Donald Trump's story was simple, relatable, and one of the main reasons he got elected, historian Doris Kearns Goodwin said.
"Donald Trump told a story, whether true or not, that people felt was real," she told David Alexrod on CNN's "The Axe File" podcast. "You know, that he was going to make America Great Again, that something had happened to this country, and that the people who had lost their jobs and their income and their dignity — he would make it better.
"And that kind of story somehow reached out to a certain part of America. And even if Hillary's plans and her programs might have touched those people more deeply, the connection emotionally between her and those people seemed to have been lost."
Goodwin, a Pulitzer-Prize winning historian who penned biographies on Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Franklin D. Roosevelt, said Trump boasting of his success early in his campaign caught her attention because "history would just record the opposite."
"I think overcoming adversity is an extraordinarily important trait for a leader," she said, "which was what stunned me, in a way, when Donald Trump said that he had the very, very best temperament of anybody who had ever run for the president because he always won, that he had a winning temperament."
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