#republican dystopian disinformation

[contemplatingoutlander]

Biden goes positive. Can voters handle it?

Jennifer Rubin discusses Biden's new positive ad. If the question is, "Can voters handle" Biden's positive ad, the answer is, it's about time the Democrats told the story of Biden's successes to counteract the relentless disinformation about Biden coming from the right.

But even more important than that, Rubin brings home the fact that neofascists and demagogues NEED people to believe that their nation is falling apart and ONLY the Dear Leader can fix it. That's why it is particularly important to counteract Trump's and the GOP's dystopian disinformation about America under Biden.

Here are some excerpts from Rubin's column.

Biden’s ad, “Fought Back,” reminds us how bad things were under his predecessor, touts Biden’s economic accomplishments and accuses Republicans (while displaying Trump’s picture) of running America down. A list of bipartisan accomplishments, such as the bipartisan infrastructure law and the Chips bill, refutes the notion that the United States is paralyzed or incapable of solving its problems. [...] This message embodies Biden’s endemic optimism: “We just have to remember who we are. We’re the United States of America. And there’s nothing — nothing beyond our capacity — if we do it together.” Moreover, it rebukes Trump’s negativity, in effect saying: Refusing to credit the improvements in the economy is tantamount to slamming Americans and discrediting their hard work. (The ad shows Biden delivering one of his favorite lines: “It’s never, ever been a good bet to bet against America.”) [...] Biden stands ready to explain how his agenda — “Bidenomics” — brought us from fears of a pandemic recession to recovery. With unemployment and inflation in decline and wages rising, the public finally might be more amenable to hearing an uplifting message. Biden would be foolish not to take credit for gains achieved as a result of smart policy and bipartisan legislative wins. However, Biden’s ad does something more than present an economic argument. He’s asking a larger question: Do we really want to go back to the trauma of the Trump years? He is betting that voters, even if they are uncertain about the future, don’t want to wallow in anger, fear and pessimism. He offers not only a choice between two policies but also two different visions, which are miles apart in tone. [...] Historians tell us that fascism arises in a mood of “cultural pessimism” that fosters a demand to entirely remake government and casts the authoritarian strongman as a messianic-like figure who can arrest decline. Without cultural, economic and political ruin and ensuing panic, there is no crisis to quell. By contrast, if a democracy is producing real gains and people see improvement, voters will be less inclined to throw the entire system overboard to follow the cult leader. No wonder hyperbole, fearmongering and hysteria are part and parcel of the MAGA message. [...] For Trump, the present is always bleak; hence, we have to go back to the past to make America great again — and rely on him to fix things. Biden, therefore, has the task of not simply correcting the economic record but also of diffusing — perhaps mocking — Trump’s excessive negativity. Things are bad for Trump, but they need not be bad for the rest of us. We’ll be just fine if we keep our heads about us, look at the facts and trust in ourselves. That’s not a bad pitch for Biden or, for that matter, any democracy trying to ward off a hysterical demagogue. [color/emphasis added]

[foreverlogical]

A federal judge restricted Biden administration officials and agencies on from communicating with social media companies on content moderation in a preliminary injunction Tuesday.

Why it matters: The decision in an ongoing lawsuit from Republican attorneys general in Louisiana and Missouri, who allege the Biden administration's efforts to encourage social media companies to crack down on COVID disinformation and other matters is "sprawling federal 'Censorship Enterprise,'" could have major First Amendment implications.

The attorneys general in court filings accuse the Biden administration of "the most egregious violations of the First Amendment in the history of the United States of America" through its communications with companies including Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.

Driving the news: Although he has yet to produce a final ruling in the case, U.S. District Court Judge Terry Doughty in Louisiana said in the injunction Tuesday the attorneys general "have produced evidence of a massive effort by Defendants, from the White House to federal agencies, to suppress speech based on its content."

The Trump-appointed judge consequently blocked certain officials from meeting with, calling, emailing, sending letters or text or meet with social media firms "for the purpose of urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech posted" online.

Of note: Officials affected by this ruling include Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra and White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, along with Department of Justice and FBI employees.

Zoom in: "During the COVID-19 pandemic, a period perhaps best characterized by widespread doubt and uncertainty, the United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian 'Ministry of Truth," Doughty wrote.

Doughty said the evidence produced thus far depicts an "almost dystopian" scenario.

"This targeted suppression of conservative ideas is a perfect example of viewpoint discrimination of political speech," he said. "American citizens have the right to engage in free debate about the significant issues affecting the country."

What they're saying: A White House official said in a statement to media the DOJ is reviewing the injunction and will evaluate its options.

"This Administration has promoted responsible actions to protect public health, safety, and security when confronted by challenges like a deadly pandemic and foreign attacks on our elections," the official added.

"Our consistent view remains that social media platforms have a critical responsibility to take account of the effects their platforms are having on the American people, but make independent choices about the information they present."

[mariacallous]

Recent news that the Republican National Committee (RNC) has used an AI-generated video to criticize Joe Biden shows how likely AI is to transform our upcoming elections. Advances in digital technology provide new and faster tools for political messaging and could have a profound impact on how voters, politicians, and reporters see the candidates and the campaign. We are no longer talking about photoshopping small tweaks to how a person looks or putting someone’s head on another individual’s body, but rather moving to an era where wholesale digital creation and dissemination are going to take place. Through templates that are easy and inexpensive to use, we are going to face a Wild West of campaign claims and counter-claims, with limited ability to distinguish fake from real material and uncertainty regarding how these appeals will affect the election.

Instant responses

Politicians can use generative AI to respond instantly to campaign developments. In the RNC’s case, it released its new video right after Biden’s reelection announcement. It did not appear the party went through extensive shooting, editing, or review. Rather, it simply asked the tool to put together a video that detailed a dystopian U.S. future if Biden were reelected.

In the coming year, response times may drop to minutes, not hours or days. AI can scan the internet, think about strategy, and come up with a hard-hitting appeal. That could be a speech, press release, picture, joke, or video touting the benefits of one candidate over another. AI provides an inexpensive way to generate instant responses without having to rely on highly-paid consultants or expert videographers.

Precise message targeting

AI enables very precise audience targeting, which is crucial in political campaigns. Candidates don’t want to waste money on those who already support or oppose their campaign. Rather, they want to target the small number of swing voters who will decide the actual election or suppress the turnout of those supporting the other campaign. With our high rates of political polarization, only a small percentage of the electorate says they are undecided at the presidential level. According to an April, 2023 Emerson College survey, only six percent of voters are undecided with 43 percent supporting Biden, 41 percent favoring Trump, and 10 percent preferring another candidate.

The closeness of the general election indicates ways in which AI can help candidates. Using microdata from commercial data brokers who have detailed information of people’s reading, viewing, purchasing, and political behavior, campaigners will be able to fine-tune their targeting, reach those who have not yet made up their minds, and give them the exact message that will help them reach their final decisions. By analyzing this material in real-time, AI will enable campaigners to go after specific voting blocs with appeals that nudge them around particular policies and partisan opinions.

Democratizing disinformation

AI likely will democratize disinformation by bringing sophisticated tools to the average person interested in promoting their preferred candidates as well. People no longer must be coding experts or video wizards to generate text, images, video, or programs. They don’t necessarily have to work for a troll farm to create havoc with the opposition. They can simply use advanced technologies to spread the messages they want. In that sense, anyone can become a political content creator and seek to sway voters or the media.

With emotions running intensely in a high-stakes election, many voters also may have incentives to spread false information designed to undermine the opposition. If someone can create noise, build uncertainty, or develop false narratives, that could be an effective way to sway voters and win the race. Since the 2024 presidential election may come down to tens of thousands of voters in a few states, anything that can nudge people in one direction or another could end up being decisive.

New technologies enable people to monetize discontent and make money off other people’s fears, anxieties, or anger. Generative AI can develop messages aimed at those upset with immigration, the economy, abortion policy, critical race theory, transgender issues, or the Ukraine war. It can also create messages that take advantage of social and political discontent, and use AI as a major engagement and persuasion tool.

Few guardrails or disclosure requirements

What makes the coming year particularly worrisome is the lack of guardrails or disclosure requirements that protect voters against fake news, disinformation, or false narratives. Since campaign speech is protected speech, candidates can say and do pretty much whatever they want without risk of legal reprisal. Even if their claims are patently false, judges long have upheld candidate rights to speak freely and falsely. Defamation lawsuits of the type seen this year with Fox News are rare in regard to political candidates and work only with well-resourced litigants.

Neither individuals nor organizations are required to disclose that they used generative AI to manufacture videos or develop specific campaign appeals. The RNC deserves kudos for its voluntary disclosure of its recent commercial, but there is little reason to think that will become the norm. It is more likely that people will use new content tools without any public disclosure and it will be impossible for voters to distinguish real from fake appeals.

[beardedmrbean]

Conservatives on social media slammed the Biden administration after it was announced that a 'Disinformation Governance Board' is being established to combat ‘disinformation’ in the 2022 midterms.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas testified Wednesday that a "Disinformation Governance Board" had recently been created, days after Tesla CEO Elon Musk purchased Twitter, to combat online disinformation and will be led by Undersecretary for Policy Rob Silvers co-chair with principal deputy general counsel Jennifer Gaskill.

CRITICS BLAST ADAM SCHIFF AS 'KING OF DISINFORMATION' FOLLOWING HIS CONCERNS ABOUT MUSK'S TWITTER PURCHASE

"The goal is to bring the resources of (DHS) together to address this threat," Mayorkas said, adding that the department is focused on the spread of disinformation in minority communities 

Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley referred to the board as a "disgrace" and wrote a letter to DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas demanding answers as to how the board will operate.

"Is there anything more dystopian than a Disinformation Governance Board run by the federal government?" Florida Republican Congressional Candidate Dr. Willie J. Montague tweeted, adding in a later tweet that the board is "Orwellian."

ELON MUSK TEASES BUYING MORE COMPANIES, INCLUDING COCA-COLA... TO ADD BACK THE COCAINE

"They didn't need a 'Disinformation Governance Board' until @elonmusk threatened their control over the narrative," Texas Republican Congressman Troy Nehls tweeted.

"The libs spent the last weeks planting the seeds for the back-up plan in case the Twitter deal actually happened," Republican Congresswoman Lauren Boebert tweeted. "Today's news of a Biden backed ‘Disinformation Governance Board’ is dystopian. They can't afford to let the truth be anything but what they say."

"Biden’s ‘Disinformation Governance Board’ is a real-world Ministry of Truth," Daily Wire reporter Megan Basham tweeted. "A conservative movement that doesn’t fight this with everything it has isn’t worthy of the name. Or the name American."

Politico reported that Nina Jankowicz, who previously served as a disinformation fellow at the Wilson Center, will head the board as executive director. 

Jankowicz suggested during the 2020 presidential election that Hunter Biden’s laptop, which has been verified by multiple media outlets, was a "Russian influence op."

Jankowicz retweeted her comment on Wednesday claiming that she was simply live tweeting the presidential debate between Biden and Trump.

DHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fox News.

[bighermie]

Share Link

GOP Rips ‘Dystopian’ DHS Plans for Disinformation Governance Board, ‘Orwellian Abuse of Power’ by Biden Admin https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2022/04/27/gop-rips-dystopian-dhs-plans-disinformation-governance-board-orwellian-abuse-power-biden-admin/

[azspot]

In a rare and somewhat dystopian example of in-sourcing, an Arizona politician appears to have been involved in employing local teens to replicate Russian efforts to spread right-wing disinformation on social media in advance of the upcoming presidential election.

The Washington Post reported Tuesday that Rally Forge, a local digital marketing company headed by Jake Hoffman, a Queen Creek council member and Republican House candidate for Legislative District 12, ran a program over the summer in which teenagers were paid to spam Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook with identical messages that asserted COVID-19 is overhyped and generally attempted to undermine confidence in the validity of American elections — all in support of President Donald Trump.

As one of only two general-election candidates running for the two open state House seats in District 12, Hoffman is all but assured to become a state legislator by default after the November election.

[xtruss]

US is World’s ‘Greatest Propagator of Disinformation’! Washington Has No Right To Tell Its Citizens What The Truth Is, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul Claims

Randal Howard Paul, United States Senator From Kentucky is an American Physian and Politician

Due to its long track record of disinformation, the US government has no right to tell the American people what the truth is, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul has stated. He went to list a number of examples of where Washington had lied to its own people, and the rest of the world.

During a Senate hearing on Wednesday, Paul grilled Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas over the so-called ‘Disinformation Governance Board’ his agency has announced to supposedly help social media platforms filter out ‘fake news.’

“Here’s the problem: we can’t even agree what disinformation is,” the Republican Senator pointed out. “You can’t even agree if it was disinformation that the Russians fed information to the Steele dossier.”

He was referring to the controversial and largely discredited report that relied on info from anonymous sources to allege collusion between the Donald Trump campaign and Moscow ahead of the 2016 presidential election in the US.

“If you can’t agree to that, how are we ever going to come to an agreement on what is disinformation, so that you can police it on social media?” Paul wondered.

“Do you know who the greatest propagator of disinformation in the history of the world is? The US government!” he insisted.

In order to back his claim, the Senator mentioned several examples of false information being deliberately spread by Washington over the past decades.

Among them were the so-called Pentagon Papers, which revealed that the US government had been misinforming the public about the scale of its military operations during the Vietnam War. The documents were officially declassified in 2011, but the media had been reporting on them since 1971.

A general view of the White House. Photograph AFP/Anna Moneymaker

Paul also mentioned “George W. Bush and the weapons of mass destruction,” referring to American claims that Saddam Hussein’s regime had been in possession of WMD, claims that were used by the US to justify the invasion of Iraq in 2003, but were never confirmed by findings on the grounds.

His other example was the Iran–Contra affair, which saw top US officials secretly organizing the sale of weapons to Iran in violation of an arms embargo between 1981 and 1986 in order to obtain money to fund the Contras insurgent group in Nicaragua.

“I mean, think over all the debates and disputes we’ve had over the last 50 years in our country. We work them out by debating them. We don’t work them out by the government being the arbiter,” the Senator said.

“I want you to have nothing to do with speech... You think the American people are so stupid they need you to tell them what the truth is?” Paul added.

The creation of the Disinformation Governance Board was announced in late April. According to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the new body would help counter disinformation, which is being spread by “foreign states such as Russia, China and Iran,” and by human traffickers operating on the US-Mexico border, among others.

The DHS gave assurances that it won’t be targeting US citizens. But critics were quick to nickname the board ‘The Ministry of Truth,’ after a fictional organization from George Orwell’s iconic dystopian novel ‘1984’.

— RT | May 05, 2022

[bountyofbeads]

I am posting a series of articles on the misinformation campaign being waged by the Trump campaign and other nafarious actors including Russia, Iran and China..Its important we recognize, educate and share this information ahead of the 2020 election. The misinformation is 20 fold to the misinformation campaign waged in 2016. WE MUST DEFEAT DONALD TRUMP FOR THE SAKE OF OUR DEMOCRACY. PLEASE SHARE!!! TY🙏🏻🙏🙏🏼🙏🏽🙏🏾🙏🏿

THE BILLION-DOLLAR DISINFORMATION CAMPAIGN TO REELECT THE PRESIDENT..... How new technologies and techniques pioneered by dictators will shape the 2020 Election

By McKay Coppins | Published MARCH 2020 Issue | The Atlantic Magazine | Posted February 13, 2020 |

(**Updated at 2:30 p.m. ET on February 10, 2020.)

(PART 1 /2)

One day last fall, I sat down to create a new Facebook account. I picked a forgettable name, snapped a profile pic with my face obscured, and clicked “Like” on the official pages of Donald Trump and his reelection campaign. Facebook’s algorithm prodded me to follow Ann Coulter, Fox Business, and a variety of fan pages with names like “In Trump We Trust.” I complied. I also gave my cellphone number to the Trump campaign, and joined a handful of private Facebook groups for MAGA diehards, one of which required an application that seemed designed to screen out interlopers.

The president’s reelection campaign was then in the midst of a multimillion-dollar ad blitz aimed at shaping Americans’ understanding of the recently launched impeachment proceedings. Thousands of micro-targeted ads had flooded the internet, portraying Trump as a heroic reformer cracking down on foreign corruption while Democrats plotted a coup. That this narrative bore little resemblance to reality seemed only to accelerate its spread. Right-wing websites amplified every claim. Pro-Trump forums teemed with conspiracy theories. An alternate information ecosystem was taking shape around the biggest news story in the country, and I wanted to see it from the inside.

The story that unfurled in my Facebook feed over the next several weeks was, at times, disorienting. There were days when I would watch, live on TV, an impeachment hearing filled with damning testimony about the president’s conduct, only to look at my phone later and find a slickly edited video—served up by the Trump campaign—that used out-of-context clips to recast the same testimony as an exoneration. Wait, I caught myself wondering more than once, is that what happened today?

As I swiped at my phone, a stream of pro-Trump propaganda filled the screen: “That’s right, the whistleblower’s own lawyer said, ‘The coup has started …’ ” Swipe. “Democrats are doing Putin’s bidding …” Swipe. “The only message these radical socialists and extremists will understand is a crushing …” Swipe. “Only one man can stop this chaos …” Swipe, swipe, swipe.

I was surprised by the effect it had on me. I’d assumed that my skepticism and media literacy would inoculate me against such distortions. But I soon found myself reflexively questioning  every headline. It wasn’t that I believed Trump and his boosters were telling the truth. It was that, in this state of heightened suspicion, truth itself—about Ukraine, impeachment, or anything else—felt more and more difficult to locate. With each swipe, the notion of observable reality drifted further out of reach.

What I was seeing was a strategy that has been deployed by illiberal political leaders around the world. Rather than shutting down dissenting voices, these leaders have learned to harness the democratizing power of social media for their own purposes—jamming the signals, sowing confusion. They no longer need to silence the dissident shouting in the streets; they can use a megaphone to drown him out. Scholars have a name for this: censorship through noise.

After the 2016 election, much was made of the threats posed to American democracy by foreign disinformation. Stories of Russian troll farms and Macedonian fake-news mills loomed in the national imagination. But while these shadowy outside forces preoccupied politicians and journalists, Trump and his domestic allies were beginning to adopt the same tactics of information warfare that have kept the world’s demagogues and strongmen in power.

Every presidential campaign sees its share of spin and misdirection, but this year’s contest promises to be different. In conversations with political strategists and other experts, a dystopian picture of the general election comes into view—one shaped by coordinated bot attacks, Potemkin local-news sites, micro-targeted fearmongering, and anonymous mass texting. Both parties will have these tools at their disposal. But in the hands of a president who lies constantly, who traffics in conspiracy theories, and who readily manipulates the levers of government for his own gain, their potential to wreak havoc is enormous.

The Trump campaign is planning to spend more than $1 billion, and it will be aided by a vast coalition of partisan media, outside political groups, and enterprising freelance operatives. These pro-Trump forces are poised to wage what could be the most extensive disinformation campaign in U.S. history. Whether or not it succeeds in reelecting the president, the wreckage it leaves behind could be irreparable.

'THE DEATH STAR'

The campaign is run from the 14th floor of a gleaming, modern office tower in Rosslyn, Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C. Glass-walled conference rooms look out on the Potomac River. Rows of sleek monitors line the main office space. Unlike the bootstrap operation that first got Trump elected—with its motley band of B-teamers toiling in an unfinished space in Trump Tower—his 2020 enterprise is heavily funded, technologically sophisticated, and staffed with dozens of experienced operatives. One Republican strategist referred to it, admiringly, as “the Death Star.”

Presiding over this effort is Brad Parscale, a 6-foot-8 Viking of a man with a shaved head and a triangular beard. As the digital director of Trump’s 2016 campaign, Parscale didn’t become a household name like Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway. But he played a crucial role in delivering Trump to the Oval Office—and his efforts will shape this year’s election.

In speeches and interviews, Parscale likes to tell his life story as a tidy rags-to-riches tale, embroidered with Trumpian embellishments. He grew up a simple “farm boy from Kansas” (read: son of an affluent lawyer from suburban Topeka) who managed to graduate from an “Ivy League” school (Trinity University, in San Antonio). After college, he went to work for a software company in California, only to watch the business collapse in the economic aftermath of 9/11 (not to mention allegations in a lawsuit that he and his parents, who owned the business, had illegally transferred company funds—claims that they disputed). Broke and desperate, Parscale took his “last $500” (not counting the value of three rental properties he owned) and used it to start a one-man web-design business in Texas.

Parscale Media was, by most accounts, a scrappy endeavor at the outset. Hustling to drum up clients, Parscale cold-pitched shoppers in the tech aisle of a Borders bookstore. Over time, he built enough websites for plumbers and gun shops that bigger clients took notice—including the Trump Organization. In 2011, Parscale was invited to bid on designing a website for Trump International Realty. An ardent fan of The Apprentice, he offered to do the job for $10,000, a fraction of the actual cost. “I just made up a price,” he later told The Washington Post. “I recognized that I was a nobody in San Antonio, but working for the Trumps would be everything.” The contract was his, and a lucrative relationship was born.

Over the next four years, he was hired to design websites for a range of Trump ventures—a winery, a skin-care line, and then a presidential campaign. By late 2015, Parscale—a man with no discernible politics, let alone campaign experience—was running the Republican front-runner’s digital operation from his personal laptop.

Parscale slid comfortably into Trump’s orbit. Not only was he cheap and unpretentious—with no hint of the savvier-than-thou smugness that characterized other political operatives—but he seemed to carry a chip on his shoulder that matched the candidate’s. “Brad was one of those people who wanted to prove the establishment wrong and show the world what he was made of,” says a former colleague from the campaign.

Perhaps most important, he seemed to have no reservations about the kind of campaign Trump wanted to run. The race-baiting, the immigrant-bashing, the truth-bending—none of it seemed to bother Parscale. While some Republicans wrung their hands over Trump’s inflammatory messages, Parscale came up with ideas to more effectively disseminate them.

The campaign had little interest at first in cutting-edge ad technology, and for a while, Parscale’s most valued contribution was the merchandise page he built to sell MAGA hats. But that changed in the general election. Outgunned on the airwaves and lagging badly in fundraising, campaign officials turned to Google and Facebook, where ads were inexpensive and shock value was rewarded. As the campaign poured tens of millions into online advertising—amplifying themes such as Hillary Clinton’s criminality and the threat of radical Islamic terrorism—Parscale’s team, which was christened Project Alamo, grew to 100.

Parscale was generally well liked by his colleagues, who recall him as competent and intensely focused. “He was a get-shit-done type of person,” says A. J. Delgado, who worked with him. Perhaps just as important, he had a talent for ingratiating himself with the Trump family. “He was probably better at managing up,” Kurt Luidhardt, a consultant for the campaign, told me. He made sure to share credit for his work with the candidate’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and he excelled at using Trump’s digital ignorance to flatter him. “Parscale would come in and tell Trump he didn’t need to listen to the polls, because he’d crunched his data and they were going to win by six points,” one former campaign staffer told me. “I was like, ‘Come on, man, don’t bullshit a bullshitter.’ ” But Trump seemed to buy it. (Parscale declined to be interviewed for this story.)

James Barnes, a Facebook employee who was dispatched to work closely with the campaign, told me Parscale’s political inexperience made him open to experimenting with the platform’s new tools. “Whereas some grizzled campaign strategist who’d been around the block a few times might say, ‘Oh, that will never work,’ Brad’s predisposition was to say, ‘Yeah, let’s try it.’ ” From June to November, Trump’s campaign ran 5.9 million ads on Facebook, while Clinton’s ran just 66,000. A Facebook executive would later write in a leaked memo that Trump “got elected because he ran the single best digital ad campaign I’ve ever seen from any advertiser.”

Though some strategists questioned how much these ads actually mattered, Parscale was hailed for Trump’s surprise victory. Stories appeared in the press calling him a “genius” and the campaign’s “secret weapon,” and in 2018 he was tapped to lead the entire reelection effort. The promotion was widely viewed as a sign that the president’s 2020 strategy would hinge on the digital tactics that Parscale had mastered.

Through it all, the strategist has continued to show a preference for narrative over truth. Last May, Parscale regaled a crowd of donors and activists in Miami with the story of his ascent. When a ProPublica reporter confronted him about the many misleading details in his account, he shrugged off the fact-check. “When I give a speech, I tell it like a story,” he said. “My story is my story.”

'DISINFORMATION ARCHITECTURE'

In his book This Is Not Propaganda, Peter Pomerantsev, a researcher at the London School of Economics, writes about a young Filipino political consultant he calls “P.” In college, P had studied the “Little Albert experiment,” in which scientists conditioned a young child to fear furry animals by exposing him to loud noises every time he encountered a white lab rat. The experiment gave P an idea. He created a series of Facebook groups for Filipinos to discuss what was going on in their communities. Once the groups got big enough—about 100,000 members—he began posting local crime stories, and instructed his employees to leave comments falsely tying the grisly headlines to drug cartels. The pages lit up with frightened chatter. Rumors swirled; conspiracy theories metastasized. To many, all crimes became drug crimes.

Unbeknownst to their members, the Facebook groups were designed to boost Rodrigo Duterte, then a long-shot presidential candidate running on a pledge to brutally crack down on drug criminals. (Duterte once boasted that, as mayor of Davao City, he rode through the streets on his motorcycle and personally executed drug dealers.) P’s experiment was one plank in a larger “disinformation architecture”—which also included social-media influencers paid to mock opposing candidates, and mercenary trolls working out of former call centers—that experts say aided Duterte’s rise to power. Since assuming office in 2016, Duterte has reportedly ramped up these efforts while presiding over thousands of extrajudicial killings.

The campaign in the Philippines was emblematic of an emerging propaganda playbook, one that uses new tools for the age-old ends of autocracy. The Kremlin has long been an innovator in this area. (A 2011 manual for Russian civil servants favorably compared their methods of disinformation to “an invisible radiation” that takes effect while “the population doesn’t even feel it is being acted upon.”) But with the technological advances of the past decade, and the global proliferation of smartphones, governments around the world have found success deploying Kremlin-honed techniques against their own people.

In the United States, we tend to view such tools of oppression as the faraway problems of more fragile democracies. But the people working to reelect Trump understand the power of these tactics. They may use gentler terminology—muddy the waters; alternative facts—but they’re building a machine designed to exploit their own sprawling disinformation architecture.

Central to that effort is the campaign’s use of micro-targeting—the process of slicing up the electorate into distinct niches and then appealing to them with precisely tailored digital messages. The advantages of this approach are obvious: An ad that calls for defunding Planned Parenthood might get a mixed response from a large national audience, but serve it directly via Facebook to 800 Roman Catholic women in Dubuque, Iowa, and its reception will be much more positive. If candidates once had to shout their campaign promises from a soapbox, micro-targeting allows them to sidle up to millions of voters and whisper personalized messages in their ear.

Parscale didn’t invent this practice—Barack Obama’s campaign famously used it in 2012, and Clinton’s followed suit. But Trump’s effort in 2016 was unprecedented, in both its scale and its brazenness. In the final days of the 2016 race, for example, Trump’s team tried to suppress turnout among black voters in Florida by slipping ads into their News Feeds that read, “Hillary Thinks African-Americans Are Super Predators.” An unnamed campaign official boasted to Bloomberg Businessweek that it was one of “three major voter suppression operations underway.” (The other two targeted young women and white liberals.)

The weaponization of micro-targeting was pioneered in large part by the data scientists at Cambridge Analytica. The firm began as part of a nonpartisan military contractor that used digital psyops to target terrorist groups and drug cartels. In Pakistan, it worked to thwart jihadist recruitment efforts; in South America, it circulated disinformation to turn drug dealers against their bosses.

The emphasis shifted once the conservative billionaire Robert Mercer became a major investor and installed Steve Bannon as his point man. Using a massive trove of data it had gathered from Facebook and other sources—without users’ consent—Cambridge Analytica worked to develop detailed “psychographic profiles” for every voter in the U.S., and began experimenting with ways to stoke paranoia and bigotry by exploiting certain personality traits. In one exercise, the firm asked white men whether they would approve of their daughter marrying a Mexican immigrant; those who said yes were asked a follow-up question designed to provoke irritation at the constraints of political correctness: “Did you feel like you had to say that?”

Christopher Wylie, who was the director of research at Cambridge Analytica and later testified about the company to Congress, told me that “with the right kind of nudges,” people who exhibited certain psychological characteristics could be pushed into ever more extreme beliefs and conspiratorial thinking. “Rather than using data to interfere with the process of radicalization, Steve Bannon was able to invert that,” Wylie said. “We were essentially seeding an insurgency in the United States.”

Cambridge Analytica was dissolved in 2018, shortly after its CEO was caught on tape bragging about using bribery and sexual “honey traps” on behalf of clients. (The firm denied that it actually used such tactics.) Since then, some political scientists have questioned how much effect its “psychographic” targeting really had. But Wylie—who spoke with me from London, where he now works for H&M, as a fashion-trend forecaster—said the firm’s work in 2016 was a modest test run compared with what could come.

“What happens if North Korea or Iran picks up where Cambridge Analytica left off?” he said, noting that plenty of foreign actors will be looking for ways to interfere in this year’s election. “There are countless hostile states that have more than enough capacity to quickly replicate what we were able to do … and make it much more sophisticated.” These efforts may not come only from abroad: A group of former Cambridge Analytica employees have formed a new firm that, according to the Associated Press, is working with the Trump campaign. (The firm has denied this, and a campaign spokesperson declined to comment.)

After the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, Facebook was excoriated for its mishandling of user data and complicity in the viral spread of fake news. Mark Zuckerberg promised to do better, and rolled out a flurry of reforms. But then, last fall, he handed a major victory to lying politicians: Candidates, he said, would be allowed to continue running false ads on Facebook. (Commercial advertisers, by contrast, are subject to fact-checking.) In a speech at Georgetown University, the CEO argued that his company shouldn’t be responsible for arbitrating political speech, and that because political ads already receive so much scrutiny, candidates who choose to lie will be held accountable by journalists and watchdogs.

"Shady political actors are discovering how easy it is to wage an untraceable whisper campaign by text message."

To bolster his case, Zuckerberg pointed to the recently launched—and publicly accessible—“library” where Facebook archives every political ad it publishes. The project has a certain democratic appeal: Why censor false or toxic content when a little sunlight can have the same effect? But spend some time scrolling through the archive of Trump reelection ads, and you quickly see the limits of this transparency.

The campaign doesn’t run just one ad at a time on a given theme. It runs hundreds of iterations—adjusting the language, the music, even the colors of the “Donate” buttons. In the 10 weeks after the House of Representatives began its impeachment inquiry, the Trump campaign ran roughly 14,000 different ads containing the word impeachment. Sifting through all of them is virtually impossible.

Both parties will rely on micro-targeted ads this year, but the president is likely to have a distinct advantage. The Republican National Committee and the Trump campaign have reportedly compiled an average of 3,000 data points on every voter in America. They have spent years experimenting with ways to tweak their messages based not just on gender and geography, but on whether the recipient owns a gun or watches the Golf Channel.

While these ads can be used to try to win over undecided voters, they’re most often deployed for fundraising and for firing up the faithful—and Trump’s advisers believe this election will be decided by mobilization, not persuasion. To turn out the base, the campaign has signaled that it will return to familiar themes: the threat of “illegal aliens”—a term Parscale has reportedly encouraged Trump to use—and the corruption of the “swamp.”

Beyond Facebook, the campaign is also investing in a texting platform that could allow it to send anonymous messages directly to millions of voters’ phones without their permission. Until recently, people had to opt in before a campaign could include them in a mass text. But with new “peer to peer” texting apps—including one developed by Gary Coby, a senior Trump adviser—a single volunteer can send hundreds of messages an hour, skirting federal regulations by clicking “Send” one message at a time. Notably, these messages aren’t required to disclose who’s behind them, thanks to a 2002 ruling by the Federal Election Commission that cited the limited number of characters available in a text.

Most experts assume that these regulations will be overhauled sometime after the 2020 election. For now, campaigns from both parties are hoovering up as many cellphone numbers as possible, and Parscale has said texting will be at the center of Trump’s reelection strategy. The medium’s ability to reach voters is unparalleled: While robocalls get sent to voicemail and email blasts get trapped in spam folders, peer-to-peer texting companies say that at least 90 percent of their messages are opened.

The Trump campaign’s texts so far this cycle have focused on shouty fundraising pleas (“They have NOTHING! IMPEACHMENT IS OVER! Now let’s CRUSH our End of Month Goal”). But the potential for misuse by outside groups is clear—and shady political actors are already discovering how easy it is to wage an untraceable whisper campaign by text.

In 2018, as early voting got under way in Tennessee’s Republican gubernatorial primary, voters began receiving text messages attacking two of the candidates’ conservative credentials. The texts—written in a conversational style, as if they’d been sent from a friend—were unsigned, and people who tried calling the numbers received a busy signal. The local press covered the smear campaign. Law enforcement was notified. But the source of the texts was never discovered.

'WAR ON THE PRESS'

One afternoon last March, I was on the phone with a Republican operative close to the Trump family when he casually mentioned that a reporter at Business Insider was about to have a very bad day. The journalist, John Haltiwanger, had tweeted something that annoyed Donald Trump Jr., prompting the coterie of friends and allies surrounding the president’s son to drum up a hit piece. The story they had coming, the operative suggested to me, would demolish the reporter’s credibility.

I wasn’t sure what to make of this gloating—people in Trump’s circle have a tendency toward bluster. But a few hours later, the operative sent me a link to a Breitbart News article documenting Haltiwanger’s “history of intense Trump hatred.” The story was based on a series of Instagram posts—all of them from before Haltiwanger started working at Business Insider—in which he made fun of the president and expressed solidarity with liberal protesters.

The next morning, Don Jr. tweeted the story to his 3 million followers, denouncing Haltiwanger as a “raging lib.” Other conservatives piled on, and the reporter was bombarded with abusive messages and calls for him to be fired. His employer issued a statement conceding that the Instagram posts were “not appropriate.” Haltiwanger kept his job, but the experience, he told me later, “was bizarre and unsettling.”

The Breitbart story was part of a coordinated effort by a coalition of Trump allies to air embarrassing information about reporters who produce critical coverage of the president. (The New York Times first reported on this project last summer; since then, it’s been described to me in greater detail.) According to people with knowledge of the effort, pro-Trump operatives have scraped social-media accounts belonging to hundreds of political journalists and compiled years’ worth of posts into a dossier.

Often when a particular news story is deemed especially unfair—or politically damaging—to the president, Don Jr. will flag it in a text thread that he uses for this purpose. (Among those who text regularly with the president’s eldest son, someone close to him told me, are the conservative activist Charlie Kirk; two GOP strategists, Sergio Gor and Arthur Schwartz; Matthew Boyle, a Breitbart editor; and U.S. Ambassador Richard Grenell.) Once a story has been marked for attack, someone searches the dossier for material on the journalists involved. If something useful turns up—a problematic old joke; evidence of liberal political views—Boyle turns it into a Breitbart headline, which White House officials and campaign surrogates can then share on social media. (The White House has denied any involvement in this effort.)

Descriptions of the dossier vary. One source I spoke with said that a programmer in India had been paid to organize it into a searchable database, making posts that contain offensive keywords easier to find. Another told me the dossier had expanded to at least 2,000 people, including not just journalists but high-profile academics, politicians, celebrities, and other potential Trump foes. Some of this, of course, may be hyperbolic boasting—but the effort has yielded fruit.

"PASCALE HAS SAID THE CAMPAIGN INTENDS TO TRAIN “SWARMS OF SURROGATES” TO UNDERMINE COVERAGE FROM LOCAL TV STATIONS AND NEWSPAPERS."

In the past year, the operatives involved have gone after journalists at CNN, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. They exposed one reporter for using the word fag in college, and another for posting anti-Semitic and racist jokes a decade ago. These may not have been career-ending revelations, but people close to the project said they’re planning to unleash much more opposition research as the campaign intensifies. “This is innovative shit,” said Mike Cernovich, a right-wing activist with a history of trolling. “They’re appropriating call-out culture.”

What’s notable about this effort is not that it aims to expose media bias. Conservatives have been complaining—with some merit—about a liberal slant in the press for decades. But in the Trump era, an important shift has taken place. Instead of trying to reform the press, or critique its coverage, today’s most influential conservatives want to destroy the mainstream media altogether. “Journalistic integrity is dead,” Boyle declared in a 2017 speech at the Heritage Foundation. “There is no such thing anymore. So everything is about weaponization of information.”

It’s a lesson drawn from demagogues around the world: When the press as an institution is weakened, fact-based journalism becomes just one more drop in the daily deluge of content—no more or less credible than partisan propaganda. Relativism is the real goal of Trump’s assault on the press, and the more “enemies of the people” his allies can take out along the way, the better. “A culture war is a war,” Steve Bannon told the Times last year. “There are casualties in war.”

This attitude has permeated the president’s base. At rallies, people wear T-shirts that read rope. tree. journalist. some assembly required. A CBS News/YouGov poll has found that just 11 percent of strong Trump supporters trust the mainstream media—while 91 percent turn to the president for “accurate information.” This dynamic makes it all but impossible for the press to hold the president accountable, something Trump himself seems to understand. “Remember,” he told a crowd in 2018, “what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”

Bryan Lanza, who worked for the Trump campaign in 2016 and remains a White House surrogate, told me flatly that he sees no possibility of Americans establishing a common set of facts from which to conduct the big debates of this year’s election. Nor is that his goal. “It’s our job to sell our narrative louder than the media,” Lanza said. “They’re clearly advocating for a liberal-socialist position, and we’re never going to be in concert. So the war continues.”

Parscale has indicated that he plans to open up a new front in this war: local news. Last year, he said the campaign intends to train “swarms of surrogates” to undermine negative coverage from local TV stations and newspapers. Polls have long found that Americans across the political spectrum trust local news more than national media. If the campaign has its way, that trust will be eroded by November. “We can actually build up and fight with the local newspapers,” Parscale told donors, according to a recording provided by The Palm Beach Post. “So we’re not just fighting on Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC with the same 700,000 people watching every day.”

Running parallel to this effort, some conservatives have been experimenting with a scheme to exploit the credibility of local journalism. Over the past few years, hundreds of websites with innocuous-sounding names like the Arizona Monitor and The Kalamazoo Times have begun popping up. At first glance, they look like regular publications, complete with community notices and coverage of schools. But look closer and you’ll find that there are often no mastheads, few if any bylines, and no addresses for local offices. Many of them are organs of Republican lobbying groups; others belong to a mysterious company called Locality Labs, which is run by a conservative activist in Illinois. Readers are given no indication that these sites have political agendas—which is precisely what makes them valuable.

According to one longtime strategist, candidates looking to plant a negative story about an opponent can pay to have their desired headlines posted on some of these Potemkin news sites. By working through a third-party consulting firm—instead of paying the sites directly—candidates are able to obscure their involvement in the scheme when they file expenditures to the Federal Election Commission. Even if the stories don’t fool savvy readers, the headlines are convincing enough to be flashed across the screen in a campaign commercial or slipped into fundraising emails.

'DIGITAL DIRTY TRICKS'

Shortly after polls closed in Kentucky’s gubernatorial election last November, an anonymous Twitter user named @Overlordkraken1 announced to his 19 followers that he had “just shredded a box of Republican mail in ballots” in Louisville.

There was little reason to take this claim at face value, and plenty of reason to doubt it (beginning with the fact that he’d misspelled Louisville). But the race was tight, and as incumbent Governor Matt Bevin began to fall behind in the vote total, an army of Twitter bots began spreading the election-rigging claim.

The original post was removed by Twitter, but by then thousands of automated accounts were circulating screenshots of it with the hashtag #StoptheSteal. Popular right-wing internet personalities jumped on the narrative, and soon the Bevin campaign was making noise about unspecified voting “irregularities.” When the race was called for his opponent, the governor refused to concede, and asked for a statewide review of the vote. (No evidence of ballot-shredding was found, and he finally admitted defeat nine days later.)

The Election Night disinformation blitz had all the markings of a foreign influence operation. In 2016, Russian trolls had worked in similar ways to contaminate U.S. political discourse—posing as Black Lives Matter activists in an attempt to inflame racial divisions, and fanning pro-Trump conspiracy theories. (They even used Facebook to organize rallies, including one for Muslim supporters of Clinton in Washington, D.C., where they got someone to hold up a sign attributing a fictional quote to the candidate: “I think Sharia law will be a powerful new direction of freedom.”)

But when Twitter employees later reviewed the activity surrounding Kentucky’s election, they concluded that the bots were largely based in America—a sign that political operatives here were learning to mimic Russian trolling tactics.

Of course, dirty tricks aren’t new to American politics. From Lee Atwater and Roger Stone to the crooked machine Democrats of Chicago, the country has a long history of underhanded operatives smearing opponents and meddling in elections. And, in fact, Samuel Woolley, a scholar who studies digital propaganda, told me that the first documented deployment of politicized Twitter bots was in the U.S. In 2010, an Iowa-based conservative group set up a small network of automated accounts with names like @BrianD82 to promote the idea that Martha Coakley, a Democrat running for Senate in Massachusetts, was anti-Catholic.

Since then, the tactics of Twitter warfare have grown more sophisticated, as regimes around the world experiment with new ways to deploy their cybermilitias. In Mexico, supporters of then-President Enrique Peña Nieto created “sock puppet” accounts to pose as protesters and sabotage the opposition movement. In Azerbaijan, a pro-government youth group waged coordinated harassment campaigns against journalists, flooding their Twitter feeds with graphic threats and insults. When these techniques prove successful, Woolley told me, Americans improve upon them. “It’s almost as if there’s a Columbian exchange between developing-world authoritarian regimes and the West,” he said.

Parscale has denied that the campaign uses bots, saying in a 60 Minutes interview, “I don’t think [they] work.” He may be right—it’s unlikely that these nebulous networks of trolls and bots could swing a national election. But they do have their uses. They can simulate false consensus, derail sincere debate, and hound people out of the public square.

According to one study, bots accounted for roughly 20 percent of all the tweets posted about the 2016 election during one five-week period that year. And Twitter is already infested with bots that seem designed to boost Trump’s reelection prospects. Regardless of where they’re coming from, they have tremendous potential to divide, radicalize, and stoke hatred that lasts long after the votes are cast.

Rob Flaherty, who served as the digital director for Beto O’Rourke’s presidential campaign, told me that Twitter in 2020 is a “hall of mirrors.” He said one mysterious account started a viral rumor that the gunman who killed seven people in Odessa, Texas, last summer had a beto bumper sticker on his car. Another masqueraded as an O’Rourke supporter and hurled racist invective at a journalist. Some of these tactics echoed 2016, when Russian agitators posed as Bernie Sanders supporters and stirred up anger toward Hillary Clinton.

Flaherty said he didn’t know who was behind the efforts targeting O’Rourke, and the candidate dropped out before they could make a real difference. “But you can’t watch this landscape and not get the feeling that someone’s fucking with something,” he told me. Flaherty has since joined Joe Biden’s campaign, which has had to contend with similar distortions: Last year, a website resembling an official Biden campaign page appeared on the internet. It emphasized elements of the candidate’s legislative record likely to hurt him in the Democratic primary—opposition to same-sex marriage, support for the Iraq War—and featured video clips of his awkward encounters with women. The site quickly became one of the most-visited Biden-related sites on the web. It was designed by a Trump consultant.

'FIGHTING FIRE WITH FIRE'

As the president’s reelection machine ramps up, Democratic strategists have found themselves debating an urgent question: Can they defeat the Trump coalition without adopting its tactics?

On one side of this argument is Dmitri Mehlhorn, a consultant notorious for his willingness to experiment with digital subterfuge. During Alabama’s special election in 2017, Mehlhorn helped fund at least two “false flag” operations against the Republican Senate candidate, Roy Moore. For one scheme, faux Russian Twitter bots followed the candidate’s account to make it look like the Kremlin was backing Moore. For another, a fake social-media campaign, dubbed “Dry Alabama,” was designed to link Moore to fictional Baptist teetotalers trying to ban alcohol. (Mehlhorn has claimed that he unaware of the Russian bot effort and does not support the use of misinformation.)

When The New York Times uncovered the second plot, one of the activists involved, Matt Osborne, contended that Democrats had no choice but to employ such unscrupulous techniques. “If you don’t do it, you’re fighting with one hand tied behind your back,” Osborne said. “You have a moral imperative to do this—to do whatever it takes.”

Others have argued that this is precisely the wrong moment for Democrats to start abandoning ideals of honesty and fairness. “It’s just not in my values to go out there making shit up and tricking voters,” Flaherty told me. “I know there’s this whole fight-fire-with-fire contingent, but generally when you ask them what they mean, they’re like, ‘Lie!’ ” Some also note that the president has already handed them plenty of ammunition. “I don’t think the Democratic campaign is going to need to make stuff up about Trump,” Judd Legum, the author of a progressive newsletter about digital politics, told me. “They can stick to things that are true.”

"EVENTUALLY, THE FEAR OF COVERT PROPAGANDA INFLICTS AS MUCH DAMAGE AS THE PROPAGANDA ITSELF."

One Democrat straddling these two camps is a young, tech-savvy strategist named Tara McGowan. Last fall, she and the former Obama adviser David Plouffe launched a political-action committee with a pledge to spend $75 million attacking Trump online. At the time, the president’s campaign was running more ads on Facebook and Google than the top four Democratic candidates combined. McGowan’s plans to return fire included such ads, but she also had more creative—and controversial—measures in mind.

For example, she established a media organization with a staff of writers to produce left-leaning “hometown news” stories that can be micro-targeted to persuadable voters on Facebook without any indication that they’re paid for by a political group. Though she insists that the reporting is strictly factual, some see the enterprise as a too-close-for-comfort co-opting of right-wing tactics.

When I spoke with McGowan, she was open about her willingness to push boundaries that might make some Democrats queasy. As far as she was concerned, the “super-predator” ads Trump ran to depress black turnout in 2016 were “fair game” because they had some basis in fact. (Clinton did use the term in 1996, to refer to gang members.) McGowan suggested that a similar approach could be taken with conservatives. She ruled out attempts to misinform Republicans about when and where to vote—a tactic Mehlhorn reportedly considered, though he later said he was joking—but said she would pursue any strategy that was “in the bounds of the law.”

“We are in a radically disruptive moment right now,” McGowan told me. “We have a president that lies every day, unabashedly … I think Trump is so desperate to win this election that he will do anything. There will be no bar too low for him.”

This intraparty split was highlighted last year when state officials urged the Democratic National Committee to formally disavow the use of bots, troll farms, and “deepfakes” (digitally manipulated videos that can, with alarming precision, make a person appear to do or say anything). Supporters saw the proposed pledge as a way of contrasting their party’s values with those of the GOP. But after months of lobbying, the committee refused to adopt the pledge.

Meanwhile, experts worried about domestic disinformation are looking to other countries for lessons. The most successful recent example may be Indonesia, which cracked down on the problem after a wave of viral lies and conspiracy theories pushed by hard-line Islamists led to the defeat of a popular Christian Chinese candidate for governor in 2016. To prevent a similar disruption in last year’s presidential election, a coalition of journalists from more than two dozen top Indonesian news outlets worked together to identify and debunk hoaxes before they gained traction online. But while that may sound like a promising model, it was paired with aggressive efforts by the state to monitor and arrest purveyors of fake news—an approach that would run afoul of the First Amendment if attempted in the U.S.

Richard Stengel, who served as the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy under President Obama, spent almost three years trying to counter digital propaganda from the Islamic State and Russia. By the time he left office, he told me, he was convinced that disinformation would continue to thrive until big tech companies were forced to take responsibility for it. Stengel has proposed amending the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which shields online platforms from liability for messages posted by third parties. Companies such as Facebook and Twitter, he believes, should be required by law to police their platforms for disinformation and abusive trolling. “It’s not going to solve the whole problem,” he told me, “but it’s going to help with volume.”

There is one other case study to consider. During the Ukrainian revolution in 2014, pro-democracy activists found that they could defang much of the false information about their movement by repeatedly exposing its Russian origins. But this kind of transparency comes with a cost, Stengel observed. Over time, alertness to the prevalence of propaganda can curdle into paranoia. Russian operatives have been known to encourage such anxiety by spreading rumors that exaggerate their own influence. Eventually, the fear of covert propaganda inflicts as much damage as the propaganda itself.

Once you internalize the possibility that you’re being manipulated by some hidden hand, nothing can be trusted. Every dissenting voice on Twitter becomes a Russian bot, every uncomfortable headline a false flag, every political development part of an ever-deepening conspiracy. By the time the information ecosystem collapses under the weight of all this cynicism, you’re too vigilant to notice that the disinformationists have won.

'POWERS OF INCUMBENCY'

If there’s one thing that can be said for Brad Parscale, it’s that he runs a tight ship. Unauthorized leaks from inside the campaign are rare; press stories on palace intrigue are virtually nonexistent. When the staff first moved into its new offices last year, journalists were periodically invited to tour the facility—but Parscale put an end to the practice: He didn’t want them glimpsing a scrap of paper or a whiteboard scribble that they weren’t supposed to see.

Notably, while the Trump White House has endured a seemingly endless procession of shake-ups, the Trump reelection campaign has seen very little turnover since Parscale took charge. His staying power is one reason many Republicans—inside the organization or out—hesitate to talk about him on the record. But among allies of the president, there appears to be a growing skepticism.

Former colleagues began noticing a change in Parscale after his promotion. Suddenly, the quiet guy with his face buried in a laptop was wearing designer suits, tossing out MAGA hats at campaign rallies, and traveling to Europe to speak at a political-marketing conference. In the past few years, Parscale has bought a BMW, a Range Rover, a condo, and a $2.4 million waterfront house in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. “He knows he has the confidence of the family,” one former colleague told me, “which gives him more swagger.” When the U.K.’s Daily Mail ran a story spotlighting Parscale’s spending spree, he attempted deflection through flattery. “The president is an excellent businessman,” he told the tabloid, “and being associated with him for years has been extremely beneficial to my family.”

But according to a former White House official with knowledge of the incident, Trump was irritated by the coverage, and the impression it created that his campaign manager was getting rich off him. For a moment, Parscale’s standing appeared to be in peril, but then Trump’s attention was diverted by the G7 summit in France, and he never returned to the issue. (A spokesperson for the campaign disputed this account.)

Some Republicans worry that for all Parscale’s digital expertise, he doesn’t have the vision to guide Trump to reelection. The president is historically unpopular, and even in red states, he has struggled to mobilize his base for special elections. If Trump’s message is growing stale with voters, is Parscale the man to help overhaul it? “People start to ask the question—you’re building this apparatus, and that’s great, but what’s the overarching narrative?” said a former campaign staffer.

But whether Trump finds a new narrative or not, he has something this time around that he didn’t have in 2016—the powers of the presidency. While every commander in chief looks for ways to leverage his incumbency for reelection, Trump has shown that he’s willing to go much further than most. In the run-up to the 2018 midterm elections, he seized on reports of a migrant caravan traveling to the U.S. from Central America to claim that the southern border was facing a national-security crisis. Trump warned of a coming “invasion” and claimed, without evidence, that the caravan had been infiltrated by gang members.

Parscale aided this effort by creating a 30-second commercial that interspersed footage of Hispanic migrants with clips of a convicted cop-killer. The ad ended with an urgent call to action: stop the caravan. vote republican. In a final maneuver before the election, Trump dispatched U.S. troops to the border. The president insisted that the operation was necessary to keep America safe—but within weeks the troops were quietly called back, the “crisis” having apparently ended once votes were cast. Skeptics were left to wonder: If Trump is willing to militarize the border to pick up a few extra seats in the midterms, what will he and his supporters do when his reelection is on the line?

It doesn’t require an overactive imagination to envision a worst-case scenario: On Election Day, anonymous text messages direct voters to the wrong polling locations, or maybe even circulate rumors of security threats. Deepfakes of the Democratic nominee using racial slurs crop up faster than social-media platforms can remove them. As news outlets scramble to correct the inaccuracies, hordes of Twitter bots respond by smearing and threatening reporters. Meanwhile, the Trump campaign has spent the final days of the race pumping out Facebook ads at such a high rate that no one can keep track of what they’re injecting into the bloodstream.

After the first round of exit polls is released, a mysteriously sourced video surfaces purporting to show undocumented immigrants at the ballot box. Trump begins retweeting rumors of voter fraud and suggests that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers should be dispatched to polling stations. are illegals stealing the election? reads the Fox News chyron. are russians behind false videos? demands MSNBC.

The votes haven’t even been counted yet, and much of the country is ready to throw out the result.

'NOTHING IS TRUE '

There is perhaps no better place to witness what the culture of disinformation has already wrought in America than a Trump campaign rally. One night in November, I navigated through a parking-lot maze of folding tables covered in MAGA merch and entered the BancorpSouth Arena in Tupelo, Mississippi. The election was still a year away, but thousands of sign-waving supporters had crowded into the venue to cheer on the president in person.

Once Trump took the stage, he let loose a familiar flurry of lies, half-lies, hyperbole, and nonsense. He spun his revisionist history of the Ukraine scandal—the one in which Joe Biden is the villain—and claimed, falsely, that the Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams wanted to “give illegal aliens the right to vote.” At one point, during a riff on abortion, Trump casually asserted that “the governor of Virginia executed a baby”—prompting a woman in the crowd to scream, “Murderer!”

This incendiary fabrication didn’t seem to register with my companions in the press pen, who were busy writing stories and shooting B-roll. I opened Twitter, expecting to see a torrent of fact-checks laying out the truth of the case—that the governor had been answering a hypothetical question about late-term abortion; that a national firestorm had ensued; that there were certainly different ways to interpret his comments but that not even the most ardent anti-abortion activist thought the governor of Virginia had personally “executed a baby.”

But Twitter was uncharacteristically quiet (apparently the president had said this before), and the most widely shared tweet I found on the subject was from his own campaign, which had blasted out a context-free clip of the governor’s abortion comments to back up Trump’s smear.

After the rally, I loitered near one of the exits, chatting with people as they filed out of the arena. Among liberals, there is a comforting caricature of Trump supporters as gullible personality cultists who have been hypnotized into believing whatever their leader says. The appeal of this theory is the implication that the spell can be broken, that truth can still triumph over lies, that someday everything could go back to normal—if only these voters were exposed to the facts. But the people I spoke with in Tupelo seemed to treat matters of fact as beside the point.

One woman told me that, given the president’s accomplishments, she didn’t care if he “fabricates a little bit.” A man responded to my questions about Trump’s dishonest attacks on the press with a shrug and a suggestion that the media “ought to try telling the truth once in a while.” Tony Willnow, a 34-year-old maintenance worker who had an American flag wrapped around his head, observed that Trump had won because he said things no other politician would say. When I asked him if it mattered whether those things were true, he thought for a moment before answering. “He tells you what you want to hear,” Willnow said. “And I don’t know if it’s true or not—but it sounds good, so fuck it.”

The political theorist Hannah Arendt once wrote that the most successful totalitarian leaders of the 20th century instilled in their followers “a mixture of gullibility and cynicism.” When they were lied to, they chose to believe it. When a lie was debunked, they claimed they’d known all along—and would then “admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.” Over time, Arendt wrote, the onslaught of propaganda conditioned people to “believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.”

Leaving the rally, I thought about Arendt, and the swaths of the country that are already gripped by the ethos she described. Should it prevail in 2020, the election’s legacy will be clear—not a choice between parties or candidates or policy platforms, but a referendum on reality itself.

______

This article appears in the March 2020 print edition with the headline “The 2020 Disinformation War.”

______

MCKAY COPPINS is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of The Wilderness, a book about the battle over the future of the Republican Party.

*********

[driftbending]

After the 2016 election, much was made of the threats posed to American democracy by foreign disinformation. Stories of Russian troll farms and Macedonian fake-news mills loomed in the national imagination. But while these shadowy outside forces preoccupied politicians and journalists, Trump and his domestic allies were beginning to adopt the same tactics of information warfare that have kept the world’s demagogues and strongmen in power. Every presidential campaign sees its share of spin and misdirection, but this year’s contest promises to be different. In conversations with political strategists and other experts, a dystopian picture of the general election comes into view—one shaped by coordinated bot attacks, Potemkin local-news sites, micro-targeted fearmongering, and anonymous mass texting. Both parties will have these tools at their disposal. But in the hands of a president who lies constantly, who traffics in conspiracy theories, and who readily manipulates the levers of government for his own gain, their potential to wreak havoc is enormous. The Trump campaign is planning to spend more than $1 billion, and it will be aided by a vast coalition of partisan media, outside political groups, and enterprising freelance operatives. These pro-Trump forces are poised to wage what could be the most extensive disinformation campaign in U.S. history. Whether or not it succeeds in reelecting the president, the wreckage it leaves behind could be irreparable. The campaign is run from the 14th floor of a gleaming, modern office tower in Rosslyn, Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C. Glass-walled conference rooms look out on the Potomac River. Rows of sleek monitors line the main office space. Unlike the bootstrap operation that first got Trump elected—with its motley band of B-teamers toiling in an unfinished space in Trump Tower—his 2020 enterprise is heavily funded, technologically sophisticated, and staffed with dozens of experienced operatives. One Republican strategist referred to it, admiringly, as “the Death Star.”

The Billion-Dollar Disinformation Campaign to Reelect the President by McKay Coppins

[garudabluffs]

The Future of the Spectacle … or How the West Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Reality Police

“If you think this vision is science fiction, or dystopian satire, think again. Or read this recent article in Bloomberg, “U.S. Unleashes Military to Fight Fake News, Disinformation.” Here the lede to get you started …   “Fake news and social media posts are such a threat to U.S. security that the Defense Department is launching a project to repel ‘large-scale, automated disinformation attacks’ … the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) wants custom software that can unearth fakes hidden among more than 500,000 stories, photos, video and audio clips. If successful, the system after four years of trials may expand to detect malicious intent and prevent viral fake news from polarizing society …”

READ MORE https://consentfactory.org/2019/09/03/the-future-of-the-spectacle-or-how-the-west-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-the-reality-police/

14 thoughts  When E.M. Forster wrote that otherwise impeccable [1909] masterpiece “The Machine Stops”, he couldn’t realize that there was no need for every individual to be walled up in a little personal cave. Just give them mobile gadgets and they walk around encapsulated just as thoroughly in their own mental worlds. “ -->https://www.ele.uri.edu/faculty/vetter/Other-stuff/The-Machine-Stops.pdf

“The danger is that this lot have guns and know how to use them.”

The Management September 5, 2019 “ Our sincere apologies for the stupidity and general evilness of our in-house satirist. We don’t enjoy posting his Putin-Nazi denialism, but we are forced to, as, technically, he owns our blog. Our in-house legal team is trying to reclaim ownership from him, and otherwise totally de-platform or at least significantly marginalize him, but navigating German intellectual property law is not so easy, as you can imagine. In the meantime, if it’s any comfort, know that we, The Management, agree with you about this horrible neo-fascist assault on democracy that was launched more or less the moment Donald Trump won the Republican nomination in 2016, and which, as you point out, the corporate media has been exhaustively documenting ever since. Our associates in the US and the UK have apprised us of the desperate situation in both those countries. From what we understand, one can hardly pop out for a triple cheeseburger or a bag of chips these days without being rounded up by Nazis and dragged off to a concentration camp. In any event, we empathize with your outrage. Please trust that we are doing our utmost (behind the scenes, of course) to foment and maintain a level of mass hysteria sufficient to eventually defeat and severely punish these Nazi swine, notwithstanding our in-house satirist’s extremist-adjacent activities. (We would, however, encourage you not to dismiss the “Russia” factor. Our in-house Putin-Naziologists assure us that Putin is indeed orchestrating this global fascist Attack on Democracy, and has been all along!)

[brajeshupadhyay]

In this dystopian world, Kamala Harris sails above the presidential bar | Kamala Harris

What is Mike Pence? When the painted smile fades and the glazed eyes begin to focus on reality, is there an honest penny in him?

For the next three months, the core question of whether Pence has any core is the only real target for America’s history-making vice-presidential candidate, Kamala Harris.

As much as the Trump campaign wants to scare the bejesus out of its old, white base with terrifying tales about Krazy Kamala, her own policy positions don’t really matter. Like every other veep candidate, Harris doesn’t deliver a voter bloc or state. She doesn’t displace the top of the ticket because veeps never do.

All that matters is one debate night, in Salt Lake City, in early October. And even that night will be quickly overshadowed by the second presidential debate a week later.

How can the summer’s biggest political story – except for the pandemic, recession and racial justice protests – be so easily dismissed? To understand that dynamic, you need look no further than Joe Biden and Pence.

Back in 2008, Barack Obama’s pick of Biden as his running mate was everything Harris is today: a counterweight to everything he wasn’t. Biden offered some older, whiter balance to the first African American nominee for president.

He also undercut Obama’s main claim to that nomination: opposing the war in Iraq. Biden had voted for the invasion, even as he turned into a sharp critic of the war like every other Democrat.

How did Obama overcome his policy differences with Biden on the campaign trail? He didn’t need to.

There was some chemistry between the Obamas and the Bidens on the day they walked out on stage in Springfield, Illinois, near the old state capitol. But more often that not, the chemistry story was overblown: Obama was a disciplined speaker where Biden was not. Obama chose not to wait his turn; Biden had spent his career waiting for his turn.

Obama was the main choice, while Biden played a supporting role. Nobody voted for Barack Obama because of Joe Biden.

Fast-forward eight years, and somehow the cosmos threw up Donald Trump and Mike Pence. Setting aside the strong possibility that nobody else was desperate enough to take the job, Pence represented a thin crust of establishment respectability on the molten lava of anti-immigrant, white supremacist, pro-Russian, self-enrichment they call Trump’s populism.

Pence undercuts so much of what passes for Trump’s politics. He built his career as a Christian conservative and fiscal hawk leading the House Republican study committee, becoming an anti-abortion, budget-cutting governor of Indiana. Somehow he signed up to play the role of cardboard cutout to a thrice-married president who paid off a porn star and blew open the federal deficit well before the pandemic struck.

[Pence’s] biblically-sized differences with Trump did nothing to change perceptions of the presidential nominee

His biblically-sized differences with Trump did nothing to change perceptions of the presidential nominee. They did, however, raise serious questions about whether the exceptionally principled Pence had any principles whatsoever.

Still, nobody voted for Donald Trump because of Mike Pence.

Which brings us to the forthcoming Harris-Pence struggle for definition. Above all else, Harris reflects something we may stupidly take for granted in this circling of the drain we call politics in the era of Donald Trump.

Through her own accomplishments, she meets the only standard relevant to a veep pick: she looks and sounds presidential because she is. In this dystopian world, Harris sails above the presidential bar that has been lowered to jackboot level by an old man who admires neo-Nazis and autocrats in equal measure.

A former district attorney and attorney general, Harris has navigated law and politics while Trump has evaded both. It’s no coincidence that her Senate grilling of Trump’s attorneys general have gone viral.

For Democrats, Harris is a return to the Obama vision of America: diverse and driven by social justice. “Her own life story is one that I and so many others can see in ourselves,” Obama said in a statement on Tuesday. “A story that says that no matter where you come from, what you look like, how you worship, or who you love, there’s a place for you here.”

For Republicans like Mike Pence, however, she represents the power behind the throne. Even though candidate Harris clashed personally and politically with Biden, somehow she is really pulling the strings.

“As you all know, Joe Biden and the Democratic party have been overtaken by the radical left,” Pence said at a Trump campaign event in Arizona on Tuesday. “So given their promises of higher taxes, open borders, socialized medicine and abortion on demand, it’s no surprise that he chose Senator Harris.”

But it is, in fact, a surprise that Biden chose Harris. The conventional wisdom was that Harris was too ambitious; that her attacks were too personal in the primaries; that Biden was too concerned about internal rivalries to pick the California senator.

Surely there were safer picks than the daughter of a Jamaican father and an Indian mother, who went to high school in Canada and graduated from Howard University?

There surely were governors and senators who could have faced a smaller tsunami of disinformation, conspiracy theories and plain old racism on a social media feed near you.

During the endless pre-game analysis of Biden’s decision, it was often said that he needed to find his own Biden. Like Obama in the Great Recession, Biden needed a partner in the White House, ready to do the work that the boss will be too busy to handle.

But Biden didn’t choose another Biden. He chose another Obama: someone who represents the future of a country of immigrants, with deep roots in the hard work of righting America’s wrongs.

Biden and his team have suggested he’s a transitional figure in Democratic politics, and that’s sensible for someone who could well be sworn in as president at the age of 78.

To be sure, Harris struggled with that transition in her own presidential campaign: was she a former prosecutor or a Bernie Sanders-style supporter of Medicare for All?

After four years as vice-president, we still may not know the answer to the question of whether Harris is a centrist or not. But in less than three months, we will know the answer to the question of what future American voters want for themselves and their country.

The post In this dystopian world, Kamala Harris sails above the presidential bar | Kamala Harris appeared first on Shri Times News.

from WordPress https://ift.tt/33QvNMw via Blogger https://ift.tt/30LB6Le

[conservativefreepress]

New Post has been published on Conservative Free Press

New Post has been published on http://www.conservativefreepress.com/legal-scoops/fec-wants-sue-internet-users-share-fake-news/

FEC Wants to Sue Internet Users Who Share “Fake News”

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According to the former chairwoman of the Federal Election Commission, Ann Ravel, it’s time for the agency to start cracking down on the spread of “disinformation” online. Ravel, who still has friends and allies sitting on the panel, argued last week that political content on the internet should be substantially regulated by the federal government. Publishers and users should be held accountable for what they share online, she said. And as far as she’s concerned, those users should be open to libel suits if they share “fake news” on their social media feeds.

In a paper published last week, Ravel and her co-authors laid out what they saw as a necessary step in government regulation given the news about Facebook and Russian propaganda. The authors proposed the following dystopian scenario:

“After a social media user clicks ‘share’ on a disputed item (if the platforms do not remove them and only label them as disputed), government can require that the user be reminded of the definition of libel against a public figure,” they wrote. “Libel of public figures requires ‘actual malice,’ defined as knowledge of falsity or reckless disregard for the truth. Sharing an item that has been flagged as untrue might trigger liability under libel laws.”

The Washington Examiner said this about Ravel’s proposal:

She would include ‘fake news,’ not just paid ads, to be regulated, though it’s never defined other than the Democrat’s description of ‘disinformation.’ And anybody who shares or retweets it could face a libel suit. She would also use regulation to ‘improve voter competence,’ according to the new proposal titled Fool Me Once: The Case for Government Regulation of ‘Fake News.’

The site’s Paul Bedard spoke to former FEC Chairman Lee Goodman, who expressed alarm at the proposals.

“Ann’s proposal is full blown regulation of all political content, even discussion of issues, posted at any time, for free or for a fee, on any online platform, from Facebook to the NewYorkTimes.com,” said Goodman. “A fatal flaw of Ann’s proposal is that it cannot define what is, or is not, ‘disinformation’ in a political message. Nevertheless, it proposes to tag threats of libel lawsuits and liability to thousands of American citizens who might want to retweet or forward a message that somebody else subjectively considers to be ‘disinformational.’ I call that the big chill.”

This is why we would prefer President Trump to lay off similar threats he’s made to the fake news media. While we fully understand where the president is coming from, he diminishes the high ground when he talks about “opening up the libel laws” and allows fanatical liberals like Ravel to wage war on freedom of speech. It’s important for Republicans to be on the right side of history when it comes to this debate.

[brajeshupadhyay]

What is Mike Pence? When the painted smile fades and the glazed eyes begin to focus on reality, is there an honest penny in him? For the next three months, the core question of whether Pence has any core is the only real target for America’s history-making vice-presidential candidate, Kamala Harris. As much as the Trump campaign wants to scare the bejesus out of its old, white base with terrifying tales about Krazy Kamala, her own policy positions don’t really matter. Like every other veep candidate, Harris doesn’t deliver a voter bloc or state. She doesn’t displace the top of the ticket because veeps never do. All that matters is one debate night, in Salt Lake City, in early October. And even that night will be quickly overshadowed by the second presidential debate a week later. How can the summer’s biggest political story – except for the pandemic, recession and racial justice protests – be so easily dismissed? To understand that dynamic, you need look no further than Joe Biden and Pence. Back in 2008, Barack Obama’s pick of Biden as his running mate was everything Harris is today: a counterweight to everything he wasn’t. Biden offered some older, whiter balance to the first African American nominee for president. He also undercut Obama’s main claim to that nomination: opposing the war in Iraq. Biden had voted for the invasion, even as he turned into a sharp critic of the war like every other Democrat. How did Obama overcome his policy differences with Biden on the campaign trail? He didn’t need to. There was some chemistry between the Obamas and the Bidens on the day they walked out on stage in Springfield, Illinois, near the old state capitol. But more often that not, the chemistry story was overblown: Obama was a disciplined speaker where Biden was not. Obama chose not to wait his turn; Biden had spent his career waiting for his turn. Obama was the main choice, while Biden played a supporting role. Nobody voted for Barack Obama because of Joe Biden. Fast-forward eight years, and somehow the cosmos threw up Donald Trump and Mike Pence. Setting aside the strong possibility that nobody else was desperate enough to take the job, Pence represented a thin crust of establishment respectability on the molten lava of anti-immigrant, white supremacist, pro-Russian, self-enrichment they call Trump’s populism. Pence undercuts so much of what passes for Trump’s politics. He built his career as a Christian conservative and fiscal hawk leading the House Republican study committee, becoming an anti-abortion, budget-cutting governor of Indiana. Somehow he signed up to play the role of cardboard cutout to a thrice-married president who paid off a porn star and blew open the federal deficit well before the pandemic struck. [Pence’s] biblically-sized differences with Trump did nothing to change perceptions of the presidential nominee His biblically-sized differences with Trump did nothing to change perceptions of the presidential nominee. They did, however, raise serious questions about whether the exceptionally principled Pence had any principles whatsoever. Still, nobody voted for Donald Trump because of Mike Pence. Which brings us to the forthcoming Harris-Pence struggle for definition. Above all else, Harris reflects something we may stupidly take for granted in this circling of the drain we call politics in the era of Donald Trump. Through her own accomplishments, she meets the only standard relevant to a veep pick: she looks and sounds presidential because she is. In this dystopian world, Harris sails above the presidential bar that has been lowered to jackboot level by an old man who admires neo-Nazis and autocrats in equal measure. A former district attorney and attorney general, Harris has navigated law and politics while Trump has evaded both. It’s no coincidence that her Senate grilling of Trump’s attorneys general have gone viral. For Democrats, Harris is a return to the Obama vision of America: diverse and driven by social justice. “Her own life story is one that I and so many others can see in ourselves,” Obama said in a statement on Tuesday. “A story that says that no matter where you come from, what you look like, how you worship, or who you love, there’s a place for you here.” For Republicans like Mike Pence, however, she represents the power behind the throne. Even though candidate Harris clashed personally and politically with Biden, somehow she is really pulling the strings. “As you all know, Joe Biden and the Democratic party have been overtaken by the radical left,” Pence said at a Trump campaign event in Arizona on Tuesday. “So given their promises of higher taxes, open borders, socialized medicine and abortion on demand, it’s no surprise that he chose Senator Harris.” But it is, in fact, a surprise that Biden chose Harris. The conventional wisdom was that Harris was too ambitious; that her attacks were too personal in the primaries; that Biden was too concerned about internal rivalries to pick the California senator. Surely there were safer picks than the daughter of a Jamaican father and an Indian mother, who went to high school in Canada and graduated from Howard University? There surely were governors and senators who could have faced a smaller tsunami of disinformation, conspiracy theories and plain old racism on a social media feed near you. During the endless pre-game analysis of Biden’s decision, it was often said that he needed to find his own Biden. Like Obama in the Great Recession, Biden needed a partner in the White House, ready to do the work that the boss will be too busy to handle. But Biden didn’t choose another Biden. He chose another Obama: someone who represents the future of a country of immigrants, with deep roots in the hard work of righting America’s wrongs. Biden and his team have suggested he’s a transitional figure in Democratic politics, and that’s sensible for someone who could well be sworn in as president at the age of 78. To be sure, Harris struggled with that transition in her own presidential campaign: was she a former prosecutor or a Bernie Sanders-style supporter of Medicare for All? After four years as vice-president, we still may not know the answer to the question of whether Harris is a centrist or not. But in less than three months, we will know the answer to the question of what future American voters want for themselves and their country. The post In this dystopian world, Kamala Harris sails above the presidential bar | Kamala Harris appeared first on Shri Times News. from WordPress https://ift.tt/33QvNMw

http://sansaartimes.blogspot.com/2020/08/in-this-dystopian-world-kamala-harris.html

[bountyofbeads]

FALSE PROPHET

Media-bashing robocalls, chloroquine Twitter trolls, briefing-room propaganda—how the president and his allies are trying to convince America he was right all along.

By MCKAY COPPINS | Published APRIL 15, 2020 | The Atlantic Magazine | Posted April 16, 2020 |

On February 28, Donald Trump stood before a crowd of supporters in South Carolina and told them to pay no attention to the growing warnings of a coronavirus outbreak in America. The press was “in hysteria mode,” the president said. The Democrats were playing politics. This new virus was nothing compared with the seasonal flu—and anyone who said otherwise was just trying to hurt him. “This is their new hoax,” Trump proclaimed, squinting out from behind a podium adorned with the presidential seal.

Six weeks later, the coronavirus has killed more than 25,000 Americans, the U.S. economy has been crippled—and Trump is recasting himself as a pandemic prophet. At Monday’s White House briefing, the president responded to questions about his handling of the crisis by dimming the lights and playing an Orwellian campaign-style video: “the media minimized the risk from the start,” the onscreen text read, “while the president took decisive action.”

This flagrant recasting of recent events wasn’t a fluke. For the past several months, I’ve been reporting on the “disinformation architecture” that Trump’s coalition of partisan media, propagandists, operatives, and trolls are relying on to reelect him. Their strategy has always been to drown out inconvenient facts with a noisy barrage of distortions—to “flood the zone with shit,” as Steve Bannon once put it. But in recent weeks, the president and his allies have been waging a dystopian campaign of revisionist history more brazen than anything they’ve attempted before.

If you’ve tuned in to one of the daily coronavirus-task-force briefings, you’ve likely seen Trump himself make the case. “I knew it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic,” the president boasted last month. “I knew everything,” he reiterated a couple of weeks later. Asked to assess his response to the virus, he responded emphatically, “I’d rate it at 10.”

[ Read: The real point of Trump’s coronavirus press conferences READ BELOW]

Cable-news outlets have struggled with how to responsibly handle these briefings, which intersperse valuable updates from public-health officials with the president’s free-wheeling insult-comedy and medical misinformation. But the briefings command huge ratings—viewership at times rivals that of The Bachelor, as Trump has gleefully noted—and coverage of them trickles down into local newscasts and social media.

This dynamic has effectively enabled the president to narrate America’s national trauma, while editing his own role in it. There are signs that his efforts are working: One Democratic strategist, who requested anonymity to describe private research, told me that when voters were shown 90 seconds of a recent Trump briefing, his performance in a general-election matchup against Joe Biden improved by more than two percentage points.

Meanwhile, Trump and the party he’s remade in his image are working overtime to undermine the journalists who are uncovering damaging details of his pandemic response. Late last month, as shelter-in-place orders went into effect across the country, people began to receive robocalls purporting to administer a “poll” focused on press coverage of the president. After giving their answers, respondents heard a sympathetic female voice express frustration with the media’s unfair treatment of Trump. The call was described to me by a 64-year-old woman in rural Texas who believed at first that she was talking to a real person.

When I asked Transaction Network Services, which tracks robocalls, to look into it, the company traced the call back to the National Republican Congressional Committee, and said it had been sent to 120,000 numbers over a three-day period. (Reached for comment, a spokesman for the NRCC confirmed it was responsible for the call but declined to play the audio for me. He said it was intended to identify prospective donors.)

Media-bashing is nothing new for the president, but in recent weeks it’s taken on a more frenzied quality. Trump now routinely derails his daily briefings by barking at White House reporters to rephrase their questions in more flattering ways. On Twitter, he has giddily celebrated recent declines in advertising revenue at disfavored outlets. And his campaign—apparently eager to memory-hole his now-infamous “hoax” sound bite—has started to send menacing cease-and-desist letters to local TV stations that air an attack ad highlighting the comment. (The campaign contends that the ad, created by a liberal super PAC, takes the clip so far out of context as to make it defamatory; fact-checkers aren’t so sure.)

In the conservative media, talking heads and talk-radio hosts have labored to convince their audiences that—despite what they may have heard—the president never doubted the gravity of the coronavirus. Central to this case is Trump’s decision in late January to restrict travel from China, when the severity of the outbreak in Wuhan was becoming clear.

Skeptics on both the right and the left have dismissed the move as a token measure that did little to prepare the U.S. for an imminent outbreak. A more generous assessment may be that while restricting travel from China slowed the spread of the virus on the West Coast, Trump’s delay in restricting travel from Europe helped turn New York into the pandemic’s global epicenter. In any case, the policy is cited incessantly on Fox News as proof of Trump’s prescience. Sean Hannity has predicted that it will “go down as the single most consequential decision in history,” and mused, “How [much] worse could this have been if the president didn’t act that quickly?”

To sharpen their narrative, Trump’s allies have taken to juxtaposing his travel restriction with cherry-picked clips of journalists downplaying the threat of the virus earlier this year. Donald Trump Jr. recently shared such a supercut with his 2.6 million Instagram followers alongside an all-caps message: “THE MEDIA WANTS YOU TO THINK MY DAD DIDN'T TAKE CHINA VIRUS SERIOUSLY. WELL LISTEN TO THIS.”

Perhaps the strangest subplot in the crusade to vindicate the president has revolved around a once-obscure anti-malaria drug. Last month, Trump latched onto the idea that chloroquine, and the related hydroxychloroquine, held the key to combatting the coronavirus. This theory had little evidence to support it beyond a handful of anecdotes and flawed studies. But the drug was being touted by Dr. Mehmet Oz, a TV star and Fox News regular, as well as Rudy Giuliani—and the allure of a miracle cure was apparently too tempting to resist. The president hyped the drug in one briefing after another, dubbing it a potential “game-changer,” and urging sick patients to take it. “What do you have to lose?” he mused.

When these presidential prescriptions drew criticism from some in the medical community—who noted, among other things, the drug’s potentially fatal side effects—Trump was defiant. Overnight, hydroxychloroquine was transformed into a right-wing weapon of culture war. The drug became a prime-time staple on Fox News, and a fixation of MAGA memes. A conservative group called the Job Creators Network launched a digital campaign to promote the drug using targeted texts and Facebook ads.

As the drug grew more controversial, false claims about its effectiveness circulated widely on social media. To see where the chatter was coming from, Graphika—a data firm that tracks online disinformation—used suspicious Twitter accounts identified by an independent security researcher named Eric Ellason to map the conversation. The firm told me that the drug appears to be especially interesting to conspiracy theorists: Among those discussing hydroxychloroquine in the U.S., the most common hashtags included #Gates, #Soros, and #darktolight, a QAnon rallying cry. But the “vast majority” of the conversation, Graphika found, was taking place among right-wing users, many of whom are invested in making the president look like a visionary.

[Read: Trump’s dangerously effective coronavirus Propaganda]

For now, the facts on the ground remain the greatest obstacle to Trump’s revisionists. In Detroit, people are dying in emergency-room hallways. In New York City, bodies are loaded into refrigerated trucks and buried in mass graves. Field hospitals have sprouted up in parks and convention centers. Meanwhile, damning reports in the press detail how Trump’s stubbornly cavalier attitude toward the pandemic hobbled his administration’s response.

As reality continues to assert itself in the coming months—whether in the form of rising death tolls, or clinical drug trials, or shifting White House policy—Trump’s information warriors will likely retreat from some of their current positions. (They may also notch a few “wins” as the facts catch up to their narratives.) In the meantime, they are staying cautiously on message.

In a recent episode of his Fox News show, Tucker Carlson—who was ahead of the curve on this story—ridiculed The New York Times’ coverage of the virus, while ignoring his own network’s failures and giving the president a pass. “As you know, the establishment media has been screwing up coronavirus stories from day one,” he told his viewers.

Hannity concluded his own takedown of the “media mob” with a carefully caveated declaration of victory: “They were wrong. The president—on January 31st—was right.”

While these shows generally don’t mention that Trump and Fox News were playing down the pandemic long after the mainstream media realized its danger, that fact hasn’t been entirely forgotten.“I want to defend every single person who was wrong on this,” Greg Gutfeld, a co-host of The Five, said last week. “Because I think the best analogy for dealing with this pandemic is a sports car. You have to shift gears depending on the terrain.”

RELATED PODCAST

Listen to McKay Coppins discuss this story on an episode of Social Distance, The Atlantic’s podcast about living through a pandemic:

_____

MCKAY COPPINS is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of The Wilderness, a book about the battle over the future of the Republican Party.

*********

The Real Point of Trump’s Coronavirus Press Conferences

The president is inescapable right now. That’s by design.

By Peter Nicholas | Published April 7, 2020 | The Atlantic Magazine | Posted April 17, 2020 |

When she finishes her 12-hour shift in the intensive-care unit at Riverside Community Hospital, Katherine Montanino stuffs her clothes into a dirty-linen bag and swaps out her soiled shoes for a fresh pair. Arriving home, she takes a shower before she hugs her family. Then she might flip on the television to see what President Donald Trump is saying about the virus she’s straining to avoid.

The 44-year-old nurse from Riverside, California, voted for Trump and might do it again. Yet with her colleagues rationing masks and the number of COVID-19 cases growing, Trump’s digressions into partisan politics leave her cold. “It’s one of the things I wish he would just stop,” she told me. “I understand he’s trying to build for the presidential campaign coming up. But it’s not the time right now. It’s not about him. Honestly, it’s about life and death.”

A president commands a formidable platform when the nation is under threat. As the pandemic worsens, Trump has been inescapable. His daily press briefings draw millions of viewers. He’s cultivated public fights with Democratic governors over scarce supplies. And he’s ignited cultural clashes by calling the novel coronavirus the “Chinese virus.” As the briefings stretch into their second hour, the wartime president morphs into the aggrieved candidate, who has created a spectacle that a captive audience can’t ignore.

One timeline in play is how long it will take before infections subside. Another is the political calendar. The two are entwined. In this new era of social distancing, Trump can’t hold rallies as a way to mobilize his base and diminish his rivals. But he’s embraced the bully pulpit, and in his hands—and at this jarring moment in the nation’s history—it’s potentially more valuable than routine campaigning. As the election approaches, he may be more and more tempted to use it for his own purposes. His prospects now hinge, after all, on his handling of the outbreak. His focus in the coming months will be to convince voters that he led a dauntless effort to keep Americans alive.

“Trump’s opponent really is the coronavirus,” Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina and a friend of the president’s, told me. “If he’s seen to have handled this well and done a good job in the eyes of the public, he’d be almost impossible to beat. If he’s viewed as having fallen short, he’d be in trouble.”

Trump quickly found a substitute for the raucous rallies he’s had to forgo amid the crisis, which his pollster John McLaughlin described as “like the September 11 attack and the 2008 financial crisis combined.” Two days after he canceled his last rally, on March 11, Trump showed up in the Rose Garden for the first of 24 straight news conferences and press gaggles. He’s revived a tradition that he’d previously done away with: the daily White House press briefings, only with himself as emcee. He doesn’t skip a day, whether he has anything new to say or not.

“From a purely political standpoint, he can be seen as the commander in chief for up to two hours a day, leading the country through this crisis,” Sean Spicer, the president’s former press secretary, told me. “In this case,” Joe Biden, Trump’s presumptive general-election opponent, “is left on the sidelines.”

No president has used the bully pulpit quite like Trump in this moment. Before the Great Pandemic came the Great Depression. At the time, Franklin D. Roosevelt used his fireside chats to reassure the country, preparing carefully with his speechwriters, Doris Kearns Goodwin, the presidential biographer, told me. “He wanted to make sure he had the right language, the right message, and the right data coming forward.” Trump’s news conferences, by contrast, spin off in all directions: ungrateful governors and Facebook followers, impeachment and Biden—lots of Biden.

But imagery could work in his favor. Trump stands behind a lectern adorned with the presidential seal. He holds news conferences in the iconic Rose Garden. Flanking him most days is Anthony Fauci, a public-health expert so admired that his face is now imprinted on bobblehead dolls, and whose mere presence lends authority to a president whom many Americans  don’t trust to speak truthfully about the threat. (Twitter lights up in alarm whenever Fauci doesn’t appear alongside Trump, though a White House aide told me the absences are only because the doctor needs time to rest or work.)

Biden, meantime, is hunkered down in the basement of his Delaware home, sending podcasts into the ether. “Voters in times of crisis want to rally around their leader,” Brian Fallon, a Hillary Clinton spokesperson in the 2016 campaign, told me. “To the extent that Trump is out there and on TV every day with all the trappings of the office, he’s playing the part. It gets him some of the benefit of the doubt that voters want to confer on their leaders.” Even Biden has acknowledged the tough position he’s in. “You can’t compete with a president,” he said at a virtual fundraising event last week. “That’s the ultimate bully pulpit.”

A disciplined use of that perch would look very different from what the president is doing. Trump could make a brief appearance to rally the country and then exit, leaving the rest to the public-health experts. He could set a time limit. He could decline to take questions unless they deal with life and safety, citing the gravity of the threat.

As chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Gulf War, Colin Powell also gave press briefings under difficult circumstances. One of his rules was to keep them short, Powell told me, declining to discuss Trump specifically. “My experience was, you don’t need more than 30 minutes to make your point,” he said. “If you go more than 30 minutes, you start to talk over yourself; you start to open up your flanks. You get attacked.”

Brevity may not serve Trump’s purposes. The longer he talks, the more openings he gets to distract from the messy government response or to skewer his foes.

He has repeatedly brought up Biden without ever being asked. On Saturday, after one health expert gave a technical answer about tracking the virus’s spread, Trump followed up with a non sequitur: Biden, he told viewers, had praised his January 31 decision to ban travel from China. Something similar happened on March 26. When a reporter asked Trump about his message that Asian Americans shouldn’t be blamed for the virus, he veered into a complaint about “Sleepy Joe Biden” and Chinese trade deals. Asked about his credibility during another briefing the week before, Trump again didn’t answer. Instead, he said he was beating “Sleepy Joe Biden by a lot in Florida.” (In his opening remarks at yesterday’s briefing, Trump mentioned that he and Biden had talked amicably about the crisis in a 15-minute phone call earlier in the day.)

[ Read: Trump is on a collision Course]

Incentives to further politicize the stage will only grow. As the general-election race begins in earnest, Trump may be more brash about slipping in the talking points he can no longer deliver to thousands of cheering MAGA supporters. “The purpose of these should be to provide factual, important information to people in a crisis—information they can trust,” says David Lapan, a former Trump-administration spokesperson at the Department of Homeland Security. “That gets diluted when they turn these into mini rallies.”

Stephanie Grisham, the White House press secretary, told me that Trump “thinks it’s very important to be the face of this in terms of comforting the country, telling the country what we’re doing, and trying to be as transparent as possible.”

People’s patience may be waning. After early poll numbers showed that a majority of Americans approved of Trump’s response to the outbreak, his ratings have started to slip. An ABC News/Ipsos poll showed only 47 percent approved of his efforts, with 52 percent disapproving.

By contrast, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who also has been holding televised daily news conferences during the crisis, enjoys 87 percent approval. That’s the sort of rating leaders normally get at the early points of a national crisis—a level Trump has not been able to match.

Trump isn’t about to stop talking; the cable networks won’t stop filming. One person who will be watching is Montanino. She told me that a friend’s husband recently died from the disease and that she’s seen more people getting sick. There’s something she’d like to hear Trump say, an unadorned message free of any politics: “I don’t have this under control, but we as a nation will get through this,” and then, perhaps, step aside for the experts to give life-and-death answers.

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An Unprecedented Divide Between Red and Blue America

The pandemic could exacerbate a major Trump-reelection vulnerability: his weakness with urban and suburban voters.

By RONALD BROWNSTEIN | Published April 16, 2020 5:00 AM ET | The Atlantic Magazine | Posted April 17, 2020 |

Updated on April 16, 2020 at 3:59 p.m. ET

The coronavirus pandemic appears destined to widen the political divide between the nation’s big cities and the smaller places beyond them. And that could narrow Donald Trump’s possible pathways to reelection.

In almost every state, the outbreak is spreading much more heavily in the largest metropolitan centers than in less densely populated areas, even when the figures are adjusted on a per capita basis, according to a new analysis by the economist Jed Kolko provided exclusively to The Atlantic.

That pattern threatens to exacerbate one of Trump’s most conspicuous political vulnerabilities: his historical weakness in big metropolitan areas that are full of the minority and white-collar white voters most skeptical of him. From the Virginia governor’s race in 2017, to a sweep of suburban House districts in 2018, to the upset victory in Kentucky’s gubernatorial race last year, Democrats have consistently posted significant gains in these areas under Trump. The pattern continued in the unexpected Democratic victory this week in a highly contested state-supreme-court election in Wisconsin, a state that could be the tipping point in the 2020 presidential race.

The question for Trump this fall will be whether he can offset that weakness by matching or building on his dominant advantage in exurban, small-town, and rural communities. In Wisconsin this week, the GOP lost ground with those voters too, but by and large, polling still shows Trump holding a strong position among them. And because most rural communities are facing fewer cases of the disease so far, they may be much more receptive than big-city leaders and voters to Trump’s calls to reopen the economy as quickly as possible.

These political, public-health, and economic trends all point toward the same possibility: Just as the disease is unfolding very differently in larger and smaller places, the gap between voter preferences there in the presidential race could reach astronomical, and possibly unprecedented, heights.

Epidemiologists and other medical experts disagree on whether the disease will ultimately besiege smaller places to a greater extent than it has so far. But there’s no question that it’s exacted its heaviest costs on major cities and their inner suburbs, including New York City, Detroit, Chicago, Boston, New Orleans, Los Angeles, and Seattle. “Densely populated urban areas are uniquely vulnerable to rapid spread of the virus,” said Larry Levitt, the executive vice president for health policy at the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation.

The research conducted at The Atlantic’s request by Kolko, the chief economist at the employment website Indeed, quantifies that dynamic. Using a comprehensive county database  maintained by The New York Times, Kolko calculated the number of coronavirus cases per million people within four different regional categories: those in large metropolitan areas of at least 1 million people; those in metros of 250,000 to 1 million; those in small metros with less than 250,000; and those in counties outside of metro areas. The consistent result was that, in most states, heavily populated areas are suffering many more cases per person.

Perhaps the most extreme example: The counties in New York State that fall under the largest metro category—New York City and its environs—have 12,454 cases per million residents. That’s compared with 3,304 in New York’s midsize metros, 1,556 in the smaller metros, and 915 in the nonmetro counties. In Michigan, where the Detroit area has been ravaged by the disease, the caseload drops from 4,787 per million residents in the largest counties to 1,000 per million in the midsize metros, 874 in the smaller metros, and just 346 in the nonmetro counties.

[ Read: The two states where Trump’s COVID-19 response could backfire in 2020]

Similar patterns apply across a wide range of states. In Illinois, where the coronavirus has battered Chicago and its closest suburbs, the largest metro counties are experiencing seven times as many cases per person as the midsize metros, and more than eight times as many as the nonmetro counties. In California, where both the San Francisco and Los Angeles areas have been hit hard, the largest metropolitan counties have more than three times as many cases per capita as the small metro and nonmetro communities. A similar pattern is also evident in Ohio, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania across the Rust Belt and North Carolina, Florida, and Texas across the Sun Belt, Kolko’s data show.

The few exceptions were states that have suffered large outbreaks in rural areas, such as Georgia (where the caseload in small places is as heavy as in the big cities) and Arizona (where the caseload in nonmetro counties has exceeded that of the biggest places).

The strains on public-health systems have followed these same tracks. Although the big metro areas typically have much greater hospital capacity than smaller places, they are also facing much greater pressure. Hospital systems in cities such as New York City and Detroit have faced widespread infection among health workers, as well as severe equipment shortages.

Large hospitals have reported a far greater surge in demand for medical equipment than smaller hospitals, according to new research from Premier Inc., a company that manages bulk purchasing for hospitals. In the survey, conducted in mid-March before the worst of the outbreak hit, large hospitals reported that they were using 17 times as many N95 masks as usual, Soumi Saha, the company’s senior director of advocacy, told me. Smaller hospitals were using about seven times as many. “The surge in demand that we are seeing currently is truly unprecedented,” Saha said.

These contrasting experiences help explain the divergence in attitudes toward Trump’s handling of the crisis. In a national Quinnipiac University survey released last week, just 37 percent of adults living in cities and 44 percent of those in suburbs said they approved of Trump’s management of the outbreak. By stark contrast, 63 percent of those in rural areas said they approved. In the latest tracking polling conducted by the Democratic firms GBAO and the Global Strategy Group, a majority of Americans in all three regions said Trump failed to take the threat seriously enough at the outset of the pandemic. But the numbers were significantly higher in urban and suburban areas, where almost two-thirds of respondents said he acted too slowly.

Other danger signs are sprouting for Trump in big urban centers. Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, was the largest county in America that Trump won in 2016. But a new poll, released this week by the Republican firm OH Predictive Insights, found Trump trailing former Vice President Joe Biden there by 13 percentage points. The survey also found Biden leading by nine points statewide, even though Democrats haven’t won Arizona in a presidential race since 1996. These results track with Maricopa’s movement away from the GOP in 2018, when Democratic Senator Kyrsten Sinema won the ordinarily Republican-leaning county by about four points.

The results in wisconsin this week offered an even more visceral measure of Trump’s continuing risk in major population centers. In the state’s supreme-court election—whose timing was extremely controversial, given the pandemic—the liberal Jill Karofsky decisively ousted the conservative incumbent Daniel Kelly.

Karofsky showed formidable strength across the state’s population centers, even though they are confronting the most serious outbreaks of the disease. Although the number of polling places in Milwaukee was limited to just five, Karofsky amassed a 70,000-vote advantage in that county. She also carried Dane County, which includes the state capital of Madison, by a crushing 62-percentage-point margin. That’s far larger than Hillary Clinton’s advantage there in 2016 (48 points) or the Democrat Tony Evers’s lead in the 2018 governor’s race (51 points).

“Dane County is the fastest-growing county in the state: massive electronic-medical-records [industry], plus biotech—and that’s not even counting the big insurance-industry component, the University of Wisconsin, and state government,” said Charles Franklin, a law and public-policy professor at Marquette University’s law school and the director of its respected public poll. “Not only does [the county] grow, but its turnout rate goes up year after year, and it’s even more Democratic from race to race to race.”

Karofsky also posted notable gains in two sets of suburban counties that are closely watched during election season. The so-called WOW counties outside of Milwaukee—Waukesha, Ozaukee, and Washington—are perhaps the most Republican-leaning major suburban counties north of the Mason-Dixon line. But, as Franklin noted, Trump won them in 2016 by less than Mitt Romney did in 2012. More recently, former Republican Governor Scott Walker carried them by a smaller margin in his losing 2018 campaign than he did in his winning 2014 race.

This week, Karofsky significantly reduced the GOP’s margin in all three counties—not only compared with Trump’s wins, but also compared with another state-supreme-court election last year. “In the WOW counties, I believe there is something systematically happening,” Franklin said. “Though it has not converted them from red to blue, it has converted them from deep red to less red.”

Just as strikingly, Karofsky won all three of the so-called BOW counties around Green Bay—Brown, Outagamie, and Winnebago—which Trump had carried comfortably in 2016, and Walker more narrowly in 2018.

Republicans, with justification, argue that the results may be skewed because the election took place on the same day as the Democratic presidential primary, which may have tilted the turnout more toward Democratic voters.

But these results are consistent with one of the most powerful political through lines of the Trump era: a recoil from his vision of the Republican Party among urban and suburban voters. In 2016, Trump lost 87 of the 100 largest U.S. counties, by a combined nearly 15 million votes. That was significantly larger than Romney’s 11.6-million-vote deficit in the 100 largest counties. In 2018, Republicans were routed in suburban House districts not only in metropolitan areas that were already trending toward the Democrats—including New Jersey and Northern Virginia and Chicago, Detroit, and Denver—but also in places where the GOP had previously remained strong, such as Richmond, Atlanta, Houston, Dallas, and Orange County, California.

[Read: Big cities won’t snap back to normal]

Geoff Garin, the veteran Democratic pollster, said that since 2018, Trump has not offered any concessions in policy or style to the moderate, white-collar suburban voters who stampeded away from the party.

“I haven’t seen anything to suggest that what happened to Trump and Republicans in the suburbs in 2018 has abated, and it’s hard to think of anything they’ve done or even tried to do that would make their situation any better in the suburbs than it was,” Garin said. If anything, Trump’s volatile behavior during the coronavirus outbreak has highlighted the concerns that many white-collar voters express about his temperament, Garin said: “that he doesn’t tell the truth, [that] he refuses to listen to experts, that his whole leadership style is erratic and chaotic when the country needs stable and steady leadership.”

In a measure of that vulnerability, national polls released last week by Monmouth University and CNN both found that fewer than 40 percent of college-educated white voters said they approved of Trump’s response to the outbreak; the OH poll found Biden leading Trump by 14 percentage points among the same voters in Arizona, another stunning margin.

To varying degrees, Republicans in the Trump era have been able to make up for their suburban decline with commanding margins among exurban, rural, and small-town voters, who are more likely to be blue-collar, white, and Christian. Despite his deficit in the 100 largest counties, Trump won more than 2,600 counties overall in 2016, more than any nominee of either party since Ronald Reagan in 1984.

But since then, there have been hints that Trump might struggle to replicate these results. In the 2018 House races, the share of the total vote won by Democrats increased by roughly the same amount in rural and more urban places compared with 2016, according to calculations by Bill Bishop, a reporter for The Daily Yonder website, which tracks rural issues. Andy Beshear, the Kentucky Democrat, notched some rural gains in his winning governor’s race last year, and Karofsky this week notably improved on recent Democratic showings in the rural northwest corner of Wisconsin.

Still, even with those gains, it’s not all good news for Democrats. The party won less than 40 percent of the total 2018 House vote in the most rural counties, according to The Daily Yonder’s classification system. Big rural margins also helped Republicans oust Democratic senators in Missouri, North Dakota, and Indiana that year. Karofsky still lost most of the counties in Wisconsin’s northwest. And the debate over how quickly to reopen the economy could align Trump with many rural communities against most Democrats and public-health experts.

Many big-city mayors are dubious that it will be safe anytime soon to reopen their economies on a mass scale, and they’ve warned that economic recovery could come slowly. “There may also be bigger challenges getting people back to work in urban areas,” Levitt, of the Kaiser Family Foundation, said. “People in cities rely much more heavily on public transportation, and they work and shop in much closer quarters.”

“The piecemeal fashion that we entered into these ‘stay at home’ orders could prove disastrous if we take a similar approach to exiting these orders,” Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson texted me on Thursday. “A more coordinated approach to relaxing and ultimately ending these harsh restrictions—whether it is national, statewide or regional—is our best insurance against the virus raging back and making all of our sacrifices for naught.”

A divergence in the economic recovery of urban and nonurban areas—coming after a comparable split in their experience with the disease itself—could put Trump in a difficult position. It could force him to generate even bigger margins in small communities to offset a potentially weaker performance than last time in the largest ones. In all these ways, the virus’s effect on America is coursing through the channels already cut by its existing geographic and political differences. It should surprise no one if a current this powerful and destabilizing only deepens that divide.

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America’s COVID-19 Disaster Is a Setback for Democracy

If the country’s institutions cannot function effectively during a crisis, and especially if a view takes hold that authoritarian regimes are managing the crisis more decisively, a grim future lies ahead.

By Larry Diamond | Published April 16, 2020 2:32 PM ET | The Atlantic Magazine | Posted April 17, 2020 |

In December 1940—a year before the attack on Pearl Harbor, but well into Britain’s struggle for survival against the Nazis—President Franklin D. Roosevelt called for the United States to abandon isolationism and become “the arsenal of democracy.” To make that happen, he mobilized American industry and produced the planes, ships, guns, and ammunition needed to defeat fascism.

With COVID-19, America faces a new existential enemy, and the country must again summon its industrial might and its scientific and engineering prowess to fight it. This is not an imperative only for the American people. Once the country has met its own overwhelming needs, the world is going to require America’s medicines, science, and supplies on a massive scale. If, when this pandemic finally abates, the dominant global narrative becomes “It was China’s authoritarian system that helped us, while the democracies of the West floundered and selfishly turned in on themselves,” humanity will emerge from this devastating crisis into a radically different and more dangerous world, one deeply hostile to freedom and self-government.

[ Tim Horley, Anne Meng, and Mila Versteeg: The world is experiencing a new form of autocracy]

Pandemics fan the instinct for closure and walling off. The U.S. can shut its borders temporarily, but there is no returning to “fortress America.” The country’s interests—and its values—are all too global.

Donald Trump’s cavalier downplaying of intelligence reports warning of a worldwide outbreak in early January—and the subsequent 70 days of what The Washington Post termed  “denial and dysfunction” across his administration—squandered precious weeks when the U.S. could have taken concerted steps to prepare for and contain the coming crisis. His continued pattern of deceit and deception about the nature and scope of the public-health disaster further cost the country a “golden hour” that could have been used to begin mass production and distribution of tests and equipment, and to educate the public about the gravity of the coming pandemic and the urgent need for social distancing. A different presidential posture early on could have saved many American lives.

It didn’t have to be this way. The narrative that China is trying to promote after its rapid recovery from the virus—that its semi-totalitarian control of people and information is the only way to manage a pandemic like this—is wrong on two counts. First, China’s authoritarian instinct to suppress bad news enabled the virus to explode in Wuhan in December, when it might have been contained by the free flow of information and a rapid emergency response. Second, democratic societies in Asia—South Korea and especially Taiwan (along with a more transparent non-democracy, Singapore)—have been able to contain the virus without China’s draconian, communist-style measures. As Rachel Kleinfeld of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has argued, they’ve done so by learning the lessons of the SARS epidemic and using strong health systems and reservoirs of public legitimacy and trust to test quickly and widely and track infected individuals.

Crises always test self-government. Unlike authoritarian regimes—which can use force, fear, and fraud to control their populations—democracies rely on open information and the consent of the governed. Unlike China, democracies cannot cover up their failures for very long. If citizens lose faith in the legitimacy of democracy as the best form of government—if their institutions cannot function effectively during a crisis, and especially if a view takes hold that authoritarian regimes are managing the crisis more “decisively”—many democracies will be at grave risk of failure.

[ Anne Applebaum: Epidemics reveal the truth about the societies that they hit]

Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic is unfolding at a time when democracy—at home and abroad—is already in distress. For more than a decade,  freedom and democracy have been in recession, and more countries have lost than gained political rights and civil liberties in each of the past 14 years. In the past decade, the rate of democratic breakdown has been accelerating, and nearly a fifth of all democracies are failing (nearly double the proportion of democracies that died in each of the preceding two decades). As the advanced, postindustrial democracies have become preoccupied with their own problems and divisions; as their prestige has waned (particularly that of the U.S.) following the 2003 invasion of Iraq and then the 2008 financial crisis; and as Russia and especially China have expanded their global propaganda operations, power projection, and self-confidence, democracy has been placed on the defensive.

The world is still in the early days of the pandemic, and by the end, some countries may be making foundational changes to their systems of government. Even wealthy states with relatively strong administrative and public-health capacities, such as Italy and the U.S., find their medical systems under strain. Imagine what will happen when the coronavirus spreads mostly unchecked in countries that lack the public-health and economic resources of wealthier countries. Health systems are likely to become overwhelmed much more quickly. Poor urban neighborhoods—where people live crowded together, with little access to sanitation, health care, or public safety, and many with weakened immune systems—could become intensive breeding grounds for the virus. Without smart and generous policy responses by donor countries “that can successfully navigate the complex health and security realities,” the death tolls in the world’s poorer nations could run into the millions. To preempt that, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in late March took the most dramatic step of any nation to try to stop the spread of the virus: a three-week stay-at-home order for all 1.3 billion citizens.

The political effects of this crisis are likely to be profound. In the medium to long run, the economic distress, piled atop the death toll, could destabilize and even topple many governments. That could wreak havoc on fragile democracies—or renew the case for transparency and good governance, which are hallmarks of liberal democracy. In the near term, the pandemic, with its need for rapid and strong government action, “provides a particularly convincing cover under which autocrats can pursue their agendas.” This cover is rapidly being exploited by autocrats around the world, from Russia to Turkey to Venezuela to Egypt; by pseudo-democrats eager to establish full dictatorship, such as Viktor Orbán of Hungary; and by democratically elected rulers—from the Philippines to India to Poland—intent on silencing free expression. Governments are ramping up information control and digital surveillance of citizens while, in the words of the Human Rights Watch president, Kenneth Roth, “detaining journalists, opposition activists, healthcare workers, and anyone else who dares to criticize the official response to the coronavirus.”

The siren song of strongman rule will be harder to resist if authoritarian regimes appear to be managing the virus more successfully. Democracies must show that they can govern effectively to meet the pressing public-health and economic dimensions of the crisis. Above all, this requires urgent steps to stop the spread of the virus through rigorous social distancing and widespread testing; to shore up the capacity of health systems to treat the sick (through the requisition and manufacturing of personal protective equipment, ventilators, and other crucial medical supplies); to construct new temporary hospital facilities when necessary; and to expedite the testing and development of potential treatments and, ultimately, a vaccine. The U.S. and its democratic partners must also act expeditiously to distribute financial relief to businesses and workers to prevent the deep and unavoidable economic recession from becoming a depression.

Annie Lowrey: This is not a recession. It’s an ice age.

This leads to a political imperative, which, if not met, could strain and even rupture American democracy. If the COVID-19 contagion persists through or resurges in the fall, the possibilities for a free and fair election on November 3 could be jeopardized. This does not need to happen. The U.S. has half a year to avoid a repeat of the horrible spectacle of the Wisconsin primary last week, when voters, unable to vote by mail, were forced to risk infection by waiting in lines, without proper distancing, to vote at crowded polling stations that had been reduced in number by more than 90 percent. People should be excused from the obligation of going out on Election Day to a polling place where they may face long lines, shared surfaces on which the virus may diffuse, and inadequate numbers of poll workers. Every American who wants to do so should be able to freely vote by mail, or to receive in the mail a ballot that they can drop off at a polling or counting center. If social distancing is the immediate public-health directive for limiting the spread of the virus, distant voting is the clear electoral parallel. Many states require financial and technical assistance (totaling up to $3 billion nationally) to make this option available to all voters, and Congress must appropriate the funds soon.

This shouldn’t be a partisan issue. Older voters, non-urban voters, and red-state voters are no less anxious to be able to cast a vote that does not put their health at risk. In fact, because of the nature of the virus, older voters are more at risk if they go to the polls. Moreover, a solidly Republican state, Utah, will join Hawaii this year to become the fifth state in the country to vote entirely by mail. The switch caps a years-long process in which voter turnout dramatically increased along with voter satisfaction as Utah counties, one by one, adopted voting by mail.

Nothing the U.S. could do to shore up the global fate of democracy would have a greater impact than the effective management of its own epidemic, economic crisis, and election. But the country must not allow its domestic trials to blind it to the need for international action and vigilance in the face of authoritarian ambition and disinformation.

The best hope for controlling and reversing the pandemic lies in deep, multifaceted cooperation among countries, sharing information, supplies, and research that can lead to medical treatments and a vaccine for the virus. That is why, even with all its flaws, America—as much as the rest of the world—needs an effective World Health Organization. President Trump’s efforts to suspend U.S. payments to the organization is shortsighted and self-defeating. Additionally, independent media and civil-society organizations around the globe need the financial support of Western democracies to ensure the free flow of information and the self-organization of society, to counter both the pandemic and the tendency of rulers to use the pandemic to aggrandize their power and eclipse civil liberties.

American diplomacy, solidarity, and assistance can make a difference in saving many lives while preventing the full-scale retreat of freedom. But if that’s not what happens, if America stands back and watches from the sidelines while governments and societies unravel, the coronavirus and its likely mutations will kill many more. And eventually, when the pandemic does subside, the world will be much more unstable, unsafe, and badly governed, a breeding ground for Islamist and other radical movements, for resentment of the West, and for a new world order with China at its center.

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This story is part of the project “The Battle for the Constitution,” in partnership with the National Constitution Center.

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LARRY DIAMOND is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and at the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University. He is the author of Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency.

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