Ben Wiseman, photograph by Sandy Huffaker/Getty Images
In his race against Marco Rubio to become the Republican nominee for one of Florida’s two seats in the Senate, the rich, brash homebuilder Carlos Beruff could not be welding himself more tightly to Donald Trump.
A recent television ad of his attacked Rubio for not being as tough as Trump. He affirmed and then one-upped Trump’s past call for a ban on Muslim immigrants, suggesting a prohibition against anyone from the Middle East except Israel.
His tweets are Trumpian, including this proclamation: “I won’t read a bunch of political crap off a teleprompter.” The Miami New Times crowned him “the Cuban-American Donald Trump.” “Little Trump of Florida,” said the publication Roll Call.
And that’s not because Florida Republicans are Rubio stalwarts. In the state’s presidential primary last March, Trump trounced him by almost 20 points.
But it turns out that Trump’s magic, if you can call it that, resists cloning. It’s not easily transferable, either. Unlike other political supernovas, Trump doesn’t have coattails or for that matter a coat — not even a windbreaker.
And that casts serious doubt on the existence of Trumpism minus Trump.
Has he created anything along the lines of the movement that he sometimes brags about? Has he assembled a coalition of voters that will outlast his candidacy and can deliver victory to a candidate who emulates him but lacks the reality-show stardom, the glittering towers, the garish tresses? Continue reading the main story
Beruff’s situation suggests not, and so do the sorry fates of other Republican candidates who channeled Trump or genuflected before him — including, most prominently, Paul Nehlen, whose early August primary face-off with Paul Ryan in Wisconsin drew national attention.
Part of Nehlen’s case against Ryan was that he’d “shown more passion in attacking Trump than he has ever shown in defending Americans,” according to one statement that his campaign released.
Trump lavished Twitter love on Nehlen before party leaders shamed him into grudgingly endorsing Ryan. Prominent Trump surrogates, including Sarah Palin and Ann Coulter, beat the drums for Nehlen. Coulter visited Wisconsin to stump for him, telling voters: “This is it. This is your last chance to save America.”
America was not saved. Voters chose Ryan over Nehlen by nearly 70 points.
Without doubt, Trump has exposed fissures in — and the fragility of — the Republican base. He has tapped into a potent, pervasive anger among American voters, and some of the positions that he’s staked out are much, much more popular than was previously understood.
Bernie Sanders’s surprisingly strong showing against Hillary Clinton helped to prove that. While Sanders didn’t share Trump’s anti-immigrant rants or racist appeals, he, too, questioned America’s open trade practices, the scope of its military interventions, the power of money in elections, and the degree to which the economy was stacked in favor of corporate interests and entrenched elites.
That complaint will survive Trump, no matter how his candidacy ultimately fares, and both the Republican and Democratic parties will be forced to grapple with it seriously going forward.
But wrapping it in a package of florid bigotry, provocative propositions, crude insults and callous language doesn’t seem to have much traction beyond Trump.
And not one of those ideas — his extreme brand of protectionism, his call to re-examine military alliances, his threat of mass deportations — shows any sign of becoming Republican dogma the way that supply-side economics did in the wake of Ronald Reagan’s evangelism for it. There’s less evidence of Republicans’ moving en masse toward Trump’s platform than of Trump himself retreating from it, as he did on immigration last week.
By Election Day, there may not even be Trumpism with Trump.
As for the mini-Trumps, they’ve known nothing but misery. Consider Kentucky’s Mike Pape, who set his sights on a congressional seat. He ran a television ad that shows three ostensibly Mexican men with flashlights and wire cutters approaching a fence that says “U.S. Border Do Not Cross.”
“Once through,” one of them vows, “we’ll stop Donald Trump!” Another chimes in that they’ll also have to stop Pape, because he’ll “help Trump build the wall.”
The commercial generated more commentary than votes. In the Republican primary in May, he lost to James Comer by 37 points.
That was a squeaker of a contest compared with the 58-point loss by Eugene Yu in a Republican congressional primary in Georgia, also in May. Yu had run — and lost — before, but was convinced that Trump’s success augured victory this time around.
“This is the man I’ve been looking for,” Yu said during his campaign. “Everything he says, I’ve been saying all along.”
It fell on deaf ears yet again.
Jim McKelvey in Virginia, Matt Erickson in Minnesota, Andrew Heaney in New York: All wrapped themselves in the Trump banner as they sought the Republican nomination for congressional seats, and all suffered huge, humiliating defeats.
In a fiercely contested Republican primary in North Carolina, Representative Renee Ellmers didn’t exactly style herself after Trump, but she did receive the first congressional endorsement .. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/07/us/politics/donald-trump-endorses-renee-ellmers.html .. he made after becoming the de facto Republican presidential nominee. She was beaten nonetheless.
The mini-Trumps aren’t all that many, and each had flaws unrelated to their messages, so it’s hard to know precisely how much to read into them.
But their failure to bloom under Trump’s sun is a fitting metaphor. In a bid for the White House as suffused with self-love as the rest of his life, he doesn’t direct his light outward. It shines only on him.
And the usual symbiosis between a major party’s presidential nominee and its other candidates doesn’t really exist with Trump. He’s not developing a ground game that might benefit Republicans in other races.
Last month Hillary Clinton “spent almost $3 million to field a staff of 700 people at her Brooklyn headquarters and in swing states around the country,” Nicholas Confessore and Rachel Shorey noted recently .. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/22/us/politics/donald-trump-fundraising.html?_r=0 .. in The Times. Trump, in contrast, “spent more money on renting arenas for his speeches than he did on payroll.”
His operation, they wrote, is “more concert tour than presidential campaign.”
Its music is peculiar to him, and it’s fading fast.
A Powerful Russian Weapon: The Spread of False Stories
Unidentified soldiers overran Crimea in March 2014. Russia reclaimed the territory from Ukraine, and President Vladimir V. Putin later admitted that the troops were Russian special forces. Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times
Sweden’s defense minister, Peter Hultqvist, last month at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland. He has tried to counteract disinformation that has threatened to sway public debate in Sweden about a proposed military partnership with NATO. Saul Loeb/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Debris from Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, which was shot down over Ukraine in 2014 by insurgents using a missile supplied by Russia. One of Russia’s theories was that Ukrainian fighter pilots had downed the airliner after mistaking it for the Russian presidential aircraft. Mauricio Lima for The New York Times
A NATO military exercise in June in northern Poland. Around that time, articles on pro-Russia websites suggested that NATO planned to store nuclear weapons in Eastern Europe and would attack Russia from there without seeking approval from local capitals. Adam Warzawa/European Pressphoto Agency
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR AUG. 28, 2016
STOCKHOLM — With a vigorous national debate underway on whether Sweden should enter a military partnership with NATO, officials in Stockholm suddenly encountered an unsettling problem: a flood of distorted and outright false information on social media, confusing public perceptions of the issue.
The claims were alarming: If Sweden, a non-NATO member, signed the deal, the alliance would stockpile secret nuclear weapons [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/science/topics/atomic_weapons/index.html ] on Swedish soil; NATO could attack Russia from Sweden without government approval; NATO soldiers, immune from prosecution, could rape Swedish women without fear of criminal charges.
They were all false, but the disinformation had begun spilling into the traditional news media, and as the defense minister, Peter Hultqvist, traveled the country to promote the pact in speeches and town hall meetings, he was repeatedly grilled about the bogus stories.
“People were not used to it, and they got scared, asking what can be believed, what should be believed?” said Marinette Nyh Radebo, Mr. Hultqvist’s spokeswoman.
As often happens in such cases, Swedish officials were never able to pin down the source of the false reports. But they, numerous analysts and experts in American and European intelligence point to Russia as the prime suspect, noting that preventing NATO expansion is a centerpiece of the foreign policy of President Vladimir V. Putin [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/p/vladimir_v_putin/index.html ], who invaded Georgia in 2008 largely to forestall that possibility.
In Crimea, eastern Ukraine and now Syria, Mr. Putin has flaunted a modernized and more muscular military. But he lacks the economic strength and overall might to openly confront NATO, the European Union or the United States. Instead, he has invested heavily in a program of “weaponized” information, using a variety of means to sow doubt and division. The goal is to weaken cohesion among member states, stir discord in their domestic politics and blunt opposition to Russia.
“Moscow views world affairs as a system of special operations, and very sincerely believes that it itself is an object of Western special operations,” said Gleb Pavlovsky, who helped establish the Kremlin’s information machine before 2008. “I am sure that there are a lot of centers, some linked to the state, that are involved in inventing these kinds of fake stories.”
The planting of false stories is nothing new; the Soviet Union devoted considerable resources to that during the ideological battles of the Cold War. Now, though, disinformation is regarded as an important aspect of Russian military doctrine, and it is being directed at political debates in target countries with far greater sophistication and volume than in the past.
The Kremlin uses both conventional media — Sputnik, a news agency, and RT, a television outlet — and covert channels, as in Sweden, that are almost always untraceable.
Russia exploits both approaches in a comprehensive assault, Wilhelm Unge, a spokesman for the Swedish Security Service, said this year when presenting the agency’s annual report. “We mean everything from internet trolls to propaganda and misinformation spread by media companies like RT and Sputnik,” he said.
The fundamental purpose of dezinformatsiya, or Russian disinformation, experts said, is to undermine the official version of events — even the very idea that there is a true version of events — and foster a kind of policy paralysis.
Disinformation most famously succeeded in early 2014 with the initial obfuscation about deploying Russian forces to seize Crimea [ http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/19/world/europe/ukraine.html ]. That summer, Russia pumped out a dizzying array of theories about the destruction of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 [ http://www.nytimes.com/topic/subject/malaysia-airlines-flight-17 ] over Ukraine, blaming the C.I.A. and, most outlandishly, Ukrainian fighter pilots who had mistaken the airliner for the Russian presidential aircraft.
The cloud of stories helped veil the simple truth that poorly trained insurgents had accidentally downed the plane with a missile supplied by Russia.
Moscow adamantly denies using disinformation to influence Western public opinion and tends to label accusations of either overt or covert threats as “Russophobia.”
“There is an impression that, like in a good orchestra, many Western countries every day accuse Russia of threatening someone,” Maria Zakharova, the Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, said at a recent ministry briefing.
Tracing individual strands of disinformation is difficult, but in Sweden and elsewhere, experts have detected a characteristic pattern that they tie to Kremlin-generated disinformation campaigns.
“The dynamic is always the same: It originates somewhere in Russia, on Russia state media sites, or different websites or somewhere in that kind of context,” said Anders Lindberg, a Swedish journalist and lawyer.
“Then the fake document [ http://politrussia.com/world/mirnoe-uregulirovanie-putem-818/ ] becomes the source of a news story distributed on far-left or far-right-wing websites,” he said. “Those who rely on those sites for news link to the story, and it spreads. Nobody can say where they come from, but they end up as key issues in a security policy decision.”
Although the topics may vary, the goal is the same, Mr. Lindberg and others suggested. “What the Russians are doing is building narratives; they are not building facts,” he said. “The underlying narrative is, ‘Don’t trust anyone.’”
The weaponization of information is not some project devised by a Kremlin policy expert but is an integral part of Russian military doctrine — what some senior military figures call a “decisive” battlefront.
A prime Kremlin target is Europe, where the rise of the populist right and declining support for the European Union create an ever more receptive audience for Russia’s conservative, nationalistic and authoritarian approach under Mr. Putin. Last year, the European Parliament accused Russia [ http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//TEXT+TA+P8-TA-2015-0225+0+DOC+XML+V0//EN ] of “financing radical and extremist parties” in its member states, and in 2014 the Kremlin extended an $11.7 million loan to the National Front, the extreme-right party in France.
“The Russians are very good at courting everyone who has a grudge with liberal democracy, and that goes from extreme right to extreme left,” said Patrik Oksanen, an editorial writer for the Swedish newspaper group MittMedia. The central idea, he said, is that “liberal democracy is corrupt, inefficient, chaotic and, ultimately, not democratic.”
Another message, largely unstated, is that European governments lack the competence to deal with the crises they face, particularly immigration and terrorism, and that their officials are all American puppets.
In the Czech Republic, alarming, sensational stories portraying the United States, the European Union and immigrants as villains appear daily across a cluster of about 40 pro-Russia websites [ http://www.evropskehodnoty.cz/ ].
During NATO military exercises in early June, articles on the websites suggested that Washington controlled Europe through the alliance, with Germany as its local sheriff. Echoing the disinformation that appeared in Sweden, the reports said NATO planned to store nuclear weapons in Eastern Europe and would attack Russia from there without seeking approval from local capitals.
A poll this summer [ http://www.europeanvalues.net/kremlinwatch/ ] by European Values, a think tank in Prague, found that 51 percent of Czechs viewed the United States’ role in Europe negatively, that only 32 percent viewed the European Union positively and that at least a quarter believed some elements of the disinformation.
“The data show how public opinion is changing thanks to the disinformation on those outlets,” said Jakub Janda, the think tank’s deputy director for public and political affairs. “They try to look like a regular media outlet even if they have a hidden agenda.”
Not all Russian disinformation efforts succeed. Sputnik news websites in various Scandinavian languages failed to attract enough readers and were closed after less than a year.
Both RT and Sputnik portray themselves as independent, alternative voices. Sputnik claims that it “tells the untold,” even if its daily report relies heavily on articles abridged from other sources. RT trumpets the slogan “Question More.”
Both depict the West as grim, divided, brutal, decadent, overrun with violent immigrants and unstable. “They want to give a picture of Europe as some sort of continent that is collapsing,” Mr. Hultqvist, the Swedish defense minister, said in an interview.
RT often seems obsessed with the United States, portraying life there as hellish. Its coverage of the Democratic National Convention [ http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/31/us/politics/russia-media-rt-dnc.html ], for example, skipped the speeches and focused instead on scattered demonstrations. It defends the Republican presidential nominee, Donald J. Trump, as an underdog maligned by the established news media.
Margarita Simonyan, RT’s editor in chief, said the channel was being singled out as a threat because it offered a different narrative from “the Anglo-American media-political establishment.” RT, she said, wants to provide “a perspective otherwise missing from the mainstream media echo chamber.”
Moscow’s targeting of the West with disinformation dates to a Cold War program the Soviets called “active measures.” The effort involved leaking or even writing stories for sympathetic newspapers in India and hoping that they would be picked up in the West, said Professor Mark N. Kramer, a Cold War expert at Harvard.
The story that AIDS was a C.I.A. project run amok spread that way, and it poisons the discussion of the disease decades later. At the time, before the Soviet Union’s 1991 collapse, the Kremlin was selling communism as an ideological alternative. Now, experts said, the ideological component has evaporated, but the goal of weakening adversaries remains.
In Sweden recently, that has meant a series of bizarre forged letters and news articles about NATO and linked to Russia.
One forgery, on Defense Ministry letterhead over Mr. Hultqvist’s signature, encouraged a major Swedish firm to sell artillery to Ukraine, a move that would be illegal in Sweden. Ms. Nyh Radebo, his spokeswoman, put an end to that story in Sweden, but at international conferences, Mr. Hultqvist still faced questions about the nonexistent sales.
Russia also made at least one overt attempt to influence the debate. During a seminar in the spring, Vladimir Kozin, a senior adviser to the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies, a think tank linked to the Kremlin and Russian foreign intelligence, argued against any change in Sweden’s neutral status.
“Do they really need to lose their neutral status?” he said of the Swedes. “To permit fielding new U.S. military bases on their territory and to send their national troops to take part in dubious regional conflicts?”
Whatever the method or message, Russia clearly wants to win any information war, as Dmitry Kiselyev, Russia’s most famous television anchor and the director of the organization that runs Sputnik, made clear recently.
Speaking this summer on the 75th anniversary of the Soviet Information Bureau, Mr. Kiselyev said the age of neutral journalism was over. “If we do propaganda, then you do propaganda, too,” he said, directing his message to Western journalists.
“Today, it is much more costly to kill one enemy soldier than during World War II, World War I or in the Middle Ages,” he said in an interview [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQErhwknhp4 (next below; with comments)]
on the state-run Rossiya 24 network. While the business of “persuasion” is more expensive now, too, he said, “if you can persuade a person, you don’t need to kill him.”
Eva Sohlman contributed reporting from Stockholm, and Lincoln Pigman from Moscow.
Dark Arts: Russia’s Stealth Conflict This article is the second in a series on how Russia covertly projects power.
Forget earthquake, flood, tornado tv coverage, forget his own attack on Judge Curiel, forget all of Trump's crap .. forget images of bruised, battered and dead children
Donald Trump: Mika must apologize for 'gang attack' on Pastor Mark Burns
by Brian Stelter @brianstelter August 28, 2016: 12:35 PM ET .. bit ..
lol .. and would you believe that earlier today on seeing the video (about 13 down in yours, just under half-way) i just thought Pastor Mark Burns simply didn't have a real good focus on much of anything at all .. :)
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