Let Trump Be Trump

by Corey R. Lewandowski

  She was, however, a bit of a drama queen.

  In late October 2016, we stayed overnight in Doral. The Florida staff had set up an event at the Doral with influential Cuban American leaders followed by a second event, a breakfast in Miami for the Cuban American veterans of the failed 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion. A.J. was there as our Hispanic outreach coordinator. The stop was a big success, and the organization endorsed Mr. Trump. After he finished his speech to the group, Mr. Trump did short interviews with three or four reporters. When he came to the last interview, Elvira Salazar, a reporter for a Spanish-language television station, A.J. stepped in between Mr. Trump and the reporter and told the reporter that she couldn’t interview the candidate. The boss didn’t know what was going on, and neither did Hope or Keith who moved Mr. Trump away. A heated discussion ensued between A.J. and the reporter. Once things went sideways, we didn’t do the interview, and instead headed straight to the airplane. When we were in the plane, the Spanish-language reporter called Hope in tears and begged us to come back. Our schedule wouldn’t allow us to wait and do the interview, but Hope promised her an interview down the road. Later, when Hope called and asked for an explanation, A.J. told her that reporter was out to trap Mr. Trump. That it was an ambush interview. The answer puzzled Hope, who had set up the meeting originally.

  That evening, we were on the jet headed home to New York when the O’Reilly Factor came on the big TV. What do you think O’Reilly’s first story was? Bill O’Reilly starts the show with, “Donald Trump cancels an interview with a Latina journalist in Florida. We’ll try to find out what happened.”

  “What the fuck?” the boss screamed.

  And it got worse. It turned out that the Latina journalist had been completing a favorable video package about Trump that was supposed to have aired on that evening’s O’Reilly Factor! What could have ended up being a fair and helpful piece just became a huge embarrassment.

  After his election, President-elect Trump instructed the team to plan and execute a thank-you tour in key states. It was on December 15 en route to Mobile, Alabama, when the following happened: Jason and A.J. had traveled together on Trump Force One from Mar-a-Lago to Mobile to attend the rally. By this time, A.J. and Hope had been arguing back and forth about the event in Miami with the Latina journalist. A.J. had accused Hope of lying to the boss about the reason she intervened. Instead of attending the rally, A.J. chose to remain on the plane. Jason, who was walking a tightrope between Delgado and the campaign team with whom he worked, was put in a difficult position. When President-elect Trump returned to Trump Force One after the event, he asked A.J., who was still in her seat in the plane, what she thought of his speech. When A.J. told him she hadn’t heard it because she hadn’t left the plane, the boss didn’t know how to respond. So he didn’t say anything, and instead sat down in his seat and picked up the New York Times. Meanwhile, A.J. turned her ire on Hope, who had just about had it with A.J—Hope had simply done her job with the journalist. So Hope starts to yell back at A.J. All of this is going on as Mr. Trump is trying to read the paper. Finally, in one of the funniest moments on Trump Force One, the boss lowers the paper and yells: “Cat Fight!”

  And just as quickly, he went back to reading the newspaper.

  The start time for the Vegas debate was 6:30 p.m., so it was prime time on the East Coast. The local press heralded the matchup as the biggest international event in Vegas’s history, and another TV audience of over seventy million was expected. We had the final debate prep in the boss’s suite. Before Hofstra, the debate team had included Steve Bannon, Kellyanne, Stephen Miller, Reince, Jared, Generals Keith Kellogg and Michael Flynn (Mr. Trump’s foreign policy advisers), Rudy, Governor Christie, Hope, and Dave. By Vegas, we had pared the prep team back to Bannon, Kellyanne, Reince, Rudy, Chris Christie, Jared, and Dave.

  After the prep, the candidate and the senior staff made their way downstairs to the venue. Backstage, someone’s phone rang. It was Matt Drudge. Someone on the senior team wanted him to talk to Mr. Trump, but no one, except Dave, knew how to pick him out of a crowd. So Dave went out into the arena to find him. On the way back, the two men walked through the bowels of the backstage, a labyrinth of hallways. When Matt and Dave turned a corner, a Secret Service agent stopped them. Now, Dave was wearing a Secret Service hard pin that identified him as being on Trump’s staff. The agent told him that it was a lockdown, that a candidate was moving. Dave knew it couldn’t have been the boss. And that’s when the thought hit him broadside.

  For twenty-five years, Dave and Matt had done more damage to the Clinton political machine than perhaps any two other living people. One thing was for sure, they were hated by the Clinton camp. And here they were, just about to come face-to-face with Hillary.

  The moment got even more surreal. When Mrs. Clinton turned the corner, Bill was at her side. The couple walked straight to them and turned the corner less than five feet away.

  Dave looked at Matt. “Did that just happen?” he asked.

  With less than three weeks to go to the election, it would have been safe to say that the Clintons were pretty sure they were about to return to the White House. Just about everything written, spoken, videotaped, and photographed in the media pointed that way. The question in the press wasn’t “if” but “by how much.” An article in Fortune magazine reported the anxiety the Clinton campaign was experiencing, not over whether or not they would win, but rather about the number of electoral votes they would need to establish a clear mandate.

  But maybe, just for a second, Hillary’s anxiety was over two faces from her past.

  Two weeks after the debate, we accompanied the boss to Gettysburg, where he made a speech. In the SUV on the way there he was lamenting the poll numbers he’d seen on one of the Sunday-morning news shows. The Access Hollywood tape and the women who had come out of the woodwork afterward to accuse him of sexual impropriety were driving the numbers down.

  “Those false accusers are killing us with the women’s vote,” he said.

  “It’s not that,” Kellyanne said. “It’s that you fat-shamed Miss Universe.”

  “No, it’s not. Nobody cares about that.”

  There was and is a false conception that Mr. Trump is surrounded only by yes-men. It’s not true.

  “Mr. Trump,” Kellyanne said. “Women spend billions of dollars every year trying to lose weight. And guess what? They spend that amount every year because they never get it right.”

  The candidate looked away. He knew Kellyanne was right. She was a mother of four. A devout Catholic. She was exactly like the women who should be voting for him but weren’t. The boss didn’t help himself in this regard with his remarks, but he did truly respect and honor women. He was so proud of Ivanka when she made a television ad asking for women to support him.

  “The most important job any woman can have is being a mother, and it shouldn’t mean taking a pay cut,” she had said to the camera.

  “And, by the way,” Kellyanne said. “Nobody remembers those false accuser’s names.”

  “Well, I can always go back to my old life,” he said. “Take a nice long vacation.”

  “Then we’ll just argue for the next seventeen days until the election.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we know you’re going to win, and you talk like someone who is going to lose.”

  Despite what the fake news wrote in the papers and said on television, we were in no death spiral, there was no backstabbing, and the campaign team wasn’t breaking apart. In fact, if one of us fell, the rest of us would pick him or her up.

  It’s hard for us to believe that Hillary’s team felt the same way about each other and their candidate. And because they lacked our spirit, we had them right where we wanted them.

  CHAPTER 15

  FAKE NEWS

  Instead of being held accountable, Hillary is running for president in what looks like a rigged election, okay? It looks to me like a rigged election. The election is being rigged by co
rrupt media, pushing completely false allegations and outright lies, in an effort to elect her president.

  —DONALD J. TRUMP, PORTSMOUTH, NEW HAMPSHIRE, OCTOBER 15, 2016

  PART OF THE VETTING process for any candidate running for public office is taking fire from the media. And when you’re running for president, you expect it’s going to be intense. If you can’t handle tough questions from reporters and even some unfair reporting, you’re probably not cut out to sit in the Oval Office.

  But the fake news war waged on Donald Trump was unlike anything anyone has ever seen. Forget the liberal media’s usual bias; this was an outright blood feud by traditionally liberal and conservative media. The conservative National Review published an entire issue attacking the boss. It was unprecedented.

  When they weren’t publishing the unsubstantiated claims of anyone who had a bone to pick with the boss or who just wanted his or her fifteen minutes of fame, they were blowing anything negative out of all proportion. Meanwhile, nobody was asking Hillary Clinton anything but softball questions. Here was a former secretary of state who arguably destroyed the Middle East single-handedly, rushing headlong into one regime change after another and learning nothing from the disasters that followed.

  When you compare Donald Trump’s scandals to Hillary Clinton’s, the media’s demonization of Trump seems ludicrous. This is a woman who, in addition to her dismal record as secretary of state, had deleted 33,000 emails from the same server she’d used for official State Department business, acid-washed the server, and then destroyed cell phones with hammers to keep their contents from being discovered. There was the Clinton Cash scandal, her receiving debate questions in advance during the primaries, Benghazi—you would think that any one of these would overshadow some locker room talk made by Donald Trump.

  They would have, if the media were after the truth, but they weren’t. They were after a Hillary Clinton victory and gave the boss the coverage they did only because he was good for ratings. But one thing even Donald Trump’s enemies had to admit was that he never backed away from a fight. At times, he seemed to relish them. His supporters couldn’t get enough of the boss calling out the corrupt mainstream media for what it was. And for their part, the media never seemed to learn that the more openly biased they were against Donald Trump, the more resolve they gave his base.

  As bizarre as the media war against Donald Trump was, the strangest part of it all was where Corey found himself after his job as campaign manager ended: right in the belly of the beast. But nothing ever distracted him from the solitary motivation for everything he did and every word he spoke for the rest of 2016: to see Donald J. Trump elected president of the United States.

  In mid-October, Dave called Corey and asked him to suggest a venue for an event in New Hampshire. The Granite State was bucking a national trend. Whereas Hillary was building leads in just about every battleground state, the race was tightening in New Hampshire—down from double digits in some polls to just three points.

  There are few things Corey knows better than the political landscape of New Hampshire. So when he suggested a Toyota dealership for the event, Dave suggested to George that he book it immediately. Though it happened to be a beautiful fall day, the weather had little to do with the size of the crowd that gathered to wait for Trump. The boss’s diehards would have come at midnight in a sleet storm.

  Colorful, to say the least, some of the Trump faithful wore T-shirts that read: TRUMP 2016: BECAUSE FUCK YOU and HOT CHICKS FOR TRUMP. The boss was in fine form, and he hit his list of policy high notes. When he got to chastising the fomenters of fake news, the dreaded media, the crowd erupted into a spontaneous “CNN sucks” cheer.

  Corey had the day off from the cable news network and decided to take a ride to Portsmouth, where the dealership was, to check in on his friends. Not that he was so out of touch with them. In fact, his contact with the campaign, and with Mr. Trump, was drawing the ire of reporters and media watchdogs alike, as it had been from the day he signed on with CNN.

  The reason for the displeasure at Corey’s position as an on-air political commentator was partly because he was being paid simultaneously by CNN and the Trump campaign. Nearly two years earlier, when Corey had taken the job as Mr. Trump’s campaign manager, he had asked for and was given a three-month severance package in his contract. When Don Jr. fired him, his severance was extended to six months, through December 2016. Considering he was making twenty grand a month as Trump’s campaign manager, the parting, at least financially speaking, was a very generous one. Every month, he got a nice check in the mail from the Trump campaign, listed on the Federal Election Commission reports as payments for “strategy consulting.” This severance wouldn’t have come to light at all had it not been for this odd phrasing on the FEC reports, which journalists pored over like bloodhounds, looking for mistakes. The phrase “strategy consulting” was enough to drum up some talk of impropriety, which caused the first backlash against Corey.

  There would be more.

  Immediately after his interview with Dana Bash the day the campaign fired him, CNN offered Corey a job, as did other networks. He took CNN’s offer. Over the course of the four months he was with the cable news network, the press pummeled him for his views, which he had been hired by the network to articulate. Was he opinionated? You better believe it. So were the network’s other hires like the politicos Paul Begala, David Axelrod, and Karl Rove. But on CNN, and on most other news networks, a double standard existed when it came to anything to do with Donald Trump.

  Corey wasn’t the only one taking the heat. Jeffrey Lord, Scottie Hughes, Andre Bauer, and Kayleigh McEnany, all Trump supporters, were taking their fair share too. Jeff Zucker, the president of CNN, who had hired Corey, was also taking his share of flak. In the eyes of many, Zucker was tainted enough by Trump as it was. He’d been the one, back when he was president of NBC Entertainment in the late ’90s, who had first broadcast The Apprentice, which turned Trump into a prime-time star. That, combined with Zucker’s willingness to carry Trump’s rallies in full when no other news organization would, made him an easy target for all these aggrieved, virtue-signaling journalists looking for someone to lash out at. Plus, he did seem to like the people from the Trump campaign. They were interesting, and they made his network more lively than it had been in years.

  The reporters under him didn’t always agree. Many of them disliked Corey intensely. They had heard some story about how Corey once caught Noah Gray, a producer at CNN, lugging his gear around the floor of a rally instead of staying in the designated press area, and revoked his credentials, and they never forgot it. They would never let go of the Michelle Fields matter, and they certainly would never forgive the boss for the way he talked about them in front of his crowds.

  Corey didn’t care what they thought. Bold by nature, he was a lightning rod on television, a staunch defender of Donald J. Trump and the movement he led across our great country. He wasn’t afraid to speak his mind or advocate for his old team in front of anyone, and he certainly didn’t have a problem going toe-to-toe with anyone. That became necessary, considering he would usually be the lone Trump supporter on a panel of three or four people who couldn’t stand the boss or him.

  Though Corey didn’t care what the press thought of him, it mattered to him that he kept the job with CNN. The exposure on television was good for his career, and he got to spend his days talking about the issues that mattered to him. And, let’s face facts, it was good for the boss. Plus, the Trump severance wasn’t going to last forever. In fact, the campaign eventually paid the balance of what they owed him in a lump sum to help put the controversy to rest.

  Though the severance controversy might have been behind him, Corey’s tenure with the cable network was still a roller-coaster ride.

  In Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on the day of the event, Corey squeezed through the crowd and walked right through the Secret Service perimeter. He knew all the agents on duty from his days on Trump Force One, when h
e and the campaign staff would trade their Big Macs and french fries for the store-bought sandwiches and salads that the agents had. He wanted to be backstage, away from the cameras.

  Backstage, Corey ran into Steven Mnuchin, who later became Trump’s Treasury secretary and who was then the campaign’s finance chairman. They watched Trump do his stump speech together, chatting from behind the stage. When Trump had finished speaking and the crowd was all but broken up, Mnuchin asked Corey where he was headed. Corey told him he had the afternoon free.

  “Well, why don’t you come fly with us?” New Hampshire was the first stop that day. The campaign had events in Maine and New Jersey yet to do.

  Before Corey could answer, Mr. Trump walked by.

  “Hey, sir,” Mnunchin asked, “can we take Corey with us?”

  “Absolutely,” Mr. Trump said with a smile.

  Corey left his car at the dealership and hopped into the boss’s SUV, which had been parked in a covered area for security.

  Now, most of the ire directed at Jeff Zucker was because of Corey’s close relationship to the campaign team and the boss. Most in the media believed the relationship ran contrary to journalistic ethics. “He’s a mouthpiece for the campaign,” they said.

  The media also believed that Corey wasn’t worth the damage he was doing to the network’s reputation. “Lewandowski is bad television,” Callum Borchers from the Washington Post wrote. “He remains prone to spouting fiction and doesn’t stay on-topic, grinding segments to a halt as CNN hosts have to correct his misinformation or interject to steer the conversation back to the point.”

  Zucker defended his hiring of Corey and his work on the air. He even had a cartoon that poked fun at the relationship in his office. Drawn by Sean Corcoran soon after the cable news network hired Corey, it depicted caricatures of Zucker and Trump in conversation. The dialogue balloon of Zucker that read, “Another Trump stooge on the payroll, Don Don!” The balloon over the depiction of Trump said, “Big-league move, Zucker.” But, behind the scenes, Zucker made it clear to Corey that he couldn’t be seen as a formal extension of the Trump campaign.