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

by Rick Wilson

  Murderous white boys posting their 8chan manifestos that sound like excerpts from Trump speeches or as if they were stolen from Tucker Carlson’s teleprompters engaged in mass murder in Poway, California, and El Paso, Texas. By the time this book goes to print, there may have been more such shootings, and the killers may also spout white-nationalist slogans that sprang from Trump’s rhetoric on immigration. These people are the worst of Donald Trump’s base. Democrats should make them his running mates.

  The long arc of Trump’s racism is a book of its own, but in terms of his presidency, from Charlottesville forward there was no mistaking the content of his heart. Candace Owens, Paris Dennard, Diamond and Silk, and Ben Carson aren’t exactly speaking to the average African American, and Democrats need no more powerful reminder of the message that President Both Sides sent to this nation when he drew a moral equivalency between Nazis, Klansmen, and alt-right anti-Semites chanting “Jews will not replace us!” and counterprotesters.

  Trump’s team and his media sycophants have tried desperately to retcon the entire event, but it remains a raw wound. Instead of trying to sell African American voters on the hypothetical of reparations, why not sell them on the immediate reality of a referendum on the man in the White House and the long, terrible history of his racial arson?

  Democrats need to make alt-right leaders like Richard Spencer, Klan scum like David Duke, and the entire enterprise of alt-reich assholes into Trump’s running mates. He needs to be pressured on this from the start for two reasons. First, it really, really bothers him. He knows how badly he blew it with those Charlottesville comments, regardless of his personal beliefs. The second reason is that it prevents another cycle of Trump playing footsie with overt racists. Opportunity costs were low in 2016; he was viewed as a joke, a prank, and a crank.

  Make him own the actions and views of the evil men and women who adore him. Make him face the terrible cost in lives and suffering since his inflammatory language poisoned our culture. Donald Trump, almost uniquely in presidential history, is supported and surrounded by people who can be seen as nothing but evil.

  There is no “both sides” in this fight. Make him own it. Make him hurt.

  2020 Debate Fact Check no. 6

  During the second of three presidential debates last night in Santa Clarita, California, President Donald Trump made the following claim:

  “If you elect my opponent, she’ll unleash a zombie invasion. It’s been her plan all along. She wants to feed Americans to the living dead. It’s right there on her website. Nothing can stop her evil plan but my iron will. Without me, you’ll be chewing on someone’s thighbone for lunch. It’s me or the shambling flesh eaters.”

  FACT CHECK

  President Trump’s reference to Senator Warren’s so-called plan to unleash a zombie invasion is, as readers will now easily anticipate, false. Senator Warren has no plan to release zombies, flesh-eating or otherwise, on the American population.

  Senator Warren’s website has, at this reporting, 431 plans or policy papers, many exceeding 600 pages in length. None of those plans reference zombies or any other form of the undead.

  REACHING TRUMP VOTERS, IF YOU MUST—AND SADLY, YOU MUST

  People trapped in a cult need special handling, and the Trump cult is no exception. Cult deprogramming is a bit of a high lift for the 2020 race, but because rescuing people from cults is always a good thing, this chapter will offer some helpful hints for how to deal with the victims of Trump misinformation and propaganda, and how to talk to Mom and Dad about getting off the Facebook Trump crack.

  I’m not kind to Trump fanatics, but the Democrats need to give some of the people getting nauseous on the Trump train’s rough ride a kind, smooth path to acceptance. The actions of Trump have built a sense of disappointment, disquiet, and division that has already pushed many Republicans away from him. The job now is to turn regret and remorse into votes, particularly in swing states.

  Trump voters, on paper, seem like implacable members of a cult so rigid and so inflexible that it makes Scientology look like a bunch of free-thinking libertines. You’ve seen all the Saddam-like stats: “107% of Republicans love Trump, with 102% saying they strongly love Trump!” “87% of Republican women would give their daughters to Trump for his sexual gratification!” When this is over, there will be Trumpers out there in the jungles of some remote suburb, convinced the war never ended and that the God-Emperor Trump still reigns, but the monolith myth of the GOP today is just that.

  The reason Trump’s number stays so high is that many Republicans have stopped identifying themselves to pollsters as Republicans. They’re unwilling to be associated with the behavior and actions of Trump, ideology be damned.

  SUBURBAN MOMS AND EDUCATED VOTERS

  Let’s be honest with ourselves. The number that blew every campaign analysis in the 2016 exit polling was that educated, suburban women voted for Donald “Pussy Grabber” Trump. It was a shock to the system because he was every single thing we were told women hated: a vulgar, abusive bully. And yet, the 2016 exit polls—particularly in the swing states that Trump surprisingly won—told the tale. Trump captured 42 percent of the female vote against Ms. Break the Glass Ceiling herself. Forty-two percent. Trump won the suburbs in 2016 by 50 to 45 percent. The suburbs, whence a majority of the votes in the 2020 targeted Electoral College states will come, will need to see Democrats improve that number dramatically.

  These groups are falling from the GOP’s orbit like a crapped-out Russian space station plunging back to earth, but they’re by no means a lock.

  They made a conflicted choice in 2016, and one that many clearly regret, judging by the current survey of work and voter data analysis from 2018.

  A mild suggestion to Democrats, if I may: Please don’t scare the living shit out of them. Telling them things like “We’re going to eliminate your private health insurance” isn’t a recipe for confidence in these skittish voters. They’re from the suburbs. They like normalcy. They like a system that doesn’t feel too disruptive. They want a return to sanity, not a different flavor of ideological passion. Many will be divided families in 2020—Mom with the Democrats, Dad with Trump.

  Trump is doing a lot of your work for you with these groups, but if you fall into too many of the culture-war traps, there’s a meaningful chance these folks will step back out of the fold and either vote for Trump again or simply stay home. You can’t afford either outcome.

  Please don’t think that they’re suddenly hardcore progressive Democratic base voters.

  You’re dating, not sleeping together, but you might get lucky if you play your cards right.

  THE J. D. VANCE DEMO

  How Democrats approach the vital questions of the economic realities in the key Electoral College states and defuse the idea that only Trump and Trumpism are the solution for their problems is perhaps the fundamental issue of the 2020 campaign. As with everything else in this election, Democrats must make these questions a referendum on Donald Trump.

  The conventional wisdom of 2016 was that Trump voters were the hurt children of globalism, international trade agreements, shifting demographics, and the radical arc of technological change. They were angry with Washington and the coastal elites.

  In 2016 J. D. Vance wrote an excellent book, Hillbilly Elegy, about this world, and a cottage industry of analysts and writers sprang up to discuss the pathologies of the heartland beset by forces beyond their ken and a sense of rage and despair that led them into the arms of Donald Trump. It was an easy story to believe, because there really is pain, dislocation, and fear in the heartland.

  But that reason is looking more and more like an excuse. The tribal nature of Trumpism is seated in a host of racial and ethnic hatreds. It’s the sloppy permission society writ large, the victim culture of too many liberal clichés from the 1970s turned on its head. Instead of being angry at the corporate world, they’ve redi
rected it into being angry at immigrants.

  Unlike conservatism, Rust Belt victim culture presumes that market forces must be moderated by the strong hand of the Great Leader. Democrats must not try merely to replace one Big Daddy with another. Promising them government will do for them what Trump didn’t is a losing proposition. They like the anger he allows them. They like the idea that the amorphous brown “they” took their jobs and communities, and your promises of job retraining or a panoply of free shit will fall on deaf ears.

  The traditional conservative credo of personal responsibility, hard work, and the power of markets doesn’t work with them. There is a rising understanding that this demographic never bought into free-market conservatism. They like how Trumpism infantilizes and marginalizes people in ways that would make the heart of any central planner glow. Conservatives once took offense at the belief they were too stupid, provincial, and prone to their various addictive pathologies to succeed. Now they’ve embraced it.

  In some meaningful ways, it’s Ronald Reagan’s fault. Reagan’s ideological instincts were sound on this question: He knew that winning back working-class voters from the Democrats would take more than free-market rhetoric. Reagan talked to union voters as one of them, sounding in many speeches a lot more like Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Friedrich Hayek.

  There’s a powerful lesson for Democrats from both Trump and Reagan when it comes to winning back white, working-class Democratic voters in the interior oblasts: Stop trying to sell them horseshit. The promise that jobs writing code or making windmill parts are going to replace jobs making auto parts is a cruel lie, whether it comes from Bush, Obama, or Trump. Blue-collar workers have heard this story, and it always ends with a flurry of feel-good press releases and then a big fat nothingburger.

  Democrats also need to be deeply aware of the profound cultural trickery my side has used for a generation to steal away your voters, particularly in the Midwest and South. Voters’ anger at the elites isn’t just because they think the educated coastal Masters of the Universe are richer; it’s that the wokeness and politically stifling word games that have come to define far too many in the Democratic political space are tiresome and offensive to them. The idea that a career might be shattered by the incorrect use of a gender pronoun may seem perfectly explicable in New York or San Francisco, but the GOP is really, really good at making voters in the states Democrats must win in 2020 feel like the PC Police will kick down their doors if they wander into the minefield of wokeness.

  Reagan understood that these blue-collar Democrats were the soft underbelly of the other side because he was one of them. He didn’t roll in with 600-page policy documents (looking at you, Elizabeth Warren); he came to them with a working-class origin story. He came to them as a champion and defender.

  Trump took it to another place entirely. The “blue-collar billionaire” element of his story was entertaining but not decisive. Trump channeled their anger and said, both implicitly and explicitly, that hatred was back in style. He told them at rally after rally that his Wall would stop the brown horde from taking their jobs. He told them he’d stop the waves of terrorist Muslims trying to come here from shithole countries. His promise to Make America White Again addressed the darkest cultural space in American politics, and he found willing audiences in the South and Midwest.

  Democrats need to understand that this didn’t have to be real to be effective.

  STOP TALKING TO THE GOD SQUAD

  One element of the GOP’s coalition is ecstatically, eternally, passionately happy with Donald Trump, and that’s the evangelical cohort. In the 2016 exit polls,9 some 26 percent of Americans identified themselves as evangelicals—you know, born again, saved, forgiven, and allowed to fuck porn stars for money. The traditional definition.

  For the 2020 election, the evangelicals are, if you’ll pardon a construction they might understand, damned. You cannot reach them. Catholics? Mainline Protestants? Sure. Evangelicals? Nope.

  Don’t buy into the stories of evangelicals cracking and breaking away because of Trump’s potty mouth or Twitter feed. Trump has transformed the evangelical movement into a more cruel and worldly political tool, validating and verifying their two most powerful desires.

  First, he empowers them to live in an intolerant society separate from the rest of the United States, one defined and bounded by the Constitution and the rule of law not to protect religious liberty but to achieve their narrowly crafted social policy goals through executive fiat. Their deal with this devil is paying off in spades.

  Second, evangelicals have found their golden calf, and they worship him as their new god. The evangelical movement has become a social argument, not a religious calling. Their ability to excuse Trump is the new standard for belief and merit.

  For men who usually seek the spotlight to promote the Word, some of Trump’s most vocal and visible evangelical enablers haven’t come off covered in glory in the Trump era. We’ll leave aside Jerry Falwell Jr.’s adventures with Miami pool boys, creepy-eyed airport pastors screaming about how Jesus wants them to have private jets, and the usual high-dollar megachurch grift.

  In my first book, I wrote about the compromises evangelicals made in the name of winning this end-times battle in the culture war. Since then, more and more of them have stopped even trying to make excuses. They are swept up in the delights of political power on this mortal plane and, with Trump as their prophet, have transformed into something unrecognizable.

  Stop talking to them. You can’t move their numbers, and you can’t change their minds. Trump has spoken, and for them, that now is the Word of the Lord.

  2020 Debate Fact Check no. 7

  During the second of three presidential debates last night in Santa Clarita, California, President Donald Trump made the following claim:

  “I have run the cleanest administration in history. No scandals. And no collusion. When Hillary Clinton was president, we had scandals every day. Sometimes five or six of them. Also, she murdered people when she was president. Imagine if I hadn’t stopped her. It would have been a genocide.”

  FACT CHECK

  From its earliest days, Mr. Trump’s administration has been rocked by firings, imprisonments, corruption…oh what the hell, people. You know the rest.

  Mrs. Clinton never served as president. No, she’s not a murderer. For fuck’s sake, people.

  BE THE PARTY OF MARKETS, FAMILIES, AND SECURITY

  Democrats have an opportunity in 2020 to recapture that sweet element of political felicity that elected John F. Kennedy, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama: optimism. Jimmy Carter depended on the externality of Nixon, and LBJ, well…you know.

  All three of those men were able to recast Democrats as something other than out-of-touch academics, bureaucratic bossypants, and do-as-I-say hypocrites. Hope may not be a strategy, but in the era of public rage and distrust, it’s a start.

  The opportunity to recapture that magic is there because Trumpism is a fundamentally negative, reductive, zero-sum political movement. In Trump’s reality bubble, the song is always the same: The media, the educated, the elites, the immigrants are coming for the Trump voters. They hear the message, hammered home every day on Fox and its online imitators: We’ve lost the culture war. They’re coming to convert you to Islam. The gays want to force your kids to participate in the school holiday drag shows. Christmas is under attack. We’ve lost the values that made America white—oh, pardon me, I meant great.

  Democrats have a generational opportunity to rebrand as the party of markets, families, and security because the referendum against Trump is a powerful contrast on all those points. They have the chance to talk about hope and freedom and uplift, not by selling endless expansions of government but a return to the character and beliefs that shape America more broadly.

  The traditional Republican strengths in all of these categories have been blown apart because
of Trump and Trumpism; the party is now defined only by Trump, who believes in nothing but himself, and sells nothing but his cult. If Democrats are smart, they will understand the market opening here is enormous and revolutionary. Since, as I’ve said, they’re usually not good at speaking American, I’ll outline it for them.

  This is a chance for them to be heroes for the working-class voters Trump snatched up in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and elsewhere. Trump didn’t win them with policy; he won them by promising to be a fierce, unrelenting avatar of their anger at the economy and their disaffection with politics, and a back channel for the not-so-hidden racism and xenophobia. The fake billionaire scanned as more working-class than the middle-class-girl-made-good Hillary Clinton.

  What do you think sells in western Pennsylvania? Mike Rowe, or some stern-faced, super-woke commissar telling a white working-class guy he’s got to give up eating meat, driving a truck, and hunting? You may want him to, but how well do you think that sells? The guy who used to make $37 an hour in a union auto-parts manufacturer doesn’t give a flip flying fuck about climate change, genderless bathroom mandates, or paper straws. He does care about getting and keeping a real job that can support his family and—stop me if you’ve heard this one—his guns and religion.

  I will continue to beat this message until Democrats understand it: This is a game of the Electoral College, not Chapo Trap House. Middle America isn’t on the cusp of being Berkeley or the Upper West Side by a long, long shot.

  Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Michigan are states that define the American working-class image. And my vital home state of Florida, king of the swing states? Guess where the majority of all those retirees flooding the Villages, Sun City Center, the exploding population centers of Central Florida and the west coast, from the Big Bend of the Panhandle down to Marco Island, came from?