I Alone Can Fix It summary

Reports from China in late January painted a bleak picture. 

The hospitals were overwhelmed, the morgues were full, and the crematoriums were working overtime. Hubei Province and its capital, Wuhan, were in lockdown. 

By mid-March, things were bad. International cases were skyrocketing, and the World Health Organization was calling COVID-19 a global pandemic. 

Inside the White House, there was a tug-of-war between advisers calling for a lockdown and officials urging Trump to keep America open for business.

Image was everything for President Trump. 

He thought that masks made him look weak, so he didn’t wear one. By contrast, assassinating Qasem Soleimani projected toughness, so he ordered a drone strike on the Iranian general. 

The Black Lives Matter movement took off in the summer. America, its supporters said, needed to change. The deaths of Black men like George Floyd had to stop. 

During these weeks of protest, the country passed a tragic milestone: 100,000 coronavirus deaths. Of course, the president didn’t mark the occasion – he was playing golf that day. 

The death toll continued to climb over the summer. By early September, the country was on track to reach 200,000 deaths. Meanwhile, Trump’s ratings were in freefall. 

According to one adviser, voters were “fatigued.” The pandemic had brought nothing but suffering. Trump had to give them hope – to show them that there was light at the end of the tunnel. 

Trump’s White House was leaky. Unflattering stories, like the scoop about him hiding in an underground bunker, tended to end up on newspapers’ front pages. 

Leaks fueled paranoia, and there was a constant search for “moles.” Yet other kinds of breaches, like the transmission of a lethal virus, weren’t taken nearly as seriously. 

In the 2016 presidential election, votes from the swing states had arrived in two waves. 

The first ballots came from Democratic strongholds like South Florida, giving Hillary Clinton an early lead. But as votes came in from Republican areas like the Florida Panhandle, Trump gradually caught up – and then overtook her. 

Votes were still being counted in key battleground states on November 5. The more ballots officials got through, the more likely a Biden victory became. 

But Trump was claiming that these votes had been cast fraudulently and demanded an immediate halt. As he put it in an all-caps tweet that day, it was time to “STOP THE COUNT!”

On January 6, 2021, the mood in Washington, DC, was electric. 

Forty thousand or so Trump supporters had come to the city, and Rudy Giuliani was firing them up. He condemned the “criminals” trying to steal the election and told his audience to prepare themselves for “trial by combat.”