Charged up after sending “Crazy Joe” Biden “crying all the way” to the ground in their hypothetical brawl, President Trump decided to work in some high-level trolling of his critics by way of the much-hyped “Cambridge Analytica scandal.” The whole thing, suggested Trump Thursday morning, was yet more evidence of just how much his opponents underestimated his campaign — and are willing to do a 180 on a narrative if it helps their agenda.
A media firestorm has erupted over claims that research firm Cambridge Analytica used the data of tens of millions of Facebook users collected without their knowledge to help the Trump campaign, a claim the firm adamantly denies and has offered Facebook access to its records to prove false. As many have highlighted since the “bombshell” story first broke, the Obama campaign was widely praised by the same media outlets now so outraged for doing much the same thing back in 2012.
On Thursday morning, Trump made clear that he’s not so concerned about the Cambridge Analytica story; in fact, he pointed to it as yet another example of how his opponents underestimated his campaign and will reverse course on a narrative if it helps their cause.
“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!” he wrote.
Amid a flood of stories sounding the alarm over the thus far unproven “Cambridge Analytica scandal,” CBS News threw some cold water on the narrative. It turns out that the Trump campaign didn’t rely nearly as much on the firm’s data as many reports were suggesting and it “never” used the Facebook data that was allegedly unethically collected:
The Trump campaign never used the psychographic data at the heart of a whistleblower who once worked to help acquire the data’s reporting — principally because it was relatively new and of suspect quality and value. The profiling approach utilized by Cambridge Analytica allowed it to predict the voting likelihoods of individual people based on personality, the firm claimed.
While the Trump campaign paid Cambridge Analytica $5.9 million for its services, CBS reports, it did not rely heavily on its data, phasing it out after the primaries and turning instead to the RNC’s data, which it determined to be “vastly more accurate”:
The crucial decision was made in late September or early October when Mr. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and Brad Parscale, Mr. Trump’s digital guru on the 2016 campaign, decided to utilize just the RNC data for the general election and used nothing from that point from Cambridge Analytica or any other data vendor. The Trump campaign had tested the RNC data, and it proved to be vastly more accurate than Cambridge Analytica’s, and when it was clear the RNC would be a willing partner, Mr. Trump’s campaign was able to rely solely on the RNC.
Related:
Narrative Fail: CBS Drops Bomb On Trump-Cambridge Analytica Claims
Mark Zuckerberg: Here’s What Really Happened With Cambridge Analytica, And How We’re Responding