TOP
Kellyanne Conway
Chapters
The FRONTLINE Interviews
Kellyanne Conway
Trump Adviser
Kellyanne Conway is a Republican strategist and pollster. Conway served as a senior adviser to Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, and counselor to the president during the Trump administration.
The following interview was conducted by the Kirk Documentary Group’s Mike Wiser for FRONTLINE on April 3, 2024, prior to Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race. It has been edited for clarity and length.
This interview appears in:
Text Interview:
Highlight text to share it
Meeting Donald Trump
When does Donald Trump first come across your radar as somebody who’s interested in politics, who's a potentially a political figure?How do you first meet him?
Donald Trump, the businessman and casino mogul, comes across my radar when I'm quite young because I'm growing up in southern New Jersey, halfway between Philadelphia and Atlantic City.And my mother, to support us as a single mom, gets a promotion: She takes a job at one of the casinos that's opening up in Atlantic City.Not a Trump casino, but she would have a career there for about 21 years until she retired.
So Donald Trump was already known to anybody on the East Coast as a big real estate developer.But he and his wife, Ivana [Trump], made their presence known and were pretty much ubiquitous fixtures, I'd say, in the Atlantic City-Philadelphia corridor.
… Donald Trump, interested in politics, was sort of always on a back burner.It was always like a slow burn, if you will.And the reason I knew that was, whether you turned on TV and saw him give an interview that ventured into politics, whether that the politicians aren't doing their job to make the policies better for the people and/or that there's a particular officeholder he thinks is doing a good job or that he'd like to be one himself, I always saw that as a news consumer.But to speak to him directly about it would have happened sometime after my then-husband, George [T. Conway III], and I moved to the Trump World Tower as it was being built in early 2002, late 2001.
I would see Donald Trump a couple times a year.He'd called me on the phone, or he'd invite me to his office to carry on a conversation about something either or both of us had said on TV that day or something he'd read in the paper.So it was much more a casual conversation about politics, but it was kind of cool to have Donald Trump's ear and interest in a very informal way.
Fast-forward to 2006, the summer of 2006, Donald Trump gets in a little bit of trouble with the current condo board at the Trump World Tower, where George and I are living.And George goes to the meeting that night, the resident meeting.I was here in Virginia with our then very young twins.And he said, "I'm going to go to the meeting."I said, "Well, is it per unit or per resident?"And he said, "No, it's per unit, so I'll go to represent us."
George T. Conway III and a guy named Michael Cohen saved the day for Donald Trump in the summer of 2006.They got rid of the existing board; a new board was going to come in.They stopped the board from making some changes, including taking Trump's name off of the building.And the next day, George was offered a seat on the newly configured board.Michael Cohen was offered an in-house position as special counsel or executive to Donald J. Trump, a position he would have for 10 years after that.
And George said to the woman who called him from the Trump Organization, "Well, I wouldn't sit on the condo board, but I bet my wife would."And his wife did.They offered the position to me, and I got to know Donald Trump much better after I sat on the condo board of the Trump World Tower.Why?Because I quickly realized how involved he is in all these buildings.
When I showed up to the first condo board meeting, in one of the conference rooms at Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue, I showed up a little bit early.I had my binder, took a cookie and a Diet Coke, minding my business, and I hear this familiar voice coming down the hall.And there's Donald Trump.And I said, he comes to the condo board meetings?He sat there with no notes, talked about the building, talked about where the building was headed, what we were doing with the building.And I said, wow.So the relationship built from there.
2011, I get a call to do a poll for Donald Trump.He wants to run against Barack Obama, something he had said publicly already.He was running against Barack Obama in Obama's reelection in 2012, and he asked me to do a poll, and the poll says it would be a very tough climb for anyone, including Donald Trump, to beat Barack Obama in 2012.Why?Well, sure, some people didn't like the economy.They certainly didn't like a government takeover of health care.But Obama was a historic figure, and the idea, like the [then-presidential candidate Mitt] Romney pollsters were saying publicly, the idea that African American men in Ohio, where the unemployment rate for them was high, the idea they would say, "You know what?I think four years for the first Black president is plenty; let's go get Mitt Romney," was foolish.
And so what I said to President Trump then looking at the data was, “Look, the thing that you have going for you is you are the wish fulfillment of what people have been telling pollsters like me for decades: I want someone who has a ton of experience who's never been in politics.”Well, who can that be?“I want somebody who's an outsider to the system who doesn't owe anybody anything, hasn't been corrupted by the system.”OK, check, check two. …
In 2011, after I looked at the polling data, I said to Mr. Trump two things: One was, “People don't think you're serious about running for president because all the political motivators that compel someone to run for public office, let alone the presidency of the United States, don't apply to you.Money, fame, fortune, power, big staff, bankability, platform—you've got all that.You're Donald Trump.”And the second thing I said to him was, “You're never going to truly know what people think about you as a presidential candidate until you actually are a presidential candidate.”And that ended up being true.He didn't like my polling data, so he hired another pollster.That pollster told him he could beat Obama, but he didn't run.
I think 2016 was the best opportunity for Donald Trump to run for president.It was the perfect storm of people fatigued enough with the Obama record, him being distant enough from Hillary Clinton, Hillary being too much Hillary and not enough Clinton, people looking at her as corruptible, not a fresh face, not interested in building consensus and negotiating, which all three attributes usually help a female candidate down ballot.And Trump got under her skin.He gave her a nickname.He gave his primary opponents nicknames.He took center stage in that debate in 2016, on Aug. 6, 2015, and never lost it.The debates definitely helped him then.And he just was able to connect with people in a way that the typical politicians could not, whether they were her in the general election or the 16 or 17 other qualified men and women who were running against him in the primaries.
From 2011 to 2013, we sort of kept our relationship going informally.Then early 2014, Jan. 9, 2014, I was invited to Trump Tower to a big conference room because Donald Trump was being courted by a lot of the county chairs to run for governor against Andrew Cuomo.And I sat there listening to Melania Trump, and the Trump kids were there, the grown Trump kids, and the county chairs.A big ice and snowstorm, but they had come from all over New York to try to court him.
And he asked what I thought about it all when I walked in, and I said, “Look, I think every big movement needs a transformational figure to truly transition into the next phase.”So not the best examples, but I was talking about how the British monarchy, flat on its back after Princess Di [Diana] passed away, you have [Prince] William and [then-Duchess of Cambridge] Kate at that time newly married.They were, I think, helping to transform the monarchy to make it more accessible to the people and more durable.The Catholic Church, of which I'm a member, flat on its back from some of its scandals, a lot of people leaving the church, new entrants not necessarily coming into the church.You have Pope Francis as a transformational character.So we gave a couple.I said the Republican Party of New York needs a transformational person and a character.
But I think his kids were giving him good advice, and he had the advice that he was giving to himself, too, which is, if you're going to run for governor of New York, why not just run for president of the United States?Go for the whole big thing.And that's what he did.And I think a lot of that was brewing early 2014, where he was really thinking about how to put all the chess pieces together.Michael Cohen was flying to Iowa, famously on Trump Force One.
2015, his campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, came to see me.I went to see Mr. Trump, four of us in the room where he said, "I'd love to bring you on.Let's wait a couple of months."We went through how to beat Hillary.We went through what was going on in the primaries, different demographic groups.I just basically told him what I saw as a pollster of many years, what I saw politically and what I saw culturally.
And that piece is incredibly important to the story of Kellyanne Conway and Donald J. Trump, because the old boys' network, but certainly the new boys' network, had tried to exclude me from a lot of the political polling contracts at the RNC, the NRCC, NRSC.I'd just have candidates rolling their eyes, poisoning the water for me, and I have to thank them, because it forced me to go out and build a business that had maybe 20% politics, but the rest were all nonprofit clients, corporate clients, individuals, companies, associations.And I learned what non-political America was thinking and doing, how they were spending their time and their money, what kept them up at night, what their frustrations and aspirations and expectations were, and how to really take that information, the social science experiments that I was working on, the cultural indicators, and put it into a political structure.
And that helped because Donald Trump himself was not coming from politics.He was coming from our culture.He was coming from business America.And so, many have said it's a match made in heaven; it certainly was one that all came together in 2016, not 2015.He made me an offer, but I ended up going to run a [Sen.] Ted Cruz super PAC because I was convinced that President—Mr. Trump was not going to do much polling, and the people would, again, ridicule me, like, “What is she doing?She's flying around the plane.What are they doing?She's not even a pollster.”
So it all came together.I was talking to him throughout the entire time.We just saw what was happening, this cultural phenomenon named Donald Trump.And the more they tried to attack him, the more they tried to deny him and denigrate him and dismiss him, the stronger he seemed to become.And whether that was other Republicans or the Never Trumpers—who has looked sillier than them, honestly, in the last 10 years?—the Democrats, people just sort of dismissing him.I call them the wrist-flickers: “Oh, Donald Trump, that's a joke; he'll never be the nominee.”And the more they said that, the more people sort of rose up and said, “Not so fast.You don't decide who the nominees are, Billionaire Donor X or Never Trump Voter Y.We do, the rank and file.The people decide who the nominees and the presidents are.”
And that really is how his rise happened, and that's how we were able to look at the electorate as it was blossoming for him.Could he rely on traditional conventional Republican voters?How would he do among Independents?How would he do among what was called, what's now called the double haters, but at the time we called, like, the double disaffected voters—they didn't care for Hillary, they didn't care for Trump.He was beating her, and ended up beating her handily by 20 points in Michigan, almost 40 in Wisconsin among people who had a low opinion of both of them.And that told us an awful lot about how people would react to somebody who did not have the political experience.
And he was basically able to say, “Look, Hillary has experience, but it's the wrong kind of experience.She voted to put us in war in Iraq; I'll get us out of there.She voted to explode the deficit; I'll get us out of that.She voted for a government-run health care.She's voted against pay raises for the troops, or she is why we have Common Core or we have high taxes or we”—All these things that he was able to say, “Help is on the way, and it comes in the form of an outsider.”
Bill Clinton ran as an outsider successfully.Hillary Clinton was running as the ultimate insider, and President Trump was able, like Barack Obama eight years earlier, who would become President Obama, to really show Hillary's would-be viabilities were her vulnerabilities.
What Draws Trump to Politics
… A central question that we have for both of the candidates, which is, why are they running?What is it that motivates them?What is the answer with that for Donald Trump?Did you get a sense of how early he had that interest in running for president or what it was that was driving him to give up what he had to enter politics?
The primary motivator for Donald J. Trump in running for president in 2016, in 2020 and absolutely in 2024 is love of country and her people and the essential freedoms that are promised to us all.Democracy does not belong to people based on race or gender or socioeconomic status, household income and education levels, and certainly not based on your wealth or your name.It is promised to each of us; it's enshrined in the Constitution—one person, one vote.
And President Trump's love for the country and him feeling like it was slipping away from us, that manufacturing jobs and our wealth were being transported overseas legally; that people would come up to him and say, “You're a businessman; you're a job creator.Please run.We need somebody who's unafraid.We need strength, not weakness.We need success, not failure.We need solutions, not problems.We need someone who's willing to speak on our behalf.”
Someone like Donald Trump would never need to run for president to have power and fame and fortune and bankability and a huge staff and a huge platform.He had all that.And we've seen the great sacrifices of wealth, of privacy, of security, of sanity that happens when you are playing at the highest echelons of the political candidacy game and indeed governance as president of the United States.He and his family have sacrificed mightily for him to run for president, be president, and now run for president again.
And the same conversation I had with him in 2011 is the same conversation I had with him 12 years later in 2023, which is, I care about you and your family.Why are you doing this?Why are you running?Go have a great golf game every day.Go enjoy your 10 grandchildren and your hot wife, brilliant wife.You've got a great life; you're Donald Trump.But he feels compelled; he indeed feels called to be president again now to undo the awful policies of the Biden-Harris administration. …
And if you don't believe me, believe everyone's polls, including the mainstream media's polling that shows President [Joe] Biden under water, with more people disapproving than approving of the way he handles his job on the core issues they say are going to motivate their vote in 2024: economy and inflation; immigration and border security; crime; Ukraine; Israel and Gaza; health care—you name it.
And so President Trump feels that he fixed the economy one time.He got these great trade deals with China and Japan and Mexico, Canada, [South] Korea.1He was forcing the other NATO countries to pay their fair share to the common defense through their dues.He feels it's his personality that brought manufacturing back and construction and mining after Hillary said, “I will put miners, coal miners out of work.”2It's like, thank you for the free ad, lady.And he feels he'll do it again.And it comes from an urging of the people.They feel like they've lost their voice and their choice, that their essential freedoms have been stripped from them.
And I'll do you one further.The Trump voter, people who don't agree with President Biden, don't want to vote for a Democrat this time, whether they call themselves, Democrat, independent, Republican, conservative, moderate, liberal, libertarian, they are now suffering castigation and denigration at the hands of the president of the United States.The idea that the commander in chief and the president of the United States, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris would insult Americans, would castigate and denigrate them based on their politics, would try to silence and censor-ban, would try to—would castigate them and denigrate them, insult them according to their politics, their beliefs—Joe Biden calling them “Mega MAGA,” giving a decidedly very political speech with a Marine right behind him in Philadelphia two years ago, the fact that he would make fun of people based on their beliefs on abortion or religion or guns, this is dangerous territory for a president of the United States and a commander in chief, to look at a whole group of people with such derision and ridicule.And Trump feels like he's their voice, and he certainly is their choice.
Why Trump Runs in 2016
He had talked about politics for a long time.There's an interview going back to 1980 where he's asked about it—
Rona Barrett, yeah.
—and he says that even somebody who's right might have unpopular opinions, and they're not going to be elected compared to somebody who's got a big smile and just says what people want to hear.Do you think that Trump was waiting, that the moment was wrong for him in 1980, the moment was wrong in 1987, in those other moments, that he was looking for a moment all along when maybe the mood of the country would fit sort of his approach?
The best opportunity for Donald Trump to run for president was 2016, and it was an inflection point in our nation.People had had enough with what they saw as us giving too much money to foreign aid.People could say, “Oh, it's not even that much of the budget.”It was the perception that we take care of other countries and other people in other countries before we take care of our own.It was this belief that America was no longer first, even to a wide swath of Americans.
And as President Trump has said many times, he expects the German chancellor to say Germany first and the French president to say France first and the British prime minister to say England first.He expects that.So we need an American president who's saying America first.We're not just another country on the map.There is this idea of American exceptionalism.
And we are the most generous country in the world when it comes to providing defense for other countries, protecting their sovereign borders, their physical sovereign borders and the people who reside within them.We are the most generous country on the earth when it comes to legal immigration—34 million and counting have come here legally.
So President Trump was looking at the flip side of that, which is all that's true.So then why do we have Americans insulting America?Why are we saying to welders and carpenters and factory workers and plumbers perhaps that you don't matter as much as the lawyers and the doctors and the businesspeople?Yes, you do, he said.We want to elevate all types of work so that America is a country that works for everyone, where everyone who wants to work is working.
And his message was very simple but very powerful.He used these three word-phrases: “Build the wall”; “Repeal/replace Obamacare”; “Repeal Common Core”; “Cut your taxes”; and yes, once in a while he'd say, "Lock her up."I think in 2024 it's "Prop him up," not "Lock her up."
But he had this way of connecting with people where they felt, improbably, that their voice in politics was a total political novice who, like them, is an outsider to the system.They felt that Donald Trump was clasping hands with them on the outside of the glass, pressing their nose, looking in and saying, “When is it my turn?What's in it for me?”
Conway Joins the Campaign
Can you take me in the moment when you're asked to run the campaign?Was the campaign in crisis at that point?
… I was asked to be elevated and promoted and assume the duties of campaign manager by Donald J. Trump on Friday, Aug. 12, 2016.And he did it privately in his office after shooing everybody out of there.He was in a fit of pique that day.He was not happy with the way some of these videos were going. ...
I went up.I said, "What's going on here?"He was doing videos like, “Hello, American Legion.Congratulations on your convention”; bar mitzvah videos for friends of the family; “I can't come to the Chamber of Commerce dinner so I'm sending in a video.”He's doing all types of things before he got on the plane to go to Altoona, Pennsylvania, and other stops.And I had not seen him in irascible moods before, necessarily.
And so I said, "What's going on?"He cleared everybody out.I said, "What's going on?"He said, "I don't know," he said."I'm told that I'm a better candidate than Hillary."I said, "Well, yes, fact check true, empirically true.""But I'm losing, and she's got better people."I said, "Well, she has more people.You've got some great men and women here."I'd been working on this campaign as one of the five polling firms and a special adviser or a senior adviser for a while now.I said, "You've got great people working downstairs for you.Very talented."He said, "Really?"And I said, "You haven't been down there since we moved to 14 and 15?""No."
So, he said, "Do you think you can run this thing?"And I said, "What? The 25th floor, the Trump Organization, the Trump campaign?"He said, "The campaign."I said, "I could, but I need three commitments from you."And he said yes to all three at one time.And I can't think of another politician who would have done that, because he wasn't a politician; he was a business guy.He saw that a high-level team member, somebody he's putting into an executive role, needed sources of support.
And I talked about looking at the data more granularly, looking at the 64 counties I thought were important, which eventually became 36 to 32 counties.Now it's about 19 to 26 counties in 2024.I told him I need another person in the C-suite.And I told him that I wanted to be able to, as campaign manager, to shift the strategy to what I called Hillary's blue wall.Oh, Hillary, I said, her blue wall is real.If we can focus your schedule and your free media appearances with local TV, if we can just focus our resources, treasure, time and talent, including his schedule and Vice President Pence's schedule, on the states that Obama/Biden had carried twice with more than 50% of the vote, where Hillary was not above 50% and staying there in anybody's credible polling.And the most important part of the three-part configuration, where a Republican had been elected statewide in that state to governor and/or senator during the Obama/Biden years.That really widened our aperture.It's Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Iowa, North Carolina, Florida, all states that we ended up winning, and included states that we didn't end up winning, but where we were going to compete—Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Colorado.The list went on and on.
And so, I said, If we can do that just the way you just chose Mike Pence, where my argument was get somebody who can help you with the either Rocky Mountain states or the Upper Midwest and Rust Belt states.And so he said OK, and I said, "Well, who do I have to tell?"He said, "You're talking to me.I just said yes."
And I had some doubt, the little girl from South Jersey, the Catholic schoolgirl always doing what she was told, raised by four self-denying Catholic Italian women, was about to say, oh—I said, "Listen, why don't you think about this, and we'll talk again tomorrow."And I said—I like to say a man would have had such confidence; he would have run down to the bored press in the corral in the atrium of Trump Tower and said, “I'm in charge now; we're going to win this thing.” ....
So boom, I became campaign manager.And he made good on his promises.And we had the wild ride of our lives.Improbable victory.But for me, I at least predicted it on TV.I was on television seven, eight times a day, so I have a living, breathing video catalog of what I thought in every state, and why we were going to that state, and how we were competing in that state and saying things like on Morning Joe, saying, “Well, Mitt Romney lost the five collar counties around Philadelphia; we're going to lose them, too, but we're going to win the state because we'll run up the totals in the western part, and then we're going to flip these couple of counties, you know, Lackawanna.”
And I remember Mika Brzezinski saying, "Did you say your candidate is going to lose?"And I said, "No, we're going to lose the collar counties like Mitt Romney did, just not as badly."And lo and behold, that is what happened.I think he still did better than us in one or two of them.
But just looking at things granularly, we were broadcasting what we were doing, but we noticed Hillary was ignoring states like Michigan and Wisconsin.They just weren't on her schedule.And there she was in those swing states of Aspen, Colorado, the Hamptons, Manhattan, Nantucket.She was just raising money most days and not really connecting with the voters.They just wanted money, money, money to put out ads, ads, ads.And we were running the campaign differently.
And I think Donald Trump does best, as he was in 2016, underestimated, underdog, under-resourced, understaffed.And people just never saw him coming.Except the people.The people saw him coming.The people whose job it is to see him coming never saw him coming.And I think they were just looking at national polls, which were meaningless, and not thinking about how we can cobble together 270.
Can you tell me about how you see Steve Bannon and what his role was in the campaign and in the Trump orbit?
So one of the three requests I made of Mr. Trump on Aug. 12, 2016, was to have another person in the C-suite, and it ended up being Steve Bannon.I don't know that he had a lot of campaign experience, but he was a fixture at Breitbart and he had his own radio show at the time.And he had seen a lot as sort of a foreign policy expert and very committed to President Trump.Understood, I think, through his perch in radio that something was really building among the grassroots here.
So he came into the campaign.We worked hand in glove.We brought on Dave Bossie as a deputy campaign manager whom Bannon and I had both worked with over time.And had some other folks involved who were obviously critical and important to our effort.
But I also inherited a lot of people when I became campaign manager who I thought were very talented, but they had been underutilized.It was my job to sort of look them in the eye and say, “What do you need?What do you do here?”And I said, “Does Mr. Trump know that you do this here?”And he brought him down to the 14th floor.I thought they were eminently talented.Some of them are on his 2024 campaign.Some of them worked in the White House.
So Bannon was helpful.I just know I'm the one with the living, breathing catalog of where we were going to win and saying that we would win, and that was a pretty bold statement.I didn't say it because I was Donald Trump's campaign manager.I said it because that's what we saw in the data.And I'm a pollster, not a plastic surgeon.I can't guarantee what your nose will look like; I just perform the surgery and live with the result.
And we were very supportive of each other.Bannon came into the White House, and he was let go within six months.So I think that speaks for itself.
The Access Hollywood Tape
The most dramatic moment of that campaign, in a way, is the <i>Access Hollywood</i> moment.Can you take me inside of how it went down, how Donald Trump survived it?
Yes, <i>Access Hollywood</i> was a huge inflection point in the campaign.It happened on Friday, Oct. 7—who's counting?We were scheduled to go to Wisconsin the next day for an event with then-Speaker Paul Ryan of Wisconsin; Reince Priebus, the RNC chairman of Wisconsin; Ron Johnson, the senator from Wisconsin who was up for reelection; and Gov. Scott Walker would be there, also a Republican, who would run in the primary against President Trump.And I knew they were going to cancel him, so I canceled our participation first.I said, “Listen, we're expected in St. Louis early on Sunday morning to participate in the prime time debate.We can't come to Wisconsin.”The press clips were that they cancelled on Mr. Trump.
What happened on Oct. 7 is, in the middle of the afternoon we had scheduled debate prep, and we were in a conference room in Trump Tower.And the "we" was Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, Chris Christie, Reince Priebus, Dave Bossie, might have been a few others in there.Me.I might have been the only woman in there.Jared [Kushner] may have been in there; I can't remember, because he does observe the Sabbath.He may not have been able to be there.I just don't remember.
And Hope Hicks was out in the atrium behind the glass and is signaling to me.So I went out, and she said, "I don't know what to make of this.It's just an email."It was an email from a <i>Washington Post</i> reporter who claimed he had a tape of Mr. Trump saying all these things.But it was just an email, and then the email became an audio clip, and then the audio clip eventually became a video clip.
But she said, "I don't know what to do," so we took it into Mr. Trump, played the video— we were going to play the video clip.And he said, "That doesn't sound like me.What is that?What is it from?"I said, "None of us know."I said, "Did you give an interview to <i>Access Hollywood</i>?I don't remember it on your schedule."It turns out it was years before, etc.
So we were just trying to piece together the facts.We didn't have the facts.And he said, "It just doesn't sound like me.I don't get it."Clearly it was him after we saw the video.So that night, you start to have a ton of Republicans who didn't want him to be the nominee to begin with.They found their excuse, not even the reason.
You found a ton of Republicans who really didn't want him to be the nominee in the first place.Some of them hadn't even showed up to the convention in Cleveland, Ohio, in August.They were all looking for an excuse to not support him or to try to replace him on the ballot, and now they had a reason.So they thought.And person after person after person came out saying, “Drop out of the race.You can't—it's not sustainable.”
And that night Mr. Trump went down to the studio we have on the second floor where I did most of my hits, and he recorded a message basically apologizing if he offended anyone and saying, "I don't remember this."And he came out with phrases like "locker room talk," and "This was meaningless.I didn't mean to hurt anybody."
The next morning, a bunch of us had planned to go to Trump Tower, to the residence, and that was pretty much the same group—Rudy Giuliani and Chris Christie, Reince Priebus, Jeff Sessions, Jared Kushner, myself. ...
And so there we were.I got out.The press was all assembled on the side door.And I went up to have a meeting.Reince Priebus told him, “You have two choices.You can stay in the race and lose by the largest margin in presidential history, or you can get out of the race, make a gracious exit and let Gov. Pence or others run.”
I was about 12 minutes late to that meeting at Trump Tower that day, only female in the room, because in my hand was a hard copy I had printed at my home of what Gov. Pence, his vice presidential running mate, was about to put out on social media about the <i>Access Hollywood</i> tape.And I handed it to Mr. Trump and I said, “This is what Gov. Pence would like to put out.I've been on the phone with Karen [Pence] and him.”
And he said, "Wow.OK, it's pretty rough."I said, "I would just say thank you."And so I called Gov. Pence.He put out a statement.Melania put out her statement while I was there.And people always ask me, “Well, what did you think?”Well, I'm a combination of Donald Trump, Melania Trump and Mike Pence.Go see what they all said.It was horrible to hear that.But I also had never experienced that, and I had been alone with Mr. Trump many times.I had talked to many people who had worked with him, for him.I lived in his building for a decade—yeah, over a decade.And we had that apartment for 12 years, and I lived there.I took three babies home from the hospital there.I know what the people who work there, who came from dozens of different countries around this globe—our apartment was catty-corner to the U.N.I know what they all thought of working for him and for the Trump Organization.
I just wanted to just wash that all away.When we had Bill Clinton, what he did with an intern in the Oval Office, we're going to have his wife just sashay into the presidency?
And that was the argument I made to President Trump.I said, "You could be the guy who hands over the election to Hillary."But he was never going to drop out.He just kept asking me, "Can they do that?"The press was saying, oh, they can throw him off the ballot.He's asking a practical legal question—can they do that?I said, "I don't think they can do that.They can try to force you, but the ballots have been printed."It's Oct. 7.I don't know.I don't even know how that would work.If that happened now, early voting already started in a lot of states.So he was going to hang tough there on behalf of the country.
But look, I said at the time and I'll say it again in 2024: We Americans, we love to complain and converse and kvetch about what offends us.But we vote according to what affects us.And I knew people were going to do that.The oddest thing about the <i>Access Hollywood</i> tape is, I could not have predicted how different people might have reacted.There were people who don't really care for Donald Trump, who were thinking of voting for Hillary, who were so upset to think that they were going to be robbed of their choice and their voice.They looked at it as election interference, some of them.Let it all hang out.Let us just look at them with all their flaws and all their merits and make a choice.
It also was important that he show up at that second debate and that the Bannon/Bossie plan of having the Bill Clinton accusers there, finally getting that realized.3And I just remember being in that room when they walked in, and I saw the faces of the young press corps; they were the embeds in the Trump campaign.I remember this guy—I won't say his name—he had no idea who these people were.If it's not on Twitter, it's not real.That's where they lived.They had no idea who Paula Jones was or Juanita Broderick or, goodness, pick a card, any card.And so they were there not because of what Bill Clinton did to them, but what Hillary Clinton did to them.That was the whole point of that.
But look, as time went on, he stayed in the race.People saw him as tough, as resolute, as not backing down.And he addressed this at the debate that night. …
Even looking back, it is obvious that the Democratic Party, the Hillary Clinton campaign and all of its adjuncts and allies in the larger left-wing ecosystem were relying way too heavily on her experience and name and the <i>Access Hollywood</i> tape, and voters just made a different decision.They just wanted somebody who represented real change and was a true outsider like they were, and who was able to take the slings and arrows.Did it cost him some votes? Yes.Did it gain him some votes? Yes.
Election Night 2016
You thought he could win; a lot of people didn't.And election night happens.I don't know if you know what Donald Trump believed in his heart, but did you see a change in him in that moment as the results of the election become—
Yes, absolutely.President Trump was one of the last people to think he was winning on election night, even though he was winning on election night.I appreciate that, because he's not somebody who is given to irrational exuberance and believing everybody saying "You're so great, and you're going to win, and this is"—he saw it changing.He knew there was something out there.He knew when he showed up at a rally that it was standing room only and people were outside looking at jumbotrons.He knew that that was not an aberration when he just showed up in Harrisburg or Eau Claire or Rochester Hills.It was everywhere.It was everywhere, it was everywhere.And the people were sitting there joyful.Sometimes they're out in the sun or the rain in their lawn chairs for a day and a half waiting to get a seat, joyfully.
And I would say to the media, "Look at all the people at the rally.""We see all the people at the rally, Kellyanne, but will they vote?"No, they sit in the sun and the rain for two days, but they're not going to vote.Of course they're going to vote.
So he knew—as I liked to say at the time; many people have taken this line since, but it really applies to Donald Trump in 2016—he knew that he had not erected your conventional, typical political presidential campaign.He had built a movement, and people felt they were part of the movement.… And I don't think he could have done it the quite the same way in 2011 or 1980, because it was the convergence of Donald Trump, the known businessman and job creator, TV star on <i>The Apprentice</i>, political outsider like you and me, who's coming with a vision and some solutions, who's elevating issues that were mired in single digits or an asterisk in the polling—trade, illegal immigration, border security.He's elevating them into the national consciousness and saying, "I'm going to tackle these."And by the way, they're also a proxy for a poor economy, for unfairness, for workers' jobs being shipped overseas, for other countries laughing at us and taking advantage of us and expecting us to pay for them and their people when we're not paying for us and our people.I remember him saying, "If we don't treat the veterans well, who are we as a country?"It's a very simple phrase that he made good on.
And a lot of this was happening offline, at his rallies, in his TV appearances, on his airplane, but so much of it was happening online through his vast, evolving, growing social media footprint.The way Donald Trump used Twitter and the way the campaign—we used Facebook and Google and YouTube to buy our ads.We couldn't afford network ads and cable ads, so we did 50% traditional ads, 50% online ads, and it paid off majorly.It's the biggest return on investment in politics in years.And we did it because necessity is the mother of invention, and it was a place where people were migrating and gravitating toward that.I don't think you could have done that quite the same way in 2011, and certainly not in 1980.
So what Mr. Trump, what Candidate Trump did, and President Trump continued to do, that caught fire and kept people loyal to him and coming back for more was what I call the democratization of information.So Mr. Trump and then President Trump is sending out a tweet or a Facebook post.Whether you're the billionaire CEO who's got 12 people working on social media, outgoing and incoming, whether you're the stay-at-home mom or you're the welder on the job looking at your phone, everybody got a presidential communication at the same time.You don't have to be a big donor; you don't have to be a lobbyist; you don't have to be an insider.You learned what I learned at exactly the same time.
And it's the democratization of information.And boy, do people miss that now.They feel the government is furtive, is not transparent, is not forthcoming.They don't communicate with us enough.That is the beauty of Trump 2016 in getting that nomination and in winning the presidency, and then communicating with the public all through his presidency, and even now.
But the reason I say that is, is because Donald Trump became a resource for many people.He's telling them what they didn't know about our manufacturing policies, what they didn't know about China and fentanyl, what they didn't know about the USMCA [United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement] being able to replace NAFTA as a more modern, more responsive, more pro-America, pro-American worker, pro-American interest and industry trade agreement.4
4
Council on Foreign Relations: NAFTA and the USMCA: Weighing the Impact of North American Trade
It's his ability to communicate with you instantly and with no handlers and no delete button.So you’ve got him unvarnished, and people appreciated that.I like to say he needs to tweet like we need to eat; it's just about better choices.I didn't love all the tweets, but I love the fact that all the tweets were a direct communication from a presidential candidate, and then indeed a president to his American population.
Inside the Transition
Can you take me inside in the transition, the moment you write about in the book, of the dossier being briefed, and you have to sort of explain it to the president-elect?What was it like in that moment?
Before I do that, let me go back to election night.So it's election night 2016.We had already known about some of the early voting going on in Democratic strongholds in, say, Broward County and Miami-Dade County.And we thought maybe the Democrats were cannibalizing their own vote, that they had done so well getting people to vote early that their day-of-vote may fall behind.
And indeed, when we saw that and then we saw the returns coming in in certain counties in Florida—for example, I knew the Panhandle was still out, and it would be very pro-Trump, and we knew, for example, he's going to win Florida.But I called Mr. Trump around 6:30 or 7:00 p.m., I said, "I think you should come down now.We're starting to get these returns."We had a little data room behind a wall on the fifth floor, and we were going back between there and the 14th floor.And he came down, and then slowly but surely, his family members started coming and some of his friends.And it was just an amazing night.
But when we got back from Grand Rapids, Michigan, we got to Trump Tower after 4 a.m. on Election Day.Of course I'm sure he got no sleep and then went and voted for himself with his family.But by the time we got back, it was Election Day, and Nate Cohn and I think it's called The Upshot—I have a new name for it—at <i>The New York Times</i> said that Donald Trump had like a 9% chance of winning Michigan and like a 12% chance of winning the whole presidency.And that number started to change throughout the night.That's what we were watching; we were watching <i>The New York Times</i> needle and watching the mainstream media just—we watched what happens when your brain and your body are totally burnt by Trump derangement syndrome, and now it's your job to tell America what's about to happen in the election, and you got it so miserably wrong that—you've seen what's happened.It happens to this very moment.
But that's what we were watching.And we were all getting super excited.I had already been on TV saying if he pulls off this, this and this, he becomes the president; we were going through the map.He's the last person to think he might have won, because I believe it comes from like the three-day rescission period in real estate.You have a deal; you come to a deal; you sign the paperwork, but you have three days to say, "I'm walking away free of charge."And I believe it comes from that.Plus he just knows that the left can pull shenanigans, or maybe the votes from the city weren't in yet, or—he just was sort of very calm.
And at some point, we went back up to Trump Tower to the residence, and he took the two versions of his congratulations speech for Hillary or his acceptance speech of the presidency, and he took that version, and he started writing things in the margins as he always does.The people who had it on electronic form started making the changes.And then here comes John Podesta: "We have no further comment tonight.We'll talk to you tomorrow."Wow. And they just called Pennsylvania for Donald Trump, which means they would call him the president.
I had said four days before Election Day in Hershey, Pennsylvania, live on television at the podium, I introduced Mr. Trump, and I said, "And on Tuesday night, when they call Pennsylvania for Donald Trump, they will call Donald Trump the president of the United States."You know, the crowd went wild.People were watching on jumbotrons.It was 50 degrees outside in November.And sure enough, they called Pennsylvania for him at 1:39 a.m.,and John Podesta says, "We'll see you tomorrow."
So what are we going to do?Let's go over to the Hilton Hotel.Let's go see all of your supporters, and let's just do there what we've been doing here, which is watching returns.So we go there, and we're in the back, and they're deciding should Gov. Pence go out and talk to the crowd?Should Reince Priebus as the RNC chair go out and talk to the crowd?And my phone is ringing, and I don't see it because it's on mute, silent, and Chris Christie's older son Andrew [Christie] says, "Kellyanne, your phone is ringing."I look, and it's Huma Abedin, and she's calling me."Hi, Huma. How you doing?""I'm great, Kellyanne. How are you?"So I'm going, "Shut up, everyone!" I was very rude.And they all look at me, "It's Huma."
"Secretary Clinton would like to talk to Mr. Trump." "Now?""Yes. Is he available?" "He's available."I hand him the phone, and I say, “Congratulations, Mr. President-elect.”Don Jr. picked me up, swirled me in the air, twirled me in the air.And I looked at Vice President-elect Pence, and I said, "Make sure she actually concedes."And she kind of sort of did that night and the next day, and then she kind of sort of didn't for the next eight years.
But just a remarkable moment in history.And speaking of history, I believe history will take a cold, hard look at the Trump legacy from 2017 to 2021 and give it much higher marks than people do now.There are historians who will write about his first-term presidency, and they've not even been born yet.And they'll go back and look at the campaign.They'll go back and look at the presidency, and they'll look at it through a very cold, metric-like way and say, “Wow, the unemployment rate, the wages, the trade deals, the—you name it.There are a lot of accomplishments there.”
So I'll go back to your question.So we're in transition, and our transition is going to be shorter than most because Election Day was basically the wee hours of Nov. 9, and we're not at transition in D.C.; we're still in Trump Tower in New York.So people are coming there to interview for jobs, to visit President-elect Trump, a constant flow of folks.And I'm still on TV quite a bit talking about the transition, saying that we'll have subject-matter experts soon, as soon as the Cabinet gets confirmed and you don't have to hear from me anymore; they should be on TV.Good luck with that.
And Jan. 5, 2017, I'm in Washington, D.C.I go first to meet with Vice President-elect Pence and Speaker Ryan and a bunch of folks in Speaker Ryan's office.We talk about the agenda; we talk about his Green Bay Packers and my Philadelphia Eagles; we talk about all the stuff we can all do together collaboratively.
Leave there, go to lunch at the White House at the invitation of Valerie Jarrett, who served all eight years for President Obama and of course is a close personal friend of First Lady Michelle Obama and President Obama.She invites me to the Navy Mess.It was very nice of her.She said, "It's very important to President Obama that we have open communication, the transition is smooth."
I went there, had lunch with her in the Navy Mess.Little did I know, maybe little did she know, upstairs in the Oval Office that same day—it's been written about—President Obama, Vice President Biden, [then-FBI Director] Jim Comey, I think [former Director of Intelligence James] Clapper—who's the other guy?[CIA Director] John Brennan.Who knows who else? They're all there.And [National Security Adviser] Susan Rice.And they're talking about this Steele dossier and these early rumors of golden showers and the Trump campaign that I just managed to a successful conclusion being compromised by its communications, its "collusion"—I don't know if they had that word yet; it's the invented word for them—collusion with Russia.
And the irony is, the next day, Hope Hicks and I are up in the residence early to go over some of the inauguration details with President-elect Trump and a few others, and then we go over to Condé Nast for whatever meeting he had scheduled with [editor-in-chief of <i>Vogue</i>] Anna Wintour.And then he's going to go back to Trump Tower, and he's going to meet with President Obama's—the administration's national security team, all the people I just mentioned to you.
And at the end of that briefing, Jim Comey is … tasked with telling President Trump, "Oh, by the way, we don't know what's going on yet, but we've got these early reports about Steele dossier and Russia collusion and don't worry about it," and says it to him while they're standing up at the end of the meeting, the proper formal briefing, the way you might say to me, “How are the kids, Kellyanne, and is it going to snow tomorrow?,” not exactly “Let's get the president-elect in the SCIF [sensitive compartmented information facility] and talk about it.”
So that's the way he said he briefed President-elect Trump.He had truly briefed the current president and sitting vice president and team.And it becomes this whole thing, and by the next Tuesday or so, Jan. 10, it's a big deal.
And then President-elect Trump has a big press conference in the atrium of Trump Tower on Jan. 11.All the press is there.The worldwide press is there.I had been on TV that morning where ABC's <i>Good Morning America</i> has pictures of Russian dancers, and they're convinced this is all real.And I very politely say, "Look, I was talking to people in Macomb County, Michigan, and Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, not Moscow."
So I was the one who had to tell President Trump what a golden shower was; I had just learned myself.And he said, "What?"And I said, "You're the world's biggest germaphobe.It doesn't make any sense."He said, "You can use it."I said, "Well, you should use it."It's true.And I'd like to tell you that they looked and looked and looked for three years to find Russia collusion that affected the election outcome, and they just moved on to something else to investigate, impeach, indict, insult Donald Trump.
It's always been about the same thing: The election in 2016 must not be real, was not legitimate.All election deniers, by the way, complete election deniers.And they never found what they were looking for.The Mueller report was a dud for them; the [then special counsel Robert] Mueller testimony was even worse.The sequel was even worse than the original on that one. ...
The Trump Administration and the Press
In the book you write about your perspective on the “alternative facts” moment, and more than the details.Does it feel like you were under assault, that the administration was on the defensive all the time with an incident like that?
Yes. Alternative facts is a great example of how we should have known early and often how unfairly we would be treated, under assault, let the lie fly about us.5Everybody knows that was—I meant to say alternative information, additional facts that [former White House Press Secretary] Sean Spicer—I wasn't defending what he said.I was explaining what he meant, which is people were watching the inauguration in a new way on their screens, that you could do a little bit in 2008, but you could really do it now.They didn't come.Not all Trump voters had the financial wherewithal to travel to Washington, D.C., to go to a party, etc.
So it was never alternative facts, like, oh, George Orwell.And they knew better.But they had never been so embarrassed.The media were totally embarrassed by Donald Trump's election.They swore that it wasn't going to happen.The unspoken bargain between the Trump campaign and the mainstream media, and certainly in giving us billions of dollars in free media time, beginning with President Trump, but also including me as his campaign manager, billions of dollars in free ad time, the unspoken bargain was: “You won't win.We'll have fun for a while.It will be a competitive race.We'll give the voters something to see, to think about.Gee, Kellyanne, you're so articulate.You're so smart.You're so”—I have all the texts, folks.
And then he won, and it all changed.Even sort of the segments, the skits on <i>Saturday Night Live</i>, which were funny.They were biting, but they were funny.People say, “Oh, what about [comedian] Kate McKinnon playing you?”I'm like, “Well, she's 15 years younger than me, and she's brilliant and funny.Let's go."Kellyanne Conway's Day Off"? Hysterical.My cousin said to me, "Somebody must have followed you around for two weeks; that's so you."But by the time he won, it all got dark and brooding and nasty and personal and untrue.The things that were said were just lies.
And so yes, I felt like we were under assault, but I was very naive.I would go on TV during the transition and say things like, "Well, the mainstream media and the Trump-Pence White House, the administration, we're going to have joint custody of the country for four to eight years.Let's all learn how to responsibly co-parent."Meanwhile, the media were like a bunch of deadbeat dads.There was no interest in co-parenting.There was no interest in paying their fair share or getting the story or getting the facts.It was all to get the president. …
So yes, I think it was an early example of being under assault, of the fix being in from the beginning.People always say, “Oh, it was the personnel churn and burn.”I mean, imagine having to be Donald Trump, complying with subpoenas, complying with investigation questions, being asked these questions by the media, by the Congress, by everyday people just, and you're trying to do all these things, and yet you're doing that with three hands tied behind your back.But he did them anyway.
Trump’s Staff
In those early months of the administration, you've written about the male egos, Priebus and Bannon and Kushner, and you operating in that environment.And you talked about the leaking with Steve Bannon.Can you help me understand what the environment was like inside the White House in those early months?
The environment in the White House in those early months began with the central figure of President Trump, who believed everyone else who was there was there for the same reason he was, which is implement, execute on the America First agenda quickly and swiftly.Whether that's through executive order or legislation, let's go.Donald Trump, the businessman, who said, “I don't know if I've ever spent the night in Washington, D.C.My first night ever in Washington, D.C., may be at the White House,” he could not believe how Washington operated, if you can even use that term so loosely.He couldn't believe this place can function when you've repealed Obamacare 36 times, now you've got a president not named Obama, you have a Republican House and Senate—let's go, guys and gals.Let's do it. They didn't do it. They didn't do it.He couldn't understand.He'd say, "What's going on?I thought they all wanted the tax cuts and infrastructure."
So it starts with the president learning that Washington does not move as quickly or swiftly as he does or as he wants to, or as his patience and performance is going to allow.And not everybody was there for the same reasons.I do think there were some egos.I think there was a lot of jockeying for Trump's attention and affection, which was totally unnecessary, by people in his inner circle because we were in his inner circle.
And for me, I'm someone who, with President Trump, even though I spent every single day with him and a lot of moments alone with him, I'm somebody who believes scarcity is a great strategy with Donald J. Trump.He doesn't need you there all the time to constantly be filling his head with different things, and "You should do this, and you should do that."Give him time to think and deliberate and read the papers that he's just been given and make the phone calls he needs to call and have us back in for a meeting.Call the people in Congress.See if Speaker [Nancy] Pelosi or Speaker Ryan wants to meet, do a deal on something.Give him some space already.
And some of these people just couldn't help themselves.They felt if one of them was in there, all three had to be in there.They needed to show everybody.And the leaking was terrible. ...
They each had their own fiefdom, their own staff and their own acronym.Jared Kushner had something called AOI [sic], American Opportunity Initiative or whatnot.Steve Bannon had SIG, Strategic Initiative[s] Group or whatever.And Reince Priebus had RNC because he brought most of the employees in with him, even though he told President Trump to get out of the race.
So if you come in with your own employees, your own fiefdom, your own acronym, E-G-O has to be part of it.And listen, I work well with all these guys, but I just call it like I see it, and I think that we wasted time.And then our time was wasted with all these ridiculous investigations and independent counsels and Congress and whatnot.And you're just wasting time.
… If I have dinner with President Trump in 2024, you're not going to see a story about it, a picture about it, in addition to me not being on social media much.I don't need to do that. …
My relationship with Donald Trump remains strong because (a) I tell him the truth.I am respectful and deferential, not obsequious, and I'm also not ubiquitous.That's a great strategy.And our relationship was forged under fire in foxholes, and then it was strengthened and expanded and deepened for four years in the White House.And it remains strong because I know, unlike other people who work for him, that nobody elected me to do anything.My name wasn't on the ballot.I didn't have the courage or the cojones to run for president of the United States.
I used to tell people in the White House, “Hey, we're here to give our best counsel based on what we see and believe and have briefed on this particular issue or idea.If your name—I want everybody to look at their name—if your name is not Donald J. Trump and Michael R. Pence, nobody elected you to do anything.So we give our best advice, and then we have to respect the result.”
And I even tangled with President Trump in the White House on things like health care, repealing and replacing Obamacare.I made a small fortune as a pollster back in the day on replacing Obamacare and repealing it.I believe it's been a terrible plan for lots of Americans who did have to give up their plan and give up their doctor, who still don't have health insurance, 28 million and counting.So those were big lies told by an American president to his people.
But after COVID hit, taking it all the way to the Supreme Court when the 5th Circuit had already upheld the elimination of the Obamacare mandate, which of course was the heart and soul of Obamacare, I just thought that women, the chief health care officers of their households, were going to be upset about that during a global pandemic.And I expressed myself and lost that debate in the Cabinet Room with lots of people there whose job it is to brief the president who said absolutely nothing.But I'm always willing to lose an argument as long as I know I'm being heard.
So I do think there was a lot of ego, a lot of competition.I think there's great merit in having family work in the family business and with you.When the family business becomes the White House, it's a little more complicated.I'm just happy I had my own relationship and my own line of communication with the president of the United States.I think that me and my situation are a little bit different than some others.
But I want to say to anybody out there who thinks they've got something to add to public service, go and do it.It's incredibly rewarding.I gave up millions and millions of dollars to do it, and a lot of other things.It is incredibly worth it to serve in whatever capacity this beautiful country and her amazing people.
Trump and Charlottesville
I think you were out of Washington at the time of the controversy over Charlottesville.
I was.
Was he was well served by the way that he responded, the way the White House responded?
That was another example, Charlottesville.When he said there were fine people on both sides, he was not talking about those with tiki torches.6And again, the media knows that.He was talking about the argument about statues.And could he use different words? Maybe.But remember, he wasn't talking about what everybody says he was talking about.Joe Biden in his announcement video in 2019 talked about Charlottesville.I mean, imagine that.He can't even talk about his own record as the Loch Ness monster of the swamp, been here for half a century.If I were here for half a century, I would hope I can talk about my record.He couldn't even do that.Talked about Charlottesville.
So they knew allowing a lie to fly had really hurt Trump.And I absolutely think that when people say something is not true about you and you're the president of the United States, you have to come out strongly.And I know he expressed sympathy for the woman who passed away.I believe her name was Heather [Heyer].And that's tragic and should never be.It's like anything else: If people commit crimes, prosecute them.He's the law-and-order president.He's not the guy looking the other way in all these neighborhoods and communities now while crimes are being committed.He's not the person letting anybody and everybody over the border; we don't even know who's here.
So I think the same thing here.If somebody tells a lie, push back and tell the truth.If somebody commits a crime, we have to be on the side of prosecuting them to the fullest extent of the law in the fairness—innocent until proven guilty.I don't care if that's Charlottesville or the summer of 2020 and social unrest or Jan. 6.We can argue about who got prosecuted and who didn't and how long they're languishing in prison or jail with no hearing and no trial.But yeah, it's—yes, I think those early days were unfortunate. ...
But he does seem to care about what people are saying, about what's going on in the news, about what's going on on Twitter.Was that ever frustrating that—
No, he does care, of course.
Would you tell him, “Don't worry about it; focus on governing”?
Well, certainly focusing on governing, but remember, he sleeps half the amount of time as the average human being, and certainly a fraction of the time as Joe Biden, I would think, does.So he's got ample bandwidth to monitor TV and social media and do a good job, a great job as president and commander in chief.
But yeah, I think he should care what the people think, first and foremost.And he said very clearly on election night that "I'm going to be the president for all Americans, not just the ones who voted for me."He said, "That includes the ones who didn't vote for me."He said, "And that's a lot of you."He snuck that in there spontaneously on election night.Does that not matter?Does his inauguration address not matter outside of people trying to make it dark and brooding?Every president gets up there and identifies problems and identifies—calls in to question chaos and crisis that we need fix.And so when he does, it's a dark, spooky inauguration address.When Joe Biden barely can say it, it's some kind of soaring oratory or oratorical feat, which we all know it's not.
Look, with President Trump and Joe Biden and all of it, people know what they see with their own two eyes, not what you say to them.So I tell the media, if people go with what you say they should see, that's one thing, but if they go with what they see, that's quite another.But really, what is the state of the mainstream media?They are so unpopular, and part of it is, people don't feel like they give them the entire story, or they feel like they pick stories that aren't relevant to them, the people. ...Look what NBC and MSNBC just did to [former chair of the RNC] Ronna McDaniel.7Then you don't really know what most of the country thinks.You're not even listening to them.You don't even see them, let alone hear them.
And that tells you all you need to know about President Trump and his relationship with the mainstream media.
I think President Trump's democratization of communication information through social media platforms by being under wing at the plane or the helicopter, by running into the press briefing room, by bringing the media into the Oval Office, by giving one-on-one interviews much more than President Biden can dream of doing, I believe that helped him to survive and thrive and for people to vote for him in the first place.They want to hear more. They want to know more.
Now, if you talk that much and you make yourself that accessible and available, you're not going to be curated; you're not going to be controlled; you're not going to be rehearsed.President Trump doesn't need people around him who do that and want to do that.So you're going to use the wrong word; you're going to get a number wrong.When Joe Biden does it constantly, it's a gaffe; it's adorable; it's endearing.No, it's not.It's a lie, and people ought to say it.
Trump’s Final Year in Office
By the time we get to 2020, has he figured out the levers?I mean, is there still the same level of intrigue in the White House of people with egos?Has it changed as you get into the fourth year?
Oh, it changed.It changed quickly after some people were gone and others came in and others realized that he was onto them.I have a whole chapter in my book, <i>Here's the Deal</i>, <i>New York Times</i> bestseller, called "How to Spot a Leaker."It's a great chapter.People should check it out.It really is, not just as a window into the soul of the early days of the Trump White House, but just generally speaking.Leakers get excellent press—that can never be me—and leakers don't talk to the media like this.They never sit for these interviews.They don't go on TV seven, eight times a day in the campaign.They talk to them quietly.They're great sources.They, like—and media do source protection. ...
By 2020, when COVID hit, it was cataclysmic, and where lots of people were complaining, "I'm home with my spouse and my kids all day," that sounds great; that would have been wonderful.We were at the White House every single day, seven days a week, trying to get this right, because it was confusing, and it was scary, and it was just all chaos in terms of uncertainty.Nobody knew what was going on.The president's asking about our capacity with ventilators, PPE.There wasn't any.The cupboards were bare, as he says.
So it was a very trying time.And that was a very collaborative moment for the country.I happened to be in the Cabinet Room in early March 2020 when we had a pre-scheduled meeting with the heads of drug companies, pharmaceutical companies.They were coming to talk about drug pricing, and the president quickly turned the conversation to developing a vaccine for this thing that was still being called the coronavirus, I believe, not even COVID-19 yet, or maybe both by then.
And he said, "I know, Anthony, I know it's going to take years," to Dr. Fauci."We don't have years.You tell me this could be the big one."And he asked the drug companies, "What could you do?"
It's amazing to sit there as a non-medical professional, senior counselor to the president, and watch these would-be competitors in the pharmaceutical space become collaborators and not competitors in the service of helping a president of the United States, commander in chief say, "What can we do to develop a vaccine?""Well, Mr. President, that will take a while, but we can do therapeutics until that comes."
But Operation Warp Speed, it's one of his best accomplishments.It doesn't matter if you took the vaccine or didn't; you don't want to or you want to.This is a free country, and President Trump made that clear from the beginning.But he saved millions of lives.That Operation Warp Speed got developed faster than anything a president has done of that scale.And it saved lives.And I, for one, think he should talk more about it in 2024.
So these were heady times.People have to remember how they felt.We had refrigerated Mack trucks in New York City filled with cadavers.We saw mass graves being built in New York City.People say, “Well, it wasn't that bad; I shouldn't have worn a mask; I shouldn't have gotten a vaccine.”You’ve got to remember how you felt.Did we need the last PPE? I don't know.Did we need the kids in the masks for the second school year, which kind of drove me out of the White House because all four of my kids were going to start online again? ...
But it just showed the leadership and the management.And I don't remember there being a lot of egos over COVID.I think everybody really banded together.
Was there a moment where it suddenly became—a meeting, a moment where it suddenly became clear, this is real?
COVID?
Yeah.
Yes.The first in-person briefings that we had in the Situation Room on coronavirus/COVID-19 were being hosted by Steve Biegun, the deputy secretary of state under Mike Pompeo, and he was talking about evacuating Americans from different areas of China, including Wuhan.And nobody really knew completely what was happening, but by then, everybody knew it was a virus.And my chief of staff had been attending twice-a-day in-person meeting and phone call on—I think back in December, people were saying something, but nobody knew it was a global pandemic; nobody had said those words.And then it was, how do we evacuate them, get them to an airstrip in California, the Americans?
And then we knew that nursing homes in Seattle had had an issue with this virus.And the governor there, who had unsuccessfully run for president in 2020, he was becoming active.Then we saw it was coming from Italy to New York.We saw it was happening in Italy.It was becoming very real.
But even then, we couldn't really get a straight answer from the people whose job it was to pay attention to this and warn us about it and prepare us for it.So I feel like lots of people were learning as it went along that you might have expected to have known about this or the prospect of this.
And President Trump sprung into action.He did a smart thing by putting his vice president as the head of the Coronavirus Task Force.He had considered Scott Gottlieb, formerly of the FDA, smart guy.He considered Chris Christie, who by then was out of the governorship in New Jersey and a close confidant of President Trump's.He considered a few others.But I think putting the vice president in charge of it showed the seriousness of purpose and showed that they were also politically accountable for what was happening.And I thought it would be easier for President Trump, too, to hear from one big voice every day about what was happening.
And those were very heady times to be in the Situation Room every day and watching these death numbers, the numbers of deaths just spiral upward.And nobody knew why, and nobody knew how to help, and nobody knew what we could do.And I feel like we always wanted to eradicate the virus, but we were trying to mitigate the early effects of that, and who was on ventilators and—I remember being part of a meeting by the phone, and some people were in my office to attend to it, but we were basically on the phone with secretary of HHS and others trying to figure out what to do for the uninsured Americans as goes the coronavirus/COVID-19.And we had two big choices: Reopen Obamacare enrollment or just pay for it, just pay out of pocket as a country.
And we did the latter.And people were like, “Oh, it's because you don't want to give Obamacare a win.”No, it's because Obamacare couldn't even run a website called the Obamacare website, ACA website.We worried that so many of the problems and hiccups and gaps in coverage that America was experiencing many years after Obamacare at that point, six years after—no, at that point, 10 years after Obamacare.At that point, 10 years after Obamacare became the law of the land, we were worried about that.So we went and paid for the testing and then the treatment, if an uninsured American, of course, had contracted COVID and was in the hospital.
So those were very heady times, talking to all the sports leagues, the heads of all the sports leagues, what they were going to do with their schedules, talking to non-COVID health professionals, being on the phone with people like Bill Gates or Adam Silver at the NBA.Very heady times, because the country was—little pieces of the country were coming to a standstill every day.
There was all the things the White House was doing, Project Warp Speed, all the things you're talking about.But as you know, a lot of it gets overshadowed, and what's remembered is injecting bleach and the light and Trump's press conferences.What were you seeing in that, in a moment like that and then that being the thing where a lot of the attention on what the White House was doing was going?
Well, there's a big difference between what America is focused on and what the media insist America is focused on or should be focused on.That's on the daily.And part of it is, they don't know America.I mean, if people whose job it is to inform us and educate us and give us the facts and the figures, if they had spent an iota, I mean like a tiny little fraction of the time learning what motivates people to vote for Donald Trump rather than obsessing over Trump himself, every tweet, every text, every word, every action, they might have learned a thing or two about the country.They don't do that.They insult them.
And so they're always going to focus on Trump and Clorox and bleach and this, that and the other.I wrote extensively about this in my book because I was there.And I wasn't in the press briefing; I had gone back to my desk.But I saw it blowing up and went back down and thought, well, is anybody going to clean this up?They didn't.But I was there in the Situation Room when somebody was mentioning, “Oh, we have an expert who can talk about bleaching the surfaces and then injecting light.”That's basically what they were doing; he conflated the two.
But you know what?Shame on anybody who talked about that beyond what needed to be said and keeps it alive four years later, and who neglected to tell the country who was qualified to be tested first: first responders, the sick and vulnerable, elderly; where you can get vaccinated, where you can get your PPP money.It's lazy to live on Twitter—don't we all know it at this point?—and to pretend that that's reporting, that your editor is Twitter.Your editor is not Twitter.It's hard to believe some of them even have editors.
And I just think it's regrettable because it's their job to inform and equip and educate and instruct the public.And if they could just all lemming-like, like ants on the same sugar cube, insult Donald Trump and keep the insult going, they'll do it for as long as they want.And you know what that's gotten them?The resurgence of Donald J. Trump as the Republican nominee.They're a gift to him.Biden's a gift to him.And the fact that people are saying, “I want somebody to do the job who's done the job before, and I'm just going to, as a voter, I'm just going to compare the two presidential records.I'm going to see what my life was like with Donald Trump, particularly before COVID, and what my life is like under Joe Biden, and I'll compare the two.”
You've also written about some of the people who were inside the White House at the time, like [radiologist] Scott Atlas.Were there people talking to the president who shouldn't have been during the COVID times?
The thing about COVID is, people started cherry-picking the facts that they liked.So as we all like to say, there are two lobes of the brain for a reason.We can hold completely inconsistent facts at the same time, but they're both facts.And that was going on here and there.People would use data in the cities to say one thing and data in the rural areas to say another.They're both right.But the question is, what needs the president's attention?What do we need to do as a nation?
And people would bring in other people to state their case to the president: “Oh, I've got an expert.”“Here comes an expert.”
… And that happened at a fever pitch after the 2020 election.You have a chief of staff allowing supplicant after showman after sycophant to come in front of the Resolute Desk and tell the president, "We're finding votes for you.Just hang tight.You don't have to pack the boxes; I'm your person."
So it's never a good idea.I think it's a terrible idea to have a secretary of homeland security or president of the United States or a press secretary now in 2024 telling the country that we don't have a crisis at the southern border.It's nonsense to lie.And it just doesn't get called out as much because their friends in the media don't want to do that, and they're scared to death of a second Trump term, which I think would be funny to watch.I think there would be lots of people who are going to be reaching for their kids' Adderall if Donald Trump gets elected again.
That year after the George Floyd death, the Black Lives Matter, how much of a crisis was that? ...Was it a crisis in the White House, figuring out how to respond to that, to the people who were outside?
So I'm the first person at the Trump White House to say publicly that George Floyd was murdered.He was.What happened after that, where thousands of people in our major cities are looting and destroying and stealing, and in some places murdering and killing other Americans, is so unfathomable and so frightening.And yes, I felt many of our own lives were threatened, too, to have people chasing after you, after the Republican National Convention final night, which had to happen on the South Lawn of the White House.Very frightening to see the streets filled with people while your car's trying to get through and—I don't know, it was very—people have a right to protest; they have a right to make their opinions heard.But somehow people forget just the sheer destructiveness and some of the storefronts in our cities that were blighted and closed and never reopened, the senior citizens saying, "I can't get my medication at the pharmacy; the roads are blocked,” or the pharmacy closed, because people screaming for truth and justice were coming out of the pharmacies with all they can carry.Truth and justice and robbery.
So those were very heady times, frightening times.And I think that if you just focused on the situation with George Floyd, you might conclude, as I have, that he was murdered.And I was happy -- relieved, and grateful. And I was grateful and relieved that the president talked to Mr. Floyd's brother on the phone.I happened to be there and witnessed that entire conversation.
But people just don't cover that as much.For everybody who wants to cover Jan. 6, they have no interest in rolling tape from the summer of 2020 and showing people destroying their own communities.
The image of the president going out with the Bible to Lafayette Park.I think you were not involved in orchestrating—
I didn't go. I certainly was invited. I didn't go.
Why didn't you go?
It didn't seem to me to be the best idea, I had heard, to go across en masse to Lafayette Park.And apparently it was a great idea to people now who have become anti-Trump, like [former Pentagon Press Secretary] Alyssa Farah Griffin; she couldn't wait to be there in the shot.And Attorney General Bill Barr was there and just so many other people who say, "Oh, Donald Trump, that was a terrible time; I'm so against Trump.”OK.
I just didn't think it was a great idea.I didn't go.And I also just thought there was a lot to do back at the White House.And there, too, the way it all got twisted and whatnot, it turned out not to be true, that people had cleared—well, I don't remember what was true and what wasn't true, but a lot of the reporting turned out not to be true, that people were planning on gassing people and clearing them, and—I don't remember all of the exact stories, but I do find in the age of Trump that his haters in the media tend to report first and verify fifth, and that was one of those situations. …8
The 2020 Campaign
Let me ask you about the campaign at the time, which is being run by Brad Parscale.Can you help me understand who he is? Because you've worked with him.
Brad Parscale was in over his head in 2020, but Jared wanted to make sure he had his own person as the "campaign manager" so Jared could be the campaign manager.And if you go back and look at all of the stories, they often say, "Jared Kushner is really running the campaign."But he's got his guy there, Brad Parscale.Brad did a nice job for us in 2016 as our director of data and digital.I always liked Brad personally.We were able to run a lot of ads on social media, Facebook, YouTube, Google.He helped a great deal in doing that when we didn't have the resources to run network ads and cable TV ads like Hillary did infinitely.
But he didn't know how to manage a campaign.He was hardly ever at headquarters in Arlington.All the people who worked there said so.He was there on Tuesdays; I think that was the day that Mike Bender, who was writing a book that Brad thought would be like the big "Isn't Brad great?" book, that's the day Mike would come on his Vespa and interview Brad for the book, so he was there that day.
I think he's a Florida resident and—nice guy, in over his head and running a reelection campaign that should have been easy.The economy and all the things that we were doing in the White House—the economy and energy independence and trade deals and deregulation and you name it.Things were moving in a good direction for many Americans, and they said so in the polls, by and large.
And then it all changed, and COVID hit.And I think they were always thinking that they can get back to the economy at some point.Just put COVID on an egg timer; the sand will run out; we'll get back to the economy.It doesn't work that way.Politics 101: You don't tell people what's important to them; they tell you.And this was incredibly frightening and important to lots of Americans, including many swing voters; many elderly Americans; many women who were worried about elderly parents that can't leave and can't really work the iPad yet, were trying to get their doctor visits through telehealth, which we expanded majorly in the Trump administration.They're worried about their kids being out of school; they're worried about their spouse being out of work, themselves, trying to keep it all together.
So he just didn't have what it took.And I look at the 2020 Trump reelection campaign as proving the old adage to be true: The fastest way to make a small fortune is to have a very large one and waste most of it.It was their idea to go to Tulsa, Oklahoma, on Juneteenth and in the height of COVID and pretend that a million people were going to show up to this rally—what?And then they didn't—and make all kinds of excuses and not fly back on the plane.Like, I know all the facts.
Right before the election, the president gets COVID and is hospitalized.Can you help me, take me to that moment?
Yes.So the president and a number of us who had been around him and others contract COVID. ...
I'm tested, and I have a positive COVID test on Oct. 2, a few of them.President Trump has COVID.Others have COVID, some public, some not public.And he goes to Walter Reed to be treated.And then, while he's there, he wants to show strength and resilience to the country, so he goes out.His chief of staff is caught on a hot mic saying whatever it is, he said, very confusing.And then the president wants to show strength by coming back and letting people know that he had the therapeutics.Chris Christie had the therapeutics.I was offered them and said no, because I considered myself to be fairly asymptomatic and a fairly healthy at the time, I don't know, 53-year-old.
And then he goes back to work.Misses the second debate, so the third debate ends up becoming the second debate.I think that cost him politically, because after the first debate, many people voted early.And the media spin from that debate and some of the realities of that debate meant that people voted against President Trump.A lot of it had to do with Joe Biden lying in the debate when he's asked, "Have you discussed business with your son?""No, never."We all know that was a lie now; we have all the evidence otherwise.9But you're not under oath at those presidential debate podiums, it turns out.And so President Biden got a little bit of advantage.
Then the last debate happens with [NBC Journalist] Kristen Welker, who did a great job.And I think Trump much improved his performance.He called me right after he got off the stage.I was somebody who was one of the last people, or the last person he talked to before he'd go onto the debate stage.And here I was just watching, like the rest of America, in my comfy clothes on my couch.And my phone rang and it said, "Melania Trump," and I said, "Hi," and she said, "Hold on."She said, "Hold on," and he said, "What'd you think?"And I said, "I think you got a couple steps closer to getting elected.I think that was a really strong performance on policy and the issues and everything and delivery, etc."
But in any event, him getting COVID showed how it is an indiscriminate virus.It is, as he says, the invisible enemy, the big one.And I thank God every day that he survived, and I thank God every day that many people in my circle of life—I'm just one person here—survived, and I'm very sad that many people did not.
Can you take me to election night and where you are as the results come in or don't?
Sure. So wasn't feeling totally hopeful about the 2020 elections for lots of reasons.I knew that the early vote in a place like North Carolina was heavily for Biden, for example, but that over time, President Trump was gaining ground and keeping pace with the Biden votes.And it was a combination of things.It was that early voting started so early in a place like North Carolina, and it was also that if Donald Trump had fooled you the first time and gotten elected, and you wanted to vote against him, you waited four years to get back there and vote against him.So boy, were you lining up early.So there was a lot of that early exuberance to get that out of your system.But let's face it: Everybody gets one vote, we hope.
And so that piled on the votes for Biden early.And then Trump kept pace.You know, Bill Stepien, then the new campaign manager after Jared and President Trump fired Brad Parscale, Stepien, who was a deputy, came in, and he was telling me—I had left the White House by then, but he's saying, "We're really catching up now," and of course, President Trump goes on to win North Carolina.
But it's just a good example.I just didn't feel great because it was just so hard to know who's voting where and what's going on.I don't think the campaign was even paying attention to what Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, were doing with Zuckerbucks—all legal, and I think all regrettable.10It sounded great, to spend half a billion dollars in making sure that we had safe voting in COVID times during a global pandemic.Sounds great, but then explain to me why every grant over $100,000 or so went to districts that heavily favored Joe Biden.Don't you want the rest of us to be safe?
So there's just so much going on, and it just felt differently than 2016.There wasn't joy on the job because we're facing global unrest and a pandemic and all these residual investigations.But I agreed—the campaign said, “Would you go and do some TV on election night?”Sure.So I voted in person in Bergen County, New Jersey, got in my car, drove myself down here and went right to the campaign, went on ABC News Live with George Stephanopoulos, went on NBC Live with Lester Holt and Savannah Guthrie, and said both the same thing: “It's probably tighter than a tick.Our elections are decided not by millions of votes across the country but by thousands of votes across a handful of states.We might have to recount.We might have to wait for everything to be counted.Our democracy deserves patience and vigilance.”And I believe that, and I still believe that.And it sounded like other people believed that until they can declare Biden the winner.Then it was, let's just go.We're completely incurious about all these outstanding ballots.
So I said that.Went to the White House, which was a much reduced footprint of a party because of COVID.There just weren't as many people as I think there would have been.And was there.And then was not upstairs for the not-so-secret super-secret meeting that some people thought they were having, and not in the Oval Office.I just was there talking to some of the others.
And then I heard what President Trump said.I know Fox News calling Arizona was a very contentious moment.And the president clearing the hurdles in Ohio, winning that by 500,000 votes, winning Florida by 400,000 votes, those were good signs.But then Georgia and Arizona, states like that, looking problematic, were very concerning.And then of course, things going on and on for days and days.
After the 2020 Election
And you talked to the president in that period after the election?
I did.
What do you tell him?
I tell him he has every right to exhaust all his legal challenges, and that there's going to come a day—it's six weeks or so away.It happens to be Dec. 14 in 2020.It happened to be December whatever and December whatever in 2000 with [then-Democratic presidential candidate Al] Gore and 2016 with Hillary.But there comes a day where the electors certify the election results in their states, and you have to really challenge these election results and turn some of them around, meaning, could you get a court to say, “Look, I looked at these subpoenas; I think you've got grounds here to say people are coming in with bushels of ballots, or they're taking them out, so let's go ahead and take action here, whatever that action is.”
I also told him that it's very rare, but there had been a county—I think it's called Pender County, North Carolina—where they had not recounted but revoted when there was credible allegations of irregularities or ballot harvesting.So there's that.He said, "You're not going to believe what we're hearing.We're hearing this and that."And I said, "Well, I would believe it, and people will believe it if you show everybody.Get them under oath; get them to show what they've got."And all the challenges came up short.I thought he had every right.
But I could not believe that the same people who spent three years looking for Russia collusion under every rock and piece of peat moss and came up short had absolutely no curiosity, no patience to spend three hours or three days, or if we had to three weeks, just making sure everything had been counted right.We had record turnout.We had people voting in drop boxes and in machines and by mail at a very, just a very unprecedented time.
And if he came up short, he came up short.But at least you want Americans to feel like the process was fair and the votes were counted properly and the rules didn't change last minute, and a lot of people don't feel that way.
Was there a point you told him directly that you thought he lost the election?
Yes. Yes, I told him he's going to come up short; that it broke my heart to say that, but he was coming up short unless you can produce this by Dec. 14.But then somebody told him he had a different bite of the apple, and that was Jan. 6.That was the date by which the Congress was going to vote to certify what the state electors did, and the vice president, in this case Mike Pence, is going to be asked to do what all the vice presidents have been asked to do, which is certify or not.
And I think, fairly, that many people were showing him clips of sitting members of Congress who had not certified a presidential election this century for a Republican.They didn't certify it in 2001 or 2005 for [George W.] Bush.They didn't certify it for Trump in 2017.11And they weren't going to do it in 2021.But at least they're consistent.They had a track record of being election result deniers.
And I think he saw that and felt, “Well, what are they doing saying no?Can you say no?Can you say it's not true?”I mean, had you ever seen any kind of meaningful, let alone expanded wall-to-wall coverage, on any of those people, some of whom still sit in the United States Congress, who refused to certify an election result?So there we are.
And people told him, "You're going to have a second bite of the apple on Jan. 6."And Mike Pence had been in Georgia on Jan. 5, I want to say, maybe [the] 4th, but I think it was [the] 5th where he said, "Wait till you see what happens."So I think other people thought something was going to happen.It was just a very confusing time.
And I understand on Jan. 6 you first find out from a tweet, something you see on your phone.Can you tell me about that?
The first thing I saw—I had a home office, but I purposely don't have any TVs on in it, and I walked back up there, and the screen didn't have—I don't have Twitter feeds going or clips, etc., going.And I saw a tweet from Don Jr. saying, "This is not who we are," whatever he said.What is that?And then I started to see, my goodness.
And so I was trying to piece it all together, ran downstairs, put the TV on and saw what was happening.Got a request to give an interview live to ABC News's George Stephanopoulos, and I did.And in the meantime, like, sent out tweets, “If anybody is looking at this—I don't know if they're looking at my tweets, but if you're looking at this, get out.You can't do that.”I retweeted the person who was in Nancy Pelosi's office, like, “”Get out. You can't do that.”
I did something I'd never done before.Rather than call President Trump directly through the switchboard, which I always do, or on his cell phone, which I occasionally did, I called the cell phone, the government cell phone of the person who I knew was standing next to him, and I said, "Please tell him they need to hear his voice.He's the only person who can tell them to get out of the Capitol."I don't know what they're doing.Is it as bad as it looks?What are people—they're breaking glass; they're running in.Some look armed; some have gas.It just was so beyond anything that I had expected or anything that any of us should anticipate or want.And this gentleman said, "Would you like to talk to him?"I said, "I'll call him later, but please add my name to the chorus of people I'm sure are calling."
And so I couldn't believe it.I put out a statement the next day, a longer statement about protesting and accepting election results and whatnot.And if you didn't like what happened this summer, you shouldn't like what happened yesterday.And I did mention this summer because, again, people who talk about Jan. 6 just didn't live through the summer of 2020 somehow.
So I think that the obsession with Jan. 6 is outsize among people who believe that their job is always to get Trump.If it's not that, it's something else.They're throwing a million things at the wall, hoping something will stick.Jan. 6 was a terrible day in American history.It always will be.I will never change my mind about that.
Having said that, there are people who are arrested in connection with Jan. 6 who have received sentences far beyond or have been detained far longer than people we see flipping off the bird, assaulting police officers in New York City, raping.12It just is terrible, the outsize difference, and I would also say the double standard, the two-tiered system of justice for many of them.
12
The Washington Post: Most Jan. 6 defendants get time behind bars, but less than U.S. seeks
I think for many people, the date always says Jan. 6, 2021; the date never changes.They can't help themselves but talk about it all the time even if America is talking about other issues.
When you go down and see him at Mar-a-Lago after this in the run-up to the moment we are [in], who is Donald Trump?What is he like in that post-presidency period?Is he angry?Has he moved on?Who is the Donald Trump who you see?
President Trump is slow to anger.It's one of the many dumb stereotypes said about him by people who know better or don't know him at all.I've certainly seen him angry or out of sorts, but he’s slow to anger, much slower than a lot of his haters, who just honestly just look miserable at this point.I haven't even seen their teeth in years.Do they smile at all?Maybe applesauce for lunch every day.It looks like a terrible existence.
He's got a lot of joy on the job, and he has a great life.He knows he has a connection to people.He had four years as president, where there were policies and accomplishments very, very easy to be proud of and want to continue into a second term or revive in a second term.And he has a great family around him, lots of supporters.He, like a majority of Americans, according to everyone's polling, Donald Trump is like a majority of Americans—he can't believe what's happening to this country.He, too, disapproves of the way Joe Biden is handling his job as goes a number of these issues.
And so he likes a trip down memory lane.He likes to be nostalgic about things we did on the 2016 campaign, in the White House, people he met, causes he championed, legislation he signed into law, executive orders he issued.His company is a great place to be.And somehow, even though the people who visit this upon his shoulders could never take it for a second in return—that's pretty obvious—he sort of just sashays through all these legal problems.
And that could change, certainly.But to date, he knows that the prosecutions as persecution have helped to solidify, not create but cement and solidify his resurgence to many people.<i>The New York Times</i> had a great article earlier in 2024 saying how college-educated Republicans learned to fall in love with Donald Trump.13And it wasn't about the border or the economy as much as it was about all these prosecutions.
13
The New York Times: How College-Educated Republicans Learned to Love Trump Again
You're telling me, the one woman, basically, "You're telling me I'm young, I'm female, I'm Hispanic.I have to vote against Donald Trump," and I'm thinking, well, why?Let me think about this.And I want to do the opposite of what you're telling me I must do.
And so there's something to that.And we'll see how it all plays out.But Donald Trump knows that he's being considered for rehiring for the same reason you and I get hired or that we hire other people, is because we like to hire people to do a job who've already done a job.
Latest Interviews
Latest Interviews
Policies
Teacher Center
Jon and Jo Ann Hagler on behalf of the Jon L. Hagler Foundation
Koo and Patricia Yuen
FRONTLINE is a registered trademark of WGBH Educational Foundation. Web Site Copyright ©1995-2025 WGBH Educational Foundation. PBS is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization.
Funding for FRONTLINE is provided through the support of PBS viewers and by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Additional funding is provided by the Abrams Foundation; Park Foundation; the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation; and the FRONTLINE Trust with major support from Jon and Jo Ann Hagler on behalf of the Jon L. Hagler Foundation, and additional support from Koo and Patricia Yuen. FRONTLINE is a registered trademark of WGBH Educational Foundation. Web Site Copyright ©1995-2025 WGBH Educational Foundation. PBS is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization.
