Matt Drudge played a critical role in getting President Donald Trump elected, according to excerpts provided to The Daily Caller from a forthcoming book by Roger Stone.
Stone, a longtime Trump confidante who has known the president since 1979, writes in “The Making of the President 2016: How Donald Trump Orchestrated a Revolution” that Trump was able to connect to voters during the campaign through the massive audiences of conservative media.
“While many other conservative websites and reporters contributed, Drudge led the charge, posting a top center headline and photograph on June 16, 2015, the day Trump declared his candidacy, proclaiming ‘Donald Goes for White House,'” Stone writes. He adds that “increasingly as the campaign progressed, the real action was not in the traditional mainstream media or in the polls, both of which were badly biased in favor of Clinton.”
“In the aftermath of Trump’s victory, the widely read economics blog ZeroHedge.com posted an article headlined, ‘How Matt Drudge Won the 2016 Election.’ The article noted that the news aggregation site Drudge.com spent much of the 18 months leading to the general election highlighting polls and stories that predicted a Trump win,” Stone writes in his book.
The Trump confidante adds: “The editor of the massive, conservative news aggregation site spent much of the last 18 months leading with those rare polls and stories that predicted a Trump victory—meanwhile the Huffington Post, sometimes called Drudge’s liberal mirror, gave Hillary Clinton a 90-something percent chance of winning just hours before the polls started closing.”