Brand is the be-all-end-all of Donald Trump. And the core of Trump’s brand is that squinty, jut-jowled, unreflective scowl, the Dirty Harry stare he insists on plastering everywhere — book covers, posters, his website—because it advertises his most marketable selling point: toughness.
But the people around the next president of the United States know he’s a lot more insecure than his blustery facade would suggest. And he had a moment of serious apprehension as he toed the diving board before his big leap into the presidential pool on June 16, 2015.
did—that this was Clinton’s hour. Except, it wasn’t.
Trump, of course, couldn’t have been more different from Clinton—in process as in everything else. Improvisational and impulsive, Trump made decisions shaped by intuition, impelled by his branding genius and reality-TV showmanship, largely uninformed by research, polling, ideology or even fact. Above all, every call he made was buttressed by a sense of daring that allowed him to take advantage of every mistake made by every opponent he faced. This was a candidate who decided from Day One that he would win or lose on his own terms, playing the cable networks for free airtime, using his Twitter feed to communicate directly with the media and voters—as if the “Fireside Chats” were written by Don King—and eschewing traditional advertising for rowdy and rousing mass rallies like leather-lung politicians in the era before microphones.
Together, these choices, combined with lightning flashes of luck and happenstance, added up to the biggest surprise in a year of shocks. Here, then, are 10 decisions that defined the 2016 campaign—and changed the course of American history.
well for Obama. He was sure Clinton needed to focus, as Obama had done, on maximizing turnout in Democratic strongholds—black communities, youth voters, educated cultural elites—and create a messaging and data machine that shaped the electorate in the Democrats’ direction, never mind that the strategy Plouffe advocated notably didn’t include a major push to win over working-class whites alienated by the two terms of America’s first black president.
Sure, there were adjustments to be made (Clinton needed to outperform Obama with educated whites and Hispanics to compensate for the loss of black voters and young people), but most Democrats believed Plouffe and Co. had created a durable presidential strategy that could serve almost any nominee. It was only afterward that Plouffe—who became attached to the Clinton cause with the zeal of a convert—realized that Trump was right, that one size didn’t quite fit all: “Presidential campaigns are driven in large part by personality, not party,” he wrote in a New York Times mea culpa a few days after the election. “Ronald Reagan, President Obama and now Mr. Trump all were able to create electoral coalitions unique to them.”
The piece of hiring advice Plouffe viewed as essential—so much so that he told Clinton about it personally: He wanted her to pick 35-year-old field organizing specialist Robby Mook for the campaign manager’s job, insisting Mook could execute the sophisticated data and outreach efforts that had enabled Obama’s grind-it-out victory over Mitt Romney in 2012. “Robby has a steadiness to him. And I think he’s more strategic than tactical, and I think that’s really important in that position,” Plouffe told me last spring, when Clinton [and Mook] were still struggling to put away Vermont Senator Sanders in an unexpectedly tough primary campaign.
In retrospect, the Michigan loss should have been a huge wake-up call for the campaign that something was seriously awry. Sanders beat her in bellwether Michigan by an excruciatingly tiny 17,000 votes—and of course Trump would go on to capture the state by just 10,000 votes, the first time a Republican had won it since the 1980s.
In numerous interviews conducted throughout the campaign, Clinton staffers attested to Mook’s upbeat attitude and mastery of detail. But, in the end, Brooklyn simply failed to predict the tidal wave that swamped Clinton—a pro-Trump uprising in rural and exurban white America that wasn’t reflected in the polls—and his candidate failed to generate enough enthusiasm to compensate with big turnouts in Detroit, Milwaukee and the Philadelphia suburbs.
Either way, there was something missing that technocrats couldn’t fix: The candidate herself was deeply unappealing to the most fired-up, unpredictable and angry segment of the electorate—middle-income whites in the Middle West—and she couldn’t inspire Obama-like passion among her own supporters to compensate for the surge.
2016 wasn’t 2012 because Obama wasn’t the nominee.
“She isn’t Obama. She is who she is—for good and, you know, for bad,” said Patti Solis Doyle, Clinton’s 2008 campaign manager—and the first staffer who had been “layered over” in 2008.
2. Jeb Bush decides to run for president. December 16, 2014.
There wouldn’t have been a President Donald Trump without Jeb Bush. A rebel needs a crown to crush, and the wolfish insurgent found his perfect prey in this third Bush to attempt to claim the White House, a princeling of a family that by 2015 had come to represent everything angry GOP voters hated about their own party.
The former Florida governor had no illusions about how tough a road he faced when in mid-2014 he quietly began exploring a run after an eight-year hiatus from politics. Indeed, when he asked longtime adviser Mike Murphy what his chances were, Murphy replied, “40 percent”—and a prophetically self-aware Bush shot back, “Oh, I think it’s a lot lower than that,” according to a Bush family friend.
gentlemanly terms. The Bushes wouldn’t lower themselves to Trump’s level, he told aides. No, he would go after his tormentor in private, as when Bush told one donor friend, discreetly, that Trump was “a buffoon,” “a clown” and “an asshole.”
The problem, of course, is that those were the kind of things that Trump was saying in public—to the howling admiration of the thousands of superfans who were soon cramming his sold-out rallies.
By the time I interviewed Bush in New Hampshire in early February 2016, sloshing around in a snow squall a few days before the primary he would lose badly, he was tense and downbeat, but still convinced his old-school style would eventually prevail. “This is the immediate gratification,” he said of Trump. “Public sentiment, how people feel, will change. It always does, and if you stick to who you are and believe what you believe and persuade people over time and you’re consistent and you’re not in the witness protection program every time the going gets tough, the simple fact is you can win the day. And I’m in it for the long haul.”
The haul wasn’t that long. Trump won South Carolina. Bush finished a lowly fourth, with just 8 percent of the vote. A few hours later, he quit the race that had started out as his coronation.
3. Donald Trump taps Corey Lewandowski as his campaign manager. January 7, 2015.
It was probably the single most important decision Trump made early in his campaign for the presidency and, true to form, the candidate made it without much consultation or due diligence, and without quite knowing what he was getting into.
Trump had been toying with the idea of running for the White House since 2012, had been quietly polling his chances on and off for years, and loved the attention (and clucking disapproval) of the Washington elites he garnered with his PR-stunt “investigations” into President Obama’s birth certificate and college transcripts. But actually running was something he hadn’t quite been willing to undertake.
By early 2014, though, Trump was telling friends and GOP operatives that he was serious about seeking the presidency this time. His main guides in the process were a trio of outsider Republican veterans: David Bossie, a former Hill staffer who founded the anti-Clinton group Citizens United; New York GOP operative Sam Nunberg; and Roger Stone, the colorful former Richard Nixon staffer who had been Trump’s informal political Rasputin for decades.
Nunberg, working with Bossie, came up with two candidates for campaign manager, but they quickly rejected his entreaties: data whiz Jeff Roe, who would go on to run Texas Senator Ted Cruz’s campaign, and Missouri-based operative Gregg Keller, a widely respected veteran operative who would hitch up with Scott Walker on his short-lived campaign.
Chairman Reince Priebus and Stone persuaded their boss to sack Lewandowski.
Yet Lewandowski never lost faith in Trump—or stopped talking to him—even after he hitched up with CNN as on-air contributor. That drove liberals nuts; they couldn’t understand how a guy who had been publicly rejected remained such a fierce Trumpite. But they missed the point: Lewandowski was never just an employee. He was, in many ways, the prototypical Trump voter, and he never forgot whose side he was on.
In St. Louis, at the second debate of the fall, a pro-Trump crowd gathered to heckle the talking heads on the CNN set, where Lewandowski happened to be sitting.
Despite their apprehensions about Lewandowski, many of the Democrats who sparred with him on the set liked him personally and found him to be friendly and self-deprecating. But during a break, a witness told me, Lewandowski pivoted in his chair, grinned and offered a pumped-fist salute to his brawling brothers outside the bubble.