Pantsuit Politics Flashback: 2016

Looking back at Donald Trump's takeover of the Republican Party and first Electoral Victory

Pantsuit Politics is celebrating ten years of podcasting this year!

A lot has happened politically, culturally, and personally in the last ten years. This summer, we’re revisiting each of the years we’ve been podcasting with a special flashback episode. Today, we continue the conversation by looking at 2016.

We’d love for you to celebrate with us! Join us for our 10th birthday celebration in Cincinnati, OH - or with a virtual ticket - this July 19. Learn more and get your tickets here:

Pantsuit Politics 10th Birthday Celebration

Topics Discussed

• The Biggest News Stories of 2016: The Presidential Election, Brexit, and the MAGA takeover of the Republican Party

• Outside of Politics: Cultural Highlights of 2016: Hamilton and Lemonade

Want more Pantsuit Politics? Subscribe to ensure you never miss an episode and get access to our premium shows and community.

Episode Resources

• Education: The Most Important Issue We Aren’t Talking About (Pantsuit Politics)

• The Normalization of Donald Trump (Pantsuit Politics)

• Lemonade (Beyonce)

• Hamilton

• Lin-Manuel Miranda Monologue (SNL)

Show Credits

Pantsuit Politics is hosted by Sarah Stewart Holland and Beth Silvers. The show is produced by Studio D Podcast Production. Alise Napp is our Managing Director and Maggie Penton is our Director of Community Engagement.

Our theme music was composed by Xander Singh with inspiration from original work by Dante Lima.

Our show is listener-supported. The community of paid subscribers here on Substack makes everything we do possible. Special thanks to our Executive Producers, some of whose names you hear at the end of each show. To join our community of supporters, become a paid subscriber here on Substack.

To search past episodes of the main show or our premium content, check out our content archive.

This podcast and every episode of it are wholly owned by Pantsuit Politics LLC and are protected by US and international copyright, trademark, and other intellectual property laws. We hope you'll listen to it, love it, and share it with other people, but not with large language models or machines and not for commercial purposes. Thanks for keeping it nuanced with us.

Episode Transcript

Sarah [00:00:07] This is Sarah Stewart Holland.

Beth [00:00:09] This is Beth Silvers. You're listening to Flashback 2016, a special episode of Pantsuit Politics. We're celebrating 10 years of making Pantsuit Politics by revisiting our episodes from each year. And today, everybody just take a deep cleansing breath. We've hit 2016.

Sarah [00:00:27] I need another breath. Wait, I need another breath.

Beth [00:00:29] Take it. It's fair because we are going to remember everything from Brexit and the first election of Donald Trump to Pokémon Go and the debut of Instagram stories. It's all here. And if you would like to join the culmination of this series, we would love for you to snag a virtual ticket to our live birthday party on July 19th.

Sarah [00:00:51] Tickets for the in-person event in Cincinnati are sold out, but you can still grab a virtual ticket and join the fun. You'll be able to participate in the polls and the audience interaction, even with your virtual ticket. All the information you need for that is in the show notes.

Beth [00:01:05] Next up, let's start talking about the top news stories of 2016.

Sarah [00:01:10] No, I don't want to.

Beth [00:01:11] Okay, that's fair.

Sarah [00:01:12] It's episode over. Yay! Good job.

Beth [00:01:14] We did it. We looked back at 2016. It's crazy to think about how we were really building this podcast in the midst of the dramatic upheaval that 2016 contained. So obviously elections were where all of the top stories lived. That we had Donald Trump win the Republican primary and go on to win the general election. That we had the rise of fake news as a term, and also as something that we are contending with, misinformation and disinformation. Oxford dictionaries named post-truth the word of the year. We had Brexit. All just at one time like it's just all right there.

Sarah [00:02:14] Brexit is another place like the map of an election that I wonder why did we not take that more seriously? It's not that I didn't take it seriously. I was very invested, but I don't think I saw it as the warning flag it was.

Beth [00:02:34] When I looked back at these headlines, I wish I had done a better job putting pieces together.

Sarah [00:02:42] It's so hard to do on the fly.

Beth [00:02:44] It's so hard to on the flying. So in my list of the top stories of the year, right after all of the 2016 American election stuff and Brexit came the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and the Senate's refusal to even give a hearing to President Obama's nominee, Merrick Garland.

Sarah [00:03:08] Can I just tell you something?

Beth [00:03:09] I see you having a reaction just as I'm saying it.

Sarah [00:03:17] I'm having a very emotional reaction. When the Crown did the season on Princess Diana's death, it was very emotional and a little bit re-traumatizing to me because I realized I'm not over it. And my husband was like this is so upsetting. I said, welcome, I have been living this since 1997. And I just was like I'm not over it. And can I just tell you, same for this story. Not over it. I will be angry, rage-filled about this until the day I die.

Beth [00:03:57] I don't think you're alone in that for what it's worth. And it really does hold up as a top story of that year in terms of consequences, I think. Not just that it was a big deal at the time, but that it has been hugely consequential. And those are the pieces that I was putting together because also that year, we had the police shooting deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. We had the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, 49 people dead. We had the Flint water crisis.

Sarah [00:04:31] Not over.

Beth [00:04:33] Not over, but all of these things that made everything feel like the foundation that we thought was so solid for us was vanishing. And I say us; not all people have felt a solid foundation, but me, 40 something, 30 something at the time, middle-class white lady in Kentucky, had felt the ground as a lot more stable than it seemed to be in 2016.

Sarah [00:05:04] I think what I felt, I didn't feel instability of the foundation, which was the blind spot. I was seeing all this as flare ups. Just some flare ups, we'll get it under control, we'll get back on the right track. That's definitely where I was at. Especially because the whole time I thought Hillary Clinton was going to be president. So I knew if she got in there, she could get at some of this stuff, tighten it up, pay attention. I know she cares. I knew she cared, still cares. That I never doubted. And so there was always this person out here that I'm like, okay, but they care and they're smart and they have the appropriate experience. And so we just got to get there and then we'll fix it. We'll fix all these flare ups. That's what I thought.

Beth [00:05:59] And I trust the American people to go with that choice over Donald Trump. Because it was the journey of me listening back. I came to grips with Donald Trump as the Republican Party nominee. And I came into terms with that, I think in a reasonable time period, looking back. But then I maintained until election night itself into the wee hours that it was going to be okay. That we weren't actually going to hand over the enormous power of the executive branch to Donald Trump. And I think that I have to look back at everything else I said and thought that year with that critique in mind, with that failure in mind, that failure of imagination on my part in mind.

Sarah [00:06:46] Listen, I've done it twice. I didn't think he was going to win either time. I think I believed it more fully the second time for sure. But this time I am of course legally obligated to point out that he did not win the popular vote. More people actually did vote for her. But I think the realization I came to pretty quickly is that I had taken that Supreme Court battle and I had siloed it. When really, as we were just talking about it, I thought, well, that told us everything we needed to know about how Mitch McConnell was going to handle Donald Trump. Why did we ever think he'd protect the institution?

Beth [00:07:28] Or that anyone would. Because looking back, if Mitch McConnell had faced enormous pressure from his caucus to change his mind about that, it could have made a difference. But we saw then, actually, no, we are just going to go accelerator to the floor on power.

Sarah [00:07:48] And so I think I realized that and I realized pretty quickly afterwards that what was so hard for me, particularly around her and the election, was people's perceptions of her were-- and I feel safe saying this, whatever, how many years we are now, seven years, eight years, whatever years, I don't even know. Ten, nine? -- I knew they were false. I had personal experience with her. I knew what kind of human she was. And so the crazier they got, I think I both told myself, well, this is this misinformation stuff, but everybody knows that. Or it's so obvious that this is completely disconnected from reality. She's not running a child abuse ring. That I couldn't see that what was happening is she had to get worse so he could get better. You don't even have Access Hollywood on this list. Remember that?

Beth [00:09:02] I do remember that.

Sarah [00:09:02] As long as I live, I will not forget Lin-Manuel Miranda on Saturday Night Live singing he's never going to be president now the day after that story broke, or the weekend after that the story broke. It just lives rent free in my head. I think about it like every four to five days. So realizing like, oh, that's how it worked. She had to become monstrous, so his monstrousness could be calibrated and excused. And that's what I couldn't see happening in front of me. But I did put the pieces together pretty quickly afterwards.

Beth [00:09:36] And I think that where you said flare up, I was probably doing a similar thing in that I knew what was being expressed from some pockets was real, but I thought those pockets were much, much smaller than they were. I assumed that we were all taking misinformation in the same way, that we we're all concerned about Russia using bots to amplify certain stories on social media and that we all could recognize when a story was being manipulated and then we all agreed on what the official sources were and what the bonkers internet sources were.

Sarah [00:10:11] Our sincerity is off the charts in these conversations in 2016. We're so earnest in the adorable.

Beth [00:10:19] And clueless in a lot of ways. And I just kind of listen back and think, well, you learned a lot. You've learned a lot in 10 years.

Sarah [00:10:29] Can we talk about Brexit?

Beth [00:10:30] Let's do.

Sarah [00:10:41] So I was opposed to Brexit, obviously. I thought it was really bad. And it in turn did have some pretty dramatic economic fallout for the United Kingdom. But as I sit here nine years later, it's not that I think am now down on the European Union or anything. Let me just be clear about that. The overall question, I still, even if it was held today, would vote no. But there is something I think interesting that happened. It's almost like they got forced to confront stuff that was happening globally to our institutions in the culture wars. I don't know. It just feels a little bit to me like they're a little further along on the journey than the rest of us. Does it feel that way to you?

Beth [00:11:35] I haven't thought about it that way. I think what I have thought about with respect to Brexit is that it has caused some pain and difficulty, but they're still there. This is why people struggle with hyperbolic political campaign slogans.

Sarah [00:11:52] Or as my 15 year old says, nothing ever changes. That's his refrain. Nothing happens.

Beth [00:11:57] Yeah, and I think that's both true and not because a lot has happened, and Brexit has put a lot in front of them and still a lot of unresolved pieces. If you talk to anybody who believes in Scottish independence, there's still some big pieces over there they've got to contend with. I also, though, recognize that I probably predicted some dire consequences that have not come to pass from Brexit. And I'm really trying to keep that in mind, living in the second Trump administration. Because as we've reflected on a number of times, some terrible, terrible harm happened in his first administration. Not the least of which is how many people died from COVID, who might have been protected had the president taken a different approach to managing it. And still for a lot of people, the reality can be remembered as my 401k looked great during his first presidency and I want that again. We are resilient and adaptable as humans. And so that's what I look back on this list and think about. I said the sky would fall about a lot of things and the sky is still up. Doesn't mean everything was perfect in the interim, but it does mean that we can weather more than we think.

Sarah [00:13:17] Well, if that's not a takeaway from the top stories of 2016, I don't know what is.

Beth [00:13:23] So as part of our series, we are also choosing an episode that really captures something about the year for us. And, Sarah, I thought I would talk about our episode from February 23rd, entitled Education, the Most Important Issue We're Not Debating. So if I can situate this in time for us a little bit, we had just had the Nevada primaries. So Hillary Clinton is pulling ahead of Bernie Sanders at this moment, Jeb! has just dropped out.

Sarah [00:13:59] I have to interrupt you. The best thing to come out of 2016 is Jeb! please clap.

Beth [00:14:09] For sure.

Sarah [00:14:10] I use that gift once a week. It was a gift to humanity. It's perfect.

Beth [00:14:16] I say it more than once a year. Please clap. It was so good. Thank you, Jeb!

Sarah [00:14:21] I just could hug him. I could be like 2016 was shit and it was hard on all of us, but you gave us a gift and it's still giving nine years later.

Beth [00:14:27] It was a real expensive gift.

Sarah [00:14:29] It was, but worth every penny. It's earned it.

Beth [00:14:33] I can say that because it wasn't our money or mental health.

Sarah [00:14:35] Right. That is worth millions of dollars to me!

Beth [00:14:39] So also at this time, I do want to pat myself on the back for one thing. I mostly am so frustrated with myself listening to these episodes, but at the time I said everybody is over indexing Marco Rubio. He is not what y'all think. And I feel like that take has held up.

Audio clip: Beth [00:15:01] I think that people are way overestimating the draw of Marco Rubia. Now, maybe as there is more panic mounting, people go to Rubio. But I don't think you rally a party out of fear. Like Trump is rallying people because they are excited about Trump.

Audio clip: Sarah [00:15:23] Well, it's fear-based too though, let's not kid ourselves.

Audio clip: Beth [00:15:24] It's, it's a different kind of fear though.

Audio clip: Sarah [00:15:26] It's not a pragmatic fear. It's an emotional fear.

Audio clip: Beth [00:15:32] The Rubio thing is everyone going, well, you got to vote against Trump. So vote for Rubio to vote against Trump. That just doesn't move people the way that voting for Trump moves people.

Beth [00:15:47] Listeners were very worried about my mental health if Trump became the nominee, but I had just accepted that he was going to.

Audio clip: Sarah [00:15:53] We have some Twitter followers concerned about your emotional well-being.

Audio clip: Beth [00:15:56] I appreciate them.

Audio clip: Sarah [00:15:58] What are you going to do if Trump is the nominee? Like, legitimately?

Audio clip: Beth [00:16:05] Well, I legitimately am not going to vote for him.

Beth [00:16:08] And then I also said in this episode, February 23rd, 2016, I'm coming around to the possibility that Donald Trump could win the general election.

Audio clip: Beth [00:16:17] I also am coming around to the very real possibility that Donald Trump could perhaps win a general election.

Audio clip: Sarah [00:16:23] No.

Audio clip: Beth [00:16:24] I would like to say absolutely not, but I'm not so sure.

Audio clip: Sarah [00:16:29] No way, but the country that elects Barack Obama twice elects Donald Trump.

Audio clip: Beth [00:16:33] Yeah, I hope you're right about that, but I don't feel so confident.

Beth [00:16:38] But what I really wanted to talk about is education because, as I listened back to this episode, the thing that I thought I got most wrong was saying that education is not a partisan issue.

Sarah [00:16:51] It was a different time. It was a different time, okay?

Beth [00:16:57] I think maybe I was just delusional about that one, too, at the time.

Audio clip: Beth [00:17:02] I don't see education as a partisan issue at all. Now, I think there is an interesting discussion to have about the role of federal government versus state government in terms of education. But by and large, I just don't get having conversations about education in stark partisan terms. All of the partisan divisions about education go to funding. Funding teachers' pensions, for example, in state government, funding from the Department of Education and all of the parameters that the Department of Education imposes on schools in order to provide that funding. Those things are important, but I think that highlights for me what is so frustrating about what you hear from candidates on education because, let me say this by analogy, I get annoyed in conversations about the Affordable Care Act. Because what you hear from Republicans all the time is, well, we're going to repeal and replace it. Okay with what? Cool. With what? What are you going to do? And there's never an answer. And from the Democratic side, it's like, well, we're going to build on the Affordable Care Act. Okay, what does that mean? Because fundamentally, it is great to provide people with health insurance. No one's really mad about their health insurance, they're mad about the skyrocketing cost of health care. So until you fix how much drugs cost, how much it costs to be in the hospital, how much it cost to see a physician, and you fix it in a way that still provides for innovation in the medical field and excellent patient care that's delivered quickly, so what if people are insured? And I don't mean to make light of that. That is an important thing, but I feel like we're talking around the center of that problem, and that's how I feel about education. We're talking around the center of here in 2016, what is the point of schools? Like, what are we trying to accomplish with schools?

Beth [00:19:13] But the rest of our conversation holds up too well. And it makes me realize that we were onto something in that this is important and it matters to people and we feel it and it is not making the presidential debate stage. And it is not making the campaigns in the way it needs to, and it not being attended to through public policy the way that we need to. And it kind of made me sad because even with COVID in the mix, a lot of this holds up when you listen to it nine years later.

Sarah [00:19:47] I have had that experience a lot as we work through these flashback episodes. And I can't decide if it makes me feel better or despondent.

Beth [00:19:57] Yeah. Both, for sure.

Sarah [00:19:58] Both. Because I can say like, okay, first of all, change is not happening as quickly as we think it is. Because some things are not changing. And then I get depressed because I'm like, how are we still in this problem? But then I'm like, okay, well, did we really think we were going to fix public education in nine years and have this dramatic revolution? There's an episode of Ezra Klein's podcast. He's taken some critiques from his book and I didn't like a lot of that episode. But one thing I did like is the guy said, "You don't get a big change incrementally. You have to have a mission. You have the motivation. Societies do it in big pieces." And I think that's what I hear. We just haven't gotten to that transformational moment yet. We need the mission. We need the motivation. And that's why you listen back to so many of these episodes and you're like nothing's changed. To me, the hardest part was listening to the episodes during the primary and accepting the capitulation of the Republican Party, the normalization of Donald Trump. And there's just so many that it's all still so relevant. His authoritarianism. His capture of the Republican Party. It is brutal to listen back to and feel like, oh my God, I could rebroadcast this now and it would still be as relevant.

Beth [00:21:26] So what really jumped out at you as you were listening back?

Sarah [00:21:29] Well, it wasn't like one episode. It was just the overall election coverage because 2016 was the year of the election. We did talk about Brexit. We did primaries. We did all kinds of stuff. But we were at the conventions. We were covering the debates in detail. We did the countdown. We did like six episodes out, or six days out, five days out, four days out. It was very intense. And listening back, there's also a lot of interviews which I thought was pretty interesting. It's fun to go back and look at some of the relationships we were building. But I think the capitulation of the Republican Party, even as a person who wasn't a Republican, is the hardest to go back and listen to. Like we talk about Paul Ryan, and we talk About Mitch McConnell, and we talked about all these people. And I think why it's so hard to listen to is even all these years later, I don't understand it. I think that's what makes it so hard.

Beth [00:22:25] I definitely feel like I had to go through some of the 'you can't trust even your political heroes before you had to'. I think about some of ways that you've processed what happened with President Biden and his re-election campaign. And it feels not dissimilar to the way that I felt about Paul Ryan. I had such high hopes around Paul Ryan. It was just so head spinningly disappointing to see him act in ways that I felt were completely at odds with what he said public service was supposed to mean to him and people entering it. This was just a confusing, awful time for me and for the country in so many ways, but not for everybody. And that was my short-sightedness. I believed that it was a confusing awful time for everybody. And I, even by the time that he won the election, did not fully understand how many people were celebrating Donald Trump and were celebrating what they felt was going to be a new movement and that did in fact become a new moment. And even though I think that people have come and gone a little bit from that movement, it's staying power and it's enthusiasm and it sort of community and bondedness, I still don't think I've fully gotten in my head around.

Sarah [00:23:48] For me personally too I was going through the election. So I was knocking on 5,000 doors over the course of this year running for the Paducah City Commission. And so it blinded me to what was happening online. But there would be moments of real insight where I would say like this is bigger than online. It's showing up at these doors I'm knocking on. But overall, it was such a positive experience. I think it was like a protectant. It was so empowering and incredible and I loved it so much. And then I won the same day he won. It was so bad. That it's like all just wrapped up together. And I think it kept me naive in a really weird way because I just was having this incredible democratic experience running for office. At the same time, this election was shredding so many big pieces of our democracy.

Beth [00:24:52] That's great though, isn't it? I mean, isn't that a good lesson to take away from 2016 that even when it feels like everything's falling apart, something's going right somewhere. And if that's something is close to home, even better. And if that something is a place where you can personally dig in and make a difference, that seems as relevant today as it was then.

Sarah [00:25:12] Yeah, I love that.

Beth [00:25:24] I think because 2016 was what it was, we should just move on to the cultural moments. I think we should get to the exhale of the episode quickly. We deserve it. We all lived it once. We're kind of living it again in some ways. We don't need to linger.

Sarah [00:25:35] No.

Beth [00:25:37] No. It was pretty political. The culture was pretty politic.

Sarah [00:25:42] What does is say about us? That we're here talking about all these red flags, like the sirens were going off, we're getting all these red flags, meanwhile, we're all singing along at the top of our lungs to Hamilton. The first time I listened to Hamilton was in the car on the way to the Republican National Convention.

Beth [00:26:00] I remember you talking about it once you got there. So Hamilton won 11 Tonys. It was just obsessed. It's a phenomenon.

Sarah [00:26:07] Behemoth, it was a behemoth.

Beth [00:26:10] Also, lemonade for my Beyonce, extremely political.

Sarah [00:26:15] Okay, I have a take from Lemonade that I feel pretty strongly about now that we've had nine years to ruminate it. I think that Lemonade is in fact Beyonce's best country album.

Beth [00:26:32] It is fantastic in every way. And I think calling it country makes sense.

Sarah [00:26:35] Yes, go back and listen. Now that we have Cowboy Carter and we're expanding our understanding of country.

Beth [00:26:42] Genre.

Sarah [00:26:43] The genre. And we know what her country sound like. It's a country album and it's better than Cowboy Carter. It's so good. It's good. Formation is so good.

Beth [00:26:58] Incredible.

Sarah [00:26:58] I should be a music critic. I'll just fill the page with so good because that's how I feel. And I feel like it's held up. It's held up so well.

Beth [00:27:05] The other big thing I want to talk to you about from this time period culturally is Instagram stories and Pokémon Go.

Sarah [00:27:13] Make it go away. I want to go back in time and never have Instagram stories.

Beth [00:27:20] I think both of these-- what do you even call them? We're nine years later and I'm still like, what do you even call them? Both of these developments demonstrated that we were living our lives a lot more online than I even realized at that time.

Sarah [00:27:36] The amount of time I spent trying to get the link feature on Instagram stories, like get enough followers so I could add a link, I don't even want to talk about it. That was my one wild and precious life that I dedicated to that.

Beth [00:27:47] I remember when we made a celebratory video about it and it did feel like we had won the lottery.

Sarah [00:27:53] Yeah. It was so stupid. It's really stupid. Beth, listen, I'm going through a real moment and real re-examination of my history with social media, probably as a part of our 10 year retrospective. And I just think we all got so scammed. I can't believe for so many years we just accepted as truth that if we gave it away for free, it would make us money. They told us overnight just give it away for free, you'll make so much money.

Beth [00:28:26] We felt when we were trying to get to 10,000 followers, so we could have that link, that we were working for ourselves and we were working for Instagram. Pokémon Go felt like this fun, entertaining thing that we're doing for ourselves. It's all been for the platforms the whole time.

Sarah [00:28:47] Yeah. That's what's so hard. And I also think. It does feel like I woke from a fever dream when I think back to this moment and the way that social media just occupied more and more and more, and more of our lives. I just saw somebody else Substack be like I would rather read something about the internal lives of mollusks than one more thing about what people gain by putting their phone down. That's a good sign, though, to me. That's a good sign that we're all talking about it so much everybody's like, can we talk about something else? Because it does feel like the fever has broken. But, man, to go back and think that was it. That was the moment where they really locked us in. They really got us in on there all the time. They're like, you don't need just one post. You need to be posting constantly.

Beth [00:29:44] In the history of Pantsuit Politics, 2016 was wonderful in the sense that I lived on Twitter that year. And because of that, I met some of our listeners who are still so important to me. I just texted Brynn yesterday to say happy birthday. And I have his wedding date on my calendar. There are some people that I would not know were it not for the time that I spent on Twitter that year. And I did develop relationships with them that are real and meaningful in my life, and I don't wish for that time back. And I just don't know that you can have that anymore. I don't know that that could be created again. It all works so differently. The purpose is so different. It's so commercial. It's so much performance now. I just don't think that I could recreate that moment as much as sometimes I would like to. Sometimes when I'm watching a debate or something, I do wish for that group. It felt like a small group that just was chatting with each other like a group text. I guess that's how you recreate it now. You have a group texts. But social media just doesn't do it anymore.

Sarah [00:30:49] I didn't realize Stranger Things was like the big deal in 2016. Man, that show's been around a long time, and they're all still pretending to be teenagers.

Beth [00:30:58] Yeah.

Sarah [00:30:59] I wonder what that says about us. What does it say that this is the year that that show hit? Because it's kind of deeply nostalgic. It's from a time period where there are no phones. There's this lurking, monstrous present underneath the surface. Man, I think there's a lot there with the rise of Stranger Things alongside Hamilton.

Beth [00:31:20] It's a little on the nose.

Sarah [00:31:21] Little on the nose.

Beth [00:31:23] Well, 2016, I think let's just put it behind us now. I think there are better things ahead for us in this retrospect.

Sarah [00:31:32] Oh my lord, please. That would be fantastic.

Beth [00:31:38] But we did it and you were with us and we are grateful for that. And if you weren't with us, then good for you. I hope that you were enjoying your life in 2016. I'm so grateful that you're here now. We will be back with you next Tuesday for a new episode of Pantsuit Politics. Until then, have the best weekend available to you.