by Doug Wead
“No one had really focused on the winning speech.” Ivanka laughed, recalling the moment. “Not because we thought we would lose, but rather to avoid being overconfident or arrogant. And maybe we were just a little bit superstitious. So nobody wanted to write it.”
Donald Trump took a look at the victory speech. “It took a lot of shots at the people who hadn’t supported us,” said Ivanka. “Mainly, the elites who had said it wasn’t possible.”
Trump dramatically ripped up the speech. “This is totally wrong,” he said. “We have to reach out to those people we saw crying tonight and we have to tell them that it’s going to be okay. And we are going to come together.”
Trump’s senior staffers reconvened around the dining room table in the private Trump apartments to work on the speech. Campaign manager Kellyanne Conway was there, helping to make revisions. “It was already in his own voice,” she remembered, “but taking a good fresh look at it and realizing he was going to be the next president of the United States, he changed a lot of it.”17
Trump wrote the words, “I’m going to be the president of all Americans, including those who do not support me.” And then he added the self-deprecating, sarcastic line, “and there are a few of you.”
Ivanka remembered the moment as almost magical. “His instinct was so immediate and so strong,” she said, referring to her father’s mood. “It was a beautiful thing. His first reaction was to feel deeply about what the Clinton supporters were experiencing. And partly because everyone had told them that this was an outcome that was not possible. He was supersensitive to that, and you saw it reflected in his words.
“It was close to midnight by then.” Ivanka recalled. “And yet, in that brief moment, none of us felt tired. We felt good about the country, and I felt good about my father and his desire to bring the country together. I have so many photos of us just sitting together and rewriting that speech. The feeling in that room was really something beautiful.”
At 12:32 a.m. the networks called Nevada for Hillary Clinton. Ivanka’s fear was realized. Her sources had been accurate after all. But then her model for an Electoral College victory, the one that all the experts had laid out, had been bypassed by another, parallel, more historically impossible combination. Nevada had been replaced by other, more important states. Nevada had not been necessary.
So when was the exact moment that Donald Trump finally realized he had won?
“My feeling is that [it was] sometime between twelve a.m. and one a.m.,” Ivanka said. “Even while working on a victory speech, just in case, Donald Trump was finally beginning to realize that he was going to be president of the United States.”
Late into the night the networks continued to refuse to declare Pennsylvania.
“We had this friend,” Eric Trump remembers, “Mark Geist. He was a marine who became a government contractor, and he was one of the guys that was left on the roof in Benghazi by Hillary Clinton. He had vowed when my father entered the race that he would do anything within his power to help my father win. ‘What that person did to me was so unthinkable,’ said Mark Geist, adding, ‘Under no circumstance can she become commander in chief of the United States. She left us on a roof with no support.’
“You probably saw his story in the movie 13 Hours. He was the coauthor of the book. He is still recovering from traumatic injuries, but he was credited with saving the lives of twenty-five Americans that night.
“So, the networks were not calling Pennsylvania. Ninety-nine percent of the votes were recorded. My father was winning by 330,000 votes, and even if Clinton got every single remaining vote she still would not have gotten over the threshold. CNN had been sitting on this for about five hours. If you want to talk about dishonesty in the media? They would not call it, because it would have put him over the top. And they didn’t want to depress voters in California, where they were apparently trying to drive up the Clinton popular vote.
“So Mark Geist says to his buddy, ‘We may be standing in this room, waiting for CNN, longer than she left us on that roof in Benghazi.’”
“I’ll never forget that statement as long as I live,” Eric Trump told me.18
“SCREW IT, LET’S JUST GO!”
At two a.m., Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, appeared at the Javits Center to address the dispirited, waiting Clinton supporters. It sounded to some like a hopeful speech. “Well, folks, I know you’ve been here a long time. And it’s been a long night and it’s been a long campaign but I can say, we can wait a little longer, can’t we?”19
“No, no, no,” Trump said, watching the moment, right after witnessing the weeping children of the Clinton campaign. “This is not right. This is not good for the country. I’m not going to let them do this. I’m going to go out and accept this thing. I’ve won. I know I’ve won.”20
“You have sir,” Brad Parscale said. “You’ve won.”
“Screw it, let’s just go!”
Steve Bannon was there. So were Kellyanne Conway and Hope Hicks.
Trump looked again at Parscale and said, “Brad, we’ve won this?”
“Yes sir, you’ve won this.”
Bannon chipped in, “Yes sir, you’ve won.”
“Okay, let’s go.”
As the motorcade worked its way a few blocks over to the Hilton, word came in from their own people that they had, indeed, carried Wisconsin. They had feared that the Fox News report had been a bit premature, but now it was confirmed by the others. The message that came into the motorcade was that Hillary Clinton had now been told by her own staff that she had lost the election and that it had been decisive. There would be no recount.
Erik Prince remembers Dave Bossie coming into one of the rooms at Trump Tower, where everyone was celebrating. “Hey, if you want to see the next president give an acceptance speech, get over to the Hilton!” The crowd broke up quickly and moved like a mob out of the Trump Tower and down the streets of Manhattan to the Hilton Hotel. Sean Spicer, the future press spokesman of the Trump administration, was in the middle of the pack, huffing and puffing down the sidewalk.
Arlene “A. J.” Delgado, a Harvard Law graduate and a senior adviser in the Trump campaign, was overcome with emotion. “I broke down just in the middle of this dark street, just on the way to the Hilton, just crying like a little girl just because of the amount of work and the amount of emotion that had gone into stumping for this candidate for a year, to realize that it did all pay off.”21
There had not been enough room for the whole Trump family and senior staff to get into the elevators at Trump Tower, so the crowd got separated in the motorcade to the Hilton. It took some time for them to slowly reassemble backstage. The Secret Service had an area roped off for them and recognized most of them by sight and others by the special, color-coded buttons affixed to their suit jacket lapels and dresses.
Eric remembers being driven over in the motorcade and then being ushered into hallways, lined by Secret Service agents, into the backstage area of the Hilton.
“There were two landings backstage. At first, we were upstairs, and they walked us down this little staircase—in fact, I have a picture of it. This was about two or three in the morning, and, remember, most of the people had been there at the Hilton since five the previous evening.”
“It was pitch dark backstage,” Brad Parscale remembers. “And there were so many people.”
While they were organizing in the darkness, word came from a staffer’s cell phone that one of the networks announced that Trump had taken Pennsylvania, confirming what his team had told him hours before. A few seconds later, as the news was relayed to television anchors on the big screens at the Hilton, the crowd on the other side of the curtain roared with approval. It was a surreal, delayed reaction.
In the darkness somebody handed Mr. Trump a cell phone and said, “It’s Hillary Clinton, she’s calling to concede.” She had barely made it. Time was running out. Robby Mook had made it clear to Kellyanne Conway that within fifteen minutes
of being declared the winner, Hillary Clinton would take to the stage at the Javits Center to address the American people. If Donald Trump wanted to have the dignity of recognizing the new president, he had to call her personal aide, Huma Abedin, within that window. But now it was Hillary who was almost left behind.
Earlier, during the campaign, when Donald Trump had complained about voter fraud, there had been questions about whether he would accept the election results and Hillary Clinton as the new president. The popular historian Michael Beschloss had said, “Fifty years from now historians will remember this debate for exactly one thing and that is Trump refusing to say that he’ll accept the results of the election.” Beschloss added that it was “absolutely horrifying.”22 Now almost no one remembered it, and Hillary Clinton was the one rushing to make her concession call and appear reasonable.
While the nation looked on, some pleased, some stunned by what was unfolding on television, Hillary Clinton called Donald Trump. “I was a foot away from him,” Eric told me. “It was Don, Ivanka, my wife, and Jared. We were all kind of around him. So he got that call. It was short. It probably lasted a minute or two. That is when we knew the whole thing was very real.”
Hillary Clinton wrote about it in her book What Happened. “I congratulated Trump and offered to do anything I could to make sure the transition was smooth. It was all perfectly nice and weirdly ordinary, like calling a neighbor to say you can’t make it to his barbecue.… I was numb. It was all so shocking.”23
In the darkness, still backstage at the Hilton Hotel, Donald Trump turned to his family and staff and said simply, “I’m president.”
As he walked through the crowd toward the stage, he passed Brad Parscale one last time and gave him a half hug. “You did a really good job, Brad. You did really good.” And then he said, “By the way, don’t stand next to me onstage.”
When he got to the side, ready to walk out, he turned back to the crowd of senior staffers and shouted out again, “Brad, I mean it. Don’t stand anywhere near me onstage!”
Brad Parscale is six feet, eight inches tall.
It was Trump’s backhanded, jocular way of giving recognition to Parscale for a job well done, without coming off as too sentimental.
Two of Donald Trump’s grandchildren had stayed up for the entire Election Night drama, nine-year-old Kai Madison and seven-year-old Donald Trump III, or “Donnie.” They had been in the Trump Tower war room, upstairs in the apartment, and later in the kitchen, where their grandfather, the candidate, and his team had watched television on that tiny screen. Their father, Donald Trump Jr., had wanted his children to be a part of history. But now, the night had dragged into the next day. “We hadn’t planned for that. They had never been up so late,” Donald Trump Jr. says.
The two children were now backstage at the Hilton, taking it all in, surrounded by adults, drifting somewhere in between sleep and wakefulness, uncomprehending of the political jockeying of the grownups around them. They were lined up, watching their uncle Barron just ahead of them. When the whole group would shuffle out onto the stage, they would follow him.
President-elect Donald Trump was flooded with memories of his parents, especially his father and his brother, Freddy, who had died too young and had missed so much of life. What would his parents and his big brother think about this night? And he brought with him fresh images of the heartbroken Clinton supporters he had just seen on television.
The president-elect and his vice president, and their families, now walked onstage at the Hilton Hotel. A massive battery of cameras filled more than half of the Hilton ballroom. But it was not the great show that one might have expected from a Donald Trump victory. A new hotel in Dubai would get more fanfare. The RNC stage had displayed much more glamour. There were no fireworks in the Hudson, as Hillary Clinton had originally planned. There stood Donald and Melania Trump and their son, Barron; Don Jr. and Vanessa; Jared and Ivanka; Eric and Lara; Tiffany; and the vice president–elect, Mike Pence, his wife, Karen, and his family. There stood little Kai Madison and Donnie in a daze.
“Now it is time for America to bind the wounds of division,” Donald Trump told the nation. “We have to get together. To all Republicans and Democrats and independents across this nation, I say it is time for us to come together as one united people.
“It is time. I pledge to every citizen of our land that I will be president for all Americans, and this is so important to me. For those who have chosen not to support me in the past, of which there were a few people, I’m reaching out to you for your guidance and your help so that we can work together and unify our great country.”24
THE PENINSULA HOTEL GOES DARK
“We left the Hilton in a state of shock,” remembers Brad Parscale. “We didn’t look for the motorcade, we just walked home.” He and his wife had rented a small apartment in Manhattan. They had a window that looked out at the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center. During the night they could hear the nonstop holiday music from Saks Fifth Avenue. For three weeks Brad had worked all day, every day, at Trump Tower, sleeping only a few hours each night at the small apartment.
“It was really a peaceful night,” Brad remembers. “Not cold out. Very calm. No wind. The moon was bright. And the streets were filled with Trump people. I think we finally got home at five a.m.”
For Katrina Pierson, the Trump campaign’s spokesperson, the whole experience was dreamlike. “That night was unbelievable,” she remembers. She had been standing onstage with the new president-elect and his family, but her thoughts went to earlier, more humble, years. “I thought about just growing up as a child with a 15-year-old mother who became addicted to drugs.”25
With the very late night, and the unexpected election results, the streets of Manhattan quickly emptied. Only moments before there had been an estimated 200,000 people watching big-screen television sets in Times Square and lining all the streets to and from the Clinton headquarters at the Peninsula Hotel.
Now there was a deathly silence. Hillary Clinton’s supporters, who had outnumbered Trump’s supporters nine to one in Manhattan, were exhausted and had retreated into their apartments and thousands of hotel rooms.
The small, enthusiastic mob of Trump supporters who had raced down the street to the Hilton to see the president-elect give his speech to the nation now walked back through the empty streets to Trump Tower, their shouts and footsteps echoing harmlessly up the walls of the skyscrapers in the vast, darkened city.
When they passed the Peninsula Hotel there were heavy trucks, filled with sand, standing guard against any terrorists who might want to attack Hillary Clinton. She had been the presumed winner, and the city had to be prepared. One could envision where the crowds of thousands would have gathered on the streets to await a royal wave from a hotel window from the first woman American president in history. Instead, the building was darkened. There were no lights coming from the rooms.
“It looked ghostly. A lot of it was empty, because they had rented out so much of it,” remembers A. J. Delgado.26 Another Trump supporter felt as if Dementors from a Harry Potter novel were lurking behind the darkened windows, sucking the life out of any passersby.
Delgado was reminded of the Titanic. “Your hubris got the best of you. And you forgot to actually campaign, and you forgot about the actual voters. And now look, the Peninsula is empty and I’m walking to Trump Tower. And we just had an election night victory party and you just conceded.”27
Hillary Clinton had enjoyed the backing of Wall Street. America’s billionaires had overwhelmingly supported her.28 Almost every major company in America and the world had donated to the Clinton Foundation, including, what would later become a great irony, more than $145 million from Russian oligarchs.29 Most of the American executives had maxed out donations to her campaign. She had the support of Silicon Valley and the emerging tech monopolies. She had the support of academia and almost all the major universities. Hollywood was solidly behind her.
Politically, she was uns
urpassed. She had 960,000 poll workers, the largest “ground game” in American history. All the living former presidents, Republican and Democratic, had voted for her.
Most important, many in the national media, abandoning all pretense of objectivity, were now openly joined at the hip with the Democratic Party. They had invested heavily in the 2016 presidential election. Two hundred and forty-nine newspapers had endorsed Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, while only nineteen had endorsed Republican Donald Trump.30 One report showed that 96 percent of personal donations from those who worked in media went to the Democratic candidate.31
Still, the American people had sensed that something was wrong. The more the media and the American establishment insisted that they vote one way, the more suspicious the public had become and thus voted another. They didn’t like being spoon-fed cherry-picked information and were unforgiving when they discovered it was wrong or slanted or, sometimes, annoyingly, missing altogether. Americans now had the internet and cable television. They developed their own sense of what the evening news should be and were unforgiving when the selectivity of a New York television producer was different from their own. Journalism had moved from reporting verifiable facts to promoting opinions and conspiracy theories. But the public already had their own opinions and their own conspiracy theories.
They resented politicians who promised one thing and did another, who talked to them as if they were children, who adhered to a tight, unforgiving uniformity of thought and word. They wanted something different. Like a modern-day Benjamin Disraeli, or a rough-and-tumble Andrew Jackson. For years they had longed for an outsider, which past presidents had pretended to be, but this time, against all odds, Donald Trump had risen up to fight the establishment and win the election. His outrageous behavior and rough edges, which astonished the media, were reassuring to masses of people who deeply resented the patronizing domination of American elites.