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Election 2024: Trump and Harris campaign in the Rust Belt

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2 weeks ago

November 1, 2024

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Election 2024: Trump and Harris campaign in the Rust Belt

In the days before the election, a political group has launched ads in Washington, D.C., with an unusual target: Fox News executives.

Set to music reminiscent of the score from the TV show “Succession,” the slickly produced ad features footage of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol along with Rupert Murdoch and other Fox News personalities.

“Two plus two is four, the Earth is round. Donald Trump won the 2020 election. Only one of those statements is a lie — a lie that Fox News and others repeated hundreds of times,” the ad says. “A lie that led to death threats against election workers, violence on Jan. 6, and untold losses for people and companies who make our elections the cleanest to the world.”

A dark-money group registered in Wyoming named “2 +2 = 4 LLC” — meaning they do not have to make public their donors — is funding the ad that was quietly launched in the weeks leading up to the election.

“An anonymous extreme left-wing group’s effort to fundraise off Smartmatic’s lawsuit is entirely predictable and we remain ready to defend this case surrounding highly newsworthy events when it goes to trial next year,” a spokesperson for Fox News said. “As a report prepared by our financial expert shows, Smartmatic’s damages claims against FOX News are highly implausible, disconnected from reality and on their face intended to chill First Amendment freedoms.”

Rick Wilson, a former Republican turned anti-Trump operative behind The Lincoln Project, said he was brought on by the 2+2 Campaign in recent months to help the group with messaging and strategy. He said that one of the goals of the group is to warn Fox News leadership and others from potentially airing false claims about the 2024 election.

“I view this as part of a broad part of an opportunity to have some accountability on organizations and people that have caused enormous damage to our democracy and to the republic,” Wilson told NBC News. “They are depending on a very pernicious lie that is going to potentially put us into a level of national chaos and destruction that is unparalleled. If we have big lie part two, I think the only outcome in this country is violence, and I am working very hard to prevent, both the election of Donald Trump, but also to prevent the big lie part two from dividing America even further … into violence and chaos.”

Wilson and others behind the group believe that Fox News had reached a critical point of financial vulnerability after litigation by two voting systems companies related to claims made in the 2020 election. Dominion Voting Systems reached a $787 million settlement with Fox News in April 2023, and a separate lawsuit by Smartmatic set to go to trial early next year could result in the cable channel having to pay billions in damages.

The court battle continues between Smartmatic, a voting company accused of rigging the election despite being used by just one U.S. district in 2020, and Fox Corp., which has said it covered newsworthy events and individuals surrounding the 2020 election. Smartmatic sued Fox and some of its hosts and guests in 2021.

Wilson said the strategy is to target “an audience of one” to appeal to a handful of individuals: Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch, the Fox News board, and key “influencers” in Washington, D.C., or elsewhere. “If Fox even looks over their shoulder and wonders, uh oh, maybe we shouldn’t go out and repeat Donald Trump’s lies again. That’s a win for the country.”

Wilson said that he planned to use traditional television advertising, digital advertising and social media platforms to disseminate the message in hopes of ensuring the short list of individuals see it. “Advertising has become incredibly granular, and allows us to target it almost at an individual level,” he said. “I can geofence around, around the Fox building, if I wanted to, I could geofence individuals inside Fox.”

The television ad has aired four times in the Washington market over the past week. Attempts to place the ad in the New York City market were not successful, a source familiar with the ad buy told NBC News.

Dmitri Malhoun, a former political adviser to Reid Hoffman, the LinkedIn founder and major Democratic donor, said that his Oakland Corps donor network had donated about $100,000 to support the initial launch, coming from him and others in his “tech and finance” circles. About $2,000 had been raised via small individual donations on the website.

A member of Smartmatic’s legal team told NBC News they had no involvement.