The Woman Who Engineered Donald Trump’s Rise From the Ashes of 2020

DeSantis told Trump and Stepien that he thought Wiles lied and leaked to the press.“Fair enough,” Stepien replied. “But you won, and so did Donald Trump in Florida in 2016.”

Trump made the final decision. “We’re hiring Susie.” She was back in the fold by the beginning of July.

The most immediate prospect for reasserting control over his party—which would also double as a test of rank-and-file fidelity to him and his MAGA movement—would be picking and choosing among the GOP candidates announcing for office in 2022 and issuing a battery of his trademark “complete and total” endorsements. But without any kind of process in place for Trump to make endorsements, he had already begun to endorse candidates haphazardly, doling out his support to Republicans that Donald Trump Jr. and some of his aides viewed as “squishy,” or not sufficiently MAGA, like Kansas senator Jerry Moran, who in their view had been too critical of Trump’s trade policies and was not sufficiently loyal.

At the end of February, his closest remaining political advisers were summoned to Mar-a-Lago to start charting out how they would approach things like endorsements.

It was a strange and empty time at Trump’s club. COVID-19 had scared off some of its members (the next month, the club would be temporarily shut down by an outbreak of the coronavirus). Other members had left after Trump’s 2020 loss and January 6, when it became clear to them the hefty membership fee was worthwhile only when Trump was in power. Being associated with someone who inspired a bloody attack on the Capitol didn’t have the same social clout as being associated with a president.

The meeting was held in the empty tea room at Mar-a-Lago, a dining room just off the main living room. Trump’s former campaign managers, Brad Parscale and Bill Stepien; Justin Clark, a White House lawyer and deputy campaign manager; Dan Scavino; Jason Miller; and Corey Lewandowski sat in banquet chairs around a table with a white tablecloth. After working in the White House and on Trump’s 2020 campaign, they found the setup oddly informal.

There was no set agenda. No one was in charge, and—unusual for Trumpworld—no one was angling to be. Trump wanted to be a political Godzilla, but at the moment he barely had the capacity to send out an email, let alone fundraise. Among the top priorities they discussed that afternoon was sorting out who was going to do mail, and some kind of process for making endorsements, so as to block people from pushing their friends on Trump. Word had already gotten back to Trump Jr. that Senator Lindsey Graham, Trump’s ally and golfing buddy, had been lobbying endorsements.

For those who had worked for Trump since 2016, having clearly delineated roles and responsibilities was a novel concept—an exciting change of pace, actually.

And even if not much came from the meeting beyond an online process for candidates to make endorsement requests and a weekly call, there was also the sense in the group that if Jared Kushner had run things in 2020, it was Donald Trump Jr. who was going to assume a larger role moving forward.

Kushner and Trump’s son were both wealthy, Ivy League–educated men, born just three years apart, but they had very different views of the world. After Kushner he served as a top adviser to Trump in the White House, he and his wife, Trump’s daughter Ivanka, were eager to move on and reingratiate themselves with the jet-set New York crowd, while Trump Jr. looked forward to disappearing into the wilderness of Pennsylvania to hunt deer and was eager to make his own mark on the MAGA movement.

Don Jr., as he was referred to, made clear that when it came to his dad’s political capital, they needed to be scrupulous: Unless Trump was getting something in return, or unless the candidate in question proved they were true believers or allies, Trump wasn’t going to give out his endorsement.

One idea came from Andy Surabian, a Republican strategist who had worked on Trump’s 2016 campaign as war-room director under Steve Bannon and went on to work closely with Don Jr. He suggested that candidates answer a one-page questionnaire about their positions on issues like immigration and foreign policy, and whether they would endorse Trump if he ran again in 2024. Everyone loved the idea, and questions were drafted. But the idea was later scrapped by Trump himself.

Trump’s small team of advisers also needed to figure out fundraising vehicles that could drop money into upcoming midterm races. Save America, a leadership PAC, was formed right after the election, and Trump planned to use that to pay for staff and political expenses. In addition to Save America, a new super PAC, Make America Great Again Action, was created to raise and spend an unlimited amount of money on advertising in upcoming midterms races.

Trump had just announced his first endorsements—for Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary turned gubernatorial candidate in Arkansas, and for Moran in Kansas—but he was eager to start endorsing more and was hell-bent on upending the campaigns of the Republicans who supported his impeachment or he felt had crossed him in the 2020 election.