Ten years ago, then-businessman Donald Trump and his wife, Melania Trump, slowly descended a golden escalator at his Trump Tower in New York City, waving at the crowd that had gathered to hear his remarks.
Nearby, Ivanka Trump, his first daughter, stood awaiting her father’s announcement that he was running for president during the 2016 election cycle with a slogan: Make America Great Again.
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Nearly all the political chattering class laughed off the stunt as just part of Trump’s attention-seeking appeal over the past decades.
It was instead the beginning of one of the most transformative political movements that revamped American politics.
In the 10 years since now-President Donald Trump descended the golden escalator, a novel political intrigue candidate, he has irrevocably changed the Republican Party and the country’s politics with his unconventional approach to campaigning and governing, in addition to his blend of social conservatism and fiscal populism.
David Urban, a 2016 Trump campaign aide and continued adviser, recalled how “on that day when he came down the escalator, I don’t think many people gave the guy a shot.”
“Now he’s, like, the most consequential president in modern history,” Urban told the Washington Examiner. “The Donald Trump that came down that escalator is the same Donald Trump today, same values, same love for America, same passion to, you know, help American families and workers. But the thing that’s changed in America is the people now believe him, right?”
Ronald Reagan biographer Craig Shirley agreed that Trump will “go down as one of those rare leaders who bent history to his service.”
“Most presidents are simply custodians of the office, but a few actually changed the course of the future,” Shirley told the Washington Examiner. “Custodial presidents usually make things worse like both Bushes, Biden, Hoover, Carter, and Nixon. But a rare few actually can leave the White House saying they made things better, like Andrew Jackson, Ronald Reagan, and Teddy Roosevelt.”
Trump faces skepticism after announcing his first presidential campaign
As Trump was launching his campaign on June 16, 2015, Jason Roe, a GOP strategist, was sitting in the grill room of the Capitol Hill club with several lobbyists.
“We watched Trump come down the escalator on the TVs in the bar, and everyone was generally mocking the entire episode, including the half-empty room and the very clunky press conference he had,” said Roe.
Trump, for much of the 80s and 90s, was a frequent tabloid-appearing businessman who waded into reality TV, as the host of “The Apprentice,” to reignite his career after declaring bankruptcy multiple times.
It was too implausible for some to see him as the next president of the U.S.
“I don’t believe many thought he would win at first,” said Woodrow Johnston, a GOP strategist based in Las Vegas, Nevada. “I suspect Trump may not have thought he was going to win either.”
But in the 10 years of Trump’s dominance, Johnston told the Washington Examiner that Trump’s two terms and his ability to help the GOP retake the House and Senate had made him the top GOP leader in modern times.
“Trump has surpassed former President Ronald Reagan as the chief Republican leader admired by the party,” Johnston said.
Other Trump aides similarly described Trump’s impact as the start of a movement that upended the nation.
“The escalator ride in June of 2015 was a fitting beginning to the most unique, riveting, and unprecedented political phenomenon in American history,” Hope Hicks, a former White House communications director who worked for Trump at the start of his first campaign, told the Washington Examiner.
According to Roger Stone, who advised Trump during his first campaign, Trump had long considered a presidential run and knew he would one day enter the White House as the commander in chief.
“Although Donald Trump explored running for president in 2000 and explored running again in 2012, many in the media, many of the elites, thought that was just brand burnishing, if you will,” Stone told the Washington Examiner. “Public relations stunts to burnish the Trump brand which is incorrect. I think every time he thought seriously about running for president. He was quite serious, largely because he didn’t like the direction the country was going.”
Despite the mockery, Trump told members of his inner circle that he would win the presidential race.
“He told me as early as 1988, you know, he says, if I run for president, I’ll win,” Stone added. “He said the same thing in 2000, said the same thing in 2012. He does not lack for self confidence. PS, he turned out to be right.”
Trump embraces the outsider role
The announcement at Trump Tower in New York City was no accident.
It was meant to signal his success as a businessman and to lean into the outsider position he had taken up.
“The staging and orchestration of his announcement was entirely his,” said Stone, who was a paid consultant but was unable to attend the announcement. “He did not want elephants. He did not want bunting. He did not want a Dixieland band. He did not want any of the usual trappings of a politician.”
At Trump Tower, Trump branded Mexican migrants as “rapists” and criminals, leading to widespread denouncements.
A former Trump campaign official for his first run recalled that the media reaction to Trump at that announcement was one of shock at the wild, free-wheeling spectacle that strayed far from the prepared remarks that were distributed.
The criticism about what he said about immigrants came hours later, after opponents latched onto it. But it kicked up a cycle of intense curiosity from the press and the public.
“The whole thing was just insane in the sense that it had never been seen before. It was wildly exciting and unpredictable,” said the former campaign official. “It was like supercharged in terms of the intensity around him and the curiosity and the interest, and him maximizing that in every way and playing to his strengths and creating this appetite that was insatiable.”
While those terms Trump used to describe illegal immigrants are safely in the GOP political lexicon now, back then, after then-Sen. Mitt Romney’s loss in 2012, the GOP authored an autopsy report with a general sentiment that the Republicans could win again by being more inclusive to minority communities and welcoming comprehensive immigration reform. Trump’s brash language was just the opposite.
But it paid off with the GOP base.
“He was different. He was unique. What you saw with President Trump was somebody who offered something that really wasn’t being captured by any other politician,” said Jason Simmons, the chairman of the North Carolina GOP, who was an early supporter of Trump in 2016 and served as the state director of the Tarheel State for the Trump campaign.
In contrast to the GOP primary field, Trump was a flashing red signal that change had landed for the American political class.
“The rest of the field was very much in that old party politics as usual, and President Trump offered something that you did not see previously. And I don’t know if you’re going to see it going forward,” said Simmons.
Trump dominates the 2016 GOP field
During the 2016 cycle, Trump beat out 16 major Republican candidates during the GOP primary season, steamrolling lawmakers with decades of political experience, including Jeb Bush, the brother of the last GOP president before Trump.
“It was very apparent there was an appetite for an outsider to come into the primary,” said a top Trump aide, who has worked in his administration and on his campaigns. “There was a real appetite, especially after 2012, right, because 2012 came right after the Tea Party movement, and it was like the outsider movement versus the establishment movement.”
After Romney failed to win the presidential election against former President Barack Obama, Republicans were itching for an outsider candidate who could take on the “Washington elite.”
Americans were still dealing with the aftereffects of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), China entering the World Trade Organization in late 2001, and the automobile bailouts after the 2008 recession, which helped “to set the perfect storm for Trump,” said Roe, who worked on then-Sen. Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign.
Hogan Gidley, who worked for Trump in the White House during the first administration as principal deputy press secretary, said Trump set the example for how the GOP can go on offense against Democrats.
“He told Republicans. It’s okay to fight back. The time of the lovable loser, the self-deprecating Mitt Romneys of the world, is over,” said Gidley. “Donald Trump didn’t murder politics. He was the coroner. He showed up and said, ‘This is dead.’ We’re doing it a different way. People always accuse him of killing the political order. No. He just realized it was already dead and pronounced it so.”
Tapping into the GOP energy for a no-holds-barred fighter, Trump mixed a form of populism that propelled him over Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton into the White House.
The fighter imagery would also captivate the GOP after Trump survived his first assassination attempt during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, last year. Bloodied from a bullet hitting his ear, Trump stood up and yelled, “fight, fight, fight” to his crowd of supporters.
The images from the rally of Trump pumping his fist in the air “were so powerfully stunning because they enabled people to see him the same way those that have loved and supported him since the early days of the triumphant 2016 campaign have: as a fearless warrior,” said Hicks.
Trump’s two terms compared
Trump’s first administration was defined by disruption, not only with policy, making announcements by what was then known as Twitter, but also with personnel, firing and hiring aides, again, by social media.
Regarding policy, Trump didn’t repeal and replace Obamacare, or didn’t build 1,000 miles of border wall and have Mexico pay for it, and critics would say he mismanaged the country’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic that went on to kill over a million Americans and wreak havoc on the U.S. economy.
But he did introduce sweeping tax reform, appoint three Supreme Court Justices, and encouraged Arab states to normalize relations with Israel through the Abraham Accords amid former special counsel Robert Mueller’s federal Russia investigation and his first impeachment by the House over pressure he put on Ukrainian President Volomyr Zelensky to find dirt on former President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter.
Trump’s first term later culminated in violence at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 after months of the president and his aides undermining the results of the 2020 election against Biden. The riot resulted in his second impeachment vote in the House before then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell decided against holding a trial in the Senate, predicting the president’s grasp on the Republican Party would weaken in Jan. 6’s aftermath.
Trump would also face four separate criminal cases after leaving office, resulting in a felony conviction over a hush money scheme during the 2016 election.
Yet, Trump staged what could be the greatest political comeback in history, dominating the 2024 Republican primary against Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) and former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley before defeating former Vice President Kamala Harris in the general election, despite four indictments, two assassination attempts, and Democrats switching Biden for Harris 100-odd days before polls closed.
“This guy’s the luckiest son of a b***h on the planet,” said Roe about Trump’s ability to overcome career-ending scandals.
Trump’s second administration has so far been underscored by the president’s expanded use of executive powers, pardoning Jan. 6 offenders, organizing mass deportations, imposing sweeping tariffs, and upending the federal government through the Department of Government Efficiency, with and without Elon Musk.
The biggest difference between Trump in his first and his second term is “he’s having fun,” said the Trump aide.
“In the first term, he was new to Washington, and he relied on a lot of people for hiring purposes or recommendations,” said the aide. “Now he knows what levers to pull, what buttons to push when it comes to governing, so he has a real command and grasp of what he needs to do and how to do it.”
Who will take up the MAGA mantel?
Regardless of quips about him running again in 2028 and repeated cries at rallies of “Four more years,” Trump, 79, has been mum concerning the prospect of his legacy, declining, for example, to anoint Vice President JD Vance as his political heir.
“It’s far too early to say that. But you know, I do have a vice president … and JD’s doing a fantastic job,” Trump told NBC News last month.
The president added: “I don’t want to get involved in that. I think he’s a fantastic, brilliant guy. Marco [Rubio] is great. There’s a lot of them that are great… We have a lot of good people in this party.”
A former Trump campaign official contended that MAGA “is here to stay” beyond Trump, “because now that people have seen it, they can’t unsee it.”
Urban noted that the president’s unique electoral coalition will be challenging to replicate.
“The hard part is, how do you convince all those different, totally disparate groups that you’re their champion?” he said. “Donald Trump did that, right? I think he is unique in that ability. I think that’s going to be a challenge for whoever runs next is going to be, how do you weave that group together?”
FULL LIST OF EXECUTIVE ORDERS, ACTIONS, AND PROCLAMATIONS TRUMP HAS MADE AS PRESIDENT
For Stone, Trump’s escalator ride was akin to an American revolution and changed the GOP “forever.”
“And whoever we nominate post-Trump,” Stone said, “will be the person who most effectively carries the banner of Trumpism.”