I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final Year Read online

  Also by Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker

  A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump’s Testing of America

  PENGUIN PRESS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2021 by Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  ISBN: 9780593298947 (hardcover)

  ISBN: 9780593298954 (ebook)

  ISBN: 9780593300626 (international edition)

  Cover photograph: Jabin Botsford / The Washington Post / Getty Images

  Designed by Amanda Dewey, adapted for ebook by Cora Wigen

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  To Naomi, Clara, Karen, and Lee

  To John, Molly, and Elise

  CONTENTS

  Authors’ Note

  PROLOGUE

  PART ONE

  One. DEADLY DISTRACTIONS

  Two. TOTALLY UNDER CONTROL

  Three. SEEKING REVENGE

  Four. THE P-WORD

  Five. REBELLING AGAINST THE EXPERTS

  Six. REFUSING TO MASK UP

  PART TWO

  Seven. BUNKERS, BLASTS, AND BIBLES

  Eight. STARING DOWN THE DRAGON

  Nine. A SEA OF EMPTY SEATS

  Ten. THE SKUNKS AT THE PICNIC

  Eleven. FEAR AND FANTASY

  PART THREE

  Twelve. SELF-SABOTAGE

  Thirteen. STAND BACK AND STAND BY

  Fourteen. NOBODY’S IMMUNE

  Fifteen. SOMEBODY’S CRAZY UNCLE

  Sixteen. THE RECKONING

  PART FOUR

  Seventeen. THE BIG LIE

  Eighteen. STRANGE RANGERS

  Nineteen. CRIES OF INJUSTICE

  Twenty. HITTING A DEAD END

  Twenty-one. THE INSURRECTION

  Twenty-two. LANDING THE BAD BOY

  EPILOGUE

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  Authors’ Note

  We never anticipated we would write a second book about Donald Trump’s time in the White House. Our first, A Very Stable Genius, brought readers deep inside his chaotic and impulsive presidency. Our story ended as Trump was about to face impeachment for pressuring a foreign country to investigate his political rival, well into his third year. We expected his presidency would follow its established pattern and rhythms. Then came the year 2020. Trump’s final year in office turned out to be by far his most consequential and, for many Americans, the most frightening. We felt compelled to pick up where we left off. Our minds raced with questions anew. We felt a responsibility, for history, to reveal what was happening behind the scenes as Trump stared down his first true crisis, the coronavirus pandemic, and chose to spawn another, the subversion of democracy, an act that led him to be the first U.S. president ever to be twice impeached.

  This book is based on hundreds of hours of interviews with more than 140 sources, including the seniormost Trump administration officials, career government officials, friends, and outside advisers to the forty-fifth president, as well as other witnesses to the events described herein. Some of our interviews with key figures extended for more than five hours in a single sitting as the sources recounted their experiences in meticulous detail. Most of the people we interviewed agreed to speak candidly only on the condition of anonymity, to share private accounts of moments that profoundly challenged or shook them, to protect their future careers, or to fend off retaliation from Trump or his allies. Many of them provided their accounts in a background capacity, meaning we were permitted to use the information they shared so long as we protected their identities and did not attribute details to them by name. A few of our sources agreed to speak on the record, including Trump, whom we interviewed for two and a half hours.

  We are objective journalists who seek to share the truth with the public. In this book, we aimed to provide the closest version of the truth that we could determine based on rigorous reporting. We carefully reconstructed scenes to present Trump unfiltered, showing him in action rather than telling readers what to think of him. These scenes were reconstructed based on firsthand accounts and, whenever possible, corroborated by multiple sources and buttressed by our review of calendars, diary entries, slideshow decks, internal memos, and other correspondence among principals. Dialogue cannot always be exact but is based here on people’s memories of events and, in some cases, contemporaneous notes taken by witnesses. In a few instances, sources disagreed substantively about the facts in an episode, and when necessary, we note that in the pages, recognizing that different narrators sometimes remember events differently.

  This book is an outgrowth of our reporting for The Washington Post. As such, some of the details in our narrative first appeared in stories we authored for the newspaper, some of them in collaboration with other colleagues. However, the overwhelming majority of the scenes, dialogue, and quotations are original to our book and based on the extensive reporting we conducted exclusively for this project.

  To reconstruct episodes that played out in public, we relied upon video of events, such as presidential speeches, many of which are archived on C-SPAN’s website. We also relied on contemporaneous news reports in the Post as well as in other publications. We have also drawn from the government record, including internal government reports and private email exchanges. In most instances we built upon the published record with our own original reporting. Material gleaned from such accounts is properly attributed, either with a direct reference in the chapter text or in the endnotes.

  Prologue

  On January 20, 2017, Donald John Trump became president, unskilled in the machinery of government and unmoved morally by the calling of the position, but aglow in his unmatched power. The first three years of Trump’s term revealed a presidency of one, in which the universal value was loyalty—not to the country, but to the president himself. Scandal, bluster, and uninhibited chaos reigned. Decisions were driven by a reflexive logic of self-preservation and self-aggrandizement. Delusions born of narcissism and insecurity overtook reality.

  In those early years, which we chronicled in our book A Very Stable Genius, Trump’s advisers believed his ego and pride prevented him from making sound, well-informed judgments. His management style resembled a carnival ride, jerking this way and that, forcing senior government officials to thwart his inane and sometimes illegal ideas. Some of them concluded that the president was a long-term and immediate danger to the country that he had sworn an oath to protect, yet they took comfort that he had not had to steer the country through a true crisis.

  Trump’s actions and words nevertheless had painful consequences. His assault on the rule of law degraded our democratic institutions and left Americans reasonably fearful they could no longer take for granted basic civil rights and untainted justice. His contempt for foreign alliances weakened America’s leadership in the world and empowered dictators and despots. His barbarous immigration enforcement ripped migrant children out of the arms of their families. His bigoted rhetoric emboldened white supr
emacists to step out of the shadows.

  But at least Trump had not been tested by a foreign military strike, an economic collapse, or a public health crisis.

  At least not until 2020.

  This book chronicles Trump’s catastrophic fourth and final year as president. The year 2020 will be remembered in the American epoch as one of anguish and abject failure. The coronavirus pandemic killed more than half a million people in the United States and infected tens of millions more, the deadliest health crisis in a century. Though the administration’s Operation Warp Speed helped produce vaccines in record time, its overall coronavirus response was mismanaged by the president and marred by ineptitude and backbiting.

  The virus was only one of the crises Trump confronted in 2020. The pandemic paralyzed the economy, plunging the nation into a recession during which low-wage workers, many of them minorities, suffered the most.

  The May 25 killing of George Floyd, a Black man, under the knee of a white police officer in Minneapolis ignited protests for racial justice and an end to police discrimination and brutality. Yet Trump sought to exploit the simmering divisions for personal political gain, quickly declaring himself “your president of law and order” and relentlessly pressuring Pentagon leaders to deploy active-duty troops against Black Lives Matter protesters.

  The worsening climate crisis, meanwhile, was almost entirely ignored by Trump, who earlier in his term had rolled back environmental regulations and withdrawn the United States from the Paris Agreement. The president was instead preoccupied with stoking doubts about the legitimacy of the election. After he lost to Joe Biden, Trump fanned the flames of conspiracies and howled about fraud that did not exist. His false claims of a “rigged election” inspired thousands of people to storm the Capitol in a violent and ultimately failed insurrection on January 6, 2021.

  The year 2020 tested the republic. Yet the institutions designed by the Founding Fathers were still standing by the time Trump left office. America’s democracy withstood the unrelenting assault of its president. Trump’s cries summoned tens of thousands of angry citizens to Washington to overturn the election, but Vice President Mike Pence and scores of lawmakers followed their constitutional duties.

  “There is a good news story here,” General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the military brass at the conclusion of Trump’s presidency. “It’s the strength of the country. There is polarization. But at the end of the day, the country did stand tall. There was a peaceful transfer of power. There weren’t tanks in the streets. And the line bent, but it didn’t break.”

  Senator Mitt Romney, who often stood alone among fellow Republicans in his criticisms of Trump, said the president’s attacks on democratic institutions amounted to one of the greatest failings of any president.

  “I think as we all recognize, democracy is more than taking a vote,” Romney said. “We’ve had a number of countries take votes to quickly fall into disrepair from a democratic standpoint in part because they don’t have the institutions that allow democracy to survive. Attacking the institutions here puts democracy itself in jeopardy, whether it’s our judicial system, our freedom of the press, our intelligence community, the FBI—these things underpin the strength of our democratic republic. So he attacked those along the way and then, as a final act, attacked election integrity itself. Those things have real consequences.”

  The characteristics of Trump’s leadership, blazingly evident through the first three years of his presidency, had deadly ramifications in his final year. He displayed his ignorance, his rash temper, his pettiness and pique, his malice and cruelty, his utter absence of empathy, his narcissism, his transgressive personality, his disloyalty, his sense of victimhood, his addiction to television, his suspicion and silencing of experts, and his deception and lies. Each trait thwarted the response of the world’s most powerful nation to a lethal threat.

  “The last year you see what happens when you actually have erosion in the capacity of government to respond, when you have a president and appointees who don’t take governing seriously and honestly don’t know how to use it,” said Margaret O’Mara, a professor of history at the University of Washington. “That’s the great tragedy. It shows how fundamentally oblivious the president was to governing and the immense power for good at his disposal.”

  Most of Trump’s failings can be explained by a simple truth: He cared more about himself than the country. Whether managing the coronavirus or addressing racial unrest or reacting to his election defeat, Trump prioritized what he thought to be his political and personal interests over the common good.

  “There come moments where you have to decide, am I going to do something that’s purely in my own self-interest if it is contrary to the interests of the people I represent,” one of Trump’s advisers remarked. “And in those moments, you’ve always got to pick the people you represent. The fact is that in 2020 Donald Trump put himself ahead of the country. When you do that as a leader, the people notice—and when they notice, they kick your ass out.”

  Throughout his presidency, Trump cast himself as a long-suffering, tormented victim. He believed himself to be persecuted by what he called the “deep state,” a reference to any number of national security, intelligence, and law enforcement officials. Because some of these officials investigated his campaign’s contacts with Russian operatives amid Russia’s effort to help Trump win in 2016, he saw them as enemies. He branded any investigation pertaining to his conduct—whether it was Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 campaign, probes into his finances, or an impeachment inquiry into his pressure on Ukraine to help him smear Biden—a “witch hunt.” He also claimed the media were running a sophisticated disinformation operation to puncture his popularity. And he demanded apologies for criticisms and slights.

  Trump’s incessant complaining ran counter to what had long been a core tenet of the Republican Party: personal responsibility. Yet Trump’s strategy of self-victimization yoked him to his supporters, who similarly felt disrespected by elites in Washington and felt wronged by the fast-changing global economy.

  Trump’s standard tool kit for getting out of trouble—bullying, bluster, and manipulation—was useless in managing the pandemic. He tried to cloak reality with happy talk. He promised cures that would never be realized. He floated dangerous and unproven treatments, such as injecting bleach into patients’ bodies. He muzzled experts like Dr. Anthony Fauci who challenged his shaky claims and became more popular than the president. He refused to lead by example and wear a mask. He picked feuds with health officials and state governors scrambling to respond to emergency outbreaks, striking out at those who didn’t praise his haphazard response. Not only did he fail to keep Americans safe; he couldn’t even keep himself safe. Trump was hospitalized with COVID-19 in October 2020, zapping his false air of invincibility.

  The coronavirus changed the world, altering how people worked, how families lived, and what constituted a community. These profound changes were accelerated by the recession and heightened by the tensions in the aftermath of Floyd’s killing. Trump, however, principally governed for a minority of the country—his hard-core political supporters—and chose neither to try to unite the nation nor to reimagine a postpandemic America. He egged on the anger and disaffection among many white people who felt economically threatened and culturally marginalized. He pitted groups of Americans against one another. He uttered racist phrases and used his immense social media platforms to spread messages of hate. He stoked fear and egged on violence.

  “His view of America is provincial, it’s parochial, it’s sullied, it’s any other adjective that calls up a sense of narrowness and ugliness,” said Eddie Glaude Jr., chair of the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University. “In so many ways, Donald Trump represents the death rattle of an old America, and it’s loud and it’s violent.”

  A senior government offic
ial who worked closely with the president drew a parallel between Trump’s handling of the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 and Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in Nazi Germany.

  “People either singularly or in crowds are interested in personal survival and stability and safety,” this official said. “When you are experiencing confusion and chaos and things you can’t quite make sense of, and you see this phenomena around you that’s getting scary—the economy and COVID and losing your job and immigrants crossing the border—along comes a guy who takes fuel, throws it on the fire, and makes you scared shitless. ‘I will protect you.’ That’s what Hitler did to consolidate power in 1933.”

  Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic House Speaker whose opposition to Trump was as resolute as any, twice presided over his impeachment—in 2019 for seeking help from Ukraine in his reelection, and in 2021 for instigating the Capitol insurrection. After he left office, she told us in an interview that she was grateful democracy had prevailed but feared another president might come along and pick up where Trump left off.

  “We might get somebody of his ilk who’s sane, and that would really be dangerous, because it could be somebody who’s smart, who’s strategic, and the rest,” Pelosi said. “This is a slob. He doesn’t believe in science. He doesn’t believe in governance. He’s a snake-oil salesman. And he’s shrewd. Give him credit for his shrewdness.”

  That shrewdness, coupled with shamelessness and unnatural political stamina, allowed Trump to deliver on many of his campaign promises. He pleased his conservative base by remaking the federal judiciary, including with three nominations to the Supreme Court; cutting taxes on corporations and the wealthy; expanding the military; toughening border enforcement; and weakening the regulatory state. Trump also forged new bilateral trade agreements, negotiated peace accords in the Middle East, and won concessions from European allies he had argued were taking advantage of the United States.