35Th e Trump campaign’s texts so far this cycle have focused on
shouty fundraising pleas (“Th ey have NOTHING! IMPEACH-
MENT IS OVER! Now let’s CRUSH our End of Month Goal”).
But the potential for misuse by outside groups is clear—and shady
political actors are already discovering how easy it is to wage an
untraceable whisper campaign by text.
In 2018, as early voting got under way in Tennessee’s Repub-
lican gubernatorial primary, voters began receiving text messages
attacking two of the candidates’ conservative credentials. Th e
texts—written in a conversational style, as if they’d been sent
from a friend—were unsigned, and people who tried calling the
numbers received a busy signal. Th e local press covered the smear
campaign. Law enforcement was notifi ed. But the source of the
texts was never discovered.
WAR ON THE PRESS
One afternoon last March, I was on the phone with a Republican
operative close to the Trump family when he casually mentioned
that a reporter at Business Insider was about to have a very bad
day. Th e journalist, John Haltiwanger, had tweeted something
that annoyed Donald Trump Jr., prompting the coterie of friends
and allies surrounding the president’s son to drum up a hit piece.
Th e story they had coming, the operative suggested to me, would
demolish the reporter’s credibility.
I wasn’t sure what to make of this gloating—people in Trump’s
circle have a tendency toward bluster. But a few hours later, the
operative sent me a link to a Breitbart Newssarticle documenting
Haltiwanger’s “history of intense Trump hatred.” Th e story was
based on a series of Instagram posts—all of them from before
Haltiwanger started working at Business Insidernsidernsider—in which he made
fun of the president and expressed solidarity with liberal protesters.
Th e next morning, Don Jr. tweeted the story to his 3 million
followers, denouncing Haltiwanger as a “raging lib.” Other con-
servatives piled on, and the reporter was bombarded with abusive
messages and calls for him to be fi red. His employer issued a state-
ment conceding that the Instagram posts were “not appropriate.”
Haltiwanger kept his job, but the experience, he told me later, “was
bizarre and unsettling.”
Th eBreitbarttstory was part of a coordinated eff ort by a coali-
tion of Trump allies to air embarrassing information about report-
ers who produce critical coverage of the president. (Th e New
York Timesimesfi rst reported on this project last summer; since then,
it’s been described to me in greater detail.) According to people
with knowledge of the eff ort, pro-Trump operatives have scraped
social-media accounts belonging to hundreds of political journal-
ists and compiled years’ worth of posts into a dossier.
Often when a particular news story is deemed especially
unfair—or politically damaging—to the president, Don Jr. will
fl ag it in a text thread that he uses for this purpose. (Among those
who text regularly with the president’s eldest son, someone close to
him told me, are the conservative activist Charlie Kirk; two GOP
strategists, Sergio Gor and Arthur Schwartz; Matthew Boyle, a
Breitbartteditor; and U.S. Ambassador Richard Grenell.) Once
a story has been marked for attack, someone searches the dossier
for material on the journalists involved. If something useful turns
up—a problematic old joke; evidence of liberal political views—
Boyle turns it into a Breitbarttheadline, which White House offi -
cials and campaign surrogates can then share on social media.
(Th e White House has denied any involvement in this eff ort.)
Descriptions of the dossier vary. One source I spoke with said
that a programmer in India had been paid to organize it into a
searchable database, making posts that contain off ensive keywords
easier to fi nd. Another told me the dossier had expanded to at
least 2,000 people, including not just journalists but high- profi le
academics, politicians, celebrities, and other potential Trump
foes. Some of this, of course, may be hyperbolic boasting— but
the eff ort has yielded fruit.
In the past year, the operatives involved have gone after jour-
nalists at CNN, Th e Washington Postostost, and Th e New York Times.
Th ey exposed one reporter for using the word fagfagin college, and
another for posting anti-Semitic and racist jokes a decade ago.
Th ese may not have been career-ending revelations, but people
close to the project said they’re planning to unleash much more
opposition research as the campaign intensifi es. “Th is is innovative
shit,” said Mike Cernovich, a right-wing activist with a history of
trolling. “Th ey’re appropriating call-out culture.”
What’s notable about this eff ort is not that it aims to expose
media bias. Conservatives have been complaining—with some
merit—about a liberal slant in the press for decades. But in the
Trump era, an important shift has taken place. Instead of trying to
reform the press, or critique its coverage, today’s most infl uential
conservatives want to destroy the mainstream media altogether.
“Journalistic integrity is dead,” Boyle declared in a 2017 speech
at the Heritage Foundation. “Th ere is no such thing anymore. So
everything is about weaponization of information.”
It’s a lesson drawn from demagogues around the world: When
the press as an institution is weakened, fact-based journalism
becomes just one more drop in the daily deluge of content—no
more or less credible than partisan propaganda. Relativism is the
real goal of Trump’s assault on the press, and the more “enemies
of the people” his allies can take out along the way, the better.
“A culture war is a war,” Steve Bannon told the Timesimeslast year.
“Th ere are casualties in war.”
Th is attitude has permeated the president’s base. At rallies,
people wear T-shirts that read rope. tree. journalist. some
assembly required. A CBS News/YouGov poll has found that
just 11 percent of strong Trump supporters trust the mainstream
media—while 91 percent turn to the president for “accurate infor-
mation.” Th is dynamic makes it all but impossible for the press to
hold the president accountable, something Trump himself seems
to understand. “Remember,” he told a crowd in 2018, “what
you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”
Bryan Lanza, who worked for the Trump campaign in 2016
and remains a White House surrogate, told me fl atly that he sees
no possibility of Americans establishing a common set of facts from
which to conduct the big debates of this year’s election. Nor is that
his goal. “It’s our job to sell our narrative louder than the media,”
Lanza said. “Th ey’re clearly advocating for a liberal-socialist posi-
tion, and we’re never going to be in concert. So the war continues.”