Pence was speaking no such fatalism to his traveling companion, Congressman Jeb Hensarling. (Jeff Flake was . . . unavailable. The Arizona senator refused to attend any events for the GOP ticket. Once, when Pence visited a church in Mesa, a Phoenix suburb, the senator texted to remind him that he would be campaigning less than a mile from Flake’s home. “Can you help me trim some hedges?” Flake asked. Pence replied, “As long as we can carve ‘Trump-Pence’ in the hedge.” Flake texted him back: “Small hedge. Only have room for ‘Pence.’”)
The VP nominee made a compelling case. Trump was going to win, Pence argued, not just because Clinton was a rotten candidate who would struggle to reassemble the Obama coalition, but because Trump represented an end to the party’s civil war. It was an odd sentiment; Trump was the most polarizing Republican at least since Barry Goldwater, and probably ever. But Pence wasn’t so much lauding his running mate’s ability to unite warring factions. Having watched “a Republican party that had lost its way” during the Bush administration, and witnessed the years of internecine conflict thereafter, Pence believed that Trump was mobilizing a base of voters that had been abandoned—“The forgotten people” Republicans were long unresponsive to.
Trump’s strength, Pence continued, was derived from his very rejection of party orthodoxy. Even in the instances where this made the Indiana governor uncomfortable, such as with immigration and trade, he had begun to see the political genius behind it. “I’ve supported virtually every free-trade agreement that’s ever come across my desk,” Pence said. “But I just found his arguments very persuasive.”
As he came around to understanding and eventually defending Trump’s viewpoints, Pence also found himself convinced that the man himself was nothing like the outward caricature. He described how Trump had asked his wife, Karen, to lead a group prayer on several occasions, and insisted that Trump is a follower of Christ. “I respect the sincerity of his faith,” he said.
This is when the BS detector starts to beep. Nobody who has spent time with Trump has ever walked away believing him to be a Christian. And, that aside, the notion of Trump being different when he’s away from the bright lights—laid back, gentlemanly, “even humble,” Pence joked—is mostly fantasy. If there ever had been a real distinction between his private self and his public persona, friends say, it receded from their view in 2016. While those who know Trump laud his humor and hospitality, they also say he is who he’s always been: someone who values professional utility over personal relationships in the people he deals with, someone who shows regret for nothing he says or does, and someone who prizes loyalty above every other characteristic.
It’s certainly possible that Trump felt remorse for his words on that old recording. But he had no choice other than to tell Pence that he was remorseful. Without the VP nominee standing loyally by his side, the campaign would have been finished.
“He took a little time. It’s okay. I understand. Many people did,” Trump says, acknowledging the letter Pence wrote him. “You know, a couple of days off, it didn’t make an impact on me. Because I had people who took a whole lifetime off.”
Pence’s knee-jerk devotion to Trump upon his returning to the campaign trail was something to behold. Even some of his aides seemed uncomfortable with the degree to which Pence was going out of his way to profess his allegiance. It became problematic at one point in our conversation at 30,000 feet.
When I asked whether he would support Ryan remaining as Speaker, a simple question, Pence hesitated. It was unexpected. They had been friends for years; Ryan had introduced him at the convention that summer, and when Trump initially declined to endorse Ryan in his primary, Pence made a rare public break with his running mate, telling Fox News, “I believe we need Paul Ryan in leadership in the Congress.” But in the time since, Ryan had denounced Trump after Access Hollywood, and Pence was visibly torn choosing between the two.
He declined three times to state his support for Ryan, which sparked an easily avoided tempest when our interview published a week later. “My respect for Paul Ryan is boundless,” Pence said, repeating the phrase twice. “I’m not a member of the House Republican Conference anymore. I wouldn’t presume upon what the members of the conference choose.”
Just over an hour later, our plane walloped the runway at LaGuardia. The head Secret Service agent leapt from his seat, handed over his firearm, and crouched next to Pence, who quickly assured him that everything was fine. The media frenzy was every bit as exaggerated, with news crews (even TMZ) trailing Pence, his team, and the reporters to our Manhattan hotel. The only development of consequence was that Pence’s plane would be garaged; in exchange, the next morning, we boarded a substitute aircraft that did not have Wi-Fi capabilities.
As we dipped below the clouds, descending toward the runway in Bensalem, Pennsylvania, on the afternoon of October 28, there was a different sort of commotion toward the front of the plane. Advisers to Pence were whispering to one another in shocked, kid-on-Christmas-morning excitement. We had dropped low enough for the cell towers to activate internet signals, and the news was at once coursing through all our smartphones: FBI Director James Comey had sent a letter to Congress reopening the investigation into Clinton.
“The big breaking news today, you may not have heard about standing in line, folks, is that we just learned that Hillary Clinton may have been a whole lot more than ‘extremely careless’ when it came to handling classified information,” Pence declared at his rally in Pennsylvania.
His aides stood at the back of the crowd exchanging looks of comic bewilderment. Suddenly—and in some cases, for the very first time—they, too, believed Trump could win the presidency.
THE SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE SAT ALONE IN THE DEN OF HIS TWO-STORY Georgian-style home in Janesville, Wisconsin, savoring a few fleeting moments of quiet.
Election Day allowed him to dwell on the nightmare that had been the past year. First, he had accepted a job he never wanted, though he convinced himself it could be used for good. Then, he lost a struggle for the soul of his party to a demagogue with no experience in policy or governing. And now, Ryan had been told, Democrats would control the presidency for another four years. He had just concluded a series of phone calls with Priebus and other party elders. The exit polls released at 5:00 p.m. Eastern left no doubt: Trump was toast.
Huddled around their laptops in Trump Tower, the nominee’s team felt blindsided. The data, collected for a consortium of major media outlets (the Associated Press, ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, CNN, and Fox News) suggested a blowout loss. It was impossible to dismiss these findings; the exit polling, based on surveys of more than twenty-four thousand voters nationwide, was generally thought to be reliable. Jared Kushner announced that he would call his father-in-law with the news.
“Everybody thought at five o’clock that I had lost the election, because the exit polling came out. And they’re screaming, ‘Did you vote for Trump? Or did you vote for Crooked Hillary Clinton?’” Trump says, offering his theory of the case. “But a tremendous number came out and said, ‘It’s none of your business.’ Any of the ‘It’s none of your businesses’ voted for Trump.”