Donald Trump was adamant: If he was going to do the interview, it had to be in front of a Christmas tree.

I suppose it was good to see the Republican front-runner in the Christmas spirit, but the message wasn’t exactly delivered in that spirit.

Here’s how Trump aide George Gigicos, the person tasked by Trump to get the Christmas tree and place it prominently, put it when John Santucci, ABC’s Trump campaign embed, talked to him about the logistics for the interview: “You are going to have a fucking Christmas tree in this fucking interview that is going to air during the fucking Christmas season.”

A few days before Christmas 2015, I flew to Grand Rapids with our team to the DeltaPlex Arena, an old hockey arena built in the 1950s. There was a full-blown Trump carnival outside: people hawking MAGA hats, T-shirts, and all kinds of Trump merchandise; a smattering of protestors; and hundreds more Trump supporters than could fit in the arena.

Inside, the arena was packed—easily exceeding its 7,000-person capacity. I was ushered into a small room with white cinder block walls just behind the stage. It was sparse, with nothing inside except for my two camera crews, two black leather love seats, and one big Christmas tree. There were no Trump ornaments on the tree, but there was an enormous “TRUMP” poster on the wall right behind it.

I had pitched the interview to Hope Hicks as a year-end retrospective on the campaign, on the journey Trump had taken from that first Iowa trip in 2013, when nobody thought he would even get into the race, to being the dominant leader. But I also knew Trump would ask about his favorite subject at the time: polls. He led all of them. None of the other Republican candidates were close anymore. And he loved to talk about how he was trouncing his Republican rivals. But more recently he had been looking ahead to a race against Hillary Clinton and saying he was the only Republican who could beat her, usually adding the admonishment, “believe me.”

Over the course of the previous several months, there had been more than two dozen polls that included a question on whom voters would prefer in a hypothetical general election race of Trump versus Clinton. Every single one of them that I had seen had Clinton beating Trump. General election polls taken before the first primary voters have voted are essentially worthless, but Trump loved polls. I figured that if Trump, in my interview, was going to claim he would trounce Clinton, I would ask him about those polls.

I wanted to be ready if Trump first brought up the issue. With Santucci’s help, I found an arena employee who essentially helped us break into a small office upstairs where I could print out a list from the RealClearPolitics website that included some six months of Clinton–Trump polls. As the papers came out of the printer, Santucci shook his head and told me, “He’s not going to like this.”

Trump came into the interview clearly energized by the crowd outside, energized by his standing in the race, and fired up about a Barbara Walters special with him and his family that had aired on ABC a month earlier.

“The Barbara Walters special did fantastically,” Trump said to me as we took our seats for the interview. “Eleven million people Friday night, at ten o’clock on a Friday night!”

And how about that crowd? “There are 9,000 people,” he said. “The biggest they ever had was 7,000. We broke every record.”

This was well-placed bravado. And he probably wasn’t exaggerating. It may not have been exactly 9,000, but it was hard to imagine when there had ever been so many people at the DeltaPlex Arena. As the interview began, I asked Trump if he was surprised by the direction of the campaign, if he had expected to see himself dominating the crowded Republican field so quickly.

“Not to this extent, Jon, and not this quickly,” he said. “I mean really it’s very quick and we’re doing so amazingly well and we have such a big lead and I want to keep the lead because ultimately what difference does it make if you’re not going to keep the lead?”

I did not intend to ask about the Clinton matchup until the end of the interview. After all, this was supposed to be a year-end retrospective on his campaign. But he brought it up first, telling me, as he said so often in his speeches, that he was the only Republican who could beat Clinton.

“The last person that Hillary Clinton and her people want to run against is me,” he told me. “And in the recent Fox poll, I’m leading. I’m beating her by five points.”

In my hand, I had the list of all the polls taken since July. There was no Fox poll, or any other poll, during that entire time that had Trump beating Clinton.

“If you look at every single poll over the six months, they have Hillary beating you,” I told him.

I did not know it at that time, but Trump was right. There were, in fact, two recent Fox News polls that showed Trump beating Clinton by five points. The most recent poll had also shown Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush beating Clinton by even larger margins. But, for whatever reason, they were not, at that time, on the RealClearPolitics list of polls. The list I held in my hand was wrong.

He responded, ”If you are so sure that Hillary Clinton is going to beat me, you shouldn’t be interviewing me because you are wasting your time.”

And with that, Trump reached out his hand and gave me a firm handshake.

“Quote the polls where I win,” he said as he got up. “Goodbye.”

Alarmed that I had traveled all the way to Grand Rapids and hired two camera crews for an interview that had now lasted less than four minutes, I got up and walked with him.

A few steps from the door, he stopped, put the microphone he had been wearing into my hand, and said, “Listen, do you hear that?”

“Trump! Trump! Trump!” The sound of the crowd was booming through the cinder block walls of our little room.

“You hear those people?” Trump said to me. “I have to go get them.” And with that, he walked out the door.

After about a minute, Santucci followed him, and then I went out. About 25 or 30 feet away, Trump was about to walk onstage, but seeing me, he started screaming and waving his arms, spewing profanities.

“Fucking bullshit! Fucking nasty guy! That was fucking bullshit!”

As I started to walk toward him, Santucci jumped in front of me and said one word: “Don’t.”

I noticed that as Trump continued to scream, George Gigicos and campaign manager Corey Lewandowski were standing between us and Trump, keeping him from coming back to me. Gigicos finally got Trump to turn, and he walked through the black curtain and onto the stage to thunderous applause. And he wasn’t done yet.

Onstage, Trump went after me, but he held back from calling me out by name.

“You know, I was just with somebody from ABC, I won’t mention who,” he told the crowd. “And he said, ‘Oh, the Hillary camp said they’d love to run against Trump.’ Of course they’re gonna say that…Ask Jeb Bush if he enjoys running against me. Seriously. Ask him.”

I had asked much tougher questions of Trump in virtually every other interview I had done with him, but any suggestion that he was, or could be, a loser enraged him. And although he was enraged, he was also fully aware of the cameras. He didn’t rage until he was out of the room and out of their sight.

Later in the speech, he talked about how great it would be if America could have better relations with Russia and attacked those who had said he was too easy on Vladimir Putin.

“They said, he’s killed reporters,” Trump said. “I don’t like that. I’m totally against that.”

Then, pointing at the press area in the middle of the arena floor, he turned it up a notch.

“By the way, I hate some of these people over here. But I would never kill them.” Pausing for effect and peering out at the press area, he said, “Huh? Let’s see, uh…”

The crowd laughed as the candidate joked about killing reporters.

“No, I wouldn’t,” Trump said. “I would never kill them. But I do hate them. And some of them are lying, disgusting people, it’s true. It’s true. But I would never kill them and anybody that does, I think would be despicable.”

While Trump was speaking, I asked Lewandowski to get him back to finish the interview. I told Lewandowski I had many things to ask about besides election polls—something that came up only because Trump brought it up first. If he came back, he’d have a chance to talk about other things.

And sure enough, Trump came back. The guy who had screamed, “Fucking nasty guy” at me just an hour or so earlier was once again all smiles, like nothing had happened.

After the interview, he asked if I wanted to get a picture taken with him. The true answer was no. Why would I want that? But, not wanting to be rude, I agreed. My facial expression in that photo, right in front of that Christmas tree, captured my mood at the moment—Trump grinning and me staring, without a smile, at the camera.

Trump had insulted and taunted reporters since the early days of his campaign, but there in Grand Rapids, the last rally before Christmas 2015, I sensed he was taking a dark turn. He was no longer complaining about unfair coverage or insulting individual reporters, he was crafting a new role for the press in the Trump Show. We were the villains. His crowds loved the attacks on the press, and he was about to give them more of what they wanted.

Trump’s first rally of 2016 was on January 2 in Biloxi, Mississippi. The Mississippi Coast Coliseum—considerably larger than the DeltaPlex Arena in Grand Rapids—was filled with die-hard Trump supporters. It only took about 30 minutes before this rally got really strange.

“These cameras back here right now, they will never show this crowd,” Trump said, pointing to the press area. “No, no, they’re never going to show this crowd. They’re never going to show it. Turn it. Turn it. Turn it. Spin it. Spin the camera. Spin the camera.”

As he pointed to the camera in the middle, the crowd started to pick up Trump’s “Turn it! Turn it! Turn it!”

“Ah, look at the guy in the middle,” Trump said. “Look at the guy in the middle. Aren’t you turning that camera? Why aren’t you turning the camera? Terrible.”

The guy in the middle was a longtime photojournalist named Stuart Clark. That night, he was working for all five of the big TV networks—ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News, and NBC. As the pool camera operator he had one job, and it was crucial. He needed to keep the camera focused at all times on the candidate. If he failed to do that, he would be letting down all of the television networks.

During the campaign, the networks pool their resources. Everybody needs the head-on shot of the candidate, so instead of having five cameras focusing solely on the candidate, there is one. That camera shares the video feed with all five networks. The non-pool cameras are free to shoot the crowd or anything else they want, but the pool camera must get the speech and only the speech.

Nobody understands this better than Trump. If you watch his speeches, he plays to that center camera. He knows the pool camera shoots the video that the cable networks use when they broadcast live. So that night, Trump decided to try to bully Clark into doing something he was not allowed to do. “It’s so terrible,” Trump said. “Look at him, he doesn’t turn the camera. He doesn’t turn the camera. It’s disgusting—I’ll tell you, it’s disgusting.”

Clark had never been in a situation where a candidate had singled him out as an object of derision. The crowd began to boo him, making obscene gestures in his direction, and Trump kept going, feeding on the energy now being directed at Clark. The rant went on for several minutes. “They’ll fire him, I guess,” he said. “It’s really, it’s really terrible.”

As the rally ended and the crowd left, Clark stayed behind in the fenced-off press area. He didn’t want anybody to take a shot at him when he left. The networks recognized the threat, thereafter sending their own security to Trump rallies. But Trump’s team did not.

The CNN producer working with Clark that night went up to Lewandowski after the incident and urged him to tell Trump to stop singling out members of the press. “It’s dangerous,” the producer said.

Lewandowski looked at him and laughed. “Yeah, right.”

From Front Row at the Trump Show by Jonathan Karl, published by Dutton, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2020 by Jonathan Karl.

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