Settle for More

by Megyn Kelly

  We knew we had made a questionable choice. This was television crack cocaine, and while it might feel good in the moment, we felt guilty afterward. Tom and I had a talk about the Trump coverage we were seeing in the cable news universe (and, soon thereafter, broadcast news too). Trump was amazing TV, but what was the cost of giving him all that time, when we knew damn well we weren’t about to do the same for Jeb Bush or Scott Walker?

  Tom and I agreed: no more gratuitous Trump coverage.

  This was not a directive to cover Trump negatively or to ignore him. It was a call to remember our journalistic duty, to provide balance and be judicious in our coverage, not to sell our souls for ratings or for our own entertainment.

  “When the postmortem is done on the Trump campaign,” I said, “let’s make sure we’re on the side of the angels.” We would wind up rather lonely in that place.

  Some other television executives and anchors made different choices. The amount of free TV time Trump was given dwarfed all others.5 In the first few months of his campaign, he received close to $2 billion worth of media attention, roughly double the haul of the next best earner, Hillary Clinton. In one month, he earned in free media about what John McCain spent on his entire 2008 campaign. Of Trump’s run, CBS chairman Les Moonves said, “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS. . . . Man, who would have expected the ride we’re all having right now? . . . The money’s rolling in and this is fun.”6

  Like many things, Trump was fun, until suddenly he wasn’t. In late July 2015, my relationship with him took a turn for the worse.

  The week before the first Republican primary debate, a report about Trump broke in the Daily Beast.7 A reporter named Tim Mak had dredged up the divorce proceedings between Donald and Ivana Trump, in which Ivana had testified that Trump raped her.

  According to her sworn deposition testimony, Ivana had encouraged Trump to have surgery to cover a bald spot. She claimed that he came home in great pain and was angry with her for encouraging him to do it. She described a violent assault, in which he held back her arms and tore out pieces of her hair, then ripped off her clothes and raped her.

  On one hand, this was under-oath testimony.

  On the other, it was a divorce proceeding, and it was from thirty years ago.

  I thought about ignoring it, but the story had gotten a ton of pickup, and so I decided to bring Tim Mak on the show to press him on his reporting.

  “You are under fire for writing a piece about a man’s divorce—allegations made in it—from three decades ago,” I said to Mak by way of opening. “Why did you think this was relevant?”

  He said it was relevant because Trump had accused Mexican immigrants of being rapists. I suggested that was hardly a strong connection, and I continued on.

  “Having practiced law for ten years,” I told Mak, “divorce proceedings are notoriously ugly. Spouses often say things that aren’t true and that they live to regret. How did you account for that reality in your reporting?” I also pointed out that Ivana had later recanted her testimony.

  Mak struggled a bit but handled himself all right. Unlike Trump’s attorney Michael Cohen, who responded to the Daily Beast article with threats and thug tactics. First, Cohen publicly defended Trump by saying, “You cannot rape your spouse. There’s very clear case law.” This is untrue, as any lawyer from this century should know (he was later forced to walk this back).

  In between bouts of misstating the law, Cohen managed to find time to threaten Mak for reporting on the story at all. I quoted a bit of Cohen’s strong-arm statement on the show, but this is the full text of what Cohen said:

  I will make sure that you and I meet one day while we’re in the courthouse. And I will take you for every penny you still don’t have. And I will come after your Daily Beast and everybody else that you possibly know. So I’m warning you, tread very fucking lightly, because what I’m going to do to you is going to be fucking disgusting. You understand me? You write a story that has Mr. Trump’s name in it, with the word “rape,” and I’m going to mess your life up. . . . for as long as you’re on this frickin’ planet. . . . You’re going to have judgments against you, so much money, you’ll never know how to get out from underneath it.

  This seemed significant enough to me to mention with Mak. I didn’t dwell on it, but it was notable, so we noted it.

  The next day I got a call from Roger Ailes.

  “What did you do to piss off Trump?” he said.

  I learned that Trump was, to say the least, not happy that I had given this story any oxygen and had called my boss. He had come to think of Fox as his friend. He is, in fact, friends with Roger and with many people at the network. He and I were friendly as well. And so when I did that segment, he felt like I had broken some kind of covenant. Trump was booked to come on my show soon after—Monday, August 2, which was the Monday before the first presidential debate. But that Monday morning Trump refused to come on unless I called him personally.

  And so I called him up from the back of my car. That phone call was the beginning of the most bizarre year of my life, my Year of Trump.

  “How could you?” he said instead of hello.

  “Mr. Trump,” I said, “that story was everywhere. I did you a favor by having the reporter on and telling the other side.”

  “Oh no,” he said. “That story never should have been on your show. O’Reilly didn’t put it on his show.”

  “Well,” I said, “Bill is not my editorial gauge.”

  He was especially enraged that I hadn’t mentioned on the show that in addition to recanting, Ivana had said she thought Trump would make “an incredible president.” That had not been relevant to the propriety of Mak’s reporting, which was the topic at hand.

  “I read Ivana’s statement rebutting the rape allegations, Mr. Trump. That’s what was relevant to the story we were discussing.”

  “You had no business putting it on your show!” he said. “Oh, I almost unleashed my beautiful Twitter account against you, and I still may.”

  “You don’t control the editorial content on The Kelly File, Mr. Trump,” I said.

  And that was when he snapped.

  “That’s IT!” he shouted. “You’re a disgrace! You should be ashamed of yourself. You should be ashamed of yourself!”

  He hung up on me. My driver looked at me.

  “That went well,” I deadpanned.

  Needless to say, Trump canceled his appearance on The Kelly File for that night.

  I called Roger, as well as the head of the debate team, to alert them to what had just happened. The debate was in less than four days. And Trump was not happy.

  He hadn’t pulled out of the debate, but it was conceivable that he might. So much of what he’d done so far had surprised us. I considered that Trump just might be nervous about his first presidential debate, and I tried not to worry about it.

  But there had been something more in that phone call. I believe Trump had realized, once and for all, that he could not control me. He had failed to woo me with his offerings. He had failed to threaten me into submission. And I believe this made him anxious. When I said he couldn’t control the editorial content of my show, it appeared to finally dawn on him that it might be true. So he launched a campaign to bring me in line before the coming debate.

  20

  The First Debate

  The Fox News debate moderating team had been set for months—Bret Baier, Chris Wallace, and me. At that point, the moderators were hoping the Fox News management would limit the debate to just the top six candidates, so there would be more time for give-and-take between them. But we were already under fire for cutting it down to ten, and ten was about as small as the Fox News brass was willing to go. We knew that with ten candidates, they would have very little time to engage with one another, so it would be on us, the moderators, to hit them with the toughest questions.

  Meanwhile, Trump, having realized in our phone call that he could not control me, tried to go
over my head to try to get others to do it for him. In the days leading up to the debate, Trump called more than one executive at Fox in an attempt to rein me in. No one suggested to me that I should go easy on Trump at that debate. Nor would that have worked even if they had.

  Trump called our then executive vice president of news, Michael Clemente. He called Bill Sammon, the head of our debate team and at this point our DC bureau chief (Kim Hume had retired years earlier). He called Roger. He wanted assurances about me, although no one ever told me exactly what they were. To my knowledge, Trump wasn’t pushing to have me removed from the debate team, but he did want a message sent. I was starting to wonder where this was leading. I had pointed questions for Trump—but my questions for all of the candidates were tough, as were Bret’s and Chris’s. I wasn’t about to dial back on one candidate just because he was complaining in advance.

  The day before the debate, Trump called Bill Sammon again, clearly anxious about the debate and me in particular. He said he had “heard” that my first question was a very pointed question directed at him.

  How could he know that? I wondered. The debate prep is sacred to the five of us on the debate team—Sammon, Chris Stirewalt (part of our decision desk on Election Night and our digital politics editor), Bret, Chris Wallace, and me. I knew no one on our team would ever have breathed a word about our questions to anyone, much less to one of the candidates. But Trump was extremely agitated, and Sammon tried to calm him down.

  Trump was not appeased. I spent a lot of time pacing the Fox News hallways on the phone. Folks were starting to worry about Trump—his level of agitation did not match the circumstances. Yes, it was his first debate. But this was bizarre behavior, especially for a man who wanted the nuclear codes. Though I usually tried to find humor in any situation, I didn’t find much to laugh about here—he seemed very anxious about me. Given the number and nature of his calls, it seemed like I was his chief concern, rather than the competitors heading for that stage.

  Meanwhile, the question that he hated so much in the debate had been written weeks earlier. Before the Ivana story. Before the “beautiful Twitter account” threat. We’d been working for two months on debate prep. My research assistant Emily Walker had prepared a huge binder on every candidate for me, and having read Trump’s cover to cover, it was clear that his Achilles’ heel was women. I went to the woman place with Trump because it was obvious this was an issue he would eventually have to face, especially if he were to run against Hillary Clinton.

  And so, under this cloud, we flew to Cleveland. I wasn’t out to kill Trump, but he wasn’t going to have an easy time, either. (Some would later claim the tough questions for Trump were pursuant to a Rupert Murdoch directive. Nonsense—there was zero interference in our debate questions by anyone in Fox management.) I was a bit on edge about asking the question, because I knew Trump was already focused on me. I also knew I had to ask it—these guys were running for president, for Pete’s sake.

  I talked to Tom Lowell, who was not involved in my debate prep but is always a chief adviser to me, as well as the entire Fox News debate team. The five of us had gone over each of our questions dozens of times. We finessed and toughened them. We eliminated parts of them, added to them, got rid of some, and in some cases wrote new and better ones up until the last minute. We did have a debate about the propriety of the line in my question about Trump telling a contestant on Celebrity Apprentice that it “must be a pretty picture” to see her on her knees.

  We talked first about whether the line was taken out of context. It was not. There was video.1 Brande Roderick, a contestant on Trump’s show, was sitting across a table from Trump. Bret Michaels, sitting next to her, mentioned that Roderick had begged on her knees to be project manager.

  Trump smirked. “Excuse me, you dropped to your knees?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “That must be a pretty picture,” Trump said, “you dropping to your knees.”

  The camera cut to a laughing Piers Morgan.

  It was not out of context.

  The next issue was whether or not it was appropriate for a prime-time debate audience.

  “Do you think it’s appropriate for the decorum of a presidential debate to make a reference to oral sex?” asked Bill Sammon.

  “The very fact that you have to ask me that is the reason I have to ask it,” I responded. “This guy is seeking the highest office in the land, and he said it on the air, on national television, to an aspiring female professional. It’s fair game.”

  After the debate, Roderick would come out and say she hadn’t even remembered him saying it. “I don’t condone men being derogatory,” she said on MSNBC,2 “but he’s on television. He’s trying to be funny. I don’t think he meant anything horrible by it.”

  Fair enough, but the truth was, this wasn’t about Brande’s feelings. It was about Trump’s history with women and how it might affect his electability, running against a woman.

  One of the things we addressed in debate prep was what to do if Trump went after me once I asked the question. I said to Bret and Chris, “If he does, don’t try to help me.”

  They both said variations of: “Oh, don’t worry. We’ll be behind you—way behind you.”

  They knew I could handle myself, and anyway, they had no particular desire to inject themselves into that back-and-forth.

  On the last day of debate prep, once the questions were set, Bret, Chris, and I looked at each other. I said, “This is it. If anyone has a problem, speak now or forever hold your peace.”

  Mine were not the only tough questions, not by a long shot. Chris was going after Trump on his four bankruptcies.3 Bret was going to open the debate by asking the candidates if they promised to support whoever the Republican nominee was. It was a controversial, dramatic way to start. I was hitting Scott Walker on abortion and Ben Carson on foreign policy. The first round of questions, in particular, was the Olympics of questioning. No one has gone harder on the candidates than we did in that opening round.

  It was electric. It was journalism. And it was spectacular. We were all in.

  To figure out who would open the debate, the debate team huddled in the Cavaliers locker room. Stirewalt went to get a coin to flip and came back holding one with a queen on the front. They looked at me and said, “Call it.”

  I said, “Gotta side with the queen.”

  The queen won. I opened up the debate. (Bret opened the next one, and I did the third.)

  The moment backstage before we went out in the arena, we were like a sports team putting all hands in. We walked out together. I knew I had the support of my co-moderators and the network. Even Brit had been in our debate prep the final day, for which I was thankful. I read him my opening question to Trump about the women. “It’s a great question,” he said. So I went out to the stage feeling fine about it.

  However, physically of course, I was not feeling fine, since I had been violently ill for most of the day. Moments earlier, as I walked from my dressing room to the debate stage, surrounded by my team—my research assistant Emily Walker, Abby, Chris, and Vincenza—I felt my mojo start to come back. I started to feel less shaky and ill, more geared up and focused. The endorphins began to flow.

  Bill Shine, our executive vice president of programming at the time, was in the hallway just outside the debate stage entrance. He pulled out his camera and shot a picture of me. In it, I am walking toward Shine, pointing at the camera, ninja-like. If I could caption that photo, I’d call it “Triumphant.”

  And I was off.

  The debate began, and it was raw, pure, all-encompassing excitement. I had a blanket on my lap and an empty trashcan at my feet in case I threw up again, but I was confident I wouldn’t. Now my adrenaline was pumping.

  The opening round boiled down to: “Are you electable?” Republican voters may like you a lot, but if you’re too extreme or uninformed or inconsistent, it could pose a problem for the party. We are here to find out: Can you win? This was
a process of elimination. Each opening question was an A-plus-level question. Three Fox News anchors, no holds barred.

  The drama started immediately when Bret asked the candidates if anyone was not prepared to say they would support the eventual nominee of the party. We weren’t sure how many hands we would get. We assumed Trump and Rand Paul might stand out. Only Trump raised his hand. In doing so, he sent a clear message to the millions watching at home that he was a different kind of candidate, one not concerned with pleasing the party elders. While Trump handled himself just fine in the moment, I now know he was very unhappy with the question.

  Moments later, I asked Trump the women question, and he became even more unhappy.

  “Mr. Trump,” I said, “one of the things people love about you is you speak your mind and you don’t use a politician’s filter. However, that is not without its downsides. In particular, when it comes to women. You’ve called women you don’t like ‘fat pigs,’ ‘dogs,’ ‘slobs,’ and ‘disgusting animals.’”

  He interrupted halfway through with the line: “Only Rosie O’Donnell.” The audience erupted in laughter. There was no way I was going to laugh. It would have been inappropriate, for one thing, and for another, what he said wasn’t true.

  By that point, I was well aware of everything he had said about Rosie O’Donnell, and what she had said about him. And in Trump’s defense, Rosie gave as good as she got during her tiff with Trump. That’s why I was determined, in crafting the question, to include more than just his references to Rosie. My question has been fact-checked many times since then, and every part of it has been verified by every publication to look into the matter. Trump had a long pattern of attacking women for not being, in his view, pretty or sexually appealing enough.

  In fact, there was so much material that I left most of it on the cutting room floor. He’d talked about wanting “a young and beautiful piece of ass” by his side,4 and said of his approach with the opposite sex: “You have to treat ’em like shit.”5 He’d rated countless women’s looks on a scale from one to ten. He’d lamented how “unattractive” Bill Clinton’s alleged lovers had been. Just to name a few.