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

by Rick Wilson

  As the smoke cleared, former Trump senior advisor Kellyanne Conway was seen whispering to President Harris-Warren on the White House lawn. Sources indicate she is in line for a senior position in the new administration.

  THE DEATH OF TRUTH

  Donald Trump broke something fundamental in our politics: the value of facts and truth. He alters the truth based on whims, and spreads both accidental and deliberate misinformation. His more cynical followers view this as part of his five-dimensional chess game, but America is now a post-truth republic, to our detriment.

  In 2020, Trump is counting on his ability to lie his way to a second term. He will do so shamelessly, constantly, and even proudly.

  Trump’s endless, torrential outpouring of outright bullshit has become a primary feature of American political life, a Colorado River of mendacity slowly carving itself into a Grand Canyon of lies. This corrosion of the value and power of truth is a political weapon in the hands of a man with so little regard for it.

  Trump has always been, to put it mildly, a lying liar who lies. His business empire was built on lies—lies to customers (“This is the most luxurious condo tower ever built in the history of the world, and every world leader and all Fortune 500 CEOs have apartments here”), lies to his contractors (“The check is in the mail, in full”), and lies to his bankers (“I’m really, really rich, lemme hold your wallet”).

  What should concern Trump’s opponents in 2020 is how readily voters have abandoned honesty and truth as necessary to a healthy society. In fact, many revel in the transgressive thrill of knowing the president of the United States is spouting bullshit. They wink back at him about how fun it is to own the libs with lies bordering on pathological.

  Two quotes have been rattling around in my brain since the first focus groups we conducted on Trump in late 2015.

  The first is from Eric Hoffer in The True Believer, his study on mass political movements:

  It is the true believer’s ability to “shut his eyes and stop his ears” to facts that do not deserve to be either seen or heard which is the source of his unequaled fortitude and constancy. He cannot be frightened by danger, nor disheartened by obstacle, nor baffled by contradictions, because he denies their existence.10

  The second is from my dog-eared copy of Hannah Arendt’s 1951 Origins of Totalitarianism, in which she writes something that could map so perfectly onto the Trump voter it’s as if she had a time machine:

  The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction…and the distinction between true and false…no longer exist.11

  In the 2020 campaign, Democrats need to plan to combat the effect his lies have had on the media, and on Americans. Trump has conditioned them to a quick-cycle pattern of behavior: He tells an outrageous lie, media condemnation rains down, he repeats the outrageous lie, and he blames lying libtard failing fake news outlet X for daring to call him a liar.

  Major news outlets have wrestled mightily with calling the president of the United States a liar. They are complicit in accepting his lies—often delivered personally, late at night from his own cellphone—and in amplifying them, at most times uncritically. Trump, a creature born in the fever-swamp New York tabloid media culture, understands the awesome power of the access journalism addiction. He’s not bothering with “John Barron” any longer; now, he’s a “senior White House official.”

  Second, while fact-checking is both meritorious and necessary, it’s also almost completely ineffective for Trump voters. You can’t and won’t move them with facts. The defense of Trump’s lies has become a core tribal signaling function inside the hollowed-out husk of the GOP. Of course, elected officials still keep getting away with the Washington game of whispering to reporters, “Well, that’s just Trump being Trump. It’s not hurting anyone. It’s just his style.”

  No, folks. It’s not a style. It’s a pathology, and in 2020 the Democratic candidates need to prepare for a picture of America painted by this president, both the fake good and the fake bad. They’ll see it as the equivalent of a madman smearing the walls of his padded cell with his own feces, but the framing of the 2020 campaign will look much more like the 1984 campaign than they currently care to admit. Trump will paint the picture as one of unparalleled economic success, and the lies will come down fast and furious.

  On the negative side, fear is one of Trump’s few weapons, and the GOP and the conservative media apparat have weaponized and monetized fear based on ludicrously overdrawn lies. Expect the 2020 campaign to feature breathless lies about the millions of criminal gang members forming armed caravans to storm the borders. Expect more stories of how immigrants are bringing smallpox, Ebola, and the plague over the border. You’ll hear stories about the mythical Antifa army sweeping the nation, Black Panthers outside every voting booth, and the terrifying scourge of godless homosexuals luring preschool children into sex-change surgery. He’ll paint the Democrats’ technocratic semi-, demi-, hemi-socialism as the second coming of Stalin, with deplorables in the place of kulaks.

  He’ll lie about the scope and intent of the culture war, because Trump understands how deeply conditioned his base is by Fox, talk radio, and the grievance culture of the right. Trump’s framing will be apocalyptic: It’s me or sharia law. It’s me or the scourge of government death panels. It’s me or godless communism (and/or Muslim theocracy) in the dark future.

  All the golden oldies are coming back! The war on Christmas. Kneeling NFL players. Taquerias replacing the local diner. You know, all the real threats in the minds of Facebook boomers with Fox News on 24/7.

  Rather than disputing the lies, it’s crucial to keep up the fact pressure to discredit the liar, and get back to what’s real and relevant to the targeted voters in the swing states. All the economic happy-talk in Trump world doesn’t fix the devastation Trump’s trade war has wrought on Midwest farming communities.

  Trump’s 2016 win relied on suburban Republicans, many of whom voted against Hillary Clinton rather than for him. In 2020, he’ll offer both a tribal and an economic choice to those same voters—that’s why we’ll hear all the “Look at your 401k!” rah-rah reaching a fever pitch. He’ll be working very hard to present a false but compelling case that choosing the Democrat means a quick slide in the markets, the destruction of John and Jane Suburbanite’s retirement fund, and a future not in a luxury condo in Del Boca Vista but one of living below a highway overpass, scrounging for roadkill.

  No matter where the economy goes in the next year, he’ll argue that the tax bill—arguably the biggest legislative action of his presidency—helped most Americans. Democrats must make the case that the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 was not a bailout for America but a monster payday for a small number of hedge funds, banks, and tech billionaires. As of this writing, Elizabeth Warren has come closest to working out a solid message on this, but it’s not rocket science, and it solidly falls into the category of making the election a referendum on Trump. His hallmark legislative accomplishment was a lie.

  America knows by now that he lies, but no one is really prepared for a body of deception so large it’s like the meteor that crashed into the Yucatán and killed the dinosaurs, only instead of a Texas-sized rock it’s a mass of Trumpian bullshit that will plunge through the atmosphere.

  Trump’s strategy is the mirror image of what the Democrats’ should be; he wants to make this a base-only election about a core package of issues relying on horseshit. He’s going to lie both to the American people and about the Democratic candidate, every day. Democrats still harbor some faint hope that they can shame him into telling the truth, or that the media fact-checkers can do it.

  Whoever the nominee for the Democrats is, he or she has a magnificent opportunity to repeat the famous “Where’s the beef?” moment in which Democratic candidate Walter Mondale wrecked his competitor G
ary Hart. Driving hard on Trump as a liar, a discredited and weak man dependent on a curtain of absurd deceptions to maintain his fragile self-image and political status, can be a striking, viral moment, and the Democratic nominee should be practicing for it, every day.

  PART 4

  HOW TO LOSE

  Donald Trump, as I’ll say until I’m blue in the face, cannot win this election.

  The Democrats can sure as hell lose it.

  Once again, my Democratic friends, in the spirit of tough love—and honestly, do I have any other kind?—you have every advantage, and yet how often you blow it. A previous part of this book looked at a lot of the myths you love so deeply, and how those sincere beliefs have left you open to repeated political spankings.

  The demographics keep shifting your way, but you keep missing elections that should be layups.

  You win the White House only on the backs of fluke, generational candidates who silence or ignore the chattering claques of highly specialized micro-interest groups inside the Democratic machine. You rush forward into obvious traps set by political morons.

  You think you sound compassionate, but it often scans as hectoring. You think you sound righteous, but it too often comes across as one long scold from the political correctness commissars. They may sometimes deserve it, but when you lecture the rubes in flyover country, damn are you condescending jerks.

  Even now, your singular advantage in the 2020 election is staring you in the face, and yet as a party you seem entirely unable to convert the fact that 60 percent of Americans loathe Donald Trump into a coherent referendum on whether America will be led by him or a sane person.

  Trump’s approval ratings, overall polling numbers, and the polling in key states point to a position of political peril of the highest order.

  The only thing that can save him is you being you.

  FLYING BY THE SEAT OF YOUR PANTS

  When I’m not busy writing New York Times number-one best-selling books and overthrowing governments, I like to fly. I like to think I’m good at it, a reasonably skilled and safe pilot. There’s a lesson from flight training that I need to impart to Democrats.

  I started out as a solid pilot in the kind of blue-skies stick-and-rudder Visual Flight Rules piloting we get in Florida much of the year. But the first time I was “under the hood” in instrument flight training I was mostly just irritated. When you train to fly on instruments, the “hood” covers your vision so you can’t look outside the cockpit to get your bearings. This simulates flying in fog or bad weather. My flight instructor popped the hood on me and started demanding I fly by instruments alone. No problem. Then he started taking my instruments offline and asking me to tell him if we were in a climb or a dive, a left or right bank. Since I couldn’t look outside to check, I learned quickly that you can’t rely on your body and senses to guide you. What felt like level flight was a slow spiral down.

  When he brought my instruments back online, I could fly perfectly well, even if I couldn’t see out of the cockpit.

  It was a revelation. The rule of trusting your instruments is there for a reason; in bad weather, reduced visibility, and the dark of night, your senses lie to you, and dangerously so. You think you’re in a climb when you’re plunging to earth. You think you’re turning slowly when you’re moments from a spin. Your eyes, sense of balance, and mind are contingent and unreliable. Aviation history is replete with people flying into bad weather, trusting their eyes and senses over their instruments, and ending up in a smoking hole in the ground.

  The only way to fly safely and survive in those conditions is to rely on your instruments.

  I’ve explained this rule to candidates before, and I’ll tell you now, the only safe flight plan through 2020 is to trust your instruments. Trump’s team is counting on you to put your ideological inclinations, emotions, and policy wish-fulfillment fantasies front and center in this election. They’re praying you run a campaign based on what the edges of your base demand, and not what a serious, bloodless analytical campaign based on polling, data analysis, and turnout models tells you.

  They want you to play for the cheap seats in California, not the tougher targets in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Florida, and Michigan. They want you to buy into a read of the political map where the fantasy of a massive, hidden progressive vote is lurking under the surface in the handful of decisive states.

  They’re desperate for you to tell the truth about what you believe on issues like guns and abortion, because they’re watching the numbers on those issues in the swing states. They want you to engage in magical thinking about who is up for grabs in this election, to chase electoral unicorns (“Hey, let’s spend money in Texas!”), and to operate on impulse, not intelligence.

  They want you to trust Twitter over polling, and Resistance Facebook groups over data analytics.

  You don’t have to fly blind. The ability of campaigns to turn polling and underlying social-media analytics into actionable political intelligence has been proven. You have the ability to target and segment messaging to a degree of granularity and power that was unobtainable two decades ago, and cutting-edge ten years back. Voters are telling you things every day, and Facebook, Instagram, Google, Snapchat, Comscore, Rentrak, and a hundred other firms can tell you how to weaponize those opinions. But listening and taking action based on those streams of data and information (there is a distinction) takes a willingness to subsume political desires for political practicality.

  When I was doing political ads for a living, I was good at the work of creating and producing those ads, but despite my rep as an amoral madman, the secret was that I built these ads with my pollsters, my researchers, and, as the science developed, my data team. We didn’t just whip out spots based on witchcraft or mystic auguries. They were tools, calibrated to move the hearts and minds of voters. They were tested, crafted, and deployed to hit targets we didn’t have a right to persuade, but we found ways to do so. Often it meant making spots with a message or ideological polarity that our base didn’t love but that the targets did.

  In politics, the weather is always foggy. The clouds are always bad and getting worse. Nobody knows nothin’. You’re in the cockpit and you can either trust the numbers, technology, and analytics in front of you, or you can fly by the seat of your pants.

  One decision results in a win. The other? A smoking hole in the ground and a political funeral.

  Fox News Election 2020 Special Alerts

  Two Fox reporters are walking through crowds, a rare walk-and-talk live shot.

  KIP: I’m Kip Karson, reporting live from the Democratic Convention, where in a surprise move, the president of the United States is parked outside in his presidential limo, “The Beast.”

  KASSIE: I’m Kassie, but does that really matter? I’m just one of several dozen interchangeable news bots who came from a mid-tier j-school with great hair and big…oopsie. (Giggles.) Was that my out-loud voice?

  KIP: It sure was, Kassie. Folks, we’re here in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, for the 2020 Democratic Convention, and well, it looks like we’re going to break some news. Kassie, I think that’s the president standing up in the sunroof of his limo. I think he’s—what’s the word, Kassie?

  KASSIE: I think it’s heckling, Kip. He’s heckling passersby. Mr. President! Kip and Kassie from Fox!

  TRUMP: Hillary needs to come out and fight me. Fight me, she-witch!

  KIP: Mr. President, Mrs. Clinton isn’t going to be the nominee. I’m not even sure she’s here.

  TRUMP: YES SHE IS. She needs to be locked up.

  KASSIE: Sir?

  TRUMP (incredulous): For murdering Jeffrey Epstein.

  (Trump looks down into the limo from the sunroof.)

  TRUMP: Bill, can I do a citizen’s arrest? Can I?

  BILL BARR: Of course, m’lord.

  (Trump begins clanking three beer bottles together
and starts a singsong chant.)

  TRUMP: HILLLAREEEE HILLLAREEEE. Come out to pl-ay-ay. HILLLAREEEE HILLLAREEEE. Come out to pl-ay-ay.

  KASSIE: Thank you, Mr. President. This is the kind of leadership that makes a second term inevitable. My producers are telling me we’re going to cut away briefly for a special on the upcoming War on Christmas. It may be August, but it’s never too soon for atheists to hate America!

  PLAYING THE CAMPAIGN, LOSING THE REALITY SHOW

  The 2020 campaign is the biggest, most dangerous, most expensive reality-television show of all time, and the only stars are the Democratic nominee and Donald Trump. The stakes are, you know, the fate of the republic and possibly the world. This game is gambling with the lives of 350 million Americans and the future of our country.

  Both the Republican and Democratic campaigns will run, well, campaigns. They’ll be fought by both sides with all the usual tools: digital and physical organizing, online and broadcast media, press relations, coalitions, and so on. They’ll look and feel like campaigns. All of those things matter on some level, but in the end they’re not the real battle of 2020.

  In this reality show, the host is also a contestant. Even worse, he is a master of the form and understands the audience with a kind of feral cunning few others share.

  In this show, policy loses to personality every time. Brain loses to heart, every time. Stunts, joking asides, dumb nicknames, and lowbrow pranks beat substance and gravitas.

  Here’s how to win this reality show.

  BE GREAT ON TELEVISION

  Democrats who think this whole battle will be fought and won on social media have another thing coming. This campaign will be waged on television. Social media is necessary but not sufficient for victory in 2020. One of the gifts Roger Ailes gave the GOP was to beat into the heads of three generations of candidates that looking like the winner on television, that great wasteland in which reality is mediated, wasn’t the only thing—it was everything. You have to be great on TV.