O’REILLY: So, you won the battle and you’re releasing the prisoners. Would you consider Ted Cruz in your administration?
TRUMP: Well, he’s certainly a capable guy. So, it’s something we can think about. It’s a little too soon to think about it too much.
O’REILLY: Kasich dropped out today. Did you talk to John?
TRUMP: I have not. I have a good relationship with him … He’s somebody that I’ve gotten along with during the debates. During intermission, I would always seem to be talking with John.
O’REILLY: Marco Rubio is [now] saying good things about you. We thought he might be out in the sun too much; it’s hot in Miami. You’ve got to win Florida. Would you consider Rubio for vice president?
TRUMP: I don’t want to talk too much about that, Bill. I am considering a number of people … and I would certainly consider him … Marco and I have gotten along very well.
O’REILLY: Would the campaign slogan be “Big Don and Little Marco”…?
TRUMP: I think it would be “Vote to Make America Great Again.” Maybe we’ll go that way.
O’REILLY: If history is any indicator, the Clinton campaign will go after you through surrogates. “Move On,” those [kinds of] sleazy websites are going to tear you up. How are you going to respond…?
TRUMP: I’ll be able to figure it out with Hillary. It depends on where she’s coming from. But if she wants to go low road, I’m fine with that. And if she wants to go high road, which is what I’d prefer, I would be fine with that.
O’REILLY: You’re fine with the low road? Most people don’t want to go on the low road.
TRUMP: No, I can handle the low road if I have to do it. I mean, we’ve had some low roads over the last few months.
* * *
THAT Q-AND-A WAS instructive on a number of fronts. First, Donald Trump’s campaign against Hillary Clinton would feature many detours onto the low road, with the “Crooked Hillary” and “Lock her up” stuff—that was mostly in response to Clinton-generated allegations of misconduct against Trump.
Second, once he emerged victorious, Donald Trump was quick to forgive his competition. The past is not important to Trump; winning in the future is. He can forge positive relationships with people who have damaged him, if he ultimately prevails.
But there are some people, like Jeb Bush, John McCain, and Megyn Kelly, who were not forgiven, and vice versa.
Finally, I have interviewed and spoken with Donald Trump scores of times. He sometimes exaggerates and often overstates, but he’s never said a calculated untruth to me. The media theme that “Trump lies” is based mainly on spontaneous statements that roll off his tongue when he’s not concentrating, which is much of the time.
The important thing to absorb if you really want to understand Donald Trump and how he achieved power is that he is a disrupter—a man with a plan—and that plan is almost always to embrace mayhem as a vehicle to getting what he wants.
That’s what that Rafael Cruz–Oswald thing was all about. Say anything to disrupt your competition, in this case Ted Cruz. Distract him, wear him down emotionally. Donald Trump plays the hardest of ball while in the political and business arenas. Once he gets what he wants, victory, he’ll label the vanquished “great” or whatever. Other presidents, like Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, were disrupters as well. They just kept quiet about it; they had others inject the chaos.
Trump is incapable of being quiet. His strategy is smash mouth and hand to hand.
Those tactics, including the loaded-speech technique, have worked for him, and he crafts his behavior by believing that the end justifies the means, an old cliché but one that is alive and well in contemporary America. Rationalization has become a national pastime. No American can escape it.
As with most human beings, Donald Trump will sometimes consciously mislead for convenience or to protect himself. But as you saw with the “low road” comments, if you ask him a straight question, you’ll usually get a straight answer.
Trump is not a precise orator and he absolutely enjoys embellishment. So, Americans can decide about the “lie” accusation as well as the morality of his competitive tactics, which are on vivid display. One thing is certain, Trump does not disguise who he is or what he does.
And in November 2016, Americans did decide—by electing Donald J. Trump president.
But before that monumental occurrence, many strange days would unfold.
The Doors had nothing on Donald Trump, who was now ready to state his case at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland.
But on the way there, the national media had a surprise for the candidate. An unpleasant surprise.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
MANHASSET, NEW YORK
APRIL 4, 2019
7:45 P.M.
In the future, historians may not fully understand how the news coverage of candidate Trump actually helped him become president. And as I type these words about two and a half years after Trump’s election, it is important to understand exactly what was taking place in the spring of 2016.
As Donald Trump does a victory lap across the country, celebrating his long, hard-fought Republican primary win, the nation’s media chieftains are not happy. On May 26, as Trump passes the 1,237 pledged delegates he needs to secure the nomination, there is little joy in the nation’s newsrooms because candidate Trump is the antithesis of Barack Obama, whom the press basically adored.
From the beginning of the campaign, the newspaper industry has loathed Donald Trump, generally cheap-shotting him whenever possible. In fact, in the run-up to the presidential vote, more than 240 editorial boards will endorse Hillary Clinton. Just 20 dailies and six weekly periodicals will suggest that their readers support candidate Trump.
Some of that lopsided Hillary boosterism is because of Trump’s personal style. It is clear he has little affection for newspapers, preferring the action of TV news. He certainly doesn’t court editors, who very much enjoy having their wisdom appreciated.
The American newspaper industry is dying and not nearly as relevant as it once was. Weekly magazines such as Time and Newsweek are also on the financial rocks, along with political magazines such as the Weekly Standard, which will fold in December 2018. Donald Trump likes being on the covers of magazines but rarely takes a peek inside them.
Television is another story.
In the beginning of the campaign, as we stated, TV news executives basically loved Trump because he brought in viewers and supplied endless narratives. But as it became clear that he was becoming a political force, attitudes began to change. What most Americans don’t realize is that 90 percent of the national news flow on television is controlled by just six corporations. And those corporations all have entertainment subdivisions that are extremely liberal. Thus, the CEOs of the media companies are usually sympathetic to the left because they have to deal with Hollywood, which is, you guessed it, liberal to the core. A conservative executive would not be well received in the salons of Beverly Hills.1
Broadcast executives usually hire personnel who think the way they do. According to data published by the firm political.law, less than 10 percent of working journalists in the United States today are registered Republicans.
So, what to do? Making money still trumps (pun intended) ideology in TV news, but not by much. Disney, Comcast, CBS, Fox, Time-Warner, and Tribune all want as much profit as they can squeeze. However, the movie and TV show people generally hate Donald Trump and loudly express that revulsion. Some Fox entertainment employees even threatened to quit their jobs to protest the Fox News Channel, perceived to be the only network favorable to Donald Trump. There was fear and loathing all over the place in the media, solely caused by candidate Trump, who, to the horror of the left, had actually criticized Mexicans and Muslims.
I’ve borrowed the fear-and-loathing description from the late Hunter S. Thompson, whom I quoted earlier. Here’s another gem from him, printed in the San Francisco Examiner in 1985: “The TV business
is uglier than most things. It is normally perceived as some kind of cruel money trench through the heart of the journalism industry, a big plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason.”
It didn’t take long for the TV moguls to figure out how to exploit Donald Trump in a different way. The two left-wing cable news outfits, CNN and MSNBC, launched an unprecedented Hate Trump campaign across the board, believing that their liberal viewers would watch such a thing religiously.
For example, Donald Trump was once treated nicely by the Morning Joe program on MSNBC, but relatively quickly, that show turned into a daily Bash Trump fiesta. All the other MSNBC programs followed.
Candidate Trump actually thought CNN chief Jeff Zucker was his friend because Zucker once oversaw The Apprentice on NBC. Candidate Trump was wrong. Zucker unleashed his liberal staff to destroy Trump. They took to the task enthusiastically.
The Fox News Channel was the lone dissenter as the network nightly newscasts, once guardians of hard news, continued to take their anti-Trump cues from the New York Times, headquarters for the “Resistance.” The network morning programs, staffed mostly by liberal folks, followed their evening cousins.
FNC continued to present Donald Trump in a mostly favorable way. My program grilled him but did not denigrate the candidate. In fact, we treated all the candidates the same, with the exception of Governor Bush, who would not cooperate with us. That was strange, as I have a decent relationship with the governor. But I had to point out his dodge.
In addition, I treated Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders equally. I was skeptical but not unfair to either. I also challenged candidate Trump because my job is to scrutinize all those in power or seeking it. Therefore, I had some doubts.
Could Trump actually govern with the establishment firmly opposed to him?
Did Hillary Clinton have any policy ideas apart from what President Obama had championed?
And come on, Bernie Sanders, your policies would crash the economy and eventually bankrupt the nation.
Fox News management under Roger Ailes generally played by the rules. News coverage was delivered in a straightforward way, prime-time opinion was the Wild West. That formula had lifted FNC to the top of the cable news industry. The left despised Fox News, and dark Internet organizations tried hard to harm its on-air talent, sometimes succeeding.
Thus, it wasn’t difficult for me to recognize the coordinated “get Trump” tactics because I had been attacked that way myself.
On the other side, the Trump campaign was often annoyed with me because I would not put its surrogates on my broadcast. As I told them, if I wanted zombies, I’d watch The Walking Dead.
Same thing with all the campaigns: no surrogates. But the candidates themselves were welcome.
Donald Trump took advantage of that; Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders did not.
* * *
IT DIDN’T TAKE long for the Hate Trump strategy to pay off for NBC News in particular. For nineteen consecutive years, MSNBC was a ratings disaster. But by loathing Trump every hour on the hour, the network increased viewership as Democrats tuned in to hear the scandal du jour.
CNN was not as successful on the Hate Trump front. Yes, it tried, but it was no match for the NBC bloodbath. Simply put, Wolf Blitzer could not sneer as well as Lawrence O’Donnell.
Fox News did fine with campaign reporting and analysis. The O’Reilly Factor dominated the cable news ratings. I like to think it was our tough, clear political coverage coupled with my charm and charisma.
You may see it differently.
Donald Trump was somewhat surprised that the press was turning on him. He had always been able to negotiate good deals with the media. But the country was changing, and largely because of Trump’s flamboyance, hammering him had become very profitable.
The outfit political.law summed it up succinctly: “The liberal media perpetuate political bias so forcefully and unrelentingly, it’s gone from subtle background noise to the entirety of their narrative. Is it any wonder Americans have record-high distrust for the mainstream media?”
And, as we will see, that distrust actually saved Donald Trump from defeat at the hands of Hillary Clinton, whom the press really didn’t have much use for, generally speaking. But she was far more acceptable than Trump.
So it is that as June 2016 approached and the Hate Trump strategy kicked in, the media had the best of both worlds: big-money ads were being sold, and Donald Trump was being marginalized in the process.
What could go wrong? The election in five months would not even be close. Hill will chill, Trump will go down.
Wait and see.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CLEVELAND, OHIO
JULY 21, 2016
EVENING
It is the biggest night of Donald Trump’s life. He has pulled off an amazing accomplishment, capturing the Republican nomination for president with no political machine or experience. Along the way, he received more primary votes than any GOP candidate in history, 14 million.
Now, as Donald Trump joins the Republican National Convention, the nation awaits his victory speech. As usual, there is no extensive entourage advising Trump. He has some writers, and advisors like Paul Manafort and Sean Spicer, but he basically continues to rely on himself for just about everything.
His daughter Ivanka will introduce him tonight. She and her husband, Jared Kushner, have the candidate’s trust, along with the Trump sons Don Jr. and Eric. But that’s about it for the inner circle.
Trump barely knows his choice for vice president, Mike Pence, the governor of Indiana. Pence spoke last night at the Quicken Loans Arena to a friendly but not frenzied crowd.
Unlike Sarah Palin eight years ago, Pence was selected because of his low-key, Christian profile. The flamboyant and secular Trump needs the Evangelical vote that rejected Mitt Romney in 2012. Thus, the buttoned-down Governor Pence received the nod. In 2008, John McCain hoped Governor Palin would supply dash to the Republican campaign. But now, with Donald Trump leading the ticket, dash is not a problem.
Behind the scenes, there was confusion over the VP selection because Trump could not make up his mind. At first, he favored the outspoken governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie. But while twinning the volatile Christie with the volatile Trump might have worked in a remake of The Wild Bunch, it was not a road map to the White House.
Paul Manafort was the influencer here, pointing out how the stability and conservatism of Pence would provide balance. Trump finally acceded.
Although the arena crowd is jazzed as Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee, finishes up his remarks, there has been some serious negativity here in Cleveland.
The Bush family didn’t show up for the convention; nor did Mitt Romney and John McCain. Even home state governor John Kasich blew off the convention proceedings, a serious display of disrespect.
Senator Ted Cruz did attend and, yesterday, gave a speech that did not endorse Donald Trump: “Vote your conscience, vote for candidates up and down the ticket whom you trust to defend our freedom and to be faithful to the Constitution.”
Cruz was heavily booed.
It is clear to all that many in the Republican establishment will not support Donald Trump for president. However, after two brutal losses to Barack Obama, the GOP mainstays have lost clout and affection. Traditional and conservative Americans are frustrated with nonconfrontational leadership. So, it doesn’t matter a whit that the Bushes are not in Cleveland.
The avenger would be there, and that’s all that mattered.
In addition to the GOP stalwarts, six major companies that sponsored the GOP convention in 2012 have disappeared: Wells Fargo, UPS, Motorola, JPMorgan Chase, Ford, and Walgreens Boots Alliance have all decided not to participate in the Trump coronation.
This is a signal that the “racist” attacks on Trump are working. Generally speaking, American companies are cowardly and could not care less about what is true. I
f there is controversy in the marketplace, even one contrived by political zealots, they run.
This un-American posture would soon greatly expand during the Trump era and become a genuine threat to freedom of speech and due process.
Outside the convention hall, taking full advantage of the first amendment, the usual left-wing suspects are venting. Carl Bernstein, of Watergate fame, called Trump a “neofascist” as part of CNN’s objective and fair election coverage.
Donald Trump isn’t going to let any of that affect his demeanor on this night. Here he is, in the middle of the action, winning, the center of worldwide attention. Trump knows he has reached the pinnacle, almost.
In a few minutes, thousands of militant supporters will cheer his every word, applause filling the massive arena. LeBron James, Michael Jordan, even Joe Willie Namath never came close.
It is a stunning achievement for the second son of Fred Trump who once yearned to conquer Manhattan.
Now he is one achievement away from being the most powerful man in the world.
* * *
POLITICAL CONVENTIONS ARE essentially choreographed propaganda displays that can wear the strongest person out after four days. Certainly, I was spent. Outside of the Ted Cruz drama, the Republicans behaved like Republicans: mostly polite and predictable. But political rhetoric is usually tedious, and Cleveland was no exception. As a commentator on TV, I could do little to liven things up.
As he readied himself for his prime-time speech, which would begin at 10:15 Eastern, Donald Trump might have heard the song “Here Comes the Sun” played as his daughter Ivanka took the stage to introduce him. It was a nice touch, as Trump’s eldest daughter is generally considered a sunny presence.
Donald Trump takes the stage to introduce his wife, Melania Trump, during the first night of the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio.
The United States of Trump Page 16