What does the white wire clip to?

whatever you did I haven't looked at a schematic to know what the red wire is for. It appears it created a short and the path of least resistance was the fuse link. You should be able to check with meter to verify it is what fried (probably. and hopefully so).

I probably would have tried to ground from the clusters metal frame bezel to the dash frame corner. The dash lights pull ground from the same thing in part. You can just replace the fuse link, either with fusable link wire, or a new replacement fuse link, without replacing the wiring harness