and an amusement park all rolled up into one.” NBC’s Seth Meyers said that “in a speech cobbled together from forwarded emails from your uncle, he let us know what he thought that America needed.” Despite leaving The Daily Show, Jon Stewart released a video calling the announcement speech “over a half-hour of the most beautifully ridiculous jibber-jabber ever to pour forth from the mouth” of a billionaire.
On Bloomberg TV’s With All Due Respect, co-host John Heilemann acknowledged that all this carried a whiff of elitism: “For the national press corps and other elites, Donald Trump’s campaign is a pure vanity exercise, and a target ripe for outright mockery, or low-level derision.”
Translation: Viewed through the eyes of his colleagues, only single-toothed welfare inbreds with second-grade educations could vote for Donald Trump.
The mockery and derision have never stopped. The media had to be dragged kicking and screaming to the realization that a large segment of Americans wasn’t listening to their chattering. In fact, these nonstop insult barrages were galvanizing his supporters.
We acknowledge that it would seem easy to dismiss Trump’s chances in the Republican primaries if you were looking at this through the lens of traditional electoral politics. He had never run for any political office and was certainly rough around the edges, to be kind. He was loud and obnoxious, the polar opposite of presidential timber. Pundits looked at the gravitas and experience, the fund-raising process and endless endorsements, and the brand names of candidates such as Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton and expected them to land the two nominations for those reasons. Indeed, these were foregone conclusions for most reporters. The “experts” were about to be exposed as dinosaurs, thoroughly out of touch with the American electorate.
On the first night, Trump’s announcement captured just four and a half minutes of airtime on the ABC, CBS, and NBC evening newscasts. NBC made Trump the third story. CBS waited until the sixth story. ABC made it the ninth item of the night.
To put that level of uninterest in its proper perspective, compare that with their coverage of the last president’s announcement. When Barack Hussein Obama announced his presidential bid on February 10, 2007, he too was an outsider without endorsements or branding, and he was registering just 18 percent in the polls, far behind the presumed nominee, Hillary. Yet the same reporters covered it as an inspirational moment in American history. He didn’t need to have a long résumé. In fact, he had no accomplishments. But he was black, a radical leftist, and charismatic, and so his self-narrated life story (including a memoir full of casual lies) was enough to qualify him as the next leader of the free world.
The day Obama announced, they went nuts for him.
Both ABC and NBC led their evening broadcasts with the Obama story even though it had been anticipated for months. CBS had scrapped its newscast, preferring to run sports instead, but its Saturday Early Show made up for it. They previewed it by devoting over nine minutes of “breaking news” time to Obama’s decision. It included Politico’s Mike Allen quipping, “Senator Obama has gotten such great publicity all his life that one of his friends joked to me that this morning, he’s throwing his halo into the ring.” So true. (And just imagine how Hillary must have responded to this coverage! No lamp in whatever room she was in was safe that night.)
Still, this was their dream, not their reality. She still had it in the bag. Shortly after that day we were in the green room at Fox preparing to do the Hannity show. Asked what chance Obama stood, former Clinton advisor Dick Morris echoed the media’s outlook on the 2008 presidential election outcome: “You conservatives are going to have to face reality. The next President of the United States of America will be Hillary Clinton.”
Democratic campaigns often are described in happy word pictures provided by “close friends” of the candidates. Liberals are awarded gold stars and twenty extra IQ points just for being liberals. They promise “hope” and “change” and never have to define what it means, knowing that their friends in the media will never call them out. But conservatives? They are presumed to be either evil or stupid and sometimes both. Anyone around in 1968, 1976, 1980, and 1984—the years Ronald Reagan ran for president—will remember that.
Donald Trump made it clear that his days as a liberal Democrat were behind him. Like Reagan, Trump declared he was now a conservative Republican. Now the leftist press was going to despise not just his personality but his policies, too.
Right off the bat they erupted over his comments about illegal immigrants from Mexico: “They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” In the first month of his campaign, ABC, CBS and NBC aired a combined thirty-one evening news stories discussing this comment ad nauseam. It would be so, one controversial statement after the next, throughout the campaign. Trump thoroughly controlled the news cycle.
Trump opponents on both sides of the partisan divide kept finding moments when they just knew his campaign would self-destruct. The opening speech about Mexico sending rapists. The statements that John McCain was a loser for getting captured in Vietnam. The presumed resistance to filling out any financial disclosure forms. Daring to withhold his tax returns. Pledging to suspend Muslim immigration to the United States. Slamming the federal judge who ordered the release of Trump Foundation documents as a “Mexican” when he was Mexican-American. Attacking grieving Muslim Gold Star parents who criticized him from the stage of the Democratic convention. Finally, there was the supposed silver bullet: the 2005 Billy Bush Access Hollywood tape, bragging about grabbing women.
Every misstep of the way they believed—hoped—he was a dead candidate walking, yet to their horror he seemed only to gain steam, with packed arenas and tens of thousands standing outside watching jumbotrons, roaring their approval along with millions doing the same thing at home. But it wasn’t just the maverick nature of this man and the unorthodox campaign he was running. It was the message. The press had no idea how powerfully it was resonating.
Missing the Revolution
The smartest people in the room believe their thumbs are pressed firmly on the pulse of the American public, but their world extends only across a tract of land along the Manhattan–Washington, D.C., corridor, along with some real estate in Beverly Hills. They were clueless as to the mood of an electorate in the real America that has lost its patience with the elites both in and out of government. This necessarily included them.
To understand the electorate in 2016 it is essential that one (re)read Angelo Codevilla’s “America’s Ruling Class—And the Perils of Revolution,” published by The American Spectator six years before. The 12,000-word essay was a masterpiece, read out loud by Rush Limbaugh to his millions of listeners. Codevilla presented an existential struggle for the future of America between what he dubbed the “ruling class” and the “country class.” It was prescient. Codevilla had perfectly described the opposing forces in the 2016 presidential campaign.
The ruling class is a fraternity whose membership includes those in a position of power over a population it views as less able—if not wholly unable—to handle its own affairs. “For our ruling class, America is a work in progress, just like the rest of the world, and they are the engineers.” The ruling class has no party affiliation. “Differences between Bushes, Clintons, and Obamas are of degrees, not kind,” the author wrote. “No prominent Republican challenge[s] the ruling class’s claim of superior insight, nor its denigration of the American people as irritable children who must learn their place. The Republican Party [does] not disparage the ruling class, because most of its officials are or would like to be part of it.”
On the other side of the coin is the country class with its “desire to get rid of rulers it regards inept and haughty. . . . The country class is convinced that big business, big government, and big finance are linked as never before and that ordinary people are more unequal than ever. . . . The country class actually believes that America’s ways are superior to the rest of the world’s, and regards most of mankind as less free, less prosperous, and less virtuous.”
Trump fundamentally understood the divide, and the billionaire chose to champion the country class. That