It was around mid-October when it became clear that Donald Trump was unlikely to go quietly, and graciously, if he lost the presidency. In one of his more undemocratic quips, he noted at a debate with Hillary Clinton that he would look at the ballot results “at the time” and decide if he would accept them. “I will keep you in suspense,” he said. The next day, he doubled down, exclaiming at a campaign rally, “I will totally accept the results of this great and historic presidential election—if I win.” In anticipation of a loss, Trump conjectured that the system was “rigged.” The entire spectacle was appalling, even by Trump standards.

Now, a month after Trump and his team of nonconformist advisers won, it’s become evident that they may be the most ungracious victors in modern American political history. The examples are rampant—Trump’s endlessly insulting tweets; his advisers’ taunts of their former opponents; surrogate Newt Gingrich’s insistence that Trump press federal officials to investigate Clinton for her e-mail server; and former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski’s belief that the executive editor of The New York Times should “be in jail” for publishing his boss’s taxes. This vitriol was most oppressive, last week, at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, where top political operatives from almost every presidential campaign convened for what was supposed to be a friendly discussion about strategy. Perhaps not surprisingly, it ended up as a place to air dirty laundry and voice recriminations.

The event, as has been reported, was shocking. I was there to interview David Fahrenthold of The Washington Post, and I can only say the discussions between Trump and Clinton advisers were even worse in person. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a group of people taunt “we won” and “you lost,” as members of Trump’s team did, in such a snide and disparaging way—and in a forum (at Harvard, no less) that was supposed to be collaborative and calm. While taking notes on my phone, I lost count of how many times various former aides repeated the phrase. It was such a shocking spectacle that I noticed one of Ted Cruz’s former top staff members, sitting nearby, watching the entire episode with his mouth agape. A professor from Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy told me afterward that he has been coming to these events for decades and has never seen a group of campaign managers act that way. “Everyone is always civil,” he said.

But not this time around. As Robby Mook, Clinton’s campaign manager, calmly discussed his view on why Clinton lost, Kellyanne Conway (whose Twitter bio now consists of only two words: “we won”) continually interrupted him and barked into her microphone, “we won.” When Joel Benenson, a Clinton strategist, was speaking, Lewandowski insolently interrupted him, noting that Trump won and Clinton did not. In a now-infamous exchange, as Lewandowski continued his garrulous butting-in, Conway seemed like she was going to act like an adult and silence Lewandowski, but instead she looked at him with a smirk and said, “It’s OK Corey; we won.” Lewandowski went on to interrupt Clinton staffers a half a dozen more times, saying, “That’s why you lost,” in one discussion, and then, in another taunting, “I’m glad you lost.”

Other Trump pollsters, strategists, and campaign managers simply blurted out, “We just beat you,” and repeated the mantra “we won” over and over like characters in Minions. One Clinton staffer aptly pointed out that the discussion at Harvard wasn’t a Trump rally, which didn’t deter Conway from snidely saying to her team, “Hey, guys, we won. You don’t have to respond. He was the better candidate. That’s why he won.”