Michael Wolff - Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency

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For Paolo Lanapoppi

We won. Won in a landslide. This was a landslide.

PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP, JANUARY 6, 2021

From the New York Times:

[an] examination of the 77 democracy-bending days between election and inauguration shows how, with conspiratorial belief rife in a country ravaged by pandemic, a lie that Mr. Trump had been grooming for years finally overwhelmed the Republican Party and, as brake after brake fell away, was propelled forward by new and more radical lawyers, political organizers, financiers and the surround-sound right-wing media.

In the aftermath of that broken afternoon at the Capitol, a picture has emerged of entropic forces coming together on Trumps behalf in an ad hoc, yet calamitous, crash of rage and denial.

But interviews with central players, and documents including previously unreported emails, videos and social media posts scattered across the web, tell a more encompassing story of a more coordinated campaign.

Across those 77 days, the forces of disorder were summoned and directed by the departing president, who wielded the power derived from his near-infallible status among the party faithful in one final norm-defying act of a reality-denying presidency.

January 31, 2021

Except

In the days and weeks after Election Day on November 3, the president was deserted by his aides and staff. The legal establishment, at least anyone in it with a promising career, abandoned him. His hapless band of co-conspirators were too crazy or drunk or cynical to develop a credible strategy or execute one. It was all a shit showludicrous, inexplicable, cringeworthy, nutso, even for the people who felt most loyal to him. The election challenge never had a chance of success.

Trumps presidency was a mirror image of good government and the normal workings of the bureaucracy, but his final days were a further quantum-leap departure from any system capable of achieving support or successful resultsor, for that matter, even an underhand and sham result.

The second impeachment trial of Donald Trump was to charge him with explicit plans and strategy and intenthis final days in office a calculated effort to do anything to remain in office. But for those who saw Trump up close, even for those who believed he was profoundly guilty of so many things, this was not getting it at all. Rather, the opposite: Trumps true assault on democratic norms was to have removed organization, strategy, method, rationale, and conscious decision making from the highest level of government.

From the beginning of Trumps intrusion into American political life, the striving, orderly, result-oriented, liberal world and its media were unable to fathom his carelessness and cluelessness or understand him or his supporters by any standard political measures. Hence, what might appear to be crazy and self-destructive must in fact have been a plan.

Politics could not be pure caprice or farce, could it?

This insistence on specific intent, on the calculated and coordinated misuse of power, keeps Donald Trump in the realm of knowable politics. But what if it was precisely the absence of intent and, instead, the swings of irrationality and mania that managed, even as his government collapsed, to hold so many people in thrall?

The fundamental modern assumption is that a crazy person cannot be elected presidenta bad person, a corrupt person, an incompetent person, a mendacious person, a bigoted one, yes, but not someone who has completely departed reality. The age of modern bureaucracy demands, at the very least, being able to sit through a meeting without barking like a dog.

From the careening and calamitous last stage of his reelection campaign through the preposterous election challenge and the deadly mayhem of January 6 to the improbable buffoonery of his second impeachment trial, there emerges a much different picture from the one much of the media has painted of a corrupt, cynical, despotic effort to hold on to power and to subvert democracy. Here, instead, is a far more complicated human and political tale of desperation and delusion.

It is one that should by any logic have ended on January 6. But the most striking and determinative fact of the political age is that the Trump story continues, even in defeat, to be inspirational to so manyand why all Republican roads now lead to Mar-a-Lago. Mr. President, said the pollster Tony Fabrizio, trying to explain to Trump what even he might have had trouble fully grasping, your voters believe whatever you tell them to believe. Indeed, by mid-May 2021, new polling showed 67 percent of Republicans were of the view that Joe Biden was not the legitimate winner of the 2020 presidential election. Trump does nothing right. Cannot put one pants leg on at a time. His ham-handed, doomed, blundering, and embarrassing efforts to undo that election, together with his heedless call to arms on January 6, showed him once more to be the naked emperor, evident not only to his enemies but, with ever-deeper sighs of incredulity, also to his allies. And yet, here we are, him with his grip on the heart of only slightly less than half the nation, the once and future Donald Trump, licking his wounds and, eyeing his public, figuring what new, absurd, and rash exploit to embark on.

This is the third book I have written about Donald Trump in as many years. Its a chronicle that has put me in close touch with almost every phase of the Trump White House and with nearly every member of the revolving cast of characters around him. A great many of them, in the West Wing, the campaign, and in the greater Republican Party, have contributed to this account, including Donald Trump himself.

The former presidents office has been supplied a detailed summary of much of the material set forth in this book. His staff has either confirmed events, conversations, and various details of Trumpworld life as I have portrayed them or offered corrections. In the event that factual matters have been disputed, they have been included only if confirmed by multiple sources.

Many who have discussed these events with me have asked to remain anonymous for reasons that will be evident from this tale.

Typos drove him wild. He might lash out for days when he found one, or when someone else, more likely, pointed out a mess-up in a letter or document prepared under his namethe infuriated concern of someone thinking somebody elses laziness might reveal his own weaknesses.

He was spitting furious now because the legal brief was filled with botches, the second time in a week this had happenedthe Unites States! In the first line! A violent overthrown! And plenty more. The press was already on himcomplete ridicule, somehow a higher indignity and reason for fury than the second impeachment trial he was being subjected to.

He wanted someone firedwhoever had proofed it, fired. He wanted them gone immediately! He placed call after call to his remaining aides. What is fucking wrong with these people? They cant hit spell-check?spell-check, in the mind of a man who did not use a computer, was the solution.