At Kushner’s instruction John McLaughlin, the president’s favorite pollster, was supplying Morris with his data. Kushner was trying to triangulate: keep the president happy with this new voice in his ear, but keep Morris at arm’s length from the campaign and, hopefully, minimize his influence on it.

Morris’s presence was mostly kept secret. The only indication was that a series of discordant questions with a racial tilt started showing up in the weekly tracking polls. “Where are these fucking questions coming from?” wondered the Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio. Then Morris sent an email mistakenly copied to the top campaign team. The secret was out of the bag: the campaign’s message was now, officially, despite Kushner’s triangulation, chaos in America—the social order in turmoil, criminals on the loose.

While the nation in a sea change of attitude seemed in sympathy with the Black Lives Matter movement, the new Trump message, in an abrupt turn, one following an old script, was all in on law and order and bad things about to be done to white ladies in the suburbs.

And, hey, chaos was engulfing the streets. At least, if you watched Fox News, it was. While virtually the entire media was otherwise focused on COVID, BLM, and economic meltdown, Fox News was nearly 100 percent focused on the burning of America.

Morris’s law-and-order campaign, his backlash against the protests, his darkness at noon in America, would certainly, Morris convinced the president, fire up the base. “Firing up the base” was a Trump White House term of art meaning a set of Trump tweets that would get Fox to double-down on an issue, thus amping up the passion at rallies, getting poll spikes, and, as well, in a perfect circle, reassuring the president that he was doing the right thing.

That was always the goal: assuring the president that he was right.

In this, foreshadowing much that was to come, little intruded on the president’s chosen version of reality.

Morris sketched a series of ads, malevolent and dark, that he sent to the president—in fact, written by his wife, Eileen McGann:

Phone rings:

Thank you for calling 911, the police emergency line. Due to defunding and increased call volume, we cannot take your call right now. Either leave your name and number and we’ll call you back. Or wait your turn on line while we help your fellow citizens. Estimated wait time is one hour thirty minutes.

In the weeks before his demotion, Parscale started to test the new messaging. Ever sensitive to what the president wanted reported, Parscale duly reported that Morris’s scare ads, as tonally far from the greater media’s sympathetic picture of the Black Lives Matter movement as could be, were scoring off the charts in pre-air testing.

And there followed two more ads in the Morris “insurrection” series. This was saturation placement: some $40 million would be sunk into the summer law-and-order campaign.