Beginning on the night of the 2020 election and continuing until his last days in office, Donald Trump unraveled and dragged America with him, to the point that his followers plundered the U.S. Capitol with two weeks left of his term. This Axios series takes you into the collapse of a president.
Episode 1: Trump’s refusal to believe the election results was premeditated. He had heard about the “red mirage” – the likelihood that early vote counts would bring down more Republicans than final counts – and decided to exploit it.
“Jared, you call the Murdochs! Jason, you call Sammon and Hemmer! “
President Trump was almost shouting. He commanded his son-in-law and senior strategist from his private quarters at the White House on election night. He shouted the names of Fox News’ top executives and the talents he hoped to respond to.
“And anyone else – anyone else who will take the call,” he said. “Tell these guys that they need to change, they got it wrong. It’s too early. Not even CNN is calling.”
As the clock struck the first few minutes of November 4, Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani screamed to top campaign advisers: “He can’t lose; this thing must have been stolen. Suffice it to say we beat Michigan! Enough say we won Georgia! Suffice it to say we won the election! He needs to go out and claim victory. “Trump’s campaign manager Bill Stepien later said to associates,” That was crazy. “
For weeks, Trump was laying the groundwork to declare victory on election night – even if he lost. But the real-time results, punctuated by Fox’s shocking phone call, changed his plans and began to unravel.
Trump planned for Americans to go to bed on November 3 to celebrate – or resign – his re-election. The maps they saw on TV should be bathed in red. But at 11:20 pm that view fell apart, when the country’s main news channel among conservatives became the first vehicle to call Arizona in search of Joe Biden. Inside the White House, Trump’s inner circle exploded in horror.
Over the next two months, Trump took the nation down with him as he fell into denial, despair and a wave of reckless revenge that fueled a deadly siege of the U.S. Capitol by his supporters seeking to overturn the election. This sparked a constitutional crisis and a bipartisan impulse to accuse Trump on his way out the door, to try to expel him from American politics forever.
But in four years, Trump has remade the Republican Party in his own image, inspiring and activating tens of millions of Americans who would not abandon it anytime soon. He once boasted that he could shoot someone else on Fifth Avenue and not lose his voters. In reality, many of them lined up eagerly to commit violence on their behalf.
As Trump prepared for election day, he was focused on the so-called red mirage. This was the idea that early vote counting would look better to Republicans than the final count, because Democrats feared COVID-19 more and would cast disproportionately absent votes that would take longer to count. Trump intended to exploit this – to turn it into a weapon for his vast following.
Their preparations were deliberate, strategic and deeply cynical. Trump wanted Americans to believe that two elections were false – a legitimate election made up of in-person voting, and a separate and fraudulent election involving false ballots for Democrats.
In the first few hours after closing returns, it looked like his plan might work. Trump was on his way to easy victories in Florida and Ohio, and had big – if misleading – early leads in Pennsylvania and Michigan.
But as Bill Hemmer narrated a live “what if” scenario on his election telestrator from Studio F to Fox’s massive Manhattan headquarters, the anchor looked confused. “What’s going on here? Why is Arizona blue?” he asked on camera, poking the image of the state on the touch screen, unable to change its color. “Did we just call? Did we make a call in Arizona?” Because of a small communication failure, Hemmer’s screen had turned blue in Arizona before he or the other anchors, Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum, found out that Fox’s Decision Office called.
Trump was seething and wanted to see his top aides right away. His son-in-law Jared Kushner, team leader Mark Meadows, campaign manager Stepien, senior strategist Jason Miller and data analyst Matt Oczkowski took the elevator to the third floor of the White House residence. They met Trump and the First Lady halfway between his bedroom and the living room at the end of the hall. Trump filled them with questions. What happened? What the hell is going on at Fox?
Oczkowski told Trump that, based on the modeling of the campaign, he thought Fox was wrong and “we are going to win narrowly” by perhaps 10,000 votes or less, “close razor”. But the reality was that hundreds of thousands of votes were pending in Maricopa County and the image was too blurred to be sure. Then Trump told Kushner to call the Murdochs.
The team was cautiously optimistic that they were watching a repeat of Trump’s defiant victory in 2016. In the West Wing, middle-level officials gathered in the halls humming with excitement and nervous anxiety. At the residence, about 200 guests – donors, cabinet secretaries, White House doctor Sean Conley, TV promoters Diamond and Silk and other VIPs – gathered for the official election night party. They chewed meat bars. Most did not wear masks.
Giuliani was sitting at a table in the middle of the party, laptop open, watching the results arrive, as if it were the Central Command. Her son, White House official Andrew Giuliani, was sitting to his right. Trump’s inner circle – sons of Don Jr., Eric, Ivanka, plus his longtime adviser Hope Hicks, White House deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino and a few others – met separately in the Old Family Dining Room to watch the results on TV. Trump’s central campaign team monitored the results at the district level in the Map Room on the ground floor, the same room where FDR had tracked the fighting during World War II.
Trump spent a bellicose summer and early autumn protests against postal ballots. After a toxic election debate on September 29 with Biden, the numbers for Trump’s internal polls plummeted. He started choreographing the election night for real during the second week of October, while recovering from COVID-19.
His former chief of staff, Reince Priebus, told a friend that he was surprised when Trump called him around that time and staged his script, including climbing to a podium and declaring victory prematurely on election night if it looked like he was ahead .
The White House senior adviser Stephen Miller’s speech-writing team prepared three skeletal speeches for election night for all possible scenarios: a clear victory, a clear defeat and an indeterminate outcome. But the speechwriters knew that if Trump was facing anything other than a resounding victory, the words would be his alone. This president would never admit defeat or demand patience.
Top officials tried to force Fox to withdraw his call. Kushner called Rupert Murdoch, who said he would see what was going on. Hicks, a former Fox executive, sent a text message to the current Fox executive and former White House employee Raj Shah. Hicks also gave the phone number of Fox News President Jay Wallace to those primarily responsible for the Trump campaign. The senior officials of the Trump campaign sent text messages to anchors MacCallum and Baier. Over the course of the night, several Fox commentators friendly to Trump – including Tucker Carlson – questioned Arizona’s call on the air. But the call remained.
To make matters even more complicated, several important Fox News personalities, including “judge” Jeanine Pirro, were at the White House while their own network spoiled what should have been a victory party.
It was shortly after 1 am on November 4 when Trump finally descended from his quarters to the main hall on the second floor of his private residence. His inner circle found him halfway. This was the first time that most of them saw the president that night. About a dozen aides and relatives huddled around Trump as he delivered an impromptu speech. Stephen Miller was sitting on a sofa furiously typing the president’s flow of thoughts. Aides rushed to print images of cable news graphs showing Trump’s illusory leads in major Midwestern states. At around 2 am, Trump wanted to know why he couldn’t just say he had won and get it over with.
The speechwriters sent a draft to Trump’s former teleprompter operator, placed on his laptop in a small room next to the East Room. The draft did not include the words that became the most infamous line of his speech: “Frankly, we won this election.”
At 2:20 am, masked helpers and supporters in the East Room raised their cell phones to record Trump, the first lady, Vice President Mike Pence and his wife walking to the cameras while “Hail to the Chief” played. Dozens of American flags lined the background behind them.
Trump declared victory – and announced that the Democrats were committing a giant fraud against the American people.
Both claims were lies.
About this series: Our report is based on several interviews with current and past White House officials, government and Congress officials, as well as direct eyewitnesses and people close to the president. The sources were granted anonymity to share sensitive observations or details that they would not be formally authorized to disclose. President Trump and other officials to whom quotes and actions have been attributed by others have had the opportunity to confirm, deny or respond to elements of the report prior to publication.
“Off the Rails” is reported by White House reporter Jonathan Swan with reporting and research assistance from Zach Basu. It was edited by Margaret Talev and Mike Allen. Illustrations by Sarah Grillo, Aïda Amer and Eniola Odetunde. Our podcast for the series is called “How it Happened: Trump’s Last Resistance.”