“Am I paying for these people?” Trump asked her.
He complained about the camera setup. The equipment seemed old and he didn’t like the lighting. The shoot wasn’t high-definition (HD). He groused about the camera crew. “Tell them I’m not going to pay.” It was a standard line.
Later he said, “I want everyone to leave except Kellyanne.”
“Everybody tells me that I’m a much better candidate than Hillary Clinton,” he said, half-asking for her evaluation.
“Well, yes, sir. No poll necessary.” But they could do some things different. “You’re running against the most joyless candidate in presidential history. And it’s starting to feel like we are that way as well.”
“No we’re not.”
“It just feels that way. I used to watch you during the primaries, and you seemed much happier.”
“I miss the days when it was just a few of us flying around doing the rallies, meeting the voters,” Trump said.
“Those days are gone,” she acknowledged. “But in fairness to you, we should be able to replicate them to a general election strategy and process that allows you to maximize those skills and the enjoyment.”
She took a stab at candor. “You know you’re losing? But you don’t have to. I’ve looked at the polls.” CNN that day had him down five to 10 points. “There’s a path back.”
“What is it?”
She believed that he had done something without realizing it. “This fiction of electability that was sucking the lifeblood out of the Republican Party,” that somehow he could not win and was not electable.
The voters were disillusioned with Republican presidential nominees. These arguments went, “You have to get behind Mitt Romney. He’s the only one who can win. You have to support John McCain. He can win. Jeb can win. Marco can win. This one,” Trump, you, “can’t win. The people decided. I will not be fooled again,” and he had won the Republican nomination.
“You get these massive crowds where you have not erected a traditional political campaign. You have built a movement. And people feel like they’re part of it. They paid no admission. I can tell you what I see in the polling. We have two major impediments.” She said they should never do national polling, ever. “That is the foolishness of the media,” which did national polls. Winning obviously was all about the electoral college—getting the 270 electoral votes. They needed to target the right states, the roughly eight battleground states.
“People want specifics,” Conway said. It had been great when Trump released his 10-point Veterans Administration reform plan in July, or a planned five-point tax reform plan. “People want those kinds of specifics, but they need them repeated again and again.
“The second vulnerability I see is people want to make sure you can actually make good on your promises. Because if you can’t deliver, if the businessman can’t execute and deliver, you’re just another politician. And that’s who you’re not.”
It was a sales pitch, a path forward that Trump seemed to embrace.
“Do you think you can run this thing?” he asked.
“What is ‘this thing’?” she asked. “I’m running this photo shoot.”
“The campaign,” Trump said. “The whole thing. Are you willing to not see your kids for a few months?”
She accepted on the spot. “Sir, I can do that for you. You can win this race. I do not consider myself your peer. I will never address you by your first name.”
CHAPTER
3
That Sunday night, Bannon headed to work—Trump Tower in New York City. The campaign headquarters. It was his first visit, and 85 days until the presidential election.
He rode up to the fourteenth floor. The sun was still out on this August night. He expected to walk in and have a thousand or so people ask, What’s Bannon doing here? He would need a cover story.
He walked into the war room, the rapid response center, with all the TV sets.
There was one person there. To Bannon’s eyes, he was a kid.
“Who are you?” Bannon asked.
“Andy Surabian.”
“Where the fuck is everybody?”
“I don’t know,” Surabian replied. “This is like it is on every Sunday.”
“This is the campaign headquarters?”
“Yeah.”
“I mean like the place where the whole thing’s run out of?”
Yeah. Surabian pointed out Jason Miller’s office—the senior communications director—and Hope Hicks’s—the young former model who had become the campaign’s main press person and perhaps the staff member closest to Trump. Surabian was the war room director.
“Do you guys work weekends?”
Surabian said yeah again. Some worked in D.C., some guys phoned in.
Bannon tried once more. “On weekends, does this place have people in it?”
“This is about average.”
“Where the fuck is Jared? I’ve got to talk to Jared and Ivanka.” Bannon had heard that Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, was the mastermind and genius here.
Jared and Ivanka were on entertainment mogul and Democratic donor David Geffen’s $300 million yacht—one of the largest in the world—off the coast of Croatia, on vacation with Wendi Deng, a businesswoman and former wife of Rupert Murdoch.
* * *
Manafort called Bannon. He wanted to meet.
“Why don’t you come up?” Manafort said.
Where?
“The Tower.”
Bannon had to go back to the lobby to get the elevator to the residences. On the ride up, he wondered if this was the deal that Trump cut with his campaign chief. “If he’s going to toss me some penthouse in the Trump Tower, why not?” It would be better than his small place on Bryant Park.
It turned out that Manafort owned the place.
Bannon felt sorry for Manafort. The campaign manager had been astonished at the success and power of Trump’s Twitter account, and had started one of his own. But the New York Daily News had run this item in April: “Make America kinky again,” noting that Manafort—perhaps unaware that Twitter was a public forum—had followed a Midtown bondage and swingers’ club called Decadence. “Manafort was following the swanky spank spot—which bills itself as the city’s ‘most intimate swing club.’?”
* * *
Manafort’s place was beautiful. Kathleen Manafort, his wife, an attorney who was in her 60s but looked to Bannon like she was in her 40s, was wearing white and lounging like Joan Collins, the actress from the show Dynasty.
“I really want to thank you for trying to step in,” Manafort said. “That’s just Donald. This is the way he acts all the time.”
“I thought he took some real cheap shots at you,” Bannon said.
Manafort waved him off. “Listen, everybody tells me you really know media,” he said.
“I run a right-wing website. I know advocacy.”
“I need you to look at something for me,” Manafort said, handing him a copy of a draft story coming in from The New York Times headlined: “Secret Ledger in Ukraine Lists Cash for Donald Trump’s Campaign Chief.”
Bannon read, “Handwritten ledgers show $12.7 million in undisclosed cash payments designated for Mr. Manafort” from the pro-Russian political party.
“Twelve million fucking dollars in cash out of the Ukraine!” Bannon virtually shouted.
“What?” Mrs. Manafort said, bolting upright.
“Nothing, honey,” Manafort said. “Nothing.”
“When is this coming out?” Bannon asked.
“It may go up tonight.”
“Does Trump know anything about this?”
Manafort said no.
“How long have you known about this?”
Two months, Manafort said, when the Times started investigating.
Bannon read about 10 paragraphs in. It was a kill shot. It was over for Manafort.
“My lawyer told me not to cooperate,” Manafort said. “It was just a hit piece.”
“You should fire your lawyer.”
“I’m thinking about it.”
“You’ve got to call Trump . . . go see him face-to-face. If this comes out in the paper, and he doesn’t know about it, it’s lights out for you. How do you even take $12.7 million in cash?”
“It’s all lies,” Manafort said. “I had expenses.”