It was Stone, the Nixon-era hatchet man, who in the mid-1980s introduced Manafort to his friend, the New York real estate scion Donald J. Trump. At that time, Manafort’s star was rising rapidly inside the GOP: He helped to elect Reagan twice, then George H. W. Bush in 1988. When Kansas senator Bob Dole won the Republican nomination in 1996, Manafort was charged with running the convention.
It was in this capacity that Manafort worked side by side with Reed, Dole’s campaign manager, a fellow northeasterner with a similar taste for fine suits and expensive cocktails. They had known each other since Reagan’s reelection campaign in 1984, but Reed eyed his old friend warily. He had heard all the stories, including the one about Manafort’s lifestyle turning lavish after millions of dollars in Filipino government money, illegally earmarked for Reagan’s reelection campaign and allegedly funneled through Manafort’s consulting firm, never surfaced in the United States.2
Twenty years after their work for Dole, Manafort was calling Reed, the senior political strategist at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, to break some news: He was taking a job with Trump.
Reed was dumbfounded. Manafort certainly didn’t need the money: Between the legal revenues and the offshore bank accounts stuffed with proceeds from his underhanded work on behalf of dodgy despots, including the pro-Russian leader of Ukraine, he was easily worth many millions of dollars. And though Manafort had always been a gambler, teaming with Trump struck Reed as a dicey bet. All the candidate’s unforeseen successes in 2016 had come in spite of a functional campaign.
Trump had no serious organization to speak of, no overarching strategy guiding his efforts. There was the raw passion of his supporters; the input of a few friends and unofficial advisers; the cloak-and-dagger counsel of Stone; the guidance and unfailing loyalty of his children; and there was Corey Lewandowski, the campaign manager, more street fighter than savant, who fed Trump’s belligerent instincts but lacked any reasoned vision for reaching 270 electoral votes.
“Trump doesn’t have a real campaign—it’s just a bunch of guys lighting everything on fire,” Reed warned Manafort. “There’s no organization, there’s no infrastructure. If you join Trump, you’ll wind up running the campaign.”
Manafort insisted he would not. Trump, he explained to Reed, was growing ever-more suspicious of the party’s efforts to defeat him at the convention. There was an emerging, noisy “Never Trump” movement—comprising activists, consultants, even some party officials—that aimed to deny him the nomination by whatever means necessary. The immediate goal was to prevent him from collecting the 1,237 delegates needed to clinch the nomination. But there was also talk of amending the rules in Cleveland to allow for “bound” delegates, those rightfully belonging to Trump, to vote against him on the convention floor.
“He just wants me to run the delegate operation,” Manafort told Reed. “I’m going to make sure he secures the necessary delegates and secures the nomination. Nothing more.”
“Look, Paul,” Reed said. “I don’t know exactly what you’ve been doing. But I know you’ve been in the Ukraine, with the penthouses and the vodka martinis and the caviar and the women on each arm. You had better be very careful. Remember the golden rule of politics: Nothing stays a secret. And believe me, with Trump, everything will come out eventually.”
Manafort assured Reed that he would be aboveboard. He swore that, for whatever roguish work he’d taken on since the Dole days, he would not be getting into any trouble with Trump.
“Everything we’ll be doing is legal,” Manafort said.
TRUMP HAD SPENT SEVERAL DECADES BUILDING HIS OWN ASSOCIATIONS with the louche and depraved. As his campaign for the presidency gained surprising credibility, few of these allies proved as valuable as David Pecker.
As the chairman and CEO of American Media Inc., the country’s largest tabloid publisher, Pecker had enjoyed a longtime symbiotic relationship with Trump, whose celebrity owed in large part to his engagement of the New York City gossip rags. The two men became close friends, sharing dinners at Mar-a-Lago and rides on Trump’s private plane.
In August 2015, two months after Trump announced his bid for the presidency, they came to an understanding. In a meeting first reported by the Wall Street Journal, Pecker offered to protect Trump from women who came forward alleging sexual escapades. He would use AMI and its biggest brand, the National Enquirer, to “catch and kill” on behalf of the candidate: purchasing testimonies that could be damaging to Trump, having the women sign exclusivity and nondisclosure agreements, and then burying the stories for good. Trump loved the idea, and instructed Michael Cohen, his lawyer and fixer, to work in concert with Pecker.3
The arrangement would prove extraordinarily beneficial—at least, in the short run. Over the ensuing year, Pecker and Cohen defused two bombshells that might have blown up Trump’s campaign. The first deal was with a former Playboy model, Karen McDougal, who approached AMI with details of her extramarital romance with Trump. Pecker bought the rights to her story for $150,000. Cohen, meanwhile, brokered an agreement with adult-film star Stormy Daniels, paying $130,000 in hush money to conceal her past sexual relationship with Trump.
All the while, Pecker was playing another role in Trump’s run for the White House: that of lead blocker.
In September 2015, as Carly Fiorina gained steam in the GOP primary, rising all the way to third place in the RealClearPolitics polling average, the National Enquirer ran a piece calling her a “homewrecker” who had lied about her “druggie daughter.”4 (It was a reference to Fiorina’s sharing the story of her stepdaughter who had died of an overdose.) The next month, as Ben Carson nipped at Trump’s heels, the Enquirer reported that the “bungling surgeon” had ruined several patients’ lives and had even left a sponge inside one woman’s brain.5 In December, as Marco Rubio moved into third place, the Enquirer published a story on the Florida senator’s “cocaine connection,” detailing his brother-in-law’s incarceration for drug dealing.6
These were mere appetizers for Pecker and the National Enquirer. The entrée would be Ted Cruz.
In early March, the Enquirer formally endorsed on its front page: “TRUMP MUST BE PREZ.” As it became apparent that the front-runner’s path to the nomination had one remaining obstacle, Pecker and his minions turned their attention to Cruz.
The National Enquirer had run one piece in February, “Ted Cruz Shamed by Porn Star,” about the senator’s unwitting casting choice of a softcore adult actress in a campaign ad. But the story fell flat. Pecker’s team dug deeper. Over the next month they turned over every rock of Cruz’s personal and political life looking for dirt. At one point, AMI reporters visited the Capital Grille in Washington, Cruz’s neighborhood haunt, offering cash to restaurant employees in exchange for compromising information on the senator. The waitstaff, having befriended Cruz (despite, in many cases, their wildly diverging political views), refused to cooperate.
On March 28, the same day Manafort’s hiring was reported by the New York Times, the National Enquirer went nuclear. The tabloid published four stories pertaining to Cruz that day. But the biggest, its “Special Report,” suggested that Cruz had carried on numerous extramarital affairs. Having been tipped off that this bombardment was on its way, Cruz chose to call his wife, Heidi, so that she wouldn’t be blindsided. She laughed so hard, so hysterically, that her husband was mildly offended.