Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Aides tussle over Trump’s win
Rivals’ political operatives look to assign blame
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Baffled at times and often bitter, more than two dozen of the country’s top political operatives grappled with questions that have dominated American politics for 18 months: What explains Donald Trump’s astonishing political success and what, if anything, could they have done to stop it?
Campaign managers for Trump’s defeated Republican primary rivals blamed their losses on media coverage they saw as unfair. Aides to Hillary Clinton talked of racism, sexism and what they saw as unprecedented interference in the election by FBI Director James Comey.
Trump’s own aides cited a feckless inability of the other Republicans to mount a serious campaign against him until it was too late.
Nearly all, however, agreed on one point, a factor that could prove crucial to whether Trump succeeds as the nation’s 45th president: his seemingly unbreakable bond with his core supporters, no matter how provocative his words or deeds.
“He was Godzilla walking into the power plant,” said David Kochel, chief strategist to former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush’s campaign. “He touched the third rail, he touched the fourth rail, he touched the fifth rail . He just got stronger.”
The venue was the Institute of Politics at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, which, since 1992, has invited top aides from the winning and losing campaigns to spend a day and a half after each presidential election answering questions about what they did and why. Few of the quadrennial sessions have been so contentious.
Aides to Trump and Clinton clashed angrily last week as the Democrats accused Trump of having used racial prejudice and “dog whistles” to power his victory.
“If providing a platform for white supremacists makes me a brilliant tactician, I am proud to have lost,” Clinton’s communications director, Jennifer Palmieri, declared after Trump’s campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, praised his strategist, Stephen Bannon.
Bannon previously ran Breitbart News, which has helped give prominence to the “alt-right,” a white nationalist movement.
“I would rather lose than win the way you guys did,” Palmieri said.
“Do you think you could have just had a decent message for white, working-class voters?” Conway shot back. “How about, it’s Hillary Clinton, she doesn’t connect with people? How about, they have nothing in common with her? How about, she doesn’t have an economic message?”
Tensions among the Republicans remained only slightly less raw.
Over and over, aides to Trump’s defeated GOP rivals complained of their inability to break through Trump’s domination of media coverage.
From the day Trump announced his candidacy through to the final stage of the primary season, “there were only two weeks that he didn’t get more media impressions than all the other candidates’ paid and free media combined,” said Terry Sullivan, campaign manager for Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, referring to campaign ads and mentions on news programs. “We couldn’t keep up.” Trump aides agreed that his understanding of social media and TV and how they could be put to work for him was a key asset.
“If Donald Trump sent out a tweet” in the morning, said his former campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, “Fox News would cover it: ‘Donald Trump just tweeted from his pajamas.’ ”
The campaign, added deputy campaign manager Michael Glassner, got “billions of dollars in free media” as a result of Trump’s ability to use Twitter to drive the day’s news agenda.
“Mr. Trump would say it was like owning The New York Times with no overhead,” he said.
Lewandowski had his own, unorthodox, complaint: that the press had focused too much on Trump’s actual words.
“This is the problem with the media. You guys took everything that Donald Trump said so literally,” Lewandowski said.
“The American people didn’t,” he added. “They understood that sometimes — when you have a conversation with people, whether it’s around the dinner table or at a bar — you’re going to say things, and sometimes you don’t have all the facts to back it up.”
Another reality, Lewandowski said during a brief interview between sessions, was that GOP opponents failed to take Trump seriously until it was too late.
Indeed, at one crucial point, a rival campaign aided Trump’s rise.
After Trump’s loss in the Iowa caucuses, Jeff Roe, campaign manager for Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, called Lewandowski to warn him that polls they had done showed Trump’s support dropping in the coming New Hampshire primary because he was attacking other candidates too much.
Trump was not doing his own polls, Lewandowski said, so the insight provided key guidance that allowed them to recalibrate strategy.
A loss in New Hampshire might have crippled Trump. Instead, his victory there, followed by triumphs in Nevada and South Carolina, virtually assured him the nomination.
Roe, in an interview, confirmed Lewandowski’s account.
At that point in the campaign, “we needed Trump” to defeat other candidates, he said, ruefully.
Trump aides said Clinton’s campaign focused too narrowly on trying to convince voters that he was unqualified for the job.
“They wanted to frame the race as, ‘Do you trust him to have his finger on the button?’ ” said Tony Fabrizio, who polled for Trump.
But with the Cold War long over, fear of nuclear war no longer had the influence it once did.
“What a lot of voters didn’t buy was that it was ever going to be a time where you have to worry about his finger on the button,” Fabrizio said.