Fever Swamp: A Journey Through the Strange Neverland of the 2016 Presidential Race
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291. For this reason, Russian hacking of emails caused the Clinton campaign real consternation—no one knew for sure what was out there.
292. They did—particularly Clinton’s three strong and assured debate performances. By the end of each debate it was Trump who seemed winded.
293. They swiftly appeared. A particularly clever version proclaimed les deplorables.
294. Substance still suffered. But this press conference was something of a watershed. Major media outlets like the Times, the Post, CNN, and MSNBC began labeling his lies as such, and there was more probing reportage of his character, behavior, and shallow grasp of issues. This was a salutory departure from the artificial strictures of “he said, she said” reporting where journalists passed on without comment whatever Trump said. But truthfully reporting Trump’s lies made the media his antagonist, feeding his claim that journalistic conspirators were rigging the election. Such were the unique difficulties of covering a behaviorally erratic candidate with no regard for truth.
295. But there hasn’t been nearly enough of this—and likely won’t be. One of the most prominent excuses comes from the public editor of the New York Times, Liz Spayd.
The media’s reluctance to critically examine Trump’s policy positions, she suggests, stems from the standards of objective journalism. Those who claim that the media is mired in “false equivalency” between Trump and Clinton are calling for “a partisan explanation passed off as factual judgment.” Thus the media should not be concerned that coverage of Clinton’s emails is excessive, lest they go down the “slippery slope” of covering the emails too little. In Spayd’s view, what critics “really want is for journalists to apply their own moral and ideological judgments to the candidates.”
Really? Or do they simply think that the media should be something more—and better—than a megaphone for unexamined claims on issues of the utmost public importance? Objectivity is different than vapidity.
296. Among the mistakes that I and other analysts made was underrating Trump’s ability to turn out his base without a conventional political machine. Another thing we missed was that the Obama coalition was not so much a Democratic property as it was the president’s personal property.
297. In the end, it appears that Clinton’s historically strong debate performances counted for less than the degree to which Comey’s letter amplified her preexisiting negatives.
298. This was a classic illustration that one can lose a debate—or worsen a defeat—after the debate is over. Sometimes it takes a while for the post-debate analysis to permeate the public consciousness. But here, again, Trump did something unique—by working overtime, he tuned a cringe-making debate moment into a rolling disaster, in the process dramatizing his imbalance.
299. In my first piece on Trump, I posited that old videos would start coming back to bite him. The pity is that we had to wait a year.
300. Again, for his followers the actual facts about Trump seem to barely matter. For them, he was an imaginary person, a larger-than-life character being smeared by vicious opponents. The dynamic began to partake of one of those bad summer movies about superheroes.
301. The second presidential debate occurred on Sunday, October 9, five days after the sole vice-presidential debate.
302. More videotape. But this one was truly historic. One could argue that, in its graphic immediacy, this was the most fateful political moment of 2016. At least until James Comey decided to write Congress.
303. Despite this, Trump carried Wisconsin in November.
304. In late August Khan’s father exacted his revenge: an ad in which he asked whether Trump would have allowed his immigrant son to come to America as a child. Clinton ran it in battleground states.
305. Some of his critics would not even commit to retaining Ryan as speaker.
306. After the videotape emerged, a number of Republican legislators retracted their endorsement of Trump. After his base erupted in fury, many retracted their retraction. The spectacle was too morally pathetic to evoke laughter. Given Trump’s sense of grievance and taste for reprisal, it will be interesting to see how he treats Republicans who were less than slavish in his defense.
307. In fact, the GOP carried Trump all the way to the White House. Given his nature, this is potentially more ruinous to the party than his candidacy threatened to be.
308. It will be harrowing to see how many of these possibilities come to be.
309. Five days before the election, Mother Jones reported that a former senior intelligence officer for a Western country working as an opposition research consultant had provided the FBI with information regarding a long-term Russian plan to co-opt and assist Trump. According to the article, the FBI thought the information credible enough to request the spy’s sources and further materials. As reported, among the spy’s more arresting assertions is that Russian intelligence had “compromised” Trump during his visits to Moscow and, therefore, could “blackmail him.” Whatever the truth of this, it is a fact that throughout the campaign Trump and his foreign policy advisers spoke positively about Putin, ignoring his brutality at home and abroad.
310. The flood of emails continued until the end, a blatant effort to assist Trump by damaging Clinton.
311. This particular irony—that Trump’s “defense” rested on calling himself a liar—went widely unremarked. This was yet another sign that Trump’s perpetual mendacity had dulled reportorial reflexes. In the same debate, Trump asserted that he did not know Vladimir Putin, having claimed months before that they had a cordial relationship. Again, hardly anyone blinked—exhausted, the press had stopped cataloguing the times where Trump identified his own lies.
312. It is impossible to know whether Trump would have conceded the election, let alone with anything like the grace that Clinton managed, or the civility with which Obama honored the tradition of an orderly transition of power.
313. For several days, the contrast between Clinton before the Comey letter and afterwards were striking. After becoming unusually upbeat and relaxed, she seemed to be grimly soldiering on. The letter had given Trump control of the narrative and a massive cudgel to beat her with. For a candidate who had entered the last days of the campaign with the wind at her back, this was a walking nightmare.
314. By this time, the Clinton campaign perceived that low turnout among the Obama coalition could be a real problem. Their hope was that deploying the Obamas themselves could lessen the shortfall.
315. For the Clinton campaign, turnout was an ever-increasing concern. A particular worry was that early voting revealed a falloff in turnout among African Americans—another reason for Obama’s hectic campaign schedule. The problem was exacerbated in the pivotal state of North Carolina by Republican efforts to strike residents of black areas from voter rolls, and to make early voting in those areas more difficult.
316. In yet another oddity, seven days before the election the FBI released documents related to its 2001 probe into Bill Clinton’s controversial pardon of fugitive financier Marc Rich. The reason for this curious timing was not immediately clear. Though the documents contained nothing of particular interest, their release deepened the sense among Clinton supporters that, in the words of David Axelrod, the FBI had become the “Federal Bureau of Intervention.”
317. I finished writing this piece one day before the election. On election day, propelled by the Latino vote, Clinton carried both Colorado and Nevada.
318. On election day, the Democrats lost the Senate contests in both Indiana and Missouri, as well as close races in Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. By a wider margin, Marco Rubio won in Florida. With these victories the GOP maintained control of the Senate.
319. In several states, the third-party votes exceeded the margin by which Trump beat Clinton. It is sheerly speculative to guess at where these votes would have gone between the two major party candidates and whether they would have made a difference in the outcome. But the risk of that was, quite obviously, very real—
as was the profound difference between Trump and Clinton.