Running Against the Devil: A Plot to Save America From Trump--And Democrats From Themselves

by Rick Wilson

  Obama’s 2008 campaign seized the moment when Facebook penetrated society, and they leveraged it beautifully. The GOP scrambled to reverse engineer it, and though it didn’t quite make the cut in 2012, they clawed and scraped to the point of extinguishing the Democrats’ digital advantage.

  In 2016, Russia, Steve Bannon’s Cambridge Analytica, and, in their punch-drunk way, the Trump campaign hammered in messages to Trump-friendly audiences using Facebook and other targeting data. The RNC had their own data operation and, once they got on board with Trump, turned it on for him. Speaking of Cambridge Analytica, they’re back with a new name and still working for the Trump reelection effort via the RNC. Data Propria, CA’s new cover name, is the same suite of software tools and many of the same people, with all the same spooky tiebacks to Russian investors and coders. What could go wrong?2

  Trump may not understand data, but he will have some of the smartest humans on this planet behind the scenes. Most of the campaign will be invisible to people outside their very narrow target set. The messages will be tuned and timed to keep his base aroused and fevered, and to try to normalize and tribalize his behavior for softer Republicans.

  He’ll have help. Facebook had reps in the room for both the Trump and Clinton efforts to help them maximize Facebook data in 2016. They’ll still be there for Trump again in 2020. Silicon Valley’s personal politics may be hard progressive, but their corporate politics are raw capitalism.

  It’s vital the Democrats get their data and digital warfare in order. They have every element at the ready, and a bigger talent pool, but don’t underestimate the commitment of people down the chain in Trump’s digital consulting universe; they either win or spend a decade in the wilderness. They’ll fight, and they’ll fight hard.

  PAID TV ADVERTISING

  Paid television ads are still a killer app in politics because—and pay attention here, because this is the tenth time I’ve told you this and there will be a quiz on November 3, 2020—old people watch television and old people vote. Trump was outspent on TV and cable in 2016 because he thought he would lose and didn’t want to spend money he could keep for his own uses.

  But 2020 will be different. The campaign will spend, and spend big, on television in the targeted states. They’ll have the money and the targeting tools to do it effectively this time. Their creative work will be backed by the ability to put Trump in settings that are tailor-made for politics. Even this shaved ape can look presidential standing in front of the Lincoln Memorial, as he made sure he did on the Fourth of July in 2019, though a just God would have struck Trump dead for besmirching the memorial of a president who saved the nation.

  Here is a preview of what kinds of television ads the Trump team will run and why the Democrats should take them very, very seriously. The definitional ad of the 1984 presidential campaign was the “Morning in America” spot produced by the great Hal Riney. It’s a famously powerful, positive ad for an incumbent president about whom the nation was divided, even in the face of a strong economy. Sound familiar? The narrator’s message went like this:

  It’s morning again in America. Today more men and women will go to work than ever before in our country’s history. With interest rates at about half the record highs of 1980, nearly 2,000 families today will buy new homes, more than at any time in the past four years. This afternoon 6,500 young men and women will be married, and with inflation at less than half of what it was just four years ago, they can look forward with confidence to the future. It’s morning again in America, and under the leadership of President Reagan, our country is prouder and stronger and better. Why would we ever want to return to where we were less than four short years ago?3

  Democrats greeted it with howls of derision. The “Yeah but what about…” screeching was deafening, and utterly ineffective. No matter how much they yelled, “Morning” connected with voters. Since nothing is new under the sun, expect Trump’s Morning in America to be even more over the top.

  Prepare yourselves for claims from Trump on the economy that fly in the face of the reality on the ground, that elide the weak spots, pain, distress, and inequality in America, and that feature Trump claiming credit for everything good and right from sea to shining sea. His sole pillar of strength—though undeserved—is the strength of the economy, and this will be the core of his paid advertising. He’ll deliver this message to the same people who held their nose and voted for him in 2016. It doesn’t matter if it’s accurate in every detail. No amount of “But it’s Obama” or “But it’s the Fed!” will change his use of ads with this powerful framing.

  He’ll shamelessly lard his ads with the faces of African American, Hispanic, Asian, LGBTQ, and disadvantaged Americans of all stripes. It will be a fucking Benetton ad of soft-focus close-ups of diverse and beautiful American faces. It will have a gruff-looking steelworker. A pretty but tough female soldier. A young, happy, suburban mom with her adorable moppets. A pair of handsome gay men. A sharp, urbane African American professional couple. Asians! A Hispanic farmer! See, they’ll say, we love diversity. Pay no attention to the racial arson.

  Hell, I could write the ad in my sleep. Here’s the script to make your brain melt:

  Under President Donald Trump, America is great again.

  Stock markets and 401ks are at all-time highs.

  More people are at work in good jobs than ever before.

  The middle class is doing better than ever.

  The Trump tax cut is working for families.

  We have record African American employment.

  Wages for women are breaking records.

  Respected judges sit on the highest courts.

  Our military is tougher and stronger.

  Our vets are cared for at last.

  We’re safer and respected in the world again.

  Our borders are protected from drugs, disease, and human trafficking.

  President Donald Trump: Keeping America Great, forever.

  You’ll nitpick the details. It won’t matter. The ad will look and feel polished as hell, featuring lots and lots of American flags, rolling landscapes, and glowing sunrises. It’ll be Main Street, farm country, and prosperous towns. It’ll be church steeples and glittering skylines. Newspapers and media will play it over and over as they tear it apart, only reinforcing the airings and the message. Fact-checkers will spurt blood from their eyes.

  The campaign will seek to dial back the threat of Trump’s instability, the crazy tweets, and the rampant corruption to convince America that Trump is a determined president with a record of success in the economy, the one area that decides most elections. Because Trump’s team knows this is a referendum on him, they’ll shore up this economic message as often as they can, seeking to reframe the election as their own referendum of prosperity versus godless socialism.

  As for the negative ads, expect a frenzy of claims that will, again, make Democratic eyes bug out. The Democratic nominee will be cast as a dangerous socialist, an open-borders traitor, a coastal elite liberal snob, a killer of babies, and a taker of healthcare. Negative ads are very on-brand for Team Trump, and expect many, many millions of dollars behind them in the swing states.

  When Democrats see the ads running in Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, they need to pay close attention to the cultural context embedded in the negative messages. For all their pretense as the party of working folks, there is a long-established GOP playbook to divorce voters who might otherwise vote Democratic from the party because it misses cultural, religious, and regional cues.

  I know. I helped write it.

  Liberal activists have a repeated pattern we’ve often exploited: Their desire for national ideological conformity is boundless. That’s why there are virtually no pro-life Democrats; the normative power of the party means a Democrat in a conservative Catholic district must still be as pr
o-abortion as a Democrat in Brookline, Massachusetts. Democrats in the rural South must still be as anti-gun as Shannon Watts and Michael Bloomberg.

  Twitter has made this problem worse, but for a generation my old team rolled up Democratic seats with ads that hammered that cultural divide. “San Francisco Democrats” was poison for a lot of formerly Democratic voters in the South and Midwest. Expect more than you’ve ever imagined of that flavor of cultural warfare in 2020.

  Objectively, Democrats will know the game he’s playing. Emotionally? Not so much. Trump’s negative ads are going to drive Democrats not just to defend but to hyperbolically defend late-term abortion, a full ban on guns, single-payer government-run healthcare, higher taxes, and all the cultural signifiers of the elite coastal cities in which the Democratic political and media machines reside.

  Very few campaigns understand the first fundamental rule of responding to negative ads: Don’t repeat the charges. The second fundamental rule of negative attack ads? Never, ever let an attack go unanswered. The only way to respond to a negative ad is to hammer home with a different negative ad of your own. You can never explain or correct; you must simply nuke them back with more. The first person on the campaign who says “We’re not doing negative attacks” needs to be shipped out to the yard-sign department and never heard from again.

  Every political generation seems to learn these rules the hard way, through painful experience. The trick for Democrats in 2020 is to prepare—knowing that Trump has previewed these culture-war attack ads, and that the Fox mode of politics depends on them—and have pushback ads in the can and ready to roll. Make them ugly. Make them hurt.

  FUNDRAISING

  “Really fucking huge” is the number of which you’re thinking. Really, really huge.

  Every day from now until Election Day, Donald Trump’s online cash machine is going to pump out hundreds of thousands of appeals, all carefully market-tested to stoke the rubes, raising $5 here, $25 there, a $1,000 from time to time. He’s going to have repeat donors, and he’s going to scare them into giving until it hurts.

  Never mind that Hillary Clinton outgunned Trump financially in 2016, for all that it mattered. 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 this new, utterly transactional Washington.

  Even companies that posture like they’ve got progressive corporate values are going to stroke Trump, the RNC, and their allied super PACs with metric tons of money. Democrats have, thus far, been terrible at trying to freeze these corporate donors and their lobbyists from sending a tidal wave of cash to Trump. Ahem, Nancy—did you forget you control the House? The old, politically incorrect rule in fundraising of “be the pimp and not the whore” when it comes to donors still obtains, as horrible as it sounds.

  Mere incumbency gives any president a massive financial advantage. 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. Corporations that give to the Democratic nominee will face his Twitter wrath, and that of his horde.

  One of the better Democratic fundraising consultants told me in July 2019 that she expects Trump to be able to raise $700 million for the campaign, the RNC, and the combined committees. That’s a lot of zeroes. That’s real money.

  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. This is always the challenge party’s problem, but in 2020 it will be far more marked than ever.

  Small-dollar donations on the Democratic side will be vital, and will be there in big numbers, but only if you make this election a referendum on Trump. 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, see him driven before you, and hear the lamentations of his women. The Democratic nominee needs to outline to donors in the usual Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and Seattle enclaves that the checks need to have seven figures, not six. Trump’s corporate cash advantage, driven by the lobbyists who manage their interests in D.C., will be significant. Don’t be shy.

  FIELD ORGANIZING

  Democrats used to have a monopoly on field organizing. They were good at it, and all the hot girls volunteered for the Democratic candidates (if you think I’m sexist, this was a truism in politics until the late 1990s), so off the lads went to knock on doors with Betty Sue Holyoke.

  Though not the first modern, hypertargeted field operation, Obama’s 2008 field operation was famously effective and organized. They faced up against a field team on the GOP side that could fit in a midsized high-school auditorium. It was a far cry from the GOP volunteer efforts run for George W. Bush’s successful reelection campaign. In the post-Obama era, the commitment on the right to data-driven, direct-contact campaigns grew, funded by folks like the Koch brothers. The GOP vowed never to get caught short again on field and data in races from dogcatcher to president.

  I should know. I was part of a secretive effort to reverse engineer the Obama model after 2008. It took a while to trickle out, but like building nuclear weapons, only the first time is hard. Now the Trump team (and more important, the lifers at the RNC and in the consultocracy) have the blueprints, the materials, and the money to put it together.

  You might have a shock coming in 2020. Trump, a man devoted to television like it’s religion, likely couldn’t give a damn, but the RNC, the state parties, and the various victory committees will be working their asses off to deploy MAGAs into the field. They have a unique selling proposition: 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 Trump/GOP’s 2020 field operation lightly at their peril.

  OPPO

  The Democratic candidates may not be paying attention to the Trump/RNC’s opposition research wizards, but those wizards are most certainly paying attention to them.

  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, the candidate’s family, the candidate’s dog, the candidate’s business associates, and every person on the plane the candidate took to the last rally.

  Remember, the power of their oppo is their ability to provide a stream of information to feed into the maw of the Trump–Fox–social-media machine to keep the rubes angry and terrified. Most oppo folks, especially the professionals, will give you an objective road map for attacks that will and won’t work on your opponent.
Some stuff is simply too much of a reach. Some of it is unethically obtained. In those cases, the so-called silver bullets turn out to be the opposite.

  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. The kinds of things that you silly Marquess of Queensberry types think are off-limits, aren’t. 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.

  THE RUSSIANS, PART DVA

  Donald Trump’s first election was a triumph for Vladimir Putin, the Russian intelligence services, and the model of special warfare the Kremlin is pursuing in a world where the hyperpowers of the United States and China will always outgun it economically and technologically. This model uses things the Russians are really good at to launch asymmetric attacks against more powerful opponents, and if 2016 was a proof of concept, it was a great success.

  The Russians never, ever walk away from equity. They never let an asset, either willing or unwilling, leave their embrace. 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.

  The Russians will be hard at work running a repeat of their 2016 operation because it was cheap, it was effective, and it worked. Expect more of the same propaganda, more of the same manipulation online and off, and more active measures designed to reelect Donald Trump. 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. They’re really, really good at this, and they’ve picked a side.