The Movement’s Revolutionary Win
As I’ve said from the beginning, ours was not a campaign, but rather an incredible and great movement. . . . It’s a movement comprised of Americans from all races, religions, backgrounds, and beliefs who want and expect our government to serve the people, and serve the people it will.
—Donald Trump
Donald Trump’s double-digit polling deficit began to shrink starting on Wednesday, August 17. That was the day he named Steve Bannon chief executive officer of his campaign. A former naval officer, Harvard MBA, Goldman Sachs executive, Hollywood producer, and chairman of the populist-conservative website Breitbart.com, Bannon was known for his intellectual firepower and no-nonsense management style.
Politically, Bannon is a true populist believer who came from a blue-collar, Catholic, working-class Virginia family. As the chief executive of the largest populist media website in America, Bannon had spent years thinking about how to communicate the message of economic nationalism. After achieving success in finance and filmmaking, Bannon says it was watching the toll the 2008 financial collapse took on his father, Marty Bannon, that ignited his passion for combating the effects of globalism and big, unaccountable institutions on everyday Americans. His dad had accumulated AT&T stock during his lifelong career with the company. In October 2008, spooked by the volatility of the market, Marty sold his AT&T shares, losing $100,000. It was seeing his father lose so much so fast due to the recklessness of the big banks that impelled Steve to embrace a philosophy of economic nationalism. “The Marty Bannons of the world were getting washed out to sea, and nobody was paying attention to them,” he told The Wall Street Journal. “Everything since then has come from there. All of it.”1
Joining Bannon at the helm of the campaign was Republican pollster Kellyanne Conway, whom Trump tapped to be his new campaign manager. A protégé of Ronald Reagan’s strategist and pollster Dick Wirthlin, Conway had made a name for herself as a smart conservative operative with a knack for exhibiting grace and poise during political firestorms. Kellyanne was already part of Trump’s campaign team but had been promoted after Corey Lewandowski’s firing, which in turn followed the firing of Paul Manafort.
As soon as the leadership shake-up was announced, the Establishment went nuclear on Bannon. They rightly feared his hard-charging, take-no-prisoners style and penchant for populist policies. Despite Bannon’s professional reputation for hiring and mentoring minority journalists, Establishment Media rolled out the usual lies and race-baiting smears, going so low as to label him a “racist” and a “white nationalist.” Hundreds of leftists later held marches and rallies to condemn Bannon and called for his immediate ouster. (You know you’ve achieved conservative rock star status when Soros thugs organize demonstrations to protest your running a political campaign.)
NeverTrump and GOP old guard types also joined the bash-Bannon brigades. Marco Rubio’s campaign chief Terry Sullivan trashed Bannon’s appointment to Trump campaign CEO and told The New York Times that the GOP candidate and Bannon “both play to the lowest common denominator of people’s fears. It’s a match made in heaven.”2 Mitt Romney’s policy director Lanhee J. Chen said Bannon’s elevation was evidence that Trump was “going back to the nativism and nationalism that fueled his rise” and was “very dangerous to the future of the [Republican] party.”3
In spite of the vitriol aimed at him, Bannon’s impact was felt almost instantly. Two weeks after his and Conway’s arrival, the Trump campaign made a dramatic and unexpected announcement: the candidate would travel to Mexico for a high-stakes meeting and press conference with Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto to discuss U.S.-Mexico relations on issues like trade and the border wall. When the event went live on television, viewers saw Donald Trump and President Peña Nieto standing side by side behind two presidential lecterns placed in front of a massive green marble wall. The optics were clear: Trump looked serious, respectful, and presidential on the world stage.
Through mutual friends, I had the pleasure of getting to know one of the Mexican officials responsible for arranging the risky but bold Trump trip. Luis Videgaray, then Mexico’s finance minister, had surprisingly keen insights into Trump’s populist appeal. While most Mexican political players bet against the idea of a Trump presidency, not the MIT-trained economist Videgaray. Although he didn’t agree with candidate Trump on the wall, and was annoyed by some of his harsher rhetoric on illegal immigration, he also understood that a president Trump could mean a new, refreshing start for his country’s relationship with the United States. Smartly, he struck up a professional friendship with Jared Kushner during the early summer of 2016, which ultimately helped lead to Trump’s Mexico visit.
Later that night Trump flew to Arizona and delivered a tough pro-enforcement speech that unnecessarily stepped on the powerful narrative his Mexico meeting had generated earlier that morning. Still, the surprise Mexico trip was a strategic masterstroke that boosted his credibility, heartened his supporters, and signaled a savvy and aggressive new approach to campaigning.
Critics believed Bannon’s presence in the campaign would make Trump into a harder, more divisive candidate. It did the opposite. Days after his Mexico meeting, Trump traveled to Philadelphia for a September 2 meeting with black church and community leaders. He also spent time with Shalga Hightower, a black mother whose 20-year-old daughter, Iofemi, had been murdered by a group of men that included two illegal aliens. Trump consoled Ms. Hightower, who, in tears, recounted her daughter’s tragic death. Iofemi’s killers all received life sentences, Ms. Hightower said. “But they should have never been here,” Trump interjected. “But they should have never been here, absolutely,” she replied.4
Those in attendance expressed their gratitude for Trump’s visit. A local black Republican leader named Daphne Goggins began to tear up when she met Trump. “For the first time in my life, I feel like my vote is going to count,” Goggins said, crying. Similarly, Renee Amoore, a local business leader, thanked the Republican nominee for making an effort to reach out to the black community. “People say, Mr. Trump, that you have no African-American support. We want you to know that you do,” said Amoore. “We appreciate you and what you’ve done, coming to ‘the hood’ as people call it. That’s a big deal.”5
Detroit native Ben Carson then accompanied Trump to the Motor City where the presidential candidate met with parishioners at the Great Faith Ministries Church, a predominantly black church. There, Trump visited privately with 100 church members with no press present before delivering simple, humble remarks inside the sanctuary. “I am here today to listen,” he said. “I hope my presence here will also help your voice to reach new audiences in our country and many of these audiences desperately need your spirit and your thought.”6 The usual gaggle of anti-Trump protestors had assembled outside the sanctuary. But inside the church, for a brief instant, Trump’s presence and heartfelt words revealed a candidate with a sincere desire to connect with a community unlikely to vote for him. It was a beautiful and hopeful moment.
Hillary Spills Her Basket of Deplorables
One week after Donald Trump’s Philadelphia and Detroit visits, Hillary Clinton attended the LGBT gala for the Hillary Victory Fund with Barbra Streisand held at a tony New York restaurant, Cipriani on Wall Street. Despite her claims to be an “inclusive” candidate who believed we are “Stronger Together,” Hillary Clinton let her mask slip and told the progressive mega-donors what she really thought about tens of millions of working-class Americans:
We are living in a volatile political environment. You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the “basket of deplorables.” Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic—you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people—now 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive, hateful, mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks—they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America.7
Trump supporters weren’t just hateful bigots. In Hillary’s eyes, the “basket of deplorables” were also “irredeemable.” That last part hit with equal if not greater offense. Christians believe that even the worst of sinners are capable of redemption through God’s grace and forgiveness. Yet in Hillary’s worldview, Trump supporters were a wretched and irredeemable lot, devoid of human worth and dignity.
In an instant, Hillary had ignited a firestorm reminiscent of Mitt Romney’s disastrous “47 percent” comment. The hashtag #BasketOfDeplorables trended across social media, as Trump supporters flooded Facebook and Twitter with memes and comments condemning her disparaging remarks. Soon, “basket of deplorables” became a badge of honor that many conservatives wore proudly and literally. “Proud Deplorable” and “Adorable Deplorable” T-shirts and hats began popping up at Trump rallies. Hillary’s line was a perfect crystallization of everything the populist movement opposed—the smug and mean-spirited superiority of an out-of-touch elite.
The Trump campaign demanded that Hillary apologize. Instead, she released a statement that doubled down on the demonization, attacking Trump and Bannon:
Last night I was “grossly generalistic,” and that’s never a good idea. I regret saying “half”—that was wrong. But let’s be clear, what’s really “deplorable” is that Donald Trump hired a major advocate for the so-called “alt-right” movement to run his campaign and that David Duke and other white supremacists see him as a champion of their values. It’s deplorable that Trump has built his campaign largely on prejudice and paranoia and given a national platform to hateful views and voices. . . . So I won’t stop calling out bigotry and racist rhetoric in this campaign.8
Democrats like Obama’s former deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter followed Hillary’s defiant lead. On NBC’s Meet the Press, Cutter said of Clinton: “I think that her only mistake is that she said half of his supporters were deplorable. . . . He is attracting a certain type of voter . . . and they tweet racist things, he retweets them, he says it from the stump. So what she said was not wrong. Her only mistake was that she described half of his supporters that way.”9 So much for being “Stronger Together”!
Democrats’ bogus racism smears were nothing new. The left had dubbed every Republican presidential candidate since Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan a racist. What made Hillary’s slander unique was that she aimed her rhetorical guns directly at 31 million voters (half of Trump’s supporters). The attack left Americans asking: how can Hillary look out for the best interests of a country when she believes that so many of us are evil? How can she claim to support democracy when she believes that so many of us are not even part of America? Do these facts explain why she is so willing to give away our sovereignty? Do they explain why she has long supported granting more power to judges and unelected global institutions? Hillary’s disparagement wasn’t an indecorous gaffe, it was the full revelation of her belief that the people are uneducated, backward, dangerous, and therefore must be controlled by elites’ superior intellect and virtue.
The fallout from Hillary’s “basket of deplorables” fiasco was profound. (We know this is true because she conspicuously left it out of her extensive post-election laundry list of reasons why she lost.) The Washington Post–ABC News poll found that 65 percent of all voters said Hillary’s statements were “unfair.” When broken down by party, 84 percent of Republicans, 68 percent of Independents, and a surprising 47 percent of Democrats all agreed Hillary’s comments were out of bounds.10 Worse, she had galvanized and energized Trump supporters. Their votes were now an act of defiance and protest—a chance to defend their personal dignity and citizenship. After the election, Diane Hessan, a Clinton campaign operative hired to track the undecided vote in swing states, said Hillary’s deplorables line was a decisive game-changer:
There was one moment when I saw more undecided voters shift to Trump than any other, when it all changed, when voters began to speak differently about their choice. It wasn’t FBI Director James Comey, Part One or Part Two; it wasn’t Benghazi or the e-mails or Bill Clinton’s visit with Attorney General Loretta Lynch on the tarmac. No, the conversation shifted the most during the weekend of Sept. 9, after Clinton said, “You can put half of Trump supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables.” All hell broke loose.11
“Basket of deplorables” was the kind of get-out-the-voter motivator money couldn’t buy.
The Clinton campaign’s woes turned even worse two days later when the candidate collapsed at a September 11 memorial service at Ground Zero in Manhattan, which Trump also attended. For months, people had speculated about Hillary’s poor health and whether she lacked the “stamina,” as Trump put it, to be president. Bizarre coughing spells during speeches only added to lingering concerns over the 2012 news that Hillary suffered from a rare and potentially life-threatening condition. She had been diagnosed with cerebral venous thrombosis after neural scans found a blood clot near her brain.12 Clinton’s operatives and members of the Establishment Media (one and the same really) dismissed questions about Hillary’s health as conspiracy theories and sexism against a female candidate. Yet on the 15th anniversary of the deadliest attack on American soil, Hillary’s handlers found themselves out of excuses.
The physical evidence was stark—and it came in the form of video taken from multiple angles of her being led out of the memorial event. Hillary appeared weak, her knees buckled, and she almost fell to the ground before being lifted into a van waiting curbside. No one from the press was allowed to follow her as she was whisked away. The traveling press pool was kept in the dark for at least 30 minutes on the whereabouts of Clinton’s location. Later, we were told she traveled to Chelsea Clinton’s apartment before reemerging just before noon to do a show-walk for the cameras. She proclaimed, “It’s a beautiful day in New York” and greeted a little girl whom she talked with for a few minutes. Asked by reporters present if she was “feeling better?” Clinton said, “Yes, thank you very much.”
A few hours later, Hillary’s campaign spun the press by revealing that Clinton wasn’t just a seasonal allergy sufferer, she also had pneumonia! If she had pneumonia, why was she exposing voters and the little girl in front of Chelsea’s apartment to her supposed illness.
CNN reporters raced to their battle stations to suffocate the blast. “Can’t a girl have a sick day or two?” said CNN’s Christiane Amanpour. (Can you imagine the firestorm and charges of sexism that would have exploded had a conservative referred to Clinton as a “girl”?)13 Not to be outshone, CNN’s Brian Stelter dismissed concerns about Hillary’s health as rank sexism: “We’re talking about the first female nominee of a major political party in American history,” said Stelter. “We should be honest about the double standards that women sometimes face with regards to their health, with the idea that women are portrayed as being weaker than men.”14 CNN also rolled out the tired old liberal Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein, who said the media must “demand that Donald Trump appear with his doctor” because “we need to know if there are heart problems”—despite the fact that Trump exhibited exactly zero indications of any heart-related ailments.15
The whole episode offered voters further proof that Hillary Clinton and the Establishment Media were not to be trusted. With just two weeks until the all-important first presidential debate, more Americans wondered if and how Hillary’s illness might affect her performance.
The Debates
On September 26, 2016, the largest-ever group of Americans huddled around their screens to watch the first presidential debate held at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York, moderated by NBC’s Lester Holt. The event smashed TV ratings records as an estimated 84 million people tuned in to watch.16 I viewed the debate onsite in a small room with Monica Crowley and other Fox News colleagues.
The pre-debate jitters were palpable throughout the building as the nation prepared to see Donald Trump’s first-ever one-on-one debate. That he was up against a seasoned debater who had lived decades of her life on the national political stage only raised the stakes.
I cringed. Even world-class rhetoricians like Ronald Reagan submitted themselves to weeks of debate prep. The Clinton team had done the same, including numerous mock debates between Hillary and one of her top advisers, Philippe Reines, who played the role of Trump. So complete was Reines’s determination to simulate Trump that he had purchased a look-alike suit from Nordstrom’s, ordered a Trump watch and cuff links on eBay and Amazon respectively, purchased four podiums, wore dress shoes with three-and-a-quarter-inch lifts, and even bought a backboard for his posture and knee braces to stop him from swaying while debating as Trump.17
But none of that mattered now. I huddled in one of the Fox News trailers with Monica and we settled in, both excited and nervous. I would appear on a few panels directly after the speech, so I had my notepad, Doritos, and iced tea. Hillary fired off her memorized, poll-tested attacks in pithy, tweet-sized talking points. She hammered Trump’s economic policies: “I call it Trumped-up, trickle-down economics.” Then Clinton slammed him on climate change: “Donald thinks that climate change is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese. I think it’s real.” On his treatment of women, Hillary hit him mercilessly: “This is a man who has called women pigs, slobs, and dogs.” She added: “And one of the worst things he said was about a woman in a beauty contest. He loves beauty contests, supporting them, and hanging around them. And he called this woman Ms. Piggy. Then he called her Ms. Housekeeping, because she was Latina.” (Hillary’s campaign then deftly fanned this attack line days after the debate by rolling out the woman in question, Alicia Machado, whom Trump unwisely attacked.)
Over and over, Hillary dropped lines like laser-guided munitions aimed at hitting key voter demographics.
Still, Trump held his own. Just about the time Monica and I started wondering aloud when he was going to drive home his points on jobs and trade, Trump delivered a great riff on NAFTA and TPP.
“Your husband signed NAFTA, which was one of the worst things that ever happened to the manufacturing industry,” said Trump.
“Well, that’s your opinion,” Clinton interrupted. “That is your opinion.”
“You go to New England, you go to Ohio, Pennsylvania, you go anywhere you want, Secretary Clinton, and you will see devastation where manufacturing is down 30, 40, sometimes 50 percent,” Trump said. “NAFTA is the worst trade deal maybe ever signed anywhere, but certainly ever signed in this country. And now you want to approve Trans-Pacific Partnership. You were totally in favor of it. Then you heard what I was saying, how bad it is, and you said, I can’t win that debate. But you know that if you did win, you would approve that, and that will be almost as bad as NAFTA. Nothing will ever top NAFTA.”
“YES!” I shouted at the TV. “Really excellent stuff!” Monica chimed in. He also hit jobs being outsourced to Mexico and China—red meat to the base, a stark contrast with Clinton.
On several occasions, Trump underscored his overarching thesis of the debate: “Hillary, I’d just ask you this: you’ve been doing this for 30 years—why are you just thinking about these solutions right now?” said Trump. “For 30 years you’ve been doing it and now you’re just starting to think about solutions.”
The unanswerable, checkmate question, I thought to myself. Nicely done.
He also flipped the script on Hillary’s “experience.” “Hillary does have experience, but it’s bad experience,” he said.
When Lester Holt brought up Hillary’s email scandal, she was ready with a response. “I made a mistake by using private email. If I had to do over again, I’d obviously do it differently,” Clinton said.
Trump pounced. “That was more than a mistake,” he interjected. “That was done purposely.” And also, “Why did she delete 30,000 emails?”
Donald also used the purposeful interruption when Hillary tried to falsely saddle him with supporting the Iraq invasion. “Wrong. Wrong. Wrong,” he said over her.
Nevertheless, there were plenty of Trump responses that made Republicans wince. Like when Hillary claimed Trump “rooted for the housing crisis” so he could make money and the billionaire real estate mogul interrupted with, “That’s called business, by the way.” Or when Trump posited that a “400-pound hacker” may have been behind the DNC hacks.
He also spent too much time defending claims better left ignored, such as when Hillary played the racism card by harkening back to questions over Barack Obama’s birth certificate—a conspiracy Hillary’s own supporters started way back in the spring of 2008.18 Trump took the bait. “She failed to get the birth certificate,” Trump said. “When I got involved, I didn’t fail.” Also missing from the debate was any discussion of the Clinton Foundation, something Lester Holt refused to ask and Donald Trump somehow failed to raise.
Still, on balance, Trump had done well. If you were scoring on Harvard debate league points, Hillary might have come out a little ahead. But that’s not how real people process presidential debates. The unprecedented onslaught of attacks from Democrats, media, and NeverTrumpers had the unintended effect of lowering expectations for Trump. They claimed he was a radical with extreme views, but the people knew better—the real radicals were those who undermined the rule of law and killed off millions of American jobs by encouraging illegal immigration. By reflecting reasonable, alternative positions and committing no major gaffes, Trump defended the people with strength if not polish. A solid performance on balance, especially for someone who hadn’t done much in the way of rehearsal.
By 2:00 a.m., Monica and I were done filming at Hofstra. We dragged our belongings into the car and headed back to Manhattan. I was spent. “I don’t know how I’m going to make my morning hit. I’m exhausted!” I told Monica. “Laura, you’re going to have no time to get ready for Fox & Friends,” she replied. “So just sleep in your eye makeup, take off your foundation, wake up, and your eyes will already be done.” A total pro, that Crowley.
The next day the Establishment Media dutifully performed their roles as the public relations arm of the Clinton campaign and eviscerated Trump’s debate performance. They declared the race over. Politico’s chief economic correspondent and CNBC contributor Ben White published an article titled “Donald Trump Can’t Win” and said the debate was a “nightmare for the Republican nominee.”19
A week after the first presidential debate, Mike Pence and Tim Kaine squared off in the first and only vice presidential debate held in Farmville, Virginia, at Longwood University. Pence smashed Kaine, just as I knew he would. Pence is a masterful communicator with deep rhetorical roots. In high school he was the top member of his speech team—named the Bull Tongues—had been crowned “speaker of the year,” and advanced through regional and state tournaments to compete in national speech competitions.20 His oratorical skills aside, Pence’s quiet strength and humble demeanor were a stark contrast to Kaine’s awkward, goofy expressions (which evoked memories of Jack Nicholson’s Joker), made worse by his incessant need to interrupt the Indiana governor’s every utterance. Pence persevered and managed to deliver a rhetorical round-house kick to Kaine wrapped in a compliment. He honored their sons’ mutual military service and then added: “if your son or my son handled classified information the way Hillary Clinton did, they’d be court-martialed.”
Then on October 7, 2016, just three days after the vice presidential debate, the campaign was set ablaze when a 2005 videotape of Donald Trump making lewd comments about women was released by The Washington Post. Trump was caught on a hot mic by NBC’s Access Hollywood, chatting with host Billy Bush on his way to tape a cameo appearance on a soap opera. Condemnation and political obituaries rained down from all quarters.
Republican senator Mark Kirk reacted by calling Trump a “malignant clown” who was “unfit to serve as president of the United States.”21 It was so awful, said Kirk, that the Republican Party must appoint an “emergency replacement” to the ticket. NeverTrump U.S. senator Ben Sasse also called for the candidate to drop out of the race, saying that Trump “is obviously not going to win” but that he can “still make an honorable move” by dropping out.22 GOP senator Mike Lee released a Facebook video. “I respectfully ask you, with all due respect, to step aside,” Lee said. “Step down. Allow someone else to carry the banner of [conservative] principles.”23 In total, three dozen Republicans had called for Trump’s removal from the presidential ticket. Several more stopped just short of that, withdrawing their support.
In Los Angeles for an appearance the next day at the annual Bakersfield Business Conference, I was bombarded by telephone calls from major political figures, donors, supporters, and reporters who wanted reassurance, analysis, or advice. For several hours after the embarrassing details broke, I really did not know what to think. Top Republicans (including some in the Trump campaign) were discussing the feasibility of dumping Trump from the ticket. “That would be political suicide,” I responded to one such top GOP official. “Democrats might as well start buying inaugural tickets,” I added. “He’s our guy.” The notion that the Republican Party should jettison the man who had energized the base more than any candidate since Reagan was not just idiotic, it was election-ending. Turning against Trump would be turning against their own grass roots (something the GOP Establishment had mastered over years of practice).
The next morning, I hit the road early to drive the almost two hours to Bakersfield, one of the last conservative strongholds of California, and home of two of my musical heroes: the late Buck Owens and Merle Haggard. Every fall the Bakersfield Business Conference featured an array of speakers from business, media, sports, and politics.
Given the sordid news of the past 24 hours, my excitement about appearing before thousands of Republicans a month before the election had turned to dread. Of course there was no defending the Trump comments, which I found personally reprehensible and disgusting. When I walked into the large VIP area, I made a beeline for Ben and Candy Carson, who were also there. “Never a dull moment,” he said, and I just nodded. “Oh well, I guess today will be a pretty interesting focus group for measuring the effect of the tape,” I noted.
My main task during my 30-minute presentation was to keep everyone focused on the prize—keeping Hillary Clinton from the presidency and electing someone who could implement the conservative-populist reforms we needed.24 If I revealed even a hint of my concern about the current mess, the audience would sense it and become demoralized.
The sweltering air in the long, wide, open-air tent was stifling, and attendees wearing sundresses and khakis, shorts and buttoned-downs fanned themselves for relief. It was an older crowd—small business owners and some farmers. As I was being introduced, an idea came to me. I would face the new scandal head-on, express my disgust before the crowd, but then ask them to choose between giving up on Trump and fighting the Washington political machine with everything they had.
I held up my cell phone camera after each question in my mini-poll and filmed the reaction. Hardly anyone seemed to support ditching Trump, while loud cheers erupted after I offered the “fight Hillary with everything we have” option. Once again, American voters were smarter than the Washington punditocracy and professional Consultant Class. They weren’t electing a saint; they were electing someone who could help get our economy going and keep the home front safe.
My event escort and I drove around the fairgrounds after my speech to find a cold beer. I was stunned by the number of people who called out to thank me, urging me to keep battling. Although obviously not happy with Trump’s comments, most chose to look past them. I hopped into the car to return to Los Angeles, firm in my belief that Trump could, in fact, win this thing. The “Bakersfield Sound” that I heard that hot fall day wasn’t the twangy tunes Buck and Merle had made famous 50+ years earlier. But in the voices and reactions of regular working people at a particularly ugly period in our political history, I heard the comforting sounds of patriotism, pragmatism, and optimism.
Forty-eight hours after the tape heard around the world, Donald Trump scored an incredible surprise victory at the second presidential debate in St. Louis, Missouri, moderated by CNN’s Anderson Cooper and ABC News’s Martha Raddatz. When I arrived at the Washington University venue, I was escorted into a Fox News holding room where Monica Crowley and I could once again view the debate via monitor before our post-debate analysis segment with Sean Hannity and populist Brexit architect Nigel Farage (a providential guest booking, to be sure). Watching with us were the nearly one out of five Americans who tuned in (66.5 million people).25
The Trump campaign knew the Access Hollywood tape would take center stage at the debate; the moderators would do everything in their power to help Hillary put Trump away once and for all. To prepare, Steve Bannon arranged for three of Bill Clinton’s sexual assault accusers—Juanita Broaddrick, Paula Jones, and Kathleen Wiley—to all be seated in the front row, along with Kathy Shelton, a woman who as a child had been raped and whose accused rapist Hillary Clinton had defended. An hour prior to the debate, Trump hosted an impromptu press conference with all four women and broadcast it live over his powerful Facebook page. As networks began their pre-debate coverage, some reluctantly flashed images of the press conference and Bill Clinton’s alleged victims—women whom Establishment Media had done their best to ignore and keep in the shadows. When the debate began and the former president entered the hall, cameras caught him making furtive glances toward his accusers. Were the women there simply as psychological warfare? Or would they become reference points in Trump’s debate remarks? Bill looked mortified.
In the opening minutes, Anderson Cooper hit Trump with a brutally worded question that everyone knew was coming. “We received a lot of questions online, Mr. Trump, about the tape that was released on Friday, as you can imagine,” said Cooper. “You called what you said ‘locker room banter.’ You described kissing women without consent, grabbing their genitals. That is sexual assault. You bragged that you have sexually assaulted women. Do you understand that?”
“This was locker room talk. I am not proud of it,” replied Trump. “I apologize to my family, I apologize to the American people. Certainly I am not proud of it.” Trump tried to pivot to national security, but Cooper persisted with follow-ups on the tape before Hillary delivered a long soliloquy on Trump’s dangerous words and attitudes about women. Then Martha Raddatz explained that due to social media interest, the debate would continue to stay “on this topic” before reading a question from a voter about whether Trump had changed since the decade-old tape. And that’s when Trump said this:
I am a person who has great respect for people, for my family, for the people of this country and certainly I am not proud of it, but that was something that happened. If you look at Bill Clinton, far worse. Mine are words and his was action. His words, what he has done to women. There’s never been anybody in the history of politics in this nation that has been so abusive to women. So you can say it any way you want to say it, but Bill Clinton is abusive to women. Hillary Clinton attacked those same women, and attacked them viciously, four of them here tonight. One of the women, who is a wonderful woman, at 12 years old was raped. At 12. Her client, she represented, got him off and she is seen laughing on two occasions laughing at the girl who was raped. Kathy Shelton, that young woman, is here with us tonight. So don’t tell me about words. I am, absolutely—I apologize for those words, but it is things that people say. But what President Clinton did, he was impeached, he lost his license to practice law, he had to pay an $850,000 fine to one of the women—Paula Jones, who is also here tonight. And I will tell you that when Hillary brings up a point like that and she talks about words that I said 11 years ago, I think it’s disgraceful and I think she should be ashamed of herself, if you want to know the truth.
By referencing the Clinton sexual assault accusers, Trump made them part of the permanent debate transcript, sent cameras swiveling toward the women and Bill Clinton, contrasted words versus deeds. He drew a direct line to Hillary’s role in demonizing Bill’s accusers through her brutal treatment of the child rape victim whose accused perpetrator she defended. The Trump campaign’s strategy paid off. The political wound that many believed would prove fatal to Trump’s candidacy had effectively been cauterized.
Better still, Trump’s policy answers throughout the rest of the debate exhibited specificity and granularity. He landed sharp, crisp policy punches on trade, taxes, Syria, Mosul, minority poverty, Benghazi, ISIS, and the Supreme Court. After the debate I went on air with Sean, Monica, and Nigel to declare Trump the hands-down debate winner:
For anyone to go on television tonight and say that this was not a decisive, and frankly, masterful performance by Donald Trump should just drop the pretense of being a Republican “strategist”—they never strategize, by the way—or a Republican quote “pundit” or analyst. He came in with the entire GOP Establishment really against him. He came in with the media against him. He came in with Hollywood against him. And the entire Bush apparatus. All of them against him. And he came in and said, we’re going down the tubes, you’re an architect of this, and we need a new path forward . . . and he hit her in a way that not a single Republican in the last 30 years has been able to lay a glove on the Clintons. And he did it. We’ve been waiting for this moment for someone, face-to-face, to take down the Clintons.
With Trump’s performance an overwhelming victory, Establishment Media rushed in to protect Hillary and rewrite the script. They seized on two of Trump’s throwaway lines and tried to amplify them into yet another “game over” moment. First, after Hillary said “it’s awfully good that someone with the temperament of Donald Trump is not in charge of the law in our country,” Trump replied with the major applause line, “Because you would be in jail.” Second, when discussing national disunity, Trump said his opponent had “tremendous hate in her heart” while referencing her irredeemable deplorables line.
Establishment Media pounced. Vox declared that “Donald Trump’s Threat to Imprison Hillary Clinton Is a Threat to Democracy.”26 CNN’s Dana Bash played the Stalin and Hitler cards: “What makes this country different from countries with dictators in Africa or Stalin or Hitler or any of those countries with dictators and totalitarian leaders, is that when they took over, they put their opponents in jail. To hear one presidential candidate say, even if it was a flip comment, which it was, ‘you’re going to be in jail’ to another presidential candidate in the debate stage in the United States of America? Stunning. Just stunning.”27 Speaking in his most dramatic cadence, CNN’s Van Jones said it was “a new low in American democracy.”28 The New York Times warned that “Trump’s Threat to Jail Clinton Also Targets Democracy’s Institutions.”29 Never has a throw-away applause line generated so much breathless coverage.
The Access Hollywood tape and the media’s unending anti-Trump drumbeat appeared to take a toll on Trump’s standing in the polls. A CNN survey taken after the video’s release found Clinton held an 11-point lead.30 Indeed, throughout the entire campaign, only one poll—the Los Angeles Times/USC tracking poll—regularly showed Donald Trump leading the race.31 We now know, of course, that all the polls save this one had it wrong. But during the election, these outrageously inaccurate polls were used as a cudgel to bash Trump’s candidacy in the hopes of demoralizing his supporters and driving down Republican turnout.
Meanwhile in NeverTrump Land, the GOP elites were busy hyping an absurd gambit to sabotage Trump in the reliably Republican state of Utah. Their plan: help NeverTrump candidate Evan McMullin pick off Utah, thereby denying Trump six otherwise guaranteed electoral votes. Their hope was that Trump would win 263 electoral votes to hold Hillary below the magic 270 votes required to clinch the election. If no candidate received 270 electoral votes, the race would get kicked to the House of Representatives for members of Congress to choose the next president. It was the kind of nutty nonsense that underscored just how unhinged the GOP apparatchik had become. Naturally, the press flocked to McMullin to grant him ample oxygen in the hopes of hurting Trump weeks before the election. While McMullin’s chances were virtually nonexistent, the NeverTrump ruse this late in the game clearly irked Trump and Pence. “Nobody ever heard of him,” Mike Pence said dismissively about McMullin. “The guy takes votes away from me,” said Trump. “He’s a puppet of a loser,” he said, referring to Bill Kristol, a NeverTrump leader.32 Still, with the third debate representing Trump’s final chance to make his closing argument, the campaign had bigger things to focus on.
The last debate was held on October 19 in Las Vegas, moderated by Fox News anchor Chris Wallace. With 71.6 million people tuning in to watch, each candidate did their best to persuade undecided voters and motivate their base.33 Many of the familiar arguments and lines of attack played out in the last debate, but there were at least three flash points that stood out. First, when asked whether he would accept the election results, Trump refused to confirm that he would and said, “I’ll keep you in suspense.” I felt that was a mistake. He should have simply said he would accept the outcome of the election. Unless we were in a recount, there was no other option. Second, Trump referred to Clinton as a “nasty woman”—a phrase too enticing for social media not to meme and mock. Whether the line was one of Trump’s psychological jujitsu tricks designed to get media to repeat a negative phrase about Hillary was unclear. If so, it worked. “Nasty woman” T-shirts and memorabilia materialized instantly. Third, and I thought most importantly, Trump articulated the pro-life cause using powerful words that exposed Hillary’s radicalism on late-term abortion and her refusal to place any restrictions on abortion, even up until the final week of pregnancy.
“I think it’s terrible. If you go with what Hillary is saying, in the ninth month you can take the baby and rip the baby out of the womb of the mother just prior to the birth of the baby,” said Trump. “Now, you can say that that’s okay, and Hillary can say that that’s okay, but it’s not okay with me.” In graphic yet simple language, Trump had captured the moral outrageousness and extremism of Hillary’s abortion on-demand regime. “That was amazing!” I said, turning to Monica with tears welling up in my eyes. We were both overjoyed that Trump had put Hillary back on the heels of her sensible shoes.
GOP elites and NeverTrumpers groused that Trump was a latecomer to the pro-life cause and would cave under pressure. Yet on that debate stage, with the election less than three weeks away and over 70 million people watching, a tough man who had previously been pro-choice chose to courageously defend life and to be a voice for the voiceless.
After the debate, Mike Huckabee and I appeared together on Hannity. The former Arkansas governor was as moved as I was about Trump’s passionate advocacy for the unborn. “I hope that every Catholic and every Evangelical in this country paid careful attention to the stark contrast between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton when it came to the issue of protecting innocent human life,” said Huckabee. “Donald Trump boldly took a stand for life tonight. For all these NeverTrumpers out there, they need to get off their keister, if you will, just stand up and recognize, there is a clear choice here.” Sean and I chided the Baptist preacher over his polite use of the word “keister,” but as usual, Huckabee nailed it. Killing babies, especially those in the latter stages of pregnancy—no matter how Clinton tried to justify it—was pure evil. Hillary’s fanatical embrace of infanticide had to be exposed. At a time when many other “conservatives” fell silent on abortion, Trump stood in the gap when it mattered most and defended life. Populists are pro-life because babies are people, too—individuals deserving of life and protection. For any NeverTrumper to claim to be “pro-life” and still refuse to support him now was illogical and self-defeating. Whether he won or lost the election, Donald Trump had placed himself and his supporters on the right side of history.
“Where I Come from, People Don’t Cut in Line”
With his poll numbers looking grim just a few days before Election Day, Trump’s campaign staff, in the 11th hour, decided to add one more stop to the four states already on his schedule.
After Sioux City, Minneapolis, Sterling Heights (Michigan), and Moon Township (Pennsylvania), he would end the day in Leesburg, Virginia. No one expected the Republican nominee to come back to the Old Dominion given Hillary Clinton’s big lead there, but Trump was unconventional right until the end. At about six p.m. that night, senior campaign adviser Dave Bossie asked if I wanted to speak at the event. “You mean in, like, three hours?” I asked incredulously.
Strange as it sounds, it would be my first Trump rally. Every other chance I had to go to one, either kids or work intervened. With so little notice and virtually zero promotion of the event, it was hard to believe that the crowd would be that big, especially so late on a Sunday evening. Although it was a school night, I thought it was important to bring my eleven-year-old daughter, Maria, so she could witness a significant moment in political history. A few other friends also came along for the hour drive out of town.
Approaching the exit for the fairgrounds, we saw that the traffic was backed up for miles. A wild ruby necklace of taillights twinkled as it wrapped around the landscape. People with lawn chairs and signs, women with babies, elderly with canes and walkers were walking three and four abreast on the side of the narrow road, leaving only one lane for driving. The campaign volunteer who guided our SUV through a police perimeter told us that the crowd started forming in the early morning hours. “It’s crazy,” he said, “because the pavilion only holds about 1,500 people—and apparently 15,000 people are here.”
The one-lane country road we turned onto was teeming with Trump supporters who parted to each side as we bumped along in the pitch black. They wore MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN sweatshirts, hats, and even had dogs dressed up in Trump T-shirts. One 20-something decorated his mountain bike in Christmas lights and red-white-and-blue streamers. Music blared over personal speakers—one woman was playing Elvis singing “America the Beautiful.” A Baby Boomer with a beard and cowboy boots played the Trump anthem, the Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.”
When we finally arrived at the opening where a “Women for Trump” tour bus had parked for “VIPs” (I hate that term), I met up with Raymond Arroyo and his family who had just arrived. The kids chatted up the guys in the Fox News satellite truck, and I began walking back along the line of what security told me was as many as 10,000 people who hoped to catch a glimpse of Trump.
By 10:30 you could see your breath in the cold night air and it was obvious the GOP nominee was way behind schedule. But I didn’t hear a single person gripe or moan. They didn’t mind if they couldn’t get through the gate and into the covered area to see Trump. “We’ll listen over the loudspeakers,” one young woman said. “He has to win!” shouted another. There were fathers carrying toddlers on their shoulders and people helping the elderly up the hillside.
Walking back toward the bus, I came upon a man in a mechanized wheelchair, wearing a Korean War baseball cap, bundled up in an old down jacket, with a red U.S. Marine blanket over his legs. “Nothing was going to stop me from being here,” he said when I asked him how he navigated all the way from the “satellite” parking lot. Accompanied by his son and grandson, he told me about his home in rural Virginia and how life had changed there (not for the better), how he lost his beloved wife months earlier—and how hard she had prayed that Trump would win.
I offered to bring them to the front of the impossibly long line.
“Appreciate it, ma’am,” he said, without breaking his gaze toward the pavilion ahead. “But where I come from, people don’t cut in line.”
After midnight I took to the stage to rev up the crowd before Jerry Falwell Jr. would step out to introduce Donald Trump. We had another 30 minutes to fill, but if the audience was tired, they did a good job hiding it. Chants of “U.S.A.!” and “Go Trump, Go!” erupted in the back. The placards read “FARMERS FOR TRUMP,” “WOMEN FOR TRUMP,” and yes, “HILLARY FOR PRISON.” When the motorcade carrying the future president of the United States pulled up in back, we were fortunate enough to greet him. “You’re late!” I said to him jokingly, when he stepped out of the Suburban. “What a day!” he said, wearing a black overcoat and his signature red tie. “This is my . . . uh . . . how many states have we been to today again?” he asked one of this staffers. A voice shouted “Five!” “Unbelievable crowds, unbelievable energy,” he told me. I’ve never seen my daughter happier than she was that night, when Donald Trump put his arm around her for a picture, thanked her for coming out on a school night, and said, “Now Maria, promise me you’ll work hard in school!”
A few moments later, Trump bounded up on stage and the place went crazy. When he referenced me a few times, I was honored, although I didn’t expect it. A bleary-eyed Steve Bannon and exhausted Jared Kushner stood off to the side, both looking like they had been through all the levels of Dante’s Inferno. In a sense, they had. The 2016 campaign, with its fits and starts, scandals and surprises, had been the wildest, nastiest, and most unpredictable in our lifetime.
Taking in the moment, the blur and roar of the crowd, I stood back to see my daughter transfixed, clapping and cheering for him as he punched out every line.
“We are one day away from the change you’ve been waiting for your entire life,” Trump said. “This is going to be Brexit times 50. . . . When we win on Nov. 8, we are going to drain the swamp.”
When I explain to people why Trump won, I think of that proud Virginia veteran in the wheelchair whose name I’ll never know. There were millions of people just like him, who live their lives in quiet dignity, according to the moral code of their ancestors, with an abiding love for America. Where I live, in Washington, people cut in line all the time. The well-connected and well-heeled always find a way around the rules that apply to everyone else. Lobbyists help the powerful interests they represent “jump the line” all the time and usually do so at the expense of the working poor and the middle class.
Voters in “middle America” concluded many years ago that our political system had been committed to policies that don’t work for most Americans. We had a trade policy that helps China to the detriment of American workers. We had an immigration system that helped people who employ illegal immigrants, but hurt anyone who had to compete with those immigrants for jobs. We had a foreign policy that delighted global elites, while American citizens paid the tab. We had a regulatory apparatus that pleased environmental radicals that choked growth and innovation. Bad policies in areas too numerous to recount weighed down the free market and hurt ordinary citizens.
After decades of exasperation—from Buchanan Brigades to Tea Parties—the frustration of the American people had finally reached a critical mass. The elites be damned, on November 8 America was going to be heard loud and clear.
The Greatest Day
In the run-up to Election Day, the dominant media, NeverTrumpers, and Democrats were busy reminding Trump supporters that there was no need to vote. The election was over. President Hillary Rodham Clinton was the inevitable and guaranteed victor. “Tomorrow night, I think, when Hillary Clinton wins, Donald Trump will have lost this election from the first day he announced,” said CNN contributor and Clinton supporter Hilary Rosen.34 University of Virginia professor Larry Sabato’s “Crystal Ball” must have been cloudy when he predicted a Clinton victory with 322 electoral votes.35 Other “experts,” like Richmond University professor James Boys, received prominent airtime the day before the election. In a CNBC piece titled, “Donald Trump Will Lose After Failing to Follow Mitt Romney,” Boys said “it is impossible to see how [Trump] can win this.”36 The Princeton Election Consortium predicted a 99 percent probability of a Hillary victory. “Whether the Presidential win probability is 91% or 99%, it is basically settled,” wrote the organization’s Sam Wang.37 Weeks prior, Wang declared confidently, “It is totally over. If Trump wins more than 240 electoral votes, I will eat a bug.”38 Let’s hope Ebola wasn’t on the menu.
During an election eve appearance on Hannity, Sean asked me whether I believed Trump would win tomorrow. I said I thought he had a really good chance of winning and retiring the Clintons—permanently. “If Donald Trump wins, we actually have a chance to begin turning this around,” I said. “That’s exciting.” And even if he didn’t prevail, the populist movement that had cropped up around his candidacy would survive regardless.
On the morning of the election I went to St. Patrick’s Cathedral to pray for the country before heading over to Fox for my usual Tuesday appearance on Fox & Friends. I recapped the race and offered a prediction. “Trump has had much of the GOP Establishment and the money class against him. He had, of course, the Clintons, the Obamas, Hollywood, academia, media . . . he’s had all of that against him. And he is standing. He’s fighting. And . . . I think this [election] is going to show that the people of this country are defiant—and they are on to this game that the elites are playing.”
An hour later, on my radio show, I rallied the troops. “Don’t believe the naysayers. Believe in yourself and your desire to change this country for the better,” I said. “Ignore the polls. Focus on the country you want to save, the country you think has been so poorly served by the bipartisan Establishment cabal for decades now.” Listeners were describing the massive lines at the polls in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, and beyond. “I have never seen anything like this,” one caller from Indianapolis noted, calling from his car directly after voting. “Line out the door, around the block.” These good Americans, who had been ridiculed, disappointed, and dismissed by so many politicians for so long were giving me more hope—and I was already cautiously optimistic.
Later in the afternoon I ran into Joe Trippi, the affable Democrat pollster, in the green room at Fox News. “So what do you think?” I asked, knowing full well it wasn’t going to make me happy. “Oh, a pretty big blowout for Hillary. A huge electoral win,” he said, according to his final number crunching. Ugh, if he’s right, I thought to myself, this is going to be a long night.
Then–Fox host Megyn Kelly and Special Report anchor Bret Baier were poring over exit polls on set, and I joined a large panel of contributors. It was too early to say much except to go through the exit poll question results—and at the time, those didn’t look so hot for Trump.
The Trump voters were maligned, sneered at, ridiculed, called “deplorable,” and in some cases physically assaulted. None of that stopped them. These same people were now heading to the polls to vote in an election experts and elites guaranteed would be a landslide victory for Hillary Clinton.
Before 7:00 p.m. on the East Coast, and with citizens still voting, pollster Frank Luntz analyzed the exit poll data and fired off the following tweet: “In case I wasn’t clear enough from my previous tweets: Hillary Clinton will be the next President of the United States.”39
Luntz may have believed the exit polls, but I wasn’t convinced. It brought back memories of 2004 when the exits were proven wildly inaccurate. Then there was Bill O’Reilly on Fox, when Trump had 67 electoral votes to Hillary’s 68, who said, “It doesn’t look like there’s going to be any shocking upsets.”40 Poring over county-by-county results in Florida, with 91 percent of the vote in, Karl Rove noted that Trump wasn’t doing as well as Romney in 2012 in key areas.
After appearing on Fox early in the evening, I decided it was important to be with the people who fought for America and supported Trump against all odds, regardless of the outcome. I went over to the Trump headquarters at the Hilton Hotel in Manhattan. The place was packed and buzzing, with MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN hats dotting the room, a few open bars, and large TV screens broadcasting the latest state-by-state results. I made it a point to walk over to the TV cameras and reporters standing on risers in the back of the room, behind a plastic barrier. “I’d forgo the premature giddiness,” I shouted over the crowd. Who knows if anyone heard me—I didn’t care. Most of the journalists up above thought they’d be covering a wake that night. I was pretty confident that they would be covering an awakening.
The faces told the story. The expressions of the hosts on MSNBC went from glowing to glum. “America is crying tonight,” said Lawrence O’Donnell. “And I mean literally crying.” Rachel Maddow was a slack-jawed mess: “I don’t know what happens next for Democratic politics.” Former John McCain strategist–turned–MSNBC contributor Steve Schmidt seemed stunned but stumbled into an accurate analysis. “I couldn’t have been more wrong about this . . . I thought it’s been over for weeks,” said Schmidt. “What you’re seeing here is just such a backlash in the country against the Establishment of the country—a business Establishment, a political Establishment, a media Establishment across the board. . . . Steve Bannon was right when he talked about the similarities between Brexit, about a rising populism.”
The Trump campaign strategy was brilliant. Even with the must-win states, Trump would still need to pick off a big blue state. The gutsy Rust Belt strategy to go after states like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania was a big gamble. The Hillary team considered these states a lock. But as the Trump campaign understood, workers in the Rust Belt had felt the brunt of globalism’s effects personally.
The early evening scenes from the Hillary Clinton headquarters at the Javits Center in New York were jubilant. An elaborate victory stage had been erected under a massive glass ceiling, a metaphorical reminder that Hillary was about to make history as America’s first female president. For the first couple of hours, the state maps were filling in as expected. When Virginia was called for Clinton, Hillary supporters cheered. But then North Carolina went for Trump, and Ohio, and Florida. What began as an upbeat Clinton victory party soon morphed into a somber political burial.
“Globalization and the elites who sold the snake oil were put on trial tonight and convicted by the American people,” I tweeted.41 Others, like Fox News contributor Charles Krauthammer—a harsh and consistent Trump critic—were coming around to a similar conclusion. “If it continues and Trump wins, this is an ideological and electoral revolution of the kind we haven’t seen since Reagan. What this means ideologically is that the Republican Party has become a populist party,” said Krauthammer. At one point in the Fox broadcast, Trump’s media nemesis Megyn Kelly, who went after him so aggressively in the first GOP primary debate, sat in stunned silence with wide eyes. She seemed to be mugging for the camera. Only she wasn’t. It may have been her most authentic TV moment ever.
Reality had also begun setting in with the Clinton camp. “It’s like Brexit,” Bill Clinton said, watching the returns come in. “I guess it’s real.”42
The Associated Press called Pennsylvania for Trump at 1:35 a.m. ET. Hillary Clinton refused to concede. Instead, Clinton campaign chief John Podesta appeared before the tear-soaked crowd at the Javits Center and said there would be no more from the Hillary camp that night and that everyone should go home. Less than a half hour later, the Associated Press called Wisconsin for Trump. The race was over.
At exactly 2:29 a.m. ET, the Associated Press officially declared Donald J. Trump president-elect of the United States. The Trump crowd erupted. Smiles, high-fives, and hugs across the Hilton ballroom. The man who had dared to defy the Establishment had rallied the people and scored the greatest presidential upset in American history. Just before 3:00 a.m. ET, the president-elect appeared on stage and delivered a magnanimous victory speech.
“I’ve just received a call from Secretary Clinton. She congratulated us—it’s about us—on our victory. And I congratulated her and her family on a very, very hard-fought campaign,” said Trump. “We owe her a major debt of gratitude for her service to our country. I mean that very sincerely.” He then pledged to unify the nation and be a president for all the people. “I’m reaching out to you for your guidance and your help so we can work together and unify our great country.”
The president-elect explained that the victory belonged to the people, not him. Restoring power to the people was a cause far greater than one man; it was a movement that sought above all else to place America and her citizens first. “As I’ve said from the beginning, ours was not a campaign but rather an incredible and great movement, made up of millions of hardworking men and women who love their country and want a better, brighter future for themselves and their family. It is a movement comprised of Americans from all races, religions, backgrounds, and beliefs, who want and expect our government to serve the people—and serve the people it will.”
I smiled and just took it all in. The people had united and taught everyone in Washington who’s really in charge.