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There were no longer any fresh flowers at the 9/11 Memorial. An American altar usually decorated with roses, carnations and postcard-sized Stars and Stripes was sequestered behind a makeshift plastic railing. Broadway, the ‘Great White Way’, went dark. The subway system was a ghost train. The Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, where Hillary Clinton had intended to shatter that glass ceiling, was now an emergency field hospital. Staten Island ferries kept cutting through the choppy waters of New York Harbour, passing Lady Liberty on the way in and out of Lower Manhattan, but scarcely any passengers were on board. Times Square was devoid of people. In the midst of a planetary pandemic, nobody wanted to meet any more at the ‘Crossroads of the World’.
New York, a place known for its infectious energy and life abundant, was now in a coma-like state. The ceaseless din of sirens turned the city that never sleeps into the city that couldn’t sleep. With more cases than any other American conurbation, this city once more became Ground Zero, a haunting term no New Yorker ever wanted applied here again. Our world was turned upside down, just as it had been on September 11.
In those first fretful weeks it felt like the headlines were crowding in on us. The coronavirus had reached America. It had come to the outer suburbs of New York. There were cases in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan. By now, the news was coming word of mouth. Someone had tested positive in our downtown office complex. A tenant in a neighbouring apartment building had been laid low. Our children’s school was shutting. All the schools were shutting. The whole of New York was soon in lockdown. Back then I remember thinking how different this was from stories I had reported on in the past. With wars and disasters there was always a refuge at the end of a harrowing ordeal. With Covid-19, however, the entire world was a trouble spot.
This was also the first time my family was living the same calamitous story that I had to cover. They were subject to the same risks and dangers. They felt the same tensions and concerns. And for us there was an extra layer of anxiety. My wife, Fleur, was in her final trimester. So some of those headlines now came like thunderbolts. A top New York hospital was barring partners from being present at the birth. Other maternity wards followed suit. Delivery rooms were being placed in Covid isolation: women sequestered from their partners, partners sequestered from their newborns. The magical realism of birth was becoming something altogether more dystopian.
In pre-pandemic times – how quickly we adopted the language of the before and after – many New Yorkers suffered from a paranoia known as FOMO: the fear of missing out. But the virus was something that everyone wanted to avoid: the talk of the town that nobody wanted to speak of from first-hand experience.
My symptoms presented on a Friday night, a weariness that I put down to weeks of covering the outbreak, and the new parental juggle of home-schooling our kids. Then came the muscle pain, the cough, the numbing of my taste buds. More worryingly, Fleur was developing a fever. Then she had the cough, what felt like a weather system on her lungs, the chronic fatigue and the tell-tale shortness of breath. New York attracts optimists. We both believed we’d be among those who only experienced mild symptoms. But Fleur’s condition was deteriorating. We feared those sirens outside our windows might soon be outside our door.
With the coronavirus, darkness brought more menace. Symptoms worsened as the day went on. And late one night, when Fleur was finding it hard to breathe properly, we feared we would have to call 911. Few things are more frightening than watching a loved one struggle to finish a sentence for lack of breath, especially when that sentence is a matter of life and death.
Sleep usually brought some comfort, and did so again. Thankfully Fleur rallied. Her breathing improved. Her blood oxygen level crept back up. She avoided hospitalisation. Slowly, over the next few days, the clouds began to part, and eventually came the brilliant sunshine of recovery. We could be counted among the fortunate, and became even more mindful of the dead, and the loved ones they left behind.
Donald Trump’s response to Covid-19 was entirely predictable. He did not change. He did not grow. He did not admit errors. He did not show humility or even sufficient humanity. For the America already horrified by his presidency, all its hallmarks were on agitated display. The ridiculous boasts – he awarded himself 10 out of 10 for his handling of the crisis. The politicisation of what should be the apolitical – early on, he toured the Centers for Disease Control wearing a campaign cap emblazoned with the slogan ‘Keep America Great’. The truth-twisting – the specious claims that America was faring better than any other country, even though it had 4 per cent of the world’s population but 24 per cent of the world’s Covid-19 deaths. The attacks on the ‘fake news’ media, including a personal assault on a White House reporter who asked what his message to frightened Americans was: ‘I tell them you are a terrible reporter.’
His attacks continued on government institutions at the forefront of battling the crisis. ‘The Deep State Department’ is how he described the State Department from his presidential podium the morning after it issued its most extreme travel advisory, urging Americans to refrain from all international travel. He hyped remedies, declaring the combination of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin to be ‘one of the biggest game-changers in the history of medicine’, even as government health officials warned against offering false hope or untested drugs. He continued to disdain science. Astonishingly, he even suggested Americans might inject themselves with disinfectant, a snake-oil suggestion that earned him the nickname ‘Domestos Don’.
His authoritarian impulses surfaced once again. Threatening to ride roughshod over the state governors, he claimed at one point to have ‘total authority’ over the decision to reopen the country, a blatantly unconstitutional assertion. More ominously, he threatened to adjourn both houses of Congress, something no previous president had ever done.
What was also striking was his lack of empathy. The Washington Post studied 13 hours of press briefings from the president and found he had spent just four-and-a-half minutes expressing sympathy for the victims. Rather than soothing words for relatives of those who had died, or words of encouragement and appreciation for those in the medical trenches, Trump’s daily White House briefings commonly started with a shower of self-congratulation. After he had spoken, his loyal vice-president usually delivered a paean of praise to the president in that Pyongyang-Pence style he had perfected over the previous three years. Trump’s narcissistic hunger for adoration seemed impossible to sate. Instead of a wartime president, he sounded at times like a sun king.
The coronavirus crisis gave this TV president his own nightly show with healthy viewing figures, which he joyfully pointed out rivalled the season finale of The Bachelor. ‘President Trump is a ratings hit,’ he tweeted on the day when his top health officials predicted as many as 200,000 Americans could die – an overly optimistic estimate, as it turned out.
Then there was the xenophobia that had always been the sine qua non of his political business model – repeatedly he described the disease as the ‘Chinese virus’ and even the ‘Kung flu’. Initially treating the coronavirus more as an immigration problem rather than a health emergency, he closed America’s border to foreign nationals who had travelled to China. As events turned out, restricting travel was an entirely rational move, but studies suggested that strains of the novel coronavirus first came to America from Europe. The China travel ban was announced on 31 January. Transatlantic travel from Europe was not restricted until 11 March.
His attempt at economic stewardship was more convincing than his mastery of public health. A lesson from financial shocks of the past, most notably the meltdown in 2008, was to ‘go big’ early on. That he tried to do. But here, as well, there were shades of his showman self. He seemed to have rounded on the initial figure of a trillion dollars for the stimulus package, because it sounded like such a gargantuan number – a fiscal eighth wonder of the world. In the end, of course, much more money was required.
The coronavirus outbreak posed a diabolical challenge to governments the world over, and required the kind of multi-pronged approach and long-term thinking that seemed beyond the US president. Instead, he repeatedly downplayed the threat, despite admitting to Bob Woodward that he understood the fatal potentialities. ‘I wanted to always play it down,’ he told Woodward. He claimed he did not want to spread panic, but his overriding fear seemed to be of spooking the markets.
The Trump presidency was so often about the pretence of progress. But the marketing skills of the sloganeer did not work here. This was a national emergency that could not be tweeted or nicknamed away. Nor could he blame it on ‘fake news’. The facts were inescapable: the soaring numbers of the dead.
What did its response to this pandemic tell us about the United States? First of all, we saw the enduring goodness of this country. As with 9/11, we marvelled at the selflessness and bravery of its first responders – the nurses, doctors, medical support staff and ambulance drivers who turned up to work with the same sense of public-spiritedness shown by the firefighters who rushed towards the flaming Twin Towers. One of the most touching sights in New York was to see firefighters standing alongside their trucks outside hospitals to applaud the doctors and nurses, the heroes of 9/11 saluting the superheroes of Covid-19.
We witnessed the ingenuity and creativity of schools that transitioned to remote, online teaching without missing a beat. We saw a can-do spirit that kept stores open, shelves stocked and food being delivered. In other words, most Americans showed precisely the same virtues we saw in every country brought to a halt by the virus.
As for the American exceptionalism on display, much of it was negative. The queues outside gun stores. The spike in online sales of firearms – Ammo.com saw a 70 per cent increase in business. The panic-buying of AR-15s. The gun lobby even managed to persuade the Trump administration to categorise firearms stores and shooting ranges as essential businesses. At least there were no school shootings in March 2020, the first time month without one since 2002.
Once again, those who lived in developed nations were left to ponder why the world’s richest country did not have a system of universal healthcare. When people lost their jobs – and more than 20 million were made jobless within weeks – they also lost their health insurance. One of the most heart-wrenching utterances of the coronavirus outbreak came from a man in a New York hospital gasping for breath before he died, whose last moments were consumed with worrying about the cost of his treatment: ‘Who’s going to pay for it?’ he asked.
Coronavirus exposed America’s racial divide and economic inequalities. Trends witnessed first in New York City were replicated nationally. Black people were six times more likely than white people to be hospitalised as a result of Covid-19. They died at twice the rate.
Poverty was a propagator of the pandemic. Hardship was a super-spreader. In Queens, the borough of New York that became the epicentre of the epicentre, I saw low-income workers line up around the block for hours, in scenes that looked like they belonged in the Great Depression. Even in the lace-curtain suburbs we saw queues of high-end cars, including Mercedes and luxury SUVs, waiting for over five hours so their owners could receive hand-outs from a local church.
At the other end of the income spectrum, the emperors of the New Economy increased their wealth. In the first three months of shutdown, the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos saw his net worth rise by an estimated $48 billion. By the end of the Covid summer, Apple had become the first US company with a market capitalisation of $2 trillion. Even as the US economy experienced its steepest decline since the Great Depression, the S&P 500 stock market index reached a record high, demonstrating once again the disconnect between share values and economic realities on the ground.
Rather than uniting the country in the face of a common enemy, the pandemic became an accelerant of polarisation. In the early weeks of the outbreak, Republicans were twice as likely as Democrats to view coronavirus coverage as exaggerated. Democrats were more likely to wash their hands thoroughly. Many conservatives rejected the epidemiology of the disease. To prove there was no virus, a pastor in Arkansas boasted that his parishioners were prepared to lick the floor of his church. Sean Hannity accused the Democrats and the media of inflating the severity of the coronavirus ‘to bludgeon Trump with this new hoax’. The Medal of Freedom recipient Rush Limbaugh likened coronavirus to the common cold. So, as well as a pandemic, America was contending with an infodemic, much of it disseminated by the misinformation super-spreaders on Fox News and talkback radio.
Shutdowns became politicised. ‘In your more politically conservative regions, closing is not interpreted as caring for you,’ the Reverend Josh King told The Washington Post, ‘it’s interpreted as liberalism.’ Tea Party-style rallies protesting against stay-at-home orders were held across the country, egged on by the president. ‘LIBERATE VIRGINIA! LIBERATE MICHIGAN! LIBERATE MINNESOTA!’ he tweeted. An armed militia group took up his call to arms, and stormed Michigan’s state capital when the Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, extended her emergency powers to combat the virus. Later in the year, the FBI arrested members of a Michigan militia over an alleged plot to kidnap Governor Whitmer and put her on trial for treason.
Wearing a mask became a badge of political identification. Trump mocked as ‘politically correct’ a reporter who was wearing a simple face mask, and refused, save for a few occasions, to wear one himself.
Even the political geography of America affected how people were physically exposed to the virus. Four out of five of the worst-infected states initially – New York, New Jersey, California and Michigan – were Democrat. Florida, whose Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, refused to shut the state’s beaches during spring break, was the only red state in the top five. By the end of the summer, however, as Covid-19 spread to the more rural parts of the country, seven out of ten of those who contracted the virus lived in red states.
For American liberals, Dr Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, became the subversive hero of the hour. Offering an antidote to this post-truth presidency, Fauci stuck to scientific facts. After repeatedly contradicting Donald Trump over the seriousness of the outbreak, he came to be viewed with a measure of the same affection and reverence as the liberal Supreme Court jurist Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
The coronavirus outbreak led momentarily to an end to the gridlock on Capitol Hill, since legislators had no other choice but to legislate, given the severity of the economic crisis. But the passage of a stimulus package felt more like freak-out bipartisanship than patriotic cooperation, the legislative equivalent of panic-buying. Besides, when it came to the negotiation of a second stimulus package, the usual partisan acrimony, point-scoring and brinkmanship quickly returned.
The paradox here was that the coronavirus crisis initially erased philosophical lines, just as the financial meltdown had done in 2008. Ideological conservatives once again became operational liberals. Those who ordinarily detested government came to depend on it. Corporate America, generally so phobic towards federal intervention, was in desperate need of government bailouts. Trickle-down supply-siders became Keynesian big spenders. Even universal basic income, a fringe idea popularised by the Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang, went mainstream. The US government gave $1,200 one-off payments to every American who earned under $75,000 a year. Trump insisted on putting his signature on each of the cheques, a self-indulgence that not one of his predecessors had ever demanded and one that delayed the delivery of the urgently needed money.
Covid-19 underscored how the federal government had been run down over the past 40 years. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had been repeatedly targeted for funding cuts by the Trump administration, including a 16 per cent reduction in the 2021 budget proposal, although Congress came to its rescue.
The team responsible for dealing with pandemics on the National Security Council at the White House had been disbanded in the spring of 2018 and not replaced. A USAID programme known as PREDICT, which was aimed at spotting zoonotic viruses that passed from animals to humans, was shut down.
As with the attacks of September 11, warnings were repeatedly ignored. In recent years there had been numerous exercises to test the country’s preparedness for a pandemic that identified exactly the areas of vulnerability that were now exposed: one, codenamed Crimson Contagion, involved a respiratory virus originating from China. Between 2003 and 2015, at least ten government reports highlighted the chronic shortage of ventilators and other life-saving equipment.1
As with Hurricane Katrina, the Federal Emergency Management Agency struggled to deliver essential supplies. As ever, there were tensions between federal agencies and the states. The institutional decline of government that led so many Americans to pin their faith on an individual, Donald Trump, was again plain to see, whether in the shortage of masks and protective gowns or the dearth of early testing. ‘How did the US end up with nurses wearing garbage bags?’ asked The New Yorker in a jolting headline. The answer lay in the hollowing out of government going back decades. At least Trump mobilised the government in an Operation Warp Speed to develop a vaccine.
America’s claim to global pre-eminence looked less convincing by the day. While, in previous crises, the world’s most powerful nation might have mobilised a global response, nobody expected that of Trump’s United States. The neo-isolationism of three years of America-Firstism had created a geopolitical form of social distancing, and this crisis reminded us of the oceanic divide that had opened up, even with Washington’s closest allies.
Take the European travel ban, blocking visitors flying in from the Continent, which Trump announced during an Oval Office address to the nation without any prior warning to the countries affected. As American infection rates worsened, the EU retaliated by imposing a travel ban on US citizens travelling across the Atlantic.
In another act of extreme unilateralism, Trump suspended US funding for the World Health Organization, the lead UN agency battling the pandemic. Noting the absence of US leadership or even much active involvement, the former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt lamented, ‘This is the first great crisis of the post-American world.’
Images of the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, the USS Theodore Roosevelt, limping into port in Guam, its captain stripped of his command by the Pentagon for decrying the inadequate response from Washington to a serious coronavirus outbreak aboard his ship, showed how much the superpower had been hobbled. The United States offered a case study of dysfunction. Much of the world looked on in shock and pity.
So many of America’s long-term ailments intersected and metastasised in this fatal moment: its democratic sickliness, its inoperative government, its ugly polarisation, its income disparities, its racial inequality and its rejection of rationality. Alas, when Covid-19 hit, America was among the most vulnerable.
In the midst of the pandemic, a video went viral. It showed a black man, George Floyd, being suffocated by the knee of a white police officer; a killing that lasted more than eight minutes. It was an allegedly murderous act that came to epitomise how African-Americans have long been held down and smothered by systemic racism. Once again we were witnessing the scourge of police brutality, a disease America has never been able to cure.
Across the country, fury broke loose. In Minneapolis, the city where George Floyd was killed, protesters torched the local police station. There was violence in Atlanta, Georgia, the birthplace of Martin Luther King. In New York shops, including Macy’s department store in the heart of Midtown, were looted. Deserted streets filled with protesters. Social distancing was temporarily elbowed aside by social unrest. The ambulance sirens we had heard for months were now drowned out by chants of protest. Cities already made combustible by Covid erupted.
The United States was confronted by three simultaneous convulsions: a public health crisis that disproportionately affected people of colour; an economic shock that disproportionately affected people of colour; and civil unrest sparked by police brutality that had always disproportionately affected people of colour. A shattered mirror was being held up to a fractured country.
At the same time there was American beauty in this moment, as the country was engulfed by its largest multi-racial and multi-generational mobilisation since the 1960s. Protesters converged on the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, the pulpit from which Dr King had delivered his most celebrated sermon, a paean to non-violence that spoke of a dream that had long been deferred. Marchers streamed across the Brooklyn Bridge in New York and the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, part of a movement that quickly established a footprint in all 50 states. Even in small, rural towns never before touched by racial turbulence, protesters took a knee.
The relics of the Confederacy, the totems of that lost cause, came under renewed assault. Memorials celebrating the fight to prolong slavery were replaced with new landmarks. The Mayor of Washington decreed that a block of 16th Street should become Black Lives Matter Plaza. So those words were painted in giant yellow letters on the very doorstep of the White House. The same motif was daubed on Fifth Avenue outside the entrance to Trump Tower, more eye-catching than the skyscraper’s golden signage.
For a time we wondered whether this was another Parkland moment, a cloudburst of activism that failed to change the political weather on gun reform. Yet the anti-racism protests felt more meaningful and profound. Black Lives Matter, a movement rejected by most Americans when it started in 2013, now enjoyed majority support. Its leaders told me they were witnessing an historic attitudinal shift: white Americans – indeed, white people the world over – were finally understanding and acknowledging their privilege.
Even Donald Trump, the one-time leader of the Birther Movement, felt compelled to act. In another of his Rose Garden ceremonies, he added his signature to an executive order paving the way for a national database to bar police officers accused of brutality moving from one force to another. His priority response, however, was to crack down on the protests. This meant adopting the ‘law and order’ language and posture of Richard Nixon’s winning presidential campaign in 1968, the year of the assassination of Martin Luther King and the last time the country had witnessed racial protests on this scale. ‘You have to dominate the streets,’ he said in a call with the nation’s governors. ‘They’re gonna run over you. You’re gonna look like a bunch of jerks.’
To demonstrate his dominance, Trump staged a melodramatic photo-opportunity in Washington DC, choreographed with the assistance of federal law enforcement officials, who fired stun grenades and mounted baton charges to disperse a crowd of peaceful protesters from outside the White House. Violently a path was cleared so the president could stride the short distance to a church that had been daubed with Black Lives Matter graffiti, outside which he held aloft his testamental prop, a leather-bound edition of the Bible. With the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, at his side, dressed in camouflage fatigues and combat boots, he could claim a pyrrhic victory in the Battle of Lafayette Square.
Later that night came more intimidating security theatre, when two military helicopters hovered low over the protesters in the heart of the capital, the downward thrust from their blades whipping up shards of glass and creating winds with the force of a tropical storm. Then, the following evening, members of the District of Columbia’s National Guard, acting on orders from the Pentagon, formed a phalanx on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Images of them standing sentinel in body armour, combat helmets and sinister-looking face coverings instantly went viral. The country seemed to be unravelling.
As around us this epic history swirled, the due date loomed for the birth of our baby daughter, our first American child. Demonstrations were taking place below our windows. New York imposed a curfew. Having opted for a home delivery to avoid the restrictions imposed by Covid-riddled hospitals, we now feared our routes to the nearest emergency room might be cut off and also that our midwife might not be able to reach us. A city immobilised by the pandemic was now paralysed by protest.
After months of living in the worst-affected city in the worst-affected country our anxiety had become habitualised. But this was altogether more frightening. Looping in my mind was the fear of something going calamitously wrong. Alas, the curse of being a foreign correspondent is to have witnessed too many worst-case scenarios.
As my wife went into labour, NYPD helicopters circled above our Brooklyn apartment building. Our midwife’s assistant was questioned by policemen outside our door. Looking out from our windows onto Brooklyn Bridge down below, I saw a convoy of police squad cars darting into Lower Manhattan. It felt like something out of the novel The Year of Living Dangerously, but that is what 2020 had become.
Inside our makeshift birthing suite, our cocoon away from the chaos, my wife maintained her extraordinary fortitude and calm. After a four-hour labour, we got the first glance of our baby daughter. Usually parents cry tears of joy when first they see their newborn. For us, they came with a flood of relief. Our baby’s safe arrival marked the lifting of months of mental siege: respite after sleepless nights of pre-traumatic stress. Then Honor Wood Bryant gulped her first lungfuls, as protesters across the country chanted ‘I can’t breathe’.
To think that we began 2020 supposing the US presidential election would be the foremost news event of the year: the story that would monopolise our journalistic attention; the travelling carnival that would see us clocking up tens of thousands of miles; the democratic spectacle that would distance us from our families. With that expectant air, we headed out from airports crowded still with mask-less travellers to the battlegrounds of Iowa and New Hampshire, where we sized up the Democratic field.
Joe Biden was a front-runner who felt like he had done his dash. Speeches, often delivered in a near-whisper, became rambling soliloquies – a reminiscence from his Senate career here, the name-drop of a friendly international leader there. Anecdotes did not make any political point, something that could not be explained by the stammer he struggled to overcome since childhood. Surrogates, many of them retired politicians themselves, upstaged him. Still he could flash his illuminative smile, but when he opened his mouth nobody could be entirely sure what would come out. On the stump, he was worse even than Jeb Bush in 2016. The former Florida governor could at least complete a cogent sentence, even if nobody applauded when it came to an end.
Bernie Sanders, with his manic energy, still drew the largest crowds. Even though he was 78 years old and had recently suffered a heart attack, he was loved by the young. At the other end of the age spectrum, Pete Buttigieg seemed prematurely old. Still, he offered the promise of generational change, which has always been so seductive for Democrats who prefer to fall in love rather than in line. Even though ‘Mayor Pete’ was no Jack Kennedy, the 38-year-old spoke in perfectly formed sentences, which it sounded like he had been rehearsing in the womb. The former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, also had a stellar CV, which included a Rhodes Scholarship and service in the US military. With immaculate articulateness, the first openly gay presidential candidate managed to persuade Iowa Caucus-goers that he was the best candidate on offer.
Had it not been for the chaos of caucus night, when glitches on a smartphone app designed to tabulate the votes delayed for a week the declaration of his victory, Buttigieg might have stormed into New Hampshire with ‘big mo’ behind him. As it was, the Iowa caucus quickly became old news, and Bernie Sanders narrowly won the first-in-the-nation primary, profiting from a field that continued to divide moderate Democratic voters.
The casualty of those early contests was Joe Biden. Fourth in Iowa and fifth in New Hampshire, perhaps the time had come for him to don his trademark Aviator shades and ride off westward into the sunset. Instead, of course, he headed to South Carolina, where the endorsement of the influential black Democratic congressman Jim Clyburn helped bring about a Lazarus-like return.
After his victory in the South Carolina primary, centrist rivals, such as Buttigieg and Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, exited the race. Faced with the alarming prospect of Sanders, a one-time socialist, seizing the party’s nomination, Democrats smashed the emergency glass in the hope that amiable Joe could put out the firebrand.
Days later, following his cascade of victories on Super Tuesday, pundits marvelled at how Biden had triumphed in states where he had not even campaigned. Yet the opposite was more probably true. His absence helped explain his success. The lesson from Iowa and New Hampshire, after all, was that the more voters saw of him, the less likely they were to vote for him. His stealth candidacy ahead of Super Tuesday helped him wrap up the nomination.
After the Covid lockdown, and for much of election year, he became a virtual recluse, but the ‘Biden in the bunker’ strategy worked well. The pandemic took the heat out of the ideological battle within the Democratic Party. He could claim to be taking the safe road to the White House. Social distancing even helped neutralise an issue that, in the #MeToo era, posed a threat to his candidacy: that he was creepily touchy-feely with women. Most importantly, Biden’s invisibility meant the focus was always on Donald Trump. After the near-death experience of the early contests, it was as if the coronavirus had given Biden political antibodies offering protection from his own underlying conditions.
His personal narrative also found a mournful echo in these sorrowful times. Just after winning election to the Senate in 1972, he suffered the trauma of losing his first wife, Neilia, and 13-month-old daughter, Naomi, in a car accident. Then in 2015 he watched his son, Beau, a survivor of that car crash, die from a rare form of brain cancer. Naturally empathetic, Biden found himself on the same emotional plane as the tens of thousands of families who had suffered bereavement.
His geniality also made him impossible to demonise, and hard to portray as a Hillary Clinton-like hate figure. His easy-listening moderation made him difficult to depict as a tribune of the radical left.
Elections are often framed as a choice between continuity and change. Yet a selling point for Biden was that he offered voters a version of both. After Trump’s chaotic handling of the coronavirus, he could plausibly present himself as a candidate of change. At the same time, by pledging to serve as a conventional president, he represented a continuum. As the campaign went on, he appeared to performing the job he was essentially hired to do: to win back white working-class voters in the Rust Belt and female voters in the suburbs.
While Biden remained sequestered at his Delaware home, Trump was impatient to resume campaigning as quickly as possible. For his first public campaign event since shutdown, his team booked a basketball arena in Tulsa, Oklahoma, for 19 June – an insensitive choice of venue in the midst of so much racial turbulence because the city had been the scene in 1921 of a race massacre, and an insensitive choice of date since it coincided with Juneteenth, a day of celebration marking the emancipation of slaves. After switching the date to the following night, the Trump campaign claimed that more than a million supporters had requested tickets. But they had been duped by an online army of TikTokers. The stadium was half-empty. Solitary Trump supporters sat amid banks of empty seats, like fans of a non-league football team on a wet Wednesday night – easy pickings for photographers depicting the desultory mood.
The television images from later that June evening also lodged in the mind. They showed the president stepping off Marine One looking unusually dishevelled, his crimson silk tie draped casually around his neck, his red cap held limply in his hand – it looked almost like a political walk of shame.
Later in the summer, the Covid convention season mirrored the surrealism of the times. For their virtual convention, the Democrats staged what felt like a public television pledge drive, with the kind of compromised production values – blurry Zoom links and speakers not quite sure whether their microphone was on or off – that we had all become accustomed to during lockdown. Yet the messaging was clarion clear, whether it came from Michelle Obama delivering a fireside chat from the sofa of her living room or her husband sermonising from a constitutional museum in Philadelphia that looked like a temple of democracy: the election was a struggle between good and evil. Declaring himself to be ‘an ally of the light’, Joe Biden’s acceptance speech followed that same Manichaean path: ‘May history be able to say that the end of this chapter of American darkness began here tonight, as love and hope and light joined in the battle for the soul of our nation.’
The Republican convention, with its superabundance of US flags, perfect teeth and presidential offspring, could hardly have been more different. Given the presence of so many family members, it felt like a night of a thousand Trumps. Camelot meets the Kardashians. There were even shades of Evita, when Ivanka Trump introduced her father on a stage built in front of the floodlit White House, which doubled that night – controversially and arguably illegally – as a political prop. Inevitably, the theatrics were compared to reality television, but it all seemed so divorced from reality, not least because the coronavirus was so often spoken of in the past tense.
Trump’s keynote speech was unexpectedly low-energy. It was as if he was still struggling to come up with a persuasive re-election message. From this master sloganeer, there was no equivalent in 2020 of ‘Build the Wall’ or ‘Lock Her Up’. ‘Keep America Great Again’ sounded misplaced. ‘Make America Great Again Again’ fell flat. Moreover, it reminded voters of the here and now. The Republican convention did not even come up with a policy platform, an attestation not just of how Trump completely dominated the party but also of his failure to formulate a programme for his second term.
Four years earlier, he had brilliantly articulated the grievances of his supporters. Now, though, he gave voice to his own frustrations: venting about having to contend with ‘the China virus’; lashing out against public health officials; assailing Democratic governors whose state shutdowns had paralysed the Trump economy, an onslaught he continued even after Governor Whitmer was targeted in the alleged kidnap plot; complaining about the press for spending too much time on ‘Covid, Covid, Covid’.
Trump succeeded in 2016 because he presented himself as an anti-Obama and an anti-Hillary candidate. Part of the reason Joe Biden led in the polls was because he so easily fitted the role of the anti-Trump. For so much of the campaign, however, it was more a case of Trump versus Trump. The president was his own political enemy: not taking the coronavirus seriously enough at the start; inviting ridicule for speculating whether bleach might offer a cure; re-tweeting video of a Trump supporter in The Villages retirement community in Florida shouting ‘white power’ from his golf cart; and, in what felt like a throwback to the 1950s, telling suburban women, such a vital demographic, that he was getting their husbands back to work.
For those already dismayed by his behaviour, his undermining of the democratic process represented a dangerous new low. In addition to making baseless claims that postal voting would lead to massive voter fraud, he encouraged supporters in the swing states of North Carolina and Pennsylvania to vote twice. As well as threatening to delay the election, which he did not even have the constitutional authority to do, Trump repeatedly refused to affirm that he would accept the outcome of the vote or even agree to a peaceful transfer of power. We were used to a leader who revelled in rejecting presidential standards, but challenging democratic norms represented a troubling new departure. Seemingly we had reached the point where an American president posed a threat to American democracy.
After Labor Day came a series of shocks that could hardly be described as surprises. On a Friday evening in mid-September we learned of the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, which raised the spectre of a constitutional paroxysm to add to the list of 2020 convulsions. Her dying words instantly became a liberal mantra: ‘My fervent wish is that I not be replaced until a new president is installed.’ The unsentimental calculus of Washington power suggested otherwise, of course, and within hours of the 87-year-old’s death, Mitch McConnell nullified every syllable of her deathbed wish. President Trump’s nominee would receive a vote on the floor of the United States Senate, declared the Senate Majority leader. Speed was essential, Republicans openly admitted on Fox News that night, because of the need to replace a liberal with a conservative in case the presidential election came to be settled in the Supreme Court. No attempt was made to camouflage their thinking.
Two weeks later, Donald Trump announced his replacement for Ruth Bader Ginsburg at a Rose Garden ceremony that will be remembered not for the unveiling of the conservative judge, Amy Coney Barrett, an acolyte of Antonin Scalia, but for becoming a super-spreader event. Indeed, future generations might find it hard to comprehend the scene of jubilant Republicans hugging, shaking hands, sitting shoulder-to-shoulder and mainly not wearing masks in the midst of a pandemic that by that stage had killed more than 200,000 Americans. It was triumphalist, hubristic and, unsurprisingly, led to the infection of numerous members of the president’s inner circle. Afterwards, the White House started to resemble one of those rural meatpacking plants that became hotspots of transmission.
Days later came the first televised debate, a verbal slaughterhouse. Over the course of 90 minutes, Trump interrupted Joe Biden or the moderator, Chris Wallace, 128 times. The former vice-president called the president ‘a clown’. Broadcast globally, it was a ghastly advertisement for US democracy, a real-time rendering of American decline.
The most stunning moment of the campaign was yet to come. Two nights later, we learned that the president had Covid – breaking news, imparted via Twitter at one o’clock in the morning, that had the jolting effect of drinking Red Bull from a fire-hose. I was in Michigan at the time, and spoke the next morning to Democrats who believed the president was faking it and to Republicans who still thought the coronavirus was a hoax – yet another reminder of how America had become a country where there was no longer an agreed-upon set of facts.
For a few days, the campaign felt more like a vigil. We waited on news of the president’s condition, and weren’t entirely sure whether we could trust the medical updates from his White House doctor. We even wondered whether his brush with mortality might bring about some kind of Trumpian epiphany, especially after he tweeted out the word ‘LOVE!!!’ in all caps.
Yet Trump remained Trump. As ever, he was alert to the televisual possibilities of the moment, and summoned his presidential motorcade to parade him in front of supporters gathered at the gates of the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. Yet this drive-past was a mere curtain-raiser.
Days later, in a departure devised to coincide with the evening news shows, he left through the golden Art Deco doors of the hospital, boarded Marine One and then flew the short distance to the South Lawn of the White House. Then he strode purposefully across the lawn, climbed the steps to the balcony, dramatically removed his mask and stood ramrod straight as he saluted in the direction of the departing helicopter. Within minutes, this triumphant homecoming was packaged up into a short film, with slow-motion videography and the usual rousing Hollywood music (although the president decided against ripping off his shirt to reveal a Superman T-shirt, an idea that The New York Times reported he had discussed with aides).
To Trump devotees, it must have looked like the happy ending of an action movie. To his detractors, it was more like a scene from a comic opera. This became a defining moment of the Trump presidency not just because it borrowed from the visual grammar of reality TV but also because it was so instantly polarising. Were you watching an all-American hero returning after vanquishing a deadly enemy or the self-satirising theatre of some American Mussolini? How you answered that question most probably determined how you would vote.
And what a vote it turned out to be. In Texas we filmed cars and pick-up trucks lined up at drive-in polling stations that looked like Covid test sites, a new innovation that made voting, with the necessary proof of identification, as easy as ordering a burger and fries. In Georgia there were snaking lines, their length a measure of the determination, especially among African-Americans, to make their voices heard. Outside a polling station near Madison Square Garden, the queue was so long it looked as if tickets had just gone on sale for Bruce Springsteen’s last ever concert. Because of the extension of early voting, the reliance on postal ballots and the resolve to participate in the most consequential presidential contest of our lifetimes, turnout in the coronavirus election was the highest in more than 100 years.
Just as election day turned into election month, so election night turned into election week. Since Donald Trump had encouraged his supporters to turn up in person, Republican votes tended to be counted first. Because Joe Biden had urged Democrats to use postal ballots to avoid exposure to Covid-19, his votes tended to be counted later. It therefore came as no surprise that Trump took an early lead. Nor should it have been much of a shock to hear him claim victory on the night, a move he had telegraphed for months beforehand. Still, it was astounding to listen to the words he delivered from the presidential podium at his East Room pseudo-victory party (a gathering that, inexorably, became another super-spreader event). ‘Frankly, we did win,’ he claimed, even though he was nowhere near accumulating the 270 Electoral College votes needed. More alarmingly, he equated continuing to count the vote with stealing the election. ‘This is a fraud on the American public,’ he falsely declared.
As the counting continued, the momentum shifted firmly in Biden’s favour. By Thursday morning he had taken the lead in Georgia, where the votes of African-Americans from the late Congressman John Lewis’s district enabled him to surge ahead. The Democrats also had what looked like an unassailable advantage in Pennsylvania, a state Donald Trump simply could not afford to lose. By early evening the Associated Press projected wins for Biden in Wisconsin and Michigan, the other two Rust Belt states that ordinarily went Democrat but which had voted for Trump in 2016.
Now facing almost inevitable defeat, Donald Trump called a press conference in the White House briefing room, where he unleashed such a blizzard of falsehoods that the three major broadcast networks, ABC, NBC and CBS, cut away midway through. No longer were they willing to broadcast the president’s lies.
On Saturday morning, after a new batch of votes had been counted in Philadelphia, the cradle of American democracy, the networks finally called Pennsylvania, and with it the election. Joe Biden was now president-elect. The American electorate had fired Donald Trump. History will record that his last tweet before being declared the loser read: ‘I WON THIS ELECTION, BY A LOT.’
In the days that followed, the warriors of the right assumed their usual battle formations. Newt Gingrich urged Donald Trump to pursue a scorched-earth legal strategy by filing a lawsuit in every state. Sean Hannity, by peddling various outlandish conspiracy theories, unleashed another Fox News misinformation campaign. Rudy Giuliani convened a press conference at what Donald Trump described on Twitter as the ‘Four Seasons’. Rather than the luxury hotel, however, baffled reporters found themselves outside Four Seasons Total Landscaping, a Philadelphia gardening business sandwiched between a crematorium and a sex shop. The madcap press conference that followed looked like a scene from a Borat movie, with the man once described as ‘America’s Mayor’ reduced to a punchinello. George Conway, the husband of Kellyanne Conway and an ardent critic of his wife’s employer, called it ‘Banana Republicanism’.
As Trump’s power drained away, his baseless claims became more desperate and nonsensical. The dozens of courtroom defeats he suffered in lawsuits aimed at overturning the election made him a serial loser. Even after the Electoral College crowned Biden the victor in December, Trump pressed on with his campaign to subvert democracy. ‘I just want to find 11,780 votes,’ he told Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, during an intimidating phone call that was even more impeachable than his Ukrainian hustle. When that failed, he pressured Mike Pence to break the law by thwarting Congress when it met to certify the Electoral College votes in January, an act of unconcealed disenfranchisement that his deputy did not have the constitutional authority in any case to execute. Pence, to his credit, finally broke from his boss.
With few options left, Trump summoned his supporters to Washington for a ‘Save America’ and ‘Stop the Steal’ rally. ‘Be there. Will be wild!’ he tweeted. On the grassy Ellipse, midway between the Washington Monument and the White House, he turned this mass of MAGA diehards into an insurrectionist mob. ‘You’ll never take back our country with weakness,’ he shouted, urging them to pressurise lawmakers by making their presence felt on Capitol Hill. ‘You have to show strength, and you have to be strong.’ Then he previewed the coming storm. ‘We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country any more.’
Many in the audience were not only ready to heed his seditious words but had arrived in Washington armed for an uprising. They had brought assault rifles, handguns, spears, pipe bombs, chemical irritants, sledgehammers, plastic handcuffs to take hostages and even a noose and gallows. ‘Hang Mike Pence’ was the cry.
Later we learned that Trump lieutenants had established a ‘command centre’ at the Willard Hotel in Washington, close to where his foot soldiers had assembled. Trump’s White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, was even in possession of a PowerPoint presentation outlining how to stage a coup. The president would announce a ‘national security emergency’ and ‘declare all electronic voting in all states invalid’. The National Guard would be placed on stand-by to ‘protect pro Trump people’.
The storming of the Capitol that January day was unprecedented in modern times. This sanctum had not been breached since the British ransacked Washington in 1814. Even during the Civil War its halls had not been so imperilled. Lawmakers, initially placed in lockdown and forced to hide under their desks, had to be evacuated to an undisclosed location, many sprinting for their lives. Police had to draw guns on the floor of the House of Representatives, its doors now barricaded to hold back the mob. Protesters smashed windows, scaled walls with climbing ropes, brandished Confederate flags, vandalised offices and defecated on the marble floors. A female rioter was shot and killed by the police. Another was trampled to death by her fellow rioters. An officer with the Capitol Police, Brian Sicknick, died after being attacked with chemical spray. More than 138 of his colleagues suffered injuries. One officer, who was knocked unconscious and went into cardiac arrest, heard a rioter shout: ‘Kill him with his own gun.’ Four officers on duty that day later took their own lives.
‘Go home, we love you, you’re very special,’ said Trump in a video statement that he was reluctantly persuaded to make, after Republican lawmakers and even Fox News hosts, including Sean Hannity, sent panicked pleas to the White House. Yet Trump was ‘gleeful’ as he watched his supporters storm the Capitol, according to his former White House press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, and even hit the rewind button so he could watch it again. ‘Look at all these people fighting for me,’ he said.
These anarchic scenes made the institutions of US government look pathetically fragile. The country witnessed one of its sorriest ever days. Nonetheless, when Congress reconvened later that night to certify the results, a majority of Republicans in the House and eight GOP Senators voted to overturn the election results. Their votes were tantamount to endorsing the insurrection.
In this culminating moment, American democracy was in maximum peril. A razor-wire-lined fence had to be erected around Congress. More than 25,000 members of the National Guard were drafted in, with troops bivouacked on the floors of the Capitol just as their forebears had been in Lincoln’s day. Washington looked like it was under military occupation, a wire and clapboard citadel.
A week later Donald Trump became the first president to be impeached twice, this time for ‘incitement of insurrection’. Then, on inauguration day, he exited town hours before his successor took the oath of office, strutting out of the back door of the White House rather than respecting the tradition of greeting the incoming First Couple at the front. It was the most graceless of departures, which even included a farewell rally on the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews with a 21-gun salute. Then came a final Trumpian flourish. As Air Force One nosed into the air and headed towards Florida, speakers blared out Frank Sinatra’s ‘My Way’.
Donald Trump left office with America in a woeful condition. Covid-19 was rampant. There were days when the death toll exceeded 4,000 victims. The city upon a hill looked like a disease-ridden ruin. Were this a different country on a different continent, we would be speaking in terms of a failed state.