by Doug Wead
What was the source of this hostility, this bite? Why was John Oliver’s audience laughing with him? Most likely this was a moment to ruin things for the Republicans and allow Hillary Clinton, the presumed nominee of the Left, to win. This was to help pave the way for the first woman president. Trump was an early, conspicuous target.
It certainly wasn’t about policies. Keep in mind, at the time, Donald Trump’s public plan for health care called for universal coverage. Some Republicans were aghast. It was like the Canadian system.11 Bernie Sanders wouldn’t have had a problem with it, they said. As of then, there was not even a hint of the Russian collusion conspiracy theories. There had been no meeting about the Magnitsky Act at Trump Tower. Trump hadn’t talked about a Muslim ban, or illegals coming across the border from Mexico. And yet, without any of these props, Hollywood and New York were already predisposed to bitterly hate him.
In April 2015, the syndicated columnist and former ABC News star George F. Will appeared on a Fox News panel hosted by Bret Baier. Each of the panel members was asked to put “play money” on which GOP candidate would win the nomination. Will put most of his money on Wisconsin’s governor, Scott Walker, and the former Florida governor Jeb Bush, with a little left over for Senator Marco Rubio and the governors Chris Christie, John Kasich, and Bobby Jindal. And then Will added this little irritated aside, he said he would add “one dollar on Donald Trump in the hope that he will be tempted to run, be predictably shellacked, and we will be spared evermore this quadrennial charade of his.”12
As it turns out, George Will would not be spared. At the time, he was only expressing what many of his colleagues felt. But what was the basis of this resentment?
For one thing, Donald Trump was considered to be a “birther”; that is, he had questioned the validity of President Obama’s official birth certificate. Was Obama actually born in the United States or not? If so, why wouldn’t he produce his official birth certificate? This whole discussion made Trump appear racist to some and a certified lunatic to others. Trump would eventually accept the fact that Obama was born in Hawaii when his official birth certificate was finally released, but he would declare victory for forcing it to be produced.13
There was more than conspiracy theories at work. Jealousy? How dare this upstart businessman Donald Trump even think he could be a president when so many of us, who are much more qualified, patiently stay in our place on the sidelines? Perhaps their anger was self-directed. Perhaps they felt that they should have tried to enter public life themselves, and now it was too late. They had been bluffed into thinking that they had to be a governor first, or at the very least a member of Congress. Was Donald Trump’s arrogance an indictment, exposing their own timidity and lack of imagination?
If Trump were really so harmless and so inconsequential, as they maintained, why did his public musings about running for president provoke such a reaction? It was not so much that they thought he might actually win as it was that they were afraid that he himself hadn’t yet figured that out. And that was infuriating. The gall.
It is important to understand that these feelings, this anti-Trump anger, already existed. It was there before the policies and words and conspiracies of the Left eventually emerged. In fact, it may have been the cause of some of them.
Finally, there was something more ominous. Trump had been outspoken on many issues. He had long opposed nation building, including the Iraq War, the Iran deal, our deficit with China, and most of our trade deals. The American elite, both Democratic and Republican, were making money off things the way they were. So yes, he was a comic book figure, as Chris Matthews declared to his television audience, and yes, he could mess things up for the Republicans, but the things he was advocating were gaining some modest traction, and that could eventually be costly to elites. Why not stop him now?14 You’ve got the guy on the ropes, go ahead and knock him out. So, even this early, there was also a little bit of fear. In retrospect, these were the wise men of the American political-corporate establishment.
On June 15, 2015, Lawrence O’Donnell of MSNBC gave his own assessment of Trump’s presidential ambitions. “He is obviously never going to be president. He is obviously never going to be the Republican nominee for president and he is obviously never going to be a candidate for president.”15 O’Donnell’s tone was malevolent.
The next day, Donald Trump made it official. He was running.
Ron Reagan Jr. told Chris Matthews of MSNBC, “This is going to turn a three-ring circus into a freak show.”16
Eventually there would be sixteen announced candidates. Donald Trump was the only one without any political experience. He had never served in office in any capacity, anywhere. He had never run for office either. And yet, by late summer 2015, he was leading in polls among Republican voters.
Media pundits, politicians, and historians all dismissed the numbers as a mirage that would soon evaporate. “If Trump is nominated, then everything we think we know about presidential nominations is wrong,” said Larry Sabato, head of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia.17
The highly respected FiveThirtyEight podcast had its three experts rate Trump’s chances to win the nomination. They came in with probabilities of 2 percent, 0 percent, and −10 percent.18 Their interactive endorsement tracker had Jeb Bush in the lead with Trump “not even on the list.”19 By September 2015, the New York Times had Marco Rubio as the likely front-runner.20
Trump’s Republican rivals disagreed about many things but were all united in the belief that his popularity bubble was going to burst. “Donald Trump is not going to be the Republican nominee,” said the former Florida governor Jeb Bush.21 He was both the son and the brother of previous American presidents. Headed into the election cycle, he had already raised more money than any other contender.
Florida senator Marco Rubio, who won the early share of political endorsements, was asked by CNN if he would support the eventual nominee, even if it were Donald Trump. “Well, I’m going to support the Republican nominee, and I’m comfortable that it’s not going to be Donald Trump.”22
On WABC radio, Texas senator Ted Cruz was asked if he would support Trump if he were the nominee. Cruz, who would later emerge as the best challenger to Trump, said, “In time, I don’t think that Donald is going to be the nominee.”23
Governor John Kasich of Ohio made it clear, saying, “He is not going to be the nominee.”24 When Trump won the nomination anyway, Kasich refused to attend the Republican National Convention, even though it was held in Cleveland. Historically, it should have been his moment in the sun. He was the governor of the home state, he was host to the Republican National Convention. But for Kasich it didn’t matter, Trump may have won the nomination, but he was going nowhere afterward. He would never be president of the United States. And when Donald Trump did become president and when his success as president swept the Republican Party almost unanimously into his camp, Kasich could still not bring himself to accept it.
The 2012 Republican candidate for president, Mitt Romney, told Jake Tapper of CNN, “Well, I don’t think it’s likely that Donald Trump will be the nominee.”25
On NBC’s Meet the Press, the political veteran Charlie Black, who had worked on every Republican presidential campaign since 1972, said flatly, “He is not going to be the nominee.”26
When a Fox News anchor asked the political analyst Karl Rove, the man who had advised George W. Bush, how Republicans should treat Donald Trump, Rove said simply, “Ignore him.”27
BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE GOP DEBATES
In 1988, the Democratic candidates for president were derisively referred to as “the seven dwarfs.”28 The same couldn’t be said for the sixteen Republicans who were running for president in the 2016 election cycle. They were governors and senators with intellectual and financial heft. Jeb Bush, a former governor of Florida, was heir to what was arguably the nation’s greatest political dynasty. He would have two former presidents raising money for him. Senator Marco Rubio
was a demographic contortionist. He was a Hispanic and a Catholic who attended an evangelical church and represented the key state of Florida, which was critical to winning a national election and was an early primary state. Senator Rand Paul was touted on the cover of Time as “the most interesting man in politics” and with good reason.29 His conservative-libertarian following had the best ground game in Iowa and New Hampshire. In 2012, his father been in a virtual tie for first in the Iowa caucuses and had come in second place in New Hampshire.
In the early Republican debates, taking place in 2015, with sixteen candidates on the stage, the key was to distinguish oneself from the pack. Almost anything would do it. But doing something different involved risk. Both were points that politicians would thereafter take to heart.
Donald Trump Jr. laughed as he remembered the early GOP debates. “He was himself,” he recalled, referring to his father. “He didn’t spout the typical dogma. Everyone was a sheep on this. He distinguished himself from the pack. Obviously you saw his wit.
“To me one of the most telling moments was the very first question in the very first debate. ‘Will you automatically support whoever gets the Republican nomination? Is there any one here who cannot guarantee that they will do that?’
“Well, he was honest. He didn’t know who the nominee would be or what they were going to advocate. He was not a blind partisan. He had seen how the establishment had ruined the country. So he was the only person who raised his hand. He was alone. You ask how he distinguishes himself from the pack? Well, there you go.”
It was his targeted rapier wit that had his opponents cringing.
I had served as a shill in the elaborate debate preparation for George H. W. Bush in 1987 and 1988. The whole process had been choreographed by Roger Ailes, later the president of Fox News. It involved hours of privately videotaped practice debates. To prepare the shills, the candidate’s son, George W. Bush, played the role of his father. So I had actually spent hours debating both Bush presidents. In 2015, I was advising Senator Rand Paul. After the first debate, the whole discussion turned to the question of what to do about Donald Trump. He was seen as a political suicide bomber. It was believed that his comments were irresponsible and disqualifying to himself but were also utterly destructive to his target. The question among the Republican debate teams was what to do. Ignore him and hope he attacks someone else? Or stand up to him?
“He has this uncanny ability to brand someone immediately,” Donald Trump Jr. said. “He’s always had that. His whole business was branding and creating the brand. But it was more than that. It worked because he actually built a better product. His skill was in building but, yes, he could find the perfect brand to make it be seen for what it is.
“He is able to see other people’s flaws and weaknesses and exploit them quickly. It’s just devastating to them. His ’low energy’ comment to Jeb Bush was just devastating. And worse, it was funny because it was seen as right on.
“You could see that his comments got to Jeb Bush. The next day he put up ads with him running down the street with people following him. But it was too late. Everybody heard it and everybody, even Bush supporters, chuckled, and said, ‘Nailed it. That’s it.’
“So there you go. He summed up Jeb Bush in two words in two seconds in a way that none of the other fifteen guys would have even thought about. Bam. There goes your front-runner with his millions of dollars of establishment, insider-donor money. Gone.”
WAR WITH THE RNC
The Republican National Convention, held at the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, Ohio, from July 18 to 21, 2016, had all of the masterful Trump technique going for it. There was the staging, the lighting, the colors, the timing, the camera angles. Trump, the showman, knew how to work a brand and how to make it fit into a television screen. He knew how to make his brands visible and remembered. He knew how to use words and color and fonts.
Each night had a successive theme. Make America Safe Again. Make America Work Again. Make America First Again. Make America One Again. And, of course, all of it under the ubiquitous brand umbrella of MAGA, Make America Great Again.
Melania, Don Jr., Ivanka, Eric, and Tiffany would all give speeches. Ivanka would introduce her father. The Trump family, in all its beauty and intellect, was on full display.
“We had national exposure from The Apprentice,” Don Trump Jr. says. “But from that I had the best of both worlds. I could put on a suit and take advantage of being recognized, being the celebrity, then I could put on a pair of jeans and run around unnoticed.
“After the speech, there was a lot of attention. Rudy Giuliani got on Meet the Press and said, ‘That guy’s gotta run for office. He should run for governor or mayor of New York.’ Rachel Maddow said something to the effect, ‘I have no words.’ Which is about as good as I’m going to get from her.
“All of this helped me as a surrogate leading up to the election. After the speech, I had a newfound strength to help in a more profound way. That’s when I started getting crowds.”
The convention was one thing; the Republican Party was something altogether different. Donald Trump had won the nomination. He had been given his convention, to run as he pleased as the nominee but the Grand Old Party, the GOP, the elected officials and their staff, and the party infrastructure had their own interests to protect. State chairmen and county chairmen were threatened by new participants who were flooding their precinct meetings and their state conventions. New people sometimes translated into new party chairmen. They had not been able to stop the Trump juggernaut, but they were fully prepared to protect their turf, to survive his political tsunami and come back to power when this wave had passed over them and was gone.
“The convention was one thing,” Don Trump Jr. remembers. “The relationship with the Republican National Committee was a different one. That relationship now is incredibly good. But at the time of the convention and really up through the election itself there was a feeling within the RNC that, ‘Okay we lost this one. We will do better in four years. Let’s just chalk this up as a loss.’”
They were utterly convinced that Donald Trump would lose the election.
“I experienced this firsthand in fundraising,” Don says. “I asked them to give me their top five hundred donors.
“They said, ‘Seriously? Now why would we do that?’
“I said, ‘Why do you think? I’m going to call them all and raise money for the campaign.’
“‘No, no, no,’ they said. ‘Susie Smith from the RNC is going to call them.’
“‘Well, I don’t know who Susie Smith is, but my guess is that I can do better. I can tell you one thing. When their assistant says—“Donald Trump Jr. is on the line for you”—they are going to take the call. They’re probably not going to take the call from Susie Smith.’
“There was a real reluctance on their part working with us. They had relationships for years with people who they were cultivating to be the next leaders of the Republican Party, and we had interrupted that process and those plans. Here was this brash guy from New York without the best conservative track record in history. He comes in and runs against the most powerful political families in history, the Bushes and then the Clintons. This was so unexpected.
“As it turns out, as we would learn with time, these political experts in Washington were all delusional. The most incompetent of all were in fear of being found out. So there was no rush to admit any of that. Bottom line? There was a real reluctance to help us.
“So I brought in a couple of my friends and we just accepted that they were not going to share with us the RNC database and we put together our own lists and started making our own phone calls. These were some of my old hunting buddies, oil and gas businessmen. They weren’t all that political. But we started raising money for the campaign on our own. Just from friends.
“It wasn’t long before we were raising some real dollars, rivaling what they were doing at the RNC and topping some records from prior elections.
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br /> “So suddenly there was this reckoning. We started getting calls from the RNC wanting our list. They were wanting to tap into the new Trump donors to get money for their Senate and congressional races.
“I wouldn’t say that they were all thrilled with us winning the nomination. There were people there that were happy with us and plenty that were not. Now we have a new team in there. Ronna Romney McDaniel is the RNC chairperson and she is doing a good job. And the Republican Party is beginning to learn how to fight back.
“They used to hear the media and the Democrats call them racist for no reason at all and they would just sit back and not respond and say well, we just have to take a loss on that. Trump fights back and answers his critics. The RNC is beginning to get that. They are beginning to understand that they are a voice for millions of Americans, but not if they don’t speak up.
“When you have a track record like we have and yet you get 93 percent bad press, it’s an uphill battle every day.
“On paper, 2020 should be over now. But it’s not because it’s not a fair fight. Media is against you. Pop culture and Hollywood are against you, academia is against you, the moneymaking elites in the establishment are against you. So it’s not a level playing field. We are fighting an uphill battle.
“For decades the Left has used aggressive tactics against the conservatives, and now you have someone pushing back on the Left and they can’t handle it. Republicans were a bit surprised by the truthfulness of Donald Trump and they were startled. And some said, ‘Wait a minute, you mean you can actually win with this? Just answer back and tell the truth?’”
NOTES
1. Unless otherwise noted, quotes by Donald Trump Jr. used throughout this book are taken from interviews with the author from May to September, 2019.
2. This story was related to me by Don Trump Jr. in 2019.