Inside Trump's White House

by Doug Wead

  Nancy Cordes, covering the Clinton campaign for CBS, said, “They’re not popping the champagne corks just yet, but they probably are thinking about how good it might taste. And that’s because all of the data they’re seeing … matches up with what they expected. Good news for the Clinton campaign, because they have so many paths to those two hundred and seventy electoral votes. They are especially heartened by that turnout in key Democratic counties in Florida,” Cordes said. “They can win without winning Florida, but Donald Trump cannot.”3

  She then added a message that drove a stake into the heart of Brad Parscale and his theories. “Other things that are encouraging to the Clinton campaign tonight? They are not seeing that secret Trump voter that the Trump campaign had been insisting was out there, that [voter who] wasn’t talking to pollsters but was going to mobilize on Election Day.”4

  Apparently the polling information that Don Trump Jr., Eric Trump, Brad Parscale, and others had passed along to the television networks, information that had provoked laughter, had been immediately passed on to the Hillary Clinton campaign.

  At seven p.m., the first returns were coming in. These were real votes. Trump had carried Kentucky and then Indiana but that was to be expected. The big news had Clinton up in Florida. And then it started to tip to Donald Trump and then back to Hillary Clinton. “Too early,” people said.

  Brad Parscale’s office became a refreshing oasis of hope for those less masochistic. Pastor Darrell Scott, the cofounder of the National Diversity Coalition for Trump, was one of those. “I just kept in Brad’s office because everyone was happy. They knew they were going to win.”5

  “The campaign owed my company $4.5 million on Election Night,” Brad remembers. “So I will confess to occasional moments of anxiety. I knew that if the Trump campaign lost the election it would be almost impossible for them to pay. In any other campaign I wouldn’t see a penny of it. That’s how politics worked.”6

  Jared and the senior staff were in the data room with Bill Stepien, getting immediate returns from their computers. Trump called down, “Why don’t you come up here? They’ve got TVs up on the walls, all the channels. This is the show right here. It’s beautiful. So you are staring at computer screens and you are only getting it five minutes earlier. This is better.”

  They agreed, and the staff soon gathered around Trump in the conference war room.

  A commentator on CNN was pointing out that Clinton would likely win because of her edge in the Electoral College contest. She went into the night with a likely advantage of 268–204. John King pointed out that it would be incredibly hard for Trump to win without Florida, which he was losing once again.

  At 7:35 p.m., Hillary Clinton was winning North Carolina by 100,000 votes. Lara Trump, tasked by her father-in-law to win that state, was still on the phones at her nearby apartment, doing radio shows.

  By 8:00 p.m., Hillary Clinton was declared the likely winner in Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Maryland, Delaware, and Rhode Island, and she was leading in Florida and North Carolina. Trump had added some southern states. When a report showed her taking the lead in Ohio, with 12 percent of the vote tabulated, CNN’s John King declared, “If this holds up, it’s all over.”

  Thirty minutes later, CNN’s Dana Bash reported news from Republican sources that claimed “models show Donald Trump will lose Florida.” Now more than half of the vote was recorded in North Carolina, and Clinton was leading by 150,000 votes. It was 51.9 percent. CNN host Wolf Blitzer concluded, “That’s significant.”7

  A PARTY IN THE TRUMP KITCHEN

  And yet while Hillary Clinton’s victory was at times tantalizingly close, the numbers in the most contested states were not final. Sometimes it swung back to Donald Trump. In Ohio, Virginia, Florida, North Carolina, and New Hampshire, there was no clear winner. While there were still only early returns in Michigan and Pennsylvania, votes from the rural areas had Trump gaining and then surpassing Clinton, although it was assumed that this would not last.

  Nevertheless, commentators on all of the networks were admitting that Trump looked better than they had thought possible. He was winning an early game of expectations. He might not actually win the presidency but he was putting the fear of God into the national media. Jake Tapper turned out to have been more correct than he knew when he’d said “there could be new surprises.” Clinton was not running away with this. On CNN, Wolf Blitzer said, “Trump is doing remarkably well.”8

  Just before nine p.m., Donald Trump went upstairs with his family and senior staffers. Brad Parscale went with the crowd. “I walked up to Governor Mike Pence and said, ‘You’re going to be the next vice president.’ He seemed to be in shock.

  “And then I walked up to Mr. Trump and I said, ‘It’s just a matter of time now. Nobody wants to be the first to call it. But it’s over, sir. My raw data says, it’s over. I have the results. The AP has just verified them. And you’re going to be the president.’”

  Trump was not so sure. Only a few hours before, the very same AP had confirmed he was going to lose.

  Perhaps remembering Brad Parscale’s earlier visit to CNN, Jake Tapper mused on air, “If this turns out to be the way that the Trump advisers expect, it will put the polling industry out of business. I don’t know of one poll that had this happening.” Tapper was wrong. As Ivanka Trump reminded me, the USC–Los Angeles Times poll had seen it happening, although the man behind the poll was so browbeaten by his colleagues that he had eventually denied his own work, announcing that he, too, thought Hillary would win.9

  The Trump team, now gathered in the family quarters, continued to excitedly discuss the unfolding events, but their deliberations only provoked more questions. The need for more information drew the party down a spiral staircase, to the only available television in the Trump apartments. The group ended up in the kitchen galley, where all of them crowded around a very small television.

  On the staircase, Trump yelled at Parscale, “Brad, you said, ‘It’s over,’ but they haven’t called it!”

  “But they’re going to, sir. It’s just a matter of time.”

  Bannon raised his voice too and said, “Yeah, it’s just a matter of time.”

  “You could tell that Mr. Trump was frustrated,” Brad remembers. “I had been telling him for days now that he would win. He wanted to believe it. And now he was getting just enough information on television to see that maybe, just maybe, I had been right the whole time. I could see it. I could hear it in his voice. He wanted it to be right, but he was frustrated. I knew him.”

  The downstairs kitchen was not a large room. Donald Trump does not cook for himself. It’s described as more of a galley for staff.

  “He doesn’t have a lot of television sets in his apartment,” Brad explained. “So we were all crammed in there waiting for the mid-Atlantic states to come in. We were all watching on this tiny little television in the kitchen.”

  “Isn’t it funny?” Lara said later, describing that night. “It doesn’t matter where a party starts, it usually ends up in the kitchen.”10

  At 9:58 p.m., Trump tweeted a picture of the family, joined by his vice presidential running mate, Mike Pence, and his wife and children.11

  Some said that Donald Trump, Jared Kushner, and Ivanka, the three who were following the numbers most closely, looked glum. “I don’t remember that,” Ivanka told me. “But then, we still didn’t know.” Earlier in the week she and other members of the family had been shown a possible Electoral College win for her father that included taking the state of Nevada. The early returns for Nevada showed that Clinton was likely to win there.

  There were about twenty-five family and staff now gathered around the small television. All of them had phones, and many were talking with staffers in other parts of the tower, at the nearby Hilton Hotel ballroom, at bars and restaurants across Manhattan, and in field offices in Florida, Ohio, and North Carolina. In Trump Tower itself, young staffers were gathered at the headquarters room on the fifth floor,
the data room on the fourth floor, and the “war room” on the fourteenth floor. When there was a positive announcement, their shouts and cheers echoed from the dozens of phones in the Trump kitchen galley, adding to the audience, all of them trying to make sense of the unfolding events.

  In between family pictures and tweets, Donald Trump sat on a chair, glued to the television screen. He was struck by the Election Night party that had been prepared for Hillary Clinton at the Javits Center.

  “Wow! I love the set,” Trump said with wide-eyed appreciation. “I think it’s the most beautiful set I’ve ever seen.” He was impressed by how the Clinton campaign had transformed the venue for their purposes and how good it looked for television. There was the map of the United States on the floor, the elaborate preparations for media, the choreographing of celebrities who would be rationed out onstage throughout the night. And, of course, the glass ceiling. As the first woman president, Hillary Clinton would be breaking the proverbial glass ceiling that night, the ceiling that holds women back from the top positions. Trump appreciated the work and planning it had taken to make it happen, and he seemed to enjoy pointing out some of the flourishes and details to his family.

  Florida was still swinging back and forth. One minute it tilted to Trump and the next minute it tilted back to Clinton. Both sides claimed that large precincts of their voters were still uncounted, the panhandle for Trump and Broward County, near Miami, for Clinton. The media believed this was true for Hillary Clinton but could not bring themselves to believe that Trump could actually take Florida. “I think the Trump campaign is inflating their unreported numbers in the panhandle,” one on-air analyst explained.12

  At 10:21 p.m., there were wild exclamations from the fifth-floor headquarters, and the noise reverberated in the staff’s cell phones in the kitchen galley. Trump had taken Ohio. How had that happened? For Trump, the state was a must-win for the presidency. Historically, Ohio had voted forty-four times for the winning presidential candidate, including two times for Barack Obama. Trump’s chances were still viable. “The path,” as the anchors described it, was still open for him. Members of the family, including Trump’s two oldest sons, finally felt some vindication. What were the executives at ABC thinking now?

  But North Carolina was still too close to call.

  WHEN TRUMP WON NORTH CAROLINA

  Lara Trump was worried. “Given the fact that I was in charge of North Carolina, I was really nervous about any news from that state. When the results started coming in, oh my God, it was so close. It was one of the closest things. Television anchors were sure that Hillary Clinton was going to win it. They said it was going blue this time. And I felt 100 percent responsible for North Carolina. So my father-in-law was sitting in front of me to the left. State after state was coming in. Oh my gosh, I am texting, you know, our state director. ‘What is going on? Do you have any info?’”

  At 11:14 North Carolina was finally declared for Trump.

  “We had it on CNN, because if CNN admits that Donald Trump has actually won a state, you know he did. They always called a state last.” Lara laughed.

  “So once CNN said it was official, ‘Donald Trump wins North Carolina,’ I was like, ‘Oh my gosh. I can die happy now.’

  “Seriously, it was probably the happiest moment of my life save for my wedding day and the birth of my son. My father-in-law literally turned around and looked at me and he goes, ‘That was all you. We won because of you.’

  “By the way, that is so Donald Trump. I mean he gives credit where credit is due. That was the longest night ever. None of us had slept for days and we were up until four o’clock in the morning.”

  Then at eleven thirty, suddenly, without any further fanfare, Trump was declared the winner in Florida. The finality of the decision was stunning. It was a critical win. Television anchors, almost all of them openly Democrats, looked shocked. Could this be right? Was this really final? This information was coming from the Associated Press and the various television network analysts. This was not Brad Parscale; this was coming from the people who only days before had openly laughed at Brad Parscale and his numbers.

  Now came news from the Trump data room on the fourth floor. There Bill Stepien and his team sat in front of monitors and input votes the traditional way, cross-checking exit polls with their own analysis. Earlier in the night, Trump had visited the data room, where he could see all the probabilities on maps, which was easier than making sense of Brad’s dizzying Excel sheets of numbers. Now Stepien was calling up to Trump with analysis that agreed with Parscale. “I think you’ve won, sir. I think this is over.”

  Meanwhile, Brad Parscale got a call from his team. He took in the information and then turned to Donald Trump. “Sir, you’ve just taken Pennsylvania. We got all the raw data. It’s done.”

  “Then why haven’t they called it!” Trump roared in frustrated disbelief.

  “Sir, again, they don’t want to be the one network to call you the winner and get it wrong.”13

  At eleven thirty p.m., Fox News called the state of Wisconsin for Trump. It wasn’t official. CNN, which would withhold from its viewers the same Associated Press numbers that informed all the networks, wouldn’t report this news until close to two thirty a.m. And it wouldn’t be official until 3:04 a.m. Still, this early announcement was a shocker. No one had expected it. Wisconsin hadn’t voted for a Republican presidential candidate in thirty-two years. Hillary Clinton had not even bothered to visit the state. In the last days of the campaign, when they had heard that Donald Trump was holding a rally there, they had openly laughed about it with reporters. “Good, keep visiting Wisconsin!” they had mocked.14

  After the Wisconsin announcement, reality finally hit, and Brad Parscale, who had been “this goofy numbers guy,” whose explanations about “models” and “low propensity” voters made the listeners’ eyes glaze over, was now a genius. Before, they had said to themselves, “Oh sure, Brad. You’re right, and all those people at the New York Times and the television networks, who have been doing this professionally since before you were born? They are all wrong. You’re the only one who’s figured this out. Sure.”

  Now, people in the campaign started coming up to Brad Parscale to shake his hand. “Congratulations,” they said. As if he was the one who had done it.

  “Donald Trump had done it,” Brad said. “I had only reported numbers.”

  On television, the Trump crowd at the Hilton Hotel ballroom had broken into wild celebration. The television anchors were in disbelief.

  TRUMP RIPS UP HIS SPEECH

  Leading up to this moment of victory, Donald Trump had already, internally, experienced a hundred imaginary defeats. All along he had followed what the pollsters had been saying. He knew what the experts had believed. He understood the arguments inside his own campaign. He had been emotionally prepared either way. “If I win, great, I want to win. If I lose.… Well, we will have a great life.”15

  And yet, Donald Trump had chosen to act as if he would win. He had worked hard. He kept doing all the necessary things, right up to the last minute. This, he told friends, was the great lesson to take away from the Mitt Romney experience. Romney had let up during the last days and hours of the 2012 presidential campaign, and the incumbent, President Obama, had pulled away. At least, that was the legend. This time, only minutes before the polls had closed, Trump was still making those phone calls to radio stations in key battleground states.

  For a moment, still uncertain, waiting for television anchors to confirm what his own team was telling him, Donald Trump sat transfixed by what he was seeing on television. He was now watching the Clinton supporters at the Javits Center as they tracked the returns. There was a slight, delayed reaction to what he was learning from his own team and what was being reported to the public.

  “Look at these crying Clinton supporters, imagine how they feel?” Trump said, studying the tear-streaked faces of young ladies at the Javits Center. “They never saw it coming. Just think how
hard they have worked. It must be terrible. It must be terrible.” For weeks, he had been bracing himself for those same feelings.

  Ivanka was struck by the contrast between her father’s mood and the jubilation echoing in the staff rooms in other parts of Trump Tower. She understood the joy of the team, even the gloating. They had every right to rejoice in a very hard-fought and bitter political victory. “New York hates you!” the crowd had screamed at the Trumps when they had voted earlier that day. But Ivanka knew her father was in no mood to rub it in.

  “This was a part of Donald Trump that the public doesn’t see,” she told me in an interview about that night. “He defies typecasting. I think it’s an area in which he is misunderstood. He is really very compassionate.”16

  All her life, even in her teens, Ivanka would be called into his office, where he would tear off a piece of the morning newspaper and say, “Ivanka, find this person.” It might be a person whose apartment had burned, destroying everything he had owned. Once it was a young woman whose father had been murdered in the Bronx, and prosecutors would not make the arrest. The young woman was left destitute. Ivanka had finally tracked her down. Donald Trump had offered her help and a job.

  “I had seen that look in his eyes before,” Ivanka said. “He was moved by the Clinton supporters he was seeing on Election Night.”

  “You were there? You saw that too?” I asked Jared Kushner. I didn’t doubt the story that Ivanka was telling me, but it was such a revelation that I instinctively sought other sources to back her up.

  “I was there,” Jared confirmed. “And Kellyanne Conway and Stephen Miller and many others. We were all gathered around.”

  Miller, who would later be a senior policy adviser for President Trump, was the speechwriter on the team. He had prepared two early drafts. A concession speech and a victory speech. Now it was time to take a look.