Triggered

  “I’m just here so no bullshit happens,” he said.

  As it turned out, he was the center for the OSU football team.

  Needless to say, Antifa was nowhere in sight.

  OH-IO!

  9.

  ELECTION NIGHT

  ON THE AFTERNOON of November 8, 2016, while Hillary’s team was busy setting up their victory party, figuring out how not to shatter the glass ceiling of the Javits Center when they popped their champagne corks, I was in my office in Trump Tower with Tommy Hicks; Gentry Beach, another Texan, who was with us from the beginning; and Charlie Kirk. A longtime friend, Gentry and I had a lot in common. He’d also attended the University of Pennsylvania, my alma mater, and he was a guy’s guy in every sense of the word. He worked his ass off. During the campaign, Gentry made phone calls night and day to raise cash, and he was phenomenal at it.

  In those early days, the RNC was likely less than thrilled that Trump was their nominee. We needed guys who believed in my father and actually wanted to see him get elected, and Gentry was one.

  Together, with a few others, we’d formed quite a team during the campaign. We did events and speeches as quickly as they rolled them out for us: six, seven a day towards the end. At midnight the night before, we were in New Hampshire with my father. We would have gone back to Michigan with him for one last rally that was held at 1:00 a.m. on Election Day, but I had to do TV hits that morning in New York. CNN, Morning Joe, Stephanopoulos, I did all of them on about two hours’ sleep.

  The polls (and we all know now how much they mattered) still had us down. Down significantly. Perhaps another campaign would have pushed back from the table, threw the napkin down, and said, “Well, we did our best. Let’s see what happens.”

  But we weren’t like other campaigns.

  Instead, I was a caged animal: getting up from the small four-person table and pacing my office, all the while holding a cell phone to my ear, talking a mile a minute. As I did, Tommy and Gentry queued up the next conservative radio show host, having them ready for me as soon as I hung up on the current one. I put Charlie in charge of my social media, and he furiously typed as I dictated tweets. I had something like 50 million impressions, a number which is insane. I remember yelling at Sean Hannity, who was hosting his radio show. He had texted me that he was getting off the air.

  “Get me on the next show!” I yelled into my phone. “We have to turn out the Panhandle! If you leave, get me on with your competition!”

  I wasn’t going to waste one second, or squander one opportunity to make a final pitch. It was like being in a battle for your life, and I wasn’t going to stop fighting until there was nothing left to fight for.

  We worked east to west, following the time zones until 7:00 or 8:00 p.m. EST. I believe I did forty-seven radio interviews in the span of several hours, which has to be some kind of record. I must have reached hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people. I said the words “Go vote” so many times, I swear, I can still hear myself saying those words when my office is quiet.

  GET OUT AND VOTE! YOU GOTTA SHOW UP, TURN OUT. NOTHING ELSE MATTERS AS LONG AS YOU GET OUT AND VOTE. REMEMBER, IF YOU GET THERE AT 7:59 AND THE POLLS CLOSE AT 8, THEY STILL HAVE TO LET YOU VOTE! GET IN LINE! VOTE!!! VOOOOOOOOOTE!!!! NOW!!!!!

  While I was in my office, Ivanka and Eric were in theirs, doing the same thing. I was running on pure adrenaline, testosterone, and about twelve Red Bulls. We weren’t weeks or days out to election anymore. There were only hours left. We were coming to the end of one of the most brutal, hard-fought campaigns in the history of American politics, and we were much closer to winning than anyone (including some members of the Trump campaign, though most wouldn’t admit it today) ever thought we would be. We never wanted to look back and think that we could have worked harder.

  I wouldn’t have been able to look my father in the eye if I had phoned it in the last day. I remembered one Saturday about three months earlier, being out in Bedminster with the whole family, Mike Pence, Reince Priebus, Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, Chris Christie, and Brad Parscale—the whole Trump team. They were presenting to my Dad the schedule they’d come up with for the last ninety days of the campaign. I forget who was doing the talking, maybe Bannon, but it went something like this:

  “Okay, you have an event this Saturday and then the rest of the day off. You have one on Sunday morning, but you’ll be free that afternoon and the entire next day.” I guess they thought they were doing him a favor by finding him days off, but I could see the reaction building in my dad’s face. Ivanka, Eric, and I exchanged knowing looks. It wasn’t a matter of if he would explode, just when.

  “Enough!” he shouted. “There’s only three months left to the election. I don’t want any days off! If I lose, I’ll have all the time off I need.”

  It was amazing to see. Two different levels of work ethic: those in politics, and my Dad’s.

  So, the idea of slowing down never entered my mind. Oh no. At this point, we could do 24/7 straight standing on our heads. We were going pedal to the metal.

  At about 9:00 or 10:00 p.m. when I went down to the war room (election night campaign headquarters) on the 14th floor of Trump Tower, it felt like the whole world was holding its breath. Like watching the last batter hit a pop fly in the bottom of the ninth inning, except the ball stays in the air for five hours.

  The energy in the war room was a kind of high-wire helpless expectancy. We were at the point of a campaign where there was nothing left to do but watch and get updates on turnout. My family and most of the campaign staff had congregated in front of the wall of six or so flat-screen televisions we’d set up. Even with the whole team it was intimate. We didn’t have HRC’s 1000-person campaign office. Like I’ve said, we were lean and mean. We had Fox News on, of course, with Megyn Kelly, but also the MSM. Every time I looked at my Twitter feed or at one of the liberal news networks, all I could see was the enemy. I know it sounds harsh, but there was no doubt they were against us. I heard journalists who were supposed to be objective reporters of the news talking about Hillary’s path to victory, as if she was the only one that mattered in the race. As things began to tighten, it was “we” could still take down Donald Trump if X, Y, and Z happens. They might as well have been wearing I’m-with-her sweatshirts and cutting into a big sheet cake with Hillary’s face on it.

  To your face, however, these people would tell you they had no agenda, never took sides, and only reported the facts. Whenever someone called them out for their obvious liberal bias, they’d deny it. But now, here they were using their platforms on the most important night of the year to push propaganda for the Democrat Party and denigrate Donald Trump on live television. All pretense of objective journalism was abandoned. Instead, they showed who they really are—partisan hacks.

  At one point, I glanced at my dad. Watching him in action during the campaign was certainly inspiring—to me and to everyone else on the staff. We had a front-row seat to see the most remarkable candidate in political history, one perfectly suited for the time, a first-time politician who shocked the political world. They had seen nothing like him before. His energy was unstoppable.

  Though seasoned politicians insisted he came out of nowhere, I knew that not to be true. The energy that flows through my father is the same energy that flowed through my grandfather and great-grandfather before him. The 2016 Donald J. Trump for President campaign was a hundred years in the making, built on a foundation of American spirit, smarts, and grit.

  Though it took me a while to realize, the same energy also flows through me. I’ve always looked up to my father and admired him more than anyone, but we seemed to have much different styles and approaches to life. Where he was brash and in-your-face, I was a little more reserved. Where he was at home amid the skyscrapers and kinetic energy of Manhattan, I was happy out in the woods or behind the wheel of my truck. But the campaign for president, and all the craziness that went along with it, changed all that.

  It took me fort
y years and an unbelievably grueling race for the presidency for me, or anyone else for that matter, to realize that I’m much more like my father than I’d ever thought. It took getting backed into a corner for those traits to manifest. I felt the same responsibility to help my country that he did, and I got the same rush from sticking my neck out into the fight like him. After a few spats with liberals and the media, I learned that I had much more of his killer instinct than I thought, too. When we get hit, we hit back twice as hard. When we’re backed into a corner, we come out swinging.

  The first time I saw my father sit down all night was in the war room. He’d come down from the apartment when it started to become abundantly clear that Hillary Clinton was not going to sail to victory the way everybody had said she would. Watching him, I tried to find some sign that he was surprised by, or at least excited about, the fact that he might become president of the United States. But there was nothing. He just watched the screens like they were showing some old movie he’d seen twenty times before—cool, calm, and collected.

  After the networks called Florida for us, DJT and the family headed upstairs with a few senior members of the campaign. Once we got upstairs, we stood around in my father’s apartment with the whole family, including Ivanka and Jared. I thought about how much my sister and brother-in-law sacrificed for the campaign. From the start, Jared brought a sense of calm to a very unruly cast of characters. Meticulous, organized, and cool-headed, he was Michael Jordan to a whole team of Dennis Rodmans. Like the rest of us Trumps, he worked as hard as he could. No one seemed able to believe what was happening. On the way, we all remembered at once that my father hadn’t allowed anyone to even contemplate writing a speech for that evening. Whether he won or lost, he was going to come up with his remarks just a few minutes before he had to deliver them. There was no reason to expend time or energy on speeches until there was a result. All of our focus was on the finish line; whatever came after would take care of itself.

  By one in the morning, the only thing between my father and the presidency was Hillary’s “firewall,” which included Pennsylvania.

  Along with some of the senior campaign staff, I watched the results on a tiny TV in the kitchen area of the apartment. Every time they zoomed into the fuzzy electoral map of Pennsylvania, I thought back to all the years I had spent there as a student in high school and college. I’d spent a quarter of my life in Pennsylvania. I thought of all the families I had met and all the sights I could see driving there—boarded-up factories, closed-down coal mines. The friends I made in the Rust Belt at the Hill School in Pottstown, and then afterward at the University of Pennsylvania, weren’t the rich brats I knew who went to fancy private schools in Manhattan, and then on to Harvard or Yale. Many of the people I knew from Pennsylvania came from the parts of the state that had suffered the most. They were the ones who had seen the jobs go away in the 1990s as we shipped most of our manufacturing overseas—the ones who had seen their influence in national politics decline just about every year since I had been out of school. Until my father, all they knew was empty promises from politicians who really didn’t care about them. These great Americans had a profound impact on my life at an early and formative time.

  As I write this, the 2020 Democrat candidates, especially Joe Biden, are pandering to Pennsylvanians, pretending to understand the real pain they’re feeling because they happened to be born there. What Joe won’t tell you is that he lived in Pennsylvania only until he was ten. I spent nearly as much time there, and was old enough to actually remember it. Hillary had used the same playbook, and she’d left the state when she was even younger than Joe. And yet, she thought she was entitled to the votes of the blue-collar people from her “home” state. Every few years, people like Biden and Hillary spout the same lies about how they support working-class people, and then they pass legislation that benefits the elite political class and leaves everyone else behind. They don’t care about working-class people or their jobs. They didn’t care about people from places like Pottstown, Pennsylvania. If you look at the policies my father has enacted since taking office, from tax cuts to widespread deregulation, you can trace almost every one of them back to the voices that came from those small towns in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, and other states. Along with my father’s signature, the executive orders and legislation written to enact those policies might as well have the names right at the bottom of everyone he’d met during the campaign.

  At 2:00 a.m., they still hadn’t called Pennsylvania. There was only 1 percent of the vote not accounted for in the state. Even if Hillary won every single vote, it still wouldn’t be enough. Yet, the networks refused to call it for my father. What could have possibly been the reason for the delay? Could it have been ratings? Dangling a glimmer of hope to the left so they’d continue to watch even though in reality their candidate was finished? Couldn’t be. No television networks would ever stoop that low, right?

  Right.

  They couldn’t hold out forever. When the networks finally called the state and Hillary’s path to the 270 electoral votes needed to win went up in smoke, just about every television set in New York City, San Francisco, and all the other sanctuary cities clicked off. When the people around me began to celebrate, however, a familiar feeling came over me.

  I’d watched the left in action. On the campaign. On social media. With fake news. I knew that respect and convention meant nothing to them. That very morning, I was reminded how horrible they could be. With my two-year-old daughter Chloe in my arms and my daughter Kai holding my hand, I’d walked from work to vote at a local public school. On the way, I was called every four-letter word imaginable. You know, tolerant liberals screaming and cursing at me while I had four of my children in tow. To the left, I wasn’t a father, and my kids weren’t children. We weren’t human beings. We were the enemy. If it was just me, I wouldn’t have cared. It’s happened so much to me, I wouldn’t have given it a second thought. You start saying things like that to my kids, well, that’s another matter altogether. I’ve used the hate the left has towards me as motivation. But this was something entirely different.

  The vile anger on the left comes right from the top. The Clintons are one of the most corrupt and uncivil political machines in the history of our nation.

  It was just another sign of their disdain for regular people, which would come back again when my father announced his reelection campaign in Orlando a few years later. Panning the camera over the long line waiting for my father to speak, the anchors would make fun of their flip flops and cargo shorts, wondering if that constituted “formal wear” in Florida. These were people who stood outside in thunderstorms for forty-eight hours. They weren’t going to the prom. They were waiting to hear a politician speak. Half of them knew they weren’t even going to get in, but they waited anyway. And then the media mocks them for being in casual, comfortable clothes out in the mud?

  Please. Their hatred of anyone who doesn’t live in New York City or subscribe to their radical ideas was disgusting to me.

  Right before my eyes, the television anchors were telling me my father was the president-elect. But, if there was one thing I learned in the prior two years, it was that the Clintons were not about to roll over and die. Too much was at stake. More than even the presidency. A global network of power that they’d spent decades building was in peril.

  I stood there in front of the television, in the place I’d grown up, with the people I cared about most in the world, and shook my head.

  “No,” I said, first to myself and then to the others in the kitchen. “No! They are not going to give in.”

  No matter what the results said, they would come up with some kind of trick to snatch the victory away. They would say the system had been rigged, that the voting machines were all wrong, that some of the ballots had been smudged and didn’t count. “They’ll come up with something,” I said. “Just watch.”

  That entire night, I waited for the other shoe to drop. When John Podesta c
ame out onstage at the Javits Center to announce that everyone would “regroup in the morning,” he confirmed my suspicion. I knew it. He was buying them time, I thought. Even when I got to stand onstage at the Hilton Hotel with my father as he gave his acceptance speech, I was still strangely detached. In my heart, I felt the fight wasn’t over. The feelings I had were surreal. I seemed to be more satisfied that Podesta had confirmed my suspicions than that we had won. I didn’t like feeling cynical; it was ugly. But by then it was a conditioned response that I had learned over the prior two years.

  Now, am I saying that I predicted then that the Democrats would cook up the Russian collusion hoax? Of course not. How could I have thought that they were going to do something so incredible? That they would get liberals to believe a story so porous, so absurd, that if it were a movie script there wouldn’t be a producer in Hollywood who would buy it? How could I believe that those same Hollywood producers, and just about every other liberal in the country, would swallow such a scam as though it were gospel truth? Still, I knew the fight wasn’t over.

  Of course, now we know the Democrats actually had begun laying the foundation of the Russia hoax months before the election. FISA warrants based on a phony dossier paid for by the Clintons gave the FBI license to spy on our campaign. Then, in January 2017, the media disinformation apparatus led by BuzzFeed began the dissemination of lies.

  When I finally saw it begin to unfold, a strange sort of calm came over me. Oddly, there’s a kind of comfort that comes when the bad thing you’ve been expecting to happen finally happens. Maybe because it’s easier to fight your enemy when you can see what they’re doing rather than waiting for the unknown. I wouldn’t wish the cynicism I developed on anyone, but the whole process opened my eyes in a terrible and unfortunate way. Three years later, I think many more people have come to that same, tragic conclusion.