Trump’s Winning White House Bet

Donald Trump has thus become the first major-party nominee and first president to be without any experience in elected office, government, or the military. That is an incredible feat. What he did bring to his candidacy, overlooked by the string of opponents he bulldozed or humiliated along the way, was four decades of nonstop experience in the public eye that began with his first major real-estate deal, for New York’s Commodore Hotel (what became the Grand Hyatt) in the late 1970s.

Some of that experience was high-prestige (the many first-rate buildings you can walk into and see for yourself) and some of it was low-prestige (casinos, beauty pageants, boxing and wrestling productions). It added up to more practice in the spotlight than all of his rivals. And it’s clear now that this experience left him well equipped to run for president using a communications-based campaign against an opponent using an organization-based one.

We don’t know when Donald Trump decided he could seriously run for president. The turning point may have come during the heyday of The Apprentice. Somewhere along that ride on primetime television, Trump had an epiphany about the resonance of his newfound good will in an unexpected conversation with NBC’s corporate boss.

In a scene recounted in former New York Times television reporter Bill Carter’s book Desperate Networks, General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt called up Trump asking to meet him for the first time. The Trump Organization had a financing deal with GE Capital to develop a property on Park Avenue, and Trump assumed this was why Immelt had called.

The lazy argument about the show’s impact on his presidential candidacy is that it presented a stylized version of Trump through the lens of reality TV. The truth is that The Apprentice let America see what Trump was really like as a fully formed businessman—tough, decisive, and an aggressive but stable problem-solver. The Trump that people got on the campaign trail was the Trump they had seen for years on NBC. The media never moved off the eighties-era Spy magazine caricature of Trump as “the short-fingered vulgarian,” but the viewing public had been primed to see him as a leader, if the circumstances warranted it. In 2016 they did.

By the time he turned up alongside nine of his opponents in Cleveland at the first Republican debate in August 2015, it was clear that Trump knew how to wage an argument before the public. Behind his entertainer persona’s outbursts and discursions was a core set of concerns that answered why 70 percent of voters saw the country on the wrong track. Income inequality was real, the immigration system was in chaos, and the military had one hand tied behind its back. Strikingly unlike his competitors, Trump wouldn’t automatically agree that America’s best days were ahead. There was too much work to be done, and he seemed eager to roll up his sleeves.

Trump talked mostly in generalities and adjectives, but he could be more specific when he wanted to be. Common Core would go. The Federal Reserve needed to stop with easy money. Supreme Court picks would come from a list of conservative judges. For years, he had maintained an open-door policy at Trump Tower for Republicans, hearing out everyone from fellow presidential aspirant Rick Santorum to CEO-turned-senator David Perdue about where the country needed to go and how Democrats could be beaten. He paid a staffer to listen to talk radio to find out what issues people were calling about. Backstage at events, he was known to quietly ask everyday workers about their lives and their jobs. Trump’s populism wasn’t a stance; it was an informed point of view.

From his first day as a presidential candidate to his last, the media never wavered from the conclusion that he was patently unacceptable. Trump was a sideshow, then a dunce, then a lunatic, then Bill Cosby, and finally Barry Goldwater. It’s possible to imagine many other candidates who would have buckled and decided to pack it in under a similar torrent of criticism. But Trump would only fight back. In doing so he wove his issues into a siren call that the system—the media, the Democratic donors, the branches of government connected to special interests—was rigged. Or, as Trump’s top strategist Steve Bannon put it, “Elites have taken all the upside for themselves and pushed the downside to the working- and middle-class Americans.”

Trump asked voters for once-in-a-lifetime permission to blow up the modern American political superstructure and get back to basics. As Bannon said, “This is not the French Revolution. They destroyed the basic institutions of their society and changed their form of government. What Trump represents is a restoration—a restoration of true American capitalism and a revolution against state-sponsored socialism.”

Sensing the potency of this message, the media in the latter stages of the campaign shifted its day-to-day criticism of Trump to nonstop fact-checking. If Trump was wrong on basic statistics related to governing, the logic went, he would be seen as unqualified for high office. The networks ran Trump fact-checks on their news tickers. The media universe of Twitter became a space for reporters to test-run new ways to call Trump a buffoon.

In a recent Atlantic article on Trump’s ability to botch statistics on topics like unemployment and yet still resonate with voters, Salena Zito offered this pithy insight: “When he makes claims like this, the press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.”

Trump’s handicaps as a nonpolitician were forgiven because his seriousness about solving an urgent problem mattered more than the evidence he cited about the problem’s existence. This was the case for illegal immigration, ISIS, health care costs, and other public ills easily seen by voters but not taken so seriously by Democratic politicians.

As something of a closing argument, on Halloween, Peter Thiel gave a speech at the National Press Club explaining his support for Trump. It was a widely covered event since much of the press was stunned that a titan of Silicon Valley would go all-in for Trump ahead of a potential blowout election loss. Thiel tried to get them to understand why, in the face of the Access Hollywood tape and other Trump comments that drove up his unfavorable numbers, his candidacy was still appealing to so many Americans. As a contrarian with a history of many winning bets, Thiel was especially well suited to turning the Trump media clichés on their heads.

“No matter how crazy this election seems, it’s less crazy than the condition of our country,” Thiel said. “I don’t think the voters pull the lever in order to endorse a candidate’s flaws,” he went on later. “It is not a lack of judgment that leads Americans to vote for Trump; we are voting for Trump because we judge the leadership of our country to have failed.”

Thiel rattled through the areas where it had failed, from the financial crisis to Obamacare to college tuition to the trade deficit. “Now that someone different is in the running, someone who rejects the false reassuring stories that tell us everything is fine, his larger-than-life persona attracts a lot of attention. Nobody would suggest that Donald Trump is a humble man. But the big things he is right about amount to a much-needed dose of humility.”

There was some personal humility, too, if you looked for it. Trump spoke often of the debt he owed America. Outside of Wilkes-Barre, Pa., near the end of the Republican primaries he casually told the audience of 15,000 people that he worked all hours of the night “just like you people do.” The effusive gratitude he offered to supporters of his candidacy—there was never a speech where he wasn’t “so honored” by someone or some group’s support—registered as genuine.

In 17 months of frenetic campaigning, Trump trusted correctly that voters would reach their own conclusions about his candidacy and not accept the context handed down by Hillary Clinton and the media that they didn’t really have a choice at all.

Having dismissed Trump as a viable choice, Clinton chose to fill her campaign presentation with platitudes and activate the vaunted Democratic turnout machine. Her aides expected that the methods perfected during Obama’s two victories—microtargeting of voters, organized early voting, and granular logistical decisions informed by polling—would achieve the same success.

Jim Messina, who managed Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign, published a New York Times op-ed five days before the election about the importance of data. He reminded us that his campaign’s computers had predicted Obama’s electoral vote total on the dot at 332, and that the lack of parallel sophistication on the GOP side was a harbinger of defeat. He dismissed Trump’s ability even to know where he stood in the race because of his refusal to adopt the Democrats’ methods:

Did any of those targeted voters feel they had a personalized conversation with Hillary Clinton? Was it via a YouTube ad or an automated text message that the “conversation” took place? The only hint of discontent with the superficial nature of these tactics came from the last Democrat to have won before Obama. Bill Clinton was reportedly upset that the campaign was obsessed with turnout and organization at the expense of having a message like Trump had.

The hyperbole from Messina and other political technocrats about advanced techniques lulled Democrats into the belief that the campaign itself mattered more than the candidate. In turn, the political press spent much of the race contrasting Clinton’s operation with Trump’s and portraying the election as a proxy contest between two campaigns of wildly unequal size and ability. Framed this way, they saw no way Clinton could lose.

Trump, for his part, refused the technocratic view of politics that was pushed on him by most Republicans. He refused to inflate the size of his campaign. He refused to match Hillary Clinton on ad spending. He refused to build a proprietary ground game with the associated software and logistics. Trump refused the professionals’ narrative about Obama’s two winning campaigns because he believed Obama won by being Obama, and that Trump could win by being Trump.

Nor did Trump accept the related conventional wisdom that the only way for him to win was if the election was a referendum on Hillary Clinton. His second of three campaign managers, Paul Manafort, reportedly told his boss at the outset of the general election, “The best thing we can do is to have you move into a cave for the next four months. If you’re not on the campaign trail, the focus is on her, and we win. Whoever the focus is on will lose.”

Trump’s plan was always the exact opposite: grab the spotlight and keep it on himself. The media wrote this off as an uncontrollable vanity play. But Trump internalized something about his prospects of becoming president few others did: His unique claim on the White House required an aggressive sales pitch. He would have to tell voters why he wanted to be their president. There would be no such thing as Trump backing into victory as the default winner while Clinton suffered death by a thousand cuts.

This is why Trump’s strategy called for him to be anywhere and everywhere getting his message out and doing rapid response. When his aides wouldn’t let him sit for national TV interviews during the general election, he did more rallies. When his campaign ground to a halt as the nation heard his “locker room talk” in the leaked Access Hollywood tape, he brought Paula Jones, Juanita Broaddrick, and Kathleen Willey to the second debate two days later and sat them by his family. At the third debate he refused to say whether he would concede if the race were called against him on election night. At every opportunity to stand down, Trump insisted on competing.

In addition to fending off the pressure from the media and his own party to stand down, Trump had to mostly dismiss the polls in order to believe his strategy was successful. He never led in a single public poll in Wisconsin. He never led in Michigan or Pennsylvania (save for one survey in July) until the very last polls in each state taken by the same Republican firm (Trafalgar Group). The final Real Clear Politics polling average had Trump at 42 percent, five points off his popular vote share (Clinton finished two points above her final average). The exit polls were so bad that Frank Luntz at 3:43 p.m. on Election Day tweeted “Hillary Clinton will be the next President of the United States.”

It’s clear that there was a hidden Trump vote that enabled him to outperform his projections in most swing states and grab narrow wins in the three Blue Wall states mentioned above. The media shaming of Trump seems to have made some respondents reluctant to participate in a poll or willing to claim they were voting for someone else (Gary Johnson and Jill Stein together had almost 7 percent support in the Real Clear Politics final average and ended up getting around 4 percent of the vote). After two presidential elections in which the polling averages and the prognosticators got it right, respect for polling science has swung from high to low.

The same undressing is happening to the media, which didn’t realize until it was too late that America was getting The Apprentice version of Trump rather than the Spy version of Trump. If consumers were already cynical and distrustful of the media before the election results, it’s hard to see where the floor is on how far their respect falls. Trump’s victory may bring realignment not only to the political parties—toward a more working-class GOP and provincial Democratic party—but also the media landscape. This would mean a flattened media power structure, where the New York Times and mainline TV networks lose their long-held ability to influence coverage down through a hierarchy of outlets that look up to them.

The power of the media sits atop a long list of political sacred cows that Trump trampled on his way to the White House. These include: polling, punditry, ground games, technology, endorsements, political parties, money, ads, debates, the Clinton dynasty, the Bush dynasty, the Blue Wall, “The economy, stupid,” “All politics is local,” and the 2012 RNC “autopsy.”

If the professional conception of politics has been shattered, one can hope this will encourage more nonprofessionals to enter politics. That class of people may be better prepared than political careerists to lead because their opinions are not scripted for them. Whether they supported him or not, many people in this country who have the talent to lead may be less afraid to try to do so because of Donald Trump. He proved that what a candidate really needs is a connection with voters. The message that forges that connection can triumph over whatever else is said about it, especially by the media. ¨

Rich Danker is a Washington-based political consultant.