by Doug Wead
While Donald Trump’s Access Hollywood scandal did not involve any physical activity, it certainly involved graphic language that was hard on the ears.
NBC’s lawyers apparently reviewed the tape for days. Meanwhile, producers readied and polished their stories and waited for the right political timing. When it was learned that WikiLeaks was planning its own anti–Hillary Clinton October surprise, that they would be releasing voice recordings of the candidate’s secret speeches at major banks, contradicting her public positions, the network decided to act. On the same day of the WikiLeaks dump, the Access Hollywood video was leaked to the Washington Post, which dutifully broke the story. A day later, NBC ran with its long-planned production. The story promised to knock Donald Trump out of the presidential race.
Ivanka Trump, the candidate’s daughter, defended her father. Privately, she urged him to fight back. “It’s eleven years old, you have to fight back. You have to say you’re sorry, but you have to fight back.”10
Trump answered immediately. “Everyone who knows me knows these words don’t reflect who I am,” he said. “I’ve never said I’m a perfect person, nor pretended to be someone I’m not. I’ve said and done things I regret, and the words released today on this more-than-a-decade-old video is one of them. I said it was wrong. And I apologized.
“I’ve traveled the country talking about change for America. But my travels have also changed me. I pledge to be a better man tomorrow, and will never, ever, let you down.”11
A statement from his wife, Melania, followed. “The words my husband used are unacceptable and offensive to me. This does not represent the man that I know. He has the heart and mind of a leader. I hope people will accept his apology, as I have, and focus on the important issues facing our nation and the world.”12
Hillary Clinton, who apparently knew the story was coming, posted on Twitter, “This is horrific. We cannot allow this man to become president.”13
The following Monday, October 10, 2016, an NBC–Wall Street Journal poll showed Donald Trump’s national numbers dropping precipitously. In the head-to-head contest, Clinton was winning 52 to 38 percent.
Republican public figures were openly abandoning Trump. House Speaker Paul Ryan told fellow congressmen to “do what’s best for you in your district.”14 South Dakota senator John Thune, a Republican, called on Donald Trump to withdraw from the race and let Mike Pence be “our nominee effective immediately.”15
As I wrote later, “Trump adviser Steve Bannon urged the candidate to bring Bill Clinton’s victims to the next presidential debate. They should just be there to shake Hillary’s confidence.”16 It would be an outrageous, nakedly desperate move.
JARED KUSHNER REMEMBERS
What happened next was crucial to the campaign and has been the subject of many books and news articles. One of the most critical players in the drama has never spoken up about it until now. In the winter of 2019, I sat down with Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and talked to him about this dramatic time, when decisions were made that would change the course of American history.
“I remember talking to Paul Ryan earlier in the campaign,” Jared said, “and I remember reporting to him about the enthusiasm at the Trump rallies and the feeling out across the country. He compared it to his last days of campaigning with Mitt Romney.
“And he said, ‘Well, you know, we believed in the end too. We had big rallies too. We thought we were going to win.’ So they were jaded by their own experience, and they just didn’t believe that our experience was any different. But we had a lot more confidence, because our database was really strong.”17
Paul Ryan had been the vice presidential running mate for former governor Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee in the 2012 election against the incumbent, President Obama.
“The Billy Bush thing was kind of critical,” Jared said. He was referring to the Access Hollywood video, the October surprise. “Our online donations went from about $1.4 million a day to $2.6 million a day.”
Wait a minute. Could this have been true? Had the Trump donations actually increased even while the scandal caused a collapse in national support for Trump’s candidacy?
“What happened is that our people started rallying around us,” Jared Kushner told me. “As the Republican establishment started to abandon us and started condemning Trump, the rank-and-file Republicans rose to support us. The RNC quickly learned that the base of their party was actually with Trump.”
It would be a rude awakening.
“We had this joint funding account at the RNC. And we were supposed to get $45 million sent to us on Friday. But when the Billy Bush video hit, all the RNC folks jumped on the trains and left Washington. Basically, we didn’t get any money.
“So, we had a meeting called at my father-in-law’s apartment in New York on Saturday. Reince Priebus was supposed to be there.”
In his book Let Me Finish, the New Jersey governor and Trump adviser Chris Christie writes that he spoke with the RNC chairman, Reince Priebus, that Saturday morning. According to Christie, Priebus was calling from the train as it approached Philadelphia. He wanted to make sure that Christie was going to be at the meeting too. It was getting politically dangerous even being seen with Donald Trump. Christie assured him that he would be there.
“Don’t lie to me,” Priebus said. He obviously didn’t want to risk it otherwise. It was that bad.
And then Priebus added, “Oh, I hate this. I hate this. This is awful. It’s terrible. I can’t believe we’re in this position.”18
Jared gave me the story from inside the family. “Ivanka and I did a run in the morning and then went to the meeting at Trump Tower. Bannon was there. Don Jr. was there. Hope Hicks was there, wearing workout clothes. Hope goes, ‘He’s up there answering phone calls from journalists.’
“Somebody said, ‘We better get up there fast.’ And everybody laughed.”
Hope Hicks was the press secretary and communications director for the Trump presidential campaign. She would later serve as communications director in the Trump White House.
“So, my father-in-law was telling journalists, one after the other, that he was never going to drop out. Which was the right thing to say. We went up and started talking. Chris Christie confronted my father-in-law and emphasized that he should apologize. Rudy Giuliani showed up and he was solid.”
Rudolph Giuliani was the former mayor of New York City and a longtime friend of the Trump family. All of them admired him. He had been an adviser to the campaign for the past year.
“Reince showed up and told my father-in-law, ‘You basically have two options. You can either drop out or you can have the worst defeat in the history of presidential politics.’
“And Trump answered back, ‘Nice, I don’t want either.’”
Jared Kushner was nagged by another problem. What if the Republican National Committee pulled its support? There was talk that they would shift all their resources to the Senate and House races. If so, the presidential race was over.
Shortly after the dramatic confrontation between Donald Trump and Reince Priebus, Jared Kushner pulled the RNC chairman aside, away from the group. “Look,” he said to Priebus, “if we don’t get our money I can’t promise you what he will do. He may decide to run against the Republicans in all of these different places. The base is with him. It is not with the Republican Party. So you better know that.”
Then, Jared cut to the chase: “Look, we had an agreement. Don’t try to disqualify him and nullify the agreement. You better honor the documentation. Don’t try to mess around.”
And then Jared added a deadline: “Look, we’ll know on Monday. We’ll know if our money shows up.”
On Monday the money was there.
Meanwhile, for whatever it was worth, Donald Trump counterpunched with a fiery Tweet: “Bill Clinton has actually abused women and Hillary has bullied, attacked, shamed and intimidated his victims. We will discuss this more in the coming days. See you at the debate on Su
nday.”19
Donald Trump Jr. was not happy with the way his father had been treated during the debates. “The networks and the tech people employed to run the events had been very happy to have my father destroy the other Republican contenders during the GOP debates,” he said. “They had expected to be running against Jeb Bush or Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio. As far as they were concerned, our win made things easier for Hillary.
“All of that changed when we got into the debates with Hillary Clinton. In the very first debate there was a lot of screwing around with his microphone. So it didn’t interfere with what went out on television, that would make the networks look bad, but it did mean that the studio audience couldn’t hear him and they wouldn’t be able to react to his comments. That would make him sound unsupported by the audience and would throw him off his game. It was really quite brazen.”
At the next presidential debate, in St. Louis, Missouri, the Trump team had its own surprise for the television networks. Steve Bannon’s ploy was uncorked. The ladies abused by Bill Clinton and, arguably, victimized again by Hillary Clinton’s efforts to keep them quiet showed up to proclaim that while Trump’s sins were verbal, Bill’s and Hillary’s were physical. It was a bizarre moment. Thus, what most expected to be the ill-fated flight of the Trump presidential campaign was held together by baling wire, Scotch tape, rubber bands, and spit. But could it actually get off the ground again and fly?
MOMENTUM ON THE BUS
Lara Trump had her own method for handling the emotions of winning or losing, and her own style of bracing for defeat, if that was what was coming.
“I think we were all cautiously optimistic. It’s the same thing I do here in the winter.” She looked out on the cold city from her skyscraper window. “I know we have another month of cold weather and, guess what? If it gets warm in two weeks, then I win.” She keeps her expectations low, and anything better is a victory.
“We knew from the numbers we had internally, we knew from the feeling on the ground, that something was missing in the news. But then it is so hard to ignore when you turn on the TV and they say Donald Trump has a one percent chance of winning. How do you rationalize that?
“The one moment I specifically remember that gave us all hope was three days before the election when Hillary got rid of those fireworks on a barge in the Hudson. I remember all of us being together. I don’t even remember what state we were in. But I remember we heard that news. And we thought, ‘They know, they know what we know. They know that something is off. They don’t want those fireworks out there because they are going to look so stupid when they are not going off.”
The last week before the election, the ladies on the bus were living on adrenaline. Someone on the team had discovered DJ Khaled’s popular rap song, “All I Do Is Win.” They played it over and over, day and night, as they cruised down the interstate, zooming past another glowing Wendy’s or McDonald’s or IHOP, on their way to the next reception at a Hampton Inn or in a Marriott ballroom.
“All I do is win, win, win, no matter what …”
Lara was almost giddy remembering the feeling. “Oh my God, we played that song over and over, all day and night, leading right up to the election. ‘All I do is win, win, win, no matter what.’
And then the bus tour ran out of gas. November 8 was upon them.
The Trump women bus tour never got wide media coverage for one simple reason: It contradicted the narrative that Donald Trump was a racist. Of the six ladies on the bus—Lynne Patton, Katrina Pierson, Diamond and Silk, Omarosa Manigault Newman, and Lara Trump—all were African American except for Lara.
The tour ended in North Carolina, where the ladies all hugged each other and Glenn, their dedicated driver, before catching flights back home across the country. Lara, meanwhile, spent the rest of the day with her father-in-law, traveling to rallies in Pennsylvania and New Hampshire before heading back to New York City to be together as a family.
“It was a very hard juxtaposition between what we felt,” Lara told me, “what we just really knew, deep down, and what we were being told by the media. If you ever wondered if the media was giving you the facts or not, well, that was the defining moment for me. These people knew all along how strong we were in the polls, and how the American people were feeling, but it didn’t fit their narrative. They hid the story of what was happening from all of those earnest people out across the country. They kept it hidden.”
NOTES
1. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotes attributed to Lara Trump in this chapter come from conversations, emails, and interviews in 2019.
2. https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/01/27/lara-trump-no-let-them-eat-cake-figure-editorials-debates/2695572002/
3. https://www.chicksonright.com/blog/2019/01/23/lara-trump-under-fire-over-controversial-remarks-on-the-government-shutdown/
4. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotes from Don Trump Jr. in this chapter come from conversations, emails, and interviews conducted in 2019.
5. https://pastdaily.com/2016/10/26/henry-kissinger-october-26-1972/
6. http://www.businessinsider.com/how-the-donald-trump-tape-got-leaked-2016-10/
7. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/president-warren-hardings-love-child-confirmed-dna-testing/story?id=33060408
8. https://nypost.com/2012/11/25/the-many-loves-of-fdr/
9. https://potus-geeks.livejournal.com/694586.html
10. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/10/trump-campaign-final-days.html
11. http://www.businessinsider.com/donald-trump-women-video-apology-billy-bush-clinton-2016-10
12. http://heavy.com/news/2016/10/read-melania-trump-responds-to-donald-trumps-vulgar-2005-tape-what-did-reaction-billy-bush-statement-wife/
13. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-recorded-having-extremely-lewd-conversation-about-women-in-2005/2016/10/07/3b9ce776-8cb4-11e6-bf8a-3d26847eeed4_story.html
14. http://www.businessinsider.com/paul-ryan-defend-donald-trump-campaign-2016-10
15. http://www.latimes.com/nation/politics/trailguide/la-na-trailguide-updates-south-dakota-s-thune-joins-chorus-1475946585-htmlstory.html
16. Doug Wead, Game of Thorns (New York: Center Street, 2017), 293.
17. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotes attributed to Jared Kushner in this chapter are taken from conversations or interviews conducted in 2019.
18. Chris Christie, Let Me Finish (New York: Hachette, 2019), 320.
19. http://www.cnn.com/2016/10/07/politics/donald-trump-campaign-crisis/
7
ELECTION NIGHT FOG
“Melania, Jared just told me that we lost!”
—DONALD TRUMP1
It can be confusing, trying to understand how things transpired on Election Night in Trump Tower. For one thing, the witnesses have different and conflicting memories, including the president himself. And Trump Tower was surprisingly empty of credentialed journalists. There were no historians. On Election Night, almost all the journalists had been embedded with the Clinton campaign, simply because they believed she would win. Even some of those correspondents assigned to cover Trump stayed camped at the Hilton Hotel, the scene of the postelection party. No one wanted to venture near the tower and be associated with the loser.
The historians were busy doing television shows. Some of them could actually be seen on the streets of Manhattan, having abandoned their limousines, which were stuck in traffic. They were accompanied by their public relations escorts, walking at a fast pace up to Columbus Circle to do CNN or walking down to West Fifty-Seventh Street to do CBS. Some would venture onto Fifth Avenue—it was the only way to reach the NBC studios at Rockefeller Center—but they carefully avoided passing too close to Trump Tower, lest anyone get the wrong impression.
One famous presidential historian and his entourage were seen in the lobby of the spectacular Peninsula Hotel. It was Hillary Clinton’s headquarters. An observer said that he and his assistants looked like a gaggle of ducks, shuffling along behind Clinton staf
fers, angling for a conversation, waiting for some bread crumbs to drop. The power was clearly shifting to the first woman president in American history, and he wanted to be there ahead of the competition. He never even bothered to stop by Trump Tower, where he could have feasted unchallenged on riches. He could have put those brief moments in the bank, just in case. But then, there was no “just in case.” Hillary was going to win.
Keeping track of locations within Trump Tower itself is a challenge. It was one of the reasons I later decided to make the trip to New York to walk around the Trump property myself. For example, the city has its own creative building codes, which makes numbering a floor almost impossible to score. A floor does not have to correspond to its actual position in a building. A floor can be named whatever you want. “The John F. Kennedy floor.” Or “The Dwight Eisenhower floor.” And since offices and apartments on higher floors were worth more money than those on lower floors, smart builders and real estate entrepreneurs simply named floors with higher numbers. That explains how the Trump Tower can be a fifty-eight-story skyscraper, while Donald and Melania Trump live on the sixty-fifth and sixty-sixth floors. No, they are not living in the clouds.
It also explains how the so-called Election Night war room could be on the fourteenth floor and staffers could walk down a back stairway, one floor down, to the “headquarters” on the fifth floor. When Ivanka Trump told me that she was in the “war room” but could hear the shouting and cheering from the headquarters, it now made sense. It was just one floor away; the noise was echoing up the stairwell.
It gets worse. It turns out that there was more than one “war room.” There was the acknowledged war room on the so-called fourteenth floor, where senior campaign staff had offices, and which the Trump family would frequently visit on Election Night, but there were at least two other rooms that other, less senior staff members referred to as the “war room.” It mattered, because sometimes a junior staffer had a bigger story to tell than a senior staffer. One had to know the building through the eyes and personal experiences of multiple persons.