The clip quickly went viral, proof to viewers that the election had thoroughly gone off the rails. "It wasn't anything against her, but I've said time and time again that I don't agree with Mr. Trump's comments or those words," Hughes told me. "To me, that word, to women, is the same word as the N-word to African-Americans, and there's no tolerance in my book for it. It doesn't exist in my household, it doesn't exist in my vocabulary in public. I just don't do that." Still, she was surprised by the reaction. "I didn't think it would explode like that."

Of course, Hughes has good reason to know what will and will not explode. In the vast and unsettling constellation of surrogates yammering on behalf of Trump, she has the distinction of being the OG. Hughes signed on in July 2015, a few weeks after Trump announced his candidacy in the atrium of Trump Tower. At the time, she'd been working for the Tea Party News Network and appearing on cable—CNN, though also Fox News and Fox Business—to little fanfare. But she caught the eye of Sam Nunberg, the blustery Trump campaign hand who would soon be fired after the emergence of racist comments he'd made on Facebook some years prior. Nunberg called her with the invitation to become an official Trump surrogate—telling her that the campaign would help book her on more shows to talk up Trump's candidacy. "'We noticed you've been saying positive things on air,'" she remembers him telling her. Although at the time she hadn't made up her mind whether to support Trump or Ted Cruz, she accepted.

Two months later, she found herself on the tarmac at LaGuardia, onboard Trump's plane, marveling at the humble spread of Subway sandwiches and bottled water. "It's like the song from Journey," she said, remembering the moment, "just a small-town girl!" Trump called over to her: "Hey, you want to go up there for takeoff. You will want to remember this." She made her way up to the cockpit and watched the pilots steer the jet into the sky. It was, she said, "amazing." When they arrived in Dallas, she introduced Trump onstage. "That's really what put my name and Trump in the same sentence," she told me.

Turn on a cable news network at nearly any time of day and you're likely to find a Trump supporter served up by the campaign to spin the conversation in his favor. Hillary has them, too, a faction of familiar faces: old campaign workers and Democratic strategists who've been appearing on TV for ages, like Paul Begala, James Carville, Donna Brazile, and so on. Of course, Hughes and many of the other Trump surrogates (much like the candidate himself) are an undisciplined and self-motivated group. Mostly, they're opportunists who perhaps see a little of themselves in Trump and a little of Trump in them. With few exceptions, they're new to the surrogate game—a fact that makes them seem, at times, crazy…or hilarious…or scary… or desperate. Or in way over their heads.

Getting other people to talk you up in public is as old as the presidency itself. In the early days of the republic, campaigning was considered so undignified (and isn't it?) that the candidates left it almost exclusively to others. Even by the time that tradition had largely died out and candidates were expected to hit the trail, Benjamin Harrison came up with a good reason to send others out there instead. "There is great risk for meeting a fool at home," he said, "but the candidate who travels cannot escape him." When William McKinley ran in 1896, he dispatched some 1,400 surrogates to press his case among the fools. That strategy inspired Newt Gingrich—who fancies himself a historian and today serves as a Trump surrogate—to suggest to Bob Dole that he leave the campaigning in 1996 to the likes of his wife, Elizabeth, and George H. W. Bush, among others.

Trump has accumulated enough surrogates to populate every green room in America at every hour of the day, making his name and his worldview a constant presence in our living rooms.

In modern times, the candidates obviously cannot escape campaigning. But the role of the surrogate has nonetheless grown in importance recently, according to Larry Sabato, the director at the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. That's because the demands on the campaign staffers and the candidates are only increasing. "The advent of social media has added more pressure," he said, noting the incredible number of people now paid to hype the candidates. "2016 has topped all previous elections. I never knew there were so many strategists in politics. CNN has tables of them."

In the last 16 months, Trump has accumulated enough surrogates to populate every green room in America at every hour of the day, making his name and his worldview a constant presence in our living rooms—even when the candidate himself isn't speaking. "It's tough to turn on the TV and go very long without seeing a Trump surrogate," Jason Miller, the campaign's senior communications adviser, told me, boastfully.

When it can, the campaign will make joyful use of Trump's three eldest children or the various politicians—Newt Gingrich, Chris Christie, Rudy Giuliani, Ben Carson—in its stable. It's also got members of Trump's staff like Kellyanne Conway, the campaign manager; Michael Cohen, Trump's hyperactive lawyer; and Miller. And now and again, you'll see Scott Baio, or Apprentice star Omarosa Manigault, or even former boxing promoter Don King—who once stomped a man to death, mind you—jammed in front of a camera. But the lion's share of the television talk-time falls to a motley crew of political neophytes that includes Hughes.

In a sense, the Trump campaign has become a jobs program for fledgling political leaders and aspiring media stars who want a fast track to relevance. The difficulty of the actual job—making sense of Trump's policies—only adds to this. Rather than promote the candidate's message and clarify his positions, an impossible task given the nature of the man, they often seem content with simply preventing opposing voices from getting a word in edgewise—second nature, anyway, for the characters who want the gig. And the gig is to fill as much airtime as possible arguing with hosts, reporters, and Clintonites.

This is where Hughes fits, along with her fellow CNN contributors Corey Lewandowski, Trump's short-fused ex–campaign manager; Jeffrey Lord, the cotton-haired former Reagan political director; and Kayleigh McEnany, a recent law school grad who wears a crucifix so large it's a wonder her neck hasn't snapped on air. And then there's a group who officially work for the campaign: people like Katrina Pierson, famous for sporting a necklace made of bullet shells and for suggesting 9/11 was an inside job; A. J. Delgado, who used to write for the media gossip blog Mediaite and once said on Hannity that Ray Rice was the real victim of his domestic abuse; and Boris Epshteyn, a fratty fashionista who tends to repeat Vladimir Putin's talking points.