Here's the Deal, page 1
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To the four chambers of my heart: Georgie, Claudia, Charlotte, and Vanessa
Introduction
Born to Run It
By every imaginable metric, I should have been a Democrat.
And a liberal. A feminist. Probably a man-hater, too.
I was raised in a house of all adult women. Four Italian Catholic women. In a small town in southern New Jersey between Philadelphia and Atlantic City. The only male in our all-female household was Pudgy the dog, and he stayed outside. (The inside dog, Beauty, was a girl.) This was the golden age of the women’s liberation movement. Roe v. Wade. No-fault divorce. My father left us when I was three with no child support and no alimony. I was half Irish, half Italian. The men in my life—uncles, cousins, family friends—were union members.
All arrows pointed to me growing up at a time and in a way that should have had me, on January 20, 2017, my fiftieth birthday, ironing my pink pussy hat, printing my protest signs, and joining the “Women’s March” in Washington, D.C. Instead, I wore a red hat and stood in front of the U.S. Capitol, steps away from President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence as they were sworn into office, and then began my new job in the West Wing as counselor to the president. I should have been running Hillary Clinton’s campaign or at least helping “the nation’s first female president” find her way into the same White House Madonna said she “thought about blowing up” and where I now worked.
By then, I’d spent a quarter century as a fully recovered attorney, plying my trade as a pollster, a political strategist, and a TV talking head. I know all the reasons why some people become Republicans and other people become Democrats and a growing number join no party at all. I was a child of 1970s New Jersey, raised in a hardworking blue-collar area by a single mom whose friend sent her copies of Ms. magazine. Do I sound like a future Republican to you?
Yet there I’d been months earlier, on August 12, 2016, on the glittering twenty-sixth floor of Trump Tower in midtown Manhattan, staring across Donald Trump’s battleship of a desk, on the verge of going to a place no woman had ever gone before. And I’d be going there with the highest-profile real estate developer, reality TV star, and business leader in America, whose immediate goal was stopping Hillary Clinton from becoming America’s first female president while he became the nation’s first president with no prior military or political experience. I had earned my way in, but it was the last place I imagined I could be.
I was already working on Trump’s 2016 campaign as one of the five pollsters and a senior advisor to a thoroughly uninterested Paul Manafort. He literally fell asleep during my PowerPoint on how to close the gender gap with Hillary. (He must have still been on Ukraine time.) But the morning of the twelfth, I got a call from Manafort’s deputy, Rick Gates, saying, “Mr. Trump is asking for you.”
The candidate was recording videos for a few events he could not attend in person. The taping wasn’t going so well. When I breezed in, there were a dozen anxious-looking people in the office and one hair-and-makeup artist who had just been told (by Trump) not to go near him. I could tell immediately he was in a fit of pique.
“Look at that,” he said to me, motioning toward a video monitor. “Why am I pink? Who hired you people? Kellyanne, tell them I look like a pink, three-year-old baby.”
Oh-kay, I thought to myself. I’ve had babies. I’ve had three-year-olds. They were sorta pink. Let me see what we can do about this. When the taping finally wrapped, Trump announced: “I want everybody out of here except Kellyanne.”
“Are you coming on the plane to Pennsylvania?” he demanded as soon as the room cleared out.
“No, sir, I…”
“Why not? I thought you said you were.”
“It’s a smaller plane, I think. It’s okay. I’ll come next time.”
“It’s not okay,” he corrected me. “Why do they keep putting the same people on the plane?”
“I don’t know how that works,” I answered. “I went on the road yesterday with Governor Pence. North Carolina looks like Trump country.”
I took advantage of the extended pause. “But what’s really going on?” I asked. Something had to be troubling him beyond the camera lighting and the airplane seating chart.
He leaned back in his huge leather chair and folded his arms. “Everybody tells me I’m a better candidate than she is.”
I nodded and smiled. “That is empirically true.”
“But she’s got the better people.”
“She’s got many more people,” I said. “She has a person whose only job is Lackawanna County.”
One arched eyebrow.
“We have, like, one person in charge of Pennsylvania and three other states,” I said. “So, yes, it is different.”
That’s when he got to what was really on his mind.
“Do you actually think we can do this?” he asked me, which I took to mean beat Hillary on November 8, less than three months away.
I didn’t sugarcoat it.
“Yes, you can win, Mr. Trump—but right now we’re losing. You’ve come this far. It’s been remarkable. Look, she’s too much Hillary and not enough Clinton. Bill was the charmer with the everyman appeal. People are skeptical of her. She rubs people the wrong way. She is seen as direct, but curt and not honest. Right now, sir, the entire conversation and election are about you.”
“I know.” He cracked a faint smile. “I get the best press coverage.”
“You get the most press coverage,” I retorted. “For you to win, the election needs to be about her, or at least more about her. The ballot won’t say ‘TRUMP’ or ‘NOT TRUMP.’ People will have to actually suppress how they feel about her to vote for her.”
“Go on.”
“The polls are rough right now. And the window is closing. But, of course, you can win. I’ve been talking about the ‘undercover, hidden Trump voter’ for weeks now and met international ridicule. Those voters are real, and they will be there for you. The question is, are there enough of them? We also need to convince the fence-sitters, the crossover voters, and the conscientious objectors. They call themselves Independents not because they are not focused on politics but because they are. They don’t like Washington, the career politicians, the system. They’re on the outside, just like you.”
I still had the floor.
I kept going, “I don’t know a billion things about a billion things, sir, but I know consumers. I know voters. And I know polls.” Then I dished up a quick version of the presentation Manafort had dozed through and others in campaigns past had ignored. “Look,” I said, “women who are running for office usually have three distinct advantages, and Hillary can’t claim any of them.”
Trump always liked reviewing Hillary’s deficits. He perked up at the prospect of hearing some new ones. “Women candidates are typically seen as fresh and new. There’s a reason you’ve never heard of the ‘Old Girls Network.’ There isn’t one. A couple of years ago, Joni Ernst cleared the primary threshold of fifty percent and then became U.S. senator. Iowa had literally never sent a woman to Washington before. The second advantage is that women are seen as less corruptible, more ethical, beyond reproach. Fairly or unfairly, often after a man is caught behaving badly in office, people immediately say, ‘We need a woman. We need a woman.’ ”
Trump smiled at that, and I pressed on.
“Nobody sees Hillary as fresh and new,” I said. “Nobody sees her as ethical and beyond reproach. In both cases, it’s the opposite.” And then there was the third advantage that Hillary lacked. “Women candidates are often viewed as peacemakers, earnest negotiators, consensus builders, as generally interested in how they can hammer out a deal with the other side. Who sees Hillary Clinton that way?”
“Nobody,” Trump agreed.
As I laid all this out, I could tell I still had his attention, which was saying something. “Hillary’s blue wall is real,” I said finally. “But if we can break through it, you will win.”
Then came the surprise question, the one I wasn’t remotely expecting when I’d walked in the door. The world-famous dealmaker wanted to make one with me.
“You can do that?” he asked me.
“I can do that.”
“Do you want to run this thing?”
“What do you mean, ‘run this thing’?”
“The campaign.”
“The campaign?”
He was serious. That made me nervous, so I just kept talking. “We need to focus on the states Obama-Biden carried twice with more than fifty percent and where Hillary is now polling below fifty and a Republican governor and/or senator was elected during the Obama years. We know people aren’t allergic to Republican leaders in those states.”
It wasn’t the first time I had made that pitch, but it was the first time Trump had heard it, uninterrupted, and with less than one hundred days to go. He liked what he heard. Jared and Ivanka were on a cruise on the Danube. Don Jr. was hunting out west. This was a Friday, so Manafort’s weekend in the Hamptons had begun a few days earlier.
Donald Trump wa
I wanted us both to succeed. So getting to yes required a few additional conditions that I wasn’t even certain I could demand without sounding disrespectful or dissuaded. There was no use doing this if we couldn’t do it right. “I’ll need direct access to you at all times,” I said. “Given the limited time before Election Day, we’ll need one other new person in the C-suite. And I’ll need the latitude to look at data more granularly, more situationally. Forget the national polls about the fiction of electability, which portends and pretends who can and can’t win. The Electoral College is how you do or don’t win.”
Trump agreed to all of it. We had a deal.
“Who do I need to tell, sir? Who else needs to meet with me?”
Trump looked to either side and looked puzzled. “You talk to me. Just me.”
If you’re going to make history, who needs hierarchy?
The political warrior in me was elated. I’d just been handed the opportunity of a lifetime. I had earned it but never thought I’d achieve it. A man who’d been offered that job would have walked out of presidential nominee Donald Trump’s office and immediately leaked the news to a favored reporter or commanded an impromptu press conference in the Trump Tower lobby. “I’m the new campaign manager,” he’d have announced to the clicking cameras and klieg lights, exuding confidence through his jutted jaw and furrowed brow. “Everything’s different now. We’re going to win this thing.” But I didn’t do that. The political warrior was one thing, but I was also that girl from South Jersey, raised in a household of loving yet self-denying women, who had a hard time accepting yes for an answer. I had triumphed over some men but let other men trample all over me.
“You know what?” I said to Donald Trump. “We’ll talk about it again tomorrow after you get back from Pennsylvania. See if you’ve changed your mind.” I handed the legend Donald Trump, also my party’s presidential nominee, a chance to rethink his offer and maybe even renege. What man would do that?
“Okay, honey,” he said as I reached for the office door. “Leave it open, Kel,” he added, a harbinger of things to come. “This is going to be great.”
I was numb as I walked down the hallway toward the elevator, nodding goodbye to his trusted assistants Jessica and Rhona. Instead of hitting 14, where my office was, or lobby, where the press were, I reflexively hit 24 and changed elevators on the residence side. Would he tweet it? Had people overheard us? Would I blurt it out to the thirsty press corps corralled in the main lobby waiting for scoops and sound bites? Instead, I went down to the residence lobby and ran smack into Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee. “Hey, Kellyanne, are you coming with us to Altoona?”
“No,” I replied, avoiding eye contact and heading toward the side exit on 56th Street.
“So whadaya think? Can he really do this? It’s too late—right?—the polls, the tweets.”
“Yes, of course he can win this,” I said. “I smell change in the air. Things are looking up. He’s making some moves.” I was as cryptic as Reince was frantic.
The only person I told that day about Trump’s offer was my husband, George. “You’re doing this,” he said to me without a whiff of equivocation and with a tear in his eye. “This is your shot. I’ve listened to all these people deny you, dismiss you, and sell you short for all these years. They never took your advice, and maybe he will. You’re going to do this.”
I nodded, knowing George’s support was genuine and unconditional.
“Kellyanne,” George said, “Trump can actually win with you.”
George was certainly right about the first part. I’d been cut down and cut off and cut out by some of the most famous and infamous men in business and politics. George had been around for plenty of it. He had little regard for the Republican consultancy that rewarded failure, operated like a walking RICO violation, and, lately, had never seen Trump and his appeal to a broad coalition of voters coming.
And so began the wildest adventure of my life, personally and professionally. I would certainly be changed by it, and so would America. I had talked my way into being Donald Trump’s campaign manager. Now we’d see if I could talk him all the way into the White House. But first I had to talk myself into believing I was worthy of the historic moment.
* * *
I LIKE TO talk. Then again, that’s not exactly breaking news.
I have spoken millions of words in public. On TV. In speeches. At rally podiums in front of roaring crowds. Before more modest but no less captive audiences in converted barns, in fancy living rooms, in hotel ballrooms, in wood-paneled boardrooms, on rooftops, and on hilltops. But I also like to listen. That’s what good pollsters (and moms) do. We listen. Carefully.
Perhaps I’ve never had more to say than I do right now. When someone told me that a book like this one is usually around one hundred thousand words, my reaction was perfectly predictable: “Is that all? I’ve crammed that many into a single TV appearance.”
Talking is what I love to do. It’s also how I make things happen. It’s a big part of who I am. I chat up strangers and find common bonds. I reconnect with old friends and reveal something new. The world is my focus group. I want to listen. And laugh. And learn.
Put it like this: I like to talk almost as much as my husband likes to tweet. On Twitter. About my boss, the president. George loved how I talked about Donald Trump, until he decided one day he couldn’t stand it and chose to throw our lives into an uproar. Opposites may attract, but similars endure. I live my life mostly offline. George spends a major part of his day online. Then and now. That may be our greatest divide… and America’s.
I’ve never had much of a filter between my brain and my lips. No notes, no net: That’s been my MO all along. Announcing exactly how and where and among whom Donald Trump was going to win the presidency. Cheerfully appearing on five Sunday shows. Delivering unscripted speeches that make people ask, “Is she using a teleprompter? Is someone in her ear?” No, that is not the way I do it. But, yes, living on a limb like that also has its perils. When the whole world is listening and you’re out there all alone—too little research, too little sleep—things don’t always come out artfully or as intended. I made my bones in traditional media, live television, and ten-minute uninterrupted live radio, which is much more difficult than sitting around, writing, curating, editing, and tweaking the perfect tweet.
Alternative facts… remember those?
The jackals sitting on their asses lying in wait to pounce had for years played a one-way parlor game of parsing a phrase here or there from the millions of words I’ve spoken, hoping to denigrate and castigate me. No matter. They are the ones who often have thick skulls and thin skin (and marbles in their mouths when they speak). These elites were never my audience, anyway. The people are. I was speaking to them and sometimes for them. Rather than lash out and clap back at every mean post or miserable person, I decided to take the high road and the long view. That didn’t happen quickly and that hasn’t come easily, but it has kept me safe and sane, improved my outlook, and allowed me to retain joy on the journey of life.
I’ve been a little quiet lately, quieter than I usually am. I even took a long break from television. I jumped off while so many others were begging to get on. When I announced on Sunday night, August 23, 2020, that I was leaving the Trump administration as senior counselor to the president—one of Donald Trump’s longest-serving senior aides—Election Day was still a few months away. I had decided to spend some much-needed time with my four growing children—ages ten, eleven, fifteen, and fifteen—and disconnect from Washington for a while. I’d given at the office. It was time to do more giving at home.
I went off the grid just as I’d promised to. George not so much, though he had vowed to give his poison Trump obsession a much-needed breather. I held my tongue, stayed out of the media, drove lots of carpools, and started nagging my children face-to-face again.
That time has been important, for all of us. But you knew I couldn’t sit quietly forever. This book is called Here’s the Deal for a reason. Rest assured, this is not one of those all-MAGA-all-the-time titles, packed with obsequious fawning, written by someone who lacked my daily proximity to or first-person perspective on President Donald Trump. This is also not another insufferable “tell-all” from an author spinning through a cycle of incredulity who has decided to place profit over principle, fame over friendship, attitude over gratitude.
