REINCE PRIEBUS WAS

clearly dispirited. It was November 2004. Priebus, then a young corporate lawyer for a Milwaukee firm, had just lost his first, and so far only, race for public office, running for a state Senate seat in his hometown of Kenosha. The incumbent Democrat, Bob Wirch, managed a four-point win in the toughest race of his Senate career.

To add insult to injury, Priebus had lost his cellphone while collecting one of his campaign signs in a field that morning.

He spent election night with his pal and fellow Republican upstart, Paul Ryan, at what was supposed to be a joint victory party at the Radisson Hotel in Pleasant Prairie. With historically high turnout thanks to the tight presidential race between George W. Bush and John Kerry, returns were slow to come out, and it wasn’t until the wee hours when the race could be called for Wirch.

“He was so dejected,” Ryan says. “I remember giving him pep talks all night, trying to cheer him up.”

Fast forward 12 years, to another election night in November 2016. Instead of the Pleasant Prairie Radisson, Priebus found himself in the posh confines of the New York Hilton Midtown alongside a different newbie candidate giving politics a try. Another late night ended with a shocking result of the opposite sort.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” a surprised Priebus pronounced after being called onstage by the candidate, “the next president of the United States, Donald Trump!” The audience erupted. In his victory speech, Trump called the slightly awestruck Republican National Committee chairman “a superstar.” The pair could not be less alike – Trump’s a billionaire son of a millionaire who’s full of bluster and bravado, while Priebus is a blend-into-the-walls son of a Kenosha electrician who just four years earlier warned Republicans that their party’s very existence depended on expanding beyond the old-white-and-angry demographic Trump had just ridden to victory.

Within days, Trump cemented the un-