“I don’t think we have time, sir,” she said when he yelled for the machine. “We’ll just get you pressed at the hotel.”
But Mr. Trump insisted. When Hope finally admitted she’d forgotten the steamer, he blew his top.
“Goddammit, Hope! How the hell could you forget the machine?”
“Sir, couldn’t we have it pressed at the hotel?”
“I want it now!”
It was a mistake she would never make again.
By July 2015, it was pretty obvious, to us at least, that the Trump campaign was going to be like no other campaign in history. The rally in Phoenix on July 11 nearly caused a full-out stampede, and Politico called it the start of “Trumpmania.” Things quickly got even crazier.
On July 15, Hope, Keith, Corey, and some security flew on the Citation with the boss to Laconia, New Hampshire, for an event at a VFW hall. As the plane was landing, Corey checked his phone. There were fifteen voice mails, all from the same number: the Laconia Police Department. As the plane taxied in, Corey called the number.
“We have a serious situation,” an officer said.
All Corey cared about was that people had shown up at the event. That wasn’t the problem.
“We can’t get you into the venue,” the officer said.
The VFW hall had a maximum capacity of three hundred and fifty. There were at least a thousand people outside the hall, literally standing on the roof of the building to get a glimpse of Donald J. Trump. The traffic was backed up for three miles leading to the venue, and as our small motorcade pulled up, people started chasing the cars to touch the car Mr. Trump was in. That day was the first time the Trump campaign needed a police escort, a practice that would become standard operating procedure.
The temperature in the hall neared ninety-five degrees.
When we tried to leave, the police had to lead us through the crowd, and people were shaking the SUVs. It looked like a riot scene from a movie. We had advance guys running alongside the SUV to keep the people away. People just wanted to be near Mr. Trump.
Mr. Trump was scheduled to do Bill O’Reilly’s show that night. Originally, we planned to tape The O’Reilly Factor from New York after the New Hampshire event. However, the event went long, so we decided to have Mr. Trump phone in from the small regional airport in Laconia. People knew we were heading to the airport, just a short distance from the VFW hall, and they started pouring in to watch Mr. Trump take off. However, what they saw instead was the team and Mr. Trump watching O’Reilly from the airport lounge. The hundreds of people waiting for a glimpse of the boss in the parking lot weren’t starstruck Apprentice fans standing there. These were sophisticated political people, grassroots activists, and local political ops. The camera crew had a TV monitor set up. A thousand people stood watching Trump as he watched TV. Those of us on the inside of the campaign knew then that what we were watching was lightning in a bottle.
It was at this time that Mr. Trump hit first place in the national polls. The numbers had gone from a low single-digit joke to nearly unanimous front-runner in less than a month—something never done before. And when Donald Trump was in first place, there was no looking back. People were begging for something different. They had something different in Trump.
On Saturday, July 18, in an interview with Frank Luntz at the Family Leadership Summit, a conservative Christian conference, Donald Trump showed just how different a candidate he was going to be. Earlier in the week, John McCain had said that Trump was “firing up the crazies” at the Phoenix rally. The boss shot back with some words of his own, defending the people who came to see him. Luntz asked Mr. Trump how he could say disparaging things to a war hero.
“He’s not a war hero,” the boss said.
Corey, Chuck Laudner, and Hope had watched the interview on a small monitor in the green room of the venue.
“What the hell did he just say?” Corey asked. He didn’t have to wait long for an answer.
“He’s a ‘war hero’ because he was captured,” Trump said. “I like people that weren’t captured.”
Corey went into full crisis mode. In the greenroom after the interview, he told the boss that they needed to have a press conference right away so he could walk back his remarks.
“You want a press conference,” Mr. Trump asked. “Let’s have a press conference.”
In what sounded more like a street fight than a press conference, Donald Trump stood his ground. He put his comments in the context of McCain’s poor record helping veterans and the absolute disgrace of our Veterans Administration. Mr. Trump and reporter Stephen Hayes got into a screaming match that lasted three whole minutes.
Corey’s first thought was that the campaign was over. He called Alison after the presser to tell her he would soon be on his way home. But his second overriding feeling was that of pure awe. He had never seen a candidate have such courage in his convictions. No matter how hard the press pushed him, Trump wasn’t backing down from his words.
By the time they got back to the airplane, the story had exploded. In the coming hours and days, just about every other candidate and talking head piled on. Governors Rick Perry and Scott Walker denounced Trump. Lindsey Graham told him he was fired. Cable news was outraged. So was nearly every pundit and op-ed writer in the country and around the world. Sean Hannity told him to apologize. So did Steve Bannon. But the boss never wavered.
Hope, Corey, and the boss flew to Newark and then drove to Bedminster, New Jersey, where Trump owns a golf club and home. There his wife, Melania, met him at the door. She had TiVoed all the news shows covering the uproar.
“You were absolutely right,” she said to her husband. “John McCain has not done enough for the veterans.”
Corey and Hope looked at each other in disbelief.
The next day, the highly respected journalist and author Sharyl Attkisson took the boss’s side, saying his words were taken out of context and the media’s reaction to them was part of a larger smear campaign. Chuck Laudner then set up a hotline for veterans to get help.
By Wednesday of the following week, the flaming controversy was only embers.
Corey had said to Hope during the height of the blowback that if the boss survived this he would be president of the United States. Trump not only survived, but his poll numbers continued to skyrocket. Corey knew then what much of the mainstream media would deny until Election Day: that Donald Trump was going to be tough to beat. He wasn’t afraid to say and do things that he believed in, no matter how politically incorrect they might seem. And by doing that, his actions and words spoke to people like no other politician’s.
Even though we were officially in the race, and despite the fact that we were leading most of the polls, pundits and opinion writers still thought of the Trump campaign as a sideshow. Later, the CNN host Michael Smerconish would call the boss “the George Costanza of the 2016 field.” But we were all business and were about to show it. All presidential candidates are required to file a personal financial disclosure (PFD) statement with the Federal Election Commission. You’re given thirty days from the day you announce to do so. The liberal media was still branding the boss as a flash-in-the-pan candidate and saying that he was using the campaign as a way to bolster his businesses. They didn’t believe he’d ever file the PDF. Around that time, Ted Cruz came to visit the boss at Trump Tower. Trump asked him if he had filed his disclosure.
“I asked for an extension,” the senator said.
“See, Corey; we can get an extension.”
But Corey knew that the media would kill Trump if he asked for more time. They’d say the boss didn’t have the money he purports to have. They’d say he was hiding some shady deals. Corey knew he had to file on time.
The campaign knew it would be the largest single filing of any PFD in the history of candidates and that it would take a lot of hard work to put it together accurately. With the oversight of Don McGahn, we assigned one accountant to the task; the young accountant worked night and day,
a finger-bleeding kind of effort. Much to the disappointment of the pundits who were waiting to swoop down on us like vultures, we filed the disclosure in twenty-nine days—one day early. The message the early filing sent was clear: Trump, a man with over six hundred businesses, got things done, while your average politician had to ask for extensions. The disclosure also allowed us to flaunt a number with a nice ring to it: $10,000,000,000. Donald Trump’s net worth was ten billion dollars. How about them apples?
The trip to Laredo came later in the month. Stephen Miller, who had been the communications director for Jeff Sessions in the US Senate before joining our team, was the one who initially helped us draft our immigration policy. We also have to give much credit to Ann Coulter, who was a significant influence and held us accountable for our immigration policy. Miller became our top policy guy, and it was Miller who gave us the contact information for officials in the border patrol union. The local union boss invited Mr. Trump to Laredo to see the border for himself. We knew the trip was going to be a big deal, and we knew the press would go wild over it, but we didn’t realize just how big of a deal it would be.
When we said earlier that we rolled into town, we mean we rolled. A presidential motorcycle brigade escorted our motorcade of several SUVs with blacked-out windows and two full-scale coach buses carrying credentialed media. At least twenty police cruisers trailed us. Our convoy included multiple unmarked cars and light armor-plated vehicles with military weapons. They closed the border for a full hour during Mr. Trump’s visit. They had snipers on the roofs of nearby buildings. And this was all for Donald Trump, who at the time held an official position no higher than John Q. Citizen.
Mr. Trump spent much of the time in Laredo talking to border agents.
“We can’t do our jobs,” they told him.
“You elect me,” the boss said, “and I’ll take your handcuffs off.”
The trip was also right in Ted Cruz’s backyard. The senator was scheduled to join us on the trip, but at the last minute his team pulled out of the event, citing important issues in Washington. Good thing. The boss sucked up all the oxygen this side of the Rio Grande. There was such a feeding frenzy among the press, an overzealous cameraman split Corey’s head open with his Nikon.
Over and over again at rallies across the country, Donald Trump’s biggest applause line was, “Oh, we’re gonna build a wall.” The line had been trial tested in front of hundreds of thousands of people. We knew it was an issue as hot as the Laredo sun. The border visit was one of the great photo ops in political history. One hundred and twenty credential media broadcast, published, posted, and tweeted indelible images of a man determined to keep our borders safe. But as politically historic as the trip was, maybe the most lasting symbol was something that the boss wore on his head. On that day, a white MAKE AMERICA GREAT hat became one of the great iconic politcal symbols.
The hat, of course, would become a sensation and one of our biggest early fund-raising tools. No marketing firm, no poll testing. For our first buy, Mr. Trump told Amanda Miller to call his merchandise guy and order a thousand. By September, the New York Times was calling it “the must-have accessory of the summer.” By April the following spring, the campaign had sold 500,000. And there were five times as many knockoffs sold (ours were American made). The boss signed thousands of them. Even the knockoffs. Corey told CNN that the hat was disruptive technology. “People who weren’t involved in politics, that didn’t have a political background, wanted to show their support for something different and their way to do that was to buy hats,” he said. At rallies, hats formed a red, white, and ultimately camouflage sea of change and helped signify that we were no longer just a campaign, but a movement.
If we didn’t know by then that Donald Trump had become a political supernova, we would become irrevocably convinced by August. George suggested we hold a rally in Mobile, Alabama, where he lived. Though the campaign didn’t have any staff then in Alabama, our advance man had plenty of friends and relatives who could lend a hand. He also knew someone in the mayor’s office, whom he called to see if a small, 2,500-seat theater was available. It was, and they sent George the contract that afternoon. By Tuesday, 10,000 people had RSVP’ed to attend the event. By Wednesday, it was 16,000. George called his friend in the mayor’s office back and booked a civic center that sat 10,000. But by Thursday, the RSVPs had swelled to 40,000. They moved the event to Ladd-Peebles Stadium, a football stadium, and people waited in a driving rainstorm to get in. As the weather cleared, Captain John did a flyover and tipped the 757’s wing, as George announced Mr. Trump’s arrival to the wildly cheering crowd of over 35,000.
Incredibly, the same scenario would happen time after time. If you look at photographs from any one of those rallies, you’ll notice something else, besides the hats and T-shirts with slogans, that they all had in common. Everyone seems to be holding up a cell phone and recording the event. Those videos then got emailed, shared, posted, and then eventually seen by the attendees’ entire online communities. Donald Trump’s reach was rally attendance times X.
Our lead in the polls grew in early August. Trump zoomed ahead of Jeb Bush and his $150 million campaign like he was Wile E. Coyote and we were the Road Runner. Beep. Beep. We had gone by the rest of the field so fast the RNC had whiplash. The pundits chalked it up to it being summertime. No one’s paying attention to the race, they said. Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight blog compared our poll numbers with the August numbers of primary candidates who ended up losing the nomination such as Joe Lieberman in 2003, Rudy Giuliani and Hillary Clinton in 2007, and Rick Perry in 2011.
Donald Trump, however, was no Joe Lieberman.
On August 6, the boss participated in his first debate: the Washington Post/Fox News Republican primary debate held at Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland. It was the first of six primary debates leading up to the Iowa caucuses.
No one watching knew what to expect from Donald Trump and, frankly, neither did we. Our debate preps amounted to conversations at Trump Tower on potential topics, a discussion on the airplane, and a final debate “prep” in the SUV on the way to the event. And sometimes debate prep gave way to more important things. In Cleveland, the band Aerosmith, which was performing in the area, reached out to Don McGahn and asked if they could say hello to Mr. Trump. They came over to the boss’s suite just before the debate that night. Mr. Trump spent “debate time” talking with the band, who offered their support to his campaign.
Donald Trump is the best game day player that politics has ever seen. He didn’t need prep; he’d been preparing for this his whole life. He knew what had happened to Romney. They had poured so much stuff into his head that he couldn’t talk when it came time to. Trump knew he could handle himself in front of the camera better than any of the other candidates. He played the game like he had nothing to lose, so he was loose and spontaneous.
Because of his standing in the national polls, Mr. Trump was placed at the center of the stage behind the most prominent podium. We also knew that he would receive most of the questions and be given the most opportunity to speak, because people weren’t tuning into the presidential debate to watch Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush; they were tuning in to see Donald J. Trump.
From the first debate on, Donald Trump decimated the field of primary candidates. There were seventeen candidates in Cleveland in August (two tiers), and only four (Cruz, John Kasich, Rubio, and Trump) by the March CNN debate in Miami. The combination of Trump’s stage savvy and street smarts was devastating. Although the mainstream media and other haters give him little credit for his intellect, Donald Trump has more than a fundamental grasp on a surprising number of fields, including Jungian psychology. One of his favorite books is Memory, Dreams, Reflections, Jung’s autobiography. Steve Bannon insists that Trump came up with the idea for the names Lyin’ Ted, Little Marco, Low-Energy Jeb, and, later, Crooked Hillary, from his knowledge of Jungian archetypes.
When Megyn Kelly sandbagged him with her first question about thin
gs he’d said about women during his life, the boss turned what should have been a devastating problem into a rousing rallying cry for the country. Instead of wasting our time being politically correct, he challenged us to be smarter in trade and energy production. The Rosie O’Donnell line was for laughs. Following the laughs, however, the boss showed himself as a serious candidate. The crowd ate it up.
Donald Trump knows how to ride a popular wave. His assault on political correctness resonated with people across the country. We took advantage of that connection whenever we could. We began posting videos for his Facebook followers. In one, the boss looked directly into the camera and told the viewer that he didn’t have time to be politically correct. The video went viral. Whether it was Rosie O’Donnell’s weight, or a federal judge, or any of the reporters following the campaign, no one was off-limits. And only Donald Trump could get away with what he got away with.
And because of his honesty, he was the draw. When he decided to boycott the next Fox debate in Des Moines, in protest of the way the network and their star anchor had treated him in the first debate, the ratings dropped 40 percent. Trump came up with the idea of having a fund-raiser for veterans on the same night. We held it less than a ten-minute drive from the Iowa Events Center, where the debate was held. Still Fox News, and Roger Ailes specifically, begged us to come. They were even okay with us getting there at the last second. They promised to move the other candidates so Mr. Trump would have the center podium if and when he showed up. We didn’t take them up on the offer, and the press we generated overshadowed the coverage of the debate. And Donald Trump raised $6 million for vets in the process.
Yes, in one way, the primary debates were a reality show, and Donald Trump drove the ratings. But they were also a serious platform from which he delivered his ideas to make America great again: to clean up Washington’s corruption and special interests; to protect American workers; to restore border security and the rule of law; to appoint a justice to fill the enormous hole left by the death of Antonin Scalia; to provide a tax code that helped keep hard-earned money in the pockets of the middle class. No doubt the boss was fun to watch onstage, but he was also the most authentic candidate. He rekindled a dream for millions of Americans—and that’s why they elected him president.
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