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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Rick Wilson
Read between
February 8 - February 15, 2020
America knows by now that he lies, but no one is really prepared for a body of deception so large it’s like the meteor that crashed into the Yucatán and killed the dinosaurs, only instead of a Texas-sized rock it’s a mass of Trumpian bullshit that will plunge through the atmosphere.
Driving hard on Trump as a liar, a discredited and weak man dependent on a curtain of absurd deceptions to maintain his fragile self-image and political status, can be a striking, viral moment, and the Democratic nominee should be practicing for it, every day.
Donald Trump, as I’ll say until I’m blue in the face, cannot win this election.
The Democrats can sure as hell lose it.
The only way to fly safely and survive in those conditions is to rely on your instruments.
I’ve explained this rule to candidates before, and I’ll tell you now, the only safe flight plan through 2020 is to trust your instruments.
They’re praying you run a campaign based on what the edges of your base demand, and not what a serious, bloodless analytical campaign based on polling, data analysis, and turnout models tells you.
They want you to play for the cheap seats in California, not the tougher targets in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Florida, and Michigan.
In politics, the weather is always
foggy. The clouds are always bad and getting worse. Nobody knows nothin’. You’re in the cockpit and you can either trust the numbers, technology, and analytics in front of you, or you can fly by the seat of your pants. One decision results in a win. The other? A smoking hole in the ground and a political funeral.
In this show, policy loses to personality every time. Brain loses to heart, every time. Stunts, joking asides, dumb nicknames, and lowbrow pranks beat substance and gravitas. Here’s how to win this reality show.
policy. If Trump is playing to the camera, and you’re playing to the New York Times opinion page and Woke Twitter, hang it up.
When you start hitting Trump, never, ever let up. Never blink, never blush, never pull back. Trump’s ego is delicate, his skin is thin. His
Trump fights dirty. There are no rules. There are no boundaries. You cannot make him feel regret, or shame, or embarrassment.
The only rhetorical tactic that will work on Trump is to hammer his ego and his personal narrative. Call him weak. Call him poor. Call him a failure. Call him fat. Call him impotent. Say he overpays for sex. Pity him for having to lie to make himself feel better. When
he rolls into one of his attacks on you, take a beat and tell him he looks tired. Ask if he wants to rest or take a break. Point out that he’s sweat...
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You are not dealing with your father’s Republicans. You are not dealing with rational actors. They are in service to an utterly amoral man, and by both inclination and necessity they will mirror his behaviors. DON’T BELIEVE NATIONAL POLLS It’s not simply that they’re often wrong. It’s that they make you focus on doing the wrong thing. The national polling pretty closely reflected the results of the 2016 race: Hillary Clinton was predicted to win the popular vote, and did. That wasn’t the ballgame, though, was
THE CULTURE WAR: WHERE DEMOCRATS GO TO DIE
Trump’s campaign team desperately, passionately wants 2020 to be about socialism, abortion, gun control, left-wing anti-Semitism, gender pronouns, the news media, and identity politics. It’s their safe space, and Democrats who get lured into playing the Social Justice Olympics of Political Correctness are going to lose forty-plus states.
Donald Trump’s greatest culture-war victory will be the Democratic nominee on camera making excuses for something only 13 percent of Americans approve of. Expect Trump to talk about late-term abortion. This will be an electoral tentpole for his messaging.
For anything short of a national military emergency, stop playing nice with the monster.
worry about the future but push on every day. It’s a social-media cliché that authenticity
They hate politics, but they love leadership. They hate partisanship, but they love passion. They’re flawed and frail and uncertain much of the time, but they still imagine a bigger, better life. Tell them you’re listening. Tell them they matter. For once, tell them it’s not about you, or the party, or some book of policy proposals but about them.
Michelle Obama is wrong when it comes to fighting Donald Trump. “When they go low, we go high” is easy for a popular, talented, charismatic First Couple to say. No. When they go low, you bring out the goddamn flamethrower. You show real passion, real heat, and let people see you’re not taking one fucking iota more of his bullshit…and that no one else should either.
His insults are projection, and you can and must use that. In fact, you need to get ahead of that with constant, personal, targeted attacks on the three softest points in Trump’s psyche.
First, he’s not rich. He’s poor. He’s—to use the famous words of my hedge-fund friend—“a clown, living on credit.” The billionaire image was
Second, his self-image is that he’s handsome, sexy, and athletic. (Try not to laugh.) Trump’s obvious obesity,
sloth, and indolent lifestyle are hanging off him in rolls. Call
he’s not physically well enough to hold the office. Hit him hard on his creeping dementia: “Donald, you’ve lost a step. It’s sad and I’m sure your family is concerned. I know you don’t...
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Charisma, likability, electability, and—for fuck’s sake—policy are fool’s gold if the campaign doesn’t have its shit together.
I’m going to call hard bullshit on the Clinton 2016 campaign because they deserve it. They were lazy, smug, wasteful, insular, arrogant, incompetent, fractured, tone-deaf, sloppy, and worst of all they lost to Donald Fucking Trump. No one was accountable, ever. 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.
Trump channeled their anger and said, both implicitly and explicitly, that hatred was back in style. He told them at rally after rally that his Wall would stop the brown horde from taking their jobs. He told them
This is a game of the Electoral College, not Chapo Trap House. Middle America isn’t on the cusp of being Berkeley or the Upper West Side by a long, long shot.
campaigns in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Ohio that a deep part of the self-identity of working-class voters in those states is in the value of hard work and the role that self-reliance plays in the American narrative. It’s vital that Democrats fall somewhere between
fend-for-yourself harshness and “Free Shit for Everyone!”
Democrats also have the unbelievable luck of being able to win the battle over Obamacare after a decade of screwing it up. As I discussed in Everything Trump Touches Dies, the issue of preexisting conditions is one of the most powerful political messages I’ve seen tested in thirty years of politics…but Democrats are on the verge of blowing it. The simple, clean argument over preexisting conditions is a sure winner, whi...
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Trivial, you say? Hold still, because I need to slap some reality into you.
If I was facing Trump, knowing what I’ve learned about him in the past four, long, dark, shitty years, I’d work based off that knowledge. I’d know that there is no bottom. There is no shame. There are no limits. He’ll push beyond all norms and boundaries, because losing this race most likely ends up with a trip to prison. Winning means a century of Trumps. I’d know that politics triumphs over policy, and passion triumphs over ideology. I’d lie, and cheat, and fight so dirty that it would barely be on this side of the law.
The last few weeks of October were a blissful whirl, with polling numbers looking strong across the board but your candidate joyfully working the crowds in swing states. She’s a happy warrior, praised for her political skills and the subject of endless glowing
Your campaign broadened its appeal, not reaching a state of beautiful progressive wokeness but of a sense of common mission and purpose, a promise to restore American norms and values.
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.
