The boss wasn’t convinced. “Look at the numbers, genius,” he said.
But the numbers had already started to turn. The undercover Trump voters, as Kellyanne Conway called them, the ones who didn’t believe the Left’s propaganda against Trump but who felt isolated by it, were streaming to the polls and finally got their say.
The shift in momentum began as a feeling. Dave called Susie Wiles, Trump’s state campaign manager in Florida, for the twenty-fifth time, or so it seemed. She had overseen setting up a state war room in which every possible outcome could be calculated, based on absentee ballots and early voting. Susie and her team knew the numbers they had to hit in each of the state’s sixty-seven counties. And, going into the election, she was confident that candidate Trump was going to win the state. Vlasto’s numbers had Trump down by five in Florida. As the polls closed, with data collection and analysis, her confidence hadn’t wavered. The margins in the southernmost “D counties,” or Democratic counties, told the story. The narrow spreads in those counties boded well for Trump’s chances.
Dave took the internal staircase to Bill Stepien on the fifth floor. Stepien had been New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s top political aide before Christie fired him over the Bridgegate scandal. He had joined Trump’s team in August as the campaign’s national field director. Along with his deputy Justin Clark and their team, Stepien had worked feverishly on the absentee and early voting results for weeks leading up to Election Day. On Election Day, it was his job to keep track of the results down to the county and precinct level. Jared and Bannon asked Stepien to do a deep dive county by county in Florida. He used the official election results map from the Florida secretary of state and, starting with Key West and Monroe County, began his way north. By the time he and his team reached Hillsborough and Pinellas Counties, on the I-4 corridor in the Tampa area, they knew Florida was in Trump’s column.
At the same time, Dave was on the phone with Eric Branstad, the state director in Iowa. With 25 percent of the vote in, Trump was down by forty thousand votes. Branstad ensured him they were right where they wanted to be. “It’s all the early urban and Des Moines area,” he said. “Don’t worry; we’re not going to have a problem.” Dave then called Mike Rubino in Virginia, and the state directors in North Carolina, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Ohio.
The flip seemed to happen in minutes; Trump went from forty thousand down in Iowa to up the same number in the blink of an eye. When he did, the bedrock under Manhattan began to tremble. At 10:21 p.m., the networks called Ohio for Trump and the famous skyline began to shake and sway. At 11:07, North Carolina fell. The island split wide open when Florida tumbled at 11:30.
It was then we sent everyone, except senior staff, to the Hilton.
Around midnight about a dozen or so of us, including Governor Mike Pence, his wife, and their daughter; Kellyanne Conway, the campaign manager; Hope Hicks, communications expert; Stephen Miller, Trump’s speechwriter and policy adviser; Chris Christie; Bannon; Brad Parscale, the campaign digital director; the Trump children and their spouses; and the candidate went along with Dave up to the residence on the sixty-sixth floor of Trump Tower. Crammed into the kitchen, many of us watched the results on a tiny TV. We all thought we were going to win but were waiting for Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin to be called. It seemed like an eternity. About one o’clock, Mr. Trump walked into the kitchen.
“Dave, can you believe this?” he said. “We just started this to have some fun.”
“We had some of that, too, sir,” Dave replied.
About two fifteen, we’d moved to the front foyer. It was there at 2:20 when Kellyanne’s phone rang.
“What state are you calling?” she asked the AP editor.
“We’re not calling a state,” he said. “We’re calling the race.”
Dave had the privilege of informing Governor Pence, who was in the living room with Karen and Charlotte, that he was now the vice president elect of the United States.
It took the president-elect, the vice president elect, their families, and the senior campaign staff less than ten minutes to get from the foyer of the residence at the top of Trump Tower to backstage at the Hilton a few blocks away. The Secret Service and the NYPD had the streets blocked off.
Earlier in the week, Robby Mook, Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, perhaps with the thought of the Al Gore’s loss to George W. Bush in 2000 in mind, had emailed and issued what was essentially an ultimatum. Mook said that if they lost, which of course they didn’t expect to do, they would call and concede within fifteen minutes after the AP called the race. But, he said, she would also wait only fifteen minutes for Trump’s campaign to phone before she gave a victory speech. To Hillary’s credit Huma Abedin called Kellyanne just as we arrived backstage at the Hilton.
“Is Mr. Trump available to talk with Hillary?” Huma asked.
“Oh yes,” Kellyanne answered. “He’s very available.”
The concession call was a gracious exchange, Kellyanne told interviewers. Mrs. Clinton was cordial and warm. At 3:00 a.m., the vice president elect and his family took the stage. Mr. Pence thanked the wildly cheering crowd and then announced the president-elect. George Gigicos, the campaign’s advance director, cued the stirring music, and after waiting a few moments to build the drama, President-Elect Trump, his wife, Melania, and the Trump children walked down a staircase and around a long catwalk, a route George had arranged to be reminiscent of Mr. Trump’s escalator ride when he launched his campaign back in June of 2015, and onto the stage. The expression on the face of President-elect Trump was one of pure gratitude. It had always been his connection with the people that fueled him and us during the campaign. Mr. Trump had invited the senior staff to join him. He hadn’t allowed anyone to begin drafting an acceptance speech until we knew victory was assured. He didn’t want to jinx himself. Jared, Ivanka, Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, and Kellyanne huddled over Miller’s computer and fashioned a speech just in the nick of time.
As he delivered it, surrounded by family and staff, Donald J. Trump stepped into the history books as the next president of the United States of America.
At four o’clock in the morning, after being onstage for the acceptance speech, Dave walked back with the president-elect and his family to the Hilton’s service elevator, which was big enough to haul grain. At street level, they walked back to the loading dock and to the waiting motorcade.
Instead of riding back to Trump Tower with the boss, Dave wanted to find Susan and his kids. During the campaign, he’d missed the birthday of his daughter Maggie Reagan, and had missed Maggie’s first day of kindergarten. He’d missed his daughter Lily’s field hockey season, Griffin’s fall baseball season, and all of his daughter Isabella’s softball season. He’d missed watching SEC football with his son. He missed Halloween. Now, more than anything, he wanted to kiss his wife and hug his kids. As the motorcade pulled away, Dave stood in the street alone.
The victory party was winding down, and Trump fans in various states of intoxication and euphoria spilled into the street. He found Susan and the kids in front of the hotel on Sixth Avenue. Together they walked a deserted Fifty-Fourth Street toward the apartment Dave had taken for the campaign. Steam rose from the manhole covers. The smell of hotel trash filled their nostrils. A man sprayed the sidewalk with a hose. The scene was like something out of a film noir. For the last ten weeks, Dave had been at the center of a political tornado. It had taken all he was able to give. Now, walking with his family on the desolate street, he took a deep breath that felt to him like his first in months.
It would have been impossible then for Dave, or Corey, to step away from the intensity of election night and see the moment for what it was: the culmination of the greatest political event in the history of our republic. It was certainly the story of the most talented and unique candidate ever. A political phenomenon, Donald Trump was elected president of the United States without having ever run for public office or having even served in government
in any capacity. He captured the imagination of a country, dominated news cycles for eighteen months straight, and led a movement like none that had been seen before. If it hadn’t happened before their own eyes, Donald J. Trump’s ride to the White House would have been a story hard for them to believe.
In the pages ahead, you’ll find out why. You’ll be backstage at Trump’s rallies. You’ll fly with us on Trump Force One, and ride along with us in motorcades. You’ll be in the minds and hearts of those who played supporting roles, and you’ll come to see the star of the show in a completely different light. This book is also the personal journey of two ordinary guys thrust into the most extraordinary of circumstances. We tell this story without restraint. Loyalty and the unvarnished truth can coexist. In fact, one doesn’t survive without the other. We speak in one voice, and for no one but ourselves. This story isn’t about us; however, it’s about a candidate like no other and the team that helped propel him to the White House.
And it’s a story that begins where the best long shots are born.
CHAPTER 2
HOUSE MONEY
The word “luck” is a very important word—very important. There’s no more important word than “luck.” But you can help create your own luck.
—DONALD J. TRUMP, APRIL 24, 1988
YOU MIGHT NOT KNOW IT from looking at him, but Donald Trump is one of the most superstitious men that most people have ever met. Sometimes, he’ll throw salt over his shoulder before he eats. He called Fox and Friends every Monday morning during the primaries because he didn’t want to change a winning routine. And he believes that some people, usually ones with low energy, carry bad luck and need to be avoided at all cost.
If you worked for Mr. Trump, you knew there were certain rules.
We were never allowed to celebrate before a win was certain, and we always had to take our losses with grace. Anything else and you’d invite in some bad juju. It’s the reason that come election night we didn’t have a victory speech—or a concession speech—written ahead of time.
“Don’t jinx me,” Mr. Trump would say.
Who knows? Maybe it’s adhering to all these little rules and rituals that’s kept Donald J. Trump in such good standing with the universe all these years. Like Midas, he’s turned everything he’s touched into gold: real estate, hotels, publishing, television, and now politics. Still, sometimes it astounds us both—the way it baffled the media and half the American electorate for so long—that Donald Trump and this ragtag band of outsiders, misfits, and political neophytes was able to pull off the biggest electoral upset in American political history. Then again, as the boss always reminded us, we had the best candidate to ever put his name on a ballot.
Still, considering how our story turns out, the backdrop of Las Vegas is a pretty good place for it to start.
It was sometime in 2010 when Dave picked up his BlackBerry, the retro phone he still refuses to part with, and dialed his friend in Vegas. Three-quarters of the way across the country, Steve Wynn took the call in his casino-floor office in “The Wynn,” as they call his five-star hotel and casino, the one with the stunning seventy-foot waterfall that tumbles into a three-acre man-made lake.
The call had little to do with politics. Dave was going to try to ply some swag out of Mr. Wynn for an auction held at the annual golf tournament he ran. “Ply” isn’t the right word. The tournament raised money for the Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, DC, a hospital that Dave knew the inner workings of intimately. Surgeons there had operated on his son, Griffin, when he was just three years old to fix holes in his heart. You see, Griffin was a miracle baby. He had already had a heart surgery at two days old to fix the descending aorta of his heart, which was too narrow to get blood out to his body. Though it was successful, Griffin would have five more major surgeries: one on his heart and four on his brain. Through all of them, Dave and Susan sat anxiously in hospital waiting rooms and on hard benches outside cardiac or neurology operating rooms, waiting for the results. During Griffin’s brain surgery, doctors suggested that Dave and Susan go out and spend a day together in New York City, where they’d gone for a specialist. This might be a long one, they said. Could be up to eighteen hours long. Instead, Dave and Susan stayed near the operating room, knowing the odds of their son surviving were almost unbearably low. The hospital had made them sign papers acknowledging it.
Inside, the team of neurological interventionists took turns going through the veins in Griffin’s brain—his head, because of significant hydrocephalus, was nearly the size of an adult male’s, though his body stayed as small as a toddler’s—and watching it the whole time on multiple high-definition screens above their heads.
Then, just a couple of hours in, something happened. Just as the doctors were getting at the area near his vein of Galen aneurism that they’d gone in to seal up, the blood vessel sealed on its own. The doctors watched on the screen, amazed. They cut the surgery short and paged Dave and Susan, who were getting breakfast with Susan’s sister, Nathalie, who had flown in from Denver to help out. They thought the worst because only a short time had passed.
“Your son’s a miracle,” Dr. Alejandro Berenstein, the lead surgeon, said. “I’ve never heard of anything like that happening, let alone seen it.”
And just like that, in a few hours, Susan and Dave saw hope. Even with three more brain surgeries and one open-heart surgery, Griffin had a future.
So Dave and a buddy, Mike Murray, who would later become one of Ben Carson’s campaign managers, decided to run a golf tournament for the renowned DC children’s hospital, and their friends were always happy to support it. And Steve Wynn, though he was a relatively new friend, was no exception.
Frank Luntz, the coarchitect of Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America, had introduced Dave to Steve Wynn in early 2010. Later, Dave flew out to Vegas and had dinner with Wynn in the steak house in his casino. Dave, the president of a nonprofit conservative political organization, had recently won a lawsuit against the Federal Election Commission in a First Amendment case you might have heard of. The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in January 2010 would rewrite US campaign finance laws, ensuring that money spent for political purposes was protected as free speech under the Constitution and couldn’t be regulated by the government. As a businessman and a frequent political donor, Wynn was someone Luntz thought Dave should know. He also thought the two would get along. He was right. They did.
Wynn promised Dave several great prizes for his tournament, including room comps and a foursome at his beautiful Wynn Golf Club, a par-70 course right by his casino in Vegas. Had the phone call ended after Steve Wynn’s display of generosity, Dave would have been perfectly content. But luckily, for our sake, the conversation continued, and that’s when Lady Luck began to smile on our story. Dave mentioned that he held the tournament at what was then known as the Loews Island resort golf club in DC.
“My friend Donald Trump just bought that golf course,” Wynn told him.
Dave doesn’t like to brag, but since we’re writing this book together, he doesn’t have to. He is good at what he does, and you don’t become a political operative of Dave Bossie’s magnitude without recognizing an opportunity when you hear one. He stored the information about Trump and a month or so later called Wynn back.
“You think you could introduce me to Donald Trump?” he asked. Although he didn’t know exactly what Trump would do for him, he figured getting to know the owner of the course where he held the tournament could only have an upside. On this crap table, he saw no harm in throwing the dice.
There wasn’t any harm. Without missing a beat, Wynn called out to his assistant.
“Cindy, get the Donald on the phone for me, please.”
And just like that, Dave was on a conference call with two billionaires.
“Any friend of Steve’s is a friend of mine,” Trump would say after the introductions. “Next time you’re in New York, come see me.”
“Funny,”
Dave said, “I’m scheduled to be in New York City in the next couple of weeks.”
As there was no such scheduled trip, Dave made a mental note to make the reservations as soon as he hung up.
When Trump got off the line, Steve Wynn had some parting advice.
“Ask Donald to waive the fee for the course,” he told Dave.
I’m on a roll, Dave thought as he hung up the phone.
The next week he walked into Trump Tower for the first time in his life with a wish list of auction prizes in his head. In the elevator up to the twenty-sixth floor, where Donald Trump had his fantastic office, Dave started to have second thoughts about this plan he had hatched. Sure, it was for a good cause, but he was about to walk in to see Donald Trump, whom he knew only about as well as you could know anybody from television and a five-minute phone conversation, and ask for stuff. Besides, he was Donald Trump. The Apprentice. The Art of the Deal. Trump had succeeded spectacularly in the world of Manhattan real estate. There are no waters more dark and shark infested.
Let Trump Be Trump Page 2