Robert Costa
Six months before he descended down the golden escalators at his Manhattan skyscraper to announce his presidential candidacy, Donald Trump traveled to Iowa in January 2015 to address a land investment expo. The trip, made on a cold winter day, is little remembered. But it was the unofficial beginning of the real-estate mogul’s extraordinary campaign for the Republican nomination.
As most pundits and GOP leaders ignored him, Trump met quietly with veteran Iowa conservative Chuck Laudner, one of the few high-profile consultants who was willing to take a meeting with a man whom so many in the party viewed warily. Aboard his private plane parked in Des Moines and backstage, Trump pressed Laudner about the state’s political topography and the intricacies of the Iowa caucuses, all of which seemed almost foreign to him.1
By the time they parted ways, Laudner was convinced that Trump was going to run—that Trump’s interest this time wasn’t like his brief, birtherismfueled flirtation in 2011.2 The businessman may not have known much about Iowa politics, but he was engaged and deeply interested in what it’d take to mount a successful outsider-themed campaign, there and nationally, on a shoestring budget and unusually high media exposure.
Less than a month later, in a lengthy interview with The Washington Post that signaled much of what was to come, Trump said he was “more serious” than ever about pursuing a run for the White House in 2016 and announced that Laudner and several other operatives had signed up for a likely campaign, including Corey Lewandowski, who would later become the Trump campaign’s first manager.3
Trump also sketched out the themes that would be at the core of his message: frothing outrage over “people around the world [who] are laughing at us” and a promise to bring industrial jobs back from China and other global economic rivals.
Again, as they had with his Iowa visit, most Republican leaders and top Democrats shrugged off Trump’s moves as more cringe-worthy attention seeking from a celebrity who reflected the worst of the Republican base’s impulses. He was racially charged, incendiary, and antiestablishment. There was no way he’d actually run.4
Of course, Trump did run, and he won the nomination in historic fashion, winning over 13 million votes—more total votes than any Republican primary candidate in the history of Republican presidential primaries.5 In the process, he outpaced sixteen major competitors who brought with them seasoned biographies, often better-funded campaigns, and pitches forged through decades of working within the party and within the conservative movement.
Trump’s stunning victory in a party that had traditionally turned to whoever is “next in line”6 and to a mainstream standard-bearer is a complicated story that will surely perplex and challenge historians for years to come, with possible clues found not only in the political sphere but in the economic and cultural orbits that festered the populist and nationalist-tinged frustrations of his supporters long before he stood before them at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland to accept the prize that he had won.7
Entering the contests as voters in the United Kingdom were pushing for “Brexit”—to leave the European Union amid fears of globalization and immigration—and as Republicans in the United States were animated by similar issues, Trump found himself in an environment that turned out to be especially fertile for him from the start, far more than he could have imagined in those early conversations in Iowa.8 In spite of his numerous controversies9 and haphazard decisions, he was routinely lifted back into contention by the raw passions of Republicans who saw in him a disruptor reflective of their own anxieties and convictions about the direction of the country and the world.10
But it took more than swirling and somewhat nebulous political winds to enable Trump and upend the Republican Party. For him to rise, other things had to fall—not just the candidates but the norms and assumptions that have long shaped the GOP.11 Trump’s path to the nomination was thus not so much about his brawling debate performances or his ground organization in certain states.12 It was ultimately about a turbulent unraveling of a party—its political-donor class, its big-name stars, and its various orthodoxies. What was expected to happen in the twilight of Barack Obama’s presidency—the ascent of a fresh-faced Hispanic senator or center-right governor who could lead them back to power and appeal to a diversifying electorate—did not happen.
Instead, Trump took the Republican Party by surprise, and over.
By early 2014, five years after his brother George W. Bush left the White House with his popularity diminished, Jeb Bush was emerging as the favorite for the Republican presidential nomination—and reviving a certain kind of pragmatic, Bush-style Republicanism that had faded as the Tea Party and other forces had grown influential in Washington. Many of the GOP’s most connected “insiders and financiers” had begun a “behind-the-scenes campaign to draft the former Florida governor,” and Bush huddled with potential benefactors as he traveled the country giving speeches on income inequality, education, and foreign policy.13
For the overlapping donor and leadership wings of the GOP, Bush’s move toward a campaign was a welcome development. Although Jeb Bush did not have the swaggering charisma of his older brother and he could be awkward and clipped while on the stump, he represented an iteration of the ideology and temperament with which they were most comfortable. Bush was supportive of comprehensive immigration reform, fluent in Spanish, and a proven vote-getter in a battleground state. He was hawkish on foreign policy and spoke with compassion about the poor.14
And he had the name: Bush. It was seen as politically gold-plated, with his father and brother both former presidents who had strong pockets of support. His late grandfather had been a senator. Looking ahead to a likely general election race against well-financed Democrat Hillary Clinton, establishment and elected Republicans were eager to have a candidate with a formidable network and a profile that could rally GOP voters together.
In other words, Bush looked like the surest bet in what was to be a crowded field, and his supporters worked to make sure that that status was preserved. Scores of loyalists and associates who had raised money for his family in the past began to raise tens of millions of dollars for his allied Super PAC, Right to Rise. A shadow campaign for Bush was evident by late 2014 and early 2015, with its fund-raising target eventually becoming $100 million, which it surpassed.15 Many prominent donors who gave to Mitt Romney’s 2012campaign joined the effort. All of them were looking for a way back to the White House and a candidate who was in the center-right mode of Romney and Arizona Senator John McCain, the party’s 2008 nominee—someone who fit the description of “electable.”16
When Bush finally announced on a humid day in June 2015 at an event before a large and diverse crowd in Miami, he was still poised to be “someone with executive experience, conservative values and a reformer’s instinct,” and he had what seemed like a viable path to the nomination, if it had been any other year.17
But it fell apart. “If they’re looking for an entertainer in chief, I’m probably not the guy,” Bush said at one of the early GOP primary debates. He was, as David Frum noted, not only disconnected from the populism that was burbling throughout the party but temperamentally uncomfortable with the way the party was drifting.18 The compassionate conservatism that carried his brother George into the White House in 2000 had lost its luster in the eyes of activists. They wanted a harder edge, and Jeb Bush, with his empathetic words for undocumented workers and nonconfrontational personality, never caught on with the GOP’s base.
Ahead of the Iowa caucuses in late 2015, Bush found himself lost in a party that no longer seemed like the one he had known his whole life. His hawkish plan to combat the Islamic State did not generate the usual GOP applause, and Trump’s noninterventionist instincts were resonating with voters weary of more than a decade of military engagements in the Middle East. His crowds were often half-full and veered older and white, with many supporters there out of loyalty to a family and party traditions now out of style.
Immigration, perhaps more than anything, haunted him. The New York Times observed in December 2015 that “large majorities in both Iowa and New Hampshire say they will only choose a candidate who agrees with them on the issue—and those majorities do not share” Bush’s position.19 He eventually stumbled badly in Iowa and New Hampshire and then hung on until South Carolina, where he stumbled again. Trump’s “low energy” tag was much discussed at the time, but more apt was what Bush’s mother, Barbara, had said months before about most voters: “We’ve had enough Bushes.”20
Bush endorsed Senator Ted Cruz of Texas in March after ending his own bid for the Republican nomination. The gesture underscored how the mainstream wing of the Republican Party, while being outpaced by Trump, was also being outpaced by the conservative bloc within the party—the ideologically driven “movement conservatives” and religious voters who were distressed by the fast-changing culture as well as aspects of the globalized economy and government power that they perceived as threatening.
Cruz, an evangelical Christian and attorney with degrees from Princeton and Harvard universities, was elected to the Senate in 2012. He quickly made his name on the national stage by supporting the 2013 effort to shut down the federal government in defiance of President Obama’s health care law, which made him a darling of activists who were resentful of establishment Republicans. He was a star in straw polls and on stage at conservative gatherings throughout 2014, racking up support as an unwavering follower of the Constitution and right-wing policies.21
By the time Cruz announced his bid on March 23, 2015 at the convocation ceremony at Liberty University in Virginia, he had also enlisted Jeff Roe, one of the party’s rising strategists, to build a sprawling digital and field operation across the country that would tap into the support he had accrued as well as the coalitions within the broader conservative movement—a ready-made base and a powerful one, if it could be fully consolidated.22 The scene at Liberty was telling: Cruz was getting into the race early not only to get name recognition and a jump start but because the path to the nomination seemed clear. Win over the evangelicals in conservative hotbeds like central Virginia and in states like Iowa, and you stood a real chance of being the nominee. After previous nominations going to the center-right and establishment, conservative leaders like Cruz felt like their time had finally come.
But first Cruz had to get over an expansive group of likely candidates who saw the same path and were adopting a similar profile as the way forward. This bloc was distinctly separate from Bush: fiercely conservative and more comfortable in the cadence of conservatism than in the Republican Party itself. They revered Ronald Reagan, saw the state as a looming threat, infused their politics with faith and wanted to be seen as outsiders from the party even as they appealed to its base. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker was among them, following a fast ascent in early 2015 following a series of well-reviewed appearances in the early states. Then there was Libertarian-leaning Senator Rand Paul, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, and former Silicon Valley executive Carly Fiorina. Senator Marco Rubio of Florida straddled the mainstream, Bush-type wing and the conservative wing, but never found traction in either.23
Trump, as ever, remained an enigmatic outlier to Cruz and others in this wing of the primary race, at least during this initial sprint. He was one of them in some ways, in terms of being an outsider, but he was, at his core, more about his own appeal and populism than anything. That was in many respects why Cruz decided for months to run in Trump’s wake—to not tangle with him directly but instead to concentrate on bringing together his own base and clashing with those candidates who were more direct competition for him in his so-called lane or path to the nomination. This plan of action, as Cruz allies told me at the time, was boosted by how Trump and Cruz both argued for more hardline immigration policies. In their view, attacking Trump didn’t make political sense because it risked eroding Cruz’s support among conservative voters whose central and driving issue was border security and immigration.
“I like Donald Trump. I think he’s terrific. I think he’s brash. I think he speaks the truth,” Cruz told Fox News in June 2015 as Trump was getting into the race and making comments about some Mexican immigrants being rapists.24 The chumminess continued throughout the fall of 2015 as Cruz’s campaign continued to believe that Trump would fade away and their own message and organization would lift the senator. The warm feelings, however, ceased by the winter as the Iowa caucuses were nearing and Cruz was ahead in that state and poised to win. Trump harshly turned on Cruz, questioning his citizenship due to Cruz’s Canadian birth and berating him at every turn. He called Cruz, at various times, crazy, unhinged, and unqualified to be president. Cruz was never comfortable under fire from Trump during this period. He was slowly but effectively building a potential winning coalition, but every day turned into a media circus about Trump’s latest remark. When Trump used a picture of Cruz’s wife in a Twitter message that was derogatory, Cruz pushed back against Trump with force, but it was a messy ordeal that left Cruz rattled and deeply unsettled.25
Cruz’s rivals eventually fell away, and his organization did prove to be formidable. Walker struggled in the debates and never seemed to take to the national scene in the same confident way he did in his Wisconsin efforts. Carson’s boomlet was brief, and his campaign was in disarray during much of the winter. Huckabee and Jindal fell short on fundrasing and then fell apart. Fiorina had her own brief moment where she ticked up in the polls, but it did not last. Paul’s failure wasn’t so much his own failing but the inability of his live and let live credo to catch on with Republican primary voters, in spite of the significant groundwork laid by his father Ron Paul, the former Texas congressman, during the 2012 Republican presidential nominating contests.26
The usual allies of conservatives like Cruz in the press, such as National Review magazine and others, failed to give him much of a lift as the race narrowed to Cruz and Trump by the spring, with Trump picking up momentum by the day. They no longer had the capital with the base as a new galaxy of outlets like the Trump-friendly Breitbart gained notice and influence. So did outlets that promoted the “alt-right,” which had figures detached from the mainstream GOP and trafficked at times in material that was snared and cheered by white nationalists. Cruz’s financial advantages and Super PACs also were less powerful than most Republicans expected because Trump was drawing intense coverage on national cable channels and was ubiquitous even though he was not competing with Cruz on paid advertising.27
As he looked for a jolt, Cruz tapped Fiorina to be his running mate in late April, just before the must-win Indiana primary where he was pinning the fate of his campaign. But the move was widely panned and seen as a political Hail Mary pass.28 Trump dismissed it, and a few days later, Cruz lost Indiana. For him, the race was over, but more stunning was the defeat of a consensus on the right that 2016 would be theirs and that the fractured nature of the Republican Party gave them an unparalleled opening. It did not. What it did was give an opening to Trump, who moved forward for months as conservatives battled among themselves and mainstream Republicans quarreled. While Trump’s rivals were scrambling to hold down their own bases, Trump was surging ahead with a hard-charging populism that drew from all sides.29
Beyond the unfulfilled political promises offered by the Bush track and the Cruz track in the Republican primary race, there were more fundamental policy fronts that kept those candidates and others from winning the nomination. There was a historic—and often barely discussed—splintering on the core issues that had defined the Republican Party. Social issues that had dominated were largely relegated to the back shelf of the GOP scene. Hawks who had defined the party since Reagan on foreign policy found themselves outpaced by Trump and his noninterventionist instincts. Economic conservatives who had embraced House Speaker Paul Ryan’s sweeping fiscal reforms saw themselves contested by Trump, who argued for few, if any, changes to long-term federal spending programs.
The social conservative evolution from powerhouse within the Republican Party primary process to a more nuanced bloc that did not necessarily turn to one of its own was a long time coming. As conservative commentator John Hinderaker noted, “Social conservatives aren’t paranoid: many in the party’s business wing have been yearning to dump them for quite a while.”30 Feeling their own influence waning in a party that was less vocal about abortion and marriage, all as same-sex marriage was being legalized nationally in 2015, many of the leaders in the community did not turn to the expected names during the first phase of the race. Huckabee fizzled as did Rick Santorum, the hard-charging former Pennsylvania senator who captured Iowa four years earlier. Other evangelicals gave Cruz a look, and many moved toward him. But others, too, were tempted by Trump, whose swagger and comments were off-putting to some but seen as defiantly antiestablishment to those in the ranks who saw both the establishment and the state as a looming threat.31
A turning point came in January 2016 when Jerry Falwell Jr., the president of Liberty University (where Cruz had announced his bid), endorsed Trump. The son of the famed late Jerry Falwell, Falwell was a major name in the faith community. But his endorsement was about more than a name; it was about the changing way evangelicals were looking at Republican candidates and the waning interest they had in finding someone who was just like them. Trump didn’t speak in their political language or cadence, and he had in the past backed liberal positions, but he was disruptive to the political class that they viewed uneasily, especially with regard to religious liberty. “Let’s stop trying to choose the political leaders who believe we are the most Godly because, in reality, only God knows people’s hearts,” Falwell wrote. “You and I don’t, and we are all sinners.”32
Falwell’s move was a culmination of sorts of how the faith community was becoming less of a political monolith, with significant consequences for the GOP primary race. As Michelle Boorstein wrote in The Washington Post, “for a decade, U.S. evangelicalism, which has no formal leadership or hierarchy, has been increasingly divided over who is fit to speak for those who choose that label.”33 Trump waded into this new environment and took advantage. While Cruz won Iowa on the strength of his backing of religious conservatives, it was not enough of a coalition to carry him to the nomination in Cleveland. Evangelicals and others in their sphere had changed “their tune on morality,” to Trump’s benefit.34
In the Republican Party’s foreign policy community, the changing dynamic that enabled Trump was similar to the one among social conservatives: the GOP didn’t change its core principles, but it changed how stake-holders and leaders on those issues exerted power in the primary race.
The usual patterns were wiped away for a variety of reasons, in particular by Trump’s disruption. But there was also exhaustion regarding the consensus that had been practiced and preached by party elites since George W. Bush’s presidency. “GOP voters are fed up, not just with President Obama and Democrats but also with their own party,” wrote former Bush speech-writer Marc Thiessen in October 2015, commenting on the unrest on policy and politics that spilled into the congressional ranks when House Speaker John Boehner stepped down as he lost support among conservatives.35 (Ryan would replace him.)
Foreign policy hawks, with their interventionist impulses and support for a military ramp up, saw their favorites like Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Jeb Bush stumble. So did New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and Ohio Governor John Kasich. These onetime boosters of the Iraq War, who were linked politically to the Bush wing of the party, encountered a Republican base that was far less inclined to the Bush view of the world and the hawkish approach to geopolitics. Rubio was perhaps the best example of how even when a hawk had a wealth of donor support and a sharp political profile, the traditional Republican foreign policy views did not translate to popularity.
“The breakdown occurred because we got into a cycle where policy didn’t matter at all. Policy was not just secondary, but it was almost not even in the conversation. And when people tried to interject policy—whether it was Rubio or Bush or others—there was just no appetite for it. It didn’t catch on,” said Peter Wehner, a former official in George W. Bush’s White House. Added former House speaker Newt Gingrich, in an interview with me in March 2016: “Rubio was prepared, much like Jeb Bush, for a reasonable dialogue in Washington policy language, offering positions that reflect 40 years of national security and foreign-policy experts. All of that disappeared. The market didn’t care.”36
Trump repeated his case against George W. Bush and the Iraq War in debate after debate throughout the primaries, such as when in February 2016 in South Carolina he said, ”Obviously, the war in Iraq was a big, fat mistake, all right? We spent $2 trillion, thousands of lives, we don’t even have it. Iran has taken over Iraq with the second-largest oil reserves in the world.” He said later that night, “We should have never been in Iraq. We have destabilized the Middle East.” These discussions and exchanges, notably with Bush, were a cold bucket of water tossed over the hawkish consensus and its proponents, who had thought their past positions and actions would largely be unchallenged through the 2016 primary race. Trump not only challenged them; he was incessant and made many primary voters rethink their own views in the process.37
The final and deep rupture in Republican policy during the primary race came on fiscal and economic policy. Trump’s economic populism on trade was in direct opposition to the kind of policy agenda that congressional Republicans and Mitt Romney had run on in recent years. Trump’s aversion to taking on the entitlement state and tweaking federal spending programs like Medicare and Social Security was another change. “This is the biggest fault line in the party: whether Republicans should be talking about reducing benefits,” conservative economist Stephen Moore told me during the campaign. “Republicans have fallen on their sword for 30 years trying to reform Social Security and Medicare, but the dream lives on—and it makes everyone nervous. Some see a political trap; others see it as necessary.”38
As Roll Call observed, “Trump’s candidacy is making plain an open secret in Washington—that Republicans aren’t as committed to fiscal discipline as they pretend,” and that extended to how Republican candidates talked about these issues on the campaign trail.39 The proposals that had been pushed by the Romney-Ryan ticket four years earlier never made waves with GOP voters, even when presented by new faces like Christie and Walker, who both positioned themselves as fiscal hawks early on. On trade and immigration, Trump again and again backed away from the traditional manner Republicans spoke about those issues. Rather than appealing to the Chamber of Commerce wing of the party and to business leaders, he struck a populist chord and in the process made this once surefire way to burnish your conservative credentials a relic of campaigns past.
Donald Trump’s unlikely presidential campaign was long in the making, and there were hints for years before he got into the race, from his appearances at conservative confabs to his rousing of the right-wing base with the “birther” charge against President Obama in the 2011–2012 period, which included a flirtation with a run for the presidency. He traveled to New Hampshire in the late 1980s, and he mulled a Reform Party bid in 1999.40 Yet when Trump began once again to consider a campaign in late 2014 and early 2015, it was as if many Republicans were sleeping. The same goes for many reporters and media pundits. There was a widespread refusal to believe that he would actually run and that even if he did, that he could win. Because Trump had come close to running before but never really gotten into presidential politics, he was considered to be a bloviating salesman who was merely seeking publicity for his brand—an American character, not an American candidate.
But Trump was able to take them by surprise. With a small cadre of aides such as operative Samuel Nunberg and GOP veteran Roger Stone, he began to build a political operation from his office on the 26th floor of Trump Tower overlooking Central Park. At the start of the primary race, it was unlike most presidential campaigns, where well-known finance advisers were hired and the campaign began to look at a ground game in Iowa and New Hampshire. What Trump wanted was to build his name recognition with television appearances and speeches, but he didn’t feel the need to build too many relationships in the traditional GOP. He saw that aspect of the party—the leadership and the donors—as something he could run against. Guided by Nunberg and Stone, and then Laudner and Lewandowski he decided in early 2015 that if he did get in, he would run as an outsider who underscored his views on trade and immigration. It would be a campaign not only to win the nomination but to destroy the norms of the modern GOP. In a time when conservatism was supposed to be the way to power in the party, Trump saw the populist path.
“A builder, an entrepreneur and a capitalist versus a bunch of politicians who are clearly part of the problem” is how Stone framed the contest in a document obtained by The Washington Post in 2015 as Trump rose in the polls. The memo suggested a sound bite: “I’m running because when I look at this field—all perfectly nice people—I know that none of them could ever run one of my companies. They are not entrepreneurs.”41
Nunberg and Stone would eventually part ways with Trump in 2015, but the model they established was crucial to Trump’s success. His past political dalliances but also his limited operation made GOP rivals pay little attention to him for much of the race. Jeb Bush’s Super PAC held off on attacking him, as did Cruz. Most party leaders privately said they thought he’d quit or would implode due to controversy or his flimsy campaign structure. But as Trump often told me in interviews throughout the race, that was projection by his opponents. Especially once Trump got in the race, he saw clearly that he could present himself as a different type of candidate than most of the others and have a relatively easy path to the final stage of the primary if he could keep his name in the headlines and his views and statements dominant in the political debate. In his mind, he didn’t need much more than that. Armed with a Twitter account and a phone, he believed he could outmaneuver candidates who raised millions.42
Lewandowski, a New Hampshire-based consultant, was brought on to Trump’s campaign in early 2015, as was Laudner, the Iowa-based consultant. Laudner started to build an unusual network for Trump in Iowa that foreshadowed the coalition to come: evangelicals looking for a warrior over a fellow-traveler and populist-leaning conservatives who were tired of the same kind of Republicans traveling through the state. Lewandowski was installed as campaign manager and ran the campaign with a “Let Trump be Trump” mantra that enabled the candidate to be unpredictable if often off-kilter in his message and presentation. There was also Hope Hicks, a youthful adviser who filtered the hundreds of press requests that arrived. A galaxy of friends and allies were around the campaign, never formally part of it but giving Trump advice over the phone in calls to his office or cell phone. It was an “unusual power grid in a capital city used to a hierarchical structure . . .[Trump presided] over concentric spheres of influence, designed to give him direct access to a constellation of counselors and opinions.”43
The family played a critical role as well, in particular Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who regularly traveled with Trump on the plane. Kushner, for example, worked closely with Paul Manafort, who replaced Lewandowski, and built relationships for Trump in a party he barely knew. Sons Donald Jr. and Eric, and daughter Ivanka, also were constants at Trump’s side, making them as influential as any member of the campaign staff and trusted confidants for their father.
But as much as Nunberg, Stone, Lewandowski, Kushner, and others mattered in the primary race, it was always Trump at the center, Trump himself who in a sense willed his way to the nomination and remade the Republican Party in his image. It was Trump who ran a campaign on gut and instinct and little organization. His ability to climb over more than a dozen rivals and snag the nomination was a feat that was both historic and strange. Here was a man who saw a broken party in the wake of George W. Bush and Mitt Romney and saw an opportunity, almost as if the GOP was a building in foreclosure from his work in real estate. It was a leaderless and rudderless party in most respects, with ideologies that had calcified and grown brittle over time. Trump didn’t necessarily have to make a better argument or run a better campaign throughout the race, he simply had to be someone who offered a different approach and had the ability to burst through the pack and do so with unrepentant swagger. There was a determination to win more than a determination to convince; a determination to do whatever was necessary even if it was abhorrent to others. In the process, it became a race like no other, and Trump found his way to the convention floor with balloons above—and a few months later, he found himself in the White House.
1. Robert Costa and Philip Rucker, “How Ted Cruz outfoxed Donald Trump in Iowa,” Washington Post, February 2, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/the-inside-story-of-how-ted-cruz-won-iowa/2016/02/02/238b0b94-c839-11e5-a7b2-5a2f824b02c9_story.html.
2. Ashley Parker and Steve Eder, “Inside the Six Weeks Donald Trump Was a Nonstop ‘Birther,’” New York Times, July 2, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/03/us/politics/donald-trump-birther-obama.html.
3. Robert Costa, “Trump says he is serious about 2016 bid, is hiring staff and delaying TV gig,” Washington Post, February 25, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-says-he-is-serious-about-2016-bid-is-hiring-staff-and-delaying-tv-gig/2015/02/25/4e9d3804-bd07-11e4-8668-4e7ba8439ca6_story.html.
4. McKay Coppins, “How the Haters and Losers Lost,” Buzzfeed, July 17, 2016, https://www.buzzfeed.com/mckaycoppins/how-the-haters-made-trump.
5. Will Doran, “Donald Trump set the record for the most GOP primary votes ever. But that’s not his only record,” Politifact, July 8, 2016, http://www.politifact.com/north-carolina/statements/2016/jul/08/donald-trump/donald-trump-set-record-most-gop-primary-votes-eve/.
6. Jonah Goldberg, “GOP voters are refusing to fall in line,” Los Angeles Times, January 12, 2016, http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-0112-goldberg-establishment-disorder-20160112-17-column.html.
7. Philip Rucker and David A. Fahrenthold, “Donald Trump positions himself as the voice of ‘the forgotten men and women,’” Washington Post, July 22, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/in-speech-at-republican-national-convention-trump-to-paint-dire-picture-of-america/2016/07/21/418f9ae6-4fad-11e6-aa14-e0c1087f7583_story.html.
8. Stephen Collinson, “Brexit: The UK’s Donald Trump moment,” CNN.com, June 24, 2016, http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/22/politics/eu-referendum-brexit-donald-trump/.
9. David A. Graham, “The Many Scandals of Donald Trump: A cheat sheet,” The Atlantic, October 13, 2016, http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/10/donald-trump-scandals/474726/.
10. Patrick Healy and Jonathan Martin, “Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders Win in New Hampshire Primary,” New York Times, February 9, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/10/us/politics/new-hampshire-primary.html.
11. Clare Malone, “The End of a Republican Party,” FiveThirtyEight, July 18, 2016, http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-end-of-a-republican-party/.
12. Philip Rucker and Robert Costa, “An Iowa surprise: Donald Trump is actually trying to win,” Washington Post, August 13, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/an-iowa-surprise-donald-trump-is-actually-trying-to-win/2015/08/13/564a9f50-4142-11e5-8e7d-9c033e6745d8_story.html.
13. Philip Rucker and Robert Costa, “Influential Republicans working to draft Jeb Bush into 2016 presidential race,” Washington Post, March 29, 2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/influential-republicans-working-to-draft-jeb-bush-into-2016-presidential-race/2014/03/29/11e33b06-b5f2-11e3-8cb6-284052554d74_story.html.
14. Gerry Mullany, “Jeb Bush on the issues,” New York Times, June 15, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/16/us/politics/jeb-bush-on-the-issues.html?_r=0.
15. Eli Stokols, “Jeb’s shock-and-awe number,” Politico, July 9, 2015, http://www.politico.com/story/2015/07/jeb-bush-2016-fundraising-11-million-in-16-days-119908.
16. Kristen Soltis Anderson, “All the Electable Republicans are Losing,” The Daily Beast, August 18, 2015, http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/08/18/all-the-electable-republicans-are-losing.html.
17. Dan Balz, Philip Rucker, Robert Costa, and Matea Gold, “One year, two races: Inside the Republican Party’s bizarre, tumultuous 2015,” Washington Post, January 3, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/one-year-two-races/2016/01/03/28f65044-b15e-11e5-b820-eea4d64be2a1_story.html.
18. David Frum, “The Man for One Season,” The Atlantic, October 29, 2015, http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/10/jeb-bush-struggles/413014/.
19. Trip Gabriel and Ashley Parker, “Jeb Bush’s New Show of Confidence Is Failing to Connect with Republicans,” New York Times, December 2, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/03/us/politics/jeb-bushs-new-show-of-confidence-is-failing-to-connect-with-republicans.html.
20. The Sun Sentinel editorial board (Broward County, Fla.), “Jeb had it all—and it wasn’t enough,” Sun Sentinel, February 24, 2016, http://archive.tcpalm.com/opinion/editorials/jeb-had-it-all--and-it-wasnt-enough-2ab74926-bf8f-0399-e053-0100007f8286-369949981.html.
21. David A. Fahrenthold and Katie Zezima, “For Ted Cruz, the 2013 shutdown was a defining moment,” Washington Post, February 16, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-cruzs-plan-to-defund-obamacare-failed--and-what-it-achieved/2016/02/16/4e2ce116-c6cb-11e5-8965-0607e0e265ce_story.html.
22. Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman, “Ted Cruz Hopes Early Campaign Entry Will Focus Voters’ Attention,” New York Times, March 22, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/23/us/politics/ted-cruz-to-announce-on-monday-he-plans-to-run-for-president.html.
23. Chris Cillizza and Aaron Blake, “Ranking the 2016 Republican field,” Washington Post, February 15, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/pb/politics/ranking-the-2016-republican-field/2015/02/15/0aaafda2-b52d-11e4-9423-f3d0a1ec335c_story.html.
24. Ryan Bort, “A Timeline of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz’s roller coaster relationship,” Newsweek, July 21, 2016, http://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-ted-cruz-history-timeline-482765.
25. Aaron Blake, “9 truly awful things Ted Cruz and Donald Trump said about each other,” Washington Post, September 23, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/23/9-truly-awful-things-that-were-said-between-ted-cruz-and-the-man-hell-now-support-donald-trump/.
26. “Here’s Who Was Wrong about Rand Paul,” Politico, February 3, 2016, http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/02/rand-paul-dropping-out-quotes-213590.
27. Justin Dyer, “The Decline of Movement Conservatism and the Rise of the Alt-Right,” The Public Discourse, November 17, 2016, http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2016/11/18253/.
28. Elaine Kamarck, “How Ted Cruz lost long before Indiana,” May 3, 2016, Brookings Institution, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2016/05/03/how-ted-cruz-lost-long-before-indiana/.
29. Eliana Johnson, “The Weaknesses That Doomed Ted Cruz,” National Review, May 4, 2016, http://www.nationalreview.com/article/434916/ted-cruz-why-he-lost.
30. John Hinderaker, “The Reagan Coalition is Dead. What’s next for conservatism?” Power Line, May 1, 2016, http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2016/05/the-reagan-coalition-is-dead-whats-next-for-conservatism.php.
31. Laurie Goodstein, “Donald Trump reveals evangelical rifts that could shape politics for years,” New York Times, October 17, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/17/us/donald-trump-evangelicals-republican-vote.html.
32. Jerry Falwell Jr., “Here’s the backstory of why I endorsed Donald Trump,” Washington Post, January 27, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2016/01/27/jerry-falwell-jr-heres-the-backstory-of-why-i-endorsed-donald-trump/.
33. Michelle Boorstein, “Why Donald Trump is tearing evangelicals apart,” Washington Post, March 15, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2016/03/15/evangelical-christians-are-enormously-divided-over-donald-trumps-runaway-candidacy/.
34. William Galston, “Has Trump caused white evangelicals to change their tune on morality?” Brookings Institution, October 19, 2016, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2016/10/19/has-trump-caused-white-evangelicals-to-change-their-tune-on-morality/.
35. Marc A. Thiessen, “Finding a consensus conservative for the GOP,” Washington Post, October 12, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/chaos-in-house-is-good-for-gop/2015/10/12/c2765450-70e8-11e5-9cbb-790369643cf9_story.html.
36. Robert Costa and Philip Rucker, “Rubio’s demise marks the last gasp of the Republican reboot,” Washington Post, March 15, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/rubios-demise-marks-the-last-gasp-of-the-republican-reboot/2016/03/15/e0a6413c-ea3d-11e5-a6f3-21ccdbc5f74e_story.html.
37. Byron York, “Trump forces GOP to take uncomfortable look at Iraq War,” Washington Examiner, February 14, 2016, http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/byron-york-trump-forces-gop-to-take-uncomfortable-look-at-iraq-war/article/2583262.
38. Robert Costa and Ed O’Keefe, “Debate over Medicare, Social Security, other federal benefits divide GOP,” Washington Post, November 4, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/debate-over-medicare-social-security-other-federal-benefits-divides-gop/2015/11/04/166619a8-824e-11e5-a7ca-6ab6ec20f839_story.html.
39. Shawn Zeller, “Not Your Father’s GOP,” Roll Call, September 26, 2016, http://www.rollcall.com/news/politics/gop-deficit-debate-disappeared-trump.
40. Justin Curtis, “Demystifying the Donald Trump, past and present,” Harvard Political Review, Feb. 15, 2016, http://harvardpolitics.com/united-states/demystifying-donald-trump-past-present/.
41. Robert Costa and Philip Rucker, “Donald Trump struggles to turn a political fling into a durable campaign,” Washington Post, August 9, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/inside-trumps-orbit-growing-pains-for-a-sudden-front-runner/2015/08/09/7672a8be-3ec6-11e5-9443-3ef23099398b_story.html.
42. Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, interview transcript, Washington Post, April 2, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/04/02/transcript-donald-trump-interview-with-bob-woodward-and-robert-costa.
43. Philip Rucker and Robert Costa, “In Trump’s Washington, rival powers and whispers in the president’s ear,” Washington Post, November 16, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/in-trumps-washington-rival-powers-and-whispers-in-the-presidents-ear/2016/11/16/50f3306c-ac03-11e6-a31b-4b6397e625d0_story.html.