“Frankly, We Did Win This Election”: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost

by Michael C. Bender

  12

  Stepien’s Shot

  “I’m not losing.”

  —Fox News Sunday, Oval Office patio, July 19, 2020

  On the morning of July 16, Stepien and Brad—the new campaign manager and the newly demoted one—assembled the staff outside the manager’s office for a symbolic passing of the torch. Brad had been crushed by the demotion—so badly that Lara, Ronna, and other friends exchanged nervous texts to make sure someone was checking in on him. He’d had a few drinks that night and emotions were still raw the next morning when he woke up on the office couch. The staff, nearly all of whom Brad had hired, was divided over whether he should have been put in charge from the start. But there was wide agreement that he’d been scapegoated by Trump and Jared—and plenty of suspicion that Stepien had helped.

  “I just want this man to win,” Brad said of Trump as he choked back tears.

  The staff erupted in applause for their former manager. But then Brad turned and left. The plan had been for him and Stepien to stand in front of the team—the first all-staff meeting of the campaign—in a show of unity. Stepien was furious that Brad had undermined that message by making for the exit.

  Still, Stepien tried to rally the troops. Trump had trailed Clinton at the exact same point in the summer of 2016, he said, and remained behind her in 213 of the next 226 public polls—until the day he won.

  Stepien promised 2020 would be no different. The upside, he said, was that internal campaign numbers also showed the race within the margin of error.

  “We’re just going to keep doing our jobs,” he continued.

  But that wasn’t exactly true. They couldn’t just keep doing their jobs. The internal polls showed a toss-up when all seventeen battleground states were averaged, but the state-by-state numbers showed Trump trailing in the electoral vote count and trending downward. Something drastic needed to change quickly.

  Stepien just didn’t know what.

  Hundreds of millions of dollars had already been spent building a campaign he believed was fundamentally flawed. He thought Brad ceded too much power to the Republican National Committee. That joint operation was underpinned by a digital program that Stepien didn’t fully understand and relied on voter data he didn’t fully trust. He was surrounded by Trump family members and White House senior staff who had little political experience, but he was rarely willing to confront them.

  At the age of forty-three, Stepien was in command of just the seventh presidential reelection bid to occur in his lifetime, with a swanky new title that would be affixed forevermore to his every public mention. But as he stood on that mountaintop and peered out at the final 109 days of the campaign, he saw nothing but black, swirling rain clouds closing in from every direction.

  “I need to land a plane that doesn’t have any wings left,” Stepien would tell confidants in the weeks to come.

  Intensely private and naturally suspicious, Stepien knew he wasn’t as likable as his chatty and outgoing predecessor. He had always been edgier and more reserved than most. Still, he could be coaxed out of his shell with talk about hat tricks, one-timers, and slap shots. Stepien loved hockey and one of his first high school jobs during the early 1990s in northwestern New Jersey was at Chimney Rock Ice Rink as a skate guard—effectively a hallway monitor on ice. The Zamboni driver was a college kid named Mike DuHaime, whose father was a Passaic County freeholder and his mother a small town mayor. Stepien wasn’t old enough to drive and didn’t much care about politics.1 But DuHaime would soon bring him into the family business.

  Stepien was enrolled at Rutgers playing club hockey and struggling with math classes for his accounting degree when DuHaime, then twenty-three, convinced him to volunteer for the state Senate campaign he was managing.2 Stepien agreed, their candidate won, and plans for an accounting career were quickly abandoned.

  Stepien graduated from Rutgers in the spring of 2000, but his more meaningful education came that fall when DuHaime hired him as the wheelman for U.S. Senate candidate Bob Franks.3 Franks was a legendary figure in New Jersey Republican circles who mentored countless young operatives during his two-dozen years in politics as a state lawmaker, state party chairman, and congressman. Stepien drove Franks around in a beat-up car with hockey gear stuffed into the trunk and strewn across the backseat.

  Franks ultimately lost to Democrat Jon Corzine, but came within three points—far closer than anyone expected—and nearly overcame a massive ten-to-one fundraising gap.4 The Franks campaign also launched the careers for a quartet of New Jersey Republicans: Stepien, DuHaime, a campaign lawyer named Bill Baroni, and David Wildstein, who had launched an anonymous blog, PoliticsNJ, to generate positive news clips for Franks—but quickly became a must-read for New Jersey political junkies. For those four, the Franks campaign was like the dead body that Gordie, Vern, Chris, and Teddy in Stand by Me went to see on a lark—and then turned into one of the defining events of their lives.

  In 2003, Baroni brought the band back together for his own campaign for New Jersey Assembly. Stepien was campaign manager, DuHaime the chief strategist, and Wildstein the unnamed house organ pumping out praise for their brilliance under the pseudonym, “Wally Edge.” And it looked like he might be right. Baroni was the only New Jersey Republican that year to defeat a Democratic incumbent.5 But the other big story was Stepien, who had found his footing as a political number cruncher. He manically combed through data in the district trying to find the Democrats who were open to voting for Republicans, armed Baroni with addresses for doors on which he needed to knock, and then walked with him marking down who was and wasn’t home. The young campaign manager then returned to the office, adjusted his numbers, and, more often than not, ended the evening in a shouting match with the campaign’s grassroots coordinator, an equally ambitious operative named Stacy Schuster.

  DuHaime and Stepien became a package deal in Republican politics. In 2004, President George W. Bush hired DuHaime to run the northeast region of his reelection bid, and DuHaime installed Stepien as his man in New Hampshire. During Bush’s second term, DuHaime was named political director at the Republican National Committee. He hired Stepien to oversee the party’s get-out-the-vote efforts.

  Meanwhile, Wildstein was breaking a ton of political news on his website.6 It had become an undeniable political force in New Jersey by 2007, when it was acquired by a would-be media mogul named Jared Kushner. Jared had branched out from the family real estate empire, bought the New York Observer, and added Wildstein’s blog to the publishing empire he envisioned. After the sale, Wildstein sent a few thousand bucks to Stepien, DuHaime, and Baroni as a thank-you for the help they’d given him at the start.7

  Even as a Jared property, Wildstein continued promoting Stepien and DuHaime, who teamed up again on the 2008 presidential campaign for Rudy Giuliani, the early Republican front-runner who ultimately ended his bid without winning a single delegate.

  In 2009, Stepien took on the most important job of his fledgling career: managing Chris Christie’s campaign for governor. Christie’s Democratic opponent: Jon Corzine. Nine years later, the Franks friends had their chance for revenge.

  Stepien ran the day-to-day of the campaign with maximum intensity, sending emails at all hours and locking staffers out of early morning meetings if they arrived late. DuHaime was Christie’s lead strategist. Baroni, now a state senator, endorsed Christie early. But Wildstein was rowing in the wrong direction. With PoliticsNJ now wholly owned by Jared, the website turned into an attack machine aimed directly at the Republican who had put Jared’s father behind bars. Still, Christie defeated Corzine by 3.6 percentage points—the first New Jersey Republican in a decade to win a statewide seat.

  Stepien was soaring. The weekend after the campaign, he was married.8 Then Christie named him deputy chief of staff in the governor’s office. His friends joined the administration, too. Baroni took a job as deputy executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, a powerful post that oversaw hundreds of millions o
f dollars in contracts. Wildstein left the website and joined Baroni at the port.

  Stepien’s professional hot streak continued through Christie’s first term. He lived and breathed the job. Stepien showed up before 7:00 a.m., and he made clear that he expected that kind of dedication from his team, too. Aides late to staff meetings were paraded in front of the group or sometimes sent home for the day.

  His mission was to deliver a landslide reelection victory in 2013—an overwhelming win for a Republican governor in the increasingly Democratic state to convince presidential primary voters and conservative donors that Christie was a top contender for the White House in 2016.

  Stepien covered his office walls with state maps dotted with push pins to identify towns where voters were most likely to split their ballots between the two parties. He set to work collecting endorsements for Christie and was furious when Democratic mayors like Jersey City’s Steve Fulop wouldn’t play ball. He instructed Wildstein to not even return Fulop’s calls to the Port Authority.

  “Ice him,” Stepien ordered.

  The silence irritated Fulop, which, in return, pleased Stepien.

  “He’s getting a little snippy,” Stepien told Wildstein. “Good.”

  Stepien had built a reputation as a political data whiz, but after a few years in Trenton, that proved to be only part of the story. From his perch in the governor’s office, he’d also proven himself to be a skilled practitioner of old-fashioned, meat-and-potatoes patronage politics. When it came to political stylings, Stepien had developed a persona that was part accountant and part hockey goon. He could read the numbers as well as anyone but was also willing to twist an arm to help his team.

  But the silent treatment for the big-city mayor hardly compared to the fate awaiting the little town of Fort Lee, whose mayor, Mark Sokolich, had also refused to endorse Christie.

  In many ways, Donald Trump’s path to the White House was cleared at 7:34 a.m. on Tuesday, August 13, 2013. By then, Stepien had taken over the reelection campaign and the person he’d hand-picked as his replacement in the governor’s office—Bridget Kelly, whom he had also been dating—sent Wildstein an eight-word email.

  “Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee,” she wrote.

  “Got it,” Wildstein replied a minute later.

  The emails ignited one of the state’s most memorable political scandals: Bridgegate. To many, Bridgegate was a brash plan of political vengeance designed to inflict pain on a small town mayor who refused to endorse Christie. For others, it was a big misunderstanding. But in the end, the result was a devastating blow to Christie’s political future—and one that destroyed the team around him.

  On Monday, September 9, just before rush hour on the first day of the school year, the Port Authority shut down two of the three lanes dedicated to Fort Lee motorists on the insanely busy, twenty-nine-lane George Washington Bridge. The lanes were shut down for five days and the bottlenecks caused huge delays for commuters, school buses, and emergency responders. New York’s appointee to the Port Authority, Patrick Foye, emailed Baroni that the closures violated both federal and state law. Baroni had publicly claimed that the lane closures were part of a traffic study, and he scrambled to keep a lid on the tension. When Wall Street Journal reporter Ted Mann called Baroni questioning the cause of the traffic, Stepien blew it off. When Mann published Foye’s email to Baroni, Stepien wasn’t so calm.

  “Holy shit,” Stepien texted Wildstein about Foye. “Who does he think he is, Capt. America?”

  Pressure was mounting from New Jersey Democrats, who had opened an investigation in Trenton into the lane closures based on Mann’s reporting in the Journal. The investigation quickly cost Wildstein and Baroni their jobs. When Wildstein resigned, Jared offered a word of encouragement to his former blogger.

  “I thought the move you pulled was kind of badass,” Jared wrote.

  But the full picture of the scandal was still coming into view as Christie cruised to a twenty-two-point victory, the widest margin in twenty years in the state and the best showing for any New Jersey Republican in twenty-four years. The successful reelection bid was also the biggest career achievement for Stepien and Christie. Stepien opened his own consulting firm, Nassau Strategies, naming it after the street he lived on in Princeton. Christie installed him as his top political adviser at the Republican Governors Association and endorsed him as the next chairman of the New Jersey Republican Party, a powerful position that would give Stepien access to the party’s most important donors and allow him to influence candidate selections and the direction of the party.

  “Bill Stepien is the best Republican operative in the country,” Christie crowed.

  But the very next day, it was Stepien who would be iced.

  On January 8, a batch of Bridgegate texts and emails that had been subpoenaed by the State Assembly were published in the media. The messages included Kelly’s famous “Time for some traffic problems” note. Baroni’s story about a traffic study seemed less credible. Stepien was intimately involved in the coordination between the players.

  Stepien repeatedly phoned Christie, but the governor refused to answer. Instead, it was DuHaime who eventually returned his messages, and asked to meet at the Panera Bread in Princeton. Surrounded by the aroma of Asiago cheese bagels and the dulcet tones of classical music playing from overhead speakers, DuHaime told Stepien what Christie could not bring himself to say: He was out.

  The two would barely speak again for years.

  “I was disturbed by the tone and behavior and attitude of callous indifference that was displayed in the emails by my former campaign manager, Bill Stepien,” Christie said at a news conference. “It made me lose my confidence in Bill’s judgment. And you cannot have someone at the top of your political operation who you do not have confidence in.”

  Stepien wasn’t just fired. He was banished. He couldn’t find work anywhere. From Lake Hopatcong to the Jersey Shore and back to the Delaware River, Christie had salted the state of New Jersey with warnings not to hire Stepien. He insisted that Stepien had lied to him.

  One of the few New Jersey Republicans willing to stick out his neck for Stepien was Ocean County GOP chairman George Gilmore, who helped find Stepien work with GOPAC, a 527 group where Gilmore was on the board of directors.9 Still, Stepien struggled to make money and moved back home. In a handwritten note to the state Division of Revenue and Enterprise Services, he changed the address of his Nassau Strategies firm to his family’s house in Washington Township.

  Stepien had hit rock bottom. By 2015 he was divorced, politically excommunicated, and a constant topic in pretrial motions. That fall, his twenty-six-year-old brother, Shane, an Iraq War veteran, died in an early morning car accident.

  His friends Baroni and Kelly were eventually convicted, and ultimately received prison sentences of more than a year, while Wildstein struck a plea deal and avoided jail.

  Stepien’s name was invoked more than 700 times during the trial—Wildstein testified in court that Stepien had been aware of the plot, its retaliatory nature, and the cover story—but he was never charged and was never called as a witness.

  Christie, meanwhile, pressed forward with his presidential aspirations, but Bridgegate clipped him badly. As a first-term governor, Christie had brilliantly deployed town halls and social media to project his forceful personality. He was Donald Trump before Donald Trump, only with a command of the issues and an approval rating in the seventies. It’s impossible to know for sure, but multiple Trump World operatives and others close to Christie remain convinced that Trump would never have run for president had Christie maintained those kinds of numbers heading into 2016. But Bridgegate changed everything. And while it was impossible to see at the moment, it was Stepien—and not Christie—who would be preparing for life in the White House by the end of 2016.

  Standing inside a hotel ballroom in eastern Iowa in 2016, Jared was convinced that blame for Trump’s caucus defeat to Ted Cruz should be pinned squarely on Core
y. The day after the caucuses, Jared called Ken Kurson for ideas on whom he could find to replace Corey.

  Kurson was a longtime friend of the Kushners whom Jared had installed as editor of the Observer in 2013. But before that, Kurson had worked for Rudy Giuliani’s 2008 presidential campaign, and later, Jamestown Associates. When Jared called that night in February, Kurson pointed him to Stepien, even though the Bridgegate trial was still ongoing.

  “Look,” Kurson told Jared. “He’s a little radioactive right now. But if you want somebody who’s still available with so many candidates in the race, it’s going to be somebody who’s got a little bit of hair on them. Otherwise, they would have already been hired.”

  The silver lining was that Stepien had been double-crossed by Christie. He and Jared would at least have a political enemy in common.

  Jared immediately called Stepien.

  Stepien viewed Trump as a paycheck, but also as payback. Christie finished Iowa with less than 2 percent and hadn’t hit 5 percent in the national polls. Without a strong showing in New Hampshire, he was finished. And Stepien was eager for the opportunity to trounce him.

  On his call with Jared, Stepien walked through his approach of estimating the total turnout of an election, and then reverse-engineering a strategy. It was a model he’d learned at the foot of Bob Franks: figure out which message appeals to which voters in order to end up with at least one more vote than 50 percent.

  “That’s what running an election is all about: a ground game,” Stepien told Jared. “You can’t do that if you have a bad candidate. But if you run a great ground game, that can help you with two or three points.”

  Jared was impressed. Stepien’s approach seemed to take the emotion out of the equation, or at least minimize it in a way that felt right to Jared and contrasted with Corey’s fondness for backroom brawling. But Jared underestimated Corey’s skill set. Corey caught wind of Jared’s meddling and got Christie on the phone himself. Even though the New Jersey governor was a competitor in the Republican primary, Corey told Christie that he—not Jared—was considering bringing Stepien into the fold. Christie said that Stepien was a skilled campaign technician but added that the Bridgegate trial was still unfolding.