It actually could have been much worse.

Going into the election, we all knew a few scary things. First, the scariest, we knew there was a chance Trump might win, despite the polls going in.

Second, we knew that the “real results” wouldn’t even be close to known until the next day (A lot of us went to bed sick to our stomachs that night). Third, if Donald Trump lost, he would claim that the election was rigged.

Hell, he had promised that. We didn’t know how effective he would be in that claim, and we didn’t know that almost the entire Republican party would go along with it.

But it could have been much worse. Imagine if Donald Trump had come out and claimed victory at the point in the evening when things looked best for him?

He almost did, according to the new book by Phillip Rucker and Carol Leonigg from the WaPo,  I Alone Can Fix It, and unlike some, this one is highly anticipated.

Mediaite has a list of nine shocking facts already released:

One, the Trump side was way over-confident it would win. They believed they’d sealed the deal:

Finally, Election Day had arrived. The morning of Nov. 3, 2020, President Trump was upbeat. The mood in the West Wing was good. Some aides talked giddily of a landslide. Several women who worked in the White House arrived wearing red sweaters in a show of optimism, while some Secret Service agents on the president’s detail sported red ties for the occasion.

Mediaite adds a few we find interesting but not worth adding here. The most shocking, and most frightening detail is obvious, Two, Rudy Giuliani advised that Trump should proclaim victory in swing states like Michigan and Pennsylvania.

Giuliani went state by state asking Stepien, Meadows and [Jason] Miller what they were seeing and what their plan was.

“What’s happening in Michigan?” he asked.

They said it was too early to tell, votes were still being counted and they couldn’t say.

“Just say we won,” Giuliani told them.

Same thing in Pennsylvania. “Just say we won Pennsylvania,” Giuliani said.

Giuliani’s grand plan was to just say Trump won, state after state, based on nothing. Stepien, Miller and Meadows thought his argument was both incoherent and irresponsible.

“We can’t do that,” Meadows said, raising his voice. “We can’t.”

We suspect, that in hindsight, Trump wishes he had listened to Giulianni. One of the aides likened it to, “It’s hard to be a parent when the cool uncle is telling you what you want to hear.” Imagine infantilizing any other president as such.

And the last we’ll put out under fair use standards from Mediaite, and this was also a generalized fear:

Secretary of Defense Mark Esper feared Trump would call out troops if the election results were not “clean and clear.”

Esper had lived through the strain of the 2000 recounts and the Bush v. Gore case. He had repeatedly told his deputies that he wanted this election to be “clean and clear,” as in free of any suggestion of corruption and indisputably clear who had won. He had feared that anything less might give Trump some shred of a reason to call out troops. Later in the evening, as returns posted in Biden’s favor, Esper told a friend, “It looks good.” The defense secretary went to bed comforted by signs that the country would get a divided and stable government — a Democratic president and, he hoped, a Republican Senate.

Trump’s own Sec. of Defense wanted him to lose. Imagine that. There are more details in the Mediaite article and we suggest the reader flip over.

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