Trump tries to salvage the brand The Republican nominee ditches the campaign trail to hawk his new hotel and to talk up his executive credentials. 
 
 With 13 days until Election Day, Donald Trump tried Wednesday morning to simultaneously burnish his business and political brands, both of which are badly tarnished. 
 
 Drawing more than 200 members of the media to his opulent new Washington, D.C., hotel for an “official opening” that comes more than a month after the property opened to the public, Trump framed the renovated downtown post office as a testament to his abilities as an executive. 
 
 Story Continued Below 
 
 “My theme today is five words: under budget and ahead of schedule,” Trump said (using six words). 
 
 Trump, who political forecasters now give just a 10 percent chance of winning the presidential election, is in a last-ditch fight to resuscitate his campaign and a business brand that has suffered from his presidential run. As Trump and his offspring lavished praise on themselves for completing the project, rooms at the hotel were being offered at $404 a night online, a discount of roughly 50 percent. 
 
 “Today is a metaphor for what we can accomplish for this country, the same kind of thing,” Trump said Wednesday morning. “I’m tired of the excuses from our politicians. I’m tired of being told what cannot be done. I’m tired of people asking Americans to defer their dreams to another day but really what they mean is another decade. We can achieve our dreams for this country and we can do so more quickly than anyone ever thought possible. There is nothing we cannot accomplish." 
 
 Eschewing the angry bombast and vitriolic attacks that define his rally speeches, Trump stood on a dais inside a packed ballroom agleam in gilded mirrors and crystal chandeliers and sought to strike a tone so uplifting and aspirational that it seemed a betrayal of his own campaign’s motto to make the country “great again.” 
 
 “The United States is great. It’s great. Its people are great. There is no task or project too great. There is no dream outside of our reach. Don’t ever let anyone tell you it cannot be done,” he continued, diverging somewhat from his campaign’s “Make America Great Again” slogan. “The future lies with the dreamers, not the cynics and the critics. Everywhere I go in this country, all I see is untapped potential waiting to be set free, and the biggest element of all is our incredible people.” 
 
 Trump’s decision to attend a ribbon-cutting at his D.C. hotel raised eyebrows, with the candidate’s time at a premium in the final stretch of a presidential race that, by his own admission, he is currently losing. He told the crowd he was heading straight to North Carolina following the ceremony in the hotel’s grand lobby, seemingly in recognition of complaints that the morning photo op seemed more about his personal brand than his campaign, which has sunk over the past week beneath the weight of myriad allegations of sexual assault. 
 
 Speaking to CNN’s Dana Bash in the lobby, Trump became testy when asked why he’s taking time out of his swing-state tour to hawk his hotel. 
 
 “I did yesterday eight stops and three major speeches, and I've been doing this for weeks straight. I left there for an hour and a half. I'm going to North Carolina right now and then to Florida, then up to New Hampshire,” Trump said flatly. “For you to ask me that question is actually very insulting, because Hillary Clinton does one stop and then goes home and sleeps, yet you'll ask me that question. I think it's a very rude question, to be honest with you.” 
 
 To any observer, the final stretch of Trump’s campaign is taking the form of an infomercial — a nightly Facebook Live “newscast” featuring Trump surrogates and staff launched on Monday — that is selling a product as much as it is a candidate and blurring the lines that delineate official campaign business and activities like never before. The appearance at the downtown Washington hotel, which came a day after a campaign event at his Trump National Doral Miami golf resort in Florida, was the fourth one Trump has made as a presidential candidate. 
 
 Trump's retreat within his newest gilded temple actually began Tuesday evening, shortly after his flight from Tallahassee landed in Washington. As campaign manager Kellyanne Conway was holding court in the hotel lobby, going from table to table speaking with guests, the bells in the post office's old bell tower rang loudly, taking waiters and bartenders by surprise. The unexpected fanfare — the Congress Bells, a Bicentennial gift from England, had not rung since 2006 — soon made sense, as Trump entered the room with his sons, acting out a dramatic tableau seemingly to remind himself of his own success. 
 
 The ribbon-cutting had been billed specifically as a non-campaign event, even though it was listed on Trump’s campaign website. His campaign staff and advisers — including Conway, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) and former "Apprentice" contestant Omarosa Manigault — were in attendance at a news conference beforehand in the hotel’s presidential ballroom. The wireless password provided to reporters was “trump2016,” and an eight-page, color-photo pamphlet handed out at the event focused entirely on the hotel and made no mention of its owner’s White House bid. 
 
 While Trump was in Washington, D.C., his running mate, Mike Pence, was campaigning Wednesday in Nevada, a battleground state, and Utah, one of the country’s most reliably red states, where Trump has admitted that he is “having a tremendous problem.” Hillary Clinton, who has begun devoting more and more of her time on the campaign trail to boosting down-ballot Democrats, took the opportunity Wednesday morning to draw a contrast with Trump’s self-promotional show and to emphasize the hypocrisy of his anti-trade, “America first” message. 
 
 As she wound down her speech in Lake Worth, Florida, Clinton noted Trump’s appearance in Washington “to open a new luxury hotel.” Trump, she claimed, “relied on undocumented workers to make his project cheaper.” 
 
 “Most of the products in the rooms were made overseas, and he even sued to get his taxes lowered,” she continued, informing the crowd that at her next rally — in Tampa — she’d be appearing with José Andrés, the chef who pulled his restaurant venture from Trump’s Washington hotel in response to his caustic comments about Mexican immigrants at the start of his campaign last year. 
 
 Trump’s team has billed the project as evidence of Trump’s business acumen, with Conway remarking that “his under-budget, ahead-of-schedule hotel” would show the “the tangible accomplishments of Donald Trump.” Speaking to reporters before the event, Gingrich said anyone concerned that Trump’s visit to his Washington property was a distraction was missing the point. 
 
 “That's because they don't understand the message: It's under budget and ahead of schedule,” he said, repeating an apparent talking point for Trump surrogates. “That's a very important message because it means nothing in the current bureaucratic government tells you what a Trump administration would be like.” 
 
 But whether or not the hotel did in fact arrive ahead of schedule remains an open question. While signs on scaffolding outside the building billed the hotel as “coming 2016,” a news release from February 2014 for the Trump International Hotel & Tower in Chicago said the Washington hotel was supposed to open in late 2015. 
 
 A modest but persistent protest outside the hotel, illustrative of how the property is seemingly attracting as many gawkers as it has paying customers, grew steadily as the event drew closer, with the crowd numbering roughly 150 by the time the event was set to begin. The protesters marched in a large circle, chanting, "What do we want? Justice. When do we want it? Now." 
 
 Taking the stage before her father, Ivanka Trump acknowledged the launch of a new brand, Scion, the corporation’s initial attempt to downplay the "Trump" brand that has always been definitional. She lauded her father but also credited others involved in the hotel’s development, including Eleanor Holmes Norton, Washington, D.C.'s, congressional delegate and a Democrat. Norton supported the launch of the Pennsylvania Avenue project but did not attend Wednesday’s event. 
 
 Ivanka Trump was the only one of Trump's four children present to speak, and her remarks were also an effort in self-preservation and the salvaging of a personal brand as a successful and nonpartisan female entrepreneur after a campaign that she described as “one of the most interesting journeys of my life.” 
 
 In praising her father, she spoke of the countless Trump employees who have remained loyal over the years and support his latest venture. But in describing her father's vision when it comes to restoring old buildings, she also seemed to be imploring a broader electorate that largely views him unfavorably to see him differently. 
 
 “My father trained my siblings and me not to see things for what they are," she said. "But for what they could be.” 
 
 Gabe Debenedetti contributed reporting from Lake Worth, Florida. ||||| Anger trumped hope. 
 
 Donald Trump’s astonishing victory over a heavily favored Hillary Clinton on Tuesday is the greatest upset in the modern history of American elections – convulsing the nation’s political order in ways so profound and disruptive its impact can’t even be guessed at. 
 
 Story Continued Below 
 
 Trump was too crass, too much of a brazen sexist, too much a blustery orange-maned joke, too ill-informed about the operations of a country he wanted to run, too much of a threat to markets and the security establishment – too pessimistic -- to ever win the White House. Underestimated at every turn, spurned by his own party, the former reality-show star was able to defeat a better-funded better-organized Clinton by surfing a tsunami of working-class white rage that her army of numbers crunchers somehow missed. 
 
 Clinton had fully expected to make history when her motorcade sped from Chappaqua to Manhattan, had planned fireworks to celebrate her being elected the first female president in the 240-year history of the republic. Instead her legacy is one of tragedy, futility and squandered opportunities – proof that a conventional candidate can do practically everything by the numbers (win debates, raise the most cash, assemble the greatest data and voter outreach effort in history) and still fall to a movement impelled by raw emotion, not calculation. 
 
 When you wake up on Wednesday morning the United States will be a different place. 
 
 The markets will tank, but they will recover. World leaders will shudder, but they will adjust as they always do. Half of the country that viewed him as a dangerous demagogue, even a neo-fascist, before the election will wonder, probably for the first time in their lives, if their country is the same one they were born in. 
 
 His tens of millions of inspired supporters will awake to a hopeful new dawn, content in having finally torn the rotten establishment they had long loathed, and wondering how he plans to make their America great again. 
 
 And in about two months Donald John Trump – the man who has said he’s smarter than any of the men who will now be his generals – will be wrapping his fingers around the nation’s nuclear football. 
 
 As a French diplomat said Tuesday, reflecting on Trump, the stunning Brexit vote and the rise of right-wing parties in Western Europe: “This is a world we do not know anymore.” 
 
 Can he do anything to bring a divided, terrified country together? Will he try? There is real fear in many parts of the country tonight. Trump’s remarkable victory was gained by waging total war on his enemies, lukewarm allies, the “dishonest” media and the very idea that he had to be civil or respect the norms of American politics. 
 
 Trump himself had trouble believing he could actually pull the thing off (an aide told CNN early Tuesday that he would need a “miracle” to win). So his final rallies had a screw-it quality, returning to a provocative pattern of his underdog days – calling out the “rigged game” he seemed certain to lose and goading his supporters into a state of fury that made dissenters and reporters feel endangered. 
 
 There was a time, earlier in the campaign, when he refused to join his backers in chanting “Lock her up!” Toward the end, he was joining them in that chant. 
 
 Democratic consultant Stephanie Cutter, who worked on President Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign, described how many Clinton supporters feel: “He’s about rejecting immigrants, he’s about keeping your foot down on people, women.” 
 
 Clinton, in her upbeat closing message had emphasized that she would be a president for all Americans, and would try to reach out to Trump’s voters; he never reciprocated and the demographic groups that backed her overwhelmingly rejected him with fewer than 7 percent of blacks backing his candidacy, under 25 percent of Latinos earning his vote and a gender gap that led women to support Clinton in 10 to 20 percent greater numbers. 
 
 The question now is whether he will do anything meaningful to reach out to them – to assure Democrats, women, blacks and Hispanics that he views them as co-equal members of the American family. And will they believe him? 
 
 Hillary Clinton is a footnote in history. As Tuesday night dragged into Wednesday morning, as the thousands of would-be revelers turned into marble-eyed mourners, some of the younger women in the crowd looked up at the roof of the joyless Javits Center, its glass ceiling very much intact. 
 
 The shocking result ended a lot of dreams, and one of the most extraordinary and extraordinarily polarizing careers in American politics. 
 
 At 69 – having suffered the most humbling upset imaginable to a deeply, nearly fatally flawed opponent believed to be the only Republican contender she could actually defeat – is spent as a political force. Clinton will forever be known as one of the worst closers in political history, a woman who was never capable of selling a wary public on herself, on account of her own shortcomings and paranoia or perhaps as a result of a sexism so ingrained in American culture that women as well as men suffered from it. 
 
 The good news for Democrats: Clinton is now out of the way, clearing the road for a new generation of leadership with far less baggage. Despite her loss, the Democratic Party’s ideas remain more popular than the Republican platform on global warming, social issues, infrastructure spending, taxes and even immigration, Trump’s signature issue. 
 
 The bad news: What would have happened if the party had nominated Bernie Sanders – the 74-year-old socialist who Clinton dismissed as unelectable? 
 
 White voters finally found someone who spoke their language. The most telling comment of the entire election came when a pollster buttonholed an early Trump supporter, and asked her how she could possibly believe in a novice rabble-rouser with no distinct plans other than a slogan on a red hat. “We know his goal is to make America great again,” she said. “It’s on his hat.” 
 
 That wasn’t a small thing. Clinton had the whiff of Ivy League arrogance and spoke with the technocratic complexity of the Federal Register, coming across as a liberal given to lecturing Americans not inspiring them. For all his flaws, Trump speaks with gut-punch directness and an earthy, sledgehammer humor that succinctly channeled their anger. 
 
 Trump made his fame as a reality TV star but, in reality, he speaks the language of right-wing talk radio, which reflects the raw rage of working-class whites (who still make up about a third of the country’s population) who feel squeezed by globalization, left out of the Starbucks-and-Snapchat prosperity of the coastal elites and really, truly need to have America be great again. It’s noteworthy that Clinton and her staff circulated academic studies documenting the life-span decline of poorer whites – and Clinton’s communications director Jennifer Palmieri, pointing to a map of the country in her office, ran a sympathetic finger over Appalachia and promised that Clinton would work hard on behalf of them after the election. 
 
 But Clinton, opting for the Obama strategy of focusing on maximizing turnout among her core constituencies, never made a serious pitch to working-class white men (who backed Trump by a record 48 percent margin) and she paid a terrible, terrible price. 
 
 The Clinton campaign got its numbers wrong. Forget the public polling of the election – which was all over the map, but backed an aggregated surmise that Clinton had a 70 to 85 percent chance of winning the presidency on the eve of the election. 
 
 When I emailed a senior Clinton strategist for their internal polling data on Tuesday morning, I was told her lead was in the 4-to-5 percent range and that the campaign was feeling “very good” about its prospects. There were, I was told, internal tensions within the campaign over the dissemination of polling data and voter-file analytics, but there appears to have been some major miscalculation that blinded her team to the massive turnout of white voters in exurbs and rural areas in the Midwest and Florida. 
 
 Clinton’s vaunted ground game was supposed to give her a one-to-two point advantage, and while it helped boost turnout in Hispanic areas (and brought some underperforming African American neighborhoods up to a respectable level), Brooklyn failed to account for the wave of Trump-stoked anger that rendered its painstakingly created model of the electorate so off-base. 
 
 James Comey is Public Enemy No. 1 (To Democrats). The evidence is mixed, but Clinton staffers and many Democrats blame the FBI director’s unprecedented announcement, 11 days before the election, for throwing the race to a man they deem unfit to serve in the nation’s highest office. Clinton’s internal numbers tanked in the days after the director announced he would examine thousands of new emails found on the laptop of Anthony Weiner, the husband of Clinton’s aide-de-camp Huma Abedin. “He f---d us, and he f----ed the country,” a senior Clinton campaign official told me late Tuesday. 
 
 The incident – to Trump’s delight – rekindled doubts about Clinton's character and trustworthiness. And even Comey's announcement, on the Sunday before Election Day, that the emails were deemed innocuous, couldn’t save her. ||||| Annie Leibovitz is reportedly set to shoot the story. 
 
 Bruce Jenner to Make Post-Transition Appearance in Vanity Fair 
 
 A man even bolder than the $30 hotdog vendor. 
 
 Enterprising New Yorker Caught Charging Tourists $400 for Free Ferry Ride 
 
 The third entrant in the Democratic primary faces an uphill struggle to define himself with voters. 
 
 Martin O'Malley Gives Hillary Clinton Someone Else to Run Against 
 
 The silver lining to the scandal: By comparison, it makes our pro leagues look downright angelic. 
 
 Once America Got Interested in Soccer, FIFA Was Screwed 
 
 It's the freakin' weekend, baby. 
 
 8 Actually Good Things That Happened This Week 
 
 “I wish I could go back and convince myself to take a different path.” 
 
 Ross Ulbricht, Founder of Silk Road, Sentenced to Life in Prison 
 
 The Los Angeles Times reports that the payments were made to conceal sexual misconduct. 
 
 Denny Hastert Indictment Linked to Alleged Decades-Old Case of Sexual Misconduct 
 
 America's youth are drinkin', smokin', and doin' it at alarmingly low rates. 
 
 The passenger jet was on its way to La Guardia. 
 
 Plane Forced to Cede Skies to Tiny Drone Flying Above Prospect Park 
 
 A university opens a gender bias investigation against a professor for ... writing a column. 
 
 What the Charges Against Laura Kipnis Tell Us About Political Correctness 
 
 Yesterday at 2:15 p.m. 
 
 FIFA Scandal Doesn’t Keep Sepp Blatter From Winning 5th Term 
 
 "I am the president of everybody." 
 
 Yesterday at 1:51 p.m. 
 
 The Presidential Election Is More Than a Year Away and Campaign Ads Already Have Fire-Breathing Eagles 
 
 It's way too early for this. 
 
 Yesterday at 1:46 p.m. 
 
 After 785 Years, Oxford University Finally Decides to Put a Woman in Charge 
 
 Professor Louise Richardson has been nominated to become the first female vice-chancellor at the British institution. 
 
 Yesterday at 1:12 p.m. 
 
 War of 1812 Buff Set to Announce Plans to Vanquish Revolutionary War Buffs 
 
 The former Maryland governor will likely announce his presidential ambitions in Baltimore on Saturday. 
 
 Yesterday at 12:58 p.m. 
 
 The Unlikely Race-Blind Mastermind Who’s Teeing Up the Roberts Court Just Scored Again 
 
 Evenwel v. Abbott, a case about voter representation, could lead to redistricting that would shift power from urban to rural electoral districts. 
 
 Yesterday at 11:53 a.m. 
 
 Cuba Now Officially Off U.S. Terror List 
 
 Iran, Syria, and Sudan are the only countries left on the list. 
 
 Yesterday at 10:09 a.m. 
 
 I Tried to Install an Air Conditioner Myself and I’ll Give You One Guess As to What Happened 
 
 This is the story of every New Yorker's worst nightmare. 
 
 Yesterday at 9:58 a.m. 
 
 Creationist Unconvinced by 60-Million-Year-Old Fossil He Found 
 
 "There's no dates stamped on these things." 
 
 Yesterday at 9:05 a.m. 
 
 6th-Grader Pens Handwritten Apology for Calling 911 and Yelling ‘Deez Nuts’ 
 
 "I am writing an apology for what I did last night. Last night I called and said deez nuts." 
 
 Yesterday at 8:59 a.m. 
 
 Inside the Latest Cuomo–de Blasio Squabble Is a Deeper Divide Over Taxes 
 
 Two days of sniping over real-estate regulations. ||||| Sorkin Girls, 
 
 Well the world changed late last night in a way I couldn’t protect us from. That’s a terrible feeling for a father. I won’t sugarcoat it—this is truly horrible. It’s hardly the first time my candidate didn’t win (in fact it’s the sixth time) but it is the first time that a thoroughly incompetent pig with dangerous ideas, a serious psychiatric disorder, no knowledge of the world and no curiosity to learn has. 
 
 And it wasn’t just Donald Trump who won last night—it was his supporters too. The Klan won last night. White nationalists. Sexists, racists and buffoons. Angry young white men who think rap music and Cinco de Mayo are a threat to their way of life (or are the reason for their way of life) have been given cause to celebrate. Men who have no right to call themselves that and who think that women who aspire to more than looking hot are shrill, ugly, and otherwise worthy of our scorn rather than our admiration struck a blow for misogynistic shitheads everywhere. Hate was given hope. Abject dumbness was glamorized as being “the fresh voice of an outsider” who’s going to “shake things up.” (Did anyone bother to ask how? Is he going to re-arrange the chairs in the Roosevelt Room?) For the next four years, the President of the United States, the same office held by Washington and Jefferson, Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt, F.D.R., J.F.K. and Barack Obama, will be held by a man-boy who’ll spend his hours exacting Twitter vengeance against all who criticize him (and those numbers will be legion). We’ve embarrassed ourselves in front of our children and the world. 
 
 And the world took no time to react. The Dow futures dropped 700 points overnight. Economists are predicting a deep and prolonged recession. Our NATO allies are in a state of legitimate fear. And speaking of fear, Muslim-Americans, Mexican-Americans and African-Americans are shaking in their shoes. And we’d be right to note that many of Donald Trump’s fans are not fans of Jews. On the other hand, there is a party going on at ISIS headquarters. What wouldn’t we give to trade this small fraction of a man for Richard Nixon right now? 
 
 VIDEO: The Evolution of Donald Trump’s Presidential Campaign 
 
 So what do we do? 
 
 First of all, we remember that we’re not alone. A hundred million people in America and a billion more around the world feel exactly the same way we do. 
 
 Second, we get out of bed. The Trumpsters want to see people like us (Jewish, “coastal elites,” educated, socially progressive, Hollywood…) sobbing and wailing and talking about moving to Canada. I won’t give them that and neither will you. Here’s what we’ll do… 
 
 …we’ll fucking fight. (Roxy, there’s a time for this kind of language and it’s now.) We’re not powerless and we’re not voiceless. We don’t have majorities in the House or Senate but we do have representatives there. It’s also good to remember that most members of Trump’s own party feel exactly the same way about him that we do. We make sure that the people we sent to Washington—including Kamala Harris—take our strength with them and never take a day off. 
 
 We get involved. We do what we can to fight injustice anywhere we see it—whether it’s writing a check or rolling up our sleeves. Our family is fairly insulated from the effects of a Trump presidency so we fight for the families that aren’t. We fight for a woman to keep her right to choose. We fight for the First Amendment and we fight mostly for equality—not for a guarantee of equal outcomes but for equal opportunities. We stand up. 
 
 America didn’t stop being America last night and we didn’t stop being Americans and here’s the thing about Americans: Our darkest days have always—always—been followed by our finest hours. 
 
 Roxy, I know my predictions have let you down in the past, but personally, I don’t think this guy can make it a year without committing an impeachable crime. If he does manage to be a douche nozzle without breaking the law for four years, we’ll make it through those four years. And three years from now we’ll fight like hell for our candidate and we’ll win and they’ll lose and this time they’ll lose for good. Honey, it’ll be your first vote. 
 
 The battle isn’t over, it’s just begun. Grandpa fought in World War II and when he came home this country handed him an opportunity to make a great life for his family. I will not hand his granddaughter a country shaped by hateful and stupid men. Your tears last night woke me up, and I’ll never go to sleep on you again. 
 
 Love, 
 
 Dad 
 
 Editor’s note: A previous version of this article overstated the amount by which Dow futures dropped on Wednesday morning. 
 
 Get Vanity Fair’s HWD Newsletter Sign up for essential industry and award news from Hollywood. E-mail Address Subscribe
– Donald Trump's poll numbers among black Americans are abysmal—he's polling at around half the 6% Mitt Romney received in 2012—but he hasn't given up trying. On Wednesday, he offered a "new deal for black America" in a policy-heavy speech delivered to what the Washington Post reports was a largely white audience in North Carolina. The "deal is grounded in three promises: safe communities, great education, and high-paying jobs," Trump said, per the Hill, blaming Democrats for "total violence" in inner cities. He promised to provide incentives for companies to move to "blighted communities," and to allow cities and states to declare such places disaster areas to receive federal funding. In other election coverage: Earlier Wednesday, Trump took the morning off from campaigning to attend a ribbon-cutting at his new hotel in Washington, DC, reports Politico. "My theme today is five words: under budget and ahead of schedule," he said. He went on to describe America as a great country where there is "no task or project too great" and "no dream outside of our reach." At the DC event, Trump congratulated Newt Gingrich on his "great interview" with Megyn Kelly, in which Gingrich accused Kelly of being "fascinated with sex." Deadline reports that on The Kelly File Wednesday night, Karl Rove told Kelly that Trump had wasted precious time opening the hotel and "complimenting Newt Gingrich on having a food fight with you last night." The Wall Street Journal looks at the latest damaging WikiLeaks release on the Clintons. A 2011 memo from then-Bill Clinton aide Douglas Band outlines how his fundraising work on behalf of the Clinton Foundation also led to paid speaking engagements and other business opportunities for the former president. The New York Times spoke to Trump supporters at rallies in six states and found that many believe there will be violence, or even a "new Revolutionary War," if Hillary Clinton wins the election. But some still expect a landslide Trump win. "You go through any neighborhood and see how many Trump signs there are and how many Hillary signs there are, and I guarantee you it's not even going to be close," a 44-year-old Florida man says. "The only way they've done it is by rigging the election." The AP reports that Clinton, who celebrated her 69th birthday Wednesday, said she was struck that Trump "was paying more attention to his business than to the campaign. That's his choice, but we're going to keep working really hard to reach as many voters as possible." (Wednesday was a very bad day for Trump's Hollywood star.)