CHAPTER 17

MY FIRST FACE-TO-FACE EXPERIENCE with Donald Trump came in mid-July 2015 at the Weirs Community Center along the shores of Lake Winnipesaukee in Laconia. At the time, Trump was still a week away from ascending to the top spot in the New Hampshire polls—a position he wouldn’t relinquish in a single public survey all the way through the February primary—but he had already become the candidate of the summer. It was an unofficial status that just about everyone in the know assumed would fade by the time the first cool breezes of autumn arrived, and yet the phenomenon was undoubtedly real. Trump was drawing massive crowds at rallies around the country and had recently taken the lead from Jeb Bush in national polls.

The morning of the Trump rally, I first swung by Wisconsin governor Scott Walker’s inaugural New Hampshire event. After impressing party activists and the national media at an Iowa Republican confab early in the year, Walker was still leading in the polls in Iowa, the neighboring early state where a victory was most important to his campaign, and he appeared to be well positioned in New Hampshire, too. Walker offered the option of a young, deeply conservative man who wasn’t scary to the establishment and had the political skills required to go the distance. But he was also burdened by a couple of fundamental handicaps that would ultimately amount to his rapid undoing. Although he had spent more than two decades in the trenches of Wisconsin politics, he wasn’t quite up to snuff on national policy, and it showed. He just didn’t come across as particularly prepared to run for president—a problem that exacerbated his second critical flaw as a White House hopeful: stature. Basically, it boiled down to this: Could voters imagine this man addressing the country in a crisis as president of the United States? Walker may have been a street fighter in the conservative movement and a second-term governor of an important state, but for many, he didn’t pass the Oval Office test.

I wrote down somewhere in my reporter’s notebook that the Walker event that morning had taken place at Joey’s Diner in Amherst, and I’m glad that I did because it was instantly forgettable. About the most interesting thing that happened came when the Wisconsin governor jumped up onto the bed of a red pickup truck to address the overflow crowd outside the event. But even that manufactured moment was rather lame, as he delivered from his elevated perch the same carefully crafted stump speech, just about word for word, that he would repeat a few minutes later inside the diner. I decided to skip his second event of the day so that I could make sure I’d get to Laconia on time for Trump. Why attend another glorified photo-op when I had an invitation to a fifty-car pileup?

Before setting out on the hour drive to Laconia, I made a pit stop at A&E Coffee Roastery—Amherst’s finest caffeine dispensary—where I set to work on filing my brief and tedious story on the Walker event. As I settled into an armchair with my large iced regular and began my Twitter-scrolling, writing-avoidance ritual, I received a phone call from Sam Stein, senior politics editor for the Huffington Post in Washington. Sam told me about a decision that our site’s founder and editor-in-chief, Arianna Huffington, had announced to editors earlier in the day: although we would continue to cover his campaign, all future HuffPost stories that featured Donald Trump would appear in the site’s entertainment section, rather than in the politics section. The reason provided for the change was that Trump’s campaign was nothing more than a media-driven sideshow, fit for Kardashian-level scrutiny, rather than the earnest inspection required to scrutinize a real contender for the presidency. Trump would soon fall as quickly as he’d risen, the expectation went, and we would get out ahead of the rest of the media in treating his candidacy as the overt joke that it was. My own mandate in covering Trump would not change, Sam assured me. From now on, I’d just have to check the box next to “Entertainment” rather than “Politics” when I filed my stories about him. I didn’t have any input on this decision, and so my opinion about its merits didn’t much matter, but I figured correctly that it would inevitably have an impact on my own access to Trump.

I made it to Laconia as the summer afternoon was at its shimmering peak. The traffic was fairly substantial by the time I caught my first glimpse of Lake Winnipesaukee—New Hampshire’s largest body of water and a major tourist destination—but not even that could sour my mood. The only thing missing was ice cream. One of the best things about New Hampshire in the summertime is that you’re never more than a few miles away from an ice cream shop. One might assume it’s all lobster rolls and clam chowder, but for reasons I can’t explain, ice cream is as integral a part of New Hampshire comfort food as those other staples are. I pulled into the Happy Cow Ice Cream Shop just north of bustling downtown Laconia and ordered a mint chocolate chip in a waffle cone. As I sat on the park bench eating my pre-dinner dessert, enjoying the warmth of the now fading sunlight and the faint breeze that topped it all off, I thought about what a shame it was that this confluence of tranquillity was all about to be upended by an air horn in a suit, whose taste in home decor would have made Louis XIV snicker.

I arrived at the event site around 5:30 p.m.—an hour before Trump was set to kick things off inside the Weirs Community Center. A crowd of several hundred people had already lined up outside the doors leading into the small building. I flashed my “media credential” (a Huffington Post business card) to the cops who stood outside the back entrance to the building and entered the packed house along the left side of the stage. Like many public buildings in New Hampshire, the community center had no air conditioning. It felt like the temperature inside was easily into the triple digits, and a quick scan of the room revealed that several of the older Trump fans who had already been waiting for hours appeared to be on the verge of passing out. Anxious volunteers handed out free water bottles at a steady clip. As I looked outside the window onto the beautiful and temperate summer evening, I wondered if Trump’s advance team had preferred the cramped, sweaty indoor venue to the expansive outdoor setting that the pier offered. Red meat tastes best, after all, when the stove’s cranked up. The extra heat gives it a nice, crisp char.

While waiting for the program to start, I began approaching people at random, asking them what they liked about Trump. The answers were fairly consistent. “What he says, he means,” Cecil Baldwin, who was in town from Arizona with his wife, told me, adding, “We need someone like him.” Marge Dahla, who had made the trip from the North Country hamlet of East Dalton, said that she “loves how he speaks” and that Trump’s personal fortune insulated him from the special interests that had taken hold of career politicians. “He’s not beholden to people,” she reiterated.

The general sentiment—that Trump was a truth-telling outsider—was more or less what I’d expected. It wasn’t just that he was a celebrity. These people liked that Trump was a plutocratic blowhard who caused members of the establishment to wrinkle their noses. My most memorable conversation was with a Mexican American mother and her adult son—Delilah Rodriguez and Alex Chapa of Laconia and Manchester—who were most effusive in singing the praises of the man who had launched his high-flying presidential campaign by declaring undocumented immigrants from Mexico to be rapists. Dressed in a shiny blue button-down shirt and red tie, his hair spiked with gel, Chapa looked a decade younger than his thirty-nine years. An Iraq War veteran who signed up for the army ten days after 9/11, he told me that his grandparents on his father’s side had immigrated to the United States from Mexico legally in the 1940s. He was in general agreement with Trump on border security but would go a step further than the candidate by closing the border “for like ten years.”

“American Hispanics don’t want all the illegals taking our tax money for free rights,” he said, standing next to his mother. Chapa clearly understood how this sentiment might come across as pulling the ladder up behind him, depriving others who wanted a better life in the United States from achieving that goal, but he didn’t care. “We’re Mexican and we’re saying this!” he added, as if he were a bit taken aback by the words that were coming out of his mouth.

As I started to chat with him, it soon became clear that while he supported Trump’s position on immigration, it wasn’t the main attraction for Chapa. To him, Trump was a role model, a guy who “knows how to make money,” as Chapa put it, and a man’s man, who said and did whatever he wanted without worrying about consequences like public ridicule that tend to hold other people back. “I like him because he’s a billionaire,” Chapa said. “And he’s powerful, and he’s international, yet when he talks, he says it straight up, like how real Americans talk in a bar or at home. I love it.”

What struck me the most about Trump supporters like Chapa was their universal sincerity. They really believed in the guy with every fiber of their beings, and they didn’t sound like people who might change their allegiances. Unlike the people who’d come out to catch a glimpse of Scott Walker that morning and make some early judgments about him, these Trump fans had already rendered their verdict about the campaign.

Showtime finally arrived when the introductory speaker welcomed “the next president of the United States, Donald Trump.”

“There’s his hair!” someone shouted, as the legendary nest of golden locks shimmered toward the stage under the direction of a huge contingent of dark-suited and stern-faced private security guards. Trump himself was dressed in his typical uniform: a bright-red power tie, white shirt, and slimming, navy-blue suit. True to form, his first task of the speech was to marvel aloud about the size of his crowd, the hugeness of which he could scarcely find words to describe adequately while staying within the restrictive confines of the English language. “There’s a massive group of people outside that the press won’t report, by the way,” Trump shouted into the microphone. “They won’t talk about it. They’re not going to talk about the hundreds—literally—I would say four times the size of this crowd!” Many in the crowd—small and sedate by Trumpian standards—oohed in response to Trump’s estimation of their numbers.

As he meandered his way into something approximating a stump speech, Trump railed in typical fashion about how “the last thing we need is another Bush” and how the United States was getting “screwed” by a duplicitous but savvy country called “Chee-EYE-nah.”

“I beat China. I beat them!” he added.

Trump even led his own distinctive version of the call and response.

“How much money do I have?” the candidate called out to his flock.

“Ten billion!” the faithful shouted in unison.

Like countless politicians before him, Trump sought to turn one of his most glaring weaknesses—his standing among Hispanic voters—into a strength. “I have so many Hispanics, and they love me,” he said, using syntax that only he could dream up. “And interestingly, we just got from the state of Nevada a poll [that] just came out, and Trump won with a tremendous amount. And the second line was, ‘Takes Hispanic vote in a landslide,’ and I’ve been saying that. I’m going to win the Hispanic vote.”

The survey he was referring to was conducted by a notoriously unreliable polling company, and it only showed him with a lead among Republican Hispanics in Nevada. But Delilah Rodriguez, Chapa’s mother, was fully convinced. “Yes, you are!” she shouted back at the candidate.

As minutes ticked away, the heat continued to take effect on the increasingly red-faced and sweating candidate. Later on in the campaign, the sight of hundreds of disinterested people walking out in the middle of Trump’s rallies would become commonplace. But at this one, I saw just one person make for the exits while Trump was still on stage. “I’ve heard enough,” a middle-aged man said aloud, as he headed for the parking lot. Just about everyone else in the crowd continued to hang on his every utterance, no matter how nonsensical. Still, there was a collective sense that pretty much everyone in the room was in on the joke. I even noticed a couple of Trump’s security guards chuckling to themselves.

Many of his fans, however, remained visibly starstruck, scarcely able to keep it together in Trump’s presence. When the candidate called on one man in his thirties to ask a question, the lucky guy’s facial reaction was akin to what you’d expect from a fifteen-year-old girl right after she’s asked to come up onto the stage to be serenaded by Justin Bieber. But the highlight of the event came during the very first exchange of the Q-and-A when a man rose from his chair, accepted the microphone from an aide, and announced by way of introduction that he was a Vietnam veteran. Never inclined to sit back and let a stranger one-up him, Trump shot back immediately, “I did the Vietnam Veterans memorial in New York. Did you know I’m responsible for that?”

Trump didn’t mention the four student deferments he’d received in avoiding the Vietnam-era draft, nor did he bring up the separate medical deferment he was granted at the time for a “foot thing,” as he’d later put it. The guy had put up some cash to build a memorial in New York, which—in his severely warped perspective—was more impressive than actually fighting in the war.

As soon as the rally ended, I made my way out the back door as quickly as possible in an effort to beat the crowd. A few minutes later, I pulled my rental car to the side of the road and searched on my phone for a nearby coffee shop to file a brief story. An approaching police siren caused me to look in my rearview mirror, where I saw a motorcade approaching rapidly. Trump and his entourage were being led out of town by police escort—one last spectacle to put a punctuation mark on the evening. I found myself wondering where they were going. I knew that at this stage of the campaign, Trump returned home every night to Manhattan to sleep in his own bed. The nearest major airport was in Manchester, which was a solid hour away, and I couldn’t imagine that he would subject himself to that level of inconvenience. I figured that Trump was probably heading to a private airfield somewhere nearby. A quick search on Google Maps revealed that Laconia Municipal Airport was just down the road, so without giving it much further thought, I headed in that direction.

A few minutes later, I pulled into the small airport and noticed that a couple of dozen gawkers had gotten there first. They were gathered outside the waiting area at the private terminal, peering into the windows. That was odd, I thought. Why didn’t they just go inside? There was nothing preventing them—or anyone else, for that matter—from entering the fixed-based operator (FBO) waiting area. But it was as if they assumed that they’d be breaking some sort of law if they got too close to Trump, who did not have Secret Service protection at this point in the campaign. Without giving it any additional thought, I walked right into the small building where I assumed Trump was holed up.

Upon entering, the very first person I laid eyes on was lounging on one of the two leather chairs that were positioned in front of a wall-mounted flat-screen TV tuned to Fox News. It was Trump, fully engaged in his favorite activity: watching himself. Surrounding him was a small contingent of aides, bodyguards, and airport employees, all of whom dared not get closer than about a ten-foot radius from the impulsive agitator to whom they each referred to in both public and private as “Mr. Trump.” It was as if such a holy figure required a buffer zone, room for the enormity of his presence. I knew that this might prove to be my one and only chance to talk to Trump, especially considering my news organization’s new policy, which had not yet been announced, but I hadn’t prepared any questions in advance and wasn’t sure of the best way to approach him.

I spotted Trump’s campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, whom I’d known previously in his role as a New Hampshire–based conservative political activist. Lewandowski was an intense, energy-drink-pounding operative with a tidy buzz cut and the disposition of a man who has something to prove. I had been to his home to interview him during the 2012 campaign and had always found him to be someone I could work with. After exchanging pleasantries and complimenting him for the sizable crowd his candidate had attracted that evening, I asked Lewandowski if I might have a few minutes of Trump’s time. He told me to hold on for a moment and then approached the candidate, whispering something into his ear. Trump answered his minion with a kingly nod and then motioned for me to sit in the leather chair next to him.

“The Huffington Post has been very fair to me,” was the first thing Trump said to me after shaking my hand. I knew that he kept extremely close score of who had written and said what about him. This was, after all, a man who was famous in journalistic circles for scrolling handwritten nasty notes on unflattering reporters’ articles and then mailing them to the offenders. I was therefore relieved that he couldn’t place my name beyond my employer. In truth, I had been pretty hostile and dismissive of Trump in my reporting to that point and knew that I probably would not have been granted this opportunity had he been aware of that.

I started out by asking him about some recent comments that Rick Perry had made, in which the former Texas governor had called Trump a “cancer on conservatism,” among other things. At that point in the race, Perry was the only Republican candidate who was even attempting to lay a finger on Trump. The others, it seemed, had all bought into the idea that he’d go away naturally, like a bout of the flu. True to form, Trump asked why I would bother asking him about a GOP rival who was merely polling in the low single digits. But in a departure from the character he played on TV, he refused to get too personal, adding that he believed Perry to be “a nice person.” This was the tenor that Trump would maintain throughout our brief conversation—a watered-down version of the character he portrayed on television.

Trump couldn’t resist boasting that earlier in the night, his driver had told him he’d been in New Hampshire for a quarter century and had never seen a crowd so large. When I asked him how much of his own money he’d be willing to put into the campaign, he replied that he’d “do what I have to do” and did not dismiss out of hand the idea when I asked him if he’d eventually be willing to drop $1 billion on it. We were still at a point in the race when it wasn’t entirely clear the extent to which Trump would benefit from the unprecedented level of free media he was already receiving. In the time left until Primary Day, as it turned out, he would scarcely need to spend a dime of his own money to win in New Hampshire.

Next, I threw him what I thought would be a tricky little curve ball: “Do you think Sarah Palin was ready to be president?” Much of Trump’s success up to that point in the race had stemmed from his ability to tap into the disaffected, economically struggling voters who were some of Palin’s strongest supporters in 2008 and beyond. If he said something detrimental about the former Alaska governor, he risked offending his own base. But if he was too kind, he could turn off the vast majority of GOP voters who’d long ago accepted the reality that Palin had been dangerously unqualified for the office that John McCain had chosen her to seek. “Uuuuuhh,” Trump replied, hesitating for the first time. “Well, you know, she’s a friend of mine, and I think she’s a terrific person.” I waited for him to elaborate. “She’s a terrific person,” he repeated, adding, “Go ahead.”

It was just the kind of noncommittal answer you typically hear from a skilled politician, not a passing fad. My god, I thought. He’s adapting! Shortly thereafter, Trump ended the short interview, as some of his braver admirers had moved in closer to the unofficial no-fly zone that surrounded him, and they wanted pictures. Before obliging their requests and doing some last-minute preparation for his impending phone interview with Bill O’Reilly, Trump took his turn at asking me a question.

“Are you going back to New York?”

I was. “You got room for me?” I asked, motioning toward his private plane that was parked in the airfield. It wasn’t the 757 that Trump usually flew in but rather a more modest aircraft that was small enough to land at the Laconia airport.

Trump turned to Lewandowski. “The problem is if we put him on the plane, he’ll write a bad story,” the candidate speculated accurately. “I don’t think they have a seat. I would love to.” Alas, I’d have to take my decidedly non-gold-encrusted rental car back to New York.

After he finished his phone interview with O’Reilly, I watched Trump’s plane take off and then headed back out on the road. The next morning, the Huffington Post announced publicly our new policy of only covering Trump in the entertainment section, where a story based on my interview had been posted overnight. Trump’s campaign wasn’t happy. The first call I received was from his press secretary, former model turned Mr. Trump-devotee Hope Hicks. She argued that Trump could be “both” an entertainer and a politician and genuinely seemed unable to understand why we didn’t see it that way. I explained to Hicks that I had not devised the policy and still planned to cover Trump the same way I had been previously. Her answer to that particular assertion was that it would be difficult for the campaign to work with me from here on out. I’m sure it would be, I thought. It was tough to argue with her on that front.

Next, I received a call from Lewandowski, who attempted to project calm. “It’s nothing personal,” he said. “But if you guys are going to do this, I don’t see how I can credential the Huffington Post for events going forward.”

The following day, the Trump campaign took me off their e-mail distribution list for press releases. The day after that, Trump told an audience in Iowa that John McCain was “not a war hero,” adding that he liked “the people who don’t get captured” in wars. The day after that, his poll numbers went up again.