by Jim Acosta
So many pundits and respected presidential historians, perhaps out of a sense of national anxiety, predicted that the office he was about to assume would transform Trump. There was a feeling that the great weight of the presidency of the United States, with all its trappings and ceremony, would rest upon Trump’s shoulders and humble him, turning the New York businessman into a leader all Americans could admire. But as Obama’s longtime strategist David Axelrod has observed, presidential campaigns have a way of magnifying one’s character—like an “MRI of the soul.” Trump’s soul was about to be magnified and projected onto the world stage. And the lessons learned from the moments leading up to January 20, 2017, suggested that the nation was about to undergo a remarkable and pivotal test.
On that night of January 19, I did find one last staffer from the Obama administration. A press aide, Brian Gabriel, greeted me and remarked on the incredible turn of political events that was about to unfold the following day. I joked to Brian that he basically was the White House. It was hard for him to crack a smile.
As I stood there with Brian, a question dawned on me that I thought I had better get out of the way while I had the chance. Trump’s treatment of the press had worried me throughout the campaign, so I asked Brian if he wouldn’t mind sharing a secret with me.
“Did you guys have the ability to listen in on our conversations in the press areas of the White House? Any listening devices in the booths?” I asked, referring to the small work areas set up for the TV networks and wire services in the press areas of the West Wing.
“No. Not that I’m aware of,” Gabriel responded, a puzzled look on his face. I’ll confess, at the time it seemed like a nutty question, but his answer did give me some relief. At least the Trump people would not have infrastructure already in place to spy on us, I thought.
* * *
ON THE EVE OF TRUMP’S PRESIDENCY, I HAD GOOD REASON TO BE worried based on what I’d seen on the campaign trail. As a reporter who’d covered previous administrations as well as much of Trump’s campaign, I suspected the office would not transform the man. Trump struck me as potentially unprepared for the White House. Neither Trump nor his top advisers thought he was going to win. Still, they had put on a good show.
Two nights before Election Day, I was in Pennsylvania and spotted a sign that the Trump wave was coming. Trump was doing a tarmac event near the Pittsburgh airport. The crowd was big and rowdy. Trump’s supporters were so loyal that they booed as a Bruce Springsteen song played over the loudspeakers. They weren’t yelling “Bruce”; they were booing, perhaps in response to Springsteen referring to Trump as a “moron” in the weeks before the election.
But that wasn’t the memory that stayed with me. It was when Trump’s Pennsylvania campaign manager, David Urban, came up to me and said, “Follow me.” We made our way outside and then walked the length of the line of people waiting to get inside. It was easily a mile and a half long.
“Does this look like a losing campaign to you?” Urban asked.
“No, it doesn’t,” I replied. It was a sight to behold. A thought occurred to me: If Trump wins Pennsylvania, Clinton is in very big trouble.
The next night, we covered Trump’s last event of the 2016 campaign, a rally in Grand Rapids before thousands of screaming Michiganders wearing red “Make America Great Again” hats. Trump had remarked that the large crowd hardly had the look of a second-place finish. How right he was! With crowds like the ones he was receiving in the final days of the campaign, Trump didn’t need the press. And what happened after his final rally in Grand Rapids made that all too clear.
Although Trump’s plane was parked on the tarmac right next to the press plane, the Republican candidate refused the time-honored tradition for a presidential candidate of posing in front of the plane for a photo with the journalists covering his or her campaign. One of Trump’s traveling press aides, Stephanie Grisham, told us he was unavailable. (Yeah, right.) Disappointed, we schlepped onto the press plane for the final ride back to New York.
It was hardly surprising that Trump would stiff the press out of the planeside picture. He had spent the better part of the last year savaging the news media. We were, in his words, “disgusting,” “dishonest,” “scum,” “thieves,” “crooks,” “liars,” and so on. Trump simply could not stand us.
As a journeyman correspondent, I had already covered three presidential campaigns before “the Donald” came along. My first Election Eve picture with a candidate was in 2004, with John Kerry, who lost. I’ll never forget that day. Unlike Trump, who rode on his own private plane (dubbed Trump Force One by the press), separate from the press plane, Kerry and the media all traveled on the same charter jet. (That’s the campaign norm, one of many that Trump was happy to break.) And on Election Day 2004, Kerry walked to the press cabin and handed out red fleece jackets. Emblazoned on each were the words “Kerry Edwards Press Corps.” (One small problem with the jackets: “Kerry Edwards” was written in a bright white stitching. The words “Press Corps” were barely visible in a dark blue—so dark that at a gas station on the way home after Kerry lost, a motorist looked at my new fleece and said, “Sorry, you lost.” He couldn’t make out from the jacket that I was with the press.)
No one thought a fleece jacket would be forthcoming from the Trump campaign. There had been no candidate bonding time with Trump as the 2016 campaign came to an end, so it wasn’t exactly a surprise when Trump skipped the group photo and one last moment as a candidate to make peace with his imagined enemy. Leaving nothing to chance, his staff had arranged it so that the two planes didn’t even land at the same airport, with the press plane landing in Newark, far away from Trump Force One’s home at LaGuardia.
I felt bad for the younger campaign reporters, some barely into their twenties, who had spent the last eighteen months chronicling Trump’s candidacy. I had wanted them to have that picture. So, as we got off the press plane in Newark at 3:30 a.m. on Election Day and started plodding toward the sad, dark buses awaiting us, I shouted at everybody to assemble in front of the plane. We were going to have our goddamned picture.
One of my colleagues had procured a cardboard cutout of Trump. We propped it up in the middle of us and all gathered together on the tarmac for the money shot. And with the flashlights on our mobile phones angled up at our faces to provide some much-needed lighting, we managed a pretty damn good middle-of-the-night photo in front of the plane. After all the taunting and all the abuse from a candidate who repeatedly lashed out at the news media, posing for that picture gave us all a good laugh.
* * *
IT WAS 4:30 IN THE MORNING ON ELECTION DAY WHEN THE CAMPAIGN reporters following Donald J. Trump’s unlikely, unconventional, unbelievable bid for the presidency arrived, haggard, half-drunk, and bleary-eyed, at the Manhattan hotel preferred by the press corps, the JW Marriott Essex House.
We were standing in line, waiting patiently for our room keys, when in walks Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee. Priebus had become a trusted adviser to Trump, sticking by the real estate tycoon when times were tough. I had always liked Priebus. A Wisconsin nice guy, he was the GOP’s smooth operator, easygoing with the party and the press. He seemed genuinely human to me, a rarity in the Washington viper pit.
The RNC chair had been with Trump through good times and bad. He had dutifully gone on the “shows” and fought the good fight, insisting against all evidence to the contrary that the former host of the reality TV show The Apprentice was going to win the presidency.
But privately, Priebus was less confident. In the lobby of the Essex House, he walked right up to me and said, “It’s going to take a miracle for us to win.” Priebus was a little tipsy that morning. Still, I couldn’t believe my ears. He just walked up in a bit of a stupor and uttered those unbelievable words. So, I let him talk.
Priebus laid out what all the data were telling them: that the Trump campaign would lose but by a narrow margin. In Reince’s mind, that was a small vi
ctory.
“Didn’t you think we were dead after the Access Hollywood thing?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “I said so on TV.” I had, actually. On The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer, the very day the Access Hollywood tape surfaced. On the tape, as most of the world knows by now, Trump was caught on a hot microphone saying he could grab a woman “by the pussy” and get away with it, among other outrageous remarks. At the time, I said that the tape probably meant the end of his campaign. “The bottom of the barrel” was how I described Trump’s behavior on the recording. Oh, how wrong I was.
Priebus repeated himself: “Didn’t you think that was the end?”
“Yes,” I said, uncertain why he kept asking me the same question.
Then he started looking on the bright side, noting how the Trump campaign had managed to pull back from the abyss and make the final weeks of the election competitive. It was going to be close, not a blowout loss to Clinton. These were all good points, and all true. This is what the Republican Party chairman, at a desperate moment, no doubt, in his career and his life, was trying to get across. Again, I liked Reince, so I felt bad for him.
He went on to say how it appeared the Republicans would definitely not lose the House and might hang on to the Senate. Again, the slightly inebriated RNC chair was speaking the truth. That was my expectation as well.
And with that, he walked off. He had said his piece.
Needless to say, Priebus was wrong. We all were. Five days later, Trump announced that Priebus would be named the next White House chief of staff.
I was hardly the only person to serve as a sounding board for Reince’s concerns about Trump. The incoming forty-fifth president had heard the dire predictions from him as well. Before the election, Reince had made it clear inside the Trump campaign that he thought the GOP nominee was in deep trouble after the Access Hollywood bombshell. After taking office, of course, Trump loved needling Priebus for his lack of faith in the final days of the campaign. Reince would laugh it off, but Trump never forgot. Sure, he needed Reince, to send a signal to establishment Republicans that he wasn’t about to burn Washington to the ground. Trump, however, never forgives people for a lack of loyalty. Priebus entered the White House as damaged goods in Trump’s eyes.
Election Night was a surreal experience. There we were in the Hilton Midtown ballroom, nearly all of us in the Trump press corps expecting a humiliating defeat for the GOP candidate. (Indeed, we were making plans for drinks later that night.) Even the Trump supporters on hand seemed to be preparing themselves for the end of the road. With the exception of a cake shaped in the likeness of Trump, it was hardly a celebratory atmosphere. For much of the night, the ballroom was half empty. Then the results started pouring in. States were falling into Trump’s column faster than anticipated. Florida and North Carolina went to Trump early, surprising analysts and campaign insiders alike. A buzz was building inside the Hilton that perhaps Trump was going to do a lot better than nearly all the experts had predicted.
There is no need to recount, minute by minute, what happened next. We all remember. But it was a scene to behold. The ballroom eventually became packed with cheering Trump supporters. Some were heckling the press. I glanced over at my campaign colleague Katy Tur, of NBC News who shot back a look of astonishment. My fellow CNN Trump reporter Sara Murray emailed me that she had “told me so.” Sara, to her credit, had predicted that Trump would win the election. I, wrongly, refused to believe you could boast about grabbing women by their genitals and get away with it. Mine seemed like the safer prediction.
The final results wouldn’t come in until the wee hours of the morning of November 9. By that point, the place was wall-to-wall red MAGA hats. As I looked out onto the crowd, I remember thinking that a new, ultranationalist political movement had arrived in America, unlike anything I had seen in my lifetime. Then, out came Trump and his family, along with now vice president–elect Mike Pence and the rest of the campaign entourage. There was an odd absence of excitement in the room. It was almost as if those assembled were just as dumbfounded as the rest of us. When it was all over, I remember climbing off the press riser and walking right up to Pence, whom I had covered during his days as an Indiana congressman. He told me that they were ready to go to work. I didn’t believe him. They had no idea what had hit them.
The true sense of how things were going inside the Trump campaign came from Jessica Ditto, a communications staffer, who was also on the ballroom floor at that early morning hour. I offered my congratulations to her and a couple of other Trump staffers who were milling around. Ditto replied acidly, “Well, maybe now we’ll get better coverage from the media.”
A thought ran through my mind: They are still wounded. They are still aggrieved. It dawned on me that the relationship between the press and the incoming administration would continue to be contentious.
It was nearly 4:30 a.m. when my head finally hit the pillow in my hotel room. I had not eaten any dinner. I downed a small can of Pringles, chugged a beer, and passed out. My phone rang about three hours later. Trump was going to be president, and the whole world was starting to freak out.
* * *
IT FELT AS IF NOVEMBER 9 WOULD LAST FOREVER. AFTER MY THREE-HOUR nap in the morning, I went for a run. And then it was back to work. We did a piece for The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer that evening. And before long, it was time to do a live shot for Anderson Cooper 360. It was back on the hamster wheel. The frenetic pace of the campaign did not end on November 8. If anything, it was accelerating.
As we were preparing to do our 8:00 p.m. live shot, something incredible was beginning to happen. Thousands of people were marching on the streets of Manhattan, descending on Trump Tower, chanting, “Not my president!” I was walking down West Fifty-Seventh Street, toward Fifth Avenue, and the demonstrators were everywhere. The election of Donald J. Trump had ended. The resistance to Trump was born.
But this new political force was an unstable source of energy, not completely directed at the incoming president. As I was getting set up for my 8:00 p.m. live shot, with my producer Kristen Holmes and a security official standing with me, the swarm of protesters was starting to gather around us. The demonstrators, understandably, were angry. Many of them were emotional and raging, and not all of them were friendly toward us. Then I started to hear the chant.
“CNN elected Trump . . . CNN elected Trump!” some of the demonstrators were shouting, a few of them directly at me. Theirs was a point shared by others. We seemed to give Trump too much coverage during the GOP primary season. The network brass has since admitted as much. We didn’t elect him, but, as I like to remind a lot of Trump supporters, the press as a whole gave their candidate a boost during the primaries that no money could have bought.
The hostility we encountered that night felt unrestrained and possibly dangerous. As soon as our live shot was over, the show producers for Anderson Cooper 360 told us to get the hell out of there. Our security guy escorted us through the crowd, and we were gone. After months of taking abuse from people at Trump rallies, now we were getting an earful from the other side. It was a sign of the new world we were all about to enter. Trump’s election had not soothed tensions on either side; it had poured gasoline over them. The whole country, Trump supporters and opponents alike, was pissed off, in a state of near rage.
The Democrats of course had quite a bit of soul-searching to do. As I saw all too clearly out on the campaign trail, there was extreme Clinton fatigue, something I believe Democrats never fully appreciated at the time. This was a major miscalculation, in my view, by the Democratic Party. I know from my interactions with Obama aides inside the White House that they overwhelmingly preferred Hillary Clinton to Joe Biden, despite the fact that Biden simply matched up better against Trump. The vice president, given his appeal to everyday Americans as “Uncle Joe,” could easily have carved into Trump’s working-class appeal and probably kept Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin in the Democratic column. The “Blue
Wall” might have withstood that late-October Trump surge. There would never have been James Comey’s memo, raising questions of impropriety in Clinton’s use of a private email server, to turn the tide eleven days before the election.
The vice president wasn’t perfect, of course. He could be too candid, which the press loved. I remember being at a Christmas party at the vice president’s official mansion, on the grounds of the U.S. Naval Observatory, in late 2015. The house was filled with reporters and operatives from Bidenworld. Unlike Obama, who rarely mixed and mingled with reporters, Biden relished working the room at his holiday parties. He held court with a couple dozen reporters for nearly an hour at the end the night, before they kicked us all out. Biden was handicapping the presidential field. He seemed to be masking his concerns about Hillary Clinton with some good ol’ “Uncle Joe” humor.
“Marco Rubio is the most charismatic candidate in the field,” Biden told us. “In both parties,” he went on, in an apparent reference to Clinton.
“What about Ted Cruz?” somebody asked.
“That son of a bitch,” Biden said. “I mean that son of a gun.”
The reporters around him howled. But it was vintage Biden. He had the kind of humor that could go toe to toe with Trump.
But as Biden toyed with the idea of running for the presidency, he simply couldn’t muster the energy to mount a campaign. He had just lost his son, Beau, to cancer in August 2015. A Democratic official had tipped me off to a call Biden held with Democratic National Committee members in the middle of the vice president’s deliberations. At one point during the call, Biden told Democratic officials listening in that he wasn’t sure he had the “emotional fuel” to run. It was Biden being Biden. He was candid. But he was exhausted. The same Biden who had lost a wife and daughter in a car accident at a young age had suffered another tragedy.