TWENTY-EIGHT
Giuliani arrived at the Trump campaign headquarters in Arlington on November 6, and headed to a conference room, surrounded by friends and assistants.
Nearby, the campaign’s general counsel, Matt Morgan, was watching them. Morgan had worked with Pence and shared much of Pence’s personality. Quiet, deeply conservative, careful.
Morgan asked what Giuliani was doing there. His legal team had a plan. They were already filing lawsuits in states and working with several outside law firms. The campaign’s post-election strategy had been in place for months with the president’s approval.
Giuliani’s friends and Trump campaign officials were chatting excitedly, a frenzy of paper and memos and iPhones. Giuliani started in, speaking confidently about massive, late dumps of votes in Democratic states and blue cities. The numbers are impossible, he insisted. It had to be stolen.
Morgan was silent. Any seasoned election lawyer knew some counties were infamous, decades-long late reporters of their results. Nothing new.
Giuliani said the Trump campaign’s observers were barred from tabulation rooms. “They kicked them out because they were cheating! This is all part of a coordinated effort by the Democrats.”
He held up a sheaf of papers. “I have eight affidavits,” he said. “I have eight affidavits that say observers were kept out of Michigan. Bad things are happening.”
That same day, Trump summoned the Giuliani group and his lawyers to the Oval Office, where they were joined by the White House’s lawyers. Giuliani again launched into his connect-the-dots conspiracy theory.
Trump asked, how do we get these abuses that Rudy is talking about before the court? It would not be easy, the lawyers replied. You need standing, a legal threshold demonstrating a party’s right to sue. Being upset is not legal grounds.
“Well, why don’t we just get up to the Supreme Court directly?” Trump wondered. “Like, why can’t we just go there right away?” There was a legal process to follow, the lawyers repeated.
Go figure this out for me, now, Trump told them. The group wandered across the hall to the Roosevelt Room.
Inside, Trump’s campaign lawyers and White House counselors had a tense, basic, law school 101 discussion about what they should tell Trump. They knew they could never go straight to the Supreme Court. Trump would have to file in district courts, then get a federal appeals court to hear the case, then file for the Supreme Court. It would take time.
Giuliani came in. He was yelling.
“I have 27 affidavits!” Giuliani said, rattling off election claims in various states. Strange, Morgan thought. Just an hour earlier, Giuliani had claimed he had only eight affidavits.
Trump soon called everyone back to the Oval Office. The group circled the president. Giuliani kept yelling, slamming Michigan about supposed fraud.
Giuliani raised his hand. “If you just put me in charge,” he told Trump, we could fix this.
“I have 80 affidavits,” Giuliani said with certainty.
On Saturday, November 7, the Associated Press declared Biden the winner at 11:25 a.m., after they concluded that Biden had won Pennsylvania and its 20 electoral votes, pushing him over the 270-vote threshold necessary to win the White House.
“Joe Biden is Elected the 46th President of the United States,” read the headline on the New York Times website. Even though all the votes had not yet been counted in some states, the rest of the national media, which usually followed the AP in reporting election results, began to say the same, a commonsense conclusion based on the available data.
Inside the majority leader’s inner circle on Capitol Hill, McConnell was the least surprised. And McConnell had seen it all, up close. “There were so many Maalox moments during the four years,” he told his staff.
With Trump brashly contesting the results, McConnell said he would give Trump room to let off steam and not publicly recognize Biden as president-elect. He still needed to have a working relationship with Trump, and, more importantly, McConnell worried Trump might react negatively and upend the upcoming, hotly contested runoff Senate elections in Georgia. Those seats were necessary to keep the Republican majority—and McConnell as majority leader.
He also said he did not want Biden, a serial telephone user, to call him. Any call from Biden was sure to infuriate Trump and set off unwanted calls from him, asking if he believed Biden had won the presidency. Better to keep the line dead.
McConnell tasked Senator John Cornyn—Republican of Texas, his former deputy in the leadership and a close friend—to speak privately with Senator Chris Coons, Biden’s close ally from Delaware. Coons had reached out to McConnell after the election and offered to be a back channel if McConnell wanted to reach Biden.
Tell Coons to tell Biden not to call him—a firm request.
McConnell wanted his strategy kept confidential. He did not want a blizzard of news stories saying he would not take Biden’s phone call. Biden would understand. They were two seasoned political hands who understood the long game.
“We’re in a delicate situation,” Cornyn told Coons. “I recognize that your guy is probably the duly elected next president of the United States. And we both know he and the majority leader have had a long, close relationship. And the majority leader doesn’t want the vice president to take any offense at his not calling directly.
“But it won’t help things if the vice president is calling the majority leader. President Trump will somehow assume that they’re cutting a deal behind his back to cut him out, and it’ll make him even more irrational.”
Coons relayed the message to Biden.
Biden addressed supporters in Wilmington on the evening of November 7. Once again in a parking lot outside the Chase Center, with lines of honking cars instead of crowds. But even with the drive-in-movie look, it was an unequivocal victory gathering.
Biden’s top campaign aides told Biden he needed to be resolute and clear: It’s over.
“Folks, the people of this nation have spoken. They’ve delivered us a clear victory, a convincing victory,” Biden said, smiling in a dark suit and powder blue tie. He thanked the Black voters who had lifted him all year. “The African American community stood up again for me. You’ve always had my back, and I’ll have yours.”
Adopting a theme Gerald Ford used 46 years earlier when he assumed the presidency in August 1974 after Nixon’s resignation, Biden said, “This is the time to heal in America.”
“Let this grim era of demonization in America begin to end here and now,” he said, reading from a text Mike Donilon and Jon Meacham, the keepers of the soul theme, had shaped with suggestions. “For all those of you who voted for President Trump, I understand the disappointment tonight. I’ve lost a couple times myself. But now, let’s give each other a chance.”
“(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher,” the classic Jackie Wilson R&B song, started playing as the cars started honking again. Supporters jumped into the back of pickup trucks and onto trunks, waving flags and signs. Fireworks exploded in the dark sky.
The Biden family embraced onstage. Jill Biden. Hunter Biden. Ashley Biden. The grandchildren. Kamala Harris and her family joined in. They all looked to the sky, the glow of the colored sparks on their faces.
Margaret Aitken, who had been Biden’s Senate press secretary for 10 years, was in the audience. She remained a close friend of the president-elect and was a clearinghouse for a vast number of the Biden Delaware connections, still one of the centers of his life.
Aitken had sent a text message to Biden: Elaine Manlove, who had been Delaware’s elections commissioner for 12 years, and her husband, Wayne, had been killed in an automobile accident the previous week, just after celebrating their 51st wedding anniversary. They had stopped in their Chevrolet Equinox at a red light on Route 13 when a tractor-trailer, whose driver had fallen asleep, hit and killed them.
Aitken told Biden a funeral Mass would be held on November 9 at St. Elizabeth, Wilmington’s largest Catholic church.
Elaine had worked on Biden’s first Senate campaign in 1972 and always called Biden “My Senator.” She was an institution in the state. She had lived at the beach in Sussex County in Delaware, a Republican enclave. Every time somebody in her neighborhood put up a Trump sign, she put up another Biden sign in her lawn. She eventually had 17 Biden signs. Biden ultimately won his home state, which has a population of less than one million, by 19 points and the state’s three electoral votes.
On Sunday, November 8, in his first full day as president-elect, Biden called Aitken.
“I saw you last night,” Biden said.
“You did?” Aitken said.
“I was waving at you.”
“I thought you were just waving at the crowd.”
“I can’t go to Elaine’s funeral,” Biden said. “There are so many restrictions. People around me have to be tested for Covid. I have to be very careful. There is the whole Secret Service thing. I can’t interrupt something like a funeral.”
Aitken said everyone would understand.
Elaine had a son, Biden recalled. What is his phone number?
Aitken gave him Matthew Manlove’s phone number. That night, Biden called Matt’s cell phone. Matt, 42, noticed an incoming call about 7 p.m. from an unknown number. Given the upcoming funeral, he answered.
“Hey, Matt, this is Joe Biden.”
“Joe,” Matt said, suddenly catching himself realizing he was talking to the president-elect. He asked permission to put his phone on speaker so his two brothers, Joseph, 39, and Michael, 35, could join in.
I am so sorry about your mother and father, Biden said. Your mother, who I knew so well, was such a force for good and honor in politics. A loyal servant of Delaware. She was so generous to me and everyone. I thought the world of her.
I am so sorry for such a loss, he said. This must be the worst time for all of you. Nearly 50 years ago in 1972, I lost my wife and daughter in an automobile accident. I can relate to what you are going through. The greatest grief. Everything going wrong in your lives. But I can tell you, I know, each day it gets a little bit better. You will get through it.
Biden went on. He did not seem rushed.
I planned to attend your parents’ funeral tomorrow, but I cannot because of Covid, he said. My doctors are not allowing me within 100 feet of a crowd. Everyone would have to be tested. Then there is the Secret Service thing. I am sorry I can’t be there. But I will be with you in spirit. Bless you and your parents forever.
Biden then said he wanted to recite some of his favorite lines from the great Irish poet Seamus Heaney. He considered it a prayer and quoted it often, most recently to close out his acceptance speech for the Democratic nomination in August.
“History says, don’t hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of Justice can rise up.
And hope and history rhyme.”
Thank you, President Biden, the three boys each said.
Matt thought it had been an amazing call for several minutes but looked at the timer on his phone. Biden had talked for nearly 20 minutes. He felt an explosion of emotions. The first person he thought of calling to explain they had heard from President Biden was his mother. Biden later sent the three boys a personal letter.