This is basically a teaser for a campaign book, where all the below-the-line guys get one last chance to spin and self-mythologize and reveal all the good ideas they didn’t get to use. But in return you get some pretty interesting stuff. Of note:
Trump was strategically jerkish to Jeb, incl. the “Bush has to like Mexican illegals because of his wife” tweet, because two decade-old debate footage showed he was at his weakest performing “confrontational”
On being hired Corey Lewandowski put Trump’s chances at 5%, Trump put them at 10%.
This quote on the resonance between Steve Bannon and Donald Trump: “Steve just likes to f–k with people,” a top Trump adviser told me
around the time Bannon was hired. “Trump loves to do that too. …
Besides, Trump only really listens to rich guys.”
Also, in the ah “editorial” judgement here seems to be a take that seems popular as a folk take but this is the first time I’ve seen credentialed media running it, that Trump won not despite but because of “being Trump”, that beefing with Khan and going on the offensive after the Access Hollywood tape and never apologizing for anything were effectively positives, credibly signaling outsider status.
And so, thanks to Trump’s unexpected electoral victory,
there is now a massive, unprecedented content graveyard of
articles celebrating or analyzing Hillary Clinton’s would-be historic
victory… . Most of that
content won’t be read by anyone. But here is a small sampling. This
collection is a tiny glimpse of what the internet would have looked like
on November 9 if Clinton beat Trump, as so many pundits forecast.
Hillary Clinton’s problem was “I am tepid neoliberal pudding Hillary Clinton” and her solution was “I will draw my opponent as far to the right as I can and put the entire postwar order on the table”
like I pride myself on kontext and any given quarter of this election was pretty well precedented just papered over in history but all at once? that shit happens in myth
everyone who saw this coming even close was an intuitionist. they ignored polls and studies and numbers and listened to taxi drivers and anonymous commenters and nowhere randoms
