Inside Trump's White House

by Doug Wead

  “‘I’ll tell you what,’ I offered. ‘If we lose, I will take you out to a steak dinner anywhere you want to go. Just a gentlemen’s agreement. And if we win, you take us out.’

  “By the way, they still owe me a steak dinner. I remind John Karl and Santucci about this any chance I get. It has become a friendly joke.

  “All you needed to do is take a dive into the damn numbers in the background, which any human being could do.

  “So Sunday, George Stephanopoulos has me on his television show. You can probably find it on YouTube. And now in retrospect, with what we know eventually happened, it’s really an embarrassment for ABC and the Washington Post. I was so passionate that day. His very first question was about the poll.

  “‘Well, we have you down by twelve percent,’ he said.10

  “I told them it was a nonsense poll and that they were going to get it wrong. And they did, because they lacked objectivity and refused to understand the true sentiment of this country. What we were hearing was a very different message from what they reported on their shows every night. The facts did not matter to the media. Their narrative was everything. Most of our nation’s media sits in an ivory tower on one coast or the other. We were living in the cities and towns all across the country, and the picture was very different.”

  WHEN THE VOTERS LIE

  The television networks and the commentators claimed that they miscalled the 2016 election because voters had lied to them in surveys and exit polls. I asked Eric if there was any truth to this theory. He told me a story about an early primary poll, taken in Florida, when Donald Trump was in a showdown with Texas senator Ted Cruz and Florida senator Marco Rubio.

  “We saw that the numbers didn’t seem to be adding up in Florida, so we polled ten thousand people on our own. We polled some of them by email, some by using a human phone operator, and some using an automated phone system. It was set up so you could press one if you wanted to vote for Trump, press two if you wanted to vote for Cruz, three if you wanted to vote for Rubio. Obviously all of those would be alternated in the next phone call so they would press one if they wanted Cruz. So the poll would be truly objective.

  “Anyway, what we found was really interesting. We found a thirteen-percent discrepancy between a human being calling up and saying, ‘Who are you voting for, Trump, Rubio, or Cruz?’ versus when we used an automated machine to call up people on our list. Think of that? There was a thirteen percent difference.

  “Then we finally got the results of our email poll and it showed the exact same thing. Once again, there was exactly a thirteen percent difference between our email poll and the poll conducted by phone with a human operator. Not twelve, not fourteen percent, exactly the same number. Thirteen percent.

  “Looking back on that experience, I suspect that as we approached the general election, the national media was missing this dynamic. On the one hand, they were openly shaming Trump supporters, and then on the other hand, they were asking people to tell them who they were going to vote for. And the people were answering back politely, like schoolchildren wanting to get a good grade, telling the teacher what she wanted to hear.

  “So, first, I do not believe they were actually calling a fair representation of Republicans. Second, a lot of people weren’t picking up their phones. Third, there were a hell of a lot of people that were hanging up on them. And finally, there were a lot of people that were just being polite to the pollsters, telling them what they thought they wanted.

  “It was this latter category that made the exit polls even harder to measure. People were coming out of their polling booths and lying about what they had done. And the networks made a big deal out of that. Once again, it was all the voters’ fault. They are ‘deplorables’ and some of them are also liars. But to be fair, that alone does not explain why the big newspapers and the television news networks got it so wrong. That’s their business. That’s why they exist. Reporting the national election is their Super Bowl.

  “If their polls had given the Democrats a plus four or a plus three, I don’t think anyone would have had an issue. But when they were running plus eleven, and not telling their television audiences what they were doing? When they were showing wacky numbers in states that we would later win by huge margins, well, they are smarter than that. They knew very well what they were doing.”

  THE PRESIDENT DOESN’T KNOW

  At this point in our conversation, I pressed Eric Trump about what he thought was going on with the national media. Why did they march in lockstep? Why did almost every newspaper, every television network, every pollster, mindlessly insist on repeating the same thing, in tandem, at the same time? It seemed so intellectually suffocating. Such a narrow confine. How could such bright people be reduced to such servility?

  Was it truly ideological? Was it related to tax percentages? Did they truly believe that one number was more moral than another? Surely not!

  Was it the magnetic pull of a powerful, mutually prescribed cultural loyalty?

  Was it just business survival? The bosses wanted it, so the anchors and pundits played along to curry favor? Paying the mortgage or keeping the yacht? Helped along by masters at the top, boards of directors, who made real money by steering the ship slightly this way or that, using regulations to build monopolies, smothering small-business competitors below? And did these owners-stockholders, television news advertisers, send signals to management, signals that were picked up and amplified by the more savvy corporate cogs and passed along unspoken? Was this a creature that was partly organic and partly strategic?

  Eric Trump said, “I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but it is crystal clear that the media was in the pocket of Hillary’s campaign. Stephanopoulos, for one, had worked for Bill and Hillary for years, and no one person watching the show on any given day could possibly say that he was not fully in their camp.

  “I do think that there are people at the networks and newspapers who are smart enough to know that a poll oversampling Democrats by eleven percent is unfair and false.

  “Are they smart enough to extrapolate out the numbers and realize that their samples are clearly skewed? Yes.”

  Conspiracies, of course, exist. Children conspire on the playground in the third grade. Ask Julius Caesar if conspiracies exist. There was that terrible moment when Nazi leaders met at Lake Wannsee in 1942 to decide the fate of the Jews of Europe, including some of the ancestors of Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law. American prisons are full of persons who conspired to break laws.

  In the closing months of the 2016 campaign, WikiLeaks released private emails that exposed the close relationship between the Clinton campaign and the American national media. Debate questions had been passed to Hillary Clinton in advance. And she had gratefully received them without public mention or protest. Reporters had submitted proposed articles to Clinton staffers for approval. Glenn Thrush of Politico emailed Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta. “Because I have become a hack,” he wrote, “I will send u the whole section that pertains to u. Please don’t share or tell anyone I did this.… Tell me if I fucked up anything.”11

  Others volunteered their services if the Clinton team wanted to make a point. “Please let me know if I can be of any service to you,” wrote a Huffington Post contributor, Frank Islam, to John Podesta.12

  Understandably, the media itself was embarrassed and alarmed by this unfolding story and quickly advanced the narrative that the leaked emails were, themselves, the real danger. It was a threat to a free press, they said. They needed to protect sources, and WikiLeaks had exposed some of them. Others insisted that the story amounted to an invasion of privacy. And then there was the idea that held that WikiLeaks had obtained its information from Russian government hackers. This amounted to Russian interference in an American election.13

  Lost by the media’s sleight of hand was what the emails themselves revealed and the degree of media collusion that had occurred with the Clinton campaign. In 2015, only days before Hillar
y Clinton had announced her candidacy for president, her campaign chairman, John Podesta, and her chief strategist, Joel Benenson, had hosted secret dinners and cocktail parties for media elites. ABC luminaries Diane Sawyer, David Muir, George Stephanopoulos, and Cecilia Vega had all agreed to attend. So had Norah O’Donnell of CBS News, Gloria Borger and John Berman of CNN, Rachel Maddow of MSNBC, and Savannah Guthrie of NBC. Of course, Maggie Haberman of the New York Times and Phil Griffin, the president of MSNBC, had replied yes.14 As had many others.

  Are “journalists too easily charmed by power, access, and creamy risotto?” asked the Columbia Journalism Review.15

  When I raised the subject of a media conspiracy with Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, his eyebrows shot up and a grin slowly spread across his face. As I suspected, he was much too sensible to respond to such an idea. But he did offer a comment. “Have you ever noticed,” he said, “not one single person ever got fired or lost their job for wrongly predicting the 2016 election? Not a single person. Not a pollster, not a programmer, not an editor, not a publisher or a producer, not an on-air anchor or contributor. No one. And that’s what they do for a living. That’s their job. They get paid to do that.

  “And can you imagine how valuable such information would have been?

  “Likewise, among the few who predicted it, nobody at the networks or anywhere else got any credit. They were despised for being right, just as Trump was despised for winning.”

  He said nothing more. He just smiled. They were all wrong, and none of them got fired.

  President Trump himself wondered about all of this. I had led him into a discussion about the media and why there was such coordination, such as common talking points, among the networks in their ongoing attacks against him. Sometimes, multiple anchors on multiple platforms used the exact same words and sentences.

  “I don’t fully know why they are doing it,” the president admitted to me. He looked genuinely curious but not bewildered, as though he had heard some theories postulated and was getting closer to a satisfactory explanation, at least for himself. So I just froze. I didn’t say a word, hoping he would say more. And then finally, after an awkward silence, he just repeated, “I don’t know why.”

  NOTES

  1. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotes from Eric Trump come from conversations, emails, and interviews in 2019.

  2. https://www.nytimes.com/1988/03/27/nyregion/plaza-hotel-is-sold-to-donald-trump-for-390-million.html

  3. https://www.salon.com/2019/07/15/tell-all-book-shows-trump-manipulated-into-choosing-pence_partner/

  4. https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-picked-pence-running-mate-he-said-nice-things-book-2019-7

  5. https://www.salon.com/2019/07/15/tell-all-book-shows-trump-manipulated-into-choosing-pence_partner/

  6. https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/do-we-remember-that-manafort-pick-pence

  7. https://www.hillaryclinton.com/feed/there-are-five-living-u-s-presidents-none-of-them-support-donald-trump/

  8. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/upshot/presidential-polls-forecast.html

  9. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/clinton-vaults-double-digit-lead-boosted-broad-disapproval/story?id=42993821

  10. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBFbxx0XFmc

  11. https://www.breitbart.com/the-media/2016/10/17/wikileaks-journalists-clinton-staff-homes-before-hillarys-campaign-launch/

  12. https://www.breitbart.com/the-media/2016/10/17/wikileaks-journalists-clinton-staff-homes-before-hillarys-campaign-launch/

  13. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/how-the-russians-hacked-the-dnc-and-passed-its-emails-to-wikileaks/2018/07/13/af19a828-86c3-11e8-8553-a3ce89036c78_story.html

  14. https://www.breitbart.com/the-media/2016/10/17/wikileaks-journalists-clinton-staff-homes-before-hillarys-campaign-launch/

  15. https://www.cjr.org/first_person/podesta_emails_journalists_dinner.php

  6

  LARA TRUMP: “I CRIED ALL THE WAY”

  “I think all of us hold out hope that the right thing will happen in the end. Maybe we will all be long gone but, eventually, we will be vindicated and validated.”

  —LARA TRUMP1

  There was one recurring question that kept coming to me. It was never asked by the hostile media and never brought up by the sometimes Trump-friendly interviews during the evening on Fox News. You couldn’t find the answer in any of the Bannon-fed books of Michael Wolf and Bob Woodward, nor in any of the books written by the hired help who had left Trump world to secure contracts to tell their stories. And that question was “How did it feel inside the Trump family?” Only the president and Trump’s family members themselves could answer that question.

  How did it feel when the polls said they were losing and they won anyway? How did it feel to enter the White House for the first time? Keep in mind that many in the Trump family had never even visited the White House as tourists. Some had seen it from the street only recently for the first time. How did it feel to see pundits on television insist that they were going to be indicted and sent to prison? That their father was a Russian spy? How did it feel to read things about themselves and their family that they knew to be false?

  These were the questions I brought to Lara Lea Yunaska Trump, the beautiful, thirty-six-year-old wife of Eric Trump, as we sat in her office on the southwest corner on the fifteenth floor of Trump Tower. Through the windows there was a spectacular view of the city, with Fifth Avenue stretching out like a straight, slender arrow before finally disappearing into a steaming blur of skyscrapers in the distance.

  “Well, it is very frustrating,” she said. Lara was seated behind her desk. My iPhone was recording the conversation.

  “I mean, first, foremost, I grew up in North Carolina. I come from a middle-class family. I was always taught that if you’re a good person and you do the right thing then good things will happen to you. That has always been my mantra for life. It is something I still follow. I grew up going to Sunday school and church. I am a religious person in the sense that I want to go to heaven one day. I want to do good things for people.

  “When my father-in-law decided to run for president, certainly he knew more than any of us that this was going to be challenging. He knew that they would write false stories or take things out of context and put things forward as their own narrative, but I don’t think any of us knew fully what to expect. Certainly, for me, as an outsider, as someone who did not grow up in New York City, it was a shock. I didn’t grow up in a family with a famous last name.”

  Lara Trump’s baptism by fire came during an interview on the digital news network Bold TV in January 2019. The country was in the middle of the US government shutdown. She had been working with Angel Families, an organization that helps parents and children who have lost “loved ones at the hands of illegal alien criminals.”2 She was thinking of these families when the issue of the government shutdown was in the news.

  “It’s a little bit of pain,” Lara had said, “but it’s going to be for the future of our country and their children and their grandchildren and generations after them will thank them for their sacrifice.”3 Her comments were perfectly appropriate, but that one sentence, taken out of context, was a provocation. Trump’s critics pounced. Joy Behar and Meghan McCain, stars of The View, compared her to Marie Antoinette. She was portrayed as a rich lady, with pearls, who had lunch with other high-society matrons, and who was out of touch with the masses.

  “In reality,” Lara said, “I grew up as a waitress having jobs where I worked for tips. Most of my family still lives paycheck to paycheck like the average American. So, for them to misconstrue that and make me out to be a person, clearly, that I’m not, is incredibly frustrating.

  “Still, I think all of us hold out hope that the right thing will happen in the end. Maybe we will all be long gone but, eventually, we will be vindicated and validated.

  “We can take some comfort in remembering what it felt like leading up to the election in 2016
. People thought we were crazy and laughed at us for standing behind Donald Trump. We said that we believed he could be a great president. We were ridiculed nonstop. And then, wow, what a validation on November 8, 2016, when he shocked the world.

  “So, when I go to bed at night, I know that I’m a good person. I know that I’m doing the right thing, fighting on the right side of history and doing what I truly, deep down in my heart, know is the right thing for the future of our country. I know it is the right thing for my son’s future and for generations to come. So, while it is so frustrating and hurtful, and it’s just not right what they do to all of us, I think we all know that we are doing the right thing. We all feel strongly that, one day, people who don’t fully understand now or have been misinformed will get the truth, one day.”

  This was a recurring theme. I had picked it up from my interviews with the president, who was feeling embattled by a hostile news media. They seemed to wish him to fail, even when he was seeking to negotiate peace with a North Korean tyrant, on behalf of their own children and families. I had experienced the same sense, in a much different way, from Jared and Ivanka. Jared was sensitive to the idea of his voice being recorded. How could I be trusted? This was what Eric was saying, how they felt during the campaign, that they, the family, were all alone.

  Ironically, the Trumps were surrounded by people. It had been that way for years. First there were those who wanted their money. Then their fame. Being in the Trump inner circle offered one an experience akin to what the Hindus call darshan. It allowed some of the magic to rub off. And now it had all vastly accelerated. Now it was all about power too. And yet, the bigger the crowds, the greater the needs of the people to be near the Trumps, the lonelier and more embattled it must have felt inside the family itself.

  On the campaign trail, Donald Trump Jr. learned how to play on this celebrity. “I didn’t just show up wherever my father was for the photo op. I decided pretty early on that the only place it didn’t make sense for me to be was where my father was. He created such a vacuum. When he was there you really knew it. You didn’t need anybody else. Anyone else was just extra.