The power of Michael Bloomberg

washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/02/18/power-michael-bloomberg/

By Daniel W. Drezner Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and
Diplomacy at Tufts University and a regular contributor to PostEverything.

Everyone and their bot account is linking to McKay Coppins’ latest Atlantic essay, “ The
Billion-Dollar Disinformation Campaign to Reelect the President.” He paints a
disturbing picture of how President Trump’s reelection campaign is using a billion
dollars to “wage what could be the most extensive disinformation campaign in U.S.
history.” The article is shot through with disturbing implications about the effect of a
well-funded microtargeting campaign on the minds of individual voters.

Coppins opened the story by describing the effects of creating a new Facebook account
and “liking” Donald Trump, and then describing what happened when he scrolled
through the ads that were targeted to him during the impeachment trial:

I was surprised by the effect it had on me. I’d assumed that my skepticism and media
literacy would inoculate me against such distortions. But I soon found myself reflexively
questioning every headline. It wasn’t that I believed Trump and his boosters were telling
the truth. It was that, in this state of heightened suspicion, truth itself—about Ukraine,
impeachment, or anything else—felt more and more difficult to locate. With each swipe,
the notion of observable reality drifted further out of reach.
What I was seeing was a strategy that has been deployed by illiberal political leaders
around the world. Rather than shutting down dissenting voices, these leaders have learned
to harness the democratizing power of social media for their own purposes—jamming the
signals, sowing confusion. They no longer need to silence the dissident shouting in the
streets; they can use a megaphone to drown him out. Scholars have a name for this:
censorship through noise.

Watching a campaign use massive sums of money to affect the political marketplace of
ideas does raise some extremely troubling questions. Little wonder that Coppins
included the delicious detail that a GOP strategist referred to Trump’s campaign
headquarters as the “Death Star.”

As it turns out, that “Death Star” appellation has been used to describe other campaigns
as well. On Monday, BuzzFeed’s Rosie Gray noted the following about Michael
Bloomberg’s presidential campaign: “The sheer hugeness of the former New York
mayor’s campaign is its defining feature. It is the Death Star of presidential campaigns.
... Bloomberg is carrying out the largest advertising campaign in the history of American
presidential politics, with over $400 million spent on ads so far and counting.
Bloomberg is cornering the market on available staff for other campaigns that might
need them.” Gray also observed that many of the controversies that have dogged
Bloomberg — such as his staunch support for stop-and-frisk as mayor of New York City
— have not deterred him from accumulating support among African American voters.

1/3
If it seems unfair to compare Bloomberg to Trump, that’s because it is. First of all,
Bloomberg is much, much richer than Trump. This means he can pour far greater sums
of money into his campaign. The guy is paying campaign staff heretofore-unheard-of
amounts and commissioning influencers to tweet about him and create favorable
memes. Political scientists tend to be skeptical about whether campaign spending tips
the scales in politics (see Tom Steyer’s performance to date for evidence). Simply put,
however, no one has attempted campaign spending on this order of magnitude, until
now.

Second, unlike Trump, Bloomberg had already invested heavily into his party’s
infrastructure before launching his presidential campaign. As the New York Times’
Alexander Burns and Nicholas Kulish have documented, Bloomberg is now “the single
most important political donor to the Democratic Party." Even more than his overt
political spending, however, it has been Bloomberg’s philanthropy that has bolstered his
standing within the Democratic Party:

It is not simply good will that Mr. Bloomberg has built. His political and philanthropic
spending has also secured the allegiance or cooperation of powerful institutions and
leaders within the Democratic Party who might take issue with parts of his record were
they not so reliant on his largesse.
In interviews with The Times, no one described being threatened or coerced by Mr.
Bloomberg or his money. But many said his wealth was an inescapable consideration — a
gravitational force powerful enough to make coercion unnecessary.
“They aren’t going to criticize him in his 2020 run because they don’t want to jeopardize
receiving financial support from him in the future,” said Paul S. Ryan, vice president of
policy and litigation at the good-government group Common Cause.

Outside the Beltway’s James Joyner is correct when he notes that Bloomberg in 2020 is
what “Donald Trump claimed to be in during the 2016 campaign: he’s so rich that it
would be next to impossible to bribe him.” Of course, there is another way to interpret
that sentence: Bloomberg is so rich that it might be impossible for any political
movement to influence him.

Third, Bloomberg’s policy positions look very different from Trump’s — but to be
honest, the only message I have really heard from the Bloomberg campaign is that he is
not Trump. This is still a big difference! Hearing Bloomberg focus primarily on
defeating Trump during his stump speech sounds fine to the person who has written a
book called “The Toddler in Chief.” I bet it sounds pretty good to the majority of the
country who disapprove of Trump as well.

But there is something nagging at me in reading these accounts of Bloomberg’s

campaign. Trump was able to use his wealth to distort the marketplace of ideas, which
was not good for the health of the republic. Bloomberg has enough wealth to drown out
the marketplace of ideas entirely. That cannot be good for the state of American
democracy as we know it.

2/3
I have no doubt that Bloomberg would be a better and more ethical president than
Trump. If Bloomberg wins, however, the lesson everyone will draw is that there are no
political constraints for a mega-billionaire with a modicum of political seasoning.
Countervailing institutions will matter even less.

The only virtue of this scenario playing out? Watching Republicans eventually call for
Citizens United to be overturned.

3/3