CHAPTER 9

Closing Arguments

She’s low energy, she actually is low energy. She’ll go home, she’ll take a nap for four or five hours then come back. No naps for Trump! No naps. I don’t take naps. We don’t have time! We don’t have time … You ever see Hillary where she comes out and she’ll read a teleprompter and then she’ll go home and you don’t see her for three, four days, then she comes back.

Donald J. Trump, Roanoke, Virginia, July 25, 20161

In 1980, President Jimmy Carter worried appropriately that the campaign of challenger Ronald Reagan might pull off an “October Surprise” with the American embassy hostages that ended up being released on the day of Reagan’s inauguration—444 days after being captured by Iranian radicals as Ayatollah Khomeini launched a revolution that ousted from power the Shah of Iran. Ever since then, presidential candidates remain wary of an “October Surprise”—an eleventh hour unexpected event of sufficient importance to determine the outcome of the presidential race.

In 2016, an “October Surprise” happened when the FBI announced unexpectedly that the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s State Department emails that had been closed was going to be reopened. Once again, Hillary Clinton was a presidential candidate under the cloud of federal criminal investigation—an unexpected event that occurred within days of Election Day.

FBI’s Comey Restarts Investigation

On Friday, October 28, 2016, less than two weeks away from Election Day, FBI Director James Comey, in a letter addressed to Congress, announced he was re-opening the FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server, effectively delivering a potentially lethal blow to the Clinton campaign.2 “In connection with an unrelated case, the FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation,” Comey wrote. “I am writing to inform you that the investigative team briefed me on this yesterday, and I agreed that the FBI should take appropriate investigative steps designed to allow investigators to review these emails to determine whether they contain classified information, as well as to assess their importance to our investigation.” Interestingly, Comey had addressed the letter only to the Republican chairmen of various key House committees, including Representative Jason Chaffetz, head of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Representative Charles Grassley and Representative Robert Goodlatte, heading the House Judiciary Committee, and Representative Devin Nunes, head of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

Predictably, the Clinton campaign reacted with outrage. John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign manager, in an angry statement, blamed Republicans for “browbeating” the FBI into Friday’s decision and demanded to know what new information had caused a closed case of this national importance to be reopened. “Director Comey’s letter refers to emails that have come to light in an unrelated case, but we have no idea what those emails are and the Director himself notes they may not even be significant,” Podesta said. “It is extraordinary that we would see something like this just 11 days out from a presidential election.”3

Clinton also reacted sharply, responding in a five-minute-long press conference hurriedly called in Des Moines, Iowa, immediately following Comey’s announcement. “I have now seen Director Comey’s letter to Congress,” Clinton began. We are 11 days out from perhaps the most important election of our lifetimes. Voting is already underway in our country. The American people deserve to get the full and complete facts immediately. The director has said himself he does not know if the emails referenced in his letter are significant or not. I’m confident, whatever they are, will not change the conclusion reached in July.” Hillary insisted it was imperative for the FBI to explain this investigation without hesitation. “So I look forward to facing the important challenges facing the American people, winning on November 8, and working with all Americans to build a better future for our country.” Clinton clearly looked irritated by the news that threatened her chances for electoral success which, until that moment, looked very strong, given that she enjoyed commanding leads in most credible polls. Responding to reporter questions, Clinton made clear that the FBI had not given her any advance warning, affirming she too learned of the decision when the FBI letter to Republican members of Congress went public. Clinton called on the FBI to release immediately all the new information the FBI had obtained. “I think people, a long time ago, made up their minds about the emails,” she insisted. “I think that’s factored into what people think and now they are choosing a president.”4

Subsequent reporting revealed Attorney General Loretta Lynch and Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates had advised Comey prior to the letter being finalized that issuing the letter would violate Justice Department policies and procedures dictating not to comment on politically sensitive investigations within 60 days of an election. When Lynch stopped short of issuing to Comey a direct order forbidding him to issue the letter, Comey decided to disregard Lynch and Yates’ concerns, proceeding to issue the letter on his own authority.5 “We don’t ordinarily tell Congress about ongoing investigations,” Comey noted in his letter to Congress, “but here I feel an obligation to do so given that I testified repeatedly in recent months that our investigation was completed.” To this, Comey added, “I also think it would be misleading to the American people were we not to supplement the record.”

The New York Times was the first to report that the FBI had found tens of thousands of State Department emails belonging to Huma Abedin on Representative Anthony Weiner’s seized laptop. The FBI had obtained earlier a search warrant about a month to seize Weiner’s electronic devices, including his cellphone and iPad, as part of an on-going investigation into illicit sexual messages Weiner had been sending via text message to an unidentified fifteen-year-old girl in North Carolina.6 An FBI source confirmed to Fox News that the new emails were discovered in an investigation unrelated to the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails. The FBI source disclosed that the new emails were discovered after the FBI seized the laptop.7

The previously unreported background of the story starts on August 22, 2016, when the Washington-based watchdog group Judicial Watch released 725 pages of State Department documents, including previously unreleased email exchanges in which Hillary Clinton’s top aide, Huma Abedin, provided influential Clinton Foundation donors special, expedited access to the secretary of state. In many instances, the preferential treatment provided to donors was at the specific request of Clinton Foundation executive Douglas Band.8 The State Department had released the documents in partial compliance with a federal court order issued in a May 5, 2015, in connection with Freedom of Information, FOIA, lawsuit that Judicial Watch had launched against the State Department. WND senior staff writer Jerome R. Corsi was interested in the emails, thinking they might shed more light on the accusations he had made that the Clinton Foundation was a “vast criminal conspiracy” in his previously mentioned 2016 book, Partners in Crime: The Clintons’ Scheme to Monetize the White House for Personal Profit.9

Corsi first realized a large number of the Abedin emails in the 725-page Judicial Watch release were 100 percent redacted, meaning the emails contained such highly sensitive national security information that State Department censors had blocked-out, or “redacted,” all the content of the emails, leaving readable only the author, addressee, date, and subject information. In an article published in WND.com on August 25, 2016, Corsi wrote, “Of the 725 pages, more than 250 pages were 100 percent redacted, many with ‘PAGE DENIED’ stamped in bold.”10 Corsi commented that previous releases of Clinton emails have forced the Obama administration to admit highly sensitive State Department information was transmitted over Clinton’s private email server. “On July 7, Charles McCullough, the inspector general of the intelligence community for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, in testimony before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, admitted his office did not have the security clearances required to read the emails transmitted over Clinton’s private email server that Congress was demanding to see,” Corsi wrote. McCullough further testified that the classification of the redacted material was so top secret that a government agency he refused to name had prohibited the State Department from sharing the content with Congress without the explicit approval of the agency he refused to identify.

Next, Corsi realized that fully two-thirds of the Huma Abedin emails released in the 725-page Judicial Watch cache were emails Abedin forwarded to herself, addressed to personal email accounts she controlled outside of the State Department email system, as well as outside Hillary Clinton’s private email system maintained at her residence in Chappaqua, New York. “Of the more than 160 emails in the latest Judicial Watch release, some 110 emails—two-thirds of the total—were forwarded by Abedin to personal addresses she controlled, humamabedin@[redacted] and habedin@[redacted],” Corsi wrote in an article published in WND.com, on August 29, 2016.11 “In other words, almost half of the emails that Abedin forwarded to her unsecured personal account have information the State Department deems too sensitive to be seen by members of Congress or the American people.”

In researching further, Corsi realized that whoever censored this cache of 725-emails had neglected to block out in one instance only the email address humamabedin@yahoo.com. This confirmed to Corsi that Abedin had been sending somewhere in the range of two-thirds of all the State Department emails she had received, including emails from Hillary’s State Department address as well as Hillary’s private email server account to her private email account at Yahoo.com. That so many of the emails Abedin had sent to herself were so heavily redacted upon release to Judicial Watch suggested to Corsi that it was likely Abedin had archived some State Department emails to her private, unsecured email account at Yahoo.com.

On October 15, 2015, prior to Abedin’s testimony in front of the House Select Committee, National Review reported the State Department explained the domain name of humamabedin@[redacted] was redacted to comply with a personal-privacy exemption.12 On August 14, 2015, the Washington Times reported that the State Department had admitted to a federal judge that Abedin and Cheryl Mills, chief of staff to Clinton when she was secretary of state, used personal email accounts to conduct government business in addition to Clinton’s private clintonemail.com to transact State Department business.13 But until the Judicial Watch email release the week Corsi’s two WND.com articles were published, there was no evidence suggesting Abedin had used her private email accounts as a forwarding address for State Department emails that contained sensitive material, including very possibly classified information. Until the publication of Corsi’s second WND.com article on August 29, 2016, there had been no previous public identification that Abedin was using a Yahoo.com account to archive off-line State Department emails.14

Realizing that archiving such a large quantity of State Department emails to a private account at Yahoo.com might well constitute a criminal violation of national security laws, Corsi contacted legal and intelligence sources in Chicago and New York to determine next steps the investigation might take.

On September 8, 2016, Corsi published in WND evidence that Abedin had forwarded an email from Clinton dated August 8, 2009, clearly marked “classified,” to her Yahoo.com account, providing even more evidence a crime had been committed.15 As September 2016 progressed, Corsi speculated that if Abedin had archived conceivably thousands of Clinton-related emails off-line at her private account at Yahoo.com, she might have been allowing foreign entities, or other unauthorized users to access and read the file. Anyone with access to Abedin’s username and password could read in real time and all the completely unredacted emails Abedin sent to her yahoo.com email account. Much of September 2016 was taken trying to find a legal way to force Yahoo.com to make public a list of all IP addresses that could identify various Internet users that had attempted to access or had successfully accessed Abedin’s Yahoo.com account. Unfortunately, the lawyers involved in the investigation could not establish legal standing to launch a lawsuit attempting to obtain the sought-after IP information.

Finally, Corsi speculated that if Abedin had taken the trouble to archive State Department emails in her Yahoo.com email account, Abedin may have also surmised that she needed to keep the project secret by using a computer or other device not issued to her or registered by her with the State Department. Speculation developed that Abedin might have kept such a laptop or other device at her home with Weiner in New York City. The investigators working with Corsi had reason to believe Weiner was once again under investigation by the New York Police Department and the FBI for sexting to underage girls. Sexting to underage girls using his cellphone was the “Weinergate” offense that had forced Weiner to resign from the House of Representatives in 2011.16 Investigators working with Corsi also had reason to believe that certain FBI agents, unhappy with Comey’s decision in July to suspend the criminal investigation into Clinton’s email scandal, had not given up trying to find a way to reopen the investigation. While the disgruntled FBI agents in New York would never have gotten permission from Washington to reopen an investigation into the Clinton email case, cooperating with the NYPD in an investigation of suspected illegal sexual activity involving minors was a different matter. Conceivably, no prior authorization from the FBI in DC was required for the FBI in New York to join the NYPD in executing a search warrant on former Congressman Weiner.

On Sunday, October 30, 2016, the Wall Street Journal reported that FBI investigators had discovered 650,000 emails related to the State Department on Weiner’s seized laptop, which had also been used by his wife, Ms. Abedin.17 The Wall Street Journal further reported the underlying metadata on the 650,000 emails suggested thousands of these emails could have been sent to or from the private server that Hillary Clinton used while she was secretary of state. The newspaper further noted it would take weeks, at a minimum, to determine whether those messages are work-related from the time Ms. Abedin served with Mrs. Clinton at the State Department; how many are duplicates of emails already reviewed by the FBI; and whether they include either classified information or important new evidence in the Clinton email probe.” The Wall Street Journal article carefully clarified that the FBI had searched Weiner’s computer while looking for child pornography, not for Clinton’s State Department emails. What the article did not specify was that now the NYPD had possession of the Weiner laptop, with time to download the contents, and that now blocking an investigation into Clinton’s emails, or preventing the release of those emails to the American public, was no longer in the sole control or at the sole discretion of the FBI in Washington.

Comey Closes Reopened Investigation

Democrats who had praised Comey for closing the Clinton email scandal in July reversed course and vilified him for reopening the investigation in October, just 11 days before the election. Notable was retiring Senate minority leader Harry Reid of Nevada who had called Comey a “fair, impartial director” in July, only to fire off to Comey a letter over the weekend of October 29–30, 2016, informing Comey that his actions may have violated a federal law known as the Hatch Act, “which bars FBI officials from using their official authority to influence an election.” Fox News reported that Reid accused Comey of a “double-standard” in his treatment of sensitive information, saying, “Through your partisan actions, you may have broken the law.”18

On Sunday, November 6, 2016, two days before Tuesday’s election, Comey notified Congress that he had seen no evidence in the trove of State Department emails on Weiner’s computer that would change his conclusion that Hillary Clinton should not face criminal charges over her handling of classified material.19 In a letter dated November 6, 2016, addressed to the same Republican heads of key House committees who had received Comey’s letter dated October 28, 2016, Comey explained, “Based on our review, we have not changed the conclusions that we expressed in July with respect to Secretary Clinton.” Comey explained that the FBI investigative team had been “working around the clock” to process and review the 650,000 State Department emails supposedly found on Weiner’s computer. “During that process, we reviewed all of the communications that were to or from Hillary Clinton while she was secretary of state,” Comey said.20

“You can’t review 650,000 emails in eight days,” Trump said at a rally that Sunday, after learning about Comey’s most recent letter to Congress that effectively called off the reopened investigation.21 Clearly, the damage had been done. By reopening the investigation so close to the election, Comey had put a brake on Clinton’s closing momentum. By exonerating Clinton so close to Election Day, Comey made it seem he had succumbed to political pressure from the Democrats. If the 650,000 State Department emails found on Weiner’s laptop were so innocuous as to require only eight days of FBI investigation, why did Comey consider them of sufficient seriousness that the criminal investigation against Clinton had to be reopened so close to the election?

After the election, Corsi confirmed with the New York Police Department’s press office that in the days leading up to the presidential election on November 8, the FBI terminated the NYPD investigation of Clinton’s emails on former congressman Anthony Weiner’s laptop, demanding that the laptop and all 650,000 State Department emails be taken to the FBI in Washington.

The move by the FBI in DC to shut down the NYPD investigation set the stage for Comey to declare in a letter to Congress November 6 that the newly discovered emails did not change the FBI’s original conclusion not to refer criminal charges. WND also confirmed with the NYPD that the FBI in Washington had blocked the NYPD from making any arrests in the Weiner “sexting” case involving a fifteen-year-old girl.22

Trump Closes Strong: 1948 Déjà Vu, All Over Again

In 2016, Trump had repeated President Harry S Truman’s miracle of 1948—he won the presidency, coming from behind, in an election where the polls, the media, and the pundits had declared him out of the race virtually from the moment he had declared his candidacy.

Trump was elected largely because in the final three months of the campaign, he won the most important phase of a campaign for the presidency of the United States—Trump won the closing argument. After each party has held its national nominating convention and the debates between the major party candidates have concluded, modern presidential campaigns enter a final, critical phase. Free of the need to confront the opposing candidate directly, the major party candidates need to make their closing arguments to the American people. This critical last phase of the presidential campaign is the last chance a presidential candidate has to make the argument to the American public that he or she is the best choice to be the next president of the United States. What 1948 proved and 2016 confirmed was that victory goes not necessarily to the favorite, but almost certainly to the candidate who proves the most capable of closing.

One of the most famous closing strategies in American political history was President Harry Truman’s 1948 “Whistle-Stop” campaign in which he came from behind in the polls to beat Republican challenger Thomas Dewey. Truman was a sitting president, who took the oath of office as vice president after President Franklin D. Roosevelt died of a stroke on April 12, 1945. Dewey was an enormously popular candidate, a former New York prosecutor who built his reputation fighting organized crime. This was Dewey’s second run for the presidency, having lost to Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1944, when FDR won narrowly his famous fourth term in office.

Truman’s idea to run a whistle-stop train campaign happened almost by accident. The inspiration came when conservative Republican Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio accused Truman of “blackguarding Congress at whistle stops across the country.” Truman’s whistle-stop campaign in 1948, when Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were both infants, was the precursor to Trump’s series of well-attended rallies some 68 years later. What exactly is a “whistle stop”? In his notable 2000 book, “The Last Campaign: How Harry Truman Won the 1948 Election,” historian and economist Zachary Karabell properly described a whistle-stop as “a town so small and insignificant that it had no regularly scheduled train service and had to signal the train by whistle if any passengers wanted to board.”23 In his classic 1992 biography of Truman, bestselling author David McCullough observed of Truman, “No president in history had ever gone so far in quest of support from the people, or with less cause for the effort, to judge by informed opinion. Nor would any presidential candidate ever again attempt such a campaign by railroad.”24

Traveling 20,000 miles through 30 states and delivering 280 speeches, Truman’s whistle-stop speeches were not noted for “grand philosophical themes,” nor did he dwell on “lofty ideas.”25 Instead, it was a campaign of plain speaking, in which Truman repeatedly attacked the GOP for the high cost of living, portraying the Democratic Party as the party of the people. As Karabell described it, Truman’s whistle-stop speeches communicated “a campaign of us and them, of anger, and bitterness, of the haves and the have-nots.” Karabell stressed that in fighting to lead the nation for four more years, Truman “was willing to sow dissension, stir up fear, and slander his opponents.”26

In her famous self-published 1964 book, “A Choice Not an Echo,”27 conservative luminary Phyllis Schlafly argued that Dewey lost in 1948 because he was a “me too” candidate who refused to criticize Truman sharply for the New Deal, failing to take on Truman directly for liberal ideology, while shying away from arguing strong conservative policy alternatives. Schlafly felt certain that if he’d gone after Truman and argued for strong conservative politics, the message would have been well-received by voters in 1948, a time when the nation was emerging from the Depression and World War II. In 2016, Schlafly was one of the first conservative leaders to endorse Trump,28 authoring her last book, “The Conservative Case for Trump,” in support of his candidacy. In this book, Schlafly defined what was to become known as the “Trump Movement.”29

Schlafly championed Trump as strongly as she had championed Ronald Reagan. “The revolution to take back America starts now,” Schlafly wrote. “America starts now. Donald Trump might seem an unlikely candidate to some, but he offers the American public something it’s been yearning for, ‘a choice, not an echo’; a candidate not intimidated by political correctness or the liberal media.” In her final analysis, Donald Trump was Schlafly’s choice for president because she felt certain Trump could win. Unfortunately, Phyllis did not live to see her predictions about Trump come true. But, with her political acuity as sharp as always, Phyllis saw correctly that while he was different from Reagan, Trump could still “remake our politics as Reagan did,” giving the Republican Party back the White House in 2016, a goal that had eluded the GOP in four of the last six presidential elections.30

Trump’s Rallies

In his post-election autopsy unfiltered for his Clinton partisanship, Politico’s chief political correspondent Glenn Thrush correctly observed that Trump’s rallies became “the centerpiece of the campaign.” Thrush criticized Trump, as well as Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s first campaign manager, for the impromptu nature of Trump’s rallies, in which Thrush observed Trump “picked up insights and policies like a stand-up comedian collecting material for a show.” Thrush quoted Lewandowski to make his point. “He lives for the energy,” Lewandowski said. “There’s no one better at taking the temperature of the crowd,” Lewandowski told Thrush during the campaign. “You can get instant feedback … We’d test out all of our best lines, some would work, some wouldn’t … That’s how we got ‘Little Marco’ and ‘Lyin’ Ted.’” Thrush commented that Trump started with “Little Marco,” then switched to “Lil’” because it got more laughs. Thrush belittled Trump, observing that Trump’s decision to call out Mexican “rapists” at his kickoff was inspired, in part, by a random chat he had with two Border Patrol agents at one of his golf resorts, road-testing his talking points.31

For Thrush and other analysts accustomed to politics in the age of television, Trump’s style was unorthodox. But for those who experienced politics when television was in its infancy, Trump again drew much from Truman. “Truman was only one in a long line of campaigners who went to extremes to excite crowds, to rouse them to action, and to convince them to vote for him on election day,” Karabell observed.32 Truman’s political rhetoric could appear extreme, almost rabble-rousing to those whose political awareness developed in the age of television. Karabell noted that Truman realized that with his whistle-stop speeches, he was speaking almost exclusively to the small audience present in that town, with that speech. “If he went too far during a whistle-stop speech, if he played fast and loose with facts, or if he descended to flinging dirt at his opponents, he knew that at worst he would be ridiculed or criticized by the press corps,” Karabell wrote. “They might write negative articles, and columnists might invoke fair play and morality. But for most of the millions who would vote, the episode wouldn’t exist. Some might read about the speech or peruse editorials against it; some might even hear it on the radio and recoil. But neither print nor radio had the same visceral effect that television would later have.”33

This was the oddity about Trump: in the age of television, he got away with the same speaking style that Truman relied upon in the whistle-stop campaign that lifted him from the underdog to the victor in 1948. When he first announced his candidacy, the mainstream media considered him even less than an underdog. The media ridiculed Trump while pundits constantly discounted his chances, never tiring of proclaiming that this gaffe or that misstep would certainly be the end of Trump’s candidacy. First, the media insisted Trump would never win the delegates needed to gain the GOP nomination on the first ballot. Then, after Trump won the nomination on the first ballot, the media and the pundits insisted Trump had a “narrow pathway” to collecting the 270 electoral votes needed to win the election. With Hillary certain to win New York and California, the judgment was near universal that Trump would fail to win both Ohio and Florida. Winning Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin seemed impossible to the media and pundits, who informed the voting public gleefully that Hillary should prepare for her coronation.

One of Paul Manafort’s best decisions was hiring Republican pollster Tony Fabrizio to determine how to beat Hillary Clinton. In the end, it was the pugnacious and bulldog-like Fabrizio, who insisted that the Trump campaign had to expand the map into Wisconsin and Michigan, while doubling down on Pennsylvania. The campaign shifted digital paid advertising resources to the states but it was Trump’s personal barnstorming in all three states that made all the difference. Fabrizio insisted Trump could win only through this route. He was right.

Trump succeeded precisely because, like Truman, he dared to speak his mind. Trump threw political correctness to the wind at precisely the time when the American voter was also throwing political correctness to the wind. Eight years of Obama’s “fundamental transformation” of America had convinced Middle America the far-left’s political agenda was not for them. By 2016, the vast majority of Americans did not want to discriminate against anyone, such that the LGBT community was accepted and same-sex marriage tolerated. But when the White House insisted the political discussion had to address transvestites and sex change operations in the military, as well as unisex bathrooms in elementary schools, Middle America was coming to the conclusion the far-left’s agenda had gone over the cliff. Americans were no more willing to read their Bibles in the closet than they were willing to hand over their guns to the local police—not when radical Islamic terrorism was wreaking havoc in Europe and beginning to crop up in the United States. Tolerance of legal immigrants was one thing, but borders open to hard-core criminals, drug cartel gangs, and Middle Eastern terrorists was again the globalism of the left reduced to the ridiculous.

Trump succeeded in the age of television precisely because the broadcast media cooperated with the print media in excoriating him for a host of remarks Hillary characterized as deplorable. Trump used mainstream media criticism to energize millions of voters disaffected with Washington insiders, smug Clinton-supporting pundits and leftist reporters. Like Truman, Trump thrived on contact with the public. Watching Trump’s rallies, it was obvious Trump was turbo-charged by the energy of the crowd. Trump goaded the audience to jeer Hillary. He pointed to the press attending the rally, saying the reporters were the enemy. At almost every rally, Trump dared the press to turn their cameras around to show not only the podium where he was speaking, but also the auditoriums packed to the rafters with cheering supporters.

Through the closing phase of the 2016 presidential election, Trump’s campaign was characterized by as many rallies as he could pack into one day. Thousands lined up for hours to see Trump, knowing capacity crowds would mean latecomers might not be able to get into the auditorium. By the closing days, Trump had honed his message down to a few simple thoughts: “Build the Wall,” “Drain the Swamp,” and “Lock Her Up.” The throngs showing up at Trump rallies came prepared for a Trump stump speech that would give them a chance to chant in unison all three of these slogans. Truthfully, it did not matter the order in which Trump served up these three themes, as long as they were all three served up such that the thousands packed into auditoriums to see and hear Trump got their chance to chant all three. Trump had mastered the art of packaging his message into a few simple thoughts that could mobilize masses of voters to get themselves to the polls. Trump’s promise to “Make America Great Again” got packaged on Twitter as #MAGA. Packaged into #MAGA was the promise of jobs returning to the United States, economic growth stimulated by tax cuts and fewer government regulations, an end to open borders, a clamp-down on Muslim terrorism, and a pledge to “Win Again.”

Trump’s campaign abandoned Obama’s computer-driven “Get out the Vote,” GOTV, effort that won strong majorities in the popular vote and Electoral College for Barack Obama in 2008. Trump spent sparingly on television ads, recognizing that, in the age of Internet. streaming broadcast and cable television were quickly moving into the “dinosaur media” category of by-passed technologies. Instead of relying on packaged 60-second television messages, Trump tweeted frequently, communicating directly with voters by jumping over the hostile intermediation of the typical radio, television, and print news that political campaigns have relied upon to communicate their message since the 1960s. Given the mainstream media’s obsession with Trump, the campaign quickly realized Trump would get almost non-stop “earned media” free time on 24-hour cable news shows. Even Fox News—the only cable news network considered GOP-friendly—shunned Trump in favor of more established GOP leaders—including Mitt Romney who attacked Trump ferociously during the primaries. But it just didn’t matter.

Clinton’s campaign tended to disregard the importance of Trump drawing huge rallies, arguing that Romney had also drawn large rallies in the post-convention closing phase of the 2012 campaign. Like Romney, most attendees at Trump rallies were white Americans, but noticeably present were women supporting Trump, as well as families in attendance bringing with them their children to see and hear Trump. In 2012, despite the large rallies, millions of Evangelical Christians and white conservative voters stayed home. The Democrats imagined the same would be the case with Trump, imagining thousands were only coming out to Trump rallies because he was a celebrity, not because he was a serious professional politician. In so calculating, the Democrats failed to understand the extent to which television had made voting for president a celebrity affair, with voters ready to vote for Trump much as they voted for favorites on television shows like “Dancing with the Stars.”

In underestimating the importance of Trump’s drawing ability at rallies, the Democrats made a classic blunder. The rallies in the closing phase of the 2016 campaign had become for Trump what the whistle-stop talks were for Truman in 1948. Like 1948, reporters figured the polls had pre-destined Hillary as president, so crowds turning out for Trump rallies were discounted as unimportant. “Because they had already decided that the outcome was sealed, reporters and commentators ignored signs that might have pointed in a different direction,” Karabell wrote about Truman’s 1948 campaign. “Even the most jaded observer noted that the crowds that came out to greet Truman were larger and more enthusiastic than those that gathered around Dewey.” But the phenomenon was easily discounted. “Different explanations were offered…. The president’s advisors bravely told reporters that the size of Truman’s crowds reflected a shift in momentum and demonstrated that voters were still undecided and still prepared to reelect Truman. But the journalists and commentators didn’t take that explanation seriously because polling data flatly contradicted it.” Even Truman’s closest advisers were not convinced. “The president’s own retinue touted the turnout as a good sign during formal interviews, but privately over drinks in the club car, they were just as likely to muse about what was in store for them and the country when Dewey won,” Karabell wrote.34

Karabell noted that “for those who did pay attention,” October offered more of Truman’s whistle-stops and more of his hard-hitting rhetoric. The same was true of Trump’s rallies in 2016. Trump had experimented with using Teleprompters for scripted speeches when Manafort had been campaign manager. That phase of the campaign brought discipline to Trump’s message. But during the stump-speech phase of Trump’s closing rallies, he found he could combine the “let Trump be Trump” encouragement of Lewandowski with the “stay on message” discipline of Manafort. Now, in the final phase, Trump found Steve Bannon had genius ability to get his messages packed into the powerful mantras the thousands attending rallies planned on chanting, while Kellyanne Conway displayed equal acumen in keeping Trump’s temperament level through the long airplane rides and nights away from home required for the 4-hour-sleep-per-night (or less) required to pack four to five rallies in different cities and different states into a single day. Trump hinted at these tensions in a stump speech he gave on November 2, 2016, in Pensacola, Florida. “We’ve gotta be nice and cool,” Trump said out loud, allowing to slip out what reporters took as an internal monologue that Trump had learned to recite to himself to stay on track. “Nice and cool. All right? Stay on point, Donald. Stay on point. No sidetracks, Donald,” Trump said, playing for the audience the internal drama going on now daily in his head as a result of the coaching his closest advisers were giving him. Reporters noted Trump closed this self-administered public pep talk by repeating the word, “Niceee”—a word Trump hung onto for emphasis.35

Hillary’s Lethargic Close

By contrast to Trump, Hillary closed her “low energy” campaign with a fizzle, not a pop. As early as August 15, 2016, the Gateway Pundit blog noted that while Trump continued to “smash Clinton in attendance at events,” Hillary appeared to have decided to take weekends off. Clinton took the weekend of August 6th and 7th off and she decided to take three days off the previous weekend August 12th through 14th. She had no scheduled events to participate in that coming Thursday through Saturday August 18th through 20th. “This in essence would mean another three days off after three days of events scheduled starting today,” the Gateway Pundit noted. In total Clinton had taken 7 days off in August out of the first 14 days and was scheduled to continue with this approach. Donald Trump on the other hand had taken only two days off in August, Sunday August 7th and Sunday the 14th.36 He had 7 days where he participated in more than one campaign event. The Gateway Pundit also noted that Trump had ten times the number of his people at his campaign events than Hillary had at hers since. More than 100,000 people had shown up for Trump events in the first half of August, with many more turned away due to the events reaching capacity. The Gateway Pundit concluded that just looking at the crowds, “Trump has a movement and Hillary has barely a heartbeat.” The Gateway Pundit was not certain why Clinton was taking so much time off, but the question raised was whether the time off was because of “her terrible campaign event turnout or her poor health or some combination of both.”37

The Gateway Pundit continued to track these trends through the rest of the 2016 campaign, concluding that Hillary was working on her campaign only about 50 percent of the time. On October 23, 2016, the Gateway Pundit reported Trump was leading Hillary by half a million people since August. “She is either sick or her campaign thinks she’ll do better if she doesn’t get in front of people or her campaign doesn’t want to show the abysmal lack of interest in her and her events,” the Gateway Pundit noted as October came to a close.38 On November 13, 2016, the Gateway Pundit noted Trump had nearly 1 million attend his rallies in the election campaign, while Clinton totaled 100,000. Hillary had taken fifty-seven days off since July without participating in campaign rallies, amounting to more than half the ninety-nine days between August and Election Day.39

Trump’s campaign airplane was his privately-owned, luxurious Boeing 757, measuring 155 feet in length, one of the fastest airplanes in the world, capable of going up to five hundred miles per hour with its Rolls-Royce engines. Hillary leased a standard Boeing 737 measuring 129 feet—an airplane with a standard first-class domestic seating configuration that the Clinton camp did not customize.40

Trump’s $100 million private jet has an interior customized to make Mr. Trump and his forty-three guests feel comfortable in a flight with maximum range of sixteen-hour flying time. Trump’s Boeing 757 features a bedroom, a dining room, and a private guest room. There is a full bath with 24-karat gold fixtures, and an entertainment system with an installed video room, plus reclining couches and reclining sleeper seats—all fitted with 24-karat gold seatbelts. Each seat has its own audio-visual consisting of an individual television. A dining room has luxury bench seats around custom-made worktables. Mr. Trump’s master bedroom is also custom-designed, with a large flat-screen television that accesses the airplane’s audio-visual system as well as his favorite movies, plus a master bathroom that includes a shower and a gold 24-karat sink.41 No other presidential candidate in US history has ever traveled with their top staff in such a world-class comfort-oriented airplane environment.

Clearly, Trump’s airplane made early-morning departures and late-night arrivals bearable, especially in contrast to Hillary whose campaign airplane lacked not only a master bedroom with full bath, but even a first-class seat that reclined fully to a sleeping position.

Several of the Podesta emails made public by WikiLeaks made clear the extent to which Clinton’s own campaign staff considered her to be a poor candidate. Jennifer Palmieri, the director of communications for Hillary’s 2016 presidential campaign, in an email dated April 19, 2015, to John Podesta, with copies to other key players on the Clinton campaign, commented that Hillary “has begun to hate everyday Americans.”42 This, coupled with emails showing Hillary had to be coached when to smile during her speeches, created the impression that Hillary had to be reminded to make believe that she actually liked the voters she was addressing. The Goldman Sachs speech transcripts WikiLeaks released also showed Clinton explaining to the investment bankers that she was “kind of far removed” from the middle class “because the life I’ve lived and the economic, you know, fortunes that my husband and I now enjoy, but I haven’t forgotten it.”43

In a WikiLeaks released email dated March 13, 2016, left-leaning opinion writer Brent Budowsky warned Podesta that Hillary “should stop attacking Bernie [Sanders], especially when she says things that are untrue, which candidly she often does.” Budowsky was concerned that by lying about Bernie in her attacks on him during the primaries, Hillary was risking alienating permanently the Sanders’ supporters Hillary would need to vote for her in November. The email was particularly damaging because of Budowsky’s comment that Hillary is a habitual liar.44 In an email chain dated August 22, 2015, Neera Tanden, president of Podesta’s Center for American Progress, wrote Podesta that Hillary’s “inability to just do a national interview and communicate feelings of remorse and regret is now, I fear, becoming a character problem (more so than honesty).” Tanden continued to say that people hate Hillary’s arrogance.45

An email exchange dated March 22, 2014, between Hillary’s campaign manager Robby Mook and her adviser/attorney Cheryl Mills, that included John Podesta, made clear all three had their doubts from the start about the likely success of a gender-based campaign focused on the premise that Hillary would be the first woman president. “In fact, I think running on her gender would be the same mistake as 2008, i.e., having a message at odds with what voters ultimately want,” Mook said. “She ran on experience when voters wanted change … and sure there was plenty of data in polls with voters saying her experience appealed to them. But that was missing the larger point—voters wanted change.” Mook felt it was similar in 2016. “Same deal here—lots of people are going to say it would be neat for a woman to be president but that doesn’t mean that’s actually why they will vote for her. That’s likely to be how she will handle the economy and relate to the middle class. It’s also risky because injecting gender makes her candidacy about her and not the voters and making their lives better.” Podesta agreed. “One caveat,” he said simply, “gender will be a big field and volunteer motivator, but won’t close the deal.”46

Finally, the Podesta emails made public by WikiLeaks revealed Hillary’s campaign insiders as highly-educated white elitists who showed no compunction in sharing amongst themselves their far-leftist biases—demeaning supporters of Bernie Sanders as “self-righteous whiners,” calling Hispanic party leaders such as former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson “needy Latino’s,” while Clinton’s communication director Jennifer Palmieri demeaned Catholics. “I imagine they think it is the most socially acceptable, politically conservative religion—their rich friends wouldn’t understand if they became evangelical,” Palmieri wrote.47 It is hard to imagine how the Clinton campaign thought Hillary could attract the votes of so diverse an array of constituencies, while their hacked emails belied their clearly disingenuous public front of identity politics.