Fake News Alert: Memo to Putin

FSB Briefing Abstract
PsyOps Bureau
May 27, 2016

Overview

So far, Candidate Trump has been singularly successful in bringing our project, which was initiated four years ago with “Project Birther,” to its final phase.

His victory in winning the Republican Presidential nomination provides resounding verification of our core assumptions regarding the U.S. electorate.

It must also be mentioned that Candidate Trump followed our instructions flawlessly through the primary process.

Although the chances of Donald Trump winning the Presidency of the United States remain remote, the current psychological makeup of the U.S. electorate can be exploited in certain ways to greatly enhance Trump’s overall prospects, especially if his opponent is Hillary Clinton, which now seems certain.

This document outlines steps that Candidate Trump will be instructed to take to win the U.S. Presidential election in November.

Psychological Characteristics of the U.S. Electorate

In the broadest of terms, much of the U.S. electorate sees the United States as a nation in decline.

The difficult recovery from the economic collapse of 2008, the rise in China’s geopolitical and economic influence and various foreign policy setbacks by the Obama Administration have been widely reported and exaggerated by undisciplined media outlets.

This has lead to high levels of anxiety (border-lining on paranoia) among many U.S. voters.

This psychological profile, which leads to a strong sense of victimization, can be exploited through various proven PsyOps tactics.

Defining Candidate Trump’s Political Issues

Our research — both direct and indirect — indicates significant potential in Candidate Trump continuing to exploit this pervasive sense of victimization by focusing on three main points: immigration, foreign trade and Islamic terrorism.

Candidate Trump must not retreat from these positions, which he successfully exploited during the primaries. He must restate his stand in even starker terms than previously. He must continue to use incendiary language to draw sharp contrasts with Candidate Clinton.

On all other issues, including gun rights, climate change, abortion and oil and gas exploration, Candidate Trump must line up unconditionally with U.S. Conservative orthodoxy.

Strong positions on the three main issues will cement his populist appeal, while his unconditional support for the Conservative issues will solidify his appeal to the Republican base.

Crossover voters (traditional Democrats switching to the Republican candidate) attracted to his populist message will give him strong potential for victory in all of the key swing states.

To carry this off, Candidate Trump must continue to appear unscripted and he must be seen as speaking “from his heart” to disenfranchised working class voters.

He must be resolute and unapologetic in his statements. He must be ferocious in his support of America’s “victims.”

Defining Trump’s Enemies

The subject of Candidate Clinton will be discussed shortly, but Candidate Trump must identify enemies other than Clinton early on in the campaign. We call these enemies the “victimizers.”

These are broadly defined groups for which much of the electorate holds high levels of antipathy. Trump’s view of the victimizers must expand on Candidate Trump’s accepted positioning as the “anti-establishment” candidate, which worked so successfully in defeating the Bush family in the primaries.

Many U.S. voters believe that enemy number one is the mainstream media, which is widely regarded as suspect by both the Republican base and ordinarily centrist swing state voters. (Polls show that the media is trusted by less than 20% of all Americans).

Trump must bait the media with statements considered outrageous and outside the norms of American politics. He must rally voters against the concept of “political correctness.”

Candidate Trump must work the media into a veritable lather, so that their attacks on him are so consistent and so strident as to lose all credibility.

He must reduce their product to name-calling, so that Candidate Trump’s defenders, who use similar language and tautologies in discussing politics, feel that they themselves are the targets (Stockholm syndrome.)

They must be made to believe that Trump is being attacked for merely saying what they themselves think, but are afraid to say out loud.

Looking beyond the media, Candidate Trump must also attack the coastal elites — intellectuals, artists and entertainers based mainly in America’s coastal cities.

The coastal elites, who appear smug and condescending to most working class Americans, will line up behind Candidate Clinton. Accordingly, by tarring the coastal elites as being out of touch with the “real” America, Candidate Clinton will be tarred with the same brush.

Candidate Trump must also attack the moneyed interests that direct the American plutocracy from behind the scenes. Candidate Clinton can be expected to rely on the patronage of this class, which includes bankers, technology billionaires and wealthy pro-Israel Jews, for financial support.

Candidate Trump must be seen as avoiding direct support from these groups. (We have arranged for transfers to Trump’s business accounts that will enable him to self-fund much of his campaign.)

Defining Trump’s Adversary

Candidate Clinton offers a target rich environment. Candidate Trump must employ a well-established PsyOps technique by attaching a descriptive to Candidate Clinton whenever he mentions her name. (We suggest “Crooked” Hillary.)

This might come off as jarring in the early stages of the campaign, but it will gain credence as the campaign wears on.

Candidate Trump must be relentless in attacking Candidate Clinton for the use of a private e-mail server, for the speaking fees she received from various U.S. vested interest entities and for her involvement in potential influence peddling through the Clinton foundation. All this must be shown within the context of past scandals involving the Clinton family.

In this way, Candidate Clinton herself will be viewed as a victimizer and will lose all emotional connection to the victims.

FSB PsyOps has arranged for our external agents to hack into various e-mail accounts used by the Clinton Campaign and for these hacked e-mails to be released into the media.

These accounts will provide a wealth of behind-the-scenes political discussion of the type with which the American electorate is unfamiliar and will thereby reinforce and cement the perception of Hillary as “crooked.”

Candidate Trump must also use tactics to divert the attention of the electorate away from substance and into various aspects of pop culture. At all costs, Candidate Trump must avoid the temptation to make the campaign dialectic substantive.

Candidate Clinton is detail-oriented and these details fly over the heads of potential supporters of Candidate Trump. A large percentage of the U.S. electorate will find Candidate Trump’s pop culture smoke screen far more alluring than Candidate Clinton’s embrace of policy minutiae.

Eroding Candidate Clinton’s Base

Candidate Trump must attack Candidate Clinton directly among Candidate Clinton’s core constituencies, who share a sense of victimization.

Here, African-American voters will be particularly susceptible to a review of the injustices visited upon them by the Clinton Administration.

The legacy of President Clinton includes the mass incarceration of young African-Americans, the end of welfare subsidies and the passage of NAFTA, among other perceived injustices.

Candidate Trump cannot “win” the African-American vote, but he will dampen overall enthusiasm and turnout, especially in key swing states.

On this, Candidate Trump must force the Clinton campaign to expend precious campaign resources merely to retain her disproportionate share of the African-American vote and, in so doing, paint Candidate Clinton as the “black” candidate in the eyes of white voters.

Candidate Trump must also make clear the divide between illegal immigrants and legal ones. He must extol the virtues of those law-abiding foreign workers who went through the exhaustive immigration process, while castigating illegals as robbing legal immigrants of what they worked so hard to attain.

He must force Candidate Clinton to embrace illegal immigrants.

Finally, Candidate Trump must show no mercy in his view of Muslims. Most Americans will maintain a starkly unfavorable view of Muslims.

Candidate Clinton, along with the mainstream media and other cultural elites, must be forced to take a more balanced view, which will be received poorly among less-educated working class voters. (To cement this view, we will arrange a homegrown terrorist act during the campaign.)

Summary

Although this document outlines a highly unconventional campaign, it is a campaign that will evoke highly predictable psychological reactions among large swaths of American voters.

Candidate Trump must be highly disciplined to carry this off. If he follows instructions as he did during the primaries, he will achieve the following results:

• Candidate Trump will win by wide margins in states that have backed Conservative Republicans in recent elections (e.g. Tennessee, Alabama, Texas), but will lose by wide margins in jurisdictions dominated by coastal elites (e.g. New York, California.) Accordingly, Candidate Trump is likely to lose the overall popular vote.
• Candidate Trump will be highly competitive in ten swing states, where he can expect overwhelming support among working class white males and, to a lesser extent, working class white females. He will also be aided by a decrease of as much as 10% in African-American turnout compared to the 2012 election. Finally, he can garner a reasonable percentage of the Latino vote by appealing to Latino citizens who feel victimized by a perceived flood of illegal immigrants.

On this basis, Candidate Trump could well win seven of the ten swing states and with them the Presidency of the United States.