By Susan Glasser. This article appeared in The New Yorker on November 1, 2017.
On the morning of October 5th, President Trump was on one of his Twitter rants from the White House, denying as “fake news” an NBC report that his Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, had called him a “moron” and threatened to resign. Elsewhere in Washington, the drama over whether Tillerson was actually on his way out threatened to overwhelm other news stories for a second straight day. But, when I arrived at the townhouse of Stanley Greenberg, the veteran Democratic strategist, on Capitol Hill, later that morning, it was not the distractions of the Trump White House that had him worked up. Greenberg was still fuming about Hillary Clinton. Clinton was guilty of “malpractice” in how she conducted her 2016 Presidential campaign, Greenberg told me. Even worse, he said, Democrats were repeating the same political mistakes a year later. “Look at Virginia right now,” Greenberg said, as soon as we sat down in his second-floor office.
