The Dirty Prankster Behind the Chaos Candidate: How Roger Stone Destroyed Civility in Politics and Created President Trump

As he tells it, Roger Stone’s interest in politics began with a mock election in grade school during the 1960 election between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon. Roger, favoring Kennedy at the time, told his fellow classmates in the lunch line that Nixon had proposed school on Saturdays, a completely made up story designed to push his classmates votes exactly where he wanted them. This in a nutshell is Stone’s specialty, the art of controlling information, or disinformation (which he claims to never have utilized again), to exert his influence on elections, and it’s something he does very, very well. After a neighbor gave him a copy of Barry Goldwater’s seminal paean to conservatism, The Conscience of a Conservative, Stone was a dyed in the wool Republican, dedicating the rest of his life to the cause of partisan warfare. He was a quick study and quickly gained a reputation as a political prodigy, advising candidates who would win and continue to seek out his guidance, all this from his dorm room in college. He wouldn’t be in school long, as shortly after he started at George Washington University, he was offered a position with The Committee to Reelect the President, also known as CREEP — the infamous reelection campaign of Richard Nixon.

In the history of Republican politics, it is unlikely you could find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy than Nixon’s Committee to Reelect the President, a campaign that not only put Roger Stone on the map, but also was a launch pad for the careers of Terry Dolan and also Karl Rove via the CRNC. Much like Nixon, the campaign was built around paranoia, an obsession to have as much information on the enemy as possible, and to win at all costs, the ideal training grounds for a young Roger Stone. It was also through his association with the Nixon campaign that Stone would find himself in the middle of the Watergate scandal, an event that he managed to escape from unscathed but that ended up costing Richard Nixon his presidency. Stone relates a story in the documentary about his family seeing his name appear on TV during the senate Watergate investigations, gushing, “My parents called me on the phone. They were mortified. I thought it was pretty cool.”

In 1977, Roger Stone was elected chairman of the Young Republicans despite controversy from him being maligned as having been deeply involved in the Watergate. In the documentary, his campaign manager for that election, Paul Manafort, weighs in saying, “They embellished what had been a 20 year old kid’s role into being the mastermind of Watergate. Roger saw the opportunity to build a reputation off of being viewed as being that politically significant.” (Manafort you may recall was for a time the campaign manager for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, and is currently under investigation by the CIA, NSA, FBI, and Treasury Dept for alleged ties to Russia). Stone’s ascent within the party along with Manafort signaled a shift from the Republican party’s easygoing reputation of the “good guy Eisenhower earnestness” as Toobin describes in the film. This was no longer your father’s Republican party, as Stone and Manafort led the charge to transform it into a slash and burn, bare knuckle party willing to fight dirty to win.

As the vanguard of a new generation of Republicans, Stone revolutionized electoral politics with the creation of the National Conservative Political Action Committee or NCPAC, a way to circumvent campaign contribution limits but spend unlimited amounts attacking candidates (think of it as the grandfather of Super PACs). As Stone describes in the documentary, “We really pioneered negative campaign advertising in massive doses to win elections.” Roger soon found himself working for Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign in 1980, where he developed perhaps his most important talent — the ability to identify and target a group he describes as “The Reagan voter… a blue collar, middle income, working class voter,” later referred to as the Reagan Democrats. Stone’s ability to understand this group of white, working class voters that typically vote Democrat, and effectively form a message to reach out to them and have them vote Republican, would prove to be of immeasurable value in 2016.

In 1980, Roger Stone and Paul Manafort decided to go into business together formally when they opened Black, Manafort and Stone, a political consultancy and lobbying shop. Previously, it was considered distasteful for campaign folks to go straight to lobbying after getting a candidate elected, but Roger was intent on cashing in. As Stone himself states, “I’m proud of the job I did at Black, Manafort and Stone because I made a lot of money.” Even if some of their clients were foreign dictators known for their human rights violations. During this time he accomplished his goal of making a lot of money, and through is association with the Reagan campaign was introduced to Roy Cohn, who would then introduce Roger Stone to a young New York City developer named Donald Trump.

In 1987, Roger Stone first advised Trump to run for president. Stone had already been advising Donald since the early ’80s, and in Trump, Roger found a kindred spirit, someone who liked to do whatever it would take to win. Stone arranged for Trump to attend a party event in the early primary state of New Hampshire and saw first hand the effect Trump’s theatrics could have on voters. In the documentary, Paul Manafort describes Stone’s appraisal of Trump saying, “Roger saw the value of the outsider image… he saw something that nobody else saw in the early ’80s.”

In 2015, after previous flirtations with running that ended up going nowhere, Trump took the plunge and announced he was running for president. This was the moment Roger Stone had been waiting for and preparing for his entire life. In Trump, Stone saw a perfect vessel for the messaging he had honed over his entire career. From Nixon’s “Silent Majority,” from Reagan’s call to “Make America Great Again,” Stone drew upon everything he had learned and put it to work in Trump, creating a Frankenstein’s monster of populist messaging. For the first time, Stone had a candidate who not only completely embraced Roger’s cynical win at all costs style of politics, but pushed the envelope even further. As Stone describes, “The rough and tumble cut throat politics, the slash and burn of what was probably the dirtiest nastiest campaign in American political history are now in vogue.” Trump’s vicious attacks on his opponents were unprecedented, calling his opponent “Crooked Hillary” and telling supporters not just to avoid his opponent, but saying that she should be locked up in jail. Stone knew how to tap into anger, and the voters were angry in 2016.

I suppose I don’t need a spoiler alert to tell you how the documentary ended — Donald J. Trump was elected president of the United States. Stone’s life long crusade against the establishment (of which he had spent much of his life a part of) of elevating the outsider over an experienced leader had come to fruition in Trump’s victory. Anger had won over experience. The film describes Trump and Stone’s shared vision as, “Taking the low road, the toughest tactics. They think people who take the high road are chumps.”

The question now is what that victory has actually won for the country.

Comfortably Smug is a government relations professional with a focus on the financial services industry. He can be found on Twitter with his musings on all things finance and politics at @ComfortablySmug.

Stream Get Me Roger Stone on Netflix