How Trump Won the White House: Did Obama Create Trump? (Ep 2)
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Hello and welcome to The Rest Is Politics US and this special series that we are doing on how Trump won the White House in 2016. Going back in history, having a little PTSD on both sides here as a reporter and as a campaign strategist. And this is episode two of

And Anthony and I are going to look at the opposing side, because remember, this was also an open primary process on the Democratic side. And there's an incredibly exciting race that was happening between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.

and we're gonna look at where they both stood at the beginning of this campaign. And then in the second half, we're gonna take a quick look at the team that Trump created now that he's secured the nomination and discuss exactly what was his strategy for winning. - Sorry to keep you waiting, complicated business. I am officially running

For president of the United States. Run for president, but don't be the world's biggest jackass. Calls himself the candidate who speaks his mind, who tells the truth. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. So make America great again.

You're never going to be president of the United States by insulting your way to the presidency. Let's see, I'm at 42 and you're at three. There's an excellent chance of Donald Trump becoming the next president of the United States. I could shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose any voters. People need to take that very seriously. He's been my candidate from day one because he's not a politician. It's just awfully good that Donald Trump is not in charge in our country. Because you'd be in jail. Election day is here. People have talked about a miracle.

I'm hearing about a nightmare. I'm so proud to call him the President of the United States because that's what's about to happen.

In this half, we're going to look at the Democrats because this was an open primary on the Democratic side. Barack Obama had done his two terms in office, and now the Democrats also have to choose their candidate for the presidency. As we all know, Hillary Clinton ends up winning the Democratic nomination. But it's worth pointing out that there was a bitter fight in the Democratic Party between Hillary Clinton, who had been the Secretary of State, and Bernie Sanders, who was the senator from Vermont.

And in many ways, it felt to me reporting on this that Bernie Sanders, who described himself as a democratic socialist, very much on the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, fought for issues like income inequality. He wanted universal health care, which America doesn't have. He wanted free public college tuition. This was a big deal for him. He wanted free tertiary education for people, campaign finance reform to punish Wall Street and the big banks.

And his campaign became incredibly popular with, uh,

young American voters who felt disillusioned, who felt they'd been left behind, who didn't feel they had many opportunities. And the kind of paradox of it all was, there are two paradoxes. One was that Bernie Sanders was the most unlikely person to appeal to young voters. He was a grumpy old white guy. I mean, let's make no bones about it. He was a grumpy old white guy who got this army of

Of Bernie supporters who would go around saying, feel the burn and his rallies. They were just like, they were devotees. I remember my 30 year old son in that election saying to me, Bernie Sanders is the one for us. Bernie Sanders is the one for young people. And the other paradox of him is that he's kind of saying the same things that Donald Trump is saying.

He is a populist on the left in the way that Donald Trump is a populist on the right. He's not anti-immigrant. He's not nativist, although he doesn't do very well in the primaries with immigrant voters. He doesn't do very well with Hispanic voters, and he doesn't do particularly well with black voters, which was one of his big weaknesses. But in terms of class, if we're thinking of this as a class election, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders...

They're more similar than they might like to think, either of them. Well, I mean, listen, Corey Lewandowski used to go to Bernie Sanders rallies because he said there was more or less the same people that were listening to the same grievance. And so here's the grievance quickly, Katty.

The grievance is we once lived in an aspirational blue collar America. And frankly, that's the America I grew up in. My dad was a crane operator, but he was going to work hard. He was going to have a living wage. The wages were going to be enough to sustain his children into college. And one of his children were to go on to live the American dream, if not all of them. Those very same people who were once economically aspirational have felt economically desperational now. And so

I'm going to indict both parties with this. It was offshoring of the manufacturing. It was the signing of NAFTA where 65,000 factories left the United States. And all of these Rust Belt areas got hollowed out. And in comes Bernie Sanders with his message or Donald Trump with his message. You're the forgotten men and women of our country. And I'm here to be your advocate. I'm here to be the avatar for your anger. And so Trump and Sanders...

have things in common more than they would like to admit. And of course, 12% of the Sanders voters go on to vote for Donald Trump.

on election day of November of 2016. Which may have been a big problem for Hillary Clinton. So the democratic race kicks off. It's very exciting. And Hillary Clinton is the establishment candidate with a lot of money, an extraordinary infrastructure around the country. And I think all of our assumption, a bit like we'd assumed that Jeb Bush was going to be the candidate on the Republican side. We spoke about that in the last episode.

Watching it, everyone assumed that Hillary Clinton was going to cruise to victory. But she goes into the Iowa caucuses. Hillary Clinton gets 49.8%. Bernie Sanders gets 49.6%. Some of the counties in Iowa, by the way, it was so close that they had to toss a coin to determine who was going to win. And then they go into the New Hampshire primary eight days later, and Bernie Sanders absolutely collapses.

crushes Hillary Clinton. And I think that was the first time we all woke up to the fact that he was going to be a real challenger to her and that they were going to have a battle on their hands. Clinton wins the next few primaries, sweeps into Super Tuesday, and it puts her in a good position. But then Hillary Clinton loses Michigan.

And I think that is a critical moment, not because of the primary, which Hillary Clinton goes on to wrap up, because of what it foretells about the November general election and that losing Michigan was going to be exactly as Donald Trump had predicted, he could smash the blue wall. And losing that Michigan primary to Bernie Sanders was

I think was the first time we all kind of thought, wow, this is not just about this Democratic primary, but there is something going on in these blue wall states that Hillary Clinton has not managed to capture. And so she kind of tries after that to move to the left, but it doesn't really work very well because it seems...

And I think that was, I don't know what it felt like from the campaign's point of view, watching Hillary Clinton try to reinvent herself in order to capture some of those Bernie Sanders magic. But it just seemed like she was almost willing to do anything to be president. Okay, so let me ask you a question, if you don't mind.

Bill Clinton, is he a retail politician? Yes or no? Yes, absolutely. One of the best retail politicians America's had. Vice President Al Gore, retail politician? No. Okay. What about Jeb Bush, retail politician? No.

Okay. But if I say Donald Trump, retail politician? Absolutely. Great with a crowd. And so you know right away in your mind when someone's connecting to people or not connecting to people. Again, you may not like their policies, but what Secretary Clinton did not have was she was over-calculating everything.

Okay. One of the reasons why I've gotten in trouble my whole life is I under calculate everything, Katty Kay. And I just say whatever the hell's on my mind, but she's over calculating and she's over. We're working on that, Anthony, a little bit. We're working on it. That's why we're getting there. That's why they team me up with you. Okay. I know you have a whistle in there somewhere. You're going to blow it on me at one point. But my, my point is she was so tight that,

And that there was no opportunity for her to release anything. She could have been a great president, perhaps. She's certainly talented. She's very well qualified. She had an unbelievable resume. But you have to win the presidency to be president. And unfortunately, to win the presidency, you have to win over your fellow Americans. You have to be popular with them. And this is something that Barack Obama is not going to like, but I've heard he doesn't listen to our podcast. So I'm just going to tell you what it is. He created Donald Trump.

Because he lit them up at the White House Correspondents Dinner, and then he told Joe Biden, hey, man, you got to take a powder. I cut a deal with the Clintons in 2012 for their big time endorsement and their speeches at the convention. And I said I would support them. You got to take a powder. You can't run for president. And of course, Biden went on a 40 minute soliloquy in the Rose Garden.

But he desperately wanted to go and run for president in 16. And perhaps he would have beat her in the primaries and slayed Donald Trump in 16, as opposed to waiting to 2020. So you have an unretail politician,

running against a populist maverick. What a recipe. And at one point during the campaign, Joe Biden actually in public calls out the Clinton campaign for ignoring white working class voters. Because what Hillary Clinton is trying to do is recreate the Obama coalition. She realizes that there is a working class problem. She tries to do these shifts to the left with some of her policy issues. She commits

to being opposed to more trade agreements. She makes a commitment on the minimum wage to raise the minimum wage. She pushes for more expanded American healthcare. She speaks about bringing the banks in line. But the trouble is it just doesn't ring true because those haven't been her policies beforehand. And what she's trying to do is get a lot of women to vote for her. And in some ways, being a woman...

and the first woman, she spoke about it a lot. She spoke about smashing the glass ceiling. She spoke about her daughter. She spoke about all the women who had come before her. And there was, to the extent that there was genuine excitement around Hillary Clinton, I think it was just this idea that she could be the first female president. It wasn't really about her necessarily. It was much more about Hillary.

America could take this step of having had a black president and then having a woman president. And I think the Clinton campaign's mistake was thinking that there was a linear progression

in American society that would show that they had moved kind of to the left. They would elect a black president, and the next thing they would do was elect a female president. Now, she would say that that was one of her biggest hurdles and that there was a lot of sexism in the campaign, which there was. I remember walking through Washington Reagan Airport going off on one of my campaign trips, and there were these nutcrackers in the shape of Hillary Clinton. They're selling this in the airport.

The idea that she's a ball breaker, that somehow she's anti-feminine or that she's tough on men. And there was all these questions about her pantsuits and what she wore. I think in a way, weirdly, that was her campaign. So the fact that I had one on my bookcase, is that something you would judge?

I would never judge you. I didn't have one of those. Of course you didn't have one. No, I remember the damn thing. Your wife would have divorced you if you'd had one. Trust me, we came very close during the Trump days. Okay, trust me. Do you think that campaign with Bernie Sanders, the fact that it dragged on so long, much longer than Hillary thought it was going to do, and the nature of the campaign damaged her reputation?

Yes, I do think that. And I think that she needed to do something that politicians hate to do. And that is she needed to bring him on board. And in 1980, Teddy Kennedy ran against the sitting President Jimmy Carter. And he was the one who was the one who was the one who was the one who was the one who

And he came close to beating him. And when it was time to bring Teddy Kennedy on board, Carter was willing to do it, but Teddy Kennedy wasn't willing to do it. And they sort of snubbed each other at the 1980 Democratic Convention. And it cost...

Jimmy Carter. And the same sort of thing happened to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. She couldn't find the right movement on the Rubik's Cube to get the colors to match up between her and Bernie Sanders, and a result of which she was hurt by that.

And she didn't consolidate the Democratic Party to the extent she needed to, to win that election. It's worth also speaking about the Democratic National Convention, because I think this is where you really see the damage that the primary has done to her. So it's the end of July of 2016, and the Democrats hold their convention in Philadelphia. I went to that. And

everybody is very excited on the establishment side of the Democratic Party because effectively, unlike in the Republican Party, the establishment has won, right? Hillary Clinton, ultimate establishment character. And in this case, she's won the nomination. But Bernie Sanders supporters, and I remember sitting there in the convention hall watching as there was all of this excitement about Hillary Clinton and she walks out in a white pantsuit wearing

onto the stage on the last night of the convention to give her address and accept the nomination, white for women's suffragettes movement. So she's channeling all of that. There's a kind of, you know, I am a female president. She talks about the glass ceiling. But there are supporters of Bernie Sanders in the hall who turn their back on Hillary Clinton, on the nominee,

And the visual image of that was a reminder, a kind of indication of, wow, there is trouble here.

They're all excited about having their first female candidate. The establishment has won, but there is a big group of her. They hated Hillary Clinton almost with the same intensity that they hated Donald Trump. And I remember speaking to young voters in that campaign who said to me, it's a stitch up. They used backroom methods. They ignored our policies. They were radicals. They were very ideologically radical and they didn't

didn't feel that it had been fair. They didn't feel, and I think this was very important, that they didn't feel it would have been fair. And the reason they didn't feel it was fair was because a few days before that convention, WikiLeaks published emails from the Democratic National Committee, which made it seem like the DNC, which is meant to be impartial in the primaries and not weigh in on any candidate, it made it clear

clear that the DNC had actually tipped the scales and they had been in favor of Hillary Clinton. Patty, didn't the DNC chair have to resign? I believe it was a woman from Florida, right? She did. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who was the Congresswoman from Florida, had to resign because she had emails showed that she had been so critical of

of Bernie Sanders. And I think all of that strengthened the idea that it had been a fix and ultimately meant that although Hillary Clinton won the Democratic nomination, she was wounded in the process. Okay, we're going to take a break there. Join us after the break when we're going to discuss the Trump team and the strategy they implemented. Travel is all about choosing your own adventure. With your Chase Sapphire Reserve card, sometimes that means a ski trip at a luxury lodge in the Swiss Alps.

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Shop blinds.com right now and get up to 45% off select styles. Rules and restrictions may apply. So let's dive into the Trump team, Antony. He secured the nomination and he starts building, has been building during the primary, a team around him. And I think it's worth looking at some of these characters because they are also going to dictate how he messages, how he does the strategy, how he uses Twitter and how he manages to secure the White House.

And one of the people I think that is worth looking at, you've spoken about Corey Lewandowski a bit in the last episode, but explain a little bit more his role in the campaign and how he was the sort of

He was the figure that Donald Trump really needed because he was kind of Donald Trump's yes man. He was the one that always said yes to him. Donald Trump didn't like having people say no to him. And Corey Lewandowski, who was a little bit of a sycophant from my point of view. But how important was he in building the strategy? So it's interesting. I guess maybe because I have a fondness for Corey, I don't see him as much as a sycophant as I saw him as a sycophant.

as somebody that knew the nature of his boss and he had a job to do, which was to get the guy elected, which was going to help him with his political bona fides. But I get the point. As a journalist, I could see what you mean.

But Corey was doing a lot of things right, but there was something going wrong between him and the family. And I don't know exactly what it was because I wasn't close enough to the campaign until I got in there in May. But there were sore feelings between the Trump children and Jared Kushner and Corey.

And that strain led to Corey's ejection from the campaign. And he was replaced by Paul Manafort. And this happened probably June-ish of maybe mid-May to June of 2016. And so what's interesting about all that is I didn't know these people. And so you have to imagine I come into the campaign, I meet with Donald Trump, we show him a PowerPoint presentation, which is the Romney fundraising campaign.

strategy. I'm with Senator Scott Brown. And Trump says to me, do you want to be my campaign finance chair? And I look at him and I say, well, I'm hosting Wall Street Week for the Fox Business Channel. I don't want to be your campaign finance chair. I'll have to give up that post. He then says to me, well, what about Steven Mnuchin? Do you know him?

I said, yes, I know Steven well. We worked together at Goldman Sachs. He's a great guy. Yes, I did a hotel deal with him in Hawaii. I'm going to call him and make him my campaign financier. Why is this important?

because Steve is coming to play. He's a former Goldman Sachs partner. He's a hedge fund manager. He's a Hollywood movie producer. He's never really been in politics before, but him and Donald Trump get on with each other. They understand each other and Steve's coming to play. And so I meet with Steve with the Romney list and we're going to do our first fundraiser, which is late May and

in 2016. And why is this important? Because we're now trying to do the Romney thing. It doesn't work, by the way, Gaddy. We can get into that later. But so Corey's still on the campaign. He's been wounded by the kids. Steve enters as the campaign finance chair. I'm on the committee, which allows me to keep my job at Fox. And we're working, but Trump is nervous. He's been told by people he's got the nomination.

But he may get bamboozled by the establishment Republicans at the convention. And that's how Paul Manafort ends up on the scene. So tell us a little bit about Paul Manafort, who had been a kind of lobbyist, political operative, gets brought in to replace Corey Lewandowski as campaign chair, manager of the campaign.

What's his relationship with Donald Trump? I mean, I know it ends up trickily, but what was his relationship with Donald Trump at the time? And why did Donald think that Paul was the guy to run his campaign? So Donald Trump has this love affair, hate affair with Roger Stone. And for those people that are listening and who is Roger Stone, he's a very famous, very

hard-knuckled, hardball political strategist, political consultant to campaigns for the Republican Party. He has always said that Donald Trump should run for office.

And Trump likes him and dislikes him. He's been fired by Trump and rehired by Trump probably six or seven times. This is why the Lewandowski situation is so interesting, because it's like a revolving door with Trump. Roger Stone, by the way, famously loved Richard Nixon so much that he has a tattoo of him on his back.

I don't know if he's added a tattoo of Donald Trump to that, but he's got a tattoo of Richard Nixon. I'm not sure, but I'm trying not to vomit during this episode. So let's... Anthony Scaramucci does not have a tattoo of Donald Trump. I don't have a Donald Trump tattoo. But by the way, I'm just trying to not think of...

Roger Stone with his shirt off, to be honest. But anyway, so to go back to the conversation, he has a lobbying in the 80s and 90s. It's Stone, Manafort and a few other people. So Trump knows Manafort. He knows Manafort through Stone.

He also knows Manafort through Roy Cohn, his former attorney, who he says is his big mentor, who's sort of a ruthless guy. But Manafort doesn't have ruthless qualities like that. He's sort of more of a more subtle guy. He's a very well manicured guy. He's very well dressed. I meet him for the first time in the lobby of the 26th floor at Trump Tower.

He says, Anthony, I see you on TV. We start to commiserate a little bit. It turns out he's from an Italian-American community in Connecticut. There's very large Italian-American immigration up there. I think his last name was Manaforte. He shortened it and anglicized it to Manaforte.

We get on quite well. He's now going to run the campaign. So we're starting to build the team around Donald Trump. But of course, there's one person that's missing, and that is the vice presidential pick. A very big moment for any campaign is when you reveal who you have chosen. There's a whole big debate about do you choose somebody because they're going to win you a state? Do you choose somebody because they're going to win you a demographic?

All of these discussions are going on in the Trump campaign. And they decide on picking Mike Pence, who is the governor of Indiana. The polls had suggested that Donald Trump needed some support amongst the evangelical community, needed some support in the Midwest. And he went for Mike Pence, who is a conservative Democrat.

very evangelical Christian, an important demographic group that he realized as part of his bid to win the presidency that he was going to have to get evangelicals with him, despite the fact that he'd been through multiple divorces, spoke about women in perhaps not the most polite way. So he chooses...

Mike Pence and he unveils him. He's not a particularly charismatic figure. He's definitely not somebody who's going to overshadow Donald Trump. He's anti-abortion. He's pro-gun rights. His career, by the way, in Indiana is not going terribly well, which may be one of the reasons why Mike Pence makes also the improbable decision to go with Donald Trump. I

Mike Pence's wife, also very Christian, also very Midwest nice. And yet they kind of attach their wagon in the way that you've talked about during this series to Donald Trump, who is sort of the antithesis of everything they represent. And I remember the first time they come on stage together thinking, this does not look like a marriage made in heaven. These two people look like they've come from totally different backgrounds, which they have. They had totally different styles.

But I guess from the campaign's point of view, when you were discussing who would be the best candidate, the decision was really just Mike Pence because of the evangelicals, because of the Midwest, because he had that kind of nice demeanor about him that perhaps Republicans who, as we said in the last episode, didn't like Donald Trump's character could take some reassurance from.

from Mike Pence. Is that why do you think they chose him? Yes, I do think that. And I would just add to this, there were three people that understood Donald Trump better than the other people, myself included. It was Mike Pence,

Steven Mnuchin and Mike Pompeo. Mike Pompeo, who became the former Secretary of State, was a congressman at the time. He was CIA director, then he became Secretary of State. But why is this important? Those guys actually understood that they needed to be as far away from the Trump show as possible. Trump was a team of one. He was a one-man show. There are no second actors on stage. There are no accessory actors, no supporting roles.

And they understood that. Steve Bannon didn't understand that. Frankly, I missed that. There were many others that missed that. But Pence did a very good job over the course of the campaign and as vice president of taking a second fiddle.

Let me restate that. Not even a second fiddle caddy, a 29th fiddle to Donald Trump. He was off in the wings somewhere of the orchestra. It was very important. And Pompeo said something. If he's listening, he's going to be mad at me for repeating it, but it's actually funny. So Mike, don't be mad at me. Mike once said, if he calls you President Pompeo,

It's time as Secretary of State to book a trip to like Antarctica and see if we can reignite our diplomatic relationship with the penguins. You know, meaning anytime he said, you're getting more famous than me, or what are you, President Caddy K? The minute he says that, you got to run for the woods. And people that didn't usually got neutralized by him. But Pence was really good at understanding that.

So Mike Pence is chosen. He's officially announced, walks out on that stage when I said it was all seemed kind of awkward. They were not the same type of person, chalk and cheese. That's the 15th of July. And three days later, we get into the Republican National Convention. And I think this is the moment where Donald Trump's strategy and his message unfold.

And we as reporters, I was up there in Cleveland, Ohio for that convention. We start to get a sense of what this campaign is going to look like. There's two parts to it. One is the way that that convention articulated Donald Trump. And it was particularly aggressive as a convention. I remember walking through the car park and there are these people in jumpsuits with a mask of Hillary Clinton on their face. And

and Lock Her Up became one of the themes of that convention with these incredible Trump supporters shouting about Hillary Clinton should be prosecuted. She has to go to jail. They really hated Hillary Clinton. And the tone of that convention when Chris Christie stood up on the stage and did a mock prosecution of Hillary Clinton, again, it was another moment where everyone was shocked,

This hadn't really been done in conventions before. There was a misogynist way that they spoke about Hillary Clinton, these people in jumpsuits around the stage, the chance of lock her up. But it would turn out to be that message and that tone turned out to be very popular with the base. When you were...

planning that convention. You were at the convention as well on the Republican side, Anthony. Did that tone of the convention, was that a deliberate strategy, do you think, on the part of the campaign? Did they want that to be a shocking convention? Because that's, from our point of view, covering it, it was kind of a shocking event. I think so, yes, Gadi, because

Trump wanted to make a big stance. Trump wanted shock and awe. Trump understood the more media attention, the better for him. The more people talking about him, pluses or minuses, the better for him. And I will say this, and again, Reince Priebus did a very good job of organizing that convention. It was infused with lots of Trumpism.

But Priebus did a very good job of organizing the delegates. He organized the whole package, if you will, the presentation. He made it very easy for the Trump campaign. It was a plug and play for whoever the nominee was going to be. And then the second thing I would say about it, which I found to be very interesting about Trump at the convention is

slightly nervous. That was an important moment for him. And if you go back to that speech, he doesn't typically do this, but he had some sweat on his face. He had some sweat on his mustache and so forth. He was worked up for that speech. I remember mostly about that speech was the setting, Anthony, and all of us watching as he kind of walks on stage walking

my memory was that he was almost in silhouette, right? Yeah. The shadow. It's so dramatic. There's this kind of shadow of Donald Trump walks on stage. There's the smoke. There's the columns behind him. I mean, the grandiosity of it is almost kind of, you know, classic Greek empire. He, the,

imagery was this big guy who walked out of the kind of shadows and suddenly was revealed with the spotlight on him as Donald Trump. It was almost funny. It was, again, it was kind of the show. It was the Trump show and he was the kind of leading role and it just all, it looked hysterical. Lots to be said there about the influence of reality television in terms of the way they produce that. So,

The reason I was saying that the message and the strategy combined and we got the sense of it at that convention was that there was a lot of influence on the convention about America first. That became the mantra of Donald Trump and became the mantra of his campaign. And this idea of the forgotten men and women of America who had been screwed by globalization, had been left behind, there was no safety net for them.

And it was a protectionist, anti-globalization economic policy, very different, by the way, from the Republicans' traditional policies, which had been free trade, pro-globalization. And he comes in with this message that is very targeted at white voters.

non-college educated, working class Americans, particularly those Americans who worked in manufacturing. And where are those manufacturing bases? They are in the blue wall of the Democrats' stronghold. States like Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin. We still talk about them. The states that we are still talking about in the 2024 campaign, Ohio. And Donald Trump figured out

that if he could push this America first message of globalization has screwed America and it has screwed you, the American public and you, the American worker and all of these jobs that have gone off to China. So it was again, this anti-foreigner thing. And

We heard it repeatedly during the course of the campaign, and of course that then became the strategy. They decided they were going to attack the Blue Wall. Improbable though it seemed because this was such a democratic stronghold. This is where the unions were strong. This is where the Democrats had been strong. But I remember after that convention going to a small town in Ohio that had had a huge steel mill.

It was known as Steel Town, that it employed something like 5,000 people and now only employed 250 people. I interviewed a guy who had been a lifelong Democrat, lifelong union worker, and for the very first time in his life, he was switching parties after that convention because he listened to that convention and he was going to switch parties and vote for Donald Trump. This guy knew more

about WTO, World Trade Organization regulations, and more about China and offshoring than is probably good for most people. But he was convinced that the Democrats had done nothing for his town, that while they'd all voted Democrats, the steel mills had shut, and that here was somebody and he'd been kind of blown away by the convention. And I remember asking him, but what do you think of Donald Trump's character? And he was one of those people who said to me,

I don't really like him. I don't like the way he talks about women in particular. This guy was very fond of his wife and his daughter, but I'm desperate. I have to vote for my family and I have to vote for my job. And that was where the kind of the strategy and the messaging all for me seemed to coalesce.

And then you had it being amplified by all of the media outlets, the right-wing media outlets. He amplified it on Twitter. He amplified it on Fox News. But in many ways, and I remember writing this at the time, 2016 for me was a class election. It was about Donald Trump appealing directly to working class American voters who had been hurt by the financial crash of 2008, who'd been hurt by offshoring.

and they became essential to his victory. And in that way, again, he flipped the script. He took those Democratic voters and he put them in the Republican camp and it was a deliberate strategy. And the only thing I want to add is that he...

went to these states. He traveled in these states. It was repetitive. We're going back to Michigan. We're going to Wisconsin. Let's go back to Pennsylvania. Can we make it back to Pennsylvania? We're in New Hampshire. Can we make it back to Pennsylvania? He was working incredibly hard to give Donald Trump his due, right? Someone will someday have to explain what happened on the other side. They either took it for granted that the blue wall was going to stay blue,

And Secretary Clinton did not need to travel there. She didn't go to Wisconsin one time after her convention in Philadelphia. So I don't know why that happened, but I can remember us being very surprised on the campaign. Compare now where we are on both sides. The Republicans have had their convention.

And yes, there's been a lot of turmoil, but they've rejected the establishment. They've rejected this notion that some people control politics and access to politics and access to power.

They've brought in this guy in a way a revolutionary, a total outsider who has nothing to do with Washington, no political history whatsoever, and yet he's won the nomination. He's kind of broken the rules. And there is Hillary Clinton, who is the ultimate rules candidate. She's had privileged access to power her whole adult life through her husband, Bill Clinton. And I think that

We didn't really appreciate at the time the degree to which this set up two completely opposing views of America and of the campaign. It's extraordinary because the opportunity was there. She won the popular vote. And we're talking about tens of thousands of votes in the swing state.

It's just interesting. And I've said this on the Restless Politics regular podcast. I want you to imagine Trump in a field 48 hours before the election. He's in a field in a farmland in central Pennsylvania. It's raining.

She is in the convention center, you know, where the 76ers play. And she's with Jay-Z and Beyonce and Jon Bon Jovi and Bruce Springsteen and perhaps even Katty Kay. I was there. And I'm in a farm field getting rained on. And Trump says her slogan is I'm with her.

He says, you know, you know, but my slogan is I'm with you. And she's got all the stars and all the elites, whether in Philadelphia, but all you have is me. And I got to tell you something, whether you like Trump or dislike Trump, you

It's very powerful imagery for garden variety Pennsylvanians who would have been left out of a concert like that. And they go to the polls and they vote in Donald Trump. And by the way, Joe Biden would have had a whole different set of instincts. He got this. He understood this. Well, he was from Scranton where my dad grew up and he had a whole different set of instincts related to those people. But I think it's worth saying that we are saying all of this with the benefit of hindsight. We've had...

Yes.

The Democrats came out of that convention extremely confident that they were going to win. The polling suggested that they were going to win. And nobody could really imagine that this upstart, outsider, brash, rude businessman could possibly go on and win the White House and become president of the United States. So the Democrats felt they had this thing locked up. Just before we go, do you think the Democrats are too cocky now?

They were certainly too cocky in 2016. It's a very good question. Are there parallels in the new energy of the Kamala Harris campaign that compare Kamala Harris to Trump?

Hillary Clinton back in 2016. My feeling is they've learned a lot from the lesson of that campaign. And one of the things they have learned is not to assume that because she's a woman, she is going to secure all of the female votes necessary to put her into the White House. They're not talking about her being a woman. They're not talking about roles. They're not talking about identity. There's none of that, I'm with her slogan. Now, listen, I think it's fascinating, but in the next episode,

of this special episodes about how Trump won the election, we're going to get into the campaign, the actual campaign trail, where he went, what he said, how he said it, how it was rebutted by Secretary Clinton, and what was the mindset of that campaign? And how did Kellyanne Conway, how did Steve Bannon enter that campaign?

And we're going to do this every step of the way. And we're going to talk about the different conversations that were being had. And it's just a reminder to people that thought we colluded with the Russians. We couldn't even collude with ourselves, Katty K. So how the hell were we going to collude with the Russians? Okay, well, we're going to get into that next episode.

If you can't wait, however, for next week's installment on this extraordinary election campaign to find out how it all went so wrong for Hillary Clinton, you can sign up to our brand new membership club on TheRestIsPoliticsUS.com to get access to all of the episodes of this series right now. Thanks for listening. We'll be back next week. Thank you, guys.