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RELATIONS SPECIALIST,
BILL MILLERthe acute despair and cynicism spawned by
Trump. The president’s vast financial en-
tanglements and habitual bad faith have
provided fertile ground for imaginative
minds. Everything is believable, because
everything seems beyond belief.
Dworkin, who grew up in North
Carolina, got his start in Democratic pol-
itics as a digital campaign fundraiser. He
launched Bulldog in 2009 and took on a
roster of long-shot congressional candi-
dates. Of the roughly 50 House candidates
he raised money for over a six-year period,
only a handful won. By 2016 that business
had dried up, and Dworkin, along with an-
other member of a short-lived group he’d
worked on called Draft Biden, branched
out by forming Keep America Great, an
anti-Trump super-pac that aimed to raise
$20 million before the election.
It didn’t. The super-pac raised less than
1 percent of its goal. Practically the only
thing @funder funded with his super-pac
was businesses he and his associates had
ties to. (Much went to his consulting firm.)
Keep America Great narrowed its focusto what Dworkin calls “messaging” and
“opposition research”—digging up and
publishing sometimes wildly speculative
information about Trump and Russia. One
month before the 2016 election, his group
announced it had discovered 249 “Trump
companies” in Russia—a titanic scoop if it
meant what it sounded like. It didn’t.
If Keep America Great (which is now
Trump’s reelection slogan) didn’t really
catch on, Dworkin still saw promise in
the model. A month after Election Day,
his group officially changed its name to
the Democratic Coalition, sometimes
expanded to the Democratic Coalition
Against Trump.
When we spoke, Dworkin told mehe welcomed the opportunity to set the
record straight about his super-pac. “A
grifter would be a person that would pres-
ent that they’re going to do something and
then not do it, when in fact, we do every-
thing that we’ve ever pledged to,” he said.
“Grifting has some kind of negative intent.
We’re patriots.”
Dworkin argued you can’t compare his
group to traditional super-pacs because the
nature of its work is different. His group’s
focus on online messaging, he said, is a re-
action to how the 2016 election played out,
when Republicans (aided by Russia) spread
phony news on social media to tear down
the Democratic nominee. “Stopping that,
or combating that, online is a necessity,” he
said. “I mean, we are on the front lines to
make sure that doesn’t go too far.”
But Dworkin sometimes spreads the
kind of misinformation he says he is trying
to combat. In 2016, he reported that Mike
Pence was leaving the Republican ticket
after the disclosure of the infamous Access
Hollywood tape. (“I regret nothing about
posting it,” Dworkin says.) In a fundrais-“Grifting has some kind
of negative intent.
We’re patriots.”