The Trump campaign had, perhaps less than inadvertently, replicated the scheme from Mel Brooks’s The Producers. In that classic, Brooks’s larcenous and dopey heroes, Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom, set out to sell more than 100 percent of the ownership stakes in the Broadway show they are producing. Since they will be found out only if the show is a hit, everything about the show is premised on its being a flop. Accordingly, they create a show so outlandish that it actually succeeds, thus dooming our heroes.
Winning presidential candidates—driven by hubris or narcissism or a preternatural sense of destiny—have, more than likely, spent a substantial part of their careers, if not their lives from adolescence, preparing for the role. They rise up the ladder of elected offices. They perfect a public face. They manically network, since success in politics is largely about who your allies are. They cram. (Even in the case of an uninterested George W. Bush, he relied on his father’s cronies to cram for him.) And they clean up after themselves—or, at least, take great care to cover up. They prepare themselves to win and to govern.
The Trump calculation, quite a conscious one, was different. The candidate and his top lieutenants believed they could get all the benefits of almost becoming president without having to change their behavior or their fundamental worldview one whit: we don’t have to be anything but who and what we are, because of course we won’t win.
Many candidates for president have made a virtue of being Washington outsiders; in practice,
this strategy merely favors governors over senators. Every serious candidate, no matter how
much he or she disses Washington, relies on Beltway insiders for counsel and support. But with
Trump, hardly a person in his innermost circle had ever worked in politics at the national level—
his closest advisers had not worked in politics at all. Throughout his life, Trump had few close
friends of any kind, but when he began his campaign for president he had almost no friends in
politics. The only two actual politicians with whom Trump was close were Rudy Giuliani and
Chris Christie, and both men were in their own way peculiar and isolated. And to say that he
knew nothing—nothing at all—about the basic intellectual foundations of the job was a comic
understatement. Early in the campaign, in a Producers-worthy scene, Sam Nunberg was sent to
explain the Constitution to the candidate: “I got as far as the Fourth Amendment before his finger
is pulling down on his lip and his eyes are rolling back in his head.”
Almost everybody on the Trump team came with the kind of messy conflicts bound to bite a president or his staff. Mike Flynn, Trump’s future National Security Advisor, who became Trump’s opening act at campaign rallies and whom Trump loved to hear complain about the CIA and the haplessness of American spies, had been told by his friends that it had not been a good idea to take $45,000 from the Russians for a speech. “Well, it would only be a problem if we won,” he assured them, knowing that it would therefore not be a problem.
Paul Manafort, the international lobbyist and political operative who Trump retained to run his
campaign after Lewandowski was fired—and who agreed not to take a fee, amping up questions
of quid pro quo—had spent thirty years representing dictators and corrupt despots, amassing millions of dollars in a money trail that had long caught the eye of U.S. investigators. What’s more, when he joined the campaign, he was being pursued, his every financial step documented, by the billionaire Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, who claimed he stole $17 million from him in a crooked real estate scam.
For quite obvious reasons, no president before Trump and few politicians ever have come out
of the real estate business: a lightly regulated market, based on substantial debt with exposure to
frequent market fluctuations, it often depends on government favor, and is a preferred exchange
currency for problem cash—money laundering. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, Jared’s
father Charlie, Trump’s sons Don Jr. and Eric, and his daughter Ivanka, as well as Trump
himself, all supported their business enterprises to a greater or lesser extent working in the
dubious limbo of international free cash flow and gray money. Charlie Kushner, to whose real
estate business interests Trump’s son-in-law and most important aide was wholly tied, had
already spent time in a federal prison for tax evasion, witness tampering, and making illegal
campaign donations.
Modern politicians and their staffs perform their most consequential piece of opposition research on themselves. If the Trump team had vetted their candidate, they would have reasonably concluded that heightened ethical scrutiny could easily put them in jeopardy. But Trump pointedly performed no such effort. Roger Stone, Trump’s longtime political adviser, explained to Steve Bannon that Trump’s psychic makeup made it impossible for him to take such a close look at himself. Nor could he tolerate knowing that somebody else would then know a lot about him—and therefore have something over him. And anyway, why take such a close and potentially threatening look, because what were the chances of winning?
Not only did Trump disregard the potential conflicts of his business deals and real estate
holdings, he audaciously refused to release his tax returns. Why should he if he wasn’t going to
win?
What’s more, Trump refused to spend any time considering, however hypothetically, transition matters, saying it was “bad luck”—but really meaning it was a waste of time. Nor would he even remotely contemplate the issue of his holdings and conflicts.
He wasn’t going to win! Or losing was winning.
Trump would be the most famous man in the world—a martyr to crooked Hillary Clinton.
His daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared would have transformed themselves from relatively obscure rich kids into international celebrities and brand ambassadors.
Steve Bannon would become the de facto head of the Tea Party movement. Kellyanne Conway would be a cable news star.
Reince Priebus and Katie Walsh would get their Republican Party back. Melania Trump could return to inconspicuously lunching.
That was the trouble-free outcome they awaited on November 8, 2016. Losing would work out for everybody.
Shortly after eight o’clock that evening, when the unexpected trend—Trump might actually win—seemed confirmed, Don Jr. told a friend that his father, or DJT, as he called him, looked as if he had seen a ghost. Melania, to whom Donald Trump had made his solemn guarantee, was in tears—and not of joy.
There was, in the space of little more than an hour, in Steve Bannon’s not unamused
observation, a befuddled Trump morphing into a disbelieving Trump and then into a quite
horrified Trump. But still to come was the final transformation: suddenly, Donald Trump became
a man who believed that he deserved to be and was wholly capable of being the president of the United States.