Liberals Plot Revenge as Donald Trump Assumes the Presidency

The fight of David Brock’s life ended on a billionaire’s rooftop overlooking Manhattan’s Upper East Side. It was election night around 9:30 p.m., and he was alone after hopping across the city for return-watching parties with wealthy donors, including investor George Soros. Standing high above Sutton Place, Brock got a text from a reporter that confirmed his creeping fears that Hillary Clinton would lose to Donald Trump. “I had my little cry, and that was that,” Brock tells TIME, before dipping into morbid humor. “It was good to be on that roof in case you had to throw yourself off.”

Brock has spent all of his adult life fighting over the Clintons, first as a conservative muckraker who discovered the sexual harassment claims of Paula Jones, sparking the fuse for Bill Clinton’s impeachment, and then as the Clintons’ chief attack dog, working with her campaign to target anyone who tried to attack her. Now it was over. “What pisses me off right now is that it looks like they won the Clinton wars,” he says.

Before election night, he had concocted a plan for what he would do if Trump won. It involved moving overseas, as so many liberals had promised, to start a new life, perhaps in London working for the public relations arm of a friend. But in the hours that followed the letdown, his plans began to shift, first with a call from the longtime Clinton adviser James Carville, then with a tearful 6 a.m. conversation with a donor, and finally with a few hours of sleep.

By the time he woke up, he had the beginnings of an answer, which he tapped out in a memo to his fundraising partner Mary Pat Bonner. The basic idea was to double down and update his organizations for the next fight, with new technology, new targets and a singular focus to hobble the Trump Administration at every turn.

He was not the only one in the vast, well-heeled infrastructure that funds the Democratic Party and progressive movement to be thinking ahead. But as is Brock’s habit, his ambitions tended to be more sweeping. For years, he has employed eight researchers whose only job was to dig up dirt and impugn the motives of Charles and David Koch, the billionaire industrialists who have endeavored to remake much of the conservative movement. Now Brock decided, once again, that he wanted to be more like those he had railed against. “Donald Trump famously threw out the political rulebook,” he wrote, in the prepared remarks for his donors. “If we are to succeed in this period, we Democrats must suspend the normal rules of politics as well.”

To make a statement, he decided to time the kickoff of this Koch-like project on the day Donald Trump was inaugurated on the steps of the capitol. Brock called together about 120 wealthy liberals at a posh hotel outside Miami for a counterevent—two days of closed-door meetings to plot strategy and raise money. The barrier to entry for donors was the ability to give $100,000, and about 20% of the group were new donors, Brock says.

The slate included a combination of new and old faces to progressive activism: Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Silicon Valley titans Mark Pincus of Zynga and Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn, along with several candidates to lead the Democratic Party and employees of Brock-controlled groups like Media Matters.

Among those who have advised him on the plan is Hillary Clinton, who suggested to Brock in a phone call after the election that he should sign up some top-notch litigators who would do pro bono work against Trump. “She spoke about trying to construct a suit that would get you discovery on potential or alleged contacts between the Trump organization and the Russian government,” Brock remembers. Brock has since been in talks with attorney Gloria Allred to help fund the defamation suit she has led against Trump on behalf of a former contestant from The Apprentice, who has said Trump made unwanted sexual advances on her.

The failures of the past year hang heavily over his new effort.

If anything, the past year further exposed the fault lines that have long existed between Brock and others in the progressive movement. The Russian hack of Clinton campaign chief John Podesta’s email revealed regular grumbling about Brock’s actions. “I truly believe he’s an unhinged soulless narcissist,” Neera Tanden, a long- time Clinton adviser who runs the Center for American Progress, wrote to Podesta in one message. (Tanden apologized in an email to Brock after the release, and their groups continue to work together.)

During the campaign, there were deep divisions between Brock and the Clinton campaign over strategy.

The dark side of politics has become a lot darker since Brock entered the game in the 1990s. And that may help explain why his fight goes on.

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