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- Trump eagerly awaited updated Wisconsin results on election night, according to an upcoming book.
- Participants in the White House believed there was a “delay” in the Midwestern state’s election results.
- The campaign ignored the time difference, with Wisconsin one hour behind Eastern Time.
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In the early hours of November 4, after one of the most tumultuous presidential elections in U.S. history, then-President Donald Trump swept aside the states that were called in his favor, including the major election prizes in Florida, Ohio, and Texas.
He was optimistic about his chances in swing states like Arizona, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin, pointing to election day voting trails that he said would last.
However, in a televised White House speech that he saw as an inspiring victory message, Trump alleged electoral fraud and vowed to go to the Supreme Court to “stop” the counting of additional ballots.
After the speech was over, the president entered the card room, with members of his family and a small circle of advisers who quickly followed, according to an upcoming book by Michael Wolff.
It was near 3:30 a.m., and the campaign began to take a keen interest in Wisconsin, a swing state that Trump narrowly won in 2016 and hoped to return to his column in 2020.
Trump and then-Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden had been competitive in Badger State overnight, but the president was hoping to end the race with updated numbers from a data release at 3:30 am.
The campaign team wanted Wisconsin’s new numbers to give them some momentum, but the unfolding situation only frustrated them, which Wolff describes in “Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Chairman.”
As of 3:30 a.m. Eastern Time, Wisconsin did not release any updated numbers.
“Everyone was waiting, not much to say, the anxiety was building up, the president muttering: Why the delay? What was happening? Did they stop counting? Wolff wrote.
Read more: Where are Trump’s staff in the White House now? We’ve created a searchable database of over 327 top employees to show where they all ended up
Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer at the time, insisted the “delay” confirmed his suspicions of electoral malfeasance.
“They now knew how many Biden votes they needed to balance Trump’s votes, and they were producing them! That’s what it was about,” Wolff wrote, describing Giuliani’s line of thought.
Trump stayed twenty minutes, but eventually became “agitated” and “angry” by the situation before heading to the White House residence.
Election attorney Matt Morgan, who was in the card room much of the night, left the White House at 4 a.m.
As Morgan drove home, he realized that Wisconsin is in the central time zone, meaning it was an hour behind on the east coast.
The so-called “delay” was actually a failure to account for the time zone difference, and the updated data was released that morning.
Biden then defeated Trump in Wisconsin by about 20,000 votes out of nearly 3.3 million votes cast.
Milwaukee County, the state’s most populous jurisdiction and a longtime Democratic stronghold, gave Biden a big 183,000 vote margin over Trump, securing his victory on the Midwestern presidential battlefield.
The Trump campaign, which questioned the results, spent $ 3 million last year on recounts in Milwaukee County and Dane County, another Democratic stronghold, to see Biden garner 132 votes in Milwaukee.
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