I endeavored to do the same thing. Indeed, much of the language about the nominee I copied almost word-for-word from Reagan’s and Kennedy’s speeches. Here’s what I said, in the critical part: “To those listening, please, don’t stay home in November. Stand and speak and vote your conscience, vote for candidates up and down the ticket who you trust to defend our freedom and to be faithful to the Constitution.”
That was the vision of how I wanted Trump to campaign and to govern, defending our freedom and being faithful to the Constitution. I wanted him to be a conservative.
But there was a difference in how the speech was received. When Reagan said largely the same thing, Ford treated it as an endorsement. When Kennedy said it, Carter treated it as an endorsement. I assumed Trump would do the same.
The Trump campaign had a written copy of my speech hours before it was given. They loaded it onto the teleprompter. They knew exactly what I was going to say.
Before I walked out on the stage, Paul Manafort—the Washington lobbyist briefly turned Trump campaign chairman and today an imprisoned felon—pulled me aside and threatened me. He said I needed to explicitly endorse Trump, or else. The “or else” wasn’t clear, but it sure sounded menacing. I told him I was giving the speech as written.
Right before I walked out, my campaign strategist Jason Johnson said to me, “now we’ll find out if they’re rational.” What he meant is that it is overwhelmingly in the interest of any nominee to unify the party to win in November. But, given Manafort’s threats, it wasn’t clear that was what they wanted.
When I went out on stage, I didn’t know how the crowd would react. It had been a hard-fought primary, and there were a ton of Trump delegates in the front rows. I didn’t know if they’d boo me the moment I stepped on stage.
Instead, they stood and gave me a rousing two-minute standing ovation.
For most of my speech, the reaction was enthusiastic, as I traced the history of our party as the Party of Lincoln—as the defender of equal rights for all and the champion of working-class Americans—and as I extolled protecting our freedom and defending the Constitution.
What I didn’t know is that Manafort had instructed his whips—the campaign staff wearing brightly colored baseball caps interspersed among the delegates—to quietly wait for me to say the words “vote for candidates up and down the ticket who you trust to defend our freedom and to be faithful to the Constitution.” And then to whip the delegates to boo ferociously.
And they did. It wasn’t organic; it was staged by the campaign chairman. I guess that was the beginning of the “or else.”
The whips were effective, and thousands of delegates followed the instructions and booed energetically. I’ve got to say, it’s a unique experience facing the angry roar of a stadium of 20,000 people. Not all were booing, but a lot were.
I hadn’t anticipated that reaction because it was so against the political interests of the campaign. Eight million voters had supported my campaign, and Trump needed everyone unified to have a chance at winning in November. But I had underestimated the thuggish instincts of Manafort and his crew. It’s simply who they were. And that mattered more to them than beating Hillary.
What got a lot of attention afterwards was the phrase “vote your conscience.” That had been a last-minute addition, and it evoked a strong reaction in the convention hall because it had also been the slogan of those contesting Trump’s delegates in the preceding week at the convention. I hadn’t been there for that battle and wasn’t involved in the delegate fight, and so I didn’t appreciate the raw emotion that phrase had taken on with many delegates.
Regardless, my purpose was to lay out a path for Trump to win and then to govern as an actual conservative. I viewed the speech as putting forth what I wanted to see in order to vote for him—and for conservatives to be able to trust that he’d defend freedom and the Constitution.
Hillary Clinton obviously was not going to do so, but I wanted to do everything I could to ensure that the Trump campaign (and later, the Trump administration) would follow through and be genuinely conservative.
And, much to the happy surprise of many (myself included), after the election the administration’s policies ended up being remarkably conservative. Far beyond anything we could have reasonably expected.
As the summer of 2016 proceeded, my top priority became getting a solid commitment from Trump on judicial nominations, and on Supreme Court nominations in particular. I was very worried that, if elected, Trump might make really bad nominations, and I wanted to do everything possible to prevent that.
At the time, remember, Trump had put out a pretty good list of eleven potential nominees for the Scalia seat, but the list wasn’t exclusive. He had said these were “the kind of nominees” he would choose—those eleven, or presumably anybody else on earth. Contemporaneously, he also said in February 2016 that he thought his sister would make a “phenomenal” Supreme Court justice. His sister was a sitting federal appellate judge appointed by Bill Clinton who had already voted to strike down New Jersey’s partial-birth abortion law. So there was reason to be concerned. (Trump later said he was joking about naming his sister.)
In the two months after the convention, Trump continued to campaign as a conservative. Unlike prior nominees, he didn’t run away from his early campaign promises. He didn’t embrace the liberal policy positions he had advocated a few
