Fault Lines

by Kevin M. Kruse

  Meanwhile, when Clinton did receive media attention, it often only amplified the attacks that Trump and other Republicans made on her. According to a study by Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center, media coverage of Clinton focused on her scandals more than it did on her policy proposals by a margin of nearly 4-to-1. (In contrast, coverage of Trump focused more on his policies than his various scandals, by a margin of nearly 2-to-1.) As the report noted, nightly news programs had devoted about three times as much coverage to Clinton’s emails as they had to her policies. There were, in fact, two different email stories: first, the revelation that she had used a private email server as secretary of state and, second, the release of hacked DNC emails by WikiLeaks, an international nonprofit publicly dedicated to exposing government secrets, but privately tied to Russia, according to US intelligence agencies. Each email scandal led nowhere on its own: Clinton’s private server contained classified materials, but had not been hacked; the released DNC emails, meanwhile, merely revealed routine exchanges typical for a campaign. But conflated in the public’s mind as a single sweeping scandal, “Hillary’s emails” became a major line of attack for Trump. In late July, a week after the “lock her up!” chants at the GOP convention, the candidate urged Russian hackers to keep digging into his rival’s private server. “I will tell you this, Russia,” he said. “If you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.” 42

  In significant ways, Trump’s attacks on the campaign trail were echoed and amplified by social media. First and foremost, the candidate made extensive use of Twitter throughout the campaign, retweeting posts from his millions of followers and, occasionally, sparking controversy when several were revealed to have white supremacist sympathies. Second, the comments sections of conservative websites like Breitbart News and right-wing Reddit threads worked to spread easily digestible internet “memes” that pushed Trump’s claims to a wider audience. Third, and perhaps most significantly, Facebook played a major role in the spread of such false information. Much of the problem seemed to be innocent mistakes by individual users, but later inquiries showed that there had been deliberate efforts to deceive, stemming from Russia. For instance, congressional investigations revealed that, seeking to sway US voters, a Kremlin-backed propaganda company bought $100,000 in Facebook ads, a purchase that might have reached 70 million users. Meanwhile, several Facebook groups pushing anti-immigration, antirefugee and anti-Clinton arguments were later found to have connections to Russia as well. One of them, Heart of Texas, an account with nearly a quarter-million followers, even organized conservative rallies. Ultimately, the co-opting of Facebook by a foreign government revealed not just how social media made voters vulnerable to outside influences, but also how social media had, in many ways, supplanted the traditional media itself. As media columnist Margaret Sullivan noted, Facebook “has never acknowledged the glaringly obvious—that it is essentially a media company, where many of its 2 billion active monthly users get the majority of their news and information. . . . When its information is false, when it is purchased and manipulated to affect the outcome of an election, the effect is enormous. When the information purveyors are associated with a foreign adversary—with a clear interest in the outcome of the American election—we’re into a whole new realm of power.” 43 The Obama administration had known about these efforts by Russia as early as the summer of 2016, but the president refused to go public—rejecting a proposal by FBI Director James Comey to write an op-ed about what they knew—for fear of looking like he was intervening in the election. Despite an extensive investigation by US intelligence agencies, information about Russian intervention, and its possible connections to high-ranking officials in the Trump campaign, still remained outside the public purview.

  Even with this array of attacks against her, Clinton entered the fall campaign confident of her chances. She had led Trump in the polls for most of the year and, after their conventions, her lead only continued to widen. At the start of August, CNN’s poll showed her leading Trump by nine percentage points; a few weeks later, Reuters/IPSOS had her up twelve. As pollsters and pundits rushed to point out, in the previous sixteen presidential elections, the candidate who led in the polls after the two parties’ political conventions won every single time. In a mid-August report, an American correspondent for the BBC asked the question then on many observers’ minds: “Has Donald Trump Already Blown It?” The media’s assumptions about the inevitable outcome of the presidential race invariably shaped their coverage of the closing months of that race itself. “The press covered Hillary Clinton like the next president of the United States,” media critic James Poniewozik reflected at the end of the election. “The press covered Donald Trump like a future trivia question (and a ratings cash cow).” 44

  To keep his chances alive, Trump shook up his campaign team in mid-August. Campaign head Paul Manafort, a political operative with Russian connections who had been brought in months before to manage the convention chaos, was abruptly sidelined. In his place came a new team. Roger Ailes, recently removed from Fox News over allegations of sexual harassment, became a new campaign advisor, while Stephen Bannon, chairman of Breitbart News, was hired as the campaign’s chief executive. In many ways, the moves reflected the larger displacement of the traditional Republican Party apparatus by the brash new upstarts of right-wing media. As the New York Times noted, “It was not lost on Republicans in Washington that two news executives whose outlets had fueled the anti-establishment rebellion that bedeviled congressional leaders and set the stage for Mr. Trump’s nomination were now directly guiding the party’s presidential message and strategy.” Longtime conservatives saw the development as a disaster. Bill Kristol, who had pushed for the addition of right-wing favorites like Dan Quayle and Sarah Palin to past presidential tickets, saw this new union as a step too far. As he observed, “It’s the merger of the Trump campaign with the kooky right.” 45

  In particular, Bannon’s appointment represented a sharp turn to the fringes, given his role as chairman of Breitbart News. “We’re the platform for the alt right,” he proudly told Sarah Posner of Mother Jones during the Republican convention. As conservative pundit Ben Shapiro confirmed, under Bannon’s leadership the right-wing website had “become the alt-right go-to website, with [technology editor Milo] Yiannopoulos pushing white ethno-nationalism as a legitimate response to political correctness, and the comment section turning into a cesspool for white supremacist mememakers.” Emphasizing the threats posed to Americans by free trade, Islamic terrorism, and Mexican immigration, Breitbart advanced a stark message of white nationalism and populism. It even contained a section titled “Black Crime,” filled with the kind of stories that had radicalized Dylann Roof and other white supremacists like him. As the head of Marco Rubio’s presidential campaign noted, Trump and Breitbart “both play to the lowest common denominator of people’s fears. It’s a match made in heaven.” 46

  Despite the criticism, Trump’s decision to double-down on the themes of white resentment did help shore up his campaign. By late August, Clinton’s lead in the polls had been more than halved, dropping from twelve points to five in a few weeks. Her campaign made many mistakes on its own, never clearly articulating an agenda, while failing to appreciate how Trump’s attacks on free trade were resonating with the white working and middle class, especially in the Midwest. Focusing instead on the vital role that appeals to white nationalism had in Trump’s revival, Clinton decided to address the issue directly in a speech in Reno, Nevada, at the end of August. “Everywhere I go, people tell me how concerned they are by the divisive rhetoric coming from my opponent this election,” she said, recounting ugly incidents from both Trump’s past and the present campaign. “A man with a long history of racial discrimination, who traffics in dark conspiracy theories drawn from the pages of supermarket tabloids and the far, dark reaches of the internet, should never run our government or command our military.” Trump’s worst instincts, Clinton continued, w
ere now moving to the forefront with the rise of Steve Bannon. “The de facto merger between Breitbart and the Trump Campaign represents a landmark achievement for the ‘Alt-Right,’ ” she noted. “A fringe element has taken over the Republican Party.” Though Clinton sought to expose white nationalists on the far right, many of them welcomed the attention, using the moment to raise funds and recruit members. “Thanks for the free PR Hillary,” one wrote on Twitter. “The #AltRight will long remember the day you helped make us into the real right.” 47

  As such reactions showed, the line between the traditional Republican Right and the new “Alt Right” had become increasingly blurred in the Trump campaign. At a Manhattan fund-raiser in early September, Clinton singled out the worst elements in her opponent’s base. “You know, just to be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables, right?” she said to laughter and applause. “The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it. And he has lifted them up.” Such people were “irredeemable,” she noted, unlike “the other basket” of Trump supporters, “people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they’re just desperate for change.” Despite her two categories, Trump supporters seized on the “basket of deplorables,” which they saw as an echo of Mitt Romney’s “ 47 percent” line, and made it a new rallying cry. “Hillary calling tens of millions of American men & women ‘deplorable’ is inexcusable and disqualifying,” Sarah Huckabee Sanders noted on Twitter the next morning, where #BasketOfDeplorables was trending. That afternoon, Trump’s running mate, Governor Mike Pence of Indiana, used a speech at the Values Voter Summit to claim she had insulted all Trump voters. “Hillary, they are not a basket of anything,” he chided. “They are Americans and they deserve your respect.” Trump’s base embraced the label. “On the shopping website Etsy,” USA Today reported, “one can find Deplorable t-shirts, key chains, car decals, buttons, pendants, coffee mugs and even a deplorable pocket watch.” Trump supporters added “Deplorable” to their user names on Twitter and sported it on shirts and signs at the candidate’s rally. At one event in Asheville, North Carolina, a white man stood outside with a homemade banner: “DEPLORABLE LIVES MATTER.” 48

  Even as his base rallied around him, Trump proved unable to take the lead. The presidential debates, which played to Clinton’s strengths as an experienced policy wonk and away from Trump’s advantages as an off-the-cuff stump speaker, helped Clinton maintain her advantage for most of the fall. Then, in early October, the wheels of the Trump train seemed to come off, with the release of a secret recording made just before a 2005 Trump interview with the entertainment news program Access Hollywood. Speaking off-camera but on-mic with host Billy Bush (a first cousin to George W. Bush), Trump graphically discussed his sexual conquests and casually confessed that he had committed sexual assault. “I’m automatically attracted to beautiful [women]—I just start kissing them,” he bragged. “And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.” “Whatever you want,” Bush chimed in. “Grab ’em by the pussy,” Trump replied. “You can do anything.” 49 Significantly, the tape came out on the same day that the leaders of the intelligence agencies finally decided to make a public statement about their discoveries on Russian meddling in the election. “The US Intelligence Community is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions,” they announced. “These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the US election process.” The remarkable statement offered serious warnings about a direct attack on American democracy. But few paid attention; all eyes and ears were on Trump’s secret tape.50

  For most pundits and political professionals, the revelations in the recording seemed serious enough to destroy Trump’s candidacy. GOP leaders in Congress distanced themselves and the party from his comments, with Mitch McConnell calling them “repugnant” and Paul Ryan saying he was “sickened.” Most seriously, Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus even traveled to Trump Tower to plead with the candidate to drop out, to spare himself humiliation and to spare the larger party a devastating defeat. If he stayed in, Priebus pled, Trump would “go down with a worse election loss than Barry Goldwater’s” landslide predicted defeat in 1964. Despite the revolt from Republican leaders, Trump’s base stood by him, convincing the candidate to stay in the race. Notably, leaders of the Religious Right remained vocally committed to Trump, overlooking his sexually graphic comments and focusing instead on the larger prize of the Supreme Court. “People of faith are voting on issues like who will protect unborn life, defend religious freedom . . . and appoint conservative judges,” Ralph Reed insisted. “I think a 10-year-old tape of a private conversation with a TV talk show host ranks pretty low on their hierarchy of their concerns.” And indeed, polls soon revealed that the Access Hollywood recording had done little to impact the overall race. Clinton still led by four to six points.51

  As the candidates headed into the closing days, the issues with Clinton’s email resurfaced and radically transformed the race. A half hour after the release of the Access Hollywood recording, WikiLeaks responded by releasing a new batch of hacked Democratic emails, this time from the private account of Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta. As with the hacked emails from the DNC, the new round of messages were largely mundane. (One of them, for instance, contained Podesta’s recipe for risotto.) But the manner of WikiLeaks’ release, trickling emails out in small batches, each and every day through the end of the election, guaranteed renewed and sustained media coverage of “Democratic emails.” More significantly, on October 28, FBI director James Comey told Congress that the investigation into Clinton’s private server, which he previously indicated had been completed, was being revived in light of new evidence. (Comey felt pressure to make this statement since he feared that, by not doing so, his agency would be accused of hiding information to favor Clinton.) Coverage of the election’s closing days was thus dominated by speculation about Clinton’s emails and the FBI investigation. The front page of the New York Times the next day, for instance, was filled above the fold with coverage, including an all-caps headline: “NEW EMAILS JOLT CLINTON CAMPAIGN IN RACE’S LAST DAYS.” The news struck a nerve with voters. “Within a day of the Comey letter,” Nate Silver later noted, “Google searches for ‘Clinton FBI’ had increased 50-fold and searches for ‘Clinton email’ almost tenfold.” Over the next week, Clinton’s lead dropped dramatically, down to just two to three points in national polls.52

  Despite the late bombshell, most observers still expected Clinton to win. On Election Day, Time ran predictions from a range of news outlets and pollsters. All of them agreed that the Democratic ticket would prevail, differing only on the exact odds and the precise margin of victory. But the prognosticators proved to be in for a surprise. When the early returns came in on election night, they showed Trump exceeding the experts’ expectations as Clinton underperformed across the board. As the forecasts tilted to the Republican, Politico ran a banner headline shortly before 10pm: “Trump Gives Clinton a Scare.” Soon after, Ohio was called for Trump, and CNBC.com noted the growing sense of uncertainty: “DOW FUTURES NOSEDIVE 600 POINTS ON ELECTION JITTERS.” As the election night dragged on, the sense of shock and surprise only deepened. By the time he opened his live special on the Showtime cable channel at 11pm, Stephen Colbert could only marvel wearily: “What a year . . . tonight has been.” 53

  By the next morning, it was clear that the 2016 race had been, in the words of Fox News anchor Bret Baier, “the most unreal, surreal election we have ever seen.” Clinton won the popular vote, taking in nearly 3 million more votes nationwide than her opponent. (In keeping with the final polls that had predicted she would win the national popular vote by 2–3 percent, she did just that: winning 48.2 percent to 46.1 percent.) Despite her advantage,
Clinton’s votes were disproportionately concentrated, while Trump’s were more evenly dispersed. As Clinton ran up the numbers in safe blue states, Trump managed to eke out longshot wins in several of the key battlegrounds, especially in the Rust Belt where Clinton had been predicted to dominate. Trump won Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania by such razor-thin margins—less than a single percentage point in all three states—that a switch of just 77,000 votes in those states (out of 136 million votes cast nationally) would have thrown the election to Clinton.54

  As election night came to a close, President-elect Donald Trump appeared before his stunned supporters to make a surprise victory speech. He looked back over a “very, very hard-fought campaign” and looked ahead to what his presidency might bring. “Now it is time for America to bind the wounds of division—have to get together,” the president-elect asserted. “To all Republicans and Democrats and independents across this nation, I say it is time for us to come together as one united people.” Those lines had, by that point in time, become something of a ritual in the remarks of winning candidates, an acknowledgment that their rise to power had been marked by partisan passions and, often, much worse. The high hopes for reconciliation in such comments speak to the best elements of American political life. But the simple fact of its constant repetition—the endless insistence, election after election, year after year, decade after decade, that this is “the time for us to come together”—speaks to the worst.55