Inside the Ruthless, Restless Final Days of Trump’s
Campaign
“What’s discipline got to do
with winning?”
By Tim
Alberta
November 2, 2024,
8:15 AM ET
At the end of June, in the afterglow of a
debate performance that would ultimately prompt President Joe Biden to end his
campaign for reelection, Donald Trump startled his aides by announcing that
he’d come up with a new nickname for his opponent.
“The guy’s a retard. He’s retarded. I
think that’s what I’ll start calling him,” Trump declared aboard his campaign
plane, en route to a rally that evening, according to three people who heard
him make the remarks: “Retarded Joe Biden.”
The staffers present—and, within
hours, others who’d heard about the epithet secondhand—pleaded with Trump not
to say this publicly. They warned him that it would antagonize the moderate
voters who’d been breaking in their direction, while engendering sympathy for a
politician who, at that moment, was the subject of widespread ridicule. As
Trump demurred, musing that he might debut the nickname at that night’s event,
his staffers puzzled over the timing. Biden was on the ropes. Polls showed
Trump jumping out to the biggest lead he’d enjoyed in any of his three
campaigns for the presidency. Everything was going right for the Republican
Party and its nominee. Why would he jeopardize that for the sake of slinging a
juvenile insult? (A campaign spokesperson, Steven Cheung, said the nickname
“was never discussed and this is materially false.”)
Over the next several days—as Trump’s
aides held their breath, convinced he would debut this latest slur at any
moment—they came to realize something about Trump: He was restless, unhappy,
and, yes, tired of winning. For the previous 20 months, he’d been hemmed in by
a campaign built on the principles of restraint and competence. The former
president’s ugliest impulses were regularly curbed by his top advisers; his
most obnoxious allies and most outlandish ideas were sidelined. These
guardrails had produced a professional campaign—a campaign that was headed for
victory. But now, like a predator toying with its wounded catch, Trump had
become bored. It reminded some allies of his havoc-making decisions in the
White House. Trump never had much use for calm and quiet. He didn’t appreciate
normalcy. Above all, he couldn’t stand being babysat.
“People are calling this the most
disciplined campaign they’ve ever seen,” Trump remarked to friends at a
fundraiser this summer, according to someone who heard the conversation. He
smirked at the compliment. “What’s discipline got to do with winning?”
Trump never did deploy the nickname
against Biden in public. Yet the restiveness he felt during that stretch of the
race foretold a dramatic shift in the tone and tenor of his campaign. Within
weeks, Trump would survive an assassination attempt, Biden would abandon his
candidacy, Vice President Kamala Harris would replace him atop the Democratic
ticket, and polls would show an election that once appeared finished suddenly
reverting to coin-flip status. All the while, Trump became more agitated with
what he saw as the trust-the-plan, run-out-the-clock strategy of his
campaign—and more convinced that this cautious approach was going to cost him a
second term.
Read: This is exactly what the Trump team feared
In conversations with nearly a dozen
of the former president’s aides, advisers, and friends, it became apparent that
Trump’s feeling of midsummer tedium marked a crucial moment in his political
career, setting off a chain reaction that nearly destroyed his campaign and
continues to threaten his chances of victory. Even as they battled Democrats in
a race that refuses to move outside the margin of error, some of Trump’s
closest allies spent the closing months of the campaign at war with one
another: planting damaging stories, rallying to the defense of wronged
colleagues, and preemptively pointing fingers in the event of an electoral
defeat.
At the center of this tumult, people
close to Trump agreed, is a candidate whose appetite for chaos has only
grown—and serves as a reminder of what awaits should he win on November 5.
Trump decided it was time to take matters into
his own hands.
For the first 10 days following
Biden’s departure from the race, Trump had listened dutifully as his campaign
co-managers—a pair of longtime GOP consultants named Susie Wiles and Chris
LaCivita—explained that the fundamentals of their strategy remained solid.
Nothing dramatic needed to change with Harris taking over the ticket, they told
Trump, because she was inheriting the vulnerabilities they had exploited so
successfully against Biden. They argued that whatever burst of money and
enthusiasm had accompanied her entry into the race would prove short-lived—and
warned him against overreacting. Staying the course, they told Trump, was the
surest recipe for electoral success.
Read: Trump is planning for a landslide win
He went along with their plan—for a
while. But every hour his campaign spent attacking Harris as if she were a
credible opponent—rather than bludgeoning her as the airheaded, unqualified,
empty pantsuit Trump was sure she was—gnawed at the former president. Finally,
he ran out of patience. On July 31, during an onstage interview with the
National Association of Black Journalists, Trump publicly unloaded the sort of
race-baiting barbs that his aides had, up until that point, succeeded in
containing to his private diatribes.
“I didn’t know she was Black until a
number of years ago when she happened to turn Black,” Trump told the
journalists onstage, eliciting gasps from the audience. “I don’t know, is she
Indian or is she Black?”
In the days after his NABJ
appearance—as staffers scrambled to satisfy their boss’s appetite for pugilism
without indulging his racist and misogynistic impulses—Trump began to lose
confidence in his team. He had long dismissed the warnings from certain friends,
such as his former acting director of national intelligence, Richard Grenell,
that Wiles and LaCivita weren’t up to the job. But now he had reason to wonder.
With Harris climbing rapidly in the polls and his own favorability numbers
slipping, Trump was pondering, for the first time, a shake-up of his team.
(Cheung said Trump never considered a change to his campaign leadership.)
In early August, Trump started
courting two of his longtime allies and former campaign managers from 2016,
Kellyanne Conway and Corey Lewandowski, discussing what it might look like if
they rejoined his political operation in a formal capacity. Trump told
Lewandowski—who promptly agreed to come aboard—that he missed the “fun,”
freewheeling nature of that first run for the White House. He told Conway,
meanwhile, that he worried he was being overly “managed” by his current team.
Trump’s conversations with Conway
troubled Wiles and LaCivita. They knew that she and Trump were talking more and
more frequently; they also knew she loved to take credit for electing him in
2016, and wouldn’t be eager to share accolades with her successors. Conway’s
back-channeled criticisms of the 2024 campaign had been subtle but pointed; in
an effort to placate her, LaCivita increased her monthly retainer at the
Republican National Committee from $20,000 a month to $30,000. But in private
conversations, Conway continued to point out the campaign’s
shortcomings—especially, in her view, the mistaken selection of Ohio’s Senator
J. D. Vance as Trump’s running mate. When Wiles and LaCivita met Trump at a
fundraiser in the Hamptons the evening of August 2—having been tipped off that
their boss just spent the day talking strategy with Conway at his Bedminster
club in New Jersey—the campaign’s top advisers fretted that their days running
the show might be numbered. (As The New York Times was
reporting on Conway’s visit to Bedminster, Trump called reporter Maggie
Haberman and angrily denied that changes were afoot, saying he was “thrilled”
with Wiles and LaCivita.)
In truth, the real threat was
Lewandowski.
A tough-talking operative who had
famously accosted a female reporter in 2016 and
later allegedly made unwanted sexual advances toward a Republican
donor’s wife, Lewandowski had promised Trump a return to the
“killer” vibes of 2016. But the details of his new role were left open to
interpretation. Lewandowski believed—and told anyone who would listen—that he
would outrank the existing campaign leadership. Trump himself, meanwhile,
assured Wiles and LaCivita that Lewandowski would be a utility man, serving as
a key surrogate while helping organize election-security efforts and field
operations in swing states.
The honeymoon period was nonexistent.
Before Lewandowski worked a single day on behalf of the campaign, he complained
to friends that Wiles and LaCivita had leaked the news of his hiring in an
unflattering light that downplayed his role—and timed it to coincide with when
he was traveling and off the grid, unable to speak for himself.
Determined to assert himself,
Lewandowski arrived at Palm Beach headquarters in mid-August with designs on
running the place. Wiles accompanies Trump nearly everywhere on the trail, and
LaCivita, when not joining them, often works from his home in Virginia, leaving
Lewandowski with a free hand in Florida. He began taking aside junior staffers
and department heads alike, one at a time, informing them that he spoke for
Trump himself. He made it known that he would be in charge of all spending, and
that he needed people to tell him what wasn’t working so he could fix it.
Meanwhile, he began calling the campaign’s key operatives in the battleground
states, probing for weaknesses in Trump’s ground game and assuring them that a
strategy shift was in the works.
Even as colleagues grew tired of
hearing Lewandowski describe himself as the former president’s personal proxy,
they realized he wasn’t wrong. His arrival coincided with a marked shift in
Trump’s mood and behavior. Gone, suddenly, was the candidate of 2024, who
despite all the inevitable outbursts was at least receptive to direction and
aware of consequences; in his place, as the summer progressed, was the alter
ego of 2016, the candidate who did and said whatever he wanted and ignored
anyone who sought to rein him in.
During the week of the Democratic
National Convention, the former president shared a social-media post suggesting
that Harris had performed oral sex in exchange for career advancement. He
denigrated the Medal of Honor, the nation’s top award for military personnel,
as less impressive than the civilian Medal of Freedom. He accused Harris of
leading a “vicious, violent overthrow of a president of the United States.” He
called into Fox News’s coverage of the convention and rambled so incoherently
that the anchors cut his line 10 minutes into the interview. (Trump promptly
dialed Newsmax to continue talking.) At a rally in North Carolina, after
polling the audience about whether he should “get personal” with his attacks on
Harris—the crowd responding rowdily to encourage his invective—Trump mused
about firing his campaign advisers.
Around that time, Trump was asked by
reporters about the tone of his candidacy. “I think I’m doing a very calm
campaign,” he replied. “I have to do it my way.”
As Trump was settling on Vance as his
vice-presidential pick, one of the arguments he found most persuasive centered
on an injection of youthful verve: The freshman senator, then just 39 years
old, could complement a running mate four decades his elder with a style and
media savvy that broadened the campaign’s appeal. With that promise, however,
came a certain peril. Vance maintained an entourage of Very Online influencers
who had little experience winning campaigns but lots of owned libs in their
social-media mentions. Now some of those right-wing agitators would be joining
an operation that was already struggling to keep its principal on message.
Vance’s first two months on the ticket
were largely uneventful. His awkward, halting appearances fueled a sense of
buyer’s remorse among some Trump confidants, but he made no mistakes of any
real consequence. (The talk of “childless cat ladies” preceded his appointment
to the GOP ticket, as did his remarks that he “would like abortion to be
illegal nationally.”) And then came September 9. It was one day before Trump
would meet Harris in Philadelphia for their first and only debate, and Vance,
according to people familiar with the situation, was feeling punchy. Over the
past several days, the young senator had marinated in right-wing agitprop
stemming from Springfield, Ohio, where it was rumored that Haitian migrants
were stealing and eating pets. When Vance’s allies on the campaign learned that
he’d already spoken out about related issues in Springfield—how the influx of
thousands of Haitian migrants who came legally to fill jobs had stressed the
city—they urged him to seize on this conspiracist catnip and turn it into a
crusade for the Trump campaign.
One staffer in particular—a young
activist named Alex Bruesewitz—helped convince Vance and his team that this was
an opportunity to put his stamp on the campaign. Vance agreed. “Reports now
show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t
be in this country,” the senator posted on X, catching the Trump campaign’s
leaders entirely off guard. Figuring there was no use in half measures,
Bruesewitz led Vance’s minions in blasting the social-media post around their
networks and urging officials on other GOP campaigns, as well as at the
Republican National Committee, to join Vance’s assault on the migrant community
of Springfield. (Bruesewitz did not respond to a request for comment about this
story.)
Most Republicans refused to go along.
But Trump himself found the shtick irresistible. Even as he was sequestered in
debate prep, word reached him that Vance had amplified the sensational claims
about Springfield. The former president’s advisers were bewildered by Vance’s
post. Though they went out of their way to avoid any talk of Springfield for
the duration of the debate prep, there was an ominous feeling that Trump
wouldn’t be able to help himself.
Yet somehow, by the time Trump charged
ahead onstage the following night—“They’re eating the dogs; the people that
came in, they’re eating the cats”—his campaign was facing a more serious
crisis.
Several days earlier, Trump had
fielded a phone call from one of his superfans: Laura Loomer. A right-wing
agitator best known for racist and conspiracist bombast—she
has celebrated the deaths of migrants and called school shootings fake events
put on by crisis actors—Loomer had remained one of Trump’s most loyal and vocal
supporters even in the darkest moments of his post–January 6 exile at
Mar-a-Lago. That loyalty gave her a direct line to the former president. After
she had joined the candidate aboard his plane during crucial trips to Iowa and
New Hampshire early in the year, campaign officials discussed ways to sideline
Loomer without causing a scene. They neutralized a volatile situation at the
convention this summer, for example, by providing Loomer with a front-row seat
for Trump’s acceptance speech—putting her in close physical proximity to her
idol while keeping her far from the VIP area that cameras would be shooting
live.
But now, in the first week of
September, Loomer was getting antsy. She called Trump and demanded to know why
the campaign had been keeping her at bay; why she hadn’t been allowed back on
the plane as the Republican nominee toured the country. Trump told Loomer not
to worry: He would personally see to it that she was invited aboard the plane
for his next trip. Later that day, when Trump relayed this request to
Wiles—who, since the beginning of the campaign, had controlled the flight
manifest—she registered disbelief. “Sir, our next trip is to Philadelphia for
the debate,” Wiles told Trump, according to two people familiar with the
conversation. “Are you sure that’s a good idea?”
Trump shrugged. “I don’t know,” he
said. “Just stick her in the back of the plane.”
Wiles knew that nothing good could
come of this. Still, after one more round of gentle pushback, she acquiesced.
(Even people like Wiles, who have a track record of talking Trump out of
certain reckless ideas, learn that you cannot retain a seat at the table if you
tell the man “no” one time too many.) Wiles decided that allowing Loomer on the
trip was not a hill to die on. Perhaps, she would later remark to friends, it
should have been.
When Trump’s jet touched down in
Philadelphia on September 10, and photographers captured Loomer disembarking,
some of the former president’s allies were apoplectic. Republican elected
officials began texting campaign aides demanding to know why she was traveling
with Trump. But outside of Wiles and LaCivita, Trump’s own staffers hadn’t
known she was on the manifest. They were as bewildered—and furious—as everyone
else. (Why Trump’s employees find Loomer uniquely noxious, when their boss
consorts with known racists and trafficks in cruel conspiracy theories himself,
is a separate question.)
As the night unfolded, with Loomer
watching the debate backstage and then joining other GOP surrogates in the spin
room, campaign leaders weighed their next move. Yanking her from the plane
risked turning the story into something bigger and messier: a jilted Loomer
lashing out against corrupt RINO deep-state simps in the aftermath of Trump’s
miserable debate performance. Wiles decided that Trump’s special guest would
remain on the manifest for the duration of the itinerary. The only problem?
They were headed straight from Philadelphia to New York City for a memorial
ceremony the next morning, honoring victims of 9/11—which Loomer, naturally,
had described as an inside job.
After the cameras showed Loomer
standing near Trump at Ground Zero, the former president’s own phone lit up.
For the rest of the day, friends and associates and donors dialed his number
with a manic urgency. Some read him old tweets that Loomer had sent; others
demanded that whoever let this woman aboard the plane be fired. Senator Lindsey
Graham asked Trump if he was trying to lose the election. To
all of this Trump pleaded ignorance. He began complaining to aides that nobody
had ever explained to him, specifically, why Loomer was so toxic. They
responded by pulling up Loomer’s most incendiary posts and showing them to the
boss. Trump winced at some and seemed unaffected by others. But he agreed, by
the end of the trip, that Loomer needed to go. What sealed Loomer’s fate,
according to two people who were part of these conversations, wasn’t just her
racist diatribes but also her appearance: Trump, who is generally appalled by
plastic surgery, was disgusted to learn about the apparent extent of Loomer’s
facial alterations. (When asked for comment, Cheung told me, “Laura was a hard
worker in the primaries and President Trump appreciates a fighter.”)
Trump regarded the Loomer episode as a
one-off nuisance. His advisers, however, feared that something more fundamental
had gone amiss. The past month had seen the campaign spiral into a
free-for-all. Lewandowski was going rogue. Morale was plummeting among the
rank-and-file staff. And Trump himself seemed intent on sabotaging a
message—curbing immigration, fighting inflation, projecting strength on the
world stage—that had been engineered to win him the election. Privately, Wiles
confided to friends that she and LaCivita felt they’d lost control of the
campaign.
When she and LaCivita sat down with
Trump in the middle of September, Wiles urged her boss to realize just how
badly things were going. These recent mistakes could not be repeated; this
current path was unsustainable. “We need to step back and think hard about what
we’re doing,” Wiles told him, according to several people familiar with the
conversation. “Because this can’t go on.”
Trump doesn’t take well to
admonishment. Yet the only other time he’d heard Wiles address him like this
was in late 2022, shortly after he’d announced his candidacy, when he’d dined
with Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist, at Mar-a-Lago. Trump seemed to recognize
now, as he had then, that he was engaging in self-sabotage. He told Wiles that
he agreed: It was time to tighten things up.
Trump thought the conversation was
over. But there was one more thing on Wiles’s mind.
Days before departing for that doomed East
Coast swing through Philadelphia and Lower Manhattan, Lewandowski had told
Trump that they needed to talk. There was information, he said, that the
candidate deserved to know.
When they met at Mar-a-Lago,
Lewandowski laid it all out. He’d spent several weeks digging into the finances
of the campaign, he told Trump, and things weren’t adding up. Far too much
money was being spent on programs insignificant to his electoral success, and
there had been no apparent oversight of contracts and arrangements that created
a windfall for certain campaign employees. Lewandowski told Trump that he’d
taken the liberty of bringing in a private consultant—personally escorting this
outsider into the campaign’s offices—to study the books. This person’s
conclusion, Lewandowski said, was: “Your people are either completely
incompetent, or they’re stealing from you.”
Trump seemed conflicted. Nothing
angered him more than the idea of being taken advantage of. Then again, if
there was one person in politics he’d come to rely upon—one person who, he
believed, would never steal from him—it was Wiles. Ultimately, Trump instructed
Lewandowski to take his concerns to her.
When Lewandowski did so, on a plane
ride that same week, things quickly went sideways. He made no accusations about
specific individuals, but shared his belief that certain tactical decisions had
been made with big paydays in mind. Wiles told him that she took offense at
such conjecture—and that she didn’t need to justify anything to him. Still,
Wiles spent the next hour walking Lewandowski through the choices made about
vendors, contracts, and costs. When he continued to suggest that things weren’t
on the level, Wiles ended the conversation, preferring to focus on preparing
Trump for the upcoming debate.
Once the debate was behind them—and
with many on the inside fearing that the campaign was falling apart—Wiles
sensed that Lewandowski was about to make a move. He had repeatedly gone back
to Trump, asking for control over hiring and firing as well as veto power over
all spending decisions, which would effectively put him in charge of the
campaign. Now he was going all in, telling Trump that Wiles and LaCivita had
invested tens of millions of dollars in direct-mail outreach aimed at
mobilizing supporters during the early-voting period—money that just so
happened to line the pockets of certain campaign staffers, including LaCivita,
and that could have been spent instead on television advertising. Lewandowski
understood that the only tactical component of campaigning that Trump cared
about was TV ads. He was telling Trump not just that he was being stolen from,
but that the money in question would have made him ubiquitous on TV.
On September 12, when Wiles told
Trump, “This can’t go on,” she added that she wasn’t just talking about Loomer
and Springfield. Lewandowski had parachuted into a well-run campaign and rolled
grenades into every department, Wiles told Trump, sowing distrust and spreading
rumors and making it impossible for her to do her job. “If there’s something
you’re skeptical of, something you want answers to, let’s talk about it,” Wiles
told her boss. “But if you don’t have confidence in me and Chris, just say so.”
It was an ultimatum. And if Trump
struggled with the decision before him—fire Wiles and LaCivita, or keep them
and banish Lewandowski—he didn’t let on. Then and there he gave Wiles a vote of
confidence. The next day, on the campaign plane, Trump convened Wiles,
LaCivita, and Lewandowski around a table in the front cabin, in a meeting first reported on by Puck. He spoke
directly to Lewandowski. “We can’t afford to lose these guys,” Trump said,
motioning toward Wiles and LaCivita. “They’re in charge.”
Lewandowski knew the fight was lost.
“Sir, I’m the only fucking person on this plane who isn’t getting paid to be
here right now,” he grumbled, according to multiple people familiar with the
meeting. “I’m happy to go back to fucking New Hampshire.”
“No, I want you on TV for me every
day,” Trump said. He paused. “And go win me New Hampshire, while you’re at it.”
Lewandowski slapped the table. “You’re
not going to win New Hampshire,” he said. “But okay.”
When passengers reboarded the plane
for the next leg of their trip, Lewandowski was not on it. Being evicted from
the plane is a signature insult in Trump’s political sphere. Lewandowski told
friends that he’d planned all along to fly commercial to his next destination;
the former president told his traveling aides that Lewandowski’s absence was
meant to send the message that dissent would no longer be tolerated. Trump had
lost a lot of ground to Harris over the previous month, and victory was
possible only if everyone on the campaign fell back in line.
Things appeared to stabilize from
there. As September gave way to October, and Harris launched a major media
offensive aimed at connecting with voters who still felt no familiarity with
her, Trump’s campaign was delighted to cede the spotlight. Wiles and LaCivita
believed that every moment Harris spent in front of live cameras translated to
more Republican votes. Instead of trying to book Trump onto major networks,
where his comments might produce negative news cycles, his team arranged a tour
of podcasts, most of them aimed at young men. The effort was led by Bruesewitz,
the impulsive young Vance sycophant who maintained an impressive network of
right-wing influencers. The strategy appeared to work: For the first three
weeks of October, Trump’s internal polling showed Harris’s momentum
stalled—measured in both net favorability and vote share—while Trump’s numbers
inched upward.
By the middle of October, Trump was
being hounded with requests from Republican candidates for joint
appearances—requests that had been conspicuously few and far between just a
month earlier. Even vulnerable incumbents, such as Representative Ken Calvert
of California, tried to grab hold of Trump’s coattails, campaigning with him in
his decidedly purple district. Surveying the narrative shift, Trump’s allies
marveled at how simple it had all been. Keeping voters’ attention on
Harris—while, to the extent they could, keeping Trump out of his own way—had
produced the most significant movement in his direction since her entry into
the race.
Not that Trump wasn’t doing his best
to muck things up. The 40 minutes he spent onstage in Pennsylvania swaying
silently to music prompted aides to exchange frenzied messages wondering
whether the audio could be cut to get him off the stage. (Ultimately, they
decided, letting him dance was less dangerous than letting him rant.) A week
later, back in the all-important commonwealth for another event, he left aides
slack-jawed by marveling at the ample genitalia of the late golf legend Arnold
Palmer.
Even as the political class settled on
Trump as the betting favorite, his allies couldn’t shake a pair of very bad
feelings. The first was about ground game: With much of their party’s resources
being diverted to legal efforts, the GOP’s field
operation was struggling to keep pace with the Democrats. The patchwork
strategy left Republicans heavily dependent on outside help. But good help is
hard to find. Elon Musk’s canvassing program was fast becoming a punch line in Republican circles.
Several GOP consulting firms saw young staffers take short leaves to knock
doors for Musk, lured by the enormous commissions he offered. His new system
proved easy to game, allowing workers to inflate the number of contacts they
reported, and to pocket the rewards. (Musk’s political entity, America PAC, did
not respond to a request for comment.)
The more urgent concern, however, was
the acrimony that had fractured the Republican nominee’s political operation.
Lewandowski had, within a month of his defenestration at 30,000 feet, worked
his way back into Trump’s inner circle—and even, at times, onto the plane
itself. Wiles had, around the time of their showdown with Lewandowski, told
LaCivita that she could no longer deal with the headache of handling the
manifest. She charged him with the thankless duty for the remainder of the
campaign, making for awkward encounters whenever Trump announced that he wanted
Lewandowski to accompany him somewhere.
Even when Lewandowski wasn’t around,
his presence was felt. In one instance, South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem—with
whom Lewandowski was reported to have carried on a romantic relationship (they
have both denied this)—boarded the Trump plane after an event and joined the
former president for a strategy briefing with his aides. As the candidate
received a series of positive updates from the ground—early-voting metrics,
state-based internal polling—Noem interrupted to say that the campaign was
lagging behind the Democrats in terms of voter-registration numbers. Trump’s
aides were stunned: Not only was she contradicting their own data, but those
present were convinced that Lewandowski had put her up to it in order to make
Wiles and LaCivita look bad. (Noem, through a spokesperson, denied this and
took offense at the notion that “she needs a man to put her up to anything.”)
As the race moved toward its
conclusion—and as the constellation of helpers and hangers-on surrounding Trump
began positioning themselves to take credit or deflect blame—more than a few
people close to the candidate were shopping dirt on their internal rivals. A
sense of foreboding settled in over the campaign. There was so much bad blood,
several aides told me, that something was bound to spill out into the open.
Sure enough, on October 15, the Daily
Beast published an explosive story alleging that
LaCivita had skimmed huge amounts off the top of TV ads, direct mail, and other
expenditures, netting him some $22 million from his work on behalf of the
campaign and a pair of related super PACs. Multiple campaign sources told me
that the nature of these arrangements was exaggerated, and that although
LaCivita had made plenty of money—and perhaps more than some people were
comfortable with—it was nowhere near that amount. (“Not only is the $22 million
number manufactured out of thin air,” LaCivita told me in a statement, “but
it’s defamatory.”) His objections hardly mattered: Trump was livid. Even when
Wiles tried to calm him down, arguing that Lewandowski had planted the story to
eliminate LaCivita, the former president kept fuming, saying the story made him
look like a fool and demanding to know why the campaign hadn’t stopped it from
being published.
With everyone in the campaign watching
to see how their boss would respond to the article, Trump made it known that
LaCivita was not welcome on the plane for a planned trip to Georgia that
evening. Trump was still beside himself a day later, ranting about the article
and telling friends that he’d fire LaCivita—and possibly his entire team—if it
weren’t for the PR hit that would cause just weeks out from Election Day.
(Cheung denied that Trump was upset by the Daily Beast report,
saying, “Everyone recognized it came from disgruntled individuals.”)
LaCivita was abruptly summoned to
Trump Tower on the morning of Friday, October 18. There, he found himself
climbing into the lead car of the former president’s motorcade, a limousine in
which Trump often rides alone to recharge between events. On this occasion,
there was another passenger, the businessman Howard Lutnick, who had recently
been named a co-chair of Trump’s White House transition team. The three of them
made small talk all the way to LaGuardia Airport, as LaCivita waited for the
hammer to drop. It felt, LaCivita would later tell several friends, like an
episode of The Apprentice: beckoned by the boss, shoved into the
limo with a spectator on hand, only to ride in suspense for what seemed like an
eternity, believing that at any moment Trump would turn and say, “You’re
fired.”
Instead, when they arrived at
LaGuardia and boarded the campaign plane, Trump signaled for LaCivita to join
him in the cramped, four-seat office at the front of the cabin. As they settled
across from each other, Trump reached for a small stack of paper: a printout of
the Daily Beast story. LaCivita, in turn, produced a much
thicker stack of paper. These were the exhibits for the defense: Federal
Election Commission reports, bank-account statements, pay stubs, vendor
agreements, and more. For the next half hour, according to several sources with
knowledge of the exchange, the two men had it out—profanities flying but voices
kept intentionally low—as LaCivita insisted to Trump that he wasn’t ripping the
candidate off. Trump, the sources said, seemed to vacillate between believing
his employee and seething over the dollar figure, wondering how something so
specific could be wrong. Finally, after a couple of concluding f-bombs, Trump
seemed satisfied. “Okay, I get it, I get it,” he told LaCivita, holding up his
hands as if requesting that the defense rest. He added: “You should sue those
bastards.”
The air was more or less cleared:
Trump has not raised the issue of LaCivita’s pay since, aides told me, save for
several episodes of the candidate teasingly—but conspicuously—calling LaCivita
“my $22 million man!” Nevertheless, the alliance remains fragile. Less than a
week after the détente, CNN unearthed LaCivita’s Twitter activity from January 6, 2021,
including his having liked a tweet that called for Trump to be removed via the
Twenty-Fifth Amendment. At that point, Trump told several people that LaCivita
was dead to him—that he would ride out the remainder of the campaign, but would
have no place in his administration or political operation going forward.
That was just fine by LaCivita; he had
always viewed himself as a hired gun, and his reservations about working for
Trump weren’t exactly a secret. Still, the word that Trump had iced one of his
two key lieutenants sent a shiver through the rest of the staff. Many had
noticed new faces poking around, asking questions about finances and
compliance. With Trump’s suspicions piqued, every staffer, as well as every
decision, would be under the microscope through Election Day.
Entering the final weekend of October,
I noticed something in conversations with numerous Trump staffers: resignation.
They had long since become accustomed to working in the high-intensity,
zero-margin-for-error environment created by Wiles and LaCivita. But this home
stretch of the campaign hadn’t just been hard and stressful; it had been
disillusioning. Several campaign officials had told me, throughout the spring
and summer, how excited they were about working in the next Trump White House.
Now those same people were telling me—as paperwork was being distributed
internally to begin the process of placing personnel on the transition team and
in the prospective administration—that they’d had a change of heart. The past
three months had been the most unpleasant of their careers. Win or lose, they
said, they were done with the chaos of Donald Trump—even if the nation was not.
Standing in the bowels of Madison Square
Garden on the evening of Sunday, October 27, an irate group of Trump staffers,
family members, and loyalists was looking for someone to blame.
The prime-time show playing out just
beyond their corridor had been eight years in the making. Trump, hailed as “the
man who built New York’s skyline” by a roster of celebrity speakers, would
stage an elaborate homecoming to celebrate his conquest of the American
political psyche. It seemed that nothing—not even the $1 million price tag for
producing such an event—could put a damper on the occasion.
And then, before some in the audience
had even found their seats, the party was over.
The first presenter, a shock comedian
named Tony Hinchcliffe, told a sequence of jokes that earned little laughter
but managed to antagonize constituencies Trump had spent months courting. One
was about Black people carving watermelons for Halloween; another portrayed
Jews as money-hungry and Arabs as primitive. The worst line turned out to be
the most destructive. “I don’t know if you guys know this, but there’s
literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now,”
Hinchcliffe said. “I think it’s called Puerto Rico.”
The blowback was instantaneous.
Elected officials—Democrats, and, before long, Republicans too—blasted the
comedian’s remarks. Headlines from the world’s leading news organizations
described the event as every bit the hate-fest Republicans had promised it
wouldn’t be. Trump aides were blitzed with text messages from lawmakers and
donors and lobbyists wanting to know who, exactly, had the bright idea of
inviting a comic to kick off the most consequential event of the fall campaign.
In truth, some of Trump’s senior staff
hadn’t actually watched Hinchcliffe’s set. The Garden was a labyrinth of
security checkpoints and political processions, and the event had barely been
under way when he spoke. Now they were racing to catch up with the damage—and
rewinding the clock to figure out how Hinchcliffe had ended up onstage in the
first place.
It didn’t take long to get to the
answer: Alex Bruesewitz.
Technically a mid-level
staffer—formally a liaison to right-wing media, informally a terminally online
troll and perpetual devil on the campaign’s shoulder—Bruesewitz had grown his
profile inside Trump’s orbit. The candidate’s appearances on various bro-themed
podcasts were hailed as acts of strategic genius. But there was one guest
booking Bruesewitz couldn’t secure: He wanted Trump to talk with Hinchcliffe on
his show, Kill Tony. When word got around that Trump was looking
for opening acts at the Garden, Bruesewitz made the introductions. Trump’s head
of planning and production, Justin Caporale, ran with the idea. No senior staff
ever bothered to vet Hinchcliffe themselves.
Now, with their grand celebration
quickly morphing into a public-relations nightmare, Trump’s allies stewed. Two
decisions needed to be made, and quickly: whether to inform the man of the hour
about this disaster before he took the stage, and whether to issue a statement
rebuking Hinchcliffe and his remarks. Some staffers feared throwing Trump off
his game at such a crucial moment, and others argued that showing any weakness
would just make things worse. But LaCivita dictated a short statement to the communications
team that was blasted out to reporters across the arena, distancing the
campaign from Hinchcliffe, while Wiles pulled the former president aside and
explained the situation. (Trump, aides told me, was merely annoyed at the time;
only after watching television coverage the next morning would he rage about
how Wiles, LaCivita, and Caporale had “fucked this up.”)
Backstage at the Garden, in the blur
of debate and indecision over damage control, it was Stephen Miller who
pondered the bigger picture. (Miller did not respond to a request for comment.)
According to two people who were present, Miller, the Trump policy adviser
whose own nativist impulses are well documented, was not offended by
Hinchcliffe’s racist jokes. Yet he was angered by them all the same: He knew
the campaign had just committed a huge unforced error. He believed that
Bruesewitz had done profound damage to Trump’s electoral prospects. And, in
that moment, he seethed at what this lack of discipline portended for Trump
should he return to power.
The irony, apparently, was lost on
Miller. He and his colleagues would spend the coming days savaging Bruesewitz
for his recklessness when really—as ever—the culprit was a man whose addiction
to mayhem creates the conditions in which a comedian who was once dropped by
his talent agency for using racial slurs onstage could be invited to kick off
the closing event of the election without a single objection being raised.
“If we can’t trust this kid with a
campaign,” Miller said to the group, according to one of the people present,
“how can we trust him in the White House?”
