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Trump tones down bombast on Election Day
InternationalNov 04. 2020
President Donald. Trump departs with Vice President Mike Pence after speaking during a rally at Gerald R. Ford International Airport in Grand Rapids, Mich., early Tuesday, Nov. 3, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Jabin Botsford
By The Washington Post · David Nakamura, Josh Dawsey · NATIONAL, POLITICS
WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump woke up on Election Day – if he went to sleep at all – working on just a few hours of rest after returning to the White House in the early morning from a marathon day of campaign rallies. His first order of business: a call to “Fox & Friends” for a pep talk with the friendliest of news outlets.
Supporters cheer as President Donald Trump speaks during a rally at Gerald R. Ford International Airport in Grand Rapids, Mich., early Tuesday, Nov. 3, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Jabin Botsford
But on the line with a trio of fawning news anchors, Trump did not strike his usual level of bombast. His voice was raspy, his tone more subdued.
Reporters speculated that he was fatigued after holding 14 rallies in three days, or that he was coming off the high of the campaign trail to confront the cold, hard reality of the polling numbers that showed him consistently trailing Democrat Joe Biden.
Asked about reports he would seek to declare an early victory before all mail-in votes were tallied, Trump demurred – he would only do so “when there’s victory. If there’s victory. I think we’ll have victory.”
“There’s no reason to play games,” added a president who for months has sought to erroneously discredit widespread mail-in voting as rife with fraud. He has vowed to dispatch his legal team to blitz swing states with lawsuits to freeze local election boards – a strategy that could portend a bitter, drawn-out dispute over the outcome stretching for days or weeks.
During the interview, Trump repeated falsehoods about the dangers of mail-in ballots, played down the threat of the novel coronavirus and insulted Democratic leaders. But he also sounded, in a few stray moments, almost reflective or wistful as the clock counted down to determine his political fate.
“There’s so much love at those rallies,” Trump said of the events, which drew tens of thousands of supporters who crowded closely together and eschewed masks despite the risks of the pandemic. “They even say, many of them, ‘We love you. We love you. We love you.’ “
For Trump, the question was whether the love of the MAGA die-hards would translate to another come-from-behind upset. The final day of the campaign meant a final chance for the president to rally the faithful, making private calls to key allies and flooding his Twitter feed with videos encouraging supporters to vote.
He also had planned a viewing party at the White House with campaign donors and supporters, a use of the complex for electioneering activities that drew rebukes from government ethics watchdogs. Trump’s campaign responded that the move to the White House was necessitated because a planned reception at Trump International Hotel a few blocks away would have violated the local District of Columbia government’s coronavirus safety regulations limiting crowd sizes.
Confined to the White House, a president who has barnstormed through swing states in the final weeks of the campaign was suddenly far more isolated. Workers had erected new security fences to keep the public farther away and create a broader ring of protection around the complex amid concerns about potential election night unrest.
As Biden traveled to Philadelphia to rally supporters with a megaphone in a state both campaigns viewed as crucial, Trump’s day was punctuated by a quick motorcade excursion across the Potomac River to the Republican National Committee’s campaign headquarters in Arlington, Va.
The president – accompanied by White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, press secretary Kayleigh McEnany and senior adviser Jared Kushner, his son-in-law – conferred with aides and greeted staffers who were dressed in blue and red MAGA masks, with Make America Great Again signs lining their cubicles.
“I feel very good. After doing that many rallies, the voice gets a little bit choppy, I think,” Trump said, drawing laughs and sounding more upbeat than he did on Fox News. “God did not design it for that much.”
Trump again criticized mail-in voting and railed against a Supreme Court order allowing ballots in Pennsylvania to be counted until three days after the election. Analysts have said Democrats are voting by mail in significantly higher numbers than Republicans in this election cycle.
“A lot of shenanigans, a lot of bad things happen with ballots when you say, ‘Oh, let’s devote days and days,’ and all of a sudden the ballot count changes,” Trump said. “You have to have a date [for the election], and the date happens to be November 3, and we should be entitled to know who won on November 3.”
Asked if he had prepared remarks, win or lose, Trump said: “I’m not thinking about concession speech or acceptance speech yet. Hopefully we’ll be only doing one of those two. And, you know, winning is easy. Losing is never easy. Not for me, it’s not.”
Though Biden has maintained a polling lead higher than Hillary Clinton’s advantage over Trump in the final days of the 2016 campaign, Trump and his team have maintained that a real path to victory remained.
Campaign officials were closely watching balloting in Pennsylvania and Arizona, which they viewed as the most likely to help the president clear 270 electoral college votes and win a second term. Privately, the officials were bullish on Trump’s chances in several other swing states – Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and Ohio.
Trump told associates that he felt confident that he would hold Florida, which he won in 2016.
“We believe this will be a tight race. It’s going to come down to turnout,” Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien told reporters on a conference call in the early evening. “We believe we are better prepared for that.”
The president’s political team had taken the unprecedented step of setting up a campaign war room in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, a federal building next to the White House. Tim Murtaugh, a campaign spokesman, said the campaign was paying for the setup.
“Every piece of equipment, including WiFi and computers, was paid for by the campaign, and no White House staff is involved,” he said. “The arrangement has been approved by White House counsel.”
Stepien suggested that Biden’s Tuesday visit to Philadelphia, where he rallied supporters on the street with a megaphone, was a sign of late desperation.
By early evening, the president was ensconced at the White House, where he would presumably stay put for the night, watching along with the nation and the world as the results came in.
“My number last time was 306,” Trump said on “Fox & Friends” about his electoral college total in 2016. (His final total was technically 304 because two “faithless electors” refused to cast their electoral votes for him.)
“That was a big number,” he said. “And I think we’ll top it.”
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