Fear: Trump in the White House(11)

Bannon tried to sit down with Trump and walk him through refinements of the strategy and how to focus on particular states. The candidate had no interest in talking about it.

Bannon assured Trump, I have “metaphysical certitude you will win here if you stick to this script and compare and contrast” with Hillary Clinton. “Every underlying number is with us.”

“I realized,” Bannon said later, “I’m the director, he’s the actor.”



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Kellyanne Conway had gone to the four-day Democratic convention in Philadelphia in July. She had listened to the speeches, talked to delegates, appeared on television. Her observations shaped her current strategy. “Their message is Donald Trump is bad, and we’re not Donald Trump. The rest of the message was race, gender, LGBT.”

Conway coined the phrase “the hidden Trump voter.” These were the people who found themselves perplexed by the vote ahead of them, saying, “God, my daddy, my granddaddy and I are all in the union. I’m going to vote for Donald Trump?” Putting a question mark at the end. “I’m going to vote for a billionaire Republican?” Another question mark.

“And you’d have these women who’d say, you know, I’m pro-choice . . . but I don’t think Roe v. Wade is going to change. But I don’t understand why we can’t afford everyday life anymore, so I’m voting on that.”

Much of the media did not buy “the hidden Trump voter” line. But Priebus and Walsh’s database gave the RNC and the campaign insight into almost everything about every likely voter—what beer they drank, the make and color of the car they drove, the age and school of their kids, their mortgage status, the cigarettes they smoked. Did they get a hunting license every year? Did they subscribe to gun magazines, or liberal magazines like The New Republic?

And Conway said, “There’s not a single hidden Hillary voter in the entire country. They’re all out and about.”

About Clinton, she said, “She doesn’t seem to have a message. Now if I’m her, I’m going to find a message. I’m going to buy a message. And it’s going to be very positive and uplifting and optimistic. All I can see from her so far is not optimism.”

Clinton had not cracked 50 percent in eight key states that Obama had won twice with over 50 percent. Conway agreed with Bannon that if the Trump campaign could make the race about Hillary, not Trump, they would win with those hidden Trump voters. If the race stayed about Trump, “we’ll probably lose.”



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Repeating the impression he’d formed six years earlier when he first met Trump in 2010, Bannon said, “Literally, I’ve got Archie Bunker. . . . He’s Tiberius Gracchus”—the second-century BC Roman populist who advocated transfer of the land from the wealthy patrician landowners to the poor.

Bannon looked at the schedule—Education Week coming up, then Women’s Empowerment Week. The third week was Small Business Week. It was as if the first George Bush were running in the 1980s. Classic country-club Republican. “Throw this shit out,” he said.

Bannon suggested a new plan to Jared Kushner. Trump was down double digits in every battleground state. There would be three stages:

First, the next six weeks, mid-August to September 26, when the first debate with Hillary was scheduled. “If we can get within five to seven points, that can build a bridge to win.”

Second was the three weeks of debates. This was the period of extreme danger. “He’s so unprepared for the debates,” Bannon said. “She’ll kill him because she’s the best” at debating and policy. Bannon said the way to handle debates was spontaneity. Trump had no problem being unpredictable. “We’re going to call nothing but audibles in these debates. That’s the only thing we’ve got . . . where he can walk around and connect.” Still he was pessimistic. “Look, we’re going to get crushed. . . . We’re going to lose ground here.”

Third was the final three weeks to election day, from the final debate to November 8. Bannon saw the fundraising by Steve Mnuchin, a Goldman Sachs alumnus and national finance chairman for the campaign, as an inadequate joke. They were going to have to turn to Trump himself. A candidate could spend unlimited amounts of his or her own money.

Bannon said he had seen data suggesting that Ohio and Iowa could be winnable. Also they had to win Florida and North Carolina. Then Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota could come back to the Republicans. It all seemed like a giant fantasy.

“This is G?tterd?mmerung,” the final battle, he said.

Manafort’s departure was announced on August 19.

On August 22, Time magazine ran a cover illustration of Trump’s dissolving face headlined: “Meltdown.”





CHAPTER


4




Signs of Russian “reconnoitering,” or digital intrusions as the National Security Agency called them, first appeared in local and state electoral boards’ computerized voter registration rolls—lists of voters’ names and addresses—in the summer of 2015. The first showed up in Illinois, then spread across the country to include 21 states.

As the NSA and FBI picked up more information on these cyber intrusions, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper worried that Russia might use the data to change or manipulate votes in some way. Is this just Russia, he wondered. The Russians were always trying to make trouble.