President Trump responded on Thursday morning to recent revelations that a data firm his campaign worked with during the 2016 election used pilfered personal data to microtarget potential voters on Facebook — not with contrition, but by suggesting he’s proud of the scandal because it helped him win.
“Remember when they were saying, during the campaign, that Donald Trump is giving great speeches and drawing big crowds, but he is spending much less money and not using social media as well as Crooked Hillary’s large and highly sophisticated staff,” Trump tweeted. “Well, not saying that anymore!”
Remember when they were saying, during the campaign, that Donald Trump is giving great speeches and drawing big crowds, but he is spending much less money and not using social media as well as Crooked Hillary’s large and highly sophisticated staff. Well, not saying that anymore!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 22, 2018
Just days ago, a number of reports detailed how the data firm, Cambridge Analytica, used a Facebook personality quiz to exploit personal data it gathered from more than 50 million Facebook users. Cambridge Analytica used the data it mined to microtarget political ads during the 2016 campaign — even after Facebook asked the firm to delete the personal data it had pilfered.
During an interview on CNN on Wednesday, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg suggested Cambridge Analytica lied to his company, saying, “I’m used to when people legally certify that they are going to do something, that they do it… we’re now not going to just take people’s word for it when they give us a legal certification, but if we see anything suspicious — which I think that there probably were signs in this case that we could have looked into — we’re going to do a full forensic audit.”
The president’s self-congratulatory tweet comes about 36 hours after he accidentally touted the key role Cambridge Analytica played in his campaign.
During a speech to the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) on Tuesday evening, Trump said the effectiveness of his “drain the swamp” campaign slogan was a surprise even to him. That same evening, the Washington Post detailed that the catchphrase originated with work done for Cambridge Analytica by former Trump campaign chairman Steve Bannon, who oversaw Cambridge Analytica’s 2014 effort “to collect troves of Facebook data as part of an ambitious program to build detailed profiles of millions of American voters.”
That effort included testing “of anti-establishment messages that later would emerge as central themes in President Trump’s campaign speeches” — including “drain the swamp” and “deep state.”
In November 2016, Jared Kushner touted the key role Cambridge Analytica played in helping Trump win the electoral college, despite receiving less overall votes than his opponent Hillary Clinton. Last year, we learned that Russia bankrolled pro-Trump ads that may have reached more than 70 million users.
Trump, however, apparently feels no shame about any of that.