6

The Donald Trump Show

Trump Tower, that totem of the ’80s, now became an emblem of America’s broken politics. The home of the billionaire’s campaign headquarters. A venue for his victory parties, as he accumulated the delegates needed to win the Republican presidential nomination. The place he slept most nights during primary season, wherever he ended up on the trail, to spare him the encumbrance of having to stay in the states he was trying to court.

The 2016 election was supposed to be a dynastic duel between the Clintons and the Bushes, families resident in the White House for 20 of the previous 28 years. But rather than watching a restoration, we bore witness to a revolution, an insurrection that had been decades in the making – not that we understood that in the moment.

Covering this bacchanal was not unlike making a first-time visit to the Indian subcontinent, with its sensory overload, roiling chaos and bundle of contradictions: the Manhattan tycoon who became a working-class hero; the candidate maligned as a New York conman whose appeal was based on his authenticity; the feminist trailblazer rejected by a majority of white female voters. So ugly was the race that even seasoned correspondents could be forgiven for suffering from a reverse form of the Stendhal syndrome, a psychosomatic response to being exposed to great beauty that can bring on confusion and even hallucinations.

Much of it felt like tripping on political acid, whether it was that victory party at the Trump National Golf Club during primary season when the candidate-cum-impresario appeared alongside a table piled high with Trump wine, Trump steaks and Trump natural spring water; or the moment he accused Ted Cruz’s Cuban-born father of being involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy; or his rally in Birmingham, Alabama, when he claimed, speciously, to have seen footage on 9/11 of ‘thousands and thousands’ of Muslims in New Jersey cheering the destruction of the Twin Towers; or the televised debate where he reassured voters about the size of his appendage. If Hunter S. Thompson, the gonzo journalist who covered Nixon’s campaigns through a drug-fuelled haze, had still been alive, he surely would have wondered what he had imbibed.

As well as saturating the media, Trump near-monopolised our minds and memories. Almost all my most vivid recollections from 2016 involve his candidacy, whether it was the site of the snaking queues outside his campaign events, which were made up not just of pot-bellied rednecks wearing ‘Lock Her Up’ T-shirts but also suburban Starbucks moms, some dressed in Lululemon yoga pants, with their lipstick-stained caffè mochas in one hand and young daughters in the other. Or the raucousness of his stadium rallies, where chants of ‘USA, USA’ and ‘Build the Wall’ were interspersed with ‘Nessun Dorma’ sung by Pavarotti and the candidate repeatedly purring the word ‘boootiful’ – which, when overlaid, sounded unnervingly orgasmic. Or the look on Melania Trump’s face on the night before his victory in New Hampshire, when she followed him into the lobby of the Best Western Hotel in Manchester, where the guest rooms came with their own microwave and the breakfast area had two self-service waffle machines, an orange-juice dispenser and small sachets of Rice Krispies. Usually when a candidate is in the same budget hotel as reporters from the BBC – I was staying on the same floor, three doors away – it is a sign of their imminent demise. So here was another iron-clad rule that was about to be shattered.

From his golden escalator descent in June 2015 until Election Day in November 2016, I confess to committing most of the same analytical mistakes as my press-pack colleagues. Of thinking that launching his campaign with an attack on Mexican immigrants was suicidal when the Republican Party faced a demographic death spiral. Of viewing his attack on John McCain’s heroism – which also doubled as an assault on what had long been universally accepted views about American goodness and virtue – as an act of terminal self-harm. Of predicting female voters would never back a misogynist beauty-pageant owner who scored women out of ten and who seemed to regret not being able to date his eldest daughter. Of believing right-wing evangelicals would find it morally complicated, if not sacrilegious, to back a thrice-married former casino owner who had appeared on the front cover of Playboy – 81 per cent of evangelicals ended up voting for him. Of assuming his puerile nicknames – Little Marco, Lyin’ Ted, Crooked Hillary – would be self-belittling. Of predicting suburban soccer moms worried about school shootings would reject a candidate who suggested ‘Second Amendment people’ could take matters into their own hands if Hillary Clinton won the election. Of thinking polite, Rotary Club Republicans, who watch their kids play football on Friday night and attend Episcopalian church on Sunday morning, would turn up their noses at a rogue candidate who instructed rally-goers, ‘If you see someone getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of them. I’ll pay the legal bills.’ To many of his supporters this aggression, which borrowed from the WrestleMania bouts he used to stage in Atlantic City, was appealing. It spoke of the destructive energy he promised to bring to Washington.

What to the Beltway commentariat seemed disbarring were unique selling points to his growing army of red-capped supporters. His xenophobia and racist slurs were seductive to the 72 per cent of supporters who believed the American way of life had changed for the worse since the civil rights era. His birtherism appealed to the 58 per cent of Republicans who believed Barack Obama was born outside of the United States or weren’t entirely sure.¹ Attacking John McCain endeared him to movement conservatives unwilling to stomach yet another establishment pick as their presidential nominee.

Evangelical Christians saw in Trump a fellow victim of elite sneering, and thus showed forgiveness when he referred to ‘Two Corinthians’ rather than ‘Second Corinthians’, and confessed the Bible was only his second favourite book after The Art of the Deal. To those who railed against political correctness, his sophomoric nicknames doubled as a poke in the eye for pious liberals. Trump bestowed respectability on their darkest innermost thoughts, which now they could express openly and unapologetically. The unsayable had become sayable.

As for his misogyny, it was not just acceptable for many of his male supporters but enviable. If only they could lurk behind the scenes at beauty pageants in the hope of catching an eyeful of nubile young flesh, or have bedded enough silicone-implanted supermodels to grade them out of ten or be in a position to tell a onetime Playboy playmate, as he did on Celebrity Apprentice, ‘Must be a pretty picture, you dropping to your knees.’

Many veterans also seemed unperturbed about voting for a draft-dodger who described surviving AIDS-hit New York as his personal Vietnam, because he spoke of ‘bombing the shit’ out of ISIS and disentangling US forces from unending wars. The conventional wisdom deemed Trump to be too unconventional. But that, of course, was precisely what his supporters craved. Perversely, there was an underlying brilliance to all that he did.

Conservatives troubled by Trump’s excesses managed to rationalise their support for him. America needed a businessman in charge. Broken Washington required an outsider to fix it. Trump might be bad, but he was better than Hillary Clinton. He wasn’t truly a racist, but made racist remarks to gin up his base. As his statements became more outlandish and his behaviour more erratic, Trump became the beneficiary of his own vicious circle. The more he was criticised by the liberal media, the more it confirmed his renegade status. The more renegade he became, the more coverage and social-media comment he generated. And the more coverage he received, the higher he soared in the polls.

His grotesque boast that ‘I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters’ was one of his most insightful statements during the campaign, and also his most honest. As the right-wing firebrand Ann Coulter rightly observed, ‘There’s nothing Trump can do that won’t be forgiven, except change his immigration policies.’²

Even after the surrealism of his early candidacy turned into a string of primary victories, our diagnostic errors continued. When he called for a ban on every Muslim trying to enter the country, most of us continued to prophesy there simply were not enough angry white male voters to reward this kind of racial demagoguery with victory. ‘It’s the demography, stupid,’ I wrote at the time, believing a nationalised version of the southern strategy was no longer viable. Progress begets progress, a Whiggish interpretation of the liberal flow of history premised on the first black president being followed into office by the first female president, was another flawed assumption.

The cliché of Trump’s primary-season success, that the billionaire had mounted a hostile takeover of the Republican Party, was also incorrect. While there was no shortage of Never Trumpers, it was more like a merger and acquisition, with shareholder support and buy-in from a large portion of the customer base. The Republican Party’s main media partner, Fox News, was on board.

We also kept on referring to the ‘Republican establishment’ as if it had citadel-like resilience. By 2016, however, the establishment was a ruined castle, with heirs to the throne exiles in their ancestral land. Jeb Bush could not even persuade his mother, Barbara, that yet another member of their dynasty deserved to be president. Other conventional Republicans, such as Scott Walker, the Governor of Wisconsin, Chris Christie, the Governor of New Jersey, John Kasich, the Governor of Ohio, and the Florida Senator Marco Rubio were quickly slain – spear-carriers up against a Gatling gun. Back in 1992 and 1996, the party leadership had been strong enough to rebuff Pat Buchanan. By 2016, it was easy for Donald Trump to breach its feeble defences. Tellingly, Ted Cruz put up the most resistance, an anti-establishment candidate who in the later primaries became the great white hope of the Never Trumpers. Nothing better illustrated the pitiful state of the GOP establishment than Cruz emerging as its potential saviour. Yet in a party that often felt more like a protest movement against Barack Obama, there was logic in nominating the untitled head of the Birther Movement. An anti-Obama party opted for the most anti-Obama candidate.

Whatever the year, whoever were the candidates, reporting on the US primary season always felt like entering the gates of a journalistic theme park and roaming its varying sectors with a notebook in one hand and popcorn in the other. Caucus-land in Iowa, with its snow-covered plains and Midwestern manners; Live-Free-or-Die-land in New Hampshire, with its white-steepled churches and ever so cranky voters; and Confederacy-land in South Carolina, with its barbeque, black churches and Stars and Bars flags.

To make sense of 2016, though, one had to visit the Old Industrial Heartland. Some Beltway commentators made do with reading the bestselling field guide, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, J. D. Vance’s memoir, with its first-hand account of white working-class despondency and self-pity.

‘We talk about the value of hard work,’ Vance wrote of his fellow Appalachians, ‘but tell ourselves that the reason we are not working is some perceived unfairness: Obama shut down the coal mines, or all of the jobs went to the Chinese.’ To see the book come to life, all one had to do was fly to Pittsburgh and then drive out to the neighbouring valleys, with their onion-domed Russian orthodox churches, Veterans of Foreign Wars halls and windowless bars – the landscape of The Deer Hunter. The most relevant local landmarks were the skeletal remains of the old steelworks, with their carcass-like furnaces, and the empty shells of derelict factories that now served as echo chambers for the rallying cry ‘Make America Great Again’. From 2001 to 2013, some 65,000 factories had closed across the country with the loss of five million manufacturing jobs.³ These post-industrial landscapes provided the seedbed of Trump-land. He was a beneficiary of a malfunctioning economy where all but 200,000 of the 11.6 million ‘good’ jobs created since the Great Recession had gone to those with a bachelor’s degree or some college education.⁴

What the billionaire told these communities aligned with their internal dialogue: politicians had sold them down the river by signing destructive trade deals; greedy corporations had betrayed them by shipping jobs abroad; cosmopolitan elites, with their sissy creed of political correctness, threatened their working-class culture; immigrants posed a threat to their national security, neighbourhood security and economic security.

Nobody in Washington cared about the opioid crisis, or understood how it had ravaged their communities. Soon we came to realise the number of discarded syringes scattered in the gutters was as accurate a political barometer of a community’s allegiance as campaign posters in the windows or placards in the yards.

Trump possessed the great skill of populists and demagogues down the ages: to articulate the fears and prejudices of voters better than they could themselves, and also to offer simplistic solutions. Bomb the shit out of ISIS. End endless wars. Build new barricades, whether it was a fortified wall along the entirety of the Mexican border or protectionist trade barriers to guard against China. His manifesto could be summed up in two slogans comprised of seven words: ‘Make America Great Again’ and ‘Build the Wall’. Nobody better gave voice to the feelings of white resentment than this adroit sloganeer.

In Braddock, Pennsylvania, where a derelict steelworks was now an industrial heritage site, the curator laughingly offered to show us the magic switch Donald Trump planned to flick the moment he became president, which miraculously would bring back tens of thousands of lost jobs. Blue-collar voters, though, were not naïve enough to look upon him as a miracle worker who could magically turn back time. But Trump made them feel seen and heard. The former Republican staffer Salena Zito put it best when she wrote in The Atlantic, ‘The press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.’⁵

To fight their class and cultural war, these hollowed-out communities co-opted a New York billionaire, a ‘bridge and tunnel’ guy from the outer boroughs who had always been mocked by Manhattan’s elites. Trump intermixed the politics of grievance with the politics of vengeance, which is why the ‘Lock Her Up’ chant directed against Hillary Clinton became so popular. Trump wasn’t so much aspirational as avenging: a vigilante candidate. He promised to settle a few scores with the political elites, China and immigrants.

Tellingly, he had nothing to say about the real job-killer: automation. From 2006 to 2013, it was estimated that trade accounted for the extinction of 13 per cent of manufacturing jobs. Robots and other factors at home killed off 88 per cent of these jobs.⁶ It was easier to scapegoat NAFTA, China and Mexican immigrants, and to stoke the nostalgic nationalism that was central to his appeal. Trump was the main beneficiary of a Rust Belt revolt against robots.

Back in 2008, Barack Obama had been pilloried for describing the resentment felt in these communities. By 2016, his words sounded prophetic. ‘You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. Each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it’s not surprising that they got bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them, or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment to explain their frustrations.’ Now they were clinging to Donald Trump.

As well as visiting the Rust Belt, it was necessary to cast an eye overseas, something a self-absorbed US media failed repeatedly to do. For while Trump was an American original, his rise could hardly be described as a uniquely American phenomenon. Trumpism was part of a larger worldwide malaise, as the global economic downturn was followed by a global democratic downturn. As early as 2013, a United Nations report found that growing income inequality was responsible for growing political instability. The following year, when Pew Research conducted a survey in 44 countries about the greatest dangers facing the world, Americans ranked inequality at the top.⁷

The sense of economic vulnerability was exacerbated by fears that predominant cultures were under assault, that multiculturalism was eroding national identity, that sovereignty was imperilled. Concerns about unchecked immigration that peaked during the refugee crisis in 2015 combined the two. Technological change, and the workplace disruption it wrought, fanned the populist and nationalistic flames. At a time when the developed world was being stratified horizontally into the haves and have-nots of globalisation, and in a wired world where tech-savvy hipsters in Brooklyn had more in common with their fellow millennials in Shoreditch or Peckham than their compatriots in Cleveland or Peoria, those who had missed out sought to erect vertical barriers – walls, barbed-wire fences, tariffs. The Rust Belt was a proxy for so many post-industrial sink regions the world over.

In this rebellion of the disenfranchised and powerless, voters not only rejected politics as usual; they sought to completely upend it. Therefore, they turned to parties, movements and individuals on the extreme right and extreme left, such as Marine Le Pen in France, Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, the extremist Geert Wilders in the Netherlands or Rob Ford, the foul-mouthed, middle-fingered mayor of Toronto, who was a municipal forerunner of Trump. All benefited from the weakness of existing party systems.

Even before the economic downturn, mainstream political parties were already in long-term decline. In France, for the first time since the creation of the Fifth Republic in the late 1950s, neither the Socialist Party led by the then president François Hollande or the conservative party Les Républicains made it to the run-off stage of the 2017 presidential election. Up against the far-right Front National, Emmanuel Macron swept to power as the leader of En Marche, a party that had only been in existence for a year.

In Britain, fears within the Conservative Party about being outflanked by the nationalist United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) had prompted David Cameron to call the Brexit referendum. In 2010, the once dominant Conservatives had only been able to form a coalition government with the help of the Liberal Democrats. The Labour Party came to be led by Jeremy Corbyn, a one-time fringe player from what used to be called the ‘loony left’, who appeared to many voters more like a protest leader than a putative prime minister.

In many European countries, the left was in retreat. The Socialists in France. The Social Democrats in Germany. The Labour Party in Britain. Post-industrialism severed the longstanding link between the working class and its traditional tribunes. Tony Blair’s centrism, which had won him an unprecedented three victories in a row, had been discredited by his support for the Iraq War. Bill Clinton’s Third Way had become increasingly untenable because his policies, personality and politics had been so polarising.

A gulf was opening up between the ‘wine left’ and the ‘beer left’: highly educated, well-paid metropolitan progressives who were beneficiaries of the New Economy, and lower-paid voters in the old industrial towns who felt excluded. Modern-day issues of the left, such as transgender bathrooms and non-binary gender terminology, widened the cultural schism.

On this side of the Atlantic, the weakness of America’s political duopoly, already exposed by the potency of Ross Perot’s Reform Party in the ’90s, now became manifest in the rise of the Tea Party, the alt-right, the Occupy Wall Street movement and Black Lives Matter campaign.

Since the turn of the century, the Green Party had also become an irritant for the Democrats. In 2000, Ralph Nader received more than 97,000 votes in Florida, taking the state away from Al Gore, the most environmentally friendly candidate ever to head a major-party ticket. In 2016, Hillary Clinton would have become president if Jill Stein’s Green Party had not siphoned off so many votes in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

The professionalisation of politics had created a cliquey political class who tended to speak in the jargon of their advisors and PR consultants. The ads may have been slicker, the sound-bites more fluent. Yet the language of professional politics increasingly sounded like the muzak piped into hotel lobbies. Plain-speaking figures, using a tongue that shocked the delicate sensibilities of the cosmopolitan elites, cut through and grabbed the headlines. The Johnsons. The Farages. The Hansons. The Trumps.

Those who presented problems in black-and-white terms and offered quick fixes tended to prosper. If they could be expressed in pithy, tweetable slogans, all the better. ‘Take Back Control’ became the mantra of Brexiteers. In the 2013 Australian election, ‘Stop the Boats’ and ‘Axe the Tax’ were the six words that helped lift Tony Abbott to victory. Decrying multiculturalism, mocking the woke left and promising to restore national greatness were common themes.

To those who blamed the global political malaise primarily on the economic downturn, Australia’s churn of second-rate prime ministers suggested there were other causes. In the midst of an extraordinary ‘wonder from down under’ 25-year recession-free run, Canberra became the coup capital of the democratic world. As a reform era was overtaken by a revenge era, voters were spurning a political class fixated on party-room intrigue, personal vendettas, petty fights and partisan point-scoring.⁸ After a long period of strong prime ministers – Bob Hawke, Paul Keating and John Howard – the talent pool started to resemble a drought-ridden billabong.

Evident in Australia, a country I observed up close for seven years as the BBC’s correspondent in Sydney, was how most talented young Australians no longer gravitated towards politics. Some complained of the selection procedures for candidates being a stitch-up. Women, and many men, bemoaned the misogyny of the brutish political culture. Student politics, the stepping stone for so many, was also off-putting. For those who wanted to change the country or the world, there were easier and more attractive ways to do it, from joining an NGO to working for the United Nations or launching a start-up.

Another way in which globalisation shaped politics was by nurturing the belief among the best and brightest that they could make an impact, and more money, at a worldwide level, which often meant joining or starting transnational organisations, rather than entering politics in their home countries. What became striking about those self-congratulatory 30-under-30 and 40-under-40 high-achiever lists was how few political rising stars appeared on them. Instead, they were populated with T-shirt-clad tech wizards, new media gurus, scientists or activists who had started charities in conflict zones, or who were running single-issue campaigns targeting global warming or sex trafficking or animal welfare, issues which transcended borders. No longer is it necessary to think globally and act locally. You can think globally and act globally. Maybe it even left the field clear for more nationalists to emerge.

With a dearth of global political talent, elections the world over were becoming ‘none of the above’ or ‘lesser of two evils’ affairs. Contests were increasingly being determined by negative partisanship, driven by animosity towards the losing party rather than any great affection for the winners. Hate had become a more powerful emotion in politics than love.

This was especially true in tribal America, and especially so in 2016. Unquestionably, Trump had an army of red-capped supporters who would happily have supported him even if he had gunned down an unsuspecting tourist outside the Tiffany store on Fifth Avenue. Yet many Republicans voted for him because they despised Hillary Clinton. In 2016, both Trump and Clinton’s unfavourable ratings were much higher than their favourable ratings. According to Gallup, they headed into Election Day with the worst public images of any major-party candidates in history.⁹ The campaign felt like a circus from which people were running away.

Even after the Brexit earthquake, we failed to grasp how the liquefaction would surface on this side of the Atlantic. The nostalgic nationalism, the evocation of lost greatness, was analagous. So, too, was the fear of immigration. Boris Johnson, a political showman whose rise had been assisted by his journalistic entertainment value, pulled off the same trick of becoming a blue-collar figurehead, an Old Etonian populist to Trump’s billionaire populist. The Brexit parallels were not lost on Trump, who repeatedly claimed in the final days of the campaign that he was about to pull off a UK referendum-style shock.

Rupert Murdoch was another transatlantic common denominator. His media outlets, such as The Sun and Fox News, revelled in political disruption and chaos, and had done so much over the decades to reduce public faith in Westminster and Washington. For a time Murdoch went cool on Trump. ‘When is Donald Trump going to stop embarrassing his friends, let alone the whole country?’ he asked on Twitter in July 2015. Yet just as The Sun threw its full support behind Brexit, so Fox News celebrities such as Sean Hannity became Trump’s biggest cheerleaders. A dramatic irony of the fall of Roger Ailes, who was fired from Fox News after being exposed as a workplace sexual predator, was that it came on the day Trump accepted the Republican nomination at the GOP convention in Cleveland. Few Americans had done more than Ailes to prepare the path for Trump’s rise.

The billionaire was not the only home-grown manifestation of this worldwide trend. Bernie Sanders, a socialist from Vermont who had operated for years on the periphery of national politics, surfed the same populist wave. To say that now, of course, is to utter a banality. Back in 2015, however, it took us too long to link these rogue candidacies. The socialist former mayor, with his wild curly hair, black-framed glasses and mad-professor energy, could hardly have been more different from the billionaire tycoon. But these two New Yorkers, one from Brooklyn, one from Queens, were flipsides of the same coin. In the Democratic race, Sanders ended up winning 23 states, 46 per cent of the pledged delegates and 13 million votes, a stunning and entirely unexpected showing. After the election, it even became possible to construct an argument that Sanders would have been better equipped to defeat Trump, if only because he might have clung onto the safe Democrat states Hillary Clinton won and added the three key states that she lost – Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. We now inhabited such a topsy-turvy political world, it was impossible to say with any certainty that a lifelong socialist could not become the President of the United States.

It was not just the Rust Belt. Donald Trump came to be seen as the saviour of another wreckage-strewn wasteland: the modern-day media, with its half-empty newsrooms and dried-up revenue streams. Into these parched riverbeds, Trump threw a lifeline. At a time when online news sites and apps were desperate for traffic and Google was raking in four times in advertising revenue than the entire American newspaper industry, he became the ultimate clickbait candidate. When cable channels were struggling to attract eyeballs, along came a ratings juggernaut. More than 24 million viewers watched the first Republican debate on Fox News in August 2015, the highest audience for any primary debate in television history. Attention had become the most valuable commodity of the digital age – we even spoke now of an ‘attention economy’. Trump generated it in spades. Yet another irony of 2015 was that an industry devastated by the New Economy, where employment in newsrooms would plummet by 45 per cent between 2008 and 2017, failed to fully comprehend how similar disruptive forces would upend politics.

News executives echoed the words reportedly uttered by Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, Robby Mook, at her Brooklyn head­quarters whenever the billionaire appeared on screen. ‘Shh, I’ve got to get me some Trump.’¹⁰ A trade known for its adrenaline junkies came to be populated by Trump junkies. The result was a form of relationship addiction, almost a textbook case of co-dependency: an excessive reliance on a partner who requires support for an addiction or illness that ends up being one-sided, abusive and destructive.

On cable, he became the man not just of every hour but of every minute. Even when he wasn’t on screen, CNN routinely broadcast an empty podium awaiting his arrival next to a countdown clock indicating when he would speak. On network television, the breakfast shows Today, Good Morning America and CBS This Morning tore up their production values to allow Trump to appear on his mobile, rather than in the studio or via satellite, the kind of ‘phoners’ ordinarily permitted only in the event of important breaking news.

Rock bottom was reached on the day Trump announced he would renounce his birtherism during a press conference at the Trump International Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, just a few blocks from the White House. The impresario turned the event into an infomercial for his new property. Then, without taking a single question, he announced perfunctorily that Obama was born in America and left. Played like a fiddle, cable news channels carried this farcical event in its entirety.

Blanket coverage meant Trump did not have to rely on the usual campaign finance model, where donations funded the ability to communicate with voters via paid advertising on television. All this he got gratis. By the spring of 2016 he had received an estimated $1.9 billion of free airtime, which meant he could bypass the establish­ment donor class.¹¹ Admittedly, much of the coverage was negative, focusing on his myriad scandals. The 15 women who accused him of sexual harassment. The fraudulence of Trump University. The refusal to hand over his tax returns. His appalling treatment of contestants in the Miss Universe pageant. Yet Trump had always lived by the maxim that any publicity was good publicity, which stemmed from a narcissistic yearning to be the centre of attention.

Trump inevitably prospered from better-story bias. Who wanted to follow ‘low-energy’ Jeb Bush, who sounded like he had been tranquillised and was forced, during a town hall event in New Hampshire, to plead with his audience to ‘Please clap’, when Trump was holding a stadium rally in the next town. Why cover a moderate candidate such as John Kasich, when the algorithms favoured Trump’s extremism? No other candidate offered anywhere near the same journalistic entertainment value or dopamine hit. So many modern-day media trends worked to his advantage: from cable channels which favoured outrage and confrontation to the fact that so many journalists now virtually lived their professional lives on Twitter, a medium Trump quickly mastered and conquered – he crowned himself ‘the Ernest Hemingway of 140 characters’.

As for our failure to predict his victory, it stemmed in part from what might be called ‘better-America bias’: the widespread belief that a candidate who stood in defiance of so many cherished American ideals, from tolerance to truthfulness, could never win; or, put another way, that Uncle Sam was better than he was. Team Trump would claim this was the usual liberal partiality from the mainstream mastheads, but in 2016 ‘better-America bias’ was written all over the conservative press. National Review, the one-time mouthpiece of the right, became the intellectual home of Never Trumpism, and devoted an entire issue to explaining why he should not be allowed near the White House.

The Barnum and Bailey-like atmosphere surrounding the race, with Trump in the role of ringmaster, brought a stern admonition from President Obama. ‘I just want to emphasise the degree to which we are in serious times, and this is a really serious job,’ he said in May 2016 from the podium of the White House briefing room. ‘This is not entertainment. This is not a reality show. This is a contest for the presidency of the United States.’¹²

But the president was swimming against a rip-tide. The mood of the media industry was best summed up by Les Moonves, the now disgraced former CBS president who was fired for sexually abusing female employees. ‘It may not be good for America, but it’s damned good for CBS.’

Did the media create Trump in 2016? Was the ‘Frankenstein’s monster’ critique of the press valid? The question, of course, is legitimate, but not perhaps the best way of framing it. For this was not just a 2016 phenomenon. The media had been willing partners going back decades. Trump had been grooming reporters and proprietors all the way back to the mid-’70s, when his then attorney, Roy Cohn, set up his first meeting with the new owner of the New York Post, Rupert Murdoch.

Generating publicity was perhaps his greatest gift. From becoming the poster boy of Reaganism in the 1980s, to becoming a darling of the tabloids in the ’90s, to remaking himself as a reality TV star in the noughties, he turned himself into a one-man content provider long before the term was even invented. From the mid-1980s, the media had almost willed him to run, and regularised the idea of him becoming president by asking him so frequently if he wanted the job. If spending a day with Donald Trump was like driving a Ferrari without the windshield, imagine spending all year with him as he careered along the road to the White House. ‘One thing I’ve learned about the press,’ he wrote in The Art of the Deal, ‘is that they’re always hungry for a good story, and the more sensational the better.’

The 2016 election showed, too, how little the traditional media understood the new media. Mistakenly we still thought traditional outlets, such as The New York Times, Washington Post and the US networks, and more recent arrivals such as MSNBC and Fox News, primarily shaped public reality. Wrongly we continued to think of news in the traditional sense: of rigorously researched stories that upheld longstanding journalistic principles of accuracy and basic truth.

What we failed to appreciate fully was how an alternative reality was being created online in the dissemination of fake news and misinformation on Facebook, Twitter and alt-right sites such as Breitbart News, 8chan and 4chan. After the election, BuzzFeed found that the 20 top-performing fake news stories, most of which were pro-Trump, generated a bigger response on Facebook than the top stories from 19 reputable news sites combined. These included the Pope endorsing Donald Trump, and Hillary Clinton selling weapons to ISIS.¹³ The ratio of ‘junk news’ to ‘professional news’ on Twitter during the 2016 election was one-to-one, a team at Oxford University found. Researchers at Ohio State University found afterwards that fake news alone might have depressed her vote by 4 points, more than enough to lose her the election.

Nor did we comprehend the malign influence of Cambridge Analytica in spreading pro-Trump propaganda and the Kremlin’s bot factories. A Red Cyber-army of 36,000 Russian bots tweeted during the 2016 election. More than 125 million Americans saw content on Facebook generated by the Kremlin. The Russians set up fake profiles pretending to be average Americans, with borrowed photos and concocted life stories, and fake protest groups to aggravate the familiar fault lines of guns, immigration and race. Groups such as Heart of Texas, Blacktivist, Secured Borders, United Muslims of America and Army of Jesus, which purported to be grassroots organisations, were run from St Petersburg in Russia. As part of this elaborate ballet, the Russians organised rallies, including a ‘Support Hillary, Save American Muslim’ event, advertised with a poster on which was printed a counterfeit quote: ‘I think Sharia Law will be a powerful new direction of freedom.’ They choreographed counter-protests to coincide with protesters. They even paid a real-life American to build a cage big enough to hold an actress playing Hillary Clinton dressed in a prison uniform. The presidential election was being manipulated and hacked, but we failed to realise it until afterwards.

Unquestionably, the media gave Trump a huge assist. But it is also worth remembering that, by the time he ran for the presidency, the reality TV star was a one-man media conglomerate. In 2016, he could boast more than 8.5 million followers on Twitter, more than traditional media behemoths such as The Washington Post, ABC News, NBC News and new start-ups such as the Huffington Post and BuzzFeed. The traditional gatekeepers of the news were not so significant because there were no longer any gates. Few understood this better than Donald Trump. He was the new media. He grasped that the future in politics belonged to those who generated their own content.

No one who had sought the presidency could boast the same panoply of qualifications as Hillary Clinton – a former First Lady, New York senator, secretary of state, education expert, human-rights champion, healthcare tsar and mother. Her overriding problem in 2016 was that no one more personified the political establishment. The stellar résumé compiled during a 30-year career in public life now condemned her. She was a career politician, a platinum-card member of the Davos set, a high priestess of the East Coast elite. Not just a limousine liberal but also a Learjet liberal. Her decision to run for president, as she freely admitted in her post-election memoir, followed a holiday in the Caribbean home of the fashion designer Oscar de la Renta. In another titbit from her book which demonstrated her inability to read the room, she spoke of hiring a make-up artist on the personal recommendation of Anna Wintour.

During her tenure as secretary of state, Hillary Clinton was at her most impressive when she was at her most authentic: when she wore Coke-bottle glasses in hearings on Capitol Hill; when she ripped into Republican lawmakers in the Benghazi hearings; when she let her hair down both figuratively and literally on trips overseas; when she donned dark sunglasses on a military transport plane, Blues Brothers-style, and punched out messages on her smartphone, the viral snapshot of which suggested she was a bona-fide bad ass.

In advance of her presidential run, however, she changed her appearance to look more like a conventional candidate, and lost that sense of mischief, fun and spontaneity. She became a creature of the consultants, and, like Al Gore in 2000, got lost in her own campaign. For a public figure spoken of as presidential material since the late 1960s, when she came to national attention after delivering a blistering commencement address to her fellow female graduates of Wellesley College, she struggled to present a compelling rationale for occupying the White House. After rejecting 84 alternatives, her campaign eventually settled on the insipid ‘Stronger Together’ as its slogan.¹⁴ For someone who had eyed the presidency for so much of her adult life, it was astonishing how she now struggled to articulate why she wanted the job. It reinforced the perception she was running out of a sense of entitlement, rather than purpose. ‘America is still great,’ her rejoinder to Trump’s galvanising slogan, also projected an air of arrogance, and did not ring true for those who had taken on multiple jobs just to make ends meet.

Given her troubled history with the press, her guardedness was understandable. But I mistakenly thought the friendships forged with reporters during her tenure as secretary of state would produce the kind of reset she was fond of in diplomacy. Sometimes on international trips she would share a late-night drink with the State Department press corps, a cabal of serious-minded foreign-policy wonks. As soon as she launched her campaign, however, old defences were re-erected.

The tone was set when we all traipsed out to Iowa for her first campaign event, a low-key roundtable discussion at a community college. Her convoy, rather than pulling up outside the front door, where the press was waiting to film the mandatory arrivals shot, unexpectedly drove around to the back of the building, prompting a needless press stampede. Perhaps her advance team thought it had pulled off a masterstroke by outwitting the waiting press. But to what end? Running for the presidency is not a covert operation, and all it did was leave veterans of the Hillary beat sighing, ‘There you go again.’

From the outset, her staffers were ridiculously overprotective. None more so than Huma Abedin, the friend whom Hillary looked upon as a comfort blanket, but who acted so often like a smothering fire blanket. Often on the campaign trail you would see Hillary talking empathetically to a supporter at the end of a speech, one of the few campaign duties she genuinely seemed to enjoy, only for the conversation to be cut short by her unsmiling aide. The connection with voters was severed. The emotions that successful campaigns feed off were suppressed.

Hillary herself could also sound snobbish and supercilious. Calling half of Trump’s supporters ‘a basket of deplorables’ was the single biggest act of self-sabotage by a presidential candidate since Mike Dukakis climbed aboard a tank in 1988 with an oversized helmet that made him look like one of Hogan’s Heroes. The setting for her speech that night, an LGBT fundraiser held at the glitzy Cipriani on Wall Street at which Barbra Streisand provided the entertainment, helped inflict maximum self-harm – a Tammy Wynette moment to the power of ten. That ‘basket of deplorables’ was another way of describing ‘white trash’ voters, the sole demographic Democrats thought it was still acceptable to malign. This deviation from the creed of political correctness did not go unnoticed in the Rust Belt. It should have come as little surprise that voters had such contempt for politicians when politicians publicly showed such contempt for them.

Then there was the Bill problem. Watching the former president on the stump in New Hampshire, where he spoke slowly, quietly and haltingly, showed how he had become an ambient presence rather than the mega-wattage celebrity of old. Clearly he did not want to outshine his wife, but it seemed more about conserving dwindling reserves of energy. More so than his lack of vim, it was the baggage Bill Clinton brought with him that encumbered his wife. Amidst the backlash against globalisation, he was remembered as the author of NAFTA. Amidst the Black Lives Matter campaign against mass incarceration, he was the heartless jailor and the author of a policy that had ended up being such a voter suppressant – in 2016, some six million people were prevented from casting ballots because of their convictions.¹⁵ Amidst the revolt against Democratic centrism, he was the New Democrat sell-out. The triangulation that had saved his presidency now looked cynical, unprincipled and opportunistic. Amidst the disgust against Trump’s misogyny, he was an alleged sexual predator who had taken advantage of a 22-year-old intern and allegedly molested other women.

Paradoxically, Bill Clinton still seemed more popular among female voters than his wife. Here, Hillary hatred was palpable. In Iowa and New Hampshire, Sanders outpolled her amongst women, who seemed, even when she effectively wrapped up the nomination, unexcited at this historic female first. On the morning after Super Tuesday, her crowning moment, we set out to get some vox pops from women voters in Miami. The first five we spoke to all despised her, and one by one ticked off the long list of dislikes. She was condescending and arrogant. She did not adhere to rules that applied to others. She was untrustworthy. One woman even told us Hillary Clinton did not have any qualifications to be president.

To understand white working-class male voters, Hillbilly Elegy became the touchstone book of the 2016 campaign. To understand female voters, Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook, was required reading. Women were seen favourably when they advocated for others, wrote Sandberg, but unfavourably when they advocated for themselves. Hillary Clinton agreed. ‘The more successful a man is, the more people like him,’ she wrote after the campaign. ‘With women, it’s the exact opposite.’¹⁶

The email scandal was a further hindrance. Confessedly, when The New York Times first broke the story, I did not think much of it. On the Richter scale of scandal, it seemed to merit a small quiver, but nothing more. In keeping, though, with the post-Watergate mistrustfulness that turned campaign reporters into crime hacks, it was elevated into an A-grade outrage. ‘It was a dumb mistake,’ Hillary Clinton claimed afterwards. ‘But an even dumber scandal.’ For Trump, it was a gift. For disaffected Democrats, it reinforced the clawing sense the Clintons did not feel bound by normal rules.

For the media, it became a means of demonstrating impartiality, a story we could return to over and over to balance the dozens of Trump scandals. Here, the billionaire benefited from the strobe effect of his many controversies. By contrast, the email scandal was constantly in the blinding spotlight, which meant it seemed worse than truly it was. A post-election study of the mainstream media’s coverage by researchers at Harvard and MIT revealed that Clinton’s email-related scandals, including the hacks of the Democratic National Committee and her campaign chief John Podesta, received 65,000 sentences in newspapers such as The New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal. All of Trump’s scandals, by contrast, were allotted just 40,000 sentences. Her coverage was also more negative than Trump’s. In the final six days of the campaign, The New York Times ran more front-page stories on the email scandal than on policy issues during the previous two months.¹⁷ When Gallup conducted a survey of what words voters associated with each candidate, ‘email’ ranked number one for Clinton.¹⁸

The FBI also took Hillary Clinton’s emails seriously. So much so that the only two times during 2016 that I seriously thought she might lose the election were when the FBI director, James Comey, thrust them into the midst of the campaign. (Comey said Bill Clinton forced his hand to go public after the former president held a mysterious meeting with Attorney General Loretta Lynch on a plane in Arizona, prompting him to assert the FBI’s independence from the Justice Department.) His first dramatic intervention came in July, on the morning when we had headed down to Charlotte, North Carolina, for Hillary Clinton’s first joint appearance with Barack Obama. For 13 minutes of his scolding 15-minute statement, it sounded as if he was about to indict the former secretary of state. Then, at the end of his highly irregular statement, he said there were insufficient grounds for a prosecution – which was hardly an exoneration.

The second Comey intervention came just 11 days before the election, with what Fox News aptly called the ‘October surprise on steroids’. Comey announced the FBI was reopening the investigation into the emails, because some had been found on a laptop used by Huma Abedin and her disgraced husband, Anthony Weiner. By then, however, it seemed the Access Hollywood tape would loom larger in voters’ minds on Election Day. Here was Donald Trump’s moment of accountability. Surely those well-heeled Starbucks moms who took their daughters to his rallies would desert him.

In those final days, as she criss-crossed the country, I travelled with Hillary Clinton on her plane and in her motorcade, and got to see the view from her window: as she arrived for a rally in the Florida countryside, where she was confronted by the snarling faces of pro-Trump protesters, some dressed in black-and-white prison fatigues, some waving the Confederate flag; as she addressed a floodlit night-time rally in Fort Lauderdale, where she was heckled by a Trump protester carrying a sign reading, ‘Bill Clinton is a rapist’; as she arrived in Las Vegas, where her motorcade passed a golden skyscraper emblazoned with giant letters spelling ‘Trump’, a name she must never have expected to see on a presidential ballot paper alongside her own. With her road to the White House lined with anger, hatred and mistrust, how galling it must have been after a lifetime in public service to peer through the tinted glass of her armoured SUV to see demonstrators who wanted her locked up in a federal penitentiary. From bullets those vehicles offered a protective shell, but not from brickbats.

After Access Hollywood, those concluding miles should have been a cakewalk. Even after Comey’s eleventh-hour reopening of the emails investigation her campaign team deliberately projected an air of invincibility. Her plane set off for Arizona, a red state that had only once gone Democrat since 1948 – a rub-his-nose-in-it campaign stop. Even neighbouring Texas was said to be in play. One day, when we flew from Florida to Las Vegas, we didn’t even hear from the candidate until late afternoon, which was well after the evening news shows on the East Coast. Her reticence spoke of the ‘too big to fail’ complacency that had seemingly set in.

All that week I was in touch with the Clinton campaign head­quarters, where volunteers manning the phone banks found that lists of supposedly rusted-on Democratic supporters included voters who planned to back Trump. One volunteer even asked whether she had been given the correct list, thinking she was ringing the numbers of swing or Republican-leaning voters.

As Hillary’s plane criss-crossed the country, it was possible to detect the same nervousness on the ground. On the fringes of a night-time rally in Florida, grassroots activists bemoaned the lack of money and attention from campaign headquarters in Brooklyn. Who knew what local Democrats were saying in Wisconsin and Michigan, states she did not even bother to visit in those final, all-important weeks? From those who occupied the front rows on her plane, however, there seemed to be no sense of panic.

Her main concession to the narrowing polls was finally to banish Huma Abedin from her personal entourage, and to change her message as she closed out the campaign. Rather than ending on high-minded appeals for national unity, the plan when she enjoyed what looked like an unassailable double-digit lead, she was forced to re-litigate the case against Trump. Rather than outlining her vision for the country, she sounded like a prosecutor making a closing argument in a scrappy trial the jury couldn’t wait to end.

Palpable in those final speeches was a tone of exasperation. As she recited again her curriculum vitae – those years fighting for children as a lawyer, her tenure as First Lady, her service in the Senate co-sponsoring bipartisan legislation, those 112 countries she visited as secretary of state – she clearly could not countenance the notion that the world’s most important job interview could possibly end with someone so manifestly unqualified being appointed. Nor could she seem to process fully the idea that a polyglot nation, in which millions more women voted than men, could tolerate electing a candidate whose name had become synonymous with xenophobia and misogyny.

Surely, she could never have imagined that at a campaign stop in Florida she would be introduced by a former Miss Universe, Alicia Machado, who was there to remind women voters that Donald Trump had called her ‘Miss Piggy’. Nor would she have predicted that at a rally in North Carolina she would have to call on a one-time socialist, Bernie Sanders, who had managed to enthuse young female voters in ways that eluded her. It must also have been wounding to have to rely on the star power of Michelle Obama, who completely eclipsed her at a stadium rally in Winston-Salem – the sort of venue the former First Lady would have struggled to fill, had not the present First Lady been at her side. Though her crowds looked more like modern America, multi-hued rather than predominantly white, always they were smaller than Trump’s.

As campaigns reach their climax, it is customary for those seeking the highest office in the land to reflect on the humbling experience of asking voters to invest them with such inordinate power. There must have been times, though, when Hillary Clinton also found it deeply humiliating. Trump contradicted her sense of America. What she looked upon as his greatest weaknesses, his supporters viewed as his greatest strengths, something she found hard to morally compute. The unspoken line of all her remarks was: ‘How did it ever come to this?’

To peer out of the window in those final days, the country flashing by, was to be reminded of much that was awe-inspiring about America. Flying into Las Vegas, we looked down on the Hoover Dam, that breath-taking monument to American ingenuity and symbol of resurgence in the years after the Great Depression. From the palm-lined beaches of southern Florida to the copper-tinted mountains on the fringes of Phoenix, we witnessed its beauty. We travelled to some of the great university campuses, the academic powerhouses so central to America’s technological dominance. But the end-stretch of the campaign was unlovely and unedifying. In those final days, it felt like we were travelling the low road to the White House.

Election Day began on the Upper West Side watching New Yorkers line up to vote outside a polling station housed in a ‘Trump’ apartment building, a pointer, some took it as, that he was about to revert to being a property developer. From the candidate himself came a final all-caps missive on Twitter, ‘TODAY WE MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!’ But most reporters thought they would soon be able to disable his tweet notifications on their smartphones. Some planned to ‘unfollow’ his account immediately.¹⁹

Late the night before, at an open-air concert outside Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, Hillary Clinton appeared alongside the Obamas and Bruce Springsteen, and was told by America’s first black president she was on the verge of a victory to historically rival his own in 2008. ‘You’ve got this,’ he whispered, as he hugged her. ‘I’m so proud of you.’ Campaign aides predicted the same outcome. ‘You’re going to bring this home,’ her chief pollster assured her. After her final rally in North Carolina, this time featuring Lady Gaga, she flew back to a private airfield near her Chappaqua residence, alongside aides who uncorked champagne in anticipation of victory.²⁰

At our New York bureau on Election Day, we undertook some cursory contingency planning for a Trump victory with bosses who had flown in from London, but in these private huddles I was more forthright than I dared be on air. Hillary Clinton was sure to win, I told them, because a lopsided victory in the popular vote would translate into Electoral College success. The Blue Wall would hold. I had experienced the rage of the Rust Belt. I was no stranger to Hillary hatred. I was mindful of Brexit. Not once, however, did I fly out of Pittsburgh, after touring the filmic valleys surrounding it, thinking Donald Trump would win. Even Fox News shared this view. ‘Stop the bullshit,’ Roger Ailes told Steve Bannon, Trump’s white nationalist campaign boss, who claimed the billionaire was going to triumph. ‘It’s going to be a blowout. It’ll be over by eight o’clock.’²¹

We filed our story on America going to the polls for our main evening bulletin and then, in glorious late-afternoon winter sunshine, walked over to the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center to report on what everyone expected to be Hillary Clinton’s victory party. A stage shaped like a giant map of the United States had been constructed. It was positioned under a vast glass ceiling that she was figuratively supposed to smash. This was the night, I remember thinking, when the fever would finally break, when Newtonian rules of political gravity would reapply, when we would no longer cover US politics in a Ferrari without the windshield but instead become passengers again in a fuel-efficient sedan.

Then, after the polls shut, the votes came rolling in. From Florida, which went Trump. From Virginia, which was closer than expected. From North Carolina, which the Clinton campaign called the ‘checkmate state’, because victory there would make it all but impossible for Trump to win the Electoral College. Like Florida, it went for Trump. Now the Blue Wall looked vulnerable. Three of its sturdiest bricks – Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania – looked like they were about to be dislodged. A digital ‘swingometer’ on The New York Times website leant ever more decisively towards the supposed no-hoper. The beaming Clinton staffers who could hardly contain their excitement at the beginning of the evening were nowhere to be seen.

Never before in my career had a moment of realisation felt so unreal. The story could scarcely have been more riveting, but the atmosphere in the giant pressroom, if not quite funereal, was strangely numb. Journalists peered unblinking at their laptops, like traders squinting at computer screens when markets are in free-fall. Reporters who earned their living by talking were rendered speechless.

In the days beforehand, many of us had composed stories that now had a ‘Dewey beats Truman’ ring to them. So there was a collective sensation, at once stomach-churning and surreal, that all of us had got the election terribly wrong. The proof was in our presence. Had we read the runes more accurately, we would have been across town at the Hilton on the Avenue of the Americas, where our colleagues had gone expecting to intrude on a wake.

Hillary Clinton was holed up at her suite in The Peninsula, a hotel on Fifth Avenue almost close enough to throw shade on Trump Tower. There, aides made panicked phone calls, Bill Clinton gnawed incessantly on an unlit cigar, and, amidst all the tension, the candidate herself somehow managed to grab some sleep. By the time she woke up, states supposed to be solid blue were coloured red. When the Associated Press called Pennsylvania for Trump, it was clear he was on his way to the White House. Blue America was in a state of anaphylactic shock. She had won the popular vote by three million votes, an electorally meaningless statistic because the Blue Wall had fallen.

Then Hillary’s supporters started racing through the seven stages of grief, with shock and denial displaced by anger. Never will I forget the words of an African-American Clinton supporter, as he walked out of the Javits Center into the Hell’s Kitchen night. Still in my mind I can hear the pulsing fury. Still in my mind I can see his fearful face. ‘America has voted for hate,’ he said with dignified rage.

For her victory speech, Hillary Clinton planned to wear a white trouser suit, the colour of the suffragettes. She also intended to recount the story of her late mother, who at the age of eight was abandoned by her parents and put on a train in Chicago with her younger sister for the cross-country journey to California. President-elect Clinton would imagine travelling back in time, so she could comfort young Dorothy in that carriage. ‘Look at me. Listen to me,’ she would say to that vulnerable young girl. ‘You will survive. You will have a good family of your own, and three children. And as hard as it might be to imagine, your daughter will grow up and become the president of the United States.’ As it was, that night she never left her hotel suite.

Standing outside Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue on the morning its owner became president-elect, I watched rush-hour commuters exchange knowing glances, as if to silently affirm that some dreadful calamity had unfolded overnight that was hard as yet to articulate. This vibrant city, which had voted overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton, seemed drained of its life force. The very place where Donald Trump once said he could shoot someone and not lose any supporters, seemed full of the walking dead. Later that day, Hillary finally delivered a concession speech, her political career ending in a rented ballroom in a faded Midtown hotel, rather than the grandeur of the White House.

Almost a year after the election, I got to spend an hour with Hillary Clinton at a hotel close to her country home in Chappaqua. Her post-election recuperation, which by her own confession had been agonising, had benefited from the novels of Elena Ferrante, the poetry of Maya Angelou, some binge-watching on the sofa (The Good Wife, Madam Secretary and, her husband’s pick, NCIS: Los Angeles), a form of yogic breath work which involved inhaling through one nostril and exhaling through the other, and ‘my share of Chardonnay’, as she put it. Given the circumstances, she was in unexpectedly good spirits and smiled her bright-eyed smile as she told me she had ‘come back into the light’.

Her strongest criticisms were directed at four men: Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Julian Assange and James Comey. Missing was the name of her husband. But she admitted the election should never have been close enough for the Russian president, WikiLeaks founder or FBI director to affect the outcome. Plainly the torment of defeat continued to inflict pain, and she admitted to making terrible mistakes, the most egregious of which was her ‘deplorables’ blunder.

When I brought up the speech about her mother that she never got to deliver, her face and voice were wracked with anguish. ‘Yeeeeeaaaaaah, yeeeeeeah,’ she said, agonisingly, as if slowing pulling off a plaster from a still septic wound. ‘Putting myself in there,’ she said, nodding slowly and imagining that scene in the railway carriage. ‘Yeeeaaaaah.’

Painful, too, was her failure to mobilise a sizeable enough sisterhood to become America’s first female president. Trump won a majority of white women, by some estimates a 52 per cent share. Her performance amongst women voters overall was only one point better than Barack Obama’s. Even amongst white college-educated women, she managed only to get 51 per cent of the vote, a statistic I often cite to show the impossibility of predicting the outcome of the election.

Even now, I find myself sifting through a mental catalogue of missed clues. The Mexican-born Uber driver who confessed to adoring Trump, a secret he kept from his immigrant parents. The female soccer team we met practising on a pitch next to the venue of a Clinton campaign event at a university campus in Florida, whose teammates were split 50/50 for Trump/Clinton – pretty much the exact divide between white female graduates as a whole. The summer day I attended the commencement ceremony at Wellesley College, Hillary Clinton’s alma mater, where Oprah Winfrey refused to say on camera whether she would support the former First Lady. The difficulty we had in finding a polling station on the campus of Duke University in North Carolina, which did not appear on Google Maps, an attempt, it seemed, to suppress voter turnout amongst the young. The long line of blue-collar workers we saw on the weekend before the election in the shadow of a cement factory in western Pennsylvania, queuing outside a community centre for food hand-outs in the biting cold. The simple historical fact the Democrats had not won three presidential elections in a row since the Roosevelt/Truman era.

Often history only reveals itself in hindsight, but it should not have come as such a shock that an era of disruptive technology would produce such a disruptive president; that an anti-Obama party selected as its nominee the most virulently anti-Obama candidate; that an anti-Washington conservative movement would back an obstreperously anti-Washington outsider; that an older and whiter GOP would pick the oldest white man in the field; that a country where racial divisions had actually widened under its first black president would pick such a racially divisive demagogue; that a nation which had witnessed such a massive redistribution of the wealth upwards would end up being run by a billionaire; that a screen- and social-media-addicted populace afflicted by so much online narcissism would plump for a narcissist; that a polity fed up with politics would select such an avowed anti-politician; that a superpower whose influence had waned over the course of the twenty-first century would pick a strongman promising to make America great again.

So rundown had America’s institutions become – Congress, the Supreme Court, the criminal justice system, Wall Street, the military, the media, the main political parties and, for much of the past 20 years, the presidency itself – that disaffected voters pinned their hopes on an individual, a self-serving businessman loyal only to his eponymous brand.

As institutions became more decayed, so, too, did the safeguards against the emergence of a demagogic figure such as Trump, and the American id he embodied. The country could no longer rely for protection on good governance in Washington, corporate responsibility in US boardrooms, a regulatory framework enforced by robust federal agencies to protect against the excesses of Big Data, effective campaign-finance laws to guard against pernicious influence of Big Money, traditional conservative constraint within the GOP, a multi-faith theology promoting communitarianism and social justice or a self-confident national and local media.

All this had been brewing for years. Our failure was not just to get 2016 wrong, but also to misunderstand and downplay the transformative changes that had been overtaking America – politically, economically, culturally and technologically – for the past 50 years.