Gaslighting America by Amanda Carpenter

Author:Amanda Carpenter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-03-19T04:00:00+00:00

12

Hacks

As fake news purveyors and the alt-right were aligning to help Trump, an aggressive group of foreign nationals were doing the same. They’d do it by dumping information that would rock the whole election. It would also accomplish what we now know the Russian government wanted most: pervasive fear among the American people that the political system was rigged and untrustworthy.

On July 22, 2016, mere days ahead of the Democratic National Convention, Russian hackers used the multinational activist organization WikiLeaks to make public thousands of private emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee. A political bombshell, splendidly positioned for Trump to exploit.

Among the thousands of emails posted, the most damaging showed DNC operatives disparaging Clinton’s primary rival, Senator Bernie Sanders, roiling the most progressive wing of the party, which was reluctant to support Clinton in the first place. In one email, a staffer wondered if Sanders’s Jewish heritage and suspected atheism could hurt his standing among Southern voters. The leaks had major, immediate consequences that cast a shadow of doubt over the convention. Two days later, as the curtains were being raised for the DNC’s big event, the woman in charge, DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, resigned, leaving the party in chaos.

Trump knew how to play it. He used the development to underscore a theme that he already had in the works. He held up the hacked emails as proof the election process was rigged. Trump said the emails showed Sanders never had a fair shot because the DNC party bigwigs were all in lockstep behind Clinton. “Leaked e-mails of DNC show plans to destroy Bernie Sanders,” Trump tweeted on July 23. “Mock his heritage and much more. On-line from WikiLeakes [sic], really vicious. RIGGED.” The Russians had to be cheering. An American presidential nominee was using his massive media microphone to amplify their work. Score. Trump wasn’t done yet, either. He was taking ownership of the WikiLeaks narrative. He was going there. This was Step One of his next gaslighting.

Once his tweet went out into the world, Trump moved on to Step Two—advance and deny. During a July 27 press conference in Doral, Florida, Trump advanced the WikiLeaks story—calling it “very serious . . . horrible, absolutely horrible”—while denying the emails would help him beat Clinton. Before the press conference, Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook told reporters that the Russians put the emails out to help Trump win, something the GOP nominee vociferously denied. When Trump was asked about that specific allegation he said:

“It is so farfetched. It’s so ridiculous. Honestly, I wish I had that power. I’d love to have that power, but Russia has no respect for our country. And that’s why—if it is Russia, nobody even knows this, it’s probably China, or it could be somebody sitting in his bed.”

Huh? If you read that carefully, you’ll see that Trump’s denial about the Russian hacking was a special one—a nondenial denial. (Note: This is a special strategy mentioned in the previous Surrogate Secrets chapter.) Trump said that he didn’t carry out the hacking, didn’t know who did it, then said, “I wish I had that power.

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