<div type="image" title="don jr and eric trump" height="1630" width="3259" msid="77154273" hostid="261"></div><ul class="summary-list"><li>Aggressive, in-your-face <keyword id="60356" type="ORGANIZATION" weightage="60" keywordseo="fundraising">fundraising</keyword> <keyword id="33554" type="COMPANY" weightage="60" keywordseo="Emails">emails</keyword> from political campaigns are nothing new, but the Trump campaign has taken it to a new level.</li><li>Following in the Obama campaign's pioneering tactic of using campaign surrogates as the apparent email senders, many of the Trump campaign's money requests come from his adult sons, <keyword id="3818716" type="PERSON" weightage="60" keywordseo="don-jr">Don Jr</keyword>. and Eric.</li><li>"I convinced my father to give you another chance," a recent subject line from Eric read, before he signed off with an ominous "We won't extend your match offer again. Don't let the President down."</li><li>To keep up with the Trump campaign's strangest fundraising emails without having to see them pile up in a personal inbox, you can follow @TrumpEmail.</li></ul>For those who have donated to the Trump 2020 campaign or otherwise ended up on their email list somehow, a summer shift in fundraising tactics has saturated inboxes.Aggressive fundraising emails from campaigns are nothing new, nor is the Trump campaign's use of surrogate cameos as the apparent sender. That method was pioneered by the Obama campaign going back to 2008 and refined to become the standard bearer for national <keyword id="6358883" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="100" keywordseo="politics">politics</keyword> in 2012.But instead of a top campaign official or surrogate offering warm invitations such as "I want you to see this first," the Trump campaign has leaned more into guilt and borderline intimidation.Campaign fundraising staff tend to pour over the data for different approaches — particularly the rate at which emails are opened and an actual donation comes through — but for those who haven't clicked on anything in their inbox from the Trump campaign recently, things can get personal pretty quickly."I convinced my father to give you another chance," <keyword id="3448533" type="PERSON" weightage="60" keywordseo="Eric-Trump">Eric Trump</keyword> wrote in a recent subject line.To hammer home the point about accepting the campaign's offer to match donations, Eric laid down the gauntlet before signing off: "We won't extend your match offer again. Don't let the President down."<div type="image" title="210B6B05 DF76 4A4D BE04 D7A7D607C127.JPG" height="994" width="1242" msid="77154275" hostid="261"></div>A July 19 email from Don Jr. goes with a simple shot and chaser: "My father — he needs you.""My father really wants YOU on his team as a member of the Trump 100 Club," the email says. "I'm a member, my brother Eric is a member - we're just waiting on YOU."Sometimes figures outside of the family make a cameo, like when former House Speaker and Republican presidential candidate New Gingrich popped up in June."We need you," Gingrich wrote in the subject line before deploying a similar line warning of disappointing Trump."Don't let President Trump think he's lost your support. He has EXTENDED your PERSONAL 500%-MATCH DEADLINE FOR 1 MORE HOUR.""This is your last chance."The Trump campaign has found ways to carve their own online strategy — particularly with their attention grabbing <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/donald-trump-campaign-internet-app-social-media-2020-5">campaign app</a> — but the fundraising emails are the bread and butter of any modern presidential bid.While former Vice President Joe Biden's campaign struggled with online fundraising during the primary, things have turned around since he became the presumptive nominee, no longer having to compete with small donor juggernauts like Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.Biden has actually <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2020/07/02/joe-biden-outraises-donald-trump-fundraising-second-straight-month/5362914002/">outraised Trump</a> over the past two months, with an average donation falling around $34.Some recent developments in the Trump campaign could lead to a change in tactics.Brad Parscale, Trump's internet campaign guru at the helm of the reelect operation since the outset, was <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/brad-parscale-is-demoted-from-role-as-trumps-campaign-manager-2020-7">demoted</a> earlier this month in favor of newly minted campaign manager Bill Stepien.Further complicating matters are allegations of "<a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2020/07/23/kimberly-guilfoyle-trump-fundraising-380380">irresponsible spending</a>" from sources inside the campaign leveled at National Finance Chair Kimberly Guilfoyle, who is also Don Jr.'s girlfriend.To keep up with the Trump campaign's strangest fundraising emails without having to see them pile up in a personal inbox, you can follow <a href="https://twitter.com/TrumpEmail">@TrumpEmail</a>, an account dedicated exclusively to tracking their frequency and content.But if you do sign up for the Trump campaign's emails, be prepared for a stern reminder from Don Jr. and Eric.

The Trump campaign's fundraising emails have gotten very in-your-face and awkwardly personal, especially with Eric and Don Jr.'s guilt trips

<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"><a href="http://www.gettyimages.com/license/826176834">Justin Merriman/Getty Images</a>President Donald J. Trump listens as the crowd cheers at a campaign rally at the Big Sandy Superstore Arena on August 3, 2017 in Huntington, West Virginia.</div></div></div><ul class="summary-list"><li><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/who-is-donald-trump-bio-age-family-key-positions-2019-4">President Donald Trump</a> has used Twitter as a digital megaphone throughout his presidency to directly address supporters - and he will soon have another tool at his disposal to get his message out unfiltered.</li><li>The Trump reelection campaign is launching a social networking app to harness the fervent energy among his legion of supporters, <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2019/09/08/anti-conservative-bias-trump-1481831">Politico reported</a>.</li><li>The smartphone app, which has no release date set, will encourage them to donate, volunteer their time and stay on top of the president's campaign schedule.</li><li>The app highlights a key part of the Trump campaign strategy, which is anchored in circumventing tech companies like Facebook and Twitter that the president has assailed as biased against conservatives.</li><li>Digital experts say a key hurdle in launching an app is getting users to download it to begin with, which has doomed plenty of others. </li><li><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/">Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.</a></li></ul><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/who-is-donald-trump-bio-age-family-key-positions-2019-4">President Donald Trump</a> has used Twitter as a digital megaphone throughout his presidency to directly address his supporters - and he will soon have another tool at his disposal to get his message out unfiltered.The Trump reelection campaign is launching a social networking app to harness the fervent energy among his legion of supporters, <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2019/09/08/anti-conservative-bias-trump-1481831">Politico reported</a>. The smartphone app, which has no release date set, will encourage them to donate, volunteer their time and stay on top of the president's campaign schedule."Trump supporters are more dedicated and committed," Rory McShane, a Republican strategist specializing in digital media, told Politico. "If there is any campaign where they have a shot at making this work, it's the Trump campaign."Read more: <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-returns-campaign-trail-after-rough-summer-2019-9">Trump returns to his comfort zone on the campaign trail to bounce back from his blundering summer</a>The app - which has no release date set - will create a prize system to persuade Trump's diehard supporters to recruit their friends with rewards such as VIP seats at a rally or a photo with the president, similar to how other campaigns do for top donors, the report said.And it will allow the Trump campaign to track followers more extensively than ever before, providing another way to double down and turn out the conservative base instead of persuading independent and undecided voters to reelect the president. The campaign has already collected 200 million voter files from the Republican National Committee, and it's aiming to target voters with hyperspecific messaging.Ahead of the 2020 presidential election, the Trump campaign is building a digital operation unrivaled by Democrats in its use of data-mining techniques and algorithms, the Los Angeles Times <a href="https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-trump-democrats-facebook-campaign-election-20190612-story.html">reported in June.</a> It has spent millions in small Facebook ad buys to reach a large swath of voters in key battleground states.Read more: <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-campaign-facebook-ads-invasion-rhetoric-el-paso-shooting-suspect-2019-8">The Trump campaign's Facebook ads promoting 'invasion' rhetoric are similar to what the El Paso shooting suspect wrote</a><section><div data-e2e-name="byline"><div data-e2e-name="byline-content">The app highlights a key part of the Trump campaign strategy, which is anchored in circumventing tech companies like Facebook and Twitter that the president has assailed as biased against conservatives. At a "White House "Social Media Summit" in July - which critics denounced as giving a platform to incendiary voices - Trump <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/07/11/we-will-not-let-them-get-away-with-it-trump-threatens-social-media-ahead-white-house-summit/">accused them</a> of "terrible bias" and silencing his supporters. Digital companies deny shutting down conservative points of view over others.</div></div></section>Back in 2016, the Trump campaign had a bare-bones app that limited its functions to campaign updates and canvassing information. It had 120,000 registered users, according to Politico.The campaign increasingly views smartphones as another method of turning passive supporters into staunch activists. At a Trump rally late last year, campaign manager Brad Parscale brandished his iPhone, <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2018/10/24/trump-2020-reelection-text-messaging-933907">telling</a> supporters, "Now this phone is how we connect with you. It's how we turn you into the army of Trump."Digital experts say a key hurdle in launching an app is getting users to download it to begin with, which has doomed plenty of others. But as elections are increasingly fought online, the app space offers campaigns another method of reaching supporters."The big challenge for campaigns in the current era we're in - when attention is oversaturated - is to reach people where they are," veteran GOP strategist Eric Wilson told Politico. "It's a no-brainer to go into the app space on campaigns. It's an important battleground."<a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/intelligence/stories-slide-deck?IR=T&amp;itm_source=businessinsider&amp;itm_medium=ctgr_bii&amp;itm_term=ctgr_leadgen&amp;itm_content=socialmedia&amp;itm_campaign=stories-slide-deck"></a> <div class="margin-top"> <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/megyn-kelly-details-sexually-harassed-roger-ailes-fox-news-2017-11">Megyn Kelly details how she was allegedly sexually harassed by Roger Ailes, then advised to 'just steer clear of him'</a></h3> <div> </div> </div>

The Trump campaign is launching its own social networking app to mobilize 'the army of Trump' for 2020

<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/undividing"></a><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image">Drew Angerer/Getty ImagesHillary Clinton suggested that her data operation simply wasn't as good as the Republicans'.</div></div></div>Campaigns can tailor messages directly to you like never before.With services such as Facebook and Google providing campaigns with the ability to micro-target smaller levels and with greater efficiency, campaigns are increasingly looking toward a valuable tool to help push voters out to the polls in favor of their candidate.After the 2016 election, a lot of attention was given to how inflammatory, false, and misleading content on Facebook, Google, and elsewhere online further polarized the electorate. But far less attention was aimed at the use of big data in campaigns, and the effects that the resulting messaging had on political polarization in the US.It was a topic that Chuck Todd, host of NBC's "Meet the Press," attempted to tackle <a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/how-big-data-broke-american-politics-n732901">in a mid-March column</a> titled "How Big Data Broke American <keyword id="6358883" type="PERSON" weightage="100" keywordseo="Politics">Politics</keyword>."Todd's argument was that the misuse of advanced campaign analytics information led campaigns to simply aim for maximum base turnout, rather than aiming for the increasingly small piece of the pie in the center: the persuadable voter. As a result, both Republicans and Democrats have been pulled further to the right and left in their messaging and governing, and they are now responsible only to their supporters, rather than their constituents."Why? Big Data - a combination of massive technological power and endlessly detailed voter information - now allows campaigns to pinpoint their most likely supporters," Todd wrote. "These tools make mobilizing supporters easier, faster and far less expensive than persuading their neighbors. Of course, this isn't an argument that data itself - be it 'good' data or 'bad' data - broke the system. It's how the data was misused and manipulated that brought us to a breaking point."The 2016 presidential cycle saw Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas launching his campaign with the firm Cambridge Analytica, a firm that claimed to be able to build a "psychographic" profile of voters. It saw a website designer, Brad Parscale, becoming the most recognizable face of Republican data at the helm of Project Alamo, the Trump campaign data venture that reportedly had "three major voter suppression operations under way" near the end of the election.After the campaign, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/hillary-clinton-democrats-data-republicans-trump-2017-5" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">suggested that her data operation</a> simply wasn't as good as the Republicans', pointing at what she considered a "bankrupt" operation as one of the reasons for her defeat to President Donald Trump.A number of campaign veterans and data-analytics experts told Business Insider that, yes, there is the potential to misuse data to a negative effect. But each was quick to say that data has not played as great of a role in polarization in comparison to a splintering media, gerrymandered districts, and a tendency for Democratic base voters to pack themselves in major cities, somewhat limiting their electoral power on congressional elections.To say that the use of big data has led to a more staunchly polarized country "gives some of these people a little bit too much credit for influencing what's happening in the country and not vice-versa," Tim Miller, who served as communications director for former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush's 2016 presidential campaign, told Business Insider, citing the "self-sorting" of voters in urban and more rural areas as well as in social networks that are increasingly less diverse in thought and ideology.That's what's "driven campaigns more towards a kind of rally-the-base turnout model" in recent elections, he said."Has that somewhat by, you know, targeted messaging that inflames people's views on the left and the right? Sure, I think you could argue that it's been exacerbated somewhat by that," Miller said. "But it's also been by social trends.""I do think if you look at Facebook, for example, it's really easy to target people on Facebook with niche messages that kind of inflame their prior beliefs," he continued. "And then those people share with their friends, who tend to be like-minded, because of the sorting that's happened in the country. So definitely I think they use these tools to exacerbate it, but I don't think it's the cause."<h2>The tools have changed</h2>In 2008, Democrats were coming off of two consecutive electoral defeats, and the Democratic National Committee was seeking to develop new methods of targeting voters. Publicly available information quickly populated voter profiles. Voter data <a href="https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/a-history-of-data-in-american-politics-part-2-obama-2008-to-the-present/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">included points</a> such as vote history, party registration, gender, age, location, and race.By the time President Barack Obama wrapped up back-to-back electoral victories, with the Democratic data operation given much of the credit for the successes, the GOP had started to invest more heavily in getting its own data operation up to par. The Republicans would spend roughly four years closing the gap between the parties in their respective data infrastructures.In the final months of the presidential election last year, the Republican National Committee was proclaiming that it had figured out a new way to target on Facebook that, in its early uses, was proving to be successful. And Parscale, the head of Trump's data team, was leading an operation that was reportedly <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-27/inside-the-trump-bunker-with-12-days-to-go" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">shaping an increasing amount of Trump's political and travel strategy</a>, in addition to his fundraising.Parscale <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2017/06/16/politics/russia-investigators-trump-digital-director/index.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">may be called before the House Intelligence Committee</a> soon to answer questions about whether there were any connections between the Trump campaign's digital operation and Russian officials.<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image">Drew Angerer/Getty ImagesBrad Parscale.</div></div></div>After the 2016 election, Parscale and his team took plenty of credit for both Trump's improbable win, claiming to see the path to victory form ahead of time. Scott Tranter, a cofounder of the data-analytics firm Optimus, told Business Insider that the biggest misconception about the use of data in campaigns is that "it wins or loses the election.""It has a marginal, on-the-edge effect in some close races," Tranter, who was on the data team for Sen. Marco Rubio's 2016 presidential bid, said. "So close races matter. The vast majority of races are not close."Terry Sullivan, Rubio's presidential campaign manager, said that although campaigns are able to accumulate data "on steroids" now, the goal of campaign messaging has remained unchanged throughout American history. He cited Abraham Lincoln's guide to campaigning."It's like a list of 10 things," Sullivan said."Basically, identify who is voting, ascertain as to who they will vote for, determine who's undecided, and persuade the undecideds. This s--- hasn't changed in the following 150 years.""Now, the tactics have changed," he continued. "And the tools. It has become somewhat more scientific."<h2>'If you get your base out, you'll win'</h2>Chuck Todd's argument - that data has allowed campaigns to aim for maximum base turnout instead of working to persuade undecided voters - was echoed by others, even if they disagreed that it was the use of data itself that was contributing to increased polarization in the country.Jesse Ferguson, deputy national press secretary for Clinton's 2016 campaign, said it's "easier than ever" to identify people who agree with your message and only speak to others who do as well."People who want to divide the country are more able to because they can use data to find only the sympathetic audience," he said. "It is rarely a winning strategy, and it is not a unifying strategy. But it is more available today than it has ever been."But he called it "a chicken and an egg" to say whether partisanship allowed partisan data, or if partisan data created partisanship. "There's no way to say which was first," he said.<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image">Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesPresident Trump.</div></div></div>Looking specifically at the past presidential campaign, Reed Galen, who served in President George W. Bush's administration and worked on Bush's and Sen. John McCain's presidential campaigns, told Business Insider that while Trump's team used data to "stoke" anger, it was clear data was not the difference between a win or a loss."Use of data by his guys was making sure to stoke that anger, to hit that adrenaline button to make those people show up," he said. "And you could argue that Hillary had all the data in the world, and she couldn't find any buttons to press on people to get them to show up for her."Trump ran the antithesis of a data-driven campaign, Galen added, saying that data is "great to have" but "you've always got to take the data you get, whatever it is, and layer in some humanity, the personality of the candidate. If you get your base out, you'll win."Scott Tranter, the Optimus cofounder, and Brian Stobie, another cofounder at the company who worked on the Rubio campaign, both insisted that going after a turnout-based message targeting approach is the wrong move. Base turnout is something that can't be measured until a race is over, they said, while campaigns can track the progress they're making with undecided voters throughout an election season."The analysis is blatantly wrong," Stobie said. "I think whether it's any level campaign ... 90% of the dollars we think we're spending on persuasion, not on turnout operation. Turnout is something that we come back to on the Republican side. Democrats are better at doing it in the long term, but Republicans come back to it as an afterthought in the last month.""Just think about it in the most cynical terms," he continued. Data professionals "don't make money off of turnout. It's very rare to do that. They make money trying to persuade people."Tranter pointed to an increasing availability of partisan media as more a rationale for growing partisanship, rather than the use of data."Those guys are running 24 hours a day, and they're going after a niche audience," he said. "I'm only going after a niche audience for about 60 to 90 days every two to four years. And I'm using anywhere from $20 million to $60 million. Fox News in an afternoon will blow through the equivalent of $20 to $60 million. And so, it's correlated. It might be correlated. I'm sure he found some correlation between voter targeting and polarization. But I'm not sure it's the causative reason."The pair additionally criticized Clinton for pointing at her data operation as a cause for loss. The electoral result, they said, was "a statistical oddity," not proof of a "bankrupt" data operation, one they said was still a step above what the GOP is able to provide."If I had to bet again, I would bet on the Hillary side," Stobie said. "Three days later or three days in advance. ... The Democrats didn't lose because of their analytics."He continued: "What were the factors? No one ever knows, because you just get one result. Reality is that she had a really good data operation. We know the guys who ran it. Reality is we had no good data operation. None of the good Republican data guys were on that Trump campaign. He won in spite of his data deficiencies. Now they're the victors. Now, she does the stupidest thing on earth and does correlation is causation. They won, ergo they had the best data in existence."Tranter added that Clinton likely had the best analytics team, while Trump "had just enough to win."Asked about Clinton's comments, Ferguson said he couldn't speak to the substance of them because he wasn't working closely with the data team. But he said that if Democrats "rest on our laurels" while conservative mega-donors such as the Koch brothers and the Mercer family continue to invest heavily in Republican data operations, Democrats will "wake up in January of 2019 with Paul Ryan still having the gavel and January 2021 seeing Donald Trump heading back into the White House."Andrew Therriault, formerly a leader on the DNC's data operation, publicly criticized Clinton for the comments in their immediate aftermath. Now working for the city of Boston, Therriault pointed to the Todd's argument as a "stretch" lacking any "thesis."<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image">Drew Angerer/Getty Images</div></div></div>"The claim seems to be that, basically, because data allows campaigns to target their supporters, that therefore there isn't an effort to persuade, and that has been the cause of polarization," he told Business Insider. "And I think the supposition in there - that I think is just a stretch, to put it mildly - is that campaign persuasion, until recently, was what kept us from being polarized. And that seems like a huge assumption that there is no thesis for at all."Therriault <a href="https://medium.com/@andrew.therriault/we-shouldnt-blame-data-for-bad-campaign-messaging-1478ce43002e" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">wrote a Medium post in February</a> titled "We Shouldn't Blame Data for Bad Campaign Messaging." "Data can't salvage bad campaigns, but it can help good ones," he wrote. "And for us to recover after 2016, we're going to need all the help we can get."He said a lot of focus on this issue has come about because of Clinton's failed campaign."That's where all of this comes from," he said. "And there are questions to raise regarding their messaging strategy. But that's not about data, that's about messaging. Data is not a strategy. And data is not a replacement for strategy."For Therriault, figuring out who is still persuadable, in a climate where he said roughly 10% of voters are "truly independent," is still "the holy grail of data." Still, the past election was one in which a lot of what was assumed about the American electorate was thrown out the door."Obviously, this past election was anything goes," he said. "There were a lot of rules that just don't apply anymore."Pointing to gerrymandering and the creation of extremely safe partisan districts as more a cause for partisanship than data itself, Miller compared blaming the latter to blaming a gun manufacturer after a shooting."People are much more concerned about primary challenges for the first time, and pleasing their base, than they ever were, rather than a general election," he said. "Sure, you can" misuse data. "It's also like blaming the gun manufacturer. Sure people use voter data to target things, but that's not the reason it's happening."Taking aim at data assumes the premise that paid media, and not earned media, is driving partisanship, Miller said."And it's not, it's the exact opposite," he said. "It's earned media. There's so much more earned content than ever before. And let's be honest, you don't really use data to target the earned media the same way."Sullivan agreed, citing Trump's election as proof.The Rubio campaign measured earned and paid impressions from the day Rubio joined the campaign until he dropped out of the race in March. Sullivan said there were just two weeks from the day Trump joined the race that he did not have more earned impressions than every other candidate combined."And so the sheer volume in his ability to drive earned media just shut out everything else," he said. "What you see out of that is that wasn't about using data to target anything. We were able to measure it, but the fundamental was that Donald Trump didn't use data at all. He just knew how to get the media to take the bait over and over again. He was PT Barnum. That is the exact opposite of using analytics to target your message." <div class="margin-top"> <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/white-house-communications-director-anthony-scaramucci-reacts-sean-spicer-resignation-2017-7">'I'm used to dealing with friction': Trump's new communications director reacts to Sean Spicer's abrupt resignation</a></h3> <div> <div> <div class="ooyala-video-player" data-video-autoplay="false" data-video-id="liYTExYzE6Uk6m88ynZNMmibrGdane_5" data-player-variable="ooyalapopvideo" id="ooyalaplayer_popvideo" style="width:1280px;height:720px"></div> </div> </div> </div>

Campaigns know more than ever about you - and it's another reason our politics are divided

<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image">Associated Press/Andrew HarnikPresident Donald Trump speaks on the phone with Russian President Vladimir Putin, January 28, 2017, in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington.</div></div></div><ul class="summary-list"><li>President Donald Trump privately did not believe a controversial phone call he had with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was cause for concern, and led a group of people that included Republican lawmakers to joke in a meeting that it was "one of his better" calls with a foreign leader, according to a Washington Post report.</li><li>Trump recounted to reporters a conversation he had with Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina about the diplomatic call, who he claimed to have said, "'I can't believe it. I never knew you could be this, really, nice to a person."</li><li>"'I didn't think you had that in you to be so nice,'" Graham said, according to Trump.</li><li><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/">Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories</a>.</li></ul>President Donald Trump privately did not believe a controversial phone call he had with Ukrainian President <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/who-is-volodymyr-zelensky-ukraine-president-central-to-trump-scandal-2019-9">Volodymyr Zelensky</a> was cause for concern, and led a group of people that included Republican lawmakers to joke in a meeting that it was "one of his better" calls with a foreign leader, according to a Washington Post <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/seven-days-inside-trumps-frenetic-response-to-the-whistleblower-complaint-and-the-battle-over-impeachment/2019/09/25/14ba426a-dfaa-11e9-be96-6adb81821e90_story.html">report</a> Wednesday.Trump, who was in New York with foreign leaders for a three-day United Nations meeting, reportedly called into a meeting with aides and Republican lawmakers at the White House on Wednesday morning. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss the imminent release of a summarized transcript of a phone call between Trump and President Zelensky - a topic which has engulfed the White House in controversy and emboldened Democrats to <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/majority-of-the-house-now-supports-impeachment-inquiry-into-trump-2019-9">launch a formal impeachment inquiry</a>.Trump was said to have been in a relatively good mood, according to The Post, but was also on edge about some parts of summary. His aides and senior officials also appeared to be divided on the public release of the summary. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo were hesitant about releasing the private conversation; whereas Attorney General William Barr and Trump's attorneys advocated for him to release it, The Post reported.During a press conference on Wednesday, Trump said he "hated" to release the memo due to national security concerns, but added that he was forced to because "folks were saying such lies, such horrible things about a call that was so innocent and so nice."Trump recounted to reporters a conversation he had with Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina about the diplomatic call, who he claimed to have said, 'I can't believe it. I never knew you could be this, really, nice to a person.'""'I didn't think you had that in you to be so nice,'" Graham said, according to Trump.<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image">Jonathan Ernst/ReutersUkraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky speaks during a bilateral meeting with President Donald Trump on the sidelines of the 74th session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in New York City, New York, September 25, 2019.</div></div></div>Read more: <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/ralph-peters-rails-against-trump-cartoon-mob-boss-2019-9">Trump is a 'cartoon of a mob boss': Former Fox News contributor says the president isn't competent enough to be compared to the real mob</a>In the publicly released summary of the Trump-Zelensky phone call in July, Trump was said to have asked the Ukrainian president for a "favor" in investigating a conspiracy theory about the Democratic National Committee during the 2016 US presidential election. Trump had also requested Zelensky to "look into" unproven allegations of misconduct from former Vice President and 2020 Democratic candidate Joe Biden and his son Hunter, according to the summary.The existence of the call was brought to light after a whistleblower complaint from an intelligence official filed in August. Acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire is scheduled to testify on Capitol Hill on Thursday, and the anonymous whistleblower has also indicated that they want to testify about the potential misconduct, according to information obtained by <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/25/politics/whistleblower-agrees-to-testify/index.html">CNN</a>. Trump denied there was a "quid pro quo" arrangement during the call with President Zelensky, who met the US president in New York on Wednesday. Zelensky publicly echoed Trump's description of a cordial call, and he said he <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-bashes-obama-on-crimea-first-meeting-with-ukraine-zelensky-2019-9">did not want to be involved</a> in the "democratic, open elections of USA."Trump's re-election campaign said it believes the ongoing scandal will inevitably fizzle and hurt Democrats ahead of the 2020 US presidential election."Democrats can't beat President Trump on his policies or his stellar record of accomplishment, so they're trying to turn a Joe Biden scandal into a Trump problem," Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale said in a statement on Tuesday."The misguided Democrat impeachment strategy is meant to appease their rabid, extreme, leftist base, but will only serve to embolden and energize President Trump's supporters and create a landslide victory for the President," he added. <div class="margin-top"> <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/animation-rise-partisanship-congress-house-representatives-60-years-2016-4">This 60-second animation shows how divided Congress has become since 1949</a></h3> <div> </div> </div>

Trump and his allies believe the Ukraine phone call was a nothingburger, and led some people to describe it as 'one of his better' calls with a foreign leader

<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image">GettyFacebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg</div></div></div><ul class="summary-list"><li>As the United States gears up for its next big presidential election in 2020, citizens can expect to keep seeing political ads on <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/category/facebook">Facebook</a>. </li><li>Internally the company is dealing with the fallout from reports that its platforms were used to manipulate voters in elections around the world.</li><li>The latest big change is that Facebook will no longer pay commissions to sales people for selling political ads.</li><li>But political <keyword id="35666" type="COMPANY" weightage="60" keywordseo="advertising">advertising</keyword> is a multibillion business and CEO Mark Zuckerberg himself decided that Facebook should continue to take part in it.</li><li><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/?hprecirc-bullet">Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories</a>.</li></ul>As the United States gears up for its next big presidential election in 2020, citizens can expect to keep seeing political ads on Facebook. The company will continue to run political ads <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-ends-commissions-for-political-ad-sales-11558603803">the Wall Street Journal</a> reported on Thursday, even as it tries to move past the scandals of its social networking platforms being used to manipulate voters in major worldwide elections in recent years.Facebook is making some changes to protect its political ads from being exploited by Russians or other bad actors. The company will no longer pay commissions to salespeople for selling political ads, the Journal reported. That's a big about-face from 2016, when Facebook not only paid commissions but even embedded its staffers into campaigns to help them with their Facebook targeting strategies. It offered such white-glove service to both the Trump and Clinton campaigns. Since Trump's campaign was smaller and less digitally savvy, Trump's campaign used this service heavily. Trump's campaign chairman Brad Parscale even praised Facebook for helping it raise money, <a href="https://www.wired.com/2016/11/facebook-won-trump-election-not-just-fake-news/">Wired reported in 2016.</a> And Trump's digital advertising director, Gary Coby, <a href="https://twitter.com/ThomasS4217/status/984195841354235905">called one of</a> Facebook's staffers his MVP.Political ads were once viewed as a promising growth area for Facebook but now, as Facebook faces increasing scrutiny over how it handles user data, such ads have fallen out of favor internally, one employee told the WSJ. At one point, senior executives even debated whether they should ban political ads altogether.But CEO Mark Zuckerberg himself decided that the company will remain in that business, an employee told the WSJ.<h2>Facebook thinks it's doing a civic duty by running political ads</h2>Political ads are big bucks. Campaigns spent just shy of $9 billion on ads in the 2018 mid-terms, up 8% over the 2014 mid-terms, according to Borrell Associates. Borrell says total digital media ads soared to $1.8 billion for the mid-terms, or 20% of the total, compared to $70 million in 2014, <a href="https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/324674/midterm-political-ads-forecast-to-hit-nearly-9-bi.html">reports MediaPost.</a>Facebook's share was about $284 million, <a href="https://www.techforcampaigns.org/2018-political-digital-advertising-report" target="_blank" rel="noopener">according to estimates by Tech for Campaigns.</a> And Tech for Campaigns says that 2020 digital spending has already begun with Trump's campaign outspending all other players on Facebook and <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/category/google">Google</a> by millions.Last year, in addition to ending the practice of embedding staffers with campaigns, Facebook also vowed to manually review political ads, an expensive fix which ran the danger of making the unit unprofitable. Facebook wouldn't comment to the WSJ on if the political ad business is profitable, but the Journal reported that ad reviewers are a combination of automation and humans.Facebook employs about 500 people on its election teams in Menlo Park, California and uses pop-up teams worldwide as needed in places like Dublin and Singapore, <a href="https://www.politico.eu/article/facebook-european-election-war-room-dublin-political-advertising-misinformation-mark-zuckerberg/">Politico reports.</a>Facebook last year also launched <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/r-facebook-launches-searchable-database-for-us-political-ad-spending-2018-10">a searchable database</a> to show who is paying for ads, although a Business Insider investigation showed that the tool can <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-approved-political-ads-paid-for-by-cambridge-analytica-2018-10">be mislead</a>. Facebook declined Business Insider's request for more information on the profitability of the unit but pointed to a post Katie Harbath, Facebook's global elections public policy director, wrote last year defending Facebook's decision not to ban the ads, when the company debated if it should do so.Those that didn't want to ban the ads argued that "banning political ads on Facebook would tilt the scales in favor of incumbent politicians and candidates with deep pockets. Digital advertising is typically more affordable than TV or print ads, giving less well-funded candidates a relatively economical way to reach their future constituents," <a href="https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/05/hard-questions-political-ads/">she wrote. </a>So the company feels like this is more like a civic duty than a money maker, she told the WSJ. <div class="margin-top"> <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/gamestop-video-games-gaming-survive-digital-future-2019-5">Now that Google and Nintendo offer digital video games, GameStop could have the same fate as Blockbuster</a></h3> <div> </div> </div>

Mark Zuckerberg personally made the decision that Facebook will keep running political ads, even though the ads were weaponized in 2016

Facebook exec Andrew Bosworth warns fellow employees against using their power to stop Trump's re-election

Hello, everyone! Welcome to the new edition of <keyword id="9095853" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="insider-today">Insider Today</keyword>. Please <a href="https://www.insider.com/insider-today">sign up here</a>.<h2>QUOTE OF THE DAY</h2>"Wait. I can catch COVID twice?" — a patient of Dr. D. Clay Ackerly.<a href="https://www.vox.com/2020/7/12/21321653/getting-covid-19-twice-reinfection-antibody-herd-immunity"> In a Vox piece</a>, Acklerly describes a case of reinfection, and the terrifying implications of it.<h2>WHAT'S HAPPENING</h2>The pandemic is battering the US, with caseloads rising in 39 states, a<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/12/us/florida-coronavirus-covid-cases.html"> single-day record in Florida</a>, and huge testing delays. Meanwhile, the White House is <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/peter-navarro-claims-fauci-is-wrong-about-everything-2020-7">smearing infectious disease specialist Anthony Fauci</a>.The Washington NFL team is dropping its offensive Redskins name. <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/washington-redskins-to-change-offensive-name-logo-announce-new-name-2020-7">Owner Daniel Snyder capitulated to the change</a> after FedEx threatened to withdraw its stadium sponsorship. Polish President Andrzej Duda narrowly won reelection. <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/polish-president-duda-squeaks-a-second-term-electoral-commission-says/2020/07/13/838d4770-c486-11ea-a99f-3bbdffb1af38_story.html">The right-wing nationalist and Trump ally</a> has weakened civil society and independent journalism, exploited anti-semitism and homophobia, and undermined the judiciary. Stocks continue to rise in the US — even as evidence mounts that <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/economic-recovery-charts-suggest-us-coronavirus-pandemic-losing-steam-indicators-2020-7">the recovery is collapsing and the economy is sinking deeper into recession. </a><h2>VIEWS OF THE DAY</h2><div type="image" title="Fauci mask coronavirus testimony" height="1667" width="2223" msid="76947786" hostid="261"></div>The White House smear campaign against <keyword id="225564" type="PERSON" weightage="60" keywordseo="Anthony-Fauci">Anthony Fauci</keyword>Given President Trump's notorious inattention to briefings, it's not surprising — or even bad news — that <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/peter-navarro-claims-fauci-is-wrong-about-everything-2020-7">Anthony Fauci doesn't talk to him anymore</a>. Trump probably wasn't listening when Fauci did brief him, and Fauci was squandering time he could have spent doing literally anything else. Sidelining Fauci is one thing. <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/white-house-seeks-to-undercut-fauci-by-circulating-mistakes-list-2020-7">Actively defaming him is much worse</a>, though entirely expected from this White House. Trump and his lackeys are smearing Fauci, probably the nation's leading infectious disease expert, as wrong "about everything" and even circulating a list of Fauci's alleged mistakes to reporters, as though it's dirt on a political rival. President Trump tolerates only one kind of relationship with his employees, toadying. Everyone who won't boot lick ends up fired, libeled, under investigation by Bill Barr, or all of the above. Since Fauci is a civil servant he can't be fired, and he hasn't yet been investigated by Barr — but don't count that out! — so instead he's just being defamed. This White House has proved time and time and time again during the pandemic that it doesn't want truth. It wants good news, even when it's false. Trump prefers happy lies to grim truths, and thanks in part to his negligence, the pandemic is proving to be a long roster of grim truths — testing catastrophes, spiking caseloads, surging deaths, a failed lockdown. As the president's desires and the actual facts of the pandemic diverged further and further, Fauci became expendable, even a threat. The Trump White House would rather silence truth than face it. — DP<a href="https://www.vox.com/2020/7/12/21321653/getting-covid-19-twice-reinfection-antibody-herd-immunity">The most alarming thing you'll read this week, and it's only Monday morning. </a>The story of a patient who has been reinfected with <keyword id="8763838" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="covid-19">COVID-19</keyword>. Writing for Vox, a doctor describes a patient who suffered a moderate case of the disease in the spring, passed two PCR tests showing he was clear of <keyword id="1754604" type="PERSON" weightage="60" keywordseo="coronavirus">coronavirus</keyword>, and then fell sick again six weeks later with a much worse case of COVID-19. Coupled with <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-antibodies-study-herd-immunity-unachievable-spain-2020-7">a recent Spanish study</a> showing that antibodies disappear in some former patients, this news of a repeat infection suggests we can't attain herd immunity, and that a vaccine is our only hope for escaping our masked, socially distant limbo. — DP<div type="image" title="qanon trump rally" height="2510" width="5021" msid="76947789" hostid="261"></div>Trump 2020 is the <keyword id="9152811" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="qanon">QAnon</keyword> CampaignThe 45th president has long peddled conspiracy theories <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-broke-brains-conspiracy-theories-obamagate-vote-mail-coronavirus-2020-5">so outlandish</a> that there have been widespread calls for him to be <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/banning-trump-twitter-disservice-public-censorship-free-speech-lawmakers-2020-5">banned from social media</a>.Among these tinfoil hat conspiracies is QAnon — which as <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2020/07/12/trump-tweeting-qanon-followers-357238">Politico's Tina Nguyen</a> described it is "a sprawling and ever-mutating belief that a mysterious government official who goes by 'Q' is leaving online clues about a messianic Trump's secret plan to dismantle a cadre of Washington elites engaged in everything from pedophilia to child sex trafficking."Did you get all that? It takes elements of "deep state" paranoia, mixes in a little bit of "Pizzagate" madness, and includes a "hero" figure fighting for "the people." It also makes absolutely no sense. As Trump's presidency implodes thanks in no small part to his catastrophic management of the coronavirus pandemic, he has been sinking ever further into the QAnon fever swamp. As Nguyen reports, on July 4 he sent 14 retweets of QAnon-friendly accounts and since the pandemic began, he's retweeted at least 90 posts from such accounts. Also sharing QAnon-associated content have been Trump's personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, his campaign manager Brad Parscale, and his deputy communications director <a href="https://twitter.com/AlKapDC/status/1242825879463571457">Dan Scavino</a>. His former national security adviser Michael Flynn even posted a video where he takes <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/07/politics/michael-flynn-qanon-video/index.html">a loyalty oath sprinkled with Q-related phrases</a>. It's not as if Trump has ever needed a reason to lean into unhinged conspiracy-mongering. But in the case of Q, in what could be the final months of his presidency, he's just giving one of his most loyal bases what they want: an enemy to focus their ire on while the economy continues to freefall and tens of thousands of new COVID infections occur on a daily basis. — AFIf you're enjoying this story, <a href="https://www.insider.com/insider-today">sign up now for the Insider Today newsletter</a> to receive more of these insights from Henry Blodget and David PlotzTed Cruz will have to cancel his vacation in HainanIn the latest tit-for-tat between the US and China, Beijing has placed sanctions on thre US lawmakers — GOP Sens. Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and GOP Rep. Chris Smith — and one Ambassador, Sam Brownback. This is in response to sanctions the US placed on senior Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials connected to reeducation camps in the country's Xinjiang province where millions of Uighur Muslims have been forcibly detained.According to the <a href="https://apnews.com/7b689e7a51bee2a7e6e1a7699257239c">Associated Press</a>, Chinese authorities didn't give much detail as to what these sanctions would entail, saying only that they would correspond to US sanctions. US sanctions prohibit the sale of property between any American and the four CCP officials and bars three of them from entering the US.It's difficult to imagine any of these gentlemen losing too much sleep over being denied entry to China. The incident highlights the imbalance that remains between the two superpowers. The US still owns the global financial system and it is a top destination for wealthy Chinese people trying to get money out of China. So yes, this response from China is a petty gesture befitting its new "wolf warrior diplomacy" strategy — a strategy that requires a hyper aggressive response to any slight, no matter what the circumstances. And what it tells us more than anything is that we're in a high-risk environment where stupid mistakes can easily be made. — LLThe swamp gets a win for the gun manufacturers<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/13/us/trump-gun-silencer-exports.html?referringSource=articleShare">Here's a story.</a> A man lobbies for The American Suppressor Association, a trade group advocating for the removal of a ban on US gun manufacturers selling silencers to non-state actors overseas.Two years later this man, Michael B. Williams, joins the Trump administration as a White House lawyer.And two years after that, against the wishes of the Department of Defense, the ban is removed in a victory for Williams and his brother, Knox Williams, the president of the American Suppressor Association.The Defense Department didn't want US gun manufacturers to sell silencers to non-state actors because it feared that troops could be attacked with silencers made in their own country. People like the Williams brothers would tell you, "What's the difference? Non-US gun manufacturers make silencers and sell them to whoever they want."This is the kind of moral relativism you always hear from swamp creatures. "If we don't do x bad thing, someone else will just do it" — as if we should have FOMO, or something, as if gun manufacturers making money should be more important than being in good moral standing with those who fight and die for our country. Trump ran on draining the swamp, but — as many who observed Trump through the years tried to explain — he actually thrives best in conditions where morality is not a consideration. He is a President who <a href="https://go.lnkam.com/link/r?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2020%2F01%2F15%2Fbusiness%2Feconomy%2Ftrump-bribery-law.html&amp;campaign_id=b7YMMAqMdAL7wyzNe5m3wz&amp;source=4apvesisr53xcfisr53xcf">can't understand</a> why the US has a Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which prohibits American companies from paying bribes overseas. He is a man who hired Paul Manafort to run his campaign. He is transactional, and so are the people he surrounds himself with. And those people get what they want in this White House. — LLWhat's really causing Daniel Snyder to drop the name "Redskins"<div type="image" title="Dan Snyder" height="1957" width="3914" msid="76947791" hostid="261"></div>Daniel Snyder, the owner of the Washington NFL team, does not understand football but he does understand money. Snyder's team finally, finally announced it's <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2020/07/12/redskins-retire-team-name-monday-new-name-be-revealed-later/">abandoning — oh, sorry, "retiring" — its embarrassing name Redskins today</a> (and presumably its horrid logo).Snyder had vowed "NEVER — you can use caps" to change the offensive name, but corporate pressure did what common decency never could with the detested team owner. FedEx threatened to pull its brand off the team stadium if Snyder didn't drop the pejorative name. Pepsi and Bank of America prepared to yank their sponsorships too. And the Mayor and City Council of DC made clear that Snyder would never get the new downtown stadium he desperately wants unless he dropped the name. But if FedEx forced Snyder to act, what forced FedEx to act? The Black Lives Matter/George Floyd protests. The protests and accompanying activism about racist names, symbols, and statues squeezed FedEx and its corporate kin. They finally realized they were risking their own good reputations by associating with the Redskins' bad one. Why should they pay for Snyder's folly? The team hasn't announced a new name yet. Apparently the name Snyder wants has to clear a trademark dispute. When they do announce it, the vast majority of fans will celebrate, and then return to our real sorrow about the team. Once upon a time, Washington had thrilling players, capable coaches, a boisterous stadium, and victories. Unfortunately, Snyder's ruinous ownership has stolen all of those from us. A new name is a small consolation. — DP<h2>BUSINESS &amp; ECONOMY</h2><div type="image" title="Warren Buffett and Elon Musk" height="400" width="800" msid="76947793" hostid="261"></div><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/analyst-predictions-for-unemployment-benefits-in-stimulus-package-2020-7">How will Congress replace the expiring unemployment benefit?</a> Insider asked analysts, who predict the US could keep some kind of higher unemployment benefit, and add a back-to-work bonus. <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/the-rise-of-elon-musk-2016-7">Elon Musk is richer than Warren Buffett</a>, With Tesla stock surging, Musk's net worth just topped $70.5 billion<h2>LIFE</h2><div type="image" title="John Travolta Kelly preston Oscars" height="974" width="1948" msid="76947795" hostid="261"></div><a href="https://www.insider.com/john-travolta-wife-actress-kelly-preston-dead-breast-cancer-2020-7">Kelly Preston died at 57 of breast cancer. </a>Her husband John Travolta announced her death. Preston starred in "Jerry Maguire" and "The Cat in the Hat," among many films. <a href="https://www.insider.com/brain-injury-induced-memory-loss-what-recovery-was-like-2020-7">He woke from a coma with memory loss. Here's how he pieced his life back together.</a> Todd Wasserman remembered the birth of his children but not his wife. He thought he was 10 years old, but he was 50. <h2>THE BIG 3*</h2><div type="image" title="jerome adams" height="512" width="1024" msid="76947798" hostid="261"></div><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-retweet-post-says-cdc-lying-about-virus-election-2020-7">Trump retweets post accusing CDC of lying about the pandemic to prevent his reelection. </a>The original tweet came from game show host Chuck Woolery. <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/surgeon-general-jerome-adams-us-coronavirus-weeks-masks-2020-7">Surgeon General Jerome Adams says US can reverse pandemic in "two to three weeks."</a> Adams says it will happen if we all do our part by wearing masks and keeping physically distant. <a href="https://www.insider.com/five-guys-employees-fired-for-refusing-to-serve-police-officers-2020-7">Five Guys employees fired for refusing to serve police officers. </a>Workers at the Daphne, AL, franchise reportedly turned their backs on the officers when they entered. *The most popular stories on Insider today.

What's the point of Trump's smear campaign against Fauci?

Hello, everyone! Welcome to the next edition of <keyword id="9095853" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="insider-today">Insider Today</keyword>. Please <a href="http://insider.com/insidertoday">sign up here</a>. Note we'll be off Monday for Memorial Day. Enjoy your weekends, everyone.<h2>BLODGET &amp; PLOTZ</h2>Facebook's remote-working plan is doomedSilicon Valley, which adopts fads like it's a tween, has found a new one. The day before pandemic, the Valley was salivating over the Apple campus, goggle-eyed at Airbnb's conference rooms, passionately arguing whether the kombucha was better on the marketing floor or the engineering floor.But now? Now let's all work from home, forever!Twitter and Square recently announced that everyone could keep working from home when the pandemic ends. Facebook, right in character, has decided to move fast and break leases.Mark Zuckerberg <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-could-allow-half-its-employees-to-work-remotely-2020-5">announced on Thursday</a> that he expected up to half of Facebook's employees to work remotely in the next five to 10 years."We're going to be the most forward-leaning company on remote work at our scale," Zuckerberg jargoned.The pivot to home offices is easy to explain. Pandemic uncertainty will make crowded workspaces feel unsafe for a while, and scare workers off public transportation. Companies can slash their real-estate costs with a remote workforce, and maybe even salaries. Zuckerberg advised that <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/zuckerberg-facebook-salary-employees-moving-out-of-silicon-valley-2020-5">Facebook would cut wages</a> for employees who live in places that are cheaper than the Bay Area.I'm writing this from my bed, but I'm skeptical that remote work will remain so enthralling for big companies once COVID-19 recedes.Yes, a surprising number of white-collar workers are finding lockdown life enjoyable — no commuting, no travel, no dressing up.And it's tempting to think that if a little bit of working from home is good, a lot of working from home will be great. The history of human civilization, however, suggests this would be a mistaken conclusion.Working from home is fine now because everyone is doing it. We've all been forced into it. You're not missing any important meetings or gossip around the water cooler or happy hours — because everyone is missing them.Humans have a glorious capacity to adapt, especially when they feel what they're going through is fair, and this feels fair, because everyone is suffering the same way.But once the possibility of office life returns, the career fortunes and experiences of people who repopulate the Silicon Valley headquarters and people who stay home are going to rapidly diverge.Ask anyone who's ever worked at a partially remote company (say, me): The insiders and the outsiders have vastly different experiences.Insiders build the small, socially lubricating connections that humans thrive on. They create stronger networks. They develop better reputations, more friendships. They know more about what's happening at the company. And that makes them more valuable employees.Companies are deluding themselves if they think they can crush the human desire for that kind of knowledge, jockeying, and connecting. Office workers will become the elite overclass. Remote workers will be outsiders, sometimes confused, excluded from the in-jokes and cliques that develop in any real-world group.Silicon Valley fantasizes that technology can fix this. Facebook, above all, is built on the notion that electronic relationships are the equal of in-person ones. But 15,000 years of human civilization says technology doesn't fix it. Slack, texting, Zoom happy hours — they're better than nothing. But anyone who's ever been remote at a meeting where everyone else is in person knows how much physical presence matters.A prediction: Facebook and other tech companies will extend remote work, and for a certain class of employee it will be a godsend. Folks who generally work alone, who are temperamentally introverted, and who aren't ambitious will love it, and will thrive.But everyone who wants to manage, to run things, to influence, to jockey, to make friends, to build a network — they will clamor to work in the office. Almost every single ambitious person in a company will be demanding a desk at HQ. Within a very short time, Silicon Valley will largely revert back to status quo, with centralized, crowded hub campuses where all the action happens, and smattering of happy introverts working remotely elsewhere. —DPCome on, Plotz, some people will be stoked to work remotely forever!My partner, Mr. Plotz, makes some excellent points in his argument above that the new remote-work-for-everyone-forever trend is just a fad.Cities are amazing places, and, once it's safe to ride subways and buses again, most people will want to continue living in them.Office life can be fantastic, especially at fun, tech-ish companies that offer food and fabulously smart and charismatic colleagues. Climbing the management career ladder will indeed still be easier to do in person: Relationships still matter, and in-person relationships are stronger than Zoom ones.So, yes, once we finally vanquish the <keyword id="1754604" type="PERSON" weightage="60" keywordseo="coronavirus">coronavirus</keyword>, enthusiasm for cities, offices, events, business travel, and in-person work will rise again.But!A significant percentage of people, especially "individual producers" — writers, engineers, designers, and others who really do not need to interact with others to do amazing work — will take advantage of our collective epiphany to leave "the office" forever.There are so many amazing places to live in this world. So many places that are cheaper, more beautiful, healthier, easier, and more fun than the "big cities." So many places where it's better and easier to raise kids; have dogs, cats, and farm animals; exercise and be outdoors.For many of us, the benefit of being able to live in these places — while still enjoying the vibrancy, stability, compensation (even at lower levels), benefits, support systems, colleagues, and opportunities of working for larger companies and organizations — will make the trade-off worthwhile.Well done, Facebook, Twitter, and others, for welcoming this new age! You'll now be able to hire and employ talented people all over the country and world who would have been miserable living amid the Silicon Valley and New York City rat race.And well done, remote workers and tech providers, for showing hidebound managers that we all can now be amazingly productive from anywhere! You've helped create a better world! —HBBrazil's coronavirus disaster confirms that the tough-guy approach doesn't workThanks to the various approaches to the coronavirus tried by different countries, humanity is getting real-time evidence about what works and what doesn't.What doesn't work, it seems, is ignoring or playing down the virus and acting as though there's nothing that can be done about it.This approach, flirted with by President Trump in the US, has been taken to its extreme by President Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, as <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/brazils-bolsonaro-mirrors-trump-playbook-for-coronavirus-response-2020-5">Insider's Sarah Al-Arshani reports</a>. And Brazilians are paying the price.The unfolding disaster in Brazil may soon give the US some competition for the worst outbreak in the world.Confirmed deaths are nearing 20,000 and accelerating.<div type="image" title="Our world in data deaths" height="868" width="1600" msid="75903836" hostid="261"></div>Confirmed cases are also soaring.<a href="https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer?casesMetric=true&amp;totalFreq=true&amp;smoothing=3&amp;country=USA+GBR+BRA+AUS+ESP+SWE+NOR+FRA+SWE+NOR+FRA"></a><div type="image" title="Screen Shot 2020 05 22 at 9.15.22 AM" height="864" width="1600" msid="75903848" hostid="261"></div>Even on a per-capita basis, Brazil's accelerating epidemic will soon make it a card-carrying member of the coronavirus Hall of Shame. And unlike most of these countries — Spain, Italy, France, the UK — Brazil is getting worse, not better.<div type="image" title="Screen Shot 2020 05 22 at 9.15.54 AM" height="868" width="1600" msid="75903859" hostid="261"></div>Countries that nipped the coronavirus in the bud — South Korea, Taiwan, Australia, Denmark, Austria, Germany, among others — show that it can be done.Countries that were initially blindsided, meanwhile — Italy, Spain, France — show that, with a coordinated, comprehensive, and overwhelming response, the virus can be brought under control.Countries that denied the threat of the virus and then rinsed their hands of national responsibility, meanwhile — the US, Brazil — are still struggling. —HB<h2><keyword id="6355005" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="news">NEWS</keyword></h2><div type="image" title="Trump Ford blood" height="702" width="1405" msid="75903868" hostid="261"></div><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-claims-he-wore-mask-didnt-want-reporters-to-see-2020-5">Trump didn't wear a mask for most of his Ford visit.</a> He said he "didn't want to give the press the pleasure of seeing" him in it. Just wear the mask, Mr. President! It's morally right, and it will actually help you, because it will encourage other Americans to mask, which will slow the disease. The faster the pandemic ends and the safer Americans feel, the better your chance of reelection.<a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/senate-republicans-aim-to-boost-trump-by-investigating-joe-biden-2020-5">Republican senators aim to boost Trump's reelection chances by investigating (and investigating, and investigating) Joe Biden:</a> They're going to subpoena Obama officials, Democratic strategy groups, maybe Hunter Biden. This has been a successful Republican strategy in recent elections — see Swift Boats, Benghazi, Hillary Clinton's emails. The idea is to build vague doubts about Biden: Is he corrupt? Is he hiding something? At best it actually uncovers something shady. At worst it creates equivalence: Sure Trump may be corrupt and sleazy, but the other guy is too.<a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/karl-rove-helping-trump-campaign-2020-5">Karl Rove is helping the Trump campaign:</a> Insider's Tom LoBianco has the scoop that "Bush's Brain" — as Rove was known — is advising Jared Kushner and campaign manager Brad Parscale on voter targeting and swing states. It probably doesn't signal a warming in the notoriously cool personal relationship between Trump and the Bush family, but does reflect how Trump now dominates all wings of the Republican Party.<a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/lancet-study-hydroxychloroquine-for-coronavirus-risk-of-death-2020-5">More bad news for Trump's favorite coronavirus drug.</a> Another big study found that hydroxychloroquine doesn't help COVID patients and increases the risk of death. Fans of the drug will point out, however, that this study doesn't address whether HCQ helps protect you from getting COVID, which is what Trump says he's taking it for. We await the outcome of those trials.<h2>BUSINESS</h2><div type="image" title="empty plane coronavirus" height="512" width="1024" msid="75903873" hostid="261"></div><a href="https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput">US air travel hit its highest per-day level since March 24.</a> Yes, the number of passengers was still only 12% of last year. But it seems Americans are — very gradually — venturing into the skies again.<a href="https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/china-economy-ditches-annual-gdp-target-for-first-time-2020-5-1029226348">China ditched its annual GDP growth target for the first time ever.</a> It's set a target every year since 1990. But party leaders said the pandemic made it too hard to predict what could happen with the <keyword id="34412" type="ORGANIZATION" weightage="60" keywordseo="economy">economy</keyword>.<a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/barbara-corcoran-shark-tank-businesses-pivoting-covid-pandemic-2020-5">How four 'Shark Tank' businesses reinvented themselves during pandemic.</a> One created a mobile app for ordering Maine lobsters.<h2>LIFE</h2><div type="image" title="The great wildebeest migration in Africa, safari" height="1936" width="3872" msid="75903883" hostid="261"></div><a href="https://www.insider.com/bucket-list-trips-to-book-a-year-in-advance">6 bucket-list trips you need to book a year in advance:</a> Remember travel? Remember bucket lists? Easter Island, the Great Migration in the Serengeti, Antarctica, and other trips you can dream about doing when this is all over?<a href="https://www.insider.com/jk-rowling-edinburgh-cafe-harry-potter-2020-5">JK Rowling debunks claim that she came up with Harry Potter in this Edinburgh café.</a> She says she started writing the books years before she ever started hanging out at the Elephant Café. Also, she never went to the beautiful Portuguese bookstore that was supposed to have inspired Hogwarts.<a href="https://slate.com/business/2020/05/coronavirus-ads-tv-commercials.html">There are 13 kinds of pandemic TV ads.</a> The "You Can Count on Us" ad. The "Hi, We're Clean Now" ad. A funny list on Slate.<h2>REVIEWS</h2><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/best-online-cooking-classes-masterclass">Famous chefs like Thomas Keller are offering online cooking lessons on MasterClass.</a> Here are the best ones.<h2>THE BIG 3*</h2><div type="image" title="Penguins" height="1500" width="2000" msid="75903891" hostid="261"></div><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-assess-your-risk-of-catching-coronavirus-2020-5">How to assess your risk of catching coronavirus in any situation.</a> The 6 key factors to consider.<a href="https://www.insider.com/penguins-visit-art-museum-for-the-day-2020-5">The Kansas City Zoo sent its penguins on a field trip to the art museum.</a> They really liked Caravaggio, not the Impressionists.<a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/personal-finance/stimulus-check-eip-prepaid-debit-card-questions-answers-2020-5">All your questions about prepaid debit cards stimulus payments, answered.</a> Such as, who gets them? Can the government track your purchases?*The most popular stories on Insider today.YOUR LETTERSI agree that we must defeat the virus to revive the economy. As to air travel, there are other factors causing the steep decline. Just as it wasn't possible to visit nonessential businesses at home, that's true anywhere you travel — and hotels and restaurants aren't open, either. However, once we have full reopening, it is very likely that air travel will remain depressed for many reasons — people have become accustomed to working remotely, and businesses will want and need to save unnecessary travel expense. And if the purpose of vacation is to relax, you may not find plane travel safe and reassuring. Driving to a nearby vacation spot will have a lot of appeal.—Jeff FurnishInsider Today's goal is to provide you with insight and analysis about the big stories of the day — "Insider in your inbox."Please feel free to reply to this email and tell us what you like or don't like, and we'll evolve and improve as we go. And if you're enjoying the newsletter, please forward to your friends.Please also let us know your thoughts on the topics we discuss. Please include your name and city/state/country. If we think other readers will enjoy your note, we'll publish it! <a href="mailto:henry@insider.com">henry@insider.com</a> and <a href="mailto:dplotz@businessinsider.com">dplotz@businessinsider.com</a>To view this newsletter on our site, <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-post-coronavirus-pandemic-remote-working-plan-doomed-2020-5">click here</a>.Read the original article on <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-post-coronavirus-pandemic-remote-working-plan-doomed-2020-5">Business Insider</a>

Facebook's remote-working plan is doomed

<div><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image">Alex Wong/Getty ImagesPresident Donald Trump</div></div></div><ul><li>Special counsel Robert Mueller is probing what, and how much, President Donald Trump knew about the Russian government-backed effort to hack the Democratic National Committee, and the subsequent release of stolen emails at the height of the 2016 campaign.</li><li>Mueller is also looking into Trump's relationship with Roger Stone, a longtime Republican strategist who was in touch with WikiLeaks, its founder Julian Assange, and the Russian hacker Guccifer 2.0 during the election. </li><li>The revelations indicate Mueller is zeroing in on what appears to be a growing timeline of Trump associates' communications with Russia-linked actors during the final months of the campaign. </li></ul>Sign up for the latest Russia investigation updates <a href="http://e.businessinsider.com/join/the-russia-investigation" target="_blank" rel="noopener">here</a>.</div>The special counsel Robert Mueller is asking witnesses in the Russia investigation whether President Donald Trump had prior knowledge about Russia's plans to hack the Democratic National Committee, whether he was involved in coordinating the release of stolen emails, and why he endorsed Russia-friendly policy positions during the campaign, <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/mueller-asking-what-trump-knew-about-hacked-emails-n851941" target="_blank" rel="noopener">NBC News reported</a> on Wednesday.Mueller's team has also asked about longtime Republican operative and Trump confidant Roger Stone's communications with Julian Assange, the founder of the radical pro-transparency group WikiLeaks. Mueller is tasked with overseeing the FBI's investigation into <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/evidence-russia-meddled-in-us-election-2017-6" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Russia's interference in the 2016 election</a> and whether members of the Trump campaign colluded with Moscow to tilt the race in his favor. Russia's hack of the DNC and WikiLeaks' involvement in disseminating the stolen emails make up a significant thread in the investigation. In particular, NBC <keyword id="6355005" type="COMPANY" weightage="60" keywordseo="News">News</keyword> reported, prosecutors are zeroing in on Trump's public appeal for Russia to recover then-Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton's deleted emails during a July 2016 press conference. "Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing," Trump said at the time. Investigators are also reportedly delving into Trump's decades-long relationship with Stone, as well as Stone's contacts with Assange and WikiLeaks. Stone told the House Intelligence Committee last September that he had never "said or written that I had any direct communication with Julian Assange and have always clarified in numerous interviews and speeches that my communication with WikiLeaks was through the aforementioned journalist." Stone was referring to <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/randy-credico-intermediary-roger-stone-julian-assange-subpoenaed-by-house-intel-2017-11" target="_blank" rel="noopener">radio host Randy Credico</a>, who Stone said acted as an intermediary between himself and Assange. <div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image">Hollis Johnson</div></div></div><h2>A timeline emerges </h2>Trump's eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., was in touch with WikiLeaks several times between September 2016 and July 2017, <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/trump-jr-was-in-contact-with-wikileaks-during-the-2016-election-2017-11" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Atlantic reported</a> last year. WikiLeaks first contacted Trump Jr. via a private, direct message on Twitter on September 20, 2016 to tell him about a PAC-run anti-Trump website, called putintrump.org, and asked him if he had "any comments" on who was behind it.WikiLeaks also told Trump Jr. that it had "guessed the password" to the anti-Trump website, and told him it was "putintrump."Trump Jr. replied, "Off the record I don't know who that is, but I'll ask around. Thanks."On the day he received that message, Trump Jr. emailed high-ranking campaign officials, including Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, Brad Parscale, and Jared Kushner, informing them that WikiLeaks had contacted him.Kushner also forwarded Trump Jr.'s email to Hope Hicks, who was a spokesperson for the Trump campaign. She is now the director of communications at the White House, though she has said she would resign in the coming weeks.Trump Jr.'s communications with WikiLeaks didn't emerge until last year, but Stone has long drawn scrutiny, particularly after he sent out a series of tweets that raised questions about whether he knew in advance that WikiLeaks was planning on publishing Clinton campaign manager John Podesta's hacked emails. "Wednesday @HillaryClinton is done," Stone tweeted on October 1."I have total confidence that @wikileaks and my hero Julian Assange will educate the American people soon #LockHerUp," he tweeted two days later.While WikiLeaks describes itself as a non-partisan transparency organization, it has been criticized for its apparently pro-Russia stance, particularly during the 2016 US election. In addition to WikiLeaks and Assange, Stone was also in touch with Guccifer 2.0, a hacker said to be a front for Russian military intelligence.Meanwhile, following its initial message to Trump Jr. on September 20, WikiLeaks touched base with him again on October 3 and told him it would be "great" if the campaign pushed a story about Hillary Clinton published by "True Pundit," a conservative-leaning outlet that's been known to spread junk news. According to the story, Clinton said she wanted to "just drone" WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.Trump Jr. replied that he had already shared the story earlier that day, adding, "It's amazing what she can get away with."He also asked WikiLeaks about an upcoming WikiLeaks dump that Stone had tweeted about a day earlier. <div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image">Saul Loeb-Pool/Getty ImagesDonald Trump Jr. (L) and Donald Trump (R).</div></div></div>WikiLeaks did not respond to Trump Jr.'s question, and it ultimately published the first batch of hacked emails belonging to Clinton's campaign manager, John Podesta, on Friday, October 7.At a campaign rally three days later, Trump said he loved WikiLeaks. "It's amazing how nothing is secret today when you talk about the internet," he told the crowd.He also tweeted about WikiLeaks on October 11, <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/785898532645502980" target="_blank" rel="noopener">writing</a>, "I hope people are looking at the disgraceful behavior of Hillary Clinton as exposed by WikiLeaks. She is unfit to run."WikiLeaks then reached out to Trump Jr. on October 12, telling him that it was "great" to see him and Trump "talking about our publications." It also "strongly" suggested that Trump tweet out the link wlsearch.tk - which he did, two days later - claiming the site would help people search through the hacked documents. WikiLeaks also told Trump Jr. it had just released another batch of Podesta's emails.An hour later, Trump <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/786201435486781440" target="_blank" rel="noopener">tweeted</a>: "Very little pick-up by the dishonest media of incredible information provided by WikiLeaks. So dishonest! Rigged system!""This WikiLeaks stuff is unbelievable," Trump said the same day, at a campaign rally in Florida. "It tells you the inner heart, you gotta read it."That day, Stone admitted to having "back-channel communications" with Assange because they had a "good mutual friend.""That friend travels back and forth from the United States to London and we talk," Stone <a href="http://miami.cbslocal.com/2016/10/12/trump-ally-roger-stone-admits-back-channel-tie-to-wikileaks/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">told CBS' Miami affiliate</a>. "I had dinner with him last Monday."Trump again praised WikiLeaks on October 13, saying at a rally in Ohio that the content the group was pushing was "amazing."<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/02/roger-stones-secret-messages-with-wikileaks/554432/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Atlantic reported</a> Tuesday that Stone was also in direct contact with the group that day, less than a month before the election. "Since I was all over national TV, cable and print defending wikileaks and assange against the claim that you are Russian agents and debunking the false charges of sexual assault as trumped up bs you may want to reexamine the strategy of attacking me," Stone reportedly wrote."We appreciate that," WikiLeaks replied. "However, the false claims of association are being used by the democrats to undermine the impact of our publications. Don't go there if you don't want us to correct you."Two days later, on October 15, Stone reportedly wrote back: "Ha! The more you 'correct' me the more people think you're lying. Your operation leaks like a sieve. You need to figure out who your friends are."<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image">AP Photo/Evan VucciPresident-elect Donald Trump arrives to speak to a "USA Thank You" tour event, Thursday, Dec. 1, 2016, in Cincinnati.</div></div></div>On November 9, 2016 - the day after Trump won the election - WikiLeaks replied, "Happy? We are now more free to communicate."The group later <a href="http://dailycaller.com/2018/02/28/exclusive-roger-stone-full-wikileaks-direct-messages-passport-photos/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">sent another message</a>, saying, "FYI, while we continue to be unhappy about false 'back channel' claims, today CNN deliberately broke our off the record comments."CNN said the comments in question were not off-the-record because it made no such prior agreement with WikiLeaks before the conversation. Stone said in a statement to NBC News that he had "no advance knowledge of the content or source of information published by WikiLeaks" and added that he had not been interviewed by Mueller's team."I never discussed WikiLeaks, Assange or the Hillary disclosures with candidate Trump, before during or after the election," he told the outlet. "I have no idea what he knew about them, from who or when. I have never met Assange."Stone's relationship with Trump has also been of particular interest to investigators. One witness interviewed by Mueller's team told NBC News that investigators asked about what Stone's interactions with Trump were like once he ended his tenure as a Trump campaign adviser in August 2015. "How often did they talk? Who really fired him? Was he really fired?" the witness said, describing the questions they were asked. <div class="margin-top"> <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/why-a-politicians-character-is-more-important-than-their-capability-2018-2">Why a politician's character is more important than their capability, according to a reputation expert</a></h3> <div> </div> </div>

You Searched For "parscale strategy" and got 9 results

The Trump campaign's fundraising emails have gotten very in-your-face and awkwardly personal, especially with Eric and Don Jr.'s guilt trips

Jake Lahut

The Trump campaign is launching its own social networking app to mobilize 'the army of Trump' for 2020

Joseph Zeballos-Roig

Campaigns know more than ever about you - and it's another reason our politics are divided

Allan Smith

Trump and his allies believe the Ukraine phone call was a nothingburger, and led some people to describe it as 'one of his better' calls with a foreign leader

David Choi

Mark Zuckerberg personally made the decision that Facebook will keep running political ads, even though the ads were weaponized in 2016

Julie Bort

Facebook exec Andrew Bosworth warns fellow employees against using their power to stop Trump's re-election

Rob Price

What's the point of Trump's smear campaign against Fauci?

David Plotz,Anthony L. Fisher…

Facebook's remote-working plan is doomed

David Plotz,Henry Blodget

A timeline emerges as Mueller homes in on what - and how much - Trump knew about WikiLeaks and the DNC hacks

Sonam Sheth