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

by Rick Wilson

A FEW NOTES FROM THE SUMMER OF 2020 When the hardcover version of Running Against the Devil went on sale in January 2020, it shot to number 4 on the New York Times bestseller list. I was immersed in the usual tasks of promoting the book—traveling, doing signings and interviews, and hitting the TV circuit with my usual vigor. My new posse, the Lincoln Project—a band of ex-Republican strategists, consultants, and heavy hitters opposed to Trump—was off the ground and plotting to make the next ten months as long and painful as possible for Donald Trump.

The Federal Reserve kept pumping liquidity into the system to keep the markets booming. The campaign and its grifter archipelago of MAGA super PACs was sucking up the Social Security payments of boomer rubes like an industrial vacuum.

Bloomberg was the first real proof case that even unlimited money can’t give a candidate those elusive gifts, luck and charisma.

The Democrats resisted their worst impulses. Almost heroically, they turned their gaze from Bernie and decided that electable and centrist Biden was better than a Thousand-Year Trump Reich. I like to think my humble little book had something to do with that, and I’m grateful for the folks from Biden’s campaign who let me know they’d read it and internalized it.

No, here on Earth 1, we had the bloated, boasting, mentally insufficient manbaby in charge. So of course he fucked it up just as fully and painfully as you might have expected from a man who had “governed” only in the loosest sense and whose three-year track record of abject failure, corruption, idiocy, management by tweeted rage-fits, and short-attention-span fuckery had already locked him in to first place as America’s worst president.

As a man who has studied Donald Trump too closely for too long, I feel like an anthropologist in hell, doomed to watch for some sign of conscience or insight or awareness to flicker in his beady eyes, or for some emotion other than pissiness to cross his jowly face. Instead, in response to a crisis that dwarfs every event in our history save the Civil War and World War II, there’s…nothing. No compassion for the death toll. No moment of leadership and dignity. Nothing but a constant stream of excuses.

the Trumpenvolk complained. About the lockdowns ordered to contain the virus, they whined, “The cure is worse than the disease.” This was Trumpspeak for, “Let granny die for the Dow Jones, but we’ve got to get NASCAR, World Wrestling, and the local Applebee’s running because I miss those jalapeño poppers,” and “Shut up, cucks, we’re reopening the economy.”

I wrote in the hardcover edition of this book that every reelection is a referendum on the incumbent, and it’s true. Typically those referenda span a variety of the decisions and actions made by the incumbent: the quality of his leadership, the security of the country, the strength of the economy, and a host of smaller factors. If COVID had not entered the scene, the 2020 race would have been a referendum on Donald Trump’s corruption and failed leadership. Now that it has, the election of 2020 is about one thing, and one thing only. It is about Donald Trump’s mishandling of this crisis and the terrible toll of his foolishness, weakness, vanity, and corruption. It isn’t a question of whether we want four more years of Trump, but rather whether we can survive four more years of Trump. The

I can tell you one thing: Joe Biden likes people. He likes to talk. He likes to bullshit. He likes to laugh. Unlike Trump, he doesn’t take every criticism as a personal affront.

To win the White House, Biden doesn’t need to reach soaring heights of rhetorical perfection. He doesn’t need libraries of policy papers and briefing books full of Elizabeth Warren–esque geekery. He needs to fall back on the characteristics that Americans expect from a president. Donald Trump once famously said to Americans, “What have you got to lose?” as he asked them to place the reins of the most powerful office in the world into his pudgy little paws. The answer, it turns out, is everything.

I loathe saying this, but Biden needs to up his Facebook game, and he needs to do it yesterday. Trump’s campaign, for all its flaws, has Facebook very clearly on their side; Mark Zuckerberg has consistently acted in Trump’s favor, refusing to block even his most ludicrous lies and incendiary provocations. Why? Who can see into Mark Zuckerberg’s android heart? Is it a desire to avoid regulatory oversight, or to destroy the planet in a sea of nuclear flame? He’s not telling. But the ludicrous amplification mechanism of Facebook, like nature, abhors a vacuum. Trump and Russian online propaganda (but I repeat myself) are still in place on Facebook, turning the social network into a hive of conspiracy-theory whackadoodles and their millions of friends. Biden has to buy, borrow, or steal a group of Facebook ad experts and content developers. The site is a hellhole, but it’s also a hellhole where older voters are exposed to this campaign, particularly in the era of COVID.

This battle will be waged and won in the Electoral College, just as it was in 2016—which means Biden and his outside allies aren’t looking for a massive swing in every battleground state. Would a crushing wave election be nice? Of course. However, even with all Trump’s deficits, he’ll still hold a core of red states, which makes a wipeout less likely. A solid double wins this game.

Steve Bannon himself acknowledged that if groups like the Lincoln Project split off 3 to 4 percent of the Republican vote, Trump can’t win.

Part of the slow but measurable drift away from Trump comes down to his incompetence. If anyone still believed the reality-TV-star shtick, his deadly and disastrous handling of COVID washed away that illusion once and for all. Many of the hardest-hit places were in red states that would have been solidly GOP but for Trump’s handling of the virus. Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin have suffered a heavy blow.

If he loses, Congress and law enforcement will be investigating this carnival of corruption for decades. (If the idea of Prisoner 45692721, Trump, Donald J., isn’t enough to get you out of bed in the morning, we can’t be friends.)

Unlike the Trump campaign’s flirtation with the alt-right in 2016, this time they’ll just hold hands in broad daylight. Trump knows that the racist elements of his base need red meat, preferably in the form of immigrant children. Expect more horror stories of caravans, this time with even more lurid tales of plagues, murderers, and human trafficking. Campaign ads will screech about sealing the border. It won’t be long before kids in cages make the news again, with a government response of “So what?” rather than, “Dear God, what have we done?”

Russians never walk away from equity, and their 2016 investment in Trump—let’s be honest, Russians have been investing in Trump since the 1980s, just at the scuzzy Russian-mob level, not at Putin’s rarefied heights—paid off spectacularly. It wasn’t merely that watching Donald bow and scrape like some medieval peasant before his lord gave the Russians a constant thrill. They got the outcome they truly desired—a divided America, weaker in the world than ever before. They got the chaos they love and the deformation of America’s political life into warring factions with nothing in common but their rage. By late spring of 2020 the bot wars were on again, with Facebook and other platforms doing almost nothing about them. According to one estimate, 50 percent of Twitter accounts pushing to reopen the economy—even as COVID-19 roared on—were bots.

Barr manipulated the Mueller Report and broke all the rules to attempt to get Trump crony Mike Flynn off the hook. Barr’s ideological ferocity for preserving executive power goes beyond anything recognizable in a modern liberal democracy.

Trump needs to max out white working-class voters without a high-school education to levels never before seen, and it’s going to be ugly. The campaign may talk a good game about African American and Hispanic voters, but it’s the white, noncollege voter, middle- to lower-middle-income, with a chip on his (and he’s almost always a he) shoulder the size of a 747, and drugstore sunglasses in rural, exurban, and suburban swing states they’re after. They’ve already given up on the college-educated GOP mom who walked away from the party in 2018.

Starting in April, however, Trump’s campaign and Trump himself launched attacks on Joe Biden claiming he was senile. They produced the usual videos of stitched-together clips of Biden fumbling his words to push the narrative that he was suffering from dementia and/or mental illness. But by June the “Joe Is Senile, Old Folks Can’t Lead” strategy was backfiring, as his once-rock-solid numbers in the senior demographic dropped sharply.

The overt and covert racial messages embedded in his “law and order” and “dominate them…take back your streets” demands during the unrest following the police murder of George Floyd appeal not just to the Trump base but to the ugliest edge of that base: the racial grievance mongers, the outliers, the dead-end anti-immigration and anti-civil-rights elements who felt validated and empowered by Donald Trump in 2016.

Trump cannot survive long without the rallies. They are his safe space in a world turned against him. No matter the risk, he’ll hold those rallies. They work for him for three reasons. First, the rallies are a guaranteed way for Trump to commit news, to darken the press sky in the way for which he is notably famous. Trump doesn’t go on the stage of these rallies and throw out racist tropes, wild lies, and metric kilotons of total bullshit for no reason. He does so because he knows that the national press corps is a machine built along certain design guidelines.

Should Joe Biden do giant rallies for the left? I would argue against it, because the MAGA rallies are going to be like a fucking petri dish of coronavirus, so let’s avoid death-by-campaign-rally, shall we?

Before COVID-19, one could be easily convinced that Donald Trump would go down in history as one of our very worst presidents. Now that we have faced untold misery and loss as a nation, and seen how a failed leader who thinks only of himself and who lacks even the most basic human empathy cannot rise to the occasion, this choice isn’t really a choice at all. He was tested, and couldn’t make even himself great, let alone this nation. Trump’s place in history is assured, and it is one of ignominy and shame. The only variable left in the eventual judgment of the Trump reign of error is whether the Democrats keep their heads in the game, run the race they must, and make Donald Trump a one-term president.

They weren’t trying to win big, or swing the nation toward a new ideological polarity, or find the next savior. They were animals, trapped in a win-or-die moment, and they resorted to tooth and claw. You realize as the Electoral College numbers rise for the Republican that your campaign mistook Trump’s sloppy, shambolic, hateful, stream-of-excrescence campaign for what was happening behind the scenes. There, for an army of professional Republican campaigners wedded to Trump out of desperate necessity, it was ride or die.

He can scream “no collusion, no obstruction” from the grave, and it won’t change the fact that he owes his election to the Russians and obstructed justice in trying to cover it up. He’ll be remembered for a spectacularly failed record in foreign policy. Despite his tough talk about being the world’s toughest negotiator, he has been routinely rolled by foreign adversaries, leaving America less safe and less respected in the world. His deficit spending puts drunken sailors to shame and makes the eyes of the few remaining fiscal conservatives pop out.

His overtly racial appeal is beyond shame. His ongoing flirtation with xenophobic arsonists over immigration and his long game of footsie with the racist virgins of the alt-right (but I repeat myself) have left the country more divided than anyone could have imagined in the post-Obama era. He has done more damage to the institution of the presidency than Nixon and given the country a White House clown show with a cast of the least competent, least ethical, least sympathetic, and least appealing supporting players in any administration in memory.

I know it sounds pious, but I really do put country over party, particularly when the party I served for a generation is on a headlong path toward becoming a collection of mere votaries to a maniacal cult leader.

I’m repulsed by how Republicans have abandoned even the paper-thin excuses that let them make the switch to Trump in the first place.

I’m on this journey as a man without a party, a rebel in the Trump era, because the man covering the Oval Office with his ichor is an existential threat to American values, institutions, the Constitution, our system of government, our security in the world, the rule of law, and, you know, the little stuff like the future of humanity.

FOUR MORE YEARS IN HELL Words fail to describe how bad four more years of Donald Trump would be for America and the world, to say nothing of the Democratic Party.

Campaigns often claim that the present election will decide what the America we leave our children and grandchildren will look like. This is rarely true; most elections aren’t epochal choices between light and darkness, liberty and servitude, good and evil. This election? Yeah. It’s the real, apocalyptic deal.

Trump cannot be shamed. He cannot be embarrassed. He cannot be controlled, and he cannot resist his impulses. Turning this election into a referendum on Trump is a gift for Democrats, not a burden.

@realDonaldTrump: As you know, Israel considers me King of the Jews. You might not know due to the lying media that I am also considered by many to be the next incarnation of the Dali Lama! THANK YOU FOR THIS HONER! Do you think I should also be POPE?

The Trump White House is lavishly and obviously corrupt to a degree unprecedented in modern American political history. Yes, we can drag back to Warren Harding and Teapot Dome, or Ulysses Grant’s multifarious scandals, or Andrew Johnson and the spoils system’s corrupt and corrupting influence, and yes, all presidential administrations are touched by corruption, though generally in trivial, marginal ways. In the modern era, we’ve had only one real standout: Richard Nixon. Until now.

Trump makes Nixon look like a rookie, a small-ball piker. He makes the nontroversies of Obama, the Bushes, Clinton, and Reagan feel utterly trivial by comparison. Carter, the most reviled Democratic president of my youth, was practically a Sunday school teacher. Oh, wait. He was a Sunday school teacher.

If the president is for sale, so is everyone else, and—spoiler alert—nations where endemic corruption takes hold aren’t stable, prosperous, or small-d democratic for long. Trumpism corrupts, and absolute Trumpism corrupts absolutely, so expect more unsubtle stories of political payoffs by powerful interests. 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

The long arc of Trump’s racial rhetoric goes from Mexican “rapists” at the beginning of his campaign to “shithole countries” to “both sides” in Charlottesville to “invasions” at the southern border to calling a majority-black district of Baltimore “rat and rodent infested.” This president isn’t a subtle racist. He’s not the kind who wants to white-glove it with pretty rhetorical dressing about culture and heritage. His endless attacks on immigrants, his quest for his illusory border wall, his lies about caravans and criminals surging over the borders are all of a piece; it’s part of repeatedly stoking his base with his racist air-raid siren. Trump-allied “conservatives” have tried to put a pretty face on white nationalism with policy conferences, gussied-up versions of The Daily Stormer, and an alt-lite media complex, but racial animus is still at the wretched heart of his filthy movement.

Comparing Trump now with video clips from a decade ago is chilling. The slippage in his verbal acuity is marked. His rages and explosions of temper aren’t part of an act; they’re no longer controlled or controllable. The nearest contemporary parallel was the second-term decline of Ronald Reagan. Americans sensed the terrible gravity of Alzheimer’s pulling at him, but he was still surrounded by largely competent people and was, on the whole, a healthy man. For all the disagreements Democrats had with him, Reagan could never be considered an impulsive narcissist with a hair-trigger temper and no concern for others. Reagan actually bothered to understand nuclear weapons and the risks they posed, unlike President Missile Parade. Trump’s lack of knowledge should terrify you as much as it does me, especially as his cognitive decline continues apace.

CRUELTY AS STATECRAFT All bullies display two distinct characteristics: cruelty and weakness. As for Trump’s cruelty, nothing represents it better than the way our government has treated immigrant children under his watch. The catalog of abuses belongs in the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

IT STARTS WITH KIDS IN CAGES. IMAGINE FOUR MORE YEARS. What do you think happens when this program gains additional bureaucratic momentum? What happens is a series of perverse incentives where instead of standing up to this deeply un-American, entirely outrageous, and inhumane cruelty the government normalizes it. It becomes the same old Nuremberg just-following-orders defense in which the outrageous becomes the expected and the cost in lives is offset by bonuses, performance awards, and promotions. Deep inside the bureaucracy, government is always unaccountable, and this is even more true of Trump’s government.

The abuses will ratchet up in order to frighten desperate immigrants—at least according to the designs of the architects of this monstrosity—into staying in their assigned shitholes. This is a last-ditch shot at the big prize of Making America White Again. Like junkies, the base of Trump’s anti-immigrant cult will need more. It’s not enough to just see children in cages. It’s not enough to see mothers having their kids torn out of their arms. Oh, no, they’ll need more to feed the monster, and Trump will provide it. Stephen Miller now largely runs the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, so expect that the leaders of those agencies will be held to his standards. He wants a theater of abuse and cruelty, and he’ll get it.

To reach the target set of voters Democrats absolutely must win in 2020, the most important countervailing message against Trump is simple: He lied to you. Political lies are perfect weapons for dividing previously loyal voters from the pack, and history is replete with examples. George H. W. Bush went to his grave knowing that, while he’d done the right thing for the government in 1991, the tax increase he supported broke a promise to the GOP base. “Read my lips” was the political lie that the GOP’s rank and file would never forgive. Barack Obama promised “You can keep your doctor” and lost the House of Representatives a year later.

The working class of America hasn’t seen wages rise, nor the prosperity of Silicon Valley and Wall Street trickle down to their neighborhoods.

Trump’s lies had a different edge and character. His deceptions were more pointed, more racial, and xenophobic. In Trump’s portrayal, the evil MS-13 gangs weren’t here just to murder your entire family but also to take your job. Their insidious taco trucks would replace the local Culver’s just as their insidious DNA would brown your neighborhood beyond recognition.

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.6

America’s role as a NATO ally will continue to degrade as Trump’s bromance with Putin, his extortion of the allies, and his utter ignorance of the traditions and meaning of the Western Alliance is demonstrated time and again. But hey, Trump Tower Moscow will make it worthwhile, right?

Part of his contempt for the environment and the natural world comes from his upbringing in New York City. Trump is a germophobic weirdo who spent the majority of his life in a glass tower. His rare moments in the natural world are on groomed, highly fertilized golf courses. Teddy Roosevelt was a famous outdoorsman and adventurer. Ronald Reagan was most at home under the clear skies of his beloved California ranch, on horseback or cutting brush. George H. W. Bush loved the waters off Maine. His son embraced the wide, sere spaces of Texas and his ranch. Barack Obama, raised in Kenya’s…sorry, Hawaii’s pristine environment, loved biking and swimming.10 He took his family to national parks, and while perhaps you couldn’t call him a rugged outdoorsman, he was at least happy to be out in the sun. Trump? Not so much.

Look, not every regulation from the EPA is sensible, balanced, cost-effective, or environmentally useful; but the Trump approach, to shred them all in a rush to please donors and troll environmentalists, is beyond reason. In the next term, expect the very worst for America’s environment.

The Trump family—including the creepy automaton Jared Kushner—will continue to view the American government not as a sacred trust but as an ATM for their crapulous enterprises and nation-state-level grifting. While Kushner’s ambitions don’t appear to be especially political, his exploitation of his high office as Grand Vizier to Emir Donald has been spectacularly profitable for his companies. As for Trump personally, his hotels, golf courses, and clubs were miraculously both popular and profitable for unknown reasons.11 (Pardon me while I recover from that epic eye-roll.)