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

Author:Katy Tur [Tur, Katy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780062684929
Amazon: 0062684922
Publisher: Dey Street Books
Published: 2017-09-12T05:00:00+00:00

March 8. Seven days before the Florida and Ohio primaries, seven days for Trump’s rivals to sideline his rise. It’s midafternoon in Jupiter, Florida, and I’m in the backseat of a rental car, trying to change my clothes. I’m ditching my jeans and T-shirt for the skirt and blouse I didn’t have the energy to fuss over when I got out of bed at five this morning. I had to catch the first flight out from Mississippi to Florida, where Trump is holding a Super Tuesday Round 2 party at his National Golf Club in Jupiter.

Four states are voting in the GOP primaries tonight: Mississippi, Michigan, Idaho, and Hawaii. Forty-six other states will watch and wonder if Trump fever has started to break. Over the weekend Trump lost Maine and Kansas to Ted Cruz. This morning two new polls showed Cruz gaining ground. The professional prognosticators have rubbed those two sticks together to make a fire.

After I change, I check in at my live location, on the courtyard between the eighteenth hole and the club’s ballroom. Then I have to see the ballroom where Trump will hold his victory party. And, my word, it’s spectacular. I don’t mean the architecture or the design. I mean the food: a table of fancy finger food, including the campaign trail’s rarest food form, fresh vegetables. Carrots, celery, peppers, and tomatoes, just washed, glistening in the twilight of a Florida sunset. It’s so beautiful I want to cry.

I wonder if Trump’s staff made a mistake by putting this out where the journalists have access to it. There’s an open bar, too, all the liquor and beer you can drink. It’s nice not to be penned in for a change, but this is weird. The ballroom is filled with rows of chairs, the kind you’d sit in at a fancy hotel wedding, wood painted gold. The first few rows are reserved for guests, leaving Trump a healthy buffer between himself and the press. He doesn’t want to get near us, but he hopes we’ll eat our veggies?

Never mind. Something far weirder is next to the stage. It looks like piles of raw steaks, bottles of wine, pallets of water, and a propped-up magazine. The Secret Service is guarding it like a table of ancient artifacts, which in a sense it is. The wine is from Trump Winery in Virginia. The water is wrapped in baby-blue Trump logos. The magazine, called The Jewel of Palm Beach, has a Trump property on the cover. And the steaks? They appear to be Trump Steaks.

This is bizarre even by Trump standards. So I send a note back to the entire politics team at NBC, and by the time I look up from my phone a crowd has gathered. The whole press corps seems to be poring over this QVC-esque display. And we start to notice some issues with it.

“They’re not even Trump Steaks,” one reporter says. Sure enough, the plastic wrap is emblazoned with BUSH BROTHERS, the name of a butcher in Palm Beach.

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