Perhaps the most surprising thing to ponder at this late stage in the election is just how close the race could have been had he taken nearly any of the advice offered to him by advisers. “This thing was doable if we did it the right way,” one adviser told me.
When Paul Manafort, a veteran Republican lobbyist and operative cut from Establishment cloth — he’d worked on Gerald Ford’s, George H.W. Bush’s, and Bob Dole’s presidential campaigns — came onboard to serve as campaign chairman at the beginning of the general-election season, he suggested a strategy that was the exact opposite of the one Trump pursued in the primaries. He wanted Trump to lower his profile, which would force the media to focus on Clinton — a flawed opponent with historic unfavorable ratings who couldn’t erase the stain of scandal, real or invented. “The best thing we can do is to have you move into a cave for the next four months,” Manafort told Trump during a meeting. “If you’re not on the campaign trail, the focus is on her, and we win. Whoever the focus is on will lose.”
As is typical with most campaigns, Manafort wanted the Trump team to perform opposition research on its own candidate, so that the team would know what to be worried about and how to prepare for it. Manafort had known Trump since the ’80s and had heard rumors about his behavior with women, according to a source. He wanted to know what was out there. But Trump — perhaps believing that the Clinton campaign would never bring up women for fear of the specter of Bill’s past, or perhaps believing that it wouldn’t matter if they did (the “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody” hubris) — declined. The only information the campaign had to go on was the research the RNC had done into all of the candidates’ public statements.
In late April, Manafort assured RNC members that Trump would pivot to a more presidential “persona.” And for a while, it worked. Trump began using a teleprompter, cut back his TV appearances, and (mostly) avoided courting scandal. His poll numbers climbed, until he was tied with Clinton.
But asking Trump to not be the center of attention is like asking him not to breathe. “His ego couldn’t handle it,” said one Republican close to the campaign. “Hillary understood that Trump needed to be the focus.” As his poll numbers climbed, Trump felt he didn’t need to listen to Manafort. “The worst part about Trump is when he was ahead,” the prominent Republican said. “He’d get into the lead and then he would veer off and start defending his interests and his honor and it had nothing to do with what people actually care about. He’s not disciplined.”
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