the New Deal. His openness to an infusion of
major government funding — paid for in part by raising taxes on the wealthiest
Americans — came at a time when he was also trying to unite a fractured
Democratic Party, and he developed a message that had some appeal to supporters
of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and other progressives.
Trump carried a major advantage on the
economy, which had been a grave concern for Biden’s advisers. But they now saw
an opportunity to link Trump’s response to the coronavirus to the economic
collapse.
Throughout the summer, Biden delivered a
series of speeches to hone that more revolutionary agenda. He proposed building
500 million solar panels, overhauling policing and pumping far more money into
public schools. The new plans were based on a 110-page policy document crafted
with Sanders allies — a group of proposals that Trump would later ridicule as
“a manifesto.”
The criticism of Trump was often implicit,
and the campaign deliberately tried to avoid arguing with Trump on a daily
basis. When Biden delivered his convention speech, he offered a rebuttal to the
current style of politics. But he didn’t mention the president’s name once.
The strategy came with grave risks for
Biden. His campaign’s top advisers were pelted with worried calls from elected
officials, particularly in the Upper Midwest. They fretted that Biden’s laissez
faire approach to campaigning was going to backfire. He needed to get out more,
they said, and the campaign needed to do more traditional campaigning.
There was also grave consternation about
how Biden would respond to the movement to defund police, which grew louder
over the summer following the death of George Floyd, an unarmed black man
killed in police custody in Minneapolis. His advisers clashed over the issue,
with a small group inside the campaign arguing that Biden should not be quick
to rebuff a movement that was calling for major cuts to police departments.
But some of Biden’s longtime aides,
channeling his career as a moderate and a pragmatist who in the past had earned
police support, pushed back against the idea and wanted Biden to be clear that
he was against calls for defunding the police.
Those advisers won the internal debate and
Biden was clear in his opposition. As Trump tried to make it a more prominent
issue — frequently mischaracterizing Biden’s position — Biden was asked about
it in almost every interview but had largely inoculated himself as polls showed
low support for the movement.
Biden’s campaign tried to expand its
digital operation and began virtual phone banking to target voters. But it
wasn’t until late September that advisers finally decided it was safe to allow
canvassers to resume knocking on doors.
Still, the campaign benefited from a
decision made late last year by the Democratic National Committee. At a time
when the party was going through a crowded primary with deep uncertainty over
who would emerge as the nominee, top DNC officials decided to start sending
staffers into key battleground states.
For top Democrats like DNC Chairman Tom
Perez, the stakes could not have been higher.
“Don’t worry, Tom,” Obama told Perez when
he was fighting to get the job as chairman. “It’s just the fate of Western
civilization.”
Trump, meanwhile, also seemed to
understand the stakes, at least for himself; he intensely hates losing. But he
approached his campaign’s messaging differently, with a frenzied,
all-of-the-above strategy, and his team largely followed his lead.
One senior administration official
described the campaign operatives as “Twitter warriors” — advisers who tried to
emulate the president’s brash style themselves, touting Trump boat parades on
social media and shouting about “Lyin’ Biden,” but lacking a clear, discernible
message for why their boss deserved a second term.
With the exception of a small group —
Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the president who left her White House post at
the end of the summer — there were few top staffers willing to offer Trump
tough-love advice that he didn’t want to hear.
When Biden first announced Sen. Kamala D.
Harris (Calif.) as his running mate, for instance, “birtherism” rumors — the
racist claim that she was not born in the United States — cropped up in
far-right, conspiracy theory circles. Some in Trump’s orbit, including senior
policy adviser Stephen Miller, fed the misinformation to Trump. During an Oval
Office meeting one day, Trump posed a question to the group: Did they think he
should go after Harris with the claim?
Even for Trump, who has long used racially
divisive rhetoric, his team knew that pushing birtherism was an inadvisable
strategy, likely to backfire with many he needed to win. But nearly everyone
remained silent, save for one adviser who — popping into the Oval for another
meeting — heard the discussion and told Trump that it was a horrible idea and a
third rail of politics that he shouldn’t touch.
A senior administration official denied
the incident.
In the end, Trump did not proactively
stoke the falsehood — but did not play it down either. When asked by reporters
about a Newsweek op-ed that outlined the conspiracy theory, Trump said, “I
heard it today that she doesn’t meet the requirements. I have no idea if that’s
right.” He went on to praise the author of the op-ed, which was later
retracted.
The president continued to ping-pong
between self-sabotaging riffs and rants, as he and his team often undermined
their own plans.
At one point, after he tweeted an appeal
to “Suburban Housewives of America,” several senior advisers urged him to
change his rhetoric, suggesting he use “suburban moms” or “suburban super
women” instead. “We needed a different tone with suburban women,” McDaniel
said.
At another point, the campaign grew
increasingly concerned about Trump’s repeatedly unsubstantiated claims that
voting by mail was rife with fraud, a senior campaign official said. Advisers
worried that the president’s outlandish rhetoric might push his own supporters
away from voting by mail, and convened several meetings to discuss preventing
that outcome.
TOP: Trump continued to hold events
across the country as the election neared, despite warnings from his
coronavirus advisers. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington
Post) LEFT: A Trump supporter gets a temperature check before a rally
in Washington, Mich., on Nov. 1. (Salwan Georges/The Washington
Post) RIGHT: In campaigning, Trump returned often to the tactics and
language that had worked in his 2016 upset victory. (Jabin Botsford/The
Washington Post)
In some moments, allies fretted Trump was
getting bad advice from the people closest to him. After the death of Floyd,
the nation erupted in protests, some turning violent as looters took to the
streets. Kushner initially counseled the president not to crack down on the
violence, saying he would alienate Black voters if he did, said three people
familiar with the discussions, who added that they viewed Kushner’s assessment
as patronizing.
A senior White House adviser said Kushner
never offered such counsel, but that some may have confused Kushner’s concern
over Trump’s overly harsh rhetoric — calling the protesters “thugs,” for
instance — with a broader opposition to a tough posture against rioters.
The constant noise emanating from the
president had often helped him muscle through rough patches, replacing one
controversy with another. But in his reelection bid, the chaos proved
distracting, undermining the campaign’s efforts to negatively define Biden.
Nothing ever stuck to the former vice president, griped one senior
administration official, because Trump was always stealing the spotlight.
Another top adviser warned that if the
question on Election Day was “ ‘Trump or Not Trump,’ Trump will lose,” urging
the president to make the race a choice between him and Biden, rather than a
referendum.
“A successful reelection campaign really
needs to be focused on disqualifying your opponent, but the president spent
most of this year keeping the spotlight focused on himself, which is
antithetical to a winning strategy,” said Steven Law, president and chief
executive of the Senate Leadership Fund, the super PAC aligned with Senate
Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Senate Republicans.
During a late-summer meeting at the White
House, infectious-disease expert Anthony S. Fauci urged Trump and Pence to own
the coronavirus problem, a senior administration official said. “The only way
you’re going to fix the problem is if you own the problem, because if you
ignore it, you can’t fix it,” the official said, paraphrasing Fauci, who sits
on the coronavirus task force. “If you blame somebody else, you can’t fix it.
The only way to fix it is to own it. But they were unwilling to own it — that’s
the problem.”
As the election neared, Trump continued to
play down the virus, ignoring warnings from Fauci, coronavirus adviser Deborah
Birx and other administration officials, and instead holding large events
across the country.
Trump also kept retreating to the
nostalgia of his 2016 upset victory, and what had worked then. He reprised not
only some of the same tactics — the divisive, racist and misogynistic rhetoric
— but even the same targets, portraying himself as the victim and filling his
rallies with snarling asides about the “Russia hoax” and Clinton.
Referring to Clinton, one Republican
operative in frequent touch with the White House quipped that Trump “might as
well be talking about Franklin Pierce.”
Perhaps the most direct effort to revive
the 2016 playbook was Trump world’s attacks on Joe Biden’s son Hunter — echoing
“Crooked Hillary” attacks by painting the former vice president as a creature
of the Washington swamp who allegedly let his son cash in on the family name.
But Trump allies struggled to link Hunter’s business dealings to his father.
Speaking just five days before Election
Day, the president told a crowd in Tampa that fellow politicians were urging
him to lay off the Hunter attacks, and to focus instead on his economic
success. “ ‘Sir, you shouldn’t be speaking about Hunter,’ ” Trump said,
recounting the advice, which some of his own aides had also pushed. “ ‘You
shouldn’t be saying bad things about Biden because nobody cares.’ ”
Yet Trump just couldn’t seem to help
himself. “I disagree,” he added, to cheers. “You know, maybe that’s why I’m
here and they’re not.”
‘Too little, too late’
The first presidential debate, at the end
of September, was Trump’s opportunity to reframe and recharge his floundering
campaign.
To prepare, the president ensconced
himself in the White House Map Room, where advisers wandered in and out of the
ad hoc sessions, offering advice and barking questions at him. Former New
Jersey governor Chris Christie and Rudolph W. Giuliani, Trump’s personal attorney,
urged the president to be aggressive with Biden — to push him off his talking
points and trip him up. Advisers eschewed a traditional briefing book for
notecard reminders, with bullet points outlining his key achievements so far
and his goals for a second term.
And Fox News host Sean Hannity — who
all summer had warned Kushner, Stepien and McDaniel that the campaign was
faltering — texted suggestions, urging Trump to prepare rigorously, and raising
additional concerns about the president’s standing and campaign strategy.
But shortly after taking the stage in
Cleveland, it became clear that Trump was not going to turn in the performance
his team was hoping for. He was confrontational and combative, brooding and
belligerent. He failed to forcefully denounce white supremacy, at one point
calling on the Proud Boys, a far-right, all-male group known for its violent
tactics, to “stand back and stand by.” He interrupted Biden and the
moderator a total of 145 times.
“The average American will choose a
doddering old fool who is past his prime over a jerky bully every day of the
week and twice on Sunday,” said one Trump ally close to the campaign. “That
first debate was the worst of Trump without any of the good of Trump.”
The debate was one in a series of bruising
missteps for Trump ending with the final debate in Nashville, about three weeks
later. Between late September and mid-October, Trump announced Supreme Court
nominee Amy Coney Barrett at a Rose Garden event that became a “superspreader”
gathering; weathered several devastating news cycles, including the revelation
in the New York Times that he paid just $750 in federal income taxes in 2017;
contracted the coronavirus himself as the West Wing became its own virus hot
spot; refused to participate in the second presidential debate; and failed to
denounce QAnon conspiracy theorists during a nationally televised town hall.
By the time Trump delivered a more
measured debate performance Oct. 22, and Barrett was confirmed to the Supreme
Court four days later, aides believed the president had finally begun to
stabilize his sinking operation. But they also worried, in the words of one
close confidant, that it was “too little, too late.”
Biden and his team approached the first debate
differently, with the former vice president curtailing his already sparse
schedule to hold rigorous preparation sessions.
Biden’s entourage was tested the night
before the debate, so they could all fly to Cleveland together. Some flew out
early that morning so they could get tested again. All of them wore masks. They
kept a social distance. They washed their hands frequently.
“We’re in this hermetically sealed
bubble,” said Sen. Christopher A. Coons (D-Del.), who was in the small group of
longtime Biden confidants who attended the debate. “We were all still distanced
and still wearing masks.”
“Then they all come in, striding in not
wearing masks,” Coons continued, referring to Trump’s family and advisers.
“This isn’t just an attitude. This is dangerous.”
Then the debate itself began.
“That was just an unbelievable dump truck
full of bile. It was a hate tornado,” said Coons, who found himself sitting
within 10 feet of both Jill Biden and Donald Trump Jr. “If you had any doubt
about the balance and the capabilities of our president, that one should have
made that clear. This is not a balanced man. I mean, it was a wrestling match.
It was a WWE throw-down. And that’s not what this moment calls for.”
Just over two days later, Trump announced he had tested positive for
coronavirus.
Aides had hoped the president might use
his diagnosis as an opportunity, emerging from his bout with the virus a more
sympathetic figure — someone capable of showing compassion and empathy to a
scarred nation. But Trump did not evolve.
During his stint at Walter Reed National
Military Medical Center, while still contagious, he took a spin outside the
hospital in a Secret Service SUV to greet his supporters — a joyride that
unnecessarily endangered the health of his security detail. And upon arriving
back at the White House, still possibly infected with the virus, he
triumphantly took off his mask before entering the residence.
“Trump’s own covid diagnosis made him a
metaphor for the problem,” Law said. “In addition, the president’s persona and
communications style were just the opposite of what the occasion required, in
terms of buttoned-down messaging and expressing sympathy.”
Biden’s campaign advisers expressed public
concern for Trump and his health, but they also decided to begin announcing
more information about their candidate’s coronavirus testing, announcing every
test result as a deliberate contrast from the White House.
Trump’s team felt the final debate could
be pivotal. Trump had called Fox News host Tucker Carlson in the wake of the
first debate, and Carlson offered blunt advice that many in Trump’s orbit were
afraid to give: that the debate had gone poorly, in part because it was a
mistake for Trump to assume that he could rely on a faltering Biden to simply
deliver him a victory.
Trump’s advisers stressed that he needed
to let Biden speak. Conway told Trump that the former vice president was easily
flummoxed and didn’t have strong answers for many of his past positions.
By most accounts, Trump did better in the final debate. But by
then, nearly 50 million Americans — a historically high number — had already
voted.
“I was watching, and I remember thinking
that if this was what we were talking about, we would be winning,” said a
former senior administration official. “But what does it matter now that 50
million people have now voted?”
Josh Holmes, a longtime McConnell adviser,
said that for Trump, “the pandemic is the difference between him winning and
losing.
“The better question is: Could he have
still won during the pandemic?” Holmes continued. “I think we’ve seen a number
of times when America has had great challenges, when you have leadership that’s
rewarded. That just didn’t happen here.”
