Trump arched an eyebrow. “Really? We can do that?”
Rove nodded. This guy has been talking about trade for thirty years, the Republican Svengali thought, and he doesn’t know the basic tools at the president’s disposal.
The Republican Party’s new leader was curious about one more thing. His team had been preparing a list of vice-presidential selections, but he felt that everyone advising him on the decision was pushing an agenda. He wanted to know what Wynn and Rove thought.
“Kasich, no question,” Wynn volunteered.
Trump frowned. “He doesn’t say nice things about me. Who else?”
“Well,” Rove said, “I think your battlegrounds are going to be between Pennsylvania and Iowa, and if you’re going to break the Blue Wall, you need someone with midwestern sensibilities and someone who has evangelical appeal. There’s one guy who fits that description: Mike Pence.”
It was the strangest of smoke-filled rooms, a Central Park château populated by the renowned party strategist alternately called “Boy Genius” and “Turd Blossom” by his former boss; the financier and casino tycoon who would soon become a high-profile casualty of the country’s sexual harassment crackdown; and the rookie politician who had heckled and hoodwinked his way to the Republican nomination for president. It wasn’t quite how Jack and Bobby had picked LBJ, or how Reagan had settled on George Bush Sr., but a seed was planted that day.
Trump allowed a smile at the suggestion of Pence. “He says nice things about me.”
ON THE EIGHTH FLOOR OF THE MARRIOTT MARQUIS IN TIMES SQUARE, Marjorie Dannenfelser stabbed anxiously at a plate of salad while offering a series of defensive answers.
It was June 21, and Dannenfelser, a social conservative titan and president of the anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony List, was one of nearly a thousand Christian activists who had traveled to New York City for an afternoon summit with the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. She also was one of roughly fifty people to join him for a VIP meeting beforehand. Many of these leaders, including Dannenfelser, had vigorously opposed his candidacy throughout the campaign.
Yet, much like Ryan—who had finally dropped his objections earlier that month, endorsing Trump in a piece for the Janesville Gazette—they were beginning to feel as though they had no recourse.
“All along the way, he was our last choice,” Dannenfelser said. “But when you get to the end, to the point of having a binary choice, you must choose.”
This sentiment echoed around the Manhattan hotel’s ornamented hallways. Some prominent Christian leaders, including Liberty University president Jerry Falwell Jr., went out of their way to lavish Trump with praise despite his sui generis secularity. (After introducing Trump at the New York summit, Falwell Jr. posed for a photograph alongside the candidate back at Trump Tower, with a Playboy magazine cover on the wall behind them.) But for most of the faith leaders in attendance, Trump represented the manifestation of their fears about societal decline. Here was a man who had paraded his mistresses through the tabloids; who had bantered with Howard Stern about the size of his own daughter’s breasts; who had previously taken extreme pro-abortion positions; who seemed to marinate in coarseness and cruelty; and who had nonetheless won the GOP nomination for president.
These concerns were not necessarily allayed during the VIP meeting. Speaking to the group of spiritual influencers, Trump said of Christianity, “I owe so much to it in so many ways.” He then proceeded to explain that he wouldn’t be standing before them without it, not because of how the faith shaped his life or informed his worldview, but “because the evangelical vote was mostly gotten by me.” The attendees walked out of the room in a daze.
The general session went somewhat better, thanks to the lively introductions of Falwell Jr. and Franklin Graham, another descendant of American Christendom royalty. Graham remarked on how God had used deeply flawed men throughout history to shape the world for good, drawing parallels between Trump and David, the giant slayer and Israeli king who ordered the husband of his mistress killed in battle. The comparison left some in the room feeling queasy.
Trump spent much of his remarks acting as though he were before any other audience, giving a self-glorifying rundown of the latest polls and his recent media coverage. But at some point, either because of his own observation or due to a planned transition, Trump switched gears. He deployed carefully curated phrases, including “pro-life judges.” The attendees, in decades of hearing from Republican political figures, had never heard someone so bold as to use that terminology; a typical conservative politician would use coded language to assure voters of such a priority. Trump also broke new ground when he raised, unsolicited, concerns about a fifty-year-old law implemented under President Lyndon Baines Johnson that could threaten the tax-exempt status of churches that spoke out on social issues. Prompted by members of his newly formed Evangelical Executive Advisory Board, Trump warned about the “Johnson Amendment,” and promised to fight on behalf of Christians in a way that no political leader had before.
This was like David’s harp to Saul’s ears. Eight years of Barack Obama’s presidency had left the white evangelical community feeling besieged, not just from the forces of big government, which approved same-sex marriage and mandated contraceptive coverage, but from a godless, violent, overdrugged, hypersexualized culture that was chewing through the fabric of their Judeo-Christian civilization. “Evangelicals had been used over and over by Republicans. And there was something different about his interaction with us,” recalled Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council. “You could describe it as transactional. He wanted our votes, and he made promises that most Christian candidates would never, ever make.”
Ever since Indiana, prominent evangelicals had advised Trump that he needed to do two things to win their voters. The first was to emphasize a commitment to conservative judges. In the wake of Scalia’s death, and McConnell’s refusal to allow a hearing for Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, the looming Supreme Court vacancy was the ultimate mobilizer for Christian conservatives. Trump did them one better: In mid-May, after running a wildly unconventional idea past several allies (including Leonard Leo, president of a GOP lawyer association called the Federalist Society, and Don McGahn, the future White House counsel), he released a list of conservative judges he would pick from for Scalia’s seat.
“I had no idea how important Supreme Court judges were to a voter,” Trump admits. “When I got involved, deep into it, I realized that there was tremendous distrust of me because they didn’t know—was I a conservative? Was I a liberal? They didn’t know anything about me.”
He pauses, sensing how this might sound demeaning to his celebrity. “They knew me very well. The Apprentice was one of the most successful shows on television by far. They knew me; they got to know me very well, they knew me long before The Apprentice. That’s why I was chosen to do The Apprentice, right?”
He continues, “But what they didn’t know, is he going to like conservative judges? Or is he going to like liberal judges?”
The judicial roster won glowing reviews from the religious right. But there was another box for Trump to check.
“We want to see,” Perkins said after the New York summit, “who he picks as his running mate.”