National Post (National Edition)
ENIGMA MAN
A YEAR AFTER HE WAS ELECTED, DONALD TRUMP’S SUCCESS IS STILL A MYSTERY TO MANY PEOPLE.
AN ALMOST UNBELIEVABLE NUMBER OF THINGS HAD TO GO RIGHT TO MAKE TRUMP PRESIDENT.
Irecently found a copy of the notes I made the first time I saw Donald Trump in person. It was at a rally in Des Moines, Iowa, in January 2016. Even outside, it was the strangest thing I had ever seen in politics. Hundreds, maybe thousands, were queued up in the cold. A who’s who of through-thelooking-glass Americana stretched over the yellow grass while reporters from all over the world buzzed the line, gawking at the scene.
There was a paradox there, even then, with the reporters, myself included. Trump was the biggest story going; we all wanted a slice. But at the same time, we were sure — we were convinced — that he wouldn’t matter in the end. His movement was something, I figured then. Trumpism was a thing. But Trump himself was definitely not. He was a carnival, a nationalist clown. But he wasn’t serious. He would never be the nominee, let alone president. That would be absurd.
How could I have been so wrong?
It’s been a year since Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton and I’m still struggling with that question. I’m not the only one. Since last November, “How Trump won” has become a publishing genre unto itself and a fulltime journalism beat, up there with cops, courts and city hall. Very good reporters like Jane Mayer, Alexis Madrigal and Joshua Green have thrown themselves at the project. So have essayists including Ta-Nehisi Coates and David Frum. Politicians, including Clinton herself, have had their say. Even the guy behind Dilbert took a turn.
But amid all that reporting, another question lingers. It’s not just: How did Trump win? It’s: Why did so many assume he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, until he actually did?
If anyone has a good answer to that question, it’s likely Green. He spent the three years before the election immersed in the new American right for Bloomberg. He even profiled Steve Bannon — Trump’s unlikely Svengali — in 2015, when the man was still, politically speaking, a nobody.
Green was there, on the ground, watching as the world shifted toward Trump. But like everybody else, he missed the wave.
“I’d like to be able to say that I saw this coming. But that would be entirely untrue,” he writes in Devil’s Bargain, his book about the campaign. “Never did I imagine that Trump would win the Republican nomination, would install Bannon to run his campaign, or would defeat Hillary Clinton in the general election.”
Only in hindsight, Green believes, “did it become clear that Bannon had a better feel for the American electorate’s anxieties than almost anyone else in the arena, save perhaps Donald Trump.”
For Green, Bannon is the biggest thing everybody missed about 2016. It’s not hard to understand why. The Bannon sketched out in Devil’s Bargain is an outlandish nutter who seemed to go out of his way not to appear credible. He trafficked, and still does traffic, in views about Islam and race and other issues that would have been disqualifying for a major political figure in an earlier era. His political ideas were drawn from such oddball sources as online gaming and apocalyptic clash-of-civilizations philosophy.
He was, in other words, not just an unlikely mastermind. He was a creature from a different political dimension. And the Clinton campaign, and most of the press, had no idea his world mattered, even once they figured out it was there.
Six months after that night in Iowa, I arrived in Cleveland, where Trump was scheduled to accept the Republican nomination for president. That week plays out in my mind now like the montage at the end of a mystery movie. There were endless clues as to what was really going on, but I picked up on basically none of them. The things I dismissed as fringe — Milo Yiannopoulos, Alex Jones — turned out to be vital. The ones I thought key — Ted Cruz and the Never Trumpers — barely mattered at all.
Everyone has heard ad nauseam about the information silos that flourished online during the election. But I’m not sure even now we fully grasp how completely discrete those worlds were, not just between Republicans and Democrats, but among tiny slices of each group, carved up and catered to by algorithms and ads.
I was judging the convention based on what I knew, on the news I consumed and what I’ve learned covering politics for more than 10 years. In retrospect, that blinded me to what I actually saw.
I was also blind, like so many others, to the impact of Facebook. I knew it was a factor. It was the most dominant media platform in the world. But I didn’t grasp how powerful and chaotic a political tool it had become. Steve Bannon did. He told Bloomberg in the summer of 2016 that he would not have joined the Trump team if the campaign wasn’t already strong on Facebook. He had learned at Breitbart, his alt-right news empire, how vital Facebook was for spreading stories and more importantly, building community.
The Trump campaign used an outsized wedge of its ad budget on Facebook, something that wasn’t covered at the time in the same way as television or radio buys. A team from Facebook even sat in with the Trump operation to help it micro-target ads to astonishingly thin slices of the electorate. In one case, the Trump team ran 175,000 ad variations a single day, according to Wired’s Issie Lapowsky.
All of this was happening on a platform that divides and dominates information in unprecedented ways. Alexis Madrigal recently argued in the Atlantic that Facebook is essentially eroding the information underpinnings of democratic life. Fake news flourishes there. Naked propaganda, including Russian propaganda, often does too. Perhaps most importantly Facebook’s algorithms funnel readers toward what they already like. It creates ideological spirals. In 2016, it allowed the fringe to become mainstream without the mainstream noticing until it was far too late.
Of course, there is a simpler explanation for all of this. There is one very good reason why so many people thought Trump wouldn’t win: His victory was a colossal fluke.
An almost unbelievable number of things had to go right to make Trump president. And remarkably all of them did. He benefited from a historically unpopular opponent. He rode a wave of racial backlash to the Obama presidency. He reaped the benefits of unfettered dark cash unleashed by the Citizen’s United ruling. He had, there is now significant evidence to suggest, the at least tacit help of Russian hackers undermining the Clinton campaign.
Even then, his own people believe, Trump still would have lost without James Comey. In Devil’s Bargain, Green details a remarkable shift in the Trump team’s internal polling after Comey, then head of the FBI, rekindled his investigation into Clinton’s emails. Five days before the vote, when the vast majority of the world thought Trump was dead and buried, Trump’s data team produced a report suggesting he wasn’t just alive, he was surging.
The most significant boost came from people the Trump campaign dubbed the “double-haters,” a surprisingly large chunk of the electorate who loathed both candidates. “What we saw is that it gave them a reason to vote against her instead of voting for him,” a senior Trump analyst told Green.
What’s remarkable, though, is that while Trump’s advisers noticed the shift, Clinton’s did not. Or if they did, they didn’t see it as important enough to change their plans. Clinton spent the final weeks of the campaign in traditionally Republican states like Arizona, trying to pad what she still then saw as an almost certain win. That decision baffled Bannon. “What is Clinton doing?” he asked a reporter a few days out. “What’s their strategy? It’s a week from Election Day and she’s in Arizona.”
Clinton, like the media, like the pollsters and the pundits, like establishment Democrats and Republicans, missed the surge. She got it wrong. To her, like so many others, a Trump win just seemed impossible. Why?
A year later, I’m still not sure we know. Even after all the books, all the reporting, all the theories, I don’t think we’ve fully caught up to what happened. People have pinned Trump’s win on racism, on sexism, on a fed-up working class. They’ve pointed to Russians and Facebook and voter suppression and even an in-bred American weakness for fabulism and fake news. But whatever else did it, this played a part too: the utter, blind refusal to accept that he might be real.
“The press covered Hillary Clinton like the next president of the United States,” James Poniewozik, a television critic for the New York Times, wrote last year. “The press covered Donald Trump like a future trivia question (and a ratings cash cow).”
I certainly did. Everything I saw in person, over months, looked good for Trump. But I never fully bought into any of it — not the enormous crowds or the unbridled, unhinged enthusiasm. I dismissed all that as interesting noise.
I wrote those notes in Iowa on an iPhone I would later lose at another Trump rally in Cleveland. I’m not 100 per cent sure, but I think it was the one on the waterfront, where dozens of reporters waited for hours in a pen on a rectangle of grass for Trump to arrive. He flew in, finally, as the soundtrack to Air Force One played, all ridiculous, swelling chords.
I got a sunburn and filed a few paragraphs of colour. The event seemed like one more gag in a long-running joke, something we’d all laugh at in November. But the crowd, they loved it. And when November came, they were the ones laughing. They still are.