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

by Rick Wilson

  White House Diaries: Melania Trump

  So, typical day.

  I gets up, does the Peloton until you know, am sweatings like same way Donald is sweating when he climb maybe two stairs. No, diary. Not two flight of stair. Two stairs. No, is not mean. Is real!

  But Peloton is good. You see this body? Work, bitches.

  Anyhows, typical day. I don’t has to see him on typical day, which is you know, good. Prenup is points system; go to rally, 50 points. Go to press conferencing, 100 points. Don’t ask what get 5000 points, but I would rather doing so with Justin Trudeau, if you know what I am meaning.

  So he is saying to me, “Why you no look at me as you look at Justin and Macaroon?”

  One day, creepy Jared see me texting Justin, so I am telling him, “Snitches get stitches.” (Is better in original Slovenian.)

  Please gods, don’t lets him be releect. Please. I am beggings you.

  NEVER UNDERESTIMATE INCUMBENCY

  The Trump White House may be Bedlam on the Potomac, but the power of the presidency to draw cameras—where the president goes, cameras follow—and move headlines is enormous. Trump’s team understands this, and they will use the power of the government as a rapid-response tool to keep Trump in the news, to make news, and to step on Democratic events.

  As a showman, Trump has a gut-level understanding that the audience is always hungry, and they will eat up the things he does that are outside the usual spectrum of presidential behavior. During an otherwise painful G20 Summit in Japan, Donald Trump called an audible and decided he wanted to spend some quality time with his BFF Kim Jong-un. In a hot scramble, the Secret Service and the Air Force spun up the jets, set the scene at the border between the two Koreas, and voilà, instant media roadblock.

  Trump’s meeting with Kim, and his symbolic crossing into North Korea, were just that—symbolic.5 It meant nothing. It didn’t move the ball on denuclearizing a nation led by the last remaining Stalinist on earth. It didn’t further U.S. interests. Oh, it helped Kim dramatically, further legitimizing him in the eyes of his starving people as he made the leader of the free world come to him, but that wasn’t the point.

  The point was that Trump wanted a picture, and he got it. He got it on short notice, and he got it regardless of the costs. Expect this in 2020 in foreign and domestic scenes when Trump uses the tools of the presidency—White House advance teams, the Secret Service, Air Force One, and government facilities around the country and the world—to do “government” events. These events will cost the campaign nothing because they’re, um, cough cough, official business.

  Both the White House itself and Air Force One are powerful visual campaign props, and presidents of both parties have used them for their political ends. As we’re painfully aware, Donald Trump lacks the genes for shame, modesty, and discretion, so expect the AF 28000 and AF 29000 to get a lot of air miles clocked in service to his campaign. Expect to see one of the two Air Force One planes parked behind him during speech after speech at airport hangar rallies around the country.

  Most presidents would instantly draw a sharp, clean line between campaign operations and the use of military force. This is the proverbial “wag the dog” scenario where a president in trouble seeks to bomb his way out of it by hitting a target overseas. With no adult supervision in the Pentagon—just who is the acting, provisional, temporary, staffing-agency, drop-in SECDEF this week?—no one should put it past Trump to escalate conflicts with China, Iran, or elsewhere when some part of his lizard brain tells him that some boom-boom will goose his polling numbers.

  Some of my former GOP colleagues will whisper, “How dare you accuse the American president of ever using the military for…” and then drop the subject, because no matter how deep they are in the Trump hole, they know who this man is and what he’ll do. Trump proves time and again that morals, laws, norms, traditions, rules, guidelines, recommendations, and tearful pleading from his staff mean nothing when he gets a power boner and decides he’s going to do something stupid. President Hold My Beer comes from the Modern Unitary Executive Power theory, where there are no limits, no laws, and no right and wrong. I’m not saying it’s a matter of if Trump will wag the dog in 2020. I’m saying that anyone who thinks he wouldn’t is a damn fool.

  One other powerful weapon in Trump’s incumbency arsenal is his addiction to executive orders and unilateral executive action from the White House. Sure, it’ll be mostly a nonsensical mass of unconstitutional, incoherent piffle, but it will be directed at swing states.

  You should certainly expect him to fill the air with executive orders that feed the base—“All immigrants must have a PhD!” “Ivanka will now be addressed as HRH Ivanka!” “Eric will be my viceroy for Greenland!”

  You should also expect counterintuitive plays like suddenly declaring an interest in the Flint water system, or disaster relief in the Florida Panhandle. Watch for Kellyanne Conway to talk him into doing orders on feel-good but substanceless items like childcare, job training, cat adoption, and literacy.

  Incumbency is always powerful, but in Trump’s case it is even more imposing as a political asset. His ability to utterly dominate the political discourse for his first term isn’t always a positive for him, but he knows the showbiz rule: All PR is good PR. He is the best-known brand on the planet, a singular character in a nation where people often kinda sorta maybe know their elected representatives. (We test this frequently in focus groups, and the number of people who know their congressional representative and U.S. senator is disheartening, to say the least. The number who know their state reps and senators is even lower. Everyone knows Donald Trump.)

  Other presidents felt bounded in their behavior, obligated to respect the office of the presidency even if it meant forsaking political advantage. If you think that’s Trump, I have some prime swamp-front lots to sell you in the Everglades.

  White House Diaries: Melania Trump

  The Donalt is telling me, “Erection Day is coming.” He thinks is funny joking. Me, not so much.

  Do not like.

  This is why I should have given old Gypsy woman dollar in subway.

  TRUMP’S MESSAGES AND STRATEGIES

  The surface level of Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign will be crafted to look like Reagan’s 1984 reelection: the Big Show, a patriotic extravaganza contrasting Morning in America 2.0 with every cliché of the Democrats of old; good economic news versus stodgy centralized state planning; sunny optimism versus doom-and-gloom. This campaign will frustrate Democrats because it will appear superficial, phony, and laughable in comparison to Trump’s actual record.

  Here’s the irony: For his target audience, it will work—really well. For the media, it will work because it will be accompanied by big, staged events, monster flags and monster trucks, a picture-perfect group of ’Mericans behind him. They’ll look surprisingly diverse, surprisingly female, and surprisingly reasonable.

  Don’t be fooled. The real Trump base is still there.

  No, the lock-her-up, send-them-back crowd will be well and truly in the cooler, always on the back side of the cameras, and with their manias, conspiracy fantasies, sputtering rage at the media, and crazy-uncle-on-Facebook personas.

  The real Trump campaign just below the surface will be pure, vintage Richard Nixon. Trump can’t stop himself because his mindset was formed by his early exposure to politics with Roy Cohn and Roger Stone. Factor in the cruel tutelage of Roger Ailes, from whom Trump learned much of his media-battering techniques, a man who validated Trump with the right as well as, you know, invented the Nixon playbook.

  Add to that his own demonstrated history of inflammatory racial views and actions, and the reward he gained in 2016 by activating the alt-right, the old-guard racists around David Duke, and the slurry of neo-, crypto-, and actual Nazis, and the preview of the 2020 campaign is easy to see.

  For his base, and like Nixon, Trump wi
ll replay 2016, portraying himself as the tribune of the silent majority, the oppressed working man, and the downtrodden white middle-class American facing a changing culture and a changing country. He may flip “MAGA” to “KAG,” but the top-level message is still “I’m with you against the elites and the scary brown people.”

  REVENGE

  With distance comes clarity, and I’m going to own up to something about my old party’s behavior. For years, it tweaked at the edges of my dislike, but now that it’s become a central defining characteristic of Trump Republicanism, it makes my skin crawl.

  It’s grievance culture. Trump has brilliantly exploited it, and 2020 will see the grievance, paranoia, and self-loathing of the GOP blossom into central themes. It’s profoundly pessimistic, and fundamentally un-American.

  Everyone is coming to get you. The immigrants. Black Lives Matter. Antifa. The deep state. Silicon Valley. The godless homosexers. Academia. Women. Sloths. Atheists. Muslims. Jews. Zoroastrians. Who knows what else will be added to the catalog, but the Fox media programming will always give you a clue. War on Christmas? Atheists. Sharia law? Muslims. Drag queen story time? Duh.

  “ALL HAIL ME”

  “Me, me, me, me, me” will also be central. Trump’s personal-message branding strategy is the 2016 playbook writ large, with two big thematic stories:

  First, the hero narrative.

  Trump, the iconoclast hero of America’s forgotten working class, has delivered unparalleled prosperity and finally made America Great Again. He has built the wall, kept every promise, and told the truth at every point. He is the smartest, handsomest president in history, not of the United States, but of the world, and we are lucky to have him give up his valuable time to serve as our leader. His royal family beside him, he will lead us to greater heights.

  This will make eyes roll and earn fact-checkers overtime, but it’s irresistible to a natural-born con man like Trump. This is the brand as it has always been and shall always be. Gold-plated. Top-notch. Luxurious. The biggest. The best. A walking superlative.

  Then, the fear narrative:

  Après moi, le déluge. Without me, the economy will collapse. We’ll be taken advantage of by world powers in both trade and security. Murderous immigrant criminals will kill your families and take your jobs. There is a conspiracy of elites ready to crush your church, your community, and your values. You will be punished for not believing the right things. Also, immigrants. And Muslims. And immigrants.

  His polling and strategy team desperately wants to make this a base-only election about a core package of issues, not a referendum on his personality, leadership, or accomplishments. The Trump base has demonstrated time and again that they’re not exactly sticklers for the little stuff like facts, truth, and consistency. Democrats can and must make this race—as I’m sure you’re sick of me saying by now—a referendum on Trump.

  White House Diaries

  DEPUTY ACTING ASSISTANT PROVISIONAL TEMPORARY CHIEF OF CABINET OPERATIONS STAFF LELAND BOB SNIPES, JR.

  Well, I made it. All the way to the White House. It seems like just yesterday I was working at the Waffle House in Weeping Sore, Arkansas. As fill-in night manager, I had plenty of responsibilities, I can tell you, but here at the White House it’s a whole new level.

  How’d I get so lucky? Well, I’ll tell you, being at that rally with my QAnon sign made all the difference. The President finally understood that people like me, and JFK Jr., are his real supporters.

  I get to deal with the President almost every day when he comes out of the Oval and screams at me because the Secret Service won’t let UberEats in with his second KFC order of the day.

  When I got here, they said they had to do a background check on me, which is fine. I knew Q would protect me. My President needs all the help he can get to fight off the Deep State. On the Q Discord channel last night (too bad 8chan is gone. I loved 8chan.) they were saying that term limits are a Deep State fraud, and that this election is being manipulated by the Illuminati Reptilian Overlords.

  NO HEROES IN THE GOP

  As a rule, I’m not a man given to a rosy view of the nature of politics and politicians. Thirty years of experience electing them has demonstrated that even the “good” ones have a gnawing desire for love and adulation that is essentially boundless. “Don’t fall in love with the meat” was a lesson I learned watching a few great, some good, and a lot of average pols live down to my lowest expectations. (Yes, Rudy, I’m looking right at you.)

  The Republican defenses of Trump have evolved slightly since I wrote the number one New York Times bestseller (sorry, but that’s never going to get old) Everything Trump Touches Dies. When that book hit the market, Republicans still had enough members of the Republican branch of the Republican Party to occasionally speak up about Trump, even if it was in the furrowed-brows and deep-concern mode.

  Now? The GOP is sunk even deeper into the muck of Trumpism, slowly losing its ability to think, move, or respond to even the most obvious moral questions surrounding this president. The resemblance to a cult becomes more pronounced with every passing day. Many of my former friends and clients who served as a silent resistance in Congress and in elected offices across the nation are gone now, either retired or defeated in the 2018 beatdown.

  The wipeout in the House increased the percentage of true believers in Esoteric Trumpism. Centrists and moderates simply quit or lost in blowouts across the suburbs. Before 2020, the last few moderates—Will Hurd of Texas, most notably—pulled the ejection handle, knowing there was no place for them in Trump’s GOP.

  Fox News has amply rewarded the opportunists—particularly former Trump-skeptics and hustle monkeys like Matt Gaetz and Kevin McCarthy, now favorites in the Fox lineup. These are men (and they’re almost all men—the jury is out on Ann Coulter) who live and breathe for the positive tweet, the ride on Air Force One, and the pat on their blocky heads from Trump. Remember, opportunists can work without moral consistency, and these folks prove it every day.

  The king of this soulless class is Lindsey Graham. Graham, who in May 2016 tweeted “If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed…and we will deserve it”6 has become Donald Trump’s attack lapdog and is among Trump’s most eager Washington cheerleaders. He spent decades as John McCain’s political wingman and as a center-right Republican. Graham now routinely shits on the late senator’s legacy with his every waking action in service to Trump.

  Graham does everything but beg to shave Trump’s back in his public statements, all for the sweet connection to a man who consistently and revoltingly insults the memory of an American hero. Graham argues it’s to influence the president, but we all know who wears the gimp suit in this relationship. His obedience to Trump is so abject, so complete, and so cringe-worthy that when Trump inevitably fucks him over, the national supply of schadenfreude will instantly run dry.

  The Trump-world Javerts like Devin Nunes, Mark Meadows, Matt Gaetz, Jim Jordan, and Doug Collins engage in performative deep-state dipshit japery every time a camera is nearby. This fake deep-state panic has become essential for the continued maintenance of the myth that there is a massive conspiracy inside the Justice Department and intelligence community against Trump. The people behind this Big Lie continue to stoke the corrosive strategy of protecting Trump by shattering America’s faith in the people on the front lines against hostile foreign powers. Expect many, many more Fox stories about Hillary’s goddamn emails, imaginary deep-state villains, and lurid conspiracies by the evil Never Trump establishment (hey, that’s me!) against Donald Trump.

  Mitch McConnell is, as always, Mitch McConnell. Love him or hate him, McConnell spanks Chuck Schumer and the Senate Democrats on the daily. He is now without question the most powerful and effective Senate majority leader in history. He’s dethroned Lyndon Johnson, and that’s saying something.

  My Democratic readers are reaching for their smelling salts
, but I’m giving you nothing but the truth about Mitch; he’s better than you at all of this. He’s better at Senate business. He’s better at elections. He’s better at shamelessly raising fucktons of money. He looks like a turtle, and he behaves like a great white shark, constantly prowling, feeding on the dreams of the Senate Democrats.

  His desire to protect Trump will lead him to be a powerful ally of the president in 2020, and if you’re not watching that flank, Mitch can and will leverage his unparalleled power to devour you. His deal with the devil took a simple form: President McConnell would be in charge of the federal judiciary from top to bottom. When I asked a McConnell aide how a pending federal judicial appointment of a Bush-friendly nominee could have possibly emerged from the Trump White House, he responded, “Oh, he’s one of ours, not theirs. They’re almost all ours.”

  The reasoning according to some close to the majority leader is simple: Trump is a reality congressional Republicans must accept, and they fully expect an apocalyptic political backlash to follow him. The only way they see to secure the gains of the conservative movement from before and during Trump is to flood the federal bench with Federalist Society hard-ass constitutionalists (is there any other Federalist Society type?).

  The shame elected GOP leaders feel about Trump is generally about one inch behind their bluster on his record. The combination of fear and ambition will make them even more determined to defend Trump until the bitter end. His power over the mob has broken them, even in the wake of the spanking they received in 2018. It’s Trump’s party now, and the postconservative moment rewards obedience over ideas, ass-kissing over principle, and forelock-tugging deference even to Trump’s most egregious behavior.