“Hail to the Chief” played loudly.
Some in the East Room of the White House winced at the sudden noise, but their brief surprise was quickly overwhelmed by loud, somewhat drunken cheering and applause. The well-dressed and well-lubricated crowd was geared up for a celebration, a night to revel in their candidate once again defying the odds and proving the polls and pundits wrong. For hours, it looked like a repeat of four years before, with Donald Trump showing surprising strength in key battlegrounds like Florida and seizing early leads in the trio of Great Lakes states—Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania—that he won in 2016 and needed again this time. But things had taken a turn. The president looked poised to lose.
President Trump strode to the lectern wearing a dark-blue suit, a blue silk tie, and a flag lapel pin. Standing in front of a wall of American flags, he was flanked by Vice President Mike Pence and First Lady Melania Trump. It was still Election Night, though the clocks had long ago raced past midnight and it was now nearly 2:30 a.m. on November 4.
The world was watching as the Big Lie was born.
“This is a fraud on the American public,” Trump said. “This is an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready to win this election.
“Frankly, we did win this election.”
What followed from Election Night was a two-month assault on the vote, in which Trump and his allies exhausted every avenue to overturn the will of the people—a sustained effort in which he was aided by Republicans and that led to an unthinkable attack on the nation’s very capital.
But Trump, of course, had taken the first steps to this moment more than four years before, with accusations against his own party during the 2016 Iowa caucus and then the full-throated conspiracy theories about election fraud that he first unveiled in an otherwise routine Ohio rally that summer. He spent his entire term moving further down that path, brazenly lying without consequence, knowing that his supporters would follow him and his fellow Republicans would back him. He had steadfastly assaulted the pillars of government and its institutions, attacking their credibility, so when the moment came—when it was time for a lie bigger than an altered hurricane map, time for one about the central tenet of the nation’s democracy—enough of the public would believe him.
There had never been widespread voter fraud throughout the history of American democracy. Like clockwork, after nearly every major recent election, some in the GOP would grab a single irregularity here or there to claim that voting laws needed to be tightened, that access to the ballot needed to be restricted. The trends, both electoral and demographic, had been clear for decades: the more people voted, the better it was for Democrats, and more new voters tended to be Democrats. But that was a trend that Trump defied: his presence on the ballot in both 2016 and 2020—as well as his looming presence in the 2018 midterms—inspired huge turnout from both parties. The examples of fraud were so few—and often laughable—that GOP efforts to use them to slash voting rights never went anywhere. Yet history had never before seen such a steady, methodical, consistent effort by a national figure, and certainly not an incumbent president, to undermine the country’s faith in the outcome of free and fairly conducted elections.
Having laid the groundwork for years, Trump accelerated his attacks on the election during the spring of 2020 as the virus swirled around him.
All campaign, he ranted and raved to aides behind the scenes that the election would be stolen, that Democratic governors and the federal bureaucracy—which he had long distrusted and that Steve Bannon has long wished to dismantle—were out to get him. And as the pandemic gripped the nation, forcing states to consider how to safely conduct elections when people were afraid of gathering in crowds or standing in lines, Trump saw a potential threat—and a potential opportunity to sow distrust.
The mail.
As the COVID-19 pandemic spread in early 2020, states holding primaries and special elections began widening opportunities to vote by mail. Trump went into a rage on Twitter in May, threatening to withhold federal funding from Michigan because its secretary of state had sent absentee-ballot applications to all registered voters. He went further against California, when he falsely claimed that the state was “sending Ballots to millions of people, anyone … no matter who they are or how they got there.” That, of course, wasn’t true, as the ballots went only to registered voters. But the falsehood was so blatant and so dangerous—undermining faith in both the civic process and the public’s health—that Twitter for the very first time moved against its most famous user. It took down two of the president’s tweets that maligned mail-in ballots in the nation’s largest state.
Even before the coronavirus emerged as a global threat, Democrats had generally favored ways to expand access to voting by mail. Some Republicans had long argued against voting by mail and in favor of tightening voter identification and registration requirements. But there was no evidence of fraud, despite GOP claims. A number of White House aides tried to dissuade Trump from arguing against mail-in ballots, nervously noting that Republican voters tended to skew older and that senior citizens, the population most vulnerable to the coronavirus, might be more apt to mail in their votes as opposed to taking a risk by standing in line at a polling station.
Moreover, the facts weren’t on Trump’s side: before the pandemic, a handful of states, including the GOP stronghold of Utah, already conducted their elections almost entirely by mail and reported very little fraud. But that fell on deaf ears with the president.
“Mail ballots, they cheat,” Trump said that September. “Mail ballots are very dangerous for this country because of cheaters. They go collect them. They are fraudulent in many cases. They have to vote. They should have voter ID, by the way.”
Trump’s goal was clear: by asserting that voting by mail, which was to be used at record levels that fall, was highly vulnerable to fraud, he was aiming to fabricate a justification for contesting election results in any state he lost. Following his lead, a number of Republican officials began to also advise their voters against mailing their ballots and to instead, despite the pandemic, show up at the polls on Election Day. Conversely, Democrats were already doing far less door-to-door canvassing than their GOP rivals, and their leaders advocated widespread use of mail-in ballots. They also raised concerns that Trump, via a slew of budget cuts and crony appointments, was trying to undermine the postal service as a means to strip down its ability to process mail-in ballots.
It was an assault on the integrity of the election. And the president’s Democratic opponent was frantically trying to get ready to defend it.
Election security first became an issue for the Biden team in early March, right after it was clear that he was going to be the Democratic nominee. Bob Bauer, the former White House counsel who also ran Barack Obama’s election protection program in 2008 and 2012, soon began telling others on the campaign that this would be a far tougher vote to safeguard because this time the Democrats were facing a Republican Party and president who no longer played by any rules.
And then COVID complicated things that much further.
The primary in Wisconsin was an early test. The state considered moving its April 7 election date, and it did end up extending its window for absentee votes to be counted. Voters didn’t know where to cast their ballots, and some showed up at the wrong polling places. Some election workers—many of them elderly volunteers—didn’t show up, for fear of contracting the virus, and it was a struggle to find adequate staffing. Bauer and others on the team—Democratic powerhouses like Anita Dunn and Jen O’Malley Dillon—saw Wisconsin as a moment from which to draw lessons on the upcoming election. As they watched Trump rail against the sanctity of the ballots, the Democrats knew they had to work on a public messaging campaign to make sure voters would believe in the integrity of the election.
Bauer created a team of former solicitors general to fight the legal battles ahead while the campaign veterans began to focus on mail-in balloting and the importance of ballot drop boxes. Private fundraising was directed toward election supplies to keep workers and volunteers safe: masks, goggles, Plexiglas partitions, hand sanitizer. And internally, strategy sessions were held, with tabletop exercises to game out what could happen during the campaign and its aftermath. Led by Dunn and Ron Klain, they tried to project scenarios both mundane and far-fetched. What if Trump refused to leave office? What if Trump considered calling in the military?
The ideas were rejected as absurd and unrealistic.
As Election Day approached, the polls were not encouraging for the president.
Joe Biden’s lead, though not massive, remained consistent as the campaign’s pace quickened dramatically that October, once Trump got out of the hospital and back on the road. The second debate with Biden was canceled after Trump refused to hold it remotely due to his own COVID diagnosis. The third one was marked by Trump’s efforts to re-create the stunt he had pulled with Bill Clinton’s accusers; this time the surprise guest was a former business partner of Hunter Biden. But it fell flat and the debate failed to change the race.
As the backlash to Trump’s handling of the pandemic grew, Republicans also looked likely to suffer significant losses across the board, including in the Senate and House, which made the president’s frequent prediction of a “red wave” mystifying. He declared night after night that the GOP would defy the polls and roll to massive wins up and down the ballot. Many GOP pollsters thought Election Night might prove to be a defeat, and Trump aides worried that the president’s public projections of overconfidence would keep some Republicans home at a time when the party couldn’t afford to lose any votes.
But what truly loomed ominously over the election was not Trump’s boast of a “red wave.” It was what might happen were there to be a “red mirage.”
As mid-October arrived, Biden campaign aides began circulating memos to senior staff, other Democrats, and news organizations. The memos carried an urgent warning that Trump might try to prematurely declare victory in order to shape news coverage and, more worrisomely, fuel claims of election fraud that could cause him to refuse to concede and provoke his supporters to violence.
There is no federal system of elections in the United States; instead, each of the fifty states conducts its own process. And in many states, mail-in ballots and early votes begin to be counted only on Election Day itself or, in some cases, after polls close that day. Therefore, because Democrats prioritized mail-in balloting during the pandemic, a lot of their votes—including in some key swing states—would not be counted until later in the day or days later. And because Trump had pushed Republicans to vote on Election Day itself, those votes would likely be counted first, giving the illusion that Trump was ahead early. The fear: that at some point on Election Night, Trump would point to the votes that were already counted and declare victory, even though thousands upon thousands of legal mail-in ballots would not yet have been counted.
The newscasts were encouraged to begin calling it “Election Week,” rather than “Election Day.” And reporters and government groups were urged to begin conditioning the public to expect that, due to the pandemic and the close nature of the race, this election would be different from previous years. The nation might not go to bed on Tuesday, November 3, knowing the winner, no matter what Trump said.
“MILLIONS OF MAIL-IN BALLOTS WILL BE PRINTED BY FOREIGN COUNTRIES, AND OTHERS. IT WILL BE THE SCANDAL OF OUR TIMES!” Trump had tweeted earlier in the campaign.
The campaign’s final push was frenetic. Biden finally adopted an aggressive schedule, crisscrossing the country to hold small, socially distanced, outdoor events. His high-profile surrogates did too, including Obama, who seemed to be having the most fun of anyone as he held a few drive-in rallies, bounded up the stage to U2, cracked some jokes, and reveled at the drivers honking their horns in approval of his blistering attacks on Trump.
The Biden team also worked quietly behind the scenes to prepare for the inevitable fusillade of attacks on the integrity of the election. In an effort led by Bauer and O’Malley Dillon, their game plan emerged: they would fight lies with transparency. A war room went state by state in the most granular detail: What time do polls close? Which counties count fast or slow? Where should the votes stand once they are counted? How many absentee ballots would be out and when would they be tallied? Every data point was saved and examined. The Biden campaign needed to have all the information for legal challenges, but it also ramped up an unprecedented education campaign for its voters to reinstall confidence in the election and ensure that its supporters could safely cast their ballot amid the pandemic.
But on the Republican side, you’d barely know there was a virus. Yes, most of Trump’s rallies were outdoors—though a few, like one just outside Las Vegas, were held inside and later found to be home to virus outbreaks—but they were packed and few masks were spotted other than those on the faces of the reporters covering the events. The rallies followed a standard playbook: people would gather at the site, often an airport tarmac; Air Force One would arrive; Trump would spend an hour or so lying about Democrats and the pandemic—“we’re rounding the corner,” he’d say night after night; and then he’d goofily dance to “YMCA” before departing again.
He also forcefully returned to his most dangerous stance from four years before: once again, Trump would not commit to adhering to American democratic traditions and refused to pledge to ensure a peaceful transfer of power. But this time he was already president, with the levers of government and world’s most powerful military at his disposal.
During an appearance in the White House briefing room in late September, Trump was asked whether he would “commit here today for a peaceful transferral of power after the election.” Trump demurred, passing on a chance to call for a calm and orderly election process. He then once again made a baseless attack against the integrity of mail-in ballots.
“Get rid of the ballots and you’ll have a very peaceful—there won’t be a transfer, frankly. There will be a continuation,” he said.
Trump’s refusal to endorse the most fundamental tenet of American democracy, breaking from the behavior of any of his predecessors, caused grave uncertainty around the November election and its aftermath. He said it over and over, casting doubt on the election results. Democrats were increasingly alarmed as Trump repeatedly questioned the integrity of the vote and suggested that he might not accept the results if he were to lose. Biden’s team began to strategize as to how to handle it if Trump prematurely declared victory, while Nancy Pelosi, who long questioned Trump’s mental stability, was blunt in her private assessments to allies. “He’s going to try to steal it,” she warned over and over.
Some Republicans were worried too, but they kept those thoughts private for fear of antagonizing Trump. Mitch McConnell was no fan of Trump the man—he found him arrogant and incurious—but also told fellow Republicans that “We had a hell of a good four years,” as he pointed to accomplishments like tax reform, a humming economy, and the appointments of scores of federal judges. He talked to William Barr a lot, both men resigned to a Trump loss and concerned as to how the president might lash out in defeat.
And since he had witnessed the measures Trump was willing to take during the George Floyd protests and at Lafayette Square, Mark Milley was deeply concerned about how the president might act were he to lose. He maintained a back channel to his Chinese counterpart to reassure Beijing that the United States did not want war. And Milley told his chiefs that a dangerous period was on the horizon, between Election Day and the January 6 certification of the results. There were hints of a coming furor: the Trump campaign embraced military-style rhetoric and language that leaned on baseless assertions of voter fraud and corruption. “Stop the steal” became a rallying cry.
“We need you to join ARMY FOR TRUMP’s election security operation!” read one Trump campaign post, with the president’s eldest son declaring that “every able-bodied man, woman” should enlist. “Don’t let them steal it,” Donald Trump Jr. wrote in one posting.
Milley was deeply worried and offered a sobering—and prescient—prediction in one meeting: “If President Trump wins, then the street’s going to explode with riots and civil unrest. If President Trump loses, there’s going to be significant issues there about a contested election.”
In the campaign’s final days, polls showed a tightening race in the battleground states that would decide the election. Republicans felt increasingly confident about Florida and North Carolina, but alarms were flashing about highly motivated Democrats making inroads in two longtime GOP strongholds: Arizona and Georgia. Still, in the campaign’s final stretch, Trump made only one visit each to the two states.
His focus instead was on the trio of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Seemingly indefatigable, he showed no sign that he had been hospitalized for COVID less than a month earlier. The crowds were big and getting bigger, and the energy had picked up. People were tired of COVID, Trump told aides; they wanted a chance to go back to their lives. And they didn’t want radical socialist Democrats telling them how to live. Even some Trump campaign aides who had been deeply pessimistic about the president’s chances, believing he had dug himself too much of a hole with his scattershot response to COVID and racial justice, found themselves starting to believe once more. Maybe, just maybe, he could defy the odds again.
Forever superstitious, Trump ended his 2020 campaign the same way he’d wrapped up 2016, with a late-night rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan. In his closing remarks, he veered toward the nostalgic and the optimistic, capping off a dark speech with a ray of light.
“With your help,” Trump said, “your devotion and your drive, we are going to keep on working. We are going to keep on fighting and we are going to keep on winning, winning, winning.”
Twenty-four hours later, he was losing. And he couldn’t believe it.
Election Night had started promisingly, with those early leads on the board across the Midwest. Florida did end up in Trump’s column fairly early, giving him a huge victory and one that revealed surprising Republican strength among Latino voters, some of whom had experiences in their ancestral countries that made them particularly receptive to warnings about socialism. Victory was in the air.
And then the night turned, and news of a loss in a Republican stronghold came from an unlikely source. Shortly before 11:30 p.m., the decision desk at Fox News called Arizona for Biden, giving the Democrat a win in what was traditionally a deep-red state and dramatically narrowing Trump’s paths to victory. The Map Room, where Franklin D. Roosevelt had tracked the progress of World War II, had been turned into an Election Night command center, and news of Fox’s call ignited outrage.
“They betrayed me! Betrayed me!” Trump yelled. He pushed his aides, including Jared Kushner, to call Fox News, to call Rupert Murdoch, and get them to rescind the call. Fox would not take it back, and the Associated Press—the gold standard of election calls, one whose lead was followed by major newspapers and treated by both parties as the final word—followed with its own call of Arizona for Biden a short time later. Though the decision desks at both Fox News and the AP privately sweated out the call in the days that followed, they stood by it. And while none of the other networks immediately followed suit by awarding Arizona to Biden, the perception of the night had changed. Trump was on the run.
When Biden appeared before a crowd of supporters parked in their cars outside a Wilmington convention center, his deficits in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania had all shrunk and the votes left to be counted were coming from heavily Democratic counties in each state. But Biden did not declare victory, instead urging patience for the mail-in vote to be tallied.
Trump did nothing of the sort when he took the small White House podium hours later and unleashed his angry speech. No one had called the race—and the networks continued cautioning viewers that it could be several days before they would—but the vote count trends were bad for the incumbent. Trump was in trouble, and he railed to aides against what he saw, declaring that the only way he could have lost would be if the election were stolen.
But off camera, he took a slightly different tone, even wondering aloud to Kellyanne Conway how he could “lose to fucking Joe Biden,” in what she took as a sign that he understood, deep down, that he had been defeated, even if he was not ready to say so publicly. She thought, as did some other Republicans, that Trump needed to perform, that he needed to vent publicly and exhaust all potential legal options.
In the first days after the election, a lot of Republicans were okay with taking results to court: the race was close, they reasoned, and a Democrat in the same position would look at the same legal options. This was a tough campaign and a narrow defeat and it would take some time to get over that; they all knew how much Trump hated losing. Plus, they assumed, Trump couldn’t be seen as quitting on his fervent base, since he needed to keep them ginned up in order to maintain their support—including financial—down the road. One Republican even infamously mused to the Washington Post for a story that ran on November 9:
“What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time? No one seriously thinks the results will change.”
The downside would become evident soon enough. But there were warning signs almost immediately. Soon after Election Day, Donald Trump Jr. sent a text to Mark Meadows outlining paths to declaring victory for his father no matter the vote tally. And the president’s Twitter account over the next forty-eight hours became completely unhinged.
“We are up BIG, but they are trying to STEAL the Election. We will never let them do it. Votes cannot be cast after the Polls are closed!”
“Last night I was leading, often solidly, in many key States, in almost all instances Democrat run & controlled. Then, one by one, they started to magically disappear as surprise ballot dumps were counted. VERY STRANGE, and the pollsters got it completely & historically wrong!”
“They are finding Biden votes all over the place—in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. So bad for our Country!”
There wasn’t a need to fact-check the first sentence of that last tweet; Biden votes were indeed being counted in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan from ballots that were legally cast early or absentee. The prophecy of the “red mirage” had come true: the votes counted first showed Trump ahead, but he was on the verge of being surpassed by Biden in the states still tallying ballots. And despite the president’s claims, it was perfectly acceptable for states to keep counting votes postmarked by Election Day—it just was going to take longer than usual due to the sheer volume of pandemic-related mail-in ballots. That didn’t sit well at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
“STOP THE COUNT!” Trump tweeted. And then: “ANY VOTE THAT CAME IN AFTER ELECTION DAY WILL NOT BE COUNTED!”
This was not a misunderstanding of a fundamental principle of American election law. This was something more insidious. This was Trump trying to wildly toss out accusations of misconduct in order to explain away his loss and to paint his defeat as less than legitimate. On that Saturday, November 7, four days after Election Day, the Associated Press called Pennsylvania for Biden, which put the former vice president over the 270 Electoral College vote threshold to make him president-elect. I wrote the story that announced Biden’s win to audiences around the world. The networks quickly followed suit, including Fox News.
Biden’s quest was complete. He had returned Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin to the Democrats’ column, his victories there due to both a surge in Black voters and his ability to win back some of the blue-collar workers who had defected to Trump four years earlier. He also won Arizona and, in the coming days, would be awarded Georgia, grabbing another GOP stronghold. He finished the race with 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232. At home in Wilmington, Biden blinked back tears as he thought about all his loved ones whom he had leaned on to make it there. He thought of his parents. He thought of Beau. That night, he took the stage and made a pledge to heal the bitter national divides that had only grown during the heated campaign.
“It’s time to put away the harsh rhetoric. To lower the temperature. To see each other again. To listen to each other again,” Biden said. “To make progress, we must stop treating our opponents as our enemy.
“We are not enemies,” the new president-elect continued. “We are Americans.”
Trump, meanwhile, was at his golf course in suburban Virginia that afternoon, when the announcement came that he soon would no longer be the most powerful, or most talked about, man on the planet. When his motorcade wound its way back to the White House a few hours later, it encountered thousands of revelers. They had descended on the area next to the executive mansion, congregating at the newly dubbed Black Lives Matter Plaza just to the north of the park that Trump had used the military to clear during the George Floyd protests five months before. They danced, they hugged, they pulled their masks down to pose for photos as they flipped off the White House. Some had been there forty-six months earlier, wearing pink pussy hats, as they marched across the capital in the wake of Trump’s inauguration. That day, they were outwardly defiant but inwardly despondent. This time, they were simply exultant. Trump had lost.
At nearly the precise moment that the race was called for Biden, an undeniably pathetic spectacle was unfolding, an event that would soon become an infamous shorthand for the ineptitude displayed after the election by the Trump legal team.
The tweet from the president had sounded impressive: “Lawyers Press Conference at Four Seasons, Philadelphia. 11:00 am.” That made sense: the Trump legal team had fanned out across the battleground states checking for voter irregularity and weighing their legal options. So a luxury hotel in a key swing state’s largest city seemed like an appropriately grand setting for the elite team of lawyers representing the president of the United States in the nation’s most pressing legal matter.
Not quite.
The second Trump tweet made the painful correction: the news conference was actually to be held at Four Seasons Total Landscaping, a rare GOP-friendly business in a deep-blue city that had the added bonus of being right off a major highway in case the lawyers needed to make a quick escape. It was a strange spectacle. The event was just Rudy Giuliani at a landscaping business down the street from a porn shop named Fantasy Island. The setting quickly became a national punch line, with DIY T-shirts sold online by day’s end. And the claims of fraud Giuliani pushed that day were almost as laughable. Giuliani was midsentence at his news conference when word came down that the AP had called the race and Biden was now president-elect. It seemed like a perfectly ignominious end to the Trump campaign.
But while that moment was a farce, something far more serious was going on behind the scenes.
In the first few days after the election, Trump had privately seemed to resign himself to defeat. But the vacuum between Election Day and when the race was called a few days later was soon filled by other, shadowy voices. A contributing factor: the White House was the site of yet another COVID outbreak, this one traced to the gathering on Election Night. Staffers and advisers were testing positive or had been exposed to someone who had come down with the virus. Aides were staying home; some, like communications director Alyssa Farah, never came back.
And in that hollowed-out West Wing, there was space for others to gain a foothold. Some were staffers, like Mark Meadows, Stephen Miller, and Peter Navarro, who seemed to believe that there must have been rampant voter fraud. Others needed the gray White House visitor’s badge, like Michael Flynn, the disgraced national security adviser who had flirted with the QAnon group of conspiracy theorists (among its theories: suggesting that some Democrats were pedophiles and that Trump was a near-mythical figure meant to redeem America). Sidney Powell, a former federal prosecutor, also stepped into the breach to push her increasingly far-fetched theories. Some of the president’s fiercest allies in Congress—like Representatives Jim Jordan of Ohio and Mo Brooks of Alabama—appeared on Fox News and other conservative media outlets to reach Trump that way, to urge him not to give up. Conspiracy-loving Mike Lindell, the CEO of MyPillow, the bedding company that ran frequent ads on conservative outlets, was a Trump backer who suddenly found himself with easy Oval Office access. And there was Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City who led that wounded city so admirably after the September 11 terror attacks. He told Trump that he was hearing from loyalists across the country who knew of stories—crazy stories, sir!—about fraud and corruption and how the results in Pennsylvania and Michigan and Wisconsin and Georgia and Arizona all couldn’t be trusted.
Trump stopped telling people he lost. He gave Giuliani and the others permission to investigate, and the ex-mayor, who had not worked as a lawyer in a courtroom in decades, swaggered into both the White House and the campaign’s Arlington, Virginia, headquarters. He seized control of the proceedings, claiming he had dozens of affidavits from Michigan alone that proved fraud. He pushed aside the campaign lawyers and told the president that the case could end up at the conservative-leaning Supreme Court, where the justices, three of whom were appointed by Trump, would surely rule in his favor.
No one stepped in to stop the growing movement in its infancy. No one dared tell Trump he lost.
Hope Hicks, one of Trump’s longest-serving and most loyal aides, met with Kushner and other top campaign aides the day the race was called for Biden. She asked who would tell Trump that it was over. Kushner, according to those present, said in a soft voice: “There is a time for a doctor and a time for a priest.” He suggested that the aides could play doctor and tell Trump that it didn’t look great. But he made clear that the plug was not to be pulled, that the president should be allowed to fight for a while. Last political rites, he said, would be the duty of the family. And it wasn’t time yet.
McConnell, too, wasn’t ready to pull the plug. He told confidants that he believed Trump lost—and, candidly, he was fine with that—but he wanted to keep the president involved and focused on the upcoming two Senate runoff races in Georgia. McConnell needed at least one win to keep Republicans in the majority—and McConnell as majority leader. He refused to tell Trump to concede, nor would he place a congratulatory call to Biden, a longtime Senate colleague, for fear of word getting out and infuriating the president.
There were a few lonely voices in the GOP who congratulated Biden privately or publicly acknowledged his election, including Nebraska senator Ben Sasse, Alaska senator Lisa Murkowski, and Illinois representative Adam Kinzinger. But these were the familiar faces, the usual small allotment of Republicans who would on occasion defy Trump. Their voices were dismissed by those left in the West Wing as same old, same old, the usual crew of bitter losers. No Republican with any real juice, no surprise voice, no powerful presence that could have made a difference—that could have shaken some sense into Trump’s inner circle, if not the president himself—dared speak up.
They had been conditioned. They had spent five years watching Trump’s popularity with the Republican base. They had spent five years living in fear of the president’s tweets that could turn his supporters—whose votes they all needed too—against them. Trump’s bullying, over matters big and small, had paid off. He had dominated his adopted party so thoroughly that, in the most perilous moment of his presidency, few dared cross him.
Even Senator Lindsey Graham, though he spoke to Biden, declined to nudge Trump to concede. In a series of private calls, he did urge the president to be mindful of his legacy, to not embark on a polarizing legal battle. But he never called on the president to step aside. Trump ignored him anyway. He also ignored Hicks, who suggested finishing his term with a series of events that reinforced his accomplishments. Her tenure at his side ended with a quiet resignation.
In the aftermath of the Four Seasons (Total Landscaping) debacle, Trump was angry at Giuliani, who he felt was humiliated by the low-rent performance. He wanted the former mayor’s fighting spirit on the team but asked David Bossie, a sharp-elbowed Republican strategist who had worked on Trump’s 2016 campaign, to keep the trains running on time. But the sigh of relief some felt about the possibility of Giuliani taking a back seat quickly vanished when Bossie tested positive for COVID and was sidelined. Giuliani and Powell were running the show.
And, for another week or so, it mostly resembled a clown show. The two, as well as lawyer Jenna Ellis, held a news conference on November 19, at the Republican National Committee headquarters in Washington, DC. Despite the raging pandemic, the room was packed, few were wearing masks, and it was warm. As Giuliani ranted and raved about fraud across the Midwest, as well as working in a reference to the movie My Cousin Vinny as a legal precedent, streaks of hair dye began running down his face. He was a mess. Powell went further. She insisted that voting machines made by Dominion Voting Systems, which was headquartered in Denver and Toronto, were part of a global communist conspiracy. Somehow Venezuela, Cuba, and China were all part of a worldwide plot to deny Trump the second term he’d rightfully won. The news conference was, in a word, ridiculous.
Later, Dominion filed a $1.3 billion defamation suit against Fox News, Giuliani, and Powell. Powell’s defense? That her allegations were—wait for it—too ridiculous to be believed.
It might have looked like amateur hour. But this was no joke. What unfurled over the next eight weeks was a carefully coordinated effort to overturn the will of the people, to deny Biden his victory, and to keep Trump in power. Every move, from the farcical to the deadly serious, added up and came far closer to succeeding than most Americans realized.
It began in court and seemed, to most, to be harmless enough. The Trump legal team’s record was woeful: it brought sixty-two federal and state lawsuits and all but one—a minor win on technical grounds in Pennsylvania—were defeated. The sheer number of lawsuits was seemingly absurd, and a waste of time and resources, but there wasn’t much of an uproar to stop them. Trump was allowed to exhaust his legal avenues, the thinking went, even though it was transparent how thin his cases were. Time after time, Giuliani would deliver incendiary and baseless accusations in front of news cameras on courthouse steps—only to backtrack inside the courtroom for fear of drawing a judge’s wrath for not presenting evidence for his claims. Two cases that made it before the Supreme Court—one challenging the legality of mail-in ballots, the other about state legislatures’ powers—were also swiftly shot down.
The Trump campaign also pushed for recounts in several battleground states, believing that a careful tallying would reveal widespread fraud and push at least one of the states—maybe more!—into the president’s column. They targeted three states in particular: Wisconsin, Arizona, and Georgia. None of them went as the Trump campaign hoped.
Wisconsin’s recount wasn’t cheap: the Trump campaign shelled out $3 million for it. And, in the end, the margin did change. By eighty-seven votes. In favor of Biden.
Georgia recounted three times, once by hand, between Election Day and May 2021. All three times, the result remained unchanged: Biden won narrowly, but clearly. Yet each recount seemed to grow distrust in the result, as did a partial fourth recount in the summer of 2021 of some of the absentee ballots. Though it had no chance of changing the outcome, it did lay the groundwork—once irregularities were found—to give Republicans a reason to claim even more oversight over elections in that state.
And then there was Arizona. A five-month-long audit by the state senate Republicans awarded Biden a few more votes than before. But what set this one apart was that it was fueled by conspiracy theories, and Cyber Ninjas, a small Florida-based data firm, was hired to find irregularities. It was a curious choice: the company had no election recount experience and its CEO, Doug Logan, had touted widespread election fraud claims on social media. Election experts also warned that the $150,000 cost was too low to do it successfully. And, well, a review of its review, however, found that seventy-six out of its seventy-seven claims were false; citing a $2 million debt from its work in Arizona, Cyber Ninjas went out of business not long after completing its recount.
As expected, none of the recounts changed the outcome of a state. But they all gave Trump more ammunition to sow distrust in the nation’s election system.
As the counts were launched in distant states, Giuliani and Powell remained the faces of the effort in Washington, while other supporters, including Flynn and Lindell, each took moments to advocate Trump enacting martial law. That option was never seriously considered, nor was a plan to have the National Security Agency sift through raw electronic intelligence to prove that foreign powers were trying to sway the election for Biden. But there were other, quieter efforts led by Steve Bannon and Trump himself to push state officials and pull the levers of government to stop the certification of Biden’s win.
The president and some of his top aides pushed Republican legislators in battleground states won by Biden to dispute the results before they could be certified. But despite some private presidential pressure, the efforts went nowhere, and all fifty states and the District of Columbia certified their election returns by December 9. The president’s campaign also convened unauthorized “Trump electors” in the close states won by Biden on the same day the real electors voted. Documents were drawn up, memos circulated. Giuliani and others seized on it, and groups of fake electors were convened in states like Arizona. But this effort went nowhere and five days later the real presidential electors cast their ballots to make Biden the president-elect.
That was finally enough for McConnell. He was still deeply worried about the Georgia races, but Trump’s rally there earlier in December was a chaotic mess. The president had whined openly about his electoral fate and cast doubt on the integrity of the upcoming January 5 special election—which, the Republican leader feared, might depress GOP turnout, since Trump loyalists might opt to stay home if they felt the proceedings were not on the up-and-up. On December 15, the day after the Electoral College vote, McConnell called Meadows with the heads-up that he was going to recognize Biden’s win on the Senate floor.
Moments after McConnell publicly said the magic words, “President-elect Joe Biden,” Trump called in a fury. He screamed at McConnell, calling him disloyal and weak.
“The Electoral College has spoken,” McConnell replied. “You lost the election.”
He hung up and called Biden to congratulate him.
There weren’t many Republicans calling the president-elect. And those who did make calls did so quietly and urged Biden to give Trump some space, to let him sulk on his way out. No one in the Biden inner circle believed Trump would concede or attend the inauguration, and that was fine. They chose to ignore him, to go ahead with their transition.
Meanwhile, Trump was also pursuing other avenues, trying to find other powers of the government he could exploit. He leaned on Barr to declare that there had been major election fraud, which the attorney general refused to do. Barr told the president that the Justice Department would of course look into credible allegations, but there had been nothing substantial. Nervous that Trump was sinking deeper into the conspiracy fever swamps and was surrounded by lawyers putting nonsense in his head, Barr summoned Michael Balsamo, the Associated Press’s justice reporter, for lunch on December 1 and delivered this on-the-record assessment: “To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome of the election.”
It was cold water on Trump’s theories. Within hours, Barr found himself in front of apoplectic Trump, who chewed him out for not supporting his lies.
“You must have said that because you hate Trump, you must really hate Trump,” the president screamed, an account first reported in Peril by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa. Barr assured him that he did not but stressed that there was no sign of widespread fraud and warned Trump that he was listening to crackpots. Two weeks later, Barr resigned.
Trump moved to have others at the Department of Justice help, finding a sympathetic ear in Acting Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Clark, who penned a series of draft letters that falsely claimed that the Justice Department was investigating claims of election fraud in several states—including Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—and called for each state to convene its own investigation. The attempt, aimed to cast more doubt on the sanctity of the election, was blocked by Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and Acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue, who both refused to go along. The letters were never sent.
Despite that failure, Trump maintained a particular fixation on two longtime Republican states that Biden had embarrassingly swiped from his column. Both of them—Arizona and Georgia—had GOP governors. Trump pushed especially hard in early December on Georgia, calling Governor Brian Kemp, who had long been an ally. But when the president asked him to convene the state legislature to overturn the results and appoint a pro-Trump set of electors, Kemp refused. Trump grew enraged and attacked Kemp. And Trump’s sense of betrayal ahead of the governor’s reelection race was so overwhelming that he threw his support not just behind a possible GOP primary opponent, David Perdue, but also to—wait for it—the Democratic gubernatorial favorite, Stacey Abrams.
A few weeks later, Trump went so far as to call Frances Watson, a staffer who investigated elections for the state, to find fault with mail ballots to justify his victory, telling her that he won the state “by hundreds of thousands of votes. It wasn’t close.” And then, on January 2, he called Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, and made it clear what he wanted: some way, somehow, for precisely enough votes to turn up to overcome his deficit to Biden and flip the state.
“So look. All I want to do is this,” said Trump in a recording later obtained by the Washington Post. “I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state.”
He went on with what appeared to be a threat: “You know what they did and you’re not reporting it. You know, that’s a criminal—that’s a criminal offense. And you know, you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you and to Ryan, your lawyer. That’s a big risk.”
It was brazen and galling. A push to disregard vote totals to quite literally change the outcome of an election, all caught on tape. It was also quite possibly illegal. Raffensperger refused. But the effort to pressure and bully elected officials in his own party—which later attracted attention from Georgia prosecutors—was a stunning act by a defeated president, a move to crash through legal and ethical boundaries as he desperately tried to cling to power. At every moment, he was goaded on by a small group of loyalists who believed that there was a chance to maintain the White House or delegitimize Biden so significantly that he would be unable to govern and be ripe for defeat by a Trump return in 2024.
Steve Bannon declared it was their moment “to kill the Biden presidency in its crib.”
Bannon was the right’s wild-haired provocateur, a navy graduate who worked at Goldman Sachs and had grown rich from his piece, of all things, of the Seinfeld syndication deal. He went on to run Breitbart News, the influential right-wing news site that frequently trolled in racism and became a thorn in the side of Democrats, particularly Hillary Clinton. He joined Trump’s 2016 campaign in its final stretch, amped up the “America First” national messaging, and had the candidate lean in hard on a populist appeal. After Trump won, Bannon became a White House chief strategist known for undercutting colleagues—he loathed Kushner—as much as for his bomb-throwing populism. In a few months, he was drummed out of his post and later ostracized after trashing the president’s family in a bestselling book, Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury.
Carrying himself as a roguish intellectual who wore a comical amount of shirts at once, Bannon supported similarly nationalist candidates in Europe. Ensconced in a Capitol Hill town house a few steps from the Supreme Court, he worked on the behalf of Trumpist causes. He was later indicted for trying to scam Trump supporters who thought they were helping build the president’s promised wall along the US–Mexico border, though Trump eventually pardoned him. But as the election approached and Trump grew desperate, he began quietly talking again to Bannon, who he privately acknowledged understood his base better than just about anyone.
Bannon had warned the president that the race was slipping away from him, but he really sprang into action after Election Day. He saw an opportunity to stop the transfer of power on a date in early January when Biden’s Electoral College victory would be certified by the House of Representatives. It was an obscure date, known only by a few political junkies. Bannon soon promised the date would be “known the world over.”
He was not wrong.
That event became the target. In a series of meetings at the White House, the nearby Trump Hotel, and the Willard hotel down the street from the executive mansion, the group gathered: Bannon, Giuliani, Flynn, Lindell, the former New York City police commissioner Bernie Kerik, and the lawyer John Eastman. Separately, Senator Ted Cruz, a Harvard Law School graduate, consulted with pro-Trump congressman Mo Brooks of Alabama and had his staff research the Electoral Count Act, to see if there was a way to stop the certification of Biden’s win.
Trump’s allies whirred with unproven claims: People voted twice! Dead people voted! Dead people voted twice! With Giuliani at the helm, they presented their case to Graham, the head of the Judiciary Committee. The senator was sympathetic but demanded evidence. They didn’t have any. Eastman then wrote and circulated a memo that claimed that an alternate, pro-Trump set of electors had been convened by seven states. Again, it was greeted with skepticism.
The memo outlined a plan to have the election thrown to Trump during the certification. It might work. But it all hinged on one man. Thankfully, the Trump allies thought, the one man had been perhaps the most loyal to the president of all.
Vice President Mike Pence.
Trump had largely gone into hiding after Biden was named the winner. He held only a handful of public events, even as the coronavirus pummeled the United States that winter. Reporters and photographers stationed at the White House would watch for the marine-posted sentry at the exterior door of the West Wing; if he was there, that meant Trump was in the Oval Office. Night after night, that marine would stand guard until 8:00 p.m., 9:00 p.m., 10:00 p.m. But Trump never showed his face.
The vaccine was ready—too late to give Trump a preelection boost, which he was convinced was a conspiracy—but not widely available. Hospitals filled up; deaths mounted. These were some of the darkest days of the pandemic, a moment when the nation needed leadership, and Trump was largely absent. His government was hollowed out. It was a dereliction of duty.
Pence was still out there, pushing the administration’s response and touting its accomplishments of the last four years. But while Trump regularly blasted election conspiracy theories on Twitter, Pence largely avoided the subject in his public remarks. He was torn. He was immensely loyal to Trump, who had plucked him from a likely defeat in his Indiana gubernatorial reelection run in 2016 to be his vice president. A deeply religious man with ties to the evangelical GOP base, Pence had watched in amazement as Trump connected with Republican rank and file. He and his wife, Karen, may not have cared for Trump’s personal conduct. But he firmly believed Trump was good for Republicans, good for the country, and good for his personal political future—including his own run for president in four or eight years.
If a single senator formally objected to certification, all hundred would have to weigh in: all the Republicans would have to go on record as to whether they thought Biden won. They’d have to choose between Trump and the rule of law. Josh Hawley of Missouri was the first to say he would object, followed by Cruz and others. The plan, outlined in a memo Eastman authored, would be for Pence to announce that due to ongoing disputes in the seven contested states, those electors would be tossed out. That would leave forty-three states: and the electors from those would tally 232 votes for Trump and 222 for Biden. And then Pence was to gavel in Trump as reelected.
Pence knew he couldn’t do it. But he gave it some thought; he wanted to be sure; he explored every avenue. He consulted legal scholars, constitutional experts. Around the same time, the vulnerabilities surrounding the Electoral Count Act became apparent to the Biden team. It wasn’t as strong as we’d like, Bauer told a nervous team. He was on the phone with Chuck Schumer and Senate aides constantly, and the team’s lawyers got ready to walk the legislators through the process step-by-step. But they also wondered aloud: Surely Pence would do the right thing, wouldn’t he? Pence talked to Dan Quayle, another former vice president from Indiana and a mentor of sorts. Quayle had been, of course, a widely mocked running mate to George H. W. Bush, but in this moment, he emerged as an unlikely defender of the republic. He told Pence his duty, his obligation, was to the Constitution, not Trump. Pence knew he was right.
The night of January 5, Trump summoned Pence for a meeting. He made the case again: throw Biden’s electors out, let the House decide the election. He told him that all his supporters, that Republicans, that tens of millions of GOP voters wanted him to do it. You can do it, Trump said. You can do it.
“I wouldn’t want any one person to have that authority,” Pence said.
Pence then stressed to Trump that he had talked to scholars, reviewed his options. His job the next day during the certification of the Electoral College vote was simply “to open envelopes.” He knew a plot was underway for Trump allies in the Senate and House to object; he knew the next day would be messy. But he wouldn’t be a part of it.
Trump was incensed, and he threatened to not be Pence’s friend anymore. Pence pushed back, told him to abandon his wild fantasy. You aren’t going to be president anymore, he told him. On the twentieth, it will be Biden.
“You’ve betrayed us. I made you. You were nothing,” Trump said. “Your career is over if you do this.”
Pence did not budge. Trump did not relent. The campaign put out a statement saying that Pence and Trump were in “total agreement,” a complete fabrication. Midnight came and went, and it was the day of the certification. Trump tweeted once more about his plot, declaring that if the vice president “comes through for us, we will win the Presidency.”
It was a coup. It was a coup endorsed by the Oval Office.
The nation was in unchartered waters. No president had ever done anything like this before.
And Republicans let him.
There were a few in the GOP who bowed to the truth and noted Biden’s win. Many more acknowledged the Democrat’s victory in private but declined to say so publicly for fear of triggering Trump. And then there was a third group: Republicans who were true believers, who believed that Trump, somehow, should still be president beyond Inauguration Day.
But all of them, no matter their own beliefs about the election, had discovered something else.
When lawmakers returned home for visits, including over Christmas, they found widespread talk from neighbors, friends, and family members about the election being stolen. Their offices were inundated with calls, their inboxes overflowing. Trump’s power was pervasive: conservative media outlets, Facebook groups, social media postings, text message threads ricocheted around Republican circles, all claiming that the election was rigged, that Biden had improperly taken it.
In the days after the election, the bogus election claims seemed limited to hard-core Trump supporters, QAnon followers, and other conspiracy theorists. But as the weeks ticked by, and Republicans continued to hold their tongues and give Trump freedom to spread his false claims, the dangerous ideas took hold among more rank-and-file Republicans as well. Law enforcement groups picked up more extremist chatter and threats of political violence. Underground online communities grew in size and became more prominent. More and more Republicans believed the election had been stolen.
The nation was splintering, and the trends of the last four years accelerated over those weeks after Election Day. It wasn’t just that the parties couldn’t agree on policy—they couldn’t agree on the same basic set of facts. Two media ecosystems, two dueling narratives, two sets of truths. It was a nation of silos, of two tribes. Tribes that were growing more and more hostile.
More and more everyday Republicans convinced themselves that something was wrong, that something was rigged, that something had to be done. Many of them planned to be in Washington to attend a rally the president was planning in the hours before Biden’s Electoral College vote was going to be certified in the Capitol. Some camped out the night before to get a good spot, holding their places as dawn approached. They were loud. There was energy and menace in the air. It was the day they were going to take their country back. The rally was going to be at the Ellipse, a short walk from the White House. Trump had tweeted that it “will be wild!”
The crowds gathered.
They had to stop the steal.
The Big Lie was everywhere.
It was finally the day.
It was January 6.