• • •
IN THE DAYS BEFORE the convention, Trump turned to his family for advice: Who should be his running mate? The party brass and Paul Manafort, his campaign manager, were pressing Trump to choose an insider, a well-respected officeholder who might win back some party mainliners who had been scared off by Trump’s willingness—eagerness, it often seemed—to break with party orthodoxies. Trump was drawn to two men who were more plainspoken, more iconoclastic, more like himself—Chris Christie and Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House. He’d even floated the idea of choosing a retired general—also an outspoken, blunt figure. But in the final hours of his anguished process, Trump asked his children for advice, as if he was searching for a way out. The children sided with Manafort, who recommended Mike Pence, the governor of Indiana and a former House member and radio talk show host. Trump seemed unconvinced of the wisdom of the move and wavered right up to the night before the announcement. He went ahead with Pence, but at their early appearances together, Trump seemed not quite comfortable. At their first news conference, Trump introduced Pence, then left him alone on the stage. In a joint interview on 60 Minutes, Trump did the bulk of the talking. The two men had disagreed on trade and waterboarding and immigration and gay rights, but now they were trying to present a united front, coming together on Trump’s promises to “get rid of ISIS, big league, and . . . get rid of ’em fast . . . and we’re going to declare war. It is war.” On 60 Minutes, Trump, confronted with the fact that his new running mate had voted for the Iraq War, said, “I don’t care. It’s a long time ago.” (Trump claimed to have opposed the war from the start, but six months before the war began, he told Howard Stern that he favored the attack.)
But haven’t you slammed Hillary Clinton for the same votes that Pence cast in favor of the war? reporter Lesley Stahl asked. Pence, Trump said, chuckling, is “entitled to make a mistake every once in a while.”
“But she’s not?” Stahl asked.
“But she’s not,” Trump replied.
Clinton pushed back. Her campaign ran a TV ad, titled “Role Models,” showing wide-eyed young children watching broadcasts of Trump’s coarsest comments, his vulgar language, his insults of women and Mexicans and Muslims and a disabled reporter and the media generally. “Our children are watching,” the ad concluded. Clinton went on TV to deliver a midconvention blast against Trump: “No self-discipline, no self-control, no sense of history, no understanding of the limits of the kind of power that any president should impose upon himself.”
In classic Roy Cohn style, Trump only accelerated his attack. He had yielded to the party elders on his vice-presidential pick, but this was still his campaign, his convention, and he was determined to keep doing what had worked in the primaries, so the lineup of speakers included reality TV star Willie Robertson of Duck Dynasty (“America is in a bad spot. . . . Donald Trump will have your back”), TV actor Scott Baio (“Nothing feels right. . . . We need Donald Trump to fix this”), and the chief executive of Ultimate Fighting Championship—a roll call of just-folks speakers aimed at blue-collar, white America. The convention’s entertainment program read like a playlist from a radio station in white suburbia in the 1970s: Lynyrd Skynyrd, Three Dog Night, The Doobie Brothers, and later acts with similar appeal—Kid Rock, Blues Traveler, Rascal Flatts. “Let’s make America America again,” Baio rallied the crowd.
Republican leaders bemoaned the image that the convention was sending viewers at home—a nearly all-white, older group, a picture at odds with efforts over the previous dozen years to invite Hispanics, immigrants, and blacks into the party. Among the 2,472 delegates in Cleveland, there were, according to a Republican National Committee accounting, only about 18 black people, down from 167 at the 2004 convention. Trump still hoped to win over African-American voters, but his history of controversial statements on race haunted him, and he entered the arena trailing Clinton among black voters by 89 percent to 4 percent. All Republicans struggle to win black votes, but this was an extraordinary falloff. In 2004, George W. Bush had won 11 percent of the black vote; it was a key to his victory. Trump had won over a few black delegates, including James Evans, chairman of Utah’s Republican Party—a man who knew what it was like to stand out as a black in a mostly white party. Evans had led an effort to draft Mitt Romney, but when that failed, he’d met privately with Trump: “The rest of America has to see the person I sat down with. The Democratic playbook is that if you are a white Republican candidate, you are a racially insensitive candidate. Let’s look at the policies of the political left and how they devastated the black community, and you tell me who is more racist.”
The Cleveland convention followed hard on a series of violent, frightening days—the attempted coup in Turkey; the terrorist attack on beachgoers in Nice, France; the horrific murders of police officers in Dallas and then in Baton Rouge as well—and Trump’s convention reacted by presenting a catalog of horrors, a cavalcade of conspiratorial notions, feeding the sense that an unnerved nation needed definitive, unnuanced leadership. “The world is a dark place, a scary place,” Marcus Luttrell, a former Navy SEAL who had been badly injured in Afghanistan, told the delegates. Representative Michael McCaul of Texas said, “Our city on a hill is now a city under siege; . . . it’s time to take back our country.” The sheriff of Milwaukee County, David Clarke, said movements such as Black Lives Matter were leading the country to a “collapse of the social order. . . . I call it anarchy.” Barack Obama was “absolutely” a Muslim, the actor Antonio Sabàto Jr. falsely insisted after his opening night speech.
Trump embraced the narrative of a country bordering on disintegration: “I’ll tell you, it is spinning. Our world is spinning out of control. Our country’s spinning out of control. That’s what I think about. And I’ll stop that.” But on TV that week in Cleveland, it was the Republican convention that looked to be spinning out of control. When Senator Ted Cruz delivered a prime-time address that pointedly failed to endorse Trump and urged Republicans to “vote your conscience,” the convention erupted in waves of boos and chants—“Endorse Trump!” At the peak of the outburst, who should walk into the arena but Trump himself, either in preparation for his son Eric’s speech or to upstage his uncooperative erstwhile opponent, depending on whose version you believed. Either way, it caused a strangely electric disarray: thousands of delegates still jeering Cruz off the stage turned to face the back of the hall, and the jeers blended into cheers and chants: “Trump! Trump! Trump!”
• • •
HE HAD ONE LAST chance at the convention to make the pivot he’d talked about on that March day in Washington, that day when he’d been under such pressure to show that he could act presidential, that he could be more than the coarse, sneering voice of a frustrated nation. On the last night in Cleveland, with the arena finally full and the internecine party battles silenced for at least one evening, Trump had the attention of 35 million Americans, slightly more than Mitt Romney had drawn four years before. This was no rally in an airport hangar; this was the formal acceptance address, with plenty of pomp and a guaranteed festival of goodwill at the end. So far in the convention, just about the only times the hall had seen anything approaching unity were when speakers ripped Hillary Clinton—the harsher the rhetoric, the lustier the cheers. Now, two biographical films whetted the delegates’ appetite for their nominee’s big speech. The carefully crafted videos offered a truncated survey of Trump’s life and career, presenting images of rising towers, fresh new golf courses, and other symbols of his life as a builder. There was no mention of his Atlantic City ventures, his gambling or beauty pageant businesses, his corporate bankruptcies, his divorces. He was, as the films presented him, a visionary businessman who got stuff done when no one else could. And that made him the right man, the only man, who could save a country in dire shape. “When you have my father in your corner, you will never again have to worry about being let down,” Ivanka told the nation as she introduced her father, and Trump, beaming, took the
stage, gave his daughter two kisses, tapped her on the hips, and took a long moment to soak in the applause.
“Who would have believed this?” he said. And he said it again. He read the speech off a prompter; this was no time for his usual stream-of-consciousness riffing. He had a case to make, a dark one, a portrait of a wounded and dazed nation, a nation he alone could save. It was a frightened and insecure nation, beset with crime, unnerved by terrorism, disoriented by rapidly swirling economic change. Donald Trump would fix it. “I am,” he said, “the law and order candidate.” He repeated that phrase throughout the speech, hitting each syllable hard and clear, like a bell tolling for an America that was nearly lost.
“Beginning on January twentieth of 2017, safety will be restored,” he announced. He would tell the truth. He would refuse to say what was politically correct. He would be, unabashedly, an “America First” president. He would stop illegal immigrants at the border. He would build that wall. (The crowd burst into cheers on that note; pockets of delegates remained pointedly silent through the seventy-six-minute-long speech, but most found something to applaud in Trump’s signature promises.) He would fix bad trade deals. He would crush ISIS—“and fast.” And he would beat Hillary Clinton, the perpetrator of “terrible, terrible crimes.”
“Lock her up! Lock her up!” the crown chanted, but Trump would not go there. This was a new phase, a different setting. He waved off the chant and broke from his script: “Let’s defeat her in November.” He wasn’t going soft on them—“the legacy of Hillary Clinton,” he said, was “death, destruction, terrorism, and weakness”—but he was finding his way toward the right mix of pure Trumpian populism and that certain presidential elevation. He would still rail against the rigged system, and against the illegal immigrants, and against radical Islamic terrorism, and against the feckless media. And he would assert his independence even as he sanded down some of his coarser edges. He promised to protect “our LGBTQ citizens from the violence and oppression of a hateful, foreign ideology—believe me,” he said. After those words won a fair amount of applause, he departed from his script to thank the Republicans for cheering a comment supportive of gays. At a convention aimed squarely at the populist base he had assembled during the primaries, he now made a somewhat broader appeal. Yes, he issued the requisite calls to protect gun rights, get rid of Obamacare, and reduce taxes, but he also spoke directly to Bernie Sanders supporters, mostly avoided social issues, didn’t use the word Mexico, and didn’t specifically promise to ban Muslims from entering the country (he did say he’d keep out immigrants from countries plagued by terrorism).
Trump’s vision featured no shining city on a hill and offered no details on how he’d make the instant, absolute fixes he promised. He would just do it—and fast. He seemed smoother now—when a lone protester interrupted the speech, Trump said nothing, just stood quietly and waited for her to be removed, though he looked as if he was bursting to let everyone know what he really thought of her. But he was still Trump, still the cocky, blunt kid from Queens, still the guy who would say what others only thought. “I am your voice,” he said. “Believe me. Believe me.”
• • •
WITH THE CONVENTION OVER, there was no rest. The hundred-day blitz of a fall campaign would begin almost immediately—three debates, rally upon rally, a blizzard of charges and countercharges in countless cable TV appearances—and it was already clear this would be a bitter battle between the two least popular, least liked major party candidates in modern political history. At the end of that slog, Trump was certain, the White House would be his. Yet as confident as he was of victory, he said he had not spent much time planning for how he would operate if he won. He would run the country much as he had his businesses, he said, keeping a close eye on everything, insisting on high standards. The difference would be that he’d be doing everything for the country, not just for himself. What exactly that might look like was not entirely clear. He expected his day-to-day work style to be similar to what he’d done for decades. At Trump Tower, he kept no computer on his desk, and he avoided reading extensive reports or briefings. He preferred to be told about issues orally, and quickly. One day in June, he had a visit from a delegation of prominent executives from the oil, steel, and retail industries, and one of the CEOs told Trump that the Chinese were taking advantage of the United States. “He said, ‘I’d like to send you a report,’ ” Trump recalled. “He said, ‘I’d love to be able to send you’—oh, boy, he’s got a lengthy report, hundreds of pages. . . . I said, ‘Do me a favor, don’t send me a report. Send me, like, three pages.’ . . . I’m a very efficient guy. Now I could also do it verbally, which is fine. . . . I want it short. There’s no reason to do hundreds of pages because I know exactly what it is . . . because I have a lot of common sense and I have a lot of business ability.”
He had no time to read, he said. As the reality of the nomination had become clear, he’d thought about digging into a biography of a president—he hadn’t had a chance to read one—“but I don’t have much time,” he said. “I never have. I’m always busy doing a lot. Now I’m more busy, I guess, than ever before. . . . I don’t have much time. I have so little time.”
There would be so much to do now. His daughter Ivanka had promised the nation on that last night of the convention that come January “all things will be possible again.” And Donald Trump had told the crowd that since “nobody knows the system better than me . . . I alone can fix it.” He alone. His father, who had warned him against being “a nothing,” was gone and never got to see this astonishing American journey to its conclusion. His family joined him onstage for the final celebration as red, white, and blue balloons fell and beach balls bounced around the arena. But in that last moment, Donald Trump was on his own. He stuck out his jaw, pursed his lips, and stepped into the dark tunnel behind the stage.
AFTERWORD
* * *
President Trump
He stood before an audience of hundreds in a Manhattan hotel ballroom—no raucous rally of thousands this time—and claimed victory with a scripted address delivered in a serious, deep, almost dour voice. Less than forty-eight hours later, he visited the White House and met, for the first time, the president he had spent years falsely attacking as foreign-born. The president-elect seemed to shrink into the formal wing chair, head down, language unusually restrained. In these first days in his new role, he sometimes seemed gracious, even calling Hillary and Bill Clinton “good people.” “Lock her up”? No, “I don’t want to hurt them,” he said. As soon as he completed the most improbable run in American campaign history, he—as he had promised at rally after rally—switched gears and adopted what he thought of as his presidential voice, measured, quieter, lower. No, he announced, he wouldn’t seek to overturn the Supreme Court ruling allowing same-sex marriage, as he had said during the campaign. “I mean, it’s done,” he said. “I’m fine with that.” And no, he wasn’t going to immediately deport 11 million illegal immigrants, just 2 or 3 million who had committed crimes. Those provocative statements he’d made in the campaign weren’t meant to be taken literally. “Sometimes you need a certain rhetoric to get people motivated,” he said. Those blustery shouts of the past fifteen months were, he said now, just opening positions for negotiations that would end up in a more reasonable place. Donald Trump was about to take office as the 45th president of the United States, and he wanted to be, as he’d promised all along, presidential.
He’d gotten here with a very different persona—plainspoken, puckish, and pragmatic, but also angry, mocking, insulting. For decades, he had boasted of his playboy lifestyle, stiffed contractors and vendors, hired illegal immigrants, avoided going to church, embraced socially liberal causes (such as abortion rights), and counted the Clintons as friends. On November 8, 2016, Trump finished off one of the most brazen pivots in American history: the billionaire who lived in a golden tower on New York’s Fifth Avenue had sold himself to voters as a populist hero who understood their frustratio
ns and guaranteed a blizzard of wins for years to come. Trump did it the way he’d said he would for more than thirty years: he ignored the rules of modern politics and spoke to Americans in coarse language, without massaging his words through the data-driven machinery of consultants, focus groups, and TV commercials. He scoffed at ideologies, preaching a tough, blunt pragmatism fueled by unbridled, unashamed ego. He told people what they wanted to hear: that a rapidly changing and splintering society could be forced back to an idyllic era of unity and order, that long-lost jobs could be retrieved, that a pre-globalized economy could be restored, that America could be great again.
Trump ran against the elites and won. Never mind that he was born rich, flaunted his wealth, and lived like a king. He defined the election as a people’s uprising against all the institutions that had let them down and sneered at them—the politicians and the parties, the Washington establishment, the news media, Hollywood, academia, all the affluent, highly educated sectors of society that had done well even as middle-class families lost their bearings. He swore that he would “drain the swamp,” and the crowds so loved the image that they would shout the words before he even opened his mouth to say them.
Trump ran against the old rules that governed how people talked about politics, and he won there, too. Political experts from both parties spent the better part of a year chortling over Trump’s delay in building a data-driven, modern campaign based on focus-group-tested TV commercials and microanalysis of voting behavior, but Trump trusted his gut and believed that his message and style would connect with the way Americans now absorb the news. More than any other major political figure in the digital era, Trump saw how social media had segregated the nation into almost wholly separate ideological and cultural camps, each with its own attitudes, narratives, and news feeds. He saw how Facebook and Twitter had blurred the line between public and private. He took advantage of that shift in culture and turned himself into a human vent, blasting the country with a stream of frustration and anger of the kind that many people had either kept to themselves or spewed online, anonymously. That shift in how people related to one another online dovetailed with Trump’s impulsiveness, his tendency to assign blame and name enemies, his quickness to hit back when criticized. The result was a new campaign rhetoric, a marketing breakthrough that dramatically altered the emotions and expectations of the presidential race.
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