Fear: Trump in the White House

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 run 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.