Double Down: Game Change 2012 (21 page)

But there was no denying that Trump’s political ledger was filled with items that any candidate would have killed for. He was at or near the top of the polls, both nationally and in the early states. He was filthy rich, with a net worth estimated by
Forbes
to be as high as $3 billion. He had two network television programs watched by millions every week, and while he would have to abandon them if he ran, he had unfettered access to the news media. (The network morning shows let Trump come on by phone, which was unheard of.) His speeches lured sell-out crowds with little promotion. Politicians of all stripes paid him homage. He was buddies with the Clintons, pals with Chris Christie, chummy with many others—not just because they wanted his money but because Trump was a hoot to hang with.

One way of seeing all of this was as a symptom of postmillennial decay, the degradation of public discourse, and the encroachment of celebrity worship into the arena of national affairs. Another way of looking at it was as an indication of the GOP’s state of disarray. Then there was the way Trump perceived the thing: as a manifestation of his magnificence—and a prime opportunity.

Trump had vaguely considered running for president under the Reform Party banner in 2000. This time, his first apparent stirrings of interest came in early October 2010, when news broke about a mysterious telephone poll in New Hampshire that included thirty questions measuring his viability. Trump insisted he wasn’t behind the survey, but two days later on Fox News he crowed, “I hear that the results are amazing . . . For the first time in my life, I’m actually thinking about it.”

Four months later, Trump made his maiden appearance at CPAC. After telling the packed room he would decide by June whether he was running, Trump said America was becoming “the laughingstock of the world.” Barely mentioning Obama, he spent much of his speech thundering about the need to get tough with China, India, and OPEC. (Also with Somali pirates: “Give me one good admiral and a couple of good ships, we’d blast them out of the water,” Trump boomed.) The audience went wild.

Trump returned to New York luxuriating in his triumph, boasting about the size of the crowd and the enthusiasm of the response. Almost immediately, his numbers began to soar. A
Newsweek/
Daily Beast poll in February showed him neck and neck with Obama. An NBC News/
Wall Street Journal
survey that month gave him higher favorable ratings than Romney, Pawlenty, or Boehner.

To Trump, it only seemed right and proper. He was one of the great entrepreneurs of the age, with properties that spanned the globe.
(The greatest properties!
Trump thought.
I’m building things in Scotland that are unbelievable.)
Everyone wanted to hear what he had to say.
(I’m the highest-paid speaker in the world for success speeches!)
The fact that he wasn’t a professional politician was the key to his appeal; his bracing stick-it-to-’em rhetoric was what drew voters to him.
It’s not because they love me,
he thought.
They see the world as ripping us off, and they think: Trump is gonna stop it.

They didn’t think that about Romney, in Trump’s opinion. He had never met the governor, best as he recalled, but his impressions from afar were unfavorable. He compared Romney to a Broadway play that opens to lackluster reviews: cursed before the curtain goes up. Trump was publicly sniffy about Romney as a capitalist, denigrating him as a “small-business guy,” and privately disdainful of Bain. “They’d buy a company and fire everyone,” he told his associates.

Trump’s view of Obama had a more sinister hue, of course. Even beyond the birther stuff, he considered the president a failure and a fraud, horrible at governing and overrated as a campaigner. Trump believed it was luck and Bush fatigue that had allowed Obama to vanquish Hillary and McCain in 2008, and he dissed the president’s oratorical skills. (
He’s not bad—but great? No.)
He was convinced that Obama’s memoir
Dreams from My Father
was actually written by Bill Ayers, the former Weather Underground member
who was a source of controversy in the last campaign. And Trump was itching to probe Obama’s academic history.
(Harvard Law Review? Bullshit! Nobody’s ever seen his grades!)
But first Trump wanted to see his birth certificate.

Trump initially fastened on to birtherism in an interview on
Good Morning America
in March. The subsequent criticism came fast and fierce, and not only from liberals. “His full embrace of the birther issue means he’s off there in the nutty right,” Rove said on Fox News. “The guy is smarter than this . . . Making that the centerpiece of his campaign means that he is now, you know, a joke candidate.”

Having written a $100,000 check to Crossroads in 2010, Trump was ripshit with Rove.
He’s a bully, just like Rosie O’Donnell,
the Donald thought. And Rove was also wrong, Trump asserted. Birtherism was just a part of his campaign; the press refused to pay attention to his other issues. But Trump also privately admitted that birtherism was a bonanza for him. The more he talked about Obama’s genealogy, the better he polled—and the higher the ratings of
Celebrity Apprentice
climbed. Trump’s office was inundated with letters from around the country imploring him to enter the race.

By the time Trump’s Sikorsky helicopter was in descent into Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on April 27, he was running a strong second in the state, behind Romney. Just before touching down, the voice of Trump’s adviser Michael Cohen cut through the roar of the chopper’s engines, informing him that Obama was about to release his long-form birth certificate. (
Or another forgery,
thought Trump.) Stepping into an airplane hangar and facing a mob of reporters as the theory he had propounded was being ripped to shreds by Obama in real time, Trump might have been abashed. Instead, he basked in the attention. “I know what I think,” Trump said later that day. “He only did it because of Trump!”

Amid talk from his camp that he would now be free to focus on other matters, Trump flew to Las Vegas. In a speech to an adoring throng at the Treasure Island Hotel, Trump addressed Iraq: “We build a school, we build a road, they blow up the school. We build another school, we build another road, they blow them up, we build again—and in the meantime we can’t get a fucking school in Brooklyn!” And OPEC: “We have nobody in Washington that sits back and says, ‘You’re not going to raise that fucking price!’”
And the Chinese: “Listen, you motherfuckers, we’re going to tax you 25 percent!”

The string of f-bombs made headlines and brought censure. Trump was only mildly chastened.
They’re not even bad words—they’re “emphasis words,”
he thought.
But would I do it again? No. I went to the Wharton School of Finance. I’m a very smart guy.

Trump hopped back in his jet and made a beeline to D.C. for the White House Correspondents’ dinner. Once again, he was swarmed—by the press, paparazzi, elected officials.
(It’s the Academy Awards of politics, and I’m the hottest one in the room!)
Once again, he was spanked by Obama. And once again, in spite of the smoke that everyone near him saw emanating from his ears, Trump professed to be pleased as punch. “It was the greatest!” he told Cohen over the phone. “To have the president of the United States spend that amount of time talking about
me—
I loved it!”

All good things must come to an end, however, even for Trump. The reality hovering over his deliberations from the get-go was the future of the
Apprentice
franchise, which had to be resolved before May 16, when NBC would unveil its fall lineup at an event in New York for advertisers. Trump was under heavy pressure from his network bosses to close down the suspense.

Trump helicoptered to New Hampshire for a Nashua Chamber of Commerce lunch on May 11, then came back and conferred with his wife, Melania.
I like New Hampshire, New Hampshire likes me, I work well in New Hampshire,
Trump thought.
I like Iowa, South Carolina, and Nevada.
But he would be giving up a lot to run, especially financially.
(They pay me a fortune, and for what? It should be illegal.)
He was negotiating for a hundred acres in Miami, on which he planned to build a resort. He’d have to give that up, too. And a self-funded campaign would require a chunk of cheddar.
Rather than making a lot of money,
he thought,
I’d be spending a lot of money.

On May 13, the same Friday that Huckabee put out word that he would announce his decision, Trump informed the NBC honchos he was choosing prime time over the pursuit of the presidency. It was a 50-50 call, Trump told his associates, and even after assuring the network he was staying, he had second thoughts—when he turned on the TV that Sunday morning and
watched
Meet the Press.
The show’s host, David Gregory, was discussing a new poll that put Trump in second place among Republicans nationally. The only person ahead of him was Huckabee, who had taken himself off the table the night before. Which made Trump the bona fide front-runner.

Am I the only guy in history at number one in the polls who got out?
Trump asked himself.
Am I fucking crazy?
Then he thought again about what he’d be sacrificing to run, and about something that Melania once told him: he was already the biggest star in the world, bigger even than Tom Cruise.

Why would I do this?
the Donald thought.
I already have an amazing life.

•   •   •

M
ITCH DANIELS’S LIFE RESEMBLED
Trump’s as much as a plumber’s resembled a porn star’s. The Indiana governor had been married twice, but to the same woman, and his idea of decadent indulgence was a fried bologna sandwich. He stood five foot seven and wore a comb-over as reticent as Trump’s hairstyle was rococo. He was averse to bluster, allergic to blarney, and drolly self-effacing. In a speech that spring, Daniels noted “all this favorable press I’ve been getting” about the possibility of his running. “Just listen to a quick sample: ‘small,’ ‘stiff,’ ‘short,’ ‘pale,’ ‘unimposing,’ ‘unassuming,’ ‘uninspiring,’ ‘understated,’ ‘uncharismatic,’ ‘accountant-like,’ ‘non-telegenic,’ ‘boring,’ ‘balding,’ ‘blunt,’ ‘nerdy,’ ‘wooden,’ ‘wonky,’ ‘puny,’ and ‘pint-sized.’ Really, it all points to one inescapable conclusion: it’s destiny!”

The venue for that speech was the annual white-tie Gridiron Dinner in Washington, one of the Beltway upper echelon’s haughtiest and hottest tickets. And Daniels’s selection as the Republican toaster spoke volumes about his status on the national stage in early 2011. Far from being put off by his lack of magnetism, the GOP’s potentates were coalescing around him, on the theory that Daniels would present the ideal contrast with the incumbent: he was the un-Obama.

The establishment attraction to Daniels was easy to understand. He had a gold-plated insider’s résumé: staffer to Indiana senator Richard Lugar, Barbour’s predecessor as Reagan’s political director, top executive at the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly, head of OMB under Bush 43. He won the Indiana governorship narrowly in 2004 and by eighteen points in 2008, even as Obama became the first Democratic presidential candidate to carry
the state since 1964. Daniels was a fiscal hawk and institutional reformer whose mixture of tough love and the common touch—he rambled around in an Indiana-made RV or on a Harley—earned him approval ratings north of 60 percent, even at the nadir of the recession.

Daniels’s experiences as a candidate in the Hoosier State informed his dim view of Romney, whom he saw as the antithesis of authentic, a pre-programmed automaton. Former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice once told Daniels that when Mitt visited Stanford, where she had returned after her time in government, she watched astonished as he emitted a canned stump speech to a sophisticated, techie crowd—then repeated the faux pas at a small private dinner she hosted for him afterwards.

Even more problematic for Daniels was Romney’s plutocratic demeanor.
If you wear the Republican uniform,
Daniels thought,
you have a stereotype stuck on you. You don’t whine about it. You do something about it. You prove it isn’t true—you prove that you’re for the policies you’re for because they’re good for poor people, good for people on the way up.
And Daniels had done just that, winning 20 percent of the black vote and a majority of the youth vote in 2008. But when he looked at Romney, all he could think was
He’s never going to get there.

Daniels spent much of 2010 trying to recruit a Romney alternative. Besides making runs at Jeb and Haley, he pressed hard on two others: Fred Smith, the founder, chairman, and CEO of FedEx, and former Senate majority leader Bill Frist. But neither took the bait.

At the same time, a handful of Daniels’s political and business cronies inspirited him to dangle his own toes in the water. Daniels believed the ballooning debt under Obama posed an existential threat to the country, and his friends maintained that he was the best person to defuse it. He had shrunk the government in Indiana, turning an inherited $200 million deficit into a $1.3 billion surplus, and his D.C. experience taught him where the bodies were buried in the federal budget. “Here’s the thing,” one of his buddies said. “Do you have any doubt you are competent to be president?”

Daniels had never aspired to occupy the Oval Office. “When I look in the mirror,” he often said, “I don’t see a president.” But posing the question in terms of competence made him think differently. I don’t know if anybody is ever really ready for that job, Daniels said, but I’m as ready as anybody.

Quietly, Daniels began holding private dinners in Indianapolis for donors, bundlers, and policy mavens while publicly floating a number of trial balloons that looked more like Hindenburgs. In a
Weekly Standard
profile, Daniels declared the need “to call a truce” on volatile social issues such as abortion and gay marriage. To
Newsweek,
he said that tax increases might be necessary to tame the deficit. In a speech in October, he talked favorably about a European-style value-added tax and tariffs on imported oil. Daniels anticipated that the reaction to these statements on the right might blow up the whole Mitch-for-president thing. But they detonated with only a dull pop—and even that sound was squelched by hosannas from other quarters.