Saturday, March 21, 2020, marked the worst catastrophe in American history.
North Korea’s nuclear strikes were carried out over the course of six hours. Of the thirteen nuclear weapons fired against the United States, seven delivered their powerful thermonuclear weapons onto the country and its citizens.
One nuclear weapon, aimed at Mar-a-Lago, struck Jupiter, Florida. Another nuclear weapon destroyed Pearl Harbor. A third struck Manhattan. Two nuclear weapons, probably aimed at the White House, missed wildly but fell on northern Virginia, their explosions separated by about an hour. Two more exploded off the California coast near San Diego, missing the port by enough that no one was killed.
In attempting to create a definitive and official account of this unparalleled national tragedy, we discovered that written accounts failed to convey accurately for millions of Americans what that day was like. The same event can mean many different things to many people. The commission found as many perspectives on the horror as there were survivors for us to interview.
Perhaps all that unites these individuals is the powerful sense that the portrayal of the events of March 21 by the media and political figures has been misleading, inaccurate, and heavily sanitized. We on the commission have come to have enormous sympathy for those who suffered through those terrible days.
Thus, rather than attempting to offer a definitive account of the events of March 21, 2020, the commission has opted to collect the stories of more than a dozen survivors. Their voices can convey what our words cannot.
Following the first reports on social media that North Korea had used nuclear weapons against South Korea and Japan, there were isolated reports of panic across the continental United States, Alaska, and Hawaii. The traffic leaving major US cities picked up as some people sought to evacuate. Social media posts showed empty store shelves as Americans tried to prepare for the same kind of cataclysm that had befallen their Asian allies.
On the whole, however, most Americans did nothing. For as long as anyone could remember, war was something that happened to other people, in other places. They were not warned that this was different, nor were they told to prepare.
Few Americans, even those in positions of power, expected that North Korea would strike the United States. Many doubted that North Korea even had such weapons, while others were confident that the Pentagon had a plan to protect Americans. And above all, perhaps, the dull pressure of everyday life held many Americans to their routines.
North Korea’s first missile was fired at Mar-a-Lago in the middle of the night in Korea, at 1:02 AM Pyongyang time. A second missile followed fourteen minutes later, headed for Pearl Harbor.
Florida has no system for alerting citizens to a ballistic missile attack. In fact, Hawaii is the only state that does. As a result, it was the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency that provided the first warning to the public that North Korea was attacking the United States. At 6:24 AM local time—just before dawn—a text message appeared on phones throughout the state of Hawaii.
⚠
Emergency Alert
BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER THIS IS NOT A DRILL.
Josh Goshorn, an electrical engineer from Carmel, California, was on vacation on Oahu with his family. He was getting ready to go surfing as soon as the sun broke over the horizon—what is called “dawn patrol”—when his phone lit up. “It was scary for sure,” he later explained, “but there had been a false alarm before. I was still planning on going out, but my wife Molly called me and said, ‘Joshua, come home now, the kids are really freaking out.’”
Despite the obvious escalation over the past twenty-four hours, very few people took shelter. Hawaii had been testing warning sirens consistently since 2018, and many people simply assumed that this warning was either yet another exercise or a false alarm. After all, a false alarm with identical wording had been mistakenly sent in 2018. Most people believed that March 21 would be a day like any other.
“I wondered who was going to get fired this time,” Goshorn recalled thinking.
After that lone warning, the nuclear warheads began landing throughout the United States. The first hit Florida, where the nuclear weapon aimed at Mar-a-Lago fell up the coast in Jupiter. Then a nuclear weapon hit Pearl Harbor. New York was next, suffering a direct hit from a nuclear weapon that exploded over Trump Tower in midtown Manhattan. A nuclear weapon, presumably aimed at the White House, missed and exploded in Arlington, Virginia, followed by another an hour later and a few miles away. Finally, another nuclear weapon that had been aimed at Pearl Harbor fell in Honolulu.
All told, seven nuclear weapons, each exploding with a force twenty times greater than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, brought death and destruction to the United States over a six-hour span.
For most Americans affected by the attack, memories begin with the flash. Survivors almost uniformly remark on the intense white light followed by pitch blackness—a darkness both literal and figurative. The blast wave that arrived shortly after the explosion’s flash engulfed survivors in a black cloud of ash, broken glass, and other debris—cutting them, breaking bones, and blotting out the sun.
[Name withheld], Honolulu, HI: There was the flash and darkness. I think I was unconscious for a while. We came to and called each other’s names.
[Name withheld], Honolulu, HI: It was like a white magnesium flash. I lost consciousness right after or almost at the same time I saw the flash. When I regained consciousness, I found myself in the dark.
[Name withheld], New York, NY: When the blast came, my friend and I were blown into another room. I was unconscious for a while, and when I came to, I found myself in the dark.
[Name withheld], Jupiter, FL: I was at the window when the flash went off. It was so bright—ten or a hundred or a thousand times brighter than a camera flash bulb. The flash was piercing my eyes and my mind went blank. The glass from the windows was shattered all over the floor. I was lying on the floor too.
[Name withheld], Arlington, VA: I cried out, and as soon as I did I felt weightless, as if I were an astronaut. I was unconscious for twenty or thirty seconds. When I came to, I realized that everybody, including myself, was lying at one side of the room. Nobody was standing. The desks and chairs had also blown off to one side. At the windows, there was no glass in the panes, and the window frames had been blown out as well.
As the survivors regained consciousness, they found themselves surrounded by dead and injured people. Many survivors were seriously injured themselves but in the shock did not realize it. Only slowly did they begin to reckon with the death and destruction that they now saw all around them.
With the United States under nuclear attack, Colonel Tom Miller, the pilot of Air Force One, had to decide where to take the president, who at the moment was accompanied only by Secret Service agents and relatively junior staff. None of them were in a position to make a strong recommendation about a destination. “I’d never heard the word ‘decapitation attack’ before,” one aide recalled. “There are still missiles out there and the Secret Service says to the president, ‘We don’t think it’s safe for you to return to Washington.’”
Given that Barksdale Air Force Base had been literally targeted on a map released by the North Koreans, Colonel Miller decided that the best thing to do would be to cruise off the coast until the situation became less chaotic. “The pilot says at that point, ‘Let’s just go cruise around . . . for a little bit,’” said the communications systems operator aboard Air Force One. “That was our Pearl Harbor. You train for nuclear war, then you get into something like that. All the money they pumped into us for training, that worked. We could read each other’s minds.”
Aides recalled the surreal feeling of knowing that the country was coming under attack, but being unable to do anything about it. They had no cell-phone reception and nothing to do. They simply waited, watching cable television as the first scenes of horror unfolded in Florida and Hawaii. “We were able to get some TV reception,” one aide recalled. “They broke for commercial. I couldn’t believe it. A hair-loss commercial comes on. I remember thinking, in the middle of all this, I’m watching this commercial for hair loss.
Over the next few hours, the horror of the day repeated itself again and again, immeasurably. The nuclear weapon that fell directly on Manhattan exploded with the force of 200 kilotons—about ten times the power of the bomb that leveled Hiroshima. The two bombs that hit the Washington metropolitan area leveled much of the northern Virginia suburban area—home to more than three million people—but missed the White House, which was largely empty. And another nuclear weapon fell on Pearl Harbor.
On the ground, survivors were beginning to collect themselves. In New York City, Nikki Haley’s apartment building at UN Plaza had been heavily damaged in the explosion, but it was still standing. She recalled that the windows had been blown out and the building had bent over so far under the pressure that she felt it might snap, before it rocked back violently, swaying like a ship on rough seas. “When I came to, I was anxious to know what happened to my son,” she recalled. “I thought, I have to go, I have to go and find him.”
There was no electricity or water, and the building’s windows had been blown out. Haley lived in the penthouse, fifty stories above the city, and the wind was fierce. Although injured, she walked down the interior stairwell all the way to the ground level and then began to make her way down FDR Drive toward the school where her son had spent the morning in a spring tennis program.
“I saw a young boy coming my way,” she told the commission later. “His skin was dangling all over and he was naked. He was muttering, ‘Mother, water, mother, water.’” she recalled. “I thought he might be my son, but he wasn’t. I didn’t give him any water. I am sorry that I didn’t.”
In the confusion and horror that followed each nuclear strike, the main impulse of many survivors was to move to safety—either to find help or offer help to others. Many survivors also tried to find friends and family members. This was difficult in the darkness, with collapsed buildings and mangled cars blocking roadways.
[Name withheld], Arlington, VA: I looked next door and I saw the father of a neighboring family standing almost naked. His skin was peeling off all over his body and was hanging from his fingertips. I talked to him, but he was too exhausted to give me a reply. He was looking for his family desperately.
[Name withheld], Jupiter, FL: I really thought I was dying because I drank so much water. I don’t know how many minutes passed, but anyway I found something like a piece of wood, but it was very soft and sticky. I touched it. It was actually my friend’s leg. She was alive, and we were so glad to see each other.
For many survivors in urban areas, the most intense memories in the immediate aftermath of the strike were the enormous amounts of rubble and ash left by the tall buildings that collapsed—and the cries in the darkness coming from underneath the debris. Many people were buried completely, while others were simply trapped by debris or so seriously injured that they could not move.
[Name withheld], New York, NY: I couldn’t see anyone around me, but I heard somebody shouting “Help! Help!” from somewhere. Then I realized that the cries were actually coming from beneath the rubble I was walking on.
[Name withheld], New York, NY: I found one of the other kids in the school alive. I held him in my arms. It is hard to say this: his skull was cracked open, his flesh was dangling out from his head. He had only one eye left, and it was looking right at me. First, he was mumbling something, but I couldn’t understand him. I held his hand, and he started to reach for something in his pocket, so I asked him, I said, “You want me to take this along to hand it over to your mother?” He nodded. I thought I could take him along. I guess that his body below the waist was crushed. The lower part of his body was trapped, buried inside of the debris. He just [refused] to go, he told me to go away.
With the widespread destruction and collapse of infrastructure, millions of people began to simply walk out of the destruction zone. Over the course of the afternoon and well into the night, millions of people walked along expressways and over bridges to escape the misery and suffering within the cities. While many eventually made it home after walking ten or even twenty miles, many tens of thousands did not, falling along the way; the escape routes were littered with the bodies of men, women, and children.
The president, over the course of the first few hours of the North Korean attack, grew increasingly agitated in his isolation. He insisted that aides put him in contact with Secretary of Defense Mattis. Communicating with anyone, however, was nearly impossible. As reports of nuclear explosions in the United States appeared on television, the volume of text messages, social media postings, and telephone calls quickly overwhelmed the communications infrastructure. Moreover, government officials were beginning to follow procedures to evacuate to safety.
“Communications systems were overwhelmed with traffic,” one aide recalled. “Key officials were being evacuated in Washington, DC, and cell calls that got through were breaking up. Information was mixed with rumor. We had to switch to the military radio network. The president couldn’t reach key people on regular phones because people like the secretary of defense had abandoned buildings in DC. Cell phones were useless because the networks were saturated.”
During this early period, Mattis was engaged in the important process of shifting Department of Defense operations out of the Pentagon and into Site R, the massive underground complex in rural Pennsylvania. Mattis had given orders to transfer operations to the Pentagon’s deep underground, alternative command center as soon as the first missile launch had been detected. Although the complex was kept on a sort of warm standby, it would still take time—more than an hour—to get the staff into the facility and activate all of its communications systems. Mattis himself was in the air, en route to the site. During this period, he was simply not available to the president.
Unable to reach his secretary of defense, the president implored his remaining aides to find a way to contact his wife and children. He was particularly concerned about his wife Melania and their son Barron, who had been staying at Trump Tower. He was also demanding to talk to his daughter Ivanka and her husband Jared. They lived in Washington. Both cities were now under attack, and the president was desperate to know that his family members were safe.
If New Yorkers remember the rubble, people in Honolulu and northern Virginia—both largely suburban areas with wood frame houses—remember the fire. The intense heat of the explosions lit fires that grew steadily into firestorms, swallowing everything and everyone in their paths.
[Name withheld], Honolulu, HI: We felt terribly hot and could not breathe well at all. After a while, a whirlpool of fire approached us from the south. It was like a big tornado of fire spreading over the full width of the street. Whenever the fire touched, wherever the fire touched, it burned. It burned my ear and leg. I didn’t realize that I had burned myself at that moment, but I noticed it later.
[Name withheld], Arlington, VA: I still felt very thirsty, and there was nothing I could do about it. What I felt at that moment was that Virginia was entirely covered with only three colors. I remember red, black, and brown, but, but, nothing else. Many people on the street were killed almost instantly. The fingertips of those dead bodies caught fire, and the fire gradually spread over their entire bodies from their fingers. A light gray liquid dripped down their hands, scorching their fingers. I, I was so shocked to know that fingers and bodies could be burned and deformed like that. I just couldn’t believe it. It was horrible.
[Name withheld], Arlington, VA: The houses on both sides of the railroad were burning, and the railway was the hollow in the fire. I thought I was going to die there. It was such an awful experience.
[Name withheld], Honolulu, HI: I could see people running in the dark. Some of them were on fire, and some of them were just rolling around on the ground. Gradually it became lighter. And just then, the sun broke through the clouds. The light appeared in many different colors, red and yellow, purple and white.
In Honolulu, it began to rain—giant drops of rain, blackened with the soot and ash from the fires. With so many people suffering from burns and especially thirst—a primary symptom of radiation poisoning—the rain initially seemed welcome. But it did not extinguish the growing fires.
[Name withheld], Honolulu, HI: The fire and the smoke made us so thirsty, and there was nothing to drink, no water, and the smoke even disturbed our eyes. As it began to rain, people opened their mouths and turned their faces toward the sky and tried to drink the rain, but it wasn’t easy to catch the raindrops in our mouths. It was a black rain with big drops.
In northern Virginia, the massive fire isolated the city of Alexandria. The two nuclear weapons had devastated much of the area to the north and west of the city, trapping its surviving residents between the growing fires and the Potomac River. As the fire swept into the city, survivors attempted to flee, but were chased by the flames into the water.
[Name withheld], Alexandria, VA: It was all quiet and the city was wrapped, enveloped in red flames. Mr. W—— came to help me. He asked me if I wanted to swim across the river. The bridge was burning, and the river was very high. I had no choice. I could barely see by then, though. And Mr. W—— took my arms and told me to swim across the river together with him, so together we went into the river and began to swim. When we reached the middle of the river, I could no longer see anything, and I was starting to feel faint. And as I began to feel faint, I also began to lose control. Mr. W —— encouraged me and helped me to reach the other side of the river. Finally, we reached the other side. What surprised me so much was all the cries of the children for help and for their mothers. It just didn’t stop.
[Name withheld], Alexandria, VA: I was pushed into the river with many other people. And since I thought it would be dangerous to stay on this side, I swam over to the other side. It was so frightening.
[Name withheld], Alexandria, VA: An awful thing happened when I reached the other side, and was relieved. I was suddenly spun around by the current. And then large pieces of hail begin to fall, and my face started hurting. So I plunged my face back into the water over and over again. I was spun around again and again. It just didn’t stop.
[Name withheld], Alexandria, VA: The water was swirling around me, and later I learned that was a tornado. And my friends somehow managed to survive it. [Interviewer: Did you think you were going to die?] Yes. The faces of my family came to my mind one after another. And I really thought I was dying because I swallowed a lot of water too.
[Name withheld], Alexandria, VA: Later on in the evening, when we were sitting around without having much to do, most of the people had already fled and the city was still burning. We could hear voices calling “Help!” or “It’s burning. Help us!” The voices, they weren’t from nearby but from far away. We didn’t know just where those voices came from, but it became quiet by midnight.
While Air Force One was loitering out over the Atlantic Ocean, air traffic controllers in Jacksonville, Florida, detected an unidentified aircraft heading toward the president’s plane. The controllers radioed the pilot. “When controllers asked if we were aware of an unidentified plane bearing down on us, we didn’t have a clue,” he recalled. “I kept thinking that the sky is huge and the chances of one aircraft finding another are just infinitesimal. But I worried that maybe we were followed as we took off.”
The pilot had few options. “Air Force One has defenses to protect against attack,” he explained, “but no offensive capability. So I changed course. As we veered west, the other plane did not follow: it was simply an airliner with a malfunctioning transponder.”
The passengers aboard the aircraft recall that the report from Jacksonville, although it turned out to be a non-issue, changed the mood aboard Air Force One. The president had grown increasingly agitated that he was unable to reach Melania or Ivanka. He had been in the air for two hours, and there were now television reports of nuclear explosions in New York City and Washington, DC. He did not know if his wife and daughter were dead or alive. Staff members could see quite clearly that Trump Tower had been near the epicenter of the blast. Some thought the president could see that too. Still, no one said anything.
Trump now insisted that they were no safer in the air than on the ground. The president began to demand that the pilot land the plane. But where? Florida, Washington, and New York were clearly not safe. And Barksdale Air Force Base, George Bush’s first stop after leaving Florida on 9/11, had been clearly marked on Kim’s map of nuclear targets—it could be attacked at any time.
There was brief discussion about attempting to get the president to Camp David, largely because it was close to both Washington and Site R. But in the end, the pilot proposed flying to the US Strategic Command Underground Command Center—the underground bunker in Omaha designed to allow the United States to fight and win a nuclear war.
No one objected.
Those who survived the blast—the intense heat of the fireball and the hailstorm of broken glass and debris—now faced dealing with severe radiation burns and the onset of radiation sickness. The scale of the casualties completely overwhelmed local medical services, many of which had seen their facilities destroyed in the explosions and their doctors and nurses killed. The suffering was especially difficult in suburban areas that were densely populated but relied heavily on road networks to move people around. The accounts of burns and radiation sickness made for some of the most difficult testimony that this commission heard, and are equally challenging to read.
[Name withheld], Honolulu, HI: It was very, very hot. I touched my skin and it just peeled right off.
[Name withheld], Arlington, VA: There was a sticky yellowish pus, a white watery liquid coming out of my daughter’s wounds. Her skin was just peeling right off. And nine hours later, she died. [Interviewer: You were holding her in your arms all that time?] Yes, on my lap. I held her in my arms. When I held her on my lap, she said, “I don’t want to die.” I told her, “Hang on, hang on.” She said, “I won’t die before my brother comes home.” But she was in pain and she kept crying.
The surviving doctors, nurses, and volunteers were quickly overwhelmed. There was often no power or water, and medical supplies were soon exhausted. Of the tens of thousands of individuals who attempted to walk out of the affected areas, many were attempting to head home, although many others were descending on hospitals or even doctor’s offices, seeking help. Over the course of the day, many people suffering symptoms of fatal radiation sickness attempted to walk to safety but fell and died along the way.
Most of the survivors who managed to reach hospitals or other places where they hoped to find medical assistance were disappointed to encounter tens of thousands of other sick and dying people and only a handful of doctors and nurses, many of them seriously wounded themselves.
[Name withheld], Arlington, VA: There were too many people. We took care of the people around us by using the clothes of dead people as bandages, especially for those who were terribly wounded. By that time, we somehow became insensible [to] all those awful things.
[Name withheld], Honolulu, HI: I felt someone touch my leg. It was a pregnant woman. She said that she was about to die. She said, “I know that I am going to die. But I can feel that my baby is moving inside. I don’t mind if I die. But if the baby is delivered now, it does not have to die with me. Please help my baby live.” There were no obstetricians. There was no delivery room. There was no time to take care of her baby. All I could do was to tell her that I would come back later when everything was ready for her and her baby. This cheered her up. She looked so happy. So I went back to work taking care of the injured, one by one. There were so many patients. But the image of that pregnant woman never left my mind. Later, I went to the place where I had found her before. She was still there, lying in the same place. I patted her on the shoulder, but she said nothing. The person lying next to her said that a short while ago, she had fallen silent.
Despite being overwhelmed, many doctors and nurses worked tirelessly to aid people, even as their own condition deteriorated from fatigue or radiation poisoning. For many survivors, the heroism of ordinary people like these is a recurring memory of those horrible days.
Moreover, despite claims to the contrary by some people—including former president Trump—we have found no evidence of widespread looting or violence. Specifically, a systematic investigation into the activities of the National Guard and Army units deployed to maintain order reveals no evidence at all that there was organized criminal activity, much less widespread executions to combat it. Despite this, Trump has repeatedly referred to such events, saying, “It was on television. I saw it. It was well covered at the time. Now, I know they don’t like to talk about it, but it was well covered at the time.”
The commission believes that these rumors stemmed from conspiracies spread on the internet claiming to show military vehicles transporting the bodies of executed looters. These images, many of which are hosted on sites maintained by the Russian Federation, in fact show the vehicles that were required to recover and bury the more than one million people killed in the attack whose bodies were not pulverized or vaporized. Hundreds of thousands of people died in the initial explosions, and tens of thousands more died by the hour. The Army and the National Guard had to organize the enormous logistical effort associated with removing these bodies as quickly as possible. For many, the presence of large numbers of such vehicles, filled with bodies—the “death cabs”—is a stark memory of the days following the attack.
[Name withheld], Honolulu, HI: As military trucks came into the city, they started loading bodies into truck beds. I saw three soldiers try to lift a burned body, but they dropped it to the ground, losing their grip when the skin sloughed off.
[Name withheld], Arlington, VA: When I came to, it was about seven in the evening. . . . I found myself lying on the floor. A soldier was looking in my face. He gave me a light slap on the cheek, and he said, “You are a lucky boy.” He told me that he had gone with one of the few trucks left to collect the dead bodies. . . . They were loading bodies, treating them like sacks. They picked me up from the riverbank and then threw me on top of the pile. My body slid off, and when they grabbed me by the arm to put me back onto the truck, they felt that my pulse was still beating, so they reloaded me onto the truck, carrying the survivors. I was really lucky.
It was this heroic effort to retrieve and bury the dead, we believe, that gave rise to the rumors and internet conspiracies.
For many survivors, the overwhelming horror of that day, and the days that followed, is not a story of looting and violence, but a tragic tale of complete strangers desperately trying to help one another in hopeless circumstances. Gillian Mackenzie, a book editor in Manhattan, was close enough to the blast that she was buried in ash and debris. Workers at a McDonald’s in Lower Manhattan pulled her out of the ash and gave her water, saving her life. Far from former president Trump’s claims of mass looting and violence, she said, it was a day when “ordinary people saved each other.”
Air Force One landed at Offut Air Force Base in Omaha, Nebraska. As soon as the president stepped off the plane, he was taken to the gleaming headquarters of Strategic Command—the military entity responsible for waging and winning nuclear wars. But instead of entering through the front door, Trump was taken beneath the concrete plaza near the building’s entrance to the Operations Center. Officially called US Strategic Command Underground Command Center, it was better known as the “Mole Hole.”
Down inside the Mole Hole, President Trump was escorted to an empty office. Despite the spartan accommodations, STRATCOM was in perfect communication with the other underground facilities maintained by the Department of Defense, as well as with the bunkers beneath the White House and Mar-a-Lago.
For many Americans, even in the months leading up to March 2020, the prospect of nuclear war had seemed remote. For the Pentagon, however, nuclear war was an ever-present possibility, and it had drawn up “continuity of government” plans that would ensure the survival of the government even in the event that American society itself completely collapsed. Over the past decade, Congress had authorized billions of dollars in funding to build secure underground facilities where US leaders could be safe from a nuclear attack. The construction of a new command center at Offut alone had cost $1.2 billion, and it was only one of six underground complexes that were now involved in coordinating the response.
These complexes included Site R, the alternate Pentagon where the secretary of defense was now organizing the attack on North Korea; Mount Weather in the Blue Ridge Mountains, where most government functions had relocated once the first nuclear weapon struck northern Virginia; NORAD’s alternate communications site at Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado; and the underground bunkers beneath the White House and Mar-a-Lago. In addition to these sites, which were now central to the federal government’s disaster management effort, members of Congress were huddled in yet another bunker underneath Fort Leslie McNair in Washington, DC. The Trump administration did not, however, attempt to establish contact with members of Congress in their bunker. “One of the awkward questions we faced [in planning for this sort of scenario] was whether to reconstitute Congress after a nuclear attack,” recalled one official present with the president in Omaha. “It was decided that no, it would be easier to operate without them.” Congress would remain in session, but the Trump administration did not make contact with them for six days.
The “continuity of government” efforts on March 21 went largely according to plan. Once he was in Omaha, the president was in regular communication with the secretary of defense at Site R and Jack Francis at Mar-a-Lago. (Aides recalled that Francis told everyone that he had volunteered to remain behind at Mar-a-Lago to assist those suffering in Jupiter.) Thanks to these communication links, the president was now receiving a steady stream of reports on both the attacks under way against the United States and the progress of the air war against North Korea.
With the reestablishment of communications, however, the scope of North Korea’s nuclear attack was now clear and President Trump’s anxiety about his family was growing. He was increasingly insistent that staff put him in contact with members of his family, particularly his wife Melania and his daughter Ivanka. Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner had been in Washington. The Secret Service had whisked them to safety at the White House and escorted them down into the Presidential Emergency Operations Center beneath the White House. They were soon put in contact with the president.
There was, however, a delicate task remaining. After the president spoke with Ivanka, he continued to ask why he had not been able to speak with Melania. For the staff around the president, the grim reality was plain enough: Manhattan had been hit directly with a 200-kiloton nuclear weapon, and Trump Tower was almost directly beneath the centerpoint of the massive explosion. The president’s son Barron had spent the day outside the city, visiting a friend in Connecticut. He was unharmed. Melania Trump, however, had been home in their penthouse atop Trump Tower at the time of the attack. News helicopters were now showing the enormous devastation throughout the country. In the images from Manhattan, block after city block had been leveled. Trump Tower had simply vanished.
None of the staff pointed out this obvious reason for their inability to make contact with Melania. After all, President Trump was known as a person who did not take bad news well. Moreover, the staff around the president were relatively junior people who had been able to get aboard Air Force One because they were staying at the Hilton next to the airport; the more senior staff who had been at Mar-a-Lago or the Colony Hotel were still in Palm Beach. They simply did not have the kind of personal relationship with the president that was now needed.
Who would tell the president? After a teleconference between Francis and Ivanka, the two decided that they needed to find Hope Hicks.
Hope Hicks was, in many ways, a surrogate daughter for Trump. Staff had sometimes joked that Hicks was the “real daughter,” making Ivanka the “real wife.” She was also well known as someone who could deliver bad news to Trump. “When a bad story would come up, she would volunteer,” explained a former Trump aide, “saying, ‘I’ll just go and tell him; I got it.’ We all had to do it, she was just better at it.” “She’s like a security blanket for the boss,” said another.
Hicks had left the White House in 2018 and was now living in Los Angeles, having started a boutique public relations firm specializing in crisis management. Summoned by telephone, she was entrusted with delivering the worst possible news to the president, who was surrounded by virtual strangers in Omaha, and she had to do it from her office in Los Angeles, using an unsecured line.
When Hicks was connected by phone with Trump, she gave it to him gentle but direct. Trump Tower, she explained, had been completely destroyed. Melania had been there. No, she told him, there was no chance that Melania had survived. No, she admitted, no one had seen her body. But, she felt compelled to add, it was not likely that her body would ever be recovered. She cried a bit. The president thanked her for calling and hung up.
“He was silent for a long time,” said one of the staff members present, “and then he said something to the effect that losing Melania was such a waste of a talented life.” Another staffer recalled the president’s comment differently, but declined to repeat his precise language, citing the need for decorum. Yet another staff member recalled the president’s comment verbatim: “What he mumbled was, ‘There was nothing in the world like her.’”