Katy Tur - Unbelievable: My Front-Row Seat to the Craziest Campaign in American History

For the love of God

I play to peoples fantasies... People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. Its an innocent form of exaggerationand a very effective form of promotion.

Donald J. Trump, The Art of the Deal

CONTENTS

This is a true story. It is also my story, which makes it a work of memory. To re-create what happened, I recovered photos, videos, text messages, e-mails, and social mediamy own and other peoples. I also relied on thousands of pages of reportinga stack of papers more than a foot highcompiled contemporaneously by my NBC colleagues and me about the Trump campaign. Given that this is a story that unfolded during more than five hundred days, while I was in hotels, airports, TV studios, and more Trump rallies than I can count, I also hired a professional fact-checker. Where I re-create moments, I depended on video, photos, and, where possible, conversations with the people involved. I cross-referenced my own memory with the memories of those who experienced the same moments alongside me. Most important, I took notes. A lot of notes.

Thank you to Donald Trumps friends, business associates, confidants, campaign advisers, staffers, and Republican Party sources whom I agreed not to name. Thank you to the Trump supporters and protesters who were unfailingly polite to a reporter just looking to understand. Thank you to the Trump supporters and protesters who were anything but polite: you also helped me understand. Thank you to the Trump press corps. Thank you to everyone at NBC, from the interns to the executives. Without you, my reporting, and ultimately this book, would not be possible.

TRUMP VICTORY PARTY

NEW YORK HILTON MIDTOWN

10:59 P . M ., Election Day

I m about to throw up.

Im standing on the press riser at Donald Trumps New York City Election Night headquarters. Fox News is playing on two big-screen televisions, framing a stage covered with American flags and punctuated by two glass cases, each containing a MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN hat. At the center, theres an empty podium gathering historical significance by the second.

We also have a big call to make now, says Megyn Kelly, on the screen alongside Bret Baier.

As the clock strikes 11 P . M ., the Fox camera pans across the studio to a jumbotron to reveal an oversized yellow check mark next to Donald Trumps grinning portrait and the state of Florida. Trump has just won it, along with all twenty-nine of its electoral votes. The ballroom crowd of staffers, supersupporters, and volunteers goes absolutely wild. The journalists in the room fall silent.

If the future is a blank sheet of paper, this news rips it in two.

My phone vibrates. And vibrates again. It doesnt stop.

Holy shit, you called it! flashes a text from a friend who had been insisting, like nearly all the polls on Planet Earth, that Hillary was a lock. I pick up my phone and check the New York Times election forecast. After predicting a Clinton victory for months, it has flipped. Trump has a 95 percent chance of winning the election, it says. Only two and a half hours ago, Hillary Clinton had an 85 percent chance.

Holy shit. I did call it.

In the seventeen months before now, I visited more than forty states, filing more than thirty-eight hundred live TV reports. I did all that as the Trump correspondent for NBC News and MSNBC, and I did it with one audience in mind: the American voter. My goal was to explain what Trump believed in and how he would govern if elected. The job came with all the usual hardships of the campaign trail plus a few new ones, such as death threats and a gazillion loops of Elton Johns Tiny Dancer, a staple of Trumps campaign rallies. I am proud of the work Ive done but also quite ready for it to be over, thank you very much.

Ali Vitali weaves her way over to me on the crowded riser. Shes been NBCs Trump embed since early on, a job that means not only attending virtually every campaign event, but also recording it for posterity. Katy! she says, with desperation in her voice. I am not prepared for the news shes about to deliver.

Katy! she says again. Hes going to keep doing rallies.

At first I dont understand her. Hes going to be presidentwhy would he keep doing campaign rallies?

Trump, Ali says. Hes already planning victory rallies.

My head is a helium balloon.

Breathe .

The panic mounts.

More rallies?

I am nearly falling over.

More taunting crowds, more around-the-clock live shots, more airports, more earsplitting Pavarotti... I cant. I just cant.

The room goes wavy. My stomach churns. Lights flash in my eyes.

Im never going on vacation. Im never seeing my friends. Im never getting my bed back. My brutal, crazy, exasperating year with Trump is going to endby not ending at all. Trump will be president. The most powerful person in the world. And I will be locked in a press pen for the rest of my life. Does anyone really believe hell respect term limits? I have a vision of myself at sixty, Trump at a hundred, in some midwestern convention hall. The children of his 2016 supporters are spitting on me, and he is calling my name: Shes back there, Little Katy! Shes back there.

Anthony Terrell, my producer, taps me on the shoulder.

They want you, he says.

I put in my earpiece and hear Brian Williams and Rachel Maddow digesting the news. In seconds, Ill be live in millions of homes. I can feel the bile in the back of my throat, but before I can swallow, I hear Brian building to a toss.

Katy Tur is just up the block from us after a 510-day Trump campaign, he says. What are you learning from there?

Well, Ive learned that Trump insists that he has the worlds greatest memory, but his vision of the future got him this far. Ive learned that Trump has his own version of reality, which is a polite way of saying he cant always be trusted. He also brings his own sense of political decorum. Ive heard him insult a war hero, brag about grabbing women by the pussy, denigrate the judicial system, demonize immigrants, fight with the pope, doubt the democratic process, advocate torture and war crimes, tout the size of his junk in a presidential debate, trash the media, and indirectly endanger my life.

Ive learned that none of this matters to an Electoral College majority of American voters. Theyve decided that this menacing, indecent, post-truth landscape is where they want to live for the next four years. Look, I get it. You cant tell a joke without worrying youll lose your job. Your twenty-something cant find work. Your town is boarded up. Patriotism gets called racism. Your food is full of chemicals. Your body is full of pills. You call tech support and reach someone in India. Bills are spiking but your paycheck is not. And you cant send your kid to school with peanut butter. On top of it all, no one seems to care. You feel like youre screaming at the top of your lungs in a room full of people wearing earplugs.

I get it.

What I dont get are the little old ladies in powder-pink MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN hats calling me a liar. I dont get the men in HILLARY SUCKS BUT NOT LIKE MONICA T-shirts. I dont get why protesting a broken political system also means you need to protest the very notion of objective truth. Because of Trumps war on the media, networks have required a traveling security detail except for Fox News (which hasnt been as demonized) and CBS (whose main correspondent is a guy who looks like he might be named Majorand is). A couple of weeks ago an advance staffer at a rally told me not to worry. Save for Trump, he said, youre the most watched person in the room. The Secret Service always has eyes on you.

I worry.

I also know enough not to mention it.

The Trump campaign is feeling really good, I tell Brian, detailing what my sources are describing as the crazy, jubilant behavior inside Trump Tower at the moment. Trump himself has supposedly left. He is upstairs spending some time with his family as the prospect of him becomingsmallest of pausespresident of the United States is suddenly a little more real than it was even earlier today.