“Donald Trump has got it. He’s Trump, but he’s got it. Trump is Trump,” affirmed Bannon.
“Yeah, he’s Trump,” said Ailes, with something like incredulity.
1
ELECTION DAY
On the afternoon of November 8, 2016, Kellyanne Conway—Donald Trump’s campaign manager and a central, indeed starring, personality of Trumpworld—settled into her glass office at Trump Tower. Right up until the last weeks of the race, the Trump campaign headquarters had remained a listless place. All that seemed to distinguish it from a corporate back office were a few posters with right-wing slogans.
Conway now was in a remarkably buoyant mood considering she was about to experience a resounding if not cataclysmic defeat. Donald Trump would lose the election—of this she was sure—but he would quite possibly hold the defeat to under 6 points. That was a substantial victory. As for the looming defeat itself, she shrugged it off: it was Reince Priebus’s fault, not hers.
She had spent a good part of the day calling friends and allies in the political world and blaming Priebus. Now she briefed some of the television producers and anchors with whom she’d built strong relationships—and with whom, actively interviewing in the last few weeks, she was hoping to land a permanent on-air job after the election. She’d carefully courted many of them since joining the Trump campaign in mid-August and becoming the campaign’s reliably combative voice and, with her spasmodic smiles and strange combination of woundedness and imperturbability, peculiarly telegenic face.
Beyond all of the other horrible blunders of the campaign, the real problem, she said, was the devil they couldn’t controclass="underline" the Republican National Committee, which was run by Priebus, his sidekick, thirty-two-year-old Katie Walsh, and their flack, Sean Spicer. Instead of being all in, the RNC, ultimately the tool of the Republican establishment, had been hedging its bets ever since Trump won the nomination in early summer. When Trump needed the push, the push just wasn’t there.
That was the first part of Conway’s spin. The other part was that despite everything, the campaign had really clawed its way back from the abyss. A severely underresourced team with, practically speaking, the worst candidate in modern political history—Conway offered either an eye-rolling pantomime whenever Trump’s name was mentioned, or a dead stare—had actually done extraordinarily well. Conway, who had never been involved in a national campaign, and who, before Trump, ran a small-time, down-ballot polling firm, understood full well that, post-campaign, she would now be one of the leading conservative voices on cable news.
In fact, one of the Trump campaign pollsters, John McLaughlin, had begun to suggest within the past week or so that some key state numbers, heretofore dismal, might actually be changing to Trump’s advantage. But neither Conway nor Trump himself nor his son-in-law Jared Kushner—the effective head of the campaign, or the designated family monitor of it—wavered in their certainty: their unexpected adventure would soon be over.
Only Steve Bannon, in his odd-man view, insisted the numbers would break in their favor. But this being Bannon’s view—crazy Steve—it was quite the opposite of being a reassuring one.
Almost everybody in the campaign, still an extremely small outfit, thought of themselves as a clear-eyed team, as realistic about their prospects as perhaps any in politics. The unspoken agreement among them: not only would Donald Trump not be president, he should probably not be. Conveniently, the former conviction meant nobody had to deal with the latter issue.
As the campaign came to an end, Trump himself was sanguine. He had survived the release of the Billy Bush tape when, in the uproar that followed, the RNC had had the gall to pressure him to quit the race. FBI director James Comey, having bizarrely hung Hillary out to dry by saying he was reopening the investigation into her emails eleven days before the election, had helped avert a total Clinton landslide.
“I can be the most famous man in the world,” Trump told his on-again, off-again aide Sam Nunberg at the outset of the campaign.
“But do you want to be president?” Nunberg asked (a qualitatively different question than the usual existential candidate test: “Why do you want to be president?”). Nunberg did not get an answer.
The point was, there didn’t need to be an answer because he wasn’t going to be president.
Trump’s longtime friend Roger Ailes liked to say that if you wanted a career in television, first run for president. Now Trump, encouraged by Ailes, was floating rumors about a Trump network. It was a great future.
He would come out of this campaign, Trump assured Ailes, with a far more powerful brand and untold opportunities. “This is bigger than I ever dreamed of,” he told Ailes in a conversation a week before the election. “I don’t think about losing because it isn’t losing. We’ve totally won.” What’s more, he was already laying down his public response to losing the election: It was stolen!
Donald Trump and his tiny band of campaign warriors were ready to lose with fire and fury. They were not ready to win.
* * *
In politics somebody has to lose, but invariably everybody thinks they can win. And you probably can’t win unless you believe that you will win—except in the Trump campaign.
The leitmotif for Trump about his own campaign was how crappy it was and how everybody involved in it was a loser. He was equally convinced that the Clinton people were brilliant winners—“They’ve got the best and we’ve got the worst,” he frequently said. Time spent with Trump on the campaign plane was often an epic dissing experience: everybody around him was an idiot.
Corey Lewandowski, who served as Trump’s first more or less official campaign manager, was often berated by the candidate. For months Trump called him “the worst,” and in June 2016 he was finally fired. Ever after, Trump proclaimed his campaign doomed without Lewandowski. “We’re all losers,” he would say. “All our guys are terrible, nobody knows what they’re doing. . . . Wish Corey was back.” Trump quickly soured on his second campaign manager, Paul Manafort, as well.
By August, trailing Clinton by 12 to 17 points and facing a daily firestorm of eviscerating press, Trump couldn’t conjure even a far-fetched scenario for achieving an electoral victory. At this dire moment, Trump in some essential sense sold his losing campaign. The right-wing billionaire Bob Mercer, a Ted Cruz backer, had shifted his support to Trump with a $5 million infusion. Believing the campaign was cratering, Mercer and his daughter Rebekah took a helicopter from their Long Island estate out to a scheduled fundraiser—with other potential donors bailing by the second—at New York Jets owner and Johnson & Johnson heir Woody Johnson’s summer house in the Hamptons.
Trump had no real relationship with either father or daughter. He’d had only a few conversations with Bob Mercer, who mostly talked in monosyllables; Rebekah Mercer’s entire history with Trump consisted of a selfie taken with him at Trump Tower. But when the Mercers presented their plan to take over the campaign and install their lieutenants, Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway, Trump didn’t resist. He only expressed vast incomprehension about why anyone would want to do that. “This thing,” he told the Mercers, “is so fucked up.”
By every meaningful indicator, something greater than even a sense of doom shadowed what Steve Bannon called “the broke-dick campaign”—a sense of structural impossibility.
The candidate who billed himself as a billionaire—ten times over—refused even to invest his own money in it. Bannon told Jared Kushner—who, when Bannon signed on to the campaign, had been off with his wife on a holiday in Croatia with Trump enemy David Geffen—that, after the first debate in September, they would need an additional $50 million to cover them until election day.