Let Trump Be Trump

by Corey R. Lewandowski

  That Tuesday, he called the cardiologist, who couldn’t see him until Friday at four p.m.

  By the time he got to see the doctor, Dave had lost a bunch of weight.

  Dave described his symptoms: he was having chills and night sweats, and said he’d been sick for about ten days. It was more like two weeks.

  His cardiologist instructed him to drive to Washington Hospital Center. He would call and have him admitted.

  Dave had been in the fire service for fifteen years. Long enough to know you never check into a hospital on your own on Friday afternoon.

  “I’ll wait until Monday.”

  “You might not make it to Monday,” the cardiologist said.

  Doctors never fully ascertained how Dave contracted the infection that invaded his heart. Once it did, he became septic, and his organs started to fail. And when the infection found its way to his heart, the microbes blew up his mitral valve.

  Doctors inserted a PICC line, so Dave was on a twenty-four-hour continual antibiotic IV drip for two and a half months. He carried the portable IV to work in a bandolier, and Isabella, his twelve-year-old daughter, helped him change it every morning.

  The IV was just the prelim. The heavyweight fight was the open-heart surgery performed after the infection had cleared. A doctor named Louis Kanda, known as one of the best valve repair surgeons around, performed the operation at Washington Hospital Center. Dave told Kanda that he wanted the valve repaired and not replaced. A pig valve or a mechanical device would most likely have meant blood thinners for the rest of his life. Plus, replacement valves wear out. Dave was forty-seven years old at the time and had no interest in having to do the surgery again, especially after he kissed his wife and children before going in for the operation and the thought came to him that it might have been for the last time.

  Dave never dwelled on his heart history, but he’d be lying if he said it wasn’t in the back of his mind as he considered the offer from Corey, Kellyanne, and Bannon. But any concern dissipated when he answered the BlackBerry to take Trump’s call.

  “I didn’t think you’d want to,” the candidate said. Mr. Trump knew about Dave’s health issues and had always expressed concern. “What about Citizens United?” he asked.

  “I’ll be able to work it out, sir.”

  “Good, we need you.”

  Paul Manafort had been in charge of the campaign for eight weeks. In that time, the campaign had gone from a primary juggernaut under Corey to a death spiral. He was brought in as a delegate hunter, but the truth is he did little more than relay information from the RNC, which did all the work collecting delegates. By the time he was fired, many in the press and elsewhere believed that the race was over for Trump. They also thought that the only reason he brought on Bannon was to burn the house down, an arsonist hired to extract revenge for Trump on a party that had turned its back on him. Inside the campaign, people were seriously concerned.

  In any other circumstance, only a miracle could have helped. But in our circumstance, we had Donald Trump.

  CHAPTER 10

  THE GROUND GAME

  Anyone who cannot name our enemy is not fit to lead this country. Anyone who cannot condemn the hatred, oppression, and violence of Radical Islam lacks the moral clarity to serve as our president.

  —DONALD J. TRUMP, AUGUST 15, 2016

  IT’S HARD TO BELIEVE, but the Obama administration’s approach to defeating radical Islamic terrorism was completely wrongheaded on every conceivable front. And his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, was a key part of his failed approach for much of Obama’s presidency.

  Donald Trump is probably best known as the most politically incorrect candidate who ever ran for the presidency. Millions of people loved him merely for that reason. They were tired of the PC double-talk from coastal elites and even more tired of those condescending attitudes. The boss took a flamethrower to all of it.

  But what a lot of people don’t understand is how deeply the mind-set behind political correctness affected crucial policies that risked the safety and well-being of everyone in this country. The reluctance to call radical Islamic terrorism what it is was rooted in the radical liberal belief that all people on the planet are equal, no matter what they believe, no matter what they do. The PC crowd in both political parties just can’t bring themselves to admit that not all belief systems are equal and that not all people who do bad things are simply victims of their environment or some sort of social oppression. Some of them are simply evil people.

  That’s why Hillary Clinton’s State Department thought it perfectly fine to recklessly destroy what stability there was in the Middle East. Support the toppling of dictators, they naively thought, and American-style democratic republics would emerge naturally from the wreckage.

  Does that mean we like dictators or don’t recognize people’s right to freedom in other countries, including those in the Middle East? No. But we do recognize that there are limitations to what America’s foreign policy can do. Running around the world trying to make every country equal simply isn’t one of them, especially when we’re dealing with long-standing tribal conflicts we don’t understand. America’s foreign policy should be focused on the security of American citizens and peaceful relations with every country with which it is in our interests to have relationships—period. America first!

  The boss has taken a lot of heat from the fake news media regarding their absurd conspiracy about collusion with Russia, which we can both tell you firsthand is ridiculous. The whole charade has somewhat muted the boss’s wise approach to alliances against radical Islam. Hillary Clinton chose radical Islamic groups as bad as those we are fighting as her allies in the war against ISIS. That resulted in people the Obama administration armed and trained simply taking the weapons and training and joining ISIS not long afterward.

  Mr. Trump repeatedly said Russia would be a natural ally against radical Islam. Anyone who can read a map or watches international news headlines can see why. Terrorism is at least as much a problem for them as for us. But Obama and Clinton thought militants carrying “Death to America” banners would make better allies.

  And just as their rose-colored view of the world blinded them to the dangers of allying with radical Islamists overseas, it blinded Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to the dangers of admitting into our country hundreds of thousands of unvetted refugees and immigrants from countries rife with Islamic terrorists. A key plank in Donald Trump’s approach to fighting radical Islamic terrorism is to contain the terrorists. ISIS has explicitly said it plans to infiltrate Western countries, including the United States, through immigration. To ignore this threat is tantamount to suicide.

  The boss wasn’t proposing anything radical. It was just common sense. People coming from hotbeds of terrorism should have to go through extreme vetting, and we shouldn’t let a single person enter the country from one of those places unless we are sure we can complete that vetting. Beef up border security operations and give the people who patrol the border what they need to do their jobs properly. We’re not talking about a large portion of the federal budget here. We spend a lot more money on things far less important, and some on things that shouldn’t be done at all.

  Having spent his entire life paying taxes instead of consuming them instilled Donald Trump with the kind of common sense that is completely missing from Washington, DC. But as lousy a job as Hillary Clinton had done fighting radical Islamic terrorism, she was beating the pants off our campaign in August 2016.

  The day after Trump called him, Dave was on a train with Susan to New York to meet with Steve Bannon at Rebekah Mercer’s office, just a few blocks from Trump Tower. Bannon was going to go over Dave’s role and update him on the state of things within the campaign. After they had covered a few broad topics and logistics, Dave and Bannon went to speak with Kellyanne. Although Dave had a good idea where the campaign stood, Steve and Kellyanne had a whole presentation ready for him—data, poll numbers, predictions. As it turned out, th
e inside info wasn’t any better than what was more widely known.

  “There’s no floor here,” Bannon told him. “It could get really bad.”

  Hillary was killing them on the ground, especially in the battleground states, where she had three times the number of campaign offices. At the end of August, the Clinton campaign had more than twice the number of field offices in Ohio. They outnumbered Trump’s campaign offices 34 to 1 in Florida and 36 to 2 in Pennsylvania—states without which a Trump victory was practically impossible.

  There was a total lack of focus of the staff due to Manafort’s lack of leadership. Mr. Trump had become frustrated and bemoaned the state of the campaign often and then railed against any attempt to rein him in. He lashed out at Khizr and Ghazala Khan, whose son, an army officer, died a hero in Iraq. He nearly imploded over the avalanche of horrible press that his campaign manager’s ties to Russian oligarchs and Ukrainian strongmen brought. Things were going so bad for the boss, his opponent took an extended fund-raising vacation on Nantucket and in the Hamptons during August, less than three months before the election!

  And then there was the morale of the team. The campaign staff in the tower was demoralized and in disarray. Paul Manafort had managed like a tyrant, dispatching orders and Rick Gates from 43G. Gates performed as a henchman and a buffer between Paul and the staff.

  Paul rarely moved among the troops, instead spending his time huddled with the boss’s family or on trips to DC, where he tried to ingratiate himself with the Republican establishment. It was on these trips where he promised “to change Trump.”

  What polarized the campaign office even further was the sudden drop in temperature when Manafort took over. The staff wasn’t used to the cold, sterile inaction that Manafort fostered—he was low energy.

  During Corey’s reign, the campaign ran on pure emotion, adrenaline, and Red Bull. Close friendships formed, and a team developed. The only name that mattered back then was Donald J. Trump, and they all liked it that way. On Corey’s birthday, the team threw him a party at campaign headquarters and presented him with a framed copy of a front-page New York Times profile of him. It’s still on the wall in his office at home, beside a small picture of the whole team.

  With Manafort, there was no such camaraderie. Not even close.

  Dave and Susan went back to DC. On the train, thoughts spun in Dave’s mind. He’d need a few days to tie up Citizens United and a few other projects he’d had in the works, including walking away from a new CU production film with Bannon and Phil Robertson of Duck Dynasty. Presidential campaigns, he knew, meant a whole lot of crushing stress, late nights, greasy food, and a mind-bending amount of travel—not the kind of thing they prescribe to a guy with health problems. Add that to missing all four kids and the little one’s first day of school, and he had a pretty good reason to turn down the job. Maybe he could just keep up his advisory role from afar, he thought. Life was better when you were a nameless team player anyway, moving around on the outside without being noticed much.

  He talked about taking the job with Susan, insisting that it’d be a temporary thing, a couple of months, tops.

  When he made it back to Trump Tower, Dave decided to keep up the low profile, moving among the campaign staffers without any mention of the role he was taking.

  It’s not like they didn’t know who he was. The year before, in 2015, Politico magazine ranked Dave number two in its list of the fifty most influential people in American politics. He’d been the president of Citizens United, a conservative advocacy group with over 500,000 members and supporters, since 2001. During that time, along with producing twenty-five political documentaries, including six feature-length films with Steve Bannon and seven films with Callista and Newt Gingrich, he had authored several books, and been a champion of conservative causes. The campaign staffers were well aware of Dave Bossie, but not of the extent to which he was about to become involved.

  Those first two days, he shared an office with Brad Parscale and Rick Gates, who had somehow survived the regime change, even though Trump had instructed several people to fire him multiple times. Survival seemed to be Gates’s main talent. On either Dave’s first or second day, Mr. Trump came down to the fourteenth floor, saw Gates, and immediately told Dave to fire him. It was not the first or the last time Donald Trump wanted Rick Gates fired. The team was worried about the press that firing Gates would engender. Besides, one of the first things the new deputy realized was how outgunned the campaign was. He needed more bodies, not less. Steve came up with a plan that would move Gates off the campaign but not out of the overall operation by making him the campaign’s liaison to the RNC. The plan boomeranged, however. The RNC mistakenly believed that Gates was their liaison to the Trump campaign. So, after just a few days, Gates was clocking in again at Trump Tower—much to the consternation of the candidate. To the senior staff, Gates was a bad penny that kept turning up.

  For the new team, however, there were far more important things to worry about.

  Job number one was to try to reestablish an esprit de corps. On September 14, 2016, Dave made one of his first trips with the boss on the campaign trail, to Ohio. They made a stop at the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton. Arriving just before the hall closed, they were given a private tour by the organization’s president, David Baker. During the visit, Baker gave Mr. Trump a Hall of Fame football. Trump spun it in the air and then lateraled it to Dave.

  Dave brought the football back to the office, where he put it on his desk for anyone to toss around. It traveled around the office. Dave would carry it under his arm to the conference room. Staffers would have a catch with it in the middle of the office, firing spirals, or dying ducks, depending on athletic ability. Johnny McEntee would show off his trick shot prowess. But even for those without Johnny’s arm or aim, the football became the symbol of teamwork and helped bring energy back to the staff.

  The uplifted mood was good, but there were also specific things that needed to be changed. Bannon and Jared asked Dave to take over the strategic scheduling for the campaign, which meant not only building the candidate’s day in, day out schedule, but also the schedules of Governor Pence, Ivanka and Jared, Don Jr. and Vanessa, and Eric and Lara. Dave also worked with the indefatigable Anne-Allen Welden to schedule all of the “super surrogates” like the Trump family, Jeff Sessions, Rudy Giuliani, and other governors, senators, and congressmen. Anne-Allen Welden was working out of the DC campaign office with Rick Dearborn. Dave immediately moved the entire DC campaign shop including John Mashburn’s policy shop to New York.

  Being in charge of Trump’s schedule was a surefire way of being the target of his wrath. But Jared explained to Dave it was one of the most important tasks of the entire campaign.

  F. Clifton White, the political strategist who wrote Why Reagan Won: The Conservative Movement 1964–1981, was another of Dave’s political heroes. White was an organizational genius. Dave needed to draw on all of White’s knowledge for the Trump campaign’s schedule, which had a lot of moving parts. Mr. Trump and Mr. Pence were like opposite hands of a clock. If Mr. Trump was visiting New Hampshire, Governor Pence would be in South Florida. The boss is out West? Then the governor would be on the East Coast. When the candidates traveled west, we’d use time zone changes to our advantage. Ivanka and Jared are modern Orthodox Jews; the couple had a house filled with children and had to be home for Shabbat, which limited their travel on the weekends. Eric and his wife, Lara, played especially well in Southern states, and Lara was a spokesperson for the campaign’s “Women’s Empowerment Tour.” Don Jr. was hugely popular in the gun and hunting states such as Nevada and Colorado. Later on in the campaign, Brad and Jared’s arm of the campaign provided digital data the digital team collected to help direct Trump’s moves.

  Hillary had a team of scheduling experts. Except they forgot where Michigan and Wisconsin were. Her team was sending Hillary and her surrogates to places they should never have been. For a campaign that was supposed to be so
sophisticated, they were acting dumb. The team used everything the campaign had to offer and sought input from multiple stakeholders to make sure the schedules were right.

  If he had it his way, Dave might still be living in the firehouse, doing the duty he’d been devoted to earlier in his life. And when we say “devoted,” we mean he lived in Firehouse Station 15 in Burtonsville, Maryland from 1990 to 2000. He slept in a bunk bed and responded to several hundred emergency calls every year. Those calls ranged from going to house fires to delivering babies to cutting victims from bad car accidents to helping sick people in need of treatment. He stood helpless in front of the Pentagon when American Airlines Flight 77 slammed into the building’s western wall. His close friend and partner in the Clinton investigations, Barbara Olson, was on the plane. He was living in the firehouse in the 1990s when he served as the chief investigator for the US House of Representatives Committee on Government Reform and Oversight, in which capacity he led all the Clinton investigations. He lived in the firehouse when he was the investigator for North Carolina senator Lauch Faircloth, a member of the Senate Whitewater committee. He lived in the firehouse almost until the day he married Susan.

  Right from the start, we knew the path for a Trump victory went through Florida. It was the base of what we called “the spine”: Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, and Iowa. When the new team arrived on the campaign, the Florida operation was lagging. Hillary, as we said, was pressing hard in the state, with over five hundred full-time staffers. The Trump campaign, by contrast, had a small headquarters in Sarasota and a few people who drove from city to city in RVs, knocking on as many doors as they could.