CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Donald Trump and his team have spent much of this year’s presidential transition gratuitously laughing at their vanquished Democratic foes, as the president-elect prepares to begin implementing his openly authoritarian platform next month.
At Harvard University’s Campaign Managers Conference, a tradition in which top campaign aides review what happened in the presidential election, Team Trump got a chance to yuk it up and laugh at top Kamala Harris and Joe Biden aides right to their faces.
During panel conversations held on Friday in a conference room on the fifth floor of a Harvard Kennedy School building, Trump campaign co-chief Chris LaCivita twice mocked the idea that Team Harris ran a “flawless” campaign — an idea floated the night prior by a top aide to Harris. “Flawless execution,” he replied after Jen O’Malley Dillon, the Biden-turned-Harris campaign chair, said she didn’t expect the first debate, between Trump and Biden, would greatly alter the race. (The debate went so badly, and Biden looked and sounded so frail, that he dropped out.)
Speaking with Rolling Stone, LaCivita confirmed the “flawless” lines were specifically referencing comments made by the Harris campaign’s chief of staff, Sheila Nix, who said Thursday that Harris ran a “pretty flawless campaign” that “hit all our marks.” Nix made the comments to a gathering of students, political operatives, and reporters at a Thursday dinner hosted by Harvard’s Institute of Politics. The moment she made that remark at the dinner, numerous faces in the room — both Democratic and Republican — perked up in disbelief. Several were clearly suppressing uncomfortable laughter.
“I thought it was humorous, so I’m not gonna let that go,” LaCivita told Rolling Stone on Friday afternoon, suggesting that Team Harris is “creating this perception that they couldn’t do anything to change the trajectory.”
“I’m not here to rub anybody’s face in it,” he said, adding: “They raised $1.5 billion in 107 days, and they never had a message. They were running triple [or] quadruple the amount of creatives every week that we were.”
And yet, it was indeed being rubbed in their faces. For much of Friday afternoon, five senior staffers of Trump 2024 were seated at tables, positioned just several yards away from a row of crimson-draped tables occupied by a similar number of Team Harris advisers. As an audience of journalists and political consultants looked on, the representatives of Team Trump and the Biden-then-Harris campaign stared directly at one another, as each side discussed the biggest chapters of the 2024 race: the debates, Biden’s exit, the assassination attempts on Trump’s life, and so much else.
Eight years ago, when Harvard held this same event with veterans of the 2016 Hillary Clinton and Trump campaigns, the conference room quickly degenerated into a shouting match and “goddamn food fight” dominated by hurt feelings and accusations of white supremacy. This week, ahead of Friday’s panels, veterans of both presidential campaigns privately indicated that they were aware of the nasty anecdotes that emerged from the 2016 conference, and neither side wanted to give the press another “food fight” to cover.
On the whole, 2024’s version was an exhibition of restraint and respectability compared to the melee of December 2016. Still, the Trump side of the room couldn’t help themselves from sporadically trolling, widely grinning, and laughing at their liberal counterparts — as well as the news media. To be fair, multiple Team Trump alums also spent time on Friday mocking former Trump opponent Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis before a room full of reporters, just as President-elect Trump has actively considered making DeSantis his new pick for defense secretary. (One panel featured representatives from several GOP primary campaigns, but none from Team DeSantis.)
“We all pay too much attention to national publications,” Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio said. “First of all, what percent of Americans get their news from newspapers these days?”
Rolling Stone did not take it personally; we are a magazine.
Meanwhile, the senior Harris and Biden officials had no choice but to sit there and take it, mostly alternating between stone-faced expressions, morose looks, and irritated demeanor.
Throughout the event, the Trump campaign aides generally offered a more candid, comprehensive explanation of how their candidate targeted and assembled a winning coalition than Team Harris gave for why theirs lost. “We lost,” O’Malley Dillon punctuated, matter of factly, repeatedly over the course of the day’s events. She did not seem keen to relitigate some of Harris’ decisions — particularly the candidate’s disinterest in making a sharper break from Biden.
Every once in a while, the opponents shared a lighthearted moment or friendly chuckle, such as when both camps laughed at the idea that Harris might win deep-red Iowa.
At one moment during the panel, LaCivita joked that the Harris campaign aides were suggesting they personally believed that Biden could win the race — before he imploded and dropped out — while simultaneously arguing that Harris “never had a chance,” as he put it.
“We are here because we think it’s important to, of course, be respectful, and we have a story to tell that is about what we saw, and we believe in who we work for,” O’Malley Dillon responded, adding that she wanted to send a message to “young people that work on all these campaigns” that it’s “good and honorable, and that you can lose and still believe in what you do.”
It wasn’t quite as sad as when Jennifer Palmieri, the Clinton 2016 communications director, exclaimed to Team Trump: “I would rather lose than win the way you guys did!”
Is there an honorable way to lose to Donald Trump?
As the final panel neared its conclusion in the late afternoon, Team Trump infuriated Team Harris by pointing out that Trump and Vice President-elect J.D. Vance did many more interviews than Harris — with Trump campaign aide and incoming White House deputy chief of staff Taylor Budowich putting an extremely fine point on it.
“Donald Trump outworked her,” Budowich said. “The Trump campaign outworked the Harris campaign in every single way.”
He added, “Why didn’t you put her out more? You said earlier that you couldn’t ever compete with the amount of attention Donald Trump got. You never gave her a shot.”
Quentin Fulks, the principal deputy campaign manager for Harris, said the Trump campaign “had a better strategy” and “won,” but that “our candidate also worked hard.” He noted that anything they said, after losing this race, might sound like a defense: “We lost the race.”
“I honestly respect that,” said Budowich, before adding: “Ron DeSantis’ team didn’t show up.”
