Exactly one week after the 2016 presidential election I lost my stepfather, Howard Shaff. A year later, I lost my father, Wayne Karl. These two towering influences on my life made this book, and so much more, possible. I have tears in my eyes as I write these words, aware that neither of them is here to read it. They were as different as two human beings could be, but in their support of me and in the pride they took in my work, they were identical.
My father began his days reading the local newspapers (obituaries first), but he didn’t read The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal. His national paper of choice was the New York Daily News. At least it was until I went to work at the New York Post in 1994. After that, and for the rest of his life, it was the Post. He would have rather watched NASCAR than national news, but he read every article I ever wrote and watched just about every time I appeared on CNN or ABC. In his final years, he would call me right after I got off the air—unless I managed to reach him first.
He was the kind of guy who would not hesitate to race into a burning building to save a stranger. After serving in the naval reserves, he became a volunteer firefighter. For ten years, he was the chief of the Noroton Heights Fire Department. He was a patriot. He would never miss a Memorial Day or Fourth of July parade. He proudly flew his American flag wherever he was, and when he was told by a homeowners’ association he could not install a flagpole at his home in Florida, he fought back hard. When he lost, he put the house up for sale and moved to a place where he could have his flagpole.
My stepfather, Howard, didn’t care much for parades. He served in the air force during the Korean War, and when he returned home, he became a cabdriver in Brooklyn, near the Crown Heights neighborhood where he grew up. Like my dad, he never went to college, but he wrote a half-dozen novels (still unpublished), and together with my mom, he wrote the definitive biography of Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor of Mount Rushmore. Howard taught me to value learning over school. When I was ten years old, we picked up in the middle of the school year and moved from Connecticut to South Dakota, where we lived in two adjoining rooms in the Circle S Motel, just outside of Hill City. From this unlikely base of operations, Howard and my mom set out to track down anybody who was still alive and had worked on Mount Rushmore. Those interviews became an oral history project you can still access at the University of South Dakota.
I made some great friends in Hill City—especially Todd Surdez and Renae Schrier—who welcomed the city kid, taught me about true friendship, and made it impossible for me to ever take myself too seriously, preparing me for life as a reporter and, especially, for the experiences described in this book.
I missed a fair amount of school in those days, traveling the West and watching Howard and my mom pry stories out of the workers who created Mount Rushmore. They were miners, not artists, but they had been recruited by Borglum to turn his vision of a mountain carving into a reality. Howard showed me the key to a good interview is to listen. In a good interview, he would tell me, you shouldn’t even notice the interviewer is there.
I raced to Howard’s hospital bedside a few days after the 2016 election. After a long battle with Parkinson’s disease, he had taken a sharp turn for the worse. He was staring at the news on the television in his hospital room, but he wasn’t really responding to those of us around him. I leaned over and asked him the one thing I believed could get a rise out of him.
“Howard, what are we going to do about Trump?”
Sure enough, he perked up; turned to me, eyes wide; and said his last words to me.
“That’s your problem.”
He died three days later.
Howard had been pleading with me to write a book for years and years and years. Oh, how I wish he could have been around to read each of my drafts of this one. He would have challenged me. He would have encouraged me. He would have made it a better book.
Without Douglas Kennedy this book simply would not have been written. Thank you, DK, for your friendship, your counsel, your humor, and for never hesitating to tell me when I am wrong. More than a generation ago, we set out to write a postpartisan manifesto for Generation X. Through all the twists and turns since then, Douglas has been as loyal a friend as the world has ever known. Most excellent.
My friends and colleagues at ABC News helped me every step of the way as I embarked on this project. Rick Klein and Chris Donovan read every word and made invaluable edits, corrections, and suggestions. Donovan suggested things to add to the book; Rick told me what to take out. I don’t think I would have survived the experiences described here without working side by side with Cecilia Vega, Mary Bruce, Devin Dwyer, Justin Fishel, John Santucci, Jordyn Phelps, Karen Travers, Alex Mallin, Ben Siegel, and Katherine Faulders—all of whom shared recollections with me as I tried to make sense of what we had all experienced. Devin talked me through this project from the beginning and encouraged me when I was discouraged. Justin told me to write chapter 5. John Santucci, who knows and understands Trumpworld better than anybody, opened up his notebooks for me and read my early drafts. Nancy Gabriner, ABC’s one-woman warehouse of knowledge, read my manuscript and offered some key corrections. So did the brilliant and generous Cokie Roberts, who was reading my manuscript on her Kindle and still giving me feedback days before she died.
I have had many great experiences working at ABC News over the years; getting to know and work with Cokie Roberts has been right at the top of the list. I miss her. I never met Roone Arledge, but having a chance to work with and learn from some of the legends he brought together—including Peter Jennings, Ted Koppel, Diane Sawyer, Charlie Gibson, Sam Donaldson, and Cokie—has been a thrill far beyond anything I could have imagined when I moved into the Circle S Motel with my mom and Howard all those years ago. Thank you especially to the fearless and tireless Diane Sawyer for making me a better correspondent and encouraging me to challenge the powerful.
One of the greatest things about covering the Trump campaign and the Trump White House has been working with Emily Cohen, who produced too many of my stories to count. She is patient, passionate, funny, and a damn good journalist. Emily also read my manuscript and helped make it better. My senior producer, Claire Brinberg, did too. Claire loves politics even more than I do. I envision us trading stories about these days many years from now, perhaps over a glass of burgundy on the banks of the Seine.
Barbara Fedida encouraged me and supported me on this project as she has on so much else. So did James Goldston, who has led ABC News through this era by urging all of us to be tough and unafraid in our reporting, but to never take sides. Julie Townsend and Kerry Smith read my rough drafts and helped make them less rough.
Nobody had more enthusiasm for this project than Ben Sherwood. Ben, who helped me through so much at ABC, read my manuscript, raved about it, and then helped me make it better.
ABC News Washington Bureau Chief Jonathan Greenberger supported the project from the beginning and helped me find a way to write the book while also continuing to cover the Trump White House for ABC. I couldn’t have done any of it without the help of the incredibly talented and hardworking journalists of ABC News, who supported me while I juggled my day job with writing this book, including Avery Miller, Chris Vlasto, John Parkinson, Meridith McGraw, Tom Shine, Alisa Wiersema, George Sanchez, Michael Corn, Almin Karamehmedovic, Pete Austin, Kirstyn Crawford, Meredith Nettles, MaryAlice Parks, Liz Alesse, Imtiyaz Delawala, Mitch Alva, Marc Burstein, Bob Murphy, Ali Rogin, Wendy Fisher, Treavor Hastings, Heather Riley, Cindy Smith, and Matt Hosford. These are just a few of the many great people at ABC whom I owe more than I can ever repay. Some of my ABC colleagues have left and are now my competitors (I am talking about you, Arlette Saenz), but I owe them too.
I have benefited immensely from working with George Stephanopoulos throughout virtually all the events described in this book. George’s influence goes back to when he wrote All Too Human, one of the best insider accounts of life in the West Wing ever written. David Muir has also been along for every step of the way and generously shared his recollections as I was writing this book.
I have been fortunate to call Mike Allen a friend since I first bumped into him in Iowa in 1999, during the early days of the 2000 presidential campaign. Since then, I have compared notes with Mike on just about every major political story I have covered, including, of course, the stories recounted in this book. I was really only able to start writing it after talking it through with Mike and Jeff Nussbaum over lunch at the Bombay Club restaurant in Washington—the way so many projects have begun.
Sal and Maryann Catalano boosted me throughout this project—and way before it started too. So did the ever generous and gracious Franco Nuschese. Michael Feldman’s counsel was invaluable, as it always is. The brilliant Robin Sproul’s too. I have many friends who offered encouragement and suggestions along the way, including Don Rockwell, Mary Ann Gonser, Scott Alexander, and Frank Luntz. Brian Brown pushed me to challenge my own assumptions and to think big. We have had some intense debates on politics, media, and culture, and those debates helped make this a better book. Paul and Karen Freitas kept me sane when the world around me didn’t seem that way. Pete Madej and Rich Dawson have been there for me since the glory days of Communiqué, the underground newspaper I started in high school.
David Larabell of CAA started pushing me to write a book before anybody thought Donald Trump would run for president. After Trump was elected, Larabell’s appeals became urgent. Finally, one morning in late 2017, David met me for breakfast at the Hay-Adams hotel near the White House and slid a note to me across the table. The note read: “Front Row at the Trump Show: The President, the Press and the Truth.”
Alan Berger voraciously devoured every chapter of this book as I wrote it. If my pace slowed, I’d get a call. He believed in this book from the start—sometimes more than I did.
Allison Pecorin helped me with the research. Allie started working at ABC News as an intern in the Pennsylvania Avenue unit during the first year of the Trump presidency. I get the sense she may be running the whole network someday. Kristopher Schneider helped me research the first part of the book, unearthing some lost gems from the ABC archives. The meticulous and thoughtful Chris Good helped me get to the bottom of the phrase “enemy of the people.” Jon Garcia opened up his archive of White House emails and pool reports. The man saves everything that comes out of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue (and makes good guacamole too).
Like every other American, I have benefited immensely from the work of the White House press corps. Reporters like Peter Baker, Maggie Haberman, Josh Dawsey, Phil Rucker, Ashley Parker, Jonathan Swan, and Abby Phillip are among the best ever to cover the beat. This also applies to the excellent work of my NBC colleagues Kristen Welker, Peter Alexander, and Hallie Jackson, with whom I have traveled all over the world covering this story. I am especially grateful to my friends and colleagues on the board of the White House Correspondents’ Association: Zeke Miller, Steve Portnoy, Tamara Keith, Anita Kumar, Doug Mills, Todd Gillman, Francesca Chambers, and Fin Gomez. Steve Thomma and George Lehner too.
Above all, this has been a family project. My mom read everything and was even more impatient than Alan Berger when the pace of my writing slowed. When I first started working in television, my mom was happy for me, but she also admonished me: “TV is fine, but you can’t stop writing.” Mom, this book is for you.
My brother Allan, better known as WorldRider, showed me the way by writing Forks, his book about his journey around the world on a motorcycle. Allan encouraged me on this project from the start, reading my drafts and offering feedback even as he was traveling through the Balkans on his motorcycle.
John Parsley of Dutton helped shape this book with his advice, and his edits made it better. I was also fortunate to have the eagle-eyed Aja Pollock on the team; she is a great copy editor and much more. Thank you to Cassidy Sachs too for shepherding this project from start to finish.
Parsley is one of the best editors in the business, but, as I am sure he will understand, there are two editors on this project who were more important: Anna and Emily Karl. Emily was born the year I started working at CNN, Anna three years later. They have been with me every step of the way. Emily asked her first question of a senator during Take Your Daughter to Work Day when she was five years old. A few years later, Anna briefly disappeared while visiting me on Capitol Hill—she was tagging along with John McCain as he bounced between meetings.
They have had their own front-row seats to history. Anna has already met two presidents. Emily has met three. They have both worked as reporters and have firm convictions about what makes good journalism. When I asked them to read the first draft of this book, they took it seriously, editing it line by line. Anna’s comments and suggestions caused me to go back and rewrite some of the chapters. She saw things that I’d missed and helped me write a more compelling story. Emily corrected errors that had slipped by everybody else and helped me write with greater clarity. I love you both and I am incredibly proud of you. I knew you were brilliant, but I had no idea the two of you were such good editors.
Finally, the biggest acknowledgment of all goes to my wife, Maria. You have been with me throughout this unbelievable ride. You have tolerated the long hours and ridiculous travel. On this project, as with just about everything I have written since my senior-year college papers, you were the very first person to read what I had written. Even more important, you have loved me even during those times when the stress of this project made me decidedly unlovable.