Trump vs. the Republican Establishment
While Trump was embracing his rallies, Paul was working behind the scenes to secure delegates—a task that often involved meeting delegates and key Republicans to convince them to support Trump based on a range of issues. And as part of that effort, he asked me to put together a PowerPoint presentation on the subject of “Why Donald Trump Can Win.” He specifically planned to make that presentation to the annual meeting of the RNC, in Florida, in late April.
Paul knew lots of people at the RNC. They had concerns. They flat out said they could never support Trump.
Paul had encountered this kind of resistance before, in countries around the world. He knew what to do. He quickly put a long-term strategy together—one which, if Donald Trump followed his lead, could get the Republican establishment on board, and in his corner.
In the PowerPoint, we showed how Trump was tackling long-ignored issues on the economy, as a business leader who had gone through bankruptcy and faced the sort of hard decision-making that Obama and the Clintons and even the Bushes had never encountered. We showed how he was self-financing his campaign, and not taking money from special interests, and paying attention to budgets, noting that Trump always hand-signed all the paychecks for the people on his staff. I witnessed him doing this in his office while we were having one of our earliest campaign meetings. Signing every check, one by one.
Paul showed how Trump talked aggressively when it came to immigration in public, but stated that his private stance was more pragmatic: He had no problem with legal entry, with people earning their citizenship and staying, but he felt that America had a set of laws, and those laws needed to be obeyed. We left out the fact that while illegal immigration was one of Trump’s signature issues, something he was vowing to eradicate, he didn’t have a major plan to do so other than building the wall, and he actually had little idea of the bureaucracy of what building such a wall would entail. Instead, we showed them how we ran some quick polls in Arizona, Texas, and New Mexico and found that even people who were offended by the way Trump spoke about the issue were very much supportive of Trump’s stance when we put it in context of “What if illegal immigration results in increased healthcare costs for you and your family?” or “What if illegal immigration costs you a job, because illegal immigrants are being paid under the table?”
We showed poll numbers that indicated just how strongly his anti-Obamacare healthcare platform was resonating with voters, despite their misgivings about possibly losing certain positive parameters of the Obamacare legislation, like putting an end to insurance companies denying coverage for those with preexisting conditions.
The overall point of Paul’s presentation was to show that while Trump was all bluster on stage and on screen, his message was resonating with voters and winning him votes—and that after the convention, Trump would “pivot.”
This is what great candidates often do. They go Far Right or Far Left in the primaries, and once they get the nomination, they pivot on certain issues to appeal to a wider swath of voters.
There was just one problem with that: Paul hadn’t yet spoken to Trump about this “pivot” plan at all.
The RNC as a whole was receptive to Paul’s presentation. Paul came back feeling great. He’d made inroads. He was building the much-needed bridge with the party.
But no sooner did Paul brief Trump on how well the meeting went than Trump turned on him. “I hate the word ‘pivot,’” Trump said. He went on and on about how he didn’t believe in pivoting, and it was nothing but a political screw word. He hated the whole idea that politicians would “say something and not mean it.” He associated the word “pivot” with the worst of what politics was all about and wanted nothing to do with it. He wasn’t going to soften his stance or rhetoric on immigration. He wasn’t going to stop attacking Obamacare. He wasn’t going to change. And most importantly, he said to Paul, “Don’t ever speak for me. Nobody speaks for me but me.”
It was the first chink in Paul’s armor.
Paul is a man who single-handedly led Ukraine’s Viktor Yanukovych from a 13 percent approval rating in 2005 to winning him the presidency in 2010, against all odds, against all sorts of internal opposition, by strategizing just the way he was strategizing now for Donald Trump. The fact that Trump was already rejecting a part of Paul’s long-term strategy was a problem. At the time, we thought it was more of a problem for Trump than for us, but it was a problem, nonetheless.
It became clear in that one moment that Paul wasn’t going to have constant and direct input into Trump’s messaging. That was something new to him
Paul understood that Trump was creating his own messaging and understood how well it had worked for him so far. But what about going forward? Paul was concerned about the topics Trump hadn’t thought about, that he would surely need to address over the course of the campaign—including foreign policy.
The only foreign policy issues he had addressed were destroying ISIS, improving America’s “lousy” deals with China (using tariffs), and the truly obscure issue of taking money back from the UN and NATO—an issue no one was talking about or cared about before Trump started obsessively bringing it up at nearly every campaign rally.
He was right: the U.S. was piling more money than other countries into those organizations, and other countries weren’t ponying up their fair share. But it was nothing anyone was focused on. Yet, the more he talked about it, the more it started showing up in polls as an issue Americans wanted to see fixed; just another example of the federal government wasting our precious tax dollars. Once again, Trump turned something into an important issue, single-handedly, just by talking about it again and again.
As long as the cameras were pointed at him, he controlled the narrative.
But how would he ever manage to stand up to former senator and secretary of state Hillary Clinton in a presidential debate in the fall when he had no handle on any other foreign policy issues at all? Paul was right to worry about that, and he was thinking that far ahead.
Paul needed help.
He needed to understand how to get Donald Trump’s ear when it truly mattered, and get him to pay attention to things he might not want to pay attention to. Otherwise, Paul thought, this campaign was going to fail.
He’d learned the hard way that reason didn’t matter, experience didn’t matter, and even bringing Trump positive news didn’t matter if it was something Trump didn’t care about—and he did not care about making friends at the RNC.
The only people who seemed capable of getting his attention and influencing his decision-making process better than any of us were his closest allies, his most-trusted sources: his family. But there was one small issue. Ivanka, Don Jr., and Eric—who all worked right there on the twenty-fifth floor of Trump Tower, one floor beneath their father—had told us they weren’t really interested in being involved in the campaign at that moment. In fairness, they were involved in their businesses and had young families of their own.
Even before he met with the RNC in Florida, Paul had made up his mind that it was time to get them involved. He asked them to come together for weekly meetings on Monday mornings, to discuss issues and share some insight into their own thoughts on their dad’s campaign.
By the time Trump became the clear front-runner on April 10, setting those meetings became easy to do. In fact, Ivanka’s husband, Jared Kushner, made his presence known as well. He was still working out of his family skyscraper at 666 Sixth Avenue and never wanted to take a campaign email address—but he wanted to be a part of this. He wanted to come to those meetings, and he started joining us on Trump’s plane when we went to rallies.
The first time we met on the plane, Trump said, “That’s Jared. That’s my son-in-law. I could’ve had Tom Brady as my son-in-law, but I got Jared.”
Jared had clearly heard that joke about a thousand times, but Trump never got tired of telling it.
Jared was a shrewd businessman. But the fact that he ran a real estate empire, and the fact that he owned the iconic New York Observer newspaper on Long Island, didn’t preclude him from openly admitting that he knew little about running a political campaign. Unlike some of the other players in the Trump universe, though, Jared spent hours doing research, listening to experts, taking other people’s opinions, and piecing it all together. He was a quick study. Actually, I give Jared and Trump’s kids a lot of credit, because they all admitted they didn’t know what they didn’t know. Most people in politics don’t do that. Politicians usually try to say they know more than they know.
Paul got along with Jared well until his departure, and Jared liked strategy, so he respected Paul and his approach to the early stages of the campaign. They formed a good bond early on. Paul saw the value of Jared becoming more and more involved, even though he wasn’t viewed as a “true” Republican and didn’t typically travel in those circles.
However, in one early strategy meeting, Jared made his alignment with Trump perfectly clear: “We need to get away from the party and go to the people,” he said to Paul and me. “Screw the party. Let’s keep going directly to the people.”
And later in the month, when Trump was confronted with some negative polling data during another meeting that Jared attended, Jared knew just what to do. Trump was angry. He started lashing out: “The polls are bogus. They’re rigged. More Dems are interviewed than Republicans so of course they’re not going to show in my favor.”
“Political consultants are worthless,” he continued. “Can somebody please tell me why I need all these political consultants? I think I will fire them all.”
We were sitting right there!
“Donald,” Jared said, glancing at Ivanka, Don Jr., and Eric, “Four of us you can’t fire.”
Paul and I held back our shock at Jared’s response. But it was clear that Jared and Ivanka were very good at knowing how Trump operated, and there was an absolute trust with family regardless. That was a strength we wanted to tap into, and which we both also recognized might be his Achilles’ heel if any of them were to make bad decisions down the road. But in this case, Jared knew exactly what to do and how to do it.
Instead of continuing to erupt, Trump said, “Yeah, yeah. These polls are useless,” and we moved on.
That one disarming, familial comment made Trump nod his head and move on from what might have resulted in the rash firing of me, or Paul, or our new political pollster, Tony Fabrizio. Maybe all of us.
On a side note, Paul suggested bringing Tony Fabrizio in. He’s a top-notch pollster, one of the best in the business, and Paul used him for polling projects around the world, but when Paul first brought up his name, Trump went apoplectic. He went to unusual lengths to describe how much he hated pollsters, and especially Fabrizio, he said. He didn’t want anything to do with the guy. I was surprised he even knew who he was, and I backed off until I learned why Trump was opposed to him joining the team: back in 2013, when Trump was flirting with the idea of running for governor of New York against Andrew Cuomo, Trump called Fabrizio—and Fabrizio never called him back.
Three years later, Trump was still steamed by one unreturned phone call.
That was a lesson I tucked away for later: When he takes something personally, Trump never forgets.
He does forgive, though. When we pressed upon him that Tony really was the best guy for the job, Trump relented. And clearly he’s been okay with that decision. Fabrizio is still working for Trump as of the writing of this book.
What Fabrizio’s polling showed us was exactly why Trump was winning.
Trump’s opponents kept assuming that he could “never” win because he didn’t act like a president, or speak like a president.
They completely missed the reality of what was happening: candidate Trump was winning specifically because he didn’t act like a president, and because he didn’t speak like past presidents always had. According to our polling data, the fact that he said what he wanted to say, no matter how outrageous it might seem, made him “authentic” in the eyes of voters. And in 2016, authenticity mattered.
One of Trump’s favorite songs to play at his rallies (and which he personally selected for his inauguration) was Paul Anka’s “My Way,” a song popularized and frequently sung by Frank Sinatra.
It was the perfect choice for Trump because it pretty much summed up the theme of his entire campaign, and maybe his entire style of leadership.
“My Way.”
Where most political candidates in the history of politics have adapted to the way things are supposed to be done, adapted to the expected norms and protocols of the systems that were already in place, adapted to the expertise of their campaign managers and the parade of top-notch political advisors and experts at their fingertips, in Trump’s case, none of that applied. Within the first few weeks of our employment, it became very clear to Paul and me that we were never going to get Donald Trump to adapt to us, because Donald Trump doesn’t adapt to, or for, anyone.
Which meant that we would have no choice but to learn to adapt to him.
I can understand why an outsider looking at the chaos that kept unfolding around Trump during the month of April might’ve thought, “There’s no way this guy’s going to make it.”
Republican candidates have always struggled with the archaic party process, just as Dems do with the DNC party procedures, but there has always been a belief that everybody in the race will eventually play nice and do what politicians do: smile for the cameras and do their backstabbing behind closed doors. With Trump, his every gripe was thrown right out in the open, shared with the people at rallies and on TV, and it left the Republican Party reeling. They didn’t know how to deal with him, how to quantify him, how to make sense of whether or not he really meant what he said when he attacked his own political party.
Trump’s way of handling things so publicly meant he wasn’t just fighting against his fellow candidates; he was fighting battles on all fronts. He was battling the party, Ted Cruz, and John Kasich, as well as the media, and the system, and the Democrats, including both Hillary and Bernie at this point—and he was doing it all at once.
He was also battling his own personal history.
While no one could attack him on policy issues, since he wasn’t a politician and therefore had no record, his biggest vulnerability was on the personal front. And after he raised the “woman card” in late April, we started getting calls from reporters who were fielding reports of Trump’s alleged history of harassment of women.
We kept track of them and brought every allegation to Trump directly, and we hoped—as any campaign would—that none of the alleged claims or stories would rise to a level of seriousness that would derail the campaign. By the time the campaign ended, we would tally a total of forty-five women in Trump’s past who claimed he’d crossed a line. He denied all of their allegations, and we took him at his word. These types of personal attacks, which have been a part of politics for two centuries, are often untrue, and so in the political arena they are viewed with skepticism until there is verifiable proof, unless of course a candidate confesses. In this case, neither of those things happened. In order to do our jobs, we simply had to set it aside, and move forward.
Around all the chaos, Paul was doing his best to look ahead and strategize for the long-term. He was already pursuing the idea of who might serve as a strong running mate to Trump should he receive the Republican nomination, and one of the earliest names he floated was the one he truly thought would do Trump the most good: Indiana Governor Mike Pence.
Pence was a strong Conservative from the Midwest, a man who could help stabilize the bridge Paul was trying to build between Trump and the rest of the Republican Party. Plus, Paul believed a boost in the Midwest was exactly what Trump would need to secure key parts of the Republican base and push him over the top in terms of electoral votes come November.
Trump didn’t have much of an opinion about Pence at first. He didn’t know Pence. He didn’t really know many politicians. In April he was still so caught up in the primary fight that he didn’t pay attention to anything Paul tried to share with him about Pence, either, until he saw the news on TV one day that Pence was 10 percentage points behind in his polls for reelection for governor.
“Why would I want a guy like that to be my VP?” Trump asked out loud on his plane, as we flew to yet another rally. “He’s losing!”
Paul had his work cut out for him.
So did the rest of us.
On April 16, as we were heading to Pennsylvania for a rally, Trump was rifling through a cardboard box of papers he carried on the plane every trip. For a man that could have had any briefcase he wanted, he carried all of his important papers in a simple beaten-up box. He caught a segment on Fox News about Hillary Clinton and her “lack of character.” I do not know if he came up with it on the spot or if he had been mulling it over for a few days, but at a rally that afternoon, he rattled off a brand-new nickname for his presumptive Democrat rival in the upcoming general election: “Crooked Hillary.”
He said it once, and the crowd cheered wildly. He started using it in tweets—more than a dozen in the course of the next week. The nickname could have applied to any number of scandals Clinton had been involved in, going back years, including Benghazi. But Trump attached it to the latest investigation into a private server Hillary Clinton used for State Department business. It was tied to an investigation that began way back in 2014 and which was still hyped on a daily basis on Fox News—because Hillary had failed to turn over somewhere between thirty-one thousand and thirty-three thousand supposedly “personal” emails to investigators, and as time went on, it had become clear that those emails were not just held back. They’d been erased. Wiped clean. The emails were scrubbed from her server using “BleachBit” and even the FBI’s forensic computer experts were unable to dig them up.
To call his opponent “crooked” was seen as crossing an unspoken line, of Trump hitting below the belt in presidential politics. The media and plenty of his fellow Republicans hit Trump hard over that nickname. And yet, none of this controversy slowed him down. In fact, the more controversy and chaos he created, the more the press kept saying his name on TV, every minute of every day. And every bit of that coverage and discussion, whether for or against him, helped to amplify the enthusiasm of his supporters.
On April 26, Trump swept the Acela primaries—nicknamed “Acela” because they cover multiple states in the Northeast that are accessed by the Amtrak train of the same name—winning five out of five states, and essentially clinching the Republican nomination. There was no path for Ted Cruz to reach the 1,237 delegates he needed going forward. But that still wasn’t enough to force Ted Cruz to drop out of the race. If Cruz won Indiana on May 3, he could perhaps gain enough delegates to take Trump into a contested convention in July. Cruz vowed to fight on, even though he was hanging on by a thread. So did Ohio Governor Kasich—not because he had a shot at the nomination, since he ran a distant third in all of those contests, but maybe out of a personal vendetta, or just to be a thorn in Trump’s side.
Part of Trump’s victory that day was specifically attributable to Paul’s strategic approach and planning. In Pennsylvania in particular, Paul worked to have ballot cards printed with the Trump campaign logo and banner, listing the names of delegates we knew supported Trump. Our team handed those cards out to voters going into the polling stations. In a state in which the voters actually choose the specific names of the delegates to send to the convention, Paul arranged for the delegates themselves to be hand-selected by our campaign—a list of solid Trump supporters who would be listed first on our ballot cards. This meant that those delegates were more likely to get chosen by voters at the voting locations, simply because they were identified Trump supporters.
And it worked brilliantly.
In a complex primary system, it’s this sort of attention to small details that can help a candidate win big. And without a longtime expert like Paul in the mix, Trump likely would not have swept that day. If even a few of the chosen Pennsylvania delegates had gone the other way and pledged their support to Cruz or Kasich, it would have made it that much harder for Trump to secure the nomination, and it wouldn’t have provided any security in a second round of delegate voting should Trump go into a contested national convention come July.
For all intents and purposes, Trump became the presumptive nominee on that day. But there was too much risk in announcing such a thing until his opponents dropped out of the race. Jumping the gun could have persuaded voters in upcoming states to vote against him, just to have their voices heard, and that would have all but ensured that he would face a contested convention. Trump didn’t come out and announce his victory quite yet. He listened to Paul and Jared and understood that there was just too much at stake.
At the same time, during the lead-up to the Acela primary, Paul and I worked with Jared behind the scenes to arrange for Trump to make his first major speech in Washington. Not a speech to the public, but to senators, House members, and select invitees from various corners of the Republican Party.
Just like Paul’s April trip to the RNC gathering in Florida, this trip was for one purpose: to prove to doubters inside the Beltway that Trump not only had what it took to win in November, but that he had what it took to lead the party, and to lead this country, as president of the United States.
We debated extensively over which policy area to focus on in this speech, and we all agreed that the biggest missing piece so far in Trump’s campaign platform was foreign policy. Which got us thinking: If he could deliver a speech on foreign policy that dealt with a long list of serious issues beyond his three tried-and-true topics—ISIS, the budgets for the UN and NATO, and his desire to go after China on trade—it would go a long way toward building a bridge with the Washington elites who, for the most part, were still decidedly anti-Trump.
Had it not been for Jared’s influence, I’m pretty sure Trump would have treated this speech like any other: he’d have gone in and winged it without much preparation after reading a half page of notes on the subject at hand. But Jared and Ivanka impressed upon Trump how important this was, how serious it had to be, how different this audience was than an audience full of his die-hard supporters. He also insisted that Trump should use a teleprompter as a way to make sure his message was clear, concise, and impressive to the people in the room, most of whom were experts on foreign policy themselves.
To our surprise, Trump listened—and agreed.
As for the content of Trump’s first foreign policy speech, Trump largely left that to the campaign in the initial stages. The speech fell first to Trump’s policy director and speechwriter, Stephen Miller, along with Jared, Paul, and me. It was an important speech, and we knew it would be used to define Trump moving forward in the campaign.
I always called Stephen “The Silent Assassin.” He was easily the most surgical guy in the group, someone who stayed in his lane and knew that his most important audience was Trump himself. Jared liked him because he was a good writer, and Trump liked him because he thought overall Stephen captured his voice accurately and authentically. And while Stephen was a super ideological guy, he rarely talked publicly about his policy ideas. Instead, he would slip ideas into Trump’s speeches now and then, especially about his hardline stance on immigration, which Trump would wind up following very closely because he felt the same way.
It wasn’t what typically happened in a presidential campaign. In most campaigns, a foreign policy advisory team of a dozen or more experts in the field would assemble to discuss every stance, every speech, every move a candidate made. Corey Lewandowski had pulled together a haphazard advisory team for Trump early on, of which Jeff Sessions was by far the most seasoned expert on the panel, but Trump never considered them serious players. Paul would work to pull together a true foreign policy advisory panel later on—but for now, we were pretty much it.
We specifically arranged the event so there would be no Q&A after he made the speech. Our fear was there might be a moment of someone asking him, “What’s the name of the president of such-and-such country?” A question that, if he blundered it, could turn into a major disaster, which history has shown has happened to many a previous presidential candidate.
Overall the speech was well balanced, talking about how he would deal with Vladimir Putin in Russia, and Kim Jong Un in North Korea, and some thoughts on the Middle East, and more—but the only parts that Trump really cared about were what he said on China and ISIS. That’s where his focus had been, and that’s what he wanted to focus on here.
In the days before the speech, the stakes were high, and the expectations were low. Several reporters told me they were certain that Trump was going to bungle this so badly that it would knock him right out of the race.
But something big happened on the day of the Acela primaries: as exit polls were released and it became clear that Trump was going to sweep all five states and gather enough delegates to push him over the top, we suddenly received RSVPs and new attendance requests from more than five hundred people wanting to attend.
It was almost as if all of Washington suddenly woke up to what was happening, that the guy they’d written off as a candidate was actually going to win.
The stakes were high—and about to get a lot higher.