Fear: Trump in the White House(17)

“Whoa,” Bannon interjected. A transition might make sense.

“It’s jinxing me,” Trump said. “I can’t have one.”

“Okay, let’s do this,” Bannon said. “I’ll shut the whole thing down. What do you think Morning Joe’s going to say tomorrow? You’ve got a lot of confidence you’re going to be president, right?”

Trump agreed, finally and reluctantly, to a slimmed-down, skeletal version of the transition. Christie would cease fundraising.

“He can have his transition,” Trump said, “but I don’t want anything to do with it.”



* * *



Two weeks before the election, October 25, 2016, I was in Fort Worth, Texas, giving a speech to about 400 executives from a firm called KEY2ACT that provides construction and field service management software. My topic was “The Age of the American Presidency. What Will 2016 Bring?” The group was mostly white and was from all over the country.

I asked for a show of hands. How many expected to vote for Hillary? As best I could tell there were only about 10. How many expected to vote for Trump? Half the room raised their hands—approximately 200. Wow, I thought, that seemed like a lot of Trump voters.

After the speech, the CEO of the firm approached. “I need to sit down,” he said, taking a chair near where I was standing. He was breathing heavily. “I’m flabbergasted. I have worked with these people every day for more than a year. I know them. I know their families. If you had told me that 200 plan to vote for Trump, I would have told you that is impossible.” He said he would have expected more or less an even split. But 200, he was astonished. He offered no explanation, and I certainly did not have one.

Ten days before the election, Trump flew to North Carolina, a must-win state. He was down several points in most national polls. The NBC/Wall Street Journal poll had him down six points.

Bannon spoke with Congressman Mark Meadows, who represented the 11th District. Meadows was a Tea Party favorite and the chairman of the powerful Freedom Caucus of about 30 conservative and libertarian Republicans. He was a big Trump supporter. Over the summer he had led rally attendees in their favorite anti-Clinton chant, “Lock her up.”

Of all the battleground states, Bannon told Meadows, “This is the one that worries me the most.” The campaign seemed not to be clicking.

Meadows disagreed. “The evangelicals are out. They’re ringing doorbells. I’m telling you, you do not need to come back to North Carolina. We’ve got this.” Meadows’s wife and other conservative women had chartered a bus after the Access Hollywood tape and traveled across the state urging women to vote for Trump. Everything was holding and getting better, Meadows said.

Meadows had big plans to oust Speaker Paul Ryan. He handed Bannon a folder. “Read this,” he said. “Some 24 hours after Trump wins, we call the question on Ryan and he’s finished. We take over the House of Representatives. And then we have a real revolution.”

Bannon was still worried, though he saw some positives in the Trump-Pence strategy. They were using Pence well, Bannon believed, running him essentially on a circuit of states—at least 23 appearances in Pennsylvania; 25 in Ohio; 22 in North Carolina; 15 in Iowa; 13 in Florida; eight in Michigan; seven in Wisconsin. The theme was for Pence to campaign as if he were running for governor of those states, focusing on local issues and what a President Trump in Washington could do for the state. “And every now and then we’d pull him [Pence] out to Jesus-land,” Bannon said.

Trump, he said, was essentially running as county supervisor in 41 large population centers.

Bannon was amazed that the Clinton campaign did not use President Obama strategically. Obama had won Iowa in 2008 and 2012 by six to 10 points. “He never goes.” Clinton never went to Wisconsin in the general election. She didn’t talk enough about the economy.

“When I saw her go to Arizona, I said, they’ve lost their fucking minds,” Bannon said. “What are they doing?”

Historians will write books in the coming years trying to answer that question and related 2016 campaign matters. I was planning on writing a book on the first year or two of the next president. It seemed likely that would be Hillary Clinton, but Fort Worth gave me pause.

Two days before the election, November 6, I appeared on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace. The discussion turned to the possibility that Trump could win.

According to the transcript, I said on the show, “If Trump does win, how is that possible? What’s been missed? And I think I find in travels around the country talking to groups from Texas to Florida to New York, people don’t trust the polls. And they look at voting as much more personal. They don’t like the idea, oh, I’m in a demographic group, so I’m going to go this way. They want to decide themselves.”

Wallace asked if I thought that meant people were lying to the pollsters.

“I think that’s quite possible,” I said. But I didn’t see any signal or have any inside information. I was far from understanding what was going on.

The day before election day, Trump made a five-state swing, including North Carolina. He was exhausted.

“If we don’t win,” he said at a rally in Raleigh, “I will consider this the single greatest waste . . . of time, energy and money. . . . If we don’t win, all of us—honestly? We’ve all wasted our time.”