November 08, 2017
How I Helped Get Trump Elected: The President’s Digital Guru
The digital director of Donald Trump's presidential election campaign has revealed how he helped get the businessman elected.
Brad Parscale, a man who's been described as "the genius who won Trump's campaign," by The Washington Post, said that Facebook had helped spread Trump's message to voters.
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The election of Trump to the U.S. presidency a year ago was largely credited to an internet campaign led by Parscale that utilized social media platforms such as Facebook to spread his political views, a strategy first employed with success by his predecessor Barack Obama.
In October, Parscale credited Facebook with helping to fuel Trump's win last November, saying during an interview with CBS News that the Trump campaign had Facebook employees "embedded inside our offices" to explain how to use the platform to target voters. Facebook said in a statement that it had offered both the Trump and Clinton campaigns "identical support."
Parscale said Wednesday that the Facebook campaign had enabled Trump to "raise a lot of money" from grassroots supporters — up to $280 million, he said. But, in turn, a lot of money had been spent on advertising on the social media platform, allowing the Trump campaign to compete with Hillary Clinton's Democratic campaign.
"When Donald Trump became the (Republican) candidate we didn't have any money other than Mr Trump's money and I don't think he wanted to write that check all himself… We needed to create a grassroots campaign and we needed to go out and find millions of people to be our supporters and Facebook allowed us to do that in alarming numbers, very fast," Parscale said.
He said social media platforms queued up to help the Trump campaign, wanting a share of its advertising spending: "If you're going to spend $100 million on social media, a lot of people show up at your office wanting to help you spend that money on their platforms, so Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Google — they were all wanting to have that money."
Facebook had helped to provide advice on how best to use its platform to engage with a wider audience, Parscale said: "They have lots of products, they're a very big company and said, 'Please educate me and my staff in everything that you can,'" something he claimed the Hillary Clinton campaign had not taken advantage of.