Illustration by Barry Blitt

In late September, when Donald Trump spoke in Chester Township, Pennsylvania, outside Philadelphia, he wasn’t the only star at the event. Kellyanne Conway, his new campaign manager, who grew up nearby, and who has become ubiquitous on television, was greeted as a celebrity. “Did you see the people asking me to sign their posters and hats?” she asked me in a text while Trump was speaking. “So weird.”

In August, Conway, who is forty-nine, and a longtime Republican pollster, became Trump’s third campaign manager. Steve Bannon, the former head of Breitbart, a right-wing news site that has championed Trump’s candidacy, was named C.E.O. Conway, who is the first woman to run a Republican Presidential campaign, told me that she was proud of the milestone but not hung up on it. “I’ve been in a very male-dominated business for decades,” she said. “I found, particularly early on, that there’s plenty of room for passion, but there’s very little room for emotion.” She added, “I tell people all the time, ‘Don’t be fooled, because I am a man by day.’ ”

When Conway took over, the campaign was foundering, owing to Trump’s repeated insults to the parents of Humayun Khan, a soldier killed in action in Iraq. Polls showed that Trump was losing to Hillary Clinton by up to ten points. By the time of the Chester speech, four days before the candidates’ first debate, Conway and her team had brought the race to a near-tie. Trump, reading from a teleprompter, sounded almost like a conventional politician as he spoke about “breaking up the special-interest monopoly” and described America as “a nation of strivers, dreamers, and believers.” Conway was being lauded as the “Trump whisperer”—the only person who could persuade him to prepare for his crucial showdown with Clinton.

For the first twenty minutes of the debate, held at Hofstra University, on Long Island, on September 26th, Conway seemed to have succeeded. Trump adroitly pressed Clinton on the fact that she had once praised the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, which she now opposes. The comedian Samantha Bee, on her show “Full Frontal,” depicted the start of the event with an image of Conway controlling Trump with an electronic dog collar. But Trump soon reverted to his natural state, bragging about not paying federal taxes, claiming that cheering for the housing-market crash was “good business,” lying about his support for the Iraq War, failing to apologize for his tenure as the leader of the birther movement, and gratuitously attacking Rosie O’Donnell.

After the debate, Trump’s aides were slow to enter the spin room, a gymnasium, where each campaign made the case to reporters that its candidate had won. Bannon, in a blazer and open shirt, kept his distance from the cameras and the microphones. Conway, wearing a royal-blue lace dress, stepped forward to deliver the Trump campaign’s message.

“I love the fact that he restrained himself tonight and he was a gentleman toward her,” she told a knot of reporters. “He definitely could’ve gone where a lot of America was thinking he should or could go, which is to talk about her husband and women, and he did not. He restrained himself, and you know what? Restraint is a virtue, and it is certainly a Presidential virtue, and I think many voters today, particularly women, probably saw that and respected that a great deal.”

For almost three hours, Conway strolled around the Hofstra gym, spreading the message with a smile. Others in the Trump campaign thought his performance was catastrophic, and they blamed the Conway camp. (The Trump campaign has several power centers, and his advisers are quick to savage one another, though not always on the record.) “I view her as an enabler,” one Trump campaign official told me. “Right now, post-debate, I guarantee you there’s a fucking Kool-Aid cooler the size of a fucking wheat silo that they’re all drinking from. I guarantee you, because none of them can accept the blame for what they failed to do.”

The next day, Conway was sitting in the Trump Grill, in the peach-marbled lobby of Trump Tower, which has served as a set for several of the campaign’s famous moments. The restaurant has a view of the escalator that Trump and his wife, Melania, descended when, on June 16, 2015, he declared his candidacy, and adjoins the area where, the same day, he claimed that Mexico was sending rapists to the United States. Eric Trump, the candidate’s thirty-two-year-old son, who is an executive vice-president of the Trump Organization and one of his father’s closest campaign advisers, was dining at a nearby table. Conway noted his presence with a wink, as if to signal that we should be on our best behavior in front of the boss’s kid.

She had already appeared on four morning shows, but she seemed as energetic as ever. She was, though, irritated by some conversations on Twitter. Her assistant, who had access to her Twitter account, was posting the results of nonscientific polls that declared Trump the winner of the debate, and readers were pillorying Conway for sharing bad data. She tapped out an urgent message to her assistant, asking her to stop polluting her feed.

Conway had no such control over Trump. As we met, he sent out a celebratory montage of the results of ten online polls. “Such a great honor,” Trump wrote. “Final debate polls are in—and the MOVEMENT wins!” In fact, according to polls that used representative samples, voters believed, by a two-to-one margin, that Clinton had won.

There were other frustrations. The day before, BuzzFeed had posted an article suggesting that Conway was nothing more than window dressing for the campaign. “Well, I know better,” she told me. “I thought it was really sexist, and I’m not one to run around screaming about sexism.”

Shortly after the debate, Stuart Stevens, who served as Mitt Romney’s top strategist in 2012, and who is outspoken about his distaste for Trump, had picked up the criticism. “Saw last night why campaign managers focus on helping their candidates prepare for debates & don’t live on tv talking about debates,” he tweeted. He later noted that, during the primaries, Conway had helped run Keep the Promise, a Ted Cruz super PAC, and that Trump had criticized Cruz’s wife’s appearance. “And yet Conway still goes to work for that man?” Stevens told me. “To me, that smacks of desperation.”

The attacks stung Conway. She supported Romney four years ago, donating to his campaign and offering it advice. “I was a good little soldier,” she said. “And, even if they”—Romney and his former aides—“can’t give that kind of support in return, then they should at least realize, hey, give us our chance to lose eight of the nine swing states like you did! I’ve noticed a lot of people are very bold and blustery on Twitter, because it’s easy to do that with the poison keyboard and a hundred and forty characters.”

Conway, who has four young children, continued, “For Stuart Stevens to say I, quote, live on TV? You know where I live? I live with four kids who need their mother, in a household that I run.” She added, “This smacks of misogyny and sexism, to suggest that I can’t do the job of a campaign manager—I can only go on TV. How about if I could do all of the above?”