by Doug Wead
In the book Let Trump Be Trump, coauthored by Trump’s former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and his deputy campaign manager David Bossie, there is a slightly different story. Bossie says he had just received the “insider” information from the source at ABC when he ran into the campaign’s CEO, Steve Bannon, in a hallway. 19 They huddled to talk about the numbers when they were joined by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner and, later, the Republican National Committee chairman, Reince Priebus. According to Bossie’s account, they had stepped out onto a balcony that overlooked Fifth Avenue. And there they had reviewed the numbers. According to Bossie, Jared then called Trump and broke the news.
I asked Bossie how his account could differ from Trump’s own recollection, and he was adamant. “My story is accurate.”20
A couple of years after Election Night, visiting with Jared and Ivanka at their house in Georgetown, I asked them to talk about that moment.
“We were around the war room,” Jared said. This would have been on the fourteenth floor.
“Bossie, Bannon, and Stepien came over to me with the exit polls they had gotten from ABC.” The “Stepien” that Jared was referring to was Bill Stepien, a former campaign manager for Chris Christie’s gubernatorial campaigns and a critical player in the 2016 Trump presidential run. He would go on to become the White House political director in the Trump administration.
“We went through the numbers,” Jared Kushner remembered. “They weren’t great. I said, ‘I guess I better call the boss.’ I had promised I would call him when I got the exits. I always called him before something big happened.”
I wanted to get this part of the story straight. Other people had characterized Jared’s conversation with his father-in-law. Were the others listening in?
Jared smiled. “Nobody heard what I said to my father-in-law. I stepped away from the others for privacy. I moved down the hall. They couldn’t have heard me.
“I called up to him and said, ‘Look we just got these exits in from the networks. They are not looking great. But you know, they’ve always screwed us on every poll before, so who knows where these numbers really are? Our people vote late, so these could be inaccurate, and also Stepien thinks the methodology is a little off. He doesn’t like the way they are doing their weighting. But I just wanted you to know this.’
“He said to me, ‘You know, Jared, look, it will be what it will be. We left it all on the field. I don’t think we could have worked any harder. I’m very proud of the job we did here. And I’m proud of you. I’m proud of the team. And tonight, regardless of how it turns out, let’s go and have some fun.’
“Basically, he was pretty cool. I was just telling him that he had lost the election. And he couldn’t have been more at ease, actually more gracious, about it.
“He told me afterward that right after he hung up he said, ‘Melania, Jared just told me that we lost!’” Jared laughed at this moment. He was amused that Trump had figured out more than he had meant to tell him. “I guess he had heard it in my voice because I hadn’t actually said that. Actually, I was trying to sugarcoat it with him a little bit. But it was going to be what it was going to be.”
Ivanka jumped into the conversation. “And I think my father believed it was really bad news because Jared had always dismissed such numbers. He largely argued against the polls that were coming from the networks. He knew how flawed they were. And this time he was more accepting.”
So, who had first told Trump that he had lost the election? He himself said that Ivanka had called him.
“Well, I did,” she said, laughing, as she recalled that emotional day. “I called several times throughout the evening and, of course, I passed on the information that Jared was giving me.”
It appears that both accounts are accurate, having happened at different times. And Bossie’s story was accurate as well. All of the stories were told from different angles and from different perspectives.
WE DON’T STOP NOW
“I called a friend of mine,” Jared said. “He was someone who would have some information. I asked, ‘What are you hearing?’ And he said, ‘I’m not talking to anybody, but I can tell you that the networks have been screwing with you guys the whole time. What makes you think that tonight will be any different? In a general election nobody really knows. It’s such a big sample going at one time. In the primaries they can get a feel for what will happen, but in a general election it is such a big sample that they cannot really know for sure. The models are too unpredictable.’
“So, after that I called Hope and Boris Epshteyn, a senior adviser, and said, ‘Let’s get everybody on the drive time radio.’ So we got Ivanka, Don, Eric, Rudy, and Ivanka’s father calling into the radio shows. We were thinking, ‘What more can we do?’
“Hope called Donald and said, ‘Do you want to do these with us?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, why not?’ And then he called back and said, ‘Hope, can you call into these radio stations for me, when I call in they keep hanging up on me.’ The producers at the stations thought they were prank calls—not really Donald Trump.’”
It turned out that Lara Trump had been on the phones even before anyone from Hope Hicks’s team had called to ask for help. She was a working machine. If she could compete in triathlons, hey, what were a few more hours without food or sleep?
“So, I did a ton of interviews the day of the election,” Lara said, “and on every single one of them I remember people saying, ‘So what do you think the chances really are that Donald Trump is going to win?’
“And on all of them I was one hundred percent. ‘Donald Trump is going to win. There’s no doubt in my mind.’ And, of course, I get off the show and I’m thinking, ‘I’m going to sound like such an idiot if this doesn’t happen.’
“Around three or four o’clock in the afternoon we got some polling information that the panhandle of Florida needed help. It was an hour behind us here on the East Coast. So they asked for Don and Eric and me to do radio. So we said, ‘Absolutely, yes.’
“We worked the radio until the polls closed at eight p.m. that night.
“Meanwhile, as a woman, you’ve got some getting ready to do. So, I was home in our apartment with headphones on, doing radio and trying my best to change and do my hair and my makeup. It was crazy, but we were not leaving anything on the table. We were going to do everything we could to win.”
Jared Kushner remembers that feeling. “That night, with everybody working right up to the end, well, it was very special moment. We were a scrappy campaign.”
Don Trump Jr. remembers the pace: “Election Day I woke up at six a.m. and started doing MSNBC and CNN. From three p.m. until the polls closed I think I did forty-eight radio interviews. Moving from east to west, trying to find the key places where our numbers were telling us that we needed to go.
“By the afternoon, there was screaming all over the place. ‘Hey, Florida is in jeopardy, we need votes from the panhandle of Florida!’ Trying to get the message out. ‘Hey, if you are in line when the polls close, it’s not too late, you can still vote. Stay there, we need you.’”
“We were a three-man band,” Donald Trump Jr. said. “It was me, Charlie Kirk, and Tommy Hicks, now cochairman of the RNC. We had been together throughout the campaign, so it was comforting to see them in the final moments. Tommy was never that big on politics, but he was my friend and he helped me, traveling with me, helping me with logistics. For many days it was just Tommy, Charlie Kirk, and myself out there trying to get votes.
“I remember only two weeks before the election, we were in a Best Western outside of Detroit. It was nine thirty at night. I still had to do a call in to Hannity, and I looked at them and I said, ‘Man, am I hungry.’
“They say, ‘Yeah, and that makes sense because we haven’t had a meal since yesterday breakfast.’
“I lost twenty-five pounds. I had to bargain. I would say, ‘Well I can eat or I can make three fundraising calls.’ ‘I can eat or I can do another radio.’ The whole
process was fueled by Red Bull and testosterone and an incredible desire to win.
Don Jr. had spoken at seventy-five rallies in Wisconsin and Michigan during the last two weeks of the campaign. They would win Wisconsin by 1 percent and Michigan by 0.3 percent. “So on Election Day,” Don said, “I can tell you, we left nothing on the table. Nothing.”
In those last hours of voting in the Florida Panhandle, while he was in the middle of a radio interview, Don Trump Jr. texted Sean Hannity at Fox News.
Get me on TV. At that moment, Don Trump Jr. could get on just about any show. They had to carry Florida.
I’m in the middle of a show, came back the text. It was either from Hannity or his producer.
Then get me on the next show, right after yours.
BRAD’S COUNTER DATA
Inside the family and the hyperactive inner circle surrounding Donald Trump, there was a positive power that drove them on. The adrenaline that comes from work sometimes produces a pleasant sedative. But when they stopped and paused, as Lara described, they could feel the oppressive certainty of loss that hung, like a cloud, over the rooms in Trump Tower.
The lifeline, if one were inclined to take it, came from Brad Parscale, the digital media director who worked closely with Eric Trump and Jared Kushner. Using his own contacts and numbers, Brad had built an independent “skunkworks” Election Night operation. His numbers were still surprisingly positive.
He continued to insist, even after the evening news reports were coming in, that Donald Trump would win 306 electoral votes. “I had the world’s best prediction model. I saw the path. I was using probability scores to determine where we were. And it was based on the actions of the people who had donated and clicked the buttons. I was constructing probability based on turnout.”21 Brad’s reports, the ones printed out on Excel pages, with color codes to demonstrate the numbers, were plastered around his office as defiant rebuttals to the naysayers.
On Election Night, while other Republican campaign workers were sullen, accepting the worst, Brad Parscale was celebrating, flying paper planes around the situation room and his nearby office on the fourteenth floor. As far as Brad was concerned, Donald Trump was going to win. He passed his positive numbers on to Trump himself and to anyone else who would listen. And some believed. But the numbers were irritating and confusing to others. It all added to the roller coaster of emotions that were roiling the tower.
According to Donald Trump, he had already met privately with his wife, Melania. “Baby, I’ll tell you what. We’re not going to win tonight, because the polls have come out, and it’s looking bad.
“But, you know what, I’m okay with it. I couldn’t have worked any harder. You can’t do any worse than that. I mean, I just couldn’t have done it. And if I lose, I lose. And you know what? If I lose, I’m going to have a nice, easy life. We can all relax, together, right?”22
But Melania, who had consistently told him from the beginning that he would win, would have none of it. Again, at this moment, when the experts all agreed it was over, and it was being proclaimed on television and he was giving her the bad news, she was still not convinced. She listened politely and then then answered back once again. “It’s not over,” she told him. “You are going to win.”
Eric Trump had lived with Brad’s numbers, and at this late hour, with time running out, he still believed. But he believed also partly because of his own experience during the campaign.
“So, there was this discrepancy between what I was seeing day to day across America and what I was seeing on television,” Eric said. “What I was seeing with my own eyes and what the New York Times was saying. On Election Day they were giving him one-point-nine percent chance to win. Declaring that there was a zero road map to an Electoral College victory, because he was not going to win Ohio, he was not going to win Pennsylvania, he was not going to win Iowa, he was not going to win North Carolina, and Florida was out of the question.”
Donald Trump may have been a little skeptical, but he did not totally reject Brad Parscale’s numbers. He wanted to believe. Late in the day, he patiently listened and followed the reasoning. But it was hard to fathom that so many media experts would put their reputations on the line and be so publicly and utterly convinced that it was a lost cause.
“Their numbers are all based on the wrong turnout probabilities,” Parscale insisted. “You are going to win, sir.”
“Well, you may be right,” Trump said to Brad, apparently not wanting to hurt his feelings, letting him down a little easier than they had at CBS, where only a few days ago they had laughed in his face, “but if you are wrong, it will still be okay.”
During this conversation, someone asked the candidate what he would do if the networks were right—which it appeared was going to happen. What should they plan? Would he stop by the party at the Hilton to greet the people who were waiting? They needed to know how to handle it.
“You know what?” Trump said, “I’m just going to go downstairs and make a statement and the next day I’ll get on my plane and go play golf in Ireland.”23 That was it. That was how the marathon presidential campaign would end. Right where it had begun. At the bottom of that escalator in Trump Tower. Or out on the streets of Fifth Avenue.
NOTES
1. This quote of Donald Trump comes from Jared Kushner, overhearing his father-in-law during a phone conversation on Election Night 2016. Kushner relayed the conversation to me in a 2019 interview.
2. Interview with Brad Parscale, January 12, 2019.
3. This quote from Nick Ayers is attributed to him by Brad Parscale in an interview in 2019.
4. Doug Wead, Game of Thorns (New York: Center Street, 2017), 41.
5. https://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/why-is-donald-trump-in-michigan-and-wisconsin
6. https://www.gq.com/story/inside-donald-trumps-election-night-war-room
7. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SG1HVMd0Urs
8. https://www.dailywire.com/news/10611/bare-breasted-women-protest-trumps-polling-station-hank-berrien
9. http://www.nbcnews.com/card/clinton-arrives-new-york-polling-place-vote-n679621
10. https://nypost.com/2017/04/30/the-moment-hillary-clinton-was-forced-to-give-up-her-dream/
11. https://www.gq.com/story/inside-donald-trumps-election-night-war-room
12. http://pagesix.com/2015/07/08/if-hilary-makes-it-to-the-white-house-so-will-huma-abedin/
13. https://www.gq.com/story/inside-donald-trumps-election-night-war-room
14. https://www.gq.com/story/inside-donald-trumps-election-night-war-room
15. https://www.politico.com/story/2017/12/06/abc-data-trump-campaign-reprimand-284327
16. https://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/donald-trump-wisconsin-232605
17. https://www.gq.com/story/inside-donald-trumps-election-night-war-room
18. https://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/donald-trump-wisconsin-232605
19. Corey Lewandowski and David N. Bossie, Let Trump Be Trump (New York: Center Street, 2017).
20. I spoke with David Bossie in the green room at Fox News in Washington, DC, in February 2019.
21. Interview with Brad Parscale, January 12, 2019.
22. https://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/donald-trump-wisconsin-232605
23. Interview with Brad Parscale, January 12, 2019.
8
THE BIGGEST UPSET IN AMERICAN HISTORY
“Look at these crying Clinton supporters, imagine how they feel?”
—DONALD TRUMP1
Not long after Donald Trump had retreated to his apartment with Melania, he got a call from Ivanka. She asked him to come down and watch the returns with the team. He agreed and spent the next two hours watching the returns in the big conference room on the fourteenth floor. This was the floor where several senior staff, including David Bossie, Steve Bannon, and Kellyanne Conway, had their offices.
CNN had begun its television coverage at six p.m., even while the Trump family were still working the phone
s, calling into drive time radio shows. Everyone at the networks was still confident that Hillary Clinton would win, but the anchors and contributors were making an effort to create some excitement to hold the viewers for as long as possible.
Jake Tapper promised there “could be new surprises,” although he wouldn’t say where that might happen. The Democrats had filed a lawsuit in North Carolina to keep the polls open an hour longer. That was the big news. The CNN television cameras showed long lines at polling places in Raleigh and Durham, where it was already dark. Jeff Zeleny of CNN tried to muster some excitement by saying that Clinton’s team saw North Carolina as the closest contest of the night and there were “urgent concerns in both North Carolina and Ohio. But they are confident in Florida and Michigan.”
CNN’s Trump correspondent, reporting from Trump’s headquarters at the Hilton Hotel, claimed that his campaign’s own “key internal metrics do not show a win.” The correspondent had obviously not spoken to Bill Stepien or Brad Parscale.
One of the more ominous early data reports showed a positive/negative ratio on the candidates. Fifty-four percent of voters viewed Hillary Clinton as unfavorable. But a whopping 61 percent of all voters saw Donald Trump as unfavorable. Yet somebody had to win.
The opening commentary on CBS included the veteran Bob Schieffer saying, “I think we have all … thought that this was going to go to Hillary Clinton. I think it’s important though, that if she is going to win, she needs to get Virginia. I think it will be extremely difficult for Donald Trump to get the presidency without Virginia.”2
Before the election coverage was over, Donald Trump would do exactly that. He would win the presidency without Virginia.