With his fame and fortune refreshed, Trump moved into the world of politics. He had long been a political gadfly, donating to members of both parties and running for president in 2000 as a long-shot candidate with the Reform Party. But during the Obama era, he steadily made common cause with forces on the far right. Most significantly, Trump emerged as the highest-profile proponent of the so-called “birther” conspiracy that alleged that Obama had not been born in the United States and thus was not a “natural-born citizen” eligible for the presidency. Rumors about Obama’s heritage surfaced in the 2008 campaign, but were largely dispelled when the candidate produced his birth certificate from his home state of Hawaii, which local Republican officials verified. When Trump first considered running for president in early 2011, he revived the issue as a way of discrediting the incumbent, pushing the conspiracy theory in countless interviews. “I want to see his birth certificate,” Trump announced on Fox News’s On the Record. “Why doesn’t he show his birth certificate?” he asked on ABC’s The View. “I’m starting to think he was not born here,” he concluded on NBC’s Today Show. As he pressed the issue, Trump surged ahead in early polls on the 2012 Republican field, moving from fifth place to a practical tie for first. After six weeks of open speculation about his legitimacy not just as a president but as an American, Obama released an additional long-form version of his birth certificate. Angry at having been subjected to a level of scrutiny that struck many as inherently racist, the president insisted that “we do not have time for this kind of silliness.” 28
Despite the repeated (and unprecedented) release of the president’s birth certificates, Trump kept the issue alive, sensing that he had struck a chord with a Republican base that regarded Obama as an enemy. Using the social media platform of Twitter, Trump pressed the issue for the next four years. “An ‘extremely credible source’ has called my office and told me that Barack Obama’s birth certificate is a fraud,” he asserted in 2012. Increasingly, his tweets about Obama’s birth certificate implied that there had been an immense criminal cover-up. “How amazing,” he tweeted in 2013, “the State Health Director who verified copies of Obama’s ‘birth certificate’ died in plane crash today. All others lived.” “Attention all hackers,” Trump posted in 2014. “You are hacking everything else so please hack Obama’s college records (destroyed?) and check ‘place of birth.’ ” 29 News outlets routinely noted that Trump’s claims were far-fetched and reminded viewers that officials had vouched for the president’s birth certificates, but nevertheless Trump pressed on. In a 2012 interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, he noted there was a ready audience for such conspiracies. “A lot of people do not think it was an authentic certificate,” Trump said. “And, frankly, if you would report it accurately [sic], I think you’d probably get better ratings than you’re getting.” 30
When he officially entered the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump showed he had a keen sense of the political issues and public spectacles that would get good ratings. On June 16, 2015, he made a dramatic campaign announcement at Trump Tower, the Fifth Avenue skyscraper where casts of The Apprentice had lived and worked for over a decade. Gliding down a gilded elevator, Trump gave a raucous, if often rambling, speech that captured the themes he would present on the campaign trail. “Our country is in serious trouble,” he began. “We don’t have victories anymore. We used to have victories, but we don’t have them.” Americans, he insisted, were losing on all fronts. Economically, Trump claimed that rival nations like China were outperforming the United States, due to unfair trade deals that disadvantaged Americans. Distancing himself from the free-trade orthodoxy of his party, Trump sought to win over disaffected members of the white working class who felt NAFTA and similar deals had hurt them. At the same time, connecting his candidacy to an issue that had been central to a growing part of the Republican Party since the 1990s, he argued that Americans were endangered by the twin threats of Islamic terrorism and illegal immigration. “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” Trump mused in a particularly memorable passage. “They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” To stop the flow of illegal immigration, Trump promised to “build a great wall” along the entire southern border of the nation. “And I will have Mexico pay for that wall.” 31
Trump’s announcement prefigured the coming campaign. As reporter Jeremy Diamond noted, “spectators got a flavor for the type of candidate Trump plans to become—one who shoots from the hip and doesn’t care for a script—and the ideas he’ll promote.” Political pundits noted dismissively that Trump’s ideas were either light on details or wrong on them, and that he had starkly reversed himself on major issues like abortion, LGBTQ rights, tax policy, and national defense. But consistency and coherency were beside the point. “If Mr. Trump’s ideology has proved flexible,” Alex Burns noted in the New York Times, “the cornerstone of his worldview has not: He has consistently been a passionate believer in Donald Trump, and his own capacity to bully and badger his way into the best possible deal.” Ultimately, Trump ran on the same persona that he had crafted on The Apprentice, in which he was the epitome of success, a natural leader who would solve all the nation’s problems, efficiently and effectively. “The irony is that although Trump may be offering himself up as the anti-politician,” Russell Berman noted at The Atlantic, “there is nobody who does a better job at telling people what they want to hear, regardless of how accurate or nonsensical it is.” 32
The Trump phenomenon took its clearest form in the rallies he led across the country. “The candidate’s angry rhetoric—on subjects like undocumented Mexican immigrants, political correctness and ‘thugs’ in Baltimore—has made his run a magnet for disaffected supporters and for identity politics protesters determined to steal the spotlight and disrupt his events,” Politico noted. “Trump’s relish for confrontation, where other politicians would seek to minimize it, has only fueled the fire.” While events by other Republicans and Democrats remained calm, Trump’s regularly erupted in ugly, violent incidents. At an October 2015 rally in Richmond, Virginia, Trump supporters ripped signs from Latino immigration activists; one spit in a protester’s face. In November, an African American protester at a Birmingham rally was punched, kicked, and choked. At a December event in Las Vegas, when a black protester was being forcibly removed by security, Trump supporters screamed “light the motherfucker on fire!” Rather than try to reduce the violence, Trump rationalized it. After the Birmingham incident, for instance, he defended the crowd’s assault on the protester, saying “maybe he should have been roughed up, because it was absolutely disgusting what he was doing.” A few weeks later, as a black protester was ejected from a Worcester, Massachusetts, event for yelling “Trump is a racist!” the candidate reveled in the moment. “Isn’t a Trump rally much more exciting than these other ones?” 33
The news media seemed to agree. Primetime viewership across the three main cable news channels—CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC—had dropped by a third between 2008 and 2014. But in 2015, the Pew Research Project showed that the three cable news networks saw “a ratings bump not seen in years.” “The Trump Effect,” media analyst Erik Wemple noted, had resulted in a surge in profits, thanks to full coverage of Trump’s rallies and countless call-in and in-person interviews on their programs. (Fox News experienced a 21 percent increase in profits; CNN, 17 percent; MSNBC, 10 percent.) More than traditional candidates, Trump understood the dynamics of the modern media. He was obsessed with cable news and capitalized on the rhythm of the medium. By saying the most outlandish things possible, he made it impossible for the press to ignore him, and he steadily became more provocative each time to keep their attention. Many producers and reporters, worried about appearing biased against Trump, went overboard trying to give him fair coverage and making sure his surrogates received ample airtime. Journalists who wer
e intent on appearing “objective” often felt the need to downplay his outlandish behavior by pointing to the existence of comparable extremism on the Democratic side. While the cable networks benefited from their extensive coverage, so did the candidate. According to a March 2016 study by mediaQuant, a firm that tracked press coverage of candidates and estimated the value of airtime provided, Trump benefited from nearly $3 billion in free media during the GOP primaries. Some of this coverage was critical, but most amounted to uninterrupted coverage of his hour-long rallies, broadcast from start to finish, with little effort to fact-check the claims as they came. Notably, Trump received more free media than all the other sixteen Republican candidates combined, and eight times as much as his closest competitor.34
Trump’s approach to that competition represented another departure from political norms. Traditionally, presidential primaries were mild-mannered contests between like-minded members of a party. But early on, Trump showed he would reject the normal niceties in his campaign when he said the party’s 2008 presidential nominee John McCain, a former POW from the Vietnam War, wasn’t truly a hero. “He was a war hero because he was captured,” Trump said dismissively. “I like people who weren’t captured.” Pundits assumed the rash comment—coming from a man who secured five separate deferments to avoid serving in Vietnam himself—would bring Trump’s campaign to an unceremonious end. Those assumptions, however, were based on memories of a political process that was long gone. Trump was much more in tune with the polarized political world as it was in the current day and age. Rather than apologize, Trump stood his ground, a stance his supporters welcomed. Emboldened by the response, Trump kept attacking his rivals. At his rallies and in the debates, he abandoned the usual honorifics for insults, mocking Governor Jeb Bush as “low energy,” Senator Marco Rubio as “Liddle Marco,” and Senator Ted Cruz as “Lyin’ Ted.” In interviews, Trump insulted businesswoman Carly Fiorina’s physical appearance and claimed neurosurgeon Ben Carson had a “pathological temper” akin to a “child molester.” He even accused Ted Cruz’s father of having ties to John F. Kennedy’s assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, a claim based on a conspiracy theory run in the National Enquirer, a tabloid published by an ardent Trump backer. His rivals tried to take the high road at first, but as Trump continued to make headway with his attacks, a few began to respond in kind. In late February 2016, for instance, Rubio mocked Trump’s “spray tan” and ridiculed his “small hands.” For many in the media, such mudslinging made for good television. CBS chairman Les Moonves captured the prevailing spirit well. The primary campaign had turned into a “circus” full of “bomb throwing,” he said, but ultimately “Donald’s place in this election is a good thing” because he boosted their ratings and profits. “It may not be good for America,” Moonves shrugged, “but it’s damn good for CBS.” 35
Though some speculated that “the Trump Effect” reflected a morbid curiosity that would never be replicated at the polls, Trump soon made it clear that he could compete for votes. Running as an “outsider” against a crowded field of more conventional career politicians, the reality-TV star essentially employed his own form of “narrowcasting” to win over a small but fiercely loyal slice of the Republican base. (The remaining establishment candidates, meanwhile, found themselves fighting over the same set of voters.) As a result, Trump finished just behind Cruz in the Iowa caucuses, and then went on to win the first three primaries in New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada outright. Relishing his new role as frontrunner, he played up his self-image as a winner and portrayed his nomination as inevitable. “If you listen to the pundits, we weren’t expected to win too much, and now we’re winning, winning, winning the country,” he said after taking Nevada. “And soon the country’s going to start winning, winning, winning.” And, indeed, Trump kept winning, taking seven of eleven states on “Super Tuesday” and nine of thirteen states over the rest of March. By early May, Donald Trump was the GOP’s presumptive presidential nominee.36
Even after his early victories, Trump still lacked strong support from social conservatives who were essential to the party’s general election plans. To win them over, he brought roughly a thousand conservative religious leaders to Trump Tower for a summit meeting in June. There, he promised them that, as president, he would work hard to roll back abortion rights and to defend the ability of Christians to discriminate against LGBTQ people on religious grounds. Most important, Trump promised them he would appoint “the right kind of Supreme Court justice.” The archconservative Justice Antonin Scalia had passed away in February; in a stunning development, Senate Republicans announced they would simply refuse to hold hearings or votes for any nominee put forth by President Obama, keeping the seat vacant so the next president could make the appointment. For social conservatives, this seat on the Supreme Court was ultimately more important than the presidency. The court in recent years had delivered closely divided decisions not just on policy matters like the Affordable Care Act but on the polarizing social causes of the culture wars. It allowed businesses to discriminate against LGBTQ people on religious grounds by a 5–4 margin in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (2014), for instance, but then legalized same-sex marriage by a 5–4 margin in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015). That decision, in particular, concerned religious conservatives because it signaled the court might be following popular opinion on cultural issues; 60 percent of Americans supported same-sex marriage at the time of the ruling. Given the balance of the court, the Religious Right realized that Scalia’s replacement could effectively set a course for social conservatism for the next generation. Ahead of the Trump Tower summit, the candidate offered a list of eleven potential nominees, picked for him by the conservative Heritage Foundation. According to World magazine, which regularly surveyed evangelical leaders, Trump’s promise to appoint pro-life justices to the Supreme Court doubled his level of support. “It makes ginormous difference,” one noted. “If Donald Trump wins, he would have to look back and credit that day for mobilizing evangelicals.” 37
Even though Trump shored up his standing with the base, the next month’s Republican National Convention displayed a party divided. Notably, all but one of the GOP’s past presidential nominees refused to take part. Both George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush made it clear they would never support the man who had humiliated Jeb Bush. McCain said he had to focus on his own reelection, while Romney had steadfastly urged his party to see that Trump was “a phony, a fraud” and reject him. (Only Bob Dole, the 93-year-old former nominee from 1996, agreed to attend.) Large numbers of elected officials likewise chose to skip the convention, offering intentionally thin excuses. Nevada Senator Dean Heller’s office mused that he might have to irrigate his ranch that week, while Senator Jeff Flake insisted he had to mow his lawn back home in arid Arizona. Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska was even blunter, noting that he would instead take his kids “to watch some dumpster fires across the state, all of which enjoy more popularity than the current front-runners.” 38
The Republican convention in Cleveland lived down to their expectations. The streets outside Quicken Arena filled with protesters and counterprotesters; thanks to Ohio’s open-carry gun legislation, several had semiautomatic weapons. Inside the arena, the mood was no brighter. Trump had campaigned heavily against “corruption” in Washington, promising to “drain the swamp” if he were elected. Hillary Clinton became the embodiment of the culture he decried. Primetime speakers promoted a dark, dystopian vision of an America besieged by problems, with Clinton linked to virtually everything wrong with America. The opening night, for instance, featured several videos and speeches about the Benghazi attacks, including an emotional address from a visibly distraught mother of one of the victims, who said, “I blame Hillary Clinton personally for the death of my son.” That same night, another set of grieving mothers—billed as “Victims of Illegal Immigrants”—told how their children had been killed by undocumented Latinos. “A vote for Hillary,” one asserted, “is putting all of our children’s lives at ri
sk.” As allegations piled up, New Jersey governor Chris Christie told the convention that as a “former federal prosecutor” he would present the case against Hillary Clinton “to you, sitting as a jury of her peers, both in this hall and in your living rooms around our nation.” Recounting the Benghazi attacks and the revelations that she had a private email server, Christie repeatedly asked, “Guilty or not guilty?” With a roar, they shouted back: “Guilty!” Later, former general Michael Flynn moved the convention’s show trial from prosecution to sentencing, leading another angry chant from the stage: “Lock her up! Lock her up!” 39
Trump’s acceptance speech stuck with the dystopian spirit. “Our Convention occurs at a moment of crisis for our nation,” he warned. “The attacks on our police, and the terrorism in our cities, threaten our very way of life.” Crime rates had steadily declined over decades to historic lows, but the candidate nevertheless spoke at length about “chaos in our communities” which he claimed had been caused by immigrants and domestic criminals. Returning to a story he told often on the trail, Trump recounted how a twenty-one-year-old Nebraska woman had been killed by an undocumented drunk driver from Honduras, becoming, in his words, yet another “sacrifice on the altar of open borders.” Having described a nation in crisis, its people endangered by enemies inside and outside its borders, Trump insisted: “I alone can fix it.” 40
“But Her Emails!”
Unlike the drama of the Republican convention, Hillary Clinton’s path to her party’s nomination had been surprisingly quiet. Her historic journey to become the first female nominee of a major party had electrified women and young girls across the country, but she was nevertheless eclipsed by the “Trump effect” in the media. Clinton’s decades in the public eye—as First Lady, US senator, and secretary of state—had made her increasingly cautious in her dealings with the press and also made the press less interested in her as well. In stark contrast to the fiery, freewheeling Trump, Clinton took a much more conventional profile as a candidate and offered far less drama on the campaign trail. As a result, Clinton found herself sidelined by the national media, much as Trump’s primary opponents had been. In May 2016, for instance, as Clinton unveiled new campaign themes in a major address in Las Vegas, all three of the cable news networks instead carried a live shot of an empty podium in North Dakota where they promised Donald Trump would soon appear.41
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