From Trump Force One to Hillary’s Hindenburg
The bad news for President Donald Trump: He may well lose reelection later this year. The good news for his top campaign staff: They will wind up really rich either way.
—S.V. Date, Huffington Post, May 7, 20201
If you spend $800 million and you’re 10 points behind, I think you’ve got to answer the question “What was the game plan?” said Ed Rollins, a veteran Republican strategist who runs a small pro-Trump super PAC, and who accused Mr. Parscale of spending “like a drunken sailor. “I think a lot of money was spent when voters weren’t paying attention.”2
—New York Times, September 7, 2020
Twenty people on an airplane. Fifty more in the Trump Tower War Room. A few money guys raising a few bucks. And all the free press the starry-eyed mainstream media couldn’t wait to give us. That was the ethos, strategy, and organizational culture of the come-from-behind, close-the-deal Trump 2016 campaign.
On a daily basis, Candidate Trump would limo out to LaGuardia airport in the late morning, hop on his 757 Boeing “Trump Force One” jet, fly a few hours away to some flyover state, give a rousing rally speech in some beat up hockey rink or basketball arena, maybe host a quick fundraiser at a local country club or quasi-mansion, and then hop back on that plane and always be home and tucked into his own bed in Trump Tower by that night.
Likewise on a daily basis, Candidate Trump thickly spread himself across all of the corporate media, which at that point clearly viewed him as a novelty rather than an existential threat. It would be phone calls with left-wing celebrities like Morning Joe Scarborough and his wife Mika on MSNBC. Evening hits on right-wing Fox News with Sean Hannity or Lou Dobbs. And anything else DJT could get in between to rack up what is the most valuable commodity for any political candidate—“free,” or as they say in the trade, “earned” media.
Of those twenty people on an airplane supporting the Boss, the razor sharp Dan Scavino had already ensconced himself as in-resident Tweet Meister, Keith Schiller and Johnny McEntee—two of the greatest and most competent guys you will ever meet—weighed in as the Boss’s body men, and Stephen Miller served as speechwriter.
On a daily basis, Stephen would dress up the basic stump speech in all its fresh and local coloring glory, and it went something like this:
•Fly into Des Moines, and the Boss would remind the crowd of how China had literally tried to steal Iowa’s seed corn, with such a reminder thereby reinforcing Trump’s Tough on China theme.
•Drop into Flint, Michigan, and Candidate Trump would wax eloquent about how globalization was killing the auto industry.
•Pop into Miami, and the Boss would surely sneak away for a couple of daylight hours to visit his Doral Golf Club. But then he would light up the night—and a massive local Cuban-American community—with attacks on Fidel Castro and warnings about the dangers of socialism.
It was a big, beautiful barnstorming formula that only Donald J. Trump could pull off. In 2016, he literally was the P. T. Barnum of politics, and there was no question that a Trump rally was the greatest show on political earth.
Of course, after Trump won the Republican nomination, the cable networks loved to cover the rallies live because they knew it would be great for ratings—and that was surely a great earned media bonanza for the Donald.
A Beautiful Muscle Car Political Machine
Back at the mothership—Trump Tower in Manhattan—there were about fifty of us supporting the Trump flying circus in the War Room on the fourteenth floor, with many of us like me there as a freebie on a volunteer basis.
The Trump Tower War Room was the perfect embodiment of an organizational culture in which all aspects of the campaign were perfectly integrated into each other in support of the candidate. What we had on that single fourteenth floor was one small, slick, sleek and oh-so-beautiful Shelby Cobra muscle car of a political campaign machine.
•While the money guys and lawyers were all upstairs, we had a communications team organized into two hard-nosed SEAL teams evenly divided between proactive messaging and rapid response.
•We had a small policy shop punching well above its weight grinding out a never-ending stream of position papers.
•We had the master strategist in Steve Bannon,
•A take-no-prisoners deputy campaign manager in Dave Bossie, and, praise the Lord and political gods,
•Jared Kushner and Steve Mnuchin mostly stayed out of the way.
Most of all, at least most of the time, we just had a heck of a lot of fun. And when I say “most of the time,” my most enduring unfun memory of the 2016 campaign relates to the notorious Billy Bush scandal. When the Never-Trump Washington Post broke this “October Surprise,” virtually everybody in the War Room stopped what they were doing and gravitated towards the TV screens. After listening to no small amount of “woe is me” whining from this gaggle of worker bees, I gave the one and only direct order that I would ever give in that War Room.
In a loud and measured voice, I told everybody to get their asses back to work. Said I: “We’ve got this.”
And have it, we did. We had that 2016 election because we had a great candidate with a great message with a lean organization with a wealth of free media and a brilliant strategy and strategist. In other words, we had everything we would not have during the 2020 campaign.
No Money, No Message, Big Problem
For every one thing the Trump campaign did right in 2016, we did at least ten things wrong in 2020. At the top of what would be a very long and tawdry laundry list of “what not to dos” was the appointment of Brad Parscale as the official campaign manager and Jared Kushner as the de facto campaign manager.
Putting Parscale in charge of what would be the biggest, and historically most consequential, presidential election in history was like promoting a journeyman NFL placekicker to starting quarterback in the Super Bowl. It was the ultimate mismatch in skill sets.
During the 2016 campaign, Parscale was a specialist in digital media, and he was reasonably good at what he did—ergo the placekicker analogy. However, Parscale knew virtually nothing—no pun intended—about managing a political campaign. He knew even less about running a presidential race that was certainly going to be one of the most contentious and complex in history.
The fact that I never saw Parscale once in the War Room at Trump Tower in my entire stint on the 2016 campaign speaks volumes about just how very specialized Brad’s role in the campaign was—and at six feet and eight inches, Brad is impossible to miss.
In fact, during the 2016 campaign, Parscale mostly hung out in San Antonio, Texas, behind a computer figuring out innovative ways to game Facebook and Twitter. Said Parscale on 60 Minutes in a thinly disguised attempt to claim credit for the Trump 2016 win:
I understood early that Facebook was how Donald Trump was going to win. Twitter is how he talked to the people…. Facebook was the method—it was the highway in which his car drove on.3
In this ill-fated burst of braggadocio, Parscale would go on to reveal that employees from Facebook, Google, and Twitter were all actually embedded in the Trump campaign, effectively working to defeat Hillary Clinton. Parscale’s big social media reveal, however, in and of itself reveals how politically naïve small-thinking Big Brad is.
Revenge of the Social Media Oligarchs
The abiding fact of the matter here is that Parscale’s revelations would set off a firestorm in Silicon Valley as the Left would rain down a hailstorm of criticism on the likes of Twitter, Facebook, and Google. Following Newton’s third law of motion as applied to politics, this hailstorm would provoke an equal and opposite reaction that would cost us dearly during the 2020 campaign cycle.
To wit: Pummeled and provoked as they were, Twitter’s CEO Jack Dorsey, Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook, and Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai would all be out to exact their revenge—and get back into the good graces of the Left. And they would do so by kicking the living bejesus out of Donald Trump in 2020 using their deep pockets and the enormous and abusive censoring, de-platforming, and cancelling powers of their social media oligarchies.
Zuckerberg alone would spend more than half a billion dollars to defeat Trump.4 With his precise targeting in key Democrat strongholds like Milwaukee and Detroit, Zuckerberg would wind up spending more than the Trump campaign in the battleground states where the election outcome would be determined—and much of those Zuckerbucks went to boost the number of illegally cast absentee ballots.
For his part, Jack Dorsey would shadow ban, throttle down, and purge Trump surrogates from the Twitter traffic. Eventually, Dorsey would cut off the Twitter account of the most powerful man on the planet.
Dorsey’s gambit was arguably the biggest F-U in American political history. This was all the more so because Dorsey’s cancellation of Trump revealed the impotence of the most powerful politician on the planet: the Boss and the White House simply had no legal tools to police Silicon Valley’s Far-Left-Leaning, Virtue-Signaling Social Media House of Cancel Culture Cards.
Meanwhile, Google would engage in all manner of search engine suppression. Like both Facebook and Twitter, Google would also aggressively de-platform Trump and Trump supporters on its YouTube platform, effectively cutting off the messaging oxygen needed to keep the Trump base and swing voters vibrant and alive.
And yes, it should not be lost on anyone that even as Zuckerberg, Dorsey, and Pichai were de-platforming Republicans, Deplorables, and others in Trump Land, everyone from the Death to America Ayatollahs of Iran to the purveyors of counterfeits and kiddie porn would go uncensored on Facebook, Twitter, and Google.
And so I do indeed lay much of this “Revenge of the Social Media Oligarchs” fiasco at the feet of Brad Parscale. For his stupidity alone in poking the social media bear, he never should have gotten the job as campaign manager in 2020.
Management by Zoom Is Not Management at All
The biggest problem with Brad Parscale as campaign manager was not so much that he didn’t know what the Hades he was doing. It was that he was rarely at the Trump campaign headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, to try to do anything at all.
Just as in 2016 when Parscale would spend most of his time in sunny San Antonio, Brad would, in 2020, spend most of his time in sunny Fort Lauderdale, Florida. In truth, for an introvert and computer geek like Brad who hated cold weather, the pandemic was a gift from the Chinese Communist Party Virus gods.
Indeed, masks, social distancing, and economic lockdowns all became perfect excuses for Parscale never to fly into the Washington Swamp. Instead, “management by Zoom conference” became the perfect tool for someone who, by temperament, preferred the cold comfort of a computer monitor over warm face-to-face human contact.
There was also the matter of how Parscale was making himself singularly nouveau riche off the backs of Trump donors. And to this point, here is a little peek behind the political curtain for any of you newbies who don’t know how campaign consulting really works:
For every political consultant in it for the money rather than the mission, the fastest way to wealth is neither through a monthly stipend nor even a winning bonus. It’s getting a piece of the advertising and marketing action.
To this end, Parscale would funnel to himself millions of dollars of commissions through his various reelection companies to pay for what would eventually become a quite nouveau riche portfolio of three posh Miami condos and six other properties; luxury wheels that ranged from a Ferrari and Range Rover to a BMW X6; and that favorite Fort Lauderdale accessory, a nearly half-a-million-dollar yacht.5
Of course, Parscale wasn’t the only one siphoning big bucks into his bank account off the backs of small Trump donors. Remember Katie Walsh? I told you earlier about how this Cruella got fired as the deputy chief of staff to Reince Priebus because of her alleged rampant leaking.
Yet here we have a case of “no bad deed goes unrewarded.” Parscale would funnel nearly $1 million to Walsh’s firms.6
Clown Prince of the Universe
With Brad Parscale mostly in Florida knocking back another cool one at poolside, reeling in another amberjack on his boat, or raking ever more lucrative commissions, that left Jared Kushner to fill the campaign manager vacuum at the Arlington, Virginia, headquarters. But here’s the thing:
The job of a campaign manager is a full-time, 24/7 job. Whether your candidate is running for state legislature, Congress, the Senate, or president, if you are doing anything else but managing that damn campaign, you are not doing your job.
That stark reality posed a dilemma for Kushner. That’s because his real full-time job was at the White House playing, what the 1980s iconic author Tom Wolfe used to call a “Master of the Universe.” Within the West Wing, Kushner simply had all of his eight fingers and two thumbs in every possible pie—China, the pandemic, peace in the Middle East, get out of jail free cards, you name it.
Here’s an albeit tongue-in-cheek sample day at the West Wing in the life of the Clown Prince:
•First thing in the morning, back channel his Chinese Communist Party handlers and Wall Street’s unregistered foreign agents on the latest in trade negotiations and thereby weaken the bargaining position of United State Trade Representative Bob Lighthizer.
•Midmorning, back channel his counterpart in Saudi Arabia, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, to help MBS evade any responsibility for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi and thereby send Secretary of State Mike Pompeo into yet another paroxysm of rage at the meddling of the Boy Wonder.
•At noon, back channel Israeli prime minister Bibi Netanyahu on the latest in Mideast peace talks and thereby keep National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien like a mushroom in the dark heaped in Jared’s excrement (which at least doesn’t stink—or so we were told).
•Midafternoon, meet with his extended staff on the latest developments in mismanaging the pandemic and see what else they can screw up.
•At sunset, call the vice president’s chief of staff, Marc Short, and see what data they can manipulate to make it look like the pandemic is getting better; and
•Afterwards, drop into the Oval Office for what would be the fifth time that day to see the Boss and tell him how great his polls look.
By the way, Kushner would endlessly peddle this “the polls look great” piddling stream of piss-poor judgement to whoever would listen, and it would be this single piece of utter Kushner bull ship that would contribute so much to the inertia and lack of urgency within both the West Wing and campaign headquarters.
In fact, there were two main pollsters on the campaign during the Parscale-Kushner reign of error—John McLaughlin from New York and Tony Fabrizio of Florida. Capable though each was, these two gentlemen could not have been more different.
On the one hand, John McLaughlin exhibited both a good “bedside manner” with POTUS and a willingness to bend with the rose-colored Kushner winds. Not surprisingly, his polling data tended more towards the glass is half full side of the median voter.
On the other hand, Tony Fabrizio is a “zero sugar” pollster who wastes no time on flattery and just sticks it to you if you are indeed getting stuck. For example, if you’re down by five, you’re getting crushed by women, and you are getting your head handed to you by college-educated men, Tony is going to tell you exactly that.
From this tale of two pollsters, you will not be surprised to learn that Jared Kushner would regularly rip Fabrizio—a guy with more than twenty-five years of experience—telling Tony he had “no idea how to poll.” The standard Kushner line to Fabrizio was: “Tony, your numbers are off by five points every time because you don’t understand the hidden Trump voter.”
Now there is certainly something to the theory of the “hidden Trump voter.” The idea behind this theory goes something like this:
Many people inclined to vote for Trump in the sanctity and secrecy of the ballot box were in no way inclined to actually admit that to their friends and relatives, much less to a pollster—and for good reason. In the virtue-signaling world we have come to be cancelled in, revealing that you are a Trump voter often can end badly.
To this point, some of my favorite clothes in my closet are the shirts and jackets and hats I have with the Trump logo on them. Yet, dating back to the 2016 campaign, I have never worn such Trump gear out in public for the simple reason it would materially increase the probability that someone would either scream at me or, in the worst case, try to punch me right in the proboscis.
Here, I vividly remember the October 2016 night one of our Trump War Room worker bees came back from a New York bar with a bloodied and broken nose. Someone had simply walked up to him and sucker-punched him without so much as a word—all for the sin of wearing Trump garb.
At any rate, I do buy into the idea of the hidden Trump voter. But there’s no way in Hades, Kushner’s lament notwithstanding, that a pollster as good as Tony Fabrizio does not make the appropriate adjustments in his data sampling and interviewing techniques to account for this hidden Trump voter problem.
Now here’s the bigger point—and Jared’s bigger lie: Whenever Kushner would brief POTUS on the internal polling, he would always plus up Tony Fabrizio’s results by five points. So if Tony’s polls said the Boss was down by four in Michigan, by the time the information got to his desk via Kushner, POTUS would be up by one.
It wasn’t just the Boss being bamboozled by Kushner’s “everything’s going great” spin. Oftentimes, we would hear about the internal polling during our trade team meetings with the Boss in the Oval. So even as I was trying to make the case that we faced a very tough race and we were getting killed on the pandemic and we had to get Tough on China and we had to get back to our Populist Economic Nationalist roots, Mnuchin and Kudlow would point to Jared’s internal polling to make their case we were going to win in a landslide.
And that, of course, was the game Mnuchin, Kudlow, and Kushner were all playing. Stand pat. Don’t rock the China boat. And we are going to sail to victory.
Every time this kind of rhetoric splattered the walls of the Oval Office, I felt like I was back in the court of Louis XIV listening to all of the sycophants telling the king how wonderful everything was—the filth and chaos and violence in the streets a few blocks from the King’s palace notwithstanding.
You Will Never Come into the Oval Again
In March of 2020, Corey Lewandowski and Dave Bossie came within a whisker of putting an end to this toxic Kushner rosy poll game. After months of Kushner’s bull ship, the Boss called Corey to ask him how he thought things were really going so Corey suggested he and Dave Bossie come see the Boss and have a frank discussion about what the real polling data looked like.
Let’s hear it now straight, no chaser, from Corey as to how that meeting went:
So Dave Bossie and I go into the Oval, and we take the RealClearPolitics publicly available tracking polls with us. As we sit down in front of President Trump, I say, ‘Sir, here are the real numbers. These are not our numbers, Sir. They’re not Tony’s numbers. And they’re not John’s numbers.
What you have here is a compilation of ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, and Fox News. They do a running total, and they give you your margins. According to the average of these numbers, we are getting our clock cleaned.
As soon as I show the Boss these numbers, it’s like alarm bells go off in his head. He tells me, “Corey, we’re going to lose based on those numbers.” Then, as Dave and I sit there, he starts calling state directors. He says, “Hey, how am I doing in Ohio? How am I doing in Florida?” And so on. Finally, I think to myself: “He is finally getting it.”
The next day I fly home to New Hampshire, and Jared Kushner calls me that night and says, “If you ever do that again, I will ban you from the White House.” I say: “Do what?” And he says, “I’ve been spending all day trying to stop what the f**k you’re doing. You have no right to come in and tell the president this information.”
So I say, “Hey Jared…if you’re so afraid of presenting the president the publicly available polling data, then maybe we need to re-look at what we’re doing.” And he says, “If you guys keep this up, I will make sure you and Bossie never get into the White House.”
Jared simply didn’t want me and Dave in there telling Trump the plain truth, which was: “Your campaign is in disarray. You have no f**king plan. You’re going to lose, and you’ve got literally two thousand people on payroll right now, and that’s what Hillary Clinton had. It’s not Trump Force One. It’s the f**king Hindenburg.”
Then I say, “And by the way, Jared, the lowest level staffers are making ten to twelve thousand dollars a month! How do you justify paying salaries like that? A hundred and twenty grand for people with no experience!
Between the campaign and the Super PAC, Trump 2020 has become a dumping ground for anybody who couldn’t hack it in the White House.
Memo to the Boss: This issue of a bloated, overpaid, and underexperienced staff that Corey raised in his particularly incisive rant was also a pet peeve of mine. We went from a total of around eight hundred low-paid staff and volunteers in the 2016 campaign to more than two thousand in 2020, many making obscene sums for a political campaign.
The practical result was a monthly overhead nut in the millions of dollars. And know this: millions of dollars will buy you a ton of TV and radio ads in the media markets of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin in the final weeks before a presidential Election Day.
Instead, when cash push came to campaign overhead shove, the Trump campaign—the most well-funded in history—had to pull its expenditures on ads. That’s right, the highest funded campaign in presidential history had to pull ads in key battleground states because it was out of cash. Thank you, Brad Parscale and Jared Kushner.
Here is how the Los Angeles Times rubbed salt into this particular self-inflicted wound:
[J]ust two weeks out from the election, some campaign aides privately acknowledge they are facing difficult spending decisions at a time when Democratic nominee Joe Biden has flooded the airwaves with advertising.7
Yes, in the critical weeks leading into the November 3 Election Day, the Biden campaign would outspend the Trump campaign by about $75 million.8
Of Silos and Fiefdoms
In the bitter end, the practical result of a missing-in-action and profligate Brad Parscale and a Clown Kushner Prince huddled in the West Wing was to create an organizational culture and structure that was the absolute antithesis of the Trump 2016 effort. Remember here, that in 2016, everybody on that campaign of any consequence aside from the state directors spread out across the country were all working shoulder to shoulder, elbow to elbow, and hand in glove every day in the War Room at Trump Tower.
In sharp contrast, in 2020, campaign structure devolved into a series of silos and fiefdoms that, as a matter of organizational culture, effectively set their own priorities and interacted rarely with the other silos.
One of my key takeaways from my whole experience with the 2020 campaign is something I had actually learned long ago: In a campaign, it is not how much money you raise. Nor is it how much you spend.
In many cases, it’s not even about how you spend your money. Instead, the most important thing of all when it comes to money is when you spend it.
I did indeed learn this lesson the hardest of ways and from personal experience. In fact, I would likely have “Mayor of San Diego” on my resume right now if I had spent what money I did spend in that 1992 campaign towards the end of the race rather than at the beginning and in the middle.
The paradox of the 2020 Trump presidential campaign was just that. The most well-funded presidential campaign in history ran out of money when it was most needed because it spent money when it was least needed.
The poster child for the profligate ways of Brad Parscale and Jared Kushner was the ten million dollars burned on a sixty-second Super Bowl ad before Donald J. Trump even had a Democrat challenger.9 To put this in perspective, one of the very few staunch supporters of Trump in Silicon Valley, Peter Thiel, would write a $250,000 check to the Trump joint fundraising committee.10 Imagine how Thiel felt when he realized that his hard-earned dough was used to pay for less than two seconds of that Super Bowl ad.
My favorite synopsis of all this Parscale-Kushner conspicuous political consumption is captured in the following simian analogy offered up by Republican political consultant Mike Murphy:
They spent their money on unnecessary overhead, lifestyles-of-the-rich-and-famous activity by the campaign staff and vanity ads way too early…. You could literally have 10 monkeys with flamethrowers go after the money, and they wouldn’t have burned through it as stupidly.11