The gold bulls were, in a sense, correct. Uncertainty usually is good for gold. The best measure of this is perhaps not so much the Vix index, which measures short-term equity risk, but the index of policy uncertainty complied by Scott Baker, Nick Bloom and Steven Davis. There has been a strong correlation between this index and the dollar gold price - of 0.6 between January 2003 and October 2016.
The gold bulls were also right to believe that gold should do well when inflation expectations rise. If we measure these by the gap between five-year conventional US Treasury yields and their inflation-proofed counterparts, they are indeed positively correlated with the gold price, if we control for other things.