Chapo Trap House - Seeking a Fren Episode 5 Teaser - I Feel Great!

Episode Date: January 8, 2025

Felix looks back at the lead-up to the 2016 election as some of the funniest and most insane days in American political history in this clip from Episode 4 of his series “Seeking a Fren for the End of the World.” The full episode and rest of the series are available for subscribers at patreon.com/chapotraphouse.

While the traditional story of Trump's upset is that he had no real chance until he benefited from the debates, WikiLeaks, and the Comey letter all at once, his real rise had started a bit earlier. Clinton had led him by quite a bit after the DNC and Gold Star families fiasco, but her advantage faded fast after she neglected to campaign for the entire month of August while the right unified around attacking her. Later gaps in September, which include both the infamous deplorables comment and her 9-11 memorial collapse that marked perhaps the funniest day of any of our lives at that point, It's a beautiful day in New York. Are you alive? Thanks everybody.

Thanks everybody. Adam Tenton, how are you feeling? Great, I'm feeling great. What happened? Speaking more to the latter incident, you could see something shift when Hillary wandered out in front of a boutique cabinet realtor and mustered the now iconic words, I feel great. If the campaign had personhood in the gift of speech, that's exactly how it would have

sounded at that point in time. Fans of Clinton World will recall one time Hillary's shadow warrior, Peter Dow, angrily proclaiming to hashtag Hillary haters jabbering about the NYC weather, I live here! I usually play outdoor summer hoops, and today was too hot even for a stroll. I feel obligated to tell the audience that I laughed for 20 uninterrupted minutes when I read this story on my floor mattress that afternoon. My face was soaked with tears.

I got up and walked around because I had things to do that day, and I just wanted to get it out of my system, but I just fucking could not. I would think it may not be that funny anymore, but then I'd picture DOW with other Clinton men of honor like Sid Blumenthal and Lanny Davis, all dressed in John Stockton shorts and headbands while doing NBA Street Jam moves, and I'd laugh some more. I'd hear John Podesta Bellow, pass me that rock, sucker, in my mind, and I'd laugh so hard that I nearly threw up.

I'd try to muster some resolve to force myself to stop. But then I'd picture Hillary lazily sort of puking like a baby with car sickness, and it would start all over again. Outdoor Summer Hopes is the most beautiful phrase I had ever read in my entire life to that point, and it still is. 2016 really was so unbelievably fun, and I can't tell you how bad I feel for kids who were just too young to appreciate it, and instead got subjected to reheated Trump versus Brandon, and then Kamala. All right, sorry, I guess you had to be there and many of us had yet to be born.

I just had to give the oral history. Anyway, coming into the debates at the end of the month, Glenn's lead had narrowed under two points and 538 was projecting the election as a pure toss-up. The race was Trump's for the taking if he could just have one good night at the podium against one of the most hated politicians in history. Unfortunately for him, he completely fucked it up. Trump's status as politics' ultimate outsider brought

a lot of advantages. But it also had a lot of downsides, the biggest being a simple one. People were scared of him. The way he acted and spoke made him come across like a corrupt, ignorant lunatic to a lot of people, including many who otherwise disliked Hillary or just liked Republicans. The only thing that saved him from being doomed by this was that, with the specter of a President Clinton looming, a lot of people who also disliked her had been taking pains to ignore this fear and see the Trump they wanted to see. This was why he always saw his biggest gains of the cycle when he was out of the news and Clinton was in it.

It gave voters some space to convince themselves that he made sense, at least relative to her. But there was no way Trump was going to hide from scrutiny forever. So when he stood on that debate stage, ranting and raving like a dumbass next to a woman who, at the very least, seemed to know what Medicare was, it reminded people exactly what they were afraid of. Some polls showed over 60% of viewers judging Clinton to be the winner. Trump's numbers tanked in the aftermath, sending him right back to where he was before his September surge. This also somehow wouldn't even be his worst news cycle during that two-week period. The Access Hollywood tape was the mother of all October surprises, a kind of

scandal never seen in American politics before. This wasn't just because it involved Trump in sexual misconduct. That wasn't new. Over the course of the 2016 election, no less than 15 women accused Trump of groping, forcefully kissing, or otherwise assaulting them, and it had never really moved the news cycle. And had this case been yet another allegation, it probably would not have even made the news. But this wasn't an allegation

It was a recording a recording of Trump himself Not only admitting to being the kind of person his haters always said he was But bragging about it in the most disgusting way possible Against almost any opponent Bernie Sanders Joe Biden Martin fucking O'Malley, whatever This would have been it. It would have been over. He'd have been more likely to have been kicked off the ticket or to have lost in a landslide than to have come even close to winning. And for all her flaws, this seemed to be the case for Hillary too.

Even though the Clinton camp arguably missed the moment with a strangely uneasy response that used the moment to drive attention to a pre-planned attack about how Trump had been mean to a beauty queen, i.e. a considerably far less severe scandal, she still looked completely certain to win after the tape drop. As for Trump, he would be forced to spend the immediate aftermath fighting to maintain the very existence of his candidacy in the face of top Republicans calling for him to drop out. Like they did during the late stage of the primary, the establishment would dream about how it could be released from the nightmare they were living in, a fresh start with a new ticket headed by say Mike Pence or perhaps Condi Rice. But, as in that spring,

Trump still held all the cards. He wanted to stay on the ticket, so he stayed on the ticket, albeit with a cursory apology where he didn't admit to any wrongdoing. For Democrats, it appeared to be the best of all worlds. By this point, they had damaged Trump grievously, to such an extent that they looked prime to win in a landslide, but not to a point where he felt compelled to drop out. Heading to the second debate, held only days after the release of the tape, the party seemed

poised to put together a historic beatdown, a punishment of the right's hubris that would ring out for decades to come. It was at this moment that Steve Bannon, now the CEO of the Trump campaign, took charge. Just before the second debate on October 9th, Bannon, working with his colleague David Bosset and reportedly on the advice of Charles Johnson, broadcasted a panel to Facebook including Trump and four of Bill Clinton's accusers talking about Clinton's sex crimes. To those covering the campaign, it looked unimaginably desperate. Politico, in their first report on the panel, described it as Trump dousing a campaign already

on fire with buckets of fresh gasoline and bringing the worst fears of many Republicans to a stunning realization. And when the second debate finally took place 90 minutes later, things appeared to get even worse. In the immediate reaction polls, voters judged Trump as the loser of his bout with Clinton for the second time in a row. With under a month until election day, and with voters in some states already casting their ballots, he looked completely and utterly fucked.

When the first polls that included samples taken after the excess Hollywood tape finally came out that week, this conventional wisdom seemed to be on the mark. Clinton's lead, which had grown above four points after her success in the first debate, swelled even further to seven points by the middle of the month. Even more growth was expected once the second debate was factored in. But over the next few days, when the polls sampling voters during an after-ban and stunt began to come in, something peculiar happened. That second shoe didn't drop. Instead of growing, Clinton's lead started contracting. Over a few days, her seven-point lead winnowed to six.

A few days after that, it fell from six to around five. Even if they weren't yet winning, and even if they were running out of time, Team Trump had accomplished something big with that press conference during the night of the second debate. Something that wasn't properly appreciated at all in the moment. They had, for lack of a better term, defeated Hillary with their own logic. In a vacuum, the context of the Axis Hollywood tape was absolutely reprehensible. The kind of thing that doesn't just end campaigns, but entire lives. Had Trump been judged by any normal standard?

The kind that says that brazen sexual misconduct represents something unacceptably bad about a person? It would have been over, right then and there. But Trump wasn't facing a normal standard, because he wasn't facing a normal opponent. He was facing the Clintons, the exact couple that had won two terms in the White House with the argument that sexual misconduct didn't really matter in serious politics. Back then in the 90s, all that mattered was how he could get the job done. But now when they saw an opening, they and their allies in the media suddenly reneged

on those decades of oppressive, said that Kresge's conduct was reasonably real and acceptable.