by Megyn Kelly
“Like a baby,” I responded. “The check clears every week, and we provide a service to the nation. And you?”
The point is, things always get tense as presidential politics fire up. That makes elections the best and worst thing to cover. I love the excitement, the competition, the high stakes. The anger, accusations, and demonization I could do without. Never do I reassess life on the political front lines more than during election years.
The truth is, it’s always far more than just a year, and, entering the 2016 presidential race, I knew the process would require endurance. The first Republican candidate, Ted Cruz, announced in March 2015, more than nineteen months before the election. Babies would be born on Election Day whose parents had not yet met when the race got started. We were going to be with these guys for a long time.
For the first few months of the primary season, our show was like a revolving door for the Republican candidates. We asked for the Democrats too, but they generally chose not to come on Fox News. If they wanted to ignore the largest cable news audience in the country, there wasn’t much I could do about it (other than incessantly ask them to reconsider, which I did). Virtually every one of the Republicans came to The Kelly File within twenty-four hours of their official announcement, and we’d talk about their bios, their policy, and the race. Slowly but surely, we were helping America get to know them.
By the time we got to the summer of 2015, the GOP had seventeen candidates. Seventeen! It was an absolute mob scene. I understood why a lot of Republican politicians thought they had a shot. We were coming off of eight years of the Obama administration, and America tends to want a change of party after a two-term president.
With so many candidates, the debates were going to be key, and Fox News was lucky enough to be hosting the first one. It was scheduled for August 6 in Cleveland, on the same stage where the GOP victor would accept the nomination one year later.
There were so many candidates that not all of them could possibly participate in one debate. We discussed the problem at length. Should there be two debates, with the candidates mixed up randomly? Just one, with the top-polling candidates only, and nothing for the others? In the end, Fox settled on two debates—one for those with the highest poll numbers, one for the lower tier. The Fox management team would choose five national polls and take the average to figure out the ten who were polling the highest. Most of the folks relegated to the undercard debate were not happy, and some complained. But in no world did it make sense to put seventeen candidates on the stage. We felt comfortable with our approach. Voters needed help figuring out what distinguished each candidate from the other, and that’s where Fox News came in.
I had moderated presidential debates four years earlier, so I knew the drill. The debate team would be spending many, many hours meeting with one another and preparing for the big night. I was not looking forward to the extra hours away from Doug and our kids, but I was also mindful of the importance of the work. It’s the most rewarding thing we do—the biggest professional responsibility we have. We take it very seriously.
One person dismissed by all of the pundits at first was Donald Trump. When Trump had announced just a couple of months earlier, his poll numbers were dreadful, in the low single digits. No one thought of him then as anything more than an entertaining diversion. For the first half of the summer, everyone was just enjoying the show.
The smart money back then was on Jeb Bush. Jeb was seen as presidential. He was smart and had experience. Maybe it’s that he is from American royalty, which the Bush family certainly is—he looked and felt like other presidents. And yet, he didn’t have that special thing that presidents usually have, the unbridled confidence, the moxie.
He gave his first television one-on-one to me after a speech at Liberty University. It did not go particularly well for him. He told me the Iraq War was not a mistake. I asked him, “Knowing what we know now, would you have invaded Iraq?” He said yes.
We went back to his team for clarification before the interview hit air, because the exchange was a little confusing. His team was steadfast: “We have nothing to clarify.” We put it on TV, and it made headlines everywhere. Jeb spent days trying to clean it up, until he finally reversed himself on the answer. Many who had thought Jeb the odds-on favorite suddenly started to ask, What if he’s not?
Chris Christie was seen as a straight-talking tough guy and was always fun to interview. But he was dogged by an exchange he had with President Obama prior to the last election, in which Christie appeared to fawn over the president, who had fast-tracked Hurricane Sandy relief funds to New Jersey. Republicans were having a hard time forgiving the governor for that display, or maybe it was just that Christie had been out-Christied by Trump.
Marco Rubio was also a contender at that early point. He was someone with a great personal story, conservative credentials, and Hispanic heritage in a party looking to increase its performance with Hispanic voters. But he’d co-sponsored the immigration reform bill a couple of years back, and in the 2016 Republican party, that was anathema. Rubio has a good-looking, boyish face, but for some reason he struggled to connect the way an Obama or Clinton or George W. Bush had. His promising run never quite soared.
As for who I suspected might take the nomination, going into that first debate? I told Doug, “Watch Ted Cruz.” Cruz, as I mentioned, was the first guest ever on The Kelly File. I liked having him on—he was interesting. He had come to my office a year before his presidential announcement with his press person. He spent an hour and a half with me, just chatting. I knew he wasn’t there because he loved my tiny office, and assumed he was laying the foundation for a presidential run. He’s not a particularly well liked guy, as you may have heard, but I found him perfectly affable one-on-one. He is the smartest man in almost any room. That was borne out as we saw him navigate the primaries.
During the run-up to the first debate I noticed which of the candidates—like Cruz, Rubio, Huckabee, or Carson—could sit for a tough interview and roll with it, and which ones would throw a fit. They shall remain nameless here. Suffice it to say that many would call up my bookers after the segments and complain about what I’d asked them. “They want George Washington’s job,” I’d marvel to my team, “but they don’t want to deal with tough questions to get there.” Some interviews call for a punch between the eyes—especially if the candidate’s been saying controversial things. Others allow (or even require) a softer touch. Over an election cycle, it all balances out.
As for Trump, believe it or not, he and I were once mutual fans. The beginning of our relationship was perfectly friendly. I used to watch The Apprentice and thought he was entertaining. I never interviewed him much, but I saw him on Fox News a lot. And during the lead-up to the 2012 presidential election, I had him on America Live once.
In December 2011 Trump wanted to moderate a Republican primary debate, hosted by Newsmax, in Iowa. Most of the candidates declined the invitation. Trump pulled out, and the debate was canceled. I went over to Trump Tower and interviewed him about it.
“I would be the best debate moderator ever!” he said.
I joked with him: “Do you really think you’d be better than me?”
“Oh no,” Trump said. “I could never be a better moderator than you, Megyn.”
Someone cleverly dredged up that exchange once he started going after me for my moderating in the 2016 election.
There was actually a funny moment in that interview where he let me run my fingers through his hair to prove that it was his own. Yes, I touched the famous hair. He had a sense of humor about it—he was not afraid to be playful.
Following the launch of The Kelly File in October 2013, I had Trump on a total of twice in the next twenty-one months. I enjoyed interviewing him. He was fun to watch, irreverent, and you never knew what he was going to say. Apart from that, I had no contact with him.
Then, in the winter of 2015, six months before he announced his candidacy for president, Trump began reaching out
to me—often. At the time, I figured he liked my show. In retrospect, I see that he was attempting to charm me in advance of his presidential bid. Starting around February, he began calling me and sending me personal notes.
When the New York Times Magazine ran a cover story about me by Jim Rutenberg called “The Megyn Kelly Moment,” Trump mailed me a copy of the article, which he’d personally signed. The accompanying note read: “Great article, especially from the source.”
Once, he forwarded me a Christmas card he found amusing.
Another time, he sent me a note about his high speaking fees.
I thought, Why is he telling me this?
“And to think,” I wrote back, “we can get you for free!”
He would call me up to chat about a segment after it aired, to compliment how I’d handled a guest.
One time Trump invited me and Doug to Mar-a-Lago, the historic oceanfront mansion and club he owns in Palm Beach. He followed up by sending me pictures of the seventeen-acre property and estate. It was an invitation I would never accept, though plenty of others who hold themselves out as journalists have.
“It’s Mr. Trump again,” Abby would say, pointing to the phone on my desk.
Why is he calling? I would mouth to her. We would look at each other as if to say, What’s going on here?
In April 2015, Abby knew I was going to be at Trump Soho, Trump’s downtown NYC hotel, for a weekend vacation with my Chicago friends Andrea and Rebecca. Abby was friendly with Trump’s assistant from all the calls he’d placed to us, so Abby asked her for a restaurant recommendation near the hotel.
Apparently, the assistant told Trump about it. She called Abby back and said, “Mr. Trump is going to take care of Megyn’s girls’ weekend.”
“Oh, no,” I said, realizing that he may have thought I had been angling for that. “Abby, call right back and say thank you so much, but I cannot accept that.”
She did, but the next time he came on my show, he told me directly, “I’m gonna take care of your girls’ weekend.”
“Thank you,” I said, “but you know I can’t accept that.”
“I’m taking care of it,” he replied.
“No,” I told him.
“I’ve got it,” he insisted.
“Mr. Trump, not only am I not permitted to accept gifts like that, I certainly can’t accept them from someone who might run for president.” This was not long before he announced his bid.
Trump started to sense that I wasn’t going to play, and he seemed slightly irritated by my refusal.
“Abby,” I said when I got back to my office, “e-mail them and put it in writing that I am paying for everything that weekend.” And I did. I paid for every last cent.
When I went onstage at that first presidential debate in August 2015, I had a printout of that e-mail under my debate papers, just in case Trump tried to discredit me. By that point, I’d seen him slam countless other people who had accepted his gifts and then fallen out of his favor.
This is actually one of the untold stories of the 2016 campaign: I was not the only journalist to whom Trump offered gifts clearly meant to shape coverage. Many reporters have told me that Trump worked hard to offer them something fabulous—from hotel rooms to rides on his 757. The few reports that have been made public—veteran reporter Wayne Barrett says Trump offered him an apartment;1 writer Mark Bowden says Trump tried to win him over with a book deal2—are from years ago, but make clear Trump’s history of trying to buy positive media coverage.
In addition to gifts, Trump used praise. This is smart, because the media is full of people whose egos need stroking. Trump would flatter certain people on Twitter—singling them out for their “incredibly fair,” “smart” coverage—one was even teased with a possible role on Celebrity Apprentice. Trump’s Twitter followers would respond with accolades, and occasionally you’d see the commentator respond with gratitude. Trump tried to work the refs—and some of the refs responded.
One pro-Trump host called up a conservative writer who had been critical of Trump and told him: “You understand where this is going, right? He’s going to be president. It’s not too late for you to get on board. Get behind him.”
This host tries to pass himself off as unbiased, as objective. But his behavior raises the question: How many other phone calls like that took place?
When it became too obvious that some media figures were in the tank, certain TV hosts actually took to gaming out with Trump in advance the hits they’d have to do on him occasionally to make themselves appear unbiased. I have been told this directly by more than one TV executive, at more than one network.
One news star would go over the subjects—and even the questions—with which he’d be challenging Trump just before their interviews. “I have to give you a hard time on X,” the host would explain, softening the on-air blow so the candidate would not get angry and cut off access.
Another very well known host would call Trump up before criticizing the candidate and warn him: “I have to hit you. I’m getting killed on credibility”—and Trump, the famous counterpuncher, mysteriously didn’t hit back after those pre-gamed attacks. Why do you think that was?
This is an egregious breach of journalistic ethics. It’s absolutely inappropriate, whether they consider themselves “journalists” or not. You don’t “act” the part of an independent, objective host and secretly rehearse your exchanges with a candidate. Ever.
If neither gifts nor praise worked, Trump would use insults or threats. Commentators like Charles Krauthammer, Brit Hume, George Will, Jonah Goldberg, Dana Perino, Rich Lowry, Steve Hayes, Marc Thiessen, and Chris Stirewalt were derided as “dummies” or “losers” or “lightweights” or “failures” for offering their honest, albeit unflattering, analysis of Trump. Anyone who didn’t fall under the Trump spell was fair game.
Plenty of straight news reporters were hit too. The Des Moines Register’s journalists were banned from Trump’s campaign events because the paper’s editorial board had harshly criticized him. The Washington Post was later banned for similar reasons. So were Univision, the Daily Beast, and others. The message was clear: cover Trump “nicely,” and good things happen. Hit him too hard, and suffer the consequences. He’d been laying the groundwork for that basic strategy for months before he launched his campaign.
In June, Trump announced his candidacy. Weeks before that, he had appeared on my show.3 As we sat on set, getting ready for the segment, he could hear me discussing with my producers in the control room which polls I needed. Trump did not approve of my choices.
“I really hope you won’t discuss those polls,” Trump said.
“Oh, we have to,” I told him. They were terrible for Trump back then.
“Well, you should mention this other poll,” he protested, naming a far less reputable poll in which he was doing a little bit better. He was trying to manipulate my coverage.
That’s fine. People try to do that all the time.
“Mention that if you want to—that’s for you to do, not me,” I told him. “I’m going to talk about the latest poll from Bloomberg.”4
He was not happy with the segment. As I said, politicians are often unhappy with their appearances, or at least pretend to be so that you will feel you owe them one. It never bothers me. It’s not my job to please them, only to be fair to them.
A month or two later in July, after Trump had formally declared, we had him on again. It was a rough time for Trump in some ways. Macy’s and NBC were ripping him for comments he’d made about Mexicans being rapists (“and some, I assume, are good people”) in his campaign announcement. Macy’s broke up with him. NBC ended his Miss Universe deal. It was a crazy story. Major companies publicly battling with a presidential candidate? When does that happen? Tom and I knew this was a big story.
During the pretaped interview, Trump kept going off topic to talk about China and trade, which he knew would play well with his base. As the world would later see, Trump would come to talk ab
out China and trade every chance he got in the primaries. You could ask him, “How’s the weather?” and he would respond, “We need to get tough with China!”
Months later, Bret and I were on set one primary election night. Trump had won and was giving a speech about his victory, saying, “We never win anymore. We’re going to start winning again.” A man in the audience yelled out, “Chy-nah!” Bret and I marveled at Trump’s messaging prowess. He had his supporters marching in lockstep with him.
At the end of the lengthy pretape on Macy’s and his NBC dispute, I thanked Trump, and he said, “I hope you’ll keep all of my remarks.”
“We won’t be able to do that,” I said. “It’s way too much for one block.”
“I really hope you’ll keep the whole thing.”
“We can’t,” I said.
Again, he seemed annoyed.
We did leave in some of what he said about China. Any candidate will get mad if you never let them highlight some of their own message. But he’d mentioned it a dozen times, so most of it got cut. I heard later that (again) he was not happy.
Two things stand out about that appearance in retrospect:
He was already trying to control my coverage of him; and
He was already remarkably adept at pushing a few core messages. And he had a read on the American electorate that few if any of the other candidates—not to mention party bosses or journalists—did.
From the beginning, Trump knew what made good TV. I remember the first time The Kelly File took a Trump campaign event and put it on the air. It was July 2015. Trump went down to the Mexican border and held a presser, and we aired it. It was riveting. It was one of the most compelling political events we had seen in years. And no news came out of it. It was just Trump being Trump: unscripted, unguarded, and fun to watch. We couldn’t take our eyes off of it.
The next day we saw the ratings, and there had been a huge pop. The viewers felt the way we did—this was great TV.
Trump held another campaign event not long thereafter. We took that too. Same result with the ratings. It was then that Tom and I looked at each other and realized something was going on here.
