Politics & Eggs & Trump
On January 21, 2014, Donald Trump came to New Hampshire.
That morning he descended on the Granite State as the featured speaker at Politics & Eggs, the long-running series of breakfast speeches at Saint Anselm College where presidential candidates and other prominent political figures speak to an audience of New England business leaders and college students and other guests, and autograph dozens of the wooden eggs handed out as souvenirs. Politics & Eggs has become such a necessary stop on the road to the White House that it was name-checked by a fictional presidential candidate on The West Wing (Carlson 2015). During the months running up to New Hampshireâs presidential primary, these breakfasts pile up one after another on the calendar as major candidates line up to take part in the ritual. During the lean years between campaigns, on the other hand, the guest list sometimes includes those who are gingerly and deniably testing the waters for a possible run in the next primary, or prominent political reporters and analysts, or those whose celebrity is adjacent to politics. Donald Trump fell into that last category. As a frequent almost-candidate in several past elections, Trump had visited New Hampshire before. But this would be the first time he had ever spoken at Politics & Eggs.
At breakfast that morningâwhere the audience was much larger than it had been for people who had actually run for president in the 2008 and 2012 primary cyclesâTrump took to the podium and spoke for just over 50 minutes. During his talk he hopscotched from questions of policy like the previous fallâs botched rollout of the Affordable Care Actâs health care exchanges and trade with China and Mexico, to the upcoming midterm elections, to arguing groundlessly that âdishonest and corruptâ unemployment numbers had helped re-elect Barack Obama in 2012, to insisting that his hair was his own, real hair and not a wig, to reminding the attendees that the fourteenth season of The Apprentice was about to premiere. He decried the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the state of American airports relative to those in Qatar and the âbeautiful coating of Teflonâ he saw as insulating President Obama from criticism and the caliber of American negotiators under the Obama administration. He agreed with a questioner that Benghazi was a disgrace, and lamented that the scandal did not resonate with the public. He praised the quality of his golf courses and Tom Brady and the New England Patriots, and speculated that Republicans would do well in the 2014 midterm elections and that Chris Christie was âone email away from disaster.â Looking back at this speech years later, it is striking how subdued Trump was in his presentation, compared to the bombastic rhetoric that has characterized him as a candidate and officeholder; this talk came across not as the prepared remarks of a serious political contender so much as the freewheeling free associations of someone who dabbles in politics and was simply happy to have been asked to speak at Politics & Eggs.
Following his breakfast remarks, Trump attended a meet-and-greet session with the Saint Anselm College branch of the College Republicans at the campusâ New Hampshire Institute of Politics. Trump blustered into the meeting room and strode to the lectern, where, without removing his topcoat, he briefly declaimed about the 2014 midterm elections, in which he assured the group he might yet decide to accept calls from unnamed people urging him to run for governor in New York, depending on who else ran; seemed to suggest that the United States should extend full diplomatic recognition to North Korea; and claimed that the United States has the highest levels of taxation in the world. He then invited those in attendance to line up for pictures with him before he departed.
If you were a politically knowledgeable person watching Trumpâs Politics & Eggs performance, you likely would have come away from it shaking your head. When it came to questions of public policy, Trump showed little ability to discuss them at anything beyond the most surface level. While Trump had elbowed his way into the political arena in the few years leading up to his visit, most notoriously as the loudest cheerleader for the groundless and racist âbirtherâ conspiracy that questioned Barack Obamaâs citizenship, and had made other feints toward the political arena during his decades on the public stage, it was clear from his remarks that he had little of substance to offer. While some were already speculating that Trump might run for president in 2016, it was more like the sort of speculation that had in previous decades attached itself to perennial candidates like Harold Stassen than that surrounding rising Republican stars like Senator Marco Rubio of Florida. The smart money would have bet that Trump would once again eventually decide once again not to run for president, even while he enjoyed the attention of not quite running, just as he had in 1988, 2000, and 2012; indeed, what little national press coverage there was of Trumpâs visit took it as given that he was clearly not actually even pretending to be running for anything anymore (Coppins 2014; Weigel 2014).
But if all you were paying attention to was what Trump knew about public affairs, you were missing the real story. The real story, it would turn out, lay not in what Trump did or did not know about the issues of the day, but in the outsized response to his visit. While many of New Hampshireâs Republican bigwigs had little interest in Trump as a presidential candidate, so many people were interested or curious enough in seeing Trump that his Politics & Eggs appearance was moved from its usual location in the auditorium of the New Hampshire Institute of Politics to the much larger student dining hall in order to hold the estimated 350 attendees who had come out on a cold January morning to see Trump. Trump was not the first celebrity to visit New Hampshire, nor the first to blend celebrity and politics, but he was an unusual type of celebrity. He was not a celebrity who had become a politician as a second career, as Ronald Reagan had been, nor a celebrity appearing on behalf of a candidate or cause, as John Cho and Sharon Stone and Chuck Norris and more had done in visits to New Hampshire in past election cycles. Trump was a celebrity who dabbled in politics, and whose celebrity came not as a performer but as himselfâas a real estate mogul, as the object of endless tabloid headlines about his personal life, as the host of NBCâs reality game show The Apprentice . And as a celebrity, Trump presented himself to the world in terms of ostentation and overdone opulence. Whatever else one might think of Donald Trump, he was never boring, and that morning the promise of spectacle drew a bigger crowd than had ever before attended Politics & Eggs.
We now know, of course, that Trumpâs visit was not just a lark. While the national political press mostly ignored his visit to New Hampshire, Trump himself was more serious about 2016 than he had been about any of his past flirtations with running for president. He had quietly trademarked the phrase âmake America great againâ just after the 2012 election (Tumulty 2017) and obsessed over the reactions to his Politics & Eggs talk (Coppins 2014). And there were hints in his remarks that 2016 might be different. He said, at one point, that Americans âused to be the smart ones, now weâre the dummies,â in a clear foreshadowing of the themes of his 2016 campaign. And he predicted to his listeners that morning that the Republican candidate in 2016 would be âsomebody nobody is thinking about.â
On January 21, 2014, few political pundits, observers, or scientists were thinking about Donald Trump as a presidential candidate at all, let alone as a plausible candidate, and certainly not as a viable nominee or the eventual winner of the election. But one day less than three years after that talk, America would find Trump standing on the steps of the United States Capitol repeating the presidential oath of office after Chief Justice John Roberts, and beginning one of the most tumultuous and divisive administrations in American history.
How did this happen? How did a vulgar multimillionaire with no political experience defeat a host of rivals for the Republican nomination for president, and then eke out a narrow electoral college victory while losing the popular vote by over three million votes?
New Hampshire deserves some of the credit (or blame, depending on your perspective). Donald Trumpâs path to power ran straight through the Granite State. Had Trump lost New Hampshireâs primary on the heels of his Iowa caucus defeat, he would very likely have lost the Republican nomination to a more mainstream candidate. New Hampshire is also a valuable case study through which to examine the impact of Trumpâs election and administration on American politics. In the general election, Trump fought hard, though unsuccessfully, for the Granite Stateâs four electoral votes, but very probably cost then-Senator Kelly Ayotte re-election. Since Trumpâs election, the stateâs Democrats...