They Always Wanted Trump

A set of tables stood where the bed should have been in the 12th-floor Manchester hotel room Hillary Clinton’s aides were using as a New Hampshire war room. It was February 6 and their candidate was 44 miles east, desperately trying to excite New Englanders at a Portsmouth rally after limping out of Iowa essentially tied against her challenger.

But New Hampshire was a lost cause, and her team knew it. So instead of watching Clinton deliver a speech, members of her senior team huddled around a television in the room that served as a home base for campaign chairman John Podesta, manager Robby Mook, chief strategist Joel Benenson and communications director Jennifer Palmieri. They watched, in shock, as the man they had feared most as Republican nominee tanked under an assault designed to boot him from the GOP primary race.

By the end of the night, the narrative was set: Marco Rubio had just lost it all on the debate stage across town from that Radisson hotel room, stuck in a robotic delivery of canned lines under Chris Christie's brutal cross-examination.
In Brooklyn headquarters, staff in the 11th-floor nerve center called the Nevada room broke into giddy laughter every time the increasingly desperate Rubio repeated himself. But back in Manchester, the new reality hit Clinton’s inner circle like a ton of bricks—there might be no one left who could stop Donald Trump from clinching the Republican nomination.

“When Rubio got taken out in New Hampshire on the debate stage, that was a moment when I said, ‘OK, this looks like it,’” said former New Hampshire Democratic Party Chair Kathy Sullivan. “He was the golden child at that point, and then was just destroyed.”
“That’s when I realized that there was something bigger going on,” added one of Clinton’s longtime friends and advisers who remembers watching in disbelief, feeling in the moment that the ground was shifting underneath the campaign. Trump “is a master manipulator and a master of the counterintuitive. He knows exactly how to get things done. It’s disgusting to watch. But it’s effective.”
Even with that view emerging so early in the contest (it would be 16 more weeks before Trump clinched his party’s nomination), Clinton’s team would struggle in the ensuing months to land on a strategy that would stick. Within days of that February GOP debate, Clinton’s aides started considering how to redraw the battleground map it had been relying on for well over a year, assessing Colorado’s and Virginia’s swing-state status and re-running the numbers on suburban white women and young Latinos. They would direct the Democrat to try out, and ditch, one campaign slogan after another. And as she finally wriggled out of the primary to face Trump, the strategy was still evolving, producing dramatic tactical shifts — from embracing disaffected Republicans to firing up liberals, from previewing an uplifting closing stretch to savaging Trump with an unprecedented television ad barrage.

“I asked a Clinton staffer about this,” said Sullivan, who around that time briefly went online to research Irish double-citizenship out of her revulsion with the Republican nominee-to-be. “He said, ‘Well, you know, now we have to save the republic.’"
It was a great paradox after nearly a year of virtual certainty—and outright enthusiasm—about their ultimate opponent that her team would swing between overconfidence, denial and disbelief as it struggled to concoct an electoral formula for stopping Trump.

It was supposed to be Jeb Bush, if you asked Democratic honchos in mid-2015, except when it was always supposed to be Scott Walker. Eventually, they insisted, it was always supposed to be Rubio.
But it was never supposed to be Trump.
Clinton circles' initial planning for Bush began even before Democrats’ wipeout in the 2014 midterms. In an October 31, 2014 memo, informal confidant and longtime friend Sidney Blumenthal mapped out a “CONFIDENTIAL” path for Clinton, which she then forwarded to aides Nick Merrill, Brynne Craig, Huma Abedin, Philippe Reines and Cheryl Mills, with the note: “Worth discussing elements.” Mills then forwarded the note to campaign manager-in-waiting Mook and Podesta.

“The Republican presidential campaign will begin on November 5th,” Blumenthal wrote. “If Jeb Bush doesn’t run, there is no viable establishment candidate. If he does run, he will be subjected to an unprecedented assault that might culminate in a splintered party, even a third party."
Around that time, an increasingly politically engaged Clinton started telling friends and political advisers that she expected something close to a classic battle about the economy against the Republican establishment’s choice.
Six months later, Clinton associates' wariness of Bush and his likely financial firepower was still acute: Democratic pollster Celinda Lake wrote to Clinton adviser Minyon Moore to warn her that she’d been testing Bush’s economic message for a client. “It has been remarkably strong. Getting even half of african americans and democrats and two thirds of latinos. Some thought it ended too harsh. But the perspective on the economy has really worked. Now we didn’t tell people this was from bush. But it’s a warning."

So to take Bush down, Clinton’s team drew up a plan to pump Trump up. Shortly after her kickoff, top aides organized a strategy call, whose agenda included a memo to the Democratic National Committee: “This memo is intended to outline the strategy and goals a potential Hillary Clinton presidential campaign would have regarding the 2016 Republican presidential field,” it read.
“The variety of candidates is a positive here, and many of the lesser known can serve as a cudgel to move the more established candidates further to the right. In this scenario, we don’t want to marginalize the more extreme candidates, but make them more ‘Pied Piper’ candidates who actually represent the mainstream of the Republican Party,” read the memo.

“Pied Piper candidates include, but aren’t limited to:
• Ted Cruz
• Donald Trump
• Ben Carson
We need to be elevating the Pied Piper candidates so that they are leaders of the pack and tell the press to [take] them seriously."

While the campaign also kept a close eye on Rubio, monitoring his announcement speech and tightly designing the tweeted responses to his moves, Clinton’s team in Brooklyn was delightedly puzzled by Trump’s shift into the pole position that July after attacking John McCain by declaring, “I like people who weren’t captured.”
Eleven days after those comments about McCain, Clinton aides sought to push the plan even further: An agenda item for top aides’ message planning meeting read, “How do we prevent Bush from bettering himself/how do we maximize Trump and others?"

They wouldn’t have to work very hard at it though; the debates were the beginning of the end for the candidate Clinton’s team always thought she would face on Election Day. The day after the first debate in August, Clinton confidante Neera Tanden emailed Podesta her analysis: “Bush sucked. I’m glad Hillary is obsessed with the one candidate who would be easiest to beat :) Besides Trump, of course.”
“Just like everybody, I thought this was a Bush against a Clinton, that’s all it was going to be,” said former Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle. “When I saw the first set of debates, I would turn them on in an entertainment mode to see what Donald’s going to say today. It was funny."

Clinton aides finally started to see Trump as more than a tool to destroy Bush. In fact, Mook took him so seriously that his team’s internal, if informal, guidance was to hold fire on Trump during the primary and resist the urge to distribute any of the opposition research the Democrats were scrambling to amass against him. That hoarding plan remained in place deep into 2016 as some senior aides stayed convinced that a race against Trump would be a dream for Clinton, but as others kept insisting on tweaking the long-term plans against Rubio and Cruz—convinced the GOP would ultimately coalesce around the Floridian.

Much of the original playbook was still intact: As late as the last week of October 2015, a private memo from Mook to top bundlers invoked Bush’s fundraising power. And it wasn’t until the December holiday season — when Cruz and Trump emerged as pack leaders, and Podesta was telling fundraisers in closed-door meetings that he thought the Texan would win—that the team realized it was not prepared, strategically or tactically, for what many saw as a dream scenario.
If Trump was going to stay competitive, a rethink would soon be needed.
Trump’s dominance of cable news had already become a point of frequent discussion among Clinton aides, led by Palmieri and media adviser Mandy Grunwald, and senior staffers started to whisper to each other that a race against Trump would require a fundamental rebudgeting of the ad scheme to combat it—another look at the expected degree of negativity in the attack plan, a reconsideration of the markets on which to focus, and a conversation about the amount of money needed to fund the air assault.

By Gabriel Debenedetti

November 07, 2016