Hillary Clinton's Campaign Was Practically Gleeful About Trump's Rise During the Primaries

Because we are trapped in a hellish zone where we’re doomed to relitigate the events of 2016 for the rest of eternity, New York Times reporter Amy Chozick, has written a new book about Hillary Clinton, in which she sheds more light on the mind-boggling fact that Clinton’s doomed campaign actually saw Donald Trump as someone it would be good to elevate.

The book, Chasing Hillary: Ten Years, Two Presidential Campaigns, and One Intact Glass Ceiling, isn’t out until Tuesday, but the Daily Beast’s Gideon Resnick reported Friday on some of the top items, including new information about the Clinton team’s previously reported effort to boost the man who became president during the beginning of the 2016 campaign,

“An agenda for an upcoming campaign meeting sent by [campaign manager] Robby Mook’s office asked, ‘How do we maximize Trump?’” Chozick writes.

From the Daily Beast:

Even as Trump surged in the polls, the Clinton camp still saw him as a danger to stronger candidates rather than such a candidate in his own right, Chozick reports, so that in August 2015, “when the main GOP debate came on, everyone pushed their pizza crust aside and stared transfixed at the TV set… [Campaign Manager] Robby [Mook] salivated when the debate came back on and Trump started to speak. ‘Shhhhh,’ Robby said, practically pressing his nose up to the TV. ‘I’ve gahtz to get me some Trump.’ Robby thought Rubio would be the nominee. Podesta was bullish on Kasich. Bill and Hillary, still stuck in the 1990s, feared the Bush surname most of all.”

It feels so distant and almost quaint to travel back to a time when Marco Rubio and John Kasich were being treated as potential frontrunners, even as Jeb Bush was bestowed that crown nearly from the beginning.

The book, to the dismay of Clinton insiders, also reports her dismissing her atrocious favorability ratings—“Oh, what’s the point? They’re never going to like me”—and discusses her extraordinary habit of going on about the “deplorables.”

As Chozick writes: “The Deplorables always got a laugh, over living-room chats in the Hamptons, at dinner parties under the stars on Martha’s Vineyard, over passed hors d’oeuvres in Beverly Hills, and during sunset cocktails in Silicon Valley.”

It’s difficult to imagine why a candidate so in touch with everyday Americans didn’t realize that bit wouldn’t have played well to an extended audience!

Asked for comment from the site, a former campaign staffer chose to bash Chozick as “not always an honest broker,” adding that the book “ridicules people with a smile, contributing little to the public discourse.”