Lucky by Jonathan Allen & Amie Parnes

Author:Jonathan Allen & Amie Parnes [Allen, Jonathan & Parnes, Amie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2021-03-02T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 13

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“It’s All Turning”

On January 29, 2020, President Donald Trump saw his reelection clearly. That morning, he held a signing ceremony for the U.S.-Mexico-Canada free trade agreement in the Rose Garden, fulfilling a high-profile campaign promise that had won bipartisan support in Congress and the approval of both business and labor groups. The economy was growing, the monthly unemployment rate had been no higher than 4 percent for almost two years, and the field of Democrats hoping to challenge him still looked weak to him. In particular, Trump felt vindicated by his party’s united defiance of Democrats’ effort to impeach him. House Democratic impeachment managers—the prosecutors—and Trump’s defense lawyers were making their closing arguments to the Senate that very day, but it was clear already that the Republican-led Senate would reject the charges. Only one Senate Republican, 2012 GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney, would vote to remove him from office.

Trump attributed some of the Senate Republicans’ resolve to the actions of their counterparts in the House, who had held firm in voting against all charges. Now, Trump had invited a group of those House Republicans to lunch in the Cabinet Room as something of a reward for their loyalty in the crucible of impeachment politics.

Seated in one of the two dozen or so high-backed, tan-leather chairs around the historic room’s long, oval conference table, Representative Gary Palmer, who represented an Alabama district that hooked around Birmingham to take in white suburbs but none of the city, told the president a fresh war story from Capitol Hill. Democrats were looking into whether the president was improperly benefiting from the federal lease on the Trump International Hotel in Washington, and Palmer recounted, blow by blow, how he had defended the president.

Trump loved it. He remembered the fight to win the lease for the Old Post Office Building, which would be converted to the Trump luxury hotel, five blocks down Pennsylvania Avenue from where he and the lawmakers were now sitting. Trump reveled in the art of storytelling almost as much as the art of the deal, and he went on about the twists and turns of the bidding and negotiation for almost thirty minutes.

“I was surprised I got it,” Trump said, “because I was so critical of Obama.”

He thanked the lawmakers for standing by him during impeachment and said voters would reward Republicans at the polls for beating back what he saw as an overreach by Democrats. “He was getting his best numbers out of impeachment, and the party was pretty unified,” said one person who was present. “It was a pretty upbeat occasion.”

At the same time, White House domestic and national security policy officials were in the midst of a mini-campaign to get Trump to pay more attention to the spreading coronavirus. Eight days earlier, on January 21, Joe Grogan, a domestic policy aide at the White House, told colleagues that the first U.S. case had been confirmed in Washington State. The news ricocheted around the West Wing in minutes.

“It was chilling,” one senior White House official said.

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