Schmidt S. - Donald Trump V. the United States - Inside the Struggle to Stop a President

In the eleven years since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, which had put America at war and changed everything about the way we think of ourselves and our relationship to the world, the anniversary of that day had become a solemn occasion. And in election years, that day had unofficially become a twenty-four-hour period when the political battles would be suspended. Whether motivated truly by patriotism or out of fear of appearing crass and callous, politicians had learned to control themselves on that day. Indeed, in 2008, John McCain and Barack Obama had actually visited the site of the Twin Towers together, where they laid roses, bowed their heads in prayer, and met with the family members of victims.

But on September 11 four years later, at 6:54 p.m. eastern daylight time, as Mitt Romney’s campaign plane made its way over the southeastern United States, the wire service Agence France-Presse moved an alert, indicating a major breaking news story. One American had been killed and another injured in an attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, by “an armed mob protesting over a film they said offended Islam,” according to the wire service. And that wasn’t all. In Cairo, reports indicated that dozens of protesters had climbed over the walls of the American embassy, torn down the American flag, defaced it, and then raised a black flag that read, “There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his messenger.” Images from the scene showed protesters standing atop the concrete walls that surrounded the facility.

The embassy in Cairo, in an apparent attempt to calm the protesters, had released a statement about the controversial film in question, in effect saying that free speech had its limits. The statement had condemned “the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims,” and added, “We firmly reject the actions by those who abuse the universal right of free speech to hurt the religious beliefs of others.”

Romney campaign aides immediately convened a call to figure out how to respond to the attacks. For the Romney aides on the call, the portrait emerging of American diplomatic outposts overrun by violent Muslims as the Obama administration remained largely silent played directly into the image of how Republicans and the conservative media had long sought to portray the president. Since Obama had first emerged on the national scene in 2004 as a candidate for Senate in Illinois, Republicans saw national security issues as one of his greatest vulnerabilities. But depending on where they stood on the party’s political spectrum, Republicans displayed their dissatisfaction differently. At the far end of the party, figures like Sarah Palin and Trump openly questioned Obama’s patriotism, with Palin describing Obama as “palling around with terrorists” and Trump falsely suggesting that Obama might have been born outside the United States and therefore was constitutionally prohibited from being president. More sophisticated and moderate Republicans like Romney and his aides portrayed Obama as too eager to apologize for the United States abroad, contending that he failed to support allies like Israel and that he had been soft on dictatorships like Russia, which Romney argued as he campaigned was the greatest geopolitical threat to the United States.

In Obama’s first term, he offered a rebuttal by aggressively pursuing terrorists through drone strikes and commando raids. No major terrorist attacks on Americans occurred, and he oversaw the greatest national security accomplishment of the post-9/11 era, the successful mission to kill Osama bin Laden. But now a nasty firefight with jihadis—with American casualties—appeared to provide an opening to counter that narrative. “From the point of view of some on the Romney high command, this was manna from heaven,” said Gabriel Schoenfeld, a campaign adviser.

On their call, the aides discussed how the White House’s reluctance to issue a statement signaled that Obama, in their view, wanted to pretend the attacks were not terrorism because such an admission would mean admitting that al-Qaeda was still active. The aides kept coming back to words like “feckless,” “weak,” and “coddling.”

Several advisers on the call suggested it might be wise to wait a day, until more complete information could be known about the attacks. But others advocated a more confrontational approach. Stuart Stevens, Romney’s chief strategist, and policy adviser Lanhee Chen drafted a statement to be issued in Romney’s name. “I’m outraged by the attacks on American diplomatic missions in Libya and Egypt and by the death of an American consulate worker in Benghazi,” the statement read. “It’s disgraceful that the Obama administration’s first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks.” Initially, the statement was meant to be embargoed until the next day, but when the campaign received word that a reporter had sent the statement to the White House seeking comment, the embargo was lifted. And so, too, was the informal embargo on campaigning on September 11.

Romney’s statement tapped a reservoir of dark energy that had been simmering, first on the margins of right-wing media with the advent in 2007 of Breitbart News, a far-right website trafficking in incendiary commentary, and then brought to a boil—and into the mainstream—by the aggrieved, conspiratorial tone of Fox News and conservative talk radio pundits. Whether he realized it or not, with his Benghazi statement, Romney had sounded a dog whistle to an emergent base of the Republican Party, who were primed by this aggressive style and hypernationalist, even nativist, rhetoric of the far-right media machine. On a primal level, as this version of the story went, the Benghazi attacks were perpetrated by shadowy foreigners who posed a threat to “us,” possessed values alien to our own, and could have been thwarted with better fortified walls protecting the besieged American outposts. Had the United States not been so deeply—and wrongly—engaged in global affairs, intervening in conflicts in far-flung countries while ignoring the erosion of life at home, according to this narrative, we could have avoided such violent attacks. Perhaps worst of all in the eyes of this growing faction of right-wing activists, instead of standing strong in the face of violence directed at America, the Obama administration’s response was to cower and capitulate. Now the Republicans’ so-called mainstream candidate was using his position as the face of the party to throw an accelerant on this smoldering fire in the party.

The Romney campaign was roundly attacked for responding prematurely to a still-unfolding national security crisis, and for doing so on a solemn day of mourning. Even some Republicans said that what Romney had done was “hasty and stupid.”

Then, at 7:22 a.m. on September 12, the news got worse for the country, and for Romney. The White House said that the death toll in Benghazi, which had risen to four, included the American ambassador to Libya, J. Christopher Stevens.

In Florida, Romney believed he had been right on the merits to attack Obama but was increasingly nervous about the backlash. He knew he could not afford to fall further behind in the race, and walking back the statement felt like the safest thing to do. On an 8:00 a.m. conference call, he let his frustration be known, criticizing his top aides for botching the response and suggesting they might need to reverse course.

“Guys, we screwed up,” he said. “This was a mistake.”

It took Romney’s advisers some time to convince him that he had to hold the line. In fact, they said, the only option was to double down. Eventually, Romney agreed, even if he was going to have to face more contentious responses from adversaries and key allies.