“The day I realized it can be smart to be shallow was, for me, a deep experience.”
– Donald J. Trump –

The Big Picture –
By Glynn Wilson –

So the news broke with the usual urgency late on a Friday that U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions fired Andrew McCabe of the FBI, prompting McCabe to say he was targeted for being a witness into whether President Donald Trump tried to obstruct the probe of Russian meddling in the 2016 election, according to Reuters and every other news outlet in the land.

Twitter and Facebook went off like a Fourth of July fireworks show, and the buzz was still going on all the Sunday morning news talk shows, along with talk of another big story that broke on Saturday about how Trump consultants exploited the Facebook data of millions.

As I read all the versions and the details of this — and it is all very interesting — I could not help but think that something was missing. Democrats took this news as another nail being driven by special counsel Robert Mueller into Trump’s coffin, and maybe it is — if Trump and Sessions don’t fire him this week. We will see.

What’s important to me is this is the first time we really get some of the details of how Steve Bannon and Robert Mercer’s Cambridge Analytica obtained and harvested private information from the Facebook profiles of more than 50 million users without their permission. It was billed as “one of the largest data leaks in the social network’s history,” even though Facebook denied that the harvesting of user data could be described as a “breach,” issuing a statement saying “people knowingly provided their information, no systems were infiltrated, and no passwords or sensitive pieces of information were stolen or hacked.” The tech giant blamed the misuse of that data on Cambridge Analytica, suspended the company from Facebook, and promised to make changes to its platform.

According to the New York Times and the London Observer, which shared the leaked information, Bannon and company gained access to Facebook’s treasure trove of user data to “exploit the private social media activity of a huge swath of the American electorate, developing techniques that underpinned its work on President Trump’s campaign in 2016.”

This all sounds very conspiratorial and could be another story on the verge of proving that Trump is an illegitimate president who should be removed from office, and certainly Mercer and Bannon’s tactics show evil intent and perhaps illegal wrong doing according to another story showing the company used foreign nationals to work on a U.S. political campaign, in violation of election laws, who also had contact with Russians and lied about it.

But ultimately it still fails to prove the outcome of the election was changed either by Russian meddling or Mercer-Bannon meddling.

Trump’s Keyword Research

So I went looking to see if anyone was reporting another key piece of the puzzle on how Trump actually won the election, and believe me it was hard to find since very few news outlets are covering this angle and the search engines are so polluted with corporate crap. I knew it was there, because I had mentioned it in my reporting last year.

Mercer had made himself one of the richest men in the world pioneering computer stock trading, then turned to developing an algorithm to use key words and phrases to manipulate the media and public opinion and move the political landscape to the right in a way that puts the Koch brothers to shame. But Trump had already been studying key words and phrases on talk radio and cable news shows to see what potential voters were talking about, angry about, disgruntled over, looking for issues to exploit in a potential run for president.

According to an article I finally found thanks to the Daily Kos in New York magazine from April, 2016 (the biweekly issues do not pick up well in search engines), Trump had been talking publicly about his desire to run for president since 1987. He toyed with mounting a campaign in 2000 on the Reform Party ticket, and then again in 2012 as a Republican at the height of his attacks on President Obama for allegedly not really being born in America. He kept a small team of three advisers together just in case he decided to run in 2016: Roger Stone, Michael Cohen and Sam Nunberg, the guy everyone now knows for his crazy drunken appearances on CNN recently daring Mueller to arrest him, then caving in to demands to appear before the grand jury.

There is a video going around on Twitter of Nunberg meeting Trump when he was five years old at a Wrestle-Mania match. While conducting this research, I found an amazing academic study showing Trump’s political style is based in many ways on what he learned when appearing with Hulk Hogan back in those days. This could be the best metaphor about the Trump campaign.

Wrestling is about heat, not truth. It’s never a fair fight. The guy with the money decides who wins, who loses, and on what terms. The audience knows this and plays along regardless. These are the people who voted for Trump. This is their, and his, ethos. This is how, having converted his fans into voters, he is running the presidential show: the unreal violence of the game now the all too real brutality of the new regime. The world of professional wrestling has come to be embodied in the political arena in the figure of Donald Trump, who has been part of the game for decades and also, most importantly, in the fans who continue to rally for him. Spectacle trumps truth.

Donald Trump Shoots the Match

What’s missing from the major news analysis of Trump’s amazing electoral victory defying all the polls and pundits is what Nunberg did for Trump, even before he hooked up with Bannon and the Mercer’s who perfected the art. Nunberg’s job for Trump was to listen to talk radio and watch cable news shows and take notes, then form strategy memos he sent to Trump with all the key words and phrases.

“I listened to thousands of hours of talk radio, and he was getting reports from me,” Nunberg said in the interview with New York magazine.

What those reports indicated was that the Republican base was frothing at the mouth over a handful of issues: immigration, Obamacare, Common Core and other things. After Trump decided to run, while Jeb Bush was boring the nation talking about crossing the border as an “act of love,” Trump was thinking about how high to build his wall. “We either have borders or we don’t,” Trump started saying as early as 2014. “Build a wall” was a highly trending topic with the base that tested well in polls and focus groups and got lots of engagement on Twitter and Facebook.

“Hillary essentially wants to abolish the Second Amendment,” was one of his favorite lines, along with “lock her up” and calling her “Killary” for the deaths in Bengazi.

By the time Trump announced his candidacy in 2015, hooked up with then U.S. Senator Jeff Sessions and came to Mobile, Alabama for his first big stadium rally to test out his campaign in a place he knew it would be well received, Trump had already figured out that using certain key words and phrases would not only get him support from all the angry, disgruntled people on the political right, but billions of dollars in free publicity from the mainstream media ($1.9 billion worth and counting, according to the New York Times), even though he was calling them “bad people” and other choice demeaning phrases.

So what Mercer and Bannon offered was the sophisticated analysis of social media messages beyond what Trump had already been harvesting from other media sources.

(David Underhill and I were already beginning to suggest that Trump had a real chance and might win this election, long before Michael Moore did. Not that anyone nationally will ever give us credit. I studied survey research and am an academic expert in media effects on public opinion, and I’ve covered public opinion as a journalist for more than 35 years).

I found an even worse picture of Steve Bannon while doing this research

Mercer-Bannon Welcomed by Trump

So when Bannon came along with a way to use Mercer’s research tools and exploit not only Facebook data but Google search engine data as well, they were welcomed with open arms in the Trump camp after he won the Republican nomination and they held their convention in August, 2016.

Nobody is reporting much about the Google data yet, although it has been reported in technology circles that the Google search engine and YouTube videos and comments were pretty much taken over by the so-called alt-right during the campaign, as well as Russian bots. Give it time.

There is a ton of post-election research out there about the Trump campaign if you feel like wading into it. While everything Trump said sounded crazy to intellectuals and liberals everywhere, average Americans were drawn to his fame and anti-establishment message.

According to one study, the conclusion is that compared to Hillary Clinton’s safe, mainstream political messaging that bored people to tears, Trump’s messaging was faster, simpler, clearer, more negative, engaging and simply worked.

“Whilst Trump’s content may appear more shallow, its response to the user’s request is clearer and it is structured in a way which makes finding information faster and simpler,” this researcher concluded after a content analysis of the campaign websites and social media. “In conclusion, we can say that whilst, as with the overall polling, Clinton has a lead in terms of SEO Visibility, Trump is ahead on certain key issues. In particular, donaldjtrump.com is designed to appeal to users with specific intentions – and it does a very good job of reaching these users.”

So back in his pro wrestling days, Trump learned something about manipulating the media and public opinion. He just perfected it during the presidential campaign of 2016.

“The day I realized it can be smart to be shallow was, for me, a deep experience,” Trump said back then.

Here’s another study of Trump’s Twitter tweets, which shows that nearly half of the Trump’s statements were “negative in connotation – and the majority of them are outright insults.” I guess that works for Republican voters. Since I am no fan of Karl Rove myself, I liked this line.

“He especially likes to pester political consultant Karl Rove, whom he’s referred to, in at least 20 tweets, as ‘dopey,’ ‘foolish,’ ‘dumb’ and/or ‘moronic’.”

Trump describes the things that please him with a slew of monosyllabic adjectives: “great,” “good,” “nice.”

“His word choice is repetitive and basic, bearing the enthusiasm of a bored teenage texter,” this researcher concluded.

Shortly before announcing his run for president, Trump’s one political consultant talked of his plan to “walk away with” the election by commandeering the media.

“I’m going to suck all the oxygen out of the room,” he reportedly said. “I know how to work the media in a way that they will never take the lights off of me.”

Trump has engineered his Twitter and campaign speeches to do just that – and it worked.

How Donald Trump Used Social Media to Become the 45th President of the U.S.

Other research is looking to use similar key word research to beat polls in predicting the outcome of elections down to the county level in states. I’m not sure how far along this research is, but take a look at this, which even looks at how counties in Alabama fell in the recent special election for the U.S. Senate won by Democrat Doug Jones over Republican Roy Moore.

Keyword Research Beats Nate Silver’s 2016 Presidential Election Prediction

It’s a fast changing world out there. I just don’t think print newspapers are going to be able to keep up. Sorry.

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