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

by Rick Wilson

  Here’s a scenario for which you’d best prepare because it or its cousins are coming:

  First, some trolling account on Twitter will post an “Oh My God have you seen this video of Joe Biden using the n-word??” tweet with the usual #MAGA #KAG #QANON hashtag crap. (The surest tell of a Trump social-media hardliner is a serious hashtag fetish.) The link to the YouTube video will be to a brand-new account, of course.

  The clip will look so damn real. It’ll be Biden (for the purposes of this example; stay in your damn seats, Warren and Bernie fans) on video, saying something to the effect of, “Well, I thought Barack was OK, for a nigger politician from Chicago. Oh, did I say ‘nigger’? Sorry folks, keep that one between us.”

  You’re thinking, “Too much, Wilson. That’s ridiculous. No one would buy that.”

  Really? A meaningful fraction of the Republican Party bought into a conspiracy theory that Hillary Clinton was the center of a global ring of child-predator cannibals based in a D.C. pizza restaurant. You really think they won’t bite on this one?

  Here are the next steps in the deepfake laundering cycle, not based on speculation but on observation of the Trump-right media ecosystem, and of the mainstream media.

  Over a couple of hours, the video will go viral on Trump-right Facebook pages, Twitter, and Instagram. At this point, the scummiest elements of the Trump media—for example, InfoWars, Gateway Pundit, or Conservative Whorehouse—sorry, Conservative Treehouse—will blast it out to their readers and social-media followers. The ball is rolling now, and mainstream reporters are pinging the Biden campaign for a response.

  Thousands of bot accounts will start posting and reposting the video, driving the view count from a few hundred to a few hundred thousand in a matter of hours. Facebook and Reddit groups for conservatives and Trump supporters are flooded. Every damn second-, third-, and fourth-tier social-media platform is pumping the video.

  At the same time, a bot army on Black Twitter starts posting furious, outraged comments, like “Do you believe this shit? Fuck Biden.” Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, ever keen for a chance to be on camera or to profit from Biden’s agony, begin concern trolling.

  The Biden campaign is readying a response, but hoping this cancerous little nugget doesn’t spread. Inside his staff, a few people are quietly sending one another messages on Confide and Signal, asking “Wait, did he say that??” Their hope of keeping it pushed down fails when Don Jr. tweets out a link to the video. Drudge pops it onto the top of the page, siren GIFs flashing.

  The monster is loose. The views climb rapidly before YouTube takes it down, but it’s too late. The relatively respectable conservative media starts pounding out the story: “While this video is unconfirmed, it has added to existing concerns about Biden’s gaffes….”

  It’s been two hours, and the Biden campaign’s war room has finally found the video from which the fake was made. They’re posting it as fast as they can, but Biden’s legal people and senior staff have their hair tangled in the spokes of this crisis and are talking through how to handle it.

  One group wants Biden in front of live cameras, now, to call it a fake. (In this fucked-up Choose Your Own Adventure story, that’s the right choice.) The lawyers want to put out a typical weak-ass twenty-paragraph statement couched in language about his record, his love of Barack Obama, his personal history and…oh fuck, it’s breaking news on Fox.

  This will be their coverage for the next four hours. Hannity parachutes live into the studio, sucking on a Juul and pissing in a bucket under his desk to not miss a single, glorious second of this. In the first fifteen minutes, he’s called for Biden to leave the race.

  The mainstream media now has to—kill me—“cover the controversy” of the Biden N-Word Tape. As they start breaking in live, the Biden campaign has been contacted by a deepfakes researcher in Silicon Valley who has watched the video, broken down the clever editing, and told them in broad strokes how it was done. They finally race out a better statement, but now it’s way too late, because the worst is already happening.

  Trump tweets it—because of course he does.

  “I LOVE THE BLACKS UNLIKE N-WORD JOE BIDEN. #KKKJoe should leave the race! #MAGA #KAG”

  Trump doesn’t include the YouTube link to the video. No, he pops a link to the video on an RNC server, where it won’t get pulled down, as YouTube and Facebook would do in the next twenty-four hours.

  That’s right. Twenty-four long, painful hours.

  YouTube pulls down the original video, then spends twenty-four hours playing human and AI whack-a-mole as other copies pop up, their new links amplified by the Russian- and MAGA-bot hordes. Facebook, being Facebook, will hem and haw as it spreads the lie and generates all that lovely, lovely click traffic across its network, feeding the data maw.

  The takedown attempts will spawn two new waves of instant stories in the Trumpian clickservative media, both beloved tropes of the whiny right. The first will be some variation of “The liberal media won’t report on the damning Biden N-Word video.” It’s a beloved flavor of horseshit that the deplorables scarf down.

  The next story and message wave firewalls the sense of Trumpian grievance and keeps the story rolling. “Why are Google and Facebook trying to hide the truth about Joe Biden? Even if the video is a fake, this shows how the biased tech giants are trying to suppress and de-platform conservative speech.” Now the respectable(-ish) conservative class weighs in, repeating the smear as a bank shot.

  The chan-children join the fun, posting memes of Joe Biden in a Klan hood with #OurGuy memes. Richard Spencer will let it be known that if Biden stays on this path he might vote for him over the cuck weakling Donald “No Border Wall” Trump. David Fucking Duke will slither out of his hole and tweet (or post something on Gab or some other social-media darkhole), “Finally Joe Biden speaks to white, working-class America in a language they understand.”

  Six hours have passed. The nightly cable lineups are set, with defenders and opponents of Joe Biden on deck. About 4:00 P.M., the analysis starts to hit, proving the video is fake. The cable-news tone everywhere but Fox immediately turns, hard. They try to start making the story about how the Trump campaign is promoting the attack and is to blame, but it’s a heavy lift. They stop showing the clip, at least. Headlines blast, “Trump Promotes Fake Viral Attack on Biden.”

  Slowly—very, very slowly—the Daily Caller, Breitbart, and the rest append tiny corrections in itty-bitty type at the bottom of their stories: “Some sources now allege this shocking video of Biden’s racist racism is fake. We will update this story as it develops.” Drudge takes down the siren and headline and replaces it with “Trump Tweets! Biden N-Word Tape Rocks Campaign.”

  The nightly cable bloodbath is one for the record books. Everyone is screaming, including me. I leave a Trump surrogate choking in a pool of his own blood and get six beeps from the seven-second-delay guy in the control room.

  Trump tweets out the link a few more times that night. The morning editorials are full of disappointed words about how the media got taken for a ride. Biden’s campaign loses a full 4 percent of African American support in the tracking polls.

  On Election Day, 40 percent of Americans will go to the polls believing that Joe Biden used the n-word on a video and that Donald Trump is the real champion of the civil rights battles of the last fifty years.

  A good deepfake can click its way around the world before the truth has time to fire up its browser.

  White House Diaries

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

  It’s Inauguration Day.

  I snuck in the last of the guns with the KFC delivery. Luckily, two of the Secret Service guys are Q, and that made it easy. They know this is the end of America unless we stop Killary’s plan. We’re going upstairs into the Residence now, and I hope I survive this.


  Maybe I’ll be something important, like Ambassador to Greenland.

  YOU HAVE NO SECRETS

  Opposition research has been with us as long as politics: Cicero was killed in 43 B.C. over what was essentially an oppo dump on Mark Anthony. Campaigns that won’t do the work to understand their own record deserve to lose. I’m begging you, Democrats, please get three or four opposition researchers who are working for different firms to scrub every single aspect of your nominee’s life, even if you think he or she is an open book. Spend the damn money. Tell them nothing, and I mean nothing, is off-limits. Pretending that there are areas that are off-limits in this day and age is as foolish as it is absurd. Just ask Hillary Clinton.

  After over forty years in the public eye, Hillary Clinton was an absurdly rich opposition-research target, and not just the stupid conspiracy “Arkansas body count” and Rose Law Firm claptrap. The deep unwillingness of people around her to bring her bad news about research findings and public perceptions was hideous malpractice. All the old material that her staff decided she didn’t need to review again got dredged up. Steve Bannon, Roger Stone, and Team Trump went all the way back to Arkansas to unearth the Clinton family’s skeletons, and she seemed shocked by it.

  Campaigns that won’t look in the mirror will wake up to discover that a story they haven’t heard about is suddenly front-page news. When Rudy Giuliani was running for U.S. Senate, we were ordered not to research the girlfriends, including the one who would eventually be a part of his very messy, very public divorce from Donna Hanover. Of course, we did so in secret and were vastly more prepared than we would have been if we’d followed orders and averted our eyes from the obvious. I’ve been on too many races where the candidate presumes there are secrets the other team won’t discover.

  This invasive political examination is something no one escapes. The Internet remembers everything, and the old formulation of “That was a long time ago” has disappeared in a cloud of hashtags, outrage, and amplification mechanisms.

  If Joe Biden’s forty-year-old tapes on busing, Al Franken’s surfaced USO tour photo, Ralph Northam’s yearbook, and other stories of recent vintage didn’t teach Democrats this lesson, they’re not paying attention.

  And because the people around Trump know how to turn oppo into messaging, amplified in the form of his Twitter feed with backup from the conservative media, National Enquirer, and his Russian friends, expect oppo drops from the Trump world to have an explosive public impact, often disproportionately so.

  There are some simple oppo survival rules for 2020.

  First, presume that nothing will remain hidden. The girl you knocked up. The one time you took X. The bounced check. The time in college you woke up with a hangover and a burning sensation when you went to pee. The time you padded your expense report. It’s all coming out. The trip to Tijuana. (That’s in my oppo file, and let’s never speak of it again, except to say bribery works to extract people from Mexican jails, and I’m good at it. “How many American dollars, right now, for my friend to walk?”) Every dumb email joke. Every retweet of someone you barely noticed but turns out to be sketchy.

  Second, don’t look at the dirty laundry your researchers discover as a normal, nonpolitical person might. Look at it and ask, “How would the most vicious, amoral, cruel operative of the Trump campaign pitch this to Fox? How would Fox turn it into a campaign attack against me? What’s the worst-case TV spot a bastard like Rick Wilson could make based on this attack? What’s the least charitable explanation for this story?”

  Third, there will be moments when you are exposed on the hot mic or the hidden camera video. These instances might be spontaneous or carefully, deviously engineered. It might be the candidate speaking far too candidly at a time he or she thinks is private—“Of course we’re going to seize every gun in America”—or a joke gone badly, badly wrong—“We’re called the Aristocrats!” Some are public—“Corporations are people, my friend”—and some are private—“People who cling to their guns and religion.” In the era of HD camera phones, expect the worst. Even moments you believe are innocent, public, and aboveboard will be repurposed as political attack vectors.

  Fourth, the best defense is an endless, aggressive, chain-saw offense.

  Finally, don’t expect to be able to pitch great dirt on Trump to national reporters. They’ve become so jaded and so deeply cynical about the tidal wave of revelations about this shitbird president that you would take them solid evidence he’s a serial killer and they’ll largely shrug. Don’t try to silver-bullet just Trump himself—be constant and wide-spectrum. Tie the failures and scandals your research discovers—and those that are already painfully in the public domain—to Trump’s personal failures and scandals. Make it about his low character, shallow intellect, and bad judgment.

  Build the picture for reporters of the corruption around him, and if it touches on his family and close associates, all the better. There are no civilian targets in Trump’s orbit.

  Frame stories on how embarrassing it is that Trump didn’t know that Cabinet Member X was in trouble for Issue Y. Your goal is to add friction and internal trouble, and to force him to focus on defense. He’s actually quite bad at playing defense, and you won’t get him there without a constant attack tempo.

  The private made public has a powerful attraction, which is why high transparency, quick reactions, and deep self-knowledge are essentials in your defensive arsenal on this front. People will perceive it as a politician talking about average Americans behind their backs—no matter how incidental.

  Next, secrets are political sores. They fester. They become worse for the hiding. Why are Trump’s taxes such a compelling mystery? Because he seeks to keep them hidden. If you work from the knowledge that the Trump-right media ecosystem can pitch any story and launder it from a bot tweet to Real­TruEagle­Freedom­MAGA­Newz­2020.ru to Infowars, then Breitbart, then Fox, you’ll know that there’s one thing you can do to even the odds: Beat them to the punch.

  The old rule of politics is “Hang a lantern on your problem.” If you set the narrative, you retake control of the story. Identify the problems, then wargame the hell out of your responses. Tell the lawyers in the room to fuck off; their caution will kill you when it comes to messaging.

  The old cliché was that the worst thing the oppo could discover was a candidate with a dead girl or a live boy. In this more woke age, that’s hardly politically correct, but unless you murdered your gender-fluid nanny and made a skin suit from xir remains, there are very few things that you can’t manage or defuse if you move fast and deflate the bubble before it bursts.

  Know your history, have a full inventory of your dirty laundry, and be ready to own it before the bad guys own you.

  White House Diaries

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

  (WASHINGTON, DC) Special to The New York Times—Today four former Trump White House officials were arrested and one killed after a shootout that echoed across the nation as President Donald Trump attempted to retain power following a crushing Electoral College defeat last November. It was the first time in modern American history that the transfer of presidential power was accompanied by violence, and serves as a grim bookend to the Trump administration.

  The day began with a break with tradition that foreshadowed the shocking events of the afternoon. As President-elect Joseph Harris-Warren was waiting in the White House to depart for the swearing-in, the 45th president refused to accompany the group to the Capitol. When the motorcade departed without him, it is alleged former Trump aides Corey Lewandowski, Stephen K. Bannon, Sebastian Gorka, Stephen Miller, and Leland Bob Snipes, Jr., began to use furniture to barricade themselves in the White House residence along with President Trump.

  After the swearing-in, Washington was beset with rumors that Trump would refuse to vacate the White House, and a
series of tweets from the @realDonaldTrump account soon became national news.

  @realDonaldTrump: Fake News. Election results wrong. Your favorite President will serve three more terms. #KAG

  Secret Service and FBI Hostage Rescue Team agents were dispatched to the White House, where gunshots were then heard. The agents who ended the armed standoff were shocked to find Lewandowski, Bannon, Gorka, and Miller manning the barricade.

  “They were wearing what looked like mall-ninja tactical gear they ordered off eBay,” said an HRT member who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “We knew it was Gorka and Bannon because they were wearing ‘Husky’-cut plate carriers.” Gorka fired repeatedly and inaccurately from cover.

  Previously obscure White House aide Leland Bob Snipes, Jr., was the sole casualty in the White House gun battle.

  Digital forensics are continuing, but sources tell the Times that Snipes was found with his phone in hand, an unsent tweet as a last memorial to his odd, lost cause of an eternal Trump presidency: “Taking fire. Q will save us though. Any minute JFK Jr. will lead the QArmy through the gates and we’ll…”

  QAnon is the widespread conspiracy theory embraced by many Trump supporters.

  Former president Trump was uninjured in the battle and has been taken to a private mental health facility for observation. He was extracted from the White House residence master bathroom holding his ubiquitous “Twitter phone” and an extra-crispy drumstick from Kentucky Fried Chicken.

  In the last hour of his administration, Trump issued multiple pardons via Twitter, and legal scholars are already debating their validity. Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, are rumored to have fled the country. Former First Lady Melania Trump was seen boarding an Air Canada flight to Ottawa and declined comment.