In September, at a resort hotel in the Coachella Valley, the California Republican Party held its fall convention. Brad Parscale—forty-four, six feet eight, balding, prolifically bearded—walked onstage in shirtsleeves and tilted the microphone upward, mumbling a self-deprecating joke about being “awkwardly tall.” Parscale has lived in a red county in California and a blue county in Texas, and he now splits his time between Washington, D.C., and two luxury properties in South Florida, yet he still speaks with the neutral accent of Topeka, Kansas, where he grew up. He was one of the top staffers on Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign. “I was the digital-media director,” he said. “So, yes, all that crazy Facebook stuff was my idea.” Other former Trump-campaign officials fill their calendars with paid speaking gigs, padding their remarks with jingoistic platitudes or rapturous accounts of Trump’s improbable victory. Parscale appears in public less often. When he does, he gets to the point.

“We have turned the R.N.C. into one of the largest data-gathering operations in United States history,” he said. He was referring to the Republican National Committee, which has raised two hundred and sixty-three million dollars for the 2020 elections. (The Democratic National Committee has raised just over a hundred million.) As Parscale explained, the Trump campaign has been operating more or less full time since 2016, continually improving its “technology and data operations.” During this period, the campaign and the R.N.C. have essentially merged, sharing staff, voter data, and other resources. The Democrats do not yet have a nominee for President, and some of their systems for acquiring and sharing data are considered outdated by comparison. “You cannot just build an app, or build out data, in the few months you have from the Convention,” Parscale said. “The Democrats will have that problem this time. As they all interfight, we are building for our future.” Two years ago, Parscale was named the manager of Trump’s 2020 campaign. “I know everybody wants me to do it from my laptop,” he joked to the audience. “Not possible. I’ve already done that once.”

Before Parscale worked for the campaign, he was a digital marketer in San Antonio with no political experience. Referring to his work for Trump in 2016, he has said, “I was thrown into the Super Bowl, never played a game, and won.” But it might be more apt to compare Parscale to the technicians who operated Watson, the I.B.M. supercomputer, while it successfully competed against two humans on “Jeopardy!” Machine learning and social-media algorithms are upending most aspects of contemporary life, including politics. One of Parscale’s advantages was that he recognized this fact and didn’t hesitate to make full use of it.

In previous elections, Presidential campaign managers tried to be strategic about where to hold public events, which slogans to emphasize in which media markets, when to give an interview to Elle or to Esquire. These were forms of targeting. We are now in the era of microtargeting, which began, arguably, in 2012—the year of Facebook’s I.P.O., then the largest in Silicon Valley history—and will continue, inarguably, long past 2020. It’s no longer good enough to run one radio ad in Scranton and another one in Pittsburgh. These days, campaigns can carve the electorate into creepily thin segments: Gold Star moms near military bases, paintball-playing widowers in the Florida Panhandle, recovering addicts in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. And, for anyone who wants to reach a specific audience with an actionable message, there has never been a platform as potent as Facebook. No matter how many bad press cycles or localized boycotts the company endures, the number of users keeps expanding; on average, those users are growing older, and that presumably redounds to Trump’s advantage. “I understood early that Facebook was how Donald Trump was going to win,” Parscale said, in October, 2017, on “60 Minutes.” “Facebook was the method—it was the highway which his car drove on.”

The instant a Presidential election is over, everyone who worked on the losing campaign is recast as a dunce, and everyone on the winning side is reborn as a genius. In 2016, three weeks after Election Day, Harvard’s Institute of Politics hosted a panel discussion featuring leaders of Hillary Clinton’s campaign and Trump’s campaign—the first public reunion of the now dunces and the now geniuses. It got heated.

“I would rather lose than win the way you guys did,” Jennifer Palmieri, Clinton’s director of communications, said.

“No, you wouldn’t, respectfully,” Kellyanne Conway, one of Trump’s campaign managers, said.

Later in the discussion, Mandy Grunwald, another Clinton adviser, rephrased Palmieri’s rebuke as a backhanded compliment. “I don’t think you guys give yourselves enough credit for the negative campaign you ran,” she said, alluding to “the fake Facebook stuff, or the great dark-arts stuff you were pumping out there.” Turning to Parscale, she went on, “I’m fascinated to hear all about that, because it’s so hard for us to track.”

“I’d agree,” he said. “That’s the beauty of Facebook.”

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Shopping Cartoon by Liana Finck

Another morning-after-Election Day tradition is the postmortem. Every political demise has a hundred etiologies. Still, when it comes to the 2016 election, we can’t seem to help ourselves: Was it the Russians? The letter from James Comey? The weather in Wisconsin? These days, the culprit many people settle on is the Internet. “There’s a tendency to turn it into a catchall explanation,” David Plouffe, a Democratic strategist who was Barack Obama’s campaign manager in 2008, told me recently. “Which is understandable, given how powerful it is, and how hard it is for most people to understand.” Plouffe came to prominence at a time when social media was generally perceived as innocuous, even liberatory. He and his team made extensive use of digital fund-raising, organizing, and advertising; after Obama’s victory, they were hailed as innovators. “At the same time, the digital stuff is not a magic potion,” he continued. “It’s an ever-evolving tool. A tool that the Trump campaign, whatever else you want to say about them, used quite effectively.” (Plouffe is now an adviser to the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a philanthropic organization set up by Facebook’s founder and C.E.O., Mark Zuckerberg, and his wife, Priscilla Chan.)

Between June and November of 2016, Parscale’s firm was paid ninety-four million dollars, most of which went toward digital advertising. Some of the ads were standard fare about national security or the debt; others were designed to help Trump’s mendacity and nativism go viral on social media, where lies and fractious memes are disproportionately likely to be amplified. Facebook did not maintain an archive of its political ads until 2018, so some of the 2016 campaign’s dodgier efforts may be lost to history. But we do know that Trump tweeted an image, originally circulated on anti-Semitic message boards, of Hillary Clinton’s face, a Jewish star, and a pile of cash; that one of Parscale’s staffers made an ad featuring audio of Hillary Clinton referring to African-Americans as “superpredators” (the intention was to microtarget the ad to black Facebook users in swing states); and that Defeat Crooked Hillary, a Facebook page funded by a pro-Trump super PAC, disseminated several conspiratorial videos, including one insinuating that Clinton was taking illicit drugs and another alleging that she had undisclosed ties to Vladimir Putin.