Running Against the Devil: A Plot to Save America from Trump--and Democrats from Themselves

by Rick Wilson

Overview

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A savvy guidebook for beating Trump’s tricks, traps, and tweets from a founder of The Lincoln Project, now updated with new material on the historic battle between Trump and Joe Biden—and how the pandemic has changed the race
 
“If you believe America’s future depends on Donald Trump’s political machine being crushed at the polls next year, then Rick Wilson’s Running Against the Devil is a must-read.”—Joe Scarborough, MSNBC

Donald Trump is exactly the disaster we feared for America. Hated by a majority of Americans, Trump’s administration is corrupt, inept, and rocked by daily scandals. In the handling of 2020’s coronavirus pandemic, its incompetence has been deadly.

Trump can’t win in 2020, right?

Wrong. As 2016 proved, Trump can’t win, but Joe Biden can sure as hell lose. Only one thing can save Trump, and that’s a Democratic campaign that runs the race Trump wants Democrats to run instead of the campaign they must run to win in 2020.

Wilson combines decades of national political experience and insight in his take-noprisoners analysis, hammering Trump’s destructive and dangerous first term in a case-by-case takedown of the worst president in history and describing the terrifying prospect of four more years of Trump.

Like no one else can, Wilson blows the lid off Trump’s 2020 political war machine, showing the exact strategies and tactics Republicans will use against Biden, and how the Democrats can avoid the catastrophes waiting for them if they fall into Trump’s traps. Running Against the Devil is sharply funny, brutally honest, and infused with Wilson’s biting commentary. It’s a vital indictment of Trump, a no-nonsense, no-holds-barred road map to saving America, and the guide to making Donald Trump a one-term president.

The stakes are too high to do anything less.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593137604
Publisher:	The Crown Publishing Group
Publication date:	08/18/2020
Pages:	368
Sales rank:	350,558
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Rick Wilson is a renowned Republican political strategist, writer, speaker, commentator, ad-maker, and a founder of the Lincoln Project. He is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Everything Trump Touches Dies. His award-winning column with The Daily Beast is a must-read in the political community. Wilson also writes for The Washington Post, Politico, Rolling Stone, the New York Daily News, The Hill, The Bulwark, and The Spectator. He regularly brings his unique insights to CNN, MSNBC, and NPR. He’s a frequent guest on Real Time with Bill Maher. Wilson lives in Tallahassee, Florida, with his wife, four dogs, and a nameless cat. They have two grown children.

Read an Excerpt

Introduction

Election Night, November 3, 2020

Imagine you’re a Democratic strategist, one of the top figures in the 2020 nominee’s campaign. It’s Election Night, and you feel something familiar in the air. It’s a feeling of confidence, of rising joy and anticipation. It’s been a long, tough campaign, but victory is in sight. You’re going to win, and you know it. It’s a certainty. After four years of Trump, the Democrats are poised to claim a sweeping Electoral College and popular-vote victory.

Finally.

The last few weeks of October were a blissful whirl, with polling numbers looking strong across the board and your candidate joyfully working the crowds in swing states. She’s a happy warrior, praised for her political skills and the subject of endless glowing media profiles. Almost every newspaper in the country endorsed her in the final week. America, after so many centuries of right-wing injustice, finally appears to have achieved a state of beautiful progressive wokeness and is ready for its bold socialist future.

After the debates, it was clear your candidate, though occasionally rattled by Trump’s in-your-grill debating presence, had triumphed. She was smart, articulate, and progressive. She’s everything you’ve dreamed about since Obama. Trump has been flailing, angrily tweeting a dozen times a day, stoking the MAGA base at an endless series of campaign rallies, and sounding crazier by the minute. He’s punchy and tired, and looks worn-out.

You and your campaign colleagues have even started those elliptical conversations about what role you might play in a Democratic White House, mostly couched in the faux-modest “Oh, I just want to help the future president in any way I can . . .” tones of people who are already plotting for office space and picking out curtains.

A few of your older, wiser hands don’t seem to share the infectiously optimistic Election Night mood. They lack the same sunny optimism the candidate displayed as she sat in the holding suite after the last long day of campaigning ended. They keep staring nervously at the FiveThirtyEight map and running the same mental calculations over Electoral College numbers they’ve done a thousand times. But hey, you feel really great about this.

The campaign’s social-media metrics were weird the last few days, though, and your data and analytics people were sending increasingly worrying messages about the massive inflows of ads from brand-new super PACs and 501(c)(4) dark-money groups. You convinced yourself these were just the final gasps of the Trumpian grifters making a last buck on the Donald, or perhaps his Russian friends trying an end run. The Trump campaign and the RNC (but I repeat myself) ad buys were scattershot, and on issues that seemed off-kilter. As the night starts, the ballroom is packed to the gills with eager, happy people ready to put Trump and Trumpism in the rearview mirror of history. The media risers, crowded with the A-talent from every network, are jammed. The results are about to come in, and the army of reporters in the back of the ballroom is in a near frenzy.

You didn’t repeat the Hillary mistake of not visiting the states Trump and his Russian allies scored in 2016. Your candidate made the stops, though the crowds were never quite as large or raucous as you wanted. Your state organizers tell you they’ve got armies of volunteers knocking on doors, making calls, and driving turnout.

Hell, none of the final tracking polls showed Trump even close except in Michigan, home of Kid Rock and one of the most stark political divides between the city and suburbs anywhere in the nation. In Michigan, his numbers weren’t just surprising; they were downright terrifying, but your pollster assured you it was an outlier and that you’d still take Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, and Wisconsin.

The exit polls were closer than you wanted but still looked good. As the first results were about to roll in, the AP, Washington Post, New York Times, Decision Desk, and Politico analysts started pinging you and the rest of the campaign’s senior staff.

“What’s going on in Michigan? Do you hear this stuff out of Florida?” Something is off the rails, and you don’t quite know what it is yet.

By 9:30, it’s not looking like you expected. Ohio is showing a razor-thin Trump lead. He’s winning Michigan handily. Florida is Florida, and although you had projected a four-point lead, by 10:00 p.m. the vote total shows Trump up by 65,000 . . . and the Panhandle hasn’t even fully reported yet.

Florida’s enormous influx of Puerto Rican voters meant the Democrats were on track for a stunning victory there, right? Wait. Didn’t someone mention in a meeting that the Hispanic turnout operation in Florida was a bit smoke and mirrors?

You post high numbers in South Florida, but everywhere else in the Sunshine State, Trump is tearing you apart. When the Panhandle does report, everything outside of the blue enclave of Tallahassee is posting numbers in the low 60 percent range for Donald Fucking Trump. Your mind flickers to an angry set of emails and Slack messages a few weeks before about avoiding the issue of gun control in North Florida, but your candidate insisted not only on an assault weapons ban but a ban on semiautomatics as well. Metrics show that north of the I-4 corridor you’re losing everywhere except liberal Alachua and Leon counties by double digits.

“What the hell is happening in Wisconsin?” is your next question. With the Democratic gains in 2018, it seemed like a lock that Trump would go down in flames, especially after the disastrous scam of Foxconn left Wisconsin workers holding the bag for a failed deal with China. Wisconsin farmers had suffered terribly from Trump’s trade war. When you see that the race is essentially tied, you think, “What in the actual fuck is going on here?”

A few thousand votes turn the easy layup of Pennsylvania into a disastrous loss. Hell, even Minnesota is closer than you thought. You get destroyed in Ohio, with record rural turnout offsetting the cities.

In nearly every swing state, you’re losing everywhere outside the metros and the most affluent suburbs. Turnout is sky-high, which your models predicted would be great for your candidate, but even then you’re just missing the margins.

That’s why, come midnight, your candidate is in the suite, calling Donald Trump to concede the election. There are tears all around. You can hear Trump on the speakerphone, curt and smug. You dread seeing that first triumphant tweet from the once and future president.

The next morning, you begin to put together the mosaic of data points in your head from the last few weeks. You start to see the messages and strategies Trump and his campaign used that seemed lurid and absurd at the time but now begin to make perfect sense.

They weren’t trying to win big, or swing the nation toward a new ideological polarity, or find the next savior. They were animals, trapped in a win-or-die moment, and they resorted to tooth and claw. You realize as the Electoral College numbers rise for the Republican that your campaign mistook Trump’s sloppy, shambolic, hateful, stream-of-excrescence campaign for what was happening behind the scenes. There, for an army of professional Republican campaigners wedded to Trump out of desperate necessity, it was ride or die.

Suddenly, your candidate’s detailed policy proposals, white papers, and granular knowledge of climate change, reparations for slavery, gun control, Electoral College reform, the Green New Deal, and healthcare reform weren’t assets. Your pride in having the most progressive candidate and campaign since FDR turns to ashes in your mouth. Maybe giving Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders keynote addresses at the convention, where they could declare fraternal communist solidarity with the workers of the world, was a mistake. You understand too late that your race to the left to win the primary and secure the progressive ideological edge blinded you to the reality of largely center-right states on the Electoral College scoreboard. You handed Trump the weapon he used to cut off your head. Sure, Trump’s lowest-common-denominator message was cultish, racist, and blisteringly stupid, but it was simple, constant, and repeated . . . and you kept feeding him issues to use against you. Wall. MAGA. Judges. Socialism. Revenge.

You thought your progressive message was universal and that the swing states have the same political polarity as California, New York, or Massachusetts. You believed you could shame Trump and Trump voters into listening to the better angels of their nature by talking about diversity, inclusion, and liberal values. In reality, you were giving the Trump campaign fodder for the weaponized grievance machine that put him in office in the first place.

Boy (or your preferred gendered interjection), were you ever wrong.

Table of Contents

A Note to Readers xiii

Introduction: Election Night, November 3, 2020 3

Why This Book? 11

Part 1 The Case Against Trump, or Four More Years in Hell 19

Four More Years in Hell 22

American Swamp 26

The Crazy Racist Uncle Act … Isn't an Act 33

Cruelty as Statecraft 38

Trump's Economic Bullshit Machine 42

Generalissimo Trump and Pillow Fortress America 50

All Rise: President McConnell's Courts 56

The Environment 61

Imperial Trumps 67

Our National Soul 72

The Mission 77

Part 2 The Myths of 2020 79

It's a National Election 84

The Policy Delusion 89

America Is So Woke 96

Kumbaya 111

You'll Get Obama's Minority Turnout 117

Muh Youth Vote 121

Part 3 Army of Darkness: Trump's War Machine 125

The Trump 2020 War Machine 128

Never Underestimate Incumbency 141

Trump's Messages and Strategies 145

No Heroes in the GOP 149

His Fucking Twitter Feed, Fakebook, and Fox Agitporn 154

The Mainstream Media 158

Deepfake Nation 163

You Have No Secrets 169

The Death of Truth 175

Part 4 How to Lose 181

Flying by the Seat of Your Pants 183

Playing the Campaign, Losing the Reality Show 187

Asking the Wrong Polling Questions 194

Magical Thinking 198

The Culture War: Where Democrats Go to Die 206

Reviving the Clintons 210

The Danger of Democratic Trumps 213

Taking the Infrastructure Week Bait 216

Externalities Are a Bitch 218

Part 5 How to Win 225

Only Fight the Electoral College Map 228

Speaking American 238

The First Rule of Trump Fight Club 247

Start Early 252

Start Advertising. Now. 255

No More Potemkin Campaigns 260

Make the Worst of Trump's Base His Running Mate 265

Reaching Trump Voters, If You Must-and Sadly, You Must 268

Be the Party of Markets, Families, and Security 275

Third Parties and Spoilers 280

Investigate + Interrogate > Impeach 288

The Target List 293

Part 6 Epilogue 299

Election Night, November 3, 2020 303

Acknowledgments 309

Notes 311

Index 317

Editorial Reviews

11/25/2019

Republican strategist Wilson (Everything Trump Touches Dies) delivers a histrionic yet trenchant guide to presidential politics with the ostensible purpose of helping Democrats win the White House in 2020. Declaring the Democratic Party to be “terrible at the work of electoral politics,” Wilson first presents the liberal nightmare of a Trump reelection (“your pride in being the most progressive candidate and campaign since FDR turns to ashes in your mouth”) before sketching the prospective lasting impacts of Trump’s second term, including the erosion of social norms (“a generation will learn its behavior from the worst role model since Saddam Hussein”) and the rise of a political dynasty (“the Imperial Trumps”). To prevent such a scenario, he suggests that Democrats make the 2020 election a referendum on Trump rather than a debate over policy issues such as health care, gun control, or the environment. Wilson intersperses his strategic advice with satirical asides (potential tweets from Trump’s second term, fact-checks from future debates) that produce more eye rolls than genuine guffaws, and while his keen political insights can be difficult to glean through his disdain for his imagined liberal reader, they’re often on-target. Democrats with a high tolerance for invective would do well to consider the book’s fundamental warning that winning in 2020 will require “put electoral realities ahead of progressive fantasies.” (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

Rick Wilson is one of the best political strategists of our times. He knows the calculus of how to win better than a mathematician. This book is going to give some old-school Democrats a little heartburn. But if we want to win in 2020, Wilson’s analysis is a full stop. Period. Read and get to work.”—Donna Brazile, former interim chair, Democratic National Committee

“‘Florida Man Chooses Country Over Party!’ It appears that the Democratic Party’s 2020 election briefing book has been written by a lifelong Republican strategist, and you’re looking at it.”—Brian Williams, MSNBC

“No one understands the nature of Trumpism better than Rick Wilson. He also knows how the Democrats can blow this election. This may be a hard book for some of them to read, but it is a message they absolutely need to hear if they want to beat Donald Trump. In this passionate, witty, insightful, and often hilarious book, Wilson brings tough love and sharp elbows to his urgent warning about the difficulty of defeating a man with no bottom, no shame, and no limits.”—Charles Sykes, author of How the Right Lost Its Mind

“Wilson brilliantly explains how Democrats could lose to Trump’s ‘racist and blisteringly stupid’ campaign message yet again unless they change course now. Drawing upon Wilson’s insights, Americans can take back their government and send the reality-TV host back to Mar-a-Lago once and for all.”—Joe Scarborough, MSNBC 

“Readers who enjoyed [Rick] Wilson’s first book, Everything Trump Touches Dies, will be pleased to know that he is in hilarious form. [The] manuscript is packed with the same punchy, straight-to-the-jugular humour that has made him a sought-after television guest and columnist in the Trump era. . . . It’s a step-by-step guidebook to defeating Donald Trump, written by ‘a Republican who knows how and why the Democrats often lose big elections they should win.’ And Wilson explains it all. Chapter by chapter, he debunks the myths, wishes, and pipe dreams which have led previous Democratic presidential nominees down the garden path to the runner-up’s position. . . . Any Democrat looking to beat Donald Trump—or really, any Democrat looking to beat any Republican—or anyone who enjoys reading and learning more about how politics really works would do well to crack the spine of Wilson’s sophomore effort.” —The Independent
 
“Running Against the Devil is pugnacious and profane . . . blunt and funny . . . relentlessly irreverent and breathtakingly brutal.” —The Guardian
 
“Snappy, breezy, entertaining, passionate . . . The book delivers sobering insights that must be heeded.”—Foreign Affairs

From the Publisher

★ 2019-10-28
A wily Republican strategist rings in on the challenge facing Democrats in 2020.

Political campaign consultant Wilson (Everything Trump Touches Dies: A Republican Strategist Gets Real About the Worst President Ever, 2018), who airs his views in a variety of venues, intensifies his strident excoriation of Trump with a hard-hitting assessment of Democrats' chances of winning the next presidential election—a victory that is crucial for saving the country. The author decries Trump as "a flawed, awful shitbird of the worst order" and a "political and moral monster" who will go down in history "for endemic corruption, outrageous stupidity, egregious cruelty, and inhumanity" and who has spread "moral and political contagion" and caused the collapse "of a once-great party." Trump needs to go, but Wilson fears that Democrats will hand him reelection unless they focus on 15 states critical for an Electoral College win. "You're not really running a national campaign," he insists. "You're running fifteen state campaigns." After many chapters of "robust and richly deserved Trump-bashing," the author turns to strategy, cautioning Democrats against focusing on policy. Instead, they need to attack Trump's actions—e.g., a trade war that victimizes farmers, cruelty and brutality toward immigrant children, unrepentant racism—and personal failings to make their case to voters who can still be swayed: "the large and growing cohort of Republican women who broke away from the GOP, and the white, Democratic men who broke for Trump in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Florida." These voters want a moderate; they are not youthful progressives, who, Wilson asserts, won't win Democrats the states they need. The author suggests talking points about abortion, guns, immigration, tax cuts, judges, and socialism. He warns Democrats of the threat of a third party run and underscores the importance of "a real modern, data-driven campaign" and deployment of surrogates, such as the Obamas. He offers a state-by-state game plan, homing in on pertinent issues and recommending liberal spending on targeted ads. Democrats can win, Wilson maintains; but will they?

A caustically funny, outraged, and deadly serious analysis.

Kirkus Reviews