How Trump Won the White House: Collusion, Collapse, and Chaos (Ep 3)
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Carrie and the Republicans will secure the border, support our families, and never turn their backs on us. Carrie Lake for Senate. I'm Carrie Lake, candidate for U.S. Senate, and I approve this message. Paid for by Carrie Lake for Senate and the NRSC. This is the sound of your ride home with dad after he caught you vaping. Awkward, isn't it? Most vapes contain seriously addictive levels of nicotine and disappointment.

Hello and welcome to The Restless Politics US and this third episode in our series on how Trump won the White House in 2016.

Today, we're going to take you on all of the ups and downs of the actual campaign trail. We're going to see how the race swung dramatically in Hillary's favor, back to Trump, back again to Hillary, back to Trump again, how they both said and did things that caused the polls to change. There were, of course, at this point, the early accusations of Trump colluding with Russia, the scandal which led to a new team, the introduction of the infamous Steve Bannon,

Clinton, and that moment of deplorables when she called Trump supporters the basket of deplorables, when she collapsed at the 9-11 memorial. And then, of course, there were the extraordinary October surprises for both campaigns. There was the Access Hollywood tape for Donald Trump.

And then the FBI announcement just before the campaign that they were reopening the case of Hillary Clinton's emails. So this is the actual campaign. Of course, Antony was there all of the way. I was reporting it all of the way. And we're going to bring you the ups and downs of what happened that autumn. Sorry to keep you waiting. Complicated business. I am officially running for

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. So, Antony, we are in August of 2016. Donald Trump is the candidate. He's received the nomination at the Republican National Convention.

Hillary Clinton is the candidate. She has received the nomination at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, as we mentioned in the last episode. And at this point in early August of 2016, Hillary Clinton is substantially ahead of Donald Trump in the polls. A CNN poll at the time had her at 52%.

and him at 43%. So for all of us watching, it still looked like Trump's campaign was struggling. There was a sense of kind of haphazardness. The speeches were rambling, not on message. He had insulted a gold star military family from the Democratic National Convention who had criticized him. And there were rumors swirling that the

leaked emails at the DNC that we spoke about in the last episode had been hacked by the Russians? Was Donald Trump colluding with the Russians? And I think in that August, there was a general sense, I don't know what you felt from inside the campaign, that basically they were flailing. Well, I would say that we were flailing. I would say that he was flailing. And I would say that the establishment Republicans were

had grown confident that he was the nominee. It was a mistake. Let's work on the House and Senate races. They thought it was a mistake. They thought it was wrong to have him at the top of the ticket. They did. So now August, I'll just set the scene for you. I'm at an oceanfront estate.

In Southampton, this is sort of a ritzy place that people go from New York professionals and they come in summer in Southampton. And I was at an oceanfront estate and Mitch McConnell was there. And it was right after the convention. Trump had these dismal poll numbers and he gave a speech and basically said, we're going to lose the election.

but let's focus on the house and Senate. And he was very dismissive of Donald Trump during that speech. And I walked out of there with the conventional wisdom. I'd like to pretend that I'm not conventional, but I was very conventional. I walked out of there and said, I was very conventional at that point. I walk out of there and said, this guy's losing. Uh,

I remember calling Jared Kushner as I was going back to my home and saying, you know- Donald Trump's son-in-law. Yeah, Donald Trump's son-in-law said, hey, you know, these guys don't think he's going to win, you know, and obviously he's way down in the polls. And then Jared said to me, well, we're going to shake things up. We're going to mix up some things. But if you were an establishment Republican, if you were a middle of the road Republican, you were like, okay, he's losing. I'm well positioned. Just again, just to talk from personal ambition, it's

sort of a disgusting part of my personality, but I'll just share it with you. I went to go work for him because I was a loyal Republican. And I went to go work for him because I thought it would be fun. I didn't think he was going to win. And I thought it would set me up for 2020 as one of the standard bearers of Republican Party donors.

And so I just want to explain to everybody the moment in time how wrong we all got it. Now, maybe as you're saying, the journalists got it wrong as well. And now this is part of Trump's genius. Again, you can like him or dislike him, but he knows he needs to make a change. He's not sure what to do. And we go to Woody Johnson's house, who goes on to become the UK ambassador, right? He is, he said, beautiful house and he stamped in.

And we're sitting in his library. And there's a very successful family, the Mercer family. They come into the room. They are right-leaning donors. They were supporters of Ted Cruz. They weren't on board with Donald Trump. They said, okay, we're going to be on board with you. We're going to give you $5 million. But Steve Bannon, we're very close to. We own a big piece of Breitbart. And he's a very smart guy. And Kellyanne Conway, who worked on the Cruz campaign, she's very articulate, very, very smart, incredible pollster, brilliant.

We want to put them into your campaign. Trump made that decision, Katty, in less than five seconds. He said, okay, that's what we're doing. Great. What are you wiring the money? Okay, we're wiring the money on Monday. Okay, great. Okay, great. We're done. We made the decision. Boom. Okay, that's Donald Trump. He knew at this point that he had to mix things up, to shake things up, and he wanted to get rid of the existing campaign manager who was Paul Manafort.

who had been a longtime Republican consultant. He'd worked with Gerald Ford, with Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush. He'd actually been out of politics for a while at this point, kind of lobbying for fairly dubious foreign entities

including Russian oligarchs. And we know later on he was sentenced to seven and a half years in prison for bank and tax fraud. So he was not the most savory of characters. There are actually quite a lot of unsavory characters, not yourself, of course, Antony, but there were a few unsavory characters in Donald Trump's orbit at that time. So Donald Trump was happy to let Manafort go. I'm not going to call myself unsavory because I'm a delusional person. No, you were

They were very not unsavory, but there were some unsavory characters there. Okay, but when you hang out with dog shit, you start to smell like dog shit. You just have to be honest with people. And I was doing something that every Republican did. And so I have to own that for the rest of my life, Gaddy. Let's just tell the viewers and listeners what it was. I was equivocating. He was talking shit about Mexicans. No problem. Let's move the goalposts again.

He's lambasting and saying misogynist things about Hillary Clinton. Okay, no problem. There's only two choices here. I'm a Republican. Let me equivocate some more. And Republicans are still doing that with Donald Trump. But that process started in 2015 and 2016. And I'm a human being and I wasn't above it. So I do have to own that. And I think it's important to explain it to people what human weaknesses there are.

I'm wiser and smarter, more psychologically minded now. But I got to tell you, that was a painful period in my time because I was doing things that I think lack some level of principle alongside of a minion of people. And Anthony, I know this story.

weighs on you. I know you've thought about it a lot. And I also know that even taping this series is giving you a little bit of PTSD going back to that time. I'm not sleeping super well taping this. And I appreciate your honesty about that. Yeah, I think it's important to be honest. But this was the, just so everybody knows, this was the 13th of August, 2016, 13th of August.

And so that's where we were. Bannon basically came into the race. He texted me on that Sunday. I don't have a relationship with Steve, even though we work at Goldman Sachs together. I meet him for the first time in Cleveland at the convention. But he's got a lot of what you call that caretsu connectivity into me from other people. And so he texts me and says, hey, could you put a 10-point memo together of what happened?

And I have the memo here. Can I tick off a few of the things on the memo? Not all of them, but I say we are in complete disarray. Mr. Trump does not listen to policy initiatives. Mr. Trump is never on message. The campaign, I'm just telling him the honest truth.

The campaign logistics, we're completely uncoordinated in terms of where we're going, when we're going, and why we're going to various parts of the swing states that we need to be the campaign. We're underfunded, Steve. We are having a very hard time raising money. There's a small group of very rich people giving Donald Trump money. We have

to come up with other ways to raise money. And this was Jared Kushner's genius. Again, people could like Jared or dislike him. I think he's an incredibly smart, gifted guy. He comes up with the idea to raise the money over the internet with Facebook and sending out ads and chip in $5, chip in $10, phone text messages. Mm-hmm.

And all this stuff. But this is what I'm saying to Steve on the 14th of August. And Steve wants to come into the campaign. He wants to have a more senior role, more formal role in the campaign at this point. Well, yeah. Well, he's now the chairman of the campaign and chief strategist. Remember his honeypot or the Mercer's.

They funded Breitbart. After Andrew Breitbart died, Steve became the head of Breitbart. This is sort of this right-wing newsletter, this right-wing organization. But these guys come in, and let me just say briefly what the impact is on the campaign.

organization. They don't just come in Kellyanne Conway and Steve Bannon, they come in with a legion of people. And this is something I can't speak to the Democrats about this, but I've seen this with the Republicans. Republicans are very well organized and they have lots of rich people that are funding them.

So they come in with apparatus from the Koch family. They come in with apparatus from the Mercer family. They come in with apparatus from various think tanks, including Heritage Foundation. And they are organized. And they are now, there's a map in Bannon's office. And we're now looking at the map saying, this is how we're going to run the grid or

over the next two months to the election. Just to fill in a little bit about who these two people are, because they were central to that final phase of the campaign. Kellyanne Conway announced on the 17th of August as the campaign manager, which basically means she's running the campaign. Although, as we all know, really, there was only one person running the campaign, and that was Donald Trump.

She'd been trained as a lawyer. She had become quite well known as a pollster and a political analyst on kind of right-leaning television cable shows. She was known as kind of one of the pundits, as they were called back then, rather kind of dismissively.

She came into Trump's orbit because she lived in Trump Tower. She kind of got to know Trump through that. Because Trump watched an awful lot of cable television, he used to see her on cable television, basically making a pitch to be on the campaign by defending him. He brings her in as campaign manager. Steve Bannon, I always think of as the sort of intellectual cohesion around Trumpism at the time, that he was the guy who believed this,

Through Breitbart News, this very right-leaning news outlet, very combative news outlet, he was very committed to this idea of fighting the establishment, of being anti-establishment. Even the way he looked, he was scruffy, kind of long, greasy hair, wore T-shirts over... I mean, he was sort of a...

I mean, he didn't look like somebody who was a natural campaign strategist for a Republican campaign. I mean, he looked the antithesis of your classic Republican strategist, which is also where he was intellectually. So these two people come in and what do they manage to do at that point to kind of get Trump a little bit more on message? Well, they write. Steve Bannon is a great writer. And I've said this before. I think I said this on Rory and Alistair's podcast, but I'll

I'll say it here. Do you know why I believe in God, Katty? Because there's a lot of Europeans that are, they no longer believe in God, but I believe in God. Can I tell you why? Because Steve Bannon is articulate. Steve Bannon is charismatic. Steve Bannon is a brilliant writer and he's very well read, but God made him so ugly to save the civilization from

Steve Bannon. He's got that contemporary hobo look. He's got that post-alcoholic phase of bulbousness in his nose. And thank God for this, because if you hear Steve Bannon on the radio or you hear Steve Bannon on our podcast, he is incredibly articulate. And he's writing. He's writing. He's putting speeches together. He articulates the case for Trump better than Trump articulates the case for Trump at this point. So let me give the Trumpism case, because I think this is very important for people to understand.

Donald Trump is not a well-read guy. He has a feeling about where he wants to go. He

Steve Bannon articulated the feeling. And when Trump read the speeches, he's like, okay, this is my idea. I like it. This is where Trump got frustrated with Bannon because Bannon used to go out to the journalists and say, you know, I'm the hand. Trump is the puppet. Okay. He's a hand puppet. I'm the hand. And he would show the journalists, look at the speech.

I just wrote, that's exactly what he just said. And Trump used to get pissed off about it, but he needed Steve. So he tolerated it during the campaign. But this is an important thing. And I just want to share this with you because I know you'll appreciate this. He wants to roll the country back to the 1890s. In the 1890s, the United States had 97% of its manufacturing was consumed in the United States.

He wants to wall off the country literally and figuratively from the rest of the world. He wants to disavow the David Ricardo principle of free trade that we're all better off searching for lower costs. He hates globalization. He really hates globalization. Oh my God. Does he hate globalization? When I was on the campaign and I introduced Donald Trump

During the transition committee, one of the chairs of the transition, I'm introducing Donald Trump to Klaus Schwab in Trump Tower. Bannon went crazy on me. Bannon went crazy on me. Klaus Schwab, who runs the World Economic Forum in Davos, ultimate globalist. Yeah. And when Trump told me to go to the World Economic Forum-

He was definitely going the year after. He couldn't go in 2017 because he had the inauguration, but go and represent me. Bannon went crazy. And I think that was my demise with Bannon. And obviously, Priebus hated me, but he was more like a howdy-doody Priebus. He was from Wisconsin, so I used to call him Kenosha Nostra. He was a mafia don now.

but he was all dressed up in this like Midwestern golly gee, while he had the machete and the machine gun and the flamethrower on him. You know, it was like an Austin Powers villain with a smiling face, you know, that sort of thing. But, but back to banning, this is very important. Bannin, whether people like it or not, he shapeshifts the campaign. And now Trump is beating on message. You can like the message or dislike the message. And Trump is moving about the country more efficiently and,

And Trump is liking the campaign now. Trump is like, okay, there's a lot of people here doing stuff that I don't like to do. And there's a lot of people here thinking about stuff that I don't like to think about. And they're putting me in position in front of a microphone. And this is a lot of fun for me. And then he starts going wild on Twitter. Okay. And this is just something, you know, say it briefly.

He is so fascinated with we're in the plane. He takes out the phone with his fat fingers. He says something completely outrageous on Twitter. Turn on CNN. You want CNN, Mr. Trump? Yeah. Okay. So now we're turning on CNN on the satellite dish in the living room of the plane. Watch this. He presses the button. The tweet goes up to the satellite. Five minutes later, Anderson Cooper is talking about the tweet on CNN.

And Trump thought this was the greatest thing that ever happened. Like he had invented something, you know, and he was like looking at me saying, do you realize the millions of dollars of publicity that I'm getting off of this? Do you realize how effective this phone is with these tweets? He would misspell shit. We'd have to, okay, you probably can we slow down and have somebody proofread the tweets?

before you send the tweets out. It was that sort of a thing. But he, now listen, he never got to 50%, Caddy, but he got to enough to win the presidency the way it's run in the United States. So he's starting to read from the teleprompter, which keeps him more disciplined. He's flying around in a more strategic way. He's giving rallies in places that matter. The campaign is

starting to feel more like a serious election campaign. Let me add one more point. Kellyanne has negotiated and recruited advocates. Dave Bossie, Brian Lanza are putting advocates on CNBC, the BBC, CNN, MSNBC. Okay.

Okay. I'm getting, Trump liked my television appearances. They gave me a list of places they wanted me to go during the day. Okay. And there were some days I didn't go on the campaign plane. I literally sat in a studio and answered questions from television journalists and it was organized and it was very well run.

I mean, the fact that you had a list of shows to be on is very different from how the Trump campaign had been. It was that sort of efficiency. And having surrogates out there in American television is very important. It's a key part of any campaign. And it was really in that August that he started to change things around. So we're going to take a look at Hillary Clinton's campaign, because at this point, as Trump is getting more organized and more efficient,

Hillary Clinton's campaign starts running into problems of its own. The most notable was on Friday, the 9th of September, Hillary Clinton is at a fundraiser in New York City trying to get donors to give her money. And she says, Half of Trump supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic...

Islamophobic, you name it.

And what she was doing in that moment, and it became such a turning point, I think, in her campaign, an iconic moment in her campaign, because she was doing the kind of classic liberal elite thing of sneering, not at Donald Trump, but at his supporters. And if she had said you could put Donald Trump into a basket of deplorables, that would have been one thing. But she said you could put half of his supporters. And suddenly...

She plays into that narrative, which has been already there around the Clintons, that she's privileged, that she's in this position of power, that she's part of the establishment, and specifically part of the kind of liberal elite, including the media, the kind of East and West Coast media that looks down on the rest of America. And I think there is

You know, that is a kind of justifiable criticism of liberal elites in America and a justifiable criticism of the media in America. They don't know middle America. They don't have bureaus based in Kansas City. They're based in New York and they think Kansas City is some backwater full of rednecks. And I think that was that moment given particularly that she needed to win over some of those voters if she was going to win the election.

Felt like a massive own goal for her and was a turning point in her campaign. The other problem that she ran into was that she failed to deal with this controversy surrounding her emails and whether as secretary of state, she had broken the law by using a private account

email server and a private email address to send emails, which as Secretary of State, she should not have been doing. And did she somehow scrub that server of the emails in order to shield herself from any kind of prosecution? I remember writing about this in early September and saying that it can

on dogging her campaign and it gave Donald Trump a way into attacking her. This is where the lock her up came from, that she should have been locked up because of that email server. And she never really managed to give a very good defense of it. I don't know whether watching that from the Trump side, how orchestrated it was that they were going to attack

her on that idea that she was a liar, that she should have been prosecuted, and that they realized that the email server thing somehow, which it sounds arcane and technical and kind of boring, but Donald Trump somehow in his kind of political genius logged on to the idea that this could be a very useful attack line against her.

Well, I mean, there's a lot there. So let me just say the first thing that comes to mind that Secretary Clinton did not fully appreciate in her campaign, but that the conservative Republicans did. They were hell bent on destroying her from 1991. Okay, so it's 1991. She comes on stage. She's a feminist. I think she goes to Wellesley and Yale Law School. And

And she's incredibly bright. She's incredibly put together. And she's a huge threat to the right-wing establishment. And they start going after her. Whitewater. President Clinton puts her in charge of the Clinton healthcare plant. They run ad after ad after ad to spoiling her. So the right-wing has...

hate mantra of Secretary Clinton, Mrs. Clinton, Hillary Clinton, however you want to describe her, is compounding over 25 years. And she doesn't understand that. Kellyanne Conway understands that. The people that wrote those checks to bash her understand that. They saw her coming as the first American female president in 1991, and they did everything they could through tropes and every other thing you could imagine to get people to hate her.

Why is this analysis important? Because she trips on a trip wire that feeds that analysis and everything that you just said about liberal elitism. She's unplugged. She's finally relaxed. She's with a group of rich donors, and she actually says what she really thinks about America. And guess what? It fits the narrative of the 25 years of hate compounding and negative advertising on her. Right.

And it really hurts her, Katty Kay. It really hurts her. It knocks her down in a way that their campaign doesn't fully appreciate because it reinforced all the tropes that the Republicans played on her for 25 years.

Yeah, and we start to see that also reflected in the polling where she starts to slip because of that. Then there was one other event around this time too. She, on September the 11th, the anniversary, of course, of the attack on America, she goes to New York and to the World Trade Center Memorial

And she collapses, whether she was dehydrated or whether she was sick. The image of her collapsing played into the idea that she was somehow weak and that she was not strong enough to be commander in chief. And that how could she possibly run America? You started getting all of this on social media. How could she run America if she couldn't even manage to go to a memorial? I should say probably in her defense that being on a presidential campaign is a

absolutely exhausting. I think that people who run for president in the United States have a different gene from me because I could not keep up that kind of pace. And she may have been a bit unwell. It was hot still. And she had that moment, but they really seize on that. And I think it compounds on the basket of prorables. And that was a

I think that was another turning point in the campaign. We watched that in the media, having come off the basket of deplorables and then seeing her claps on television and thought, she has a problem here. And I think it was really the first time that it occurred to me watching the campaign that

that she might not win, that there was a chance that Donald Trump was going to beat her. And really, it had been a foregone conclusion up until mid-September that she was going to walk away with this thing. But the self-inflicted damage of the comment about deplorables and the unfortunate moment of her collapsing coming so close together made many of us, I think, start to think that

her lead was going to slip away. And we saw it reflected in the polls because she had been four or five points ahead and a week later, she was only a point or two ahead. So we saw him gaining on her. So it was the combination of his efficiency and these events surrounding her. And at that time, again, there's another swing because Donald Trump, in contrast to Hillary Clinton, who collapses at the memorial, is flying around the country like a kind of whirling dervish

managing to hit every one of the swing states multiple times a day. I mean, the logistics of how he did that campaign. And I traveled on it briefly. I traveled on it for a few days and my head was spinning. I barely knew what state I was in. But how did he keep up the stamina to do that kind of schedule? Listen, he's 78. He's doing it today. That was nine years ago, eight years ago. He's 70. He

He's a beast. There are certain people that are anatomically designed to do certain things. He feeds off of it. I'm not a psychologist, but there's definitely an open wound or a black hole in his personality where he needs the attention. And so the attention energizes him. Certainly the rallies energize him, right? The rallies, but also the attention. So the rule of thumb was, and it always is on private aircraft, you don't let

the owner wait. So if the departure is seven o'clock, you better get your ass there at 6.30 AM. So he's always flying at a Shelt Air at LaGuardia Airport. I live on Long Island. It's a 20 minute ride for me. The plane's leaving at 7 AM. I am at the plane at 6.30. I'm sitting on the plane. Stewardesses know me and they put out on the table, Trump is going to come onto the plane and they put out on the table all of the papers. This would be the FT, the Wall Street Journal,

the New York Post. And he would come on the plane because he's a very prompt guy, German sort of a guy, come on the plane prompt at 7 a.m. He walks on the plane. He sees me. He's very happy when you're there early. Trust me. Oh, great to see you. And then he sits down in his seat and he starts looking at the papers and he looks over at me. He says, you know, Anthony, take a look at this paper. I was only on the top end of this broadsheet paper twice in my career.

And every day I'm on the top of the fold of this broad sheet paper. Every day. Can you imagine? This is the greatest thing in the world running for president. Look at the attention I'm getting. I remember looking at him like, wow, this fucking crap. Why would you even care about getting that kind of attention? But it's the attention that fuels him. It's the attention that keeps him going. That's how he does it. Attention and money. He needs the attention. He wants people...

There's pain in this man's soul. His father probably kicked him in the ass too many times, sent him to military school, and he needs validation. And he's searching for social accreditation and validation. You know, Caddy K, you're a snobby Brit. You don't like me. Well, let me show you what I'm going to do. I don't think you're a snobby Brit, by the way. I'm just telling you it's the manifestation in his own mind. Yeah, I'm channeling Trump, okay? I think you're delightful. I don't think you're a snobby Brit, but

This is Trump. Okay, you look down on me, you peer down on me from your nose. Well, I'm going to go be the American president and shove myself in your face for the next four years.

He was rejected from a golf club out here on Long Island. A golf club, I might add, that probably the closest I could get to it is landscaping the goddamn place. They would never let me anywhere near it. But this guy gets rejected. He gets upset. So he builds 18 golf courses. That's Donald Trump. So this energy that we're talking about, because you seem pretty happy in your life. You don't need to be

this upset about everything and just driven to show up everywhere. But I want to contrast it just quickly because we're talking about Hillary Clinton. We're mapping her. Okay, where are we going today? Well, we're going to Wisconsin. We're going to be in Michigan. We're going to fly to New Hampshire. Then we're going back to LaGuardia. And he really would do that many stops in one day. Oh, 100%. He would do three rallies in one day. I can show you the grid. Okay. And then where's she going? No place. No place.

Nowhere. Where's she going? Is she going to Wisconsin? No. Is she going to Pennsylvania? No. Why are they doing this? What are they doing? So it was either a health issue for her. It was either complacency and cockiness on the campaign. It was either they really believed the blue wall or maybe she thought she was Joe Biden. Maybe she thought she had Joe Biden's blue collar presence in those areas and

But after the deplorable speech, the fact that she's not moving around the country to repair that, we found astonishing on our side. From the press's point of view, let me describe what it was like going to a Donald Trump rally, and then you can describe the logistics of getting to one of those rallies. I went to many of them, and you would turn up a good...

or so before Donald Trump was going to get there. And the lines would be sometimes a mile long, maybe even two miles long. I mean, and we would walk down the line asking people, why are you going to this rally? And they were just giddy with excitement. This was like going to a rock concert. This was better than Mick Jagger. They would stand in the sun for hours waiting to see Donald Trump. And then you get put into this and we would chat and they would all be delightful. They were

all not at all deplorables. They would be friendly and interested. And of course, you know, I could turn up as a Brit. So they're thrilled that the Brits are there. Um,

And they all tell me about how their grandmother was Scottish or their grandfather was Irish and how they loved their last trip to London on spring break. And then you get into the rally itself. And usually it's an airplane hangar because he wants to fly in. It is so beautifully choreographed. He flies in on the Trump plane. He parks in front of the airline hangar, which is packed with people.

And then he comes onto the stage and we are standing there, the press, as a member of the press, you're in this kind of press pool ring. We're kind of fenced off. And there's a rhythm to Donald Trump rallies. They were fun. They were super fun. It was kind of energetic and it was a show. And he goes through these segments of the speech and he talks about building the wall. That's a big opener. And then he talks about how the election will be stolen if he doesn't win, it's because they cheat.

And then he turns to the press and he singles us out in our press pool and he gets the crowd to turn around and boo and shout at the press. And the idea is that the press are cheating on him. They're not covering him fairly. He singles out individual members of the press. A friend of mine, Katie Turr, who works for NBC News, had to have security after those rallies because he would single her out by name.

And what was interesting about that moment is I remember at one of the rallies, as they are turning, I mean, it's like kind of a lynch mob. It was slightly scary because you didn't know where this crowd that was so revved up was going to go. And they were sort of being given license. And you knew that people did get beaten up and Donald Trump had encouraged it at rallies for people to be beaten up.

And I'm standing in this press pool and these delightful couple in Florida who I'd been talking to about their spring break in London just half an hour beforehand, look at me as they are sort of yelling at the press. And they kind of mouthed to me, don't worry, we don't mean you, we really like you. And it was this kind of weird disconnect between what a mob does and

what a crowd does, and how they were as individual people. I went up and spoke to them afterwards and I said, "What did you feel?" They said, "It's not about you. We really like you. You're great." But they had been caught up in that moment. The rallies had a slightly... That was a dark side to those rallies, but I could also see how incredibly effective they were for him. The staging of them, his energy,

the way he revved up the crowd, the way he created this sense of community amongst Trump supporters, that we are all in this together and we are against something. We are a tribe that is fighting somebody else.

And that felt to me very significant. And she wasn't doing it, as you say, and for him, it was so important. But you tell us what it was like from your point of view as you fly in, because I always wondered what it was like being on the other side of the podium. Before I get there, I just have to ask you this question, if you don't mind.

Is Donald Trump entertaining? I think he was kind of entertaining. Yeah. He was a showman. I thought the rallies were sort of fun. They were sort of like a medieval fair. People would be passing out food and hats and swag and singing songs and the music was loud. And he knew how to command that. He had them in the palm of his hand, which I don't think he does, by the way, in this campaign because he goes on too long. But in that campaign, he got it. He nailed it. So I

I just sent you some photos of backstage at some of these events and some pictures of all of us jokers on the Trump plane. And so you're asking what it was like backstage. Well, the first thing that changed with Bannon and with Kellyanne was they always had hoity-toity people backstage with Donald Trump. And so what do I mean by that? If we went to Michigan and

They found the best Republican mayor, the best Republican councilman. There may have been a billionaire or a centimillionaire in the area that was a Republican. Would you like to meet Donald Trump before he goes on stage? Right? So this was the Mick Jagger backstage pass before the rock concert. They did an incredible job of that. And that was great for Trump because if you think I'm a name dropper, there's nobody like Trump. Okay. He loves that. Okay.

If you're a famous person or well-known in your area and you're backstage with him before he goes out to speak, it energizes him. It enervates him. And so that's number one. The second thing, and I think I've told you this story, I was always fascinated about who was in the crowd. And again, this story does not reflect well on me, but I'll share it with you. The Secret Service always gave me a day pin. The first time I had a day pin on, I didn't know what it was. And so for viewers and listeners, they give you a day pin for your lapel.

And I said to the service agent, I said, sir, what is that for? Well, if the shooting starts, we know you're with us. We won't shoot at you. I was like going like this with my lapel. I'd be like, Jesus Christ. So I took the pin off and I put it in my pocket and I crossed the security perimeter and I went into the first rally and I said to people,

you know, sir, why are you here? Or sir, why are you there? And I'm going to give you the composite. My first rally was in New Mexico. This 35-year-old gentleman said to me, you know, I'm working at a factory. The factory closed down. My dad worked there for 30 years. He's got a pension. He's okay. I was only there for 12 years. So I'm working at Domino's, the pizzeria. I'm making delivery at night. And I'm working at Lowe's, the home improvement store. And

in the middle of the country, New Mexico during the day. I've got two jobs. I'm down 60% on my income. By the way, Anthony, you think you're in New Mexico? You're not in New Mexico. New New Mexico, that would be Mexico. We lost 65,000 factories as a result of signing the NAFTA deal in 1993. The factories left and these people were getting decimated, losing their jobs.

I'm here because Mr. Trump is going to bring the jobs back. This is what this man said to me. And I walked out of the campaign plane afterwards and Trump looked at me, he said, what did you think of my first rally? And we were flying on to California and I had already downloaded my dad's wages from his union. And I said to Mr. Trump, I said, my dad's 1976 wages

compared to the same union, same job, 2016, they're down 27.5% in real spending. So the Scaramucci's that lived in a small little middle-class house, blue-collarish house,

We're on the EBT line. We're getting support from the government. My father could have never afforded our family on the wage is now because of the lost real value of wages. And I looked at Mr. Trump and I said, you know, you saw this. I didn't see it. And I'm embarrassed for myself because I grew up like this.

We've taken aspirational working class families in the country and we've turned them into economically desperational. These are people that would have voted for Lyndon Johnson, Cady. Their grandparents would have voted or great grandparents for Franklin Roosevelt. But now they're standing with Mr. Trump. And by the way, they would have voted for Bill Clinton too in 1992. They would have. They would have voted for Bill Clinton. He understood them. They're now standing with Mr. Trump and they're making a proclamation that the establishment Republicans and

And the establishment Democrats have left us out of the equation. We're no longer committed to the aspirational idea, right? I was working class aspirational. These people are now working class, desperational. They can feel it. They need an avatar for their anger. He's going to represent them. This is the reason why they adhere to him so tightly. Right. And we're feeling this now palpably through the campaign. So we've come to the end of September and we're,

The pendulum has swung significantly. The polls have narrowed at this point, and it's becoming apparent that Hillary Clinton is no longer the sure favorite to win this race. The narrative of Hillary, she's tired, sneery, losing momentum, that's growing, and there is Donald Trump relentlessly rolling through one campaign stop after another. We are going to take a quick break and come back with yet more of those extraordinary pendulum swings.

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Welcome back. We have had so many ups and downs in this campaign, and we are going to spend this half of the program talking about the October surprises. Donald Trump's Access Hollywood tapes, James Comey's letter to Congress announcing that he was reopening the email case into Hillary Clinton, and what impact those events had in this extraordinary last week.

four weeks and how the election potentially could have gone either way. But these events changed the course of it. So the Access Hollywood tape, I was actually in West Virginia. I was giving a talk to a group of

And I woke up in the morning and it was the 7th of October and the Washington Post had released a video from 2005 of Donald Trump on an Access Hollywood, which is a television show, on their bus. And he's there with the host of the show, Billy Bush. You know, I'm automatically attracted to beautiful. I just start kissing them. It's like a magnet. You just kiss them. I don't need to wait. And when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Whatever you want. Grab them by the...

I can do anything. When I heard the tape on that 7th of October, sitting in a hotel in West Virginia, I thought to myself, well, that's it, that he can't recover from this. The tone of Trump's campaign had already shocked lots of women. He had already had moments where he was effectively bragging about his penis size on a debate stage. There'd been kind of...

other incidents of him kind of talking misogynistically about other women. And it just seemed to us that it would be very hard for him to recover. I mean, remember, women decide American elections. They vote in bigger numbers than men do. And

The feeling then was that how could he recover? And it was not just the feeling of observers like me. It was the feeling in the Republican establishment. And you have senior figure after senior figure in the Republican Party, including Congressman Paul Ryan, who had been running for the vice presidency in 2012, who

coming out and condemning him and saying he is going to lose the race and we can't support that kind of language. In her own memoir, Kellyanne Conway says that Reince Priebus told Donald Trump, the head of the RNC, that he could either drop out or lose by the widest margin in presidential history. Trump that night, overnight, releases a kind of

sort of an apology to the extent that Trump was ever going to release an apology on Facebook. And he says, "I've never been a perfect person. I've never pretended to be someone that I've not. I've said and I've done things I regret." And the words released today on this more than a decade old video are one of them. And he seemed to understand

in that moment that this was a real threat to his campaign. Is that how it felt on the inside, Anthony? And what were the discussions in the team and with... Because on that Facebook posting, he looks pretty shaken. He looks a little diminished. And what

were the discussions about how to respond to this? So let me give you the backstory. I had left work early. I drove home from New York City and I got a call from Hope Hicks, who was on the team, campaign communications person, a

strategist, a lovely person, really just a very nice person. And she called me and she said, did you see the news? And I said, what news? I probably had, you know, I was getting driven out of the city, probably fell asleep in the back of the car. So I wasn't watching the news or anything. And then she sent me the Access Hollywood tape. She said, there's an all hands on deck meeting going to happen in Trump's triplex apartment.

at 6 p.m. Everyone understood what a problem this was. And I said, okay. I said, do you want me to drive back into the city to go to that meeting? She said, no, you don't need to do that. But I'll report back to you. I'll tell you what happened in the meeting. It's basically what was reported in the press, in my understanding, happened in the meeting. Reince told him he was going to lose. Other people said they couldn't go on television to support him. Rudy said he would.

Rudy was on the Sunday shows that two days later. Bannon was in his camp. People went around the horn. I think Mike Pence was at a fundraiser up in Rhode Island. He was on the phone. He said he was still with the president. He would still support it. He did condemn him though, Mike Pence. You have to remember Mike Pence

conservative Christian. But he got permission from Trump to do that. He went to Trump and said, hey, as a conservative Christian, I got to say this. This will actually help us. And Trump said, yes, 100%, you have to say that. So he didn't do that unilaterally without talking to Trump. But here's the most interesting thing about it. Melania supported him. And the second most interesting thing about it is I've only heard...

Donald Trump offer an apology two times in his life. Okay. The first time was he said, I would just like to apologize to the original Pocahontas for calling Senator Elizabeth Warren Pocahontas. I know that's a stain on your legacy. Okay. That was a big laugh line at his debates. The second time I heard him apologize was that night. And I'm going to tell you what happened because the studio guys, I was very close to them. We had a studio on the sixth floor or the fifth floor. And we were sitting in there and

And we had the studio and we would do all of our broadcasts in there. Trump went down to the studio at 11.45 PM and he had seven takes to get out that apology that they eventually broadcasted that night. And he did look ashen. He did look disturbed. But again, like Donald Trump or dislike Donald Trump, the resilience and the

persistence is amazing. He gets up the next day and he's working through the problem. And I just want to bring up this one thing before we go on to something else. We thought in the campaign

that because of the early morning announcement about the WikiLeaks divulging Clinton's emails, John Podesta, her campaign manager and others' emails, it's going to be very damaging to the campaign. They big footed that news with the Access Hollywood tape. We always felt that their oppo guys, their opposition research guys had the tape and they were going to deploy that tape late October. So you know-

knew they had the tape. You knew the Access Hollywood tape was out there. Let me rephrase it. We did not know what was out there. Trump always said, half jokingly, there's a lot of stuff that is on tape that he hopes stays in the vaults. Mark Burnett told him, don't worry about anything from The Apprentice. I've controlled that. Any off-color remark that you made and

any setting in rehearsal or something like that, never getting divulged. Trump always thought that there could have been a tape of him saying something stupid because he was always playing for laughs and always saying things like this sort of thing. We did not know that that existed. But what I am saying is when it hit, we said, okay, wow, they were probably holding that to weak

you know, three or four of October right before the election day. But they chose to drop it on October 7th because the WikiLeaks stuff was so damaging in their minds. They were going to eclipse the story, Bigfoot the story with this story. Just to clarify, there are two email incidents in October. And we're going to talk about the second one, which is James Comey in a minute. But the first one, which came out also on

the same day as the Access Hollywood tape, was the news that WikiLeaks had released hacked emails from the Clinton campaign between her campaign manager and other members of the campaign. Now, actually, there was nothing terribly incendiary in those emails.

The press covered it a lot. I sometimes think the press covered it a lot because we felt we had to be even-handed on both sides, but there was nothing that dramatic in it. But it was out there at the same time as the Access Hollywood tape, which actually was probably a lot more damning. But in the second part of that statement, and I'm just going to read a bit of that because it suggests what's going to come next.

Trump makes a pivot. He kind of apologizes for what he did and says that he regrets those words. But then he says, I've said some foolish things, but there is a big difference between words and actions. Bill Clinton has actually abused women and Hillary has bullied, attacked, shamed and intimidated his victims.

We will discuss this more in the coming days. So I think you see in that overnight, midnight taping, the strategy that's going to evolve going into the next presidential debate, which is due to happen on October the 9th, just now.

Two days later, he's due to go on a debate stage with Hillary Clinton, and the Access Hollywood tape is dominating the news. But there's a hint, I think, in that second half of that kind of apology regret taping that kind of tells us what he's going to do. And he does something at the debate. So the pendulum again in this extraordinary story has swung dramatically against Donald Trump. We think that's it.

Forget the deplorables. Forget collapsing at 9-11. Donald Trump is toast. He needs women to win. He already has a problem with female voters. How can he recover from this? And then he does something at that debate in St. Louis that shocks all of us. He pulls something out of the hat that

that none of us has expected, we are told in the press to turn up for a press conference ahead of the debate. And we funnel into this little room and sitting in front of us are four of Bill Clinton's accusers. And it was a kind of

It was a sort of, in a way, a terrible thing to do, bring out these women. But it also, again, it just like on a dime shifted the narrative around Access Hollywood and put the focus back on Hillary Clinton. Did it work?

Look, he ended up winning 55% of white women voters. And he ended up winning the presidency. And I think that moment of those women standing there accusing Hillary Clinton of being complicit in Bill Clinton's abuse of women. There was one woman who sat there and she said, Donald Trump has said bad words. I'm paraphrasing. Donald Trump has said bad things, but Bill Clinton raped me

And Hillary Clinton threatened me when I wanted to tell the story. And I think it put the Clinton campaign right on the back foot as they headed into that 9th of October debate. So my quick point, Katty, is that that was Donald Trump's idea. He brought the Clinton accusers. He called them himself. He was the one that came up with the press conference. Again, it's a staggeringly garish thing to do, but it was effective. It

And it marveled people like Steve Bannon. I remember Bannon shaking his head, go, can you believe he's bringing the Clinton accusers to the debate in St. Louis? But he was marveling at it in a way that was genuflecting on Trump's genius of doing it. Again, you can like it or dislike it from a taste point of view or from what's appropriate or not, but it was effective. Yeah, I think it was effective, but-

Hillary Clinton has two more opportunities to kind of redeem herself. She's got to go from that press conference happening onto the debate stage.

And if she was thrown by it, they didn't show it. And she responds very quickly. At one point in the debate, Hillary said, it's awfully good that someone with the temperament of Donald Trump is not in charge of the law in this country. And he quips back kind of quick as anything and says, because you'd be in jail. And he got lots of cheers in the room. But I don't think Hillary Clinton was seen as losing that debate either.

And then there was one more debate where she had the opportunity to kind of push her case against him further and to push her poll numbers up to push the swing against him. And that was the 19th of October. And at that point, I think she was widely seen as winning that final debate.

And the poll numbers at that point are starting to swing back in her favor. We're at the end of October, and she has almost a seven-point lead against Donald Trump. So the Access Hollywood tape has damaged him. He hasn't quite managed to recover. And...

And at this point, it looks like it's back in Hillary Clinton's grasp and that she is going to win the election. But there is one more thing in this campaign that pushes the pendulum back in the other direction. And that is that on October the 28th, 11 days before the election, the director of the FBI, James Comey, sends a letter to Congress saying,

saying that he is reopening the case against Hillary Clinton of her email server. And he says, the FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation, and therefore the case should be reopened. And that

was seen as a huge problem for Hillary Clinton because it raised again the idea of her being somehow above the law or thinking she was above the law, of having lied about those emails and the email server, of taking her position for granted and all

Although there was no conclusion from James Comey, he wasn't saying we're finding her guilty. All he said was we are reopening the case. It did an enormous amount of damage to the Clinton campaign. And Trump loved this. He made such hay of it. He said, this is bigger than Watergate. It's this idea that there's some kind of scandal, something nefarious about Hillary Clinton and

I've always wondered whether James Comey understood what he was doing that day. And he's been interviewed very many times on this. And he said he was just doing what his duty led him to do. They'd found these emails and they were going to reopen the case against Hillary Clinton. But in subsequent interviews after that.

election, I think he understood afterwards what it did because it was at that moment, according to kind of Hillary Clinton and her memoirs on all of this, that the campaign saw their numbers fall. There's only 11 days before the election.

And there was no time for her to recover. And she herself has said, if not for the dramatic intervention of the FBI director in the final days, we would have won the White House. Did Donald Trump understand what had just happened? Did he realize how big this was going to be and that he was now on track in those last days? Did you see the numbers for Hillary Clinton falling? No.

Yes and no. I think the campaign was happy that it was being reopened. He sent out massive amounts of tweets and suggesting a criminality, the whole lock her up sort of ideas. But we had internal polling after that last debate, and it looked like we were going to lose the election. And so we were not confident, Caddy, that there was enough there to tip the balance to him.

But if I'm going to say something, which I think is objective, but critical, is that it should not have been that close for Secretary Clinton. Had she had gone to Wisconsin, had she had gone to Pennsylvania, had she had marshaled all the resources at her disposal on the democratic apparatus and all of the swing states, she would have been well ahead of him. And she doesn't reconcile that in her book, and she doesn't reconcile that in what happened. But the...

issue related to James Comey in our minds was a minor issue, positive for Trump,

But what was more positive for Trump was her relative lack of activity in the last month of the campaign. And of course, she falls down at the 9-11 event. And so we don't know how sick she is or not. She's seen later in the day, I guess, at her daughter's apartment, giving a interview that everything is fine. And that can happen to people, heat exhaustion, dehydration, whatever it might be. But we think it's something more than that on our side.

because she's not out there. Now, maybe she's not going to be out there the way Donald Trump was in this prodigious energized sort of way, but we never could understand why she was not out there more. And I think that was a way more of a bigger deal than the Comey thing in our minds. She has always pointed to the Comey thing and said that's when they saw their numbers declining. In fact, post-election analysis suggests that

She may have lost about four percentage points because of the James Comey letter, but it may also have only been about less than that two or three percentage points.

But she only lost the election by one percentage point in those key swing states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. It's hard to know, honestly, whether that was enough. The loss was so slim in those states, perhaps anything could have shifted it. But I think you're right. The campaign didn't do enough to insulate itself against a possible setback of any kind by going out to those states. We have got to the end of the campaign.

Election Day is looming. And in the final episode of this series, we're going to take a look at that fateful day and analyze this whole story that we've been discussing and what it meant for the United States. Why did Donald Trump win the 2016 election?

election. That's next Monday on The Rest Is Politics US. We hope that you will join us for the last episode of this series. But if you can't wait, you can sign up to our brand new membership club on therestispoliticsus.com to get access to the final episode right now, ad-free, and find out why Donald Trump.

won the 2016 election. Thank you, Katty. And we'll see you guys soon. But please sign up. You know, we're going to have a lot of fun gems in our subscription program.