White House Down

November, 2018, after the Midterm Elections

Sign marking my spot with the media at President Biden’s trip to Menlo, Iowa, this spring.

While I have been to several Donald Trump rallies over the years (a tale for another day), I have only met him once. In the spring of 2015, he flew into the Des Moines airport to meet with maybe a dozen local media. He hadn’t yet decided if he would run for President in 2016 and came to Iowa to check us out. I and the rest of the media walked across the tarmac to the plane, and one by one, we climbed the stairs where Trump cordially greeted us, shaking our hands (his hands seemed normal-sized to me). Behind him was a young woman who eventually became his communications director, Hope Hicks. There was a bottleneck of reporters in front of me, so I asked her a few questions, not knowing who she was or the significant role she would take on. She smiled, politely answered my questions, and then handed me her card if I had more questions. Yes, I have Hope Hicks’ phone number, and while I have often been tempted to text or call her to ask a question or two, I haven’t summoned the courage. Where would I start?

Trump spent much of his time with the media talking about his plane's value and pointing out the fine woods, metals, and such. Since I don’t know platinum from plastic and couldn’t care less, I wasn’t paying much attention. I watched as Trump grew increasingly uncomfortable with all of the press who were touching the fabrics, the decor, leaning against countertops, etc., and I realized that he was very fussy. It must be like being on Martha Stewart’s plane, I thought. “Watch it, watch it!” he said to someone with a boom mic, trying to get it close to him. “Careful, careful,” he said, reaching out in a defensive posture to someone putting a camera down on a piece of furniture, apparently made of some rare wood. The camera slipped from the reporter’s hand, clunking against the wood. While the person who dropped it recovered it sheepishly, Trump said, almost in sorrow, “I knew this was going to happen…I knew this was a bad idea,” Shortly after, we were welcomed to leave the plane. I suppose there is a downside to being rich.

After the 2018 midterm elections in November, I knew Trump wouldn’t leave office easily if he lost in 2020. He gave us way too many indicators that he wouldn’t go without a fight. I waited for someone to write about it and then waited some more. I didn’t see or hear any media takes, so I wrote it, completing it mid-month.

Stealing the title of a “great” disaster movie, I called my piece “White House Down.” 

It was rejected by the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and The Daily Beast. I was told it was too “improbable,” “unlikely,” and “unrealistic.”

It was prescient but incredibly naive. I could never have conceived the efforts Trump and his followers would go to keep him in power; the depth and breadth of the lies of the election being stolen, the complicit behavior of Republicans in Congress, the fake electors, the assault on Congress, “hang Mike Pence,” “lost” Secret Service texts, and on and on.

Writing at the time, I presumed that smart people were figuring out what would happen if Trump tried to remain in office. I was so, so wrong. No one was ready, despite the clear warnings.

Let’s go back to mid-November 2018. Here are my early thoughts on what ended up being a rolling coup that is still in play. Democracy is in danger.

White House Down (November 2018)

What if President Trump loses the 2020 presidential election and refuses to cede power? 

Are intelligent people considering what they will do if this happens? If not, they should be. If Trump loses, he likely won’t accept the loss. Can you imagine a Trump concession speech where he steps down gracefully and offers his best wishes to the incoming administration? 

Of course not. Trump didn’t have the grace to respectfully bury his political “enemy” and fellow Republican Senator John McCain. What makes you think he will lose the election with dignity?

His allegations of fraud in the recent Florida recount are only the latest example of how he is sowing doubt in our election process--Trump’s been setting the stage for two years now.

On the eve of the 2016 election, on October 20, the New York Times reported that Trump “insisted...that he would not cede the right to contest the outcome of the presidential election, even as Democrats and Republicans expressed concern that his position threatened to upend America’s tradition of peaceful power transfers.” In other words, he would accept the election results only if he won.

After the election, Trump disputed the result, recognizing that he won the electoral college but falsely claiming that millions of unauthorized immigrants had robbed him of a popular vote.

He established an election integrity commission to investigate election fraud, which didn’t find much at all while insisting there was rampant election fraud. The commission has since disbanded.

Trump maligned and undermined the Justice Department for months by what he calls the “illegal” Mueller investigation. He also regularly attacks the FBI, and other intelligence agencies, undermining their credibility in the eyes of his followers. This is a continued and pointed attack on the rule of law.

His attacks on the media are legion--”fake news” is any news he finds unfavorable, and calling the media reporting on him “enemies of the state.” 

Trump is undermining reality, telling an audience at a VFW event in Kansas City not to believe his critics, saying, "Stick with us. Don't believe the crap you see from these people, the fake news...What you're seeing and what you're reading is not what's happening."

Many have pointed out the Orwellian nature of this quote, pointing to a line from Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984: “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

As we lurch toward a post-truth world, Trump had denied the veracity of the Hollywood Access tape, even when he admitted to it before. He also denies video evidence, accusing NBC News of altering the tape of an interview with Lester Holt -- America’s most trusted news anchor-- during which he cited the Russia investigation as why he fired James Comey as FBI director. 

In an interview on CNN with the New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet and Washington Post executive editor Marty Baron, Baquet told host David Axelrod that Trump “wants to disqualify the press as an independent arbiter of fact.” Beyond the news media, “Trump doesn’t want scientists to be that arbiter...he doesn’t want the courts to be that arbiter. He doesn’t want the intelligence agencies to be the arbiter. He wants himself and his White House to be the arbiter of fact.” It’s happening right now with Trump’s denial of the facts presented in the Black Friday Climate report and the intelligence community’s conclusion that the Saudi royal family was involved in the murder of the Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

His associates contribute as well to Trump’s post-truth world. From the beginning of the administration, when Kellyanne Conway said Trump used “alternative facts” to support his assertion that the crowd size at his inauguration was larger than Obama’s, to earlier this year, when Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani opined that “truth isn’t truth.”

According to the Washington Post, Trump has made more than 6,400 false or misleading claims.

It’s irrelevant to those who inhabit Trumpworld; only Trump’s utterances matter.

Of significance are also Trump’s threats of violence, particularly against the media and individuals who disagree with him.

Trump warned evangelical leaders that Democrats “will overturn everything that we’ve done, and they’ll do it quickly and violently” if Republicans lose control of Congress in the midterm elections and lose the House. In Trump’s infamous remarks on Charlottesville, Trump equated the left’s “Antifa” with the alt-right and white supremacists--where one drove his car into a crowd, injuring 19 and killing Heather Heyer. Heyer was peacefully protesting the white nationalist rally. Here, Trump continues to set the stage for violence in the midterms by telling his base to expect violence from the left when there is no reason to. He’s priming the pump for violence, as he has many times before.

While considerable evidence suggests that the Russians interfered in the 2016 election to help elect Trump, he has asserted without evidence that they interfered to support Clinton. This is classic Trump projection and playground name-calling: " No, I’m not, you are!” 

In the final presidential debate of the 2016 election, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton accused Republican nominee Donald Trump of being a “puppet” for Russia and its President Vladimir Putin.

Trump said, “Putin, from everything I see, has no respect for this person.” 

“That’s because he’d rather have a puppet as president of the United States,” Clinton responded.

“No puppet. No puppet. You’re the puppet,” Trump said.

This is playground stuff, but it works with his base. 

Again, after undermining every other branch of government, and the fourth estate, what if Trump disputes the outcome of the 2020 election and refuses to step down? 

Edward B. Foley, professor of law at The Ohio State University and author of the 2016 book “Ballot Battles: The History of Disputed Elections in the United States,” says we have no good way out. The founders didn’t give us a clear path.

Without a clear procedural solution, Trump may exploit this opening. He will likely be aided by a powerful force--the Fox news and opinion team that has propped him up since he won the Republican nomination. Fox is the dominant source for national news and opinion in rural America, and my friends who consume only Fox live on a different planet than I do. When other news sources are reporting on yet one more Trump scandal, indictment, resignation, or plea deal, Fox nearly always buries it, largely ignores it, or goes through illogical contortions to find a positive spin. If you want to see how extreme the efforts Fox panelists go through to support Trump, watch Art Laffer, the architect of President Ronald Reagan’s supply-side economics, try to defend Trump’s tariffs.  It would be funny if it weren’t so sad. He’s pathetic, and I almost feel sorry for him.

Night after night, as I skip from one channel to the next to see how the different networks are covering the most recent Trump self-inflicted disaster or tweet, the evening opinion shows on Fox I see--the Carlson, Hannity, and Ingraham programs invariably downplay or ignore it, instead hiding behind their same familiar story tropes--the “evils” of Obama and Hillary, stupid things a few college kids and professors do or blowing up a perceived slight of Christians into a full-blown war on Christianity. Also, Fox is hungry to take a horrific local crime done by a minority, preferably a Muslim or someone in the country illegally, and blow it up into a national issue, tainting all in that minority group with the crime perpetrated by one member. The pre-midterm Trump boogeyman before the midterms was a caravan of desperate people from Central America looking for safety. Now? Not so much.

Night after night, the most privileged people in the planet's history--white American Christians--are told they are victims and under attack. Regular Fox viewers become quaking snowflakes who live in fear--and encouraged by Fox and the NRA, many pile their guns high and wide as they tremble in their homes, ready to pull the trigger when a door slowly creaks open. What could go wrong?

Some Fox news anchors have become increasingly critical of Trump and their own network, and reporters are jumping ship because of the network’s bias. Good for them. Yet, even when real journalism does break out in the Fox newsroom, most of us will never see it. Our evening is chock full of pro-Trump propaganda. I swear that if Barack Obama went 9 for ten at the free throw line, Fox opinion would scream, “he missed!” If Donald Trump ate a hot dog at center court, they would cry that “he could have been as good as LeBron!”

Perhaps the most damning criticism of Fox comes from their former military analyst of many years, Lt. Col. Ralph Peters. Peters declared on CNN’s Reliable Sources on August 20 that Fox viewers have a skewed view of reality. That network is a “destructive propaganda machine” for President Trump. He left Fox because he could not be part of an institution “assaulting the Constitution, the constitutional order, the rule of law.” 

Sound familiar? Like our president?

Again, what if Trump loses the 2020 election and refuses to step down? And what if Fox stands with him? 

Are smart people in high places planning for this and training? 

Are we looking at the possibility of a “White House Down” situation when, sometime between election day and the inauguration of the new president where Secret Service Agents are hustling President Trump down hallways into a bunker deep in the White House to secure him while U.S. Marshals are in hot pursuit? Where various agencies, including our military, choose sides, and where the wishes of Congress and the Supreme Court fall on deaf ears, or conflict, and we have rioting in the streets? Where both sides accuse the other of treason?

I’m on our local emergency planning commission, and our first responders plan and train regularly for events that most likely won’t happen here--a school shooting, a terrorist attack, and a train derailment with toxic materials have been recent training exercises. They want to be prepared for the worst-case scenario. Shouldn’t we have plans in place for a contested presidential transition? If so, what are they?

I’m sure that some are reading and thinking that I’ve gone off the deep end and that we will have a peaceful transition--we always have. Maybe. And yet, remember, we have never had a president who has assailed and undermined our American institutions so convincingly that much of the populace believes nothing is real unless he says it so. That, and others in his base don’t care what he does, as long as he puts conservatives in judicial positions. He’s challenged the integrity of one election; why not another?

We have also never had such a powerful propaganda arm of the presidency as in Fox. The goal of the press is to hold the powerful accountable, and Fox has failed miserably. Instead of telling the American people the truth about Trump, it exalts him.

Congressional Republicans have shown they lack the spine to stand up to Trump. If there were such a crisis, and if Fox stood behind Trump, Republican members of Congress would trample each other to death to get first in line to rationalize what would in any other administration be a coup.

Trump has set the stage perfectly to reject the results of the 2020 election if he doesn’t like the outcome. And now the midterm elections are over, it’s a perfect opportunity for a dry run, to test positions, and to see how far he can push Congress and the public. He set the stage again to question the results of the midterms with this October 20 tweet: “All levels of government and Law Enforcement are watching carefully for VOTER FRAUD, including during EARLY VOTING. Cheat at your own peril. Violators will be subject to maximum penalties, both civil and criminal!”

I could say that we don’t have to wait and see what Trump will do if he loses. A reporter in the White House pool could ask, “Mr. President, will you contest the outcome of the 2020 presidential election if you lose?” The problem is, Trump’s word is meaningless. He’s already lied to us over 6,400 times. 

Are we ready for such a situation? Of course not. We weren’t ready for Trump before the election, or now. 

One might be tempted to say all of the power lies with Trump. That’s not true. His pom-pom waving troika of Carlson, Hannity, and Ingraham could bring him down should he decide to contest the election if he loses. And all they and the Fox news division have to do is put the pom poms down, practice journalism, and put our country above ratings. It would be the patriotic thing to do.

end

How did I feel about this piece being rejected? Not great, but it’s part of being a writer. It happens. Get used to it. Besides, there are plenty more stories begging to be told, and like Nemo says, “just keep pitching, just keep pitching…”