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by
Rick Wilson
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October 19 - October 25, 2020
Installing Ivanka and her android husband, Jared, in the White House was already the greatest display of nepotism in presidential history, but by the summer of 2019 Jared and Ivanka had become the awkward party guests at events like the Tokyo G20 meeting. Trump’s work to frame Ivanka as the First Princess led him to include her in event after event with world leaders, to incredibly awkward effect. It wasn’t the first time he’d thrust his groomed but talentless daughter into the spotlight, but it was one of the most embarrassing. Her presence was deeply unwelcome at a number of events where she
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Garry Kasparov said so presciently in 2016: “The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.”15
What a spectacular role model for the youth of America. Four more years of a president normalizing the worst behaviors, enabled by his political party, will result in a generational change. JFK’s lofty postwar New Frontier resonated for a generation of leaders. Ronald Reagan shaped my cohort of young conservatives on matters of economic freedom and national security. Barack Obama shaped millennial attitudes and values on issues of inclusion and diversity. Donald Trump’s legacy will be a generation of young people comfortable with casual cruelty, rampant dishonesty, and revenge as pillars of
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Republicans became masters at leveraging Democrats’ insistence on picking candidates based on what policies they like versus what wins. Many Democrats campaigned in an alternate reality, believing the myths of the campaign as they desired it to be, not the one they truly faced. We, by contrast, were cold-eyed, clearheaded operators.
IT’S A NATIONAL ELECTION No. It isn’t. It’s not even close to a national election. It’s an election in about fifteen Electoral College battleground states, and don’t you forget it. I’m going to keep reminding you of this, because if you take away no other lesson from this book, let it be that. Every time I hear “Hillary won the popular vote,” I cringe. The correct answer to this is “And?” Winning the popular vote and $5.45 gets you a venti mocha latte at Starbucks. It. Means. Nothing.
Say it with me: “The only game in town is the Electoral College.” Now say it again, with feeling: “The only game in town is the Electoral College.”
Policy is a luxury good in this election because this race is against a man, not a party, a platform, or an ideology. Democrats are fighting a cult and a cult leader, and until they realize that the referendum against Trump is about Trump, he has the winning hand.
May I remind you of death panels, migrant caravans, the war on Christmas, creeping sharia, Hillary’s emails, Seth Rich, the Clinton Body Count, babies being killed after birth, Antifa, and a thousand other weaponized issues and stories Democrats laughed at, saying “How absurd, darling. Is this organic kale slushie gluten-free?” while Republicans ate their political lunch?
Democrats don’t need policy to make their voters turn out against Trump. Those people will crawl over broken glass to vote against him, as they did against his minions in 2018.
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. They are dead-enders, the last guys in the bunker.
I want to close with a simple principle I’ve applied for a couple of decades in professional politics: In a Walmart Nation, don’t run on boutique issues. Or, as a campaign mentor once said to me, “Never underestimate the power of dumb.” Language matters. Presentation matters. Charisma matters. Policy? Not so much.
DSA members won’t believe this, but not every Democrat is a screaming progressive with a knife in their teeth ready to board the USS Plutocrat and start slitting the throats of the idle rich. Not every Democrat thinks abortion is without a single moral question. A hell of a lot of Democrats own and carry guns. Some Democrats aren’t sold on government as the solution to every problem or tax increases as a universal good. Many of the 110 million holders of private insurance are Democrats and want to keep it, thank you very much.
Now, the dirty but open secret of socialism in America, one conservatives tend to underestimate and liberals overestimate, is this: Americans are OK with a splash of socialism, but they don’t want to call it that.
For Democrats, this really is a Flight 93 election—except the emergency isn’t to elect Trump, but to beat him. Unless Democrats put aside their internal grievances, beefs, ideological wish lists, and purity-posse threats to stay home in November, they might as well expect Trump for another four years, and his spawn in the White House for decades after.
It’s going to take some time to convince his “my way or the highway” supporters that knocking Trump out of office is more important than ushering in the Workers’ Paradise with Comrade Bernie at the helm. It sucks for the eventual nominee, but Bernie’s pattern of behavior, if repeated, is a significant problem.
The raw, real politics of 2020 demand that the Democrats get their shit together when it comes to their most loyal and vital constituency. African Americans have given the Democrats their votes with stunning regularity and consistency for decades. The only differences come with turnout rate. They may not be voting for Trump, but the key question is whether Democrats are turning them out to vote at all.
The struggle of the GOP to play the “Look at my black friend” game in the era of Trump is a monumental lift, and largely results in merely nervous laughter. Those great voices of the civil rights struggle like Diamond and Silk, Candace Owens, and Sheriff David Clarke haven’t exactly altered the political chemistry for a presidency that reeks of racism from stem to stern.
The youth vote is a moving target, a political unicorn running through a field of poppies, shooting rainbows from its ass. Democrats in particular seem to spend an enormous amount of time trying to activate 15 percent or so of the voting pool in general elections (lower in the off-cycle races). Yes, youth participation was up in 2018, and meaningfully so. The percentage of millennials who voted in 2014 was nearly doubled in 2018. Want to know why? Because the oldest millennials (for our purposes, people born between 1980 and 2000) are closing in on forty, the age when voter participation tends
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Do not mistake his clownishness and stupidity for a campaign that’s incompetent. The consulting people around him are not dumb, and they’re going to have unlimited resources. Underestimate my former colleagues and their appetite for survival at your peril.
Donald Trump is the most effective, powerful, and amoral user of earned media in the history of American campaigning. His massive Twitter and social-media footprint and his pet state-media organs amplify every signal, no matter how mendacious or misspelled. His 60 million followers—including a few million bots controlled by foreign intelligence services (ahem, @Jack!)—will echo, signal-boost, share, and spread every message. If Trump tweeted the word “fart,” he’d get 100,000 likes and people would sing his praises for breaking down the old barriers of presidential stodginess.
He will never, ever look over his shoulder and think “Uh-oh. Have I crossed a line with the PC speech commissars? Have I offended the [select your disadvantaged group] community? Did I use the wrong gender pronoun? Is my base mad at me for being too mean?” His base thrives on the transgressive, offensive, ignorant, and linguistically incoherent sewer outflow of his Twitter feed. It binds them to him. It is a secret handshake, and the outrage from anyone outside the cult only makes the bond more powerful. They’re all members of the same juvenile, shitty little club, but it’s their club, and
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Paid television ads are still a killer app in politics because—and pay attention here, because this is the tenth time I’ve told you this and there will be a quiz on November 3, 2020—old people watch television and old people vote. Trump was outspent on TV and cable in 2016 because he thought he would lose and didn’t want to spend money he could keep for his own uses.
Trump’s small-donor suckers also believe this is the fight of their lives, an existential challenge between Trump and mandatory abortions fortnightly, the razing of every evangelical church, and forced Arabic lessons at their grandchild’s elementary school from the local deep-state MS-13 representative. Trump will drain every single dollar from every single Social Security check to survive, and his people will happily give it.
As we’re painfully aware, Donald Trump lacks the genes for shame, modesty, and discretion, so expect the AF 28000 and AF 29000 to get a lot of air miles clocked in service to his campaign. Expect to see one of the two Air Force One planes parked behind him during speech after speech at airport hangar rallies around the country. Most presidents would instantly draw a sharp, clean line between campaign operations and the use of military force. This is the proverbial “wag the dog” scenario where a president in trouble seeks to bomb his way out of it by hitting a target overseas. With no adult
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Trump will replay 2016, portraying himself as the tribune of the silent majority, the oppressed working man, and the downtrodden white middle-class American facing a changing culture and a changing country. He may flip “MAGA” to “KAG,” but the top-level message is still “I’m with you against the elites and the scary brown people.”
Everyone is coming to get you. The immigrants. Black Lives Matter. Antifa. The deep state. Silicon Valley. The godless homosexers. Academia. Women. Sloths. Atheists. Muslims. Jews. Zoroastrians. Who knows what else will be added to the catalog, but the Fox media programming will always give you a clue. War on Christmas? Atheists. Sharia law? Muslims. Drag queen story time? Duh.
Expect many, many more Fox stories about Hillary’s goddamn emails, imaginary deep-state villains, and lurid conspiracies by the evil Never Trump establishment (hey, that’s me!) against Donald Trump.
Trump could say “Yeah, the Russians are going to elect me again and the payoff is I get to build a tower in Moscow when I’m done. What about it?” and they’d praise him like the second coming of Lincoln. He could admit every conceivable sin, and his elected GOP cohort would redefine them as virtues. “Well, adultery is a problem, but a man as virile and powerful as Mr. Trump needs…”
Fact-checking doesn’t work with these folks. Politifact, Snopes, and the rest aren’t a remedy for Facebook information warfare; in fact, the Trump fan base views refutations of Trump’s lies based on facts and evidence as confirmation Trump is right.8 Fake news is a problem almost exclusively on the right. The people driving it can’t be shamed, and the only people who could make them play by the rules—at least at this point—won’t. Mark Zuckerberg has a wee bit of power at Facebook but can’t seem to rouse himself to meaningful action. Democrats will face stories that make the worst excesses of
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He is the human train wreck from which they can never look away. He is the evidence the dog isn’t house-trained. He is every addiction, wrapped into one package. He knows that no outlet will truly punish him for lying. No outlet will bust the “senior administration official” who makes calls from the White House residence at midnight. The Democratic campaign will struggle every day to overcome his brighter-than-the-sun media presence. For 2020, they have to build a smart, media-friendly team of surrogates who can get on television—the only place attacks are real for Trump—and follow his rule:
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If you haven’t been paying attention, our current political culture isn’t sane, Fox is Trump’s pet outlet, shared truth is a memory, and the social-media platforms seem both uninterested in and conflicted about finding a solution to the problem. After all, they monetized the propaganda efforts of the bad guys in the last election, and while they’ve said the right words, their actions are lagging, badly.
The old rule of politics is “Hang a lantern on your problem.” If you set the narrative, you retake control of the story. Identify the problems, then wargame the hell out of your responses. Tell the lawyers in the room to fuck off; their caution will kill you when it comes to messaging.
In the last hour of his administration, Trump issued multiple pardons via Twitter, and legal scholars are already debating their validity. Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, are rumored to have fled the country. Former First Lady Melania Trump was seen boarding an Air Canada flight to Ottawa and declined comment.
THE DEATH OF TRUTH Donald Trump broke something fundamental in our politics: the value of facts and truth. He alters the truth based on whims, and spreads both accidental and deliberate misinformation. His more cynical followers view this as part of his five-dimensional chess game, but America is now a post-truth republic, to our detriment. In
What should concern Trump’s opponents in 2020 is how readily voters have abandoned honesty and truth as necessary to a healthy society. In fact, many revel in the transgressive thrill of knowing the president of the United States is spouting bullshit. They wink back at him about how fun it is to own the libs with lies bordering on pathological.
while fact-checking is both meritorious and necessary, it’s also almost completely ineffective for Trump voters. You can’t and won’t move them with facts. The defense of Trump’s lies has become a core tribal signaling function inside the hollowed-out husk of the GOP.
“Well, that’s just Trump being Trump. It’s not hurting anyone. It’s just his style.” No, folks. It’s not a style. It’s a pathology, and in 2020 the Democratic candidates need to prepare for a picture of America painted by this president, both the fake good and the fake bad. They’ll see it as the equivalent of a madman smearing the walls of his padded cell with his own feces, but the framing of the 2020 campaign will look much more like the 1984 campaign than they currently care to admit. Trump will paint the picture as one of unparalleled economic success, and the lies will come down fast and
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Trump’s framing will be apocalyptic: It’s me or sharia law. It’s me or the scourge of government death panels. It’s me or godless communism (and/or Muslim theocracy) in the dark future.
Democrats must make the case that the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 was not a bailout for America but a monster payday for a small number of hedge funds, banks, and tech billionaires. As of this writing, Elizabeth Warren has come closest to working out a solid message on this, but it’s not rocket science, and it solidly falls into the category of making the election a referendum on Trump. His hallmark legislative accomplishment was a lie.
The big moments matter; after all, about 65 percent of the electorate doesn’t even start paying attention until the last thirty days of the campaign. When they’re watching, the nominee has to deliver.
For shy Trump women voters, messages about his history of sexual assault, dalliances with porn stars, and pussy grabbing need another workout. Reminding them that their daughters will grow up in a world defined and shaped by Donald Trump’s values is a powerful message. These women voters were part of the swing away from the GOP in 2018, but their importance for 2020—particularly in the suburbs of Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Milwaukee, Tampa, Orlando, Charlotte, and Atlanta—can’t be emphasized strongly enough.
Magical thinking in campaigns is deadly. It’s dumb. It’s all too common. The coming election is a time to focus on the real world, and it’s not a pretty picture. Donald Trump takes advantage of human weakness like few other people in the world. He’s predatory, amoral, and a dark, shitty monster of a person. This chapter is meant to help you identify and face your weaknesses, and to cauterize your soul sufficiently so he doesn’t wreck your campaign. DEPENDING ON DECENCY You want to believe this is a just and good world. You want to believe that good guys win, liars never prosper, and
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Donald Trump has the devil’s own luck when it comes to getting out of things that would have doomed any other candidate or elected official. I’ve been as guilty as anyone of believing that some issue or outrage would finally destroy Trump. Because I believe we are being tortured by the cruel and capricious gods of politics, he slithers away from crisis after crisis, never tested fully, never held to account, and always ready to detonate a wave of more news to escape the problem of the moment. People hoped insulting John McCain would derail him. They hoped Iowa or New Hampshire or Florida would
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Democrats won forty-two seats in 2018 in large measure because they stayed out of the culture-war quicksand.
Expect Trump to talk about late-term abortion. This will be an electoral tentpole for his messaging. He understands that a solid evangelical base is mandatory for reelection, so more tweets like this one won’t surprise anyone: “Democrats are becoming the Party of late-term abortion, high taxes, Open Borders and Crime!”2
If we fail to stand by President Trump now…now of all times…we’re doomed to a future of miscegenation, uppitiness, and sassy backtalk from the help. As an American and a multimillionaire heir to a frozen-food company that sells processed fish as prole chow, I vow to you, this will not stand. Thanks for tuning in tonight. Catch my new column at The Daily Stormer and my one-man show at the German American Bund Hall in Babylon, Long Island. THE
How Democrats should respond: “Robert Mueller uncovered hundreds of contacts between your campaign and the Russians. The only reason you’re not charged in this case is the Department of Justice guidelines. Two of your former aides are in prison. Donald, the way you behave toward Vladimir Putin is so deferential, and the way you trust him over American intelligence and military officials has people wondering about you. If Putin doesn’t have something on you, it’s hard to tell.”
Immigration is the killer app of Trumpism. For his supporters and true believers, it is a symbol of Trump’s imaginary strength at confronting an imaginary problem. And it is a permission slip for millions of Americans to Make Racial Animus Great Again. With its sister issue the Wall, Trump’s immigration obsession motivates the rally crowds and a handful of high-profile Trump fellators like Lou Dobbs, Ann Coulter, Mark Levin, and others. But the Wall is one of his most meaningful vulnerabilities and needs to draw as much ridicule as Democrats can muster. Say it with me: There is no wall. There
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Donald Trump secretly loves the decency of normal people because he knows it to be a weakness. Every woman he ever sexually harassed or assaulted, every business partner he screwed, every contractor he stiffed got to know Trump’s style of predation and mistreatment: He finds a weakness and bullies and intimidates you into silence at best or obedience often, and at worst forces you to become an accessory to his continued bad behavior.
Trump is a man without a single ethical scruple. He is without compunction when it comes to breaking the letter of the law. Hell, he’ll crack the spirit of the law just for fun.
