Inside Trump’s Campaign Headquarters With NYU Republican Megan Powers
Four floors above a Gucci store, a public garden, and the gilded lobby of Trump Tower is a room that looks like a basement. Concrete floors, bare bulbs, fold-out plastic tables.
These are the campaign headquarters for Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump, and this is where I meet his campaign coordinator Megan Powers late one August evening.
Powers gestures around at the half-finished space. “Sorry about the mess.” This room used to be storage, or maybe a soundstage for Donald Trump’s reality show “The Apprentice,” she says.
Things are changing quickly around this place. Every week, it seems, Trump’s poll numbers are rising and his campaign — despite Twitter gaffe after sexist remark after anti-immigrant tirade — is growing. It’s a welcome, if unexpected, change for Powers, 22, who took the campaign coordinator job on a whim one week after her May 2015 graduation from NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Studies.
“I was supposed to start Georgetown Law School like last week,” Powers tells me. But shortly before her May graduation, she received a LinkedIn message from a man asking if she would help him enlist interns for a Republican political campaign.
Messages of this sort were nothing unusual to Powers, who was finishing a year-and-a-half stint as vice president of the NYU College Republicans. But unlike other campaign officials, the man behind this message refused to disclose his candidate’s name over email.
“Mr. Trump hadn’t announced yet so they didn’t want to really advertise it everywhere, because there was all this speculation,” Powers says. She agreed to meet the campaign official in his office to discuss internships. “He was very nice. I thought it was really normal, and then I got the impression that he was interviewing me for a job.”
Powers dropped her law school plans.
Talk with a Trump fan long enough and they’ll likely attribute some of their support to the billionaire’s brash personality. Donald Trump speaks his mind, in ways that would prove ruinous for more mainstream candidates. Jeb Bush would not be able to get away with calling Mexican migrants “rapists” any more than Marco Rubio could realistically tweet the words “F**ckface Von Clownstick”.
And yet Donald Trump has pulled both these stunts and watched the negative ramifications fade away behind him, like limousine exhaust in a world where global warming is a hoax perpetuated by the Chinese government (something Trump believes).
How does a public relations official handle a candidate whose greatest campaign strength is a penchant for headline-ready controversy?
“Everyone has fans and everyone has people who aren’t fans,” Powers says. “I’ve had a lot of my friends want to talk to me about it because they think it’s so interesting. They ask me kind of the same things you’re asking me: what’s it like and do you actually like him, do you actually think he’s good? And I think Mr. Trump is fantastic.”
Still, the campaign keeps Powers endlessly busy, she says.
“The job started out a little slow because it was before he announced. That feels like a million years ago. Or it feels like two years ago.”
Powers’ campaign coordinator job is a kind of catch-all role: part-scheduler, part-intern-wrangler, part-press secretary. “It’s always a new thing,” she says. “Tomorrow we’re having an event in Alabama that has tens of thousands of RSVPs … I’m the contact for every single attendee.”
It’s 7:30pm, and Powers needs to get back to work. As I’m packing up my notes, we chat about NYU, how this semester will be her first in the post-graduate world. Starting a new job on the Donald Trump campaign reminds her of moving to New York City four years ago, she says. Both are “like baptism by fire. It’s just go, go.”
Powers searches for another analogy. “I learn so much, I feel like — last night I was thinking to myself, I could get any job after this.”
Does she honestly believe Donald Trump can become President of the United States, then?
“People ask me how long I’m going to work for Mr. Trump,” Powers says. “I say the next nine years.”
