October 7, 2016. Thirty-two days before Election Day.
DONALD TRUMP SAT IN the conference room on the twenty-fifth floor of Trump Tower in New York while his team worked to get him ready for his second presidential debate against Hillary Clinton. Trump didn’t like preparing for debates. He hadn’t practiced much for his first one and lost steam after the first half hour. To avoid another disaster, his team was taking another run at it. In the midst of this, the deputy campaign manager’s phone rang.
Hope Hicks, the campaign spokesperson, was on the line with bad news.
A Washington Post reporter had called her with a bombshell. He’d sent her a transcript of crude and troubling comments the Republican presidential candidate had made in 2005. The reporter was planning a story and wanted the campaign’s comment.
A group of aides huddled in another room, trying to figure out what to do next. First, they decided, they’d show Trump the transcript. But when he glanced at it, he waved it off. “It doesn’t sound like something I would say.”
By then, the reporter from the Post had sent the campaign the video. Recorded not long after Trump married his third wife, the footage began with a shot of an oversize bus rolling onto a Hollywood production lot. Trump, wearing a live microphone inside the bus, hooted as he caught a glimpse of the actress he was about to meet.
“Yeah, that’s her!”
Something rattled; then he said, “I better use some Tic Tacs just in case I start kissing her. You know, I’m automatically attracted to beautiful—I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. I just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything … Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.”
Trump headed down the steps of the bus, joking that he’d better not trip like former President Gerald Ford. After a bit of trouble with the door, he emerged and greeted the actress with a hug, a kiss, and a disclaimer: “Melania said this was okay.”
Once he saw the video, Trump agreed the remarks were his, which meant his team had to come up with a response for the press. Coverage was sure to be intense.
Trump’s daughter Ivanka, on the verge of tears, wanted her dad to apologize. This did not interest Trump. Along with his aides, Trump crafted a response that was equal parts excuse, apology, and attack on his opponent.
… Trump crafted a response that was equal parts excuse, apology, and attack on his opponent.
“This was locker room banter, a private conversation that took place many years ago. Bill Clinton has said far worse to me on the golf course—not even close. I apologize if anyone was offended.”
Nonetheless, the story drowned out other major headlines of the day, at least temporarily. And it wasn’t as if the breaking news was inconsequential. Two government agencies jointly released a statement saying the US intelligence community was “confident” the Russian government had directed hackers to steal e-mail from American citizens and institutions. An hour later, two thousand potentially damaging e-mails stolen from John Podesta, the chair of Clinton’s campaign, appeared online.
Though the e-mails would make headlines in the days to come, there wasn’t much coverage of the Kremlin’s part in it. For whatever reason, Trump’s eleven-year-old hot microphone banter was more interesting to the media than cyber warfare from a foreign government.
Later that night Trump did make the apology Ivanka had urged. He released a video statement on Twitter, bypassing the mainstream media.
“This was locker room banter, a private conversation that took place many years ago. Bill Clinton has said far worse to me on the golf course—not even close. I apologize if anyone was offended.”
DONALD TRUMP
October 7, 2016
January 26, 2017. Official White House photo by Shealah Craighead.
But damage had been done, and many in Trump’s corner worried it was the last straw. It was far from the first.
When he’d launched his campaign at Trump Tower in 2015, he embellished his prepared remarks and suggested Mexico was sending horrible people to the United States: criminals, drug dealers, rapists.
Not long afterward, he argued that a judge who happened to be of Mexican descent would be unfair in the high-profile fraud suit against Trump University, his real-estate education program.
This unusual language shocked even members of his own party. House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan called the remarks “the textbook definition of a racist comment … It is absolutely unacceptable.”
But Trump’s base of voters did not seem to mind. And they loved his promise to build a “big, beautiful wall” that Mexico would pay for.
“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.”
His rallies sometimes turned violent, and although Trump claimed he didn’t condone this, he also said his people would investigate paying the legal fees of a man who’d been charged with assault after sucker-punching a protestor. Trump even joked about getting away with murder himself at an Iowa rally: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.”
Trump tested the loyalty of his voters in other ways. Candidates typically don’t insult the parents of soldiers who die in combat, but Trump picked a fight with the parents of a Muslim immigrant killed by a car bomb in Iraq. Trump didn’t like what the Gold Star family had said about him at the Democratic National Convention. He also claimed that Hillary Clinton’s speech writers had probably written the family’s remarks, and he implied the mother had been forced to remain silent because of her religion.
This followed a pattern of hostility toward Muslims he’d displayed on the campaign trail, even promising a potentially unconstitutional ban of Muslim immigrants.
Trump also took a shot at Senator John McCain, a Vietnam war hero blasted from the sky by a Russian missile the size of a telephone pole. McCain had been severely injured in the fall, and his captors imprisoned him for five and a half years, torturing him on many occasions.
Trump, who avoided military service altogether, wasn’t impressed: “He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”
All along, Trump’s disregard for political norms astonished observers. But something about the crude remarks about women and the admission that he repeatedly touched them sexually without their consent distressed Republican Party donors and officials. It seemed to corroborate the accusations of at least fifteen women who’d accused Trump of sexual misconduct. What’s more, Trump’s personal lawyer was in the midst of frantically securing a hush agreement from an adult film star Trump had slept with months after his youngest child was born.
Reince Priebus, the party chairman, suggested Trump had two options after the latest debacle: drop out, or face an epic loss.
That was all Trump needed to hear.
He wasn’t going to quit. What’s more, he wasn’t going to lose.
Donald Trump hated losing more than anything else in the world. His father had raised him to be a tiger, and in his life, Donald Trump had figured out what it took to come out on top, even when defeat looked inevitable. Sometimes, you had to do things other people wouldn’t. Sometimes you had to bend or even break the rules. And sometimes, it all came down to how you told the story afterward.
He had a message for Priebus and the rest of the party.
“I’m going to win,” he said. “And second, if the Republican Party is going to run away from me then I will take you all down with me. But I’m not going to lose.”
“We must not let #CrookedHillary take her CRIMINAL SCHEME into the Oval Office. #DrainTheSwamp”
—@realDonaldTrump, October 28, 2016
FOR MORE THAN A YEAR, THE FBI HAD BEEN probing Hillary Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server for government business when she was secretary of state. FBI Director James Comey concluded his work in July, calling the e-mail extremely careless but not criminal. He closed the case, largely ending the extensive media coverage of the subject.
But then FBI agents working on a separate investigation involving the disgraced husband of Clinton’s top aide made a discovery: more e-mails.
Comey, torn between disclosure and the risk he’d influence the election, let Congress know he was taking another look.
If anything could upend the race in favor of Donald Trump, this was it. The media eagerly jumped back on board. Clinton’s e-mail stories—both the ones about her use of a private server for classified material, and the ones about correspondence leaked from the hack on Democratic Party officials—had been their favorites of the year, dwarfing the amount of airtime and ink they spent covering public policy.
Comey, meanwhile, said nothing of another FBI investigation the bureau had launched days after he ended the one into Clinton’s e-mails.
This investigation focused on disturbing contacts Trump and his top advisers had with the Russian government. The silence infuriated Democrats and puzzled some who knew exactly what the FBI had found on Trump, which included the sort of salacious material blackmailers loved.
“Our American comeback story begins 11/8/16. Together, we will MAKE AMERICA SAFE & GREAT again for everyone!”
—@realDonaldTrump, November 6, 2016
November 6, 2016. Two days before Election Day
Comey announced there was nothing in the new Clinton e-mails, after all. She would not face criminal charges.
But her lead in the polls had withered to 2.5 points, down from the 7.1-point advantage she had before Comey’s October surprise.
Even so, analysts at the influential FiveThirtyEight website predicted Trump had only about a one-in-three chance of winning. Most other pollsters gave him even worse odds.
“I will be watching the election results from Trump Tower in Manhattan with my family and friends. Very exciting!”
—@realDonaldTrump, November 8, 2016
ALL MORNING, TRUMP’S TEAM HUDDLED IN THE war room on the fifth floor of Trump Tower. Boxes of fat frosted donuts lined white tables, and workers in black chairs studied computer data and social media while an image of a red, white, and blue Donald Trump looked on, dwarfing the American flag nearby.
When a Fox News reporter stopped by to see how things were going, a campaign spokesman told her he thought they were on the “verge of something historic.”
It didn’t feel that way to everyone. Trump’s endless controversies had filled the Republican National Committee with doubts. Several top staffers were sniffing around TV networks for jobs. Trump himself was figuring out how to parlay his increased fame into a lucrative television network.
Around 5 P.M., Trump’s phone rang. It was his daughter and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, calling with bad news. Exit polls, where journalists queried people leaving voting booths, looked grim.
Trump chucked the phone across his bed. “What a waste of time and money.”
“What a waste of time and money.”
He broke the news to Melania. “Baby, I’ll tell you what, we’re not gonna win tonight because the polls have come out.”
He planned to give a quick concession speech and get back to his “nice, easy life,” where he and three of his adult children—Don Jr., Ivanka, and Eric—ran his real estate and branding companies, while Melania focused on his youngest son, Barron. (Another adult daughter, Tiffany, had recently graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, her father’s alma mater.)
Around 9 P.M., Trump left his bedroom and took an elevator down from his apartment to the campaign’s war room to watch coverage on the half dozen seventy-five-inch televisions mounted on the wall.
“Hey, geniuses,” he said, laying on the sarcasm, “how’s this working for us?”
Better than most had predicted, actually.
As the night wore on and the pizza boxes were emptied, the electoral college maps on the big TVs began “bleeding red,” as Trump put it.
Although a lot of attention is given to the popular vote, the electoral college is what matters in US presidential elections. Each state chooses people to be electors, receiving a number equal to the numbers of senators and representatives they have in Congress. That means two for each of the two senators per state, plus additional electors equal to the number of seats in the House of Representatives, which is based on population.
As the hours ticked by, crucial battleground states fell, and the electoral votes stacked up. The world watched, astonished at the biggest upset in modern American politics. By 2:30 A.M., as world leaders were starting their day across the Atlantic, Hillary Clinton had conceded. Even though Clinton had received almost 2.9 million more votes than Donald Trump, he had won the presidency.
While his campaign team and children celebrated, Melania reportedly burst into tears. This wasn’t what she wanted. It wasn’t what he’d promised her, that she need hang on only until Election Day. There would be no return to their easy life.
Not that he’d planned a gracious loss, anyway. Some of his most ardent supporters had threatened a “bloodbath” if Trump lost. Joe Walsh, a former Congressman, tweeted, “On November 9th, if Trump loses, I’m grabbing my musket. You in?”
Fear drove the violent rhetoric. Were he not elected, Trump warned, immigrants would flood through open borders and cause unending waves of crime, and terrorists, extremists, and radicals would fill schools and infect communities. Trump also claimed a Clinton presidency would not only risk American lives, it would create a Constitutional crisis, land her in a criminal trial, and destroy America.
“When the people who control the political power in our society can rig investigations,” he said, “they can wield absolute power over your life, your economy and your country, and benefit big time from it.”
This was the America that Trump predicted if he lost: one where the most powerful person in the land would contrive to live above the law, menace citizens, jeopardize businesses, and subvert American values—all while profiting personally.
Despite Trump’s dark musings, the nation had “bled red” for him. The upset stunned much of the nation and the world, but it was happening: Donald Trump would be the forty-fifth president of the United States.
President-elect Donald Trump walks into the inaugural ceremony. Friday, January 20, 2017. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead.)
