President Trump’s campaign lit into tech giants on Thursday for “voter suppression” and policies that cut them off from hardcore supporters.
Campaign manager Brad Parscale told reporters in Virginia that he knew immediately after the 2016 election that changes would be made to prevent a repeat in 2020.
Mr. Parscale said he told senior Trump adviser Jared Kushner at the time that Silicon Valley would “start systematically trying to destroy everything we did in 2016.”
“They have a culture within their companies and a bias within their companies — I don’t even think this is as much for the general public as it is to keep control of their own companies because they’re places that are so liberal, they’re so progressive, that they even think giving us an opportunity to talk to our voters is something they need to stop because it’s the virtuous, righteous thing to do at this point,” he said, the Daily Caller reported.
The comments come in the wake of Google’s decision to ban opt-in targeted ads, along with Twitter’s abandonment of all campaign spots.
“What Google has just done would be no different than the phone companies taking our phone lists and saying, ’you can’t call your voters,’” he added. “That is a complete voter suppression activity.”
Google rejected Mr. Parscale’s framing of the situation.
“We know that political campaign strategists on both sides of the aisle have raised concerns about how our changes may alter their targeting strategies, but we believe the balance we have struck — allowing political ads to remain on our platforms while limiting narrow targeting that can reduce the visibility of ads and trust in electoral processes — is the right one,” a Google spokesman told the Daily Caller.
• Douglas Ernst can be reached at dernst@washingtontimes.com.
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