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Twelve Days in June is a work of speculative fiction. The Lodestar

magazine and Max Ezer are fictitious entities. Public figures and entities are
depicted in a fictitious context—their actions and statements are presented
hypothetically as satirical political commentary protected
under fair use and the First Amendment. All other characters are wholly
fictitious, and any resemblances to persons, living or dead, or events that
take place after the publication of this work are purely coincidental.

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The Lodestar

Twelve Days in June

The untold story of the American Spring
MAX EZER | JUNE 2022 ISSUE | _U.S._

This is the fifth story in a five-part series on the greatest crisis in American democracy since the Civil

War, as it unfolded over just twelve days in June 2021. Drawing on newly available sources and

exhaustive research, Max Ezer recounts the gripping drama of those events from the perspectives of

key participants, and places the violence in the context of the political turmoil that preceded it. This

issue’s story, “Full Firepower,” addresses the climax of the Trump Out demonstrations, and the frantic

maneuvering to force a political compromise. It takes us inside Mar-a-Lago during the final act of the

crisis, as administration insiders reckon with the looming collapse, even as the president makes

nuclear threats and launches a last-ditch plan to preserve his grip on office.

Part V: Full Firepower

A
LL OVER THE Washington D.C. area, black SUVs with red-and-blue

flashers wound through empty streets in the misty blue morning.

Stopping at historic redbrick homes, swank townhouses, and
modest apartments, Capitol Police officers with Kevlar and long guns got out
and went to the doors of members of Congress to escort them out to the
waiting vehicles. LRAD warning tones echoed on the chilly air, as morning
patrols reminded residents that the all-day lockdown remained in effect. It
was around 5:00 a.m. on Wednesday, June 23. House and Senate leadership
had called an emergency 8:00 a.m. session to begin an accelerated
impeachment process, with a joint press conference with Speaker Ryan and

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Majority Leader McConnell slated for an hour later. With the threat of
surveillance and leaks, they had no choice but to assemble in person. Getting
up to 535 elected officials safely through the gauntlet of security and
unpredictable protests posed a daunting challenge, though, and to have any
hope of getting everyone to the Hill on time, Capitol Police chief Steven Sund
had needed to call upon Joint Task Force National Capital Region for
additional manpower.

Just as the operation was going into effect, someone—likely either a GOP
congressional aide or someone on SCRAG Pete Zeller’s staff in the Joint
Operations Center—had placed a predawn call to Mar-a-Lago. Deputy chief
of staff Stephen Miller was awakened, and as phone records subsequently
showed, placed a call to Zeller on his personal cell phone at 5:07 a.m. that
lasted for six minutes. Shortly thereafter, the SCRAG appeared in the JOC
ops bay and ordered the entire area around the Capitol locked down. Watch
officers from the Army and UAC member agencies recall him explaining that
he’d just gotten intelligence from the National Security Council suggesting
credible terrorist threats targeting Congress. As the Senior Civilian
Representative of the Attorney General, and thence the president, Zeller
lacked formal authority over the Capitol Police, who answer to the legislative
branch. But he didn’t need it. The National Response Framework put Sund’s
officers at his operational direction, and they couldn’t carry out their mission
without JTF-NCR help anyway. So Zeller’s directive went out by radio: the
representatives and senators already on the move should be driven to safe
locations, and the rest should shelter in place at home.

Soon there was chaos as congressional staffers being driven by van to the
Capitol were turned away by armed Marines telling them the area was being

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evacuated. Many tried to get an answer by phone from Capitol Police
headquarters, but no one there knew what had prompted the alert. Aides
started getting frightened calls from members whose security teams had
suddenly dropped them at other government facilities and warned them
about a terror threat. Leadership got the same warnings, but when the chiefs
of staff to Tim Ryan and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer spoke with
Chief Sund and heard the threat had been relayed by SCRAG Zeller from the
NSC, they immediately smelled a rat. They teleconferenced with Mitch
McConnell’s staff and began making plans to convene at a backup site in
Maryland—whose precise location remains classified—but it would take until
midafternoon for everyone in both chambers to assemble there.

It had not been easy to reach, at long last, a bipartisan consensus that Trump
needed to go. Since Sunday, Senators Mitt Romney and Marco Rubio, Nikki
Haley, and several other prominent Republicans had been intensely pressing
the majority leader to withdraw his support from the increasingly deranged
president. McConnell had resisted even after the SOP 303 and Section 606
shutdowns were announced, although staffers recall he was greatly disturbed
by what he saw as gross overreactions. But by Tuesday, it had become clear
that the corporate losses caused by the crisis were simply too severe. With
civil disorder paralyzing all of the nation’s most vital economic centers to
varying degrees, even conservative business leaders were privately baying in
the Kentucky senator’s ear that he had to abandon ship. And with the Army’s
failure to decisively crush the demonstrations as Trump had promised,
McConnell had come to believe that the protest movement could no longer
be suppressed by force.

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According to Michael Wolff in Vanity Fair, Sen. McConnell had given Trump
an ultimatum on Tuesday morning that if the Mall could not be retaken by
that night, he would support impeachment—but The Endgame and several
witness accounts dispute this. At any rate, the wily GOP leader had settled on
his new play: limiting the impeachment to Trump and thereby installing Vice
President Pence as his successor. Indeed, in his conversations with senior
Democrats on Wednesday morning, he made it sound like he had never
really supported Trump in the first place.

At Mar-a-Lago, the ominous horns of “Ride of the Valkyries” blared across

the grand ballroom as speechwriter Peter Bartos got one of the club’s
workers to cue up some Wagner on the sound system and set a suitably
apocalyptic mood to wake the other junior staffers. In his sleeping cubicle,
Harry Katsouros rolled off the blowup mattress and slipped groggily back
into the suit he’d been wearing for ten days straight. Gathering with NSC
colleagues at breakfast in the dining room, he noticed that several faces were
missing. They had packed up and quit during the night. Those who stayed
behind—mainly young conservatives in their twenties and early thirties—
looked shell-shocked. Some were watching Fox News on phones or tablets.
As cameras showed more National Guard units forming up and staging
outside major cities, guests on air said sources inside Mar-a-Lago described
President Trump as increasingly despondent and isolated. Again and again,
hosts replayed clips of Trump’s “by any means necessary” video from the
night before. Looking around the table, Katsouros could see the sickening
truth starting to sink in. The President of the United States would rather
plunge the nation into civil war than yield power peacefully.

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In his private wing of the estate, the commander-in-chief was having a
gloomy breakfast with Stephen Miller, chief of staff Rudy Giuliani, and a
handful of other senior aides. Rumors were swirling that rogue elements at
the FBI had obtained sealed indictments against Don Jr. and Eric, and were
planning to arrest Trump’s sons when they came to join him in Florida. So
the boys had called that morning to say it was safer to stay put in New York.
Even worse, Ivanka and Jared Kushner and taken their children and flown
back to D.C. just before 8:00 a.m.—ostensibly to shore up support for her
father in the capital, but the president felt abandoned.

While they were eating, National Security Advisor Sebastian Gorka blustered
in talking about the “final putsch,” and played a video for Trump on his
phone. Drone footage showed a tide of demonstrators flooding down 6th
Street with shields and battering rams. Organizers told a news camera that
they were marching south to break the siege of the Mall and bring supplies to
the encircled protesters there. “We won’t be stopped this time,” one
promised. “They’d have to shoot us… And there are more of us than they
have bullets.” Trump looked around the room, seemingly judging everyone’s
reactions.

“They’re giving us no choice,” the president said at last. “Tell the Army to do
what they have to do.” According to two witnesses, Giuliani laughed it off as a
joke. But Miller reminded Trump of the existence of a draft presidential
proclamation designated Presidential Emergency Action Document 022A.
This was one of a set of then-top secret directives first filed in the 1950s to
ensure continuity of government in the event of nuclear war—and most
recently updated in March 2021 after the Super Bowl attack. They had
already used PEADs 009A, 009B, 009C, 011, 012, and 015A in activating

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Operation ROSEWATER, shutting down communications, and initiating the
nationwide Guard mobilization.

Trump had wanted to also use PEAD 019A—which enabled mass arrests of
any of the 2.2 million Americans in Homeland Security’s secret “Aspen
Nexus” database of potential subversives—to round up Antifa and Trump
Out leaders. But such an operation was determined to be impossible amidst
the coast-to-coast disorder, and the subsequent congressional probe found
that the database was too sloppy to have satisfied that purpose anyway.

The function of PEAD 022A, in turn, was essentially to put federal troops on
full war footing against the civilian population they were attempting to
subdue. It codified a principle that had been part of Operation GARDEN
PLOT (the antecedent to ROSEWATER) since at least 1978: that military
forces acting to quell a civil disturbance could only use “full firepower” when
“the consequence of failure to completely subdue the riot would be imminent
overthrow of the government.”

By activating 022A, Miller argued, Trump could legally order the use of lethal
force to defend the Mall. It wouldn’t be authorizing a massacre, he said—as
soon as the most lawless and violent armed extremists in the mob had been
neutralized, everyone else would see that the government meant business
and beat a quick retreat. At this, witnesses later told investigators, Gorka
concurred, offering an anecdote about Napoleon employing a “whiff of
grapeshot” to restore order in Paris during the French Revolution. The
administration’s only hope, he said, was to show decisive strength against the
rebels. Trump did not have to think long before rendering a decision: “Do it.”

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At around 9:35 a.m., SCRAG Zeller was overseeing a meeting in the Joint
Operations Center when he received a direct cell phone call from the
president. He stepped outside to have the conversation in private, but
returned about five minutes later and informed senior DHS officials that the
White House had declared the government in imminent danger of
overthrow, and that JTF-NCR had been authorized by presidential
proclamation to use any force required to defend the Mall and its environs
from the armed “insurgent” columns converging on it. Leaving the stunned
conference room, the SCRAG found Brigadier General Galen Wood and
passed on the commander-in-chief’s message. Now it was up to Wood to
transmit the orders revising his troops’ Rules for the Use of Force.

Yet as he thought over the implications, Wood hesitated. Zeller and his
civilian bosses seemingly imagined that snipers would just pick off some
armed Antifa types in the crowd and that would be that. But Wood had been
in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was never that simple. Defending the
Mall with “full firepower” meant that innocent members of the crowd would
die. Perhaps this could have been justified if the demonstrations were
genuinely a murderous riot. That’s what he’d thought he was coming to
Washington to suppress. But the past several days had complicated that
notion in the general’s mind. Yes, he’d seen the drone photos of gun-toting
protesters. But he’d also seen thousands-strong peaceful assemblies with his
own eyes. Many of the detainees he’d seen at FedExField outwardly seemed
like normal citizens. And just that morning, he’d spoken with his 20-year-old
daughter McKenna, who was interning in Boston after her sophomore year at
Suffolk University. She said she’d joined the protests there after seeing
Trump’s latest video. Many of her friends were protesting with her. No,
Wood couldn’t give that order. He told Zeller that the president’s directive

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would put his soldiers in danger of using force unlawfully, and couldn’t be
implemented in its current form.

The SCRAG relayed this refusal back to Mar-a-Lago, and at 10:02 a.m.,
Trump called Wood with his personal cell. “I gave you a direct order,” the
president said, according to the general’s subsequent testimony. “The law
says that I can order full firepower, and I’m ordering full firepower.” But it
wasn’t just blunt commands. Trump intoned dire warnings about imminent
communist revolution, and heaped flattery on the one-star general—telling
him he was the only man who could save America, and praising him as the
“next Patton.” He reminded Wood that Douglas MacArthur had forcefully
dispersed the 1932 Bonus March protesters in Washington and, in his telling,
become a national hero for it. “Even Abe Lincoln had to use full firepower
when there was a rebellion,” he said. “They gave him no choice.” Some
journalists have speculated that Trump may have also offered a pardon for
any killings that might occur, but during the Romney-Porter hearings Wood
explicitly denied this.

Nonetheless, the brigadier general had become close with his commander-in-
chief during their several-times-a-day phone calls, and Wood found himself
struggling to resist. During the call, he agreed to loosen the RUF to allow
lethal force in response to potentially deadly attacks like thrown bricks or
glass bottles. This seemed to appease Trump for the moment. But after
hanging up, Wood felt himself come to his senses. He realized that what he’d
just promised was legally dubious, presidential proclamation or not, and
consulted two JAG officers, who both concurred that such a change would
likely be unlawful. He then called General Glen VanHerck at USNORTHCOM
and told him what had transpired. Horrified, the four-star ordered him to

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leave the rules as they were. And so, the troops on the street received no
special authorization as the swelling columns of demonstrators bore down on
them.

D
RUMS AND WHISTLES echoed down 6th Street as over 40,000

Trump Out participants marched steadily south toward the Mall.

Those at the front carried heavy mobile shields—sturdy wooden
doors taken off their hinges and faced with aluminum foil to block
government pain rays. Others had felled telephone poles to form battering
rams, or wielded wire cutters to get through crowd-control netting. Almost
everyone in the vanguard had helmets, goggles, and gas masks. One of those
masked figures was Kayla Weber, the 22-year-old Shake Shack employee
who’d been protesting since the first White House vigil the night Michael
Glazer was shot. She struggled to see over the heads of taller guys in front of
her, and just tried to avoid losing her footing in the dense mass of people.

In three consecutive intersections, National Guard shield walls had blocked

their path, only to retreat as the demonstrators’ own shields—bolstered by
the weight of onrushing numbers—slammed into their formations and drove
them back. Flashbangs exploded amidst the tightly packed crowd, followed
by thick white blankets of tear gas. But between her earplugs and the mask,
Weber hardly noticed them. The dull thuds outside faded beneath the heavy
sound of her own panting breath, and her vision had tightened to the
bouncing, constricted view through the goggles. With the crowd pressing
behind her, she couldn’t have stopped if she wanted to.

At N Street, about 12 blocks north of the Mall, the Guard had unrolled bales
of concertina wire in front of their positions, and a black ADS Humvee idled

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behind them, pointing its dish at the approaching mass of demonstrators.
Yet this time, the people were prepared. Closing ranks with the shields to
block the pain rays, they charged forward through smoke and sparks, jabbing
lasers into the eyes of the guardsmen trying to pick protest leaders off with
nonlethal weapons. The crowd slowed, methodically cutting its way through
the wire, and then swarmed into the breach. Support platoons had to rush
forward just to delay them long enough for the ADS crew to back up and
escape.

In the JOC, Brig. Gen. Wood’s officers were weighing their options. Unlike
the under-equipped protesters trapped on the Mall behind a thick and well-
defended cordon, the demonstrators now marching to their rescue were
prepared to resist nonlethal attacks—and were easily plowing through
whatever defenses JTF-NCR could scrape together and throw at them. Riot
formations that could easily contain large unshielded crowds or small groups
of goggled-and-masked Antifas were proving mere speed bumps to these new
columns. With lethal force off the table, the Joint Task Force’s best hope was
to throw even more soldiers in front of them, trying to create a phalanx thick
enough that the demonstrators’ momentum could be halted. Then, they
could attack each column from the flanks and rear—where, drone footage
showed, fewer protesters had masks or shields—and divide the crowd into
more manageable groups. But as tactical commanders reported in, it swiftly
became clear that they lacked the numbers to stop everyone at once.
Moreover, trying to stop the columns with shield walls risked creating
another crush like the one on Friday near the Watergate Hotel, and would
pose severe risk of death to demonstrators and soldiers alike. So at 10:36
a.m., Wood sent out the order to his commanders: withdraw.

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Pete Zeller came back into the ops bay minutes later, and went berzerk when
he heard what was happening. A heated verbal exchange erupted between
Zeller and Wood, with the SCRAG arguing that the general was disobeying
“direct orders from [his] commander-in-chief.” Wood got up in Zeller’s face,
towering over his slightly built counterpart. As commanding officer of the
JTF he had the final life-and-death responsibility, he said. Any orders to use
disproportionate lethal force were unlawful, and the judge advocates had
counseled him to that effect. Zeller threatened him with the destruction of
his career, but the decorated paratrooper could see which way the wind was
blowing. Congress would be meeting that afternoon, having announced
enough votes to ensure swift impeachment and removal. As far as Wood was
concerned now, it was only a matter of time before President Pence might see
things differently. This left the SCRAG with little leverage, and he eventually
backed down and slouched out of the JOC in a huff.

Back on 6th Street, Kayla Weber gradually noticed that the flashbangs had
died down, and the crowd was now moving unimpeded from block to block.
Drones still circled overhead, but the National Guard had melted out of sight.
As they passed Capital One Arena, they saw MPD riot police guarding the
improvised detention facility. A few hundred of the demonstrators rushed
the Arena, brawling with the cops hand-to-hand and smashing lobby
windows in an—ultimately successful—attempt to free the prisoners. But
Weber kept moving forward, eyes fixed up ahead on the dome of the National
Gallery of Art. That was the Mall. She remembered the footage she’d seen of
the Carole Evans beating, the “thin blue line” flag over the Lincoln Memorial,
and the failed self-immolations. Before Trump Out, she had never protested
before in her life, but over 11 days of struggle she had become an experienced

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and determined resister—now steeling herself for what would surely be
intense fighting as they tried to break the siege.

But there was no crush of shields against shields, no smothering cloud of gas.
Weber could see Army and Park Police units pulling back before them, and
the crowd just kept moving. A couple blocks before reaching the National
Gallery, they unexpectedly found themselves crossing friendly lines and
rushing in among Mall protesters. People hugged strangers and broke out
into dancing. Weber pulled her gas mask off and gulped a Coke from
someone handing out sodas outside the old Newseum building. There, she is
in the background of Reuters photographer Jim Bourg’s iconic image of a
mother and daughter’s reunion embrace after the teenage daughter had been
trapped inside the cordon all week.

At the Hay-Adams, Trump Out organizers were apprehensive when the first
reports came in that government forces were standing down. Over the past
week there had been several false reports of something similar, and the lead
organizing team was wary of some kind of trap. But as photos and videos
emerged of large crowds streaming through the cordon, the cautious
optimism turned to celebration. Actor Sean Penn, who had been staying with
the protesters on the Mall all week, gave out high-fives in the war room.
Civilian drones were still being aggressively shot down, so they couldn’t get a
direct bird’s eye view, but as the electric news spread, there was an audible
change in the mood of the crowd down in Lafayette Square. Trucks rolling in
with the relief columns brought badly needed food, water, and supplies. After
a week of granola bars and “swamp scum,” it was like Thanksgiving. On the
Ellipse, someone was handing out still-warm pizza. And soon, a volunteer

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triumphantly lumbered into the Hay-Adams lobby weighted down by as
much Popeye’s fried chicken as she could carry.

L-team logistics coordinator Francesca Alvarez, a Boston Consulting Group

executive with a raspy voice and buzzed hair, came charging into the war
room just as organizers were digging in. “They could tighten this up again
any minute,” she warned. “We need to get more diesel for the generators just
in case.” Calls were placed to volunteers elsewhere in the city, and pretty
soon, several thousand gallons of fuel were on their way. But few expected to
need it. Over the next hour, confirmation came in that police and military
units all around the cordon were standing down and allowing free passage off
the Mall. People trying to enter the protest zone were still subject to search,
but they only seemed to be concerned about weapons and terror threats. As
word spread on television and over the revived internet that the iron ring was
melting in Washington, residents and visitors from around the district
streamed back into public spaces by the tens of thousands. With the threat of
a renewed government crackdown seemingly receding, the carnival
atmosphere of just after Trump’s departure returned to Lafayette Square.

Cable news cameras covered it all, and the viewer-in-chief was taking it all in
from his Mar-a-Lago couch—swinging ever more violently between sullen
indifference, panicked paranoia, and incandescent rage. Aides bringing lunch
set the tray down and backed out of the room as he spat accusations at them
and threatened ruin. Broadcasts endlessly repeated video of protesters
storming Capital One arena, and the shaky footage from inside as police
retreated and detained activists were set free. At 1:31 p.m., even OANN
acknowledged what other outlets had been reporting for over an hour.
Several hundred D.C. police officers had begun an unofficial strike action—

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refusing to deploy for anti-demonstration operations or simply staying home
altogether.

Furious at the apparent stand-down, Trump had been trying to reach Pete
Zeller since about 11:30 a.m., jabbing his fingers against his iPhone screen as
though more force might make him pick up. But the SCRAG wasn’t
answering. And his staff couldn’t find him. Zeller, it later emerged, had
ducked into a bathroom after his altercation with Brig. Gen. Wood and called
his personal attorney to discuss the legal jeopardy that he had just put
himself in by attempting to execute the president’s “full firepower” order.
Wood wasn’t answering, either. His aide-de-camp told Trump that the
general felt ill and had left for a brief rest, but transcripts from inside the
JOC show that this was not the case. Locked out of direct access to the
leadership in D.C., Trump fired off a string of frustrated Facebook posts
promising that “the COUP will be defeated,” and that “Our Military is on MY
side … Congress (treasonous!) may have to go.”

Shortly after 1:45 p.m., Stephen Miller entered Trump’s private wing to share
information he’d just confirmed with an ally in the Pentagon: the substance
of PEAD 022A had never been communicated to the tactical units of JTF-
NCR. In effect, the Joint Task Force was refusing presidential orders.
Further, the proclamation itself had somehow not been made public since its
signing. Ordinarily, it would have been filed with the Federal Register, but
with the National Archives and Records Administration building just off the
Mall closed due to the demonstrations, NARA was operating out of two
backup sites in Maryland and Northern Virginia—and somehow the message
from Mar-a-Lago via the White House never got through. Even the social
media staffers believed to have promulgated the proclamation directly were

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found not to have done so. Dan Scavino, the fire-eating social media director,
canned two of them on the spot.

We don’t know exactly how Trump reacted to this latest blow, but about 15
minutes after Miller entered, they emerged together and made their way to
the estate’s secure room. Miller had informed his Pentagon contact that Brig.
Gen. Wood would shortly be relieved of command, and instructed him to
send the revised RUF to subordinate commanders through alternate
channels. But in the course of trying to do so, the contact learned from a
USNORTHCOM officer that Secretary Jack had sent out word to ignore any
unusual or erratic orders from the White House. Sebastian Gorka, Harry
Katsouros, and a handful of other NSC staffers had just entered the secure
room for a hastily-called meeting when Miller’s contact texted him with this
latest bombshell.

When the deputy chief of staff read key details aloud, Trump’s reaction was
volcanic. “He should be shot,” Katsouros recalls him raving. The president’s
wild calls for revenge were so vehement, so profane, so hateful that the young
staffer was viscerally frightened. After several minutes, the fever broke, and
Trump was pouty again. Calls for execution or scatological humiliation
subsided, and he started thinking through his options. The bottom line,
Trump told the room, was that there was no time to lose. J.J. Jack needed to
be fired and arrested to thwart the coup.

Gorka was pacing and stroking his goatee. “Mr. President,” he asked. “Did
you ever see Seven Days in May?” Trump said he had. Katsouros wasn’t
familiar. Seven Days in May, Gorka recalled, was a classic 1964 film about a
military plot to overthrow a democratically elected president. The plot was

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foiled, but only because that president and his advisors acted carefully and
quietly to uncover the scheme without tipping their hand to the plotters. The
film taught a valuable lesson, Gorka said. It was unclear who all in the
military had joined Jack in his treason. If he caught wind that he was about
to be sacked, he would surely try to overthrow Trump before that could
happen. And he could succeed, with blood running in the streets of Palm
Beach. Instead, Gorka urged caution. Better to feel out who’s still loyal first.
Figure out who was on the president’s side, formulate a plan, and then strike
Jack with overwhelming force before he could react. Ultimately, the
president agreed, and Miller started his attempts to determine the exact size
and nature of the conspiracy.

A
T THE SECURE Maryland location referred to during the Romney-
Porter hearings as Site G, congressional leaders watched as
members from both houses arrived in a steady caravan of black
Capitol Police SUVs. As key staffers raced to draw up preliminary documents
to begin the formal impeachment process, Speaker Ryan and Majority
Leader McConnell huddled with comms advisors drafting their joint
statement. A small number of media, sworn to secrecy about the location,
had been invited to the facility, and were now milling about in a nearby room
tiding themselves over with coffee and candy originally intended for senators
sheltering underground during a nuclear exchange. Ryan wanted to hurry up
and get this on TV, but McConnell’s people were fussing over some of the
language. “Stupid stuff,” a speechwriter for the then-speaker recalls, “but
they wanted to avoid any of the blame for what had already happened.” At
one point, it appeared that the wording was locked in, and the journos were
ushered into the small briefing room where cameras were already being set
up. But the majority leader balked at something, and the press was left

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squirming for another half hour while the two sides hammered out final
issues just down the hall.

Finally, at 2:49 p.m., Tim Ryan and Mitch McConnell walked out to twin
podiums, flanked by a dozen senior legislators from both parties. Some of
them looked noticeably bulkier under their suits or blouses from wearing
Kevlar vests. The speaker greeted his fellow citizens watching at home,
explaining that Congress was taking “swift, bipartisan action” to bring the
present crisis to an end. “We have come together,” Ryan said, “to put a stop
to this president using his power against the millions of Americans peacefully
protesting his actions.” Those actions included the “unconstitutional
shutdown of much of our nation’s communications infrastructure,” the
“declaration of martial law to suppress peaceful protest,” and “deliberate
incitements to violence.”

More guardedly, McConnell said Republicans were joining in impeachment

because “The president’s psychological state no longer allows him to perform
the duties of the office.” As a result, the majority leader said, he had “made
statements that threaten law and order in America … and we will act very
quickly to stop that.” McConnell had resisted Democratic pressure to
acknowledge Trump’s attempts—going back to June 14—to order lethal force
against the demonstrators, arguing that those claims were unproven despite
his own wife Elaine Chao resigning from the cabinet over them. Instead, he
merely expressed “deep concern … over the way our military has been used”
by the president.

Ryan announced that Congress “will begin voting this afternoon,” but
expressed hope that President Trump would “take this last opportunity and

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resign” to bring the country’s agony to a merciful conclusion. McConnell
finished by urging viewers to be “reassured” that “at the conclusion of this
process, President Pence will put America on the road to recovery.” They
each took a handful of questions, offered no new substantive information in
the answers, and led the bipartisan delegation out of the briefing room.

Immediately, aides rushed up to the leaders with their smartphones. The

networks were all reporting on a presidential proclamation that had just
gone out on the White House’s social media channels. Donald Trump had
authorized “any force necessary,” including “full firepower” to defeat the
“terrorist groups” in the capital and prevent the overthrow of the
government. It was terrifying, but also baffling. The news had been reporting
that the troops around the Mall were standing down. Were the proclamation
posts some kind of hack? Was the military refusing orders? Was it all some
bizarre Trumpist ploy? Nobody could say. While the reporters were told to
stand by for another statement, leadership from both parties gaggled in one
of Site G’s communications centers to gather more information and
strategize a response.

As if taking a cue from the president’s fortunes, dark storm clouds boiled up
over Palm Beach by late afternoon, and rain began to lash the windows of
Mar-a-Lago. As lightning flickered to the west and rumbled through the
estate’s thick walls, news thundered in of one betrayal after another. As the
text of the proclamation carpeted the airwaves, a succession of Trump’s most
loyal cabinet members abandoned ship. Acting Attorney General Gallup,
stunned to only be notified about PEAD 022A’s activation minutes before it
went out, faxed a terse letter of resignation from Washington. Clearly written
for posterity rather than his boss, it condemned the president’s “decision to

20
take these actions wholly without my knowledge, consultation, or approval.”
Bobby Jindal at HHS, James Comer at Labor, and Cynthia Lummis at
Interior all announced their resignations publicly, casting themselves as
patriots who tried and failed to rein in the president’s worst impulses. As
Jindal put it, “My goal was always to prevent President Trump from taking
the unconstitutional and immoral actions he has taken this week.” Key allies
outside the cabinet were deserting him as well. Army Secretary Matt Caesar
had been his most solid man in the Pentagon, but now posted his resignation
to Twitter and stopped answering his phone. Longtime legislative advisor
Paul Teller, who’d been staying at Mar-a-Lago, left a handwritten note with
Giuliani’s secretary and left by taxi. On the drive to the airport, Teller could
still see several hundred protesters massed on the other side of the bridge—
braving the storm’s downpour rather than suspending the demonstration.

As other senior advisors likewise packed up and left, Harry Katsouros found
himself included in more of the president’s briefings. Between these updates,
he sometimes lingered in Trump’s living room answering questions the boss
had about the situation in Washington. At one point, he received a summons
and came in to find Trump watching Seven Days in May on his television.
Sitting there on his couch with a MAGA hat low over his eyes and a jacket
draped around his shoulders, he seemed smaller and more broken than
Katsouros had ever seen. In 2018, Katsouros had written in the pro-Trump
journal American Nationalist that the president was “always in control …
setting the rules that everyone else plays by.” Now, the most powerful man in
the free world was zoning out with a movie as his administration crumbled
around him.

21
Disillusionment gnawing his gut almost to nausea, for the first time
Katsouros seriously considered following Teller and so many others out the
door. His phone buzzed. He unlocked it and felt a wave of relief. It was an
email from his sister in Brooklyn—the cell networks there were still flooded,
but Gmail had just become accessible again. She was fine. Harry played out
in his mind what he would tell her about all this when he saw her again. He
found it hard to find the right words.

The Congressional leaders holed up at Site G were finding it hard to find the
right words, too. After flirting with a constitutional crisis many times since
February 2017, the United States had now plunged headlong into its worst
since the Civil War. The president and commander-in-chief had given facially
legal orders to the military, and the military had effectively refused them.
That cast serious doubt on the ability of the nation’s elected constitutional
authorities to control the armed forces. Tim Ryan and Mitch McConnell
knew full well that “Who is in charge?” would be the first question they heard
the moment they stepped back out in front of the news cameras, and right
now, they didn’t have a satisfactory answer. As they worked to craft a new
statement to the press, advisors warned that acknowledging the severity of
the crisis could be disastrous.

From a domestic standpoint, the civilian population needed to know that no

massacre by government forces was imminent. If D.C. descended into panic,
violence could break out unintentionally and get people killed. Civilians
might stampede out of the city and trample people in the streets fleeing the
threat of the Army’s “full firepower.” And with Wall Street aiming to reopen
markets by midday Thursday, fears of all-out urban warfare would leave
regulators with no choice but to keep the exchanges shuttered.

22
But reassuring Americans would require telling them that the president’s
orders would not be followed. As national security aides pointed out, this
would rattle U.S. allies and risk enticing foreign foes to exploit the chaos in
Washington. And there were already signs that this was beginning. Hours
ago, during the middle of the night in Asia, a chemical tanker had caught fire
just off Sin Cowe Island—a tiny Vietnamese outpost in the South China Sea
that was claimed by Beijing. The ship was carrying a large cargo of
acrylonitrile, and the inferno was blanketing the military garrison with highly
toxic smoke. The CIA suspected a Chinese operation intended to make the
Vietnamese evacuate so they could land their own troops and seize the
island. The incident could well escalate, and the president had fired or
alienated his National Security Advisor, Director of National Intelligence,
Secretary of State, and Secretary of Defense in the space of nine days. Now,
the man with the commander-in-chief’s ear in global affairs was a known
hack who had just months earlier been hawking personalized birthday
greetings on Cameo for $45 a pop—and won a spot back in the White House
by posting Twitter videos likening Trump’s vengeance against the Deep State
to a “kraken.”

If suddenly the world got the idea that the United States military was in open
mutiny, the powder keg could ignite. Beijing could easily escalate its actions
in the South China Sea, or conceivably even strike Taiwan. Satellite
intelligence showed unusually high Russian military activity along the
Ukrainian border, too—who was to say Putin wouldn’t seize the opportunity
to grab more land? In Pyongyang, Tehran, Ankara, and a dozen other foreign
capitals, strongmen could interpret America’s paralysis as a golden
opportunity to invade their neighbors or carry out genocide.

23
No, Ryan and McConnell concluded, they had to somehow search for a
middle ground. Signal to the world that American might could still be
effectively projected abroad, but that citizens were safe at home. After
agonizing deliberations among the bipartisan leadership staff, at 4:10 p.m.,
the speaker and majority leader released another joint statement strongly
condemning the president’s proclamation, but expressing “relief that
President Trump has decided against attempting to enforce such an
obviously illegal and immoral order … and that the honor, discipline, and
good order of the U.S. military remains intact.” It was, one speechwriter later
recalled to The Lodestar’s Conor Friedersdorf, “absolute B.S., but we didn’t
have the luxury of being honest.” The leaders decided not to appear again
before the press, knowing that their fragile story would easily collapse under
questioning.

A
S CONGRESS DID its best “nothing to see here, folks” act for the

public, behind closed doors, legislators were frantically trying to

figure out where the military really stood. Adding to the confusion,
when Sen. Romney reached Secretary Jack by phone, he denied rumors that
he had given any general instructions to disobey the president. Jack later
testified that this was true in the sense that he had only warned about orders
that may be unlawful or spurious anyway, but at the time Romney took it as
an indication that Jack was still on Trump’s side. After Jon Huntsman
confirmed through a Pentagon source that Brig. Gen. Wood had indeed
refused to carry out the “full firepower” order, they needed to learn where his
uniformed superiors stood. Through intermediaries, senior opposition
figures made discreet overtures to Trump’s handpicked Chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley, and to the four-star “combatant

24
commanders” who actually exercise operational control over units in the
field. They needed to know whether they would be willing to turn their guns
on demonstrators at the president’s command, and whether they would
regard the in-progress impeachment as legitimate.

Milley, according to persons familiar with these overtures, was extremely

cautious in his reply, but seemed to indicate he would defer to the political
process. Of the combatant commanders that responded to the congressional
feelers, all were likewise tight-lipped, but no one signaled support for war
against civilians. Among them, the most important was Gen. VanHerck at
USNORTHCOM, who was directly responsible for all the troops carrying out
Operation ROSEWATER in the Lower 48, including the men and women of
JTF-NCR in Washington. VanHerck allegedly implied that he would not
allow units under his command to use rules of engagement like those
authorized by Trump’s proclamation.

While some commentators subsequently criticized Milley and VanHerck for

not being more forthcoming, they were in a truly impossible position. Both
realized that a definitive statement would carry the odor of a
pronunciamento—a kind of coup where the military announces it will no
longer follow the leader’s orders. These had once been common in Spain and
Mexico, but in America such a grievous breach of the constitutional order
was unthinkable. That was a bell that truly could never be unrung. And there
was no way to safely explain this worry to the opposition. Both generals were
shrewd enough to understand that anything they said would leak. For the
same reason, VanHerck was unable to issue a general order on the legality of
“full firepower,” as he would have wished. But he did call each of his joint

25
task force commanders by phone to make sure they were all on the same
page, and warned them not to say anything concrete if they were queried.

Yet as maddeningly oblique answers from top brass trickled in over the space
of a few hours, House and Senate leadership gradually concluded that the
military was not, as Trump had menacingly claimed, “on [his] side” about
impeachment. In Site G’s lecture hall-style legislative chambers, committee
work and voting continued into the evening free from the fear that Humvees
would roll up on the president’s orders and halt the proceedings.

At the same time, McConnell was leading backchannel efforts to avert

impeachment altogether. Even under highly accelerated procedures, the
whole process would take several days, and every day the crisis dragged on
was costing the economy tens of billions of dollars. If the majority leader
could convince Trump that his removal was inescapable, perhaps he could be
persuaded to resign immediately and save face. One of McConnell’s aides
called White House Counsel Rob Bennett and made an offer: if the president
stepped down that night, GOP leadership would encourage President Pence
to give him and his family full pardons.

Yet even as Republicans envisioned a Pence presidency, Democratic

leadership was getting furious blowback from Trump Out organizers. When
the Hay-Adams war room heard McConnell’s reference to “President Pence”
during his afternoon presser, there had been a chorus of boos and curse
words. Sarah Turk led other L-team principals in contacting Tim Ryan,
Chuck Schumer, and others to aggressively reject that possibility. Trump
Out’s demands were clear and non-negotiable, they said. Donald Trump and
Mike Pence must resign or be removed. If Trump merely resigned in favor of

26
Pence, the movement would have no choice but to escalate. The national
general strike would widen, the transport shutdowns would worsen, and the
economy would be brought to its knees indefinitely. Pence would be besieged
inside the White House from day one. Only removing both would prevent
that. Constitutionally, this would make Representative Ryan, as Speaker of
the House, the next president.

To his credit, Ryan was cool to this idea. He knew his Republican colleagues,
and he understood that having Pence as an alternative was the only reason
many of them were even considering impeachment. The speaker knew that
ousting their own party from the White House would be a vastly harder sell,
and that his leadership on removing Trump would be undermined if it could
be seen as his own grab for power. Ryan’s chief of staff Frank McGregor
explained as much on a dinnertime videoconference with the L-team. Turk
and her fellow organizers said they appreciated the speaker’s concerns, but
that the matter was out of their hands. The movement would not accept a
compromise. In fact, they were about to conclude leadership elections that
could wind up bringing far more radical demands into the platform. If Ryan
thought it was hard to turn Senate Republicans against Pence even after his
complicity in Trump’s crimes, getting them to agree on abolishing the
electoral college or nationalizing banks would be downright impossible.

“We want to help you steer this to a solution that’s workable for everyone,”
Turk said. Legislative outreach coordinator Mina Love, a longtime staffer to
the late Rep. Elijah Cummings, suggested two approaches that might
strengthen the speaker’s hand. First, he would recuse himself from both
impeachment proceedings, acknowledging that he didn’t want to create even
the appearance of personal conflict of interest. Second, congressional

27
Democrats would promise—if the GOP would go along with removing
Pence—to appoint a Republican vice president and serve out the remainder
of the term as a bipartisan government of national reconciliation. It would be
unprecedented, yes, but so was everything else that was happening. If the
new administration swiftly pardoned the rounded-up demonstrators, they
could go a long way toward restoring order in the capital and getting America
working again. McGregor promised to take those suggestions back to his boss
and see what they could do.

After a contentious meeting with his staff, Ryan agreed to explore options for
removing Mike Pence as well. Yet since Democrats had the votes in the
House on their own, the negotiation would have to take place in the upper
chamber. As Senate leaders from both parties sat around over pizza and
Chinese takeout finalizing their plans for the upcoming trial, Minority Whip
Dick Durbin explained that the protesters in Washington had explicitly
rejected only impeaching Trump as a solution to the crisis. Trump Out had
just put out another statement reiterating its demand that the vice president
be impeached as well, citing his steadfast support for President Trump’s
unconstitutional and illegal orders. Constituents back home agreed, he said,
flooding opposition legislators with messages saying that they would join the
general strike if Pence got to stay.

Mitch McConnell wasn’t having it. Democrats had “no case” against the vice
president, he said, and the idea of Pence’s complicity was “totally
speculative.” If liberals wanted to turn this into a partisan bid for the White
House, Republicans would not play along. The meeting broke down, and
McConnell warned that unless the other side could find a way to accept
Pence, he would have to reconsider his support for removing Trump. The

28
GOP senators and their aides theatrically stormed out, leaving Schumer,
Durbin, and their colleagues trying to guess whether it was a bluff.

Back at Mar-a-Lago at around 6:45 p.m., speechwriter Peter Bartos brought

Trump a printout from the far-right website called The Gateway Pundit. It
was an article headlined “Troops Will Resist Generals’ Coup,” which claimed
that there was a junta of military officers loyal to Trump who saw generals
like Glen VanHerck and Galen Wood as treasonous. Their refusal to use “full
firepower” against the Washington terrorists “prove[d] their intent to
overthrow the duly elected president,” the article quoted an anonymous
colonel as saying. “We swore an oath to defend the Constitution against all
enemies, foreign and domestic,” the source said, “and we will defend our
president against this coup... There are more of us than they can imagine.”

Trump’s spirits brightened immediately. According to Ben Carson’s

testimony before the Romney-Porter Committee, the president started telling
everyone in earshot that generals VanHerck and Wood were about to be
arrested. When the story was picked up by Breitbart and The Epoch Times—a
pro-Trump newspaper associated with the Falun Gong movement—Trump’s
confidence only solidified, even though those outlets were merely echoing
Gateway Pundit’s reporting. He crowed to aides that any time now, the
traitors would be arrested, and with loyal officers back in command, the
situation in Washington could be quickly and easily brought back under
control. After praising Brig. Gen. Wood all week as “a real killer,” “so tough
you wouldn’t believe,” “right out of central casting,” and “maybe our next
Patton,” now he was “probably a socialist” who “hates America.” But, Trump
said, “this colonel is somebody special.”

29
Yet for all Trump’s visions of loyalists secretly plotting to round up their
generals at gunpoint, an extensive FBI-DoD investigation found no evidence
that there was ever any conspiracy of active-duty officers to stage a mutiny or
arrest their commanders. And despite ongoing litigation, The Gateway
Pundit has refused to divulge the identities of any of the anonymous sources
it quoted in the original article, leading many commentators to speculate that
the whole thing was a hoax.

But Trump’s belief in his imminent deliverance seemed absolute. At 7:15

p.m., he received a visit from Paula White-Cain, a spiritual advisor to the
president who’d infamously proclaimed that “to say no to President Trump
would be saying no to God.” The forces trying to tear him down were demon-
worshippers, she told him, and genuine Christians across America were
firmly behind him. She had someone take a photo of her praying over him,
and posted it to her social media with the caption “‘I will be an enemy to your
enemies and will oppose those who oppose you.’ - Exodus 23:22.”

For the president’s remaining supporters around the country, the crescendo
of events seemed biblical indeed. On talk radio and social media, right-wing
commentators were making the case that the revolution they’d long warned
of was finally at hand. As Sean Hannity put it: “These may be the last hours
of America.” Historian and polemicist Carlisle A. Hendrix called on Trump to
act as a Caesar and assume dictatorial powers “so that the American regime
and the American people might live.” Bryce Ethan Tapp told his 275,000+
followers that “Phase 4 has begun. The genocide begins tonight. Unless we
stop them.” Lurid rumors spread online that Antifa and BLM gangs had
begun rampaging through majority-white neighborhoods—rioting, looting,
and burning people alive in their beds. Viral Facebook posts purported to list

30
the next set of suburbs to be hit. In well-manicured Republican communities
like Simi Valley, California and Highlands Ranch, Colorado, homeowners
patrolled sleepy cul-de-sacs with assault rifles at the ready—waiting for
invaders that never came. Some barricaded themselves inside like in The
Purge and retreated to panic rooms. Others turned their trucks into mobile
arsenals and bugged out to cabins in the wilderness.

In the private wing at Mar-a-Lago, the president was back to raving about the
patriotic colonel when Seb Gorka and Harry Katsouros came in at 7:30 p.m.
to deliver a briefing on the latest spasms of violence sparked by the “full
firepower” proclamation. Earlier in the evening, amidst continued rioting in
Atlanta, gunfire had broken out near Georgia Tech and 3rd Infantry soldiers
had killed three civilians. Chris White, DaeSean Jones, and Zion McKinney—
all young African-American men in their twenties—were pronounced dead at
the scene. The subsequent investigation could not conclusively determine
which side started shooting first, but found that all three had been armed,
and that all three had fired multiple rounds at the soldiers from as close as 35
yards. Yet because bystanders apparently removed their handguns before
investigators could arrive, it was initially reported that they had been
unarmed. As a result, both sides took this as a sign that shoot-to-kill orders
had been given in response to the president’s wishes. This seemed strange to
Katsouros, since PEAD 022A had specifically been activated in reference to
the demonstrations in Washington. But he was revolted to see Trump react
to the report with fist-pumping bravado.

Trump asked if that was everything. “Not quite,” Gorka said. Because the
shootings had taken place within sight of CNN headquarters, there had been
a firestorm of media coverage—and ever more defections of administration

31
officials—so Atlanta had taken top billing in the briefing. But an even more
alarming situation was unfolding in a little Mississippi town called Quitman
(due to a typo by Katsouros, Gorka pronounced it to the president as “quiet
man”). A large militia had stormed a local courthouse, shot two police
officers, and declared its allegiance to Trump. Governor Tate Reeves had
been trying to reach the president all day, but in all the chaos hadn’t gotten
through—and although Secretary Wolf had learned about the siege by
morning, had been too absorbed with the macro crisis to notify POTUS. So
now Trump was hearing for the first time about the MDSF threatening to kill
five hostages including the county sheriff—all in his name. Finally, humanity
flickered back into the president’s face. Katsouros thought he looked
bewildered by the news. Trump said something to the effect of “well,
obviously I don’t have anything to do with that.” Gorka suggested he put out
a statement to that effect.

F
ACEDOWN ON THE carpet of a second-floor courtroom, Sheriff Wade

Brock wriggled at the zip-tie pinning his wrists behind his back. His
shoulders throbbed and hands tingled from circulation that had
been constrained for almost 24 hours. As SWAT teams gathered outside the
night before, the Mississippi Delta Security Force had gone about fortifying
Quitman’s courthouse against anything short of an airstrike. They had
hauled their .50 caliber machine gun up onto the roof, reinforced sniper’s
positions with bags of dirt from the lawn, hung blackout drapes over the
windows, and barricaded the entrances with heavy furniture. The militiamen
preferred the advantage of their night vision goggles, so Brock and his fellow
hostages had been kept in near-total darkness. He could hear the sirens
echoing from outside, and the throbbing diesels of a BearCat somewhere in

32
the distance. Every now and then, there was a crack from a high-powered
rifle as the MDSF bared its teeth at law enforcement testing their perimeter.

A few times through the night, the guards gave him little paper cups of water,
but they refused his requests to use the bathroom and soon he could feel a
warm soak spread across the pants of his uniform. When the heavy, booted
footfalls receded, he whispered to his fellow hostages nearby and made sure
everyone was okay. One of his deputies had gotten a broken hand during the
raid on the jail, but overall they were holding up well.

At some point, a tall shape loomed out of the blackness and barked at them
to pipe down. Brock recognized the voice of General Steel Raven, the MDSF’s
commander. “Mark,” he said, using the self-styled guerrilla’s real name.
“You’re from a good family. Think of what you’re doing.” For the first time,
Steel Raven tacitly acknowledged his true identity, answering gruffly that
he’d thought everything through perfectly. “Your beef isn’t with us,” Brock
said. “Anyone you kill here are just good Mississippi folks.” But the militia
leader stalked off silently and disappeared into the inky darkness. Brock tried
not to get discouraged. He knew he wasn’t going to win Mark Beauman or his
men over in a single conversation. But his training and experience told him
that building rapport at every opportunity would lower the chances they
would kill hostages, and maybe create an opening to defuse the crisis.

When he’d awakened on Wednesday morning, Brock could hear Steel Raven
in a nearby room, talking to the FBI hostage negotiator on a walkie-talkie. He
couldn’t make out exactly what they were saying, but the tone sounded civil.

33
Shattering bangs clattered overhead. Ratatatatatatat. Militiamen shouted
orders and sharper rifle shots rang out. Ratatatatatatat. More heavy gunfire
from the roof again. Then silence. After maybe 30 seconds, Steel Raven got
back on the walkie-talkie. Sheriff Brock could hear him crystal clear now. “If
you try that one more time,” he bellowed, “the hostages die. All of them. We
are not fucking around here.”

Masked men charged into the courtroom and hauled Brock up by his
armpits. One of them slipped the hood back over his head and they carried
him out onto the balcony at the front of the building. Someone pressed his
face down into the railing and held a pistol to his skull again.

He felt a stabbing pain in one ear as the gun went off right next to the hood.
His whole head ringing, he could barely hear as one of them called out to the
police over a megaphone. “Next time that truck approaches, that goes in his
brain… Do not try a rescue. We have supplies to stay here for six months if
we have to.”

After the balcony stunt, Brock had tried talking sense into the militiamen as
they dragged him back to the courtroom. “There’s no way to win,” he told
them, hot with anger. “The government won’t back down, and if you kill me
you’ll rot in Supermax until you go insane—they won’t even let you kill
yourself.” One of them, a 6’7” monster with ‘roided out muscles bulging
under his camo, answered theatrically that they were all prepared to die.
Brock recognized the voice and frame, and instantly saw an opening to
exploit. “Ain’t you Laura Vaughn’s boy? Cody?” Startled, he said he was.
Cody VanDyne was another Clarke County kid, and the sheriff had chatted

34
with the 27-year-old mechanic probably half a dozen times over the years. In
the MDSF, he was known as SGT Modux.

“Look, Cody,” police microphones picked up Brock saying as they set him
back down on the floor, “you’ve got a bright future. Nobody needs to die
here. You sure don’t need to die for Mark—or ‘Steel Raven’—or whatever he’s
calling himself. Listen … if you can convince him to end this peacefully, I will
make sure you and the others get very soft treatment… You end this now, you
might not even go to prison. But you need to end this quick before somebody
gets killed.”

“We’re acting in the name of the legitimate government,” VanDyne

answered. “[Trump] will send the Army to clear out all the communists.” The
governor, he said, had proven his Marxist commitments when he removed
the Confederate symbols from the state flag. Brock told him calmly that the
Army wasn’t coming. The governor—conservative Republican Tate Reeves—
was anything but a communist. If they were really so sure that Trump
supported them, he said, they should ask the hostage negotiator to speak
with the president directly. The huge militiaman stamped out of the
courtroom without answering, and Brock couldn’t immediately tell if he had
made any progress. But as the morning wore on, he heard VanDyne and a
couple others talking heatedly with Steel Raven in the hallway.

Gov. Reeves arrived on scene late in the morning, and was briefed by the FBI
that the MDSF was demanding to speak with the president. He and his staff
tried to reach Trump repeatedly via several different channels, but the entire
executive branch was in chaos and nobody could get him on the phone.
Meanwhile, hostage negotiators were getting worried. Police listening

35
devices picked up some of the militiamen’s conversations, and the long delay
was making them think that Reeves was intentionally stonewalling them. At
one point, Steel Raven and his deputy discussed the possibility of executing
one hostage to demonstrate their seriousness. Having been in Quitman for
less than an hour, the FBI’s premier SWAT unit, the Hostage Rescue Team,
planned for an emergency assault in case the MDSF started killing. But it
would likely be a bloodbath. They were too well armed.

All the while, Sheriff Brock used every opportunity to build rapport with his
captors and sow doubt in their minds. He reminded them of the militiamen
who surrendered peacefully after the Malheur and Kaniksu sieges—they went
before sympathetic conservative juries and many were acquitted altogether.
But the Branch Davidians in Waco? The Weavers at Ruby Ridge? They’d
killed government agents, and gotten slaughtered for it. “If you want to kill
yourself, Mark, kill yourself,” Brock scolded Steel Raven early Wednesday
evening. “But don’t drag these boys with you.”

The MDSF commander had been getting more erratic on the phone with the
FBI negotiators. At one point, he demanded a large order of hot Italian food
as a show of good faith, only to cancel the request and accuse the police of
plotting to poison it. Minutes later, the demand was back on, with the
stipulation that it come from a specific restaurant in Hattiesburg. But when
the SWAT truck approached with the pizza, it got lit up with the .50 cal. and
was forced to withdraw.

The sun was sinking into a bank of fiery clouds by 7:15 p.m. local time, when
Steel Raven saw on the group’s lone smartphone that President Trump had
issued a statement about the standoff. The crux: “I totally condemn and

36
disavow the actions of the group that has shot and wounded several heroic
police officers and taken hostages in Quiet Man, Mississippi... If they are
truly patriotic and loyal Americans, they will lay down their weapons and
surrender immediately.”

“That’s a [psychological warfare operation], no doubt at all,” police

overheard Steel Raven reassuring his men shortly afterward. “They’re just
trying to trick us.”

At the governor’s command post two blocks away, a buff HRT commander in
body armor was leaning over a floorplan of the courthouse, walking Reeves
through their contingency plans when an urgent call came over the radio and
he bolted up the street. There was another militiaman on the balcony with a
gun to a hostage’s head. This time it was one of the sheriff’s deputies
captured at the jail. Snipers lined up shots and reported readiness to fire.
Incident command told them to hold. The negotiator was trying to get Steel
Raven on the line and figure out what was going on.

The gun went off. Before police could react, the shooter yanked the hooded
hostage by the neck and ducked back inside. A quick review of the video
footage showed that it had just been another mock execution, but the FBI
feared that the MDSF was feeling desperate enough to do something stupid.

Now, as Wade Brock wriggled at his zip-ties on the courtroom floor, he heard
heavy boots in the hallway outside. He’d heard the shot moments before, and
didn’t know whether the executions had begun. Brock strained with all his
strength, cutting the skin on his wrists, but the ties were just too strong. The
courtroom doors slammed open.

37
About 645 miles to the southeast in Mar-a-Lago’s secure room, Seb Gorka
and a clutch of NSC, FBI, DOJ, and DHS officials were briefing President
Trump on his options. As Gorka noted, the pardon power of the presidency
had been created by the Founders for exactly these situations. Sometimes
decisive executive action was exactly what was needed to defuse a crisis and
avert bloodshed. If he pardoned the MDSF, Trump might be able to get the
hostages freed—and federal pardons wouldn’t prevent them from still being
prosecuted on state charges. Given the severity of the situation, even a few
career law enforcement advisors were open to the possibility.

As the discussion unfolded, one of the president’s most fanatical allies in

Congress arrived at the estate with several aides in tow. Rep. Matt Gaetz,
who’d proudly posted to his Twitter bio Trump’s quote that “He’s a
machine…handsome and going places,” had taken every opportunity in his
young career to showcase a rabid brand of attack-dog loyalty—from
denouncing Robert Mueller’s probe as a potential “coup d’etat” in 2017 to
slamming Rep. Adam Schiff as a “malicious Captain Kangaroo” during the
2019 impeachment investigation, and supporting the death penalty for anti-
Trump rioters in 2021. Appearing now at Mar-a-Lago, Gaetz announced that
he had critical national security information for POTUS, and White House
political staffers showed him to the secure room. Trump put the briefing on
hold to hear the 39-year-old congressman’s report.

In Gaetz’s fevered telling, top legislators in both parties had made secret
overtures directly to military commanders, trying to get them to defy
legitimate civilian leadership and carry out a military coup. This was clearly
sedition. To Gaetz, though, it was also an opportunity. He said the president

38
still had the support of 130 representatives led by Minority Whip Steve
Scalise, and 25 senators, including Republican Conference Chair John
Barrasso. It would be too late to stop the articles of impeachment, but if the
seditious plot could be publicly exposed, they might be able to prevent
conviction and removal. Stephen Miller, who had joined the meeting along
with Gaetz, started to shoo out the career officials so they could freely discuss
what had to be done next.

One of the Justice Department officials stopped the president and pressed
him for an answer: pardons or no pardons? Miller warned that pardoning
violent militiamen would hurt their chances of turning things around in the
Senate. According to witnesses, Trump appeared easily persuaded by this. In
fact, he seemed to want to look tough in dealing with them. He asked the
room about options for “going in with the military” and killing the
militiamen. When aides firmly advised that causing the deaths of hostages
would be bad for him, Trump wavered. He sounded torn between a desire to
focus on the sedition plot and his overwhelming sense that he alone had the
talent and genius to resolve the siege in Quitman.

Ultimately, he decided to talk to the militiamen directly. Some advisors,

including Miller, strongly urged him not to, but they soon saw it would be
easier to just let him make a five-minute call than get into a big fight about it.
While Gaetz and his small entourage fiddled with their phones outside, West
Wing staffers scurried to find Gov. Reeves’s cell phone number. When Trump
finally reached the governor, he was already on his way back to Jackson for
the night, and he had to get one of his own staffers to call back with the
number for incident command. So it wasn’t until 8:02 p.m. in Mississippi

39
that the FBI negotiator told General Steel Raven that the President of the
United States was finally on the line to speak with him.

“This is President Trump,” said the unmistakable voice. Beauman, dropping

the gruff affect, said it was an honor to be talking to him. Trump continued
with a 16-minute barrage of flattery, threats, and tangents that elicited gasps
when the transcripts were read aloud during the Romney-Porter hearings.
The president swung from one to another seamlessly. First, he was
expressing gratitude: “They told me that you guys are, let’s just say, very big
fans of me.” Seconds later, he was almost yelling: “I think it’s horrible what
you did to those police.” Then back to compliments: “You are, from what they
tell me, very strong patriots—thank you.” And soon, more intimidation: “If
anybody gets killed, the gloves come off. Have you ever heard that
expression? Those gloves come right off. Then it will be not so nice for you,
believe me.” Steel Raven asked if the president would pardon them. But
Trump wouldn’t make any promises. “Put down your weapons … come out of
there, and then we can talk about what we’re going to do for you.”

From inside the courtroom, Sheriff Brock couldn’t hear the conversation, but
he heard the other militiamen buzzing that the General was on the phone
with the president. Afterward, the hushed talk came back that Trump
wouldn’t guarantee pardons. Brock told Cody VanDyne and the others
guarding him that this was probably for political reasons—maybe Trump
would pardon them once the national crisis settled down. At any rate, he
said, since they proclaimed loyalty to Trump, they were obligated to obey his
orders.

40
A short time later, Steel Raven huddled about a dozen MDSFers in a back
office to judge their willingness to try and fight their way out. But it was
immediately clear that the men had taken Trump’s rejection like a gut punch.
VanDyne suggested they trust the president’s wisdom, and mentioned the
Malheur and Kaniksu acquittals. Running out of options, Beauman went to
the courtroom to ask the sheriff some legal questions. Were the feds
forbidden to use force if they negotiated a peaceful resolution? Could they get
out on bail while awaiting trial? Under no obligation of strict truthfulness,
Brock gave them the answers he thought would be most reassuring. If they
surrendered without a fight, Brock even told them, he would testify for them
in court—and with any luck the juries would let them off altogether. “I just
want to see you boys get on with your lives,” he said. “You can do a lot of
good in this country.”

And so, Beauman called the FBI negotiator again and told him they were
ready to bring the occupation to an end. It took more delicate maneuvering,
but just before midnight—almost 30 hours after the siege began—the
Mississippi Delta Security Force released the hostages and emerged onto
courthouse lawn with their hands raised in surrender.

A
S SOON AS President Trump had hung up with the wayward militia

leader, he had turned his full attention back to Matt Gaetz’s

explosive report from Washington. With perceived unreliables out
of the room, his remaining political advisors pumped the congressman for
information. Stephen Miller and a couple of his lieutenants graphed out the
conspiracy on a whiteboard and made calls to their own sources back in
D.C.—soon, they were able to corroborate the overtures to the Joint Chiefs,
and had six senators pegged as likely ringleaders. Seb Gorka, who had

41
heretofore advised caution, now counseled that there was no time left to wait.
Everyone suspected of involvement in the plot had to be arrested
immediately before they could depose the duly elected president by force.

Trump liked that idea. His instinct, subsequent witness testimony held, was
to strike fast and hard. “Round them all up,” he told the dozen or so loyalists
in the room again and again. But how? The two civilian agencies with the
capability to pull off a simultaneous operation like that—the FBI and U.S.
Marshals Service—both answered to the Justice Department. With the
resignations of Ian Gallup and Acting Deputy AG Brian Rabbitt, that left
Principal Deputy Associate Attorney General Mark P. Dana III as the man
responsible for carrying out the president’s orders.

Dana and his young family were having a quiet evening in their Kalorama
home when he received the call that a DOJ car was on its way to whisk him to
the department’s backup facility in Northern Virginia. Mark and his wife
Shira are both Harvard-educated attorneys who clerked for Brett Kavanaugh
on the D.C. Circuit and then for conservative Supreme Court justices, before
serving as special assistants in the Trump White House. But they’d gradually
grown disenchanted with the president’s erratic leadership, and watched
with alarm as his crackdown paralyzed the country and put National Guard
troops in the streets outside their townhouse. Now, just hours after learning
that he had become the nation’s seniormost law enforcement officer, Mark
found himself in the back of a speeding Suburban, racing to answer a
summons too sensitive to discuss on his normal work phone. On arriving, he
was ushered into a SCIF (Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility)
and videoconferenced to Mar-a-Lago. On the other end, he saw President
Trump looking crazed and hollow, surrounded by grim-faced diehards.

42
“There’s about to be a coup—a real one,” the leader of the free world said.
Trump outlined his orders: the Justice Department was to arrest SecDef
Jack, Brig. Gen. Wood, Gen. VanHerck, SCRAG Zeller, the entire Joint
Chiefs, and the six senators believed to have instigated the plot. More arrests
would likely follow. But Trump wanted the first blow to fall before dawn.

Dana had a hard time believing what he was hearing. Trump’s cluttered
speaking style made him think he had somehow missed important details.
He asked the president to slow down, back up, and start with the evidence.
Trump became agitated, only pressing more insistently for immediate
arrests. He wanted to know how fast the arrestees could be shipped to
Johnston Island. As the conversation wore on, Dana later testified, it became
clear that the evidence of an active sedition plot was basically someone-told-
someone-who-told-Matt-Gaetz-that-senators-had-communicated-with-the-
Joint-Chiefs. Even if all that was true, it wasn’t clear that such conversations
would have violated any law. As such, Dana explained, Justice couldn’t just
start rounding people up. Although the President of the United States is
ultimately in charge of enforcing the laws, he or she does not have the power
to order American citizens arrested at will. Unless Dana’s attorneys could
show judges probable cause that crimes had been committed, the arrests
wouldn’t hold up in court. Barring some new revelations, they were nowhere
near that standard.

Trump apparently didn’t get it. He seemed desperate, panicky. Why was
Dana refusing his orders, he asked. Didn’t he know that everyone in the
government had to do whatever he told them? The exchange was, Dana later
told NBC’s Chris Wallace, “quite surreal … like nothing I could have

43
anticipated.” Doing his best to remain calm, Dana explained his refusal in the
simplest, clearest terms he could muster: “There is no legal justification to
arrest any of them.” When Trump threatened to fire him if he wouldn’t
comply, Dana shot back that he couldn’t fire his way out of the truth.
“Everyone at Justice will tell you the same thing.” As Trump raved, he
seemed to slowly realize that the DOJ wouldn’t budge. The call ended at
10:34 p.m. with no progress toward arrests, and the president returned to his
living room in despondent silence.

There, as he flicked on the television, his problems multiplied. While he had

been in the meeting, more aides had resigned, and longtime supporters were
rushing to condemn him all across the airwaves. “The rats,” as Rachel
Maddow put it with relish on MSNBC, “are scurrying off the ship.” From
Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos to favorite trade advisor Peter Navarro
and loyal communications strategist Alyssa Farah, the departures were
painful and surprising personal blows. Chad Wolf had left by car and the ex-
DHS chief was already on Fox News slamming his boss. Firebrand
conservative pundit Glenn Beck had finally decided that Trump “wants to be
a dictator,” and former sitcom queen Roseanne Barr was telling any network
that would have her on that the president “is an insane sociopath … and
needs to go.”

Yet there was one betrayal that stabbed Trump in the heart and sent
wounded, bestial sounds echoing through the residence. The president had
apparently been composing a text message to Kayleigh McEnany, who he
believed was in her guest room at the estate, when he saw her face appear on
CNN. “He is a danger,” she told a wide-eyed Don Lemon. “And I am
heartbroken that I couldn’t prevent [the ‘full firepower’ order].” In Kayleigh’s

44
telling, she had understood Trump’s menace all along, but had stayed to curb
his worst impulses. Without her, she insisted, the past week might have seen
massacres in the streets.

The president stormed out of his private wing and stood on the rain-soaked
lawn, coatless and panting, while Secret Service agents watched
apprehensively in the background. The club was quiet and deserted. This
Wednesday there was no Six Star Seafood Night. Over the past three days,
the usual crowd of Mar-a-Lago hangers-on had discreetly slipped away.
Tonight, there were no faded socialites reveling at the bar, and no over-
bronzed golfers puffing cigars on the patio. Other than on-duty security, the
only signs of life on the giant estate were the strike-depleted staff and about
fifty exhausted members of Trump’s retinue—a number that was dwindling
by the hour. In the grand ballroom, more than half of the cubicles set up for
West Wing personnel had been abandoned.

On his way back to his residence, Trump found 30-year-old Deputy Assistant
to the President Samantha Weiss and named her to Kayleigh’s old job. He
ordered her and Hogan Gidley to get on whatever cable news they could and
push back vigorously on McEnany’s narrative—claiming that she was fired
for incompetence and was lying out of bitterness. Around this time, Stephen
Miller texted his boss to remind him that while DOJ wasn’t willing to arrest
J.J. Jack, they could still publicly announce his firing so as to deny the
SecDef legal decision-making authority. Trump gave his assent, and Peter
Bartos went to work drafting an order for the president’s signature.

With trusted allies abandoning him and most of the government in open
revolt against his commands, Trump returned to his living room shortly

45
before midnight. Aside from one member of his Secret Service detail, he was
alone. Most of the lights were off. He pulled out his iPhone, hoping to shoot a
Facebook video, but found that his account had been banned. He was cut off
from the people. He texted Hogan Gidley to come quickly. The press
secretary rushed in and dutifully filmed a 90-second video that he uploaded
to his own Twitter account.

The room was largely in shadow, and the president was lit chiefly by the
flickering glow of the television out of frame. His eyes were burning coals
deep under the brim of his red MAGA hat. “The Democrats and treasonous
Republicans have joined forces to carry out a coup against your president…
They have asked the military to arrest me, or maybe worse than that, but our
loyal military has refused… But we have their names. We know who they are.
We know that they are being backed by foreign enemies … who are trying to
overthrow our government. This is an act of war, and we will be announcing
who is responsible in a very short time.” Trump pointed his finger shakily at
the camera. “All options—including nuclear—are on the table.”

D
EEP UNDER NEBRASKA’S Offut Air Force Base, the men and women

of U.S. Strategic Command were monitoring worldwide nuclear

threats in their state-of-the-art Global Operations Center. On the
ops floor, Battle Watch Commander Colonel Erica Schow and her team were
paying particular attention to the situation off Sin Cowe Island—waiting to
see whether Beijing would escalate the alert status of its own arsenal.
Chinese and Vietnamese warships were in close proximity, and the
camouflage-wearing duty personnel stationed at the room’s jungle of
computer screens knew they were in for a long night. One of Schow’s NCOs
called her over. The news was reporting that President Trump had posted a

46
video threatening nuclear retaliation against unspecified foreign enemies. He
played her the clip. Schow had been worried by the commander-in-chief’s
volatile statements throughout the past week, but this was vastly different.
Incomprehensibly dangerous. “Zero to Mach 1,” she described the feeling to
the Romney-Porter Committee. Schow ordered one of her officers to contact
the White House and try to confirm the authenticity of the video. Meanwhile,
she activated the alarm to summon her boss, USSTRATCOM’s commander.

Four-star admiral Charles A. Richard was catching a power nap in his office
when the auditory alerts jarred him awake. After getting a brief summary
from Schow by phone, he took the express elevator down to the ops floor and
saw the video for himself. He immediately concurred that Trump’s
comments created a horrific danger—if Russia or China believed that an
American nuclear attack was imminent, they would have a powerful
incentive to strike first. One of the duty officers announced that someone on
Trump’s staff had confirmed the authenticity of the video. Admiral Richard
was about to call the president directly when he paused with a stomach-
turning thought. The man on the video was clearly unhinged. If Richard
called him demanding some kind of damage control statement, he was
unlikely to succeed and might well be relieved of command and lose the
ability to mitigate the crisis. On the other hand, he felt he had a duty to raise
his objections to the commander-in-chief. He decided to call the Secretary of
Defense first to get his advice and coordinate their actions.

The direct line to J.J. Jack got no answer. So he called the National Military
Command Center at the Pentagon, trying to figure out what was happening.
The Deputy Director of Operations that night was Brig. Gen. Thomas
Lattimore, a former ICBM launch officer. Lattimore, sounding much calmer

47
than he was, informed Adm. Richard that he’d just received word that the
SecDef had been fired and his secure phone seized by federal agents. DoD
was racing to establish secure emergency communications with Jack’s
successor, but there was a yawning gap in the org chart.

The next man in the line of succession, Deputy Secretary of Defense James
McPherson, had resigned earlier that day in protest of the “full firepower”
order. With Army Secretary Matt Caesar already out, and Acting Navy
Secretary James Geurts and Acting Air Force Secretary William Roper Jr.
both ineligible, that left Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and
Sustainment Grace Leung as the top DoD official. But she was vacationing in
Brazil and hadn’t been reachable yet. The next highest officials in the
continental United States were several more ineligible actings. In short,
Lattimore told the admiral, it was “an absolute clusterfuck.”

Because the White House had publicly announced Jack’s dismissal and the
McPherson and Caesar resignations had already been in the media,
America’s adversaries would know by now that at least the Pentagon’s top
three leaders were gone. Trying to put himself in the shoes of his Russian and
Chinese counterparts, Adm. Richard could see how this might portend
apocalyptic orders by a desperate madman in control of over 800 warheads
on hair-trigger alert.

In the USSTRATCOM operations center, Richard saw information flash on

one of the large screens at the front of the room. Signs were coming in that
the Russians were bringing their strategic nuclear forces to higher readiness.
Watch personnel started calling out information in response to Col. Schow’s
commands. The admiral told Brig. Gen. Lattimore at the NMCC to contact

48
Moscow on the hotline. Depicted in popular culture as a red phone, in its
present incarnation it is actually a secure email link for real-time
communication between the two superpowers. Lattimore was to inform his
opposite number in the Kremlin that President Trump’s statement was a bad
joke, and that all U.S. nuclear forces were under positive control. Then,
Lattimore would convey the same message on the Beijing-Washington
hotline. Before Richard had even hung up with the NMCC, voices on the ops
floor started calling out information that the Chinese appeared to be
escalating their own military alert status.

Envisioning the crisis through foreign eyes again, Richard saw that the
hotlines wouldn’t be enough. If Trump was really planning a nuclear strike
somewhere, of course the Americans would conceal their intentions until the
last moment. If the roles were reversed, he would have been wary about
believing some one-star general’s reassurances if Vladimir Putin were
obviously insane and publicly threatening doomsday. What STRATCOM
needed to do was figure out some means of credibly signaling to Moscow and
Beijing that American nukes were in safe hands and that no surprise attack
was forthcoming.

Admiral Richard went upstairs one level to the Battle Deck, the crown jewel
of Strategic Command’s $1.3 billion headquarters. Two semicircular rings of
flat-screen workstations faced a giant video display at the front of the room.
About a dozen duty personnel were already hard at work gathering
information about the unfolding situation. Richard stepped down into the
well at the front of the big screen and addressed them all. The president’s
threats seemed to have alarmed the Russians and Chinese, he said. Pentagon
leadership was in disarray, and their chain of command had become unclear.

49
So it was STRATCOM’s job to keep America safe while the civilians figured
out the mess in Washington. Whatever happened, Richard said, he assumed
full responsibility for their efforts to de-escalate. The team understood its
mission. Everyone was focused, dialed in.

Richard stepped out to a private conference room and placed another call to
the NMCC. If Trump decided to crack open the Nuclear Football and actually
order a strike, Brig. Gen. Lattimore was the man who would be responsible
for transmitting his orders to the missile launch control centers across the
Great Plains and to the ballistic missile submarine commanders lurking in
the ocean deeps. Hopefully it would never come to that, but if it did, Richard
got Lattimore’s agreement not to transmit any launch orders without
checking with him personally first.

Returning to the Battle Deck, Adm. Richard began to set his plan in motion.
There was no reliable way for Moscow and Beijing to confirm that land-based
silos had been de-alerted, so that couldn’t be used to signal peaceful intent.
But any American surprise attack would rely on its submarines staying
hidden to launch their missiles close to enemy heartlands. The Alabama
native had previously commanded the U.S. submarine force and NATO’s
Allied Submarine Command—and understood as well as anyone alive the key
strategic significance of these undersea weapons. On Richard’s orders,
STRATCOM officers urgently started tracking down the men in overall
command of America’s ballistic missile subs. In Norfolk, Virginia, the calls
woke Adm. David Kriete, STRATCOM’s Joint Force Maritime Component
Commander, and COMSUBLANT (Commander, Submarine Force Atlantic)
Vice Adm. Daryl Caudle. At Pearl Harbor, U.S. Pacific Fleet commander
Admiral William Merz was still in his office monitoring the Sin Cowe Island

50
situation, while COMSUBPAC (Commander, Submarine Force Pacific) Rear
Adm. Douglas Perry was nearby at dinner. They also tried to loop in Admiral
John Aquilino, the head of Indo-Pacific Command (USINDOPACOM), but he
was hospitalized with meningitis.

At 12:25 a.m. Central, the videoconference began. Richard explained the

extraordinary circumstances the nation found itself in, and proposed a truly
stunning idea. U.S. ballistic missile submarines on patrol would surface and
make contact with Russian and Chinese warships—thus giving Moscow and
Beijing firm assurance that Trump was not planning a surprise first strike.
This would, of course, leave the homeland vulnerable. If Putin or Xi wanted
to seize the opportunity to sink the American subs and launch a first strike of
their own, they might be able to get away with it. But Richard argued that
this was much less likely than the fog of war inadvertently precipitating
disaster. After a brief debate about the specifics of the plan, Richard, Kriete,
Merz, Caudle, and Perry all agreed. All five understood, they later testified,
that the gamble would likely cost them their careers—and as of May 2022, all
have retired. But they knew it was the world’s best chance.

Within half an hour, Emergency Action Messages had gone out across the
world by very low frequency radio, triggering flash alerts aboard the huge
nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines standing silent sentinel under
the waves. Each SSBN, or “boomer,” was 560 feet long, crewed by 155, and
armed with 20 Trident II missiles carrying around 90 nuclear warheads—
potentially thousands of times the firepower of the bomb that leveled
Hiroshima. The orders to compromise the secrecy of these fearsome vessels
were so extraordinary that several commanders reportedly doubted their
legitimacy and requested additional confirmation from the Pentagon. The

51
NMCC managed to convince them that the messages from Pearl Harbor or
Norfolk were valid, and the dark behemoths were soon breaching the surface
like whales of biblical proportions.

High in the North Atlantic, somewhere off the coast of Iceland, the USS
Rhode Island came up into the bright subarctic summer morning. It detected
the Russian frigate Admiral Gorshkov not far away and hailed it by radio in
the clear. We are here to assure you that American strategic arms are under
full control and that we have no aggressive intent, the submariners
announced. You are welcome to observe us.

In the Western Pacific, USS Henry M. Jackson surfaced into a blustery

evening and signaled a nearby People’s Liberation Army Navy flotilla led by
the destroyer Changchun. The Chinese surface units acknowledged the
message but kept their distance, and soon a diesel attack submarine had
appeared alongside the boomer as a shadow. The crews atop their respective
conning towers exchanged friendly waves.

By 0530 hours on the STRATCOM Battle Deck, with American SSBNs

reporting uneventful contacts with rival navies, intelligence started to
indicate that Moscow and Beijing were easing their nuclear alert postures.
There was still sharply elevated activity in North Korea—which a subsequent
intelligence community assessment determined came closest to a preemptive
attack—but the Kim regime had been subjected to more than three years of
brinksmanship and ultimately judged that this time wasn’t any different.
Once he was assured that the State Department had an open line of
communication with Pyongyang and was working to deescalate, Admiral

52
Richard went back up to his office to catch a few more winks before the day
began.

M
EMBERS OF CONGRESS had slept over at Site G, bedding down in

the dormitories that had been meticulously prepared to house

them in the event of a nuclear holocaust. Those who’d gone to
sleep before midnight woke early on Thursday, June 24 to hysterical
messages from staffers about Trump threatening nuclear war. Those who’d
been up when the video dropped were running on a couple hours’ sleep and
strong coffee. Virtually all of them—Democrat or Republican, young or old—
looked profoundly shaken. Pentagon sources had confirmed to leadership
around three in the morning that they were aware of no war plans, but senior
legislators understood that there was now almost nothing to stop a
disconsolate and unstable president from launching warheads. The situation
was not without precedent. As Richard Nixon sank into alcohol-soaked
despair in the final days of his presidency, senior advisors feared he might
start World War III in a fit of suicidal nihilism. So Secretary of Defense
James Schlesinger had instructed the Pentagon to check with himself or
Secretary of State Henry Kissinger before transmitting any nuclear launch
order. As of that morning in 2021, though, Congress was unaware of Admiral
Richard’s similar directive to the NMCC.

Europe had awakened to the threat of Armageddon, and markets there had
been in havoc all day. With the possibility of a military strike still looming,
U.S. regulators had no choice but to cancel the resumption of trading
planned for midday and aim to reevaluate that night for a Friday open.
American investors were getting torn to shreds, and anyone with any pull
was screaming at their senators to get Trump out immediately.

53
Congressional leadership was also rattled by a Trump Out news release
announcing the election of 20 new activists to its L-team—and a general
assembly on Saturday to consider changes to the movement’s platform.
Browsing the bios, staffers from both parties groaned. They saw names like
Alyx Peoplepower, who wanted a constitutional amendment to abolish the
Senate, and Lori D’Andrea, who advocated seizing and nationalizing every
company worth more than a billion dollars. Suddenly, the demands of Trump
and Pence leaving office and pardons for demonstrators seemed more
reasonable.

At Mar-a-Lago, the president slept uncharacteristically late, and his aides

were hesitant to wake him. At 9:30 a.m., Sebastian Gorka, Harry Katsouros,
and a pair of CIA officers were summoned to his private wing for the
Presidential Daily Brief. They found him in marginally better spirits than the
night before, but Katsouros noticed he was moving haltingly and slurring his
words more than usual. His face looked puffy and pale. As the meeting
began, it fell to Gorka to break the news about the submarines. They could
try to have the admirals arrested, he added, but it wasn’t clear who would
even carry out the order at this point. And with the boomers already
revealed, it was too late to make a difference anyway. Trump slumped back
on his couch, breathing heavily and saying nothing. Katsouros braced for
cataclysmic rage, but was surprised to hear the president finally say that
things were going to be alright.

“We’ll still beat them,” Trump said. “That colonel is going to turn this
around.” Katsouros and Gorka exchanged a look. The who? The anonymous
colonel from the Gateway Pundit article the day before, Trump clarified. The

54
one who said there was a junta of officers loyal to Trump who would step up
to prevent the coup. The one who promised “There are more of us than they
can imagine.” That one. “You wait,” Trump said in the tone he used at rallies,
“the loyal officers in this country are going to take our military right back.”
The briefers shifted awkwardly in their seats as the president grated on that
the loyal officers would be taking back control any hour now. Boy, would
those admirals be sorry then.

A text came in from Don Junior. The AP was reporting that several GOP
senators had traveled by car from Site G to Number One Observatory Circle
to meet with the vice president. Pundits speculated that they were laying the
groundwork for a Pence presidency, perhaps seeking promises not to pardon
Trump so as to mollify Democratic colleagues. Trump read part of the article
aloud, and it seemed to Katsouros that his voice was quavering with fear.
“Mike…” he trailed off, addressing no one in particular. “Mike…”

Inside the elegant first-floor library at the vice president’s residence, Mike
Pence was locked in quiet conversation with Richard Burr of North Carolina,
Tim Scott of South Carolina, and Todd Young from his home state of
Indiana. Mitch McConnell had sent them in a last-ditch effort to keep the
White House in Republican hands. According to staffers familiar with the
events of the meeting, the trio proposed a list of concessions for Pence to
offer Democrats in exchange for them dropping his impeachment and
allowing him to succeed Trump. In addition to promises not to pardon the
45th president or any of his associates, they wanted him to accept a moderate
conservative as his own vice president, shutter Johnston Island, and issue
pardons to all nonviolent Trump Out demonstrators. Pence listened intently,
but he seemed to show little interest in cutting a deal for power.

55
An aide interrupted the meeting to inform Pence that the president was on
the phone for him. The VP excused himself and took the call in another
room. It appears that during this conversation, which lasted just over four
minutes, Trump requested or demanded that Pence release a statement
throwing his full support behind Wednesday’s use of PEAD 022A to order
“full firepower” in the nation’s capital. He returned to the library and the
meeting continued for another 45 minutes or so—and ended without the vice
president giving any indication of his intentions. But by the time Burr, Scott,
and Young got back to Site G at around 11:15 a.m., they saw the one-page
announcement from Observatory Circle that Pence “wholeheartedly agrees
with President Trump’s decision to order lethal force against violent armed
rebels, as a last-resort measure to stop their attempted overthrow of the
government in Washington.” The text, which a Buzzfeed stylometric analysis
attributed to Peter Bartos, repeatedly condemned Congress for trying to
install a “communist regime.”

In effect, the statement was Trump’s attempt to give Pence a poison pill—to
align him so closely with the president’s own misdeeds that he would be
totally unviable as an alternative. Republican senators would thus be forced
to choose between either letting Trump stay in office or impeaching both and
handing the White House to the Democrats. It remains unclear why Pence
swallowed this poison pill on the threshold of power—whether he was driven
by genuine loyalty, cowardice, or some more Machiavellian political
calculation. But on Trump’s part, the move proved a colossal misjudgment.
The game had changed since the 2020 impeachment, when the costs of blind
allegiance were low. Now, fueled largely by Trump’s own overreactions, the
public had rallied to the most crippling and widespread civil disobedience in

56
American history. Amidst staggering economic losses, GOP legislators saw
little choice but to make the concessions necessary to restore order. Further,
by escalating in two weeks from inciting a murder, to calling for nationwide
violence, to threatening nuclear war, he had given even his closest ideological
allies a face-saving pretext for removing him: he went crazy. As a gesture of
good faith, Tim Ryan’s camp had promised to nominate a Republican as his
vice president in return for double removal.

By lunchtime, McConnell and majority leadership had reluctantly concluded

that there was no other way. Pence had to go, too. An intermediary had
privately floated to Stephen Miller an endgame in which Pence would have
resigned, Trump would have nominated Mitt Romney to replace him as VP,
and then resigned in favor of the Romney administration. At least, the
intermediary argued, this would let Trump’s party hang on to the executive
branch. But the reply, as bowdlerized by Maggie Haberman later that
summer, was “go bleep yourself.” Neither Trump nor the inner circle still
standing by him wanted anything to do with a party that would stab him in
the back.

Just after one in the afternoon, McConnell and Democratic Majority Leader
Rep. Jim Himes took to the podiums at Site G to announce that they had the
votes to impeach and remove both Trump and Pence. Final votes in the
House could be completed by that night.

Meanwhile, reports were leaking out of the Justice Department that

prosecutors were planning to seek indictments for Trump and several
members of his family as soon as he was out of office. Analysts speculating

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freely on cable news tossed around potential prison terms: 10 years, 25 years,
or even “hundreds of years.”

At Mar-a-Lago, Trump was soaking in the coverage, realizing with mounting

horror that his gambit with the Pence statement had spectacularly failed. He
started asking advisors about self-pardon options. Giuliani suggested it
might be possible, but when they conferenced in White House Counsel Rob
Bennett, he threw cold water on the idea. There was no legal precedent for a
president pardoning himself, Bennett said, and any attempt would likely be
struck down by the courts. Worse, such a move could complicate any legal
proceedings Trump might face following his presidency.

So Trump turned back to counting on a military coup to save him. Associates

who saw him in his private wing that afternoon recount that he told everyone
he could find that loyal military officers were plotting his rescue even now.
He had spoken by phone at some point with conspiracy theorist Anthony
Rossi, and cited him as confirming the original Gateway Pundit article.
Perhaps seeking to reassure himself more than his supporters, he repeated
the story until it became almost a mantra: “The colonel… The colonel… The
colonel…”

By that point, though, almost everyone around the president could see the
writing on the wall. Anyone who saw a future for themselves in post-Trump
politics was lawyering up, packing their belongings, penning letters of
resignation, and getting out of Palm Beach. On the street outside the estate,
staffers abandoning ship lined up on the sidewalk waiting for Ubers. In the
distance, they could hear airhorns from the protest on the mainland. At
about 1:45 p.m., a private car arrived and collected Commerce Secretary

58
Wilbur Ross from the circular driveway. The billionaire’s decades-long
friendship with Trump had led him to tolerate four years of outrages, but he
was not going to commit sati on the funeral pyre of his presidency. He
slipped out without a goodbye.

As Trump brooded on this latest betrayal, a segment on CNN highlighted a

series of brewing disagreements among the protesters in Washington.
Interviews with a range of radical activists revealed deep dissatisfaction with
the politics of the L-team, and some expressed willingness to break with the
mainstream movement over issues like race, reproductive rights, and wealth
redistribution. Alyx Peoplepower, the colorful camp organizer who ran Block
by Block Revolution, told the network that they were going to push for a
platform change to demand a totally new Constitution. According to The
Endgame, Stephen Miller was in the room while Trump watched this
segment, and advised him to try to wait out the protesters. Rob Bennett
would be legally contesting the rushed kangaroo-court impeachment in the
courts, and even if SCOTUS ultimately ruled against them, it would be at
least several days before the Senate could vote on removal. Maybe they could
drag it out for a week. Possibly even more. In that time, Miller said, Trump
Out’s fragile unity would almost certainly crumble. Many would go home,
and those who remained would no longer be able to pressure Congress
effectively. If he could just stall for time, Miller urged, Trump might face a
much more favorable situation by the weekend.

I
T WAS A brilliant, clear day in Washington D.C. as over 1.4 million

people took to the streets for the twelfth consecutive afternoon of

demonstrations. Despite the massive security presence, almost
complete peace between civilians and government forces reigned from

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Northern Virginia to Maryland. Wanting no part of any bloodshed that might
accompany Trump’s Götterdämmerung, police and military commanders
were effectively giving protesters the run of the capital. Hundreds of
thousands marched southward down 16th Street toward the White House, with
another equally large march moving down New York Avenue from the
National Arboretum. Most of the crowd control netting that had been erected
around the city center had been slashed or torn down, but the paratroopers
and guardsmen on patrol now made no attempts to repair it.

At a wide intersection along the New York Avenue march route, D.C. National
Guard captain Brian Davis and his troops tried to keep the marchers moving
smoothly. Davis’s company and the rest of the “Red Hand” military police
battalion had been ordered to focus on deterring looting or violence against
counterdemonstrators, but there was no sign of either. They saw few black
bloc types, and the crowd included large numbers of families again. These
people were neither seeking nor expecting a fight. Davis ordered many of his
troops to dismount from their Humvees and armored personnel carriers, and
to raise their riot visors to present friendlier faces to the demonstrators.
Exhausted by nearly two weeks of continuous operations, many of which
included physical combat with civilians from their own community, the
guardsmen were immensely relieved by the new calm across the city.

Davis had read about the “full firepower” order on his phone the night before
when they got back to the Armory. By the time he did, Brig. Gen. Wood and
JFHQ-NCR had already defied the president. But Davis was deeply disturbed
by the news. Although a lifelong conservative and practicing evangelical, he
had soured on Trump politically after Charlottesville—largely out of concern
for the now 8-year-old African-American son he and his wife had adopted out

60
of the foster system. But as a soldier and student of history, he was also
passionately committed to the idea of an apolitical military. Ever since he got
the mobilization order on the evening of June 13, he had put aside his
reservations and thought of Trump as his legitimate—if volatile—commander-
in-chief. But the invocation of PEAD 022A was different.

From the safety of his Armory cot, Davis could see that using full firepower in
these circumstances constituted an illegal order. “The system worked,” he told
his unsettled troops the next morning. Yet what if the generals had passed it
on? What if he’d been leading his guardsmen out in the city, battling masked
rioters, and one of the kids he led had gotten their head bashed in with a brick,
or been burned alive by a Molotov cocktail? What if, at that moment, battalion
reported via radio that the mob was foreign-backed terrorists trying to
massacre Congress—and ordered them to fire into the crowd to save the
United States government? Davis fervently hoped he would have been
prepared to refuse ostensibly legal orders from his lawful superiors—to
mutiny. But he could not be certain.

One of the few heated confrontations that afternoon took place near the
Trump International Hotel, where PFC Kevin Diaz and two companies from
the 82nd Airborne were trying to keep the peace. At first, the crowds on the
street out front—although more radical than average—were still nonviolent. A
group of Democracy Spring and Democracy Awakening activists carried a
banner that read “5 Million Snowflakes Moving Together = Avalanche.” A
Justice Democrats organizer with a bullhorn led a few hundred people
chanting for the stone-faced paratroopers to break ranks and join them in the
protest. A white woman with long dreadlocks walked down the shield wall
holding up a large antique mirror to the heavily armored soldiers. A sign atop

61
the mirror read “Want to see who came to riot? Look who dressed for a riot.”
Several black-clad demonstrators shook their fists at the hotel and called out:
“Eat your pheasant, drink your wine! Your days are numbered, bourgeois
swine!” One of them pulled what looked like dark little pineapple from his bag,
and hurled it arcing over the shield wall toward the building’s barricaded
entrance.

Someone behind the line screamed “Grenade!” and dozens of paratroopers

hurled themselves flat against the sidewalk. The reflex was so automatic that
PFC Diaz didn’t even process what had happened until he was prone on the
ground. Silent seconds dragged by. Then a muted bang. Red droplets rained
down. Officers ordered everyone back up—it was a pyrotechnic with fake
blood. Soldiers swarmed the thrower, and demonstrators around him waded
into the fracas. Diaz remembers striking a violent “Viking-looking guy” with
his club and using his shield to block someone trying to spray black paint on
his visor, but the fighting was mostly a blur. A citizen journalist filming nearby
captured a flex-cuffed activist bellowing “You’re fascists! … War criminals! …
Genocide! … You rape brown babies!” as he was hauled away. Maryland State
Police showed up as reinforcements, and after about ten minutes of brawling,
16 people had been taken into custody, and quiet returned to Pennsylvania
Avenue.

Diaz’s company was rotated off the line, and as they gulped water in the hotel’s
soaring, opulent lobby, PFC Jaxon Trimble went off about the “grenade guy.”
If he’d been on lethal overwatch, he said, man. He would have popped that
fool so fast—two rounds center-of-mass before he’d gotten the bomb halfway
out of the bag. That thing could have been real, Trimble mused. They could
have had their legs blown off or their junk shredded. If the Rules for the Use of

62
Force hadn’t been so weak, he said, “they’d actually be afraid of us.” If the
officers had enforced Trump’s orders, no one would have dared throw that
thing. But the guys around him told Trimble to shut up in the most vehement
and colorful terms Army life had taught them. They kept jawing until shoving
broke out and one of them threw the yappy PFC onto one of Trump’s gilded
chairs, causing enough commotion for a senior NCO from another unit to
charge over and threaten them with destruction if they moved another muscle.

The guys didn’t want to hear Trimble’s kind of talk anymore. When they’d first
arrived, hearing rumors of armed terrorists in the streets, some of the
enlisted—none of whom had deployed overseas—had been amped up at the
thought of shooting Antifa revolutionaries. But after almost a week of
relentless operations all around the city, they recognized that ordinary people
saw them as an occupying force in their own country. When they’d heard
about the “full firepower” order on Wednesday night, almost all had been glad
it wasn’t given. Diaz couldn’t help wondering what would have happened if it
had been. Would he have refused, as one of the lieutenants said they should
have? Looking nine stories up at the Trump International’s glass roof, he
doubted it.

At that same time in the stands at FedExField, murmurs of freedom were

racing through the crowd. Although the detainees had all had their phones
confiscated, a steady stream of new arrivals until Wednesday had kept
everyone abreast of the news. Now, overheard snatches of conversation
between their Maryland Army National Guard jailers filled in the gaps. A
couple of the guardsmen had even given protesters updates under their breath
when their officers were out of earshot. After nearly four days in custody,
Columbia professor Jasper Rice Sullivan was thrilled to hear that the military

63
had mutinied and Congress would shortly force Trump from office. For a time,
he’d feared that the Teflon Don would somehow hold onto power after all and
rule as a dictator. Now, the people in the stands were getting word that the
military anticipated pardons for the demonstrators and was preparing to
release people en masse.

A Maryland Guard officer with a clipboard led a team of MPs up the aisle,
surveying the prisoners. She called out with a megaphone: “If you hear your
name called, please step forward. You’ll be getting out of here, and we’ve got
some food and showers for you.” A buzz spread through the crowd. She began
announcing names. Filthy demonstrators stood up one by one, making their
way into the aisle, where they were flex-cuffed and led up out of sight.

Sullivan turned to one of his neighbors, Georgetown law student Caleb

Broadlie. “I don’t like the way this smells,” he hissed. “Don’t answer your
name—pass it on.”

Moments later, the officer asked for “Sullivan, Jasper! Sullivan, Jasper!” and
craned her neck to scan the crowd. Sullivan avoided eye contact, looking down
at his feet. He said nothing. “Jasper Sullivan!” she squawked. “We have your
picture. Let’s not play games.” One of the MPs pointed at him and shouted out
his location. The officer looked down at her clipboard and back up at the
black-and-blue, bearded face in the stands. “Mr. Sullivan, you can either come
on down, or we can go up there and tase you until you do. This is not
optional.”

Part of Sullivan wanted to resist. To kick, flail, scream, and bite the guardsmen
as they zapped him. Just for the sake of defiance. But he was so weak and sore

64
that he didn’t have it in him. He looked skyward, and with no Trump Out
drones overhead to capture video of a struggle, he gave in to his fate. With a
few final hugs and daps with Broadlie and the others around him, he sidled
down his row and into the waiting cuffs of the MPs.

Sullivan’s wariness was justified. JTF-NCR had directed the detainees

suspected of violent or aggravated offenses to be separated from the others
and bused to a temporary stockade at Joint Base Andrews until order was
restored in D.C. and they could be remanded to civilian custody. For Jasper
Rice Sullivan and many of his 1,934 fellow Deferred Status Arrestees, it was
only the beginning of a nightmarish legal odyssey that remains ongoing today.

Just as Sullivan’s bus was winding its way into Joint Base Andrews, the
Citation twinjet carrying David Cimino and the rest of his HIRT team touched
down on a nearby runway. They had been in the field for three and a half
days—first shuttering IXPs across the Upper Midwest and then undoing their
own handiwork. A Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency manager
met them on the tarmac and relayed the good news. The Ninth Circuit had just
ruled against Trump about Section 606. CISA had been vindicated. No one on
the team had been happy about forcing CRYSTAL SPIKE on the civilian
internet. So it was a relief to know that their mission was over. The manager
warned them that the shutdown had left the web still badly disrupted, and that
they would be redeployed within days to help straighten things out. But for
now, they were home.

As his phone buzzed back to life after the flight, Cimino looked down at the
two Verizon bars in the corner of the screen with newfound gratitude. The
internet was still very slow, but as a DHS van dropped the team off back at

65
their homes, he managed to pull up several news articles about the past few
days’ events. They’d been so busy all week that Cimino had mostly lost sight of
the drama in Washington. Now, he was surprised to read how quickly the
president’s position had deteriorated—it looked like Trump’s departure had
become inevitable. It was just a question of when.

As he rolled his suitcase through his front door in Falls Church, he called out
to his wife Kat. The apartment was empty. There was no note. And he couldn’t
reach her by cell. For about fifteen minutes, he was worried. Finally, the
voicemail she’d sent hours before loaded to his inbox. She had driven her
sister and several friends to the demonstrations in Arlington. Without a car to
drive the five miles, and Uber not showing anything available, Cimino changed
into a “Teddy Roosevelt, Badass” t-shirt and set off to join them on foot.

At the same demonstration, human rights lawyer Noor Shah was back on the
streets—with her young daughter Annie and now both of her parents. As
government violence abated, children and seniors had rejoined the protests in
huge numbers. Everyone was in high spirits. People were pitching in to clean
up from the past 11 days of unrest—sweeping broken glass from the roadway,
picking up trash, gathering spent munitions. Annie pointed at a line of riot
police standing with their visors up and shields resting on the ground: “Look,
they’re happy now, too.” “Yes,” Noor said. “I think they do look happy now.”

A
S TRUMP’S NUCLEAR threats plastered cable news, the Trump Out

lead organizing team worked to keep up pressure on Congress.

Coordinated wildcat transit strikes expanded across numerous
major cities, where downtowns had basically shuttered normal commercial
activity. Even though Air Force Reserve and National Guard troops were

66
filling in for striking workers at the FedEx and UPS air shipping hubs, truck
drivers in Memphis and Louisville were refusing to pick up or drop off cargos
there. By now, the New York Times estimates, over 29 million Americans had
participated in demonstrations nationwide—by far the largest protest
movement in U.S. history. But that afternoon, the estimates were even higher.
Many television outlets were credulously repeating online estimates that 35,
37, even 40 million people were in the streets at once. A headline on CNN’s
website briefly trumpeted an outrageous 50 million. But even conservative
outlets like Fox News, suffering from the fog of war and hampered by still-
sluggish communications, were estimating 25-30 million marchers Thursday
afternoon alone.

With the gales of public opinion howling against the administration, Sen. John
Barrasso, the Republican Conference Chair, led five other senators in publicly
supporting Trump’s removal just after 3:00 p.m. Eastern. The president’s
support in the upper chamber was down to just 19 dead-enders, and at Mar-a-
Lago, the commander-in-chief began to recognize that hopes of turning the
tide in Congress were evaporating.

His thoughts turned to resistance. The coup was obvious, he raged to anyone
who’d listen. Real Americans had to see that, didn’t they? They’d been caught
red-handed. If he just refused to recognize his conviction in the Senate, the
people would support him. If he didn’t go, he said, they couldn’t make him. He
wasn’t about to go quietly in the face of treason. But gradually, these rantings
become less brash and belligerent, sounding more and more like he was
begging those around him for reassurance.

67
Seb Gorka and Harry Katsouros were getting ready to brief him in his living
room when Trump saw Brig. Gen. Wood on CNN, holding a press conference
to quell the wild rumors that had been swirling around the capital. There had
been no mutiny, Wood told the cameras, and the military’s chain of command
was still fully functional. As far as he was concerned, JFHQ-NCR had
consulted military lawyers and made the proper legal application of the
president’s directives.

“I fired him!” Trump roared, jabbing a finger impotently at the TV. But he
hadn’t. In all the chaos, despite repeatedly demanding Wood’s firing,
imprisonment, execution, or worse, nobody had actually set pen to paper
relieving him of command. Likewise, Gen. VanHerck in Colorado was still in
charge at USNORTHCOM, carrying out his duties until ordered otherwise.
SCRAG Pete Zeller, in turn, was off the radar altogether. He had emailed his
resignation to Ian Gallup late Wednesday, but Gallup had already resigned
himself and no one got the message. Investigators didn’t figure out his
whereabouts until he turned up in Vienna in late August. But now, Trump
summoned an aide to personally sign orders removing all three from their
positions. He then placed a brief call to Acting Secretary of Defense Grace
Leung, trying to gauge her loyalty. They’d only been in the same room once
before, and he claimed to know nothing about her. Leung assured him that the
military was still under normal civilian control—but when he asked point-
blank whether she would help him “put down the coup,” she pointedly
refused. There was no coup, she insisted, and she would only transmit lawful
orders. Nobody else in the line of succession was likely to be different, Leung
said, so there was no point in even firing her.

68
Running out of options, Trump sent urgently for the head of his Secret Service
detail at around 3:45 p.m. Mike Monaghan arrived not knowing what to
expect. The commander-in-chief told him that Congress was plotting a coup to
remove him. His question: “How will you protect me?”

With Gorka, Katsouros, and two other witnesses in the room, Monaghan
solemnly informed the president that the Secret Service would recognize all
lawful actions by Congress. If the Senate voted to convict him, he would no
longer hold the office, and would lose access to its powers. Left unsaid: he
would lose the Nuclear Football. The good news, Monaghan pointed out, was
that since Trump owned Mar-a-Lago, he wouldn’t need to vacate the premises.
He and his family would even retain their security details, and they could all
be flown to join him in Florida.

“But they’re going to try to arrest me afterward,” Trump protested. “Can’t you
defend me?” Monaghan shook his head. No. The Secret Service was charged
with keeping him safe from those who would physically harm him. But if
presented with a valid arrest warrant, his agents would not stand in the way.

Something like resignation darkened the president’s face. Waving Monaghan

away silently, he sank back into his chair, looking shattered like Katsouros had
never seen.

Back in Washington, Senate Republicans were finally starting to accept a

bitter truth of their own. McConnell’s plan to broker a Pence presidency had
gone up in smoke. The GOP could no longer keep hold of the White House
against the tidal forces of civil resistance sweeping the country. With the
party’s grip on power a lost cause, conference members were scrambling to

69
save their own legacies. Everyone understood that with the White House
resisting impeachment in the courts, the Senate could not maintain a
semblance of constitutional procedure and complete the planned pro forma
trial before Monday or Tuesday. Some legal advisors were warning McConnell
that the process could even drag out for another week or two as the judiciary
played referee. With gigantic economic losses piling up every hour, that was
simply too long to wait—pandemic-battered America would be in a full-blown
depression by then. And with tensions in the South China Sea and a doomed
Trump trapped in Palm Beach with the nuclear launch codes, the risks of
Armageddon were fast escalating. They had to somehow get him out sooner.

As the clocks struck five at Mar-a-Lago, the mood around the estate had
become funereal. Aides walked the vacant halls, talking softly on cell phones
to arrange their departures. Their flights had turned into an exodus. Some of
those still on the property sobbed quietly or slumped against the furniture in
glassy-eyed shock. In the circular driveway, an assistant rolled Rudy Giuliani’s
bags out to a waiting limo while the man once hailed as America’s Mayor
printed out tickets to Ukraine, which lacks an extradition treaty with the
United States. The terse resignation letter he’d left with a staffer to walk over
to the president had gotten misplaced and wasn’t found until a week later.

In Trump’s private wing, he took a call from former advisor Hope Hicks, who
had just spoken with a senior McConnell intermediary. Republicans were
getting desperate, she told the president. If he drove a hard bargain now,
perhaps he could get a good deal for himself and his family. As Hicks later told
Vanity Fair, she was surprised by how easily Trump seemed to accept this
idea.

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Using Hicks as a backchannel, Trump sent back his terms. He would resign
only in exchange for a golden parachute: a guarantee of full pardons for
himself and everyone in his family, along with promises to leave his worldwide
business interests unmolested.

In the Hay-Adams war room half an hour later, the power was finally back on
and L-team members clustered around a laptop as Speaker Ryan’s chief of
staff Frank McGregor explained the overture via Zoom. Apparently, he said,
Trump’s people had told McConnell he was willing to leave voluntarily—all he
wanted from the Ryan administration was pardons, so they could finally put
this national nightmare in the rearview mirror. The important thing,
McGregor said, was that he would be out. While sympathetic to the protesters’
feelings, the speaker saw no sense in risking any more violence haggling over
prosecutions of an old man. But Trump Out leadership was adamant: no
pardons. Regardless of ideological bent, they were unanimous in rejecting any
resolution that let the president escape fair justice for his crimes. If a
President Ryan touched pen to paper in doing so, the occupation and general
strike would continue.

This answer was met with groans and curses at Site G, where the Democratic
and Republican leadership staffs were sweating through the permutations of
what deals might be possible. With pardons totally off the table as far as the
protesters were concerned, McConnell’s people didn’t even send a
counterproposal to send to Mar-a-Lago.

In a spartan bedroom two levels below, Tim Ryan had his suit jacket off and
was reclining atop his comforter with his shoes on, watching a movie on his
laptop. Although publicly recused from the impeachment proceedings, aides

71
regularly came in to give him updates on the negotiations. He seemed quieter,
more reflective than usual, as the inevitability sank in that one way or another,
he would soon be the 46th President of the United States. The film on his
screen, several aides recall, was Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln. The theme could
not have been lost on the Ohio legislator—a former midwestern congressman
thrust into responsibility for reconciling two bitterly opposed factions and
binding the wounds of a bleeding nation. Near the end, there is a scene where
Daniel Day-Lewis’s Abraham Lincoln considers the fate of Confederate
President Jefferson Davis after the South’s defeat: “And the leaders, Jeff and
the rest of them, [if] they escape, leave the country while my back’s turned,
that wouldn’t upset me none. When peace comes, it mustn’t just be hangings.”

With the McConnell-Hicks backchannel at an impasse, hope for a deal that

night faded, and leadership staff started breaking up for dinner. But at 6:47
p.m., a call came into Trump’s cell phone from a number associated with Ohio
governor Mike DeWine. The first-term Republican had become a much closer
ally of Trump’s in the wake of the president’s visit to Cleveland after the
devasting floods, but he’d also developed a warm bipartisan relationship with
Tim Ryan. The call to Trump lasted just under nine minutes. DeWine has
publicly denied delivering any message on behalf of Ryan, who likewise denies
any communication with DeWine about the president. But according to four
Democratic staffers briefed on the negotiations that evening, the governor had
been charged with directly delivering a secret offer.

Republicans could no longer protect Trump, DeWine allegedly told him. In

days, he faced not only conviction and removal by the Senate, but a raft of
indictments by federal and state prosecutors. In all likelihood, Trump would
die in jail. The new administration could not, politically, offer him a pardon.

72
But if Trump and Pence resigned by midnight, President Ryan would look the
other way and allow Trump to slip out of the country. If he made it to a nation
without a U.S. extradition treaty, Ryan would of course have to make hollow
demands for his return, but was willing to let him live out his life in luxurious
exile—surrounded by his family. The offer also came with a warning: if Trump
rebuffed this olive branch, leaked it to the press, or issued a single pardon on
the way out the door, the Ryan administration would hunt him down and
prosecute everyone he loved to the fullest extremity of the law.

In Washington, Mike Pence’s phone rang a short time later. After a brief
conversation, the vice president joined the second lady and gathered their staff
in the tastefully furnished sitting room of Number One Observatory Circle.
Looking out at the evening shadows spilling across the lawn, Pence calmly
informed them that he would be resigning that night. Rather than force a
divisive removal by Congress, he said, he would be stepping down in the
interest of national healing.

A mile away, at their Kalorama home, Jared Kushner and Ivanka were quietly
pumping their overseas contacts for somewhere willing to take in the family
patriarch. Their search, prosecutors have since alleged, soon concentrated on
the Arabian Peninsula, which is free of U.S. extradition treaties. These efforts
were complicated by the fact that it was still before dawn in the Middle East—
but in gilded bedchambers around the region, aides woke royals to convey the
Trumps’ desperate request. In one after another, the answer was no. Finally, at
8:28 p.m. Eastern, Jared received a text message from an associate of the
UAE’s crown prince. Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan (known as MbZ), he
said, “says yes, at least temporarily.” Now, the problem would be slipping ex-
president Trump out of the country before law enforcement could stop him.

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W
HEN WORD REACHED Site G that Trump and Pence had both

agreed to resign, at first there was disbelief. There had been so

many moments over the preceding six years when it appeared
that Donald Trump’s political career was over, Democrats were bitterly
jaundiced. But as confirmations trickled in, leadership realized that this was
probably the real deal. As staffers rushed to prepare one of the subterranean
conference rooms for the swearing-in, Capitol Police were sent to escort Chief
Justice John Roberts to administer the oath. Another unit was dispatched to
bring Ryan’s wife Andrea and then-seven-year-old son Brady to witness the
ceremony (teenaged stepchildren Mason and Bella were back in Ohio).
Selected press was summoned for a major announcement, but reporters were
kept in the dark about what was going on.

At 8:51 p.m., a white Bell 222 helicopter took off from Palm Beach
International Airport in the deepening twilight and headed eastward. Almost
immediately, it attracted the notice of the protesters camped out across the
lagoon from Mar-a-Lago. The chopper flew right out over the water and
lowered itself onto the estate’s helipad. As the rotors spun down, those in the
crowd craned their necks and stood on tiptoe to see what was going on.
Journalists snapped photos through telephoto lenses or livestreamed blurry
lights in the distance. But nobody had a good view.

Radar tracking data showed that the aircraft belonged to Marvin Aronowitz,
the South Florida real estate developer and Trump booster who’d once told a
German documentary crew that the president “is the greatest human being
since Martin Luther King.” The longtime Mar-a-Lago member had been
investigated by federal prosecutors in connection with donations to the 2021

74
inaugural committee, and had visited the club on six different days since the
president’s June 14 arrival. Now, speculation flared over his helicopter’s
arrival. Had Aronowitz arrived to bolster his friend’s spirits? Or was it going to
carry Trump or some of his associates off the besieged barrier island? Cable
news experts dismissed the idea of Trump as a passenger—if the president
planned to leave Palm Beach, he would be taken aboard Marine One.

Speculation was now buzzing from coast to coast that Trump might be
resigning soon. Television coverage featured panes with live views of Mar-a-
Lago from across the lagoon.

At a few minutes before nine, Fox News broke into its Florida coverage with a
report that Vice President Pence had resigned, effective immediately. The
other networks were hot on their heels, and anchors were soon reading his full
three-paragraph letter on the air. Pundits talked audiences through the
implications: now if Trump was removed by the Senate, Speaker Ryan would
ascend to the presidency. Producers hastily cobbled together packages on the
Ohio congressman’s career to date: working for Rep. Jim Traficant before he
was expelled from the House in disgrace, the years as a moderate
backbencher, the aborted presidential run, and succeeding Nancy Pelosi in the
speakership after the 2020 disaster. There was talk about his young family, his
Midwestern values, and the famous Ellen interview. Colleagues from over the
decades were brought before the cameras to weigh in on how he would be
processing this historic moment. The drama dragged out minute by minute
with no news from Palm Beach.

Shortly after 10:00 p.m., MbZ’s people sent an update to Jared Kushner in
D.C.—they’d found a plane. An Emirati retail tycoon named Khaled bin Ali Al

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Saadi had a private 757 parked in Orlando, ready to spirit Trump abroad. The
crown prince soon reported that the arrangements were all set. If Trump could
make it to Al Saadi’s plane, they would fly him across the Atlantic to Morocco,
refuel, and continue on to Abu Dhabi—where another wealthy businessman
had offered the use of his 7,000-square foot penthouse for as long as the exile-
to-be wished. From there, an MbZ associate suggested, Trump might even be
able regroup and stage a return to power.

But in the Mar-a-Lago club and its eerily empty dining room, there was no
sense yet that the president’s departure was imminent. Harry Katsouros sat
with a table all to himself, writing out his letter of resignation in longhand. He
gave special care to the penmanship, cognizant that historians would one day
read it for clues about what had happened during that stormy June. “I have
always felt that I could do more good as a constructive voice of reason within
the administration than as a negative critic outside it,” he wrote, searching his
memory for statesmanlike phrases. “Yet I can no longer have confidence that
my role with the National Security Council will allow that.” No single moment
had driven him to it. It was everything. But watching Trump fantasize about
refusing to go quietly had crystalized it in his mind. He reproached himself for
not leaving earlier. The really brave ones had refused to follow Trump down to
Florida in the first place. It was far too late for a departure now to count as a
principled stand. But Katsouros didn’t want to be stuck with the knowledge
that he’d gone down with the ship. He signed the letter, and left it for Seb
Gorka along with a second, personal note thanking him for the opportunity.
Then he took a last look through the grand ballroom—but didn’t linger. His
taxi was waiting.

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Inside Trump’s wing, Gorka had just been informed of the commander-in-
chief’s intention to resign. Remaining staff gathered, some misty eyed, after
the sudden all-hands-on-deck announcement by Director of Oval Office
Operations Keith Schiller. Trump appeared suddenly and passed through the
room shaking hands and patting shoulders. Barely above a whisper, he
revealed that he had just signed his own resignation. He wished a few of them
well, thanked others for their service. Before they knew it, he had left.

Secret Service led Trump out to the estate’s library, where lighting and video
cameras had been set up in front of a large wooden desk. The exact wording
demanded by McConnell’s camp was sitting there in large print. He looked
gaunt and strained, but he was back in a suit and red tie, and his hair looked
properly styled for the first time in days. “The past two weeks have brought
great division to our country,” the president said. His voice was almost
monotone, and he visibly squinted down to read the words on the page. “In
order to end that division, I will resign the presidency effective at midnight
tonight. Because the vice president has already resigned, the Speaker of the
House, Tim Ryan, will be sworn in as president at that time in Washington.”
The White House posted the two-minute address online simultaneously with a
press release about the resignation. It was 10:38 p.m.

I
NSIDE TRUMP OUT headquarters at the Hay-Adams, there was instant

pandemonium. Organizers crowding the war room saw CNN play it for
the first time. At “midnight tonight,” they lost their minds. The flip from
rapt silence to utter chaos was like the last penalty kick of a World Cup final.
Deafening cheers, bear hugs, tears. In seconds, dancing and fist-pumping had
spilled out into the hallways and lobby of the hotel. For the L-team, even more
than joy the feeling was relief. Sarah Turk agonized for a while about putting

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out an immediate statement, worried that it might somehow prove premature,
but the others prevailed on her. At 10:47 p.m., users of the Trump Out app got
a push notification: “VICTORY!” The message promised more updates to
come, but credited “You. Yes, YOU” for “forcing Trump and Pence to follow
the will of the American people and resign.” It was only possible, the
organizers said, “thanks to the historic courage, strength and sacrifices you
have made — individually and collectively.” But while others went to celebrate,
Turk stayed curled up with her laptop refreshing the news.

Security coordinator Peter Balakrishnan missed the celebrations, too. He was

fast asleep on his bed upstairs, finally crashing hard after keeping death march
hours ever since the protests began. The 34-year-old Boston Dynamics
engineer didn’t find out about the resignations until Friday afternoon.
Veterans outreach coordinator Evan Vrabec had also kept hellish hours, but
now found himself absolutely wired. Texting two Navy buddies, he went down
to the hotel’s underground bar-turned-clinic, expecting they’d have the place
to themselves. Last time he’d been inside, the floor had been a mass of
bloodied bodies as exhausted medics patched people up . Now, with the siege
lifted, it was packed with revelers again. There was hardly room to stand,
much less sit. So he invited his friends up to the quiet rooftop terrace. They
opened a Macallan 18 Year—a $300 bottle of Scotch—and shared stories of the
past 12 days while looking across to the White House.

Lucía Campos-Herrera tried to meet some of her own friends down on the
street, but the crowd was so thick she couldn’t find any of them. The mob
scenes spilled out into Lafayette Square. Many were chanting “U-S-A! U-S-A!
U-S-A!” while a few sang “The Internationale”—others just stood bawling their
eyes out in pure catharsis. Campos-Herrera joined the thousands massed

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outside the White House gates. She was struck by how young most were—born
in 1994, she was just old enough to have followed the Twitter revolutions of
the Arab Spring. But looking around at the kids a decade younger, she could
sense that this was very much a Snapchat and TikTok revolution. Thrusting
triumphant V-signs into the warm night, they proclaimed as one voice: “I am
not afraid! We are not afraid!”

Within minutes of the news breaking, the exultation had spread across the
country. In Manhattan, drivers honked car horns as Trump’s statement was
played over the radio. In Chicago, protesters in Grant Park applauded
thunderously for 16 minutes after that announcement was made on the
loudspeakers. In San Francisco, fireworks blossomed over Telegraph Hill.
Back on the Mall—for the third time since the protests began—the jubilant
chorus echoed out over the Potomac: “Na na na na, na na na na, hey hey-ey,
goodbye!”

As the day’s final minutes ticked away at Site G, members of the press were
herded into the room where the inauguration was to take place. As camera
shutters clattered, Schumer press secretary Nico Rizzolo came to the podium
and introduced the minority leader. Sen. Schumer described the moment as
“solemn” and “bipartisan,” assuring “the American people and the world” that
“our constitutional form of government remains strong.” Following the
resignation of the vice president and then the president, he explained, the
Constitution established the Speaker of the House of Representatives as next
in the line of succession. At 11:58 p.m., Speaker Ryan and Chief Justice
Roberts entered through separate doors.

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Roberts shifted from one foot to another under his black robes, looking at his
wristwatch. Midnight. A whisper of anticipation swept the room. The chief
justice looked at Ryan. “Are you ready?”

The speaker nodded. As Andrea held their family’s Roman Catholic edition of
the Bible under his left hand, he raised his right to take the oath and repeated
after Roberts: “I Timothy John Ryan… I Timothy John Ryan… do solemnly
swear… do solemnly swear… that I will faithfully execute the office of
President of the United States… that I will faithfully execute the office of
President of the United States… and will to the best of my ability… and will to
the best of my ability… preserve, protect, and defend… preserve, protect, and
defend… the Constitution of the United States… the Constitution of the United
States… So help me, God. So help me, God.”

Roberts extended a handshake. “Congratulations, Mr. President.”

A tinny blast of music blared in the corner of the room. When they’d been
unable to get a military band to Site G in time, a junior House staffer had cued
up “Hail to the Chief” on his iPhone. Frank McGregor had said no, on the idea
that bad music was worse than no music, but there was a miscommunication.
Now it was too late to stop. President Ryan and the several dozen others
crammed into the room stood in awkward silence until the song was over.

Some political aides at Mar-a-Lago watched the ceremony live on TV, but it’s
not clear whether the former president saw any of it. At 12:05 a.m., Hogan
Gidley released a statement to the press that Trump would be staying in Palm
Beach for the week to spend time in private with his family. At almost the
same moment, Trump, Stephen Miller, body man Rory Freylinger, and

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personal assistant Brittany Catlett crossed the lawn and got into Marvin
Aronowitz’s helicopter. So as not to be tracked, they’d all left their cell phones
behind at the estate. Aronowitz’s pilot throttled up the idling engines.

Photographers across the water tried to get a look, but couldn’t see who had
boarded. The rotors became a blur, and the 222 lifted off into the black Florida
sky.

P
RESIDENT RYAN HAD not had time to write the sort of inaugural

address he’d envisioned for himself during his 2019 run for the
White House. There had been no chance for speechwriters to
wordsmith high-flung metaphors or infuse the text with soaring historical
allusions. Instead, his six-minute remarks were a series of earnest,
plainspoken promises that suited his character much better. “I will give you
every ounce of my energy,” Ryan said, glancing down at the marker-amended
text, “to put this country back together… I will do everything I possibly can to
help America heal. And I will be a president for all of you, no matter who you
voted for last year.” In that spirit, Ryan announced, “I have invited House
Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy to serve as vice president in a bipartisan
administration dedicated to, as Lincoln said, ‘binding up the nation’s wounds.’
We … had a heartfelt conversation about the work that needs to be done, and
he has accepted.” Together, he said, they would work to issue “full pardons” to
“all peaceful demonstrators” as swiftly as possible.

As Ryan spoke, sources at Mar-a-Lago tipped off several White House

journalists that Trump had just left the estate in a helicopter. Twitter was
starting to boil with speculation as users followed the radar track north. At
12:19 a.m., Washington Post reporter Jonathan Swan tweeted: “Per three

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sources familiar - Trump told associates tonight that Tim Ryan offered him a
deal to escape prosecution if he leaves the country immediately.” It didn’t take
the internet long to put two and two together. Reactions were overwhelmingly
of primal anger and betrayal.

In the Site G briefing room, Ryan and McCarthy were taking questions from
the press. Looking down at her Twitter feed, the Wall Street Journal’s Rebecca
Ballhaus saw Swan break the story just as one of her own Trumpworld
contacts messaged her that he’d seen Trump and a small entourage board the
helicopter. She read the new president the tweet and asked whether it was
true.

“That is false,” Ryan said quickly and firmly. “No truth to that whatsoever.” He
assured the pool that “my administration will not, uh, hurt, will not hurt or
hinder anything prosecutors may choose to do or not do.” Asked to comment
on speculation that sealed indictments had been recently filed against Trump
and could now result in his arrest since he was no longer sitting president,
Ryan said “I honestly do not know anything about that.” NBC’s Chandler Lott
asked whether he would be speaking with Mark Dana that night to learn where
things stood. The president paused. “Sorry, who?” Your Acting Attorney
General, he was informed, to nervous laughter in the room.

Meanwhile, the internet tracked the helicopter up the Florida coast in real
time. Conjecture mounted as its miniature yellow outline inched along the
map on flightradar24.com—where was Trump going? What would he do when
he got there? Who was with him? Users worked out right away that he couldn’t
be trying to leave the country on a commercial flight. He owned two jets
capable of making it across the Atlantic—the famous “Trump Force One” 757,

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and a smaller Citation X. Both were easily determined to be in New York. But
based on its range and flightpath, the Aronowitz 222 was almost certainly
headed for either Orlando or Jacksonville. So Citizen journalists were soon
combing through publicly available data on other private jets with sufficient
range and last known locations in one of those two cities. By 12:30 a.m., cable
news was running live coverage that rivaled the breathless intensity of O.J.
Simpson’s white Bronco chase. Local stations were trying to get chase
helicopters into the air, as Floridians flooded them with shaky cell phone
footage of flickering lights overhead. Residents along the route spilled out
their doors under the bright full moon and looked skyward.

Moments after his presser had ended, President Ryan ducked into a private
room as aides put through a call to the Acting AG. When he reached Mark
Dana, aides recall, one imperative took first priority: make sure Trump
doesn’t make it out of the country. The turmoil at DOJ made it difficult to
quickly get good information after midnight, but Dana soon learned that there
were indeed recently sealed indictments. Senior Justice officials were
scheduled to meet with him the next morning about the situation—and if he
approved, federal agents would have descended on Mar-a-Lago to take Trump
into custody. But now it was a race to stop him from escaping American soil.
The Secret Service reported that the ex-president had left his detail behind,
and gave definitive confirmation that he was now aboard the fugitive 222.

Since they could not immediately be sure where the helicopter would land,
Justice needed to cover both airports. The FBI’s Jacksonville field office could
supply sufficient force there—and the Bureau already had personnel in
Orlando due to the failed Amway Center bombing. At 12:42 a.m., orders went
out from D.C. scrambling teams into position.

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As prime time audiences in the West followed the flight mile by mile, many
called friends and relatives on the East Coast to wake up and turn on their
televisions. In Times Square, jumbotrons splashed live coverage over rapt
crowds. On the Mall and around Lafayette square, Trump Out volunteers with
megaphones read announcements for the benefit of those who still couldn’t
get wireless data. Gasps and cheers followed each new morsel of information.
At 12:55 a.m., a Twitter user called @plinkedman appears to have been the
first to identify Khaled bin Ali Al Saadi’s 757 as the most probable candidate
for Trump’s escape—but his thread about it received no major media coverage
that night.

As FBI units deployed, sirens wailing, to the two airports, information came in
via the FAA that the helicopter appeared to be heading for Orlando. The
Bureau had already warned area news stations to keep their helicopters away.
The stated reason was safety concerns. In truth, they were afraid that Trump
might get spooked at the last moment and attempt an improvised landing
elsewhere. Yet one helo, WESH’s Chopper 2, was already airborne, loitering
along the approaches to Orlando International. At about 1:05 a.m., pilot Bill
Doyle spotted the 222 making its approach. He brought Chopper 2 into a wide
following arc, and the NBC affiliate was soon broadcasting live footage of the
chase. At the same time, law enforcement was on the phone with air traffic
control, making sure that nothing tipped off their presence.

The helipad was atop an eight-story concrete parking structure. A black Range
Rover waited nearby—its driver had been told to race the passengers and their
bags across the airport to Al Saadi’s jet, which was already being prepared for
takeoff.

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ATC told the Bureau that everything sounded normal as Aronowitz’s
helicopter made its final descent toward the pad. The pilot flared, bringing up
the nose to slow the landing. Just a few feet to go. The skids touched down
dead center, and he cut the engines. It was 1:17 a.m.

The door opened. Miller and Catlett emerged, followed by Freylinger rolling
the luggage, and finally Trump. They spotted the Range Rover and started
walking towards it.

Out of nowhere, a dozen FBI agents converged on them with guns drawn.
Trump and his little entourage were too stunned to resist.

In Chopper 2 above, Bill Doyle flicked on his brilliant white spotlight. America
saw figures in Bureau windbreakers swarming around Donald Trump’s
unmistakable silhouette. His prized hair was windblown and his hands were
raised helplessly in surrender. Under the helicopter’s stark illumination, he
stood meekly as Deputy Special Agent in Charge Heather Ostermeyer placed
him under arrest for three counts of incitement in violation of 18 U.S. Code
§ 373—the first of over two dozen charges that would follow in the months to
come. As Ostermeyer read him his rights, they cuffed his hands in front of his
body and marched him across the roof and into a waiting SUV. The door
closed, and he was gone.

A
S MOST OF America breathed a stunned sigh of relief, the Ryan-

McCarthy team began a sleepless night taking over the levers of

government. Staffers who’d been sworn enemies over the last six
months now worked together in sweaty Site G cubicles, trying to cobble

85
together the beginnings of a functional bipartisan administration in the wee
hours of the morning. Democrats and Republicans alike strove to put country
before party in picking up the pieces of Trump’s final act.

It was a task unprecedented since Reconstruction. In March of this year, the

Federal Reserve estimated that U.S. GDP in 2021 was $790 billion lower
because of the June crisis. Other estimates put the overall damage as high as
$2.4 trillion. None of that counts the transient losses from market disruptions,
which by some measures ran into the tens of trillions worldwide.

Of course, the greatest costs were the human ones. Officially, 33 civilians and
six police officers had been killed over the 12 days of unrest, including
demonstrations in almost 4,500 communities across America. Much of the
subsequent commentary has focused on these fatalities being much lower than
they might have been. And relief is certainly warranted. Yet this count does
not include around a dozen demonstrators and bystanders whose respiratory
deaths were likely caused by tear gas and smoke exposure. Nor does it include
excess deaths from stress-related heart attacks and strokes, ambulances
getting stuck in protest gridlock, or people not being able to get their
prescribed pharmaceuticals. According to a forthcoming study in the New
England Journal of Medicine, such indirect fatalities were around 1,690—the
equivalent of almost a 2 percent increase in total nationwide mortality during
the course of the unrest. In the year since, say researchers at Harvard’s T.H.
Chan School of Public Health, the close gatherings at the protests likely also
resulted in 10,000-30,000 more COVID-19 deaths than otherwise would have
occurred. And while slain officers like Sgt. Yale have received national
attention, the 11 National Guard personnel killed in helicopter crashes during
Operation ROSEWATER have been largely ignored. As have the eight police

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who lost their lives in traffic accidents or other mishaps while responding to
the disorder. In addition to the dead, at least 16,500 civilians across the
country were injured in the violence, while 1,479 military, law enforcement,
and other first responders were hurt badly enough to require medical care.

Yet while these tangible wounds represent the most immediate and personal
toll of June 2021, the invisible harms to the nation were no less real. Citizens’
trust in each other had been battered by six years of Trumpism, and their
psyches brutalized by watching fellow Americans violently killed in
uncensored detail. Millions had marched in the streets and stared down their
friends and neighbors standing opposite them in riot gear. Hundreds of
thousands in uniform were forced to consider whether they might be ordered
to turn their weapons on the demonstrators—and in the months since, each
has had to grapple with their own conscience about what they would have
done.

The first step to healing would be restoring some sense of normalcy. Ryan and
McCarthy agreed that the most urgent priority was reassuring the country and
the world that the government was functional and working again. Even if it
took years to repair the body politic, people at least had to be confident that
they and their government were on the same team again.

To that end, the vice president spent the remainder of the night surveying the
wreckage of the last administration—calling what was left of the cabinet,
contacting senior government officials to reestablish the normal chain of
command, and marshaling staff to plan for the coming weeks of the transition.

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As McCarthy oversaw damage control domestically, Ryan spent those first
crucial hours on the phone with foreign leaders, working to convince them
that U.S. leadership and military readiness were in good order. He promised
more substantive exchanges in the coming days—for now, they just needed to
hear his voice and know that a stable leader was firmly in charge.

Out on the Mall, the wild celebration continued for hours. When organizers
announced Trump’s arrest in Orlando, tens of thousands broke into spiteful
“Lock him up! Lock him up!” chants that echoed all the way to Virginia. But
the overall mood was less vengeful than hopeful. A news helicopter captured a
sparkling blanket of demonstrators—from the Lincoln Memorial to the
Capitol—holding phone lights aloft in solidarity. From below, an
overwhelming chorus: “We are not afraid.”

With JTF-NCR no longer enforcing the curfew, open revelry spread all across
the District. Politically, the people were far from united. In the days ahead,
lingering tensions within the Trump Out movement would resurface. Deep
and essential questions remained over whether this revolution had achieved
its goals and what its participants should do next. For most, this was the
moment of victory, while the minority that decided to stay would soon be
splintering into the constellation of rival occupation groups that persist
around the capital today. Yet in those predawn hours of Friday, June 25, 2021,
the joy was stronger than any divisions.

Inside Jeff Bezos’s Kalorama mansion, Julia and Gabby Glazer could hear the
distant drums and horns gradually approaching. The sound meant they could
go home soon. Yet both knew the home they’d known didn’t exist anymore.

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Their house in Alexandria would have the same walls and furnishings when
they walked back in the front door, but no one would be waiting for them.

From a third-floor bedroom window, they looked down onto the empty street
below. Private security with guns and earpieces patrolled the block on foot.
Even at this time of rejoicing, it was an alien sight that reminded them of what
had been lost. Julia unlocked her phone and stared at Michael. It felt like years
since she’d seen him. The photo was a decade old, but that was just how she
remembered him. He’d want so badly to be right down there on the Mall. In a
sense, she knew, he was.

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