raw

On August 14, right after Bannon came aboard, the New York Times reached out to Paul, saying they were getting ready to run an unflattering story—not on Trump, but on Paul himself. A reporter at the Times had been given a document from Ukraine, reportedly copied from a “black ledger,” that allegedly showed evidence that long before the Trump campaign started, Paul had taken payouts of more than $12 million in cash from the Party of Regions, the ruling party in power at that time. The problem is that the story was completely made up by an opposition politician named Serhiy Leshchenko.

Three years later, investigations showed that the “black ledger” was fabricated. Paul’s signature on that ledger was not actually his. And the “pages” supposedly shared with the Times were unverified copies, not originals. Furthermore, the parties who were interviewed by the Times at the time have since confirmed that they were handed the photocopied pages by sources they did not know. And the man who sent the fake ledger pages to the Times was one of Paul’s clients’ major political opponents in Ukraine, who has since admitted that the ledger would not stand up as credible in a court.

In the middle of a presidential campaign, there was no time for Paul to prove any of that. The damage was done. The Times, which apparently did little due diligence as to the sourcing of the ledger pages, ran with the story despite Paul indicating that the story was fraudulent. The story made other unfounded accusations about Paul’s financial and lobbying activities too, which sent shockwaves through Washington regardless of whether the story was true or not.

Paul let Trump know what was happening before the story hit and told him, “We’re not going to respond to this. It’s a completely fabricated story with no basis in fact.”

I knew then that Trump had lost confidence in Paul Manafort.

If Paul had gone to Trump, told him the story was complete nonsense, and that he was going to attack the Times for printing it, Trump would have supported him. If Paul fought, I’m positive Trump would have respected that more, even if the story were true. (To be clear, it was not.)

But in this instance, Paul was weighed down by an old school mentality and never fully realized how much the media had changed in presidential politics since he’d worked on Bob Dole’s campaign back in 1996. Paul’s position was that he should never put the focus on himself and distract from the candidate. This was breaking a cardinal rule of presidential campaigns. Instead, Paul decided he would attempt to minimize the impact on both himself and Trump by having his attorney make one short statement and then letting the story fade into the background.

In the new, Twittering, non-stop twenty-four-hour-cable-news-cycle world, that strategy did not stand a chance at working.

On August 18, Paul called me near midnight. Jared had just called him, he said, asking him to meet for breakfast in the morning to discuss the story and developing situation. Paul said, “It’s not blowing over. I think I’m going to suggest that I take a leave of absence and come back once things cool down.”

The next morning, Jared told Paul that Trump did not believe he was going to be able to overcome “the Ukraine issue,” and that he wanted Paul to resign and step aside. Paul attempted to explain, once again, that the ledger was fabricated. He could prove it. But none of them had time to endure a long fact-finding mission.

Jared wouldn’t give him the time.

Paul suggested a leave of absence, but Jared said, “That’s not going to work. The announcement is coming out in about thirty minutes.”

Thirty minutes later, the campaign released an announcement saying Paul had resigned.

In reality, he was fired. Not by Trump himself, of course. But by Jared.

Jared came to me later in the morning. “I just want you to know you’ve done a phenomenal job for us,” he said. “You have your hands in so many areas of the campaign. We still want you to be deputy manager reporting to Kellyanne and Bannon.”

Kellyanne had been promoted to campaign manager.

I went to Paul’s office. He had just settled into his new space on the fourteenth floor. He told me he was “gone” and Jared did not entertain the idea of a leave of absence. I told him I wasn’t sure if I wanted to stay with the campaign without him. For the last ten years, I had watched Paul develop winning strategies and execute them near flawlessly. I didn’t know Bannon at all.

I questioned whether or not Trump would have a fighting chance without Paul. I believed Trump had what it took—his messaging, his stamina, his presence—but as Paul and I knew, there was a lot more to presidential campaigns than just that when it comes to actually winning.

“Trump can win this. Trump can absolutely win this,” Paul said.

I still wondered if this was my cue to bow out.

“I absolutely believe Trump can win,” Paul reiterated. “I think you should stay. You know how he operates, you know how he thinks, you know the campaign. I can understand if you want to leave, but you should seriously consider staying.”

I felt bad for Paul. I knew the Times story was false. I was there. There was no phantom $12 million in cash. But the more I thought about it and the timing of it all, the more it became clear to me that Paul was fired for more than just the Ukraine story. For Trump, the issues with Paul went right back to the very beginning—to Paul telling the RNC that Trump would “pivot” and be “more presidential” after the convention, and the other little clashes along the way.

Paul was the type of political operative into whose hands most candidates place their chance at success or failure. He was used to managing a candidate, building and following a strategy, scripting everything out, and Trump just wasn’t that type of individual.

Paul had never really encountered a candidate like Trump, and Trump never had any interest in putting his fate or future in anybody’s hands except his own.

On Monday, August 23, I met with Bannon for the first time ever, one-on-one. He had already set up an office on the fourteenth floor. So had Kellyanne—she moved right into the office that Paul had only recently set up for himself.

Bannon was very matter of fact. “All right, give me a download. Give me the lay of the land,” he said.

I had learned that Bannon grew up in Richmond, where I currently live, so we talked briefly about our shared roots before I gave him a rundown on how we had managed to operate the campaign up to that point. We also talked about a few special programs that Paul had organized as part of his overall strategy, including:

•Building a strong outreach campaign to unions. Many blue-collar workers liked and respected Trump. A number of union representatives had already ensured Paul that as long as Trump didn’t take a position on Right to Work, they would encourage their members to vote for Trump (unofficially)—even though “officially” they were giving their endorsement to Hillary. This would make a big difference in certain battleground states.

•In addition, the unions agreed to hold back resources normally used for “get out the vote” efforts on the Democrat side. This was significant but easy for them to do, they stated, since Hillary had not inspired them.

•Building a real National Economic Council for Trump, and a real National Security Council, to advise him—especially as we got closer to the debates.

•Putting together some consistent, formal coalition groups and outreach programs.

•And continued bridge-building with the RNC.

That last one was going to be tough. Having Bannon at the helm didn’t go over well with the RNC at all. Priebus and Bannon didn’t get along. They played nicely when needed to but fought each other behind the scenes on many issues.

Bannon also had a totally different style of working compared to Paul’s. For instance, he would stay at work until 2:00 a.m. but then wouldn’t come into the office until 10:00 a.m.

That actually worked well with Trump’s schedule. Even though Trump was up and reading the news and making calls in the early morning hours, he rarely left his residence before 10:00 a.m. to make his way down to the twenty-sixth floor.

Bannon’s presence also synced with Trump. Bannon was good at building narratives and deflecting issues. But more than anything, Bannon found an immensely powerful voice through Trump and his agenda of “America First.” As an ideologue, Bannon could not have found a more perfect union. Trump provided the army of supporters that Bannon wanted so desperately to use to promote this shared agenda and similar policy goals.

With all of this internal shuffling going on, the media kept reporting that Trump’s campaign had fallen into chaos. But it hadn’t. It’s actually pretty normal for a campaign to go through personnel changes and shuffling as the focus shifts from the convention into the general election. It just seemed more chaotic than usual because of how quickly, and publicly, Paul had been ousted, and the fact that the Trump campaign had such a small staff to begin with. But the core of the campaign remained the same. Social media director Dan Scavino and director of strategic communications Hope Hicks remained. Stephen Miller was still speechwriting, and in so doing was influencing the strength of Trump’s “America First” policy points along the way. (Miller and Bannon had similar ideologies, so they got along from day one. Miller had used Breitbart to promote some of his policy positions well before his role started with the Trump campaign.) Jared continued to solidify his role as de facto campaign manager and confirmed that I would remain as deputy campaign manager.

However, I suspected that the scrutiny of Paul would extend to me in my current role. Also, I was hesitant that Bannon and Kellyanne were bringing their own people into the campaign. I expressed my reservations to Reince, who then offered me a position as liaison with the RNC. Reince thought it was the right path for me at that stage, and I was eager to get out of the spotlight. Eventually, I took the role along with working on specific issues for Jared and Bannon.

Primarily, I was working with Brad Parscale to keep strengthening our digital campaign game.

It was widely acknowledged that Barack Obama’s strong digital game was what put him over the top in 2008. And ever since then, the RNC had put a lot of time, money, and research into building a data operation that could overcome whatever system the Democrats had built. A lot of that work was done through a company that former George W. Bush campaign advisor Karl Rove had built, and it was assumed that once the party unified in 2016, whoever the nominee was would pick up the RNC data operation.

But we never really fully unified, although both sides worked genuinely to build bridges. And the campaign wasn’t interested in using the RNC’s system at all. Throughout the campaign, Jared made it clear that he wanted to build our own proprietary system, which we believed would be far more effective than anything the RNC had to offer.

That decision alone caused a lot of revised tension because the RNC had spent so much money on previous data operations and wanted everyone within the party to use it.

Our system was built on an incredibly small budget, primarily by Brad—a guy who had been hired over the internet to build Trump Organization websites, mainly for Trump’s hotels and golf courses. Brad had never even been to New York before I flew him in for the first time in May, even though he had worked for the Trumps for about six years.

Born in Kansas and largely raised in San Antonio, the 6’8” tech whiz had no experience in politics when I called in early April to see what he’d been up to and what he might be able to offer. He was surprised to hear from me. “This is great,” he said on the phone. “I’ve been trying to talk to people about this stuff. This guy Corey has buried me. I have literally no budget, and there’s been no interest in what I have to offer the campaign so far, and I’m telling you, I think we can win this thing!”

Brad is passionate about what he does, and his enthusiasm was so genuine, the campaign was happy to let him run with his ideas. And he did. His company in San Antonio, Giles-Parscale, had worked for the Trump Organization for several years. His non-political understanding of digital data operations proved invaluable over the time of the campaign (and continues to this day).

In 2012, while working in Ukraine, I had worked with Obama’s data guys and learned a ton from them, so I knew instantly that what Parscale had to offer was solid and a necessary pillar of how we would win the election.

He was already doing some online polling work, for free, that the Trump team in the early stages had basically ignored. For instance, back on March 8, when Corey Lewandowski was telling Trump he was going to win the Idaho Republican primary by ten points or more with no issues, Brad compiled polling data all on his own that showed Trump losing by twenty points. This data was never shared with Trump.

And Trump lost the primary by seventeen points.

Brad was the only one, in public or private, who got it right.

He wanted to show me how important data ops could be in the campaign in 2016—way more important than it was in 2008 or 2012, he surmised, just because of how the use of the internet and social media had changed so drastically in the last few years—but he didn’t have to sell me. I was in complete agreement.

I had tried to convince Paul that we needed to spend bigger on digital after the convention, but he was reluctant because Trump was reticent about data and polls. He wanted to use the rallies as advertising and let the media continue to give us free time. He supported some tried-and-true TV and radio advertising, but we had a limited budget. Now that Jared was in a better position to influence and make decisions, he fully agreed with the digital data plan and became its chief sponsor.

Data analytics is basically the ability to break up and segment various demographical data and organize it into buckets, which in the political sphere allows campaigns or political operatives to identify core groups of people to target by the issues they support, and how they show their support, combined with all sorts of economic data. Ten years ago, I couldn’t find out where a person shopped. There was no way to do that. Today? I can easily put together a digital profile of almost anyone, based on the digital footprints you leave behind through credit card usage, store membership info, discount membership info, and more, to find out not only where you shop, but how much you spend, and what you spend your money on, plus what kind of car you drive, how much your house is worth, and more. Most people don’t want to think about it, but there is so much data out there on you, and how you operate, it’s disconcerting.

I can then target you as a political voter, specifically, based on all of that data.

How?

First, we determine if you’re an ardent Democrat or Republican or whether you’re sort of on the fence based on historical voting. We especially wanted to target people on the fence, because they’re the “unknowns” at the voting booth.

Then, to put it in simple terms, if you’re someone who goes to Walmart and buys guns, I’m sending you ads on gun rights: “Hillary is going to take away your guns!”

That’s powerful. Think about it: the way to get to voters in Richmond, Virginia, (or anywhere else) in 2006 was to send mailers, usually a postcard, to the entirety of Richmond, knowing that more than 50 percent of those cards would go in the trash because they were sent to voters of the opposite party. It was a waste of money and resources.

With data analytics, I can get the data on an individual household, and almost pinpoint exactly how they’re going to vote or if they are likely to vote. That’s a game-changer. In 2016, we gained the ability to succinctly identify what issues matter to you, then send targeted advertising directly to your computer or phone.

With a campaign operation as lean as ours, if Google charged me a certain dollar amount for a hundred thousand ads, and I had great data analytics resources, then instead of sending out those ads generically to a hundred thousand people, I could tell Google I wanted the ads sent to one hundred thousand specific IP addresses.

And here’s why that was even more powerful in 2016 than it was in 2012. Back in 2012, if you were watching TV and the ads came on during your favorite TV show, you might have muted the TV or gone to get something to eat, but more likely, you just sat there until the ads were over. In 2016, most people who were watching TV when the ads came on opened their laptop or looked at their phone, where we hit them with our Trump ads, targeting people directly on an issue that specifically mattered to them. And it was at a fraction of the cost of regular TV ads.

So instead of sending some guy watching football an anti-abortion ad, we sent him an ad saying, “Here’s what Trump will do for you on economic growth.”

For immigrants—and I’m talking legal immigrants here—Trump’s anti-immigration stance didn’t always play so well. His public comments were just too harsh for many. But we were able to turn the tide on that in part by targeting immigrants specifically with our data that said, “If illegal immigration keeps up, you’re going to lose your job—because illegals are taking your job!” or “Health care costs are going to go up, because of the increased cost of caring for people here illegally.”

Our polling showed that this type of information helped us massively with the Latino vote, and more—because we were able to make the distinction between Latinos who were here legally, and those who weren’t. And that got voters fired up.

It worked. And there is no doubt that it was a major key to Trump’s victory. It enabled our campaign to channel Trump directly, unfiltered, to every individual that we wanted to target. We could send out upwards of 150,000 digital ads per day. And if candidates want to win in the future, they should learn from the Trump campaign’s digital example. Because while we never had a team of more than twenty people in digital ops, Hillary had over two hundred people in hers. And she lost. At every step of the game, she lost.

And here’s one big reason why: as we headed toward the general election, Brad made the rounds to Google, Twitter, and Facebook, and talked to them about how we could make our digital effectiveness stronger. It is fair to say these companies are motivated by money, and presidential elections create a lot of revenue. Each of these companies readily offered to help us directly, by embedding some of their own employees inside our campaigns. They were not offering partisan help. They wanted to help both sides accomplish whatever digital goals they had. Equally.

We accepted their help immediately.

Hillary’s campaign received the very same offer, from all three companies—and her campaign turned them down.

The Google, Twitter, and Facebook staffers were able to show us what was working and what wasn’t in online advertising, which is very different from TV advertising. Where TV targeted mostly to the over-sixty crowd still featured high production values, with waving flags and amber waves of grain in the background, the digital audience didn’t care about any of that.

We went out with cartoonish ads that looked a little bit like South Park characters, and people resoundingly responded to them. We did impromptu video shoots with Trump, filming ten-, twenty-, and thirty-second ads. All Trump, all authentic.

If we had stuck to using the RNC structure and political firms to target our digital ads, I’m not sure it would have been nearly as effective because we never would have taken those kinds of “risks”—not knowing, of course, that the bigger risk would have been to keep things more traditional.

As I mentioned earlier, our campaign spent $93 million on TV ads. But we spent half that much on digital ads and got eight to ten times the impact of traditional advertising. Sinking money, time, talent, and effort into our digital game gave us a huge advantage.

I’m not the only one who thinks this. In interviews after the election was over, members of Hillary’s campaign admitted that if they had shifted more budget to digital operations earlier, they might have been able to curtail our digital drive.

In 2016, I would offer that we were just crossing the line in terms of digital becoming more important than TV. And in 2020, I think digital will far surpass anything that TV ads have to offer.

Which means the Biden team, and the Democrats in general, had better have improved their data game substantially long before this book comes out if they want to have a shot at beating Trump. Brad and his team are not running a shoestring operation anymore. They have resources: lots of money, more staff, and deeper relationships. Brad has had three years to build a sophisticated digital platform and there is no doubt that it will be formidable.

Trump did not care to get too deep into any of these details. He cared about winning vs. losing. Bannon understood that aspect of Trump, right from the start. But since he was media-driven himself, and since he understood from the inside out how to manipulate the media in ways that aligned perfectly with Trump’s messaging, he wound up being the perfect guy to take Trump to the next level. And he was able to do so from behind the scenes.

While Kellyanne Conway quickly became the leading face and voice of the campaign on TV, Bannon stayed in the shadows.

I remember spotting him in his office one week when no one else was there. Trump was traveling, and Kellyanne and most of the other senior staff were on the road with him.

I asked Bannon why he wasn’t traveling too.

“No, no, no,” he said with a laugh. “The dark lord stays in the tower upon high.”