Month: January 2020

TRUMP’S DIGITAL CAMPAIGN LEAVES DEMOCRATS IN THE DUST

Although he has been an acute and chronic failure in so many ways, Donald Trump is an accomplished high achiever in the arena that matters most to him: building a base that will deliver votes. 

Leading Democratic strategists scornfully view Trump as a vile malignancy on the body politic, but they are in reverential awe of his ability to use social media as an organizing platform.  David Plouffe ran the 2008 Obama campaign, heralded at the time for its innovations in social media use. In an interview with Politico, Plouffe said that advantage now clearly belongs to Trump. He called the digital imbalance a “DEFCON 1 situation.” Numerous Democratic operatives have recently expressed similar concern over Trump’s ability to digitally out maneuver their party (here, here and here). 

Here’s what they’re talking about:  The fulcrum of Trump’s campaign is a social media engine capable of targeting messages to millions of MAGA types and wannabes. These ads, mostly on Facebook, are far different than conventional political advertising in that they are aimed not just at persuading, but at organizing a movement. With Facebook’s help, they are seen only by those whose online activity has been Trump-friendly. That’s just the starting point. Those ads come with an ask: sign up for a rally, take a survey, make a donation, buy MAGA merchandise.  The responses give the campaign names, zip codes, email, phone numbers, and a ton of demographic data. 

With all of that information – in tandem with Facebook analytics on users who “like” memes and posts about gun rights, undocumented immigrants, and white supremacy, etc. – the campaign’s targeting escalates into microtargeting.  That opens the door on tailoring each social media ad to hyper-specific groups, like 50-something, white male gun owners in the Florida panhandle who own a motorcycle and a dog and attend church infrequently.  This sort of microtargeting is not a Trump exclusive by any means.  His campaign has simply taken it to heights never before seen. In 2016, for example, according to an internal Facebook report, the Clinton campaign placed 66,000 unique ads on the platform, a drop in the bucket compared with Trump’s total of 5.9 million different ads. 

Although Trump and Facebook executives have had their differences, they share one critical value: lying.  The social media platform has been adamant about its policy of running political ads even if they are utterly false.   His campaign, of course, has been only too happy to provide the falsehoods.  Trump’s Facebook ads have spun fairytale story lines about his protection of pre-existing conditions, abating the North Korean nuclear threat, saving America from an imminent Iranian attack, among a plethora of other fantasies. He turned his own impeachment into a fund-raising bonanza, peppered with blatantly false claims about his supposed victimhood and Joe Biden’s imaginary corruption.

As of January 5, Trump’s campaign has spent $35 million to reach 2020 voters through precision-targeted ads on Google and Facebook. The top Democratic candidates have spent a tiny fraction of that amount on digital advertising.  Joe Biden, the purported front-runner, has spent less than $5 million on social media ads. In fact, he recently pulled what little advertising he had on Facebook and moved it to television.  

People spend an estimated one-third to one-half of their lives on their phones and other internet-connected devices. Through microtargeting, Trump is constantly reaching out to, and expanding, his base there.  Meanwhile, Biden and many of his fellow Democratic candidates have slight to no visibility in that digital infrastructure.   While they use more conventional advertising to quibble over Medicare for all versus a public option, Trump is using his online advertising to organize, to fire up his expanding MAGA army through incendiary links to false information about “criminal immigrant invaders” and the “far-left corrupt socialists” who love them.

This Trump advantage gets worse, exponentially worse.  Through artificial intelligence, the campaign is able to have Facebook match target constituencies with what are called “look-alikes”, hundreds of thousands of people who share the same backgrounds and political beliefs as those in the target group.  Once the Trumpers pull new recruits from the look-alikes, that new subset is used to cull more of the same.  Rinse and repeat. Therein lies the growing core of fired-up true believers who Trump hopes will walk through fire on election day to give him a second term.

The campaign has been building this social media organizing machine for more than three years. Trump’s every crazy, insipid, illegal action is put on a digital assembly line where it is completely fictionalized, re-spun, and fed to his fans so that they can be identified and used to reproduce themselves in their own images. For Team Trump, this is the path that will deliver four more years to the only president whose approval ratings never made it to the 50 percent mark.

But hark, help is on the way.  Under the heading of better late than never, there are two recent encouraging signs that Democrats may get their digital act together. Former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg has spent $25 million on Google and Facebook advertising. Although he’s a late entrant and a long-shot candidate for the Democratic nomination, his ads are designed to take sharp swipes at Trump, an approach the billionaire says he will continue even if he is not the nominee.

Although Bloomberg’s ad buy is a significant improvement, it will not, by itself, counter the Trump social media onslaught.  Enter “Four is Enough” a unique digital organizing campaign headed by Plouffe, Obama’s former campaign manager, and Tara McGowan, a 33-year-old digital guru who cut her political teeth on the Obama campaign. She is also the CEO of a nonprofit called Acronym that helps progressive groups organize online. They are in the process of raising $75 million to build an online organizing effort, particularly in the swing states that will determine electoral college results.    McGowan told the New York Times that the Four is Enough campaign was the result of “screaming into the abyss” about the Democrats’ weak digital presence, and “finally deciding to take matters into our own hands.”

Let’s hope that it works. As we learned in 2016, being right on the facts doesn’t win elections. Organizing does, and that means using every available digital tool to mobilize disgusted, disgruntled and depressed Americans who know full well that, when it comes to Donald Trump, four years is way more than enough.

RINGING IN THE NEW YEAR WITH WORLD WAR THREE

If you squint your eyes just right, and try very hard to look beyond and beneath the wreckage of our national politics, it’s possible to find signs of hope, of a new dawn ready to rise out of the ashes of our Trumpian despair. Really. Well, sort of. Anyway, I wanted my first blog post of 2020 to focus on the hopeful, on a vision of transcendence and progressive change. I had 16 pages of notes and was all set to make the case for optimism.  Then our president ordered the assassination of a top Iranian general, and the deafening rat-a-tat-tat of the war drums quickly drowned out all aspirations of hope and change.   

Happy New Year, same as the old year. Only worse. And we thought 2019 got off to a bad start when Trump shut most of the government down.  We should be so lucky to have a shutdown right now. It might have prevented Friday’s drone strike that killed Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, Iran’s top security and intelligence commander.  

Instead, we woke up on the third day of this new year to a cascade of depressing news. Yes, Suleimani orchestrated the deaths of hundreds or thousands (the Prevaricator in Chief says millions) of American and Iraqi troops and citizens. He was also revered as almost a cult figure by Iran’s leaders and allies.  The country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, promised “forceful revenge”.  

As a result, our country went into to full-scale war prep.  The State Department warned all U.S. citizens to leave Iraq immediately.  Thousands of American troops are on their way to the Middle East. U.S. businesses and government agencies were told to prepare for Iranian cyber attacks. “World War III” trended on Twitter.  The Selective Service’s website crashed after being inundated by young men worrying about getting drafted into battle.

Trump, meanwhile, took a hero’s bow at a Miami campaign rally, boasting about Suleimani’s execution-by-drone. “He was planning a very major attack,” said the president, “and we got him!” The crowd roared, and Trump took it to the next level with a single declarative sentence: “God is on our side.”  

If all this had gone down at any other time in our history, the prudent and rational course for us would have been to take a deep breath and engage in watchful waiting as events unfolded.  As unseemly as an assassination of another country’s leader might appear, we would also be mindful of how much we don’t know about the underlying facts of the kill order. The president, after all, is surrounded by military and intelligence experts who carefully weigh all available facts before advising the commander in chief.  If they all thought killing one high ranking Iranian leader would save many American lives, that would warrant a green light in many moral paradigms.  

Sadly, this is not any other time in history. This is now.  This is Donald J. Trump.  His narrative about killing the bad guy in order to save American lives can only be viewed through the lens of a pathological liar, one who, according to the Washington Post’s fact checker, made 15,413 false or misleading statements during his first 1,055 days in office.  He has also demonstrated a propensity to ignore the advice of the experts who surround him, bragging about how, due to the power of his instinct, he knows more than any general.  

Then comes Trump’s single most important behavioral characteristic, at least in terms of predicting the choice he will make in any given situation. He will, without fail, follow the impulse to do whatever he thinks at the time will make him look the strongest and the winningest to his adoring MAGA base.  As a piece of leverage, last year’s government shutdown was a dismal failure for the administration. Trump’s base, however, showered him with adoration for messing up a government they disdain in order to build a wall to keep brown people from “invading” America.  The same please-the-base decision making was responsible for putting children in cages, the transgender military ban and withdrawing from the Paris Climate Treaty, to name but a few. 

The dynamic also explains why Trump rejected the advice of military experts last fall and announced a sudden withdrawal of troops from Syria, leaving our Kurdish allies to fend for themselves.  The president hit the campaign rally circuit in October with boasts of “No more endless wars. I’m bringing them all home.” He basked in the dopamine of cheering crowd approval. 

Not even three months later, the Trump administration is sending thousands of troops into the middle east, gearing up for an Iranian retaliatory strike in response to Suleimani’s killing. Most authorities on the middle east say we are closer to a full-blown war in that region than at any time in the past several decades.  Some say we are already at war, that the drone strike on Suleimani was an act of war.  

How is it that the same president who took bows before a cheering crowd for ending wars is now getting the same reaction for starting one?  Chalk it up to the magic of a freeze frame presidency.  This guy doesn’t do strategy, only tactics in the moment. And whatever that moment portends is all that counts.  Shortly after Suleimani was killed, Trump triumphantly announced that he had “ended a war”, even while thousands of American troops were on their way to the middle east in preparation for Iran’s retaliatory strike. In Trump Time, that neither counted nor mattered.

What makes this horrendous situation even worse is the current political atmosphere in which congressional Republicans have abandoned all moral calculus in order to march in lockstep with a president they know is, at best, unhinged, out of fear that Trump will disparage them on Twitter. These GOP leaders have spent the past few months insisting that there is nothing wrong with a president asking foreign countries to interfere in our elections, a revolting abandonment of long-held norms and values. Add to that now, the party’s acquiescence with the assassination of another country’s leader. 

This rapid and deep abdication of the moral underpinnings of our democracy will one day be laid bare in our history books.  The days we are now struggling through will be correctly portrayed as a major stain on what has been known as the “American Experiment”.  The only control we have over the content of those pages will be the length of that stain, and how we go about removing it and taking our country back.