Chasing Hillary

by Amy Chozick

  When Pat Healy interviewed Trump around that time and ran some of Hillary’s debate-prep techniques by him, Trump responded, “I don’t need to rehearse being human.”

  46

  Debate Hillary

  Long Island, New York, September 26, 2016

  The morning of the first general-election debate, I slept until eight. I did a hip-hop yoga class in a candlelit, one-hundred-degree room and then sat in Seward Park drinking the first of a half dozen iced coffees I’d ingest over the next twenty hours. Watching the elderly Chinese ladies doing tai chi in Seward Park always soothed me. I wanted to join in on their languid arm circles and ninja-like toe pivots, but I worried that I didn’t know the moves.

  A few weeks earlier I’d asked my friend and neighbor Martin Wilson, “How do they all know exactly what to do?”

  “It’s like the hokey pokey for them,” he said. “They just do.”

  Debate day was kind of like that. We had our own rhythms. It starts out quiet. Print reporters typically sleep in, work out, and indulge in a carb-heavy breakfast. By midday we are gaming out different scenarios and assembling a thousand words of “B matter,” the paragraphs of generic background that we can cut and paste into a story on deadline. (“A vast, plodding political machine surrounds her, insulates her and protects her. But Mrs. Clinton is at her most compelling—and sympathetic—when she is all alone, defending herself in these tense, hard-to-watch moments.”) Then comes an extended anticipatory period between 4:00 p.m. and the start of the debate, 8:00 or 9:00 p.m. This is when pizza or sub sandwiches arrive in the newsroom and we reach our limit of listening to cable TV pundits. Someone picks up the remote and yells, “Mind if I mute this?”

  As soon as the candidates walk on the stage, we do not speak. For the next ninety minutes there is only the occasional yell of “Did anybody get that line?” and “Can someone send me that exchange?”

  I arrived at Hofstra University nine hours before the debate started, which seemed a reasonable amount of time to check in and make sure the Wi-Fi worked. I found Hired Gun Guy looking telegenic in heavy foundation after an MSNBC hit.

  Reporters pounced. In my continued misreading of the scrum, I told him my hot-yoga predebate ritual and asked about Hillary’s. (I didn’t know Hillary’s debate-day rituals, but I did know something about her workouts. She’d said she does yoga “my own way.” I once asked if this type of yoga incorporated briefing books. A girlfriend talked her into trying P90X home videos, and Bill told me the previous summer, “Hillary has been working out—regimen in the morning six a.m. in the pool. I thought it was easy and she made me try it with her.”)

  “Did Hillary walk her dogs? Did she do yoga? Do she and Bill binge on blueberry pancakes as a debate-morning tradition?” I asked.

  “We’re not that kind of campaign,” Hired Gun Guy said.

  Hillary knew this was the biggest night of her career. “Somebody said to me, ‘Well, remember there’ll be a lot of people watching—a hundred million people watching. And sixty million will be paying attention to the campaign for the first time,’” Hillary said at a fund-raiser in East Hampton. (The press had been kept in a basement TV room and could hear her remarks through the ceiling.)

  Hillary was always so insecure after debates. Almost a year earlier, after the first primary debate in Vegas, when Sanders had declared that “the American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails,” Hillary had appeared so masterfully competent that she’d crushed Biden’s lifelong dream in two televised hours. She went backstage at the Wynn and asked her team, “How’d I do? Was I okay?” The Guys erupted, reassuring her all at once. “Are you kidding? That was unbelievable.”

  There was no real reason for Hillary to doubt herself. Aside from the time in 2007 when she gave a yes-no-maybe response to whether she supported giving driver’s licenses to undocumented immigrants, she almost always killed it.

  The debate is to Hillary what the handshake is to her husband, what the soaring oratory is to Obama. This preternatural gift went back to high school. A childhood friend, Ernie “Ricky” Ricketts, told me about the time Hillary, such a die-hard Goldwater girl that she wore a hat with the AuH2O logo, had to play LBJ in a mock debate of the 1964 presidential election. She protested but eventually pored over Johnson’s civil rights, foreign policy, and health-care positions and presented her case with such ardor that by college, she’d even convinced herself and became a Democrat. “Whenever we would say, ‘Well, who could speak up for this or that for us?’ It was always, ‘Well, let’s get Hillary to do that,’” Ricketts recalled.

  I’d covered her in more than thirty of them, and each time I watched her onstage, I felt something almost like pride. In 2007, she’d shown her biting wit, including joking that she was wearing an “asbestos” pantsuit. She mastered the art of playing the victim. (“Maybe we should ask Barack if he’s comfortable and needs another pillow,” she said in another 2008 primary debate, after Saturday Night Live portrayed a coddled Obama in a debate skit.) In New Hampshire, she’d earned the sympathy of women voters after the moderator asked about her likability problem. “Well, that hurts my feelings . . . but I’ll try to go on,” leading to Obama’s “You’re likable enough” quip.

  All of those debates seemed so inconsequential compared to this one. The first woman nominee on the general-election debate stage against a reality TV star renowned for misogyny.

  Karen Dunn, the petite lawyer and preeminent Democratic debate coach, gave Hillary a fist bump before she went onstage. She reminded her to smile, since viewers would see a split screen while Trump spoke. “I got this,” Hillary said.

  She was right. Hillary won the debate. Hillary won all three of the debates. After the final debate in Vegas, OG hugged Hillary and told her she was a “badass hombre.”

  I won’t bore you with all the details because in the end the debates didn’t matter. Our rituals, the Times’ and Hillary’s, our antiquated notion that voters would assess the candidates as we did, failed us. Competence, preparedness, policy. These were words the privileged used. Turned out a lot of people just wanted to blow shit up.

  The irony was that after the debate, Hillary, for the first time in months, had been cocky. There was none of her usual self-doubt and how’d-I-dos. She hugged aides and donor friends, financiers mostly. She told them that they didn’t need to worry anymore. “I will win this,” she said.

  She got the Republican nominee to admit he hadn’t paid federal income taxes (“That makes me smart.”), shimmied her shoulders (“Whoo! Okay!”) in a five-second burst of humanity that went viral, and dispensed the trove of opposition research she’d memorized with the sweet precision of a PEZ dispenser.

  But her favorite part of the debate—the moment when she knew she had him—came at the very end, when Trump was asked why he said Hillary didn’t have a “presidential look.”

  Trump squirmed out of it, pivoting to her lack of “stamina.” Hillary saw her opening.

  “One of the worst things he said was about a woman in a beauty contest. He loves beauty contests, supporting them and hanging around them,” she said. “And he called this woman ‘Miss Piggy.’ Then he called her ‘Miss Housekeeping’ because she was Latina. Donald, she has a name—”

  “Where did you find this? Where did you find this?” Trump said.

  “Her name is Alicia Machado.”

  Twenty-four hours later, her name was everywhere.

  Trump spent the next several days fat shaming Machado. “She gained a massive amount of weight and it was a real problem,” he told Fox News the morning after the debate.

  Brooklyn arranged a press conference call with Machado. They released a string of bilingual Machado-themed ads with footage of Trump dragging the curvaceous Venezuelan to the gym (“This is someone who likes to eat”) and sent out guidance so Democrats could blanket the airwaves with Machado talking points.

  We all agreed with Hillary that Trump must’ve been “unhinged” to keep t
he fight with Machado going. He was self-destructing. We’d taken his earlier declaration, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose voters,” as a cry for help. But it hadn’t been that at all.

  Each day that Trump handed Hillary ready-made attack ads too delicious for any candidate, especially one focused on women and Latinos, to pass up was another day Hillary didn’t talk about jobs or health care or debt-free college. Hillary dropped her promise to give voters something to vote for and not just against. Instead of ending her campaign talking about “opportunities for kids and fairness for families,” she campaigned with Machado, tweeted about Machado, talked about her at rallies (“I mean, really, who gets up at three in the morning to engage in a Twitter attack against a former Miss Universe?”).

  Hillary had consulted over two hundred academics and economists to help put together her campaign’s policy proposals. A year earlier, at the OTR drinks in New Hampshire, Hillary had berated our pea-size political brains for being uninterested in policy. Now, Trump had made her as devoid of substance as he was.

  By the fifth day of Machado-themed programming, the Travelers would say, “Donald, she has a name . . .” and someone would reply, “Her name is Miss Swing State Latina.”

  47

  How I Became an Unwitting Agent of Russian Intelligence

  You could define the beginning of the end as the point when the protagonist has to see that her actions mean something and that if they don’t work out right, she is well and truly fucked.

  —Julie Powell, Julie and Julia

  New York City, October 2016

  The moment you realize that without even knowing it, you’ve ended up on the wrong side of history. It’s dizzying. Months after the election, every time you hear the words “Russia” and “collude,” this realization will swirl in your head, enveloping everything. It will be the worst at night. You weren’t the only one, but it will sting you the most. And the strange thing is, it started just like any other day.

  Friday, October 7, 2016, at 12:15 p.m. Hurricane Matthew barreled up the western Atlantic toward Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas. Hillary took a break from debate prep to “discuss the storm’s trajectory” with the Department of Homeland Security secretary and FEMA. That’s what presidents do, and Hillary thought that if people could see what kind of president she would be, they’d vote for her.

  An hour earlier, the Washington Post’s David Fahrenthold picked up the phone. The voice on the other end asked if he’d be interested in taking a look at some previously unearthed footage of Trump in a 2005 Access Hollywood video.

  The Times newsroom had been quiet that afternoon. I’d fed a statement from the campaign (on background, from an aide) to the main story about the hurricane. “[She] noted her commitment to ensuring that FEMA has the tools and resources it needs to both prepare for and respond . . .”

  I needed to get out by 7:00 p.m. to meet Bobby for dinner and the Jason Isbell concert. My birthday had been a few weeks back. Bobby, after a couple of rocky years of odd gifts (a pair of platform sandals he bought at the local shoe repair), had finally adopted my family’s opulent observation of every birthday. On any other year, the tickets would’ve been the perfect gift—I adored the Alabama singer-songwriter. But when I opened the card, I anticipated marital calamity. I thanked him, fighting the urge to yell, “How could you buy me tickets for something A MONTH BEFORE THE ELECTION?” I prayed breaking news wouldn’t get in the way.

  The Post story hit at 4:15 p.m. I heard “Oh my God,” and “Oh God,” and “Jesus Christ” float from cubicle to cubicle until my largely agnostic newsroom sounded like a Sunday church choir. We were so paralyzed in disbelief watching the footage of the GOP nominee bragging about sexually assaulting women (“I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it, you can do anything,” Trump told Billy Bush. “Grab ’em by the pussy.”) that it took several minutes to set in that the Post had scooped us bigly.

  This is how men and women are different: The men in the newsroom popped out of their chairs. They discussed the implications of the video. They started scribbling skedlines—brief descriptions of upcoming stories—on Carolyn’s whiteboard. A story on the quick rebuke by the GOP Establishment. (“Is somebody calling Paul Ryan?”) What impact Pussygate would have on women voters. (“He just lost more than half the electorate, if he hadn’t already lost them.”) The pressure on Trump to drop out. (“There’s no way he can survive this.”)

  I stared into my screen, as frozen as the paused image of Trump and Bush stepping off the Access Hollywood bus, the unknowing actress in the fuchsia halter dress waiting to greet them. I thought of Hands Across America rubbing us down in Iowa. I thought of the senior Hillary for America field organizer in Brooklyn who’d harassed his assistant until she begged to be transferred to Colorado. Nobody said anything because Senior Field Organizer was a member of the “Mook Mafia.” And these things happen on campaigns . . .

  I was still in this haze at 4:32 p.m. when WikiLeaks tweeted, “RELEASE: The Podesta Emails,” along with a link to emails from Podesta’s Gmail account, including excerpts of Hillary’s Wall Street speeches.

  Fuck. 4:32 p.m. I had two and a half hours to read through thousands of pages of emails, try to confirm that they were legit, write a story, and answer my editors’ questions. Four hours, if I missed our dinner reservation, and I always missed our dinner reservation. I texted Bobby, “Sorry, some breaking news. Meet you at theater. Can’t wait!”

  Michael Barbaro and another colleague, Nick Confessore, jumped in to help. The three of us could’ve pulled off a story on Hillary’s paid speeches in time for dinner had it not been for the Russians.

  Earlier that afternoon US intelligence agencies said the Russians had been behind the DNC hack. “Earlier today, the US government removed any reasonable doubt that the Kremlin has weaponized WikiLeaks to meddle in our election and benefit Donald Trump’s candidacy,” the campaign said in a statement. The report confirmed what Brooklyn had been screaming about since Philadelphia—Putin was interfering in the election to hurt Hillary and help Trump. The report didn’t say anything about Podesta’s emails.

  At the same time, Clinton aides, Podesta haters mostly (and there were a lot), cautioned me not to believe the “Russia spin.” They said it could’ve been the Chinese. Or they asked how Podesta, a former White House adviser who had published a study on cybersecurity in 2014, could’ve used a Gmail account with no two-step verification. Maybe it was, as Trump said, “somebody sitting on their bed that weighs four hundred pounds.”

  But the campaign insisted the hack had been part of the same “sophisticated misinformation campaign” and warned us that the emails could’ve been “doctored.”

  I confirmed that the Wall Street speech excerpts were legit. I’d suspected they were. They sounded like Hillary, not the Hillary I heard on the trail, but the real Hillary, the one who charmed donors in the Hamptons and reassured a party in Martha’s Vineyard that the financial industry wasn’t the enemy. The one who was witty (advising Lloyd Blankfein, the Goldman Sachs CEO, that if he wanted to run for office, he should leave and “start running a soup kitchen somewhere.”). She was unencumbered by political correctness (saying the Dodd-Frank financial regulatory bill she lauded on the trail had been passed purely for “political reasons”).

  I remembered what Bernie asked Pete D’Alessandro when he first hired him in Iowa in 2015—“Do you understand my politics?”—and how I’d struggled to answer that question about Hillary. There in a January 25, 2016, email titled “HRC Paid Speeches,” sent by the campaign’s research director, Tony Carrk, as “flags” to Podesta et al. and leaked to the world via Julian Assange, was my answer.

  In 2014, Hillary said her lifestyle made her “kind of far removed” from the “growing sense of anxiety and even anger in the country over the feeling that the game is rigged.” She cited backroom deal making used by Abraham Lincoln and mused on the necessity o
f having “both a public and private position” on politically sensitive issues. In these speeches, she didn’t sound like a “progressive who likes to get things done,” but a smart, savvy technocrat at home among the global elite. Hillary lamented, “there is such a bias against people who have led successful and/or complicated lives.” She said, “My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders,” a comment (in the context of clean energy) that drew a couple more oh-my-Gods from the politics pod.

  We huddled with editors to discuss how to proceed. Hillary’s refusal to release the speeches had been such a cause célèbre in the primary that I regularly saw protesters holding signs that said i’d rather be at home reading your goldman sachs speeches. Now the juicy excerpts of the most sought-after trove of documents in the election had landed in our laps. But it wasn’t a scoop, more like a bank heist.

  I never told anyone this, but one time when I’d been visiting the Brooklyn campaign headquarters I found an iPhone in the ladies’ room. I wasn’t sure, but it seemed to belong to Podesta’s assistant because when I picked it up, a flood of calendar alerts for Podesta popped up. I placed it on the sink counter, went into the stall, came out, and washed my hands. I had the sense that someone was watching, like those kids in the famous experiment told not to eat the marshmallows. I left the phone sitting there, worried that if I turned it in, even touched it again, aides would think I had snooped. This seemed a violation that would at best get my invitation to the Brooklyn HQ rescinded and at worst get me booted off the beat for unethical behavior.