American Carnage

by Tim Alberta

  In a continuation of the Campaign That Nobody Wanted to Win, the Republican nominee kept finding ways to make his opponent a sympathetic figure, even as her own party’s progressive wing was burning with resentment toward her.

  On August 9, Trump seemed to suggest that Clinton could be assassinated if she won the White House. “Hillary wants to abolish—essentially abolish the Second Amendment,” he said in North Carolina. “By the way . . . if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is. I don’t know.”11

  Having sparked a national frenzy—another one—Trump ran straight into the comforting arms of Sean Hannity. “Obviously you’re saying that there’s a strong political movement within the Second Amendment, and if people mobilize and vote, they can stop Hillary from having this impact on the court,” the Fox News host said.

  “Well, I just heard about that,” Trump replied, playing dumb, “and it was amazing because nobody in that room thought anything other than what you just said.”

  Except that some people did. Darrell Vickers, a local Republican and Trump supporter who sat directly behind the candidate onstage, had his shocked reaction captured on live television. “I was just absolutely taken aghast,” Vickers later told CNN.12 “Down here in the South, we don’t curse in front of women, we don’t drink liquor in front of the preacher, and we don’t make jokes like that in public.” (Vickers said he would still be voting for Trump.)

  A day after the “Second Amendment people” stunt, Trump blamed Obama for creating a power vacuum by withdrawing troops from Iraq—but in less diplomatic terms. “He’s the founder of ISIS. He’s the founder of ISIS. He’s the founder. He founded ISIS,” Trump said of the president. “I would say the co-founder would be crooked Hillary Clinton.”13

  As Trump flailed, his numbers spiraled sharply downward. He had consistently trailed Clinton by healthy margins, both in national polling averages and in battleground state surveys. But as Labor Day approached, signaling the final sprint of a presidential campaign, things were looking bleaker than ever. As of the middle of August, the RealClearPolitics averages showed Clinton leading Trump by 9 points in Pennsylvania; by 7 points in Michigan; and by 9 points in Wisconsin. He was closer in North Carolina and Florida, and his campaign felt good about Ohio and Iowa. But the keys were Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Without a sweep in those “Blue Wall” states in the Rust Belt, Trump’s team feared, he wouldn’t have a prayer.

  Whatever nominal bounce Trump had received from the convention was long gone. The party’s fissures were fresher by the day and showing no signs of repair. His campaign was treading water, understaffed and out-organized: Some media estimates reported that the Democratic nominee had nearly three times the number of field offices as her Republican opponent.14

  There were two saving graces for Trump. The first was Priebus and his infrastructure. Since taking over the Republican National Committee in early 2011, the chairman had completely revamped its operations. The party had raised record amounts of money and spent heavily to strengthen the field programs of its affiliates in the key battleground states. In the realm of technology and voter targeting, where Obama’s Democratic Party was once hopelessly ahead of its counterpart, Republicans had all but caught up. Priebus had, in the span of five years, turned the RNC from a punch line into a powerhouse.

  And not a moment too soon: Trump had virtually no campaign organization to speak of. In many of the crucial nominating contests, while Cruz commanded a sprawling ground game and a data-driven turnout machine, Trump countered with small, ragtag teams of volunteers. This made his primary conquest all the more impressive, but it rendered him woefully unprepared to compete in the general election. Without a strong national party doing the blocking and tackling on behalf of his campaign, Trump’s chances might have slipped from slim to none.

  The second silver lining for the Republican nominee was his opponent. Trump was the most unpopular major-party nominee in modern American history, but Clinton wasn’t far behind. Controversies had dogged her candidacy from day one: Benghazi, the Clinton Foundation, a private email server that had been wiped of potentially damning messages. Even after then-FBI director James Comey cleared Clinton in July, rebuking her use of the server but recommending no criminal charges, the allegations of her slipperiness remained, with large majorities of voters throughout the year telling pollsters that she was “untrustworthy.”15 By August, Clinton’s popularity had reached an all-time low. The ABC News/Washington Post poll showed that 59 percent of registered voters viewed her unfavorably—compared to 60 percent for Trump.16

  Perhaps even more detrimental was her campaign’s strategic obliviousness. It was plainly apparent by late summer that Trump’s only path to 270 Electoral votes ran through the states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. And though Clinton poured time and resources into Pennsylvania, she had a decidedly lighter footprint in Michigan, and was completely MIA in Wisconsin. Republican officials in the latter two states sensed that she was vulnerable but feared that Trump and his amateurish campaign were incapable of capitalizing.

  In mid-August, the Republican nominee announced a dramatic shakeup of his operation. Manafort was relieved of his duties as campaign manager, replaced by Conway, the messaging maestro. Priebus, having all but relocated from Washington to New York, was taking on a broader role as unofficial chief strategist. In the most newsworthy move, Trump hired Breitbart News honcho Steve Bannon as the campaign’s chief executive.

  While no single person’s influence on American politics has ever been more overstated—journalists would spend parts of 2017 penning stories suggesting that Bannon was creating a shadow party to take down the GOP establishment—his hire was of enormous symbolic value.

  Trump had spent the three months since clinching the nomination attempting to conform himself to the party: firing Corey Lewandowski, bringing on veteran operatives, playing nice (for the most part) with GOP leaders, dialing back (when possible) his rhetorical superfluities. The addition of Bannon, whose website had championed Trump’s “America First” policies and lashed out at his establishment critics, suggested that the Republican nominee was going to finish the campaign his way—win or lose.

  The Clinton camp could barely contain its euphoria. Having long debated the timing of hitting Trump explicitly over his ties to the “alt-right,” a marginal internet movement of nationalists and Neanderthals, she saw Bannon’s hiring as the ideal opportunity. “The de facto merger between Breitbart and the Trump campaign represents a landmark achievement for this group, a fringe element that has effectively taken over the Republican Party,” Clinton announced the following week during a speech in Nevada. She warned that Trump was campaigning in concert with “the rising tide of hardline, right-wing nationalism around the world.”17

  Trump, a firm believer in the “all publicity is good publicity” mantra, saw Clinton’s speech as a net positive for his campaign. So did many of his friends and advisers. Even those skeptical of the Bannon move now felt that Clinton’s attacks could help Trump bring home the base.

  There was another layer of intrigue. Roger Ailes, the longtime Fox News chieftain who had recently been fired amid spiderwebbing allegations of sexual harassment, had begun advising Trump in an informal capacity. By bringing Bannon aboard the campaign, Trump was now guided by the leaders of the two most loyal media outlets on the right. It was all gravy for Ailes and Bannon. If Trump won, their kindred spirit would occupy the Oval Office. If he lost, the possibilities for a new, nationalist-branded, Trump-inspired media empire were boundless.

  AS LABOR DAY APPROACHED, A NATION ALIENATED FROM ITSELF OVER issues of politics, culture, and identity found fresh ammunition for its intrasocietal cold war. It came from the unlikeliest of places: the sidelines of a football game.

  Colin Kaepernick, the biological son of a black father and a white mother, was given up for adoption and raised by an affluent white family in California. A secon
d-round pick in the 2011 NFL draft by the San Francisco 49ers, he spent his rookie season on the bench before gaining stardom a year later, replacing the team’s starter halfway through the season and leading the 49ers all the way to the Super Bowl. (In his first career playoff game, Kaepernick ran for 181 yards, setting the NFL’s single-game record for rushing yards by a quarterback.) He took the 49ers back to the conference championship game in 2013 and was rewarded with a princely $126 million contract. His next two years, however, were plagued by injuries and inconsistency, and by the start of the 2016 season, Kaepernick was the 49ers’ designated backup.

  Although he didn’t see the field until the team’s sixth game, Kaepernick was the talk of the NFL. On August 26, after staying seated on the bench during a rendition of the national anthem, the quarterback told a reporter with NFL.com, “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color. To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.”18

  Two days later, Kaepernick expanded on his explanation. “I’m seeing things happen to people that don’t have a voice, people that don’t have a platform to talk and have their voices heard and effect change. So I’m in the position where I can do that and I’m going to do that for people that can’t,” he told the local media. “I have great respect for the men and women that have fought for this country. I have family, I have friends that have gone and fought for this country. And they fight for freedom, they fight for the people, they fight for liberty and justice—for everyone. That’s not happening. People are dying in vain because this country isn’t holding their end of the bargain up.”19

  Kaepernick also noted of the two presidential nominees, “You have Hillary who has called black teens or black kids ‘super predators,’ you have Donald Trump who’s openly racist.”

  The anthem protest blitzed America’s consciousness in a way that no sports-related story had since the turn of the century. Within a week of the NFL.com interview, just about every media outlet in the country was covering Colin Kaepernick—and everyone, it seemed, had an opinion.

  Sensing an opportunity to further rile his base, Trump pounced. “Well, I have followed it and I think it’s personally not a good thing. I think it’s a terrible thing,” the Republican nominee told a conservative talk radio show in Seattle. “Maybe he should find a country that works better for him.”20

  Kaepernick was an imperfect messenger. On August 31, amid the national uproar over his protest, a local reporter tweeted out a photograph of the quarterback at practice a few weeks earlier wearing socks that showed pigs dressed like police officers. Months later, after the election concluded, Kaepernick revealed that he did not vote, drawing harsh criticism from liberal commentators who questioned his seriousness as a social activist.

  Yet he had launched a national dialogue virtually overnight. And though he wasn’t backing down, Kaepernick did make an attempt to refine the contours of that dialogue. Before the team’s final preseason game in San Diego, he met with Nate Boyer, a former Green Beret who had played briefly in the NFL. The two decided that kneeling, rather than sitting on the bench, was a more respectful gesture. At the game, while being pelted with boos, Kaepernick was joined on a knee by his teammate Eric Reid.

  By September, Kaepernick was on the cover of Time magazine. Dozens of professional athletes across other sports had joined in the demonstration. Stories popped up across the country of black high-schoolers kneeling before their games as well.

  Trump could not have asked for anything more. The controversy was perfectly suited to his campaign’s narrative of a culture in rebellion against the country’s traditional values, with anyone holding said values made to feel backward and bigoted for rebelling against the rebellion. Even sweeter for the Republican nominee: His opponent played right into it.

  “You could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?” Clinton said on September 9 at an LGBT for Hillary gala in New York City, “The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic—you name it.”

  Arguing that Trump had “given voice” to those elements, she continued, “Some of those folks—they are irredeemable. But thankfully, they are not America.”

  THE FIRST GENERAL ELECTION DEBATE, HELD SEPTEMBER 26 AT HOFSTRA University in New York, served as a ninety-minute microcosm of the Trump-Clinton contrast. With a record eighty-four million people tuning in, Clinton was steady if unspectacular, giving safe and crisp answers while keeping her cool throughout. She was clearly well prepared. Trump, on the other hand, was out of his depth. He was baited into damaging sound bites and fitful, long, rambling responses. He was blindingly unprepared.

  Clinton was scored the consensus winner. Even the Republican’s cable news advocate struggled to spin his performance.

  “The good news for Donald Trump is that he discussed serious issues for ninety minutes,” Howard Kurtz, the conservative media reporter, said on Fox News afterward. “But Hillary Clinton won the night on points. She was aggressive out of the gate, and in basketball terms, she controlled the ball. He started to talk louder, faster, trying to compete with her. And as time went on, it seemed to me that he got a little more disjointed.”

  To Trump, the verdicts of his debate defeat were reflective of nothing more than a biased jury of journalists. The Republican nominee had used the media as a foil throughout the campaign, tapping into decades of percolating distrust of (and bitterness toward) the press corps among conservatives. He called out and derided individual reporters by name. He blacklisted certain publications—the Washington Post, BuzzFeed, the Des Moines Register—refusing to grant them access to cover his campaign events. He accused the Fourth Estate of peddling “fake news” to deceive the masses (a perversion of the term used to describe attempts by foreign troublemakers to sow chaos in the electorate by propagating deceptive information online).

  In an era defined by friction over “snowflakes” (overly sensitive people) acting “woke” (highly attuned to political correctness) in response to “microaggressions” (perceived slights to marginalized persons or communities), Trump’s hostility toward the press, increasingly perceived as the arbiters of American dialogue, made him a hero to the right.

  He was not always wrong with his charges of bias or hysteria. Twitter-happy reporters and click-drunk newsrooms and advertising-mad cable news shows turned no small number of molehills into mountains. In early August, during a rally in Virginia, Trump teased a mother about her crying baby, flippantly remarking, “You can get the baby out of here.”21 After dozens of outlets reported that he’d ejected an infant from his event, PolitiFact was forced to weigh in: “Donald Trump accurately says media wrong that he kicked baby out of rally.”

  Even so, the GOP nominee deserved the historic number of negative headlines dropped on his campaign. Trump told hundreds and likely thousands of provable lies during the 2016 campaign, falsehoods both big (his supposed opposition to the Iraq War) and small (his endorsement from Immigration and Customs Enforcement). He routinely said things far outside the mainstream of political discourse, be they personal insults or pointless boasts or menacing threats.

  Even when he stood to benefit from a news cycle, such as when the New York Times and other prominent outlets reported on the details of the FBI’s probe into Clinton’s emails (tough press coverage the right never seemed bothered by), Trump had a knack for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. The same day that the State Department’s inspector general released a report excoriating Clinton for her email habits, he stole headlines by lashing out at the Republican governor of New Mexico.

  Professional press-bashers on the right, such as the Media Research Center, waged a campaign to delegitimize the coverage of Trump. The group’s signage—“DON’T BELIEVE THE LIBERAL MEDIA!”—was ubiquitous around Cleveland the week of the convention, �
�LIBERAL MEDIA” written in bloody red. And yet it was the MRC’s president, the longtime conservative activist Brent Bozell, who had been among the most strident essayists in the infamous National Review issue, calling Trump “the greatest charlatan” he’d ever seen in politics.22 Bozell, a Cruz supporter in the primary, also called Trump a “huckster” and a “shameless self-promoter” in one Fox News appearance, concluding, “God help this country if this man were president.”

  By the first week of October, the Republican nominee’s lack of support from the establishment media, including its most conservative elements, came into sharp focus. Trump was the first presidential nominee in history to receive no major newspaper endorsements. The traditionally conservative editorial pages of the Dallas Morning News, the Arizona Republic, the Houston Chronicle, and the Cincinnati Enquirer backed Clinton; others, including the Detroit News, the New Hampshire Union-Leader, and the Richmond Times-Dispatch supported the Libertarian Party’s nominee, Gary Johnson. USA Today, which had never endorsed in its history, threw its weight behind Clinton, calling Trump “a serial liar” who was “unfit for the presidency.”23

  The poll numbers were no more encouraging. As of early October, Trump still trailed Clinton by 9 points in Pennsylvania, according to the RCP average; by 7 points in Michigan; by 6 points in Wisconsin; and by 3 points in both Florida and North Carolina.

  With the writing on the wall, and the post–Election Day repercussions to consider, some of Trump’s frenemies in the GOP began circling the wagons. Cruz finally offered an endorsement in late September. And Ryan, who had gone out of his way never to be photographed with Trump, fearful that it would be used to tarnish his image, invited the nominee to join him at “Fall Fest,” an annual rally in his Wisconsin district on October 8.

  There would be a reckoning among Trump’s supporters after he lost in November, and his Republican rivals were acting preemptively to avoid any blame.