When Hillary Clinton's staffers faced Donald Trump's last week at a post-election forum, things got testy. In a Washington Post op-ed, Jennifer Palmieri, Clinton's communications director, recalls the moment when Trump’s campaign manager asked her directly, "Do you think I ran a campaign where white supremacists had a platform?”
I could have let it go last week when Kellyanne Conway, Donald Trump’s campaign manager, challenged me to look her in the eye and say she ran a campaign that gave white supremacists a platform. I considered for a split second. I knew you were supposed to be gracious when you come for the post-election forum at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. But I decided this was a year where normal rules don’t apply. Speaking the truth was more important.
“It did. Kellyanne, it did,” I told her. It’s just a fact. Trump winning the election doesn’t change that. To my mind, his win makes it all the more important that the truth be acknowledged.
Palmieri obviously isn't letting this one go, and with good reason. She was right to call it for what it was, especially when no one in the Trump campaign has come anywhere close to admitting that they appealed to white supremacists, retweeted their propaganda, and have been openly celebrated by their leaders.
A good bit of the post-election analysis has centered on what our campaign should have done differently. That’s appropriate. We should think long and hard about why we lost. Trust me, we have.
But it’s also important for the winners of this campaign to think long and hard about the voters who rejected them. I haven’t seen much evidence of such introspection from the Trump side. That’s concerning.
Palmieri writes that she knows how to be a gracious loser, but this moment in history doesn't call for that. It calls for a reckoning with the truth, something Trump and his coterie are allergic to.
If Trump's people want graciousness, why don’t they start by permanently separating him from his phone and giving his overworked thumbs a rest. That might go at least part of the way toward giving grace a fighting chance in the toxic political environment he’s stirred up.