Disenchanted voters or Trumportunists?

Are defecting Trump voters featured in Super PAC ads truly indicative of a trend, or are the same convenient needles poking out of the haystack in the right place?

In the course of his almost three years in office and previously during his presidential campaign, President Donald Trump has burned a lot of bridges, from former spokesman and New York biz pal Anthony Scaramucci to Defense Secretary James "Mad Dog" Mattis, to former Apprentice contestant and black outreach coordinator Omarosa Manigault, the Donald hasn't been shy when it comes to dumping what he considers to be dead weight. Yet despite these high profile fall-outs it is virtually unthinkable that he could be ousted ahead of the 2020 election by a conservative challenger. While millions of Republican voters say publicly that they are not happy about supporting Trump the man, but are happy about his results, they usually acknowledge that there is no palatable alternative on the landscape. 

But a Democrat Super PAC has attempted to make the case to voters with November ad buys in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin that Trump has betrayed the Rust Belt. American Bridge 21st Century is managed by its co-founders David Brock and Bradley Beychok, who confesses that even as a kid he would take down opponents' yard signs when his dad was a political consultant. American Bridge is one of the most unscrupulous and ruthless organizations operating on either side of American electoral politics. In 2018 one of its stringers got into a physical altercation and manhandled a female staffer for Nevada gubernatorial candidate Adam Laxalt. Brock's vicious and vindictive whispering campaigns haven't only attacked conservatives; he originally was a co-author of The Real Anita Hill attacking Clarence Thomas's accuser, a book that he later claimed was a lie. Since crossing over to the left has attacked progressives too, leading Senator Bernie Sanders to call him the "scum of the Earth" in a Time Magazine interview. American Bridge often features undercover audio snippets on its Facebook page that they record at rallies of Republican politicians, a tactic for which conservative Project Veritas is often criticized as selectively edited "gotcha journalism". 

This makes it all the more surprising that The Young Turks, a well-known progressive news outlet, has praised American Bridge's series of videos with ex-Trump voters. The idea that a nominally pro-Bernie news and opinion group would trust a Super PAC that is admittedly funded by the likes of billionaire investor George Soros, North Face billionaire Susie Thompkins Buell and oil heiress Anne Earhart shows how shallow their principles have become. They could regret this soon, as Brock stated already in April that establishment Democrats should start a #StopSanders movement sooner rather than later in a statement to the New York Times. 

The "Voters"

How credulous are the people featured? American Bridge found three individuals from across the three states and their ads have sparked the attention of local media and communities:

• Mark Graham of Erie, Pennsylvania is a real estate appraiser. But did American Bridge find Graham on its own? He was interviewed over the course of September and October by the New York Times in connection to the same topic. Somehow the guy who was portrayed as a humble middle aged man raking leaves was found by American Bridge during the same time period that he was talking to the NYT. The article was written by Trip Gabriel. 

• Dave Soborowicz of Eau Claire, Wisconsin is a plumber who was also featured in an April article by the NYT's Trip Gabriel about the state supreme court races there. Then in July he was featured in a CNN broadcast of Anderson Cooper 360 (see video above) in which he griped about Trump's tweets telling "The Squad" to go back to their countries. The new ad did not escape the attention of local political observers. It seems that this episode is at great variance with Soborowicz's other issues with Trump's trade policies. And if he is so dead set against tariffs then why did this man vote for the candidate that vowed to rip up the Trans-Pacific Partnership and NAFTA? Is this an indication that he was simply the "low information voter" that the media has lampooned and now embraces?
• Lori Malburg of Romeo, Michigan. She speaks about "all of the promises" of the campaign not coming true, but doesn't cite a specific example. 

Why a Trickle and not Throngs?

The ad buys are of course understandable as each of the three states were lost by razor thin margins that represented a few thousand votes. It is entirely plausible that some voters would be disappointed by the president - in Soborowicz's case apparently due to tariffs although for some reason he stated to CNN that he prefers to buy American made water heaters, meaning that the tariffs do not necessarily affect their prices. However if there is such dissatisfaction in these three states, why is it that the same two people sourced by one New York Times reporter ended up in an American Bridge ad campaign?

News organizations like CNN are enamoured of the elusive disaffected Trump activist. While there likely exist plenty of them, is it really so newsworthy that some people get disappointed with the president without delving into the motivations? The media seeks out many of these people regardless of their motivations, ignoring the fact that perhaps if (as they say) Trump is a selfish, dishonest person a lot of the people that turn against him were also selfish and dishonest. Such was the case when suddenly the media fawned over Trump defectors Omarosa and Michael Cohen that they had previously depicted as scoundrels. In 2017 Cohen was depicted as Trump's evil crook lawyer by Vanity Fair. But by earlier this month Buzzfeed, a publication that accused him for over two years of lying about visiting Prague, was reporting his claims that his false statements to Congress that got him convicted of perjury were "not his idea". The pattern always seems to hold - the bad people that enable Trump are granted sin indulgences once they turn against him.

I noticed a similar issue this year concerning another Trump supporter that has wavered and may have turned against the president. I bring this example in order to illustrate that while anyone has the right to be dissatisfied with Trump, it is not a given that the dissatisfaction is always a symptom of the same cause:

Pennsylvania conservative political activist Kevin Martin was earlier this year embroiled in a feud within the Turning Points USA and Blexit movements. Without defending the TPUSA side, it appears that Martin's complaints were mainly grounded in self-interest. Candace Owens and Charlie Kirk's successes are admittedly very self-aggrandizing and commercialized ("grifting" for those that insist on it), attracting a whole crowd of right-wing critics like Uncle Hotep and Jesse Lee Peterson. Some have policy based dissents from TPUSA's corporate friendly conservative, such as its gay-friendly policies, dubious immigration policies, and support for Israel. But in Martin's case it appears to be more careerist in nature, meaning that for him the main issue. It is interesting that for someone that claims to be a conservative activist he chose the following outlets to vent with about the lack of free speech within TPUSA:

• In 2018, as a supporter of Pennsylvania congressional candidate Dan Meuser, Martin was accused by rivals of sending hate messages to fellow right-wing activist Laura Loomer, including calling her a whore and other sexually explicit insults. It is therefore, to say the least, ironic that he complains of others bullying him.
• He claimed that there was a "mutiny" going on within the organization and that movement founder Charlie Kirk was running a "cult" in a January 8 statement to The Daily Beast reporter Will Sommer. Unlike the current schism on the right, this episode has no discernible ideological root. In his case he had been ousted from a TPUSA event after some (apparently petty) argument with Candace Owens and formed a now defunct splinter organization called Heal Our Voice.

• A few days later he spoke to Mashable writer and YouTube creator Matt Binder, another progressive far leftist and spilled the beans on TPUSA. But the majority of his complaints were about shoddy hotel accommodations, calling himself "a pretty popular guy within the conservative movement". Binder was forced to ask what was so terrible about the events, but Martin only accused Owens and Kirk of pushing "extreme right wing ideologies" on their followers. His complaint about not welcoming people of the left is ironically what Groypers claim is TPUSA's dishonest emphasis. In the end he couldn't cite an actual example of bullying.
• His choice of talking to Binder implies that Martin's freedom of speech motive is disingenuous. Binder has been a regular on The Majority Report with Sam Seder. Weeks earlier on his DOOMED podcast he dedicated an entire show to the "Most Wonderful Bans of the Year", gleefully applauding the deplatforming of Gavin McInnes, Laura Loomer, and Gab.
• In July 2019 he appeared on a CNN panel of Pennsylvania voters who were distraught over (what else) Trump's comments about the squad. Martin claimed to Erin Burnett that there was a groundswell of black conservatives like him to . . . Kamala Harris. But the Pennsylvania polling for June had shown Harris at a lousy 3%, and at 9% in New Hampshire the day before. She has also sunk to only 6.3% in South Carolina, where black voters dominate the Democratic market.

The voters depicted in the American Bridge ads may be genuinely disenchanted Trump voters, or they could be individuals like Martin with their own careerist ambitions tied to their Trump support that went unfulfilled. But the bizarre manipulations of these stories still do not mean that conservatives should rest on their laurels. Trump remains popular among his fans, but his base is divided against itself, and not all of the divisions are predicated on actual policy positions but rather on selfish personal goals being pursued in the name of #MAGA while calling rivals "grifters". The media is focused on the immediate issue of the 2020 election and the daily Trump circus, but should he be reelected, old conflicts will resurface and new ones sprout over who takes over the mantle. As for "swing voters" portrayed in ads, often same personalities pop up because they are easy to find or they want to be found. TYT's willingness to buy corporate propaganda sets them up for a huge disappointment and warrants the skepticism of their residual viewers.

This article is not addressing the more well known "Groyper War" which is a larger issue that deserves its own space.