How Trump Won the White House: Did Obama Create Trump? (Ep 2)

0:06Hello and welcome to The Rest is Politics US and this special series that we are doing on how Trump won the White House in 2016, going back in history, having a little PTSD on both sides here as a reporter and as a campaign strategist. And this is episode two. And Anthony and I are going to look at the opposing side, because you remember, this was also an open primary process on the Democratic side. And there's an incredibly exciting race that was happening between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. And we're going to look at where they both stood at the beginning of this campaign. And then in the second half, we're going to take a quick look at the team that Trump created now that he's secured the nomination and discuss exactly what was his strategy for winning.

0:58Sorry to keep you waiting, complicated business. I am officially running for president of the United States. Run for president, but don't be the world's biggest jackass. Calls himself the candidate who speaks his mind, who tells the truth. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. So make America great again. Make America great again. You're never going to be president of the United States by insulting your way to the president. Let's see, I'm at 42 and you're at 3. There's an excellent chance of Donald Trump becoming the next president of the United States. I could shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose any voters.

1:35People need to take that very seriously. He's been my candidate from day one because he's not a politician. It's just awfully good that Donald Trump is not in charge in our country. Because you'd be in jail. Election day is here. People have talked about a miracle. I'm hearing about a nightmare. I'm so proud to call him the president of the United States because that's what's about to happen. In this half, we're going to look at the Democrats because this was an open primary on the Democratic side. Barack Obama had done his two terms in office, and now the Democrats also have to choose their candidate for the presidency.

2:12As we all know, Hillary Clinton ends up winning the Democratic nomination. But it's worth pointing out that there was a bitter fight in the Democratic Party between Hillary Clinton, who'd been the Secretary of State, and Bernie Sanders, who was the senator from Vermont. And in many ways, it felt to me reporting on this that Bernie Sanders, who described himself as a democratic socialist, very much on the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, fought for issues like income inequality. He wanted universal healthcare, which America doesn't have. He wanted free public college tuition. This was a big deal for him.

2:49He wanted free tertiary education for people, campaign finance reform to punish Wall Street and the big banks. And his campaign became incredibly popular with young American voters who felt disillusioned, who felt they'd been left behind, who didn't feel they had many opportunities. And the kind of paradox of it all was, there are two paradoxes. One was that Bernie Sanders was the most unlikely person to appeal to young voters. He was a grumpy old white guy. I mean, let's make no bones about it. He was a grumpy old white guy who got this army of Bernie supporters who would go around saying, feel the burn.

3:31And his rallies, they were just like, they were devotees. I remember my 30-year-old son in that election saying to me, Bernie Sanders is the one for us. Bernie Sanders is the one for young people. And the other paradox of him is that he's kind of saying the same things that Donald Trump is saying. He is a populist on the left in the way that Donald Trump is a populist on the right. He's not anti-immigrant. He's not nativist, although he doesn't do very well in the primaries with immigrant voters. He doesn't do very well with Hispanic voters, and he doesn't do particularly well with black voters, which was one of his big weaknesses.

4:07But in terms of class, if we're thinking of this as a class election, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, they're more similar than they might like to think, either of them. Well, I mean, listen, Corey Lewandowski used to go to Bernie Sanders rallies because he He said there was more or less the same people that were listening to the same grievance. And so here's the grievance quickly, Caddy. The grievance is we once lived in an aspirational blue collar America. And frankly, that's the America I grew up in. My dad was a crane operator, but he's going to work hard. He was going to have a living wage.

4:39The wages were going to be enough to sustain his children into college. And one of his children were to go on to live the American dream, if not all of them. Those very same people who were once economically aspirational have felt economically desperational now. And so I'm going to indict both parties with this. It was offshoring of the manufacturing. It was the signing of NAFTA where 65 ,000 factories left the United States. And all of these Rust Belt areas got hollowed out. And in comes Bernie Sanders with his message or Donald Trump with his message. You're the forgotten men and women of our country, and I'm here to be your advocate.

5:19I'm here to be the avatar for your anger. And so Trump and Sanders have things in common, more than they would like to admit. And of course, 12 % of the Sanders voters go on to vote for Donald Trump on election day of November of 2016. Which may have been a big problem for Hillary Clinton. So the democratic race kicks off. It's very exciting. And Hillary Clinton is the establishment candidate with a lot of money, an extraordinary infrastructure around the country. And I think all of our assumption, a bit like we'd assumed that Jeb Bush was going to be the candidate on the Republican side. We spoke about that in the last episode.

5:56Watching it, everyone assumed that Hillary Clinton was going to cruise to victory. But she goes into the Iowa caucuses. Hillary Clinton gets 49.8%. Bernie Sanders gets 49.6%. Some of the counties in Iowa, by the way, it was so close that they had to toss a coin to determine who was going to win. And then they go into the New Hampshire primary eight days later and Bernie Sanders absolutely crushes Hillary Clinton. And I think that was the first time we all woke up to the fact that he was going to be a real challenger to her and that they were going to have a battle on their hands. Clinton wins the next few primaries, sweeps into Super Tuesday, and it puts her in a good position, but then Hillary Clinton loses Michigan.

6:43I think that is a critical moment, not because of the primary, which Hillary Clinton goes on to wrap up, because of what it foretells about the November general election and that losing Michigan was going to be exactly as Donald Trump had predicted, he could smash the blue wall. And losing that Michigan primary to Bernie Sanders, I think was the first time we all kind of thought, wow, this is not just about this democratic primary, but there is something going on in these blue wall states that Hillary Clinton has not managed to capture. And so she kind of tries after that to move to the left, but it doesn't really work very well because it seems inauthentic.

7:25And I think that was, I don't know what it felt like from the campaign's point of view, watching Hillary Clinton try to reinvent herself in order to capture some of those Bernie Sanders magic, but it just seemed like she was almost willing to do anything to be president. Okay. So let me ask you a question, if you don't mind. Bill Clinton, is he a retail politician? Yes or no? Yes, absolutely. One of the best retail politicians America's had. Vice President Al Gore, retail politician? No. Okay. What about Jeb Bush, retail politician? No. Okay. But if I say Donald Trump, retail politician? Absolutely.

8:00Great with a crowd. Okay. And so you know right away in your mind when someone's connecting to people or not connecting to people. Again, you may not like their policies, but what Secretary Clinton did not have was she was over-calculating everything. Okay. One of the reasons why I've gotten in trouble my whole life is I undercalculate everything, Katty K. And I just say whatever the hell's on my mind. But she's overcalculating and she's over - We're working on that, Anthony, a little bit. We're working on that. We're getting there. That's why they team me up with you. Okay. I know you have a whistle in there somewhere.

8:35You're going to blow it on me at one point. But my point is she was so tight and that there was no opportunity for her to release anything. She could have been a great president, perhaps. She's certainly talented. She's very well qualified. She had an unbelievable resume. But you have to win the presidency to be president. And unfortunately, to win the presidency, you have to win over your fellow Americans. You have to be popular with them. And this is something that Barack Obama is not going to like, but I've heard he doesn't listen to our podcast. So I'm just going to tell you what it is. He created Donald Trump because he lit him up at the White House Correspondents' Dinner.

9:12And then he told Joe Biden, hey, man, you got to take a powder. I cut a deal with the Clintons in 2012 for their big time endorsement and their speeches at the convention. And I said I would support them. You got to take a powder. You can't run for president. And of course, Biden went on a 40-minute soliloquy in the Rose Garden, but he desperately wanted to go and run for president in 16. And perhaps he would have beat her in the primaries and slayed Donald Trump in 16, as opposed to waiting to 2020. So you have an unretailed politician running against a populist maverick. What a recipe. And at one point during the campaign, Joe Biden actually in public calls out the Clinton campaign for ignoring white working class voters, because what Hillary Clinton is trying to do is recreate the Obama coalition.

10:03She realizes that there is a working class problem. She tries to do these shifts to the left with some of her policy issues. She commits to being opposed to more trade agreements. She makes a commitment on the minimum wage to raise the minimum wage. She pushes for more expanded American healthcare. She speaks about bringing the banks in line. But the trouble is, it just doesn't ring true because those haven't been her policies beforehand. And what she's trying to do is get a lot of women to vote for her. And in some ways, being a woman and the first woman, she spoke about it a lot. She spoke about smashing the glass ceiling.

10:40She spoke about her daughter. She spoke about all the women who had come before her. And there was, to the extent that there was genuine excitement around Hillary Clinton, I think it was just this idea that she could be the first female president. It wasn't really about her necessarily. It was much more about America could take this step of having had a black president and then having a woman president. And I think the Clinton campaign's mistake was thinking that there was a linear progression in American society that would show that they had moved kind of to the left. They would elect a black president and the next thing they would do was elect a female president.

11:19Now, she would say that that was one of her biggest hurdles and that there was a lot of sexism in the campaign, which there was. I remember walking through Washington Reagan Airport going off on one of my campaign trips, and there were these nutcrackers in the shape of Hillary Clinton. They're selling this in the airport, the idea that she's a ball breaker, that somehow she's anti-feminine or that she's tough on men. And there was all these questions about her pantsuits and what she wore. I think in a way, weirdly, that was her campaign. So the fact that I had one on my bookcase, Is that something you would judge?

11:52I would never. I would never judge you. I didn't have one. I didn't have one of those. Of course you didn't have one. No, I remember the damn thing. Your wife would have divorced you if you'd had one. She was - Trust me, we came very close during the Trump days. Okay, trust me. Do you think that campaign with Bernie Sanders, the fact that it dragged on so long, much longer than Hillary thought it was going to do, and the nature of the campaign damaged her as a candidate ultimately? Yes, I do think that. And I think that she needed to do something that politicians hate to do. And that is she needed to bring him on board.

12:28And in 1980, Teddy Kennedy ran against the sitting president, Jimmy Carter, and he came close to beating him. And when it was time to bring Teddy Kennedy on board, Carter was willing to do it, but Teddy Kennedy wasn't willing to do it. And they sort of snubbed each other at the 1980 Democratic Convention, and it cost Jimmy Carter. And the same sort of thing happened to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. She couldn't find the right movement on the Rubik's Cube to get the colors to match up between her and Bernie Sanders, and a result of which she was hurt by that. And she didn't consolidate the Democratic Party to the extent she needed to, to win that election.

13:13It's worth also speaking about the Democratic National Convention, because I think this is where you really see the damage that the primary has done to her. So it's the end of July of 2016, and the Democrats hold their convention in Philadelphia. I went to that. And everybody is very excited on the establishment side of the Democratic Party because effectively, unlike in the Republican Party, the establishment has won, right? Hillary Clinton, ultimate establishment character. And in this case, she's won the nomination. But Bernie Sanders supporters, and I remember sitting there in the convention hall watching as there was all of this excitement about Hillary Clinton, as she walks out in a white pantsuit onto the stage on the last night of the convention to give her address and accept the nomination, white for women's suffragettes movement.

14:05So she's channeling all of that. There's a kind of, you know, I am a female president. She talks about the glass ceiling. But there are supporters of Bernie Sanders in the hall who turn their back on Hillary Clinton, on the nominee. And the visual image of that was a reminder, a kind of indication of, wow, there is trouble here. They're all excited about having their first female candidate. The establishment has won, but there is a big group of her. They hated Hillary Clinton almost with the same intensity that they hated Donald Trump. And I remember speaking to young voters in that campaign who said to me, it's a stitch up.

14:45They used backroom methods. They ignored our policies. They were radicals. They were very ideologically radical and they didn't feel that it had been fair. They didn't feel, and I think this was very important, that they didn't feel it would have been fair. And the reason they didn't feel it was fair was because a few days before that convention. WikiLeaks published emails from the Democratic National Committee, which made it seem like the DNC, which is meant to be impartial in the primaries and not weigh in on any candidate, it made it clear that the DNC had actually tipped the scales and they had been in favor of Hillary Clinton.

15:27Yeah. Didn't the DNC chair have to resign? I believe it was a woman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who was the congresswoman from Florida, had to resign because she had emails showed that she had been so critical of Bernie Sanders. And I think all of that strengthened the idea that it had been a fix and ultimately meant that although Hillary Clinton won the Democratic nomination, she was wounded in the process. Okay, we're going to take a break there. Join us after the break when we're going to discuss the Trump team and the strategy they implemented.

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17:36So let's dive into the Trump team, Anthony. He's secured the nomination and he starts building, has been building during the primary, a team around him. And I think it's worth looking at some of these characters because they are also going to dictate how he messages, how he does the strategy, how he uses Twitter, and how he manages to secure the White House. And one of the people I think that is worth looking at, you've spoken about Corey Lewandowski a bit in the last episode, but explain a little bit more his role in the campaign and how he was the sort of, he was the figure that Donald Trump really needed because he was kind of Donald Trump's yes man.

18:17He was the one that always said yes to him. Donald Trump didn't like having people say no to him. And Corey Lewandowski, who was a little bit of a sycophant from my point of view, but how important was he in building the strategy? So it's interesting. I guess maybe because I have a fondness for Corey, I don't see him as much as a sycophant as I saw him as somebody that knew the nature of his boss. And he had a job to do, which was to get the guy elected, which was going to help him with his political bona fides. But I get the point. As a journalist, I could see what you mean. But Corey was doing a lot of things right, but there was something going wrong between him and the family.

18:54And I don't know exactly what it was because I wasn't close enough to the campaign until I got in there in May. But there were sore feelings between the Trump children and Jared Kushner and Corey. And that strain led to Corey's ejection from the campaign. And he was replaced by Paul Manafort. This happened probably June-ish of maybe mid-May to June of 2016. And so what's interesting about all that is I didn't know these people. And so you have to imagine I come into the campaign. I meet with Donald Trump. We show him a PowerPoint presentation, which is the Romney fundraising strategy. I'm with Senator Scott Brown.

19:38And Trump says to me, do you want to be my campaign finance chair? and I look at him and I say, well, I'm hosting Wall Street Week for the Fox Business Channel. I don't want to be your campaign finance share. I'll have to give up that post. He then says to me, well, what about Steven Mnuchin? Do you know him? I said, yes, I know Steven well. We worked together at Goldman Sachs. He's a great guy. Yes, I did a hotel deal with him in Hawaii. I'm going to call him and make him my campaign finance share. Why is this important? because Steve is coming to play. He's a former Goldman Sachs partner. He's a hedge fund manager.

20:16He's a Hollywood movie producer. He's never really been in politics before, but him and Donald Trump get on with each other. They understand each other and Steve's coming to play. And so I meet with Steve with the Romney list and we're going to do our first fundraiser, which is late May in 2016. And why is this important? Because we're now trying to do the Romney thing. It doesn't work, by the way, Gaddy. We can get into that later. So, Corey's still on the campaign. He's been wounded by the kids. Steve enters as the campaign finance chair. I'm on the committee, which allows me to keep my job at Fox.

20:54And we're working, but Trump is nervous. He's been told by people he's got the nomination, but he may get bamboozled by the establishment Republicans at the convention. And that's how Paul Manafort ends up on the scene. So tell us a little bit about Paul Manafort, who had been a kind of lobbyist, political operative, gets brought in to replace Corey Lewandowski as campaign chair, manager of the campaign. What's his relationship with Donald Trump? I mean, I know it ends up trickily, but what was his relationship with Donald Trump at the time? And why did Donald think that Paul was the guy to run his campaign?

21:32So Donald Trump has this love affair, hate affair with Roger Stone. And for those people that are listening and who is Roger Stone, he's a very famous, hard knuckled, hardball political strategist, political consultant to campaigns for the Republican Party. He has always said that Donald Trump should run for office and Trump likes him and dislikes him. He's been fired by Trump and rehired by Trump probably six or seven times. This is why the Lewandowski situation is so interesting because it's like a revolving door with Trump. Roger Stone, by the way, famously loved Richard Nixon so much that he has a tattoo of him on his back.

22:17I don't know if he's added a tattoo of Donald Trump to that, but he's got a tattoo of Richard Nixon. I'm not sure, but I'm trying not to vomit during this episode. Anthony Scaramucci does not have a tattoo of Donald Trump. I don't have a Donald Trump tattoo. But by the way, I'm just trying to not think of Roger Stone with his shirt off, to be honest. But anyway, so to go back to the conversation, he has a lobbying in the 80s and 90s. It's Stone, Manafort and a few other people. So Trump knows Manafort. He knows Manafort through Stone. He also knows Manafort through Roy Cohn, his former attorney, who he says is his big mentor, who's sort of a ruthless guy.

22:58But Manafort doesn't have ruthless qualities like that. He's sort of more of a more subtle guy. He's a very well manicured guy. He's very well dressed. I meet him for the first time in the lobby of the 26th floor at Trump Tower. He says, Anthony, I see on TV. We start to commiserate a little bit. It turns out he's from an Italian American community in Connecticut. There's very large Italian American immigration up there. I think his last name was Manaforte. He shortened it and anglicized it to Manaforte. We get on quite well. He's now going to run the campaign. So we're starting to build the team around Donald Trump, but of course, there's one person that's missing, and that is the vice presidential pick.

23:40A very big moment for any campaign. It's when you reveal who you have chosen. There's a whole big debate about, do you choose somebody because they're going to win you a state? Do you choose somebody because they're going to win you a demographic group? All of these discussions are going on in the Trump campaign. And they decide on picking Mike Pence, who is the governor of Indiana. The polls had suggested that Donald Trump needed some support amongst the evangelical community, needed some support in the Midwest. And he went for Mike Pence, who is a conservative, very evangelical Christian, an important demographic group that he realized as part of his bid to win the presidency that he was going to have to get evangelicals with him, despite the fact that he'd been through multiple divorces, spoke about women in perhaps not the most polite way.

24:34So he chooses Mike Pence and he unveils him. He's not a particularly charismatic figure. He's definitely not somebody who's going to overshadow Donald Trump. He's anti-abortion. He's pro-gun rights. His career, by the way, in Indiana is not going terribly well, which may be one of the reasons why Mike Pence makes also the improbable decision to go with Donald Trump. I mean, these two characters are so different. And Mike Pence's wife, also very Christian, also very Midwest nice. And yet they kind of attach their wagon in the way that you've talked about during this series to Donald Trump, who is sort of the antithesis of everything they represent.

25:16And I remember the first time they come on stage together thinking, this does not look like a marriage made in heaven. These two people look like they've come from totally different backgrounds, which they have. They had totally different styles. But I guess from the campaign's point of view, when you were discussing who would be the best candidate, the decision was really just Mike Pence because of the evangelicals, because of the Midwest, because he had that kind of nice demeanor about him that perhaps Republicans who, as we said in the last episode, didn't like Donald Trump's character, could take some reassurance from Mike Pence.

25:50Is that why do you think they chose him? Yes, I do think that. And I would just add to this, there were three people that understood Donald Trump better than the other people, myself included. It was Mike Pence, Stephen Mnuchin, and Mike Pompeo. Mike Pompeo, who became the former Secretary of State, was a congressman at the time. He was CIA director, then he became Secretary of State. But why is this important? Those guys actually understood that they needed to be as far away from the Trump show as possible. Trump was a team of one. He was a one-man show. There are no second actors on stage. There are no accessory actors, no supporting roles.