Jared Kushner and Steve Bannon were sitting together on the terrace on the 14th floor of Trump Tower on Tuesday, November 8, 2016, despairing over the early data.
The exit polls were rolling in and they were showing what most pundits had believed was inevitable—a Hillary Clinton landslide.
Kushner turned to Bannon. “What do you think?”
“Fuck, this can’t be right,” said Bannon.
Kushner paused. “Let’s call Drudge.”
Matt Drudge picked up the phone. After Kushner voiced his concerns about the early exit polls, Drudge’s voice turned incredulous.
“You fucking morons,” Drudge answered. “Fuck the corporate media,” he added. “They’ve been wrong on everything. They’ll be wrong on this.”
Down below in the campaign’s war room, Donald Trump was surrounded by several television sets monitoring the returns when he received a call on his cell phone. It was Fox News host Sean Hannity. He told Trump that he had seen the exit polling and that his advisers were “picking straws” to decide who was going to give the boss the bad news.
Moments later, the phone rang again. This time it was Drudge.
“You are going to win,” he told Trump.
A former campaign official said Drudge took it a step further, telling Trump he was going to win Pennsylvania and more.
“Drudge was absolutely confident,” the official added.
Later in the evening, another campaign aide lifted his phone to show Trump the banner headline on the Drudge Report reading, “POLITICAL MAP COULD BE RESHAPED.”
Trump smiled. “We’re about to find out how smart he really is.”
Drudge’s headline proved prophetic. Trump lost the popular vote but won in an electoral college landslide.
Drudge’s power had reached a new apex in the Trump administration when he took on the role of a de facto Oval Office adviser during the administration’s first hundred days, according to Sam Nunberg. “When he wasn’t on the physical premises, he was always in Jared’s ear.”
It wasn’t uncommon for staffers to see Kushner walking through the walls and yelling, “I just got off the phone with Drudge.”
When Drudge did see Trump face-to-face, he had a familiar refrain, telling the commander in chief, “Don’t worry about the media,” in Nunberg’s words.
“Drudge is great, by the way,” Trump said to Fox & Friends host Steve Doocy in a June 2018 interview. “Matt Drudge is a great gentleman, who really has an ability to capture the stories that people want to see.”
Behind closed doors, the president also voiced his approval of the web publisher, telling a staff member, “He’s a smart guy. Very savvy. Interesting.” Another official summed up the president’s curiosity: “Trump thinks Matt Drudge is a star. And Trump is a starfucker. That’s why you see Kanye West and Jim Brown in the Oval.”
Six months into the Trump administration, a power struggle emerged. Both Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and a top adviser, and Drudge wanted Bannon—the former Breitbart News chief, Trump 2016 campaign chief executive, and then White House chief strategist—out of the administration.
The main issue between Bannon and Kushner was philosophical. According to one official, Bannon felt like after the election, “Jared and Ivanka became totally different people,” adding, “Bannon thought Trump’s kids were political lightweights. He believed Jared was stupid. Jared kept thinking the Dems wanted to work with the White House. He never understood that the Dems’ only goal was to take down the president. After the election victory they suddenly didn’t have time for Steve.”