Here's the Deal, page 50
Trump’s judicial record bore potentially powerful political currency. In 2016, 21 percent of voters who supported Trump said in one postelection poll that “judges” was a top issue. Four years later, Trump wasn’t just promising on the judiciary. He was delivering. In his four years as president, Trump would preside over the confirmation of 230 federal judges, including 3 to the U.S. Supreme Court and 54 to the U.S. circuit courts. He often marveled in private about the number of vacancies he inherited from Obama: 128.
Amy Coney Barrett was the latest example, and a high-profile one at that, of Trump’s fulfilled promise to place men and women on the federal judiciary who would treat the Constitution not as a paper towel but as the law of the land, one of the most important ways a president can safeguard our God-given rights and man-made freedoms. The campaign cited the success but never truly capitalized on it.
Following that ceremony and the announcement by the president and First Lady that they had tested positive for COVID, I went on Friday to get tested. I had tested negative every morning before debate prep and the Barrett ceremony. As I was sitting in the doctor’s office, I also got an email from another medical firm, saying that my son and I had tested negative from a test we’d taken days earlier to attend an NFL game. Within the hour, I got a call from the doctor’s office I had just left, telling me I had tested positive. I got into my van alone and drove fourteen miles, more than ninety minutes in traffic from New Jersey to NYU Langone Health on the East Side of Manhattan to get a more accurate test. That test confirmed I was positive. Claudia tested positive two days later, and we quarantined for twelve days together, which I affectionately referred to as bonding. We stayed together in a guest bedroom on the lower level of our house, with friends leaving food at the side door for us. George, Georgie, and the corgis had fled to D.C. When my son realized he couldn’t taste his spicy chicken wings, we knew instantly that he, too, had been infected. Thankfully, Charlotte and Vanessa did not get the virus and stayed with godparents in Philadelphia until it was safe to reunite. As a mother, I was more concerned for my children than for myself and grateful that we all recovered in two weeks’ time.
I rejected the therapeutics offered to Claudia and me, given how rare they were then and how healthy she and I were pre-COVID, and kept close tabs on two other COVID-inflicted men about whom I cared deeply. I watched as the president was sent to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. I was pleased to see him walk to Marine One on his own, but I was also worried for him. I checked in daily with Chris Christie, who was hospitalized in New Jersey, and forced him to FaceTime me so I could see for myself how he was. I was grateful to see he was recovering steadily. I checked in with the president, who said he felt fine and was getting out of there soon. He asked how I was recovering and joked to me, “Well, you know, they say if you have zero percent body fat, you’ll be fine.” It was great to hear the president sound like himself but very strange to see Meadows spending the night at Walter Reed. I long ago realized he wanted to be the president’s BFF or the second most important person in the White House, which meant more important than the duly-elected vice president, but now it seemed like he wanted to be the First Lady. He’s most famous for that weekend in leaking, off the record but on camera, the president’s actual health condition and later writing about it in a book, which the president told me personally he was disappointed in.
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I HAD LEFT the White House but like that famous line from The Godfather, just when I thought I was out, they kept pulling me back in… first for Amy Coney Barrett and then for debate prep. There was also the superstitious president. He had confided in me that he felt he had the “yips.” As a nongolfer, I learned that meant “nervousness that causes a golfer to miss an easy putt.” He felt one way to cure the yips was to bring back the team that had helped him cross the finish line the last time. By reclaiming my chair in debate prep in 2020, I could at least satisfy that superstition.
I had run debate prep in 2016 along with Reince Priebus and Chris Christie. With the first debate set for September 29, I returned to the White House several times in the week leading up to it. Governor Christie, a smart and skilled debater, had been doing informal prep sessions with the president for a few weeks. Now he would play the role of Joe Biden, just as he had played Hillary in 2016. With me as the “moderator” and Stepien next to us, there was plenty of Jersey in the room.
I knew Trump’s strengths on the stage, and the tripwires and quagmires the moderators might set up for him. I was fluent in Trump. Trump was fluid in his answers. Many things were similar to 2016, but many more were different and distinctive. On the positive, Trump was the president, not an aspirant. As a candidate seeking the public’s votes, he was no longer promising what he would do. He had actually done much of it.
On the other side, people had learned how to get under his skin, though the ones who claimed to were not actually the ones who succeeded.
It was essential that he speak to the accomplishments of the past four years, not just try to slam Biden. He should make clear that he shared a nation’s grief rather than express his own about the unexpected year. I had supplied my favorite line of the fall: “Trump has done more in forty-seven months than Joe Biden has done in forty-seven years,” a remark I made first on live TV (Hannity, August 19), and that the president himself would repeat many times to show the contrast between the consummate Washington insider Joe Biden and the president—yet still political outsider—Donald J. Trump. It truly encapsulated the two candidates. Democrats claimed they wanted a person of color or a woman and ended up with… Joe Biden. The progressive, pro-youth, pro-energy, pro-future, pro-inclusion party nominated exactly the opposite, the brightest illustration the Democrats had of someone who had been in office too long, had accomplished too little, and wasn’t given to either eloquence or enthusiasm.
Soon after I arrived, I sat down with Christie, Hope Hicks, Bill Stepien, Jason Miller, Stephen Miller, and the president for our first formal debate session. Our strategy focused on letting Biden talk—which often left him with participles dangling and coherent sentences hanging. And numbers would numb him completely.
The next day, I was back at the White House for another debate prep session with the president just before he would go outside to the White House Rose Garden, where he announced the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice. I tried to focus the session on two things—one defensive and one offensive. The president had done so much for this country on COVID. But for a man who usually loved to brag and take credit, for some reason he ceded the mantle to the governors. When he was being attacked on the issue, he invariably fell back on the China travel ban, a decision his administration’s health experts had resisted and Biden had denounced. It was the right call. But people already knew that. Now he needed to go further. Another principle of Politics 101 is to not tell people what they already know and can see, tell them what they don’t know and can’t see. They love being in the loop and appreciate the transparency and accountability that accompanies that.
I recommended that, once he mentioned the China travel ban, he follow up with six key points with which the public was not as familiar: He had led HHS, FEMA, and the private sector to come up with 100 million N95 masks, 250 million face coverings, 345 million surgical gowns, and nearly 100 million gloves. He procured more than 100,000 ventilators and distributed them to states so no one who needed a ventilator would be without one. He had vaccines and therapeutics being produced at a rapid pace. He used the Defense Production Act more than thirty times to provide $3.2 billion in critical support for essential medical resources. He sent the Army Corps of Engineers to build field hospitals, deployed thousands of National Guardsmen, sent CDC staff into every state, and deployed the USNS Comfort and Mercy. He made available federally provided meals for stuck-at-home schoolchildren who relied upon them. He took more than seven hundred actions to suspend regulations that would have slowed our response. He signed three bills from Congress totaling $3 trillion in relief for Americans. I had assembled and memorized these facts and knew he could place them in his own words, with cadence and potency.
Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. Just like that.
I also urged the president to use the Supreme Court opening to our advantage. Many in the media and on Team Biden thought we would be defensive over the pro-life Amy Coney Barrett. My advice in 2020 was to have President Trump flip that Supreme Court discussion on its head to expose Joe Biden, the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman of three decades earlier. For decades, Supreme Court nominees were noncontroversial. Antonin Scalia was confirmed 98–0, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg confirmed 96–3. But that changed when Biden was the Judiciary chairman thirty years earlier and led what Clarence Thomas called a “high-tech lynching.” In fact, Biden had consistently used his perch as chairman to politicize Supreme Court nominations. By revisiting Biden’s past on the Thomas hearing, the president could also highlight Biden’s sketchy history on race issues, which also included supporting crime and sentencing laws that disproportionately affected people of color, palling around with southern Democrat segregationist senators, and sharing his creepy “Corn Pop” story with a group of African American children. (Corn Pop, Biden said, was the name of a “gangster” he and his “hairy blond legs” fought during his youthful lifeguarding days.) After all, this was the same dude who described Senator Barack Obama thusly: “You got the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”
“Geez, she’s brutal,” the president responded as I was peppering him with examples of this all-but-guaranteed question about race.
I told the president I’d rather he hear it from me in the privacy of the Map Room than on the debate stage for the first time.
“You are going to get a race question or three,” I assured him. “However they ask you, you have to be ready to give the same answer.”
“Mr. President,” I said, playing the debate moderator, “the Bidens have a guest here tonight. Her daughter, Heather Heyer, was killed by one of your supporters who purposefully drove his car into a crowd at Charlottesville. Would you please tell Heather’s mother how you justify her daughter being killed by someone who supported you?”
“Whoa! Are they going to ask that?” the president snapped back.
“They won’t ask the question that rudely, maybe. So let’s get it out here in the family. They may ask about Charlottesville or ‘shithole countries’ or how COVID disproportionately affected African Americans or the Proud Boys. You can be asked seventeen different ways. But whenever it comes, you need to identify it immediately. I know you will talk about the lowest unemployment among African Americans. You can also mention your record on HBCU [historically black colleges and universities] funding, school choice, opportunity zones, breaking the back of the opioid crisis, criminal justice reform, and an economy that lifts everyone. But you should also hit Biden on his troubling record and tumultuous comments about race.”
Debate prep was meant to be tight. Tom Joannou had prepared red and blue cards and posterboard with quick hitters for the president that I detailed in debate prep. But crowd control in the debate prep room was no competition for all the straphangers who wanted to cram in, sit down uninvited, and leak to the press “I was there” or pipe up unhelpfully with lines that sounded like a cable news food fight and not a presidential debate.
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IN THE FIRST debate of 2016, I was the last person to speak to Donald Trump before he took to the stage in front of a worldwide audience of millions, as I’d been at the Commander-in-Chief Forum weeks earlier. I was the busiest guest in the spin room after each event. But now I was like millions of others: watching from my home. There was a sort of peace about it. Two things caught me by surprise. The first was how aggressive Biden and then Trump were almost from the get-go, talking over and about each other with ferocity. Fierce is fine. Passionate is preferred. But the interruptions, accusations, and yelling by both of them did not match the moment. Of course, it allowed the spinmeisters to pin it on Trump even as Biden did his fair share of interrupting. Trump had gone a bit rogue and did not adhere as closely to the debate strategy that we had all agreed upon previously. He had been advised to just let Biden do all the talking, let the man ramble, stumble, and mumble without interruption. Could Biden outlast the ninety-minute clock? Would he win the war of attrition or seem evenly matched in energy with Trump, whose indefatigability was the stuff of legend?
The second surprise was that I didn’t expect Joe Biden to mention me by name.
In one of his shots at the president, Biden said, “And by the way, you know, his own former spokesperson said, ‘You know, riots and chaos and violence help his cause.’ That’s what this is all about.” When Trump asked who said that, Biden, in front of millions of people, said, “Kellyanne Conway.”
“I don’t think she said that,” Trump answered, defending me immediately.
Trump was right. I didn’t. In response to a claim by Pete Buttigieg that the riots were happening “on Donald Trump’s watch,” I noted that the riots were happening in Democrat-run cities that rejected Trump’s help to send in the National Guard. I quoted an anti-Trump restaurateur who was yelling at the looters that they were trying to get Trump reelected. Then I noted that Trump was the one calling for law and order in these cities, not the Democrat mayors and governors, the same point that was being made by the anti-Trump restaurateur whose neighborhood was burned and looted.
The second debate was canceled because Trump was recovering from COVID. But that wasn’t the only reason. Months earlier, the president’s campaign team had demanded more and earlier debates. But now, when it really mattered, the campaign shied away from the second debate because they didn’t like the moderators’ anti-Trump tweets and didn’t want to do the debate virtually. In 2016, Trump had benefited from all three debates to make his case to undecided voters, especially the second one, two days after Access Hollywood. Trump’s strong, unflappable performance helped settle the ground.
In 2020, he needed those debates for similar—and different—reasons. He could have used the second one to highlight his own remarkable recovery from COVID. It presented an excellent opportunity to remind the public of his administration’s work in securing vaccines and therapeutics and show that even people of his age could come back strong from the virus. Sadly, none of that happened. Instead the campaign reverted to the old Bill Clinton playbook: “It’s the economy, stupid!” That is nearly always true. But in the face of a once-in-a-century pandemic, people really were worried about COVID, both as an excuse for lockdowns, closures, mandates but also as a legitimate health concern. Compounding this was the belief by many voters that Biden was a moderate who would use his experience in Washington to unify the Beltway and the country and negotiate good deals for America. There was no punch left in attacking Biden as a progressive. That strategy would have worked against Bernie Sanders or even Elizabeth Warren, but it did not play well against affable, enigmatic Joe Biden, who used COVID as an excuse to bury himself in his basement.
In 2016, Donald Trump’s campaign message was known by all. He repeated it countless times at rallies, during interviews, and in tweets. Trade and manufacturing. Stop illegal immigration. Fairness. America First. Forgotten men and women. Jobs. Lower taxes. Repeal Common Core. Build the wall. Stop drugs and crime. Take on China. Rebuild the military. Take care of our vets and military spouses. At the same time, Hillary was seen as the establishment favorite. In her case, the candidacy represented change, but the candidate did not. An ABC poll showed that 62 percent of Americans said she was not trustworthy. What could possibly follow the “… but I’ll vote for her anyway” that would make any sense?
In 2020, winning became hard, but the message was uncomplicated: Revive the prosperity, opportunity, and security that President Trump had delivered before COVID hit, and emphasize how he met the challenges posed by a once-in-a-century pandemic that no one saw coming, and that was still, as he put it, “the invisible enemy.”
For a man who loves to brag, Trump sure had a lot to say: Border security. Economic prosperity for all Americans. Tax cuts and deregulation. New fair and reciprocal trade deals with Korea, Japan, Mexico, Canada, and China. A strong national defense. Peace abroad. No new wars. Energy independence. Less income inequality. Fewer Americans on welfare or food stamps. More healthcare choices at lower prices. Two hundred and eighty new conservative judges. A rebuilt military. Major investments in our veterans. A strong response to the opioid crisis. Criminal justice reform. Support for school choice and educational freedom. Therapeutics to mitigate and, soon, vaccines to eradicate this pandemic. Soleimani and al-Baghdadi dead. Hostages and detainees returned home to the United States. Record-low unemployment rates for blacks and Hispanics, and a fifty-year low for women. Record-high median household income, including the largest gains for minority groups. Poverty at a record low, including an all-time record low for every race and ethnic group.
It was a long, hot list and a highly impressive one.
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THE SECOND DEBATE, which was really the scheduled third debate, took place on October 22 at Belmont University in Nashville. It went much better than the first one, hewing closer to the original plan. It also helped that in the vice presidential debate, Mike Pence had delivered a master class in how to message the accomplishments of the Trump administration and defend against an ill-prepared, unimpressive Kamala Harris (a harbinger of her awful early tenure as vice president). Pence knew how to brag about Trump and challenge the shopworn sound bites that Harris delivered.
