by Howard Kurtz
Every time Trump said or did something stupid, they would declare him to be toast, only to find him climbing higher. And the same cycle repeated itself during the general election. They were misreading both the man and the mood of the country.
There was no middle ground. I was called a Trump sycophant when I argued that the billionaire shouldn’t be counted out, and when I criticized him on some issue, his loyalists would savage me as a Trump hater. Both were way off the mark.
I don’t like either party. I believe even the best politicians can be self-serving hypocrites. My brand has always been fairness. I’ve been a reporter and columnist for the Washington Post and Newsweek. I’ve been an anchor at both CNN and Fox. I’ve got plenty of opinions but I don’t take political sides.
And I’ve always tried not to be trapped in the airless bubble of establishment media types. My father sold shirts for a living. I grew up in a city-subsidized apartment building next to a sewage treatment plant in the non-trendy part of southern Brooklyn. I went to the state university in Buffalo, which is practically Ohio, though I did get a master’s at Columbia. My first job was working the night shift at a newspaper in Hackensack for $10,000 a year.
So I may have been quicker than most of my colleagues to grasp that the country was fed up with the empty promises and utter dysfunction of Washington. I was sensitive to the fact that many Americans we blithely categorize as working class had lousy jobs, were bouncing between jobs, or worried about losing their jobs, and were brimming with resentment. I didn’t dismiss them as racist yahoos. This novice candidate, I thought, is connecting on a visceral level.
I had the sense that Trump appreciated my fairness. But he can be quick to feel slighted.
Two weeks after his announcement, when I arrived at Trump Tower for our first interview for my Fox News show Media Buzz, he ushered me into his office for a good-natured chat about the race. He wanted to know how I thought he was doing.
When we sat down in front of the cameras, the man who starred in The Apprentice for fourteen seasons didn’t like the shot.
“Your side is perfect for me, but for some reason they have me sitting in this seat,” he said, though he had the skyline backdrop.
He looked at the lights that had been set up. “Can you move it over a little further?” he asked the crew. In the lull he told me, “You’re doing a great job.”
Trump wanted to examine the shot again: “Can I take a look at it now?”
More instructions: “Could you turn down that heavy light on top? So much better. Okay. Well, a little darker than that.”
I admired his persistence in perfecting the image. But as the crew scrambled, he started getting impatient. “Let’s go, fellas, are we ready?” Then he said, “It looks very orangey, but I guess that’s my face.”
When I stumbled on a word out of the gate, Trump graciously suggested we do it again to fix it.
I noted that while he was in second place in the polls, his critics, including Ari Fleischer, who had been George W. Bush’s White House spokesman, had called him “irresponsible” and “divisive.” I asked, “Does that hurt your feelings?”
He pushed back, as I expected.
The rest of the interview proceeded without a hitch, notable for his forecast that he had a 15 to 20 percent chance of winning the nomination.
But as soon as the cameras were off, Trump let me have it. “It was so negative. It was very negative. I mean, you quoted every person—”
“To give you a chance to hit back,” I said.
“You started out by quoting seven people who killed me. Then you quote Ari Fleischer, who’s a loser.”
He wished me well, and I was puzzled at how pissed he seemed. But when I passed his office on the way out, he waved me in and we shot the breeze for another fifteen minutes.
After the next interview—he greeted me by reciting his great poll numbers—he was more upbeat. Although we had shot at least ten minutes more than I could possibly fit on the show, he said: “You should run the whole thing. You were good, I was good. Use the whole thing.”
Suddenly I was on his good side. When I went to a Trump Tower news conference, Trump announced as he called on me that “I love Howie Kurtz”—which proved a tad more embarrassing when I learned that the session had been carried on CNN. But in his eyes you were only as good as your last sound bite.
As our interviews proceeded—in New York, in Las Vegas, at Mar-a-Lago—Trump took hard shots at the pundits who were criticizing him, on the right as well as the left. He told me that Fox News in general—and Megyn Kelly’s show repeatedly and in particular—was slanted against him.
One time he told me off camera that I was “not good” on one of Megyn’s recent shows, because I had made an unspecified criticism that bothered him. Another time he told me on camera that “you were not fair.” We aired it, of course, and whatever my transgressions, he kept sitting down with me.
Trump was less available after he clinched the nomination, and during a phone call in the summer of 2016, he sounded frustrated. “You are marginalizing me,” he insisted. I had no idea what he meant, since we covered his campaign intensively, but he had a long memory for even the slightest criticism.
Trump was obviously working the refs, trying to get a better call next time. He did that more vociferously with his biggest critics. I once saw him walk over to Karl Rove, the Bush White House aide turned Fox commentator who frequently ripped his candidacy, throw an arm around him and vow to win him over. They later had a three-hour lunch at which Rove tried to convince him he couldn’t win New York, California, or Oregon.
In the final weeks of the campaign, when the entire media establishment was convinced that Hillary Clinton was a lock, I thought the pundits were falling into the same trap they had when they predicted he couldn’t win the Republican nomination. Sure, things didn’t look good for Trump as he lagged in the battleground state polls, even as Kellyanne Conway kept insisting they had a path to 270 electoral votes. On Media Buzz the Sunday before the election, I said it was irresponsible for journalists to count Trump out.
It wasn’t until the wee hours of November 9, sitting on the Fox set in New York, the anchors’ voices betraying a sense of disbelief, a pro-Trump crowd outside roaring its approval as each state turned red, that I realized how right I had been. What Trump had told me back in 1987 turned out to be true: if he ran, he would win.
Kellyanne Conway liked to say that she was the most pro-press person in the White House.
She was certainly the one with the deepest relationships with journalists and the greatest savvy about working the media, the most ubiquitous performer on television, and the rock star of the new administration.
But she wound up getting badly burned. Many of her old friends turned on her with a vengeance she had never imagined.
These journalists would act oh so friendly: Kellyanne, how are the kids? Did you find a house in Washington? Love that dress. Then they would eviscerate her.
Conway had forged her future from a difficult childhood in which she grew up not knowing her father. He had ditched the family when she was a toddler, with no alimony and no child support, leaving her to be raised in New Jersey by four strong-willed Italian Catholic women—her mom, her grandmother, and two aunts. She didn’t see her dad until she was twelve. She spent eight summers working long shifts picking blueberries at a nearby farm. And she developed a fierce streak of independence, getting a law degree, and launching a business when she was twenty-eight.
Despite Conway’s growing prominence over the years, her staunch position against abortion and her embrace of “femininity” over “feminism” alienated some women in media and politics who would otherwise be cheering her on.
I first knew her as Kellyanne Fitzpatrick, a pollster by trade who did stand-up at open-mike clubs, melding self-deprecation with pointed barbs at various Beltway players. She embraced the label “pundette,” one of a group of conservative blonde women blanketing the cable net
works.
Conway had joined the Trump camp after her first candidate, Ted Cruz, dropped out. Trump soon soured on his campaign chairman Paul Manafort, especially after the New York Times reported that he had gotten millions in undisclosed cash payments from Ukraine’s pro-Russia party. Three days later, on August 17, 2016, Trump made Conway his campaign manager. She immediately pressed him to manage the media, rather than trying to make news around the clock.
Hillary Clinton was lying low, basking in the afterglow of the Democratic convention and sitting on her lead in the polls.
“I get 10 times as much coverage as she does,” Trump boasted.
“Is that a good thing?” Conway asked.
She paused before explaining: “You’re not making a new golf course, you’re not on The Apprentice, you’re not marketing a hotel. All the press is not good when you’re running for president of the United States.”
Trump was unpersuaded. Saturating the airwaves and giving constant interviews had worked extremely well for him so far.
But if he kept it up, Conway said, “You’ll destroy my strategy. My strategy is this has to be a referendum on her, not a referendum on you.”
Under pressure from Conway and other staffers, Trump began cutting way back on television interviews, appearing mainly on Fox News. He was accustomed to picking and choosing shows, but the team quietly conspired to keep most of the invitations away from him. With Conway in charge, Trump would not hold another news conference for the rest of the campaign.
By the time she stepped in, Trump had already made the media a major target, having yanked the credentials of Politico, the Washington Post, the Huffington Post, the Des Moines Register, BuzzFeed, and others.
In October, when a dozen women accused Trump of sexually assaulting or harassing them, in the wake of his comments on an old Access Hollywood video that if he liked a woman he would “grab her by the pussy,” Conway stood by her man, even knowing full well that his poll numbers would plummet. And her loyalty was crucial.
“The reason you survived this was Kellyanne Conway,” Newt Gingrich told Trump. She and her long blonde tresses were the face of the campaign. The candidate didn’t disagree with the former House speaker, one of the few close advisers with the fortitude to tell Trump he was wrong—first privately, and then, if he didn’t listen, on the airwaves.
Conway was adroit in her defense, viewing her job as explaining Trump, not justifying his behavior. When she saw a couple of CNN pundits describing Trump as a sexual predator, she called Jeff Zucker, the network’s president, and said his talking heads were wrong to imply that Trump was guilty of a criminal act when not one allegation had been proven.
“You can’t have people on your panels calling him a sexual predator,” she insisted.
Conway pressed the same case with Anderson Cooper, the globetrotting CNN anchor and son of Gloria Vanderbilt, when she was on his show. “I’m trying to do you a favor,” she said. Conway later saw Cooper challenge a panelist who tried to use that description.
As Election Day approached with Clinton leading in most battleground states, Kellyanne tried to keep Trump’s morale up, despite his hearing the constant media refrains of “you’re going to lose, you’re going to lose big, and you’re going to destroy the Republican Party.” When she insisted in TV interviews that the Trump campaign had a real path to 270 electoral votes, she knew the anchors were thinking, “We love Kellyanne, but she’s full of it.”
Kellyanne believed what she said, but it was also her duty to say it, and in the final days of the campaign, she privately feared that Trump might lose. She asked friends if the Republican Party would ostracize her. As it turned out, of course, her faith in Trump was rewarded, and in the early morning hours of November 9, 2016, she became the first woman to manage a winning presidential campaign.
CHAPTER 3
TRUMP TRAUMA
President-elect Trump remained amazed—and proud—at how his words echoed across the media and American landscape.
When Conway told him that a church leader had spoken of ripping babies out of the womb—using language Trump had used in the third presidential debate to describe abortion—he was pleased.
“This is a trending item,” Trump announced. “It became a news story. I did that.”
The bigger news story, naturally, was how Trump’s White House team was taking shape. Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, was named chief of staff. Priebus, a plain-spoken Wisconsin native, lacked an easy rapport with Trump, and thought it odd that Steve Bannon was simultaneously named White House chief strategist, as if they were co-equals, especially as Priebus represented the Republican establishment and Bannon represented the populist rebellion against the Republican Party. It was clear that Trump’s daughter Ivanka, and her husband Jared Kushner, would wield considerable clout, inside or outside the White House. But Conway’s role remained undefined.
She was nevertheless highly visible. When Trump weighed making former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney secretary of state, Conway was upset. Romney had attacked Trump during the campaign as a “fraud” and “con man.” She was appalled he might be rewarded with such a plum job.
Conway did something remarkable for a staffer. She went on State of the Union, the CNN show hosted by aggressive anchor Jake Tapper, to speak for the large “number of people who feel betrayed to think that a Governor Romney would get the most prominent Cabinet post, after he went so far out of his way to hurt Donald Trump.” She made the same argument on Meet the Press.
The media world was stunned. Was Kellyanne defying her boss?
It seemed that way the next day on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. Joe Scarborough, the former Republican congressman who was gradually repairing relations with Trump after their friendship blew up during the campaign, declared that Conway was “going rogue,” citing as his source, “the top three people in the Trump organization.” And, he added, the president-elect was “furious.”
Conway, watching the show, couldn’t believe it. She had cleared her anti-Romney diatribe with Trump, who put out a statement confirming her account.
Conway texted Scarborough during the show that his report was “false” and “sexist” and that despite his disparagement of her career, she could have any job she wanted in the White House. Scarborough, denying any sexism, read her comments on the air.
Conway suspected Joe’s main source was Reince Priebus. She confronted him.
“Go ahead and keep telling Scarborough lies about me,” she said.
Priebus looked startled. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Priebus told friends that while he had not discussed the matter with Scarborough, he did believe that Kellyanne had gone rogue; she had no authority to go on TV and say a Romney nomination was a terrible idea.
Several weeks into the transition, Kellyanne still had no official position. Some, including Kellyanne, assumed that Trump’s family—Don Jr., Eric, Ivanka, and Jared—did not want her in the White House.
Conway herself agonized over whether it was feasible for a mom raising four kids to work on a backbreaking White House schedule, and felt guilty for hesitating to go into the speaking and punditry world where she could make far more money with more flexible hours. Beneath her warm smile and pleasant demeanor, no one was a rougher infighter than Conway, who was accustomed to being the only woman in a male-dominated profession. Her journalistic connections came into play when Trump wanted to arrange a summit meeting with the New York Times, whose negative campaign coverage so rattled him that he had threatened to sue the paper.
At the same time it was his hometown newspaper, delivered every morning to his glittering three-story apartment, and Trump yearned for its approval.
Trump’s press secretary Sean Spicer, an intense, combative Republican operative, often chewing cinnamon gum, quickly voiced his opposition: “Mr. President, I think that’s a very bad idea. They’re never going to treat you fairly. They’l
l twist what you say.”
Trump exploded, yelling at his new spokesman for the first time. “I know how to fucking take care of myself,” he shouted.
Priebus hated the idea too, but Trump seemed determined to do it—until the meeting date approached and Trump asked, “Why are we doing this?”
Hope Hicks answered, “Because that’s what you asked us to do.”
But Trump had changed his mind, saying, “This is ridiculous.”
Priebus agreed. The last thing they needed was thirty attackers from the Times peppering him with questions.
“I agree with you 100 percent,” Trump said. Priebus fell on his sword and came up with a pretext to cancel the gathering. He said the paper was insisting it all be on the record, rather than just a confidential chat with the publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr.
Trump took to Twitter, his favorite weapon for firing off insults against the media: “I cancelled today’s meeting with the failing @nytimes when the terms and conditions of the meeting were changed at the last moment. Not nice.”
Times executives balked, and Kellyanne Conway not only got the meeting back on the calendar, she made sure her boss wasn’t blamed.
The paper quoted unnamed sources as saying Priebus “had tried to scuttle the meeting at the Times by telling Mr. Trump, erroneously, that the newspaper was shifting its terms.” Priebus wanted the session canceled because Trump “could face questions he might not be prepared to answer.” The New York Times had just called Reince Priebus a liar.
Every president gets pounded by the press. But no president had ever been subjected to the kind of relentless ridicule, caustic commentary, and insulting invective that has been heaped on Donald Trump.
I have a name for this half-crazed compulsion to furiously attack one man. It’s called Trump Trauma.
It started during the campaign, when the media geniuses were certain that Trump was a joke. New York’s Daily News depicted him as a red-nosed bozo, with headlines like “Dead Clown Walking.” The Huffington Post, in an act of awesome arrogance, relegated Trump to its Entertainment section, and stuck with that stupid decision until the day after the election.