I employ thousands and thousands of Hispanics. I love the people. The Latinos. I love the people. They’re great; they’re workers. They’re fantastic people. But they want… legal immigration.
—DONALD J. TRUMP, LAREDO, TEXAS, JULY 23, 2015
EVERYONE KNOWS what the media said about the boss’s campaign after he announced his candidacy. Every time he said anything not politically correct, they declared his campaign over. But after weeks of having those thirty-six words from his announcement speech knowingly misrepresented by the media as racist, the boss accepted an invitation to travel to Laredo, Texas, and meet with its border patrol officers and local officials.
The media tried to downplay the warm reception that Mr. Trump got from just about everyone involved, including the mayor of Laredo, a Democrat. The border patrol, the local government, and much of the population knew there was a problem with border security, and they were glad someone had finally dared to propose real solutions. Border security and immigration were Donald Trump’s campaign issues.
There was an awfully small group of Latino protesters there when we arrived. But, unfortunately, they were protesting a lie the media told them. They had been told Donald Trump called all Mexicans or all Mexican immigrants rapists, murderers, and so forth. But go back and read those thirty-six words again. He didn’t even call all illegal immigrants rapists or murderers. He distinctly said he assumed some were good people.
So if the boss is a racist, why did he say, “They’re not sending their best?” If he believed all Mexicans were the same, based on their race, that wouldn’t make much sense. Neither would his statements about some of them being criminals and some being good people.
Those thirty-six words were as close to the opposite of racism as any words could be.
So, no matter how hard the media tried to spin the story on his trip, it was a total success. The people there saw through the smoke CNN and others were blowing, just as the boss figured they would. We rolled into town to cheering crowds and appreciation from everyone we met with.
Come to think of it, we rolled into just about every place we visited the same way. Donald Trump knew how to roll—and fly.
When Donald Trump listed the aircraft he had during Corey’s job interview, Corey shrugged it off as a random boast. But Trump wasn’t boasting. He was pointing out the military equipment he had for the war ahead. A candidate with a jet has a formidable advantage over rivals without one. A candidate with an air force was going to be tough to beat.
And we’re not talking cargo planes here.
Trump Force One is a 24-karat-plated, plush-leather-adorned, first-class aircraft complete with a master bedroom, dining room, galley, big-screen TV, and concert-level sound system. The Rolls Royce engines on the 757 can blow the wings off most commercial airliners. It has every amenity you can imagine. And though the jet was the crown jewel of the fleet, there were also other gems, including the Cessna Citation X, the fastest corporate jet available, and the multitude of helicopters.
When you flew with Trump, you flew first class times ten.
Except, that is, when it came time to eat.
The first time Dave told his wife Susan that he was going to be on Trump Force One, she asked him to take some photos of what they served him to eat on the plane. She had read somewhere that Mr. Trump had a personal chef who traveled with him. When dinner came on the flight, Dave pulled out his BlackBerry and snapped a picture of the bag of McDonald’s hamburgers and unopened package of Oreo cookies and emailed it to Susan.
On Trump Force One there were four major food groups: McDonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken, pizza, and Diet Coke. There were also ancillary groups, including Vienna Fingers and the ubiquitous Oreo, before the boycott (after it was Hydrox). The reason the package of Oreos was unopened was because Mr. Trump would never eat from a previously opened package. If you’ve seen the Seinfeld episode in which George double-dips his chip, you have a pretty good idea of the boss’s reasoning. Packages of cookies, along with small airliner-size bags of pretzels and potato chips, filled the plane’s cupboards. An army might march on its stomach, but Trump’s team flew on junk food. And those snacks would have to sustain us during long flights and even longer days.
T he candidate would hardly ever eat lunch and would eat dinner only after he finished the last event of the day. We’d be in the jet or on the road from seven or eight a.m., make however many scheduled stops we had, and after the last one, perhaps around nine p.m., Mr. Trump would clap his hands and say, “Let’s eat!” And the food needed to be hot and ready for him. Some of the time, especially when he was pleased with his performance at a rally or event, he’d say, “Do you think I deserve a malted today? I think I deserve one.” Trump, a city kid, grew up drinking malteds, so that’s what he always called a milkshake. Whatever you want to call it, it better be there and it better still be thick.
The orchestrating and timing of Mr. Trump’s meals was as important as any other aspect of his march to the presidency.
In the beginning weeks of the campaign, with just the core five—Hope, Keith, Dan Scavino, George Gigicos, and Corey—the job of getting Mr. Trump his dinner fell to Corey and Keith, and the task needed teamwork and coordination to accomplish. There were variables to take into account. For instance, we didn’t know how long the candidate would spend working the rope line. He could shake hands for ten minutes or half an hour. We had to take into consideration traffic patterns, last-minute chats with VIPs, and other unexpected diversions. There were lots of moving parts. At the end of the day, however, the boss’s meal had to arrive on time.
As soon as Mr. Trump came off the stage, Corey would peel off in a car to the local McDonald’s while Keith kept him apprised of the candidate’s progress.
In no time, they had it down to a science, with Corey arriving at the jet’s steps just as Mr. Trump would climb out of the car on the tarmac.
As the events started to get bigger, and Corey had to let others take over the meal run, it became more challenging. Corey hired Michael Glassner in July 2015. He had been Sarah Palin’s top adviser in 2008. Later, Corey would promote Glassner to deputy campaign manager. Michael’s first job on the campaign, however, was taking over Corey’s duty as the food runner.
One time in Chicago, when our motorcade blew through red lights with a police escort, the boss’s dinner—two Big Macs, two Fillet-O-Fish, and a chocolate malted—sat in bumper-to-bumper traffic. In times like that, the “run” would become like a scene out of Fast and Furious : burning rubber, up on two wheels, donuts. Well, close to that.
And, if you were late, you got no mercy.
We were on the road one time in South Carolina when the boss decided he was ready for dinner. Sam Nunberg was in the follow-up SUV when Keith and Corey went in to get the food. Sam went in also, leaving just Hope and the boss in the car. A few minutes later, Corey came out with the bag that contained dinner for himself, Hope, Keith, and the boss’s meal in a separate bag. But Sam had decided he wanted a special order: no pickles, extra onion, hold the lettuce, along those lines. Mr. Trump was sitting with the bag on his lap. We had the SUV’s door open for Sam like it was a getaway car. Two minutes went by. Three minutes passed by.
“Keith, go get him, would ya?” he said.
When Keith returned without him, the boss had had enough. “Leave him,” he said with absolute finality. “Let’s go.”
Roger that.
Corey turned and looked out of the back window to see Sam, empty-handed, waving and running after the SUVs. The lesson here is that there is only one boss, and when he is ready to go, you go. Period.
W hen traveling in the air with the boss, you also learned pretty quickly to like Elton John. Donald Trump really likes Elton John. Anthony “the Mooch” Scaramucci got in all sorts of hot water—which is not at all an unfamiliar position for him—when he told an interviewer that Elton John would play at President Trump’s inaugural. It had been wishful thinking on Mooch’s part, probably because he’d been on the plane when the boss had “Tiny Dancer” or “Rocket Man” playing as loud as the concert-level speakers could bring it.
We’re telling you, when the boss cranks up Elton, you can’t hear yourself think. The music is loud enough to rattle your brain.
Still, suffering through a brain-rattling “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” is far more preferable than the boss going off over something on Fox News, CNN, or MSNBC—and yes, we would even watch MSNBC, perhaps just to hear what the liberals were saying about him.
In all the time Corey flew with him, some thousand hours plus, he saw Mr. Trump close his eyes maybe five times. And by “close his eyes,” he means for three minutes, tops. Donald Trump is an absolute machine. He is the single hardest-working person we have ever seen. You could count the number of times on one hand when, once in a blue moon, when it was a long flight, like coming back from Vegas to New York, he might go into his room and come out thirty minutes later. We’d think at first, Finally! Now we can watch something other than CNN or Fox . And then the TV would start changing channels, because the remote he had changed the channels on all the TVs on the plane. It got to the point where he was getting so much airtime not even the boss could take it.
“Too much Trump for Trump,” he said one day.
During that flight, instead of news, we watched a film, Deliverance . It would be Hope’s first and last time she watched the movie.
Speaking of Hope, the last thing we’ll tell you about life on Trump Force One is the steamer. Mr. Trump was a stickler when it came to how he looked onstage and at events. He had a steamer on board that would take the wrinkles out of his suits. When we landed, it was Hope’s job to steam him.
“Get the machine!” he’d yell. And Hope would take out the steamer and start steaming Mr. Trump’s suit, while he was wearing it! She’d steam the jacket first and then sit in a chair in front of him and steam his pants.
One time, Hope forgot to bring the steamer on the jet.
“I don’t think we have time, sir,” she said when he yelled for the machine. “We’ll just get you pressed at the hotel.”
But Mr. Trump insisted. When Hope finally admitted she’d forgotten the steamer, he blew his top.
“Goddammit, Hope! How the hell could you forget the machine?”
“Sir, couldn’t we have it pressed at the hotel?”
“I want it now!”
It was a mistake she would never make again.
B y July 2015, it was pretty obvious, to us at least, that the Trump campaign was going to be like no other campaign in history. The rally in Phoenix on July 11 nearly caused a full-out stampede, and Politico called it the start of “Trumpmania.” Things quickly got even crazier.
On July 15, Hope, Keith, Corey, and some security flew on the Citation with the boss to Laconia, New Hampshire, for an event at a VFW hall. As the plane was landing, Corey checked his phone. There were fifteen voice mails, all from the same number: the Laconia Police Department. As the plane taxied in, Corey called the number.
“We have a serious situation,” an officer said.
All Corey cared about was that people had shown up at the event. That wasn’t the problem.
“We can’t get you into the venue,” the officer said.
The VFW hall had a maximum capacity of three hundred and fifty. There were at least a thousand people outside the hall, literally standing on the roof of the building to get a glimpse of Donald J. Trump. The traffic was backed up for three miles leading to the venue, and as our small motorcade pulled up, people started chasing the cars to touch the car Mr. Trump was in. That day was the first time the Trump campaign needed a police escort, a practice that would become standard operating procedure.
The temperature in the hall neared ninety-five degrees.
When we tried to leave, the police had to lead us through the crowd, and people were shaking the SUVs. It looked like a riot scene from a movie. We had advance guys running alongside the SUV to keep the people away. People just wanted to be near Mr. Trump.
Mr. Trump was scheduled to do Bill O’Reilly’s show that night. Originally, we planned to tape The O’Reilly Factor from New York after the New Hampshire event. However, the event went long, so we decided to have Mr. Trump phone in from the small regional airport in Laconia. People knew we were heading to the airport, just a short distance from the VFW hall, and they started pouring in to watch Mr. Trump take off. However, what they saw instead was the team and Mr. Trump watching O’Reilly from the airport lounge. The hundreds of people waiting for a glimpse of the boss in the parking lot weren’t starstruck Apprentice fans standing there. These were sophisticated political people, grassroots activists, and local political ops. The camera crew had a TV monitor set up. A thousand people stood watching Trump as he watched TV. Those of us on the inside of the campaign knew then that what we were watching was lightning in a bottle.
It was at this time that Mr. Trump hit first place in the national polls. The numbers had gone from a low single-digit joke to nearly unanimous front-runner in less than a month—something never done before. And when Donald Trump was in first place, there was no looking back. People were begging for something different. They had something different in Trump.
On Saturday, July 18, in an interview with Frank Luntz at the Family Leadership Summit, a conservative Christian conference, Donald Trump showed just how different a candidate he was going to be. Earlier in the week, John McCain had said that Trump was “firing up the crazies” at the Phoenix rally. The boss shot back with some words of his own, defending the people who came to see him. Luntz asked Mr. Trump how he could say disparaging things to a war hero.
“He’s not a war hero,” the boss said.
Corey, Chuck Laudner, and Hope had watched the interview on a small monitor in the green room of the venue.
“What the hell did he just say?” Corey asked. He didn’t have to wait long for an answer.
“He’s a ‘war hero’ because he was captured,” Trump said. “I like people that weren’t captured.”
Corey went into full crisis mode. In the greenroom after the interview, he told the boss that they needed to have a press conference right away so he could walk back his remarks.
“You want a press conference,” Mr. Trump asked. “Let’s have a press conference.”
In what sounded more like a street fight than a press conference, Donald Trump stood his ground. He put his comments in the context of McCain’s poor record helping veterans and the absolute disgrace of our Veterans Administration. Mr. Trump and reporter Stephen Hayes got into a screaming match that lasted three whole minutes.
Corey’s first thought was that the campaign was over. He called Alison after the presser to tell her he would soon be on his way home. But his second overriding feeling was that of pure awe. He had never seen a candidate have such courage in his convictions. No matter how hard the press pushed him, Trump wasn’t backing down from his words.
By the time they got back to the airplane, the story had exploded. In the coming hours and days, just about every other candidate and talking head piled on. Governors Rick Perry and Scott Walker denounced Trump. Lindsey Graham told him he was fired. Cable news was outraged. So was nearly every pundit and op-ed writer in the country and around the world. Sean Hannity told him to apologize. So did Steve Bannon. But the boss never wavered.
Hope, Corey, and the boss flew to Newark and then drove to Bedminster, New Jersey, where Trump owns a golf club and home. There his wife, Melania, met him at the door. She had TiVoed all the news shows covering the uproar.
“You were absolutely right,” she said to her husband. “John McCain has not done enough for the veterans.”
Corey and Hope looked at each other in disbelief.
The next day, the highly respected journalist and author Sharyl Attkisson took the boss’s side, saying his words were taken out of context and the media’s reaction to them was part of a larger smear campaign. Chuck Laudner then set up a hotline for veterans to get help.
By Wednesday of the following week, the flaming controversy was only embers.
Corey had said to Hope during the height of the blowback that if the boss survived this he would be president of the United States. Trump not only survived, but his poll numbers continued to skyrocket. Corey knew then what much of the mainstream media would deny until Election Day: that Donald Trump was going to be tough to beat. He wasn’t afraid to say and do things that he believed in, no matter how politically incorrect they might seem. And by doing that, his actions and words spoke to people like no other politician’s.
E ven though we were officially in the race, and despite the fact that we were leading most of the polls, pundits and opinion writers still thought of the Trump campaign as a sideshow. Later, the CNN host Michael Smerconish would call the boss “the George Costanza of the 2016 field.” But we were all business and were about to show it. All presidential candidates are required to file a personal financial disclosure (PFD) statement with the Federal Election Commission. You’re given thirty days from the day you announce to do so. The liberal media was still branding the boss as a flash-in-the-pan candidate and saying that he was using the campaign as a way to bolster his businesses. They didn’t believe he’d ever file the PDF. Around that time, Ted Cruz came to visit the boss at Trump Tower. Trump asked him if he had filed his disclosure.
“I asked for an extension,” the senator said.
“See, Corey; we can get an extension.”
But Corey knew that the media would kill Trump if he asked for more time. They’d say the boss didn’t have the money he purports to have. They’d say he was hiding some shady deals. Corey knew he had to file on time.
The campaign knew it would be the largest single filing of any PFD in the history of candidates and that it would take a lot of hard work to put it together accurately. With the oversight of Don McGahn, we assigned one accountant to the task; the young accountant worked night and day, a finger-bleeding kind of effort. Much to the disappointment of the pundits who were waiting to swoop down on us like vultures, we filed the disclosure in twenty-nine days—one day early. The message the early filing sent was clear: Trump, a man with over six hundred businesses, got things done, while your average politician had to ask for extensions. The disclosure also allowed us to flaunt a number with a nice ring to it: $10,000,000,000. Donald Trump’s net worth was ten billion dollars. How about them apples?
T he trip to Laredo came later in the month. Stephen Miller, who had been the communications director for Jeff Sessions in the US Senate before joining our team, was the one who initially helped us draft our immigration policy. We also have to give much credit to Ann Coulter, who was a significant influence and held us accountable for our immigration policy. Miller became our top policy guy, and it was Miller who gave us the contact information for officials in the border patrol union. The local union boss invited Mr. Trump to Laredo to see the border for himself. We knew the trip was going to be a big deal, and we knew the press would go wild over it, but we didn’t realize just how big of a deal it would be.
When we said earlier that we rolled into town, we mean we rolled. A presidential motorcycle brigade escorted our motorcade of several SUVs with blacked-out windows and two full-scale coach buses carrying credentialed media. At least twenty police cruisers trailed us. Our convoy included multiple unmarked cars and light armor-plated vehicles with military weapons. They closed the border for a full hour during Mr. Trump’s visit. They had snipers on the roofs of nearby buildings. And this was all for Donald Trump, who at the time held an official position no higher than John Q. Citizen.
Mr. Trump spent much of the time in Laredo talking to border agents.
“We can’t do our jobs,” they told him.
“You elect me,” the boss said, “and I’ll take your handcuffs off.”
The trip was also right in Ted Cruz’s backyard. The senator was scheduled to join us on the trip, but at the last minute his team pulled out of the event, citing important issues in Washington. Good thing. The boss sucked up all the oxygen this side of the Rio Grande. There was such a feeding frenzy among the press, an overzealous cameraman split Corey’s head open with his Nikon.
Over and over again at rallies across the country, Donald Trump’s biggest applause line was, “Oh, we’re gonna build a wall.” The line had been trial tested in front of hundreds of thousands of people. We knew it was an issue as hot as the Laredo sun. The border visit was one of the great photo ops in political history. One hundred and twenty credential media broadcast, published, posted, and tweeted indelible images of a man determined to keep our borders safe. But as politically historic as the trip was, maybe the most lasting symbol was something that the boss wore on his head. On that day, a white MAKE AMERICA GREAT hat became one of the great iconic politcal symbols.
The hat, of course, would become a sensation and one of our biggest early fund-raising tools. No marketing firm, no poll testing. For our first buy, Mr. Trump told Amanda Miller to call his merchandise guy and order a thousand. By September, the New York Times was calling it “the must-have accessory of the summer.” By April the following spring, the campaign had sold 500,000. And there were five times as many knockoffs sold (ours were American made). The boss signed thousands of them. Even the knockoffs. Corey told CNN that the hat was disruptive technology. “People who weren’t involved in politics, that didn’t have a political background, wanted to show their support for something different and their way to do that was to buy hats,” he said. At rallies, hats formed a red, white, and ultimately camouflage sea of change and helped signify that we were no longer just a campaign, but a movement.
I f we didn’t know by then that Donald Trump had become a political supernova, we would become irrevocably convinced by August. George suggested we hold a rally in Mobile, Alabama, where he lived. Though the campaign didn’t have any staff then in Alabama, our advance man had plenty of friends and relatives who could lend a hand. He also knew someone in the mayor’s office, whom he called to see if a small, 2,500-seat theater was available. It was, and they sent George the contract that afternoon. By Tuesday, 10,000 people had RSVP’ed to attend the event. By Wednesday, it was 16,000. George called his friend in the mayor’s office back and booked a civic center that sat 10,000. But by Thursday, the RSVPs had swelled to 40,000. They moved the event to Ladd-Peebles Stadium, a football stadium, and people waited in a driving rainstorm to get in. As the weather cleared, Captain John did a flyover and tipped the 757’s wing, as George announced Mr. Trump’s arrival to the wildly cheering crowd of over 35,000.
Incredibly, the same scenario would happen time after time. If you look at photographs from any one of those rallies, you’ll notice something else, besides the hats and T-shirts with slogans, that they all had in common. Everyone seems to be holding up a cell phone and recording the event. Those videos then got emailed, shared, posted, and then eventually seen by the attendees’ entire online communities. Donald Trump’s reach was rally attendance times X.
O ur lead in the polls grew in early August. Trump zoomed ahead of Jeb Bush and his $150 million campaign like he was Wile E. Coyote and we were the Road Runner. Beep. Beep. We had gone by the rest of the field so fast the RNC had whiplash. The pundits chalked it up to it being summertime. No one’s paying attention to the race, they said. Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight blog compared our poll numbers with the August numbers of primary candidates who ended up losing the nomination such as Joe Lieberman in 2003, Rudy Giuliani and Hillary Clinton in 2007, and Rick Perry in 2011.
Donald Trump, however, was no Joe Lieberman.
On August 6, the boss participated in his first debate: the Washington Post /Fox News Republican primary debate held at Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland. It was the first of six primary debates leading up to the Iowa caucuses.
No one watching knew what to expect from Donald Trump and, frankly, neither did we. Our debate preps amounted to conversations at Trump Tower on potential topics, a discussion on the airplane, and a final debate “prep” in the SUV on the way to the event. And sometimes debate prep gave way to more important things. In Cleveland, the band Aerosmith, which was performing in the area, reached out to Don McGahn and asked if they could say hello to Mr. Trump. They came over to the boss’s suite just before the debate that night. Mr. Trump spent “debate time” talking with the band, who offered their support to his campaign.
Donald Trump is the best game day player that politics has ever seen. He didn’t need prep; he’d been preparing for this his whole life. He knew what had happened to Romney. They had poured so much stuff into his head that he couldn’t talk when it came time to. Trump knew he could handle himself in front of the camera better than any of the other candidates. He played the game like he had nothing to lose, so he was loose and spontaneous.
Because of his standing in the national polls, Mr. Trump was placed at the center of the stage behind the most prominent podium. We also knew that he would receive most of the questions and be given the most opportunity to speak, because people weren’t tuning into the presidential debate to watch Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush; they were tuning in to see Donald J. Trump.
From the first debate on, Donald Trump decimated the field of primary candidates. There were seventeen candidates in Cleveland in August (two tiers), and only four (Cruz, John Kasich, Rubio, and Trump) by the March CNN debate in Miami. The combination of Trump’s stage savvy and street smarts was devastating. Although the mainstream media and other haters give him little credit for his intellect, Donald Trump has more than a fundamental grasp on a surprising number of fields, including Jungian psychology. One of his favorite books is Memory, Dreams, Reflections , Jung’s autobiography. Steve Bannon insists that Trump came up with the idea for the names Lyin’ Ted, Little Marco, Low-Energy Jeb, and, later, Crooked Hillary, from his knowledge of Jungian archetypes.
When Megyn Kelly sandbagged him with her first question about things he’d said about women during his life, the boss turned what should have been a devastating problem into a rousing rallying cry for the country. Instead of wasting our time being politically correct, he challenged us to be smarter in trade and energy production. The Rosie O’Donnell line was for laughs. Following the laughs, however, the boss showed himself as a serious candidate. The crowd ate it up.
Donald Trump knows how to ride a popular wave. His assault on political correctness resonated with people across the country. We took advantage of that connection whenever we could. We began posting videos for his Facebook followers. In one, the boss looked directly into the camera and told the viewer that he didn’t have time to be politically correct. The video went viral. Whether it was Rosie O’Donnell’s weight, or a federal judge, or any of the reporters following the campaign, no one was off-limits. And only Donald Trump could get away with what he got away with.
And because of his honesty, he was the draw. When he decided to boycott the next Fox debate in Des Moines, in protest of the way the network and their star anchor had treated him in the first debate, the ratings dropped 40 percent. Trump came up with the idea of having a fund-raiser for veterans on the same night. We held it less than a ten-minute drive from the Iowa Events Center, where the debate was held. Still Fox News, and Roger Ailes specifically, begged us to come. They were even okay with us getting there at the last second. They promised to move the other candidates so Mr. Trump would have the center podium if and when he showed up. We didn’t take them up on the offer, and the press we generated overshadowed the coverage of the debate. And Donald Trump raised $6 million for vets in the process.
Yes, in one way, the primary debates were a reality show, and Donald Trump drove the ratings. But they were also a serious platform from which he delivered his ideas to make America great again: to clean up Washington’s corruption and special interests; to protect American workers; to restore border security and the rule of law; to appoint a justice to fill the enormous hole left by the death of Antonin Scalia; to provide a tax code that helped keep hard-earned money in the pockets of the middle class. No doubt the boss was fun to watch onstage, but he was also the most authentic candidate. He rekindled a dream for millions of Americans—and that’s why they elected him president.
I n the middle of August, we headed to a must-stop event for every presidential candidate, the Iowa State Fair. There the boss pulled off one of the great campaign PR maneuvers of all time. Chuck Laudner actually came up with the idea. He’d heard about Mr. Trump giving helicopter rides to Dave’s kids in New Hampshire, and he asked the boss if he would do the same at the fair. Of course, he didn’t care that it was a three-day helicopter trip, that the Sikorsky, which had a three-hundred-mile range, would have to refuel four times each way. Nor did he care that it would be a huge insurance liability. But neither did Mr. Trump.
“Don’t worry about it,” the boss said about the cost. “Let’s do it.”
As it turned out, the media coverage we received was worth a hundred times the outlay. A photo of the Sikorsky with TRUMP emblazoned on its side ran in newspapers and on television news segments across the country. Martha Raddatz of ABC News elbowed her way onto the first trip on the helicopter with Mr. Trump and the children so she could use the footage for ABC’s Sunday news show. One of the kids on the ride asked Mr. Trump if he was Batman. Perfect!
You couldn’t pay for better PR.
O n December 2, 2015, Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, a married Muslim couple living in Redlands, California, walked into a state-run San Bernardino center that provided services for the disabled and shot and killed fourteen people, wounding twenty-two others. Five days later, on the anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Trump campaign issued a statement that called for the ban of all Muslims entering the United States. Later that day, at a rally in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina aboard the USS Wisconsin , the boss reiterated his stance. As was the case with the uproar over his comments about John McCain, the reaction to and condemnation of the proposed ban in the press and by the other candidates was fast and furious. Jeb Bush called Trump “unhinged.” Governor Christie said the plan was ridiculous, and Senator Lindsey Graham said it was “downright dangerous” to the United States. Two days after we released the statement, a Bloomberg poll showed 65 percent of Republican voters were for a Muslim ban, and nearly 40 percent said they were now more likely to vote for Trump because he had proposed it.
We started talking about the Muslim ban right after San Bernardino. There wasn’t a person on the Trump team who was against releasing the statement. And yet, according to those who are supposed to know about these things, Donald Trump was a dangerous ideologue and his campaign didn’t know what it was doing.
For us, the decision was simple. We wanted none of the other candidates to move to the right of us on immigration. From the overwhelmingly positive reaction we received at rallies to the boss’s hard-line immigration stance, we knew he had struck a chord with a large number of voters. What we couldn’t believe was how tone-deaf all the other candidates and the mainstream media seemed to be.
A lot of comparisons have been made between Brexit, Britain’s June 2016 withdrawal from the European Union, and the Trump campaign. Indeed, we shared the same major issues: immigration and trade. But we also shared a passion that, as strong and significant as it was, was nearly invisible to the establishment. The boss became friendly with Nigel Farage of the UK Independence Party, who, like Trump, was the leader of a movement many underestimated.
B y Christmas, the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries were approaching fast. Though the boss, of course, wanted to win them both, he wanted to win Iowa big-league. One reason he wanted to win the caucuses was because so many people had told him that he couldn’t. But maybe the main reason he wanted to win the caucuses is because he wanted to beat Ted Cruz.
In one way, the battle for the Iowa caucuses turned out to be a land war against an air campaign. Having the Citation X was a huge advantage because we could hit multiple media markets outside Iowa: the Nebraska media market, the Wisconsin media market, and the southern Iowa media market. Sometimes we’d be in the air for only fifteen, twenty minutes. It would take other candidates hours to drive the same distance. We would do three events in a day while they would only do one or two, tops. Chuck Lauder put together the strategy. He’d tell us where we should go and when to be there, both from a timing perspective and an optics perspective. We’d do a big rally and then a small hall, and then a small hall and a big rally. There are certain boxes that every candidate has to check in Iowa. It was the model Governor Bradstad used to be successful.
But Ted Cruz had been in Iowa for months. He had so many volunteers that his campaign rented a college dorm in Des Moines to house them. We couldn’t field a baseball team with the full-time people we had on the ground. Though we ruled the air, there’s something to be said for good old retail politics—hitting the mom-and-pop stores, having breakfast in the local diner. It was a classic race between the tortoise and the hare. Cruz was giving us all we could handle and more.
It wasn’t like Cruz was the only one in the race. Dr. Ben Carson started out as a real threat. Marco Rubio had a significant presence, and Jeb overwhelmingly outspent our campaign (later, after losing big there, he denied putting any effort into Iowa). There was also Huckabee and Santorum, both of whom commanded a strong following among religious conservatives. Santorum had won the caucuses there in 2012 and Huckabee in 2008.
As the voting drew near, the boss put a lot of pressure on Corey. It was Donald Trump’s first election of any kind as a candidate, and he saw it as do or die. Winning Iowa isn’t always an indicator that you’ll be the nominee. In 2008, when McCain was the Republicans’ choice at the convention, Mike Huckabee had swamped him in Iowa. But you couldn’t tell Trump that. One day in January, he ordered Corey off the jet in the middle of a blizzard with the instructions, “Go win Iowa for me.”
Six months earlier, the idea that Donald Trump would even be competitive in the caucuses was a fantasy. “You could have won a hundred million dollars betting that he would finish in the top three,” Corey said. Perhaps, if everything had broken Donald Trump’s way that day, he might have pulled off the victory. But everything didn’t break his way.
A caucus system is very different from a primary. Voters go to a given location at a given time, where they listen to candidates or representatives of the candidates. Then they cast votes for a delegate of the candidate of their choice. For a campaign, it requires an enormous amount of organizational skill. You need to have all seven hundred of the caucus locations covered. You need speakers or at least reps in all of those places, and you have to have campaign literature at all of those places. Trump visited the largest sites, in Ames and other areas, while his surrogates covered as many of the smaller venues as they could. At the time, our surrogates numbered eight or nine. They included the candidate’s grown children, Donald Jr., Eric, and Ivanka, and his son-in-law Jared. Our limited number was a recipe for disaster.
Though the small number of campaign representatives would indeed prove problematic, it was perhaps unrealistic expectations, mostly from family members, that would lead to the beginning of the end of Corey’s time as Donald Trump’s campaign manager.
Corey was in the SUV with Keith, Hope, and the candidate on caucus day when the call came. When Trump hung up the phone, he looked at Corey.
“You don’t know what you’re doing,” he said to him. “This team is completely lost.”
It had been Ivanka on the phone. She and Jared had arrived as surrogates at a precinct caucus to find it without any Trump campaign staff or even literature. Nothing makes the boss angrier than when someone embarrasses his children. As far as Trump was concerned, the screwup at the voting location was inexcusable and a permanent mark against Corey. Though the mix-up was more the state director’s fault than his, Corey was the campaign manager and ultimately bore the responsibility for all aspects of the campaign in Iowa. Plus, for most of the time, he was seated right next to Trump, so he was an easy target.
In retrospect, the campaign’s performance in Iowa was pretty remarkable given the size of and inexperience of the team. We had set a goal of 45,000 votes, which we achieved with room to spare. Of course, we thought that 45,000 would be enough to win. In 2016, however, the Iowa caucuses drew a record-breaking number of voters—in no small measure because Donald Trump was in the race. And had it not been for a robocall blast by Cruz’s campaign the day of the voting containing the erroneous message that Ben Carson had dropped out of the race, Trump might have won. There was also the not-so-little matter of the boss skipping the Fox News debate in Des Moines the week before the caucuses because of the Megyn Kelly issue, which, though his base supported the move, might have hurt him in Iowa. Still, he finished second, falling short by just a little over six thousand votes. Any other candidate would have had plenty of positives to take from the effort. Marco Rubio took third, and his campaign was ecstatic. But for Donald Trump, second place was the same as coming in last. And in the boss’s eyes, losing Iowa was a significant strike against Corey.
The week following the Iowa caucuses was a low point in the campaign. Mr. Trump wouldn’t let go of the loss and took every opportunity to remind audiences how Cruz had cheated. In close quarters, he took the opportunity to chastise Corey and anyone else on his team who crossed his path. Trump was in a miserable mood, and his temperament started to have a discernible negative effect on his numbers. The New Hampshire primary was only a week away, on November 9, and Corey was concerned his attitude would turn voters off. Then Jeff Roe, Ted Cruz’s campaign manager, called, and the concern increased to real worry.
“Your candidate is dropping like a rock,” Roe told Corey. “Your favorable rating is dropping through the floor.”
Why, you ask, was Ted Cruz’s guy so concerned about the health of our campaign? Well, the Cruz camp had made a strategic decision to run against Donald Trump at the end of the campaign, when most of the other primary candidates would be out of the race, and not compete in New Hampshire. He also knew the Trump campaign did not use polling (hard to believe for a candidate who just missed winning the Iowa caucus) and so Corey didn’t have the data he had.
“You’re down nine points in the last three days,” Roe said. “And if you don’t do something soon, you could lose New Hampshire, and John Kasich will catch you.”
On the Thursday before the Tuesday primary, Corey called Ed Rollins. Like many in politics, Corey has great respect for Rollins. Rollins had run Ronald Reagan’s presidential reelection campaign. Without looking at any data, Rollins estimated that Trump’s “fave/unfave” number had dropped 10 points.
“You’re on the cusp of losing this thing,” he told Corey.
Corey was not traveling with the candidate when he called Rollins. Although the boss spent most of his time in the Granite State that week with Corey, Trump also did events in South Carolina and Little Rock, Arkansas without him. After talking with Rollins, and while the boss was on the road, Corey called Ivanka, Don Jr., and Eric.
“Guys,” he said on the teleconference. “If your father doesn’t change his negative ways, he’s going to lose New Hampshire. And if he loses New Hampshire he’ll lose South Carolina. If he loses South Carolina, your father will be a very wealthy person who once ran for president of the United States.”
That afternoon, Mr. Trump walked into the campaign office in Manchester for lunch. He greeted the volunteers who were busy making phone calls for him. Trump’s volunteers received very little credit in the press, but there wasn’t a more enthusiastic or dedicated group among the campaigns in the 2016 cycle, or any other cycle for that matter. Corey was in the small office he had taken over since his arrival in New Hampshire. On his desk sat a bag from McDonald’s for the boss. When Trump walked in, Corey got right to the point.
“Sir, we need to talk,” he said.
Corey remembers the moment as the frankest conversation he had had with his boss—just campaign manager to candidate. He told Trump of the Roe and Rollins telephone calls. He informed the boss of anecdotal evidence he’d gathered. Corey knew the New Hampshire voter.
“If you don’t start talking about what your positive vision is for the country and stop complaining about Ted Cruz, you’re going to lose,” he said frankly.
The candidate listened quietly as he ate his hamburger. When he finished, he stood up and walked out of the room. That day he had an event at the Manchester Police Department and had to be there for the afternoon shift change. Along with Chief Nick Willard and much of the department’s rank and file, waiting for him at the police headquarters was an officer who had recently been shot in the line of duty. The hospital gave the injured cop a temporary pass to leave because he wanted to see Trump. The bond between law enforcement and Donald Trump is one of the strongest among his base. And the admiration goes both ways.
The cameras that day didn’t capture the true emotion of the event. It’s very seldom you see the boss emotional. As he shook the wounded man’s hand, however, you could see the gratitude in his expression.
When the boss left the police headquarters, he went to Theo’s Pizza Restaurant on Elm Street in Manchester for a CNN town hall meeting. Most people see Donald Trump only when the camera lights are on him. In Theo’s, he was gracious and friendly. He worked the room and shook every hand. When the lights went on, Anderson Cooper pressed him about the feud with Cruz. “Who cares,” the boss said. “This is the place I’m focused on.” He then laid out his vision for America, and from that moment forward he didn’t mention Iowa to Corey again. Not once.
T he celebration for Trump’s New Hampshire primary election win took place at “the Yard,” the same location as the 2014 Freedom Summit, where Mr. Trump first met Corey. It was not a coincidence. Corey made sure of it. We knew we were going to win that night. The New Hampshire primary ended in a landslide victory for Trump. In the hold room, before he went onstage, someone took a photo of the campaign team—Corey, Hope, George, Michael, and Dan Scavino—with our arms around each other’s shoulders. The whole team knew that Corey’s job depended on a win, and they hadn’t let him down.
New Hampshire has always been a better indicator of who will be the Republican nominee than Iowa. We could feel the confidence building, and Corey could feel the candidate’s confidence in him growing too. We had a chip on our shoulder. Mr. Trump won the New Hampshire primary by nineteen points. It was our first win against the establishment and for the American people. The feeling was righteous. We wanted more.
The misfit toys were becoming Transformers.