Battling the Big Lie Read online

  Copyright © 2022 by Daniel Pfeiffer

  Cover design by Jim Datz

  Cover photographs: © Jon Hicks/Stone and Jon Cherry/Getty Images News, via Getty Images

  Cover copyright © 2022 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  First edition: June 2022

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  Library of Congress Control Number: 2022931656

  ISBNs: 9781538707975 (hardcover), 9781538707999 (ebook)

  E3-20220513-JV-NF-ORI

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  I. What Happened 1. Canaries in the Information Coal Mines

  2. From Russia with Love

  3. How Trump Almost Stole the 2020 Election

  4. A Short History of the Long War on Truth

  5. Why Republicans Need to Lie to Win

  6. The Anatomy of the MAGA Megaphone

  7. The Best Disinformation Money Can Buy

  8. Roger Ailes and the Evil Genius of Faux Journalism

  II. How It Happened 9. Disinformation and the Destruction of Local News

  10. Facebook: Too Big to Succeed

  11. Poking Holes in Facebook’s Defenses

  12. The Media’s Conservative Bias

  13. Debunking the Dumbest Myth: Why MSNBC Is Not “Liberal Fox”

  14. Message versus Megaphone: The Real Reason Dems Suck at Messaging

  III. What We Do about It 15. The High Stakes of the Battle against the Big Lie

  16. Get on a War Footing and Win Hearts and Minds

  17. A Modern Model of Journalism

  18. Preaching to the Progressive Choir

  19. Starve the Trolls: How Liberals Can Stop Being Owned Online

  20. Build an Army of Keyboard Warriors

  21. Signs of Hope

  Acknowledgments

  Discover More

  About the Author

  For Jack—whose joy and curiosity light up the world

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  Introduction

  January 6, 2021, was one of the darkest days in American history. On that cold, cloudy day, more than two thousand Americans, many of them armed, stormed the US Capitol to stop the certification of the election that made Joe Biden president and Donald Trump a giant loser.

  After smashing windows and breaking down doors, the mob ransacked offices, desecrated property, hunted members of Congress, and chanted “Hang Mike Pence!” A murderous rage pulsated through the crowd. Though many carried “Blue Lives Matter” flags to demonstrate their support for law enforcement, the crowd turned on anyone who stood in the way of their insurrection. Two Capitol Police officers died. Others were beaten down to the pavement with lead pipes, rocks, and ironically, even the pole from an American flag. Some rioters slinked through the halls with zip ties and Tasers, hunting for members of Congress to take hostage and potentially execute. And in case the parallels to a Jim Crow lynch mob were too subtle, a gallows was erected on Capitol grounds.

  The viral photo of a man parading throughout the Capitol Building waving a Confederate flag perfectly captured the violence and sedition of that day. More than 150 years after the conclusion of the Civil War, insurrectionists had breached the Capitol and flown the flag of treason. The rioters came within minutes of entering the House Chamber while members were still on the floor. Vice President Pence was evacuated with only moments to spare. An opposing force took the US Capitol for the first time since the War of 1812. After it was all over, the fragility of the American ideal was presented in glaring relief.

  The mob included avowed white supremacists, antigovernment paramilitaries, QAnon adherents, and MAGA fanatics in full regalia. There were elected officials, right-wing personalities, and a Texas socialite who had chartered a private plane to join the insurrection. The whole thing was funded in part by the heiress to a grocery store fortune. Participants came from all walks of life and every corner of the country. And despite their unique experiences, they had one thing in common: They had all fallen for the Big Lie; they all believed, without a single doubt, that the election had been stolen from Donald Trump.

  There were various iterations of this lie. Some believed Democratic officials in big cities had stuffed ballot boxes; others believed thousands of dead people had voted with help from family members. Conspiracy theories abounded: Trump votes were purged. Voting machines flipped thousands of ballots to Biden. Some swore that China, Venezuela, and a global cabal of Communists and celebrities had played a role in stealing the election from Trump. Each theory was more absurd than the last.1

  The stolen election argument was debunked over and over. There was zero evidence to support the allegations. Every court rejected the claims—including the courts of judges appointed by President Trump himself. Republican election officials dismissed the claims and testified to the integrity of the election.

  None of it mattered. Nothing could shake Trump supporters’ faith in these unfounded claims. The militant agitators at the Capitol were immune to the truth, facts, opposing viewpoints, or evidence. They were willing to break the law, destroy property, and commit murder for a lie—and one so easily disproven.

  After the rioters left and the property damage was repaired, the people who promoted the Big Lie denounced the violence without reflecting on the role they had played in fomenting it. These same people began recommending a peaceful transfer of power. They finally started referring to Joe Biden as “President-elect.” Most Republicans attended Biden’s inauguration. Even Sen. Ted Cruz, a leader of the insurrection, showed up to rinse the blood off his hands.

  In the immediate aftermath of the insurrection, Republicans bemoaned the violence and denounced the perpetrators. Some even had the temerity to mention Trump’s name.

  But this period of awareness was fleeting.2

  Before long, history was rewritten. Republicans, on Capitol Hill and out in the country, convinced themselves that the whole thing was not a violent extremist attack on democracy, and the question of who was at fault became a subject for debate. Some in the press, with their own deranged balance, covered this lack of accountability as if the Capitol riot were a he-said-she-said argument instead of a clear and indisputable event born out of the words and tweets of a president who spread lies, incited rioters, and then refused to send help as his own vice president feared for his life from a mob of his voters.

  Few Republican elected officials were willing to take on the lies or the biggest liars. When Trump was impeached for his role in inciting the violence, only 10 House Republicans voted to hold him accountable. Less than 10 percent of the Republicans in Congress were willing to publicly sanction President Trump for dispatching his supporters to murder them.

  Within months, the majority of people who had voted for Trump believed the election was stolen. Seventy percent of Republicans told pollsters that Biden was an illegitimate president. The Big Lie had become the uniting principle of the GOP, a litmus test, the price of admission to the Republican Party.

  Everyone was shocked by what happened at the Capitol and by how quickly and easily it was swept away in a cloud of lies and disinformation. But they should have expected this.

  I have spent twenty years in politics, working on campaigns, on Capitol Hill, and in the White House. Throughout that time, I have had a front-row seat to Republicans’ efforts to bend the truth to their will. I’ve watched good people smeared, good policy stymied, and urgent problems go unaddressed. I’ve seen America elect its worst president and then almost reelect that person despite a mountain of evidence as to why that would be an epic disaster.

  In my various positions, my central task has been to get the message out to the public, to present arguments in the most compelling fashion. That task is now impossible. Politics is no longer a debate about solutions to mutual problems. History, science, and math are no longer seen as immutable truths. They are subject to debate, with no right or wrong answer—like whether LeBron James is better than Michael Jordan.3 People like to say that Democrats and Republicans now live in two separate realities, but that is incorrect. Democrats live in the real world, and Republicans live in a deeply delusional alternative ecosystem.

  The insurrection and the subsequent rewriting of history are proof that the Republicans have mastered a form of politics that depends on disinformation and propaganda. They have built a m
egaphone that drowns out the truth and any and all dissenting views.

  After all these years in politics, the Republican Party’s ability to bend reality is not just a problem. It is the problem. The insurrection at the Capitol, the inability to control COVID-19, and the rapidly accelerating threat of climate change are all products of the GOP’s disinformation machine.

  The lesson from the 2020 election is that the long-running Republican war on the truth is over and the Republicans have won. Most Americans didn’t even know such a war was happening. Many still don’t know it took place. Over a period of decades, the Republican Party built up a massive propaganda and disinformation apparatus that allows them to dominate politics despite representing a shrinking share of the electorate. This “MAGA megaphone” is embodied by Fox News and powered by Facebook and gives the GOP the power to bend reality.

  The vast majority of the Democratic Party’s leadership, many of whom were born before the advent of television, have their heads buried in the proverbial sand. They run the same old plays from the same outdated playbook with the same poor results. Too many are comforted by Joe Biden’s victory in 2020, and too few are asking how it is possible that Trump, despite massively mishandling a pandemic that killed hundreds of thousands of Americans by Election Day, narrowly lost that race. A shift of 40,000 votes over four states, and Donald Trump would have been reelected.

  Let me be even clearer: The Democratic Party isn’t just losing. We are getting our asses kicked.

  The 2016 election should have been the moment of reckoning for the Democratic Party, the media, and anyone who cares about democracy. Setting aside the fact that America elected a corrupt, racist reality TV star, other cracks in the U.S. system were appearing by then. The polls were wrong. Political observers4 made incorrect assumptions about the durability of the coalition that had elected Barack Obama only four years before. And yes, there were some black swan events, like Russia’s hacking and Jim Comey’s fuckery, that may have tipped the election, but something much bigger happened, and nearly everyone missed it. A universe of alternative information had come to reside on Facebook, on Fox, and in the digital lives of millions of Americans. In that universe, Hillary Clinton was a criminal, Donald Trump was a hero, all immigrants were terrorists, and everyone was coming for the rights and privileges of white Americans. This universe was not accounted for in political strategy or communications planning. In the “real world” of facts communicated to the public by “objective” journalists, the case against Donald Trump was open and shut. He was corrupt, dishonest, and dumb. Perhaps most important, he was obviously and completely full of shit. He said he was anti-immigration, but he hired undocumented people to work at his hotels and vineyard. He called himself a populist, but he promoted tax cuts for the wealthy and owned a plane with a gold toilet. He said he was above reproach because he was self-funding his campaign, but he was depending on the largesse of billionaires and selling merch to millions of his credulous supporters. It was one of the least clever cons in American history.

  When Trump won, the reaction from Democrats and the media missed the point. Many Democrats bemoaned the naïveté of Trump’s base, calling them cult members or arrogantly dismissing them as gullible rubes. The political press went on countless “safaris” in MAGA country, spending time in the usual hangouts, like diners and small-town bars. The goal was to understand how so many people could look at the same information about Trump’s physical and intellectual capabilities and come to a different conclusion about the man. Those who didn’t support Trump questioned whether he could tie his own shoelaces,5 let alone be responsible for the world’s largest nuclear arsenal.

  Large portions of the country never heard any negative information about Trump. And if some of that information slipped through, Americans already surrounded by Trump-supporting peers were conditioned to dismiss it out of hand. They were living in a hermetically sealed information bubble. The problems of right wing propaganda and disinformation have only gotten worse—much worse.

  America stands on a precipice. We are nearing the point of no return. If Democrats and the press do not fight back against the right-wing media machine bent on division and destruction, democracy has no chance of surviving.

  This is the tipping point.

  The problem of disinformation and conspiracy theories is long-standing and incredibly complex. Much of it predates the internet and has nothing to do with partisanship. Prior to COVID-19, antivaccine conspiracy theories were often the province of rich liberals.

  I don’t pretend to have all the answers or the capacity to tell the full story of how America diverged from reality. My focus is narrower and, I believe, more necessary.

  This book is about how disinformation and propaganda became the dominant Republican political strategy, how it works, what it means, and how Democrats can fight back. I wrote Battling the Big Lie as a wake-up call and a call to arms for Democrats sick of losing the message wars. It’s impossible to understand American politics without knowledge of the history and inner workings of the MAGA megaphone.

  If Democrats, and the country, can’t find a way to narrow the right wing’s media advantage, nothing else we do will matter. We can raise more money, have better candidates, run better ads, have the best message in the world—and still lose. Over the next couple of elections, democracy and the planet will be on the line.

  We cannot afford to lose.

  Footnotes

  1 Speaking of absurd: When I was writing my first book, I used footnotes to entertain myself with the jokes and asides I thought the publisher would never let me use. I forgot to delete them before submitting the first draft, and they all ended up in the final bound book. Readers seemed not to hate them, so here we go again.

  2 Like “don’t blink” levels of fleeting.

  3 There is only one answer to this question, and it’s not LeBron.

  4 Me, me, me.

  5 I’m pretty sure that was Corey Lewandowski’s job during the campaign. Ted Cruz now does it and is grateful for the opportunity.

  I. WHAT HAPPENED

  1

  Canaries in the Information Coal Mines

  My entire career in politics has been on the front lines of this battle. Unfortunately, it has taken me years1 to fully comprehend what we are up against.

  When I started more than twenty years ago, there was order to the communications chaos. The internet was new. Mark Zuckerberg had yet to unleash his relentless greed and invasive algorithms on the world. Most people got their news from the same newsstands and the same coffee spots. On my first major campaign, the 2000 presidential election between Al Gore and George W. Bush, the staff gathered at the end of every day to watch the evening news together. What aired on NBC, ABC, and CBS was our most reliable barometer of how the public was viewing the campaign. If the coverage was good for us, it meant we were winning. If the coverage was bad, we were losing. The Republican campaign engaged in the same exercise at the same time with the same calculus. Voters—Republicans, Democrats, and independents—passed judgment on the candidates based on the same information delivered from the same sources. While America was—as it has always been—quite divided, that division existed as a disagreement over a shared set of facts and a mutual understanding of the challenges.

  Fox News was around back then. Internet news sites existed, but they were an ancillary part of politics. When I traveled to staff an event or attend a debate, I neglected my emails for up to a week.2 If someone needed me, they would page me, and I would call them back on a pay phone or a landline—the campaign did not issue cell phones to all staff. Our rapid-response operation involved a “tracker,” who would follow Bush around the country to videotape his remarks in the hope of catching the candidate in a gaffe we could exploit in campaign ads. This is still a central part of campaigns, but rapid is a relative term. After capturing Bush on tape, the tracker would have to drive to a FedEx office and overnight the tape back to headquarters, where our research staff would watch it in its entirety—on a VCR! The researchers would then send notes to the communications staff. Our response would come twenty-four to forty-eight hours later.