raw

A few rogue Russians weren’t the only ones trying to better their own positions through association and proximity to Trump. Paul Manafort wasn’t immune to using the power of that proximity for himself.

The fact that Paul was now leading the presidential campaign of an American businessman and political outsider who just happened to be a celebrity known all around the world, combined with the fact that Paul’s strategies for the Trump campaign were working, was a major achievement. It could quite possibly raise his status overseas like never before, earning him consulting contracts in Ukraine and elsewhere around the globe that would be much more lucrative going forward. And in Paul’s case, it might also serve as leverage to help him get paid for some work he did for Ukrainian clients who had stiffed him on bills in years past. Any of his old clients who wanted to remain close to Paul, which could be perceived as their having an “in” at the White House in the future, would certainly want to step up and pay their overdue bills in order to get back into Paul’s good graces.

In the interest of all of that, to make sure his associates back in Ukraine knew exactly how well Paul was doing, he decided to share some of our positive polling data with a man named Konstantin Kilimnik.

Kilimnik had worked for Paul for years. We called him “KK” for short, and the two of us shared an office in Ukraine. At 4’11”, this forty-something political operative used to tell me all sorts of Russian and Ukrainian jokes and spent time asking me to explain certain American phrases that he found funny or interesting. Born in Ukraine while it was still part of the Soviet Union, Kilimnik was one of only a handful of Russians who were sent to a specialized language school on merit, where most of his classmates were sons of high-level politicians. Although initially schooled in Finnish, he spoke English extremely well, and when the wall came down, he stepped out publicly as a proponent of Democracy.

Kilimnik was easygoing. A nice guy to be around. And despite his background and connections, which could have lent themselves to suspicion that he might have worked for the KGB (now the FSB), KK was the last guy anyone would suspect of working as any sort of spy or secret operative, for Russia or anyone else. His personality just didn’t lend itself to suspicion, which may have been why so many people at the U.S. Embassy trusted him. He introduced me to his family several times over the years. And his American ties went back to his work with the International Republican Institute—a U.S.-backed think tank that supports Democratic efforts in former communist regimes. In fact, he had worked to help open the Moscow office of IRI, which I’m sure was no easy task, back when the institute was headed by John McCain. McCain’s right-hand man at that time was Rick Davis, Paul’s business partner, and that’s how he and Paul met (even though McCain and Paul were not friendly).

KK was the perfect person to help spread news of Paul’s success to people of influence—including Paul’s former clients—back in Ukraine. So Paul instructed me to send KK copies of the New York Times story announcing that Paul had been hired by Trump, and later Paul had me send him some ad hoc polling results just to prove how well Paul was performing. The numbers came from both our internal daily polling data and some public data, but were always a couple of days old. This wasn’t deep polling research. It wasn’t the binders full of detailed breakdowns (called cross tabs) on polling stats and demographic alignments by state and region and town and household that our digital team would use in the general election to better target our political ads online. It was just top-line polling data, saying things like, “Ohio: Trump 48, Hillary 42….”

Paul knew that those numbers were all KK needed to spread the word, and Paul was excited about the business prospects of his post-election future because of it.

It’s no secret that there’s a lot of money to be made in political consulting in Ukraine and other emerging democracies, and Republicans aren’t the only ones capitalizing on the opportunities. Not only is there high demand for American political operatives to help individuals and parties win elections, but once those elections are won, bringing anywhere from four to eight years of new political stability to a particular region, those same political operatives are then in a perfect position to work as consultants to American, European, and Asian companies that want to come in and do business with the new regimes. They have the connections and knowhow to walk companies in and help them get the contracts, tax breaks, and whatever other assurances they need to do business in those countries. And in a place like Ukraine, none of this is considered illegal, unethical, or unseemly. Not at all. There is also nothing in U.S. law or trade policy that blocks it.

Muddying the waters even further, in Ukraine, it is perfectly acceptable for a leading businessman—say the head of a major solar energy firm—to also serve as prime minister. Simultaneously. No one bats an eye that an individual is performing both roles at the very same time.

And if American companies want help moving into a certain region, who better to turn to than an American consultant? Whenever a new U.S. president is elected, you can bet that the consultants behind that campaign—from either political party—are going to get the majority of these foreign contracts.

When Obama won in 2008, his chief strategists, David Axelrod and David Plouffe, made millions doing the same kind of work that Paul had been doing. There were no fewer than eight different major political consultants from America actively working in Ukraine during the ten-year period while we were there. And the truly ironic and amazing thing about it is that when we export the American political model, the party lines fade away.

In Ukraine, Paul brought in Tad Devine, who was on the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign and who’d worked for Al Gore and John Kerry in the past, to write speeches and do all sorts of high-level work for us. Our media team was all Dems. Our pollster leaned Republican. The digital data team we used in Ukraine in 2012 was made up entirely of Obama data gurus from his 2008 presidential campaign.

When we weren’t fighting with each other the way we do under the brutal divisiveness of American politics, we could actually partner and align with each other in the rest of the world to get things done.

But here in America, the divisiveness persists. While people from other countries were scrambling to get close to Donald Trump and we did our best to keep them at bay, here in the States, there was still a ton of hesitation to associate with Trump at all. Not just across political divides, but because of the fight Trump himself had created within the Republican Party.

A big part of the bad blood stemmed back to the primary debates when Trump was the only Republican who refused to sign a pledge to support the Republican nominee at the end of the race, no matter who won. Trump wouldn’t sign it. Instead, he said that if he didn’t win, he “might have to take a look at Bernie.”

The establishment Republicans would not support that kind of behavior.

In June, as we marched on toward the July convention, Trump started to soften up a little bit to Paul’s idea that he wanted and needed the party on his side. After all, Paul had proven himself to be a winner in Trump’s eyes. So he met with Reince Priebus again, this time on his own turf, at Trump Tower, and agreed to let Reince work more closely with our campaign. He also pulled back some of his anti-RNC rhetoric, just a touch. He realized it wasn’t as necessary now, anyway. He kept his focus instead on “Crooked Hillary,” and asked his crowds and the television cameras, not so rhetorically, “Where are the emails? Where are they?”

His crowds cheered more than ever.

Internal polls showed Hillary’s trust level dropping over the course of the summer.

The nickname was sticking.

Unfortunately, so were the “racist” accusations being hurled at Trump. And he didn’t make things any better when, on July 4, he sent a tweet featuring an image of Hillary Clinton in front of a great big pile of cash, with what looked to me (and pretty much anyone else who saw it) like a six-pointed Star of David. Inside the red star were the words: “Most Corrupt Candidate Ever!”

The image was interpreted as anti-Semitic.

I was one of the first people notified about the tweet that morning, and I immediately reached out to Paul. He directed me to draft a press release, affirming that Trump was not a “racist” or an “anti-Semite”—a short “apology” without it being an overt apology, since we knew that Trump would never apologize for something he tweeted. I ran it past Paul and then ran out to find Trump on his golf course in Bedminster, New Jersey, to get his approval.

Mike Pence, his wife Karen, and their youngest daughter Charlotte had secretly flown in on July 2 to meet with Trump and Melania for some time to get to know each other, arranged by Paul. Melania hadn’t participated in the campaign much at all up to that point. But when it came to meeting potential VPs and their wives, she stepped into the role easily and gracefully.

Pence had come into that weekend thinking he had no shot at landing the VP slot. When I met him that evening, he was proud but humble and was honored to meet with Trump. He hoped maybe it would lead to a good relationship down the road, and possibly help him in his own bid for reelection as Indiana’s governor. The plan was to meet for breakfast the next morning, after which Trump and Pence were going to play a round of golf.

Trump greeted the Pence family with the enthusiasm and graciousness I always saw him show at his resorts. He wanted to make sure they were taken care of and had everything they needed. When we sat down to eat, the Pences were equally polite and were very down to earth. After a few pleasantries, and without missing a beat, Trump looked over at Charlotte and said, “You know your dad endorsed Ted Cruz over me, right?”

Pence smiled back and said, “You were right, and you won Indiana and they love you.” Trump, still looking at Charlotte, responded while smiling, “It was a weak endorsement anyway.” And just like that, Pence won some points with Trump for owning it and acknowledging Trump beat him (and Cruz).

So you can imagine Pence’s surprise when I drove a golf cart over to Trump later that same morning and asked if I could speak with him—and Trump said, “Just tell me. What have we got?”

Trump sat with Pence at his side while I informed him about the controversial tweet. And when I handed him the draft press release, he glanced at it quickly and then handed it to Pence. “What do you think?” he asked. “Should I send this out?”

I knew instantly that this was a test. Trump’s body language said clearly that he didn’t want this press release to be issued. He handed it to Pence to see what kind of a response he’d give. Trump loved to test people. He’d make it seem like he wanted your opinion when what he really wanted to know was if you agreed with him or not.

I knew this.

Pence didn’t.

“What do you think?” Trump said. “I’m not apologizing, but what do you think?”

I could see the struggle on Pence’s face. He didn’t know how to respond. Finally, he answered, “Yes, yes, Mr. Trump, you know, I think that you’re right on this. I think this is the right approach, to not send out the press release.”

Good answer for Pence.

Terrible answer for me.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll let Paul know.”

I walked away, called Paul, and Paul simply felt we had to respond. In what he thought was a “compromise” solution, rather than issue the press release, Paul made the decision on his own to pull the tweet down from Trump’s account.

By the time Trump came off the golf course, I was waiting for him. I told him what we’d done. And Trump went nuts: “Why would you do that? We have nothing to apologize for!”

I hesitantly tried to explain the trope of Jewish people and money, and what the Star of David represented—

“What ‘Star of David’? It’s just a star!” he yelled.

He said it looked like a sheriff’s badge, and what Paul had done was “the wrong response. It makes us look weak!” He wanted us to put the image back up on his Twitter account, and we did—only we replaced the star-shaped graphic with a circle. It didn’t help. The media noticed. It only made it worse.

The next morning, Paul flew in and we gathered at Trump’s cottage at Bedminster to watch the fallout on TV. CNN in particular kept hammering on the issue. Not only had their reporters seen the tweet, and noticed that we’d taken it down and replaced it, they had done some research. They aired a scathing report, noting that the very same image that Trump tweeted had appeared on an anti-Semitic, white supremacist website a few weeks earlier.

Trump insisted the image didn’t come from that site. He had seen it on some guy’s rabidly anti-Clinton Twitter account. I looked it up, and sure enough, he was correct, it was on the anti-Clinton tweet.

As we watched, Melania sat in the room with us. Trump started yelling at the TV. Then he yelled at me and Paul. He said we needed to fix this. This was on us. Then he told us both to get lost.

“Have a nice Fourth of July weekend,” I said with sincerity on the way out.

Trump exploded when I said it and continued to yell at us from the side door of his cottage.

“I can’t believe you just said that,” Paul whispered.

We worked for the better part of the weekend trying to come up with a response that might quell the controversy. Dan Scavino took the fall and claimed he had posted the tweet himself, and that of course it wasn’t anti-Semitic because his wife was Jewish, and he had been celebrating Jewish traditions with her and her family for the past sixteen years. He said the star was a Microsoft stock image that was clearly labeled “Sheriff’s Star.” But the media just wasn’t buying it. Neither was the Clinton campaign. They issued a harsh statement, reprimanding Trump for his behavior. To which Trump came out Monday bashing Hillary all over again.

The whole thing set off an alarm for Karen Pence. Through Paul, I got word that she wanted her husband to remove himself from VP consideration. She knew that her husband had long-term goals to run for the presidency himself, and she believed that his association with someone as volatile and lacking in “good Christian values” as Trump would end his chances for good. She promised to support him if he decided to stay in, but from what Paul said, she was not happy about it.

No one was happy about it.

Why did we need to fight this hard? Why did we need to endure this kind of chaos? It certainly didn’t help us to gather the surrogates we needed. No one wanted to go out and have to defend this sort of behavior. And it certainly wasn’t helping us to build bridges with the RNC as we inched closer and closer to the convention.

It wasn’t helping our VP search, either. If Pence dropped out, Paul didn’t have a solid Conservative on the bench to take his place.

Later Trump would tell me he was impressed by the way Pence backed him up at Bedminster over the whole tweet debacle, but he was not sure about Pence as a running mate. He wanted to choose a running mate that was more “like him,” he said. “Someone that was more aggressive and willing to fight.”

Since May, he’d been pushing for either Chris Christie or Newt Gingrich—neither of whom Paul wanted because Paul knew neither of them added any value to Trump’s ticket. Both of them had such huge personalities, and they were both angling for the presidency themselves. Paul believed they would have attempted to sideline Trump once inside the White House. So we used the influence of the kids and any other tactics we’d learned about how to best approach Trump to persuade him to look elsewhere. He mostly backed down by early July without telling Christie or Gingrich that they were out of the running, of course. He wanted to keep the tow lines in the water, even as he started talking about bringing a general on board instead.

Early on, I heard him ask people what they thought of General Flynn, mainly because he had defied Obama and was a Trump supporter early on. He asked about General Jack Keane, a retired four-star general in the U.S. Army and a noted national security analyst, and General Stanley McChrystal, also a retired four-star who commanded the U.S. and international forces in Afghanistan. He didn’t bring them up in detail, though. There didn’t seem to be a seriousness to any one of these suggestions he made. So we didn’t vet them.

Honestly, we knew a general wouldn’t necessarily help him fill a void anyway. Trump already looked strong to his base in terms of his rhetoric on ISIS and China. So we tried to deflect with other, more innovative ideas.

One suggestion that he was very open to considering was the possibility of bringing in Condoleezza Rice, who served as secretary of state under George W. Bush. The thinking was that having an accomplished woman on board, and a minority woman at that, would throw Hillary completely off her game, instantly taking away the power of the “woman card,” and simultaneously diffusing any racist accusations. But Rice turned us down for personal reasons, saying she didn’t want to be vetted for the role.

In mid-June, Trump took us down a completely unexpected path. During a VP discussion that included Jared and the other kids all assembled in one room, Trump said, “I think it should be Ivanka. What about Ivanka as my VP?”

There was silence.

“Ivanka should be vice president,” he said again.

All heads turned toward her, and she just looked surprised.

We all knew Trump well enough to keep our mouths shut and not laugh. He very well might have been joking. He sometimes did that. Then again, he might not have been joking at all. He might have been perfectly serious.

No one knew what to do, what to say, how to react.

He went on, “She’s bright, she’s smart, she’s beautiful, and the people would love her!”

Okay, I thought. He’s not joking.

Ivanka was all of those things. So are a lot of other young women in business in New York City. Unfortunately, that is not enough to make someone a viable candidate for vice president of the United States. Nobody would ever believe that a candidate would pick their daughter as a VP possibility. But there it was.

Looking around the table, there were lots of pursed lips and furled brows and raised shoulders and inquisitive nodding, but we somehow moved on quickly to another topic.

Trump didn’t stop.

A few weeks later, after looking at Tennessee Senator Bob Corker (whom Trump liked a lot at that moment, but who took himself out), and Iowa Senator Joni Ernst (whose inexperience drew harsh comparisons to Sarah Palin), and Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions (whom Trump called “Mr. Magoo” often), Paul subtly pushed once more for someone who could bring balance to the ticket, like Pence. But Trump said, “Look, I don’t like any of these people.”

Again and again we had learned that he only trusts family, he values loyalty above all other traits, and that seemed to be the reasoning he was placing behind his choice for VP when, once again, he said, “I think it should be Ivanka.”

He must have sensed the reservation in the room when he said it, because he kept trying to sell Ivanka to us on her own terms, listing her credentials, her likability, trying to get us on board. He actually took a measured approach every time he brought her up over the next few weeks, and that said a lot since this was not how he normally did things. His own approach to this made us realize just how serious he was about putting his politically inexperienced daughter just a heartbeat from the presidency. So as a way to move on, we decided to field test her on one of our favorability polls—placing her name next to a dozen or so other names of potential VP candidates. These polls gave us an indication of her name recognition, and in rough terms whether people liked or disliked her and the idea of her as a possible VP candidate. She didn’t poll tremendously high, but higher than we expected, and that only added to the seriousness of her consideration.

Trump said he believed that Ivanka was a good choice, and we knew that he believed his instincts were great. They were great. So we couldn’t help but listen. He thought she would be “loved by the people,” especially by his Republican base. And there were people on the team who thought, “Who knows? If we push it—maybe!” As crazy as it sounds and as ridiculous as it might have been, it wasn’t that far off the rocker in the context of everything else that had happened so far.

We included her in a second poll, and her numbers were higher than the first time. Still low double digits, which showed that people did not really know her or couldn’t see her in that position, but she polled higher than some of the other names we were floating.

As we headed into July and Trump still seemed cool to Pence, the Ivanka idea started to catch some momentum. People on the team argued that Ivanka brought a balance to her father. “She’s more moderate.” “She could help with Independents!” The fact that she was focused on childcare programs and social issues that leaned a little left, if not fully left, gave some people the idea that she might bring voters with her that would bolster her father.

By early July, I wasn’t the only person on the team who realistically wondered if all the discussion and vetting and polling in the world would ever be enough to make him reconsider. As with so many other decisions, we had to ask ourselves if we were going to wind up standing at the convention shaking our heads, saying, “Wow. He’s really going through with this.”

That notion was definitely on our minds as we brought Trump to Washington, once again, to try to build bridges in a meeting with the Senate Republican Caucus on July 7.

We kept this meeting closed to press. We needed our candidate to be focused, reasonable, agreeable, even friendly. Paul had counseled Trump numerous times that he would be speaking not only to the most powerful Republicans but to some of the most powerful people in Washington. “You want them on your side,” Paul said.

But the whole plane ride down, Trump kept expressing his anger over the way some of these senators had treated him throughout the primaries. Many of them had verbally attacked Trump over the preceding months for his rhetoric and campaign style. Now, as the presumptive nominee, they had to listen to him, and he said he was “going to unleash on these people.”

We feared the meeting could create a greater divide, but we needed to try. Especially since we were busy trying to get a handle on a new problem that had surfaced within the party.

Ever since he’d become the presumptive nominee, a movement had been afoot. The most vocal anti-Trumpers—the Never-Trumpers—had been organizing, aggressively. A long list of seasoned politicians and former politicians, military generals, governors, cabinet secretaries, and bureaucrats had banded together into a movement. It wasn’t all that unusual for parties to splinter, for anti-nominee sentiment to cause a quiet fracturing within one party or the other if certain politicians were unhappy with the nominee. But rarely has intra-party, anti-nominee sentiment grown so organized within either party in the history of this country.

We were slowly getting word from operatives and friends in the field that the Never-Trump movement was focusing strategically on targeting delegates—much in the same way Paul and I had been lobbying delegates to get them to commit to voting for Trump at the convention. And the intel we had suggested that they had made some serious headway, with Never-Trumper delegates now numbering in the hundreds. There are only 2,472 delegates in total. “Hundreds” of defectors could mean they had enough to prevent a legitimate nominee from securing the nomination. It was certainly enough to upset the apple cart and turn the convention into a circus, at the very least, and that could hurt Trump’s chances in November.

If on top of that, Trump burned bridges rather than building them at this July 7 meeting—a meeting in which the caucus members would finally be able to ask Trump questions and hear his responses for themselves—we knew he would be in serious trouble.

The room was pretty full when we got there. I think the Republicans had forty-four members in the Senate at that time, and thirty-eight of them showed.

Mitch McConnell got up and gave Trump a very lukewarm introduction, and I stood in the back of the room with my heart pounding, wondering what Trump would have to say to him in response.

But Trump got up on the dais, he politely thanked Senator McConnell for the introduction, and the first words out of his mouth were all about how he wanted “to unite the party.”

He echoed many of Paul’s themes and talking points perfectly.

He said he wanted to “build relationships” with everyone in that room, and move toward “the common goal of beating Hillary Clinton.”

I could hardly believe it.

Once again, when it really mattered, when he stood in front of an elite audience of Washington insiders, he rose to the occasion of the seriousness of the office he sought.

Looking back, it seems that he used his staff to vent, rage, argue, and test. And then when the moment mattered, knowing his audience, he was able to do what we thought was the impossible: he delivered.

Over the next hour, he fielded pointed questions on healthcare, on the economy, and on national security, and throughout it all, he kept his cool. He kept his composure, even knowing some in the room despised what he had accomplished. He made a joke about how he and McConnell “didn’t talk much,” which lightened the mood. Overall, he didn’t give very definitive policy responses, but he kept turning back to the fact that he grasped the understanding of what it would take to beat Hillary. “Like nobody else,” he said. He told the senators in that room that he would bring his massive wave of supporters out to vote—for them too. And together, they would win.

It was, I think, the closest Trump would ever come to building the bridge Paul wanted him to build during the campaign.

Back at campaign headquarters, it was time to go all in on convention planning and double down on our efforts to make sure our delegates wouldn’t flip on Trump.

Members of our campaign had been lobbying delegates for months. I’d personally met with certain, more influential delegates three or four times by now. But after realizing how strong the Never-Trump movement had grown, we started asking delegates to put pen to paper—to pledge their loyalty, and sign their names as supporting Trump. These weren’t legal documents of course. But the symbolic act of putting pen to paper made some of these people take the pledge more seriously. It was us saying, “It’s now or never. Trump is the nominee. We need you to step up.”

For delegates in states where they were bound by party rules to vote for Trump, we made it clear that they were “legally obligated to vote for Trump.” If not, then we would “pursue legal options.” But in reality, these state regulations binding delegates in each state had never been tested. We had no idea what might happen.

We updated our spreadsheet every day to keep track of who was solidly on our side and posted the numbers on a whiteboard. It was wild. In any other campaign, once everyone else in the race has dropped out, your candidate becomes “the nominee.” The term “presumptive nominee” isn’t something anyone ever bothers saying. The fact that we were using that term showed how dicey this all was: there were that many influential Republicans who didn’t support him as a candidate, and the Never-Trumpers kept reminding them that it “wasn’t over.”

Their message to delegates was, “The nomination hasn’t been formalized. He still has to get through the convention. You can stop this.”

While keeping up with all of that, we were rushing to plan the logistics, the staging, the hotels, the signage, the speakers, the nearby fundraisers, and parties for the convention itself, while still trying to narrow down a VP choice, all with the smallest staff I had ever encountered on any presidential campaign.

Usually the nominee’s campaign works closely with the RNC, and despite the recent history, we needed to come together. I was on the phone or in person with them no fewer than what seemed like ten times per day. But given the state of the tensions that still existed, instead of making things easier, Trump’s imprint on the partnership made it all the more difficult.

The RNC had already negotiated TV coverage for the convention, which meant we needed our best speakers on stage between 7:00 and 10:00 p.m. on all four days of the convention—that was when the networks (outside of cable) would be broadcasting the proceedings. In a traditional convention, a good number of those speakers would’ve already been preselected based on party position, and in this case, that would have meant McConnell, Ryan, other members of the congressional leadership, Reince Priebus, and so forth, would automatically get primetime slots.

That became one of our first of many fights.

“I don’t want any politicians speaking at the convention,” Trump told me. “None.”

Although he was trying to build bridges through Paul, he also believed that if it looked as if he “pivoted” to embrace the party, he would lose the support of voters who didn’t like the party. And there were many of them, but we had to remind him that few of them would actually be at the convention. Those at the convention were largely the party faithful. We didn’t want to alienate them.

A part of me loved it. I thought, “Here’s the first time a guy is truly breaking down the old system.”

I truly believed that most Americans were tired of the old staged theatrics of the conventions, with speeches by safe (i.e., boring) politicians, and maybe one or two good keynotes other than the candidate themselves. But the fact is that I was the one who was going to have to relay this news back to Paul and Reince, and it was not going to be well received. I knew it. And I questioned, once again, “Why does this have to be so difficult?”

Two of the first people Trump asked me to secure to speak at the convention were Serena Williams and LeBron James—two sports stars who had previously attended or spoken at Trump Organization events, such as the opening of the Trump International Tennis Center in D.C.

“Do you think they’ll do it?” I asked.

“Of course!” he said. “They’ll all do it!”

He still had no clue that politics and celebrity weren’t the same business, and that even where celebrity and the business world mixed, there was no such mixing in politics unless everyone’s ideologies were well aligned.

We took Trump’s list of speakers back to his kids, and even they were concerned. “What is he thinking? These people aren’t going to talk at a political convention!”

He wanted Don King to speak too, and Reince and his team went ballistic. Trump kept pushing it. He pushed it harder every time they pushed back until the RNC finally came back and threatened to cancel the convention rather than let someone convicted of manslaughter speak. They weren’t bluffing. It took that big of a threat for Trump to eventually back down.

The convention is a political spectacle. Other politicians would be thinking about choosing speakers based on all sorts of criteria and points they wanted to make, even vetting the individuals to make sure there was no chance they would go rogue on live TV. All Trump cared about was bringing in speakers who weren’t politicians.

After weeks of negotiation, Trump was just beginning to ease his stance and open up to the idea of letting some top Republicans have slots at the convention as a show of good faith as we were getting ready for that July 7 caucus meeting.

Ted Cruz specifically wanted a primetime speaking slot, and he wanted it bad. As the runner-up in the primary race, he thought he deserved it. He thought it would be the spotlight he’d need to help project him into the possibility of running for president again in the future. That’s usually how it works. But Trump didn’t want to give it to him. So we set up a sort of summit meeting between these two rivals on July 7, right after Trump’s caucus meeting with the Senate Republicans.

We were feeling good about it as the caucus meeting ended. One bridge built, Paul and I thought. At least partially built. This alliance with Cruz would get us a few feet closer to spanning the gap.

I had worked with Paul to negotiate the terms for weeks, to try to make the Trump-Cruz meeting one-on-one. Trump was a dealmaker. We figured he’d be able to find some way to work this out with Cruz and make everybody happy, as long as they were alone in the room. But Paul was planning to be in the room as well, so of course, Cruz’s campaign manager, Jeff Roe, wanted to be in the room too. He wouldn’t let it go as a condition. We finally agreed to it and moved forward with the planning. I knew the presence of others would change the conversation, but hopefully not in a bad way. If the number of people in the room grew beyond that, chances were Trump would take to posturing more than he would one-on-one.

But on that day, when Trump came out of the caucus meeting, Jared and Ivanka followed Trump and Paul, and a nervous-looking Reince Priebus, straight into the room where Cruz was waiting, which triggered a seriously glaring look from Jeff, directed at me.

“Oh, no,” I thought.

They closed the door, and a few minutes later Trump emerged shaking his head. I found out what happened as we all headed for his plane. The deal he offered to Cruz was this: the only way he would let Cruz speak at the convention was if he came out and formally endorsed him publicly. Flatteringly. He thought Cruz would jump at the offer. It was easy! It was the same thing Trump wanted from anyone else, he told him. But Cruz didn’t jump at it. Instead, Cruz and Roe hemmed and hawed and said, “Give us some time to think about it.”

So Trump walked away.

Then, as we were boarding the plane, Cruz’s team put out a press release announcing that Cruz was now “scheduled to speak” at the convention.

Trump was furious. He thought he’d made it clear that “nobody” from the party was going to speak without endorsing him. (Which was still better than his original stance of “no politicians” on the convention stage at all, I thought.)

He took his anger out on Paul, and told Paul to “fix it.”

So Paul called Cruz’s team that instant. But instead of shutting Cruz down completely and telling them they’d broken the deal and lost their slot, Paul believed that it still made sense to find a way to make it work. He told Jeff Roe, “It’s okay to put out that you might be speaking, but we need that endorsement. We need it.”

Paul wanted to make it look like the meeting had gone well, in the interest of continuing to mend fences on what had otherwise been a very good day with the Republican Party. He was still angling to get Trump an endorsement from Paul Ryan, and others, which would have gone a long way toward bringing some of the more conservative members of the caucus and party faithful into the fold, for certain.

His intention was absolutely wanting to help Trump, but he got mired in a gray area—and because of that, he wound up angering Trump more than anything else.

As the plane took off, Trump turned to us and announced, “This is not going to happen. Cruz is not going to speak at the convention. In fact, forget it. McConnell, Ryan—none of them are speaking!”

The convention was ten days away.