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VIKING An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC penguinrandomhouse.com Copyright © 2021 by Edward-Isaac Dovere Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader. ISBN 9781984878076 (hardcover) ISBN 9781984878083 (ebook) Book design by Daniel Lagin, adapted for ebook by Cora Wigen pid_prh_5.7.0_c0_r0 To Sarah and the boys who make every day happiness, no matter what else the days may hold. There is more day to dawn. CONTENTS Prologue 1. Benign Neglect 2. Breaking the Glass 3. I Hope __________ 4. Fate and Planning 5. Not Friends 6. The Spark 7. Democrat X 8. Why Not? 9. Launched into a Void 10. “God Knows How Rusty Joe Is” 11. That Little Girl 12. How Much Fun 13. The Line from Kyiv 14. Heart Trouble 15. This System Is Crazy 16. What Was the Plan? 17. A Billion Dollars for Samoa 18. Seventy-Two Hours That Changed History 19. Take Him Seriously 20. Tic Toc 21. A Knee on the Neck 22. A Horrible, Horrible Process 23. You Have Got to Be Kidding 24. White House Petri Dish 25. The Other Side of the Desk 26. What if It Wasn’t? 27. The Dog That Caught the Bus Acknowledgments Note on Sources Index PROLOGUE November 8, 2016 Election Day H ow do you feel?” Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, Robby Mook, was headed out of the Javits Center as the sun set, hours before the polls closed, when excited people were still showing up to get a good spot for the party. He looked up, trying to find who’d called out to him. “I feel nothing,” he said back. They knew in the White House by the afternoon that they had a problem. The early vote from Florida could not have been better, but when they started seeing the numbers for the people actually showing up on Election Day, panic quickly spread. By quarter to eight, they realized that the state was probably gone. Barack Obama spent the afternoon and the evening mostly alone, up in the residence. David Simas, Obama’s political director, who’d been assuring everyone in the White House every morning that Clinton was going to win, would check in every forty-five minutes by phone, telling him where things stood. He listened quietly, not asking many questions, and waited for the next update. The Wisconsin results ended it. Wisconsin, where Obama had been scheduled to make his debut on the trail with her in June, before the Pulse nightclub shooting led them to scrap the trip. Where he’d always won easily. Where the last Democrat to have lost the state in a presidential election had been Walter Mondale in 1984. Where Clinton had never gone for the whole campaign. Simas called Mook, holding a printout of the preliminary results from the state. “What am I missing?” he asked. Mook said something about more votes being out, but Simas wasn’t buying it. Making up the margin in one state would be a historic shift. Then to replicate that in two or three states? “Donald Trump,” Simas said when he next called Obama, “is going to be the president.” There was silence for a few seconds. Obama asked them to get Trump’s phone number. The closest contact they had was Chris Christie, from work the White House had done with the New Jersey governor during Hurricane Sandy. They started tracking down the ever more likely to be president- elect. Obama asked what the Clinton campaign’s plan was for what was now unavoidable. They didn’t seem to have one, Simas told him. They seemed to be buying time. “Well,” Obama said. “That’s a problem.” Obama had never understood why people disliked Clinton so much. He could also never get over how bad a campaigner she was. When they had finally hit the trail together at the beginning of July in North Carolina and made the obligatory surprise stop at a barbecue restaurant, she’d quickly slipped out—Jim Comey had announced the end of the FBI investigation into her email server that morning, and she was ducking reporters waiting to shout questions at her. Obama had been working the crowd so intently, shaking so many hands and buying so much food, that he hadn’t realized she’d gone until he was outside and looking for her to say goodbye. “Where did she go?” he asked aides, confused. He liked that story. He has told it over and over again in the years since. Obama shouldn’t have been surprised. She was a pioneering force for feminism, an icon of America’s shift into the twenty-first century, and the most successful woman in the history of American politics, but she was also the frozen-faced embodiment of Democrats as “Democrats”—all the good and bad qualities of government, all the promises it had made that hadn’t addressed what was actually happening in the country. There was racism and sexism and xenophobia and nativist paranoia particular to Trump, the overnight pop culture icon who’d wheedled his way into the public consciousness to the point of becoming an easy joke on sitcoms. But the core of Trump’s campaign was the same as the core of Bernie Sanders’s campaign, and it was the same as what had been the core of Obama’s campaign against her: “Change You Can Believe In.” That 2008 slogan was just a shorter way of saying what Trump had charged her with in their first debate—“Secretary Clinton and other politicians should have been doing this for years, not right now, because of the fact that we’ve created a movement.” Voters went with the outsider they hated over the insider they despised. Obama would have been able to make more sense of Clinton’s losing if it hadn’t been to a man he thought of as a moronic carnival barker, who brought out the worst in people, and whom he’d never forgive for turning a fringe obsession with his birth certificate into an issue he’d had to address from the White House briefing room in 2011. At the beginning of September, after a briefing to discuss how Trump was apparently bouncing back from yet another scandal—at that point, it was the outrage of insulting Khizr Khan’s Gold Star military family—and how Clinton could never seem to make up any ground, Obama was starting to get exasperated. His order: fix it. “Do you really want a psychopath sitting at that desk?” he’d asked. Find a way to break through to voters. “Get someone to listen.” But of course she was going to win. If he’d had any doubts about it, he never would have appeared on Jimmy Kimmel’s show just a few weeks before the election and done Kimmel’s standard bit of having a guest respond to mean tweets. He read an infamous one from Trump—“President Obama will go down as perhaps the worst president in the history of the United States!”—and replied, “Well, @realDonaldTrump, at least I will go down as a president,” and then glared right into the camera and dropped the prop iPhone. He never really even considered Clinton could lose. Until those last few days. The crowds didn’t feel right. The previous Friday in North Carolina, they were into him in Fayetteville, but they were more into booing an old man in what might have been an old army jacket who’d gotten up and started waving a Trump lawn sign. He couldn’t get