Donald Trump did not care for most of the Republican leaders he’d met with after sealing the nomination in early May. This was especially true of Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House, who had promptly attempted to tutor Trump with a PowerPoint briefing during a meeting at the Republican National Committee’s headquarters. Trump had no patience for him—“Okay, Paul, I get the point,” he snapped at the Speaker—finding Ryan dull and supercilious, “a fucking Boy Scout,” as he told friends after the meeting.

But the party’s new standard-bearer was not averse to being schooled by the establishment. Trump did not necessarily suffer from a lack of teachability; he simply preferred to dictate the flow of information, rather than be dictated to. Lengthy seminars and conference calls were never a staple of his executive style. He favored an aggressive, inquisitive approach, learning about issues, and about people, with rapid-fire questioning, consuming what he needed from the answers and discarding the rest.

After eliminating his final competitors from the GOP primary, Trump knew that he needed a crash course on what lay ahead. This was how he came to sit down with Karl Rove.

Trump didn’t particularly like Rove either. He found the “architect” of George W. Bush’s winning campaigns to be haughty and condescending. For much of the past year, Trump had raged against Rove when reading his columns in the Wall Street Journal, many of which were pitilessly critical of the GOP front-runner. On numerous occasions, Trump reached out to a mutual friend, the casino magnate and GOP mega-donor Steve Wynn, asking him to relay his displeasure to Rove.

In early May, Rove’s phone rang. “Karl, kiddo, I talked to Donald, and he wants you to write something nice about him,” Wynn said. “He won the Indiana primary. Can you write something nice about him?”

“As a matter of fact, I just got done writing a column, and I said some nice things about him,” Rove replied. “Would you like to hear it?”

Rove read portions aloud. He said that Trump had “bludgeoned 16 opponents into submission” and “rewrote the rule book,” beginning the column with a blunt declaration: “No one has seen anything like this.”

Wynn approved. But the next morning he called Rove back. Trump hated the column. Rove had castigated the candidate for his endless string of insults, called the JFK–Rafael Cruz talk “nuts,” and had written, “Trump’s scorched-earth tactics have left deep wounds that make victory more uncertain.”

Wynn read Rove the riot act on behalf of his friend. But then he added something surprising: Trump wanted to sit down to talk strategy. “He says he wants to meet with you and get your advice,” Wynn told Rove. “He knows you did this twice.”

A few weeks later, on May 23, Rove surveyed the 900-square-foot living room of Wynn’s apartment in New York City. The setting was fabulous: situated on the 30th and 31st floors of the Ritz-Carlton hotel, the ballroom turned domicile featured, among other things, 15-foot cathedral ceilings, a library, a media room, and a private terrace overlooking Central Park South. Rove had arrived two hours early, wanting to keep the meeting private and avoid the media scrum surely accompanying Trump. Yet the candidate arrived by himself, right on time, without any entourage or fanfare. He, too, seemed intent on secrecy.

There wasn’t much foreplay at the meeting, the existence of which was first reported by Maggie Haberman of the New York Times but is detailed here for the first time. Trump asked Rove what he needed to know, and Rove, in fire hose fashion, launched into his lecture on the contours of the Electoral College.

“You have to have a strategy to get to 270. We had several paths to get there,” Rove began. “We had the traditional battleground states, which were Florida, Ohio, New Hampshire, Iowa, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Minnesota. And we had four battleground states that had traditionally been carried by Democrats: Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, and West Virginia.”

“West Virginia?” Trump interrupted. “I did really good in the primary there. I can win West Virginia—that’s a big Republican state.”

“Well, in 2000 it wasn’t,” Rove explained. “Bob Dole had lost it by 15 points four years earlier. The last time it had gone for Republicans in an open-seat presidential race was 1928, and it took nominating a New York Catholic to bring all the Methodists and Presbyterians and Baptists out of the hills and hollows of West Virginia to vote Republican.”

Rove worked his way around the map. When he reached the West, he focused on four states, Montana, Nevada, Arizona, and Oregon, explaining that Bill Clinton and Al Gore had each carried at least one of them, and that Trump would need to win at least three of the four to stand a chance in 2016.

“Oregon? I can win Oregon,” Trump said excitedly. “I did really good in the primary there.”

“No, you can’t,” Rove cautioned. “In 2000, we had Ralph Nader on the ballot there, and he had a real following in Portland and Eugene; the state had just elected a Republican U.S. senator; they had Republican constitutional officers; they had a Republican majority in the statehouse; and we still lost it by half a point. Since then it’s gone hard left. The last time we won a statewide race was 2002; we hold no constitutional offices; and we’re down to less than a third in the statehouse and a third in the State Senate. There’s no way you can win Oregon.”

Trump smirked. “I don’t need to,” he said. “I can win California.”

“No, you really can’t,” Rove chuckled, wondering whether the candidate was being facetious. Judging from Trump’s expression, he was not. “You’re down 17 points in the RCP average,” Rove told him. “It’s a giant suck of time and money. There’s no way you can win California.”

Trump was growing irritated. “Well, I’ll win New York.”

Rove sighed. “No, you won’t. Bernie Sanders got more votes by himself than all the Republicans combined. Two and a half times the number of people voted in the Democrat primary than the Republican primary. You’re losing to Hillary by 26 points in the RCP average, and it’s a waste of time. If you spend a day trying to win votes in a place like California or New York or Oregon, it’s a day you can’t spend trying to win votes in Pennsylvania or Iowa.”

Trump looked puzzled. “I can win Iowa?”

“Oh yeah,” Rove cooed, building the candidate back up after tearing down his illusions. “You didn’t win the caucuses, but those farmers in the western part of the state, they hate her guts. And there are a bunch of blue-collar workers in the eastern part of the state that are worried about their jobs. You can win Iowa. But not if you’re spending your time in Oregon, California, and New York.”

Trump turned to Wynn. “Why aren’t people in my campaign talking to me about this?”

(Three days later Trump gave a speech naming the “15 states” that he would campaign in. Among them: New York and California.)

As the conversation progressed Trump grew less defensive. He seemed to recognize that Rove, however patronizingly, was trying to help him succeed. Trump’s clutch of advisers talked little of long-term strategy or historical voting trends; mostly they urged him to concentrate on animating the base with his rhetoric and policy positions. He had long dismissed the complaints from his adult children that Corey Lewandowski, the campaign manager, was doing him a disservice. But now as he soaked up a briefing of unprecedented depth, Trump was beginning to wonder.

The Republican Party’s new leader was curious about one more thing. His team was preparing a list of vice-presidential selections, telling him it was the most important decision he would ever make. But Trump felt that everyone advising him on the decision was pushing an agenda. He wanted to know what Wynn and Rove thought.

“Kasich, no question,” Wynn volunteered, referring to the Ohio governor and Trump’s former primary opponent.

Trump frowned. “He doesn’t say nice things about me. Who else?”

“Well,” Rove said, “I think your battlegrounds are going to be between Pennsylvania and Iowa, and if you’re going to break the Blue Wall, you need someone with Midwestern sensibilities and someone who has evangelical appeal. There’s one guy who fits that description: Mike Pence.”

It was the strangest of smoke-filled rooms, a Central Park château populated by the renowned party strategist alternately called “Boy Genius” and “Turd Blossom” by his former boss; the financier and casino tycoon who would soon become a high-profile casualty of the country’s sexual harassment crackdown; and the rookie politician who had heckled and hoodwinked his way to the Republican nomination for president. It wasn’t quite how Jack and Bobby had picked LBJ, or how Reagan had settled on George Bush Sr., but a seed was planted that day.

Trump allowed a smile at the suggestion of Pence. “He says nice things about me.”

The short list of potential ticket mates got shorter in a hurry the following month, thanks to a revamped campaign operation manning the controls inside Trump Tower.

On June 20, at last hearing the pleas of his children, Trump fired his campaign manager. Lewandowski had been a disruptive presence for good and for ill, encouraging Trump’s primal political instincts but never refining them. Replacing him atop the campaign was Paul Manafort, the veteran scoundrel who’d sworn to friends that he was joining Trump’s team only to help with the convention operation and nothing else.

The following week Trump tapped a new communications director, Jason Miller. It made for an interesting interview: Miller had spent the past 16 months helming the messaging machine of Ted Cruz, who had become Trump’s blood rival and closest competitor for the Republican nomination. Miller himself had been responsible for a flurry of brutally negative tweets directed at the GOP front-runner throughout the primary. Trump worried about the operative’s allegiance. In a conference room on the 25th floor of Trump Tower, he glowered at Miller with a sinister smirk.

“You just came over from Cruz? I guess you want to join the winning team, right?” Trump said. “Ted is a little nasty. Sometimes he’s nice.”

Miller didn’t speak.

“Let’s see where your loyalties lie,” Trump continued. “Tell me something negative about Ted. Give me some dirt.”

“I can’t do that,” Miller replied.

“No?” Trump said. “C’mon. You have to give me something.”

Miller still refused. After two more rounds of this, Trump abruptly turned angry. “Okay, I’m not fucking around anymore,” he told Miller. “Give me something on Cruz or you’re outta here.”

The room went silent. The assembled cast—Manafort, Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, who had extended the job offer to Miller—wore concerned looks. Miller sat speechless, expecting to see security coming for him at any moment.

Then Trump broke into a grin. “Right answer!” he cried, pounding the table. “Jared, did you coach him?” (If this smacked of a mafioso scene, it wasn’t coincidental: Trump had learned at the knee of legendary New York City fixer Roy Cohn, who was famous not just as Senator Joseph McCarthy’s general counsel, but as consigliere to some of America’s biggest mobsters.)

Finally, a few days later, Trump hired Kellyanne Conway, the veteran pollster who had spent the GOP primary helming a pro-Cruz super PAC.

It wasn’t long after Cruz quit the race that Conway began talking with Trump’s team about accepting a position in his campaign. Over lunch with Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump one day in mid-May, Conway was asked who she thought made the most sense as Trump’s running mate. This was an opportunity to launch a stealth lobbying campaign on behalf of her friend and longtime client, Pence, whom she viewed as an ideal complement to Trump. But Conway decided that subtlety was the best strategy. She replied that it wasn’t about “who,” but rather, “what,” and laid out her criteria: someone with appeal in Middle America, someone trusted by conservatives, someone who added stability, not excitement—“because we’ve got all the excitement we need”—to the ticket. She was making the case for Pence, just not by name.

Conway was already well acquainted with Trump himself; she had polled on his behalf in 2011, when he was flirting with a presidential run in 2012. They were a natural pairing: Conway had spent her career pushing the party establishment to ditch its concerns about “electability” and embrace outsider candidates who could reach new voters. In this sense, although he’d defeated her preferred candidate in Cruz, Trump’s vanquishing of the GOP was the realization of her life’s work.

“The Republican Party was always looking for the next Ronald Reagan, but it kept picking Bushes,” Conway says.

Trump reveled in such assessments, feeling disrespected even after spanking a sprawling field of 16 well-regarded Republican opponents. That summer as he neared a decision on his running mate, he agreed to meet with a small group of corporate kingpins loyal to the GOP. They represented a range of industries, from banking to energy, and were convened by Jeff Sessions for a private get-to-know-you at Trump’s new hotel in Washington, D.C.

The property, once home to the historic Old Post Office, was still under construction, and laborers in hard hats milled about as the conversation commenced. After the Republican heavyweights introduced themselves, and Trump broke the ice by grilling an automotive executive about the productivity of Mexican workers, he surveyed his audience with a question: how many of them had supported him during the primary?

Nobody raised their hand. The men looked around nervously. Trump, leering at them in a way that implied some combination of disgust and delight, went around one by one, demanding to know whom they had voted for and why. Most of the attendees said Jeb Bush, out of loyalty to the family; a handful said Marco Rubio, believing he was best equipped to beat Hillary Clinton.

A long silence hung in the air. “Well,” Trump finally told them. “At least none of you supported Lyin’ Ted Cruz.”

When Pence learned that Trump’s campaign was interested in vetting him, he scoffed. No two human beings could have less in common, the governor joked to friends. Pence was a lifelong free trader; Trump wanted to rip up NAFTA. Pence supported a path to citizenship for many illegal immigrants; Trump had floated the idea of a “deportation force.” Pence was a devoutly religious Midwesterner who refused to attend alcohol-related functions without his wife or work alone in a room with female staffers; Trump was a thrice-married Manhattanite who worshipped at the shrine of his magazine covers.

And yet as time passed, the governor had grown more intrigued. The wholesome, aw-shucks, milk-drinking routine mastered by Pence belied the beating heart of a shrewd and ferociously ambitious politician, and he saw in Trump someone who had achieved a preternatural connection with the electorate, channeling voters’ anxieties in a way he had never witnessed. The longer Pence watched, the more he gravitated toward this source of power.

There was also the matter of self-preservation. Pence’s reelection was looking bleak: public polling showed the race neck and neck, but private surveys conducted that spring showed the governor’s numbers nosediving all across the state. His calamitous handling of so-called religious-liberty legislation in Indiana had cost Pence his own shot at the White House in 2016, and now it might cost him a second term. If Trump might rescue him from his predicament in Indiana, was the governor in any position to refuse?

Dazed by the entire situation, Pence reached out to a number of friends to ask for advice. One of them was David McIntosh, the former Indiana congressman who was now president of the Club for Growth, an organization that had spent millions of dollars attacking Trump during the primary. “What if he offers me the position?” Pence asked.

“That’s a no-brainer,” McIntosh replied. “The most likely result is you don’t win in the fall, but you’re probably next presidential nominee. Or, who knows—you might even be vice president.”

“You don’t think it’ll be damaging to my career to be associated with Trump?” Pence pressed.

“No,” McIntosh said. “You’re still going to be Mike Pence.”

The Indiana governor decided to make a request of Trump’s campaign. Before proceeding any further—and certainly before answering, if the offer were extended—Pence wanted his family to spend time with Trump’s family. He assumed that such an ask was unrealistic given the time constraints on a presidential campaign; if Trump could not accommodate him, Pence figured, he would know that it wasn’t meant to be.

Almost immediately, however, Trump responded in the affirmative. His campaign invited the Pences to spend the July Fourth weekend at his private golf club in New Jersey. The Indiana governor was pleased and genuinely surprised. And yet as the trip drew closer, Pence felt increasingly uneasy. On his way to the Indianapolis airport, with a plane waiting to take him to New Jersey, he placed an anxious call to Conway—who, it so happened, had been formally hired by the campaign just one day earlier. All the concerns Pence had about Trump were flooding over him. She wouldn’t hear it. “You crossed the Rubicon. Now that you’ve gone this far, there’s no going back,” Conway told Pence. “I’m going to make sure you get it.”

The access he was given to Trump that weekend proved surprising—and surprisingly reassuring. “Morning, noon, and night, we got to be around them,” Pence recalls. “That first time we got together, I was really struck by what an inquisitive person he is. He literally leads by asking questions. The first time we were together, we had breakfast and played a round of golf. Then we had lunch and dinner together. He must have asked me a thousand questions.”

About what?

“Everything,” Pence says. “My background. Politics. People. Policy. I mean, we were talking through things. But he never stops. And I’ve learned from him, it’s a leadership style in which he’s constantly asking questions.”

Trump was also fun to be around—unpredictable, comfortable in his own skin, and often hilarious. Picking up the phone as he sat with Pence on Saturday, Trump dialed Steve Scalise, the House majority whip. “Steve, question for you,” he said. “I’m thinking of making Mike Pence my vice-presidential pick. What do you think about him?”

Scalise gushed with positive feedback on Pence, his friend and fellow alumnus of the Republican Study Committee. “Well, that’s good. Real good, Steve,” Trump said. “Because he’s sitting right here!”

As the weekend wore on—and especially after a breakfast in which Trump charmed the Pences’ 23-year-old daughter, Charlotte, who had accompanied her parents on the visit—Pence found himself smitten with Trump. The Indiana governor began to believe that his friends in the governing class had gotten their nominee all wrong. No longer was he the pursued; Pence became openly desirous of the position. (Boasting to reporters that Trump “beat me like a drum” on the golf course was a good start.)

By the time he departed New Jersey with his wife and daughter, Pence felt sure that he wanted the job. He was less certain that Trump would offer it.

It was 8:30 p.m. on July 12 in Westfield, Indiana, when Pence launched into his tryout. With six days until the start of the Republican National Convention, and three days until Trump’s self-imposed deadline to name a running mate, Pence sought to answer the whispered questions of whether he possessed the intestinal fortitude for what was shaping up to be a nasty, low-down, watch-through-the-slits-in-your-fingers campaign.

“To paraphrase the director of the FBI,” Pence declared, “I think it would be extremely careless to elect Hillary Clinton.” The crowd ate it up. Their governor, basking in the noise, then introduced “the next president of the United States of America, Donald J. Trump.”

Trump climbed onto the stage with a satisfied smile, mouthing “wow” and pointing to Pence. Concluding his speech nearly an hour later, Trump said, “I don’t know whether he’s gonna be your governor or your vice president—who the hell knows?”

Such uncertainty didn’t sit well with Manafort. He was adamantly opposed to one of the other finalists, Newt Gingrich, as Trump’s running mate, believing his loud mouth and self-important streak would become a distraction to a campaign already swimming in such traits. But he had yet to convince Trump, who arrived in Indiana that Tuesday night with lingering doubts about Pence’s toughness.

As the rally drew to a close, Manafort pulled a rabbit from his hat. After coordinating with the candidate’s traveling personnel and offering a few modest bribes, he informed Trump that his plane was suffering from “mechanical problems.” They would have to stay the night in Indiana.

Meanwhile Manafort schemed with Kushner, who booked a flight into Indianapolis along with Ivanka, Don Jr., and Eric Trump, as well as with Pence’s top advisers. They were to make certain that the governor capitalized on the extended audition. Told of the plan, Pence promptly invited the entire Trump clan to breakfast the next morning at the governor’s mansion.

With news crews camped outside on the lawn, the Pences and Trumps broke pastries and sipped coffee inside the Tudor-style edifice. Sensing his final opportunity, Pence, as the New York Times reported, “delivered an uncharacteristically impassioned monologue,” describing to the Trump family “his personal distaste for Hillary Clinton and her husband, the former president, and spoke of feeling disgusted at what he called the corruption of the 1990s.”

A short while later, with the “mechanical problems” fixed, Trump was wheels up to New York. He was still unsure of whom to choose, but the candidate’s children were not. With Manafort and Kushner egging them on, they made the hard sell. Pence was deferential. He would attract evangelicals. He was polished. And he looked the part—an invaluable asset in the eyes of their father.

Finally, after another 24 hours of cajolery, Trump was convinced—or as convinced as he was ever going to be.

His campaign flew Pence to New Jersey on Thursday night and then ferried him to a Manhattan hotel. As Pence settled in, with reports surfacing that he would be announced the next day, Trump went on Fox News and said he hadn’t made his “final, final decision.” Pence chuckled and turned off the television; this seemed like some last-minute showbiz suspense. Except that it wasn’t. Trump, in California for a fund-raiser, was furious after learning that Pence’s trip to New York had been leaked—apparently by Manafort, in an attempt to lock in the selection. Stranded on the West Coast, away from the action in Trump Tower, the candidate spent much of the night on the phone with his friends and family, agonizing over the circumstances and complaining that he felt “backed into a corner” by Manafort. He even took a call from Chris Christie, the brash New Jersey governor who had long been a finalist and a Trump favorite, who made an emotional closing argument for himself.

Trump bought himself some time by pushing back the announcement of his running mate until Saturday. This was out of respect for the victims in Nice, France, where an ISIS-inspired jihadist had rammed a truck into a crowd celebrating Bastille Day, killing 86 and injuring hundreds more. But with reports swirling of his uncertainty over the V.P. selection, Trump decided on a sudden and surprise plot twist.

Flying back from California on Friday morning, he tweeted, “I am pleased to announce that I have chosen Governor Mike Pence as my Vice Presidential running mate. News conference tomorrow at 11:00 a.m.”

It was the unlikeliest of pairings—and, arguably, the smartest political decision Trump ever made. “Pence was exactly what he needed, because he was the antithesis of Trump: a solid Christian conservative who the evangelicals loved,” says John Boehner, the former House Speaker, who had handpicked Pence to join his own leadership team years earlier. “And Pence needed Trump. Here’s a guy who’s about to lose his reelection, then Trump picks him, puts him on the ticket, and gets him out of his troubles in Indiana. He’s been a loyal soldier ever since Trump threw him that lifeline.”

On Saturday the sixteenth of July, in front of a friendly audience in New York City, Trump spent nearly half an hour introducing his ticket mate, though much of the homily had nothing to do with Pence. Trump did make sure to mention how the Indiana governor hadn’t endorsed him a few months earlier, noting that it was due to pressure from donors and GOP hacks scared of his candidacy. He then devoted a considerable stretch of time to recounting his primary conquests, detailing his methodical destruction of the Republican primary field.

At one point amid the soliloquy, Trump stopped himself. “One of the big reasons I chose Mike is party unity,” he said. “I have to be honest.”