Annie Karni covers the White House for POLITICO.

The code name for the operation was “Royal Water,” English for the Latin-named “Aqua Regia” acid, which is powerful enough to dissolve gold.

That was how the small group of Hillary Clinton aides clued in to the top-secret identity of the man who played Donald Trump in debate preparations referred to him and his small team.


And for Philippe Reines—the colorful and famously combative longtime Clinton confidant who stepped into the role of Trump opposite his old boss in tense and testing mock sessions—it was the name of the project that drove him deep into Trump's mind for three of the most bizarre months of his life.

Clinton’s chief gatekeeper in the Senate and at the State Department, Reines, 46, was a longtime clutch player in Clinton’s tight-knit and clubby inner circle. But until August, when the 2016 Democratic nominee signed off on his star turn as Trump, Reines had been kept at arm’s length from the ultimately doomed campaign, playing no official role. When he was finally handed one, Reines effectively took a three-month leave from his day job and went full method actor, cribbing from the all-in immersion techniques of Hollywood legends like Marlon Brando and Robert De Niro.

Reines purchased four podiums on Amazon, two for his home and two for the secret office the Clinton campaign lent him at the PerkinsCoie law firm in Washington, D.C. He searched eBay for a 2005 Donald J. Trump signature collection watch, which he purchased for $175. He experimented with a self-tanning lotion on his face. Before prep sessions, Reines began suiting up with velcro knee pads (to keep his legs straight), a posture enhancer (to keep his arms back), and dress shoes with three-inch lifts (to match Trump’s 6-foot-1-inch frame). His longtime tailor fit him for a loose-fitting suit with large cuffs. His goal was not a “Saturday Night Live”-style caricature of Trump, so he didn’t try to replicate Trump’s famous mane. But he wanted to approximate his physicality so that Clinton would grow accustomed to Trump’s looming presence when she saw Reines in her peripheral vision.

He also sat down with Tony Schwartz, Trump’s ghostwriter-turned-tell-all critic, to better understand the man’s psychology. Hoping to fully become the character he had been cast to play, Reines briefly went off his meds (he declined to say which, or if he has since resumed them).

The preparations were conducted in such secrecy that Reines bought a bag with combination locks to store his prep materials while shuttling between his home and his temporary office. He became so anxious about accidentally leaving the bag in an Uber that he put a GPS locator on it and then shackled the entire contraption to his wrist.

At home, or in his secret office, Reines watched all 12 Republican primary debates three times, while standing behind one of his podiums—practice for the physical feat of simply standing still for 90 minutes. During his first viewing, he would watch the debate all the way through, taking notes. The second time, he would watch just for Trump’s lines and reaction shots, and the third time he would watch with the sound off, studying Trump’s mannerisms and body language.

Trump eventually defeated Clinton, but it wasn’t because he bested her in the debates, which former Clinton campaign officials still consider some of the few high points for the former secretary of state during a generally nasty and depressing campaign.

For Reines, who thought he was playing a historic role in helping elect the next president, the months he spent studying Trump’s every word and gesture have transformed into something else, now that Clinton lost and Trump won: They’ve given him a unique perspective into the mind and behavior of the president-elect.

Reines hasn't talked about the experience publicly until now. But nine days before Trump was set to be sworn in as the country’s 45th president, he sat down with POLITICO and opened up about what living like Trump taught him about what to expect when Trump's unusual psyche collides with the unique demands of the American presidency. Looking ahead to the inauguration and beyond, Reines thinks Trump's biggest challenge is going to come from within himself.

"I want him to leave his brain to science, I’m just so curious,” Reines says. “We just need to understand because it’s a simultaneously scary yet fascinating person."





***

Megan Rooney, then a Clinton speechwriter, was the first to think of Reines as a potential stand-in for Trump, back in May of 2016. There were skeptics within the Brooklyn headquarters, worried about bringing the flamethrowing aide back into the mix. But eventually staffers, including policy chief Jake Sullivan, realized that Reines’ famous temper, deep understanding of Clinton and ability to needle could, in fact, make for the perfect fit.

“Usually [Clinton] has a visceral reaction to my sheer presence,” Reines explained over a breakfast of pancakes and grapefruit juice at the Ritz-Carlton hotel, near Reines’ old stomping grounds in Foggy Bottom. “With principals and their press people, it becomes a bit of a Pavlovian response. It’s not like your spokespeople come in and say, ‘I have a great thing to tell you.’ It becomes a degree of, ‘What now?’ I knew how to push her buttons.”

As a staffer, Reines was not a standard choice for the gig, which often goes to established politicians with built-in staffs to help with all of the research and practice that comes with the role. In 2012, for instance, Sen. John Kerry played Mitt Romney opposite President Barack Obama in debate prep. In 2008, former White House counsel Greg Craig played Sen. John McCain. Aside from the help of three volunteers—Jeremy Barber, Kirsten Nelson and Stephanie Cohen, who kept him current on Trump’s tweets and other statements—Reines, however, was basically left on his own.

While subsuming himself in the mind and words of Trump, Reines saw certain patterns emerge—ones he doesn’t expect will change when the president-elect enters the White House.

He noticed lesser-known physical tics, like the fact that Trump never makes eye contact. To train himself to avoid looking at Clinton, Reines taped a big X on the opposite wall and stared at it intently.

Reines and Clinton at the third debate. | Courtesy Barbara Kinney

In the first full mock debate session on September 1 (the Obama team pulled its full 2012 mock debate stage out of storage and lent it to the Clinton campaign), Clinton entered the room and saw her suited-up former aide standing at the podium in character. “Oh God, Philippe looks ready to be obnoxious,” Clinton joked to cut the tension. Reines focused on his X on the wall and didn’t acknowledge her. “I did not look at her for the next five hours,” he recalls. “We took a break for lunch, and I stood at the podium. She came walking by and said, ‘Aren’t you getting lunch?’ I didn’t answer her.”

"He is so annoying. Just unbelievably annoying. God, Philippe, so annoying," Clinton said. To Reines, "that summarized the whole thing. It was impossible to tell who she was talking about."

“Don’t worry about him, he’s just staying in character,” Ron Klain, who alongside attorney Karen Dunn oversaw the debate prep, assured her. “He’s going to go around and just take a little off of everyone else’s plate.”

Reines’ deeper takeaways about Trump, he says, give a hint of how the president-elect will govern. To try and anticipate where Trump might fall on an issue, or what he might do, the key is to think of him as innately contrarian, Reines advises.

He gave, as an example, Trump’s response at the first Republican primary debate in 2015, where he famously raised his hand to say he would not pledge to support the eventual Republican nominee. Before doing so, Trump quickly peeked at the other candidates on stage, checking to see that no one else’s hand was shooting up.

“The moderator said it would be a show of hands. Right there, that's all the information he needed. If all of them had raised their hands, he wouldn’t have,” Reines says with confidence. “He smelled their hesitation, his hand shot up. At worst, he had a 50-50 chance of choosing right. The question didn't even matter. It could have been, ‘Who wants a root canal?'” It was only of secondary importance that it also happened to be his position, Reines says. “He’s one of the most predictable unpredictable people.”

To attribute forethought to how and when Trump tweets, or how he comes to a decision, is to misunderstand the instinctual player who might not be strategic but certainly recognizes the upside of simply being himself, according to Reines. “I think of it like a pinball machine, where Congress are the bumpers, the machine says tilt, no one controls where the ball goes, and the player, at best, is just playing goalie,” says Reines. “Trump is not the player, he’s the ball,” he adds. “The truth is the ball doesn’t know what it’s about to do.”

President Trump will be more preoccupied with being able to declare success than with actually succeeding, Reines predicts. Trump, for instance, declared victory when Sprint agreed to keep 5,000 jobs in the United States. Those jobs, however, were part of a commitment that Sprint’s parent company had previously announced. Those details didn’t matter much to Trump. A photo-op at the groundbreaking of a wall along the Mexican border might be all he needs to declare the fabled project successfully underway, and move on.

Reines noticed that Trump has two modes: basically polite, and what he refers to as “hot under the collar.” The red-faced, finger-wagging, interrupting Trump was brought on mostly by people who just got under his skin, like Jeb Bush and then Clinton. “Jeb’s mere presence drove him crazy,” says Reines. “The pyschobabble part of me thinks it was because Jeb was the only person taller than him on stage. The less psycho-babble part of me thinks that in the back of his mind, he thought if someone was going to beat him it was probably the guy with $100 million.”

On Oct. 26, Hillary Clinton's 69th birthday, Philippe Reines was still in full Donald Trump mode, and wrote her an 821-word email wishing her a happy birthday, in the stylings of Trump. Below is the full text of the email he sent the former secretary of state, which helps show how Reines mastered the president-elect's style of speech. From: Philippe

Date: Wednesday, October 26, 2016 at 11:08 PM

To: Evergreen

Subject: 10/26 October 26th. Such a bad date. Terrible date. She's a Scorpio. The Zodiac people - and by the way, the Zodiac is so so bad, there was a serial killer named The Zodiac Killer, it's true, it's true - they chose Scorpio because it was short for Scorpion. I mean, come on, how much time does cutting one letter save you? It's one letter. And N, I mean, it's not a terrible letter. It's not as great as D or J or T - but not terrible. H - boy, that's such a horrible letter. The worst letter. R and C are pretty terrible too. Scorpion, you know what that is? You all know, I see everyone nodding. It's a predatory arachnid. I mean, unless you're lending, predators are bad bad things. Trust me you don't want a predatory arachnid around. She loves arachnids. Eight legs, 73 legs, 200 legs - she loves them all. So sad. The Zodiac people - again, so incompetent - they say Scorpioans are known for their composure. Are you kidding? She has the worst composure. The worst of all time. Worse than OJ Simpson. I used to like OJ, but then he did that horrible thing to Nicole. OJ never found the real killer. You know who has no alibi that day? This is interesting, they don't want you to know this. Rafael Cruz has no alibi the day Nicole was killed. OJ had an alibi. That Kato guy. Weird guy. Nutjob. Space cadet. But very reputable. People tell me all the time that my composure is the best thing about me. But Scorpianians are all loozers. I hate to say it, I won't say it. But they are loozers. Incompetent. You know who was a Scorpianian? Pat Sejak. That guy couldn't even spell. Literally couldn't spell. He needed that blonde woman to tell him how to spell. So so incompetent. What's worse? 1947. Terrible year. The worst. You know what happened in 1947? She let India and Pakistan break away from Britain. Everything was great until 1947. She's born and boom, India and Pakistan are set free to threaten each other. I love Indians, there's a great Indian restaurant in Mar-a-Lago. It's open year round because the Indians are OK with that kind of heat. Nobody else is. You know what else she screwed up in 1947? She let Britain nationalise the coal mines. Can you believe that? Nationalise! With an S! They can't even spell it with a Z. They don't want you to know, they are lying so they pronounce it the same. But they are lying and spelling it with an S. The British are like Pat Sejak, they need a blonde spelling out all their stupid stupid decisions. But that's when she started to hate miners, back when she was an embryo and she nationaliZed the mines in England. And here is something I couldn't believe. Listen to this, this is unbelievable. There were only 144 million people in America in 1947. Now? 320 million people. Do the math people - do we need the Vanna White of math? No, we can do it. That's 176 million more people. One hundred and seventy six million more people! Since she was born she has let 176 million people pour into our country. Our country would be half the size if it wasn't for her. I'm sure some were OK, maybe one out of every ten. But still. And 69 is a stupid stupid age. I went straight from 68 to 70. Our leaders want you to think you need to add 1 every birthday. But that's because the whole birthday system is rigged. I might not even accept my 71st birthday it's so rigged. We'll see, we'll see. Maybe I will. Gemini is a great sign. The best. That's not me saying it, that's what people tell me. Scorpianians tell me too. Gemini is the best of them all. The Zodiac people say Geminis are outgoing and talkative. Again, they are so wrong. So wrong. Look at me, am I outgoing and talkative? Maybe a little. People come up to me and say I'm talkative. But I don't respond to them to prove I'm not talkative. I say nothing. I just stand there. She says she'll be the youngest woman president. Such a cute line. She hires Madison Avenue to come up with these lines. And they test all these words, and they are in cahoots, the Madison Avenue people, in cahoots with the Zodiac people. Not the murderer Zodiac - who by the way she has yet to catch even though she's had decades to find him - the Zodiac company. They do all this testing and decide that calling me talkative is how to beat me. Such nasty people. They know I'm not talkative, but they say it anyway. So dishonest. Look at me, I haven't even said anything this whole time! I've been standing here in total silence!...



Another sure-fire way to get under his skin, Reines says, is to quote Trump back to Trump. “It was when Clinton quoted his tweet on climate change being a Chinese hoax that he went off the rails,” he says, referring to a moment in the first general-election debate when Trump interrupted Clinton multiple times to deny calling climate change a hoax. “He really doesn’t like being quoted back to him,” says Reines. “I think part of it is he might not remember what he said or wrote at any given time.”

But Trump’s “hot under the collar” mode flashes and then dissipates quickly. “He tends to move on,” Reines observes. Despite all of his lashing out against individuals and political foes, “it would be hard to find someone he has consistently beat up over the past two years. When you kick him in the shins, he kicks back. There’s no such thing as being the bigger person. But he moves on.”

Trump’s digs at Clinton since the election, for instance, have come only in retaliation: He slammed her on Twitter after the campaign joined the Jill Stein recount, and again on Friday, in reaction to her former aides emerging from hibernation to weigh in on the Justice Department’s investigation of FBI chief Jim Comey’s conduct during the election. But “he’s had a couple of glimpses of fundamentally respecting her,” Reines notes. When Trump backed off of his campaign promise to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the former secretary of state, for instance, Trump said of the Clintons, “They’re good people. I don’t want to hurt them.”

Trump’s most famously cutting insults—“Little Marco,” “Lyin Ted”—were also what Reines calls his “in case of emergency, break glass” moves. “He didn’t start out there,” Reines says. “When Trump called him Little Marco, it’s because that was all that was left. It was a last-ditch effort to save himself” after Rubio vigorously took him on.

Trump, Reines says, is most at ease at a rally, where he engages in stream-of-consciousness thinking and talking, rather than participating in a conversation. “I don’t think he’s in a lot of situations where he’s not dictating the conversation,” Reines says.

This might be Trump’s biggest struggle in adjusting to his new role on Jan. 20, Reines speculates. “When’s the last time someone said to him, you have to do X and he bought into it?” he says. “I think the presidency is going to be a lot more ‘you have to’ than he realizes.”

Reines has not been able to give up his Trump obsession, and was glued to the news conference last week, where he thinks the president-elect skillfully dominated the media.

“You guys are bringing knives to a gunfight,” the famously combative Reines says of the press corps covering Trump, joking that he should stand in to train the media on how to grill the president-elect. Reines cringed at the convoluted, multipart questions that allowed Trump to avoid a straight answer. The media’s only hope of pushing Trump where he doesn’t want to go is working together to ask follow-up questions, he says. “He knows that whack-a-mole works.”



***

If the confident Clinton campaign made a mistake in its assessment of Trump, it was in underestimating how the simplicity of his message was breaking through to win the war, even if Clinton was winning every debate battle. They saw the poll numbers—after the town hall-style debate, for example, an instant CNN/ORC poll found 57 percent of viewers thought Clinton won, compared with 34 percent for Trump—and celebrated what they thought were dominant performances.

But after processing Clinton’s loss on a meditative train trip across the country, Reines went back and thought about Trump through a different lens. “With 20/20 hindsight,” he says, “you remember how direct his arguments were, and how compelling they were, if you set aside veracity. If people were waking up looking for something they had never seen before, this was it.”

And part of Trump’s ability to plow ahead while disregarding his previous positions, or distorting the truth, Reines muses, is because he doesn’t experience shame or regret—human emotions that drive many politicians who expend energy trying not to make a gaffe or contradict themselves.

“I think he’d look at you blankly if you asked him, ‘What’s the biggest regret, or mistake you have made in your life?’” Reines says. “Talking about those things were some of the few questions, when I was figuring out how he would answer, where I couldn’t come up with a good answer.” It’s a different mind-set from which to approach the presidency—and part of the explanation for Trump’s “I alone can fix it” ethos.

***

Today, Reines takes great pride in being able to predict what Trump might say, do or tweet, before he does it—and his former colleagues say it was uncanny watching him nail moments in debates before they happened.

“It’s one thing to learn everything that had been said by Trump,” says Dunn. “With Philippe, it became an ability to predict situations that hadn’t happened. It’s a whole other level of understanding of the person you are playing, to be able to do that.”

Reines, for instance, predicted correctly in a debate-prep session that Trump would blame the microphone when cornered—which he did after the first debate, where he said he had a defective microphone. “He puts his fingers on it and leans in,” says Reines, who had noticed that at rallies “he used the mic as a schtick.” But Clinton aides less familiar with Trump’s go-to moves were confused about what Reines was saying when he started yelling at the mic in debate prep. “Who’s Mike?” they asked during a break.

Reines has long since resumed his regular life. But the line between Reines and Trump at times is still blurry in his mind. "It went from me saying things I knew he had said, to me saying things I thought he would say," he admits. "There are times when he says something and I spend five minutes trying to figure out if I was copying him or if he was copying me."