parscale 2 campaign

main capt 619

see cloud commerce TM

promoted primary 3/18 trump 2020 

insider trade scam?

mueller collusion dmitri simes oppo bill clinto

see parscale on facebook roll, working the refs, dirty tricks dark posts 2020 online campaign

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/04/brad-parscale/

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/04/brad-parscale/

see cloud bak

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/trumps-campaign-files-frivolous-lawsuit-against-tv-station-for-airing-attack-ad-slamming-his-coronavirus-response

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Trump campaign sues Wisconsin TV station over ad using his words on coronavirus

By Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America - Donald Trump, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=52647057

Written by Alex Henderson April 14, 2020

President Donald Trump’s initial response to the coronavirus pandemic has been the subject of various attack ads, including one from the Lincoln Project (a group of Never Trump conservatives that includes attorney George Conway) and one from Priorities USA (a Democratic super PAC). The theme of those ads is that Trump hasfailed to take the coronavirus threat seriously. And in Wisconsin, Trump’s reelection campaign has filed a frivolous lawsuit against WJFW-TV (which airs NBC programming in North-Central Wisconsin) for airing the Priorities USA ad — calling it “false and defamatory,” claiming that the ad takes Trump’s words out of context.

The campaign filed the lawsuit on Monday, April 13 in Price County Circuit Court. The ad by Priorities USA, called “Existential Threat,” depicts a graph and timeline that uses actual statements Trump made in January and February — for example, “This is their new hoax” and “We have it totally under control.” A variety of Trump critics, from liberals and progressives to centrists to Never Trump conservatives, have been using these quotes to tar and feather Trump and demonstrate that he spent months downplaying the severity of coronavirus. But the Trump campaign, in its lawsuit against WJFW-TV, takes issue with the way Trump’s words “the coronavirus” and “this is their new hoax” are used together — arguing that the ad makes it sound like Trump was saying “the coronavirus, this is their new hoax” as a single sentence. However, the intonation in Trump’s voice makes it sound like two different statements made at different times: Trump’s tone of voice is much lower on “the coronavirus” than it is on “This is their new hoax.”

Law & Crime reporter Jerry Lambe explains, “The tone and deflection of the speech between the first and second phrases is quite different, but the Trump campaign’s lawsuit suggests the text on the screen contains a comma to connect the phrases in a way which suggests they were uttered together.”

Trump’s “this is their new hoax” assertion was made at a South Carolina rally on February 28. Downplaying the threat that coronavirus posed in the U.S. — even though it had killed thousands of people in China — the president argued that Democrats were using coronavirus as a “hoax” just as they had used impeachment and the Ukraine scandal as a “hoax.” Trump’s campaign is claiming that he was saying that Democrats were perpetrating a hoax, not that coronavirus itself was a hoax. But clearly, Trump was downplaying coronavirus’ severity and the threat that it posed in the U.S. — where, according to John Hopkins University in Baltimore and CNN’s coronavirus/Hopkins page, it had killed more than 23,600 people as of Tuesday morning, April 14.

In the lawsuit, Trump’s campaign argues that “Trump’s actual remarks demonstrate that he was specifically referring to the Democrats’ politicization of the coronavirus pandemic when he used the word ‘hoax.’”

Lambe also points out that although the lawsuit “refers to the defendant as WJFW-NBC,” it “is formally filed against Northland Television, LLC, the corporate owner of the local affiliate. The affiliate is not owned by NBC but broadcasts the network’s programming.”

The Lincoln Project’s attack ad, titled “Distraction,” is equally scathing. In that ad, anti-Trump conservatives tear apart the absurd claim that Trump, in January and February, was distracted from coronavirus because of his impeachment. That ad argues that when the World Health Organization (WHO) was warning that coronavirus was a “global health emergency,” Trump was too busy with “campaign rallies and golfing” to seriously address the crisis:

Priorities USA has released an official response to the Wisconsin lawsuit, asserting, “This is pretty simple: Donald Trump doesn’t want voters to hear the truth, and he’s trying to bully TV stations into submission. The truth is that Trump ignored warnings from experts and his own team and downplayed the coronavirus even as it spread unchecked across the country and the world. Americans are now suffering as a result of his inaction. We will never stop airing the facts and holding the president accountable for his actions.”

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/trump-campaign-lashes-out-in-letter-to-jeff-sessions-accusing-him-of-making-a-delusional-claim/

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/trumps-campaign-chief-has-been-funneling-money-to-don-jrs-girlfriend-and-eric-trumps-wife-report

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Trump’s campaign chief has been funneling money to Don Jr’s girlfriend and Eric Trump’s wife: report

Written by Alex Henderson March 10, 2020

President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign includes not only Donald Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump, but also, the women two of Trump’s sons have been romantically involved with. And according to the New York Times, the president’s campaign manager has been funneling money to Kimberly Guilfoyle (Trump Jr.’s girlfriend) and Eric Trump’s wife, Lara Trump.

The payments, the Times reported, were made through Parscale Strategy, a private, San Antonio, Texas-based company owned by the president’s campaign manager, Brad Parscale.

HuffPost’s Mary Papenfuss notes that the “family benefits” are “linked to a network of politically connected private companies — operating with the support and help of Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner — that have charged roughly $75 million since 2017 to the Trump reelection campaign.”

Guilfoyle is a former Fox News pundit who left that right-wing cable news channel in 2018 and has been dating Trump Jr. for two years. In January, Trump’s campaign announced that Guilfoyle would be leading joint fundraising between Trump’s reelection campaign and the Republican National Committee (RNC).

Long before she dated Trump Jr., Guilfoyle was married to Democrat Gavin Newsom — who was mayor of San Francisco at the time and went on to become governor of California.

According to the Associated Press (AP), Lara Trump was hired as a senior consultant in early 2017 by Giles-Parscale — another company owned by Parscale. In January, Lara Trump mocked former Vice President Joe Biden’s stuttering and said, “Joe, can you get it out? Can you get the words out, Joe?”

Adam Brewster

@adam_brew

The Trump Campaign is in Des Moines with the Women for Trump bus tour. @LaraLeaTrump, Senior Adviser @mercedesschlapp and Nat’l Press Sec @kayleighmcenany are speaking

Joe Biden (Text Join to 30330)

@JoeBiden

I’ve worked my whole life to overcome a stutter. And it’s my great honor to mentor kids who have experienced the same. It’s called empathy. Look it up. https://twitter.com/SarahHuckabee/status/1207863935426322432 …

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see voter suppression

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-27/inside-the-trump-bunker-with-12-days-to-go

OMFG

Crucially, this recording sets in context the claim by a senior Trump campaign source that “we have three major voter suppression operations under way”,made to Bloomberg in October 2016. By then Cambridge Analytica was working simultaneously with the Trump campaign; the Defeat Crooked Hillary Super PAC, overseen personally by Rebekah Mercer; an underground platform doing psychographic microtargeting of congregations and religious communities;the far-right Media Research Center; theNational Rifle Association; and a massive, secretively funded campaign by the National Sports Shooting Federation of gun companies.

How to make black youth not vote

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-27/inside-the-trump-bunker-with-12-days-to-go

...Several things jump out. Despite Trump’s claim that he doesn’t believe the polls, his San Antonio research team spends $100,000 a week on surveys (apart from polls commissioned out of Trump Tower) and has sophisticated models that run daily simulations of the election. The results mirror those of the more reliable public forecasters—in other words, Trump’s staff knows he’s losing. Badly. “Nate Silver’s results have been similar to ours,” says Parscale, referring to the polling analyst and his predictions at FiveThirtyEight, “except they lag by a week or two because he’s relying on public polls.” The campaign knows who it must reach and is still executing its strategy despite the public turmoil: It’s identified 13.5 million voters in 16 battleground states whom it considers persuadable, although the number of voters shrinks daily as they make up their minds.

Trump’s team also knows where its fate will be decided. It’s built a model, the “Battleground Optimizer Path to Victory,” to weight and rank the states that the data team believes are most critical to amassing the 270 electoral votes Trump needs to win the White House. On Oct. 18 they rank as follows: Florida (“If we don’t win, we’re cooked,” says an official), Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Georgia.

Trump believes he possesses hidden strength that may only materialize at the ballot box. At rallies, he’s begun speculating that the election will be like “Brexit times five,” implying that he’ll upend expectations much as the Brexit vote shocked experts who didn’t believe a majority of Britons would vote to leave the European Union. Trump’s data scientists, including some from the London firm Cambridge Analytica who worked on the “Leave” side of the Brexit initiative, think they’ve identified a small, fluctuating group of people who are reluctant to admit their support for Trump and may be throwing off public polls.

Still, Trump’s reality is plain: He needs a miracle. Back in May, newly anointed, he told Bloomberg Businessweek he would harness “the movement” to challenge Clinton in states Republicans haven’t carried in years: New York, New Jersey, Oregon, Connecticut, California. “I’m going to do phenomenally,” he predicted. Yet neither Trump’s campaign nor the RNC has prioritized registering and mobilizing the 47 million eligible white voters without college degrees who are Trump’s most obvious source of new votes, as FiveThirtyEight analyst David Wasserman noted.

To compensate for this, Trump’s campaign has devised another strategy, which, not surprisingly, is negative. Instead of expanding the electorate, Bannon and his team are trying to shrink it. “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.

On Oct. 24, Trump’s team began placing spots on select African American radio stations. In San Antonio, a young staffer showed off a South Park-style animation he’d created of Clinton delivering the “super predator” line(using audio from her original 1996 sound bite), as cartoon text popped up around her: “Hillary Thinks African Americans are Super Predators.” The animation will be delivered to certain African American voters through Facebook “dark posts”—nonpublic posts whose viewership the campaign controls so that, as Parscale puts it, “only the people we want to see it, see it.” The aim is to depress Clinton’s vote total. “We know because we’ve modeled this,” says the official. “It will dramatically affect her ability to turn these people out.”

The Trump team’s effort to discourage young women by rolling out Clinton accusers and drive down black turnout in Miami’s Little Haiti neighborhood with targeted messages about the Clinton Foundation’s controversial operations in Haiti is an odd gambit. Campaigns spend millions on data science to understand their own potential supporters—to whom they’re likely already credible messengers—but here Trump is speaking to his opponent’s. Furthermore, there’s no scientific basis for thinking this ploy will convince these voters to stay home. It could just as easily end up motivating them.

Regardless of whether this works or backfires, setting back GOP efforts to attract women and minorities even further, Trump won’t come away from the presidential election empty-handed. Although his operation lags previous campaigns in many areas (its ground game, television ad buys, money raised from large donors), it’s excelled at one thing: building an audience. 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.”

...

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Wylie covers plenty of ground, explaining in illuminating and often scary detail how Cambridge Analytica exploited the data to create Facebook pages that would needle “neurotic, conspiratorial citizens,” propagating an outraged solidarity.(The efficacy of these techniques is still a matter of debate.)He describes another project that the company called “voter disengagement” — that is, suppression of African-American voters. Republican clients, worried that demographic changes were spelling electoral trouble for them, asked Cambridge Analytica to find “ways to confuse, demotivate and disempower people of color.”

Trump campaign tweets video of president as murderous comic book villain who loses in the end

Aldous J. Pennyfarthing / Daily Kos

Republicans don’t do pop culture very well. Remember Mike “My Reproductive Organs Should be Declared an EPA Superfund Site” Huckabee doing a parody of Adele’s “Hello” during his 2016 presidential run/cringeworthy performance art piece?

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/after-being-caught-running-fraudulent-fundraisers-trump-will-use-white-house-for-new-maga-campaign-event/

grift

for  nearly two years the Trump re-election campaign has been running apparently fraudulent fundraising contests that promise breakfast, lunch, or even dinner with the President – reportedly at least sixteen separate contests over the course of nearly two years. There was just one winner announced and that person never dined with the president.

That’s called fraud. It’s illegal. >(Don’t expect anyone to prosecute Trump or the campaign for it.)

Well-known veteran journalist and founder of both Popular Information and ThinkProgress, Judd Legum, has been chasing down this story for months, and publishing the results in his email newsletter and to Twitter....

https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/why-is-the-media-cheering-trump-for-his-campaign-of-lies/

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Why is the media cheering Trump for his campaign of lies?

Written by Eric Boehlert / Daily Kos November 4, 2019

It’s gone from bad to worse: After spending years refusing to call Donald Trump a liar, the press is now toasting his reelection campaign, which is built on lies.

“That campaigns are now being fought largely online is hardly a revelation, yet only one political party seems to have gotten the message,” The New York Times recently reported in a major story on Trump’s reelection run. “While the Trump campaign has put its digital operation firmly at the center of the president’s re-election effort, Democrats are struggling to internalize the lessons of the 2016 race and adapt to a political landscape shaped by social media.” The message the Times presented was unmistakable: Trump’s reelection campaign is trouncing Democrats online. (Trump had gotten “the message.”) Separately, the Times in another piece announced, “The technical superiority and sophistication of the president’s digital campaign is a hidden advantage of incumbency.”

What did the Times almost completely ignore in its flattering reports about Trump’s “web operation”? His reelection campaign is built around spreading lies online. Somehow, that unprecedented presidential campaign strategy wasn’t considered to be the newsworthy one.

“His 2020 campaign, flush with cash, is poised to dominate online again, according to experts on both ends of the political spectrum, independent researchers and tech executives,” the newspaper reported. That was the key angle. Also, Trump isn’t necessarily pushing lies online. Instead, he’s creating “emotionally charged content” and “provocative ads” featuring “divisive themes” and touting an “angry partisan approach,” the paper reported.

If a Democratic candidate such as Joe Biden unleashed a torrent of fabricated and outlandish claims via Facebook campaign ads, it’s highly doubtful that the Times would marvel at how savvy Biden was being and how he was outsmarting Republicans with a digital strategy that relied on constant bouts of purposeful misinformation. Instead, Biden’s constant lies would be the Times’ obvious area of focus. And the brazen untruths wouldn’t be gently referred to as “provocative content.”

Yet with the Trump coverage, the fact that his campaign is wallowing in aggressive misinformation isn’t presented as the most newsworthy element. Instead, Trump’s lies are depicted as being part of a formidable, winning online formula that has desperate, overwhelmed Democrats trying to catch up.

“The campaign under Mr. [Brad] Parscale is focused on pushing its product—Mr. Trump—by churning out targeted ads, aggressively testing the content and collecting data to further refine its messages,” the Times marveled.

At least a recent Washington Post report gently noted so many of Trump’s online ads aren’t true:“Some of the ads accused the freshman [Democratic] lawmakers of making “pro-terrorist remarks,” which they have not done.” But that salient fact garnered just a passing mention.

When the press touts his online reelection campaign as a masterful stroke of marketing and largely ignores the fact that it’s built on a mountain of falsehoods, this all amounts to another way that Trump’s signature lies get normalized. Has the press become so numb to Trump’s torrent of untruths that news outlets are prepared to shrug their collective shoulders when blatant lies emerge as the driving force of a U.S. presidential campaign? That’s stunning, considering that just a few years ago the same news outlets manned fact-checking teams to put campaign ads under a microscope in search of misleading information.

It’s the same type of normalizing Facebook now does when it throws up its hands and says politicians in the Trump era are allowed to lie in their ads, knowing full well there’s only one party that traffics in lies incessantly: the Republican Party.

One Trump ad clearly has been labeled false by the press, in part because it became the centerpiece of a campaign battle over Facebook’s porous policy retarding the truth. The clip from the Trump campaign erroneously claimed that Joe Biden offered the Ukraine government $1 billion in U.S. aid if it stopped an investigation into a company tied to his son.The preposterous claims had already been debunked, and CNN refused to play the ad. But Facebook rejected the Biden campaign’s demand the ad be taken down. The lie-riddled Trump video has been viewed well over 5 million times.

Meanwhile, also being quietly set aside by the press in its mostly positive reporting on Trump’s online reelection machinery is the fact there’s no proof yet that any of it is working. For instance, the Times noted that in an attempt to change the narrative, the GOP campaign quickly spent more than $10 million in the wake of Democrats launching the impeachment inquiry one month ago. “The biggest political crisis of Trump’s presidency is translated into an “impeachment defense task force” to fire up supporters and tap their wallets,” the paper reported, clearly impressed. (Trump’s impeachment-related ads have been viewed tens of millions of times on Facebook.) Because spending more money automatically means success, apparently.

Yet since that time, the percentage of Americans in favor of impeachment and of removing Trump from office has only increased. Overall, there’s been no improvement in Trump’s reelection chances since his campaign started spending tens of millions of dollars on Facebook ads. Doesn’t that suggest Trump’s team is flushing away a lot of money online? Doesn’t that suggest the Trump campaign might not be so savvy and that Democrats might not actually be in disarray?

Recently, Axios touted the fact that online, “Trump attracted three times the attention of all the Democratic candidates combined, underscoring how he consumes the social media conversation.” But again, there’s no evidence that people talking online about Trump more often than they’re talking about Democratic candidates means good news for him, since it’s obvious that lots of people online hate Trump and that’s why they talk about him.

Trump’s online reelection campaign is unlike any in American history, simply because it’s willfully detached from facts and the truth. It’s stunning that the Beltway press looks at something that reckless and labels it super savvy.

Eric Boehlert is a veteran progressive writer and media analyst, formerly with Media Matters and Salon. He is the author of Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush and Bloggers on the Bus. You can follow him on Twitter @EricBoehlert.

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https://boingboing.net/2019/10/11/facebook-and-twitter-say-they.html

Trump has been buying ads with false content that run on Facebook and Twitter, and the two social media platforms both say they will continue to accept paid ads that contain lies.

From Technology Review:

Last month, Facebook communications chief Nick Clegg said Facebook will not fact-check politicians’ ads, a stance the company has reiterated. In a letter to Biden’s campaign, Facebook’s head of global elections policy, Katie Harbath, said that “if a claim is made directly by a politician on their Page, in an ad or on their website, it is considered direct speech and ineligible for our third-party fact checking program.”

The letter goes on to say: “These policies apply to organic and paid content from politicians—including the ad by President Trump you reference in your letter.”

In other words, even if the content is false, the fact that it is being said by a politician, or a campaign on the politician’s behalf, means it is considered newsworthy, making it exempt from certain standards. (Facebook says that things like viral hoaxes that are shared by a politician would be demoted, displayed alongside fact-checking information, and banned from ads.) This disparity in the policy is confusing, to say the least.

Meanwhile, Twitter told The Verge that the ad is “not in violation of our policies,” without clarifying further.

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...ProPublica’s Peter Elkind joined “Trump, Inc.” to talk about his in-depth profile of Parscale in ProPublica and the political juggernaut Parscale is assembling to re-elect the President.

Here’s what Elkind says about Parscale and the stories he tells about himself: “He changes dates. He rearranges facts. He omits conspicuous events. He basically rewrites his own life story to become a more romantic tale, to fit into the image that he’s trying to convey. He is a promoter, he’s a hustler, he’s a marketer.” In short, Brad Parscale is a lot like his boss.

To find out more, listen to the episode.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/wacky-qanon-conspiracy-theorists-have-become-a-major-headache-for-trumps-reelection-campaign-report/

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Wacky QAnon conspiracy theorists have become a major headache for Trump’s reelection campaign: report

Written by Alex Henderson September 12, 2019

Not all of the right-wing Republicans who want to see President Donald Trump reelected in 2020 are believers in the goofy QAnon conspiracy theory, which claims that Trump is secretly fighting an international ring of pedophiles and child sex traffickers — and that an anonymous figure known as Q is secretly sending updates on the battle. Many conservatives and Trump supporters believe that the QAnon cult is completely nuts. But QAnon theorists won’t go away, and in a report for the Daily Beast, journalists Will Sommer and Asawin Suebsaeng describe the ways in which they have become a headache for Trump’s 2020 campaign.

Sommer and Suebsaeng report that QAnon theorists are feeling increasingly energized: in addition to making their presence felt at Trump rallies, they have been holding rallies of their own — for example, a QAnon rally was held across the street from the White House on Wednesday, and about 100 people showed up.

At a recent Trump rally in Tampa, Florida, according to Sommer and Suebsaeng, QAnon supporters were so visible that cable news couldn’t ignore them. QAnon supporter John Welch told the Beast, “By the time the rally was over, they didn’t have any choice but to put us on (television).”

The problem that QAnon poses for the Trump campaign is that when they are able to attract media attention at Trump events, it sends out a message that parts of his base are divorced from reality — and gives Democrats a possible weapon to use against Trump.

Sommer and Suebsaeng report that “to Team Trump…. QAnon diehards who adore Trump and garner media coverage and camera shots at his 2020 rallies have been a long-time nuisance.” And one senior Trump campaign official, interviewed anonymously, told the Beast that the campaign has a formula for dealing with QAnon: “ignore them” and don’t “make a big deal out of” them — and at the same time, try to avoid “pissing off the crazy” people.

On one hand, Sommer and Suebsaeng report, Trump’s team don’t want to anger QAnon supporters — who view Trump as an heroic figure who will topple an international ring of pedophiles and child sex traffickers. But on the other hand, their visibility at Trump events is bad publicity for the campaign.

“The presence of Q believers at rallies,” according to Sommer and Suebsaeng, “also means Trump could accidentally endorse the theory, at least in the eyes of its believers. Nearly every Trump appearance produces footage that QAnon believers scrutinize in hopes of seeing Trump’s hand movements form what they believe to be a Q.”

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/the-myths-of-the-genius-behind-trumps-reelection-campaign

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The myths of the ‘genius’ behind Trump’s reelection campaign

Written by Peter Elkind, Doris Burke / Pro Publica September 11, 2019

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom.

On the evening of May 30, Brad Parscale, the campaign manager of Donald J. Trump for President Inc., gave a speech to a gathering of the faithful. Parscale is a striking figure: 6-foot-8, with a trademark Viking beard and a penchant for bombast. He was a phenom of the 2016 election, rising, in a matter of months, from an anonymous web designer in San Antonio to the Trump campaign’s reputed digital savior. Parscale has become a frequent warmup act at Trump rallies and a prized attraction in GOP fundraising circles.

On this occasion, he was speaking to the Miami Young Republicans. Parscale regaled the audience with his litany of Trump’s achievements, according to a recording of the speech (provided by Palm Beach Post reporter Christine Stapleton). He warned of the “crazy socialist Democrats” who want to “slaughter” babies in the third trimester; admit “all of South America” to the U.S. through open borders; and render jet-fueled planes illegal and “farming cows” extinct. “I don’t know about you guys,” Parscale told them. “I really like steak.”[literal red meat]

Parscale then turned to his own rhetorical question: “How the heck did you get from East Topeka, Kansas, 43 years old, to become the right-hand man to the Trump family?” That’s a truly remarkable tale, although much, as it turns out, is not quite as Parscale describes it.

In the speech, Parscale painted his own life story as a testament to the need for Trump. He served up a vivid account of facing crushing personal and professional setbacks (“I was down and out”) before launching a business on a shoestring, then prospering through hard work and self-reliance. He is evidence of the American dream, Parscale declared. His life, he said, shows “why we all need to go out and fight for the president. So that all of our kids can have that same possibility to have that dream happen for them.”

In fact, Parscale’s accounts of his life and his work for the president comprise a classic Trumpian tale: They’re a combination of hyperbole, half-truths and the occasional fiction. Indeed, Parscale shares more than one trait with his most important client. He has embraced political beliefs not in evidence before the 2016 campaign. Like Trump, he has adapted to opportunities as they arose. And like Trump, Parscale is largely unencumbered by the concerns for consistency and accuracy that are the hobgoblins of smaller minds. “When I give a speech, I tell it like a story,” Parscale says when asked about his biographical embellishments and errors. “My story is my story.”

Consider what Parscale has said about his own compensation this campaign season. He has repeatedly emphasized that he is refusing to take the customary cut of the campaign’s digital ad spending. “I felt like as campaign manager it would seem not very ethical and very good of myself to pay myself a percentage of my decisions,” Parscale told CNN earlier this year. Instead, he said, he is accepting a relative pittance for his efforts: an annual “retainer” of $300,000, plus unspecified bonuses. “I wanted to set a high mark,” he told Breitbart News. As he put it: “I don’t do this for a percentage. I do this for my country and for President Trump.”

But that wasn’t the full story. Parscale’s no-commissions policy did not apply when the client was the Republican National Committee, whose main mission, at least when it comes to employing Parscale’s firm, is reelecting Trump. That work represented $18 million in billings for Parscale Strategy since he was named 2020 campaign manager, dwarfing the $4.8 million his companies have received directly from Trump committees.

In an interview for this article, Parscale confirmed he was taking commissions on the portions of the $18 million that was used to buy advertising, but he declined to discuss specifics. Parscale said he saw no conflict of interest because the party was making the decisions. “That’s the RNC’s money,” he said. “If they call me tomorrow and say, ‘We’re not spending any more money on this,’ there’s nothing I can do.”

Parscale then changed his position following that interview and two articles in other publications that examined Parscale’s compensation. The RNC told ProPublica and Texas Monthly in early September that, at Parscale’s request, it would no longer purchase digital ads through his firms. “Going forward, all RNC digital buys will be made directly to the host sites,” party spokesman Mike Reed says. “This is to ensure complete transparency and to give Democrats and the press no way to mislead and wrongly accuse anyone of impropriety.”

Parscale and his fees have attracted an unusual amount of attention, but they’re only part of the story. He has also spearheaded what appears to be the Trump campaign’s takeover of the RNC to the benefit of the president — and the seeming detriment of other Republican candidates. Other presidents have consolidated control over their party; similar criticisms were made of Barack Obama. But the extent of Trump’s takeover is unprecedented, according to experts. They say it inflicted damage on Republican congressional candidates in the 2018 elections, and could do so again in 2020.

One previously unreported example: Since Trump’s election in 2016, critical “voter scores” — sophisticated polling-based analytics that the RNC provides to party committees and candidates — have conspicuously omitted an essential detail for any down-ballot race: how voters in specific states and congressional districts feel about Trump. Republican insiders believe these analytics are being withheld to try and prevent GOP candidates from publicly distancing themselves from the president or leaking unfavorable results that embarrass Trump.

“They don’t want you to know if it isn’t good,” says former RNC chairman Michael Steele, a vocal Trump critic. “There’s a lot of data they’re sitting on that they’re not sharing.” Steele adds that today, “the RNC is not an independent actor; the RNC is now a part of the Trump campaign. The question now isn’t, ‘What do you need?’ The question is, ‘Do you support Donald Trump?’”

In both power and money, the 2020 Trump campaign dwarfs the 2016 incarnation. “You have less than a handful of people who now control the entire ecosystem” of the Republican Party, says one prominent former RNC official, and Parscale is one of that handful. A big part of his sway stems from the massive quantities of money he raises. Parscale sits atop a juggernaut that reported gathering $108 million just in the second quarter this year and that is well on its way to becoming what he claims will be America’s first billion-dollar campaign.

All of which raises the ultimate question for Parscale: He won big in 2016 as an upstart among a small band of political insurgents. Can he win again in 2020 as the captain of an operation so big and established that one operative refers to it as the “Death Star”?

In political terms, Brad Parscale was a nobody before his association with Trump. In the span of just a few years, he has reinvented himself, transforming from an apolitical digital geek — building local websites in T-shirts and cargo shorts for a small San Antonio company — into a hyperpartisan president’s raging avatar, bestriding the national stage in Ermenegildo Zegna suits.

“He was not that guy three years ago,” says John Dickson, a principal of Denim Group, a prominent San Antonio cybersecurity firm, who met Parscale during the 14 years Parscale worked in that city. “He was not a bomb-thrower or an ideologue. He was a savvy business guy, a hustler.”

Indeed, before Trump, Parscale’s Twitter feed was far more Deep Nerd than Deep State — exchanges of coding tips and bro talk. He almost never weighed in on politics. Back then, his Twitter targets weren’t Bernie and Biden, but Luby’s and Chipotle, for falling short on his culinary expectations (“sad there are no standards on how much you get in a salad…”).

Parscale and his parents say he adapted so quickly to meeting Trump’s needs because his own father is very much like him: impatient, unfiltered and larger-than-life.

“I’m not a silver-spoon-type person,” Dwight Parscale declares during a three-hour conversation in the 19th Hole restaurant at Club at Sonterra, the San Antonio country club where he holds court many mornings. “I worked my ass off all my life, and I didn’t know any other way. … Am I worth over a million bucks? Yes. But that’s not that much today. I’ve never considered myself rich.”

Dwight Parscale, 73, was a lawyer but says he abandoned the profession around age 50 after an unfriendly local judge handed down an “outrageous” opinion, prompting him to announce to friends, “I’m going to beat the crap out of him!” He adds, “I finally calmed down and went home and told my wife I’m not going to practice law anymore.”

Aside from Dwight Parscale’s legal practice, he and his wife, Rita, operated a string of businesses over the years, sometimes three at once. They included a swimming pool company, a scuba shop, real estate enterprises, restaurants and a Western-themed nightclub featuring a mechanical bull imported from Fort Worth.

Brad Parscale has spoken of a modest upbringing, describing himself as a “farm boy from Kansas.” In fact, he grew up on a suburban cul-de-sac. He attended Topeka-area public schools, where he was a good student and a basketball star. A frustrating college sports career, ended by injuries to his leg and back, took him to four schools. He graduated from Trinity University in San Antonio in 1999, majoring in international business and economics. (He regularly describes it, incorrectly, as an Ivy League school.)

Dwight Parscale, meanwhile, had become the CEO of a Topeka technology company, NewTek, and moved its headquarters to San Antonio before a falling-out with the founder that ended in litigation. The Parscales then relocated to Southern California, where Dwight Parscale became the CEO of a small 3D animation software company called Electric Image.

Brad Parscale went to work for his dad after college, becoming sales manager for Electric Image at a salary of $95,000. Rita Parscale helped manage the company’s books. By the fall of 2001, the Parscales say, they were trying to sell to private investors when the deal, and their business, collapsed amid the economic swoon that followed 9/11.

In his Miami speech, Parscale said he had “just had my first child, married” when he moved out to California, along with “an adopted son,” before the failure of Electric Image and the loss of his job, “within a few months” of the 2001 World Trade Center attacks, sent him reeling. “In a year of that, I lost my wife. Not died — separated. … We got divorced, ended back in Texas.”

In fact, Parscale wasn’t married then, much less divorced. He had become a father in July 1999, at age 23, just weeks after graduating from college. The mother was a 22-year-old woman he’d met while she was working at a San Antonio tanning salon he patronized; she had a son from a previous relationship.

Court records show that the two didn’t marry until March 2003, three years and eight months after their daughter was born. Parscale filed for divorce in August 2004. The split wasn’t finalized until October 2007, when he was 31. Parscale never adopted his first wife’s son.

Electric Image’s failure is also more complex than he has portrayed it. The company filed for bankruptcy in August 2002, declaring $188,453 in assets and nearly $2 million in debt, including $100,068 owed to the IRS for unpaid withholding taxes.

Parscale and his parents improperly transferred company funds and assets to themselves, according to a lawsuit against the three family members filed by a U.S. bankruptcy trustee, a claim disputed by the family. Exhibits in the case show checks, all signed by Rita Parscale in August 2003, for $33,000 paid to Dwight Parscale, $4,800 to Rita Parscale and $6,200 to Brad Parscale. According to the bankruptcy trustee’s filings, Dwight Parscale had taken the company’s business records “to the garbage dump” before the family left California and returned to Texas.

The trustee also accused the Parscales of improperly transferring Electric Image assets for use by a new company in San Antonio, EI Technology Group, which later listed Brad Parscale as CEO. (He continued selling software through EI for years until 2009.)

The matter was finally settled in 2006, with the Parscales agreeing to repay a portion of the disputed funds. “We paid out of our pocket $86,000,” Rita Parscale says. She calls the claims of misappropriation “a bunch of baloney.”

Back in San Antonio, Brad Parscale became a website developer, incorporating in October 2005 what became Parscale Media. He has repeatedly spun a memorable origin tale. He said he started the business with his last $500, seeking clients by approaching them in the tech aisle at a local Borders bookstore.

“Life is amazing,” he wrote in a May 2016 tweet. “My first day I had $500 to my name and tapped shoulders for work. No one knew me.” In 2017, he tweeted from a speech in Monaco about delivering “my story of starting with $500.” In its online biography promoting him for paid speeches (fee range $25,000 to $40,000), the speaker’s bureau representing Parscale repeats that “he invested his last $500 in Parscale Media.”

Parscale may have started his business in late 2005 with $500. But it’s unlikely it was his last $500. Courthouse records show that Parscale, who had begun investing in rental properties, owned three San Antonio homes at the time (each carried a mortgage).

There was no question about the business’s early struggles. In 2008, Parscale’s operation was sandwiched between a car wash and a tattoo parlor and smack in the flight path of the San Antonio airport. “Every time you had a meeting in there,” recalls Ryan Kelly, a San Antonio digital marketing consultant who worked closely with Parscale, “you’d feel like a plane was going to fly right through the office.”

From the start, Parscale displayed qualities that would serve him well with Trump. He was a great salesman. He was a quick study and intensely loyal to his customers. And he worked like a maniac.

In San Antonio, Parscale built a volume business. He did fast, inexpensive work for small enterprises like Dury’s Gun Shop, Quest Plumbing and D&D Farm and Ranch. He pitched clients by day, often making cold calls, and cranked out websites at night. On the side, he sold his own software add-ons to website developers.

At the start, Parscale knew little about digital marketing and even less about design. But he recognized his limitations. Says Natalie Silva, a San Antonio marketing consultant who worked with Parscale for two years starting in 2007: “He was the type of guy who would oversell capabilities and then figure it out — ‘well, I’ll go find someone.’ He would bring in the people he needed to do the things he couldn’t do.”

By 2009, Parscale Media, on its website, claimed a staff of seven and pitched Parscale as “a true pioneer of the industry” with “over 13 years of professional web experience.” (That would date back to 1996, his sophomore year in college.) It also trumpeted “prestigious” Top 10 web designer awards “as seen in” Forbes and Texas Monthly magazines. In fact, both citations were paid marketing promotions, published as advertisements in the two publications.

As his reputation grew, Parscale sometimes found himself paired on projects with a San Antonio graphic and web designer named Jill Giles, who’d run her own small firm since 1984. Giles handled the projects’ look and branding strategy; Parscale did the under-the-hood work.

The two could not have been more different. Giles was 20 years older, a tiny, soft-spoken woman with blond curls and refined taste; a committed Democrat, she socialized with urban liberals. Parscale was a red-headed giant with a booming voice who lived in the suburbs. He dressed, Giles later joked to friends, “like a German tourist,” wearing T-shirts, shorts and sandals with socks to work. (Giles declined to be quoted.)

But in an age when businesses built their reputations and brands online, marrying design and tech skills made sense. They formed Giles-Parscale Inc. in July 2011. They set up shop inside the walled compound Giles owned on the edge of downtown, building out separate, industrial-chic structures for the design and digital teams.

Afflicted with chronic back pain from his basketball injuries, Parscale presided over his domain from an unusually tall standing desk; on difficult days, he sometimes conducted business stretched out on the floor.

With Parscale leading the sales effort, Giles-Parscale won prestigious new contracts. Dickson, the San Antonio tech businessman, saw Parscale dazzle the executive committee of the San Antonio Economic Development Foundation, winning its website and digital work. “He’s like Don Draper. He’s a great pitchman,” says Dickson. “There are just so few who can walk in, pick up the vibe in the room and say the right thing.”

It was just nine months after the merger, in April 2012, that Parscale got his first opportunity to work for the Trump Organization. Asked to bid on designing a website for Trump International Realty, Parscale — eager to land the legendarily cheap celebrity client — won the job with an outrageously low bid of $10,000.

In his Miami speech, Parscale described the Trump Organization call as coming at a moment when he was still struggling. “At this point,” he said, “I have six employees. … I’m living in an $80,000 house, driving a Dodge Charger.” In fact, in 2012, Giles-Parscale had a staff of 30. Parscale lived in a $500,000 home with a swimming pool on a golf course and drove a Lexus.

Parscale simply “made up” his $10,000 price for the initial 2012 work, he later told The Washington Post, with the aim of hooking the Trumps as a client: “I recognized that I was a nobody in San Antonio, but working for the Trumps would be everything.”

Giles-Parscale soon became the go-to choice for other Trump work: the Trump Winery website, Melania Trump’s skin care products website; the Eric Trump Foundation website (Parscale did the latter work for free).

In November 2013, Eric Trump, in Texas for an event, stopped by Giles-Parscale with his future wife to meet the family’s webmaster. Parscale took them out for a steak dinner afterward, then promoted the visit on Twitter: “Hung out with \@EricTrump & his fiancé today. Truly was honored to have their time. One #supercool couple.”

Parscale insisted that Giles-Parscale made “a lot of money” from the Trump businesses. “Over the next five years,” reported the Post, “the Trump Organization sent hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of website-related work to Parscale.”

A knowledgeable Giles-Parscale colleague says that’s not true. “We always lost money on the Trump commercial stuff. Brad wanted it so bad he would bid it ridiculously cheap. He would say, ‘Oh no, this is going to lead to a lot of other work.’… We all knew that we should have been charging more money for it.”

What came next is widely known: In February 2015, the Trumps asked Parscale to craft a simple landing page for the presidential exploratory committee. Parscale did it for $1,500, completing the work on his laptop at home over a weekend. He got another call in June and agreed to build the Trump presidential campaign’s website for $10,000.

Jill Giles was mortified. A lifelong Democrat, she told friends she found Trump’s candidacy “repellant,” and she didn’t want her firm to have anything to do with it. But Parscale reassured his partner: “Nothing will come of this. This isn’t going to last long.”

Indeed, 10 days after Trump announced his candidacy for president, Parscale met two top local Republicans for lunch. But he wasn’t there to chat about the race for the White House. Parscale wanted their support as he considered running for a seat on the San Antonio City Council. Says one of the lunch participants, Robert Stovall, then the Bexar County Republican chairman: “He was very serious about it.”

The two men told Parscale they couldn’t back him. The seat’s conservative incumbent was likely to run one last time in 2017. They didn’t want Parscale to challenge him. Throughout the conversation, Stovall says, one thing was clear: “Brad didn’t think the announcement of Trump running for president was going to be a long-term thing. Everyone was just chuckling about it.”

After Trump’s upset victory in 2016, Parscale would receive acclaim for his central role in a campaign whose intensive, targeted use of social media was without precedent. But it was nondigital skills that proved essential to Parscale’s ascent: learning to navigate the cutthroat culture of Trump’s political world. “He’s a rare survivor of Trump 1.0,” notes Kurt Luidhardt, co-founder of Prosper Group, a political consulting firm that worked on the 2016 campaign. “That’s a big feat to pull off.”

Not that there weren’t some close calls for Parscale. The first came in late 2015, when an array of technical problems and lapses dogged the Trump website. Volunteer data wasn’t getting promptly downloaded. State campaign offices weren’t listed. And the website sometimes functioned poorly or crashed, hitting a low point in early December.

“Today was insane,” Parscale wrote his bosses on Dec. 7, 2015, a day on which traffic spiked as hackers tried to overwhelm the website with a so-called distributed denial of service attack. His email’s recipients included Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, political director Michael Glassner and communications chief Hope Hicks. “About 4 p.m. CST time the traffic on the website increased by about 700,000x the normal traffic…The site has become very unresponsive because it is designed to do 200-300K people a day, not a million in a few minutes.”

“I can build to handle these numbers,” Parscale added, “but at this time I have not spent the cost to make it work this large…I am sorry for the problems today, these numbers were just insane high fast.”

Glassner conferred by email with Matt Braynard, the campaign’s data chief. The two men had been discussing the website problems for weeks. Glassner asked if the day’s traffic would have been a problem if another company ran the Trump website. His email’s subject line: “Transition away from Brad.”

“My suspicion was the answer was no,” Braynard replied, “but I’ve confirmed” that the crash wouldn’t have happened if another firm was running the site. He promised to quickly “compose a summary of reasons why I believe we should transition.”

But before he could do so, Glassner ended the discussion. “We’re going to stick with Brad,” he emailed the next day. Glassner later explained the reason simply: “Brad is considered family.” (Braynard departed the campaign himself a few months later and now runs a nonprofit seeking to register conservative voters.)

Parscale had cultivated a crucial relationship with Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, who had taken a special interest in the campaign’s digital efforts. Kushner became his most essential ally, enlisting Parscale as his proxy. Parscale understood a fundamental rule of life of Trump’s world: The family’s favor meant everything. “He focused on the kids,” says estranged Trump adviser Omarosa Manigault Newman, who met Parscale during the campaign. “Once the kids like you, you’re in with Trump.”

Parscale regularly announced his interactions with various Trumps and assiduously flattered them. His Twitter profile today proclaims: “Proud to work for America’s best POTUS.” He has described Trump as “like a second father to me” and recently proclaimed the family “a dynasty that will last for decades.” In tweets, he has called the Trumps “the most amazing family” and pronounced Kushner “a great leader” and “a genius. Also the nicest guy ever.”

In 2016, several factors conspired to elevate Parscale’s role. One was the Trump campaign’s raging distrust of the usual suspects from the GOP’s political “swamp,” including both Washington operatives and the Republican National Committee.

Trump also harbored contempt for conventional political practices. With his universal name recognition and domination of media headlines, Trump, who had pledged to bankroll his own primary campaign, had neither the need nor the desire to spend heavily on TV ads. That opened the door to a low-cost alternative in Parscale’s sweet spot: Facebook.

With Kushner’s backing and a small budget, Parscale began crafting Facebook ads directed at voters in key primary states. He’d also built a website page to sell “Make America Great Again” gear, which became a profit center for the campaign.

Through the end of 2015, the Trump campaign had paid Giles-Parscale just $39,000, mostly for “website development,” according to Federal Election Commission filings. By February 2016, his firm was receiving monthly six-figure sums for “digital consulting.” In June, he was named the campaign’s digital director.

Back in San Antonio, Parscale’s work for Trump had roiled his firm. At the start, Parscale had managed the website from home on his laptop. But as his duties grew, he began tapping Giles-Parscale staff for help, recruiting a few designers after first asking, “You got a problem with Trump?”

At the start, Parscale had portrayed the Trump work as just another contract, telling a San Antonio reporter: “We don’t have a say in his views. We are just a mechanism for his delivery.” Giles held to the view that he was, as ever, going overboard to please his client. “I think he would have been equally enthusiastic if he were doing it for Hillary,” she told friends.

By the spring primaries, it became impossible to pretend the work wasn’t affecting Giles-Parscale. Campaign operatives were appearing regularly in the office. “Nobody in their right mind thought it would go very far,” Giles explained to friends months later. “It was kind of scope creep. One day you wake up and say, ‘Holy shit, how did this happen?’”

Giles finally told Parscale he needed to take the Trump work elsewhere. In early June, after it was clear that Trump had locked up the GOP nomination, Parscale secured office space on the third floor of a building near the San Antonio airport. He announced plans to hire a general election digital team of as many as a hundred staffers. With that, Parscale largely abandoned Giles-Parscale.

As Parscale assumed his new role as the Republican nominee’s digital chief, he faced a big question: Now what do we do? He’d never helped run anything approaching the scale and complexity of a presidential campaign.

At that stage, most presidential nominees would already have dozens of experienced digital operatives on board. Clinton had more than a hundred. Trump had just one data staffer in New York and no data infrastructure. “He had to scale from two people to national in 30 seconds,” says Bill Skelly, a veteran RNC data consultant who worked with the 2016 campaign.

Parscale frantically began conferring with an array of consultants, seeking their advice. He was open about how much he didn’t know and bombarded everyone with questions.

With Trump now the certain nominee, his campaign and the Republican National Committee — warily viewed as a haven of “Never Trumpers” — had forged an uneasy alliance. The RNC dispatched about a dozen staff members to San Antonio: experts in political strategy, email fundraising, data and digital marketing.

Conflict soon erupted over power and money. In June 2016, the most immediate flashpoint was the joint fundraising agreement Trump had signed with the RNC, as was customary for the party’s presidential nominee. It provided for fundraising emails to go out in the name of the candidate, seeking donations of $200 or less.

All the funds were to flow into a joint committee, to be split 80-20 between the campaign and the party, and the two sides were to share the valuable donor data the emails generated. Trump clearly needed the help. He hadn’t done any email fundraising during the primaries, and, as of June 1, he had just $1.3 million in his campaign coffers, compared with Clinton’s $42 million.

Yet Trump was refusing to cooperate with the RNC, which wanted both its promised money and the donor lists. Trump’s campaign, relying on private firms, finally dispatched his first fundraising letter on June 21, but it was a disaster. Although the campaign reported raising about $3 million in one day, more than half of the emails were caught in spam filters. Trump-haters had also slipped in prank addresses, generating embarrassing publicity about the campaign seeking illegal donations from members of the Australian, British and Icelandic parliaments.

The letter also directed all resulting donations to the Trump campaign rather than to the joint committee. RNC officials were furious. They wanted their promised cut — and control over the entire fundraising apparatus. “There was a lot of real angst happening at that moment about Brad,” recalls one GOP operative on the scene.

The RNC decided to play hardball.Ahead of the July 4 holiday weekend, it ordered all the RNC staffers working in San Antonio for Trump — more than a dozen — to leave. A former senior RNC official recalls the committee’s digital director, Gerrit Lansing, explaining what happened this way: “I pulled everyone out. They don’t know what the fuck they’re doing down there.” Lansing told the RNC official he had even suggested to RNC chief of staff Katie Walsh that he would quit if Parscale wasn’t fired.

Lansing declined to comment on the record about this episode. Walsh says “there was a negotiation. … I don’t accept the premise that there was any sort of conflict.”

Parscale arrived at his new offices on Friday, July 1, to find the place virtually empty. The lone RNC staffer who remained in town was Gary Coby, director of digital advertising, who had quickly gained Parscale’s trust.

Coby later stood by as Parscale phoned Kushner, effectively pleading for his job. “He just kind of humbled himself to Jared,” Coby recalls. “He said: ‘Obviously it’s your guys’ call. But I’ll do anything for the candidate and the family. … I love this family. … Whatever you guys decide, you can count on me for anything you need or want.’” Adds Coby, “He was making his case as if his role was in jeopardy.”

Parscale managed to keep his job — and to broker peace between the campaign and the RNC. Unlike much of Trump’s inner circle, which viewed the GOP as the enemy, Parscale recognized that the party possessed critical political infrastructure that was impossible for Trump’s makeshift team to replicate. As Parscale puts it: “When I showed up at the RNC for my first meeting, I expected them to be my enemy. I was told that by many in Trump world. But I learned very quickly that for everyone to be successful, we need to be working hand in hand.”

By the middle of the following week, Parscale and his bosses had signed on to a deal with the RNC. The Trump campaign would get all the proceeds from text message appeals and ads on social media sites like Facebook, YouTube, Google and Twitter. All donations from email fundraising — a bigger pot — would be split, though the RNC would cover all the costs. The RNC would run the joint email program and get access to Trump’s growing donor file.

Notes one campaign adviser: “I’ve always thought that was the moment when Brad realized if I play nice with these people, they’re going to play nice with me. And he’s maintained that ever since. I am convinced to this day Brad is who he is because he made peace with the RNC. At every point since then, the benefit of that arrangement has been reinforced. He’s navigated all the levers of power very effectively. Honestly, I think that’s what he’s best at.”

Any collaboration with the Trumps, of course, required support from the family, and Parscale worked to ensure that too. After the RNC fundraising showdown, he urged Kushner to sign off on joining forces with the RNC on the digital front. Parscale also met Eric Trump in Washington for a tour of the Trump International Hotel construction site, dirtying his suit before attending a high-level briefing at RNC headquarters on the party’s plans for the campaign’s ground game. Parscale then backed that plan during a three-hour Acela train trip with Eric to Manhattan and convinced him to support the plan, too. “That’s the day we all got married,” Parscale says of the campaign and the RNC.

After the 2016 election, much was written about the Trump campaign’s use of new Facebook tools to “microtarget” voters, sophisticated data analytics and rapid-fire testing of thousands of campaign ad permutations. Parscale was hailed as an innovative “genius,” an impression he encouraged. “I understood early that Facebook was how Donald Trump was going to win,” he told Lesley Stahl, of “60 Minutes,” in 2017. “Twitter is how he talked to the people. Facebook was going to be how he won.”

Parscale also claimed that after being given broad new responsibilities late in the race, he’d spotted critical voter shifts and “changed all the budgets around” in the campaign’s final days. He says he diverted “every nickel and dime” from hopeless Virginia and sure-win Ohio into advertising in Michigan and Wisconsin, where Trump notched narrow upsets.

“If you don’t know what you’re talking about, you think he’s a 21st-century Steve Jobs,” says a Republican consultant who knows Parscale. “He’s not an asshole. He’s kind of a huckster. But he’s smart enough to realize he’s a huckster.”

Parscale’s true gift wasn’t deploying new, cutting-edge uses for technology. It was skillful management: cobbling together and empowering a fast-moving, opportunistic digital team staffed by experts from the RNC, commercial ad placement firms and social media companies, which flew about a dozen employees into San Antonio to work alongside Parscale’s team. At Parscale’s direction, the digital operation carried out an unprecedented tilt toward social media, for which the Trump campaign spent nearly half its media budget.

Parscale’s all-in approach toward Facebook was perfectly suited to his unique candidate. “The key to digital success is bottling lightning, and with Donald Trump, the lightning strikes every five minutes,” says Wesley Donehue, CEO of Push Digital, who worked on Marco Rubio’s failed bid for the 2016 presidential nomination. “You will never be able to replicate any digital strategy you had for Donald Trump for any other candidate or any corporation because there is no other Donald Trump.”

Academics and political strategists say digital ads don’t do much to persuade voters to switch candidates. They’re aimed primarily at raising money, firing up the base and suppressing turnout among opposition voters — which perfectly matched Trump’s needs.

In large part, Parscale’s approach was a matter of necessity. In 2016, Trump was anathema to the GOP’s traditional wealthy donors. But small-dollar contributors — “the Army of Trump,” Parscale would later call them — loved him. Trump’s supporters were uniquely responsive to donation appeals on social media; his celebrity and gut-level appeal commanded eyeballs. “The hardest thing in digital advertising is getting people’s attention,” says Coby. “You got a cheat code with Trump.”

Trump’s online and email fundraising generated a record $239 million in small-dollar donations, far more than Hillary Clinton’s and more than two-thirds of his donation total, according to the nonpartisan Campaign Finance Institute. This made Trump competitive in a race where he was outspent nearly 2 to 1.

Parscale’s growing role remained pretty much a secret for weeks into the general election race. But in mid-August, a new FEC filing was about to reveal that Giles-Parscale, an obscure San Antonio firm, had become the campaign’s biggest vendor, receiving $12.5 million to date. That prompted Wired to run a quick, flattering profile of him. Trump, according to a former RNC official, soon began referring to Parscale as “my $10 Million Man.”

By the October FEC filing, that figure had multiplied. Giles-Parscale had received more than $20 million in the previous month, on its way to a jaw-dropping final $94 million tally from the Trump committees. After Trump read media reports spotlighting Parscale’s most recent take, he erupted. Making a rare descent to the campaign’s makeshift offices in Trump Tower, he cornered his digital director in the kitchen and flew into a spitting rage, screaming, “Where the fuck is my money?”

Parscale told Trump that the vast majority was simply passed through his firm and went toward buying ads. After salaries and various consulting fees, he insisted, he’d received only a small percentage — far below what’s typical — as profit. Deputy campaign manager Dave Bossie, who had jumped between the two men, backed Parscale’s story. According to two witnesses, the confrontation ended when Kellyanne Conway sneezed on Trump, distracting him from his fury.

Inside the walls of Giles-Parscale, Hillary Clinton’s concession speech, on the morning after Election Day, was met with tears. For months, many at the firm had clung to a hope: Trump would surely lose; Parscale would come back. Everything would go back to the way it was.

Early in 2016, Parscale appeared to be putting down roots in San Antonio. In January, he and his second wife had spent $801,456 on a new 6,145-square-foot home in a gated country-club community near his parents. But after Trump’s victory, he wasn’t about to go back to selling websites. His partner, Giles, was just as eager to part ways.

The two partners agreed: Parscale, the hot commodity, would take the lead in seeking a buyer who could run the digital business. In the meantime, he was busy taking victory laps, attending election post-mortems at Harvard and in Silicon Valley, giving a speech in Monaco and sitting for interviews. He’d assigned a copywriter who had worked on the Trump campaign to write a Wikipedia profile for him.

On Aug. 1, 2017, the sale of Giles-Parscale was announced, to a company called CloudCommerce Inc. The commercial marketing business would become Parscale Digital. The design side would be renamed Giles Design Bureau. The political work — along with Parscale himself — would move to Florida as an independent company called Parscale Strategy.

A press release described the deal as a $9 million all-stock purchase of Parscale’s business. Parscale was also to receive $1 million in cash for his web hosting company, become the face of the parent company and receive a seat on the board. Giles got stock options, along with rent for use of her building and about $700,000 cash.

In reality, in selling to CloudCommerce, an obscure California penny-stock company, Parscale had jumped into a mess of his own making. For starters, his stock would be worth $9 million only if the shares rose exponentially. And the company, as Trump might say, was a doozy.

CloudCommerce had lost money for seven straight years, according to Securities and Exchange Commission filings, prompting its accountants to voice “substantial doubt” about its ability to remain “a going concern.” In the days before the acquisition was announced, its stock was trading at less than a penny.

The company had a distinctly dodgy past. A former CEO and a second executive had pleaded guilty to federal fraud charges in a scheme to pump up the price of the company’s shares. Its current CEO had once filed for personal bankruptcy. CloudCommerce, whose leadership had vowed to rapidly grow the enterprise enough to uplist it onto a major exchange, had changed names and business strategies three times, while seeking to entice acquisition targets, as one email put it, with the prospect of “riding the tidal wave” of company shares “to early retirement.” (CloudCommerce did not respond to requests for comment.)

After the sale, Parscale began deploying his digital-marketing tactics on a new product: himself.

On Aug. 8, he tweeted about a 500% spike in CloudCommerce’s share price, from less than a penny to 5 cents, that had greeted the announcement.

Much like Trump, CloudCommerce and its new marquee player worked to lure business by creating a premium brand that would convey the value of his personal magic. They called it “the Parscale Effect.” Digital ads for Parscale Strategy’s website, which featured juddering images of Parscale and admiring media headlines (“Donald Trump’s Michael Bay”), declared: “Brad Parscale shaped the 2016 presidential election with a data driven digital strategy to influence action. Find out how the Parscale Effect can transform your business.”

Parscale approached political contacts, asking if they’d want to sell their firms in exchange for CloudCommerce stock, according to two people with direct knowledge. At least two turned him down. One recalls Parscale’s pitch: “He told me he was going to list CloudCommerce on Nasdaq, and we were all going to be really rich.”

Parscale’s political success intrigued some high-profile clients. In mid-2017, Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, hired Parscale for a “sales analytics” project, to see if he could help sell basketball tickets. “I figure, we’ll see if what he does can make a difference. … I’m a big believer that when it comes to data, you don’t take sides. You look to see results,” says Cuban, a reality TV star who has toyed with running for president. In the end, Parscale’s impact was “in line with what we did with other advanced metrics companies,” says Cuban. “It helped, but wasn’t anything dramatic.”

Parscale was hired to boost ticket sales for “Only the Brave,” a Hollywood movie about an elite California firefighting team. He retained a Trump surrogate, Marcus Luttrell, a former Navy SEAL and war hero who was depicted in the movie “Lone Survivor,” to endorse the film, according to Variety, and Parscale promoted the movie on Twitter without disclosing he’d been paid to do so: “A film about real American heroes. Risked it all to save others. Can’t wait to honor these men by watching the movie! #onlythebrave #maga”

Ultimately, CloudCommerce was unable to successfully exploit Parscale’s commercial business, which largely went on hiatus as Parscale turned back to politics. CloudCommerce continues to lose money and bleed cash. The company’s SEC filings now list Parscale’s role as Trump’s campaign manager as a “risk factor,” citing the president’s unpopularity with some employees and customers.

“Brad thought if he got on board and applied some of his techniques, a penny stock becomes a dollar stock and $1 million becomes $100 million,” says Jeremy Sloan, a San Antonio lawyer who represented Parscale in the CloudCommerce deal and has known him for a decade. “I remember telling him: ‘Dude, you’re taking a risk here — selling your whole company, all these assets you’re selling for stock. If you go from one penny to $3, that’s great. But if you go from one to zero, that $9 million headline turns into $90,000.’”

As of Sept. 9, CloudCommerce shares were trading for less than a cent.

Parscale’s efforts to monetize his role in Trump’s victory met with more success in the political world.

Trump pioneered the nonstop presidential campaign, filing for reelection on the day of his inauguration, and Parscale positioned himself to capitalize on it. He incorporated Parscale Strategy, his political-consulting business, just 10 days later. Although Parscale lacked a formal campaign title until being named campaign manager in February 2018, he never stopped working for Trump — or getting paid for it.

During the 14 months before Parscale’s selection, his firms received more than $13 million. The money came from three different Trump campaign committees, the RNC, the presidential inaugural committee, a pro-Trump super PAC and a “dark money” organization. Parscale unsuccessfully sought work from at least two other GOP campaign committees.

Parscale simultaneously served as a co-founder of and senior adviser to America First Policies, a pro-Trump “dark money” group, and its sibling, the super PAC America First Action, which quickly became a paid refuge for Trump campaign veterans. The two groups are allowed to raise unlimited sums but are legally barred from coordinating with the campaign. Activist group Common Cause claims, in complaints to the FEC and the Justice Department, that the two groups have illegally coordinated with the Trump campaign. The complaints are still pending. (A spokesperson for America First declined to comment.)

Up through his appointment as Trump’s campaign manager on Feb. 27, 2018, the two America First groups paid Parscale’s firm more than $3.5 million for “media advocacy,” website services and work in congressional special-election campaigns. Days after his appointment, America First ceased paying Parscale Strategy, presumably to avoid running afoul of laws barring the super PAC from coordinating with Trump’s campaign.

Instead, America First Action soon began making payments for similar services to a new entity, incorporated in Delaware on March 2, calledRed State Data & Digital. Parscale told ProPublica and Texas Monthly that he formed Red State to allow his employees to continue working for America First while he distanced himself from the group. Parscale didn’t mention that one of the employees was his wife, a fact subsequently revealed by CNN. Red State Data & Digital has received $923,201 from America First Action.

Red State represents Parscale’s attempt to channel those funds to a legally separate entity. “The lawyers suggested it for firewall purposes so it would have its own billing,” says Parscale. “It was legally recommended to me. I don’t even see the bills. I have employees that work for them, and they are firewalled from me.”

Such maneuvers are part of “a really troubling trend” — a “fig leaf” — to form campaign vendors that are “legally distinct but practically inseparable” from a campaign, says Adav Noti, former associate general counsel for the FEC, who is now senior director for the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center. “One serves the super PAC, one serves the campaign, but they’re run by the same people. You can firewall off staff people, but you can’t firewall your own brain. I would be very skeptical about that. Candidates and their advisers are not supposed to be coming in any contact with soft money.”

In 2016, Parscale, out of necessity, ceded much of the Trump campaign’s digital operations to the RNC. For the 2020 election, the tables are turned: Trump’s reelection campaign has effectively taken over the party organization.

The tone was set early at the top, with the installation of Ronna McDaniel, a fierce Trump loyalist, as RNC chair. But with Parscale’s help, Trump’s control over the committee has gone deeper. The group’s willingness to do Trump’s bidding has extended to its handling of voter data, for which Parscale has helped empower two former RNC chiefs of staff (who happen to be married to each other), Katie Walsh and Mike Shields. They’re the winners in an intraparty struggle that has shifted power, money and staff from the RNC to the party’s private repository of voter information, called the Data Trust. Parscale was named to the Data Trust board in May 2017.

The changes have degraded the GOP’s data operation, which is critical for winning elections, according to critics, including Bill Skelly, a longtime Republican data consultant no longer doing RNC work, and Jesse Kamzol, an RNC data director who was ousted in mid-2017. They believe out-of-date and incomplete information in the party-supplied voter files, used for voter contact and turnout efforts, contributed to the GOP’s poor performance in the 2018 midterms.

One example: sophisticated RNC voter score projections for Rep. John Culberson, a nine-term incumbent defending a suburban Houston seat held by Republicans for a half-century, showed Culberson winning his race handily, with a 56% to 35% margin among likely voters 11 weeks before Election Day, documents reviewed by ProPublica show. Other polls during this period consistently showed Culberson and Democrat Lizzie Fletcher in a far closer race. Culberson ultimately lost 52.5% to 47.5%.

Former RNC data experts blame such problems on poor data “hygiene,” the tedious work of keeping the files accurate and current. Says one: “They’re getting wrong addresses, wrong phone numbers, wrong emails. … They’re not updating it. They’re building voter files and political data sets. It’s not a technical thing; it’s kind of an art. Imagine you suddenly went from having a bunch of Picassos and Monets. Then you go to someone who can finger-paint.”

Shields, who served as a senior adviser to the Data Trust until July 31, says all changes occurred “with the full knowledge of the Trump campaign and Brad.” He adamantly denies any systemic problems. He and RNC officials defend the quality of the data and blame the criticism on a “small pocket” of political operatives who have lost business in the Trump era. Skelly denies any such motivation, saying, “It is right to continue to innovate and look for change, but not for its own sake.”

More conspicuously, since Trump’s election, the RNC — at his campaign’s direction — has excluded critical “voter scores” on the president from the analytics it routinely provides to GOP candidates and committees nationwide, with the aim of electing down-ballot Republicans.

Republican consultants say the Trump information is being withheld for two reasons: to discourage candidates from distancing themselves from the president, and to avoid embarrassing him with poor results that might leak. But they say its concealment harms other Republicans, forcing them to campaign without it or pay to get the information elsewhere.

Indeed, RNC “voter score” documents from 2018 include a wealth of voter information for a given district, including attitudes toward the major parties, state elected officials, local candidates, critical issues and even Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. There is no data on Trump. To the contrary, according to one GOP expert, 2016 Trump information previously made available was conspicuously withheld starting in mid-2017.

“There has been a major decision to lock down the Trump voter scores,” says a former national GOP data official, who was repeatedly blocked from obtaining the information. He calls this “Trump-first mentality” at the RNC “outside the norm” and a “major hindrance” to the success of down-ballot candidates.

According to RNC documents, the scores are used to guide an array of campaign efforts, including field programs, fundraising, digital advertising and communications. Says a former RNC data officer: “It’s definitely hurting the party not to release that information. I wish we could have handed it over.”

Current and former party officials from two major battleground states confirm that the RNC refused their repeated requests for Trump data. “What voters in our state think about Donald Trump matters,” says the executive director for one state. “There are people who loved our governor but were turned off by the president. We deliver different messages to people who need to be convinced to come out to our side. How are we supposed to run campaigns if we’re flying blind on thinking about the president?”

When asked about this, Walsh, who serves as a senior adviser to the RNC, embraces the proposition that the committee now — properly — does the president’s bidding. Because Trump effectively paid for the voter data by raising money for the RNC, according to this view, his campaign was fully entitled to withhold it even from other Republicans. “I don’t think most campaigns give their data out to other campaigns for free,” Walsh says. “So I don’t see why the president would be expected to. That’s all data work done by the RNC, and the head of the party is the president. So it’s his data.”

Says one veteran GOP consultant: “They should just put ‘TRUMP’ signs in front of the Republican National Committee building now, just like every other building he’s got.”

The 2020 Trump campaign could not be more different from 2016. Parscale has been methodically assembling a political war machine, largely along traditional lines. He has created a large-dollar fundraising network; begun training sessions for field recruits; and established outreach groups for African Americans, women and Hispanics. (In 2016, the campaign didn’t even translate its website into Spanish.) Parscale has also spent tens of millions building contact files of Trump donors and supporters, harvested from responses to Facebook ads and rally sign-ups.

Parscale’s life feels a lot bigger-scale these days, too. He now lives in a $2.4-million home on the Intracoastal Waterway in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He now drives a Ferrari and a BMW X6. Since his star turn on “60 Minutes,” Parscale has become a recognizable conservative political celebrity. He has 361,000 Twitter followers, up from 3,793 just three years ago.

Parscale has assumed the role of Trump’s troll-in-chief, backing his boss’s boasts and false claims; generating ads playing to voters’ fears; twisting the knife on the president’s opponents; and caricaturing Democrats’ policies. Recently, the Trump campaign circulated an ad on Facebook claiming that every Democratic presidential candidate would eliminate private health insurance. As a website called Popular Information first pointed out, the ad included a photo of five candidates raising their hands affirmatively at their June 27 debate, but it omitted the fact that they were responding to a different question. When I asked him about the ad, Parscale ignored the false photo and displayed some Trumpian defiance. “Make no mistake,” he says. “All Democrats from Bernie to Biden will eliminate private insurance either outright or as a consequence of the public option crowding out private insurance.”

Parscale seems to revel in the combat — at least part of the time. “I barely leave the house,” he says. “We don’t even go to dinner any more. We eat in. It’s not worth it anymore.” The world is now divided among fans who want to pose with him for a selfie and antagonists who’d rather throw things at him. In that way, as in so many others, he has come to resemble his boss.

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Politics

After latest shooting, Trump pushes Facebook ads ‘straight from the NRA playbook’

A campaign surrogate also falsely linked Beto O’Rourke to the Saturday shooting.

A sign at a demonstration coinciding with President Trump's visit to El Paso last month after the mass shooting there. (Mario Tama/Getty Images)

By Isaac Stanley-Becker September 3

From the White House lawn on Sunday, President Trump promised a package of laws to address the scourge of gun violence.

But in advertisements that went up Monday on Facebook, the president delivered a very different message, pointedly warning a select group of voters that Democrats were intent on repealing the Second Amendment and asking them to sign their names to a petition to defend gun rights.

“Democrats have finally admitted what they truly want: a repeal of the Second Amendment,” reads one variation of the ad, which went up two days after a shooting attack Saturday in two Texas towns left seven dead and 22 wounded. “It’s up to the American people to stand strong and defend our freedoms.”

The appeal went out as a Trump surrogate — a member of his 2020 advisory board — promoted a conspiracy theory on Twitter falsely tying the Saturday gunman to Beto O’Rourke, a former Texas congressman and presidential candidate.

The Facebook blitz, which relies on misleading claims about Democratic objectives, offers a window into Trump’s mixed messaging on guns in the wake of a pair of mass shootings in early August — in El Paso and in Dayton, Ohio — that marked the nadir of a bloody month in which more than 50 people were killed in mass gun attacks.

In the days after the El Paso shooting, Trump signaled he was open to proposals for new background checks, saying that “there is a great appetite” for such measures. Soon after, following a phone call with National Rifle Association head Wayne LaPierre, the president changed his tune, echoing the messaging of the NRA.

Last weekend, Trump again embraced the NRA’s talking points, asserting that background checks would “not have stopped any of it.” Still, he said, “we’re doing a package, and we’ll see how it comes about.” Mum on details, he said, “We’re looking at a lot of different bills, ideas, concepts."

The ads illuminate how targeting techniques offered by Facebook and other platforms allow Trump to sound one note from the White House lawn and a different note to a handpicked group of Internet dwellers. The base gets one message; everyone else gets another.

Some versions include a video with foreboding music and a promise that “Your Second Amendment will NEVER BE REPEALED.” An invitation to sign what the ads bill as the “Official Defend the Second Amendment Petition” flashes in red. Users who comply are asked to enter their names, email addresses and Zip codes, with the option to add a mobile number.

The ads, sponsored by Trump’s official Facebook page, were paid for by the Trump Make America Great Again Committee, a joint national fundraising committee run by the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee.

“The messaging [of the ads] is straight from the NRA playbook, painted in as dire and apocalyptic terms as they can muster,” said Robert Spitzer, a political scientist at the State University of New York at Cortland. “To the extent that he’s been oscillating back and forth and making sympathetic noise about a number of different proposals, this abandons all of that.”

The ads were targeted at users across a broad swath of the country but appeared to be concentrated in certain left-leaning states with a sizable population of gun owners, such as Oregon and Washington, as well as a handful of Midwestern states, including Michigan and Ohio.

One version appears only to men between the ages of 45 and 54 in Louisiana, which is exceptionally specific, said Laura Edelson, a researcher at New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering who studies advertising on social media. She speculated that it was an attempt to collect personal identifying information from attendees of a single event, such as a gun show.

Spitzer said the ads amounted to a “rallying cry for the gun base,” delivered two days after a deadly shooting and as prominent Democrats pressed the case for gun control. That environment provides fertile ground for dire warnings about the Second Amendment, he said, because of anxiety that spikes about lawmakers reining in access to firearms.

[On Labor Day, presidential candidates turn the conversation to guns]

The Trump campaign did not respond to a request about the timing of the ads and whether they were specifically tied to fresh calls for gun control after the shooting in West Texas. Also unanswered was a question about the accuracy of saying Democrats want to repeal the Second Amendment, which is not a pathway publicly favored by any Democratic presidential aspirants or member of Congress.

Reexamining the Second Amendment has gained currency among a small group of state lawmakers and candidates for federal office. Hawaii Democrats introduced a measure in March urging Congress “to clarify the constitutional right to bear arms.” And Shannon Liss-Riordan, who is challenging Sen. Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts in the Democratic primary, last month said it was “time we take real action and repeal the Second Amendment.”

John Paul Stevens, a Republican who served on the Supreme Court for 35 years, in March made the case for the Second Amendment’s repeal in a New York Times op-ed. (Stevens died in July.)

Facebook did not return a request for comment about whether the characterization of Democratic priorities violates its policy against “deceptive, false, or misleading content.”

The Trump campaign has spent massively on Facebook in recent months, including about $5 million since the start of June, according to data compiled by Bully Pulpit Interactive, a Democratic communications agency. But it has not been a top Facebook spender on ads related to guns and gun control. Among top-tier Democratic presidential candidates, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) was alone in putting out new ads about gun control after the weekend violence.

Other groups that have come out with fresh gun-related ads on Facebook after Saturday’s shooting included Washington Gun Law, an advocacy group that promises to “keep you apprised of all relevant legal issues involving firearms and self-defense in Washington state,” and U.S. & Texas LawShield, a legal-defense organization.

Social media was awash in misinformation about guns and gun control after Saturday’s shooting, which unfolded in Odessa and Midland.

Much of the false messaging targeted O’Rourke, who has called for mandatory buybacks of assault weapons, among other measures to curb the violence that has convulsed scores of American cities, including his hometown of El Paso.

Anthony Shaffer, a former Defense Intelligence Agency officer and a member of Trump’s 2020 advisory board, on Monday promoted a conspiracy theory falsely claiming that the gunman in West Texas was an O’Rourke supporter, with a sticker on his truck supporting the candidate — claims for which there is no evidence, authorities confirmed.

Shaffer, who has promoted baseless claims about the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya, and clashed with the U.S. military and intelligence communities over his allegations of an intelligence failure before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, took to Twitter after the shooting to assail Democrats for calling for new restrictions on firearms. In one post, he said the gunman was a supporter of O’Rourke, tagging the Democrat, and retweeting a post from an account with the handle @suemo54 and the name “Sue Moore.”

The original tweet, posted Sunday, read: “The Odessa Shooter’s name is Seth Ator, a Democrat Socialist who had a Beto sticker on his truck.” It had garnered more than 10,000 retweets by early Tuesday, despite being previously flagged to Twitter.

Oscar Villarreal, a spokesman for the Texas Department of Public Safety, said there was no indication the gunman was linked to O’Rourke in any way. Nir Hauser, a co-founder of a firm called VineSight, which uses artificial intelligence to track misinformation, said the post appears to have been amplified mainly by bot accounts.

Shaffer, in a brief interview Tuesday morning, stood by his tweet, saying “That’s not what I’ve seen from people” when informed that his claim about the gunman had no basis in fact.

He declined to answer questions about his work on Trump’s advisory board, saying only that it was an unpaid role that he has fulfilled “since the time they went into office.” In April, Shaffer was interviewed by Lara Trump, the president’s daughter-in-law, on the Donald J. Trump Podcast.

Responding to an inquiry about Shaffer’s role on the advisory board, the Trump campaign said: “The Trump 2020 Advisory Board is a diverse group of key supporters committed to reelecting President Donald Trump. Advisory Board members often serve as surrogates in media appearances or by writing op-eds.”

The account that appears to have hatched the conspiracy theory about O’Rourke, drawing Shaffer’s attention, identifies its owner as a 72-year-old retiree living in Mesa, Ariz. A message left on a linked Facebook page went unanswered Tuesday.

Trump campaign ad featured QAnon signs despite FBI warning that conspiracy could ‘motivate’ extremists

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/:{trumps-unapologetic-campaign-refuses-to-end-ads-featuring-invasion-rhetoric:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:-%e2%81%a0-even-as-the-president-visits-el-paso/

https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/trump-and-right-wing-media-are-peddling-an-apocalyptic-ideology-of-a-civilizational-conflict/

no lnx

AN

Trump and right-wing media are peddling an apocalyptic ideology of a civilizational conflict

Written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly August 6, 2019

It has been seventeen years since John Judis and Ruy Teixeira published their book, The Emerging Democratic Majority. One of the central themes of the book was to cite demographic data about the so-called “browning of America” and note that it was the left that was positioned to benefit from the fact that non-Hispanic whites would eventually become a minority in this country.

In the years since the book was published, a lot of liberals (including one of the authors) came to question the premise that “demography is destiny.” While those on the right have publicly panned the book’s analysis, there is a way in which it has become the foundation of what we are witnessing from Donald Trump and his enablers.

Two years ago, I wrote about the connection between the president and white supremacists, including this quote fromRichard Spencer.

“Trump, on a gut level, kind of senses that this is about demographics, ultimately. We’re moving into a new America.” He said, “I don’t think Trump is a white nationalist,” but he did believe that Trump reflected “an unconscious vision that white people have – that their grandchildren might be a hated minority in their own country. I think that scares us. They probably aren’t able to articulate it. I think it’s there. I think that, to a great degree, explains the Trump phenomenon.”

More than a year before Trump was elected, Spencer—a spokesperson for white supremacists—explained that the “Trump phenomenon” was based on the fear white people have about the changing demographics in this country.

As Courtney Hable explains, the El Paso gunman was inspired by “the white supremacist ‘great replacement’ conspiracy theory that white people are being systematically ‘replaced’ by people of color through mass immigration.” She goes on to document how Fox News has been pushing that narrative relentlessly.

The subtle shift in how this narrative is being presented is that personalities like Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham have re-framed the demographic changes away from being the inevitable destiny of this country so that they can blame it on immigration. The El Paso gunman caught on and described immigrants as “invaders” flooding into the United States.

Thomas Kaplan documents how that is exactly the language being employed by the Trump campaign on social media.

President Trump’s re-election campaign has harnessed Facebook advertising to push the idea of an “invasion” at the southern border, amplifying the fear-inducing language about immigrants that he has also voiced at campaign rallies and on Twitter.

Since January, Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign has posted more than 2,000 ads on Facebook that include the word “invasion” — part of a barrage of advertising focused on immigration, a dominant theme of his re-election messaging.

I would not normally read an article titled, “White Terrorism Shows ‘Stunning’ Parallels to Islamic State’s Rise” because it sounds exploitative. But Max Fisher, who has a reputation as a thoughtful and serious journalist—especially on matters related to terrorism and propaganda—is the author. Here is what he wrote.

Many scholars of terrorism see worrying similarities between the rise of the Islamic State and that of white nationalist terrorism, seen most recently in the carnage in El Paso, Tex.

“The parallels are stunning,” said Will McCants, a prominent expert in the field.

And they are growing more notable with each new attack.

Experts say that the similarities are far from a coincidence. White nationalist terrorism is following a progression eerily similar to that of jihadism under the leadership of the Islamic State, in ways that do much to explain why the attacks have suddenly grown so frequent and deadly.

In both, there is the apocalyptic ideology that predicts — and promises to hasten — a civilizational conflict that will consume the world. There is theatrical, indiscriminate violence that will supposedly bring about this final battle, but often does little more than grant the killer a brief flash of empowerment and win attention for the cause.

There are self-starter recruits who, gathering in social media’s dark corners, drive their own radicalization. And for these recruits, the official ideology may serve simply as an outlet for existing tendencies toward hatred and violence…

The feedback loop of radicalization and violence, once triggered, can take on a terrible momentum all its own, with each attack boosting the online radicalization and doomsday ideology that, in turn, drive more attacks.

The apocalyptic ideology of a civilizational conflict is being peddled by the president of the United States and his enablers in right-wing media via the great replacement conspiracy theory. The use of indiscriminate violence as a response travels around the underbelly of social media in places like 8chan.

Americans who don’t pay attention to right-wing media and have no exposure to radicalized social media forums have no idea this kind of thing is happening. They simply wake up one day to see that yet another mass shooting has taken place. When Democrats point the finger of blame at Trump and his enablers, it can appear as if it’s just another example of the politicization of tragedy.

That’s why it is important for people to learn about what’s going on. The use of the word “invasion” over 2,000 times on Facebook by the president’s re-election campaign is no accident. It is a calculated strategy to incite the kind of reaction we just witnessed in El Paso.

As Fisher notes:

It is nearly impossible to eradicate a movement animated by ideas and decentralized social networks. Nor is it easy to prevent attacks when the perpetrators’ ideology makes nearly any target as good as the next, and requires little more training or guidance than opening a web forum.

It will take time and a concerted effort to deal with those decentralized social networks that have developed. But it all begins by exposing the president as the man behind the curtain who is inflaming the situation.

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https://www.ecowatch.com/trump-campaign-plastic-straws-2639302658.html

Trump Campaign Is Selling Plastic Straws to ‘Make Straws Great Again’

Olivia Rosane Jul. 22, 2019 11:00AM EST POPULAR

The campaign to re-elect President Donald Trump has found a new way to troll liberals and sea turtles.

The campaign website is selling packs of 10 plastic straws for $15, Trump re-election campaign manager Brad Parscale tweeted on Thursday, as USA Today reported.

"Liberal paper straws don't work. STAND WITH PRESIDENT TRUMP and buy your pack of recyclable straws today," the straws' description reads.

Parscale further promoted the straws in an email Friday titled "Make Straws Great Again," NPR reported.

"I'm so over paper straws, and I'm sure you are too. Much like most liberal ideas, paper straws don't work and they fall apart instantly. That's why we just launched our latest product—Official Trump Straws," Parscale wrote. "Now you can finally be free from liberal paper straws that fall apart within minutes and ruin your drink."

Calls to ban plastic straws increased after a video of a turtle with a straw stuck up its nose went viral. Cities like Seattle have passed restrictions, and companies including Starbucks have vowed to phase them out. California became the first state to ban them in sit-down restaurants last September.

But conservatives aren't the only ones who have expressed frustration with the paper alternatives, which tend to become unusable as the liquid permeates them, NPR pointed out. Journalists across the political spectrum have complained about them on social media. For some people with disabilities, the flexibility and heat resistance of plastic straws are more than just a convenience: They enable people with mobility issues to hydrate on their own and drink independently when dining out.

When asked about straw bans on Friday, Trump gave an answer that was "oddly reasonable," according to The Guardian.

"I do think we have bigger problems than plastic straws," Trump answered. "You know, it's interesting about plastic straws: so, you have a little straw, but what about the plates, the wrappers, and everything else that are much bigger and they're made of the same material? So, the straws are interesting. Everybody focuses on the straws. There's a lot of other things to focus on. But it's an–it's an interesting question."

Plastic straws only account for about one percent of the plastic in the oceans, according to Stanford Center for Ocean Solutions co-director Jim Leape. The oft-cited statistic that Americans use 500 million straws a day was downgraded to between 170 - 390 million straws a day, according to market research firms cited in a New York Times article fact-checking the higher claim.

...ew

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new

https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/a-shadow-digital-campaign-may-prove-decisive-in-2020-and-donald-trump-has-a-clear-advantage/

no lnx

A shadow digital campaign may prove decisive in 2020–and Donald Trump has a clear advantage

This article was paid for with reader donations to Alternet 2020.

written by Steven Schmidt July 11, 2019

Steven Schmidt was president of interactive digital at Aspen Marketing, now a division of Epsilon/Publicis.]

I think for the first time in history, the data operation ran everything from TV buying to where we were on the ground to all of the different operations. And so, having that data right there, we could start to where the persuadable targets are, [Get out the Vote], everything we needed to know.

Pennsylvania and Michigan… I started to see data and started to track it. We were making thousands of live calls, web tracking… and it was building and it’s building what’s called models and universes. What we can start to see is, ‘we’re in play in Pennsylvania’ and ‘in play in Michigan’. Let’s buy in these areas…. And by the Friday before the election, I had predicted that we were going to win 305 electoral results.”

-Trump Campaign Director Brad Parscale, interviewed on Fox News, November 16, 2016]

Marketing is big business in the U.S. and the Trump campaign is positioned to have the biggest digital marketing operation in history.

Today, with a reported database of 20 million active supporters, Brad Parscale, Trump’s campaign manager and digital guru, is confident. Parscale is predicting that the campaign will raise $1 billion, three times as much as they were able to raise in 2016, when Trump claimed to be self-financing his campaign and fundraising only became a coordinated Republican effort late in the game.

As Parscale explained on Fox News shortly after the election, his strategy began and ended “with the data.” The campaign decided to spend its limited resources in swing states late in the race, arguably pushing them over the top. Months later, Trump rewarded Parscale with the top job for 2020. The president, a self-described marketing genius, had found his own marketing genius in Parscale. And Parscale succeeded personally beyond his wildest dream when he took his little marketing company and hitched it to Trump.

Digital marketing has become ubiquitous in Americans’ lives as the age of Madison Avenue relying on TV and print advertising has given way to smarter, more narrowly targeted internet campaigns. Republicans appear to understand this shift well while Democrats have yet to show that they really ‘grock‘ how digital marketing targets and delivers messages to targeted audiences.

Reaching, Acquiring, Engaging and Converting Voters

Hillary Clinton’s team made 66 thousand visual ads. My team made 5.9 million ads. Those are ads targeted directly to people the way they want to consume them. I stopped looking at people as demographics, groups, personas. I said: let’s look at people as individuals, how do they act. Because two people who look the same, might act differently.

– Brad Parscale on ‘Micro-targeting’

As a former president of one of the largest marketing services companies in America, I can tell you that the Democratic party is far behind the curve. While the Democrats continue to rely heavily on old-school techniques of grassroots organizing, union get-out-the-vote drives and appealing to people with ad hoc causes, the Republican playbook has leaped ahead.

Today’s political battles are fought largely through interactive social media. Digital life has become almost indistinguishable from real life, especially for those who grew up with the internet. Every move we make in this world creates valuable data waiting to be harvested. Personal patterns emerge. Political beliefs are packed into your profile. All of this allows marketers like Parscale to finely tune their pitches for specific groups of voters.

When your angry old uncle or MAGA-loving grandpa attends a Trump rally or answers a text message, their contact information is being harvested for Parscale’s sprawling database. When they surf the web, visit popular conservative news sites or click on trending topics about hot button issues for the right, their personal data are, thanks to lax privacy standards across the industry, sifted, sorted and grouped into preferences for targeting.

This is the world of psychographics–a qualitative approach to defining consumers psychological attributes. Psychographic profiles –measures of an individual’s activities, interests and opinions, or AIO variables in industry-speak–were once used to sell sneakers and deodorants but have now become a potent tool for voter outreach and persuasion.

This is marketing 101 and the Democrats are only beginning to get into this high stakes game. Former Vermont Governor Howard Dean has been given the task, as of early 2019, to launch a new voter database. Dean called it “a big breakthrough” that will aim to compete with what the Republicans have spent years putting in place. “I’d sort of given up that we could get it done,” Dean told the Associated Press.

The Guru

Brad Parscale is a six foot, eight inch balding libertarian out of Topeka, Kansas via San Antonio, Texas. Before becoming Trump’s digital 2016 campaign director, he was a hungry young businessman and digital marketing whiz. When the opportunity of his life sat down next to him on a flight to New York in the person of Eric Trump, Parscale jumped on the opportunity to move up.

In early 2015, Donald Trump asked Parscale if his firm, Giles-Parscale, could build a website for $1500. When Trump launched his campaign in June 2015, he paid Parscale $10,000 to build out of his campaign’s site.

“I just made up a price,” Parscale later told The Washington Post. He promised Eric Trump that the money would be refundable if the work proved unsatisfactory.

Parscale realized that there was some real upside potential here. Trump, a tall man, had to look up to talk to Parscale, which seemed to impress him. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, soon asked him what he could do with Facebook and its marketing platform. Parscale Strategy, a spinoff of Giles-Parscale, kicked into high gear on the Facebook front.

Facebook: A Game-Changer

Earlier this year, during a talk to a Romanian audience titled, “Let’s Make Political Marketing Great Again,” Parscale hinted at how he plans to leverage his experience from 2016 to run a billion-dollar campaign during the 2020 cycle.

Forbes reported that:

The Trump team gained access to the Republican National Committee’s Data Trust, a collection of more than 200 million voter files gathered through a massive operation begun in the wake of Romney’s 2012 Presidential defeat. It was like a “Christmas present”, Parscale remembers. The team now had a way to “know what Americans think”. But Parscale and his team still needed an efficient way to target them. “And this other Christmas present showed up: these guys from Facebook walked to my office and said: ‘we have a beta … it’s a new onboarding tool … you can onboard audiences straight into Facebook and we will match them to their Facebook accounts’.”

Parscale’s strategy aligned perfectly with Facebook’s algorithms, importing lists of supporters gleaned from Trump rallies and those ubiquitous on-line ads. In his world, data–voters’ contact info–was gold.In 2016, Cambridge Analytica mined millions of users’ Facebook data after acquiring them from a researcher who told the social media giant that he would use it exclusively for academic purposes.

The Associated Press reported last year that Data Propria, “a company run by former officials at Cambridge Analytica,” has “quietly been working for President Donald Trump’s 2020 re-election effort.” But Parscale’s operation no longer relies on such vendors. It has become a multi-platform, multi-app shop utilizing direct, one-to-one communications, interactive messaging, mobile content and live events. In 2020, one might call this database-coordinated marketing campaign the ‘Secret Sauce 2.0’.

Some of Parscale’s techniques are proprietary, but others are simply industry best practices. “I always wonder why people in politics act like this stuff is so mystical,” Parscale told reporters in 2016. “It’s the same shit we use in commercial, just has fancier names.”

While the Republicans romped online, the Democrats stalled out in 2016. Hillary Clinton’s email travails became the ‘whatabout’ attack line of the campaign. Unfortunately for the Democratic Party,Hillary and Bill had an aversion to hiring Obama’s successful digital team and brought in their own consultants–young, inexperienced, and lacking a firm grasp of important security practices. An email server was set up in a closet. It would later be breached. The results were disastrous.

The Coming Onslaught…

What we need to do is create technology, an app on your phone [that] will help execute any type of volunteer programs… once we have data back. The volunteer app would be powered by and fed into the campaign’s data-gathering operation through the use of alarge scale machine learning system. So, when knocking on a door, the team already knows what issues the person cares about, and the takeaways from their discussion will help improve the campaign’s advertising program.

—Parscale on ‘Individual ad targeting’

Opposition research on whomever emerges from the Democratic primary are yet to come, but it is already clear that the party is not prepared to fight back with its own state-of-the-art political marketing apparatus.

Parscale revealed to the Palm Beach Post that in 2016, he created as many as 100,000 ads a day, testing different images, colors and wording to see which were the most effective for particular voters.“We will continue to make content that is tailored for you and the message you need to hear from the president,” he said, promising that during the course of the campaign, millions of personalized messages from the president will be arriving daily on cell phones, in emails, and via news feeds.

This time around, Parscale’s systems are mostly ready to go at this very early date. They’ve been engineered and tested. His team will use various performance metrics to track their successes, optimize their programs as they go, and maximize their spending clout.

They’re running their plan right now.

Via the Palm Beach Post:

At a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on March 28, Parscale walked onto the stage, raised his cell phone above his head and asked the audience to pull out their phones and text TRUMP to 88022. In a video clip of the rally, Trump supporters behind Parscale can be seen taking their phones out and texting.

“The power of bringing our party together is in that phone,” Parscale told the crowd in Miami. Recently, the campaign has been relentlessly texting supporters, asking them to sign a digital birthday card for the president. However, signing requires turning over your contact information and cell phone number.

“The whole game will be different” in 2020,said Parscale. Back in 2016, “the most people [the Republican National Committee] could contact to show up [to vote] without using television, advertising or some kind of mass media was 2 million people.” By 2020, “we’re gonna have 50-60 million… that’s a gigantic advantage, because the Democrats can’t do that.” Parscale expects to have a least 50 million personalized direct voter contacts in their database (62 million voted for Trump in 2016). “We will have a formidable ground game, one volunteer for every 13 swing voters, and a data operation that cannot be replicated,” Parscale told Face the Nation earlier this year.

According to The New York Times, in the first five months of this year, the Trump campaign had already pumped $4.9 million into Facebook ads, triple the figure of Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic candidate who spent the most.

But swing voters aren’t the only ones being targeted by the Trump campaign. The numbers from 2016 tell us those who stayed home in 2016–40 percent of eligible voters–represent a huge untapped source of votes for Parscale and his team to win over.

Those non-voters are being identified and targeted right now by the GOP’s marketing operations. Their data are being mined and put into Parscale’s databases in preparation for the next phase of the campaign. They will be flattered, told of Trump’s many awe-inspiring achievements and repeatedly warned about the horrors that will occur should Democrats get back in power.

It was recently revealed that part of Team Trump’s Facebook strategy to convert users into supporters is a series of targeted ads depicting members of various demographic groups that tend not to be supportive of Trump—among them bearded hipsters, young women and people of color–gushing over how great he is. These testimonials by “real Americans,” it turns out, are not only stock photos but some of them are Turkish stock photos.

Already, those in the database–core Republican voters, persuadables, and non-voters–are getting messages from the campaign. They’re being told to believe in America, keep the economy growing, protect their pocketbook, protect their family and protect the nation.

Brad Parscale is on his way, as he says, to make “political marketing great.” The database politics of the future is here now. Dems need to catch up.

sorta dirty trick

Trump’s reelection campaign recently launched a digital birthday card for the president’s June 14 birthday, a common gimmick that’s actually aimed at harvesting the contact information of potential voters. The Daily Beast reported that ABC affiliate stations ran an identical article about it on their websites as news, in effect helping Trump get contact information from voters.

But that is not all. Media Matters' Eric Hananoki found that a number of local stations -- with many different owners -- across the country also promoted the Trump campaign stunt on air, including in battleground states like North Carolina, Michigan, and Florida.

am 1st history origin WW

https://www.alternet.org/2019/03/the-entangled-history-of-america-first-and-the-american-dream/

A hospital-board election in central California wasn’t exactly what Burstien had in mind when he set out to establish Psy-Group in the U.S. election market. In early 2016, as the Presidential race was heating up, he and Zamel both tried to pitch much bigger players. Being hired by one of the main campaigns initially seemed like a long shot for an obscure new company whose services sounded risky, if not illegal. Lawyers at firms in New York and Washington expressed curiosity about Psy-Group, but most were too cautious to sign contracts with the company.

The Trump campaign, however, presented an opportunity. Early in 2016, a Republican consultant with ties to the Israeli government put Psy-Group in touch with Rick Gates, a senior Trump campaign official. Eager to secure a potentially lucrative project, Burstien drew up plans for an intelligence and influence campaign to promote Trump and undermine his rivals, first in the Republican primary and then in the general election. In the proposal, dubbed Project Rome, which was first reported on by the Times, last October, Psy-Group used code names for the candidates: Trump was Lion, and Hillary Clinton was Forest. Psy-Group also hired the Washington law firm Covington & Burling to conduct a legal review of its work. Former Psy-Group officials said that the resulting memo gave a green light to begin offering the company’s services in the U.S. (A spokesperson for Covington & Burling said that the firm could not discuss its advice to clients.)

Zamel often operated independently of Burstien, and it’s unclear how closely the two coördinated, but both saw the Trump campaign as a potential client. Trump’s vocal support for Israel and his hard-line views on Iran appealed to Zamel, and he reached out to Trump’s inner circle. In early May, 2016, Zamel sent an e-mail to Gingrich, saying that he could provide the Trump campaign with powerful tools that would use social media to advance Trump’s chances. Zamel suggested a meeting in Washington to discuss the matter further. Gingrich forwarded the e-mail to Jared Kushner and asked if the campaign would be interested. Kushner checked with others on the campaign, including Brad Parscale, who ran Web operations. According to a person familiar with the exchange, Parscale told Kushner that they didn’t need Zamel’s help. (A 2016 campaign official said, “We didn’t use their services.”)

Also that spring, Zamel was introduced to George Nader, a Lebanese-American with ties to the Emirati leader Mohammed bin Zayed and other powerful figures in the Gulf. Born in 1959, Nader was almost twice Zamel’s age. Both men preferred to operate behind the scenes, but were consummate networkers who touted their connections to high-level political figures. Some viewed Nader as an influence peddler; others said that he had been intimately involved in high-stakes negotiations in the Middle East for decades. Martin Indyk, an adviser to Presidents Clinton and Obama on Middle Eastern affairs and now a distinguished fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said, “We used to joke that George was in the pay of at least three intelligence services—the Syrian, the Israeli, and the Iranian.”

In June, 2016, Nader was attending an international economic forum in St. Petersburg, Russia, when Zamel approached him and requested a meeting. According to a representative for Nader, Zamel told Nader that he was trying to raise money for a social-media campaign in support of Trump; he thought that Nader’s Gulf contacts might be interested in contributing financially. Nader listened to Zamel’s pitch but didn’t make any commitments, according to the Nader representative. (Zamel’s representatives denied that he spoke to Nader in St. Petersburg about trying to help Trump.)

Zamel had another opportunity to pitch his services in early August, 2016, when Erik Prince, the founder of the Blackwater security firm, helped arrange a meeting at Trump Tower among Zamel, Nader, and Donald Trump, Jr. (Prince, whose sister Betsy DeVos became Trump’s Education Secretary, was a major Trump donor and had access to members of his team.) In the meeting, Zamel told Trump, Jr., that he supported his father’s campaign, and talked about Psy-Group’s influence operations. (Zamel’s lawyer, Marc Mukasey, played down the encounter, insisting that Zamel made no formal proposals during the meeting.)

Burstien said that his talks with the Trump campaign went nowhere; a representative for Zamel denied that his client engaged in any activity having to do with the election. But, according to the Nader representative, shortly after the election Zamel bragged to Nader that he had conducted a secret campaign that had been influential in Trump’s victory. Zamel agreed to brief Nader on how the operation had worked. During that conversation, Zamel showed Nader several analytical reports, including one that described the role of avatars, bots, fake news, and unattributed Web sites in assisting Trump. Zamel told Nader, “Here’s the work that we did to help get Trump elected,” according to the Nader representative. Nader paid Zamel more than two million dollars, but never received copies of the reports, that person said.

A representative for Zamel denied that he told Nader that he or any of his operatives had intervened to help Trump during the 2016 election. If Nader came away with that impression, the representative said, he was mistaken. “Nader may have paid Zamel not knowing when, how, or why the report was created, but he wanted to use it to gain access and new business,” the representative said. “In fact, it used publicly available material to show how social media—in general—was used in connection with the campaign.”...nyer

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sjmn

Big Peter Thiel donation shows he’s still with Trump

Billionaire entrepreneur was top donor to the Trump Victory Committee

By Levi Sumagaysay

lsumagaysay@bayareanewsgroup.com

Tech billionaire investor Peter Thiel has again put his money where his mouth is: He’s still with Trump.

With $250,000, Thiel was the biggest donor to the Trump Victory Committee in the most recent quarter, a new Federal Election Commission filing shows.

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The donation, dated July 10, appears to be the first donation by Thiel to the organization since the 2016 presidential campaign, when he forked over more than $1 million. He also donated $101,700 to the Republican National Committee July 10, according to a previously released FEC filing.

Thiel, of PayPal Mafia fame and one of Silicon Valley’s most high-profile supporters of President Donald Trump, was joined in this round of donations by United States Steel, which gave $100,000, and Trump attorney Mark Kasowitz, who gave $50,000, and a plethora of retired individuals from around the nation.

Overall, the Trump campaign raked in in $18.1 million last quarter through his campaign committee and two joint committees with the Republican National Committee. He has raised about $106 million since he came into office, according to the Washington Post.

It is unclear what kind of role, if any, Thiel plays in the Trump administration. He played a role during the presidential transition, but there have been reports that he later became critical of the president. Earlier this year, he said during a newspaper interview that “It’s been a crazier two years than I would have thought… There are all these ways that things have fallen short.” But he said he had no regrets about supporting Trump, because “It’s still better than Hillary Clinton or the Republican zombies.” Over the summer, Thiel compared Silicon Valley — which conservatives decry as too liberal — to North Korea, calling it a “oneparty state.” In the July-September quarter, the Victory campaign transferred money to the Republican National Committee, plus spent money on travel expenses, marketing and about $120,000 on the digital consulting services of Parscale Strategy.

Brad Parscale was the digital media director for Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign who famously said on “60 Minutes” that Facebook “embeds” — employees who help campaigns use the company’s ad-targeting tools more effectively — helped propel Trump to victory. Parscale is now leading Trump’s 2020 campaign.

A spokesman for Thiel — who was Facebook’s first outside investor and remains a board director of the social media giant — didnot return a request for comment.

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...Yet the sorry fact is that despite The Clinton Foundation's extensive good works, many, perhaps most, Americans probably believe that it is no better than Trump's fountain of sleaze. That negative image is owed to a carefully crafted and heavily funded plan to defame the Clinton Foundation, run by none other than Steve Bannon. Using funds supplied by the right-wing billionaire Mercer family, Bannon oversaw the production of a highly inaccurate book, "Clinton Cash," which he then used to manipulate mainstream news outlets. The book author even made a deal with The New York Times to feature the book's "research" in a front-page story that suggested Hillary Clinton had engineered approval of a uranium sale to Russia for the benefit of foundation donors.

That false and cynical story ran in 2015, around the time that Clinton declared her presidential candidacy -- and it molded a damaging narrative that influenced all ensuing coverage, just as Bannon and Mercer had plotted. From that moment until November 2016, news coverage of The Clinton Foundation mainly consisted of snuffling around for gossip, stolen emails and any other stray nonsense that advanced the negative story. Coverage of the Clinton Foundation's actual achievements was pushed aside.

The Trump Foundation escaped any such harsh scrutiny until just six weeks before Election Day 2016, when the Washington Post published the most devastating articles in a series by David Fahrenthold. His outstanding investigations eventually set the stage for the Trump Foundation's exposure and dissolution by New York authorities. But most of Fahrenthold's toughest stories came far too late for any political impact -- and received far too little coverage in mainstream outlets

By then, Brad Parscale,the Trump aide who is already managing Trump's reelection campaign, had bamboozled voters with a wildly bogus comparison, as summarized in this June 2016 tweet: "Data doesn't lie: Clinton Foundation was 'slush fund' while Hillary was a Senator/Secretary/Pres candidate. Trump Foundation helped people in need with 100 percent to charities, but @realDonaldTrump voluntarily shut his down. Yet who is the sleazy NY AG suing?!"

Parscale earned four Pinocchios from the Post fact-checker for this crude deception. But he got the last laugh.

Voters can depend on Parscale and Trump to slander their opponent in 2020, just as they lied viciously and incessantly about the Clintons. The question is whether mainstream news outlets will again amplify such lies in the name of "balance" or defend truth against its enemies.

To find out more about Joe Conason and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

https://www.factcheck.org/players-guide/2018/

leanings: Republican/Pro-President Trump

Spending target: Unknown

America First Policies is a 501(c)(4) nonprofit devoted to promoting the agenda of President Donald Trump. According to its website, the group’s main goals are repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act, overhauling the U.S. tax system, securing the border with Mexico, building a strong national defense, rebuilding infrastructure, and providing choice in education.

America First Policies is allied with America First Action, a pro-Trump super PAC that plans to spend $100 million in 2018, according to Politico.

Six of Trump’s former campaign aides created America First Policies in January 2017. The group’s founders include: Brad Parscale, Trump’s digital and data director; David Bossie, Trump’s deputy campaign manager; Nick Ayers, Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff; Marty Obst, who managed Pence’s gubernatorial reelection campaign in Indiana; and Katrina Pierson, Trump’s senior campaign communications adviser.

Rick Gates, Trump’s other deputy campaign manager, also helped create the nonprofit. However, Gates was forced to leave the group in March 2017 because of his ties to Paul Manafort, a former Trump campaign manager. As we have previously reported, both Manafort and Gates were indicted on charges of money laundering and tax evasion related to their work for a pro-Russia political party in Ukraine.

America First Policies was mostly inactive during the first months of the Trump administration, according to Politico. Then, in late October, the organization’s officials met with Trump advisers at the White House to plan a multimillion-dollar campaign to sell Trump’s plan to overhaul the U.S. tax system.

As part of that effort, the group said it planned to spend $1 million on a TV and online ad campaign with former Trump campaign manager Cory Lewandowski calling on “fellow patriots and friends” to get behind Trump’s tax proposal.

As of April 20, America First Policies has spent more than $1.9 million on ads and other independent expenditures trying to get Republicans elected to Congress. Most of that amount, $1.5 million, was spent opposing Democrat Jon Ossoff, who lost to Republican Karen Handel in the race to fill Georgia’s 6th District House seat. The group also spent more than $452,000 supporting former Sen. Luther Strange, who lost to Roy Moore in the special GOP Senate primary runoff in Alabama.

America First Policies has not publicly disclosed its donors to the Federal Election Commission because 501(c)(4) organizations are not required to do so.

• Categories
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maplight

The country’s second-biggest tobacco company has been a top funder of the controversial “dark money” organization created to promote President Donald Trump’s legislative agenda, according to a MapLight review.

Reynolds American Inc., which manufactures Newport and Camel cigarettes, disclosed last week that it donated $1.5 million toAmerica First Policies in 2017. Created by former Trump campaign officials, the nonprofit has faced criticism for the racist, anti-Muslim and anti-Semitic views expressed by its staff.

While America First Policies raised $26 million last year, three Fortune 500 companies said earlier this month that they would no longer give money to the organization after MapLight reported on their donations. Two officials have left the group in recent weeks.

The donation from Reynolds is the largest known contribution to America First Policies, which does not disclose its donors to the public. Reynolds also gave $1 million to Trump’s inaugural committee. Cigarette smoking kills more than 480,000 Americans each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"Dark money groups are often used to disguise the support for candidates or officeholders from unsavory industries," said Brendan Fischer, a lawyer at the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center in Washington, D.C. "Trump may not want to be publicly associated with the tobacco industry, but the tobacco industry certainly wants Trump's support for their agenda."

Reynolds American and America First Policies did not respond to questions from MapLight.

Reynolds has been a major beneficiary of Trump’s time in Washington. The Republican tax bill was a boon for the company, which reported lobbying on the legislation. Reynolds announced that most of its employees would receive a $1,000 bonus. Its parent company, London-based British American Tobacco, said it will ultimately save $13.3 billion under the new law.

Last year, the Trump administration allowed British American Tobacco’s $54 billion acquisition of Reynolds to proceed without raising any antitrust questions. The purchase created the world’s largest publicly traded tobacco company, and it means that Reynolds is now a wholly owned subsidiary of a British company.

Although federal election law bars foreign nationals from participating in U.S. elections, domestic subsidiaries of foreign corporations are allowed to spend in elections. The only conditions are that the money must come from U.S. profits, and the spending can’t be directed by foreign nationals.

In 2016, the Intercept reported that a Chinese-owned company had donated $1.3 million to a super PAC supporting former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush’s failed presidential campaign at the direction of a foreign national.

America First Policies and its sister super PAC, America First Action, set a fundraising goal of $100 million to support Trump’s agenda and aid Republican congressional candidates in the midterm elections this year.

Last year, America First Policies disclosed spending $452,000 to support former Sen. Luther Strange, R-Ala., in his unsuccessful GOP primary campaign, and it spent more than $1.3 million to prevent Democrat Jon Ossoff from winning an open congressional seat in Georgia.

The organization has hosted more than a dozen events with Vice President Mike Pence this year to build support for the Republican tax law. Pence was heckled by protestors at a recent America First Policies event in Ohio over his anti-gay views and the administration’s immigration policy, which has separated thousandsof immigrant children from their families at the border.

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America First, the primary pro-Trump outside organization, raised $30 million in 2017, according to a source familiar with the group’s finances and an FEC report shown to Axios before it is filed tonight.

Why it matters: $30 million is an impressive total, ahead of the $26 million Organizing for Action, the pro-Obama group, raised in its first year. America First's goal for 2018 is far more ambitious: $100 million.

“America First got off to a strong start in 2017, and we are grateful for those supporters who believe in our mission and the team we have assembled. We are working hard every single day to help the president make America great again,” Tommy Hicks Jr. the chairman of America First Action, said in a statement.

The breakdown:

America First Policies, a 501(c)(4), raised $26 million and spent $14 million of that total, primarily on ads.

America First Action, a Super PAC, raised just shy of $4 million of which it spent about $2 million.

• Trump campaign holdovers from America First Action include Corey Lewandowski, Katrina Pierson and Brad Parscale, while David Clarke, the controversial former Milwaukee County Sheriff, serves as a spokesman.
• The group's biggest spend of 2017 came during the Alabama special election, on which it spent more than $1 million. That race was ultimately won by Democrat Doug Jones.
• Brian Walsh, President of America First Action, said: "This is just the beginning for America First. We expect to be more aggressive in 2018 to ensure that those candidates who embrace President Trump’s agenda have the outside support they need to be successful as we work to grow our majorities in the House and Senate."

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https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/trumps-2020-campaign-effort-has-hired-officials-sketchy-data-firm-mueller

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Trump's 2020 Campaign Effort Has Hired Officials from the Sketchy Data Firm Mueller Is Investigating: Report

Cambridge Analytica was at the center of a massive scandal concerning the misuse of Facebook user data.

By Cody Fenwick / AlterNet June 15, 2018, 7:52 AM GMT

President Donald Trump's campaign is working with former employees of the disgraced data firm Cambridge Analytica, a company that collapsed after its scandalous misuse of Facebook data was revealed and is facing scrutiny by special counsel Robert Mueller, according to the Associated Press.

At least four ex-employees of the firm now work for Data Propria, which performs campaign services similar to those Cambridge Analytica provided, the report says. The employment of workers who were involved with such a scandalous enterprise remains a focus of an investigation into malfeasance in the 2016 election and shows a brazen disregard on the Republican Party's part for even having the appearance of concerns about propriety and election security.

Though the leader of the new firm, Matt Oczkowski, denies working for the Trump campaign, AP reporters said that Oczkowski said he and Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale were "doing the president’s work for 2020" during an overheard conversation.

The AP also notes that Parscale is a part owner of Data Propia's parent company.

Cambridge Analytica folded in May because its reputation had been fatally damaged by the scandal. It would appear, however, that's its reputation has not been so tarnished that the president's team wouldn't want to work with people involved in its sketchy practices.

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https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/05/donald-trump-brad-parscale-2020-campaign

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2020 Election

TRUMP’S NEXT CAMPAIGN MAY BE EVEN CRAZIER THAN THE FIRST

With no Establishment to hammer, Team Trump is declaring a new kind of war.

BY TINA NGUYEN

MAY 15, 2018 3:48 PM

Donald Trump addresses supporters during a political rally at the Phoenix Convention Center in Arizona, July 11, 2015.

While the G.O.P. braces for an electoral wipeout in November, the nominal head of the party, Donald Trump, appears more concerned with 2020. Winning re-election, of course, is easier said than done, especially for a president whose approval rating has never cracked 46 percent. And political lightning rarely strikes twice. Trump’s 2016 bid, after all, had two big things going for it, despite being a shambling jalopy of a campaign: a feckless group of establishment primary challengers in a year when the conservative base was ready to revolt, and a widely loathed Democratic opponent in Hillary Clinton. Trump’s schtick was new, and the moment was right: the former real-estate mogul decimated his primary opponents and eked out a victory over Clinton by running as an outsider, pissing on Washington’s sacred cows, and decrying the whole system as irredeemably corrupt. Two years later, however, Trump is the ultimate insider, even if he occasionally treats his presidency like he’s watching it on TV. His boldest promises—to repeal Obamacare and build a Great Wall on the U.S.-Mexico border—have come to naught. His Cabinet is rife with corruption scandals. And his gleaming, trillion-dollar infrastructure plan is gathering dust. Perhaps that is why the Trump 2020 campaign quietly jettisoned one of its initial re-election slogans, “Promises Made. Promises Kept,” in favor of the more straightforward “Keep America Great.”

Trump, of course, does not appear to have any doubts about his re-election. He famously filed to run in 2020 just hours after his inauguration, faster than any other incumbent president. He slashed corporate taxes and presides over a booming economy, both factors that have helped him and his affiliated super PACs raise over $73 million in 2017 alone. (Trump’s own campaign raised $43 million last year, four times what his predecessor Barack Obama raised during his first two years as president.) That stroke of extreme confidence has yielded other strategic benefits, too, giving him a massive head start against his future Democratic opponent (currently leading in the polls, according to hypothetical matchups) and allowing him to pay off his hefty legal fees. While Mike Pence handles the tedious particulars of helping to win midterm elections (and perhaps building support for his own future campaign), Trump fills his mostly empty schedule with monthly rallies to keep himself and his base energized. According to Axios, Trump aides are confident they can pick up two new states in 2020: Minnesota and Colorado.

Some elements of the Trump playbook will remain the same. Brad Parscale, Trump’s digital director in 2016, has returned to lead the 2020 effort as campaign manager, and plans to double down on the digital-first strategy that helped Trump circumvent traditional media. As Axios reports, Parscale is focused on building a formidable data operation with data for up to 40 million likely Trump voters, in hopes of bringing more apathetic Americans into the MAGA fold. He’s reportedly building project-management software to streamline the internal campaign apparatus, and devising various new tools to translate interest into action—for instance, those who attend a Trump rally will have to provide a phone number, which will shore up the campaign’s database. As Parscale put it, “We’re crushing it in prospecting.”

At the same time, Trump can’t rely on the same messaging twice—now that he is the Establishment and his party holds the majority in all houses of government, he’ll have to swivel his narrative to cast blame elsewhere. Per Parscale, it will be placed squarely on the shoulders of Democrats: “Democratic obstruction,” he implied, will be positioned as the cause of a handful of roadblocks, chief among them the Russia investigation, the push against a border wall, and resistance to repealing Obamacare. Parscale didn’t mention other various enemies Trump routinely blames for his shortcomings, among them leakers, Deep State actors, Hollywood liberals, the Clinton Foundation, and the “fake-news” media. But in the absence of other obvious punching bags, these elements will likely drift to the forefront of the president’s 2020 campaign.

As I reported earlier this month, Trump’s increasingly public temper tantrums over said enemies have done little to ding his support, even as they’ve driven him into deeper and deeper legal trouble. In fact, new public-approval polls indicate that Trump’s disapproval ratings are going down—a fact upon which the president seized with verve in a Tuesday tweet. Orchestrating a summit in North Korea and moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem have given Trump supporters something to gloat about, while they’ve largely tired of the White House scandal cycle. But without concerted messaging, Republicans will have to rely on Trump to steer the ship—something he indicated during a lunch with senators that he’s only too willing to do. With the ultimate unpredictable candidate at the helm, and no clear target ahead, Trump’s 2020 campaign could shape up to be even more toxic, hateful, and polarizing than the last.

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many lnx docs

Dark money group America First Policies is running a pro-Trump polling operation. Here is an inside look at its secretive work

America First Policies, a nonprofit group with close ties to President Donald Trump, has hired Trump's pollsters to conduct a wide range of political polling and research.

The practice breaks with decades of tradition and raises concerns about potential coordination between the dark money group, the White House and the RNC.

CNBC, over the past six months, obtained more than 50 documents through an obscure portal on the America First Policies website.

Christina Wilkie | @christinawilkie

Published 4:45 PM ET Thu, 1 March 2018 Updated 4:14 PM ET Fri, 2 March 2018

CNBC.com

America First Policies, a nonprofit group with close ties to President Donald Trump, has hired Trump's pollsters to conduct a wide range of political polling and research that experts say resembles the kind of expensive work the Republican National Committee has performed for prior GOP administrations.

Such a practice breaks with decades of tradition and raises concerns about potential coordination between the pro-Trump dark money group, the White House and the RNC. America First Policies and the RNC have denied coordinating. The White House did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Over the past six months, CNBC has obtained more than 50 documents through an obscure portal on the America First Policies website.

Much of what the group polls and surveys would be standard work for a presidential campaign or a major political party. But America First Policies, which was founded days after Trump's inauguration, is not a campaign or a party. It's what the IRS calls a "social welfare organization," permitted to operate tax-free and keep its donors secret as long as its main focus isn't politics and it doesn't coordinate with candidates.

Election lawyers typically interpret this to mean 51 percent of a group's activities must be issue related. "Our primary purpose has to be issue related, but that doesn't mean we can't throw in questions that are news related or political [in our polling]," said Erin Montgomery, communications director for America First Policies.

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Last summer, America First Policies took an unprecedented step for a politically allied nonprofit: It started using three top polling firms from Trump's 2016 presidential campaign to produce a steady stream of Trump-focused polls, strategy memos and reports that continue to this day. The three firms initially put their own logos on the polling they did for the group, but over time the America First Policies logo gradually replaced theirs on some of the documents.

America First Policies, which actively advocates for policies favored by Trump, denied that any of the documents, many of which are labeled "confidential," were intended to benefit the White House or the president. "We have very clear lines and high walls between us and the RNC or the administration or the Trump campaign," Montgomery said.

Yet the lines between the group, the White House and Trump's campaign are often blurred.

This week, Trump announced that Brad Parscale, a founder of America First Policies and a senior advisor to the group who also ran digital operations for Trump's 2016 campaign, will lead his 2020 re-election bid.

Former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, who is known to stay in close contact with Trump, is also a senior advisor to America First Policies.Last week, Lewandowski reportedly met with the president and chief of staff John Kelly in the Oval Office, two days before Trump gave a freewheeling, campaign-style speech at the annual CPAC conference.

Another key advisor to America First Policies, former Trump campaign spokeswoman Katrina Pierson,recently posted this photo of herself with the president online, from a White House reception ahead of Trump's first State of the Union address on Jan. 30.

This was three months after a group of senior advisors to America First Policies, including Lewandowski, Parscale and Executive Director Brian O. Walsh huddled with top Trump administration officials in the White House in late October, plotting strategies to push tax reform.

Montgomery and Walsh both told CNBC that America First Policies gives its polling data to its allies while abiding by the "high walls and clear lines" separation from Trump.

In January alone, this data included more than a dozen surveys and memos on topics that ranged from marijuana legalization to how the White House handled the release of "Fire and Fury," a tell-all book about the Trump administration. Some of these documents were posted online and then removed, while others remained posted.

"We share our polling with lots of outside groups and elected officials, and we put all of them up online," said Montgomery. "I don't know if this information is ever shared with the White House. Anyone can see it."

"In the old world [of political polling], things were kept secret. In the new world, you make everything public," Walsh said.

Yet after CNBC spoke to Walsh and Montgomery on Wednesday, several of the research documents from January appeared to have been removed from the site by Thursday morning, including the results of polling on marijuana, analysis of how women view Trump, and January's polling results.

Dozens of other documents have also been removed from the site but left up on the web, apparently by accident. Walsh was under the impression that they had all been permanently deleted, and he accused CNBC of acquiring the reports from someone inside the group's network. Walsh also refused to share several additional documents that CNBC requested.

A lot of what America First Policies has learned from its polling is not flattering to the Trump White House. Moreover, a significant portion of the polling shows that issues important to Trump are not necessarily important to voters.

Below are some of the key details spread throughout the group's research and polling:

Building a wall along the southern border is not only unpopular with Democrats and independents. Even Trump's base voters ranked the construction of a wall as their least important policy issue in a January survey.

A September poll showed that America First Policies was exploring ways to defeat Arizona Republican Sen. Jeff Flake in a primary, a month before Flake, a Trump critic, announced his retirement.

When "Fire and Fury" came out in January, an America First Policies social media report noted that few people seemed to notice that the White House banned personal cell phones in the West Wing that same week.

According to the group's February polling, the largest percentage of voters agreed with Nancy Pelosi's comment that worker bonuses stemming from the GOP tax bill were "crumbs" compared with corporate windfalls.

The February survey also found that only half of respondents agreed with Trump's plan for a military parade, while voters disagreed with the way he handled a scandal involving a senior White House aide accused of domestic abuse.

"AFP is doing the type of polling that would typically be done by a presidential campaign or a major party committee like the RNC or the DNC," said Brendan Fischer, an election law expert at the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center. "So even though they claim to be committed to a set of issues, the available evidence here indicates that they're operating as a polling shop for the president."

A door to a treasure trove of data

America First Policies reportedly raised $26 million last year for issue advocacy, but the "Issue" pages on its website do not appear to have been updated for months. "This is supposed to be an organization dedicated to informing the public about issues, and yet its issue pages contain stale news stories and reports borrowed from other outlets," said Fischer.

But these pages of recycled reports are not where the real action is happening for America First Policies. Buried at the bottom of the group's homepage is a tiny, easily overlooked link labeled "Data."

Behind this link lies an entirely separate section of the website, divided into "Survey Research," "Social Media Reports" and "Other."

America First Policies posts new reports under Survey Research nearly every week. Sometimes there are social media reports on the page, and, other times, the group posts strategy memos and large collections of public polling and news articles. The latest addition to the survey research page was uploaded earlier this week: An 84-page summary of America First Policies' February national polling, available for download in a document format called Keynote, which can be converted to a PDF.

Asked why the "Data" link was so small and difficult to see, while other tabs on the website were large and prominent, Montgomery responded, "It's there on the homepage." She also said she plans to update the issue pages, but has been too busy with other tasks. "We're not hiding anything," she said.

"I just put the link at the bottom of the page so I can find it easily," said Walsh, who said he notifies other like-minded groups when new data is posted to the site. "We want to make sure it's publicly available," he said. Walsh refused to share additional polling that CNBC requested.

"If things get taken down [from the site], it's for server space," he added. The group removed several documents from the site after speaking to CNBC.

In February, the group measured support for Trump's proposed military parade; whether voters agreed with Trump's defense of former White House staff secretary Robert Porter, who is accused of spousal abuse; and whether voters believe the claims contained in the Nunes memo, in addition to other topics. (Half support the parade; voters don't agree with Trump about Porter, and voters don't believe the Nunes memo).

White House Staff Secretary Rob Porter (L) reminds U.S. President Donald Trump he had a bill to sign after he departed quickly following remarks at his golf estate in Bedminster, New Jersey U.S.., August 12, 2017

Jonathan Ernst | Reuters

White House Staff Secretary Rob Porter (L) reminds U.S. President Donald Trump he had a bill to sign after he departed quickly following remarks at his golf estate in Bedminster, New Jersey U.S.., August 12, 2017

"So much of the information they're gathering is focused on the president himself and not necessarily his policies," said Geoffrey Skelley, associate editor of the nonpartisan campaign newsletter Sabato's Crystal Ball from the University of Virginia Center for Politics. Skelley questioned whether this could run afoul of campaign finance laws, which require nonprofit groups to disclose money they spend directly to benefit candidates.

Stephen Spaulding, a former special counsel at the Federal Election Commission and now director of strategy for the nonpartisan watchdog group Common Cause, agreed. "There are ample grounds here to investigate whether America First Policies has been raising money that's subject to limits and disclosure requirements because it's being used for political purposes," he said.

Asked specifically about the group's September poll that tested the best candidates in Arizona to knock out Flake in a GOP primary, Walsh said he was just "scratching an itch" when he commissioned it. The poll was conducted a few weeks after Trump openly called on Republicans to challenge Flake in a primary. At a Phoenix rally in August, he surprised aides by meeting backstage with two potential challengers and encouraged them to run.

The America First Policies polling effort operates as a network of coordinated groups, with two lesser-known firms, National Research Inc. and Baselice & Associates, working alongside a well-known Washington firm, The Polling Company, which was founded by former Trump campaign manager-turned-White House counselor, Kellyanne Conway.

Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway.

Mandel Ngan | AFP | Getty Images

Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway.

When Conway sold her firm in September 2017, The Polling Company had already been working for America First Policiesfor more than two months, judging from the company's logo on polls that it conducted for the group in June and July.

Conway was granted a special ethics waiver last June so she could engage in "communications and meetings" with former clients of The Polling Company without violating Trump's two-year ban on communications with former employers or clients. Conway has been called the "Trump whisperer" for her ability to influence the often mercurial president. In a 2016 interview with MSNBC, she described herself as a "discreet advisor" to Trump who was expected to use her data and strategy experience to help Trump craft his message.

A break from the norm

For decades, White House pollsters for Republican presidents have been paid by the RNC, while the Democratic National Committee has paid for presidential polling during Democratic administrations.

But the prolific output of polling data from America First Policies has coincided with a steep drop in the amount of money the RNC spends on presidential pollsters, as compared with the first 12 months of previous Republican administrations dating back to the Reagan White House.

According to FEC reports, the total amount that the RNC spent on Trump's campaign pollsters in 2017 amounts to just 5 percent of what the committee spent on Ronald Reagan's White House polling in 1981, adjusted for inflation, and around 12 percent of what it spent for President George W. Bush's pollsters in 2001.

This is partly due to a shift in the type of data system that is used by the RNC, away from traditional polling and toward a scoring system, according to an RNC official who spoke to CNBC on the condition of anonymity.

"Since 2013, we've spent $250 million to gather information through voter scoring, and we have a huge amount of information that informs these scores," the RNC official said. "So, we don't really pay for traditional polling anymore. We rely on this data, instead."

On the rare occasions that traditional White House polling is needed, the RNC official said, the committee still relies on the president's preferred polling firms. This happened twice in 2017 and once again in January.

Trump's top polling firms, meanwhile, do not come cheap. The three firms currently identified on some of America First Policies' documents charged the Trump campaign a combined $2.1 million for just two months' worth of polling during the final stages of Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, according to FEC filings. At these rates, the cost of the polling these firms have produced for America First Policies since last summer could easily be in the seven figures.

Yet ever since Trump was inaugurated, these same filings reveal that the rebooted Trump 2020 campaign has not spent any money on polling, despite raising $17 million last year.

"This looks like a million-dollar polling operation," said Spaulding, the former FEC special counsel, who reviewed the documents that CNBC downloaded. "And this isn't the kind of issue polling you'd expect to see from an outside nonprofit: This is more like a shadow campaign on behalf of the president."

Much of the polling itself is deeply flawed, however, according to polling experts who reviewed the documents uncovered by CNBC. For example, America First Policies' pollsters frequently use leading questions, which make it clear that one answer is much better than other possible answers. The group also employs leading questions to test public opinion, skewing their own results and painting an incorrect picture of how voters feel about certain policy issues, like immigration and infrastructure.

"If you want to test a position, you test a position. If you want to test a message, you test a message. There's a time for both. But you don't deliberately f--- up the results of your position survey by dumping a message in front of it," said a veteran political pollster who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "If you're trying to gauge a person's stance on asylum seekers, you don't taint your question with some bull---- about how violent MS-13 can be before you ask it. I mean, what good does that do? All it shows you is that scary things can scare people."

America First Policies' Montgomery acknowledged that some of the questions were leading, but said the ones she had helped to write were not leading. Walsh said the leading questions were actually just message testing. But message testing typically occurs only after public opinion has already been measured without the use of leading messages. Many of America First Policies' questions contain leading language the first time they appear on a survey.

One recent example of leading language was in a February poll's description of Trump's proposed military parade. Here, voters were asked whether they supported or opposed "a military parade that honors our nation's veterans and the troops and families who sacrificed their lives for our country, as well as the strength of our military."

In another question from February, as shown in the above screenshot from one of the group's reports, respondents were reminded that large companies had given out employee bonuses before they were asked if they agreed with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi's comment that worker bonuses were "crumbs" compared with corporate windfalls. The results were surprising: A plurality of voters agreed with Pelosi, despite the lopsided question. This would suggest that for Republicans, using the "crumbs" comment as an attack line against Democrats in 2018 campaigns, which Trump has suggested they do, may not be a good idea.

Over the past six months, CNBC monitored America First Policies' website and found hundreds of pages of polling and research paid for by donors whose names are permitted to be kept secret. Much of this polling has since been removed from the site, but a portion of the removed documents are still available online.

America First Policies is not the first nonprofit group created to advance a president's priorities, nor is it the first to conduct intensive polling. Two Obama-linked groups, Priorities USA and Organizing for Action, did the same thing. Priorities USA did not disclose its donors, but OFA did voluntarily, releasing quarterly donor lists.

But by hiring the Trump campaign's pollsters to conduct such a large and secretive Trump-focused data operation, and paying for it with dark money, America First Policies is going well beyond what previous outside nonprofit groups have done.

While a political committee such as the RNC is designed and expected to collect information that helps to win elections, a nonprofit group such as America First Policies — permitted to operate tax-free and accept unlimited donations from donors whose names can be kept secret — is not.

"So you have a situation where large donors are contributing to America First Policies with the understanding that their secret donations are going to be seen as valuable by the president, because this group appears to work so closely with the White House," said Campaign Legal Center's Fischer. "And because these donors are secret, the public and Congress will never know if the White House later took action to advance a donor's interests."

In addition to a slew of senior advisors with ties to Trump, America First Policies has three board members, all of whom are also close to the Trump White House. Its chairman,Tommy Hicks Jr., is the son of a billionaire and a good friend of Donald Trump Jr. He has also reportedly brokered White House introductions for companies seeking business with the Trump administration.

Another board member, Dallas financial executive Roy Bailey, serves as managing director and founding partner of Giuliani Partners LLC, along with former New York City mayor and longtime Trump ally Rudy Giuliani. The newest board member is Harold Hamm,a shale oil billionaire who was Trump's top pick for energy secretary but reportedly turned down the job.

Harold Hamm, chief executive officer of Continental Resources Inc., speaks during the Republican National Convention (RNC) in Cleveland, Ohio, U.S., on Wednesday, July 20, 2016.

Andrew Harrer | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Harold Hamm, chief executive officer of Continental Resources Inc., speaks during the Republican National Convention (RNC) in Cleveland, Ohio, U.S., on Wednesday, July 20, 2016.

CNBC sent detailed questions to the White House about its relationship with America First Policies and asked what, if any, polling firms the Trump administration relies on to track public opinion and information for the president. The White House did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

A murky new era of campaigning

In recent years, the laws that govern political spending and disclosure requirements have come under attack. "Judicial rulings like [2010's] Citizens United and the explosion of outside funding groups that followed it have had a cumulative effect, loosening the rules around money in politics," said Skelley. "The result is that there are a lot of gray areas in the law today, and there are a lot of different groups all trying to fill in the gray."

In this brave new world of often unlimited political money, some groups risk being left behind — and few more so than the two major party committees, the DNC and the RNC. The case of America First Policies only underscores how easy it is for one of the newer, less-constricted political groups to take over what had once been a core party function.

Yet the shift away from the traditionally intertwined relationship between the RNC and the president's pollsters is also part of a bigger trend, Skelley said. "We've seen the political parties weakened in recent years, in terms of their control over their members and their policy agendas. America First Policies represents just another step in the waning influence of the party committees over how political activity in America is actually being conducted."

Increasingly, top-down party bureaucracies like the RNC and DNC are giving way to loosely aligned networks of dark money groups, super PACs, political campaigns and charities that may look distinct, but often share staff, vendors and office space with one another.

The nonprofit America First Policies has a sister political action committee, America First Action, which is also run by Walsh.

As a super PAC, America First Actionmust report its donors to the FEC, but in return for that transparency, it is permitted to spend all of its money helping to win elections.

In October of last year, America First Action launched a $100 million fundraising campaign with a series of events in Texas, including a donor meeting at the ranch of oil magnate T. Boone Pickens. There, Walsh reportedly made a pitch to donors about how America First Action was the only pro-Trump super PAC that had the president's blessing.

Among the attendees was Donald Trump Jr., who told the other guests that America First Action was the only outside group to which he would be donating. Between America First Action and America First Policies, Walsh said, more than $25 million had been raised so far that year.

"All these entities are indistinguishable from one another on the ground level," said Campaign Legal Center's Fischer. "We have rules to guard against corruption and rules to help ensure transparency when money is being spent to influence elections. And it seems that there are grounds here to ask whether this group is just flouting those rules."

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...

Parscale do for Trump in 2016 that is setting the standard for 2018?

“If I had to characterize what the Trump campaign did, theyautomated Facebook’s best [advertising] practices at a very large scale. I think that statewide campaigns will try to do the same kind of thing in 2018,” said Colin Delany, founder of Epolitics. “I’m wondering if any new technology is going to come out of the resistance. It’s possible. I think a lot of what you are seeing is training and capacity building.”

In other words, Democrats are playing catchup to Republicans, compared to 2016, when their presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, and the Democratic National Committee—under a series of chairwomen—were more focused on older media platforms like TV, rather than new platforms like social media.

To begin to understand how Parscale, an online advertising specialist, went from building websites for Trump products, to running Trump’s online messaging and fundraising in 2016, to assisting the RNC with small donor outreach in 2018, to being named Trump’s 2020 campaign manager, you have to examine how Parscale used Facebook.

Consultants like Delany are quick to say they can’t tell you how the Trump campaign’s messaging specifically affected voters when they cast ballots. But they can say how Parscale used Facebook, which revolutionized how national campaigns targeted and messaged likely voters.

The Trump campaign took voter files from the Republican Party, which had people’s electoral histories—age, gender, address, party registration and voting histories. They took more personalized data by Cambridge Analytica, the data-mining firm run by hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, which boasted it had psychological profiles of every voter. (On Friday, Facebook suspended Cambridge Analytica for not deleting data taken from the social network in 2016 to create its voter profiles. The Guardian reported Cambridge Analytica's data was culled from 50 million to 60 million Facebook user profiles it had stolen before it joined the Trump campaign.)If you roll back the clock to before the internet, a baseline emerges showing how much has changed. When I was press secretary on the 1990 campaign that first elected Bernie Sanders to the House of Representatives, I remember picking up a half-dozen TV ads for the campaign’s final stretch. Bernie looked at the stack of 30-second videos and said his future rested on those tapes. That was a statewide race in a rural state with small media markets, but compare its scale to what Parscale and Facebook did for Trump.

It’s no secret. An October 2016 in-depth report by Joshua Green and Sasha Issenberg for Bloomberg.com laid out the basics. It started with indentifying persuadable voters in swing states, and then sending messaging poking at their biases and personality types. More recent reports, such as this weekend's Guardian report featuring a Trump campaign whistleblower, added more detail showing how powerful Facebook's user profiles were in 2016.

The campaign put all that voter profiling data into Facebook’s advertising supercomputers, which had its own deep profiles of users based on their pages, communications and networks. Facebook provided staffers to every major campaign in 2016 to facilitate this process. From that data merging and data mining, Parscale oversaw an operation that identified 13.5 million Facebook users in 16 states that it deemed were persuadable. It targeted those individuals with the kind of personality-driven content that social media emphasizes—more opinion, belief and bias than facts.

The Trump campaign didn’t just send out original content, noted Melissa Ryan, who writes the Ctrl Alt Right Delete newsletter. “The Trump campaign put out relatively few ideas of their own,” she explained on Medium.com. “Instead they chose to validateand amplify the conversation happening online. They didn’t need to confirm or deny anything, they simply gave Trump’s army their megaphone… [It] put their supporters one content front and center, taking a backseat in their own campaign.”

“They were banking that people are more likely to believe something from an unofficial source that seems true rather than to believe something from an official source that actually is true,” Ryan explained. “Once they realized there was no line to cross, they went all in using social media to bully and intimidate others, spread misinformation, and mainstream the language of hate. Those who spoke out were met with a flood of abuse, and that abuse was organized. Their targets had few places to turn as tech companies turned a blind eye, and law enforcement was of little help.”  

By late October, days before former FBI director James Comey announced the FBI was reopening its investigation into Clinton’s handling of classified emails, the Bloomberg reporting team said Parscale’s crew of subcontractors had determined “which social media ads [messages, memes, shares, etc.] were most effective. Those companies test ad variations against one another—the campaign ultimately generated 100,000 distinct pieces of creative content—and then roll out the strongest performers to broader audiences.”

Facebook allowed Parscale to build and target what it calls “custom audiences,” as ex-Facebook executive Antonio Garcia-Martinez explained in a Wired piece, “How Trump Conquered Facebook—Without Russian Ads.” Its custom audience consisted of all the impressionable voters—Trump enthusiasts on one hand, Democrats dubious about Clinton on the other—who could be encouraged to vote or encouraged not to.

Then the campaign used another Facebook advertising feature built atop that preliminary customization called “Lookalike Audiences.” It targeted another wider circle of Facebook usersin the swing constituencies in swing states. Some of this was to keep Trump’s base engaged. Some was to discourage three key columns of Clinton supporters from voting. As Bloomberg noted, “idealistic white liberal, young women and African Americans” were the targets of Trump’s three voter suppression campaigns.

Garcia-Martinez, the original product manager for "Custom Audiences,” explained how the Trump campaign targeted audiences and then fed it content, often propaganda from other online sources. This explains how Breitbart.com temporarily had more traffic than Fox News in the campaign’s final weeks. But Garcia-Martinez’s explanation also alludes to platform features that are designed to be psychologically engaging and provoke emotional responses. It starts with creating political echo chambers filled with like-minded associates.

“We’ve all contributed to this political balkanization by self-sorting (or being sorted by Facebook) into online tribes that get morphed into filter bubbles, which are then studiously colonized by commercial memes planted and spread there by a combination of Custom and Lookalike Audiences,” he wrote. “One of the ways the Trump campaign leveraged Lookalike Audiences was through its voter suppression campaigns among likely Clinton voters. They seeded the Audiences assembly line with content about Clinton that was engaging but dispiriting. This is one of the ways that Trump won the election, by the very tools that were originally built to help companies like Bed Bath & Beyond sell you towels.”

Colin Delany, the online media consultant and author on the topic, is quick to point out that it’s impossible to trace how all this messaging affected voters’ behavior when they cast their 2016 ballots. That’s because the thread Parscale could observe—whether messaging recipients liked, commented on or shared his handiwork—was broken as voters put down their devices and picked up ballots.

But Delany said there was another metric that confirmed how powerful and engaging Facebook was before 2016’s Election Day. It helped raise a fortune for Trump.

“Now one of the main things with Facebook is this is one of the few operations that I’ve heard of that’s been able to raise a significant amount of money by targeting people on Facebook,” he said. “Now my suspicion is that almost all the money actually got raised by email. But they would identify and recruit the people via Facebook.”

“If you can get them to respond to the first fundraising pitch and give you $5, then you are in their email program. Or you get them to sign a petition. You get them to do whatever it is that gets them the email address,” Delany said. “The small donor lists that the RNC is using to pretty good effect right now comes out of the work that Parscale did for Trump. If you want to look for results, I think you can look to social media fundraising.”

Seen from that metric, there’s no denying the political power of social media. With 10 days to go before Election Day, Bloomberg reported that Parscale’s operation raised $275 million from 2.5 million small donors. That’s more than the nearly $238 million raised by the Sanders presidential campaign from his grassroots base. Think about that: Parscale’s operation outraised Bernie’s operation—but Parscale isn’t bragging about it.

The Clinton campaign, as many political insiders and former Facebook executives have said, didn’t use Facebook as aggressively. In one intriguing series of recent tweets, these tech and political insiders said that Democrats in general rely more on TV ads than online messaging, partly because political consultants can earn more that way. They also said her campaign was relying on dated internal assessments by Facebook (from 2010) about its affects on voter participation, and that overall, its campaigns discounted—and didn’t sufficiently study—“observational political science,” or how voters responded to social media provocations in focus groups.

These cringe-worthy observations are part and parcel of political campaigns, which are like startups that rapidly pop up and then mostly disappear after Election Day. Political campaigns are perpetually in search of messaging and fundraising infrastructure they can use; just as institutions like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter have created infrastructure seeking new users. Garcia-Martinez, reached by email, said he was stunned by how little political professionals—and academics who study politics—know about advertising.

“My recent [Wired] piece tossed me into a few threads with political/election/academic Twitter, and I found it a very strange world,” he wrote. “Very punctiliously following strict experimental protocols and the scientific method, and also not knowing the first f**king thing about how to advertise on Facebook (their studies measure what they can as outsiders, which isn't much). It is a leap of faith to just assume Facebook ads work for politics.... but without question, they work for more commercial direct-response advertisers.”

His takeaway: “Parscale is hailed as this genius, but all he did is what any reasonably savvy ecommerce operation would have done, and that set him way beyond Hillary and the supposedly ‘best and brightest.’ Which is why, as Delany and Graves, campaign media consultants and columnists, said, social media will be at the center of 2018’s elections for control of Congress and constitutional offices in swing states.

Steven Rosenfeld

==

random update

.... We learned that Jared Kushner has had his top security clearance downgraded — and it was likely because National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster found out that he has been having meetings with foreign dignitaries on the sly, while certain governments have been keenly interested in taking advantage of his inexperience, debt and blatant conflicts of interest. And that's not even counting the fact that he's up to his neck in the Russia investigation. The White House insists that he's still got his portfolio of bringing Middle East peace and handling relations with China and Mexico, among other things, but nobody can figure out how he can possibly do it if he is not privy to the top U.S. intelligence.

The president could, of course, just slip him the paperwork — he has that power — but it appears that Trump is trying to put a little public distance between himself and his son-in-law, only mustering a lame defense that he's been "treated unfairly" and that he's a good person who works for nothing. (Trump doesn't seem to realize that we all know that rich people in great debt who work for free, like Kushner and Paul Manafort, might be getting something else out of the deal.)

Meanwhile, White House Communications Director Hope Hicks testified before the House Intelligence Committee and, like Steve Bannon before her, apparently just refused to answer most of their questions. The White House has not claimed executive privilege and she didn't plead the Fifth — so normally this would result in a witness being held in contempt of Congress. But this committee is run by Devin Nunes and his Trump coverup band of Republicans, so that was that. She did admit to telling some "white lies" on her boss's behalf sometimes, so that's something.

Meanwhile, the Atlantic's Natasha Bertrand got a hold of private Twitter messages revealing that Trump pal and Nixon dirty trickster Roger Stone was actually in touch with Wikileaks during the campaign, even though he said he wasn't. Joshua Partlow and David A. Fahrenthold at the Washington Post reported that police arrested a security guard at a Trump hotel in Panama when the hotel’s majority owner tried to fire the Trump Organization and Trump employees wouldn't leave. Now the Panamanian government is involved in the dispute, which causes exactly the kind of conflict of interest that might be expected when a president refuses to divest himself of properties and interests in foreign countries.

But perhaps the most important story of the day was a rather stunning appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee by Admiral Mike Rogers, director of the NSA and U.S. Cyber Command. On the verge of retirement and clearly not pulling any punches, he let it all hang out, testifying that the president hasn't issued any special directives to counter Russian election interference and saying  “Clearly, what we’ve done hasn’t been enough.” He specifically criticized the administration’s decision not to bother implementing  sanctions mandated by Congress as punishment for their intrusion in 2016:

Not just the sanctions but more broadly, my concern is, I believe that President Putin has clearly come to the conclusion there’s little price to pay here, and that therefore I can continue this activity... everything, both as the director of NSA and what I see on the Cyber Command side, leads me to believe that if we don’t change the dynamic here, this is going to continue and 2016 won’t be viewed as something isolated. This is something that will be sustained over time.

One can only surmise that President Trump is fine with that, assured for some reason that he will be the beneficiary. In fact, he is so fine with it that he announced he had hired his controversial digital guru from 2016, Brad Parscale, as his campaign manager for 2020.

You may be wondering why in the world Trump is announcing his campaign manager already — after only a year in office. But Trump seems to love campaigning more than being president, which he isn't very good at. There is also the matter of a lot of fundraising already being done for the campaign, large amounts of it being spent on salaries for relatives and cronies of Trump and Vice President Mike Pence, along with big bucks for rent in Trump Tower. It's best to have someone "managing" all that money.

Parscale would normally be an odd choice for such a job. He is enmeshed in some very shady business deals, although that seems to be a requirement for any job with Donald Trump. He had no political experience before 2016; he basically was a webmaster who fell into the job of working with Jared Kushner and the shadowy digital company Cambridge Analytica on their social media strategy, which was the only sophisticated aspect of their operation.

Parscale took credit for developing the Facebook and Twitter strategies that he claims won Trump the election, so choosing him for a top Trump 2020 campaign job while the Russia investigation is ongoing is simply mind-boggling. After all, special counsel Robert Mueller just indicted 13 Russians for using those platforms for their propaganda effort, and there is plenty of suspicion that more Americans may have been involved in targeting and strategy.

Nobody knows if Parscale was involved — but he was very, very close to the action.  And it's not as if there aren't any other campaign operatives Trump could turn to. After all, the person who really ran his campaign is right there in the White House — Kellyanne Conway.

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huffpo

...On July Fourth weekend in 2014, members of the Mercer clan (Robert, Rebekah and her husband, Sylvain Mirochnikoff) went to visit some new friends. They traveled on Robert’s 203-foot luxury superyacht, the Sea Owl, and anchored just off the WASP enclave of Fishers Island in New York’s Long Island Sound. Their destination, a medieval-style granite castle called White Caps, towered over the shoreline. This was the summer home of Lee and Alice Hanley, Reagan conservatives who’d made their fortune in Texas oil and gas but lived mostly between Greenwich, Connecticut, and Palm Beach, Florida. Like the Mercers, the Hanleys were convinced that the American political establishment was rotten to its foundations. Unlike the Mercers, though, they were popular and vigorous socialites. They loved to entertain and to act as connectors between politicians and donors in their assorted properties, even on their private jet.

That holiday weekend, Lee Hanley revisited the subject of a poll he’d commissioned in 2013 fromPat Caddell, a longtime friend. Hanley had wanted to truly understand the mood of the country and Caddell had returned with something called the “Smith Project.” The nickname alluded to the Jimmy Stewart movie “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” because its results were so clear: Americans were hungry for an outsider. It didn’t matter whether the candidate came from the left or the right; voters just wanted somebody different. They had lost all faith in the ruling class—the government, the media, Wall Street. “It showed the entire blow-up of the country coming,” Caddell told me. “A whole new paradigm developing.”

No Republican had yet emerged as a front-runner in the 2016 primary, but the Hanleys believed Ted Cruz could take Caddell’s insights and ride them all the way to the White House. They saw Cruz as a unicorn: a dedicated fiscal and social conservative who had broken with his party repeatedly. They were dismissive of Trump. “He doesn't understand politics or geopolitics or anything about the running of the government,” Alice Hanley told me recently.

REBEKAH MERCER SAW THE KOCH NETWORK AS HOPELESSLY SOFT ON TRADE AND IMMIGRATION AND WAS HUNGRY FOR A WAY TO PROMOTE HER OWN MORE HARD-LINE IDEOLOGY.

Robert Mercer and Cruz had met before during a conference in February 2014, when Lee Hanley had invited them to the five-diamond Breakers resort in Palm Beach for a grilling session. Robert was impressed by Cruz’s intellect, according to a person at the meeting, but worried that the 43-year-old senator was too young and might struggle to capture voters’ imaginations. Still, Robert warmed to him over the course of many weekends at various Hanley homes. Apparently, Cruz can hold his alcohol (his preference is cabernet), which is a prized attribute in the Hanleys’ circle.

As the Mercers weighed whether to get involved in a presidential race, their calculus was quite different from that of other megadonors, most of whom run massive corporate empires. Various people who have worked with the Mercers on campaigns told me they didn’t pressure their candidates to adopt policies that would benefit the family’s financial interests, such as favorable regulations for hedge funds. Instead, their mission was a systemic one. Steve Hantler, a friend of Rebekah’s, says she was determined to “disrupt the consultant class,” which she saw as wasteful and self-serving. She wanted to disrupt the conservative movement, too. Rebekah saw the Koch network as hopelessly soft on trade and immigration and was hungry for a mechanism to promote a more hard-line ideology. According to Politico and other sources, she was frustrated at the time that no one was taking her seriously. As it happened, however, the family owned what seemed to be an ideal vehicle for achieving her goals.

Around 2012, Robert Mercer reportedly invested $5 million in a British data science company named SCL Group. Most political campaigns run highly sophisticated micro-targeting efforts to locate voters. SCL promised much more, claiming to be able to manipulate voter behavior through something called psychographic modeling. This was precisely the kind of work Robert valued. “There’s no data like more data,” he likes to say. Robert had made his money by accumulating piles of data on human behavior (markets might move in a certain direction when it rains in Paris, for instance), in order to make extremely precise and lucrative financial bets. Similarly, SCL claimed to be able to formulate complex psychological profiles of voters. These, it said, would be used totailor the most persuasive possible message, acting on that voter’s personality traits, hopes or fears. The firm has worked on campaigns in Argentina, Kenya, Ghana, Indonesia and Thailand; the Pentagon has used it to conduct surveys in Iran and Afghanistan. Best of all, from the Mercers’ perspective, SCL operated entirely outside the GOP apparatus. (A source close to Rebekah said she wanted a “results-oriented” consultant.) As Rebekah saw it, SCL would allow the Mercers to control the data operation of any campaign they supported, giving the family enormous influence over messaging and strategy.

And it would be Rebekah who would actually carry out this plan. Robert preferred to focus on his work at Renaissance, often operating from his Long Island mansion, Owl’s Nest. “He wouldn’t look under the hood, because that’s not what he does,” says Bob Perkins, one of Caddell’s associates who worked on the Smith Project. Besides, Rebekah was the political animal in the family. (Her older sister Jenji has practiced law; her younger sister Heather Sue is, like Robert, a competitive poker player).

This was a relatively new phenomenon. Rebekah isn't known to have been particularly political earlier in adulthood, while gaining a master’s degree in management science and engineering from Stanford, or in early motherhood. (She has four children with her French-born husband, who became an investment banker at Morgan Stanley.) But, after the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2010, which significantly loosened restrictions on political spending, Rebekah decided it was time to “save America from becoming like socialist Europe,” as she has put it to several people. She started attending Koch events and donating to the Goldwater Institute, a right-wing think tank based in Arizona. The family’s political advocacy accelerated rapidly. It was in 2012 that she really attracted attention in GOP circles when, not long after Mitt Romney lost the presidential race, she stood up before a crowd of Romney supporters at the University Club of New York and delivered a scathing but detailed diatribe about his inadequate data and canvassing operation. “Who is that woman?” people in attendance asked.

With SCL, Rebekah finally had the chance to prove she could do better. The company’s American branch was renamed Cambridge Analytica, to emphasize the pedigree of its behavioral scientists. And Rebekah started flying Alexander Nix, the firm’s Old Etonian CEO, around the country to introduce him to her contacts. Nix, 41, is not a data scientist (his background is in financial services), but he is a showy salesman. Dressed in impeccably tailored suits, he is in his element on stage making presentations at large conferences. He can, however, come across as arrogant. (“I love the fact that you're telling your story, but I'm the one giving the interview,” he told me in a conversation.)

Alexander Nix at Cambridge Analytica's New York office. Rebekah Mercer was impressed by Nix's command of data and artistry on the polo field.

According to Perkins and Caddell, Rebekah and Nix met with them a few times to discuss how CA could use the Smith Project. Rebekah was clearly impressed by Nix. In one meeting, according to Perkins, she gushed about his polo prowess and asked him to show off cellphone photos of himself on horseback. (Nix says he doesn’t recall this meeting or others with the three. He also doesn’t remember displaying such a picture and can “think of no good reason why Bob or Pat would be interested in horses.") Thepolitical veterans were skeptical. “I didn’t understand what Nix was talking about,” Perkins told me bluntly. Caddell says he was perplexed when Nix wouldn’t show him the instruments CA used to predict voter behavior. He also thought the firm didn’t grasp the seismic shift underway in American politics. And yet to his great surprise, Bannon vouched for CA, telling Caddell its scientists were “geniuses.” Caddell knew that Bannon was beholden to the Mercers—they were, after all, Breitbart’s part-owners. According to The New York Times, however,Bannon was also vice president of CA’s board.“Even if he did not have a financial investment, he intellectually owned it, which was invaluable,” says a fellow political strategist. After he learned of Bannon’s involvement, Caddell stopped asking Bannon questions about CA.

In the end, Bannon helped seal the deal between the Mercers and Cruz, with CA as the glue. In the fall of 2014, Toby Neugebauer, a garrulous oil-and-gas billionaire from Texas, took Cruz and his campaign manager, Jeff Roe, to the “Breitbart Embassy,” the website’s Washington headquarters near the Capitol. Bannon flitted in and out. Nix, as usual, did most of the talking. After Neugebauer and Roe visited SCL’s London headquarters, the Cruz team agreed that CA could play a key role in their operation, running models and helping with research. However, it was made clear to Rebekah and Nix that the entire data analytics operation would be supervised by Chris Wilson, CEO of the research firm WPA. A source close to Cruz told me that Wilson’s operation had played a crucial role when Cruz ran for the Senate with only 2 percent name recognition in Texas and defeated a far better-known opponent. Why, then, was CA necessary at all? “No one ever said directly that the quid pro quo for hiring CA was that the Mercers would support Cruz,” says someone close to Roe. Nevertheless, after CA was engaged, Neugebauer took a private jet to the Bahamas to meet Robert Mercer on the Sea Owl. When Neugebauer asked him to donate to Cruz’s bid, Robert was matter-of-fact. The family would start with $11 million.

(Clockwise, starting top right) Jeff Roe, Ted Cruz, Alexander Nix

All modern political campaigns have to balance their need for exorbitant sums of money with the obsessions of the people who want to give them that money. Roe, the straight-talking manager of the Cruz operation, has observed that running a campaign is like trying to solve a Rubik’s cube of complicated personalities and uncomfortable dependencies. He has also told people that he is careful not to get too close to the donors who make his campaigns possible, because they can be so easily annoyed by the most trivial of things—his laugh, for instance, or the way he eats a bread roll.

In the case of the Cruz campaign, the donor obsession in question was Cambridge Analytica. And it wasn’t long before Roe and his team suspected that Nix had promised them a more impressive product than he could deliver. On March 4, 2015, Cruz, Roe, Wilson and others gathered in the Hyatt in Washington D.C. for an all-day meeting with Nix and a group of CA senior executives. Wilson took notes on his computer. According to multiple members of the Cruz team, Wilson was dismayed to learn that CA’s models weren’t fully ready for his focus groups the following week. As far as the team could tell, the only data CA possessed that the campaign didn’t already have appeared to be culled from Facebook. In addition, they recalled, CA hadn’t set itself up with Data Trust, the Republican National Committee’s repository of voter information. At one point, they recall, Nix explained that the National Rifle Association’s database of members would be a valuable way to target donors. Wilson typed an emoji with rolling eyes next to the statement because it was so obvious. He told people that he came away thinking, “Red flag, red flag, red flag.”

In response to an extensive set of questions, Nix disputed this account of the meeting. He denied that Cambridge Analytica had obtained any data via Facebook—a source of controversy for the firm ever since The Guardian reported in 2015 that CA based its data on research “spanning tens of millions of Facebook users, harvested largely without their permission.” Nix also claimed that it was the Cruz team that didn’t have access to the RNC’s Data Trust for much of the cycle and that “all data used for the majority of the campaign was provided by Cambridge Analytica.”However, Mike Shields, then the RNC’s chief of staff and Data Trust’s senior adviser, told me the Cruz campaign was in fact the second to sign an agreement with Data Trust, in 2014.

Meanwhile, the red flags kept coming. Wilson found the data scientists that CA sent to Houston to be highly efficient at the day-to-day work of his research operation. But according to Cruz staffers, when he began to test CA’s specialized models, he found that they were notably off, with, for example, some male voters miscategorized as women. In phone surveys, staffers said, CA’s predictions fell short of the 85 percent accuracy the campaign expected. (“Different models have differing levels of accuracy,” Nix said in his response. “I suspect these numbers have been taken out of context to make us look bad. In many previous articles the Cruz campaign have highly rated the quality of our data scientists.”) By September, CA’s first six-month contract was up. A CA employee in the campaign’s Houston office accidentally left the invoice in the photocopier, and Wilson happened to fish it out. The invoice totaled an eye-popping $3,119,052 for work that Wilson estimated to be worth $600,000 at most. “I can’t fucking believe it,” Wilson told Roe, who concurred.

Jeff Roe (left) with Ted Cruz (right), who ultimately fell out of Rebekah Mercer's favor. “We felt to some extent she was being manipulated by Bannon," a Cruz adviser said.

Nix disputed this account too, noting that the firm’s fee was “clearly stated in our statement of work and contract.” However, a former consultant for the campaign, Tommy Sears, attended budget meetings “for two if not three days” over the matter. “There was an understanding between both parties that the totality of the contract through March 2016 would be $5.5 million,” he says. “The heartburn felt by the Cruz team was that over $3 million had already been spent by September 1, 2015.”

When the Cruz team decided not to pay the full $3 million, bedlam ensued. A phone call was scheduled with Rebekah, Bannon and CA’s attorney. “I understand she’s a nice lady,” Wilson says politely of Rebekah. According to multiple people on the call, she accused Wilson of undermining CA. Bannon, meanwhile, unleashed a torrent of profanities at the Cruz team. Someone on the call gave me a censored version of his outburst: “The only reason this campaign is where it is right now is because of our people and I. My recommendation to the Mercers is just to pull them out of there and we’ll have them on another campaign by Monday.” Bannon’s language was so foul it was difficult to listen to, says one person on the call who had never met him before. Another of the political pros, who knew Bannon well, wasn’t shocked. “That’s Steve doing business,” he says.

The Cruz team was taken aback by Rebekah’s reaction. Some even wondered if she’d been given all the facts. One person who was close to the campaign says, “She is somewhere between the daughter of a brilliant hedge fund manager and mathematician and somebody who runs a bakery in New York. She clearly has a skill set, but the skill set we’re discussing here regarding the understanding of the value of data and analytics doesn’t fall into that area. She is operating under the information she’s been given.”

“IF REBEKAH MERCER WAS BROKE AND WASN’T A MAJOR DONOR IN THE REPUBLICAN PARTY,” SAYS A CRUZ ADVISER, “NOBODY WOULD SPEND TWO SECONDS TRYING TO KNOW HER… SHE’S NOT FUN. SHE’S JUST LIKE A SERIES OF AMOEBA CELLS.”

The two sides were also diverging ideologically. In the summer of 2015, according to two sources, Rebekah reprimanded Cruz for an April article he’d co-authored with House Speaker Paul Ryan in The Wall Street Journal in support of free trade. She and Bannon told Cruz that he should adopt the positions of Jeff Sessions, whose views on trade and immigration were more in line with the conservative base. By this time, Cruz and his team were becoming increasingly concerned about Bannon’s relationship with Rebekah. Bannon (who declined to comment for this article) was now blatantly pro-Trump. Over the course of the primary, Breitbart would publish around 60 pieces disputing that Cruz was eligible to be president because he had been born in Canada. Cruz repeatedly called Rebekah to complain, but she insisted that she had to be “fair and impartial.” One of his advisers says, “We felt to some extent she was being manipulated by Bannon.” A person close to Bannon counters: “There's absolutely no way anyone could manipulate Rebekah Mercer."

After the first debate in South Carolina, Rebekah gave Cruz a “dressing down” on his performance, according to three sources. “Given what was going on around him—and what he must have truly felt—he behaved like an absolute gentleman,” says a person close to Cruz. Rebekah was incensed that Trump had a tougher immigration policy than Cruz did—she particularly liked Trump’s idea for a total ban on Muslims. Subsequently, Cruz proposed a 180-day suspension on all H1-B visas.

Meanwhile, even though the Cruz staffers generally got along well with their CA counterparts—they sometimes took the visitors country-western dancing —the firm remained a source of friction. In retrospect, Wilson told people, he believed that Nix resented the campaign for allocating work through a competitive bidding process, rather than favoring CA. Two weeks before the Iowa caucuses, Wilson assigned a contract to a firm calledTargeted Victory. CA then locked its data in the cloud so it couldn’t be accessed by Roe’s team. The data remained unavailable until, a Cruz campaign source said, it was pretty much too late to be useful. Cruz won the Iowa caucuses anyway.

The Cruz operation became so fed up with Nix that they pushed back, hard, on CA’s bill for its second six-month contract. Wilson was able to negotiate the fees down after, as Cruz staffers recalled, a CA representative accidentally emailed him a spreadsheet documenting the Houston team’s salaries. (Nix said CA had intended to send the spreadsheet.) Still, the campaign wound up paying nearly $6 million to CA—which represented almost half of the money the Mercers had pledged to spend on Cruz’s behalf.

The acrimony lingered long after Cruz exited the race in May. When he decided not to endorse Trump at the GOP convention, the Mercers publicly rebuked him. In a statement, Cruz was diplomatic: “We were delighted to work with Cambridge Analytica, they were a valuable asset to my campaign, and any rumors to the contrary are completely unfounded.” (The source close to Rebekah added, “I was with Rebekah the other day and Ted Cruz was falling all over her. It’s not fair to blame CA's methodology for Cruz's loss.”) Others from Cruz’s team, however, remain bitter about the whole experience. “If Rebekah Mercer was broke and wasn’t a major donor in the Republican Party,” says one, “nobody would spend two seconds trying to know her. … She’s not fun. She’s just like a series of amoeba cells.”

(Clockwise, starting bottom left) The Mercers, Kellyanne Conway, Brad Parscale, David Bossie, Stephen Bannon, Jared Kushner

One of the great challenges in reporting this story was that almostevery single person in Trump’s orbit claims sole credit for his extraordinary victory on November 8. The multiplying narratives of his win can be difficult to untangle, but it is true that his operation ran somewhat more smoothly after Rebekah Mercer helped to replace Manafort with Bannon. This wasn’t necessarily because Bannon himself was a particularly deft manager—he much preferred to focus on big-picture strategy, especially Trump’s messaging in rallies. Most of the details were left to his deputy, David Bossie—at least until October, when Bossie and Trump got into an argument over Trump’s impetuousness on Twitter and Bossie was kicked off the campaign plane, according to multiple sources. But one undeniable benefit of having Bannon in charge was that Rebekah trusted him.

Bannon, several sources said, can be charming when he chooses to be. And he has a record of successfully cultivating wealthy patrons for his various endeavors over the years. At the same time, certain of his ventures have involved high drama. The most spectacular example is the Biosphere 2, a self-contained ecological experiment under a giant dome in the Arizona desert that was funded by the billionaire Texan Ed Bass. Hired as a financial adviser in the early 1990s, Bannon returned in 1994 and used a court order to take over the project, following allegations that it was being mismanaged. He showed up one weekend along with “a small army of U.S. marshals holding guns, followed by a posse of businessmen in suits, a corporate battalion of investment bankers, accountants, PR people, and secretaries,” according to a history of the project called Dreaming the Biosphere. In an effort to thwart Bannon’s takeover, some of the scientists broke the seal of the dome, endangering the experiment.

Because of his relationship with the Mercers, Bannon was able to avoid some of the tensions over Cambridge Analytica that had plagued the Cruz campaign. Before taking the job, he phoned Brad Parscale, a 41-year-old San Antonio web designer who had made websites for the Trump family for years. Although Parscale had never worked in politics before, he now found himself in charge of Trump’s entire data operation. According to multiple sources, Parscale told Bannon that he had been hauled into an unexpected meeting with Alexander Nix earlier that summer. Parscale, who is fiercely proud of his rural Kansas roots, immediately disliked the polished Briton. He informed Nix he wasn’t interested in CA’s psychographic modeling. Parscale and Bannon quickly bonded, seeing each other as fellow outsiders and true Trump loyalists. Bannon told Parscale: “I don't care how you get it done—get it done. Use CA as much or as little as you want.” Parscale did ultimately bring on six CA staffers for additional support within his data operation. But he had his own theory[4]

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Parscale has told people that the campaign’s previous models had been based on high turnout figures. “I started to run models with lower turnout which looked like the midterm elections of 2014,” he has said. “I mapped out how, based on that, we could get to 305 electoral college votes.” Trump got 304. of how Trump could secure victory—in the final weeks, he advised Trump to visit Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan, three states no one thought Trump could take. The campaign never used CA’s psychographic methodology,as a CA staffer who worked on the campaign later publicly acknowledged at a Google panel.

For the most part, Rebekah kept a low profile during the last phase of the election. On the few occasions that she appeared at Trump Tower, she sat in Bannon’s 14th-floor office. “Most people had no idea who she even was,” says one person who was there regularly. “The idea that she was on the phone to Trump or anyone all the time, that’s nonsense,” says a different source from the transition. The Mercers did intervene when a tape surfaced of Trump bragging to NBC’s Billy Bush about sexually assaulting women—by making a rare statement in Trump’s defense. In a statement to The Washington Post, they said: “If Mr. Trump had told Billy Bush, whoever that is, earlier this year that he was for open borders, open trade and executive actions in pursuit of gun control, we would certainly be rethinking our support for him. …. We are completely indifferent to Mr. Trump’s locker room braggadocio.”

Bannon in the East Wing of the White House on January 22, with Mercer (uncredited) in the background. ANDREW HARRER-POOL/GETTY IMAGES

On election night at Trump Tower, Robert Mercer was nowhere to be seen. Rebekah was in Bannon’s office. Staffers and Trump children wandered in and out of Parscale’s office, because he was usually the first person to have any actual information. Parscale, unlike almost everyone else, including Trump’s children, was convinced his boss was going to win. Trump himself remained glued to the television, refusing to believe anything until victory was officially declared. No one I talked to recalls where Rebekah was in the blur of the celebration.

But people certainly remember her presence during the transition. One night, Rebekah called Trump and told him he absolutely had to make Bannon his White House chief of staff. Trump himself later described the phone call—in a manner an observer characterized as affectionately humorous—to a crowd of about 400 people at the Mercers’ annual costume party at Robert’s mansion on December 3. This year’s theme: “Heroes and Villains.” A guest recalls that Rebekah was dressed in something “that fitted her very well, with holsters.” To the gathering, Trump recounted being woken up at around midnight— Rebekah told friends it was around 10 p.m.—and being bewildered by the late-night tirade. “Rebekah who?” he eventually asked. Everyone laughed,” says the observer. As it happened, Bannon didn’t actually want to be chief of staff, believing himself to be ill-suited to the role. He was named chief strategist instead.

Rebekah had more than personnel decisions on her mind, however. She was particularly focused on what was referred to on the transition as the “outside group.” After the election, it was widely agreed that the GOP needed a nonprofit arm, supported by major donors, to push the president’s agenda across the country, much as the Obama team had set up Organizing for America in 2009. The most important component of any organization like this is its voter database, since it can be used to seek donations and mobilize supporters behind the president’s initiatives. Rebekah wanted CA to be the data engine, which would essentially give her control of the group. And if the venture were successful, she would have an influence over the GOP that no donor had ever pulled off. Theoretically, if the president did something she didn’t like, she could marshal his own supporters against him, since it would be her database and her money. A friend of Rebekah explains: “She felt it was her job to hold the people she’d got elected, accountable to keep their promises.”

“I’M EXPECTING TO BE FIRED BY THE SUMMER,” BANNON HAS TOLD FRIENDS.

On December 14, there was a meeting to discuss the outside group in a glass-walled conference room on the 14th floor of Trump Tower. Brad Parscale sat at the head of the table. Around him were roughly 12 people, including Rebekah; Kellyanne Conway; David Bossie; Michael Cohen, Trump’s lawyer; Jason Miller, then Trump’s senior communications adviser; and Marc Short, Mike Pence’s senior adviser. Parscale was known to be livid that Alexander Nix had gone on a PR blitz after the election, exaggerating CA’s role. Even worse, Parscale had heard that Nix had been telling people, “Brad screwed up. We had to rescue Brad.” (Nix denied this, saying, “Brad did a brilliant job.”)

And so when Rebekah pushed for CA to run the new group’s data operation, Parscale pushed back. “No offense to the Mercers,” he said, according to multiple attendees. “First, this group is about Trump, not about the Mercers. Second, I don’t have a problem with hiring Cambridge, but Cambridge can’t be the center of everything, because that’s not how the campaign ran.” (He did, however, suggest that Rebekah be on the board.) “No offense taken,” Rebekah replied.

But she would subsequently complain about the exchange to Bannon and others, and continued to lobby for CA to be at the center of the new organization. The situation became so testy that before the inauguration, Jared Kushner brought inSteve Hantler,Rebekah’s friend, to referee. Hantler, a quiet, gentlemanly sort, proposed that the venture be led by someone he knew would be acceptable to both sides: Nick Ayers, a senior adviser to Pence. The “outside group” is now named America First Policies. Parscale is a member, and its first national TV ads have appeared. Ayers has also been cultivating a friendship with Donald Trump Jr., who, sources say, may eventually want to lead the group himself.

The Mercers, however, have withdrawn completely. When it came to the question of whether America First should employ CA, it was Parscale’s view that prevailed: CA has no role in the group at all. “Tens beat nines in poker,” says someone involved with the formation of America First, meaning that Parscale’s close rapport with the Trump family carried greater weight than Rebekah’s connection with Bannon. Rebekah’s relationship with Jared and Ivanka is said to be diminished. Nearly every person I spoke to—Trump supporters, Cruz supporters, fellow donors, friends of Rebekah—agreed on one point: to regain some of her standing, she should fire Alexander Nix. (“We are hoping that she reads your piece and does it,” says a person she works with closely.)

On December 19, Rebekah attended a memorial service in Palm Beach for Lee Hanley, who had died four days before the election. Someone who spoke to her there was expecting her to be thrilled about the election and the position she now occupied. Instead, Rebekah was very low, says this person. She complained about John Bolton being passed over.[5]

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