I guess it makes sense that the craziest election campaign anyone ever witnessed would produce a spectacularly crazy result.
And I still can’t believe it. Honestly, after witnessing Donald Trump’s campaign from the beginning, I have to come back to the question: how on Earth could anyone run such a cringe-worthy, divisive, unending gong show of a race and still win the White House?
There is only one answer I can come up with: the Trump campaign wanted it more. That’s it, in a nutshell.
That, and the fact voters really were mad as hell at Washington D.C., and they expressed their outrage the only way they could. By voting for the guy who wasn’t from D.C. and had no political experience. They sure as hell weren’t going to change things by voting in Hillary Clinton. They were ready to boot the Establishment, and Trump connected with that mood and caught fire in a major way. It was a sight to behold.
His campaign simply outworked and outhustled Clinton. No doubt about it, Trump’s criss-crossing of the country, staging rallies in so many of these battlegrounds, paid off. He even paid visits this year to places like Montana and North Dakota, and my buddy Brian Zinchuk even went down to North Dakota and hurled questions at Trump at a news conference there — the highlight of his career.
I think it was telling that Trump made a last-minute decision to stage one last rally in Grand Rapids, Mich. the night before the election — after hearing that Hillary was staging a rally there. Trump left nothing to chance. No wonder he won the election, in spite of himself.
During this campaign, Donald Trump was crude, lewd, and oftentimes rude. He insulted opponents, had no end of verbal gaffes and embarrassments, and was embroiled in controversy right from the beginning. Members of his own party disowned him, his own convention was chaotic, and the debates were a circus act. The media absolutely hated him, with editorial boards all over the United States rejecting his bid for president.
And yet Trump won the campaign. For better or worse, everyone was talking about him, all campaign long.
He won by setting the agenda from day one. His issues — on immigration, trade, terrorism and law and order — were exactly in tune with the hot issues going on in America. The Democrats kept on trashing him for promoting this dark vision of America, but the reality is Trump was in tune with what was happening, and proposing to address the problems. I still think he was offering dead-wrong solutions, proposing walls and all that, but at least he was proposing something.
As for Hillary Clinton, all the baggage associated with her 33,000 deleted emails and all the other failures and controversies that she and the Democrats had been associated with over the past eight years finally caught up with her. What finished her off was when James Comey reopened the FBI investigation into her emails, and that simply reminded voters about all the reasons why they hated the Clintons.
But I think what really ticked people off was her campaign’s overall disrespect for the electorate.
When Hillary went on stage to label Trump voters as “deplorables,” it really was an insult to the voters. You can’t do that in an election — you can’t slam the supporters of the other candidate. It’s as if you’re ignoring their legitimate concerns.
That was probably the biggest gaffe of the campaign — bigger than all of Trump’s gaffes, and that says a lot.
And Hillary was totally out-hustled on the stump, holding fewer rallies and blowing off entire states like Wisconsin because her campaign assumed that state was in the bag. Meanwhile, Trump had gone to Milwaukee and made his big speech there imploring African Americans to abandon the do-nothing Democrats. (“What have you got to lose?”)
For me, the surprise of the election was what happened in Wisconsin, a state as Democratic “blue” as the sky. When that state was called for Trump, my reaction was “OMG.”
The flip of the whole rust belt from blue to red — Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania — was the deciding factor of the election, just as documentary filmmaker Michael Moore had predicted when he wrote about it over the summer in a piece in the Huffington Post. The same voters who put President Barack Obama back into office because of his support for the bailout of the auto industry were the same ones who were mad as hell about NAFTA and TPP, and about their jobs being shipped overseas to foreign countries.
The voters of the rust belt are the kingmakers of American politics. They elected Ronald Reagan (the famed “Reagan Democrats”), they put in Bill Clinton and Obama, and now they’ve put in Trump. And I’m surprised, because Wisconsin and Pennsylvania have notorious reputations for letting down Republican presidential candidates on election night. They couldn’t even carry Wisconsin with one of their locals, Paul Ryan, on the Romney ticket in 2012. The last GOP presidential candidate to carry Wisconsin was, in fact, Reagan. The last one to carry Pennsylvania was George Bush, in 1988.
Every election since then, the GOP would think they would have a chance to win these states, and every time, they’d lose. Until last Tuesday. Holy cow.
You could tell that all the Clinton supporters at the Javits Center in New York were shell shocked by what transpired on election night.
It’s bad enough to lose an election even when you expect it, but it’s far worse when you think you’re about to make history (first female president) and when almost all the polls had your side winning the election.
We should have seen this coming, though. Everyone saw the big crowds and excitement Trump was getting, everyone saw the outrage being expressed in the primary results of both parties, no less, and yet right to the end of the campaign no one wanted to believe it.
Well, believe it. The craziness we have come to expect in American politics over the last year, ever since that famous Trump escalator ride to announce his candidacy, gets to continue on for four long years.
And then we’ll have another election. You know what we’re in for in 2020: the same clown show we got in 2016.
Trump II: The Sequel. God help us all.
