All politicians lie in one way or another. Some shade the truth, some exaggerate, some practice the sin of omission. And without question, some dwell in outright falsehoods.
Among the most famous:
George H. W. Bush: “Read my lips: no new taxes.”
Bill Clinton: “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.”
Richard Nixon: “I’m not a crook.”
Sometimes these were misstatements, sometimes complete fabrications. George W. Bush cited faulty intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq War. Ronald Reagan swore that arms would not be traded to Iran for hostages until, well, they were. But there had never been a politician like Donald Trump, whose relationship with the truth was so casual. It didn’t begin when he threw his hat in the ring for president: his entire public platform and persona were built on mistruth.
Even as a young developer, Trump understood the power of a lie or an exaggeration, especially when it was put to use to make him—or his buildings—seem bigger, better, bolder. It was all about promotion. Because promotion, and the resulting publicity, equaled prestige and power and, of course, money. At first he lied about his buildings, not just saying that they were taller than they were, but that they were home to the most famous and sensational people. Several different times in the 1980s and 1990s, he planted stories that the British royal family was interested—for whatever reason—in buying property in one of his Manhattan buildings. He capped that off by telling Howard Stern in 1993 that Princess Diana was interested in becoming his neighbor in Trump Tower.
“I hope she’s looking at—she is really hot. She has gained twenty to twenty-five pounds, she looks great,” Trump told the shock jock. “There could be a love interest. I’d become King of England. King of England. I’d have to leave, I’d have to lose the New York accent quickly.”
Sure. A good old-fashioned lie to promote himself is one thing. But how to get that lie out there? How to get people to see that lie, consume that lie, believe that lie? That’s where the media came in.
Donald Trump had some undeniable skills. He was adept at reading a room, telling people what they wanted to hear, and ingratiating himself to others, particularly the rich and powerful who could give him what he wanted (read: money, fame, and power). He was shameless, seemingly free of the intrinsically human ability to be embarrassed, a neat trick when occasionally the lies backfired. And he was very good at knowing what the media wanted.
Trump became a public figure in the 1980s and 1990s, at a time when the New York media world was booming and insatiable and rife with competition. The city was home to multiple national and local television stations, much of the nation’s magazine industry, and a number of daily newspapers. There were the New York Times, the paper of record, and the Wall Street Journal, the paper of business. Trump certainly cared about those, but his appearances in their pages were vastly outnumbered by the times he showed up as a boldface name in the city’s two tabloids, the New York Daily News and the New York Post.
The News was the paper of the city’s working-class residents of the boroughs outside Manhattan, the read for city workers as they commuted on the subway. The Post was more of a scandal sheet, the second read for the city’s elite in their homes on the Upper East Side or the Hamptons. Both papers had good sports sections; both covered cops and crimes and murder and mayhem in a city that at the time averaged around two thousand homicides a year; both had screaming headlines on the front page—known as “the wood,” a term dating back to typesetting days—meant to capture a reader’s eye on the newsstand and become watercooler talk later in the day; and both had rather extensive gossip sections to cover the ups and downs of the city’s famous and infamous.
Trump liked being in the news pages. He loved being in the gossip pages.
It was there he built his reputation as a young real estate mogul on the make, a rising force on Manhattan’s real estate scene, a budding celebrity who dated only the most beautiful women. He was obsessed with appearing in the papers, believing that all publicity is good publicity, certain that New Yorkers would want to buy one of his apartments in an effort to steal a piece of the life Trump was leading, one of glamour and gold, for themselves.
“The final key to the way I promote is bravado: I play to people’s fantasies. People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do,” Trump wrote in his 1987 bestselling book The Art of the Deal. “That’s why a little hyperbole never hurts. People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration—and a very effective form of promotion.”
And to shape the impression created in the tabloids, Trump needed a reliable spokesperson, an advocate well acquainted with the developer’s innermost thoughts and secrets and wishes and desires. A publicist with a very familiar voice.
The tone and cadence were just so distinct, so unique, so Trumpian. A man would call the newsroom of the News or the Post or People magazine and declare that he was a spokesman named John Miller—or sometimes John Barron—and would then vigorously defend or promote his client, one Donald J. Trump. They were public relations men who sounded just like Trump and, well, they were Trump, masquerading as an unusually insightful advocate for the man himself.
New York newsrooms of the 1980s and 1990s got used to these calls from Trump posing as someone else. Linda Stasi, then a New York Daily News gossip columnist, said Trump once left her a voice mail from an “anonymous tipster” who wanted it known that Trump had been spotted going out with models. Another time, John Miller (or was it Barron?) claimed that the actress Kim Basinger had been trying to date Trump. Starlets wanted to live in Trump Tower. And, yes, Madonna had tried to put the moves on Trump during an event at the Plaza Hotel.
But the PR man assured the reporter that, despite Madonna’s intentions, nothing untoward occurred between the developer and the biggest pop star on the planet: “He’s got zero interest that night.”
Other times, all Trump wanted to sell was his sex life. Even if little of it was true.
Few pre-politics stories better displayed Trump’s ability to control a news cycle with his sensationalism, shamelessness, and lies than the drama over his divorce from his first wife, Ivana. Trump had been having an affair with Marla Maples when his mistress brazenly confronted his wife in Aspen in 1989. In Ivana’s book, she recalled, “This young blond woman came up to me out of the blue and said, ‘I’m Marla and I love your husband. Do you?’”
The subsequent divorce was tabloid gold.
The front page of the Daily News on February 13, 1990, was “‘Ivana Better Deal’: Mrs. T Brands Donald’s $25M Pre-Nuptial Pact a Fraud.”
The same day’s Post: “Ivana to Donald at Secret Sitdown: Gimme the Plaza!… the Jet and $150 Million, Too.”
People magazine got in on the act, with the cover tagline reading: “Billion Dollar Blowup: She wants the Plaza, he’ll take Manhattan. America’s gaudiest couple square off in an old-fashioned battle over babes and bucks. Direct from Aspen, Palm Beach and New York City, here’s the latest dish.”
And then the coup de grâce, the most famous Trump-related headline of the period, one simply invented by Trump or Miller or Barron—all the same man—to push his narrative, to make him seem more successful and famous than possible: “Marla Boasts to Her Pals About Donald: ‘Best Sex I’ve Ever Had,’” screamed the headline in the Post.
The subhead, though not as infamous, was just as braggadocious or hilarious or nauseating, suggesting that the city “always knew that Trump was a tiger in the corporate boardroom” but now it had learned that “he was wildcat in the bedroom too.”
Trump lost $14 million in the divorce. He only grew more famous.
But trouble was on the horizon and bankruptcies followed. Trump’s Taj Mahal casino opened with great fanfare in April 1990 in Atlantic City, but six months later defaulted on interest payments to bondholders as his finances went into a tailspin. It filed for bankruptcy in 1991, while two other Atlantic City hotels and the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan—the Central Park South jewel Ivana so desperately wanted—filed for bankruptcy the following year. Eventually, only one bank, Deutsche Bank, continued to lend Trump money, and his real estate empire began to cool.
Still, Trump had made it; he was a celebrity, his standing bolstered by lies as much as truth.
But was it enough?
Trump was the second son of Fred Trump, a Queens-based real estate developer who had never made it across the East River to become a player amid the gleaming skyscrapers of Manhattan. Donald Trump could not handle that, driven by an insecurity to move beyond the forgotten, middle-class neighborhoods where his father built.
He pushed the company into Manhattan and, like in the outer boroughs before, immediately ran into accusations that it discriminated against minority renters. Despite his holdings on the nation’s most famous island, the true New York elite never admitted Trump into their circle, looking down upon his Queens roots and shameless self-promotion. He continued, as best he could, to be a man about town, to seek out the limelight and attention. He’d hold random stunt press events, cold call journalists, happily talk to reporters at any time on any topic. He’d slip into the movies after the lights went down—during a late 2001 screening of Vanilla Sky, he was spotted sneaking in his own snacks—but yet would be sure to linger after the film was over so he’d get noticed.
Once, in the summer of 2001, he stayed behind a rote news conference to give a few unrelated quotes to a New York Daily News intern, only to grow distracted when he noticed that the intern had the same color of red hair as a young television producer nearby.
“Are you guys together?” Trump asked.
“Uh, no,” I answered, somewhat baffled, since I had never seen the young woman before in my life.
“Are you sure?” Trump asked. “But you have the same hair.”
Apparently, couples came color-coded in the celebrity developer’s mind. And then Trump went one step further, offering to play matchmaker.
“I mean, would you like to be together?” he asked, as he stepped into his waiting limo. “Because I can make that happen.”
But what made Trump Trump—the gauche need for publicity; the boasting, the need to emblazon his name in giant gold-plated letters on the side of every building he owned; the constant Page Six presence; even his odd hair—made him toxic for Manhattan’s blue bloods. They mocked him and excluded him if they thought about him at all. The insecurity drove Trump. How to fit in, to finally be accepted and envied? There were two main possibilities.
First: television.
Everyone watched television. Trump was initially skeptical when approached by producer Mark Burnett about hosting a reality show, but he warmed to the pitch that he would appear as a glamorized version of himself, a successful mogul with a luxurious lifestyle.
What The Apprentice did for Trump cannot be overstated. It ran for fifteen seasons, showcased his properties and his adult children, gave him an iconic catchphrase—“You’re fired!”—and made him tens of millions of dollars. But more than that, it changed how he was perceived.
In Manhattan, he was still an afterthought, even a joke. But for much of America, this was their introduction to Trump, and, like so much else about his life, it wasn’t a truthful one.
In reality, Trump did live large in his gilded penthouse and had a fleet of helicopters and planes. But the version of Trump depicted in the show was supersized: it exaggerated his wealth and business prowess; even his signature line was bogus, since Trump himself hated firing people and usually delegated that unpleasant task to others. The show portrayed him at the pinnacle of his powers, a Master of the Universe in Manhattan, as opposed to a celebrity sideshow who at that point had largely stopped developing projects in favor of licensing deals, having his name attached to buildings at home and, at times, with dubious business partners abroad.
It was that glossy depiction of Trump that was beamed weekly into the living rooms of six or seven million homes across America, many of whom were getting their first dedicated look at someone they knew, at best, in passing as a vaguely famous person. Though later lost in the chaos of his presidency, much of Trump’s 2016 campaign—especially the early stages—was built on the idea that he was a successful businessman who was the perfect CEO to hire in order to turn around the nation’s economy.
Voters at rallies across the country thought they knew “Mr. Trump”—as he was inevitably called on the show—as a corporate tycoon perfectly suited to strike a favorable international trade deal and start bringing American jobs home.
And maybe they knew one other thing about him: that he was the leading proponent of the idea that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States. And that, too, was not the truth.
Trump had once been a Democrat. He flirted with a presidential campaign as far back as 1999, even briefly attaching himself to the fledgling Reform Party in 2000, putting forth some vague economic proposals before dropping out. There was far more serious talk in 2010 and 2011, as he became a darling of the fringe GOP because of his obsession with Obama’s birthplace, a fixture on the conservative media circuit, a favorite at right-wing events.
He opted against running that year but he had laid the foundation. His political career was born, the seeds of his 2016 campaign planted. And it was all based on a lie. A racist lie.
It wasn’t his first: in 1989, he took out a full-page ad to call for the death penalty for the “Central Park Five,” a group of Black teenagers arrested for an assault of a female jogger. Their convictions were later overturned. But birtherism was, in many ways, Trump’s first Big Lie. It was an idea plucked from the fever swamps of the Right when confronted with an out-of-nowhere presidential candidate from Illinois with an unusual name that, to some in the years after September 11, evoked a deposed Iraqi dictator and a vague sense of Muslim menace.
Barack. Hussein. Obama. When Trump really wanted to lean in on the racism, he’d add and accentuate the middle name, one that didn’t sound like it would belong to a man whose mother was from Kansas. Now, Trump wasn’t the first to question the heritage of Obama, who was born in Hawaii. When Obama burst onto the national scene ahead of the 2008 election, he had to fend off all sorts of accusations that he wasn’t American—Kenyan was the most popular guess—and therefore not eligible to be president.
Memorably, his GOP opponent that year, Senator John McCain, corrected a woman who, at a town hall, declared that Obama was an Arab. McCain said that, no, his opponent was “a decent family man.” Though hailed as a unifying moment—the transformative election of the nation’s first nonwhite president, the ascension to power of a Black man a century and a half after the end of slavery—Obama’s victory did little to quell the conspiracies. Entire cottage industries were set up on the fringes of the right-wing media—all too often seeping onto the airwaves on Fox News—that suggested that Obama was Other, that he was not qualified or eligible to be president.
No one stoked those hateful flames more than Trump. In 2010, as he eyed a possible challenge to Obama’s reelection bid, he had his then-fixer Michael Cohen plant stories with the Trump-friendly editors at the National Enquirer that questioned the president’s birthplace. Trump himself upped the ante the following year, doing a series of interviews that spring in which he declared himself “skeptical” of Obama’s heritage.
With no evidence, Trump theorized on The View that “there [was] something on that birth certificate that Obama doesn’t like,” which prompted this understated response from host Whoopi Goldberg: “That’s the biggest pile of dog mess I’ve heard in ages.” On a near-daily basis, Trump questioned Obama’s citizenship and demanded to see his long-form birth certificate, even suggesting he would send private investigators to Hawaii to prove that the president was not born there.
Well, Obama released the long-form birth certificate. Trump, always trying to claim a victory and twist a moment to boost his own stature, shamelessly took credit, somehow trying to spin a humbling defeat into a personal triumph, saying, “I am really honored and I am really proud, that I was able to do something that nobody else could do.” Obama, though, didn’t let him off the hook, turning that spring’s White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner into a roast of Trump, who was in attendance.
Obama unloaded one cutting joke after another while Trump sat there, trapped, his smile frozen in place. He managed a few waves.
“No one is happier, no one is prouder to put this birth certificate matter to rest than the Donald,” Obama said. “And that’s because he can finally get back to focusing on the issues that matter—like, did we fake the moon landing? What really happened in Roswell? And where are Biggie and Tupac?”
Obama didn’t let up: “All kidding aside, obviously, we all know about your credentials and breadth of experience. For example—no, seriously, just recently, in an episode of The Celebrity Apprentice at the steak house, the men’s team cooking did not impress the judges from Omaha Steaks. And there was a lot of blame to go around. But you, Mr. Trump, recognized that the real problem was a lack of leadership. And so ultimately, you didn’t blame Lil Jon or Meat Loaf. You fired Gary Busey. And these are the kind of decisions that would keep me up at night. Well handled, sir.”
The president’s victory only became more astounding the next day, when it was revealed that he was humiliating Trump just hours after he had authorized the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. It was, in many respects, Obama’s highest moment and Trump’s lowest.
But Trump did not fade away. The birtherism lie had found traction on the Right and it allowed Trump to grab a foothold within the Republican Party. His spots on Fox News only increased, and his was a coveted endorsement among Republicans in 2012 after he passed on his own candidacy that year. The unease that more establishment Republicans felt about Trump was obvious when the party’s nominee that year, Mitt Romney, accepted the developer’s backing. The event wasn’t at Romney’s campaign headquarters in Boston, a short distance from Fenway Park, but rather at an awkward, halting news conference in the lobby of the provocateur’s Las Vegas hotel.
“There are some things that you just can’t imagine happening in your life,” an uncomfortable-looking Romney told the crowd. “This is one of them.”
And when Romney lost to Obama, Trump was quick to blame the former Massachusetts governor for ignoring his advice, for not fighting dirty; privately, he even suggested the defeat was because birtherism voters were ignored. Lies should be embraced, he reasoned, if they helped a candidate win.
He would not make the same mistake.
On June 16, 2015, a small crowd of onlookers—some of whom, it was later discovered, were paid to be there—and a crush of reporters crowded into the gilded basement lobby of Trump Tower. Trump had teased running so many times before, and he was perceived by official Washington as such a sideshow, that many news outlets didn’t send their top political reporters. The campaign editor at the Associated Press, for instance, didn’t bother sending up a reporter from Washington and just had its New York–based political reporter cover the event. Expectations were low: the editor had booked a story for just three hundred words.
Then Trump descended the golden escalator. A lot more words were needed.
What followed was the beginning of the most tumultuous and likely most vicious presidential campaign in modern history. In the Tower that day, I watched Trump spew a hard-line anti-immigration policy, declaring that many Mexicans were rapists. He became the day’s top political story. And he held that title just about every day for the next year and a half.
Trump was vulgar, outrageous, shameless, thrilling. His campaign was a mix of celebrity, wealth, racism, and political incorrectness, and he became a phenomenon, drawing both outsize media attention and massive crowds to swamp his far more established Republican rivals. As his signature 757 airplane crisscrossed the nation, he’d insult Republican and Democrat alike, no cow too sacred to attack. He turned politics on its head and did so in front of the unblinking eyes of TV cameras that allowed him to dominate cable in a way that left his rivals hopelessly jealous and helplessly outgunned.
The campaign was built on one after another seemingly indestructible lie. By noon nearly every day, Trump would have already committed three political gaffes so severe that any one of them would have ended Mitt Romney’s career. Yet he moved on without seemingly suffering a scratch.
And his Biggest Lie, the one that would redefine politics for the upcoming decade, also first took root during what ended up being that victorious campaign.
Trump faced voters for the first time that February in Iowa, a state where he failed to dominate the GOP polls like he did so many of those that followed. Anxious about the race, his behavior turned (more) erratic: he tossed off allegations that the Republican Party had fixed the election, and he pulled out of the final debate to instead hold a fundraiser for veterans that didn’t pay out what it raised until it came under media scrutiny many months later.
He lost Iowa narrowly. And it was in Iowa where he first floated the idea that an election, the most sacred element of American democracy, was “rigged.” It wasn’t the claim of full-fledged voter fraud that would define his bid four years later, but he still assailed the integrity of the process. His target wasn’t some vast federal conspiracy, but rather the man who captured the caucus, Texas senator Ted Cruz.
“Based on the fraud committed by Senator Ted Cruz during the Iowa Caucus, either a new election should take place or Cruz results nullified,” Trump tweeted. And another one: “Ted Cruz didn’t win Iowa, he stole it. That is why all of the polls were so wrong and why he got far more votes than anticipated. Bad!”
The celebrity businessman made some half-baked assertion that Cruz—perhaps with help from the Republican Party—had made some efforts to improperly woo backers of another candidate, Ben Carson, but Trump never followed up with any support for his claims. And his supporters in the media were also not willing to back him up, as they would in the future, when he wielded presidential power. He looked like a whiner, they said, a sore loser. One cable television personality even visited Trump in his New Hampshire hotel days later and screamed at him to knock it off.
Trump’s allegation didn’t last: he rolled on to massive victories in New Hampshire and South Carolina, and the nomination was quickly in his grasp. But a marker had been placed.
Politics had never seen anything like Trump’s shamelessness. He compared hand size with Marco Rubio. He called a former Apprentice contestant overweight. He feuded with a Gold Star family. He praised authoritarians. And he tried to ban an entire religion.
After a terror attack by Islamic State terrorists in Paris in November 2015, Trump proposed tracking Muslims in the United States, putting surveillance teams on mosques and creating a database for all members of the religion in the United States. It was met with sharp bipartisan rebukes but, a few weeks later, after an attack by a married couple of ISIS sympathizers in San Bernardino, California, the candidate went even further, calling for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.”
It was his most outrageous statement of the campaign to that point, one that was immediately denounced by the Pentagon—which feared it could inspire more terror—as well as by leaders in the United Kingdom and France. But Trump for days repeated the call at his rallies, drawing cheers from the crowds.
Republican leaders wondered what was going on. Would Trump’s supporters follow him anywhere, even when he proposed stifling the nation’s defining creed to protect freedom of religion?
Would they follow him after he made a racist attack on a federal judge?
Trump University, the candidate’s real estate development course, turned out to offer no college credit and very little value. It became the subject of a series of lawsuits that charged that it was nothing more than a scam to line Trump’s pockets. In one case, after Trump was dealt a setback, he unleashed an attack on Gonzalo Curiel, the presiding judge in two of the cases, stating that Curiel’s Mexican heritage served as a conflict of interest.
“Now, this judge is of Mexican heritage. I’m building a wall, okay? I’m building a wall.”
Curiel was from Indiana. Trump was denounced by Republican leaders, including House Speaker Paul Ryan. His crowds continued to cheer.
Trump’s campaign was dealt its lowest blow in October, just before the second presidential debate, when a 2005 recording emerged of Trump on Access Hollywood bragging about sexually assaulting women. For forty-eight hours, his campaign seemed on the verge of collapse; Trump, appearing in what looked like a hostage video, even offered a pseudo-apology for the “locker-room talk” heard on the clip. Republican leaders called for him to drop out. He holed up in his penthouse. His campaign seemed finished. But the day after the tape was released, he went downstairs and ventured into a crowd of supporters who had gathered outside Trump Tower. They mobbed him. He felt energized, he felt loved again, and he vowed to keep fighting. The next day, just before the debate with Hillary Clinton began in St. Louis, the campaign press pool was told to gather for a last-minute event. We reacted with surprise. Who holds an event within an hour of a debate? We were then told we’d simply be getting a quick glimpse of Trump rehearsing. But that’s not at all what we saw.
Instead, Trump was sitting with four women, three of whom—Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey, and Juanita Broaddrick—had accused Clinton’s husband, the former president, of sexual misconduct. The fourth, Kathy Shelton, was there because when she was raped as a twelve-year-old, Hillary Clinton, then a lawyer, defended her assailant in court. The Trump campaign was answering the Access Hollywood tape with its own allegations of women being mistreated.
Reporters who had covered Trump for more than a year—who felt they were beyond being shocked—were left with their mouths hanging open, as Steve Bannon smiled wide with glee behind them. I was slack-jawed. A news photographer hardened by a brutal time in Iraq who was too tough to be stunned—well, he audibly gasped. The secret was so closely held that Stephanie Grisham, the campaign staffer whose job it was to wrangle the press pool, keeping them in line and on time, wasn’t told in advance about it, instead thinking, like the reporters, that she was simply giving them a chance to observe debate prep.
Grisham later broke down and wept, telling confidants that she was horrified by the stunt and just as upset to be kept out of that loop. She would later become White House press secretary and First Lady Melania Trump’s closest aide.
It was a reckless gambit, but it steadied the campaign. But even that wasn’t enough. Months later, when he took office, Trump revised his story, walking back his public acknowledgment of the recording’s authenticity. To the amazement of staffers and a handful of Republican senators with whom he addressed the matter, Trump began raising questions as to whether it was his voice on the tape at all.
“We don’t think that was my voice,” Trump privately told a senator, according to an aide who overheard the conversation. He suggested that he might order an investigation into the matter. The probe never materialized.
The St. Louis stunt worked. Trump had changed the conversation; the race stabilized. And, soon after, the Republican moved back into striking distance when FBI director James Comey ordered the investigation into Clinton’s private email server reopened. Trump forged ahead with the campaign, moving into darker rhetoric, avoiding interviews, dodging events where reporters might ask him about further accusations of sexual harassment.
When he did hold a small business roundtable in West Palm Beach, Florida, on October 13, just a few weeks before the election, I tried to ask him if he had ever touched or kissed a woman without her consent. As the crowd of business leaders booed me and staffers pushed the press pool out the door, Trump could be heard speaking as he gestured toward me: “What a sleazebag.”
That night, at a packed downtown arena in Cincinnati, the audience was so vitriolic toward the press that the Secret Service moved the press pool out of its normal position on the floor near the rally goers, away from the ugly crowd and back toward an exit bay behind the parked motorcade and the SWAT team. The agents told us it was the only way that they could guarantee our safety.
The final few weeks of the campaign were relentless: Comey had given Trump an opening, raising those (often sexist) questions about Clinton’s trustworthiness. The new emails had been found on the computer of Anthony Weiner, the former congressman who had resigned after a sexting scandal. Weiner, who suffered a relapse that cost him a chance at the 2013 New York City mayoral election, was married to Huma Abedin, Clinton’s most trusted aide. Trump hammered it home night after night, his campaign also happily embracing the help offered by WikiLeaks, which took a batch of hacked Clinton campaign emails—stolen by Russian operatives—and slowly doled them out over months. Later, the media would have a collective soul-searching over the appropriateness of reporting on the stolen materials; but in 2016, it for the most part eagerly reported on the materials, and the drip, drip, drip wounded Clinton.
The race tightened dramatically in the final week. Trump relentlessly pushed across the map, holding five or six rallies a day. His finale was supposed to be on Election Day eve in New Hampshire, the site of his first primary victory, but some late data prompted Bannon to schedule another one, post-midnight, in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Democrats in that state—as well as the others in the blue firewall, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania—saw the same things. They frantically signaled to the Clinton campaign that they could glimpse troubling omens: Trump signs and hats were everywhere, and new voters—the most difficult thing to find in politics—were emerging for the Republican. Independents broke his way too at the end. Bill Clinton also sensed trouble, but his wife’s campaign was focused on expanding the map, rather than simply getting the needed 270 Electoral College votes. Still, a final rally in Philadelphia, featuring the Obamas and Bruce Springsteen, felt like a coronation.
Clinton’s choice of setting for her expected Election Night victory was full of symbolism. She would stand under the glass ceiling of the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in Manhattan as she shattered the last one remaining in American politics. The night started well: the exit polling and some early states looked strong. But within a few hours, in newsrooms across America, journalists looking at the data could all see the same thing: Florida was going hard for Trump, fueled by an overwhelming turnout in Republican counties. A few hours later, it was clear that the rural areas in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin were coming out in record numbers for Trump and, combined with softer Democratic turnout in the cities, would give him those states too.
Clinton conceded the next morning. The glass ceiling remained intact. It was instantly one of the unlikeliest electoral triumphs in the nation’s history. The political world had been upended.
Trump won.