About Facebook, Cambridge, and the Russians, Can We Try to Be Serious?
It was October of 2016, and scandal-tarred Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump was limping toward the finish line in a race against Hillary Clinton. About his wildly dysfunctional campaign, New York Magazine’s Gabriel Sherman indicated a few weeks before election day that Trump’s top advisers were “starting to position themselves for what comes after a loss.” Crucial for the purposes of this piece was how early the positioning began. An old campaign hand from Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential run told Sherman that “it’s a window into a campaign in a downward spiral when the positioning begins.” Applied to Trump’s then-freefalling run for the White House, the established vet told Sherman that “I’ve never seen it begin this early.”
And for readers prone to dismiss the musings of someone close to Trump’s then enemy in Romney, Sherman also asked a senior Trump adviser to provide a sense of the scene inside Trump 2016 HQ. He responded with “Think of the bunker before Hitler killed himself.” Lest we forget, Trump was set to lose to Clinton, and lose big.
The above was a known quantity by the fall of 2016, and it was well-known inside the Trump campaign. As Sherman also reported, Trump aides whom the real estate mogul was known to not listen to were talking to Sherman about Trump in the past tense; as in “This thing was doable if we did it the right way.” Trump was over with.
Which brings us to the overdone hysteria about the alleged role of the Russians, Facebook, and now Cambridge Analytica when it came to Trump’s monumental upset victory over Clinton. This column has already ridiculed the insulting (to the U.S., and its people) notion that the flamboyantly incompetent Russians swayed Election 2016, but the supposedly wise who are seemingly intent on shrinking the U.S. continue to pretend that “the Russians” did it. Yes, they saw what no one else did, including Trump and those inside his campaign, and proceeded to use Facebook to fulfill their prescient vision.
Most recent is an opinion piece written by “longtime technology and communications executive” Michael Bergevin. Eager to place at least some of the blame for Trump’s victory on the doorstep of Facebook, Bergevin claims the social network “has become a place” where “Russians peddling misinformation seek to undermine the institutions of a free society.” Who cares that at least half of the alleged Russian attempt to “to promote confusion and disrupt the 2016 presidential elections” happened after the election, and that the spending on these efforts to “promote confusion” amounted to a microscopic fraction of total ads on the site. To those eager to further the fiction of the Russians as wildly crafty, the Russian angle has an exciting, “Cold War” ring to it. That it’s ludicrous doesn’t seem to bother those who seemingly thrill at being gulled.
Sadly, the story gets more ridiculous. The latest is that Cambridge Analytica (CA), a company founded by hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer and – gasp – former Trump campaign CEO Steve Bannon, may have helped sway the outcome of Trump v. Clinton. As one media account put it, CA “reportedly gained access to the personal information of tens of millions of Facebook users and used it to target voters during the 2016 election.” It’s all so compelling, Bannon and an endlessly rich hedge funder….Except that the real story is quite a bit more nuanced.
Lest we forget, Donald Trump won the Republican presidential primary in blowout fashion when Bannon was an outside adviser, but more crucially when Mercer was a rather public supporter of Trump opponent Ted Cruz. Implicit in the CA narrative is that a campaign known for seat-of-its-pants dysfunction, and that supported a candidate who mocked John McCain for not being a war hero, who committed the ultimate political sin of attacking Gold Star families, who got into public Twitter wars in the middle of the night with the smallest of the small, was in fact quite organized, disciplined, and informationally savvy. Readers would then have to believe that a supporter of Cruz was aiding this campaign’s sophisticated vote-winning effort. Please.
Some will of course say that Bannon was on board with Trump all along, and while true, it’s also irrelevant. It’s irrelevant based on Bannon’s very own track record ever since Trump. Though he went to work for the outsider intent on “dealing a devastating blow to the permanent political class,” according to former Breitbart colleague Alex Marlow, Bannon’s political genius ended at Trump. And even there his Svengali-like qualities are more than suspect. Lest we forget, Trump rolled over seasoned Republican hands in the GOP primaries well before Bannon had an established role in the campaign. Love or hate his politics or policy, Trump is the skilled pol. But he’s a party of one, and his movement so far seems limited to him if the elections since his own for the presidency are at all indicative.
After that, readers once again need only think about the total free-for-all that was the Trump campaign. According to one high-placed Trump adviser who saw the campaign’s operations up close, Trump HQ was a ghost town. Of those who were there, they were hardly known political quantities. We’re then supposed to believe the man with no real campaign strategy other than getting out in front of voters cracked the Facebook code through skillful mining of personal data? Such skills, if real, will earn Trump – or son-in-law Jared Kushner - billions and billions once out of office.
Back to reality, the talk of a well-oiled data/social networking/Russian effort to influence Election 2016 is too silly for words, and an offense to common sense. Goodness, it’s well known that even the people running Trump’s transition were all of the opinion that their candidate would lose.
So if readers are Fed up with Facebook and ready to close their accounts, they might rethink doing so. And they might cease criticizing Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for mostly being silent. In truth, Zuckerberg comes off as uniquely wise compared to the unhinged in our midst intent on criticizing Facebook, the Russians and CA for undermining “confidence in the Western canon.” Oh dear. Cheers to Zuckerberg for the most part choosing to not dignify what is absurd.
