46 THENEWYORKER, MARCH 9, 2020
Obama’s campaign manager in 2008, told
me recently. “Which is understandable,
given how powerful it is, and how hard
it is for most people to understand.”
Plouffe came to prominence at a time
when social media was generally per-
ceived as innocuous, even liberatory. He
and his team made extensive use of dig-
ital fund-raising, organizing, and adver-
tising; after Obama’s victory, they were
hailed as innovators. “At the same time,
the digital stuff is not a magic potion,”
he continued. “It’s an ever-evolving tool.
A tool that the Trump campaign, what-
ever else you want to say about them,
used quite effectively.” (Plouffe is now an
adviser to the Chan Zuckerberg Initia-
tive, a philanthropic organization set up
by Facebook’s founder and C.E.O., Mark
Zuckerberg, and his wife, Priscilla Chan.)
Between June and November of 2016,
Parscale’s firm was paid ninety-four mil-
lion dollars, most of which went toward
digital advertising. Some of the ads were
standard fare about national security or
the debt; others were designed to help
Trump’s mendacity and nativism go viral
on social media, where lies and fractious
memes are disproportionately likely to
be amplified. Facebook did not main-
tain an archive of its political ads until
2018, so some of the 2016 campaign’s
dodgier efforts may be lost to history.
But we do know that Trump tweeted
an image, originally circulated on anti-
Semitic message boards, of Hillary Clin-
ton’s face, a Jewish star, and a pile of cash;
that one of Parscale’s staffers made an
ad featuring audio of Hillary Clinton re-
ferring to African-Americans as “super-
predators” (the intention was to micro-
target the ad to black Facebook users in
swing states); and that Defeat Crooked
Hillary, a Facebook page funded by a
pro-Trump super PAC, disseminated sev-
eral conspiratorial videos, including one
insinuating that Clinton was taking il-
licit drugs and another alleging that she
had undisclosed ties to Vladimir Putin.
The point of all this, of course, was
to sway the election in Trump’s favor,
and, given the election’s narrow margins,
it’s highly possible that it worked. (The
Internet Research Agency, a troll farm
associated with Putin, purchased thirty-
five hundred Facebook ads between 2015
and 2017; Parscale and his team bought
millions.) None of this is evidence of
election-related malfeasance, however.
Most social platforms have rules against
harassment, hate speech, and violent
threats, but they have usually granted ex-
ceptions to those rules when the bound-
aries are tested by a Presidential cam-
paign, or by the President. Parscale used
Facebook to move fast and break things,
but it seems that the things he broke
were long-standing norms, not laws.
However, the Internet has disrupted
global politics so rapidly, and regulators
have been so slow to adjust to the new
reality, that there weren’t many relevant
laws to break.
In response to questions from The
New Yorker, Parscale issued a written
statement, which read, in part, “This isn’t
journalism, it’s a transparent attempt to
divert attention away from the fact that
President Donald Trump is on track to
steamroll past the socialists and win re-
election this November.” He did not
agree to be interviewed for this article,
but dozens of people did, including peo-
ple who worked with him and against
him in 2016. Predictably, Parscale’s name
elicited praise from most pro-Trump
Republicans and scorn from nearly ev-
eryone else. “I can tell you with high
confidence that Brad Parscale is not a
genius,” Tara McGowan, a left-leaning
strategist, told me. Nevertheless, “he un-
doubtedly had a massive impact on the
outcome of the 2016 election, and he
undoubtedly will again in 2020.” For bet-
ter or worse, she continued, “you don’t
need to be a genius to have a massive
impact. You don’t even need to break the
rules. An average person, given enough
time and money and support, can use
Facebook to help a demagogue win a
national election.”P
arscale often tweaks his biography,
in Trumpian fashion, to suit his im-
mediate needs. Sometimes he portrays
himself as having been an aimless rube
before a fortuitous encounter with Don-
ald Trump. Other times, he says that his
work on the Trump campaign was merely
an extension of “what I’ve done for twenty
years.” Recently, warming up the crowd
at a Trump rally in Florida, Parscale spoke
as an avatar of red-state alienation: “I
was born in Kansas. And people in Kan-
sas don’t matter. I lived in Texas. They
tried to push our voice out.” On Insta-
gram, he looks more like a member of
the Intracoastal élite, posting a videofrom aboard his thirty-two-foot Sea Ray
cruiser (“Love boating through Fort Lau-
derdale”), or a photo of an outdoor fire
pit next to an emerald-green patch of
lawn (“Good fire night! ”).
In a 2016 interview with Wired, Par-
scale called himself “a farm boy from
Kansas.” His childhood home was not
on a farm but on a paved cul-de-sac in
Topeka, within walking distance of a
Sonic Drive-In and a disk-golf course.
His parents, Dwight and Rita, were en-
trepreneurs whose businesses, accord-
ing to ProPublica, “included a swimming
pool company, a scuba shop, real estate
enterprises, restaurants and a Western-
themed nightclub featuring a mechan-
ical bull.” “Am I worth over a million
bucks?” Dwight said in an interview
with ProPublica. “Yes. But that’s not
that much today.” Brad attended a pub-
lic high school, Shawnee Heights, which
students at a nearby school sometimes
referred to as Scrawny Whites. In Par-
scale’s case, the aspersion was exactly
half accurate: by ninth grade, according
to a former coach, he was already a sturdy
six feet five.
He attended the University of Texas,
San Antonio, on a basketball scholar-
ship, then transferred to Trinity Univer-
sity, a nearby liberal-arts school, to study
business. Shortly after graduation, in
1999, he moved to Orange County in
California to work for his father, who
was then the C.E.O. of an animation-
software company called Electric Image.
The company filed for bankruptcy in
2002, and Brad Parscale returned to San
Antonio. Later, in an interview with the
Palm Beach Post, he recalled visiting a
bookstore and asking for the best-sell-
ing book in the business section, which
turned out to be an instructional text
about Web development. At first, he
said, “being a good procrastinator, I didn’t
read it.” He got around to it two weeks
later, when he was bedridden with food
poisoning. “I finished it and thought, I
could do that,” he said.
In 2005, he founded a Web-devel-
opment company called Parscale Media.
“Brad is a power player in the interna-
tional web marketing community,” his
online bio read. Actually, Parscale Media,
which was run out of a small office next
to a tattoo parlor, mostly produced sim-
ple sites on behalf of brick-and-mortar
businesses around town—Finck Cigar