In late January of 2016, Paul Manafort asked me to start building a detailed memo on the Republican presidential primary process.
Paul didn’t tell me which candidate the information was for, but what he wanted seemed pretty straightforward: a breakdown of the Republican Party delegate system, state by state, pinpointing the number of delegates needed in order to win the nomination, and the rules and procedures that those delegates would have to abide by at the Republican National Convention in July.
That’s how it all started for me. With a research assignment for an anonymous client.
The request itself caught me off guard. I had no indication until that moment that my boss wanted to dive back into American politics. Paul had a long and storied career as a political consultant, having guided both Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan to their respective wins. But the last presidential campaign he’d worked on in any official capacity was Bob Dole’s bid in 1996. Since that time, he’d been working almost exclusively overseas, as he and his business partner, Rick Davis, consulted with and ran campaigns for major international candidates and political parties in a total of seventy-two countries over the years. Their clients included major political dynasties, such as the Kirchner family in Argentina, and such prominent individuals as President Juan Carlos Varela in Panama and Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan.
I had met Paul briefly, and Rick as well, in the summer of 1995, when I worked as a full-time intern for Charlie Black, one of Paul’s partners in their public affairs firm—Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly—one of the largest bipartisan political affairs firms in the world. I did so while simultaneously going to night school, where I was working on my master’s degree in public policy at George Washington University. I spent nearly a decade after that working as a government relations consultant in the gaming industry, addressing issues both in the U.S. and abroad before I agreed to join Rick Davis at their new firm, Davis Manafort Partners, in 2006. Soon after, Rick left the firm to work on John McCain’s presidential campaign, and I started working with Paul, whom I barely knew at the time. I’d had the privilege to work directly on political campaigns and elections globally, including in parts of Europe and Latin America. But for the last ten years, most of our work had been in Ukraine; and most recently Paul had been actively working to rebuild the political party of ousted Ukraine President Viktor Yanukovych.
In all of these instances, Paul’s reputation for political strategy preceded him. It is no exaggeration to say that in the rest of the world, it was generally assumed that if Paul came on board with his expertise at building candidates and political parties using an American campaign model, whichever candidate or party he worked for was likely to win. He was that good at what he did. Running international electoral work was challenging but more profitable than U.S. campaigns—a compelling reason why so many U.S. political consultants take their tradecraft abroad. In addition, many years earlier, Paul had helped found the precursor to the National Democratic Institute to promote democratic values in foreign countries. Paul always believed that U.S. presidential elections were the pinnacle of global politics, and winning a U.S. presidential election at this stage in his career would give him the accolades he so desired after being on the outside of U.S. campaigns for so long.
This was going to be his swan song.
In mid-February 2016, Paul finally told me who my research project was for: Republican candidate Donald J. Trump.
My first question was, “Why would Trump need this sort of basic research when primary season is already almost halfway over?” It was the kind of research that would typically be done at the very start of a campaign, even before a candidate announced that he or she was running. But in the coming weeks, the answer would become glaringly clear: Donald Trump and his staff did not fully understand how the process worked.
Even after successfully bulldozing his way through twenty-one state primaries, winning the vast majority of them while knocking all but five of his sixteen Republican opponents out of the race, he had little understanding of the intricacies of the primary system.
He didn’t understand the various rules and technicalities concerning how state delegates would cast their votes at the Republican National Convention, which is pivotal to actually winning the Republican nomination.
He did not fully grasp that unless all of the other leading Republican contenders dropped out and united behind him, he would go into a “contested” convention and could potentially lose the nomination at that point—despite winning the majority of primaries.
Ever since he had announced his candidacy in June of 2015, Trump had moved forward under the assumption that the primary process was simple: that whenever he won a state, he actually won that state; that all of the delegates from that state automatically were pledged to him. Whether his staff never explained it to him, or whether he’d simply ignored the complex details of the delegate process, he kept on assuming that whichever way the people voted, the delegates were bound to follow the will of the people; that a win was a win, and therefore the convention was nothing more than a celebration and coronation of the nominee.
Of course, that isn’t how presidential primaries work at all, on either side of the political aisle. The national conventions are much more than just TV events. The delegates who come to the convention from certain states can attempt to vote their conscience or to switch their blocs of votes to support a candidate other than the one their state’s voters chose.
It’s not all that dissimilar to what happens in the general election, in which—as most people are quite aware today—the Electoral College and not the popular vote dictates the winner. But the primary process is much more complicated, and purposefully so.
To put it bluntly: The nominating systems of both major parties in the United States of America are not designed by the people, for the people. Instead, they’re systems designed by the few, to benefit the few. Specifically party leaders. And the last person these systems were built to benefit is an outsider—like Trump.
Lucky for him, he had a couple of friends and close advisors who recognized this particular blind spot. Political operative Roger Stone and billionaire real estate investor Tom Barrack were both trying to persuade Trump that he needed to hire an experienced political operative to help get him through the convention. And they both told him the best man for the job was none other than their friend, Paul Manafort.
I was Manafort’s right-hand man at that point. A “junior partner” at Davis Manafort, one of five employees. I wasn’t an equity partner in the firm. I mostly worked from an office in my home in Richmond, Virginia, while Paul did more of the traveling back and forth to Ukraine.
There was just one problem: despite Stone and Barrack’s prodding, and Trump’s apparent admiration of Paul’s political skills, the man showed little to no interest in hiring Paul, or even taking a meeting with him initially. The media was salivating over the idea that the Republican National Convention was going to be a contested convention, but given Trump’s success in January and February and his status as the growing front-runner, he thought he had it all under control. Trump was winning “more primaries than anyone.” He already had “the best people” on his team. He was doing “unbelievable.” He was “going to win,” he told them.
Trump’s optimism came crashing down in March.
Trump won the Louisiana primary on March 5, but a few days later, he read a headline that drove him crazy: more than half of the Louisiana delegates came out and publicly stated that despite his primary win, they would not vote for Trump at the convention.
Instead of meeting with Paul and discussing our research, instead of stepping back and trying to understand the process, Trump immediately went on the attack. He went on TV and chastised the RNC, saying they’d put together a “sham system.” He tweeted that the party system was in “shambles” and that the Louisiana Republican Party executives were a bunch of “crooks.”
He attacked first. And then he called Paul.
Paul agreed to fly down and meet Trump at Mar-a-Lago on March 25, the Thursday before Easter weekend. By that time, news was spreading that some of the delegates in states outside of Louisiana that Trump had handily won wouldn’t support Trump at the convention either. Paul instructed me to pull together all of the research and other data I had gathered into a brief presentation, not only to show Trump how the delegate and nomination process worked, but more importantly to show Trump how the nomination could be stripped away from him. If Trump didn’t protect his success, certain people within the Republican Party would use a contested convention to select their candidate instead of him.
By the time he met with Paul in March, Trump was basically bleeding delegates.
What Paul confirmed during his meeting at Mar-a-Lago is that prior to reading the headlines about the delegates in Louisiana, Trump had no idea that the primaries and convention could be stolen from him. He mistakenly believed that if he won a state with fifteen delegates, he won all fifteen delegates automatically. He thought that once he won a sufficient number of primaries, he would just go to the convention as a sort of formality. As if the convention was just a big show. A press opportunity. A political rally on a massive, nationally televised scale. A press conference to the world to announce he had “won.”
He did not know that he would receive some delegate votes from the proportional states he’d lost, or that other candidates would receive delegate votes from the proportional states he had won. He didn’t know that some states gave their delegates the right to change their votes at the convention itself. And no matter how Paul tried to explain that the RNC had a set of national rules governing the process, he couldn’t seem to get Trump to understand that each state still had the flexibility to make their own rules and that in many cases it was the governors or other high-ranking political officials who chose the delegates and could therefore sway those votes as well.
He didn’t know any of this because he had never spoken to anyone at the RNC. At this stage, he didn’t have a relationship with the RNC, at all, and he told Paul more than once that he didn’t care to.
Hearing the truth from Paul at that meeting, Trump’s reaction wasn’t that he wanted to get a handle on this mistaken perception or learn how to do better moving forward. His reaction was that the whole primary system was “rigged.”
To Trump, the hundreds of years of precedent and protocols that had lent themselves to the creation of the primary process were a “problem” that he wanted “fixed.”
Paul returned from Florida that night and told me to plan to join him in New York on Monday, right after Easter. “The meeting went very well,” he said. He wasn’t able to make our full presentation at Mar-a-Lago, but that single meeting with Paul convinced Trump that he needed to understand how this “rigged” primary system worked.
“He wants us on his team,” Paul said. “Here we go.”
Early Monday morning, Paul and I flew separately to New York City and headed straight to Trump Tower. I had been inside the building a couple of times in the past, as a guest at political fundraisers for other candidates. But that only gave me access to the marble and gold-accented lobby area of Trump’s infamous black skyscraper. I’d never been upstairs, to either the residences or to the office space, and I had never met Trump, even in passing at one of those events. However, Paul had met Trump on a number of occasions over the years. And coincidentally enough, he had an apartment at Trump Tower, and other partners in his firm had even done some lobbying work for Trump back in the early 1990s. He gave me a few pointers on the way in.
“I’m one of the few people who call him Donald, but most people call him Mr. Trump,” he noted. “And he probably won’t give us a lot of time. The meeting will be short.”
We rode the elevator to the twenty-sixth floor, where a receptionist let us in through a set of glass doors. We entered the office space, where two more assistants sat at their desks and never got up as we walked right up to the open doorway to Trump’s personal office. He was on the phone with someone. His longtime assistant Rhona Graff called out from her office next door, “He’ll be with you in a minute!”
It was surprisingly informal, as was Trump’s office itself. From our standing point outside, I could see that the view over Fifth Avenue and Central Park was impressive, but the office was strewn with papers. There were so many framed photographs and awards, many on the floor, leaning against walls instead of hung up since the walls were already full. His desk was toward the back of the office, near the window overlooking Central Park, and when he got off the phone Trump yelled, “Paul! Come on in.”
Paul made a quick introduction. Trump’s campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, and his press director, Hope Hicks, were already in the room. Trump yelled to Rhona to bring him some papers he wanted us to see and then yelled to anyone listening outside, “Somebody bring me a Diet Coke!” All the yelling was just so New Yorkish. Only in New York do people yell for things. It’s not rude, or angry, it’s just a style of inter-office and even inter-family communication that is unlike anything that goes on in most other parts of the country.
Trump didn’t bother with any small talk. He jumped right into talking about the delegates as if we were already in the middle of a conversation.
“It’s a sham system! If you win a state, the delegates should be yours,” he said as I opened my notebook and pulled out our detailed presentation on how it all worked. Paul only got about two minutes into taking them through it when the meeting stopped for Trump to take a phone call. He picked it up on the speakerbox on his desk, which looked like something out of the 1970s, on a cord. Like the speakerbox in Charlie’s Angels, but with the speaker on top instead of on the side.
It was a business call.
I didn’t know much of anything about his business dealings at the time, other than recognizing some of the real estate he owns, including the hotels and golf courses that bear his name. I had watched a few episodes of The Apprentice too, but who takes a call in the middle of a high-level political meeting?
When the call was over, Paul continued the presentation for another few minutes. Trump quickly seemed disinterested in the background and jumped in with a few questions about what could be done about the delegates. Paul said we could find ways to protect the delegates Trump won. He had done this many times in the past, through many presidential contests. Plus, Paul could organize a strategy for the rest of the primaries to help ensure that he would not only win the number of delegates needed to secure the nomination but do everything in his power to get them committed—so there were no “political games” at the convention itself.
Paul assured him that even if he went into a contested convention, he could handle things there as well. Sometimes delegates do not follow through on their commitment to support the candidate that won, but Paul was determined to prevent it. Trump already knew that Paul was one of the few political consultants alive and working today who had actually been through a contested convention before, the last one this country had ever seen: with Gerald Ford in 1976.
We weren’t even a quarter of the way through the presentation yet, but that’s when Trump cut us off.
“Great,” he said. “Go make it happen.”
He wasn’t interested in hearing the rest of the details of our plan.
“Do it. Work with Corey, work it out,” he said. “You guys get what you need and make sure we win the delegates.”
The whole thing lasted less than fifteen minutes.
We said goodbye, and Corey Lewandowski took us down to the fifth-floor campaign headquarters. He told us on the way down that the space they were in formerly served as the production offices for The Apprentice, and as soon as we walked through the metal doors we realized the space was raw: concrete floors, open ceilings with exposed pipes and wires, no individual rooms, no real offices, no privacy. There were a couple of major areas marked out on the floor, one where campaign staff was sorting mail and correspondence, and another with plastic tables bearing taped signage on pieces of paper designating “Advance” or “Travel” or “Delegates.”
Corey took us to a barely walled-in “office” in the back, with a desk for Paul, and a table for me. It was maybe twelve by six feet. When Corey stepped out for a moment, Paul told me the office space was not going to work. There was no way to have any private conversations with anyone. He decided then and there to work primarily from his apartment upstairs, even though it was difficult to get to. There is only one crossover floor between the residential and office sides of Trump Tower, on the twenty-fourth floor. Which meant lots of tedious up-and-down elevator rides with a wait in the middle. But at least his apartment was nice and would provide a haven away from the chaotic environment of the day-to-day campaign operations, he said.
Which meant I would be Paul’s eyes and ears on the campaign floor, working from that makeshift headquarters while he dealt with high-level matters from upstairs.
I should mention that Paul joined the campaign as a volunteer. He was never placed on Trump’s payroll. Neither was I.
It struck me as odd that the headquarters had very few landlines. Everybody was using personal cell phones and computers. Where were the call centers and the phone banks? And over the course of the first day, the oddness continued. Paul and I spoke to the “delegates” team and realized even they had no idea how the national convention worked. They were largely clueless and had no real plan to navigate through the process. The number of delegates they thought they had locked up were nowhere near “locked up” at all. And in talking with Corey, we realized that it was more than Trump who had failed to do any outreach or communication with the RNC since the campaign began; the campaign itself had done no liaising at all with the RNC. They hadn’t connected to anyone on top, including RNC Chair Reince Priebus, or anyone below, either. Which meant they had little to no idea at all that the Republican Party establishment, as a whole, was backing Ted Cruz and eschewing Donald Trump, which would ultimately mean big trouble in the weeks and months ahead. If he wanted to win, and especially if he was serious about wanting to win the general election, he would need the RNC on his side.
Given the fact that Trump had started publicly bashing the RNC for its “rigged” system, it quickly settled in that we weren’t just starting from the ground level on these things. We were starting from a ditch.
Generally, this is not the way you want to start a campaign. But if anyone was up for the challenge, it was Paul. When Paul came on board, his official title was “convention manager” and I was introduced as the deputy convention manager. On March 29, a press statement was released to make the announcement. Immediately the response from the press was positive: “Trump finally hires an expert,” the talking heads said, referring to Paul as Trump’s “first true campaign consultant.” Paul was “seasoned,” an “expert” at what he did. He was going to bring “structure” to an otherwise disorganized campaign effort. The media called him “one of the best,” and Trump loved that. “Paul’s a killer,” he started saying, and he immediately began referring to Paul as “the greatest political consultant you could have on your team.”
Late that evening Paul returned to his apartment upstairs, and I continued to work through the night. At this point, my belief was this would all be temporary. We were only hired to manage the convention, which was set for July 18-21 in Cleveland, Ohio, and I knew there was a possibility that our work would end whenever the Trump campaign came to a close. And from what I was looking at, despite Trump’s wins so far and his rising poll numbers, a big part of me imagined that could come sooner rather than later.
I should point out here that initially I wasn’t a Trump supporter.
It’s not at all unusual for political operatives and staff members to not personally support the candidate with whom they wind up working. During primary season, when one candidate drops out, many of the staffers from that person’s campaign often go find work at competing candidates’ campaigns, and so forth. Everyone gets it. It’s normal. So it surprised me when a number of my friends and colleagues got upset when they learned that I was working for Trump. Never had I experienced a situation in which so many people were angry at me for working on a political campaign. I expected that the 2016 election was going to be intense. A level of divisiveness had long marked the nature of major elections in our country, and the passions on either side had grown more and more heated since the 1990s. But I was not prepared for the rabid emotional feelings people had about the candidates this time around.
Friends came right out and told me that Trump “didn’t stand a chance.” Those were my better friends. Others were more abrasive and told me I would “never work in Washington, D.C.,” or even in “politics” again, just because I was working for Trump. Some friends stopped talking to me altogether.
The reactions were unusually personal in a business that had become mostly impersonal.
Politics has become a business in which “the best people” are not willing to serve, or never get far enough to win. At the end of the day, we’re all left with one of two people to choose from, and sometimes we make a choice not because we want to, but because we feel compelled to.
Honestly, I didn’t agree with the way he bullied people, personally, on the national stage, and I didn’t like some of the hurtful rhetoric he delivered, but I was impressed that Trump had managed to get as far as he had, and I liked the idea of a political outsider bringing change. No other politician had ever accomplished so much so quickly, and he had done it with no advertising budget whatsoever.
Later on, we did the math based on airtime and figured that Trump received around $5 billion of unpaid network and cable coverage during the primaries alone. Five billion! That is an astonishing amount of free advertising for a political election. It was hard for anyone to compete with that.
The more time I spent with him the more I got to see the person behind the camera. Despite the wave of emotions he evokes with his policies and his tweets, one observation stood out among all others: he loves his country. And I saw this as the driving force for the reason he was running in this race.
Still, it was all I could do to muster my personal support for any political candidate at that point in my life and career. I was tired of politics.
Like a lot of Americans, I was discouraged by witnessing too many years of government inaction. I was sick and tired of watching politicians say one thing on the campaign trail only to do something different, or worse, do nothing at all once they were in office. They routinely made promises they didn’t keep, and in the end, the American people suffered for it.
For far too long I’d been telling myself, “This is my last foray into politics,” and this time, I meant it: after my work on the Trump campaign ended, it would be time for me to go do something else. I wasn’t sure what that something else would be, but I was convinced it was time to change careers.
I felt that if this didn’t work out, or if Trump dropped out of the race the next week, it wouldn’t matter much to me either way.
Even with all the ground he’d broken, and even with Paul’s help—knowing that Paul really was the best, a political strategist like no other—I was not sure he had a shot at winning. Not because of him, but because the system would not allow for it. The rules of the game were just too well established. And historically speaking, in order to become president, you had to check off a long list of boxes.
First of all, you had to have political experience: a record of climbing the political ladder to a mayorship or a governorship, or serving in the House or Senate at the very least. You had to have an established record on and understanding of the issues—all of the big issues, from the economy to social issues to foreign policy. You had to have an effective political fundraising operation in place because presidential elections cost a fortune. You had to have a ground game, with offices and operatives in place in every state, and nearly every significant region of every state. And you had to have the backing of at least some of the party elite: the people who hold the reins of power in the process.
Trump checked none of those political boxes. Not a single box. But it was worse than that: on our third day in the office, Trump made an off-the-cuff remark in an interview with MSNBC, saying “there needs to be some form of punishment for women who have abortions.”
How could someone who says things like this win? He was brash and aggressive, and some of the things he said were offensive to millions of people. But some of these statements were not offensive to millions of others. Despite the extreme nature of some of his statements, the fact that he spoke his mind was refreshing in politics, and it almost drove people to react in a way that showed them how they truly felt. He drew very clear lines, which made people decide if they were on one side or the other. And I could not believe that the establishment would ever get behind a guy who talked like this.
On the campaign trail, he’d already made divisive comments about immigrants, climate change, and healthcare. Not to mention the fact that he had a number of lingering allegations thrown at him about his treatment of women, and he’d been married three times. I kept thinking: How is any of this going to win over a Republican Party that once sold itself as the party of “family values”? How could Trump ever expect to win over Evangelicals and Conservatives in the Midwest, or the South, or anywhere else?
He’d even gone so far as to attack his Republican rivals in ways no candidate had ever attacked members of their own party. Ever. I remembered watching one of the first few Republican debates, where Ted Cruz, who was basically the front-runner among hardcore Conservatives, gave this long set of introductory remarks, talking about the issues and the serious changes he wanted to make, and when he was done, and it was Donald Trump’s turn to speak, Trump just turned to Cruz and called him “Lyin’ Ted!”
And it worked. Two words out of his mouth and he knocked Ted Cruz off his game. Poor Cruz couldn’t shake it. The nickname stuck, and Trump kept hammering with it at every debate and every campaign rally from that moment forward.
He had an uncanny ability to attach biting nicknames to just about every one of his Republican rivals, and he used that tactic again and again. (Remember “low-energy” Jeb Bush?) No one in politics had ever dared to do something like this, and it was incredibly effective on TV. Surprisingly, viewers loved it. They were sick of politics as usual and Trump added some reality-TV-style drama to the proceedings. But inside the Beltway? Republican elites, the people who really control the party, couldn’t stand Trump. Many made it clear, in public, early on, that they would never cast a vote for him, let alone throw their public support behind the man or encourage their constituents to vote for him. And that’s important: in the history of presidential politics, no candidate has ever won without the support of Senators and House members (and more) whose endorsements bring voters to the polls in their home states.
Even setting all of that aside, a lot of Republicans didn’t like him simply because Trump wasn’t a lifelong Republican. It was well known by this point that he had registered as an Independent, and even a Democrat, at various times in his life. Just a few years earlier he had donated to Hillary Clinton’s U.S. Senate campaign in his home state of New York. That kind of behavior and history wasn’t going to fly with the “true” Republicans.
Stepping foot into Trump Tower did nothing to convince me he could win, either. His campaign staff simply wasn’t experienced, starting at the top: Corey wasn’t schooled in presidential politics and he had never worked on a presidential race. The biggest campaign he’d ever run was a primary race for U.S. Senator Bob Smith in New Hampshire—and they’d lost. He was one of only a handful of salaried people on the entire campaign staff, which was made up of mostly college-aged hourly workers who had never worked on a political campaign in their lives. They hadn’t set up any state offices. They had no ground game. And the whole operation was unstructured and disorganized, right down to the most basic calendar items.
In the first few days, Paul and I realized that Trump hadn’t properly registered for upcoming primaries in some of the remaining states. Every state has a different process, and many require in-person signatures from a candidate or his designate, meaning someone from the campaign, if not the candidate himself, has to physically go to the state and register. It was now April, and neither Trump nor his staff had managed to do that, in numerous states, and we were right up against the deadlines in most of them.
If he had missed those registration deadlines, his name would have been left off the ballots in those states—and that alone could have prevented him from winning the Republican nomination.
Paul and I started to work on it immediately and get it all sorted out. At the level of presidential politics, it is essential that a campaign team understands the nuances and intricacies of campaigning. Experience matters.
By the end of our first two weeks, Paul and I were mostly up to speed on where things stood. So we turned our attention to putting Trump’s delegate house in order in preparation for the convention, which is what we were hired to do.
Then, on April 5, the Wisconsin primary happened.
Internally, everyone on Trump’s team had assured him that he was going to win, and win big—and they were wrong. He got destroyed.
It was the most dramatic loss Trump had faced to date in the primaries, losing to Ted Cruz by 13 percent.
That’s when Trump blew a gasket.
That night, he called Paul and told him he wanted him to get more involved in the overall state operations. Paul wasn’t sure yet what that would entail because there were only a few people working on it. All he knew was that Trump was angry. He didn’t want to face a surprise like that—or a loss like that—ever again.
Early the next morning Paul met with Trump at his residence. Trump was fuming over the headlines about losing Wisconsin. “They lied to me,” he said. “My own team told me I would win. They lied to me. Can you believe it?” Paul gave me the rundown the moment he walked out, and his message to Paul was: “My team has no idea what they are doing.” This was a pivotal moment, a fracture in the campaign, and Paul knew exactly how to fix it. In fact, he already had a plan mapped out.
As I boarded a plane for Iowa two days later for my first official campaign event, it all seemed like too much. Privately, Paul and I both had serious concerns about whether we could do what Trump needed us to do in such a short amount of time. If we couldn’t? Trump was bound to get crushed by his own party at the convention. And even if he somehow managed to survive the coming Republican backlash and rebellion, would Trump and his team have what it took to go up against the gigantic power of the Clinton machine and the organizational prowess of the DNC in the general election?
In those first few days, there was one recurring thought that kept rattling around my head: This is chaos.