Witness to history: The election of Donald J Trump

Andrew Buncombe reflects on his experience of the president’s stunning rise to power: the lessons journalists learnt and how they parted with any notion of augury

The president-elect appears before jubilant supporters with his family in the early hours of 9 November 2016

The decisive moment came at 2.30am on America’s east coast.

The television networks and the Associated Press called Wisconsin with its 10 electoral college votes for Donald Trump, pushing him past the 270 needed to grasp the presidency. In The Independent’s New York office, somebody immediately posted a one-sentence article to break the news.

Twenty-nine minutes later, still scrambling to make sense of events, I published something modestly more considered. It began: “The unthinkable has happened. Reality television has merged with reality. Donald Trump is America’s president-elect.”

The failed tycoon’s capture of the White House was genuinely stunning, certainly for Hillary Clinton, who had bettered him in the popular vote by three million votes, as polls suggested she would. It was stunning too, for her supporters, gathered in the Javits Centre convention hall, their mood turning rapidly from excited expectation to bewilderment and horror.

John Podesta, the chair of her campaign, appeared and urged people to go home, saying “they’re still counting votes”, even as Clinton was preparing to pick up the phone and formally concede to the man she had once termed a “threat to democracy”.

For those prepared to look, signs of Trump’s potential were there from the start. Soon after he declared he was running, descending the escalator at Trump Tower in June 2015, Melania at his side, to declare the country was in serious trouble and branding Mexican immigrants as rapists and murderers, he assumed a place at the top of the polls.

In that cycle’s primary season, I saw Trump several times. At the Adler Theatre in Davenport, Ohio, at an event hosted by evangelical Christian Jerry Falwell, he was charming and self-effacing, and made people smile, a talent shared by Ronald Reagan.

In Plymouth, New Hampshire, large crowds gathered to listen to him vow to waterboard terror suspects. Toby and Wendy Shaw were in the audience, carrying a banner bearing his name. “People are fed up with the lies,” said Mr Shaw. “How many years have we had these politicians? It’s time for someone with a backbone to stand up and do what needs to be done.”

And so it went. People liked his swagger, his private jet, his story of having made it in the world of business, despite getting a major hand from his father. They liked that his wife was a model, and that he dared to trash other politicians, including those from his own party.

By the time Trump won the Indiana primary in May 2016 and his last serious opponent, Ted Cruz, dropped out of the race, one sensed anything was possible. If he could beat the likes of Jeb Bush and Chris Christie to secure the GOP nomination, then why not the presidency?

Four years on, with Trump fighting off impending impeachment while also campaigning for reelection, it can still be tempting to ask “what if?” What would have happened if the Clinton campaign, often scornful of Trump and his supporters, were more conscious of his threat, especially in the upper midwest?

What if she had sought to unite Democrats and energise young people by asking Bernie Sanders, who ran her very close in the primary, to be running mate, rather than the dull but worthy Tim Kaine.

For journalists, though, that time is better spent reflecting on the lessons learned covering his victory, and the first three years of his presidency.

The first was the failure to take him seriously as a candidate.

The second was the failure to take him literally. It’s an irony that while the president lies about so much, he has also delivered on many of the promises that matter most to his supporters – to appoint conservative judges, to seek to limit the entry of Muslims to the US, to enforce draconian immigration policies on the US-Mexico border, to turn on its head any previous notion of what it meant to be presidential, to pull the US out of international agreements, to oversee a huge tax cut for the wealthy.

The third was an assumption failure to write off all Trump supporters as racists and thugs. Lots of his fans do enjoy his racist rhetoric, but others support him primarily for other reasons.

Plenty of them are wealthy, lots of them are women. A decent slice are Hispanic. Polls suggest more African American men are considering voting for him.

Many books have already been written about Trump’s presidency, and more will follow. It is impossible to assess properly his first term in a single article, or seek to answer the question of whether he is America’s worst commander-in-chief, something many of his critics hold true.

In terms of damage done, Trump may have been less harmful than the last Republican president, George W Bush, whose decision to invade Iraq, aided by Tony Blair and based on cooked up intelligence, has resulted in the loss of probably more than a million lives. Nothing Trump has done comes even close, though one could argue his refusal to confront climate change is hastening the planet’s doom and the end of us all.

What certainly feels true since Trump entered the Oval Office is that a sense of chaos has never felt far away.

Part of it may be the impact of our age of social media. But one drama rapidly follows on the heels of another – the firing of James Comey, the appointment of Robert Mueller, the buddying up to Putin, the midnight trashing of former Mexican models on Twitter, the visit to Saudi Arabia to collect a medal, protests about his state visit to Britain, or his being investigated for allegedly seeking a quid pro quo with Ukraine.

We can barely catch our breath, let alone consider which of these may be inflection points for his administration, or pointers to his demise.

Sometimes it feels this suits Trump, that the master entertainer knows the best way to get rid of a bad news cycle is to create a new story. The subject matter of the story often matters less than its novelty.

It could be inviting Xi Jinping to Mar-a-Lago, or it might be declaring a trade war on Beijing.

As observers of Trump, we are wise to dispense with any notion of augury, the belief we can predict what is going to come next. All we can know is that something is coming.

It is difficult too, to assess Trump’s chances of reelection, especially with so much uncertainty hanging over the impact of the impeachment investigation, and the identity of the Democratic challenger. I ask almost everyone I meet what they think; the answers range from “very strong” to “no chance whatsoever”.

When I’m asked, I pause and say it’s probably 50/50. Democrats ought to be able to carry the day, but we said that in 2016.

History sometimes repeats itself.