raw

Back in New York City, Paul impressed upon Trump that we absolutely needed to decide on a VP by week’s end. We needed to make an announcement. We needed to get his choice up to speed and ready for the convention.

Fortunately for us, Ivanka pulled herself out of the running. She went to her father and said, “No, Dad. It’s not a good idea.” And he capitulated.

All of Trump’s other potential VP picks had been made public already. Usually, VP candidates are under lock and key; no information is shared until the appointed day. The media constantly played the speculation game about who it might be, and they did it poorly since they never had enough information to complete the picture. In Trump’s case, he encouraged his potential VP candidates to go out and tell people they were being considered, and then he kept every one of them thinking they were still in the running.

Jared and Ivanka were fond of Newt Gingrich as a choice, but Trump had already told us, privately, that he thought “there was something wrong and off” with Newt. He would constantly hit Trump with a barrage of policy ideas, and Trump did not have the appetite or patience to deal with him. Trump kept throwing bones to Christie too, although Trump had already agreed that the fallout from his “Bridgegate” scandal and Christie’s own media-hungry presidential ambitions meant he would never be seriously considered as the top pick for the job.

There was almost no one left on the VP list when Trump flew to Indiana on Tuesday, July 12, to attend a rally in Westfield. So we arranged for Trump to meet with Pence again as part of a bigger campaign tour out West, where Trump would hold rallies but also continue vetting some of the VP candidates. And when Trump arrived at the governor’s mansion, the two had an okay meeting. It was cordial, and it was clear that Pence wanted the job and would stand by Trump as a loyal soldier. But Trump still wasn’t sold.

Ten days earlier, on the way to Bedminster on July 2, Trump asked about our vetting of Pence and whether there was anything in his past that might hurt him. So I gave him a copy of the vetting report and showed him: the vetting on Pence came back so squeaky-clean that Trump didn’t believe it was real.

“Come on,” he said. “This guy must be hiding something.”

Trump simply did not trust politicians, and even after this second meeting on the twelfth, he felt he still did not know Pence well enough to bring him on board.

That’s when I got a call from Johnny McEntee, a hardworking young aide to Trump, with some unexpected news: there was a mechanical issue with Trump’s plane. The issue was serious enough that they weren’t going to be able to fix it before morning—the brake on one of the wheels had malfunctioned and popped the tire in the process. Trump was in disbelief.

Looking back, it almost feels like some kind of divine intervention, because the chain of events that followed could not have happened without it.

We scrambled to try and get Trump’s smaller jet out to Indiana, but he was traveling with too many people to fit on it. So Pence offered to host Trump in Indianapolis for the night, and although Trump was not thrilled with the prospect, he accepted the offer and ended up staying at the Conrad Hotel.

That night, Trump had an impromptu dinner with the Pences at the Capital Grille, which was located inside the Conrad. They made a plan to meet for breakfast the next morning at the governor’s mansion. Originally, Pence was supposed to travel back to New York City following the rally with Trump to meet with Trump’s kids so they could get to know him better, but the mechanical issue upended that plan. So at 1:00 a.m., Jared called me to see if I could find a private jet to get the kids to Indiana so they could meet Pence there instead. We scrambled a jet, and fortunately for us, the kids flew to Indianapolis undetected by the press.

The next morning, over breakfast at a table decorated with flowers that Mike and Karen had picked themselves from the garden, Trump witnessed something he had never seen before: the normally exceptionally polite and subdued Pence verbally ripped into Hillary Clinton in a vicious and extended monologue. He focused on both Bill and Hillary, and all of the “corruption” he saw in the Clinton administration in the 1990s, which he believed persisted to this day.

Trump thought it was great. He responded in agreement with almost everything Pence said, and he clearly liked seeing some fire in the guy.

When breakfast was over, the whole group moved to another part of the mansion, and Trump got down to business. Trump wanted to know why Mike Pence wanted the job of VP, and Pence continued to step up his answers. His staff told me he was well aware of some of the statements that Trump had made to others about Pence struggling in his gubernatorial race, referring to him as a “loser” when he was down 10 percent and throwing his endorsement to Cruz. Knowing how Trump kept score, Pence knew he needed to perform on this day. And it was arguably one of the best performances of his life.

Trump’s instincts were that he needed “a killer” as his VP. It was a concept we had discussed many times as we worked through the VP candidates. Paul didn’t see it that way: “Donald, the vice presidential candidate is usually the hatchet man,” he said. “But on your ticket, you are the hatchet. You are the killer. So why do you need a killer?”

Trump posed this very question to Pence after their breakfast meeting. And as might be expected, Pence declared to Trump that he was “not” a killer, but rather an “ardent worker” who would be a great governor in support of Trump and his policies.

So, Trump pressed Pence once more. “Why do you want this job, Mike? Why are you going through this process?”

Pence looked at Trump and assertively said, “Well, you tell me. You’re in my home.”

Trump responded, “Wow,” and for the first time he saw a strong side to Pence that he had not before seen. Trump was clearly impressed—and so were the kids.

He didn’t offer Pence the VP slot then and there. He flew on to California later that morning for more rallies and a few roundtables. But on the plane ride, he phoned Paul to update him on the meeting and remarked that Pence “looked the part” of a vice president. “The guy’s straight out of Central Casting,” he said.

I knew enough to know that Trump was still not completely sold.

Encouraged by Jared and Ivanka, later that night, Trump called Pence and told him, “I want you to be ready,” implying that he was going to be Trump’s VP candidate. But I knew he had used that exact same phrase when talking to Chris Christie and Newt Gingrich about the VP slot in the past. Still, there wasn’t much time left. We went ahead and invited Pence to come to New York that weekend to participate in campaign events already scheduled, just in case.

The next day, in private, Trump struggled with his decision and started unwinding it. Then he called in to Greta Van Susteren’s show on Fox that day, and when she asked him if he’d made his VP pick, he said, “I still haven’t made my final final decision yet.”

Fortunately, the kids weighed in again. It seemed to me that Trump often wanted multiple reassurances about his choices. He would second-guess his own decisions long after the rest of us thought they had been finalized, and he generally wanted to know that his family was on board with any decision he made. In this case, Jared, who Trump knew had been a proponent of Newt’s for a long time, stepped up and gave his full support to Pence. So did Eric, Don Jr., and Ivanka.

Melania had already given him her endorsement of the Pences too.

So instead of waiting to make the formal announcement of his running mate at a press conference, which had always been the protocol for an announcement this important, he tweeted out his selection of Pence on the morning of July 15. The following day, at a previously planned campaign event in Manhattan, Trump announced his selection to the gathered crowd and brought Pence out on stage to rousing applause.

With less than forty-eight hours to go before the start of the convention in Cleveland, the VP selection process was finally over.

Now we just had to make sure that Trump actually secured the nomination.

A number of anonymous sources had kept tabs for us on the Never-Trumpers’ every move. They had informed us that we needed to have a strong presence at the party’s Rules Committee meeting one week prior to the official convention itself. The Rules Committee, made up of a group of 112 Republican National Committee members, generally meets every four years to determine the rules for the next convention, which won’t occur until four years after the current one. I suppose it’s similar to the way the Olympics Committee might meet to determine rules for future Olympics, four years in advance. It would be unusual, and frankly unfair, for anyone to attempt to change the rules for the Olympics a week before they began. It seems obvious that it would be unfair for anyone to attempt to change the rules of what goes on in the procedures of the presidential nomination process just one week before the convention kick-off too. But that’s exactly where the Never-Trumpers were planning to make their stand.

We discovered that certain members were going to try to bring about changes in the way the formal nomination process unfolds, to change the technical process of the way delegates are counted at the convention. In essence, the Never-Trumpers intended to stage a coup.

Thankfully, we were able to talk to enough of the 112 Rules Committee members ahead of time to ensure such a rule change would never come to a vote.

But isn’t it kind of insane that 112 die-hard Republicans, many of whom have held their positions on the Rules Committee for twenty years or more, are the sole arbiters of the rules surrounding the choice of who becomes the Republican nominee for president? Frankly, the possibility of the rules changing every four years seems insane. That small group of individuals holds too much power. This is the very essence of the “rigged” system that Donald Trump railed against, and which so many Americans want to see ended. When a system is this complicated and this insular at every stage, then every stage opens up a new possibility of corruption.

Our effort worked, but the attempted coup wasn’t over.

There was still a possibility that a Never-Trumper could call for a rules change from the floor of the arena, at the very start of the convention come Monday. And that was the plan: for one state’s chair to call for a roll call vote then and there, which could trigger a rule change—and all it would take to enact such a rule change was for nine state delegations to support it.

Given how much anti-Trump sentiment there was, we knew the Never-Trumpers had a shot at possibly securing nine states’ worth of support, and we were not going to take any chances that this might occur.

The convention takes place over a grueling four-day schedule. There’s no way that one chairman could possibly be expected to oversee it all. So the RNC uses a rotating cast of prominent Republicans to take over as the party’s “presiding chairman” for various periods of time throughout the official proceedings.

Reince Priebus was in charge of that schedule. So we worked with him to ensure that a Trump supporter would serve as the presiding chairman at the opening of the convention—at the only moment in the four-day proceedings when a rules change could be enacted.

We chose Steve Womack, a pro-Trump congressman from Arkansas.

We let Steve know about the pending coup attempt, so he’d be ready for it if it came.

In the opening minutes, in a packed arena in Cleveland, Ken Cuccinelli, the chair of the Virginia delegation and one of the leaders of the Never-Trump movement, made a motion asking for roll call votes.

Womack, in his role as presiding chair, acknowledged the motion: “There’s a motion on the table,” he said. He then followed the established parliamentary procedure of calling for a voice vote from the Virginia delegates on the motion their chair had put forth.

“All those in favor?” he asked.

A good number of delegates across the convention floor called out, “Aye!”

“All those opposed?” Womack asked.

An equally solid number of delegates called out, “Nay!”

“The Nays have it,” Womack said.

Cuccinelli immediately stood up and objected to Womack’s ruling. He called for a roll call on the voice vote, and Womack replied, “No. The Nays have it. Next order of business.”

Cuccinelli was visibly incensed, and the Never-Trumpers around him and from various seats all over the arena started yelling: “Fraud!” “Sham!” “It’s rigged!”

I was standing next to the Virginia delegation as it all unfolded, and to my ears, the Nays really did have it.

Cuccinelli tried to continue arguing for the roll call vote, saying that there were nine states that supported his motion, and that according to procedure, those nine states should be heard from next. But Womack simply declared that three of those states had backed out. As chair, it was up to him to decide whether to hear from those states, and he chose not to.

“The chair recognizes that three states no longer support that motion, so motion is denied,” he said.

It was pure parliamentary finagling.

Cuccinelli was furious. He knew this was the last possible stand to muster, and the Never-Trumpers fell. He threw his credentials on the ground and stormed out of the arena.

If we didn’t have Womack in place as the presiding chair, it all could have gone down very differently. Whoever controlled the mic controlled the process. But because we controlled it, we were able to quickly quell the Never-Trumpers’ attempt at subversion.

When I look back and think of the number of months, the twenty-hour days, the resources dedicated to ensuring this one thing—the convention would not be contested—it astounds me that it all ended in a single three-minute exchange on the floor.

After all of the threats, the rumors, the subterfuge, and a barrage of drooling media reports saying that the Never-Trumpers had something up their sleeves, in less than five minutes, we destroyed them. There was nothing more they could do to stop Trump from becoming the nominee, and in the end, we squashed them with a procedural measure.

It also astounds me just how close this country came to not seeing Donald Trump make it through the convention. It all could have ended then and there. And hardly anyone outside of a small, intensely politically minded circle had any idea what had occurred.

Donald Trump never got into the minutia of it all. He didn’t ask us about what we were doing to stop the Never-Trumpers. He had no idea of the lengths we’d gone to, to put Trump supporters in charge of the subcommittees of the convention Rules Committee itself, or how important Paul’s relationship with Reince Priebus and the party apparatus actually was to his success.

When he did ask about it, we told him, “We won. We’ve got it under control,” and that was good enough for him.

When he flew into Cleveland on the evening of July 18, secretly, in order to walk on stage and make a surprise appearance to introduce Melania at her speech, we didn’t brief him on every detail of what had taken place on the floor. We just told him that the Never-Trumpers had been defeated.

“The way is paved for you to get the nomination,” Paul said.

“Great,” Trump replied. “Great job.”

An hour later, I was standing backstage with Trump as all the lights in the arena went down, and a hush fell over the crowd.

During our Convention 101 talks with Trump and his family, Paul and I had explained to him that traditionally, the nominee doesn’t arrive in the city of the convention until Wednesday night, the night before his speech. When his wife speaks, usually on the first night of the convention, she would be introduced by a close friend or other family member.

But Trump said, “What if I introduce her?”

Paul and I looked at each other and he said, “Different. Okay. Let’s do it.”

As we got into production meetings, weeks before the convention, Trump described exactly what he wanted. “I want the whole auditorium dark, and then I want to simply come out, in the middle, and I’m going to introduce her,” he said. I wrote several lines for him to say, and he read them, and he told me, “This is good, but I’m just going to go out and say, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, my wife, Melania Trump.’”

The production guys, who Trump knew from his Apprentice days, thought it might be cool to add a smoke element, and some backlighting, so when he first stepped on stage the only thing the audience would see was his silhouette, and Trump loved that idea.

He picked the music too: the latter part of Queen’s “We Are the Champions.”

And now, it was happening. The smoke machines billowed. The music started. The lights came up, and he turned to me and said, “Watch this.”

Trump stepped out through the smoke, and the backlighting came up, and the audience caught one glimpse of his distinctive silhouette on that stage, and they went nuts. Nobody in the audience knew he was there. He wasn’t supposed to be there. It was a complete surprise, and they gave him a long standing ovation.

“Thank you,” he said. “Thank you. We’re going to win so big. Thank you.” He had to repeat it a few times until the crowd calmed down. And then, riding the energy, he said, “Ladies and gentlemen, it is my great honor to present the next First Lady of the United States, my wife—an amazing mother, an incredible woman—Melania Trump.”

As she walked out, they feigned a kiss without actually touching, so as not to mess up her makeup. She walked to the podium wearing an all-white dress and she just wowed everyone. She had never stood on the international stage like this. Ever. She had never been asked to speak in a political environment for more than a single minute in her entire life. But she was poised. She read from the teleprompter with ease. She connected with the audience. Trump came back behind the curtain and watched her on a TV monitor, alongside me and Paul, and he just kept saying, “Fantastic. Fantastic. This is great!”

The applause at the end of her speech was huge.

Honestly, our first day could not have gone any better.

Melania planned to head straight home to Trump Tower after her speech, and so did Trump. We ushered them to the motorcade, they rode to the airport, and our program ended around 10:00 p.m.—and by 10:30 p.m., our moment of first-day campaign bliss ended.

Suddenly my phone started blowing up with text messages from reporters. “Hey. Who wrote Melania’s speech? There are some big similarities to Michelle Obama’s speech from 2008.”

Paul got on the phone to Trump, just before the plane took off. “We’ve got a problem,” he said, as I held up my phone and showed him one part of Michelle Obama’s speech that seemed way too close for comfort to what we had just heard from Melania on the stage in Cleveland. “It appears Melania might have used excerpts from Michelle Obama’s speech.”

“It was a great speech,” Trump said. “Everyone loved it.”

Once again, when we should have been taking a victory lap, we found ourselves pulling into the pits for repairs. Paul immediately went on TV and defended the speech, vigorously. But in the late hours, one of the networks made a line-by-line comparison of the two speeches and pretty much blew Paul’s defense out of the water.

One word or one action was often the difference in our campaign of going from control to chaos. And managing the aftereffects was a challenge.

The moment Trump and Melania landed in New York, Paul got him on the phone again. I was with him. He put it on speaker. “It’s worse than we thought,” Paul said. “It appears that there are several excerpts that are used word for word from Michelle’s speech.”

Melania started crying. Through tears, she said she was less upset about the embarrassment for herself than she was worried that it might hurt her husband.

Trump stayed remarkably calm. “Baby, don’t worry about it,” he said. “You did phenomenal. You did a great job.”

Paul said, “We’ll continue to defend it, but we need to get to the bottom of it.”

None of us had worked on her speech, which begged the question: Who did?

Trump’s kids, including his second youngest, Tiffany, who was in college and who stayed out of the limelight most of the time, were all scheduled to give speeches, and all of them had worked with the campaign’s speechwriters that were hired by Paul, Jared, Stephen Miller, and me. They had all been proofread. (But we immediately started proofreading them again, searching for any plagiarized passages, just in case.) The speechwriters we hired gave some material to Melania to read too. But almost as soon as we started the process, Melania said she was “all set.” She would handle the speech with her own team from that point forward. So we had no idea who might be to blame for the plagiarism.

By 9:00 the next morning, the media started identifying me as the guy in charge of Melania’s speech. My name was suddenly all over the news. Before that morning, my name hadn’t surfaced publicly in the course of the entire campaign.

Weeks later, I would learn that Corey Lewandowski was the guy who planted that seed with the media. I knew he was still angry with Paul. Perhaps this was his way of seeking a little revenge for his June firing—but I didn’t know that at the time. I was sure I was about to be fired. I called Paul to see if he’d gotten any kind of a heads-up, and he said, “Don’t worry about it, everybody knows it’s not your fault. You’re fine.”

But I wasn’t so sure. To do something wrong and get caught for it is one thing. To be innocent and charged with something you had no part in at all is another. This was my reputation on the line. And to be fired for it could very well mark a disastrous end to my political career.

A few minutes later, my cell phone rang. It was Trump calling from his office in New York City. I picked up. I could tell he had me on the speakerbox. “Rick, I want to talk to you about Melania’s speech. With everything that’s going on with this speech, I wanted to call you. I want to let you know,” he said, speaking slower with every word, “that you…are…not fired!”

He started laughing.

“Look, I know it wasn’t your fault,” he said.

I was relieved.

He seemed to be in a really good mood. He started talking about what a fantastic job Melania did. He said he recognized there were issues with the speech, but he didn’t want any of us to focus on them because she gave such a great speech.

Before the day was out, a new round of press reports emerged saying that Meredith McIver was the one who wrote Melania’s speech. Meredith is a full-time writer on Trump’s staff. She’s a grandmotherly type who stays completely out of the spotlight, who happens to be the ghostwriter behind most of Mr. Trump’s books over the years—almost all of them after The Art of the Deal. But in the end, there was never a retraction from any of the media outlets or a specific press release from the campaign saying that I wasn’t the one who wrote the speech.

Meredith wasn’t fired for plagiarism, either. She had worked for Trump for far too long. I don’t think it was her fault. I think she just fell on the sword a bit because the other two speechwriters who came aboard at the beginning—before Melania said she would handle the speech on her own, with her own people—had prepared a document drawing upon highlights from great speeches by First Ladies from the past. Meredith, and anyone else on Melania’s team who worked on the speech, seemed to have worked from that preliminary document. Apparently, they did so without realizing that the passages they were reading were examples meant to inspire, not to copy.

This was the sort of chaos that happened on Trump’s campaign far too frequently. There were miscommunications all the time.

In this case, the criticism directed at Melania calmed down, and she didn’t take that big of a hit. There were plenty of media pundits who tried to use the plagiarism to say she was of poor character, mainly because she was easy pickings. But the people of America did not see her as some “politician’s wife” who’d been at this for twenty-five years. There was a sympathy factor.

It’s amazing to me that we didn’t have issues with any of Donald Trump’s other chosen speakers at this convention. Because his speakers list was out there.

The Monday night speakers, selected around a theme of “Make America Safe Again,” included Willie Robertson, of Duck Dynasty fame; actor Scott Baio (yes, Chachi from Happy Days); and former Navy Seal Marcus Luttrell, who survived a Taliban attack and inspired the movie Lone Survivor. On Tuesday, for the theme of “Make America Work Again,” Trump kicked things off with a speech by Dana White, the president of the UFC. That’s the Ultimate Fighting Championship, an organization which oversees and broadcasts massive mixed martial arts fights staged at Madison Square Garden and other huge arenas all around the globe. I wound up sitting with Reince Priebus and the CEO of the convention, Jeff Larson, for that one, and they didn’t know who half of these people were. But so many of the speeches went smoothly and were so well received by the audience that they just went with it. After all the infighting and resistance, the party adapted to Trump—and wound up getting all kinds of positive publicity for it. For instance, that night, billionaire investor Peter Thiel spoke, and it was the first time in history that an openly gay man had spoken in a primetime slot at the Republican National Convention. For decades, the very thought of a gay man speaking in front of that audience was considered taboo. It was basically forbidden. But when it happened? Nobody blinked an eye.

To me, it was a great example of why change is good, and a great example of why even the radical change of electing an outsider like Trump to break up this old system was so very, very welcomed by the American public.

It will be up to the Republican Party, and to history, to determine if what they gave up while embracing Trump’s brand was worth it in the end.

Trump’s friend, real estate billionaire Tom Barrack, spoke that night. So did Kimberlin Brown, an actress from the soap opera The Bold and the Beautiful. Kerry Woolard, the general manager of Trump Winery, spoke too. The RNC didn’t like that last one at all. They felt it was a brazen attempt at self-promotion by Trump, the private citizen and businessman, to pump his brand to an international audience. The party had to pick their battles.

I won’t get into all the speakers for Wednesday’s “Make America First Again” theme, or Thursday’s “Make America One Again” theme—yes, a theme of unity from Donald Trump. But many were just as unexpected and “outrageous” as the speakers on the first two nights.

And then there was Ted Cruz.

An hour before Cruz’s allotted speech time on Thursday evening, President Trump made one last demand (through Paul) for Cruz to endorse him during the speech. And Cruz still brushed him off. So Trump said, “I want him out. He is not speaking.”

Paul begged Trump not to do it. He insisted that he himself had made the deal to let Cruz speak, and he understood if Trump was angry with him, but Cruz was the runner-up in the primaries and caucuses. It was tradition. The delegates expected to hear from him, and it could look really bad for Trump—as if he weren’t a team player on the night they were talking about unity, of all things—if he were to cut Cruz’s speech at the last minute.

“Fine,” Trump said. “But he can’t sell it. Never could. This will be bad for him.”

Later that evening, just before Cruz started his speech, Trump came over to Rocket Arena and I brought him down to our holding suite. He was watching the proceedings on a TV. But restlessly, he said, “Come on, Rick, let’s go have some fun.” We headed to the family suite area where his kids were seated. I accompanied him up through the hallways to show him how to get there. I assumed he would want to know where to look during his own speech so that he could point to his family in the crowd later that night.

“It’s over here,” I said, leading him to an entryway into one of the audience sections. “It’s right through here. So when you’re on stage, you’ll just look up and to the right.”

“Oh,” Trump said. “I see.”

Cruz’s voice was echoing through the arena and spilling out into that empty hallway, and at that moment, more than a few Republicans on the floor started booing him. In his speech, he told the delegates to “vote your conscience,” in what seemed like a blatant dig against Trump.

Trump peeked out through the stairwell opening at the arena full of people, and then he looked back at me with a mischievous look in his eye.

“Watch this,” he said.

Before I could say anything, Trump walked straight out into the well-lit arena and started descending the stairs near the Trump family box, slowly. A few audience members in the vicinity spotted him immediately. They started cheering. All of a sudden, every head in the arena turned to see what was going on, and as soon as people saw him they started shouting and hollering from all the way down on the convention floor. He waved to them. Like royalty. Cruz kept looking at the cameras and talking, oblivious to all of the shouts and commotion, clearly not connected to the crowd at all, or he would’ve noticed too. Then the cameramen figured out what was going on, and the production manager killed the lights on stage and cut away from Cruz’s speech to show Trump mingling in the audience, all smiles and hand waves and thumbs up for the cameras and crowd.

I was standing right behind him, and I just turned my head and laughed.

The timing of Trump’s spontaneous walk-on completely distracted from everything Cruz was saying. It destroyed the man’s big moment on national TV. It happened right as Cruz was getting into the closing section of his speech, which I’m sure he thought was going to be a home run. But Trump drew so much attention that Cruz basically got ejected from the stage. The producers turned his mic off, and Cruz walked away with his head down, as the crowd kept chanting for Trump.

Where is Ted Cruz today? Supporting President Trump.

That one moment did him in. It took the wind out of his presidential-hopeful sails, and he’s never been able to get that wind back.

Once again, Trump proved that he could draw more attention than anyone else in the room and outplay any politician in the game. And for those who crossed him or refused to play by his rules, there would always be a price to pay.