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

by Rick Wilson

They ascribe all their losses to imagined bogeymen like gerrymandering or the Koch brothers or Citizens United, because the deeper causes are too painful to examine honestly: policy and cultural disconnects, reliance on generational superstar candidates, and crappy campaigns run for the base alone while scorning and insulting the middle.

But he’s trapped, desperate, and will do anything—and I mean anything—to win.

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.

this election will be fought in fifteen or so swing states and will be entirely a referendum on Donald Trump.

They do need to make the case that Trump is a mentally and morally unwell man, and that he sold a pack of lies to the voters in the fifteen or so swing states that matter in 2020. Democratic base voters gave us a preview in 2018, and they’re ready to rock again in 2020.

vital it is they fight this fight as it is, not as they wish it to be.

Democrats are finally investigating the extraordinary degree and depth of corruption that orbits Trump. They’re moving too damn slow, but they are moving nevertheless.

The referendum against Trump is in part an anti-corruption message, highlighting through clear narratives and illustrations that Trump is a tool of K Street and that the D.C. corruption that swing state voters associate with their own misfortunes is more extreme and corrosive than ever. If Democrats can’t tell Americans a tale of how greed, corruption, and self-dealing define Trump’s Washington, they need better writers.

obvious plan for 2020 and beyond. It’s a plan that works on one assumption: Get while the getting is good.

Whether it’s lobbyists for Wall Street banks, big coal, the payday-loan industry, private prisons, or any other number of economic vampires, the Trump kakistocracy really does have something for everyone: nepotism, cronyism, pay-for-play, backroom deals for donors, abuse of power, lying to Congress, threats and intimidation, and, as a bonus, monetizing cruelty to children. And the first term was just a preview.

all the political restraints are off.

monetized every moment of his occupancy of the Oval Office

We no longer live in a healthy political society.

Given the House Democrats’ unwillingness to hammer Treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin for ordering the cover-up of Trump’s tax returns and for refusing to comply with black-letter law on this matter, Trump knows the second term is his time to pillage. What’s Congress going to do? Send a strongly worded letter?

Donald Trump is sending a signal, loud and clear, that he’s for sale,

The consequence-free corruption of the first term will slide into a second, where it will become normalized and mainstream. It’s another short slide from there to an American political system in which corruption, self-dealing, and criminality become the central tendency of government.

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.

McConnell blocked bipartisan efforts to stymie Russian election interference in the 2020 election shortly thereafter.

Expect many, many more examples of Trump donors being handed the keys to the kingdom

a coal lobbyist now runs the Environmental Protection Agency, a pharma lobbyist runs the Department of Health and Human Services, and, for a time, a defense lobbyist ran the Department of Defense.

Expect more cabinet and subcabinet members to dwell in limbo as “acting” this-or-that. By naming “acting” secretaries of departments and having those departments staffed by armies of “acting” minions, Trump can avoid ever having his hires truly vetted and examined for conflicts of interest.

Trump 2020 campaign, its leadership will be a ripe target for both foreign and domestic interests.

The majority of the Trump folks today look at the few who got prison time as outliers. They’ve seen the money made by Trump 2016 veterans,

it’s increasingly clear Trump is not a well man.

It took a while for them to realize he wasn’t playing a dumb and dangerous liar; he is one, and always was.

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.

endless attacks on immigrants, his quest for his illusory border wall, his lies about caravans and criminals surging over the borders

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.

Trump’s arena events are a couple pointy white hats shor...

His overtly racist attacks on the “squad” of four Democratic congresswomen who all—quelle surprise!—happen to be women of color

blistering series of attacks on the late Representative Elijah Cummings

it’s not an act, it’s not a strategy, and it’s not something the American people can bear. It is exactly who he is: a fucking racist. The referendum on Trump’s racism will play out in 2020, and well beyond, costing the GOP seats, status, and support for generations.

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.

Trump’s lack of knowledge should terrify you

The madness, the narcissism, the eccentricities, the pathological lying, the delusions of both persecution and grandeur are rationalized and normalized now. The remaining cabinet members are men and women who have capitulated, morally and mentally, to the realities of this president. It’s not leadership and policy that keeps them in line; it’s terror. They wake up every day knowing that the moment they move or speak against him, they’ll be fired, Twitter-shamed, dismissed as mere coffee boys, and victims of brutal news coverage

Pulling off a Twenty-Fifth Amendment play against Trump based on his mental state is utterly justified, and utterly impossible, given the composition of bootlicks, yes-men,

Today, he’s still bounded by a burning desire for reelection, and he knows at some level he has to pretend to observe the forms from time to time

All bullies display two distinct characteristics: cruelty and weakness.

The catalog of abuses belongs in the International Criminal Court in The Hague. The administration’s immigration policy is deliberate, planned, and engineered to shock the conscience.

Now, his impulses toward cruelty are backed by government policy, and the results are a human rights disaster.

This cruelty is still playing out in squalid detention centers and ICE roundups along the U.S. border. As immigrant children are forcibly separated from their parents and placed in cages inside warehouses where they are maltreated and malnourished, America looks on in horror. 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. The cliché “This is not who we are” has suddenly taken on more weight, and it’s important to outline for voters how Trump’s cruelty and bigotry damage our national soul. This is a message Democrats can and must use to complete the divorce of women voters from the GOP.

The abuse of immigrants will accelerate for a host of reasons in the second term, the most consequential of which will be that the Republicans around Trump will understand that he’s saddled them with a generational problem with Hispanics. Even red states like Texas will experience profound erosions of Republican political strength, almost entirely because of the damage their cooperation with Trump has done to them with Hispanic voters. Set aside Texas for a moment and consider that Florida, Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina are experiencing rapid growth in the legal immigrant population of Hispanics, and those folks are going to be voting soon—and their American-born children will follow them. For them, Trump is a racist who hates them with a fiery passion, and in politics, people always return hate for hate.

Trump is about to own a stock market correction, an overextended economy, massive new debt and deficits, and the inevitable train wreck of a trade war run by morons. All of his economic mistakes are accreting into a mass of errors and evils that will hit Trump voters, and hard. Democrats can and must use working- and middle-class examples of the foolishness of the Trump economic model to actually communicate that they give a damn instead of proposing some ephemeral and unsaleable “Yay, free college!”

It has harmed farmers, ranchers, timber, manufacturing, tech companies, and small businesses all while driving up costs to American consumers.

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.

From promising “great healthcare” to destroying the now-popular Affordable Care Act

The promised auto, coal, steel, and manufacturing jobs aren’t just fiction; they’re a cruel lie to people who spent the last three decades in a slow, painful decline. Trump’s lies convinced many working-class Americans for a reason. They’re rightly pissed off, stressed out, and lost.

They simply want to live that American dream they grew up believing

Here’s the painful irony: The big-picture economy, which is largely out of any president’s control, is the real source of this president’s political strength with voters who like him. The SSRN poll for CNN in June 2019 had a striking finding. Of those who approve of Trump, a plurality of 26 percent said they do so because of the economy, more than twice the next most-frequent answer. In the same economic issue basket, 8 percent cited jobs as a reason for liking him. On immigration, 4 percent said that’s the reason they like him. When it comes to other aspects of Trump’s persona, support falls to the single digits. Just 1 percent said they approve of him because he’s draining the proverbial D.C. swamp. A whopping 1 percent said they like him because he’s honest, which proves you can fool 1 percent of the people all the time.