* * *
I didn’t vote at the polls. I voted on Trump Force One. I filled out my absentee ballot on the plane while we were flying to a campaign rally. I showed Trump that I’d voted for him. He took the ballot and looked at it for a long time, turning it over and studying it for a while. He saw me looking at him looking at the ballot. He regained his composure. He said, “But it’s California, so it won’t matter.”
I sent in my ballot anyway. I really wanted to win. Yes, my candidate was deeply flawed. So was Hillary. It had been a long battle, and I’d taken a thousand blows along the way. The only thing that would make it all worthwhile would be to get that victory on Election Day.
With one week to go, we pulled out all the stops. Literally, we made up to eight campaign stops per day. It was a crazy rush to the finish. Although every poll predicted a Hillary win, there was one—a Los Angles Times USC poll—that had Trump slightly ahead. We clung to that poll. It was at the top of our MAGA messaging daily emails. As long as we had one reason to hope, we could keep going on a relentless path to uncertain victory.
Chapter Nine
* * *
Election Day
“HuffPost Forecasts Hillary Clinton Will Win with 323 Electoral Votes,” The Huffington Post, November 7, 2016
“Optimism from Hillary Clinton and Darkness from Donald Trump at Campaign’s End,” The New York Times, November 7, 2016
On November 8, Election Day, we were back in New York. I returned to my suite at Trump International Hotel at Fifty-Ninth Street and Central Park West. That morning, I took a car through Central Park to Trump Tower at Fifty-Seventh Street and Fifth Avenue, up to the campaign headquarters, and into the comms shop to get my media-hits list. Most of my hits were on African American and other minority radio stations. I did back-to-back interviews until 2:00 p.m. I also did a hit on TMZ, which was a fun reprieve from the other more serious interviews. We had a satellite broadcasting station in Trump Tower, so all I had to do was sit in front of the camera and answer questions live.
TMZ founder and on-air TV host Harvey Levin asked about Trump’s demeanor, and I replied, “He’s real chill today. I thought he’d be tense, but he’s relaxed. We’re all very relaxed. There’s a light mood here today. His grandchildren were here eating chocolate chip cookies. We’re all just enjoying the fact that we did it. There’s a ton of gifts and food here, but we’ve also got stacks and stacks of briefings. We are prepared to lead this country.”
In the early afternoon, I popped upstairs to have a brief talk with Trump. When I arrived in his office, he was on two phones, his cell and a landline. I asked, “You good?”
He said, “I’m good, come back after I finish this.”
I went back downstairs to the war room, intending to go back up in an hour, but Donald and Melania eventually came to us. When they walked into the room, everyone there applauded. They were both ebullient. They had their coats on, and I believe they had just come back from voting. Donald and Melania made their way through the room, shaking hands and chatting briefly. When Donald got over to me, he grabbed me by both shoulders and kissed my cheek. He asked, “How’s it going?”
“Very well,” I assured him.
Melania was right behind him, and I remember thinking, “She’s smiling!” Melania rarely smiles. Reports that Melania spent Election Day sobbing in a corner are inaccurate. Melania was as upbeat as I’d ever seen her in thirteen years of our acquaintance, and very engaged by what was going on. She, like everyone, wanted to win, desperately. I suppose she had some concerns about how her life would change tomorrow, but on that night, she was hoping for a victory.
I have many videos and photos of that day, including a striking one in the data shop office at 3:00 p.m., of me standing over Brad Parscale, with Eric Trump, Pastor Darrell Scott, and Bruce LeVell all standing by Brad’s desk, with Rick Gates and Avi Berkowitz, Jared Kushner’s assistant, looking on.
Brad sat in front of his computers and could zoom in on any county in any state to see the incoming data. Even that early in the afternoon, our numbers showed Trump winning in key battleground states. I was focused on African American turnout, keeping in mind how Romney performed in 2012, how Trump did in the primary, and what was happening there in real time. Despite the erroneous reports of pessimism the Trump campaign was reported to have by the New York Times and other outlets, we were looking at very encouraging numbers.
Our figures were different from the ones you might have seen on CNN, based on exit polls. We were basing our numbers on reports from our state directors, who were being informed by county heads. We coupled the anecdotal information we were getting from our folks with analytical data from our operation, which included the Cambridge Analytica research. The company was instrumental early on in helping us pinpoint where to dispatch resources at the beginning stages.
Of course, I am completely opposed to any voter suppression or anyone interfering with a person’s fundamental right to cast a vote. I had previously been on the board of an organization called Transformative Justice Coalition (TJC) until I took my appointment in the Trump White House. The TJC had an apparatus in place to monitor any voter suppression incidents. So while I was watching Brad’s data flow in, I was simultaneously checking TJC’s feed and information from other civil rights organizations like the NAACP, the National Urban League, and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. They had volunteers stationed at poll places in the event that African Americans or minorities in general reported that they had been turned away. I was concerned about the disenfranchisement of black voters from either side, whether Democrat or Republican.
After the election, Donald Trump made some controversial statements that were very troubling to me, saying that black voters came through for him “big league,” and that the ones who stayed home had been almost as good for him. I sent a warning email to Sean Spicer, Jason Miller, Bryan Lanza, and Ashley Bell that said, “We must be careful that this statement is not interpreted as encouraging voter suppression.”
The RNC, under the direction of Reince Priebus, is accused of engaging in some tactics that would be considered voter suppression. For example, in North Carolina, state Republicans took advantage of obscure rulings to target predominantly African American districts and ban early voting, enforced strict voter ID laws that most impacted people of color, severely restricted the number of early-voting sites, making it impossible for working people to cast their ballot, canceled voter registrations by the thousands if the voter had one piece of returned mail. Early reporting found that those efforts had been successful.
What Brad and his data team were most concerned about were the key factors in his algorithm for a Trump victory, our pathway to 270 electoral votes. For example, according to the stats, Hillary needed African American turnout to be high, at Barack Obama 2012 levels. From the information I’d gathered leading up to November 8, African American turnout was expected to be 20 percent lower than the previous elections in traditional Democratic strongholds. If she were looking at the same data, Hillary Clinton had to be on pins and needles. She needed that 20 percent, particularly in states like Florida and Michigan, to win. If those projections held up, then we knew Michigan would go our way.
But since I’d worked for the Clintons, I knew they had a big, deep bag of tricks and they could get the turnout they needed. Bill Clinton had already won two presidential elections. They had a tremendous amount of experience, an extensive network, huge resources, momentum, and a message they thought would win. Their major setback had been the Comey letter. No one knew how that would impact the election turnout.
And yet, I was cautiously optimistic that Donald Trump was going to win. On my media hits, I said that we felt that he was going to pull it off, no problem, as we’d all been instructed to do. But I also knew how powerful the Clintons were.
Donald Trump had talked about the possibility of a loss. He said at a Nevada rally, “If I don’t win, this will be the greatest waste of t
ime, money, and energy in my lifetime, by a factor of one hundred.” There was also some hedging on his behalf. In a tweet, he wrote, “If they win, it’s because they cheated.” He made no secret of the fact that he thought the entire system was rigged. He’d said it when Obama beat Romney four years ago and had been saying it throughout the election. His saying “rigged” over and over, and then his winning the election, exacerbated the Russian discussion.
It was widely speculated that, if he lost, Trump could move on to his next venture, Trump TV, a Fox News–like news channel that would provide twenty-four-hour news coverage. He experimented with a streaming Facebook live broadcast; I called it the “Live from Trump Tower Hour.” I did a few spots on it, and the number of people who watched and engaged was very high. So if Trump TV was his backup plan, I was sure it’d be a huuuge success.
I didn’t have a backup plan. I was getting married in April 2017 to the love of my life, John, a pastor, and I was going to move to Florida to help him with the work of the church and we’d live happily ever after. My plan B was returning to my life of service to God and community—a beautiful life. I’d heard that others on the campaign (like Sean Spicer) had started looking for other jobs before Election Day. Most of the loyal soldiers, like Michael Cohen, would never say die. I spent some time with Michael in Trump Tower that day, and he was prepared for a battle, ready to do whatever was needed to challenge the election results if Hillary won and take it all the way to the Supreme Court! He was in “they’re going to steal it” battle mode.
Everyone else said, “We’ve got this. We’re going to win” on repeat, with the glazed conviction of Trumpword’s most dedicated followers. This optimism wasn’t just part of the loyalty requirement of being in Trump’s orbit. We already had a precedent of beating the odds and defying predictions, going back to the New Hampshire primary. We’d had months of headlines saying he’d never win the nomination, but one “more qualified” candidate after another fell to Trump in the primaries anyway. We were preconditioned to ignore media predictions. They’d proven to be wrong, over and over again. When people said things like “I never saw that coming” or “I was shocked by the results on election night,” I had to wonder why.
In fact, I lay some of the blame for Hillary’s low turnout on those assurances from the media that her victory was a sure thing. Voter behavior indicates that if voters believe their candidate has it in the bag, they will not, for example, take off work to go vote and lose a day’s wages, believing their vote isn’t needed. The press actually demotivated her base. If they’d reported the truth, that the race was very close, there is no doubt in my mind that they would have turned out for her.
At around 4:00 or 5:00 p.m. on Election Day, I had left Trump Tower and headed back to Trump International to get changed and touch up my makeup. The press team had compiled all the media requests that came through for Election Day. When they handed me the full list, I pushed back. I just could not do them all. I was given a revised media schedule, which included ten live standup hits from the party at the New York Hilton, and I needed to get camera ready. The crush of people around Trump Tower was so thick, the driver couldn’t get to me. I ended up walking from Fifth Avenue back to Central Park West.
I was wearing a hat, so no one recognized me. I did stop to take a picture with several police officers. I talked to them for a minute, just to get a read on what was happening on the streets. A few of them whispered to me, “I voted for Trump.” I wasn’t too surprised, since he was the law-and-order candidate.
While I walked, I listened to the chatter around me. Every single person was talking about the election. Most of the people who I passed were Hillary supporters. Again, not surprising. New York City voted overwhelmingly for her; her campaign headquarters was in Brooklyn; she’d been a New York senator. A group of college kids came up alongside me, and they talked about going to the Javits Center that night, where Hillary was having her big party. The Javits Center is made of glass; she would be shattering the glass ceiling, etcetera. These young women couldn’t have been more excited to celebrate Hillary’s certain victory. Hearing them gave me knots in my stomach. Even with the data we had coming in, we could still be wrong. It could go either way, and it was possible that I’d wake up tomorrow morning to a Clinton presidency.
After I changed and freshened up, I had to go to the New York Hilton on Fifty-Fourth Street and Sixth Avenue. The traffic was even more congested now because there were even more sand trucks and police, and protesters. Roads were shut down. Mobility around New York City was extremely limited. I wanted to show our supporters what it was like out there, and posted a Facebook Live report of my commute between Trump International and the Hilton. It was about six or seven blocks, but it was slow going.
I arrived at the Hilton around 6:00 p.m. On the main floor level, there was the large area for staffers, supporters, and all the camera crews from every TV network, and press from every major newspaper and outlet. I would do my media hits on the floor level, and then in between I would go up to the invitation-only party to visit the VIP and the VVIP rooms, which were already packed with luminaries including billionaire David Koch, New Jersey governor Chris Christie, and actor Stephen Baldwin. Off to the side, there was a hold room with food, music, and a little side seating area where I could just take a break and think.
In the end, we achieved our goal. The exit polling showed that we received 8 percent of the black vote, beating Romney’s 6 percent by two points. Thirteen percent of African American men voted for Trump, and I think that goes back to his aspirational image, the rappers and the actors he was friendly with. I was praised by the campaign, by the leadership, for that turnout. I didn’t have a whole team like the Clinton campaign, which had twenty-five full-time staffers working on African American outreach. I didn’t have the Democratic grassroots infrastructure. I was grateful to Bruce, Darrell, and Michael for the National Diversity Coalition efforts.
We had our eyes peeled on key battleground states—in particular, Florida and my home state of Ohio. Traditionally, if you win Ohio and Florida, you win the presidency, so when those states went for us, there were cheers, mayhem, total elation in the room. We were still waiting for Pennsylvania and Missouri, though. I didn’t want to get overconfident.
But states just kept falling our way. The enthusiasm in the room was palpable. You could feel how excited and optimistic people were, and the momentum just kept building. Interesting enough, the media still did not call the election. They seemed to drag it out, as if things were going to turn around. Their reluctance turned to despair once it was clear that Donald Trump was getting closer and closer to 270. Every time he won another key state, we thought they’d declare it, but they seemed to be drawing it out. For ratings? Because it was painful to accept the truth? Probably both.
Around 2:00 a.m. back at the war room, Kellyanne got the call we had all been waiting for from Clinton.
Hillary’s concession didn’t trickle down to the rest of the world for a while. Her campaign staff didn’t tell the thousands who’d come to the Javits Center to go home until 2:00 a.m. I thought about those girls I’d seen on the street earlier. I didn’t understand why they’d kept those kids standing there all that time. It seemed cruel, prolonging their hopes when the contest was already over.
We got word shortly after that that the senior staff and the Trump family were heading over to the Hilton. We had to navigate from the VIP room, through security, to the freight elevator they would be coming up in. Interestingly enough, in our little entourage of Lynne, Katrina, and myself, we picked up a stray. Sarah Palin found out we were going to meet the Trumps, and she joined us as we walked to the freight elevator. She wanted to be there when the group arrived so she’d be swept up along with the rest of us as we walked to the stage in the main room.
At two thirty, they started the walk. The room was at capacity; hundreds of screaming supporters went crazy when Donald came onto the stage.
And I was r
ight there with him. It was just unbelievable, a thrilling moment for me. It was a rush, a surge of adrenaline. And it was emotional, the culmination of everything that we’d done. All the hard work, travel, rallies, interviews, death threats. They were all worth it for that moment.
Donald gave his victory speech, framed by Mike Pence and Barron Trump. I was on the stage along with the family members, Kellyanne, Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, Lynne, everyone who’d played a major part in this win. After he finished, Donald made his way down the stage, shaking hands and embracing everyone up there. When he got to me, he gave me a hug and a cheek kiss. The moment was caught on camera and broadcast to the world.
That moment was one of the highlights of my life. I marked it down as proof of how wonderful and great this country had been to me. At that moment, I was living the American dream. I’d had many low points in my life: being on public assistance, going to the mission to get food from the food bank, the murders of my father and brother. And now I was standing on that stage with the president-elect of the United States, soon to be the most powerful man in the country, if not the world. That anyone could overcome such tremendous odds, so many hurdles and barriers, to wind up there, seemed incredible and humbling. I’d had to navigate the media, the meanness, the name-calling from petty people online and from members of the press, who mocked me with a clown nose on the cover of a newspaper. I’d faced it all down, stood strong in my sense of purpose and loyalty—just like Donald had—and now, against all odds, the two of us were on that stage together.
I walked with him and his family to the motorcade at 3:20 a.m. I congratulated him and said good night as he headed back to Trump Tower. It was a good night, a crazy night. TMZ cameras caught me returning to Trump International in the small hours of the morning, still celebrating our victory. The headline on the video was “Omarosa Parties After Trump Win.”
Unhinged: An Insider's Account of the Trump White House Page 15