Liberals Plot Revenge

THE FIGHT OF DAVID BROCK’S LIFE ENDED ON A BILLIONaire’s rooftop overlooking Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

- Michael Scherer

It was election night around 9:30 p.m., and he was alone after hopping across the city for return-watching parties with wealthy donors, including investor George Soros. Standing high above Sutton Place, Brock got a text from a reporter that confirmed his creeping fears that Hillary Clinton would lose to Donald Trump. “I had my little cry, and that was that,” Brock tells TIME, before dipping into morbid humor. “It was good to be on that roof in case you had to throw yourself off.”

Brock has spent all of his adult life fighting over the Clintons, first as a conservative muckraker who discovered the sexual harassment claims of Paula Jones, sparking the fuse for Bill Clinton’s impeachment, and then as the Clintons’ chief attack dog, working with her campaign to target anyone who tried to attack her. Now it was over. “What pisses me off right now is that it looks like they won the Clinton wars,” he says.

Before election night, he had concocted a plan for what he would do if Trump won. It involved moving overseas, as so many liberals had promised, to start a new life, perhaps in London working for the public relations firm of a friend. But in the hours that followed the letdown, his plans began to shift, first with a call from the longtime Clinton adviser James Carville, then with a tearful 6 a.m. conversation with a donor, and finally with a few hours of sleep.

By the time he woke up, he had the beginnings of an answer, which he tapped out in a memo to his fundraising partner Mary Pat Bonner. The basic idea was to double down and update his organizations for the next fight, with new technology, new targets and a singular focus to hobble the Trump Administration at every turn.