by Tim Alberta
Trump didn’t particularly like Rove, either. He found the “architect” of George W. Bush’s winning campaigns to be haughty and condescending. For much of the past year, Trump had raged against Rove when reading his columns in the Wall Street Journal, many of which were pitilessly critical of the GOP front-runner. On numerous occasions, Trump reached out to a mutual friend, the casino magnate and GOP megadonor Steve Wynn, asking him to relay his displeasure to Rove.
In early May, Rove’s phone rang. “Karl, kiddo, I talked to Donald and he wants you to write something nice about him,” Wynn said. “He won the Indiana primary. Can you write something nice about him?”
“As a matter of fact, I just got done writing a column, and I said some nice things about him,” Rove replied. “Would you like to hear it?”
Rove read portions aloud. He said that Trump had “bludgeoned 16 opponents into submission” and “rewrote the rule book,” beginning the column with a blunt declaration: “No one has seen anything like this.”
Wynn approved. But the next morning, he called Rove back. Trump hated the column. Rove had castigated the candidate for his endless string of insults, called the JFK–Rafael Cruz talk “nuts,” and written, “Trump’s scorched-earth tactics have left deep wounds that make victory more uncertain.”4
Wynn read Rove the riot act on behalf of his friend. But then he added something surprising: Trump wanted to sit down to talk strategy. “He says he wants to meet with you and get your advice,” Wynn told Rove. “He knows you did this twice.”
A few weeks later, on May 23, Rove surveyed the nine-hundred-square-foot living room of Wynn’s apartment in New York City. The setting was fabulous: Situated on the thirtieth and thirty-first floors of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, the ballroom turned domicile featured, among other things, fifteen-foot cathedral ceilings, a library, a media room, and a private terrace overlooking Central Park South. Rove had arrived two hours early, wanting to keep the meeting private and avoid the media scrum surely accompanying Trump. Yet the candidate arrived by himself, right on time, without any entourage or fanfare. He, too, seemed intent on secrecy.
Trump and Rove had met before: In 2010, Rove traveled to Trump Tower to solicit funds for his super PAC, American Crossroads. He walked out with a $50,000 check. The small victory earned Rove some ribbing from Steven Law, a former Mitch McConnell aide and American Crossroads’ president. “Congratulations,” Law told Rove. “I think you’re the first Republican I’ve ever known to get a check from Donald Trump.”
There wasn’t much foreplay when they sat down across from one another inside Wynn’s opulent living room. Trump asked Rove what he needed to know. Rove, in firehose fashion, launched into his lecture on the contours of the Electoral College.
“You have to have a strategy to get to 270. We had several paths to get there,” Rove began. “We had the traditional battleground states, which were Florida, Ohio, New Hampshire, Iowa, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Minnesota. And we had four battleground states that had traditionally been carried by Democrats: Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, and West Virginia.”
“West Virginia?” Trump interrupted. “I did really good in the primary there. I can win West Virginia—that’s a big Republican state.”
“Well, in 2000 it wasn’t,” Rove explained. “Bob Dole had lost it by fifteen points four years earlier. The last time it had gone for Republicans in an open-seat presidential race was 1928, and it took nominating a New York Catholic to bring all the Methodists and Presbyterians and Baptists out of the hills and hollows of West Virginia to vote Republican.”
Rove worked his way around the map. When he reached the West, he focused on four states, Montana, Nevada, Arizona, and Oregon, explaining that Bill Clinton and Al Gore had each carried at least one of them. Trump, Rove said, would need to win at least two—and probably three—to stand a chance in 2016.
“Oregon? I can win Oregon,” Trump said excitedly. “I did really good in the primary there.”
“No, you can’t,” Rove cautioned. “In 2000, we had Ralph Nader on the ballot there, and he had a real following in Portland and Eugene; the state had just elected a Republican U.S. senator; they had Republican constitutional officers; they had a Republican majority in the statehouse; and we still lost it by half a point. Since then, it’s gone hard left. The last time we won a statewide race was 2002; we hold no constitutional offices; and we’re down to less than a third in the statehouse and a third in the state Senate. There’s no way you can win Oregon.”
Trump smirked. “I don’t need to,” he said. “I can win California.”
“No, you really can’t,” Rove chuckled, wondering whether the candidate was being facetious. Judging from Trump’s expression, he was not. “You’re down seventeen points in the RCP average,” Rove told him. “It’s a giant suck of time and money. There’s no way you can win California.”
Trump was growing irritated. “Well, I’ll win New York.”
Rove sighed. “No, you won’t. Bernie Sanders got more votes by himself than all the Republicans combined. Two and a half times the number of people voted in the Democrat primary than the Republican primary. You’re losing to Hillary by twenty-six points in the RCP average, and it’s a waste of time. If you spend a day trying to win votes in a place like California or New York or Oregon, it’s a day you can’t spend trying to win votes in Pennsylvania or Iowa.”
Trump looked puzzled. “I can win Iowa?”
“Oh yeah,” Rove cooed, building the candidate back up after tearing down his illusions. “You didn’t win the caucuses, but those farmers in the western part of the state, they hate her guts. And there are a bunch of blue-collar workers in the eastern part of the state that are worried about their jobs. You can win Iowa. But not if you’re spending your time in Oregon, California, and New York.”
Trump turned to Wynn. “Why aren’t people in my campaign talking to me about this?”
(Three days later, Trump gave a speech naming the “fifteen states” that he would campaign in. Among them: New York and California.5)
As the conversation progressed, Trump grew less defensive. He seemed to recognize that Rove, however patronizingly, was trying to help him succeed. Trump’s clutch of advisers talked little of long-term strategy or historical voting trends; mostly, they urged him to concentrate on animating the base with his rhetoric and policy positions. He had long dismissed the complaints from his adult children that Corey Lewandowski, the campaign manager, was doing him a disservice. But now, as he soaked up a briefing of unprecedented depth, Trump was beginning to wonder.
The meeting spilled into its third hour. Rove coached Trump on everything he could think of, from campaign finance to parochial swing state policy disputes. When the conversation turned to Pennsylvania, Wynn complained about Chinese steel, and Trump sounded off on the country, saying the United States should never have allowed it to join the World Trade Organization. “Actually, we should have,” Rove corrected him, “because that binds them to an international set of trading norms, and if they violate them, we can take action in front of the WTO. It takes a little time to do it, but in 2015, the Obama administration filed like one hundred and fifteen actions against China and other actors, and if history is any guide, we’ll win almost every one of those actions and recoup money for affected industries.”
Trump arched an eyebrow. “Really? We can do that?”
Rove nodded. This guy has been talking about trade for thirty years, the Republican Svengali thought, and he doesn’t know the basic tools at the president’s disposal.
The Republican Party’s new leader was curious about one more thing. His team had been preparing a list of vice-presidential selections, but he felt that everyone advising him on the decision was pushing an agenda. He wanted to know what Wynn and Rove thought.
“Kasich, no question,” Wynn volunteered.
Trump frowned. “He doesn’t say nice things about me. Who else?”
“
Well,” Rove said, “I think your battlegrounds are going to be between Pennsylvania and Iowa, and if you’re going to break the Blue Wall, you need someone with midwestern sensibilities and someone who has evangelical appeal. There’s one guy who fits that description: Mike Pence.”
It was the strangest of smoke-filled rooms, a Central Park château populated by the renowned party strategist alternately called “Boy Genius” and “Turd Blossom” by his former boss; the financier and casino tycoon who would soon become a high-profile casualty of the country’s sexual harassment crackdown; and the rookie politician who had heckled and hoodwinked his way to the Republican nomination for president. It wasn’t quite how Jack and Bobby had picked LBJ, or how Reagan had settled on George Bush Sr., but a seed was planted that day.
Trump allowed a smile at the suggestion of Pence. “He says nice things about me.”
ON THE EIGHTH FLOOR OF THE MARRIOTT MARQUIS IN TIMES SQUARE, Marjorie Dannenfelser stabbed anxiously at a plate of salad while offering a series of defensive answers.
It was June 21, and Dannenfelser, a social conservative titan and president of the anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony List, was one of nearly a thousand Christian activists who had traveled to New York City for an afternoon summit with the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. She also was one of roughly fifty people to join him for a VIP meeting beforehand. Many of these leaders, including Dannenfelser, had vigorously opposed his candidacy throughout the campaign.
Yet, much like Ryan—who had finally dropped his objections earlier that month, endorsing Trump in a piece for the Janesville Gazette—they were beginning to feel as though they had no recourse.
“All along the way, he was our last choice,” Dannenfelser said. “But when you get to the end, to the point of having a binary choice, you must choose.”
This sentiment echoed around the Manhattan hotel’s ornamented hallways. Some prominent Christian leaders, including Liberty University president Jerry Falwell Jr., went out of their way to lavish Trump with praise despite his sui generis secularity. (After introducing Trump at the New York summit, Falwell Jr. posed for a photograph alongside the candidate back at Trump Tower, with a Playboy magazine cover on the wall behind them.) But for most of the faith leaders in attendance, Trump represented the manifestation of their fears about societal decline. Here was a man who had paraded his mistresses through the tabloids; who had bantered with Howard Stern about the size of his own daughter’s breasts; who had previously taken extreme pro-abortion positions; who seemed to marinate in coarseness and cruelty; and who had nonetheless won the GOP nomination for president.
These concerns were not necessarily allayed during the VIP meeting. Speaking to the group of spiritual influencers, Trump said of Christianity, “I owe so much to it in so many ways.” He then proceeded to explain that he wouldn’t be standing before them without it, not because of how the faith shaped his life or informed his worldview, but “because the evangelical vote was mostly gotten by me.” The attendees walked out of the room in a daze.
The general session went somewhat better, thanks to the lively introductions of Falwell Jr. and Franklin Graham, another descendant of American Christendom royalty. Graham remarked on how God had used deeply flawed men throughout history to shape the world for good, drawing parallels between Trump and David, the giant slayer and Israeli king who ordered the husband of his mistress killed in battle. The comparison left some in the room feeling queasy.
Trump spent much of his remarks acting as though he were before any other audience, giving a self-glorifying rundown of the latest polls and his recent media coverage. But at some point, either because of his own observation or due to a planned transition, Trump switched gears. He deployed carefully curated phrases, including “pro-life judges.” The attendees, in decades of hearing from Republican political figures, had never heard someone so bold as to use that terminology; a typical conservative politician would use coded language to assure voters of such a priority. Trump also broke new ground when he raised, unsolicited, concerns about a fifty-year-old law implemented under President Lyndon Baines Johnson that could threaten the tax-exempt status of churches that spoke out on social issues. Prompted by members of his newly formed Evangelical Executive Advisory Board, Trump warned about the “Johnson Amendment,” and promised to fight on behalf of Christians in a way that no political leader had before.
This was like David’s harp to Saul’s ears. Eight years of Barack Obama’s presidency had left the white evangelical community feeling besieged, not just from the forces of big government, which approved same-sex marriage and mandated contraceptive coverage, but from a godless, violent, overdrugged, hypersexualized culture that was chewing through the fabric of their Judeo-Christian civilization. “Evangelicals had been used over and over by Republicans. And there was something different about his interaction with us,” recalled Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council. “You could describe it as transactional. He wanted our votes, and he made promises that most Christian candidates would never, ever make.”
Ever since Indiana, prominent evangelicals had advised Trump that he needed to do two things to win their voters. The first was to emphasize a commitment to conservative judges. In the wake of Scalia’s death, and McConnell’s refusal to allow a hearing for Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, the looming Supreme Court vacancy was the ultimate mobilizer for Christian conservatives. Trump did them one better: In mid-May, after running a wildly unconventional idea past several allies (including Leonard Leo, president of a GOP lawyer association called the Federalist Society, and Don McGahn, the future White House counsel), he released a list of conservative judges he would pick from for Scalia’s seat.
“I had no idea how important Supreme Court judges were to a voter,” Trump admits. “When I got involved, deep into it, I realized that there was tremendous distrust of me because they didn’t know—was I a conservative? Was I a liberal? They didn’t know anything about me.”
He pauses, sensing how this might sound demeaning to his celebrity. “They knew me very well. The Apprentice was one of the most successful shows on television by far. They knew me; they got to know me very well, they knew me long before The Apprentice. That’s why I was chosen to do The Apprentice, right?”
He continues, “But what they didn’t know, is he going to like conservative judges? Or is he going to like liberal judges?”
The judicial roster won glowing reviews from the religious right. But there was another box for Trump to check.
“We want to see,” Perkins said after the New York summit, “who he picks as his running mate.”
WHILE THE PRESUMPTIVE REPUBLICAN NOMINEE WAS HARD AT WORK attempting to heal the lacerations suffered in his primary, Democrats were still swinging knives.
The contest to succeed President Obama atop the Democratic Party was underwhelming. It drew only six declared candidates, three of whom withdrew before the voting began. Of the remaining group, Martin O’Malley, the former Maryland governor, promptly exited the race after a distant third-place finish in Iowa.
That left just two contenders for the nomination: Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.
Everyone in politics recognized that the two parties had been systematically weakened since the turn of the century. What no one could have predicted was that the two candidates who most energized the party bases in 2016, Trump and Sanders, did not actually belong to the parties.
Though Sanders caucused with the Democrats during his quarter century in Congress, first in the House and later in the Senate, he was an independent and self-described socialist, a left-wing version of the erstwhile GOP presidential candidate Ron Paul: a ruffled, doctrinaire, septuagenarian zealot. Much like Paul, whose brand of strident libertarianism struck a chord with portions of the post–George W. Bush Republican Party, Sanders initially seemed more energized by influencing the post-Obama Democratic Party’s direction rather than winning its nomination.
And then,
the familiar flaws of his opponent resurfaced.
More than any figure in American political life—more than Obama, who had helped birth the Tea Party, and more than her own husband, who had been impeached—Clinton had a knack for eliciting congenital hatred from the right. It dated back several decades to her time as First Lady, and the perception of her complicity in all her husband’s scandals dating back to his days as the governor of Arkansas. Her approval ratings peaked after the president admitted to a sexual relationship with a young White House intern, Monica Lewinsky, but even then, many conservatives viewed her as dishonest and politically calculating.
Clinton went on to be popular and highly effective as the junior senator from New York. She was also well liked during her tenure as secretary of state, with a 66 percent approval rating that topped Obama’s own standing. Even so, and yet again, Clinton found herself under fire from the right: her failed “reset” with Russia; her conflicts of interest related to the Clinton Foundation; her response to the terrorist ambush that killed four Americans in Benghazi; and, as the House GOP’s Benghazi probe uncovered, her use of a private email server to conduct government business.
Underscoring all these vulnerabilities was the most basic of political defects: a failure to connect with people. It had been a defining moment of the 2008 primary when Obama, smirking during a debate, remarked, “You’re likeable enough, Hillary,” highlighting the charisma gap between the rival candidates.
Bernie Sanders was no Barack Obama, but like the forty-fourth president, he had tapped into something unique on the left. Sweating through his oversize suit, blades of white hair shooting in every direction, jabbing a finger in the air and talking of the yuge gap between the one-percenters and the rest of the country, Sanders was the Doc Brown of the Democratic Party, and the issue of economic inequality was his flux capacitor.
