by Sean Spicer
The next stop for me was Philadelphia where the Democrats were preparing to nominate Hillary Clinton. It is expected that a presidential campaign will plant its flag in the opposing campaign’s convention city for what we call “counterprogramming.” While we knew the Democrats and Hillary Clinton would dominate news coverage, our goal was to be the biggest thorn in their side. So, we set up a site a mile from the convention to talk with reporters and introduce them to Republican surrogates. Our primary draw would be our nominee’s campaign manager.
I asked Paul Manafort when he was coming to Philadelphia.
“I’m not,” he said. “I’ll be in the Hamptons.”
“You’re going on vacation?” I asked, incredulously. “Now?”
I finally talked Manafort into coming down to Philadelphia for a few hours on the first night of the Democratic convention. He stayed for ninety minutes, answered questions, chatted up reporters, and went straight back to the Hamptons.
Except for Manafort’s brief and forced appearance, and Josh Pitcock from Mike Pence’s team, not a single member of the campaign joined us in Philadelphia. The director of surrogate speakers for the campaign, normally a key player in responding to the other party’s convention speakers, had gone on vacation. In contrast, in 2012, more than twenty-five members of the Romney campaign had joined a core RNC team at the Democratic convention.
Despite it all, we still managed to put together a great team to respond to the Democratic convention. Republican elected officials, pundits, and activists like Congressman Lee Zeldin, former Congressman Jason Chaffetz, Ric Grenell, Boris Epshteyn, Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge, Ashley Bell, former Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Jose Fuentes, and Kellyanne Conway (who was not with the campaign at the time) helped drive our counterprogramming message home with press conferences and media interviews. At our convention, the Democrats had hosted a modest spin room at a law firm in downtown Cleveland. We tried to do more, so we peppered the city with mobile billboards that were not intended for mass consumption but rather to annoy Democrat delegates and create a larger-than-life feeling that we had invaded their convention. We took over a mixed-martial-arts boxing facility and turned it into a Republican headquarters with surrogate speakers, a robust social media team that put out our message, and a variety of social events to attract reporters.
At our convention, we had to deal with the schismatic Never Trumpers, but the Democrats faced a schism of their own. Hillary’s defeat of socialist Bernie Sanders left his supporters bitter, especially when it became apparent that the DNC and its superdelegates had squashed their grassroots efforts.
We sought to exploit this division.
Despite the partisan nature of our time in Philadelphia, there was a semblance of bipartisanship at work. In the past, the RNC and DNC each begged, borrowed, and spent countless hours doing who knows what else to acquire passes to each other’s conventions. To save time, my counterpart at the DNC, Communications Director Luis Miranda, and I made a deal: we agreed to provide a handful of hall passes to each other. When his team showed up in Cleveland, we ensured they had their passes. But when we showed up in Philadelphia, DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz had been forced to resign amid the disclosure of her behind-the-scenes effort to advantage Clinton over Sanders. After Wasserman Schultz resigned, most of the DNC’s senior staff followed suit, including Luis. Luis wanted to be helpful, but with him officially gone I thought I was screwed. So much for my deal.
Our surrogates were coming to Philadelphia with the understanding that I would be able to get them access to the convention center for their media interviews. I called Donna Brazile, who had been named interim chair of the party. Even though Donna would not assume control of the DNC until after the convention ended, she understood the nature of the deal and that it was made in good faith. Despite it being a tumultuous time for her and the Democratic Party, Donna was a true professional and ensured the deal was upheld.
As the conventions came to a close and the general election season swung into full gear, reporters began to ask Republican operatives and officials how we could support Trump. I told them what I tell everyone to this day: I wasn’t a Rubio guy, a Bush guy, or any candidate’s “guy.” I am a fiscal and social conservative who will take any Republican candidate over any Democrat any day of the week. I am a party guy who believes in the system and worked hard to make the party better—and the grassroots voters of our party chose Trump.
On August 14, 2016, the New York Times reported that Paul Manafort’s name was found on a secret ledger account, showing he had received millions of dollars from former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, a strong ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Within two days of that news appearing, Manafort was gone from the Trump campaign.
First Corey, then Paul. As I was wondering who would be next, my phone rang. Two people were on the line—Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway.
“We need to talk to you in confidence,” Steve said. “We’re going to be announced tomorrow.”
“That’s right,” Kellyanne chimed in. “I’ll be campaign manager. Steve will be chief strategist.”
I congratulated them and thought, this is going to be interesting. Kellyanne had been in politics for a long time. I knew she had a deep understanding of polling and how to spot the direction of underlying currents of public opinion. Steve knew how to read the populist pulse, which he would ensure would remain the beating heart of the campaign. While I knew both fairly well, and respected them in their domains, neither had run a national campaign.
“We need you to come up to New York on a full-time basis right away,” Kellyanne said.
I felt a twist in my gut.
I was torn. I knew at my age, this was a chance to play a major role in a national campaign. With my kids growing up, it would be years—if ever—before I could or would want to make that kind of commitment again.
I was looking forward to some family time on Labor Day. My kids were about to start kindergarten. I was already working crazy hours at the RNC, but at least I could go home every night and help Rebecca with the kids. And then there was my dad. His long and brave struggle against pancreatic cancer was clearly becoming harder.
But, if I moved to New York, I’d be closer to Rhode Island and my father, and I could bring some (necessary) RNC expertise to Donald Trump’s campaign. I thought about my time aboard Trump’s plane. I felt that Donald Trump and I had clicked.
I asked Rebecca. She had always supported my career choices, but this was different. She knew it was important because I wouldn’t have entertained the idea of moving otherwise. She saw this as a pivotal moment in my career and said, “Well, you’ll only be gone for ten weeks or so. What’s a few weeks?”
I still worried about leaving Reince Priebus behind at the RNC. Reince had hired me six years earlier. I thought we made a strong team and had done important work building up the RNC. Reince didn’t want my position at the RNC vacated at such a crucial time. So, we came up with a compromise that from a campaign point of view (if not a workload point of view) would serve as a workable solution. I would commute to New York and work three or four days a week in Trump Tower. But I’d return to D.C. for the rest of the week and maintain my RNC duties. It worked from a family point of view as well.
During the primaries, the campaign had been based on the fifth floor of Trump Tower, which had previously served as the prop space for The Apprentice and was now an unused, barren storage space of poles, support beams, and exposed wood. Now that Trump was the nominee, the campaign had moved most of the operation to the fourteenth floor (which was just one flight of stairs above the fifth floor). The fourteenth floor had actual offices, conference rooms, and a large, open, war-room area. But many of the desks and offices were still empty, waiting for campaign positions to be filled.
Hope Hicks was my guide to navigating Trump World. What she lacked in political experience, she more than made up for with her knowledge of our candidate—what he wanted to do
and how he wanted to do it. And how Trump wanted to do things was often not what we teach in political campaigning 101.
What made the Trump campaign so different was that eight times out of ten they would break the rules and be proven right. We’d say you can’t do that, and they would do it anyway. And it would work. It was a humbling experience to give professional advice only to see it empirically refuted time and again. And it was also bracing to see a campaign so willing to act indifferently to the sort of political correctness that inhibits all but the most conservative (and safe-districted) Republican politicians without any apparent political cost.
But I also saw a danger. If you were with Donald Trump from the start—you believed he could be president when no one else did, you were told he would be slaughtered for the things he said, and you knew he could thrive despite these obstacles—it was easy to start feeling infallible when he succeeded.
One of my main goals was to make the campaign team understand how the campaign could benefit from the massive investment the RNC had made in data and technology. It could help us target voters, tell us where and how we should campaign, and guide our ad strategy.
Donald Trump knew a campaign that followed the polls was apt to be led by the nose to positions and postures not of its choosing. The goal was to shape opinion, not to be a creature of it. But to do that, you had to know where opinion was and what the best messages were to lead it in the direction you wanted.
We also had to convince the campaign that it actually needed to be . . . well, a campaign. To that end, Reince, Katie Walsh, RNC Political Director Chris Carr, Kellyanne, Steve Bannon, Jason Miller, digital strategist Brad Parscale, Jared Kushner, Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, and I were all pulling our oars in the right direction, working to support the rapid building of a national campaign structure.
A final challenge was managing the general election debates. Here we had greater leverage than we had in the primaries. If either of the two candidates was unhappy with a proposed debate format, there would be no debate.
Before the debates began, NBC proposed to host a “Commander-in-Chief” forum on national security issues. It was to be held on the USS Intrepid, an Essex-class aircraft carrier from the Second World War, now a museum docked on Pier 86 on the Hudson River. It wasn’t to be an actual debate but two separate discussions by the candidates with Matt Lauer, the now-disgraced, former host of NBC’s Today show.
Republicans remained skeptical of NBC.
While we had concerns about NBC News, our primary concern was about the role MSNBC would be playing. NBC News shared resources and personnel with MSNBC, which leans left and provides America with the nightly wisdom of Rachel Maddow and Chris Matthews.
So, why deal with NBC in any form?
Because Donald Trump said so. He decided that this time it would be different. He was looking forward to facing Matt Lauer one-on-one and appearing on the same stage as Hillary. Looking back, I can see it was a good trial run for Trump. After all, he was the political newcomer, facing an opponent, Hillary Clinton, who had not only served in high office but also had been involved in politics virtually her entire life, including her teenage years. With the decision made, Kellyanne and Steve asked me to negotiate the logistics and lines of questioning with NBC News President Deborah Turness and her team. When we first started negotiating the terms of the forum, the NBC team clearly believed that I had been sent on behalf of the campaign with a hidden agenda of blowing up the event. After the RNC canceled NBC’s Republican debate, NBC executives were clear that they would not soon forget what they perceived as a slight and an insult to their journalistic integrity. We eventually came to terms, and in the process, I learned that Donald Trump likes to manage the details when it comes to the media.
With the deal done, NBC invited me and a Clinton campaign representative to meet aboard the Intrepid for a coin toss to determine which candidate would be interviewed first.
“Whatever you do, Sean,” Donald Trump told me, “make sure I go first.”
“I’ll do my best, sir.”
On my way out of Trump Tower, I ran into Eric Trump.
“Should I call heads or tails?”
Eric didn’t hesitate.
“Heads.”
The coin toss was in an interior, below-deck office of the Intrepid. Knowing I would be held accountable for the outcome, I brought newly hired campaign aide David Bossie with me to serve as my witness. Waiting for us were cameras to memorialize the event. We were offered no choice of heads or tails. Deborah Turness simply announced that heads meant Hillary and tails meant Trump.
When we were done, I called Steve Bannon.
“I’ve got good news and bad news.”
“Give me the bad news,” Steve said.
“We got tails for the coin toss.”
“And what’s the good news?”
“We’re going first.”
Trump would be pleased. I had passed the first small but seemingly important test. I was relieved and ready to never do another coin toss again.
During the interview with Matt Lauer, Donald Trump seemed comfortable talking about veterans, the military, and foreign policy. Before the event, I had briefed Trump on a series of issues that affected veterans. One statistic I shared with him was that every day twenty-two veterans kill themselves.1 Throughout my briefing, Trump listened intently, occasionally asking questions to get more details.
In his discussion with Matt Lauer, it was the host who got that statistic wrong, and Trump corrected him. I had done my job in the briefing, and Trump had nailed it. I relaxed. When Hillary’s turn came, she appeared uncomfortable. She seemed resentful of Lauer’s probing into her email scandal, as if her handling of national secrets as Secretary of State had no business being brought up in a national security forum.
It was not a good night for her. In the end, the Hillary camp and her media allies were reduced to blaming her bad performance on Matt Lauer. For us, it was a double victory—Trump had exceeded media expectations, and Hillary looked like a sore loser.
CHAPTER SIX
UPSHIFTING THE DOWNSHIFTERS
Donald Trump’s preparation for the debates was unorthodox. He thought mock debates, with a staffer filling in for Hillary, were a waste of time. But reporters who said he just showed up at the debates and winged them were also wrong. The truth was, Trump was preparing all the time, in his rallies, in give and take with voters and journalists, and in talks with Reince, Governor Chris Christie, former Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Stephen Miller, Hope Hicks, Steve Bannon, Jason Miller, Jared Kushner, and other top aides. They would toss issues at him at the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey, as if the candidate were in batting practice.
At the first formal debate at Hofstra University, Hillary Clinton was poised and on the attack. For all her rhetoric, her campaign was never about the issues. It was a relentless attack on Donald Trump’s character and the character of his supporters, “the deplorables.” Trump wanted to talk about his issues—tax cuts, economic nationalism, immigration reform, an America-first foreign policy—but Hillary had him playing defense much of the night. She hit Donald Trump for having a “long record of engaging in racist behavior.” She accused Donald Trump of supposedly calling a Latina beauty contestant “Miss Housekeeping.” Trump, fighting a cold, tried to over-talk her and accused Hillary of lacking “stamina.” She coolly replied, “When Donald Trump spends eleven hours testifying in front of a congressional committee, he can talk to me about stamina.”
While she may have had a point, she reminded people why she had been testifying before Congress (about the handling of the raid on the U.S. compound in Benghazi, Libya) and her lack of candor in the aftermath of the attack. So, while she made her point against Trump, she did so at the expense of her own message.
This time, the media consensus was set by the Clinton spin room. John Podesta, chairman of the Clinton campaign, said of Trump, “He came in unprepared and what we saw was kind of a meltdown
.”
I could not entirely disagree. Trump seemed slightly and uncharacteristically off his game. He left several attacks unanswered and missed obvious opportunities. And things were about to get worse.
The second debate with Hillary Clinton was to take place on Sunday, October 9, 2016, at Washington University in St. Louis.
On the Friday before the debate, our digital team told me that a deal long in the making with Twitter was being scrapped by its leader, Jack Dorsey. The team had worked for months with Twitter to create a political emoji, and the plan was to create an image when people tweeted about “crooked Hillary.” I never fully understood the usefulness or effectiveness of it, but the digital experts were convinced the emoji would yield results. Twitter had offered this new opportunity to both sides, but the Clinton campaign took a pass. So, Twitter worked with the RNC digital team for months to build a robust online effort that would total into millions of dollars. When word reached Jack, he abruptly canceled the buy, claiming legal concerns (lawyers had been part of the process). As I was walking down a jetway to board a flight, I was on my phone listening to Jack explain his rationale for cancelling the million-dollar deal. As I hung up, I was certain we could make a big deal out of Twitter’s political bias. I had hoped that their cancelling the deal would make a big splash as another example of the tech community’s bias. But just moments later, another story would overshadow it in a big way.
As I took my seat on the plane flying from Reagan National Airport to St. Louis, Missouri, my phone chimed. I had a message from Katie Walsh.
We have a problem. Look at the email I just sent you.
On the plane, as discretely as I could, I read a transcript Katie had flagged as urgent. It was not good. But it was a transcript, and perhaps it was inaccurate. Then came a second email from Katie. There was a video that had been leaked to the Washington Post. The video had been recorded in 2005, and it captured a raunchy conversation between Donald Trump and Billy Bush, then host of Access Hollywood, in which Trump bragged that being a celebrity made it easy for him to seduce women, in rather graphic terms.