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justinspoliticalcorner · 7 months ago

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Adam Wren at Politico Magazine:

NEW YORK CITY — Brian Glenn was about to go live. Amid the hundreds of reporters crowded outside a Manhattan courthouse on the first morning of Donald Trump’s criminal trial last week, Glenn, the director of programming for Right Side Broadcasting Network, would be delivering the news from the circus straight to hundreds of thousands of faithful MAGA viewers. Glenn looked like a typical television newscaster, but a bright blue and white pin he wore on the lapel of his suit set him apart from others in the press corral: It featured a big, bold “47” — a nod to Trump’s possible return to the presidency, which was gifted to him by the Trump campaign. Surrounded by Trump fans, Glenn cut the figure of a former homecoming king navigating the crowd at the big game. People wearing red caps kept coming up asking to be interviewed, a request he repeatedly obliged. In between, he pulled out his iPhone and flashed me photos from when he had shown up at this same spot to cover Trump’s arraignment last April. Pointing to one image, he singled out his girlfriend, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. (He calls himself the other half of “MAGA America’s favorite couple.”) He recounted how his crew had to cut their coverage short that day after Greene was mobbed by press and onlookers. “I probably physically bulldozed a dozen people getting her out of there,” Glenn said.

As Glenn spoke, he stopped mid-sentence, a voice breaking through his AirPods. “30 seconds?” I heard him say. He quickly returned to his mark and began to broadcast to an audience of what would soon blossom into more than 200,000 RSBN viewers spread across YouTube and Rumble, the right-coded video service. “This is Biden’s witch hunt,” Glenn told his viewers. “This is what this is. This is Biden’s trial. This is his ability, or effort right now, to take President Trump off the campaign trail.” Right Side Broadcasting Network dates back to 2016, when stay-at-home dad Joe Seales launched the online channel in order to live stream Trump rallies. Eight years later, RSBN has grown into a full outlet that employs roughly a dozen people and features a website full of stories. RSBN is like NFL RedZone for Trump rallies, covering them hours before any speakers approach the dais. Now, as Trump’s general election campaign kicks into high gear, it has also cemented itself as the pro-Trump media outlet of record for the MAGA base. The network boasts 1.64 million subscribers on YouTube (a larger subscribership than One America News Network) and another half a million on Rumble.

Glenn is the star who Seales has largely handed control over to. He is the Trump rally gameday host who plumbs the depths of MAGA America in the crowds wherever Trump goes. Glenn is fast becoming one of Trump’s favorite reporters, likely racking up more one-on-one interviews with Trump in the last year than any other journalist. During gaggles, Trump often singles him out for positive-slanted questions after entertaining a series of hardballs from other reporters. Christina Bobb, one of Trump’s revolving cast of attorneys, is a regular guest alongside Glenn on RSBN’s coverage of the trials.

[...]

RSBN has developed a reputation for going nearly everywhere that Trump ends up. Thanks to that flood-the-zone mentality of documenting Trump’s every move, it’s likely your favorite mainstream media reporter’s go-to method for keeping tabs on Trump on days that they’re off the campaign trail. Filipkowski and Glenn have formed an unlikely friendship online over direct messages that have spanned years, something I did not expect when I reached out to Filipkowski, a prominent X personality who made his name by spending almost every waking moment dunking on Trump and the MAGA movement. “I actually have found them to be the most valuable resource over the last four years to understanding MAGA — more than any other source,” Filipkowski told me. “I’ve probably posted 50 or 100 Brian Glenn interview clips of Trump, probably even 200. I find those clips incredibly valuable, because you’re getting it unvarnished. That’s when [Trump] lets his guard down a little, when he’s got a friendly face.”

What Filipkowski and many reporters most appreciate about Glenn’s coverage is a simple open-ended question he asks MAGA stans: What is it that you love most about Donald Trump? “If you say ‘I’m from the New York Times,’ his fans at rallies say ‘you’re fake news’ and don’t talk to you,” Dave Weigel, a Semafor politics reporter who relies on the site, told me. “That’s obviously less interesting than somebody saying, ‘We love you guys. Let me explain to you all my views in an interesting way,’ which is what Right Side Broadcasting does.” RSBN has “replaced mainstream media in the needs of your average Trump supporter: Why would you turn on Fox where they’re going to cut away when you can watch this website, and they’ve also got more access,” Weigel said.

Politico Magazine reports on Brian Glenn, the boyfriend of far-right extremist Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA). Glenn is a host for far-right MAGA propaganda outlet Right Side Broadcasting Network (RSBN).

#Brian Glenn #Marjorie Taylor Greene #RSBN #Right Side Broadcasting Network #Conservative Media Apparatus #Joe Seales #Christina Bobb #Ron Filipkowski

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justinspoliticalcorner · 7 months ago

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Chris Smith at Vanity Fair:

On a sunny afternoon the views from Joe Biden’s campaign headquarters in downtown Wilmington, Delaware are so clear that if you squint hard you can almost see the White House, 100 miles to the south. The floor plan is open and the windows run just about floor to ceiling, so all 200 staffers share in the sweeping vista.

With the striking exception of probably the most important person on the premises. That Jen O’Malley Dillon sits at the very center of the office is appropriate, symbolically: She is a hub of the reelection effort’s leadership infrastructure. It also means that O’Malley Dillon, officially the campaign chair, is the only person on the team who occupies a dimly lit cubicle. Four years ago, J.O.D., as most everyone in Bidenworld knows her, became the first woman to manage a winning Democratic US presidential campaign, and the first person of any gender in three decades to knock off an incumbent. O’Malley Dillon, 47, has shunned credit and most interviews since. So her nondescript current workspace—blank walls, a tiny desk strewn with papers, a small bookshelf holding a jumble of binders and framed family photos—fits her no-nonsense approach. O’Malley Dillon is ferociously focused on reelecting Biden. Gazing out the window would be a useless distraction. “You have to keep in perspective what’s at stake because every second I waste is a second that we could lose the thing that matters most to me, which is a future for my kids,” she tells me.

Her relentlessness is a good thing, because her candidate is running uphill. For months polls have shown Trump beating Biden nationally, though the race remains tight; more important, thanks to our genius electoral college system, is Trump’s advantage in six of the seven battleground states that are likely to be decisive. Things look equally rugged for Biden when you go deeper than the horse race: A majority of Americans believe economic conditions were better under Trump—despite Biden delivering record-low unemployment numbers—and inflation remains stubbornly high. In March the share of voters strongly disapproving of Biden’s job performance reached a new peak, according to a New York Times survey. Many voters under 35 are angered by the administration’s support for Israel’s military offensive in Gaza. And voters of every age group think Biden, 81, is too old to bid for a second term.

The leaders of his reelection team aren’t in denial; they understand they’re facing daunting challenges. The coalition that elected Biden in 2020 has splintered. “We believe that Joe Biden has an important story to sell and has been a historic president,” a senior campaign strategist says. “But that doesn’t mean to say that everyone is going to love him perfectly.” Which may not make for the most stirring political rallying cry. But it underlies the campaign’s methodical drive to raise tens of millions of dollars to assemble a sophisticated operation that will press the fight in both conventional and innovative ways. The plan stretches from boosting Latino turnout in Arizona to winning Michigan—despite the state’s much-hyped “uncommitted” Democratic primary voters—to flipping North Carolina to wooing a meaningful number of Nikki Haley-Republican-primary voters to aggressively educating potential Robert F. Kennedy Jr. voters about his beliefs. For months the campaign has quietly built infrastructure in key states—a foundation that is now allowing it to capitalize on Republican gifts, like the Arizona supreme court’s approval of a near-total ban on abortion. “We know exactly the voters we need to turn out,” a senior campaign operative says, “and we’ve got a plan to do it.”

That confidence flows from data research that assigns probabilities to individual voters. It is also based on a deep roster of human political intelligence, like Quentin Fulks, the principal deputy campaign manager, who was a top aide on Raphael Warnock’s winning Georgia senate reelection campaign over Herschel Walker in 2022, and Julie Chávez Rodríguez, the 46-year-old campaign manager who is a granddaughter of pioneering labor leader César Chávez. “We wanted to make sure we had strong campaign experience, but also really strong lived experience for the communities and voters that we want to reach. So it’s not by default that it’s myself and Quentin running this campaign. That was extremely intentional,” Rodríguez says. “And being able to prioritize our base targets, it’s not the way that most presidentials have been run. They don’t usually invest in doing outreach to communities of color early.”

Yet much of the work of piecing together the strategy and the machinery has occurred in Wilmington, outside the national media spotlight, which has contributed to a perception among many Democrats that the Biden campaign is eerily, delusionally calm. “What scares me to death is they think they’ve proven everyone wrong every time,” a senior Democratic insider says. “They have this outward posture of, ‘We came from nowhere in the 2020 primary, we’re the only ones who beat Trump in the general, so trust us.’ But remember, in the fall of 2020, they sent Biden to Ohio and Kamala Harris to Texas where they had no chance, when they could have been in Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona, and Pennsylvania. So let’s not get on too high of a horse.”

Maybe so—though Biden visited and won those four key states four years ago. And up close, it’s clear no one is resting on their horses, or their laurels. The 2024 campaign’s activities are intense and far-reaching, permeated by a deep sense of urgency. “I can certainly feel the weight of what we’re doing,” says Dan Kanninen, who leads the battleground-state effort. “But to be in it gives a measure of purpose that is different than just allowing your anxieties to take you somewhere else.” Biden’s lieutenants have forceful, detailed, logical pushbacks to every possible criticism of the campaign. There’s only one part of the reelection operation that feels unnerving: so much of the victory calculus hinges on voters, once they’ve heard the relevant facts, behaving rationally. That worry is compounded by the stakes. “If we lose this election,” a national Democratic strategist says, “we might not have another one.”

Rob Flaherty rates a private corner office. One of its walls is decorated with images of Biden’s trademark aviator sunglasses in a repeating pattern of green, blue, black, and orange. The opposite wall is dominated by a banner, its black background contrasting with large white letters reading “NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING.” Flaherty had better know something. His title, deputy campaign manager, doesn’t even hint at the magnitude of his responsibilities. The 32-year-old oversees two crucial aspects of Biden’s campaign: digital strategy and relational organizing. The first role means not simply figuring out how to target a multi-million-dollar pro-Biden online ad campaign, but trying to fight off a fire hose of right-wing attacks and disinformation. Flaherty did this craftily for Biden during the 2020 campaign, particularly in steering an effort to identify “market moving” issues—separating things that had the potential to actually influence voters, like concerns about Biden’s mental fitness, from mere noise, like the Republican obsession with Hunter Biden. In some respects—most notably Gaza and inflation—there are new substantive challenges this time. One major concern hasn’t changed: Biden’s advanced age. “The way you combat the age issue,” Flaherty says, “is, one, he gets out there and addresses it. What you see him doing in his paid [media] right now. And it’s by fighting on the issues that people care about. If we address the fact that they want to see him go and fight for them, the issue goes away pretty quick.”

Yet the online landscape has changed dramatically in four years, with media consumers fractured into ever-more-personalized content silos, many of them hardened against campaign messaging, a shift that seems to benefit Trump. “Voters who do not want to hear about politics never have to,” Flaherty says. “People who are not hearing about politics, they are not trusting of politicians, they’re not trusting the media. So it becomes incumbent on the campaign to think about, how do we reach those people where they are? You have to diversify the way you do paid media, right? You can't just spend 70% on linear broadcast television and hope you’re going to reach folks.”

One of Flaherty’s priorities is reaching tuned-out potential voters. “The voters who we think are pretty much the difference makers in this election, these voters, you have to persuade them to participate,” he says. “This is going to be a back-loaded election for when people start to pay attention. They are largely a younger, more diverse set of people who voted for us last time, who lean Democrat. They hate Trump. They are really hard to reach. And there’s just more of those this time.” A related task is neutralizing the deluge of Republican disinformation. “At the close of any campaign, I know my candidate is in trouble if key parts of the electorate are awash in more negative than positive information about my candidate,” a top Democratic strategist says. “And right now, particularly younger voters of color on social media, they’re hearing more negative than positive information about Joe Biden. How do they turn that?”

Massive spending is part of the answer. But the campaign believes the cash must be spread on a wider array of formats than ever before and in creative ways. So when Biden visited a North Carolina home in March, Flaherty’s team enlisted the family’s 13-year-old son to post a video on TikTok, generating more than five million views across a range of sites, the kind of reach a conventional rally doesn’t produce. The White House has bolstered the president’s online presence by encouraging the work of independent liberal influencers, including Aaron Rupar and Ron Filipkowski, who have driven news cycles by circulating video clips of Trump’s stumbles and incendiary comments. Biden’s team is also investing heavily in first-person testimonial ads from ordinary Americans. “Having elected officials give speeches or be on Sunday talk shows is important,” says Roger Lau, who was Elizabeth Warren’s campaign manager in 2020 and who now works closely with the Biden effort as deputy executive director of the Democratic National Committee. “But finding that nurse in Nevada who can talk about why capping the cost of insulin at 35 bucks a month is important to their families because Filipinos have a much higher rate of type two diabetes than other communities—that kind of video, digital, and social content, it just cuts through in a totally different way.”

Flaherty comes across as ebullient and exhausted, which is understandable given that he’s crafting in-real-life organizing plans at the same time he’s trying to counteract the Laura Loomers of the world online. His digital turf overlaps with his more experimental turf, relational organizing. “You have to get people to share content through their friends and family, trusted messengers,” Flaherty says. “This is important because of what I think is the second trend that is different from ’20. In 2022, half of the content shared on Instagram was in private. So if you’re running a digital strategy that is aimed just at reaching people in their feeds, you’re missing where a lot of conversation on the internet is happening.”

[...] While Biden’s Gaza-fueled problems with younger voters have likely been overstated, the conventional wisdom has been understating the damage the war could cause the president with swing voters—and not because of their allegiances to Israel or Palestine. The conflict itself fueled a sense that the world remains volatile, though it was still happening at a distance, literally and politically. Now campus skirmishes have made the mess domestic, and the president’s brand is all about delivering calm. “Biden has got to be seen as the reasonable guy who gets shit done, where Trump is a madman,” a top Democratic strategist says. “You can’t do that when you’ve got chaos on the southern border or chaos on campuses.”

The Biden administration has put together a compelling record in some big-picture ways, including the revival of the economy, the defense of Ukraine, and advances in the battle against climate change. The campaign’s challenge is to translate the president’s record into gains that voters recognize in their everyday lives. “If we’re able to frame the president’s accomplishments in the face of Republican extremist obstructionism,” Tyler says, “you actually have a fantastic story to tell. I mean, I’ll talk about Black folks, for example, right? Since before the pandemic, Black wealth is up 60%, highest rate of small business growth for Black-owned businesses in a generation, cutting Black child poverty in half through the child tax credit before MAGA Republicans ripped it away, which Joe Biden is going to bring back in a second term to make permanent.”

There are also large vulnerabilities in Biden’s first-term record: the suffocatingly high price of housing and the immigration crisis, to pick two. But presidential elections are weird, unique animals that more often turn on personality than on policy, on what Americans are feeling they need in the White House as much as what might objectively be best for the country. Mood is a powerful force in national elections, and the Biden campaign has identified an intriguing, and ominous, headwind. “We don’t like to talk about the fact that COVID still has an impact,” a senior strategist says. “It’s easy to kind of be nostalgic for a time before COVID, to remember, ‘Oh, well, the economy was better, or I felt like prices were better.’ And you don’t hear Trump every day. People are not viscerally feeling how they felt when he was a leader, because he’s been silent for lots of reasons. So we have a lot of work to do. Now, it just so happens that Trump says such crazy stuff all the time that we have ample opportunity.” Everyone at Biden HQ is well aware of the possible consequences, both for the country and for themselves, of Trump winning and turning the craziness into policy. “The people behind him are very well organized,” a Biden campaign operative says. “It can feel like an abstraction, but actually there are people I know, and myself, who would be targets.”

Vanity Fair has a story on the Biden campaign’s re-election team that is navigating tough headwinds to get Joe Biden re-elected.

#2024 Presidential Election #2024 Elections #Joe Biden #Biden Administration #Jen O'Malley Dillon #Dan Kanninen #Julie Chávez Rodríguez #Kamala Harris #Campus Protests #Israel/Hamas War #Robert F. Kennedy Jr.#Donald Trump #Quentin Fulks #Rob Flaherty #Aaron Rupar #Ron Filipkowski

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