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

by Rick Wilson

  I remain a deep skeptic of impeachment as a political strategy for another reason: He’ll raise a quarter of a billion dollars off it. The boob-bait GOP base emails will never end. Convinced of his impending removal from office, Trump would batter down every possible email inbox to scrape the last $5 from Granny’s Social Security check for his campaign grift. He’s already going to have a hell of a financial advantage; don’t make it worse.

  I’ve argued time and again that the smart play is IIABN—impeachment in all but name—but the great beast of Washington shambles ever forward, its ponderous, inexorable tread leading it toward the inevitable impeachment proceedings against Donald John Trump, forty-fifth president of the United States.

  For the love of God, don’t bet the farm on it unless you can win in the Senate.

  Look, I feel your pain and frustration, but unless you convict Trump in the Senate and destroy his political future, you’re not fucking anyone; you’re just enjoying a masturbatory revenge fantasy. Democrats who make the argument on the impact of impeachment hearings do so based largely on magical political thinking. They’re missing the point.

  This isn’t the Watergate era. Not a single Republican vote beyond Justin Amash can be guaranteed in the House, and the Senate landscape is entirely bleak. Until you can get to two-thirds of the Senate for a conviction, impeachment means nothing. Do you really think Mitch McConnell will do more than laugh? I’d put down 3:2 odds that McConnell could flip two or three Democrats.

  The Senate will exonerate Trump. He will hang his entire campaign on No Collusion, No Obstruction, No Conviction. You think Trump will be shamed, and you’re wrong. He cannot be shamed. Ever. Your people don’t need impeachment to win, given how fired up their base is for his removal; they do need to keep up the pain.

  The Democrats aren’t helpless. They can and should turn 2020 into a spectacle. Let the congressional oversight become a weaponized accountability tool. Open a second front in the war of 2020. Lest you think that the American people would reject such a transparently political ploy, may I remind you of the 2015–2016 Benghazi show trials? How’d those turn out for Hillary Clinton? I’ll tell you how: badly.

  Constant, always-on, televised torture sessions won’t backfire in the way an impeachment would. Show Americans the dregs and scum who work for Trump. Keep beating the drum. Keep dragging Trump’s feeble mental process back to Russia, impeachment, corruption, emoluments, his sons, his little friends Cohen, Manafort, and Stone.

  The trick is to keep up the pace of investigations and flood the zone. Democrats need to up the tempo and visibility of these hearings. You need cameras, spectacle, vivid moments the public can see and remember. This is playing by the rules of your reality-TV show, not Trump’s.

  This isn’t just about Russia and the 2016 election scheme to help Trump. No, this is also about the rich portfolio of corruption and self-dealing that comprises this entire criminal enterprise masquerading as a White House. So what if they’re gone? Bring in Pruitt, Carson, Tillerson, Mattis, Lewandowski, and the rest, both the good and the bad. Get their asses in the chair for public testimony. Drill, baby, drill. You will rivet Trump’s attention to the spot.

  Here’s just one small example of how the House Democrats could drag the administration into a deep mire and frame the 2020 referendum on Trump:

  In July 2019 it was revealed that a secret Facebook group of current and former Customs and Border Patrol agents and officers was a revolting sink of raging racism, abuse, and mockery of immigrants, including dead immigrant children who died while being held in detention centers.

  Every one of the currently serving CBP officers on that group should be dragged in front of the cameras. Drill down. Get into it with them. These are Stephen Miller’s frontline troops in the war on migrants, and they’re a lockstep group of Trump supporters. One even posted a meme called “Lucky Illegal Immigrant Glory Hole Special Starring AOC,” showing the Bronx congresswoman being forced by President Trump to service him orally.

  I’m not a reality-TV producer, but this is the kind of play that is riveting television and will cause Trump to dig deep to defend crooked, sick cops. Adorable moppets telling stories of their time in cages? Call me cynical, but that’s good TV, and in the Trumpverse, good TV counts.

  Trump’s reality is bounded by television. It is defined by cable news. If the Democrats in the House make this an aggressive element in 2019 and 2020, Trump will begin his usual obsessive watch-tweet-sleep cycle and further elevate the stories of his lawless administration.

  You want to drag Don Jr. off the campaign trail. You want Hope Hicks and Michael Cohen and Paul Manafort and Kellyanne Conway and the rest of the parade of his clingers and toadies taking the oath, sitting through the grilling, generating pictures and headlines.

  Impeachment may work, but it’s likely a bridge to nowhere. Investigations serve a valid accountability purpose, and have the corollary benefit of being a great earned-media and political trap for this president.

  Besides, what else are you going to do? Pass an infrastructure bill?

  2020 Debate Fact Check no. 10

  During the final presidential debate last night in Tampa, Florida, President Donald Trump made the following claim:

  “This election is a choice between me, and my satanic opponent. Many evangelicals, who know me and who love me very much, are telling me that the devil himself is behind my opponent. It’s a vote for me—your Lord and Savior, the Chosen One—or a devil-worshipping socialist vegan.”

  FACT CHECK

  Satan, when reached for comment on his electoral preferences, said, “Hell no, bro. I’ve been with the Donald from the very, very start.” When asked if he had any recent contact with the 45th president, the Lord of the Eternal Flame responded, “No, but I’ll be seeing him very, very soon, and we’ll have plenty of time to catch up.”

  The Democratic nominee is a nonpracticing Catholic.

  The Democratic nominee is not a vegan.

  THE TARGET LIST

  The 2020 battle against Trump has to be waged on every front, and by every stakeholder in the coalition against him. The goal is to deprive Trump of having the singular ability to set the topic of conversation every day. The goal is to drive up the friction in his world, to push him into defensive positions. He’s going after your people. Be ready to do the same.

  NO CIVILIANS ON TEAM TRUMP

  I’ve tried to live by the “consultants are never the story” rule, but Trump’s forward-facing consultants are such a parcel of dead-enders, grifters, scumbags, and wannabes that we would be remiss in not making them part of the story.

  I’m not arguing for political attacks on Trump’s consultants just because I’m cruel. I’m arguing for making them part of the story because it isolates Trump from people who could help steer his efforts, and it raises the friction inside the machine. These people are a paranoid, ratty clan of backstabbing villains, and the more you focus the hot light of inquiry on them, the more their grubby little deals and scammy actions are exposed.

  His more dangerous and effective backroom guys are rich targets for opposition research; most don’t want to be seen or known to be working with Trump. Many have separate corporate and lobbying clients. Some are in line for massive paydays by taking their cut of the revenues and expenditures of Trump’s 2020 campaign. Many will craft deals structured to cleverly keep them off Trump’s personal radar. They’ll hide their profits, jack up apparent costs, and play other games with subcontractors and vendors because they don’t want the Trump clan to ask for a piece of the action.

  A current Republican consultant to the RNC told me that Donald Trump is obsessive about what the people working for the campaign and the national committee are making. As always, it all comes down to whether he and the family are getting their slice of the vig.

  The people running scam PACs in Trump’s name are also f
antastic targets.

  With names like the Great America PAC, the American Greatness PAC, the PAC for America PAC, every variation of MAGA-PAC, and the Red Hat PAC for People Who Can’t Read Good and Want to Read Good, the gigantic hoovering sound you’re hearing is millions of olds eagerly sending their money into the swampy vortex of scam PACS in the Trump era. From the earliest days of the movement on the right, the Howard Phillips and Richard Viguerie types discovered a gold mine was out there in the bank accounts of Middle America’s conservative voters, waiting to be tapped one $25 donation at a time.

  The advent of email marketing, consumer profiling, and social media turned these appeals into psychologically compelling, laser-focused weapons where Granny couldn’t hit CLICK HERE TO SAVE AMERICA FROM GODLESS HOMOSEXERS fast enough.

  Conservatives who had made their uneasy peace with Trump were appalled.11 In the old days, the donations would largely be spread across campaigns; donors were interested in the House, Senate, and presidential races. Today, the GOP small-dollar donors love Trump and almost Trump alone. One email fundraiser for a Senate race told me in 2019 that the reason they mention Trump in every sentence of every email is that it’s now the only thing that moves the small-ball donors to click.

  When I was in the business, I enjoyed raising my money the old-fashioned way—from pitch meetings with billionaires who could crap out a $5 million media buy and have it not even constitute a rounding error in their smallest bank account. I was never at home with the idea that some lurid, screaming-headline, fundraising mailer to a little old man on Social Security was a moral option.

  The worst of Trump’s lot on this are David Bossie and Corey Lewandowski. They play an odd role in Trump world: strategists for a man notoriously without a strategy, and advisors to a president who only takes advice from the gibbering demons in his head. Lewandowski, tolerated by Trump for his willingness to get rough with female reporters, his world-class dickishness, and his utter subservience, is a human wrecking ball. His raging anger-management disorder is a weapon and an earned-media opportunity for the Democrats, who should absolutely engineer face-to-face encounters with this guy. Send women. He’s not good with women.

  Lewandowski is rumored to have had an affair with presidential favorite and former aide Hope Hicks, to which Trump told Hicks, “You’re the best piece of tail he’ll ever have.” Because he’s such a gentleman, Lewandowski got into a screaming match with Hicks on the street outside Trump Tower in 2016.12 Stay classy, Corey.

  Long a player in the conservative monetization demimonde, he was yellow-carded in Trump world in May 2019,13 likely for not cutting the Large Adult Sons or Jared in for a slice of the pie. Bossie’s scam PAC used breathless direct-mail pieces featuring pictures of Trump, quotes from and about Trump, and lurid claims that George Soros and Nancy Pelosi are beating down the door to impose full sharia communism and only AN IMMEDIATE DONATION RIGHT NOW will stop them. Sure, the sleaze of direct-mail fundraising has reached new lows in the era of Trump, and the vivid scaremongering now features everything but ISIS werewolves tagging up with MS-13 zombies, but Bossie’s was a cut above.

  In May 2019, Trump figured out how much money was rolling into Bossie’s pockets and realized the scope of the scam. Bossie’s “Presidential Coalition” raised $15.4 million and spent just $425,000 on actual campaign activity. Trump snapped, releasing a statement aimed squarely at Bossie’s low forehead:

  President Trump’s campaign condemns any organization that deceptively uses the president’s name, likeness, trademarks, or branding and confuses voters. There is no excuse for any group, including ones run by people who claim to be part of our coalition, to suggest they directly support President Trump’s reelection or any other candidates, when in fact their actions show they are interested in filling their own pockets with money from innocent Americans’ paychecks and, sadly, retirements. We encourage the appropriate authorities to investigate all alleged scam groups for potential illegal activities.14

  When the Campaign Legal Center broke the Bossie story, it wasn’t a shock to anyone inside the campaign world; Bossie’s long series of hustles seemed to have a high cost and low impact. In one campaign we helped in the late 2000s, Bossie, Roger Stone, and Dick Morris seemed to pocket roughly ten times more in “consulting fees” than hit the airwaves in the ads we made for the effort. It was a shock to one person, however, and that person was Donald Trump.

  “There is a cottage industry of groups targeting vulnerable communities with self-serving borderline scams. What sets the Presidential Coalition apart is that it is explicitly—and successfully—capitalizing on Bossie’s connection with the president of the United States.”15

  So powerful was the condemnation of Trump, virtually the only person willing to defend Bossie was Richard Viguerie, another vampire squid who has spent decades bleeding cash away from credulous old folks for various iterations of scammy undertakings.

  As in 2016, not every Trump supporter is a vile, cousin-fucking, Jew-hating racist shitbird, but in 2020, all the vile, cousin-fucking, Jew-hating racist shitbirds are Trump supporters. This time, he’ll be looking to squeeze out any advantage, and if he sees a path to turn out that faction for him again without opposition, he’ll most certainly take it.

  THE GREATEST HITS ARE COMING BACK

  Trump is like a black hole of sleaze, a singularity of scumbags drawing the worst of the worst into his crappy orbit. Many of these people are, to put it mildly, now long-term guests of the federal government in facilities not known for their turndown service and Pratesi linens. You’d do well to continue to remind the American people just how many of the Best People in Trump’s world are, you know, fucking criminals and scumbags. There’s no downside in reminding Americans about the people around Trump. The list is long, and distinguished only in their scummy opportunism.

  STEVE BANNON

  Bannon is the Maximum Leader of the nationalist-populist Wee Fascists Club and, as an apostate to Trump, a rich target to bring back into the dialogue. It won’t be hard, and it will vex the hell out of the Donald. Trump was for a time under Bannon’s greasy spell but cast Gristle Icarus into the outer darkness for leaking. Because Bannon cannot resist the media, he’ll be back from his supervillain lair in Europe to opine, and opine, and opine on Trump, immigration, nationalism, and how to get the blood of Gypsy children out of your Barbour jacket.

  PAUL MANAFORT

  Paul Manafort is busy right now, mostly in prison, but I’m sure reminding the president of the United States that his former campaign chairman was a mobbed-up Russian money launderer and scumbag now serving a long stretch in the hard yard will go just fine with President Touchy Bastard.

  Also, he’s still in prison.

  MICHAEL COHEN

  Michael Cohen is still a dangerous loose cannon, and has the potential to drag Trump’s dirty laundry into the 2020 campaign. Someone needs to fill up his commissary account, get his wife a book deal, and get Mike talking. He’s angry, Trump fears him, and he’s still got tales to tell.

  ROGER STONE

  Former Trump advisor and a walking example of the Everything Trump Touches Dies rule, Roger Stone has watched his fortune plummet. Abandoned by Trump, his last scam PAC efforts from 2016 are behind him now, and he’s reduced to being a sad old man in a one-bedroom apartment shitposting on Instagram for his legal defense fund.

  Roger will likely soon be spending more time with Paul Manafort in the custody of the federal correctional system.

  PART 6

  EPILOGUE

  I know not all of this book was easy to read for my Democratic friends. I poked you in some soft spots that generally breed a bit of resentment, because the truths are hard, and my elbows are sharp.

  I told you in the beginning I would treat you like a client, and clients don’t pay me to be delicate with their feelings. Some of the advice in this book will be heeded, some not.<
br />
  Do not, as my party did, underestimate the evil, desperate nature of evil, desperate people. Do not come to this fight believing that the Trump team views any action, including outright criminality, as off-limits. This is a battle that decides whether they have an unlimited runway to create a dynastic kleptocracy based on an authoritarian personality cult that makes North Korea look like Sweden, or whether the immune system of the republic kicks in and purges them from the body politic.

  If I was facing Trump, knowing what I’ve learned about him in the past four, long, dark, shitty years, I’d work based off that knowledge. I’d know that there is no bottom. There is no shame. There are no limits. He’ll push beyond all norms and boundaries, because losing this race most likely ends up with a trip to prison. Winning means a century of Trumps. I’d know that politics triumphs over policy, and passion triumphs over ideology. I’d lie, and cheat, and fight so dirty that it would barely be on this side of the law.

  Well? How about it? You’re in a bar fight with bikers, not a fucking Princeton debating society. You gonna pick up the axe handle and start swinging, or you gonna try to win based on a 600-page healthcare plan? Are you going to shut up about the shit you know is political poison in the Rust Belt, or are you afraid of Woke Twitter and Media Matters?

  Are you going to—in the words of Winston Churchill—deserve victory?

  Trump is surrounded by cowards with frightening and tremendous skills, and they understand you as well as I do. We fought alongside them to destroy you and your party for decades, and they’re damn good at it. They will never let you make a mistake without cost. They will take help from any enemy of this nation in order to win, as they proved in 2016.