Donald Trump did not care for most of the Republican leaders he’d met with after sealing the nomination in early May. This was especially true of Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House, who had promptly attempted to tutor Trump with a PowerPoint briefing during a meeting at the Republican National Committee’s headquarters. Trump had no patience for him—“Okay, Paul, I get the point,” he snapped at the Speaker—finding Ryan dull and supercilious, “a fucking Boy Scout,” as he told friends after the meeting.

But the party’s new standard-bearer was not averse to being schooled by the establishment. Trump did not necessarily suffer from a lack of teachability; he simply preferred to dictate the flow of information, rather than be dictated to. Lengthy seminars and conference calls were never a staple of his executive style. He favored an aggressive, inquisitive approach, learning about issues, and about people, with rapid-fire questioning, consuming what he needed from the answers and discarding the rest.

After eliminating his final competitors from the GOP primary, Trump knew that he needed a crash course on what lay ahead. This was how he came to sit down with Karl Rove.

Trump didn’t particularly like Rove either. He found the “architect” of George W. Bush’s winning campaigns to be haughty and condescending. For much of the past year, Trump had raged against Rove when reading his columns in the Wall Street Journal, many of which were pitilessly critical of the GOP front-runner. On numerous occasions, Trump reached out to a mutual friend, the casino magnate and GOP mega-donor Steve Wynn, asking him to relay his displeasure to Rove.

In early May, Rove’s phone rang. “Karl, kiddo, I talked to Donald, and he wants you to write something nice about him,” Wynn said. “He won the Indiana primary. Can you write something nice about him?”

“As a matter of fact, I just got done writing a column, and I said some nice things about him,” Rove replied. “Would you like to hear it?”

Rove read portions aloud. He said that Trump had “bludgeoned 16 opponents into submission” and “rewrote the rule book,” beginning the column with a blunt declaration: “No one has seen anything like this.”

Wynn approved. But the next morning he called Rove back. Trump hated the column. Rove had castigated the candidate for his endless string of insults, called the JFK–Rafael Cruz talk “nuts,” and had written, “Trump’s scorched-earth tactics have left deep wounds that make victory more uncertain.”

Wynn read Rove the riot act on behalf of his friend. But then he added something surprising: Trump wanted to sit down to talk strategy. “He says he wants to meet with you and get your advice,” Wynn told Rove. “He knows you did this twice.”

A few weeks later, on May 23, Rove surveyed the 900-square-foot living room of Wynn’s apartment in New York City. The setting was fabulous: situated on the 30th and 31st floors of the Ritz-Carlton hotel, the ballroom turned domicile featured, among other things, 15-foot cathedral ceilings, a library, a media room, and a private terrace overlooking Central Park South. Rove had arrived two hours early, wanting to keep the meeting private and avoid the media scrum surely accompanying Trump. Yet the candidate arrived by himself, right on time, without any entourage or fanfare. He, too, seemed intent on secrecy.

There wasn’t much foreplay at the meeting, the existence of which was first reported by Maggie Haberman of the New York Times but is detailed here for the first time. Trump asked Rove what he needed to know, and Rove, in fire hose fashion, launched into his lecture on the contours of the Electoral College.