THIRTY-NINE
Trump played golf in Florida with Lindsey Graham on Christmas Day.
“Mr. President,” Graham said, “there’s no doubt in my mind that there’s a lot of shenanigans going on in Georgia and other places but it’s just not going to rise to the level of overturning the election.”
Graham’s strategy was now not to try to convince Trump he lost—he had lost that battle—but to convince him he could not change the outcome.
Trump persisted. He could not understand how he won 74 million votes and lost. His pollsters and campaign staff told him if he won 74 million votes, he had to win. That was more votes than any presidential candidate in history—except Joe Biden. Trump had won many bellwether counties. He had won Ohio and Florida.
“Mr. President, you lost a close election. You need to be thinking about ‘The Great American Comeback.’ ”
“Why won’t you let me play it out?” Trump asked Graham twice during the round.
“I’m going to let you play it out,” Graham said after the second time. “There’s certain things I can’t do, and you know what they are. But let’s play this out. Keep shining a light on election processes that you think were tainted.”
Graham said he, too, believed some mail-in-ballots were suspect. “Keep fighting” in the courts, he said, but do not go to the extreme.
After 18 holes, Trump and a Russian-born golf prodigy were tied with Graham and the club pro.
“Let’s keep playing,” Trump said.
They kept tying for several holes. At a par 4, the wind was howling at 30 miles an hour.
On the second shot, Trump said to his partner, “Make sure you hit it there. Make sure you’re using enough club.”
The young man plunked his ball in the water before the green.
Graham thought that the kid was going to cut his wrists for having let the president down.
“Oh, that’s okay,” Trump said. “You’re a great player. Make sure you think next time. That’s life.”
Graham thought he would remember Trump’s comment for the rest of his life. Graham almost said, “I couldn’t say that any better—make sure you think next time.”
But Trump couldn’t get that 74 million out of his head and kept coming back to it. He didn’t believe that Biden got 81 million—7 million more.
Graham toggled between support and tough love, friendship and realism.
“Mr. President,” Graham said, “I’m not going to argue with you. When you win 19 out of 20 bellwether counties. Win Florida and Ohio. When you get 74 million votes and you lose, that’s got to be hard to take.”
“You better believe it’s hard to take!”
“It is what it is,” Graham said. “That’s life.”
Pence’s chief of staff, Marc Short, and his taciturn counsel, Greg Jacob, told Pence there was no legal or constitutional basis for him to do anything to disrupt the counting of the electoral votes. Lawmakers, not the vice president, could object. But they felt their boss was in a corner. Pence was only 61 years old and harbored presidential ambitions. He could not sever his relationship with Trump.
The risk became real when Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, a Yale Law–educated freshman and former Supreme Court law clerk for Chief Justice John Roberts, announced on December 30 that he would object to the Electoral College certification on January 6, becoming the first senator to do so.
“At the very least, Congress should investigate allegations of voter fraud and adopt measures to secure the integrity of our elections. But Congress has so far failed to act,” Hawley said.
Down in Houston, after watching Hawley garner attention for his plan to challenge the count, Cruz grabbed his laptop and began to sketch out his own idea: an electoral commission created by Congress to investigate the result. He kept typing as he took his seat on a Southwest Airlines flight back to Washington.
Maybe I’ll do it solo, maybe others will sign on, Cruz told his staff on a conference call. Once back in Washington, he mentioned the commission idea to Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana. He signed on. Cruz kept moving down the line of conservatives.
Senator Lee, his closest friend in the Senate, did not sign on. When Lee said a commission was not viable, Cruz said they would agree to disagree.
There was no out. Pence would now be forced to emcee his own defeat, and Trump’s, on national television, as rivals and allies pounded lecterns.
“JANUARY SIXTH, SEE YOU IN DC!” Trump tweeted on December 30 from Mar-a-Lago, where he was spending the holiday.
His allies, led by a group called “Women for America First,” had filed a National Park Service permit for January 22 and 23 in Washington. But they amended their permit application for a rally and instead reserved space at Freedom Plaza near the White House for January 6.
If Trump had any hesitation, it was erased by his supporters on television and on the right-wing websites he tracked on Twitter. The deplorables, the MAGA crowd, “my people” were all about the fight.
Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon was on the second floor of his townhouse on Capitol Hill on December 30, talking with Trump by phone.
Trump and Bannon had had a falling out two years earlier over Bannon’s high profile but had rekindled their relationship despite Bannon’s current legal troubles.
In August, Bannon had been charged in a federal Manhattan court for defrauding donors on a private project called “We Build the Wall,” an attempt to sidestep the government and build Trump’s wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. Trump did not seem to care. Maybe Bannon would get a pardon.
Trump ranted about how Republicans were not doing enough to keep him in power.
“You’ve got to return to Washington and make a dramatic return today,” Bannon told him.
Bannon’s gray hair was shaggy, and he wore heavy layers, black on black. His eyes were sunken and bloodshot from staying up until nearly dawn on many days, making phone calls and plotting with friends around the world, or writing out notes for his right-wing podcast.
“You’ve got to call Pence off the fucking ski slopes and get him back here today. This is a crisis,” Bannon said, referring to the vice president, who was vacationing in Vail, Colorado.
Bannon told Trump to focus on January 6. That was the moment for a reckoning.
“People are going to go, ‘What the fuck is going on here?’ ” Bannon believed. “We’re going to bury Biden on January 6th, fucking bury him.”
If Republicans could cast enough of a shadow on Biden’s victory on January 6, Bannon said, it would be hard for Biden to govern. Millions of Americans would consider him illegitimate. They would ignore him. They would dismiss him and wait for Trump to run again.
“We are going to kill it in the crib. Kill the Biden presidency in the crib,” he said.
On December 31, Trump returned early from Florida, cutting his trip short and skipping the New Year’s Eve gala at Mar-a-Lago. Stepping off Marine One, Trump, in a heavy black winter coat and bright red tie, stared over at reporters. He did not take questions.