My
year with Trump: covering a curiosity that became a dark phenomenon
The
Republican’s long road to election day took in insults, adulation,
violence and outlandish claims as the press pack was progressively
corralled and vilified
Ben Jacobs in
Washington
Sunday 6 November
2016 14.00 GMT
In the beginning,
Donald Trump simply wouldn’t allow the press to eat cold meats from
the buffet.
Trump was holding a
house party in suburban New Hampshire in late June 2015. The main
event was around a backyard swimming pool under a fickle summer sky.
The family hosting
the presidential candidate had a 22-year-old son who was a Trump
superfan. He had somehow coaxed the candidate to appear at the
backyard event. Before the speech, there would be a reception for
invited guests with hors d’oeuvres stacked on the family’s dining
room table. But this was for invited guests only. Reporters, let
alone more plebeian Trump supporters, were not permitted to partake.
Otherwise, there
were no press pens as reporters stood intermingled in the crowd with
ardent Tea Partiers and curious onlookers there to see a television
celebrity who had somehow ended up in Bedford, New Hampshire, for the
evening.
Trump delivered a
long, winding monologue of the sort that would later become his
trademark as he veered from dire warnings about illegal immigrants to
praise for executives at Comcast and an extended and impassioned
anecdote about how professional politicians couldn’t recognize
low-quality highway guardrails.
The event, with more
than 200 people was one of the rare times that Trump attempted
anything approaching traditional retail politics. As he soared in the
polls, Trump became a phenomenon who packed arenas and stadiums
across much of the south. By September 2015, even the gesture of a
retail stop at a tailgate outside an Iowa v Iowa State football game
turned into a mob scene. The candidate was swarmed by people chanting
his name and reaching out to somehow touch him as a pack of
bodyguards protected Trump from getting too close to the masses
outside the stadium.
It was during this
period that the Guardian interviewed Trump in a New Hampshire hotel
conference room after he had addressed a non-partisan event designed
to focus on “problem solving”. He was gracious and soft-spoken if
vague on policy detail. He broadly endorsed several progressive
priorities like federal funding for police body cameras and rail
transit while striking his typical isolationist notes on foreign
policy. The interview was filmed and it was noteworthy how keenly
aware he was of the camera and how carefully he positioned himself
for it.
Instead, Trump
became a candidate of big venues and big speeches. Once or twice a
day in high school gyms or a convention center in Iowa or New
Hampshire, the Republican nominee would put on his show. By the
autumn of 2015, Trump had acquired secret service protection and all
the other accoutrements of a general election candidate, despite the
fact that he was a political novice who had never appeared on a
ballot. Reporters were caged in a press pen, unable to freely roam
and mingle with voters once the nominee was in the vicinity.
Trump supporters
jeer at protesters during a campaign rally in Burlington, Vermont, on
7 January. Photograph: Erin Siegal/Reuters
His campaign stops
became must-see events, especially in states where visits from
presidential candidates were rarities. Trump rallies seemed to
resemble rock concerts more than anything previously seen in
presidential politics. In a January 2016 rally in the Bernie Sanders
heartland of Burlington, Vermont, lines stretched for blocks in the
bitter cold as thousands of people congregated to see Trump in a
downtown theater. Many were taking their minds off the weather by
drinking steadily as they waited and the street was soon littered
with empty beer cans.
The atmosphere was
just as unusual inside the Trump rallies. The Republican candidate’s
events became ground zero for protests over a variety of issues,
ranging from his vehement anti-immigrant rhetoric to his advocacy of
a ban on Muslims entering the United States. In Burlington, a liberal
college town, Trump staffers were eagle-eyed at the door, requiring
attendees to take loyalty pledges to enter. That wasn’t enough to
stop the event from being repeatedly interrupted, with the candidate
urging: “Take him out. Get him out of here. Don’t give him his
coat!” as one heckler was ejected.
Repeated disruptions
became routine, along with actual outbreaks of violence. The
disturbing trend culminated in a cancelled rally in Chicago, which
descended into chaos. The candidate didn’t take the stage as the
venue in the heart of deep Democratic blue, ethnically diverse
Chicago was filled with protesters. When the announcement came that
Trump was not taking the stage, fights quickly broke out throughout
the arena. Such scenes of political violence had not been seen in
decades in the United States.
The next day,
Trump’s rally in Cleveland had about a dozen interruptions from
protesters, something which would have been astonishing had it
happened in any other year to any other candidate. Instead, there was
no violence and no attempt by Trump to encourage violence and it just
seemed like the new normal as he sneered at those who were escorted
out, claiming that they were sent by “our communist friend”,
Bernie Sanders.
But it wasn’t just
the crowds at Trump’s events, which were unusual. It was the
candidate’s rhetoric. On a daily basis, Trump made statements that
were just astonishing by any traditional standard, comparing a rival
to a child molester, or linking another’s father to a plot to kill
President Kennedy. In the course of a single day on the campaign
trail in South Carolina, Trump both attacked the pope and accused one
of the most decorated American soldiers in history of committing war
crimes. The statements had no effect on his standing in the polls and
he won a commanding victory only a few days later in the South
Carolina primary.
Trump finally
clinched the Republican nomination in early May when Ted Cruz dropped
out after the Indiana primary. His next event was a raucous rally in
a grim brutalist arena in Charleston, West Virginia. It had been
scheduled in advance of the state’s primary. Hours before it
started, the crowd outside formed a disorderly horde in red and white
Make America Great Again hats. Once Trump finally took the stage in
the dank 60s-era construction in the dilapidated downtown, he
strutted about the stage triumphantly, suggesting to attendees that
they didn’t need to bother to vote in the primary any more as he
boasted about his abiding love and affection for coal and coalminers.
In the weeks that
followed, there was no pivot to a general election. Instead, Trump
seemed nostalgic for the intra-Republican contest as he travelled the
length of California in advance of the state’s June primary, as
well as taking a bizarre trip to Scotland to see his golf course in
the aftermath of the Brexit referendum.
When Trump
officially became the nominee in July, it was at a convention in
Cleveland that was more banal than anyone could have imagined.
Although Trump had promised star-studded festivities and there were
fears that protests in the surrounding streets would rival the
dramatic scenes outside the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, it
was instead a grim, depressing slog.
In lieu of
celebrities, there was former Happy Days actor Scott Baio and,
instead of graceful concession speeches, former rival Ted Cruz urged
Republicans to “vote their conscience” in what was widely viewed
as a snub to Trump. Much of the effort seemed to be focused on
stopping anti-Trump rebels from forcing any vote or coming close to
any open display of dissatisfaction. No one had any illusions that
Trump could somehow be thwarted.
The nomination was
secured after more than a week of grinding procedural warfare replete
with the type of tactical chicanery that one would have expected from
smoke- not iPhone-filled rooms. Anti-Trump petitions mysteriously
disappeared, wavering delegates were subjected to intense pressure
and every available scrap of procedure was put to good use. For a
moment, he was just like any other candidate overseeing a political
organization.
Paul Manafort, the
shadowy veteran campaign aide who had finally elbowed out Trump’s
longtime campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, after an intense turf
war, oversaw all of these efforts. For his reward, he was
unceremoniously fired less than a month later after growing reports
of his ties to Russia and acrimony within the highest ranks of the
Trump campaign.
At that point, the
campaign came under the control of Steve Bannon, the editor of the
rightwing site Breitbart. Working in concert with veteran GOP
pollster Kellyanne Conway, Trump abandoned his unscripted rallies and
began using a teleprompter exclusively. He also hunkered down,
avoiding the media outside of deeply conservative talk radio and Fox
News.
In personal
unguarded interactions, Trump was genial with the press. When the
Guardian accompanied him on his personal plane in September as a pool
reporter, he chatted freely with handful of journalists who
accompanied him and went out of his way to be gracious. But these
were few and far between as the Republican nominee became
increasingly distant outside of his rallies and his omnipresent
Twitter account.
The rallies began to
take on darker tones. There was no more open violence or unruliness.
Protesters had become rare. Instead, they became venues for Trump to
share his rage over the “rigged system” and stir up an angry
crowd – against the media, against Hillary Clinton, against
“globalists” and a host of other villains.
Attendees showed up
in bitter T-shirts proclaiming that they were “deplorable” and
took up Trump’s invitation to deride reporters.
At one rally in
Cincinnati in October, the traveling press was booed by a crowd of
roughly 15,000 as it entered the arena.
Trump had stopped
trying to be a normal candidate but he was no longer being Trump. It
was a dark hybrid. He had lost much of the freewheeling joie de vivre
that had taken him to strange, albeit controversial places. Instead,
he had become a relatively coherent figure, articulating a clear
world view – but one that was deeply paranoid and out of the
mainstream, where the press was no longer a stalking horse but simply
the enemy.
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