Targeted by Brittany Kaiser

Author:Brittany Kaiser
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2019-09-12T16:00:00+00:00

12

Straitjacket

AUGUST 2016–JANUARY 2017

During much of the summer of 2016, Cambridge was working on the Trump campaign largely under the radar. Up through to the Republican National Convention, our staff was working their magic across multiple offices, while many of us sat back and hoped they weren’t nearly as good at persuading voters as we’d advertised.

Though knowledge of Cambridge’s efforts on Trump’s behalf had largely been kept secret for many months, events in August 2016 pushed the Mercers and, by extension, Cambridge, much closer to the spotlight shining on Trump. Around the office, we were wide-eyed when reading the news each day, watching our board members and business associates such as Steve, Bekah, and Kellyanne take control of the U.S. presidential race. It hadn’t been too long before this that the three of them were seen as fringe elements, disruptive to conservative politics but not mainstream enough to be working with the real nominee—and having no chance at the White House.

But now the writing was on the wall: the only contender to Hillary Clinton was Donald J. Trump, and Trumpworld was fully entwined with Cambridge and its people. On a daily basis, the news cycle now featured the faces of those whom I had known to be running our company, and they were influencing not just the nation but the world.

Strangely enough, it wasn’t just on TV that I saw the Trump campaign invading CA; they literally, physically, invaded our offices, too. If Trump Tower was surrounded by protestors, which it often was, or if the Trump “inner circle” just wanted some privacy, our Fifth Avenue offices became a secondary campaign office. The boardroom was now nearly unusable to our commercial team—it was always filled with Trump team spillover from HQ. And when the meetings were distinctly commercial, the potential client was usually a Mercer or Bannon introduction being placed in our boardroom for Duke Perrucci, a serious sales executive and dedicated family man, now our new chief revenue officer, and the rest of the team to “wow” into a contract. It was confusing but at the same time exhilarating. Cambridge seemed to be rising into the ranks of the powerful movers and shakers in both DC and New York, and the air was abuzz with energy.

For my part, I’d been bouncing around the United States and Mexico for much of the summer, pursuing commercial contracts. Mexico, to put it straight, was at least ten years behind the United States in data-driven decision making. I spent much of my time with the Fortune 500 companies that were known to be the lead players across the continent and the world, such as AB InBev and Coca-Cola, and I found that even the largest firms like these were hardly using analytics to reach consumers in Mexico. Data was hard to purchase there and tricky to collect, and these companies needed all the help they could get. I was impassioned as I built up our offerings across the border, and all the happier at

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