Trump’s Former Campaign Manager Is Back and He Wants to Remake American Politics With AI

GOP operative Brad Parscale is credited with using technology—specifically social media—to help get a certain former reality TV star elected President. Now, Parscale is back and he wants to use tech again to disrupt America’s political game. This time, the tech he’s excited about is artificial intelligence.

According to a report from the Associated Press, Parscale has launched a new company, Campaign Nucleus, which describes itself as a “game-changing SaaS platform that serves as the ultimate command center for running effective and scalable operations.” The company is using AI to turbocharge political campaigns via automated emails, voter sentiment analysis, and the amplification of “social media posts of ‘anti-woke’ influencers,” the AP reports.

Parscale was behind Donald Trump’s digital operations during his victorious 2016 campaign. During that election cycle, Parscale was linked to the notorious Cambridge Analytica scandal, which involved a British defense contractor helping the Trump team win via targeted political advertising. In 2020, he was promoted to being Trump’s campaign manager during the President’s failed re-election bid. Parscale left that campaign after less than six months, however, after a police-related incident that led to his involuntary hospitalization. At the time, Parscale said that he would be stepping back from politics to focus on “family and get help dealing with the overwhelming stress.”

Now, it appears he is back in the game. The AP writes that Parscale is certain that his AI product will help Republicans win elections, big time. The news outlet reports:

Parscale, the digital campaign operative who helped engineer Trump’s 2016 presidential victory, vows that his new, AI-powered platform will dramatically overhaul not just polling but also campaigning. His AI-powered tools, he has boasted, will outperform big tech companies and usher in a wave of conservative victories worldwide.

Will AI help Republicans auto-spam their way to the top? Given how AI has failed to deliver in other industries, it seems somewhat difficult to conceive that this will be the case. That said, it’s still early days in the generative AI boom, so it’s anybody’s guess as to whether these new products will be useful. Political emails already read like they were crafted by AI, so it seems somewhat irrelevant whether a human or an algorithm generates them. Either way, they will undoubtedly remain annoying as hell.

Gizmodo reached out to Parscale’s company, Campaign Nucleus, for comment but did not receive an immediate response.