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.’ ” View more 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?” She said that she was trying to spend more time on campaign management, but for Trump a measure of her success was her presence on television. “I’ve cut my TV time in half,” she told me. “And he’s, like, ‘I didn’t see you on TV in the last hour. Where are you?’ I’m, like, ‘Mr. Trump, managing the campaign means talking to the state directors and the mail house and the R.N.C.’ ” Conway worked for Newt Gingrich in the nineties, when he was rising in the House of Representatives, and in 2012, when he ran for President. Gingrich, who is one of Trump’s most prominent supporters, told me that he had recently observed Conway and Trump on Trump’s plane. “They have very good chemistry,” he said, adding that previous advisers had made the mistake of trying “to reshape him.” Gingrich said, “That’s not going to happen, because he’s a seventy-year-old adult billionaire who has been on a top-rated TV show, had the No. 1 book in the country, beat sixteen people, got the record number of votes as the nominee. He actually thinks he knows something.” Gingrich went on, “Her view is that she needs to intuit what he’s good at and what he’s bad at, and how to deal with them.”

Running Donald Trump’s campaign is like being the drummer in Spinal Tap: those who take the position tend to disappear in mysterious circumstances. First, there was Corey Lewandowski, an operative from New Hampshire, who oversaw Trump’s rise from reality-television star to Republican-primary front-runner, but who was seen as indulging his erratic behavior. “Corey was ideal for that first phase, because Trump just wanted someone who would follow orders,” a Trump adviser told me. “There was never any juncture during which Corey would ever say to him, ‘Well, wait a minute, Mr. Trump. Maybe that’s not a good idea.’ ” Lewandowski had near-total control of the campaign, and he gradually alienated Trump’s eldest children, Donald, Jr., Ivanka, and Eric, and Ivanka’s husband, Jared Kushner, the owner of the New York Observer. “The Trump children didn’t like Corey, because they thought Corey was becoming too familiar,” the Trump adviser said. “He started regarding himself as another Trump child. Corey, who is from a relatively poor, working-class background, became quite mesmerized with the life style.” In March, Trump hired Paul Manafort, a Republican lobbyist who was a partner in the firm Black, Manafort, Stone & Kelly. His job was to make sure that Republican delegates would not be able to stage a coup against Trump at the Convention. The end for Lewandowski came when Manafort and Kushner allied against him. “When Manafort was brought on, Corey and Manafort basically went head to head,” the Trump campaign official said. “Jared, the son-in-law, who is a snaky little motherfucker, a horrible human being, hated Corey, so Jared sided with Paul to get rid of Corey.” Manafort became the campaign chairman in May, and took full control when, a month later, Lewandowski was fired. But Manafort turned out to be too blunt to get Trump to do his bidding. “You have to know how to influence Trump’s thinking, and that takes a mix of diplomacy and psychiatry,” the Trump adviser told me. Manafort, he claimed, had “no chemistry with Donald.” Manafort wanted Trump to pay for polling and focus groups to test TV advertisements. “Donald went berserk,” a Republican close to Manafort said. Trump is known to disdain the traditional tools of politics. He thinks “this is all just a public-relations exercise,” the Trump adviser said, “and he’s a master of public relations, and the rest is all bullshit.” Kushner sided with Trump. By early August, Manafort was further weakened, by scandals related to political work that he had done in Ukraine. After the Times reported that he might have received millions of dollars in cash payments from a party aligned with Vladimir Putin, there was open speculation about how long he could keep his job. “When the Ukraine stuff comes to pass, Jared now is holding the axe over Paul’s head,” the campaign official said. The Trump adviser added, “The real campaign manager, in fact, the entire time, has been Jared Kushner, who is still the real campaign manager, even today.” At the start of the election cycle, Conway talked to several Republican candidates, including Rand Paul, Scott Walker, Rick Santorum, and Carly Fiorina, about joining their campaigns. She spoke to Lewandowski, too, but she ended up working for Keep the Promise, the Ted Cruz super PAC. Keep the Promise had an important supporter, the conservative hedge-fund manager Robert Mercer, who donated more than ten million dollars to the PAC. Conway said that working for Cruz was “a geographic decision, because the Mercer super PAC is in New York.” But she also knew Mercer’s daughter Rebekah, who leads many of the family’s political efforts. “Rebekah’s a very close friend of mine, personally,” Conway said. During the primaries, Conway occasionally took shots at Trump on behalf of Cruz. She said that Trump should be “transparent” about his tax returns, and described his personal attacks on his rivals as “fairly unpresidential.” And she objected to his comment, in a television appearance in March, that “there has to be some form of punishment” for women who have abortions. Conway passionately opposes abortion rights, but she knows the subject has to be addressed with care, and has spent years shaping language to articulate the pro-life position. When we spoke, she was still bothered by Trump’s statement. “Pro-lifers believe there are two victims in an abortion: the unborn child and the woman who felt that that was her best option,” she told me. “We never look at her as the perpetrator—ever.” Trump’s remark was “a great example of him just undoing decades of work where we worked really hard.” Steve Bannon had his own alliance with the Mercer family. Since 2011, Robert Mercer has been a major backer of Breitbart, Bannon’s news site, and Bannon has served as a political adviser to the Mercers. Breitbart enthusiastically embraces the nationalist right, and, as Trump’s political fortunes rose, Breitbart became his most obsequious media booster. “You can make the case that Breitbart pretty much wrote Trump’s immigration policy,” Kurt Bardella, who resigned as Breitbart’s spokesman in March, told me. He added, “Bannon is the poster child for that white, nationalistic, alt-right world view.” After Trump’s victory in the Indiana primary, on May 3rd, Cruz dropped out of the race, and the Mercers, with Bannon’s encouragement, moved into the Trump camp. Later that month, Rebekah Mercer and Conway met with Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner at Trump Tower to discuss the campaign. In late June, the Mercers transformed Keep the Promise into Make America Number 1, a Trump super PAC, and the Trump campaign, at the Mercers’ urging, hired Conway as a pollster. With Manafort falling out of the Trump family’s favor, Conway began subtly undermining his strategists. When Tony Fabrizio, the lead pollster, submitted a budget that Kushner thought was too high, Conway offered a cheaper alternative. “Kellyanne gives him a budget of between one and a half and three million dollars,” the campaign official said. “Come on. I mean, Senate races do more than that. You can’t do a modern Presidential campaign on that.” In August, the Mercers recommended that Trump bring in Bannon to lead a reorganized effort. “I’ve never run a campaign,” Bannon told Trump. “I’d only do this if Kellyanne came in as my partner.” Conway said that Trump offered her the job of campaign manager on August 12th, in a private meeting in his office. “We’re losing,” she told him. “No—look at the polls,” Trump replied. “I looked at the polls. We’re losing,” she said. “But we don’t have to lose. There’s still a pathway back.”

In a sense, Conway’s life prepared her for a boss like Trump. Born Kellyanne Fitzpatrick, she grew up in Atco, New Jersey, twenty miles from Philadelphia. Her mother raised Kellyanne in a house that they shared with her grandmother and two unmarried aunts. “These four Italian women raised me,” she said. “It’s like South Jersey’s version of ‘The Golden Girls.’ ” When Kellyanne was a teen-ager, her mother worked at the Claridge Hotel and Casino, in Atlantic City, as a shift supervisor in the main cage, where players cash their chips. Her father was a truck driver, and was divorced from her mother by the time Kellyanne was two years old. She didn’t see her father again until she was twelve or thirteen. She said, rolling her eyes, that he is now married to his fourth wife. The family was religious. “We had pictures of the Pope and the Last Supper and anything I drew at school,” she said. “We never had pictures of Kennedy or Reagan. We never had a single political conversation that I can remember. I should’ve been a Democrat. I mean, I grew up with all women in the nineteen-seventies.” She recalled that someone gave her mother a subscription to Ms. She discovered politics in 1984, when, in high school, she wrote for a local paper about the Democratic and Republican National Conventions. “I loved Cuomo and Ferraro at the Democratic Convention,” she said. Geraldine Ferraro, the first female nominee on a major-party Presidential ticket, and Mario Cuomo, then governor of New York, were the two best-known Italian-American politicians in the country, and both gave speeches. But when she saw Ronald Reagan’s speech she knew that she was a Republican. “He really touched me,” she said. “I liked the more uplifting, aspirational, yet tough-guy kind of thing.” Conway went to Trinity Washington University, a Catholic college in Washington, D.C., and received a law degree from George Washington University. She pointed out that, while Hillary Clinton failed the D.C. bar exam in 1973, before passing in Arkansas, Conway was allowed into the D.C. bar after passing the exams in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Conway said she thought about that during the first debate: “Boy, she really can cram a lot of information into her head for one performance. How the heck did she fail the D.C. bar?” While Conway was in law school, she worked as a research assistant in the firm of Richard Wirthlin, Reagan’s longtime pollster and strategist. She briefly practiced law, and later worked for the Republican pollster Frank Luntz. The polling business was dominated by men. “I’m a female consultant in the Republican Party, which means when I walk into a meeting at the R.N.C. or somewhere I always feel like I’m walking into a bachelor party in the locker room of the Elks club,” she said. Conway found mentors in political fixers such as Charlie Black, a partner in Black, Manafort, Stone & Kelly. To Conway, the firm’s principals, who worked for Reagan and George H. W. Bush, “were the untouchables. They were the gold standard of lobbying, Capitol Hill access.” Early in her career, Conway was invited to Black, Manafort, Stone’s Christmas party, and, she said, “it was, like, ‘What am I gonna wear?’ It was like Cinderella.” They talked, and she listened. “Charlie’s one of those men in Washington—and there have been many of them—who, early on in my career, took an interest in what I was doing and would stop by the office, or we’d go have lunch at the Palm,” Conway said. “I tended to learn from what I would consider the revered wise men, the veterans, the political veterans who really took an interest in my career.” Conway founded her own firm, the Polling Company, in 1995, and developed a niche advising corporations—American Express, Hasbro, Vaseline, and others—about consumer trends, especially among women. Her most well-known political clients, including Gingrich, Mike Pence, and Dan Quayle, have been socially conservative Republicans who needed help reaching female voters. “She spent most of her career looking at polling data, with a particular emphasis on consumers and on women,” Gingrich said. “So she sees them more holistically than a lot of political pollsters.” In the nineties, Conway started appearing on television, as a panelist on Bill Maher’s “Politically Incorrect,” which brought together an eclectic group of entertainers and political commentators, and featured a new generation of female pundits. Bill Maher gave “a great platform” to “the young conservative women who were just coming into their careers,” Conway said. “You can’t put a young girl in her twenties of any political affiliation alone in a room with half of Congress. It’s like an occupational hazard. But I always felt Bill Maher was a perfect gentleman.” Maher said, “I think we’re the show that kind of made Ann Coulter and Kellyanne and Laura Ingraham—you know, those were, like, our blond Republican ladies.” For a time, Conway stopped appearing on Maher’s show, because she had grown tired of his anti-Catholic sentiments. Earlier this year, Trump showed his own lack of respect for the Church. Pope Francis said that a person who wants to build walls is “not Christian,” and Trump called the comment “disgraceful.” Conway spun this into proof of Trump’s virtue. “Oftentimes, Mr. Trump punches down,” she told me. “I actually think the Pope is punching up or punching across, if you will, if you’re Mr. Trump.” Maher, who despises Trump, said that he didn’t remember any disagreement with Conway—“I’ve blocked it out, like an uncle who molested me”—but he was incredulous at her description of Trump’s response to the Pope. “Wow,” he said. “That so epitomizes the whole campaign. Everything Donald Trump does is marked on a curve.” He went on, “Because Donald Trump is normally a giant asshole who punches down, the one time that he does it up to the Pope then we say it’s O.K. If there’s a Nobel Prize in hypocrisy, those people have got to win it this year.” Kellyanne’s husband is George T. Conway III, who as a young lawyer played a historic—and largely hidden—role in the impeachment of Bill Clinton. Conway, a graduate of Harvard College and Yale Law School, worked at the New York City firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, and was a member of the Federalist Society, the conservative organization that led many of the legal challenges to the Clinton Administration. When Paula Jones sued Bill Clinton for sexual harassment, Conway wrote the Supreme Court brief, though his name never appeared on it. The Court, in a landmark decision, agreed with Jones’s argument that a sitting President could face a civil lawsuit. During depositions in the lawsuit, Clinton denied having a sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky, which eventually led to his impeachment trial. George Conway became deeply involved in getting out information from the depositions. During that period, he reportedly e-mailed Matt Drudge an infamous scoop about the shape of Clinton’s penis. In January, 1998, the month that Drudge broke the Lewinsky scandal, Conway saw a picture of Kellyanne Fitzpatrick on the cover of a Washington society magazine and asked a mutual friend to set them up. They met the following year, and married in 2001. Their four children are between the ages of six and eleven. “I had my first children at thirty-seven, then I had two daughters in my forties, forty-one and almost forty-three,” she said. “They say there are no eggs left in your forties, but there were two rolling around in there somewhere. I was surprised both times, like, ‘Oh! O.K. Not a stomach ache.’ ” In 2004, Conway wrote a book with Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster, called “What Women Really Want.” “We have the common bond of struggling in a male-dominated business,” Lake said. “Lots of women consultants told us to be careful how much you do about women voters, because that can be a ghetto, not just a franchise.” Lake joked to me that Conway has tried to teach Trump some of the lessons of their book, which emphasizes that women respond better to the language of inclusion than to that of division, “but Trump won’t stay on the lessons learned.” In 2001, the Conways bought an apartment in Trump World Tower, near the United Nations, where they lived for seven years, and where she got to know Trump. “I sat on the condo board, and he’s very involved in his condos,” she said. “Over the years, he would ask me my opinion about politics.” One of her top clients at the time was Major League Baseball, which relied on her advice about marketing the game to female fans. In 2008, the Conways moved to a six-million-dollar home in Alpine, New Jersey, a town that Forbes has called “America’s most expensive Zip Code.” In late 2013, Trump was considering running for governor of New York, and Conway produced a poll for him. “She thought that it was possible for him to win New York,” Michael Caputo, a Trump adviser at the time, who resigned from his Presidential campaign after clashing with Lewandowski, told me. In a memo on the poll results, Conway wrote, “NY loves its celebrity politicians and families: the Kennedys, Moynihans, Buckleys, Clintons, and even the Cuomos. Donald Trump fits that (loose) bill, and he has the money and moxie to compete if he chooses to enter the race.” Conway’s research showed Trump losing to Andrew Cuomo by thirty-five points, but she chose not to include that figure in her memo. A Trump adviser involved in the discussion said that Conway misrepresented Trump’s prospects: “She produces an analysis that buries every terrible number and highlights every positive number. It’s just an enormous crock of shit.” He added, “She’s looking for a client because Trump is talking about spending a hundred million dollars to run for governor, which we both know he was never really going to do, just like he was going to spend a hundred million dollars in this race, which he has not done.” Conway responded, “I see nowhere in the memo where I claim Trump is ahead or can win.” She added, “This does not account for the private presentation I and another team member had with him about the data.” Conway told me that some advisers asked Trump, “‘If you’re going to run for office, why not start with President of the United States?’ And, you know, it’s a fair question, and he ultimately decided that.”