"The outcome of the election was a direct rebuke of everything that we had been trying to do for the last 10 years,"
""I know it's crazy," Trump was saying, "but I'm in front of the polls.""
""I kind of chuckled at it and went to my seat," Axelrod recalled. "I don't think any of us really anticipated that Donald Trump would be a serious candidate for president, much less president.""
Obama and his advisers did not anticipate Donald Trump's rise and often dismissed him as a con man, a clown, and a laughingstock. At the 2011 White House Correspondents' Association dinner, Obama mocked Trump's reality TV persona while David Axelrod overheard Trump boasting about leading in the polls. The administration's misreading of the shifting national mood contributed to the unexpected 2016 outcome, described by Josh Earnest as a direct rebuke of the prior decade's efforts. The Incite Institute and the Obama Foundation compiled more than 450 interviews and over 1,100 hours of audio and video documenting these perspectives.
Read at Boston.com
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