Past expectations are key to understanding campaign actions
Then-Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton speaks as then-Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump listens during the second presidential debate at Washington University in St. Louis, Sunday, Oct. 9, 2016. Credit: AP / Rick T. Wilking
To look back realistically at the election a year ago, it is important to consider what both candidates and their supporters expected while the battle was underway.
Late in the game, chaotic candidate Donald Trump appeared, to Democrats and Republicans alike, on shaky ground against Hillary Clinton.
Trump already showed a taste for going negative during the GOP primaries, so it would make perfect sense that he and his strategists would accept all help, foreign or domestic, in sliming his general-election opponent.
He and associates pursued business interests in the former Soviet Union. Hostilities were clear between the Vladimir Putin regime and ex-Secretary of State Clinton. Russian troll farms feeding the internet couldn’t have been a violation of any principles from Trump’s side.
Paul Manafort, now indicted on money-related charges, had long represented foreign clients of a particularly authoritarian kind, so Ukraine’s pro-Putin ex-leader was no anomaly. The Trump family already had its bids for hotels in the region and its beauty pageant in Russia.
Were Trump-team members arranging for their post-campaign lives outside the White House? The actions of Michael Flynn, who was booted early on in the new administration as national security adviser, make you wonder.
Last Nov. 8, the very day his candidate won the presidency, an opinion piece from Flynn appeared in The Hill. As a private consultant, Flynn promoted the interests of the current Turkish government and denounced a leading dissident living in Pennsylvania, who supported Clinton in the race.
If he truly believed Trump would win and make him a key national security official, Flynn could have simply looked forward to pushing a pro-Turkish policy from inside the White House. Why keep acting as outside advocate?
Now, special counsel Robert Mueller has reportedly been exploring Flynn’s role for foreign entities, including whether he laundered money or lied to federal agents.
Then consider the partisan flip side.
Clinton had gone into the election with as clear a road to the Democratic nomination as any incumbent might have enjoyed. The national committee leadership was clearly aligned with her. The rebellion led by Sen. Bernie Sanders — a nonparty member who caucuses with the Democrats in Congress — gathered force against her “inevitability.”
Whatever explicit agreements the committee had with the Clinton campaign, as described by former interim DNC Chairwoman Donna Brazile, they reinforced what just about everyone knew — that the party powerful and donor class backed her.
Few of these party bigs expressed the belief Trump would win. Whether they’d have backed Sanders in retrospect is doubtful, since he was explicitly leading a party rebellion against them.
Clearly Trump’s top lieutenants, not to mention Putin, had no way of knowing for sure how the election would turn out.
The expatriate Russian writer Masha Gessen wrote this week in The New Yorker: “There is every indication that Moscow was as surprised as New York when the vote results came in. Indeed, in Russia, where election results are always known ahead of time, the Trump victory might have been even more difficult to absorb.”
She suggests Putin was just out to meddle, since he was convinced Americans — particularly Clinton — had meddled in his country.
Who knows? Reliable crystal balls might have radically changed all kinds of campaign behavior. It is hard to believe any of it was predetermined, or even possible to predict.
Dan Janison is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
