The Briefing

by Sean Spicer

  The minute I arrived in Boulder, Colorado, I knew we were in trouble. Chris LaCivita, a marine and a seasoned political operative working for Rand Paul, tweeted a picture of his candidate’s green room. It looked like a closet, and its most prominent feature was a door that opened to a toilet. He compared it to Donald Trump’s green room, which looked, in comparison, like a five-star hotel. More tweets of other green rooms surfaced. They all looked small and depressing.

  Why had this happened? Each candidate obviously had to have privacy to review notes and speak candidly with staff within a close proximity to the debate hall. There are only so many spaces in a gym that are appropriate for such uses. We allocated makeshift green rooms by the only objective standard we could think of: a candidate’s standing in the polls as assigned by the network. There was no other way to do it and no better rooms to give out. I became the focus of ire for this and for every other complaint the campaigns had, including the apportionment of tickets. Every candidate thought the others were getting a better deal.

  Things went from bad to worse for me when Rand Paul stepped out of the secure zone for an interview and then tried to get back in without his credentials. He jumped a gate and was chased down by a security guard. The senator was furious, and some of his campaign’s fury fell on me.

  At the debate itself, the candidates were asked one “gotcha” question after another by the CNBC moderators. New York Times columnist John Harwood, for instance, asked Trump, “Is this a comic-book version of a presidential campaign?”11 I had known Harwood for years but never appreciated his bias or how he could ask such an inexcusable question. Media bias, always a problem for Republican candidates, escalated whenever Trump was involved.

  Afterwards, all the candidates were angry and adamant that we would never deal with NBC ever, ever, ever again.

  So, Reince withdrew sponsorship for a planned NBC-Telemundo debate, and this time the candidates had our back. Reince’s letter to NBC News President Andrew Lack still gives off verbal steam.

  CNBC billed the debate as one that would focus on “the key issues that matter to all voters—job growth, taxes, technology, retirement and the health of our national economy.” That was not the case. Before the debate, the candidates were promised an opening question on economic or financial matters. That was not the case. Candidates were promised that speaking time would be carefully monitored to ensure fairness. That was not the case. Questions were inaccurate or downright offensive. The first question directed to one of our candidates asked if he was running a comic book version of a presidential campaign, hardly in the spirit of how the debate was billed.12

  I came out of Boulder determined not to repeat such a painful debacle. The campaigns were incensed. They were so furious at how the RNC and I had handled the debate with CNBC that they decided to take matters into their own hands. The campaigns met to come up with a better system without us.

  The Saturday night before their big meeting was Halloween. Rebecca and I took our children trick-or-treating, but I was on the phone the entire time. With my headphones firmly locked in, I trailed my wife and kids from house to house as people put candy in their buckets, and I talked with one campaign after the next, trying to minimize the fallout with the RNC. The RNC had tried to protect the best interest of the candidates and play the dual-role of negotiator and manager of logistics for the seventeen campaigns that wanted to be part of the debates. If they came up with a better system, we were happy to support it. But there had to be a consensus, and there was one possible holdout. I called Corey Lewandowski. He told me he would not be at the meeting. Trump was up in the polls. He was doing well in the debates, and since his campaign was receiving the spoils of being in first place, he didn’t have any major concerns about how the debates were being run.

  To my surprise, later that evening I saw Corey’s name listed as one of the meeting’s attendees. But I shouldn’t have been surprised—being told one thing by him and finding out another was par for the course. During the Republican primary debates, he decided that Reince’s chief of staff, Katie Walsh, had not afforded him the respect he deserved, and he refused to work with her. So, I became the RNC’s delegated Trump campaign handler, on top of my other duties of managing logistics, communications, and strategy for the RNC as a whole. This assignment became all-consuming once Trump won the Indiana primary on May 3, effectively clinching the nomination.

  I soon found out that many “Trump people,” like Corey and others who had no campaign experience, viewed the RNC with suspicion. That was a sign of their political inexperience and ignorance, not a mark of loyalty to Trump. They did not appreciate that the RNC’s job was to support the party’s presidential candidate and to win races down the ballot. They did not appreciate the good work the RNC was doing to pacify nervous donors who were worried by some of Trump’s statements and tweets. They blamed the RNC for every comment and criticism from local and former party officials who had no connection to the RNC. And they did not yet appreciate the whole campaign apparatus that the RNC had painstakingly assembled—over a period of several years—and that would soon be at the service of the Republican presidential candidate.

  Reince had to balance the demands of supporting the nominee, promoting the long-term viability of the party, retaining a congressional majority, and fundraising. We were taking shots from donors, the media, and elected Republicans as the party divided over Trump. Reince, under these trying circumstances, did a solid job of keeping the party together and working for the congressional majority that any Republican president would need to enact his or her agenda.

  One morning, when I dialed into the 9:00 conference call with the Trump campaign, only Paul Manafort, who had joined the campaign to handle the convention and was serving as its chairman, picked up.

  “We can just start,” he said. “Corey’s in a meeting.” (It would be his final “meeting.”)

  Since those days, Paul Manafort’s image has suffered. He worked for anti-democratic politicians in Ukraine and was indicted for alleged money laundering and acting as an unregistered agent for a foreign principal. Keep in mind, these revelations and charges were yet to come and, as I write, are still being adjudicated.

  With his well-tailored suits, deep voice, and gravitas, Paul was a K Street lobbyist out of central casting. It was clear that Paul wasn’t going to be a modern campaign manager in the mold of Obama’s David Plouffe, pulling insights from big data to execute brilliant social media strategies. But Paul brought a much-needed maturity to the Trump campaign when it needed an experienced political professional operative more than anything else.

  At the time, the Trump campaign was running on bare-bones. Frugality is one thing, malpractice is another. I had seen congressional campaigns that were better staffed with significantly less funding. There was no semblance of a campaign structure, just a few, distraught, overworked people constantly barking into their phones. Paul immediately set up and staffed the political and communications operations necessary to take on the Clinton machine.

  It was a relief to see all of this, but the campaign clock was ticking. It was getting very late in the game. Imagine an NFL football coach who assembles a team and scribbles a playbook while the national anthem is being sung. That is what it felt like as we prepared for the upcoming Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, and the future presidential debates with virtually no presidential campaign to work with.

  The campaign had a bare-bones political and communications team, no fundraising operation or fundraising staff, and no opposition research or opposition-research staff. The RNC had expected to augment the nominee’s campaign, but it essentially became the campaign.

  There was chaos on the other side as well. Hillary Clinton was having trouble putting away the socialist from Vermont. Her deliberate and orchestrated plan to handle classified secrets by shifting them onto a private, unsecured server highlighted a long career of ignoring the rules. When FBI Director James Comey gave his long, unpreced
ented statement on July 5, 2016, both excoriating Clinton and exonerating her, we knew that our side wasn’t the only one seeing things that had never happened before.

  We recognized in Comey’s actions the influence of an Obama administration and its attorney general, Loretta Lynch, to protect their candidate at all costs. We also saw a wounded front runner. And Donald J. Trump saw someone he was determined to beat and a swamp of political corruption he was determined to drain.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE NEVER-TRUMP CONVENTION THAT NEVER WAS

  The contentious primary season was over in terms of the delegate count, but in emotional terms it was an unspent force. Donald Trump had risen as an insurgent within the Republican Party, leaving a lot of bruised egos and raw feelings in his wake. “Never-Trump” Republicans threatened to challenge his nomination and spark a contested convention, even if it was, in reality, all but impossible to replace a candidate with such an impressive majority of delegates. We still had to keep the RNC rulebook close at all times to avoid surprises that could embarrass the convention and the Republican Party.

  In our worst dreams, we imagined the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, becoming the GOP version of the notorious 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Illinois, which had been roiled by controversy within the convention hall and riots in the streets.

  We leaned heavily on the professionals serving the Committee on Arrangements. That’s a fancy title for the specialists who show up every four years and put the big show together for the nominee—everything from logistics and staging to lighting and confetti.

  At the RNC, we understood that there is more to national party conventions than formally nominating the candidates for president and vice president. They have become media spectacles that present the party nominee to the country. Less visibly, delegates vote on and establish the party’s governing rules for the next four years.

  Despite Paul Manafort’s last-minute efforts, the Trump campaign was still far behind the organizational curve. It didn’t have a good lineup of surrogate speakers who could talk on behalf of the candidate—one of the first prerequisites of any national political campaign. What they did have were successful business associates of the candidate and celebrities from the fringes of reality TV, country music, and sports, but very few prominent Republicans had been on the “Trump train.” The Trump campaign had no detailed plan for who should speak at the convention and no organization to handle the mundane, but important, tasks of assigning and managing rooms and credentials. At previous conventions, these sorts of decisions had been made weeks before the event, but the Trump campaign was almost a one-man show, lacking the large, professional campaign structure of previous candidates like Mitt Romney, John McCain, and George W. Bush.

  Delegate committees generally meet a week before the convention to establish how the convention will be run. Usually, this isn’t a big deal, but this year would be quite different. In 2012, I don’t think the rules committee received more than a dozen requests for media credentials. This time, there were hundreds because the Never-Trump coalition wanted to establish rules that would “unbind” the delegates. And the media didn’t want to miss that.

  Under the RNC’s existing rules, most delegates had to vote for the candidate with the majority or plurality of the delegates in their state primary or caucus. Those were the rules that had made Donald Trump the presumptive nominee. The rules also prohibited nominations of other candidates who had not received a majority of the delegates from at least five states. If these rules were adopted again by the 2016 convention, no other candidate would have been allowed to have their name placed in nomination. The Never Trumpers thought that changing these rules was their great opportunity.

  As a Republican Party loyalist, I recognized that Donald Trump had won fair and square according to the RNC rules. The Never Trumpers did not want to accept that outcome. Their attempt to manipulate the rules, had it been successful, would have disenfranchised millions of voters who had voted for Trump, blown up party unity, and made it possible for them to elect Hillary. What worried me most was that Trump and his team expected the RNC to have a tight grip on this process because the Trump campaign certainly didn’t. And most of his team didn’t understand that when a convention kicks off, it’s the delegates, not the RNC and its staff like me, who run the show and have full control. In fact, for the duration of the convention, the party is led by a temporary chairman, and, under the rules, the RNC literally does not exist.

  As delegates gathered to discuss the rules, many signed on to support changes without fully understanding that such alterations would make nominating an alternative presidential candidate (or candidates) possible and thus create chaos on the convention floor, which might have been good for TV ratings but would have been utterly destructive to the party and our chances of winning the White House. Seeing the danger, Manafort, Reince, and key RNC members (all 168 members of the RNC party structure are delegates to the convention) engaged in old-fashioned politics—twisting arms, making promises and even the occasional threat.

  The rules committee held fast, and we were moving on to the convention.

  Unfortunately, that was not the end of that fight. Many Never Trumpers argued that it was a matter of principle that delegates should always be unbound, regardless of the fact that their state rules bound them to a particular candidate. They threatened to challenge the rules on the convention floor. There were tense moments when delegates assembled to vote on the rules package.

  As the vote was being called, Manafort released an all-points bulletin to the leaders of each state’s delegation. We were dangerously close to a convention-floor fight over the rules. The Never Trumpers had circulated a petition to vote down the rules package. It would have taken the party away from its grassroots voters and volunteers and handed it over to a faction that thought it could manipulate the convention in its favor.

  But make no mistake, whatever the Never Trumpers thought, Trump would still be the nominee, and we would be single-handedly giving the media and the Democrats the sort of contentious convention of turmoil and mayhem they had all wanted.

  Manafort and his lieutenants went one by one down the list of people who had signed the petition and persuaded them to remove their signatures. How Manafort and company did this was a scene out of 1950s politics—alternating between carrot and stick and sometimes bat, even, at one point, conveniently making the convention’s parliamentarian unavailable to keep the opposition from formally submitting their petition. The Manafort message was clear: Trump will be our nominee and our next president, and anyone who didn’t want to work to that end could spend the next four years in political Siberia. (No Russia pun intended.)

  Finally, it came down to Robert Sinners, a South Carolinian who was now a member of the Washington, D.C., delegation. Sinners is a hard-charging, passionate Republican who had been told that the petition was in the best interest of the party and somehow the candidate himself. Sinners suddenly became the focus of the Manafort team, and he had an issue he wanted addressed.

  He wanted Donald Trump to support gay rights.

  Without missing a beat, Manafort summoned Jason Miller, the Trump campaign’s senior communication adviser. Jason was an experienced, conservative operator with a background in South Carolina politics and knew Sinners.

  Jason assured Sinners that Trump would be the most “inclusive” candidate the Republican Party ever had.

  “This is your moment, Robert,” Jason told him. “You can deliver this.”

  Before Jason could finish, Brian Jack, a top member of Manafort’s delegate whip team, jammed a pen in front of Sinners so that he could sign a form that officially removed his name from the petition. Jason told Sinners Donald Trump’s acceptance speech would acknowledge the LGBT community, which no other Republican acceptance speech had done. And it did.

  The 2016 convention had its occasional, minor breakdowns, and it had the Never Trumpers who tried to derail
it, but overall it ran like a well-oiled machine—thanks in large measure to the steady hands of the staff and volunteers of the Committee on Arrangements and convention veterans like Steve King, Jeff Larson, Bill Harris, Sara Armstrong, Mike Miller, Kirsten Kukowski, Phil Alongi, and John Zito.

  With the delegate fight behind us, we thought the drama was over. But that would not be the case. Enter Ted Cruz. The Texas senator had been asked to speak, but no one knew what he was going to say. There were many assumptions but no agreements about the content of his address. The two candidates had sparred during the primary season, and this was an opportunity to turn a corner. At the event, he gave a speech that went on . . . while we waited for him to endorse Donald Trump . . . and went on . . . while we waited for the endorsement . . . and approached the conclusion without an endorsement of the nominee.

  “Say his name!” delegates screamed at Cruz. “Say his name!”

  Donald Trump had been in his holding room waiting for his son Eric to take the stage after Cruz. The plan was for Trump to wait until Cruz was done and then take his seat in the family viewing area while Eric spoke.

  As Cruz continued to go on and on, and it became obvious that he wasn’t going to say those magic words, Trump did what Trump does. He changed the narrative.

  “Let’s go,” he said to his team.

  Trump came tearing through the curtains and the far side of the arena across from the stage, interrupting Cruz’s peroration with thunderous applause that echoed through the hall. Trump had come out and sucked the oxygen out of Cruz’s speech. It appeared that Cruz’s non-endorsement speech was supposed to establish him as the conservative standard-bearer for a run in 2020. If that was in fact his goal, he miscalculated badly. Instead, it helped unite the party behind Trump, and Cruz faced backlash from his own donors and constituents. The Never-Trump movement was effectively done as a political force, and Donald Trump had won another victory.