← The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
How Donald Trump Will Wage His Reëlection Campaign
00:18:16
How Donald Trump Will Wage His Reëlection Campaign
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- [00:00]
A
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- [01:16]
B
This is the Political Scene, a weekly conversation with New Yorker writers and guests about politics. It's Thursday, March 12th. I'm Eric Latch, a staff writer at the New Yorker, filling in for Dorothy Wickenden. I'd rather run against, I think Biden than anybody. I think he's the weakest mentally, and I like running against people that are weak mentally. I think Joe is the weakest up here. The other ones Donald Trump may soon get his wish. After racking up victories on Super Tuesday and in this week's primaries in Michigan, Missouri and Mississippi, Joe Biden looks very likely to become the 2020 Democratic presidential nominee. After a historically long primary season, we appear to be on the cusp of the general election. Donald Trump never really stopped running for president. He filed for reelection the day of his inauguration in 2017. After more than 12 months of Democrats jostling among themselves for votes, they, as in Biden, presumably will soon come directly up against the operation that Trump has been building all this time. Andrew Morantz, a New Yorker staff writer, recently wrote about Brad Parscale, Trump's 2020 campaign manager and the architect of Trump's digital election strategy. Andrew joins me to discuss what he learned about Trump's campaign tactics in 2016, particularly when it comes to data collection and targeted advertising, and what we might expect in the general election. Andrew, welcome. We're recording this in my apartment because we're all working remotely this week.
- [02:42]
C
Yeah, thanks for having me. I don't feel that. That I'm getting sick from anything in this lovely bedroom. And the walls are a lovely shade of blue.
- [02:50]
B
Yeah. So I guess the place to start is with Brad Parscale, who, when the 2016 campaign was happening, was kind of a background figure in Trump world. And then after Trump's surprise victory, kind of emerges as a kind of central player. He's now been elevated to campaign manager of the 2020 campaign. So can you tell us about his trajectory, sort of where he comes from and how he links. Ends up linking up with Trump?
- [03:14]
C
Yeah. So Brad Parscale, he was actually pretty savvy about staying out of the media limelight for a while. I think that was part of his strategy. Originally, he was a guy from Kansas. He played college basketball in Texas, ended up getting an injury and no longer being a college athlete, and just studied business. And from all accounts, from folks who knew him then, he, you know, he was interested in being a good businessman, being a competitor, trying to make his mark on society in some unspecified way. And the way he ended up finding was through web development, basically building websites. For a few years, he was just building websites for your local, you know, landscaping company, and, you know, nothing particularly remarkable. And then in 2012ish, he lands a big client named Donald Trump who wants him to build websites for Trump Wineries and for Melania's skin care products. And, you know, this is just a big client, and he's just sort of doing it for money. Although, notably, the way he got the contract was by bidding way lower than anyone else.
- [04:17]
B
He. But he's, you know, there's different aspects of Trump's business that sort of migrate into politics when he starts running for president. So it seems like Parscale is part of that, right?
- [04:27]
C
Yeah, he, you know, first of all, whether through intuition or through a lucky guess or whatever, he nails two of the main things that you need if you're going to be a Trump family loyalist, which is frugality and loyalty. And so he bids way low. They call him and say, hey, are you missing a zero on this proposal? And then he is extremely conspicuously loyal to the family. He basically gets considered one of the family and through Jared Kushner, he then has an in. You know, Jared Kushner sort of taps Brad Parscale to essentially run everything social media related for the campaign.
- [05:02]
B
Yeah.
- [05:03]
C
So over Parscale's career, his web development sort of migrates into search engine optimization and web marketing through Google search and through YouTube ads, and all these. All these ways that instead of just building a website and hoping people find it, you go find the people and bring their eyeballs where you want them.
- [05:20]
B
Yeah. And so what does it look like? Because I think a distinction that your reporting helpfully makes is between the kind of disinformation or, like, illegal abuse of social media that got a lot of attention right after 2016 campaign, but then the huge legal terrain on which these campaigns operate, that has to do with bringing to bear all of the data and pinpoint accuracy that the Internet allows to, like, get directly at the voters you want to get at.
- [05:52]
C
I think this is really the key thing, is that we spend so much time obsessing over where were laws broken, where were campaign finance regulations violated? And. And, of course we should. Right. I mean, if foreign entities are paying in rubles to influence our elections, that's a big deal. The question, though, is one of scale. And the Internet research agency bought 3,500 ads on Facebook during the 2016 election. The Trump campaign themselves bought either thousands or millions, depending on how you measure. So there's lots of stuff you can do without breaking any rule, without breaking any terms of service, without being against the law that are bad for democracy and bad for humanity. You can lie, you can be a racist, you can be a climate change denier. No, none of that is against the law. It just so happens to be an existential threat to our survival. So it's just a little too neat when we just sort of obsess over, okay, where was there a technical violation of the rules, when actually it's sort of a frog boiling in water situation. You're looking for the one illegal source of heat, when actually the problem is just the heat itself.
- [06:52]
B
Yeah. And one of the things, I think, that makes Parscale such an interesting figure and such an appropriate sort of sideman to Trump is that it seems so hard to parse the effectiveness from the bragging. And, you know, that seems to be a big part of deciding whether stuff matters is answering the question of whether it even works. So how are we supposed to. How are we supposed to decide that?
- [07:15]
C
Yeah, I think with this stuff, as is often the case, it's somewhere between this is the single magic potion and the other extreme, which is it's snake oil. It has no effect. I think it's impossible to look at the entire data collection, micro targeting social media world and say that has no effect. People are spending more and more time on social media. It's where their attention is, it's where their eyeballs are. If you can effectively target them and get them to pay attention, whether it's to ads or to organic content or to just little wisps of things that they see out of the side of their eye and then, you know, go away from. It's got to be doing something. It just has to be doing something. That said, it's not the silver bullet. It's not the thing that, oh, if you just crack that code, you can get a 20 point swing in an election, but you can maybe get a two point swing. And that's usually enough.
- [08:05]
B
Part of this is also the way that the social media companies themselves were participating in this because it was a potential big business line. Talk to us about like the embed system and how these companies were sort of working hand in hand with, with the Trump campaign and what that meant. Basically.
- [08:24]
C
Yeah. So this is one place where there was a real sharp distinction between the two campaigns. Clinton and the Trump campaign, the Clinton and the Trump campaign. In 2016, the Clinton campaign was much more fully staffed. They had a lot more experts in house. And the experts were essentially saying, we can do this ourselves. We don't need help from the big tech companies. But the big tech companies, Facebook, Google, Twitter, they were offering help to both campaigns. And the Trump campaign was like, we don't know what we're doing. We'll take that help. So often someone like Parscale is credited for being this single minded genius who saw the future, when in fact he was sort of more of a resourceful, hard working guy who took what he could get. And one of the things he could get was that these companies were sending embeds, as they're called. The companies don't like that term, but I do. They were sending people to essentially embed within the campaign the way you, you know, a military reporter might embed with the troops or whatever. And they would go to Brad Parscale's makeshift office in San Antonio, which was called Project Alamo. They would sit side by side with Trump campaign staffers and work for them essentially. Now the reason that the companies wanted to do this is because by sending a Facebook employee to San Antonio and saying, hey, I bet you guys didn't Know, there's this one cool thing you can do with a brand lift study, or there's this one cool thing called a custom audience or whatever. By telling the campaign that was a possibility, you get them to spend more money on your platform, but you also materially help the campaign. I mean, Parscale himself, when he was interviewed about this on Frontline, he said, if you have a car, but you never had a manual, you might not know that there's this button you can push that makes your fuel efficiency better. It makes you go a little bit faster. All those differences matter a huge amount when every presidential election is essentially a 50, 50 election.
- [10:10]
B
And so you end up talking to the embed that Facebook sent. Tell us who that guy is.
- [10:15]
C
So he tried to stay anonymous during the campaign. As soon as the campaign was over, they wanted to give him credit for how much he helped. They called him an MVP of the campaign, and they sort of outed him inadvertently as this guy, James Barnes, who was 28, I think, and was this guy from Tennessee who had always sort of considered himself an evangelical Republican. And he had this kind of crisis of conscience. After helping this campaign really materially to win the election. He then ended up voting for Hillary Clinton, and then is now working to essentially use the tricks of the trade now from outside the company to try to defeat Donald Trump. And part of the thesis of him and the people he works with is that the Democrats need to get their act together. They have been way too slow to adopt these tactics. They would feel that you can't unilaterally disarm. You have to do what it takes to win. And if you don't have an effective social media operation, you're just hampering your chances of ever winning.
- [11:16]
D
What the hell is going on right now and why is it happening like this? At Wired, we're obsessed with getting to the bottom of those questions on a daily basis, and maybe you are, too. I'm Katie Drummond, the global editorial director of Wired, and I'm hosting our new podcast series, the Big Interview. Each week, I'll sit down with some of the most interesting, provocative and influential people who are shaping our right now. Big Interview conversations are fun.
- [11:43]
B
I want a shark that.
- [11:44]
D
That eats the Internet, that turns it all off, unfiltered and unafraid.
- [11:49]
B
So in a lot of ways, I.
- [11:50]
C
Try to be an antidote to the unimaginable faucet of reactionary content that you see online. To the best of my ability, every.
- [11:57]
D
Week, we're going to offer you the ultimate luxury of Our times, meaning and context. True or false. You, Brian Johnson, the man sitting across from me, one day, at some point, as of yet undefined in the future, you will die. False. Tell me more. Listen to the big interview right now in the same place you find WIRED's Uncanny Valley podcast. Subscribe or follow wherever you get your podcasts.
- [12:26]
B
Yeah, so. So maybe that's a good place to sort of transition to what the Trump campaign. What. What are the lessons that they have taken from 2016 that they're thinking about and applying now as we go into the general election. 2020.
- [12:42]
C
Yeah, well, so I think there's a lot of things here that are worth teasing apart. Right. On the one hand, some of the things the Trump campaign has done and is continuing to do is just sort of good, smart campaigning, you know, making sure everyone who wants to be in touch with you is in touch with you. Making sure every time you have a rally, you collect everyone's phone number. What the Trump campaign is also willing to do is lie, allegedly cheat, allegedly steal, get pushed right up to the bounds of racism and inappropriateness and insult. And those are things that I don't think the Democrats should do. Right. So it often gets conflated into like, well, should we get dirty? Should we fight fire with fire?
- [13:19]
B
You mean here with digital ads? You mean pushing out messages that are misleading or downright false?
- [13:26]
C
Yeah, well, and there's a lot of gray area. So there are some that are just purely false. Like there was a big sort of flagship one where back in October, Trump, who was already just assuming he was going to run against Biden, his campaign made an ad essentially alleging that the real villain in the Ukraine corruption scandal was in fact, Joe Biden and not Donald Trump, which is false. And just. It's so obviously a false premise that the Biden campaign wrote to Facebook and said, you should probably take it down, because I don't think they use the word defamatory, but they said it's false, and Facebook said, we actually are not gonna do that because politicians are allowed to lie on our platform. And that's not against the rules.
- [14:10]
B
Yeah.
- [14:11]
C
Now they got a huge amount of heat for that.
- [14:14]
B
Zuckerberg, how much of this is philosophical and how much of this is business?
- [14:20]
C
I would argue that it's very hard to make someone believe something when his salary depends on believing the opposite. And in Mark Zuckerberg's case, he has spent literally his entire adult life pumping himself up around the premise that this thing that he made in his dorm room is going to fundamentally reshape the world for the better. And the more he gets evidence to the contrary, the more he has to fit it through some weird cognitive dissonance into this model of no, in the long run, it's ultimately going to be better for everyone. And everyone who is telling me the opposite just doesn't see the long, the big picture.
- [14:53]
B
And there's another aspect of this that you highlight in your article, which is that there used to be a presumption with negative advertising that if you ran an ad that was racist, that as many quote, unquote, non racists as racists might see it. And so there was a potential cost, there was a potential political cost to running an ad that was racist because you might just offend many, many people, many, many potential voters.
- [15:21]
C
But.
- [15:21]
B
But what platforms like Facebook allow you to do is potentially only show your racist ad to racists. And so the cost of blowback, you know, you just remove it.
- [15:32]
C
Yeah, and we should be clear, you know, this stuff did happen previous to Donald Trump. He didn't invent racist ads. You know, there was, you know, the Willie Horton ad being the most famous example. But yet you would. George Bush paid a political cost for that ad. In Facebook land, there might have been dozens of Willie Horton style ads that.
- [15:54]
B
We never knew about, just nobody saw except the people with the Trump campaign. And yeah, you're right. I mean, everybody can use these tools, but the Trump campaign was very excitedly using them.
- [16:03]
C
Everyone can. And I think the political realist part of me would argue maybe should be using these tools. Now there's a larger sense of like, should these tools exist and should anybody be using them? But that whole thing aside, it's not a level playing field with respect to how different messages travel. It just is the case that the way the algorithms are built on these platforms around emotional incitement and engagement, it is easier to rile people up with xenophobia and jingoism than it is with stronger together.
- [16:35]
B
And there's two aspects to the micro targeting. One of it seems to be to try to drive or juice your supporters, your turnout. But then there's the suppressive side, which is targeting people who might support your opponent and trying to bum them out or dissuade them from voting. So what's the latest thinking on sort of how that worked in 2016, how it might work this year?
- [17:01]
C
Yeah, well, I think it's appropriate to use terms like bumming people out, because the fundamental engine of social media is emotion. That's always been the case. But the fundamental engine of cable TV is emotion, or for that matter, tabloid headlines. But with social media, you're getting feedback in both directions. So you're not only trying to pump sensationalist stuff into people to hope they don't change the channel, you're also getting feedback from them saying, oh, I'm smashing the rage comment button, or I'm smashing the retweet button or whatever. You get to see how they're responding to it. And the more quickly they respond to it, the more powerful and the more viral it is. It's not like it's impossible to run a hope and change candidate ever again. But there is a disadvantage now, because hope and change and your chest swelling with pride, those are emotions, but they're not as immediate and sharp and powerful as emotions like fear and disgust and loathing. So, you know, you can try it, and we're going to, I think, see Biden try it. But there's an inherent disadvantage built in there because he's not running on a campaign of quickly lock the door, there's someone coming.
- [18:09]
B
Yeah. Another topic you write about is data and data collection. And Parscale has said that he and Trump World have turned the Republican National Committee into one of the biggest data collection organizations going. Is that true? Is that a concern? You know, is that the data collection, should that be the concern for people in general, for voters, for, you know, in terms of how we participate in our government?
- [18:38]
C
Yeah, I think everyone should be concerned about data collection just as a general matter. And, yeah, look, I mean, often with this stuff, I would encourage people to think systemically when there's a temptation to think personally. A lot of times you hear people say, well, what are they doing with my data? Or how does this affect my privacy? How does this affect my addiction or my kid's phone addiction? And the larger set of concerns to me is sort of a tragedy of the Commons issue. It might actually not affect you in any immediate negative way that Google knows where you are all the time, but if Google knows where everyone is at all times, we don't know exactly what they can do with that. So the point with our politics is it's hard to ratchet this stuff down. Once you flood politics with money, once you flood politics with all these data points, where the more they know about you, the more they can target you in ways that not only feel vaguely creepy, but also carve you up into these tiny slivers in an immediate sort of cycle by cycle sense. Of course, you understand why if your opponent's doing it, you want to do it too, but it's hard to see how we come back from this stuff. Like, you know, in the short term, I get why people are into it, but in the long term, it's pretty terrifying.
- [19:54]
B
Yeah. Andrew, thanks so much.
- [19:57]
C
Yeah, thanks.
- [20:02]
B
Andrew Morantz is a staff writer and the author of Online Extremists, Techno Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation. This has been the political scene. You can subscribe to this and other New Yorker podcasts by searching for the New Yorker in your podcast app and find more political analysis and commentary on new yorker.com feel free to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. Our theme music is by Russell Gillespie. This program was produced by Alex Barron and Kylie Warner. For newyorker.com I'm Eric Laatsch, filling in for Dorothy Wickenden. Right now we are living through some of the most tumultuous political times our country has ever known. I'm David Remnick, and each week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, I'll try to make sense of what's happening alongside politicians and thinkers like Cory Booker, Nancy Pelosi, Liz Cheney, Tim Waltz, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Newt Gingrich, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Charlamagne, tha God, and and so many more. That's all in the New Yorker Radio Hour. Wherever you listen to podcasts from PRX.