by Bob Woodward
“Paul, am I a baby?” Trump asked Manafort. “Is that what you are saying, I’m a baby? You’re terrible on TV. You’ve got no energy. You don’t represent the campaign. I’ve told you nicely. You’re never going on TV again.”
“Donald . . .,” Manafort tried to respond.
Bannon suspected this familiar, first-name, peer-to-peer talk irked Trump.
“One thing you’ve got to understand, Mr. Trump,” Bannon said, “the story had a lot of these unnamed sources, we don’t know the veracity.”
“No, I can tell,” Trump replied, directing his fire at Manafort. “They’re leakers.” He knew the quotes were true.
“A lot of this is not for attribution,” Bannon said. No one by name, all hiding. “The New York Times is, it’s all fucking lies. Come on, this is all bullshit,” Bannon continued his full-body, opposition-party pitch, though he knew the story was true.
Trump wasn’t buying it. The story was gospel, and the campaign was full of leakers. The assassination of Manafort continued for a while. Trump turned to a few war stories for half an hour. Manafort left.
“Stick around,” Trump told Bannon. “This thing’s so terrible. It’s so out of control. This guy’s such a loser. He’s really not running the campaign. I only brought him in to get me through the convention.”
“Don’t worry about any of these numbers,” Bannon said. “Don’t worry about the 12 to 16 points, whatever the poll is. Don’t worry about the battleground states. It’s very simple.” Two thirds of the country thinks we’re on the wrong track, and 75 percent of the country thinks we’re in decline, he argued. That set the stage for a change agent. Hillary was the past. It was that clear.
In a way, Bannon had been waiting all his adult life for this moment. “Here’s the difference,” he explained. “We’re just going to compare and contrast Clinton. Here’s the thing you’ve got to remember,” he said, and recited one of his mantras: “The elites in the country are comfortable with managing the decline. Right?”
Trump nodded agreement.
“And the working people in the country are not. They do want to make America great again. We’re going to simplify this campaign. She is the tribune of a corrupt and incompetent status quo of elites who are comfortable managing the decline. You’re the tribune of the forgotten man who wants to make America great again. And we’re just going to do it in a couple of themes.
“Number one,” Bannon went on, “we’re going to stop mass illegal immigration and start to limit legal immigration to get our sovereignty back. Number two, you are going to bring manufacturing jobs back to the country. And number three, we’re going to get out of these pointless foreign wars.”
These weren’t new ideas for Trump. In an August 8 speech to the Detroit Economic Club a week before, he had sounded all these notes and hammered Clinton. “She is the candidate of the past. Ours is the campaign of the future.”
“Those are the three big themes that she can’t defend against,” Bannon said. “She’s part of the thing that opened the borders, she’s part of the thing that cut the bad trade deals and let the jobs go to China, and she’s the neocon. Right?”
Trump seemed to agree that Hillary was a neoconservative.
“She’s supported every war out there,” Bannon said. “We’re just going to hammer. That’s it. Just stick to that.”
Bannon added that Trump had another advantage. He spoke in a voice that did not sound political. This was what Barack Obama had in 2008 in the primary contest against Clinton, who spoke like the trained politician she was. Her tempo was overly practiced. Even when telling the truth, she sounded like she was lying to you.
Politicians like Hillary can’t talk naturally, Bannon said. It was a mechanical way of speaking, right out of the polling and focus groups, answering the questions in political speak. It was soothing, not jarring, not from the heart or from deep conviction, but from some highly paid consultant’s talking points—not angry.
Trump said okay, you become the Chief Executive Officer of the campaign.
“I don’t want some big brouhaha story about palace intrigue,” Bannon said. “Let’s keep Manafort in as chairman. He’ll have no authority. Let me manage that.”
They agreed that Kellyanne Conway—a feisty, outspoken Republican pollster who was already helping the campaign—would be designated campaign manager.
“We’re going to put her on television every day as the female-friendly face on the thing,” Bannon proposed. “Because Kellyanne is a warrior. And she’ll just take incoming. But people like her. And that’s what we need is likability.”
In a moment of self-awareness, he added, “I’ll never be on TV.”
Conway had never run a campaign either. That made three of them—the shiny neophyte candidate, the campaign CEO and the campaign manager.
* * *
Kellyanne Conway was supervising the filming of some campaign ads that month.
“Am I paying for these people?” Trump asked her.
He complained about the camera setup. The equipment seemed old and he didn’t like the lighting. The shoot wasn’t high-definition (HD). He groused about the camera crew. “Tell them I’m not going to pay.” It was a standard line.
Later he said, “I want everyone to leave except Kellyanne.”
“Everybody tells me that I’m a much better candidate than Hillary Clinton,” he said, half-asking for her evaluation.
“Well, yes, sir. No poll necessary.” But they could do some things different. “You’re running against the most joyless candidate in presidential history. And it’s starting to feel like we are that way as well.”
“No we’re not.”
“It just feels that way. I used to watch you during the primaries, and you seemed much happier.”
“I miss the days when it was just a few of us flying around doing the rallies, meeting the voters,” Trump said.
“Those days are gone,” she acknowledged. “But in fairness to you, we should be able to replicate them to a general election strategy and process that allows you to maximize those skills and the enjoyment.”
She took a stab at candor. “You know you’re losing? But you don’t have to. I’ve looked at the polls.” CNN that day had him down five to 10 points. “There’s a path back.”
“What is it?”
She believed that he had done something without realizing it. “This fiction of electability that was sucking the lifeblood out of the Republican Party,” that somehow he could not win and was not electable.
The voters were disillusioned with Republican presidential nominees. These arguments went, “You have to get behind Mitt Romney. He’s the only one who can win. You have to support John McCain. He can win. Jeb can win. Marco can win. This one,” Trump, you, “can’t win. The people decided. I will not be fooled again,” and he had won the Republican nomination.
“You get these massive crowds where you have not erected a traditional political campaign. You have built a movement. And people feel like they’re part of it. They paid no admission. I can tell you what I see in the polling. We have two major impediments.” She said they should never do national polling, ever. “That is the foolishness of the media,” which did national polls. Winning obviously was all about the electoral college—getting the 270 electoral votes. They needed to target the right states, the roughly eight battleground states.
“People want specifics,” Conway said. It had been great when Trump released his 10-point Veterans Administration reform plan in July, or a planned five-point tax reform plan. “People want those kinds of specifics, but they need them repeated again and again.
“The second vulnerability I see is people want to make sure you can actually make good on your promises. Because if you can’t deliver, if the businessman can’t execute and deliver, you’re just another politician. And that’s who you’re not.”
It was a sales pitch, a path forward that Trump seemed to embrace.
“Do you think you can r
un this thing?” he asked.
“What is ‘this thing’?” she asked. “I’m running this photo shoot.”
“The campaign,” Trump said. “The whole thing. Are you willing to not see your kids for a few months?”
She accepted on the spot. “Sir, I can do that for you. You can win this race. I do not consider myself your peer. I will never address you by your first name.”
CHAPTER
3
That Sunday night, Bannon headed to work—Trump Tower in New York City. The campaign headquarters. It was his first visit, and 85 days until the presidential election.
He rode up to the fourteenth floor. The sun was still out on this August night. He expected to walk in and have a thousand or so people ask, What’s Bannon doing here? He would need a cover story.
He walked into the war room, the rapid response center, with all the TV sets.
There was one person there. To Bannon’s eyes, he was a kid.
“Who are you?” Bannon asked.
“Andy Surabian.”
“Where the fuck is everybody?”
“I don’t know,” Surabian replied. “This is like it is on every Sunday.”
“This is the campaign headquarters?”
“Yeah.”
“I mean like the place where the whole thing’s run out of?”
Yeah. Surabian pointed out Jason Miller’s office—the senior communications director—and Hope Hicks’s—the young former model who had become the campaign’s main press person and perhaps the staff member closest to Trump. Surabian was the war room director.
“Do you guys work weekends?”
Surabian said yeah again. Some worked in D.C., some guys phoned in.
Bannon tried once more. “On weekends, does this place have people in it?”
“This is about average.”
“Where the fuck is Jared? I’ve got to talk to Jared and Ivanka.” Bannon had heard that Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, was the mastermind and genius here.
Jared and Ivanka were on entertainment mogul and Democratic donor David Geffen’s $300 million yacht—one of the largest in the world—off the coast of Croatia, on vacation with Wendi Deng, a businesswoman and former wife of Rupert Murdoch.
* * *
Manafort called Bannon. He wanted to meet.
“Why don’t you come up?” Manafort said.
Where?
“The Tower.”
Bannon had to go back to the lobby to get the elevator to the residences. On the ride up, he wondered if this was the deal that Trump cut with his campaign chief. “If he’s going to toss me some penthouse in the Trump Tower, why not?” It would be better than his small place on Bryant Park.
It turned out that Manafort owned the place.
Bannon felt sorry for Manafort. The campaign manager had been astonished at the success and power of Trump’s Twitter account, and had started one of his own. But the New York Daily News had run this item in April: “Make America kinky again,” noting that Manafort—perhaps unaware that Twitter was a public forum—had followed a Midtown bondage and swingers’ club called Decadence. “Manafort was following the swanky spank spot—which bills itself as the city’s ‘most intimate swing club.’ ”
* * *
Manafort’s place was beautiful. Kathleen Manafort, his wife, an attorney who was in her 60s but looked to Bannon like she was in her 40s, was wearing white and lounging like Joan Collins, the actress from the show Dynasty.
“I really want to thank you for trying to step in,” Manafort said. “That’s just Donald. This is the way he acts all the time.”
“I thought he took some real cheap shots at you,” Bannon said.
Manafort waved him off. “Listen, everybody tells me you really know media,” he said.
“I run a right-wing website. I know advocacy.”
“I need you to look at something for me,” Manafort said, handing him a copy of a draft story coming in from The New York Times headlined: “Secret Ledger in Ukraine Lists Cash for Donald Trump’s Campaign Chief.”
Bannon read, “Handwritten ledgers show $12.7 million in undisclosed cash payments designated for Mr. Manafort” from the pro-Russian political party.
“Twelve million fucking dollars in cash out of the Ukraine!” Bannon virtually shouted.
“What?” Mrs. Manafort said, bolting upright.
“Nothing, honey,” Manafort said. “Nothing.”
“When is this coming out?” Bannon asked.
“It may go up tonight.”
“Does Trump know anything about this?”
Manafort said no.
“How long have you known about this?”
Two months, Manafort said, when the Times started investigating.
Bannon read about 10 paragraphs in. It was a kill shot. It was over for Manafort.
“My lawyer told me not to cooperate,” Manafort said. “It was just a hit piece.”
“You should fire your lawyer.”
“I’m thinking about it.”
“You’ve got to call Trump . . . go see him face-to-face. If this comes out in the paper, and he doesn’t know about it, it’s lights out for you. How do you even take $12.7 million in cash?”
“It’s all lies,” Manafort said. “I had expenses.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m just a general consultant,” he explained. “I’ve got guys.” Many others had worked for him in Ukraine. “It all was paid to the guys. I didn’t take $500,000 out of there.”
“That’s all lost. It’s not laid out in the article. It’s ‘you got $12.7 million in cash,’ okay?”
Bannon called Jared.
“You’ve got to get back here,” he said.
The Times article on Manafort ran online that night and in the paper the next morning. As Bannon predicted, Trump was apoplectic. He’d had no heads-up.
* * *
Trump called Reince Priebus to tell him that Steve Bannon was coming in as CEO. Priebus marveled that Trump would again bring in someone with little experience running anything, but he didn’t say much. He’d come around on Bannon’s Breitbart operation. After getting killed for about two years by Breitbart as part of the Republican elite, he’d developed a new strategy: It was a lot easier to work with Breitbart, and get less killed.
* * *
Polls showed only 70 percent of Republicans were for Trump. They needed 90 percent. That meant getting the party apparatus on Trump’s side.
“Look, you don’t know me,” Bannon said. He had met Priebus briefly years before. “I need to have you here this afternoon. And this girl Katie Walsh, who I just hear is a superstar.” Priebus and Walsh, the RNC chief of staff, had the Republican database on every likely voter in the country.
Bannon wanted to be sure that the RNC was not going to leave Trump. There were rumors about donors fleeing and how everyone in the party was trying to figure a way out of the Trump mess.
That’s not the case, Priebus assured him. We are not going anywhere.
“We’ve got to work as a team,” Bannon said.
“You think you can do it?”
“Look, Trump doesn’t care about details,” Bannon said. It was up to them.
As Bannon later remarked with his trademark profanity, “I reached out and sucked Reince Priebus’ dick on August 15 and told the establishment, we can’t win without you.”
* * *
Even if Trump and his campaign didn’t know it, Priebus knew Trump needed the RNC to stick with him. Trump had almost no field operations out where the voters were, and didn’t know some of the most fundamental things—Politics 101.
Priebus had spent the last years overseeing a massive effort to rebuild the RNC into a data-driven operation. Borrowing from Obama’s winning campaign strategy, the RNC started pouring vast sums—eventually more than $175 million—into analytics and big data, tracking individual primary voters, and using that information in areas divided into neighborhood “turfs” staffed w
ith armies of volunteers.
All along, the expectation had been that once the Republican nominee was selected, the RNC would hitch this massive shiny new wagon to an already fairly robust and large campaign apparatus. For all the abuse the RNC had taken during the primaries—at one point Trump had called the RNC a “disgrace” and “a scam” and said that Priebus “should be ashamed of himself”—the RNC was effectively the Trump campaign staff.
The first step was for field staff to get an absentee or early voting ballot to those they deemed pro-Trump because they scored a 90 or above on a scale of 0 to 100 in the national database. In Ohio, out of perhaps 6 million voters, approximately 1 million would score 90 or above. Those 1 million would be targeted for early voting ballots, and the field staff and volunteers would hound each one until the ballot was sent in.
Next the field staff would move to persuade those who scored 60 or 70, trying to convince them to vote for Trump. The system was designed to reduce the randomness of voter contact, to make sure the volunteers and field staff concentrated their efforts on those most likely to vote for Trump.
The campaign announced the leadership changes on August 17. The New York Times reported, “Trump’s decision to make Stephen K. Bannon, chairman of the Breitbart News website, his campaign’s chief executive was a defiant rejection of efforts by longtime Republican hands to wean him from the bombast and racially charged speech that helped propel him to the nomination but now threaten his candidacy. . . . For Mr. Trump, though, bringing in Mr. Bannon was the political equivalent of ordering comfort food.”
Bannon tried to sit down with Trump and walk him through refinements of the strategy and how to focus on particular states. The candidate had no interest in talking about it.
Bannon assured Trump, I have “metaphysical certitude you will win here if you stick to this script and compare and contrast” with Hillary Clinton. “Every underlying number is with us.”