Even for Donald Trump, the distance is still fun to think about, up here in his penthouse 600 ft. in the sky,
where it’s hard to make out the regular people below. The ice skaters
swarming Central Park’s Wollman Rink look like old-television static,
and the Fifth Avenue holiday shoppers could be mites in a gutter. To
even see this view, elevator operators, who spend their days standing in
place, must push a button marked 66–68, announcing all three floors of Trump’s princely pad.
Inside, staff members wear cloth slipcovers on their shoes, so as not
to scuff the shiny marble or stain the plush cream carpets.
This is, in short, not a natural place to refine the common touch.
It’s gilded and gaudy, a dreamscape of faded tapestry, antique clocks
and fresco-style ceiling murals of gym-rat Greek gods. The throw pillows
carry the Trump shield, and the paper napkins are monogrammed with the
family name. His closest neighbors, at least at this altitude, are an
international set of billionaire moguls who have decided to stash their
money at One57 and 432 Park, the two newest skyscrapers to remake
midtown Manhattan. There is no tight-knit community in the sky, no
paperboy or postman, no bowling over brews after work.
Photograph by Nadav Kander for TIMEPresident-elect Donald Trump photographed at his penthouse on the 66th floor of Trump Tower in New York City on Nov. 28.
Behind TIME’s Person of the Year Cover
And yet here Trump resides, under dripping crystal, with diamond cuff
links, as the President-elect of the United States of America. The
Secret Service agents milling about prove that it really happened, this
election result few saw coming. Hulking and serious, they gingerly try
to stay on the marble, avoiding the carpets with their uncovered shoes.
On his wife Melania’s desk, next to books of Gianni Versace’s fashions and Elizabeth Taylor’s jewelry, a new volume sits front and center: The White House: Its Historic Furnishings and First Families.
For all of Trump’s public life, tastemakers and intellectuals have
dismissed him as a vulgarian and carnival barker, a showman with big
flash and little substance. But what those critics never understood was
that their disdain gave him strength. For years, he fed off the
disrespect and used it to grab more tabloid headlines, to connect to
common people. Now he has upended the leadership of both major political
parties and effectively shifted the political direction of the
international order. He will soon command history’s most lethal
military, along with economic levers that can change the lives of
billions. And the people he has to thank are those he calls “the forgotten,” millions of American voters
who get paid by the hour in shoes that will never touch these
carpets—working folk, regular Janes and Joes, the dots in the distance.
It’s a topic Trump wants to discuss as he settles down in his dining
room, with its two-story ceiling and marble table the length of a
horseshoe pitch: the winning margins he achieved in West Virginia coal country,
the rally crowds that swelled on Election Day, what he calls that
“interesting thing,” the contradiction at the core of his appeal. “What
amazes a lot of people is that I’m sitting in an apartment the likes of
which nobody’s ever seen,” the next President says, smiling. “And yet I represent the workers of the world.”
The late Fidel Castro
would probably spit out his cigar if he heard that one—a billionaire
who branded excess claiming the slogans of the proletariat. But Trump
doesn’t care. “I’m representing them, and they love me and I love them,”
he continues, talking about the people of Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio and
Pennsylvania, the struggling Rust Belt necklace around the Great Lakes
that delivered his victory. “And here we sit, in very different
circumstances.”
The Last, Greatest Deal
For nearly 17 months on the campaign trail, Trump did what no American
politician had attempted in a generation, with defiant flair. Instead of
painting a bright vision for a unified future, he magnified the
divisions of the present, inspiring new levels of anger and fear within
his country. Whatever you think of the man, this much is undeniable: he
uncovered an opportunity others didn’t believe existed, the last,
greatest deal for a 21st century salesman. The national press, the
late-night comics, the elected leaders, the donors, the corporate chiefs
and a sitting President who prematurely dropped his mic—they all
believed he was just taking the country for a ride.
Now it’s difficult to count all the ways Trump remade the game: the
huckster came off more real than the scripted political pros. The
cable-news addict made pollsters look like chumps. The fabulist
out-shouted journalists fighting to separate fact from falsehood. The demagogue won more Latino and black votes than the 2012 Republican nominee.
Trump found a way to woo white
evangelicals by historic margins, even winning those who attend
religious services every week. Despite boasting on video of sexually
assaulting women, he still found a way to win white females by 9 points.
As a champion of federal entitlements for the poor, tariffs on China
and health care “for everybody,” he dominated among self-described
conservatives. In a country that seemed to be bending toward its
demographic future, with many straining to finally step outside the
darker cycles of history, he proved that tribal instincts never die,
that in times of economic strife and breakneck social change, a
charismatic leader could still find the enemy within and rally the
masses to his side. In the weeks after his victory, hundreds of
incidents of harassment, many using his name—against women, Muslims,
immigrants and racial minorities—were reported across the country.
The starting point for his success, which can be measured with just
tens of thousands of votes, was the most obvious recipe in politics. He
identified the central issue motivating the American electorate and then
convinced a plurality of the voters in the states that mattered that he
was the best person to bring change. “The greatest jobs theft in the
history of the world” was his cause, “I alone can fix it” his unlikely selling point, “great again” his rallying cry.
Since the bungled Iraq War faded into the rearview mirror, there has
been only one defining issue in American presidential politics, spanning
party and ideology. It’s the reason Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth
Warren thunders that “the system is rigged” by the banks, and Vermont’s
Bernie Sanders got so much traction denouncing the greed of
“millionaires and billionaires.” It’s what Marco Rubio meant when he
said, “We are losing the American Dream,” and why Jeb Bush claimed
everyone has a “right to rise.”
Nadav Kander for TIMEPresident-elect
Trump in the living room of his three-story penthouse on the 66th floor
of Trump Tower in New York City on Nov. 28
President Barack Obama identified it early, back in 2005, as a newly
elected Senator delivering a commencement speech at tiny Knox College in
Galesburg, Ill. Obama’s hymn to “the forgotten” was his ticket to the
White House. “You know what this new challenge is. You’ve seen it,” he
said. “The fact that when you drive by the old Maytag plant around
lunchtime, no one walks out anymore … It’s as if someone changed the
rules in the middle of the game and no one bothered to tell these
folks.”
As Obama explained it, the American promise was being put up on
cinder blocks, buttressed by massive economic forces. His vow, repeated
in his final 30-minute-long television ad in 2008, was change for the
struggling, help for those who needed it, security for the ones who felt
themselves slipping. Four years later, he would return to the same
playbook to defeat Mitt Romney, casting the Republican nominee as an
obtuse private-equity moneybags aiming to bankrupt Detroit. A quote
pulled from a focus group—”I’m working harder and falling behind”—became
the watchwords of Obama’s 2012 re-elect, hung on walls and placed atop
PowerPoints. He had identified the issue, and as long as his name was on
the ballot, no one could beat him.
But Obama never fully delivered the prosperity he promised. There was
certainly help on the margins, slowing cost growth for health care and
providing insurance to millions, for example. He started some pilot
projects for manufacturing hubs, increased incomes marginally in the
past couple of years and led the nation to recover from a vicious
recession, with the federal government directly creating or saving
millions of jobs. An unemployment rate that peaked at 10% in October
2009 has been halved to 4.6% now, at the end of his term. But the great
weather systems of global change continued under his watch. Ultimately,
he grew resigned to the fact that there was only so much he could do in
office.
The most recently available data tells the remarkable story: between
2001 and 2012, the median incomes of households headed by people without
college degrees—nearly two-thirds of all homes—fell as they aged,
according to research by Robert Shapiro, an economist who advised Bill
Clinton’s 1992 campaign. As American productivity and gross domestic
product grew in the first decade of the new century, median wages for
all Americans broke away, effectively flatlining. Most Americans making
less than the median income, but not so
little as to qualify for poverty benefits, suffered income losses of
about 5% between 2007 and 2013, according to research by Branko
Milanovic, a former World Bank economist.
If you lived in the nation’s great cities or held a college degree,
you probably didn’t feel the full fury of these forces. Average income
declines for top earners were closer to 1% during the postrecession
years. Global change is tricky that way. It enriches those in the
developed world who can handle bits and bytes, create something new or
sell their work at a distance. And it elevates the fortunes of the
global poor, largely in Asia, pushing about a billion people from
poverty into the beginnings of a new China-led middle class.
But for the working men and women of developed countries, many of
whom had made good livings in the 20th century, the price of others’
success could be seen all around, in peeling house paint and closed
storefronts, in towns that went belly-up when one of the two big
employers closed shop. The pressures pushed across the Atlantic Ocean.
The size of the middle classes, as measured by those who earn 25% above
or below the median income, dropped in the U.S. from the 1980s to 2013.
It also dropped in Spain and Germany, the Netherlands and the U.K. It is
no accident that all those countries now find themselves in the midst
of political upheaval as well.
The reasons for the shifts are more complex than the simple
offshoring of manufacturing plants to Mexico or China. Global trade and
new technology also pressure wages on jobs beyond the assembly line.
When combined with rising health-insurance costs and incessant
shareholder demands, companies found themselves unable or unwilling to
give raises. Automation also accelerated as factories turned to robots,
checkout lines retooled with self-operated terminals, and engineers
developed self-driving trucks and taxis. Political gridlock in
Washington, and the mild austerity it created, weighed everything down.
‘I hoped for change and never saw it’
But properly diagnosing the problem doesn’t help much if you live in a
place that has taken it on the chin. In Shiawassee County, Michigan,
which sits like a pit stop between Flint and Lansing, Obama won
comfortably in 2008 and by a narrow margin in 2012. Then Trump tromped
to victory this year with a 20-point margin. Rick Mengel, a 69-year-old
retired pipe fitter, was one of the union members who voted for the
young Illinois Senator in 2008, after seeing him promise to renegotiate
the North American Free Trade Agreement, which Obama once called
“devastating” and a “big mistake.”
“I hoped for change and never saw it,” Mengel says of the Obama
years. “I watched jobs go away, and any jobs that came in were at
McDonald’s. I’m not knocking McDonald’s, but it’s a starter job. It
doesn’t make the car or house payments.” When a friend bought him a MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN hat this year, Mengel took to wearing it everywhere he went. He never believed the polls that said Hillary Clinton
would carry Michigan, because he can’t remember ever sitting down with a
group of five or six people and finding more than one for her. “Hillary
came along and she just never said what she was going to do,” Mengel
explains. “She just talked bad about Trump.”
First he needed to define the bad guys. then he needed to knock them over.
Such voices were easy to find in central Michigan, northeast
Pennsylvania and western Wisconsin in the days after the election. Here
were historically Democratic counties that Obama had won twice, only to
see Trump then win comfortably. They are mostly white parts of the
country, with struggling Main Streets and low college-graduation rates,
where the local beauty salons do better business than the car dealers.
They are places where people start their life stories by recounting the
good-paying jobs their grandparents held, or the long-gone second homes
up on the lake where they used to play as kids. In the 1970s, the bumper
stickers on trucks in Prairie du Chien, Wis., would read LIVE BETTER. WORK UNION. Now the sign in the local Walmart says, SAVE MONEY. LIVE BETTER.
Joseph Dougherty, a former Democratic mayor of Nanticoke, Pa. who
manages an automotive paint store, switched his voter registration this
year for Trump. He was one of many in Luzerne County, a gorgeous river
valley of rolling hills and former coal mines, who had lost patience.
Trump cleared 78,000 votes in these hills, 20,000 more than Romney. “The
Democratic Party forgot about its base. It’s all less for us and more
for someone else,” Dougherty said, explaining how he could betray the
party he was born into. “People are tired of surviving. People want to
go on vacation, improve their home, get a better car, invest in their
children’s future.”
Economists looking at the voting patterns since Election Day have
been able to draw clear correlations between the local effects of
international trade and voter angst. In counties where Chinese imports
grew between 2002 and 2014, the vote for Trump increased over the vote
George W. Bush won in 2000. For every percentage-point increase in
imports, the economists found an average 2-point increase for the
Republican nominee.
In some places, the shift was even steeper. In Branch County,
Michigan, near the Indiana border, about halfway between Detroit and
Chicago, a 3% increase in Chinese imports coincided with an 11% bump for
Trump over Bush. The message of renewed protectionism, new tariffs and
scrapped trade agreements broke through. “His approach was much more
visceral,” says David Autor, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology
economist, who co-authored the study. “He seemed to say, ‘We don’t have
to adapt to globalization. We can reverse it.'”
It’s hard to find any trained economist who believes that’s possible,
at least in the terms Trump uses. The supply chains are too broadly
dispersed, the pricing efficiencies too embedded in our lives, the
robots too cost-effective. Then there are the dangers of massive
disruption, the unquantifiable costs of trade wars, or the actual wars that could follow.
But Trump’s improvement on Obama’s sales pitch was never about the
details. He communicated on a deeper level, something he has done all
his life. His was not a campaign about the effects of tariffs on the
price of batteries or basketball shoes. He spoke only of winning and
losing, us and them, the strong and the weak. Trump is a student of the
tabloids, a master of television. He had moonlighted as a professional
wrestler. He knew how to win the crowd. First he needed to define the
bad guys. Then he needed to knock them over.
The Presidency as Improv
On Dec. 1, just weeks after his victory, Trump traveled to Indiana to
announce that United Technologies, the 45th largest company in the
country, had agreed to his demands and would retain 800 Carrier
manufacturing jobs in Indianapolis. This mostly fulfilled a campaign
promise he had made after the factory became national news when video
shot inside showed the despair of workers discovering their work was
headed to Mexico. “Companies are not going to leave the United States
anymore without consequences,” he declared at the plant.
Three days earlier, Trump met with TIME in his towering dining room.
The Carrier deal was basically done, thanks to a mixture of $7 million
in state tax breaks, presidential threats and promises of tax and
regulatory reform. But it was still a secret. His running mate, former
Indiana governor Mike Pence, declined to discuss the deal when a
reporter ran into him in Trump’s high-rise kitchen. But Trump could not
stop himself. “I’m going to give you this off the record,” he said. “You
can use it if they announce.”
For both conservative and liberal ideologues, including Sarah Palin
and Bernie Sanders, the deal Trump struck with Carrier was an
abomination, an example of government using taxpayer money to pick
winners and losers. But as Trump told the story in his tower, ideology
had nothing to do with it. This was just another tale of a little guy
getting his voice heard.
“So the other night, I’m watching the news,” Trump began. NBC’s
Lester Holt had introduced a segment on the Carrier plant featuring a
union representative and a plant worker talking in a bar. The man looked
at the camera and spoke to Trump, saying, “We want you to do what you
said you were going to do.” Trump claimed this shocked him: “I said, I
never said they weren’t going to move, to myself.”
But of course he had, as the news segment demonstrated. So Trump says
he had no choice. He had to listen to his people. “He energized me,
that man,” the President-elect explained. “And I called up the head of
United Technologies.”
Shortly after he spoke those words, Reince Priebus, the next White
House chief of staff, walked into the room. With the tape recorders
rolling, Trump began to issue new instructions. “Hey, Reince, I want to
get a list of companies that have announced
they’re leaving,” he called out. “I can call them myself. Five minutes
apiece. They won’t be leaving. O.K.?”
He was talking as if he had just realized—at that moment, in the
middle of an interview—that he had the power to do what he promised to
do on the campaign trail. But it was just a show. At that point, Trump
had already had a similar talk with Bill Ford of Ford Motor Co., and he
boasted of putting out three other calls out to corporations with
outsourcing plans.
This is the presidency as improv, as performance art, with good guys,
bad guys and suspense. It’s a new thing for the United States of
America. The reporters in the room, the voters who will read this
article, the nation, the world—we are the audience. A quick study who
grew up in Kenosha, Wis., Priebus is far too Midwestern to be mistaken
for a showman. But he got what Trump was trying to do, and smiled. “It
worked for you last time,” he told the boss.
Missing the Message
History will record that Clinton foresaw the economic forces that
allowed Trump to win. What she and her team never fully understood was
the depth of the populism Trump was peddling, the idea that the elites
were arrayed against regular people, and that he, the great man, the
strong man, the offensive man, the disruptive man, the entertaining man,
could remake the physics of an election.
“You cannot underestimate the role of the backlash against political
correctness—the us vs. the elite,” explains Kellyanne Conway, who worked
as Trump’s final campaign manager. His previous campaign chairman, Paul
Manafort, put it somewhat more delicately: “We always felt comfortable
that when people were criticizing him for being so outspoken, the
American voters were hearing him too.”
Meet the Voters Who Helped Put Donald Trump in the White House
Lise Sarfati for TIME
1 of 9
In June 2015, Clinton’s pollster Joel Benenson laid out the state of
the country in a private memo to senior staff that was later released to
the public by WikiLeaks. The picture of voters was much the same as the
one he had described to Obama in 2008 and 2012. “When they look to the
future, they see growing obstacles, but nobody having their back,”
Benenson wrote. “They can’t keep up; they work hard but can’t move
ahead.” The top priority he listed for voters was “protecting American
jobs here at home.”
That message anchored the launch of Clinton’s campaign, and it was
woven through her three debate performances. But in the closing weeks,
she shifted to something else. No presidential candidate in American
history had done or said so many outlandish and offensive things as
Trump. He cheered when protesters got hit at his rallies, used sexist
insults for members of the press, argued that an American judge should
be disqualified from a case because of his Mexican heritage. He would
tell an allegory about Muslim refugees entering the U.S. that cast those
families fleeing violence as venomous snakes, waiting to sink their
fangs into “tenderhearted” women. And he would match those stories
with bloody tales of undocumented immigrants from Mexico who murdered
Americans in cold blood. “His disregard for the values that make our
country great is profoundly dangerous,” Clinton argued.
His rhetoric had in fact opened up a new public square, where racists
and misogynists could boast of their views and claim themselves
validated. And to further enrage many Americans, Trump regularly peddled
falsehoods, without offering any evidence, and then refused to back
down from his claims. He promised to sue the dozen women who came
forward to say they had been sexually mistreated by him over the years.
He said he might not accept the outcome of the election if it did not go
his way. He described a crime wave gripping the country based on a
selective reading of statistics.
For a Clinton campaign aiming to re-create Obama’s winning
coalitions, all of this proved too large a target to pass up. Clinton
had proved to be a subpar campaigner, so with the FBI restarting and
reclosing a criminal investigation into her email habits, her closing
message focused on a moral argument about Trump’s character. “Our core
values are being tested in this election,” she said in Philadelphia, the
night before the election. “We know enough about my opponent. We know
who he is. The real question for us is what kind of country we want to
be.”
The strategy worked, in a way. Clinton got about 2.5 million more
votes than Trump, and on Election Day, more than 6 in 10 voters told
exit pollsters that Trump lacked the temperament for the job of
President. But the strategy also placed Clinton too far away from the
central issue in the nation: the steady decline of the American standard
of living. She lost the places that mattered most. “There’s a
difference for voters between what offends you and what affects you,”
Conway helpfully explained after it was over.
Stanley Greenberg, the opinion-research guru for Bill Clinton in
1992, put out a poll around Election Day and found clear evidence that
Clinton’s decision to divert her message from the economy in the final
weeks cost her the decisive vote in the Rust Belt. “The data does not
support the idea that the white working class was inevitably lost,”
Greenberg wrote, “until the Clinton campaign stopped talking about
economic change and asked people to vote for unity, temperament and
experience, and to continue on President Obama’s progress.”
Interestingly, Greenberg said turnout among young, minority and
unmarried female voters also decreased when the economic message Obama
had used fell away.
Anecdote, Not Analysis
The irony of this conclusion is profound. By seeking to condemn the dark
side of politics, Clinton’s campaign may have accidently validated it.
By believing in the myth that Obama’s election represented a permanent
shift for the nation, they proved it was ephemeral. In the end, Trump
reveled in these denunciations, which helped him market to his core
supporters his determination to smash the existing elite. After the
election, Trump’s campaign CEO Stephen Bannon—the former head
of a website known for stirring racial animus and provoking liberal
outrage—explained it simply. “Darkness is good,” he told the Hollywood Reporter.
Nadav Kander for TIMEThe Rabble-Rouser:
The former head of Breitbart, Stephen Bannon has pushed for a darker,
more divisive populism, publishing articles that stirred racial animus.
He will be a senior adviser at the White House.
This is the method of a demagogue. The more the elites denounced his
transgressions, the more his growing movement felt validated. Shortly
after the campaign, Trump tweeted that 3 million votes had been cast
illegally on Nov. 8, a false claim for which he has offered no hard
evidence. But when asked about it in his penthouse, he seems eager to
talk about the controversy he stirred. “I’ve seen many, many
complaints,” he says. “Tremendous numbers of complaints.”
In the dining room, a TIME reporter reads to Trump one of Obama’s
oft-stated quotes about trying to appeal to the country’s better angels
and to fight its tribal instincts. Trump promptly stops the interview in
its tracks. The human brain is wired for anecdote, not analysis, and
Trump’s whole career is a testament to this insight. Even when his
business failures mounted, he could always boast about the ratings of
his hit reality show, The Apprentice, or that time he finished
construction on the Wollman ice rink outside his window. “So let me go
upstairs for one second and get you one newspaper article,” he says. “Do
you mind if I take a one-second break?” And then he disappears into his
living quarters above.
He returns a few minutes later with that morning’s copy of Newsday,
the Long Island tabloid. The front-page headline reads, “EXTREMELY
VIOLENT” GANG FACTION, with an article about a surge of local crime by
foreign-born assailants. His point, it seems, is that the world is
zero-sum, full of the irredeemable killers that Obama’s idealism fails
to see. The details are more compelling than any big picture. “They come
from Central America. They’re tougher than any people you’ve ever met,”
Trump says. “They’re killing and raping everybody out there. They’re
illegal. And they are finished.”
A reporter mentions that what Trump is saying echoes the rhetoric of
Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, who has overseen the extrajudicial
killing of thousands of alleged drug dealers and users in recent
months. The President-elect offers no objection to the comparison.
“Well, hey, look, this is bad stuff,” he says. “They slice them up, they
carve their initials in the girl’s forehead, O.K. What are we supposed
to do? Be nice about it?”
Days later, Trump will have a phone call with the Philippine
President, who called President Obama the “son of a whore” a few months
ago. A readout from the Philippine government subsequently announces
that during the call, Trump praised Duterte’s deadly drug crackdown as
“the right way.”
Populism Takes Center Stage
A year from now, when Trump travels to the U.N. to address the world’s
leaders, he is likely to find far more sympathy for this hard-edged
populism than any thought possible in 2008. Trump is all but rooting for
it. “People are proud of their countries, and I think you will see
nationalism,” he says, before describing the growing backlash against
Muslim migration in France, Belgium and
Germany. “A lot of people reject some of the ideas that are being forced
on them. And that’s certainly one of the reasons you had this vote,
having to do not with the European Union but the same thing.”
In this view, Trump will find common cause with Vladimir Putin, the
authoritarian President of Russia who, like Trump, seeks to challenge
diplomatic and democratic norms. For reasons that remain unclear, Trump
still refuses to acknowledge the U.S. intelligence community’s
conclusion that Putin’s agencies were responsible for stealing the
Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign emails released on
WikiLeaks. “I don’t believe it. I don’t believe they interfered,” Trump
says. Asked if he thought the conclusion of America’s spies was
politically driven, Trump says, “I think so.” Since the election, Trump
has chosen not to consistently make himself available for intelligence
briefings, say aides.
He has also so far refused to acknowledge established diplomatic
boundaries. When the Pakistani government gave a long, apparently
verbatim readout of its President’s call with Trump, India’s leaders
reacted with strained nerves. Then Trump accepted a phone call from
Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen, intentionally discarding a policy
enforced since Jimmy Carter, which prompted an official complaint from
China. In response, he sent out a tweet suggesting that such
formalities, a bow to Chinese sensibilities, were ridiculous.
“Interesting how the U.S. sells Taiwan billions of dollars of military
equipment but I should not accept a congratulatory call,” it read.
As he proved in the campaign, there are sometimes few negative
consequences in politics for offending or painting a false picture of
reality. History suggests the same is less true in international
relations, where the stakes are not just votes at the ballot box but
also the movement of armies and the lives of citizens. Among the tight
circle that has formed around Trump, one can sense some unease as they
try to navigate a mercurial boss to a successful first term. There is
talk of strategies for steering him when he is wrong, for appealing to
his own intention to succeed. And Trump himself, true to his
reality-show persona, has a history of allowing his staff to fight among
themselves for his attention. “If I had to describe his deliberating
style, I would say that it’s very similar to Socratic method, just like
in law school,” explains Priebus. “He asks a lot of questions, he wants
answers to those questions to be thorough and quick, and he relies on
the people giving him the answers to be accurate.”
Just a day earlier, Conway had gone on television to suggest that
picking Romney, an old Trump foe, for Secretary of State was a terrible
idea. Some Trump aides told reporters that this amounted to a betrayal
of the boss, who had not yet made up his mind. Trump seemed to enjoy the
spectacle. “I might not like it, but I thought it was fine,” he says at
the dining-room table. “Otherwise I would have called her up.”
Nadav Kander for TIMEThe Reconciler:
After serving as Republican chair during the chaotic campaign, Reince
Priebus will become Trump’s first White House chief of staff, acting as a
bridge to the Washington establishment. The Trump Whisperer: A
former resident of one of Trump’s buildings, pollster Kellyanne Conway
became his campaign manager in August. She is known for her blunt
advice, sometimes through TV appearances.
At the same time, Trump has tried to
curtail some of his own bravado since the campaign. The day after the
election, Priebus says, Trump told his aides in his apartment, “Guys,
I’m for everybody in this country.” Last year, Trump boasted about the
great instincts that led him to support forced deportation for all
undocumented immigrants and a ban on Muslims from entering the country.
He has since backed off both positions. “I mean, I’ve had some bad
moments in the campaign,” he says. But then he notes that his poll
numbers seemed to rise after several of them, including his insults of
Arizona Senator John McCain’s war service.
Trump claims that his unpredictability will be his strength in
office. It certainly has left the political world guessing. He has so
far refused to describe how he will separate himself from the conflict
of owning a company and employing his children who do regular business
with foreigners. On the one hand, he supports a broad policy platform
shared by conservatives in Congress: a reduction in regulations, lower
taxes, a pull back from the fight against global warming, and a cabinet
filled with free-market ideologues. On the other hand, he has signaled
that he is willing to break from Republican doctrine. His designated
Treasury Secretary, the former Goldman Sachs banker Steve Mnuchin, has
said Trump would back off his campaign suggestion that he would give
large net tax windfalls to the wealthiest. “Any reductions we have in
upper-income taxes will be offset by less deductions,” Mnuchin said.
While Trump offered public words of support for the Iraq War at the
time, he sees George W. Bush’s great adventure as a disaster now. He
rejects wholesale the social conservative campaign to keep transgender
people out of the bathrooms they choose, but promises to reward
conservative ideologues with a Supreme Court Justice of their liking.
And he has little patience for the organizing principle of the Tea
Party: the idea that the federal government must live within its means
and lower its debts. Instead, he seems to favor expensive new
infrastructure spending and tax cuts as economic stimulus, much like
Obama did in 2009. “Well, sometimes you have to prime the pump,” he
says. “So sometimes in order to get jobs going and the country going,
because, look, we’re at 1% growth.” The next day, the third-quarter
gross-domestic-product estimates would be released, showing an increase
of 3.2%, up from 1.4% earlier in the year.
He also suggests that some stock analysts may have misread his
intentions. The value of biotechnology stocks, for example, which enjoy
large profit margins under current law, rose 9% in the day after Trump’s
election, a rally of relief that the price controls Clinton had
proposed would not happen. But Trump says his goal has not wavered. “I’m
going to bring down drug prices,” he says. “I don’t like what has
happened with drug prices.”
As for the people who were brought to the U.S. illegally as youths and now have work visas under Obama,
Trump did not back off his pledge to end Obama’s executive orders. But
he made clear he would like to find some future accommodation for them.
“We’re going to work something out that’s going to make people happy and
proud,” he says, showing a sympathy for young migrants that was often
absent during the campaign. “They got brought here at a very young age,
they’ve worked here, they’ve gone to school here. Some were good
students. Some have wonderful jobs. And they’re in never-never land
because they don’t know what’s going to happen.”
Nadav Kander for TIMEThe True Believer:
A devout evangelical Christian and a former leader in the U.S. House,
Vice President–elect Mike Pence will help Trump navigate the agendas of
conservative lawmakers and activists.
Trump’s America, for Better and Worse
The truth is no one really knows what is going to happen, up to and
including the occupants of Trump Tower. “It’s a very exciting time. It’s
really been an amazing time,” Trump says, as the country still tries to
come to terms with what he accomplished. “Hopefully we can take some of
the drama out.”
That’s not likely to happen anytime soon. Following a President who
prided himself on sifting drama through the sieve of careful
consideration, Trump’s methods, for better and worse, tend to be closer
to the opposite. And this is now Trump’s America to run, a victory made
possible either because of historical inevitability or individual
brilliance, or some combination of the two.
It’s an America with rising stock markets despite the tremors of a
trade war. A country where a few jobs saved makes up, in the moment, for
the thousands still departing. This is a land where a man will stand up
in a plane headed to Allentown, Pa., to demand allegiance to the new
leader—”We got some Hillary bitches on here? Come on man, Trump! He’s
your President, every goddamn one of you!”—and then get banned by the
airline from ever traveling again. It’s where a hijab-wearing college
student in New York reports being attacked and jeered at in the next
President’s name, where American-born children ask their citizen parents
if Trump will deport them, where white supremacists throw out Nazi
salutes in Washington meeting halls for their President-elect.
It’s a country where many who felt powerless have a new champion,
where much frustration has given way to excitement and where politics
has become the greatest show on earth. Here men in combat helmets and
military assault rifles now patrol the streets outside a golden
residential tower in midtown Manhattan. And almost every day at about
the same time they let pass a street performer who wears no pants, tight
white underwear and cowboy boots, so he can sing a song in the lobby
for the television cameras with Trump’s name written in red and blue on
his butt. It’s an America of renewed hope and paralyzing fear, a country
few expected less than a year ago. Because of Donald John Trump,
whatever happens next, it will never be like it was before.
—With reporting by Zeke J. Miller/New York; Elizabeth
Dias/Saginaw, Mich.; Haley Sweetland Edwards/Nanticoke, Pa.; and Karl
Vick/Lancaster, Wis.
