Senior Trump Official: ‘We Have Three Major Voter Suppression Operations Under Way’

Trump Targeting ‘Three Groups Clinton Needs to Win Overwhelmingly: Idealistic White Liberals, Young Women, and African Americans’

A senior official with the Trump campaign, according to an article published Thursday morning at Bloomberg News by Joshua Green, admits: “We have three major voter suppression operations under way.”

It is a stunning admission, and in context even sounds like they’re bragging. 

Instead of doing the hard on-the-ground work effective campaigns do, which, in Trump’s case, should have included, “registering and mobilizing the 47 million eligible white voters without college degrees who are Trump’s most obvious source of new votes,” as Green writes, “Trump’s campaign has devised another strategy, which, not surprisingly, is negative.”

And instead of Trump trying to expand his own base, he’s merely trying to shrink Hillary Clinton’s.

“We have three major voter suppression operations under way,” says a senior official. They’re aimed at three groups Clinton needs to win overwhelmingly: idealistic white liberals, young women, and African Americans.

Here’s one way the Trump team is doing this, and it’s disgusting:

On Oct. 24, Trump’s team began placing spots on select African American radio stations. In San Antonio, a young staffer showed off a South Park-style animation he’d created of Clinton delivering the “super predator” line (using audio from her original 1996 sound bite), as cartoon text popped up around her: “Hillary Thinks African Americans are Super Predators.” The animation will be delivered to certain African American voters through Facebook “dark posts”—nonpublic posts whose viewership the campaign controls so that, as Parscale puts it, “only the people we want to see it, see it.” The aim is to depress Clinton’s vote total. “We know because we’ve modeled this,” says the official. “It will dramatically affect her ability to turn these people out.”

The entire article is a frightening look directly inside the workings of the Trump campaign, and it’s clear Donald Trump isn’t going away after he loses in November.

“Trump is a builder,” Steve Bannon, the Breitbart publisher on leave to be Trump’s campaign CEO, tells Bloomberg. “And what he’s built is the underlying apparatus for a political movement that’s going to propel us to victory on Nov. 8 and dominate Republican politics after that.”

Read the article.  

 

Image by Gage Skidmore via Flickr and a CC license