Thursday's required reading on the subject of Rats: How They Won't Fck Themselves comes from Bloomberg News, courtesy of Josh Green and Sasha Issenberg, who were allowed inside the guts of the Trump campaign—"Only the best e.coli. Great e.coli!"—to see what's actually going on with it beyond rallies and baseball caps. What they found should scare the hell out of two groups that otherwise have little contact with each other—people who care about the health of our democracy, and Republicans.
As to the former, the big noisy takeaway is an admission from "a senior campaign official" that the primary goal of the actual Trump campaign is to suppress the votes of people who have demonstrated a deep immunity to the appeal of El Caudillo del Mar-A-Lago.
"We have three major voter suppression operations under way," says a senior official. They're aimed at three groups Clinton needs to win overwhelmingly: idealistic white liberals, young women, and African Americans. Trump's invocation at the debate of Clinton's WikiLeaks e-mails and support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership was designed to turn off Sanders supporters. The parade of women who say they were sexually assaulted by Bill Clinton and harassed or threatened by Hillary is meant to undermine her appeal to young women. And her 1996 suggestion that some African American males are "super predators" is the basis of a below-the-radar effort to discourage infrequent black voters from showing up at the polls—particularly in Florida.
OK, so this is nasty and distasteful and dangerous, and it's a wonder that John Lewis doesn't just show up for work some morning with an ax in his hand and murder in his eye. But it can't really be surprising. Suppressing minority voters—rather than, say, earning their support with something beyond "What have you got to lose?"—is now as conventional a piece of Republican electoral strategy as tax cuts and fetus-fondling are.
This is true at all levels, from the local polling place all the way up to the Supreme Court, and has been for quite some time. Hell, it was how William Rehnquist got his start in Republican politics and he went on to a sweet career, if I recall correctly. So having a senior official come clean on it is a nice detail to have, and it will make a lot of noise and, if American democracy continues its historic run of luck, the revelation will piss off enough people at whom the strategy is aimed to bury it under a landslide. I'm not betting heavy either way on that one.
But the story's real news is how the overall Trump operation is built to last, which is the thing that ought to shake Republicans all the way down to the tassels on their loafers. Unless the whole thing is some kind of Potemkin fundraising scam, and I do not dismiss that possibility entirely, any hope that the Republican establishment has of hand-waving Trumpism into ancient history is clearly doomed.
Powered by Project Alamo and data supplied by the RNC and Cambridge Analytica, his team is spending $70 million a month, much of it to cultivate a universe of millions of fervent Trump supporters, many of them reached through Facebook. By Election Day, the campaign expects to have captured 12 million to 14 million e-mail addresses and contact information (including credit card numbers) for 2.5 million small-dollar donors, who together will have ponied up almost $275 million. "I wouldn't have come aboard, even for Trump, if I hadn't known they were building this massive Facebook and data engine," says Bannon. "Facebook is what propelled Breitbart to a massive audience. We know its power." Since Trump paid to build this audience with his own campaign funds, he alone will own it after Nov. 8 and can deploy it to whatever purpose he chooses. He can sell access to other campaigns or use it as the basis for a 2020 presidential run. It could become the audience for a Trump TV network. As Bannon puts it: "Trump is an entrepreneur." Whatever Trump decides, this group will influence Republican politics going forward. These voters, whom Cambridge Analytica has categorized as "disenfranchised new Republicans," are younger, more populist and rural—and also angry, active, and fiercely loyal to Trump. Capturing their loyalty was the campaign's goal all along. It's why, even if Trump loses, his team thinks it's smarter than political professionals. "We knew how valuable this would be from the outset," says Parscale. "We own the future of the Republican Party."
This Parscale cat seems to be the star of the piece, setting up this massive machine out of a storefront in San Antonio. A longtime and devoted Trump employee, Parscale, who was born in where-the-fck-else? Kansas, has his eye squarely on the prize.
Parscale's department not only paid for itself but also was the largest source of campaign revenue. That endeared it to a candidate stingy with other parts of the budget. When Trump fired his campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, Parscale's responsibilities grew, then further still when Lewandowski's replacement, Paul Manafort, flamed out. In June, Parscale, whose prior political experience was a Bexar County tax assessor's race (his client lost), became Trump's digital director and, in many ways, the linchpin of his unusual run.
Meanwhile, Bannon, who's already saving space on his den wall for Paul Ryan's head, has plans for the Republican Party that may not jibe with anyone who's actually trying to steer that listing hulk—Hi, Reince!—at the moment.
Most Republican Party officials ardently hope he'll go away quietly if he loses. But given all that his campaign—and Kushner's group especially—has been doing behind the scenes, it looks likelier that Trump and his lieutenants will stick around. They may emerge as a new media enterprise, an outsider political movement, or perhaps some combination of the two: an American UK Independence Party (UKIP) that will wage war on the Republican Party—or, rather, intensify the war that Trump and Bannon have already begun…As it happens, this cross-pollination of right-wing populist media and politics is already occurring overseas—and Trump's influence on it is unmistakable. In early October, the editor-in-chief of Breitbart London, Raheem Kassam, a former adviser to Nigel Farage, announced he would run for leader of UKIP. His slogan: "Make UKIP Great Again."
As with all things Trump, the whole thing may just be an elaborate plan to turn your money into his money. Or, also as with all things Trump, the man himself may just lose interest in the whole thing and go on to some other doomed-to-fail new venture. (One of the country's night terrors should be that this latter consideration also applies to the presidency, if he should win.) But, as the kidz say, read the whole thing. The stuff between the lines is real and it's ominous.
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