Let Trump Be Trump

by Corey R. Lewandowski

  Even later, when our video production was much more sophisticated—and Brad’s budget was greatly expanded—we were getting much more than our money’s worth online. We’d make internet ads for five grand and get six million views. We could get a whole state’s voting population to watch a video for twenty-five grand. During the debates, Jared’s assistant, Avi Berkowitz, a Harvard Law grad ran what we called Trump Tower Live, a live-feed Facebook talk show that we posted pre- and postdebate. The show was a hit. In the days leading up to the election, we called it Facebook Live, which made Boris Epshteyn, the campaign adviser, an internet star and made Kellyanne’s media profile even more substantial than it already was. The whole business cost us practically nothing. Of course, we had the product that people wanted to see—the one who made them want to dance.

  Though Jared and Brad’s partnership began back in November 2015, the digital operation didn’t start kicking ass until after the convention. That’s when the RNC let us in on a little secret, one they’d been keeping for a while.

  Donald Trump, emerging as the clear favorite in a field of sixteen candidates, had a good digital following and a killer Facebook strategy. But if he was going to win, he would need to reach voters of all kinds, and in all places. Luckily, the RNC had spent years working on it.

  Not that it had been easy. When Reince Priebus took command of the Republican National Committee in 2011, the organization was in shambles. Its leaders had been focused for years on outdated and expensive forms of campaign messaging like old-fashioned direct mail and television ad campaigns. They knew little about their voters and couldn’t collect the donations that were supposed to keep the organization running. Even through the beginning of Reince’s tenure, the RNC survived on table scraps from big donors. At the end of the year, after these individuals had given to the senatorial and congressional committees, and to their political action committees and specific congressional campaigns, maybe they would throw the RNC a few thousand bucks. Back then, the RNC, like the party it represented, was reeling.

  This new influx of money into politics, in the form of new organizations called super PACs, could exist only after Citizens United won its landmark case before the Supreme Court. Super PACs could take in as much money as they wanted, spend it on whatever political activity they wanted, put up as many ads on television as they could buy in support of whatever candidate they felt like endorsing. It was a kind of freedom that some had never known. For organizations like the RNC, which had become bloated and ineffective, the decision could have been a death knell.

  If he wanted the RNC to survive, Reince was going to have to figure out what it could do that nobody else could. The answer, he realized, was collect data. According to the laws of campaign finance, the RNC is allowed to collect data on voters, store it, and then share that data with individual campaigns. No other organization can. Considering all the money that’s now allowed in politics, it’s one of the most important things—along with a solid ground game and infrastructure—that make the RNC incredibly useful. Reince redefined the mission. Under his watch, the RNC would build the most comprehensive voter file that the country had ever seen, and it would fold it all into a complex digital operation. He’d coordinate the ground game—that’s people like door knockers and volunteers in small communities—and work to locate voters who hadn’t been engaged in the past few elections. When it came time to name the new digital initiative, which began around 2014, Reince and his team settled on Para Bellum Labs—para bellum meaning “prepare for war” in Latin.

  So when the 2016 election cycle came, the RNC was ready. All it needed was an army. Whatever campaign emerged from the sixteen-person field of candidates was going to have the entire infrastructure of the RNC at its fingertips. All it would need to do was flip the switch. On the book tour for her lament What Happened, Hillary Clinton said the Democratic National Committee’s digital operation was bankrupt and inept. “It was on the verge of insolvency. Its data was mediocre to poor, nonexistent, wrong.” Conversely, of ours she couldn’t have been more complimentary, calling it the foundation of our ultimately successful campaign.

  “So Trump becomes the nominee and he is basically handed this tried-and-true, effective foundation,” she said.

  Though the apparatus the RNC assembled was state-of-the-art, their ability to analyze their data would prove to be something less.

  Many within the RNC were surprised that Donald Trump turned out to be their candidate. Even after he became the Republican nominee, some establishment Republicans were putting pressure on the rest of their party to disavow him. Many hoped in private that he would fail.

  Part of the reason for the animus was because of a common misconception. When Steve Bannon came aboard, fresh out of the dissident world of Breitbart, some in the party believed that the purpose of the Trump campaign was to blow up the RNC and reestablish it into a Tea Party–like conservative Right. When the campaign hired Cambridge Analytica, the controversial data mining company partly owned by the Mercers and on whose board Steve Bannon sat, that mistrust only deepened. But Dave helped smooth the divide. He served as the national committeeman from Maryland, one of the 168 members of the RNC, and interfaced with the RNC daily. And by late August and early September 2016, Reince and the RNC wanted to elect Trump as president of the United States.

  Enter Katie Walsh. Katie had joined the RNC in 2013, just as the Para Bellum system was being implemented, and she knew how to work it. She became the director of all finances for the organization. In 2014, using the newly designed digital tools, the RNC broke the record for the amount of money that it had raised in a single year—about $200 million. When it came time to meld this operation with that of the Republican nominee for president in 2016, she became the conduit between the RNC’s and the Trump campaign’s digital operations. She would correspond remotely with Brad and his team in Texas, then spend three or four days a week at Trump Tower in New York. During meetings, she was the voice of the RNC and made sure that nobody on our campaign ever felt that the Republican party wasn’t behind us one hundred percent.

  As the GOP nominee, Mr. Trump relied on the RNC for voter data, ground game, dedicated walkers in major cities—things we hadn’t been able to afford. Luckily, the RNC had been building it all for us. All we had to do was figure out how to dovetail what we had—namely, Donald Trump and his legion of loyal supporters, “the Army of Trump”—with the infrastructure that the RNC had spent years building. It was “plug and play.”

  So we had Brad—who, just like Jared and Corey, has always been great about admitting what he doesn’t know and then learning it quickly—sit for hours with Katie. They’d go through the technology that the RNC had built, take it apart, and then put it back together in a form that we could use. Together they figured out how to mobilize an entire ground game.

  Maybe Dave said it best. During the postelection conference at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, a symposium for the campaign managers and senior staff, Hillary’s team began boasting about its digital campaign and director. “I hate to break it to you, guys,” Dave said. “But Brad and Jared ran the best digital campaign in the history of American politics.”

  In the last months of the campaign, the data team in Texas had over a hundred people, including data scientists, Web designers, graphic artists, programmers, copywriters, network engineers, “gun-toting elderly call-center volunteers” (as a Bloomberg article called them), and others working for us in the “nerve center” of his San Antonio office. Brad also had help from big tech and social media companies such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter. He figured that since the campaign was spending so much money with these firms—about $50 million each—the least they could do was send someone over to give the campaign a hand setting up and teaching them the platforms. So they did. Whenever the team needed help with Facebook, they would call—who else?—Facebook, and the company would give him all the help he needed.

  The logic was simple, and the companies w
ere happy to comply. But it was an idea that Hillary’s campaign hadn’t thought of, or if they had thought of it, had decided not to implement to the extent our campaign would.

  As the digital budget increased, not everybody was confident of the bang it provided for the buck—at least not right away. But winning had a way of making the boss just fine with the way his money was being spent—$100 million by Election Day. Facebook would become our biggest fund-raising tool, bringing in some $250 million in contributions. The base and the supporters would vote with their credit card every day. Ten bucks here, five dollars there. If they liked what they heard or saw, they might give you twenty bucks. For each dollar we spent on ads, we were making around $1.70 back. Most campaigns spend a dollar and make only 70 cents. But our profit was because of Mr. Trump more than anything else. The cash would go up when the candidate did something that captured the public’s imagination, such as the time he visited the Mexican president. And the money would predict the polls, which spiked after the Mexican visit. Conversely, if something broke bad, like the Access Hollywood tape, the cash flow would dry up, and three days later the polls would take a hit. When all was said and done, everything was Trump driven. And real-time data gave us a leading edge.

  By mid-September, with the digital operation in full gear, the boss focused like a laser on Hillary, and, with the Trump road show in overdrive, the polls had us pulling even. In a little over a month, we made up ten points. We also knew from our data research that there were millions of voters who hadn’t yet made up their minds, many of them living in battleground states.

  CHAPTER 12

  THE HIGH ROAD

  For centuries, the African American church has been the conscience of our country. It’s from the pews and pulpits and Christian teachings of black churches all across this land that the civil rights movement lifted up its soul and lifted up the soul of our nation.

  —DONALD J. TRUMP, DETROIT, SEPTEMBER 3, 2016

  A FEW WEEKS before the first presidential debate at Hofstra University on Long Island, Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks who appears on Shark Tank, went on Fox Business and said that a Trump victory in November would cause the stock market to crash.

  Though much of the animus between the boss and Cuban was just the usual billionaire rivalry—Cuban offering millions if Trump shaved his head, Trump calling Cuban a “dummy”—as the first debate with Hillary Clinton approached, Cuban wasn’t always down on the boss.

  “I said pay attention to how DJT says things more than what he says,” he said. “People hate politicians. Donald fashioned himself a killer of political correctness. A killer of politics as usual. A killer of those both real and imagined who would threaten Americans’ future.”

  When the boss announced his candidacy, Mark thought that he would bring fresh ideas and new perspective to the White House. He touted Mr. Trump’s “honesty,” and said that he “had the chance to change the business of politics as a result of it.” In those early days, Cuban called Mr. Trump regularly to offer advice. The day before the Republican primary debate at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California, the campaign held a massive rally at the American Airlines Center in Dallas, Cuban’s home court. “We need new ideas. We need candor,” Cuban said about Trump’s candidacy. “That only comes when the candidate getting all the attention is candid and open.”

  But as the first general election debate neared, Cuban had a change of mind. Why he began to sour, who knows. Jealousy? There were stories in the newspapers about Cuban considering a presidential run in 2020.

  “He’s not smart enough to be president,” the boss tweeted in February 2016.

  A few days before the debate at Hofstra University, Cuban tweeted that Hillary Clinton was saving him a front row seat at Hofstra just to get into Trump’s head.

  Mr. Trump responded to Cuban with a tweet of his own saying he would get Gennifer Flowers a seat next to him. It was a good comeback, but it was an even better harbinger of things to come. The Hofstra debate would have its soaring moments. It would also loom over maybe the most controversial and audacious weekends ever in politics.

  In the two-week span between mid-September 2016 and the Hofstra debate, the Trump campaign held rallies in at least five cities in Florida. On September 16, at a $10,000-a-plate fund-raiser at Cipriani on Wall Street, Hillary called half of our supporters “a basket of deplorables.”

  Mr. Trump immediately took advantage. In Miami, he told George Gigicos to play the theme from Les Misérables as he took the stage. “Welcome to all you deplorables!” the boss said as the crowd went nuts. We went to Hartford, Connecticut, Greensboro, and Cleveland with Don King. A big fight fan, the boss had been friendly with the boxing promoter for many years and was disappointed when he thought Don hadn’t come to the convention in July. But King had come to see his friend accept his party’s nomination. Dave had run into him there and took a photo of him with Griffin. When he showed the boss the picture, he told Dave to call King, which he did. The next day, Keith Schiller made sure Don King was on the campaign trail with us.

  In Philadelphia, the legendary Indiana coach Bobby Knight introduced the candidate, and we played the theme from Rocky. We went back to Laconia, New Hampshire, where the press plane was delayed, much to the amusement of candidate and crowd. “They called and asked if we could wait,” Mr. Trump told them. “And I said absolutely not.”

  Around this time, similar to what was done during the primaries, we started to book hangar rallies whenever we could. The campaign was making so many stops, and the motorcades to and from the events took so much time, renting airplane hangars was simply more convenient and a huge time saver. All we had to do was land, pull Trump Force One up to the hangar, walk down the steps, and climb up onto George’s stage. Beautiful! We did thirty-five rallies in September, compared to seventeen by Hillary. From October 1 up to and including Election Day we did 143!

  We loaded the bosses schedule with rally after rally each drawing 10,000 to 20,000 people. He’d do Virginia, Colorado, Nevada, and Ohio, all in one day. Days before the election we scheduled a rally in Minneapolis, the Clinton campaign didn’t know what we were thinking. But Marc Short had approached Dave with a poll that had us only down five in Minnesota, and the next day Dave saw another poll that had us down only three. After speaking to Steve, Jared and Nick Ayers, Dave scheduled a hanger rally for the boss in Minneapolis and a rally for Governor Pence in Duluth. When we advertised the boss’s rally online the response was insane--a thousand RSVP’s an hour. The hanger held 12,000 and we could have filled three times that. As it was, 24,000 people showed for the event. We ended up losing the state by only 44,000 votes and that was with Gary Johnson receiving 112,000 votes and Ed McMullen getting 53,000 otherwise we might have pulled something off not seen since Nixon.

  Though Donald Trump was a draw, we had to make sure that we got the word out about his events in enough time for people to plan and RSVP. John Pence, the vice president’s nephew, was working at an Indiana law firm when he came aboard the campaign. John helped come up with a system we called the “crowd-building process.” Once the advance team had booked the event and the rental contract was signed, we’d go live with ads on Facebook. John and the team would create segments by zip codes, and send out email blasts. Later on, we’d buy radio ads and robocalls. And if it was a really big event, we’d have the boss tweet out an RSVP link. In all, we did 276 public events from the convention to the election. That’s an average of three a day. And they all had a lot of moving parts. It was a remarkable feat of logistics, and John and the team played a big part in the success.

  On September 11, during a visit to the National September 11 Memorial and Museum, Mrs. Clinton wobbled and nearly collapsed getting into her Scooby-Doo van. The health of the candidates had been a huge issue, and the video of her staggering exploded in the media. She took several days off to recover from what her campaign called “pneumonia.” Mr. Trump was gracious by wishing her a speedy recovery an
d return to the campaign. We were gracious—for a little while, that is, as grace has a short shelf life on the campaign trail. The boss taped a segment with Dr. Oz on Wednesday, September 13, in which he presented the results of a recent physical exam he was given by his doctor in New York. The results concluded that Donald Trump was not just a horse; he was a thoroughbred—American Pharaoh, as Corey called him. In all the time we spent together on the campaign trail, we saw no indication of him slowing down, never mind being ill. Not even a sniffle. And it wasn’t as if the guy was a health nut. He subsided on Filet-O-Fish and Vienna Fingers. And yet he had the stamina of an ultramarathoner. Amazing. So when he questioned Hillary’s strength, and there was all that blowback about him being sexist, all of us on the plane with him knew how wrong that categorization was. Donald Trump questioned everybody’s stamina! Because no one could keep up with him!

  Though the schedule in late September kept everybody busy, the Hofstra debate was on all our minds. The boss had the momentum and had closed what had ballooned to a sixteen point gap in the polls by mid-August. On the one hand, we were looking forward to the opportunity. But we knew Hillary Clinton was going to be a formidable foe in the debate arena. She had debated at every level she held in politics: senator, secretary of state, presidential candidate. She debated Barack Obama, and more than held her own. Plus, she’d been prepping for months. She took three days off from the campaign trail before the debate and remained sequestered with her team in a hotel in Westchester. The Clinton team built a full-size replica of the debate stage to get her prepared. She enlisted Philippe Reines, a former staffer, to play Donald Trump. Reines was so into the role, he bought a Donald Trump signature collection watch and four podiums for his home and the DC office the Clinton campaign had set him up in. But there was no candidate alive, and probably none who ever lived, who could show up bigger in front of a TV camera than Donald Trump. Still, even though Mr. Trump had blown through sixteen tough, smart debaters in the primaries, he had never debated one-on-one or against a seasoned pro like Hillary Clinton.