TWENTY-NINE
“I’m the dog who caught the car,” Biden joked on the phone with his old friend, Senator Lindsey Graham, in the days after the election.
Graham laughed hard.
“We used to be friends,” Biden said.
“Joe, we’re still friends,” Graham said. “You know, I’ll help you any way I can.”
Graham expected to support several of Biden’s cabinet nominees, especially for top national security posts.
A dozen years earlier Biden, while vice president, had told President Obama, “Lindsey Graham has the best instincts in the Senate.” Obama agreed, and Graham, the bachelor-lawyer colonel in the Air Force Reserve, and Biden had traveled the world on various diplomatic and military missions during Obama’s presidency. It was a real bipartisan bond.
The friendship had unraveled during Trump’s presidency due to Graham’s support for Trump’s attacks on Hunter Biden and his business dealings.
Graham made no apologies.
In the phone call with Biden, he said, “I’ve got no problem with you. But Joe, if Mike Pence’s son or a Trump person did what Hunter did, it’d be game, set, match.”
For Biden, anything relating to family was deeply personal. Graham, who had no children, had crossed a red line.
Biden and Graham would not talk again for months—and if Biden had anything to do with it, they likely would never talk again.
Hope Hicks, a former model who in 2017 had become Trump’s White House director of strategic communications at age 28 and was the closest aide to Trump during the 2016 campaign, had rejoined the White House in February 2020, after a stint as Fox’s chief of communications.
Due to their history and close working relationship, Hicks felt she could be candid. Unlike most other aides, she had no agenda.
On November 7, the day media outlets called the election for Biden, Hicks met with Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner and several other Trump campaign advisers that morning at the Arlington campaign headquarters. Trump was playing golf at his nearby club in Virginia.
Who is going to tell the president the race is over after he finishes golf? No one volunteered.
Kushner, thin and with a soft voice, who served as the president’s confidant, spoke up. “There is a time for a doctor and a time for a priest,” he said. He looked at several senior campaign aides. Perhaps they could be the doctor and give the president the tough diagnosis.
Last political rites, if they ever came, would be left to the family, Kushner indicated.
“The family will go in when the family needs to go in,” Kushner said. “But it’s not time for that.”
Others argued the legal fight was only beginning. Maybe Trump could score a few wins. But no one was confident Trump could claim the presidency.
Hicks spoke up. “Why don’t we just tell him the truth?” she asked.
“He can make the best of a bad outcome. This wasn’t a blowout. This wasn’t a repudiation,” Hicks said, pointing to the more than a dozen pickups in the House. The Democrats’ 232-seat majority had shrunk to just a handful of seats above 218, the bare minimum for holding power in the chamber.
“This was an embrace of his policies, if not him personally, and sometimes things just go a different way,” she said.
Hicks said there was a way to shutter things with dignity, or something close to it. The book deals, comeback rallies, splashy television shows and paid speeches could maybe make it a little easier for Trump to accept he lost. He could be the king of Palm Beach, running the GOP.
Several other senior campaign officials agreed to speak with Trump that afternoon, including communications adviser Jason Miller and campaign manager Bill Stepien, who had ascended as pivotal figures after Parscale was demoted.
Trump brushed away any talk of conceding.
Rudy Giuliani held a news conference in Northeast, a blue-collar Philadelphia neighborhood known for its auto shops and fair-priced cheesesteaks, in the parking lot of Four Seasons Total Landscaping.
Photographs of Giuliani and serious-looking Trump advisers standing in a random parking lot soon ricocheted around Twitter and news outlets.
Standing outside the small company’s garage and a building with faded green paint, and next to a self-proclaimed poll watcher who news reports later identified as a convicted sex offender, Giuliani rambled at length, with conspiratorial claims and one-liners.
“Joe Frazier is still voting here—kind of hard, since he died five years ago,” Giuliani joked, referring to the late boxing legend. “But Joe continues to vote. If I recall correctly, Joe was a Republican. So maybe I shouldn’t complain. But we should go see if Joe is voting Republican or Democrat now, from the grave.”
He also claimed actor Will Smith’s father, who died in 2016, had voted twice since he died. “I don’t know how he votes, because his vote is secret. In Philadelphia, they keep the votes of dead people secret.”
When a reporter told Giuliani the election had been called for Biden, he laughed. “Come on, don’t be ridiculous,” he said. “Networks don’t get to decide elections. Courts do.”
That evening, up in the White House residence, Trump told a group of allies and advisers that he was not pleased with Giuliani’s performance or the low-rent location, which was being mocked on cable news. He thought Rudy was going to be at the luxury Four Seasons hotel.
The media coverage of Biden’s victory and Four Seasons Total Landscaping seemed to make Trump more determined to push forward. He asked, what’s the plan? What’s our plan in each state? What are our options?
He was focused on how to pick up just tens of thousands of voters in several states. That would give him a second term, another four years.
“You know, this is going to be hard,” Trump’s outside political adviser, David Bossie, told him. “We need to do this the right way, methodically, and work hard at it. But we can fight this and win.”
But, Bossie emphasized, “it’s going to be difficult. It’s going to be an uphill battle.”
Bossie, a seasoned political knife-fighter, had been Trump’s deputy campaign manager in 2016.
“Oh?” Trump asked him. “Are you not thinking we should fight?”
“No,” Bossie said. “We have to fight for every legal ballot.”
Residence staff brought in plates of meatballs and pigs in a blanket. Trump had his usual Diet Coke.
“How do we find the 10,000 votes that we need in Arizona? How do we find the 12,000 that we need in Georgia?” Trump asked. “What about the military ballots? Are they all in?”
The next morning, November 8, Trump summoned Bossie back to the White House. Maybe Bossie could be in charge and let Rudy do Rudy. Bossie could keep the trains running. That was his skill.
When Bossie arrived that afternoon, he was tested for the coronavirus, then walked toward the residence. But before he headed upstairs to see Trump, a White House official abruptly pulled Bossie aside. He needed to head back to the medical unit. His test was back.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,” Bossie thought as he entered the medical office. His coronavirus test was positive, joining a long list of Trump White House aides and Trump loyalists who had contracted the virus.
Bossie took a few more tests, just to make sure. He sat on the steps of the Old Executive Office Building and hung out with Peter Navarro, Trump’s hardline trade adviser, talking politics on a sleepy Sunday.
Bossie was angry. He knew Trump was about to give him the reins of the election fight. It would be a huge public role. But he now had to isolate and leave the White House grounds. Those were the rules.
From the steps, as dusk fell, he saw Giuliani and Sidney Powell. Powell, a stern, right-wing lawyer, had once been a well-regarded attorney. But she had recently been making bizarre claims about voting machines being rigged.
Speaking to Fox Business host Lou Dobbs, who Trump watched regularly, on November 6, Powell asserted a “likelihood that 3 percent of the total vote was changed in the pre-election, voting ballots that were collected digitally.
“That would have amounted to a massive change in the vote that would have gone across the country,” she said, and “explains a lot of what we’re seeing.” She claimed hundreds of thousands of ballots were appearing out of nowhere to illegally give Biden the presidency.
Bossie watched Powell and Giuliani walk into the White House together. A panic rose.
Powell was a peddler of “concocted bullshit,” he thought. And he could not stop her. She and Giuliani were now the ones inside the room.