Let Trump Be Trump

by Corey R. Lewandowski

  The numbers on the ground were equally embarrassing. The state director was Karen Giorno, who had been at the helm when Mr. Trump destroyed Marco Rubio in the state primary. Karen was a superstar and had Mr. Trump’s ear. She also was a terrific person, but Dave wanted to move Karen to a bigger role as the chairwoman of coalitions. And Steve Bannon wanted to make the change in Florida quickly. Bannon began talking with Dave about ideas for a replacement.

  Dave had years of experience dealing with Bannon, and his one steadfast rule for managing things with him on the Trump campaign was this: don’t solve one problem by creating a bigger one. Luckily, Dave already had a solution, and she was working a few feet from him in Trump Tower.

  There aren’t a whole lot of people in Florida politics more capable than Susie Wiles. The daughter of the legendary football sportscaster Pat Summerall, Susie is the consummate political pro. Besides other numerous statewide campaigns, she ran Governor Rick Scott’s 2010 campaign. Corey had named her cochair of Trump’s Florida campaign, and she recently had begun working for us in Trump Tower as the communications coordinator in battleground states.

  One night, just as she was settling into her life in New York, Steve and Dave called her into Bannon’s office. Together, they told her they needed to make significant changes in Florida and they needed to do it immediately. Otherwise, Florida might fall into the lost-cause category, as would Trump’s election chances.

  But her arrival didn’t change the bad numbers, at least not right away. The team needed additional staff to be successful.

  But it was the polls that the boss had noticed.

  Sooner or later, everybody who works for Donald Trump will see a side of him that makes you wonder why you took a job with him in the first place. His wrath is never intended as any personal offense, but sometimes it can be hard not to take it that way. The mode that he switches into when things aren’t going his way can feel like an all-out assault; it’d break most hardened men and women into little pieces. Around the campaign, we’d call it getting your face ripped off. Being the target of his wrath can make for a pretty jarring experience, especially if you aren’t used to it. Corey and Dave both had firsthand experience with this, both had moments where they wanted to parachute off Trump Force One, but it was new to Susie.

  She had been in charge in Florida for about a month and the polls had continued to drop, sinking even lower than they’d been when we had declared the state of emergency that brought her back to the state in the first place. Even polls that had historically leaned our way had the boss down three to five points. The “geniuses” on TV and in newspaper columns—most of whom, by the way, still have jobs—were predicting a Hillary landslide, for Florida and the country at large.

  To try to stem the tide, Dave and Susie scheduled the candidate for a four-day, seven-city swing across Florida, set to kick off in Miami. That first night, along with Dave and Susie, Mr. Trump had dinner with the usual group, including Keith, Hope, Dan Scavino, and Rudy Giuliani. He knew that he was down in the polls and that Susie, the woman sitting across the table from him, hadn’t fixed it yet. There were a lot of phone calls to New York and other campaign offices, tirades against people, both present and not, and a few pointed questions about the failure of the Florida ground team—which had only existed, actually, for a couple of weeks—to get him better numbers. Multiple times, he told Susie that she might not be up for the job. He could not have said anything more hurtful to a pro like Susie Wiles.

  The heat she was feeling got so bad that Susie couldn’t take it anymore. She turned to Dave and said, “I’m done,” got up, and walked away from the table. Dave was sure that she had quit. He ran after her and talked her off the emotional cliff. In the end, she assured him that she wasn’t leaving but, she said, she wanted to get back to the office and redouble her efforts.

  People say that Donald Trump never apologizes. There is some credence to that. In an interview, Frank Luntz once asked the boss if he ever asks God for forgiveness. “I don’t think I do,” Mr. Trump said. “I just try to do better.”

  For example, Corey and Hope were in the car with him on the way to a rally in San Diego in May 2016. A few months before, he’d told Fox News that Judge Curiel was hostile to him because of his positions on immigration. US District Judge Gonzalo Curiel was presiding over the Trump University lawsuit. Then in June on CNN, he said that Curiel’s bias against him stemmed from the fact that the judge was Mexican. The blowback was insane, a veritable avalanche of bad press. Reince Priebus told the boss he should apologize. Corey knew better than to do that but pleaded with him in the car to not mention Judge Curiel at the rally. And what happened? He went out onstage and hammered the judge.

  “Screw it,” he told Corey later. “I feel better, and I’m glad I did it.” The same thing happened with Alicia Machado, the Venezuelan Miss Universe. When they came at him, he hit back twice as hard.

  But that doesn’t mean it’s personal. Although apologies are not in his makeup, the boss does know how to make things right, especially with the people who work for him.

  When Susie met us at the last stop, the boss couldn’t have been more gracious to her. When he got offstage and met her again, they were talking like old friends. “I’m going to call you every day,” he said. “I’m going to find out if you have what you need. And if you don’t have what you need, I want you to call me. Don’t take no from anybody. And if it’s slow, or it doesn’t come, I want you to call me personally.”

  It became apparent to Susie only later, after the Florida team cobbled together one of the most successful short-term ground games in the history of American politics, what a turning point that dinner had been. Amid all the tense discussions, she and Dave had put forward several ideas for electoral improvement in Florida, mostly to do with money, mailing, and door knocking. In the days and weeks that followed, Trump had arranged for her to get all the resources she wanted.

  Most of the improvements, Susie believed, had to do with wresting control of the campaign away from the Republican National Committee—which still had, remarkably, little faith in our campaign or our candidate—and putting it back into the hands of our own team, made up of people who were loyal to Donald J. Trump.

  At the time of the dinner, the Florida GOP was sending out pieces of mail that barely mentioned Donald Trump. It was as if they’d cut their losses and just focused on down-ballot candidates. At the time, hardly anyone in that organization had any faith in Mr. Trump. After the dinner, Susie was given sufficient funds and the authority to design a few new pieces of mail—things that put Trump front and center.

  After Susie got all she wanted from him, Trump asked her, point-blank, if she thought he would win the state. Susie emphatically told him she thought he would, a statement that seemed ludicrous at the time to many, even to those who make their living in politics.

  The month of August ended with Mr. Trump’s trip to Mexico to visit with President Enrique Peña Nieto. The trip was so secretly planned very few people knew it was going to happen. The campaign also thought discretion the better part of valor and used Phil Ruffin’s jet instead of flying Trump Force One into Mexico City. In his speech, Mr. Trump praised the Mexican people and their president. He talked about the need for the two countries to work together on the issues of illegal immigration and drug trafficking. It was a big moment. “We just want to give people permission to vote for him,” Steve Bannon always said. The Mexican trip was a big step in that direction. And Hillary’s lead, which had been well into the double digits when the new team took over the campaign, was now down to five points.

  But things were just starting to get interesting.

  CHAPTER 11

  DIGITAL MADNESS

  My Twitter account has become so powerful I can actually make my enemies tell the truth.

  —DONALD J. TRUMP

  We are in a competition with the world, and I want America to win. When I am president, we will.

  —DONALD J. TRUMP, AU
GUST 8, 2016

  AMERICA HAS the largest economy in the world, thanks to its long traditions of private property, economic freedom, and hard work. Donald Trump should know; his companies have contributed more to our GDP than most others. But GDP measures only what a country is producing right now, not how much it is growing. And as far as growth is concerned, it’s barely 1 percent in the United States.

  As we said before, multinational corporations don’t necessarily have a vested interest in any one country. That’s why they’re 100 percent behind any public policies that will boost their revenues or lower their operating costs. NAFTA did both. It was a win-win for Wall Street and corporate America, but a lose-lose for most Americans.

  Everyone was surprised the boss won Michigan and other Rust Belt states like it, but we weren’t. We knew his message was like water to a man dying of thirst in places like Detroit, formerly one of the capitals of American industry, now reduced to a blighted ghost town. These people haven’t only seen firsthand the devastation wrought by trade deals like NAFTA, they’ve lived it.

  And it’s not just that people in foreign countries will work for less. It’s how much doing business in America costs, due to taxes and regulations. Hillary Clinton took for granted that the same tired old Democratic message of more regulation and more “taxes on the rich” was going to give her blue-collar states like Michigan. But once again, it was Donald Trump who understood and truly cared for the people whose jobs had been exported and whose dreams had been downsized.

  The Democrats like to talk about how wonderful European socialism is, cherry-picking a few statistics from categories where they can show supposedly better results. But what they don’t tell you is that along with their larger welfare states, most of those countries have much less regulated economies. Denmark, for example, scored a 93.9 in the business freedom category in the Heritage Foundation’s 2016 Index of Economic Freedom. The United States scored 84.4. The United States has fallen to seventeenth in the world overall on that index. In 1995, we were fourth.

  Unlike the self-appointed experts in Washington, the boss doesn’t presume to know how to run every single business in the United States. So he made it very simple: for every new regulation enacted, two must be repealed in its place. Most people know when regulations go from the reasonable to the ridiculous. When your goal is to make America competitive, to make America great again, rather than appease lobbyists, it’s not hard to figure out which ones should go.

  Another inconvenient fact for the Democrats is the US corporate tax rate. They like to demagogue about how the rich don’t pay enough taxes, but the United States has the third-highest corporate tax rate in the world. Donald Trump knows you aren’t going to put people back to work if all the new business investment is fleeing to countries with lower tax rates. And just like with immigration, he wasn’t afraid to tell unemployed blue-collar workers the politically incorrect truth, instead of the class-warfare message they got from Hillary Clinton.

  He wasn’t afraid to say things many Republicans didn’t like either. There would be no more one-sided trade deals that benefited their big-business donors but impoverished middle America. Even NAFTA was going to be renegotiated. The days of free trade for them, currency manipulation and subsidies against us, were over. American workers were no longer going to be asked to compete on a playing field that slanted straight up.

  But before any of that could happen, we needed a competitive advantage to overcome the huge special-interest funding advantage that Hillary Clinton enjoyed.

  Early on in his time with us on the campaign, Brad Parscale went to Mr. Trump and Jared and made this analogy: Imagine, he said, two television screens. The one on the left is a commercial for a new personal music device. The device is open so you can see its inner workings. It is a marvel of engineering. You can also see how sleek it looks on the outside, and the gold plating where you plug in the headphones.

  The scene on the right has only a silhouette of a woman with long, curly hair dancing while listening to the device. The tagline is, “iPod, this is how it’s going to make you feel.”

  Brad was new to politics. He told everyone who would listen that he’d never worked on or even volunteered for a political campaign before. But he had been in the Web design business for many years, and he knew what sold and what didn’t.

  “The people want to know how it makes them feel,” he said. “They want to buy the dance.”

  If Donald Trump was Twitter, then Hillary Clinton was LinkedIn. Her online presence was filled with long descriptions of stances and policies. Every time she had the chance, she explained who she was. She was the television screen on the left. But people never cared who she was. Voters didn’t want a scripted intellectual connection. They wanted a visceral one. That’s what Mr. Trump gave them.

  He made them dance.

  Brad began working for the Trumps back in 2011. A real estate executive who knew Brad’s Web design work called and asked if he’d be interested in bidding to build a real estate website for Ivanka and Jared Kushner. He bid low, ten grand, and told them he’d give them the money back if they didn’t like his work. He thought that having a Trump contract on his résumé would be good for his business. The Kushners liked the website, and Brad got the job. That one job would lead to many others in the Trump Organization, such as with the Trump Winery and the Eric Trump Foundation.

  He would bid low again when Corey called in January 2015 looking for a website for the Donald J. Trump presidential campaign. Brad charged the campaign $1,500, and then worked overnight, hunched over his computer in his living room, on the design.

  For the first seven months that Brad worked for the campaign, Corey didn’t even know what he looked like. He was just a country voice on the other end of the phone. When he did finally meet him, Corey was like, “Whoa, big fella.” Along with being six eight, he had a buzz cut and wore an Amish-style beard. All he was missing was a plaid shirt and a giant ax.

  Together, Jared and Brad would run the entire digital operation, gaining voters and donations via the internet. When they started working together, Brad was still pretty much a low-level design guy—at least compared with what he’d become—and Jared was serving as an unofficial adviser to Trump. When the boss needed an opinion or some numbers run, his son-in-law was usually his first phone call.

  Jared first traveled with the campaign in November of 2015. It was on a plane ride back from Illinois, almost by accident, that Jared and Brad would first become destined to work together, though neither one knew it.

  Jared had come along on the flight hoping that he would be able to get some time with the boss to break down data for him. He did. Then, on the plane ride back, just as they were finishing up, Jared made an offhand comment to his father-in-law.

  “You know, I’m not sure you’re utilizing your Facebook correctly,” he said.

  Jared had been noticing a few trends in the way that other campaigns were using Facebook, and saw some potential. If he could learn those techniques, then use them on an online audience that was as dedicated as Trump’s, the campaign would go into the primaries with a big advantage.

  He offered a few more details, and Trump listened intently. After a few seconds, the boss nodded.

  “All right,” he said. “Why don’t you be in charge of the Facebook? Scavino, you’re with Jared now.”

  Just like that, Jared was involved. With what little experience he had in digital media and data analytics—he didn’t even have his own Facebook account—he now had to work with Dan Scavino and find the best way to reach voters through their computer screens.

  The first thing he did, as always, was to watch, listen, and learn. One thing about Jared that made him invaluable throughout the entire campaign was his ability, not unlike that of Trump himself, to find the experts on a given topic, make friends with them, and then soak up whatever they had to say. He was a sponge. Before long, he and Dan had done full studies on every other campaign’s social media strategie
s, inventoried their own strengths, and decided what messages would resonate best on the internet. Jared even brought in friends from top marketing firms to give him and Scavino presentations on the microtargeting tools that Facebook offered.

  It all sounded good, but nothing that he could look after on a day-to-day level by himself. For that, he’d need to find somebody with enough tech and marketing skills to take over.

  It didn’t take him long to think of the perfect guy.

  Soon Jared was on a conference call with Brad Parscale and Dan, delegating the tasks as best he could. On Brad’s recommendation, the new team of three leaned heavily on tweets and Facebook, the social media aspect of the campaign, and on online fund-raising. The advantage there, as with all other aspects of the campaign, was the passion that Trump’s supporters had. They were excited, sure, but they also couldn’t help sharing their excitement. You couldn’t hope for more from a Facebook audience. Donations soon came rolling in at an unprecedented rate.

  “People vote with their wallets,” Brad would say. By paying close attention to the donations page—Does the Donate button go on the left or right side of the screen? Should it be green or red?—Jared and Brad got a pretty good idea of who their voters were and what they cared about. Trends that showed up in donations would be reflected days, sometimes hours later, in the polls.

  Still, in the early days of the primary season, the campaign’s digital operation had a small budget. Brad began marketing the candidate with ads on Facebook. We shot many of the videos on Dan Scavino’s iPhone. Mr. Trump would just look into the camera and talk off the top of his head about a topic we’d give him.

  With the data he collected from Facebook’s marketing tools, Brad would target the ads, and we’d watch the traffic spike. Ad targeting also allowed us to hone our message to specific subsets of groups and accumulate data. That information would in turn become our message and policy. When Mr. Trump was out on the stump, he would know what issues the local people cared about. And, along with Trump’s established greatest hits—the wall, China, draining the swamp—the digital team would recommend a local issue that pertained directly to the people who were coming to hear him.