1. THE ONLY THING THAT MATTERS IS WINNING

TWO DAYS AFTER THE 2020 election, House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy told me he had talked to Donald Trump. “He knows it’s over,” McCarthy said. Trump just needed some time to process the loss. “He needs to go through all the stages of grief,” McCarthy added.

For Trump, the stages of grief seemed to involve tweeting in all caps. Shortly after 9:00 a.m. on November 5, he tweeted: “STOP THE COUNT!” An hour later, at 10:09 a.m.: “ANY VOTE THAT CAME IN AFTER ELECTION DAY WILL NOT BE COUNTED!”

Thirty minutes later, Trump retweeted himself: “STOP THE COUNT!”

Shortly after noon: “STOP THE FRAUD!”

Donald Trump had been told repeatedly by his top campaign advisers, including on Election Day itself, that early returns on Election Night could show him leading initially, but that those numbers were likely to change as absentee and mail-in votes were counted. This happened in every presidential election. In many states, Election Day votes were counted first, and a larger percentage of Republicans than Democrats voted on Election Day. This was even more likely to be the case in 2020 because Trump had spent months, against the advice of his political advisers, urging Republicans not to cast absentee and mail-in votes and to vote in person on Election Day instead.

Donald Trump knew there would be a “red mirage,” in which he seemed to be ahead at the outset. He helped create that red mirage. Despite this, he claimed the phenomenon was evidence of major fraud.

“We were up by nearly 700,000 votes in Pennsylvania. I won Pennsylvania by a lot. And that gets whittled down,” he said in remarks from the White House briefing room on November 5. “Likewise, in Georgia, I won by a lot, a lot, with a lead of over, getting close to, 300,000 votes on Election Night in Georgia. And by the way, [that] got whittled down, and now it’s getting to be to a point where I’ll go from winning by a lot to perhaps being even down a little bit.” The same was happening in Michigan and Wisconsin, he claimed. “They’re trying to steal an election. They’re trying to rig an election and we can’t let that happen.”

Trump’s fraud claims also included repeated assertions about nefarious-sounding “ballot dumps.” He tweeted that his lead in key states “started to magically disappear as surprise ballot dumps were counted. VERY STRANGE…” In another tweet, he said the “Mail-in ballot dumps were devastating in their percentage and power of destruction.” We now know that Trump was aware this claim was false, too. Bill Stepien, Trump’s campaign manager, told the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol that he had personally informed Trump that “periodic release of ballots would occur.” Once again, Trump was taking something he knew to be a routine feature of the counting process and making it seem criminal.

When McCarthy and I spoke on November 5, we discussed the fact that although the election hadn’t yet been called for Joe Biden, it seemed likely that would happen soon. When Biden’s tally in the Electoral College reached 270, the dynamic would shift and people would start looking toward the future, the next administration, and the new Congress.

McCarthy appeared to be dealing in reality. This made it all the more surprising when I saw his appearance on Fox News just a few hours later: “President Trump won this election,” Kevin proclaimed, “so everyone who is listening, do not be quiet! Do not be silent about this! We cannot allow this to happen before our very eyes.” McCarthy knew that what he was saying was not true.

Every candidate has the right to bring legal challenges in court if they have evidence of fraud or irregularities in an election. That is what I expected to happen next. But even as the Trump team was beginning to discuss and file these suits, there were signs that Trump and his supporters might not accept the outcome of any legal challenges.

One of the first hints I saw of this came only a couple of days after the election in a tweet by Trump supporter and radio personality Mark Levin. I had known Mark for many years. He had supported me in the past. During the 2016 primaries, Mark initially supported Ted Cruz. At one point, before Trump’s 2016 nomination, Mark had declared himself “Never Trump.” But all that had changed over the past four years. Mark had become an ardent defender of Trump, sometimes signaling what people inside Trump’s orbit were thinking.

On November 5, 2020, Levin tweeted this in all caps:

REMINDER TO THE REPUBLICAN STATE LEGISLATURES, YOU HAVE THE FINAL SAY OVER THE CHOOSING OF ELECTORS, NOT ANY BOARD OF ELECTIONS, SECRETARY OF STATE, GOVERNOR, OR EVEN COURT. YOU HAVE THE FINAL SAY—ARTICLE II OF THE FED CONSTITUTION. SO, GET READY TO DO YOUR CONSTITUTIONAL DUTY.

When I saw Levin’s tweet, I wondered what exactly he was talking about. The legislatures had already had their “final say” under Article II of our Constitution, which provides that each state legislature directs the manner in which their state appoints presidential electors. Levin surely knew that every state legislature had already done so, and the manner they all chose was a popular vote. Each of the state legislatures had also specified a detailed manner in which to resolve any election disputes—through recounts, audits, and lawsuits, if necessary. If a presidential candidate disputes the election in any state by saying it was fraudulent or illegal, and the issue is not resolved by recounts or other procedures, the proper way to proceed under our Constitution is to file a lawsuit. And once that lawsuit is over and the courts’ judgments are final, the election issues are resolved.

Now, however, it seemed that Levin was suggesting the state legislatures should ignore the laws they themselves had passed specifying the manner in which election disputes would be resolved, ignore the outcome of balloting in their states, and simply switch the results from Biden to Trump. Even conservative law professor John Eastman—who later worked with Donald Trump and would play a major role in January 6—confided to a colleague before the 2020 election that state legislatures could not change the outcome after the fact:

Article II [of the Constitution] says the electors are appointed “in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct,” but I don’t think that entitles the Legislature to change the rules after the election and appoint a different slate of electors in a manner different than what was in place on election day.

We were only two days past the election, and already Trump and his key supporters were inventing ways to ignore the lawful outcome of that election.

Early the next morning—Friday, November 6—I texted Adam Kinzinger, a Republican member of Congress from Illinois and an Air Force veteran who had flown missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Adam and I had worked together on national security issues. He was no-nonsense and unafraid of speaking out, even in the face of party pressure.

As ballot counting continued in key states, the networks had yet to call the election for Biden. I thought it would be called soon—and once that happened, I believed Republicans in Congress would accept the results and move on. However, Levin’s tweet and other public statements by Trump and his supporters made me think we needed to be prepared in case attempts were made to pursue paths like the one Levin was suggesting. I asked Adam to help me pull together a list of Republican members we could count on if it became necessary to step forward publicly and put a stop to the nonsense. Kinzinger readily agreed.

I had been elected two years earlier by my colleagues to serve as Chair of the House Republican Conference. The conference chair is the third-ranking Republican in the House, responsible for communications and messaging for the Republican Conference. As conference chair, I also convened the weekly conference meetings for all House Republicans.

Our weekly meetings, sometimes conducted by phone, normally involved a couple of hundred participants, including Republican members of Congress and congressional staffers, as well as staffers from the White House office of legislative affairs. Occasionally, we would ask guest speakers, including key officials from the Trump administration, to present on a particular topic. Kevin McCarthy sometimes had Trump dialed in, secretly listening to our discussions. Kevin didn’t inform the entire conference when Trump had joined a call unless Trump planned to speak, but it wasn’t difficult to tell when Trump was listening in. When certain members were particularly lavish in their praise for Trump, I suspected that Kevin had alerted them we had a presidential eavesdropper.

Our first post-election call of 2020 was at 1:00 p.m. on Friday, November 6. Following our opening prayer, we moved into leadership reports, where Kevin, Republican Whip Steve Scalise, and I briefed the membership. Our discussion that day focused on how well House Republicans had performed in races across the country. Though projected to lose seats, we had gained 15, leaving Democrats with a narrow nine-seat majority.

After leadership reports, we opened up the call for questions or comments from other members. Most commended the House Republicans’ success on Election Night, and a number of them described what had happened in their own districts or states. Not a single member of Congress—including those from the states Trump was already saying had been stolen from him—suggested that their own election had been rigged or was flawed in any way. There were questions about the process the Trump campaign was likely to pursue going forward, and some discussion of possible audits, recounts, or election-related litigation.

After Kevin’s appearance on Fox News the night before, I had heard from several colleagues unhappy that he was echoing Trump’s stolen-election claims. One member addressed this when it was his turn to speak: “There’s a legal process for contesting results, and Trump has the right to go through that,” he said. But, he warned, “we can’t have people on TV saying this was rigged when we don’t have any evidence of that.” McCarthy knew this was a direct criticism of him, and he responded by claiming he hadn’t said the election was stolen. His denial was impossible to reconcile with the video of his Fox News appearance.

When it was Jim Jordan’s turn to speak, the Ohio congressman—perhaps Trump’s closest ally in the House—was dismissive of the discussion about the legal process for challenges and recounts. Jordan was not interested in understanding or discussing the rules. He didn’t seem to think the rules mattered.

“The only thing that matters,” Jordan said, “is winning.”

As we now know, Trump’s own campaign leadership was meeting with him to tell him he was not, in fact, winning. At a meeting on Friday, November 6, and again on Saturday, November 7, they informed the president that he had almost certainly lost.

Things got weirder over the weekend.

On Saturday, former New York City mayor−turned−presidential lawyer Rudy Giuliani held a press conference on behalf of the Trump campaign at Four Seasons Total Landscaping, a small business located between a crematorium and an adult bookstore in a strip mall outside Philadelphia. The site was a perplexing choice. Did someone think they were reserving space at the Four Seasons Hotel and end up at the strip mall by mistake? That’s what Donald Trump seemed to believe when he issued his first tweet about the event and then had to correct it, adding the word Landscaping a few minutes later.

The owner of Four Seasons Total Landscaping appeared equally mystified. “We don’t really know how it happened,” the owner’s son said a week later. “We heard it might’ve been a mistake or something. We just kinda picked up the phone and said yes and cleared some stuff out and managed to make it happen.” The landscaping company capitalized on its newfound notoriety, offering MAKE AMERICA RAKE AGAIN and LAWN AND ORDER T-shirts for sale by the next week.

Watching news coverage of the event, my first thought was, Is this a joke? It quickly became clear that it was not. Here was Rudy Giuliani, the lawyer for the president of the United States, standing in a strip-mall parking lot making wild and false claims of election fraud. Giuliani had led New York City as our nation recovered from the attacks of 9/11. I had visited the remains of the World Trade Towers with him in the weeks after the attack. Now, as I watched the press conference, I kept thinking how far Rudy Giuliani had fallen. How had we gotten to a point that a spectacle like this was being held on behalf of the President of the United States?

Though they weren’t saying so publicly at the time, the leadership of the Trump campaign had essentially the same reaction that I did.

To make matters worse for Donald Trump, the networks called the presidential race for Joe Biden just as Giuliani’s Four Seasons press conference was airing. Maybe now, I thought, Trump will concede.

Instead, two days later, Trump announced personnel changes at the Pentagon that were unprecedented for a lame-duck president, and added to growing concerns about just what he might be planning. On November 9, Trump fired his secretary of defense, Mark Esper. I had known Mark for many years. We’d first worked together in 2008, when Tennessee Senator Fred Thompson ran for president and Mark and I were foreign-policy advisers to his campaign. I respected Mark and knew he was trying to do the right thing in a very tough set of circumstances.

I was serving on the House Armed Services Committee at the time, charged with overseeing the Department of Defense (DOD). Esper’s firing was deeply disquieting.

The period of transition from one administration to the next is a time of heightened potential vulnerability for the United States. What happens at the Pentagon is especially important. Ensuring stability and a smooth transition is crucial. No lame-duck president focused on securing the nation would replace his top civilian leaders at DOD days after losing an election. Yet that’s what Trump was doing.

Eric Edelman, a tremendously skilled and effective career ambassador who had served presidents of both parties at the highest levels of government, including in the White House, in the State Department, and as undersecretary of defense for policy, described it to me this way: “This is getting very serious, very dangerous, and very worrisome, even for folks who are disposed to remain calm.” Esper believed he had been fired in part because he had made it clear that he would not stand for any use of the military to contest the outcome of an election.

Trump’s appointment of Chris Miller to replace Esper was a further troubling sign. Despite a lengthy career in special operations, Miller lacked any expertise or relevant background in dealing with what had become our nation’s greatest challenge: the threat from great-power competitors China and Russia. He had no familiarity with the huge array of policy challenges facing the Defense Department, its acquisition process, or its sprawling bureaucracy.

Although Chris Miller had briefly been placed in charge of the National Counterterrorism Center, he had never managed anything close to the scale of DOD. He was quite possibly the least-qualified nominee to become secretary of defense since the position was created in 1947.

At the same time, Trump moved to install other loyalists in what seemed an effort to ensure the inexperienced Miller could be guided and his decisions shaped to suit Trump’s whims.

Kash Patel was appointed on November 10 to serve as Chris Miller’s chief of staff. As far as I knew, Patel had no military experience. He had never served in any capacity at the Defense Department. But Patel was a Donald Trump loyalist. The president had reportedly attempted to appoint Patel to several other positions throughout the government, including as deputy CIA director and deputy FBI director, only to meet strong resistance—including threats of resignation—from the agency professionals who would have had to work with Patel.

Douglas MacGregor, a retired colonel who regularly spreads pro-Putin propaganda on American airwaves, was named senior adviser to the secretary of defense. Trump had nominated MacGregor to be US ambassador to Germany a few months earlier, but MacGregor failed to win confirmation. Now he was installed in the upper echelons of the Pentagon.

Trump also named retired Brigadier General Anthony Tata to be acting undersecretary of defense for Policy. Tata was yet another Trump nominee unable to win Senate confirmation. In this case, Trump was appointing him to the very position for which the Senate had refused to confirm him just a few months earlier.

Taken together, these appointments were deeply troubling. Trump had lost the election. Why was he appointing inexperienced loyalists to the most senior civilian positions in the Pentagon at a moment when stability was key? Why was he making these moves if he intended to begin an orderly and peaceful presidential transition to Joe Biden?

It was an ominous sign of things to come.