Trump, Clinton campaign managers hash out election at Harvard forum

Three weeks after Election Day, the conference was timed to take place while memories – and wounds – were still fresh. The tone is usually civil, but like everything else that happened in 2016, this year’s event was different.

The heated exchange between the Clinton and Trump camps came during a discussion of why Trump hired Breitbart News executive Stephen Bannon to be a campaign chief strategist.

Hillary Clinton’s communications director Jennifer Palmieri and campaign manager Robby Mook speak to the traveling press corps aboard the campaign plane above Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

Amid a rumble of protests from the Trump side, Conway told their side, “OK, guys, we won; you don’t have to respond”.

Joel Benenson, Clinton’s chief strategist, piled on: “There were dog whistles sent out to people.Look at your rallies”.

“Well, he’s President-elect so that’s presidential behavior yes”, she said at the forum taped Thursday and aired Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union”. “Hashtag ‘he’s your president, ‘ how’s that?” Bernie Sanders, a Democratic primary challenger, for helping “soften up” Clinton and paving the way for Trump’s victory.

Aides argued that FBI director James Comey’s investigation, media coverage, the hacking of Democratic email accounts, gender bias and even Clinton’s personal penchant for privacy and policy were to blame for her defeat. Daou’s next-to-official position with the Clinton campaign is causing speculation that simmering tension between the two former candidates may be about to erupt.

Or was it, Conway said, that Clinton just failed to have a message for “white working class voters?”

Dubuque’s Rebecca Thoeni, a lifelong Democrat until recently, said Clinton did not seem to reach out to her or her peers in 2016. They said they faced huge headwinds within the electorate because of the strong desire for change: “We underestimated the force of that wind of change”, Mook said. That was encapsulated with the campaign’s assumption that the Obama coalition would turn out for Clinton.

It is safe to say there was no agreement why Trump won and Hillary Clinton lost. These people have learned nothing.

Frighteningly it’s also a plague that will go house to house in an America torn apart by the results of the Donald Trump election victory. “She said she regretted putting a number on it”, she said. It’s a cornerstone issue for the metropolitan progressive. Rep. Stein previously asked for recounts of the votes in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Trump supporters should be searching for the way to turn off the gas before the explosion hits.

STEPHANOPOULOS: We also heard a lot from president trump this week on Twitter. We connected with voters. “I’m trying to figure out who that message was for”.

“And she made it because she believed and she had said during the campaign that it is important to our democracy that whoever wins, that their opponent concede the election and be supportive of them becoming President-elect and so she acted in good faith with that”. And that’s not how our system works.

To win the GOP nomination, Trump vanquished a highly credentialed field of 16 other Republicans, some of whom were backed up by tens of millions of dollars in outside spending.

He went on to praise Bannon, as well, calling him a “brilliant strategist” and a “really terrific guy”.