Trump’s Iowa field general is on a ‘crazy ride.’ But he knows how to win.

Donald Trump and Chuck Laudner in Iowa. (Photo illustration: Yahoo News; Photos: Charlie Riedel/AP, Charles Ommanney/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

DUBUQUE, Iowa — The call came with no warning last December, and, at first, Chuck Laudner thought it was a joke. The man on the other end of the line had identified himself as Donald Trump, and even though it was a New York phone number and the voice sounded just as it did on TV, the veteran Republican operative couldn’t help but wonder for a moment if he was the subject of some elaborate trick.

“I have a friend who likes to make prank calls so I immediately wondered, ‘Is this for real?’” he recalled.

For about 20 minutes, Trump delivered a passionate spiel on why he was thinking about running for president. He told Laudner that he wanted to rebuild the country from the ground up, to attract new voters and “to start something like we’ve never seen before,” the operative recalled. And Trump wanted Laudner, a highly regarded GOP hand known here for his ability to win campaigns on a shoestring budget, to be his man on the ground in Iowa. A few weeks later, he agreed.

“I knew then this was going to be unlike anything I’d ever run before,” Laudner said with a laugh. “But I had no idea what a crazy ride it would be.”

Nine months later, Trump sits atop early polls in the race for the GOP nomination — startling establishment Republicans who thought his presidential aspirations might just be a flash in the pan or, as many put it, a “summer fling.” Perhaps nowhere has Trump’s rise been more strongly felt than in Iowa, where voters spanning the partisan divide have spoken warmly of the candidate’s willingness to say whatever is on his mind, political correctness be damned. Statements and policy positions that would surely doom other candidates seem to only help Trump, whose megawatt celebrity and willingness to spend his own money on the race have also boosted his political fortunes. The candidate has not only attracted massive crowds — at least 2,000 are expected to turn out for a rally here on Tuesday night — but large numbers of volunteers, many of whom have never been involved in politics before. And it’s all happening before Trump has even officially opened a campaign office in the state.

Even rival operatives agree Trump has tapped into something not quite seen in presidential politics before — a sentiment that many here liken to Howard Beale’s line in the film “Network”: “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” It’s a feeling that Laudner, a burly former high school football coach, identifies with because that was part of his own attraction to Trump. But while many involved with the Trump effort are political neophytes, Laudner actually knows how to win in Iowa and has — though doing so this time around may mean blowing up his own party and eschewing everything he knows about conventional campaigning.

“I’ve never been involved in anything like this before,” Laudner admits. “It took me a while to retrain my brain because there’s no conventional wisdom anymore [about how campaigns should operate]. Conventional wisdom is just out the door.”

Though Laudner didn’t immediately say yes to Trump’s entreaties, it wasn’t exactly an out-of-the-blue proposal. Though many have derided Trump’s presidential aspirations as a sideshow, his decision to reach out to Laudner was a hint of the reality star’s political shrewdness. He was thinking about winning even from the very beginning. And for Laudner, Trump, in many ways, was the anti-establishment candidate he’d been itching for.

For the past three decades, Laudner had worked his way up through Republican ranks here — first as an intern for Sen. Chuck Grassley and then overseeing the ground game for local, state and presidential campaigns. Four years ago, as the chief Iowa strategist for Rick Santorum’s presidential effort, he drove the former Pennsylvania senator around in his own Dodge pickup truck because the campaign was too broke to rent a car. They visited all of Iowa’s 99 counties — and Santorum subsequently eked out a narrow victory over Mitt Romney to win the state’s first-in-the-nation caucuses.

But Laudner, who spent years working as Rep. Steve King’s chief of staff, began to feel increasingly disillusioned with his party. Now 50, he had worked in GOP politics his entire life — including a stint as executive director of the Iowa Republican Party — and he felt as though he had nothing to show for it. “In my 32 years of adult life, we have had no significant policy achievements as conservatives, nothing lasting, nothing landmark,” he said. “We can win the majority in the Senate and take the House and have all these governorships, but what do we have to show for it? We have expanded government and increased debt.”

Though Iowa Republicans made gains in last fall’s midterm elections, including taking back one of the state’s U.S. Senate seats, Laudner was, as he puts it, “in a foul mood” about the state of GOP politics. “I didn’t see anything changing,” he said.

And then came the call from Trump. While some of his GOP colleagues publicly snickered about the idea of the reality TV star running for president, Laudner had conversation after conversation with Trump — grilling the brash New York real estate magnate on his plans and seriously considering whether he could actually win and bring about the political change he felt establishment candidates had failed to deliver. He wanted to see a candidate who would bust out of the party norms and be able to take his message beyond Iowa to win the nomination — which is something the last two winners of the caucuses, Mike Huckabee in 2008 and Santorum in 2012, had failed to do.

Republican presidential candidate and former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum gets into his campaign vehicle, a Dodge truck dubbed the “Chuck Truck,” driven by Laudner, after a campaign stop in Iowa in 2011. (Photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images)

“I was tired of busting my ass day in and day out on these elections only to be outnumbered later. … I felt that if you’re going to come out here and do the same thing that others have done, you’re going to get crushed. It doesn’t matter which candidate you are,” Laudner said. “You can’t run a campaign on conventional wisdom anymore — this is what I do, this is the speech I give, this is where I give that speech, that sort of thing. It’s never going to be enough. It may be enough to win the Iowa caucuses, but it’s never going to be enough to make real change.”

From the start, Laudner began plotting a campaign in Iowa that would be different than anything he’d done before. Sure, he would target the estimated 120,000 Republicans who regularly turn out for presidential caucuses. But he also began looking for ways to attract people new to the political process — people who, he jokes, “wouldn’t be caught dead at a Republican event.” It wasn’t hard. While Trump has spent just a dozen or so days campaigning in the state so far this year, every appearance has attracted hundreds, if not thousands, of people.

While rivals downplayed the crowds — insisting they were there only because of Trump’s celebrity — his campaign insists it was more than that. Laudner points to a June trip to Mason City, Iowa, where close to 1,500 people turned out to see the former host of “The Apprentice.” He and other Trump staffers were struck by the number of people who turned out with homemade signs, and by the number of people who filled out cards afterward vowing their support for Trump. Close to 1,000 turned in cards offering support or to volunteer. “They heard the speech and then signed up,” Laudner said. “And this is supposedly only because he’s a celebrity? Come on.”

While many Republicans were debating whether Trump would last through the summer, his campaign, under Laudner’s guidance, was quietly building an infrastructure that now rivals many of the other GOP campaigns. As of this month, the Trump campaign has 10 paid staffers in Iowa — besting former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who has nine, and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who has just four. And that doesn’t include what Laudner says are a few hundred volunteers and growing who have spread out across the state knocking on doors and canvassing at festivals and local fairs on Trump’s behalf, the traditional blocking and tackling of retail politics. “Brewfests, baconfests, every little diner in the state. … If something is happening, if people are there, we have someone there signing up people,” he said. “I would challenge anyone who says we don’t have the strongest ground game going right now.”

But not all of Trump’s outreach has been conventional. One of the co-chairs of Trump’s campaign in Iowa is Tana Goertz, an admitted political novice who is best known as a runner-up on “The Apprentice.” Under her guidance, the campaign rented a charter bus, known as “The Trump Bus,” that travels the state with a staffer — advertising its stops on Facebook. To go inside the bus, people have to fill out a supporter card, and at some stops, as many as 100 people have turned out — in spite of the fact the candidate is nowhere in sight.

And while other campaigns traditionally make a show of recruiting volunteers to serve as county chairs or advisers, Goertz has undertaken a competition called “The Political Apprentice,” in which people compete to serve as local chairs for the Trump campaign. It is, perhaps inevitably, the ultimate Trumpian blending of politics and entertainment. In the latest round, 40 contestants — most of whom have no political experience — are set to meet with Trump on Tuesday night in Dubuque.

Asked about the campaign’s unconventional outreach efforts, Laudner struggles to contain a huge grin. “This is how you grow the party. This is how you create excitement,” he said. “We can’t operate like it’s politics as usual. That’s not what the future is.”

But an open question is how far Trump can go by defying convention. Iowa is a state where voters demand to see their candidates up close and personal. But Trump, so far, has focused heavily on large events and seems unlikely to do the kind of micro-campaigning that candidates often have to do to win. To compromise, Laudner has been inviting county chairs and other influential types to meet in small groups or one on one with Trump, but he admits that might not make everyone happy.

Another potential land mine for Trump is how he might play with social conservatives, who account for an estimated one-third of caucus-goers. They have been credited with sinking the fortunes of previous presidential contenders — including Rudy Giuliani and Newt Gingrich, who were criticized for having multiple marriages. And some wonder if Trump could face the same scrutiny. Not only has Trump been married three times, but last month, the former reality television star bluntly admitted to a somewhat casual relationship with religion, telling an audience at an Iowa faith conference that he’d never asked God for forgiveness.

But so far, Trump has avoided the condemnation for his moral shortcomings that some Iowa Republicans have privately expected, and few seem to be outwardly doing anything to stop his momentum in the race. Part of it could be that Laudner had already methodically reached out to those groups. He said he speaks regularly to Republican National Committeeman Steve Scheffler, who also heads the Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition, and Bob Vander Plaats, a onetime ally of Huckabee who heads the Family Leader, another influential faith group that hosted Trump last month.

Laudner sits behind Trump as he arrives at the Iowa State Fair on a golf cart on Aug. 15. (Photo: Joshua Lott/Reuters)

“I think the reason they are supportive of the Trump effort — and I say supportive because I think they are — is because the enemy of my enemy is also my friend,” Laudner said. “I tell people, even if you don’t line up with him on everything ideologically, Trump is going to kick the door open so that the rest of us can come running through. He’s the only candidate who can really do that. I think they have to root for that because if that doesn’t happen, their agenda goes nowhere.”

But even if social conservatives break away from Trump, not everyone thinks it would be a deathblow to his campaign. “You have to look at it in that Trump is bringing a bigger world to the caucuses,” said Craig Robinson, a veteran GOP operative who runs the blog the Iowa Republican. “He’s not a typical Republican candidate. He’s opening doors to people who have never been involved in the caucuses. … And the field is so big. There are so many different candidates who could split that pie up. He may not even need social conservatives to win.”

Yet the biggest dilemma Trump faces in the immediate future is how to sustain the excitement about his campaign until the February caucuses — and it’s an issue that Laudner admits he and his colleagues are openly thinking about. After Trump’s visit this week, he and others staffers plan to regroup. First, they will finally set up their office in a space they have reserved in West Des Moines — giving volunteers a place to go and work. And they will begin to go over all the data they have collected so far, to look for gaps in support across the state as they prepare to start caucus training.

Sitting outside the venue where Trump speaks Tuesday, Laudner couldn’t help but laugh and grin as he again and again spoke of the “crazy ride” it has been working for Trump over the last nine months. He giggled about some of Trump’s more outrageous stunts — including flying a helicopter over the Iowa State Fair as Hillary Clinton campaigned. And he marveled at the breadth of Trump’s support across the state, which he said was “unlike anything” he’d ever seen.

“Can you sustain that for six more months? Nobody knows,” he bluntly admitted. “No one has ever seen anything like this before. We have no idea what the next month or the next year brings. … All we can do it try to win every day. Win every day, and it takes care of itself.”

As he walked back into the venue to continue planning for Trump’s visit, he paused and grinned again. “I hope it continues, because it’s been a crazy ride,” he said. “But if I get hit by a bus tomorrow, I will die a happy man. I know we’ve been doing something right.”