Speaking in Ohio just after the Access Hollywood bombshell dropped, Pence had initially dismissed the news as just another media hatchet job. Yet soon after, he called Trump from the road, checking in as he did daily, sounding upset. He advised Trump to offer a sincere apology. That was the last anyone had heard from the VP nominee. Pence had gone back to Indiana and bunkered down, cutting himself off from the outside world, praying with his wife about what to do next and telling his advisers that he wasn’t sure he could continue with the campaign.
To the extent Trump felt regret, it was over disappointing the Pences.
“Oh boy,” he said Friday afternoon after hanging up with his running mate. “Mother is not going to like this.”
THE APOLOGY VIDEO DID LITTLE TO STANCH THE FLOW OF DEFECTIONS. On Saturday morning, another tranche of Republicans—congressmen, senators, governors, former primary rivals—announced their renunciations of Trump.4 The list also included GOP luminaries such as Bill Bennett, the former education secretary, and Condoleezza Rice, the former secretary of state, whose name was being tossed around inside the RNC as a potential substitute running mate if Pence took over the ticket.
By midday Saturday, October 8, more than two dozen Republican elected officials had abandoned Trump (counting only those presently in office). Many were calling for Pence to replace him as the GOP nominee. Among them were Senator John Thune, a member of the GOP leadership, and Ann Wagner, the Missouri congresswoman and a former co-chair of the national party committee.
Priebus continued to swat away the suggestion. As the former general counsel of the RNC, he knew better than anyone that no trigger existed for forcing out the party’s nominee—especially not at this late stage. When he received a call Saturday morning from Wisconsin’s national committeeman, Steve King, informing him that some RNC members were mulling an organized mutiny, the party chairman told King the same thing he was telling everyone else: “It’s not going to work. We need to ride this out.”
But Priebus worried, as did just about everyone else he spoke with, that another shoe was soon to drop. There had been rumors in recent weeks that a lethal opposition-research blast was imminent. Now that it had occured, Republicans felt certain there were more to follow; that somewhere there existed a veritable treasure trove of old tapes revealing Trump’s greatest hits: misogyny, racism, and all sorts of other uncouth talk from the set of his NBC show. (Reporters raced unsuccessfully to reach Mark Burnett, producer of The Apprentice, sensing that he possessed the power to swing an election.)
While the party chairman saw no path to removing Trump, he wasn’t ruling out the possibility of Trump stepping aside on his own accord. Having gotten the sense from Pence’s advisers that the Indiana governor would be willing to take over if Trump quit, Priebus talked into the wee hours Friday night with trusted allies—Ryan and McConnell, as well as top staffers and party lawyers—discussing the logistical hurdles to replacing a nominee one month before Election Day. It wouldn’t be easy: Early voting had begun in some states, and ballots had been printed in most others.
The biggest obstacle, of course, was Trump. It would be tricky enough rejiggering the ticket to pair Pence with a new running mate; doing so without Trump’s blessing would be impossible.
Shortly before 11:00 a.m. Saturday, the Republican nominee convened the campaign’s high command in his residence on the sixty-fourth floor of Trump Tower. Everyone looked withered. Giuliani wore a Yankees cap low over his eyes. Priebus hadn’t shaved. Christie dressed in jeans and a Mets jacket, had already informed the group that he needed the rest of the weekend off and would not fly to Sunday’s debate with Trump as planned.
“So,” Trump began, looking to Priebus. “What are you hearing?”
The RNC chairman had spent the past day defending Trump’s rightful claim to the party’s nomination, dismissing calls to expel him and urging calm amid the commotion. But Priebus was not going to sugarcoat the situation. He had long been nauseated at watching all the nominee’s sycophants telling him whatever would keep him happy and upbeat. Trump needed to hear the truth for a change.
“I’ll tell you what I’m hearing,” Priebus said. “Either you’ll lose in the biggest landslide in history, or you can get out of the race and let somebody else run who can win.”
Nobody said a word. Trump’s many loyalists who had gathered—his children, Hicks, Bannon, Conway, Christie, Bossie, Giuliani—were shocked by the blunt assessment. Yet none was eager to push back on it. When Trump went around the room, asking what people thought his chances were, he heard a lot of throat-clearing. Even Bannon, who made it a habit of always saying “one hundred percent” whenever Trump asked the question, dodged it this time.
Trump tried humor. “So, what’s the good news?” he said.
Nobody laughed.
The meeting lasted another thirty minutes, most of which was spent pushing Trump to sit for an interview that afternoon with David Muir of ABC News. His team said it would be best to discuss the comments fully, and repent for them, ahead of the debate. Trump agreed and the meeting broke up. But then he abruptly changed his mind. Complaining that he would look “weak” by subjecting himself to a journalist whose sole purpose would be extracting as many apologies as possible, he told Hicks the ABC interview was off.
The Republican Party was going to live or die with Trump; if his team couldn’t persuade him to do a network television interview, they certainly weren’t going to convince him to step aside as the nominee. Whatever fantasies of a Pence-Rice ticket danced through the heads of party elders were officially dashed on Saturday afternoon. “The media and establishment want me out of the race so badly,” Trump tweeted. “I WILL NEVER DROP OUT OF THE RACE, WILL NEVER LET MY SUPPORTERS DOWN! #MAGA.”
Pence himself was nowhere to be found. Ryan had asked his old friend to attend the Saturday rally in his district in lieu of Trump. Pence had accepted. Accommodations were made; a Secret Service checkpoint, waved off at the news of Trump’s disinvitation, was re-erected outside the event in Elkhorn, Wisconsin. But then Pence didn’t show up. There was no notice, no courtesy call from the VP nominee’s staff. Ryan dialed his old friend’s cell number and got voice mail. Pence was AWOL.
Instead of returning Trump’s calls, or Ryan’s calls, or flying to his friend’s district, the Indiana governor spent Saturday at home. He mostly prayed with his wife, Karen. She was apoplectic, warning her husband that she would no longer appear in public if he carried on as Trump’s running mate. He, in turn, hinted to his advisers that his time on the trail might be up. Feeling moved to communicate his inner anguish, Pence wrote Trump a letter describing what hearing that audio had done to him and his wife. When two of Trump’s advisers learned of the letter, they worried they had seen the last of his running mate.
Meanwhile, Ryan was left to fly solo in Elkhorn—no Trump, no Pence, and no Priebus.
“There is a bit of an elephant in the room,” the Speaker said, taking the stage in Wisconsin.5 He referenced his statement from the previous day and how “troubling” the situation was. Then, announcing that he wasn’t there to talk about said elephant, Ryan pivoted to his homily about “ideas” and “conservative principles” and his vision for being a “proposition party.”