There, in a slide show, Mr. Manafort assured members that Mr. Trump was ‘evolving’ and simply playing a part with his incendiary style of campaigning, which has helped drive him to the front of the race but has caused party leaders to worry that Republicans will be punished in November.28
Trump himself has claimed that even his wife, Melania, and daughter, Ivanka, have called on him to act more presidential. Two days after Manafort addressed the RNC, Trump addressed the calls himself at a campaign rally in Connecticut, saying he wasn’t about to start “toning it down.” Parker writes:
I started thinking, and I said I can, you know being presidential is easy, much easier than what I have to do,” Mr. Trump said, before quickly adding that, as a colorful entertainer-turned-politician, he might risk boring his audiences if he pivots too much toward general-election propriety.29
Worse than his mouth was his fingers when connected to an Android smartphone with access to Twitter. In 140 characters he managed to derail his candidacy with insulting, racy, or inappropriate comments including those retweeting neo-Nazi and White Supremacy comments. The former host of The Apprentice often takes to Twitter to blast those who speak critically of him. The New York Times even kept a running list of the “People, Places and Things Donald Trump Has Insulted on Twitter.”30
The Democratic Simmer
Compared to the unusually large number of candidates competing for the GOP nomination, a number that remained in the double digits through the Iowa caucuses, the Democratic side pitted two main candidates against one another from early on: Former Secretary of State, U.S. Senator and First Lady Hillary Clinton and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.
Initial CNN/ORC polls showed Clinton with a big lead over Sanders, with a poll conducted June 26–28, 2015 showing Clinton polling at 58 percent to Sanders’s 15 percent. Other would-be candidates Jim Webb, Lincoln Chafee, and former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley never polled higher than 3 percent, according to an analysis of CNN/ORC polls.31 O’Malley suspended his campaign after the February 1, 2016 Iowa caucus.
For a self-proclaimed democratic socialist from Vermont, Sanders had a decent showing in the 2016 race for nomination. A March 17–20 poll showed Sanders reaching a high of 44 percent support to Clinton’s 51 percent.32 Distrustful of Clinton and the Democratic Party machine, Sanders’s followers were ardent and deeply believed that the power structure of the Democratic Party could be overturned in a new liberal progressive era. Accusations of vote rigging, favoritism, and delegate manipulation permeated the campaign. By the time Clinton secured the nomination a great deal of mistrust between the Clinton and Sanders supporters had set in. Clinton supporters saw Sanders’s campaigners as youthful, naïve, and ready to believe anything they read on the internet. Sanders’s supporters saw the Clinton machine in terms that Trump and the Republicans could appreciate: For over twenty-five years the Republicans had fostered an image of Clinton as a corrupt, dishonest, and manipulative liar who was ambitious at all costs, despite decades of investigations by Republican Congresses that had revealed no evidence of corruption or complicity in criminality.
The Benghazi Gambit and Email Questions
Sanders took a first shot at Clinton with his criticism of her emails related to the Benghazi scandal. In November 2015, after rejecting the scope of the Republican-led controversy, Sanders suddenly about faced, contending that any emails related to the subject were fair game.
A terrorist attack on the U.S. mission compound in Benghazi, Libya on September 11, 2012 went from being a regrettable incident leading to the deaths of four Americans to a full-blown Republican-manufactured conspiracy theory positing that President Obama and Hillary Clinton allowed Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and his staff to die by issuing a “stand-down order.” Republicans attacked Clinton relentlessly for her handling of the Benghazi attacks as Secretary of State. Critics charged the administration didn’t listen to intelligence warnings ahead of the attack and subsequently covered up their actions. Nine separate congressional bodies investigated, and as Vox reported, “Each has identified problems with the way the incident was handled, but none have uncovered real evidence of an administration cover-up or failure to properly respond to the attacks.”33 In October 2015, Clinton testified before the House Select Committee on Benghazi for over eleven hours. David Herszenhorn of The New York Times wrote, “The hearing was widely perceived to have backfired on Republicans, as she answered their questions and coolly deflected their attacks.”34 The Committee released its final report as the primary campaigns were wrapping up in June 2016. The Times reported “no new evidence of culpability or wrongdoing by Hillary Clinton.”35 Still, hours after the release of the report, Trump tweeted, “Benghazi is just another Hillary Clinton failure. It just never seems to work the way it’s supposed to with Clinton.”36
In the end nothing helped the Sanders Campaign. Clinton had won more than three million more votes and by June, however, Clinton had won enough delegates to secure the nomination, also beating Sanders in the superdelegate count.37 On July 12, with less than two weeks until the Democratic National Convention, Sanders endorsed Hillary Clinton. In a post published the day of his endorsement, Sanders wrote he could not “in good conscience” allow Donald Trump to be elected President. “Today, I endorsed Hillary Clinton to be our next President. I know that some of you will be disappointed with that decision,” he wrote. “But I believe that, at this moment, our country, our values, and our common vision for a transformed America, are best served by the defeat of Donald Trump and the election of Hillary Clinton.”38
A hallmark of the 2016 campaign was the effort to damage Hillary Clinton with information related to a private email server located in her home while she was Secretary of State, which first surfaced in March 2015. Republicans, as well as some in the Bernie Sanders campaign, desperately wanted Clinton to be found criminally liable for the usage of private emails for official business. Despite Sanders saying he was “sick and tired” of hearing about the emails, his campaign manager Jeff Weaver bluntly told Fox news that it would be hard for Clinton to keep running for election if she were “under indictment.”39
This level of talk got Sander’s supporters as frothed up as Trump supporters and the wait was on for the FBI investigation to conclude and rule against her so Sanders could walk away with the nomination. The email controversy was now the core of the Republican strategy; they theorized that if Clinton was indicted then her campaign and political career would be over and that Trump could easily insult Sanders to victory.
However, this was not to be. The FBI did conclude its investigation and determined that Secretary Clinton did not intentionally commit any crimes. There would be no indictment. The FBI determined that 110 of the 30,000 emails Clinton originally turned over contained information that was classified at the time she received them, but most had classification markers removed. Clinton had not deliberately misled anyone nor had she lied to the FBI. FBI Director James Comey called her actions “extremely careless,” although the agency recommended no charges be filed against the former Secretary of State.40
Seemingly nothing could derail the Clinton nomination. The Democratic Convention in Philadelphia was fast approaching and the last chance for Clinton’s detractors to take down her campaign by the use of the emails had seemingly evaporated.