“Look at you! Right out of Central Casting,” Trump said to Corey as Nunberg introduced them. “A good-looking guy.”
There were three red velvet chairs facing the desk. Trump motioned for Corey and Nunberg to sit, and they did—Corey in the middle, Nunberg to his right.
“I want you to know I have the greatest air force in the world,” Trump began, unprompted.
“I’ve got a 757, I’ve got a Citation X. And I’ve got three helicopters.”
Corey sat there with a half smile on his face, not knowing quite how to respond.
“I’ve also have a bunch of houses and seventeen golf courses.”
The whole scene was surreal. It felt like something out of the opening of The Apprentice.
Though the air force thing sounded like gratuitous boasting or a non sequitur, Corey would come to find in the months and years that followed that Donald Trump’s mind works differently than most. His thoughts sometimes come out like pieces of a puzzle. It’s only later when you put the pieces together that you realize how much they’re worth. Sometimes the puzzle pieces form a masterpiece.
Corey was still wondering why Trump was telling him what he owned when the mogul began to list the prospective campaign managers with whom he’d already met.
“Are you better than them?” he asked.
“I don’t know, I think so,” Corey answered. “But I know I’ll work harder.”
Trump nodded.
He then asked Corey how much it would cost to run a presidential campaign in the first three states: Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina, a question for which Corey was ready. On the phone the night before, he and Dave had discussed what Trump might ask.
“Twenty-five million,” he said.
If the number bothered the real estate mogul, he didn’t show it.
“I’ll spend your money like it was my own,” Corey added, just to be sure.
Trump nodded again. “What’s my chances of winning the Iowa caucuses?” he said.
“You’ve been divorced twice, and Iowa is a very conservative state,” Corey said carefully.
This time Trump didn’t nod. Instead, he shrugged.
“I’d like you to run my New Hampshire operations for me.”
Corey had no interest in running one state campaign, but before he could tell Trump, Nunberg jumped in.
“He wants to run the whole thing, sir.”
Trump looked at Nunberg, and then back to Corey. “You want me to give you the keys to the whole place?”
“Yes sir,” Corey said.
“What do you think my odds of winning are?”
“Five percent.”
“I think it’s ten percent,” Trump said. “Let’s split the difference. Seven and a half.”
“Sounds good to me,” Corey said, smiling.
“How much money do you need to make?”
“Twenty thousand a month.”
“How’d you come up with that number?” Trump shot back.
Corey told him that Matt Rhodes, Mitt Romney’s campaign manager, made fifteen thousand a month, and he reminded him of his promise to work harder.
“Plus, I think I should make a bonus if we finish in first or second place in Iowa, New Hampshire, or South Carolina,” Corey said. “So our incentives are aligned.”
Mr. Trump is a world-renowned negotiator, but Corey knew the basics. One of the fundamental ingredients to a successful negotiation, he knew, is leverage. Corey had plenty. He already had a job, a good one. And, despite what Trump said about the other campaign managers that he talked to, Corey knew that the established ones weren’t knocking down Trump’s door. If he wants me, Corey thought, then he’s going to have to make it worth my time. As confident as Corey was, what Trump said next still shocked him.
“You’re hired,” the boss said dismissively. “You start tomorrow. All right, get out and get to work.”
It was 9:00 p.m. when Corey got his car out of the garage and headed back to New Hampshire. After his meeting with Trump, he’d met with Michael Cohen, Trump’s lawyer, and then accompanied Sam Nunberg to an Irish bar on Fifty-Seventh Street for drinks. Well, Sam had drinks. Corey had just one: a Heineken. He knew he had a long drive ahead of him. When it got to be around seven, Sam told Corey he had someone he wanted him to meet.
Roger Stone sat at a table in the nearby restaurant with his wife and granddaughter. He wore an immaculate dark suit, his white hair slicked back, and a tan that might have come from a can. Thanks to a couple of straight-up martinis, he was gracious and talkative. Corey knew Stone only by reputation, one that was murky at best. Still, he was happy to listen. At this point, he was glad to hear from anyone who could shed some light on the personality of his new boss. Stone and Trump had known each other for thirty years. Still, looking back, Corey would remember the meeting with Stone as strange. For one thing, it would be the last time he’d see him until Trump was the front-runner for the nomination. Stone didn’t even come to Trump Tower the day his friend announced his run for the presidency. Then there was the remark by Nunberg on the way to the restaurant.
“The only reason you have the job with Trump is that Roger Stone said you could,” he’d said.
On its face, the statement sounded ridiculous to Corey. But he had just entered the world of Donald Trump, and there was much he didn’t know.
As Corey navigated the city traffic to the FDR Drive and then onto the Triborough Bridge, the events of the day spun in his mind. He still didn’t believe a campaign would happen. He was glad that he had insisted on a contract, one with a ninety-day out clause and a three-month severance, something that is unheard of in the business of politics. Still, he had just taken a big gamble.
He was heading north on the New York State Thruway when he tapped Alison’s number on his cell.
“It looks like I just took a job with Donald Trump,” he told his wife.
“What does that mean?” she said.
“I’m not sure,” he answered. “Let’s talk when I get home.”
Corey met Alison when he was a freshman at a small Catholic high school in Massachusetts. It was the end of the school year, and his class attended a fair held at Alison’s Catholic grammar school. She was twelve. He was thirteen. He had known her older sister, who was a year ahead of him in high school. The next fall, Alison enrolled as a freshman in Corey’s high school. Pretty soon after that, they were dating, an on-again, off-again relationship that was on at the time Corey graduated. They went to his senior prom together. The romance continued when Alison went away to college at Bridgewater State. Corey would make the hour drive from Lowell to Alison’s school often. But when Corey graduated from UMass in December 1995 and moved to Washington, DC, to attend graduate school at American University, the relationship began to fade. The truth was, the political bug had bitten him, which is something like what sailors in the old days must have felt when they realized that their first true love was the sea.
He might have had second thoughts, though. In 1997, he called Alison out of the blue. It was during that conversation when she told him she was getting married. Corey knew Alison’s fiancé. They had both wanted to be electrical engineers and were in all the same classes the first semester in college. He liked Brian Kinney and admired him for his work ethic. His family had owned a Texaco gas station in Lowell for a couple of generations and, when he wasn’t in class, Brian was pumping gas. The gas station was right around the corner from Alison’s family home; her brothers worked there for years.
But if Corey pined over a missed opportunity, the feeling didn’t last for long, at least on the surface.
By 2001, Corey was working for the RNC as the Northeast political director. At the time, he was living in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, and working in Trenton, New Jersey, which is about a four-hour commute. He spent most nights during the week in a Marriott in Princeton, New Jersey. But on the night of September 10, 2001, he slept in Old Saybrook and left for work early the morning of the eleventh. Corey was a
fan of Howard Stern and had the show on the car radio when Stern began talking about a small plane hitting the World Trade Center. Like many people, the radio host didn’t realize the significance of what was happening. But as the events that morning unfolded, Stern went from shock jock to newsman. When Corey crossed the Tappan Zee Bridge over the Hudson River, he had a clear view of Manhattan. It was only then that he could put a visual to Stern’s words. From midspan, he could see the Twin Towers burning.
It was the next morning that an old high school classmate called Corey to tell him that Brian Kinney, Alison’s husband, had been on flight 175, the one that slammed into the South Tower. He was killed.
Corey came back to Lowell to attend Brian’s funeral. After the service, he went to a restaurant where there was a small reception attended by family and close friends. Corey knew everyone in the room; he had grown up with most of them in Lowell. There, he talked to Alison for the first time in four years.
As fate would have it, two months later Corey took a job managing the reelection campaign of Bob Smith, the senator from New Hampshire. He left Old Saybrook and moved to Manchester, New Hampshire, about a thirty-five-minute drive from Lowell, where Alison still lived. Soon they reconnected.
Corey married Alison in December 2005. Abigail, their first child, was born in October 2006, the twins, Alex and Owen, in February 2009, and Reagan during the Americans for Prosperity dinner in April 2011. He considers Brian Kinney an American hero, one who died for his country, and believes that his sacrifice is no less important than those killed on the battlefield.
Alison was still up when the headlights of Corey’s car flashed across the front windows as he pulled into the driveway. It was one o’clock in the morning. As they sat in the kitchen, Corey filled Alison in on the juicy details.
It all sounded fascinating. After all, you don’t get a chance to work for a big celebrity every day. Corey told her about the contract and promised her that they would be okay. Mr. Trump seemed excited, he told her. And Trump did call Dave while Corey was on the phone with him after the meeting. It was a leap of faith, for sure, but it wasn’t the first leap Alison had taken with her husband. Corey’s wife is Lowell born and bred. She’s one of eight siblings, and the only one who doesn’t still live within four miles of the others. When Corey first approached her with the idea of moving to New Hampshire, he might as well have said they were going to live on the moon. But that was nine years earlier, and things had worked out just fine. She had no reason to believe that her husband’s new job was anything other than a great opportunity.
“Don’t sweat it too much,” Corey said to her.
Though Alison had left Lowell, she still had plenty of Lowell’s toughness left in her. She wasn’t going to sweat it, at least not right away.
But the truth of it was that Corey didn’t know how long the new job was going to last, or what it would entail. The whole thing could evaporate like Sam Nunberg’s vape mist at any moment.
CHAPTER 5
THE ISLAND OF THE MISFIT TOYS
What separates the winners from the losers is how a person reacts to each new twist of fate.
—@REALDONALDTRUMP, SEPTEMBER 20, 2014, 2:03 A.M.
Government will become lean and mean, except it will have a big, fat, beautiful heart.
—DONALD J. TRUMP, 2016
ONE OF THE THINGS the media harped on during the campaign was the supposed “lack of organization” due to the boss’s refusal to hire an army of politicos who make a living off campaign contributions. Yes, we ran “lean and mean,” but that’s because Donald Trump understood why his businesses made billions in profits and the government is $20 trillion in debt. Mr. Trump doesn’t believe that throwing more money at a problem is the answer.
In business, controlling costs has a lot to do with success or failure. Like Mr. Trump always said, “To bring in a building on time and under budget, you have to manage dozens of vendors selling hundreds of goods or services. And you have to make sure you are getting the best price on every single one of them, while also ensuring that what they’re selling you meets the specifications for safety and quality.”
The boss knew from experience that success wasn’t a matter of spending lavishly or cutting corners. It was a matter of spending wisely. So we ran very lean at first and spent the money we needed to, when we needed to, to win. Just as he didn’t waste money on a building but also didn’t go cheap on what was important to make it safe and valuable, Mr. Trump didn’t waste money or go cheap on the campaign. On the contrary—and the media always got this wrong—Donald J. Trump never said no to a spending request. At the end of the day, however, Hillary Clinton spent twice as much money and lost. Donald Trump brought his campaign in on time, under budget, and into the White House. But it all started smaller than most people would believe.
Donald Trump’s first campaign office was just a little bigger than a cubicle. The tiny space on the twenty-fourth floor of Trump Tower contained two desks next to each other, separated by a credenza. For the first six months, Corey kept his expectations similarly small, calling himself, “Donald Trump’s senior political adviser” instead of his campaign manager. When Dave called the office, he’d often ask for the “very senior adviser.” Corey was never hard to find, given that he was pretty much the only guy in the office, which until then had been the modest lair of Sam Nunberg alone.
As with every job he’d ever had, however, Corey showed up on day one ready to work.
One of Corey’s and Dave’s heroes is Lee Atwater, the game-changing political icon, and the coarchitect of the modern Republican party. Throughout his career, Atwater rubbed shoulders with all the guys Corey would come to admire, working his way up from congressional campaigns and other small races to the Reagan White House, until finally becoming the mastermind behind George H. W. Bush’s winning presidential campaign in 1988.
From the moment he started with Trump, Corey had a biography of Atwater on his desk, a book called Bad Boy by John Brady, which he tried to keep within reach at all times, right next to Sun-tzu’s The Art of War. It had always been easy for Corey to see a bit of himself in Atwater, to use Lee’s career as a kind of rough blueprint for his own. Both men came from outside the DC scene and shared a mild disdain for all the glitz and Ivy League glamour that came with it; and yet, as Brady puts it in the book, they both “learned things that they didn’t teach at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.”
Oddly enough, Corey would come to share a few of Atwater’s anxieties about rolling with the political and economic elite. Brady writes in places about an uneasy friendship that Atwater had with Roger Stone writing that Atwater was uncomfortable with the way Stone “liked expensive suits, palled around with Donald Trump and the jet set.”
Most important, though, Corey admired Atwater’s ability to, as he often put it, “see around corners”—in other words, the talent to anticipate whatever unlikely circumstance might happen next, subtle shifts in public opinion, a kink in some polling models, even a sudden rainstorm on Election Day. Working for Donald Trump, Corey would become adept at the art of anticipation; there was no other way to survive. But it also helped, especially in his early months on the job, that he had another set of eyes. Even better, eyes that were attached to a guy who’d come around these particular corners a few hundred times himself.
Dave, sensing that it might take his first pick for campaign manager a little time to get acclimated, called Corey almost every morning at 8:00 a.m. sharp, dialing from the car after he dropped his kids off at school. In the beginning, Corey didn’t know if he should be hiding in the tiny campaign office, sitting by Trump’s side upstairs, or some combination of the two. He couldn’t tell if the boss liked his space, wanted frequent updates, or even how much of his attention the boss could afford to spend on the campaign at all. After all, he was still running the Trump Organization then, which employed thousands of people around the country and saw billions in revenue every year.
Dave ha
d a few ideas about that. For Dave, it all boiled down to a simple piece of advice: Make sure you have things buttoned up. And that’s what he told Corey to do before he saw Trump.
In those early days, Corey would prioritize two or three bullet points to bring up to the twenty-sixth floor, then run through them in a few tight sentences, not unlike a proposal or a sales pitch. In those days, it wasn’t uncommon for Trump to have mere minutes—sometimes seconds—to sign off on big decisions regarding the campaign. He had new hotels to build, checks to cut, and, most important, a multibillion-dollar business to run, the future of which he needed to secure if he had any hope of seeing it grow while he was out campaigning. If Corey could get him for a few minutes in the office to plan a campaign stop, he’d consider it a good day. Donald J. Trump never cared about the schedule. Corey would work with Rhona Graff, Donald Trump’s longtime personal assistant and senior vice president of the Trump Organization, to arrange all of that.
The first big lesson that Corey learned about his new boss was that Donald Trump practically lived on his phone, a big black landline at the left-hand corner of his desk. In the early days, every time Corey walked into Trump’s office, he seemed to be on the phone with some titan of industry or celebrity. One day early on when he walked in, Trump was on the phone with former president Bill Clinton, having a lengthy conversation with him.
Trump also used the phone to manage his organization. The lesson was that if you worked for Donald Trump, you better have your phone on, because he was going to call.
Then there was the internal politics within Trump Tower, that Dave and Corey discussed.
Along with frequent phone calls from Mr. Trump, and a short meeting that they had every morning on the twenty-sixth floor of Trump Tower, Corey could count on seeing his boss at least twice a day.
Though all the windows look identical from the outside, Trump Tower is actually divided in half—twenty-six floors on the lower half, for commercial use, and twenty-six more at the top that are exclusively residential. The twenty-fourth floor, where Corey and Sam Nunberg shared their little half room of an office, was what people who spent time in both halves of the tower called the “cut-through” floor. Because each half had its own dedicated elevator, you couldn’t get from the commercial section to the residential—or the other way around.
Let Trump Be Trump Page 5