Let Trump Be Trump

by Corey R. Lewandowski

  No matter what anyone said, Corey was good TV. On air, he was high energy and articulate. Plus, he knew his subject better than just about anyone in the world, especially given the direct line that he still had to Trump and people in his circle. When most anchors had a question for Trump, they’d have to speculate or wait until a surrogate could make time to talk to them. Corey, on the other hand, only ever had to answer his phone.

  One time on air, Corey was debating Tony Schwartz, the ghostwriter who had helped Mr. Trump write The Art of the Deal. Schwartz had been ubiquitous on cable and morning news shows during the campaign, perhaps seeking to use his association with Trump as an opportunity to get his name back into the limelight. Though Corey was holding his own against the ghostwriter, after one commercial break, with a little help, he laid him out cold.

  Mr. Trump had been watching the show back at Trump Tower and decided to look through some old papers to see what kind of records he had on the guy. As it turns out, Schwartz had written Trump a letter after he’d finished their book thanking Trump profusely for the opportunity. The letter said nothing but wonderful things about Mr. Trump and the experience. Unlucky for Schwartz, the boss has kept everything that anyone has ever sent him. More remarkably, he remembers where he stores all of it. He had Hope text a picture of the letter to Corey. He also told Corey to ask him how much he made from the book, which was over $1 million in 1987 dollars, and if he’d asked Mr. Trump to write a sequel, which he had.

  When the program came back on the air, Corey began shooting the loaded darts.

  The ghostwriter, who wouldn’t shut up for the first part of the show, suddenly had nothing to say.

  But this type of access didn’t exactly endear him to his fellow talking heads.

  Hiring Corey had placed Zucker in an untenable position. He wanted a good relationship with the Trump campaign—mostly because of the ratings it brought him—but he also wanted to keep whatever was left of his journalistic soul. Like Sergeant Schultz from the old TV show Hogan’s Heroes, Zucker would rather see nothing when it came to knowing what Corey was up to. Oddly enough, this wasn’t a position that he needed to take when it came to the commentators with ties to any other campaigns—Paul Begala and the Clinton super PACs, for instance? No, there was only one campaign that the media didn’t want on television: the only one that had any power over them.

  Still, with all the heat he’d been taking about the ethics of hiring Corey, the last thing that Zucker wanted to hear was that his new political commentator was catching a ride on Trump Force One.

  The motorcade geared up and headed to the airport, followed by vans filled with reporters. With less than a month to go to the election, the media pool was enormous and from all over the world. The candidate’s SUV arrived first, and Corey was in the jet before anybody from the press could see him. He knew he shouldn’t be there, but he didn’t care.

  It was the first time in four months that Corey had boarded the plane that he’d practically lived on for a year and a half. And as he did, it was as though he’d never left.

  Mark Halberstadt, the Secret Service detail leader for Trump, greeted him warmly and together they shared a laugh.

  “He doesn’t know about the dog yet,” Mark said.

  Corey laughed. Just like during the primaries, during the last months of his campaign, Mr. Trump ordered his advance team to book only hotels that were less than six months old. He didn’t care if it was a Motel 6 or a Four Seasons, just as long as it was brand-new. He didn’t like the dust. And if you sneezed around him, he would make you go to the back of the plane.

  So they decided not to tell him that part of his Secret Service protection was a sweep of the jet by a bomb-sniffing dog. Mr. Trump would have exploded had he known that some wet-nosed mongrel was all over his beautiful leather seats, never mind the dog hairs that were undoubtedly everywhere.

  “You deserve to be here,” Mark told Corey.

  Before taking the seat that had been his for eighteen months on every flight—the back seat at the table, closest to the exit, near the Secret Service—Corey went up to the cockpit to say hello to Captain John Duncan. On many long flights, Corey would pass the time in the cockpit with the pilots. Captain John always met his passengers at the door and welcomed them aboard. And he always wore a smile and had an easy way about him, even during the most hectic days filled with cross-country trips.

  “Good to have you back, Corey,” John said.

  Of course, the gang of Keith, Hope, and Dan felt the same way as Captain John. Also on the plane were Senator Jeff Sessions, Mayor Giuliani, Eli Miller, and John McEntee. It was nice to be back with his team.

  The plane took off and landed in Maine thirty minutes later, and Corey joined the campaign team backstage to stay out of sight. But a reporter from ABC News had seen him in the boss’s SUV, despite the fact that Corey had worn a big ski parka and had hunched down into it. The reporter tweeted out the news.

  His phone rang just as he was getting back on the plane to head to New Jersey.

  “Where are you?” Jeff Zucker asked.

  “Well I got good news and bad news, Jeff,” Corey said. “The good news is I made my flight. The bad news is, it’s on Trump’s jet.”

  “Don’t you dare get on that airplane,” he said.

  On either side of Corey, the engines revved. Captain John was ready for takeoff. Corey said nothing.

  “I’m warning you.”

  The 757 began rolling, gathering speed down the runway.

  “If you take that flight, you’re gone.”

  Wheels up.

  At the time, the Access Hollywood tape was still dominating the news across platforms, even after the press conference with Clinton’s accusers. The boss and the campaign were able to tamp the story down somewhat by hammering Bill Clinton every chance they had, but the tape still dominated every other bit of campaign news. The whole business was like an anvil pulling the numbers down to the bottom of the ocean. The boss was fuming about it.

  On the flight to New Jersey, Corey reached back into his campaign manager’s mind and, with Hope’s help, came up with the idea that he thought would solve everything—both with Corey’s job and the plummeting poll numbers.

  “What’s up, kids?” Mr. Trump asked as Hope and Corey sat on either side of him.

  Hope, who later became the White House communications director, always had, and still does, an important role when it came to making recommendations to the boss. Mr. Trump trusts her implicitly, as well he should. She has no other agenda than doing the best job she can for him, and he knows it. When she pitched our idea to him, he responded immediately.

  “I love it,” Mr. Trump said. “Get it done.”

  For many campaign watchers, Melania Trump was as mysterious as a beautiful actress in a foreign movie. She never wanted the attention the campaign brought. Instead, she loved her life as a mom and Mr. Trump’s wife. Couldn’t blame her. She had a full, rich life. But when her husband made the final decision to run for president, a topic they had long discussions about, she supported him 100 percent. But she also said that her priority was their son Barron.

  As campaign managers, we knew how powerful her presence was. Along with being beautiful and caring, Melania owns a special allure, an honesty that makes you like her and trust her, whether you’re meeting her in person or watching her on television. Lost in the ridiculous uproar over the similarities of her and Michelle Obama’s speech at the Republican convention, the cause of which was a speechwriter’s mistake, was the effect she had on the audience both in the arena and around the country. A successful supermodel, she showed a kind of quiet star power that was both opposite of and complementary to her husband’s celebrity.

  After the convention speech, she kept a low profile. Melania’s privacy made the media froth at the mouth. Just a quote from Melania was a scoop. A one-on-one interview? Just a week removed from the Access Hollywood tape? Please. Somebody yell, “Stop the presses!”

&
nbsp; That was our idea. We’d get Zucker the most sought-after interview in politics.

  Journalistic integrity always has its price. And in this case, the price was an Anderson Cooper exclusive sit-down interview with Melania Trump.

  Without exaggeration, the story of the boss’s campaign, and now his presidency, has commanded more news coverage for a longer period than any other news story in the history of cable TV. Zucker’s timing is sublime. He is the president of a news network during a time when Donald Trump turned the news industry upside down. CNN, specifically, was a dead network before the boss decided to run for president. But since the boss exploded onto the political scene, CNN’s ratings increased 50 percent during the day and 70 percent during prime time. For a failing news organization, of which the news industry was then littered, Donald Trump was money. And Zucker realized that before anyone else, undoubtedly because he had been the president of NBC Entertainment and had a front-row seat to watch The Apprentice practically salvage the network singlehandedly. Zucker wouldn’t have been the president of CNN if it hadn’t been for the boss. When it came to Donald Trump, Jeff Zucker had seen the act before, and he liked what he saw.

  To his credit, the network exec dedicated time and resources to the story of our campaign when other cable news organizations were just catching on to the Trump phenomenon. And both those who loved and hated the boss would tune in to watch the rallies that CNN televised in full.

  Corey stayed on Trump Force One that Saturday until the New Jersey event. Then he hopped a flight to Boston and took an Uber to his car in Portsmouth. That Monday night, Melania did the prime-time interview with Anderson Cooper at Trump Tower. CNN had flown Cooper back from California in a private jet just for the broadcast, and they never told him how it was arranged.

  How much the Melania interview affected the sea change that happened over the next few weeks is hard to say. It had to have helped. So did the letter to Congress from FBI director James Comey about the newly discovered emails pertinent to the investigation against Hillary, which would come a week later.

  In spite of what’s been written and reported ad nauseam, the Jim Comey letter wasn’t the reason for the outcome on Election Day. By the end of October, we knew from the data team’s numbers that Mr. Trump had already begun to draw even with Mrs. Clinton—and we knew we had the momentum. The Clinton team was so confident (or arrogant) about their certain election victory they failed to poll in the final weeks of the campaign.

  It was four in the morning on November 9 when Corey headed back to the George Hotel, where his bag still sat unpacked. He had just resigned from CNN. During a commercial break, Jeff Zucker had told him he needed to be magnanimous and respect his colleagues.

  “Bullshit, Jeff,” he said. “We won.”

  When he signed off that morning, he made his departure from the network official and permanent.

  In the cab to Reagan National, his thoughts went back to the spring of 2014, and to the Freedom Summit held at “the Yard” in Manchester, New Hampshire. It was there where Dave first introduced Corey to Donald Trump. Earlier in the evening on election night, he’d talked to people in Manchester. He knew the ballroom was filled again, this time with foot soldiers of the Trump campaign who had gathered to watch the results. For Corey, Manchester was the bookend of this most improbable story.

  As Donald Trump’s campaign manager, Corey had reached a place few in his profession have been. The connection to his political roots in New Hampshire never wavered. He knew that it was the people of New Hampshire, and of Florida’s panhandle, of eastern Ohio, Pennsylvania, Montana, and other places like them who were the reason Donald Trump was president.

  By eight a.m., Corey was at the front desk of a hotel on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He hadn’t known he was going to New York, so he didn’t have a reservation and had to go on Hotels.com. The receptionist informed him that his room wouldn’t be ready until four in the afternoon. At that point, he’d been up for forty straight hours. He went to the gym in the hotel’s basement to wash up. He was in the small bathroom changing his shirt when his phone rang. It was Donald J. Trump.

  “Yes, Mr. President,” Corey answered.

  “Corrreee!” the new president-elect said.

  “Sir? Did you hear what I just said? You’re the fucking president of the United States!”

  “Can you believe it?”

  “No, sir, I can’t.”

  “Me neither. When we started this thing, it was you and me, and an airplane. That’s all we had.”

  “And we had Hope,” Corey added, referring to Hope Hicks, the campaign’s first communications staffer.

  “She had about as much experience as a coffee cup.”

  “But she’s good-looking,” Corey said.

  “That always helps,” he said.

  The president-elect told Corey to come over to Trump Tower.

  “Corey,” he said just before he hung up. “I wouldn’t be here without you.”

  And that was true.

  Before anyone else, Corey realized how Donald Trump could pull off the unimaginable. That moment came early in the campaign, when Corey was still in the tiny office on the twenty-fourth floor of Trump Tower that he shared with a couple of interns and Sam Nunberg. On the whiteboard, he wrote a simple reminder to himself and anyone else who had the candidate’s ear. Those words stayed on the whiteboard as long as Corey was campaign manager. More than any other strategy, more than Bannon’s America First nationalism, more than Jared and Brad’s digital campaign, more than Dave’s brutal schedule, and more than James Comey’s or any other October Surprise, Corey’s four-word phrase was the reason Donald Trump won the election:

  “Let Trump Be Trump.”

  Later that afternoon, running on pure adrenaline, Corey stood across the street from Trump Tower. In a sea of people, he looked at a building transformed. Dump trucks from the New York City Department of Sanitation, one abutting the other, formed a ring around the tower. US Army personnel with assault rifles manned metal detectors. The transfer of power had begun. The crowd, protesters mostly, were vile and angry. Corey was too tired to care.

  A little less than two years before, he had stood at the very same spot looking up at Trump Tower. That day he was about to interview for a job to manage a campaign he thought would never happen. Now, Donald J. Trump was the president-elect of the United States.

  Somehow he made his way past security. The doorman manning the desk in front of the elevator greeted him like the old friend that he was.

  Dave was sitting at his desk in what was now the office of the presidential transition and looked up to see Corey in front of him. As they hugged, they both said the same thing at the same time: “Can you believe this?”

  For both of us, the 2016 campaign was the ride of a lifetime. And for the most part, all we had to do was to be in the right place at the right time. It wasn’t as though we were shocked that Donald Trump was elected president; we’d left everything on the field to help make that happen. Rather, we just couldn’t believe our good fortune to have played the small part in it we did.

  THE END

  EPILOGUE

  THE TRANSITION

  You need people with heart. That’s probably the one thing you need in government that they don’t have in business, not quite as much. You need some, but not a lot.

  —DONALD J. TRUMP, ON HIRING A STAFF

  A COUPLE of weeks after the election, while Dave sat in the campaign office in Trump Tower with Bannon, Johnny McEntee walked in and told us he was going to order dinner for the boss. It was nearing seven o’clock in the evening. Most of the volunteers and full-time staffers had gone home for the day. The feeling in the room was starkly different from the roller coaster of emotions it held on election night.

  “What’s for dinner tonight, Johnny?” the president-elect had asked. He’d been taking meetings with potential cabinet secretaries and working the phone since morning, and it was nearly time for him to take his nigh
tly elevator ride up to the residence, where he could watch a little news and have his dinner—then get back on the phone.

  “I’ll go to the Carnegie,” Johnny said. The famous deli, just a few blocks from Trump Tower on Seventh Avenue, had announced that it would soon close its doors for good. Johnny figured he should have one more pastrami on rye from the Carnegie while he still had the chance. They make a nice sandwich.

  Dave had never had one of their sandwiches. “I’ll have the same as the boss,” he said.

  Priebus and Bannon had been trying to figure the best way to go about the difficult business of a presidential transition. They had been going through candidates for cabinet positions for a few days, mostly wondering where to start and how to get organized. Bannon was leafing through a book called The Romney Readiness Project, that Dave had found in his desk drawer beside a small pile of ketchup packets on his first day working in Trump Tower. It was a comprehensive manual containing suggestions for staff hires and budgetary guidelines, as well as a clear guide to thousands of presidential appointments that the Romney team created to help staff their own White House had they won the 2012 election. Bannon had read through it several times already, and had highlighted a few useful things. If nothing else, the book gave the Trump campaign a blueprint on how to organize itself, and some sense of what to tackle first and how to properly allocate the federal government’s funds.

  Not many people are aware of this, but the Trump transition didn’t have much to work with on its way in, especially when it came to money. By November 2016, the Obama administration had used up about 78 percent of the White House budget for its fiscal year, which begins and ends at the beginning of May. Meaning, the Trump transition didn’t have much to work with, and it left us only 22 percent of the budget, or about two and a half months of money, to pay federal salaries and upkeep costs from January 20 until the end of April. That meant, among other things, that we would have to go light on the lower-office appointments, at least for a little while.