Running Against the Devil: A Plot to Save America from Trump--and Democrats from Themselves

by Rick Wilson

The Bernie bros were revealed to be an online circle jerk, sound and fury signifying trolling.

In the spring of 2020, Republicans also announced they were investing $20 million in an army of attorneys to fight “voter fraud.” (In related news, I’m spending $20 million on the prevention of leprechaun incursions.) They are signaling that they will go balls-to-the-wall on any kind of voting irregularities, push to have polls closed early, and fight to the death on every precinct across the country.

Don’t bring whiny complaints about voter suppression when you haven’t built an equally aggressive army of your own. Did you learn nothing from how badly we rolled you in 2000?

Do tell!

We’ve been going right at Trump and Trumpism, and with the happy gusto of pirates, leading him to online and in-person temper tantrums focused on us, while Biden and his allies are able to keep working. Distracting Donald Trump and serving as a harassing force is perfectly in our wheelhouse; we’re agile, vicious, and unbound by a party or the rules of normal campaigning. You’re welcome, Democrats.

According to one estimate, 50 percent of Twitter accounts pushing to reopen the economy—even as COVID-19 roared on—were bots.2

It’s a common trope that every election is the most crucial election in history. This time, that cliché has both the danger and the benefit of being true.

In 2019, sanctioned Russian oligarch and Putin bestie Oleg Deripaska mysteriously announced that his firm, Rusal, would build a new aluminum plant in the United States, in Mitch McConnell’s home oblast of Kentuckistan.1 It struck one columnist and some Senate Democrats as a remarkable coincidence that McConnell blocked bipartisan efforts to stymie Russian election interference in the 2020 election shortly thereafter.2

We once were a beacon of freedom and liberation for the oppressed and those held in tyranny. A long line of presidents from both parties held that America plays a unique role in the world as a trusted defender of freedom, a model for other nations. But Trump’s America is transactional. With Trump, it’s “Fuck you, pay me.”

In July 2019, diplomatic cables sent by the British ambassador to the United States, Kim Darroch, were leaked, resulting in his resignation. In the leaked emails, Darroch stated the unvarnished truth about Donald Trump: “We don’t really believe this administration is going to become substantially more normal; less dysfunctional; less unpredictable; less faction-riven; less diplomatically clumsy and inept.” The ambassador described Trump and his team as “uniquely dysfunctional” and noted the deep divisions and internecine warfare inside the White House. He predicted the Trump presidency could “crash and burn” and “end in disgrace.” Remember, these are the observations of an ally.

There’s an equal, if thankfully smaller, fire on the other side of the political divide. The Trump base may be smaller, but as two and a half years of painful experience demonstrates, Republican unity behind Trump is virtually unshakable. He is the parasite that ate the GOP from the inside out as an ideological force. In 2020, they’ll be utterly united, motivated, and angrier than ever; we’re moving away from red-hat, spittle-flecked, rally crazy and approaching bomb-vest crazy. I wish I was kidding.

In August 2020, a Trump supporting 17 year old was charged with killing two BLM protestors in Wisconsin. https://news.yahoo.com/kyle-rittenhouse-kenosha-wisconsin-shooting-police-militia-jacob-blake-211413849.html

In a Walmart Nation, don’t run on boutique issues.

if Obama was the peak of the progressive secret plot for world communism, he was really bad at his job).

A good deepfake can click its way around the world before the truth has time to fire up its browser.

Trump’s endless, torrential outpouring of outright bullshit has become a primary feature of American political life, a Colorado River of mendacity slowly carving itself into a Grand Canyon of lies.

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction…and the distinction between true and false…no longer exist.11

Strap in, because the last two weeks of the 2020 campaign are going to be lit.

That’s right. Hillary Clinton was off the air in Wisconsin and Michigan until two weeks before Election Day.3

Hillary Clinton could have taken Florida, Wisconsin, and Michigan but didn’t do the work, leaving those prizes wide open for marginal efforts by Trump and his Russian allies to tip the scales.

The simple, clean argument over preexisting conditions is a sure winner, which is why the Democrats are talking about single-payer, Medicare for All, and ending private health insurance.

Lewandowski is rumored to have had an affair with presidential favorite and former aide Hope Hicks, to which Trump told Hicks, “You’re the best piece of tail he’ll ever have.”

This is a battle that decides whether they have an unlimited runway to create a dynastic kleptocracy based on an authoritarian personality cult that makes North Korea look like Sweden, or whether the immune system of the republic kicks in and purges them from the body politic.

Every authoritarian regime in history depends on silence, either coerced or purchased, and every whistle-blower and truth-teller who raises their hand, swears to speak the truth, and takes fire is deserving of our appreciation.