With Florida flushing Tuesday night, President Donald Trump and his advisers thought they were witnessing a replay of election night 2016, when a victory in Florida heralded an overall victory.
Inside the East Room, the mood was upbeat as hundreds of people, including cabinet secretaries, ambassadors and former officials who have remained loyal to Trump, mingled and dined on sliders and fries. Officials who had been pessimistic about the president’s reelection chances suddenly began to imagine four more years in power.
That mirage of victory was traversed when Fox News called Arizona in place of former Vice President Joe Biden at 11:20 p.m., with just 73% of the state’s votes counted.
Trump and his advisers exploded at the news. If it were true that Arizona was lost, it would question any claim of victory the president might make. What followed for Trump was a night of angry calls to Republican governors and councils of campaign aides that he ignored, leading to a midnight presidential briefing in which he made a series of reckless and unsubstantiated comments about the democratic process. . Standing in the East Room at 2:30 am, he dismissed the election as “fraud” and claimed he wanted to stop the counting of votes and leave the results to the Supreme Court.
The Trump campaign knew Arizona could be at stake, but the Fox News appeal that put it on Biden’s column was symbolic, making it the first state to appear to have switched from the president’s group of winning states in 2016. Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican of Arizona, had been on the phone all night with administration officials and campaign staff, insisting there were still Republican votes to count in his state.
Jason Miller, Trump’s political adviser, questioned the veracity of the call on Twitter and frantically called Fox News to ask the network to retract. It was unsuccessful. Instead of backing down, the Fox News decision table redoubled their call, putting Arnon Mishkin, the network’s head of the network’s election decision table, on the air to defend the call. Several hours later, The Associated Press also called Arizona for Biden. (Other news organizations, including The New York Times and CNN, had not declared victors as of Wednesday afternoon due to missing ballots that remained to be counted.)
Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, was also in contact with Rupert Murdoch, the owner of News, as the evening wore on. And on Wednesday morning, Trump’s campaign manager Bill Stepien insisted that the president would win Arizona by 30,000 votes.
Keeping Arizona in play was critical to the narrow path the campaign still saw to a victory Wednesday, along with Georgia and Pennsylvania.
Trump spent much of Tuesday night and early Wednesday watching the election results on Fox News from the White House residence, where he spoke by phone with several Republican governors. In conversations with Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, he asked about the possibility of fraud being committed, according to people briefed on the call.
On Twitter, Ducey insisted that the entire count be completed before anyone else calls the state.
Angry and hurt, the president and his aides watched as Biden gave a short speech in Wilmington, Delaware, projecting victory for himself. “We feel good about where we are, we really do,” Biden told his fans, who honked their horn in support. “We believe that we are on the way to winning this election.”
As Biden spoke, the president tweeted for the first time all night, claiming unsubstantiated that Democrats were trying to “steal” the election. In a follow-up tweet, he said he would comment as well. A podium bearing a presidential seal had already been installed in the East Room.
Trump’s advisers tried to persuade Trump to speak in the East Room before Biden made his comments in Wilmington, but were unsuccessful. Instead, they sat and watched as Biden set the tone for the evening.
So it was hours before Trump actually showed up in the East Room. In the Oval Office, he met with aides who discussed how to frame the race status and whether he could declare victory or should he adopt a more subtle tone.
He did not choose the last approach. “This is a fraud to the American public,” he told a crowd of supporters at 2:30 am, in comments that were immediately criticized even by some of his own allies, such as Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey. The president continued: “This is a shame for our country. We were preparing to win this election. Frankly, we won the elections. “
As the map approached the Trump campaign on Wednesday, with Michigan and Wisconsin called out for Biden, the president was not seen in public all day. A Marine who stands guard outside the West Wing gates when the President is in the Oval Office hadn’t been seen all day.
From the residence, Trump continued to make calls to supporters and friends throughout the morning, sounding off and somewhat discouraged for some people. Outside of the White House, they had already begun to point out what went wrong. Some attendees said Trump had often resisted pleas from Ronna McDaniel, chair of the Republican National Committee, and Brad Parscale, his former campaign manager, and others to spend more time in Arizona. But they said he had resisted in part because he didn’t like to travel west and spend the night on the road.
They and several other aides had also tried and failed to get Trump to stop attacking an Arizona son and favorite war hero, Senator John McCain, a Republican whom the president has continued to criticize even after the senator’s death ago. two years.
There were also questions about whether the campaign had not spent as much money prior to the coronavirus
When the pandemic began, he may have had additional resources to spend in states where Biden had won or was leading narrowly, such as Wisconsin, Michigan and Nevada.
But others defended the initial spending by Parscale, who among other things had focused on increasing the president’s turnout among Latino voters, who ended up being a key part of his support in Florida.
On Wednesday, the president’s family was heavily involved in efforts to question the validity of the vote counts. Trump had joked at a rally that if he lost, he would never speak to any of his adult children again.
Kushner was making calls, seeking what he described as a “James Baker-like” figure who could lead the legal effort to dispute the tabulations in different states, according to a person briefed on the discussions. (Baker led the successful George W. Bush recounting case in 2000). The president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., was working at the campaign headquarters in Virginia. Another son, Eric Trump, whose wife, Lara, has been heavily involved in campaign activities, spoke at a press conference in Philadelphia alongside former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.
“They are not allowing the election observers to see the polls,” said Eric Trump visibly annoyed, in an unfounded attempt to question the ballot count that is still ongoing in Pennsylvania. Giuliani, the president’s personal attorney, also made the unsubstantiated claim that Pennsylvania elections were being stolen. He also raised the idea of a “national lawsuit” over fraud allegations, but it was unclear what that meant.
Despite all the president’s superstitions and his attempts to surround himself with the team that helped lead him to victory four years ago, this time he found himself in a much weaker position. In the final weeks before Election Day, Kushner brought together a group of people who had been involved in Trump’s first campaign, including former White House Deputy Chief of Staff Katie Walsh, to work with Miller and others. in the last few weeks of television spending. .
But by Wednesday, several White House officials and outside advisers said they were hopeful, but not particularly optimistic, that Trump’s legal challenges in several states could change the trajectory of the race. The president himself tweeted a suggestion that “a lot of secretly cast votes” had cost him Michigan, a message that Twitter was quick to label as misleading.
Annie Karni and Maggie Haberman c.2020 The New York Times Company
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