Viewers were anticipating round two between Trump and Kelly, but the two were cordial to each other from the start. He said, “Nice to be with you, Megyn. You’re looking well.”
She said, “As are you.”
From my seat to the far right of the stage, I exhaled deeply. I’d hoped Trump’s performance would be disciplined and substantive. The nomination was within his grasp, and a solid showing tonight could be enough to clinch it.
Throughout the two-hour debate, Kelly’s questions to Trump were tough but fair. The only glimmer of tension between the two was over the Better Business Bureau’s ranking of Trump University; he said it’d been awarded an A rating, and she corrected him and said that it had actually received a D−.
Next to me in my row was Pastor Darrell Scott and his wife, my friend from Cleveland, and several other VIP Trump supporters. In front and behind, to the left and the right, we were surrounded by supporters of Rubio, Cruz, and, for the most part, Kasich. They’d driven across the border from Ohio to Michigan in droves.
Rubio supporters had high hopes coming into this debate because their candidate had taken some low blows at Trump. I suppose their new strategy was “let Rubio be Trump.” A few days earlier, on February 28, in retaliation to Trump’s calling him “Little Marco,” Rubio said at a rally in Salem, Virginia, “He doesn’t sweat because his pores are clogged from the spray tan that he uses. Donald is not going to make America great, he’s going to make America orange! I’ll admit the guy, he’s taller than me. He’s like six two, which is why I don’t understand why his hands are the size of someone who is five two. Have you seen his hands? And you know what they say about guys with small hands . . . You can’t trust them! . . .” Had he hired a joke writer from Saturday Night Live?
Rubio couldn’t pull off the crassness like Donald. The media pounced on it, though, almost begging for a debate confrontation.
I was afraid Donald would not be able to resist taking the bait and was pleasantly surprised that he didn’t attack Rubio unduly. He didn’t need to. He was so close to winning it all. He didn’t have to do more than show up. But he did very well. It was his most disciplined and prepared debate yet.
Until.
Toward the end of the debate, Marco Rubio said, “Trump has basically mocked everybody with personal attacks. He’s done so to people that are sitting on the stage today. He’s done so about people that are disabled. He’s done it about every other candidate in this race. So if there’s anyone who’s ever deserved to be attacked that way, it has been Donald Trump, for the way he’s treated people in the campaign. Now that said, I would much prefer to have a policy debate. Let’s have a policy debate. . . . Talk about Donald Trump’s strategy and my strategy . . . and on healthcare and on the important issues facing this country.”
Trump responded, “I have to say this. He hit my hands. Nobody has ever hit my hands. I’ve never heard of this. Look at those hands. Are they small hands? . . . And he referred to my hands, if they are small, something else must be small. I guarantee you there is no problem. I guarantee it.”
I was flabbergasted. Had Donald just referenced his penis onstage during a political debate? My hopes of a sober performance from Donald came crashing down. Of course, in the days to come, the pundits were outraged by the vulgarity. Everyone in the Trump section was extremely uncomfortable with the exchange, and we’d all been so pleased with his performance until that moment. Knowing him as well as I did, a part of me knew he couldn’t resist going there. His ego would not allow him to ignore an insult to his manhood.
As one of the few female surrogates for the campaign, it was my responsibility to respond to this latest Trump outrage in the spin room that night and media hits for days to come. The last thing I wanted to do was answer questions about the size of Trump’s hands or any other body part. I went on MSNBC and a couple of other networks that night. I couldn’t reach anyone from the campaign for talking points, so I had to wing it.
• • •
ON MARCH 8, right after a Florida rally, just days after Handsizegate, Corey Lewandowski grabbed the wrist of Michelle Fields, a Breitbart reporter. When she was trying to ask Trump a question, Corey yanked her back so forcefully, he left bruises on her wrist. Now Corey was part of Trump’s ongoing “woman problem,” not to mention the growing “violence problem.”
The MAGA rallies were getting hostile. Reporters and photographers were being roughed up by supporters and security. Angry confrontations were sprouting up. We had a big rally scheduled for March 11 at the University of Illinois Chicago Pavilion, and we all worried about an escalation of the by-now established pattern. In the week leading up to this particular event, in Barack Obama’s hometown, organizations such as MoveOn.org, Black Lives Matter, and College Students for Bernie had been mobilizing their members to lobby UIC to shut down the event, and, when that failed, they showed up with bullhorns, signs, and sore attitudes. Thousands of protesters arrived the night before the event and held a vigil.
I was never intimidated by aggressive protesters, because I’d made a practice of being nonconfrontational. When I walked through a group of them, I was respectful and friendly and did not engage. I firmly believed that they had every right to be there. Protesting is one of the most fundamental rights and freedoms that we enjoy in this country. Our great democracy was created to ensure freedom of speech, freedom of protest, and freedom to assemble. I am not opposed to anti-Trump protests, but I am opposed to violence to shut down free speech.
I was among the surrogates scheduled to attend this rally. I’d been in Columbus, Ohio, doing another event, and was at the airport to fly to Chicago. Moments before I boarded the plane, I texted Trump’s bodyguard Keith Schiller and he said that the event wasn’t going forward, that Donald would not be attending. Immediately, I found a TV in a sports bar to see what was going on at the UIC Pavilion.
It was the first time that I thought being part of this campaign could be dangerous for me.
Outside the venue, thousands of protesters were screaming at the supporters. People held up signs denouncing Trump as a racist and sexist, and pictures of Trump as a Nazi. I was taken aback by the sheer size of the crowd, and the massive force of three hundred armed police in riot gear surrounding the venue to control the crowds, scores of them on horseback. Many blocks surrounding the venue were shut down to vehicles. The images from inside the venue were even more alarming. Security forces escorted protesters out, but there were too many to control. More than nine thousand supporters had waited for hours to see their candidate—Trump liked to start his rallies at 9:00 p.m. or later—and only moments before he was supposed to speak, it was announced that, due to security concerns, he would not take the stage. The protesters inside whooped with victory. The supporters were furious and frustrated. Instantly, like a lit match igniting a dry forest, throngs of warring groups and individuals started shoving and yelling. Heightened tensions were close to or beyond the breaking point. People started chanting, “Bernie! Bernie! Bernie!” Other people chanted, “Hillary! Hillary! Hillary!” And, of course, since it was a Trump event, there were chants of his name: “Trump! Trump! Trump!”
The crowds inside didn’t want to leave, but they were forced to exit by the police. The organizers were criticized for pushing thousands of disappointed Trump supporters onto the streets, exactly where the protesters were assembled. Inevitably, mayhem followed. Multiple arrests. Skirmishes on the street. Protesters blocking traffic. Citizens and police bloodied.
I did not condone the violent behavior by any Trump supporters or the protesters, nor did I agree with threatening violence against anyone. But we had reason to believe that at least some of the hostile participants were not doing it out of the passion of their convictions.
Based on internal reports not made public at the time, we suspected that the protesters had been organized by the opposition. And in fact, later that year, an explosive investigation would be released by Project Veritas Action that showed secre
tly videotaped conversations of Scott Foval, the field director for the Americans United for Change, and Bob Creamer of Democracy Partners, two consultant groups working with organizations supporting Clinton. In the videos it appeared that Foval and Creamer were basically bragging about having their people wear Planned Parenthood T-shirts and wave Nazi Trump signs to get Trump diehards to “pop off” and to “draw them to punch you” at Trump/Pence events. The Project Veritas Action investigation provided evidence that both the Clinton campaign and the DNC were supporting disruptive activities. Their objective was to cause anarchy at Trump events, and to make his supporters look subhuman and deranged in front of the media.
Did you ever hear about Trump supporters crashing Clinton or Sanders rallies? No. We didn’t resort to planting agitators at their events. But according to Project Veritas’s investigation, the Clinton campaign not only knew about the plants, they requested them. In the WikiLeaks dump of Clinton emails, there were allegedly references to “birddogging,” or the practice of having people sit in the front row at Trump events to stir things up, in full view of the cameras.
We believed that the Clinton camp was doing what the Clintons had always done—playing dirty. Having worked in the Clinton White House and in the early parts of the Ready for Hillary campaign, I felt that was their modus operandi.
When Trump said from the podium in Alabama in 2015 about a rowdy protester, “Get him the hell out of here, will you, please? Get him out of here. Throw him out!” and on Fox News the next day, “Maybe he should have been roughed up,” he suspected this person to be a planted agitator.
There were a few other statements of this nature, too. In Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in February, “If you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of them, would you? Seriously. I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees.”
Same month, in Las Vegas: “Oh, I love the old days, you know? You know what I hate? There’s a guy, totally disruptive, throwing punches. We’re not allowed to punch back anymore. I love the old days; you know what they used to do to guys like that when they were in a place like this? They’d be carried out in a stretcher, folks. Oh, it’s true,” Trump said. “The guards are very gentle with him. He’s walking out with big high fives, smiling, laughing. I’d like to punch him in the face, I’ll tell you.”
With his rhetoric, Trump encouraged his people and gave them license to behave in exactly the way the Clinton plants hoped they would. It wasn’t hard to agitate the darker elements of society, susceptible idol-worshippers who looked up to the candidate/cult leader on the stage and had a physical, if not violent, orientation. Members of the Trumpworld cult would do anything he said or asked, directly or indirectly.
People texted and called me to ask how I could support a man who threatened protesters with violence. I wasn’t at liberty to explain that we suspected a good number of them to be plants. I did think that Trump’s rhetoric went too far. Behind the scenes, everyone on the campaign advised him to tone it down and said that it was dangerous. I remember speaking with Michael Cohen about my concerns, and he said, “This whole situation is out of control. It’s time to f**k people up. If they are bringing people in, we should bring people in.” I’d get no help in deescalating the tone at rallies from him.
But no matter what Trump said or did, no one could control everyone who came to events and supported him. The thinking was “the show must go on.” As long as supporters weren’t harming anyone, everybody was welcome.
There was a lot of blame to go around for the failure of the Chicago event. We blamed the protesters. We blamed law enforcement for not properly managing the situation. We blamed Chicago and its mayor, Obama acolyte Rahm Emanuel, for not supplying adequate security resources. We blamed everything and everyone, except for Donald Trump. No one talked about what we could do to change him or his message. The divide in our nation was simply too big to bridge, even if the candidate wanted to (he didn’t). He relished the conflict.
I was concerned, but trusted that he knew best how to handle the matter. The way things were talked about, you were either on his side or working to undermine him. When I look back and try to pinpoint the moment when, in my own heart, I adopted an “us” versus “them” mind-set, it was that night in Chicago in March 2016. We all had a bunker mentality. We were hunkered down, ready to battle for our candidate. I had picked my team, and I wanted my team to win. The longer I stayed involved, the deeper my loyalty was to Donald Trump and the bigger my blind spot became. As I’ve said, he chooses people who are very loyal, who subscribe to the fame and charisma that is Donald Trump’s magnetism. And I was one of those people.
I never stopped to ask myself what all this conflict meant for the future of the country. If I acknowledged my role in what was happening, I would have had to come to terms with nearly thirteen years of suppressed doubts and concerns about Donald Trump, and I was simply incapable of doing that at that point. I’d wake up the next day and put out a new fire, or do damage control about a new tweet or one of his crazy claims. There was always an emergency to manage. I focused my mind and energies on short-term Trump problems, which allowed me to avoid thinking about my own long-term Trump problem of having given him the benefit of the doubt for more than a decade, despite having many reasons not to.
When you work on a campaign day in, day out, you’re only thinking about the next rally, the next primary, the next debate. It was all about winning, winning, winning. Winning votes and defeating opponents. When things came up, we would say, “It’s the opposition creating problems. They’re crooked and corrupt,” and then we’d pivot back to the issue at hand or putting out the next fire. We had an answer for everything.
And the response, nine times out of ten, was always “What about Hillary Clinton’s emails? What about her use of a private server? What about her emailing classified documents that put our national security at risk?”
I called our number one campaign strategy “whataboutism.”
In all of our talking-point memos and emails, we were instructed to bring up her emails. No matter what a reporter asked us, we pivoted to that. It was the only thing we had. At that point, we lacked a platform, plans, big ideas about foreign or domestic policy. All we had was Trump’s bluster, the MAGA slogan, and Hillary’s emails.
The night of the Chicago rally left a deep scar on my consciousness, and I’d never even reached the city.
From my place in the figurative bunker, I came out aggressively to support candidate Trump and believed the argument that the protesters were at fault. I spoke to MSNBC host Chris Matthews later that night, and said, “This is a country that you have the right to assemble, you have the right to free speech. But you have no right to go into a closed, private event, and, if you do, you get what’s coming to you. I do not condone violence, but if you go into an environment where you’re interrupting thirteen, fourteen times, do you expect a hug or kumbaya? Come on, Chris. These protesters know exactly what they’re getting at this point. . . . He’s from New York. He’s not going to be pushed around.”
I got a lot of flak for that interview. The media used the clip to insist that we condoned the violent attacks on protesters. They generally portrayed the protest as organically occurring, and rarely explored whether they might be staged. I could not share the details we had internally with Matthews or anyone, but I stand by my convictions that these were tactics and that they came straight out of the Clinton playbook.
Shortly after that dark spot, a bright light came into my life. In late March 2016, I was invited to the board meeting for the charity Golf. My Future. My Game, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to teach African American kids how to play the sport, founded by Craig Kirby, a Democratic political strategist, a fellow Ohioan, and a colleague of mine from the Clinton White House. The plan was for me to fly in from LA and meet Craig at DCA with the board chairman, a man named John Allen Newman, a pastor, who was flying up from Jacksonville, Florida. The flight was delayed, and John wait
ed with Craig to pick me up. He greeted me in a dark suit, looking very handsome.
We spent the day running around, doing things for the charity. Our chemistry was instant. On our first date, we went to see DC’s cherry blossom festival and walked under the trees around the Washington Mall water basin as pink petals drifted down. It was pure romance. I’d been dating on and off in Los Angeles but hadn’t been in anything serious since Michael died. This felt different, though. John was a Democrat, as I’d been for most of my life. He didn’t judge me for my allegiance to Trump, although he was concerned about his rhetoric. We didn’t discuss politics that much, and chose to discover what we shared. Our connection was undeniable.
John and I started a long-distance relationship. He was in Jacksonville, and I was all over the map. Once, when I was in LA, I got a text from him, and he asked me to dinner. Turned out, he was already on a plane, flying across the country just to have a meal with me. I was flattered and charmed, but I wasn’t ready to give up my dating life yet. I made it clear that until I had a firm commitment, I was going to continue seeing other people. He didn’t like the sound of that.
I was so busy with the campaign, I took a wait-and-see attitude about John. If we were going to get serious, I’d know soon enough.
• • •
SENATOR MARCO RUBIO lost to Trump in his home state of Florida. He dropped out on March 15, and on July 20, he endorsed Donald Trump.
Only three contestants—I mean candidates—remained in the reality show that was the GOP primary race. It was down to Trump, Cruz, and Kasich.
Things had already gotten personal, but the acrimony intensified when the battle between candidates turned into a beauty contest between their wives. An anti-Trump super PAC, which we thought was working in secret collaboration with Cruz’s camp, released a raunchy photo of Melania from her modeling days. The aim was to disparage her and, through her, her husband. As always when he felt insulted, Trump reacted aggressively and tweeted that he could “spill the beans” about Ted Cruz’s wife, Heidi, who’d struggled with depression. A Trump supporter created a meme with an unflattering photo of Mrs. Cruz on one side, and a modeling headshot of Melania on the other, and the caption, “No need to ‘spill the beans.’ The images are worth a thousand words.” Trump retweeted the meme.
Unhinged: An Insider's Account of the Trump White House Page 10
