The only two other presidents impeached were both at the White House when House lawmakers affixed that political stigma to their permanent record.4 Trump, once again, would do things a little differently. He was going to rally the base.
What unfolded over the 121 minutes onstage in Battle Creek would stand as not only the longest rally speech of his career but also one of the strangest. Trump was unapologetic, divisive, and almost immediately off-script. The prepared remarks totaled nine pages for the teleprompter and followed a Trump rally speech’s usual construction. They opened with some comments on the news of the day at the very top, designed to catch the ears of cable news anchors and earn some free airtime. At the top of page three, he would mention the list of local Republicans in the audience, whom Trump would usually bring onstage. But Trump started ad-libbing so quickly, the teleprompter sat frozen. It was more than an hour before Trump mentioned the local Republicans.
Nothing was off-limits for Trump. He attacked the living as well as the dead. He recalled how Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer “used to kiss my ass.” He called a female protester a slob and encouraged security to rough her up. He was so aggressive that he earned a few groans from the Midwestern crowd when he suggested that John Dingell, a Democratic congressman from Michigan who’d died ten months earlier, had gone to hell.
He condemned low-flow toilets and energy-efficient light bulbs.
He said that his thirteen-year-old son, Barron, could draw bigger crowds than Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren—ignoring public complaints just days earlier from his wife, First Lady Melania Trump, about dragging her son into politics.
Backstage, Pence watched on the television tuned to Fox News as the votes were tallied back in Washington. Marc Short, his staff chief, and Ronna were by his side. Stephen Miller and his wife, Katie Miller, watched, too. David Bossie, the 2016 deputy campaign manager, paced.
The moment felt surreal for Murtaugh, the campaign’s communications director: On one side of the curtain, he stood along with the vice president watching the president of the United States being impeached on national television, while the president himself was just on the other side of the curtain whipping the crowd into a state of frenzy.
Hell yeah, Murtaugh thought, anticipating what the moment would mean politically for Trump.
Pence betrayed no emotion when the House lawmakers voted to impeach Trump. The staff around him scrambled to relay the message to Trump.
Gidley had taken his assignment from Trump exceptionally seriously. He fashioned himself as something of a perfectionist in these arts-and-crafts projects. He had a fanboy’s crush on his boss, and he wanted the president to be pleased with the presentation.
Gidley told the team backstage that the sign had to be clear enough for Trump to read from the stage. But it also had to be ready for a prime-time TV audience, just in case Trump wanted to hold up his handiwork for the crowd.
Gidley found some white corrugated plastic board but dismissed the markers that Nick Luna, Trump’s body man, offered. No, Gidley knew the marker lines wouldn’t be thick enough for Trump to see from that distance. He remembered a printer backstage.
I can print this in huge black letters, Gidley thought.
Stephen Miller’s assistant showed him how to use the printer. Gidley went to work on a series of practice runs with the printed-out numbers as Grisham and White House staff secretary Derek Lyons looked on.
Should he put a hyphen between the vote counts? Yes, he should.
Should the board be vertical or horizontal? Horizontal looked better.
How about stacking the vote totals, one on top of the other?
Hmm, Gidley thought.
He went back and forth on this decision. He finally decided to keep the vote counts on the same line. Gidley knew that’s what the president would want.
When the vote was announced, Gidley printed out the final numbers and went to work on the board. A small group of White House and campaign staffers gathered around. Gidley set to work, Scotch-taping his black block letters to the whiteboard with Pence looking over his shoulder.5
Lyons offered a last-minute suggestion, but Gidley was too focused and too far along to consider it.
“Look, jackleg,” Gidley snapped. “I’ve been working on this for like a minute. Yeah. So, you back up.”
Nervous laughter rippled through the room. Gidley taped down the last number. Pence gave a nod of approval.
Onstage, Trump was still unaware of the vote. When the first impeachment article was approved, he was riffing about selling nuclear submarines to other countries and creating the Space Force.
As the second impeachment article passed, the president mocked Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg for his “unpronounceable name.”
Trump had just referred to Adam Schiff, the California Democrat in charge of the House Intelligence Committee, as a pathological liar when a smiling McEnany carried the board into the buffer area, the few feet of space created by the bike racks that separated the crowd from the stage.
“What the hell do I have to do with Russia?” Trump said. “But this guy gets up… Oh, I think we have a vote coming in. So, we got every single Republican voted for us. Whoa. Wow. Wow.”
He thanked McEnany—but referred to her three times as “Haley” instead of “Kayleigh”—and described the outcome not as a devastating loss but as a political victory for his party.
“The Republican Party has never been so affronted,” Trump continued. “But they’ve never been so united as they are right there, ever. Never. And I know the senators, and they’re great guys and women, too. We have some great women. We have great guys and great people. They love this country. They’re going to do the right thing.”
Impeachment seemed to energize Trump, and he performed for another hour despite beads of sweat dripping down his face.
At the end, he lingered for several minutes after the opening bars of “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” the Rolling Stones’ 1969 tune that usually played him off. He clapped and pointed into various parts of the crowd as he paced the stage. He looked into the distance and pumped his fist. He made eye contact with the front row and smiled. He waved as he ambled along the catwalk.
Just before he disappeared behind the backstage curtain hung from inside the giant cardboard fireplace, Trump pointed high into the stands and mouthed the words “Thank you.”
For the Front Row Joes, the rally had delivered. The group’s only miscalculation was the extra layers of clothes that had insulated them from the wintery weather outside made an already toasty arena unbearably hot once they were finally inside. The change in temperature—and Trump’s late start—took its toll. The group sweated and stripped layers. Judy fell ill and had to bail about forty-five minutes early to check into the Baymont Inn for a decent night’s sleep.
The gang met up the following morning for breakfast at Denny’s and recounted the highlights from the previous night: How the historic rally had been the first in ages that Saundra and Brandon had attended together, the unusually high number of local news interviews they’d given from the front of the line, and, of course, the impeachment vote—the latest scam!
Saundra unfurled the local paper.
“Hey, Judy,” she said. “Here’s a picture of you and me in line.”
Saundra hit the road by 9:00 a.m., drove straight to Walmart, and punched in just in time for her 2:00 p.m. shift.
Footnotes
1 Trump’s “Merry Christmas Rally” in 2018 included a mini-chimney enhanced with fake snow, which fluttered down from the rafters. The Secret Service had monitored flake production to watch for poison because, as chance would have it, some fake snow landed in the president’s mouth. Safety was checked, but not the taste. Trump was so repulsed that snow machines were forever banned.
2 The fear of getting blasted by Trump on Twitter, and the repercussions from MAGAland that would follow, cannot be overstated.
3 The night bef
ore Mulvaney’s stunning news conference confessional, he was at dinner in Washington where he boasted to a group of congressmen that he’d finally convinced Trump to let him hold a news conference. Tune in tomorrow, Mulvaney told them, and watch him set the record straight on this whole impeachment nonsense.
4 In 1868, President Andrew Johnson relied on messengers scurrying along the Belgian blocks that lined Pennsylvania Avenue to keep him apprised of the impeachment vote. In 1998, President Clinton made a statement in the Rose Garden within minutes of the vote. He apologized, vowed to win back the country’s trust, and paraphrased Ben Franklin as he commended his accusers for helping him understand his own faults.
5 Gidley later had Trump autograph the sign for him on the flight back to Washington.
2
The Forty-Year Itch
“Why would I want to run? That’s not a bad question. When I look at people who have become president, they seem to go out not looking as good as they did going in.”
—Newspaper interview, September 14, 1999
Donald Trump’s first adrenaline rush from the psychological combat of presidential politics pulsed through his veins in 1980 during Ronald Reagan’s third bid for the White House, when the former California governor was trying to unseat President Carter. By that time, the thirty-four-year-old Trump had built the sixty-eight-story Trump Tower—replete with a six-story atrium and home to some of the world’s top luxury stores. He brought armed bodyguards into meetings with investment bankers and wore maroon suits and matching loafers. He had started deploying the nom de guerre John Barron, posing as his own public relations agent in phone calls with reporters from New York newspapers and tabloids.1
So when Roy Cohn, the preeminent Republican fixer in New York City, suggested that Reagan’s team reach out to the brash builder from the outer boroughs, little additional explanation was required.
“I’ve heard of him,” said a towheaded, twenty-eight-year-old Reagan operative named Roger Stone.
Trump and Stone immediately hit it off. Both were ambitious young strivers resentful of the ruling class whose approval they craved and whose extravagances they were eager to afford. Each viewed being boring as a sin worse than being wrong. They shared an instinct to attack when mere mortals might have been inclined to apologize.
Stone had already established his reputation as a minister of the political dark arts by the time he met Trump. His first dirty trick had been in elementary school, when he misled his fellow pupils by suggesting that John F. Kennedy’s opponent supported school on Sundays. He turned to conservatism before he was a teenager and dropped out of college to campaign for Richard Nixon. He donated to Nixon’s primary rival in the name of the Young Socialist Alliance—and then sent the receipt to the Manchester Union Leader. When the Watergate hearings revealed Stone’s role in an attempt to infiltrate the campaign of George McGovern, Nixon’s 1972 rival, it cost him his job on U.S. senator Robert Dole’s staff.
Stone was setting up a Washington-based consulting firm with Paul Manafort and Charlie Black, two fellow Republican lobbyists, when he recruited Trump and his father, Fred Trump, to raise money for Reagan. The Trumps hit up their subcontractors and quickly raised $100,000, an impressive amount in 1980 for a first-time fundraiser. But to Trump, the contributions were no gift. He now owned a piece of the campaign. He followed the ups and downs like a day trader monitoring his stock portfolio. He checked in incessantly with Stone.
“What’s wrong with Carter?” Trump would ask. “Why’s he doing this to you?”
When Reagan dethroned Carter, the Black, Manafort & Stone firm expanded and the Trump Organization was included among the group’s new clients. The firm eased regulations for Trump’s casinos and expedited an environmental permitting process so he could dredge the Atlantic City harbor deep enough to accommodate the Trump Princess, his $30 million yacht.
The Trump-Stone business relationship veered into politics again in 1987 as the New York builder prepared to publish his first book, The Art of the Deal. As part of the promotional tour, Stone recruited a New Hampshire woodworker and Republican activist named Mark Dunbar to launch a petition to draft Trump into the presidential race. Stone and the forty-one-year-old Trump flew via helicopter to Portsmouth, where a limousine waited to escort them to Yoken’s, an old restaurant that hosted weekly Rotary Club meetings. Dunbar planned for about 200 people. Instead, a standing-room-only crowd of 500 greeted Trump, who spoke for the next forty minutes “with the rhythm of a Borscht Belt comedian,” according to a report from the Philadelphia Inquirer. Trump’s remarks that day would become a template for every political speech that would follow for the next three decades. He promoted his private interests. He hammered away at weak American politicians who were letting foreign powers “knock the hell out of the United States.” He signaled his fascination with strongmen with a riff about Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Iranian leader who had supported holding hostage fifty-two Americans in the Tehran embassy and referred to the United States as the “Great Satan.”
“This son of a bitch is something like nobody’s ever seen,” Trump said. “He makes Gorbachev look like a baby.”
Twelve years later, Trump again floated the possibility of running—this time as a third-party candidate. The fledgling Reform Party offered some inherent advantages to a potential candidate like Trump. His status as a tabloid celebrity had turned him into a household name, which reduced the need for help from a major political party to introduce him to voters. But an established political infrastructure might not take kindly to a hostile takeover from an audacious outsider like Trump. There would be no such resistance from the embryonic Reform Party founded the previous election cycle by Ross Perot, who in 1992 unsuccessfully ran for president as an independent. Most important, Trump could spend other people’s money. Perot had performed well enough as his own party’s presidential candidate four years earlier that the next nominee would be eligible for $12.5 million in federal matching funds.
“You mean I don’t have to spend anything?” Trump asked Stone.
Stone was never sure how serious Trump was about the race. Still, together they established an exploratory committee and assembled a policy platform that merged Stone’s libertarianism with Trump’s market-driven populism. Trump opposed public financing of political campaigns and abortion restrictions. He supported some gun control measures, and came out strong for the Cuba embargo, school choice, missile defense, and a national health care system “that will make Ted Kennedy blush,” as Stone promised at the time.
Trump’s most audacious proposal was a soak-the-rich tax plan that included a one-time 14.25 percent tax on wealth greater than $10 million, which he said would wipe out the $5.7 trillion national debt.2 Trump’s platform tested far better in the polls than his candidacy. But he was panicked about his own tax proposal, which would have cost him $725 million of his own money.
“There’s no chance this is going to pass, right?” Trump asked Stone as they promoted the plan in a series of phone interviews with reporters. “Because it would be terrible for me.”
Stone reassured him that Congress would never vote on it and reminded him of internal polling that showed how well it tested with middle-class Americans.
“It’s the only reason you’re credible,” Stone told him. “You’re fighting for the little guy.”
But even with a poll-tested policy platform, Trump’s standing with a naturally skeptical political press corps had been badly damaged by both his penchant for hype and hyperbole—two main ingredients in The Art of the Deal—and the obvious ploy twelve years earlier to disguise a promotional book tour as a possible presidential bid. The reactions to his flirtation ranged from cynicism to open hostility.
In his second TV interview after announcing his exploratory committee, Today show host Matt Lauer opened the conversation by immediately drilling into Trump’s renown as a womanizer.3
“The reputation of Donald Trump—the man who dates a different wom
an every year…” Lauer began.
“I don’t do that,” Trump interjected. “I mean, I’ve been with a number of women, but it’s been over a fairly long period of time. I’ve had great relationships with women. The fact that my women are more beautiful than Warren Beatty’s women, I guess a lot of people have a problem with that.”4
“You’ve called them your Achilles’ heel,” Lauer said.
“I don’t call it an Achilles,” Trump responded, despite having called it that just twelve days earlier in an interview with the New York Times.5
Trump understood something about his relationship with the American public that Lauer didn’t—nor would much of the political press either then or for the next two decades. His dalliances with women, his casual relationship with the truth, his repeated business bankruptcies were the kinds of questions that would torpedo any other political candidate. But with Trump, everything was on the table—and people commended him for that seeming authenticity.
“I’ve been more public than the so-called public figures, and I think everything is known about me,” Trump told Lauer. “If I go someplace, if I sneak into a room someplace, it’s written about. So, you know, you really pretty much know what you’re getting. I think you know what you’re getting with me much more so than most of the politicians that you deal with.”
Trump then filled the rest of the interview with the kind of unconventional ideas and comments that were catnip for TV viewers and political reporters alike. He suggested Oprah Winfrey as his possible running mate. He blasted the media as “a vile lot” save for a single exception—New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd. When Lauer cited a CNN poll that showed Trump would get trounced in a matchup against Texas governor George W. Bush and Vice President Al Gore, Trump, with no hint of shame, pointed out a more favorable survey from the National Enquirer.
“Frankly, We Did Win This Election”: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost Page 3