Nobody thought Donald Trump would be the Republican nominee, least of all Hillary Clinton and her team. In fact, Clinton and her allies had been preparing for a showdown against Jeb Bush since before the 2014 midterm elections, Politico Magazine reports. Trump's candidacy, on the other hand, had long been a joke with the staff, an impossible dream scenario. Until suddenly it wasn't a scenario anymore:
Clinton aides finally started to see Trump as more than a tool to destroy Bush. In fact, [Robby] Mook took him so seriously that his team's internal, if informal, guidance was to hold fire on Trump during the primary and resist the urge to distribute any of the opposition research the Democrats were scrambling to amass against him. That hoarding plan remained in place deep into 2016 as some senior aides stayed convinced that a race against Trump would be a dream for Clinton, but as others kept insisting on tweaking the long-term plans against [Marco] Rubio and [Ted] Cruz — convinced the GOP would ultimately coalesce around the Floridian.Much of the original playbook was still intact: As late as the last week of October 2015, a private memo from Mook to top bundlers invoked Bush's fundraising power. And it wasn’t until the December holiday season — when Cruz and Trump emerged as pack leaders, and Podesta was telling fundraisers in closed-door meetings that he thought the Texan would win — that the team realized it was not prepared, strategically or tactically, for what many saw as a dream scenario. [Politico Magazine]
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