Dumb as a fox

If we heard it once, we heard it a thousand times across that autistic spectrum known as the MSM about the amazing Clinton ground game. If saying something often enough and loud enough made it true, this screed turned mantra from the highest levels of American Pravda would be valid. Alas, the recent insightful polemic in Forbes magazine about how Donald J. Trump won the presidency put that lie to rest. If you rode the rails of the Trump train early and often, you somehow knew this was true – you just couldn’t capture the how, the what, the where. But you sensed it when you received three personal text messages on election day to go out and vote. You detected it again when two more Facebook ads popped up on your timeline on November 8, not to mention the several targeted emails waiting to be opened in your inbox. Hell, if Hillary Clinton had the ground game, Trump was flying a Boeing 757.

And now what we saw only through the dark glass before has come to light in Forbes. “It’s hard to overstate and hard to summarize Jared’s role in the campaign,” says billionaire Peter Thiel, the only significant Silicon Valley figure to publicly back Trump. “If Trump was the CEO, Jared was effectively the chief operating officer.” “Jared Kushner is the biggest surprise of the 2016 election,” adds Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, who helped design the Clinton campaign’s technology system. “Best I can tell, he actually ran the campaign and did it with essentially no resources.” And what exactly were they doing? Well, as in all good things, there is a baseball analogy. “We played Moneyball, asking ourselves which states will get the best ROI for the electoral vote,” Kushner says. “I asked, How can we get Trump’s message to that consumer for the least amount of cost?” FEC filings through mid-October indicate the Trump campaign spent roughly half as much as the Clinton campaign did. So the New York Yankees (aka the evil empire) with all their money and all their vast left-wing conspiracy theorists endowed by the Clinton machine were outfoxed by the scrappy little Oakland A’s. You gotta love it, people. By nature, foxes will eat everything, from insects to reptiles. Their behavior is characterized by a pouncing technique whereby they crouch down to camouflage themselves and land on top of their prey, ready to devour them. Using their powerful canine teeth, foxes grip the prey’s neck and shake it until lifeless. It is then that they can disembowel the animal and eat. As Albert Einstein once said, “Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.”