raw

I think there were many Republicans, and plenty of Democrats, who fully expected Trump to tone down the rhetoric after we moved into general election mode. That’s what politicians do. They change. They curry favor. They bend, in order to appeal to the masses.

The general feeling among Washington elites was, “How could Trump possibly keep talking the way he’s been talking and acting the way he’s been acting and ever expect to become president of the United States—especially now that he’s facing the formidable Clinton dynasty?”

This is the classic example of failing to know your opponent.

Understanding Trump isn’t difficult. You have to acknowledge that he has a very unique set of skills that traditional politicians do not have.

He is not a chameleon like other politicians, and he’s never going to put his finger in the wind and try to measure the mood of the people before making a decision. He is the final decision-maker. He thinks that his answers, based on his instincts, are the right answers to just about any question that arises.

When it came to the campaign, he went with his instincts time and time again, often against all of our very experienced and well-thought-out recommendations, and often what he did turned out to be the right thing. It got him where he wanted to go. It certainly got him further than anyone ever imagined he could go.

Trump’s unpredictability and authenticity came with the baggage of him saying whatever he felt, often in inappropriate moments. He never stopped to think that his opinions were supposed to be reflective of or representative of the thoughts of millions of Republicans or other American voters.

Stopping to think carefully about what to say is what politicians do, and Hillary was very much the penultimate politician, which is why she rarely came across as “authentic” by comparison in most polls. And here’s where that really hurt her: being inauthentic affects a candidate’s trustworthiness.

Tony Fabrizio monitored this closely in our internal polling throughout the campaign, and by September, Hillary’s negative on trustworthiness was a whopping 85 percent.

By comparison, Trump’s negative on trustworthiness was only 65 percent, which is still terrible, but nowhere near as terrible as Hillary’s number.

In his entire career, Fabrizio had never seen candidates with such significant negatives on trustworthiness make it this far in an election cycle. Polling data showed that we now had two of the most untrustworthy people he’d ever seen in this race. And one of them was going to be president!

Here’s the really telling part, though: historically, Fabrizio’s polling data had always shown that whoever’s competing against someone with a negative trustworthiness rating, whether Republican or Democrat, has the upper hand. Which meant that Hillary wouldn’t have been favored as a strong candidate against any opponent she faced.

Hillary’s trustworthiness was so abominable that Fabrizio came to believe, based on that one piece of polling data alone, that Trump would be able to annihilate her going forward. And so much of our plan, to Trump’s joy, was to attack her on her character, and the polling data made it easy to do it.

Also, remember this: almost nothing that happens in the election cycle really matters to voters until September. That’s when the majority of voters start to pay attention for the first time. For all the Sturm und Drang, the breathless reporting on cable news, and the headlines that seem so important in the year-long run-up to the election, the only things that actually stick with the vast majority of voters when they go to the polls in November are the things the candidates do and say in the all-important fall season.

And what did Hillary do to open the fall season of 2016?

On September 9, she made her infamous “basket of deplorables” comment.

At a fundraiser in New York City, she told the audience, “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, Islamophobic—you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.”

She went on to say that the other half of Trump’s supporters “feel that the government has let them down” and are “desperate for change.”

“Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well,” she said.

But it was the first part that resonated. Jason Miller, who had come on board as the senior communications advisor with the campaign, quickly put out a statement: “Just when Hillary Clinton said she was going to start running a positive campaign, she ripped off her mask and revealed her true contempt for everyday Americans.”

Hillary wasn’t talking in nuance here. She was talking in generalizations, and by creating that “deplorables” term, she alienated people—including some Democrats who fit the description. She came off as an elite politician who was talking down to half of America. And Trump benefitted from that immensely.

At a rally the next day, people showed up with “Deplorables” written on the front of their shirts. And Trump seized on it. The word turned into a mantra for people who were in blue-collar occupations, who didn’t have a lot of money, who lived in rural areas—people who were already angry over politicians who had lost sight of them.

“Deplorables” became a rallying cry. Hillary took what Trump was already delivering in terms of voter intensity (that very key factor that gets people to the polls) and made it worse for herself. She made his voters angrier than ever.

Privately, the racist and xenophobic allegations bothered Trump. “I don’t understand why they keep saying I’m a racist,” he would say. “I’m not. I’ve done more for African Americans than Obama did….” His bravado didn’t help him, of course, but he viewed the “racist” allegations as a personal assault.

He had a number of friends and acquaintances, many of them minorities, who knew him, who came out in the press and said that he is not “racist.”

But it would not go away.

In politics, certain topics linger, and once the political press grabs hold of them they never go away.

I think the greatest example of this came when Trump was confronted with the notion that he and his campaign were somehow working in coordination with Russia, and specifically Vladimir Putin.

On Friday, July 22, after our convention had ended and just before the Democratic Convention began, WikiLeaks released twenty thousand emails that had been stolen during a hacking of a DNC server earlier that year. The emails were embarrassing for a number of powerful Democrats. They showed that there were multiple discussions among the DNC elite of how to ensure that Hillary Clinton became the nominee, and what they could do to keep Bernie Sanders from winning the nomination despite his massive groundswell of support all across America.

The emails were so damaging, and so embarrassing, that DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz was forced to resign before that start of the convention that Monday.

Our campaign had no idea those emails were coming, despite what anyone might think. It was a complete surprise—good for us, and bad for the Democrats.

A few reports surfaced quickly saying that investigators believed that the DNC server had been hacked by Russian operatives, who may or may not have been working for Vladimir Putin, but there was no conclusive evidence. The hacking was still under investigation.

But on July 24, on the eve of the convention, in the middle of the firestorm that was erupting between the Hillary and Bernie camps that would spill over into violent protests in Philadelphia, Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, Robby Mook, went on Jake Tapper’s show on CNN and said that certain unnamed “experts” were now saying “that the Russians are releasing these emails for the purpose of helping Donald Trump.”

He then connected that statement to a notion that Trump and the Republicans had changed their platform during the Republican convention to be more “favorable” to Russia (which wasn’t true), adding that “when you put all of this together it’s a disturbing picture, and I think voters need to reflect on that.”

It was an astonishing accusation.

It was the first time that the Clinton campaign officially went on record saying that Trump was being helped by Russia. The inference was that Trump and the Republican Party were somehow working with Russia to get Donald Trump elected, to sway U.S. policy to benefit Putin. It was an outrageous charge. Some of Clinton’s surrogates had been hinting at this supposed relationship and saying as much for a few months. But now that the damaging emails were out there, it seemed very clear to us that this talking point was a deflection—just one more unfortunately all-too-common act in the wicked game of presidential politics.

We believed it was a deflection from the embarrassing facts the leaked emails revealed.

In reality, it was more. Two years later, in the course of discovery during the Mueller investigation, emails revealed that certain members of the Clinton campaign and other high-ranking Democrats met in person at the White House with members of the National Security Council on January 23, 2016, and concocted a plan to accuse members of the Republican Party of working with Russia. The plan was a way to get ahead of a story, to deflect from Hillary Clinton’s own history of taking major donations from Russian sources, which they worried might have a negative impact on her as the campaign moved forward.

One of the people who helped hatch that plan was Sidney Blumenthal, who’s the equivalent of a Roger Stone figure in the Clinton world, a dark arts political operative. It was subversive, and it worked. Their candidate managed to escape any serious inquiry into her dealings with Russia through either the Clinton Foundation or the State Department throughout the campaign.

Coincidentally, one of the Republican operatives they aimed to accuse of working with Russia was Paul Manafort. The accusation was built around the fact that Paul’s client, Viktor Yanukovych, had ties to Moscow, yet it ignored the fact that Yanukovych’s aims were to align Ukraine with the European Union—not with Russia. Paul’s work all along had been aimed at bringing Ukraine into the European Union, which aligned with U.S. policy in the region, even if Yanukovych wasn’t the choice of Ukraine president that some U.S. diplomats supported. (See Postface for more detailed information on our time in Ukraine and its relevance to U.S. politics.)

Paul was not working in any way to bolster Russian interests.

To the media, it did not seem to matter. The connection was drawn.

After their plan was put into action, and now that the Clinton campaign had turned it into a very public issue, Trump’s response was to go out and basically egg it on. While laughing at the absurdity of it all and calling it one of the most ridiculous “conspiracies” he’d ever heard, Trump tweeted, “If Putin wants a relationship, I have no problem with that.”

As I’ve discussed earlier, he didn’t have a problem with that. He wanted to sit face to face with Putin and negotiate with him in America’s best interest. He wanted to talk to Putin and others specifically so the U.S. could benefit from better relations. But the media immediately used it against him, suggesting that Trump was soft on Russia—and implying that there must be a reason for that. They used statements he made about Putin being a “strong leader” as an indication that Trump “looked up” to Putin.

I can tell you firsthand: Trump doesn’t “look up” to anyone.

The perceived lovefest between the two actually started with Putin, on December 17, 2015, when some of the first polls came out showing Trump as the Republican front-runner.

“He is a very flamboyant man,” Putin said at his annual year-end press conference. “Very talented, no doubt about that. But it’s not our business to judge his merits, it’s up to the voters of the United States. He is an absolute leader of the presidential race, as we see it today. He says that he wants to move to another level relations, a deeper level of relations with Russia.”

“How can we not welcome that?” he continued. “Of course, we welcome it.”

Trump responded with praise of his own.

“It is always a great honor to be so nicely complimented by a man so highly respected within his own country and beyond,” Trump said in a statement. “I have always felt that Russia and the United States should be able to work well with each other towards defeating terrorism and restoring world peace, not to mention trade and all of the other benefits derived from mutual respect.”

Later, in February, Putin called Trump “a genius,” which of course elicited a favorable response as well.

I find it funny that Putin seemed to know what Trump cared about—adulation—and used it early and often to gain his attention. Anyone with a sizable public platform could have accomplished something similar.

Flashing forward to after the election, when Trump was president and was finally set to meet with Putin in person for the very first time, he said to the press, “I think President Putin and I will get along…but who knows? Maybe I don’t have a good relationship with Putin and this thing goes sideways.”

If he had made statements like that all along, maybe people wouldn’t have assumed that he was actually coordinating with Russia. But instead, Trump being Trump, he kept defending against the allegations the way he would any other far-less-consequential attack—from a celebrity, or a gossip columnist, or a political rival.

He spoke in soundbites because he believed that talking “too much” was detrimental to his brand, but when he did, he always seemed to leave out a part of what he was thinking.

In this case, that made a difference.

I do not believe that Trump understood just how damaging it would be to deal with the political press in the same way he’d dealt with the tabloids in New York or the entertainment shows on TV. I don’t think he realized how dangerous it was to deal with the Washington elite in that manner, either.

Trump was never soft on Russia. During the campaign, I went back and looked at his tweets from 2014, after Russia invaded Crimea, and he was talking about putting sanctions on Russia even then. His talk was actually stronger than what President Obama was delivering as president at the time. But the media—reflecting the Clinton campaign’s talking points—weren’t interested in looking at the deeper story, or analyzing the accusation beyond the face of it. Robby Mook planted the public seed, and a perception and storyline grew from there. He cast his bait, and the media bit hook, line, and sinker.

And since the media were biting as hard as they were, Trump saw it as a chance to keep his name in the news, to generate more of that valuable unearned media that was pure gold to him.

On July 27, in Miami, Trump threw an impromptu press conference before heading to his plane. None of us were ready for it, none of us were warned about it, he just stopped and talked—as he sometimes did.

Perhaps I should have been prepared for what came next, given what he’d said earlier in the day. He had been watching TV, where the talking heads were going on and on about Russia, and whether or not Vladimir Putin was working to interfere in our election to help Trump win. “I don’t understand,” he said. “These people are losing their minds over this issue. We’re gonna have some fun with this.”

When he stepped in front of the cameras, I wondered if he might tell them about the night we’d just had. After a super successful campaign rally, Trump met with a number of Gold Star families in what I thought was one of the most heartfelt and powerful meetings he’d ever had. In an impromptu moment, a veteran stood up and gave his Purple Heart to Trump, as a gift. It was incredible.

He could’ve spoken about that. He could’ve spoken about how successful his Miami rally had been. But instead, he started talking about Hillary’s still-missing emails: “Russia, if you’re listening,” he said, “I hope you’re able to find the thirty thousand emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”

It was a flippant remark. It was Trump jabbing at the press for their latest obsession, and toying with the Clinton campaign for starting this ridiculous storyline in the first place.

That wasn’t how it was received.

From the New York Times to CNN to the inner offices of the FBI, wheels started turning—over whether or not Trump had just sincerely asked an enemy nation to dig up potentially damaging information on his opponent in the race for the presidency.

The thing that was most infuriating about this topic is that the Russians, and many other countries too, have been interfering in our elections for years. They’ve been using our own social media against us. They’ve created their own data analytics programs to study our behaviors and to exploit our divisions. Automated bots and Russian troll farms are responsible for planting untrue stories and inflammatory comments all over Facebook, Twitter, and Google, that are specifically meant to drive a wedge between Americans on all sorts of issues, from politics to race relations to the safety of vaccines. There are reports now showing that the “anti-vaxxer” movement that caused so much anger in this country was made up almost entirely of Russian trolls. The movement wasn’t real. This means that we’re dealing with a new form of propaganda-style cyber warfare that we still don’t have a handle on, and the more unrest and infighting the Russians sow, the weaker the “United” part of the “United States of America” looks to the world.

U.S. Intelligence has been aware of this for years. Reports in 2015 and 2016 informed the Obama administration that this kind of cyber-driven “election interference” was happening in the current election cycle. But almost nothing has been done to stop it.

And the more it’s allowed to proceed, the more the division sown by those bots and trolls helps Putin gain and keep power.

Did Russia interfere in the U.S. election in 2016? Yes. Overwhelmingly, yes. But did it interfere in the presidential elections of 2004, 2008, and 2012 as well? Absolutely.

So what does “interfere” actually mean?

It means what I described above, and not much else. Look at any of the dozens of government agency and intelligence reports on this matter, and that’s exactly what you’ll see.

Does “interference” also mean that Putin was working with Trump, or me and Paul, or anyone else on the Trump campaign to coordinate in some way to steal the election from Hillary Clinton? Absolutely not. There is not now nor has there ever been any evidence to suggest this was the case. (I’ll talk more about this later.)

Was Putin working to hack voting machines and change America’s votes at the ballot box? Maybe. Those efforts had been made by the Chinese and North Koreans in the past as well. But as Obama said back in April of 2016, there is no way to hack, or “rig,” an entire American election “in part because [voting] is so decentralized, and the numbers of votes involved. There’s no evidence that that has happened in the past, or that there are instances where that will happen this time.”

Plenty of prominent election experts, hacking experts, and intelligence experts all agree on that subject.

As more than one political operative in Ukraine told us later, Putin would have benefitted more from having Hillary Clinton become president. She was predictable—a known quantity from decades of being in U.S. politics. He knew her weak points and how to handle her, the way he knew how to handle Obama, and Bush. Instead, Putin wound up facing an unknown quantity in the White House. And Trump wound up placing more sanctions on Russia than were placed by any other U.S. president since the Cold War ended, including Obama after the annexation of Crimea.

Despite all of that, the story would not die. And maybe that’s because through Trump’s election, and the reaction to it, even despite the risks of the unknowns, and the sanctions, Putin wound up getting what he desired anyway—the seeds of separation, division, and infighting that he had been attempting to sow in America for years.

The idea that Putin would somehow coordinate with Trump, or attempt to work with his campaign, is absurd. No leader in his or her right mind would ever think they could get away with such a thing in today’s world, when all eyes are on everyone, everywhere, all the time. But the good news for Putin was he didn’t have to. He didn’t even have to risk trying to coordinate with Trump or his campaign, because America itself was already doing the work for him.

Throughout the campaign, Trump truly saw the “Russia collusion” talk as a joke, as something to laugh at, as something to egg on and toy with, because he knew it wasn’t true. He didn’t know Putin. He wasn’t working with his people or his government. If anything, he thought, Hillary’s own ties to Russia would come back to bite her before the election was over.

So, the fact that the media kept hammering the Russia issue well into fall when his primary comments on the matter had already come and gone way back in July, when the vast majority of the electorate wasn’t even paying attention, made him wonder just how desperate Clinton must be.

He was sure that before long, the media would catch on to some other topic and it would all be gone.

In retrospect, he couldn’t have been more wrong.