SOARING HIGH ABOVE IOWA in his private jet, Donald J. Trump permitted himself to imagine a successful campaign for the White House.
The year was 2013, and Trump had just finished a short trip to Ames, where he had spoken to the Family Leadership Summit, a gathering of evangelical Christian conservatives that had become a mandatory Midwest stop for aspiring presidential candidates. During his speech, Trump lamented the decline of the country, which he said was on the brink of collapse. He mercilessly ridiculed Mitt Romney’s losing presidential campaign and what he said was the failed strategy of Republican operatives like Karl Rove. He warned that Hillary Clinton would be tough to beat in 2016 and cautioned Republicans against cutting any immigration deal that would allow undocumented immigrants to gain citizenship. That would be “a death wish” for the party, he said, given that all 11 million illegal immigrants would certainly vote for Democrats. He threw in some signature Trumpian flourishes, too, drawing chuckles from the audience when he said he’d much rather talk about himself than Romney. “It’s very hard for me to build up somebody else,” he told the crowd of devout, churchgoing Christians. “But what the hell.”
In fact, Trump was preoccupied with building himself up on that trip. He was already sixty-seven years old and thinking about seizing what his advisers were telling him would be his final chance at mounting a winning presidential campaign. As a Manhattan real estate magnate and political neophyte, he had donated to liberal Democrats but done little more than flirt on the fringes of Republican politics. He had no obvious policy platform on which to run and no core set of beliefs with which the public identified him. He was known for his boastful air as a businessman, his glitzy buildings and golden hair, his brash “You’re fired!” television persona—and not much else. But Trump had a gut feeling that he could build a movement that would capture the imagination of a group of disaffected Americans who disdained conventional politics and felt that they were being talked down to by politically correct elites. He imagined harnessing their anger and sense of exclusion to create a powerful groundswell. Trump knew they existed, and he knew how to speak to them because he had been cultivating them for years. These were the same people who had bought into a pet cause that had recently gained purchase as he traveled around the country: Trump’s quest to prove that Barack Obama was an African born in Kenya, making him an illegitimate—indeed an illegal—president.
Trump had been stoking the birther lie for two years, bringing it up in television interviews, embracing fringe conspiracy theorists who offered detailed purported evidence, and tweeting false claims about Obama’s birth certificate. Trump repeatedly taunted the sitting president to prove that he belonged in the Oval Office. Sam Nunberg, the foul-mouthed political operative from New York City who worked for Trump, had seen the result: Trump’s popularity among hard-core Republican primary voters had skyrocketed. Nunberg thought that people who believed in the birther conspiracy could represent at least 5 to 7 percent of Trump’s base if he ran for president. But running openly as a birther was a nonstarter. The trick, Nunberg told Trump that summer, was to weave the birther theme into a legitimate campaign platform, without losing those voters.
“It’s going to be immigration,” Nunberg told Trump that day as they flew back from Iowa to New York on his private 757, emblazoned with “TRUMP” in giant white letters. Birtherism was an attempt to stoke fear about installing in the Oval Office a dark-skinned foreigner whose loyalties and patriotism were in question. The voters who appreciated the theory were also moved by Trump’s blunt talk about the evils of immigration, and they harbored deep anxiety about people who looked and sounded different from themselves. “It’s interconnected,” Nunberg said later. “We would be able to keep those people.”
Trump was captivated throughout the flight, peppering Nunberg with questions. A communications operative who relished the same kind of in-your-face politics that animated Trump, Nunberg first drew attention for his fierce opposition to construction of a mosque two blocks from Ground Zero in New York. He was a volunteer for Mitt Romney’s first presidential campaign in 2007 and signed on with Trump in 2011, long before the real estate mogul was taken seriously as a potential candidate. That day on the plane, they discussed the Republican Party’s “autopsy,” in which the party leaders had called for renewed outreach to Hispanics after Romney’s loss in 2012. In a campaign, Trump would take the opposite approach, seizing on the threats posed by immigrants as a way of doubling down on the fears of American citizens who were struggling economically. Immigration dovetailed perfectly with Trump’s protectionist impulses and his long-standing antipathy for multilateral trade agreements, which riled up voters who felt exploited by globalization. And it had the advantage of setting Trump apart from some of the Republican Party’s leading lights, like Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida, and Marco Rubio, the Florida senator—two possible rivals whose positions on immigration were squishy at best. Nunberg ranted during the flight about John McCain, the Arizona senator who had tried, and failed, to pass a liberal immigration compromise with Democrats. “Nobody kissed the Spanish people’s asses more than Juan McCain, okay?” Nunberg told Trump. “And he got less votes from the Spanish than even Mitt Romney did in 2012,” Nunberg told him (though the opposite was true). “This shit is not how you get their votes.” Immigration was an issue Trump could take on without any real financial risk to his business, Nunberg promised. “I don’t think those people are getting married at Trump Tower or Mar-a-Lago,” Nunberg said with a laugh. “It’s not going to cost you business.”
If there was any doubt in Nunberg’s mind that immigration would be Trump’s issue, the flight dispelled it. It was, he said later, like pushing on an open door.
Trump did not know it at the time, but seven months earlier, three men had gathered in Washington, D.C., and sketched out what would become the contours of Trump’s immigration-centered campaign. They met in the shabbily chic, ornate dining room of a townhouse on Capitol Hill known as the Breitbart Embassy, which served both as Steve Bannon’s home and the headquarters of Breitbart News, the right-wing media empire he oversaw. Bannon had invited Jeff Sessions, the Republican senator from Alabama, and Stephen Miller, one of the senator’s top aides, for a dinner that would last for five hours and serve as the spark for a political alliance that would change history.
A onetime Navy officer and Goldman Sachs investment banker, Bannon in 2013 looked like neither, with his unkempt, ragged mane of salt-and-pepper hair, chinos and multiple layers of shirts, open at the collar and usually stacked under a khaki barn jacket. He was not yet a universally recognizable figure on the national stage, assailed by the left as an anti-Semite or lampooned by Saturday Night Live as a Grim Reaper–like figure behind a childlike president. But as the chairman of Breitbart, the hard-right internet outlet backed by the conservative Mercer family, he was well known in media circles and within the Republican Party as a political anarchist. Bannon had spent $1 million of his own money making The Undefeated, a hagiographic documentary about Sarah Palin, McCain’s ill-fated 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee, which had been panned by critics. Bannon used his clout at Breitbart and the megaphone of a satellite radio show popular with the far-right conservatives and white supremacists who make up the alt-right to torment establishment Republicans. He prodded the party toward a darker view of American society and culture—one in which whites felt threatened by immigrants, radically left-leaning Democrats, and, most importantly, by mainstream Republicans who he argued had forsaken the people who sent them to Washington. There was, Bannon argued, a “collective unconsciousness” among working-class voters, who believed that immigrants were to blame for the social and economic problems they were suffering. But politicians had to find a way to tap into those concerns, and he needed to find the perfect vessel to carry the message. Bannon railed against elites even as he eagerly rubbed shoulders with Washington reporters while pitching them on the dangers of a corrupt ruling class. A fan of apocalyptic imagery and the 1973 French novel The Camp of the Saints, in which mass migration to the West from the Third World leads to the destruction of Western civilization, Bannon argued that the “Judeo-Christian West” was engaged in a war against Islamic fascism.
Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III had strong views on immigration shaped by his experience as a young politician in rural Alabama. He had watched as an influx of immigrants had moved into his state’s white working-class communities, taking the grueling, low-wage jobs in poultry plants that had once been the exclusive domain of poor, unskilled Americans. During more than a decade as a federal prosecutor and state attorney general, and twenty years in the Senate, Sessions came to believe that legal and illegal immigrants posed a direct threat to the country by depressing wages, committing crimes, and competing for welfare benefits. At sixty-six years old, he was deeply influenced by the work of George Borjas, a Harvard economist who has said that immigrants have an adverse impact on the economy. An apple-cheeked, almost elfin white-haired man with a glint in his eye, Sessions was as courtly as his deep southern accent suggested. He was no fire-breather, and he did not set out to become the leading anti-immigrant voice in the United States Senate. He had never worked much on the issue before 2006, when George W. Bush had set out to forge a bipartisan comprehensive immigration reform bill that would give the undocumented immigrants living in the United States—then estimated at around 12 million—a pathway to citizenship. But during a meeting in his Senate office that year with Roy Beck, the executive director of NumbersUSA, a group that pressed for less immigration, it dawned on Sessions that he might be the only person willing to take up the cause and try to block Bush’s “amnesty.” Sessions turned to look out his window, clasping his hands behind his back as he pondered a future as the leading anti-immigration voice in Congress. “I guess if I don’t do it,” Sessions finally said, “nobody’s going to do it.”
Miller, then in his mid-twenties, had found a home on Capitol Hill as a spokesman and strategist for Sessions. By day, he drafted the senator’s strongly worded speeches lamenting how Congress was too complacent in the face of Obama’s overly permissive immigration policies. By night, he would pelt journalists with barrages of emails arguing that immigrants were taking advantage of native-born Americans, depressing wages, living off welfare, and posing threats to their communities. He forged an informal alliance with Breitbart, pumping out a steady stream of tips and critiques that the news site would dutifully publish, making life exceedingly uncomfortable and politically dangerous for those seeking a consensus for a comprehensive immigration overhaul.
Together, the trio couldn’t have been further out on the fringes of the Republican Party establishment in 2013. But they were convinced that their views represented those of the majority of voters. And they were determined not to give up on their vision of a very different future for America, one where secure borders meant that immigrants were no longer threats to the economic and physical safety of the native-born.
The dinner unfolded at Bannon’s home at a dark time for Republicans. Obama’s reelection victory over Romney two months earlier had sent dejected party leaders searching for answers for how they could have suffered defeat in two consecutive presidential elections. Some argued that Romney’s harsh approach on immigration—he had proposed making life so untenable for undocumented immigrants that they would “self-deport”—had cost Republicans the election, driving away Hispanic voters who helped Obama win key states like Colorado, Nevada, and Virginia. Miller thought that analysis was disastrously stupid. What was needed, the trio agreed, was not a more inclusive party but a raw, populist appeal to the grievances and concerns of white working-class voters. Those men and women felt betrayed by liberal politicians like Obama, who constantly cried foul about “inequality” but did nothing to confront the trade agreements and immigration policies that created job loss, low wages, and disappearing economic opportunity. Over steak and fish from Dean & DeLuca, the three men discussed an article entitled “The Case of the Missing White Voters” by Sean Trende, a right-wing writer. More than six and a half million white voters did not show up in 2012, Trende wrote, because they could not stomach Romney, who had allowed himself to be caricatured as a wealthy elitist and failed to articulate an agenda that spoke to their fears and insecurities.
As the clock ticked close to midnight, talk shifted to 2016, and Bannon turned to Sessions with an out-of-the-blue idea: “We have to run you for president.” Bannon told Sessions the same thing that he had told both Sarah Palin and Lou Dobbs, the Fox anchor, during similar conversations years before. He wouldn’t win the presidency. But a Sessions campaign could catapult trade and immigration to the top of the Republican agenda and reshape the party in the process. The argument was simple. Mass illegal immigration was just a scam perpetrated by the Chamber of Commerce and corporate-backed Republicans to suppress wages for unskilled black and Hispanic workers, Bannon said, and legal immigration was doing the same to skilled workers. Trade agreements were nothing more than a permission slip for unfair foreign competition, hurting working people while fattening the wallets of the elites who ran the companies that benefited. It was the same set of arguments Sessions had been making in the Senate for many years, Bannon argued. If he took it national in a presidential campaign, the populist right could seize control of the Republican machinery in Washington.
The Alabama senator demurred. I’m not the guy, he said. Even if he thought the strategy could elevate the issues that he had been toiling quietly for years to highlight, a presidential campaign would dredge up the nasty accusations of racism that his enemies raised during his failed bid to be a federal judge in 1986. In his Senate confirmation hearings that year, an African American prosecutor testified that Sessions had called him “boy.” Sessions had always denied the story, but if he ran for president, that would all come up again, he told Bannon and Miller. Still, the three men were captivated by the idea of finding a candidate who could seize on the deep resentments of white, working-class Americans toward the large influx of immigrants entering the country.
Sessions believed there was a cleavage between where the American people were and where the political establishment was. Bannon saw it, Stephen Miller saw it, and Sessions saw it, along with a few others. Why not give the American people what they want? What’s wrong with a lawful system of immigration that serves the national interest? The energy generated from the clash between elites and everybody else was what generates populism, Sessions liked to say. And if a politician was serving the people, instead of the elites, there was nothing wrong with honest populism.
Even if they didn’t know it that night in early 2013, the three men were setting in motion an absurdly unrealistic takeover of the Republican Party and an improbable presidency, which would usher in an equally audacious effort to upend decades of law and policy that had opened the United States to generations of immigrants. By the time their project had come to fruition, they would erode a public consensus in favor of immigration that was more fragile than most in Washington had thought it to be.
The notion of finding a candidate who could catapult those ideas to the forefront of the Republican Party was still on Bannon’s mind two months after their dinner when he heard Trump speak at the Conservative Political Action Conference, CPAC, in Washington. Trump was not a candidate for anything at the time. But his speech touched on all of the themes that Bannon, Sessions, and Miller had talked about at dinner: China’s rise, the danger of 11 million “illegals” gaining the right to vote, the decline of the manufacturing sector in the United States. “You’re on a suicide mission,” Trump told Republicans. “Our country is a total mess—a total and complete mess, and what we need is leadership.” Bannon’s ears perked up. Suddenly, the conversation that had started two months earlier was no longer in the realm of the hypothetical. Trump was the living, breathing embodiment of what Bannon, Sessions, and Miller had agreed was needed to bring their party back from the dead. Miller was impressed, too. Within months, Miller would tell friends that he hoped that Trump would run for president.
Raised in Queens and a longtime resident of Manhattan, Trump spent most of his life in places defined by diversity, where differences of language and national origin are a reality and multiculturalism is a fact of life. But even in his childhood, Mr. Trump and his family sought the homogeneity afforded by wealth and privilege that set him apart. Jamaica Estates, the neighborhood where he grew up, was a cloistered and mostly white enclave in a sea of more pluralistic communities, where he attended a private school before being sent to a military academy. As an adult, Trump was equally removed from the clash of cultures on the streets of New York City, overlooking them from the windows of his glitzy triplex apartment in Trump Tower. He once observed that from the top floor of his building “we looked down on the sidewalk and there were thousands and thousands of people, they looked like ants, little people going all over—boom boom boom—so little, because when you’re sixty-eight floors, they look really small, but there were a lot of them.”
The president himself is a grandson of immigrants, as Michael D’Antonio notes in the biography of Trump that he wrote a year before the 2016 election. Friedrich Drumpf, Trump’s grandfather, immigrated in the 1890s from Bremen, a German city on the banks of the Weser River in the northwest part of the country. He arrived in New York at Castle Garden, an entry point at the southern tip of Manhattan, where immigration officers conducted many inspections before stamping their approval, and the name Trumpf, on his papers. A barber in Germany, Friedrich Trumpf followed the mining boom of that decade to the Pacific Northwest, and later renounced his allegiance to his home country and became an American citizen. He eventually returned to New York like many immigrants, wealthier and more prosperous than he was when he arrived. After traveling back to Germany to marry, D’Antonio writes, Friedrich Trump (by then he had dropped the “f”) returned to New York with a pregnant wife.
If Trump took anything profound from his grandfather’s experience as an immigrant to America, there is little evidence of it. Despite having been the subject of attention and scrutiny for much of his adult life, Trump rarely built his grandfather’s immigrant story into the narrative of his own life. (In fact, one of Trump’s most curious fabrications involves claiming that his father, not his grandfather, had been born and raised in Germany, a false assertion that he has repeated at least three times as president.) His early upbringing was not without exposure to some other kinds of people; his family occasionally vacationed at the Concord in the Catskills, where they “ate dinner together at tables piled with platters of kosher food,” writes Gwenda Blair in her book The Trumps: Three Generations of Builders and a President. But there are few stories about Trump’s exposure to people from other cultures during his time at the New York Military Academy, where he attended high school, and later at Fordham University and the Wharton School of Business. Those early years offered few clues to explain his later embrace of xenophobia and anti-immigrant sentiment as a path to political power.
In the early 1970s, the Justice Department sued Trump and his father, alleging that the pair refused to rent apartments to African Americans, a charge that Trump vigorously denied. As Blair observed, the future president learned a lesson from the episode about surviving accusations about racism: “He had also seen that being charged with discrimination did not seem to deter anyone in the public or private realm from doing business with him,” she wrote. “Indeed, practically speaking, the entire matter appeared to add up to little more than ‘a spit in the ocean.’ ”
In the 1980s and 1990s, Trump’s instincts about race and immigration became public fodder when he called for the death penalty in the case of the Central Park Five, four African Americans and a Hispanic man who were convicted of brutally beating and raping Trisha Meili, a white woman who was out for a nighttime jog in Central Park. In full-page ads that he took out in the city’s four major newspapers, Trump assailed what he called “roving bands of wild criminals,” and later, in an interview with Larry King, he said that, “maybe hate is what we need if we’re gonna get something done.” Twelve years later, the convictions of the five men were thrown out after a serial rapist linked by DNA confessed to the crimes, but Trump never apologized. Then in 2011, Trump revived the birther conspiracy about Obama, instinctively tapping into a fear of “the other” that he felt strongly himself.
Bannon had no elegant theory about where Trump’s views on immigration came from. “We needed a vessel” for the anti-immigration presidential campaign, Bannon would say later, and this guy was it; it was as simple as that. He saw Trump as a modern-day Archie Bunker the “lovable bigot,” as the television producer Norman Lear once called his fictional character, sitting in his armchair ranting about the threat to the common folk. Trump, who lived in a gilded tower bearing his name in the heart of Manhattan, was about as far as he could be from the blue-collar Archie in his working-class home in Queens, but when he opened his mouth, it was sometimes hard to tell the difference. Some who knew Trump said the prejudice ran deep and had been building for years. “He’s always been fearful where other cultures are concerned and always had anxiety about food and safety when he travels outside the United States,” said D’Antonio, who spent hours talking with Trump before he became president. “His objectification and demonization of people who are different has festered for decades, and he has sought out the safety of the same.” Over time, those views hardened and became part of a more insidious story Trump told himself about people from outside the United States.
By the time he entered politics, Trump had grown to see immigration as a zero-sum issue: what is good for immigrants is bad for America. But even as Trump embraced those hard-line views, he remained conflicted, often describing himself to friends as benevolent and wanting to be liked by the many immigrants he employed. As a budding politician, he harbored ambitions of appealing to Hispanic voters who he believed would share his anger at illegal immigrants because they were competing unfairly for jobs. Two weeks after returning from Iowa with Nunberg in 2013, Trump met with Antonio Tijerino, the president of the Hispanic Heritage Foundation, to discuss whether the group might honor him at their annual gala. Tijerino arrived at Trump Tower with three guests, young undocumented immigrants. Sitting in Trump’s office, they shared their stories one by one, describing how they had been brought to the United States as children and raised as Americans, but each lacked the legal status to attend college, serve in the military, or work.
“I came to this country when I was five and a half years old,” José Machado told Trump. Machado had awoken one morning years earlier at the age of fifteen to find his mother had vanished—deported, he later learned, back to Nicaragua. Trump was shocked. “Honestly, he had no idea,” Machado would say later.
Trump was preoccupied with the politics of the Hispanic community. He quizzed his young guests about what they thought of the potential Republican presidential candidates—Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, Rick Perry, Chris Christie—and asked who they thought would win their community’s support in the next election. He mused about his own personal experiences with immigrants, at one point saying that some of the employees keeping the lawns beautiful and green at his hotel and golf properties were probably “illegals.” But the future president displayed no understanding of how the immigration system worked. “Well, why don’t you just hire an attorney and get legal?” Trump asked them, appearing perplexed when they insisted that it was not that simple. “What do you mean that’s not possible, to just pay someone to make sure you can stay?”
Trump was friendly and charming, and seemed touched by the Dreamers’ personal stories. But he also displayed flashes of what would later become his America First philosophy, at one point asking the young immigrants “so who deserves to go to college? A young man who’s in a wheelchair, or one of you?” The question hung in the air awkwardly. As the meeting wound down, Trump insisted that his guests accompany him downstairs to his gift shop for souvenirs for them and their families. In the elevator on the way to the lobby, Trump became quiet, looking at his visitors and seemed to come to a conclusion in his own head. He nodded slightly and said quietly, “You convinced me.”
Before the group could react, Trump was showing them around the gift shop, choosing watches, books, and neckties for them to take home. As soon as they left Trump Tower, the activists—stunned to have apparently won his support—rushed to draft a press release memorializing his stance. “Perhaps the most poignant part of the meeting was when Donald Trump told José, Diego and Gaby ‘You’ve convinced me,’ ” the release said. Trump was irate that his words had been made public. Days later, Estuardo Rodriguez Jr., a lobbyist who had attended the meeting and drafted the statement, received a call from Trump’s assistant, Rhona Graff, who said that Trump wished the group had not issued a press release without clearing it with him first.
“We never heard from him again,” Rodriguez said.
By 2014, Nunberg and his political mentor, Roger Stone, were the two primary consultants urging Trump to run for president. Stone was a legend in Manhattan, a Republican political assassin and former aide to Richard Nixon who made money in the 1980s and 1990s by parlaying his connections into a Washington lobbying firm. Nunberg and Stone shared a palpable disdain for the establishment, an appreciation of the outrageous, a tendency to be profane, and an on-again-off-again friendship with Trump. Nunberg would frequently be fired by the mercurial Trump (in 2014 for arranging an article that turned out to be unflattering) only to be rehired again, and then fired once more (in August of 2015, for racist Facebook posts). Stone would eventually get caught up in the Russia election meddling probe after bragging during the campaign that he had connections with Julian Assange and knew what WikiLeaks planned to release before Election Day.
In April of 2014, the pair arranged for Trump to attend the New Hampshire Freedom Summit at the Executive Court Banquet Facility in Manchester. Organized by Americans for Prosperity and Citizens United, the event gave Trump a chance to mock Jeb Bush, who had just claimed that people who enter the United States illegally do so out of “love.” Trump was merciless in his skewering of Bush and the audience loved it. “That’s one I never heard of before. I’ve heard money. I’ve heard this. I’ve heard sex. I’ve heard everything. But one thing I’ve never heard of is love.” A few months later, Trump attended a fundraiser in Iowa for Steve King, the virulently anti-immigrant congressman, and called for a ban on travel from parts of Africa hit by an Ebola outbreak. “He said, why the fuck is it our problem that these idiots went to Africa?” Nunberg recalled.
But getting Trump to remember to talk about immigration was tricky. He rarely stuck to a script on anything. Nunberg and Stone knew they needed a gimmick to make sure that their candidate would never forget his anti-immigration screed. One day that summer, Nunberg called up Stone with what he thought would be the perfect mnemonic. Trump loves two things: boasting about himself and talking about building things. Let’s have him promise to build a wall on the southwestern border with Mexico. And tell him to say he’ll cut foreign aid to Mexico to pay for the construction. Trump fancied himself above all else a master of the construction trade. He wouldn’t be able to resist talking about building a giant edifice as only he could, and from there it would be easy. He would promise to crack down on illegal immigration, lament the problems at the border, and warn of the threat of violence and disease from migrants swarming into the United States.
In January of 2015, Trump tried out a version of the idea during a return visit to Iowa for the Freedom Summit. “We have to build a fence—and it’s got to be a beauty,” Trump said. “Who can build better than Trump? I build. It’s what I do. I build. I build nice fences. But I build great buildings. Fences are easy—believe me.” Trump then went on to deliver the rest of his immigration attack, saying that the political responses to the border had been “incompetent” and asserting that he had seen video of immigrants crossing the border illegally and walking right past armed members of the military. The crowd loved it.
Trump loved their reaction even more.
The “build-a-wall” message was cemented four months later, when Trump gleefully delivered it during a little noticed visit to the Texas Patriots, an ultraconservative political group with roots in the antigovernment Tea Party movement. Sitting on a stage in a big leather-backed chair in a large auditorium, Trump laid it on thick: Mexicans were pouring “illegals” and cheap cars across the border with the United States like so much “vomit.” He let out a sound effect to mimic throwing up for emphasis, drawing laughs from his audience. “These are people—and some are very fine, I’m sure—but they’re sending their killers, their rapists, their murderers, their drug lords. This is what we’re getting,” he told the audience. “One thing I can tell you—I’m a great builder. I would build the greatest wall that anybody’s ever seen. Believe me.” There was enthusiastic hooting and a sustained round of applause.
Trump was hooked. The wall would become a permanent part of his campaign machinery and a potent symbol for everything that he stood for, taking on totemic significance and shaping his presidency. It would ultimately prompt a government shutdown as Trump battled with Democrats over border security, and the declaration of a national emergency of dubious constitutionality. The populist, anti-immigrant appeal that Bannon, Miller, and Sessions had envisioned at their dinner years earlier was a perfect fit for Trump as he prepared to hijack a Republican establishment that he viewed as soft on crime, weak on the border, and gripped by political correctness.
That was the plan as Trump prepared to officially announce his bid for the presidency on June 16, 2015.
In the few minutes before Trump walked out to start the show, Nunberg had just one final opportunity to offer some advice. (First, though, Trump kicked him out of the holding room so he could make a last-minute switch from a black suit to a navy blue one.) Remember, Nunberg said when Trump let him back in, you have to get in as much about immigration as you can. He pleaded with Trump not to forget, as the developer-turned-celebrity prepared to face the cameras. The speech that Nunberg had helped write included a critical section about Mexico beating the United States on trade. It repeated Trump’s call for a “massive wall to secure our southern border,” along with a Trumpian boast that “nobody can build a bigger and better wall than Donald Trump.” But this was Trump. He was infamous for paying little attention to prepared remarks. And so on that day in June, Nunberg was nervous about what he might—or might not—say.
Moments later, Trump emerged with his wife, Melania, at the top of an escalator in the grand, marble-and-brass-adorned lobby of Trump Tower, his fortress in midtown Manhattan. With Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World” blaring, Trump made his way down the escalator and onto a flag-lined stage, where his daughter Ivanka gave him a peck on the cheek. Nunberg didn’t need to hold his breath for long. After a few introductory remarks to the packed room, Trump delivered only six words from the written speech—“Our country is in serious trouble”—before veering off script. Within forty-six seconds, Trump was talking about Mexico beating the United States at the border. And fifty seconds after that, he delivered a rant about immigration and the line that would forever define his campaign and his presidency.
“The U.S. has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems. It’s true. And these aren’t the best and the finest. When Mexico sends its people, they are not sending their best. They are not sending you. They are not sending you. They are sending people that have lots of problems, and they are bringing those problems with us. They are bringing drugs; they are bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
Bannon, listening to Trump wandering off script, was thrilled. Turning to Alex Marlow, Breitbart’s editor in chief, he said, “That’s the sound bite! Get it pulled.” Bannon was gleefully anticipating the outrage that was to come. “They’re going to go full meltdown,” he said. “Nobody’s ever talked like this. People don’t talk like this—you can’t! This is the way you cut through the vernacular.”
His prediction did not play out immediately. Initial reports about Trump’s announcement focused on his bombastic promise to make America great again, and hardly mentioned his comments about Mexico. But after a twenty-one-year-old white supremacist killed nine African Americans at a church in South Carolina the next day, Hillary Clinton suggested that Trump’s comments about immigrants could “trigger people who are less than stable” to commit such acts, and she condemned Trump for saying “some very inflammatory things about Mexicans.” Trump offered a video retort on Instagram, calling it “pretty pathetic” that Clinton had blamed him. But when the fierce backlash to Trump’s comments finally came over the course of the next week, it proved financially costly for Trump. NBC and Univision dumped Trump’s Miss USA and Miss Universe programs. Macy’s canceled its line of Trump-branded menswear. Mattress-maker Serta said it would stop selling the Trump Home collection of bedding. José Andrés, the famed Spanish-born chef, backed out of a restaurant deal for Trump’s new hotel in Washington. NASCAR decided not to hold its annual banquet at the Trump National Doral resort in Miami. “Why did you have to say they’re rapists, Donald?” Don Lemon, the CNN anchor, asked during a telephone interview with Trump. Trump was defiant and fired back. “Well, somebody’s doing the raping, Don.”
On July 8, three weeks after Trump’s announcement, Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, called to beg Trump to tone down the immigration rhetoric. Donors and activists were worried that Trump’s attacks on Mexicans were going to stain them all, Priebus warned. We are working really hard at the RNC to build Hispanic and black coalitions, and we can’t do it if these are the words that you are using. It would cost the party crucial votes among people of color, and hand the White House to Democrats. When the call from Priebus leaked to the press, Trump lied about it in a tweet, calling the story “totally false reporting” and saying that Priebus had merely told him his speech had “hit a nerve.” Trump refused to back down and later told NBC News that he had “nothing to apologize for.” He filed a lawsuit against Univision. And on Fox News, he doubled down, saying that “some of the people coming here are very violent people—not all.”
But Nunberg was ecstatic about the Priebus flap. The Republican establishment, the left-wing liberals, and the familiar cast of immigration-reform characters were all whining that Trump’s over-the-top rhetoric about the Mexicans should disqualify him as a candidate. In three short weeks, Trump had drawn a line in the sand, setting himself apart from his rivals, especially Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio. For every Republican voter who was frustrated about immigrants, there was now a clear choice between Trump and the rest of the political world. “It was a tremendous advantage for us,” Nunberg said. The seeds of Trump’s embrace of immigration as a political weapon had been planted years earlier, by Nunberg and others. It had taken a while. But in the days after Trump’s announcement at Trump Tower, they finally bore fruit.
“They thought they were going to knock us out for that,” Nunberg recalled with a sneer. Trump had been at number eight in some polls when he was at the top of the escalator before his announcement. Within weeks, he had shot up to the top of the Republican pack. “It helped us. It didn’t help business-wise; he lost millions of dollars. But it helped us politically.”