Joel B. Pollak - How Trump Won

Copyright 2017 by Joel B. Pollak and Larry Schweikart

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To my mother-in-law, Rhoda Kadalie, a pioneering black feminist, anti-apartheid struggle veteran, human rights activist, and writer, who predicted proudly from the very beginning that Donald Trump would win

Joel Pollak

To the Deplorables

Larry Schweikart

CONTENTS

W hen my co-author Larry Schweikart calls Trumps victory the most astounding election in American history, he knows whereof he speaks.

Larry is a professional historian with decades of college teaching, groundbreaking historical research, and numerous popular history bestsellers to his credit. He has written extensively on the American presidency, particularly in the nineteenth century, and so he brings a long historical perspective to the astonishing events of 2016 that culminated in the election of Donald J. Trump as president of the United States.

He was also personally involved in Trumps paradigm-busting campaign, as a member of a group of volunteer analysts who were feeding data and analysis in key states to the Trump organization up through Election Night. Larry and his fellow Renegade Deplorables knew weeks ahead of Election Day that Trump was on a course to win Florida, Pennsylvania, and key states in the Midwest and become the forty-fifth president of the United States. On election night, they were able to reassure my former Breitbart News boss Stephen K. Bannonby then the CEO of the Trump campaign organizationthat when early voting totals seemed to be tipping the election to Hillary Clinton, these were merely the Democrat-heavy early votes being posted, and that the bulk of the red Election Day ballots had yet to arrive. The story of where they found their hard numbers, and how they were able to analyze the data, is behind-the-scenes election news that I, as a reporter, have been fascinated to learn.

When I was reporting from the Trump rallies all across the United States in the last two weeks of the campaign, I found myself thinking how Trumps movement was both like and unlike the resurgent conservatism that so many of us had imagined would emerge from the Tea Partyand really, that conservatives had been hoping and working for in vain ever since the Reagan era. Larrys analysis sheds some light on that question. He points out that Donald Trump is an updated version of an older kind of American conservatism, one that Reagan took for granted but one that we, in our post-nationalist generation, have begun to rediscover. He also has some interesting things to say about whether Trumps victory may have inaugurated a third American party system, finally ousting the establishment that has been shutting down debate of critical political issuesand shutting the American people out of self-governmentfor decades. Maybe thats what the tens of thousands of Trump supporters I observed, and the dozens I interviewed, in the campaigns final push were sensing. Many of the Trump fans I spoke to conceded that their candidate wasnt perfect. They knew all about the numerous scandals that the media had pushed, one after another, in the ever-renewed hope that the campaign would finally implode. But Trump was offering a historic opportunity for the people to take their governmentand their own destinyout of the control of a corrupt elite and into their own hands. And they took itjoyfully.

Joel Pollak

Reporting for Breitbart News from the Donald Trump press plane in the last weeks of the 2016 election, my fellow author, veteran reporter Joel Pollak, had a unique ringside seat on history.

Not only was he one of the few able to observe the spectacular finale of the Trump campaign as an eyewitness, but from the inside, as a member of the traveling press corps, he was confirming many of the things we Deplorable analysts were seeing from afar. As editor at one of the only media outletsand that includes conservative mediathat was not hostile to Trump, Joel may have been the only person on the press plane who was genuinely interested in what Trump was doing. It might be said that Joel was trying to get Trump, while his media cohorts were only interested in getting Trump. While the rest of the press corps, smugly oblivious to Trumps appeal and obsessed with gotcha moments, squandered their access to the candidate and his supporters on increasingly feeble attempts to trip up the candidate (or failing that, at least to make his supporters look really stupid), Joel used his opportunities to delve into the sui generis phenomenon that was the Trump campaign. He reported on the outsider Republican candidates unprecedented approach to media and spectacle, his fresh message, and the reasons that it had such a broad appeal. As a matter of fact, Joel was so out of sync with the rest of the press corps that at one point he was nearly banished from the press plane. But he managed to soothe ruffled feelings among the other reporters, and stay on board.

Joel had covered the campaign from the West Coast, from all angles, since the beginning: Hillary Clinton events, Bernie Sanders rallies, and the early Republican primaries. But he joined the press plane at a truly critical point for Trumps candidacy. And the eyewitness story he tellsfrom Trumps debate performance in Las Vegas after the Access Hollywood tape release, when the candidate seemed almost to be conceding the election, to the final frenetic days of the campaign, with visits to seven different states in one daycould not be more fascinating.

His on-the-ground reporting, talking day in and day out over the very last leg of Trumps groundbreaking campaign to Trump votersmen and women; white, Hispanic, and black; straight and gaywho would be responsible for the electoral upset of the century, perfectly complements my historical perspective and my inside line to the campaign and to the data that ensured Trumps victory.

We start the story of Trumps historic campaign for the White House with a cold open, as the filmmakers call it: Joels campaign diary begins in Las Vegas with the Trump team just before the third presidential debate, as the last crucial weeks of the general election campaign were about to get under way. From there, we take a step back for a look at the bigger picture in my first chapter, as I delve into how Donald Trump won the most astounding victory in the history of the U.S. presidency. Then its back to the frenetic closing weeks of the campaign, as Joel reports the excitement from the press plane.