But shortly afterward, the estate of the late Beatle George Harrison, who wrote the song, lodged an objection. The statement issued said the use of the tune by the Trump campaign was “offensive and against the wishes of the George Harrison estate.”
Given that American democracy is on display at both presidential conventions, that seems kind of petty.
In fact, it was kind of petty.
* * *
IT IS SHOWTIME, the main event. As thirty-two million Americans watch, Donald Trump kisses his daughter and approaches the microphone, an object he profoundly loves.
For the next seventy-five minutes, candidate Trump would ruminate, bloviate, holler, and promise. The National Public Radio correspondent described Trump’s speech this way:
Trump repeated a similar litany that re-created Nixon’s dark canvass. Then he blamed it all on Clinton, adding that he was sure President Obama was deeply sorry he had appointed her Secretary of State.
It probably does not matter that the president will say very much the opposite about her next week when Clinton is nominated by the Democrats in Philadelphia. In a world depicted in a Trump speech, fantastic assertions are far from an aberration.
For example, Trump repeatedly promised to solve the nation’s and the world’s thorniest problems quickly …
ISIS would be defeated … trade deals would be ripped up and renegotiated, and billions would flow into America to create jobs …
* * *
THAT REPORT SIMPLY reinforced the fact that NPR is not a fan of Mr. Trump, but its reporter, Ron Elving, deserves some attention even though sarcasm dominated his speech coverage. Let’s look at some of Elving’s “fantastic assertions.”
As I write these words, President Trump has been in office just over two years. In that time, ISIS has been largely defeated, applications for unemployment insurance are at a sixty-nine-year low, NAFTA and other trade deals have been renegotiated, and billions in corporate money have flowed back to the United States because of the Trump tax revision.
Facts can be annoying things. What say you, NPR?
That is not a partisan question. The fact is that NPR’s analysis of the Trump speech turned out to be shallow. So, should NPR acknowledge that?
After candidate Trump’s speech, many media outlets laced him as NPR did. The Washington Post, a charter member of the Hate Trump Club, called Trump’s words “relentlessly gloomy.”
Other detractors dubbed the speech “Mourning in America,” a pivot off Ronald Reagan’s hopeful ad that proclaimed “Morning in America.”
But Donald Trump does not care about any of that. He saw the folks, he heard the thunderous applause. Against heavy odds, his marketing campaign and fearless style were working. Now just one person stands in his way.
But that woman is just as determined as candidate Trump to win the presidency, and she has an army of supporters, including the powerful American media.
Once upon a time, even Donald Trump supported Hillary Clinton and, donated money to her senatorial campaign. But that was then.
As he boards his private jet to fly from Ohio to New York City, Donald Trump understands that he has to make new calculations. He must find a way to rattle his Democratic opponent, demoralize her as he has his GOP rivals.
But Hillary Clinton has been through hell and doesn’t fear Trump. In fact, she thinks he’s an amateur who can’t possibly defeat her.
Donald Trump certainly isn’t the slick Barack Obama who took away her minority support and made campaigning look easy while she struggled to relate to the folks. No, this is a real estate hustler with bad hair and a cheesy TV résumé; a casino operator who should be back in Atlantic City, where he belongs.
Triumph awaits Hillary Clinton. Everyone knows that.
Well, not quite everyone.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA
JULY 28, 2016
EVENING
Life is always complicated for Hillary Clinton. It’s as if there’s a thundercloud everywhere she goes. It is never easy, never calm. Turbulence is attached to her like a skin mole.
Mrs. Clinton’s résumé is beyond impressive: First Lady for eight years, senator from New York, secretary of state under President Obama. But in every situation, there has been unrelenting controversy. The only person in public life who comes close to Mrs. Clinton in the chaos category is a man named Donald Trump.
So, how did Hillary Diane Rodham, a brilliant but sheltered girl from Illinois, arrive at this point in life? Raised in a traditional family, she was once a “Goldwater Girl,” working for the far-right Arizona senator Barry Goldwater as he sought to defeat President Lyndon Johnson for the presidency in 1964. But then things quickly changed: Hillary packed up to attend the all-female Wellesley College, outside Boston, during the Vietnam War years. From there, it was on to Yale Law School, liberal politics, feminism, and a fellow traveler named Bill.
On this humid summer night, Hillary Clinton readies herself for her convention speech in Philadelphia. The month of July has been hellish for her. In particular, there has been more intense controversy about the “email scandal,” which has battered her throughout the primary campaign against socialist senator Bernie Sanders, a man she should easily have crushed.
But that did not happen, as Sanders defeated her badly in the first primary vote, New Hampshire, and then went on to win twenty-one other state primaries and caucuses, compiling 43.1 percent of the total votes cast. Once again, Hillary Clinton was forced to defend herself within her own party as the ghost of Barack Obama appeared to be standing beside Bernie Sanders.
The email thing again raised concerns about Mrs. Clinton’s honesty, an ongoing problem for her. Federal officials discovered that she had been using her personal server to conduct State Department business, some of it classified. But why would she do that?
Hillary Clinton could not put forth a cogent explanation—and presto! Yet another Clinton scandal enveloped the country.
In her debates with Bernie Sanders, candidate Clinton refused to explain or even discuss the email deal in detail. And the crusty Sanders, as we saw, allowed her to avoid the issue.
That was strange. The Republicans were kicking one another all over the place, but Bernie Sanders seemed tentative around Hillary Clinton. I have no answer other than the possibility that Sanders knew he was going to eventually lose: the superdelegates were in Clinton’s pocket, and he wanted to remain in good standing within the party.
The New Yorker put it this way: “Sanders saw Clinton as a clueless, corrupt, temporizing, muckraking member of the neoliberal elite; she saw him as unserious about the details of policy, reckless, self-righteous, swept up in his own sense of ideological purity and ‘not a Democrat.’”
Whatever they thought of each other, Sanders has hurt Clinton with younger Democratic voters. But the feds have hurt her more.
After press reports about Hillary’s emails, the FBI was tasked with investigating Mrs. Clinton’s alleged security breach, and on July 5, Director Comey held a rare press conference defining the problem:
Although we did not find clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of classified information, there is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handing of very sensitive, highly classified information.
Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.
Construction on the gallows instantly stopped.
One major problem, however.
Director Comey is not a prosecutor; he’s a cop. Attorney General Loretta Lynch should have been the one holding that press conference on behalf of the Justice Department. But since she had met strangely and privately with Bill Clinton in Arizona, Ms. Lynch was tainted.1
The clarification by Comey was highly unusual, and he acknowledged that he had ventured i
nto a legal gray area. However, he justified it by saying, “In this case, given the importance of the matter, I think unusual transparency is in order.”
Backstage at the Philly sports arena, Hillary Clinton well understands that she has not just dodged a bullet; she has avoided a drone strike, barely. Faced with potential federal charges, she put forth publicly the only explanation she had: that she used the private server as a matter of “convenience.”
Her detractors immediately rejected the Church Lady rationalization, verbally bludgeoning her and the FBI. Talk radio and Fox News ran full-time with the story for weeks.
But like Donald Trump in Cleveland, Hillary Clinton believes her supporters will stay with her no matter what. And the happy crowd now on the floor of the Wells Fargo Center reinforces that belief—despite another disaster two days before the convention began.
On July 23, an internet activist group called WikiLeaks posted twenty thousand emails hacked from Democrat National Committee officials. Some of the correspondence showed that the DNC chair, Florida congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, was working against Bernie Sanders when she should have been keeping neutral.
Schultz, a rabid partisan and Hillary supporter, was forced to resign just a few hours before the convention was set to begin, an unheard-of occurrence and one that totally obliterated the announcement that Virginia senator Tim Kaine would be the VP nominee.
Thus, WikiLeaks had an immediate impact on the presidential race. The shadowy organization began in Iceland ten years ago, run by an Australian named Julian Assange who, apparently, despises Hillary Clinton. In a private email, Assange stated, “We believe it would be much better for GOP to win … She [Clinton] is a bright, well connected, sadistic sociopath.”
Assange took a strong interest in Middle Eastern politics and objected to Mrs. Clinton’s behavior as secretary of state—at least, that was his reported rationale for attacking the DNC.
Still unknown to Hillary Clinton is the source of the hack. A few weeks from now, President Obama will be told by U.S. intelligence officials that Russians were involved in providing the stolen emails to WikiLeaks.
The president will not share that revelation with Hillary Clinton. We don’t know why.
Yet, even with all the July chaos swirling around, Mrs. Clinton has not lost focus. She remains disciplined and driven. She will not be denied the presidency again.
* * *
IT FALLS TO thirty-six-year-old Chelsea Clinton to introduce her mother, whose speech will close the Democratic National Convention. Like Ivanka Trump with her father, Chelsea is one of the few people in the world whom Hillary truly trusts. The mother of two young children, Chelsea is the calm Clinton, a woman of charity and thoughtfulness.
Hillary’s speechwriters have crafted a sixty-minute presentation for the candidate that emphasizes two themes: first, that Americans should come together for the “greater good”; and second, that Donald Trump is the devil, and the “greater good” is to smite him. Hard.
Chelsea’s setup is to portray her mother as Joan of Arc: “I’m voting for a fighter who never gives up, and who believes we can always do better when we come together and work together. I hope my children will someday be as proud of me as I am of my mom. I am so grateful to be her daughter.”
The introduction complete, Hillary Clinton takes the stage resplendent in a white pantsuit. Her TV audience will number around twenty-seven million, significant but smaller than that for the Trump speech.
Time magazine columnist Joe Klein, a pro-Democrat observer, wrote this about the speech:
The smartest thing about Hillary Clinton’s acceptance speech Thursday night was that she didn’t try to compete with the oratorical athletes who spoke before her during one of the most stirring weeks of speech-making I’ve ever witnessed. She couldn’t summon the passion of Michelle Obama and Joe Biden, so she didn’t try. She couldn’t summon the conversational brilliance of her husband or Barack Obama, either. She stayed within herself, solid, but showing flashes of her wicked humor at times.
I was in Philadelphia the same time Joe Klein was, and I have to say I did not “feel it” the way Klein did. Like the Republican Convention, the speeches were mostly predictable, and the “conversational brilliance” escaped me entirely.
But then again, I am a simple man.
Mr. Klein did signal his agenda in the column by writing “we’re not going to get flashy speeches from Hillary Clinton.… We saw what we’re going to get [in Philadelphia]—and considering the unthinkable alternative, that should suffice.”
But, of course, it did not suffice. And as Hillary Clinton left the arena stage, basking in the applause of her supporters and most in the media, there was doubt in some precincts—although not on the part of the political partisans or most in the national press, who were certain they had just seen the first woman president speaking this evening.
No, the doubt was harbored where the votes actually come from: the folks.
* * *
AS STATED EARLIER in these pages, it is journalistic fraud to try to psychoanalyze politicians or anyone else as part of news coverage (or even when writing a book). But in America, we see that disgraceful exercise on TV all the time. Trump is this, Hillary is that. You fill in the blanks.
I do not know Mrs. Clinton. I’ve been in her presence exactly twice.
I do know Donald Trump, though. We are not close friends, but we have an honest rapport.
So, in order to write about Donald Trump and the 2016 presidential campaign in a fair and perceptive way, I had to find some insightful material on Hillary. I did cover the campaign on a daily basis, but my observations on television were mostly about policy and tactics, and were not personal. And in the end, personal decided the Clinton-Trump race.
In 2000, Hillary Clinton was elected senator in New York State. Hoping to derail Mrs. Clinton before the vote, Peggy Noonan, a former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan, wrote a book entitled The Case Against Hillary Clinton.
The title, of course, defines Ms. Noonan’s view of her subject.
Subsequently, Peggy Noonan would become a columnist for the Wall Street Journal, where she now routinely criticizes Donald Trump, and has even done some witch-hunting in support of the gender prosecutors.
Ms. Noonan was brought up in Massapequa Park, on Long Island. In her book, she fantasizes about a conversation with one of her childhood friends, a real person, who is now married with three daughters, living a working-class life. Ms. Noonan is trying to convince her former schoolmate not to send Hillary Clinton to the Senate.
God, remember the Hillarys? The Hillarys would only be nice to us, would only look at us in the hall and say hello when they were running for senior council president. And then only because every vote counts. So, she’d actually talk to people like us, and I wish I could say we told her to drop dead but we didn’t, did we? We were a little honored, because we knew what she knew: She was a superior person.
You wanted a decent life, she wanted power. You made a marriage, she made a deal. You became a citizen, she became an operator; you became someone who contributes, she became someone who connives to tell contributors what to do and how to do it. She portrays herself as a victim, but she’s a victimizer.…
She has neither your class nor your courage. If you want a woman to represent your point of view, then you can find one in New York, which has plenty. Don’t fall for the one who only wants to use this place as a stirrup to climb onto a horse called the presidency.
She doesn’t know your concerns, and she doesn’t share them, either. She is not like you. She was never like you.
* * *
HARSH. “NOT LIKE you,” “never like you.”
Written about sixteen years before Hillary Clinton’s triumphant night in Philadelphia, leading to the final push for the White House.
It’s almost haunting.
CHAPTER THIRTY
NEW YORK CITY
AUGUST 22, 2016
MIDDAY
“Donald Trump is a racist.” That’s the theme in the national news again today, after candidate Trump reiterated that, if elected president, he will “round up” the “bad” undocumented aliens and ship them out of the country “so fast your head will spin.”
Well, as I am looking at research in my office on Sixth Avenue, my head is rotating somewhat. The press knows that in seventy-eight days, Donald Trump may be elected president, and that must not happen.
So, the national media narrative is this: Trump hates blacks, Hispanics, and Muslims.
Blacks because of the Obama birth certificate thing.
Hispanics because the candidate staunchly opposes illegal immigration from Mexico.
And Muslims because Donald Trump is calling for a freeze on immigration and refugee acceptance from “terror-prone regions.”
Having spoken in detail with Donald Trump about all these issues, here’s what he really believes when you strip away his overstatements designed to fire up voters.
The “birther” thing was a political tactic to curry favor with anti-Obama voters. Trump could not have cared less about the facts surrounding the president’s birth. He simply signed on to a foolish conspiracy theory in order to get attention. It was divisive politics, not skin color.
Illegal immigration bothers President Trump on a number of levels. He is a “law and order” guy and sees the failure to control the southern border as weakness in apathetic politicians. He believes immigration anarchy harms the country.
On the Muslim issue, Donald Trump is not sympathetic to that religion’s culture. He is deeply offended that the Muslim world has not risen up en masse against jihad. As a New Yorker, he took 9/11 very personally and does not believe it benefits the nation to accept many Muslim immigrants. It’s not about ethnicity for Mr. Trump; it’s about the soft reaction to terrorism in the Islamic world.
The United States of Trump Page 17
