#I’m on a data plan 24/7 too so no I can’t even blame a bad router or anything unfortunately I just live somewhere weird tbh

[transrobotgecko]

one day my internet will be normal when I need to use it. One day.

[hitsuackerman]

Unpredictable (Overhaul x Reader) pt.30

warnings: this cannot be read solo

Links: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, part 7, part 8, part 9, part 10, part 11, part 12, part 13, part 14, part 15, part 16, part 17, part 18, part 19, part 20, part 21, part 22, part 22, part 23, part 23.5, part 24, part 25, part 26, part 27, part 28, part 29

Masterlist to my other fics: here :) (that has not been updated for how many months now... proceed with caution~)

“Kurono.” Overhaul spoke up as he discarded red stained gloves. “You’re in charge while I’m gone. Something came up.”

“Are you going to her?” He asked as he accepted the gloves and threw them into a bin. Taking a disinfectant from the corner, he began to wipe a small area of the chair Eri had sat. The day was rather long and none of them had sufficient sleep.

While it was true that Overhaul had went home late at night, the shuffling of his footsteps was enough to peek Kurono’s interests. Knowing full well where he had come from, he assumed it was safe to spark up a conversation with Kai. Of course, there was a tinge of regret when he agreed to working on the bullets. A mere check up turned into an extensive fix of the small deadly items.

“She is asking for information regarding Tamisura.” The annoyance behind his mask was a little too obvious. He hated that woman with a passion.

“Tamisura? She’s part of the Fukuo Kai now?” Kurono was not expecting that news at all. “Isn’t she the loner type?”

“She is.” He sighed. “However, that woman was given a rather good portion of the Fukuo Kai’s members. If anything, she’s basking in the sudden power given to her. It won’t surprise me if she falls drunk to the sensation.”

“Have you interacted with her during those meetings?” Kurono asked as he locked the experiment room. The only sound echoing were his and Kai’s footsteps.

“Once. There have been many meetings to which I have chosen not to partake in.”

“Do they know?”

“No. It wouldn’t be fun if I gave them everything.” It wasn’t all a lie, though. He was never a huge fan of meeting with the other yakuzas. Even before the Shie Hassaikai was established, he strayed away from those gatherings. “I’ll be back before the night falls.”

“Alright.”

“See to it that Eri-chan eats. If not, force her.”

Kurono simply nodded and watched as Overhaul walked his way towards his car. If he were doing Shie Hassaikai business, he was sure he would have to drive him around but this time he was the one moving. It only meant he was going towards his only person of interest. Whether it was a good or bad thing, Kurono couldn’t tell. Brushing those thoughts aside, he went to the kitchen. The child would surely not eat whatever he would cook, but at least he followed orders.

The drive towards your apartment was uneventful. Occasionally, he would yawn and roll his shoulders. The night was rather long and not even that cup of coffee he had 6 hours ago helped give him energy. Remembering that he had to buy food, he turned right and went for Mendy’s. Knowing what you would want, he ordered something for himself too.

Staring at the rear view mirror, he took note of the license plate. It was a pretty run down car but the plate was new. Must be a second hand car, he thought to himself. Looking at the hood, he scoffed at the dirt.

“Disgusting.” He complained as he reached out for the paper bag.

Knowing he was using his personal car, the guard would surely not allow him entry to the basement parking. Finding a secure spot a few good blocks away, he took off his jacket and folded the sleeves of his dress shirt. Sliding the tie off his neck, he checked the rearview mirror for any oddities. Seeing as it was clear, he took a surgical mask and grabbed the food.

Walking his way closer to the building, he could see a few of the lesser members of the Shie Hassaikai doing their assigned task. With his phone ringing, he took it out and answered it.

“Hurry up. I’m starving.” You complained.

“Give me 5 minutes.” He quickened his pace. “And don’t complain about the food getting cold. You have a microwave.”

“Are you walking?”

“Yes.”

“You know the guard knows your car right?” You sat down on the sofa and began to prepare the files.

“I used my personal one.”

“I’ll meet you at the entrance.” Just as you stood up, he told you there was no need. “Okay then. Just knock when you’re here.”

Dropping the call, you began to review the files you had prepared. Most of them were just gathered data regarding Tamisura and the Asaki-Gumi. With barely anything to get on, all you could do was sigh and hope that Overhaul could provide a decent amount of information. Knowing full well that he attended meetings without the precincts knowledge, the chances were there.

Hearing the knock on your door, you were quick to open it and be greeted with a paper bag held to your face. Taking it from his hands, you stepped aside and he went in.

“You look different today…” You commented as the snacks were taken out from the bag.

“How so?”

“Your sleeves are folded and your jacket’s missing.” And he looked really good. “Any special event I missed?”

“As I recall,” He walked towards the sofa and took a seat. “You mentioned you were bugged, is that right?”

“And?”

“If it wasn’t the Shie Hassaikai’s doing, then it surely could have been Nighteye or your precinct themselves. However, we seem to have grown rather too comfortable with one another that another party has taken your interest.”

On instinct, your eyes began to survey your unit.

“I was followed on my way here. Hence my tardiness.” Overhaul let out a sigh. “A few of my men are patrolling the area but as to whether or not they trailed me all the way here is for debate.”

“You set up a few henchmen here?” You raised an eyebrow.

“Precautionary measures, my guilty pleasure.”

It had been a long while since you last heard him call you that nickname. Feeling your mind turning to mush, you quickly grabbed a folder and handed it over to him. When he leaned back on the sofa and began to scan the papers, you couldn’t help but stare.

The young yakuza boss was examining files with a police officer. One of the most powerful and feared villains sat there with his sleeves rolled to his elbows while his mask hung limply on his ear. Looking at his hands, the gloves were still there but in some strange way, they complimented him. The walk towards your apartment ruffled his hair a bit too.

With your cheeks slowly reddening, you snapped yourself back to reality.

“So, uh, what exactly do you know about Tamisura?”

“As to the names of her quirk, I am not sure.” He began. “But, the records here state facts that she does need time to prep her abilities. If I am not mistaken, she needs a rather considerable amount of time as well.”

“Would you know how long?”

“Assuming it hasn’t evolved, once she is around her target, she would need at least 20 minutes.”

“Is there a time limit to her quirk?”

“Perhaps an hour.”

“That long?” You cursed at the duration.

“As for how to stop her speed, it is beyond my knowledge.” He shrugged. “Based on what I’ve gathered, she still prefers to work alone despite having a few new men under her wing.”

“How do you know so much about her, though?”

“She’s quite popular in the underground.” A few more exchanges of information, it was safe to say that you had gained just enough to satisfy Nighteye. With the bug now planted in the Fukuo Kai, the raid was now within arms reach.

Now that you were done interviewing the yakuza, the two of you were now eating the food he had bought. As always, he came through and ordered what you liked in their menu. You wanted to start a conversation with him, yet the only thoughts running through your head was the amount of time left you had with him.

“Tsukauchi has informed me that we will be partnering during the raid, is that correct?” Overhaul broke the silence.

“We are.” You couldn’t help but chuckle. “Back to where we were, huh?”

“Being melancholic?”

“I can’t help it. In a matter of days the raid will take place and after that, we’ll see each other as enemies. Tragic, isn’t it?”

“You were the one who pursued this.”

“Blaming everything on me?” You teased and kicked his leg. “Who was the one who attmepted to seal the deal?”

“I was not blaming, (y/n). I never stated that I too did not pursue this.” He pointed his index finger at you. Upon hearing your laughter, he couldn’t help but notice the sudden weight on his shoulders. Shaking the looming fear that crept in him, he grabbed a glass of water and gulped it down.

“Now that we’re on the topic…” You grabbed a pillow and hugged it. “What did you first think of me?”

“Annoying.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“That hurts.”

“Along the way, you only grew more annoying. But somehow I got used to it and find it rather endearing in its own cursed way.” He paused and rolled his golden eyes. “Were those the words you wanted to hear?”

“Maybe. Flowery words don’t suit you.”

“Really?”

“Don’t mock me, Chisaki.”

“That’s all we’ve been doing these past few minutes.” He flicked your forehead. “But I stand by what I said. I have to go, (y/n).”

“So soon?” The words went out of your mouth before you could think.

“The longer I stay the higher they’ll suspect me. You wouldn’t want your plans to go into failure, no?”

Leading him to the door, you couldn’t help but wonder what would happen in the next few days. With the raid’s plan going smoothly, it was only a matter of time before Nighteye would push for your full cooperation with their case. Would you still be able to meet him in secret? Or would the heroes truly prevail and bring their needed justice home? Could you even dare look at him when they detain him?

“Don’t overthink things.” Overhaul said as he rested his head on your shoulder.

“I can’t help it…” Your grip on the doorknob tightened.

“It isn’t the end of your world. We still have one more moment before going separate ways.”

“Right…” You turned around to face him. Taking in the features of what his mask didn’t cover, you couldn’t help but raise your hand in an attempt to touch his face. Remembering that he wasn’t one who was fond of physical contact, you decided it was best not to continue your action. “I’ll see you next week.”

Watching as Overhaul exited your building, you dragged your feet back to the sofa. Closing your eyes, images of possible outcomes began to flood your head. With Nighteye knowing your complicated relationship, there was no escaping. All you could do was think of alibi’s to clear whatever you could.

Even if you did file a case about them bugging you, it wouldn’t be the best decision due to it leaning on their favor. It would also be best to not let the media know about whatever footage they had obtained.

With nothing else to do, you quickly grabbed your laptop and began to search for the details once villains would be handed over to the HPSC.

- - - - -

I hope you guys liked the chapter despite me being gone x) again, if you want to be tagged, feel free to message me or comment :) Take care and have a nice day!

would you buy me a ko-fi :3

[escxpedes]

loopholes (cont.)

I literally can’t even begin to tell you how much everyone’s support meant to me on the last chapter. All your comments and tags were so sweet, it was seriously the highlight of my day. I’m sorry for the delay, I meant to get this out a couple of days ago, but I’ve come down with a bad cold. This part, while fun, was so hard to get right. Angus Macgyver is a genius, his mind goes a mile a minute, and I wanted to do my best to replicate that. This part is a little slow in getting to the Macriley stuff, but I wanted to show how much he really thinks about things. He’s such a complex character, that if I didn’t do him justice, I wouldn’t be able to forgive myself. Also, there’s dialogue in this one! Sadly, Jack isn’t mentioned in this chapter, but he’s there in spirit. Clearly, we all love and miss him. I hope you guys enjoy, the last part will be out soon! x

~

loop·hole

noun | A loophole is an ambiguity or inadequacy in a system, such as a law or security, which can be used to circumvent or otherwise avoid the purpose, implied or explicitly stated, of the system

~

Riley finally moves into her new apartment, but struggles to adjust after the events of Codex and the realization of her feelings for Mac. When Mac finds her passed out over her keyboard after a late night of coding at Phoenix, he decides a talk is long overdue. Just some slightly angsty soft!macriley to help you cope with this season 5 hiatus.

~

of lips that i am yet to kiss (and eyes not met my own.)

It's highly unlikely that you'll find Mac walking down the halls of the Phoenix Foundation so late at night. Without the bustling energy of his coworkers fetching important documents or discussing the best way to break down one of the many mysteries the foundation deals with, the darkened hallways and quiet atmosphere can be unnerving.

Sure, he spends nearly every waking hour employed there, but he'd rather be outside the office in different countries, doing hands-on work and saving lives. When you work in his profession, It can be difficult to separate business and pleasure, but that only makes it more important—if only to conserve what mental health he has left. 

However, in the haste of putting together last-minute preparations for yet another meeting with the Department of Justice and trying to make it back to his house in time for something Desi whipped up, he managed to forget his cellphone.

It's funny, mainly because of how little the small device truly matters to Mac.

It only goes to show how insignificant material objects, or even human beings in general, are. The idea that something so meaningless can affect someone's life so much when, if they just looked past that obsession and considered its part in the profound scope of the universe, another perspective would take shape.

It's fascinating stuff, really.

There's a concept essential to understanding Japanese aesthetics, otherwise known as an ancient set of ideals important to Japanese society, called Yūgen. When applied in the right context, Yūgen underlines this deep awareness of the universe and the experiences we have within it. It's often the feeling interpreted when you gaze at the stars late at night or watch the sunset dip behind a hill.

Mac wouldn't think twice before breaking his phone, or rather, breaking the phone of his nearest friend, open for an obscure part that might make one of his many homemade devices come together. However, when he's the only person able to communicate the scientific specifications of an unheard-of-until-recently base plan for saving the planet, he's practically on call 24/7.

He remembers having it in the labs earlier that day when he stopped by before his meeting to remind Bozer to come by his house on Friday for the team's new weekly attempt in group-bonding.

After the betrayals that surfaced during the climax of taking down Codex, the team collectively decided to spend more time as a group in hopes of eliminating any lingering doubts. 

They used to hang out all the time before the government dismantled the Phoenix Foundation.

Mac still can't believe that, after everything they had been through, he allowed his friendships to dissipate over the year they had been separate.

Bozer is his childhood best friend, and Riley had become a solid foundation in his life. He didn't have anyone outside his team at Phoenix, and while he deeply cared for Desi, their first relationship was proof that too much time—and too little communication—with each other can do severe damage to one's sanity.

If Russ hadn't brought them back together, would they have tried to reconnect at some point?

Mac wants to say they would have but wouldn't blame them if they didn't; they all lost something they cared about, and each served as a constant reminder of it.

It would've been hard, but part of him feels like living without them is a lot harder.

When he manages to access the lab, flipping his shiny new I.D. card over his fingers and into its place in his wallet, his eyes scan the room. It's empty, which isn't unusual at this time, but years of military training have rewired his brain to notify him of threats, even if there aren't any.

Just like he thought it would be, the device sits untouched a few tables behind Bozer's workspace where Mac had been sitting.

Quickly, because he left the house in a hurry and forgot to leave a note, he scoops up his phone and makes his way towards the exit. There's a couple of missed calls, but it doesn't seem like he missed anything too important.

Not that they would let him. 

At any rate, they would probably show up on his doorstep if they couldn't get a hold of him. With days off so few and far between, that's the kind of interaction he's hoping to avoid. Hence, why he came to pick up his phone when he realized it was missing instead of waiting until the next day.

He's nearly made it to the end of the hall when a light flashes in his peripheral vision, coming from the I.T. department.

His body is tense with apprehension; his mind races with several different kinds of possibilities and outcomes. He slows his pace, his movements fluid, silent, and controlled from years of stealth practice.

The light is soft, he notices, as if only one or two monitors are in use.

When he gets to the doorway and nudges open the door, hands at the ready, his entire body sags in relief to see the dark wavy hair he's come to associate with one of his closest friends.

"Riles?"

The nickname falls from his mouth before he can stop it, and even though the light from the monitor creates a halo above her head, shadowing her features, it's unmistakably her.

She doesn't move. 

It becomes abundantly clear why as Mac moves towards her and notices the monitor's screen filling up with a sequence of letters that look nothing like coding despite his lack of knowledge in programming languages.

Her elbow balances precariously on the edge of the table, her arms creating a makeshift pillow for her head. The weight of her forearm bears down on the keyboard, causing the side of her hand to press down multiple keys at once.

He shakes his head a little, amused by the situation unfolding. 

Her cheek rests comfortably on her hand, a serene expression masking the signs of exhaustion that showed on her face.

Mac's lips curved into a soft smile, seeing Riley in any state that wasn't cloaked in layers of worry or anxious determination always washed away any doubts he might have about working in such a stressful field.

The scars that covered his body, the secrets he has to keep, and the pain he has to endure are so unbelievably worth it as long as she out of harm's way and able to sleep peacefully.

Of course, he couldn't imagine anyone else by his side on a mission, knowing they share the same love and passion for kicking ass and saving lives.

However, he also knows that more lies underneath the surface.

He wouldn't wish the hardships of this job on anyone. Seeing it affect someone he cares about, watching it break them down slowly pulls at his heartstrings and fills him with a knowing sadness. 

When a piece of hair falls into her face, his fingers don't hesitate to gently brush it behind her ear, lightly tracing her cheekbone and caressing her cheek.

Kneeling, his hand drops to her shoulder in an attempt to gently wake her.

After a couple of shakes, the expressive brown eyes he's come to look forward to seeing begin to flutter open and nearly render him speechless.

She blinks a couple of times, inhaling slowly, "Macgyver."

Her voice is full of sleep and breaks from misuse, but the way she says his name—like there's nobody else she'd expect to see when she wakes up —has him grinning from ear to ear.

"Good morning, sleepyhead."

Rising from her position on the table, she scans the room before meeting his eyes and scoffing, "It's hardly the morning."

He laughs softly, holding back the urge to mention that technically it is morning considering its past twelve. Instead, he focuses on the matter at hand, or more likely, the question at hand.

"What are you doing here so late?"

She's more alert now, sitting back in her chair and lifting her arms to stretch out the muscles that stiffened while she slept, glancing at her work on the monitor.

Her face drops into a grimace when she notices her mistake, "Matty and I were talking about updating the foundation's firewall and spyware," she yawns, "I must have been more tired than I realized."

Mac's eyebrows scrunch in thought, remembering something Bozer said earlier about Riley spending quite a few nights this week working late.

Between going over his mother's scientific data, trying to patch up whatever relationship he had left with Desi, and making sure he didn't go off the rails with grief, his effort to check in on everyone decreased significantly.

"Yeah, you've been doing that a lot lately," his hand returned to her shoulder to emphasize his point, "Everything okay?"

She waves him off, "There's too much work that needs to be done around here before we can get things running the way they used to."

Riley doesn't lie to him—if you overlook the whole situation with her ex, Aubrey, that is, but the movements she's making indicate otherwise.

Her eyes refuse to meet his, flickering down and to the right. When she talks, her head shakes lightly, and she purses her lips in an attempt to give off a careless impression. Maybe someone who doesn't know her or didn't train to pick up on it would believe her, but he knew better.

She was definitely hiding something from him.

Part of him understands that if she wanted to talk about it, she would. However, his instincts urge him to press harder, locate the problem, and bring back her contagious smile that always seems to fill him with warmth.

As much as he doesn't want to admit it, you can't patch some things together by sheer will and sellotape, so instead, he stands up and drops his hand from her shoulder.

"Let's get you home."

[fgodestinyawakenings]

EOR SE.RA.PH Singularity: Prologue~Act 1

Welcome to SE.RA.PH Singularity aka EOR Singularity 1.5 since this is between Shinjuku and Agartha timeline. Just a quick and good warning, there’s lot of ranting so you’ve been warned... Time to go through this shit round 2 again

Prologue

In Gudas' room, both Tamamo and Nero are hanging out in plans of the supposedly coming Summer event. What a way to skip out Spring break... Isn't that why there's no Sakura Blossom related events?! And yep, a huge foreshadowing dropped courtesy of her Majesty Nero of her Summer Version coming after this hell

Well, let's not compete with Mordred on who's going to suntan aka boiled themselves hot in that steel tin can. Let's not forget while we stranded on that island first half Tamamo... Second half we got stupid writer in need to show waifu and fanservice, decided to half-ass their work to shove out all the men away.

Mama Emiya as usual, decided to drop in to make sure no one bother his kid/Master too much! Nagging Mom activated his skill: Nagging/Worrying from overthinking! Watch it, Tamamo. Mama Emiya is still my best Mama/waifu among all you people as he now crowns as Ruler of Chaldea Kitchen!

And Mash called in on us? Or rather this Seraphinx department...? Oh hey! It turns out we can finally contact other people aside from Chaldea's office! Looks like we got one of our resource back to supply Chaldea better. Turns out it belongs to Animuspere huh... Been a while their name turned up ever since Solomon Singularity

Mama Emiya doesn't have good impression on them since that's a place prone for terrorist target. While we postpone on studying magecraft with Mama Emiya, we head to the Command Room to find out Seraphinx

Arriving there, Mash and Da Vinci greeted us with the latter skeptical on attempting contact with an oil rig place. Da Vinci, you must understand... While Nero and Tamamo came for interest, Mama Emiya is merely concerned of his children.

Learning more about Seraphinx from Mash, and... Turns out excluding the ones we saved somehow... The rest aka most of the original staff died from Lev's explosion. One of Chaldea staff talked to us while discussing. And... DAMN IT, WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS?! ARE YOU TRYING TO HURT ME AGAIN BY BRINGING UP ROMANI?! TT__TT

As Romani is really well loved even by Seraphix staff... And... Something wrong with Sheba? We're not getting any video on Chaldea's end? What the... An SOS?! WHAT?! People are turning data and the one in message...?!

Seraphix disappeared from 2019?!?!??! What's happening?! And... What the fuck?! NOW WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU?! A random weird cheerful voice, casually threatens to kill everyone... Called herself BB... After hacking into Chaldea's system... Her livestream begin. For an AI that's probably recently made, she speaks as though she's already an old woman.

Now aside from the fake pity, Chaldea got the warning signal of BB messing further with the system. Less of a wizard, more of a random idol self-proclaimed girl from that random hacking video. AI is one thing, but Ruler of the Moon? Someone been too much of Chunnibyou here. Been taking up classes with Jeanne Alter how to be one? But yeah, I know what she mean considering this is a crossover

No need to be humble and admit for an AI who make fun of humans, you upgraded yourselves to be superior in everything. Blame DW instead, Gudas. That's where our money went and gone from gacha hell. And nah personally, I could care less if you even have a voiceover.

So your point is while you claimed to not really care... Okay what the hell?! Marina Trench that's all the way bottom in the sea.... WHY THE HELL IS IT DOING THERE IN 2030?!?!??! And got a full clear that's a Singularity we need to head over and fix

What a way to throw us a job, BB. And yeah, whatever, be our kouhai for your fans that care. If I'm disappointing, you're even a bigger disappointment and more boring than I thought, kouhai. I've seen bigger egos like Gilgamesh that makes fun 24/7 at us mongrels. So nice try in your attempts to be sadistic, gotta give you effort of A+ in doing so. And who needs AI when you got Enkidu? That's what I called more impressive of a clay gaining soul and learning how to be a human

Ignoring the competition of two kouhais fighting over that self-proclamation... And technically we're not your replacement for Hakunos too.

Well said, your majesty! Now it's time for us to go and fix this Singularity! We're saving time here BB, so get your useless ass working instead of running that mouth of yours!

Mama Emiya despite not trusting BB's words... He agree that she should let us help her, having a fragment feelings of their past meetings in CCC. Da Vinci given us her order to go ahead too! With Mama Emiya, Tamamo and Nero with us... Lastly Da Vinci's warning about the future... Let the rayshift to the future begins!

And of course... This is why Mama Emiya never showed up... Haish, oh well, at least in alternate headcanon and stories, we can always put it ways they can sneak back in to join us

Act 1 (1/6)

Arriving alone... We've reached the SE.RA.PH singularity. And a whole bloodfest to survive alone in this hell begins to kill the rest of 127 Masters.

BB once again starts her feed. Other than her boring crap and well fooling us.... And boring attempts for sadism, for a front gate, you want Gudas to start a fucking rape session to go through all over your body.

And great, looks a strange fox girl going to kill us after BB's talk. You've got hundreds of blood-thirsty Servants at Chaldea, if you can't dodge their shit while trying to calm their shit, then I got some pressing issues for you.

Also just in time... Someone looks like BB but not really saves us! While talking to her... Looks like the one killing us is Suzuka aka Suzuka Gozen! Like there's any choice for this hell, so a contract shall be made, Meltryllis!

For 6 turns, both Suzuka and Melt are on par at each other! While Suzuka rants her own goal to get the grail, Melt is totally bored with her from the fight. High school girl peppy much? At least she leave us alone... And don't even try call me maybe by carly rae to! I'm not giving you the number anytime!

Well, thanks for saving us, Melt? Well now you just admit yourself, you're probably eavesdropping on us didn't you?! Are you really a Servant?! First time hearing a class called Alter Ego you know! Like we got any choice to end the contract, we got an oil rig  to save, finding Mama Emiya and everyone, and getting back home safely afterwards!

Uh, Melt? You want to try being summoned and see how many jackass Servants we got at Chaldea? Excluding her Tsundere attempts... Melt suggest in which direction to go next from this Holy Grail War. Good to know BB isn't trustworthy even from Melt with BB look-a-like face too. 10 days aka 21/2 hours before Seraphix sinks...

We definitely got ourself one heck of an ally here in this hell hole! Gee, are we going to start how no one fucking is kind to me like shake hands and you're special to me?! Okay, skip that crap, let's move!

After revealing about Chaldea up to now... Well aren't we lucky Gudas happened to be your type of puppet to protect? Melt then reveal more of MoonCell's end of where they originally came from, and their own kind of Holy Grail War. And also, learning what an Alter Ego is with Melt revealing her origins.

Oh did we say you were nice? I mean yeah, like you saving us, taking care of us like an escort is TOTALLY not doing nice at all. Riiight, I heard lines before so don't bother.

Well so much directing our way around, if you actually decided to go out for an all out attack. Yes, whatever you say, ma'am... Let's fight... WITH STYLE!

Despite an "okay" battle against a Saber... Gee, Gawain, how rude! Have you not met other lady that can be Heroic Spirits?! And... WAIT, YOU'RE OUR GAWAIN?! Uh... Did BB just fucking reshuffle who's supposed to be coming with us?

Well whatever, thanks for coming to our rescue Gawain! Why the hell are you angry when your face say so! Blushing will not excuse your way out of this!

And so one long explanation later... We got both Gawain and Melt to help us around. Once again, BB arrived with the boring entrance... Someone got pissy just because things don't go her way

We can take the whole damn time we want since you throw our Servants away. One moment you'd like us rot to death, another you want to save us, someone got a bad mood swing here. And duh, how the hell does it look like we want your jealousy? Not me! So move on, you want to kill us right?

Poor Robin... Must suck getting thrown around by BB's whims... Robin is technically popular if writer need to stop shoveling waifu at every chance needed. So if you want a fight, then it's a pain in the ass fight you want!

With only requirement BB's first boss is to break her first HP bar... Good to know she's totally unbeatable. And the whole bribing scheme comes from Sakura Chips and so forth... Well, one way to be Pay 2 Win player in a Holy Grail War

Act 1 (2/6)

Gudas’s definition of normal is a bit warped thanks to the amount of Servant in Chaldea. Both Gawain and Melt began arguing about Servant’s going back to their true base instinct... Huh?! Wait?! All the masters died? So we’re fighting that same thing in Fuyuki all over again?!!!

Picking up the object looking like a Holy Grail, while cutting short... Oh god!

Okay wait... This is like CasGil’s Babylonia trip in seeing memories or sort... A man talking about working in the oil rig... One of the staff perhaps? It was showing what happened before Chaldea’s arrival in Seraphix. And killing their own current director, the heck?! Damn it... The final thoughts and memories turning the whole place in a killing festival to survive...

Act 1 (3/6)

Arriving a path that splits into two, Chest for Command Room, Thighs for Helicopter area, and Hair for submarine cable and pump with power plant. Aside from the unneeded comment on Chest, Tristan shows up! At least this isn’t our Tristan back n Chaldea but...

Ok, wait, I hope you don’t mistake her for BB but... You may be right and totally wrong at the same time! It’s hell but Melt is definitely our ally so far! Play Despacito if needed, but I’m not letting you harm Melt. Gee Melt, you want guillotine session, find Sanson and Carmilla! And do it later after you got what you need from this place!

Thankfully he doesn’t have pain in the ass gimmick for his boss fight, story wise both Melt and Gawain are facing off against Tristan. With Tristan pinned down, we got a choice to either let Melt end his life or... Melt withdraw herself since he noticed her condition. Thanks to Melt’s tsundere act, we manage to get Tristan to become our ally!

But unfortuantely we got a cat fight between Melt and Tristan... All’s well ends well still! While walking to the next destination, Gudas explained to Tristan everything so far... And while Tristan does the same, please don’t start poetry session like Shakespeare too

Heading towards Breast Valley aka Command Room where another particular Alter Ego lies... Aka Passionlip, an Alter Ego like Melt born from BB made of love and hatred. Good to know for someone in horrible condition, your pervert “sadistic” side is still working with that mouth

And woah! That’s a staff from Seraphix coming to us! We finally did found a survivor in Command Room! While Gawain already has Mable charmed by his looks, Gudas got to explain on their end while Melt is with them.... But first... That loud stomping sound behind Mable is a giant claw?! And... It’s Passionlip that Melt mentioned!! Here’s come the first round attempt in fighting her!

Surviving 6 turns is good to know in story, she’s definitely unbeatable with that Trash & Crush skill. Despite bound in restrainment on her sense of self, Passionlip destroyed the route to the Command Room. Getting out of this area ASAP, we take along with Mable in two while Lip continues to compress the area.

Act 1 (4/6)

Fleeing all the way to the Thigh area... We’re safe. And a long explanation later to Mable, it pretty much confirms how much Seraphix is cut off from the world. There’s confirmed of other survivors inside the Command Room beside her. Finding another time to get back to Command Room, Gudas still remain firm in taking Mable to find a safe place.

Melt mentioned a chapel where they could rest, though Tristan remembered Vlad Extra being there as a guard... Nevertheless, we still need to get there to recover from fatigue

Act 1 (5/6)

Reaching the Chapel, safe to say the newly found bloodied spear shows Vlad is still lurking around. Also pretty much confirmed there’s no point explaining to Vlad, since he definitely wants Gudas dead.

Good for you, Tristan. At least you’re repenting your mistake of attacking us out of madness. And... What did Vlad say again?!

Gawain’s fatal blow killed Vlad once and for all... Vlad told us hurry to the chapel where Archer is waiting for us! But why? What’s wrong with Archer? Isn’t it our Mama Emiya?! No time to waste, Emiya is waiting for us!

And inside the Chapel.... Emiya--Wait.... Isn’t that... EMIYA ALTER?! So BB up to her no good tricks in switching around the Servant again... And a brief explanation later...

Emiya Alter is still our Mama Emiya in ways to make sure we’re okay. The Chapel becomes our newfound base as Emiya Alter delivers more information. Melt ended up sleeping outside since Mable still doesn’t trust any Alter Ego by her experience. But before we could sleep, looks like one of the wall is in a weirdly haphazard problem?

At least we got a good night sleep... Melt on the other hand outside, laments about Lip she saw earlier.

Act 1 (6/6)

300 Sakura Money paid to that BB just cause she want suffering in exchange... At least we got the key to unlock whatever that’s hidden in the church! And Mable, never question that AI who wants to be superior at every humane thing because of how inferior she probably feels

But with restrainment of who will get the data... Gudas ended up taking the information since Mable decided to let us know it. The record starts with a person working as a mental health specialist in Seraphix joined in 2016. Revealing the inner workings and different staff available to harvest oil and magical energy... There’s also a conflict between them, as they described the amount patients they received

Eventually pondering the reason of Seraphix’s creation... 3 years later, they lost contact with the outside world and chaos happened within them internaly. Monsters he encountered that attacked human minds? They even noted the change in themselves now they can longer trust people a month later, describing blood fest that’s probably Vlad and other Servants attacking around the church

On his final memory, they got attacked and losing their left eye in the process. The Director and assistant director went mad as confirmed by record keeper themselves. But... The planetarium? Experiment?

It ended there as Gudas now explained what they just learned. Melt revealed about the Planetarium being the power source of this singularity. Tristan offered to stay behind with Mable while we continue exploring this Singularity. Emiya Alter goes off on his own to deal with the remaining Servants...

Melt later reveals her true feelings to the sleeping Gudas how Gudas should be able to be in contact with Chaldea once they reached the Command Room. And her own feelings so far and about Gudas after becoming their Servant...

Act 1 done, 3 more to go! I’ll stop here and get back to grinding to clear some of the relevant missions...

[ask-svt-hearteu]

soulmate! Jun (pt.2)

Anon requested:  HELLO I REaLLY LOVE YOUR SOULMATE AUS SO CAN I REQUEST A JUN & JEONGHAN PART 2? I LOVE YOUR WRITING SO MUCH OMG ALDJJDKSKS

Genre: fluff

Word Count: 2951

Recap: where your soulmate’s first words are tattooed on your arm (part one)

A/N: AWWW TYSM LOVELY OFC YOU CAN. Jun’s was the first one we did, so both Seri and I love Jun’s soulmate au, it’s our baby, it’s iconic, lol. THANKS FOR REQUESTING AND HOPE YOU ENJOY. (might low key hint about the other part two’s who knows;)

Jun likes to tease you

ever since that rainy night when you finally met him

finally met your soulmate

and everything suddenly fell in place and made sense

he just refuses

to give you back that extra umbrella you gave to him as you spoke the words tattooed on his arm

as often you’re over at the dance studio hanging out with him

or even the occasional times you’re at the dorm just chilling

he never brings up your umbrella, or when he might return it

and that’s fine, you don’t really need it

but he said he’d return it eventually and he hid it for now, which was just driving you crazy

“Jun, this is like the fifth time y/n, has checked the living room for the umbrella.” Minghao says laughing as you turn red and stop your rummaging through the couch cushions

“It’s not that I refuse to give it back- . . . actually no that's exactly what it is” Jun says from the kitchen shooting you a wink

turning even more pink you say

“Wen Junhui, what is your deal with not giving me back my umbrella!?!?”

“It just reminds me of you and how lucky I got that night for having lost rock, paper, scissors.” he says shrugging

which shuts you right up as you stare down at your feet, blushing again

“I’m still here guys, I didn’t need to throw-up my dinner.” Minghao says rolling his eyes

walking out of the kitchen Jun says

“Jealous?” as he wraps an arm around your waist to pull you closer to him

leaving the both of you a giggling mess and blushing like fools

“MINGYU, THEY’RE DOING THAT WEIRD GIGGLNG TOGETHER THING AGAIN!”

Mingyu comes out of the bathroom armed with a broom to shoo you and Jun out of the dorm so you can stop infesting the place with the “love bugs”

as Mingyu calls the two of you

granted, you and Jun have been a couple for a while

he was the first of Svt to meet his soulmate

and wasted no time making it clear to everyone in Seventeen that you two were together

you both were the couple that everyone would have assumed had been dating forever

you might as well have been called that "old married couple"

with your random tickle fights when everyone was trying to enjoy their movie

"Really?!?!? Do the two of you have to do that now?"

"Keep your hands to yourself, guys we get it, you're dating."

"Making skin ship 24/7 is NOT NECESSARY."

going shopping together not only for clothes but for random crap for your apartment or his dorm room

like that vase of fake orchids that now sits on top of your night stand

or this striped dress shirt you called him cute in

you also get asked a lot of relationship questions

since you’ve been dating the longest and you've been around for when all the others found their soulmates

“Do you know where I can get a stuffed animal bunny, y/n?” Joshua asks

“What place has the best flowers?” Vernon asks you

"I want to do something special, what's a good date idea?"

which low key triggers Jun 

“Ok, if any of them come to you for advice with how to deal with their soulmates, tell them to get lost because you’re too busy spending time with me and they need to get their own experience.” Jun says playfully with a pout while sitting next to you on the floor against the practice room’s mirrors

“They really shouldn’t ask me, I probably don’t know any better.” you say with a laugh

“Good, once they realize you’re bad at giving relationship advice, they’ll leave you alone that way I can spend more time with the most beautiful person in the whole universe.” he said cutely giving a small nod of his head

"Yah! My advice is solid!" you say playfully smacking his arm

"Is it really?" he says jokingly earning another smack on the arm from you

dates generally end up him ordering coffee from your café

and the two of you walking around taking pictures

you often have Jun model for you

even though you can't post or use any pictures of him

there was something about the way he held himself when posing in front of the camera

that you just had to capture it in all its glory

Jun himself is art 

he always convinces you to pose a few times too while he takes pictures

of course the selca master

the two of you take a lot of selcas together, you have a whole folder on your phone dedicated to selcas with him, and you're each other's home screens

"Sorry I can't use you for my lock screen, but the other members would  tease us forever, and I'd rather preserve your sanity."

lately though, all of Svt are really busy with their upcoming concerts and activities

and so you just low key try to stay out of their way

you'll be working at the cafe across the street from their studio and catch yourself staring up at the window where you know they're probably rehearsing

and perfect timing

Jun texts a simple "I miss you"

which nearly makes you spill the Americano you were making to smile down at your phone

before your manager asks what you're smiling at, is making coffee funny all of a sudden?

and not seeing Jun everyday was a bit sad

you haven't been feeling all that well either, though you're not sure if it's the stress of making coffee or trying to maintain your grades

since Jun is often busy rehearsing, you both stay up late face-timing

him telling you cute little stories about the members

and you telling him about your day

even if the both of you are exhausted

you don't mind staying up to talk even if the both of you sometimes fall asleep on the phone

you especially like the story of how they burst into the locked bathroom to wish him a happy birthday

but for a college photography major

you need your sleep

and the late night call sessions weren't helping your health

which is probably how you ended up in bed

with a horrible cold

and your brain pounding against your skull

"I welcome death" you groan taking another painkiller before flopping back onto your sofa bed in front of the TV

since money is tight and you like sleeping in the living room anyway

your bed is the sofa bed that folds outward

you fall asleep watching a drama and wake up to 267 messages

"Yah! Y/n! Your manager told me you took the day off? Are you sick?" Jun's contact picture and messages are the ones that stand out the most amongst others

"Noona, are you ok? Jun-hyung is freaking out."

"Yah, y/n pick up so Jun can stop annoying us all with his worrying."

"DID YOU DIE WHY AREN'T YOU PICKING UP?!?!?"

"I'm really sorry if we're being annoying but please come collect your boyfriend."

the struggles of being a soulmate to one of the members of svt?

all 13 of them will get your phone number, and rip if you don't have a good data plan 

you can't help but smile a bit to yourself as you scroll through all your notifications

when an incoming call from Jun lights up your cell

you reeeeeeeaally don't want him to worry, so you start panicking and debating whether to answer

he needs to focus on rehearsing and avoid worrying about you

but you pick up anyway

and hearing his voice was enough to stop the incessant headache thank the lord

"Jun?" curse you and your dead sounding voice, you regret answering and omg he's going to panic so much and

"I'M OUTSIDE YOUR APARTMENT COME OPEN THE DOOR"

"How'd you get here Jun you have rehearsals?!?"

"Your manager said you were sick and so naturally I went to buy you soup, rehearsals ended like ten minutes ago."

"Aw babe, that's nice but HOW DID YOU GET MY ADDRESS?!??"

he chuckles into the phone

"I didn't even ask your manager for it, he says he's seen me before and asked why I wasn't  home taking care of you and why I don't know your address yet even though we're married."

"HE WHAT?"

"He thought we were married." you can hear Jun dying from laughter

"Remind me not to murder my manager, cuz then I wouldn't get paid."

"I mean, I'm ok with him thinking that we're married."

"Yah! Wen Junhui!"

"It's cold hurry open the door!"

you drag yourself up with the five blankets wrapped around your shoulders not caring they drag on the floor to open the door

when you open the door, he stands there thinking you're just the cutest thing ever with your nose red and so many blankets wrapped around you

he's about to hug you

"STOP"

"What why?" he says giving you the cutest little frowny face

"I don't want you to get sick too!"

"I don't care let me take care of you." he pouts cutely, knowing if he acts cute enough he might just get through to you

not toooodaaaaaay

"Wen Junhui we all know you'll cry and blame me for weeks if you so much as sneeze once." you tease him trying to laugh before you sneeze into your elbow

"Ok, yes that might be true, but I went out to buy soup so I have the right to stay."

he looks at you standing barefoot by the door with several blankets wrapped around you, some of it dragging on the floor

holding up the soup, he gives you a cheeky wink

"The soup's hot but I'm hotter."

you groan, rolling your eyes, but smiling as you playfully throw a pillow at his face

"Hey that's violence!"

it misses, Jun's dodge could only be described as elegant

"Hey if I spill soup on the carpet, you have to clean it up not me."

"How is this supposed to make me feel better?" you tease him, sneezing again and settling back down on the sofa bed with your mountain of blankets

"No, clearly I came here to annoy you." he chuckles

you watch as he looks around your kitchen for a bowl

he pours out the soup and sets the steaming bowl at the dinner table

and before you can protest

he picks you up into his arms and carries you over to the table

then he sits down across from you with a smirk on his face noticing the gentle blush creeping up your face

"I know I've been busy lately, so I wanted to do something for you. And aren't boyfriends supposed to take care of their other half when they're sick?" he says hiding his shy smile behind his hand

you sit there, your heart racing from his words

"Hurry and eat! I'm not leaving until you finish."

what a liar

he didn't leave your side at all that night

insisting on carrying you back to bed and snuggling up against you despite your protests he might get sick

you both fell asleep like that

you wrapped around his arms, blankets piled around the two of you

until his phone blasts a loud alarm in the morning

Jun jumps up, almost falling off the sofa bed and you look at the time, before realizing

"JUN WERE YOU HERE ALL NIGHT?!?!"

"I FELL ASLEEP OK?"

"MAN THE OTHERS ARE GOING TO FREAK"

"AT LEAST YOU DON'T LIVE WITH THEM, I'M NEVER GOING TO HEAR THE END OF THIS."

his phone starts buzzing and when he answers the call you can hear people screaming even though Jun's phone isn't on speakers

"WEN JUNHUI I EXPECTED MORE FROM YOU"

"You're not as in innocent as we thought hyung!!!"

"I'll fight you boy, if you did anything to y/n, Junhui."

"WE DIDN'T DO ANYTHING." Jun yells back into the phone while trying not to laugh

you throw another pillow at him

"STOP SMILING IS THIS FUNNY?"

"WAS THAT Y/N PUT HER ON THE PHONE I WANT ANSWERS!"

"I'LL BE BACK IN A BIT!" Jun yells before hanging up and immediately throwing his phone onto the sofa bed

"Ok so on the bright side, doesn't look like they're angry at you, but on the not so bright side I'M DEAD."

"If it makes you feel any better, I don't feel too sick anymore."

"GREAT BUT NOW I FEEL SICK."

Jun laughs and grabs your arm dragging you into a hug

"You can't escape, you have to come explain things to them for me so I can walk around with my head intact pleeeeeeease????"

he wraps you up in his sweatshirt before the two of you head out to go back to the studio

walking into the studio, the both of you grip each other's hands tightly anticipating the worst

"What if they actually kill me, y/n, I've got a lot of things to say to you though." Jun says eyes wide and alert

"So do I Jun, but let's discuss this if we do make it out alive."

you both walk in to the practice room to twelve boys staring into your souls

RIP

an hour of screaming later

though honestly it was mostly them laughing and yelling and poking Jun every once in a while

they let the two of you leave, satisfied with their interrogation

"Jun-hyung, be good while we're gone"

"No anything 19+ in the practice room, we need it for rehearsals."

"Y/n is precious and innocent, if he tries anything, y/n, just give us a call."

"Oh my god just get out!" Jun says flustered and shooing them away

ever since that incident

Jun and you never tell Svt when the two of you are going on a date

"You sure you can't change your number, I'm ok with them not contacting you" Jun says over ramen at the convenience store on the corner looking dead serious

you stir your ramen and laugh

"No unfortunately, some of their soulmates know where I work, I'd never be able to escape."

"Aish, them convincing their soulmates to work on the side of evil."

"They're all really sweet and pretty though, some of us hang out as friends now because of all of you, should we form an idol group too?"

"When would you guys debut?" he laughs

"I was joking, all of us can only take so much Svt craziness you know."

"You love us though."

"True"

"And they're pretty, but you're the prettiest."

"Omo stop Junhui, you'll actually make me laugh."

"Last night, I had to convince Minghao not to tell them I was getting dinner with you because he caught me sneaking out, and now I have to do his laundry for a week."

"Thanks for your noble sacrifice."

"I know right, the things I do for you"

the two of you should be aspiring food critics

you've both been to almost every Chinese restaurant in Seoul

just because you know he likes spicy food

and try everything

him occasionally just staring at you

until you shove more food on his plate to get him to stop

you of course taking pictures of the food to post on SNS

yes, you're that person at restaurants

standing on chairs to get a good shot

with Jun standing behind you, arms ready to catch you if you lose balance

and as the both of you walk back to the studio after a dinner date

it starts raining

and you're silently cursing yourself for not checking the weather forecast when leaving your apartment earlier

but Jun magically pulls out the umbrella you gave him the night you met him and opens it above the both of you

"Oh my god, see, you knew exactly where it was and yet never gave it back."

"Mian, I had to hold onto it."

"Why?"

"It felt like a dream, meeting you. I had to make sure it wasn't a dream, so I kept it as physical proof."

you stop walking and face him as he stops too, still holding the umbrella above the both of you

"That's hecka cheesy." you say grinning

"Yea well, I'm naturally cheesy."

"No, you're cute and sweet and romantic."

"Nah, you're cute."

you both stand staring at each other a little longer, near the dance studio

"Well, I'll give it back tonight."

"Why? Don't need it anymore?"

"Nope, because now I know it wasn't a dream. And every time I need proof, I'll just look for you."

and he lifts your chin up and kisses you softly, the sound of rain pattering around you

it's not cold though, no, the warm feeling from the gentle kiss is enough to keep the cold rainy night's cold away from the both of you

you don't recall how long the both of you stay like that

but when you finally pull away

he gives you a cute smile while tilting his head

and gives you a wink

"OH MY FREAKING GOD FINALLY!"

shocked the two of you turn around to see Svt staring at the two of you from the front doors of the studio

"Children, it's 10 o'clock, way past curfew."

"Mingyu, you owe me ten bucks, I told you he'd kiss her first."

"Man, I really thought she would be the one to do it."

"YAH! YOU'RE ALL DEAD"

"Shi- run!"

and you laugh as Jun and you chase the scattering svt members out into the rain

all thoughts of getting soaked or catching a cold lost in your moment of happiness

The Seventeen Soulmate AU Series:

|| Seungcheol / Pt. 2 || Jeonghan / Pt. 2 || Joshua / Pt.2 || Jun / Pt.2 || Hoshi / Pt.2 || Wonwoo || Woozi / Pt.2 || Seokmin / Pt.2 || Mingyu / Pt.2 || Minghao || Seungkwan || Vernon / Pt.2 || Dino ||

MASTERLIST

[imagining-supernatural]

Avenging Angel: Part 27

Summary: You’ve spent the last five years on a dangerous mission to solve the crime that wrongly imprisoned your father. When the Winchesters find you half-frozen on the side of a mountain, they make it their own mission to save your life and make sure you stay alive. But after five years of uncovering horribly dark secrets, you’ve learned not to trust anyone. Especially people who seem like they have good intentions.

Word Count: 1526

Warnings: None

A/N: Links aren’t working on this part, so here’s the URL to the series Masterlist: https://imagining-supernatural.tumblr.com/post/158422944355/avenging-angel-masterlist

Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4 – Part 5 – Part 6 – Part 7 – Part 8 -- Part 9 -- Part 10 -- Part 11 -- Part 12 -- Part 13 -- Part 14 -- Part 15 -- Part 16 -- Part 17 -- Part 18 -- Part 19 -- Part 20 -- Part 21 -- Part 22 -- Part 23 -- Part 24 -- Part 25 -- Part 26

Celeste looked over the reports that came back on your blood tests to see if you had the genetic marker. You watched her carefully, looking for any sign.

Her eyebrows drew together and you saw her eyes skip back to the top of the page to look over the data again.

“What is it?” you asked with apprehension.

“It’s… It’s nothing I’ve ever seen before.” She tilted the papers so you could see them too. As she explained, she pointed to various diagrams and words that had no real meaning to you. “It looks like you have a partial marker here, but I’ve never seen someone have only part of that marker. And that, my dear, isn’t even the strangest part.”

“Do I wanna know what the strangest part is?”

She flipped through a few more papers. “Well, it doesn’t matter whether you wanna know or not because I don’t understand what is happening here. This right here shouldn’t look like that. And these numbers are far from the normal range.”

Celeste lifted her eyes to yours. “I think we should run another test. Just to make sure everything is kosher.”

Slowly, you took the papers from her hand and looked at the gibberish on the pages. “Okay. Maybe it was just a lab error or something.”

“I’m sure that’s what it was.”

After she drew more blood, you left to go check on your storage unit and wait for word on the results. Those results never came back, though, because Celeste called you a week later to tell you that her house with all of her tools had burnt down.

*****

*****

“Mr. Winchester here has led quite the exciting life,” Mr. Covington confirmed. “But I was disappointed that you hadn’t confided in him.”

“About what?” You hedged, wanting to know exactly what he was talking about before you gave anything away.

“The information I require from you.”

This didn’t make any sense. Dean knew about the research. He knew where it was, and he’d read through most of it. Therefore, George should know about it too, since he’d downloaded all of Dean’s memories. So why was he acting like he didn’t know?

Well, if he was gonna act ignorant, then you were too. And a quick glance at both Sam and Dean showed you that the three of you were on the same page.

“You require from me? I’m not just going to roll over and give it to you. I may not like my dad too much at the moment, but I still put him way above you and two guys I met just over a month ago. Why do you want the research anyway?”

Victoria sat forward. “Because he could twist it to make his pack practically invincible, isn’t that right? Once your father and I realized the full extent of what George and his family could use our research for, we stopped immediately."

"You're the reason my family got killed that night," George bit out angrily.

Victoria didn't back down. "Your family died that night because they got careless. Don't blame me for your incompetence."

"Unless you want me to tell Y/N exactly why you left, I suggest you shut up."

Cold, dense tension surrounded the booth so much so that even the waitress looked nervous to come take everyone's orders. As soon as she left, you picked the conversation right up again. "Why you really left?"

"He's just trying to bait you, honey."

"Don't call me honey. Why did you leave?"

"I thought you wanted to keep our relationship strictly professional," Victoria said coolly.

You crossed your arms and leaned forward. "And I thought you wanted to fix our relationship."

“I never said that,” she countered.

Her words hurt more than you could let her know. Sure, you didn’t want her to act like your mother right now. It would just make this meeting harder. But hearing that she didn’t want to fix what she did to you?

“Why are you here, then?” Sam asked in the silence you’d created.

Victoria’s eyes slid to the man she had caught her daughter in bed with and narrowed slightly. “Y/N is my daughter. We share blood. That makes her a part of my pack. I wanted to protect her from the Covingtons.”

“You didn’t seem too concerned for the past year,” you muttered insolently.

“You were untouchable for the past year. Especially after you moved in with Braxton.”

That was the flimsiest excuse you’d ever heard. You just spent five years of your life dedicated to getting your father out of prison, where he was relatively safe already. But your mom couldn’t be bothered to get you out of a dangerous situation when your life was at stake?

You trained your eyes on Dean, signaling for him to take over the conversation. If you opened your mouth right now, you were pretty sure that you would start yelling.

“Why are you gathering such a large pack?”

Victoria’s eyes slid toward George for a split second. “For protection.

“From the shifters?” Sam asked, having seen what you had.

“Don’t listen to her,” George cut in. “She’s not making a defensive plan. She’s the one who’s going on the offense. She’s the one you should be worried about.”

“You tried to kill me,” you reminded him.

“She hurt your friends,” he countered. “I wonder what is so important that she’s hiding that she would burn down the house of one of her old colleagues.”

It was always a bad sign when a Covington made sense. At least he was upfront about his intentions. Or, at least, more upfront than Victoria was being.

Your phone vibrated just then, and you glanced down to see that an unknown number was calling you. Probably some telemarketer. Ignoring the call, you turned your attention back at the werewolf and shifter sitting at the table.

“And you seem pretty intent on getting the attention off of you,” you pointed out to George. “I wonder why that is.”

“Self-preservation, dear. I’m sitting in a diner with two hunters. You never know what you say that could set their kind off. Keep that in mind if you foolishly decide to keep breaking bread with them.”

Keep breaking bread with them? Who said stuff like that anymore?

Your phone vibrated again with the same unknown number flashing across the screen. Slightly curious, but not curious enough to step away from this conversation, you ignored the call again. It wasn’t ten seconds later when a text popped up.

Unknown: Answer the phone. It’s important. –t9

As soon as you processed that the number was Braxton’s, a third call came through. Glancing at Sam, then Dean for a second, you excused yourself and headed outside to take the call.

“Braxton?”

“Look, I don’t have much time, Y/N. Have you talked to your dad yet?”

So that’s what this was about. “Brax, your dad is here right now. If he can’t get that research out of me, then there’s no way I’m giving it to you.”

“I’m not working with him.”

He said it so simply that you had no choice but to believe him.

“What?”

“Meet me at the Skyloft in Vegas next Thursday at eight. Alone. No Winchesters.”

“Why would I do that?” You were curious, but meeting Braxton in Vegas? That didn’t seem like a good idea if you didn’t have any backup. Especially since you didn’t know where he stood anymore. At least when you thought he worked with his dad, you had an idea of how to handle him. But now?

“I have answers.” He knew that would get you. “I’ll explain everything. Please, Y/N. It’s important.”

Braxton Covington begging to see you? Not many people could claim that. Still though, you weren’t stupid enough to just blindly walk into whatever he had planned. “Braxton, I don’t—“

“Do you want to meet your sister?”

Your mouth hung open in the middle of your sentence. Sister? You didn’t have a sister. You were an only child. Sure, you’d dreamed of having siblings, but that was never in the books for you.

“Skyloft. Thursday. Eight o’ clock. We’ll explain everything.”

Braxton hung up and you slowly brought your phone away from your ear, staring at the screen. We’ll explain everything. We. Him and your sister? Both of them would be in Vegas? Your eyes wandered back to the table and you could see your mother through the glass, glaring at something Dean was saying. You could ask her if she knew what he was talking about. But for some reason, you trusted Braxton to tell you the whole truth rather than the woman who gave birth to you.

Slowly, you started walking back inside, your mind still swirling with confusion. But one thing was clear to you.

“We’re not getting anywhere here. It’s a waste of our time.” Both Winchesters had questions in their eyes, but you just shook your head. You’d tell them once the three of you were alone. “George, we’ll leave you with the bill. I think you can afford that. And… Can I get my car back?”

Part 28 of Avenging Angel (Links aren’t working here, so here’s a link to Part 28: https://imagining-supernatural.tumblr.com/post/158339510805/avenging-angel-part-28 )

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[sheminecrafts]

The real risk of Facebook’s Libra coin is crooked developers

Everyone’s worried about Mark Zuckerberg controlling the next currency, but I’m more concerned about a crypto Cambridge Analytica.

Today Facebook announced Libra, its forthcoming stablecoin designed to let you shop and send money overseas with almost zero transaction fees. Immediately, critics started harping about the dangers of centralizing control of tomorrow’s money in the hands of a company with a poor track record of privacy and security.

Facebook anticipated this, though, and created a subsidiary called Calibra to run its crypto dealings and keep all transaction data separate from your social data. Facebook shares control of Libra with 27 other Libra Association founding members, and as many as 100 total when the token launches in the first half of 2020. Each member gets just one vote on the Libra council, so Facebook can’t hijack the token’s governance even though it invented it.

With privacy fears and centralized control issues at least somewhat addressed, there’s always the issue of security. Facebook naturally has a huge target on its back for hackers. Not just because Libra could hold so much value to steal, but because plenty of trolls would get off on screwing up Facebook’s currency. That’s why Facebook open-sourced the Libra Blockchain and is offering a prototype in a pre-launch testnet. This developer beta plus a bug bounty program run in partnership with HackerOne is meant to surface all the flaws and vulnerabilities before Libra goes live with real money connected.

Yet that leaves one giant vector for abuse of Libra: the developer platform.

Facebook announces Libra cryptocurrency: All you need to know

“Essential to the spirit of Libra . . . the Libra Blockchain will be open to everyone: any consumer, developer, or business can use the Libra network, build products on top of it, and add value through their services. Open access ensures low barriers to entry and innovation and encourages healthy competition that benefits consumers,” Facebook explained in its white paper and Libra launch documents. It’s even building a whole coding language called Move for making Libra apps.

Apparently Facebook has already forgotten how allowing anyone to build on the Facebook app platform and its low barriers to “innovation” are exactly what opened the door for Cambridge Analytica to hijack 87 million people’s personal data and use it for political ad targeting.

But in this case, it won’t be users’ interests and birthdays that get grabbed. It could be hundreds or thousands of dollars’ worth of Libra currency that’s stolen. A shady developer could build a wallet that just cleans out a user’s account or funnels their coins to the wrong recipient, mines their purchase history for marketing data or uses them to launder money. Digital risks become a lot less abstract when real-world assets are at stake.

In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook raced to lock down its app platform, restrict APIs, more heavily vet new developers and audit ones that look shady. So you’d imagine the Libra Association would be planning to thoroughly scrutinize any developer trying to build a Libra wallet, exchange or other related app, right? “There are no plans for the Libra Association to take a role in actively vetting [developers],” Calibra’s head of product Kevin Weil surprisingly told me. “The minute that you start limiting it is the minute you start walking back to the system you have today with a closed ecosystem and a smaller number of competitors, and you start to see fees rise.”

That translates to “the minute we start responsibly verifying Libra app developers, things start to get expensive, complicated or agitating to cryptocurrency purists. That might hurt growth and adoption.” You know what will hurt growth of Libra a lot worse? A sob story about some migrant family or a small business getting all their Libra stolen. And that blame is going to land squarely on Facebook, not some amorphous Libra Association.

Image via Getty Images / alashi

Inevitably, some unsavvy users won’t understand the difference between Facebook’s own wallet app Calibra and any other app built for the currency. “Libra is Facebook’s cryptocurrency. They wouldn’t let me get robbed,” some will surely say. And on Calibra they’d be right. It’s a custodial wallet that will refund you if your Libra are stolen and it offers 24/7 customer support via chat to help you regain access to your account.

Yet the Libra Blockchain itself is irreversible. Outside of custodial wallets like Calibra, there’s no getting your stolen or mis-sent money back. There’s likely no customer support. And there are plenty of crooked crypto developers happy to prey on the inexperienced. Indeed, $1.7 billion in cryptocurrency was stolen last year alone, according to CypherTrace via CNBC. “As with anything, there’s fraud and there are scams in the existing financial ecosystem today . . .  that’s going to be true of Libra too. There’s nothing special or magical that prevents that,” says Weil, who concluded “I think those pros massively outweigh the cons.”

Until now, the blockchain world was mostly inhabited by technologists, except for when skyrocketing values convinced average citizens to invest in Bitcoin just before prices crashed. Now Facebook wants to bring its family of apps’ 2.7 billion users into the world of cryptocurrency. That’s deeply worrisome.

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg arrives to testify during a Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee and Senate Judiciary Committee joint hearing about Facebook on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, April 10, 2018. (Photo: SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images)

Regulators are already bristling, but perhaps for the wrong reasons. Democrat Senator Sherrod Brown tweeted that “We cannot allow Facebook to run a risky new cryptocurrency out of a Swiss bank account without oversight.” And French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire told Europe 1 radio that Libra can’t be allowed to “become a sovereign currency.”

Most harshly, Rep. Maxine Waters issued a statement saying, “Given the company’s troubled past, I am requesting that Facebook agree to a moratorium on any movement forward on developing a cryptocurrency until Congress and regulators have the opportunity to examine these issues and take action.”

Yet Facebook has just one vote in controlling the currency, and the Libra Association preempted these criticisms, writing, “We welcome public inquiry and accountability. We are committed to a dialogue with regulators and policymakers. We share policymakers’ interest in the ongoing stability of national currencies.”

That’s why as lawmakers confer about how to regulate Libra, I hope they remember what triggered the last round of Facebook execs having to appear before Congress and Parliament. A totally open, unvetted Libra developer platform in the name of “innovation” over safety is a ticking time bomb. Governments should insist the Libra Association thoroughly audit developers and maintain the power to ban bad actors. In this strange new crypto world, the public can’t be expected to perfectly protect itself from Cambridge Analytica 2.$.

Get up to speed on Facebook’s Libra with this handy guide:

Facebook announces Libra cryptocurrency: All you need to know

from iraidajzsmmwtv http://bit.ly/2WMUW8m via IFTTT

[technicalsolutions88]

  Everyone’s worred about Mark Zuckerberg controlling the next currency, but I’m more concerned about a crypto Cambridge Analytica.

Today Facebook announced Libra, its forthcoming stablecoin designed to let you shop and send money overseas with almost zero transaction fees. Immediately, critics started harping about the dangers of centralizing control of tomorrow’s money in the hands of a company with a poor track record of privacy and security.

Facebook anticipated this, though, and created a subsidiary called Calibra to run its crypto dealings and keep all transaction data separate from your social data. Facebook shares control of Libra with 27 other Libra Association founding members and as many as 100 total when the token launches in the first half of 2020. Each member gets just one vote on the Libra council, so Facebook can’t hijack the token’s governance even though it invented it.

With privacy fears and centralized control issues at least somewhat addressed, there’s always the issue of security. Facebook naturally has a huge target on its back for hackers. Not just because Libra could hold so much value to steal, but because plenty of trolls would get off on screwing up Facebook’s currency. That’s why Facebook open sourced the Libra blockchain and is offering a prototype in a pre-launch testnet. This developer beta plus a bug bounty program run in partnership with HackerOne is meant to surface all the flaws and vulnerabilities before Libra goes live with real money connected.

Yet that leaves one giant vector for abuse of Libra: the developer platform.

Facebook announces Libra cryptocurrency: All you need to know

“Essential to the spirit of Libra . . . the Libra Blockchain will be open to everyone: any consumer, developer, or business can use the Libra network, build products on top of it, and add value through their services. Open access ensures low barriers to entry and innovation and encourages healthy competition that benefits consumers” Facebook explained in its white paper and Libra launch documents. It’s even building a whole coding language called Move for making Libra apps.

Apparently Facebook has already forgotten how allowing anyone to build on the Facebook app platform and its low barriers to ‘innovation’ are exactly what opened the door for Cambridge Analytica to hijack 87 million people’s personal data and use it for political ad targeting.

But in this case, it won’t be users’ interests and birthdays that get grabbed. It could be hundreds or thousands of dollars-worth of Libra currency that’s stolen. A shady developer could build a wallet that just cleans out a user’s account or funnels their coins to the wrong recipient, mines their purchase history for marketing data, or uses them to launder money. Digital risks become a lot less abstract when real-world assets are at stake.

In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook raced to lock down its app platform, restrict APIs, more heavily vet new developers, and audit ones that look shady. So you’d imagine the Libra Association would be planning to thoroughly scrutinize any developer trying to build a Libra wallet, exchange, or other related app, right? “There are no plans for the Libra association to take a role in actively vetting [developers]” Calibra’s head of product Kevin Weil surprisingly told me.  “The minute that you start limiting it is the minute you start walking back to the system you have today with a closed ecosystem and a smaller number of competitors, and you start to see fees rise.”

That translates to ‘the minute we start responsibly verifying Libra app developers, things start to get expensive, complicated, or agitating to cryptocurrency purists. That might hurt growth and adoption.’ You know what will hurt growth of Libra a lot worse? A sob story about some migrant family or a small business getting all their Libra stolen. And that blame is going to land squarely on Facebook, not some amorphous Libra Association.

Image via Getty Images / alashi

Inevitably, some unsavvy users won’t understand the difference between Facebook’s own wallet app Calibra and any other app built for the currency. ‘Libra is Facebook’s cryptocurrency. They wouldn’t let me get robbed’ some will surely say. And on Calibra they’d be right. It’s a custodial wallet that will refund you if your Libra are stolen and it offers 24/7 customer support via chat to help you regain access to your account.

Yet the Libra Blockchain itself is irreversible. Outside of custodial wallets like Calibra, there’s no getting your stolen or mis-sent money back. There’s likely no customer support. And there are plenty of crooked crypto developers happy to prey on the inexperienced. $1.7 billion in cryptocurrency was stolen last year alone, according to CypherTrace via CNBC. “As with anything, there’s fraud and there are scams in the existing financial ecosystem today . . .  that’s going to be true of Libra too. There’s nothing special or magical that prevents that” says Weil, who concluded “I think those pros massively outweigh the cons.”

Until now, the blockchain world was mostly inhabited by technologosts, except for when skyrocketing values convinced average citizens to invest in Bitcoin just before prices crashed. Now Facebook wants to bring its family of apps’ 2.7 billion users into the world of cryptocurrency. That’s deeply worrisome.

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg arrives to testify during a Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee and Senate Judiciary Committee joint hearing about Facebook on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, April 10, 2018. (Photo: SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images)

Regulators are already bristling, but perhaps for the wrong reasons. Democrat Senator Sherrod Brown tweeted that “We cannot allow Facebook to run a risky new cryptocurrency out of a Swiss bank account without oversight.” And French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire told Europe 1 radio that Libra can’t be allowed to “become a sovereign currency”.

Most harshly, Rep. Maxine Waters issued a statement saying “Given the company’s troubled past, I am requesting that Facebook agree to a moratorium on any movement forward on developing a cryptocurrency until Congress and regulators have the opportunity to examine these issues and take action.”

Yet Facebook has just one vote in controlling the currency, and the Libra Association preempted these criticisms, writing “We welcome public inquiry and accountability. We are committed to a dialogue with regulators and policymakers. We share policymakers’ interest in the ongoing stability of national currencies.”

That’s why as lawmakers confer about how to regulate Libra, I hope they remember what triggered the last round of Facebook execs having to appear before congress and parliament. A totally open, unvetted Libra developer platform in the name of “innovation” over safety is a ticking time bomb. Governments should insist the Libra Association thoroughly audit developers and maintain the power to ban bad actors. In this strange new crypto world, the public can’t be expected to perfectly protect itself from Cambridge Analytica 2.$

Get up to speed on Facebook’s Libra with this handy guide:

Facebook announces Libra cryptocurrency: All you need to know

from Social – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/31JgIIX Original Content From: https://techcrunch.com

[milaleah]

Untold Stories Of Election Day 2016

BELOW IS A RECAP OF ELECTION DAY/NIGHT FROM ESQUIRE MAGAZINE featuring ROGER STONE. 

**** Roger Stone, longtime Trump ally: She was just dead in the water. ****

On November 8, 2016, America’s chief storytellers—those within the bubbles of media and politics—lost the narrative they had controlled for decades. In a space of 24 hours, the concept of “conventional wisdom” seemed to vanish for good. How did this happen? What follows are over 40 brand new interviews and behind-the-scenes stories from deep inside The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, Fox News, and more—plus first-hand accounts from the campaigns, themselves. We’ve spent a year hearing the spin. Now it’s time for the truth.

THE RUN-UP

Steve Bannon, Trump campaign CEO: When I first came on the campaign, I said, “You have a hundred-percent chance of winning.” We just got to stick to that plan. Even with Billy Bush, I never wavered for a second.

Jim Margolis, Clinton campaign senior adviser: I am normally a glass-half-empty guy when it comes to expectations on election days. This was the first big election where I was absolutely certain we were going to win.

Dave Weigel, The Washington Post: I called Jeff Flake the Sunday before the election. I said, “I have one round of questions if Hillary wins, and one if Trump wins.” And he just started laughing, saying, “Why would you bother asking the second one?”

Rebecca Traister, New York magazine: We got up around 7 a.m., and there was an electric current running through my body.

Ana Marie Cox, Crooked Media, formerly of MTV: I was staying at my in-laws’ place in New York. They’re Trump supporters. They weren’t in town, but my father-in-law made a joking bet with me. He said, “The next time we see each other, there will be a President Trump.” I remember laughing at him.

Neal Brennan, comedian/writer: I was at SNL. Chappelle was like, “Dude, I feel like Trump’s gonna win.” I was like, “Dude, I’ll bet you a hundred thousand dollars he won’t win.” He did not take the bet, thankfully.

Sen. Tim Kaine, Democratic vice presidential candidate: I thought we would win, but I was more wary than many for the simple reason that the U.S. had never elected a woman president and still has a poor track record of electing women to federal office.

Ana Navarro, CNN commentator and Republican strategist: I schlepped my absentee ballot around with me for a month. It was getting pretty beat up inside my bag. I would open it up and look at it every now and then and say, “I’m not ready. I can’t bring myself to vote for Hillary Clinton. Please, God, let something happen that I don’t have to do this.”

Brian Fallon, Clinton campaign national press secretary: There had been a battleground tracking poll our team had done over the weekend that had us up 4 [points]. We were up in more than enough states to win, taking us over 270. The public polls all showed a similar outlook.

Zara Rahim, Clinton campaign national spokeswoman: We were waiting for the coronation. I was planning my Instagram caption.

Van Jones, CNN political commentator: The Democrats had this attitude, which I think is very unhealthy and unproductive, that any acknowledgement that Trump had a chance was somehow helping Trump, and that we all had to be on this one accord that it was impossible for him to win. I thought that was stupid. I’ve never seen that strategy work.

Matt Oczkowski, formerly of Cambridge Analytica (Trump campaign data firm): When you see outlets like the Huffington Post giving Trump a 1 percent probability of victory, which is not even physically possible, it’s just like, “Wow, people are going to miss this massively.”

Roger Stone, longtime Trump ally: She was just dead in the water.

Joel Benenson, Clinton campaign chief strategist: I go into the 10 o’clock call and we’re getting reports from the analytics people and the field people. And they finish, and whoever’s leading the call asks if there’s anything else. I said, “Well, yeah, I got a call 20 minutes ago from my daughter in Durham, North Carolina. People are standing on line and aren’t moving, and are now being told they need to vote with paper ballots.” To me, that was the first sign that something was amiss in our boiler room process. That’s essential information. We needed those reports so the legal team would activate. I was stunned, and actually quite nervous. I thought, “Do we even have what we need on the ground to manage election day?”

“I MEAN, IT LOOKED LIKE A LANDSLIDE”

5 p.m.

Nate Silver, FiveThirtyEight: When I was coming in on the train at 5 p.m., according to our model, there was one-in-three chance of a Clinton landslide, a one-in-three chance of a close Clinton win, and a one-in-three chance of a Trump win. I was mentally preparing myself for each of those outcomes.

David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker: I thought about, and actually wrote, an essay about “the first woman president,” and the historical background of it all. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the suffragettes, the relationship with Frederick Douglass…a historical essay, clearly written in a mood of “at long last” and, yes, celebration. The idea was to press “post” on that piece, along with many other pieces by my colleagues at The New Yorker, the instant Clinton’s victory was declared on TV.

Bret Baier, Fox News chief political anchor: We got the exit polls at 5 p.m. in a big office on the executive floor. Rupert Murdoch and all the staff were there. It looked like we were going to call the race for Hillary Clinton at 10:30 or 11 p.m.

Steve Bannon: The exit polls were horrific. It was brutal. I think we were close in Iowa and Ohio and everything else was just brutal. Losing everywhere. Florida, Pennsylvania. I mean, it looked like a landslide.

Ashley Parker, The Washington Post, formerly of The New York Times: The RNC thought they were going to lose. The Trump campaign supporters thought they were going to lose. They were rushing to get their side out of the blame game. I spent part of my day lining up interviews for later that night or the next morning to get their version of events.

Jerry Falwell Jr., president of Liberty University, Trump’s religious adviser: I called Sean Hannity and said, “I really think he’s going to win tonight.” Sean said, “Well, I’m glad you do, because the exit polls don’t look good.” I found out later that Trump was very pessimistic, too.

Steve Bannon: Jared [Kushner] and I were out on this balcony in Trump Tower. We looked at it on Jared’s iPhone. And the numbers were so bad that we regrouped inside. We look at each other and we go, “This can’t be right. It just can’t.” And Jared goes, “I got an idea, let’s call Drudge.” And Drudge says, “The corporate media—they’ve always been wrong the entire time—these numbers are wrong.”

Brian Fallon: I was hearing from my high school principal, people I hadn’t spoken to since college. Everybody is conveying thanks for taking on Trump. It was going to be a cathartic experience of him getting his comeuppance after months of representing something that was so egregious in the eyes of so many people.

Rebecca Traister: They were serving, like, $12 pulled pork sandwiches [at the Javits Center]. It was nuts, people were bouncing off the walls. Everyone genuinely believed she was going to win. I don’t know if it made me feel more confident or not.

Evan McMullin, Independent candidate: Our election night event was in Salt Lake City. I was drinking Diet Coke and eating hummus and olives.

Ana Marie Cox: At the MTV watch party, we had dancers and graffiti artists. There were people giving temporary tattoos. I remember my colleague Jamil Smith and I both bringing up at a meeting, “Hey guys, what if something goes wrong? What if this doesn’t go how we think it’s going to go?” And the answer from some MTV exec was, “We’ll pivot.”

Steve Bannon: Drudge snapped us out of it, saying, “You guys are a couple of jamokes. Wait until the second exit polls come out, or later.” We called the candidate and told him what the numbers were and what Drudge had said. And then we said, “Hey, ya know, we left it all on the field. Did everything we can do. Let’s just see how it turns out.”

Sen. Tim Kaine: Based on the returns from one bellwether Virginia county I know well, I realized that we would win Virginia by a significantly larger margin than President Obama four years earlier. This was a huge feeling given all the work that Anne and I have done for 30-plus years to help make Virginia more progressive. It struck me for the first time, “I will probably be vice president.” That feeling lasted about 90 minutes.

Ashley Parker: I walked over to the Hilton for election night. At some point they rolled in a cake that was like…a life-sized, very impressive rendering of Trump’s head.

Melissa Alt, cake artist: I got an order for a Hillary Clinton cake. So, I was like, “Okay, I’m going to make Donald Trump as well.” Just because that would generate a lot of interest. My manager, who has a friend who works for Donald Trump Jr., said, “Let’s contact them and see if they’re interested in having cake.” And obviously they said yes.

The Kid Mero, Desus & Mero: I’m surprised a stripper didn’t jump out of the cake.

Melissa Alt: I start getting phone calls of people saying, “This is TMZ, or Boston Globe, or People magazine. Do you know that your cake is trending all over the whole internet?”

Ashley Parker: I don’t know if I was ever allowed to eat it. It seemed fairly decorative.

Melissa Alt: Obviously, I wanted everyone to see it first and then eat it. That cake could probably feed about a hundred.

Gary Johnson, Libertarian candidate: I was taken aback by the fact that, at least at the start of the evening, all the networks were showing three names on the screen for the first time, meaning mine and Clinton and Trump. But no, I don’t remember the cake.

“I THINK I’M GONNA THROW UP”

8 p.m. – 1 a.m.

Maggie Haberman, The New York Times: When I went downstairs at 8:15, Hillary was up in Florida. When I came back upstairs, it had flipped. I got a sense the second I set foot in the newsroom that something was going on.

Van Jones: You got smoke coming out of every gear trying to figure out what the heck is happening out there. And you’ve got John King who had said, over and over, that there is no pathway for a Trump victory. Suddenly, that whole thing starts to come apart.

Roger Stone: I was committed to be an on-air anchor for InfoWars. I think I was on the air for seven hours straight.

Steve Bannon: We had taken over the fifth floor of Trump Tower, which had been Corey [Lewandowski]’s original headquarters. It was a concrete floor with no carpeting. They didn’t heat it. It had computers everywhere, guys are tracking everything, we had a chain of command. We called the fifth floor “the crack den.” It looked like a crack den. We put all the maps up and we started getting raw feeds from both our local guys and also the secretary of state of Florida. They were putting up their total vote counts. And [national field director] Bill Stepien was sitting there with all of our modeling. They were really focused on Florida—particularly the Broward and Miami-Dade counties. Also North Carolina was coming in. And obviously Ohio and those states were starting to come in. But the big one we were focused on was Florida. Because if we didn’t win Florida, it was not going to happen.

Omarosa Manigault, Trump campaign: If we believed what was on the television, we would have thought we lost. But looking at the numbers that were in front of us in the key battleground states, we were up…or we were neck and neck, with expectations of higher turnout and more enthusiasm. We were going off of our own internal data. What was being shown on CNN and MSNBC and some of these other networks was showing a stark contrast to what was in front of us.

Reza Aslan, author and religious scholar: I thought, “Oh my God, how terrible are we that it’s even this close?”

Brian Fallon: As I was walking off the risers [at Javits], Jen Epstein, a Bloomberg reporter, grabbed my arm and said, “Are you guys nervous about Florida?” I gave her some sort of verbal shrug. Right after that I called into the boiler room and asked for a gut check.

Van Jones: My phone was literally warm from the text messages coming in.

Zara Rahim: I had been going back and forth between the venue and backstage. My face was really tense. All of these reporters can read your energy and your face. You never want a reporter to tweet like, “Clinton campaign members are nervous.”

Jim Margolis: I finally called Steve Schale, who ran Florida for us in the Obama campaign. I said, “Steve, what’s going on here? Is this just a lack of information?” He said, “I think you’ve got a problem.”

Bret Baier: At 8:30 I turned to Chris Wallace, who was sitting next to us on the set, and said, “This does not look like it’s lining up.” We came back from commercial break and Chris said, “Donald Trump could be the next president of the United States.”

Jerry Falwell Jr.: My 17-year-old daughter, Caroline, had been following the election. It’s the first time she’s ever followed politics. And she was so nervous about the result that her stomach got upset. She told her brother, “I think I’m gonna throw up.” So he took off his Trump hat and she threw up in it, right next to Laura Ingraham.

Felix Biederman, Chapo Trap House: At that point the blue wall hadn’t come in yet, and that’s when the air in the room started to tighten. It was like, “Oh, fuck.” She can still do it, but everything that needs to happen for Trump is happening. What if what’s always happened with Hillary—they did all the work, they know everything, they’re super qualified—what if they didn’t do it? What if they fucked it up?

Ana Marie Cox: I did a couple of on-camera news hits where I was told, “What you need to do here is tell people not to panic.” Meanwhile, I was panicking.

David Remnick: Not only did I not have anything else ready, I don’t think our site had anything, or much of anything, ready in case Trump won. The mood in the offices, I would say, was frenetic.

Dave Weigel: I’m in the parking lot of the Scalise party. There are Republicans drinking, some celebrating, some not paying attention. My editor was calling to see when I would hand in my story. One, I’m on a minor story that’s falling apart, and two, I’m probably in the wrong place. Three, I need to reorder the story, and four, how much did I tell people confidently about the election that I was wrong about?

Ashley Parker: We started running up to one another like, “He’s gonna win, he’s gonna win. We know it now, it’s gonna happen.”

Desus Nice, Desus & Mero: It’s one thing to find out Donald Trump is president, but another to be on TV with people watching you watch Donald Trump become president.

Michael Barbaro, The New York Times: Carolyn Ryan, who was the politics editor, pulled me aside and said, “I need you to be involved in a ‘Trump Wins’ story.”

Matt Flegenheimer, The New York Times: Michael and I build this thing out together into a fully sweeping and historical news story. Maybe 1,500 words. We lock ourselves in this little glass office in the Times building and try to tune out the unstoppable din of the newsroom.

Steve Bannon: Jared came down and the candidate was upstairs. Then when word got out that Florida was competitive, that it was gonna be real, he came down to the 14th floor, the headquarters, where we had what we called the war room, which had multiple TVs running. And so what we did is we moved the data analysis thing that we had up to the 14th floor. And I went over with Stepien and the others and just stood next to the candidate and walked him through what was going on. And he finally took a seat. And we sat there and watched everything come in.

Jacob Soboroff, MSNBC correspondent: I went from this feeling of, “Oh my god, wow. I can’t believe it,” to, in a matter of seconds, “Oh, whoa, I can totally believe it.”

Steve Bannon: Stepien looked at it and said, “Our spread is too big, they can’t recover from this.” Miami-Dade and Broward were coming back really slow. They were clearly holding votes back, right? And then Stepien looked at me and said, “We have such a big lead now. They can’t steal it from us.

“I FELT SO ALONE, I KNEW IT WAS DONE”

Ashley Parker: I received a frantic call from Mike Barbaro, so I was racing around the ballroom getting quotes and feeding them back to the story.

Joshua Green, Bloomberg Businessweek correspondent and Devil’s Bargain author: At 9:05 p.m. I sent Bannon an email and said, “Holy shit, you guys are gonna win, aren’t you?” He sent a one word reply: “Yes.”

Dave Weigel: I had told my parents, who are Clinton supporters—my dad actually knew Clinton growing up as he’s from the same town in Illinois she is. I texted him early in the night saying, “These Florida counties seem to be going the way they usually go.” But once I realized there was no way for Clinton to win, I called them saying, “I’m sorry, this is what I do for a living and I was wrong.” My dad said, “Well, I’m still holding out hope.” And I said, “Don’t bother. Process this, and figure out what you’re going to do next, because it’s not going to happen.”

Trae Crowder, comedian and author: I felt very mad at liberals, you know, like my team. I was very upset with all of us for a lot of reasons.

Rebecca Traister: I felt so alone, I knew it was done. I was by myself on the floor. I started to cry.

David Remnick: That night I went to a friend’s election-night party. As Clinton’s numbers started to sour, I took my laptop out, got a chair, found a corner of that noisy room, and started thinking and writing. That was what turned out to be “An American Tragedy.”

Steve Bannon: As soon as we got Florida, I knew we were gonna win. Because Florida was such a massive lift for us, right? We were so outstaffed. But then we won Florida. Just made me know that the rest of the night was going to go well.

Maggie Haberman: I started texting some of the Trump people and one of them wrote back, “Say it with me: ‘President Trump. President Trump.’”

“CAN WE STAY IN THE U.S.?”

Zara Rahim: A member of senior leadership came, and I’ll never forget him looking at us and saying, essentially, “If she doesn’t win Michigan and Wisconsin, Donald Trump will be president-elect.” That was the first time I heard those words.

Jim Margolis: The tenor had changed completely. People were very nervous in the room, we’re all talking to each other. I’m going back and forth with [Clinton campaign manager] Robby Mook, who is over at the hotel. We’re on the phone with some of the states that are still out there, trying to understand what is taking place in Wisconsin and Michigan, because those numbers are softer than they ought to be. That’s beginning to weigh very heavily.

Rebecca Traister: I was thinking everything from, “I’m gonna have to rewrite my piece” to, “Can we stay in the U.S.?” I texted my husband, “Tell Rosie to go to bed. I don’t want her to watch.”

Roger Stone: The staff at InfoWars is largely people in their late 20s, early 30s, all of whom are interested in politics, but none of whom would consider themselves an expert. So they would look to me and say, “Well, are we going to win or not?” And I said, “Yes, we’re going to win.”

Matt Flegenheimer: Michael Grynbaum—who covers media—we had been following the Upshot percentages on the race. We were trying to get our heads around it. If it’s 75 percent, two coin flips, Donald Trump’s president. You had dynamic, shifting odds on the meter. Maybe it’s one coin flip. Maybe it’s half a coin flip. At some point, when I was in that little room with Michael Barbaro, Grynbaum comes in, takes a quarter, slams it down on the middle of the desk. Doesn’t say a word. Just walks out. I still have that quarter in my wallet.

David Remnick: Obviously, we were not going to press “post” until a result had been announced. So I made some revisions, came across a quotation from George Orwell, played around with various sentences, but all in a kind of strange state of focus that happens only once in a while.

Steve Bannon: We stayed there until I want to say about 11 o’clock, 11:30, after Florida got called. It looked like others were coming our way, that we were obviously gonna win. That’s when we went upstairs to the residence, to the penthouse. In hindsight, we still had two and a half hours to go, because they didn’t call it ‘til like 2:30 in the morning.

Symone Sanders, Strategist for Priorities USA: Omarosa called [into MTV] saying, “It’s a good night over here at Trump Tower.” She’s like, “I knew Donald Trump would be the president. I told everyone months ago. And the day is here!” I was just dumbfounded.

Neal Brennan: Slowly but surely it dawns on us. And I had said things like, “You know, I’ve heard that technically Republicans can never win another presidential election.” I’m just saying dumb shit, all things I’d read on Politico or fuckin’ The Atlantic or whatever. And then slowly but surely it happens. It’s like we…it…fucking Hillary lost.

Van Jones: I picked up my pen and I wrote down two words: “parents” and “whitelash.”

Jeffrey Lord, former CNN political commentator: People get so obsessed with the race thing.

Ana Marie Cox: I happen to be in recovery. I had a moment of, like, “Why the fuck not?” I went on Twitter and said, “To those of us ‘in the room’ together, he’s not worth it. Don’t drink over this.” And the response I got was amazing. I said, “I’m going to a meeting tomorrow. Everyone get through this 24 hours, get to a meeting, we’re not alone.”

Evan McMullin: I looked at my staffers. In my mind’s eye, they were all seated up against this wall. They were disappointed, they were afraid, all of that. I told them that I didn’t want to see any long faces. I told them to buck up. And it had no effect.

Van Jones: I literally said, “This was many things. This was a rebellion against elites, it was a complete reinvention of politics and polls. And it was also about race.” But the “whitelash” comment became this big, big thing. What’s interesting about it is, I’m black, my wife is not. She and I were talking about what was happening in Europe. And I said, “The backlash is coming here.” She said, “Yeah, it’ll be a whitelash here.” That was in the back of my mind. People think I made that term up on the spot. It’s very rare you can put two syllables together and make the entire case.

Jeffrey Lord: I thought he was wrong. While Van and I disagree, he’s a curious and sensible soul. I thought at some point he would come to a different conclusion.

“WHAT’S OBAMA THINKING?”

1 a.m. – 3 a.m.

Melissa Alt: People were texting me the whole night, just congratulations on the cake. That was funny because the night turned out so different than I expected. Who knew cake could generate so much hype?

Bret Baier: The futures markets had taken a nosedive, so we were covering that aspect of things. Fortunately, we had Maria Bartiromo on the set, who looked at the numbers and said, “Well, I would think this is a buying opportunity, because if you look at policy, tax cuts, regulation roll back, and everything else, that’s probably going to mean the market turning around when businesses weigh in.” That turned out to be pretty prescient.

Ana Marie Cox: A Muslim colleague of mine called his mother. She was worried he was going to be the victim of violence at any moment. A colleague who is gay and married was on the phone with her wife saying, “They’re not going to take this damn ring away from me.”

Van Jones: I had Muslim friends who came from countries like Somalia asking, “Should we leave the country tonight?” Because in their countries of origin, if a president that hostile takes power, they might start rounding up people in the morning.

David Remnick: Jelani [Cobb] and I spoke around midnight. We were both, let’s put it this way, in the New Yorker mode of radical understatement, disappointed. Jelani’s disappointment extended to his wondering whether he should actually leave the country. He wasn’t kidding around. I could tell that from his voice.

Gary Johnson: Well, I was really disappointed at the results. But what I came to very quickly was, as I’ve said many, many, many, times, if I wasn’t elected president, I was going to ski a hundred-plus days and I was also going to ride the Continental Divide bike race.

Jill Stein, Green Party candidate: Did I have remorse about running? Absolutely not. I have remorse about the misery people are experiencing under Democrats and Republicans both.

Neal Brennan: That’s sketch-writing night at SNL. So all the writers are crestfallen, and it was up to us to write comedy for that Saturday. Me and [Colin] Jost wrote the sketch where Dave [Chappelle] is watching the election, and Chris Rock shows up and everyone’s bawling. It was based on the experience of being in Jost’s office and me saying incredibly stupid shit as reality crumbled.

Ashley Nicole Black, writer/correspondent, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee: We all went into a room and sat in silence for at least five minutes. The conversation wasn’t like, “What is it going to be in the country?” It was like, okay, “We’re at work. We have a show tomorrow. What are we going to do?” And Sam goes, “I think this is my fault.” It’s Sam’s first time voting in an American election, and she told us how the first time she was on Law & Order, Law & Order got canceled the next day. And she got interviewed by Playboy, and the next day they announced they were no longer doing nudity. And now she voted for the first time and broke America. We all laughed, it broke the tension in the room. Then we started writing Act 1 with that idea in mind.

Rep. Adam Schiff, congressman, 28th District of California: I was at a victory party for my campaign at the Burbank Bar and Grill. And it was the most somber and depressing victory party I’d ever had.

Brian Fallon: Eventually there were conversations around the awkwardness. There started to be this pressure to concede even before AP called the race.

Nate Silver: I felt like if the roles had been reversed, and if Clinton had been winning all of these states, that they wouldn’t have been so slow to call it. In some ways, the slowness to call it reflected the stubbornness the media had the whole time about realizing that, actually, it was a pretty competitive election.

Jerry Falwell Jr.: The crowd at the Trump party was really aggravated because Megyn Kelly didn’t want to call it. She was so hopeful that Trump would lose. She let hours go by. Finally, the crowd started chanting, “Call it! Call it! Call it!”

Bret Baier: There was a growing group of people who had gathered outside Fox News who obviously were Trump supporters. They were going crazy.

Zara Rahim: There was a massive garage behind the Javits center. John Podesta stood up on a box and told us, “We will have more information for you soon,” which is the most frustrating thing to hear in that moment. Everybody was in this big circle of sadness and nobody knew what to do. Leadership didn’t know what to do. We were all at a loss.

Jon Favreau, Crooked Media, former Obama speechwriter: We were in a constant text chain with our buddies in the White House, asking, “What’s going on? What’s the boss thinking? What’s Obama thinking?” And finally they told us, “Oh, he just talked to her and he thinks she should concede and she agrees. She’s just waiting for the right moment.”

Jerry Falwell Jr.: I called the president-elect. He said, “Well, why don’t you come over to Trump Tower, you and your family, and watch the returns with us?” And I said, “I don’t want to do that, because by the time I get over there, you’re going to be coming over here to do your victory speech.” And he said, “All right, whatever.”

Matt Paul, chief of staff to VP candidate Tim Kaine: Senator Kaine, when the news became very grim…the senator actually went to bed. Nothing was going to happen that night. He had to put together a different type of speech.

Brian Fallon: I was on the phone with the decision desk people at AP, trying to glean a sense of their confidence about the numbers in states like Wisconsin and Michigan. I knew that when those got called, it was ball game, so I was trying to impart to them what we were hearing about what precincts might still be outstanding. We were also trying to gauge if they were about to call it, if and when she should speak.

Michael Barbaro: We really labored over a few paragraphs and a few words, just capturing the enormity of a Trump victory. That it wasn’t expected. The messages the campaign had run on, what they would suddenly mean for the country. And it was a real challenge to convey all of the things he had said and done in the campaign, and all the controversies that he had sparked and put those into the context of a traditional, sweeping, “This person has just been elected president of the United States,” New York Times story.

Matt Flegenheimer: I think after 1 o’clock we had our final version and we were ready to press the button on “Trump Just Won.” It did make the last edition of the print paper.

Michael Barbaro: There was so much going on that night and so many last-minute changes and such a hectic schedule that the story was published with the wrong bylines. The historic front page, “Trump Triumphs,” ran in the paper with the wrong bylines.

Jelani Cobb, The New Yorker: I saw the New York Times headline and I was very discomforted by it. For one, I knew that I had a child on the way.

Maggie Haberman: I was supposed to go on a CNN panel at 2 a.m., they were doing a very early version of New Day. I got stuck because of a deadline anyway, so it worked out I couldn’t make it, which I felt bad about. In reality, I wasn’t prepared to talk about it. I couldn’t really understand what had happened. And I think images of gobsmacked reporters probably wouldn’t have helped.

Michael Barbaro: We’re all sitting around and we’re all doing what journalists do after a big story, which is talk about it endlessly. I don’t think any of us wanted to go home. I don’t think any of us wanted to go off into the private space of figuring out what this all means. This gravitational pull kept us there much later than we needed to be.

Reza Aslan: My wife stayed up and I went to sleep, then she woke me up around 1 or 2 in the morning bawling and told me that it was over. My poor, sweet wife. She wanted to hug and kiss me but I went into a panic attack and couldn’t breathe.

David Remnick: We agreed that night, and we agree today, that the Trump presidency is an emergency. And in an emergency, you’ve got a purpose, a job to do, and ours is to put pressure on power. That’s always the highest calling of journalism, but never more so than when power is a constant threat to the country and in radical opposition to its values and its highest sense of itself.

Brian Fallon: We had this issue where the Javits Center needed us out by 3 a.m. The decision was made that someone had to come out and address the crowd.

Zara Rahim: There were die-hard Hillary supporters that were like, “We’re not going.” Folks who were sobbing and literally couldn’t move because they were so distraught. I remember pieces of memorabilia on the floor, little Hillary pins and “I believe that she will win” placards.

Rebecca Traister: People were throwing up. People were on the floor crying.

Steve Bannon: We had an agreement with these guys. Robby Mook had sent this email saying, you know, “When AP calls it, we’ll call and congratulate you right away.” Because they were expecting Trump to keep saying, “It’s rigged, it’s rigged.” So Robby Mook sent a thing over which I’m sure he regrets. [Laughs]. He sent an email to us, he said, 15 minutes after AP calls it, they would expect to hear from us. If they hadn’t heard from us, she would get up to give a victory speech. I think AP called it right when we left.

Roger Stone: We figured they had her in a straitjacket by then. Or that she was throwing things and cursing.

“LET’S GO ONSTAGE AND GET THIS DONE”

Bret Baier: It was around 2:30 in the morning, and I said, “Donald Trump will be the 45th president of the United States.” This whiz-bang graphic with all of these firework animations flashed across the screen with the words Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States. Just seeing that, everybody on the set was silent for a little bit, as the whole thing was being digested.

Stephen L. Miller, conservative blogger: The Onion headline kept flashing through my head really heavy. During the primaries they had the Trump story, “You really want to see how far this goes, don’t you America?”

Jorge Ramos, Univision news anchor: When he won, I said it as if I was reporting a football score or a soccer match. “Donald Trump is going to be the next president of the United States.” No emotion. Just the facts. That’s what the audience demanded. That is a sign of respect. As a journalist you have to report reality as it is, not as you wish it would be. That’s exactly what I was doing.

Jeffrey Lord: It was an amazing moment. Anderson [Cooper] came over to me and, in his classy fashion, shook my hand and said, “Congratulations, you were right.”

Steve Bannon: When it was called, he was actually upstairs in the kitchen. He has a small kitchen with a television. When he heard it was being called by AP, I shook his hand and said, “Congratulations, Mr. President.” So we kinda laughed. There were no big hugs or anything. Nothing crazy. He’s not a guy who gets overly excited. He’s very controlled. People around him are very controlled. We were obviously very happy and ecstatic. But it’s not a bunch of jumping around, high-fiving, anything like that.

Matt Oczkowski: It almost felt like a videogame, like you were playing something and won. You’re like, “Wow, this is the presidency of the United States.”

Roger Stone: The champagne tasted great. This was the culmination of a dream that I’d had since 1988.

Jim Margolis: I was on with Robby [Mook], who was in the room with her when she did the concession call to Trump. It was surreal. It was beyond my imagination that we would be in this position with this person being elected president.

Steve Bannon: It only took us 10 minutes to get there, it was right down the street. When we got there, we were in this weird holding stage, kind of off to the side. Very crammed. She called the president on his phone. Or it might have been Huma Abedin called Kellyanne [Conway] and then she hands her phone off to the president, and then Secretary Clinton was on there, you know, “Hey, Donald, congratulations, hard-fought win.” Two or three minutes. Then we looked at each other and said, “Let’s go onstage and get this done.”

Roger Stone: He looked surprised at the fact that he’d won. Which is surprising only because he pretty consistently thought he would win. Not unhappy, but rather, shocked.

Neal Brennan: I thought it was so fucking weird that he was like, “Is Jim here? Come on up here.” Like he was emceeing a sports banquet. But it was good that he set the tone right there. So long, context. So long, history.

Joshua Green: I thought he had actually made at least a cursory effort to try to unite the country by reaching out to Hillary Clinton voters. That sentiment probably evaporated before the sun rose the next day. At least on election night he said something approximating what you would expect a normal presidential victor to say in a moment like that, to try and bring the country together.

Symone Sanders: I still couldn’t believe it was happening. When he talked about us coming together and healing for the country, I wanted to throw up in my mouth.

“YOU’RE FUCKED”

3 a.m. – 7 a.m.

Maggie Haberman: I was getting bewildered texts from my child who couldn’t sleep, asking me what happened. I think this election was really difficult for kids to process.

Matt Paul: It was fucking terrible. We had these hastily organized calls every 10 minutes to determine what was going to happen the next morning. There was no advanced plan. Where were we going to do this massive global television event? How were we going to get people in the room? Who was going to say what in what order? That happened between 4 in the morning and when she spoke.

Rebecca Traister: In the cab home, the cabbie had on the news, that’s when I heard his acceptance speech, and I said, “Can you turn it off?” I couldn’t hear his voice. I was like, “I can’t listen to his voice for the next four years.”

Desus Nice: I went home, and it was like when your team loses and you watch it on SportsCenter over and over and over. I turned on MSNBC, and Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow were asking, “How’d you get this wrong? How did Nate Silver get this wrong? What did Hillary do?” I kept turning to Fox News and seeing them gloat and the balloons falling. I think I stayed up until three in the morning just drinking and watching.

The Kid Mero: I went home and smoked myself to sleep. I was like, “This sucks.”

Ashley Nicole Black: I took a shower, and then as soon as water hit me, I started bawling. I didn’t really have any feelings until that moment.

Ashley Parker: Times Square felt like a zombie-apocalypse movie. There was no one there. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I walked from the ballroom to the newsroom. They were like, “Go home, get some sleep, you’ll need it.” I walked back to my hotel. I couldn’t sleep. I watched cable news and then fell asleep.

Van Jones: I was walking out the building. Your thumb just kind of automatically switches over to Twitter. I saw that my name was trending worldwide. And I was like, “Whoa, that’s weird.”

Brian Fallon: I stayed in Brooklyn throughout the campaign, but that night I got a hotel in Midtown, close to the Peninsula. I actually walked past his hotel. I saw all the red hats that were still milling about outside of his victory party. It was pretty surreal.

Ashley Nicole Black: I looked at myself—I’m going to cry even saying this right now—I looked at myself in the mirror, and in that moment, I looked like my grandmother. The first thought I had was that I was glad that she wasn’t alive to see that. Then I felt so guilty because of course nothing would ever make me glad my grandmother is not alive. I love her so much, and I wish she was here. But she died when Obama was president, with that hope that the world had moved forward, and black people had moved forward. And she didn’t see the huge backlash that came after. In that moment, I was very grateful, and then guilty, and then I went to bed.

Jorge Ramos: I’ve been to wars, I’ve covered the most difficult situations in Latin America. But I needed to digest and to understand what had happened. I came home very late. I turned on the news. I had comfort food—cookies and chocolate milk—the same thing I used to have as a kid in Mexico City. After that, I realized that I had been preparing all my life for this moment. Once I digested what had happened with Trump and had a plan, which was to resist and report and not be neutral, then I was able to go to bed.

Rebecca Traister: I got back to Park Slope, I went to check on the girls. When I went to say goodnight, I looked at Rosie, and I had this conscious thought that this is the day that will divide our experience of what is possible. This is the day where a limitation is reinforced for her.

Michael Barbaro: I went home and woke up my husband, I think it was 4 or 5 in the morning, and asked him what the next steps should be journalistically. Should I move to Washington? Should I change jobs? It was pretty disorienting.

Maggie Haberman: One Trump supporter sent me a message saying, “You’re fucked.” [Laughs] If you use that, please recall me laughing about it. It was really something.

Van Jones: I got to my apartment and put my head down. I woke up like three, four hours later. And in my mind I thought, it was a dream. Just for a split second. I was still fully clothed. I had makeup all over my pillow. And I was like, “Shit.”

“IT WAS ONE OF THE BEST SPEECHES SHE’S EVER GIVEN”

7 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.

Jon Favreau: It felt like when you wake up after someone close to you passes away. Not nearly as bad, obviously, but that same feeling where you think, for like five seconds, you’re okay, maybe it’s a normal morning, and then it hits you what happened.

Roger Stone: I mean, we were walkin’ on clouds. We were still in the halo of the whole thing. I was very pleased.

Jerry Falwell Jr.: The feeling afterward was relief. I had worked so hard to help him. I’d risked so much and went so far out on a limb. Everybody thought I was crazy. It was a renewed hope for the future of the country, and a little bit of fear that I was going to be chosen to serve in the administration, because I didn’t want to.

Steve Bannon: I had my whole family that had come up to the victory party and I hadn’t seen anybody, so I went home and grabbed a shower, just like the night before, got another hour of sleep, and I was with Jared. And I think we were with Trump at like 8 in the morning. So it was just like the exact same thing as the day before. The day before I felt we were gonna win the presidency, and the next day we had won the presidency. It was odd, there was never any big insurgent feeling or anything like that. It played out how I thought it would play out. I didn’t have much doubt the first day of the campaign, didn’t really have much doubt on Billy Bush weekend. He was connecting. He had a powerful message.

Reza Aslan: I remember thinking, as clear as day, this is who we are. This is what we deserve.

Shani O. Hilton, U.S. news editor, BuzzFeed News: You get on the train from Brooklyn. It’s silent. And not in the normal way of people not talking to each other. It felt like an observable silence. I saw at least three people sitting by themselves, just weeping silently.

Melissa Alt: The next day my manager took the cake back to Trump Tower because they didn’t cut it at election night. Donald Trump Jr. told my friend that it was delicious.

Matt Paul: I remember rolling up in the motorcade and seeing some of our staff and organizers couldn’t get in. A reporter or cameraperson who was familiar to me said, “Can I sneak in with you?” I looked at that person, sort of stunned, and said, “Fuck no.” Then I realized I shouldn’t have said that. It was just a visceral, gut reaction to seeing some of our staff that couldn’t get in who had killed themselves for two years.

Nate Silver: If you read FiveThirtyEight throughout the election and listened to our arguments with other journalists and reporters, then you would’ve been much better prepared and much less surprised by the outcome.

The Kid Mero: We very quickly became familiar with the term “economic anxiety.”

Reza Aslan: You take your kids to school, you go to the store, you go to the post office, you’re looking around, and you’re thinking, “These people hate me.”

Jelani Cobb: I went to the airport the next morning for a 7 a.m. flight. There’s an African-American gentleman, maybe in his 60s, working at the check-in counter. He starts talking about how disastrous and dangerous this moment’s going to be. And he’s seen history in the South and thinking that we might be headed back toward the things he thought were in the past.

Dave Weigel: I was connecting through the Atlanta airport. I looked around and thought, well, for eight years, I didn’t really think about who voted for who. But as a white dude with a mustache, fairly bloated by the campaign, most of the people who look like me voted for this guy who, as far as they know, is a bigot. I remember feeling that this divider had come down, this new intensity of feeling about everybody I saw.

Van Jones: The next day, my commentary had become this sort-of viral sensation. Fox News is mad at me for saying “whitelash.” Liberals are treating me as some kind of hero. And literally, for the next two weeks, I didn’t have to pay for anything in any establishment in D.C. or New York. Not one meal. Not one cab. Uber people would turn the thing off and just drive me around for free.

Joshua Green: Bannon called me. He said, “You recognize what happened?” I’m like, “What the fuck are you talking about?” He goes, “You guys,” meaning you on the left, “you fell into the same trap as conservatives in the ‘90s…you were so whipped up in your own self-righteousness about how Americans could never vote for Trump that you were blinded to what was happening.” He was right.

Matt Paul: There were five or six of us standing in a hold room. One of Hillary’s brothers was there with his wife. A couple of the president’s people. Myself. A couple of campaign photographers. President Clinton walked in. It was very tough. Secretary Clinton walked in and was strong and composed. I stood there in shock at how put together and strong she was.

Rebecca Traister: As someone who covered her in 2008 and watched her struggle with speechgiving, it was one of the best speeches she’s ever given.

Jim Margolis: Everybody was basically in tears. Huma was in front of me. Jake [Sullivan] was on one side. It was one of those incredible scenes. Nobody had had any sleep.

Steve Bannon: Never watched it. Couldn’t care less. Her, Podesta, all of it. I thought they were overrated. I thought they were—they’re a media creation. People say how genius they were, how brilliant they were. Look, I’d never been on a campaign in my life. But I can understand math. Just looking at where it was gonna come down to. Morning Joe tells me they’re so brilliant every day. Why are they not getting some pretty fundamental stuff here? But no, I had no interest in seeing her concession speech. I have no interest in a damn thing with their campaign because I don’t think they knew what they were doing. I only have interest in what we did. Which was just, focus, focus, focus.

Rep. Adam Schiff: My staff both in California and in D.C. were absolutely devastated. People would come up to me, constituents and others, with tears in their eyes. And the astounding thing is, here we are now. People continue to come up to me with tears in their eyes about what he’s doing. I’ve never seen people have a visceral reaction over an election and be so deeply alarmed at what’s happening to the country.

Charles P. Pierce, Esquire writer at large: On the Sunday before the election, I drove out from Philadelphia to Gettysburg. Once I got out of the sprawling Philadelphia exurbs, I started to see improvised signs. There were several of those small portable marquees that you see outside clam shacks and chili parlors. I saw a huge piece of plywood nailed to a tree outside a motorcycle repair shop. I saw an entire barn painted red, white, and blue. “Trump,” it said, on the side of the barn. “Make America Great Again.” And I could see that barn, out in the field, in my mind’s eye, as Hillary Rodham Clinton gave her belated concession speech. And when she talked about making the American Dream available to everyone, I thought, damn, somebody had to want it bad to paint a whole barn just to argue about that.

Roger Stone: Trump is a winner. He’s a very confident, upbeat guy. That’s just his style. He thought all along that he would win. There’s no doubt that the Billy Bush thing shook him a little bit, but it ended up not being determinative.

Jerry Falwell Jr.: We had traveled on the plane with him during the campaign. He went and got the Wendy’s cheeseburgers and the fries, put them out on the table for us. I just think he’s a people’s president. I think that’s something we’ve not had in a real long time.

Gary Johnson: Well for me, just speaking personally, I do not aspire to be president of the United States anymore. Why would anybody want to be president of the United States now that Donald Trump’s been president of the United States?

##########

from Roger Stone – Stone Cold Truth https://stonecoldtruth.com/untold-stories-of-election-day-2016/ from Roger Stone https://rogerstone12.tumblr.com/post/167439001643

[rogerstone12]

Untold Stories Of Election Day 2016

BELOW IS A RECAP OF ELECTION DAY/NIGHT FROM ESQUIRE MAGAZINE featuring ROGER STONE. 

**** Roger Stone, longtime Trump ally: She was just dead in the water. ****

  On November 8, 2016, America’s chief storytellers—those within the bubbles of media and politics—lost the narrative they had controlled for decades. In a space of 24 hours, the concept of “conventional wisdom” seemed to vanish for good. How did this happen? What follows are over 40 brand new interviews and behind-the-scenes stories from deep inside The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, Fox News, and more—plus first-hand accounts from the campaigns, themselves. We’ve spent a year hearing the spin. Now it’s time for the truth.

THE RUN-UP

Steve Bannon, Trump campaign CEO: When I first came on the campaign, I said, “You have a hundred-percent chance of winning.” We just got to stick to that plan. Even with Billy Bush, I never wavered for a second.

Jim Margolis, Clinton campaign senior adviser: I am normally a glass-half-empty guy when it comes to expectations on election days. This was the first big election where I was absolutely certain we were going to win.

Dave Weigel, The Washington Post: I called Jeff Flake the Sunday before the election. I said, “I have one round of questions if Hillary wins, and one if Trump wins.” And he just started laughing, saying, “Why would you bother asking the second one?”

Rebecca Traister, New York magazine: We got up around 7 a.m., and there was an electric current running through my body.

Ana Marie Cox, Crooked Media, formerly of MTV: I was staying at my in-laws’ place in New York. They’re Trump supporters. They weren’t in town, but my father-in-law made a joking bet with me. He said, “The next time we see each other, there will be a President Trump.” I remember laughing at him.

Neal Brennan, comedian/writer: I was at SNL. Chappelle was like, “Dude, I feel like Trump’s gonna win.” I was like, “Dude, I’ll bet you a hundred thousand dollars he won’t win.” He did not take the bet, thankfully.

Sen. Tim Kaine, Democratic vice presidential candidate: I thought we would win, but I was more wary than many for the simple reason that the U.S. had never elected a woman president and still has a poor track record of electing women to federal office.

Ana Navarro, CNN commentator and Republican strategist: I schlepped my absentee ballot around with me for a month. It was getting pretty beat up inside my bag. I would open it up and look at it every now and then and say, “I’m not ready. I can’t bring myself to vote for Hillary Clinton. Please, God, let something happen that I don’t have to do this.”

Brian Fallon, Clinton campaign national press secretary: There had been a battleground tracking poll our team had done over the weekend that had us up 4 [points]. We were up in more than enough states to win, taking us over 270. The public polls all showed a similar outlook.

Zara Rahim, Clinton campaign national spokeswoman: We were waiting for the coronation. I was planning my Instagram caption.

Van Jones, CNN political commentator: The Democrats had this attitude, which I think is very unhealthy and unproductive, that any acknowledgement that Trump had a chance was somehow helping Trump, and that we all had to be on this one accord that it was impossible for him to win. I thought that was stupid. I’ve never seen that strategy work.

Matt Oczkowski, formerly of Cambridge Analytica (Trump campaign data firm): When you see outlets like the Huffington Post giving Trump a 1 percent probability of victory, which is not even physically possible, it’s just like, “Wow, people are going to miss this massively.”

Roger Stone, longtime Trump ally: She was just dead in the water.

Joel Benenson, Clinton campaign chief strategist: I go into the 10 o’clock call and we’re getting reports from the analytics people and the field people. And they finish, and whoever’s leading the call asks if there’s anything else. I said, “Well, yeah, I got a call 20 minutes ago from my daughter in Durham, North Carolina. People are standing on line and aren’t moving, and are now being told they need to vote with paper ballots.” To me, that was the first sign that something was amiss in our boiler room process. That’s essential information. We needed those reports so the legal team would activate. I was stunned, and actually quite nervous. I thought, “Do we even have what we need on the ground to manage election day?”

“I MEAN, IT LOOKED LIKE A LANDSLIDE”

5 p.m.

Nate Silver, FiveThirtyEight: When I was coming in on the train at 5 p.m., according to our model, there was one-in-three chance of a Clinton landslide, a one-in-three chance of a close Clinton win, and a one-in-three chance of a Trump win. I was mentally preparing myself for each of those outcomes.

David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker: I thought about, and actually wrote, an essay about “the first woman president,” and the historical background of it all. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the suffragettes, the relationship with Frederick Douglass…a historical essay, clearly written in a mood of “at long last” and, yes, celebration. The idea was to press “post” on that piece, along with many other pieces by my colleagues at The New Yorker, the instant Clinton’s victory was declared on TV.

Bret Baier, Fox News chief political anchor: We got the exit polls at 5 p.m. in a big office on the executive floor. Rupert Murdoch and all the staff were there. It looked like we were going to call the race for Hillary Clinton at 10:30 or 11 p.m.

Steve Bannon: The exit polls were horrific. It was brutal. I think we were close in Iowa and Ohio and everything else was just brutal. Losing everywhere. Florida, Pennsylvania. I mean, it looked like a landslide.

Ashley Parker, The Washington Post, formerly of The New York Times: The RNC thought they were going to lose. The Trump campaign supporters thought they were going to lose. They were rushing to get their side out of the blame game. I spent part of my day lining up interviews for later that night or the next morning to get their version of events.

Jerry Falwell Jr., president of Liberty University, Trump’s religious adviser: I called Sean Hannity and said, “I really think he’s going to win tonight.” Sean said, “Well, I’m glad you do, because the exit polls don’t look good.” I found out later that Trump was very pessimistic, too.

Steve Bannon: Jared [Kushner] and I were out on this balcony in Trump Tower. We looked at it on Jared’s iPhone. And the numbers were so bad that we regrouped inside. We look at each other and we go, “This can’t be right. It just can’t.” And Jared goes, “I got an idea, let’s call Drudge.” And Drudge says, “The corporate media—they’ve always been wrong the entire time—these numbers are wrong.”

Brian Fallon: I was hearing from my high school principal, people I hadn’t spoken to since college. Everybody is conveying thanks for taking on Trump. It was going to be a cathartic experience of him getting his comeuppance after months of representing something that was so egregious in the eyes of so many people.

Rebecca Traister: They were serving, like, $12 pulled pork sandwiches [at the Javits Center]. It was nuts, people were bouncing off the walls. Everyone genuinely believed she was going to win. I don’t know if it made me feel more confident or not.

Evan McMullin, Independent candidate: Our election night event was in Salt Lake City. I was drinking Diet Coke and eating hummus and olives.

Ana Marie Cox: At the MTV watch party, we had dancers and graffiti artists. There were people giving temporary tattoos. I remember my colleague Jamil Smith and I both bringing up at a meeting, “Hey guys, what if something goes wrong? What if this doesn’t go how we think it’s going to go?” And the answer from some MTV exec was, “We’ll pivot.”

Steve Bannon: Drudge snapped us out of it, saying, “You guys are a couple of jamokes. Wait until the second exit polls come out, or later.” We called the candidate and told him what the numbers were and what Drudge had said. And then we said, “Hey, ya know, we left it all on the field. Did everything we can do. Let’s just see how it turns out.”

Sen. Tim Kaine: Based on the returns from one bellwether Virginia county I know well, I realized that we would win Virginia by a significantly larger margin than President Obama four years earlier. This was a huge feeling given all the work that Anne and I have done for 30-plus years to help make Virginia more progressive. It struck me for the first time, “I will probably be vice president.” That feeling lasted about 90 minutes.

Ashley Parker: I walked over to the Hilton for election night. At some point they rolled in a cake that was like…a life-sized, very impressive rendering of Trump’s head.

Melissa Alt, cake artist: I got an order for a Hillary Clinton cake. So, I was like, “Okay, I’m going to make Donald Trump as well.” Just because that would generate a lot of interest. My manager, who has a friend who works for Donald Trump Jr., said, “Let’s contact them and see if they’re interested in having cake.” And obviously they said yes.

The Kid Mero, Desus & Mero: I’m surprised a stripper didn’t jump out of the cake.

Melissa Alt: I start getting phone calls of people saying, “This is TMZ, or Boston Globe, or People magazine. Do you know that your cake is trending all over the whole internet?”

Ashley Parker: I don’t know if I was ever allowed to eat it. It seemed fairly decorative.

Melissa Alt: Obviously, I wanted everyone to see it first and then eat it. That cake could probably feed about a hundred.

Gary Johnson, Libertarian candidate: I was taken aback by the fact that, at least at the start of the evening, all the networks were showing three names on the screen for the first time, meaning mine and Clinton and Trump. But no, I don’t remember the cake.

“I THINK I’M GONNA THROW UP”

8 p.m. – 1 a.m.

Maggie Haberman, The New York Times: When I went downstairs at 8:15, Hillary was up in Florida. When I came back upstairs, it had flipped. I got a sense the second I set foot in the newsroom that something was going on.

Van Jones: You got smoke coming out of every gear trying to figure out what the heck is happening out there. And you’ve got John King who had said, over and over, that there is no pathway for a Trump victory. Suddenly, that whole thing starts to come apart.

Roger Stone: I was committed to be an on-air anchor for InfoWars. I think I was on the air for seven hours straight.

Steve Bannon: We had taken over the fifth floor of Trump Tower, which had been Corey [Lewandowski]’s original headquarters. It was a concrete floor with no carpeting. They didn’t heat it. It had computers everywhere, guys are tracking everything, we had a chain of command. We called the fifth floor “the crack den.” It looked like a crack den. We put all the maps up and we started getting raw feeds from both our local guys and also the secretary of state of Florida. They were putting up their total vote counts. And [national field director] Bill Stepien was sitting there with all of our modeling. They were really focused on Florida—particularly the Broward and Miami-Dade counties. Also North Carolina was coming in. And obviously Ohio and those states were starting to come in. But the big one we were focused on was Florida. Because if we didn’t win Florida, it was not going to happen.

Omarosa Manigault, Trump campaign: If we believed what was on the television, we would have thought we lost. But looking at the numbers that were in front of us in the key battleground states, we were up…or we were neck and neck, with expectations of higher turnout and more enthusiasm. We were going off of our own internal data. What was being shown on CNN and MSNBC and some of these other networks was showing a stark contrast to what was in front of us.

Reza Aslan, author and religious scholar: I thought, “Oh my God, how terrible are we that it’s even this close?”

Brian Fallon: As I was walking off the risers [at Javits], Jen Epstein, a Bloomberg reporter, grabbed my arm and said, “Are you guys nervous about Florida?” I gave her some sort of verbal shrug. Right after that I called into the boiler room and asked for a gut check.

Van Jones: My phone was literally warm from the text messages coming in.

Zara Rahim: I had been going back and forth between the venue and backstage. My face was really tense. All of these reporters can read your energy and your face. You never want a reporter to tweet like, “Clinton campaign members are nervous.”

Jim Margolis: I finally called Steve Schale, who ran Florida for us in the Obama campaign. I said, “Steve, what’s going on here? Is this just a lack of information?” He said, “I think you’ve got a problem.”

Bret Baier: At 8:30 I turned to Chris Wallace, who was sitting next to us on the set, and said, “This does not look like it’s lining up.” We came back from commercial break and Chris said, “Donald Trump could be the next president of the United States.”

Jerry Falwell Jr.: My 17-year-old daughter, Caroline, had been following the election. It’s the first time she’s ever followed politics. And she was so nervous about the result that her stomach got upset. She told her brother, “I think I’m gonna throw up.” So he took off his Trump hat and she threw up in it, right next to Laura Ingraham.

Felix Biederman, Chapo Trap House: At that point the blue wall hadn’t come in yet, and that’s when the air in the room started to tighten. It was like, “Oh, fuck.” She can still do it, but everything that needs to happen for Trump is happening. What if what’s always happened with Hillary—they did all the work, they know everything, they’re super qualified—what if they didn’t do it? What if they fucked it up?

Ana Marie Cox: I did a couple of on-camera news hits where I was told, “What you need to do here is tell people not to panic.” Meanwhile, I was panicking.

David Remnick: Not only did I not have anything else ready, I don’t think our site had anything, or much of anything, ready in case Trump won. The mood in the offices, I would say, was frenetic.

Dave Weigel: I’m in the parking lot of the Scalise party. There are Republicans drinking, some celebrating, some not paying attention. My editor was calling to see when I would hand in my story. One, I’m on a minor story that’s falling apart, and two, I’m probably in the wrong place. Three, I need to reorder the story, and four, how much did I tell people confidently about the election that I was wrong about?

Ashley Parker: We started running up to one another like, “He’s gonna win, he’s gonna win. We know it now, it’s gonna happen.”

Desus Nice, Desus & Mero: It’s one thing to find out Donald Trump is president, but another to be on TV with people watching you watch Donald Trump become president.

Michael Barbaro, The New York Times: Carolyn Ryan, who was the politics editor, pulled me aside and said, “I need you to be involved in a ‘Trump Wins’ story.”

Matt Flegenheimer, The New York Times: Michael and I build this thing out together into a fully sweeping and historical news story. Maybe 1,500 words. We lock ourselves in this little glass office in the Times building and try to tune out the unstoppable din of the newsroom.

Steve Bannon: Jared came down and the candidate was upstairs. Then when word got out that Florida was competitive, that it was gonna be real, he came down to the 14th floor, the headquarters, where we had what we called the war room, which had multiple TVs running. And so what we did is we moved the data analysis thing that we had up to the 14th floor. And I went over with Stepien and the others and just stood next to the candidate and walked him through what was going on. And he finally took a seat. And we sat there and watched everything come in.

Jacob Soboroff, MSNBC correspondent: I went from this feeling of, “Oh my god, wow. I can’t believe it,” to, in a matter of seconds, “Oh, whoa, I can totally believe it.”

Steve Bannon: Stepien looked at it and said, “Our spread is too big, they can’t recover from this.” Miami-Dade and Broward were coming back really slow. They were clearly holding votes back, right? And then Stepien looked at me and said, “We have such a big lead now. They can’t steal it from us.

“I FELT SO ALONE, I KNEW IT WAS DONE”

Ashley Parker: I received a frantic call from Mike Barbaro, so I was racing around the ballroom getting quotes and feeding them back to the story.

Joshua Green, Bloomberg Businessweek correspondent and Devil’s Bargain author: At 9:05 p.m. I sent Bannon an email and said, “Holy shit, you guys are gonna win, aren’t you?” He sent a one word reply: “Yes.”

Dave Weigel: I had told my parents, who are Clinton supporters—my dad actually knew Clinton growing up as he’s from the same town in Illinois she is. I texted him early in the night saying, “These Florida counties seem to be going the way they usually go.” But once I realized there was no way for Clinton to win, I called them saying, “I’m sorry, this is what I do for a living and I was wrong.” My dad said, “Well, I’m still holding out hope.” And I said, “Don’t bother. Process this, and figure out what you’re going to do next, because it’s not going to happen.”

Trae Crowder, comedian and author: I felt very mad at liberals, you know, like my team. I was very upset with all of us for a lot of reasons.

Rebecca Traister: I felt so alone, I knew it was done. I was by myself on the floor. I started to cry.

David Remnick: That night I went to a friend’s election-night party. As Clinton’s numbers started to sour, I took my laptop out, got a chair, found a corner of that noisy room, and started thinking and writing. That was what turned out to be “An American Tragedy.”

Steve Bannon: As soon as we got Florida, I knew we were gonna win. Because Florida was such a massive lift for us, right? We were so outstaffed. But then we won Florida. Just made me know that the rest of the night was going to go well.

Maggie Haberman: I started texting some of the Trump people and one of them wrote back, “Say it with me: ‘President Trump. President Trump.’”

“CAN WE STAY IN THE U.S.?”

Zara Rahim: A member of senior leadership came, and I’ll never forget him looking at us and saying, essentially, “If she doesn’t win Michigan and Wisconsin, Donald Trump will be president-elect.” That was the first time I heard those words.

Jim Margolis: The tenor had changed completely. People were very nervous in the room, we’re all talking to each other. I’m going back and forth with [Clinton campaign manager] Robby Mook, who is over at the hotel. We’re on the phone with some of the states that are still out there, trying to understand what is taking place in Wisconsin and Michigan, because those numbers are softer than they ought to be. That’s beginning to weigh very heavily.

Rebecca Traister: I was thinking everything from, “I’m gonna have to rewrite my piece” to, “Can we stay in the U.S.?” I texted my husband, “Tell Rosie to go to bed. I don’t want her to watch.”

Roger Stone: The staff at InfoWars is largely people in their late 20s, early 30s, all of whom are interested in politics, but none of whom would consider themselves an expert. So they would look to me and say, “Well, are we going to win or not?” And I said, “Yes, we’re going to win.”

Matt Flegenheimer: Michael Grynbaum—who covers media—we had been following the Upshot percentages on the race. We were trying to get our heads around it. If it’s 75 percent, two coin flips, Donald Trump’s president. You had dynamic, shifting odds on the meter. Maybe it’s one coin flip. Maybe it’s half a coin flip. At some point, when I was in that little room with Michael Barbaro, Grynbaum comes in, takes a quarter, slams it down on the middle of the desk. Doesn’t say a word. Just walks out. I still have that quarter in my wallet.

David Remnick: Obviously, we were not going to press “post” until a result had been announced. So I made some revisions, came across a quotation from George Orwell, played around with various sentences, but all in a kind of strange state of focus that happens only once in a while.

Steve Bannon: We stayed there until I want to say about 11 o’clock, 11:30, after Florida got called. It looked like others were coming our way, that we were obviously gonna win. That’s when we went upstairs to the residence, to the penthouse. In hindsight, we still had two and a half hours to go, because they didn’t call it ‘til like 2:30 in the morning.

Symone Sanders, Strategist for Priorities USA: Omarosa called [into MTV] saying, “It’s a good night over here at Trump Tower.” She’s like, “I knew Donald Trump would be the president. I told everyone months ago. And the day is here!” I was just dumbfounded.

Neal Brennan: Slowly but surely it dawns on us. And I had said things like, “You know, I’ve heard that technically Republicans can never win another presidential election.” I’m just saying dumb shit, all things I’d read on Politico or fuckin’ The Atlantic or whatever. And then slowly but surely it happens. It’s like we…it…fucking Hillary lost.

Van Jones: I picked up my pen and I wrote down two words: “parents” and “whitelash.”

Jeffrey Lord, former CNN political commentator: People get so obsessed with the race thing.

Ana Marie Cox: I happen to be in recovery. I had a moment of, like, “Why the fuck not?” I went on Twitter and said, “To those of us ‘in the room’ together, he’s not worth it. Don’t drink over this.” And the response I got was amazing. I said, “I’m going to a meeting tomorrow. Everyone get through this 24 hours, get to a meeting, we’re not alone.”

Evan McMullin: I looked at my staffers. In my mind’s eye, they were all seated up against this wall. They were disappointed, they were afraid, all of that. I told them that I didn’t want to see any long faces. I told them to buck up. And it had no effect.

Van Jones: I literally said, “This was many things. This was a rebellion against elites, it was a complete reinvention of politics and polls. And it was also about race.” But the “whitelash” comment became this big, big thing. What’s interesting about it is, I’m black, my wife is not. She and I were talking about what was happening in Europe. And I said, “The backlash is coming here.” She said, “Yeah, it’ll be a whitelash here.” That was in the back of my mind. People think I made that term up on the spot. It’s very rare you can put two syllables together and make the entire case.

Jeffrey Lord: I thought he was wrong. While Van and I disagree, he’s a curious and sensible soul. I thought at some point he would come to a different conclusion.

“WHAT’S OBAMA THINKING?”

1 a.m. – 3 a.m.

Melissa Alt: People were texting me the whole night, just congratulations on the cake. That was funny because the night turned out so different than I expected. Who knew cake could generate so much hype?

Bret Baier: The futures markets had taken a nosedive, so we were covering that aspect of things. Fortunately, we had Maria Bartiromo on the set, who looked at the numbers and said, “Well, I would think this is a buying opportunity, because if you look at policy, tax cuts, regulation roll back, and everything else, that’s probably going to mean the market turning around when businesses weigh in.” That turned out to be pretty prescient.

Ana Marie Cox: A Muslim colleague of mine called his mother. She was worried he was going to be the victim of violence at any moment. A colleague who is gay and married was on the phone with her wife saying, “They’re not going to take this damn ring away from me.”

Van Jones: I had Muslim friends who came from countries like Somalia asking, “Should we leave the country tonight?” Because in their countries of origin, if a president that hostile takes power, they might start rounding up people in the morning.

David Remnick: Jelani [Cobb] and I spoke around midnight. We were both, let’s put it this way, in the New Yorker mode of radical understatement, disappointed. Jelani’s disappointment extended to his wondering whether he should actually leave the country. He wasn’t kidding around. I could tell that from his voice.

Gary Johnson: Well, I was really disappointed at the results. But what I came to very quickly was, as I’ve said many, many, many, times, if I wasn’t elected president, I was going to ski a hundred-plus days and I was also going to ride the Continental Divide bike race.

Jill Stein, Green Party candidate: Did I have remorse about running? Absolutely not. I have remorse about the misery people are experiencing under Democrats and Republicans both.

Neal Brennan: That’s sketch-writing night at SNL. So all the writers are crestfallen, and it was up to us to write comedy for that Saturday. Me and [Colin] Jost wrote the sketch where Dave [Chappelle] is watching the election, and Chris Rock shows up and everyone’s bawling. It was based on the experience of being in Jost’s office and me saying incredibly stupid shit as reality crumbled.

Ashley Nicole Black, writer/correspondent, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee: We all went into a room and sat in silence for at least five minutes. The conversation wasn’t like, “What is it going to be in the country?” It was like, okay, “We’re at work. We have a show tomorrow. What are we going to do?” And Sam goes, “I think this is my fault.” It’s Sam’s first time voting in an American election, and she told us how the first time she was on Law & Order, Law & Order got canceled the next day. And she got interviewed by Playboy, and the next day they announced they were no longer doing nudity. And now she voted for the first time and broke America. We all laughed, it broke the tension in the room. Then we started writing Act 1 with that idea in mind.

Rep. Adam Schiff, congressman, 28th District of California: I was at a victory party for my campaign at the Burbank Bar and Grill. And it was the most somber and depressing victory party I’d ever had.

Brian Fallon: Eventually there were conversations around the awkwardness. There started to be this pressure to concede even before AP called the race.

Nate Silver: I felt like if the roles had been reversed, and if Clinton had been winning all of these states, that they wouldn’t have been so slow to call it. In some ways, the slowness to call it reflected the stubbornness the media had the whole time about realizing that, actually, it was a pretty competitive election.

Jerry Falwell Jr.: The crowd at the Trump party was really aggravated because Megyn Kelly didn’t want to call it. She was so hopeful that Trump would lose. She let hours go by. Finally, the crowd started chanting, “Call it! Call it! Call it!”

Bret Baier: There was a growing group of people who had gathered outside Fox News who obviously were Trump supporters. They were going crazy.

Zara Rahim: There was a massive garage behind the Javits center. John Podesta stood up on a box and told us, “We will have more information for you soon,” which is the most frustrating thing to hear in that moment. Everybody was in this big circle of sadness and nobody knew what to do. Leadership didn’t know what to do. We were all at a loss.

Jon Favreau, Crooked Media, former Obama speechwriter: We were in a constant text chain with our buddies in the White House, asking, “What’s going on? What’s the boss thinking? What’s Obama thinking?” And finally they told us, “Oh, he just talked to her and he thinks she should concede and she agrees. She’s just waiting for the right moment.”

Jerry Falwell Jr.: I called the president-elect. He said, “Well, why don’t you come over to Trump Tower, you and your family, and watch the returns with us?” And I said, “I don’t want to do that, because by the time I get over there, you’re going to be coming over here to do your victory speech.” And he said, “All right, whatever.”

Matt Paul, chief of staff to VP candidate Tim Kaine: Senator Kaine, when the news became very grim…the senator actually went to bed. Nothing was going to happen that night. He had to put together a different type of speech.

Brian Fallon: I was on the phone with the decision desk people at AP, trying to glean a sense of their confidence about the numbers in states like Wisconsin and Michigan. I knew that when those got called, it was ball game, so I was trying to impart to them what we were hearing about what precincts might still be outstanding. We were also trying to gauge if they were about to call it, if and when she should speak.

Michael Barbaro: We really labored over a few paragraphs and a few words, just capturing the enormity of a Trump victory. That it wasn’t expected. The messages the campaign had run on, what they would suddenly mean for the country. And it was a real challenge to convey all of the things he had said and done in the campaign, and all the controversies that he had sparked and put those into the context of a traditional, sweeping, “This person has just been elected president of the United States,” New York Times story.

Matt Flegenheimer: I think after 1 o’clock we had our final version and we were ready to press the button on “Trump Just Won.” It did make the last edition of the print paper.

Michael Barbaro: There was so much going on that night and so many last-minute changes and such a hectic schedule that the story was published with the wrong bylines. The historic front page, “Trump Triumphs,” ran in the paper with the wrong bylines.

Jelani Cobb, The New Yorker: I saw the New York Times headline and I was very discomforted by it. For one, I knew that I had a child on the way.

Maggie Haberman: I was supposed to go on a CNN panel at 2 a.m., they were doing a very early version of New Day. I got stuck because of a deadline anyway, so it worked out I couldn’t make it, which I felt bad about. In reality, I wasn’t prepared to talk about it. I couldn’t really understand what had happened. And I think images of gobsmacked reporters probably wouldn’t have helped.

Michael Barbaro: We’re all sitting around and we’re all doing what journalists do after a big story, which is talk about it endlessly. I don’t think any of us wanted to go home. I don’t think any of us wanted to go off into the private space of figuring out what this all means. This gravitational pull kept us there much later than we needed to be.

Reza Aslan: My wife stayed up and I went to sleep, then she woke me up around 1 or 2 in the morning bawling and told me that it was over. My poor, sweet wife. She wanted to hug and kiss me but I went into a panic attack and couldn’t breathe.

David Remnick: We agreed that night, and we agree today, that the Trump presidency is an emergency. And in an emergency, you’ve got a purpose, a job to do, and ours is to put pressure on power. That’s always the highest calling of journalism, but never more so than when power is a constant threat to the country and in radical opposition to its values and its highest sense of itself.

Brian Fallon: We had this issue where the Javits Center needed us out by 3 a.m. The decision was made that someone had to come out and address the crowd.

Zara Rahim: There were die-hard Hillary supporters that were like, “We’re not going.” Folks who were sobbing and literally couldn’t move because they were so distraught. I remember pieces of memorabilia on the floor, little Hillary pins and “I believe that she will win” placards.

Rebecca Traister: People were throwing up. People were on the floor crying.

Steve Bannon: We had an agreement with these guys. Robby Mook had sent this email saying, you know, “When AP calls it, we’ll call and congratulate you right away.” Because they were expecting Trump to keep saying, “It’s rigged, it’s rigged.” So Robby Mook sent a thing over which I’m sure he regrets. [Laughs]. He sent an email to us, he said, 15 minutes after AP calls it, they would expect to hear from us. If they hadn’t heard from us, she would get up to give a victory speech. I think AP called it right when we left.

Roger Stone: We figured they had her in a straitjacket by then. Or that she was throwing things and cursing.

“LET’S GO ONSTAGE AND GET THIS DONE”

Bret Baier: It was around 2:30 in the morning, and I said, “Donald Trump will be the 45th president of the United States.” This whiz-bang graphic with all of these firework animations flashed across the screen with the words Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States. Just seeing that, everybody on the set was silent for a little bit, as the whole thing was being digested.

Stephen L. Miller, conservative blogger: The Onion headline kept flashing through my head really heavy. During the primaries they had the Trump story, “You really want to see how far this goes, don’t you America?”

Jorge Ramos, Univision news anchor: When he won, I said it as if I was reporting a football score or a soccer match. “Donald Trump is going to be the next president of the United States.” No emotion. Just the facts. That’s what the audience demanded. That is a sign of respect. As a journalist you have to report reality as it is, not as you wish it would be. That’s exactly what I was doing.

Jeffrey Lord: It was an amazing moment. Anderson [Cooper] came over to me and, in his classy fashion, shook my hand and said, “Congratulations, you were right.”

Steve Bannon: When it was called, he was actually upstairs in the kitchen. He has a small kitchen with a television. When he heard it was being called by AP, I shook his hand and said, “Congratulations, Mr. President.” So we kinda laughed. There were no big hugs or anything. Nothing crazy. He’s not a guy who gets overly excited. He’s very controlled. People around him are very controlled. We were obviously very happy and ecstatic. But it’s not a bunch of jumping around, high-fiving, anything like that.

Matt Oczkowski: It almost felt like a videogame, like you were playing something and won. You’re like, “Wow, this is the presidency of the United States.”

Roger Stone: The champagne tasted great. This was the culmination of a dream that I’d had since 1988.

Jim Margolis: I was on with Robby [Mook], who was in the room with her when she did the concession call to Trump. It was surreal. It was beyond my imagination that we would be in this position with this person being elected president.

Steve Bannon: It only took us 10 minutes to get there, it was right down the street. When we got there, we were in this weird holding stage, kind of off to the side. Very crammed. She called the president on his phone. Or it might have been Huma Abedin called Kellyanne [Conway] and then she hands her phone off to the president, and then Secretary Clinton was on there, you know, “Hey, Donald, congratulations, hard-fought win.” Two or three minutes. Then we looked at each other and said, “Let’s go onstage and get this done.”

Roger Stone: He looked surprised at the fact that he’d won. Which is surprising only because he pretty consistently thought he would win. Not unhappy, but rather, shocked.

Neal Brennan: I thought it was so fucking weird that he was like, “Is Jim here? Come on up here.” Like he was emceeing a sports banquet. But it was good that he set the tone right there. So long, context. So long, history.

Joshua Green: I thought he had actually made at least a cursory effort to try to unite the country by reaching out to Hillary Clinton voters. That sentiment probably evaporated before the sun rose the next day. At least on election night he said something approximating what you would expect a normal presidential victor to say in a moment like that, to try and bring the country together.

Symone Sanders: I still couldn’t believe it was happening. When he talked about us coming together and healing for the country, I wanted to throw up in my mouth.

“YOU’RE FUCKED”

3 a.m. – 7 a.m.

Maggie Haberman: I was getting bewildered texts from my child who couldn’t sleep, asking me what happened. I think this election was really difficult for kids to process.

Matt Paul: It was fucking terrible. We had these hastily organized calls every 10 minutes to determine what was going to happen the next morning. There was no advanced plan. Where were we going to do this massive global television event? How were we going to get people in the room? Who was going to say what in what order? That happened between 4 in the morning and when she spoke.

Rebecca Traister: In the cab home, the cabbie had on the news, that’s when I heard his acceptance speech, and I said, “Can you turn it off?” I couldn’t hear his voice. I was like, “I can’t listen to his voice for the next four years.”

Desus Nice: I went home, and it was like when your team loses and you watch it on SportsCenter over and over and over. I turned on MSNBC, and Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow were asking, “How’d you get this wrong? How did Nate Silver get this wrong? What did Hillary do?” I kept turning to Fox News and seeing them gloat and the balloons falling. I think I stayed up until three in the morning just drinking and watching.

The Kid Mero: I went home and smoked myself to sleep. I was like, “This sucks.”

Ashley Nicole Black: I took a shower, and then as soon as water hit me, I started bawling. I didn’t really have any feelings until that moment.

Ashley Parker: Times Square felt like a zombie-apocalypse movie. There was no one there. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I walked from the ballroom to the newsroom. They were like, “Go home, get some sleep, you’ll need it.” I walked back to my hotel. I couldn’t sleep. I watched cable news and then fell asleep.

Van Jones: I was walking out the building. Your thumb just kind of automatically switches over to Twitter. I saw that my name was trending worldwide. And I was like, “Whoa, that’s weird.”

Brian Fallon: I stayed in Brooklyn throughout the campaign, but that night I got a hotel in Midtown, close to the Peninsula. I actually walked past his hotel. I saw all the red hats that were still milling about outside of his victory party. It was pretty surreal.

Ashley Nicole Black: I looked at myself—I’m going to cry even saying this right now—I looked at myself in the mirror, and in that moment, I looked like my grandmother. The first thought I had was that I was glad that she wasn’t alive to see that. Then I felt so guilty because of course nothing would ever make me glad my grandmother is not alive. I love her so much, and I wish she was here. But she died when Obama was president, with that hope that the world had moved forward, and black people had moved forward. And she didn’t see the huge backlash that came after. In that moment, I was very grateful, and then guilty, and then I went to bed.

Jorge Ramos: I’ve been to wars, I’ve covered the most difficult situations in Latin America. But I needed to digest and to understand what had happened. I came home very late. I turned on the news. I had comfort food—cookies and chocolate milk—the same thing I used to have as a kid in Mexico City. After that, I realized that I had been preparing all my life for this moment. Once I digested what had happened with Trump and had a plan, which was to resist and report and not be neutral, then I was able to go to bed.

Rebecca Traister: I got back to Park Slope, I went to check on the girls. When I went to say goodnight, I looked at Rosie, and I had this conscious thought that this is the day that will divide our experience of what is possible. This is the day where a limitation is reinforced for her.

Michael Barbaro: I went home and woke up my husband, I think it was 4 or 5 in the morning, and asked him what the next steps should be journalistically. Should I move to Washington? Should I change jobs? It was pretty disorienting.

Maggie Haberman: One Trump supporter sent me a message saying, “You’re fucked.” [Laughs] If you use that, please recall me laughing about it. It was really something.

Van Jones: I got to my apartment and put my head down. I woke up like three, four hours later. And in my mind I thought, it was a dream. Just for a split second. I was still fully clothed. I had makeup all over my pillow. And I was like, “Shit.”

“IT WAS ONE OF THE BEST SPEECHES SHE’S EVER GIVEN”

7 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.

Jon Favreau: It felt like when you wake up after someone close to you passes away. Not nearly as bad, obviously, but that same feeling where you think, for like five seconds, you’re okay, maybe it’s a normal morning, and then it hits you what happened.

Roger Stone: I mean, we were walkin’ on clouds. We were still in the halo of the whole thing. I was very pleased.

Jerry Falwell Jr.: The feeling afterward was relief. I had worked so hard to help him. I’d risked so much and went so far out on a limb. Everybody thought I was crazy. It was a renewed hope for the future of the country, and a little bit of fear that I was going to be chosen to serve in the administration, because I didn’t want to.

Steve Bannon: I had my whole family that had come up to the victory party and I hadn’t seen anybody, so I went home and grabbed a shower, just like the night before, got another hour of sleep, and I was with Jared. And I think we were with Trump at like 8 in the morning. So it was just like the exact same thing as the day before. The day before I felt we were gonna win the presidency, and the next day we had won the presidency. It was odd, there was never any big insurgent feeling or anything like that. It played out how I thought it would play out. I didn’t have much doubt the first day of the campaign, didn’t really have much doubt on Billy Bush weekend. He was connecting. He had a powerful message.

Reza Aslan: I remember thinking, as clear as day, this is who we are. This is what we deserve.

Shani O. Hilton, U.S. news editor, BuzzFeed News: You get on the train from Brooklyn. It’s silent. And not in the normal way of people not talking to each other. It felt like an observable silence. I saw at least three people sitting by themselves, just weeping silently.

Melissa Alt: The next day my manager took the cake back to Trump Tower because they didn’t cut it at election night. Donald Trump Jr. told my friend that it was delicious.

Matt Paul: I remember rolling up in the motorcade and seeing some of our staff and organizers couldn’t get in. A reporter or cameraperson who was familiar to me said, “Can I sneak in with you?” I looked at that person, sort of stunned, and said, “Fuck no.” Then I realized I shouldn’t have said that. It was just a visceral, gut reaction to seeing some of our staff that couldn’t get in who had killed themselves for two years.

Nate Silver: If you read FiveThirtyEight throughout the election and listened to our arguments with other journalists and reporters, then you would’ve been much better prepared and much less surprised by the outcome.

The Kid Mero: We very quickly became familiar with the term “economic anxiety.”

Reza Aslan: You take your kids to school, you go to the store, you go to the post office, you’re looking around, and you’re thinking, “These people hate me.”

Jelani Cobb: I went to the airport the next morning for a 7 a.m. flight. There’s an African-American gentleman, maybe in his 60s, working at the check-in counter. He starts talking about how disastrous and dangerous this moment’s going to be. And he’s seen history in the South and thinking that we might be headed back toward the things he thought were in the past.

Dave Weigel: I was connecting through the Atlanta airport. I looked around and thought, well, for eight years, I didn’t really think about who voted for who. But as a white dude with a mustache, fairly bloated by the campaign, most of the people who look like me voted for this guy who, as far as they know, is a bigot. I remember feeling that this divider had come down, this new intensity of feeling about everybody I saw.

Van Jones: The next day, my commentary had become this sort-of viral sensation. Fox News is mad at me for saying “whitelash.” Liberals are treating me as some kind of hero. And literally, for the next two weeks, I didn’t have to pay for anything in any establishment in D.C. or New York. Not one meal. Not one cab. Uber people would turn the thing off and just drive me around for free.

Joshua Green: Bannon called me. He said, “You recognize what happened?” I’m like, “What the fuck are you talking about?” He goes, “You guys,” meaning you on the left, “you fell into the same trap as conservatives in the ‘90s…you were so whipped up in your own self-righteousness about how Americans could never vote for Trump that you were blinded to what was happening.” He was right.

Matt Paul: There were five or six of us standing in a hold room. One of Hillary’s brothers was there with his wife. A couple of the president’s people. Myself. A couple of campaign photographers. President Clinton walked in. It was very tough. Secretary Clinton walked in and was strong and composed. I stood there in shock at how put together and strong she was.

Rebecca Traister: As someone who covered her in 2008 and watched her struggle with speechgiving, it was one of the best speeches she’s ever given.

Jim Margolis: Everybody was basically in tears. Huma was in front of me. Jake [Sullivan] was on one side. It was one of those incredible scenes. Nobody had had any sleep.

Steve Bannon: Never watched it. Couldn’t care less. Her, Podesta, all of it. I thought they were overrated. I thought they were—they’re a media creation. People say how genius they were, how brilliant they were. Look, I’d never been on a campaign in my life. But I can understand math. Just looking at where it was gonna come down to. Morning Joe tells me they’re so brilliant every day. Why are they not getting some pretty fundamental stuff here? But no, I had no interest in seeing her concession speech. I have no interest in a damn thing with their campaign because I don’t think they knew what they were doing. I only have interest in what we did. Which was just, focus, focus, focus.

Rep. Adam Schiff: My staff both in California and in D.C. were absolutely devastated. People would come up to me, constituents and others, with tears in their eyes. And the astounding thing is, here we are now. People continue to come up to me with tears in their eyes about what he’s doing. I’ve never seen people have a visceral reaction over an election and be so deeply alarmed at what’s happening to the country.

Charles P. Pierce, Esquire writer at large: On the Sunday before the election, I drove out from Philadelphia to Gettysburg. Once I got out of the sprawling Philadelphia exurbs, I started to see improvised signs. There were several of those small portable marquees that you see outside clam shacks and chili parlors. I saw a huge piece of plywood nailed to a tree outside a motorcycle repair shop. I saw an entire barn painted red, white, and blue. “Trump,” it said, on the side of the barn. “Make America Great Again.” And I could see that barn, out in the field, in my mind’s eye, as Hillary Rodham Clinton gave her belated concession speech. And when she talked about making the American Dream available to everyone, I thought, damn, somebody had to want it bad to paint a whole barn just to argue about that.

Roger Stone: Trump is a winner. He’s a very confident, upbeat guy. That’s just his style. He thought all along that he would win. There’s no doubt that the Billy Bush thing shook him a little bit, but it ended up not being determinative.

Jerry Falwell Jr.: We had traveled on the plane with him during the campaign. He went and got the Wendy’s cheeseburgers and the fries, put them out on the table for us. I just think he’s a people’s president. I think that’s something we’ve not had in a real long time.

Gary Johnson: Well for me, just speaking personally, I do not aspire to be president of the United States anymore. Why would anybody want to be president of the United States now that Donald Trump’s been president of the United States?

  ##########

from Roger Stone – Stone Cold Truth https://stonecoldtruth.com/untold-stories-of-election-day-2016/

[averyella]

Untold Stories Of Election Day 2016

BELOW IS A RECAP OF ELECTION DAY/NIGHT FROM ESQUIRE MAGAZINE featuring ROGER STONE. 

**** Roger Stone, longtime Trump ally: She was just dead in the water. ****

 On November 8, 2016, America’s chief storytellers—those within the bubbles of media and politics—lost the narrative they had controlled for decades. In a space of 24 hours, the concept of “conventional wisdom” seemed to vanish for good. How did this happen? What follows are over 40 brand new interviews and behind-the-scenes stories from deep inside The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, Fox News, and more—plus first-hand accounts from the campaigns, themselves. We’ve spent a year hearing the spin. Now it’s time for the truth.

THE RUN-UP

Steve Bannon, Trump campaign CEO: When I first came on the campaign, I said, “You have a hundred-percent chance of winning.” We just got to stick to that plan. Even with Billy Bush, I never wavered for a second.

Jim Margolis, Clinton campaign senior adviser: I am normally a glass-half-empty guy when it comes to expectations on election days. This was the first big election where I was absolutely certain we were going to win.

Dave Weigel, The Washington Post: I called Jeff Flake the Sunday before the election. I said, “I have one round of questions if Hillary wins, and one if Trump wins.” And he just started laughing, saying, “Why would you bother asking the second one?”

Rebecca Traister, New York magazine: We got up around 7 a.m., and there was an electric current running through my body.

Ana Marie Cox, Crooked Media, formerly of MTV: I was staying at my in-laws’ place in New York. They’re Trump supporters. They weren’t in town, but my father-in-law made a joking bet with me. He said, “The next time we see each other, there will be a President Trump.” I remember laughing at him.

Neal Brennan, comedian/writer: I was at SNL. Chappelle was like, “Dude, I feel like Trump’s gonna win.” I was like, “Dude, I’ll bet you a hundred thousand dollars he won’t win.” He did not take the bet, thankfully.

Sen. Tim Kaine, Democratic vice presidential candidate: I thought we would win, but I was more wary than many for the simple reason that the U.S. had never elected a woman president and still has a poor track record of electing women to federal office.

Ana Navarro, CNN commentator and Republican strategist: I schlepped my absentee ballot around with me for a month. It was getting pretty beat up inside my bag. I would open it up and look at it every now and then and say, “I’m not ready. I can’t bring myself to vote for Hillary Clinton. Please, God, let something happen that I don’t have to do this.”

Brian Fallon, Clinton campaign national press secretary: There had been a battleground tracking poll our team had done over the weekend that had us up 4 [points]. We were up in more than enough states to win, taking us over 270. The public polls all showed a similar outlook.

Zara Rahim, Clinton campaign national spokeswoman: We were waiting for the coronation. I was planning my Instagram caption.

Van Jones, CNN political commentator: The Democrats had this attitude, which I think is very unhealthy and unproductive, that any acknowledgement that Trump had a chance was somehow helping Trump, and that we all had to be on this one accord that it was impossible for him to win. I thought that was stupid. I’ve never seen that strategy work.

Matt Oczkowski, formerly of Cambridge Analytica (Trump campaign data firm): When you see outlets like the Huffington Post giving Trump a 1 percent probability of victory, which is not even physically possible, it’s just like, “Wow, people are going to miss this massively.”

Roger Stone, longtime Trump ally: She was just dead in the water.

Joel Benenson, Clinton campaign chief strategist: I go into the 10 o’clock call and we’re getting reports from the analytics people and the field people. And they finish, and whoever’s leading the call asks if there’s anything else. I said, “Well, yeah, I got a call 20 minutes ago from my daughter in Durham, North Carolina. People are standing on line and aren’t moving, and are now being told they need to vote with paper ballots.” To me, that was the first sign that something was amiss in our boiler room process. That’s essential information. We needed those reports so the legal team would activate. I was stunned, and actually quite nervous. I thought, “Do we even have what we need on the ground to manage election day?”

“I MEAN, IT LOOKED LIKE A LANDSLIDE”

5 p.m.

Nate Silver, FiveThirtyEight: When I was coming in on the train at 5 p.m., according to our model, there was one-in-three chance of a Clinton landslide, a one-in-three chance of a close Clinton win, and a one-in-three chance of a Trump win. I was mentally preparing myself for each of those outcomes.

David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker: I thought about, and actually wrote, an essay about “the first woman president,” and the historical background of it all. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the suffragettes, the relationship with Frederick Douglass…a historical essay, clearly written in a mood of “at long last” and, yes, celebration. The idea was to press “post” on that piece, along with many other pieces by my colleagues at The New Yorker, the instant Clinton’s victory was declared on TV.

Bret Baier, Fox News chief political anchor: We got the exit polls at 5 p.m. in a big office on the executive floor. Rupert Murdoch and all the staff were there. It looked like we were going to call the race for Hillary Clinton at 10:30 or 11 p.m.

Steve Bannon: The exit polls were horrific. It was brutal. I think we were close in Iowa and Ohio and everything else was just brutal. Losing everywhere. Florida, Pennsylvania. I mean, it looked like a landslide.

Ashley Parker, The Washington Post, formerly of The New York Times: The RNC thought they were going to lose. The Trump campaign supporters thought they were going to lose. They were rushing to get their side out of the blame game. I spent part of my day lining up interviews for later that night or the next morning to get their version of events.

Jerry Falwell Jr., president of Liberty University, Trump’s religious adviser: I called Sean Hannity and said, “I really think he’s going to win tonight.” Sean said, “Well, I’m glad you do, because the exit polls don’t look good.” I found out later that Trump was very pessimistic, too.

Steve Bannon: Jared [Kushner] and I were out on this balcony in Trump Tower. We looked at it on Jared’s iPhone. And the numbers were so bad that we regrouped inside. We look at each other and we go, “This can’t be right. It just can’t.” And Jared goes, “I got an idea, let’s call Drudge.” And Drudge says, “The corporate media—they’ve always been wrong the entire time—these numbers are wrong.”

Brian Fallon: I was hearing from my high school principal, people I hadn’t spoken to since college. Everybody is conveying thanks for taking on Trump. It was going to be a cathartic experience of him getting his comeuppance after months of representing something that was so egregious in the eyes of so many people.

Rebecca Traister: They were serving, like, $12 pulled pork sandwiches [at the Javits Center]. It was nuts, people were bouncing off the walls. Everyone genuinely believed she was going to win. I don’t know if it made me feel more confident or not.

Evan McMullin, Independent candidate: Our election night event was in Salt Lake City. I was drinking Diet Coke and eating hummus and olives.

Ana Marie Cox: At the MTV watch party, we had dancers and graffiti artists. There were people giving temporary tattoos. I remember my colleague Jamil Smith and I both bringing up at a meeting, “Hey guys, what if something goes wrong? What if this doesn’t go how we think it’s going to go?” And the answer from some MTV exec was, “We’ll pivot.”

Steve Bannon: Drudge snapped us out of it, saying, “You guys are a couple of jamokes. Wait until the second exit polls come out, or later.” We called the candidate and told him what the numbers were and what Drudge had said. And then we said, “Hey, ya know, we left it all on the field. Did everything we can do. Let’s just see how it turns out.”

Sen. Tim Kaine: Based on the returns from one bellwether Virginia county I know well, I realized that we would win Virginia by a significantly larger margin than President Obama four years earlier. This was a huge feeling given all the work that Anne and I have done for 30-plus years to help make Virginia more progressive. It struck me for the first time, “I will probably be vice president.” That feeling lasted about 90 minutes.

Ashley Parker: I walked over to the Hilton for election night. At some point they rolled in a cake that was like…a life-sized, very impressive rendering of Trump’s head.

Melissa Alt, cake artist: I got an order for a Hillary Clinton cake. So, I was like, “Okay, I’m going to make Donald Trump as well.” Just because that would generate a lot of interest. My manager, who has a friend who works for Donald Trump Jr., said, “Let’s contact them and see if they’re interested in having cake.” And obviously they said yes.

The Kid Mero, Desus & Mero: I’m surprised a stripper didn’t jump out of the cake.

Melissa Alt: I start getting phone calls of people saying, “This is TMZ, or Boston Globe, or People magazine. Do you know that your cake is trending all over the whole internet?”

Ashley Parker: I don’t know if I was ever allowed to eat it. It seemed fairly decorative.

Melissa Alt: Obviously, I wanted everyone to see it first and then eat it. That cake could probably feed about a hundred.

Gary Johnson, Libertarian candidate: I was taken aback by the fact that, at least at the start of the evening, all the networks were showing three names on the screen for the first time, meaning mine and Clinton and Trump. But no, I don’t remember the cake.

“I THINK I’M GONNA THROW UP”

8 p.m. – 1 a.m.

Maggie Haberman, The New York Times: When I went downstairs at 8:15, Hillary was up in Florida. When I came back upstairs, it had flipped. I got a sense the second I set foot in the newsroom that something was going on.

Van Jones: You got smoke coming out of every gear trying to figure out what the heck is happening out there. And you’ve got John King who had said, over and over, that there is no pathway for a Trump victory. Suddenly, that whole thing starts to come apart.

Roger Stone: I was committed to be an on-air anchor for InfoWars. I think I was on the air for seven hours straight.

Steve Bannon: We had taken over the fifth floor of Trump Tower, which had been Corey [Lewandowski]’s original headquarters. It was a concrete floor with no carpeting. They didn’t heat it. It had computers everywhere, guys are tracking everything, we had a chain of command. We called the fifth floor “the crack den.” It looked like a crack den. We put all the maps up and we started getting raw feeds from both our local guys and also the secretary of state of Florida. They were putting up their total vote counts. And [national field director] Bill Stepien was sitting there with all of our modeling. They were really focused on Florida—particularly the Broward and Miami-Dade counties. Also North Carolina was coming in. And obviously Ohio and those states were starting to come in. But the big one we were focused on was Florida. Because if we didn’t win Florida, it was not going to happen.

Omarosa Manigault, Trump campaign: If we believed what was on the television, we would have thought we lost. But looking at the numbers that were in front of us in the key battleground states, we were up…or we were neck and neck, with expectations of higher turnout and more enthusiasm. We were going off of our own internal data. What was being shown on CNN and MSNBC and some of these other networks was showing a stark contrast to what was in front of us.

Reza Aslan, author and religious scholar: I thought, “Oh my God, how terrible are we that it’s even this close?”

Brian Fallon: As I was walking off the risers [at Javits], Jen Epstein, a Bloomberg reporter, grabbed my arm and said, “Are you guys nervous about Florida?” I gave her some sort of verbal shrug. Right after that I called into the boiler room and asked for a gut check.

Van Jones: My phone was literally warm from the text messages coming in.

Zara Rahim: I had been going back and forth between the venue and backstage. My face was really tense. All of these reporters can read your energy and your face. You never want a reporter to tweet like, “Clinton campaign members are nervous.”

Jim Margolis: I finally called Steve Schale, who ran Florida for us in the Obama campaign. I said, “Steve, what’s going on here? Is this just a lack of information?” He said, “I think you’ve got a problem.”

Bret Baier: At 8:30 I turned to Chris Wallace, who was sitting next to us on the set, and said, “This does not look like it’s lining up.” We came back from commercial break and Chris said, “Donald Trump could be the next president of the United States.”

Jerry Falwell Jr.: My 17-year-old daughter, Caroline, had been following the election. It’s the first time she’s ever followed politics. And she was so nervous about the result that her stomach got upset. She told her brother, “I think I’m gonna throw up.” So he took off his Trump hat and she threw up in it, right next to Laura Ingraham.

Felix Biederman, Chapo Trap House: At that point the blue wall hadn’t come in yet, and that’s when the air in the room started to tighten. It was like, “Oh, fuck.” She can still do it, but everything that needs to happen for Trump is happening. What if what’s always happened with Hillary—they did all the work, they know everything, they’re super qualified—what if they didn’t do it? What if they fucked it up?

Ana Marie Cox: I did a couple of on-camera news hits where I was told, “What you need to do here is tell people not to panic.” Meanwhile, I was panicking.

David Remnick: Not only did I not have anything else ready, I don’t think our site had anything, or much of anything, ready in case Trump won. The mood in the offices, I would say, was frenetic.

Dave Weigel: I’m in the parking lot of the Scalise party. There are Republicans drinking, some celebrating, some not paying attention. My editor was calling to see when I would hand in my story. One, I’m on a minor story that’s falling apart, and two, I’m probably in the wrong place. Three, I need to reorder the story, and four, how much did I tell people confidently about the election that I was wrong about?

Ashley Parker: We started running up to one another like, “He’s gonna win, he’s gonna win. We know it now, it’s gonna happen.”

Desus Nice, Desus & Mero: It’s one thing to find out Donald Trump is president, but another to be on TV with people watching you watch Donald Trump become president.

Michael Barbaro, The New York Times: Carolyn Ryan, who was the politics editor, pulled me aside and said, “I need you to be involved in a ‘Trump Wins’ story.”

Matt Flegenheimer, The New York Times: Michael and I build this thing out together into a fully sweeping and historical news story. Maybe 1,500 words. We lock ourselves in this little glass office in the Times building and try to tune out the unstoppable din of the newsroom.

Steve Bannon: Jared came down and the candidate was upstairs. Then when word got out that Florida was competitive, that it was gonna be real, he came down to the 14th floor, the headquarters, where we had what we called the war room, which had multiple TVs running. And so what we did is we moved the data analysis thing that we had up to the 14th floor. And I went over with Stepien and the others and just stood next to the candidate and walked him through what was going on. And he finally took a seat. And we sat there and watched everything come in.

Jacob Soboroff, MSNBC correspondent: I went from this feeling of, “Oh my god, wow. I can’t believe it,” to, in a matter of seconds, “Oh, whoa, I can totally believe it.”

Steve Bannon: Stepien looked at it and said, “Our spread is too big, they can’t recover from this.” Miami-Dade and Broward were coming back really slow. They were clearly holding votes back, right? And then Stepien looked at me and said, “We have such a big lead now. They can’t steal it from us.

“I FELT SO ALONE, I KNEW IT WAS DONE”

Ashley Parker: I received a frantic call from Mike Barbaro, so I was racing around the ballroom getting quotes and feeding them back to the story.

Joshua Green, Bloomberg Businessweek correspondent and Devil’s Bargain author: At 9:05 p.m. I sent Bannon an email and said, “Holy shit, you guys are gonna win, aren’t you?” He sent a one word reply: “Yes.”

Dave Weigel: I had told my parents, who are Clinton supporters—my dad actually knew Clinton growing up as he’s from the same town in Illinois she is. I texted him early in the night saying, “These Florida counties seem to be going the way they usually go.” But once I realized there was no way for Clinton to win, I called them saying, “I’m sorry, this is what I do for a living and I was wrong.” My dad said, “Well, I’m still holding out hope.” And I said, “Don’t bother. Process this, and figure out what you’re going to do next, because it’s not going to happen.”

Trae Crowder, comedian and author: I felt very mad at liberals, you know, like my team. I was very upset with all of us for a lot of reasons.

Rebecca Traister: I felt so alone, I knew it was done. I was by myself on the floor. I started to cry.

David Remnick: That night I went to a friend’s election-night party. As Clinton’s numbers started to sour, I took my laptop out, got a chair, found a corner of that noisy room, and started thinking and writing. That was what turned out to be “An American Tragedy.”

Steve Bannon: As soon as we got Florida, I knew we were gonna win. Because Florida was such a massive lift for us, right? We were so outstaffed. But then we won Florida. Just made me know that the rest of the night was going to go well.

Maggie Haberman: I started texting some of the Trump people and one of them wrote back, “Say it with me: ‘President Trump. President Trump.’”

“CAN WE STAY IN THE U.S.?”

Zara Rahim: A member of senior leadership came, and I’ll never forget him looking at us and saying, essentially, “If she doesn’t win Michigan and Wisconsin, Donald Trump will be president-elect.” That was the first time I heard those words.

Jim Margolis: The tenor had changed completely. People were very nervous in the room, we’re all talking to each other. I’m going back and forth with [Clinton campaign manager] Robby Mook, who is over at the hotel. We’re on the phone with some of the states that are still out there, trying to understand what is taking place in Wisconsin and Michigan, because those numbers are softer than they ought to be. That’s beginning to weigh very heavily.

Rebecca Traister: I was thinking everything from, “I’m gonna have to rewrite my piece” to, “Can we stay in the U.S.?” I texted my husband, “Tell Rosie to go to bed. I don’t want her to watch.”

Roger Stone: The staff at InfoWars is largely people in their late 20s, early 30s, all of whom are interested in politics, but none of whom would consider themselves an expert. So they would look to me and say, “Well, are we going to win or not?” And I said, “Yes, we’re going to win.”

Matt Flegenheimer: Michael Grynbaum—who covers media—we had been following the Upshot percentages on the race. We were trying to get our heads around it. If it’s 75 percent, two coin flips, Donald Trump’s president. You had dynamic, shifting odds on the meter. Maybe it’s one coin flip. Maybe it’s half a coin flip. At some point, when I was in that little room with Michael Barbaro, Grynbaum comes in, takes a quarter, slams it down on the middle of the desk. Doesn’t say a word. Just walks out. I still have that quarter in my wallet.

David Remnick: Obviously, we were not going to press “post” until a result had been announced. So I made some revisions, came across a quotation from George Orwell, played around with various sentences, but all in a kind of strange state of focus that happens only once in a while.

Steve Bannon: We stayed there until I want to say about 11 o’clock, 11:30, after Florida got called. It looked like others were coming our way, that we were obviously gonna win. That’s when we went upstairs to the residence, to the penthouse. In hindsight, we still had two and a half hours to go, because they didn’t call it ‘til like 2:30 in the morning.

Symone Sanders, Strategist for Priorities USA: Omarosa called [into MTV] saying, “It’s a good night over here at Trump Tower.” She’s like, “I knew Donald Trump would be the president. I told everyone months ago. And the day is here!” I was just dumbfounded.

Neal Brennan: Slowly but surely it dawns on us. And I had said things like, “You know, I’ve heard that technically Republicans can never win another presidential election.” I’m just saying dumb shit, all things I’d read on Politico or fuckin’ The Atlantic or whatever. And then slowly but surely it happens. It’s like we…it…fucking Hillary lost.

Van Jones: I picked up my pen and I wrote down two words: “parents” and “whitelash.”

Jeffrey Lord, former CNN political commentator: People get so obsessed with the race thing.

Ana Marie Cox: I happen to be in recovery. I had a moment of, like, “Why the fuck not?” I went on Twitter and said, “To those of us ‘in the room’ together, he’s not worth it. Don’t drink over this.” And the response I got was amazing. I said, “I’m going to a meeting tomorrow. Everyone get through this 24 hours, get to a meeting, we’re not alone.”

Evan McMullin: I looked at my staffers. In my mind’s eye, they were all seated up against this wall. They were disappointed, they were afraid, all of that. I told them that I didn’t want to see any long faces. I told them to buck up. And it had no effect.

Van Jones: I literally said, “This was many things. This was a rebellion against elites, it was a complete reinvention of politics and polls. And it was also about race.” But the “whitelash” comment became this big, big thing. What’s interesting about it is, I’m black, my wife is not. She and I were talking about what was happening in Europe. And I said, “The backlash is coming here.” She said, “Yeah, it’ll be a whitelash here.” That was in the back of my mind. People think I made that term up on the spot. It’s very rare you can put two syllables together and make the entire case.

Jeffrey Lord: I thought he was wrong. While Van and I disagree, he’s a curious and sensible soul. I thought at some point he would come to a different conclusion.

“WHAT’S OBAMA THINKING?”

1 a.m. – 3 a.m.

Melissa Alt: People were texting me the whole night, just congratulations on the cake. That was funny because the night turned out so different than I expected. Who knew cake could generate so much hype?

Bret Baier: The futures markets had taken a nosedive, so we were covering that aspect of things. Fortunately, we had Maria Bartiromo on the set, who looked at the numbers and said, “Well, I would think this is a buying opportunity, because if you look at policy, tax cuts, regulation roll back, and everything else, that’s probably going to mean the market turning around when businesses weigh in.” That turned out to be pretty prescient.

Ana Marie Cox: A Muslim colleague of mine called his mother. She was worried he was going to be the victim of violence at any moment. A colleague who is gay and married was on the phone with her wife saying, “They’re not going to take this damn ring away from me.”

Van Jones: I had Muslim friends who came from countries like Somalia asking, “Should we leave the country tonight?” Because in their countries of origin, if a president that hostile takes power, they might start rounding up people in the morning.

David Remnick: Jelani [Cobb] and I spoke around midnight. We were both, let’s put it this way, in the New Yorker mode of radical understatement, disappointed. Jelani’s disappointment extended to his wondering whether he should actually leave the country. He wasn’t kidding around. I could tell that from his voice.

Gary Johnson: Well, I was really disappointed at the results. But what I came to very quickly was, as I’ve said many, many, many, times, if I wasn’t elected president, I was going to ski a hundred-plus days and I was also going to ride the Continental Divide bike race.

Jill Stein, Green Party candidate: Did I have remorse about running? Absolutely not. I have remorse about the misery people are experiencing under Democrats and Republicans both.

Neal Brennan: That’s sketch-writing night at SNL. So all the writers are crestfallen, and it was up to us to write comedy for that Saturday. Me and [Colin] Jost wrote the sketch where Dave [Chappelle] is watching the election, and Chris Rock shows up and everyone’s bawling. It was based on the experience of being in Jost’s office and me saying incredibly stupid shit as reality crumbled.

Ashley Nicole Black, writer/correspondent, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee: We all went into a room and sat in silence for at least five minutes. The conversation wasn’t like, “What is it going to be in the country?” It was like, okay, “We’re at work. We have a show tomorrow. What are we going to do?” And Sam goes, “I think this is my fault.” It’s Sam’s first time voting in an American election, and she told us how the first time she was on Law & Order, Law & Order got canceled the next day. And she got interviewed by Playboy, and the next day they announced they were no longer doing nudity. And now she voted for the first time and broke America. We all laughed, it broke the tension in the room. Then we started writing Act 1 with that idea in mind.

Rep. Adam Schiff, congressman, 28th District of California: I was at a victory party for my campaign at the Burbank Bar and Grill. And it was the most somber and depressing victory party I’d ever had.

Brian Fallon: Eventually there were conversations around the awkwardness. There started to be this pressure to concede even before AP called the race.

Nate Silver: I felt like if the roles had been reversed, and if Clinton had been winning all of these states, that they wouldn’t have been so slow to call it. In some ways, the slowness to call it reflected the stubbornness the media had the whole time about realizing that, actually, it was a pretty competitive election.

Jerry Falwell Jr.: The crowd at the Trump party was really aggravated because Megyn Kelly didn’t want to call it. She was so hopeful that Trump would lose. She let hours go by. Finally, the crowd started chanting, “Call it! Call it! Call it!”

Bret Baier: There was a growing group of people who had gathered outside Fox News who obviously were Trump supporters. They were going crazy.

Zara Rahim: There was a massive garage behind the Javits center. John Podesta stood up on a box and told us, “We will have more information for you soon,” which is the most frustrating thing to hear in that moment. Everybody was in this big circle of sadness and nobody knew what to do. Leadership didn’t know what to do. We were all at a loss.

Jon Favreau, Crooked Media, former Obama speechwriter: We were in a constant text chain with our buddies in the White House, asking, “What’s going on? What’s the boss thinking? What’s Obama thinking?” And finally they told us, “Oh, he just talked to her and he thinks she should concede and she agrees. She’s just waiting for the right moment.”

Jerry Falwell Jr.: I called the president-elect. He said, “Well, why don’t you come over to Trump Tower, you and your family, and watch the returns with us?” And I said, “I don’t want to do that, because by the time I get over there, you’re going to be coming over here to do your victory speech.” And he said, “All right, whatever.”

Matt Paul, chief of staff to VP candidate Tim Kaine: Senator Kaine, when the news became very grim…the senator actually went to bed. Nothing was going to happen that night. He had to put together a different type of speech.

Brian Fallon: I was on the phone with the decision desk people at AP, trying to glean a sense of their confidence about the numbers in states like Wisconsin and Michigan. I knew that when those got called, it was ball game, so I was trying to impart to them what we were hearing about what precincts might still be outstanding. We were also trying to gauge if they were about to call it, if and when she should speak.

Michael Barbaro: We really labored over a few paragraphs and a few words, just capturing the enormity of a Trump victory. That it wasn’t expected. The messages the campaign had run on, what they would suddenly mean for the country. And it was a real challenge to convey all of the things he had said and done in the campaign, and all the controversies that he had sparked and put those into the context of a traditional, sweeping, “This person has just been elected president of the United States,” New York Times story.

Matt Flegenheimer: I think after 1 o’clock we had our final version and we were ready to press the button on “Trump Just Won.” It did make the last edition of the print paper.

Michael Barbaro: There was so much going on that night and so many last-minute changes and such a hectic schedule that the story was published with the wrong bylines. The historic front page, “Trump Triumphs,” ran in the paper with the wrong bylines.

Jelani Cobb, The New Yorker: I saw the New York Times headline and I was very discomforted by it. For one, I knew that I had a child on the way.

Maggie Haberman: I was supposed to go on a CNN panel at 2 a.m., they were doing a very early version of New Day. I got stuck because of a deadline anyway, so it worked out I couldn’t make it, which I felt bad about. In reality, I wasn’t prepared to talk about it. I couldn’t really understand what had happened. And I think images of gobsmacked reporters probably wouldn’t have helped.

Michael Barbaro: We’re all sitting around and we’re all doing what journalists do after a big story, which is talk about it endlessly. I don’t think any of us wanted to go home. I don’t think any of us wanted to go off into the private space of figuring out what this all means. This gravitational pull kept us there much later than we needed to be.

Reza Aslan: My wife stayed up and I went to sleep, then she woke me up around 1 or 2 in the morning bawling and told me that it was over. My poor, sweet wife. She wanted to hug and kiss me but I went into a panic attack and couldn’t breathe.

David Remnick: We agreed that night, and we agree today, that the Trump presidency is an emergency. And in an emergency, you’ve got a purpose, a job to do, and ours is to put pressure on power. That’s always the highest calling of journalism, but never more so than when power is a constant threat to the country and in radical opposition to its values and its highest sense of itself.

Brian Fallon: We had this issue where the Javits Center needed us out by 3 a.m. The decision was made that someone had to come out and address the crowd.

Zara Rahim: There were die-hard Hillary supporters that were like, “We’re not going.” Folks who were sobbing and literally couldn’t move because they were so distraught. I remember pieces of memorabilia on the floor, little Hillary pins and “I believe that she will win” placards.

Rebecca Traister: People were throwing up. People were on the floor crying.

Steve Bannon: We had an agreement with these guys. Robby Mook had sent this email saying, you know, “When AP calls it, we’ll call and congratulate you right away.” Because they were expecting Trump to keep saying, “It’s rigged, it’s rigged.” So Robby Mook sent a thing over which I’m sure he regrets. [Laughs]. He sent an email to us, he said, 15 minutes after AP calls it, they would expect to hear from us. If they hadn’t heard from us, she would get up to give a victory speech. I think AP called it right when we left.

Roger Stone: We figured they had her in a straitjacket by then. Or that she was throwing things and cursing.

“LET’S GO ONSTAGE AND GET THIS DONE”

Bret Baier: It was around 2:30 in the morning, and I said, “Donald Trump will be the 45th president of the United States.” This whiz-bang graphic with all of these firework animations flashed across the screen with the words Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States. Just seeing that, everybody on the set was silent for a little bit, as the whole thing was being digested.

Stephen L. Miller, conservative blogger: The Onion headline kept flashing through my head really heavy. During the primaries they had the Trump story, “You really want to see how far this goes, don’t you America?”

Jorge Ramos, Univision news anchor: When he won, I said it as if I was reporting a football score or a soccer match. “Donald Trump is going to be the next president of the United States.” No emotion. Just the facts. That’s what the audience demanded. That is a sign of respect. As a journalist you have to report reality as it is, not as you wish it would be. That’s exactly what I was doing.

Jeffrey Lord: It was an amazing moment. Anderson [Cooper] came over to me and, in his classy fashion, shook my hand and said, “Congratulations, you were right.”

Steve Bannon: When it was called, he was actually upstairs in the kitchen. He has a small kitchen with a television. When he heard it was being called by AP, I shook his hand and said, “Congratulations, Mr. President.” So we kinda laughed. There were no big hugs or anything. Nothing crazy. He’s not a guy who gets overly excited. He’s very controlled. People around him are very controlled. We were obviously very happy and ecstatic. But it’s not a bunch of jumping around, high-fiving, anything like that.

Matt Oczkowski: It almost felt like a videogame, like you were playing something and won. You’re like, “Wow, this is the presidency of the United States.”

Roger Stone: The champagne tasted great. This was the culmination of a dream that I’d had since 1988.

Jim Margolis: I was on with Robby [Mook], who was in the room with her when she did the concession call to Trump. It was surreal. It was beyond my imagination that we would be in this position with this person being elected president.

Steve Bannon: It only took us 10 minutes to get there, it was right down the street. When we got there, we were in this weird holding stage, kind of off to the side. Very crammed. She called the president on his phone. Or it might have been Huma Abedin called Kellyanne [Conway] and then she hands her phone off to the president, and then Secretary Clinton was on there, you know, “Hey, Donald, congratulations, hard-fought win.” Two or three minutes. Then we looked at each other and said, “Let’s go onstage and get this done.”

Roger Stone: He looked surprised at the fact that he’d won. Which is surprising only because he pretty consistently thought he would win. Not unhappy, but rather, shocked.

Neal Brennan: I thought it was so fucking weird that he was like, “Is Jim here? Come on up here.” Like he was emceeing a sports banquet. But it was good that he set the tone right there. So long, context. So long, history.

Joshua Green: I thought he had actually made at least a cursory effort to try to unite the country by reaching out to Hillary Clinton voters. That sentiment probably evaporated before the sun rose the next day. At least on election night he said something approximating what you would expect a normal presidential victor to say in a moment like that, to try and bring the country together.

Symone Sanders: I still couldn’t believe it was happening. When he talked about us coming together and healing for the country, I wanted to throw up in my mouth.

“YOU’RE FUCKED”

3 a.m. – 7 a.m.

Maggie Haberman: I was getting bewildered texts from my child who couldn’t sleep, asking me what happened. I think this election was really difficult for kids to process.

Matt Paul: It was fucking terrible. We had these hastily organized calls every 10 minutes to determine what was going to happen the next morning. There was no advanced plan. Where were we going to do this massive global television event? How were we going to get people in the room? Who was going to say what in what order? That happened between 4 in the morning and when she spoke.

Rebecca Traister: In the cab home, the cabbie had on the news, that’s when I heard his acceptance speech, and I said, “Can you turn it off?” I couldn’t hear his voice. I was like, “I can’t listen to his voice for the next four years.”

Desus Nice: I went home, and it was like when your team loses and you watch it on SportsCenter over and over and over. I turned on MSNBC, and Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow were asking, “How’d you get this wrong? How did Nate Silver get this wrong? What did Hillary do?” I kept turning to Fox News and seeing them gloat and the balloons falling. I think I stayed up until three in the morning just drinking and watching.

The Kid Mero: I went home and smoked myself to sleep. I was like, “This sucks.”

Ashley Nicole Black: I took a shower, and then as soon as water hit me, I started bawling. I didn’t really have any feelings until that moment.

Ashley Parker: Times Square felt like a zombie-apocalypse movie. There was no one there. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I walked from the ballroom to the newsroom. They were like, “Go home, get some sleep, you’ll need it.” I walked back to my hotel. I couldn’t sleep. I watched cable news and then fell asleep.

Van Jones: I was walking out the building. Your thumb just kind of automatically switches over to Twitter. I saw that my name was trending worldwide. And I was like, “Whoa, that’s weird.”

Brian Fallon: I stayed in Brooklyn throughout the campaign, but that night I got a hotel in Midtown, close to the Peninsula. I actually walked past his hotel. I saw all the red hats that were still milling about outside of his victory party. It was pretty surreal.

Ashley Nicole Black: I looked at myself—I’m going to cry even saying this right now—I looked at myself in the mirror, and in that moment, I looked like my grandmother. The first thought I had was that I was glad that she wasn’t alive to see that. Then I felt so guilty because of course nothing would ever make me glad my grandmother is not alive. I love her so much, and I wish she was here. But she died when Obama was president, with that hope that the world had moved forward, and black people had moved forward. And she didn’t see the huge backlash that came after. In that moment, I was very grateful, and then guilty, and then I went to bed.

Jorge Ramos: I’ve been to wars, I’ve covered the most difficult situations in Latin America. But I needed to digest and to understand what had happened. I came home very late. I turned on the news. I had comfort food—cookies and chocolate milk—the same thing I used to have as a kid in Mexico City. After that, I realized that I had been preparing all my life for this moment. Once I digested what had happened with Trump and had a plan, which was to resist and report and not be neutral, then I was able to go to bed.

Rebecca Traister: I got back to Park Slope, I went to check on the girls. When I went to say goodnight, I looked at Rosie, and I had this conscious thought that this is the day that will divide our experience of what is possible. This is the day where a limitation is reinforced for her.

Michael Barbaro: I went home and woke up my husband, I think it was 4 or 5 in the morning, and asked him what the next steps should be journalistically. Should I move to Washington? Should I change jobs? It was pretty disorienting.

Maggie Haberman: One Trump supporter sent me a message saying, “You’re fucked.” [Laughs] If you use that, please recall me laughing about it. It was really something.

Van Jones: I got to my apartment and put my head down. I woke up like three, four hours later. And in my mind I thought, it was a dream. Just for a split second. I was still fully clothed. I had makeup all over my pillow. And I was like, “Shit.”

“IT WAS ONE OF THE BEST SPEECHES SHE’S EVER GIVEN”

7 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.

Jon Favreau: It felt like when you wake up after someone close to you passes away. Not nearly as bad, obviously, but that same feeling where you think, for like five seconds, you’re okay, maybe it’s a normal morning, and then it hits you what happened.

Roger Stone: I mean, we were walkin’ on clouds. We were still in the halo of the whole thing. I was very pleased.

Jerry Falwell Jr.: The feeling afterward was relief. I had worked so hard to help him. I’d risked so much and went so far out on a limb. Everybody thought I was crazy. It was a renewed hope for the future of the country, and a little bit of fear that I was going to be chosen to serve in the administration, because I didn’t want to.

Steve Bannon: I had my whole family that had come up to the victory party and I hadn’t seen anybody, so I went home and grabbed a shower, just like the night before, got another hour of sleep, and I was with Jared. And I think we were with Trump at like 8 in the morning. So it was just like the exact same thing as the day before. The day before I felt we were gonna win the presidency, and the next day we had won the presidency. It was odd, there was never any big insurgent feeling or anything like that. It played out how I thought it would play out. I didn’t have much doubt the first day of the campaign, didn’t really have much doubt on Billy Bush weekend. He was connecting. He had a powerful message.

Reza Aslan: I remember thinking, as clear as day, this is who we are. This is what we deserve.

Shani O. Hilton, U.S. news editor, BuzzFeed News: You get on the train from Brooklyn. It’s silent. And not in the normal way of people not talking to each other. It felt like an observable silence. I saw at least three people sitting by themselves, just weeping silently.

Melissa Alt: The next day my manager took the cake back to Trump Tower because they didn’t cut it at election night. Donald Trump Jr. told my friend that it was delicious.

Matt Paul: I remember rolling up in the motorcade and seeing some of our staff and organizers couldn’t get in. A reporter or cameraperson who was familiar to me said, “Can I sneak in with you?” I looked at that person, sort of stunned, and said, “Fuck no.” Then I realized I shouldn’t have said that. It was just a visceral, gut reaction to seeing some of our staff that couldn’t get in who had killed themselves for two years.

Nate Silver: If you read FiveThirtyEight throughout the election and listened to our arguments with other journalists and reporters, then you would’ve been much better prepared and much less surprised by the outcome.

The Kid Mero: We very quickly became familiar with the term “economic anxiety.”

Reza Aslan: You take your kids to school, you go to the store, you go to the post office, you’re looking around, and you’re thinking, “These people hate me.”

Jelani Cobb: I went to the airport the next morning for a 7 a.m. flight. There’s an African-American gentleman, maybe in his 60s, working at the check-in counter. He starts talking about how disastrous and dangerous this moment’s going to be. And he’s seen history in the South and thinking that we might be headed back toward the things he thought were in the past.

Dave Weigel: I was connecting through the Atlanta airport. I looked around and thought, well, for eight years, I didn’t really think about who voted for who. But as a white dude with a mustache, fairly bloated by the campaign, most of the people who look like me voted for this guy who, as far as they know, is a bigot. I remember feeling that this divider had come down, this new intensity of feeling about everybody I saw.

Van Jones: The next day, my commentary had become this sort-of viral sensation. Fox News is mad at me for saying “whitelash.” Liberals are treating me as some kind of hero. And literally, for the next two weeks, I didn’t have to pay for anything in any establishment in D.C. or New York. Not one meal. Not one cab. Uber people would turn the thing off and just drive me around for free.

Joshua Green: Bannon called me. He said, “You recognize what happened?” I’m like, “What the fuck are you talking about?” He goes, “You guys,” meaning you on the left, “you fell into the same trap as conservatives in the ‘90s…you were so whipped up in your own self-righteousness about how Americans could never vote for Trump that you were blinded to what was happening.” He was right.

Matt Paul: There were five or six of us standing in a hold room. One of Hillary’s brothers was there with his wife. A couple of the president’s people. Myself. A couple of campaign photographers. President Clinton walked in. It was very tough. Secretary Clinton walked in and was strong and composed. I stood there in shock at how put together and strong she was.

Rebecca Traister: As someone who covered her in 2008 and watched her struggle with speechgiving, it was one of the best speeches she’s ever given.

Jim Margolis: Everybody was basically in tears. Huma was in front of me. Jake [Sullivan] was on one side. It was one of those incredible scenes. Nobody had had any sleep.

Steve Bannon: Never watched it. Couldn’t care less. Her, Podesta, all of it. I thought they were overrated. I thought they were—they’re a media creation. People say how genius they were, how brilliant they were. Look, I’d never been on a campaign in my life. But I can understand math. Just looking at where it was gonna come down to. Morning Joe tells me they’re so brilliant every day. Why are they not getting some pretty fundamental stuff here? But no, I had no interest in seeing her concession speech. I have no interest in a damn thing with their campaign because I don’t think they knew what they were doing. I only have interest in what we did. Which was just, focus, focus, focus.

Rep. Adam Schiff: My staff both in California and in D.C. were absolutely devastated. People would come up to me, constituents and others, with tears in their eyes. And the astounding thing is, here we are now. People continue to come up to me with tears in their eyes about what he’s doing. I’ve never seen people have a visceral reaction over an election and be so deeply alarmed at what’s happening to the country.

Charles P. Pierce, Esquire writer at large: On the Sunday before the election, I drove out from Philadelphia to Gettysburg. Once I got out of the sprawling Philadelphia exurbs, I started to see improvised signs. There were several of those small portable marquees that you see outside clam shacks and chili parlors. I saw a huge piece of plywood nailed to a tree outside a motorcycle repair shop. I saw an entire barn painted red, white, and blue. “Trump,” it said, on the side of the barn. “Make America Great Again.” And I could see that barn, out in the field, in my mind’s eye, as Hillary Rodham Clinton gave her belated concession speech. And when she talked about making the American Dream available to everyone, I thought, damn, somebody had to want it bad to paint a whole barn just to argue about that.

Roger Stone: Trump is a winner. He’s a very confident, upbeat guy. That’s just his style. He thought all along that he would win. There’s no doubt that the Billy Bush thing shook him a little bit, but it ended up not being determinative.

Jerry Falwell Jr.: We had traveled on the plane with him during the campaign. He went and got the Wendy’s cheeseburgers and the fries, put them out on the table for us. I just think he’s a people’s president. I think that’s something we’ve not had in a real long time.

Gary Johnson: Well for me, just speaking personally, I do not aspire to be president of the United States anymore. Why would anybody want to be president of the United States now that Donald Trump’s been president of the United States?

 ##########

from https://stonecoldtruth.com/untold-stories-of-election-day-2016/ from Roger Stone http://rogerstone1.blogspot.com/2017/11/untold-stories-of-election-day-2016.html

[ariaanna27]

Untold Stories Of Election Day 2016

BELOW IS A RECAP OF ELECTION DAY/NIGHT FROM ESQUIRE MAGAZINE featuring ROGER STONE. 

**** Roger Stone, longtime Trump ally: She was just dead in the water. ****

  On November 8, 2016, America’s chief storytellers—those within the bubbles of media and politics—lost the narrative they had controlled for decades. In a space of 24 hours, the concept of “conventional wisdom” seemed to vanish for good. How did this happen? What follows are over 40 brand new interviews and behind-the-scenes stories from deep inside The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, Fox News, and more—plus first-hand accounts from the campaigns, themselves. We’ve spent a year hearing the spin. Now it’s time for the truth.

THE RUN-UP

Steve Bannon, Trump campaign CEO: When I first came on the campaign, I said, “You have a hundred-percent chance of winning.” We just got to stick to that plan. Even with Billy Bush, I never wavered for a second.

Jim Margolis, Clinton campaign senior adviser: I am normally a glass-half-empty guy when it comes to expectations on election days. This was the first big election where I was absolutely certain we were going to win.

Dave Weigel, The Washington Post: I called Jeff Flake the Sunday before the election. I said, “I have one round of questions if Hillary wins, and one if Trump wins.” And he just started laughing, saying, “Why would you bother asking the second one?”

Rebecca Traister, New York magazine: We got up around 7 a.m., and there was an electric current running through my body.

Ana Marie Cox, Crooked Media, formerly of MTV: I was staying at my in-laws’ place in New York. They’re Trump supporters. They weren’t in town, but my father-in-law made a joking bet with me. He said, “The next time we see each other, there will be a President Trump.” I remember laughing at him.

Neal Brennan, comedian/writer: I was at SNL. Chappelle was like, “Dude, I feel like Trump’s gonna win.” I was like, “Dude, I’ll bet you a hundred thousand dollars he won’t win.” He did not take the bet, thankfully.

Sen. Tim Kaine, Democratic vice presidential candidate: I thought we would win, but I was more wary than many for the simple reason that the U.S. had never elected a woman president and still has a poor track record of electing women to federal office.

Ana Navarro, CNN commentator and Republican strategist: I schlepped my absentee ballot around with me for a month. It was getting pretty beat up inside my bag. I would open it up and look at it every now and then and say, “I’m not ready. I can’t bring myself to vote for Hillary Clinton. Please, God, let something happen that I don’t have to do this.”

Brian Fallon, Clinton campaign national press secretary: There had been a battleground tracking poll our team had done over the weekend that had us up 4 [points]. We were up in more than enough states to win, taking us over 270. The public polls all showed a similar outlook.

Zara Rahim, Clinton campaign national spokeswoman: We were waiting for the coronation. I was planning my Instagram caption.

Van Jones, CNN political commentator: The Democrats had this attitude, which I think is very unhealthy and unproductive, that any acknowledgement that Trump had a chance was somehow helping Trump, and that we all had to be on this one accord that it was impossible for him to win. I thought that was stupid. I’ve never seen that strategy work.

Matt Oczkowski, formerly of Cambridge Analytica (Trump campaign data firm): When you see outlets like the Huffington Post giving Trump a 1 percent probability of victory, which is not even physically possible, it’s just like, “Wow, people are going to miss this massively.”

Roger Stone, longtime Trump ally: She was just dead in the water.

Joel Benenson, Clinton campaign chief strategist: I go into the 10 o’clock call and we’re getting reports from the analytics people and the field people. And they finish, and whoever’s leading the call asks if there’s anything else. I said, “Well, yeah, I got a call 20 minutes ago from my daughter in Durham, North Carolina. People are standing on line and aren’t moving, and are now being told they need to vote with paper ballots.” To me, that was the first sign that something was amiss in our boiler room process. That’s essential information. We needed those reports so the legal team would activate. I was stunned, and actually quite nervous. I thought, “Do we even have what we need on the ground to manage election day?”

“I MEAN, IT LOOKED LIKE A LANDSLIDE”

5 p.m.

Nate Silver, FiveThirtyEight: When I was coming in on the train at 5 p.m., according to our model, there was one-in-three chance of a Clinton landslide, a one-in-three chance of a close Clinton win, and a one-in-three chance of a Trump win. I was mentally preparing myself for each of those outcomes.

David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker: I thought about, and actually wrote, an essay about “the first woman president,” and the historical background of it all. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the suffragettes, the relationship with Frederick Douglass…a historical essay, clearly written in a mood of “at long last” and, yes, celebration. The idea was to press “post” on that piece, along with many other pieces by my colleagues at The New Yorker, the instant Clinton’s victory was declared on TV.

Bret Baier, Fox News chief political anchor: We got the exit polls at 5 p.m. in a big office on the executive floor. Rupert Murdoch and all the staff were there. It looked like we were going to call the race for Hillary Clinton at 10:30 or 11 p.m.

Steve Bannon: The exit polls were horrific. It was brutal. I think we were close in Iowa and Ohio and everything else was just brutal. Losing everywhere. Florida, Pennsylvania. I mean, it looked like a landslide.

Ashley Parker, The Washington Post, formerly of The New York Times: The RNC thought they were going to lose. The Trump campaign supporters thought they were going to lose. They were rushing to get their side out of the blame game. I spent part of my day lining up interviews for later that night or the next morning to get their version of events.

Jerry Falwell Jr., president of Liberty University, Trump’s religious adviser: I called Sean Hannity and said, “I really think he’s going to win tonight.” Sean said, “Well, I’m glad you do, because the exit polls don’t look good.” I found out later that Trump was very pessimistic, too.

Steve Bannon: Jared [Kushner] and I were out on this balcony in Trump Tower. We looked at it on Jared’s iPhone. And the numbers were so bad that we regrouped inside. We look at each other and we go, “This can’t be right. It just can’t.” And Jared goes, “I got an idea, let’s call Drudge.” And Drudge says, “The corporate media—they’ve always been wrong the entire time—these numbers are wrong.”

Brian Fallon: I was hearing from my high school principal, people I hadn’t spoken to since college. Everybody is conveying thanks for taking on Trump. It was going to be a cathartic experience of him getting his comeuppance after months of representing something that was so egregious in the eyes of so many people.

Rebecca Traister: They were serving, like, $12 pulled pork sandwiches [at the Javits Center]. It was nuts, people were bouncing off the walls. Everyone genuinely believed she was going to win. I don’t know if it made me feel more confident or not.

Evan McMullin, Independent candidate: Our election night event was in Salt Lake City. I was drinking Diet Coke and eating hummus and olives.

Ana Marie Cox: At the MTV watch party, we had dancers and graffiti artists. There were people giving temporary tattoos. I remember my colleague Jamil Smith and I both bringing up at a meeting, “Hey guys, what if something goes wrong? What if this doesn’t go how we think it’s going to go?” And the answer from some MTV exec was, “We’ll pivot.”

Steve Bannon: Drudge snapped us out of it, saying, “You guys are a couple of jamokes. Wait until the second exit polls come out, or later.” We called the candidate and told him what the numbers were and what Drudge had said. And then we said, “Hey, ya know, we left it all on the field. Did everything we can do. Let’s just see how it turns out.”

Sen. Tim Kaine: Based on the returns from one bellwether Virginia county I know well, I realized that we would win Virginia by a significantly larger margin than President Obama four years earlier. This was a huge feeling given all the work that Anne and I have done for 30-plus years to help make Virginia more progressive. It struck me for the first time, “I will probably be vice president.” That feeling lasted about 90 minutes.

Ashley Parker: I walked over to the Hilton for election night. At some point they rolled in a cake that was like…a life-sized, very impressive rendering of Trump’s head.

Melissa Alt, cake artist: I got an order for a Hillary Clinton cake. So, I was like, “Okay, I’m going to make Donald Trump as well.” Just because that would generate a lot of interest. My manager, who has a friend who works for Donald Trump Jr., said, “Let’s contact them and see if they’re interested in having cake.” And obviously they said yes.

The Kid Mero, Desus & Mero: I’m surprised a stripper didn’t jump out of the cake.

Melissa Alt: I start getting phone calls of people saying, “This is TMZ, or Boston Globe, or People magazine. Do you know that your cake is trending all over the whole internet?”

Ashley Parker: I don’t know if I was ever allowed to eat it. It seemed fairly decorative.

Melissa Alt: Obviously, I wanted everyone to see it first and then eat it. That cake could probably feed about a hundred.

Gary Johnson, Libertarian candidate: I was taken aback by the fact that, at least at the start of the evening, all the networks were showing three names on the screen for the first time, meaning mine and Clinton and Trump. But no, I don’t remember the cake.

“I THINK I’M GONNA THROW UP”

8 p.m. – 1 a.m.

Maggie Haberman, The New York Times: When I went downstairs at 8:15, Hillary was up in Florida. When I came back upstairs, it had flipped. I got a sense the second I set foot in the newsroom that something was going on.

Van Jones: You got smoke coming out of every gear trying to figure out what the heck is happening out there. And you’ve got John King who had said, over and over, that there is no pathway for a Trump victory. Suddenly, that whole thing starts to come apart.

Roger Stone: I was committed to be an on-air anchor for InfoWars. I think I was on the air for seven hours straight.

Steve Bannon: We had taken over the fifth floor of Trump Tower, which had been Corey [Lewandowski]’s original headquarters. It was a concrete floor with no carpeting. They didn’t heat it. It had computers everywhere, guys are tracking everything, we had a chain of command. We called the fifth floor “the crack den.” It looked like a crack den. We put all the maps up and we started getting raw feeds from both our local guys and also the secretary of state of Florida. They were putting up their total vote counts. And [national field director] Bill Stepien was sitting there with all of our modeling. They were really focused on Florida—particularly the Broward and Miami-Dade counties. Also North Carolina was coming in. And obviously Ohio and those states were starting to come in. But the big one we were focused on was Florida. Because if we didn’t win Florida, it was not going to happen.

Omarosa Manigault, Trump campaign: If we believed what was on the television, we would have thought we lost. But looking at the numbers that were in front of us in the key battleground states, we were up…or we were neck and neck, with expectations of higher turnout and more enthusiasm. We were going off of our own internal data. What was being shown on CNN and MSNBC and some of these other networks was showing a stark contrast to what was in front of us.

Reza Aslan, author and religious scholar: I thought, “Oh my God, how terrible are we that it’s even this close?”

Brian Fallon: As I was walking off the risers [at Javits], Jen Epstein, a Bloomberg reporter, grabbed my arm and said, “Are you guys nervous about Florida?” I gave her some sort of verbal shrug. Right after that I called into the boiler room and asked for a gut check.

Van Jones: My phone was literally warm from the text messages coming in.

Zara Rahim: I had been going back and forth between the venue and backstage. My face was really tense. All of these reporters can read your energy and your face. You never want a reporter to tweet like, “Clinton campaign members are nervous.”

Jim Margolis: I finally called Steve Schale, who ran Florida for us in the Obama campaign. I said, “Steve, what’s going on here? Is this just a lack of information?” He said, “I think you’ve got a problem.”

Bret Baier: At 8:30 I turned to Chris Wallace, who was sitting next to us on the set, and said, “This does not look like it’s lining up.” We came back from commercial break and Chris said, “Donald Trump could be the next president of the United States.”

Jerry Falwell Jr.: My 17-year-old daughter, Caroline, had been following the election. It’s the first time she’s ever followed politics. And she was so nervous about the result that her stomach got upset. She told her brother, “I think I’m gonna throw up.” So he took off his Trump hat and she threw up in it, right next to Laura Ingraham.

Felix Biederman, Chapo Trap House: At that point the blue wall hadn’t come in yet, and that’s when the air in the room started to tighten. It was like, “Oh, fuck.” She can still do it, but everything that needs to happen for Trump is happening. What if what’s always happened with Hillary—they did all the work, they know everything, they’re super qualified—what if they didn’t do it? What if they fucked it up?

Ana Marie Cox: I did a couple of on-camera news hits where I was told, “What you need to do here is tell people not to panic.” Meanwhile, I was panicking.

David Remnick: Not only did I not have anything else ready, I don’t think our site had anything, or much of anything, ready in case Trump won. The mood in the offices, I would say, was frenetic.

Dave Weigel: I’m in the parking lot of the Scalise party. There are Republicans drinking, some celebrating, some not paying attention. My editor was calling to see when I would hand in my story. One, I’m on a minor story that’s falling apart, and two, I’m probably in the wrong place. Three, I need to reorder the story, and four, how much did I tell people confidently about the election that I was wrong about?

Ashley Parker: We started running up to one another like, “He’s gonna win, he’s gonna win. We know it now, it’s gonna happen.”

Desus Nice, Desus & Mero: It’s one thing to find out Donald Trump is president, but another to be on TV with people watching you watch Donald Trump become president.

Michael Barbaro, The New York Times: Carolyn Ryan, who was the politics editor, pulled me aside and said, “I need you to be involved in a ‘Trump Wins’ story.”

Matt Flegenheimer, The New York Times: Michael and I build this thing out together into a fully sweeping and historical news story. Maybe 1,500 words. We lock ourselves in this little glass office in the Times building and try to tune out the unstoppable din of the newsroom.

Steve Bannon: Jared came down and the candidate was upstairs. Then when word got out that Florida was competitive, that it was gonna be real, he came down to the 14th floor, the headquarters, where we had what we called the war room, which had multiple TVs running. And so what we did is we moved the data analysis thing that we had up to the 14th floor. And I went over with Stepien and the others and just stood next to the candidate and walked him through what was going on. And he finally took a seat. And we sat there and watched everything come in.

Jacob Soboroff, MSNBC correspondent: I went from this feeling of, “Oh my god, wow. I can’t believe it,” to, in a matter of seconds, “Oh, whoa, I can totally believe it.”

Steve Bannon: Stepien looked at it and said, “Our spread is too big, they can’t recover from this.” Miami-Dade and Broward were coming back really slow. They were clearly holding votes back, right? And then Stepien looked at me and said, “We have such a big lead now. They can’t steal it from us.

“I FELT SO ALONE, I KNEW IT WAS DONE”

Ashley Parker: I received a frantic call from Mike Barbaro, so I was racing around the ballroom getting quotes and feeding them back to the story.

Joshua Green, Bloomberg Businessweek correspondent and Devil’s Bargain author: At 9:05 p.m. I sent Bannon an email and said, “Holy shit, you guys are gonna win, aren’t you?” He sent a one word reply: “Yes.”

Dave Weigel: I had told my parents, who are Clinton supporters—my dad actually knew Clinton growing up as he’s from the same town in Illinois she is. I texted him early in the night saying, “These Florida counties seem to be going the way they usually go.” But once I realized there was no way for Clinton to win, I called them saying, “I’m sorry, this is what I do for a living and I was wrong.” My dad said, “Well, I’m still holding out hope.” And I said, “Don’t bother. Process this, and figure out what you’re going to do next, because it’s not going to happen.”

Trae Crowder, comedian and author: I felt very mad at liberals, you know, like my team. I was very upset with all of us for a lot of reasons.

Rebecca Traister: I felt so alone, I knew it was done. I was by myself on the floor. I started to cry.

David Remnick: That night I went to a friend’s election-night party. As Clinton’s numbers started to sour, I took my laptop out, got a chair, found a corner of that noisy room, and started thinking and writing. That was what turned out to be “An American Tragedy.”

Steve Bannon: As soon as we got Florida, I knew we were gonna win. Because Florida was such a massive lift for us, right? We were so outstaffed. But then we won Florida. Just made me know that the rest of the night was going to go well.

Maggie Haberman: I started texting some of the Trump people and one of them wrote back, “Say it with me: ‘President Trump. President Trump.’”

“CAN WE STAY IN THE U.S.?”

Zara Rahim: A member of senior leadership came, and I’ll never forget him looking at us and saying, essentially, “If she doesn’t win Michigan and Wisconsin, Donald Trump will be president-elect.” That was the first time I heard those words.

Jim Margolis: The tenor had changed completely. People were very nervous in the room, we’re all talking to each other. I’m going back and forth with [Clinton campaign manager] Robby Mook, who is over at the hotel. We’re on the phone with some of the states that are still out there, trying to understand what is taking place in Wisconsin and Michigan, because those numbers are softer than they ought to be. That’s beginning to weigh very heavily.

Rebecca Traister: I was thinking everything from, “I’m gonna have to rewrite my piece” to, “Can we stay in the U.S.?” I texted my husband, “Tell Rosie to go to bed. I don’t want her to watch.”

Roger Stone: The staff at InfoWars is largely people in their late 20s, early 30s, all of whom are interested in politics, but none of whom would consider themselves an expert. So they would look to me and say, “Well, are we going to win or not?” And I said, “Yes, we’re going to win.”

Matt Flegenheimer: Michael Grynbaum—who covers media—we had been following the Upshot percentages on the race. We were trying to get our heads around it. If it’s 75 percent, two coin flips, Donald Trump’s president. You had dynamic, shifting odds on the meter. Maybe it’s one coin flip. Maybe it’s half a coin flip. At some point, when I was in that little room with Michael Barbaro, Grynbaum comes in, takes a quarter, slams it down on the middle of the desk. Doesn’t say a word. Just walks out. I still have that quarter in my wallet.

David Remnick: Obviously, we were not going to press “post” until a result had been announced. So I made some revisions, came across a quotation from George Orwell, played around with various sentences, but all in a kind of strange state of focus that happens only once in a while.

Steve Bannon: We stayed there until I want to say about 11 o’clock, 11:30, after Florida got called. It looked like others were coming our way, that we were obviously gonna win. That’s when we went upstairs to the residence, to the penthouse. In hindsight, we still had two and a half hours to go, because they didn’t call it ‘til like 2:30 in the morning.

Symone Sanders, Strategist for Priorities USA: Omarosa called [into MTV] saying, “It’s a good night over here at Trump Tower.” She’s like, “I knew Donald Trump would be the president. I told everyone months ago. And the day is here!” I was just dumbfounded.

Neal Brennan: Slowly but surely it dawns on us. And I had said things like, “You know, I’ve heard that technically Republicans can never win another presidential election.” I’m just saying dumb shit, all things I’d read on Politico or fuckin’ The Atlantic or whatever. And then slowly but surely it happens. It’s like we…it…fucking Hillary lost.

Van Jones: I picked up my pen and I wrote down two words: “parents” and “whitelash.”

Jeffrey Lord, former CNN political commentator: People get so obsessed with the race thing.

Ana Marie Cox: I happen to be in recovery. I had a moment of, like, “Why the fuck not?” I went on Twitter and said, “To those of us ‘in the room’ together, he’s not worth it. Don’t drink over this.” And the response I got was amazing. I said, “I’m going to a meeting tomorrow. Everyone get through this 24 hours, get to a meeting, we’re not alone.”

Evan McMullin: I looked at my staffers. In my mind’s eye, they were all seated up against this wall. They were disappointed, they were afraid, all of that. I told them that I didn’t want to see any long faces. I told them to buck up. And it had no effect.

Van Jones: I literally said, “This was many things. This was a rebellion against elites, it was a complete reinvention of politics and polls. And it was also about race.” But the “whitelash” comment became this big, big thing. What’s interesting about it is, I’m black, my wife is not. She and I were talking about what was happening in Europe. And I said, “The backlash is coming here.” She said, “Yeah, it’ll be a whitelash here.” That was in the back of my mind. People think I made that term up on the spot. It’s very rare you can put two syllables together and make the entire case.

Jeffrey Lord: I thought he was wrong. While Van and I disagree, he’s a curious and sensible soul. I thought at some point he would come to a different conclusion.

“WHAT’S OBAMA THINKING?”

1 a.m. – 3 a.m.

Melissa Alt: People were texting me the whole night, just congratulations on the cake. That was funny because the night turned out so different than I expected. Who knew cake could generate so much hype?

Bret Baier: The futures markets had taken a nosedive, so we were covering that aspect of things. Fortunately, we had Maria Bartiromo on the set, who looked at the numbers and said, “Well, I would think this is a buying opportunity, because if you look at policy, tax cuts, regulation roll back, and everything else, that’s probably going to mean the market turning around when businesses weigh in.” That turned out to be pretty prescient.

Ana Marie Cox: A Muslim colleague of mine called his mother. She was worried he was going to be the victim of violence at any moment. A colleague who is gay and married was on the phone with her wife saying, “They’re not going to take this damn ring away from me.”

Van Jones: I had Muslim friends who came from countries like Somalia asking, “Should we leave the country tonight?” Because in their countries of origin, if a president that hostile takes power, they might start rounding up people in the morning.

David Remnick: Jelani [Cobb] and I spoke around midnight. We were both, let’s put it this way, in the New Yorker mode of radical understatement, disappointed. Jelani’s disappointment extended to his wondering whether he should actually leave the country. He wasn’t kidding around. I could tell that from his voice.

Gary Johnson: Well, I was really disappointed at the results. But what I came to very quickly was, as I’ve said many, many, many, times, if I wasn’t elected president, I was going to ski a hundred-plus days and I was also going to ride the Continental Divide bike race.

Jill Stein, Green Party candidate: Did I have remorse about running? Absolutely not. I have remorse about the misery people are experiencing under Democrats and Republicans both.

Neal Brennan: That’s sketch-writing night at SNL. So all the writers are crestfallen, and it was up to us to write comedy for that Saturday. Me and [Colin] Jost wrote the sketch where Dave [Chappelle] is watching the election, and Chris Rock shows up and everyone’s bawling. It was based on the experience of being in Jost’s office and me saying incredibly stupid shit as reality crumbled.

Ashley Nicole Black, writer/correspondent, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee: We all went into a room and sat in silence for at least five minutes. The conversation wasn’t like, “What is it going to be in the country?” It was like, okay, “We’re at work. We have a show tomorrow. What are we going to do?” And Sam goes, “I think this is my fault.” It’s Sam’s first time voting in an American election, and she told us how the first time she was on Law & Order, Law & Order got canceled the next day. And she got interviewed by Playboy, and the next day they announced they were no longer doing nudity. And now she voted for the first time and broke America. We all laughed, it broke the tension in the room. Then we started writing Act 1 with that idea in mind.

Rep. Adam Schiff, congressman, 28th District of California: I was at a victory party for my campaign at the Burbank Bar and Grill. And it was the most somber and depressing victory party I’d ever had.

Brian Fallon: Eventually there were conversations around the awkwardness. There started to be this pressure to concede even before AP called the race.

Nate Silver: I felt like if the roles had been reversed, and if Clinton had been winning all of these states, that they wouldn’t have been so slow to call it. In some ways, the slowness to call it reflected the stubbornness the media had the whole time about realizing that, actually, it was a pretty competitive election.

Jerry Falwell Jr.: The crowd at the Trump party was really aggravated because Megyn Kelly didn’t want to call it. She was so hopeful that Trump would lose. She let hours go by. Finally, the crowd started chanting, “Call it! Call it! Call it!”

Bret Baier: There was a growing group of people who had gathered outside Fox News who obviously were Trump supporters. They were going crazy.

Zara Rahim: There was a massive garage behind the Javits center. John Podesta stood up on a box and told us, “We will have more information for you soon,” which is the most frustrating thing to hear in that moment. Everybody was in this big circle of sadness and nobody knew what to do. Leadership didn’t know what to do. We were all at a loss.

Jon Favreau, Crooked Media, former Obama speechwriter: We were in a constant text chain with our buddies in the White House, asking, “What’s going on? What’s the boss thinking? What’s Obama thinking?” And finally they told us, “Oh, he just talked to her and he thinks she should concede and she agrees. She’s just waiting for the right moment.”

Jerry Falwell Jr.: I called the president-elect. He said, “Well, why don’t you come over to Trump Tower, you and your family, and watch the returns with us?” And I said, “I don’t want to do that, because by the time I get over there, you’re going to be coming over here to do your victory speech.” And he said, “All right, whatever.”

Matt Paul, chief of staff to VP candidate Tim Kaine: Senator Kaine, when the news became very grim…the senator actually went to bed. Nothing was going to happen that night. He had to put together a different type of speech.

Brian Fallon: I was on the phone with the decision desk people at AP, trying to glean a sense of their confidence about the numbers in states like Wisconsin and Michigan. I knew that when those got called, it was ball game, so I was trying to impart to them what we were hearing about what precincts might still be outstanding. We were also trying to gauge if they were about to call it, if and when she should speak.

Michael Barbaro: We really labored over a few paragraphs and a few words, just capturing the enormity of a Trump victory. That it wasn’t expected. The messages the campaign had run on, what they would suddenly mean for the country. And it was a real challenge to convey all of the things he had said and done in the campaign, and all the controversies that he had sparked and put those into the context of a traditional, sweeping, “This person has just been elected president of the United States,” New York Times story.

Matt Flegenheimer: I think after 1 o’clock we had our final version and we were ready to press the button on “Trump Just Won.” It did make the last edition of the print paper.

Michael Barbaro: There was so much going on that night and so many last-minute changes and such a hectic schedule that the story was published with the wrong bylines. The historic front page, “Trump Triumphs,” ran in the paper with the wrong bylines.

Jelani Cobb, The New Yorker: I saw the New York Times headline and I was very discomforted by it. For one, I knew that I had a child on the way.

Maggie Haberman: I was supposed to go on a CNN panel at 2 a.m., they were doing a very early version of New Day. I got stuck because of a deadline anyway, so it worked out I couldn’t make it, which I felt bad about. In reality, I wasn’t prepared to talk about it. I couldn’t really understand what had happened. And I think images of gobsmacked reporters probably wouldn’t have helped.

Michael Barbaro: We’re all sitting around and we’re all doing what journalists do after a big story, which is talk about it endlessly. I don’t think any of us wanted to go home. I don’t think any of us wanted to go off into the private space of figuring out what this all means. This gravitational pull kept us there much later than we needed to be.

Reza Aslan: My wife stayed up and I went to sleep, then she woke me up around 1 or 2 in the morning bawling and told me that it was over. My poor, sweet wife. She wanted to hug and kiss me but I went into a panic attack and couldn’t breathe.

David Remnick: We agreed that night, and we agree today, that the Trump presidency is an emergency. And in an emergency, you’ve got a purpose, a job to do, and ours is to put pressure on power. That’s always the highest calling of journalism, but never more so than when power is a constant threat to the country and in radical opposition to its values and its highest sense of itself.

Brian Fallon: We had this issue where the Javits Center needed us out by 3 a.m. The decision was made that someone had to come out and address the crowd.

Zara Rahim: There were die-hard Hillary supporters that were like, “We’re not going.” Folks who were sobbing and literally couldn’t move because they were so distraught. I remember pieces of memorabilia on the floor, little Hillary pins and “I believe that she will win” placards.

Rebecca Traister: People were throwing up. People were on the floor crying.

Steve Bannon: We had an agreement with these guys. Robby Mook had sent this email saying, you know, “When AP calls it, we’ll call and congratulate you right away.” Because they were expecting Trump to keep saying, “It’s rigged, it’s rigged.” So Robby Mook sent a thing over which I’m sure he regrets. [Laughs]. He sent an email to us, he said, 15 minutes after AP calls it, they would expect to hear from us. If they hadn’t heard from us, she would get up to give a victory speech. I think AP called it right when we left.

Roger Stone: We figured they had her in a straitjacket by then. Or that she was throwing things and cursing.

“LET’S GO ONSTAGE AND GET THIS DONE”

Bret Baier: It was around 2:30 in the morning, and I said, “Donald Trump will be the 45th president of the United States.” This whiz-bang graphic with all of these firework animations flashed across the screen with the words Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States. Just seeing that, everybody on the set was silent for a little bit, as the whole thing was being digested.

Stephen L. Miller, conservative blogger: The Onion headline kept flashing through my head really heavy. During the primaries they had the Trump story, “You really want to see how far this goes, don’t you America?”

Jorge Ramos, Univision news anchor: When he won, I said it as if I was reporting a football score or a soccer match. “Donald Trump is going to be the next president of the United States.” No emotion. Just the facts. That’s what the audience demanded. That is a sign of respect. As a journalist you have to report reality as it is, not as you wish it would be. That’s exactly what I was doing.

Jeffrey Lord: It was an amazing moment. Anderson [Cooper] came over to me and, in his classy fashion, shook my hand and said, “Congratulations, you were right.”

Steve Bannon: When it was called, he was actually upstairs in the kitchen. He has a small kitchen with a television. When he heard it was being called by AP, I shook his hand and said, “Congratulations, Mr. President.” So we kinda laughed. There were no big hugs or anything. Nothing crazy. He’s not a guy who gets overly excited. He’s very controlled. People around him are very controlled. We were obviously very happy and ecstatic. But it’s not a bunch of jumping around, high-fiving, anything like that.

Matt Oczkowski: It almost felt like a videogame, like you were playing something and won. You’re like, “Wow, this is the presidency of the United States.”

Roger Stone: The champagne tasted great. This was the culmination of a dream that I’d had since 1988.

Jim Margolis: I was on with Robby [Mook], who was in the room with her when she did the concession call to Trump. It was surreal. It was beyond my imagination that we would be in this position with this person being elected president.

Steve Bannon: It only took us 10 minutes to get there, it was right down the street. When we got there, we were in this weird holding stage, kind of off to the side. Very crammed. She called the president on his phone. Or it might have been Huma Abedin called Kellyanne [Conway] and then she hands her phone off to the president, and then Secretary Clinton was on there, you know, “Hey, Donald, congratulations, hard-fought win.” Two or three minutes. Then we looked at each other and said, “Let’s go onstage and get this done.”

Roger Stone: He looked surprised at the fact that he’d won. Which is surprising only because he pretty consistently thought he would win. Not unhappy, but rather, shocked.

Neal Brennan: I thought it was so fucking weird that he was like, “Is Jim here? Come on up here.” Like he was emceeing a sports banquet. But it was good that he set the tone right there. So long, context. So long, history.

Joshua Green: I thought he had actually made at least a cursory effort to try to unite the country by reaching out to Hillary Clinton voters. That sentiment probably evaporated before the sun rose the next day. At least on election night he said something approximating what you would expect a normal presidential victor to say in a moment like that, to try and bring the country together.

Symone Sanders: I still couldn’t believe it was happening. When he talked about us coming together and healing for the country, I wanted to throw up in my mouth.

“YOU’RE FUCKED”

3 a.m. – 7 a.m.

Maggie Haberman: I was getting bewildered texts from my child who couldn’t sleep, asking me what happened. I think this election was really difficult for kids to process.

Matt Paul: It was fucking terrible. We had these hastily organized calls every 10 minutes to determine what was going to happen the next morning. There was no advanced plan. Where were we going to do this massive global television event? How were we going to get people in the room? Who was going to say what in what order? That happened between 4 in the morning and when she spoke.

Rebecca Traister: In the cab home, the cabbie had on the news, that’s when I heard his acceptance speech, and I said, “Can you turn it off?” I couldn’t hear his voice. I was like, “I can’t listen to his voice for the next four years.”

Desus Nice: I went home, and it was like when your team loses and you watch it on SportsCenter over and over and over. I turned on MSNBC, and Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow were asking, “How’d you get this wrong? How did Nate Silver get this wrong? What did Hillary do?” I kept turning to Fox News and seeing them gloat and the balloons falling. I think I stayed up until three in the morning just drinking and watching.

The Kid Mero: I went home and smoked myself to sleep. I was like, “This sucks.”

Ashley Nicole Black: I took a shower, and then as soon as water hit me, I started bawling. I didn’t really have any feelings until that moment.

Ashley Parker: Times Square felt like a zombie-apocalypse movie. There was no one there. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I walked from the ballroom to the newsroom. They were like, “Go home, get some sleep, you’ll need it.” I walked back to my hotel. I couldn’t sleep. I watched cable news and then fell asleep.

Van Jones: I was walking out the building. Your thumb just kind of automatically switches over to Twitter. I saw that my name was trending worldwide. And I was like, “Whoa, that’s weird.”

Brian Fallon: I stayed in Brooklyn throughout the campaign, but that night I got a hotel in Midtown, close to the Peninsula. I actually walked past his hotel. I saw all the red hats that were still milling about outside of his victory party. It was pretty surreal.

Ashley Nicole Black: I looked at myself—I’m going to cry even saying this right now—I looked at myself in the mirror, and in that moment, I looked like my grandmother. The first thought I had was that I was glad that she wasn’t alive to see that. Then I felt so guilty because of course nothing would ever make me glad my grandmother is not alive. I love her so much, and I wish she was here. But she died when Obama was president, with that hope that the world had moved forward, and black people had moved forward. And she didn’t see the huge backlash that came after. In that moment, I was very grateful, and then guilty, and then I went to bed.

Jorge Ramos: I’ve been to wars, I’ve covered the most difficult situations in Latin America. But I needed to digest and to understand what had happened. I came home very late. I turned on the news. I had comfort food—cookies and chocolate milk—the same thing I used to have as a kid in Mexico City. After that, I realized that I had been preparing all my life for this moment. Once I digested what had happened with Trump and had a plan, which was to resist and report and not be neutral, then I was able to go to bed.

Rebecca Traister: I got back to Park Slope, I went to check on the girls. When I went to say goodnight, I looked at Rosie, and I had this conscious thought that this is the day that will divide our experience of what is possible. This is the day where a limitation is reinforced for her.

Michael Barbaro: I went home and woke up my husband, I think it was 4 or 5 in the morning, and asked him what the next steps should be journalistically. Should I move to Washington? Should I change jobs? It was pretty disorienting.

Maggie Haberman: One Trump supporter sent me a message saying, “You’re fucked.” [Laughs] If you use that, please recall me laughing about it. It was really something.

Van Jones: I got to my apartment and put my head down. I woke up like three, four hours later. And in my mind I thought, it was a dream. Just for a split second. I was still fully clothed. I had makeup all over my pillow. And I was like, “Shit.”

“IT WAS ONE OF THE BEST SPEECHES SHE’S EVER GIVEN”

7 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.

Jon Favreau: It felt like when you wake up after someone close to you passes away. Not nearly as bad, obviously, but that same feeling where you think, for like five seconds, you’re okay, maybe it’s a normal morning, and then it hits you what happened.

Roger Stone: I mean, we were walkin’ on clouds. We were still in the halo of the whole thing. I was very pleased.

Jerry Falwell Jr.: The feeling afterward was relief. I had worked so hard to help him. I’d risked so much and went so far out on a limb. Everybody thought I was crazy. It was a renewed hope for the future of the country, and a little bit of fear that I was going to be chosen to serve in the administration, because I didn’t want to.

Steve Bannon: I had my whole family that had come up to the victory party and I hadn’t seen anybody, so I went home and grabbed a shower, just like the night before, got another hour of sleep, and I was with Jared. And I think we were with Trump at like 8 in the morning. So it was just like the exact same thing as the day before. The day before I felt we were gonna win the presidency, and the next day we had won the presidency. It was odd, there was never any big insurgent feeling or anything like that. It played out how I thought it would play out. I didn’t have much doubt the first day of the campaign, didn’t really have much doubt on Billy Bush weekend. He was connecting. He had a powerful message.

Reza Aslan: I remember thinking, as clear as day, this is who we are. This is what we deserve.

Shani O. Hilton, U.S. news editor, BuzzFeed News: You get on the train from Brooklyn. It’s silent. And not in the normal way of people not talking to each other. It felt like an observable silence. I saw at least three people sitting by themselves, just weeping silently.

Melissa Alt: The next day my manager took the cake back to Trump Tower because they didn’t cut it at election night. Donald Trump Jr. told my friend that it was delicious.

Matt Paul: I remember rolling up in the motorcade and seeing some of our staff and organizers couldn’t get in. A reporter or cameraperson who was familiar to me said, “Can I sneak in with you?” I looked at that person, sort of stunned, and said, “Fuck no.” Then I realized I shouldn’t have said that. It was just a visceral, gut reaction to seeing some of our staff that couldn’t get in who had killed themselves for two years.

Nate Silver: If you read FiveThirtyEight throughout the election and listened to our arguments with other journalists and reporters, then you would’ve been much better prepared and much less surprised by the outcome.

The Kid Mero: We very quickly became familiar with the term “economic anxiety.”

Reza Aslan: You take your kids to school, you go to the store, you go to the post office, you’re looking around, and you’re thinking, “These people hate me.”

Jelani Cobb: I went to the airport the next morning for a 7 a.m. flight. There’s an African-American gentleman, maybe in his 60s, working at the check-in counter. He starts talking about how disastrous and dangerous this moment’s going to be. And he’s seen history in the South and thinking that we might be headed back toward the things he thought were in the past.

Dave Weigel: I was connecting through the Atlanta airport. I looked around and thought, well, for eight years, I didn’t really think about who voted for who. But as a white dude with a mustache, fairly bloated by the campaign, most of the people who look like me voted for this guy who, as far as they know, is a bigot. I remember feeling that this divider had come down, this new intensity of feeling about everybody I saw.

Van Jones: The next day, my commentary had become this sort-of viral sensation. Fox News is mad at me for saying “whitelash.” Liberals are treating me as some kind of hero. And literally, for the next two weeks, I didn’t have to pay for anything in any establishment in D.C. or New York. Not one meal. Not one cab. Uber people would turn the thing off and just drive me around for free.

Joshua Green: Bannon called me. He said, “You recognize what happened?” I’m like, “What the fuck are you talking about?” He goes, “You guys,” meaning you on the left, “you fell into the same trap as conservatives in the ‘90s…you were so whipped up in your own self-righteousness about how Americans could never vote for Trump that you were blinded to what was happening.” He was right.

Matt Paul: There were five or six of us standing in a hold room. One of Hillary’s brothers was there with his wife. A couple of the president’s people. Myself. A couple of campaign photographers. President Clinton walked in. It was very tough. Secretary Clinton walked in and was strong and composed. I stood there in shock at how put together and strong she was.

Rebecca Traister: As someone who covered her in 2008 and watched her struggle with speechgiving, it was one of the best speeches she’s ever given.

Jim Margolis: Everybody was basically in tears. Huma was in front of me. Jake [Sullivan] was on one side. It was one of those incredible scenes. Nobody had had any sleep.

Steve Bannon: Never watched it. Couldn’t care less. Her, Podesta, all of it. I thought they were overrated. I thought they were—they’re a media creation. People say how genius they were, how brilliant they were. Look, I’d never been on a campaign in my life. But I can understand math. Just looking at where it was gonna come down to. Morning Joe tells me they’re so brilliant every day. Why are they not getting some pretty fundamental stuff here? But no, I had no interest in seeing her concession speech. I have no interest in a damn thing with their campaign because I don’t think they knew what they were doing. I only have interest in what we did. Which was just, focus, focus, focus.

Rep. Adam Schiff: My staff both in California and in D.C. were absolutely devastated. People would come up to me, constituents and others, with tears in their eyes. And the astounding thing is, here we are now. People continue to come up to me with tears in their eyes about what he’s doing. I’ve never seen people have a visceral reaction over an election and be so deeply alarmed at what’s happening to the country.

Charles P. Pierce, Esquire writer at large: On the Sunday before the election, I drove out from Philadelphia to Gettysburg. Once I got out of the sprawling Philadelphia exurbs, I started to see improvised signs. There were several of those small portable marquees that you see outside clam shacks and chili parlors. I saw a huge piece of plywood nailed to a tree outside a motorcycle repair shop. I saw an entire barn painted red, white, and blue. “Trump,” it said, on the side of the barn. “Make America Great Again.” And I could see that barn, out in the field, in my mind’s eye, as Hillary Rodham Clinton gave her belated concession speech. And when she talked about making the American Dream available to everyone, I thought, damn, somebody had to want it bad to paint a whole barn just to argue about that.

Roger Stone: Trump is a winner. He’s a very confident, upbeat guy. That’s just his style. He thought all along that he would win. There’s no doubt that the Billy Bush thing shook him a little bit, but it ended up not being determinative.

Jerry Falwell Jr.: We had traveled on the plane with him during the campaign. He went and got the Wendy’s cheeseburgers and the fries, put them out on the table for us. I just think he’s a people’s president. I think that’s something we’ve not had in a real long time.

Gary Johnson: Well for me, just speaking personally, I do not aspire to be president of the United States anymore. Why would anybody want to be president of the United States now that Donald Trump’s been president of the United States?

  ##########

from Roger Stone – Stone Cold Truth https://stonecoldtruth.com/untold-stories-of-election-day-2016/

from Roger Stone https://rogerstone1.wordpress.com/2017/11/13/untold-stories-of-election-day-2016/

[sheminecrafts]

The real risk of Facebook’s Libra coin is crooked developers

Everyone’s worried about Mark Zuckerberg controlling the next currency, but I’m more concerned about a crypto Cambridge Analytica.

Today Facebook announced Libra, its forthcoming stablecoin designed to let you shop and send money overseas with almost zero transaction fees. Immediately, critics started harping about the dangers of centralizing control of tomorrow’s money in the hands of a company with a poor track record of privacy and security.

Facebook anticipated this, though, and created a subsidiary called Calibra to run its crypto dealings and keep all transaction data separate from your social data. Facebook shares control of Libra with 27 other Libra Association founding members, and as many as 100 total when the token launches in the first half of 2020. Each member gets just one vote on the Libra council, so Facebook can’t hijack the token’s governance even though it invented it.

With privacy fears and centralized control issues at least somewhat addressed, there’s always the issue of security. Facebook naturally has a huge target on its back for hackers. Not just because Libra could hold so much value to steal, but because plenty of trolls would get off on screwing up Facebook’s currency. That’s why Facebook open-sourced the Libra Blockchain and is offering a prototype in a pre-launch testnet. This developer beta plus a bug bounty program run in partnership with HackerOne is meant to surface all the flaws and vulnerabilities before Libra goes live with real money connected.

Yet that leaves one giant vector for abuse of Libra: the developer platform.

Facebook announces Libra cryptocurrency: All you need to know

“Essential to the spirit of Libra . . . the Libra Blockchain will be open to everyone: any consumer, developer, or business can use the Libra network, build products on top of it, and add value through their services. Open access ensures low barriers to entry and innovation and encourages healthy competition that benefits consumers,” Facebook explained in its white paper and Libra launch documents. It’s even building a whole coding language called Move for making Libra apps.

Apparently Facebook has already forgotten how allowing anyone to build on the Facebook app platform and its low barriers to “innovation” are exactly what opened the door for Cambridge Analytica to hijack 87 million people’s personal data and use it for political ad targeting.

But in this case, it won’t be users’ interests and birthdays that get grabbed. It could be hundreds or thousands of dollars’ worth of Libra currency that’s stolen. A shady developer could build a wallet that just cleans out a user’s account or funnels their coins to the wrong recipient, mines their purchase history for marketing data or uses them to launder money. Digital risks become a lot less abstract when real-world assets are at stake.

In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook raced to lock down its app platform, restrict APIs, more heavily vet new developers and audit ones that look shady. So you’d imagine the Libra Association would be planning to thoroughly scrutinize any developer trying to build a Libra wallet, exchange or other related app, right? “There are no plans for the Libra Association to take a role in actively vetting [developers],” Calibra’s head of product Kevin Weil surprisingly told me. “The minute that you start limiting it is the minute you start walking back to the system you have today with a closed ecosystem and a smaller number of competitors, and you start to see fees rise.”

That translates to “the minute we start responsibly verifying Libra app developers, things start to get expensive, complicated or agitating to cryptocurrency purists. That might hurt growth and adoption.” You know what will hurt growth of Libra a lot worse? A sob story about some migrant family or a small business getting all their Libra stolen. And that blame is going to land squarely on Facebook, not some amorphous Libra Association.

Image via Getty Images / alashi

Inevitably, some unsavvy users won’t understand the difference between Facebook’s own wallet app Calibra and any other app built for the currency. “Libra is Facebook’s cryptocurrency. They wouldn’t let me get robbed,” some will surely say. And on Calibra they’d be right. It’s a custodial wallet that will refund you if your Libra are stolen and it offers 24/7 customer support via chat to help you regain access to your account.

Yet the Libra Blockchain itself is irreversible. Outside of custodial wallets like Calibra, there’s no getting your stolen or mis-sent money back. There’s likely no customer support. And there are plenty of crooked crypto developers happy to prey on the inexperienced. Indeed, $1.7 billion in cryptocurrency was stolen last year alone, according to CypherTrace via CNBC. “As with anything, there’s fraud and there are scams in the existing financial ecosystem today . . .  that’s going to be true of Libra too. There’s nothing special or magical that prevents that,” says Weil, who concluded “I think those pros massively outweigh the cons.”

Until now, the blockchain world was mostly inhabited by technologists, except for when skyrocketing values convinced average citizens to invest in Bitcoin just before prices crashed. Now Facebook wants to bring its family of apps’ 2.7 billion users into the world of cryptocurrency. That’s deeply worrisome.

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg arrives to testify during a Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee and Senate Judiciary Committee joint hearing about Facebook on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, April 10, 2018. (Photo: SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images)

Regulators are already bristling, but perhaps for the wrong reasons. Democrat Senator Sherrod Brown tweeted that “We cannot allow Facebook to run a risky new cryptocurrency out of a Swiss bank account without oversight.” And French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire told Europe 1 radio that Libra can’t be allowed to “become a sovereign currency.”

Most harshly, Rep. Maxine Waters issued a statement saying, “Given the company’s troubled past, I am requesting that Facebook agree to a moratorium on any movement forward on developing a cryptocurrency until Congress and regulators have the opportunity to examine these issues and take action.”

Yet Facebook has just one vote in controlling the currency, and the Libra Association preempted these criticisms, writing, “We welcome public inquiry and accountability. We are committed to a dialogue with regulators and policymakers. We share policymakers’ interest in the ongoing stability of national currencies.”

That’s why as lawmakers confer about how to regulate Libra, I hope they remember what triggered the last round of Facebook execs having to appear before Congress and Parliament. A totally open, unvetted Libra developer platform in the name of “innovation” over safety is a ticking time bomb. Governments should insist the Libra Association thoroughly audit developers and maintain the power to ban bad actors. In this strange new crypto world, the public can’t be expected to perfectly protect itself from Cambridge Analytica 2.$.

Get up to speed on Facebook’s Libra with this handy guide:

Facebook announces Libra cryptocurrency: All you need to know

from iraidajzsmmwtv https://tcrn.ch/31JgIIX via IFTTT

[technicalsolutions88]

  Everyone’s worred about Mark Zuckerberg controlling the next currency, but I’m more concerned about a crypto Cambridge Analytica.

Today Facebook announced Libra, its forthcoming stablecoin designed to let you shop and send money overseas with almost zero transaction fees. Immediately, critics started harping about the dangers of centralizing control of tomorrow’s money in the hands of a company with a poor track record of privacy and security.

Facebook anticipated this, though, and created a subsidiary called Calibra to run its crypto dealings and keep all transaction data separate from your social data. Facebook shares control of Libra with 27 other Libra Association founding members and as many as 100 total when the token launches in the first half of 2020. Each member gets just one vote on the Libra council, so Facebook can’t hijack the token’s governance even though it invented it.

With privacy fears and centralized control issues at least somewhat addressed, there’s always the issue of security. Facebook naturally has a huge target on its back for hackers. Not just because Libra could hold so much value to steal, but because plenty of trolls would get off on screwing up Facebook’s currency. That’s why Facebook open sourced the Libra blockchain and is offering a prototype in a pre-launch testnet. This developer beta plus a bug bounty program run in partnership with HackerOne is meant to surface all the flaws and vulnerabilities before Libra goes live with real money connected.

Yet that leaves one giant vector for abuse of Libra: the developer platform.

Facebook announces Libra cryptocurrency: All you need to know

“Essential to the spirit of Libra . . . the Libra Blockchain will be open to everyone: any consumer, developer, or business can use the Libra network, build products on top of it, and add value through their services. Open access ensures low barriers to entry and innovation and encourages healthy competition that benefits consumers” Facebook explained in its white paper and Libra launch documents. It’s even building a whole coding language called Move for making Libra apps.

Apparently Facebook has already forgotten how allowing anyone to build on the Facebook app platform and its low barriers to ‘innovation’ are exactly what opened the door for Cambridge Analytica to hijack 87 million people’s personal data and use it for political ad targeting.

But in this case, it won’t be users’ interests and birthdays that get grabbed. It could be hundreds or thousands of dollars-worth of Libra currency that’s stolen. A shady developer could build a wallet that just cleans out a user’s account or funnels their coins to the wrong recipient, mines their purchase history for marketing data, or uses them to launder money. Digital risks become a lot less abstract when real-world assets are at stake.

In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook raced to lock down its app platform, restrict APIs, more heavily vet new developers, and audit ones that look shady. So you’d imagine the Libra Association would be planning to thoroughly scrutinize any developer trying to build a Libra wallet, exchange, or other related app, right? “There are no plans for the Libra association to take a role in actively vetting [developers]” Calibra’s head of product Kevin Weil surprisingly told me.  “The minute that you start limiting it is the minute you start walking back to the system you have today with a closed ecosystem and a smaller number of competitors, and you start to see fees rise.”

That translates to ‘the minute we start responsibly verifying Libra app developers, things start to get expensive, complicated, or agitating to cryptocurrency purists. That might hurt growth and adoption.’ You know what will hurt growth of Libra a lot worse? A sob story about some migrant family or a small business getting all their Libra stolen. And that blame is going to land squarely on Facebook, not some amorphous Libra Association.

Image via Getty Images / alashi

Inevitably, some unsavvy users won’t understand the difference between Facebook’s own wallet app Calibra and any other app built for the currency. ‘Libra is Facebook’s cryptocurrency. They wouldn’t let me get robbed’ some will surely say. And on Calibra they’d be right. It’s a custodial wallet that will refund you if your Libra are stolen and it offers 24/7 customer support via chat to help you regain access to your account.

Yet the Libra Blockchain itself is irreversible. Outside of custodial wallets like Calibra, there’s no getting your stolen or mis-sent money back. There’s likely no customer support. And there are plenty of crooked crypto developers happy to prey on the inexperienced. $1.7 billion in cryptocurrency was stolen last year alone, according to CypherTrace via CNBC. “As with anything, there’s fraud and there are scams in the existing financial ecosystem today . . .  that’s going to be true of Libra too. There’s nothing special or magical that prevents that” says Weil, who concluded “I think those pros massively outweigh the cons.”

Until now, the blockchain world was mostly inhabited by technologosts, except for when skyrocketing values convinced average citizens to invest in Bitcoin just before prices crashed. Now Facebook wants to bring its family of apps’ 2.7 billion users into the world of cryptocurrency. That’s deeply worrisome.

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg arrives to testify during a Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee and Senate Judiciary Committee joint hearing about Facebook on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, April 10, 2018. (Photo: SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images)

Regulators are already bristling, but perhaps for the wrong reasons. Democrat Senator Sherrod Brown tweeted that “We cannot allow Facebook to run a risky new cryptocurrency out of a Swiss bank account without oversight.” And French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire told Europe 1 radio that Libra can’t be allowed to “become a sovereign currency”.

Most harshly, Rep. Maxine Waters issued a statement saying “Given the company’s troubled past, I am requesting that Facebook agree to a moratorium on any movement forward on developing a cryptocurrency until Congress and regulators have the opportunity to examine these issues and take action.”

Yet Facebook has just one vote in controlling the currency, and the Libra Association preempted these criticisms, writing “We welcome public inquiry and accountability. We are committed to a dialogue with regulators and policymakers. We share policymakers’ interest in the ongoing stability of national currencies.”

That’s why as lawmakers confer about how to regulate Libra, I hope they remember what triggered the last round of Facebook execs having to appear before congress and parliament. A totally open, unvetted Libra developer platform in the name of “innovation” over safety is a ticking time bomb. Governments should insist the Libra Association thoroughly audit developers and maintain the power to ban bad actors. In this strange new crypto world, the public can’t be expected to perfectly protect itself from Cambridge Analytica 2.$

Get up to speed on Facebook’s Libra with this handy guide:

Facebook announces Libra cryptocurrency: All you need to know

from Mobile – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/31JgIIX ORIGINAL CONTENT FROM: https://techcrunch.com/