Before he even got to his planned comments about building a massive wall on the Mexican border, Trump — in a style that Americans would come to recognize over the next year and a half — unleashed a diatribe against illegal immigrants.

But limiting Donald Trump to eight minutes, before a bank of television cameras, at the moment he was launching his bid for the most important elected office in the world? Not going to happen.

WASHINGTON — The choreography was consummate Trump. The candidate’s slow ride down the gold escalator at Trump Tower. The eight American flags positioned in the lobby atop a carpet of deep, presidential blue. And waiting on the podium for the New York real estate billionaire was the printed speech — eight minutes’ worth of carefully prepared remarks.


“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,’’ he said. “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.’’

This was not part of the plan. But Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, standing in the wings on that day in June 2015, told the Globe he thought little of the ad-libbed lines at the time. Part of a rant that stretched the speech to 45 minutes, Trump’s extemporizing, Lewandow-ski said, only built on themes they’d “gone through, word by word and line by line.”

It fell to Hillary Clinton to help crystallize the significance of the moment when she decreed in an interview in the battleground state of Nevada a few days later, “You don’t talk like that on . . . political campaigns.”

Oh, yeah?

The potency of Trump’s nativist, wildly over-the-top blast became clear within weeks as like-minded voters in the GOP’s conservative base pushed him straight to the top of the primary contest and, one year later, onto the nominating stage at the Republican National Convention.


Trump’s ride down the escalator in his gilded Manhattan tower and his calls for a popular uprising against the GOP elite in Washington began an election season unlike any in modern history, one that will conclude Tuesday when voters deliver their verdict on a spectacle that has riveted the world.

The candidates not only seem to loathe each other, they are also intensely disliked by the electorate, which rates them as the most unpopular major party nominees ever. One is weathering a serial FBI investigation of her use of a private e-mail server. The other has been repeatedly accused of groping women and was caught on tape bragging about such behavior.

This campaign has been tawdry, loud, bitter, and oh-so-rarely uplifting. It has upended political convention and widened partisan, racial, and class divides in America that were already painfully deep. Whoever wins will face a citizenry that in large part disapproves, distrusts, and dislikes its new leader.

It has been a campaign with so many singularities along the way, so many seeming turning points. Here is a look back at nine of them, starting with Trump’s opening salvo, telling moments that anchored some of the key themes of this unimaginable campaign year and that helped propel these two weakened combatants to the brink of the American presidency.

. . .

Hillary Clinton. Seth Wenig/Associated Press

Hillary Clinton, of course, stuck to her script.

Every conceivable Democratic constituency got some kind of shout-out in the hodgepodge of uninspired phrases she unleashed at her first campaign rally, three days before Trump’s opener, at Four Freedoms Park across the East River from Trump Tower.


A Clinton administration would “ease the transition for distressed communities!” She promised, as president, to build “smarter electric grids!” She pledged, confusingly, to “connect workers to their jobs and businesses!” There was even a nod to the credit markets: She would “sell bonds to pay for some of these improvements.”

The only memorable phrase recalled the historic nature of her candidacy: She said that she selected the park because it is a place “with absolutely no ceilings.”

From that day forward, she would rotate through various campaign slogans, promoting different themes at different moments and to different audiences. She issued reams of policy papers, but without a coherent theme — an easy way for voters to get what she would do with the world’s most powerful office.

“Do we have any sense from her what she believes or wants her core message to be?” top Clinton adviser Joel Beneson asked in an e-mail released by Wikileaks. “It is still not clear what her singular message is.”

Beneson sent the e-mail on Feb. 7, 2016 — nearly eight months after Clinton began campaigning for president.

. . .

FBI Director James Comey. Yuri Gripas/AFP/Getty Images

Tom Fitton’s right-wing nonprofit in Washington had been filing lawsuits seeking information about Hillary Clinton for years. Going back to 2011. The group was poking around about the Clinton Foundation. And later wanted to know what top government officials were saying about Benghazi.


It wasn’t getting very far. And definitely wasn’t getting the e-mails sent and received by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

“I recall thinking, ‘Maybe she didn’t use e-mail,’ ” said Fitton, whose conservative group, Judicial Watch, had fewer than 50 employees. “But we didn’t assume.”

When The New York Times broke the news in March 2015 that Clinton was nearly exclusively using a private e-mail account as secretary of state, Fitton was furious — but also felt vindicated.

Now he knew the game. He mobilized his lawyers for a months-long legal siege. He wasn’t the only one, and soon other groups, including Vice News, which had also been seeking Clinton’s records, would have a judge on their side ordering the documents released.

Clinton’s team didn’t read the moment the same way. One spokesman, according to a campaign e-mail released by Wikileaks, suggested they could “cauterize this just enough so it plays out over the weekend.” The team considered having Clinton answering questions at a Gates Foundation event. They considered asking Larry Wilmore to make a joke about it.

They settled on a different plan: Clinton would address the matter with a news conference held at the United Nations after a meeting there. She opened by talking about global women’s issues and the Iran deal — and then read a carefully crafted statement about her private server.

In response to a question toward the end, she volunteered an answer that would haunt her for the rest of the campaign.

“I did not e-mail any classified material to anyone on my e-mail,” Clinton said. “There is no classified material.”


She was wrong.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation seized Clinton’s private server and found 52 e-mail chains with information classified as confidential at the time they were sent. Thousands more were classified retroactively.

FBI Director James Comey, announcing there was no evidence of a crime on July 5, said Clinton and her staff were “extremely’’ careless in their handling of classified material. Eleven days before the election, Comey penned a letter to 16 members of Congress: A new batch of e-mails had been discovered that could affect the dormant Clinton investigation.

The State Department is still releasing batches of e-mails, a drip, drip, drip that will continue after the election no matter who wins.

Fitton’s group has no plans to stop; the latest batch of e-mails he requested were released Friday, and Republicans are already vowing congressional investigations.

. . .

House Speaker Paul Ryan. Cliff Owen/Associated Press

Trump barreled through the primary season by hammering his party. He wouldn’t pledge to support the winner — if it wasn’t him. He ridiculed the entire Bush family, and developed pet names for his soon-to-be vanquished opponents. Lying Ted. Little Marco. And so on.

After he emerged from the rubble, the clear winner, one of the rising forces in his campaign — Washington insider and lobbyist Paul Manafort — pushed Trump to try to unify the party.

That meant making amends and reaching out to people he’d once lampooned. It was a move that would have been obvious to any ordinary candidate. But ordinary Trump decidedly is not.

Of the GOP’s leading powers, House Speaker Paul Ryan was an obvious person to woo. He was not only the 2012 vice presidential nominee but the top elected Republican in the country.

But one Friday in May, it became clear how difficult the job was going to be.

That day, through a series of phone calls, according to a former Trump adviser, Michael Caputo, the Trump campaign officials understood that an endorsement from Ryan could come at any moment.

So when they saw Ryan on their TV screens later that day, they were aghast.

“I’m not there right now,” he told CNN, declining to endorse the Republican presidential nominee.

To Ryan, Trump represented too much of a departure from the party he revered. To Trump, Ryan was a phony pol who would shift with the political winds.

“Paul Manafort was trying to engineer a rapprochement. He was cautiously optimistic about it,” Caputo said. “But Donald Trump at no time had faith that Ryan was going to deliver.”

Ryan did eventually — and tepidly — endorse Trump a few weeks later, in early June. He wrote: “It’s no secret that he and I have our differences.’’ Trump thanked Ryan on Twitter.

The show of unity was never real.

. . .

First lady Michelle Obama acknowledged the crowd after delivering remarks on the first day of the Democratic National Convention. Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Clinton faced her own problems uniting her party, with a “Bernie or Bust” cadre of voters who wouldn’t let go of her septuagenarian primary opponent. Help arrived from an unexpected quarter.

When planning the Democratic convention in Philadelphia, Clinton campaign officials didn’t initially include Michelle Obama as a featured speaker, according to a Democratic strategist familiar with the plans.

The first lady has never been overtly political, choosing instead to focus on needs of veterans or proselytizing for healthy food. There was little reason to believe she coveted a role in this down-and-dirty campaign.

But as the general election campaign became more divisive, Michelle Obama wanted to engage.

“She said, ‘I don’t want to give a policy speech,’ ” said a White House aide familiar with Michelle Obama’s thinking. “The first lady wanted to take her personal knowledge of seeing the presidency up close through her husband, and talk about the way people look up to the president.”

For Clinton’s campaign, it made sense to put her on the rostrum on the tumultuous opening day — when Bernie Sanders and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren were both to speak. “We thought it would be hard for Sanders’ people to boo Michelle Obama,” said the person, who isn’t authorized to talk about the first lady’s deliberations.

The gambit worked. The revolt from the Sanders wing of the party has been mostly forgotten, and instead Clinton’s campaign could finally latch on to a memorable line, one that would give Clinton a calm and dignified response when the rhetoric grew crude and undignified, as it often did: “When they go low, we go high,” Obama said.

. . .

Khizr Khan held his copy of the Constitution while addressing delegates on the final day of the Democratic National Convention. SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images

The other memorable speech came on the convention’s final night. On the schedule at least, Khizr Khan was far overshadowed by the gathering’s climactic moment: Clinton was about to become the first woman in American history to lead a major political party.

But Khan’s moving account of his 27-year-old son, a devout Muslim who joined the US military and was killed in Iraq, became a counterpoint to Trump’s anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant gunslinging.

The father, standing next to his grieving wife, schooled Trump on core American values.

“Have you ever been to Arlington Cemetery? Go look at the graves of the brave patriots who died defending America — you will see all faiths, genders, and ethnicities.”

His final observation, from a family that sacrificed everything without succumbing to bitterness, was the most searing.

“You have sacrificed nothing and no one,” Khan said.

Trump’s response could not gone more badly.

Rather than conciliate, he went after Kahn and his wife. He mused that Ghazala Khan stood silently as her husband spoke because, as a Muslim woman, she was “not allowed” to talk. In fact, she was too overcome by grief to speak and feared that she’d break down sobbing before a national audience.

. . .

It wouldn’t be the last time Trump was tripped up by a person who he misjudged as unimportant.

Alicia Machado. Trump appeared befuddled when Hillary Clinton uttered the name. He shouldn’t have been. His campaign had been warned she presented a danger that needed to be defused.

In this case, the candidate’s disdain for preparation cost him dearly.

The first debate was supposed to be over. It was only at the 92nd minute of what was supposed to be a 90-minute debate that Clinton pivoted off Trump’s claim thatshe didn’t have the “look” of a presidential candidate or the “stamina.” Then, running down a litany of Trump’s wounding comments about women, she pounced:

“One of the worst things he said was about a woman in a beauty contest,” she said. “He loves beauty contests, supporting them and hanging around them. And he called this woman ‘Miss Piggy.’ Then he called her ‘Miss Housekeeping,’ because she was Latina. Donald, she has a name. Her name is Alicia Machado.”

Trump sputtered, “Where did you find this?”

It was a cunning ploy, designed to bait a fatigued Trump into a stumble. And he fell for it, big time.

Miss Universe Alicia Machado of Venezuela reacted after she won the 1996 title. Eric Draper/Associated Press/File

The Clinton apparatus had learned of Machado, a former Miss Universe from Venezuela, months before. Her story first appeared in December 2015 in an opposition research portfolio on Trump compiled by American Bridge, a super PAC supporting Clinton’s candidacy.

Trump’s campaign, too, was well aware of the vulnerability.

Caputo, the Trump adviser, said he sat down in May at a private club in New York with Matt Rich, the former head of public relations for the Miss Universe pageant.

Months before Machado became a focus during the debate, she had just recounted to The New York Times her humiliating experience with Trump. Over hamburgers and fries, Rich told Caputo that Machado’s account was inaccurate. She had told him at the time of the pageant she was grateful for Trump’s generosity, with no hint of animosity.

“When she first began working with us, she called herself a pig, and said, ‘I’m Miss Piggy,’ ” Rich recounted in an interview. “She said herself she had an eating disorder. She confided in me, ‘I need some help.’ ”

Rich said he spoke with Trump at the time, who asked him to find out if she wanted to quit — as CBS, the broadcaster, supposedly wanted — or if she wanted him to seek out a nutritionist and exercise equipment for her.

“When I spoke to her, she began to cry,” Rich said. “She said, ‘No person in my life has ever cared for me enough to do these things.’ ”

Caputo said he took the message back to the campaign in May, urging top officials to use Rich’s account to discredit Machado before her story could come back to haunt them.

“That would have been at least an effective counterpunch,” Caputo said. “They did nothing. Nothing. And by the time Hillary Clinton brought it up at the debate, it was baked into the cake.”

Lewandowski disputed Caputo’s account, saying Caputo had almost no role within the campaign.

In the days after the debate, Trump seemed incapable of reining in his rage. He issued bitter tweets in wee morning hours, attacking Machado. His words only perpetuated the self-destructive narrative about Trump and women that pre-dated the campaign and would return again and again — right up to his open mic remarks on the “Access Hollywood” bus.

“By not knocking this down, the campaign failed him and left him with the only device he knows: hit back, and hit hard,” Caputo said. “Because that’s what he’s done for 30 years in the New York City media market where he was getting pummeled every week by the tabloids.

“If you’re a developer in New York it’s a smart way of doing things,” he added. “If you’re a candidate for president, maybe not.”

. . .

Cardinal Timothy Dolan sat between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump at the annual Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner in October. Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Not 24 hours after the third and final presidential debate, Clinton and Trump appeared again on the same stage. This time it was in Manhattan at the Waldorf Astoria: The Al Smith Foundation Dinner, named for the former governor of New York.

The people in the room included many who run the country, or at least New York. The heads of banks. The CEOs. The political elite.

Trump craves their acceptance, which they’ve never granted him despite the size of his bank account and high profile in the city.

In Clinton they see someone who understands them, even if she might not always give them what they want.

“You could tell she was very much in her realm,” said NBC’s Chris Matthews, who was seated on the dais at the dinner. “It’s New York. She knows all those people.”

She was funny and self-deprecating, in a crowd of the country’s most influential people. She walked in alone, with no staff, something that impressed. A candidate who’s acknowledged her difficulty connecting with audiences suddenly owned the room.

She knew who’d react well to a little dig, and who needed a little boost to the ego.

Should Clinton win, this may be the promise of her presidency: She’s the one who can harness the power in rooms like this and try to use it to help people who would never be allowed in the door. She knows the rules of the insider game so well that she can make them work for “everyday Americans” as she calls regular people.

Clinton gamely joked that Trump had sent a car to bring her to the dinner — a hearse. She talked about her “rigorous nap schedule.”

And then, after entertaining the room, she ended on a serious note.

“What makes this dinner important are not the jokes we tell but the legacy that we carry forward. It is often easy to forget how far this country has come,” Clinton said.

. . .

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. Carlo Allegri/Reuters

When it was Trump’s turn to speak, it was plain from the start that either he doesn’t know the dialect of this sort of crowd or that he disdains it.

“A special hello to all of you in this room who have known and loved me for many, many years. It’s true,” Trump said with a bitter tone.

“But then suddenly, [they] decided when I ran for president as a Republican, that I’ve always been a no-good, rotten, disgusting scoundrel. And they totally forgot about me.”

If it was a joke, it was hardly recognizable as such. Trump quickly transitioned into the attack lines that he regularly delivers on the campaign trail.

His performance bombed — really for the same reason that his candidacy has taken off.

“They booed him,” Matthews said, “because he broke the rules.”

Trump’s candidacy has shown the world that a lot of people want those rules — the same customs and practices that govern boardrooms, judges’ chambers, universities, Congress — to be not just broken but completely smashed out of existence.

His core followers don’t care one bit that he bombed the Al Smith dinner. They love him for it. They flock to him for it.

Nearly 18,000 stood in a field in Selma, N.C., on Thursday night to see him and hear him speak. A firefighting company set up a red engine with an extended ladder flying the American flag. People held up their red “Make America Great Again” hats. Country music played.

“I will never, ever let you down. I will tell you that,” Trump said when he finally got to the stage. “And you’ve been let down. You’ve been let down plenty over the years, believe me.”

It was the same message he started with. The one that helped him slay 16 opponents. It’s Trump’s promise to rewrite the rules.

The 2016 election

Matt Viser can be reached at matt.viser@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @mviser. Annie Linskey can be reached atannie.linskey@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @annielinskey.