It’s been one week since Donald Trump pulled off the biggest upset in
modern political history, and his headquarters at Trump Tower in New
York City is a 58-story, onyx-glassed lightning rod. Barricades, TV
trucks and protesters frame a fortified Fifth Avenue. Armies of
journalists and selfie-seeking tourists stalk Trump Tower’s pink
marble lobby, hoping to snap the next political power player who steps
into view. Twenty-six floors up, in the same building where washed-up
celebrities once battled for Trump’s blessing on The Apprentice, the
president-elect is choosing his Cabinet, and this contest contains all
the twists and turns of his old reality show.
Winners will emerge shortly. But today’s focus is on the biggest
loser: New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who has just been fired
from his role leading the transition, along with most of the people
associated with him. The episode is being characterized as a “knife
fight” that ends in a “Stalinesque purge.”
The most compelling figure in this intrigue, however, wasn’t in Trump
Tower. Jared Kushner was three blocks south, high up in his own
skyscraper, at 666 Fifth Avenue, where he oversees his family’s
Kushner Companies real estate empire. Trump’s son-in-law, dressed in
an impeccably tailored gray suit, sitting on a brown leather couch in
his impeccably neat office, displays the impeccably polite manners
that won the 35-year-old a dizzying number of influential friends even
before he had gained the ear, and trust, of the new leader of the free
world.
“It’s hard to overstate and hard to summarize Jared’s role in the
campaign,” says billionaire Peter Thiel, the only significant Silicon
Valley figure to publicly back Trump. “If Trump was the CEO, Jared was
effectively the chief operating officer.”
“Jared Kushner is the biggest surprise of the 2016 election,” adds
Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, who helped design the Clinton
campaign’s technology system. “Best I can tell, he actually ran the
campaign and did it with essentially no resources.”
The Trump campaign, meanwhile, delved into message tailoring,
sentiment manipulation and machine learning. The traditional campaign
is dead, another victim of the unfiltered democracy of the Web–and
Kushner, more than anyone not named Donald Trump, killed it.
The decision that won Trump the presidency started on the return trip
from that Springfield rally last November aboard his private 757,
dubbed Trump Force One. Chatting over McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish
sandwiches, Trump and Kushner talked about how the campaign was
underutilizing social media. The candidate, in turn, asked his
son-in-law to take over his Facebook initiatives.
Despite his itchy Twitter finger, Trump is a Luddite. He reportedly
gets his news from print and television, and his version of e-mail is
to handwrite a note that his assistant will scan and attach.
Television and online advertising? Small and smaller. Twitter and
Facebook would fuel the campaign, as key tools for not only spreading
Trump’s message but also targeting potential supporters, scraping
massive amounts of constituent data and sensing shifts in sentiment in
real time.
Soon the data operation dictated every campaign decision: travel,
fundraising, advertising, rally locations–even the topics of the
speeches. “He put all the different pieces together,” Parscale says.
“And what’s funny is the outside world was so obsessed about this
little piece or that, they didn’t pick up that it was all being
orchestrated so well.”
For fundraising they turned to machine learning, installing digital
marketing companies on a trading floor to make them compete for
business. Ineffective ads were killed in minutes, while successful
ones scaled. The campaign was sending more than 100,000 uniquely
tweaked ads to targeted voters each day. In the end, the richest
person ever elected president, whose fundraising effort was rightly
ridiculed at the beginning of the year, raised more than $250 million
in four months–mostly from small donors.
“I assume he’ll be in the White House throughout the entire
presidency,” says News Corp. billionaire Rupert Murdoch. “For the next
four or eight years he’ll be a strong voice, maybe even the strongest
after the vice president.
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