BENGALURU: The president had heard something that filled him with fear and brought his campaign to a sudden standstill. The 2020 race was about to enter the key summer months. Joe Biden was sheltering in his basement while the president was taking all the grief for COVID-19, and without his fighting rallies. But attacking Joe Biden, really slaughtering him as only Trump believed he could, was just what the Dems wanted him to do – so he wouldn’t do it. He wasn’t that stupid.
Brad Parscale, the Trump family-appointed campaign manager, who had built one of the biggest political money machines in history, a true Cadillac campaign, was seeing poll numbers sink and everything going south because Donald Trump was afraid to go on the attack. Because the Democrats were f****** with him. Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and the behind-the scenes power in the campaign, told Parscale to make the call. They needed a new strategy. They needed the ultimate strategist. Call Karl Rove!
Parscale implored Rove to come to Washington ASAP. He had to sit down with the president.The Dems were screwing with his head.The Dem strategy was diabolical. Trump and the party needed him. Rove was the political mastermind of the George W. Bush administration, and was on top of the Trump list of party doyens targeted for frequent slurs. (“He looks so f****** stupid up there with that white board,” Trump would reliably mock Rove for his election night appearances doing hand tallies on Fox News.) But he was a professional, something in short supply in Trumpworld.
At the raging high point of the coronavirus pandemic, Rove, from his home in Texas, got himself to Washington DC, for what was to be a secret meeting with the president. Except that, when he was shown into the Oval Office, a dumbfounded Rove found fifteen people there. Rove had spent eight years in an office near the Oval when it was a place of formal and select purpose. This was a bus station. Or, as Trump aides, as confounded as anyone by the Oval Office’s crowds, ado, and unlikely characters, often put it, the Star War bar scene.
There was Parscale and Kushner; Ronna McDaniel, the Trump picked head of the Republican National Committee; Mark Meadows, the newly appointed chief of staff; Dan Scavino, who managed the president’s Twitter accounts; Hope Hicks, the president’s personal advisor and hand-holder; and a slew of others Rove didn’t know.
The president – to Rove’s ear, sounding like Alec Baldwin’s Saturday Night Live impersonation of him, an impersonation (of the impersonation) that Rove himself would often perform – outlined the dilemma: He had come to understand that the Democrats wanted him to attack Biden so as to weaken and destroy him. And then, when he had destroyed “Sleepy Joe” as only Trump could, the Democrats’ plan, he had it on super-secret authority, was to replace Biden as the nominee with ... Andrew Cuomo. The governor of New York had been leading a popular daily television rebuttal to the White House’s COVID response – a constant affront to the president.
“Even assuming they wanted to do this,” said Rove, astonished by the ludicrousness of the assumption, “why would Bernie Sanders” – the clear Democratic runner-up – allow it to happen?” “Because,” the agitated president said, lowering his voice, “this is all being coordinated by the Obamas. And,” Trump added, more darkly “there is a very good chance that Michelle will go on the Cuomo ticket as VP.”
As respectfully as he could, Rove offered that he found this to be, to say the least, a bizarre theory. Trump, with his signature shmear of flattery, acknowledged Rove’s reservations, piling it on about his being the smartest, and yet the president was dead set on believing that here was an exceedingly clever conspiracy to bring him down – yet another one!
The conversation among the fifteen people in the room – some participating, some there for no reason that Rove could fathom – continued for an hour. Should they attack Biden and run the risk of Cuomo? Should they let Biden alone until it was too late for the Dems to replace him? But how strong might he become without being challenged in his basement? And wouldn’t Michelle Obama certainly spell doom for them? What was to be done?
“My God, where did he get this from?” Rove asked Parscale as he was being shown out.
(Excerpted with permission from Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency by Michael Wolff published by The Bridge Street Press)