by Rick Wilson
Heroism should be its own reward, but in Trump’s Republican Party it is punished, and swiftly.
For congressional Republicans, it doesn’t matter what happens in the 2020 election. They will lose their seats before they cross Trump, so great is their terror of his mob. No revelation will split them. No behavior will stop them from towing Trump’s line. It is now well beyond the typical partisan loyalty we’ve seen in the past. They will not stand up. They will not speak out. Expect no heroism. Don’t even expect passive-aggressive asides. Lyndon Johnson always sought his opponents’ abject submission, and he got there by intimidation, threats, power plays, and horse-trading. The GOP lined up to give Trump full control of their destiny without so much as a fight.
Trump could say “Yeah, the Russians are going to elect me again and the payoff is I get to build a tower in Moscow when I’m done. What about it?” and they’d praise him like the second coming of Lincoln. He could admit every conceivable sin, and his elected GOP cohort would redefine them as virtues. “Well, adultery is a problem, but a man as virile and powerful as Mr. Trump needs…”
The Party of Lincoln is now the Party of Trump, a weak, cowardly, amoral, and faithless husk of a once-great party of ideas and leadership. They’ll follow him into a political graveyard, red hats, tawdry nationalism, dumb policies, cruel tweets, and all. Their cult-like obedience to him has consumed their honor, and their souls.
White House Diaries
DEPUTY ACTING ASSISTANT PROVISIONAL TEMPORARY CHIEF OF CABINET OPERATIONS STAFF LELAND BOB SNIPES, JR.
The great thing about the Qmunnity (Hey, I like that! I’m going to use that more!) is that we really back each other up. I’m not very busy right now, so I’ve been spending a lot of time looking at the evidence the Deep State is still trying to take out Our President.
This election looks bad, I’m not going to lie, but I’ve seen the real truth. All those polls are fake news run by Jeffrey Epstein (you don’t really think he’s dead, do you, sheeple?) and his pedophile army.
Mr. Trump is the winner already, and we know it.
This election is a big fake news lie. Someone has to do something about it.
And that someone is me, Leland Bob Snipes, Jr.
HIS FUCKING TWITTER FEED, FAKEBOOK, AND FOX AGITPORN
Fox.
I know, I know. I can hear it in your head. “Rupert’s propaganda network.” “Faux News.”
Hate Fox all you like, but don’t underestimate its power to cement the views of your candidate in the minds of the Republican base voters and beyond. With their various personnel’s role as Donald Trump’s chief fluffers, enforcers, cheerleaders, policy advisors, and image launderers, Fox has a massive, almost unrivaled media reach. When you’re tempted to dismiss them, have your media consultants give you the earned-media value of the airtime Trump receives on their network every single day.
More important, and for the first time in history, the largest news outlet in the country isn’t just ideologically simpatico with a president; Fox is in daily coordination on message, targeting, and strategy with the president and his campaign.
No, this isn’t normal. It isn’t cool. It isn’t American. But it is the reality of the most powerful cable news outlet in the nation.
Their bond is driven both by the network’s understanding of its audience (old, white, and pissed off) and by the president’s addiction to their fellating coverage of his every move, word, and thought. He supplies them with an audience who follows his every utterance. They keep his numbers up with his base.
Fox has 1.39 million views a day. Its rivals CNN and MSNBC are at 622,000 and 1.04 million, respectively.7 Fox is an unmatched weapon in Trump’s arsenal, and you’d better be ready for it. Pick the most damaging thing in your defensive oppo file and turn it up to 11, then add a big dose of insane. Overcoming this media ecosystem is going to be one of the Democrats’ singular challenges in 2020.
An impassioned speech about the challenges and glories of America? Lost in the static when Trump tweets out some incoherent tripe. Your brainy essay for The New York Times on climate change or gun control or worker retraining will get a few thousand smart people nodding, but Trump’s angry tweet will be read and retweeted by tens of millions of followers not known for critical-thinking abilities and shared by hundreds of thousands of boomers on their Facebook pages.
Democrats still don’t seem to have a serious approach to the massive, organized Facebook infrastructure on the far right. Grassroots groups and pages created by one person can take on a life of their own, and their utility to spread political propaganda, misinformation, overseas propaganda, and deceptive messages and images was abundantly demonstrated in the 2016 election. Democrats need constant monitoring of these sub-rosa, powerhouse propaganda arms of the Trump effort; they need the infrastructure and teams to push back with countervailing messages and, when they identify that “Real Americans for America” has an IP in Macedonia or Moscow, to work with Facebook to kill them off.
Fact-checking doesn’t work with these folks. Politifact, Snopes, and the rest aren’t a remedy for Facebook information warfare; in fact, the Trump fan base views refutations of Trump’s lies based on facts and evidence as confirmation Trump is right.8
Fake news is a problem almost exclusively on the right. The people driving it can’t be shamed, and the only people who could make them play by the rules—at least at this point—won’t. Mark Zuckerberg has a wee bit of power at Facebook but can’t seem to rouse himself to meaningful action. Democrats will face stories that make the worst excesses of the National Enquirer look like the pages of The Paris Review, and the social-media giants won’t do a damn thing about it unless they’re under market and social pressure. Get to know their board members, folks.
Democrats are running against a party and a constituency who not only view the president’s loose relationship with the truth as tolerable, but who see any lie or conspiracy theory that accomplishes their beloved goal of owning the libs as acceptable and, in fact, desirable.
Crazy Facebook pages pushing fake news to the Trump right are here to stay. If the Democratic campaign isn’t staffed, trained, and ready to push back on these stories instantaneously, expect a meaningful fraction of the American people to buy into characterizations of your candidate’s life, morals, finances, religious practices, and sexual appetites that are lurid, crazed, and utterly false.
I know. I saw it on ConservativeDailyEagleNewsHubSuperMAGATruthWarriorQAnon.com.
Donald Trump’s Twitter feed is the very maw of hell. It is the crapulous wellspring of his endless river of bullshit, polluted and polluting. It is like a biblical flood of divisive mendacity, a shameful example of dementia, sociopathic behavior, foot-stomping rage, Adderall-babble, and a window into the hideous, Lovecraftian landscape of Trump’s id.
For all that, his Twitter feed has been, and remains, an asymmetric political weapon of unparalleled power. You wish you had one-thousandth of that power.
His Twitter leverage can reshape the day’s media coverage, move attention from one crisis to the next, detonate massive explosions in the political sphere, and turn the most egregious, obvious lies into rock-solid gospel truth for his 60 million followers. The temptation to dismiss his tweeting as trivial, as a mere online embarrassment or amusement, and to believe that it won’t be his main tool in the 2020 earned-media war is a profound mistake.
The Democratic nominee will never have the Twitter following or power Trump enjoys, but it’s time to learn the ancient art of tweet-fu. The Democrat needs to use swift replies with a video or graphic component to increase the reach of every response. They need to be fast, funny, authentic, and cutting. Don’t hesitate to go to the vaults to hurl out Trump’s triggers and insecurities—his business failings, his taxes, his payoffs to porn stars, his terrible polls, his physical appearance, his friends in jail, his D-grade celebri
ty, and, of course, his tiny, tiny hands.
White House Diaries
DEPUTY ACTING ASSISTANT PROVISIONAL TEMPORARY CHIEF OF CABINET OPERATIONS STAFF LELAND BOB SNIPES, JR.
My God. The Fake News Libtard Antifa Socialists are claiming they won. They’re saying President Trump lost the Electoral College.
Save us, Q. Please. You’re the only thing standing between us and socialism.
We can’t accept a fake election where the fake news media lied and said Mr. Trump lost. I didn’t take the Greyhound from Weeping Sore, AR to see Mr. Trump get taken out by Deep State Sharia Sleeper Agents.
UPDATE: Just had a really interesting meeting with “the alumni” group. It looks like Mr. Trump and Mr. Bannon have a plan. #TrustThePlan
THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA
Donald Trump has a powerful media ally.
It’s not Fox.
It’s not Rush Limbaugh.
It’s not Mark Levin or Ann Coulter or Breitbart, or any of the rest of the shill-caliber Trump-centric right-media enterprise.
No, Trump’s biggest media ally in 2020 is the media itself. The mainstream media. You know, the enemy of the people. The Washington–New York media axis. They’re not ideologically in line with Trump. They find his behavior, attitude, actions, and policies largely as revolting as do the 60 percent of Americans who dislike Trump in degrees ranging from distaste to apoplectic rage.
The American media is under constant attack from Donald Trump. They are put at physical risk by the edge cases of his wild-eyed minions. They are insulted by his staff. They are lied to by his most senior advisors with a frequency and intensity that boggles the imagination even as they themselves are routinely cast as liars attacking the only font of truth and wisdom, Mr. Donald J. Trump.
But they just can’t quit him.
Trump knows it, and they know it.
He is the human train wreck from which they can never look away. He is the evidence the dog isn’t house-trained. He is every addiction, wrapped into one package. He knows that no outlet will truly punish him for lying. No outlet will bust the “senior administration official” who makes calls from the White House residence at midnight.
The Democratic campaign will struggle every day to overcome his brighter-than-the-sun media presence. For 2020, they have to build a smart, media-friendly team of surrogates who can get on television—the only place attacks are real for Trump—and follow his rule: Punch back twice as hard. The key is to recruit, train, and inform surrogates early, and tune them to one key point: Always bridge back to making the race a referendum on Donald Trump. Skip the senior statesmen or people with their own ambitions and agendas; get quick-thinking, sharp surrogates with social-media amplification powers. Set them free to “commit news” every time they’re on camera.
Democrats need to dramatically up their earned-media game. It’s no longer “Lemme email you this press release.”
Some of the Democratic campaigns in the primary running up to 2020 seemed a bit…old-fashioned. I was born the week JFK died, so I’m in that bridge between boomers and gen X, but some of the campaigns seem to be ready to embrace the telegraph and that newfangled faxin’. The Biden, Sanders, and Warren campaign operations on the press side weren’t exactly full of digital natives.
Trump is an earned-media machine who depends on his opponents to be on defense, and to respond to his cues. If they spend the day only pushing back on Trump’s tweeted outrages, lies, and bullshit, they’re not pushing out their own messages, and they’re not on the attack.
The media wants war, fire, loud noises, alarums, and explosions. Democrats need press people who are aggressive as hell and don’t need much sleep. It’s better for them to move fast, break shit, and cause trouble than it is to be too cautious. The idea of campaign-ending gaffes by staffers died when Corey Lewandowski grabbed a reporter by the arm so hard it left a mark.
Trump feeds the media, practically every minute of the day. If the Democratic campaign isn’t launching messages at reporters every one of those same minutes, they’re fated to get swamped by Trump’s social-media-powered flood.
The tone of the earned-media efforts needs to get off that snippy, shame-function tone so much Democratic messaging seems to display. You cannot shame Donald Trump. You can put his excesses and evils front and center to the American people to keep your base motivated and to address the targets in the Electoral College swing states. It’s about the damage he’s doing to everyday Americans. It’s about his corruption, vulgarity, dishonesty, broken promises, and failed policies.
Be angry. Be aggressive. Be American. Voters want to see some fight from the Democrats, a return of the happy-warrior ethos where you don’t duck a fight and you’re ready to take on bullies. Stop with the “deeply disappointed” tone—hoist the black flag and commence cutting throats.
The press and media operations of every presidential campaign are always top-down and top-heavy. In 2020, the national campaign needs to put aggressive press operatives on the ground in the top fifteen targeted states. They should be folks who understand the media in Florida or Michigan or Arizona or Pennsylvania. Spend the money; it’ll be worth it. Those operatives need to feed the state press corps in the target Electoral College states stories of real people who have been hurt by Trump’s policies—talk about agriculture in Iowa, trade disasters in Wisconsin, the Puerto Rican hurricane relief failure in Florida, and so on. The national press, with few exceptions, won’t chase or find those stories. Why bother when the Trump twitter feed spews stories that write themselves?
You want a story about that Iowa soybean farmer weeping because she supported Trump and now she’s losing her farm. You want one about that union worker in Michigan or Wisconsin who hated Hillary and held his nose while voting for Trump. Now the trade war has cost him his job.
The great thing about this is that television wants it also. You’re committing news, and you’re spreading a message to local television viewers, news consumers, and social-media junkies that Democrats give a damn about the swing states as much as they care about the coastal blue kingdoms.
What about the big blue states, you ask? Assign one intern to them at HQ. They’ll take care of themselves. Honestly. I know Democrats hate this idea, but the election is already over in thirty-five states. Fight where the fight is.
White House Diaries
DEPUTY ACTING ASSISTANT PROVISIONAL TEMPORARY CHIEF OF CABINET OPERATIONS STAFF LELAND BOB SNIPES, JR.
We’ve got a lot of people ready to back the President’s play, and it’s only fair since we all know the election was invalid. Mr. Bannon is positive the American people will be with us. Mr. Hannity and Mr. Tucker are on board. It was such an honor to meet them.
The Q forums are popping with real news.
Did you know no one has ever seen Hillary Clinton and the President-elect at the same time? DID YOU? It’s probably her in disguise, which makes our mission that much more important.
Also, since the President-elect would be “46” it’s so obvious. 46 divided by 2 is 23. Benjamin Harrison was the 23rd President. “Benjamin Harrison” is an anagram for “Major Brains In Hen” which is obviously Hillary Clinton. It’s all SO CLEAR NOW.
We have to stop her.
DEEPFAKE NATION
If you have a creeping sense that what you read, hear, and see online these days might not be the exact truth, you’re not alone. From Photoshop in the 2000s to highly convincing digital imitations and manipulations of video today, the arc of technological progress to produce convincing fakes is riding the same Moore’s Law curve like everything else. Even the uncanny valley effect of fake video and audio a few years ago has passed. The use of faster AI, GPUs, and hella processing power, even on desktops, means that amateurs can produce decent-looking fakes, professionals can hit near-perfection, and nation-state actors can generate work so sophisticated it takes AIs and other
nation-state actors to detect it.9
If our civic and media cultures were healthy and relatively sane, this would be a more tractable problem. If the largest American cable television network acted in good faith, and we had an agreed-upon standard of truth, this would be more manageable. If the largest social-media platforms moved aggressively against fakes and outright propaganda, we would be in a better position to protect our republic from this threat.
If you haven’t been paying attention, our current political culture isn’t sane, Fox is Trump’s pet outlet, shared truth is a memory, and the social-media platforms seem both uninterested in and conflicted about finding a solution to the problem. After all, they monetized the propaganda efforts of the bad guys in the last election, and while they’ve said the right words, their actions are lagging, badly.
Given bad actors at home and abroad, Trump’s willingness to cheat, and the eighteen- to twenty-four-month cycle of technological innovation in this country, by the time the fall of 2020 arrives, you should doubt your eyes, your ears, and the truth of any video you see.
Profoundly convincing deepfakes will enter the political bloodstream in this election. The first are attacks on your candidate, and they’ll be real enough to blow the news cycle to hell. Deepfake attacks are an existential threat to the Democratic nominee. They’ll seek to wreck the message and media cycle, take attention off Trump, fire up his base, and divide the Democratic coalition.
