Original subtitles

[chattering]

- [Man] I guess turning on the AC would be impossible.

- [Cameraman] That brown leather thing is...

- [Soundman] Marker. [beep]

[clapperboard clapping]

- My hair okay?

- [Director] Yeah

[clap]

- Uh...

- This is a lovely room.

This is one of the best for an interview.

And it's the people's house, so we might as well use it.

[clapping]

- We are on the fourth floor of the New York Times building.

- Stupid is what stupid does, as Forest Gump says, right?

- Is this fake news?

[woman laughs]

- This is not a complete dumper on him, right?

- Check one, two, three. Check one, two, three.

Check one, two, three, four.

- I dare you to put this in the documentary.

- [Director] I might give it a go.

- Tensions beginning to run high. [chuckles]

- Run the tape back.

[tape rewinding]

[clapping]

- [Man] We're getting started!

- You tell me when you're ready. I'm always ready.

- Well, like most people, I didn't take it seriously.

- When the entire country was laughing at him,

they were mocking him...

- Donald Trump has been saying

that he will run for president as a Republican,

which is surprising, since I just assumed

he was running as a joke.

[crowd laughing]

- There was just no serious thought given

to him as a candidate.

- It's obvious that the Republicans think

Trump's gonna lose.

- Well, I can imagine it in a Saturday Night skit.

- Utterly unqualified

- He's an embarrassment to this country.

- Hillary belongs in the White House.

Trump belongs on my show.

- Right now we have Hillary as about a 75

or an 80% favorite.

We have different versions

of the forecast. - That high?

- You're not gonna be president. All right?

[audience laughing]

- So discombobulated. So unconventional.

- This is a joke, and it's an absurdity.

- Donald Trump will never be elected

President of the United States.

- I don't think there's any way that Donald Trump

gets elected President of the United States.

- Donald Trump is not gonna be President

of the United States.

- You know, you guys sound like two kittens

sitting on a train track, looking down at a train,

thinking, "That train got a little bit bigger

a few seconds ago, but I'm sure it's gonna stop.

Hey, it got a little bit bigger,

but no way it's gonna keep going.

Hey, it-"

Splat.

Listen, if something is getting bigger and bigger

and bigger every day,

it's probably going to continue doing that.

[dramatic electronic music]

[electronic beeping]

- 2015 U.S. was really a space of more than one America.

[soft electronic music]

- [Reporter] Breaking news coming in now

from Charleston, South Carolina,

where there are reports that eight people have been killed

in a shooting at a church.

- We as a country will have to reckon with the fact

that this type of mass violence does not happen

in other advanced countries.

- There was this growing gap

between rich and poor Americans

and it was really one of the major challenges

facing the country.

- Sometimes I just don't buy groceries every months,

and I live eating a meal a day.

- We automated away

four million manufacturing jobs

in Michigan Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin,

and those communities have never recovered.

- Today, we can say in no uncertain terms

we've made our union a little more perfect.

[light electronic music]

[helicopter whirring]

- [Reporter] Orlando became the tragic scene

of the worst mass shooting in American history.

[train creaking]

[car honking]

[train rattling]

[crowd cheering]

[stark electronic music]

[crowd shouting]

- You killed that man!

- Huge country, 340 million people, all Americans,

but pretty distinct cultures regionally

and drastically different political sensibilities.

So you had people who were pleased

with the performance of President Obama.

[upbeat electronic music]

- And that was a winning campaign.

You just felt-

Millions of people at these rallies, every age, every race.

You felt the swell of excitement

about this historic candidacy.

- It was a creed written into the founding documents

that declared the destiny of a nation.

Yes, we can.

[crowd cheering]

There was just incredible enthusiasm for Obama,

enthusiasm very rarely seen for a politician.

He offered a message of hope and change

that electrified the Democratic base,

and they turned out in big numbers for him.

- And CNN can now project that Barack Obama, 47 years old,

and will become the president elect of the United States.

[crowd cheering]

- Walking down the street,

people were just screaming, "Obama!"

[energetic electronic music]

- What Republican voters believed to their core

was that Barack Obama had succeeded,

that he had set out to change America,

and he did, and he wrecked it.

[somber electronic music]

- You had a few different contingents

that were starting to maybe look

for a way to coalesce around something

to replace president Obama, knowing that he'd be leaving.

- I think Liberals and Conservatives

were both looking for someone who would go to political war

for the issues that we care about.

Obama pushed this country way to the left.

Are you gonna keep that ground?

Or are you gonna cede that ground?

And to just elect somebody who was gonna come in

and be kind of a caretaker of the status quo?

No way. Nobody wanted that.

[crowd cheering]

- Hello, Iowa!

[crowd cheering]

I'm back!

[crowd cheering]

- Well, what Democrats believed as gospel

was that Barack Obama had permanently changed

the composition of the electorate.

[stark electronic music]

This ascendant coalition of African-Americans,

of Latinos, of women, of Millennials,

was going to turn out in the same levels that it had

for president Obama's two successful elections.

[crowd cheering]

- The Democratic party was like,

"You know what we should do?"

Hillary Clinton.

- Hillary Clinton. - Hillary Clinton.

- Hillary Clinton.

She is running for president. - I am running for president.

- This was like the re-re-re-introduction

of Hillary Clinton.

Most people had already formed an opinion about her,

and that's hard to change.

[crowd cheering]

- There had never been a candidate

in the history of the United States

who had been as famous for as long as she had been.

- She's always prepared, she always does her homework,

and she works very, very hard

not to make a story of herself.

- Has had 25 years to figure out how to do this perfectly.

All the money in the world.

All the smartest people around her.

And it was inevitable.

There was no way that she would ever be denied

the idea that she'd be the President of the United States.

Those segments were all convinced

that Hillary Clinton was the next president.

I don't mean like 90-to-10 or 85-to-15. Every one of them.

[crowd cheering]

- It was all math and no poetry.

It was all about identifying Obama voters,

building this Hillary coalition.

And I thought, well, maybe this is just how Hillary wins.

Sort of a dreary, mechanical slog.

- And that kind of canned political candidate,

Over-managed by consultants,

over work-shopped by a giant committee of people,

that's what people are tired of.

People are tired of being sold a polished product.

They want something that feels like a real person,

even if that real person is all kinds of weird.

[intense orchestral music]

[crowd cheering]

- I don't believe he intended to become president

when he declared his candidacy.

- When he came down those stairs, the escalator,

I did not think he was a serious candidate.

I thought it was all for publicity purposes.

- This was a marketing exercise.

This was a yolo campaign.

Even if he lost, he'd win,

because he'd raise his profile even higher.

- I think his expectation was that,

"I'll do well and do better

than people initially thought I would,"

which was a smart bet,

"And I'll increased my brand share, my market share."

[bright orchestral music]

- I think he intended to provoke a conversation

about Donald Trump.

- Wow. [energetic rock music]

Whoa!

That is some group of people. Thousands!

- I think he was contemplating turning 70

and thought, "How do I want to go out?

Oh, I want to go out in a blaze of attention."

And what better vehicle for getting attention

than a presidential campaign?

[audience members cheering]

I am officially running...

[crowd cheering]

for President of the United States...

[audience cheering]

and we are going to make...

our country great again!

[audience cheering]

[dramatic orchestral music]

- It's something that's been in the back of Trump's mind

for a long time.

- Could the Manhattan magnate be eyeing the White House,

or is he just calling a bluff?

- As early as 2000, he floated the idea publicly

of running for president.

- I think that nobody's really hitting it right.

The Democrats are too far left.

The Republicans are too far right.

- He was thinking about it in the 1990s.

- This sounds like political, presidential talk to me.

- I do get tired of seeing what's happening

with this country, and if it got so bad,

I would never want to rule it out totally.

- He talked about running on the Reform Party ticket.

- Do you have a vice presidential candidate in mind?

- Well, I really haven't gotten quite there yet.

- He came very, very close to running in 2012,

and people, I think, have slightly forgotten that.

He was front runner at one stage in the polls.

- Are you or are you not going to run for the presidency?

- I am seriously thinking about it.

Well, I am thinking about it, but we'll see what happens.

- And ended up endorsing Mitt Romney

and making a big show of it in Las Vegas.

[audience cheering]

He was always someone who, I think,

as part of his showmanship, felt that he deserved to be

on the biggest stage in the world.

- The country is doing very poorly.

Our country is in serious, serious trouble.

The country is going to hell in a handbasket.

This country can not continue to support Japan

and Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.

You look at what China's doing to us,

how they're just ripping us left and right.

They're taking our jobs.

I'll bring back our jobs from China, from Mexico,

from Japan, from so many places.

I'll bring back our jobs, and I'll bring back our money.

- I really believe that this was a gimmick

to get NBC to raise up his salary

and to keep "The Apprentice" on.

- Well...

- And I would bet the farm on that.

- [Interviewer] Some say Donald Trump

entered the race to win it.

And the other half say he entered

to see where it took him.

- He absolutely-

And I talked to him before he ran

and talked to him throughout the race.

He absolutely ran to win it.

And he also said, we'll see how it goes.

The usual political motivators

that attend to people running for president

did not apply to Donald Trump:

money, fame, position, bankability, power.

He had all that.

He had a great life in New York City. He's Donald Trump!

- Think about the opening of "The Apprentice".

["The Apprentice" theme music]

♪ Money money money money

It's Donald Trump in a helicopter narrating the scene

as he approaches the island of Manhattan

and talks about what a big deal he is.

- New money, boorishness, is quintessentially American

From the Gold Rush, this idea of striking it rich

and celebrating it.

There's no restraint.

Trump lives like a rap star.

- He is a master marketer who had a celebrity resonance

with the American people

as a successful businessman and a strong leader.

[stark music]

- This establishes for America

that Donald Trump really is the mogul he claims to be.

Now, I say claims to be

because he isn't the mogul he claims to be.

He's not nearly as rich as he says he is.

But it doesn't matter.

This is a thing that he intuits, but he also knows.

He knows that the truth is really beside the point.

It's what are you selling, and can you sell it,

and will people buy it?

In every case he was selling himself,

and that is the best preparation possible for a politician.

[overlapping shouts]

- If you're a kind of narcissist,

where as long as your name's being mentioned

it really doesn't matter if it's good or bad,

if that's good for your marketing campaign

and building a larger brand.

- Three weeks, when I started,

I thought he was probably born in this country,

and now I really have a much bigger doubt than I did before.

- But based on what? - And you know what?

His grandmother in Kenya said he was born in Kenya,

and she was there and witnessed the birth, okay?

- I think he clearly saw how the criticism of Obama

got him traction as red meat for the Republican base.

- And I just say very simply,

why doesn't he show his birth certificate?

Perhaps it's gonna say Hawaii.

Perhaps it's gonna say Kenya.

- Are you a birther, Donald?

- Something on that birth certificate

- Oh my God! - Oh, that's a terrible thing!

- If you really don't like what President Obama did,

there certainly can be an underlying racial resentment.

[crowds shouting]

The idea that his presence was disproportionately good

for non-white people, and thus your status as a white person

may be endangered or in jeopardy.

- He tapped into that group.

Yeah, there are more things, but race was a major issue,

and people will say it's not, but it was.

He started chanting and,

and the rhetoric was shrill about race.

- When Mexico sends its people,

they're not sending their best.

They're bringing drugs, they're bringing crime,

they're rapists.

And some, I assume, are good people.

- Remember, after Mitt Romney lost in 2012,

most of the Republican establishment thought

it was because he alienated Hispanic voters

with self-deportation.

Kellyanne was one of a very small group

of Republican professionals

who thought it was actually the opposite,

who thought that you could take a populist message

against immigration, not more liberal,

but more conservative on immigration,

and you could get not just Republican primary voters

but a lot of blue-collar, white, working-class voters,

particularly in the Rust Belt, the upper Midwest.

- I will build a great, great wall on our southern border,

and I will have Mexico pay for that wall.

Mark my words.

[woman cheering]

- Are you concerned about alienating the Hispanic vote

by saying that Mexico is not our friend

and we're building a wall?

- If it's good for me or bad for me, I don't think of that.

I think of saying the right thing.

And people have to be alerted to the fact

that we are getting some really bad characters

coming into this country.

- How can you succeed when you say things like that?

- Well, you can't-

Again, Gayle, if the question is,

how can you become president,

you can't by saying things like that.

- Are you racist?

- I am the least racist person that you have ever met.

- He was fearless.

When Donald Trump denounces Mexicans,

and people are outraged,

and he loses the PGA Championship from

does he back down?

No.

He doubles down.

- Donald J. Trump is calling for a total

and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States

until our country's representatives

can figure out what the hell is going on.

[audience cheering]

- It is, in fact, the case

that you have a big chunk of racists in this country.

But, worse than that, you have a big chunk of people

for whom racism is not a disqualifier.

And Trump understood that.

- [Audience] Build that wall, build that wall!

- Build that wall, build that wall, build that wall,

build that wall, build that wall, build that wall,

build that wall, build that wall!

[intense music]

- He realized this wasn't about ideology.

It was about who was the angriest.

It was about who was the angriest at Obama, specifically,

and who could embody that anger the most authentically.

And so it didn't matter that he wasn't

a conventional conservative on all kinds of metrics.

What the base was really looking for was just,

who could be the most opposed to Barack Obama?

- Were it not for the transformative love

of Jesus Christ?

- What makes our country exceptional? Faith and freedom.

It's no exaggeration to say

we're at the most critical point in our nation's history.

- The greatest nation the world has ever known.

- I see a great country on the verge

of its greatest century.

- A new, American century. Thank you, God bless you.

[crowd cheering]

God bless the United States.

- Donald Trump was blessed

with the biggest field in modern Republican history.

[intriguing electronic music]

- Oh, there's no doubt in my mind

that the Trump campaign was delighted

by the fact that there were so many other candidates.

- This was possibly the most qualified group

of Republican candidates in history.

- Every single one of them who ran

thought there was at least some chance

that they could get lightning in a bottle

and win this thing.

- Ted Cruz is my man.

He fits the bill.

- They thought that you go out, you get your base,

you're gonna fight this out in the states.

Jeb Bush is gonna get X constituency,

Rubio's gonna to get this constituency,

and so forth and so on.

[crowd cheering]

- They were prepared and responsible and ready to lead.

They were not prepared to play the lowest common denominator

every day to maximize attention.

- So, along comes Donald Trump.

And what Donald Trump understood is that-

- Republicans were not looking for the smartest candidate

or the most sophisticated candidate.

They were looking for a gut puncher, a street fighter.

[crowd shouting]

- Rubio, total lightweight.

And little mouth on him. Bing, bing, bing.

- A con artist will never get control of this party!

- Jeb Bush is a low energy person.

- I think Donald Trump is trying to insult his way

to the presidency, and it's not gonna work.

- Do you believe Senator Ted Cruz is a natural-born citizen?

- I don't know, to be honest.

- Donald Trump alleges that my dad

was involved in assassinating JFK.

- And he's like this, "And we will... [gasping]

I need water. Help me, I need water!"

- This man is a pathological liar.

- And he knew that all he had to do

was seem different from the typical Republican,

and he would naturally draw the public's interest.

[audience laughing]

Unbelievable.

- [Reporter] Trump's latest poll numbers matching

his larger-than-life personality.

In a reversal from when he entered the race,

Republicans increasingly believe Trump has staying power.

But the question remains, can Trump turn his poll numbers

into actual votes?

- Because his name ID was so high,

because he was such a spectacle from day one

that, in a giant field,

his name bumped to the top of polling,

and then it sort of feeds off of itself,

because, once he's the leader,

oh, maybe I'm maybe I'm for the leader too.

Yeah, sure, that sounds interesting. Donald Trump.

[stark music]

- In reality television, the villain is always the star.

All the way back to American idol.

You know, Simon, he was rude and mean. He's the star.

That's a trope in reality TV.

[crowd shouting]

- Who would you rather have negotiate with Iran?

Trump or Jeb?

- [Audience] Trump!

- But here's the problem with Rubio.

When you sweat that much.

[audience laughing]

"Hello. Hello.

Can I have some water?"

And Putin's sitting there,

"What the hell kinda stuff is this?"

This is not exactly a poker player, folks.

Not exactly a poker player.

She said, "I never expect to hear that from you again."

She said, "He's a pussy." That's terrible.

[audience yelling]

Terrible.

- He had this reality TV experience,

which I contend people watch for the humor.

It's not jokes, but they just laugh at what's happening.

I think that, with Trump's candidacy,

that the news became comedy.

- This is a TV star who knew how to work

the medium of television.

And because most of the Republican candidates

were cowed into thinking they shouldn't expose themselves

too much, Trump sucked up all the airtime.

- Why don't you turn your camera?

Show 'em how many people come to these rallies.

Turn 'em! Go ahead, turn 'em!

[audience booing]

Go ahead!

[audience cheering]

Brutal.

- Immediately thought that Donald Trump

had climbed over the wall from the world of entertainment

into the world of politics.

That's not what he did.

He pulled the world of politics over the wall

into the world of entertainment.

I'm Mike Huckabee. I'm delighted to be on this stage.

- I'm Jeb Bush, and I believe America's

on the verge of its greatest century.

- I'm Ted Cruz.

I'm the son of an Irish-Italian mom.

- My wife, Jeanette, and I are the proud parent.

We've been married 17 years,

and we're the proud parents of four children.

- I'm Donald Trump. I wrote "The Art of the Deal."

I say, not in a braggadocious way,

I've made billions and billions of dollars

dealing with people all over the world.

- The thing that makes Trump the most unique

is not any one element of his personality,

his skillset, his history.

It's the lethal combination of them.

I've referred to this as a talent stack,

or, in this specific case,

you could call it a persuasion stack.

It's a bunch of skills that,

if you put them together,

you would say each of these individual skills

is not the best I've ever seen,

but almost nobody has this combination.

[audience applauding]

[soft electronic music]

- Donald Trump took center stage in that first debate

in early August, 2015 and never lost center stage.

- Positioned on the stage by how they stand in the polls.

In the center of the stage tonight,

businessman Donald Trump.

[audience cheering]

- When Donald Trump raised his hand and said

that I might not support the nominee, oh, I just...

- Can I see hands?

Who is unwilling tonight to pledge your support

to the eventual nominee of the Republican Party?

[audience booing]

Mr. Trump.

- People aren't watching these primary debates

to really learn about the candidate.

It's a show. It's a TV show.

[audience applauding]

- Mr. Trump...

- He was in this situation with Megyn Kelly

that I don't think anybody could have escaped from

If they were a standard politician with a

- You've called women you don't like fat pigs, dogs,

slobs, and disgusting animals.

[audience laughing]

Your Twitter account lists several-

- Only Rosie O'Donnell.

[audience laughing]

- [Moderator] No, it wasn't.

- The Trump method is not to deny everything.

It's to own a little piece of the terrible thing.

- Everyone on stage with him that night

got the memo too late

that we were playing a different game.

- You had serious policy debates in 1960.

56 short years later,

you don't have serious policy debates anymore,

because the phone changed everything, right?

Because what happened is the phone shortened up

everybody's attention span.

Trump understood that, "I'm in this

and I'm out of this thing in 30 seconds.

That's gonna show up on everybody's media page.

That's gonna show up on soundbites in the news

and I'm going to beat the guy controlling the narrative.

They're not."

- We don't need a weak person

being President of the United States, okay?

We don't need that.

[audience booing]

We don't need that.

Nasty guy.

Now I know why he doesn't have one endorsement

from any of his colleagues.

- All right, John, I get to respond.

- [Moderator] Senator Cruz, pick from the buffet.

- Rand Paul shouldn't even be on this stage.

He's number 11. He's got 1% in the polls.

- I don't know. - You're not beating Hillary.

- Well, then, if I can't...

Hey, if I can't, if can't beat her

you're really gonna get killed, aren't you?

[audience shouting]

So let me ask you this,

'cause you're really getting beaten badly.

I know you're embarrassed.

I know you're embarrassed, but keep fighting.

Keep swinging, men. Swing for the fences.

Let me just tell you. Let me just tell you..

- I mean, they were all ready for each other,

but they weren't ready for him.

Okay, he was like the human wrecking ball.

He was the Howard Stern of presidential candidates.

He was the first smash-mouth, shock jock candidate.

So he came in there with his tongue.

He used them as boxing fists.

He was just boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

- Quiet.

- And he's knocking 'em left and right,

and they couldn't handle it.

[audience booing]

- That's all of his donors and special interests out there.

[Jeb laughing]

So...

[audience booing]

Two days ago he said he would take his pants off

and moon everybody, and that's fine.

Nobody reports that.

He gets up and says that.

- Jeb's crowd, as you know, right down the street.

They're sleeping! They're sleeping now.

- There's a lot of technique in the linguistic kill shot,

as I call it.

- He's very low energy.

I'm not used to that kind of a person.

- If you looked at a Jeb Bush before the nickname,

you probably thought what I did

which was, hey, this Jeb Bush guy

looks like a real cool, calm, even-headed leader.

- But the moment that Trump said he was low-energy,

you couldn't unsee it.

- Please clap.

[audience applauding]

- Simple fact is, Donald, you cannot take-

- More energy tonight. I like that.

- And then he got to "Lying Ted".

Well, look at him. He looks shifty

- And he cleverly made it

Lyin' with an apostrophe, not a G.

- L-Y-I-N-apostrophe Lyin' Ted!

- And by the time he did "Little Marco"...

- Little Marco, Little Marco.

[audience laughing]

- I knew this stuff works.

- It was the idea that Trump was assigning people names.

That conveys a sort of authority.

- Don't worry about it, Little Marco, I will.

- All right, well let's hear, Big...

- Don't worry about it, Little-

Don't worry about it, Little Marco.

- [Moderator] Gentlemen!

Sometimes the only way to deal with a bully

is to knock him on his ass.

- He's always calling me Little Marco.

And I'll admit, the guy, he's taller than me.

He's like 6'2", which is why I don't understand

why his hands are the size of someone who's 5'2".

Have you seen his hands? They're like this.

And you know what they say about men with small hands...

[audience gasping]

- Everyone criticizes Rubio for going dirty on Trump, right?

Oh, he messed up his brand, and that was never his brand.

It was exactly that... It was cringe-worthy.

- He hit my hands. Nobody has ever hit my hands.

I've never heard of this one.

Look at those hands. Are they small hands?

[audience laughing]

And he referred to my hands,

if they're small, something else must be small.

I guarantee you there's no problem. I guarantee it.

[audience laughing]

- You have young children.

Do you regret where this has gone?

- Look, I...

I regret the way that campaign has become, absolutely,

because Donald Trump, for the last year,

has made it one of the most vulgar spectacles

in American political history.

[overlapping shouts]

- Trump ran through the Republican field like a buzzsaw.

- The Bush dynasty is done.

There were Republicans who were rising stars,

whether you're talking about a Chris Christie

or a Marco Rubio, a Rick Perry, who are done,

done in American life.

And then it got to the Democrats.

- Part of Hillary's whole strategy in the primaries

was to elevate Trump to make sure

that the media took him seriously.

- Now, some transformation has happened,

and Republicans, whether they support Donald Trump or not,

seem to think that he really is their best chance

of winning the general election next November.

- Anne, which Republican candidate

has the best chance at winning the general election?

- Of the declared ones, right now Donald Trump.

[audience laughing]

- There was a feeling of like the Clinton campaign

felt like this is great.

He'll destroy the Republican Party

and make it impossible for a Republican to win.

- Donald Trump's continue ascent in the Republican Party

could mean the end of the Republican Party as we know it,

that George W. Bush could be the last

elected Republican president.

- The RNC apparatus...

eventually panicked...

at the idea of Donald Trump being the nominee,

and they started to be more aggressive behind the scenes

to try to derail it.

If we Republicans choose Donald Trump as our nominee,

the prospects for a safe and prosperous future

are greatly diminished.

- You can see how loyal he is.

He was begging for my endorsement.

I could've said, "Mitt, drop to your knees."

He would have dropped to his knees. He was begging!

- We've confirmed that both presidents

George W. Bush and his father George H.W. Bush

will stay silent and not endorse anyone.

- He's a race baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot.

He doesn't represent my party.

- They wanted him to write checks.

They viewed him as a donor.

They did not view him as a serious candidate.

They viewed him as a threat to everything

that the RNC had been working for.

And what the RNC didn't realize

is that the American people could really have cared less

what their point of view was.

- CNN projects that Donald Trump

will be the winner of the New Hampshire Republican Primary.

- Oh, wow!

Wow, wow, wow.

- [Reporter] Donald Trump is the winner

of the Nevada Caucuses.

- We won with young. We won with old.

We won with highly educated. We won with poorly educated.

I love the poorly educated.

- [Reporter] A 22-point margin in Alabama,

14-point victory in Tennessee and Georgia.

- Yeah, baby!

- [Reporter] Very big nights for Donald Trump.

- They got destroyed.

Donald Trump, all five states called

relatively early in the night.

- People thought that Conservative values voters

were gonna care more about personal morality

than political and policy alignment.

And at the end of the day, it turns out

they don't care that much about personal morality

for their leaders.

[audience cheering]

- He exposes the fact that it's not about ideas.

It's about emotions.

This is not about actually ideology.

It's, oh, you know, he talks like me,

he thinks like me, in some cases he hates like me.

They felt like the two major parties

had failed the country in the most fundamental ways,

and they simply weren't listening,

and they wanted to find the person

who could personify their anguish

about the country's future.

[crowd cheering]

- [Audience] Bernie, Bernie, Bernie, Bernie!

- Well, look, nobody saw Bernie Sanders coming,

least of all the Hillary Clinton campaign.

And even Bernie Sanders himself was surprised

by how much traction he got.

- [Announcer] Senator Bernie Sanders!

[audience cheering]

- What this campaign is about is creating

a political revolution in America.

[audience cheering]

- CNN projects that Bernie Sanders

will win the Wisconsin Democratic Presidential Primary,

beating Hillary Clinton.

A big, big win for Bernie Sanders.

He won five of the last six states.

- We've now won, I guess, nine states.

And a lot more are yet to come.

I think Bernie Sanders was...

said a lot about weaknesses in her candidacy

that he gave her such a hard run.

- Her campaign refused to take seriously

that there had been an insurgency in her party,

and a 149 year old socialist from Vermont

who nobody ever heard of got 47% of the vote against her.

She went to Michigan and got beat to a bloody pulp

by Bernie Sanders.

That lets you know that there's a problem for you

in the industrial heartland.

- The fact that he was able to pull off

that incredible upset showed people

that there is still a very vocal constituency

in the Democratic base.

- What we see is a populism rising,

but a populism that is formed

by a lack of economic gain

and movement in the middle of the economy.

- A very large swath of the country has felt left out

by the economic miracle that's taken place

over the last 30 years.

[soft music]

In the process of globalization,

there's been rising living standards all over the world,

but the American middle-class

and American lower middle-class missed out on this.

- In the United States of America today,

there is massive injustice

in terms of income and wealth inequality.

- When you have no real wage growth,

when 67% doesn't have $1,000 dollars in savings,

when all the economic gains accrue at the top,

that will ultimately destabilize politics.

- Remember, 76% of Americans

do not have a four year college degree.

More than two thirds of Americans

have never been to college at all.

So, what you're excluding is the vast majority

of the country from the possibility of

of the upper middle class.

- Those people were angry.

- [Audience] Bernie Sanders! [clapping]

Bernie Sanders!

- [Audience] Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump!

- Boo!

- Things he's saying I've been saying for years.

When he wins, we all win.

[soft music]

- He tapped into a vein of the American mindset

that believed that the American dream was aspirational

but no longer achievable.

- I'm tired of the politicians in Washington.

I'm tired of the way the country's being run.

And I want some change.

I want somebody new, and the man knows what he's doing.

- If you want a candidate

who's gonna help create a government

which for all of us and not just the 1%...

- The jobs, incomes, and security of the American worker

will always be my first priority.

- And this guy is saying,

I'm not gonna ship your job jobs overseas.

I'm not going to trade with people

who will undermine our economy.

I'm not gonna let people into the country

who will jeopardize your security.

That's what they're looking for.

- I am going to be...

the greatest jobs president...

that God ever created.

Remember that.

[audience cheering]

- I think a lot of people go, "Oh my gosh!

Look at this Trump, he's upending everything!"

And this is some disease that just popped out of nowhere

in the American polity.

And it's like, no, he's actually a symptom

of the fact that many people have felt alienated

for a long time, have felt disappointed in their vehicles

for reaching Congress, in Congress,

in this entire sort of system.

- Our system is rigged.

The system is corrupt.

The system is broken.

[somber music]

- They were waiting for someone who just would grab

the people of Washington, the leeches and the lawyers

and the lobbyists and all of them,

just grab them by the neck and say get the fuck out.

- We are going to drain the swamp.

It is time to drain the swamp in Washington, D.C.

We're draining the swamp.

[audience cheering]

- [Interviewer] Some people have told us

that Trump voters were dumb and that he manipulated them.

- It is a mistake to say, or to believe,

that people who voted for Donald Trump are stupid,

just like it's a mistake to say

that they're sexist or racist or xenophobic.

It is fair to say, though, that they were duped.

Because if you're looking for a champion,

if you've been squeezed as a member of the middle-class

for a Rust Belt city, a billionaire populist

who lives on Fifth Avenue is not gonna be your savior.

Now, to Donald Trump's credit,

he was able to connect with them.

- And I'll tell you what.

The big business in this country, and I'm a part of it,

but I decided-

I'd been on the other side. You do know that, right?

I understand the other side.

- In some way, it's possible that,

because he owned being the rich guy

who was going to help everybody do better,

it, in a way, circumvented the criticisms

that he's just some rich guy.

- Large numbers of Americans have thought

for a very long period of time

that, if we can only get a businessman in there,

someone who understood business,

we could make the government run like a business.

Which is kind of a funny point of view

when you think of all of the senators and governors

who were businessmen, who were elected

and generally have been a disastrous politician.

[helicopter whirring]

- He was out there giving helicopter rides to children,

spending tons of money showing anything

but humble beginnings.

but that's who his persona was,

and that made him seem authentic.

- So he wore a suit where other people don't wear suits.

He stayed looking presidential in every situation.

[overlapping shouts]

- Mr. Trump now has security

equal to the President of the United States.

- We commonly refer to our activity as the show,

and the reason being is because it was a show.

If you think about the optics, the black vehicles,

the limousines, the agents that jump out

with sunglasses and earpieces,

there's a sense of importance and gravitas

that comes with the show.

And Donald Trump had that almost one year

in advance of the election.

- And he made sure that, when he landed his plane,

that it looked a lot like Air Force One.

That there would be plenty of camera time for that.

- The American people would have been disappointed

if he had appeared at any airport

in any other jet.

The black and gold and red Trump color scheme,

and the giant block letters of gold, Trump,

are things that people respond to now emotionally.

It's not just that they're amused and riveted by it.

They like it.

- They admire Donald Trump the same way

they once admired Elvis.

They see a man who's living large, who's enjoying life,

Who's doing what they would probably do

if they were worth billions of dollars.

- Trump is the guy that the working class man would be

If he won the lottery.

There's something about Trump's wealth, the gold-platedness,

the eating a bucket of KFC on his airplane.

[soft electronic music]

- He's one powerful person

who's gonna stand up and stand between

the regular folks and the elite and say, "I'm with them."

- He has money.

He's supporting this campaign from his own money.

He believes in this.

- I'm here for Donald Trump

because he loves America and he loves Texans.

- And veterans.

- Yes! Yes!

- We need jobs and we need more jobs.

I mean, it's getting bad, but it's gonna get better,

'cause he's gonna be our president.

- He wants to eliminate some of the corruption

that's in the government.

And there's a lot of corruption in this government

at the present time.

- If you were afraid that your child was being indoctrinated

in high school or college, Trump had a message for you.

If you were angry about the cultural signals

that Hollywood was sending, he had a message for you.

And if you were...

resentful that the media wasn't telling the whole story,

boy, did he have a message for you.

And it became Trump versus this cultural elite.

[grave electronic music]

- If you look at a Trump rally, you see the joyful faces,

people laughing, people having fun.

- He was electrifying audiences

of 10 to 20 to 30,000 people.

- I would go early to the events.

They would be lined up around the block,

into the second block, into the third block.

Never seen anything like it.

- They would show up in labyrinth, snake-like lines

to go to a rally just to say they were there

when he was there and be part of his movement.

[stark music]

- [Audience] We want Trump! We want Trump!

We want Trump!

[audience cheering]

We want Trump!

- When you start to draw 10,000 people,

15, 20,000, in Trump's case 30,000 people...

and they're all cheering your name...

And you're Donald Trump...

It's better than Oxycontin.

I mean, it is the most addictive thing in life,

even more than private jets.

Just...

[audience cheering]

- Unbelievable!

Thank you!

Ah, that's so beautiful.

- Donald Trump is very, very hard to understand

if you come at him through the lens of an educated person.

I went to a number of his rallies

in New Hampshire and in South Carolina.

And I would listen to Trump's speeches,

and it seemed to me as if he was changing thoughts

in the middle of a sentence,

not just in the middle of the paragraph.

There were so many unfinished thoughts

and so many imprecise wordings.

I thought, my gosh, what does this guy even talking about?

- Did you read about Starbucks?

No more "Merry Christmas" on Starbucks.

Then you say, sorry, we're leaving.

You go out, you double up the sanctions.

By the time your plane lands

at one of our decrepit airports, they're all decrepit.

This was said to me by one of the great musical geniuses.

I won't tell you his name.

I don't want to get in trouble.

But he said, "Donald, you're the greatest in the world.

You're the only one that can fill an arena

without a guitar," meaning without music.

I don't want Oreos made in Mexico!

[audience booing]

Right?

- It's baffling to me...

why people would say that he...

that Trump gets anyone in the Rust Belt,

any middle-class person.

Not only...

Yes, does he literally live in a gold tower in New York City

and a mansion in Beverly Hills, on a golf course in Florida

I never saw a speech of Donald Trump's

where he addressed the needs of the working class.

I never saw a single speech of Donald Trump's

where he talked about anything but himself and his enemies.

- And yet, when I talked to the people in the crowd,

I found that he was resonating with them.

- We're gonna win so much,

you may even get tired of winning!

And you'll say, "Please, please!

It's too much winning!

We can't take it anymore!

Mr. President, it's too much!"

And I'll say, "No, it isn't!

We have to keep winning!

We have to win more!

We're gonna win more!"

- You can mock it.

You can say you don't agree with it.

You can say it wasn't sophisticated enough.

But you can't say he didn't have it.

He knew exactly what he wanted to tell people.

- People came to the rallies

because they had no idea what he was gonna say.

They had no ideas whether there were gonna be fights.

You didn't know.

- His campaign violence gone viral.

Those are the big questions this week

after the ugliest two days

of a dangerously angry White House race.

- Oh, we have a protester.

We have a protester.

[audience booing]

I love the old days.

You know what they used to do to guys like that

when they were in a place like this?

They'd be carried out on a stretcher, folks.

[audience cheering]

Ah, it's true.

Get 'em outta here!

Get 'em out!

Out, out, out!

Bye! Go home to mommy.

- [Reporter] Do you regret saying any of those things

about punching protesters,

sending them out on stretchers?

- No, I don't regret it at all.

- Racist go home! - Build that wall!

- Racist go home! - Build that wall!

- Is there anything more fun than a Trump rally?

- [Audience] No!

- The ancient Romans said that the electorate

was motivated by bread and circuses.

So the idea that giving people a show

is not unique to 21st century America

or 21st century world.

But Trump Is good at it. He's good at provoking people.

He's good at getting a rise out of people

in whatever medium.

ISIS...

is honoring...

President Obama.

[audience booing]

He is the founder of ISIS.

He's the founder of ISIS.

- Trump has launched a new line of attacks

trying to link the Obama administration

to the founding of ISIS.

- Founding ISIS would be, I mean, that's treason.

- I know what you meant.

You meant that he created the vacuum, he lost the peace.

- No, I meant he's the founder of ISIS.

He was the founder of ISIS.

Absolutely.

- Every night I had to sit on set...

cable news, and listen to people explaining

how Trump is moments away from self-destructing,

how the most recent thing he's done is so terrible

and he'll never survive it.

- And I think what Trump understood better

than really anybody is the truth of being in the media.

There's not a liberal or a conservative bias

as much as there's a conflict bias,

and Donald Trump provided daily conflict.

- You gotta see this guy, "I don't know what I said!

[mumbling]

I don't remember!"

- That reporter he is talking about is Serge Kovaleski,

who now works for the New York Times.

- Do you believe in punishment for abortion, yes or no?

As a principle.

- The answer is that...

there has to be some form of punishment.

- For the woman?

- Yeah.

- Have you even read the United States Constitution?

- If you look at his wife, she was standing there.

She had nothing to say.

She probably, maybe she wasn't allowed

to have anything to say.

You tell me.

- That's a famous Mussolini quote. You retweeted it.

Do you like the quote?

Did you know it was Mussolini?

- It's okay to know it's Mussolini.

Look, Mussolini was Mussolini.

I'm gonna bomb the shit out of 'em!

[audience cheering]

It's true.

I don't care.

They give us the most dishonest reporting,

and that's the way it is, folks.

That's the way it is, and we just get used to it.

- Whenever Trump would appear on television,

the ratings would go up.

- Man, who would have expected the ride

we're all having right now.

It may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS.

That's all I got to say.

[audience laughing]

- So they had this endless appetite for Trump,

because they had an endless appetite for ratings.

[audience cheering]

- Trump's a racist!

[audience laughing]

- Yeah, I mean, it's symbiotic, right?

And everyone should admit

that this is a symbiotic relationship that...

he rates...

we cover him 'cause he rates.

You could just put a camera on him

and guarantee that it was gonna be entertaining in some way.

- Because he's a controlled car crash.

And once in a while he'll hit the guard rail

doing 75 miles an hour and sparks will come off the car,

and you're like, okay, where's this thing gonna go?

I gotta watch this thing.

- At first, he would do an interview with anybody.

He was calling in to TV stations

and radio stations left and right.

- I'm joined now on the phone from New York by Donald Trump.

- On the phone, Donald Trump.

- Donald Trump on the phone

- We have a phone call from somebody.

- Good morning, darling.

- Nobody had ever seen that before.

Usually you have walls and walls of media handlers

between a candidate and the media system.

What's on the Facebook page?

What's on the Twitter page?

Who's he talking to when?

Trump just kept accelerating his share of the media market.

[cameras snapping]

- It was partly it was Trump's celebrity

and the expectation that he would say something outrageous.

- It may be.

Again, I don't have the data,

but I'm just gonna make a guess

that Donald Trump was the most televised candidate

in the history of candidates.

- He's someone that commands media attention

and television oxygen.

And actually, what happened is everyone,

in the liberal media in particular,

continued to underestimate him.

- I think there is a large segment of the population

in the United States that wants to blame somebody,

and the media becomes an easy target.

- But I do think that there were things done for him,

like photos of the empty podium, waiting for the presser,

because it was guaranteed conflict, good TV.

- Front-runner Donald Trump expected to speak

at a campaign rally.

- So we're just expecting him.

- [Reporter] We're awaiting his remarks.

- [Reporter] Still waiting for that Donald Trump.

- Any minute now.

- All the news coverage just got sucked up

and focused on him, because he continued to be

the most interesting story.

You can't even remember

what the other candidates were about.

- But the media is not the one that told

all of his competitors not to do interviews.

They were running an old game and an old playbook.

Trump, to his credit, understood that new media world.

And he took advantage of it. There's no question about it.

- That led to just an unconscionable amount

of free media coverage

that we could sort of quantify in dollars.

It would be a really, really high number.

- You know, people say that he got a billion dollars

in free media in the primary,

but a lot of that was negative.

A lot of that would have been considered not a campaign ad

for his campaign but for his opponents.

- I supported him. He lost, he let us down.

But, you know, he lost.

So I never liked him as much after that

'cause I don't like losers.

[audience laughing]

But Frank, Frank,

let me get to it. - He's a war hero.

He hit me. - He's a war hero.

You hear me say, "But he's a war hero."

I couldn't believe it.

He's a war hero. And I said it like that.

- He's not a war hero.

- He's a war hero.

- He's a war hero-

- Five and a half years.

- He's a war hero 'cause he was captured.

I like people that weren't captured, okay?

I hate to tell you.

- And I thought to myself at that moment

the gentleman who is sitting across from you

is in the process of lighting himself on fire.

- Oh, that was my first moment

where I naively was like, well, this guy's done.

[laughs]

- Supposedly, that's something that the right

does not tolerate.

You cannot go after members of the military.

- You know, I'm just speechless.

'cause I just can't believe such reckless words

out of a person's mouth.

- He did 10 things, from the announcement

through the first vote in Iowa,

10 things that would have killed any other candidate.

And each time, he just got stronger.

- This is going to be a nightmare of a campaign.

If he insists on being so uncivil and so disrespectful,

but you better get ready for it.

- They say I have the most loyal people.

Did you ever see that?

Where I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue

and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, okay?

It's incredible.

[audience laughing]

- You're encouraged to be modest, to be humble,

not to show off, not to be brash,

not to say provocative things, to be very careful,

to tip toe around the niceties of language.

Trump just ignored all the playbook.

Trump just went, "No, actually, I'm gonna be me.

For better or for worse, I'm gonna to be authentic."

- And that was tremendously attractive to an audience,

and I think a country, that is perhaps rightly tired

of politicians who seem bound

by what they considered political correctness

in not saying those things.

[audience cheering]

- What happens with Trump

is that he uses the same method over and over again

until it fails.

And in the primaries, he discovered that it didn't fail.

- An outsider who read the mood of Republican voters

better than anyone now controls a party

that fought him every step of the way.

This evening, his last opponent dropped out,

ensuring that Donald Trump

will be the party's first nominee since Eisenhower

to run with no political experience.

- I saw an organization that was the most pathetic

of anything I've ever seen in American politics.

His polling operation was weak.

His grassroots was almost non-existent.

They refused to spend money for advertising.

All the elements of what you spend or invest in the campaign

were not happening.

- We hit the 1237, right? 1237.

- [Reporter] Trump celebrated the victory tonight

with McDonald's.

- Here I am, watching Hillary fight,

and she can't close the deal.

And that should be such an easy deal to close.

It could be we're gonna run against Crazy Bernie.

That could be big.

[audience booing]

Could be Crazy Bernie.

He's a crazy man, but that's okay. We like crazy people.

- Certainly, great politicians master new media.

Right, so, FDR was the king of radio.

JFK used TV.

Obama used the internet and nascent social networks

very well, but Trump and Twitter,

it was a particularly powerful, toxic combination.

- Well, I think Twitter is a unique kind of network

in that it brings together a social network

and a broadcast network.

[intriguing electronic music]

You have millions of followers,

you're effectively a broadcaster.

And these two modes interact.

Sometimes a tweet goes viral,

where eventually millions or tens of millions of people

will see that one message.

- It was his understanding of Twitter

and how to make that entire platform his,

in a way that creates direct intimacy with his supporters.

It was unbelievable, what he was doing.

And I recognized that immediately.

It was like I was sitting there going...

almost reverential, like, "Oh my gosh!"

- It was Mr. Trump himself

who drove that social media platform train

by directly communicating with the people,

and the media had to cover the candidates' tweets.

- Matt, I want to put up that tweet again this morning,

of course tweeting, "I love Hispanics."

- I want you to look at this graphic of one of his tweets.

I'm sure that you have seen this.

A star that is the shape of the Star of David.

- Donald Trump very successfully used

not only Twitter as a tool in and of itself

but Twitter as a tool to disrupt legacy media.

- I would be on a live TV set, and I'd be mid-sentence,

they'd be like, "Hold on, Kellyanne, breaking news."

And I'd say, "Oh, God forbid, what happened?"

And they'd say, "Your boss, your candidate

just tweeted the following..."

And I'd look at it, and they'd ask me to comment on it.

But he literally would make news instantaneously.

- And maybe a lot of that innermost decision-making

and kind of tuning of messaging

was happening by the man himself, and...

and the speed and the agility that you need to surf...

a near real-time medium, which is what Twitter is,

that might be a huge strategic advantage.

- I just can't think of a worse candidate

in the Twitter era.

I mean, Hillary isn't like a bite-sized candidate

who would just fire off things without thinking about them.

And to her credit, a lot of people

would like a president who puts a lot of thought into things

before they release them to the world.

There would be a whole team to approve a simple tweet.

Ultimately that...

I think that people saw that and could tell

a lack of spontaneity or genuine emotion.

- I am honored to be here amongst you

on behalf of what really made this country great,

working people, men and women.

- The new currency...

that's rare and needed in politics is no longer money.

It's attention. It's name recognition.

That is the new currency.

And Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump had oodles of that.

The difference is how they used it.

[stark electronic music]

Hillary Clinton tried to stay out of the spotlight,

away from interviews, and just rest on the fact

that she had the biggest brand in American politics.

- [Reporter] Secretary Clinton...

we haven't heard from you in a month.

- Yeah, maybe when I finished talking to the people here.

How's that?

- She tried to walk in a parade. To cordon off the press...

They were put in this moving rope line.

- This is the worst visual metaphor.

Before you could say she's not talking to reporters,

but you can't cover not talking.

You can show this image over and over again, and it's awful.

- Her press strategy was essentially to ignore us.

She felt like the front runner

and didn't think that she necessarily needed to talk

to the gaggle of reporters

who traveled with her everywhere, covering

- I am so happy to have all of you with me!

- [Reporter] Have you missed us?

- I've been just waiting for this moment!

- The relationship between the Clinton campaign

and the press is just hostile on both sides.

And it's early for that.

- She gave very few interviews.

She did almost no print interviews that I'm aware of

before the general election.

- The criticism is directed at the Clinton campaign on this.

We're trying to wrap her in bubble wrap

this entire campaign

and not let her actually associate with real people.

- Nobody wanted any kind of moment to go wrong

and go viral and look bad.

And so I think there was an extreme caution

that prohibited her from having more of those moments

that could have ultimately helped her.

- We saw a systematic difference between members

of the what we call Trump tribe and Clinton tribe.

just more retweets, more tweets, more replies, more activity

per account from the Trump tribe versus the Clinton tribe.

And so we describe that as a passion gap.

And at some point, you know, someone on our team said,

"It's almost like there's a public awakening."

We're seeing something happening

in the nature of the conversation where...

Donald Trump seems like a far more serious possibility

than the polling numbers or anything else would indicate.

- I think that the key is that Donald Trump's

defiant authenticity resonated,

and that's something I think all politicians

can learn from.

That doesn't mean simply play

to the lowest common denominator every day,

But it does mean, for God's sakes,

be yourself and talk like a goddamn human being.

- What's what's something that you always carry with you?

- Hot sauce.

- Really?

- Yeah. Yeah.

- Really?

- Are you getting in formation right now?

[laughing]

- Hot sauce?

- Hot sauce in my bag swag?

- Hot sauce.

- Really? - Yes!

- Now, listen, I want you to know

people are gonna see this and say,

"Okay, she's pandering to black people."

[laughing]

- Okay.

Is it working?

[laughing]

- Don't forget what a terrible campaign Hillary Clinton ran.

Her campaign, to this day,

nobody can remember a thing about it.

- [Interviewer] A quick soundcheck.

What was written on Donald Trump's baseball cap?

- "Make America great again".

- Make America great again. - Make America great again.

- Oh, make America great again?

- [Interviewer] What was Hillary's campaign slogan?

- I'm still trying to figure it out.

- Ready for Hillary?

I don't know.

- I don't remember.

- Together?

Forward together?

- I don't know.

- Oh, I don't actually know what it said on her plane.

What was her slogan?

- And she had "stronger together", whatever that means.

- On one point, being this well-known

made it hard for her campaign to craft a narrative,

but it also made it just hard for Hillary.

I mean, she's lived in this cloistered, rarefied world

for a very long time.

And so, to emerge from that world

and try to really connect to voters

suffering in these steel towns where Trumpism took hold

I think was very difficult.

The sounds so old school,

but we wouldn't see any Hillary yard signs.

You saw a ton of Trump yard signs.

[anxious music]

- I never got the sense that they had really captured

the energy of people out there,

connected with them in that way.

Often you get a sense that a candidate

will fight for every inch, and she just never exuded that.

- It was all bullshit.

It was all sloganeering.

- I'm just chilling in Cedar Rapids.

I try to figure out how we get them

to have Pokemon Go-to-the-polls.

[audience laughing]

[audience cheering]

- I think just viscerally

she missed the anger that had taken root in the electorate.

- Secretary Clinton does represent the establishment.

I represent, I hope, ordinary Americans

and, by the way who are not all that enamored

with the establishment.

- It's always been the case, going back to 2008, even,

that Hillary Clinton just wasn't an inspirational figure,

whether it was her speaking ability,

whether it was her record,

whether it was the way she saw the world.

It was an issue that her campaign

was in complete denial about.

They thought it was Bernie who convinced

a lot of left-leaning people not to like Hillary.

But in fact, this was just a fact

that Sanders and his campaign saw and exploited.

It was a preexisting condition for Hillary

that people just didn't really like her.

[anxious music]

- We have won, at this point, 45% of pledge delegates.

But we have only earned 7% of superdelegates.

[crowd booing]

So in other words, the way the system works

is you have establishment candidates

who win virtually all of the superdelegates.

- NBC News is now declaring Hillary Clinton

the presumptive Democratic nominee.

[group cheering]

[crowd cheering]

- At the Democratic Convention, I went down to the protests,

the Bernie or Bust protests.

[protestors shouting]

Kids from all over the country,

people in their teens and 20s,

who said the Democratic Party has lost me for a generation,

I don't have something to believe in

if Bernie is not on top of the ticket.

- [Protestors] We won't vote for Hillary!

- [Reporter] Many Sanders backers just aren't willing

to shift their loyalties

from the U.S. Senator's progressive platform.

- I mean, that was a tense convention.

- Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine

want to build an economy that works for everyone...

[crowd booing]

not just the people at the top.

[crowd booing]

[crowd shouting]

- If I didn't know any better, I would have thought

I was at Bernie Sanders' convention last night.

It rose to the rafters.

[crowd booing]

- There was a sense that the DNC

had kind of tilted the table in her favor,

there hadn't really been a fair contest

between Hillary and Bernie.

- There's no question to my mind,

and I think no question to any objective observer's mind,

that the DNC was supporting Hillary Clinton

and was in opposition to our campaign.

- Rigged! Rigged!

Remember hashtag rigged?

How offensive to say it was rigged.

How dare you say that our democracy could be rigged?

How dare you say that?

And, it was rigged.

- I actually think Hillary and some of her top advisors

are more angry at Bernie Sanders than they are Donald Trump.

They thought that he gave her sort of a lukewarm endorsement

when he finally got around to it.

- And I move that Hillary Clinton be selected

as the nominee of the Democratic Party

for President of the United States

[audience cheering]

- Senator Sanders has moved in the spirit of unity

to suspend the rules.

- Bernie Sanders lit the place on fire.

I mean, he came out of nowhere and God bless him.

Bernie was an Independent.

He agreed to run in Democratic primaries,

but he was an Independent.

And of course there are going to be associations

and friendships and loyalty built up to somebody

who's been a Democrat their whole life.

- That's why you're an insurgent.

You're an insurgent because there's a status quo

establishment in the party,

and there's an establishment candidate.

- And so, my friends, it is with humility, determination,

and boundless confidence in America's promise

that I accept your nomination

For President of the United States

[audience cheering]

- I do think that she matched up with the mood

of the electorate particularly badly.

A lot of people felt the system was rigged,

and the Clintons, for many people, and fairly,

were a symbol of a rigged system.

- And so, you put all that together,

you have a real big problem for Hillary Clinton

going into that election with a divided party

and an arrogant campaign

that believed it could not be defeated.

[uneasy music]

♪ We are the champions my friends ♪

[crowd cheering]

- Even Trump may have underestimated Trump.

I knew he wanted to be the great disruptor

who would attract more eyeballs

and create this reality show.

I knew he wanted to do that. That was clear.

But did he want to stay the whole way

and make it into a general election?

Because if he did, he was gonna be there.

- Friends...

delegates...

and fellow Americans...

I humbly...

and gratefully accept your nomination

for the presidency of the United States.

[audience cheering]

- I suspect that Donald Trump

did not decide he really wanted to be president

until he turned to face Hillary Clinton.

- This is the legacy of Hillary Clinton:

death, destruction, terrorism, and weakness

[audience cheering]

- It was gonna be one of the more negative campaigns

in the history of the country.

Why?

Because I might be able to get you to stay home

instead of voting for Hillary Clinton.

- Hillary Clinton was a perfect foil for him.

She embodied, or could be made to embody,

everything that he said he was against.

And some of this was just Trump's gut.

And some of this is Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway

and others building an actual, coherent worldview

around Trump's gut.

- I always knew Hillary Clinton could lose the election,

which is one way of answering the question

of when I thought Donald Trump could win the election.

- [Reporter] Down the stretch they come.

We've been talking about Hillary Clinton

opening up that lead.

- [Reporter] He struggles with women.

He struggles with minorities.

- [Reporter] Mr. Trump, with the support

of 2% of African American voters.

- By the time I came on board, we were down in the polls.

I said we're way behind, the window's closing,

but it's still open.

We're way behind.

And he said, oh, the polls.

And I said, I looked at the polls, and she's winning,

but she doesn't have to. You can.

- She had a lot more paths to victory than he did.

- He can win Florida, he can win North Carolina,

and he can win Ohio and still be short.

That's important.

He can win Arizona and still be short. He can win Utah.

- And then, even then, he's gotta go and get

maybe it's a Michigan or a Wisconsin

to put him over the top.

- A normal Republican can not take your terms, frankly,

I hate to say this, cannot think in terms

of bringing in Michigan.

- He represented a great push forward

in our demonstrable quest to bust through

Hillary Clinton's very real blue wall,

beginning with the upper Midwest.

So, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, Ohio, Pennsylvania.

- They've taken our jobs out of Pennsylvania.

We're gonna be bringing 'em back, folks. Believe me.

[audience cheering]

We're bringing 'em back.

- This is industrial. This is blue collar.

There are a lot of towns

that have been hurt by globalization.

- We talked a lot about the white working-class vote,

particularly white working-class men

in those Rust Belt states.

Hillary is notably weak with these voters,

losing them by as much as two-to-one or more,

10 to 15 points weaker than Barack Obama

with white, working-class men.

- We were competing in states

that Obama-Biden had carried twice.

But had also elected a Republican statewide as senator

and/or governor in the interim,

and where Hillary Clinton had never gotten to 50%

and stayed there for very long.

- Hillary Clinton just didn't go to these states.

She was hanging out in places like Arizona

and Texas, inexplicably.

- When your allies are putting a lot of effort

into red states right now, Arizona, Utah,

you're doing this even though it's still neck-and-neck

in a lot of the traditional battleground states,

Ohio and Iowa, Florida.

Are you guys getting over-confident?

- There's a special opportunity

that popped up late in Arizona.

It is possible to win it.

- Arizona has not, 12 of the past 13 presidential elections,

has not voted for a Democrat.

And so you saw this extreme confidence

on the part of the campaign that they could expand the map,

that they could bring in new voters

in places like Arizona and Georgia

that are sort of going purple.

- While Donald Trump is up in these states,

saying I'm gonna make America great again.

[somber music]

- In August, after she had a 10-point lead

after her convention, after a successful convention,

she basically disappeared in the Hamptons to fundraise.

Her campaign would get very defensive about this:

we need money, we need a lot of money to go against Trump.

But every single day, Trump was doing rallies.

[jet whooshing]

[stark electronic music]

Then she re-emerged Labor Day, and she was sick,

and she just had sort of a string of bad luck.

- I think that was a very troubling moment for her.

That was her worst weekend in many ways.

September 11th, very early in the morning,

she had her spill.

[tense music]

- She's supposed to fight all of these different things,

and she can't make it 15 feet to her car.

Give me a break. Give me a break.

[audience cheering]

- Thank God she was okay health-wise.

But the worst thing for her was two days earlier,

when she was caught on tape.

You know, to just be grossly generalistic,

you could put half of Trump's supporters

into what I call the basket of deplorables.

- Hillary Clinton on Friday evening,

"basket of deplorables" already entered

into the annals of campaign flubs.

- They are not a basket of anything.

They are Americans and they deserve your respect.

- [Narrator] People like you, you and you...

Deplorable.

You know what's deplorable?

Hillary Clinton viciously demonizing

hardworking people like you.

- It as a reflection perfectly of what the coastal elites

in the United States feel about the people

trapped in the working-class counties

and cities of the country

that have been decimated by globalization.

- And it was like, wow, we thought you thought that of us,

and now we know for sure.

[upbeat music]

[audience cheering]

- She is a really gifted debater,

maybe one of the best debaters we've seen

on a stage in a long time.

- Why won't he release his tax returns?

And I think there may be a couple of reasons.

First, maybe he's not as rich as he says he is.

Second, maybe he's not as charitable as he claims to be.

- We're gonna come up with three or four clever things

that were gonna hit Trump with tonight,

and you'll say them in the following sequence.

- I call it Trumped up trickle down,

because that's exactly what it would be.

- And she was picking out her outfit to look perfect.

- He's showing up with a tie down to his ankle.

Give me the microphone. I'm ready to go.

- I don't believe that Hillary has the stamina.

- [Moderator] Let's let her respond.

- Woo! Okay!

[audience laughing]

- He stood there, waiting to be exposed.

- As soon as he travels to 112 countries

and negotiates a peace deal, a cease fire,

or even spends 11 hours

testifying in front of a congressional committee,

he can talk to me about stamina.

- But Hillary invested a lot,

instead of doing rallies that 20,000 people

on an amazing night would see,

how about we just bunker down and invest in these debates?

- And I just left Detroit, and I just left Philadelphia,

and I just, you know, you've seen me,

I've been all over the place.

You decided to stay home, and that's okay.

- I think Donald just criticized me

for preparing for this debate.

And yes, I did.

And you know what else I prepared for?

I prepared to be President.

And I think that's a good thing.

[audience applauding]

- I think the consensus was that she won all of them.

- Did anybody see that debate last night?

[audience cheering]

[somber music]

Oh!

Yes!

One down, two to go.

- I want a word or phrase

to describe Donald Trump's performance tonight.

- Strong start, weak finish.

- Missed opportunities.

- Bombastic.

- Not presidential.

- Sloppy.

- I want a word or phrase to describe

Hillary Clinton's performance.

- Prepared.

- Firm.

- Powerful.

- I think she had one of the best debate preps

that I have seen in the last 25 years.

- I think she came across more presidential.

- It seemed, for all the world,

like something of a victory lap.

- Yeah, and I think Hillary Clinton

deserves a victory lap this morning.

[crowd cheering]

- One history professor, meanwhile,

says that Donald Trump will be

the next leader of our country.

- Professor Allan Lichtman from American University,

good enough to join us now.

- I delivered my Trump prediction

in a Washington Post interview in September, 2016,

and people wondered if I had gotten too old

and lost my sanity.

My system forgets the pundits, forgets the polls,

does not look at the day-to-day events of the campaign.

I don't look at debates. I don't look at ads.

I don't look at campaign tricks.

And I predict elections in advance.

In other words, I put myself on the line

and have been doing so successfully since 1984.

And for 32 years, everyone has asked me the same question:

Couldn't there be an October surprise?

Couldn't there be something so extraordinary

that it could turn around your prediction?

And there never has been an October surprise

that's doomed a candidate.

Everybody talks about it, but it's never happened.

[gentle vocal music]

- I just start kissing them. It's like a magnet.

You just kiss.

[laughing]

I don't even wait.

And when you're a star, they let you do it.

You can do anything.

- Whatever you want.

- Grab 'em by the pussy.

[laughing]

You can do anything.

- My assumption from the bus is that he was done.

- A recording of Donald Trump,

made more than a decade ago, has surfaced.

It is lewd, it is vulgar, and we caution you,

you won't want young children to hear it.

- Every single Republican

is going to have to answer the question,

what did you do the day you saw the tape

of this man boasting about grabbing a woman's pussy?

Period!

- All right. We'll be-

Will you please stop saying that word?

My daughter is listening.

[overlapping shouts]

Don't tell me you're offended when I say pussy,

but you're not offended when Donald Trump says it

- Exactly. - I am very offended.

- What was your response when you first heard it?

- Horrible remarks.

They're remarks you certainly don't want to hear

from anyone, much less a presidential candidate.

- This was a powerful individual speaking freely and openly

about sexually predatory behavior.

- I saw it, and I said the election is over.

There's no way you come back from this.

Folks are gonna stay home.

- This race is over

Tomorrow morning, the money will dry up,

the Republicans will start to hide.

[anxious music]

- One top Republican said to me,

we're gonna to see the fastest cut and run

in American political history.

- I'm not sure of the Republican party's gonna survive.

- The fundraisers, the donors, they're all walking away.

- I'm out. I can no longer endorse Donald Donald Trump.

- I think Donald Trump should step aside,

which I've been asked many times today.

Yes, I do.

- I passed and a TV...

that literally said Trump's female campaign manager

expected to quit.

You know, she's got four young children.

She's a devout Catholic. There's no way she can stay.

- How she stood up there and defended him

when nobody else was willing to do so.

- This is suggesting sexual assault, and-

- That's a very unfortunate phrase,

and people really should stop using that.

- Why?

- Because I know him better, and I know better.

- But it's what he said.

- He did not say the word sexual assault.

- No.

- And I remember watching her, thinking,

A, that's a very courageous thing for a woman to be doing;

secondly, it was really helping him.

It managed to take the sting out of the tail.

- Nobody was saying, oh, it's nothing.

- [Reporter] This was locker room banter,

I apologize for it.

- Mr. Trump apologized for it.

He spoke about it.

- I've never said I'm a perfect person

nor pretended to be someone that I'm not.

I've said some foolish things, but there's a big difference

between the words and actions of other people.

Bill Clinton has actually abused women.

- And I felt it was really important

for us to talk about what he would do for you as president,

transport you away from this moment and into his presidency

and the promises he was making.

And I did famously say there's a big difference to voters,

and indeed all Americans,

between what offends you and what affects you,

and voters were making that choice.

- All men do it, and women do it.

- Honestly, you gotta stick with him.

Hillary's no better.

I mean, she's just lying through her teeth

left and right, over and over again.

Here's the thing. He's not running to be the Pope.

Look at the culture of our country.

- I don't care! Nobody cares!

- Hillary Clinton said that the women who make allegations

deserve to be heard,

except the ones who accused her husband!

- If I remember, October 7th this happens,

October 8th, we have a meeting in Trump Tower.

He knew people were going to have

some tough recommendations.

Reince Priebus told him to drop out,

drop out or stay in and lose by the most in history.

But, as is Donald J. Trump's custom, he did it his way.

There was no time for him to be inauthentic and phony.

And so I think people saw that,

and they probably thought he would fold in the next debate,

but it almost reinvigorated him.

And then of course, you know

the Clinton accusers were there as well.

- There you see in the middle of your screen, Donald Trump,

but from left to right, Kathleen Willey

Juanita Broaddrick, then Donald Trump in the middle.

These are women who have made very strong accusations

against Bill Clinton.

- It was several people's idea.

And...

it was an idea that had been floated for a while though.

Hillary Clinton, and really Mark Cuban,

made a big deal that he was gonna go sit in the front row

and torment Donald Trump.

And so it was like, well, we'll see you one Mark Cuban,

and we'll raise you four or five Clinton accusers.

[chuckles]

See how much fun I had?

[dramatic music]

What he's basically saying is, hey, go fuck yourself.

I'm not going to be attacked by you,

who's now all of a sudden the champion of women.

- If you look at a Bill Clinton, far worse.

Mine are words, and his was action.

- What he basically says is

both sides are guilty, let's muddy the contrast here,

even though Hillary Clinton is in some ways the victim,

obviously, of her husband's infidelity.

- So you can say any way you want to say it,

but Bill Clinton was abusive to women.

Hillary Clinton attacked those same women

and attacked them viciously.

Four of them are here tonight.

- He gave the right wing something to hold on to.

And they really-

The only thing uniting the Republican coalition

isn't Donald Trump; it's hatred of Hillary Clinton.

[intense music]

[faint chatter]

- And he does have a way, this is what many people

right of center in this country like about him,

of not letting Democrats off the hook

for their bad behavior.

I'd like to know, Anderson,

why aren't you bringing up the emails?

I'd like to know why aren't you

getting to the emails? - We brought up the emails.

- No, it hasn't. It hasn't.

And it hasn't been finished at all.

- Trump had a lot of luck,

in that the FBI was...

very vocal about their investigation

into Hillary's private server.

- There is evidence that they were extremely careless

in their handling of very sensitive,

highly classified information.

- [Reporter] Questions over a classified email.

- Email account.

- [Reporter] Emails, in one form or another,

they have been dogging Clinton throughout this campaign.

- Two years after she had left office

for it to become clear

that she had been using this private email

and that she had handed over 30,000 emails,

and that 31,000, almost 32,000,

had been deleted in this process.

- She deleted the emails... She has to go to jail

His narrative of "Crooked Hillary",

he had this giant data point

of this looming FBI investigation.

- I didn't think I'd say this, but I'm going to say it.

And I hate to say it, but if I win,

I am going to instruct my Attorney General

to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation.

- It's just awfully good that someone with the temperament

of Donald Trump is not in charge of the law in our country.

- Because you'd be in jail.

- [Moderator] Secretary Clinton-

[audience laughing and cheering]

- The fact that he was willing to say to her face

on national television, "You belong in jail,"

is exactly what voters wanted to hear from him

to know that he was serious.

- [Crowd] Lock her up! Lock her up!

Lock her up! Lock her up!

- It's all right.

- We're gonna beat her on November 8th. That's better.

[audience cheering]

- We're gonna beat her on November 8th.

- Three weeks isn't typically too early

for the October surprise.

But with our current short attention spans,

courtesy of social media, Twitter and other things,

three weeks actually, I think, was too early.

Instead, there was time for the Comey letter to come out

and resuscitate all those concerns about Hillary Clinton.

- They're reopening the investigation

into crooked Hillary Clinton.

Crooked Hillary. She is crooked.

She is a crooked one.

- A new possible investigation by the FBI

into Hillary Clinton's emails.

- [Reporter] Just 11 days before the election,

the announcement creating shock waves.

The FBI reopening the investigation

into Hillary Clinton's email use.

- We are 11 days out

from perhaps the most important national election

of our lifetimes.

So the American people deserve to get

the full and complete facts immediately.

- The FBI situation significantly hurt

- Their outrage today certainly suggests

that they are nervous about this.

They are furious that this came 11 days before election day.

- Donald Trump, meanwhile, and his team

clearly reveling in this latest plot twist.

- The FBI, after discovering new email...

The news this morning is...

This is bigger than Watergate.

This is bigger.

- And if you look at the trend line,

Hillary had peaked shortly after the three debates,

which she was thought to have won by most observers.

And then there was a gradual tightening

all the way up until election day,

and the Comey letter in the waning days of the campaign

accelerated that.

The question, though, that a lot of Democrats had,

why was she ever in a position

where that could have been decisive?

To most people's minds,

to most of the conventional political class's thinking,

this is someone she should have been beating by 20 points.

This was a bigger issue that she had.

It was a bigger issue

that she was never able to put Trump away.

[jet whooshing]

- [Air Traffic Control] One, zero.

Runway two, three clear for takeoff.

Contact departure is 126.55

Have a nice flight, and thanks for making ATC great again.

- [Reporter] Tonight, Donald Trump,

with one last battleground blitz.

A whirlwind sprint to the finish.

Eight States in 24 hours

- Part of it was the reality of budget.

We were understaffed and under-resourced financially

and had to become creative.

[jet whooshing]

- You have one to make every dream

you ever dreamed for your country come true.

[crowd applauding]

Real change also means restoring honesty to government.

First thing you should do is get rid of Clinton.

- But our two greatest assets all through the campaign

were Donald J. Trump and Michael R. Pence.

And they were willing to go anywhere.

And they were willing to go to many stops a day

those last four weeks.

They were doing five, six, seven stops a day each.

- This is the last day of our campaign.

Who would have believed it?

They say it's the single greatest movement,

politically speaking...

[audience cheering]

in the history of this country.

Could you believe that? Can you believe it?

[audience cheering]

- Coming in, yes, we do see the lines,

we see the rallies, we see all the people.

But will they vote?

No, they waited in line in a tent for two days in the rain

just to have a seat in a 20,000 person arena,

but they're not going to show up on election day.

- So it's now officially Tuesday, November 8th.

[audience cheering]

Did you ever think you'd be hearing a major speech

at around close to one o'clock in the morning?

Are we crazy?

[audience cheering]

And we don't need...

We don't need Jay-Z or Beyonce.

We don't need Jon Bon Jovi.

We don't need Lady Gaga.

All we need is great ideas to make America great again.

That's all we need. That's all we need.

[audience cheering]

- Hillary's closing message was very much

about Trump's unfitness for the presidency.

She thought she could sway a lot of Republican-leaning,

suburban, white, college educated women

by pointing out how how offensive Trump was

to so many people.

- There is a clear choice in this election.

A choice between division or unity.

Between strong, steady leadership

or a loose cannon who could put everything at risk.

[booing]

Because none of us, none of us want to wake up

on Wednesday morning and wish we had done more.

[anxious music]

I think we can all agree it's been a long campaign.

But tomorrow, you get to pick our next president.

- Her campaign is not cocky, but confident.

They believe that victory is well within their grasp.

She is holding her election night watch party

in an atrium that is conveniently

and symbolically equipped, Gayle, with a glass ceiling.

- We have the presidency at about 89%

For Hillary Clinton.

- I'm calling it.

Hillary Clinton, the winner of this presidential election.

- The president's race is over.

- Let's make history together.

I'm Hillary Clinton and, one last time,

I approve this message.

- The day before the election I got a call, off the record,

from senior members of the campaign

who were affiliated with the RNC.

And they were calling a bunch of editors in chief,

and they're saying, "Look, we're gonna lose tomorrow,

but we want you to know it's not our fault.

We've got the greatest data operation in human history."

And I said, "Okay, well, how bad do you think it's gonna be?

You think you're gonna feel...

You think you're gonna keep the Senate?"

Long beat.

And the operative replied, "We feel good about the House."

[intense electronic music]

[crowd cheering]

- She wins her state of Illinois,

New Jersey, and Massachusetts, another 11 electoral votes,

Maryland, carries the state of Rhode Island, Delaware.

- Donald Trump has won the state of Ohio.

No Republican has ever won the White House

without winning Ohio.

- And we are about to make a major call.

Donald Trump has won the state of North Carolina.

This is exactly what he needed to do.

- Anderson, this night is turning out

to be a real nail-biter.

[anxious music]

And CNN projects Donald Trump

will carry the state of Florida.

[crowd groaning]

- I wouldn't call anything encouraging

for Hillary Clinton at the moment,

to be honest with you, my friend.

- He will win Wisconsin

with its 10 electoral votes.

He's cracked the so-called blue wall

that Hillary Clinton that tried to create.

[somber music]

- [Reporter] Donald Trump has won the state of Pennsylvania.

- [Reporter] That is the race, frankly.

There is no path forward for Hillary Clinton.

[crowd cheering]

- Everybody should head home.

You should get some sleep.

- Hillary Clinton has called Donald Trump

to concede the race.

- [Reporter] Donald Trump wins the presidency.

[grim music]

- What happened here is the more competent

and qualified candidate, Secretary Clinton,

got 3 million more votes

across the country than Donald Trump got.

- Look, I don't think-

You can't argue that much with the Clinton sales pitch.

You could argue could have been better,

but in the end they won the popular vote.

This wasn't a race that they lost

because they didn't have a message

that could win enough votes.

- And it wasn't like a nail-biter.

I mean, he lost by 3 million votes.

That is a larger number than Nixon beat Humphrey.

It's a larger number than Kennedy beat Nixon.

That is a significant victory for Hillary.

- Well, hold on a second. That's not the race.

The race is to zig and zag through the country

and beat the person in the electoral college.

And he did that, and he beat her in places

where Republicans typically don't win.

- They took Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania

and places like that for granted,

that they were gonna to win them

without having to do a whole lot,

without having to put a big get out the vote effort

on the ground.

- She refused to spend any money for grassroots turnout

in Michigan, in Indiana, in Pennsylvania,

because her data dummy pollsters told her

she had it in the bag based on polling.

- There's gonna be an incredible, long, deep,

rigorous autopsy done on the polling

that pervaded this campaign.

Public polling and the Clinton campaign zone data,

which obviously was wrong in a lot of ways.

- The big falsehood was that her ground game was good.

It actually wasn't.

And she never went to Wisconsin,

which is something we all should have noticed

in retrospect.

- I think a big swing in Wisconsin

was Hillary never coming here.

I think she just assumed that Wisconsin

was gonna go her way,

and that didn't work out too well for her.

- This is a state that Hillary Clinton hasn't even visited

since the Democratic Convention over the summer.

- Wisconsin's always tight,

and what happens in the end is Democrats always win.

But that was before Governor Walker

had instituted a series of reforms

that made the unions less powerful.

President Obama would have gone to Wisconsin.

By all kinds of reports, he wanted to go to Wisconsin,

but the campaign told him, and his people,

that there's no reason to go there.

- Do you think it would have made a difference

if she'd come on your show?

- Hillary?

- Yes

- I do

It's 70,000 votes, and in those states I am popular,

particularly Pennsylvania, for example

- If you don't catch the signal

that you've got a big problem in the industrial heartland

when you can't when your own primary in Michigan,

if you can't respond to that on the ground

when people are begging for help, you're gonna get beat.

At the end of the day, it is a ground operation

that was not funded in the heartland

that cost this campaign.

It was political malpractice of the highest order.

Donald Trump saw that hole in her plan,

and he went to the heartland, and he beat her there.

It's her fault.

- Our campaign was never about one person

or even one election.

It was about the country we love

and about building an America

that's hopeful, inclusive, and big hearted.

[crowd applauding]

- At some point, we, the voters...

we have to take responsibility for this.

And if, yes, it's been true for a while,

not just in 2016, but it's been true for a while,

and you put it very well,

that voters are being treated like an audience.

And...

as long as we keep responding as an audience...

that's how they're gonna try to win elections.

The moment we, the voters,

insist on a higher level of debate,

that's when we'll get one

- [Reporter] Clearly we have missed something

on the polling side.

How did polling get this so wrong?

- [Reporter] A lot of those people were not willing

to say to a pollster they were willing to vote for him.

- Are they not talking to us?

Are they not interested in doing surveys?

- That term "hidden Trump voter", "undercover Trump voter"

was met with international derision and ridicule.

Thank you, everyone.

And they said on election day, they'll still be hidden.

Well, that was to explain not that people were embarrassed

to say they're voting for Donald Trump,

but they weren't supposed to be.

[crowd cheering]

They're women who are supposed to vote

for the first woman President of the United States.

They're hispanics who were supposed to not like

his immigration policy.

They're young who were supposed to say

the Democrats are woke.

If you are a union worker in any of these states

we were talking about earlier,

how in the world can you vote for Donald Trump?

And so they just don't want to argue

with people in their circle of life,

their family, their friends or their colleagues anymore.

But they came out for him.

- I think the idea that it's only the dumb people

who would fall for Trump doesn't stand up to science,

because there are plenty of brilliant Republicans

who are pro-Trump.

- A lot of rich guys voted for him, too,

in case you didn't know.

They closed the curtain.

They said, okay, can't tell anybody.

Trump.

And then they open the curtain.

- He tapped into a lot of frustration

and people who, at the last minute, just said,

fuck it, let's take that a risk.

[crowd cheering]

- There was this divided, fragmented nation,

and really an understanding gap

that we didn't even have a sense

of what was necessarily going on

on the other side of the communication divide.

And within that "we"

I would include a lot of our journalists.

- Obviously we missed it, right?

But a lot of people missed it.

- [Reporter] Everybody missed it.

Just about everybody missed it.

- I don't think that the mainstream media

was lying about what was going to happen.

I think we missed the overarching story,

- And see so many in the American media today.

And in the last, I'd say 72 hours

having the self-reflection

and telling themselves they need to look in the mirror,

that this was not a shock to millions of Americans,

but it was a shock in the newsrooms at

at The New York Times, at CNN.

- I actually believe that what we watched happen

in the 2016 election was an example

of this very new set of affordances, if you will,

of the media system.

The gatekeepers of the old media system

no longer are the gatekeepers.

Once upon a time, we had audience members

who were each sitting in their own living rooms,

watching this television broadcast,

and maybe shouting back at the TV.

That landscape has completely changed,

because now we have audience members

who are all on the internet,

all on different social media platforms,

connected with one another...

and talking with each other

about new political possibilities.

When we're now connected to more of our friends,

and we have the ability to self-select

and tune into networks of people who think like we do.

- [Reporter] Facebook is admitting Russia agents

bought thousands of ads during the election.

Now the social media giant says

it will turn over those ads to Congress.

- And now you throw this into the mix,

where it really sort of raises questions, again,

about the legitimacy of his election.

- The clear evidence that Russia tried to influence

the outcome of the election is unprecedented.

They were clearly trying to sow the seeds of confusion

and discord, play to identity politics.

But they had a favored candidate. That's

- I do not believe in a giant global conspiracy

whereby the Trump campaign,

which literally didn't even know it was winning

at like eight o'clock that night...

orchestrated this in order to beat Hillary Clinton.

- But what I definitely think happened

is that the Russians were interfering

as much as they could do

in the mindsets of American people,

through Facebook through WikiLeaks,

through all sorts of stuff.

The Russians were everywhere, trying to create noise

around probably Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton.

Was Donald Trump responsible for that activity? No.

Did he mind it? I doubt it.

You know, all's fair in love and election war.

But is the central charge true

that Donald Trump was only there

because of Russian interference?

I just don't buy that at all.

- [Announcer] Ladies and gentlemen, the president-elect

of the United States, Donald John Trump.

[audience cheering]

- I think America always gets the president it deserves.

This is an age distorted by greed,

distorted by inequality, distorted by social media.

Why wouldn't we be offered the chance

to elect a president whose main skill is self-promotion?

That makes him the ultimate American.

- A guy like Trump was inevitable.

You're calling it the accidental presidency.

It may be an accident that Trump is the president,

but it is not an accident that someone well-known,

outside of politics would suddenly rise.

- We can no longer assume that what we've known

for the last 50 years has any relevance or resonance.

We can't tell that anymore, because the public has changed.

Politics has changed.

- You can't go back now.

You can't have boring, robotic leaders anymore.

The rise of populism around the world,

driven a lot by people like Donald Trump,

is because people have had a reaction, I think,

to robotic politics.

And I think, in America, Trump tapped into

the same sentiment about Washington

and said that Washington is broken,

it's paralyzed, it's not working.

- He offered, as the demagogue does,

easy answers to complex questions.

We live in this era where we're being disrupted...

by globalization, by technology revolution, by automation.

How does Donald Trump win?

How does he not win?

- We're still talking about the 2016 election

because it's still the case

that no one has wrapped their head around it.

And the president is no exception.

He won't shut up about the 2016 election either.

We're still trying to figure out what the heck happened

and whether it's a fluke.

To me, that's why we keep covering politics,

because we don't know.

What I'm trying to figure out,

what I'm trying to cover is...

has our political framework changed?

Has it been destroyed?

Has Trump realigned the way that

the American electorate works?

Or was it just a really weird fluke

that took advantage of the imbalance

between the popular vote and the electoral college,

the Russians, Jim Comey

a fractured Republican field, a divided Republican party?

Was there just this really specific set of circumstances

that allowed something really unusual to happen?

[soft music]

- We're going to face many challenges.

But this is truly an exciting time to be alive.

[audience cheering]

The script is not yet written.

We do not know what the page will read tomorrow.

But for the first time in a long, long time,

what we do know is that the pages

will be authored by each and every one of you, and you.

[audience cheering]

[intriguing electronic music]