American Carnage

by Tim Alberta

  Trump had no serious organization to speak of, no overarching strategy guiding his efforts. There was the raw passion of his supporters; the input of a few friends and unofficial advisers; the cloak-and-dagger counsel of Stone; the guidance and unfailing loyalty of his children; and there was Corey Lewandowski, the campaign manager, more street fighter than savant, who fed Trump’s belligerent instincts but lacked any reasoned vision for reaching 270 electoral votes.

  “Trump doesn’t have a real campaign—it’s just a bunch of guys lighting everything on fire,” Reed warned Manafort. “There’s no organization, there’s no infrastructure. If you join Trump, you’ll wind up running the campaign.”

  Manafort insisted he would not. Trump, he explained to Reed, was growing ever-more suspicious of the party’s efforts to defeat him at the convention. There was an emerging, noisy “Never Trump” movement—comprising activists, consultants, even some party officials—that aimed to deny him the nomination by whatever means necessary. The immediate goal was to prevent him from collecting the 1,237 delegates needed to clinch the nomination. But there was also talk of amending the rules in Cleveland to allow for “bound” delegates, those rightfully belonging to Trump, to vote against him on the convention floor.

  “He just wants me to run the delegate operation,” Manafort told Reed. “I’m going to make sure he secures the necessary delegates and secures the nomination. Nothing more.”

  “Look, Paul,” Reed said. “I don’t know exactly what you’ve been doing. But I know you’ve been in the Ukraine, with the penthouses and the vodka martinis and the caviar and the women on each arm. You had better be very careful. Remember the golden rule of politics: Nothing stays a secret. And believe me, with Trump, everything will come out eventually.”

  Manafort assured Reed that he would be aboveboard. He swore that, for whatever roguish work he’d taken on since the Dole days, he would not be getting into any trouble with Trump.

  “Everything we’ll be doing is legal,” Manafort said.

  TRUMP HAD SPENT SEVERAL DECADES BUILDING HIS OWN ASSOCIATIONS with the louche and depraved. As his campaign for the presidency gained surprising credibility, few of these allies proved as valuable as David Pecker.

  As the chairman and CEO of American Media Inc., the country’s largest tabloid publisher, Pecker had enjoyed a longtime symbiotic relationship with Trump, whose celebrity owed in large part to his engagement of the New York City gossip rags. The two men became close friends, sharing dinners at Mar-a-Lago and rides on Trump’s private plane.

  In August 2015, two months after Trump announced his bid for the presidency, they came to an understanding. In a meeting first reported by the Wall Street Journal, Pecker offered to protect Trump from women who came forward alleging sexual escapades. He would use AMI and its biggest brand, the National Enquirer, to “catch and kill” on behalf of the candidate: purchasing testimonies that could be damaging to Trump, having the women sign exclusivity and nondisclosure agreements, and then burying the stories for good. Trump loved the idea, and instructed Michael Cohen, his lawyer and fixer, to work in concert with Pecker.3

  The arrangement would prove extraordinarily beneficial—at least, in the short run. Over the ensuing year, Pecker and Cohen defused two bombshells that might have blown up Trump’s campaign. The first deal was with a former Playboy model, Karen McDougal, who approached AMI with details of her extramarital romance with Trump. Pecker bought the rights to her story for $150,000. Cohen, meanwhile, brokered an agreement with adult-film star Stormy Daniels, paying $130,000 in hush money to conceal her past sexual relationship with Trump.

  All the while, Pecker was playing another role in Trump’s run for the White House: that of lead blocker.

  In September 2015, as Carly Fiorina gained steam in the GOP primary, rising all the way to third place in the RealClearPolitics polling average, the National Enquirer ran a piece calling her a “homewrecker” who had lied about her “druggie daughter.”4 (It was a reference to Fiorina’s sharing the story of her stepdaughter who had died of an overdose.) The next month, as Ben Carson nipped at Trump’s heels, the Enquirer reported that the “bungling surgeon” had ruined several patients’ lives and had even left a sponge inside one woman’s brain.5 In December, as Marco Rubio moved into third place, the Enquirer published a story on the Florida senator’s “cocaine connection,” detailing his brother-in-law’s incarceration for drug dealing.6

  These were mere appetizers for Pecker and the National Enquirer. The entrée would be Ted Cruz.

  In early March, the Enquirer formally endorsed on its front page: “TRUMP MUST BE PREZ.” As it became apparent that the front-runner’s path to the nomination had one remaining obstacle, Pecker and his minions turned their attention to Cruz.

  The National Enquirer had run one piece in February, “Ted Cruz Shamed by Porn Star,” about the senator’s unwitting casting choice of a softcore adult actress in a campaign ad. But the story fell flat. Pecker’s team dug deeper. Over the next month they turned over every rock of Cruz’s personal and political life looking for dirt. At one point, AMI reporters visited the Capital Grille in Washington, Cruz’s neighborhood haunt, offering cash to restaurant employees in exchange for compromising information on the senator. The waitstaff, having befriended Cruz (despite, in many cases, their wildly diverging political views), refused to cooperate.

  On March 28, the same day Manafort’s hiring was reported by the New York Times, the National Enquirer went nuclear. The tabloid published four stories pertaining to Cruz that day. But the biggest, its “Special Report,” suggested that Cruz had carried on numerous extramarital affairs. Having been tipped off that this bombardment was on its way, Cruz chose to call his wife, Heidi, so that she wouldn’t be blindsided. She laughed so hard, so hysterically, that her husband was mildly offended.

  But whatever humor they found in the situation soon dissipated. Two days later, amid a flurry of other hit pieces on Cruz, the Enquirer piled onto its original report by printing the images, eyes blurred out, of five women the Texas senator had allegedly cheated with.7 Three of them, it reported, were former staffers; one was a “sexy” schoolteacher; and the fifth was a DC prostitute.

  The tabloid had finally broken through. Mainstream media outlets were forced to cover the allegations and the candidate’s reaction. Google searches for “Ted Cruz affair” spiked. The hashtag #CruzSexScandal went gangbusters on Twitter. Cruz blamed Trump for the onslaught. “I want to be crystal clear: these attacks are garbage,” the candidate wrote on his Facebook page. “For Donald J. Trump to enlist his friends at the National Enquirer and his political henchmen to do his bidding shows you that there is no low Donald won’t go.”

  Trump responded, true to form, on his own Facebook page. “I have nothing to do with the National Enquirer and unlike Lyin’ Ted Cruz I do not surround myself with political hacks and henchman and then pretend total innocence,” he wrote. “Ted Cruz’s problem with the National Enquirer is his and his alone, and while they were right about O.J. Simpson, John Edwards, and many others, I certainly hope they are not right about Lyin’ Ted Cruz.”

  Amazingly, this was not the low point of the Trump-Cruz rivalry.

  The week prior, an anti-Trump super PAC published a Facebook ad featuring a 2000 photo, taken for British GQ, that showed Melania Trump nude. The ad, which targeted Mormon voters ahead of Utah’s March 22 caucuses, read, “Meet Melania Trump. Your Next First Lady. Or, You Could Support Ted Cruz on Tuesday.”8

  Infuriated, Trump warned the world via Twitter that he might have to “spill the beans” on Heidi Cruz—whatever that meant. Trump later retweeted an unflattering photo of his opponent’s wife that was posted in juxtaposition to a flawless-looking Melania Trump. The caption read, “No need to ‘spill the beans.’ The images are worth a thousand words.”

  Cruz finally lost his cool. “Donald, you’re a sniveling coward,” he said during a campaign stop in Wisconsin, looking straight into the camera.9 “Leave H
eidi the hell alone.”

  The mainstream media couldn’t help but cover the story as the professional wrestling melee that it was—schoolyard taunts, nude women, the “cage match” Cruz had once scoffed at. The National Enquirer had sparked the fracas, a real-time embarrassment for the world’s leading liberal democracy, but its more sophisticated counterparts in the Fourth Estate had fanned the flames, dedicating hours of breathless blow-by-blow coverage. Trump, a master manipulator of the media for so much of his adult life, had done it again.

  Ultimately, it wasn’t David Pecker and the National Enquirer that thwarted Cruz’s candidacy. It was Roger Ailes and Fox News.

  THE CRUZ CAMPAIGN HAD BEEN NEGOTIATING A SIT-DOWN INTERVIEW with Sean Hannity one day before the National Enquirer story broke alleging the senator’s extramarital adventures. Wanting a forceful response but needing to move on from the story, Cruz’s spokeswoman, Catherine Frazier, negotiated a deal with Hannity’s producers. He would ask the candidate a single question, at the top, about the Enquirer report. Then they would turn to substantive matters.

  But Hannity had other ideas. When Cruz dismissed the story as nonsense, attempting to pivot to discuss other topics, the Fox News host would not let him. Hannity continued to raise questions about the Enquirer story. Cruz grew angry. Finally, he blew up at Hannity, telling him the story had been planted by one Trump hack, Stone, the fabled “dirty trickster,” in the publication of another Trump hack, Pecker.

  Hannity’s response? Stone had assured him, personally, that he had had nothing to do with the Enquirer report.

  “Sean,” Cruz exclaimed, “you’re too damn smart to believe that.”

  The exchange was hot—so hot that it never aired. When Cruz’s campaign staff tuned in for the segment, the tense back-and-forth wasn’t included. They were mystified. As they discussed the reasoning, they decided that Fox had cut that portion not just because it made Hannity look bad, but because it made Trump look bad.

  This was a recurring theme of the campaign, much to the chagrin and bewilderment of Cruz. He had been a mainstay on Fox News for the past three years, earning copious amounts of coverage for his crusade against the party establishment. But now he was being shoved aside. The network had a favorite new iconoclast, someone brasher and even more swashbuckling than he. This was, in its broadest sense, a reflection of the core dynamic between the two candidates.

  “What Donald Trump did,” observes Jim DeMint, “is out-Cruz Ted Cruz.”

  What Trump also did was out-hustle Cruz. The senator was a demon on the campaign trail, frequently making five or six stops on a bus each day, shaking hundreds of hands and taking more questions—from voters and reporters—than any other canditate. But those long days often turned into late nights. To wind down his brain, Cruz would ask a staffer to go buy a bottle of pinot noir and host the traveling team in his hotel suite, sipping wine and debriefing on the day’s activities. This meant, at the instruction of Cruz himself, no campaign events before ten in the morning and, sometimes, no morning events at all.

  By contrast, Trump (who does not drink) was always up before six, and typically dictating the day’s news cycle with his Twitter feed. He met a fraction of the voters Cruz did, but knew, somehow, that it didn’t matter. For a first-time candidate with no real consultants guiding him, Trump’s instincts as a campaigner were phenomenal. And for a septuagenarian who would subsist on fast food and as many as twelve Diet Cokes a day, Trump’s stamina was almost supernatural. He was game to go anywhere, engage anyone, and stay on offense at all hours of the day—an insurgency-style campaign that proved impossible to keep up with.

  As the field winnowed down to what was essentially a mano a mano showdown, Fox’s attitude toward Cruz became more pugnacious. In March, two paid contributors to Fox phoned the candidate with an ominous warning. “We’re not allowed to say anything positive about you on air,” they told Cruz. He thought it was a joke; they assured him it was not. “You’ve got to talk to Roger,” one of them said, referring to Ailes. Cruz had already been trying. The senator once enjoyed a friendly relationship with the Fox News chairman, joining him for private breakfasts when he visited New York. But since the end of 2015, Ailes had not been responding to Cruz’s calls.

  A year later, when Ailes passed away, Cruz would tell friends, “I think it was Roger’s dying wish to elect Donald Trump president.”

  The most galling expression of this, in the eyes of Cruz, came on the evening of April 5. The results of the Wisconsin primary were coming in. It was a huge prize for both candidates, with 42 delegates up for grabs, and an absolute must-win for Cruz. The campaign would move later that month into the northeastern states, Trump’s backyard, and his rival’s only chance was to arrive with a head of steam.

  Everything had gone right for Cruz in the state. In populous southeastern Wisconsin, where conservative talk radio was renowned both for its influence and its pragmatic streak, Trump’s negatives had soared sky-high in the polls. Two outside groups, the Club for Growth and Our Principles PAC, blanketed Wisconsin’s airwaves with anti-Trump ads. The state’s GOP establishment, led by Governor Scott Walker, rallied around Cruz as the party’s last, best hope for toppling Trump. (Speaker Paul Ryan, who had spent the last four months ripping the front-runner behind closed doors, remained publicly neutral.) And swarms of pro-Cruz volunteers and super PAC workers descended on the state, seizing upon the lull in the primary schedule to out-organize the competition as they had done in neighboring Iowa. As the primary neared, polls showed Cruz opening up a double-digit lead in Wisconsin.

  Cruz was ecstatic. He viewed Wisconsin as a watershed in the race, proving his capacity for beating Trump one on one and laying a blueprint for how to stop him in other contests. This was willfully naive; the stars had aligned in the Badger State in ways Cruz’s team could not hope to replicate elsewhere. Still, taking the stage in Milwaukee to celebrate his victory, Cruz called the Wisconsin result “a turning point,” and a “rallying cry” for Republicans to defeat Trump. He touted his consecutive delegate conquests in four states—Utah, Colorado, North Dakota, and Wisconsin—before declaring, “We’ve got the full spectrum of the Republican Party coming together and uniting behind this campaign.”

  Once Cruz had shaken hands and posed for pictures to commemorate his triumph, he climbed onto his campaign bus and dialed into Fox News. The initial signs were positive; Hannity’s program was showing images of him, not Trump, on the screen. (Cruz had become accustomed to seeing all three cable networks, CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News, showing his opponent simultaneously, a situation his advisers referred to as “The Full Trump.”) Relieved, Cruz settled in to hear the analysis. Just then, however, Hannity began discussing the night’s developments with Laura Ingraham.

  “If Ted Cruz can keep beating Donald Trump in state after state after state—” she began.

  “Can he?” Hannity interrupted.

  “I don’t see that happening in a place like New York and especially the New England states,” Ingraham replied.

  “Yes, New York’s got to be Trump’s firewall,” Hannity said. “He’s going to win New York. He’s up by thirty-four points.”

  Cruz’s grin turned into a grimace.

  When Hannity returned from commercial, he was joined by news anchor Bill Hemmer, who ran down the slate of upcoming state contests.

  “New York—winner take all. Right now, Trump looks pretty good in New York,” Hemmer said. “End of the month here, you’ve got five states in the Northeast. Trump looks pretty good in all five. And then we clear the month of April and move to May. And on May third is Indiana. We’ve looked at the numbers so far. We’re crunching them. Looks pretty good for Trump. Go a week later, West Virginia looks good for Trump. That’s winner-take-all, by the way . . .”

  Cruz leapt from his seat. “What the fuck?” he screamed at the television. His staffers were startled and more than a bit surprised. Their boss was not the emotional sort. But months of building antagonism toward
Trump, and frustration with Fox News, could no longer be suppressed.

  Cruz flopped back into his seat. He had just secured his biggest victory to date, yet he felt deeply defeated.

  IN THE TWO WEEKS BETWEEN WISCONSIN ON APRIL 5 AND NEW YORK on April 19, the Cruz campaign laid the groundwork for its last stand.

  Despite the candidate’s public projections of confidence, everyone knew Trump was poised to steamroll through the northeastern primaries and crush Cruz in late April. If that happened, the campaign would need an abrupt, high-profile victory to stop the bleeding. Their best shot: Indiana on May 3.

  The state offered 57 delegates, an electoral jackpot that, if hit, could make Trump’s delegate math unworkable. Cruz’s team began throwing everything they had into Indiana, hoping to reapply the formula that had worked in Wisconsin. But despite some demographic similarities, Indiana bore little electoral resemblance. There was no multimillion-dollar assault from outside groups on Trump. The conservative talk radio army was nowhere to be found. And unlike in Wisconsin, where Cruz was backed by much of the party establishment, Indiana’s top officials showed no signs of support. Trump was far too popular in the state for Republican leaders to risk disaffecting their base by denouncing him.

  Mike Pence was Exhibit A.

  The governor loathed Trump, his longtime friends and allies whispered at the time, viewing his personal indiscretions and campaign rhetoric as destructive to the cause of conservatism. But Pence was in no position to do battle with the GOP front-runner. He had been damaged goods since early 2015, when the religious liberty dispute blew up in his face. The governor’s actions had alienated almost every constituency imaginable—the left, the socially moderate center, the business community—when he first signed the legislation, and then, for good measure, the conservative base and evangelical right when he backtracked. By the spring of 2016, things looked grim. Pence’s popularity had tanked, his approval rating was underwater in public and private polls, and he was running even in his race against Democrat John Gregg. Almost uniformly, Pence’s friends believed his political career was slipping away. The last thing he needed was a war with Trump.