Once the debate was behind them - and with many on the inside fearing that the campaign was falling apart - Wiles sensed that Lewandowski was about to make a move. He had repeatedly gone back to Trump, asking for control over hiring and firing as well as veto power over all spending decisions, which would effectively put him in charge of the campaign.
Now he was going all in, telling Trump that Wiles and LaCivita had invested tens of millions of dollars in direct-mail outreach aimed at mobilizing supporters during the early-voting period - money that just so happened to line the pockets of certain campaign staffers, including LaCivita, and that could have been spent instead on television advertising. Lewandowski understood that the only tactical component of campaigning that Trump cared about was TV ads. He was telling Trump not just that he was being stolen from, but that the money in question would have made him ubiquitous on TV.
Sure enough, on October 15, the Daily Beast published an explosive story alleging that LaCivita had skimmed huge amounts off the top of TV ads, direct mail, and other expenditures, netting him some $22 million from his work on behalf of the campaign and a pair of related super PACs. Multiple campaign sources told me that the nature of these arrangements was exaggerated, and that although LaCivita had made plenty of money - and perhaps more than some people were comfortable with - it was nowhere near that amount.
LaCivita was abruptly summoned to Trump Tower on the morning of Friday, October 18... As they settled across from each other, Trump reached for a small stack of paper: a printout of the Daily Beast story. LaCivita, in turn, produced a much thicker stack of paper. For the next half hour, according to several sources with knowledge of the exchange, the two men had it out - profanities flying but voices kept intentionally low - as LaCivita insisted to Trump that he wasn't ripping the candidate off. Trump, the sources said, seemed to vacillate between believing his employee and seething over the dollar figure, wondering how something so specific could be wrong. Finally, after a couple of concluding f-bombs, Trump seemed satisfied. "Okay, I get it, I get it," he told LaCivita, holding up his hands as if requesting that the defense rest.
Less than a week after the dtente, CNN unearthed LaCivita's Twitter activity from January 6, 2021, including his having liked a tweet that called for Trump to be removed via the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. At that point, Trump told several people that LaCivita was dead to him - that he would ride out the remainder of the campaign, but would have no place in his administration or political operation going forward.
Entering the final weekend of October, I noticed something in conversations with numerous Trump staffers: resignation. This home stretch of the campaign hadn't just been hard and stressful; it had been disillusioning. Several campaign officials had told me, throughout the spring and summer, how excited they were about working in the next Trump White House. Now those same people were telling me that they'd had a change of heart. The past three months had been the most unpleasant of their careers. Win or lose, they said, they were done with the chaos of Donald Trump - even if the nation was not.
