The Briefing

by Sean Spicer

  Once the plane leveled off, the staffer talking to Trump departed, and Corey Lewandowski turned to me and said, “Let’s go talk to Mr. Trump.”

  Corey had asked me to go to New York to help plan media strategy and staffing. The candidate was sprawled out in his seat wearing his trademark blue suit, white shirt, and red tie, relaxed a few notches—a human flag, which of course was the idea. Donald Trump looked up at me and smiled warmly, though whether he remembered our previous encounters throughout the primary debates, I couldn’t be sure. Twice during the campaign, as the spokesperson for the RNC, I had criticized comments Trump had made about Mexican immigrants and John McCain’s status as an American war hero.

  Had he noticed? Did he hold a grudge? I later learned that if you didn’t criticize Trump personally—and I had not—he didn’t take it personally. Whether he remembered me or had been prompted by Corey, he called me by name.

  “Hey, Sean,” he said. “Take a seat.”

  I did and for the next ten minutes we had an easy conversation about the state of the race, the stories of the day, and what the media was up to. By the time we landed in New York, I was feeling better about the candidate, the campaign, and where I stood with the likely nominee and possible future president.

  As we landed, Keith Schiller, Trump’s longtime bodyguard, took me to the cockpit to watch the landing as the plane approached LaGuardia Airport.

  Starting in 2012, I had helped craft a major RNC initiative called the Growth and Opportunity Project. It was based on the premise that we had to meet the changing demographics of the United States if the Republican Party was to remain viable as a national party. GOP governors—from Scott Walker in Wisconsin, to John Kasich in Ohio, to Rick Scott in Florida—were making deep inroads with millennials and independent women as well as with Hispanics, Asians, and Latinos. Walker in particular resonated with blue-collar workers and union members, alienated by a Democratic Party that was dominated by identity politics and appeared remotely elite to working men and women.

  The party of Lincoln and Reagan has an inclusive message of opportunity for all, but many Republican politicians had little interest and saw little benefit in expanding the message beyond our base of middle-class, suburban, white voters. Too many expected that African Americans, Hispanics, and Asians would naturally come our way because they shared our Republican values and stood to benefit from Republican policies. But that’s not how politics works. You have to make the ask—and too many of our candidates weren’t doing that. We weren’t in their neighborhoods, churches, and businesses, and the vote totals showed it.

  The RNC aimed to change that by going into minority communities and union strongholds and explaining how Republican policies would greatly improve their economic prospects.

  In the RNC’s Growth and Opportunity Project report (many would call it an “autopsy,” a term that I have never liked) of the 2012 campaign, the RNC concluded that Hispanic voters were especially ripe for Republican appeals. They were far more conservative than the liberal politicians they supported in the Democratic Party. Millions of church-going, Hispanic small business owners were particularly amenable to hearing Republican arguments about lower taxes, less regulation, respect for life, and school reform that focused on hard academics and employable skills rather than liberal social engineering. Our failure to reach Hispanics and engage with them on their top issues would have a major impact on our ability to win national elections if we did not make significant structural changes. We needed to create a system akin to those used by missionaries, one that would spread conservative values.

  So, political alarm bells went off at the RNC in mid-June 2015 when Donald Trump, in his announcement that he was running for the Republican nomination for president, declared, “The U.S. has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems . . . .When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you . . . .They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”1

  That was so far from our message that it was almost a parody—and a not a funny one. Reince and I agreed that we needed to make sure we communicated about where the party was on this. When CNN asked me about Trump’s statement, I said, “[A]s far as painting Mexican Americans with that kind of a brush, I think that’s probably something that is not helpful to the cause.”2 I criticized the message but not the messenger.

  Just a month later, I saw Donald Trump being interviewed by pollster Frank Luntz at a Family Leadership Summit in Iowa. The pollster asked the candidate if it was appropriate to call Senator John McCain of Arizona a “dummy,” as Trump had done at a recent rally, in retaliation for McCain calling some Trump supporters “crazies.”

  Luntz said, “He’s a war hero.”

  Trump shot back, “He’s not a war hero . . . .He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured . . . .I believe, perhaps, he’s a war hero. But right now he said some very bad things about a lot of people . . . .”3

  Criticizing John McCain’s position on the issues is fair game, and it is true that McCain sometimes seems like the Washington Post’s favorite go-to critic of whatever his fellow conservatives and Republicans are trying to do. At the same time, John McCain is a man who wore our country’s uniform—and wore it proudly—and never wavered during the arduous years he was held captive as a POW. At one point while he was in solitary confinement, his brutal North Vietnamese captors offered to release him because his father was an admiral and they wanted to score propaganda points. But he refused any special treatment and rejected any parole unless every other American prisoner of war captured before him was released as well. The North Vietnamese responded by torturing McCain even more. His actions were unmistakably heroic and honorable. Most Americans, including myself, felt that John McCain has endured more pain and suffering for our nation than most of us can ever fathom.

  I did not want to get involved in a political feud between Senator McCain and Donald Trump, and I did not want the RNC to take the side of one Republican presidential candidate over another. But I did think that it was important to affirm that McCain, a longtime Republican senator and our former presidential nominee, was a genuine American hero.

  I felt the RNC needed to make a statement. Beyond my own feelings, we were getting flooded with calls from reporters and dismayed Republicans—but what should the statement say, and who should issue it?

  Reince was speaking at the Bohemian Grove in Northern California, a gathering of business and political elites, where no phones or electronic devices are allowed. I consulted Katie Walsh, Reince’s chief of staff. We made an executive decision and issued a statement and a tweet under my name.

  @SenJohnMcCain is an American hero because he served his country and sacrificed more than most can imagine. Period.4

  (See, I have a tendency to end statements with “period.”)

  Once again, I was careful not to criticize Donald Trump personally, and I let Trump’s campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, know what we were going to do. Later, there was a lot of speculation about “fissures” between the Trump campaign and the RNC, but Corey understood our concerns and, I think, shared them.

  The press saw the political damage from Trump’s remarks in stark terms. In reporting on the McCain comments, Politico concluded: “Donald Trump might have finally crossed the line.”

  I hope Politico coded that sentence with a single keystroke because it would have reason to use it again and again. If “crossing the line” was the concern, candidate Trump would cross the line, jump over the line, and dance merrily back and forth over the line. But he never paid the price any other candidate would have paid.

  Why? In a word, relatability. There was group of voters who believed neither party understood their concerns or was speaking to them. They view Trump, despite his wealth, as being one of them.


  I slowly came to realize that for all his roughness of speech and manner, Donald Trump was a Growth and Opportunity Project all to himself. He was doing personally what the RNC was only beginning to do nationally, but he was doing it in a very different way to a somewhat different group of voters. While he was not reaching out to black, Hispanic, and Asian voters in the way that the RNC had prescribed, he was reaching out to many of these voters and others in a way that we could never have imagined—what he called the “forgotten men and women.”

  His ability to do this came from his lifetime career as a contractor and hotelier.

  Donald Trump had taken the time to get to know the people employed on his projects—the electricians, plumbers, carpenters, boilermakers, ironworkers, masons, and roofers. He also got to know hotel housekeeping teams as well as cooks, bellmen, and cashiers.

  The media wants to believe that Trump’s base is all white. The people Trump took pains to know represented a diverse cross section of our country—white, black, Hispanic, Asian American, and immigrants from a wide range of countries. He asked them about their dreams, their fears, and their complaints about job security and upward mobility. Even though he was their boss, there was something about him that prompted people to open up. Franklin Delano Roosevelt had come to know the lives of rural Southerners during his stays in Georgia, joining them on the porch and following them by car on hunts. Trump went to the trouble to get to know “working-class people” and recognize that his businesses wouldn’t survive without their hard work and dedication. He valued their work, and he listened when they opened up about a relative who was worried about keeping a job or a small business while living from paycheck to paycheck. He knew that many of these people felt ignored during the Obama administration, which was passionate about reassigning bathrooms and combating climate change while apparently dismissing the interests of small business owners and working-class Americans. The Obama administration was very keen on “globalism” and seemingly unconcerned about job losses among coal miners and steelworkers and people who worked in struggling small towns. Many Americans felt that neither party really spoke for them—the Republicans focused on business owners rather than workers; the Democrats obsessed with progressive crusades rather than jobs.

  But now the forgotten men and women of America finally had a candidate who heard their concerns and whom they could support.

  The RNC had spent several years analyzing the 2012 election results and trying to figure out how to win a national election. We invested over $150 million and worked diligently to build a data system that effectively identified the voters we needed to get to the polls. But Donald Trump knew how to win by instinct. He had a populist message that no Republican messaging laboratory could have ever devised. He motivated conservative and working-class voters, some who had sat out previous elections because they felt that neither party’s candidate truly represented their views or cared about them. He was taken seriously because he was willing to discard the clichéd, boilerplate conservative message and replace it with something that resonated with blue-collar workers’ experiences and observations. He attacked Republican orthodoxy on free trade and the Iraq War. He made fun of the party’s barons. He was so politically incorrect that pundits assumed, over and over again, that his campaign was finished, that no candidate could survive such controversy and media condemnation. But Trump stayed in the game because he spoke to the dreams and ambitions of millions of Americans of all races who felt they were the heart and soul of this country but were being ignored. My father put it this way: “Many candidates say something like, ‘I will fight for policies that will create a better economy,’ while Trump says, ‘I’m going to get your job back.” It was a very personal message that was vastly different from what people were used to hearing.

  Donald Trump could sell his message to working-class people of all backgrounds and colors because they knew he was more comfortable among them than he ever would be at the annual Gridiron Club dinner or the Council on Foreign Relations. And if he sometimes spoke crudely or bluntly, they forgave him because they believed that they or their friends or their relatives spoke that way, too. Despite his glamorous lifestyle, Trump had developed his image as a man of the people who spoke his mind and not a typical politician who only reiterated what he had been told to say by handlers, pollsters, and strategists. For people who thought America was headed in the wrong direction, Donald Trump seemed to offer real hope and change, despite any inappropriate language.

  As ridiculous as it sounds, the RNC had little role in the overall nominating process or primary debates. After losing the 2012 election, we made several structural reforms to improve our future chances. We shortened the primary season but involved more states, slowed down the potential of a runaway candidate, moved up the convention, and took control of the primary debates.

  I told Reince that our debate and presidential nominating process was backwards with too many debates that forced our candidates to be led around the nose by media sponsors.

  After the 2012 elections, the Growth and Opportunity Project, with a sophisticated data and technology operation, was well underway. The 2014 midterm elections were very successful for Republicans, and I offered to stay at the RNC for the 2016 presidential cycle, provided Reince gave me a chance to lead the sort of major initiatives I thought we needed. Reince agreed and added chief strategist to my title.

  Along the way, we also had to manage the party’s internal ideological tensions and cultural divides. Small donors—people who give between twenty and one hundred dollars per year and also put up yard signs and make get-out-the-vote calls—tend to be social conservatives who want their issues at the forefront of the party’s agenda. High-dollar donors, drawn from the top ranks of business, finance, and technology, tend to be more socially moderate and focused on fiscal responsibility. They wanted us to lean into issues of regulation and taxation. The party’s bigger donors naturally felt their libertarian take on social and economic issues should be paramount.

  Managing these disparate and sometimes fractious constituencies was a task for which Reince Priebus was well suited. A consensus-builder by nature, his calming, businesslike demeanor got everyone pulling their oars in the same direction.

  In the 2014 midterm elections, the Republican Party gained control of the Senate, increased our hold on the House, and added two governors. We had the largest majority in the House and state legislatures since 1928. As the presidential campaign got underway, the RNC was finally able to compete at the Democrats’ level when communicating our message and getting people to the polls. I truly believe that if Mitt Romney had gone into the 2012 race with the capabilities the RNC had in 2016, he would have won the election.

  The RNC had gotten up to speed, but we weren’t pushing the cruise-control button. We still had our foot on the accelerator. We didn’t want just to compete against the Democrats—we wanted to beat the Democrats in the 2016 election. Inside the RNC building and among donors, we could feel even greater success building. There was an energy like I had never experienced in more than two decades in political circles. At the time, none of us had any idea that energy would result in the election of one of our donors—one of our celebrity donors.

  Becoming the nominee of the Republican Party in 2016 required getting 1,237 delegates from the primaries and caucuses. Delegates from the states are awarded in different ways: winner take all, proportional, and hybrid. In order to get more voters and states involved in the process of selecting the nominee, the RNC had reformed the way delegates were apportioned and had limited the ability of early states to be “winner take all.” This reduced the ability of a well-funded candidate, or one with high national name ID, to come out of the gate and rack up delegates without being “tested” in the political arena.

  In recent cycles, the presidential primary season started in January and wrapped up in June. A candidate would generally become the presumptive nominee about halfway through the process, limiting the number of st
ates and voters whose votes mattered and forcing the eventual nominee to spend valuable time and resources fending off lingering opponents. The 2016 rules of the RNC shortened the season, but they also involved more states and voters and helped more states award their delegates “proportional” earlier in the process. No states were allowed to be “winner take all” until after the second week in March, which was two weeks longer than the 2012 timeline. Further, only four “carve-out” states—Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada—were allowed to hold contests before March 1, further reducing the chances of a runaway candidate. While states had ignored the rules and jumped the que in previous cycles, the new system worked—no state broke the rules. For states that violated the rules, higher penalties were put in place that would strip them of their delegates. A state like Florida, which had ignored the rules in the previous cycle, didn’t want to risk losing delegates because leaders in the state assumed one of their own, Bush or Rubio, would need those delegates in the race to 1,237. Ironically, Florida was a “winner take all” state, and Donald Trump took all ninety-nine delegates.

  Another strategic step we took after the 2012 cycle was to move up the convention date by a few weeks. Conventions used to be held much earlier in cycle, but after Watergate and the advent of public financing, conventions were moved back to late August and early September. As it is with most things, money was the motivating factor. Candidates who agree to public financing also agree to forgo raising money for their campaign in return for a lump sum from the government. The conventions were pushed back to maximize the money during the final weeks of the campaign. In 2008, Barack Obama’s campaign flip-flopped on their pledge to take public financing and began raising money for the general election. That cycle will likely be the last time any major candidate takes public financing. Thus, the need to wait to access the money is gone.