never taken anyone furniture shopping!” he laughed, throwing up his arms. His staff members traded disoriented looks.
Just after midnight, on Saturday the eighth of October, the campaign posted a ninety-second video clip to Trump’s Facebook page. Against a dark superimposed horizon of illuminated skyscrapers, Trump looked directly into the camera. “I’ve never said I’m a perfect person, nor pretended to be someone that I’m not. I’ve said and done things I regret, and the words released today on this more than a decade-old video are one of them. Anyone who knows me know these words don’t reflect who I am. I said it, I was wrong, and I apologize,” he said.
Trump added, “I’ve said some foolish things, but there is a big difference between the words and actions of other people. Bill Clinton has actually abused women and Hillary has bullied, attacked, shamed, and intimidated his victims. We will discuss this more in the coming days. See you at the debate on Sunday.”
Not for a moment would Trump consider quitting the race. He was unmoved by the rebukes of the Republican lawmakers who were piling on with excoriating statements; most of them, he scoffed, were the same people who had opposed his candidacy from its inception. Trump cackled as one of his aides read aloud the rolling list of disavowals from the likes of Ryan and Romney. He could not have cared less what they had to say.
There was one politician whose reaction Trump worried about: Pence.
It had been a shotgun marriage, one of convenience more than love. Yet Trump had grown unusually fond of Pence. There was a sincerity to his running mate that he thought rare and endearing. Certainly, Trump found Pence a bit alien: the way he was always praying; the way he referred to his wife, Karen, as “Mother”; and the way the couple was constantly holding hands. (“Look at them!” Trump would tease. “They’re so in love!”) But he appreciated the earnestness with which Pence seemed to believe, as so few in the party did, that Trump was a decent person. Trump had worked hard to earn that faith. On the night of the October 4 vice-presidential debate, he even left a voice mail for Pence letting him know that he would be saying a prayer for him.
Speaking in Ohio just after the Access Hollywood bombshell dropped, Pence had initially dismissed the news as just another media hatchet job. Yet soon after, he called Trump from the road, checking in as he did daily, sounding upset. He advised Trump to offer a sincere apology. That was the last anyone had heard from the VP nominee. Pence had gone back to Indiana and bunkered down, cutting himself off from the outside world, praying with his wife about what to do next and telling his advisers that he wasn’t sure he could continue with the campaign.
To the extent Trump felt regret, it was over disappointing the Pences.
“Oh boy,” he said Friday afternoon after hanging up with his running mate. “Mother is not going to like this.”
THE APOLOGY VIDEO DID LITTLE TO STANCH THE FLOW OF DEFECTIONS. On Saturday morning, another tranche of Republicans—congressmen, senators, governors, former primary rivals—announced their renunciations of Trump.4 The list also included GOP luminaries such as Bill Bennett, the former education secretary, and Condoleezza Rice, the former secretary of state, whose name was being tossed around inside the RNC as a potential substitute running mate if Pence took over the ticket.
By midday Saturday, October 8, more than two dozen Republican elected officials had abandoned Trump (counting only those presently in office). Many were calling for Pence to replace him as the GOP nominee. Among them were Senator John Thune, a member of the GOP leadership, and Ann Wagner, the Missouri congresswoman and a former co-chair of the national party committee.
Priebus continued to swat away the suggestion. As the former general counsel of the RNC, he knew better than anyone that no trigger existed for forcing out the party’s nominee—especially not at this late stage. When he received a call Saturday morning from Wisconsin’s national committeeman, Steve King, informing him that some RNC members were mulling an organized mutiny, the party chairman told King the same thing he was telling everyone else: “It’s not going to work. We need to ride this out.”
But Priebus worried, as did just about everyone else he spoke with, that another shoe was soon to drop. There had been rumors in recent weeks that a lethal opposition-research blast was