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A BARE-KNUCKLE FIGHTER IN THE BLOODIEST CONTEST EVER

Rhys Blakely

NOVEMBER 8 2016

IT BEGAN WITH a ride down a golden escalator in the marble atrium of a New York skyscraper. It was June 16, last year, and Donald Trump was announcing a run for the White House. America had no idea what was about to hit it.

Some of the crowd had been paid $50 apiece to turn up at that first campaign event and Mr Trump made headlines with a 40-minute speech in which he praised his golf courses, promised to build a “great wall” along the southern border and called Mexican immigrants rapists. The most wildly unpredictable US election in living memory had begun.

In the months to come, Mr Trump would feud with the family of a fallen Muslim soldier, a Hispanic beauty queen, the leadership of his party, and the Pope. Defying the pundits, this former reality TV star, whose divorces and sex life had kept New York’s tabloids entranced for decades, would become the first presidential nominee of a major US party to have no experience in office since Eisenhower and the very first to have boasted about the size of his manhood in a presidential primary debate.

On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton would face another populist. The former secretary of state announced her candidacy in April last year. She set off on an image-softening road trip to Iowa. The path ahead was rockier than she imagined. The rivals she feared most — Joe Biden, the vice-president, and Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts senator — stayed out of the race. But Bernie Sanders, a septuagenarian socialist senator from Vermont, would electrify Democrats suspicious of Mrs Clinton’s ethics, her ties to big business and her support for free trade.

She endured a bruising primary while the FBI investigated a secret email system she used while leading the State Department. In February Mr Sanders effectively battled her to a tie in the Iowa caucus, the first primary contest, and then trounced her in New Hampshire. Mrs Clinton was running to be the first woman president, but young women shunned her candidacy.

As the primary race headed to the South, black voters saved her campaign. But questions lingered over whether she could animate Obama voters. She emerged as the second most unpopular nominee of a major US party since polling began. The silver lining? She was running against the first.

It was often predicted that Mr Trump’s candidacy would fade. Seventeen Republicans had thrown their hat into the ring: it was a good year to run as a member of the Grand Old Party. A Democrat had occupied the White House for two terms, and rarely has a party kept it for three. Most voters thought the country was on the wrong track. There were six past and current Republican governors and five senators in the race.

Few thought that a brash, twice-divorced celebrity could make a mark. Early on, though, Mr Trump displayed two skills. The first was for attracting media coverage. His mastery of Twitter and of insults bamboozled his rivals. It was estimated that he garnered “free” media coverage worth $2 billion.

The second skill was reaching voters who felt overlooked and left behind, especially white men without a college education. His candidacy coincided with a new scepticism about what he called “the siren song of globalisation”.

Mr Trump’s diatribes against political correctness, free trade and illegal immigration electrified a section of the right. Supporters quickly forged a consensus on what made him special: his outspokenness, his business acumen, wealth that made him immune to cronyism and his outsider status.

At his first “town hall” event, in the critical early voting state of New Hampshire, Jim Donahue, 65, a maths teacher, thought that Mr Trump could be “America’s Vladimir Putin — a nationalist to make the people think that the country could be great again”.

It was not until the first Republican primary debate, on August 7 last year, that his rivals realised that Mr Trump was a threat. He was leading the polls and placed at the centre of the stage. His demeanour was glowering, his tan a striking shade of orange. In the opening seconds, the moderators asked the ten men who had qualified to participate if any would refuse to rule out running as an independent in the election.

A theatrical pause — then one hand crept up: Mr Trump’s, of course. The crowd booed this challenge to Ronald Reagan’s 11th commandment: thou shalt not turn on a fellow Republican. The atmosphere was somewhere between game show and a bare-knuckle boxing match. It was riveting television. The audience broke records.

That evening, aides of Marco Rubio, the Florida senator whom the Clinton campaign feared the most, realised something: untethered to an ideology, unburdened by a respect for facts, and willing to say things no other candidate would dare, Mr Trump was unmanageable.

But that first debate also highlighted his flaws. Megyn Kelly, a star presenter, confronted him on how he had called women “fat pigs, dogs, slobs and disgusting animals”. Later that evening he was swarmed by a mob of reporters. Amid the mêlée, Mr Trump fumed. “I think Megyn behaved very nasty to me,” he said. That night he retweeted a message that called her a “bimbo”. He later suggested that she had asked him unfair questions because she had been menstruating.

That pattern would recur: Mr Trump could not let slights slide. Fourteen months later, when they met for three presidential debates, Mrs Clinton, apparently on the advice of psychologists, baited him. In Las Vegas she said he would be a “puppet” of Vladimir Putin. Mr Trump could barely contain his fury. “No puppet. No puppet,” he spluttered. “You’re the puppet.”

Voters were already worried about his temperament. In the final days of the campaign his aides had blocked him from Twitter, to stop the acts of self-sabotage that frequently cost him support. His treatment of women would come back to haunt him, too.

The summer of last year, however, became known as the “summer of Trump”. While the Clinton campaign churned out thousands of words of policy proposals and dodged press conferences, Mr Trump did things no candidate had ever done. At a fair in Iowa he gave children rides on his helicopter. He spent more money on “Make America Great Again” baseball hats than on polling. He demurred when he was asked to denounce a leader of the KKK. He did not release his taxes. He had fun: “We will have so much winning if I get elected that you may get bored with winning,” he said.

Last February a second place in the Iowa caucuses for Mr Trump was followed by a victory in the New Hampshire primary. As the primaries headed first to the conservative Deep South and then north to the rust-belt states of the upper Midwest and the industrial Northeast, Mr Trump kept on winning. May 4 marked the Indiana primary. Mr Trump started his day by alleging without a shred of evidence that the father of Mr Cruz, one of only two rivals still standing, had helped to assassinate President Kennedy. By the end of the day the contest was over: Mr Trump was the Republicans’ presumptive presidential nominee.

Mrs Clinton, meanwhile, was making campaigning look like solemn work. In July the FBI said it would not recommend charges after investigating whether she had broken the law by using a private email server. The revival of that investigation ten days before the election would send Democrats reeling, and the unflattering inner workings of Mrs Clinton’s campaign were revealed when private emails were hacked, probably by Russia.

Time and again, though, Mr Trump defied the laws of political gravity. He won the votes of evangelical Christians despite saying: “I’m not sure I have ever asked God’s forgiveness.” He said: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.”

He called the voters of Iowa “stupid”. He said that women who had abortions should be punished. The leaders of his own party denounced his attacks on a Hispanic judge as racist. He made remarks some interpreted as promoting violence against Mrs Clinton. He was forced to fire his second campaign manager over alleged links to Kremlin-sponsored strongmen, praised Mr Putin and asked Moscow to hack Mrs Clinton. In the final presidential debate, he suggested he might keep the country “in suspense” and not accept the results of the election.

America has seen populists before. None, though, rose as far or as fast. US politics will never be the same.