by Rick Wilson
They will never blink or stop or give you the benefit of the doubt. To rely on their mercy is to beg for your political death. They are smart—smarter than your folks, in many cases. They always had to work with the folks we had, and unlike you, we rarely pulled a magical, generational wunderkind candidate like Obama, JFK, or Bill Clinton.
And they’ll burn this country to the fucking ground to win. You’ll cry out in horror at what they’ll do and how far they’ll go. They will ignite a race war, wreck the economy, and abuse their fellow humans to win. They put children in cages for political theater, and laughed about it.
Never, ever underestimate how much they’ll do to survive.
Trump is not invulnerable. He is broadly loathed, seen as a liar and a moral failure. He is beset with legal and criminal exposure at every turn. He is a specific flavor that works for a specific set of demographics. He is stupid, but cunning. He is unpredictable, but shallow. He is corrupt, but brazen. He is a reckless, day-trading gambler with the luck of the devil. He is a sign and a symptom of an America in transition from one world to the next, and a rebuke to a broken two-party system. He will always be with us, to the end of our days, either as a warning or as a boot stomping on our faces, forever.
Donald Trump has long avoided the judgment he deserves on every front, and America is at a crossroads so important and so urgent that we are all faced with difficult choices and painful compromises. I beg you: Run the campaign you should rather than the one you want.
2020 will demand much of you.
If I can leave you with one final piece of counsel, it is this: Compromise on everything except your utter commitment to his absolute, crushing defeat.
Do America a favor, OK?
Don’t fuck this up.
ELECTION NIGHT, NOVEMBER 3, 2020
It’s Election Night, and you feel something familiar in the air. It’s a feeling of confidence, of rising joy and anticipation. It’s been a long, tough campaign, but victory is in sight.
You’re going to win, and you know it. It’s a certainty. After four years of Trump, the Democrats are poised to claim a sweeping Electoral College and popular-vote victory.
Finally.
The last few weeks of October were a blissful whirl, with polling numbers looking strong across the board but your candidate joyfully working the crowds in swing states. She’s a happy warrior, praised for her political skills and the subject of endless glowing media profiles, but she keeps coming back to the big message: This is a referendum on Donald Trump. Almost every newspaper in America endorsed her in the final week, picking up that message; this is about removing him, at all costs. Your campaign broadened its appeal, not reaching a state of beautiful progressive wokeness but of a sense of common mission and purpose, a promise to restore American norms and values.
After the debates, it was clear your candidate, though occasionally rattled by Trump’s in-your-grill debating presence, had triumphed. She was smart, articulate, humble, and when it mattered, she hammered his weak spots. It’s everything you’ve dreamed about since Obama. Trump has been flailing, angrily tweeting a dozen times a day, stoking the MAGA base at an endless series of campaign rallies, but he’s punchy and tired, and looks worn-out.
Your campaign has a hard rule against engaging even those elliptical conversations about what role you might play in a Democratic White House. Instead, any time someone starts one, you cut it off, pushing them to focus on their mission, and work harder for the win. You’re going to need to rebuild the government from scratch, but there’s time for that after you defeat Trump.
A few of your older, wiser hands are grudgingly pleased, smiles slowly spreading on their weathered faces. They see how hard the team is working, down to the door-knockers and phone-bankers, all of whom are tracked to the very limits of technology. Everyone is exhausted, but people are knocking on doors, making calls, and pushing out voters until even after the polls close. The candidate herself insisted on adding events until the last second, her voice shot, her advance team shaky. Your finance people report that the campaign is going to end with just enough money in the bank to pay salaries and expenses, and not a dollar more. Everything else—everything—is either on the air in the swing states or in digital advertising to targeted voters.
They keep staring intently at the FiveThirtyEight map and running the same mental calculations over Electoral College numbers they’ve done a thousand times, but hey, you feel really great about this, not because of anecdotes, but because of data. You spent an eye-popping amount on targeting, data analytics, and digital, more than any campaign in history. You fought only where the battle was, and let the rest take care of itself. You ignored the screams from safe blue states, and kept the candidate and your dollars in the fifteen states you knew were the swing battlegrounds.
The campaign’s social-media metrics were weird the last few days, though, and your data and analytics people counterpunched hard against the massive inflows of ads from brand-new Republican super PACs and 501(c)(4) dark-money groups. You couldn’t take the chance this was just the last gasp for the Trumpian grifters making a last buck on the Donald. You suspected it was his Russian friends trying an end-run, just like 2016, but you had ads in the can, and a budget to respond. The Trump campaign and the RNC (but I repeat myself) ad buys were scattershot, and on issues that seemed off-kilter.
As the night starts, the ballroom is packed to the gills with eager, happy people ready to put Trump and Trumpism in the rearview mirror of history. The media risers, crowded with the A-talent from every network, are jammed. The results are about to come in, and the army of reporters in the back of the ballroom is in a near-frenzy.
You didn’t repeat the Hillary mistake of not visiting the states Trump and his Russian allies scored in 2016. Your candidate made the stops, and your advance and targeting efforts filled the halls and stadiums with big, happy, raucous crowds. Trump’s rallies were full, but the 2016 magic was missing from 2020, and it showed. Your state organizers tell you they’ve got armies of volunteers knocking on doors, making calls, and driving turnout. Your monitoring and data systems confirm it for you.
Still, the final tracking polls were close. You knew you couldn’t take your foot off the pedal in Florida, Wisconsin, Arizona, Michigan, Ohio, and the rest. You took absolutely nothing for granted.
The exit polls were closer than you wanted but still looked good. As the first results were about to roll in, the AP, Washington Post, New York Times, Decision Desk, and Politico analysts started pinging you and the rest of the campaign’s senior staff.
“What’s going on in Michigan? Do you hear this stuff out of Florida?” Something is moving, something big, and you don’t quite know what it is yet.
By 9:30, it’s not looking like what you expected. Ohio, where polls showed Trump with a razor-thin lead, is breaking, barely, your way. He’s losing Michigan, as record turnout in Detroit rolls up a massive African American turnout, and the expected defection of suburban women means a bloodbath for Trump in Macomb and Oakland counties.
Florida is Florida, and although you had projected a four-point lead, by 10:00 the vote total shows the usual tied ballgame. It’s going to be a long night in the Sunshine State, but the exits are showing that you swung the Orlando, Tampa, and even Jacksonville suburbs cleanly enough to offset the blowout in the Panhandle and on the Gold Coast of southwest Florida.
Florida’s enormous influx of Puerto Rican voters meant the Democrats were on track for a stunning victory there because someone bothered to register them, communicate with them, and turn them out. You did. You fired any consultant who wouldn’t produce results.
You post sky-high numbers in South Florida.
“What the hell is happening in Wisconsin?” is your next question. With the Democratic gains in 2018, you expected to do well, but as local results roll in, it seems that 2018 wasn’t a fluke; Trump’s deep
unpopularity is realigning the state. The disastrous scam of Foxconn left Wisconsin workers holding the bag for a failed deal with China. Wisconsin farmers had suffered terribly from Trump’s trade war. The Wisconsin GOP is wiped out, top to bottom.
Pennsylvania is a blowout. You focused on calling out Trump’s economic bullshit in western PA and rolled up earthshaking female turnout in Philly and its suburbs, and it worked.
Hell, even Texas is closer than you thought, though you still don’t win it. You lose New Hampshire by a nose, but Shaheen holds the seat. Taxes are still a thing there, and that’s one message you couldn’t escape.
In nearly every swing state, you’re losing rural areas and taking the most affluent suburbs, just as you planned. Turnout is sky-high everywhere, and you needed it. GOP turnout percentages are just as high, but the party itself isn’t what it was. All those newly minted independents in the suburbs used to be Republicans, and you were there to catch them.
That’s why, come midnight, your candidate is in the suite, taking the call from Donald Trump to concede the election. There are tears all around. You can hear Trump on the speakerphone, curt and smug. His concession tweet will be late in coming.
* * *
—
The next morning, you begin to put together the mosaic of data points in your head from the last few weeks. You start to see the messages and strategies Trump and his campaign used that seemed lurid and absurd at the time, and how easily you could have fallen into his traps in the same way Hillary Clinton did in 2016.
You weren’t trying to win big, swing the nation toward a new ideological polarity, or be the next savior. You were animals, trapped in a win-or-die moment, and you used tooth and claw to succeed. You realize as the Electoral College numbers for the Democrat rise and rise that Trump’s campaign needed the cliché Democrats to run the cliché campaigns of the past, and you refused to play that game.
Suddenly, you see that your candidate’s refusal to be bound to policy proposals and white papers, and her very measured words on climate change, reparations for slavery, Electoral College reform, guns, the Green New Deal, and healthcare policy, were assets. You put electoral realities ahead of progressive fantasies, and as difficult as it was, it paid off. Refusing to give Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders keynote addresses at the convention where they could declare fraternal communist solidarity with the workers of the world was a smart move.
You refused to let the primary race to secure the progressive bleeding ideological edge blind you to the reality of largely center-right states on the Electoral College scoreboard. You refused to hand Trump the weapons he could use to cut off your head. You knew Trump’s lowest-common-denominator message was cultish, racist, and blisteringly stupid, and even though it was simple, constant, and repeated, you refused to feed him issues to use against you.
Wall. MAGA. Judges. Socialism. Revenge.
You laughed it off, bringing it back to Trump, over and over. You posited one question, and one question only: “Should this man be president?” You never, ever lost focus on the fact that this election is—I promise, this is almost the last reminder on this point—a referendum on Donald Fucking Trump.
You believe in your progressive message but know it isn’t universal, and you know the swing states have a very different political polarity from California, New York, or Massachusetts. You knew you could never shame Trump or Trump voters into listening to the better angels of their nature by talking about diversity, inclusion, and progressive values. You never gave the Trump campaign fodder for the weaponized grievance machine that put him in office in the first place.
You never let them distort, twist, or slander your message, policies, and values. You turned out your base, and added to it, winning back the Obama-Trump voters, consolidating African American and Hispanic support, and appealing to the moderates in both the GOP and the Democratic Party. You destroyed the GOP with Hispanics, winning almost 80 percent of their vote for the first time ever. Kids in cages turned out to be a bad look.
You beat the worst president in history.
You beat him by making the campaign about him; his record, his hideous personal behavior, the reeking cloud of corruption, and his broken economic promises made him unelectable for even a decent campaign, and you ran—shockingly—a decent campaign. His divisive, shitty, be-worst reign was a stain and an embarrassment. He tried to make it a referendum on policy, not a referendum on himself, and you never let him. You went into a reality-television contest understanding the rules, and you beat the master of the genre at his own game.
The sun is rising over America again, and you’re exhausted, beaten down, and shaking. For five years, you’ve greeted every Trump tweet with a sense of dread. Has he conceded?
Does it matter?
At this point you open the Twitter client on your iPhone, enter “@realDonaldTrump” one last time, and do what America just did, and put him on mute, forever.
You send a text message to Kellyanne Conway: “In the words of the poet, sage, and philosopher DJ Khaled, ‘You played yourself.’ ”
To the men and women inside government who have confronted enormous risk and danger to their careers, reputations, and personal safety to tell the truth about this White House and this president. In the face of the hatred and abuse that hits anyone Trump designates as an enemy, they have demonstrated something truly rare in today’s Washington: honor. Every authoritarian regime in history depends on silence, either coerced or purchased, and every whistle-blower and truth-teller who raises their hand, swears to speak the truth, and takes fire is deserving of our appreciation.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank Mary Reynics, my editor at Crown Forum, for her consistently excellent insights into how to make RATD more relevant, more engaging, and sharper. She’s a delight to work with as a friend and as an editor, and doesn’t hesitate to whack out large blocks of my text with a cold-eyed efficiency that’s slightly terrifying but ultimately makes for a more crisp and illuminating read.
My agent, Christy Fletcher, is, as always, a rock star, and I literally couldn’t do this without her. She has the ability to look at five hundred of my random ideas and grab the ones that work, every time.
As always, the love, support, tolerance (so much tolerance), and outstanding humor of Molly, Nora, and Andrew are as amazing to me every day as they are unstinting. I’m truly blessed with a family who are all loving, brilliant, and strong as hell.
I also treasure the love, encouragement, and occasional shit-checking of a circle of personal and political friends who keep my head from growing too large (have you seen this thing? It’s gigantic to start with) and who are all in this fight in their own ways.
NOTES
PART I: THE CASE AGAINST TRUMP, OR FOUR MORE YEARS IN HELL
1. Cristina Maza, “Sanctioned Russian Oligarch’s Company to Invest Millions in New Aluminum Plant in Mitch McConnell’s State,” Newsweek, April 15, 2019, www.newsweek.com/company-russian-oligarch-millions-aluminum-plant-mitch-mcconnell-1397061.
2. Paul Kane, “McConnell Defends Blocking Election Security Bill, Rejects Criticism He Is Aiding Russia,” Washington Post, July 29, 2019, www.washingtonpost.com/politics/mcconnell-defends-blocking-election-security-bill-rejects-criticism-he-is-aiding-russia/2019/07/29/08dca6d4-b239-11e9-951e-de024209545d_story.html.
3. Donald J. Trump, @realDonaldTrump, Twitter.com, April 14, 2019, twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1117428291227533312.
4. Julie Hirschfeld Davis, “Trump, at Putin’s Side, Questions U.S. Intelligence on 2016 Election,” New York Times, July 16, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/07/16/world/europe/trump-putin-election-intelligence.html.
5. David D. Kirkpatrick, Ben Hubbard, Mark Landler, and Mark Mazzetti, “The Wooing of Jared Kushner: How the Saudis Got a Friend in the White House,” New York
Times, December 8, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/12/08/world/middleeast/saudi-mbs-jared-kushner.html.
6. Nahal Toosi, “U.K. Defends Ambassador After Disparaging Trump Comments Leak,” Politico, July 6, 2019, politi.co/2NFxFB6.
7. Tom McCarthy, “Pence Acknowledges Tie-Breaker May Be Needed to Confirm Kavanaugh,” The Guardian, September 9, 2018, www.theguardian.com/law/2018/sep/09/brett-kavanaugh-supreme-court-confirmation-mike-pence-tie-breaker-vote-.
8. Dylan Matthews, “How the 9th Circuit Became Conservatives’ Least Favorite Court,” Vox, January 10, 2018, www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/1/10/16873718/ninth-circuit-court-appeals-liberal-conservative-trump-tweet.
9. David Brennan, “Does Windmill Noise Cause Cancer? Donald Trump Renews Campaign Against Wind Power with New Claim,” Newsweek, April 3, 2019, www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-wind-power-windmills-noise-cancer-renewable-energy-birds-1384338.
10. I was the first Republican consultant to condemn the stupid birther smear in 2008. Relax, people.
11. Julie Bykowicz, “Checking In: Report Lists Dozens of Groups That Used Trump Properties,” Wall Street Journal, January 16, 2018, www.wsj.com/articles/checking-in-report-lists-dozens-of-groups-that-used-trump-properties-1516078861.
12. Natasha Bertrand and Bryan Bender. “Air Force Crew Made an Odd Stop on a Routine Trip: Trump’s Scottish Resort,” Politico, September 6, 2019, politi.co/2A1XDVG.
13. David Smith, “Trump Nepotism Attacked After ‘Out-of-Her-Depth’ Ivanka Given Key Summit Role,” The Guardian, July 1, 2019, www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jul/01/donald-trump-ivanka-g20-north-korea-nepotism.
