Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign

by Jonathan Allen

He ran on nostalgia, adopting a campaign slogan—“Make America Great Again”—ripped off from Ronald Reagan, and traced the decline of the country to the mid-1960s. Though he didn’t mention the Johnson era’s Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, or public subsidies for housing and health care, Trump’s dog whistle was just the right pitch to attract the support of white supremacists and nearly all-white crowds of thousands at his campaign rallies. A similar dynamic was taking hold among liberals, who no longer found the “socialist” label affixed to Sanders to be so off-putting. In early August, he drew a reported 27,500 supporters to a rally in Los Angeles, where the comedian Sarah Silverman elicited cheers with her observation that “Bernie always seems to be on the right side of history.” As a member of Congress, his most noteworthy positions were in opposition to legislation: the Iraq War authorization, the Patriot Act, the 2008 Wall Street bailout, and a variety of trade deals. For both sides, Hillary was the perfect symbol of everything wrong with America. At times, Trump and Sanders would act as the right and left speakers on a stereo blaring a chorus on repeat: Hillary’s