One of the most important people in Donald Trump’s life whom you’ve probably never heard of is “Gabe.” The reason a lot of people don’t know who he is, is that there is an unofficial protection racket set up to keep Gabe’s name out of the press. Multiple well-known Trumpworld personalities chided us throughout the course of our reporting on Gabe, even for some of our more mundane questions, such as, “What’s his last name?”

For what it’s worth, it’s Perez. And in a certain respect, Gabe has mastered the art of controlling Trump’s public statements. The president is known for his rambling asides, and that is where Gabe shines. Those who would speak with us about him said Gabe has an uncanny ability to edit scrolling teleprompter text in a way that fits seamlessly with Trump’s unpredictable speaking style. He knows when to pause. He can follow Trump’s stream of consciousness effectively enough to get boss right back on track, even after a not-uncommon 10-minute deviation. During the campaign, these skills were an invaluable asset.

The intense hypocrisy of Trump’s reliance on Gabe was obvious. He’d spent years suggesting that Barack Obama was incapable of delivering a speech without reading from prepared remarks. And if Trump could do so, even during a campaign defined by his freewheeling rants, it was probably better for everyone if he himself didn’t come up with his own public remarks.

One howler of an example of impromptu inanity came in September 2016, when Donald Trump and his team had announced that he was—ostensibly—prepared to put all that ugly birther racism in the rearview mirror. Election Day was fast approaching, and it was time to at least do the pantomime of “presidential.”

Sinking In the Swamp by Lachlan Markay and Asawin Suebsaeng.

Trump had built his political career and conservative street cred, circa 2011, on his reckless questioning of Obama’s place of birth. It was an early lesson for Trump in the potency of press attention, even when the coverage itself was relentlessly negative. It’s entirely possible that Trump never actually thought Obama was ineligible for the presidency by virtue of his place of birth. But harping on the issue would provide Trump with two very potent political benefits: He would fire up the contingent of the political Right, which was apparently far larger than many at the time believed, that harbored racist sentiments toward Obama and thought Trump was right on the merits, or at least assumed that the black president just had to be an Other of some kind. At the same time, Trump would ensure that he would make headlines. The press, he likely knew, wouldn’t be able to resist criticizing him. To criticize him, they would have to talk about him. And the more they talked about him, the more powerful and prominent he’d become, and not just as a businessman and reality-TV star but as a voice in American politics. So what if the voice was a racist one? His original sin in the arena of national politics would also be his golden ticket.

By 2016, he apparently considered it a liability. But to jettison this from his arsenal would be to ignore what made Trump, well…Trump. Still, the decision was made by the future president and his senior staff that it was worth letting this one slide. In the days leading up to Trump’s first presidential debate with Hillary Clinton, held at Hofstra University on September 26, 2016, Team Trump tried to organize an event at the site of the Trump International Hotel in the nation’s capital. There, he would—however tepidly—relinquish birtherism at long last.