Let Trump Be Trump

by Corey R. Lewandowski

  So, when he wanted to get from the top-floor, where he lived, to his office on the twenty-sixth, Mr. Trump would have to take the elevator down from his 15,000-square-foot triplex penthouse to twenty-four, walk past Corey’s office, then take the commercial elevator up two floors to his office.

  More often than not, the boss would stop in to see what was going on with the political operation. When he did, he’d usually see a couple of staff members, some papers, maybe a few notes on strategy. Corey was laying the groundwork for the campaign but didn’t have anything to show yet. Beginning a habit that he’d keep until election night, Corey had already begun to tack up pictures and notes that arrived at the office to the wall. Looking back, he realizes that the room must have looked more like a college dorm room than a campaign office, as there were so many odds and ends lying around. Whatever it looked like, it bore little resemblance to the free-balling, cartwheeling road show that the campaign would become.

  The first campaign hires Corey made were state campaign directors in the first three primary states: Jim Merrill, Ed McMullen, and Geri McDaniel in South Carolina; Matt Cipielowski in New Hampshire; and Chuck Laudner in Iowa. These were the people who’d be in charge of setting up small Trump headquarters in their home states, then reporting back to home base in New York. Corey made sure that they knew the voters and districts of their states inside out, the same way he knew the local climate of New Hampshire. Because of that, Matt Cipielowski was an easy choice—local boy, Polish, and Corey’s former right-hand man at Americans for Prosperity, where Cipielowski had worked as a field director.

  As a member of the South Carolina House of Representatives since 2000, Jim Merrill was an easy choice, too. At the time, he was the majority leader of the state House. He also owned a public relations and marketing firm in South Carolina. McMullen had been in South Carolina politics and business for twenty-five years. He had also been the president of the South Carolina Policy Council, a conservative think tank, through 2007. Those two were a perfect team in the state.

  Chuck Laudner, who had been the chief of staff for Representative Steve King, served as the executive director of the Iowa Republican Party, and helped guide Rick Santorum in a successful Iowa Caucus campaign in 2012, was an obvious pick. Corey hired him immediately on the emphatic recommendation from Dave.

  Laudner knew Iowa Republican politics maybe better than anyone and had a proven track record of winning. He also knew which events a candidate absolutely had to attend—just to “check the box,” as he put it—and which ones could suck up too much of a campaign’s energy without translating to votes.

  Early in 2015, Trump and Corey flew to Iowa, where Trump spoke at an event called the Land Investment Expo, an agricultural conference in Des Moines hosted by the social conservative Bob Vander Plaats. It was a paid speech for Donald J. Trump. It was on this trip when the boss and Corey met Chuck for the first time. It was also the first time that Corey, Chuck Laudner, or anyone else from the tiny campaign team had ever seen Trump speak in front of such a niche crowd. They had seen him do fine in front of die-hard political crowds, but Iowa farmers? When it came right down to it, Donald Trump knew how to speak to the people, whether they were from the Iowa farmland or Woodside, Queens. There is no better communicator.

  Joining the boss and Corey on the trip were Hope Hicks and Amanda Miller, an early campaign staffer, and Keith Schiller. Chuck and his wife, Stephanie, met Mr. Trump’s jet at the airport, and they rode with Corey and Trump to the hotel where the event was to be held. During the short ride, Trump peppered Chuck with questions about Iowa. Having been the state director for Santorum and running the shop for Steve King, both of whom are big personalities, he knew the importance of a good, back-and-forth relationship. Moving forward, trust would be important—especially when it came to making decisions.

  The trip turned out to be another moment that foretold the campaign’s future. Well, almost. Trump, in what by then seemed like an inevitability, was a hit. He donated a weekend at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida club, that raised $40,000. In return, the expo gave him a one-acre deeded parcel of Iowa. Even for a guy with enough acreage to spare, it was pretty cool. Though he spoke about the type of real estate that involved towering buildings, hotels, and golf courses, his language translated to field management and farm investments. He mesmerized the crowd, which numbered a thousand or more. They gave him a thundering, standing ovation.

  From the Land Expo, we went right to a Republican dinner, where the boss gave a political speech replete with references to border fences, China, trade, and jobs—using early versions of the lines that he’d soon polish into his greatest hits—and energized the room. Going from one venue to the other we witnessed an incredible display of oratorical versatility. Neither of us knew of anyone who could hop between modalities quite as well, and certainly not as naturally, as Trump had that day. There is very little in politics that Chuck Laudner hasn’t seen, but he was impressed. He predicted that Trump would win the Iowa caucuses, though they were still over a year away.

  Mr. Trump started to feed off the momentum. You could see it in the eyes of the people who attended his rallies, in the way he stood in front of the audience and invited them, as if he was standing again in front of Griffin and Abigail at the New Hampshire Freedom Summit, keys to his helicopter in hand, to come along on the ride he was offering. The mind-set that would become the hallmark of our campaign had formed thirty years ago in our leader. Now it was time to show it to America.

  First, it was Donald Trump against the Establishment; soon, it would become the United States against the World—America First!

  The day after the Land Expo, Dave and Citizens United, along with Steve King, hosted the Iowa Freedom Summit at the Hoyt Sherman Place, an old 1,500-seat historic theater with a raised proscenium stage. As at the New Hampshire Freedom Summit we had hosted nearly nine months earlier, twelve presidential hopefuls strode to the stage, one after the other, ready to give their speeches.

  In planning for the event, Dave was worried about the crowd. He packed the schedule with military-like precision. Sure, the crowd was big, but as lunchtime approached, Dave began to wonder if people would come back for the second half of the summit after leaving the theater for lunch. If not, nobody would hear Senator Ted Cruz, Governor Scott Walker (who ended up stealing the show), or Donald Trump.

  So, as they had in New Hampshire when Trump spoke, Dave and his crew served box lunches right in the theater, just to make sure people would stay in their seats. Dozens of volunteers set everything up on folding tables by the exits, and they told the crowd that lunch would be served in-house. Intermission came and lunches were served, followed by mixed conversation and the sound of just over 1,500 people chomping on sandwiches and chips.

  After exactly twenty-two minutes, Dave sent staffers up the aisles with garbage cans to collect any leftover cardboard, then started up again. And it still was a full house.

  Seeing around corners, as we would come to find, means more than anticipating a negative ad or seismic shifts in public opinion. For the most part, it’s about sweating the small stuff—phone calls, first names, seating arrangements. Even lunch.

  Trump gave a robust speech, as usual. The Des Moines Register called him “easily the most brazen speaker to take the stage.” But the rest of the media was busy fawning over Scott Walker, claiming that Trump’s performance had been a distant second.

  Walker had channeled Elmer Gantry and gave the speech of his political life. He strutted the stage with his sleeves rolled up. The spell he cast that day started his presidential aspirations off with a burst and infuriated Trump.

  “Who the hell is Scott Walker?” he said later.

  Even with the gathering popularity of the campaign and the increasing workload he was taking on, Corey was in no rush to put together a centralized staff. It was nice running things with a small, tight staff for a while.

  Looking back, Corey realizes that being virtually alone in the office al
lowed him to begin building the perfect machine, letting him acquaint himself with all the little pieces and their various functions, ensuring they would run smoothly when he finally decided to bring on more people. In those early days, a large, diversified staff—like the ones that Cruz, Clinton, and Jeb Bush had been building and maintaining for years—would only have clouded his vision.

  That, and he had no place to put them.

  He was still working out of the twenty-fourth-floor office then, bumping elbows with whoever he had working that day. The only internal hires he had made were Alan Cobb, a lawyer and friend in Kansas who helped with early ballot access and whose last work on a campaign had been on Bob Dole’s, and a few interns, who were there to sort through mail and get logistical items in place. They spent a lot of time running into each other, forced to share one of the two desks in the office.

  It’d be slow work building a team, Corey thought. But it would also need to be careful work if they were going to have any chance of pulling this off.

  When he did start to assemble the core group, it came together like something out of a superhero comic book story—just without the superpowers, or any experience in politics.

  For instance, there was Dan Scavino, whose prior political experience was as Mr. Trump’s regular caddy at the Briar Hall Country Club in Westchester, New York. In an interview with a Westchester magazine, Dan said that the first time he carried his golf bag, Mr. Trump tipped him with two one-hundred-dollar bills. “I still have those bills,” he told the magazine. After attending college in upstate New York and graduating with a degree in communications, Dan bounced around a couple of jobs. When Trump bought the Briar Hall Country Club and renamed it the Trump National Golf Club, he hired Dan as assistant manager. The onetime caddy worked his way up to become the club’s executive vice president. He also worked for Joe Torre’s Safe at Home Foundation. Just before the boss announced his run for the presidency, Dan was in the process of starting a public relations business. He dropped everything and joined the campaign. He would become Mr. Trump’s Twitter lieutenant.

  Then there was Hope Hicks. She was already working for the Trumps and had an office one floor above Corey’s. At the time, Corey was looking for someone to handle the media for Mr. Trump’s nascent campaign, and Hope was doing PR for one of the boss’s golf tournaments. He asked Hope if she wanted to come to a rally in South Carolina the following weekend. She was game, but weather grounded her commercial flight, so she didn’t make it. The following week, Mr. Trump was headed to Iowa for the Land Expo, and again Corey asked Hope to come along.

  “Is there going to be golf?” she asked.

  Smart and private, with nearly a photographic memory, Hope had grown up in Greenwich, Connecticut. A talented athlete, she was captain of her lacrosse team at Southern Methodist University. She was also a competitive swimmer and could travel the length of an Olympic-size pool underwater. Along with her sister, Hope was a model for Ralph Lauren when she was eleven. She began at the Trump Organization doing public relations for Ivanka’s fashion line and for some Trump resorts, and she served as the director of communications for aspects of the organization.

  She didn’t have any idea what the job that Corey was offering entailed until Mr. Trump called her into his office.

  “I’m going to Iowa this weekend and you’re going to be the press secretary for my campaign.”

  “Which one?” Hope asked. “The Doral marketing campaign?”

  “No. My presidential campaign! I’m running for president.”

  Okay, sure, Hope thought. Me too.

  Hope had so little knowledge of politics then that when Corey told her he had worked for the Kochs she asked if he knew Danny Masters. “He’s worked for Coke for a while,” she said.

  Along with Hope, there was Keith Schiller, the retired NYPD narcotics cop and Donald Trump’s longtime bodyguard. Keith was the head of security for the Trump Organization when the campaign started and then oversaw the boss’s private security team when he became a candidate. Our other security guys included Eddie Deck, Gary Uher, and Michael Sharkey, all retired FBI agents; Ron Jurain, an officer in the NYPD; and Burt Mentor, who hadn’t any formal security experience but was six four, two hundred and seventy-five pounds, and had been shot a couple of times. As the crowds at the boss’s rallies grew, the Trump security team did yeoman’s work with crowd control, working out the logistics with local law enforcement and keeping the candidate safe.

  We brought on Geri McDaniel from South Carolina to start to build a grassroots campaign in that state. Cassidy Dumbauld came aboard in August 2015, right out of college. Her first job for the campaign was answering mail. Standard operating procedure then (before it became impossible to do so) was to answer every piece of mail Mr. Trump received. Two weeks after she started, Corey called her into his office.

  “Why are you here?” he asked.

  “Because I want Donald Trump to be president,” she answered.

  Corey hired her full time on the spot.

  John McEntee was another political neophyte. A former walk-on UConn quarterback and YouTube football trickster sensation, he moved on the spur of the moment to New York City from California. In the city, he got a job working for Fox News, where he first learned Donald Trump was running for president. From the moment he found out, he began emailing the campaign asking if he could help. As an intern, he was the first in and the last to leave the campaign’s office just about every day. When he came on board officially, he joined the advance team on the road and in the air.

  But there was Don McGahn, a partner at Jones Day, the Washington powerhouse law firm, and a former chairman of the Federal Election Commission. McGahn was an expert on campaign finance law. Mr. Trump had asked Dave to recommend the best campaign lawyer in the field, and McGahn’s name was the first he thought of. The talented lawyer’s move to the Trump team demonstrated a seriousness on the part of the campaign that drew the attention of the Republican establishment. This was a serious move. The white-shoe firm had been involved in presidential campaigns for many years, and had represented candidates such as George W. Bush and Mitt Romney in their presidential runs. No doubt Don had a lot of internal conversations at Jones Day about taking on the new client. He would become the eyes and ears of the Trump campaign in Washington. McGahn, who owns over thirty guitars and plays in a cover band in Ocean City, Maryland, also acted as “Father Confessor” when Corey, usually at night, needed to speak with someone on the team who actually had campaign experience.

  The campaign’s first national spokesperson was Katrina Pierson. Katrina came aboard shortly after Corey did. As a spokesperson for the Tea Party, a movement she helped found, Katrina was a known commodity on television news shows. Mr. Trump admired her unvarnished honesty on the air and invited her to Trump Tower. There, in the boss’s office, they talked for two hours about conservative politics, and at the end of the discussion he offered her the job as his political spokesperson. Katrina flew with us often on Trump Force One. On her first trip, Mr. Trump insisted that she sit up in the jumper seat in the cockpit. Later, when she became inundated with media requests, the boss had the campaign help her build a studio in her home in Dallas. Still, on a busy day—and all the days on the campaign were just that—she’d spend more time in the studio than in any other room in the house. Or so it seemed.

  Other members of the team were Campbell Burr, who only worked weekends at first, but soon left her job and came on fulltime, and Daniel Gelbinovich, who opened mail for a year. He once bought $2,000 worth of Elvis stamps for the campaign. Cassidy had to help him return them after he was reminded that they weren’t really appropriate for a presidential campaign. Bringing them back wasn’t as easy as it sounds. The Postal Service was giving its clerks a bonus for selling the Elvis stamps. They went to several post offices before a clerk in one across from Penn Station agreed to exchange them.

  “The only reason I’m taking them back is because I think Trump is going to become
president,” the clerk said. “If he does, let him know I refunded his money.”

  We had Meghan Powers, who picked up and moved to Iowa in the middle of December for the primary. There was Thomas Tsveras, our first intern. If you Google the Trump campaign launch announcement you’ll see him standing right next to the escalator. We had Thomas Baptiste, who ran the call center, sang in a choir at his church, and addressed everyone by their first and last names. We had Ashley Mocarski, the queen of the late-night press release. There was Robert Gabriel, who was Stephen Miller’s assistant and who worked on a plastic desk in a closet-size room with nails coming through the walls. Baylor Myers and Zach McEntee, who was John’s cousin, worked on the finance team for Eli Miller, who joined after Marco Rubio faded out, and Steven Mnuchin. There were terrific folks like Jared Smith, Ashton Adams, and Victor Gutierrez and Stephanie Grisham and Ben Weiser, just out of high school, who delayed going to college to work for the campaign.

  It’s remarkable when you think about it. Donald Trump launched his presidential campaign with a tweet, an escalator ride, and a staff that mostly wouldn’t know the difference between a caucus and a cactus.

  The only members of Corey’s original team who had any political experience, other than him, were Alan Cobb, George Gigicos, and his early advance team, which included Kevin Chmielewski (whom we beat up a lot—meaning he took a lot of our grief and we ran him ragged—but who was the person who could articulate the type of expectations that the candidate had for these events), Aaron Chang, and Ben Miller, who were with us from the very beginning right until the end, and Don McGahn.