The Plot to Hack America

The violence wasn’t limited to those in the crowd. His campaign staff mimicked the aggressive stance of the candidate. Trump’s campaign manager Corey Lewandowski was accused of forcibly grabbing conservative Breitbart News reporter Michelle Fields hard enough to leave a bruise at a campaign rally in Florida. Lewandowski was charged with misdemeanor battery, charges that were ultimately dropped. But it was Trump’s response to the incident that worried some. Vox explains:

In fact, Trump supported Lewandowski since the accusations first surfaced. First he denied it ever happened. Then he denied the video footage existed. Then he said the video footage showed nothing. And then argued that Fields prompted the whole thing by first grabbing Trump while holding a pen (which Trump says Secret Service could have easily mistaken for a tiny bomb).²⁷

The entire demeanor of the campaign was called into question. Trump chief strategist, Paul Manafort, addressed these concerns at an April closed-door meeting of the Republican National Committee. Ashley Parker writes in The New York Times:

There, in a slide show, Mr. Manafort assured members that Mr. Trump was ‘evolving’ and simply playing a part with his incendiary style of campaigning, which has helped drive him to the front of the race but has caused party leaders to worry that Republicans will be punished in November.²⁸

Trump himself has claimed that even his wife, Melania, and daughter, Ivanka, have called on him to act more presidential. Two days after Manafort addressed the RNC, Trump addressed the calls himself at a campaign rally in Connecticut, saying he wasn’t about to start “toning it down.” Parker writes:

I started thinking, and I said I can, you know being presidential is easy, much easier than what I have to do,” Mr. Trump said, before quickly adding that, as a colorful entertainer-turned-politician, he might risk boring his audiences if he pivots too much toward general-election propriety.²⁹

Worse than his mouth was his fingers when connected to an Android smartphone with access to Twitter. In 140 characters he managed to derail his candidacy with insulting, racy, or inappropriate comments including those retweeting neo-Nazi and White Supremacy comments. The former host of The Apprentice often takes to Twitter to blast those who speak critically of him. The New York Times even kept a running list of the “People, Places and Things Donald Trump Has Insulted on Twitter.”³⁰

The Democratic Simmer

Compared to the unusually large number of candidates competing for the GOP nomination, a number that remained in the double digits through the Iowa caucuses, the Democratic side pitted two main candidates against one another from early on: Former Secretary of State, U.S. Senator and First Lady Hillary Clinton and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.

Initial CNN/ORC polls showed Clinton with a big lead over Sanders, with a poll conducted June 26–28, 2015 showing Clinton polling at 58 percent to Sanders’s 15 percent. Other would-be candidates Jim Webb, Lincoln Chafee, and former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley never polled higher than 3 percent, according to an analysis of CNN/ORC polls.³¹ O’Malley suspended his campaign after the February 1, 2016 Iowa caucus.