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by
Rick Wilson
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February 8 - February 15, 2020
She’s a happy warrior, praised for her political skills and the subject of endless glowing media profiles.
Almost every newspaper in the country endorsed her in the final week.
Trump
Sure, Trump’s lowest-common-denominator message was cultish, racist, and blisteringly stupid, but it was simple, constant, and repeated…and you kept feeding him issues to use against you.
In reality, you were giving the Trump campaign fodder for the weaponized grievance machine that put him in office in the first place.
You lost because you made the election into a referendum on policy, not a referendum on Trump.
You went into a reality-television contest not understanding the rules, and the master of the genre kicked your ass.
In the words of the poet, sage, and philosopher DJ Khaled, “Y...
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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.
We’re on the same side now, and that side is America.
But this isn’t just any election; it is an existential moment for America. This is either the last election of the nation we understood and loved, or the first of a long reset where we restore our honor and image after Trump’s term. Campaigns often claim that
Pick one: our messy, flawed, wonderfully sloppy democratic republic stumbling toward the shining city on the hill, or a kingdom of cruelty and utter corruption led by a family of authoritarian kleptocrats in thrall to foreign powers. In those terms, you’d do anything to win, right? Right?
Democrats might—in spite of themselves—understand how vital it is they fight this fight as it is, not as they wish it to be.
assumption: Get while the getting is good. Eat, drink, and snatch all the federal largesse we can, for tomorrow we may die, or be indicted.
Corruption is a disease.
We no longer live in a healthy political society.
The endless revisions of his con-in-law Jared Kushner’s financial and personnel security reports point to how that side of the Trump family business is monetizing government.
Far from the Greatest Negotiator Ever, he’s the easiest lay in White House history. In the second term, foreign and domestic powers will start cashing in their chits, and the losers will be the American people.
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.
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.
This is not simply President Munchausen.
It is exactly who he is: a fucking racist.
The madness, the narcissism, the eccentricities, the pathological lying, the delusions of both persecution and grandeur are rationalized and normalized now.
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.
If you’re looking for a referendum point on Trump with the suburban demo of former Republicans, this is it. If Democrats are looking for a referendum point with anyone with a basic scrap of humanity, this is it.
If Democrats can’t build an entire suite of messages and ads around this story, I don’t know if anyone can help them.
The working class of America hasn’t seen wages rise, nor the prosperity of Silicon Valley and Wall Street trickle down to their neighborhoods.
Like all predators, Trump can sense the weakness in his marks, every time.
We’re awash in trillion-dollar deficits, the national debt is asymptotically approaching infinity, and we have a president who’s never hesitated to borrow and spend well beyond his means, or to simply throw up his hands and declare bankruptcy when it suits him. We never did—and most likely never will—tackle entitlement reform. Nations don’t get to go bankrupt; they collapse.
I’m not saying this as some kind of Bernie-bro socialist. I’m saying it as a conservative who sees that federal government protections have allowed the investment sector, and the folks who can afford to game the tax and regulatory systems, to enjoy a boom like no other.
My suggested portfolio in the coming Trump depression is gold, ammunition, and canned goods.
They’ll learn what 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
Donald Trump’s legacy will be a generation of young people comfortable with casual cruelty, rampant dishonesty, and revenge as pillars of our politics.
Are you willing to practice raw, pure, amoral politics before ideology? Honestly, I have my doubts.
I can promise you one thing: I will never give up this fight.
We may hate him for different reasons, but I hope we’re united in the understanding that his defeat is an existential challenge for this republic, and that odd alliances, political compromises, and joint operations are worth the discomfort we may feel as we step back from our ideological priors.
Donald Trump is the devil in human form, and the battle against him requires all men and women who believe in the dream of America and the continuation of this republic to stand together to destroy him and all his works.
What the fuck are you gonna do?
It’s evident from a mile off that Democrats are setting themselves up to reelect Trump by making 2020 into the anointing of someone who strokes their ideological happy place rather than someone who could, you know, win.
This part of the book will outline the campaign-killing myths of 2020. Pay attention. The final exam is in November 2020.
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.
You’re not playing a game of winning the popular vote, and whether you like it or not the game is exclusively about victory in the Electoral College.
Fight where the fight is. Ignore where it’s not. It’s not in California. It’s not in New York. It’s not in Massachusetts.
In campaigns, though, they show up with the veggie platter, and I show up with oysters and a case of Champagne.
This race has absolutely
nothing to do with policy. This race is about Trump and a competing candidate’s personality and presentation, not about soon-forgotten policy papers and ...
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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 referendu...
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To use a technical political term, they fucking hate Donald Trump.
Show voters how Trump tried to eliminate healthcare coverage for preexisting conditions, highlighting how his corrupt government screws over working families. Educate voters on how the trade war is wrecking their economic future, and how farmers and manufacturing are both being crushed. Call out Trump’s cruelty and brutality toward immigrant children. Call him out as the unrepentant racist he has proven himself to be.
