by Doug Wead
“Unfortunately, that’s what you usually find in a political campaign. People show up just to be in the photo op. I made sure I was out on the road, hitting the key states, all over the Rust Belt, hitting the smaller venues and smaller towns that my father couldn’t get to. But also places that it didn’t make sense for him to be, like college campuses.”4
I said to Lara, “It must be very important, as a family, that you have each other.”
“I’ll say.” She laughed. It was obvious. “I think the greatest thing we all have had throughout this entire process is one another. It has surprised many people that our family has not fractured in any way. We got into this as a family. We went through the whole campaign in 2016 as a family. And we are still today a very solid unit.
“It is because we all know the reality. Donald Trump didn’t have to do this. He didn’t need to be maligned and pushed around and accosted every single day. He did this because he really felt like he was the last hope for this country. And I think a lot of people would agree with that.
“So sure, having family, having one another when you get upset with things or something happens, to have a group text, to get a text from somebody saying, ‘Don’t worry about it, everybody knows the truth,’ it’s very helpful. Any family, I think, feels that way. You have one another. Sometimes, that’s all that matters.”
THE WAITRESS FROM WILMINGTON
Lara Lea Yunaska was born on October 12, 1982, in Wilmington, North Carolina. She grew up in a town nearby called Wrightsville Beach. Her parents still have the same home. The family attended the local United Methodist church. It was just Lara and a younger brother.
“My dad started a boat-building company in the eighties. He actually built Walter Cronkite’s sailboat. That was his claim to fame. Then he started a car wash in Wilmington. He also developed commercial and residential properties. And my mom was an operating room nurse until my brother and I were probably five or six. Then she came home and took over the payroll and helped my dad run their business.”
So, when did she work as a waitress?
“Oh, gosh. There were so many restaurants in Wilmington. I waited tables at my uncle Leon’s restaurant. He had a Greek-southern fusion restaurant, if you can imagine that. So I know all about Greek food and, of course, southern food. Then, there is a restaurant called Brasserie du Soleil that I helped open in Wilmington. It’s still quite popular and right by the beach. When I first moved to New York City, I was a waitress here right down in Rockefeller Center. I was also a bartender at several places. So I’ve had many jobs.
“It’s interesting. I just tweeted something supporting my sister-in-law, which is another thing we do for each other. Ivanka was recently attacked by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, first saying that she would have no idea what it’s like to have an hourly-wage job, which isn’t true, and then attacking Ivanka’s comment that people who aren’t willing to work don’t deserve a paycheck.
“I think it is terrible to try and make someone feel badly about their background. You don’t get to choose the family you are born into. Now, you can choose what you do with your life. As a person who has worked for an hourly wage, I can tell you that most people want to work in this country. They don’t want a handout. They want to feel pride for being able to take care of their family and take care of themselves.”
So, how did she become a Trump?
“Eric and I met eleven years ago this month.
“I had followed the rules. I did what I was supposed to do. Went to college. Got good grades. But when I graduated there was just no job market. Nothing. It was a very hard time. I was a waitress in a restaurant, working, like so many, for tip money. I also worked part time as a personal trainer. I thought, ‘Hey, I went through all of this, doing everything they told me to do to be successful, and after all of those many years and all of that disciplined work, this is it?’
“There had to be something more than this.
“Well, I was very interested in cooking and I thought, ‘I have to see what’s out there past North Carolina,’ so I applied to the French Culinary Institute, which was in New York City, down in SoHo. Understand, I didn’t know a single person in New York. Nobody. My parents thought I was crazy.
“I cried the whole drive from North Carolina to New York City. It was so scary. What had I done? What was going to happen to me now? Was I leaving behind dreams that would never happen? Was it all a waste? Was I supposed to get married and have a good life in North Carolina? Now I was just driving into the darkness, utterly alone, with nothing to show for all my work.
“Eventually, I got settled in the city. One night, my roommate had a friend in town and wanted to go out. I was in pajama sweatpants and was going to stay in and watch movies, but she begged me to go with her. So, reluctantly, I agreed.”
And she met Eric?
“I ultimately met Eric.
“I actually had no idea who he was. I just saw the tallest guy in the room. Remember, I’m five eleven and with heels probably like six three. So I thought, ‘This guy is tall, this could work.’ So we started talking.
“Someone came up to me afterward and said, ‘Do you know who you were talking to all night?’
“I said, ‘You mean Eric?’
“They said, ‘Yes. Eric Trump. He’s Donald Trump’s son.’
“I thought, ‘I didn’t even know Donald Trump had a son.’
“We got married in 2014 down at Mar-a-Lago and then, of course, June 2015 my father-in-law announced he was running for president, so it’s been an interesting ride for sure.”
HOW TO WIN NORTH CAROLINA?
Lara Trump would end up in a crucial role in the 2016 presidential campaign. She would be running the Trump campaign in North Carolina. It would be one of the most important swing states in the whole contest, one that Hillary Clinton would openly target and media experts were certain she would win, taking it out of its traditional place in the Republican column.
It would require a pretty quick learning curve. Lara was the first to admit that she knew nothing about politics. Not on the national level. Not on the state level. This was a typical Trumpian move. He was impressed by competence, but sometimes he was even more impressed by desire. He had learned that if someone wanted to do something and enjoyed what he or she was doing, he or she could be successful. It was a pattern that had worked for him over and over in business and later in entertainment. Would it work in politics?
“My involvement in the campaign, honestly, came as a surprise,” Lara said. “I had been working for five years as a booker and producer for Inside Edition, a nationally syndicated television show. But it became very hard to continue to work there after my father-in-law decided he was running for president. He was in the news almost every single day. We always reported on him, and not everybody that I worked with was particularly a fan.
“Oddly enough, before he decided to run for president, they often wanted to stop by Trump Tower and get a sound bite from him. They liked him then. They would want a comment about almost anything. They would say, ‘Get a Donald Trump comment.’ And we would send a crew over. But when he started running for president, and they saw him as a Republican, well, a lot of people decided they didn’t like him.
“In August 2016, my father-in-law was going to go down to Wilmington, North Carolina, my hometown, for a rally. I decided I wanted to go with him. Nobody else from the family was able to go. Donnie, Ivanka, and Eric all had something going on. So I said, ‘I will just go with him.’”
“You went down on the big Trump campaign jet?” I asked.
“Yes, we flew down on the Trump plane. And my whole family came to the rally. Everybody was very excited. Then we all flew from Wilmington to Fayetteville for another rally, which is only a twenty-minute flight. Fayetteville is the home of Fort Bragg, the big army base. And on the way there my father-in-law was complaining about something that was upsetting him, something he didn’t like about the way the last rally had been done, and so I s
tarted opining on what people think about in North Carolina and how they feel.
“Well, you know how he likes to get opinions from people. He is a great listener. It is one of his gifts, and before I know it, he is looking at me and he goes, ‘You know what? I want you to be in charge of—’
“And I say, ‘Wait a minute. I have no idea about anything related to politics. I work in a newsroom. This is far outside of anything I have any knowledge of.
“But when Donald Trump tells you he wants you to win your own home state, I was like, ‘Absolutely. Of course. I will do it.’
“So as soon as we landed, I called Eric and said, ‘I don’t know what happened, but your dad just tasked me with winning North Carolina.’
“Everything changed. I went to work the next day and told my boss that I needed a three-month leave of absence. I said, ‘My father-in-law wants me to help him with the campaign. I would like to do it. If you guys will allow me, I will take three months off.’
“So, they granted me a three-month leave of absence, and that next day I was here in the offices of Trump Tower. I was actually in this office.”
I knew from Eric’s tour that the two floors below us had both been used for the campaign. In fact, entire parts of Trump Tower had been turned into a campaign machine for six months.
THE WOMEN ON THE BUS
“Lynne Patton, who was Eric’s oldest assistant, was one of my best friends. I was chatting with her over lunch, and we were talking about how Donald Trump hired so many women and had them in leadership roles in his business but there weren’t many women out on the campaign trail. She and I sat down and came up with this idea of a bus tour with women that know and love and have worked with Donald Trump.
“At first it was Lynne, Diamond, and Silk, the video bloggers who gained fame for their support of Donald Trump, and Katrina Pierson, who later became national spokesperson for the campaign. We also brought on Omarosa Manigault Newman, who at the time acted as though she was our friend and was very supportive.
“So, we literally set out on a campaign bus tour, and the first place we went to was North Carolina. We traveled the country for three months on a bus. Anytime we had any downtime, I would be back in North Carolina, where I worked very closely with our state director.
“It was probably the craziest three months of my life. I never saw Eric. We were always in different places.
“Once by accident we ended up in Columbus, Ohio. We didn’t know we were going to be there at the same time. We ran into each other in the lobby of the same hotel, if you can believe that. It was a, you know, ‘What are you doing here?’
“So I said to the other ladies, ‘I don’t need a room. I am with this guy for the night.’
“We had no idea that we would both be in town on the same day, because it was so crazy and hectic. Anyone that’s worked on a campaign knows the pace. Our dogs didn’t see us for three months. Thank God for two of our friends who constantly stayed with our dogs at our apartment. They were lifesavers.
“You have to understand, Eric and I didn’t have kids then. So, there was really no excuse for us not to be out there working full time. I didn’t want to wake up on November 9 and say I could have done one more thing, so I mean, we did our best.”
The rallies and the personal appearances were energy packed, but in between there were long hours of boring travel on interstate highways. In the end, the bus tour would cover five states, dozens of cities, and thousands of miles.
“We had a television, which worked fifty percent of the time, depending on where we were in the country. And when it worked we were glued to the news networks.”
When the news wasn’t available, they didn’t sleep or take long dinners in restaurants along the road. They stopped only for radio interviews. Back on the bus, they spent hours comparing notes about what they were seeing and feeling. One recurring theme was the persistent feeling that people were going to be surprised by the election.
“I am not even a blood relative of Donald Trump,” explains Lara. “But the places we visited would draw hundreds of people. They would show up at event after event. People would say, ‘I’m a lifelong Democrat and have always voted Democrat but I’m voting for Donald Trump. A ninety-four-year-old veteran came up to me at one stop saying that he had never voted in his entire life. He said he was a World War Two veteran. He said, ‘I’m voting for Donald Trump. I can barely walk but I am getting to the polls on November 8.’
“On one of our visits to North Carolina, I was in the hotel gym, working out very early in the morning. I was watching the early news, and they were reporting locally that Hillary Clinton was in the state and I was in the state at the same time. And they were giving just as much time to my visit as hers. I thought, ‘What is going on here?’ But they just couldn’t ignore the crowds of people that were involved. The local news outlets were still reporting actual news.”
While the ladies on the bus were seeing their thousands, Donald Trump, the candidate, was drawing tens of thousands. Occasionally, the ladies would cross paths and experience a full-blown Trump event.
“It is unlike anything you’ve ever experienced in your life. The campaign put out all those RSVPs and they would get double the capacity. And the people actually showed. People would start lining up the night before. They would wait overnight. I mean, it’s incredible. Political people told us that this was unprecedented and it had never happened before, and it definitely meant something. So we knew that something was going on. And the media was there. They could count the crowds at a Hillary Clinton rally and a Donald Trump rally. They knew. They just didn’t report it.”
THE OCTOBER SURPRISE
Presidential campaigns are fluid events with only a few crucial dates that are sacrosanct. Among them are the date of the candidate’s announcement to run; the dates of the various state primaries, conventions, and caucuses; the filings for the Federal Election Commission; and finally the actual presidential election. But there is another date that in recent years has emerged as one of the most important of all. And that is the so-called October surprise. The latter, of course, is not a formal event, but in the last few decades it has become increasingly dependable. It refers to the last-minute surprise that a campaign will launch, just before the election, to tilt the results its way.
Timing is everything. If a story is released too early, it may be overcome and negated by Election Day. If it is released too late, it may be rejected by suspicious voters or even unknown by many it never reached.
An October surprise can be positive or negative. In 1972, with the Vietnam War raging, the national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, held a press conference at the White House on October 26, announcing that “peace is at hand.”5 It was only days before a huge landslide victory for the presidential incumbent, Richard Nixon.
On the other hand, in 2000, the campaign for Democratic presidential nominee, Al Gore, released a story that many years before a youthful George W. Bush had been found guilty of drunk driving in Maine. The Democrats had been sitting on the information since the previous May. It came too little, too late.
In 2008, only days before the election, the campaign of the Republican nominee, John McCain, released a story about the aunt of the Democratic nominee, Barack Obama, which asserted that she was living illegally in the United States. It had no impact. The surprise has to have time to soak down into the layers of voter strata.
In 2016, one of Donald Trump’s old partners from the entertainment industry, NBC, was emerging as one of his biggest and most earnest political enemies. The media giant had the right weapon and the right political experience for timing an October surprise. That summer, NBC had covered the Olympics in Brazil. One of its on-air anchors, Billy Bush, had been talking off-camera into a corporate microphone, with the sound picked up by engineers in New York City. Bush was overheard talking about a “tape of Trump being a real dog.”6
NBC’s employees went on the hunt, and after days of researching ultimat
ely found the videotape of Donald Trump appearing on Access Hollywood. The candidate was using lewd, sexually explicit language.
Of course, this was not the first time that a presidential candidate’s private life had become an open scandal, but in earlier years public servants were spared such humiliation. Early in my research on presidential children, for example, I would speak on the phone with Warren G. Harding’s daughter, who had been born out of wedlock. Over the years the national media had railed at her when she dared to speak up publicly. Media was protective of presidents, who they needed as sources. Such stories were never raised when Harding was a candidate, and long afterward, the Harding family would fiercely defend their family torchbearer. In the case of the Harding love child, DNA evidence eventually confirmed her remarkable claims, but only after she had died.7
FDR was declared by history books to be impotent from polio. Journalists respected this idea and never raised the issue of his infidelities during his political campaigns. We know today that FDR likely had many sex partners and actually died while he was with a favorite mistress in Warm Springs, Georgia.8
According to his biographer, LBJ was serviced by young ladies on his White House staff.9 There is John F. Kennedy, whose philandering was legend—but never mentioned when he campaigned for office.
And of course, there is the long saga of Bill Clinton. There is the story of numerous events with numerous partners, including his own intern and his own devoted supporter and fundraiser who claimed sexual assault, and the dubious role that his wife, Senator Hillary Clinton, played in dealing with these stories and events.