The 2016 Iowa caucuses took place on February 1, nearly two months before Paul and I joined the Trump campaign, but they were still a thorn in Trump’s side. He’d lost to Ted Cruz, and both Trump and then-candidate Ben Carson accused the Cruz campaign of “stealing” the caucuses by deceiving caucus-goers on the ground—telling them that Carson had dropped out of the race the night before the caucuses, when he hadn’t, and other tactics that, if true, very well could have worked in this particularly unusual contest that kicks off every election season in earnest.
The media said Cruz won because he connected better with Iowa evangelicals and Conservatives. Personally, I would say that Trump’s pulling out of the Republican debate on Fox News two nights before the Iowa caucus might have had more to do with Cruz’s win than anything else. In politics, showing up is half the game. Which is why Paul dispatched me to go to Iowa in person as a representative for the Trump campaign at the Iowa Republican District Committee meetings on April 9. The committee meetings aren’t something most Americans are aware of because they’re mostly a formality. It’s when the state formally picks its delegates to send to the Republican National Convention and when statewide candidates are chosen in other races outside of the presidential election. But the event offered an early opportunity for me to get a feel for voter intensity—to see how much passion Trump supporters had for their candidate, and whether they were coming out for him and willing to stand up for him, even in a situation where he hadn’t initially won the caucuses earlier that year.
The meetings were set to unfold at four locations across the state, and I decided to check out the scene in Cedar Falls, where Senator Chuck Grassley was scheduled to speak as a cautious surrogate for Trump in front of an audience of hundreds of potential delegates at Northern Iowa University.
I arrived at the convention and was immediately taken by the scene, as hundreds of people milled about wearing shirts and buttons with candidates’ names on them, dressed in red, white, and blue hats, and carrying little flags. These people were passionate about their involvement. Passionate about this process. It was refreshing to see people who wanted to make a difference.
I met up with some Trump supporters who had a table in the lobby, where they were handing out Trump bumper stickers, and no sooner did I introduce myself than people started coming over to talk to me. “We love him!” they said. “I’m so glad he’s running.” Disabled veterans, even a few people who identified themselves as lifelong Democrats, said, “He’s real. He’s authentic. He speaks his mind.”
People said they wished he didn’t use profanity but said they forgave him because he was so fed up at the government—and so were they.
I sat in meetings and briefings, and I listened to potential delegates make their two-minute speeches from the small stage, and I was floored by the passion they showed. They spoke about farming and protecting the Constitution. Almost every speech had God in it. Many spoke about the America we were leaving for our children and grandchildren. One lady opened with, “Obama changed my life.” She then proceeded to attack just about every policy President Obama had enacted in the last eight years. She believed those policies hurt our country. These people had paid attention.
I went to lunch at a BBQ joint up the street and saw guys in Harley shirts talking about Trump, and how they couldn’t wait to vote for him. But there were whole families there, all eating together and smiling, and so many people nodded and smiled and said hello to me—the only guy dressed in a suit in the whole place.
I called around to our team members at the other three locations, and they all had similar experiences. They saw lots of Trump supporters, and the enthusiasm was strong. These Iowans believed that Trump could make a difference in their lives. Not that it made a big difference that day. Cruz won the majority of the delegates at the district committee meetings—eleven of the twelve that go to the national convention. So Cruz walked away with a small victory. And in Iowa, the rules for the national convention stated that those delegates had no choice but to vote just the same as the people of Iowa had voted—at least for the first round of voting. If there was a second round? Anything goes. And the support we saw on the ground that day could sure come in handy if anyone tried to push Trump out at the national convention.
I didn’t get back to the hotel until after 9:00 p.m., and I still had work to do. I’d been put in charge of keeping the master schedule for Trump’s activities, and I was firming up plans for a series of campaign rallies in the week ahead. After getting Trump’s personal schedule from Rhona, it was my task to make sure everything was set. Paul tried to get Trump to set a monthly calendar, or more, but he wouldn’t do it. The furthest out we could schedule anything was a week, and most of the time he preferred not to book events more than forty-eight hours in advance. Even big events. Which meant we were always scrambling, always adjusting, always dealing with issues at the very last minute.
I barely blinked and I was back in New York boarding the private jumbo jet, aptly nicknamed Trump Force One, to fly with him to my first Trump campaign rally, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It was the first of a series of near-daily rallies that wouldn’t stop for the whole month of April and beyond. And what I learned in an instant, the moment we touched down, was that the “voter intensity” I’d glimpsed in Iowa, even the Trump support I’d seen born out on TV and in primary results so far, barely scratched the surface of a volcano of support that was building under the surface.
These weren’t campaign rallies. They were rock concerts. It was like nothing I’d ever seen before. I’d attended political rallies for George W. Bush at the height of his popularity, and Mitt Romney at his peak in the past, and they were nothing like this. People had lined up for six hours just waiting to see him. There were overflow areas in the arenas, and even the overflow areas were packed. We’re talking five thousand people, growing to ten thousand people as the campaign went on, and even upwards toward thirty thousand by the time we were finished.
Trump had already fallen into a pattern when it came to rallies, and Paul and I worked to solidify the pattern into a solid, predictable routine—one of the few predictable, routine things we would encounter during the entire campaign.
First of all, Trump largely refused to stay in hotels. That meant we flew back to New York City after every rally, no matter where it was, so he could sleep in Trump Tower.
His rallies were almost always held in the afternoons. And the routine included a pretty basic format: He’d fly in, motorcade to the rally site, and wait in a holding room, signing a few photos or other memorabilia for certain dignitaries or donors or friends of the organizers—but not many, and not in person with them. While he waited, a surrogate would fire up the crowd. It might be General Michael Flynn talking about Trump’s tough stance on eliminating ISIS, or Rudy Giuliani, or Newt Gingrich, or sometimes early on in the campaign his speechwriter Stephen Miller would take on the task. Whoever it was, their one task was to talk red meat issues and get the crowd on their feet—so Trump walked out to a standing ovation.
At some rallies during the campaign, I was tasked with walking out ahead of him, making sure the microphone was adjusted to the correct height and everything was ready to go. The blue backdrop was in place—the exact Pantone shade of blue that Trump picked out and insisted upon—with a series of American flags in front of it. That was it. No video screens or fancy backdrops. Just blue cloth and flags. The microphone was a single mic, not the traditional double-gooseneck mics you see at most political speeches. That was also at Trump’s insistence. The lighting was just so. The media was the correct distance from the stage. He oversaw every bit of minutia when it came to the optics of the rallies, and the only thing that really ticked him off was that CNN and other “mainstream” television networks refused to ever turn the cameras around and show the full size of the crowd. Trump was convinced it was because his rallies dwarfed the turnout at Hillary Clinton’s rallies, and the mainstream media was on her side. He called them out on it. Publicly. Which made the crowds go wild and get angry at the media too.
He called out the RNC as well, telling these gathered crowds that the Republican primary system was “rigged,” and how together they were going to change things. His message was, “The Republican Party has done nothing for you, and nothing for me. We’re going to win big, we’re going to change Republicans, we’re going to change Washington, we’re going to change the entire system!” And the crowds ate it up. They were as fed up with the political process as I was, with the added fire of feeling like they’d been cut out of the whole process for far too long. The message even resonated with Democrats, and especially Independents, who saw Bernie Sanders getting forced out of the process on the DNC side of things, while the media refused to show the size of his crowds, either. So the people were angry, on all sides.
Later on in the campaign, a Reuters/Ipsos poll showed more than half of Americans believed the primary process was “rigged.” It didn’t hurt that Bernie Sanders picked up the same mantra on the Dem side. But it was one example of how Trump’s repeated messaging and simple “branding” of subjects could almost single-handedly sway beliefs, nationwide.
So many Americans felt that no one was speaking to them, or to their issues. And now? Here was Trump. Talking directly to them while bashing the media, crushing the politicians, and verbally destroying anybody else who’d been standing between them and the way they ought to be treated in the America they loved.
I was stunned to witness the visceral anger on the faces of the people in these crowds. They were angry at politicians who said they were going to do things but never did them, and the wasteful spending in Washington, and how useless Congress had become—this mostly geriatric group of lifetime politicians who, collectively, had even lower approval ratings than the president. (Congress’s approval rating under Paul Ryan hovered at a dismal 13 percent.) That anger gave them a level of voter intensity I had never witnessed in my political life. An intensity that I started to believe would push them to get to the polls and vote, whether or not they had ever voted in an election in their lives.
The proof? As part of the admission process to every rally, our campaign collected voter data—names, email addresses, and cell phone numbers—and by the end of May, our campaign had accumulated a list of almost four million potential voters that the RNC didn’t have on their rolls. Four million voters, many of whom had never voted, some of whom hadn’t voted in years, many of whom were registered Independents, and some of whom were Democrats ready to flip to the other side specifically because of what they saw in and heard from Donald Trump.
Over the course of the campaign, the RNC begged us for that list. They swore that by sharing the list, they could help us. But Trump and our campaign refused. He wasn’t about to betray his potential voters like that. Not when he was at war with the system itself, and those voters were his soldiers.
The way these rallies unfolded threw the Democrats for a loop as well. Even the seasoned Clinton team didn’t know how to counter the effects of these rallies, or the media coverage of these rallies, because they’d never seen anything like them. They also couldn’t predict what was going to happen, because we planned these events so last minute, all the time. They couldn’t get ahead of us.
At the first few rallies, I assumed people might get tired of listening to Trump after two hours. I was wrong. I thought, just as any political operative might think, that flying in and out of rally locations across the country on a daily basis would be far too much for any candidate to handle. He might get exhausted. But that never happened, either. In the end, the rallies were what gave Trump his energy. It was the only real factor in the campaign that I ever got the sense was something he wanted to do, and actually loved to do. He soaked up the energy and adulation.
For all of the organization and routine that went into the staging of the rallies, once Trump was on stage, we never knew if he would stay up there for thirty minutes or three hours. And we also had no idea what he was going to say. Ever. Sure there was a boilerplate speech and some talking points. He knew it. He’d studied it. But I quickly learned that he prepared most of his speeches on the plane on the way to whatever rally he was going to, and he finished them up in the car on the way from the airport to the venue. He gathered his talking points from watching TV on the plane too, simply by watching whatever they were talking about on the news, not only on Fox News (his go-to information source, for sure) but on CNN and MSNBC as well. As much as he said he didn’t watch those networks, he actually watched them all the time. He would flip between them. He wanted to know what they were all talking about. But Fox was the one he focused on for important issues.
When we tried to give him specific talking points for the regions where his rallies were held, it didn’t go so well. I quickly learned that Trump wouldn’t focus on any written document that was more than a half page in length. He preferred to see no written documents at all. He wanted to talk, engage, ask people their opinions. This is the way he absorbed information. And once he felt he had a message to deliver, he got up on stage or in front of a camera and delivered it. And from that point forward, in his mind, whatever he said was fact. Even if he wasn’t correct.
It was clear that he could do these rallies endlessly.
Paul and I tried setting him up with a few small but important meetings with potential donors and some members of an evangelical group at Trump Tower in our first couple of weeks, and in those small group settings we could physically see him get cooped up, turned off, tired, anxious, and ready to walk out after just a few minutes. But at the rallies? He was himself. No matter what spin the media put on it, no matter how much juggling we had to do to try to explain something after he said it, it was worth it. Once we saw the reaction from the crowd, we knew it was a net positive.
Pretty soon, we stopped fighting him on it because there wasn’t any point.
His way of talking was winning.
By April 10, according to all of the major polls and all of the primary results so far, Trump had become the clear front-runner for the Republican nomination.
Paul was a Republican Party guy. He believed strongly that Trump would absolutely need that party to be on his side in order to win the general election, and he took it upon himself to act as a bridge between them. Paul was thinking that far in advance. This wasn’t just about winning over the people at the rallies or in the primaries. It wasn’t just about securing delegates at the national convention. It was about beating Hillary Clinton.
Behind the scenes, Paul was making plans to build that bridge.
Trump however still had no interest in the party establishment. The people he respected were law enforcement, veterans, and first responders. And at the rallies, that meant he would only leave after he shook the hands of law enforcement and military personnel who had come out to protect him that day.
We could hardly ever get him to shake a governor’s hand, or the hand of a Republican donor. But police officers? Veterans? He would stop and shake the hand of every law enforcement officer and veteran he encountered from the time he left the podium to the time he boarded the plane. Whether it was in the hallway of the arena, or in the motorcade, or at the airport, he talked to nearly every one of them.
At one of our rallies in Florida, more than a hundred motorcycle cops showed up to lead Trump from the airport to the arena. These weren’t mandated motorcades. These officers were volunteering their time to show up off duty but in uniform to participate. And Trump shook their hands and spoke to them. All of them. There were times when the campaign would lose him to the law enforcement handshaking for an hour, in the middle of an incredibly busy schedule. It drove me nuts at first, but it was the way it was going to work. It was the way he wanted it to work. And after a while, it became clear to me that we weren’t really “losing” anything.
This was Trump talking directly to the people. His people. His audience. And that audience was growing in the most grassroots way possible—person to person. It was different than any other “grassroots” campaign in history, of course. But it really was sort of grassroots and personal in its own uniquely Trumpian way.
As was well known by this point, Trump ran his own Twitter account too, where he spoke directly to his then-thirty-five million followers. (He has eighty million now.) The power of that is unfathomable—and completely unprecedented.
There has never been a politician whose social media wasn’t controlled by his or her campaign staff. In other campaigns, anything a candidate wants to be posted is first cleared by others in his or her organization. Most politicians don’t want anything to do with social media. It’s too overwhelming, too risky, too easy to make a mistake.
With Trump? If we wanted something posted on his Twitter account, we had to clear it with him. And unless he asked for input, nothing he ever posted was vetted, proofread, or cleared by anyone on his team.
One of the first things anybody who joined the campaign (including Paul and me) wanted to do was to try to control what he put on Twitter, because it mattered. And every one of us failed. Trump saw it as the one part of the campaign where, as he said, “I don’t need anybody.” He loved that he could communicate directly to his followers and say whatever he wanted to say, however he wanted to say it. He insisted on no interference from anybody.
To protect the candidate and the campaign, Social Media Director Dan Scavino put a system in place to receive a copy of his tweets and an alert as soon as one was sent so we would know instantly what Trump had said. But it only helped us marginally since even in the space of a few seconds Trump’s tweets went global, leaving us little time to react, much less change the message. On multiple occasions, this led to 2:00 a.m. “Oh *?&@! We’ve got a problem” calls from Dan.
Trump would occasionally have other people write his tweets. He would dictate them to Hope or me or whoever was in earshot. But then he absolutely reviewed them before he posted them himself. And if you suspect that you can tell which ones he writes vs. which ones somebody else has written, you’re correct. It’s easy to tell. But what moved the needle, both on Twitter and in person, was when he challenged people, when he took them on, when he said something directly from his voice.
Like the day in April when he stood at a press conference at Trump Tower and said, “Frankly, if Hillary Clinton were a man, I don’t think she’d get 5 percent of the vote. The only thing she’s got going is the women’s card. And the beautiful thing is, women don’t like her.”
On a subject most candidates would readily avoid, he opened up the “woman card” like he was opening up a letter bomb. That brought all kinds of hateful comments from the Left, and from women’s groups, and from a slew of celebrities, including Rosie O’Donnell—Trump’s old nemesis, whom he sparred with all over the media in the mid-2000s, calling her “my nice, fat little Rosie” in an article on People.com, and threatening to sue her over some comments she made about him and his businesses on the talk show The View. Trump loved the controversy. He ate it up. It kept people talking about him for weeks on end back then, and it keeps people talking about him for weeks on end now. Same strategy, same players, only raised into this new arena where his political opponents never seemed to know what to do in response.
His audiences devoured it. In the history of presidents and candidates, almost everything has been scripted. The rule, especially in campaigns, is always: the message drives the candidate.
Trump was the first person in three decades, maybe longer, that actually drove the message himself. Even Reagan was scripted, to a large extent, when compared with Trump. They all are.
Being careful and strategic, thinking about timing, following a plan, staying on message—all the sorts of things that most people cared about in terms of running for president, Trump ignored. He didn’t care about those things at all. Reagan, Obama, Bush, Clinton—any candidate in the past spent all sorts of time learning about foreign policy and other issues; he didn’t do any of that. Connecting to the people was what was going to get him the win.
He played the traditional media game better than any of them too.
In a traditional campaign, the campaign manager and communications director would do everything in their power to keep 90 percent of the press at bay, at all times, while putting the candidate directly in touch with the 10 percent of the press that they considered friendly. With Trump, it was the polar opposite approach.
From the day I came aboard, I noticed that Trump almost never said no to reporters’ requests. He had reporters calling him directly. He had reporters calling Rhona, who would shout over to him to let him know, and he’d shout back, “Put him through!”
Some reporters would call his longtime security guard, Keith Schiller, and thankfully he’d run most of those requests by us before bringing them to Trump—at least when they had something to do with the campaign. But most would just go ahead and call his political press coordinator Hope Hicks because Hope would bring him all of the requests she received.
And the way Trump handled the press was remarkable to watch. He famously called out reporters by name, lashing out at them when they wrote things he didn’t like. And yet, even the press that Trump lashed out at, if they called back for an interview on another story the next week, Trump would pick up the phone and speak with them directly. He played the media game on a personal level unlike anything I’d ever seen.
Honestly, after going to Iowa, after attending his rallies, after watching the way the press breathlessly covered his every move and reported his every word, and every tweet, I started to question my assumptions about what winning the Republican nomination might take—and whether, at this juncture in our nation’s political history, this completely unorthodox, chaotic approach to running a campaign might in fact be a strength instead of the weakness I’d assumed it was in the beginning.
After a couple of weeks in the Trump universe, and especially after witnessing the enthusiasm of his crowds up close, I started to fully believe that the answer to whether Trump could pull this off was a resounding “Yes.”