An unpublished chapter in Donald Trump's explosive biography
Trump's unauthorized biography chapter reveals how
shocked he was when he was elected president
On the afternoon of November 8, 2016, Kellyanne Conway - Donald Trump's campaign director and star-like character in the Trump world - settled into her glazed room at the Trump Tower. Until the last weeks of the election race, Trump's campaign headquarters was a despondent place. All that set him apart from any commercial office were some posters with right-wing words.
Conway now did not hide his good humor, since he was no longer about to witness a resounding, if not cataclysmic, defeat. Donald Trump would lose the election - she was sure - but could perhaps hold a defeat by less than six percentage points, which would in fact be a substantial victory. As for the impending defeat, Conway was not too worried: it was Reince Priebus's fault(Republican leader), not his.
Conway now did not hide his good humor, since he was no longer about to witness a resounding, if not cataclysmic, defeat. Donald Trump would lose the election - she was sure - but could perhaps hold a defeat by less than six percentage points, which would in fact be a substantial victory. As for the impending defeat, Conway was not too worried: it was Reince Priebus's fault(Republican leader), not his.
She'd spent most of the day calling on friends and political allies to blame Priebus. He was now giving information to some producers and television anchors with whom he had solid ties - and with whom, after the last weeks of constant interviews, he had counted on getting a job after the elections. He had been carefully courting many of them since joining Trump's campaign in mid-August and became the combative, trusting voice of the campaign with his spasmodic smiles and a strange mixture of sourness and impassibility, as well as his particularly Telegenic
Beyond the other terrible misunderstandings of the campaign, the real problem, she said, was the demon they could not control: the Republican National Committee, run by Priebus, Katie Walsh, her faithful 32-year-old squire, and her press release, Sean Spicer. Rather than headlong, the Republican National Committee, ultimately an instrument of the Republican status quo , had been lowering its bet since Trump won the nomination in the middle of the year. When Trump needed support, support did not come.
This was a part of the story told by Conway. The other was that, despite everything, the campaign had really recovered and came out of the hole. For a team with serious funding problems and, to sum up, the worst candidate in modern political history - every time Trump's name was pronounced, Conway rolled his eyes or took a dead fish look - they had gone extraordinarily good. Conway, who before Trump had never participated in a national campaign and run a small opinion-research firm and worked in smaller campaigns, realized that after the presidential campaign he would become one of the main conservative voices of news channels.
In fact, one of Trump's campaign analysts John McLaughlin had begun to hint about the previous week that the numbers in some important, hitherto disheartening states might be shifting in favor of Trump. But neither Conway, nor Trump himself, nor his son-in-law Jared Kushner - the real campaign director, or supervisor of the family-designated campaign - had shaken his certainty: the unusual adventure would soon come to an end.
Only Steve Bannon, with his vision of a man who was always at an advantage, insisted that the numbers would turn in their favor. But as that was Bannon's opinion - of the wacky Steve - it was the opposite of being reassuring. Almost everyone in the campaign, even if they were part of an extremely small team, considered themselves a group on the ground, more realistic about their prospects than perhaps any other political team. There was an unspoken agreement between them: Donald Trump not only would not be president, as probably should not be. For convenience, the first assumption meant that no one would have to deal with the second question.
As the campaign drew to an end, Trump himself became optimistic. He had survived the leaking of Billy Bush's tape when in the ensuing tumult the Republican National Committee had the nerve to pressure him to abandon the race. FBI director James Comey, after Clinton's awkward attitude toward bad news - by announcing, 11 days before the election, that he would reopen the investigation into her e-mails - had helped to avoid Clinton's overpowering victory.
"I can be the most famous man in the world," Trump told advisor Sam Nunberg, who was leaving and returning from the team near the end of the campaign.
"But do you want to be president?" Asked Nunberg (a question qualitatively different from the one usually asked of a candidate: "Why do you want to be president?").
Nunberg remained unanswered.
It was that an answer was not necessary because Trump would not be president.
Old friend Roger Ailes liked to say that anyone who wanted to make a career in television should run for the presidency first. Trump now, encouraged by Ailes, was rumored about a Trump network. It was a beautiful future.
Trump assured Ailes that he would leave the campaign with a much more powerful brand and incredible opportunities. "It's a lot more than I would ever have dreamed," Ailes confessed in conversation a week before the election. "I do not think about losing because this is not a defeat. It is a clear victory. "Moreover, he was already preparing his public reaction to electoral defeat: the election had been stolen!
Donald Trump and his tiny band of campaign minions were prepared to lose with fire and fury. They were not prepared to win.
In politics, someone needs to lose, but everyone invariably thinks they can win. Those who do not believe in their own win will probably not win - except in the Trump campaign.
Trump's favorite theme about his own campaign was how bad it was and how everyone involved was a loser. He was also convinced that Clinton's team was brilliant and made up of winners. "They got the best, and us with the worst," he always said. The time spent with Trump on the field plane was always an epic experience of disrespect: everyone around him were idiots.
Corey Lewandowski, the first or most official director of Trump's campaign, was being reprimanded by the candidate. For months, Trump called him "the worst," and in June of 2016 he finally fired him. But then he declared that without Lewandowski his campaign was doomed. "We are all losers," he said. "Everyone on the team is terrible, nobody knows what he's doing. I wanted Corey back. "Soon Trump was also disappointed with his second campaign director, Paul Manafort.
In August, when she was 12 to 17 percentage points behind Hillary Clinton and faced a daily storm in the demolishing press, Trump did not even consider the improbable scenario of electoral victory. In this moment of desperation, Trump, in a certain essential sense, sold the defeated campaign. Right-wing billionaire Bob Mercer, Ted Cruz's financier, went on to support Trump with a $ 5 million injection. Believing the campaign was losing ground, Mercer and his daughter Rebekah took a helicopter off their Long Island estate and attended a fundraising event - with other potential donors leaving the boat every second - at Woody Johnson's summer residence , owner of the New York Jets and heir to Johnson & Johnson in the Hamptons.
Trump had nothing to do with Bob Mercer or Rebekah. There had been few conversations with Bob, which was almost always monosyllabic, and all the contact with Rebekah was a selfie with her, taken in the Trump Tower. Still, when the Mercer presented their plan to take over the campaign and set up their incumbent Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway, Trump offered no resistance. He just showed that he did not understand at all why anyone might want to do something like that. "It's all screwed up," he told the Mercer.
Any reliable indicator would attest that something even greater than failure haunted the campaign that Steve Bannon called a "cripple" - there was a complete structural impossibility.
On the afternoon of November 8, 2016, Kellyanne Conway - Donald Trump's campaign director and star-like character in the Trump world - settled into her glazed room at the Trump Tower. Until the last weeks of the election race, Trump's campaign headquarters was a despondent place. All that set him apart from any commercial office were some posters with right-wing words.
Conway now did not hide his good humor, since he was no longer about to witness a resounding, if not cataclysmic, defeat. Donald Trump would lose the election - she was sure - but could perhaps hold a defeat by less than six percentage points, which would in fact be a substantial victory. As for the impending defeat, Conway was not too worried: it was Reince Priebus's fault(Republican leader), not his.
Conway now did not hide his good humor, since he was no longer about to witness a resounding, if not cataclysmic, defeat. Donald Trump would lose the election - she was sure - but could perhaps hold a defeat by less than six percentage points, which would in fact be a substantial victory. As for the impending defeat, Conway was not too worried: it was Reince Priebus's fault(Republican leader), not his.
She'd spent most of the day calling on friends and political allies to blame Priebus. He was now giving information to some producers and television anchors with whom he had solid ties - and with whom, after the last weeks of constant interviews, he had counted on getting a job after the elections. He had been carefully courting many of them since joining Trump's campaign in mid-August and became the combative, trusting voice of the campaign with his spasmodic smiles and a strange mixture of sourness and impassibility, as well as his particularly Telegenic face .
Beyond the other terrible misunderstandings of the campaign, the real problem, she said, was the demon they could not control: the Republican National Committee, run by Priebus, Katie Walsh, her faithful 32-year-old squire, and her press release, Sean Spicer. Rather than headlong, the Republican National Committee, ultimately an instrument of the Republican status quo , had been lowering its bet since Trump won the nomination in the middle of the year. When Trump needed support, support did not come.
This was a part of the story told by Conway. The other was that, despite everything, the campaign had really recovered and came out of the hole. For a team with serious funding problems and, to sum up, the worst candidate in modern political history - every time Trump's name was pronounced, Conway rolled his eyes or took a dead fish look - they had gone extraordinarily good. Conway, who before Trump had never participated in a national campaign and run a small opinion-research firm and worked in smaller campaigns, realized that after the presidential campaign he would become one of the main conservative voices of news channels.
In fact, one of Trump's campaign analysts John McLaughlin had begun to hint about the previous week that the numbers in some important, hitherto disheartening states might be shifting in favor of Trump. But neither Conway, nor Trump himself, nor his son-in-law Jared Kushner - the real campaign director, or supervisor of the family-designated campaign - had shaken his certainty: the unusual adventure would soon come to an end.
Only Steve Bannon, with his vision of a man who was always at an advantage, insisted that the numbers would turn in their favor. But as that was Bannon's opinion - of the wacky Steve - it was the opposite of being reassuring. Almost everyone in the campaign, even if they were part of an extremely small team, considered themselves a group on the ground, more realistic about their prospects than perhaps any other political team. There was an unspoken agreement between them: Donald Trump not only would not be president, as probably should not be. For convenience, the first assumption meant that no one would have to deal with the second question.
As the campaign drew to an end, Trump himself became optimistic. He had survived the leaking of Billy Bush's tape when in the ensuing tumult the Republican National Committee had the nerve to pressure him to abandon the race. FBI director James Comey, after Clinton's awkward attitude toward bad news - by announcing, 11 days before the election, that he would reopen the investigation into her e-mails - had helped to avoid Clinton's overpowering victory.
"I can be the most famous man in the world," Trump told advisor Sam Nunberg, who was leaving and returning from the team near the end of the campaign.
"But do you want to be president?" Asked Nunberg (a question qualitatively different from the one usually asked of a candidate: "Why do you want to be president?").
Nunberg remained unanswered.
It was that an answer was not necessary because Trump would not be president.
Old friend Roger Ailes liked to say that anyone who wanted to make a career in television should run for the presidency first. Trump now, encouraged by Ailes, was rumored about a Trump network. It was a beautiful future.
Trump assured Ailes that he would leave the campaign with a much more powerful brand and incredible opportunities. "It's a lot more than I would ever have dreamed," Ailes confessed in conversation a week before the election. "I do not think about losing because this is not a defeat. It is a clear victory. "Moreover, he was already preparing his public reaction to electoral defeat: the election had been stolen!
Donald Trump and his tiny band of campaign minions were prepared to lose with fire and fury. They were not prepared to win.
In politics, someone needs to lose, but everyone invariably thinks they can win. Those who do not believe in their own win will probably not win - except in the Trump campaign.
Trump's favorite theme about his own campaign was how bad it was and how everyone involved was a loser. He was also convinced that Clinton's team was brilliant and made up of winners. "They got the best, and us with the worst," he always said. The time spent with Trump on the field plane was always an epic experience of disrespect: everyone around him were idiots.
Corey Lewandowski, the first or most official director of Trump's campaign, was being reprimanded by the candidate. For months, Trump called him "the worst," and in June of 2016 he finally fired him. But then he declared that without Lewandowski his campaign was doomed. "We are all losers," he said. "Everyone on the team is terrible, nobody knows what he's doing. I wanted Corey back. "Soon Trump was also disappointed with his second campaign director, Paul Manafort.
In August, when she was 12 to 17 percentage points behind Hillary Clinton and faced a daily storm in the demolishing press, Trump did not even consider the improbable scenario of electoral victory. In this moment of desperation, Trump, in a certain essential sense, sold the defeated campaign. Right-wing billionaire Bob Mercer, Ted Cruz's financier, went on to support Trump with a $ 5 million injection. Believing the campaign was losing ground, Mercer and his daughter Rebekah took a helicopter off their Long Island estate and attended a fundraising event - with other potential donors leaving the boat every second - at Woody Johnson's summer residence , owner of the New York Jets and heir to Johnson & Johnson in the Hamptons.
Trump had nothing to do with Bob Mercer or Rebekah. There had been few conversations with Bob, which was almost always monosyllabic, and all the contact with Rebekah was a selfie with her, taken in the Trump Tower. Still, when the Mercer presented their plan to take over the campaign and set up their incumbent Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway, Trump offered no resistance. He just showed that he did not understand at all why anyone might want to do something like that. "It's all screwed up," he told the Mercer.
Any reliable indicator would attest that something even greater than failure haunted the campaign that Steve Bannon called a "cripple" - there was a complete structural impossibility.
The candidate who advertised himself a billionaire - multibillion dollar - refused to invest his own money in the campaign. When Bannon took over the campaign, he told Jared Kushner - who was then vacationing in Croatia with his wife and David Geffen, Trump's enemy - who after the first debate in September would need an additional $ 50 million to get arrive on Election Day.
"There's no way we can get 50 million unless we can secure victory," Kushner said lucidly.
"Twenty-five million?" Ventured Bannon.
"Only if we can say victory is more than likely."
In the end, the best thing Trump did was lend $ 10 million to the campaign, which would be returned as soon as they could raise the money on another front (Steve Mnuchin, then treasurer of the campaign, went to get the loan with the drafting instructions already drafted, because so Trump could not "forget" to send the money.)
In fact, there was no real campaign because there was no real organization. At most, there was a singularly dysfunctional organization. Roger Stone, the former de facto director of the campaign, resigned or was fired by Trump - both publicly said that they had slapped the other. Sam Nunberg, Trump's advisor to Stone, was loudly dispatched by Lewandowski, and Trump later contributed a lot to increasing the laundry by processing Nunberg. Lewandowski and Hope Hicks, Ivanka Trump's Republican party advisor to the campaign, had a case that ended in a street fight on the street - an incident cited by Nunberg in the lawsuit brought by Trump. It was in the face that the campaign had not been thought to win anything.
Not even the elimination of the other 16 Republican pre-candidates, however improbable, made the ultimate goal of winning the presidency of the United States less foolhardy.
And if during the fall the victory had seemed a little more plausible, hope fell through after the Billy Bush affair. "I'm automatically attracted to pretty women. I just start kissing them, "Trump told CNBC host Billy Bush on an open mic, amid the debate over sexual harassment in the country. "It's like a magnet. I go and kiss. I do not expect it. And when you're a star, they leave. You can do whatever you want ... Take them for ... You can do whatever you want. "
Fixing that was a serious problem. The event was so staggering that when Reince Priebus, the leader of the Republican National Committee, was called to New York for an emergency meeting at the Trump Tower, he barely had the courage to leave Penn Station. Across the town, Trump's team took two hours to convince him.
"Maybe we'll never see each other after that," Bannon said desperately, cursing Priebus over the phone, "but you have to come to this building and have to come in through the front door."
The good side of the humiliation that Melania Trump had to endure after the story with Billy Bush was that now there was no possibility of her husband becoming president.
Donald Trump's marriage was perplexing to almost everyone around him-or at least to those who had no private jets or a lot of houses. Melania and he spent relatively little time together and stayed days without contact, even when the two were in the Trump Tower. Many times she did not even know where he was or did not pay much attention to it. Her husband moved between his residences as if changing the room. Aside from little knowing about his whereabouts, she also knew little about business and was hardly interested in them. Father absent for his first four children, Trump was even more absent for the fifth, Barron, whom he had with Melania. In his third marriage, he told his friends that he had finally perfected his art: to live and let live - "Do what you want."
Trump was a notorious womanizer, and during the campaign he became perhaps the most famous conqueror in the world. Although no one ever praised Trump's sensitivity to women, he boasted of having many opinions about how to get along with them, including a theory that the greater the age difference between an older man and a woman, At least she carried the horns to the personal side.
However, the idea that their marriage was merely a formality was far from the truth. He talked a lot about Melania when she was not there. She loved to praise her appearance - often in the presence of others, to her embarrassment. As he would tell everyone, with pride and without any irony, she was a "trophy wife". And though she did not share many moments with her, she happily shared her booty. "A happy woman is a happy life," he said, repeating a commonplace well-known among rich men.
He also sought Melania's approval. (In fact, he was looking for all the women around him, who wisely approved.) By 2014, when he began to think seriously about running for president, Melania was one of the few people who thought he could win. It was the end of the line for his daughter, Ivanka, who was careful to stay away from the campaign. With undisguised antipathy for her stepmother, Ivanka would tell friends: "All you need to know about Melania is that she thinks that if he competes, he will definitely win."
Despite her conviction, the prospect of seeing the president's husband horrified Melania. She believed it would destroy her sheltered life - protected too, it must be remembered, from Trump's own family - almost entirely centered on her young son. "Do not put the car in front of the oxen," her husband teased, even as he spent every day in the campaign, dominating the news. But Melania's terror and torment increased.
As she learned from friends, in Manhattan she was running a campaign against her, cruel and funny in her insinuations. Her modeling career has been turned from end to end. In Slovenia, where she was born and spent her childhood, a celebrity magazine, Suzy , published rumors about her after Trump's nomination. Later, as a nasty appetizer of what was to come, the Daily Mail spread the story world-wide.
The New York Pos t put his claws on the remains of a photo shoot from the beginning of her modeling career, with naked Melania photos - a leak that anyone who does not Melania Trump could assign to itself.
Inconsolable, she confronted her husband. Is the future going to be like this? She said she would not be able to bear it. Trump responded in his own way, "Let's sue!" And got lawyers. But he was also very sorry. "There is little left," I told her. "Everything will end in November." And he gave his wife a solemn guarantee: there simply was no way he could win. And even if he was a chronic infidel - he would say irremediable - this was a promise he seemed certain to be able to keep.
Trump's campaign had, and perhaps on purpose, reproduced the scheme of Mel Brooks 's film The Producers . In that classic, Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom, Brooks' crooked heroes, decide to sell beyond 100% of the shares of a Broadway musical they are producing. As they would only be discovered if the show was a success, they do everything to make the musical fail. For this, they create a spectacle so strange that ends up doing success, which ends badly for the heroes.
Driven by pride, narcissism, or a supernatural faith in destiny, most of the time the successful presidential candidates devote much of their careers, if not life, from adolescence, to preparing for the role. They ascend one by one the elective posts, perfect the public image, create and expand their network of contacts, since the success in politics depends very much on the allies. Work without respite. (Even a disinterested one like George W. Bush relied on his father's trusted men to work for him.) And erase his tracks - or at least take care to cover them up. They prepare to win and rule.
Trump's calculations, quite conscious, followed another line. The candidate and his top aides believed that they could enjoy all the advantages of becoming president without having to change a millimeter of their behavior or world view: we do not have to be anything but what we are, because Of course, we will not win.
Many candidates for the presidency of the United States have turned into virtue the fact that they are outsiders in Washington. In practice, this strategy only favors candidates for governor and senator. Every serious candidate, no matter how small- mindedWashington is, looks for habituésof the establishment for guidance and support. However, in Trump's case, virtually no one in his narrower circle had ever worked in politics at the national level: his closest advisers had not worked in politics at all. Throughout his life, Trump had had few friends from any area, but at the beginning of the campaign for President he had almost none in politics. The only real politicians close to Trump were Rudy Giuliani and Chris Christie, the two in their own peculiar and isolated ways. And it would be a compliment to say that Trump knew nothing - absolutely nothing - about the essential fundamentals of the post. At the beginning of the campaign, in a scene worthy of The producers, Sam Nunberg was assigned to explain the Constitution to the candidate: "I came to the Fourth Amendment before he began to press his lip with his finger and roll his eyes."
Almost everyone on Trump's team was accompanied by obscure problems that could embarrass a president or his advisors. Mike Flynn, a future National Security Adviser who opened Trump's campaign rallies and amused the candidate by complaining about the cia and the lack of luck of the American spies, heard from friends that it had not been a good idea to receive $ 45,000 of the Russians for a lecture. "Well, that will only be a problem if we win," he reassured the interlocutors, knowing that, therefore, there would be no problem.
Paul Manafort, the international lobbyist and political consultant whom Trump had appointed to lead his campaign after Lewandowski's resignation - and who agreed not to be paid for the service, arousing mistrust of a possible exchange of favors - had spent 30 years representing dictators and corrupt tyrants, earning millions of dollars in a succession of financial operations that had long drawn the attention of researchers in the United States. What's more, by the time he joined the campaign, he was being sued - with all his financial operations documented - by the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, who accused him of stealing $ 17 million in a fraudulent real estate deal and vowed bloodthirsty revenge.
For obvious reasons, few politicians - and no president before Trump - came from the real estate business: a poorly regulated market, based on high indebtedness and exposed to frequent fluctuations, always depending on favor of rulers and preferential currency of exchange to solve cash problems : money laundry. Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner; his father, Charlie; the children of Trump, Don Jr., Eric and Ivanka, as well as Trump himself, all of them based their commercial ventures, to a greater or lesser extent, on the dubious limbo of the international cash flow of assets and money from tax evasion . Charlie Kushner - whose real estate operations were closely linked to his son,
Modern politicians and their teams investigate their tracks more rigorously than the opposition. If Trump's team had evaluated his candidate, he would have wisely concluded that he would be in trouble if a thorough ethical examination were carried out. But Trump evidently did not do this job. Roger Stone, Trump's former political adviser, explained to Steve Bannon that Trump's psychic structure prevented him from seeing clearly. But Trump would not let anyone else know so much about him-so that he was in some sense superior to him. Be that as it may, why subject yourself to such an in-depth and potentially dangerous look if there is no chance of victory?
Trump not only ignored the potential conflicts of his business and real estate companies, but audaciously declined to disclose his Income Tax return. Why would he do that if he was not going to win?
Moreover, Trump refused to take some time to analyze, even if hypothetically, questions about the transition, saying that this was "bad luck," but actually meaning that it would be a waste of time. Nor would he contemplate, albeit remotely, the question of his enterprises and conflicts.
He was not going to win! Or lose would be win.
Trump would be the most famous man in the world - a martyr to unscrupulous Hillary Clinton.
His daughter Ivanka and his son-in-law Jared would pass from rich boys more or less in the shade to international celebrities and brand ambassadors. Steve Bannon would become the de facto leader of the Tea Party.
Kellyanne Conway would be a star of the news channels.
Reince Priebus and Katie Walsh would have their Republican Party back. Melania Trump could return to lunch without being noticed.
This was the outcome without setbacks that they expected on November 8, 2016. The defeat would do well for everyone. Shortly after 8 pm, when the unexpected possibility - Trump really could win - was about to confirm, Don Jr. told a friend that his father, or djt, as he called him, seemed to have seen a ghost. Melania, whom Donald Trump had given solemn assurance, kept crying-and they were not tears of joy.
At an interval of just over an hour, at the playful observation of Steve Bannon, a stunned Trump metamorphosed into an unbelieving Trump and soon into a terrified Trump. But the final transformation was yet to come: Donald Trump suddenly became a man convinced that he deserved to be President of the United States and that he was fully capable of holding office.
The lack of scruples was a feature of previous presidents of the United States. What really confused many people who knew Trump very well was that he had managed to win the election and accomplish this feat despite missing something that, in an obvious sense, is the main requirement for the job: what neuroscientists call a function executive. He had managed to win the race for the presidency, but his brain was unable to perform essential duties of the new position. Trump did not have the ability to plan, organize, pay attention and change focus: he had never been able to adjust his behavior to the goals of the moment. At a more basic level, I just could not relate cause and effect.
The accusation that Trump had allied with the Russians to win the election, of which he was a little case, was for some of his friends a perfect example of his inability to connect the points. Even though he did not conspire personally with the Russians to defraud the election, the initiatives he took to fall on Vladimir Putin's graces, above all, left no doubt a trail of alarming words and acts that would likely cost a huge political cost.
Shortly after the election, his friend Roger Ailes urgently told him, "Now you have to deal with Russia." Even exiled from Fox News, Ailes maintained a fantastic network of informants. It prevented Trump from potentially damaging material that could burst. "You need to take this seriously, Donald."
"Jared already did that," Trump said cheerfully. "It's all settled."
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