You're Fired: The Perfect Guide to Beating Donald Trump

by Paul Begala

elections are about the lives of the voters, not the candidates’ lives.

But a significant percentage of Americans just thought, There he goes again! I wonder what The Donald is gonna say on the show next week? My Hollywood friends have a name for this: they call it a Pre-Aware Title. A pre-aware title is something the audience is already familiar with. Think of the Lego movie. Even if you’ve never seen it, you know what Legos are. Or Iron Man XII: you know what you’re getting there.

A great many of Trump’s savage, obscene character flaws were already known to the audience. Or at least they were assessed less critically because they came from a man whose flamboyance earned him a place in your living room every Thursday night for fourteen years.

Mitt is a fundamentally good person who had some business deals that hurt him politically; Trump is an awful person of the lowest character. And he had a lot more business deals that screwed working people. We should have filmed the plumbing contractors he drove out of business when he wouldn’t pay his bills. The housekeepers and cooks and blackjack dealers who lost their jobs when his casinos went bankrupt. The undocumented workers he used and abused at his golf courses. The veterans who lost tens of thousands of dollars on a worthless “degree” from Trump University. We should have shown how Trump has hurt people like you.

In April 2018, Trump fired Tom Bossert, his White House adviser for homeland security. Bossert had held a similar post in the George W. Bush administration and was known to be especially concerned with emerging threats—like pandemics.

A month later, Trump fired the pandemic response team that President

He cut the pandemic prevention budget of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention by 80 percent in 2018.

President Obama decided to fight the virus over there so we would not have to fight it over here. Trump inherited a CDC that was forward-deployed in forty-nine countries.

the CDC to abandon or drastically reduce efforts in thirty-nine of those forty-nine countries. One of the countries where we dramatically scaled back our efforts was China. And the virus came.

it did not come out of nowhere. It came out of China. One of the thirty-nine countries the CDC had to pull back from because of your budget cuts.

Donald Trump is the first president in all of American history with no prior experience in government or the military. For many of his supporters, that lack of experience was a blessing. Now it looks like a curse.

But here’s the thing about being president: you don’t have to know everything, because you have access to the world’s foremost experts on everything.

Every crisis communications professional will tell you that credibility is the coin of the realm. You fight fear with facts, and facts should be sacred in a crisis.

The credibility of the White House—and especially of the president of the United States of America—is a precious national resource. Trump has squandered it with an almost diseased disregard for the truth.

According to a count from CNN, Trump made thirty-three false claims about coronavirus between March 2 and March 15, a crucial time when Americans were seeking accurate information and making critical decisions about how seriously to take the virus.

by the third week of January, diplomats were pulled out of Wuhan, China, where the contagion began.

Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar had been briefed on discussions between Chinese and American health officials but could not get through to Trump for days or weeks.

Joe Grogan, the head of Trump’s Domestic Policy Council, sounded the alarm to acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney in a January 27 meeting. Mulvaney then began convening meetings on the virus, but “officials said Trump was dismissive because he did not bel...

I helped President Clinton balance the budget in the late nineties. We did it knowing that while times were flush, we should pay down our debt so that we would have the option of relatively painless deficit spending when a crisis hit. Trump had the opposite view.

Trump is a Republican, but he is a Trump first, last, and always. And the Trump business empire (such as it is) is built on hospitality: hotels, resorts, golf courses. (Now that his casinos have gone bankrupt.) Before bailout legislation was even drafted, Trump was calling for federal assistance to hotels.

But how the heck does a president who is a hotel magnate promote bailing out, potentially, his own properties? By being shameless. Fortunately for the American people, Democrats were on guard. Sen. Chuck Schumer inserted a provision into the bailout bill that would bar Trump, other senior administration officials, and their families from benefiting from the bailout. Amazingly, the last minute before the vote, Schumer realized the provision he’d insisted on was missing. Just an oversight, he was assured. Right. Schumer held firm. For two hours he and his fellow Democrats refused to let the bill come up for a vote until their anticorruption (aka, anti-Trump) provision was put back in.

In a crisis, as in combat, three Cs are essential: Command, Control, and Communications.

A central thesis of this book is that it is a trap to fixate too much on Trump.

He is a narcissist. As such, he craves attention and will say or do anything to grab it.

the Trump Trap lures us into talking about him, not us.

In the last hundred years, incumbent presidents have faced the voters sixteen times. They have won twelve times.

Many observers have described our politics as driven by hyperpartisanship. I think it’s worse than that. We are not merely hyperpartisan, we are consumed with negative partisanship.

For too many of us, it is more important that the other party loses than that our party wins. Indeed, the majority of the people who voted for Trump in 2016 (53 percent) did so more because they were rejecting Hillary; and the precise same percentage of Hillary voters said that their vote was more against Trump than for Hillary. This is unusual. In 2008, 68 percent of the people who voted for Obama said it was because they believed in him, and 59 percent of McCain voters said the same about their candidate.

He understands how to grab an audience and how to hold it. He knows the power of simple story lines with cartoon villains and overdrawn heroes. He knows the need for drama, conflict, comic relief, and resolution. And he knows that in our short-attention-span media environment, subtlety and nuance are the enemy. From the get-go, his outrageous schtick drew the cameras and allowed him to dominate a field of sixteen others.

By March 16, 2016, more than thirty states and territories had had their primaries or caucuses. Trump by then had won 1,448 delegates—comfortably past the 1,237 required to be the GOP nominee. Yet he had spent only $10 million on television advertising. (Jeb Bush had spent $82 million on advertising alone. By the time he was done, he and his allied super PAC had spent a whopping $130 million.) How can anyone run in thirty contests—and win—by only spending $10 million on advertising? It’s the Earned Media, Stupid. By the time he’d locked up the nomination in March, Trump had received $1.9 billion in earned media. No one else was even close to half that amount. (Hillary was a very distant second, with $746 million.)

By November, Trump was the beneficiary of $4.96 billion in earned media—more coverage than...

In the exit polls, Hillary’s unfavorable rating was a whopping 55 percent. Trump’s was 60 percent. But wait. How can a guy who’s disliked by 60 percent of the voters get 46 percent of the vote? Because, crucially for Trump, nearly one in five voters hated them both. And Trump won those voters by a crushing 17-point margin (47–30).

And yet if you ask Trump supporters why they like him, one of the first things you’re likely to hear is, “Because he tells it like it is. He’s a truth-teller.”

Trump has redefined truth. For most of us, truth is fidelity to facts; to some Trump fans, truth is reflecting what they believe in their bones but cannot state without fear of repercussions in our “politically correct” world:

Neuroscience teaches us that fear shuts down thought. The amygdala overwhelms the hippocampus and the frontal cortex.

“Don’t be afraid” rarely works. Replacing fear with thought and action is critical.

You fight fear with facts.

Ridicule, rather than outrage, should be our response to Trump’s attacks, his fear, his bigotry. I would have loved it if Sen. Elizabeth Warren had said she would release her DNA test… when Trump releases his tax returns. “And I bet you a dollar I’m more of a Cherokee than he is a taxpayer.” Never answer his attacks.

Gen. George Patton is often quoted as saying, “The object of war is not to die for your country. It’s to make the other son of a bitch die for his country.” The object of a campaign is not to answer the other candidate’s attacks; it’s to make him answer yours.

Define your opponent, not let them define you.

If we try to out-Trump Trump, we will not only lose the election, we will deserve to.

Too often, Democrats appeal to the head, not the heart. We focus on policy, not feelings. Position papers will not defeat Trump. Nor will trying to match him hate for hate. We need to tell folks how we feel, not what we think. Any Democratic message must begin by asking how we want people to feel.

the 2018 midterms saw the largest turnout of any midterm election since 1914—before women had the right to vote. This is a complete turnaround from the catastrophic midterms of 2010 and 2014, where turnout dropped dramatically and Democrats lost, bigly. Important lesson here: when more Americans vote, more Democrats win. It kinda goes with being the party of the people.

Pelosi didn’t flinch. True to form, she put on her heels and went to work. She named New Mexico congressman Ben Ray Luján chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Luján is soft-spoken but strong. With Pelosi and Luján working nonstop, the DCCC raised a record-shattering $296,422,428 for the 2018 elections.

the DCCC outraised the NRCC by more than $90 million.

Pelosi knew how to deploy those resources strategically. Her strategy, it seems to me, had four elements: diversity, moderation, message discipline, and organization.

Pelosi’s

Democrats did dramatically better among them, not by calling them racists and not, tellingly, by simply bashing Donald Trump. They gained 9 points among the most loyal Trump voters by talking about voters’ lives, voters’ health, voters’ future—not about Trump.

To make it in America, a million breaks have to go your way. Too many in the meritocracy look at their own success and think, “I did it all on my own.”

Even worse than neglect, some elites treated the white working class with contempt; at best, they patronized them. “You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania,” then-senator Obama said to a group of wealthy meritocrats in San Francisco, “and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to their guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

Obama is a caring, decent man. But when he saw the pain of the white working class, he seemed to offer analysis rather than empathy.