On November 3, 2020, MarkMeadows was eagerly waiting for the results of the presidential election with Donald Trump and a lot of Republican loyalists at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
He remarked on the president's leads in additional swing states as he basked in his vote advantage over Joe Biden in Florida.
According to the former presidential aide's new book, the Republicans at the White House were almost certain that Trump would be re-elected.
When a phone call came through for Trump from a Republican political consultant, he was waiting for official network calls to declare victory.
The mood in the White House turned sour when Fox News called the state of Arizona for Biden, despite the fact that the state had not supported a Democratic presidential nominee since Bill Clinton in 1996.
The analysts were reporting good news from social media. The traffic on the social network was in the right direction.
He said that he heard a loud series of screams from the next room. Arizona was called for by Fox News.
The decision to call Arizona for Biden at that stage was premature, according to a former congressman from North Carolina.
It was impossible to determine at this early hour. He wrote that Fox News could not have made the call because of the information they had at the time.
The presidential aide had previously initiated a testy phone call with Bill Sammon, the managing editor of Fox News Washington, over what he felt was unfair election coverage by the network.
On election night, he felt that his suspicions about Fox News had been proven correct.
There was a liberal contingent within the network that was trying to sabotage President Trump in the name of objectivity. He wrote that he was surprised he didn't crack the screen of his phone when he called Bill Sammon again.
He told Sammon that there was no information that could make this call possible.
Sammon told the congressman that the network's election modeling projected a Trump loss in Arizona, but the top presidential aide pushed back.
It may be that President Trump loses Arizona. There is no way you can know if he does or not, because it will be by less than ten thousand votes.
In Arizona, Biden won by a single vote out of 3.4 million ballots cast.
Sammon was said to have said that it wasn't the network's job to appease political figures in the White House.
According to three individuals who spoke with The New York Times, Sammon received criticism from Fox News executives for his oversight of the network's election coverage, despite the accuracy of the Arizona projection.
Sammon left the network in January.
The presidential aide complained in the book that in the early morning hours of November 4, Democratic votes were being added to the tally without mentioning that states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin were not allowed to count Biden mail-in ballots until Election Day.
