More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Rick Wilson
Read between
April 17 - May 4, 2020
have pushback ads in the can and ready to roll. Make them ugly. Make them hurt.
If you underestimate the power of an incumbent president to raise all the damn money in the world, you’re mistaken. Lobbyists will be lined up outside the RNC with pickup truck beds full of bearer bonds. Every president takes care of his donors, in large ways and small, but in the Trump administration, there’s everything but a price list. Corporation after corporation has seen how effective donations to the RNC, the Trump campaign, and the constellation of super PACs and joint committees have been. Industry groups and leaders know rewards come—damn the consequences—for people who play ball in
...more
Trump’s position is not one of mere incumbency. He’s a warlord president, both utterly bribable and utterly capable of turning the mechanism of government against his political enemies.
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.
Democrats will be at a financial disadvantage in 2020. The primary is going to be a long, costly slog through hell, leaving the campaigns bankrupt.
No one is sending in donations because of the nominee’s infrastructure plan. They will send in donations by the billions if you promise to crush Donald Trump,
Democrats used to have a monopoly on field organizing.
Obama’s 2008 field operation was famously effective and organized.
The GOP vowed never to get caught short again on field and data in races from dogcatcher to president.
The GOP is no longer defined by the old divisions of social, economic, and foreign policy conservatives. GOP activists are now all one with the Trump borg, and the RNC is moving quickly to turn the cultists into door-knocking, voter-registering, tweet-posting automatons. They’re investing in training, with more than one thousand sessions held across the country in the week before Trump’s June 18, 2019, campaign kickoff.4 Trump’s base may be many things, but above all they are motivated, even if their motivations are in service to the worst president in our history. Democrats take the
...more
The RNC has access to a horde of smart, eager, and talented oppo nerds who will drill down into the most granular details of the lives of the candidate,
provide a stream of information to feed into the maw of the Trump–Fox–social-media machine to keep the rubes angry and terrified.
Some of it is unethically obtained.
Trump’s orbit is also filled with folks who aren’t standard opposition research professionals. They’re dirty, dark, and will pay money for dirt.
Trump can and will use unverified, untruthful oppo, and no matter how many times it’s debunked, a fraction of his audience will believe every word.
Donald Trump’s first election was a triumph for Vladimir Putin, the Russian intelligence services,
model uses things the Russians are really good at to launch asymmetric attacks against more powerful opponents,
They’re already back in the fight in 2019 to help ensure Trump’s reelection. Their propaganda model has been refined, their audience is more credulous than even they can believe, and the target of their operation does everything but take long steams with Vova at his dacha.
it was cheap, it was effective, and it worked.
It’s one hell of an in-kind contribution, from a man who operates from ego and venality rather than ideology. Money and pride are always more certain to produce the outcomes the Russian kleptocracy desires.
Trump has a gut-level understanding that the audience is always hungry, and they will eat up the things he does that are outside the usual
Trump’s meeting with Kim, and his symbolic crossing into North Korea, were just that—symbolic.5 It meant nothing.
Oh, it helped Kim dramatically, further legitimizing him in the eyes of his starving people as he made the leader of the free world come to him,
The point was that Trump wanted a picture,
These events will cost the campaign nothing because they’re, um, cough cough, official business.
no one should put it past Trump to escalate conflicts with China, Iran, or elsewhere when some part of his lizard brain tells him that some boom-boom will goose his polling numbers.
expect him to fill the air with executive orders that feed the base—“All
expect counterintuitive plays like suddenly declaring an interest in the Flint water system, or disaster relief in the Florida
Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign will be crafted to look like Reagan’s 1984 reelection: the Big Show, a patriotic extravaganza contrasting Morning in America 2.0 with every cliché of the Democrats
laughable in comparison to Trump’s actual record.
For his target audience, it will work—really well.
The real Trump campaign just below the surface will be pure, vintage Richard Nixon. Trump can’t stop himself because his mindset was formed by his early exposure to politics with Roy Cohn and Roger Stone. Factor in the cruel tutelage of Roger Ailes, from whom Trump learned much of his media-battering techniques, a man who validated Trump with the right as well as, you know, invented the Nixon playbook.
Add to that his own demonstrated history of inflammatory racial views and actions, and the reward he gained in 2016 by activating the alt-right, the old-guard racists around David Duke, and the slurry of neo-, crypto-, and actual Nazis, and the preview of the 2020 campaign is easy to see.
replay 2016, portraying himself as the tribune of the silent majority, the oppressed working man, and the downtrodden white middle-class American facing ...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
grievance culture. Trump has brilliantly exploited it, and 2020 will see the grievance, paranoia, and self-loathing of the GOP blossom into central themes.
Everyone is coming to get you.
First, the hero narrative. Trump, the iconoclast hero of America’s forgotten working class, has delivered unparalleled prosperity and finally made America Great Again.
Then, the fear narrative: Après moi, le déluge. Without me, the economy will collapse. We’ll be taken advantage of by world powers in both trade and security. Murderous immigrant criminals will kill your families and take your jobs. There is a conspiracy of elites ready to crush your church, your community, and your values. You will be punished for not believing the right things. Also, immigrants. And Muslims. And immigrants.
His polling and strategy team desperately wants to make this a base-only election about a core package of issues, not a referendum on his personality, leadership, or accomplishments. The Trump base has demonstrated time and again that they’re not exactly sticklers for the little stuff like facts, truth, and consistency.
The GOP is sunk even deeper into the muck of Trumpism, slowly losing its ability to think, move, or respond to even the most obvious moral questions surrounding this president. The resemblance to a cult becomes more pronounced with every passing day. Many of my former friends and clients who served as a silent resistance in Congress and in elected offices across the nation are gone now, either retired or defeated in the 2018 beatdown. The wipeout in the House increased the percentage of true believers in Esoteric Trumpism. Centrists and moderates simply quit or lost in blowouts across the
...more
rewarded the opportunists—particularly former Trump-skeptics and hustle monkeys like Matt Gaetz and Kevin McCarthy,
