by Rick Wilson
They’ll be taught that mocking the disabled and the disadvantaged isn’t to be greeted with disdain and anger, but rather a hearty “Womp womp!” They’ll be taught that egregious racism is bad only when you get caught, because, you know, “both sides.”
They’ll learn that the president can sexually assault women for decades and get away with it as long as he claims they are “not his type.” “Grab ’em by the pussy” is the new “Shall we dance?” and paying women for sex is OK, as long as it’s on the back end of a deal with an airtight NDA.
What they will learn, every day, is that threats, intimidation, serial deceptions, bullying, bluster, and bullshit are a full substitute for character. They will learn from the master of cons that after he took the highest office in the land with a series of brazen deceptions and help from hostile foreign governments,16 he faced absolutely no consequences.
They’ll learn that this man’s history of business failures and his sordid personal life, including paying hush money to a bevy (I love the chance to use “bevy”—sadly underplayed word) of porn stars, actresses, models, pageant contestants, and God knows what other random victims of his lusts, is perfectly acceptable for the president.
What a spectacular role model for the youth of America.
Four more years of a president normalizing the worst behaviors, enabled by his political party, will result in a generational change. JFK’s lofty postwar New Frontier resonated for a generation of leaders. Ronald Reagan shaped my cohort of young conservatives on matters of economic freedom and national security. Barack Obama shaped millennial attitudes and values on issues of inclusion and diversity.
Donald Trump’s legacy will be a generation of young people comfortable with casual cruelty, rampant dishonesty, and revenge as pillars of our politics. They’ll combine the dissonant images of a “Fuck Your Feelings” T-shirt and a string of pearls to clutch when anyone questions their behaviors.
As I’ve said before, Trump isn’t Hitler. Hitler had normal-sized hands and the ability to concentrate for more than thirty seconds.
Trump is, however, cut from the same modern authoritarian cloth as the leaders he publicly and slavishly worships: Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán, Kim Jong-un, Rodrigo Duterte, and others.
Trump and his acolytes display a fundamental contempt for the American experiment and an obvious, persistent attachment to the trappings, affect, and untrammeled power of strongmen. A decent president would view these men with contempt and disgust; Trump views them with envy.
The Founders—whom Republicans once revered but whom they now conveniently forget—knew it. Madison wrote in Federalist 10, “Men of factious tempers, of local prejudices, or of sinister designs, may, by intrigue, by corruption, or by other means, first obtain the suffrages, and then betray the interests, of the people.”17
Trump is a complete package of the Founders’ greatest fears—delusions of royalty, appeals to the basest appetites of the polity, populism over small-r republicanism, and vulnerability to the blandishments of foreign powers who so obviously are welcome to corrupt him with gifts or flattery of his ravenous ego.
To date, his actions have had the possible check of the 2020 election hanging over him, which has influenced him whether or not he admits it. Trump needs to win reelection to continue his nation-state level, god-tier grifting and to avoid prosecution.
He thrives not on a competition of ideas but on the division of the country. Our parties and politics will follow him down, fighting a dirtier, more savage battle until we’ve forgotten what it means to share even the most common baseline with our fellow Americans. The cold civil war is warming by the day. He’s not the only centrifugal political force, but he’s the most powerful.
This will only accelerate if he is reelected. There will be no end to his ambition and no check on his actions. He will conclude that he’s the winner who wins, and for him that will justify everything in his catalog of errors and terrors. We’ve learned there is no bottom with Trump, no level to which he won’t sink, no excess he won’t embrace.
The future I’ve described in the preceding chapters isn’t inevitable, but if Trump wins a second term as president, it is all too likely. I never want to leave you with anything but a sense of existential dread, so let’s do something about it, shall we?
Tweets from Donald Trump’s Second Term
@realDonaldTrump: Forget What the Fake News says. Our GREAT AG Bill Barr says a 3rd term is totally legal if I issue an executive Order! Me and Vice President Ivanka are going to Keep America GREAT…FOREVER.
@BigBillBarr: Yes, sir. Totally legal. Super legit. Very cool.
@nytimes: Trump Plunges Nation into Constitutional Crisis
@WashingtonPost: End of the Republic; Trump’s Dynasty Begins
@FDRLST: Trump’s Bold Plan to End Gridlock
@NRO: At least we got some judges.
@BreitbartNews: LONG LIVE THE KING!
THE MISSION
Your mission is tough but simple.
Defeat Donald Trump.
The preceding chapters offer just a glimpse of another four long years of Donald Trump in office. I didn’t even touch on the corruption of the Justice Department, the long-term impact of the ludicrous debt and deficits, the attacks on the free press, and other further corrosions of American values and virtues that are assured if he is reelected.
The 2020 election is the one last chance the American people have to slam on the brakes and turn this country off a path to authoritarian statism, racially motivated nationalism, and ingrained corruption that sullies our history and image forever.
You probably liked this part of the book. It’s all the robust and richly deserved Trump-bashing you’ve come to love, and I love delivering. The next part? Not so much.
You know you’ve got a problem in 2020. It’s not just Trump.
It’s you.
So ask yourselves: Even if this gets uncomfortable, are you in for the win?
Are you willing to do the things you need to do?
Are you (in the words of Van Jones) willing to drop the radical pose to achieve the radical ends?
Are you willing to compromise, to show strategic patience and personal discipline?
Are you willing to listen to a person you view as an enemy on every axis but our shared loathing of a man who is poised to destroy this nation?
Are you willing to practice raw, pure, amoral politics before ideology?
Honestly, I have my doubts.
Trump is a flawed, awful shitbird of the worst order, a historical accident mutating into a political and moral monster who, as much as he deserves to lose, might not. Democrats looking at national polls are deluding themselves that this race will be easy, or that Trump will go down—or leave the White House—without a battle from hell.
I can promise you one thing: I will never give up this fight.
Every day, from now until the time I can salt the earth over his grave, I will do everything in my power to stop Donald Trump and his enablers. I hope that by now, if nothing else, you know that about me.
We may hate him for different reasons, but I hope we’re united in the understanding that his defeat is an existential challenge for this republic, and that odd alliances, political compromises, and joint operations are worth the discomfort we may feel as we step back from our ideological priors.
Donald Trump is the devil in human form, and the battle against him requires all men and women who believe in the dream of America and the continuation of this republic to stand together to destroy him and all his works.
You know I’m in this fight until the last dog dies.
So my question for you is simple.
What the fuck are you gonna do?
PART 2
THE MYTHS OF 2020
Every campaign, particularly a presidential campaign, operates i
nside a bubble of its own deeply held beliefs. Inevitably, campaigns create strategies that seem brilliant inside the bubble but cannot survive the hard collision with political reality.
They view the country as one homogenous entity, not as it is, a patchwork of regions, cultures, and ethnic groups. They think every idea that comes from their pet think tanks is precisely what a restive electorate is seeking. They chase political fashions and trends, extrapolating too much policy from too little data. The GOP and the Democrats alike fall victim to this cognitive mistake. Both sides try to resist them, and fail.
I made a career in the GOP helping to take Democratic seats by exploiting the mismatch of policy to politics. Republicans became masters at leveraging Democrats’ insistence on picking candidates based on what policies they like versus what wins. Many Democrats campaigned in an alternate reality, believing the myths of the campaign as they desired it to be, not the one they truly faced. We, by contrast, were cold-eyed, clearheaded operators.
Democrats are already doing every goddamned thing they can think of to lose to this moron, making the same mistakes they made against Nixon, Reagan, George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, and Trump. I feel dirty putting them all on the same list, but as a professional campaign guy and trench-historian of American presidential politics, I know how those men beat the Democrats, and how those wins have iterated down the political chain in the last fifty years.
It’s evident from a mile off that Democrats are setting themselves up to reelect Trump by making 2020 into the anointing of someone who strokes their ideological happy place rather than someone who could, you know, win.
The previous election provides a vital lesson for Democrats in 2020. Forget about Russia, economic anxiety, or Trump’s celebrity. The lesson is that you ran a candidate who existed in your heads. In your heads, Hillary Clinton was the most accomplished woman in American public life: a warm, lovable, approachable leader ready to shatter the glass ceiling and govern as a wise and merciful Athena.
The real Hillary Clinton was a greatest-hits album of Democratic Party mistakes wrapped up in a candidate: unlikable, cagey to a fault, cautious, a terrible combination of turgid and defensive on the stump, and cursed with a campaign that promised the moon and delivered little outside the deep-blue states. They left easy votes on the table and phoned in the last weeks of the campaign. When they should have been rolling up votes in Milwaukee, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Broward County, Florida, they were picking out curtains in the White House and scheming over jobs in the administration. Hillary was a perfect proof case that Democrats are holistically bad at politics.
The run-up to 2020 seems little different.
Sure, sometimes Democrats pull a generational candidate like Bill Clinton or Barack Obama, or find a theme that resonates, or build a smart campaign infrastructure, but for the most part, they can’t do all three at once. Like juggling, it’s hard. Like juggling chain saws with a live ferret in your pants, it’s also dangerous. (You practice first with a dead ferret in your pants. Don’t ask.)
In 2020—for the sake of the nation—they can’t afford to put ideological indulgences over strategy, or reliance on the witchcraft, folklore, and anecdotal evidence of campaigns over the mathematics, demographics, and operations of a sure-footed, focused election effort. They can’t afford to make this election anything other than a brutal referendum on Donald Trump.
This part of the book will outline the campaign-killing myths of 2020. Pay attention. The final exam is in November 2020.
Scenes from a Trump Focus Group
The following is a transcript of a focus group of Republican voters outside of ■■■■■■■■ [rhymes with Smaukesha], a major suburb in the key swing state of ■■■■■■■■ [rhymes with Smisconsin].
MODERATOR: Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for coming. I hope everyone got something to eat and drink. Please let me know if anyone needs a bathroom break before we start. I’m ■■■■■■■ from the ■■■■■■ ■ ■■■■■ Polling Company and I want to thank you all for taking the time to come out tonight to talk to us.
BRIAN (male, white, 56, some college): The fifty bucks didn’t hurt.
(Sound of laughter in room.)
MODERATOR: OK. Let’s get started. We’re here tonight to talk about Donald Trump and your vote in 2020.
MARCY (female, white, non-college, 49): That’s President Trump, Praise Be upon Him.
MODERATOR: Uh, OK, Marcy.
MARCY (hisses): Infidel.
IT’S A NATIONAL ELECTION
No. It isn’t. It’s not even close to a national election. It’s an election in about fifteen Electoral College battleground states, and don’t you forget it. I’m going to keep reminding you of this, because if you take away no other lesson from this book, let it be that.
Every time I hear “Hillary won the popular vote,” I cringe.
The correct answer to this is “And?”
Winning the popular vote and $5.45 gets you a venti mocha latte at Starbucks.
It. Means. Nothing.
Every person on the Democratic side who brings up this tired, dumb, irrelevant point again is really in contention for the political Darwin Award.
Here’s a phrase Democrats need to take out of their game plan for 2020: popular vote. Pretend it doesn’t exist. You need to understand the rules of the game, once and for all.
You’re not playing a game of winning the popular vote, and whether you like it or not the game is exclusively about victory in the Electoral College.
Them’s the rules.
Say it with me: “The only game in town is the Electoral College.”
Now say it again, with feeling: “The only game in town is the Electoral College.”
Now say it with your raging, Samuel-L.-Jackson-in-a-Tarantino-movie face: “The only motherfucking game in town is the motherfucking Electoral Fucking College.”
Fight where the fight is. Ignore where it’s not. It’s not in California. It’s not in New York. It’s not in Massachusetts. If the Democratic campaign or a single political committee on the left spends a goddamn dollar in those states or visits them for any reason other than fundraising, they’re helping Donald Trump. The only states in your campaign are the target states on the Electoral College map.
I feel like a Bubba Sun Tzu trying to instruct my Democratic friends who think this is a fifty-state campaign effort. Bless your hearts. The campaign is already over in thirty-five states. Done. Cooked. Kaput. Finito.
You’re fighting an election in ten to fifteen states. Most of them aren’t blue. Some are pretty red and getting redder. (In a later chapter, I’ll outline how to fight and win in them.)
“But muh popular vote” has become such a tiresome refrain that it betrays something more fundamentally broken about the Democratic Party approach to elections. It’s a stark disconnect from reality as it stands today, and the reality you will most certainly face in November 2020. No, you’re not getting rid of the Electoral College in 2020.
Which is of course why the Democrats can’t stop talking about it. (Did I mention they’re bad at politics?)
The major players in the Democratic primary field—and nearly all of the fringe cases, some of whom are now out of the race—bought into the idea that we should abolish the Electoral College and spent valuable time on the stump in the spring and summer of 2019 talking about it.1
And talking about it. And talking about it.
Elizabeth Warren, Comrade Bernie, Beto O’Rourke, Julian Castro, and Cory Booker all made dumping the Electoral College a tentpole of their early campaigning (as did, among the early dropouts, Jay Inslee and Kirsten Gillibrand). Warren attacked the Electoral College with both passion and commitment: “I believe we need a constitutional amendment that protects the right to vote for every American citizen and makes sure that vote gets counted….A
nd the way we can make that happen is that we can have national voting and that means get rid of the Electoral College.”2
Even Pete Buttigieg, a man who is demonstrably smarter than most of the field, got on board with this absurdity. In a profile by The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent, the South Bend, Indiana, mayor and Flavor of the Month in the pre-Biden spring of 2019, said: “We need a national popular vote. It would be reassuring from the perspective of believing that we’re a democracy.”3
Leaving aside the constitutional concerns and political impracticality, this is one of those hothouse flowers of an issue that take on a life of its own in a party seemingly dedicated to stoking its base with promises they can’t keep on issues that won’t move votes. Every iota of energy and focus on an issue so esoteric and specialized is wasted. Not only is the Electoral College not going away in 2020, it likely never will.
When it fails to come to pass, it will demoralize and anger Democratic primary voters. They will feel cheated by the system, when in fact it was never going to happen. It’s one thing to promise your daughter a pony. It’s another to promise her a unicorn.
This is the kind of messaging failure that tells working-class Democrats, centrists, and soft-Republican voters in the key states that the Democrats will chase any dumb rabbit rather than talk about things that might, you know, matter to them on Election Day. All the talk of things that can’t happen in 2020 makes me fear for a Democratic base who believe some deus ex machina maneuver will save them. It won’t. In politics, God helps those who help themselves, and devil take the hindmost.
Some Democrats are rubbing their little paws together, imagining some pre-2020 miracle…like the National Popular Vote Compact passes and the GOP forgets to litigate it into oblivion, or that other political unicorn gallops onto the scene and we become a direct democracy. This is worse than fantasy. This is political malpractice.