Let Trump Be Trump

by Corey R. Lewandowski

  We wouldn’t have been at the convention at all had we not been elected chairman of our respective delegations: Dave from Maryland, Corey from New Hampshire. At the time, Trump’s delegate count had started to become a big issue (and the reason for Paul’s hiring). We knew that by being elected chairmen of our delegations, we would have control over who was on the rules committee from our states, which would have been important had the convention been contested.

  Though we continued to do our best for the campaign, we couldn’t have felt any more detached from it. Corey had spent eighteen months at the candidate’s side. As an outside campaign adviser, Dave weighed in with Corey regularly. He had talked to the team and the candidate often. But now it was as though that hadn’t happened at all.

  At one point, Mike Pence walked by with his wife, Karen, daughter, Charlotte, and the team of Nick Ayers and Marc Short. Dave had known Pence since he was a congressman, and Charlotte had interned at Citizens United years before. Corey, meanwhile, had headed up the original VP selection committee.

  “What are you guys doing back here?” Pence asked. The vice presidential nominee was as surprised at where we were standing in the convention hall as we were.

  Still, Corey stood straight and proud in front of the microphone and announced the delegate count for New Hampshire.

  “Eleven votes for my friend, the next president of the United States, Donald J. Trump.”

  Dave stood next to Diana Waterman, a breast cancer survivor and state party chair, as she read the Maryland roll call.

  The morning the New York Times story was published, Rebekah Mercer called Steve Bannon. All the way back to the New Hampshire Freedom Summit, Bannon was convinced that Trump would be the nominee and would win the presidency. “It’s 100 percent,” he’d tell anyone who would listen. He practically bet the future of the Breitbart website by backing Trump.

  “The conservatives hated us, National Review, they all hated us,” he said.

  But the way Manafort was running the campaign sickened him. He couldn’t shake the thought of Trump’s new campaign chairman on Meet the Press the week before. Bannon hated the Sunday shows; he never watched them and tuned in only to see what Manafort was all about. He didn’t know the guy at all, only having talked to him once on the phone at Breitbart, and thought he was a stiff. The image of Manafort wearing yachting blue filled the screen above a banner that read, “From Southampton, New York.” Bannon was incensed. “This is a populist, nationalist campaign?” he screamed at the TV. “And the guy’s on from the Hamptons?” And if that wasn’t enough, he thought Manafort was terrible on air—he had no energy whatsoever, and didn’t know the issues.

  He can’t find his own ass with both hands, Bannon thought.

  On the phone, Rebekah told him that major Republican donors had begun to jump ship, and that was before the New York Times article. Things were going to get worse, Rebekah told him.

  They would. There was already talk of the party cutting Trump loose. Mitch McConnell was going to focus on the Senate, Paul Ryan on the House. Super PAC money would be redirected to down-ballot races. The way things were going, Trump could lose by twenty, twenty-five points. But Bannon still believed in Trump and his message.

  “I think I can help,” he said.

  Five minutes later, Bob Mercer was on the phone. Mercer is the quietest man in the world. He’s a mathematician. He’ll listen to you all day. He’ll whistle once in a while. But he’s not a big talker.

  Bannon told him his ideas, which included promoting Kellyanne, who was working for Trump on women’s empowerment issues, to campaign manager. “We’ll put her on TV, she can be the face of the campaign,” he said.

  “That sounds like a terrific idea,” he said to Bannon.

  It was a sentence that spoke volumes.

  Later that day, Rebekah and Bob Mercer arrived at Woody Johnson’s beachfront estate to see the usual deep-pocketed suspects Carl Icahn, Peter Kalikow, Lew Eisenberg, Steven Mnuchin, and Anthony Scaramucci. There was only one person they wanted to speak with, however, and that person was Donald Trump. Rebekah had the Times article in her hand.

  “It’s embarrassing,” the candidate said to them.

  Rebekah came right to the point.

  “You have to hire Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway,” she said.

  The next morning was Sunday, August 14. Bannon was at the front desk at Trump Tower telling the doorman that he had an eight o’clock appointment with Trump.

  “When’s the last time you talked to him?” the doorman asked.

  “Last night.”

  “He doesn’t live here on the weekends. He’s in New Jersey.”

  What did Bannon know? He figured a guy named Trump lived in Trump Tower all the time. Bannon dialed his number.

  “Where are you?” Trump asked.

  “Trump Tower.”

  The miscommunication didn’t seem to faze the candidate; he was eager to talk. They did for two hours.

  “I’m going out to play golf,” Trump said finally. “Come out later, and we’ll have lunch.”

  “Where are you?” Bannon asked.

  “Bedminster!”

  Bannon, who wouldn’t know Bedminster from Westminster, had to ask where it was.

  “You have to get off on Rattlesnake Road,” Trump began, “then take a left at the small church; you’ll see a stone house on your right…”

  By the time Trump mentioned the stone house, Bannon had made up his mind to take an Uber.

  What he thought was going to be a one-on-one lunch turned out to be something entirely different. Bannon arrived at Bedminster to find a table set for eight in a glass gazebo overlooking the first tee.

  While Bannon was standing there contemplating his situation, Roger Ailes, with an accordion file under his arm, walked in the door.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” he growled to Bannon.

  “I’m having lunch with Trump.”

  “This isn’t lunch. It’s debate prep. He shouldn’t be out here dicking around with lunch. He’s got to get his mind right for the debate.”

  With that, Rudy Giuliani and Chris Christie walked in. Then Mr. Trump. Right off the golf course.

  “Where’s the hot dogs and hamburgers?” he asked.

  After several rounds of burgers, the “debate prep” portion of the program finally started and consisted almost entirely of Roger Ailes telling war stories of prepping Ronald Reagan and George H. W. for debates. He said nothing of any substance that might help Trump in September against Hillary.

  Bannon was beside himself. He’d come all the way out to God-knew-where New Jersey for a cookout and war stories.

  Then, just when things couldn’t get any stranger, Paul Manafort appeared, dressed in boat shoes, white capri pants with string ties, and a blue blazer complete with a crest on the breast pocket.

  Thurston Howell III, Bannon thought.

  Somehow, Manafort’s lieutenant, Rick Gates, had gotten wind of the meeting at Bedminster and had called Paul. Manafort dropped whatever he had been doing, perhaps out on a three-hour cruise, and drove from Southampton to Trump’s golf club in New Jersey. It’s at least a three-hour ride.

  With Manafort’s arrival, the meeting went from theater of the absurd to a scene out of The Godfather.

  “Trump was hot enough to fuck,” Bannon remembered.

  “You think I’m a baby, Paul?” the boss began.

  Giuliani and Bannon both tried to calm Trump down to no avail.

  “Am I a baby, Paul? You think you’re so fucking smart! Like you’re a genius! Well, you suck on TV.”

  By the time the boss finished, Manafort looked like a crushed blue beer can. Even Bannon felt sorry for him.

  The boss is one of those people who can be hot as an August afternoon at one moment, then turn a switch and be as calm as a spring evening the next. With his fury spent, he stood and clapped his hands.

  “I’m going for ice cream,” he said.

  Ba
nnon sat there for a full few minutes wondering what the fuck had just happened.

  Later, however, real business took place. Mr. Trump called Bannon that evening.

  “Look, no doubt you can win,” Bannon said to the candidate on the phone “You just need to get organized. Get some pollsters. Tony Fabrizio.”

  “Fine, let’s do it,” the boss said.

  “And you have to get Bossie,” Bannon said.

  Bannon began working for Trump that very night. On Sunday night, even Trump Tower was relatively empty. He made his way to the fourteenth floor and took a desk that belonged to Dan Scavino. Scavino wouldn’t miss it, the staffers there told him. He was always in the air with the candidate. Just as Bannon was settling in, his phone rang. Paul Manafort thanked him for trying to calm Trump down at the luncheon and then asked if they could meet.

  “Sure, where are you?” Steve asked.

  “Trump Tower,” Manafort said.

  Well, that’s convenient, Steve thought.

  “I’m in 43G,” he said.

  The apartment, like all the apartments in Trump Tower, was beautiful, with a drop-dead view. On the couch lounged a woman wearing a white muumuu. Manafort wanted Steve to look at a transcript of a story, yet another one, that a New York Times reporter had sent to him. Bannon read the first three paragraphs and then looked up him.

  “Twelve-point-seven-million-dollar payment from Ukraine?”

  The woman in the muumuu sat bolt upright. “Paul?” she said.

  “How much of this is true?” Bannon asked.

  “It’s all lies,” Manafort said. “My lawyers are fighting it.”

  The muumuu-clad woman was now on her feet, her arms folded.

  “Paul, twelve million?”

  “When are they going to run it?” Bannon asked.

  “They’re threatening to publish tomorrow.”

  “Does Trump know about this?”

  “What’s to know, it’s all lies.”

  “But if it’s in the paper someone has to give Trump a heads-up, because if it’s in the paper, it’s reality.”

  “Paul?” she asked imploringly.

  “It was a long time ago,” he said to her. “I had expenses.”

  Bannon knew what he had in his hand. It was an explosive, page one story. And even if the story wasn’t true, it was in the fucking New York Times. At the very least it would leave a mark.

  Just as Steve had thought, the story ran the next day, August 15, page one, above the fold.

  “I’ve got a crook running my campaign,” Trump said when he read it.

  Paul’s propensity to operate in dark corners had perhaps showed itself early in his tenure on the campaign. On the day Corey was fired, amid the craziness, Paul went to Jeff DeWit, the campaign’s chief operating officer, and asked for a $5 million check to be cut for a media buy that sounded vague at best. DeWit said he would issue the check only after he received a memo from Allen Weisselberg with Donald Trump’s “D” signed on it. That was the last DeWit heard about the check or the buy.

  Then there was the strange and murky case of Left Hand Enterprises LLC. In May 2016, after Manafort joined the campaign, and before they fired Corey, the campaign operated on two separate budgets. Corey oversaw the funds in one, and Manafort managed the other. Soon after the campaign hired Manafort, his budget quickly cut successive checks totaling over $700,000 to a newly formed Delaware company that was supposed to provide direct mail to Nebraska and Indiana. Whether or not the mailing found its way to those states, or to any other location, is still up for debate. What is known is that Left Hand LLC had a mailing address at a farm in Virginia that just happened to be the voting residence of Manafort’s former business partner.

  The complete story of the Left Hand incident has never been fully resolved. But the amount of $700,000 for a mailing that no one knows for sure ever happened is something that a guy with the initials DJT will not soon forget.

  Trump told Bannon to fire Manafort right away. Steve argued that firing his campaign chairman would cause a shit storm of bad press. Instead he argued that Trump should take away his authority and give him a new title, which is what happened. When the campaign announced the new team, Bannon had the title of campaign CEO, Kellyanne Conway was the campaign manager, and Manafort remained the campaign chairman.

  The kill shot for Paul came on Thursday the eighteenth, when Trump was about to go onstage at a rally in Charlotte, North Carolina. A friend showed him a printout of an AP story written by Jeff Horwitz and Chad Day. Based on emails that the AP had obtained, the story described Manafort running “a covert Washington lobbying operation on behalf of Ukraine’s ruling political party, attempting to sway American public opinion in favor of the country’s pro-Russian government.” It also said that Manafort and his deputy, Rick Gates, had “never disclosed their work as foreign agents as required under federal law.”

  “Tell Jared to fire him,” Trump said.

  The next morning at a breakfast meeting in Trump Tower, Jared asked Manafort to resign. At first, Paul balked. He was worried about the perception of being forced out of the campaign right after the Ukraine stories broke.

  “It will make me look guilty,” he said.

  Jared told him there wasn’t much that could be done. A press release was going out in sixty seconds.

  Steve Bannon would prove to be a significant change for the campaign, and the promotion of Kellyanne Conway was equally important. A few days after she took over as campaign manager, Kellyanne was in Mr. Trump’s office on the twenty-sixth floor of the tower. That day, the boss happened to be in a surly mood. He was shooting a Facebook ad and didn’t like the way it was going. He had asked Kellyanne to look over the script, which she did.

  “It’s not in your voice,” she said.

  The boss asked the other staffers to leave. He wanted to talk to Kellyanne privately.

  “You’re running against the single most joyless candidate in politics,” she said. “And it’s starting to feel that way around here.”

  Mr. Trump said he missed the days when it was only a few of them—Corey, Hope, Keith, Scavino, and the rest. He said he had more fun then, because he talked to the people who came to see him.

  “Well, let’s see if we can replicate that for the general election campaign,” she said.

  Kellyanne had known the boss from back in the 2000s, when she owned a condo in one of his buildings. She sat on the condo board and was surprised and impressed that a man who owned eighteen buildings in New York City and dozens more around the world would find the time to show up at a condo board meeting, but he did. She also knew something about his allure as a politician. She had run Dave’s poll in 2013 when Mr. Trump was considering running for governor of New York. Corey had tried to hire her early in the campaign.

  “Do you do any polling?” she had asked.

  The answer was no, so she didn’t come aboard then. But even in those early days, she was impressed with the moxie the candidate showed, and his fervent and consistent resistance to naysayers and haters. Mr. Trump, which out of deference she always called him, was one of the few politicians who could go off script and stay on message.

  Though she was called the “face of the campaign” and was a ubiquitous Trump presence on TV, Kellyanne was much more than that. She navigated the campaign through some very sticky moments. She brought to her job as spokesperson for Mr. Trump a depth of political knowledge that was deeper than most, probably all, who interviewed her. Even Rachel Maddow, MSNBC’s big Kahuna, couldn’t outduel Kellyanne.

  One of Kellyanne’s biggest assets was her understanding of Mr. Trump and the brilliance of how he delivered his populist message. She would use the example of him talking to a stadium filled with people at one of his rallies.

  “China is killing us,” he’d say.

  Though some did, plenty of those who came to see him didn’t know the nuances of our trade deficit with the People’s Republic. But they did know that everything they boug
ht seemed to be made in China. So the message resonated. The message was also defendable in the same simple terms.

  With Mr. Trump, changes in staff wasn’t as important as it would be with a traditional candidate. Still, with Bannon and Kellyanne, the Trump campaign had traded up considerably from Manafort and Gates. All they needed was one more piece to complete the puzzle.

  Dave was pulling into his driveway in Maryland when his BlackBerry buzzed. The caller ID read DONALD TRUMP. In Disney World, and on the drive home, he’d received calls from Corey, Kellyanne, and Bannon. It was a full-court press trying to get him to come on board as deputy campaign manager. Corey told him he’d been in touch with the boss and the boss wanted him on the team.

  Susan and the kids were unpacking the Suburban. The idea was exciting to Dave. Opportunities to help run a presidential campaign are few and far between. But he had a lot going on, and it would be a huge sacrifice. The kids were going back to school. He would miss Griffin’s baseball and Isabella’s softball seasons. Yes, there were only a couple of months left in the campaign, so it wasn’t like he’d be gone forever. But the last two months of a presidential campaign are brutal, a pressure cooker at best, and a trash compactor at worst. Dave knew he could stand the pressure. He thrived on it. He just wondered if his heart could.

  Three years earlier, he had been on a hunting trip with Griffin in Alabama. A few days before the trip, he began to feel like he was getting the flu. Griffin was looking forward to the weekend, so he went. Deer hunting is not an activity to do when you’re not feeling well: up at four a.m., trudging through the woods, bagging deer. By the time they returned home, Dave felt terrible. Susan took one look at him and demanded he see his doctor. As it happened, his doctor was away. But Dave had a fallback, a cardiologist. The year before, he’d had a mild heart attack. He didn’t even know he’d had it until he took a physical for an insurance policy. Dave never smoked and isn’t a big drinker. He’ll have a beer or a glass of wine now and then. Stress was the culprit.