Emily Jane Fox - Born Trump

At the outset, he said he would announce his decision by Friday. Adding to the pressure, Friday happened to be the deadline for Pence to decide whether or not he would continue with his reelection bid. By Thursday evening, Donald was agitated and uncertain about Pence, chafing at being locked into making a choice under deadline. Jared reminded him that he was choosing a guy who’d make the ticket strongest and bridge the divide within the Republican Party, not a best buddy. Manafort agreed with Jared, adding that he worried Christie wouldn’t be as easy to handle and reminding Donald of Christie’s own presidential ambitions. He couldn’t choose someone who wanted the role for himself. Never mind the fact that very often that is not the case; Donald heard them.

But he was still uneasy. He didn’t know what to do, but his family was pushing him in Pence’s direction. That evening, a terrorist drove a nineteen-ton rental truck onto the sidewalk of the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, France, after the annual Bastille Day fireworks, killing eighty-six people and injuring dozens more. Out of respect for the victims, the campaign initially decided to delay the announcement. But Donald grew restless, and a little before ten o’clock in the morning, he tweeted out his pick: “I am pleased to announce that I have chosen Governor Mike Pence as my Vice Presidential running mate. News conference tomorrow at 11:00 A.M.”

When he talked to Christie, Donald told the governor that Pence just looked like a vice president. I have to take him, he said. He told him that if he won, any other job he wanted, all he’d have to do was ask for it.

LONG BEFORE the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Jared reached out to two speechwriters, Matthew Scully and John McConnell. These guys were the real deal; they worked closely with President George W. Bush in crafting his speeches, including the addresses he gave after the September 11 attacks. Jared wanted them to come up with a bang-up speech for his stepmother-in-law to give onstage at the RNC. Melania was such a reticent campaigner that she hardly ever accompanied her husband on his many campaign stops. She had a young son at home in New York whose life she wanted to keep as normal as possible. She still tried to pick Barron up at school as often as possible, though that grew increasingly difficult as time wore on, given the traffic her Secret Service detail caused at dismissal time. None of this politics stuff had been her idea; she liked their life, and why shouldn’t she? Most of it was guarded within their gilded doors and planes and homes on golf courses either bearing her husband’s name or at which he was the boss. She was a former model, so the attention wasn’t the problem. But she was not a native English speaker, and she saw how the press ripped her husband to shreds every day. No one in their right mind would be happy about throwing themselves to those wolves.

Jared wanted her rare appearance to be a hit. Not only would this boost the campaign, appealing to Americans who might have been turned off by the candidate’s multiple marriages and treatment of women, but also maybe if she knocked it out of the park, she would be more willing to jump into the political fray more often. She polled well, and with Trump going up in the coming months against the first female general election candidate, having a woman on the team whom people liked, who softened and defended her husband, couldn’t hurt. McConnell and Scully agreed. About a month before the convention, they shot her over a draft. A response never came.

Instead, Melania turned to people within her inner circle to rip the draft to shreds. It did not sound like her. She wanted to essentially start fresh. One of the people who helped was Meredith McIver, a former professional ballet dancer and Trump employee who had helped write Donald’s book Think Like a Billionaire . A handful of others had their hands in it as well.

None of them stopped Melania from getting onstage on the Monday night of the convention to deliver an address to 23 million viewers that stole entire phrases and themes from a speech Michelle Obama had given years earlier at a Democratic National Convention.

Immediately the Trump campaign spun into damage control mode. It was nearly impossible to understand how this colossal—and entirely avoidable—mistake could have slipped by so many people. How could a gang who couldn’t protect the potential First Lady from not straight-up ripping off a former First Lady’s speech word-for-word be trusted to run a winning campaign—let alone protect the United States of America? Melania Trump was barely offstage before journalists figured out that much of her speech was borrowed.

It took little more time before the finger-pointing within the Trump campaign began. On Tuesday morning, Ivanka and Jared blew off steam in their hotel gym, as did a number of other campaign officials. Jared walked up to one official who was pedaling idly on a stationary bike as he tried to catch up on the rest of the headlines—as if anyone was talking about anything other than Melania-gate—and for a brief moment forget about the whole thing. “You know, this was all Manafort’s fault,” he told the official, who questioned why it was Manafort’s responsibility or duty to proofread the candidate’s wife’s speech and make sure she hadn’t plagiarized it from Michelle Obama. A month later, Manafort was fired.

IN THE process of figuring out who the campaign should bring in to replace Manafort, members of the team knew they had to find someone who could right a ship that, by that point, was foundering. The whole tone of the Republican National Convention was dour, downtrodden, and fearful. By contrast, the Democratic Convention felt like the shining city on a hill in which most Americans would prefer to live, regardless of how realistic or euphemistic it was. Donald was entangled in public feuds with a former beauty pageant contestant who said he’d made unkind remarks about her weight and the Khans, a Gold Star Muslim family who criticized the Trump campaign’s rhetoric at the DNC.

His poll numbers dipped. They needed a new jolt. Jared started asking his friends and campaign advisers close to his father-in-law for options. Ivanka knew that bringing a woman on might help with the optics, even if, as a fairly obvious political calculation, it would likely be met with snickering. Ultimately, Jared believed no one would run the campaign better than he would—he had been the de facto campaign manager for months anyway—but he agreed with his wife. He started asking around for names of women to whom he could give the title of campaign manager, though, she would mostly just be going out on TV, and talking like the campaign manager. He would still call the shots. The people he asked were gobsmacked. What woman in her right mind would come on board, knowing that she was getting a fake job to make Donald look good while Jared was the one actually running the show? He wouldn’t tell her that, he’d reply.

It was under those conditions that, not long after, Kellyanne Conway joined the campaign, officially becoming the first female campaign manager in a general election bid in the history of the United States.

ON MONDAY, September 19, the Secret Service officially started protecting Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner and their children. Her brothers hadn’t yet received protection.

Her father had received his detail nearly ten months earlier, going with the Secret Service code name Mogul. Since the call signs within a First Family all begin with the same first letter, the rest of the Trumps fell in line with M names, as well. This naming tradition, which dates back to President Harry Truman, has since its inception sometimes been a way for commanders in chief to live out their fantasies—a game of high-stakes make-believe in which the most powerful men in the world get to try on a name to match the image of themselves they wished were true. Truman, for instance, decided to be called General, though he had only been a captain in World War I. The Kennedys’ names all referred to Camelot. The Obamas stuck with Renegade and Renaissance.