It’s a classic political dirty trick. The robocall advises people the election has been moved to Wednesday, or that they can vote over the phone, or that they don’t need to vote. That last disinformation tactic resulted in Paul Schurick, 2010 campaign manager for former Maryland governor Robert L. Ehrlich Jr., being convicted of “of trying to influence votes through fraud, failing to identify the source of the call as required by law and two counts of conspiracy to commit those crimes.”
The tactic is usually deployed by shadowy players who make an effort to distance themselves from the candidate they mean to help. In this year’s disinformation campaign aimed at keeping people from voting by mail, the disreputable player is the candidate. He’s President of the United States and doing it openly using Twitter.
Twitter this week attached fact-check disclaimers to the two Trump tweets above, tacitly branding them false. The move sent Trump into a paroxysm of rage. He threatened a “big action” against social media companies he accuses of silencing conservatives. He is expected to sign an executive order today to remove legal protections from social media companies in the name of free speech. Or free lying, in his case.
Trump is convinced proposals to encourage voting by mail to save lives during a deadly pandemic will hurt his reelection chances in November. He’s deployed publicly paid White House staff as accessories in spreading his disinformation.
Team Trump would rather THOSE people stay home or risk sickness or death if they vote:
This is Trump’s and the White House press secretary’s metamessage:
Nice, decent white people wake up on Election Day, shower, dress, eat breakfast, then go the polls to do their patriotic duty by casting their votes. OTHERS — Poors numbering in the invisible millions — are not like US. They go instead to commit felonies punishable by five years in prison and a $10,000 fine for each offense just to add a single extra vote to their team’s total.
We may mock Trump or wager he has no power to bring down legal wrath upon Twitter. But that’s not the point. Trump’s efforts are beyond the decades-old habit of conservatives “working the refs.”
“Even if these threats do not end up coming to fruition, the threats themselves constitute a serious abuse of power,” writes Greg Sargent at the Washington Post’s Plum Line:
The threat of conservative rage via fake claims of “bias” and the threat of state action as retribution are two sides of the same coin: The latter constitutes a deeply corrupt wielding of institutional power in and of itself, and it’s also critical to helping mobilize the former. Such a threat is not somehow rendered meaningless if Trump cannot find a way to follow through.
And this surely works, at least to some degree. This is obvious when you consider how mild and tentative Twitter’s corrective efforts have been. The tweets spreading Trump’s lies about voter fraud remain posted, and he has already posted more such lies that do not yet have any such corrective appended.
To this point, Trump has felt conservative outlets like Fox News may freely distribute false and misleading information. He feels entitled to having access to their privately owned platforms. Only when they begin straying from his preferred narrative does the habitual whiner feel put upon. Now seeing his fortunes fading and him headed for defeat likely taking Republicans with him, conservative outlets are beginning to distance themselves. Trump means to nip that in the bud.
Especially today, Trump needs D.O.U.S.’s.
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For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.
Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way by June, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.