The first time I ever walked into Trump Tower’s marble lobby, I was dragging a rolling suitcase behind me and had a blue backpack slung over my shoulder. I had come straight from the airport, and these two bags contained all of the belongings I had brought to get me through the next few months.
“Fourteenth floor, please,” I told the elevator operator.
“Right away, sir,” he replied. He was a middle-aged African American man, and he was impeccably dressed: black tuxedo jacket with gold buttons and the letters “TT” embroidered on the sleeves—in gold as well, of course—gray vest, black bow tie.
“Where are you from?” he asked, facing away from me as the doors slid shut and we began our ascent.
“Alabama,” I said, laughing. “I only said three words and you could already tell?”
He smiled.
“Well, I knew it wasn’t New York. I haven’t seen you here before. Do you work for Mr. Trump’s campaign?”
“Just started,” I said, looking down at the backpack and luggage I’d set down on the floor in front of me. “I got off the plane at LaGuardia and came straight here.”
There was a brief silence and I wondered to myself what his day must be like. An elevator operator, dressed to the nines and riding up and down all day—in 2016? His sunny disposition had certainly made my ride more pleasant, and nothing oozed “Trump” more than over-the-top service. But I wasn’t sure there was a single elevator operator left in my entire home state.
A bell dinged, bringing the elevator to a stop, and the doors slid open.
“Here we are,” he said. His body was still facing away from me, but he turned his head to the left to look me in the eyes for the first time. “Good luck, sir.” I thanked him and stepped out of the elevator into a small, empty lobby.
In contrast to its surroundings, the campaign’s office space was decidedly less Trumpian. Commercial-grade gray carpet stretched from wall to wall. A standard receptionist’s desk sat unoccupied in the middle of the room, and the white walls were bare—no gold or marble in sight. To my right, a large glass wall with magnetic-locking doors separated the lobby from the rest of the offices. I tugged on the handles, but it was clear I would need an ID to swipe in. As I turned back around, a wooden door opened on the other side of the room, and four staffers in their early twenties emerged. I caught the door before it closed and suddenly found myself in a hub of activity.
The room was long—roughly four times as wide as it was deep. Dozens of desks were positioned in two long rows stretching from end to end. All of them were facing a bank of eight flat-screen TVs neatly hanging on the wall with no cords in sight. Seven of the TVs were muted, but one near the center was blaring MSNBC. In the back of the room, giant windowpanes overlooked an atrium down on the ground floor.
Roughly a dozen staffers sat in front of their laptops, most of them alternating between looking at their computers and glancing up at one of the TVs. As I walked past them all, a few peeked up at me, but most didn’t pay any attention to the random stranger walking by. It felt a little like my first day of middle school. As I put my bags down on the floor next to a wall, someone in the back of the room piped up.
“Hey, could somebody change this TV over to CNN?” he said to no one in particular.
Nobody moved, but I happened to see a TV remote sitting on the desk right in front of me. Picking it up, I pointed it at the second screen from the left and pressed the channel button “up.”
Seven of the eight TVs all changed channels in unison.
“Bro!” a guy in the front row said emphatically as he got out of his seat. Taking the remote out of my hand, he walked right up to each TV’s sensor and changed the channels back one by one.
“Don’t mess with Surabian’s TVs,” another staffer in his early twenties said, laughing and sticking out his hand as he approached me. “I’m Kaelan Dorr. And you must be Cliff. I heard you’d be here at some point today.”
Surabian, Kaelan explained, was the war room director. I’d come to find out that he was a shrewd political operative with a libertarian streak. His knowledge of American politics—including in-depth and random insight into seemingly every congressional district—was surpassed only by his Rain Man–like knowledge of the history of professional wrestling. “And that’s Cheung,” Kaelan continued, pointing to the campaign’s director of rapid response. I recognized him. There had been a round of stories when he left his job running public affairs for the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) to join the campaign. Coming in at about three hundred pounds, with a shaved head and hands the size of bear paws, Steven Cheung looked like he could cave in a grown man’s chest with his fist. “And this is Chris Byrne,” Kaelan said. Neatly dressed in an open-collared shirt and blue blazer, Byrne stood up and shook my hand. He’d worked as a producer for Sean Hannity’s Fox News show, he explained, but was now spearheading the campaign’s regional media operation.
After a few more introductions, Kaelan walked me over to his boss’s office. When I walked in, Jason Miller, the campaign’s senior communications adviser, was yelling at a TV screen mounted on his wall.
“Come on, Hallie!” he yelled as NBC’s Hallie Jackson delivered her latest report direct to the camera. As I would come to find out, one of the ways Trump would test his top communications aide was by telling him what topics he wanted to be highlighted in the media that day. Reporters liked it because they could say, “According to a senior source inside the Trump campaign.…” And Trump liked it because he could see that his communications shop was effectively pushing his narrative. This time, however, it looked like Jason had failed to deliver what the boss wanted.
Jason, in his early forties, had spent the previous fifteen years working his way up the ladder of D.C.’s political consulting class. He’d run countless House and Senate races, usually for antiestablishment, “outsider” candidates. In fact, he’d managed to get himself blackballed by the National Republican Senatorial Committee for helping conservatives challenge establishment incumbents. Most recently he’d served as the top comms staffer for Senator Ted Cruz’s ill-fated presidential campaign. He’d joined the Trump team just ahead of the Republican National Convention, when it was clear that Trump was going to win the nomination.
As the story was told to me by several people in the coming months, Trump had asked his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who was leading Ted Cruz’s communications. Cruz’s campaign was setting him on fire day after day and he wanted to know who was behind it. When Kushner told him it was Miller, whose television appearances had impressed Trump, the candidate asked for him to be brought in for an interview. Once Miller arrived in Trump’s office, Trump pushed him to dish on Cruz. Miller deflected at first, but finally said he didn’t think it would be right for him to speak ill of his former boss. “That’s good,” Trump told him. “If you had, I wouldn’t have hired you.” And with that, Miller—or “my Jace,” as Trump would end up calling him—was brought into Trump’s tight-knit inner circle.
Miller told me he wanted me to help sharpen the campaign’s messaging. So one of my first tasks was to overhaul the way we produced talking points—the playbook for how allies all around the country would talk about the issues of the day. In addition to that, he wanted me to work with Dan Scavino, the director of social media, to help his team develop the campaign’s social media reach outside of Trump’s massive personal accounts. Other than that, he just wanted me to fill any void I saw in the operation.
“Hey, they’re back,” Kaelan said, popping his head in as Jason and I wrapped up our first meeting. Trump had just arrived back at the Tower, along with the small group of aides who traveled with him on his Boeing 757 jet. Trump called the plane “T-Bird,” but to everyone else it was known as Trump Force One.
Moments later, Stephen Miller entered. I’d known him for years as Senator Sessions’s communications director. He was now Trump’s speechwriter and often warmed up the crowd for him at rallies. He stood in the doorway staring at me for a moment. “What are you doing here?” he deadpanned. It would have come across as rude if it were anyone else, but I’d known Stephen long enough to understand that it’s just how he is. He was often the funniest guy in the room, thriving as the center of attention as he poked fun at people and bragged about his brilliance. Other times it just felt like an act—overcompensation for his own insecurities. He had always been self-conscious about the perception that he was a fringe character, both ideologically and socially. But now he was one of the closest advisers to the Republican nominee for president. Suddenly at the top of this emerging new power structure, Miller’s social response was to buddy up to other top aides while harshly condescending to anyone he perceived as being below his newfound status. In short, he was just treating others the way he had been treated for so long.
By the time I met him, in his mid-twenties, he already had a fully formed political ideology and worldview. I often disagreed with him but respected that he knew what he believed and why he believed it. And he could write—I mean really write, and fast. While working in Sessions’s Senate office, he’d single-handedly written what amounted to the definitive “anti-amnesty” handbook. It was full of statistics and messaging recommendations. Immigration hard-liners had used it as their road map to successfully kill a bipartisan effort to pass so-called “comprehensive immigration reform.” Since joining the Trump campaign, he’d helped the candidate flesh out his populist platform, and based on the next conversation I had, he was impressing the people who mattered.
Jared Kushner walked into Jason Miller’s office right behind Stephen. Jason told him who I was and what I’d be doing on the campaign. Kushner welcomed me to the team and began introducing me to Stephen, who told him we already knew each other through Senator Sessions.
“This is our key man right here,” Kushner told me, putting his hand on Stephen’s shoulder. “If we took out key-man insurance on any one person on the campaign, it’d be him. We’d be lost without him.”
If Stephen Miller overcompensated for his insecurities, Kushner seemed to take the opposite approach. The candidate’s son-in-law had a relaxed vibe that reflected his unassailable position in the Trump orbit. Unlike most of the other men on the campaign, who usually wore suits and ties, Kushner was wearing a chill long-sleeve blue cardigan with a green vest over it. A black leather bag was strapped over his shoulder and hanging at his waist, like someone might wear on a trendy college campus. I’d seen him countless times on television, but I’d never heard him speak. His voice was soft, but there was a quiet confidence in everything he said. Upon finding out I had run a successful digital media company, he immediately wanted to pick my brain to see if anything I’d learned along the way could be useful. While the Trump team was reinventing what a presidential campaign looked like, Kushner was clearly looking to soak up knowledge and information wherever he could.
“We need to get you connected to our digital director, Brad Parscale,” he said. “We’re killing it on social and digital and small-dollar donations.” He was right. It would become public a few weeks later that Trump’s small-dollar donations—two hundred dollars or less—were dwarfing every other campaign in history. He’d built a donor base of over two million Americans, a milestone it had taken the Clintons decades and multiple campaigns to reach, and he’d done it in just three months.
Before I left Trump Tower for the first time that night, I wandered around the fourteenth floor to get my bearings. The layout was basically a giant square. If you walked in one direction long enough you would arrive back where you began. Along the way there were several open-concept offices with desks pushed up against the walls. Around the perimeter of the square were glassed-in offices with external views overlooking some of the world’s most exclusive real estate. As I walked by them I noticed printouts labeling offices for campaign manager Kellyanne Conway and deputy campaign manager David Bossie. Neither one of them was inside. But as I approached the office of campaign CEO Steve Bannon, I noticed he happened to be standing in there alone.
Bannon looked like he hadn’t shaved in weeks. Like Kushner, he was also dressed atypically, but hardly in a style that anyone would characterize as “trendy” or “cool.” He was wearing black-rimmed glasses, an army-style jacket over multiple open-collared shirts, and khaki slacks. If he had been wandering around the streets outside Trump Tower, instead of inside it, passersby would have handed him their spare change.
“Steve?” I said, leaning slightly into the room.
“Yeah,” he replied without looking up from his phone.
“I wanted to take a second to introduce myself,” I continued.
“Give me a minute,” he said, still not looking up.
For the next—well, it felt like five solid minutes of silence, I stood patiently as Bannon finished his email. When he finally hit “send,” he still didn’t look at me, choosing instead to walk over to his external window as if there was something urgent needing his attention down on Fifth Avenue.
“Okay, what’s up?” he asked, facing away from me. “Whaddaya got?”
“Uh, I just started on the campaign today and wanted to introduce myself. I’m Cliff Sims, from Yellowhammer News down in Alabama.”
He spun around suddenly. His voice was filled with energy. “The f—ing Yellowhammer is here?! The Hammer?! Epic. I know Yellowhammer. I followed it. I want you weaponizing everything. We’re not being aggressive enough. F— anyone who tells you not to do something. Let’s start wrecking some s—, okay? Good. Go.” He buried his head back in his phone and started typing again. The conversation was over. But that was positive, right? We had met for the first time minutes earlier and he sent me on my way like I was his closest confidant and with the fate of the campaign in my hands. Of course, I wasn’t entirely sure what to “weaponize,” or how to do it, or if my new friend Steve had the authority to offer such direction to me. Or even if he’d remember me the next time I saw him. But I decided to assume that this was Steve’s way of giving me the green light to jump in and contribute wherever I could, which was what I planned to do anyway.
When I left Trump Tower that first night, I decided to walk, instead of taking a taxi, to the apartment the campaign had secured for me at the corner of Sixth and Forty-fifth Street, twelve blocks away. As I walked down Fifth Avenue, I saw St. Patrick’s Cathedral lit up in spectacular fashion. Its marble spires stretched so far into the Manhattan sky that I couldn’t see their tops. On the other side of the street, I immediately recognized 30 Rock. The iconic Art Deco skyscraper overlooked a scene that had been familiar to me since childhood. All that was missing was the ten-story Christmas tree, which would arrive soon enough. I’d visited New York City numerous times before, but now I was living here—even if for only a short period of time.
When I finally made it to my apartment, I opened the door to a panoramic view of midtown Manhattan. It was a fully furnished two-bedroom near the top of a forty-eight-floor high-rise. I had the whole thing to myself, compliments of the campaign. I didn’t find out until later that most staffers’ accommodations weren’t nearly as luxe, and I’m not entirely sure why I had it so good. I walked over to the window, and the neon glow of Times Square, just a block away, hit my face. I was a long, long way from home.
In the coming days, I wrote speech inserts for Mr. Trump’s campaign rallies and strategized on ways to expand our social media reach by tapping into the large online following of our top surrogates. But my primary role was developing our messaging. Following Trump’s lead by emulating the way he liked to talk about various issues, I’d draft talking points for senior campaign aides, coalition leaders, and TV surrogates. I’d get emails from people all over the country asking what the campaign’s message was on just about every issue under the sun.
Occasionally Omarosa Manigault, who was traversing the country on a “Women for Trump” tour, would reach out for direction on how best to answer questions on issues related to women and minorities. I’d never met her, but I’d seen enough of The Apprentice to know that she’d earned her spot on TV Guide’s list of “The 60 Nastiest TV Villains of All Time.” So let’s just say I did my best to get her what she needed. I figured she was trouble I didn’t need.
I realized quickly that the Trump campaign experience was dramatically different for two main groups of staffers: the small cohort who traveled on the plane, and the larger group who stayed behind at Trump Tower. The former spent most of their days traversing the country. They fed off the energy of the crowds and mood of the candidate. The latter rarely traveled farther than a few blocks’ radius around Trump Tower. With rare exceptions, I was in the latter group. Most of us on the tiny communications team became fast friends. We ate lunch together almost every day, often riding down into the cafeteria on the same escalator made famous when Trump rode down it to announce his candidacy.
When Mr. Trump was preparing to take the stage at a rally, which I usually watched on television, I would sound a tornado-siren-style alarm on my computer and yell “Battle stations!” to the delight of our merry band of misfits. We were each doing the job of numerous Clinton staffers. The New York Post ran a report a month before Election Day revealing that the Clinton campaign had literally five times more staffers than we did. We couldn’t care less. The way we saw it, they were the spoiled rich kids whose mommies and daddies bought them BMWs for their sixteenth birthday. We were still riding the bus to school and wearing last year’s fashions. But if a fight broke out in the lunchroom, you’d much rather have us on your side. We came in early, stayed late, and heard the candidate’s stump speech so many times that we could laughingly predict when the chants of “Build the wall,” “CNN sucks,” “Lock her up,” and “Drain the swamp” were about to begin.
Bannon later described our war room team to Politico as “f—ing killers.… These are my psychos who do all this s—. They don’t sleep. They don’t care.” We weren’t entirely sure what to make of that. But he was spot-on about the lack of sleep, at least. It didn’t take long, however, for me to realize we were playing with live ammo.
In September 2016, Alicia Machado, a former Miss Universe, accused Trump of calling her “Miss Piggy.” According to her allegations, Trump, who owned the Miss Universe pageant during Machado’s reign in the mid-1990s, had been upset with her because she’d gained weight and decided to ridicule her for it. Pretending that it was suddenly news that Donald Trump said something offensive about someone, cable news channels covered this particular story nonstop for days, especially after Secretary Clinton brought it up during the first debate.
During that same debate, Trump had hinted at his own response—bringing up past accusations against the Clinton family, a subject that was decidedly not covered nonstop on the news. “I was going to say something extremely rough to Hillary, to her family,” he said. “And I said to myself, ‘I can’t do it. I just can’t do it. It’s inappropriate. It’s not nice.’ But she’s spent hundreds of millions of dollars on negative ads on me.… I will tell you this.… It’s not nice.”
Back at Trump Tower the next day, Jason Miller asked me to work up some talking points on what we might say if Trump were to change his mind and decide to go on the attack.
“How hot do we want these talking points to be?” I asked.
“Make them pretty spicy,” Miller replied. “Not, like, nuclear, but let’s start hot and then tone them down if we need to.” It wasn’t entirely clear what that meant, but it was as much direction as I was going to get, and I thought I had a decent idea of what he wanted.
Walking out of his office, I noticed Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the daughter of former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, sitting in the back of the war room. Her family had been dealing with the Clinton machine in her home state since before any of them were household names. Sarah’s job on the campaign was organizing pro-Trump coalitions in the faith community, and she went about it quietly in the midst of the war room chaos. When I introduced myself, she reminded me that her husband had been the top consultant on Robert Bentley’s Alabama gubernatorial campaign. They’d closely followed my coverage of his scandals.
“I don’t know what happened to him,” she said. “He went from this sweet country doctor to … I don’t even know what. It’s sad.”
I agreed, told her it was nice to have a fellow Southerner on the campaign with me, then went straight to work compiling information about all the times Hillary Clinton was said to have intimidated or sought to discredit Bill Clinton’s past sexual accusers. It was a lengthy list. Then I drafted talking points that surrogates could use to go on the attack during interviews, such as: “Mr. Trump has never treated women the way Hillary Clinton and her husband did when they actively worked to destroy Bill Clinton’s accusers.” “Hillary Clinton bullied and smeared women like Paula Jones, Gennifer Flowers, and Monica Lewinsky,” added another.
This was pretty controversial stuff. For many years, especially after the political fallout of impeachment, Republican candidates had refused to “go there” on Bill Clinton’s women issues, including accusations of sexual assault and rape. Only those on the far right ever mentioned that Hillary Clinton had played a role in bullying accusers. Atypically for a man like Trump, who tended to say whatever was on his mind, he had largely stayed away from this, too. Perhaps this was because he’d faced his own accusations of sexual misconduct.
When I was done, I emailed the document around to our small team for review. It was more of a thought exercise than a work product that would ever be deployed. I didn’t think much more about it for the next few hours.
It was business as usual in the war room, until Kaelan Dorr blurted out, “Oh, not good!” and pointed up at one of the TVs.
CNN’s chyron at the bottom of the screen made my heart drop into my stomach.
They spent the next several minutes discussing this shift in direction for the Trump campaign, quoting my draft talking points. An online story hit our in-boxes a few minutes later.
It’s still unclear exactly how this happened, but someone in the group that received the draft document mistook it for a finished product that needed to go out. So it had been sent to every Trump surrogate in the country—hundreds of them, maybe thousands.
Moments later, deputy campaign manager David Bossie stormed into the war room with the CNN article printed out.
Bossie was a hard-nosed former firefighter. In the nineties he’d served as chief investigator for the House Oversight Committee that investigated then-President Bill Clinton. He’d gone on to run Citizens United, a conservative activist group most famous for winning a Supreme Court case abolishing limits on how much companies and nonprofits could spend on political advertising. For two solid decades, nobody had been a bigger Clinton foe than Bossie, and even he wasn’t sure what to think about these talking points.
“What. Is. This?” he demanded in a tone that verged on outrage.
I was mortified. In other campaigns, people got fired over things like this. Years before, Donna Brazile had been forced to resign from the Dukakis campaign for even mentioning accusations of adultery by George H. W. Bush. Was I next?
Bossie went into Jason Miller’s office and shut the door, only to emerge minutes later.
“Hammer!” he yelled out, looking for me. “You wrote these? I mean, no one’s going to accuse me of being soft, but dude.”
“They weren’t supposed to go out,” I protested. “But everyone said they wanted to see some hot talking points, so there they are.”
“Hot?” he said, his voice raising with his eyebrows. “Hot?! Ha.” He crumpled up the printed-out CNN article and threw it in the garbage. “You know I was a firefighter, right? Okay. This isn’t hot. This is arson.”
Bossie was no-nonsense and extraordinarily loyal—to Mr. Trump and to anyone in the foxhole with him. He was giving me a hard time for being a part of the talking points fiasco, but he would have defended me to the death if anyone had actually tried to make it a real issue.
“Somebody supervise the arsonist,” he said, walking out of the room.
Trump never mentioned the talking points himself—something tells me he probably liked them—and I quickly realized that such a misstep was light-years from a fireable offense in this campaign.
We didn’t know it at the time, but if those talking points were hot, what would come later would be Chernobyl.
For most of the country, Fridays are the best day of the workweek. Everyone looks forward to heading home to start the weekend. But in Trump Tower, that day in particular was met with trepidation. Late in the campaign, it felt like a new, salacious story was dropped on us every Friday afternoon. “Leak ’em if you’ve got ’em!” Jason Miller would joke about how Clinton oppo researchers must have approached the day. The stories would then lead all of the Sunday talk shows, setting the tone for the following week.
On Friday, October 7, 2016, our comms team arrived at Trump Tower in time for our daily 7:30 A.M. conference call, then hunkered down in anticipation of what was to come. Sure enough, word slowly began to spread through the team that The Washington Post had obtained a video of Mr. Trump making lewd comments about women. We sat quietly for hours in the war room, anxiously anticipating the video’s release.
“It’s up,” Surabian shouted. The short Armenian stood up out of his chair but continued hunching over his computer, sending an email alert to senior campaign staff and communications aides.
“Donald Trump bragged in vulgar terms about kissing, groping and trying to have sex with women during a 2005 conversation caught on a hot microphone,” wrote the Post’s David Fahrenthold, “saying that ‘when you’re a star, they let you do it,’ according to a video obtained by The Washington Post.”
We’d endured plenty of hits that would have sunk most campaigns, but this was, even for Trump, a devastating blow. Americans have become numb to the constant flow of accusations and hit pieces during presidential campaigns. But video is a powerful medium. It displays nonverbal communication, so viewers can read body language. It includes audio so listeners can hear tone and discern the meaning beneath the words. Trump had mastered video as a communications medium, and now the same medium that had catapulted him to stardom was threatening to take him down. Within minutes the video was running simultaneously on every single one of the war room’s eight TVs.
The entire atmosphere of the campaign immediately changed. On most days, our small communications team would be in nonstop contact with reporters and cable show anchors, working to correct stories, add our perspective, and shape the coverage of the day.
This was the first time that the coverage was so bad—and the backlash so severe—that there was essentially nothing we could do. The carnage was uncontrollable. Surabian was sending a nonstop torrent of emails to campaign staff. It was part of his job to “flag” important stories as they were breaking so everyone had situational awareness in real time. In this instance, he was sending email after email—it must have been hundreds in total—with statements of condemnation and withdrawals of support from prominent figures. “I feel like the prophet of doom, or something,” he said ominously.
Many of our most loyal campaign surrogates refused to go on TV. Almost immediately, Republican National Committee staff stopped answering our phone calls, texts, and emails. At one point they even removed campaign staffers from their internal communications alerts, severing the operational ties that had bound the teams together since the convention. The drumbeat for Mr. Trump to exit the race began almost immediately.
RNC research director Raj Shah texted his counterpart on the campaign, Andy Hemming, summing up the attitude of many in the establishment wing of the GOP. “u wanna hear something a little f—ed up?” Shah asked. “I’m kinda enjoying this, some justice. I honestly don’t think it’s the worst thing he’s done but he somehow got passes for the other acts.”
“Trump is a deplorable,” he concluded, echoing Hillary Clinton’s controversial description of Trump supporters.
Campaign staffers’ friends, family members, and acquaintances started peppering us with texts and phone calls asking if we were planning to abandon the sinking ship.
“You headed home yet?” one friend in Alabama texted me at the height of the fury.
I silenced my phone and walked down to the fifth floor of Trump Tower, which once housed the set of The Apprentice. It was now a large, open, warehouse-style room, with some tables and chairs and a portable basketball hoop in the center, which had been brought in by campaign aides as a way to blow off steam.
I grabbed a ball and shot by myself for a while—and thought. Had it been a mistake to come here? I had played a major role in exposing accusations of sexual misconduct by a Republican governor in Alabama. He never recovered. How could Trump come back from this? How would I?
Tired of shooting and not ready to return to the nonstop news coverage in the war room, I spent the next hour scrolling through Twitter and digesting the onslaught. Then I heard footsteps clicking on the concrete floor and glanced up from my phone.
To my surprise, Mr. Trump had walked into the room. To that point, I had not been around him very much. He was usually either crisscrossing the country, in his office twelve floors above the war room, or in his penthouse looking down on the world from above. Instinctively, I stood up. He was wearing a blue-and-white-striped tie and his usual dark suit with an American flag lapel pin. He clearly wasn’t in a hurry to get anywhere. The fifth floor was home to the campaign’s video recording studio. It was typically used for campaign aides to do satellite television hits, but tonight it was being used to record Trump’s response to the Access Hollywood tape. Turns out, he had grown exasperated with the recording and walked into the cavernous room to take a break.
The thing I remember most about his demeanor was how remarkably calm he was. There may have been moments throughout the day when he was angry or frustrated or flew off the handle, but I wasn’t there to see them. The Trump I saw was somewhat defiant, but more than that, relaxed—placid. The most embarrassed I ever remember feeling was when someone pulled my shorts down in front of my entire elementary school class at recess. I can still feel my face turning red decades later when I picture everyone laughing about it. Meanwhile, the entire country was coming unglued about Trump and he didn’t even seem flustered. It was strange—but also inspired a sense of, well, maybe we’ll actually get through this. Of course, Trump had been through major celebrity scandals for decades—two bitter and very public divorces, for example—and he was toughened by them in ways most of us weren’t. (Or would ever want to be.)
Also sitting quietly in the room was a swimsuit model in her early twenties who had volunteered for the campaign. She had a large following on Instagram, but none of her fans were more committed to her than the unmarried campaign guys on the fourteenth floor.
Seeing her sitting alone at her laptop, Mr. Trump made a beeline for her, and she stood up to greet him.
“What do you think about all of this—the video and what everyone is saying?” he asked her with what seemed to be genuine curiosity.
“Oh, I don’t understand why everyone is so upset,” she said without hesitation.
He didn’t seem to believe that.
“C’mon,” he pressed. “Tell me what you really think about it. It’s okay.”
“I don’t think people will care after a few days,” she said confidently. “I was totally not offended—not offended at all, Mr. Trump.”
With that, he smiled, shook her hand, turned around, and locked eyes with me on the other side of the room.
“Not offended,” he said with a shrug. No big deal.
He walked by and tapped me on the chest with the back of his hand. Maybe he saw the doubt on my face. “Don’t worry about it. We’ll be fine, believe me.”
He walked back into the tiny studio and finished the recording. “See you at the debate on Sunday,” the video concluded, at his insistence.
Campaign staffers later came to call it “the hostage video” because we thought it resembled the terrorist videos where they force someone to read a prepared script. His face wasn’t exactly in focus and the lighting wasn’t great, but it got the job done.
With the video set to be released, we all assembled in the war room to watch the reaction. Our usual squad was joined by Bannon and campaign manager Kellyanne Conway. Now in her late forties, Kellyanne had spent the previous two decades building a public opinion research firm called The Polling Company. She had deep ties to conservative donors around the country and had run a pro-Cruz super PAC during the primary. She was initially brought onto Trump’s campaign to advise the candidate on how to appeal to female voters, but she had been elevated to campaign manager in August 2016 upon the ouster of Paul Manafort. She was a Jersey girl, sometimes standoffish, but had thrived for decades in a business dominated by alpha males. She had earned a reputation on the campaign for being willing to go on any network at any moment and fight tooth and nail. Trump loved her for it.
Though she held the title of campaign manager—and was justifiably proud to be the first woman to manage a successful presidential campaign—Kellyanne functionally acted as the top spokesperson. Bannon, who held the title of CEO, was focused on preserving Trump as the vessel through which his populist nationalist ideas could hit the big time. He was also too ADD to manage much of anything. By my observation, if anyone besides Donald Trump was in charge of his presidential campaign, that person was Jared. He didn’t need a title to be in charge.
But Kellyanne was a fighter, and a good one. When she arrived in the war room on Access Hollywood night, she looked exhausted, even frazzled. Her hair was slightly disheveled as she plopped down in a chair just behind Surabian and Cheung and put her cell phone down on a desk beside her. Her body language made it clear that she wasn’t interested in making small talk, so everyone quietly went about their business as we waited for the video to post.
“None of our female surrogates will go out to defend us,” Cheung whispered. “Except Scottie Nell Hughes. She’s about to get her head kicked in on CNN.”
The video began playing, and for ninety-five seconds the entire war room watched in total silence.
For reaction, CNN had assembled a panel on Don Lemon’s show that included Hughes and André Bauer, a pro-Trump former Lieutenant Governor of South Carolina, and anti-Trump commentators Tara Setmayer, Bob Beckel, and Ana Navarro.
“This race is over,” Beckel declared. “Tomorrow morning the money will dry up, the Republicans will start to hide. Trump has no place to go. This race effectively, as of tonight, is no longer a presidential race.… You might as well accept it.”
Navarro was indignant. “Every single Republican is going to have to answer the question, ‘What did you do the day you saw the tape of this man boasting about grabbing a woman’s pussy?’”
When Hughes asked Navarro to stop saying the “p-word” because her daughter might be watching, the segment devolved into a screaming match.
The moment it ended, Bannon was the first to speak.
“Yes. Perfect. Let’s go. Back in the game.” I suppose that was the sort of thing you had to say at the moment. We were still standing. Move on. Keep fighting.
I still had my doubts.
I walked into one of the offices just off of the war room, closed the door behind me, and lay down on a couch. The statements Trump had made in the Access Hollywood video were abhorrent. Watching people defend them was a perfect example of why being a surrogate on TV never appealed to me—not for Trump or any other candidate. How could people go on TV, night after night, and defend things they knew in their heart were indefensible? But the question facing me in that moment was whether I should continue on the campaign at all.
As I thought about it, every argument I could come up with for why I should consider quitting was selfish: What would people say about me? What would my friends at church think about me? How will being attached to this debacle affect me in the future? Me, me, me. As I considered the bigger picture, I couldn’t think of a single thing that would have been made better—for my country, my family, or myself—by Hillary Clinton being elected President.
I joined the campaign with no illusions about who Trump was—a deeply flawed man. But the balance of the Supreme Court was on the line, which mattered to me and so many others. In my view, this really was the Flight 93 Election: “charge the cockpit or you die.”
I also thought about my Christian friends in Egypt, where I had enjoyed a lengthy visit earlier in the year. In 2013, they had taken to the streets by the millions to protest the Islamist government of Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood. They’d vocally supported the rise of military general Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. He wanted to crush ISIS in the Sinai and promised Christians—and other religious minorities—greater civic equality. El-Sisi wasn’t George Washington. He wasn’t going to rise to power, only to give it back to the people in an act of democratic heroism. He would still control a largely authoritarian, militarized state. And he was a devout Muslim. In short, he was far from everything Christians wanted. But he was far better than the alternative, so they campaigned hard for him.
Other sincere, well-meaning people of faith considered the same facts that I did, but came to a different conclusion with regard to supporting Trump. I respected them for refusing to violate their conscience. But in the coming weeks, when American Christians demeaned their Trump-supporting brothers and sisters for lacking moral courage, I often thought of Egypt. What about Egyptian Christians, whose churches were bombed and whose dead bodies were paraded through the streets while you flaunted your moral superiority on Twitter from the comfort of your couch? Did they lack moral courage, as well, for supporting a Muslim authoritarian over an Islamist who wanted the streets to run red with their blood?
That’s a pretty hot take, obviously—probably hotter than the “arsonist” talking points I’d written about Clinton’s accusers—so I never said this publicly. But these were the things I was thinking. They were the things I needed to tell myself in order to keep going on this campaign.
Lying in my bed that night, a scene from Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird came to mind. This may seem random, but people from Alabama will understand. Lee’s our most famous author, and the book is set in our home state. It’s the pinnacle of our literary canon. At one point late in the book, one of the characters, Miss Maudie, consoles a crying girl and offers her some simple but profound advice: “Don’t fret,” she says. “Things are never as bad as they seem.”
Donald Trump was the living embodiment of that statement. I know many of my friends on the left had a hard time understanding this, but it’s why so many people stuck with him after that. No one questioned his toughness or his willingness to punch back. But one quality not often attributed to Trump was consistency. In fact, most often he was—and still is—characterized as the exact opposite: erratic, unpredictable, even unstable. There’s no question that he displays each of those characteristics at times, but I thought there was something to be said for someone who just keeps going, no matter what. When it’s a good day, he gets up and grinds it out. When it’s a bad day, he gets up and grinds it out. Then he does it again. Then he does it again. And again.
It’s a quality that seems to be more prevalent in Trump’s generation than in my own. For decades, my grandfather, Lonnie Sims, worked at Trunkline Gas Company in the Delta of Mississippi. When he passed away, we found in one of his drawers a small box of lapel pins with different numbers on them—5, 10, 15, and 20. Turns out, the company had given each of them to him—one every five years—in a ceremony recognizing how long it had been since he missed a day of work.
Yes, Trump could be impulsive, even reckless. Sure, he operated almost entirely off of gut instinct. But he was also the most methodical, patient person I’ve ever seen in the midst of a crisis—the eye of the storm. And you could bet every penny you had that he was going to get up and go to work the next morning.
So that’s what we did, too.