Double Down: Game Change 2012

by John Heilemann

  All along, Huckabee was eyeing another presidential run—in 2016. But the events of 2010 caused him to revise his timetable. In Obamacare, Huckabee saw a defining moment of doom for the incumbent; in the Tea Party, he saw a populist rebellion in which many of those who were packing the pitchforks were also Christian conservatives. In his travels before the midterms, Huckabee was struck by the fame he had achieved by being on Fox. During the 2008 race, he rarely had been recognized in public except by political junkies. Now people were coming up to him on the street, in airports, and in restaurants, asking for his autograph or a photograph with him, telling him they loved what he said on the tube, beseeching him to run again.

  The night after the midterms, Huckabee had dinner with Ed Rollins, who had been his 2008 campaign chairman, and told him he was raring to go. Rollins was a storied political strategist, the manager of Reagan’s reelection campaign in 1984. Loquacious and pugnacious—Rollins titled his memoir Bare Knuckles and Back Rooms and posed on the cover wearing boxing gloves—he was sixty-seven but still appetent to be in the game.

  Rollins saw a clear pathway to the nomination for Huck—and a last chance at glory for himself. A Reuters/Ipsos national poll at the end of 2010 ranked Huckabee as the most popular Republican in the country. He would be unstoppable in Iowa and South Carolina, and with those wins in the bag, he could close the sale in the Sunshine State, his soon-to-be home. Rollins imagined headquartering the campaign in Tampa, where the GOP convention would be held. He insisted on total control, telling Huckabee that he was too old to have it any other way. Huckabee said, I wouldn’t do this without you, Ed.

  Over the next several months, Huckabee, Rollins, and two other operatives met for dinner regularly to hash out the race. A forty-page memo on the field was prepared, which yielded a verdict that Rollins spelled out succinctly: “If you don’t run, Romney is going to be the nominee,” he said.

  Huckabee’s bitterness toward his 2008 rival was unsurpassed, and owed in part to personal grievance. On the night that Huckabee took Iowa, Romney failed to call to congratulate him; when Huckabee extended that courtesy to Romney after losing to him in Michigan, he felt Mitt brushed him off. For two years, Huckabee stewed, until one day Romney phoned during his mending-fences phase. I didn’t do right by you, Mitt said. I apologize. I should have realized that’s the way the game is played.

  Huckabee thanked Romney, who seemed sincere enough. But he couldn’t help suspecting that Mitt was thinking, This guy is on television every week. He’s on radio every day. A lot of Republican voters pay attention to him, and I don’t want him telling everybody what a bum I am.

  Huckabee’s bully Fox News pulpit had a major downside, though: his contract prevented him from taking any steps toward a candidacy. (In March 2011, Fox suspended Gingrich and Santorum, who also had deals with the network, for ramping up their campaigns.) So Huckabee had to keep his meetings on the down-low. In mid-April, when a dozen religious-right leaders flew to New York to exhort him to run and vow their support, Huckabee steered clear of the session, letting Rollins handle it.

  The political world assumed he would pass, and that money was the reason. One day, Rove, who had a home of his own in Florida not far from where the Huckabees were building, drove over to take a peek at the construction project. That ain’t a $3 million house—that’s a $6 million house, Rove thought. And after doing some guesstimates regarding Huckabee Inc.’s revenues, Rove surmised, No way he can afford to run.

  Money was indeed on Huckabee’s mind, but the calculations were more complicated. He realized that if he ran, he would have to sell the Florida property. Although doing so would have been painful for him and Janet, they were willing to take that step. The greater personal financial obstacle was regular income. Unlike Romney and other candidates who could live off of dividends, Huckabee had no stocks or bonds. Everything I do for a living, every dime I make, ends the minute I become a candidate, he thought. No more speaking engagements, radio, or TV. How will we make it for two years?

  Sometimes Rollins guilt-tripped Huckabee when he brought up these concerns. “God’s calling to you was ‘Go spend twenty years in a ministry and twelve years in a governorship, and you could be the first real moral man elected president,’” Rollins said. “You think God wants you just to go make money?” Other times he tried to placate his guy. “We’ll figure something out,” he said. But no solution was ever found to cover Mike and Janet’s monthly nut.

  Equally confounding was the other side of the financial equation, which involved fund-raising. As governor, Huckabee had taken some moderate positions that the far right hated; he also had granted clemencies to prisoners who committed violent crimes after their release. Huckabee took hits for all of this in 2008, but in the new world of super PACs, he assumed the pounding from Romney’s allies would be much more brutal.

  To equip himself to fight back, Huckabee believed he would have to raise $50 million for the nomination contest. But he abhorred asking rich people for money, and his populism had alienated business and Wall Street. What Huckabee needed was his own Spencer Zwick, a gangbusting finance chair. Recruiting such a person, however, would require a signal that he was getting in, which would jeopardize his Fox contract. Thus was Huckabee caught in a devilish catch-22: wary of sacrificing his livelihood without knowing that the support for a run would be in place, but unable to gauge how much support was there without risking that livelihood.

  Even so, Huckabee was inching toward yes—until he and Rollins came a cropper. For months they had been arguing over how long they could wait before rendering a final decision, with Huckabee wanting to defer until September and Rollins insisting on June. In late April, Huckabee began seeing stories in the press about his increasing inclination toward a run, and they had Rollins’s fingerprints all over them. When Huckabee confronted him, Rollins was unrepentant. Mike, I’ve got to do this to keep us in the conversation, he said.

  Huckabee was furious. His situation with Fox was already delicate, and now he was being summoned to meet with the company’s lawyers to explain away the stories. Huckabee’s family was ticked off, too. Janet was enthusiastic about his running, and his three kids were on board. They viewed Rollins’s blabbing as inexcusable.

  Huckabee saw it as a kind of epiphany. While he had learned in 2008 that Rollins was sometimes indiscreet, Huckabee always believed he could trust the strategist. No longer. And if you can’t trust the people in your inner circle to keep their mouths shut, you can’t run a campaign, he thought. With no team in waiting, no confidence about the money, the gaze of the Fox attorneys on him, and the prospect of being pulped by Romney’s super PACs ahead of him, Huckabee decided that there was no point in waiting until September.

  On Friday, May 13, Fox released a statement saying that Huckabee would announce his intentions on his TV program the next night. He didn’t alert Rollins as to his decision. He didn’t tell his executive producer or his staff. Outside of his family, the only person Huckabee informed in advance was the one who mattered most: Fox News CEO Roger Ailes.

  “I’m surprised,” Ailes said. “I thought you were going to do it.”

  • • •

  HUCKABEE FEATURED A SPECIAL guest star on his program that night, who appeared right after the host’s sign-off. “I’m Donald Trump, and this is a special announcement,” the besuited billionaire said. “Mike Huckabee is not going to be running for president. This might be considered by some people, not necessarily me, bad news, because he is a terrific guy—and frankly I think he would be a terrific president. But a lot of people are very happy that he will not be running, especially other candidates.”

  The two men had huddled in Trump’s office a few weeks earlier. The Donald liked Pastor Mike, although he wasn’t sure that Huckabee should be the person negotiating with the Chinese. (That was Trump’s department.) Huckabee entered the meeting suspecting, as did many observers, that Trump’s coquetry about running was a charade, a publicity stunt. But he left with
a different opinion. Gosh, he might really jump in, Huckabee thought.

  In the terrarium of American public life, Donald John Trump was an exotic specimen: famous and infamous, beloved and detested, lauded and mocked—but never ignored. His politics were promiscuously ecumenical. He had been a Republican, a Reform Party member, and a Democrat, and now he was a Republican again. On the left, he was excoriated as a racist for his promulgation of birtherism. On the right, he was scorned as a crank for espousing a variant of protectionism that bordered on mercantilism. Among many in the Beltway and Manhattan smart sets, he was derided as a bloviating braggart.

  But there was no denying that Trump’s political ledger was filled with items that any candidate would have killed for. He was at or near the top of the polls, both nationally and in the early states. He was filthy rich, with a net worth estimated by Forbes to be as high as $3 billion. He had two network television programs watched by millions every week, and while he would have to abandon them if he ran, he had unfettered access to the news media. (The network morning shows let Trump come on by phone, which was unheard of.) His speeches lured sell-out crowds with little promotion. Politicians of all stripes paid him homage. He was buddies with the Clintons, pals with Chris Christie, chummy with many others—not just because they wanted his money but because Trump was a hoot to hang with.

  One way of seeing all of this was as a symptom of postmillennial decay, the degradation of public discourse, and the encroachment of celebrity worship into the arena of national affairs. Another way of looking at it was as an indication of the GOP’s state of disarray. Then there was the way Trump perceived the thing: as a manifestation of his magnificence—and a prime opportunity.

  Trump had vaguely considered running for president under the Reform Party banner in 2000. This time, his first apparent stirrings of interest came in early October 2010, when news broke about a mysterious telephone poll in New Hampshire that included thirty questions measuring his viability. Trump insisted he wasn’t behind the survey, but two days later on Fox News he crowed, “I hear that the results are amazing . . . For the first time in my life, I’m actually thinking about it.”

  Four months later, Trump made his maiden appearance at CPAC. After telling the packed room he would decide by June whether he was running, Trump said America was becoming “the laughingstock of the world.” Barely mentioning Obama, he spent much of his speech thundering about the need to get tough with China, India, and OPEC. (Also with Somali pirates: “Give me one good admiral and a couple of good ships, we’d blast them out of the water,” Trump boomed.) The audience went wild.

  Trump returned to New York luxuriating in his triumph, boasting about the size of the crowd and the enthusiasm of the response. Almost immediately, his numbers began to soar. A Newsweek/Daily Beast poll in February showed him neck and neck with Obama. An NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey that month gave him higher favorable ratings than Romney, Pawlenty, or Boehner.

  To Trump, it only seemed right and proper. He was one of the great entrepreneurs of the age, with properties that spanned the globe. (The greatest properties! Trump thought. I’m building things in Scotland that are unbelievable.) Everyone wanted to hear what he had to say. (I’m the highest-paid speaker in the world for success speeches!) The fact that he wasn’t a professional politician was the key to his appeal; his bracing stick-it-to-’em rhetoric was what drew voters to him. It’s not because they love me, he thought. They see the world as ripping us off, and they think: Trump is gonna stop it.

  They didn’t think that about Romney, in Trump’s opinion. He had never met the governor, best as he recalled, but his impressions from afar were unfavorable. He compared Romney to a Broadway play that opens to lackluster reviews: cursed before the curtain goes up. Trump was publicly sniffy about Romney as a capitalist, denigrating him as a “small-business guy,” and privately disdainful of Bain. “They’d buy a company and fire everyone,” he told his associates.

  Trump’s view of Obama had a more sinister hue, of course. Even beyond the birther stuff, he considered the president a failure and a fraud, horrible at governing and overrated as a campaigner. Trump believed it was luck and Bush fatigue that had allowed Obama to vanquish Hillary and McCain in 2008, and he dissed the president’s oratorical skills. (He’s not bad—but great? No.) He was convinced that Obama’s memoir Dreams from My Father was actually written by Bill Ayers, the former Weather Underground member who was a source of controversy in the last campaign. And Trump was itching to probe Obama’s academic history. (Harvard Law Review? Bullshit! Nobody’s ever seen his grades!) But first Trump wanted to see his birth certificate.

  Trump initially fastened on to birtherism in an interview on Good Morning America in March. The subsequent criticism came fast and fierce, and not only from liberals. “His full embrace of the birther issue means he’s off there in the nutty right,” Rove said on Fox News. “The guy is smarter than this . . . Making that the centerpiece of his campaign means that he is now, you know, a joke candidate.”

  Having written a $100,000 check to Crossroads in 2010, Trump was ripshit with Rove. He’s a bully, just like Rosie O’Donnell, the Donald thought. And Rove was also wrong, Trump asserted. Birtherism was just a part of his campaign; the press refused to pay attention to his other issues. But Trump also privately admitted that birtherism was a bonanza for him. The more he talked about Obama’s genealogy, the better he polled—and the higher the ratings of Celebrity Apprentice climbed. Trump’s office was inundated with letters from around the country imploring him to enter the race.

  By the time Trump’s Sikorsky helicopter was in descent into Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on April 27, he was running a strong second in the state, behind Romney. Just before touching down, the voice of Trump’s adviser Michael Cohen cut through the roar of the chopper’s engines, informing him that Obama was about to release his long-form birth certificate. (Or another forgery, thought Trump.) Stepping into an airplane hangar and facing a mob of reporters as the theory he had propounded was being ripped to shreds by Obama in real time, Trump might have been abashed. Instead, he basked in the attention. “I know what I think,” Trump said later that day. “He only did it because of Trump!”

  Amid talk from his camp that he would now be free to focus on other matters, Trump flew to Las Vegas. In a speech to an adoring throng at the Treasure Island Hotel, Trump addressed Iraq: “We build a school, we build a road, they blow up the school. We build another school, we build another road, they blow them up, we build again—and in the meantime we can’t get a fucking school in Brooklyn!” And OPEC: “We have nobody in Washington that sits back and says, ‘You’re not going to raise that fucking price!’” And the Chinese: “Listen, you motherfuckers, we’re going to tax you 25 percent!”

  The string of f-bombs made headlines and brought censure. Trump was only mildly chastened. They’re not even bad words—they’re “emphasis words,” he thought. But would I do it again? No. I went to the Wharton School of Finance. I’m a very smart guy.

  Trump hopped back in his jet and made a beeline to D.C. for the White House Correspondents’ dinner. Once again, he was swarmed—by the press, paparazzi, elected officials. (It’s the Academy Awards of politics, and I’m the hottest one in the room!) Once again, he was spanked by Obama. And once again, in spite of the smoke that everyone near him saw emanating from his ears, Trump professed to be pleased as punch. “It was the greatest!” he told Cohen over the phone. “To have the president of the United States spend that amount of time talking about me—I loved it!”

  All good things must come to an end, however, even for Trump. The reality hovering over his deliberations from the get-go was the future of the Apprentice franchise, which had to be resolved before May 16, when NBC would unveil its fall lineup at an event in New York for advertisers. Trump was under heavy pressure from his network bosses to close down the suspense.

  Trump helicoptered to New Hampshire for a Nashua Chamber of Commerce lunch on May 11, t
hen came back and conferred with his wife, Melania. I like New Hampshire, New Hampshire likes me, I work well in New Hampshire, Trump thought. I like Iowa, South Carolina, and Nevada. But he would be giving up a lot to run, especially financially. (They pay me a fortune, and for what? It should be illegal.) He was negotiating for a hundred acres in Miami, on which he planned to build a resort. He’d have to give that up, too. And a self-funded campaign would require a chunk of cheddar. Rather than making a lot of money, he thought, I’d be spending a lot of money.

  On May 13, the same Friday that Huckabee put out word that he would announce his decision, Trump informed the NBC honchos he was choosing prime time over the pursuit of the presidency. It was a 50-50 call, Trump told his associates, and even after assuring the network he was staying, he had second thoughts—when he turned on the TV that Sunday morning and watched Meet the Press. The show’s host, David Gregory, was discussing a new poll that put Trump in second place among Republicans nationally. The only person ahead of him was Huckabee, who had taken himself off the table the night before. Which made Trump the bona fide front-runner.

  Am I the only guy in history at number one in the polls who got out? Trump asked himself. Am I fucking crazy? Then he thought again about what he’d be sacrificing to run, and about something that Melania once told him: he was already the biggest star in the world, bigger even than Tom Cruise.

  Why would I do this? the Donald thought. I already have an amazing life.

  • • •

  MITCH DANIELS’S LIFE RESEMBLED Trump’s as much as a plumber’s resembled a porn star’s. The Indiana governor had been married twice, but to the same woman, and his idea of decadent indulgence was a fried bologna sandwich. He stood five foot seven and wore a comb-over as reticent as Trump’s hairstyle was rococo. He was averse to bluster, allergic to blarney, and drolly self-effacing. In a speech that spring, Daniels noted “all this favorable press I’ve been getting” about the possibility of his running. “Just listen to a quick sample: ‘small,’ ‘stiff,’ ‘short,’ ‘pale,’ ‘unimposing,’ ‘unassuming,’ ‘uninspiring,’ ‘understated,’ ‘uncharismatic,’ ‘accountant-like,’ ‘non-telegenic,’ ‘boring,’ ‘balding,’ ‘blunt,’ ‘nerdy,’ ‘wooden,’ ‘wonky,’ ‘puny,’ and ‘pint-sized.’ Really, it all points to one inescapable conclusion: it’s destiny!”