Donald Trump couldn’t sleep.
Moments later, Larry Kudlow’s cell phone buzzed. He recognized the number.
It was afternoon in Washington; it was the middle of the night where the call was coming from. But that didn’t matter to Kudlow, a former CNBC presence now working as a White House economic adviser, for this wasn’t the first call he’d received from the same man halfway around the globe.
The sun would not rise for several hours in India, but the president of the United States hadn’t slept, pacing in his palatial New Delhi hotel suite. He was battling some jet lag, to be sure, but he wasn’t awake because of that, or because he was still charged up from the 125,000-person rally he had held at the world’s largest cricket stadium or the majestic tour he had received of the Taj Mahal.
The president didn’t know it yet, but he was embarking on one of the most consequential weeks of his term. At the beginning of the week, he had believed that he would be running for reelection on the back of a strong economy while facing a socialist. By the end of that week, neither was true.
And in the months to come, it would become clear that for the first time in his political life, Trump’s lies weren’t going to save him. And it just so happened to be in an election year.
Trump’s whirlwind trip to India in the final days of February 2020 was meant to be pure celebration. Short on policy but long on pageantry, the president was to be feted by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the head of the self-proclaimed world’s largest democracy, whose rule had tilted menacingly to the right, leading to open discrimination and violence against the nation’s Muslim minority. It was meant to be a trip of the grand: the biggest Trump rally ever; a photo op at arguably the world’s most famous building; a visit to the home of one of history’s most revered men, Mahatma Gandhi.
The spectacles were as massive as expected, fit for a president whose demands were always for things to be bigger and better. But, upon reflection, a small, unassuming event tucked into the presidential schedule carried by far the greatest import.
The event was a quick talk to business leaders, held at the US ambassador’s residence in New Delhi and slated for just a few minutes. But this was where Trump felt compelled to address the coronavirus, which had begun rattling the foundation of his argument for another four years in office: the economy.
“We lost almost a thousand points yesterday on the market, and that’s something,” Trump told the two dozen or so gathered. “Things like that happen where—and you have it in your business all the time—it had nothing to do with you; it’s an outside source that nobody would have ever predicted.”
The virus was “a problem that’s going to go away,” he said with bravado. “And I think I can speak for our country, for—our country is under control.”
But his public confidence was undermined by his private worry. Trump had been up the night before, repeatedly calling Kudlow and other economic advisers. He asked Kudlow what he had heard, what the titans of business were saying, and if he would go on cable TV—always the most important part of a Trump public relations overture—to defend the president’s precious economy. Trump was nervous about the first significant stock market slide caused by COVID-19, the mysterious new virus that had stealthily emerged in China two months prior and was beginning to race around the globe. There was suddenly talk of lockdowns, travel bans, and mass death, and the stock market—so bullish for most of the Trump era, it had become an idealized symbol in his mind for economic prosperity—was shaken.
Trump had known for a while that COVID-19 was poised to spark a pandemic unlike the globe had seen in a hundred years. After he and other top aides, among them Mike Pence and Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, initially downplayed warnings coming from elsewhere in the administration—including from national security aide Matt Pottinger and trade adviser Peter Navarro—the president had grown convinced of the danger posed by what he often dubbed “the plague.” He confided to journalist Bob Woodward as far back as February 7 that he knew the virus was deadly.
But publicly, Trump lied.
He lied at the gathering of the world’s elite in Davos, Switzerland, on January 22, saying, “It’s one person coming in from China. We have it under control. It’s going to be just fine.” He lied days later in Iowa, declaring that “everything’s going to be great” and falsely claiming, “We pretty much shut it down coming in from China.” He later said the virus was going to have “a very good ending for it.” And with an eye toward Wall Street, he lied to the entrepreneurs in India, declaring, “As far as what we’re doing with the new virus, I think that we’re doing a great job.”
But the markets fell again that day, creating their biggest two-day slide in four years. When Trump boarded Air Force One well after sundown in India, he was in a rage about the virus and his inability to slow the market tumble with reassuring words, according to the officials. Trump barely slept on the plane as it hurtled back to Washington overnight, landing early in the morning of February 26 after more than a dozen hours in the air, creating the effect of one endless day. He then quickly tore into aides about Nancy Messonnier, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, who had just publicly predicted that the virus’s impact would be severe.
The president returned to the West Wing to watch the market tumble yet again and, in something akin to a panic, told aides that later that day he would take the podium and preside over the coronavirus task force briefing.
The virus was on the nation’s doorstep, poised to claim hundreds of thousands of lives, alter the very norms of society, and define Trump’s final year in office.
But that was not the only event in February’s final days that sealed Trump’s political fate and helped shape the nation’s future.
Joe Biden was a lion of Washington. He had served for thirty-six years in the Senate, representing his home state of Delaware, rising through the ranks to, at various points, chair two of its most powerful committees, Judiciary and Foreign Relations. He was well liked among his colleagues, occasionally reached across the aisle to work with Republicans, and gained the spotlight—for better or worse—in Supreme Court confirmation hearings. He also liked to talk. He never, his friends said, wasted a chance to turn a one-minute story into five minutes, gaffes often included.
His life was also touched by immense tragedy. A 1972 car crash killed his first wife and one-year-old daughter and put his two young sons in the hospital. Decades later, one of those sons, Beau, who was Delaware’s attorney general, a military veteran, and a rising political star, died of brain cancer. Once more, Biden was burying one of his children.
Beau’s death, in 2015, seemed to put an end to his father’s lifelong dream of living in the White House. He had run twice before and neither attempt got much beyond the launching pad: his 1988 campaign was doomed by a plagiarism scandal and a series of other missteps, and then his 2008 bid didn’t survive past Iowa. But that year he did impress Barack Obama, the young Illinois senator who turned the political world upside down yet needed Biden’s gravitas and foreign-policy experience to help address doubts about his own youth and experience. Moreover, a candid calculation was made: an older white senator might offset some voters’ anxieties about a youthful Black candidate. Biden was reluctant at first but later relented, exacting a promise to be the last person in the room any time Obama made a key decision.
Their partnership wasn’t flawless, but it was undeniably effective. Amid the 2008 financial crisis, Biden was tasked with steering the auto industry bailout and much of the recovery act and played a key role in getting the Affordable Care Act passed (he declared the adoption of Obamacare “a big fucking deal”). He also came out in favor of gay marriage before the president and took the lead in the White House’s negotiations with Congress in massive budget deals.
Moreover, a true friendship was born between Obama and Biden, with the president offering to pay Biden’s mortgage when Beau’s medical bills mounted. Biden was wrecked by Beau’s death, later saying that he believed his son would have been elected president. Biden’s friends saw him buckle under the weight of his grief.
Obama also telegraphed that he favored his successor to be another trailblazer to follow his own history-making election, suggesting that his former secretary of state Hillary Clinton be the party’s next standard-bearer. Biden passed on the presidential run and watched in horror with fellow Democrats when Trump was elected. His political career seemed over. Until Charlottesville.
Clad in khakis and carrying tiki torches, more than two hundred white supremacists marched through the Virginia college town in August 2017 to protest the planned removal of a statue of the Confederate hero Robert E. Lee. The chilling images were emblematic of the rise in hate, as those who had kept silent before were emboldened to emerge from the darkness upon Trump’s election. The next day, during a counterprotest to the march, the violence was worse, and a car driven by one of the white supremacists struck and killed Heather Heyer, a thirty-two-year-old anti-racist demonstrator.
Trump pinned the responsibility on “both sides.”
That was the turning point for Biden. In that moment, he felt the nation tear at the seams. It tore again in Helsinki when Trump sided with Putin over his own intelligence community; and once more when children were held in cages at the southern border. The very “soul of America” was at stake, Biden kept telling people, as he slowly, inexorably moved toward declaring a third presidential campaign. He proved a successful surrogate for Democrats during the 2018 midterms and began to be considered a possible candidate again, even if a seemingly uninspiring one. Few people had tried to be president longer than Joe Biden had. He consulted his family, he pulled the trigger, he was in, he was making one final attempt. He declared his candidacy in April 2019.
At first it didn’t go all that well.
Armed with unparalleled name recognition, Biden entered the race in the pole position. But as 2019 turned to 2020, his campaign seemed sluggish and listless, and it struggled to raise money. He had jumped in the race late and missed the chance to hire some of the top staff talent in the party. And though he was a beloved former vice president, Democrats weren’t clearing the field for him. Biden was overpowered by enthusiasm on the Left (Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren) and eclipsed by a fresh face in the center (Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana). And to make matters worse, Mike Bloomberg and his billions eventually entered the race, offering another moderate option for Democrats, one who could potentially spend Trump into oblivion.
Iowa had not been kind to Biden. His 1988 campaign had never even reached the first caucus state, imploding before any votes were cast. And in 2008, Biden finished fifth, winning less than 1 percent of the vote. He abandoned his campaign just a few days later. This time around, it wasn’t much better, with Biden drawing far smaller crowds than his rivals and finishing fourth, at just over 16 percent.
Iowa was bad. New Hampshire was worse.
In a moment that became the sort of metaphor that political writers can only dream about, one of Biden’s campaign buses broke down alongside a wintry New Hampshire road in the primary’s final days. The cash-strapped campaign appeared stalled as well. In a primary week appearance on Morning Joe filmed at a Manchester, New Hampshire, restaurant, Biden confided off camera to the panel that he was bracing for the worst. Trump, who held a counterprogramming rally in the state just before the primary, reveled in Biden’s failing. Things were so grim that Biden left the state before the polls closed. He finished a shockingly poor fifth. His political obituaries were being written again.
But Biden wasn’t dead yet. The voters of South Carolina, and one man in particular, offered him a lifeline and helped change the course of American political history.
Representative Jim Clyburn, the then seventy-nine-year-old House minority whip, had known Biden for decades. He and his late wife, Emily, who had passed away the year before, had grown close to the former vice president’s family. Clyburn’s endorsement was heavily coveted, with every candidate making an appearance at his famed fish fry in an effort to secure his support. The primary, the first of the season in which Black voters—a key part of the Democratic base—would play a sizable role, was on February 29. Four days before the primary, the Democratic field gathered for what for many of them was a make-or-break debate, and Clyburn, one of the party’s most influential Black voices, hustled backstage during a late commercial break.
He grabbed Biden and reminded him of a promise the candidate had made a few days earlier: that he would use the debate to unveil a commitment to name a Black woman to the Supreme Court. Biden had missed out on several opportunities to do so during the debate and Clyburn was afraid he was running out of time, both in the debate and as a candidate.
Biden, eventually, awkwardly, got it out.
“The fact is, what we should be doing—we talked about the Supreme Court,” he said. “I’m looking forward to making sure there’s a Black woman on the Supreme Court, to make sure we in fact get every representation.”
Clyburn had pledged to make his endorsement after the debate. The SCOTUS promise, and his longtime friendship with Biden, was enough. He backed Biden, who already had an enormous reservoir of goodwill among Black voters after loyally serving the nation’s first African American president for eight years.
A Biden victory in the South Carolina primary wasn’t surprising. But he didn’t just win. He romped, reaching almost 49 percent of the vote, while Sanders finished a distant second at just under 20 percent.
The race was turned on its head. Once the contest moved past the demographically homogeneous Iowa and New Hampshire, Biden suddenly appeared to be the only candidate who could win with the minority voters who made up the core of the electorate Democrats needed that November. The very next day, even though Biden had won only one state, the other major moderate candidates—Buttigieg and Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar—both dropped out and endorsed the former vice president. Beto O’Rourke, another moderate who briefly sizzled in the race, also threw his support behind Biden. They consolidated their portion of the party under the premise that Biden was the one Democrat who could win in November, and the pressure was on Warren and Sanders to bow out too.
Biden, given up for dead just days earlier, was suddenly the prohibitive favorite. He racked up more wins on Super Tuesday and the race was his. The country was increasingly rattled by the virus, and Biden had begun the improbable comeback journey that would lead him to become the Democratic nominee. As a moderate choice with decades of experience, Biden reassured a public that found stability appealing as it grappled with a once-in-a-century pandemic.
It would be two more weeks before the world stopped. On the night of March 11, in a matter of hours, the NBA suspended its season, Tom Hanks announced that he had contracted the coronavirus, and the United States hurriedly moved to ban travelers from Europe.
But the final days of February were when the year began to slip away from Trump. He had thought he was going to campaign on the back of a strong economy; that was now destroyed by the virus. And he had been expecting to run against a scary socialist; now he was going to face a less threatening moderate in Joe Biden.
Riding high off his impeachment acquittal, Trump had been telling confidants that he could foresee a walk to reelection. He was in disbelief that this had changed. To that point in his political career, he had been able to bend Washington to his will, using sheer force of personality—including an extraordinary shamelessness—to dominate the media and his fellow Republicans.
With the ground under his feet suddenly unsteady, Trump once more tried to exert control by force of will. But for the first time, that method didn’t work. A shaky Oval Office address did little to reassure a jittery nation. And his blustery social media posts didn’t move the needle either.
The virus, after all, didn’t have a Twitter account.
The COVID-19 task force had been led by Azar, then Pence; now Trump was taking over to become the leading voice of the nation’s pandemic response. Even in the early days of the pandemic, when it was too soon to predict just how many Americans would die and how the very norms of society would be reshaped, some White House aides warned the president that he should take a step back. Defer to the scientists, the aides said, as a matter of both good policy and good politics, as they urged him not to be the face of something that was not guaranteed to end well.
But Trump couldn’t resist. He couldn’t stay away from the TV cameras, couldn’t accept not being center stage. The briefings would, for a time, become must-see TV for a panicked nation. Trump would brag about the ratings and try to schedule appearances each day around 6:00 p.m., just ahead of the nightly evening news. They were a daily ritual for Trump to try to enforce his belief that the virus was under control, even as infections surged and the death toll mounted. Only a handful of times did Trump strike a more somber tone from the podium; most of the time it was pure gaslighting with claims that the virus was on the run.
But these lies didn’t work. COVID-19 was immune to his force of personality.
It was already too late to pretend otherwise, not that Trump stopped trying. Warning signs had been missed. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention failed in an early attempt at a coronavirus test. Trump refused to turn up the pressure on China for fear of alienating Xi Jinping and scuttling a trade deal. Schools shut down. Businesses closed. There were runs on hand sanitizer and, inexplicably, toilet paper, and millions of Americans tried to figure out how to use Zoom.
There was so much fear and so little known. Images of refrigerator trucks parked outside a New York City hospital, just a few miles from the Queens neighborhood where Trump grew up, shook the president. But even within those terrifying first weeks of the pandemic, Trump saw the frozen economy as the gravest threat to his reelection chances and began pushing for society to reopen far sooner than his public health experts advised.
He reflexively rejected measures that made the nation—or himself—look weak. When scientists coalesced around the idea that masks offered protection against the airborne virus, Trump refused to wear one, even though a president modeling the behavior could have had a far-reaching impact, particularly when that president inspired such devotion from his supporters. Aides urged him to do so, and some later wondered if the choice to not wear one helped cost him the election. Trump thought that wearing a mask made him look like “a pussy,” he told aides, and it hurt the image of strength he always tried to project.
“I just don’t want to be doing—I don’t know, somehow sitting in the Oval Office behind that beautiful Resolute Desk, the great Resolute Desk,” he said in early April. “I think wearing a face mask as I greet presidents, prime ministers, dictators, kings, queens—I don’t know, somehow I don’t see it for myself. I just, I just don’t.”
Even more dangerously, he lied and claimed on national television that a CDC study shows that “85 percent of the people wearing masks catch” the virus.
He mocked aides who showed up at the White House in masks and talked down to reporters who wore them to his briefings. Advisers tried repeatedly to get him to wear one—even flattering him by dubbing him the “Lone Ranger” when he did, as required, wear one to visit wounded troops at Walter Reed medical center—but Trump resisted, even when it was explained to him that he was putting his own voters’ lives in jeopardy, since they would follow his lead.
To Trump’s credit, he invested heavily in the development of COVID-19 vaccines, in part fueled by the hope that their emergence before the election could be an “October surprise” that would propel him to victory. But his management of the pandemic was otherwise disastrous, primarily due to his efforts to repeatedly downplay the severity of the virus in a misguided attempt to return the country to normal ahead of November.
The lies were constant.
“It’s going to disappear. One day—it’s like a miracle—it will disappear.”
“Many of those cases are young people that would heal in a day. They have the sniffles, and we put it down as a test.”
The pandemic is “fading away. It’s going to fade away.” America is “rounding the corner” and “rounding the final turn” of the pandemic.
They were all lies. And with each lie, more people died.
The country was soon divided: with GOP governors eager to please the president, the Trump-friendly states imposed far fewer virus restrictions and subsequently experienced more deaths. Trump’s poll numbers saw a slight uptick in the early weeks of the pandemic; though nowhere close to the surge George W. Bush saw after 9/11, there was still, even in a sharply divided country, an instinct to rally around the flag. But the bump faded with each Trump misstep, including his suggestion at one COVID briefing that health experts study the impact of injecting bleach into a human body. After that, much to some of his aides’ relief, the daily coronavirus briefings were suspended for a while.
The more the country saw of Trump, the less they trusted his pandemic response. He would keep declaring that the nation was through the worst of the virus, and the death count would keep proving otherwise. His Democratic opponent took a different angle. As COVID-19 swept across the nation, Biden quickly pledged that his administration would follow the science, respect health guidelines, and take an approach opposite the cavalier mentality demonstrated by Trump’s team. Biden told aides repeatedly that he didn’t understand why Trump wouldn’t don a mask and presciently feared that the White House itself could be a site of a virus outbreak at some point.
The pandemic also provided a silver lining for Biden. With travel deemed too dangerous, Biden hunkered down at his Delaware home, with aides converting a spare room at his Wilmington estate into an ad hoc studio for TV appearances and virtual campaign appearances. Everything became remote: speeches, fundraisers, policy releases. The shift allowed the then seventy-seven-year-old Biden, who moved noticeably more slowly than he had even four years earlier, as vice president, to avoid the rigors of the road. And the remote campaign allowed his events to be far more closely managed by staff, cutting down on the off-the-cuff gaffes for which Biden was known and that could dominate a news cycle.
That drove Trump—who had been banking on Biden self-destructing—mad. He and his allies began to take shots at the former vice president for hiding, brazenly suggesting that the Democrat was a mere puppet controlled by staff or more liberal members of the party—like Nancy Pelosi or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—and that he didn’t have the mental capacity for the job. While members of the Trump base ate up the conspiratorial talk and spread it on social media, the lies, like his foolhardy COVID reassurances, didn’t resonate with the general public.
And, though simplistic, one of Trump’s great strengths was his ability to deliver a cutting nickname and, through the power of repetition via Twitter or the rally stage, effectively brand an opponent. Crooked Hillary. Low-Energy Jeb. Lyin’ Ted. Lil’ Marco. The nicknames were savage, and they stuck. But Sleepy Joe, his moniker for Biden, didn’t quite land. The Democrats’ poll numbers kept going up the deeper the nation fell into the pandemic.
The president told aides he knew what was wrong. He looked weak, he said, largely stuck at the White House. He needed the energy of the crowds, and he complained to aides during the first half of 2020 that he was in withdrawal. He wanted to draw the contrast to stuck-at-home Biden, he needed to reassure his base that he was out there fighting for them, and he felt it was time to deliver a sign that America was back and unafraid. It was time for a campaign rally.
Trump rallies were a singular, undeniable political phenomenon. On one hand, they were a throwback to the door-to-door barnstorming of campaigns past, a break from the high-tech, data-driven operations of recent years. But the rallies were more sophisticated than they appeared, as they enabled the Trump campaign to gather data from attendees so they could target them later. And, of course, they allowed Trump to connect with his supporters, some of whom followed him from city to city like groupies following a band on tour. One of his true talents was his ability to read a room, and he’d road test material, using the feedback from the crowds to calibrate new attack lines. Many of those lines, of course, would be lies.
The country was still on fire from the virus when Trump wanted back out on the road. So his choices were limited. He had fought repeatedly with Democratic governors throughout the pandemic—with New York governor Andrew Cuomo, his most consistent foil, emerging as a darling of the Left for his no-nonsense briefings that stood in stark contrast to what Trump was offering.
But Trump also encountered resistance from the Democratic leaders of key swing states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, and those states would not bend local health regulations to allow a large gathering like a rally. The governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer, frequently clashed with Trump and became a target for right-wing extremists. Their plan to kidnap her, an ominous hint of future violence inspired by Trump, was thwarted by the FBI.
The next thought was Florida, now officially Trump’s home state and a key battleground, but Governor Ron DeSantis impressed upon the campaign that the virus was simply too rampant there. Pence then pointed out that Oklahoma had both lower case levels and lax regulations, and its GOP governor was willing to play ball. No one would mistake deep-red Oklahoma for a swing state, so the internal strategy shifted: instead of being portrayed as a comeback rally in a key battleground, it would be a show of force in a Republican stronghold.
The goal was to go big, really big, to show that the virus was on the run and both Trump and America were back. Campaign manager Brad Parscale, the team’s digital guru in 2016 who now had the big job thanks to ties to Jared Kushner, was happy to feed into that notion, and took to bragging on Twitter about receiving more than a million ticket requests. Trump wouldn’t just fill the indoor arena: plans were in the works for him to speak at one, and maybe two, overflow outdoor stages too.
But the rally, it would soon become clear, was doomed by outside forces too big for Trump to browbeat into submission.
The campaign had unknowingly originally scheduled the rally for the night of Juneteenth, a holiday celebrated annually on June 19 that honors the end of slavery in the United States. Nor did they appear to realize that Tulsa had been the site of one of the country’s bloodiest outbreaks of racist violence nearly a century before. The moment, instead of offering a glide path back to the campaign trail, underscored how out of touch Trump was when it came to Black Americans. And it wasn’t the only one that month.
George Floyd was a forty-six-year-old Black man who was stopped by Minneapolis police after a convenience store employee called 911 and said that he had bought cigarettes with a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill. What happened next would soon ricochet around the world, as Darnella Frazier, a seventeen-year-old bystander, filmed the officers taking down Floyd. One of them, Derek Chauvin, kept his knee on Floyd’s neck for well more than eight minutes.
Floyd yelled, “I can’t breathe,” and called for his mother. The knee never budged. Floyd died.
Protests soon swept the nation, the vast majority peaceful. Already in the grips of a pandemic, America was in the middle of a new reckoning on police violence and race—all while being led by a man who had not subtly winked at white supremacists from his perch in the White House.
One protest took hold at Lafayette Square, just steps from the White House. A small fire was ignited at nearby St. John’s Episcopal Church—long known as “the church of the presidents”—and the protests grew so intense that the Secret Service rushed Trump and his family down to an emergency bunker under the executive mansion—a move that, when leaked to the press, caused Trump to explode with anger for fear that it made him look weak.
Aides later recalled that they perhaps had never seen the president in such a rage. Two of them described Trump, his face red and veins popping, screaming, “Find me the fucking leakers,” and ordering an investigation to find out who had told the media that he had been taken to the bunker. Though always upset about unflattering stories, this one pushed him to another level, the aides thought. No leaker was ever publicly identified.
Still livid, Trump wanted to push back, to project strength. A plan was hatched for the military and federal police to clear Lafayette Park so Trump could cross it to hold a photo op in front of the damaged church. Outside of that first night, the protests in Washington were largely peaceful. But Trump lied in order to justify his actions, deeming the protesters “thugs” and endorsing violence by declaring “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” In what would become a template for the events of that fall and winter, Trump used a lie as the basis for abusing the powers of the presidency for his political gain.
The scenes that unfolded horrified much of the nation.
Peaceful protesters were forcibly pushed from the park by federal officers, who deployed tear gas and clubs to clear out the nonviolent demonstrators. Flash-bangs and the wails of sirens could be heard in the Rose Garden, where the press had gathered to hear Trump speak. And the president led much of his cabinet and senior staff on a fateful walk through a park.
They strode to the church, with Ivanka Trump handing her father a Bible from her bag. He held it awkwardly near his head, as if he weren’t sure what to do. When asked by a reporter if it was his Bible, Trump didn’t answer. He stood there, camera shutters clicking. He believed he had put together an unforgettable American image, a tableau of the triumph of law and order and presidential power.
Some of those who walked with Trump realized a mistake had been made. Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley, wearing his general’s uniform, broke away from the pack to make a point of talking to officers on duty. He was joined by Defense Secretary Mark Esper, who also tried to distance himself from the scene, which they both feared was a gross overreach of the use of the military on American soil. Milley offered an apology for his presence a few days later, triggering Trump’s ire.
“Why did you apologize?” Trump asked him. “That’s weak.”
“Not where I come from,” said Milley in a scene first recounted in Michael C. Bender’s book Frankly, We Did Win This Election. “It had nothing to do with you. It had to do with me and the uniform and the apolitical tradition of the United States military.”
“I don’t understand that,” Trump said. “It sounds like you’re ashamed of your president.”
The stunt backfired, with polling suggesting that a majority of Americans were, in fact, ashamed of the display and the president who ordered it. With the nation already roiled by racial tension, Trump had thrown gasoline on the flame. Two crises had engulfed the United States: the virus and the racial reckoning.
Against that backdrop, Trump went to Tulsa. And it was there that he was presented with a stinging visual reminder that 2020 was not 2016: a sea of empty seats.
The ticket requests for the rally, though sizable, were inflated, thanks to a wave of TikTok pranksters who registered for seats but had no intention of going. Some Trump fans also stayed away, turned off by the conservative media’s breathless warnings of violent protests or racial clashes that never materialized. And still others, despite the president’s relentless minimization of the threats posed by the virus, were leery of attending a packed indoor rally where few would be masked. One supporter who did attend, former GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain, died of COVID-19 a few weeks after the rally.
The outdoor overflow stages were quickly pulled down, and Trump erupted in fury when footage of the sparse crowd appeared on Air Force One’s televisions as the presidential plane descended into Tulsa.
He lashed out at Parscale, who soon found himself demoted. He raged at aides who had promised him a triumph and had delivered a humiliation. He still gave a game performance for those who had gathered inside the arena—attendance, all told, topped out at about six thousand people—and went into a long rant about how he had urged his staff to test fewer people for the coronavirus because, the thinking went, the more you test, the more positive cases you’ll find, and those numbers were bad for Trump.
That declaration was the lasting sound bite from the rally. The enduring image came a few hours later, well after midnight back in Washington, as Trump trudged from Marine One across the White House lawn. His tie was loosened, his face drooping and fatigued. For a president whose appearance meant everything to him, he looked beaten. He looked like a candidate who, try as he might, may have encountered the first crisis that he could not gaslight his way past.
Trump bowed to reality and tabled rallies for nearly two months, though any talk of him being humbled by Tulsa was dashed by his grandiose appearance on July 4 at Mount Rushmore—including posing so it looked like his visage was the fifth on the famed South Dakota mountain. He amped up the culture war rhetoric and the violent imagery, lying about Biden’s Senate record and claiming he was in the clutches of socialism. Biden’s polls didn’t drop. A dystopic Republican National Convention, in part held at the White House in violation of federal guidelines, also didn’t move the needle.
But another large event at the White House, held on September 26, was the final twist of the campaign, one both stunning and inevitable, and yet one more 2020 moment during which the powers that had worked for Trump up to that point failed him when he needed them most.
After Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died just six weeks before Election Day, Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell rushed to seat a new Supreme Court justice. Democrats howled hypocrisy, since there was far less time left in Trump’s term than there had been in Obama’s back in 2016 when McConnell had refused to even give a hearing to the Democrat’s nominee, Merrick Garland. It didn’t matter: Amy Coney Barrett soon took her place on the bench.
Trump hosted a celebration for his pick at the White House, drawing her family, Republican senators, and dozens of GOP allies. But there was also another, uninvited guest: the coronavirus. Within days, nearly two dozen people—including GOP senators and senior White House staff—tested positive for the virus. Some, including former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, became so ill they had to be hospitalized.
Trump got sick that week. When he first tested positive remains a matter of some dispute, but his own chief of staff, Mark Meadows, said it was before he shared a Cleveland stage with Biden on September 29 for their first debate. Trump’s family defied venue regulations by remaining maskless while the president blew off the required predebate test. Trump was erratic and angry that night, constantly interrupting both the moderator, Fox News’ Chris Wallace, and his Democratic opponent, who at one point exclaimed, “Will you shut up, man?” The president was all over the place, giving comments that seemed to support the Proud Boys white supremacist group and berating his staff after he stepped off the stage.
For nearly a year, Trump had flouted the rules. He had refused to wear a mask; he held packed events; he was convinced that even if he caught the virus, he was strong enough to easily defeat it. He was wrong. At a rally in Minnesota the night after the debate, Trump seemed low energy and cut his speech short. One of his top aides, Hope Hicks, fell ill and isolated on Air Force One on the flight back to Washington. The next day, Trump still went ahead to a maskless fundraiser at his New Jersey golf club. He tested again when he returned to the White House and called in to Hannity’s show while waiting for the result.
“I just went out with the test … and the first lady just went out with a test also,” Trump told his longtime confidant. “So whether we quarantine, or whether we have it, I don’t know.”
Across Washington and New York, newsrooms slowing down for the night sprang back to life. Speculation grew. Guests on late newscasts like The 11th Hour on MSNBC were asked to hang around as the shows blew through commercial breaks and stayed on the air for hours past their normal time. At 12:54 a.m., the president tweeted the official confirmation: he and the first lady had COVID-19.
It felt like the world quaked. The leader of the free world, just a month before he was to stand before voters at the end of a tumultuous term, was ill with a deadly disease. The markets were rattled; global capitals watched with worry. The Biden campaign was livid that their candidate may have been exposed to the virus at the debate. It was the biggest story in the world, but there was little in the way of news from the White House. And when updates did emerge, they quickly proved untrustworthy.
Aides told reporters the next morning at the White House that the president was resting and in good health. That afternoon, a quiet update was given to the reporters in the presidential pool that Trump would travel to Walter Reed for a checkup and that he’d likely return to the White House in a few hours. A short time later, we were told it would be a few days. His condition had worsened.
When my colleagues and I in the pool gathered on the South Lawn a short time later, we came to a quick agreement: Trump, contagious with the virus, wouldn’t be allowed to come over and talk to us unless he was at a safe distance. It became a moot point, as the president, this time wearing a mask, only waved at the press as he slowly walked to the helicopter waiting to take him to the hospital. His condition had deteriorated rapidly, and his alarmed staff told him that, if he wanted to walk out under his own power, he had to get on Marine One right then, or, if he waited, he would likely need to be taken out in a wheelchair as he fell more ill.
More lies came the next day. With the world watching, the president’s medical team, led by Dr. Sean Conley, held a news conference for the pool outside Walter Reed. I pressed the doctor over and over as to the vital questions of the moment: What was Trump’s oxygen level and had he received supplemental oxygen? But Conley repeatedly answered disingenuously, parsing his language and obfuscating his answers. His performance was so unhelpful that Meadows, hardly a paragon of truth, approached the pool after the news conference to confirm that Trump had, in fact, needed oxygen and was in far worse shape than publicly believed.
Pumped full of state-of-the-art treatments not available to the general public, Trump recovered. To demonstrate his vitality, the White House put out a photo of him in the hospital’s presidential suite. The next day, fueled by the medication and his ever-present need to not look weak, he demanded to visit the crowd of supporters who had gathered across the street from Walter Reed. It was a scene reminiscent of the weekend of the Access Hollywood tape, back in October 2016, when he exited his isolation at Trump Tower to see his adoring fans. Like then, this was a decisively low moment, and Trump needed to hear the cheers, it seemed, to keep going. But this time, Trump was full of virus, and he put the Secret Service agents in his vehicle—wearing protective suits—in grave danger.
He pushed for a discharge, and Marine One returned to the White House at dusk on October 5. He had been hospitalized for three days. The lighting just so, Trump strode back across the lawn and up the steps to the Truman Balcony. And though still highly contagious, he tore off his mask before stepping inside. Reporters on the lawn, though, noticed something odd: Trump immediately backtracked out to the balcony again before returning inside, as if re-creating his entrance. And that’s what he did: he was using the moment to film a video marking his so-called triumph over COVID.
“Don’t be afraid of COVID. Don’t let it dominate your life,” Trump said.
Trump, though having required emergency hospitalization, was once more downplaying the virus. More than two hundred thousand Americans already had died. And as much as the president was trying to project strength, to convey the impression that he was impervious and could bully and trick his latest and greatest foe into submission, a careful watch of the video depicting him ripping the mask from his face showed a different story.
Trump was gasping for air.