Ailes enjoyed many things about Trump: his salesmanship, his showmanship, his gossip. He admired Trump’s sixth sense for the public marketplace—or at least the relentlessness and indefatigability of his ceaseless attempts to win it over. He liked Trump’s game. He liked Trump’s impact and his shamelessness. “He just keeps going,” Ailes had marveled to a friend after the first debate with Hillary Clinton. “You hit Donald along the head, and he keeps going. He doesn’t even know he’s been hit.”
But Ailes was convinced that Trump had no political beliefs or backbone. The fact that Trump
had become the ultimate avatar of Fox’s angry common man was another sign that we were
living in an upside-down world. The joke was on somebody—and Ailes thought it might be on
him.
Still, Ailes had been observing politicians for decades, and in his long career he had witnessed
just about every type and style and oddity and confection and cravenness and mania. Operatives
like himself—and now, like Bannon—worked with all kinds. It was the ultimate symbiotic and
codependent relationship. Politicians were front men in a complex organizational effort.
Operatives knew the game, and so did most candidates and officeholders. But Ailes was pretty
sure Trump did not. Trump was undisciplined—he had no capacity for any game plan. He could
not be a part of any organization, nor was he likely to subscribe to any program or principle. In
Ailes’s view, he was “a rebel without a cause.” He was simply “Donald”—as though nothing
more need be said.
In early August, less than a month after Ailes had been ousted from Fox News, Trump asked
his old friend to take over the management of his calamitous campaign. Ailes, knowing Trump’s
disinclination to take advice, or even listen to it, turned him down. This was the job Bannon took
a week later.
After Trump’s victory, Ailes seemed to balance regret that he had not seized the chance to run his friend’s campaign with incredulity that Trump’s offer had turned out to be the ultimate opportunity. Trump’s rise to power, Ailes understood, was the improbable triumph of many things that Ailes and Fox News represented. After all, Ailes was perhaps the person most responsible for unleashing the angry-man currents of Trump’s victory: he had invented the rightwing media that delighted in the Trump character.
Ailes, who was a member of the close circle of friends and advisers Trump frequently called, found himself hoping he would get more time with the new president once he and Beth moved to Palm Beach; he knew Trump planned to make regular trips to Mar-a-Lago, down the road from Ailes’s new home. Still, though Ailes was well aware that in politics, winning changes everything—the winner is the winner—he couldn’t quite get his head around the improbable and bizarre fact that his friend Donald Trump was now president of the United States.