By Michael Scherer, Josh Dawsey, Ashley Parker, Tyler Pager The Washington Post (c) 2024
Trump Force One was Michigan-bound this spring when the former president confronted one of his biggest political weaknesses: abortion.
Donald Trump bragged about his role in helping to overturn Roe v. Wade. Now some longtime advisers wanted Trump to sign on to a national 15-week ban, like the 20-week federal limit he had supported from the White House. His senior campaign team, however, had prepared a long presentation to stop him.
He needed to win voters, they argued, who supported state referendums on protecting abortion rights. If he backed a national ban like before, he would be limiting medical options in some states. They showed him the electoral map, explaining that in critical battlegrounds like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, his opponents would be able to successfully argue that he had rolled back reproductive rights.
That was all he needed to hear. As he flew into Michigan, he agreed to tape a video opposing a national ban.
Soon after, the campaign team came back with another proposition: Stop bashing early voting, they said. He needed mail-in and early votes from Republicans to win the presidency. He pushed back, arguing that voters should cast their ballots only in person and on the day of the election.
Again, they put together a written presentation, showing Trump the benefits of earlier votes. A top Republican official in Pennsylvania called to tell him how excited his supporters were to act before Election Day. He reluctantly cut a video supporting the practice, giving the campaign the ammunition they needed for ads to get out the message.
Trump was running for president after two impeachments, 91 felony charges and 34 felony convictions. He had left office after inciting a riot at the U.S. Capitol and denying the results of a legitimate election, with a pitch to voters that he could deliver them “retribution.” His political instincts had carried him further and faster than anyone in modern American political history. But they had undermined him just as well.
As he launched his third campaign for the White House, with the tailwinds of widespread national anger over inflation and immigration, he found himself for the first time with a coherent, professional political operation. To win back the White House, he would have to learn to trust those around him, and those around him would have to learn to give him space.
Nothing would go smoothly. Little was predictable. He would continue to campaign on falsehoods, use sexist language and accuse undocumented immigrants of “poisoning the blood of our country.” But, in the end, he found a way for a decisive win that stretched across battleground states. His victory Tuesday showed gains across the board from 2020, when his handling of the covid pandemic had denied him a second term. He dominated among men. As he celebrated on Tuesday night, he cemented control of the GOP again and was surrounded at his palatial club, a noted difference from his ignominious exit four years ago.
He let advisers and family persuade him to soften his image with photos of his grandchildren, to appear on podcasts he’d never heard of. He allowed his campaign to invest heavily in direct-mail advertising, though he claimed no one would see it and that it was a waste of money.
At the same time, he continued to trust his own instincts, ignoring advisers who told him to talk about the economy above all else – and even mocking them from the stage. In one of his final speeches, he suggested he would be “fine” with a gunman having to fire into the news media to take a shot at him and said he should have stayed in office in 2020 after he lost. In moments of panic, he invited infighting among his own staff.
This story of the hidden moments and decisions that shaped the 2024 campaign for president is based on interviews with more than 50 people involved in the Democratic and Republican campaigns for president, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak frankly about private events.
They told the story of an election like no other, with a summer implosion of the incumbent president’s campaign, a live television assassination attempt that failed by a quarter-inch, a mid-July candidate switch, and a $2 billion sprint to Election Day – all in the context of an electorate that seethed for two years with dissatisfaction and frustration at the state of the nation’s political health.
Democrats realized that Trump had not defeated himself when he unleashed a mob on the U.S. Capitol in 2021. The country ended the election season as it had begun – with a closely divided population and no clear path to national reconciliation.
When he strode into a gymnasium in Palm Beach on Tuesday to vote, he had slept for only a few hours. Melania Trump stood nearby, in oversize sunglasses. He attacked Oprah Winfrey, saying he once agreed to host a funeral for an associate of hers at Mar-a-Lago and she was not grateful.
You always have regrets, he said. But that wasn’t the important thing.
“We ran a great campaign,” he said.
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Candidate swap
Even in the darkest days, President Joe Biden bragged about his numbers. “It’s essentially a toss-up race,” he told NBC’s Lester Holt in a July 15 interview, while the Democratic Party rose up in rebellion around him.
At that moment, fundraising was hundreds of millions of dollars behind schedule. Volunteers were tough to recruit. Internal campaign research, by pollsters who never briefed Biden, failed to probe deeply because many of Biden’s top aides thought polling had limited value. His campaign team demanded a June debate with Trump to jump-start the race, only to watch it blow up in its face.
Three days after the Holt interview, Biden was isolating with covid-19 in Delaware when the campaign’s three top pollsters – Geoff Garin, Molly Murphy and Jef Pollock – finally got time with the senior White House team, including Chief of Staff Jeff Zients, counselor Steve Ricchetti, communications adviser Anita Dunn and Biden’s political guru Mike Donilon. Campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon pulled her quants aside before the meeting: Lay it all out as you see it, she said.
The trio had 10 bullet points and little good news, according to several people familiar with the meeting. Some of the swing states were still within the margin of error, sure. But that masked deep structural problems in the electorate. The fundamentals had fallen away. The pollsters used data from other clients, in states like Virginia and New Mexico, because the campaign did not have its own research.
The news was not surprising or well-received. Biden’s team compartmentalized the pollsters in 2020 for exactly this reason, convinced that their science had become less predictive even as their tools claimed greater precision. The Biden team still had no doubt he could win. A senior White House adviser complained after the meeting, saying it was the job of the campaign staff to outline the path to victory, not say there wasn’t one, according to multiple people briefed on the comments.
But it was too late for decorum or debates over survey methods.
The Democratic leaders from New Yorksuch as Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer and House Minority Leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries had already spoken to the president. In a private meeting on a July 8 swing through Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) was blunt when the president asked about the campaign. Shapiro said he would do what he could to help Biden, but things were in a grim state.
Biden still had covid on July 21 when he took himself out of the race. He spent that Sunday morning on the phone with the Slovenian prime minister to put the finishing touches on the most complicated prisoner swap in modern history, according to a person familiar with the events. He spent the evening calling about 50 party leaders to thank them for their support and encourage them to support Harris.
No one in Biden’s senior orbit, including the president, thought there was any option but the vice president, who could legally retain Biden’s operation.
“Donors commissioned polls that showed the only candidate who would be weaker than Biden was Kamala Harris and that was full of,” well, feces, said one Biden adviser. “You can’t project that stuff. It’s such a misuse of data.”
Harris had tried on multiple brands in her career before settling into second fiddle – prosecutor, daughter of Oakland, speaker of “truth.” Until the call came this summer, her caution and loyalty to Biden dominated. Her team initially refused requests from Biden’s own aides for her to speak with donors and activists. They didn’t want to feed any speculation.
The only Harris campaign plan that existed had been scribbled secretly by staff on paper, in the case of one senior campaign adviser, or discussed in hushed tones in late-night phone calls. O’Malley Dillon allowed no meetings in Wilmington. Even Harris’s closest advisers did not share what they were doing with her.
But Harris had been preparing for months in plain sight, running through drills to get better. Stephanie Cutter, a communications whiz who worked for President Barack Obama, had been quietly doing media training with Harris, an effort revealed by White House visitor logs that showed her visits with Harris starting in December.
While Biden slow-walked campaign travel, the vice president had been going nonstop, finding her footing over dozens of events: a midterm blitz on abortion, a 2023 “Fight for our Freedoms” college tour and a 2024 “Economic Opportunity” tour.
Harris got only a few hours notice to relaunch the 107-day sprint. Her first major decision, after failing to reach her husband in Los Angeles, was to empower O’Malley Dillon, who offered to lead the campaign only if Harris gave her full authority.
By that point, the largest outside group supporting Democrats, Future Forward, had launched a massive research machine – a sensor array with rolling poll, testing and focus groups that would log nearly 14 million voter surveys in 10 months. The work was secretly shared with the Harris campaign through a public website known to only a few. Navigate there, wait a second for the photo on the dummy front page to fade, and millions of dollars worth of Google Docs links appeared.
Five days after Biden dropped out, the research described the dynamics that would shape the Democratic campaign. “In testing of 35 recent speech clips of the VP, all had directionally positive results,” one document read. “Economic themes and the VP’s framing of her record as a prosecutor and values do the most to move the vote; her praise of President Joe Biden does the least.”
By then, the Democratic polls were bouncing back. The money soon broke records – $1 billion in three months. For the first time in eight years, Democrats had the spectacle of major rallies. Harris tended toward bland, market-tested clichés, repurposing the greatest hits of Democrats past. But she hit every mark from July through September, when she dominated Trump in their only debate.
“She came out of the bullpen and threw like seven scoreless innings,” said Chauncey McLean, the president of Future Forward, reflecting a near-universal appraisal in the party.
Harris had the benefit of a country that had rejected Trump’s politics through three national elections, and a backlash that had begun with the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn a constitutional right to abortion. One central problem remained: Trump was winning the top three issues for voters – the economy, inflation and the cost of living.
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Reframing Trump
When Trump left office in 2021, 2 out of 3 Americans disapproved of his presidency, and barricades surrounded the U.S. Capitol. Suddenly a loser, he kept trying to cast himself as a winner.
“I’ve got nicer real estate than the president has,” one person who visited with him in Bedminster, New Jersey, remembers Trump saying in 2021. Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) told others he did not plan to utter Trump’s name. Many of his advisers struggled to find jobs.
But neither Trump nor the 1 in 3 voters who still supported him had finished with politics. The Conservative Political Action Committee conference, once a celebration of Christian crooners such as Pat Boone and Cold War holdovers such as Dick Cheney, welcomed the former president to Orlando in February. A straw poll found 97 percent of attendees approved of Trump’s job as president. For the first time in weeks, advisers saw Trump in a good mood.
“He was like a god down there,” said one person involved in the visit.
Trump’s political operation at that point was threadbare. In early 2021, Trump had asked Susie Wiles, a calming, no-nonsense ally, to take over his political organization. Few others wanted to be around him, as he raged about the 2020 election and was in such a foul mood that a lot of his friends and club members began avoiding him.
Wiles worked quietly for two years as investigations swirled and Trump vacillated about running for the White House again. She signed Chris LaCivita, a political brawler who had done just about everything except steer a major presidential campaign, before the 2022 midterms.
When Trump announced his run in late 2022, his team struggled to get any serious Republicans to attend the event. Only a few far-right House members showed up. Then came a wave of near-fatal blows.
Still in denial over the election, Trump proposed in 2022 the “termination of all rules, regulations and articles, even those found in the Constitution,” a black-and-white betrayal of the oath he had sworn in 2017. He met at Mar-a-Lago for dinner with rapper Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, who had recently promised to go “death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE,” and Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist and antisemite who had marched in Charlottesville at the deadly 2017 white-nationalist rally.
There were other setbacks – an FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago, dozens of federal indictments, state charges, a civil finding of sexual assault, a New York finding of fraud by his company and the decision of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to challenge Trump with the backing of some of the deepest pockets in Republican politics.
In the face of all of this, Wiles imposed order. For the first time in three campaigns, Trump had a unified command working on his behalf, calmly executing the basics. Wiles had told staff that she wanted all of them to bring a single message to the boss. They would try to stick up for one another.
One goal, Wiles told others, was to change how people saw him. Trump had honed his political persona at his rallies – a boundary-breaking strongman with a side of borscht belt stand-up. But the campaign needed something more. Aides told him to put out photos of his grandchildren.
“That took work,” an adviser said. “He has a certain view he wants to project, of a business leader, in a business suit, who is very serious.”
Alex Bruesewitz, a social media wunderkind who was in high school when Trump first retweeted him, called the former president on a golf day in July to pitch an appearance on the podcast of Theo Von, the popular mullet-haired stand-up comedian. He could get the Nielsen ratings effect of a week of MSNBC, Bruesewitz pleaded. Trump wasn’t sure.
“Ask Barron,” the former president said of his youngest son, now 18 years old and 6 feet 9 inches tall.
Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, connected Barron with Bruesewitz. “Oh yes, you should definitely do Theo Von. I watch it all the time,” the youngest Trump son said, according to a person briefed on the exchange. “And then he says, ‘You should do Adin Ross next.’”
The pattern was set, with a proud father obeying his youngest. “Did Barron approve this?” Trump asked when advisers came to him with another pitch.
The campaign put Trump in a bodega in Harlem, at a Bronx barber shop, behind the drive-through window at McDonald’s and in an orange worker vest riding shotgun in a garbage truck. (The U.S. Secret Service denied Trump’s request to ride in the truck in the motorcade, said one person present.)
On Von, Trump spoke in detail about his deceased brother’s alcohol addiction. On Joe Rogan’s podcast, perhaps the biggest in the country, he speculated about life on Mars. When an attempted assassin’s bullet nearly took his life in Butler, Pennsylvania, he rose defiant, fist in the air, blood spattered across his face. The images of Trump from before- a celebrity businessman on the debate stage, a defiant president stumbling through a pandemic – were slowly replaced.
“They made him look normal, a guy you like, not like the guy who is yelling at you. McDonald’s was the smartest damn thing I’ve seen him ever do,” said Brad Parscale, Trump’s 2020 campaign manager. “No one paid attention to his rallies, Americans stopped listening to them, and that really helped him.”
But the advice only went so far. Trump would adjust but not be bottled up. He remained outrageous on the stump. He verbally attacked donors behind closed doors. Repeatedly Trump’s aides told him to focus on the economy, the thing the research showed voters cared most about, just like Future Forward was doing. Trump instead would question Kamala Harris’s race, or go on long tangents at rallies about 2020, costing the campaign days of news cycles.
“But people want a show,” Trump told advisers in August in Pennsylvania, when they encouraged him to keep his speeches shorter – and on Teleprompter. At another point, he held a binder of economic talking points and deemed them “boring,” a person who heard his comments said.
“He thinks he can win more than we think is realistic,” the adviser said. “It’s about finding ways to do what he wants.”
No one knew what was coming next.One day, he was focused on a new business project. “He loves that stuff,” said one person, describing frustration among advisers. Another day, he was picking fights with people who should be his allies.
Trump sent a nasty message to Miriam Adelson, who was spending $110 million to help elect him, forcing allies to broker peace. Trump had a makeup meeting with DeSantis at his golf club that was initially incredibly unpleasant, according to a person with knowledge of the event. (Taryn Fenske, a spokeswoman for the governor, denied that characterization of the meeting.)
Wiles stood backstage in Atlanta in early August, shocked as Trump hammered Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp and his wife. “He is the most disloyal guy I think I have ever seen,” Trump thundered.
After the event, several Trump advisers, including Steve Witkoff, the former president’s best friend, begged Kemp for a détente. Witkoff flew to Atlanta to broker a deal. “Kemp is a popular governor, and the apparatus in the state is totally controlled by him,” said an adviser. “We needed to make peace.”
The governor went on Fox News to praise Trump and pledge his vote, while aides made sure Trump was watching. The former president responded on social media. “Thank you to #BrianKempGA.” Within weeks, the anger had been erased, as is so often the case with Trump, in exchange for something that benefited him.
Other attempts at reconciliation failed. After dispatching Witkoff to Kiawah Island, South Carolina, Trump advisers thought they had persuaded a reluctant Trump to campaign with former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley, arguably one of his best potential surrogates for reluctant GOP voters, especially women. A Fox town hall was discussed, but planning fizzled.
Trump was still fuming about Haley’s attacks during the primaries. At asummer meeting with New York donors, he had called her attacks “very nasty.” “I don’t like her,” he told them. By mid-October, even the mention of her name got him going. “They keep talking about Nikki. Nikki, I like Nikki. Nikki, I don’t think she should have done what she did,” he said on Fox News on Oct. 18.
She shot back weeks later on the same network, criticizing the campaign for allowing the insults of Puerto Ricans and Latinos at the Garden. “This is not a time for them to get overly masculine with the bromance thing that they’ve got going on,” Haley said. “Fifty-three percent of the electorate are women. Women will vote.”
Then just as things got rough in August, Trump tried to mix things up. He hired Corey Lewandowski, a former campaign manager who had been accused of sexual harassment by a donor.
Lewandowski set about calling everyone who worked in the campaign, asking them if they had everything they needed. Heconcluded that the campaign’s early decision to invest heavily on direct mail was malpractice. There was confusion about who was in charge.
“He started to destroy morale; he started to destroy everything immediately. He went around and tried to get information and play people off each other – here’s why everything the campaign is doing is wrong,” said one person of those days. “He just picked things he knew he could try – pick the boss’s scabs.”
Eventually, Wiles and LaCivita sat down with Trump and said that it was not sustainable for them to work together with Lewandowski. On the plane later that day, Trump told Lewandowski to go on TV and to head to his home state and win New Hampshire.
“They’re in charge,” he said of Wiles and LaCivita.
Weeks later, the Daily Beast published a story alleging that LaCivita was making “eye-opening” amounts from the campaign. Trump read the story, forcing LaCivita to gather his own paperwork to plead his case with the boss in a 20-minute meeting on the plane. The number wasn’t accurate, LaCivita and Trump advisers said.
Rather than rock the boat further, Trump agreed to move on. But Lewandowski stayed around, too, regularly flying on Trump’s plane. He was spotted smiling at the election night party on Tuesday.
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‘A new way forward’
As soon as Harris walked off the September debate stage, her campaign knew she had a problem. It was a clear win – the vice president had dominated Trump. But there were still eight weeks until Election Day and no big moments left on the calendar. Everyone in America had an opinion of Trump, but many of the voters she needed to reach still didn’t know who she was.
They immediately challenged Trump to another debate and spent weeks taunting him about it. They even considered debating on Fox News, Trump’s home turf. But Wiles and LaCivita were smart enough to smell the desperation. Trump passed on blockbuster ratings.
David Plouffe, a senior adviser, posited to the team his theory of the case: The campaign had to find a way to be the most interesting campaign every day – a high bar given Trump’s unmatched ability to attract attention. She would have to create her own moments. After months of tight controls on her message, the campaign sent her out on the talk circuit.
Harris sought to win over women on the “Call Her Daddy” podcast, Black men on the “All The Smoke” podcast, and conservatives on Fox News in a news interview. She participated in a CNN town hall and took a handful of questions from the press corps that was traveling with her almost every day.
The Kamala Harris of 2021 would have not agreed so easily. She entered the White House with a rocky relationship with the media, feeling burned by her short-lived 2019 presidential run. Even though she had just come out of days of intensive debate prep, she demanded her aides present a convincing case to why she should do many of the interviews, advisers said.
“What’s the audience?” she would ask. “What do I need to do? What are my goals?”
The risk of this strategy became clear in an early October appearance on ABC’s “The View,” which campaign leadership considered her only major blunder of the cycle. Asked what she would have done differently than Biden over the last four years, she hesitated. She had been prepped for a question like this. There was a correct answer – deflect, talk about the importance of generational change and her own new policy proposals going forward. Instead she said, “There is not a thing that comes to mind.”
Those close to her read the blunder as just another example of how much loyalty she still felt toward Biden, but the Trump team was ecstatic – his war room erupted in delighted disbelief the moment the words left her mouth – and the moment soon began circulating in ads from the Trump campaign.
Her bond with the president would soon be tested again, even as the two leaders remained in regular touch behind the scenes. On a swing through New Hampshire, Biden said he would like to lock Trump up, before quickly correcting himself. Then just before Harris gave her closing speech on the White House Ellipse, Biden went on a Zoom call to respond to the Garden “garbage” comments.
“The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters,” Biden said.
Some of Harris’s top aides were blissfully unaware of the mushrooming crisis inside the White House, standing outside the building with limited phone service and no WiFi. When they learned, they were exasperated. Biden wanted to clean it up, and the White House proposed to the campaign a post from Biden on X. The next morning, Harris distanced herself from the comment, and her campaign tried to sideline the president from major audiences.
Other dilemmas for the Harris team had no obvious answer. The first ad they released, “Fearless,” was “a centaur,” said one person involved – a compromise between two different spots. The first was an emotional piece in her own words, using footage from her Milwaukee rally right after Biden dropped out. The second was a pure bio spot, hitting her background as a prosecutor.
The pollsters and Harris’s team liked the bio. O’Malley Dillon and the creatives liked Harris in her own words. It was an early signal of what was to come, a constant round of phone calls and Signal chats about how to fly the plane with a new crew, uncertain weather and maps that were being drawn as they went. Sometimes, simple decisions like issuing a statement could take far longer than it should, campaign advisers said.
O’Malley Dillon brought in a new team, signing up Cutter, Plouffe and her old field partner Mitch Stewart. She rejected the idea of a single ad consultant, choosing a team instead. She made a point of hearing everyone out, bringing the pollsters into meetings they had been excluded from before, advisers said. But everyone was clear: The final decisions were hers. She helped drive the decision to go to Texas in the final weeks to lean into reproductive rights. She championed the speech on the Ellipse – Harris’s closing argument arguing Trump was a danger, and his second term would be more fraught than his first.
They had decided that Harris was “A New Way Forward” within weeks of taking over. But the negative frame for Trump took months. O’Malley Dillon and others were not convinced that “dangerous” – which the pollsters were pushing – did the job. The numbers showed that former Republican advisers, who had fallen out with Trump, should deliver the message, leading O’Malley Dillon to work the phones with former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney (Wyoming) and even former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who never came around.
Harris and her team sought to woo Republicans and independents in the final stretch, campaigning with Cheney and frequently focusing on Trump’s top former aides who were critical of him. But some in the campaign questioned whether it would ever work, even as Harris forged ahead, wondering how many undecided voters there were. What was the campaign doing, one adviser asked, to fix its problems with other groups more likely to vote?
The ultimate solution, which only came in October, was an alliterative triple negative, hard to remember and all-encompassing: “Unhinged, unstable and unchecked.”
Future Forward, meanwhile, picked its message strategy early and never wavered, directing $450 million in ads for Harris. The group would measure 3.71 billion video impressions from its spots, almost all of them focused on the economic contrast between Harris and Trump, including ads in Tagalog, Mandarin, Korean, Vietnamese, Hindi, Arabic, Hmong and Spanish.
They faced multiple opponents supporting Trump, the Adelson-backed Preserve America, the Trump-ally creation MAGA PAC and Right for America, with former Marvel executive Ike Perlmutter running the show.
But Future Forward wasn’t just another super PAC. It was a clearinghouse, a foundation, better funded than the Democratic Party itself. The quiet machine spit out 1,048 ads in the first 100 days of Harris’s candidacy, releasing only a single-digit percentage. It tested and ranked more than 700 clips of Trump for voter reaction, the top news clips, the top social media memes. It distributed tens of millions of dollars to other groups, including paid influencers and door-knocking campaigns.
Over and over again, the testing found a single clip that rose to the top – a cellphone video of Trump at Mar-a-Lago praising the wealth of the people in his audience and promising to make them richer.
“‘You’re rich as hell’ and ‘We are going to give you tax cuts’ was our version of Geico saying you can ‘Save 15 percent or more on your car insurance,’” McLean, the Future Forward president, said.
The centralization of the operation infuriated many of the groups who had been building for years to support Democrats, feeding the very criticism that Biden’s advisers had always had about the myopia of polling and testing. Ads that packed information into 30 seconds often tested the best, but that did not mean they always were the best, especially with abstractions like democracy on the ballot.
“The best approaches tend to mix art and science, and at times some of our funders in particular have really pushed us into an overemphasis on marginal efficiency that really doesn’t translate in 2024,” said another Democratic strategist.
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‘Dangerously liberal’
When Trump’s senior team convened by phone after Biden bailed on the campaign, Tony Fabrizio, the campaign pollster, predicted Harris would surge, making it a much tougher race. The campaign had to define her before she defined herself. They got to work, even as Trump himself struggled to move on, complaining bitterly in public and private that he had to face a new opponent.
Within days, they had their message. Testing showed voters did not think she was serious, so Trump showed her dancing in his ads. “Failed, weak and dangerously liberal,” was the tagline. The first two words had been planned for Biden. The punchline drew on the San Francisco past of the new Democratic nominee.
Trump’s own advisers knew he had a ceiling that was probably around 48 percent. They had to keep her ceiling lower, particularly among Black men, Arab Americans and others, two campaign advisers said. “We have to make them incredibly uncomfortable with her,” one of these people said.
Trump turned to the father of his daughter Tiffany’s husband, Lebanese American businessman Massad Boulos, to conduct outreach with the Arab American community. The former president, who had been elected in 2016 on a plan to ban entry to people from six Muslim-majority countries, started dialing into Michigan to show Muslims that he cared. The mayor of Hamtramck, Amer Ghalib, who is of Yemeni descent, eventually took the meeting and endorsed.
His advisers believed a powerful message against Democrats was the botched handling of the exit from Afghanistan, which they believed was a palpable mistake that Americans remembered.
No Trump ad tested better than those that used Harris’s own words from a 2019 campaign stop, when she boasted of pushing California prisons to provide gender-affirming medical care to transgender inmates, according to four advisers. Some advisers had expected the economy and immigration to be their top messages.
“It wasn’t even close,” one of these people said. “The trans issues, and the men in girls sports, that whole topic is the most animating topic at Trump rallies, but I was a little surprised that carried over to Democrats and everybody, including Black men.”
By Election Day, the campaign had spent $12 million or more on eight ads, according to AdImpact. Three of them were about the economy. Two of them were about Harris’s stumble on “The View.” Three of them were about the transgender issue. “Kamala is for they/them. Trump is for you,” said one. They tried to even translate the trans ads to Spanish but could not figure out how to make it work.
The Harris team never had an answer for the transgender attack and struggled throughout the cycle to come up with responses to other ads as well. The problem was Harris had supported transgender health care for inmates and was on camera saying so in her own words. It was still the policy, including inside the federal government. She would not renounce it. Her team just doubled down on their own messaging about her plans for the future.
When Harris told the hosts of “The View” that she did not disagree with Biden on anything, cheers went up inside the campaign’s headquarters. When she eventually was forced to visit the U.S.-Mexico border, the campaign believed they were winning, multiple advisers said.
“Our feeling was always he wins on policy. If we gave her a personality fight, we’d be playing on her turf. If we had a vibes campaign, we’d be playing on her turf. If the race was about abortion, we’d be playing on her turf,” said another adviser.
The Trump team, meanwhile, attempted to rebuild the machinery of Republican politics. When Trump officials took over the RNC, they wanted complete loyalty to the campaign. Among the first questions they asked prospective employees: Do you believe the 2020 election was stolen?
They believed that the RNC in the past had faulty data, had spent too much money on voter contact, and had been filled with establishment Republicans. One dataset had Wiles, a White woman in her 60s, as a Black woman in her 20s. They immediately tossed out the RNC’s plans for battleground states, forgoing plans to immediately hire staff and open offices.
“Susie wanted to stockpile resources until the end,” one person involved in the campaign said, a strategy that allowed Trump to draw even or ahead of Harris in October advertising.
Around the same time, the opinion came down that outside groups could coordinate with the campaign on field efforts. A new plan was formed. “We got these groups together and explained our thesis of the race, low-propensity voters are a necessity, not a nicety, as we saw in the ’18 midterms and the ’22 midterms,” a top campaign adviser said.
It was a big bet, made not from strength but weakness. The Democratic field effort on the outside was already much larger. Campaign officials privately admitted that turning over the get-out-the-vote efforts to people like Charlie Kirk, the head of Turning Point USA, and billionaire Elon Musk was risky. But Wiles told others they wanted to change how the Republican Party worked. “We won’t have to go back to the old way,” she said at one point, if the campaign was to win.
Trump was often striking transactional deals, telling corporate chieftains that were skeptical of him that he would lower their taxes. He promised oil billionaires a slew of things they wanted and urged them to give $1 billion to his campaign. He told waitresses and others there would be no taxes on tips in a bid for votes. He gave broad support to the cryptocurrency industry, which he once called a “scam,” after they became major donors.
Inside Trump’s operation, a sense of paranoia that sometimes verged on gallows humor underpinned the final months of the campaign. There had been two assassination attempts, Iranian hacks of email, and claims that the Chinese believed to be intercepting calls of Trump, his running mate JD Vance and others.
The Secret Service footprint ballooned around him. Suddenly, snipers were everywhere. He was always in front of bulletproof glass. He could no longer play golf. Campaign advisers began using burner phones and stopped using email for much of their work.
Trump, who had nearly died, was among the least impressed. “Trump said, ‘I’m not giving up my phone number, I assume they’re listening anyway. What do I care?’” an adviser said.
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Everyone in the room
For a kid from Queens, a sellout at Madison Square Garden was as good as it gets – hours of planned tributes and not just the political stiffs: Hulk Hogan, Doctor Phil, a Kennedy kid, even the richest man in the world.
Trump told his top advisers to make the trek, never mind the crowds or traffic, the lines that left even rich guys waiting hours. He put billionaires with his family in the motorcade for the trip down Fifth Avenue, so they could see the streets lined like a parade. He gathered them all backstage in the New York Rangers locker room. Cantor Fitzgerald’s Howard Lutnick, the Long Island boy running the transition, walked around shaking hands.
“Everyone in the room thought he was going to win,” an adviser said.
This was Trump as he had always been, a king in his court, surrounded by spectacle and adulation. Trump’s polls showed him in a stronger position than even 2016, when he had flipped over the nation’s political table and taken the White House by storm.
“We will achieve success that no one can imagine,” he told the crowd when he made it onstage, never mind the offensive statements of his warm-up act, which would fill headlines for a week. “This will be America’s new golden age.”
Of course, when he left the stage, he was livid. A comedian and other entertainers had made crude comments that were stealing the headlines, prompting several days of negative coverage. Among them was the joke that Puerto Rico was a “floating island of garbage.” Trump, who very rarely expresses regret, raged for days. “I can’t believe it,” he said at one point. “That comedian hurt me, huh?” he mused at another.
In the final days of the campaign, the temper rose up within him. He mocked others as he campaigned, fumed about his microphone, painted violent images of what guns could do to the media and one of his political foes. He said he should never have left the White House when he lost in 2020.
His team urged him to relax. He was winning. They were sure of it – an argument that was validated even beyond some of their predictions.
Wiles, his top adviser, made a rare move. She appeared publicly, glaring at him onstage until he wrapped up the event. On the plane, staff pleaded with him to get back on message, warning that he would turn off the voters he needed. “He heard from a lot, a lot of people. People were trying to get him to get his head back on straight,” said one ally.
When he appeared at his campaign’s West Palm Beach headquarters on Tuesday morning for the first time of the cycle, he praised Wiles as she stood nearby. The entire staff clapped and cheered.
He then told the room what he really believed: There should be no mail-in ballots. There should only be voting by paper on Election Day.
At that point, it didn’t matter what he thought. The winning message had already gone out. He would be president of the United States again.
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Video: Former president Donald Trump told reporters after voting in Palm Beach, Florida., on Nov. 5 he thought he ran his best presidential campaign. (c) 2024 , The Washington Post