In politics somebody has to lose, but invariably everybody thinks they can win. And you
probably can’t win unless you believe that you will win—except in the Trump campaign.
The leitmotif for Trump about his own campaign was how crappy it was and how everybody
involved in it was a loser. He was equally convinced that the Clinton people were brilliant
winners—“They’ve got the best and we’ve got the worst,” he frequently said. Time spent with
Trump on the campaign plane was often an epic dissing experience: everybody around him was
an idiot.
Corey Lewandowski, who served as Trump’s first more or less official campaign manager,
was often berated by the candidate. For months Trump called him “the worst,” and in June 2016
he was finally fired. Ever after, Trump proclaimed his campaign doomed without Lewandowski.
“We’re all losers,” he would say. “All our guys are terrible, nobody knows what they’re doing….
. Wish Corey was back.” Trump quickly soured on his second campaign manager, Paul
Manafort, as well.
By August, trailing Clinton by 12 to 17 points and facing a daily firestorm of eviscerating
press, Trump couldn’t conjure even a far-fetched scenario for achieving an electoral victory. At
this dire moment, Trump in some essential sense sold his losing campaign. The right-wing billionaire Bob Mercer, a Ted Cruz backer, had shifted his support to Trump with a $5 million infusion. Believing the campaign was cratering, Mercer and his daughter Rebekah took a helicopter from their Long Island estate out to a scheduled fundraiser—with other potential donors bailing by the second—at New York Jets owner and Johnson & Johnson heir Woody Johnson’s summer house in the Hamptons.
Trump had no real relationship with either father or daughter. He’d had only a few
conversations with Bob Mercer, who mostly talked in monosyllables; Rebekah Mercer’s entire
history with Trump consisted of a selfie taken with him at Trump Tower. But when the Mercers
presented their plan to take over the campaign and install their lieutenants, Steve Bannon and
Kellyanne Conway, Trump didn’t resist. He only expressed vast incomprehension about why
anyone would want to do that. “This thing,” he told the Mercers, “is so fucked up.”
By every meaningful indicator, something greater than even a sense of doom shadowed what
Steve Bannon called “the broke-dick campaign”—a sense of structural impossibility.
The candidate who billed himself as a billionaire—ten times over—refused even to invest his
own money in it. Bannon told Jared Kushner—who, when Bannon signed on to the campaign,
had been off with his wife on a holiday in Croatia with Trump enemy David Geffen—that, after
the first debate in September, they would need an additional $50 million to cover them until
election day.
“No way we’ll get fifty million unless we can guarantee him victory,” said a clear-eyed
Kushner.
“Twenty-five million?” prodded Bannon.
“If we can say victory is more than likely.”
In the end, the best Trump would do is loan the campaign $10 million, provided he got it back as soon as they could raise other money. (Steve Mnuchin, then the campaign’s finance chairman, came to collect the loan with the wire instructions ready to go, so Trump couldn’t conveniently forget to send the money.)
There was in fact no real campaign because there was no real organization, or at best only a uniquely dysfunctional one. Roger Stone, the early de facto campaign manager, quit or was fired by Trump—with each man publicly claiming he had slapped down the other. Sam Nunberg, a Trump aide who had worked for Stone, was noisily ousted by Lewandowski, and then Trump exponentially increased the public dirty-clothes-washing by suing Nunberg. Lewandowski and Hope Hicks, the PR aide put on the campaign by Ivanka Trump, had an affair that ended in a public fight on the street—an incident cited by Nunberg in his response to Trump’s suit. The campaign, on its face, was not designed to win anything.
Even as Trump eliminated the sixteen other Republican candidates, however far-fetched that
might have seemed, it did not make the ultimate goal of winning the presidency any less
preposterous.
And if, during the fall, winning seemed slightly more plausible, that evaporated with the Billy Bush affair. “I’m automatically attracted to beautiful—I just start kissing them,” Trump told the NBC host Billy Bush on an open mic, amid the ongoing national debate about sexual harassment. “It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.”
It was an operatic unraveling. So mortifying was this development that when Reince Priebus,
the RNC head, was called to New York from Washington for an emergency meeting at Trump
Tower, he couldn’t bring himself to leave Penn Station. It took two hours for the Trump team to
coax him across town.
“Bro,” said a desperate Bannon, cajoling Priebus on the phone, “I may never see you again after today, but you gotta come to this building and you gotta walk through the front door.”
* * *
The silver lining of the ignominy Melania Trump had to endure after the Billy Bush tape was that now there was no way her husband could become president.
Donald Trump’s marriage was perplexing to almost everybody around him—or it was, anyway, for those without private jets and many homes. He and Melania spent relatively little time together. They could go days at a time without contact, even when they were both in Trump Tower. Often she did not know where he was, or take much notice of that fact. Her husband moved between residences as he would move between rooms. Along with knowing little about his whereabouts, she knew little about his business, and took at best modest interest in it. An absentee father for his first four children, Trump was even more absent for his fifth, Barron, his son with Melania. Now on his third marriage, he told friends he thought he had finally perfected the art: live and let live—“Do your own thing.”
He was a notorious womanizer, and during the campaign became possibly the world’s most famous masher. While nobody would ever say Trump was sensitive when it came to women, he had many views about how to get along with them, including a theory he discussed with friends about how the more years between an older man and a younger woman, the less the younger woman took an older man’s cheating personally.
Still, the notion that this was a marriage in name only was far from true. He spoke of Melania frequently when she wasn’t there. He admired her looks—often, awkwardly for her, in the presence of others. She was, he told people proudly and without irony, a “trophy wife.” And while he may not have quite shared his life with her, he gladly shared the spoils of it. “A happy wife is a happy life,” he said, echoing a popular rich-man truism.
He also sought Melania’s approval. (He sought the approval of all the women around him, who were wise to give it.) In 2014, when he first seriously began to consider running for president, Melania was one of the few who thought it was possible he could win. It was a punch line for his daughter, Ivanka, who had carefully distanced herself from the campaign. With a never-too-hidden distaste for her stepmother, Ivanka would say to friends: All you have to know about Melania is that she thinks if he runs he’ll certainly win.
But the prospect of her husband’s actually becoming president was, for Melania, a horrifying
one. She believed it would destroy her carefully sheltered life—one sheltered, not
inconsiderably, from the extended Trump family—which was almost entirely focused on her
young son.
Don’t put the cart before the horse, her amused husband said, even as he spent every day on
the campaign trail, dominating the news. But her terror and torment mounted.
There was a whisper campaign about her, cruel and comical in its insinuations, going on in
Manhattan, which friends told her about. Her modeling career was under close scrutiny. In
Slovenia, where she grew up, a celebrity magazine, Suzy, put the rumors about her into print after
Trump got the nomination. Then, with a sickening taste of what might be ahead, the Daily Mail
blew the story across the world.
The New York Post got its hands on outtakes from a nude photo shoot that Melania had done early in her modeling career—a leak that everybody other than Melania assumed could be traced back to Trump himself.
Inconsolable, she confronted her husband. Is this the future? She told him she wouldn’t be able to take it.
Trump responded in his fashion—We’ll sue!—and set her up with lawyers who successfully did just that. But he was unaccustomedly contrite, too. Just a little longer, he told her. It would all be over in November. He offered his wife a solemn guarantee: there was simply no way he would win. And even for a chronically—he would say helplessly—unfaithful husband, this was one promise to his wife that he seemed sure to keep.