CHAPTER 27

AS TRUMP CONTINUED TO coast with the holidays approaching, one Republican candidate who looked like he might stumble upon a late surge into contention was Marco Rubio. As a young, eloquent Hispanic first-term senator who also happened to represent the biggest swing state in the Senate, Rubio was in several ways every GOP consultant’s dream candidate. His campaign had largely succeeded in its efforts to keep expectations low, and compared to most of his Republican competitors, he hadn’t spent much time on the ground in New Hampshire. With the countdown to Primary Day now being measured in weeks rather than months, the Rubio campaign was ready to make its move.

The fundamental problem for Rubio, however, was that though he was many New Hampshire voters’ second choice, he had trouble standing out in a field filled with more compelling options. His top selling point was his electability, but even that perceived strength was flimsy when you realized that it was mostly cosmetic. Yes, Rubio could throw a tight spiral and recite Tupac lyrics, but polls consistently showed that he had minimal appeal to younger voters, who vastly preferred the seventy-four-year-old Bernie Sanders because they agreed with him on policy. Rubio’s views on almost every major issue made him just another boilerplate Republican, albeit one with fewer wrinkles on his face than most. He was against a woman’s right to have an abortion even in cases of rape and incest, and he had folded to the pressures of political expediency when his push for comprehensive immigration reform went awry, coming out in opposition to his own proposals. I got a kick out of Rubio’s stock answer to whether he believed man-made climate change was real. Time and again, the Florida senator would glibly point out that the “government can’t control the weather.” His audiences of deeply conservative, older voters ate it up, but for people who planned to spend another half century or more on the planet, it wasn’t an especially convincing line and made Rubio look like the unambiguous opportunist that he was.

Rubio was precisely the kind of mechanical, always-on-message candidate that New Hampshire primary voters had tended to reject over the years more times than not. In the most egregious example of an attempt to position himself as a culture warrior à la Pat Buchanan or Ted Cruz, he released a TV ad in which the gangsta-rap-loving candidate lamented that he and many of his fellow Americans had come to “feel out of place in our own country.” Right.

One discerning New Hampshirite who wasn’t having it was Erik Eisele, a reporter for the Conway Daily Sun, which had a circulation of about 17,000. The decline in influence of local New Hampshire newspapers had never been more apparent than it was in the 2016 campaign. Few of them had the resources to cover many—if any—campaign events, and the coverage was typically superficial at best. Every so often, however, the small-town papers could still cut through on something meaningful, especially when they had a writer as skilled as Eisele.

In a December column, Eisele recounted a recent visit by Rubio to the Conway Daily Sun’s newsroom, when the candidate spent about twenty minutes making his case for why he should be president. Eisele, suffice it to say, was unimpressed. “In that time he talked about ISIS, the economy, his political record and his background,” he wrote of Rubio’s visit. “But it was like watching a computer algorithm designed to cover talking points. He said a lot, but at the same time said nothing. It was like someone wound him up, pointed him towards the doors and pushed play. If there was a human side to the senator, a soul, it didn’t come across.”

In addition to his devastating assessment of Rubio as a “a man so stuck on script it doesn’t even matter when the cameras are off,” Eisele’s column also elaborated on New Hampshire voters’ responsibility to everyone else. “Living in a political environment where only the script makes sense, where the race is about the television audience rather than the general electorate, why deviate?” he wrote of Rubio’s strategy of playing it safe. “Those willing to risk off-message interaction also risk alienating. It’s too great a risk, and retail politics drops by the wayside as voters are courted only by the millions, not one-by-one. New Hampshire sits as the bulwark against that world.” It was a persuasive case for New Hampshire’s continued relevance—a special status that was being challenged by the 2016 paradigm, in which the debates and national media coverage were defining the race. New Hampshire still had an opportunity to stand up for itself in the face of this new paradigm. Eisele’s piece was a call to arms.

The only problem was that almost no one read it at first. The Conway Daily Sun didn’t put all of its articles online right away, and this one remained in analog form for a couple of days after it had first appeared in the newspaper. But then, later in the week, a staffer from a rival campaign happened upon a print copy of the Rubio takedown and sent a digital copy of Eisele’s piece my way. I immediately posted it on Twitter, along with some accompanying praise, and the collective reaction proved to be in keeping with my own assessment of the column. A lot of observers who’d been following Rubio closely thought it hit the target. On a debate stage in Manchester a little more than a month later, Rubio would demonstrate just how prescient Eisele’s biting assessment of him had been.

I remained in New Hampshire pretty much full time until Primary Day on February 9. As the campaign entered the stretch run, it was already clear that just about everyone who had made a prediction had been wrong. On the Democratic side, Bernie Sanders had gone from Dennis Kucinich with a worse haircut to the clearcut New Hampshire front-runner, and the trajectory had been even more volatile in the GOP race, as potential challengers to Trump continued to flail. As for the ill-tempered Orange Creamsicle himself, Trump seemed scarcely able to believe what was happening, as he pointed out that he could probably stand “in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody” without losing any of his support.

My first Trump rally of the new year was at a high school gym in Claremont—a western New Hampshire town of 13,000 people in sparsely populated Sullivan County. I arrived an hour early, and there was already a line out the door of over 1,000 people. It was especially cold—no more than 6°F or 7°F outside, but there they waited without complaint, as if queuing for the bus on a nice spring afternoon. As I continued to be a card-carrying employee of the Huffington Puffington Post, there was no way I was getting a media credential for the event. Still, I made my way to the media entrance, where I was greeted by a friendly campaign volunteer who, wouldn’t you know it, couldn’t seem to find my name on the list. I began to issue a rather mild protest, when a blonde woman from the Trump campaign stepped in. She seemed to have more authority and was eager to use it.

“If you’re not on the list, you can’t get in,” she told me with a disdainful scowl.

“I’m a credentialed reporter,” I said, not letting on that the term was essentially meaningless in this particular context. “Can’t I just sign in now, and you can let me in?”

“That’s not how it works,” she replied.

It wasn’t going well, and I wasn’t helping matters. “Well, that’s how it works with every other campaign, except for this one. Doesn’t that strike you as odd?”

We didn’t seem to be coming any closer to a resolution, and each of us was appreciating the other a little less by the second. I stepped aside to consider my next half-baked attempt to get in, as a local reporter who was being similarly excluded from the event began to issue his own protest. With nothing to lose, I decided to start shooting video on my iPhone of the confrontation between the Trump staffer and the irritated local reporter who was now being denied access. The Trump aide wasn’t especially thrilled. She immediately covered her face with her hands and darted off to the side, as if I had taken aim at her with an Uzi.

“There’s no shooting video in here!” she shouted.

“That’s not how it works,” I replied calmly, pleased with myself.

The Trump staffer turned to the female Secret Service agent standing behind her. “Tell him to stop shooting in here,” she demanded.

The Secret Service agent folded her arms across her chest. “It’s a public space,” she said dispassionately. “He’s a journalist, and he has a right to shoot video, if he wants to.”

The Trump aide stormed off, and then the Secret Service agent waved me into the event, with the slightest hint of a smile crossing her lips.

On this particular night, Trump brought his A game from the moment he took the stage. He began the festivities by complaining about his microphone, whining that if he continued to be unhappy with the sound mix, he wouldn’t pay the vendor who provided the audio equipment. Then, like the old political pro he was, Trump seamlessly transitioned into mocking his supporters who were still waiting outside the venue in the cold. “We’ve got a lot of people standing out there,” he told the crowd who’d made it into the venue. “Should we wait for them? No!” Next, Trump held aloft his big, beautiful numbers from the latest Reuters poll, scribbled out on a piece of scrap paper. He talked about building the big, beautiful wall with the big, beautiful door, and during the call-and-response segment of the sermon when Trump asked who was going to pay for it, the crowd screamed out in unison, “Mexico!”

When Trump got to the part of his act where he began talking about how “politicians are incompetent people,” a man standing right behind me screamed, directly into my ear, “You’re right!” His name, I learned when I spoke with him after the rally, was Daniel, and he was a volunteer for the Trump campaign. Well over six feet tall and dressed memorably in a bright-yellow tie, dark green checkered shirt, and brown sport coat, Daniel had salt-and-pepper hair and an exceptionally loud voice. And he truly adored Donald Trump.

“Yaay! Yaaay! Yaaaay!” Daniel kept shouting, as Trump hurled more insults and added to his list of promises. Daniel laughed at all the right moments, too, like when Trump alluded to the remoteness of his current venue: “How many people come here when it’s not me? Like nobody.”

“You’re a winner!” was Daniel’s response to that one.

Daniel had jokes, too. When a protester was taken out of the arena, the exuberant Trump volunteer shouted, “It’s Hillary!”

Trump liked that one. “Oh, it’s Hillary,” the candidate replied from the stage to much laughter. In response to this brief moment of direct interaction with his favorite candidate, Daniel began giggling maniacally. It was at this point that I noticed he was carrying a copy of The Art of the Deal tucked underneath his arm.

For his next act, Trump took a direct turn into minimally coherent conspiracy theory territory, and Daniel was right there with him. “There is anger in our country because the people are smart,” Trump told the crowd. “The people that are representing them are either dishonest, not smart, incompetent, or they have some other agenda that we don’t even know about. And some of these things, you’d think they have another agenda because you would say things they do, deals that they make, like the Iran deal. Who would make this deal?”

“A Muslim!” Daniel shouted, again directly into my ear, and loud enough for just about everyone in the gym to hear.

Trump chuckled.

“What did you say?” the delighted candidate asked, putting his finger to his ear in feigned confusion. “I didn’t hear him.”

“A Muslim!” Daniel again screamed gleefully.

“OK, I didn’t say it,” Trump shot back, extending his tiny hands as far to his sides as they would stretch. “I didn’t say it. I refuse to get in—oh, I’m supposed to reprimand the man. Who is the man that said that?” Daniel beamed like a third-grader who’d just been singled out for acclaim by the teacher. He waved at Trump.

“I have to reprimand him,” Trump deadpanned to Daniel’s delight. “How dare you. OK. I’ve reprimanded him. Now the press can’t be angry.”

Trump continued his speech with a couple more direct interruptions from Daniel, who now had all the validation he needed to interject at will.

“You’re brilliant!” Daniel shouted at one point toward the end of Trump’s remarks.

“He says I’m brilliant,” Trump replied, just in case anyone hadn’t heard, all but waving his ring to be kissed.

After Trump concluded his latest self-deification session, Daniel pushed his way to the front of the crowd that had lined up to try to shake the candidate’s hand. Leaning over the rope line, he managed to get close enough to exchange a series of pleasantries with the candidate, who dutifully signed his copy of The Art of the Deal. Daniel raised the book in triumph.

As he prepared to stream out of the gym with the last few dozen rally-goers, I tapped Daniel on the shoulder and introduced myself as a reporter. He happily agreed to be interviewed.

I started by asking him why he had shouted about Obama being a Muslim. “I don’t know if I should say this,” was how Daniel began his response. The humane thing for me to do might have been to cut him off right there and say, “You shouldn’t, actually.” I let him continue.

“There was a big issue with Iran, and what’s happening with our president,” Daniel said. “And Obama has talked about his Muslim faith.”

“No, he hasn’t,” I might have said then, “Because he’s a Christian.” In general, I think it’s important for reporters to speak up when someone says something that is factually inaccurate. But this was a taped interview to which I’d be able to add context and correct the record. And so I continued to listen without interjecting.

“And so, Trump has made allusions to whether or not the expansion of Islam has anything to do with our administration right now in the country, in the world,” Daniel said. “I mean, I think we can believe in any God we want to believe in.”

The thing about it all was that Daniel actually seemed like a nice enough guy—a painfully obsequious and grossly misinformed nice guy, but a nice guy nonetheless. Still, he was the personal embodiment of why Trump was so dangerous. This was a presidential candidate who was extremely skilled at playing on people’s ignorance and igniting their worst instincts. He was winning by an especially wide margin in New Hampshire, and people were still underestimating him. It really was scary.

After my interview with Daniel, I pulled up a stool at the Salt Hill Pub in nearby Newport. My expectations were modest, but when I arrived, I was pleasantly surprised to find a cozy brick tavern on the second floor of a historic building. The bartender was even willing to put on the college basketball game that I wanted to watch. I ordered a burger and a pint and turned my attention toward the game. Within seconds, though, my ears were assaulted by the loud rants of a moderately intoxicated young woman. Her extended anti-Trump diatribe was ostensibly for the benefit of her boyfriend and the heavily tattooed firefighter who was sitting on her other side. But it was delivered so loudly and without interruption that there could be no doubt the diatribe was intended to ensure that all eight of us in the pub knew exactly where she stood on the matter. Her commentary was so unrelenting that it would take an additional book to fully do justice to it, but here is a heavily condensed list of her grievances against the Republican front-runner.

• Donald Trump is such an idiot.

• How can anyone deal with Donald Trump?

• Donald Trump is a racist.

• Donald Trump had a cameo in Home Alone 2.

• Now she knows what it must’ve been like during the rise of Hitler.

• Donald Trump sucks.

• You’re an idiot if you like Donald Trump.

I was almost finished with my burger by the time the bartender, also a young woman, brought over to the anti-Trump evangelist another drink. Then she dropped the bomb. “I gotta admit it,” the bartender said during one of the rare five-second intervals when it was possible for anyone to get a word in. “I’m voting for Trump.”

You’d expect that a fight might have followed, or at least a bit of painfully awkward tension. Two people with diametrically opposed views on the most controversial presidential candidate in modern history had been set against one another in a place where a lot of alcohol was being consumed. Instead, something more interesting happened. The young woman who’d been railing against Trump with rare gusto backed down immediately and sought reconciliation.

“Oh, it’s not about his supporters,” the anti-Trump evangelist assured her pro-Trump bartender. “I’m voting for Bernie, but you do you.” Meaning the bartender should feel absolutely free to do her own thing without judgment.

The thoroughness of her capitulation was what struck me. Here was an obviously idealistic young woman who disdained everything Trump stood for and wasn’t afraid to say so, as long as she wasn’t offending anyone. Mere seconds before the bartender made her own views known, she had been comparing Trump to Hitler. Yet when pressed in the mildest way, she was entirely unwilling to stand up for her beliefs. As much as the majority of voters continued to oppose Trump—many of them passionately—the act of supporting him had become normalized. It was nothing to get into an argument over, at least. “You do you.” With a big assist from a compliant TV news media, Donald Trump had become socially acceptable.

“Yeah, I don’t even like Trump,” the bartender added, continuing the theme. “I just can’t support anyone else that’s running.”

I stayed for another beer, but as I tried to refocus on the basketball game, I noticed that the two women’s conversation had veered completely away from politics. They had moved on to discussing Titanic, and whether they’d cried the first time they saw it. Politics was just an entertaining diversion—something to take up a few minutes of time on a boring night in a boring town.

A few days later, the Union Leader announced that it had been dumped from its partnership with ABC News to host the Republican debate that was scheduled to take place three days before the primary. The Trump campaign had been complaining about the Union Leader’s participation in the debate, noting that the paper had been critical of Trump on its editorial page. It was a scurrilous argument, but ratings were on the line, so the Trump campaign got what it wanted.

Via his Twitter account, Trump immediately took credit for having the Union Leader “removed” from the debate, as if he had been a bouncer who had escorted off the premises an unruly patron. Newspaper editorial boards had been criticizing candidates for decades without their news divisions suffering repercussions from campaigns, but Trump had all the leverage now. It was another feckless capitulation by a network news division that fully confirmed where the power between the Trump campaign and major journalistic institutions rested. There were a few murmurs of protest in the broader media over ABC’s decision, but nothing significant. Everyone just moved on and started talking about something else.