Meridith McGraw on Trump’s Resurrection, Plus a Kellyanne Comeback? 33:34

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Hi, I'm Tara Palmieri. I'm Puck's senior political correspondent, and this is Somebody's Gotta Win.

Things aren't going so well in Trump world, and Trump can obviously see it too, or he wouldn't have been calling reporters over for an impromptu press conference just to shift the narrative away from Kamala Harris and the Tim Walz momentum. I'm told he's anxious. He's wondering why his team hasn't been able to land a punch on Harris. He doesn't understand why she's getting so much attention, why she's able to raise so much money.

fundraising, how she's able to raise so much grassroots money, why the crowds are so big. And you know, he really looks at crowd size. I have some exclusive new reporting at Puck about how he's eager to bring on a familiar face to shake up the campaign, to lead the reset that just won't happen. It's been weeks and they are stagnant. You can read all about it at puck.news.tara-palmeri. Of course, you can use my discount code Tara20 for 20% off a subscription at Puck.

We will get to all of that in this episode. It's a jam-packed episode. But first, I want to draw your attention to my friend and former colleague, Meredith McGraw's new book, Trump in Exile. It's an excellent read. She details how Trump went from rock bottom with blood on his hands from January 6th, facing a second impeachment, and yet somehow...

He turned it all around. He ended up being the Republican nominee overwhelmingly and somehow for almost a year was ahead of Joe Biden in the polls, then in a landslide after that debate. And now he's tied with Kamala Harris. There's still a good chance. I mean, this is a coin flip. Let's face it, this election. Was it all luck or was it strategy? I can discuss all that with Meredith, who also covers the Trump campaign for Politico as a national political reporter.

First, I want to talk about all of the ins and outs of Trump world right now. It's been kind of a mess. I mean, Thursday, that press conference, Meredith, what did you make of that? To me, it felt like Trump was just like, OK, I need to get the cameras on me. I know that there were reporters out there for an off the record. And when Trump heard about it, he told them to go to Mar-a-Lago and he set up this impromptu press conference there.

It felt like they were throwing a Hail Mary, right? I mean, to me, this really felt like vintage Trump. We saw him do this time and time again in 2016. And then when he was in the White House too. I mean, as a White House reporter, and for me covering the White House with you, he would do this all the time. He would just randomly...

call a press conference or do a press gaggle. And it would be to capture everybody's attention. And he, I write about in the, in my book, he really delighted in seeing the TV chyrons change the

right off the bat once he opened his mouth and started making news. And so for him, I think there were a few things at play with this press conference yesterday. For one, Vice President Kamala Harris is getting a lot of heat for the fact that she hasn't sat down for a serious interview

since June with Morning Joe, which would be a more friendly forum for her to do an interview anyways. He believes that she'll make a mistake. I think he has a deep-seated belief that she needs to have an unscripted moment and then that will cause her to tumble, don't you think?

Yeah. And so I think that was a big part of it. And then, you know, frankly, he's just trying to regain his footing and capture some attention. This past week, he saw all the spotlight on Harris and Walls and that rollout. And so he really wanted to redirect all the eyeballs back on him. And, you know, he definitely did it. He had heard that

Like you said, there were all these national reporters down there to get a briefing from Trump's advisers on the state of the race. And he used that as an opportunity to bring them to Mar-a-Lago and let them pepper him with all sorts of questions for an hour. Yeah, he said some pretty bizarre things, too, like comparing his crowd size at January 6th to the crowd sizes that Martin Luther King had.

would draw. It's kind of nuts because you would think that the last thing you'd want to do was revel in January 6th, right? Also, his obsession with crowd size, bizarre. He talked about abortion, which is like the third rail that he doesn't like to talk about and neither does his campaign. He suggested that he might make the abortion pill Mifepristone illegal. He was all over the place. Like, was there anything to you that really jumped out as truly, you know, shooting himself in the foot jarring or is that just...

what we get all the time. So it doesn't ever really stick anyway. Yeah, it was hard to think of one thing that really stuck out because it was so all over the place. And reporters were taking the opportunity to ask him about everything, right? That's what you do. I did think he became the most animated though when he was talking about

crowd sizes. And you've seen this past week how Harrison walls have been filling stadiums and pulling in Trump size rally crowds. And that's not something that we saw from president Biden at all. And so I can imagine for Trump who is so obsessed with crowd sizes and always has been that seeing those visuals has been, um,

I'm sure jarring for him. And it was very clear he was rattled by that yesterday. Yeah, I know from my reporting that Trump is very concerned about the data. He's seeing the fundraising that Harris is hauling in grassroots fundraising, like the kind of money that he raises even more so. And clearly he's realizing that the messaging is not working. The DEI stuff, the gender, the race third rail stuff.

It's not working. And I know that he's frustrated and he's starting to take outside voices outside of the campaign more seriously than his team, as he perceives that they're a little flat footed on Kamala Harris. He's also clearly from that press conference, he made it very clear that he's unhappy that he's not running against Joe Biden. He thinks that he should be right. He seems to have not really moved on himself. And I think he also thinks that his campaign hasn't moved on. I have some new reporting that he wants to bring his favorite comfort creature back into the fold, Kellyanne Conway.

He has nostalgia for her in 2016. He remembers her as being an advisor of a campaign that actually won. And he thinks that she can help him with messaging around a female candidate like she did with Hillary Clinton. So that is something that I've heard everywhere.

that they are seriously talking about. There was a meeting in Bedminster this past weekend with Laura Trump, who's also supportive of bringing Kellyanne Conway into the fold. Also, Kellyanne had a call with J.D. Vance, who she's been a bit at odds with to clear the air, which is seen as a way to sort of patch things up, because she really lobbied hard for Marco Rubio to be the vice president. There was a feeling afterwards that she was leaking stories that made J.D. Vance look bad.

She denies that. But there was clearly a need to sort of make sure that that was solved before she's brought back in. But I mean, she's already on retainer with the RNC. She's making $30,000 a month, according to FEC reports. So it's not like she isn't already advising them in some capacity. But, you know, I'm told that she would be basically at the same level as Susie Wiles, whose campaign manager would be a lateral move. Again, it's something Trump wants. They're still discussing it.

There's a 50-50 chance it actually happens. But I think it shows you the level of desperation that Trump is at, that he thinks he needs some new blood to inject into the campaign to really change the strategy. What are you hearing, Meredith? Well, I love that you say new blood. And it's Kellyanne Conway, who is one of the OGs from Trump world who's been with him since the very beginning. But I think what you were saying about Trump wanting to recreate the magic in 2016, I mean, that is something he has...

been thinking about for a long time. And I write in the book that, you know, after he got back to Palm beach, he really wanted to like have a small scrappy crew around him. And that was one of the things they were thinking about when they were putting together his, his 2024 operation. And now here we are with Kellyanne Conway, you know, who played a key role in 2016, you

once again being considered to come back into the fold. Yeah, she has a bit of that, I guess you could say superstition about it too. I mean, I saw her at the RNC and she was wearing the same dress that they wore on the night of their victory party. And she was proudly wearing that. So I think they all have a bit of superstition about 2016. Like, how do we make that happen again? Yeah. How do we like recapture that magic and recapture that, that

that je ne sais quoi that maybe they haven't found this time around yet. What's the struggle, though? Like, what is his campaign advising him to do right now? And is he even listening? Well, you know, we've seen how his campaign is still focusing on these key battleground states. But even so, we're seeing Donald Trump do a rally tonight

in Bozeman, Montana. You know, Montana is not a state that I think Trump should be worried about in 2024. And yet he's going to be doing his rally there. You know,

Trump said in a truth social post yesterday that I thought was kind of interesting because it wasn't a normal Trump truth post, but he said this election is about immigration, the economy, you know, preventing World War III. He laid out these policy points that he thinks the election is about, and yet it

it seems like so much of the election in this moment is about personality. And I think, um, at the moment it just feels like it's a popularity contest and it's not anything that's rooted in, um, serious policy discussions at all. It's, you know, talks about, uh,

J.D. Vance and his background or Governor Walz. So I wonder how long that lasts.

And if we're going to see any more sort of like substantive conversation about the issues at hand. Yeah, you're absolutely right. This has definitely not been a very policy heavy campaign. It's been personalities driven from both sides, really. It's interesting. I think maybe as a reflective of the audience of the voters, how much they can really handle.

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All right. Well, I really want to get into this book because it's great. I just got it two days ago when it came out, Trump in Exile. And it's a page turner, like I said, five times already. But I really am enjoying it. I'm already at page 50. And I started last night, late at night. So I really like the fact that you go into the dark period. You have little details in there like...

Each chapter title is based on his Spotify playlist. So at Mar-a-Lago, Trump famously likes to play from his Spotify playlist on the patio for everyone to listen to. And it's so random. It's like everything from like opera, Andrew Lloyd Webber to the Rolling Stone and the Backstreet Boys. For example, chapter three is I Want It That Way. Chapter eight is Pinball.

wizard. Nine is memory. I'm standing still. It's really great. And I think it kind of lets you get into Trump's mind. You have so many details, just even the way he walked out of the White House and the vibe and the mood and how Melania is all wearing black. And then she drops into Mar-a-Lago and she's in some like Gucci, colorful, I guess you could say like caftan. And I like how you also have some small details like

that everyone around him knew not to talk about a presidential library.

which is something you would normally do after you step down as president. You think about your legacy. You write a book, presidential library. Trump had no interest in that. That library would have been seen as a political graveyard or cemetery like you wrote. So I really liked reading it because I also remember being in Palm Beach at the time. I was, I guess you could say, a COVID refugee at that time. I really just had an apartment for a few months that I could rent. So I took my friend up on it. It was my little Fauci free zone. But it was a very bizarre thing.

thing because in Washington, there was PTSD from the horror that just happened on January 6th, right? Everyone was still shaking, Republicans and Democrats. Some of the Republicans I talked to were like, I cannot even ever talk about that day again.

and he's being prosecuted. You know, people are strategizing. They don't know how to answer questions. How do they stand on this? And then you have Palm Beach where like people are just coming into Mar-a-Lago to kiss the ring and see him and praise him. And he's getting a totally different vibe, which I saw. I was like, wow, everyone from the GOP is still coming. It's still the GOP universe. How much did his experience in Mar-a-Lago make him believe that a comeback was possible? I think that's

one of the reasons I wanted to write this book is that period from when he got down to Palm Beach to, of course, when he made his presidential announcement, there are so many stories and moments and people around him that, um,

really changed the destiny of American politics. It certainly changed Trump's destiny in a lot of ways. And I just felt it was worthy of doing a deep dive. And so I really wanted to bring people inside the world of Mar-a-Lago and Palm Beach and Bedminster and the places where Trump was spending time. But you know Palm Beach well. It is so true that

it transformed into this kind of, especially Mar-a-Lago, the center of

the GOP universe. I mean, if you just think about some of the big conservative figures who moved down to South Florida, especially around Palm Beach after Trump and, you know, all the events that happened at Mar-a-Lago in that era. All of the fundraisers. People wanted to host fundraisers out there after January 6th. Right. Because they wanted his endorsement. Trump had this real power over a

good chunk of the Republican Party. And I think once Republican leadership understood that they weren't going anywhere and they were so essential for them to be able to have any sort of success in the future, they could not leave Trump. They could not walk away from Trump and Trump and the Republican Party at that point.

were already so intertwined. And so from people coming down to Mar-a-Lago to attend these fundraisers, or I wrote about, I went to two different movie premieres at Mar-a-Lago and

the figures, the lawmakers, the right-wing influencers that would come here, the donors, it really became the center of the universe for Trump world. And, you know, for Trump, who was cast out of Washington, I mean, he lost the election and then you had Republican leadership denouncing him on the, you know, on the floors of the Senate and

and Congress and casting him aside. At Mar-a-Lago, that's a place where he's always surrounded by people who love him, who support him,

cheering him on and telling him what he wants to say. It's his court. Yeah, it seemed like this protective cocoon around him in this period. So there's, I think, so much that you can learn about where we're at now just from how he navigated that time and the people who were around him and what he was doing. You wrote that even as he was driving from the airport to Mar-a-Lago when they landed in Palm Beach that he saw people

all these signs and people cheering and waiting for him. And he thought in his heart, oh, wow, I can have a comeback. Just seeing the crowds greeting him made him believe it was possible because he thought he had the grassroots, right? Yeah, that like these people are with him. They were all lined up along Southern Boulevard there in West Palm Beach. And right before you cross that bridge with signs and

When he got back to Mar-a-Lago too, he was greeted by people cheering for him. So he was given this hero's welcome that he really desired and wanted right when he got back. And that sort of continued. He dove right into putting his hand back into politics again.

And then, of course, there was the fateful lunch with Kevin McCarthy at Mar-a-Lago that really sent a message back to Washington after January 6th that Trump was going to be a big player in.

In Republican politics, no matter what, moving forward. Yeah. So you better not vote to impeach him. Right. And that was interesting because I didn't realize that Trump was the one who was so keen to push out the picture and made sure there was a photographer to document that.

Kevin McCarthy was there to kiss the ring, even though Kevin McCarthy did meet with him. But he was actually there for a fundraiser with Wilbur Ross in Palm Beach. But Trump knew what he was doing. They were being strategic. Speaking of strategy, though, they also sort of threatened to create a third party, the Patriot Party, which you really kind of go into detail about how that kept Republicans in line to like leadership.

like Ronna McDaniel, the RNC and others that it made them realize, okay, this guy could actually destroy our party. Well, that was something in my interviews with people. They said they really didn't take Trump's threat

all that seriously. And yet one of Trump's little superpowers, if you will, is his chaos and is how unexpected he is. I wrote in the book, he's sort of like the spinning top where you never know where it's going to turn next. So whether you are a foreign leader or you are

a political ally, you really don't know what Trump is going to do. So even if they didn't really take that threat all that seriously, it's still Trump. And you don't know, he might actually make up his mind and say, oh, I'm going to abandon the party. So that's always something in the back of their minds. And it was also around, of course, the same time as impeachment. So it was a bit of a wink and a nod that

you know, watch it. I'll take all of my supporters and, you know, we can move on if we want and we have that power. I think that what you also made pretty clear was that there was a strategy. It wasn't all luck that Trump came back. It wasn't just the indictments, right? They had to prove that they could take out leaders that would resist him. And they really focused on Liz Cheney, right? They, you know, sent Matt Gaetz out there, rile up the base and show her that,

we are bigger than you. Yeah. And I mean, you, I remember you traveled to Wyoming and you reported from out there during that time. Um, I was reporting on all of it too. I mean,

They were so determined to take down Cheney and to take down all those Republicans who had voted for Trump's impeachment to really send a sign, a signal there. And it was an all hands on deck effort to oust Cheney from the recruitment of Harriet Hageman to, you know, everything that they did. And there was also this, I think, surprise from Trump's team, too, of, you know,

Liz Cheney understood her political fate early on. You know, she wasn't campaigning heavily. She sort of understood that what she was doing was more about, you know, taking a principled stand and her own legacy in the end. So they get rid of Liz Cheney in the 2022 midterms, right? But not many of his candidates actually get elected. Dr. Ah,

Kerry Lake, or Herschel Walker. They're all seen as crazy right-wingers that can't be elected. The party's pissed at Trump, right? It's almost like he went up and then he dropped right back down again. You saw a surge in the polls, at least in the early primary states in New Hampshire, for Ron DeSantis. He's this...

you know, shiny white knight. All of the donors are tired of Trump. They want him gone. They're ready to put as much cash as needed to get Ron DeSantis ready to go and ready to be the new face of the Republican Party. There was a lot of hope. And then pudding fingers comes along, would you say? Can you explain how they were able to disassemble Montezuma?

Ron DeSantis, although I don't think Ron DeSantis had a lot of talent to begin with. I saw him in New Hampshire and I thought he was a paper tiger. But still, he could have lasted for a lot longer if it wasn't for Trump's team, many of them ex-DeSantis staffers who frankly hated him and knew how to take him down. If you think back to that story arc, and I try to walk people through it, from the midterm results, Ron DeSantis just...

kicks ass in Florida against Charlie Crist. And he's suddenly seen as like the second coming for the Republican party. If you remember like the wall street journal, New York post, um, Fox news, Murdoch, everyone. Yes, exactly. Um, we're singing to Santa's praises and, you know, wagging their finger at Trump over his decisions in the midterms. And it was like, uh, the,

The next low point after January 6th for him, he was really, it was another moment where Republicans were like, okay, like, are we really going to do this again? Right. The New York Post put on like the 10th page, Florida man announces election, right? Exactly. And like, there weren't any star lawmakers at his announcement at Mar-a-Lago the week after the midterms. Barely family members. Yes. Yes. And then like the months after he announced too,

Where he was floundering. He had the dinner with Kanye West and Nick Fuentes. He launched his NFTs. He teased this big announcement he was going to do. And then it was an NFT collection, which actually Trump loved because he loved the cartoons on them. He loved the idea of like...

his supporters being able to cash in on these things, but it was widely panned. And even some of his own advisors were like, what, what are we doing here? And then he had the, his comments about the constitution. It was really, things were going sideways. But it,

It was right after the Nick Fuentes dinner that MAGA Inc, the super PAC that was for Trump, they had a meeting in Alexandria in a conference room and they

The vibes were grim, I describe in the book, but they went over some of the polling that they'd done on DeSantis and Trump. And it was in that moment that they really started to start strategizing from the Super PAC side how they were going to take down DeSantis. And flash forward

A little bit later, that's when they started thinking about this putting fingers commercial that really has become sort of infamous for the 2024 primaries and cycle.

That came out of a story from Tallahassee about DeSantis eating, putting with his fingers. He denied the episode, said he didn't remember it, but it really was a part of Tallahassee lore and was turned into this ad. But, you know, Trump early on was attacking DeSantis. He had that like multi-paragraph screed against DeSantis that he was criticized for. He said,

He knew that DeSantis was going to be really his only major threat to getting the Republican nomination. They had all really written off Nikki Haley pretty early on. Um,

But it was really DeSantis that they were determined to take down early. And they really did. OK, even before this, though, Roe versus Wade is overturned. Abortion has long been Trump's kryptonite, right? Like he'll claim credit for it when he's in front of evangelicals in the right crowd. But then he also realizes that basically kills him politically among general election voters, women, etc.

et cetera. What was it like when he found out that Roe versus Wade was overturned? Was he actually happy about it? Well, I have a scene in there where the day that it was actually overturned, he was actually sitting in his office with Chris LaCivita and LaCivita got a notification on his cell phone and turned to Trump and said, like, you actually did it. You overturned Roe. But

Trump really had been skeptical of how Republicans had handled the issue of abortion. He had advised some of the candidates that he had endorsed that they need to change how they talk about abortion. That being said, he endorsed people like Tudor Dixon or like

Doug Mastriano, who had more extreme positions on it, but he really understood that this was going to be an issue for the party. And, you know, other people in Republican leadership did too. Ronna McDaniel and Kellyanne Conway were at a Republican donor event. And I wrote how they were in a

they were heading to the airport together and they called Dr. Oz to talk to him about the issue of abortion, that that was going to be a big problem in 2022. And there were other people who just knew that they didn't have the right messaging with all of it. And, you know, there was a lot of talk of that red wave in 2022. And there was one advisor who said that Trump

even though he was like pushing the red wave and everything on truth social, he understood that abortion could end up being a big problem for them. Yeah. As I'll never forget the way that he learned about how to speak about abortion was to use the L I R R is in the long Island railroad life incest and rape are the exceptions. Yeah.

That's how much he had really thought about the issue. What do you think was the seminal moment that got us back to where we are right now, where Trump is the leader of the Republican Party? That's a great question, Tara. I don't think there was one moment. It was a lot of

you know, different people, different little decision trees within the GOP that got us where we were. And I hope when you read the book, you can sort of follow along with those breadcrumbs and see how it all sort of added up to where we are now. Okay. And I highly recommend reading it. Trump in Exile by Meredith McGraw. Go to Amazon, run to Barnes & Noble. If that's still open, I don't even know anymore. Read it.

Hate read it. Love read it. I don't know. Just do what you got to do because it's a great book in a crazy way. It's a dark comeback story. And here we are. And here we are. That was another episode of Somebody's Got to Win. I'm your host, Tara Palmieri. I want to thank my producers, Christopher Sutton and Connor Nevins. If you like this show, please subscribe, rate it, share it with your friends. If you like my reporting, go to puck.news slash Tara dash Palmieri and you can use the discount code Tara20 for 20% off.

a subscription at Puck. I promise you won't regret it. I'll be back next week.