CHAPTER 11
My Twitter account has become so powerful I can actually make my enemies tell the truth.
—DONALD J. TRUMP
We are in a competition with the world, and I want America to win. When I am president, we will.
—DONALD J. TRUMP, AUGUST 8, 2016
AMERICA HAS the largest economy in the world, thanks to its long traditions of private property, economic freedom, and hard work. Donald Trump should know; his companies have contributed more to our GDP than most others. But GDP measures only what a country is producing right now, not how much it is growing. And as far as growth is concerned, it’s barely 1 percent in the United States.
As we said before, multinational corporations don’t necessarily have a vested interest in any one country. That’s why they’re 100 percent behind any public policies that will boost their revenues or lower their operating costs. NAFTA did both. It was a win-win for Wall Street and corporate America, but a lose-lose for most Americans.
Everyone was surprised the boss won Michigan and other Rust Belt states like it, but we weren’t. We knew his message was like water to a man dying of thirst in places like Detroit, formerly one of the capitals of American industry, now reduced to a blighted ghost town. These people haven’t only seen firsthand the devastation wrought by trade deals like NAFTA, they’ve lived it.
And it’s not just that people in foreign countries will work for less. It’s how much doing business in America costs, due to taxes and regulations. Hillary Clinton took for granted that the same tired old Democratic message of more regulation and more “taxes on the rich” was going to give her blue-collar states like Michigan. But once again, it was Donald Trump who understood and truly cared for the people whose jobs had been exported and whose dreams had been downsized.
The Democrats like to talk about how wonderful European socialism is, cherry-picking a few statistics from categories where they can show supposedly better results. But what they don’t tell you is that along with their larger welfare states, most of those countries have much less regulated economies. Denmark, for example, scored a 93.9 in the business freedom category in the Heritage Foundation’s 2016 Index of Economic Freedom. The United States scored 84.4. The United States has fallen to seventeenth in the world overall on that index. In 1995, we were fourth.
Unlike the self-appointed experts in Washington, the boss doesn’t presume to know how to run every single business in the United States. So he made it very simple: for every new regulation enacted, two must be repealed in its place. Most people know when regulations go from the reasonable to the ridiculous. When your goal is to make America competitive, to make America great again, rather than appease lobbyists, it’s not hard to figure out which ones should go.
Another inconvenient fact for the Democrats is the US corporate tax rate. They like to demagogue about how the rich don’t pay enough taxes, but the United States has the third-highest corporate tax rate in the world. Donald Trump knows you aren’t going to put people back to work if all the new business investment is fleeing to countries with lower tax rates. And just like with immigration, he wasn’t afraid to tell unemployed blue-collar workers the politically incorrect truth, instead of the class-warfare message they got from Hillary Clinton.
He wasn’t afraid to say things many Republicans didn’t like either. There would be no more one-sided trade deals that benefited their big-business donors but impoverished middle America. Even NAFTA was going to be renegotiated. The days of free trade for them, currency manipulation and subsidies against us, were over. American workers were no longer going to be asked to compete on a playing field that slanted straight up.
But before any of that could happen, we needed a competitive advantage to overcome the huge special-interest funding advantage that Hillary Clinton enjoyed.
Early on in his time with us on the campaign, Brad Parscale went to Mr. Trump and Jared and made this analogy: Imagine, he said, two television screens. The one on the left is a commercial for a new personal music device. The device is open so you can see its inner workings. It is a marvel of engineering. You can also see how sleek it looks on the outside, and the gold plating where you plug in the headphones.
The scene on the right has only a silhouette of a woman with long, curly hair dancing while listening to the device. The tagline is, “iPod, this is how it’s going to make you feel.”
Brad was new to politics. He told everyone who would listen that he’d never worked on or even volunteered for a political campaign before. But he had been in the Web design business for many years, and he knew what sold and what didn’t.
“The people want to know how it makes them feel,” he said. “They want to buy the dance.”
If Donald Trump was Twitter, then Hillary Clinton was LinkedIn. Her online presence was filled with long descriptions of stances and policies. Every time she had the chance, she explained who she was. She was the television screen on the left. But people never cared who she was. Voters didn’t want a scripted intellectual connection. They wanted a visceral one. That’s what Mr. Trump gave them.
He made them dance.
Brad began working for the Trumps back in 2011. A real estate executive who knew Brad’s Web design work called and asked if he’d be interested in bidding to build a real estate website for Ivanka and Jared Kushner. He bid low, ten grand, and told them he’d give them the money back if they didn’t like his work. He thought that having a Trump contract on his résumé would be good for his business. The Kushners liked the website, and Brad got the job. That one job would lead to many others in the Trump Organization, such as with the Trump Winery and the Eric Trump Foundation.
He would bid low again when Corey called in January 2015 looking for a website for the Donald J. Trump presidential campaign. Brad charged the campaign $1,500, and then worked overnight, hunched over his computer in his living room, on the design.
For the first seven months that Brad worked for the campaign, Corey didn’t even know what he looked like. He was just a country voice on the other end of the phone. When he did finally meet him, Corey was like, “Whoa, big fella.” Along with being six eight, he had a buzz cut and wore an Amish-style beard. All he was missing was a plaid shirt and a giant ax.
Together, Jared and Brad would run the entire digital operation, gaining voters and donations via the internet. When they started working together, Brad was still pretty much a low-level design guy—at least compared with what he’d become—and Jared was serving as an unofficial adviser to Trump. When the boss needed an opinion or some numbers run, his son-in-law was usually his first phone call.
Jared first traveled with the campaign in November of 2015. It was on a plane ride back from Illinois, almost by accident, that Jared and Brad would first become destined to work together, though neither one knew it.
Jared had come along on the flight hoping that he would be able to get some time with the boss to break down data for him. He did. Then, on the plane ride back, just as they were finishing up, Jared made an offhand comment to his father-in-law.
“You know, I’m not sure you’re utilizing your Facebook correctly,” he said.
Jared had been noticing a few trends in the way that other campaigns were using Facebook, and saw some potential. If he could learn those techniques, then use them on an online audience that was as dedicated as Trump’s, the campaign would go into the primaries with a big advantage.
He offered a few more details, and Trump listened intently. After a few seconds, the boss nodded.
“All right,” he said. “Why don’t you be in charge of the Facebook? Scavino, you’re with Jared now.”
Just like that, Jared was involved. With what little experience he had in digital media and data analytics—he didn’t even have his own Facebook account—he now had to work with Dan Scavino and find the best way to reach voters through their computer screens.
The first thing he did, as always, was to watch, listen, and learn. One thing about Jared that made him invaluable throughout the entire campaign was his ability, not unlike that of Trump himself, to find the experts on a given topic, make friends with them, and then soak up whatever they had to say. He was a sponge. Before long, he and Dan had done full studies on every other campaign’s social media strategies, inventoried their own strengths, and decided what messages would resonate best on the internet. Jared even brought in friends from top marketing firms to give him and Scavino presentations on the microtargeting tools that Facebook offered.
It all sounded good, but nothing that he could look after on a day-to-day level by himself. For that, he’d need to find somebody with enough tech and marketing skills to take over.
It didn’t take him long to think of the perfect guy.
Soon Jared was on a conference call with Brad Parscale and Dan, delegating the tasks as best he could. On Brad’s recommendation, the new team of three leaned heavily on tweets and Facebook, the social media aspect of the campaign, and on online fund-raising. The advantage there, as with all other aspects of the campaign, was the passion that Trump’s supporters had. They were excited, sure, but they also couldn’t help sharing their excitement. You couldn’t hope for more from a Facebook audience. Donations soon came rolling in at an unprecedented rate.
“People vote with their wallets,” Brad would say. By paying close attention to the donations page—Does the Donate button go on the left or right side of the screen? Should it be green or red?—Jared and Brad got a pretty good idea of who their voters were and what they cared about. Trends that showed up in donations would be reflected days, sometimes hours later, in the polls.
Still, in the early days of the primary season, the campaign’s digital operation had a small budget. Brad began marketing the candidate with ads on Facebook. We shot many of the videos on Dan Scavino’s iPhone. Mr. Trump would just look into the camera and talk off the top of his head about a topic we’d give him.
With the data he collected from Facebook’s marketing tools, Brad would target the ads, and we’d watch the traffic spike. Ad targeting also allowed us to hone our message to specific subsets of groups and accumulate data. That information would in turn become our message and policy. When Mr. Trump was out on the stump, he would know what issues the local people cared about. And, along with Trump’s established greatest hits—the wall, China, draining the swamp—the digital team would recommend a local issue that pertained directly to the people who were coming to hear him.
Even later, when our video production was much more sophisticated—and Brad’s budget was greatly expanded—we were getting much more than our money’s worth online. We’d make internet ads for five grand and get six million views. We could get a whole state’s voting population to watch a video for twenty-five grand. During the debates, Jared’s assistant, Avi Berkowitz, a Harvard Law grad ran what we called Trump Tower Live, a live-feed Facebook talk show that we posted pre- and postdebate. The show was a hit. In the days leading up to the election, we called it Facebook Live, which made Boris Epshteyn, the campaign adviser, an internet star and made Kellyanne’s media profile even more substantial than it already was. The whole business cost us practically nothing. Of course, we had the product that people wanted to see—the one who made them want to dance.
Though Jared and Brad’s partnership began back in November 2015, the digital operation didn’t start kicking ass until after the convention. That’s when the RNC let us in on a little secret, one they’d been keeping for a while.
Donald Trump, emerging as the clear favorite in a field of sixteen candidates, had a good digital following and a killer Facebook strategy. But if he was going to win, he would need to reach voters of all kinds, and in all places. Luckily, the RNC had spent years working on it.
Not that it had been easy. When Reince Priebus took command of the Republican National Committee in 2011, the organization was in shambles. Its leaders had been focused for years on outdated and expensive forms of campaign messaging like old-fashioned direct mail and television ad campaigns. They knew little about their voters and couldn’t collect the donations that were supposed to keep the organization running. Even through the beginning of Reince’s tenure, the RNC survived on table scraps from big donors. At the end of the year, after these individuals had given to the senatorial and congressional committees, and to their political action committees and specific congressional campaigns, maybe they would throw the RNC a few thousand bucks. Back then, the RNC, like the party it represented, was reeling.
This new influx of money into politics, in the form of new organizations called super PACs, could exist only after Citizens United won its landmark case before the Supreme Court. Super PACs could take in as much money as they wanted, spend it on whatever political activity they wanted, put up as many ads on television as they could buy in support of whatever candidate they felt like endorsing. It was a kind of freedom that some had never known. For organizations like the RNC, which had become bloated and ineffective, the decision could have been a death knell.
If he wanted the RNC to survive, Reince was going to have to figure out what it could do that nobody else could. The answer, he realized, was collect data. According to the laws of campaign finance, the RNC is allowed to collect data on voters, store it, and then share that data with individual campaigns. No other organization can. Considering all the money that’s now allowed in politics, it’s one of the most important things—along with a solid ground game and infrastructure—that make the RNC incredibly useful. Reince redefined the mission. Under his watch, the RNC would build the most comprehensive voter file that the country had ever seen, and it would fold it all into a complex digital operation. He’d coordinate the ground game—that’s people like door knockers and volunteers in small communities—and work to locate voters who hadn’t been engaged in the past few elections. When it came time to name the new digital initiative, which began around 2014, Reince and his team settled on Para Bellum Labs—para bellum meaning “prepare for war” in Latin.
So when the 2016 election cycle came, the RNC was ready. All it needed was an army. Whatever campaign emerged from the sixteen-person field of candidates was going to have the entire infrastructure of the RNC at its fingertips. All it would need to do was flip the switch. On the book tour for her lament What Happened, Hillary Clinton said the Democratic National Committee’s digital operation was bankrupt and inept. “It was on the verge of insolvency. Its data was mediocre to poor, nonexistent, wrong.” Conversely, of ours she couldn’t have been more complimentary, calling it the foundation of our ultimately successful campaign.
“So Trump becomes the nominee and he is basically handed this tried-and-true, effective foundation,” she said.
Though the apparatus the RNC assembled was state-of-the-art, their ability to analyze their data would prove to be something less.
Many within the RNC were surprised that Donald Trump turned out to be their candidate. Even after he became the Republican nominee, some establishment Republicans were putting pressure on the rest of their party to disavow him. Many hoped in private that he would fail.
Part of the reason for the animus was because of a common misconception. When Steve Bannon came aboard, fresh out of the dissident world of Breitbart, some in the party believed that the purpose of the Trump campaign was to blow up the RNC and reestablish it into a Tea Party–like conservative Right. When the campaign hired Cambridge Analytica, the controversial data mining company partly owned by the Mercers and on whose board Steve Bannon sat, that mistrust only deepened. But Dave helped smooth the divide. He served as the national committeeman from Maryland, one of the 168 members of the RNC, and interfaced with the RNC daily. And by late August and early September 2016, Reince and the RNC wanted to elect Trump as president of the United States.
Enter Katie Walsh. Katie had joined the RNC in 2013, just as the Para Bellum system was being implemented, and she knew how to work it. She became the director of all finances for the organization. In 2014, using the newly designed digital tools, the RNC broke the record for the amount of money that it had raised in a single year—about $200 million. When it came time to meld this operation with that of the Republican nominee for president in 2016, she became the conduit between the RNC’s and the Trump campaign’s digital operations. She would correspond remotely with Brad and his team in Texas, then spend three or four days a week at Trump Tower in New York. During meetings, she was the voice of the RNC and made sure that nobody on our campaign ever felt that the Republican party wasn’t behind us one hundred percent.
As the GOP nominee, Mr. Trump relied on the RNC for voter data, ground game, dedicated walkers in major cities—things we hadn’t been able to afford. Luckily, the RNC had been building it all for us. All we had to do was figure out how to dovetail what we had—namely, Donald Trump and his legion of loyal supporters, “the Army of Trump”—with the infrastructure that the RNC had spent years building. It was “plug and play.”
So we had Brad—who, just like Jared and Corey, has always been great about admitting what he doesn’t know and then learning it quickly—sit for hours with Katie. They’d go through the technology that the RNC had built, take it apart, and then put it back together in a form that we could use. Together they figured out how to mobilize an entire ground game.
Maybe Dave said it best. During the postelection conference at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, a symposium for the campaign managers and senior staff, Hillary’s team began boasting about its digital campaign and director. “I hate to break it to you, guys,” Dave said. “But Brad and Jared ran the best digital campaign in the history of American politics.”
In the last months of the campaign, the data team in Texas had over a hundred people, including data scientists, Web designers, graphic artists, programmers, copywriters, network engineers, “gun-toting elderly call-center volunteers” (as a Bloomberg article called them), and others working for us in the “nerve center” of his San Antonio office. Brad also had help from big tech and social media companies such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter. He figured that since the campaign was spending so much money with these firms—about $50 million each—the least they could do was send someone over to give the campaign a hand setting up and teaching them the platforms. So they did. Whenever the team needed help with Facebook, they would call—who else?—Facebook, and the company would give him all the help he needed.
The logic was simple, and the companies were happy to comply. But it was an idea that Hillary’s campaign hadn’t thought of, or if they had thought of it, had decided not to implement to the extent our campaign would.
As the digital budget increased, not everybody was confident of the bang it provided for the buck—at least not right away. But winning had a way of making the boss just fine with the way his money was being spent—$100 million by Election Day. Facebook would become our biggest fund-raising tool, bringing in some $250 million in contributions. The base and the supporters would vote with their credit card every day. Ten bucks here, five dollars there. If they liked what they heard or saw, they might give you twenty bucks. For each dollar we spent on ads, we were making around $1.70 back. Most campaigns spend a dollar and make only 70 cents. But our profit was because of Mr. Trump more than anything else. The cash would go up when the candidate did something that captured the public’s imagination, such as the time he visited the Mexican president. And the money would predict the polls, which spiked after the Mexican visit. Conversely, if something broke bad, like the Access Hollywood tape, the cash flow would dry up, and three days later the polls would take a hit. When all was said and done, everything was Trump driven. And real-time data gave us a leading edge.
By mid-September, with the digital operation in full gear, the boss focused like a laser on Hillary, and, with the Trump road show in overdrive, the polls had us pulling even. In a little over a month, we made up ten points. We also knew from our data research that there were millions of voters who hadn’t yet made up their minds, many of them living in battleground states.