CLEVELAND—Donald Trump was only nine hours from accepting the nomination of the Republican Party when he walked into a private lunch with 300 donors and ridiculed the GOP. He could have beaten any of his competitors even as an independent, he said. His vanquished rivals were insignificant and their withheld endorsements are meaningless, Trump contended.

And, perhaps critically, the victor of a brutal and ugly primary warned the party brass to get their house in order and hire the people who can get him elected because he’s spending a lot of time raising a lot of money for the Republican National Committee.


It was a stunning penultimate chapter to a national party convention that was already high on dysfunction. The most chaotic, messy and perhaps memorable political convention in decades offered more fodder than even the countless spray-tanned TV talkers could cover from their sidewalk sets downtown. In four days of mistakes by the lake, it was inflamed war between Trump and Ted Cruz—a congressman calling the runner-up an "asshole" while Cruz's top adviser charged Chris Christie had "turned over his political testicles" in backing Trump—that really sent this weeklong GOP unification event spiraling into a vortex of grievances and division.

Experiencing these four days in Cleveland was akin to binge-watching a full season of the Kardashians—and it’s unclear if the target audience of swing state voters will have found the spectacle of the Trumps, a family of one percenters whose successes and flaws are obvious and undeniable, horrifying or strangely captivating and even endearing.

“What we are seeing in Cleveland probably looks more like real life to most voters than the usual political stuff, and that may be good,” said Bruce Haynes, a GOP consultant in Washington. “No one can say this convention was full of the usual politically packaged picture perfect pablum. Voters will ultimately tell us if they are serious about wanting authentic politics, warts and fights and all.”

It began the moment the cameras began broadcasting on Monday.

***

As Day 1 dawned here, Manafort slammed Ohio Gov. John Kasich for refusing to take part in the convention his home state was hosting, setting a divisive tone for a week that was supposed to be at the very least a cosmetic presentation of party unity. Seated in the middle of a long table at a breakfast for 20 reporters, Manafort doubled-down, slamming Kasich’s behavior as “petulant” and “dumb” as he flicked at a plate of scrambled eggs.

At 2:08 p.m. that afternoon shortly after the convention had been gaveled to order, a text message flitted into the inboxes of anti-Trump activists at the Republican National Convention.

"Watch the floor."

In the halls, a ragtag band of rebellious delegates and their hired operatives had just spent an hour racing frantically around the arena, trying to identify or convert more supporters—and convince them to sign forms that could grind the convention to a halt. They paused at Section 118 to share their results. Two hundred delegates had signed on.

Dane Waters, the whip leader of the recalcitrant delegates, cracked a smile.

"They made it a powder keg," he said of the Trump campaign and national Republicans. "At some point the RNC has got to release this pressure."

But that never happened. Instead, the RNC activated its own whip operation, leaning on dozens of delegates to rescind their signatures and kill the upstart effort altogether. The result was a victory, but a simmering anger among a small but aggrieved minority of conservative delegates that would spill onto television screens nationwide.

Monday’s evening program began with a parade across the stage of unlikely speakers, from actor Scott Baio and reality TV star Willie Robertson of Duck Dynasty fame to Navy SEALS with a few politicians sprinkled in. There was little structure and many directorial disasters, with entertainment acts being cut short and speakers running over.

One of the more stirring speeches was delivered by Pat Smith, the mother of Benghazi victim Sean Smith. With tears in her eyes, she was blaming Hillary Clinton for her son's death. But as she spoke, Trump got on the phone with Fox News Channel’s Bill O’Reilly—interrupting the network’s coverage of the poignant moment.

By all accounts, the night’s headliner, Trump’s wife, Melania, gave a well-received, humanizing speech. But after an unemployed California journalist tweeted evidence that a passage of her speech was plagiarized from Michelle Obama’s 2008 DNC address, the campaign was slow to realize they had a communications crisis that would last more than one news cycle.

Come morning, Manafort and Miller were trying to bulldoze through the controversy, first denying the plagiarism and encouraging allies to follow suit. Their excuses were widely mocked.

The plagiarism controversy – and particularly the refusal of the RNC and the Trump team to even acknowledge the problem (RNC strategist Sean Spicer compared some of Melania Trump’s words to things said by Twilight Sparkle from “My Little Pony”) extended through Day 2 even though the evening program represented a rebound of sorts.

“Just when you think the campaign is getting better, this happens and it’s another totally unforced error that it took 48 hours to clean up,” said one RNC staffer, grousing privately in the hallways of the Quicken Loans Arena. “For two days, this was the big story at this convention and it was because no one on the campaign knew who’d signed off on the speech. It’s astounding.”

As soon as the one controversy was finally quelled (an in-house ghostwriter for Trump Corporation, not Trump’s campaign, said she was responsible for lifting the lines), another would surface – one so dramatic it will assuredly be written in history books for decades to come.

***

Donald Trump’s black helicopter circled three times above the shore of Lake Erie before touching down Wednesday afternoon. A line of photographers captured the dramatic return as the Republican presidential nominee and his running mate, Mike Pence, strode confidently across a vast lawn.

Pence was hours from giving the acceptance speech that would headline Day 3, introducing himself to millions of television viewers around the country. In the end, though, Pence’s speech would be largely forgotten because of what took place in the moments before he took the stage.

It was Cruz’s turn first, a set-up act for the vice-presidential nominee and a speech meant to demonstrate Republican unity after a divisive winter and spring. He delivered a speech designed to excite his Constitutional conservative supporters, keeping Republican politicos and the media hanging on every word, waiting for an endorsement. Instead, he implored he audience to “vote your conscience” and loud boos filled the arena.

It was a shock to everyone watching to see such an audacious display of self-interest and disrespect. Trump entered his family’s box 80 feet from the stage just as tension filled the room, seemed to grimace even as he signaled with an upturned thumb that all was well. But the signature moment of the convention—not a speech, but a snub – was only one of two events that played out in rapid succession that sent the four-day spectacle of the RNC—and the Trump campaign—spiraling further into chaos.

“He’s a key voice that people listen to and it was my hope he would see how important that was and the role he could play," said Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, a staunch Cruz ally in the primary who huddled with Cruz in the moments before he took the stage pleading with him to reconsider. "But he made a decision to give the speech he gave. That's his call.”

Trump’s team had said it would go the other way. Just a week earlier inside the lobby of the Westin hotel, Trump’s newly hired communications adviser, Jason Miller, told a group of reporters that Cruz, his former employer, would certainly be endorsing Trump. Similarly, Manafort, Trump’s top strategist, had told reporters on the convention’s opening day that Cruz would likely at least state that he would be voting for Trump in November.

But their actions on the floor that night revealed they knew better, as they joined RNC staffers in encouraging delegates to loudly boo when Cruz left the stage. After weeks of negotiating, it was their only move.

Top Cruz lieutenants had been in contact with Manafort since suspending the campaign back in May and talks had intensified in the last two weeks following a meeting between Trump and Cruz in Washington.

On Wednesday night, Miller called Roe.

“Mr. Trump would really appreciate… he would remember it if [you] endorsed,” Miller said around 6 p.m., according to the Cruz strategist.

“I hear you,” Roe replied.

At 6:30, the Cruz camp sent the senator’s speech to the Trump campaign.

“They would have liked us to go further than we did,” Roe said, when asked whether Manafort pushed to change the language.

“I understand where they want to go, they understood where we were starting from,” he continued. “I think they were less than pleased we weren’t going to go through with a full endorsement.”

The condemnation of Cruz was swift and brutal.

***

Early Thursday morning – on Day 4 – Trump himself tweeted: “I saw his speech two hours early but let him speak anyway. No big deal!”

But by lunchtime, when Trump arrived at the luncheon with 300 supporters and donors, his truculence betrayed his bitterness as he railed against his Republican rivals. He slammed John Kasich, Cruz and Jeb Bush and casually threatened the RNC, which his bare bones campaign is more reliant on than any nominee in recent history, stating that the organization “had better do a good job” of getting out the vote.

After four days marked by controversies, simmering grievances and the sinister undertones of speeches that mostly played to the base, Trump’s daughter Ivanka strode gracefully onto the stage just after 10 p.m. Thursday night and spoke glowingly about her father and revealingly about herself as a working woman, mother and wife. It was, many noted, the first big moment that likely appealed to swing voters and even Democrats.

And then Trump took the stage and returned almost immediately to the darker, dystopian portrait of a country riven by division and grievances. Adhering mostly to the speech that was loaded into the teleprompter—a draft of which had been leaked Thursday afternoon to Democratic operatives who in turn shared it with the press—Trump barreled through 75 minutes of bluster, the longest speech a presidential nominee has ever given. As he slogged toward the end, the delegates who’d attempted to stand and cheer throughout began to sit. In the Trump suite on the club level, Katrina Pierson, a prominent campaign surrogate, stared intently at her phone.

After Trump’s big finish, a familiar promise to “Make America Great Again,” his family slowly came to join him on stage. His youngest son, Barron, did not smile. When the entire clan was arrayed, the confetti and balloons began to drop.

From the loudspeakers, one of the dozen or so songs played in constant rotation at Trump rallies for more than a year rose up from the speakers: “You can’t always get what you want.”

Katie Glueck and Kyle Cheney contributed to this report.

