1 ELECTION DAY
On the afternoon of November 8, 2016, Kellyanne Conway—Donald Trump’s campaign manager and a central, indeed starring, personality of Trumpworld—settled into her glass office at Trump Tower. Right up until the last weeks of the race, the Trump campaign headquarters had remained a listless place. All that seemed to distinguish it from a corporate back office were a few posters with right-wing slogans.
Conway now was in a remarkably buoyant mood considering she was about to experience a
resounding if not cataclysmic defeat. Donald Trump would lose the election—of this she was
sure—but he would quite possibly hold the defeat to under 6 points. That was a substantial
victory. As for the looming defeat itself, she shrugged it off: it was Reince Priebus’s fault, not
hers.
She had spent a good part of the day calling friends and allies in the political world and blaming Priebus. Now she briefed some of the television producers and anchors with whom she’d built strong relationships—and with whom, actively interviewing in the last few weeks, she was hoping to land a permanent on-air job after the election. She’d carefully courted many of them since joining the Trump campaign in mid-August and becoming the campaign’s reliably combative voice and, with her spasmodic smiles and strange combination of woundedness and imperturbability, peculiarly telegenic face.
Beyond all of the other horrible blunders of the campaign, the real problem, she said, was the
devil they couldn’t control: the Republican National Committee, which was run by Priebus, his
sidekick, thirty-two-year-old Katie Walsh, and their flack, Sean Spicer. Instead of being all in,
the RNC, ultimately the tool of the Republican establishment, had been hedging its bets ever
since Trump won the nomination in early summer. When Trump needed the push, the push just
wasn’t there.
That was the first part of Conway’s spin. The other part was that despite everything, the
campaign had really clawed its way back from the abyss. A severely underresourced team with,
practically speaking, the worst candidate in modern political history—Conway offered either an
eye-rolling pantomime whenever Trump’s name was mentioned, or a dead stare—had actually
done extraordinarily well. Conway, who had never been involved in a national campaign, and
who, before Trump, ran a small-time, down-ballot polling firm, understood full well that, post-
campaign, she would now be one of the leading conservative voices on cable news.
In fact, one of the Trump campaign pollsters, John McLaughlin, had begun to suggest within
the past week or so that some key state numbers, heretofore dismal, might actually be changing
to Trump’s advantage. But neither Conway nor Trump himself nor his son-in-law Jared Kushner
—the effective head of the campaign, or the designated family monitor of it—wavered in their certainty: their unexpected adventure would soon be over.
Only Steve Bannon, in his odd-man view, insisted the numbers would break in their favor. But
this being Bannon’s view—crazy Steve—it was quite the opposite of being a reassuring one.
Almost everybody in the campaign, still an extremely small outfit, thought of themselves as a
clear-eyed team, as realistic about their prospects as perhaps any in politics. The unspoken
agreement among them: not only would Donald Trump not be president, he should probably not
be. Conveniently, the former conviction meant nobody had to deal with the latter issue.
As the campaign came to an end, Trump himself was sanguine. He had survived the release of the Billy Bush tape when, in the uproar that followed, the RNC had had the gall to pressure him to quit the race. FBI director James Comey, having bizarrely hung Hillary out to dry by saying he was reopening the investigation into her emails eleven days before the election, had helped avert a total Clinton landslide.
“I can be the most famous man in the world,” Trump told his on-again, off-again aide Sam Nunberg at the outset of the campaign.
“But do you want to be president?” Nunberg asked (a qualitatively different question than the
usual existential candidate test: “Why do you want to be president?”). Nunberg did not get an
answer.
The point was, there didn’t need to be an answer because he wasn’t going to be president.
Trump’s longtime friend Roger Ailes liked to say that if you wanted a career in television, first run for president. Now Trump, encouraged by Ailes, was floating rumors about a Trump network. It was a great future.
He would come out of this campaign, Trump assured Ailes, with a far more powerful brand
and untold opportunities. “This is bigger than I ever dreamed of,” he told Ailes in a conversation
a week before the election. “I don’t think about losing because it isn’t losing. We’ve totally
won.” What’s more, he was already laying down his public response to losing the election: It was
stolen!
Donald Trump and his tiny band of campaign warriors were ready to lose with fire and fury. They were not ready to win.