Peeking into Trump's Black Box: David Bossie and Citizens United

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Tuesday April 12, 2016 · 2:17 PM PDT

2016/04/12 · 14:17

The Donald shakes Bossie's hand (from The Daily Mail 4/12/2016)

Peeking into Trump’s Black Box: David Bossie

Donald Trump, a man seemingly driven largely by vanity and vindictiveness, has managed to turn vague and sometimes contradictory statements into a successful appeal to disparate groups of largely white voters. There are also those who see the election as an opportunity for transformational change either because 1) Trump is a billionaire and therefore won’t be subject to the whims of the 1% and who will act in the interest of what they think of as “real Americans” (basically, themselves) because he said so; 2) Trump will act in his own interest and be such a disaster that the system will collapse, creating a faint possibility that a better system will rise out of the ashes.

For many Trump voters, in other words, Trump is a black box that you can’t see into, and that opacity is part of his appeal, as it allows voters to project their own desires on to him. Of course, in some sense everyone is a black box because we cannot read each other’s minds or see into each other’s souls. Trump’s presentation of insincere sincerity as part of the art of the deal is both empowering (he’s just like me and he has the power to get things done) and socially toxic (because the golden rule suddenly only applies to those in a narrow interest group rather than to all of society). In order to deal with the difficulty of seeing into the motives of others, we usually judge people not only on their words, but how their words match up to their deeds and, furthermore, by who they choose to befriend (“birds of a feather . . .”)

One of Trump’s important relationships, I think, has received too little attention, which is sort of surprising since it was publicized in a major national publication. NY Times reporters Maggie Habberman and Alexander Burns in “Donald Trump’s Presidential Run Began in an Effort to Gain Stature” argue that Trump’s decision to run dates back to the April 2011 White House correspondents dinner in which Trump became the object of President Obama’s ridicule, although they also spend considerable time detailing his growing alienation from the Republican establishment. Although their basic idea hasn’t got a lot of traction in the MSM, it does get at least occasionally referred to in the What-Makes-Donnie-Run sub genre of articles. Most interesting to me, however, was who Trump listened to when putting together his campaign organization:

Only a handful of people close to Mr. Trump understood the depth of his interest in the presidency, and the earnestness with which he eyed the 2016 campaign. Mr. Trump had struck up a friendship in 2009 with David N. Bossie, the president of the conservative group Citizens United, who met Mr. Trump through the casino magnate Steve Wynn.

Mr. Trump conferred with Mr. Bossie during the 2012 election and, as 2016 approached, sought his advice on setting up a campaign structure. Mr. Bossie made recommendations for staff members to hire, and Mr. Trump embraced them.

Among those staff recommendations, at least according to a NY Times article from last September, Bossie helped connect the Donald to ex-campaign manager Corey Lewandowski. Apparently his chief qualification, according to Bossie himself, was that he “’is as anti-establishment as Mr. Trump.’”

Who is David Bossie? He is the president of Citizens United, which remains his proudest achievement, although—if Trump gets the presidency—that might change. According to an article in the Independent Journal, the two “forged a bond of friendship with Trump when they fundraised for Children’s Hospital in Washington, D. C., where Bossie’s received treatment for a brain aneurysm.” Citizen’s United (with which Bossie has been associated since 2000, and for which he received approximately $478,000 in compensation in 2013) has a long history of disinformation and dirty tricks, and his own ugly history includes doctoring evidence and harassing people, a practice he still apparently engaged in fairly recently. The landmark court case itself was about Bossie’s attempt to air inflammatory commercials for Hillary: The Movie, and he is apparently at work on another, tentatively entitled Hillary: The Sequel. His hatred for the Clintons is longstanding and legendary, occasionally evincing a nasty adolescent sense of humor that reminds one of Trump himself. Apparently some of the current (resolved?) feuding between Trump and Stone, is in part because of Bossie's influence.

Trump’s relationship with Bossie suggests that his supposed criticism of Citizen’s United and even of money in politics generally, is extremely disingenuous. After having donated $100,000 to Citizens United in 2014, in 2015 he is vaguely critical of them, saying the following in a Bloomberg interview:

Trump also criticized Citizens United, the controversial 2010 Supreme Court decision that paved the way for unlimited independent spending to influence elections. He said super-PACs, which are legally prohibited from coordinating with campaigns they support, are a "total phony deal," noting that Jeb Bush's super-PAC is run by "somebody that's very close to him." He said the law "forces people into being somewhat dishonest."

The Donald’s point seems to be, especially when we consider the influence of someone like Citizens United’s David Bossie upon him, if only we didn’t have those pesky laws forcing us to break them, we wouldn’t be forced to be criminals. In other words, if we just get rid of laws that restrict financial behavior in politics, the crimes themselves would disappear. This does not strike me as the “reform” of money-in-politics that most of us are hoping for. Nevertheless, I would bet that there are at least a few wealthy and powerful people who are hoping for just that sort of “reform”: I think two of their names are David and Donald.

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Peeking into Trump's Black Box: David Bossie and Citizens United

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