CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton’s top strategists sat 15 feet apart from one another on Thursday — and it was clear the anger and raw feelings that defined the general election haven't faded.

The ugliest presidential campaign in modern American history continued through a raucous post-mortem at Harvard University, where strategists gather every four years to chew over the recently completed contest from an insiders’ vantage point.


The scene on Thursday was fraught, from the moment the top campaigns' top officials sat down across the room from each other. There were interruptions, accusations and plenty of cross-talk for more than two tense hours.

“We’re not at a Trump rally, Corey,” Clinton chief strategist Joel Benenson snapped at one point at Trump’s first campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski.

Later, Trump’s last campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, cautioned her side of the table, “Hey guys, we won. We don’t have to respond.”

The "we won" line turned into something of a mantra as the night wore on.

Clinton’s advisers looked pained from the start. They gulped water. They gripped their pens. They crossed their arms. They glared. Then they boiled over.

After 90 minutes, when Trump deputy campaign manager David Bossie called Trump’s campaign CEO, Steve Bannon, the former chairman of Breitbart News, “an unbelievably brilliant strategist,” an impassioned Jennifer Palmieri, Clinton’s communications director, jumped in.

“If providing a platform for white supremacists makes me a brilliant tactician I am glad to have lost,” Palmieri said. “I would rather lose than win the way the guys you did.”

Palmieri called Clinton’s speech in Reno denouncing the “alt-right” in August one of her “proudest” moments as shouting ensued across the room.

“Do you think I ran a campaign where white supremacists had a platform?” Conway snapped back. “You’re going to look me in the face and tell me that?”’

“I did, Kellyanne,” Palmieri said. “I did.”

"Do you think you could have just had a decent message for the white working-class voters?" Conway said, adding to no one in particular as the conversation moved on, "You guys are bitter."

"I can tell you are angry, but wow," Conway chided her Democratic counterparts. "Hashtag he's your president."

Clinton adviser Karen Finney retorted, "Hashtag if he's going to be my president he's going to need to show me that white supremacy isn't acceptable."

There was little consensus of what, exactly, led to the Trump victory that shocked the world.

Still, Trump’s team insisted they were not nearly as surprised as the rest of the political universe. In fact, Brad Parscale, Trump’s digital director, said he had told Trump the Friday before the election that the GOP nominee was headed to victory, even as the public polls suggested otherwise.

Clinton’s team blamed a tough environment in which voters wanted change, Russian medded through hacked emails, a media that they said over-scrutinized her and, mostly, FBI Director James Comey. Campaign manager Robby Mook said both of Comey’s letters in the race’s final two weeks galvanized Trump’s backers and depressed Clinton’s supporters.

Trump’s team called the summer tarmac meeting between Attorney General Loretta Lynch and former President Bill Clinton a “defining moment” amid the FBI investigation into her email server. “That event just played right into the hands of those Americans who felt there was a culture of corruption,” Bossie said.

Conway acknowledged that Clinton had emerged from the two party conventions with momentum but said she lost it with a lackluster August schedule that saw her off the trail and on the fundraising circuit.

CNN's Jake Tapper on stage with Trump Campaign Manager Kellyanne Conway and Clinton Campaign Manager Robby Mook speak during the event titled "War Stories: Inside Campaign 2016" at the Harvard Institute of Poltiics Forum on December 1. | Getty

“She got a good bump but then she almost disappeared,” Conway said.

Shockingly, there was almost no discussion of the controversial October tape of Trump bragging of grabbing women by the genitals.

Neither side was quick to acknowledge errors — a silence that rung especially loud on the Clinton side of the room.

Her advisers steadfastly refused to admit any specific fault, as Clinton media strategist Mandy Grunwald noted multiple times that any one person's diagnosis of the ultimate problem was likely correct in a race so close.

But they didn’t hesitate to point to “headwinds” that disadvantaged Clinton — a phrase used so often that Lewandowski began scoffing at it as Mook repeated it.

Mook identified the WikiLeaks releases of campaign chairman John Podesta’s emails and Comey’s letters as the two points that they never anticipated, but he repeatedly declined to go in depth into his campaign’s shortcomings.

“No one of those emails that was put out, no one day of that, was a game-changer in the race, however it was a low-grade fever throughout, and that was an enormous strategic disadvantage,” he said. “If you ask me what was the single greatest headwind we had in the race, it was the two letters from James Comey."

“In retrospect, should we have put even more in terms of schedule and perhaps unpaid communications into Michigan, Wisconsin?” he added, alluding to two states his candidate surprisingly lost. "Absolutely." Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin combined were decided by less than 100,000 votes.

One theme throughout the conference was frustrations among Trump’s foes — Republicans in the primary; Clinton in the general election — about the media, in particular the blanket coverage Trump received on cable television.

“You guys only cover her when she talks about him,” Palmieri complained.

On Wednesday evening, Republican campaign managers shouted down and heckled CNN president Jeff Zucker when he said that all candidates had been invited onto his airwaves.

“Wrong!” shouted Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who had worked as campaign manager for her father. Later, Sanders rattled off one statistic from August 2015 that in a 10-day period Trump had been on CNN during prime time for 256 minutes, and Mike Huckabee had been on for 17 seconds.

In fact, Sanders said, she got on television more when she became a Trump adviser than she could get her father on as a candidate.

Mook, in particular, complained about the lack of focus on Trump refusing to release his taxes and the lack of focus on the Russian connection to the hacked Clinton emails. “The media didn’t seem willing to put that in the proper context,” he said.

“No one cared,” Conway said of Trump’s taxes. When Mook insisted it wasn’t covered, she responded, “That question was vomited to me every day on TV.”

The lingering frustrations were also on display on Thursday morning when lead Clinton strategists briefly sparred with two of Bernie Sanders' lead operatives over the result.

"We probably would've won," said Sanders' campaign manager Jeff Weaver.

Conway praised Sanders for “softening” Clinton up for the general election.

Clinton's team acknowledged repeatedly during the afternoon session that Trump had won, but Benenson stopped when Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio noted how clear it was that the country would vote for Trump considering how many voters believe things are moving in the wrong direction.

"Don't act like you have some popular mandate for your message," said Benenson.

Other Clinton aides chimed in to note that her lead in the national vote is now above 2 million. Both sides erupted.

“We weren't running that way,” Conway said. “We were running for 270."

Grunwald captured the scene with a backhanded compliment as the conference came to a close.

“I don’t think you give yourselves enough credit for the negative campaign you ran,” Grunwald said of Trump’s team, saying they had executed a “very impressive gassing of her,” citing their use of unreported Facebook ads, fake news and the National Enquirer, holding up the final pre-election edition.

When Conway objected, saying Trump had closed the race on a positive note, Grunwald cut in, “Take the compliment, Kellyanne.”

“I would,” Conway retorted, “if it were one.”