by Doug Wead
“Over and over people were saying, ‘I’m praying for you. Praying for the family. We need him.’ The enthusiasm was just different. It was at a different level.
“As the Trump movement emerged, I quickly realized how desperate America was for somebody who wasn’t a politician, who was somebody unconventional, maybe somebody who was a little bit non-PC.” Eric laughed, correcting himself, “No, very non-PC. They saw him as a fighter, and that whole kind of enthusiasm continued through to winning the Republican nomination and eventually culminating on Election Day.”
CHOOSING MIKE PENCE: THE REAL STORY
In July 2019, new books and online reports promoted insider stories about how Donald Trump had picked Mike Pence as his running mate. At the time, I was editing parts of this book with Eric Trump. He asked about the Mike Pence story. Eric had been frustrated by so many false accounts. He had been there. He knew what had happened, but somehow, with all the hours of interviews and editing, his remarkable story had ended up on the cutting room floor.
With the rash of new books and false theories, there were urgent reasons to write about it. One story declared that “Trump was manipulated by staffers into picking Mike Pence as his running mate.”3 It was Karl Rove, the theory insisted. It recounted conversations between Trump and Rove, saying that the political pundit had been the catalyst.4 I knew Donald Trump and I knew Karl Rove and I knew the story was false. Another theory, from the same book, claimed that White House staffer Kellyanne Conway allegedly told Pence, ‘I’m going to make sure you get it.’”5
Still another article claimed that Trump’s campaign manager Paul Manafort had tricked Trump into thinking that his airplane had mechanical problems. It had all been a setup, to keep Trump stranded in Indianapolis, where Pence could seal the deal.6
So in between exhausting edits, I prevailed on Eric Trump to tell me, one more time, how in 2016, Donald Trump had actually selected Mike Pence as his running mate. What had really happened? His story didn’t disappoint.
“My father and I were at a campaign event near Westfield, Indiana,” Eric Trump said. “Governor Mike Pence and his wife, Karen, were with us. Governor Pence was introducing my father at the rally. We got word that one of the tires on the Trump plane had been damaged when we had landed. It had been apparently cut by a piece of metal on the runway. It would have to be changed and we would have to stay for the night.
“After the rally, the campaign booked us into the Conrad Hotel in Indianapolis. Mike and Karen invited us to dinner. That night, the four of us, Mike and Karen Pence and my father and I, went to a back room of the Capital Grille, right in the hotel. There was nothing we could do. So it was an unexpected break, a brief moment to relax in the middle of a marathon campaign. I can tell you that there was great conversation that night. I know my father, and I could tell that he and Pence were on the same page. When we got back to the hotel corridor, outside our rooms, my father pulled me aside and told me to call Don, Jared, and Ivanka and get them out to Indiana right away.”
The next morning the media was all over the story. The Trump family had breakfast at the governor’s mansion. Later, media reports would say that Melania weighed in when they got back to New York City. She thought that Pence offered good balance to the ticket. Another member of the family suggested that days later the candidate and Pence had bonded on the golf course at Bedminster. But the first indication that lightning had struck came that night at the steak house in Indianapolis. There, at a dinner with Mike and Karen Pence and his son Eric Trump, the candidate had checked off all the boxes. It was an intimate discussion.
“I knew that it was going to happen,” Eric Trump said, “when my father whispered in the hallway of the hotel, ‘Get Don and Jared and Ivanka on the next plane out here.’
“If there had not been that piece of metal on the runway, Mike Pence may not have been his running mate or vice president of the United States. Sometimes, things happen for a reason.”
NO ONE ELSE FIGHTING ALONGSIDE US
Heading into the general election with Hillary Clinton, the Trump family was hearing the conventional wisdom that they were going to lose. They had to brace themselves, steady themselves emotionally. And yet they had to project optimism if they were going to have any chance of winning. I asked Eric how he juggled those feelings.
“It wasn’t so much personal emotion about losing or not losing,” Eric said. “It was more confusion between what I was seeing with my own eyes out on the campaign trail and what I was seeing on television when I got home. And as far as the emotion? It was easier and happier to be in those swing states fighting and seeing the love and support than it was to come back to New York City and turn on the television.
“Don, Lara, and I literally crisscrossed every town in Iowa, Ohio, New Hampshire, Nevada, Florida, Maine, and Pennsylvania. We spent eighteen months in thirteen swing states talking to every factory worker and concerned citizen. And the reception that we were getting at these places was incredible. We would be in the middle of a very quaint part of rural Iowa and we would have one thousand people show up to see us. It was pretty remarkable, but we had no one else fighting alongside us. The media called the campaign a joke, and the political elites dismissed us, but the movement was very real, as they would soon come to find out.”
It was interesting to hear Eric talk about the loneliness of the political process, his sense that the family was on their own. After Trump won the nomination, there were other major Republican figures who traveled with the candidate and were part of his entourage. New Jersey governor Chris Christie, Alabama senator Jeff Sessions, the Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus, General Mike Flynn, and former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani come to mind. Governor Mike Pence was demonstratively loyal and was out on the campaign trail himself. Of course, there were layers of iconic and diverse Trump friends that went back for years, from Keith Schiller to the televangelist Paula White. But much of the hired staff, from Steve Bannon to Kellyanne Conway, Bill Stepien, David Bossie, and, earlier, Corey Lewandowski, were not there when everything was in doubt. Almost all of them came later, after Trump had won the big primary states. They came after Trump had essentially won the nomination. Until that time, most of them were still hedging their bets. Eric Trump was surely revealing how it must have felt to be inside the Trump family bubble running for president in early 2016.
It is likely that the sense of loneliness the Trump family was experiencing in the campaign was something that all political families have felt in their quest for power. It was probably shared by the Kennedys and the Bushes and the Clintons. And yet, I had been on the trail with George W. Bush, during his father’s campaign. We had flown in commercial aircraft and private jets, ridden in car caravans, coaches, and Winnebagos. We had stayed in nice hotels and fleabag motels. We went days with little or no food, from one radio interview to the next. There was never a sense of abandonment. The Republican Party—indeed, half of the nation—was behind us. What Eric Trump was talking about was different.
“There are five living US presidents,” the Clinton campaign bragged. “None of them support Donald Trump.”7 I could see how it must have felt lonely.
Yet when I traveled for Bush, there was none of the enthusiasm that Eric Trump described. There were never convention centers, spontaneously full of thousands of people waiting to see the candidate—with thousands more standing in line outside. There weren’t barns across the Midwest with bush painted on the side. I had traveled on campaign trips with Ronald Reagan and had not seen that. The Trump family was leading a revolution. They were trying to make America great again. It meant making powerful people less powerful and poor people less poor. Did such a process provoke enemies? Certainly. Did it seem lonely from the inside? Sure. I could see that. But if they succeeded, some of the people who were now outside would be in, and some of the people who were now inside would be out. It was a struggle.
WIN OR LOSE? WHICH NARRATIVE DID YOU BELIEVE?
In the last days of the 2016 presidential campaign, there were two very distinct narratives inside the Trump family. Brad Parscale, the campaign’s digital director, had numbers showing them winning the election. But almost all of the national polls continued to show them losing, and losing decisively.
“We certainly heard both narratives,” Eric Trump said. “There is no denying that.
“One thing that needs to be in the book is that the morning of the election the New York Times had a graph showing my father’s likelihood of winning at fifteen percent.8
“I remember that we saw polls of him losing Pennsylvania by a wide margin. Now, you have to understand, we had practically lived in Pennsylvania for eighteen months. I think I visited every single town in the state.
“Driving across the state was like immersing yourself into Trump country. You would see a barn and you would see the entire side painted TRUMP. I can’t tell you how many times I pulled off the side of the road and I went into one of those houses, and I would just say that I was driving by and saw the barn and wanted to say thank you. Just to tell them that what they had done meant the world to our family. By the way, you never saw that reciprocal on the other side. There were no barns painted HILLARY.
“There were sides of delis or hardware stores in the small little towns. Sometimes brick walls were painted TRUMP MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN. This wouldn’t be a three-by-three sign. This would be an entire side of the building. Maybe sixty feet long and thirty feet high. Somebody was up there with a ladder and probably put in a week’s worth of work because they loved my father and because they loved his message. It was the very thing all other candidates lacked.
“I was in a little town in Ohio. We had heard that the owner of an eyeglass store happened to be our biggest fan and I had to stop by and say hi.
“Well, he called his neighbor and all of a sudden we had twenty people in the store and then thirty. I went out into the street and everyone was calling their friends. As we walked the five blocks that encompassed the entire town, I will never forget arriving at a hardware store, situated exactly across from the fire station. By that point, I had over a thousand people, the entire town showed up. The streets were blocked. People were cheering. I would not have guessed that that many people lived in that area. The support was unbelievable. How do you explain that to a pollster?
“It would never make sense to us, Doug. I would be in Iowa or Pennsylvania, driving down the road and I would see one hundred Trump signs to every Hillary sign.”
“So, what was your personal life like during this time? Where did you eat? Where did you sleep?” I asked.
“My wife and I were on the road every single day,” Eric recalled. “We would come home, spend half a day together on Sunday, and then grab a bag and repack and go back out to our assigned swing states until we saw each other again the next Sunday.
“I was kind of quasi-depressed, and I use the word ‘depressed’ loosely, but I would be looking up at the TV and see the stories on CNN saying that Trump is down in Pennsylvania. I’m thinking, ‘I just spent six days in Pennsylvania, and everywhere I went I would have one thousand people turn out for me, and I wasn’t even the candidate.’
“They would say, ‘Trump is losing in Ohio.’ I’d be sitting there thinking, ‘There is just no way we are going to lose Ohio. There’s just no way. They’re wrong.’
“They would say, ‘Michigan is safe for Hillary. Trump is going nowhere in Michigan. Michigan is done.’
“But we would see wild enthusiasm. We had members from the United Auto Workers come up to us, and they would say, ‘Eric, I have voted Democratic all my life. Every election. And I always, always vote. I voted twice for Obama. But we are voting for your father. All of us. Everybody you see here is voting Trump. But don’t tell our leaders.
“I’d go to another plant and the workers would say the same thing. ‘You realize that we are one hundred percent behind your father. Everybody here. One hundred percent.’
“Others would say, ‘We have seen all of these plants close and go overseas. We are sick of it. We are with you.’
“I would say, ‘Well, look, I know you are union leaders and you have obligations.’
“And they would say, ‘No, no, the rank and file are completely behind you. Everyone you see here is voting Trump. These are tough guys. No one tells them what to do.’
“Others told us, ‘Our guys at the top don’t even try to get us to do what they want anymore. We would throw the bums out. They tell their Democratic bosses what they have to say to keep them happy but we all do what we want.’
“It didn’t surprise me to hear on Election Day that the media was getting bad exit polling data. Some people were telling the exit poll surveys that they were voting for Hillary but they had pulled the lever for my father.
“There would be stories saying that Trump cannot carry Florida. And I remember watching Senator Tim Kaine, Hillary Clinton’s vice presidential running mate, having an event in West Palm Beach. I had my own event nearby. I jumped in a car and quietly drive past his event so I could see it for myself. It looked like there were fifty or sixty people, including his staffers and others. Yet the nation was being told Hillary was winning. It did not fit the narrative being spewed on CNN or in the Washington Post. It was totally dishonest.
“It just did not make sense. I was going to these small towns with shut-down factories, and there would be hundreds of people turning up, yet the Democratic vice presidential candidate goes to an event in a heavily populated Palm Beach County and no one shows up. They had no enthusiasm.”
A POLLING CONSPIRACY?
Eric Trump grew frustrated with the talking heads, the television pundits who were commenting on the political campaign. NBC and MSNBC operated out of Rockefeller Center. CNN studios were up on Columbus Circle.
“You listen to the pundits, preaching from Rockefeller Center, preaching from Lincoln Center or Columbus Circle. They were telling audiences that the American people didn’t really understand Donald Trump and he didn’t understand them. And I’m thinking, ‘This is kind of odd, because I just had one thousand people show up for me in Michigan and I’m not even the candidate. I’m actually a guy that wants nothing to do with politics. My only role is that of a son and a surrogate doing everything humanly possible to make sure this guy wins.’ So, for me, it was a strange disconnect.
“Let me give you one other story that I think is meaningful. Go back and you will find an ABC–Washington Post poll, only a couple of weeks before the election.9 And it said we were down twelve percent. It ended up becoming one of the most famous polls of the whole campaign. Everybody hopped on it and said, ‘Look, Trump is down, there is zero chance he is winning.’ Well, I am a numbers guy, that’s what I do in life. I work numbers. So I would always read the backup explanations in a poll. I would study the sample sets.
“So after this poll, Kellyanne and I went over to ABC we met with James Goldston, president of ABC News. George Stephanopoulos and John Karl were there, as well as John Santucci and some others. And our message was basically, ‘Your poll is b— s—.’ Pardon the language. We said, ‘It is absolutely garbage.’”
George Stephanopoulos had worked on the Bill Clinton presidential campaign of 1992, serving as communications director and later on senior staff in the White House. He was a star of the 1993 Clinton movie documentary, The War Room. And Trump was now pitted against Bill Clinton’s wife, Hillary, in a national campaign for the presidency. Eric Trump was making the point that George Stephanopoulos was hardly an objective authority to be commenting on the election.
“They are all looking back at us like we are crazy. What are we even doing there? They were all looking at us like we were out of our minds. There’s no chance you can win.
“Kellyanne and I said to the group, ‘Your poll is b— s—. First of all, you’re oversampling Democrats by eleven percent. D plus eleven. Go look at the backup. Your poll sampling is D plus eleven. If you move to D p
lus two or D plus three, we win the election. But you are sampling D plus eleven. And you’ve got twice as many African American voters voting for Hillary as voted for Barack Obama in 2008. You have twice as many college-educated women voting in your poll than actually exist in the United States. That would be the result if you were to extrapolate out the numbers.’
“So, Kellyanne and I went through the poll, point by point. In their on air-discussions they weren’t disclosing this subset information to the American people; they weren’t telling their viewers that they had oversampled Democrats by almost eleven percent, that they had two times the amount of African Americans voting for Hillary than voted for Obama.”
In the end, when the final numbers came in, the Republican candidate, Donald Trump, would win a higher percentage of votes among African Americans and Hispanics in 2016 than the Republican candidate, Mitt Romney, won in his 2012 presidential election. The network polls were off.
“You have to wonder,” Eric continued. “Were they trying to rig the election? Were they trying to push it in the direction they wanted? Encourage Clinton voters to turn out? Suppress Trump voters by convincing them that it was a lost cause, that their vote wouldn’t make a difference?
“So James Goldston says to me, ‘What do you think is going to happen?’
“And I tell him, ‘I think we are going to win.’
“He says, ‘And why do you think that?’
“And I tell him what I told you. What I am seeing all across the Midwest and the South. You could drive an hour west of New York City and see Trump signs all over the farms and little towns across Pennsylvania. I told him what Lara was seeing, what Don was seeing, what Jared and Ivanka were seeing.