NOV E MBE R 21, 2016
Donald Trump President-elect. Nov. 9, 2016
time.com
vk.com/stopthepress FRESH MAGAZINES EVERYDAY
СВЕЖИЕ ЖУРНАЛЫ НА АНГЛИЙСКОМ ЯЗЫКЕ В ГРУППЕ
VK.COM/STOPTHEPRESS
ZOO -ZOO} ZOO} -ZOO
Mazda6 Grand Touring interior with Premium Package shown.
CA N A CA R B E D ESI GNE D A ROUND A D RI VE R’S I NSTI NCTS?
T H E N E W M A ZDA6 Before you lean into a curve, before you command that straightaway, you just know. The Mazda6 offers driver-centric details in harmony with your intuitions. Like a steering wheel shaped for your optimal hand position. And available supple Nappa leather seats that cradle you in comfort. So your drive feels exactly like you knew it would.
D R I V I NG M AT T E R S
ÂŽ
ELECTION|2016
VOL. 188, NO. 21 | 2016
What’s Next
Ian Bremmer on what a Trump White House means for future diplomacy. Rana Foroohar on what his win means for the economy. Joe Klein on the toppling of the American political establishment 22
Shock and Awe Polls got the outcome all wrong. There’s no historical parallel for Trump By David Von Drehle 28
The Culture War
Commentary by pollster Frank Luntz, Princeton’s Eddie S. Glaude Jr. and TIME’s Charlotte Alter 42
How Trump Won
Called stubborn and outrageous, he took seriously voters who harbored a deep distrust of elites By Zeke J. Miller 48
How Hillary Lost
She banked on preparation over emotion. Here’s what her campaign missed By Philip Elliott 58
Time Off
2016 Little Miss Pennsylvania holds a campaign sign for Donald Trump at a Hershey, Pa., rally on Nov. 4, four days before the billionaire carried the state to victory
Reviews of the Gilmore Girls revival and Zadie Smith’s new novel, Swing Time. Plus, 8 Questions for artist Marina Abramovic 65
ON THE COVER:
President-elect Donald Trump addresses supporters at his victory-night party at 2:52 a.m. on Nov. 9 in New York City. Photograph by Chelsea Matiash for TIME
2
Time November 21, 2016
BEN LOW Y FOR TIME
TIME (ISSN 0040-781X) is published weekly, except for two combined issues in January and one combined issue in February, April, July, August, September and November by Time Inc. PRINCIPAL OFFICE: 225 Liberty Street, New York, NY 10281-1008. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send all UAA to CFS (See DMM 507.1.5.2); Non-Postal and Military Facilities: send address corrections to TIME Magazine, P.O. Box 62120, Tampa, FL 33662-2120. Canada Post Publications Mail Agreement No. 40110178. Return undeliverable Canadian addresses to: Postal Station A, P.O. Box 4322, Toronto, Ontario M5W 3G9. GST No. 888381621RT0001. © 2016 Time Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is prohibited. TIME and the Red Border Design are protected through trademark registration in the United States and in the foreign countries where TIME magazine circulates. U.S. Subscriptions: $49 for one year. SUBSCRIBERS: If the Postal Service alerts us that your magazine is undeliverable, we have no further obligation unless we receive a corrected address within two years. Your bank may provide updates to the card information we have on file. You may opt out of this service at any time. CUSTOMER SERVICE AND SUBSCRIPTIONS: For 24/7 service, visit time.com/customerservice. You can also call 1-800-843-TIME; write to TIME, P.O. Box 62120, Tampa, FL, 33662-2120; or email privacy@time.customersvc.com. MAILING LIST: We make a portion of our mailing list available to reputable firms. If you would prefer that we not include your name, please call or write us. PRINTED IN THE U.S. uuuuuuu
PUTTING YOU AT THE CENTER OF OUR WORLD Welcome to our Business Class, where your comfort is our priority.
AIRFRANCE.US
E L E C T IO N|2 01 6
FROM THE EDITOR
COVERING HISTORY in the best of times, a presidential campaign acts as a quadrennial checkup for the body politic, a series of tests that measure our health and national well-being. In the worst of times, we discover we’re sicker than we knew. Donald Trump has triumphed after a historic and bruising campaign, to face a historic challenge: to be as astute in uniting the country as he was in dividing it over the length of this race, to prescribe a course that somehow breaks the fever that built day after day after day and burns hot still. The campaign of 2016 will be remembered for many things, but surely high among them was the constant experience of surprising alarm, and alarming surprise. Trump said and did things that had never been done before; political experts were serially humiliated by events that defied every prediction they’d made. Both Trump and Hillary Clinton warned that the stakes this time were uniquely high, that their opponent represented a threat to democracy itself. No institution came through unscarred—certainly not the press, nor the parties or political leaders, nor the FBI. When I asked Michael Scherer, our brilliant bureau chief in Washington, what challenged him most in guiding our reporters in the field, he said it was dealing with a race that had as its substance “efforts to undermine the democratic norms and institutions of our country—from the Republican nominee, who prided himself on breaking rules, to a Democratic nominee who often campaigned from a distant cocoon. This forced us to rethink a lot of how we do things. And we had to adjust without sacrificing out mission: to be tough, fair, right and ultimately help voters make sense of the decision they had to make.” The team Scherer and senior editor Ryan Teague Beckwith deployed ranged from reporters Charlotte Alter and Sam Frizell, covering their first campaigns, to columnist Joe Klein, covering his 11th. Zeke J. Miller, Philip Elliott, Alex Altman, Tessa Berenson and others logged countless miles, from New Hampshire to Chicago to the suddenly unsettled precincts of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan. Director of data journalism Chris Wilson and editor Julie Shapiro devised interactive features to both explain and entertain (“Do you eat like a Republican or a Democrat?”), while our graphics team of Lon Tweeten, Heather Jones and Emily Barone produced acres of charts capturing the changing shape of the race. Ideas editor Claire Howorth recruited a range of contributors from Princeton professor Eddie Glaude to political analyst Elise Jordan to retired Admiral James Stavridis. Creative director D.W. Pine created more than a dozen campaign covers, including the serial TALK TO US
▽
follow us: facebook.com/time @time (Twitter and Instagram)
Letters should include the writer’s full name, address and home telephone and may be edited for purposes of clarity and space
4
time November 21, 2016
Nancy Gibbs, editor Back Issues Contact us at help.single@customersvc. com or call 1-800-274-6800. Reprints and Permissions Information is available at time.com/reprints. To request custom reprints, visit timereprints.com. Advertising For advertising rates and our editorial calendar, visit timemediakit.com. Syndication For international licensing and syndication requests, email syndication@timeinc.com or call 1-212-522-5868.
Please recycle this magazine and remove inserts or samples before recycling
P E T E R H A PA K F O R T I M E
▽
send an email: letters@time.com Please do not send attachments
“Meltdown” images and this issue, while editor at large David Von Drehle brought his unique perspective as both journalist and historian to our coverage. Ultimately any campaign, even as unsettling a one as this, is a chance to learn. Trump, on his way to beating 16 challengers and collecting more primary votes than any Republican ever before, exposed and then deepened fissures in a party he barely belonged to. Where the GOP stands on trade, immigration, entitlement reform and foreign policy is an open question after a race in which the leadership of the party often appeared fed up with its rank and file—and vice versa. Meanwhile the Democrats, faced with a shocking loss, are hardly united. That Bernie Sanders could have caused Clinton so much heartburn through the fall and winter, and that voters ultimately rejected a candidate so experienced and qualified in favor of a wild gamble, speaks to a party badly in need of new ideas, new messages, new messengers. And so one conversation ends and another begins. At TIME we are committed to a conversation that is civil, an exploration that is openminded, a vision that is hopeful. This is a choice we all now face: Do we exploit the passions laid bare by this race, make deeper tears in the fabric that holds us together? Or do we look for common ground, and reasons to work together?
WE’RE BULLISH ON COMFORT
The Un-Sneaker ™ goes to work. With leather-lined interior, padded collar and custom soles — the world’s most comfortable shoe is now dressed for the office.
Free shipping and returns. Order online or call 844.482.4800.
ELECTION|2016
Trump supporters cheer as he gives his first speech as President-elect in Manhattan early on Nov. 9 PHOTOGR APH BY DINA LITOVSKY FOR TIME
‘THE FORGOTTEN MEN AND WOMEN OF OUR COUNTRY WILL BE FORGOTTEN NO LONGER.’ Donald Trump President-elect
E L E C T IO N|2 01 6
THE RESULTS: PRESIDENT
2000 Bush (271) beats Gore (266) ELECTORAL VOTES
47.5% 47.7% Donald Trump (R)
59,588,436 votes
Gary Johnson (Libertarian) 4,040,510 votes
3%
2004
Hillary Clinton (D)
Bush (286) beats Kerry (251)
59,794,940 votes
Jill Stein (Green Party) 1,206,743 votes
2008
1%
Obama (365) beats McCain (173)
HOW AMERICA VOTED, ELECTORALLY Although Clinton won the popular vote, she fell short in the all-important Electoral College, losing most of the battleground states to Trump.
2012 Obama (332) beats Romney (206)
WIDTH Number of electoral votes
50 HEIGHT Margin of victory (in percentage points)
40
Electoral votes won
HAWAII
10
30
25
ARK. NEB.
KANS.
50
CALIF.
LA.
IND.
75
MASS.
MO.
100
MD.
N.Y.
MISS.
S.C.
UTAH
ALASKA
TENN.
MONT.
ALA.
IOWA
TEXAS
125
WASH.
150
ILL.
R.I.
40 89
N.J.
G E T T Y I M A G E S (2)
In October, Trump’s campaign pulled out of Tim Kaine’s home state, freeing resources for other battlegrounds.
D.C.
20
KY.
Trump lost Iowa in the primaries but used the experience to reshape his campaign.
VT.
10
S.D.
N.D.
OKLA.
IDAHO
W.VA.
20
WYO.
30
ALL RESULTS AS OF 5 P.M. E.T. NOV. 9
HOW AMERICA VOTED, THEN VS. NOW At least five states that voted for Obama in 2012 turned red in this election. Here’s a closer look at some of them.
Cleveland
ee
Cleveland
Green Bay
WISCONSIN
Trump took the Badger State with a 1-percentage-point mpa margin of victory, marking the first time it has gone red in a presidential race i since 1984. Columbus Miami
OHIO
PENNSYLVANIA
In the final weeks before the election, Clinton’s campaign spent more than double what Trump’s did on television ads. Tallahassee Pittsburgh Philadelphia Cincinnati Madison Milwaukee Columbus
Historically favorable to Democrats, Pennsylvania became contested territory among blue-collar workers in rural areas.
Madison Milwaukee
WASH.
12
MONT.
N.D.
3
ORE.
7
3
IDAHO
4
55
6
COLO.
9
ARIZ.
KANS.
6
7
5
ILL.
IND.
20
11
MO. KY.
6
OHIO
18
8
W.VA. VA.
5 13
ALA.
6
9
GA.
16
9
Tampa After they clinched their nominations, Trump spent 19 days campaigning in the Sunshine State, compared with Clinton’s 15.
Trump (279) beats Clinton (228)
GA.
ORE.
200 N.M.
VA.
MAINE*
DEL.
175
FLA.
N.C. 225 COLO.
NEV.
279 Electoral Votes
WIS.
250
300
MINN.
228 Clinton
Trump’s lawyers unsuccessfully tried to file a lawsuit arguing that voting hours at four precincts were improperly extended during early voting.
PA.
Miami
Trump
A third of North Carolina’s voters were nonwhite, and Clinton took 79% of them. But white voter turnout propelled Trump.
*
OHIO
Tallahassee
FLORIDA
29
2016
This reliably red state became a battleground leading up to the election. History remained on Trump’s side, however.
Philadelphia
15
FLA.
4
Pittsburgh
N.J. 14 DEL.3 MD. 10 D.C. 3
8
38
HAWAII
CONN.
20
S.C. MISS.
3
MAINE
PA.
N.C.
TENN.11
ARK.
LA.
TEXAS ALASKA
MICH.
10
OKLA.
N.M.
11
N.H. 4 MASS. 11 R.I. 4 MiamiCONN.7
29
16
6
4
N.Y.
IOWA
5
UTAH
MAINE
3
WIS.
10
NEB.
NEV.
6
10
3
WYO.
3
CALIF.
MINN.
S.D.
VT.
Tampa
Green Bay
270 needed to win
Electoral Votes
*M A I N E S P L I T S I T S F O U R E L E C T O R A L V O T E S , O N E F O R E A C H O F I T S T W O C O N G R E S S I O N A L D I S T R I C T S A N D T W O F O R T H E S TAT E W I D E V O T E . T R U M P T O O K O N E V O T E A N D C L I N T O N T O O K T H R E E . C L I N T O N ’S M A R G I N O F V I C T O R Y I S F O R T H E T W O S TAT E W I D E V O T E S . S O U R C E S : A P ; F E D E R A L E L E C T I O N C O M M I S S I O N ; N E W YO R K T I M E S; B L O O M B E R G ; A B C N E W S
By Emily BaronE
E L E C T IO N|2 01 6
ISSUES
STATES LEAN LEFT ON LOCAL VOTES By Josh Sanburn There was more To elecTion day Than a hisToric presidenTial voTe. Across the country, voters considered 162 ballot measures in 35 states, ushering in sweeping changes involving the legalization of marijuana, the future of the death penalty, the regulation of guns, the minimum wage, health care and even changes in how bail bonds are administered.
16
Time November 21, 2016
CRIME New Mexico set itself apart from the common practice of posting cash bail when voters approved a measure to prohibit the detention of defendants who aren’t a threat or flight risk simply because they can’t afford bail. The measure’s proponents say it’s designed to prevent poorer defendants, often from communities of color, from experiencing unnecessary financial hardship and to avoid placing undue burdens on people before they’ve been convicted of a crime.
Marijuana won big at the polls, with three states legalizing recreational pot and four others approving it for medical use to allow a so-called right to die for terminally ill patients, one year after California passed a similar measure following the death of Brittany Maynard. Colorado’s law gives those with six months or less to live the ability to obtain life-ending medication. Patients would have to be diagnosed by two separate doctors and be deemed mentally competent, and will be required to administer the medication themselves. The law would also create immunity for physicians who prescribe life-ending medicine. The measure was modeled after Oregon’s Death With Dignity law, which passed in 1997. The referendum was supported by Maynard’s widower Dan Diaz. Maynard helped revive the aid-in-dying movement when she moved from California to Oregon in 2014 after being diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. Coloradans rejected, however, a measure that would have
MINIMUM WAGE Four states—Arizona, Colorado, Maine and Washington—voted to incrementally raise their minimum wages to at least $12 an hour by 2020, all well above the federal minimum wage of $7.25. Washington elected to raise its floor to $13.50. In South Dakota, voters rejected a measure to exclude workers under 18 from the state’s recent increase in its minimum wage to $8.55. DEATH PENALTY Oklahoma became the first state to add a section to its constitution that protects the death penalty and declares that it can’t be deemed cruel and unusual punishment by state courts. Voters in Nebraska reinstated capital punishment after a protracted backand-forth battle between state legislators, who eliminated it last year, and Governor Pete Ricketts, who bankrolled the ballot measure to reinstate the penalty. In California, voters rejected a proposition that would’ve repealed the death penalty while approving one to speed up the state’s dysfunctional death-row-appeal process, which was deemed unconstitutional by a federal judge in 2014.
GE T T Y IMAGES
HEALTH Colorado split on two measures at the heart of the nation’s health care debate. The Centennial State became the sixth in the U.S.
EDUCATION As California’s population becomes increasingly diverse, Golden State voters repealed an almost two-decade-old law requiring English-only classes in public schools. While the measure preserves a portion of the 1998 law that mandates that students show English proficiency, schools will now have the ability to develop bilingual and multilingual courses. Fewer than 5% of California’s public schools currently offer multilingual programs. VOTING Maine became the first state to approve a system of ranked-choice voting, upending the way state races are decided. Voters will now rank candidates in order of preference, with the last-place finisher in each count eliminated until one earns a majority. Missouri, meanwhile, overwhelmingly passed an amendment requiring voters to show a photo ID at the ballot box. The state became the eighth to require photo ID, double the number that did so in 2012.
MARIJUANA Legal marijuana took a huge step forward on Election Day, with three states voting to allow recreational use and four approving the drug for medical purposes. California, Massachusetts and Nevada became the fifth, sixth and seventh states to create legal weed markets. (A measure in Maine was too close to call on Nov. 9.) That means more than 20% of Americans now live in a state where the drug is legal. The only state to reject a referendum on the drug was Arizona, where voters said no to recreational marijuana. The vote in California—the country’s most populous state and the world’s sixth largest economy—is expected to transform the nation’s fledgling legal marijuana industry and could potentially lead to loosening of federal regulations. GUNS Voters chose to tighten restrictions on firearms in three of the four states where such measures were on the ballot. In Nevada, voters barely approved a measure to expand background checks to private gun sales and transfers, with 50.45% in favor. A similar measure failed in Maine. California, meanwhile, voted to outlaw possession of large-capacity ammunition magazines, require background checks for ammunition sales and allow the state to take firearms from people immediately after they’ve been convicted of a felony or a violent misdemeanor. Voters in Washington also approved a measure that allows courts to order the temporary seizure of guns from people who are judged to be a threat. Maine’s rejection of expanded background checks and the narrow support for them in Nevada shows the challenge facing even well-funded national organizations like Everytown for Gun Safety, the advocacy group founded by former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, which spent tens of millions of dollars to build support for the measures.
created the nation’s first state-run singlepayer health care system.
River Cruising Done Perfectly™
Rolling on the Mississippi
MinneapolisSt. Paul
Red Wing
WISCONSIN
MINNESOTA
La Crosse
IOWA Dubuque Davenport
The Mississippi is the lifeblood of the American Heartland. Explore its history and culture this spring with an 8 to 22-day
ILLINOIS
Hannibal
cruise aboard one of our brand new paddlewheelers. With American Cruise Lines, you’ll experience River Cruising Done
St. Louis Chester
MISSOURI
KENTUCKY
Perfectly.™ Call today for a free cruise guide.
New Madrid
M iss
i s s i p p i R i ve r
Memphis
Columbus TENNESSEE
ARKANSAS Greenville MISSISSIPPI Vicksburg
LOUISIANA
Natchez Baton Rouge Oak Alley
New Orleans
AmericanCruiseLines.com
Call toll-free
1-800-981-9139
today for a free Cruise Guide
E L E C T IO N|2 01 6
TRUMP’S FOREIGN POLICY IS UNILATERAL— AND WORRYING By Ian Bremmer DonalD Trump’s foreign policy? sTill up in The air at this point. With Hillary Clinton, we would have known exactly what we were getting. That was her biggest selling point—and a big part of the problem. But Trump is the ultimate black box. Much of this was by design—making America great again was always about America itself, allies and enemies be damned. That makes for an effective political pitch, but it’s a wholly unrealistic governing philosophy for a person whose main responsibility is to navigate the country through choppy geopolitical waters. And these days, the waters are heaving. The foreign policy challenges Trump will face on Jan. 20 are much more complex than those that Obama inherited from George W. Bush. Technological change, particularly in communications and in the workplace, creates risks and problems that are entirely new. Russia is looking to undermine U.S. power and influence whenever and wherever possible, and a Trump presidency could well embolden Vladimir Putin. Trump becomes the face of Western capitalism at a moment China is offering the world an alternative economic model. For fans of globalization as it has progressed for the past few decades, that’s cause for concern.
22
Time November 21, 2016
Trump views foreign policy as a businessman would— as purely transactional
have yielded few tangible results over the last decade-plus, they at least added some semblance of predictability to the proceedings. No longer. but Let’s be cLear: “America first” is not an isolationist policy but a unilateral one. It does not have America retreat from the world, but impose its will firmly upon it. Trump views foreign policy as a businessman would—as purely transactional. That makes it incredibly difficult for the U.S. to continue in its capacity as the policeman of global security, the architect of global trade and the cheerleader of global values. That appeals to plenty of people in America who feel they’ve been left behind. Donald Trump has helped to reveal just how many Americans care more about nation building at home than in far-flung battle zones. It’s clear that millions of Americans want a more robust economic recovery, a surge in job creation, investment in infrastructure and a budget surplus— quite a combination. Americans are divided on how to improve health care, immigration and tax policies, and those divisions are reflected in a polarized Congress. But they’re not nearly so divided on the need to invest in the future of America’s economy rather than Iraq’s or Syria’s. They aren’t nearly as interested in U.S. foreign policy. That’s good news for Trump, who will have to figure it out as he goes along. That’s bad news for the rest of the world. □
HANNIBAL HANSCHKE— REUTERS
Let the questions begin. How best to respond to Russian aggression in cyberspace while minimizing the risk of a dangerous escalation? How best to balance allimportant relations with China? How long before North Korea demands an urgent and forceful U.S. response? How best to repair damaged relations with Britain, European allies, Japan, Israel and Saudi Arabia after a period of tension in which each of them has hedged bets on American staying power? There are no easy answers. There weren’t going to be any for a former Secretary of State, and there certainly won’t be any for Trump. We do know that the “pivot” to Asia is dead, as is the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal that went along with it. Asian allies had signed on to TPP to balance against China’s growing geostrategic weight. Overnight, China now looks much more stable and sane to its Asian neighbors than the U.S. does. America’s special relationship with Europe was already under strain; there’s no reason to think that will change with President Trump sitting in the Oval Office. Fires in the Middle East will continue to rage like they always have, and while American forays in the region
Putin will look to undermine the U.S. whenever possible—one of countless international challenges Trump will face
THE BEST PURE COTTON NON-IRON DRESS SHIRT
BAR NONE. YOU SAVE 70% UNBEATABLE INTRODUCTORY
OFFER
$24.95 REG $89.50
PLUS,
FREE MONOGRAMMING
REG $10.95
ADD THIS TIE FOR JUST $19.95
REG $72.50
PAULFREDRICK.COM/BEST
•
800.309.6000
100% Black 1/C spot
PROMO CODE T6FSTA
WHITE 100% COTTON PINPOINT / NEAT WRINKLE-FREE WEAR / EASY NON-IRON CARE 4 COLLAR STYLES / GUARANTEED PERFECT FIT.
BUTTON OR FRENCH CUFF / REGULAR, BIG & TALL & SLIM FIT
FREE EXCHANGES. EASY RETURNS. NEW CUSTOMER OFFER. PMS 7463 1/C spot LIMIT 4 SHIRTS. IMPORTED. SHIPPING EXTRA. EXPIRES 12/31/16.
E L E C T IO N|2 01 6
THE CURIOUS CAPITALIST
THE MARKETS IN THE AGE OF TRUMP By Rana Foroohar As They sAy in The mArkeTs, pAsT performAnce is no guarantee of future returns. Donald Trump’s surprise presidential victory has turned the markets, which have run at record highs for the past few years, upside down, with precipitous drops on election night in global stocks and bonds, and a flight to safety assets like gold. That’s actually not surprising. Not only have investors long feared the economic implications of a Trump presidency, but markets never like the uncertainty of a new President (the S&P 500 fell 5% when Barack Obama was elected in 2008, for example). A few days after an election, they usually rebound (indeed, just a few hours after the Trump victory, markets were already gaining back a bit of what they’ve lost). Longer term, they tend to respond more to fundamental economic factors rather than politics. But these are not typical times, and our economic future is deeply entangled with politics. A Trump presidency fundamentally challenges the future of globalization and status quo capitalism. Indeed, the fact that Trump grabbed an unexpected share of the minority vote, as well as some college-educated women, speaks to the fact that economic anxiety is about more than just income levels. It’s about the fact that a large percentage of the population—not just factory workers in Michigan or Ohio—feels that we have a rigged economic system that disproportionately benefits the U.S. and global elite. And of course, no one epitomized that elite more than the Clintons. In this sense, the Trump victory is quite similar to the U.K.’s Brexit vote to leave the European Union. People aren’t voting for a clear set of policies so much as they are voting against what’s come before. As Allianz chief strategist Mohamed El-Erian put it to me, Trump’s victory is “yet another illustration of the politics of anger, and of the mistrust in the Establishment and expert opinion. It speaks to the stress and strains that Western economies are experiencing in the aftermath of too many years of low and noninclusive growth. The result is a higher likelihood of improbables becoming reality, be they economic, financial, institutional or political.” So what does that mean for the markets, and the economy? For the next few weeks, you’ll see plenty of— surprise!—volatility. The markets, which have never been 24
Time November 21, 2016
TRUMP ECONOMY
4.0%
Rate of U.S. economic growth promised by Trump, far above the 1.5% average annual GDP growth rate of the past decade
0.9%
The average drop since 1928 in the S&P 500 index the day after a presidential election; stock futures plunged as Trump won key states, but the S&P was up 0.7% by noon the next day
great at predicting populism since traders are mainly elites, will be up and down depending on how Trump communicates. If we see more of the relatively balanced tone of his acceptance speech, we’ll see gains. If you hear populist rhetoric around trade, immigration and so on, the markets will dip. The uncertainty investors feel will magnify any small bit of bad news. If the next round of job numbers comes in soft, or Chinese manufacturing figures look weak, or it seems as though Italian banks might blow up, the markets will react more strongly than they have previously. So buckle up, as it will be a bumpy few weeks. Beyond that, investors will be looking for signs of what policy changes a Trump presidency will bring. It’s likely that if Obama tries to push through the TPP trade agreement, Trump would use it as an opportunity to inflame trade rhetoric and brand China a currency manipulator. That could galvanize the flight of capital from emerging markets that have already destabilized, like Mexico. While that country can probably weather such a storm, some Asian nations could end up having trouble servicing their debts, which might then set off a domino effect of collapsing global asset prices. There is, after all, more debt out there in the world than there was before 2008, and much of it is held by emerging-market nations. Amid that, American businesses and consumers, who had been the best hope for a stronger recovery (the thinking being that as the economy strengthened, they’d once again start spending), may lose faith. Confidence will likely fall, as will corporate and consumer spending. There’s little chance U.S. growth will go above 2% this year—let alone the 4% Trump promised on the campaign trail. That’s bad news for the world, since the U.S. is still the global growth engine. You might see a replay of the trend we’ve seen over the past several years, when U.S. stocks become a kind of safe haven, the prettiest house on the ugly block that is the global economy. But that will likely mean fewer losses than in other markets. A new era of slower growth has already begun. And if Trump delivers what he’s promised over the past year— unfunded tax cuts, tariffs, barriers to immigration and a large dose of economic populism without any real constructive job-creating policy behind it—his presidency will make it slower still. •
E L E C T IO N|2 01 6
IN THE ARENA
WHAT COMES NEXT WITH PRESIDENT TRUMP By Joe Klein
26
Time November 21, 2016
AFTER WORDS
‘I pledge to every citizen of our land that I will be President for all Americans.’ —TRUMP,
calling for unity in his victory speech
‘We owe him an open mind.’ —CLINTON,
conceding the race to Trump
It would be nIce to think his revolution will be a gentle one. But he is not a gentle man. He is puerile, thin-skinned and crude. He is also 70 years old, and all those decades of bombastic hucksterism have now been ratified by the American people. His vision of a dark, declining country has been ratified too—but only by a momentary plurality that looks more to the past for answers than to the future. That has never been the American way. This is a dynamic country. Its only possible future is multiethnic and globalist. Donald Trump won’t succeed unless he learns how to keep up with it. □
G E T T Y I M A G E S (2)
iT Turns ouT ThaT DonalD Trump was qualifieD to be President, after all. He was credentialed by the American people on Election Day. I’m still not sure he’s fit for the job, and I’m certain he’s not prepared for it, and his demeanor remains profoundly unpresidential—but make no mistake, it was his demeanor that won him the presidency. Every time he said something that “serious” people found unhinged, a vast swath of the country found it honest and refreshing and real, even if they disagreed with it. This should have been obvious from the moment he slagged Senator John McCain, a true American hero, early in the campaign. He didn’t suffer for the outrage; he gained strength from it. And now the American political establishment has been toppled. As a longtime member of that clan, I am writing from beneath the rubble. The view from here is rather limited. I don’t trust myself to predict what happens next, although Trump’s victory speech set a far more gracious and sober tone than anything he said or did during the campaign. It is also impossible, given his frequent policy shifts, to say what Trump will actually do as President. But it is possible to catalog some of the pillars that have fallen: the entire political-consultant industrial complex has collapsed. Money raised and spent on advertising meant nothing. The use of market-tested language has become a liability, a sign of dull conformity on the part of the candidate. Focus groups, polling, the ground game, surrogates and—yes, sadly—truth have been shown to be irrelevant. Political parties have long been hollow vessels, but they now seem utterly archaic. Several truths do remain. A successful candidate for the presidency needs a message and also the ability to sell that message. Trump didn’t need policies: his attitude was the message. He was distressingly effective at selling it; the fact that he could barely control himself was integral to what he was selling—spontaneity, authenticity, strut. Indeed, the greatest danger of his victory is that it will spawn a whole generation of candidates, in both parties, who believe that being obnoxious is the path to power. Like Trump, Hillary Clinton was her message. She was the embodiment of the boring pillow fight that American
politics had become. She was the embodiment of a system slouching toward dynasty—remember when we thought Clinton and Jeb Bush would replay that same old familial battle? It was appropriate that her closing argument became: I’m not him. That was, in the end, all she had. Clinton has been a fine public servant—let the silly investigations stop now—but she was a clueless candidate from start to finish, and her perpetual defensive crouch was the precise opposite of Trump’s offensiveness. He said some things that needed saying. The war in Iraq can now be acknowledged by Republicans for the terrible mistake it was. But it also became permissible for a certain sector of people—white people without college educations—to say and think a lot of less savory things too. Trump empowered a brutal ignorance, especially about Latinos and Muslims and the world outside our borders. He attracted a dangerous, supremacist, sexist, lunatic fringe. He created scapegoats and encouraged his followers to exploit them. And what now? The Republican Party suddenly has a shiny new populist identity, and the Democrats are in shambles. It is likely that both parties will now pursue the wrong road. Democrats, led by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, will move left; Trump has liberated the Democrats to lift the taboo on the word socialism, a philosophy fundamentally at odds with the American spirit. The future of Trump’s Republican Party is harder to discern, and people like Paul Ryan may not have a place in it. But who knows? Trump didn’t mention the border wall in his victory speech. He did mention infrastructure. He promised to get along with all nations “willing to get along with us.”
ELECTION|2016
MESSAGE DELIVERED The candidate no one saw coming accomplished what few thought he could By David Von Drehle PHOTOGR APH BY CHRISTOPHER MORRIS—VII FOR TIME
Trump arrives with his family to greet the crowd at his victory celebration in New York on Nov. 9
IT WAS ALMOST 3 A.M. when the President-elect finally took the stage, his blue suit, white shirt and red tie perfectly matched to the phalanx of flags arranged behind him. The polls and the experts and the data modelers predicted it would be a woman for the first time in the nation’s history—but no, it was another man, another blue suit, another red tie. And yet, if it had been the woman, everyone would have known what to expect. Donald John Trump, political novice, selfpromoter and gleeful provocateur, was elected the 45th President of the United States on Nov. 8 in one of the most extraordinary and unforeseen developments in American history. Universally dismissed as a vanity candidate when he entered a field crowded with Republican talent, the former Democrat and former Independent mowed down 16 challengers while breaking every rule in the book. Then he pivoted to take on one of the most seasoned and famous politicians in the world, a former Secretary of State, U.S. Senator and First Lady, lost three straight debates to her (according to opinion surveys) and earned the disapproval of roughly 60% of all Americans. A dozen women accused him of sexual assault. He bragged about earning tens of millions of dollars each year while never paying income tax. His margin of victory in the Electoral College was on track to be the largest any Republican has achieved since 1988. What would he say? What could anyone say? Of Hillary Clinton, the opponent he threatened to put in jail if he were elected, Trump said: “We owe her a major debt of gratitude for her service to our country.” Of the nearly 60 million Americans who voted for Clinton after she denounced Trump relentlessly as a racist and sexist, Trump said: “I’m reaching out to you for your guidance and your help so that we can work together and unify our great country.” Of the global community whose trade treaties he vowed to dismantle and whose alliances he called into question, Trump said: “I want to tell the world community that while we will always put America’s interests first, we will deal fairly with everyone.” Of his plans, which have always been lightly
The President-elect’s supporters celebrate his stunning upset on election night
PHOTOGR APH BY DINA LITOVSKY FOR TIME
31
As the drama dragged into the night, Trump supporters tracked the returns at a Manhattan hotel
PHOTOGR APH BY DINA LITOVSKY FOR TIME
sketched, at best, Trump said: “America will no longer settle for anything less than the best.” That is what he said, in a speech so subdued and low-energy that it could have been a hospital director’s annual message to the medical staff. Left unsaid was how he could make himself into the gentle, unifying and effective force he spoke of on that victory stage. It will be a long, steep hill to climb. Why? Because candidate Trump either insulted women, Hispanics, Muslims, blacks, disabled people and so on and so on—or else spoke so loosely and carelessly that millions of people misunderstood him. In a President, either one is bad. He’ll be trying to heal the country in a climate of utter contempt for government. Throughout his campaign, Trump heaped abuse on Presidents from Obama to Reagan, on Congress and the courts, on America’s military leaders and foreign envoys. The entire apparatus, he preached again and again, is “a rigged system.” That’s the government he now leads. He’ll be seeking to win the trust of black and brown Americans, of American Muslims and Jews, while white nationalist bigots and anti-Semites are cheering his victory. Trump picked at sores in this election that will bleed before they heal. He will be trying to define a mandate despite his possible failure to win the popular vote. President Trump will be trying to strengthen the U.S. while at the same time extricating it from the network of security alliances and free-trade agreements that underpin the world order. News of his victory sent markets into a brief swoon from Tokyo to New York. The Mexican peso plunged to its lowest value in more than 20 years. Amplifying the shock of the Brexit vote in June, which might be the first step in breaking up the European Union, Trump’s win could shatter the fragile world recovery. He’ll be facing in Congress a Republican Party that he took by force, not by persuasion, and dealing with the wreckage. In victory, he lavishly praised RNC chairman Reince Priebus, but that alone won’t mend the damage done. A party supposedly pledged to conservative values has elected a radical President who promises to tear up treaties, overturn laws, jail his opponent and sue his critics. On the morning after, House Speaker Paul Ryan, a Trump skeptic, glossed over the fact that the winner’s campaign was thick with his enemies. Instead, he proclaimed a Republican dawn. With the GOP in control of the White House and Congress, he said, the party will heal around a mission to repeal Obamacare. Trump will be expecting Americans to trust his family as they run the large international business he built, the one that rests mainly on selling the family name, after he devoted his campaign to attacking his opponent for commingling the national interest with personal gain. He will be asking Americans to have faith in his 33
choice of people, when he allied himself with the Internet’s noisiest conspiracy theorist. To have faith in his prudence, when he attacked a former beauty queen on Twitter at 3 in the morning. To have faith in his temperament, when he repeatedly allowed himself to be goaded during debates. Perhaps no other presidential election raised so many questions with so few answers. The Presidentelect has no track record, few associates, very little in the way of policy positions. He believes America is broken. He said at his convention: “I alone can fix it.” We’ll find out. A bloodied veterAn of the casino business, where he built an empire and lost a fortune, Trump knows what it means to push all your chips into the center of the table and blow on the dice. That’s how he ran his unprecedented campaign, gambling that Americans would elevate a man who toyed with their prejudices, tickled their ids, dodged his taxes, exaggerated his philanthropy, skimmed over policy and flouted the truth. He took people seriously when they told pollsters, year after dismal year, how sick they were of politics as usual. Nothing in politics is more unusual than Trump. Trump’s favorite bets are on himself. The man hates to finish second. Second is for “losers”—a favorite Trump epithet—and life presents endless chances to win or lose. Who but Trump would have mentioned, on the very day the Twin Towers were destroyed, that he now owned the tallest building in lower Manhattan? Who else would think to create a hierarchy of Vietnam heroes, and say of former POW John McCain, “I like people who weren’t captured”? Finding himself late in the campaign in a room with Medal of Honor winners, he entertained the idea that they might be braver than he. Then he dodged the implication by redefining the competition: “I am financially brave,” he concluded. In this ultimate victory, Trump credited himself with leading “the single greatest movement in the history of this country,” as he put it in the final hours of the campaign. His promise: to “win, win, win and win.” His aim: to “make America great again.” His genius: to convince people by the millions whose lives are utterly unlike his that he alone could be trusted with their grudges, their passions, and their resentments. The thrice-married former playboy who spoke on video about assaulting women persuaded evangelicals to turn out as never before. They accepted his conversion to pro-life fervor and relished his pledge to push the Supreme Court to the right. “God uses the least likely,” South Carolina televangelist Mark Burns explained, “from myself to Donald Trump.” The former Democrat from Manhattan and longtime donor to liberals persuaded the hardest rightwingers to fall into line. The billionaire channeled 34
Time November 21, 2016
The election of Donald Trump has no historical parallel
anti–Wall Street energy. The Wharton graduate found the wavelength of noncollege voters. And Trump rode this movement, exactly as he said he would, on a straight line from the edge of Philadelphia to the streets of Green Bay, Wis., winning Great Lakes states that Republicans have not won in years, or in some cases decades. His triumph was the Rust Belt’s revenge, an expression of the same economic and racial unease that gave these states to Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s. The supposed job stealers were in Japan in those days; now they are in China and Mexico. The children of the Reagan Democrats are Trump Republicans now, and that fact was fatal to Clinton. He called plays no quarterback had ever called and executed them for touchdowns, yet Trump should not be viewed as a tactician, his former adviser Corey Lewandowski explained in an interview with TIME, nor as a performer, though he held his audiences spellbound for more than a year. Trump won because he is a tribune, as all wave-catching leaders must be, Lewandowski said. For all the strange originality of Trump’s triumph, the essential element “is what it always is” for one winning the White House. “It’s a snapshot in time that says, ‘I’m the messenger. I’ve harnessed what the American people are tired of and sick of, and I’m just going to give that a voice.’” That voice was thunderous, but it spoke a familiar language. Trump made himself the messenger for a faction of Americans that has cried out at irregular intervals down through our history. Suspicious of governing elites, opposed to open immigration, resistant to free trade and international entanglements, this faction was Jacksonian in the 1820s, populist in the 1920s and now Trumpist in 2016. He brought them out of the shadows of the Republican coalition, where they have been neglected stepchildren for half a century, fed on scraps of antiWashington rhetoric. Trump’s crude and reckless style signaled that he shared their contempt for established order. He chose one of their clarions, Steve Bannon of Breitbart.com, to serve as his righthand man. Trump’s closing message, conveyed in a two-minute television ad, could have been written at almost any time over the past two centuries for consumption by this audience: international bankers and their Washington puppets are conspiring to weaken the nation and rob the American people. Many GOP leaders refused to be found in such company. Only one of Trump’s living predecessors as Republican standard bearer, 1996 nominee Bob Dole, was on record supporting him. The two living Republican Presidents—the George Bushes—refused to vote for him. Judging from the returns, though, whatever Republicans he lost through his bluster and carelessness, Trump more than made up among alienated voters who would normally have opted out. By ringing the chords of gun control, abortion and PHOTOGR APH BY DINA LITOVSKY FOR TIME
Slow counts and tight races meant voters had to wait until early on Nov. 9 before a clear winner emerged
Obamacare, “we really started bringing Republicans home,” the campaign’s senior communications adviser Jason Miller told TIME. The elecTion of Donald Trump has no historic parallel. Having never served in government or the military, he is the least conventional choice the American people have ever made. He’s not a lawyer, as 26 of the 44 Presidents have been. As a builder, he might share something in common with the engineer Herbert Hoover and the architect Thomas Jefferson—if you squint hard enough. But as the overstretched operator of bankrupt New Jersey casinos? A promoter of international beauty pageants? Star of a long-running reality-TV show? It might seem that the choice of such a man reflects a steep drop in the level of respect Americans have for the demands and the office of the presidency. But should that be a surprise? Over the last quartercentury we’ve had a President who—whatever good things he was doing—found time to play sex games with an intern in the Oval Office. He was followed by a President who—however well-intentioned— committed the nation to a foreign war with no postinvasion plan and left the economy in the deepest pit since the Great Depression. That man was followed by a President who—though his approval ratings have been rising sharply of late—took office with a résumé so thin, you could see through it. They were very different men, but they shared an inability to convince a majority of the public that they had a firm grip on a rapidly changing world. All three talked about saving American manufacturing jobs, but the jobs kept bleeding away. They talked about lifting impoverished children out of desperate lives, but the children seemed just as desperate. They promised to heal divisions between left and right, but the polarization felt more acute. They pledged to hunt down and wipe out terrorists, but terrorists sowed chaos in the Middle East, crisis in Europe and fear from Orlando to Boston to San Bernardino. True, there was a parallel reality unfolding at the same time. Over those three consecutive two-term presidencies—two governors and a Senator, two Yale men and a Harvard grad, three suits in different styles from the same Establishment rack—the U.S. economy grew from $9.5 trillion to more than $16 trillion in real-dollar terms, U.S. scientists and inventors dominated the rise of digital technology, and the 47year interval without a war between major powers extended to 71 years—the longest peace since the days of the Roman Empire. But it was not in the nature of politicians or pundits to dwell on that sunny side of the story. Especially after Iraq and the recession, the felt story, the lived story for tens of millions of Americans, the story leaked out through hacked NSA files and shamefaced congressional testimony, was a story of excess, impotence and decline. 36
Time November 21, 2016
‘God uses the least likely, from myself to Donald Trump.’ MARK BURNS, South Carolina televangelist
Trump could not have won without that background. No doubt there were many Trump voters who looked at the skyscrapers and jets and helicopters with his name emblazoned on them and figured any man who could do that could do anything. These same folks may have nodded when Trump adviser Rudy Giuliani cited Trump’s loss of nearly $1 billion on a single year’s tax return as a sign of “genius.” But to win the grand prize he needed more than just those votes; he needed the people who figured that he was bluffing his way through the race and decided it didn’t matter—the people who had come to suspect that being President might not be so hard after all, if what it mainly entails is reading botched intelligence reports, muddling through intractable crises and making promises you have no way of keeping. And there was a deeper current that also ran toward Trump. For all their Davos conferences and TED talks, world leaders are flailing around for an agenda. No one really knows how to cope with the revolution sweeping the world. It is a technological revolution, yes, and the lords of Silicon Valley spin endless hours of jargon about its magical possibilities. But its social and political impacts— already overwhelming and rapidly multiplying— are coming much faster and more furiously than governments can digest them. What does it mean to put a computer in the palm of every human being, and to link each palm instantaneously with every other? When Gutenberg’s revolution of movable type first made it possible to share ideas widely across space and time, the political and social follow-on effects included the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the rise of democracy and the industrial and scientific revolutions. In other words, everything from daily routines to international order was scrambled and re-scrambled. How much change, and how rapid, will this massively more powerful technology cause? Elites have been riding high on the back of this beast, and have not yet seen its teeth or felt its claws. But many millions more Americans, living outside the best zip codes, feel it breathing down their necks. This matters for Trump because he lasered in on the dislocations that technology is causing, in concert with globalization: the manufacturing jobs lost not just to China or Mexico but to robots. The coal jobs lost not just to green liberalism but to higher efficiency in generation and consumption. The asymmetrical warfare made possible not by American weakness but by social media. The retirement and health care time bombs set ticking by more people living longer lives, which is in part made possible by computer power unraveling disease. Trump tapped the pain of dislocation, though he misplaces the blame. The failure of American leaders to solve these mind-boggling questions helped get
him elected—but now he is the leader, and it’s his turn to be baffled by them. The technology revolution mattered for another reason too: Trump was the first successful candidate to realize that these same forces must disrupt the political sphere. Communication is the wiring of democracy; the more communication you have, the easier it is for people to find what they want, and to organize with others who are seeking the same thing. This is true whether the people want the right thing or the wrong thing, whether they seek evil or good. For this reason, many of the Founding Fathers feared an excess of democracy. But one voter’s excess is another voter’s justenough, and Trump was able to connect with just enough voters to win the election. Much as Amazon has barreled over the retail giants and Facebook is gobbling up the media, Trump used technology to cut out the middlemen of politics: the reporters and editorial boards, endorsers and political parties, even the mega-armies of door knockers and phone bankers who were the fabric of analog democracy. His relationship to the voters was direct—or felt direct— through the digital idioms of Twitter, Facebook and reality TV. The people wanted him, even when the intermediaries did not, and in the hyper-democracy of the smartphone age, the people can get what they want, when they want it. And some of them may have wanted it desperately. In some neighborhoods that still looked middle class a major issue in 2016 was opioid addiction. A recent Princeton report noted that 44% of men who had dropped out of the labor force had taken pain medication the previous day. If they did not always vote, the everyday reality of them informed many who did. Trump understood that campaigning is a performance, and he geared his star turn to a particular audience. His convention in Cleveland told the tale. Experts panned the event as a train wreck, but Trump understood that train wrecks are interesting to watch. Every day a new member of his family appeared, every night ended on a cliffhanger. The leading man normally steers clear of the hall until his speech, but Trump was a hovering presence all week, stalking, glaring, emerging from billowing smoke. Trump disclosed the meaning of his method earlier this year in an interview with TIME as he winged across America on his private jet and watched himself dominate the news on a giant flat-screen TV: once you build an audience, “that gives you power,” he said. “It’s not the polls. It’s the ratings.” His rambling late-night Twitter rants and his loose-limbed, jazz-riff, fact-free speeches would have killed his chances if the middlemen still reigned. Instead, by some strange alchemy, they made him more real to his followers. More real, obviously, to the bigots and trolls who made him a hero of the
so-called alt right. But also more real to voters for whom Trump’s style signified freedom from wornout conventions and a refusal to toe the line. Trump’s supporters didn’t take him seriously, except when they did. He was like the guy at work who makes inappropriate jokes but never misses his monthly sales quota.
Trump’s style signified freedom from worn-out conventions and a refusal to toe the line
A mAn cAst his early vote last week in Kansas. As he walked from the polling place, he confessed to a friend, “I feel like I need a shower.” That feeling, so widespread in this election, was not solely the fault of the President-elect. It was common to hear people marvel disgustedly that so broad and abundant a nation somehow managed to produce two deeply unpopular candidates. Hillary Clinton ran in spite of an electorate clamoring for change, which no 25-year veteran of national politics can represent no matter what gender she is. She ran in spite of souring polls that would show that a majority of Americans neither liked nor trusted her. She ran in spite of nagging questions about her e-mails and enormous wealth. She kept running in spite of a fainting spell at a public ceremony and all the questions about a 68-year-old woman’s stamina that followed. She ran in spite of a last-minute intervention by the director of a mutinous FBI. Her campaign wasn’t pretty, or edifying, or entirely uplifting. She spent most of her time on the attack, as she’d planned to do all along. Long before she knew whom she would run against, Clinton looked at the partisan divisions of the nation and the shifting demographics that usually gave her party an Electoral College head start. Figuring that she could win simply by surviving, she built a machine specifically geared to that purpose, all fail-safes and firewalls, but no passion. She signed up party insiders to protect her from primary challengers, hired data analysts to target the voters she could not win by personality alone and surrounded herself with rugged pros who would never flinch under fire. Then she did what she does best: gritted her teeth and stuck to the plan. “You can count on this,” she promised in her final televised campaign appeal. “I’ve never quit, and I never will.” In the wee hours of Nov. 9, after Clinton called Trump to congratulate him on his win, the stragglers at her thwarted celebration in New York were stupefied by the result. It’s hard to exaggerate how convinced they all were—from the candidate on down—that the election was in the bag. The entourage was nothing but cheery in the final days before the election, as Jay Z and Beyoncé and LeBron and the Boss and Bon Jovi and a flock of celebrities too numerous to mention joined the bandwagon to bring out the vote. Many of her senior aides had moved on to the agenda for the first 100 days. All their polls. All their models. All wrong. 39
The President-elect greets supporters at his victory party in Manhattan early on Nov. 9
PHOTOGR APH BY CHRISTOPHER MORRIS—VII FOR TIME
Clinton wore the enemy uniform for the Trump campaign as if it were custom tailored. She was the Establishment he promised to purge. She profited from the cronyism that he dared to call out. She embodied Washington, the swamp he pledged to drain, in all its mansions and motorcades and mendacity. And so for the second time in her remarkable career, Clinton had given her all and fallen just short against a less experienced, less accountable, more confident man. Her concession speech, the morning after, was somehow graceful and gritty at the same time. “Donald Trump is going to be our President,” she said. “We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead.” There will be a Madam President, after so many female governors and Senators and Prime Ministers, so many female entrepreneurs and CEOs, so many female judges and chancellors. It will happen soon. But she won’t be Hillary Clinton. A veterAn of decades of Washington politics stared at his television on that dumbfounding night as a question took shape in his mind. “What is it that has won?” President Trump represents a victory for seismic forces roiling under the mantle of history, the same forces that are shaking Berlin and Beijing, Paris and Mosul, Scranton and Flint. He is a symptom, not a cause, but he is the symptom that cannot be ignored. “America was always a pillar of stability,” says Dhruva Jaishankar, an expert in U.S.India relations who, like all experts everywhere, was trying to get his arms around the news. “Suddenly we don’t know what’s going to happen.” Let that be the lesson of Trump’s feat and a motto for our future—America’s, the world’s, for a long time to come. Suddenly, we don’t know what’s going to happen. We probably never did, but in times of slower, smaller change we could lull ourselves into believing that we did. We could organize ourselves around elites who claimed to know. We could entrench ourselves for endless political battles over years and decades, play self-serving games with our institutions, ignore nascent threats as we feathered our nests, all because we thought we knew what would happen. We must reorganize ourselves around creativity, flexibility, experimentation and goodwill. We don’t know what will happen. But we can know what matters. Freedom matters, dignity, opportunity, kindness. The list goes on, and for most people it is written in their hearts. The list got lost in this election, yet there it was in everyday lives, in families, schools, neighborhoods. And there it was in the first official message of the newly elected President Trump. He spoke of teamwork, gratitude and mutual respect, and promised: “I will not let you down.” So much hangs on his ability to live by it.—With reporting by Sam Frizell and zeke J. miller/New York; Nikhil kumar/New Delhi; and elizabeth DiaS/waShiNgtoN • 41
E L E C T IO N|2 01 6
NOW WHAT?
TIME contributors offer insight into election night and solutions to move America forward CHARLOTTE ALTER
Hillary Clinton again collides with the highest glass ceiling It turns out that the hIghest, hardest glass ceIlIng is reinforced with metal beams. The Javits Center in Manhattan, where Hillary Clinton had planned to give a victory speech under an actual glass ceiling, turned into a scene of despair on election night and into early Wednesday morning as Donald Trump won the presidency. Female supporters wearing white pantsuits and nasty woman buttons sat on the floor, many of them crying, realizing that they were witnessing a different kind of history than they’d hoped. It’s impossible to know how much of Clinton’s loss was due to the fact that she is a woman. Trump’s victory was fueled by a supersurge of white voters from rural areas, motivated by economic anxiety with strong undertones of racial resentment. Yet the stench of sexism engulfed Clinton’s quixotic bid for the presidency, magnifying her flaws and minimizing her considerable strengths. It’s possible that a male candidate with Clinton’s political baggage would have been allowed to transcend his mistakes and outrun his errors. It’s possible that a male candidate would not have faced the same scrutiny and suspicion, or have been held to the same impossible standards. It’s possible that a male candidate would not have been dogged by questions of likability and stamina. There’s simply no way to know, except to look at all the other male politicians with less accomplished résumés (like Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden, for example) who faced fewer obstacles and more goodwill. We don’t know how Clinton’s gender affected her campaign, but we do know how Trump’s gender affected his: the fact that he has won the presidency despite numerous allegations of sexual harassment and assault has revealed what men can get away PHOTOGR APH BY BEN LOW Y FOR TIME
with in 21st century America. Of the 60% of voters who had an unfavorable opinion of Trump, 15% still voted for him, and of the half who said they were bothered by his treatment of women, 11% voted for him anyway. Fifty-three percent of white women voted for Trump, according to Edison Research exit polls, including 62% of white women without a college degree. Other things— jobs, trade, “taking our country back”—were more important. Once again, the treatment of women has been downsized to a side issue, even among women themselves. If Clinton had won, her gender would have defined her victory as a historic moment. But her gender is no less significant in defeat. A Clinton victory would have signified that America is ready for a female President; her defeat is a sign that the glass ceiling is much more durable than anybody thought.
The glass ceiling of the Javits Center in Manhattan, where Clinton supporters thought they’d be celebrating, remained intact
Much is made of the message this election will send to our daughters. At the end of the day, the message is this: In the United States of America, a woman can be the most qualified presidential candidate in history, according to the current President, and still lose to a man who calls women “dogs,” has been repeatedly accused of sexual assault and has bragged that he likes to grab women “by the pussy.” Inside the Javits Center, many Clinton supporters felt as if a historic moment had been snatched from their fingertips. Michael Zorek and Shelly Friedland had brought their 14-year-old son Jeremy and 10-year-old daughter Diana to see what they thought would be the election of the first female President. “I feel like my future’s just down the drain,” said Diana, up far past her bedtime. “We’re gonna have to move, because we can’t live in a country with Trump as the leader.”
The nation will not be healed from the White House. It has to be healed in backyards, in halls of worship, in public parks and clubhouses. DAVID WOLPE , the Max Webb Senior Rabbi of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles
Her father reassured Diana that the family had no plans to move. But Zorek is upset that he had to explain “pussy grabbing” to his kids, and he can’t believe that Trump’s treatment of women has gone excused for so long. “I was hoping I could stand here with my daughter and see the first female President elected,” he said. “It’s like you came to a party and now it’s a funeral.” Some women, who only hours earlier had been sure the night would end in a victory for feminism, now doubt they will see a female President anytime soon. Friedland hesitates when asked if she thinks she’ll ever see a female Commander in Chief. She says she hopes so, but gestures to Diana and says, “It will happen in her lifetime for sure.” But in the final hours of election night, Diana had tasted the bitter patience tolerated by so many generations of women before her. “I’m confident that a woman will be President,” she says. “But not yet.”
EDDIE S. GLAUDE JR.
The abyss that is the value gap AS I WALKED OUT OF MY HOTEL EARLY THIS MORNING, THE SAME HOTEL WHERE
Trump and his supporters reveled in their surprise victory, I stumbled a bit. Slight vertigo had set in. Trump had pulled off a historic victory, and even though I wasn’t a Clinton supporter, the result threw me off. It happened. White America (and a smattering of people of color) elected an ill-informed racist who, by any standard, is morally and ethically bankrupt. Over the next few months, pundits and scholars will dissect this election. Many will find fault with Hillary Clinton. Some will blame James Comey. Others will hold the third-party candidacies of Jill Stein and Gary Johnson responsible. But most will talk about the discontent of working-class white Americans, how elites dismissed them with scorn and treated them with condescension, and how they, in the end, rejected the status quo and the economic philosophy that has left them behind. These are the folks Donald Trump called “the forgotten men and women of our country,” and this election will be read as their revenge. That is a lie. To be sure, non-college-educated, working-class white men overwhelmingly voted for Trump. But what the early exit-poll data, with all of its flaws, reveal is a much more complicated picture. The fact, and it is one this country must confront, is that the majority of White America voted for Trump to be the 45th President of the United States. According to the results of Edison Research’s national election poll, 53% of white women voted for him and 48% of white people supported him. Large numbers of college-educated white women (45%) and men (54%) voted for him. What is becoming increasingly clear is that White America, writ large, supported the candidate who wants to ban Muslims, build a wall on our southern border and deport anyone who enters the country illegally; who calls himself the candidate of law and order; and who degrades and demeans women. White America—and I mean those who see themselves as white people, not as those who happen to be white—has struck back. I have written of the value gap: that what fundamentally organizes this country is the belief that white people matter more than others. With each moment of substantive progress, with each moment of hard-fought gains to advance democracy, people reassert the value gap to arrest change and to maintain the belief that white people matter more. The value gap isn’t the possession of high-schooleducated white folks. The ugliness of so many white elites can’t be hidden behind the veil of so-called white working-class resentment. Black people know that business owners and politicians donned white sheets and sat on White Citizens’ Councils. The election of Donald Trump is just the latest instance of this collective sickness. White America still wants to matter more. The writing is on the wall, and all the racial anguish expressed in this election cycle reflects that we are, even with the election of Donald Trump, in the death throes of the idea of White America. To be sure, we will have to prepare ourselves for, at least, the next four years. Organize. Fight. James Baldwin wrote in Harper’s magazine in 1961 that the questions that America faced about the death of segregation—a symbol of White America’s stranglehold—were “how long, how violent and how expensive the funeral is going to be.” As we do the postmortem of the election, as we announce the bankruptcy of an economic philosophy that has decimated workers, no matter the color of their skin, and as we reflect on what this all means for the country’s standing in the world, let’s not lose sight of what happened on Nov. 8. White America made its last stand, and it’s not going to be an easy death. Glaude is the chair of the department of African-American studies at Princeton University and the author of Democracy in Black
44
Time November 21, 2016
Republican elites attempted to shove former Florida governor Jeb Bush down the primary voters’ throats, but Trump prevailed. Democratic elites actually succeeded in forcing Clinton on their electorate, and that’s why she ultimately lost. ELISE JORDAN, NBC News/MSNBC political analyst; she has worked for the Department of State and the National Security Council
OPAL TOMETI
Let substance trump symbols in order To earnesTly map a way forward for a humanrights and social-justice agenda with an inexperienced President like Donald Trump—who has been brazen about his xenophobic, sexist and racist beliefs—we must remain steadfast to our vision and values. During these times, we do not need symbols but substance. For those who are committed to correcting the power imbalance in our world, we must know that there are no easy shortcuts to addressing issues like the relentless racism that characterizes our systems and leaves us with disparities that plague our communities. Tometi is a co-founder of Black Lives Matter
FRANK LUNTZ
What the polls refused to tell us it doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, does it? President-elect Donald J. Trump. A campaign that began with him blithely riding down an escalator ends with him boldly ascending to the highest office in the land. Polls missed it. Pundits dismissed it. Prognosticators blew it. For decades, millions upon millions of Americans have felt looked down upon and left behind. They were mad as hell. On Nov. 8, they declared in unison: Enough. Their vote was their voice. And the resounding electoral echo was historic, unforeseen and unprecedented. While many Americans are surprised by the result, the people who populate the punditry class are truly shocked by it. I’m one of them. Many of us relied on a set of polls that were structurally off by 2 or 3 points in favor of Clinton and exit polls that were simply wrong. Trump voters weren’t lying to the pollsters or afraid to be counted. On Election Day and before, they simply refused to be polled. They refused to participate in a political exercise they saw as rigged against them. But it wasn’t just the polls that were off. Never has the political class/industry/elite so misread the electorate and so misunderstood American priorities. The echo chamber of journalists, politicians and corporate leaders and the international community kept reassuring itself that there was no way “a man like him” could win, even in times like these. The American people decided differently. They did it the British Brexit way, using this election as a vessel to vent their anger against All Things Big. They proved that intensity was more important than organization. They proved that states we’ve been conditioned to think of as “red” and “blue” in the past four elections are actually made up of living, breathing people who will keep voting for change until they finally get it. This is a wake-up call for everyone at every level of government. Governors, Senators, mayors—all of them need to have a retreat where they can work together to bring about peace in the populace. Importantly, this isn’t about government officials reconciling with one another—which in itself is needed. Rather, it is about their facilitating their constituencies to reconcile with one another. It’s about bringing people together, bridging our divides and binding our wounds. That’s what real leadership is about. We know Trump proved to be a master of sailing on the trade winds of disenchantment and
I don’t think it is finished yet. I think this phenomenon is set to sweep other parts of Europe over the course of a couple years. Hungary is now basically giving two fingers up to Brussels. You get much the same language in Slovakia, in Poland and the Czech Republic. NIGEL FARAGE,
interim leader of the U.K. Independence Party
frustration; what remains to be seen is if he can make peace with those he profited from attacking. He should heed the advice from one of my favorite lines in Game of Thrones: “We only make peace with our enemies. That’s why it’s called making peace.” Looking ahead, I asked Election Day voters what they wanted most from their elected officials to “fix their government.” Fully 58% said they want “leaders who are willing to compromise and work with everyone to get things done,” compared with 42% who want “leaders who have big ideas and real solutions, even if their boldness creates some division.” Swing voters overwhelmingly wanted compromise, by 69% to 31%. Democrats wanted compromise by 65% to 35%. Republicans were the exact inverse, preferring boldness by 65% to 35%. This is the looming challenge for Donald Trump and a Republican Party that is only temporarily less fractured after its electoral triumph. My recommendation to him, and to all elected officials, is to remain true to an agenda of dramatic change (which wide majorities of voters want) but to adopt a tone that is welcoming rather than incendiary. Whoever came up with Trump’s “contract with the American voter” certainly deserves a place in his Cabinet. The best place to start is with the inefficiency, ineffectiveness and unaccountability of the federal government. Nearly 7 in 10 voters (69%) told me that when government increases spending, “generally more is wasted,” compared with just the 31% of those who believe “generally it delivers more.” Nearly 3 in 4 (72%) said, “I pay for more government than I receive,” while just 28% said, “I received more from government than I pay for.” If Trump is serious about draining the swamp, he’ll start with a forensic audit of the federal budget, going line by line, program by program, through the thousands of pages until he has enough programs to cut to bring our books into balance. The bottom line: voters have made it clear that they want a shake-up ... and they want progress, not just bomb throwing. What remains to be seen is whether Trump can be as effective a President as he was a candidate. As for everyone else—and that includes Congress—be kind to one another. Don’t spike the football or take the ball and go home. Don’t silo yourselves in anger. America has a future. It will be a bright one only if we work together to get there. Luntz is a polling analyst and contributor to CBS and Fox News 45
The “MAGA” hat sat in protective casing during Trump’s acceptance speech QASIM RASHID
We must wage a jihad of peace
Rashid is the national spokesperson for the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community USA
46
Time November 21, 2016
JILL FILIPOVIC, a writer and lawyer
CHRISTOPHER MORRIS —VII FOR TIME
One of the high marks of Islam that the Prophet Muhammad taught is that loyalty to your country is part of your faith. I can sympathize with the anger and fear that many have: I’m a person of color; I’m a Muslim; I have young children. But these are the cards we’ve been dealt, and we need to find ways to continue working to build bridges of understanding and peace, because the alternative, which leads to more fear and more violence, is simply not a tenable option. There is a great deal of ignorance about Islam and what Muslims believe. The word jihad means struggle, and the Prophet Muhammad said that the greatest jihad is the struggle against self to become better human beings through peace. Our goal as American Muslims should be to wage a true jihad of education, compassion and service to humanity. Now is not the time to throw in the towel. It’s the time to work even harder to live values of pluralism and to start conversations and overcome fear. It’s easy to do that when there is no opposition. But when you face a counter-narrative, it becomes that much more important. That’s when jihad really matters. That’s why it’s called a struggle. To my fellow American Muslims, keep your heads up. To non-Muslim Americans, we’re still here, proud of our faith and proud of our identity as Americans. We want to continue to make our country better.
There is a lot to fear in a Trump presidency— economic chaos, bigotry, the demise of power. But there’s just as much to fear in the American people, especially in the white America that elected Trump.
Q&A J.D. VANCE
What we can learn about—and do for—the white working class Why did so many people not see the white working class coming in this election?
I think so many people were blinded to it because they didn’t know a Trump supporter, so they didn’t realize how passionate a lot of people were but also how durable his support would be in the face of a lot of political setbacks. I think it’s just a consequence of this incredible geographic and cultural segregation we have in this country. Does the not knowing each other go both ways?
It does. And one of the things that people from my neck of the woods, people who supported Trump, should try to do is understand why the prospect of a Trump presidency was frightening to a lot of Americans. The reconciliation that I hope will happen in this country can’t just happen in one direction.
If the divide is starkly geographic, how does America overcome it?
It would be great if people returned to areas of the country that need talented people with good economic prospects. Our country would really benefit if those who went to elite universities, who started businesses, who started nonprofits weren’t just doing so on the coasts. Folks should be encouraged to return home—but in the broadest regional sense. It’s not just that somebody who’s from southwest Ohio needs to go back to southwest Ohio. People should be encouraged to go back to so-called Middle America. One of the takeaways of this election certainly should be that we can’t have an elite culture isolated from the rest of the country. It’s not a durable way to have a well-functioning society. Vance is the author of Hillbilly Elegy
We start by acknowledging reality. When he assumes office, Trump will be the only head of state to deny that climate change is real, and as a parent and a leader in the environmental movement, that is enormously disturbing. But there’s progress that’s being made on climate change that can’t and won’t be stopped—we may slow down the rate but it’s progress that can’t be reversed. MICHAEL BRUNE, executive director of the Sierra Club
Q&A JACK GOLDSMITH
The potential for a three-branch executive power trip What checks will there be on a Donald Trump presidency?
The potential checks are many, including Congress and the courts, the free press and many internal Executive Branch watchdogs like inspectors general, lawyers and the permanent bureaucracy. And of course the people in the next election. Will they work?
It depends on what Trump tries to do. If he tries to follow through on pledges that are clearly unlawful—like restarting waterboarding, or worse—I am sure the internal and external checks will prevent that. But there are many lawful decisions the President can make and implement that will not be checked. One obvious example concerns the domestic clean-air regulations and the related international agreement President Obama famously forged. Trump can and likely will kill those. Constitutional checks do not pre-
vent Presidents who win elections from changing Executive Branch policies. What will it mean for all three branches to be controlled by one party?
It will mean that Trump has an enormous opportunity to implement his agenda, especially in the short term.
Is there historic context to Trump’s approach to executive power?
Hard to say since we don’t really know what his “approach” is. To the extent he is promising to disregard or abuse the law, the obvious analogy is Richard Nixon. And the reaction to Nixon is an obvious guide. Goldsmith is a Harvard Law School professor and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution
47
E L E C T IO N|2 01 6
HOW HE WON
Inside Donald Trump’s stunning upset By Zeke J. Miller/New York City Chris reilly, a Commissioner in york County, Pennsylvania, has lived in the heavily Republican area north of Baltimore for 28 years. On the day in September after Mike Pence spoke to some 800 folks in downtown York, Reilly scanned a panoramic picture of the crowd in the local paper and had a shock. “I recognized one face,” he said. That’s when the party stalwart knew something was going on. Then, on a recent Friday, Reilly got word that the county had received 9,000 absentee-ballot applications in a single day. It had to mail them out by Monday but had no money for extra help. So Reilly turned up at the election office on Saturday to stuff the applications into envelopes himself. As he did, he noticed something surprising. The applications were running 10 to 1 male. And when he peeked at the employment lines, he saw a pattern. “Dockworker. Forklift operator. Roofer,” Reilly recalled. “Grouter. Warehouse stocker. These people had probably never voted before. They were coming out of nowhere.” Back in Manhattan, at the gilded Trump Tower, the most unconventional campaign in history put its faith in these voters. Hillary Clinton and her allies had run three TV ads for every one that Donald Trump got on the air. Her ground operation had tens of thousands more volunteers and hundreds more field offices. Trump had lost each of the debates against Clinton, and he had spent weeks defending himself from a video in which he bragged about sexually assaulting women. But only the Trump campaign had PHOTOGR APH BY JONATHAN ERNST
Trump’s final rallies drew massive crowds, which his campaign relied on to gauge voter enthusiasm
a candidate who had struck a nerve. Only the Trump campaign had a message that was breaking through. “To a person, there was never a doubt that we could come back and win this race,” said Trump’s communications adviser Jason Miller, one of just a handful of senior staff members who guided Trump through the final weeks. They saw it at the rallies, which they believed were a better measure than the polls. “You go to Scranton, you go to Dayton and ask those guys, ‘Hey, do you feel like you have had 2.5% GDP growth this quarter?’” Miller told TIME just before Election Day. “They’ll look at you like you have three heads.” There were two Americas after all, and one of them demanded to have its voice heard. The task of the Trump campaign was to tap this seething populist distrust of the nation’s elites, and they had no better foil than Clinton. From the beginning, Trump presented himself as a disruptive app; his campaign staff compared him to Uber. He had authenticity. He could draw a crowd. He could make statements—often outrageous and regularly false—that would spread through the media and social networks like wildfire. He was what the wizards in Silicon Valley call a platform: something new that people didn’t know they needed, and which everyone could use as they wished. And like a killer app, Donald Trump mowed down every challenge. It was his message, his vision, his stubbornness and bombast that changed the country. Trump was the one who picked immigration and trade as his signatures issues. He recognized the populist tide waiting to be unleashed. If he stopped tweeting and started reading his speeches in the final weeks, it was only because he finally chose to heed long-ignored advice. Only those closest to him saw the upset coming. for Corey leWandoWski, Trump’s first campaign manager, the initial signs came early. Weeks after the campaign launched in June 2015, Lewandowski booked a stop in Laconia, N.H., a town of about 17,000 that hosts the state’s pumpkin festival. “We land at the Laconia airport. I look and I literally have 15 messages, all from the same phone number,” he remembers. It was the local police. “We’ve got a problem at the venue,” the officer said. A cruiser was waiting by the tarmac. So many people had turned out that the roads had been shut down. Two miles from the venue, cars lined the shoulders, because people had parked to walk. When the event was over, nearly 200 people followed Trump’s entourage to the airport to send him off. “I said, ‘Wow,’” Lewandowski recalls. “This is beyond anything.” This was the simple notion Trump and his evershifting team decided to build the campaign around. If he could keep the crowds, he could win. He wanted to fill them with spirit. He wanted to be fun. He was outrageous, a vessel for their anger. The larger the 50
Time November 21, 2016
target he could topple, the better. No one would have advised him to do any of this, not even Lewandowski. Time and again, Trump’s advisers objected as he broke rules. A few weeks before Election Day, Trump promised a meaty policy speech in Gettysburg, Pa. Instead, he used the historic stage to threaten to sue the women accusing him of sexual assault. Campaign manager Kellyanne Conway pleaded with him to stay on message. But he would not be tamed. “You don’t tell Trump you can’t do this, stop doing that,” said RNC strategist Sean Spicer. “You say, ‘You know what would be more helpful or more effective?’ Or, ‘Right now the Dems are taking advantage of how you’re saying this.’” For weeks his advisers told him his closing pitch to African-American voters—“What the hell do you have to lose?”—could probably be better phrased. But then a black pastor in Charlotte, N.C., came out after a shooting, echoing the same words to reflect his frustrations. “I think he’s going to really surprise people with the numbers he gets among African Americans,” said Miller. In the end, Trump won 8% of the black vote, according to exit polls, two points more than Mitt Romney got four years ago. Lewandowski points to another moment when it all came together for him. In the final sprint to the South Carolina primary in February, his cell phone buzzed with leaked word that Pope Francis had slammed Trump’s pledge to erect a wall between the U.S. and Mexico. It was “not Christian,” the popular Pontiff declared. In the tradition of the Vatican, the news wouldn’t become public for an hour or two. Lewandowski advised caution as he searched his phone to find the Catholic share of the state’s electorate. “You don’t understand,” he told his boss. “I’m Catholic. This is the Pope.” But the reality host turned candidate had other ideas. “He just loves Mexico. He’s brainwashed,” Lewandowski recalls Trump saying. Without delay Trump dictated a response, calling the Pope’s words “disgraceful.” The next day, the Pope released another statement, making clear he had not attacked Trump and was not indicating a political preference. Trump claimed victory. The reality show was real.
‘There was never a doubt that we could come back and win this race.’ JASON MILLER, Trump communications adviser
While Trump shoT from The lip, the mechanics of building a campaign fell on others to figure out. A 15th-floor office in Trump Tower was filled by young staffers, many of whom had never worked on a House race, let alone a presidential bid. Wearing suits and slicked-back hair, they took their cues from the candidate in more ways than one. There were few late nights or early mornings, but lots of bravado. “It’s the island of misfit toys,” one staffer said of the scene. When Trump clinched the GOP nomination on May 3, he had no machine to drive his message. The skeletal campaign had fewer than 75 staff members, no field program or data operation and a meager
P R E V I O U S PA G E S : R E U T E R S; C H R I S T O P H E R M O R R I S — V I I F O R T I M E
fundraising outfit. But the Republican National Committee was ready to pick up the slack. Aides deployed to San Antonio, the home base of Trump digital director Brad Parscale. A tall, bearded web designer who started his small business 12 years ago with $500, Parscale latched on with the campaign after working for Trump’s companies. Through the early primaries, Parscale ran the digital team from a laptop in his living room. But he would emerge as one of the most powerful operatives in Trump’s orbit, earning the ear of the candidate’s influential sonin-law Jared Kushner. Parscale and his team tested countless combinations of Facebook ads, designed to turn out disaffected whites and sow doubts among young voters and minorities about Clinton. By the campaign’s end, senior aides said, Parscale had say over everything from the budget to creative, and from voter targeting to the candidate’s schedule. He and deputy campaign manager David Bossie spent hours tossing a football in Trump Tower as they planned Trump’s final campaign stops. The big guns were run out of Washington. The national party had more staffers and fulltime volunteers than in 2012, and its field army contacted some 20 million voters. “Every single thing Trump did that had anything to do with direct voter contact— a paid TV ad, a paid mail piece, paid phone call, door knock—was done because the RNC told him these things needed to be done,” said Katie Walsh, the RNC chief of staff. Parscale credited their “hand in glove” relationship. In the final weeks, the RNC’s team was sending daily updates on where to send the candidate and put ads on television to reach more voters. Yet still even the party’s own models did not predict this victory. Just before election night, Republican aides told reporters they believed 12 states were within three points. At least eight broke for Trump. He won many of them handily. Inside Trump Tower, Parscale was an optimist, projecting nearly the entire electoral map correctly on the Friday before Election Day. (His models missed the mark in Colorado and Wisconsin.) Victory brings a happy challenge of huge proportions. Between now and Jan. 20, Trump’s transition team must fill roughly 4,000 government jobs,
Trump credits the selection of his running mate, Mike Pence, with enticing Republican voters back to his candidacy
from high-profile Cabinet positions to bureaucratic backwaters. It’s a challenge for any incoming Administration, but Trump’s transition team is thin even by his standards. The effort is made up of about 100 people, the vast majority of whom are volunteers. Trump’s transition chair, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, despite being distracted by the criminal prosecution of two former top aides, has spent recent months interviewing potential candidates. But vetting for top posts has yet to formally begin, foreshadowing a frantic scramble. “It’s very different” from a traditional transition effort, says a senior team member. “I think Romney had a better idea of what he wanted to do.” Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions told TIME on Nov. 9 that “many decisions” had yet to be made. One thing Trump knows: GOP chair Reince Priebus is the favorite to become chief of staff, according to two people familiar with Trump’s thinking. That will reassure many Republicans, including House Speaker Paul Ryan, who must try to bridge their differences with a candidate who stormed to power by smashing the party’s cherished principles. There are signs that Trump will defer to Republicans in Congress, which could provide an ironic coda for the party he once seemed to break into pieces. With control of both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, the GOP is poised to realize a suite of once distant dreams: the potential for a new conservative majority on the Supreme Court, a repeal of all or part of Obamacare, dramatic reductions in tax rates, new military funding, an enhanced enforcement of immigration law and a historic rollback in environmental regulations. “He just earned a mandate, and we now have a Republican unified government,” Ryan said on Nov. 9. The candidate many Republican leaders once could not stomach could become their savior. But only if he chooses to. The one thing we know about the next President is that he will run much of the government, and the nation’s relationship with the rest of the world, exactly as he pleases. —With reporting by Alex AltmAn/new York citY; elizAbeth DiAs and michAel DuffY/wAshington • 55
MONEY IN POLITICS The 45th President will face unprecedented ethics decisions By Zeke J. Miller
56
Time November 21, 2016
Trump-branded products were on display at a campaign event in Jupiter, Fla., on March 8
Trump would be free to talk up his wardrobe collections on foreign trade missions
ments clause, which prohibits U.S. officials from taking money from foreign sources without the consent of Congress. If Trump committed an official act in exchange for a financial reward from another person or company, he could open himself up to prosecution or impeachment. Prosecutors would be called upon to demonstrate a quid pro quo relationship between a specific act and a material gain for the Trump organization. That probe could be conducted by Congress or as a criminal investigation within his Justice Department, where it might prompt the appointment of a special prosecutor. The emolumenTs Clause bans anyone holding government office from accepting “any present, emolument, office, or title” from a foreign government without congressional approval. The clause has been the subject of almost no legal scholarship or case law but has been interpreted by Congress and the Office of Legal Counsel to prohibit even the smallest arrangements, like educational scholarships and business consulting deals, from foreign interests. With a web of foreign business interests extending from Azerbaijan to Panama, Trump could find that the most minor contractual renewal turns into a new reason for concern. Even Trump’s oft-touted status as landlord to the Bank of China in Trump Tower could place him in jeopardy, if, for example, the state-backed bank agreed to pay above-marketrate rents in the future. “Every one of those contracts if he becomes President must be at arms length,” says Painter, “or he can get himself impeached.” Trump could remove these potential conflicts by selling his business empire and placing the proceeds in a blind trust. He has said only that he will pass off control of the empire to his three eldest children, who serve as executives at his company. “I would probably have my children run it with my executives, and I wouldn’t ever be involved,” Trump said at a debate earlier this year. It’s a choice he now faces. •
JOE SKIPPER— REUTERS
DonalD Trump sTooD before Dozens of TV cameras at his new Washington, D.C., hotel for what was billed as a mid-September news conference. “Nice hotel,” Trump began, with an exaggerated nod toward the cameras, which were broadcasting live on three cable stations. Later, he invited news cameras to accompany him on a tour of the property. So it has gone all year with Trump, a man who often refuses to distinguish between his political interests and his business promotion. He has hawked bespoke water and beefsteaks at political events, while taking his press corps to five golf courses in two countries, three hotels and a winery. In fact, there is little to stop him from using the bully pulpit to sell his business interests from the West Wing. Indeed, Trump would be legally allowed to do far more than simply brag about his newest buildings or branding efforts from the White House. “There would be nothing that would preclude him from making a decision on trade or otherwise that could impact, for better or worse, those interests,” says Don Fox, former general counsel and acting director of the Office of Government Ethics. “It simply would not be a violation of law.” That’s because the nation’s founders designed a system in which the President is primarily answerable to voters. James Madison wrote in the Federalist papers that it would be “vain” to believe that future leaders could always separate their self-concern from the national interest. “Conflict of interest for elected officials has been kind of embedded in our constitutional framework,” says Richard Painter, chief ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush. That means presidential press conferences could be legally held from the Trump hotel, where a President Trump continued to boast of the property’s offerings. Trump water or vodka could be served in the White House, and Trump could choose to stay in his properties on foreign trips. And Trump would be free to talk up his wardrobe collection on trade missions around the world. There are two main legal issues he would have to avoid, ethics experts say: traditional prosecution under government bribery laws and a little-noticed provision in the Constitution known as the emolu-
The first school to train disaster search dogs is nearly finished. But we need your help to complete our National Training Center. Right now, every single dollar you donate will be doubled thanks to a generous grant. Help us train rescued dogs to be rescuers, so when disaster strikes no one is left behind. The Search Starts With You.SM www.SearchDogFoundation.org (888) 4K9-HERO
E L E C T IO N|2 01 6
HOW SHE LOST Hillary Clinton built a machine. The nation wanted a movement By Philip Elliott/New York From the start, there were things that were under Hillary Clinton’s control, and many, many things that never would be. She was a technocrat facing an America demanding revolution. She was a scarred but stalwart fighter in her third decade of battle, facing a new generation of enemies. Her instincts, oriented toward substantive debate, were in the words of one loyalist, “suboptimal” for a changing political scene in which voters were looking for attitude, not answers. When convinced she was right, she proved stubborn. Yet there was potential for her and for history. No one hustled harder than Clinton, whose childhood Sunday-school lessons about the virtues of hard work and good deeds she had translated into a life in public service. She obsessed over details and demanded plans for everything, all the while being unfailingly kind to her allies and aides. And perhaps most appealF R O M T O P, L E F T T O R I G H T: K E N A B E TA N C U R — A F P/G E T T Y I M A G E S; C A R L O S B A R R I A — R E U T E R S; A D R E E S L AT I F — R E U T E R S; C A R L O S B A R R I A — R E U T E R S
Clinton’s supporters embrace amid the stunning loss on election night as return after return signaled trouble for the Democrat
ing to the political professionals, she valued a welloiled campaign machine and recruited many of the people who built the one Barack Obama used in his two winning elections. It seemed, as she readied her campaign launch, the dysfunction that bedeviled her 2008 run for the White House had been exorcised. So hundreds of Democratic operatives uprooted their lives, from the top-ranking leaders in the party who moved to New York for positions in the high-stakes, low-pay headquarters to the idealistic 20-somethings who registered only vague memories of Clinton’s time as First Lady or even her 2008 campaign. Aides who had launched the Obama campaigns shared offices, while others traded West Wing perches for cramped spaces and roommates. It was never going to be sexy, but it didn’t have to be. They were this generation’s best and brightest, matched with a trailblazer who was poised to become the first woman to earn the Oval Office. The campaign Clinton and her team built was a dramatic departure from the inspirational tours de force that twice elevated Obama to the White House. Without a mantle of change or a movement of hope, Clinton and her crew patiently worked to construct an unstoppable machine. It was at times laborious and often dispiriting. And in the end, it came up short against the populist phenomenon of Trump, who bet his entire campaign not on mechanics but on energy. He had the ability to electrify voters. While the billionaire defined his side of the race by the fantastic and spectacular, Clinton kept her head down, frequently focused on priorities that would never make headlines or on the nuts and bolts that keep a campaign running. If Obama’s quants had pioneered the use of complex analytics to identify and attract voters, the Clinton operation used data sets to identify volunteers for the campaign that tried—and failed—to overcome an enthusiasm deficit. There were moments of optimism. When Clinton was on, she was unstoppable. Her marathon, 11-hour testimony in October 2015 on the attacks on the U.S. outpost in Benghazi, Libya, was a shining moment that calmed Democrats’ nerves about her still uncertain nomination. Her three generalelection debate performances sparked the imagination of skeptical crowds, especially younger voters. The Clinton campaign was wired to run circles around Trump’s operation in the states and was unquestionably far better prepared than Trump’s. For a time, it seemed those strengths might be enough to overcome the phenomenon of a former realityTV star whose empty podium drew more coverage than her policy speeches—or a press corps whose dogged antagonism toward the Democrat left many Clinton staffers personally offended by what they saw as a double standard. Still, there were warning signs. Her Democratic 60
Time November 21, 2016
rival Bernie Sanders promised a revolution of his own and rallied young voters who resisted Clinton, with her policy prescriptions and merit-based candidacy. Her use of a private email server while she was Secretary of State dogged her endlessly, including at a precampaign press conference in a U.N. hallway that later proved too rosy and a late-campaign bombshell from the FBI that ticked ominously before proving a dud. She fought to keep paid Wall Street speeches on Bill Clinton’s schedule. In landlocked Iowa, she detailed plans for tackling Laotian land mines and in Libertarian-leaning New Hampshire effused about government-backed loans for Big Business. Aides grimaced and groaned—and then put online the video of the ill-timed land-mine chat as evidence of a heavyweight worthy of support. It worked in a way—Clinton made up for voters lost on the campaign trail with ones gained through social media. Her digital team called this evidence of an ability to clothe traditional politics in trappings of technology. The eternal political reality remained, however: a machine can’t stop a movement, and America prefers a warrior over a wonk.
The data told them they were on solid ground. The voters told them otherwise
FROM THE START, campaign manager Robby Mook knew he had challenges ahead of him. The boyish Columbia University graduate with a degree in the classics had been hired at 35 for the toughest job in politics. He shared Clinton’s unflinching belief that preparation can trump emotion. Everyone warned him that Clinton could be tough to crack and often had parochial preferences, like staying at her home in New York rather than camping out in swing states. She also insisted on beginning her campaign on a listening tour to hear voters speak about their concerns, even though her pollsters had binders of research that would have allowed her to skip that step. Aides made their displeasure clear to one another but knew that forcing Clinton to do something against her instinct was unlikely. It wasn’t until last June that Mook and friends were able to deliver the textbook, picture-perfect campaign launch on New York City’s Roosevelt Island. Clinton was neither lazy nor lackadaisical. Once she settled on a plan, she worked harder than anyone to execute it, a discipline acquired during a summer away from Yale Law School when she campaigned out of an empty storefront on West Sixth Street in Austin for George McGovern’s hapless 1972 White House bid. “I had a small cubicle that I rarely occupied because I spent most of my time in the field,” Clinton wrote in her memoir. Like her staff, she reveled in the grind. But that diligent focus produced huge blind spots away from the field; Clinton never visited Wisconsin during the general-election campaign, and on Nov. 8, the state tipped in Trump’s favor with an ease that caught the Democrat flat-footed.
J E W E L S A M A D — A F P/G E T T Y I M A G E S
Some of the volunteers doing the kind of fieldwork Hillary Clinton had done 44 years earlier sensed the problem. “I’d feel a lot better if she was winning by 20 points,” said Andrew Silvia, a 34-year-old city engineer from Attleboro, Mass., who took his first turn as a volunteer in the New Hampshire offices the weekend before Election Day. He was part of the army that knocked on more than 415,000 voters doors in the state that weekend alone. But it didn’t stem Trump’s surging tide. The campaign’s rough early going might have foreshadowed the stunning final hours. Sanders’ unexpected primary challenge gave voice to a youthdriven populist fury that sought a revolution against powerful elites—in short, people like Clinton. She would prove her mettle with voters, but the victories tended to be difficult, costly and uncertain, starting with lead-off Iowa, where her victory was razor-thin. As Clinton boarded her middle-of-the-night flight, the staff left behind to tidy up found themselves with a six-pack of Miller Lite. The room-temperature tallboys were, like the campaign, serviceable and a bit tepid, but they got the job done. Things didn’t get easier in New Hampshire, the state that gave Clinton her second chance in 2008.
After her loss to Obama in 2008, Clinton faced a long, slow climb back for another run at the presidency. On election night she lost, again, to a candidate promising sweeping change
Mook met with the veteran activists from the previous campaign who volunteered to stay away from her small events in order to give newcomers a chance to size up the candidate. Even so, Sanders, from neighboring Vermont, crushed her almost 2 to 1. As the primaries progressed, the emotional seesaw swung higher and sank lower. Blue collar voters in Michigan bought Sanders’ antitrade rhetoric, dealing Clinton such a blow that the March 8 primary was almost universally regarded as the worst day of the campaign—that is, until Nov. 8. In the primary, public polls showed her ahead while the data team back at headquarters was seeing entirely different numbers. Clinton lost the state by 1.5 percentage points to Sanders and by an even smaller margin to Trump. But if the primaries were a grind, Clinton’s confidence never wavered. Aides had warned her early on that there would be losses—as many as three of the first four states could go to Sanders, according to one briefing memo. Mook mobilized his team to hire staff for the fall campaign even before the nomination was sewn up. “That will be a tell to everyone that we are moving on to the general,” Mook told his cabinet. The candidate, who was open 61
about her lackluster skills at political theatrics, had a veritable passion for preparation. CLINTON’S TEAM projected confidence for good reason. They had impressive data on every voter they needed to turn out, yet their statistical models, much like public polls, were wrong. They used Clinton’s star turn at the first debate to generate enormous energy. The campaign challenged its satellites in the states to make new recruitment records. Most did, but North Carolina had the most impressive results: its previous record for one-day recruitment was 3,000 shifts. It set a goal of 4,000 shifts and signed up 13,000 shifts in the 24 hours after Clinton won the first debate. On the last weekend of October, 23-year-old Elizabeth Nadler filled one of those shifts. A recent graduate of Duke University, she worked in the school’s theater department as an assistant while volunteering for the Clinton campaign at least 20 hours a week in the Durham, N.C., office. “We’re all in this together,” she said on the Saturday that TIME caught up with her at the campaign offices, where newcomers got a crash course in campaigns and were then sent out with lists of doors to knock on and questions to ask. The movement vibe that Clinton had never been able to spark was, finally, emerging, largely because Clinton had stood toe to toe with Trump for three debates and never flinched. By the time Election Day arrived, Clinton had swayed the voting public. Exit polls found 63% of those casting ballots said Trump lacked the temperament to do the job, and 60% said he was unqualified. As those findings were coming in, Nadler was working one last shift door to door. “There’s still time to knock on doors. This is going to be close,” she said. Like supporters at campaign headquarters in Brooklyn, she was expecting the night to end with chants of mADAm PreSiDenT. So had Clinton’s team. It just didn’t work out that way. It is hard to overstate how shell-shocked the campaign felt as that realization settled in on election night. Many senior aides had been openly talking about whether they had the energy to go straight from the campaign into the White House. Some spoke of cashing in for a few years in the private sector so they could afford the terrible pay of government work. There was watercooler chatter about who would get what office in the West Wing and more serious discussions of moving much of the machinery from Brooklyn to the Democratic National Committee in D.C. to establish a permanent campaign. The data told them they were on solid ground. The voters told them otherwise. “I know how disappointed you feel because I feel it too,” Clinton said the morning after. “This is painful, and it will be for a long time.” —With reporting by SAm frizeLL and ChArLoTTe ALTer/ new York □ 62
Time November 21, 2016
THE END OF AN ERA What does the future look like for a post-Clinton Democratic Party? By Sam Frizell/New York and Maya Rhodan/Washington Long before The Age of obAmA, when Democratic candidates more routinely lost presidential campaigns, progressives typically went through three stages following an electoral defeat: shock, denial and then a lurch to the left. The party that has held the White House since 2008 was well on its way through stages 1 and 2 by the time the sun had risen on Wednesday morning. A boogie to port can’t be far behind. For many, Hillary Clinton’s defeat will be treated in Democratic circles as a failure of nerve: if only she had fully embraced the flinty populism of socialist Bernie Sanders, she could have made quick work of Trump. If only. In fact, Clinton was beset by a sea of shortcomings that contributed to her defeat, many of them having nothing at all to do with her ideology or lack thereof. It was sometimes hard to know what Clinton was really for. She wasn’t a natural pol. Her husband was a handicap. Pick your own reason. In American politics, personnel is policy. For the Democrats, something else is at work. A generational change is overdue: Clinton is 69; Sanders is 74; and Joe Biden is pushing the same number. . Michelle Obama has said she will never run for President. President Obama will retire to private life. And the party’s middle-aged stars burn dim. Clinton’s loss means that the Democratic Party will have to take a long, hard look in the mirror and ask, Where do we go from here? Undoubtedly, this will require new faces to step to the forefront, but the bench looks thin at the moment. “It will be a fresh start for the Democrats, and it will give many smart, emerging Democrats an opportunity to forge leadership roles in a postClinton Democratic Party,” says Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg. How many of them lead from the left remains an open question. If anything, this year’s election results threw doubt on the dream of Barack Obama, to build a lasting coalition on generational and demographic change. White working-class voters swamped young and minority voters in key
FACES TO WATCH IN A PARTY AT SEA As the Clinton era finally ends, the leadership of the Democratic Party is up for grabs. A generational change is both needed and overdue. Here are 10 to keep an eye on:
Kamala Harris One of three women of color elected to the U.S. Senate in 2016, Harris, who was California’s attorney general, will get a chance to establish herself as a new national face for her party.
Cory Booker After winning the coveted convention keynote slot in Philadelphia, the New Jersey Senator burnished his credentials this year as a rising star with strong ties to the party’s fundraising heavyweights.
Tim Kaine After a relatively frictionless turn as a likable, goodguy running mate, Kaine will return to the Senate with a new platform to lead the opposition to Republican leader Mitch McConnell. Watch to see which issues he picks up.
Sherrod Brown The progressive populist Ohio Senator knows how to win in a state that Trump easily carried in 2016. Like the new President, he is a foe of free-trade deals.
Andrew Cuomo The centrist Democratic governor of New York managed to pass measures like the $15 minimum wage and gun-control laws. He just needs to escape the taint of Justice Department investigations in Albany.
Elizabeth Warren The Massachusetts Senator is beloved by progressives for taking principled and fiery stands for more financial regulation and fewer free-trade deals. She could tap into the populist anger Trump found and unite her party against him.
Chuck Schumer A canny negotiator, the Brooklyn-born Senate leader will be the most important power player in Washington during Trump’s term. He will have as loud a voice as any in setting the direction of the party.
Amy Klobuchar Funny and wise, the onetime intern for Vice President Walter Mondale is known for reaching across the aisle in the Senate, a rarity in Washington. The Minnesota Senator has long been rumored to be looking at a presidential campaign.
Julián Castro Young, Latino and charismatic, the outgoing Secretary of Housing and Urban Development was on the list of possible Clinton Vice Presidents. His roots in Republican Texas could help the party expand its appeal in the Sun Belt and Mountain West.
Kirsten Gillibrand The Senator from New York has excellent political instincts and a healthy ambition. She made combatting sexual assault in the military a cause and has often been compared to Clinton, her predecessor.
states. According to exit polls, more than half of white men and women voted for Trump, including 7 in 10 white voters who did not attend college. Swaths of votes from union members, a traditionally Democratic voting bloc, went to the Republican nominee. The industrial Midwest, once a Democratic working-class stronghold, crumbled in the face of a Clinton candidacy. The debate will now begin about the best way to win back this crowd. In 2008 and 2012, Obama was able to position himself as the economic champion of these communities—as the man who would bring hope and change after George W. Bush and G E T T Y I M A G E S (10)
the President who had saved the automobile industry. Clinton used similar language, but could never make the sale. While the liberal populism of Sanders and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren offer one path to re-establishing the connection, there are others out there. Back in 1992, it was a moderate Southern governor, Bill Clinton, who charted the path to Democratic resurrection. New saviors are sure to rise before 2020. But it may take some years in the wilderness before the party figures out which ones can find the promised land. □ 63
Advertisement
I Hate Annuities... And So Should You! Get the FREE report the annuity industry doesn’t want you to read! Whether you already own an annuity or are just thinking about investing in one, call right now for your FREE copy of Annuity Insights: Nine Questions Every Annuity Investor Should Ask. Annuities are sold as completely safe, secure investments that deliver dependable, predictable returns. But the vast majority are extremely complicated insurance policies and may obscure an annuity’s true costs and restrictions. Even worse, annuity providers often reserve the right to change terms after you’ve bought the annuity! Before you sign on the dotted line, please read our FREE report.
The serious downside of fixed, indexed and variable annuities. (Page 2) Why some annuity providers reserve the right to change terms after you sign up. (Page 3)
Why many annuities charge you several layers of fees that can add up to thousands of dollars annually. (Page 4)
Careful! If you need your money early, you may have to pay high “surrender fee” penalties. (Page 6)
Watch out for the high commissions you may be paying. (Page 7)
Locked up in annuity jail? Want out of your annuity and have a portfolio of $500,000 or more? We may rebate some or all of your annuity surrender penalties.* Call 1-866-822-4686 for details, plus a free analysis of your annuity.
Yours FREE!
Why annuities don’t always provide the “safety” they often promise. (Page 1)
About Fisher Investments — Fisher Investments is a money management firm serving successful individuals as well as large institutional investors. Fisher Investments and its subsidiaries use proprietary research to manage over $67 billion** in client assets and have a 35-year performance history in bull and bear markets.
Call now for your FREE report!
Toll-free 1-866-822-4686 ©2016 Fisher Investments. 5525 NW Fisher Creek Drive, Camas, WA 98607. Investments in securities involve the risk of loss. Past performance is no guarantee of future returns. * Rebates are for investors who liquidate an annuity with surrender penalties and fund a Private Client Group account. We may rebate some or all of your fees. Call for details. Terms and conditions apply. Surrender costs will generally be reimbursed in the form of a credit to quarterly advisory fees, and payments will cease if the relationship is terminated before the end of the payment period. Payment periods can last over ten calendar quarters or longer. See www.AnnuityAssist.com/Terms-and-Conditions for further information. **As of 6/30/2016.
®
‘THEY ATE JUNK FOOD, TOOK ROAD TRIPS AND FELL IN AND OUT OF LOVE, AND STARS HOLLOW STAYED THE SAME.’ —PAGE 69
Arrival stars Adams as Louise Banks, a linguist who must translate an extremely foreign language
MOVIES
In Arrival, Amy Adams takes a listening tour of the universe
J A N T H I J S — PA R A M O U N T
By Sam Lansky
“It’s a weIrd tIme to be promoting a movie,” Amy Adams says, pointing toward the TV in the bar of the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills, a few days before the election. It’s tuned to CNN and, even in deeply blue California, tensions are running high. “I’m not even that political,” Adams says, turning away from the television. “Part of my job is to be open to hearing sides so I can understand different people’s perspectives.” Right then, as if conjured by magic, a woman in a trump 2016 shirt sits down across the bar. She looks at Adams and says, unsolicited, “I dare to wear this in L.A.” Adams smiles at her. “It’s a free country,” she says warmly. She turns back and gives me a knowing glance. “There you go,” she says. “But I believe in diversity and open
conversations. The more you invest in somebody else’s experience, the more you might change your own.” These subjects have been on her mind lately as Adams awaits the release of her new film Arrival, in theaters Nov. 11. She stars as Dr. Louise Banks, a linguist tasked with learning to communicate with aliens who descend upon Earth. But as she works with a physicist (Jeremy Renner) and a military colonel (Forest Whitaker) to decode the extraterrestrial language, she begins to question her own reality. That synopsis may suggest that Arrival is just another science-fiction blockbuster, but the film actually has more in common with the prestigious fare that crowds the holiday film season: it’s a tender, intimate drama that interrogates themes of communication, 65
Time Off Reviews
memory and time—and just happens to feature a few interplanetary visitors. It’s also a surprisingly moving allegory for our times. At the tail end of an election that’s made the country feel so stratified that basic communication across (and even within) party lines has broken down, Arrival’s story— of trying to understand that which appears unknowably different— resonates somewhere profound. This is sophisticated, grownup sci-fi: a movie about aliens for people who don’t like movies about aliens. Adams credits a tricky, nonlinear screenplay by Eric Heisserer (Lights Out, The Thing) and the nuanced style of director Denis Villeneuve—who earned raves last year for his gritty crime drama Sicario—for imbuing the film with such an unusual texture. Still, it wasn’t a sure thing. “When I read the script, I thought, If this is done right, it’s going to be really special,” she says. “If it’s done wrong, it’s going to be epic.”
66
Time November 21, 2016
△
Renner co-stars opposite Adams as a theoretical physicist working the same case
for a child it becomes overwhelming or hurtful. That’s really what it’s like talking to anybody.” Adams, 42, found herself disappearing into a character who questions the validity of her experience. “The more you dive into [the movie] world, the more it messes with your mind—it can affect my sense of reality in a strange way, because I’m making my body and my mind believe that something is happening,” she says. “Being a mom, I can’t go home in character. I had to learn how to create separation for myself.” ArrivAl isn’t the only film that sees Adams navigating complex themes this season. In the Tom Ford–directed
thriller Nocturnal Animals (Nov. 18), she stars as an art gallerist revisiting an old romance through a novel written by her ex (Jake Gyllenhaal). “It has all the style you would expect from Tom Ford,” Adams says, “but it has so much substance and grit.” Both films, shot back-to-back, are portraits of women in extreme transition. The performances highlight Adams’ versatility. In Nocturnal Animals, she modulates effortlessly from friendly ingenue to polished ice queen, while Arrival starts off showing her as a woman muted by grief, then spins the character into something much more complex. Which is why it’s no surprise that once again, awards chatter swirls around Adams, who since 2005 has received four Best Supporting Actress Oscar nominations and one for Best Actress. She, however, resolutely avoids self-promotion. “If I’m campaigning for myself, it hurts my spirit,” she says. “I don’t feel like a performance of mine has failed if I don’t get nominated. That’s not how I gauge my success.” With a movie like Arrival, which doesn’t have the genre trappings of a typical awards film, it’s less about the recognition and more about ensuring that people see it. “Whatever the awards validity of the film, I’m just super-proud that it got made,” she says. “A female-driven, emotional, intellectual, high-concept sci-fi movie!” As for that politic temperament, Adams may end up putting it to use on a bigger stage down the road. “Right now I’m focused on acting and being a mom, but that is my intent,” she says of future work in some kind of service. “Not so much in politics, per se, but definitely organizations for change, when the time is right.” She says she’s ready to take on a different set of challenges—maybe not translating across species, but between people who have a hard time hearing each other. Promoting a movie has had her talking a lot. Next up, she wants more opportunities to listen. □
A R R I VA L : PA R A M O U N T; D I V I N E S : D I A P H A N A ; E L L E : S O N Y
to hear screenwriter and producer Heisserer describe it, Arrival’s journey to the screen was a “long, invisible war.” Heisserer fell in love with the source material, a short story by the writer Ted Chiang titled “Story of Your Life,” and pitched a film adaptation for years. “It just devastated me,” he says. “It’s an amazing story, and so cerebral.” But when he brought the idea to producers, they invariably balked at his vision. “I say, ‘It’s a female lead and it deals with linguistic relativity,’ and I can see your eyes are already glassing over,” Heisserer recalls. Eventually, he wrote the screenplay on spec; on the merits of that script, he secured independent financing and attracted Adams as the star with Villeneuve as director. At the Cannes Film Festival in 2014, a heated auction between five studios resulted in Paramount’s acquiring distribution rights to the film for a reported $20 million. Heisserer says he envisioned Adams for the role of Louise from the beginning. “She’s the kind of performer who shows you what she’s thinking just in
her eyes,” he says. “Beyond that, she’s just a remarkable human being. As a friend of mine said, ‘It’s like she doesn’t know she’s Amy Adams.’” It’s true: in conversation, Adams is gracious, candid and free of movie-star affectations. But even for a successful actor, exploring the ideas presented by Arrival felt like a rare opportunity, one that hit close to home for the mother of a 6-year-old daughter, Aviana (with husband Darren Le Gallo). “I think about how often I’ve communicated to my daughter and it’s come across the wrong way because I haven’t taken the time to think about her perspective,” she says. “I’ll speak in a language that makes sense for an adult female, but
TIME PICKS
BOOKS Megyn Kelly’s memoir Settle for More (Nov. 15) takes an unflinching approach to her personal history before and throughout her career as an iconic Fox News anchor.
△
MOVIES Netflix’s original French-language coming-of-age film Divines (Nov. 18) follows an adolescent girl who finds empowerment via a drug hustle in the slums of Paris. AUDIO SERIES Former Daily Show head writer Elliott Kalan and historian Alexis Coe humanize former Commanders in Chief by recounting compelling stories about their quirks, like FDR’s bartending skills, in Audible’s Presidents Are People Too! MUSIC The Weeknd embraces his passionate streak, singing knowingly about the fragility of celebrity life on his third album, aptly titled Starboy (Nov. 25).
All hands: Lafitte and Huppert are in it together in Elle
MOVIES
Elle’s belle: Huppert resounds in Verhoeven’s latest By Stephanie Zacharek EvEn by thE out-thErE standards of Basic Instinct and Showgirls, Paul Verhoeven’s latest, Elle, is a thing to behold. Part thriller, part obsidian-black comedy, part cerebral firebomb, it’s confrontational, terrible and glorious. You almost can’t believe such a picture exists. Elle opens with a savage, horrifying rape: Michèle (Isabelle Huppert), the successful co-owner of a video-game company, is attacked in her luxe-tasteful Parisian home by a masked intruder. His getup, as one character observes, is like that of “a stalker on a TV show.” Her smoke-gray house cat looks on with mild curiosity, a characteristically blasé feline Greek chorus. Michèle sees a doctor but doesn’t report the assault to the police. It’s not that the event doesn’t trouble her. But there’s something in Michèle’s makeup that refuses to yield to victimhood, perhaps partly because she has carried, since age 10, a dark burden connected with her family’s past. The rest of the world has judged her for it, refusing forgiveness, which may be why she has learned to move through life asking almost nothing of those around her. She doesn’t just confront demons; she welcomes them.
The people in Michèle’s orbit include a rather helpless novelist ex-husband (Charles Berling), a loyal best friend and business partner (Anne Consigny) and a young, handsome new neighbor (Laurent Lafitte), whom she eyes as a potential romantic conquest; his beatific wife (Virginie Efira) barely registers as a hindrance. Among this gang, it’s at first hard to know if Michèle, with her forthright, nearly frosty demeanor, is the most well adjusted or the most messed up. Verhoeven, like that cat, seems to know all, but he refuses to give anything away easily. Each character is a playing piece in his wicked little game, though Elle is more than just a sly amusement. Beneath the picture’s cool, glassy elegance lie roiling questions about the weightiness of guilt, the uneasy relationship between sex and power, and the nature of female desire after 50—which, easily written off as a soft, cuddly thing, may in reality be a lawless beast. At the heart of it all is Huppert, in her thorniest, funniest and perhaps finest performance. When Michèle flirts with that neighbor, her businesslike mien dissolves— but even then, her face shows not softness but prickly radiance. She’s never easy to read, which is exactly what keeps us reading. The people around Michèle hide their duskiest anxieties deep inside, while all her darkness shimmers on the surface. Huppert glows as if lit from within by some kind of unholy sunlight: she’s defiant, resplendent, teasing— and impossible to turn away from. □ 67
Time Off Television
Fictional astronauts land on the Red Planet with technology firmly grounded in current research
MINISERIES
Want to go to Mars? Ron Howard’s new series gives Red Planet fever a boost By Jeffrey Kluger
68
Time November 21, 2016
△
PLANETARY PIONEERS Jihae Kim, left, and Sammi Rotibi play members of the 2033 Daedalus crew
about the crew of the spaceship Daedalus, sometime in 2033, trying to make the first human landing on the Red Planet. So Howard and Grazer mix the futuretense fiction with present-day preparation, intercutting the action with scenes of the work being done today to make a Mars trip a reality. Prominent voices in the field—SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, NASA administrator Charles Bolden and others—are on hand to explain the extreme challenges of interplanetary flight. You may not understand how hard it is
M A R S : N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C C H A N N E L (3); G I L M O R E G I R L S : N E T F L I X
iT’s a FirsT-World luxury To live in a country in which we can gripe about not having gotten to Mars yet. If we could land on the moon 47 years ago, why is Mars taking so long? The question is being asked more often lately, which makes it a good time for the National Geographic Channel’s new sixepisode series, straightforwardly titled Mars, produced by Imagine Entertainment’s creative duo Ron Howard and Brian Grazer. Howard and Grazer made their space bones with 1995’s Apollo 13, a movie that—full disclosure—was based on the book I co-authored with astronaut Jim Lovell. That might make me a soft touch for any space product that comes from the Imagine shop, but it also gave me a close look at the take-no-prisoners way Howard and Grazer keep their material scientifically honest. That’s true of Mars too, but it’s a bigger challenge in this case, since the series is in some ways a straight-up sci-fi tale
to land a spacecraft upright on another planet now, but you will when you see the footage of SpaceX’s first, explosively failed attempts to land one of its rockets that way on Earth. “The documentary footage keeps informing the drama,” Howard says. “And the drama keeps reflecting the science and what the experts are telling us.” One of the things they tell us is why we’d bother with Mars in the first place. The series is based on the book How We’ll Live on Mars, by Stephen Petranek, and the first episode makes clear that the 2033 crew is traveling to Mars not just to visit, but to settle. We are no more immune to an extinction event than the dinosaurs were, so why not hedge our bets with another whole planet? “Wouldn’t we feel stupid if we could have gone before the meteor was headed our way, but now we’re out of time?” Howard says jokingly—mostly. As with all exploration, there is another, less practical reason to go to Mars: it’s simply in our nature. “Going to Mars is such a grand leap,” says Grazer. “There’s so much nobility that lives inside of it.” It’s that part of Mars— both the planet and the series—that will stay with you most. □
NOSTALGIA
In the Gilmore girls’ hometown, things are (mostly) the same By Eliana Dockterman StarS Hollow waS a town frozen in time. The tiny Connecticut home of Gilmore Girls never changed, nor did its inhabitants: diner owner Luke was always grouchy, inn chef Sookie always bubbly, town jester Kirk always good for a pratfall. The Gilmores, young mom Lorelai (Lauren Graham) and her bright daughter Rory (Alexis Bledel), with just 16 years separating them, had an enviably close relationship. They ate junk food, took road trips and fell in and out of love with boys, and Stars Hollow always stayed the same. Until now. As it did with Arrested Development’s shoddy model homes and Fuller House’s Painted Ladies, Netflix will resurrect Stars Hollow’s storefronts on Nov. 25 in Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life. And they’ll be different—slightly. Television is still perfecting the art of conjuring up nostalgia while contending with the passage of time. After all, nine years after the show’s last episode, Lorelai and Rory aren’t girls anymore, and in four 90-minute chapters, creator Amy ShermanPalladino gives them grownup problems. “We didn’t want do a bunch of Gilmore episodes. We’d already done those,” she says. “It was a good time to see how Lorelai’s and Rory’s choices paid off.” The new chapters (named “Winter,” “Spring,” “Summer” and “Fall” in a nod to the theme song) tackle grief, regret and loneliness, and each of the three Gilmore women—including Lorelai’s mother Emily—finds herself at a crossroads. Rory realizes at 32 that things haven’t turned out the way she meticulously planned. Lorelai, now 48, considers a major life change. And Emily, whose existence revolved around her husband Richard, must make a new life when he dies—a plot point spurred by the 2014 death of actor Edward Herrmann. Sherman-Palladino muSt alSo reckon with a completely transformed television landscape. When the show premiered in 2000, the fast-talking, ambitious Gilmores were radical. It found a home on the WB alongside Buffy and Felicity, with all three expanding the boundaries of how women could be portrayed on the small screen. Rory, especially, stood out for her confidence. “Teenagers were either pretty cheerleaders or angsty girls wearing Doc Martens who wanted to be the pretty cheerleader,” says Sherman-Palladino. “Their lives revolved around boys and sex. We wanted Rory to be a teenager who was concerned with her studies
Graham, left, and Bledel return as Lorelai and Rory in four new episodes of Gilmore Girls on Netflix
▽
‘Sometimes I wish the Deanand-Jess thing weren’t such a prominent thing ... I don’t see anybody debating if Rory won a Pulitzer.’ AMY SHERMAN-PALLADINO,
creator of Gilmore Girls
but was also comfortable in her skin.” Compared with today’s shows, when even sitcoms tackle issues of race and gender, Rory’s problems feel quaint. The creator says Gilmore would be “too small” to be greenlighted today. Of course, that’s part of the show’s charm, and much of the same DNA is in the new installments. In the first scene, Graham and Bledel warm up for a verbal marathon, their banter updated with 2016 jokes about Gwyneth Paltrow’s brand Goop and Apple Watches. Some things are harder to modernize. Online chatter focuses on which exboyfriend Rory should end up with— Dean the puppy dog, Jess the rebel or Logan the spoiled millionaire— speculation that is a bit retro in the year when Rory’s idol Hillary Clinton
ran for President. “Sometimes I wish the Dean-and-Jess thing weren’t such a prominent thing,” ShermanPalladino says. “I don’t see anybody debating if Rory won a Pulitzer.” Most 30-something women, she argues, aren’t mooning over high school beaux. Yet the fans adore Rory’s love triangles, so to write them out would disappoint those viewers who demanded the revival in the first place. All three exes will appear in the new episodes, and Rory will have to contend with the fact that as far as she tries to stray from Stars Hollow—nowadays she works in London—there’s part of her that will never truly grow up. □ 69
Time Off Books
FICTION
In Zadie Smith’s new novel, performance is the tie that binds, and divides
Smith is also a noted essayist ▷ 70
Time November 21, 2016
HISTORY
The past goes to the hospital OpTing OuT Of hisTOry was never a choice for Bellevue. As New York City’s original public hospital, it has been obligated to accept whatever comes its way. Pulitzer winner David Oshinsky’s new history of the institution, Bellevue, makes a convincing case that the hospital’s story “mirrors” that of its home. Since Bellevue first went from country estate to hospital, in 1795, the city has funneled people there who were not wanted elsewhere—from 19th century tenement dwellers to an Ebola patient in 2014. Bellevue has seen it all, and has often responded with impressive medical advances (not that you’d have wanted to end up there in the days before germ theory). Therein lies the point Oshinsky makes skillfully, if unsubtly. Bellevue is famous for celebrity patients and headline-grabbing problems; to many, “Bellevue” means “psychiatric ward”—and not in a good way. But the urban-legend aspect ought not overshadow what can be learned from a great, enduring medical institution. —lily rOThman
△
MEDICAL FIRSTS Oshinsky highlights the hospital’s many innovations, including the first U.S. maternity ward
SMITH: DOMINIQUE NABOKOV
complexity of this novel, and its density. Every scene, every attribute pays off—the way, for example, the narrator’s involvement in Aimée’s goodwill project taps into her mother’s lifelong work as a community organizer. Intelligent and perceptive, the narrator also knows comedy when she hears it: “ ‘Look, I don’t want to have an argument iT has been 16 years since Zadie with you on the phone,’ said my mother, Smith published White Teeth, becoming, sounding very much like she wanted to at 24 years old, a standard bearer for have an argument on the phone.” Smith has contemporary Anglophone fiction. Her always been smart about being funny. fifth novel, Swing Time, comes out Nov. 15. But passivity comes early to the narraMy favorite remains her last one, NW, an tor, and eventually even her perceptiveness ambitious chronicle of four can’t unseat it. Her mother characters from a London puts her second as a child, council estate, whose lives take behind her own autodidactic dark and difficult turns. Where goals. Tracey simply domiSmith’s debut was marked by nates her. Then she becomes its exuberance, bursting with one of multiple assistants to personalities, bursting with a mercurial celebrity, signvitality, bursting at the seams ing on to an adult life of being (“hysterical realism,” the critic overshadowed. Aimée is a bit △ SONG AND DANCE James Wood called it), NW of a caricature, which makes Like her narrator, Smith is showed a mature stylist, all the narrator’s willingness to drawn to the performance sinewy precision. Smith had serve her frustrating and hamarts; as a student at made her name delivering pers the power of those secCambridge she earned lush, abundant prose to rapt tions of the book. As in the money singing cabaret audiences, but it turned out she real world, fandom can be could drop the charm and deliver even more. alienating when you don’t share it. As Smith’s first novel written in the first The other two alpha women in her life person, Swing Time, too, marks a departure. give the novel its swing. Flamboyant in The narrator, whose name we never learn, words and actions, they may cast shadows, grows up in a council flat in London, the but they also sculpt the narrator daughter of an Afro-Caribbean mother into relief so we can make and a white father. Her best friend, out her contours. A seTracey, is also of mixed heritage. ries of cascading scanThe two girls share a bond in dals in the denouethe mode of Lenù and Lila of ment sends her Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan retreating home, novels—fierce, competitive back into their intimacy punctuated by periods company. Sociof mutual disdain. They love ety tends to judge dance, but only Tracey excels that as failure. at it, and they grow in different Here it feels like her directions. At 23, the narrator falls story might finally into a job with an Australian pop star be about to begin. named Aimée, whose desire to open a —radhika jOnes school for girls in a West African village broadens the novel’s geographic scope and cements the sense that in the era of globalization, every human interaction, domestic or political, involves a clash of culture. The narrator’s unaffected voice masks the structural
haveKINDLE willTRAVEL GOZO, MALTA
JAMES FREY, BRIGHT SHINY MORNING @ AMAZONKINDLE
Time Off PopChart
The Simpsons was renewed for two more seasons, bringing its total episode count to a record-setting 669.
Khloé Kardashian said that a mystery man gave her sister Kendall Jenner a $250,000 Rolls-Royce for her 21st birthday.
McDonald’s announced plans to introduce two new sizes of its famous Big Mac: the Grand Mac (bigger) and the Mac Jr. (smaller).
Chicago Cubs star Anthony Rizzo was overheard quoting the movie Anchorman shortly before his team won its first World Series since 1908:
A survey found that 43 of 895 regular characters on broadcast-TV series identified as LGBTQ (including The Real O’Neals’ Kenny, below), the highest percentage ever.
‘I’m in a glass case of emotion right now.’
TIME’S WEEKLY TAKE ON
Bruno Mars said that Beyoncé prepped for her Super Bowl 50 halftime performance by eating a bag of Cheetos.
LOVE IT LEAVE IT
Los Angeles prosecutors charged former Playboy Playmate Dani Mathers with invasion of privacy after she Snapchatted a body-shaming photo of an elderly woman changing in a gym locker room. Several Justin Bieber superfans are reportedly already camping out for the singer’s concert at Rio de Janeiro’s Sambadrome—in March 2017.
Samsung recalled more than 2.8 million washing machines because of an explosion risk.
Supermodel Gisele Bündchen said she gave away her kids’ Halloween candy after letting them have one piece. (In fairness, she added, she had their blessing.)
72
Time November 21, 2016
By Raisa Bruner, Cady Lang and Megan McCluskey
C A R : R O L L S - R OYC E ; B I G M A C : M C D O N A L D ’S; C H E E T O S : F R I T O - L AY; W A S H E R : S A M S U N G ; B Ü N D C H E N : I N S TA G R A M ; B I E B E R F A N S : T W I T T E R ; R I Z Z O, T H E R E A L O ’ N E A L S , T H E S I M P S O N S , B E YO N C É , C A N DY, R O U S E Y: G E T T Y I M A G E S
Ronda Rousey said that her UFC fight next month would “definitely” be one of her last.
WHAT POPPED IN CULTURE
Essay The Amateur
How to recover from this no good, very bad election season and all its spooky horrors By Kristin van Ogtrop
I L L U S T R AT I O N B Y L U C I G U T I É R R E Z F O R T I M E
And now we’re All just trying to recover. It’s been a rough few months. Unless you were living on the International Space Station, you felt it—a rising sense of hysteria as our fine nation barreled toward an uncertain future. For weeks, we saw the troubling signs: Children wondering why grownups were acting strangely. Horrifying placards in the yards of neighbors, suggesting proclivities you’d rather not know about because you always thought they were such nice people. Ads designed to make you question everything you thought you believed in. Menacing messages monopolizing your social-media feeds. Ordinary-seeming folks out for blood. And skeletons! Oh my, skeletons everywhere. Then, finally, the big night. Laughter, tears, maybe even the rending of clothing in certain households. Kids staying up way past bedtime to see how it all turned out. And most of us wondering, blearily, whether it was just an extended nightmare. And how long the hangover would last. Am I describing Halloween or the presidential election? Exactly. It’s been more than a week since Halloween, but we’re still feeling the effects: every year it seems to get more garish, more excessive and tougher to recover from. And every four years the presidential race—now days behind us—seems to get more ffffrrrrrrgggggghhhhh. Yes, that was my brain freezing, as the word to describe this race hasn’t been invented yet. Remember when there were no decorative outdoor lights for Halloween? Once upon a time, Christmas had a monopoly on the whole outdoor-light thing. That was back in the dark ages, when Lloyd Bentsen’s informing Dan Quayle that he was no Jack Kennedy nearly caused national riots. And now look at us. Blinking orange lights everywhere, and a presidential race filled with nasty women and Putin’s puppets and blood coming out of Megyn Kelly’s wherever. Hello, AmericA? I’m calling from the past, when a single jack-o’-lantern was an acceptable amount of decorating and public decorum mattered. Particularly when you were applying to be the leader of the free world, the one kids are supposed to trust, and admire, and maybe even grow up wanting to be. Halloween and politics aren’t exactly the same. The intoxicating thing about Halloween is that, though there are lots of scary things, you know they’re fake. No such comfort in this election. Because the scary anger and vitriol were real. The skeletons—from Miss Universe to Anthony Weiner— were real. The red-faced guy suggesting in an interview that the Democratic candidate should be assassinated is real. Deplorable, ridiculous to some, but real.
Have you ever walked straight into a spiderweb that you didn’t know was there? While the spider’s ingenuity is a thing to behold, you are still left with creepy detritus on your face and a sense of “Wait, what just happened?” That’s how I feel after this election. I look back on the newsmaking moments, each one higher on the yuck meter than the one before, and wonder whether I’ll ever be able to remove the detritus from my brain. Will we all, as a nation? After Halloween, the calendar forces many of us to move along to the next thing. And so we start hauling out the Thanksgiving stuff to prepare ourselves for the holiday where people with diametrically opposed political beliefs get together and try to get along. Well, perhaps this Thanksgiving presents an opportunity. my fellow AmericAns, I propose a cleansing Thanksgiving. No, not a juice cleanse—a cleanse of our national soul. First, turn off cable news. Just turn it off, and don’t turn it back on until the Inauguration. Second, absolutely no political posts on your Facebook feed. None! Believe it or not, you will continue to exist even if your friends (or “friends”) aren’t reminded of your political views every day. Finally, when you sit down to dinner on Thanksgiving, look at those around you and make yourself forget who you think they voted for. Bow your head and give thanks that you don’t live in _______ (fill in the name of any one of dozens of countries on this planet that don’t have a democratic process). Close your eyes and take a breath deep enough to clear the cobwebs. And, silently or aloud, tell yourself that you are grateful for the people at your table. Because we’re all human, and most of us are just doing our best. Van Ogtrop is the author of Just Let Me Lie Down: Necessary Terms for the Half-Insane Working Mom 73
8 Questions
Marina Abramovic The performance artist, 69, has won fame and respectability, but her new memoir details how difficult and unlikely that ascent has been Why did you call your memoir Walk Through Walls? I felt, coming from East Europe and the Tito regime, there were so many walls I had to go through in order to make my 50-year career get to where it is now. Some of this book is so incredible, I wondered if it were another performance. You say your grand father was killed when the King of Yugoslavia ground up diamonds and put them in his food. Really? Yes, not only him, but his two brothers. My great-uncle was the Patriarch. He refused to unite the Catholic and the Orthodox churches. So King Alexander put crushed diamonds [in their food at a royal dinner]. All three brothers died within one month’s time from bleeding of the stomach. Your mother was a revolutionary communist leader. She slept with a pistol, never took anesthesia at the dentist, was obsessively tidy. In what way do you think you are most like her? When I was living with her, I was doing everything not to be her. But my opinion about my mother went through multiple changes after she died and I found her diary. If I’d read just one page of this, I would completely have had another kind of relationship to her. With her unbelievable coldness and by being so restrictive, she was making a warrior out of me, which I didn’t realize at the time, and I hated her.
74
Time November 21, 2016
‘I always believed that people don’t do anything really important from the state of happiness.’
You say your work “stages the fear of the audience.” What does that mean? Everybody suffers fear of pain, fear of suffering and mortality. But physical pain is almost like a door to secrets. The moment you understand how you can control the physical pain, then you stop having the fear. And this only happened to me if I used the energy of the public. In my own life, I don’t do any of this. I don’t like suffering. Why in history are there so few prominent female artists? Because, unfortunately, women are not ready to sacrifice as much as men. Because women want to be loved and to have a relationship, and to have children. You only have one energy in your body. And that energy will go where you focus it. I’m totally not marriage material. I proved it. I never wanted children. For your breakthrough 2010 show at NYC’s Museum of Modern Art, you sat for 736 hours looking at people. How do you do that? I could not do that kind of performance when I was 20 or 25. I didn’t learn that kind of willpower or concentration. It’s taken me a lifetime to learn this. But that show told me that the public is ready to be part of something. Not just to look at something. But to experience something themselves. —Belinda luscomBe
E VA N A G O S T I N I — A P
What was your first art lesson? Since I was a child, I never doubted that I was an artist. So my father hired a soldier who was a painter. He cut irregular canvas, put it on the floor, took a can of paint, poured it over the canvas. Then he threw some pigment and crushed cement. Over this he put gasoline, took a match, burned the whole thing. And he looked at me and he said, “This is sunset,” and he left. Wow. This was like the lesson of my life. Everything was about the process. And a kind of fleeting reality which became so important in my later work.
As part of your work, you’ve taken dangerous medications, you’ve pub licly stabbed, burned and whipped yourself. Anything you regret? No. I’m healthy and 70 [this month]. I always believed that people don’t do anything really important from the state of happiness. Because happiness is to say that you don’t want to change.
BbQ flavor SO RICH and SMOKY you can almost HEAR IT SIZzLE. All trademarks are owned by Frito-Lay North America, Inc. ©2016