Company, Texas Hill Country Land-
scaping. But Parscale was also open to
political commissions. In 2010, he de-
signed a campaign site for Karen Crouch,
a conservative lawyer running for county
judge, with a slogan in bold type: “Re-
spect for the Victim. Tough Justice for
the Criminal.” For a far-right move-
ment called My America Again!, an al-
ternative to the Tea Party that billed it-
self as “a phalanx of self-governing
citizens bound by Christ, honor, and pa-
triotism,” he built a password-protected
site that purported to “harness the power
of the Internet” to facilitate a new kind
of political activism.
Parscale was also beginning to ex-
periment with social-media marketing,
which allowed him to measure, with
ever more empirical specificity, where
people were likely to focus their atten-
tion. In 2010, in an interview with a
small Web-development blog, Parscale
was asked about a project he’d recently
completed for Dury’s Gun Shop, in San
Antonio. At first, he said, the store’s
owners weren’t even thinking about sell-
ing guns online; they’d only commis-
sioned Parscale to make an online cat-
alogue of the store’s inventory. Parscale
showed the owners how, through search-
engine optimization and “great cate-
gory management,” they could find new
customers outside South Texas. “Dury’s
was mesmerized by the amount of hits
they were getting from nearly every city
in the U.S.,” he said. “Once Dury’s could
visualize the potential business from
the new web traffic, they were ready to
sell guns.”
Time’s Person of the Year in 2010 was
Mark Zuckerberg. The accompanying
profile was mostly adulatory. (At one
point, Zuckerberg receives a friendly visit
from the director of the F.B.I., an oth-
erwise taciturn man named Robert Muel-
ler, who is described as “delighted” to
make Zuckerberg’s acquaintance.) The
piece also notes that Facebook “knows
exactly who you are and what you’re in-
terested in, because you told it. So if Nike
wants its ads shown only to people ages
19 to 26 who live in Arizona and like
Nickelback, Facebook can make that
happen.” The article did not mention
that the same sophisticated targeting
tools, designed to sort the American pop-
ulation into various micro-demographic
segments in order to influence their pur-
chasing decisions, could also be used to
influence their other behaviors, includ-
ing the way they vote.I
n 2011, Jill Giles joined Parscale Media
as its creative director, and the com-
pany became Giles-Parscale, Inc. A re-
spected graphic and interior designer,
Giles was “responsible for much of the
cool look of San Antonio’s chic build-
ings and restaurants,” according to the
San Antonio Current. Giles and Parscale
owned two of the more ambitious Web-
design businesses in town, and the merger
allowed them to focus on their respec-
tive strengths: Giles made everything
look good, and Parscale made everything
work on the back end.
The company moved to a tonier office
across town and took on more lucrative
clients—the University of Texas, Exxon-
Mobil, a few real-estate agencies in New
York. Giles, like most San Antonians,
was a Democrat; Parscale, like most Tex-
ans, was a Republican, at least in theory.
“I had a mediocre voting history, let’s
just put it that way,” he said later. (Pub-
lic records suggest that he registered
to vote for the first time at the age of
twenty-seven.) “Brad was a business-man,” Quintin Mason, who was Par-
scale’s college basketball teammate and
who remains his friend, told me. “He
was savvy, ambitious, all about getting
to that next level of success.” Once or
twice, he continued, “I heard him refer
to himself as having libertarian tenden-
cies”; other than that, he said, “politics
never really came up.”
Around 2012, Parscale was at an IHOP,
eating a ham-and-cheese omelette, when
he got an e-mail from a woman who
worked for the Trump Organization.
Trump International Realty needed a
new Web site, and she invited Parscale
to bid on the project. He did, and,
whether by luck or by intuition, he met
the main requirement for anyone who
wants to win Trump’s business: he bid
low. As Parscale later told it, Eric Trump,
upon receiving Parscale’s written pro-
posal, called him to say, “We think you’re
missing a zero, and we don’t know if
you’re just dumb or you don’t know what
you’re doing.”
Parscale got the contract, and it led
to more: Trump Wineries; the Eric Trump
Foundation; Caviar Complexe, Melania
Trump’s line of skin-care products. In
February, 2015, for fifteen hundred dollars,