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.”

Front Row at the Trump Show by Jonathan Karl.

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.”