This Will Not Pass

Trump, Biden and the Battle for American Democracy

Jonathan Martin, Alexander Burns

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781982172503
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Partiti politici

The "blockbuster" ( The Guardian ) New York Times bestseller, a shocking, definitive account of the 2020 election and the first year of the Biden presidency by two New York Times reporters, exposes the deep fissures within both parties as the country approaches a political breaking point. This is the authoritative, "deeply reported" ( The Wall Street Journal ) account of an eighteen-month crisis in American democracy that will be seared into the country's political memory for decades to come. With stunning, in-the-room detail, New York Times reporters Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns show how both our political parties confronted a series of national traumas, including the coronavirus pandemic, the January 6 attack on the Capitol, and the political brinksmanship of President Biden's first year in the White House.From Donald Trump's assault on the 2020 election and his ongoing campaign of vengeance against his fellow Republicans to the behind-the-scenes story of Biden's selection of Kamala Harris as his running mate and his bitter struggles to unite the Democratic Party, this book exposes the degree to which the two-party system has been strained to the point of disintegration. More than at any time in recent history, the long-established traditions and institutions of American politics are under siege as a set of aging political leaders struggle to hold together the changing country.Martin and Burns break news on most every page, drawing on hundreds of interviews and never-before-seen documents and recordings from the highest levels of government. This "masterful" (George Stephanopoulos) book asks the vitally important (and disturbing) question: can American democracy, as we know it, ever work again?

Chapter 1 Reciprocity

IT WAS HOURS before dawn in California when Gavin Newsom’s phone rang. The fifty-two-year-old governor was accustomed to early calls from the East Coast, but under normal circumstances a 4:30 a.m. wake-up call from the White House was unusual.

These were anything but normal: The coronavirus pandemic had struck Newsom’s state and the president of the United States wanted to talk about it.

Newsom, a Democrat, enjoyed a strange relationship with President Donald Trump. The two had known each other since long before Trump’s election in 2016: When he was merely a celebrity real-estate developer, Trump had donated money to one of Newsom’s campaigns, and Newsom’s ex-wife, the television personality Kimberly Guilfoyle, was dating the president’s eldest son. Trump and Newsom had dealt with each other in office a number of times, mainly around natural disasters like wildfires.

They had a disaster on their hands now.

It was the very beginning of March, and the respiratory pathogen that had already ravaged parts of China and Italy was in increasingly abundant evidence in the United States. The first case had been confirmed on January 21, in Washington State, and six weeks later West Coast governors and mayors were moving toward embracing strict clampdowns on public activity and commerce in order to slow the spread of the disease.

Trump had something more specific on his mind. The president was concerned about the Grand Princess, a cruise ship anchored off San Francisco. Passengers on the ship had been exposed to the coronavirus, and it was not yet clear what the local, state, or federal government would do with the people on board.

If we bring them ashore, Trump complained to Newsom, that could increase the total number of coronavirus cases in the country.

Trump’s tone was equal parts flippant and frustrated. It was the kind of offhand remark Newsom had learned to expect from a president who routinely hectored him about why California did not do a better job “raking” its forests to clear out flammable debris—an almost comically reductive view of the state’s complicated forest-management challenge.

The president was not a student of policy, Newsom knew, and sometimes he just sort of said stuff. You had to wait him out and then ask for what you wanted—which in this case, Newsom told him, was federal cooperation with bringing the boat into dock and processing the passengers for medical treatment or quarantine.

“Whatever you guys need,” Trump said, according to Newsom’s memory. “Let’s bring it in.”

On March 6, Trump blurted out in public what he’d told Newsom on the phone. While visiting the headquarters of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, he was asked a question about the cruise liner and replied that he would leave the decision to others, but added: “I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship.”

The media coverage was merciless. Here was the president of the United States, at the onset of a global pandemic, musing openly about massaging the infection stats by keeping a cruise ship at sea.

For a governor like Newsom, there was no free political capital to be spent on outrage. The difficult reality of the situation was that a world-historic threat to public health was under way, and the man in the Oval Office was a shallow political provocateur. Donald Trump was not interested in negotiating the fine points of legislation or learning the details of his public-health powers.

Indeed, as the House and Senate swept a $2.2 trillion aid package, known as the CARES Act, into law, Trump was not even on speaking terms with the top Democrat in Congress, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. (In conversations with Newsom, Trump typically called her “your friend Nancy,” while the Speaker would refer to “your friend Trump” in her own chats with the governor.)

The state, local, and federal officials tasked with managing the day-to-day response to the pandemic could choose to vent outrage about the lamentable realities of the Trump White House, or they could do their best to extract what they needed from the Trump administration by staying on the right side of Donald Trump.

And the president, a notoriously vengeful man, made it more than apparent that he was keeping track of who treated him like a friend and who did not.

Trump was watching, he told Newsom, for “the reciprocity.”

“He used to say that even privately—that it was one of his favorite words,” Newsom says. “It says everything and nothing at the same time.”

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That transactional worldview defined Donald Trump’s presidency, including his response to the coronavirus pandemic. A proudly divisive leader who saw the executive branch as an extension of his own personality, he had governed for three years as a factional president before the pandemic struck—a champion of “his people” and a scourge of the other side, however he chose to define those groups at any given moment.

There had never been a pretense that Trump was a leader for all Americans, or that the White House saw no distinction between red states and blue states. He was the leader of his own coalition: a largely white, largely rural, largely working-class voting base that relished Trump’s reactionary cultural politics, soldered to a largely white, largely urban, extremely wealthy donor base that valued his hostility to taxes and regulation.

If other constituencies factored into Trump’s week-to-week thinking as president, they only did so because he thought they might be politically useful for one reason or another.

It was not the governing style of a president suited to pulling the country together in a crisis. But then, for three-quarters of his term, Trump had faced no crisis on the scale of the worst his immediate predecessors confronted. There had been no 9/11, no global economic collapse, no new foreign war, no truck bombs aimed at an American barracks in Beirut or a federal building in Oklahoma City. There had been episodes of horror, like the caging of migrant children on the Southern border, but for the most part those had been authored by the president and his aides rather than inflicted on the country from above or abroad.

When the pandemic struck, Trump did not have a plan for crushing it, or even a general theory of how to handle a public-health crisis.

After all, Trump had spent his whole term preparing to ask voters to give him another one based on a promise of continued peace and prosperity. For the first three-quarters of his presidency, unemployment had been way down. The stock market had been way up. Yes, Republican officials acknowledged, the president was thinly versed in the details of governing. Yes, he occasionally derided major American cities as vermin-infested hellholes and demonized people on the basis of their race or national origin. And, to be sure, his personality was problematic: Haley Barbour, the former Mississippi governor and Republican Party chairman, had taken to joking of Trump: “Narcissistic asshole syndrome is incurable after seventy.”

But, Republicans insisted and mostly believed, many voters had decided to look past that and found Trump more palatable than the Democrats. Besides, their argument went, even if he was a factional leader, he was a factional leader who wound up creating wealth for everybody.

The coronavirus pandemic shattered that argument. The unemployment rate soared to nearly 15 percent by April. Trading on the stock market had to be repeatedly paused due to steep plunges. Entire sectors of the economy—restaurants, hotels, airlines, movie theaters—effectively collapsed overnight. And at the outset of the 2020 general election, there was no end in sight.

Donald Trump needed a new plan—a plan to win a difficult campaign.

The president had anticipated that the 2020 race would be an easy one. He had dismissed many of his Democratic challengers in private conversations and lapped up rosy prognoses fed to him by solicitous advisers who went to great pains to keep bad news away from him.

There was no apparatus in place to give Trump a tougher prognosis about his chances of winning reelection, let alone one shaped by an unpredictable public-health crisis.

Long before 2020, some Republican leaders—people outside the White House—had feared that Trump would face a challenge from a mainstream, moderate Democrat who could win the election simply by making it a referendum on Trump’s personality. The person many of them feared most was Joe Biden, the former vice president with an affinity for the blue-collar whites whose support Trump needed in overwhelming numbers.

But Trump did not fear Biden. Indeed, at a dinner with Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, before the 2018 midterm elections, Trump belittled Biden as a joke, a weak old man—hardly someone to be feared. When Christie suggested Trump might be underestimating the grandfatherly Delawarean, the president scoffed at the idea. He told Christie he was more concerned about Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders, since they would promise the voters huge new government benefits.

That, Trump said, would be popular.

Not that he would ever really admit to being concerned about any of his potential rivals.

Flying to California on Air Force One in September of 2019, shortly after Elizabeth Warren had drawn a massive crowd to Manhattan’s Washington Square Park, Trump boasted to the White House press corps that he could have commanded the same numbers in the heart of one of America’s most liberal cities.

“If I stood there, you’d have twenty thousand people,” he insisted.

As Trump rambled on during the off-record session with reporters, his staff encouraged his bravado by applauding his stamina.

“Would Joe Biden do this?” Trump asked.

“We’ve been going on forty minutes,” responded Stephanie Grisham, then the White House press secretary.

Trump’s court of sycophants appalled more clear-eyed Republicans. In 2019, the president summoned the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, to the White House, and instructed his aides to walk the Kentucky Republican through their presidential polling. They were forecasting a Trump romp from coast to coast, though there were still a few delicate strategic decisions for the campaign to resolve.

“Go get the hats,” Trump told his assistant, Madeleine Westerhout. She returned, to McConnell’s visible dismay, with one hat emblazoned with the slogan “Make America Great Again,” and another hat reading “Keep America Great.” Which one, Trump wanted to know, should he go with? And should he put an exclamation point on the end?

The Republican National Committee chair, Ronna McDaniel, took a strong position on that last point. A former member of the party establishment who had gone by her full family name, Ronna Romney McDaniel, until her affiliation with the Romney clan became inconvenient, McDaniel curried favor with Trump by ridiculing another humbled dynast. “It reminds us of ‘Jeb!’ ” she said, according to a person in the room, alluding to Jeb Bush’s campaign-sign punctuation. “No exclamation point.”

Trump instantly agreed. McConnell remained impassive through the meeting.

Telling Trump what he wanted to hear had become a way of life for an entire political party. Brian Jack, the White House political director, told Senate strategists not to share their swing-state polling information with Trump, lest he react badly to the numbers. When Republicans approached the White House early in 2020 to express concern that Trump could be vulnerable in Georgia, a once-red state in the midst of a rapid demographic transformation, Jack responded: “There is no way you can convince the president he will win Georgia by less than ten points, let alone that he might lose.”

But of course, few people were trying to dissuade Trump from thinking that way. After a meeting at the White House in July 2020, McConnell expressed bewilderment to an aide about the stream of happy news Trump’s advisers were feeding to him. It was one of the bleakest periods in the campaign for Trump, but no one could have known it from the cheerful prognoses presented by the president’s political team.

One Trump adviser in particular surprised McConnell—a fair-haired and sharp-featured man who offered only sunny forecasts to the president. McConnell wanted to know: Who was that guy?

Learning that it was Bill Stepien, Trump’s new campaign manager, McConnell grumbled: He just tells Trump what he wants to hear.

There was a horde of accomplices in this presidential-level coddling, at every tier of the Republican Party, driven by an accurate conviction that Trump was a singularly popular figure on the right and that keeping his good favor was simply the cost of doing business.

Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, stood out from the pack as perhaps the most ingratiating major figure in the GOP. Having failed in a previous bid for Speaker of the House amid opposition from the right wing, McCarthy had no anchorage in his party’s ideological waters—he was simply determined not to be outflanked on the MAGA wing.

He had worked in politics nearly his entire adult life, first as a junior aide to his predecessor in Congress, then as a state legislator before winning his House seat in 2006. In an early meeting with national party strategists during that campaign, McCarthy was up front about the scale of his ambitions: He was running for Congress, McCarthy said, because he planned to be the Speaker of the House.

Even as he rose, though, McCarthy retained the nose-against-the-glass style of a Bakersfield kid who wanted to make it big, always gazing longingly at the famous. In his case, that frequently meant quite literally showing off pictures of himself with movie stars. It also meant he was particularly vulnerable to the force field of political celebrity, first in Sacramento when Arnold Schwarzenegger became governor of California and then when Donald Trump became president of the United States.

McCarthy was always determined to be part of the in crowd, and so it came as no surprise, but rather as a source of amusement to his fellow Republicans when he sent Trump a jar of Starburst candy containing only the president’s two favorite flavors. He was just as determined to present a menu of House candidates to the president that fit his tastes.

He made a habit of briefing Trump on McCarthy’s own favored congressional recruits, making sure the president knew of the many nice things they had said about him in the past. On rare occasions when McCarthy wanted to enlist a candidate who had been critical of Trump, he would orchestrate displays of loyalty to appease the president. He instructed Carlos Gimenez, the mayor of Miami-Dade County and a former Trump critic, to tweet an expression of admiration for Trump in order to secure the support of the White House, and Gimenez had quickly obliged as he entered a crucial House race.

In sessions with House and Senate strategists, Trump would veer back and forth between issuing edicts of intimidation and playing the class clown to a chortling audience. In meetings with McConnell and his advisers, the president would rail against Martha McSally, the appointed Arizona senator who was running for election in her own right. A former fighter pilot and survivor of sexual assault, McSally had denounced Trump after the 2016 publication of the Access Hollywood tape that showed the future president bragging about groping women. Like most Republicans, McSally had run back to Trump soon after, and she was campaigning in 2020 as a supporter of the White House. But Trump himself had not forgotten.

“She’s a horrible candidate,” Trump would say. “Just terrible. No one likes her.”

McConnell would try to speed through the races where he knew Trump didn’t like the leading Republican Senate candidates, often attempting to skip discussion of Maine entirely, where Susan Collins was running for reelection and had not endorsed Trump for a second term. But in several meetings Trump could not resist weighing in with what he might call locker-room talk about Collins’s challenger, Sara Gideon, the telegenic Speaker of the Maine House of Representatives.

“Sara Gideon—very attractive. Very attractive,” Trump said in one session, according to a person in the room.

Then he added a joke at the first lady’s expense: “Not that I’ve looked at a woman that way in five years—five years at least.” (He and Melania Trump were married in 2005.)

But the president’s threats were no joke. Republicans who had stepped out of line in more memorable ways usually found themselves defeated, driven into retirement, or pleading for forgiveness. As he ...