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

by Rick Wilson

  Fox News Election 2020 Special Alerts

  LAURA INGRAHAM: It’s a week to go before the election, and I’m joined by two very special guests. Tonight, the lovely Ann Coulter is with us, and on Take Your Fascist to Work Day, she’s brought along her youthful ward Tammy Laurent.

  LAHREN: It’s Tomi.

  INGRAHAM: Right. Tumor. My apologies.

  Now, ladies, with a week to go, can you tell me how you feel about this campaign? Is it looking good for the only president who ever promised to maintain the ethnic purity of our gene pool?

  COULTER: Honestly, Frau Laura, it’s not. Trump should have followed my plan for slaughtering and butchering immigrants for food. Mexican: the other dark meat.

  INGRAHAM (nervous laugh): Well, Ann, that sure is an interesting metaphor but…

  COULTER: It’s not a metaphor.

  INGRAHAM: Well, I mean…

  COULTER: I really do think the only way to stop the browning of America is to eat illegals. Trump cucked out on the wall, so it’s the only logical choice.

  LAHREN: Like, um, like, am I supposed to, like, be, like, mad now?

  (Glares at Ingraham, is directed to stare directly into camera)

  INGRAHAM: Though I suppose if President Trump won’t build the wall in his second or third term, we’ll have to start eating the caravans. Would you try immigrant meat, Ann?

  COULTER: Well, hypothetically, but I haven’t eaten solid food since 2011. My diet is Marlboro Reds and diet pills washed down with the tears of immigrant children. I had a gummy bear at Christmas.

  LAHREN: Can we talk about my athleisure clothing line now?

  REVIVING THE CLINTONS

  He was a giant astride the political landscape for a generation. A once-in-a-lifetime, Electoral College lock-picking genius of politics, policy, and human connection. She was his brilliant, put-upon wife and a political force in her own right.

  For all that, it’s time to put Bill and Hillary into a cryo-chamber for the 2020 election. No more tweeting. No more speeches. No convention role. I know some Hillary fans and staffers will look at this recommendation with a bit of a scowl, but hear me out.

  For as much as Republicans disliked Barack Obama, his natural poise and steadiness—almost to a fault—meant even his harshest critics were often disarmed. Not so with Hillary. The 2016 election was in large measure a referendum on Her. In Hillary, Republicans had a villain who’d checked every damn box for decades, and a media apparatus to reinforce it, every damn day. It doesn’t matter if it was fair. It matters that it was real.

  Why on earth would you give Donald Trump a chance to make the 2020 election about Her again? Why on earth would you let him turn this race into Crooked Hillary Part Deux? Jesus, people…do I have to do all of this for you?

  No more tweeting. No more speeches. No convention role.

  This election must be a referendum on Donald Trump.

  If I’m a Trump “strategist” (it’s hard to call them that, since for most of them “strategy” is standing in front of a TV camera saying things like “Donald Trump did not shit the bed on Issue X, and if he did shit the bed, it was the most amazing bed-shitting in history”), I want nothing more than to see Hillary Clinton’s mug on TV. It’s a callback for the Trump base to the person they hate more than Hitler. Hell, in this current iteration of the GOP, some Trump fans (and Steve King) are muttering into their anime waifu pillows, “What’s wrong with Hitler, cuck? Hitler did nothing wrong compared to Hillary.”

  For God’s sake, follow where the numbers lead you: Barack and Michelle Obama need camera time at the Democratic Convention, not Hillary Clinton. Keep her away from 2020, but should you win, park her on the podium on Inauguration Day in Trump’s sight line. He’ll know she got the game, at long last, and had a hand in his demise.

  Fox News Election 2020 Special Alerts

  TUCKER CARLSON: With less than a week to go before the most important election in history, I have a vital message for America. If you’re a white-leaning…pardon me…right-leaning voter who hasn’t gone to the polls, I encourage you to gather your Klan…if you know what I mean…and get them out to the polls tomorrow. The Fuh…President needs you to help make America white…er, great again. Fox has had reports today of brown people voting early around the country. I don’t know if they’re black, or Hispanish, or some other race. I don’t see color…We’ll be right back after a word from our sponsor.

  (90 seconds of Fox show promos run back-to-back.)

  TUCKER: This election has seen the hateful brown horde who have washed up on our shores since 1619 refuse to acknowledge the good Donald Trump has done for them. The man who lives in the Big House…I mean, the White House…is a master. Some of these ingrates have even refused to stand in the colored lines at their polling stations, to take their literacy tests, or to pay the required poll tax. Is that the America you want? (wild-eyed) Is it? A taco truck on every corner?

  If we fail to stand by President Trump now…now of all times…we’re doomed to a future of miscegenation, uppitiness, and sassy backtalk from the help.

  As an American and a multimillionaire heir to a frozen-food company that sells processed fish as prole chow, I vow to you, this will not stand.

  Thanks for tuning in tonight. Catch my new column at The Daily Stormer and my one-man show at the German American Bund Hall in Babylon, Long Island.

  THE DANGER OF DEMOCRATIC TRUMPS

  This election has two stars. Only two. Trump and the Democratic nominee.

  One of the meaningful dangers of the Ambition Cohort in the Democratic Party comes from people who aren’t in the 2020 race or who will have lost the primary. Many will sit on the sidelines, cynically convinced Donald Trump will inevitably win and that their time is coming in the 2024 cycle. Some of them will try to sandbag the nominee for not fitting their exact ideological test set.

  For the right, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is straight from college-dorm-Marxist central casting. She combines incandescent social-media skills and a patent hunger for attention with a lack of policy credibility. Sorry guys, I’m calling balls and strikes here. Every moment she does anything other than be a surrogate for the prog base, Trump is winning. Her polling numbers outside the Democratic base are well in the negative range. But she can, and should, be useful playing the role of progressive rah-rah with groups who question the nominee’s far-left bona fides. The GOP and Fox have elevated her because they are masters at creating a villain, and Trump’s instinct to play against her is part of his feral genius with his base voters.

  Ilhan Omar has given Donald Trump a gift-wrapped package. She’s so fucking tone-deaf she can’t understand that her flirtations with anti-Semitic tropes and themes are one step short of a Pepe meme; she lets Trump off the hook by projecting the anti-Semitism of his alt-right fan club back on them.

  The self-styled Squad of progressive freshmen who spent the early summer of 2019 taking Nancy Pelosi off-message and off-agenda and thus depriving the Democrats of messaging opportunities against Donald Trump were elevated by Trump’s attacks on them. He’s a crafty animal, and he knows that four women of color who aren’t pure ’Mericans like the MAGA base are a fantastic foil.

  The ambitious Squad are riding the Trump attacks to more prominence. They’re also buying the eventual nominee no end of trouble. Expect the Democratic presidential candidate to have Pony-Tail Guevara and the others tied around his or her neck and to have to continually play defense on socialism and anti-Semitism when they could be hammering Donald Trump. Presidential politics is a team sport.

  We’ve talked previously about Bernie and his proven pattern of wrecking the party when he doesn’t get his way, but some of the other candidates may be so cynical as to hope for a Trump victory on some level to clear their path for 2024. The party, the nominee, and the donor class need to keep folks like Beto, Booker, and Buttigi
eg (it sounds like a great law firm—think about it, boys) in the game and on the team.

  Fox News Election 2020 Special Alerts

  HANNITY: It’s Election Night and I’m Sean Hannity, bringing you live Fox coverage of the vote. Tonight, the deep state, Jim Comey, and the cabal of Satanists decided to end the reign of our God-Emperor President who has led America into an era of glorious prosperity and stability. Our nation and civilization will now plunge into an epoch of darkness and despair.

  (Hannity is visibly weeping now.)

  Why, Mr. and Mrs. America, did you betray Donald Trump, this paragon of leadership, this tall, handsome—so, so handsome—man of compassion, grace, and poise? Why? You elected a ravenous, deadly Antifa sleeper agent eager to burn our nation to the ground.

  PRODUCER (off-camera): Wrap, Sean.

  HANNITY (wild-eyed): You wrap, you lefty sonofabitch. I’m staying on the air live until Donald Trump is named president for life or my bladder fails.

  PRODUCER: Sean, we need to go to break, and you’re saying that live.

  HANNITY (begins removing his jacket and shirt): Donald Trump isn’t our best president. He’s our only president. There was no America before Trump and there will be none after. Don’t you people see? Can’t you see his aura?

  PRODUCER (off-camera): Sean, what the fuck?

  (At this, Hannity leaps onto the desk, peeling away his tie, shirt, and Spanx girdle. Moments later, the Fox feed cuts to footage of a waterskiing squirrel, but for a brief, indelible moment America saw that a florid Sean Hannity’s jiggling, barrel-like torso was covered from neckline to waist with a tattoo of Hannity and Trump in a passionate embrace.)

  HANNITY: There is a place for all of us on the Trump comet! Join us and live forever!

  (Broadcast ends.)

  TAKING THE INFRASTRUCTURE WEEK BAIT

  This chapter is for you, Nancy.

  The rules, mores, and traditions of the ancient regime of Washington are a smoking hole where Donald Trump’s presidency landed, but Democrats in Congress still persist in a set of beloved traditions that are the political equivalent of standing outside a monkey cage at the zoo. Unless your objective is to be splattered with monkey feces (hey, I’m not judging your life), you’re going to get the inevitable, shitty result every time.

  Nancy Pelosi keeps repeating variations on a remark that sounds like it was expelled from the bowels of some interminable focus group: “The American people sent us here to do X,” and for X insert healthcare, infrastructure, education, or any other pet issue.

  No, they didn’t, Madame Speaker. The election of 2018 was about one thing, just as the election of 2020 is about one thing.

  Donald Trump.

  The midterms were a bloody, raging, furious burst of energy and anger to deprive Donald Trump of control of the House of Representatives. The era when people think of their elected leaders as tribunes for good policy is over. This is a brutal, Darwinian struggle.

  Every time Nancy drags the hapless Chuck Schumer to the White House and pretends it’s happy-family time, they’re giving Trump an edge. They’re helping to normalize the abnormal and giving Trump leverage to push back against the oversight and investigations the American people elected forty-one new Democrats to conduct.

  Besides, my Democratic friends, by now you should know that in addition to Donald Trump…what’s the word…oh, yes…fucking you on every policy question, Mitch McConnell is going to get his turn at bat to humiliate you, either before or after you sit in the Oval Office with Trump. Democrats consistently underestimate just how good McConnell is at his job, and how much he has riding on Democrats getting trapped in transactional moments that always end the same way.

  I know, you’re thinking, “That unassuming, soft little man with the turtle face doesn’t look the part of a blood-soaked political killer.” That’s part of his power; Democrats spent decades missing the fact, in legislative fights large and small, that Mitch was the Patrick Bateman of the Senate, ready to party with his fire axe.

  If Mitch McConnell has a polar opposite for courage, competence, and ice water for blood, it’s Chuck Schumer. He’s a proxy for the weakness of the Senate Democratic caucus, and it’s because he’s a transactional liberal of the New York School. “Fuck you, let’s make a deal” may be fine with rational actors, but I think we understand by now that Donald Trump is a hundred miles from rational.

  Democrats go to the White House, Trump throws a tantrum and sends out a batch of shit-talking tweets, and we end up with neither legislative action nor any improvement in President Oppositional Defiant Disorder’s behavior. While Pelosi irritates and baffles Trump, Schumer believes in so very little that even though he’s known Trump for thirty years, he still seems inclined to fall for the con.

  If Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer trot down to the White House one more time to make a deal with Trump over an infrastructure plan or anything other than his constitutional surrender of office, they should be slapped. For anything short of a national military emergency, stop playing nice with the monster.

  EXTERNALITIES ARE A BITCH

  No battle plan survives contact with the enemy. Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. Your hidden porn folder is labeled “Taxes.” She’ll never guess the PIN code to your phone. No one expects the Spanish Inquisition.

  Welcome to the world of the October surprise, 2020 edition. I’ve been in politics for something like 1,500 years now and I’ve seen a few October surprises in my day. Hell, I’ve caused a couple October surprises in my time, and I honor the form.

  There are two kinds of October surprise. This election will add a third type for our mortification and dismay. The first kind is, well, engineered by assholes like my evil opposition-research minions and me. (Shout-outs to G, J, D, and M. Y’all know who you are.) They are legitimate, though stinky, attacks. They’re the hits on the opposition candidate’s voting record, campaign finance, friends and allies, personal life, business dealings, and taste in clothes from the 1980s. Both sides play it, and play it hard. The long-fostered relationships with reporters on the campaign trail come into play with a fake-frenzied call or email, “You won’t believe this shit!”

  The second kind of October surprise is the external event: the sweeping crisis, international incident, or financial meltdown that no one plans for when they’re doing their calendar of the campaign’s end. The financial crisis of September 2008 was a shock that sent McCain’s effort into a stall. In 2012, Mitt Romney couldn’t have planned on Hurricane Sandy giving Barack Obama a chance to play the Serious Leader in a Time of Crisis. (Or Chris Christie’s photogenic, viral bro-hug of Obama.)

  October surprises generally influence folks making up their minds late in the game. And, by and large, voters traditionally are not that highly engaged in the minutiae of campaigns until the closing weeks of October, if then. (Lower-propensity voters don’t pay attention until the final days of the effort.) These surprises are a final, gift-wrapped opposition-research hit to bloody the water and set the mood before people march into the booth and dimple their chad. These days, as early and absentee voting rise in popularity, campaigns should plan for a number of stories in the closing weeks of the campaign.

  Are you ready for the October surprises this time around? Hillary Clinton most certainly wasn’t. There’s no doubt that FBI director James Comey’s October 28, 2016, release of a letter announcing the FBI was reopening the investigation of Clinton’s use of a private email server drove her White House bid into a ditch. It didn’t matter if the story was turned, flipped, distorted, or misinterpreted; by the time Comey walked it back with an awkward retcon, the damage was done. This October surprise was a classic of the genre.

  The Trump campaign—which, it is rumored, had been given a steady drip of intel on this matter by the New York Field Office—reacted as if they knew it was coming. They were so ready to explo
it the opening that it seemed dissonant with their usual level of incompetence and dumbfuckery.

  After weeks of blasting Comey, Trump turned on a dime, saying, “I have great respect for the fact that the FBI and the DOJ are now willing to have the courage to right the horrible mistake that they made.”3 (That respect wouldn’t last, but it showed how Trump’s feral media brain understood the opening.) A gloating Kellyanne Conway tweeted, “A great day in our campaign just got even better. FBI reviewing new emails in Clinton probe.”4

  The Clinton campaign’s reaction was a kind of bemused “What fresh hell is this?”

  They could not process the power this externality would exert. It meaningfully shifted the discourse and allowed the Trump (and Russia’s, but I repeat myself) efforts to amplify the “Hillary is corrupt” message they’d been blasting into (wait for it) targeted Electoral College states.

  I’ve drilled down on this story for you for a reason: If you think your candidate could never face something absurd and manufactured in the last two weeks of October 2020, think again. You are about to be enrolled in the 2020 master class in engineered crises for the Democratic nominee. Expect to see both the Trump campaign and the government engage in political dirty tricks. Nixon was a piker.

  In 2018 we saw repeated attempts by the Trump White House and their allies at Fox News and elsewhere to turn the alleged “caravans” of deadly migrants streaming north into a political weapon in the closing days of the election.5 The president tweeted: “We are a great Sovereign Nation. We have Strong Borders and will never accept people coming into our Country illegally!”6 But caravan fear-mongering was ultimately a flop; the caravan’s members were more tattered, exhausted women and children than hardened, bloodthirsty, rapey MS-13/ISIS.