How Donald Trump won—by being Donald Trump
Live MintFormer President Donald Trump cleared a path to the White House by doubling down on the very things that Democrats said made him unfit to return to the Oval Office. Yet Trump felt free to repeat Republican presidential candidate Ronald Reagan’s famed question to voters during the 1980 debate with incumbent President Jimmy Carter, a performance that helped vault Reagan into the White House. The Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee put together a social-media team that “made hay out of everything," to intimate White House failings, a Trump campaign official said. Some on the Trump campaign team came to regret Biden’s dismal performance in the debate, which cost Trump an easy opponent. In the campaign’s closing days, Trump continued to veer into controversy, saying at one appearance that he would be a “protector" of women, “whether the women like it or not."