The Making of the President 2016

How Donald Trump Orchestrated a Revolution

Roger Stone

• Publisher: Skyhorse
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781510726925
• eBook ISBN: 9781510726932
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In the tradition of Theodore White's landmark books, the definitive look at how Donald J. Trump shocked the world to become president From Roger Stone, a New York Times bestselling author, longtime political adviser and friend to Donald Trump, and consummate Republican strategist, comes the first in-depth examination of how Trump's campaign tapped into the national mood to deliver a stunning victory that almost no one saw coming. In the early hours of November 9, 2016, one of the most contentious, polarizing, and vicious presidential races came to an abrupt and unexpected end when heavily favored presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton called Donald J. Trump to concede, shocking a nation that had, only hours before, given little credence to his chances. Donald Trump pulled the greatest upset in American political history despite a torrent of invective and dismissal of the mainstream media. Stone, a long time Trump retainer and confidant, gives us the inside story of how Donald Trump almost single-handedly harnessed discontent among "Forgotten Americans" despite running a guerrilla-style grass roots campaign to compete with the smooth running and free-spending Clinton political machine. From the start, Trump's campaign was unlike any seen on the national stage—combative, maverick, and fearless. Trump's nomination was the hostile takeover of the Republican party and a resounding repudiation of the failed leadership of both parties whose policies have brought America to the brink of financial collapse as well as endangering our national security. Here Stone outlines how Donald Trump skillfully ran as the anti-Open Borders candidate as well as a supporter of American sovereignty, and how he used the Globalist trade deals like NAFTA to win over three of ten Bernie Sanders supporters. The veteran adviser to Nixon, Reagan, and Trump charts the rise of the alt-conservative media and the end of the mainstream media monopoly on voter impacting information dissemination. This is an insider's view that includes studying opposition research into Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton's crimes, and the struggle by the Republican establishment to stop Trump and how they underestimated him. Stone chronicles Trump's triumph in three debates where he skillfully lowered expectation levels but skewered Mrs. Clinton for the corruption of the Clinton Foundation, her mishandling of government email, and her incompetence as Secretary of State. Stone gives us the inside word on Julian Assange, Wikileaks, Clinton campaign chief John Podesta, Huma Abedin, Anthony Weiner, Carlos Danger, Doug Band, Jeffery Epstein, and the efforts to hide the former first lady's infirmities and health problems. Stone dissects the phony narrative that Trump was in cahoots with Russian strongman Vladimir Putin or that the e-mails released by Wikileaks came from the Russians. The Making of the President 2016 reveals how Trump brilliantly picked at Hillary Clinton's weaknesses, particularly her reputation as a crooked insider, and ignited the passions of out-of-work white men and women from the rust belt and beyond, at a time when millions of Americans desperately wanted change. Stone also reveals how and why the mainstream media got it wrong, including how the polls were loaded and completely misunderstood who would vote. Stone's analysis is akin to Theodore H. White's seminal book The Making of the President 1960. It is both a sweeping analysis of the trends that elected Trump as well as the war stories of a hard-bitten political survivor who Donald Trump called "one tough cookie."

Part 1

How Donald Trump Hijacked the Republican Presidential Nomination

Donald Trump’s Hostile Takeover of the GOP

In modern American presidential politics since the 1960s, the only route to win the Republican or Democratic Party nomination for the nation’s highest office is to enter the six-month grueling complex of state primaries, caucuses, and state conventions that began in 2016 with the Iowa primary, scheduled for February 1, 2016, and ended on June 7, 2016, with primaries in South Dakota, New Mexico, New Jersey, Montana, and California.

As Theodore White explained in his original The Making of the President 1960, after Abraham Lincoln, the first presidential nominee of the Republican Party, won the party’s nomination at a convention held in the wood-framed “Wigwam” building in Chicago. For a period of thirty-five years, from 1865 to 1900, the choice of presidential candidates was “left to the bosses in convention assembled,” with the result that their selections tended to result in mediocre presidential candidates at best. In 1960, only sixteen states held presidential primaries, far different from the fifty-state primary contest common today. “These sixteen states were as diverse in their politics and sociologies as the diversity of American civilization itself; they had been chosen by no superior reason or plan,” White wrote. “Altogether to the foreign eye they must have seemed the most preposterous field of battle on which men who aspire to the leadership of American freedom and control of its powers should choose to joust. Yet these states were, and remain, vital to the play of American Presidential politics.”1

In 2016, the goal of the Republican Party presidential primaries was for a candidate to gain the party’s nomination on the first ballot of the national nominating convention by winning a simple majority of delegates, 1,237, from the total of 2,472 slated to attend the Republican National Committee’s national nominating convention scheduled for July 18–21, 2016, at the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, Ohio. This is the home arena of the Cleveland Cavaliers basketball team led in 2016 by superstar LeBron James. Should no candidate achieve the 1,237-delegate majority required for the nomination prior to the start of the RNC national nominating convention, most delegates would be free to vote their preference, starting on the second ballot. Professional politicians warned that a deadlock could result in a “brokered convention,” with the implication that the convention would revert to the type of backroom deal making and swapping of delegates that characterized old-style, smoke-filled back-room national nominating conventions that today’s series of national primaries, caucuses, and state conventions was designed to prevent.

While the United States has not yet entered a perpetual presidential election cycle, where candidates declare for the office as soon as a president is selected on Election Day, the presidential cycle typically commences early in the third year of the current president’s term. In 2016, the first candidate to declare for the presidency was first-term Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who announced on March 23, 2015; followed closely by first-term Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, who made his announcement on April 7, 2015; and by the first-term Florida Senator Marco Rubio, who made his announcement on April 13, 2015. Even though all three of these contenders held lowly “freshman” status in the US Senate, each felt he had cultivated a national audience that could propel him into the White House.

The next few months proved another rule in modern American presidential politics, namely, that the party not currently holding the presidency tends to generate a large field of contenders, each of whom has managed to convince themselves and their initial financial backers that they have a chance to win the White House.

• On May 4, Carly Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard CEO who, in 2010, lost a race for US senator from California to incumbent Democrat Barbara Boxer, declared.

• Fiorina was joined on May 4 by retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson declaring for president, hoping to capitalize on the publicity he gained at the White House 2013 National Prayer Breakfast where President Obama sat through his twenty-seven-minute critical speech that prompted a Wall Street Journal editorial encouraging him to run for president.2

• On May 5, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee threw his hat in the ring, followed by former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, who declared on May 27, as well as former New York Governor George Pataki, who made his presidential announcement on May 28.

• June saw the following added to the growing field of Republican contenders: US Senator from South Carolina Lindsey Graham; former Texas Governor Rick Perry, June 4; Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, June 24; New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, June 30.

• But the two biggest announcements in June were former Florida Governor Jeb Bush on June 15, and billionaire New York businessman Donald J. Trump, on June 16.

• July filled out the field with announcements by Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, Ohio Governor John Kasich, and former Virginia Governor Jim Gilmore.

The end result were seventeen Republican Party presidential candidates, including nine governors or former governors, five US senators or former US senators, one female CEO who had never held elective office, a retired neurosurgeon who had never held elective office, and Donald Trump—a true outsider who had toyed with running for president in 2000 and 2012 but had never stood as a candidate facing an election or held a political position of any kind whatsoever.

CHAPTER 1

Trump vs. the Elites

He’s a total stiff, Jeb Bush. Here’s a guy, honestly, if he weren’t in government, you wouldn’t hire him to do anything, okay? If you had a company, you wouldn’t even hire him.

Donald J. Trump1

With Hillary as the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate, the presidential race, as 2015 came to a close, looked like it would come down to Hillary being “the first woman” to win the US presidency, or Jeb becoming “the third Bush” to occupy the White House. The last person political pundits in the mainstream media ever expected to win was Donald J. Trump, regardless how rich he might be. Far-left elites, typified by Hollywood on the West Coast and by the mainstream media on the East Coast, were confident going into the 2016 presidential election cycle that their biased version of America in the Twenty-First Century would be accepted uncritically by the rest of what the elite liked to call “Fly-Over” America.

Here Comes Jeb: “America Deserves Better”

On June 15, 2015, some seventeen months before the election, Jeb Bush—the third of the Bush dynasty to seek the presidency—bounded onto the stage of Miami Dade College’s Kendall Campus, in Florida, where he had been the state’s first two-term Republican governor, looking relaxed and casual as he appeared before some 3,000 supporters in the community college gymnasium, wearing a button-down blue shirt and casual pants, while his mother clapped appreciatively in the wings just offstage.

Determined to be the first presidential candidacy in two languages, Bush proclaimed to an excited auditorium composed mostly of college kids skipping class, “Yo soy Jeb”—in English, “I am Jeb”—telegraphing his goal of featuring Hispanic outreach as the centerpiece of his campaign in a strategy that put stage center his marriage to a Mexican woman and his ability to speak Spanish fluently. The declaration in Spanish mirrored Bush’s campaign logo that read simply “Jeb!”—a slogan that carefully omitted any mention of his family name. Jeb, fully aware of the problem posed by dynastic politics in an era where Americans were inclined to say “no more Bushes,” as well as “no more Clintons,” had chosen to run as Spanish-speaking Jeb, not Jeb Bush, the son and brother of two previous Bush family presidents.

Ironically, just as Jeb introduced his mother to the Miami crowd, a group of immigration protestors organized by the immigration advocacy group United We Dream and wearing bright yellow shirts, each with one initial that together spelled out, “LEGAL STATUS IS NOT ENOUGH” began chanting their slogan.2 If Jeb thought he would get a pass for his appeal to Hispanics and his obvious embracing of what in previous years had been termed “comprehensive immigration reform”—a catchphrase that opponents of open borders took to mask amnesty—he was wrong. The protestors were here in force precisely because Bush had chosen to run on immigration issues and the fact that as a Republican, Jeb could never go as far as to embrace open border amnesty the way Democrats like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton could.

Quickly shouted down by the audience chanting in return, “We want Jeb,” Bush interrupted to take back control of the situation, saying in a firm voice, “By the way, just so that our friends know, the next president of the United States will pass meaningful immigration reform, so that will be solved, not by executive order.” Later the group tweeted, “We protested @JebBush bc [because] he has been all over the map on #immigration. From ‘act of love’ to ‘kindly asked to leave.’”3

This was a problem that both McCain in 2008 and Romney in 2012 faced competing as moderate Republicans against Obama. By seeming to agree in principle with the Democrats on many if not most policy issues, McCain and Romney lacked the policy differentiation needed to energize a GOP base that remained more conservative than the GOP establishment leadership that was entrenched comfortably in the nation’s capital. Phyllis Schlafly, who endorsed Trump early in the presidential campaign, was presciently correct in her famous 1964 book, A Choice Not an Echo, when she argued the GOP should stop picking as presidential candidates establishment Republican politicians whose public policy positions were largely indistinguishable from those advanced by their liberal Democratic Party counterparts.4

Ironically, while Bush planned to feature his Hispanic appeal as a centerpiece of his presidential run, there was no reference to immigration reform included in the printed text of his announcement speech.5 Had the protest not occurred, the subject would have gone unmentioned by Jeb in his appeal that “America Deserves Better” leadership than that provided in the eight years under Barack Obama.

Jeb ended his speech speaking Spanish. “Júntense a nuestra causa de oportunidad para todos, a la causa de todos que aman la libertad y a la causa noble de los Estados Unidos de América.” The translation of this is: “Join our cause of opportunity for all, the cause of all who love freedom and the noble cause of the United States of America.”

Covering Jeb’s speech, the New York Times commented that Jeb’s announcement in the Florida community college gym was not the dramatic headline the Bush campaign may have wanted, but yet another in a series of restarts Jeb had launched in an already failing campaign that was unable to ignite enthusiasm among GOP voters who were already facing exhaustion from the hard-to-shake syndrome of “No More Bushes.” This syndrome presaged failure at the polls, regardless how much Spanish Jeb spoke at his rallies.

“After a bumpy six months in which he struggled to excite primary voters who are skeptical of his surname and of his conservative convictions, Mr. Bush turned his announcement rally here into a carefully choreographed reintroduction and a muscular attack on his rivals in both parties,” wrote Michael Barbaro and Jonathan Martin, two New York Times reporters known for their disdain not just for Jeb, but for Republicans in general.6

Noting that Jeb had belittled some of his most credible Republican opponents in Washington as unseasoned managers, Barbaro and Martin commented that Bush “derisively likened the senators he faces in the primary field—among them Marco Rubio of Florida, once a protégé of Mr. Bush’s—to President Obama, who campaigned for the White House after just three years in the Senate.”

For the New York Times, Jeb’s slogan “America Deserves Better” was as doomed to fail as his pledge to accomplish for America what he had accomplished for Florida. He disregarded his previous pledges to expand charter schools, to reduce the size of government, and to cut taxes by the billions—tired themes that up to now had failed to propel him to the top among the GOP faithful likely to vote in the primaries.

Trump Tower Becomes Center Stage

The next day, on Tuesday, June 16, Donald Trump used the elegant marble and gold laced lobby atrium of Trump Tower on New York City’s Fifth Avenue at 57th Street, the heart of Midtown, to make his presidential announcement.

In sharp contrast to Jeb Bush’s announcement, the atrium was filled with three levels of Trump supporters, as Trump’s daughter Ivanka looking like a model, wearing a smartly designed white dress, introduced her father.

Donald, wearing his characteristic perfectly tailored solid-blue suit and bold red tie, stepped up on a blue dais to give his announcement from a mahogany wooden podium, with a blue background, red pin-stripe trimmed sign reading “Trump—Make America Great Again,” broadcast real-time to the nation on television and via live-streaming Internet by the dozens of media outlets competing for the space in front of the podium—all framed against a blue-draped background lined with a row of American flags.

“Our country is in serious trouble,” Trump began.7 “We don’t have victories anymore. We used to have victories, but we don’t have them. When was the last time anybody saw us beating, let’s say, China in a trade deal? They kill us. I beat China all the time. All the time.”

Speaking without the aid of teleprompters and not apparently reading from a printed speech, Trump continued in a style that seemed rehearsed as to themes he wanted to cover but delivered largely impromptu.

“When did we beat Japan at anything?” Trump continued. “They send their cars over by the millions, and what do we do? When was the last time you saw a Chevrolet in Tokyo? It doesn’t exist, folks. They beat us all the time.”

This thought triggered for Trump a comment on Mexico, another rival he wanted to position as stealing US jobs as a result of the NAFTA agreement, signed by President Bill Clinton.

“When do we beat Mexico at the border?” Trump asked. “They’re laughing at us, at our stupidity. And now they are beating us economically. They are not our friend, believe me. But they’re killing us economically.”

This sequence led Trump to the punch line: “The U.S. has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems.”

Some twenty minutes into a passionate announcement that pounded the Obama administration for its failures in the Middle East, a rising percentage of the population dropping out of the labor force, and for Obamacare that launched with a costly but failing website, Trump hit the core message of why he should be president.

“So I’ve watched the politicians,” he began, entering the sales close part of the speech.

“I’ve dealt with them all my life. If you can’t make a good deal with a politician, then there’s something wrong with you,” he continued, building in intensity. “You’re certainly not very good. And that’s what we have representing us. They will never make America great again. They don’t even have a chance. They’re controlled fully—they’re controlled fully by the lobbyists, by the donors, and by the special interests, fully.”

The setup in place, Trump delivered his closing argument.

“Now, our country needs—our country needs a truly great leader, and we need a truly great leader now,” Trump said with emphasis. “We need a leader that wrote The Art of the Deal.”

Trump positioned himself as a Washington outsider, a businessman who built his fortune by being a negotiator who could get deals done. To top it off, Trump made clear he was sufficiently wealthy to finance his own run for the presidency, even against the Democrat’s Hillary Clinton who was already rumored to be raising $2 billion to finance her presidential bid.

“I’m using my own money,” Trump said with the type of braggadocio that endeared him to supporters and made him the object of hatred for liberal Democrats who have won elections for decades by courting underclass votes. “I’m not using the lobbyists. I’m not using donors. I don’t care. I’m really rich.”

Trump continued, imagining a scenario he described as follows: “After I’m called by thirty friends of mine who contrib...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Acknowledgments
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Part 1 How Donald Trump Hijacked the Republican Presidential Nomination
• Part 2 How Hillary Clinton Stole the Democratic Presidential Nomination
• Photos
• Part 3 How Trump Won the White House
• Conclusion: Trump Wins
• Appendix A
• Appendix B
• Endnotes