Standing backstage at a boisterous rally in Columbia, Missouri, five days before the election, with Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA” pulsing throughout a packed airport hangar, Trump threw his head back and marinated in the moment. Soon enough he would be dazzling a pack of six thousand with his usual riff: Democrats letting the illegals in, Republicans fighting the drugs and criminals, plus the new wrinkle of nixing birthright citizenship. But before any of that, he took a long, introspective pause. Preparing to take the stage, the president seemed to feel it all—the crowd, the music, the energy, the media glare—coursing through his veins.
“I fucking love this job!” he howled into the November night.
ONCE USED BY PRESIDENTS AS A BILLIARDS ROOM IN THE FILTHY, FORSAKEN basement, the Map Room had changed status when Theodore Roosevelt renovated the entire ground floor of the White House. He turned it into multipurpose space, only for later presidents to bring back the pool table and restore the leisurely room’s reputation. Franklin D. Roosevelt had another idea: With the onset of World War II, he needed a situation room stocked with records, charts, and maps to track the progress of military engagements across Europe and the Pacific. Hence the Map Room was born, and it has remained ever since, suffering only slight remodels by subsequent administrations careful to keep its integrity and historical value intact.
On the evening of November 6, the Map Room was used to track a different sort of battle—one between Republicans and Democrats, with control of the federal government on the line.
The Office of Political Affairs transformed the space into an impressive Election Night war room. Running down the middle of the floor was one enormous table featuring power strips and docking stations, allowing everyone to project their laptops onto large monitors. A pair of fifty-inch high-definition televisions were situated on either end of the table, resting on roller carts; one showed a four-way split between ABC and the three cable networks; the other was tuned exclusively to Fox News.
True to the room’s tradition, maps and charts were plastered across every vacant inch of the walls and table, guiding the president’s team through the nearly one hundred races they would be monitoring at the House, Senate, and gubernatorial levels: poll closing times; historical results by state and district; heat maps showing areas of targeted turnout; bellwether counties; contacts for every candidate and campaign; election attorneys by state; and opposition research briefs on Republican candidates whom they suspected might lose, allowing for quick spinning by White House surrogates.
A number of VIPs drifted in and out of the election bunker: Trump’s children and their spouses, Pence and his wife, Kellyanne Conway and Sarah Sanders, among others. The vice president took a particular interest in Indiana, asking for maps to be zoomed in so that he could examine county returns and determine whether Democratic senator Joe Donnelly, one of the GOP’s top targets, could survive. Other visitors zeroed in on specific states where the president had campaigned, praying for good news to bring him.
In fact, the only prominent official who avoided the Map Room was the president himself. He remained upstairs in the East Room, where a small party was being hosted for friends of the administration, who snacked on pizza and watched the returns come in on Fox News. Trump seemed dour and fatalistic; he made no speech and seemed less conversational than usual, eyeing the bank of televisions and awaiting updates from Stepien, his anxious political director. The president seemed to know that the night would not be one to celebrate.
Downstairs in the Map Room, his team clung to a more optimistic outlook. Word had gotten around that the previous night, Steve Stivers, the chairman of the NRCC, had called Ryan, McCarthy, and Scalise with great news: Republicans were going to keep the House. Ryan was skeptical; all the polling from the Congressional Leadership Fund, the GOP’s allied super PAC, showed losses approaching 30. Stivers was adamant that his projections were more accurate, that Republicans would hold on. McCarthy, always eager to deliver good news to Trump, had passed along the message to the president and his team.
In the first three hours following the initial wave of poll closings at 6:00 p.m. Eastern, Republicans were encouraged: Marsha Blackburn had won the Tennessee Senate race, which had been surprisingly competitive all year; and Andy Barr, the GOP incumbent in Kentucky’s Sixth District, had fended off a tough Democratic opponent in what was widely viewed as a bellwether race for control of the House of Representatives. Nothing encouraged the president and his team more than the result in Missouri, a state Trump had visited seven times, where Republican challenger Josh Hawley knocked off Democratic senator Claire McCaskill.
On CBS, John Dickerson declared that “Planet House is not spinning the way the Democrats want it to.” On ABC, George Stephanopoulos predicted a “disappointing night” for Democrats. On CNN, the liberal commentator Van Jones described the early returns as “heartbreaking.” Indeed, by 9:00 p.m. in Washington, things were looking up for the White House.
Thirty-three minutes later, however, a familiar voice pierced through the din. “We are now ready to make one of the biggest calls of the night,” announced Bret Baier. “The Fox News Decision Desk can now project the Democrats will take control of the House of Representatives for the first time in eight years.”
The Map Room fell silent. Then, after what might have been less than one full second, it ignited with shouted expletives and strewn papers. The president’s staff could not process what they had just heard: Early races had broken their way, polls on the West Coast were still open, and no other network or news service had yet made the call for control of the House. Some were sure it was a mistake and shushed their colleagues so they could hear more. “A lot of listeners out there, their heads are exploding,” Chris Wallace said, staring straight into the ground floor of the White House. “But this is going to be a very different Washington.”
Trump was equally aghast upstairs in the East Room. It felt unreal to everyone watching from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. All the “Fake News” organizations were holding back, recognizing the GOP’s strong showing early in the night, while Fox News, which typically operated as the president’s personal Pravda, was sticking a fork in his party.
Trump wanted answers. Sanders, the press secretary, agreed to have White House communications director Bill Shine, a longtime Fox News executive who was still being paid by the network after joining the administration, reach out to his former colleagues for an explanation. What he got was short and sweet: The network was using, for the first time on an Election Night, new and advanced modeling that spliced AP election returns with advanced polling statistics to get a better picture of where certain races were headed. It was clear in their modeling, by the time Fox News made the call at 9:33 p.m., that Democrats would regain control of the House.
It wasn’t until 10:22 p.m. that NBC News followed suit. CNN, which had been the first to call the Senate for Republicans (a far less controversial projection), did not join Fox News and NBC News in calling the House for Democrats until after 11:00 p.m.
As the losses for House Republicans piled up, the result was sweet vindication for the election team at Fox News. It was a valuable reminder that, for all the brainwashing practiced by the likes of Hannity, Ingraham, and Jeanine Pirro, the network also employed some outstanding journalists: Baier, whose anchoring is strong and rigidly objective; Chris Wallace, the best interviewer in the business; Chris Stirewalt, the razor-sharp politics editor; Shepard Smith; Bill Hemmer; and several others.