Jeb Bush interrupted, “While Donald Trump was building a reality TV show, my brother was building a security apparatus to keep us safe.” Trump hit again: “The World Trade Center came down during your brother’s reign, remember that.” The audience booed loudly. Trump was told afterward that he had put his victory at risk. But he was unrepentant: “There were people who said, ‘You just blew the state.’ I said, ‘I have to be honest.’ ”
Trump seemed to be scouring the landscape for controversy. He next got into a scuffle with Pope Francis. Aboard his plane after a trip to Mexico, the pontiff had told reporters, “A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian.” Trump heard the comment and “I immediately thought of the Vatican, with the massive walls, and I said, ‘Well, wait a minute, he’s got the bigger walls, he’s got walls like you couldn’t even dream of.’ ” Trump issued a written response calling the pope’s words “disgraceful,” adding, “If and when the Vatican is attacked by ISIS, which as everyone knows is ISIS’s ultimate trophy, I can promise you that the pope would have only wished and prayed that Donald Trump would have been president.”
The night before the primary, at a rally in Charleston, Trump with great flourish told a discredited story about army general John Pershing and how he had dealt with Muslim terrorists in the Philippines early in the twentieth century: Pershing’s men lined up fifty captured Muslim prisoners and dipped fifty bullets in pigs’ blood. Forty-nine prisoners were shot dead. The survivor was told to go back to his people and describe what had happened. In a state with a military tradition, Trump used the story to project strength. “You gotta be tough,” Lewandowski later explained. “This is toughness.” The rumor-tracking site Snopes.com had long ago debunked the story, and PolitiFact gave Trump’s use of the tale its worst rating, Pants on Fire. Asked why Trump used a story that wasn’t true, Lewandowski said, “Look, it’s an analogy, right?”
Once again, the usual rules didn’t seem to apply to Trump. On primary day, February 20, he swept to his second straight victory, carrying the state with 32.5 percent of the vote. Rubio, after his poor finish in New Hampshire, rebounded to second, edging Cruz by three-tenths of a percentage point. Bush got just 8 percent and quit the race that night, having spent more than $100 million through his campaign and its allied super PAC. Rubio adviser Whit Ayres noted that Trump’s negatives had doubled after his attacks on Bush and the pope. “Two-thirds of the South Carolina primary electorate voted against the guy,” he said, “but the opposition was sufficiently split that he could eke out a win.” Trump’s rivals now understood the magnitude of the challenge ahead. Cruz adviser Jeff Roe later said, “It was very clear that Trump was going to get thirty to thirty-five percent everywhere, and as long as it stayed a multi-candidate race, it was going to be a problem.” Strategists in rival camps came to see that New Hampshire and South Carolina had put Trump on a near-unstoppable path to victory.
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THE RESULTS WERE PARTICULARLY troubling for Cruz. All along, Cruz had relied on a Southern strategy, counting on a victory in South Carolina and then a virtual sweep of Southern primaries on March 1 to put him ahead of the field. Instead, Trump now had momentum. After South Carolina, he carried Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee, and Virginia (and Massachusetts and Vermont). Cruz won only Texas, his home state, and Oklahoma.
Trump’s sudden clear advantage stirred a powerful backlash within the GOP establishment, led by Mitt Romney. For a party’s previous nominee to attack its prospective nominee was unprecedented, but Romney delivered a powerful rebuke to the front-runner, calling Trump “a phony, a fraud,” a failed businessman who knew little about the world and was temperamentally unfit for the presidency. Romney encouraged voters to do whatever they could to defeat Trump. Trump had other thoughts. He saw the March 15 primary in Florida as an opportunity to knock out Rubio. The Florida senator had started off with a reputation as a gifted campaigner and the face of a new, more diverse party. As a candidate, he struggled. Now he would prove to be wholly inadequate to the Trump challenge. First, he tried aggression. At a February 25 debate in Houston, he pounded Trump on immigration, trade, and the New Yorker’s business practices. Then, he tried sarcasm, calling Trump a “con man” and belittling his appearance. Rubio got into the mud with Trump: at a debate in Detroit, the two candidates traded barbs about Trump’s “small hands,” an exchange that devolved—incredibly—into a thinly veiled discussion of the man’s penis size. Rubio pointed out that Trump’s hands were disproportionately small compared to his height: “And you know what they say about men with small hands?”
Trump took the bait: “Look at those hands, are they small hands? . . . He referred to my hands—if they’re small, something else must be small. I guarantee you, there’s no problem. I guarantee.” The coarse banter appeared to do little damage to Trump’s momentum; Rubio, on the other hand, soon fell into a downward spiral. He went out with a whimper. Trump won Florida with almost 46 percent of the vote to Rubio’s 27 percent. Rubio quit the race. Bush’s campaign manager, Danny Diaz, would later say that after Florida “there was no argument for a quote-unquote ‘establishment’ candidate for the remainder of the Republican primary.” Christie adviser Mike DuHaime offered this view: “There was this incorrect thesis that Donald Trump beat the establishment. The establishment sat it out—or got in too late.” The others had spent more time attacking one another than taking on Trump.
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BEFORE TRUMP ARRIVED IN Chicago ahead of the March 15 primaries, anti-Trump protesters clashed with his supporters outside and inside the rally site. The worst spasm of violence thus far forced Trump to cancel his appearance. He spent the evening doing phone interviews with cable television anchors, decrying the protesters. The next day, a man was arrested as he tried to jump to the stage at Trump’s rally in Ohio. Tensions had been building at Trump’s events. The candidate could be abusive—toward opponents, demonstrators, and the media. When protesters disrupted his rallies, they were removed, with Trump’s encouragement. “Get ’em out of here!” he’d say. Or: “In the good old days, this doesn’t happen because they used to treat them very, very rough.” And: “You know what they used to do to guys like that when they were in a place like this? They’d be carried out on a stretcher.” He seemed to revel in egging on the crowd: “I’d like to punch him in the face.” And this: “Try not to hurt him. If you do, I’ll defend you in court.” And this: “Knock the crap out of him.” Asked whether he had created a tone that contributed to violence at his rallies, Trump responded, “I truly hope not. . . . We have some protesters who are bad dudes. They have done bad things.”
• • •
BY THE END OF March, Trump was down to just two opponents: Cruz, the anti-Washington antagonist who continued to win some states; and Kasich, the moderate-sounding governor who had won only his home state of Ohio. The stop-Trump forces were clinging to the slender hope that they could deny Trump enough delegates for the nomination and force a contested convention in July. Cruz hoped to give that strategy a significant boost in Wisconsin on April 5. Cruz had beaten Trump soundly in Utah, as Mormon voters, encouraged by Romney, fled from the front-runner. In Wisconsin, Trump found the state’s entire conservative apparatus aligned against him. The opposition began with Governor Scott Walker. Though he had fizzled as a presidential candidate, Walker had a tested political organization at home and put it to work for Cruz. And a loose alliance of local talk radio hosts had for weeks broadcast a consistent message: not Trump.
In the week before the primary, more problems erupted. On March 29, Lewandowski was charged with simple battery in Florida, based on an accusation from Michelle Fields, a reporter for Breitbart News, who said he had roughed her up at a Trump rally in Florida. Trump defended his campaign manager and denounced the accuser: “I can’t destroy a man for that.” (The charge against Lewandowski was eventually dropped.) The next day, Trump created yet anothe
r controversy during a town hall meeting with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews. Trump said he would favor punishment for abortions. “For the woman?” Matthews asked. Trump: “Yes, there has to be some form.” Hours later, in a rare reversal, Trump recanted the comment, saying only the doctor should be held responsible, “not the woman.”
Wisconsin’s demographics seemed hospitable to Trump, with a smaller evangelical population than states where Cruz had done best and a preponderance of the white working-class voters who were the heart of Trump’s constituency. But Trump could not overcome the combination of a narrower field of opponents and his own gaffes. On Election Day, Cruz captured 48 percent to Trump’s 35 percent. Cruz was exultant that night as he delivered his victory speech, but his advisers’ joy quickly dissipated when they learned that Fox News had cut away from Cruz’s victory address. “Fox cutting away halfway through the speech was stunning,” Jeff Roe said later. “We got no bounce out of Wisconsin.”
• • •
WISCONSIN DID, HOWEVER, FUEL talk of a contested Republican convention. “It gave them a glimmer of hope,” Trump said. Cruz now targeted upcoming state GOP conventions to round up delegates who would support him on a second ballot, even if they were bound to Trump on the first. In the complex battle for delegates, Cruz’s campaign ran circles around the Trump operation. Trump had won the Louisiana primary, but in the final scramble for delegates, Cruz had gained ground. In North Dakota, where delegates were officially free to vote their conscience, Cruz filled the delegation with far more people partial to him than Trump was able to secure. In Colorado, where delegates were chosen at conventions rather than in a primary, Cruz smoked Trump, leaving the front-runner without a single pledged delegate. Trump blasted the process as “rigged.” In truth, Cruz was simply playing the game more skillfully.
In late March, Paul Manafort, a veteran of Republican campaigns going back to Gerald Ford’s in 1976, joined Trump for dinner at the candidate’s Mar-a-Lago estate. Through a mutual friend, he had offered his services to Trump, whose campaign had impressed him almost from the start. The dinner in Florida brought him into the campaign initially with the title of convention manager (later to become chairman) and a broad portfolio that put him in competition with Lewandowski. Manafort quickly concluded that Trump was on a path to win more delegates than anyone else, but not necessarily the 1,237 he needed for a first-ballot victory.
Manafort developed a new plan designed to maximize delegates and showed the projections to Trump. Tellingly, he did not let Trump keep the piece of paper. He wanted to keep his numbers under wraps. But he made a bold public prediction. Three days after the defeat in Wisconsin, he said, “Our goal is, in the middle of May, to be the presumptive nominee.” Trump later said he never doubted that he would sew up the nomination well before the convention: “I felt it was never going to go to a contested convention. . . . When Cruz was trying to get delegates for the second ballot, I said, ‘Who cares if he gets it? We’re not going to do a second ballot, it’s going to be over in the first ballot.’ ”
• • •
AFTER WISCONSIN, THE CALENDAR began to favor Trump with a series of contests in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic. In New York, he followed a strategy designed to maximize his delegate count, locating his rallies in key congressional districts to boost his margins of victory. He battered Cruz for having derided “New York values” earlier in the race. A limping Kasich, meanwhile, was a virtual nonpresence. On primary day, April 19, Trump won 60 percent of the vote and all but six of the ninety-five delegates at stake. The results instantly reshaped the narrative of the GOP campaign.
Trump sauntered into the Trump Tower lobby to Frank Sinatra’s “New York, New York” displaying a new, more sober mien. He delivered his most policy-oriented victory speech yet, promising to bring jobs back from overseas, negotiate better trade deals, block US companies from moving to Mexico, build up the military, care for veterans, and get rid of the Affordable Care Act and Common Core education standards. There was no mention of waterboarding, banning Muslims, building a wall, or any of his other controversial ideas.
But no single appearance could ease the concerns of many party regulars. Appalled by Trump’s insults, alienated by his narcissism, frightened by his unpredictability, some Republicans in Congress and in statehouses distanced themselves from the man who would be at the top of their November ticket. In private, Manafort offered assurances that Trump would soon be the kind of tempered candidate GOP leaders wanted. At a closed-door meeting of the Republican National Committee in Florida, Manafort said Trump had been playing a “part” on the campaign trail, but was starting to pivot toward a more presidential “persona.” Within days, however, Trump undercut his new adviser, making clear that the “let Trump be Trump” faction knew him better.
A week after New York, Trump swept contests in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Connecticut, Delaware, and Rhode Island. He won every county in each of the states. “I consider myself the presumptive nominee,” he told reporters. One more hurdle remained before others would accept that claim—the May 3 primary in Indiana. Cruz knew the Hoosier State was his last stand and tried everything possible to shake up the race. He and Kasich announced a peace pact—they would decide who was strongest in upcoming states and stay out of each other’s way where possible. The fragile alliance quickly crumbled. Then Cruz announced former rival Carly Fiorina as his vice presidential running mate, which looked mostly like an act of desperation designed to win a news cycle. Cruz won the endorsement of Indiana governor Mike Pence, and Trump countered with an endorsement from another legendary figure popular for his blunt, unfiltered style—Bobby Knight, the former head basketball coach at Indiana University.
On primary night, Trump won going away. Before Trump could deliver his victory speech, Cruz quit the race. Kasich followed the next day. Four members of Trump’s original team posed for pictures at Trump Tower, having pulled off one of the most surprising victories in political history. After the speeches, Manafort and some members of Trump’s family celebrated at a cigar bar near Trump Tower. The candidate, now clearly the presumptive nominee, went to bed.
After Indiana, Trump, virtually unopposed, won the last few primaries, in California, New Jersey, and New Mexico, by enormous majorities. He could have pivoted toward the fall election. Instead he found himself mired in controversy. Although many GOP elected officials, driven by fear of a Clinton presidency, endorsed Trump, some prominent Republicans distanced themselves from him. House Speaker Paul Ryan, after offering his endorsement, seemed to squirm almost daily in reaction to something Trump said or did. Romney led the attacks, explaining why he would not endorse Trump: “I wanted my grandkids to see that I simply couldn’t ignore what Mr. Trump was saying and doing, which revealed a character and temperament unfit for the leader of the free world.” Richard Armitage, Ronald Reagan’s deputy assistant secretary of defense and George W. Bush’s deputy secretary of state, said Trump “doesn’t appear to be a Republican [and] doesn’t appear to want to learn about issues.” Armitage, a lifelong Republican, said he would vote for Hillary Clinton. Internally, the campaign remained unsettled into the summer; in late June, acting on the encouragement of Trump’s three adult children, the candidate fired Lewandowski after a period of feuding between the campaign manager and Manafort.
As Clinton sewed up her own nomination and the July party conventions loomed, Trump seemed determined to settle old scores rather than reach out to a broader electorate. When a gunman who pledged allegiance to ISIS killed forty-nine people at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Trump responded by doubling down on his call to ban Muslims from entering the country. (Once again, the shooter, Omar Mateen, was a native-born US citizen.) Trump insinuated that the president was in league with the country’s enemies. (When the Washington Post, like many other news organizations, reported on that statement, Trump responded by revoking the newspaper’s credentials—a tactic the campaign had used against nearly a dozen other news outlets. Publicly, Trump called
the Post “dishonest” and “phony,” but offstage, his campaign continued to respond to questions from Post reporters.) Trump created a firestorm by calling out the federal judge overseeing a class action suit against Trump University, accusing the Indiana-born judge of having a conflict of interest because of his Mexican heritage. Some Republican leaders urged their colleagues to leap off what they saw as a runaway train. Senator Lindsey Graham called Trump’s comments about the judge “the most un-American thing from a politician since Joe McCarthy. If anybody was looking for an off-ramp, this is probably it. There’ll come a time when the love of country will trump hatred of Hillary.” Ryan did not rescind his endorsement, but did call Trump’s attack on the judge “absolutely unacceptable . . . the textbook definition of a racist comment.”
Throughout, Trump stood firm—defiant, even. After the Orlando shootings, he put it this way: “I refuse to be politically correct. I want to do the right thing. I want to straighten things out. I want to make America great again.” That, he said, was his only motivation. That was why he was willing to deal with the career politicians and the critical press and the close protection by the Secret Service. “It’s not like a normal situation,” he said of life as a candidate, a life in which even a drive of a few blocks was a precision-choreographed paramilitary operation: “I get into the car, thousands of people. . . . They close the street and thousands of people form on the corner, waving, going crazy, and all this Secret Service. And my wife gets in, and I get in, and she looks at me, and we’re in this car with windows that are this thick, with steel walls. . . . And she says to me, ‘Are you sure this is what you want for the rest of your life?’ ”
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