Trump Revealed

by Michael Kranish

  • • •

  HE BARELY SMILED. HIS supporters had been chanting “Lock her up! Lock her up!” but now it was his turn to speak, and this time there would be no impish smile, no egging on of the crowd’s throaty chants. It was 2:45 in the morning in New York, and the Clinton campaign had announced that their candidate would not appear this Election Night. At 2:00 a.m., her campaign chief, John Podesta, had come out and said, “We can all wait a little longer, can’t we?” No, the inevitable could not wait. The numbers were clear—not rigged by the corrupt system, not twisted by the hateful media, not fixed by unnamed operatives from the opposition. The numbers said Donald Trump had done it, and now here he was, graciously paying tribute to Crooked Hillary: “We owe her a major debt of gratitude for her service to our country. I mean that very seriously. Now it is time for America to bind the wounds of division.”

  Gone was the Make America Great Again cap. There was no shouting. His face did not flush from the passion of a stream of insults. His voice was soft, his suit crisper than usual, with a single Old Glory pin on his lapel. He said nothing about banning Muslims or deporting Mexicans or “bombing the shit” out of ISIS. He said, quietly, that “This was tough. This was tough. This political stuff is nasty and it’s tough.”

  Trump won as he’d planned to—by helping Clinton defeat herself. Trump won a million fewer votes than Mitt Romney had four years earlier, but Clinton got six million fewer votes than Obama had in that election. Despite the evidence of voters’ unprecedented unhappiness with their options, Trump did outperform Romney in places where the 2012 Republican nominee had come off as a rich, distant, aloof figure who didn’t comprehend the struggles of middle- and working-class people. Trump’s strategists had believed throughout the fall campaign that Americans were primed to send a message, as Britons had five months earlier in their shocking Brexit vote to leave the European Union. But first Trump needed Clinton to fall into the trap of making him the central issue of her campaign. She did.

  In her ads and speeches, Clinton focused heavily on Trump’s manifest flaws rather than offering an alternative vision to the nation’s middle class. Left with a choice between two severely damaged candidates, many people, especially in places that had not enjoyed the fruits of the Obama recovery—which had turned cities like Washington, San Francisco, Austin, and New York into magnets for young people eager to dive into the tech-driven economy—took a deep breath and voted for change. Barely more than a third of voters believed that Trump was qualified to be president, and barely more than a third said he had the right temperament to do the job, but Trump nonetheless, according to exit poll data, earned the votes of 60 percent of white men and 52 percent of white women. Despite waves of defections over Trump’s boasts about sexual assaults, he brought his voters home in the final weeks, winning 88 percent of Republican votes and 78 percent of ballots cast by white evangelicals. Clinton’s strength was based in the narrowest definition of the Democratic Party—nonwhites and college-educated whites. College graduates made up fully half the electorate, and Clinton did a bit better among that group than Obama had in 2012, but Trump’s margin among people with little or no college was a massive 39 points, vastly larger than Romney’s 25-point margin four years earlier.

  The election turned out to be as much about class differences as it was about the historic unpopularity of the two candidates. (Overall, voter turnout was the lowest of any presidential election since 1996. Slightly more Latinos and slightly fewer blacks voted than had in 2012.) Many Trump voters said they were more drawn by how he stood up for them and positioned himself against the elites than by any menu of specific policies. Even his most prominent position, his oft-repeated promise to build a wall along the border with Mexico, seemed not to be a priority shared by his own supporters: exit poll data showed that a majority of voters opposed the wall idea, about seven in ten voters said most illegal immigrants should get a chance to become legal residents, and only a quarter of voters agreed with Trump’s call to deport everyone who was in the country illegally. In the days immediately after his victory, Trump added nuance to that position: he still promised a wall, but said that parts of the border would be just as well served by a fence. Gingrich, who became a close ally, said Trump actually might not fulfill the second half of his wall promise either: “He may not spend very much time trying to get Mexico to pay for it, but it was a great campaign device.” In the first week after the election, Trump said that he would indeed move quickly to deport illegal immigrants who had committed crimes, but he would hold off on any decision about what to do with the far larger group who had come into the country illegally and were now productive residents. He called them “terrific people.”

  • • •

  IN THE PRESS, ALL this backpedaling was immediately labeled a U-turn on his promises. But Trump voters voiced no outrage; they were, by and large, willing to give their man some running room. They were okay with him making deals with the other side, compromising even on some of his core positions. He represented change, and they had been voting for change ever more insistently for more than three decades—for Ronald Reagan, for Bill Clinton, for George W. Bush, and for Barack Obama, and now for the ultimate renegade, a rogue outsider. Trump was their man, and even if he was going to hire hedge fund guys and Wall Street executives, they were sticking with him. They believed he could really turn the stubborn steamship in Washington.

  Trump saw no betrayal in his post-election about-faces. He’d been pivoting all his life to get to this moment. He said he might “amend” Obamacare, not repeal and replace it, as he had repeatedly promised. Top Republicans in Congress said it would take several years to devise and pass an alternative approach to health care. Trump wanted to keep the plan’s guarantee of coverage for people with pre-existing conditions, and he liked how it let young people stay on their parents’ health insurance until they turned twenty-six. But the president-elect didn’t say how he’d pay for those benefits if he scrapped other parts of Obamacare, such as the requirement that people get insurance or pay a penalty.

  Trump had paid little attention before the election to what would happen if he won. He had resisted advisers’ efforts to get him to focus on personnel issues. And although he had said that his adult children would take over the family business, the ethical questions surrounding the separation of the Trump empire from the work of the nation had not been worked through. Trump said that instead of putting his companies into a blind trust, he would hand the reins to Ivanka, Eric, and Donald Jr. But then he put the three children on his presidential transition team, setting up the very same conflict that he’d spent the campaign accusing the Clintons of creating—a murky mix of private enterprise with public service.

  As Trump began to build his administration, he focused, as ever, on loyalty. He intended to reward those who had stood by him. Rather than settle the debate over whether he would join forces with the Republican establishment or assemble a renegade White House in opposition to his party’s congressional leadership, Trump went in both directions at once. He appointed Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, as his chief of staff, but gave top billing and “equal” status to Bannon, his new chief strategist and senior counselor. Bannon, who had no government experience, was executive chairman of Breitbart News, the favored site of the alt-right, the amalgam of nationalists, white supremacists, and anticorporatists who had embraced the Trump campaign. Bannon had brought the candidate a context for his movement, a set of ideas and slogans about the people rising up against the elites, not only in middle-class America but as part of a worldwide revolt against globalization, the hegemony of the tech utopianists, radical Islam, and the arrogance of the overeducated. Bannon repeatedly told Trump that his candidacy was part of something bigger, a dismantling of the elites in finance, media, and politics—including in the Republican Party. Bannon had spent years slamming the very same GOP leaders he would now be working with. Faced with the monumental task of putting toge
ther a government, Priebus and Bannon swore they were on the same page. But within the first week after the election, the party and the incipient administration were beset with purges (lobbyists were first hired into the transition, then ousted), battles over personnel and policy (push for a reset of relations with Russia, or keep the Putin regime at a safe distance?), and even calls for Bannon’s immediate resignation.

  Although some of Trump’s appointments seemed designed to assure the nation that his administration would align with traditional Republican ideology, he made a series of controversial appointments that sent a clear message that this would be a different and iconoclastic presidency. His pick for attorney general, Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, had been rejected by the Senate for a federal judgeship three decades earlier in part because he’d made racially inflammatory comments. Trump’s choice for national security adviser, retired Army Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, called fear of Muslims “rational” and tweeted out fake news articles that sought to link Hillary Clinton with “sex crimes with minors” and accused her of “wearing hijab in solidarity with Islamic terrorists.”

  On the surface, Trump had it made—he not only won the White House, but his party controlled both houses of Congress. Washington, however, is never simple: even with his majority, Trump faced big obstacles. Democrats could filibuster and try to block legislation. Republicans who saw Trump as antagonistic to conservative principles of small government and lower taxes could fight his policies. And Trump had to decide what kind of president he would be: the master of the “art of the deal,” negotiating compromises in the manner that he’d always claimed had been at the heart of his business success, or the flame-throwing change agent, the role he’d played through the campaign—and the persona he’d adopted more than four decades earlier, when Roy Cohn had instructed him to answer every attack with a hundredfold-harder counterattack.

  In the early going, after the election, Trump seemed to want to explore both paths. He would repeatedly say he wanted to be a healer, and then he blasted those who were protesting against him on the streets of cities across the country. He chose not Priebus or Bannon but both. He sent mixed messages about how many millions of illegal immigrants he’d try to deport. The initial battle over what Trumpism would look like took place squarely within the Republican Party. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who had given Trump grudging and minimal support during the campaign, warned the incoming president against a perennial problem: overreach. “It’s always a mistake to misread your mandate,” he said, “and frequently new majorities think it’s going to be forever. Nothing is forever in this country.”

  • • •

  AGAIN AND AGAIN IN the first weeks after the election, Trump’s awkward attempts to appear presidential butted up against his peevish insults and his overnight tweets about the elites who were unfairly attacking him. Like cartoon devils and angels whispering into his ears, the two forces that propelled Trump through all his life’s crises—his thin skin and short temper warring against his oceanic confidence—were on all too public display. In the three debates against Clinton, Trump had at moments been on his best behavior, clearly straining to hold back and rise above; yet she so easily goaded him into lashing out. Now, as president, which Trump would prevail?

  After the victory, the page describing Trump’s plan on “preventing Muslim immigration” disappeared from his website, leading to news stories speculating that the new president would ease off his campaign promise of “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.” But then the president-elect’s office said the website had been fixed and the Muslim-ban statement was back. After the victory, as thousands of demonstrators marched through city streets to protest his election, Trump tweeted that they were “professional protesters, incited by the media. . . . Very unfair!” Hours later, another tweet, with a completely different tone: “Love the fact that the small groups of protesters last night have passion for our great country.”

  What had happened between tweets? Which one was, as his Twitter handle put it, realDonaldTrump? Had a staffer managed to wrest away his phone to send a more diplomatic message? The campaign had presented Americans with Trump unfiltered, all id, boisterous and bawdy, to some a disgraceful lecher and to others a refreshingly unbridled change agent. Now the president-elect, secluded in Trump Tower and at his golf club in New Jersey as he met with a parade of office-seekers, watched on TV as demonstrators in the coastal cities and college towns that had voted heavily against him chanted “Not my president!” And when vice president–elect Pence attended the hit Broadway musical Hamilton, one of the lead actors broke out of character at the show’s end to deliver a short, pointed lecture: “We, sir, we are the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us, our planet, our children.” On TV talk shows in the days after his visit to the theater, Pence heartily recommended that Americans go see the show; the boos some members of the Hamilton audience showered him with were, he said, “what freedom sounds like.” But Trump tweeted that Pence had been “harassed” by a cast that was “very rude to a very good man. Apologize!” the president-elect demanded. He insisted that he would still call them as he saw them.

  Trump said he knew in his gut how to get through any crisis. Although Clinton’s campaign had the money, the manpower, the gravitas, and the experience, his campaign had Donald Trump—the only candidate who had excited any substantial portion of the electorate. He was no joke now—unnerving to half the country, a puzzle to many others. He kept saying he wanted to heal the divisions in the country he’d just spent more than a year describing as doomed, gone, lost, distorted by a rigged system—a nation diminished by criminal immigrants and Muslim terrorists. Now, he was the one who was burdened, weighed down from the start by what he had injected into the social fabric of the nation: suspicion, scapegoating, and more open racial animosity than America had seen since the 1960s. Now, he said it was time to unite.

  He knew he needed to alter his campaign persona, to find a tone that might work in the Oval Office. “I’ll conduct myself in a very good manner,” he said on 60 Minutes the weekend after the election, “but it depends on what the situation is—sometimes you have to be rougher. When I look at the world and you look at how various places are taking advantage of our country, and I say it, and I say it very proudly, it’s going to be America First. It’s not going to be what we’re doing—we, we’ve lost—we’re losing this country. We’re losing this country. That’s why I won the election. I don’t want to be just a little nice monotone character, and in many cases I will be . . .” He left the sentence hanging. How would President Trump govern? Throughout his career, he had kept only his own bottom line in mind: “I was representing Donald Trump,” he said, and so if others lost money, that wasn’t his concern. Now, he said, he would work not for himself but for the country. He’d never done that before, he agreed, but he would now make that pivot. He couldn’t spell out the details of how he’d make that change, he said: “I’ll just do it.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  * * *

  Traditional biographies gestate for years, taking advantage of archives and interviews with people who speak with a freedom born of having attained a measure of distance. We didn’t have such luxuries; to produce a work of biographical journalism in time for voters to use this book to learn more about perhaps the least well-examined presidential nominee in modern American history, we had to vacuum up whatever documents we could find and ask sources to speak openly about a man who has gone to great lengths to control his image. The bulk of the work on this book took place over three months in mid-2016; the book would have been impossible without a large team of surpassingly talented, experienced reporters, researchers, and fact-checkers who were ready to work around the clock for many weeks without a break. The Washington Post journalists who reported this book are among the best in t
he business, and a full catalog of their names, along with those of the editors who were vital to this project, appears in the “About This Book” section at the beginning of Trump Revealed.

  We are extremely grateful to the many people who told us about their experiences working for Donald Trump, competing with him, or otherwise observing him in his youth, his career, and his political and personal pursuits. Many of those people spoke to us on the record, and they are named either in the body of this book or in the endnotes. Many others talked to us confidentially despite having signed nondisclosure agreements with Trump. We also relied on more than a million pages of documents that we obtained from court records, the various state casino control commissions, and other public sources, and from Trump’s former executives, associates, competitors, and regulators.

  We owe a special debt to the Trump biographers who hacked the first paths through a tricky thicket. Wayne Barrett, one of the most dogged and devoted investigative reporters in the annals of New York newspapering, not only wrote Trump: The Deals and the Downfall (1992), but has also maintained one of the largest and most important archives of Trump-related documents, which he graciously shared with us. Gwenda Blair’s The Trumps: Three Generations That Built an Empire (2000, reissued in 2016 as The Trumps: Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate) is the best guide to the family’s journey to America and to more than a century of the Trump experience in this country. Timothy L. O’Brien’s TrumpNation: The Art of Being The Donald (2005) and Harry Hurt III’s Lost Tycoon: The Many Lives of Donald J. Trump (1993) well capture Trump’s showmanship and business style at crucial junctures in his career. Michael D’Antonio’s Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success (2015) is a thoughtful, detailed overview of Trump’s life and work. We also consulted the memoir of former Trump Plaza Hotel & Casino executive John O’Donnell, Trumped! The Inside Story of the Real Donald Trump—His Cunning Rise & Spectacular Fall (1991).