Bill Mitchell Breaks the Internet

And despite an appearance of self-parody, he is genuinely devoted to Donald Trump’s candidacy. “Once I decide about something it’s hard to shake me off of it,” Mitchell tells me in an interview. His steady and smiling delivery of fringe theories gives Trump supporters a fallback reassurance they haven’t seen from their unpredictable candidate. From the moment of the future Republican nominee’s dramatic entry into the race via escalator, Mitchell hasn’t once doubted Donald Trump will win.

Over the last year and a half, Mitchell’s over-the-top pro-Trump tweets helped him build an online audience. His Twitter following ballooned from 124 (per his recollection) to over 96,000. In February, MIT Media Lab ranked him the top ordinary citizen influencing the election—number 26, after politicians and media networks. As his online following grew, the 56-year-old Mitchell attracted the attention of conservative talk radio hosts, who began booking him as a frequent guest. Mitchell’s decades working as an executive recruiter honed his communication skills, he told me. And being a bachelor left him enough time to obsess over his favorite news sites, Breitbart and the blog of Gateway Pundit, where he’d been a frequent commenter for years. Early influences explain his success as an entertainer, he said: His mother was a public-speaking professor, and he loved musical theatre as a child.

In June he founded YourVoiceRadio, a podcast and a YouTube channel, where he and a cohort of cohosts answer callers, pump for Trump, and rail against the twisted system. (Sunday night, a cohost wept for the possibly assassinated Julian Assange.) Would he consider a career with Trump TV? “If they ask me!” he says.

And why wouldn’t they? Mitchell’s highest calling is “unskewing” the polls to mete out the hidden truth of an inevitable Trump win. He calls his show a “suicide prevention squad,” a rare recognition of Trumpkins’ lament from the delusional optimist. But it’s not the reality of Trump’s likely loss tanking their morale: It’s a media conspiracy.

“This is what the media’s trying to do: trying to demotivate us, so we won’t knock on doors, so we won’t make phone calls, so we won’t contribute, you know, so we won’t go out and vote. You know, they’re trying to discourage us,” Mitchell told me. Fortunately their evil plan will backfire: “What they’re doing is risky because you know coming out with these polls they’re even demotivating their own base, [who will say] I don’t even need to go vote because we’re winning by so much.”

Reflecting on his sudden fame, Mitchell credits a knack for catchy “word pictures, to create images that people could understand and grasp not just logically or emotionally. That carried over to Twitter.” In fact, Trump surrogates—ones Mitchell swore I would recognize but declined to name—call him for one-liners before their television appearances. They’ll use his “zingers,” and he gets no credit, happy just to do his part.

Trump detractors who find Mitchell ridiculous fail to comprehend his rhetorical style. “They don’t understand that I quite often speak in symbolism,” he explained. One since-deleted tweet he sent earlier this month that united left and right in appreciation of its absurdity—”Trump’s groundgame isn’t in a computer, it’s in our hearts”—had a deeper meaning, lost on the brainwashed hordes. Mitchell cleared it up for me.

The Clinton campaign believes “they’re going to win because they have detailed data for every voter in America,” but “Trump supporters’ hearts are with Trump. That’s where the strength of our ground game is.” Data is no match for emotions, and “that’s why Trump has had over a zillion people attend his rallies.” While Never Trumpers have made him a meme, Mitchell’s detractors in the Clinton campaign are mainly robots, he claims. If they’re stormtroopers, Mitchell analogizes, “[Trump is] like Han Solo. Han Solo started out a smuggler, ended up being galactic hero, you know.”

Disappointing numbers are the enemy in this fantasy narrative.

But Mitchell doesn’t discount all data. The post-debate poll published by the Trump-friendly Drudge Report showed an epic Trump win, 85 percent to 15 percent. And, taken with Hillary Clinton’s weak book sales and lackluster rallies, these online results reassure Mitchell that Clinton may control the media, but she can’t change our hearts.

Count heartland yard signs and attend Trump rallies for a dose of reality, Mitchell counsels. “If I was an alien walking around looking at the empirical evidence all around me, I would gather that Trump’s running away with this thing. And that Hillary’s not even in this race.”

Bill Mitchell is not alien, as far as we know. But even he admits his unshakable faith in a Trump win, and his rapid rise from obscurity to fame, suggest some paranormal interference. “The reason that I know Trump is going to win is that I’m actually from the future. I came back just to observe the whole thing,” he told me. Then his voice fell, “Just kidding by the way. Don’t write, ‘Bill Mitchell is crazy.'” Why would I do that?