1THE BEGINNING
The crowd wasn’t quite sure what to think.
Donald Trump, the unlikeliest major party presidential nominee in more than a century, had drawn several thousand people to the Greater Columbus Convention Center. They laughed at his jokes, they chanted “Lock Her Up!” about Hillary Clinton, they seemed to think Mexico might pay for a border wall. They did not expect to hear that the most basic and vital element of American democracy was a sham.
After suggesting that the process might be rigged, Trump declared that he had been hearing “more and more” that the election might not be contested fairly, though before elaborating further, he changed the subject to a tangent about one of his first real estate deals, in (somewhat) nearby Cincinnati.
He made his incendiary accusation after suggesting that the Democrats had fixed their primary system so Clinton could defeat Bernie Sanders, making some wild link to a batch of hacked emails from the national party that appeared to indicate a preference for the former secretary of state. But emails aside, Clinton had received 3.7 million more votes than Sanders nationwide and had established a clear lead in delegates months before her party’s convention, which had concluded just days earlier in Philadelphia.
This followed Trump’s own evidence-less claim that the Republican nomination would have been stolen from him had he not won by significant margins. Part of his pitch was that he was an outsider, someone who was not from Washington and not beholden to its traditions and informal and formal rules. He wielded that status as a weapon, and at times made it appear that he was running in opposition to the Republican Party as much as representing it.
He accused the GOP of plotting against him, with claims that the system was fixed against him becoming frequent catchphrases during low-water marks of his primary campaign, months earlier, first when he lost Iowa and then when forces allied with Republican rival Ted Cruz managed to pack state delegations with supporters of the Texas senator. He claimed that the whole thing was “rigged” and also asserted that the Republican Party had changed the delegate allocation in the Florida primary to favor a native candidate, like Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio, at Trump’s expense.
The celebrity businessman had long been known to dabble in conspiracy theories, including jump-starting his political career by falsely claiming that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States and then, incredibly, that Cruz’s father was hanging out with President John F. Kennedy’s assassin (he was not). But this was the first time Trump had asserted that November’s general election might not be on the up-and-up.
And it wasn’t just a slip of the tongue, a stray thought that crossed his lips, never to be uttered again. Those happened plenty. But veteran Trump watchers knew from hundreds of campaign rallies that if one of his sentiments played well with the crowd—the candidate, truly skilled in reading a room, liked to test material on the audience, like a comic workshopping a joke—it could then become part of his nightly routine.
And truly, his campaign was, at its heart, just one rally to the next: outside of a few core tenets (the nation’s trade deals were bad, its immigration system worse), there was very little in the way of political philosophy to Trump. The core goal was simply to seize attention, to get the crowd to cheer, to spawn a cable news chyron, to dominate Twitter, to own the libs.
And Trump stuck to this idea, repeating the charge that night on Fox News channel’s Hannity: “I’m telling you, November eighth, we’d better be careful, because that election is going to be rigged. And I hope the Republicans are watching closely or it’s going to be taken away from us.
“I’ve been hearing about it for a long time,” Trump continued. “And I just hope that there’s really—I hope the Republicans get out there and watch very closely because I think we are going to win this election.”
The host did not push back. They rarely did.
Trump’s lies did not remain confined to the rally stage. They needed life; they needed amplification. He did some of that himself, via his Twitter account, which was in the early stages of a five-year reign as the most potent political weapon on the planet, one that would rattle global capitals, leave political foes cowering in fear, and, at times, weigh in on pressing matters like the quality of Diet Coke. But he needed accomplices, he needed coconspirators, he needed a way to reach those who did not live their lives 140 characters at a time.
He needed cable news.
Every network was guilty of giving Trump too much time, including those without conservative leanings. He was a welcome guest on panel shows, even if conversations got contentious, and his rallies received wall-to-wall coverage, far more than any other Republican candidate. His rivals cried out that it was unfair, but the networks didn’t care. Trump was compelling TV; people couldn’t look away. Trump was ratings gold.
But it was conservative media, and Fox News in particular, with which Trump eventually formed a symbiotic relationship. It’s true that Rupert Murdoch, the head of News Corporation, which ran Fox News, was at first deeply skeptical of Trump. But the programming didn’t reflect that. In Fox, Trump had a huge platform: the number one cable channel in the country, and one on which he was never challenged. One that gave him free media and, often enough, regurgitated his lies.
Fox News became a wing of the Trump campaign. The celebrity maybe-billionaire called in at will to its morning show Fox & Friends and then later did the same with his prime-time pal Sean Hannity. As Trump took power, stations launched and rebranded themselves, catering to those for whom Fox News just wasn’t conservative enough. Newsmax and One America News Network (OAN) each grabbed a foothold with those on the Right and showed a willingness to parrot Trump’s lies.
And he lied a lot. He lied about his wealth. He lied about his sex life. He lied about how many times he was on the cover of Time magazine, hanging a fake on the walls of his New Jersey and Florida golf courses. He repeatedly claimed things that did not happen. He said Obama was born in Kenya, then falsely claimed that Hillary Clinton’s campaign team had started the “birther” movement that questioned Obama’s origins. He said he saw thousands of Muslims in New Jersey celebrate the collapse of the World Trade Center after the attacks on September 11, 2001. He said Russian president Vladimir Putin called him a “genius” when in fact Putin called him something like “colorful” or “bright.”
He lived in his own world and created his own reality. He refused to accept hard truths. He appeared to think that if he just said things over and over, he could will them into reality—and persuade his followers to believe them. At times, it was hard to know whether he knew he was lying or if he had somehow convinced himself of the alternate, and incorrect, reality.
Steve Bannon, the conservative provocateur who ran Breitbart News, took over the Trump campaign for its 2016 stretch run and then spent a tumultuous seven months inside the White House as the president’s chief strategist. A firebrand whose website would run sensational and at times offensive headlines, who derided the media as the “opposition party” but happily spoke off the record to reporters to help shape their stories, Bannon was not shy about coloring or shading the truth.
But even for Bannon, Trump was something new. The chief strategist told me that Trump “was not looking to win a news cycle, he was looking to win a news moment, a news second.” An at-times shell-shocked Bannon would relay to aides that “Trump would say anything, he would lie about anything to win that moment, to win whatever exchange he was having at that moment.” Entire campaign proposals had to be written on the fly, policy plans reverse engineered, teams of aides immediately mobilized to meet whatever floated through Trump’s head in that moment to defend his record, put down a reporter, or change a chyron on CNN.
A hurricane map had to be redrawn after the president made a mistake. A task force was created to fight an imaginary caravan of immigrants that was getting big play on Fox News. A commission was formed to look into whether illegal votes had cost him the popular vote.
And so much of it—so, so, so much of it—was to avoid the impression that Trump was wrong. Or, more dangerously, that he was a loser.
* * *
Donald John Trump hates losing. He hates the idea of appearing weak, hates that anyone might think he was not as rich/handsome/skinny/smart/successful/well-endowed as would be required to perpetuate the gold-plated Trump brand. He hated being laughed at.
His campaign was based on a central idea that the world was laughing at the United States, that the once-mighty and respected nation had fallen so steeply that it had become nothing but a global joke. “The world is laughing at us,” he said in May 2016. “They’re laughing at us, at our stupidity.”
Who was doing the laughing? It varied by the day, but it could be China or Mexico or the Arab League or OPEC or Vladimir Putin. His great fear was to be the subject of ridicule, which is why, aides would later say, one of his angriest moments in office was at the United Nations in September 2018 when, with typical hyperbole, he declared, “In less than two years, my administration has accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of our country.”
He drew audible laughter from the heads of state from around the world. Trump, taken aback, paused, and said, “Didn’t expect that reaction, but that’s okay,” and went ahead with his speech. He later screamed at his aides.
He couldn’t stand being bested; he always had to have an excuse at the ready. When Trump Tower was eclipsed as the tallest building in its section of Midtown Manhattan, he simply renumbered the floors in the elevator. The fifty-seventh floor became the sixty-seventh, the fifty-eighth-floor penthouse became the sixty-eighth, and so on. Voilà! The building had not grown an inch, but in the Trump Organization’s promotional materials, it suddenly was sixty-eight floors. Still the tallest.
When pundits roundly declared him the loser, to Hillary Clinton, of the first general election debate in September 2016, Trump was ready with an excuse: his microphone was not working properly. When he didn’t want his tax returns released for fear they would reveal that he was worth a lot less than he claimed—and potentially showcase the true sources of his wealth—he said the IRS had been auditing him for years (it wasn’t) and that he couldn’t release them (he could). He simply couldn’t publicly face the possibility of being defeated or shamed.
And maybe that’s all that day in Columbus was, some thought.
Copyright © 2022 by Jonathan Lemire
