20 Days of Fantasy and Failure: Trump's Quest to Turn the Election Over

 Although Trump aides may have been on the verge of losing him to President-elect Joe Biden, many of them have praised their president and encouraged him to keep fighting with legal challenges.

But Trump refused to view it this way. He was impeached in the White House and shunned public opinion after his election defeat, and was raging and sometimes raving in a torrent of private conversations, and Trump, in the narration of one of his close advisers, such as "Mad King George, mutter," You've won, you've won. You have won. "

Although Trump aides may be on the verge of losing him to President-elect Joe Biden, many of them have indulged their president and encouraged him to keep fighting with legal challenges. This consultant said they were "happy to itch." "If he thinks he's won, it's like," Shh ... we're not going to tell him. "

For example, John McLaughlin, a Trump campaign pollster, discussed with Trump a post-election poll that showed Trump had positive support, a plurality of countries that believed the media were "unfair and biased against him" and a majority of voters who believed their lives were Better than four, according to two people familiar with the conversation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations. As expected, Trump threatened him.

The result was an election unprecedented in US history. Denying the outcome, despite a string of defeats in the courtroom, Trump endangered American democracy, threatened to undermine national security and public health, and fooled millions of his supporters into believing, perhaps permanently, that Biden was illegally elected.

Trump's allegations and hostility to his rhetoric - and his unique power to persuade and motivate his followers - have generated extraordinary pressure on state and local election officials to endorse allegations of fraud and take steps to prevent certification of results. When some refused, they agreed to security details to protect against threats they were receiving.

"It was like the Whac-A-Mole rumor," said Georgia's Foreign Minister Brad Ravensberger. Although a Republican voted for Trump, Ravensburger said he rejected repeated attempts by Trump's allies to get him to cross moral lines. "I don't think I had a choice. My job is to follow the law. We won't be pushed from doing that. Integrity is still important."

All the while, Trump has largely relinquished the responsibilities of the job he has been struggling hard to maintain, chief among them managing the coronavirus pandemic as the number of infections and deaths soars across the country. In an ironic irony, Trump's advisor orchestrated the post-election legal campaign and communications, David Bossi, caught the virus just days after his mission and was sidelined.

It was only on November 23 that Trump reluctantly agreed to initiate a peaceful transfer of power by allowing the federal government to formally initiate Biden’s transition - yet he has protested that he is the true victor.

The 20 days between the November 3 election and the green light for Biden's transition represent some of the hallmarks of life in the White House under Trump: government paralyzed by the president's fragile emotional state; Advisors feed his myths. Insults laden with factions of aides and advisors; A malicious obliteration of truth and fiction.

Although Trump ultimately failed in his quest to steal the election, the weeks-long Geremade undermined confidence in the election and the legitimacy of Biden's victory.

This account of one of the last chapters of Trump's presidency is based on interviews with 32 senior administration officials, campaign aides and other advisers to the president, as well as other key figures in his legal battle, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity. To share details about private discussions and assess the situation frankly.

In the days following the election, while Trump was scrambling for an escape hatch, the president has largely ignored his campaign staff and the professional lawyers who guided him through the Russia investigation and impeachment trial, as well as the army of lawyers who stood up. Willing to file legitimate judicial appeals.

Instead, Trump empowered loyalists who were willing to tell him what he wanted to hear - that he would have won an overwhelming majority if the election had not been rigged and stolen - and then sacrificed their reputation by campaigning in the courtrooms and in the media. To convince the audience of this illusion.

The efforts culminated on November 19, when attorneys Rudolph W. Giuliani, Gina Ellis and Sydney Powell on behalf of the President at the Republican National Committee headquarters to claim a far-reaching and coordinated plot to steal Biden's election. They have argued that Democratic leaders rigged voting in a number of black-majority cities, and that the voting machines were tampered with by Communist forces in Venezuela under the direction of Hugo Chávez, the Venezuelan leader who died seven years earlier.

There was no evidence to support any of these claims.

The Venezuelan tale was highly fictional even for Trump, a man who had been a conspiracy theorist who frantically spread fiction for years. Advisors described the president as unsure of the recent maneuver - which was exacerbated by the fact that what appeared to be black hair dye mixed with sweat formed a trail of falling off both sides of Giuliani's face during the press conference. Trump believes the show made it "sound like a joke," according to a campaign official who discussed it with him.

A Republican official said, "I, like everyone else, have not seen any evidence of this yet, but it is an exciting movie - you have Chavez, seven years after his death, who masterminds this international conspiracy funded by politicians in both parties." flashy. "It's a crazy story."

Aides said the president was particularly disappointed in Powell when Tucker Carlson, the presenter of most-watched Fox News show, attacked her on-air credibility after she refused to provide any evidence to support the fraud allegations.

Trump fired Powell. Days after urging the advisers, he agreed to allow the General Services Administration to formally initiate Biden's transition - a procedural step that amounted to a capitulation. Aides said this was the closest Trump could get to handcuff the election.

However, even this incomplete capitulation was short-lived. Trump went on to falsely claim that he had "won", that the elections were "a complete fraud" and that his legal appeals would continue "as quickly as in the future." He spent part of Thanksgiving calling in counselors to ask them if they believed he really lost the election, according to a person familiar with the calls. "Do you think it was stolen?" The person said Trump requested it on vacation.

But his advisers conceded that was largely a hype from a president who still tolerated the loss. As November drew to a close, Biden floated his picks in the cabinet, states ratified his victory, and voters planned to make them official when the Electoral College meets on December 14 and federal judges speak.

A simple and clear rebuttal of the president came Friday from a Trump nominee, when Judge Stefanos Pepas of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit wrote a unanimous opinion rejecting the president's request for an emergency order revoking certification of the Pennsylvania state election results.

"Free and fair elections are the lifeblood of our democracy," he wrote. "Accusations of injustice are serious. But describing the elections as unfair does not make them so. The charges require specific allegations and then evidence. We do not have either of them here."

For Trump, it's over.

"Not only have our institutions resisted," said William Galston, head of the Governance Studies Program at the Brookings Institution. "The president's most determined effort to overturn the rule of the people in American history has achieved nothing." "It's not that he failed. It didn't get anywhere. That, to me, is cool."

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Trump's transition to disbelief began on election night at the White House, joining campaign manager Bill Stephen, senior advisers Jared Kushner and Jason Miller, and other senior aides in a makeshift war room to monitor returnees.

In the run-up to the election, Trump was aware of the fact - or likelihood, according to opinion polls - that he could lose. He commented several times to his aides, "Oh, isn't it embarrassing to lose to this guy?"

But in the final phase of the campaign, nearly everyone - including the president - thought he would win. And early on election night, Trump and his team believed they were witnessing a repeat of 2016, when he defied polls and expectations to make an unbeatable progress in the electoral college.

Then Fox News invited Arizona to Biden.

A senior administration official recalled Trump's reaction: "He was shouting at everyone." He was like, 'What the hell? We were supposed to win Arizona. what is happening? “Tell Jared to call [News Corp CEO Robert] Murdoch.”

Efforts by Kushner and others on Trump's team to persuade Fox to regain its call in Arizona failed.

Trump and his advisers were furious, in part because Biden's invitation to Arizona undermined Trump's sporadic plan to declare victory on election night if he appeared to make significant progress in enough states.

With Biden now only one country away from garnering a majority of 270 votes in the electoral college and the media narrative turning hard against him, Trump decided to claim fraud. And his team set out to try to prove it.

Over the summer and fall, Trump laid the groundwork for calling for "rigged" elections, as he often called them, warning of widespread fraud. Former Chief of Staff John Kelly told others that Trump "was preparing for his excuse when he lost the election," according to someone who heard his comments.

In June, during a meeting in the Oval Office with political and outside advisers, Trump raised the possibility of state governments being sued over how they ran the elections and said he did not believe they were allowed to change the rules. He said all countries should follow the same rules. Advisers told him he did not want the federal government in charge of the elections.

Trump also received many offers from his advisers in his campaign about the potential increase in mail-order ballots - partly because many Americans felt safer voting on the pandemic by mail than in person - and were told they would oppose it overwhelmingly, according to For Previous Campaign Administrator.

Advisors and allies, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, have encouraged Trump to try to bridge the gap in mail-order voting, arguing that he will need some of his voters, especially the elderly, to vote early by mail. Instead, Trump urged his supporters not to vote by mail, claiming they could not trust their vote count.

"It was kind of crazy," said the former campaign official.

Ultimately, it was the late count of ballot papers by mail that wiped out Trump's early leads in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and other conflicting states and propelled Biden to victory. When Trump watched his margins contract and then reversed, he became furious, and saw the conspiracy theory at play.

"You really have to understand Trump's psyche," said Anthony Scaramucci, a longtime Trump aide and former White House communications director who is now separate from the president. "The classic symptom of an outsider is that there must be a conspiracy. It's not my faults, but there is a gang against me. That is why he is vulnerable to these conspiracy theories."

This fall, deputy campaign director Justin Clark, Republican National Committee advisor Justin Rimmer and others laid out plans for post-election litigation, lining up with law firms across the country for a recount and potential polling challenges, people familiar with the work said. This was the kind of preparatory work that presidential campaigns usually do before elections. Giuliani, Ellis and Powell did not participate.

This team scored some victories in court against Democrats in a series of lawsuits in the months leading up to the election, over issues ranging from absentee ballot deadlines to signature matching rules.

But Trump's success rate in court will change dramatically after November 3. Arguments that began pouring in from Giuliani and others on Trump's legal team after the election left federal judges baffled. In one Pennsylvania case, some attorneys left the Trump team before Giuliani brought the case before a judge. Campaign advisers said Giuliani met with lawyers and wanted to present arguments they were uncomfortable with putting forward.

A few hours before his departure, the flight was foiled. "A bullet escapes," said one of the campaign advisers. "It would have been a total humiliation."

That afternoon, Trump called a meeting of the Republican senators in Wyndham, where Giuliani and Ellis addressed the audience. He spoke over a muddled call to Ellis' mobile phone, which she was playing on the speakerphone. At some point, the line beeps to indicate another caller.

"If I were a Republican poll watcher, I was treated like a dog," Trump complained, using one of his favorite methods of insult, even though many people treat dogs well, like their family members.

"The Democrats lost this election," he falsely said. "They were deceived."