How Trump Won the White House: The Day that Changed America (Ep 4)
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Experience amazing at your Lexus dealer. Welcome to the fourth and final episode of our mini series on how Donald Trump won the White House. Joining me is Katty Kay. And today is going to be all about November the 8th, 2016. That was election day. At the start of the day, the New York Times gave him a 9% chance of winning. But as the evening wore on and the results trickled in, hour by hour, slowly,

The pendulum swung towards Donald Trump. I was there at Trump Tower with the president to be. And so we're going to take you behind the scenes. What was the mood like and what was Trump doing and what was the moment we realized we were going to win? And then in the second half of the episode, we're going to answer the big question. How did Donald Trump win the White House? 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 3. 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 before i get into my side of the story caddy what were you doing on election day november the 8th 2016 do you remember so i was up in new york anchoring the bbc's coverage of that election night just a few blocks away we were in times square a few blocks away from trump tower

And on the morning of the election, I was on Morning Joe, MSNBC's political show here. And Kellyanne Conway was a guest on the show. Publicly on the show, she said, we have multiple routes to 270. And none of us believed her because the New York Times at that point was giving Trump a 9% chance of winning on the 8th of November. And then when the cameras turned off,

she had a kind of different message. She didn't think that the Trump campaign was going to win. She didn't sound like she was particularly enamored with her candidate. And we came away from that show thinking, like everybody else did, even on election day,

Hillary Clinton was going to be the next president of the United States. Okay, so what was extraordinary for me in the 24 hours leading up to the election day and the actual election day is the movement of the candidate, our candidate, Donald Trump. He goes from Florida to North Carolina and

to Pennsylvania, to New Hampshire. He's traveling through three time zones. He does literally 10 stops in, I guess, about 55 hours, if you counted them all up. But there's a very famous moment that all of us still talk about eight years later. And that's the moment where he's in New Hampshire. Everybody is completely and totally exhausted. They're climbing up the steps of the campaign stairs up to the plane.

They get on the plane. Trump rips off his tie, which is always his first signature move. He loosens his collar and he looks at everybody and he says, okay, I would like to do one more stop. I know it's going to be close in Michigan. Can we make it to Michigan? What time are we going to get to Michigan? The campaign ops person, somebody I'm very, very close to, told me that the pilot said it would be just over two hours to Michigan and

which meant he would be late in the evening, 1230, one o'clock in the morning. By the time they got there, he looks at George. He says, well, can we get the bunting? Can we get the flags? Let's do an event right there in the FBO. Well, we haven't told anybody that we're coming. That's okay. Let's make some phone calls from the plane. You give me a list of people to call. You call a group of people and we'll marshal a group of people. They get up in the air. They're starting to make the calls. Trump sends out

one of his fat finger tweets, he's heading for Michigan. And I wasn't on the plane because I was assigned to media that day and I was doing nonstop media, various television stations. But George told me that Trump said, watch the TV, watch the TV. He used to hate watch CNN for some reason. You know, he loved Fox News at that time. He probably hates them more now, but he was watching CNN. Watch what's about to happen.

And it was Anderson Cooper groaning with astonishment that the Trump campaign was still continuing. And he was heading to Michigan after midnight leading into election day. And of course, he went to Michigan, flew back to LaGuardia Airport, drove back into the city to his personal residence at Trump Tower. And then the following morning, he got up

with Melania Trump, and he went to vote at the precinct where he was registered. And then I can take you through my TikTok, but I'd like to hear before I do that, just some of your thoughts on what expectations were, because we thought we were losing, and it sounds like the BBC thought we were also losing. So what was interesting about

I thought about that late night rally. And you have to understand, normally these rallies take weeks to organize. So the fact that you guys did it between New Hampshire and Michigan in the space of two hours was remarkable in and of itself with a candidate who must have been exhausted. And he realizes it's a kind of, you know, he needs to take one more shot at that democratic blue wall. But he tells the crowd. We're hours away.

From a once in a lifetime change, we're going to have real change, not Obama change. Today is our Independence Day. But he also says at that rally. Because everyone's saying unbelievable, unbelievable. It doesn't matter if you win or lose. There's never been a movement like this. I said, let me just tell you, stop right there. If we don't win, this will be the single greatest waste of time, energy and money in my life.

We have to win. To do what we have to do, we have to win. And I thought the contrast of those two statements, we're going to win, it's going to be great. But actually, you know what? Maybe we won't. And the kind of the sort of this idea that it would be a great waste of money for him, that it was about him, that he would have wasted his money, time and energy. It wasn't really about the American people. And there was something so revealing for me in that. And it made me wonder,

Did he believe he was going to win? Did he go into that night thinking that you looked at all the polls, you looked at Hillary being so confident that she hadn't even gone, as you've said before, to Wisconsin and not campaigning very much? Did he think there was any chance he was going to be the next president? I'm not going to say he didn't think there was any chance. He thought he was losing. And so I have anecdotal evidence that I'll provide in a second, but I just want to go to these moments where

I heard probably 10 times from the day I joined the campaign until election day, if I lose, what a blankety blank waste of money and time. Can you believe this? Can you believe how hard this is? If I lose-

What a blankety blank waste of money and my time. And so he wanted to win. People say to me, he did it for publicity. No way. This guy wanted to win. And that's an example of it, Caddy. He was leaving it on the field, running through the tape, going from New Hampshire to Michigan the night before the polling opened. And so here's what I would say.

By 6 p.m., nobody in that campaign thought he was winning. We had a live Facebook, it was like a sort of a newish thing back then. You would turn a button on and you could live stream on Facebook. And so Trump wanted us to do 12 hours of live streaming on Facebook.

And so I was in the studio and we had a couple of hosts and we kept rotating through hosts and we had Boris Epstein, myself, others coming down to the studio while we were live streaming and they were peppering ads for donations. Send the link. We're still running the campaign. Send us your $5, right? Again, Trump thinking, send me the $5, you're going to vote.

And I went upstairs at six o'clock and saw him in his office. And he was very casual. He was very relaxed. And he just looked at me. He says, so what are you going to be doing tomorrow? And I said, what do you mean? What am I going to be doing tomorrow? He said, well, what are you going to be doing tomorrow? I said, I don't know. I said, we went in the election.

And then he went like this with his hand. He waved his hand as he usually does. He says, look, I know what I'm going to be doing. I'm moving my plane from JFK over to LaGuardia and I'm going to fly to Scotland to my brand new golf course. Let her have her day in the sun. I don't need to be here for the media spectacle that's going to descend on her and the criticisms of me. I'm just going to go play golf and relax.

I said, "I'm going back to work." I said, "I got a lot of work to do." I walked out of there. Now, I was assigned that night to go to the New York Times. This is an important part of the story for me because I will never forget it for the rest of my life. I own a restaurant at the Hunt and Fish Club. It's located on 44th Street. It's one block from the Times Square, Time Center building. You may have been in that building. It's the global headquarters for the New York Times.

And downstairs, they have this beautiful 300-seat amphitheater.

And the New York Times was hosting an event on election night. Nick Confessori, the front page editor, I was the delegate from the Trump campaign to represent the Trump campaign at the New York Times, which was all in the tank for Hillary. They had endorsed her in the editorial page, but we wanted to send somebody. And so they decided to send me. I had dinner with Steven Mnuchin's fiancee.

and my wife, and I got up from the dinner while they were finishing dinner, and I walked down to the New York Times, and I went into the amphitheater. And

Katty, Harvey Weinstein was in the front row. You remember Harvey Weinstein? You know where he is today. The infamous Harvey Weinstein. Right. So he was right there, part of the Democratic Party glitterati. They were all in the front row. Arthur Schultzberger, all of these guys. Okay. And I got up on the stage and they looked at me and said, you know, Trump has an 8% chance. And what do you say to all that? And I said, well, you guys say he has an 8% chance. I said, I'm an athlete. I've been an athlete my whole life. You play till the...

Last down, the last inning, the last quarter of the period. You go right at it until the end. Polls haven't closed anywhere yet. We don't know what's going to happen.

But if Donald Trump loses, I have a message for my friends and my fellow Americans that are Democrats. And I told the aspirational American message where many people feel economically desperational now. And let me tell you something, we have to fix that as a nation. We have to work on that in a bipartisan way. And a lot of you are friends with Secretary Clinton. If she becomes the president, hopefully you'll share that with her. I have to go because we're having a VIP donor party at the Hilton Hotel on 6th Avenue, which

And I shook hands with some people. People thanked me for coming. Maureen Dowd was there. You know Maureen? The New York Times columnist. Yes. She could be a little snarky. I like her, but she could be a little snarky. And she was just like snarkifying at me that you're a little bit of an idiot and a loser, that you're with the losing candidate.

who's a dummy. And I, okay. And then I took the cab up to the Hilton. I met my wife up there. We were on the second floor. We had every donor that was in that campaign.

on the second floor. We were serving him shirt cocktail and prime rib and all the things you do at one of these events. And we had flat screen- So it was your second dinner of the evening? Second dinner of the evening. Okay. And we had flat screen TVs everywhere. Drinks were pouring everywhere. And then from that vantage point, you could overlook the ballroom where the hoi polloi were for the campaign. And Mnuchin was hosting the event. I brought his wife up there with me and we were waiting for the results.

And then something seminal happened. And the New York Times back then used to have this needle caddy. I don't know if you remember this on your phone, but the needle was way over here for Clinton and it was way over there for Trump. And they started moving. They started moving.

And we were looking at each other and say, okay, Trump looks like he's got a better chance. And then the results started coming in. So let's go through the night. And I'm going to relive that night of anchoring. I'm sitting on the desk and the show opens as the polls close at 7 p.m. And the first results start coming in. Trump takes Indiana and Kentucky, no surprises, they're red states. Hillary Clinton takes Vermont. Again, not a surprise. Vermont, very blue state.

More results start coming in as more polls close across the United States. You have to remember that the time zones means that the polls close at different times. And at 10.36 p.m., Ohio goes for Donald Trump. And that's a big win. Ohio in 2016 was a swing state. Hillary had played hard for it. And Trump ended up winning, not just winning it, but he won by a margin of about 8%.

Now, the whole thing about Ohio that we always like to say is that Ohio voters have picked the winner of the election every time since 1964. So I'm sitting there on the anchoring desk knowing this history, having seen all of the polls and assuming it was going to be Hillary Clinton's night. And I remember it was just after the Ohio results came in that a Clinton surrogate came on our show and sounded very nervous. Right.

And it was at that moment that all of the panelists, some of whom were Trump people, some of whom were Hillary Clinton people, the mood shifted on set. And there was a realization that if he had won Ohio by such a large margin, then potentially all of these other states that we thought were going to go for Hillary Clinton in that blue wall might go for Donald Trump. And then we get to 1050 and

and Florida results came in. Again, another huge moment, swing state. And that too goes for Donald Trump. So in the space of half an hour, he's got two big swing states. Remember, Barack Obama had taken Florida, and the Democrats assumed that they had a very good shot there. But now it's really looking good for Trump. And I think that's the moment, Anthony, where

On your side, you must have all started to think, oh my God, this could be real. And this could now mean that Donald Trump's going to be the president because he's

1050 Florida goes. 20 minutes later, 11.11 p.m., North Carolina, another swing state, another state that Barack Obama had won, declares for Donald Trump. And Hillary had made actually last-minute campaign stops to North Carolina. So her campaign had realized that they had to go there.

But now she's kind of lost Florida. She's lost Ohio. She's lost North Carolina. That's a whole load of electoral college votes that have gone to Donald Trump. And she's kind of depending on that blue wall. And her path to victory at that point is starting to narrow. And then we get to midnight and Trump wins Iowa.

And it's another victory for him. And I think my sense at that point was that the mood in the Clinton campaign was starting to feel really defeated. So I imagine from your point of view, the mood was starting to feel what? Kind of thrilled, bewildered?

anxious. Oh my God, we've got this thing. I was sitting on a couch with Mayor Giuliani and we had flat screen TVs everywhere in that VIP lounge. I had my arm around him and he looked up at the TV and he said, Anthony, Trump's going to win the presidency. I said, what do you mean, Mr. Mayor? He said, those precincts in Florida that haven't reported yet

They're going for Trump. He wins Florida. He's going to win the presidency, and they're going to make that announcement pretty soon. And you may or may not remember this, but the futures were down now. After he won Ohio, because I have all this stuff on my phone because I'm in the capital markets, the futures were down. The Dow Jones futures were down 600 points, pretty big number, like 1.5%, 2%.

And so people were anticipating a Trump victory, and that was going to be very bad for the markets. I took my cell phone out and I called Mr. Trump, who was upstairs now in the suite. He had moved from like the pizza box 14th floor of Trump Tower. He had moved from there by motorcade to a suite at the Hilton, where he was upstairs at the Hilton while we were on the second floor. I called his personal cell phone.

He picked up right away, which he always did. And you can hear his signature voice. He was, hey, Anthony, can you believe this shit is happening? Can you believe it? I said, yeah, I can believe it. You're going to win the election. I said, but the futures are down 600. And you have to make sure this speech that you're talking about is assuring to the markets. And then he moves the phone away. Jared, Jared.

Put some shit about the markets into the speech. Put some shit. Okay. Yeah, yeah. That's a good idea, but I got to go. I got to go. And he hung up the phone. So he hadn't prepared until like midnight on election night. He hadn't prepared a victory speech. And this is again, Bannon, hate Bannon, like Bannon. Bannon's genius was he was ready to go with two different speeches and

And Trump didn't want anything to do with it. He's famously superstitious. Yeah, famously superstitious. I'm not giving or writing a speech until I know the results. We had free fireworks that somebody wanted to donate to blow off on Mr. Trump's victory in the East River.

And Trump went crazy and said, NFW, what are you guys, nuts? That's superstitious. I can't have fireworks ready to blow off and she beats the tail off me. Okay. So he was very superstitious.

And so, yes, we didn't hear from him until 1230. He called Rudy at 1230 to say that they are working on the speech. And is she going to concede? And then the mayor said, well, you can't give that speech until she does. And then you should take it over from there because she actually doesn't. And tell us what you think happened there. So.

So just to finish off the night, that's 1230, 1.35 a.m., Pennsylvania goes for Donald Trump. And that was the turning point. I remember I was on my like 55th cup of coffee at that stage, realizing this was going to be a very different night from what we'd expected.

Hillary Clinton had held a rally in Philadelphia with Bruce Springsteen and Barack Obama the day before Donald Trump had been out in the more rural areas, as you've said before, and he gets it. And Trump at this point is on 264 electoral college votes. He only needs to get to that magic number of 270, and we're still waiting for Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona to declare.

And he was ahead in the polls at this stage of the night. And it was, we were all watching that New York Times ticker that went from the election is it was a kind of real time tick tock. And through the course of the night, we started off at 7pm. The elections are sure thing for Hillary Clinton and slowly the needle started to move.

And it was after he won Pennsylvania that the medieval just slammed into Trump territory. And it was clear that everybody thought at that stage that we had got this massively wrong, that we had not understood this election, that we had not understood Donald Trump's appeal, and that he was going to win this. And at 2.29 a.m., Trump wins Wisconsin.

And the Associated Press declares the election for Donald Trump. It was the first time, by the way, that a Republican had won Wisconsin in three decades. And that strategy that he had had of blanketing the blue wall with rallies, but also of appealing to white working class voters and manufacturing voters who had had their jobs taken away from them and their factories closed, it had played out.

So at this point, the mood in the Hillary Clinton victory camp is like under the ocean. Everybody's in tears, literally in tears on the floor. They had got the champagne out. They shoved the corks back in the champagne bottles. They took down the bunting and they realized that they had lost. It was terrible.

A while before Hillary Clinton actually calls Donald Trump, they'd said that they were going to call, I think it was in 15 minutes, but it took them longer. And Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton's aide, somebody she was very close to, then finally called Kellyanne Conway, saying that she had the secretary on the line for Donald Trump. And Hillary Clinton congratulated him on his win. And then it was, what, half an hour later, 2.50 in the morning,

And Donald Trump takes the stage with all of his family. They all walk onto the stage. This is an important part of the story from our angle. She concedes to him by phone. But traditionally, you allow your opponent to have a concession speech before you give your victory speech. And so we're now waiting for her to, you know, she's conceded. So we're expecting her to go before her people to give her a concession speech before

And I don't know why. And you're a way better journalist than me. I only play one on television. I don't know why she didn't do it. But John Podesta shows up and he says, we're not going to give a speech tonight.

The secretary has called Mr. Trump, the president-elect, and conceded we'll be giving a speech tomorrow, Wednesday the 9th. It was very uncharacteristic and very nontraditional. Why, Katty Kay? Why was that? The plan that she had laid out between Kellyanne Conway and Huma Abedin before this

had always been that there would be a phone call, right? This is what she is going to do. This is what we expect you to do. And my understanding of it was that Donald Trump had never confirmed that he would make that phone call if he lost, that there wouldn't be that traditional phone call.

Clinton's understanding, I think, was just that I can't overstate the mood. I remember talking to our reporters who were in what was meant to be the Clinton victory party. They were stunned. They were so shocked by what had happened because they didn't expect it to happen. There was

I think it was just an emotional reaction that she could not, in that moment, get up and get herself together enough emotionally to give that traditional concession speech. She needed time to digest what had happened. Because remember, it wasn't just that she had lost an election that she thought she was going to win. She had lost to Donald Trump.

Donald Trump at that point, right through the campaign, had these extraordinary unfavorable ratings. I said in one of the previous episodes, even people who supported Donald Trump didn't like him very much. There were plenty of his supporters who described him as a bigot and a racist. The campaign had been so infused with that kind of language that

It wasn't like she had lost to George W. Bush. It wasn't like she had lost to Bob Dole, other Republican stalwarts, or to Mitt Romney. They thought that Donald Trump represented an existential crisis for the United States.

And I think that was why she couldn't get up there that night and give the traditional concession speech. We were now waiting for him. And I was downstairs in the main ballroom with everybody. And he walked in. And I will tell you that you could watch the tape. He looked like a block of granite had landed on his head from 20 feet.

OK, and so you can feel the lump like growing. He looked punched in the head. Melania Trump also looked punched in the head. If I'm just being honest, I never talk about her one way or the other because I like her and she's a civilian. But they did not look like people who were going to be the president and the first lady and were ready to rock and roll. They had the expectation. That's where the narrative came from, that he didn't want it.

Because we all watched him on that election night, like you say, and all of the speculation was that Melania didn't want to be first lady. She didn't want to go to Washington. She wanted to stay in New York. She was a very private person and she wanted to carry on living her private life. And the two of them walk onto the stage looking like they've just seen a ghost.

And this is not what they'd expected. And so, of course, we start to think, oh, that's not the face of somebody that's thrilled to have just won the presidency. But I thought it was so interesting what you said in the first half, which is that he did want to win.

He just was so stunned by it. Yeah, he was stunned by the wind. And I'm going to tell you this. So none of us slept. And I was scheduled to go on mornings with Maria Bartiromo on the Fox Business Channel. And so I went to the hotel room that I was staying in. My wife got my clothes together because I was completely exhausted. I couldn't sleep. I took a shower. I went over to the

soundstage, the television. I did mornings with Maria. We were regaling on his victory. Of course, I was very pumped up and exuberant. I then went to Trump Tower. It was 11 o'clock in the morning. He's now the president-elect of the United States. And he was giddy and scared shit at the same time. He was excited that he won.

But it's like, what the hell did I just do to myself? And there was some trepidation. Now, I can't mention the cabinet member's name because he'd be pissed at me.

But there was a cabinet member who I'm very close to. Wasn't a cabinet member yet because he wasn't named to the cabinet. There was a cabinet member standing there with me with Trump. We walked out of his office. He looked back at me. He said, this son of a bitch is scared shit. He's like, Mooch, he might actually listen to us. But there could be an opportunity here to like build a good government for him because he's actually, he was actually listening to what you were saying. And I know you're going to not believe this, but you can verify from other sources that

I am going to stop tweeting. I'm going to be a better president than Abraham Lincoln. I'm not going to tweet at all. I mean, literally, he was saying shit like this, you know, 12 hours after his victory. I mean, his head cleared up and he returned to his normal idiocy. But I'm just saying that's the shit that he was saying to us. OK. And then he when he got me alone, he said to me, OK, you're going to come work in the government.

I said, no, I'm not going to work in the government. I'm hosting the show. I got a nice asset management company. Plus my wife would kill me. I'm not going to come work in the government. No, no, no. I'm the president elect now, you know, and you're going to do exactly what I want. Don't you want to serve your country? Oh, and by the way, these shitty little agencies are 25 times the size of the Trump organization and 2 million times the size of Skybridge. You're going to come work for me. I said, I really don't want to come work here. And honestly, at that moment, I really did not want to go work for him.

I was on a couch with the Fox News Channel morning show, Fox and Friends, when it came over the ticker that I was named to the presidential transition team. He didn't even tell me. And so the anchor, Brian, looks at me, Brian killed me. He says, so congratulations on being named to the 16-person executive transition team. And I looked at him like,

What are you talking about?" And then I had to like, fub that, "Oh yes, I'm so thrilled." And then I called Trump on his cell phone and I said, "What the F are you doing?" He says, "I'm the president-elect. You're going to do exactly what I say. And I need you to join the transition team. You'll help me pick the people. You're a smart guy. You're a smart guy. You'll help me interview the people, blah, blah, blah." And I'm going to tell you something, okay? This is where my ego's involved and this is very embarrassing, doesn't reflect well. I was thrilled.

I was a blue collar kid from Long Island, went to a couple of fancy schools, built a business, lived a portion of the American dream. And I was going to get a chance to serve my country for the American president.

Now, my wife wasn't thrilled because she probably hates Trump almost as much as Melania hates him, which is like way the fuck up here. She wasn't thrilled. And I should have listened to her and I didn't. I let my pride and my ego get in the way. And we can talk more about that in another episode of something. But that's where we all were in this moment of tenuousness and uncertainty. And he was tenuous and uncertain.

So with Donald Trump now the president-elect of the United States and Antony on his way to Washington to serve in the White House, we'll take a quick break. Freshly made ravioli or hand-pulled ramen noodles? When you dine with Chase Sapphire Reserve, either will be amazing because it's the choice between a front row seat at the chef's table while getting a live demo of how to make ravioli or dining family style as you hear the story behind your ramen broth. This weekend, it's ravioli.

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Welcome back. So we have Donald Trump now as the president-elect heading to the White House. And in this half, we are going to dig into why we both think he won that election so improbably. And it's just worth pointing out that he carried 30 states and he won the electoral college vote by 304 electoral college votes to 227. It was a pretty big margin. But

But Hillary Clinton won the national popular vote with a nearly 3 million vote margin. I set this half up because I don't want people to think that Donald Trump, although he had an electoral college blowout in a way, he didn't win the popular vote in this country. And I think that gets to how close this was. And sometimes, Anthony, I don't know what you think about this. I think he was just lucky.

I think on that 2016 election, he got a lucky break. He was up against a candidate who didn't manage her campaign well, who had the email scandal around her, who'd said that thing about deplorables. But the margins were so close in those blue wall states, it was about 1%. It could have gone the other way and we would have been telling a very different story. I don't think the fact that he won means that it was inevitable.

in other words, that he was going to win. But if you look at the reasons he won, one of them I think that's important that we haven't mentioned during the course of this series is actually something that's coming up in the United States. And that's that according to census statisticians, in about 2044, America becomes a minority white country. So immigrants from Latin America and Africa

African-Americans and Asian-Americans will be a bigger portion of the American population than white people. First time that that's happened since the founding of the country. And I think that date of 2044 hangs over the 2016 election, that in some way, having just had a black president,

White voters, which was really Donald Trump's base, and you dig into the demographics of this, and really he won by performing particularly well with white voters, especially white men who didn't have a college degree. Those white voters turned out in big numbers because they're conscious that this country is changing.

And it's not necessarily changing to their advantage. If you had been a white man without a college degree in America for centuries, you had an inbuilt advantage. You were going to get a job. You were going to be ahead of everybody else.

And I think the fact that America is changing so fast, and I remember people saying to me things like, you know, I ring some call center and it says, you know, for English press two, for Spanish press nine. And they didn't like the idea that the change was coming, that the change is coming in this country. And I feel that was the kind of meta reason that Donald Trump won. She outspent the Trump campaign almost two to one.

She outmanned us 2.2 to 1. And so people say, well, money matters a lot in politics. And if you have more money than the other people, you can beat the other people's brains in. And maybe you could say that Trump got all that free media. We've talked about billions and billions of dollars of free media, which maybe offset her money advantage. But I guess what I'm asking you, and I want you to put your British hat on and your American hat on,

is was she just a terrible candidate? Okay, forget about what you think of her as a person because I actually like her. I've interacted with her. I think she's incredibly smart. And I'm going to stipulate that she probably could have been a great president

Okay, she had the skill set to be a very good president. She's knowledgeable, organized, good thinker, could build a team. But was she just a terrible candidate? And I think she was, by the way, but I'd like to hear from you and then I'll explain to you why I think she was arguably the worst candidate in modern presidential history.

But what are your thoughts there? Am I being too harsh? No, I think she was a much weaker candidate than we were aware of at the time, perhaps. Maybe from the Trump side, you realized how weak she was. But there were certain things along the way beyond her comment about deplorables that she just...

failed to do. She didn't run her campaign well, and that may have been arrogance that they assumed that they were going to win. One caveat to that, and again, it gets back to this luck thing, that there was a third party candidate from the Green Party, Jill Stein, and she took enough votes away, if you look at the data analysis of this,

Yeah.

Yes, she was a very weak candidate. And yes, Donald Trump in those last weeks managed to mount an extraordinarily impressive kind of fly around the country. But there were these factors. The margin was so small that take out Jill Stein, for example, Hillary Clinton would have been president. Now, of course, Jill Stein was in the race, so you can't talk about that. But it was a fact she was there and Hillary Clinton should have built up enough of a margin in those states to

to withstand a third party candidate who didn't actually get very many votes. Steve Bannon was on the phone August and September asking the wealthiest conservative donors in the country to donate to Jill Stein. Yeah. Okay. You know that. And I know that. Same group donating to RFK Jr. in the 2024 election because it was a divide and conquer strategy. See, the Republicans voted

Caddy K are the lowest populated registrants. 29% of the registrants are Republican on the way down. 33-ish percent are Democrats and the bulk 40 plus percent of the registered

Voters in the United States are now independent. And so the Republicans know they have to divide and conquer. And Jill Stein was a missile that got sent into the campaign to destroy Hillary Clinton. And so that worked. But here's the thing. It should not have worked. She had the money. She had the entire Democratic establishment, Barack Obama,

She had the Democratic governors. She had all the elected officials at the state and federal level that were Democrats. But for some reason, she didn't have it in her. And it's like I've said to you before, you can't put into somebody what God left out. She did not have the Savoir Faire. Okay, so I'm going to ask you something.

It's sort of a yes or no question, but you can throw in a few sentences, okay? Oh, thank you. Does Hillary, does Hillary Pitt, I heard that, I heard that. What did you say? I'm just going, does Hillary Clinton like people? She like common people? So Hillary Clinton, if you get her in a room one-on-one, is warm and effective and loyal to those around her. But she doesn't have that

common touch. And we could see that when she went to coffee shops in Iowa or smaller rallies, smaller venues, right? She used to, in the primary process particularly, you see these candidates up with normal people. You don't really see them with normal people during the actual general election campaign because there's all these big rallies. But before that, you do see them. And I remember following her around and she was awkward.

She would go into those coffee shops and her laugh sounded a little inauthentic. And some of that, I don't know whether it's because she was a woman and so she didn't present in the way people expected presidents to present because they'd never had a female president. And I think there was sexism during the course of the campaign that hurt her. But no, she doesn't have a particularly common touch in crowds.

And she certainly didn't plug in to the dissatisfaction of common people, of ordinary working class people in America. She missed that. I'm going to write down three things I would ask you to comment, please. Okay. Number one, 25 years of right-wing hatred and billions of dollars spent on besmirching her

for 25 years. That's 1991 to 2016. Number two, doesn't have the common touch. We know that. And anybody, if you ask us, the man or woman on the street, does Bill Clinton have the common touch? Yes. Does Hillary Clinton have the common touch? No. And the third thing

She did not deploy Bill Clinton anywhere in the country. Now, it could have been because she was mad at him because of the Clinton accusers. It could have been because she thought that he was hurting her cause for feminism by some of the things that he was accused of over the course of his career, things that Donald Trump was showcasing. But I always thought

I said this when I was a young man, when I was 36 years old. I said, Al Gore disliked Bill Clinton. He didn't use him in 2000. He lost the election. 16 years later, Bill Clinton's wife doesn't use him. She loses the election. So do you agree with any of those three points or disagree with all of them? I agree with all of them.

I'll give a little context to the last one, which is that my understanding from the campaign in part, and remember, this was pre-MeToo. There wasn't as much focus on his role. He was still a very popular Democratic figure. He hadn't been tarnished by the MeToo movement, which slightly reworked his presidency and our understanding of his presidency and the kind of person he was towards women.

But my understanding from the campaign was that they were worried that she would be overshadowed by him. And so they couldn't let this consummate campaigner and the guy with the common touch become

become the focus of the story. It had to be about her. And I think it was more that than that she was still mad at him because of the whole 1997 Monica Lewinsky affair. They just were worried that he was going to show her up. He was going to reveal what you also said was that she didn't have the common touch, and he did. It's interesting that we've talked so much about Hillary Clinton, because I think we should also talk about what Donald Trump did and how he ran the election. And

And one of those ways that he did that was by getting this incredible loyalty. And I think that was the rallies and jamming up this enthusiasm and by getting his supporters to feel that he was their champion. I've said before that this election campaign in 2024, there is a kind of messianic language around this.

Donald Trump as a kind of savior for America. There wasn't that same messianic language, quasi-religious language around him, but the people who supported him and turned up to those rallies felt that he was going to fight for him. And that moment where he famously said in the 2016 election, I could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and I wouldn't lose any voters was

He was right. I mean, you know, in that kind of weird twisted way, he was right. He could do anything. The Access Hollywood tape, all of these things that we thought were going to sink him didn't sink him because he had managed through the course of his campaign to

gather the kind of devotion of his followers. And I think the other thing that he did that was so clever that we also didn't kind of realize us in the media, and maybe that was on the press to some extent, was the degree to which we were giving him free airtime. And that was your money point that-

Her massive campaign chest that dwarfed his was mitigated by the fact that I remember being on Morning Joe many mornings and Donald Trump would just call in. He would call in and he would get free airtime. One time he called in and I was interviewing him and he said, "Oh, Katty, you've been pretty negative about our campaign, but don't feel too bad about it." In that kind of funny sort of way, he had that kind of disarming way of speaking to people.

But he called into all of these shows and they would take him from anywhere. And that got him a lot of free publicity. And I don't know if that was a campaign strategy or if it was deliberate or if it was just his desire for attention. But boy, that was a successful strategy. It was a campaign where this man had a low ceiling, never punched through the majority of the voters, lost the popular vote.

but he was running against the candidate that was very beatable. Had he run against Joe Biden in 2016, I'm going to say this declaratively, people can disagree, Joe Biden would have beat him. And the same way Joe Biden beat him, he was a sitting president, Katty. I agree. He had all of the power of the company and Joe Biden beat him and Joe Biden would have beaten him. So Barack Obama sits here today in a little bit of denialism, which is fine because we all

are in denialism. Someday you'll tell me I'm not 6'4", and I'll look at you aghast, and I'll say, that's not true. Of course, I'm 6'4". I will never be the messenger who tells you that, Anthony. My Italian mother has been telling me I'm 6'4", since 1964. So yes, I am 6'4". But my point is, you want to soar up Barack Obama, tell him, hey, you caused Donald Trump.

You were mouthing off to him. Judd Apatow wrote all of those. The comedic writer from Hollywood wrote all those jokes in 2011. You were mouthing off to the guy.

You then told Joe Biden to take a powder when you knew Trump was in the race threatening, and you created Trump. And in the immortal words of Van Jones, and we both know Van, he's a friend of both of ours. He's a commentator and a political analyst at CNN, former Obama administration official. On the eve of the election, when it was clear that Trump had won the election,

Van Jones, who is African-American, he's a black man in the United States, said, this is a white lash. This is a white lash. This is a group of white people who, when they hear the word White House, they think, hmm, a white person is supposed to live in the White House. But a black person and his family lived in that White House. And now we're going to go uber white. We're going with the open spam can. And we're going to have him be the president.

And whether we like this or not- And Barack Obama, by the way, hates that narrative, but I think it's absolutely true and undeniable. Oh, he hates it. In fact, he'd be bristling right now. And hey, sorry, but that's the facts. I've got to own my stuff and the mistakes I've made working for Trump. You got to own your mistakes getting Trump into office. But in any event, my last point on this topic is that

Your country, your former, I'm assuming you're still a UK citizen, and the United States were at a cultural inflection point in 2016.

And that cultural inflection point was there's something wrong in the establishment. There's something wrong with the sclerosis and the indifference of our political leaders. They're not tuned into the man and woman on the street and what their fears are and what their aspirations are, a result of which we want a Brexit from the EU. That's too bureaucratic and too controlling. And we want to bring an orange wrecking ball

into Washington to shake up the system. And both countries have felt this. Now, I bet it'll be interesting to see. I think both countries have remorse about this, by the way. And we'll be interested to see if Trump is able to return to the White House in 2024. If he does, Katty K, it's the greatest political comeback in American history. Again, like him or dislike him, you've got a convicted felon now. If he takes the oath on January 20th, 2025, greatest

And I think in the context of 2024, and we should close this series on that and what that election tells us about this election. In one way, Donald Trump rewrote the electoral map. He put states that the Democrats had held for decades into play for Republicans. And he put states that the Democrats had held for decades into play for Republicans.

And that's why those states, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, are key states in this 2024 election campaign because Donald Trump found all of these voters who had voted Democrat for decades and he turned them into Republican voters. So he has...

reshaped the political map. And the other way I think that he has changed American politics fundamentally is that capturing of the Republican Party. He has changed the nature of the Republican Party into the Donald Trump Party. And he has such allegiance from the machine of the party that I think that helps him going into this election campaign.

The area where I'm questioning whether all of the things that he achieved in 2016 can be replicated is around this question of whether he was lucky with the candidate he had, and we'll see whether Kamala Harris turns out to be a better strategist than Hillary Clinton was.

But if you look at the record since 2016, it's a string of losses for Donald Trump. He hasn't replicated what he did on that fateful night.

on the 8th of November, 2016, a single time. He has, as the head of the Republican Party, the de facto head of the Republican Party, he has lost elections in 2017, in 2018, in 2020, in 2022, and in 2023. And that record has to be set against him winning in 2016. So,

Whether we can surmise from 2024 that he did it once and shocked the world, certainly shocked both of us, and do it again this November,

I think that's still an open question. That's beautifully said. I don't really have much to add to that. That's right on the money. So we're going to leave it there. That was the 2016 election. Thank you so much to everyone who's listened, especially to those of you who signed up to our new TripUS membership club, which we are super excited about, where you've had all of these episodes early and ad-free. Seriously, it's been great. And I know our listeners...

or an inquisitive bunch. So we're going to do, based on popular demand and survey, a final Q&A episode this Saturday as a bonus for our founding members. So please tune into that. Yeah. And do send in your questions on Twitter or to tripus at goalhanger.com.

However big or small, we want to know what you're thinking and what you want to ask. And if you want to sign up to become a founding member, head to therestispoliticsus.com. We have enjoyed doing this series, although I'm a little worried about Anthony and whether he needs time to recover now from having relived the

that campaign. Probably need Xanax. How much hair have you lost during the course of this? Thank God, so far not. But if I do, I do know where to go in Turkey to get the turf retreading if I need it. But here's the thing I want to say, and you're going to be mad at me, but I'm evaluating you and you should be mad at me. You're like a brilliant salesperson. If you were on Wall Street, it would have been untold millions for you.

You're telling people in this very polite British voice to subscribe to the YouTube channel. You know, I'm the salesman, Caddy K. I'm the one that has the water in the flour on my lapel, the plastic flour, and I shoot the water at people. Not you. You've told people to subscribe to the subscription channel.

Press the subscribe button on YouTube. I mean, I'm very impressed. I got to just tell you, if we were at like a Goldman Sachs review and you were like one of the institutional salespeople, there's very high marks on this. Just letting you know. I could have made those untold millions rather than working for a public broadcasting company. You could have been a contender, Katty Kay. I'm just letting you know. Okay. We're going to relive that. We're going to negotiate this afterwards, Anthony, and see if I can come and join you on Wall Street. It would have been a much more sensible use of my time.

So having said all of that and that kind sales pitch by Anthony, if you are not thinking of signing up to the club, that's okay too. All we ask is that you click follow on the show wherever you get your podcasts right now so that you never miss an episode of The Rest Is Politics US with me and Anthony. Thank you guys again. We hope to see you soon.