#2580: David Bossie

David Norman Bossie is a political activist, chairman of Citizens United, member of the Council for National Policy and the 2016 deputy campaign manager to the Donald Trump presidential campaign. In 2020, Bossie became a central, early promoter of Trump’s conspiracies surrounding the integrity of the election. That December, for instance, Bossie was a signatory to a letter falsely declaring Trump to be “the lawful winner of the presidential election” and urging state legislators to ignore certified election results and appoint pro-Trump electors. During Trump’s tenure, Bossie was a central promoter of deep state conspiracy theories, e.g. in his book (with Corey Lewandowski) Trump’s Enemies, which “reads in part like Trump’s Twitter grievances in book form”, and which was a deliberate attempt to demonize law enforcement and intelligence officials and dismiss all checks and balances to the president’s power as “a vast left-wing conspiracy”. 

 

Under Bossie, Citizens United has produced a number of movies that blur the line between documentary and feverish fiction to attack political opponents. The 2008 film Hillary: the Movie, would happily report the weirdest conspiracy theories, including the allegation that Hillary Clinton had the cat of a woman who made claims of sexual harassment against Bill Clinton killed. It was, of course, also the movie that gave us the 2010 Citizens United ruling that weakened campaign finance laws and ushered a flood of dark money into U.S. elections.

 

In 2010, Bossie produced the film Generation Zero for Citizens United Productions, written and directed by Steve Bannon. According to the film, the financial crisis of 2007–2008 is partially to blaim on the moral failings of the Baby Boom generation – perhaps not an unreasonable claim in itself, but these people are silly, so by “moral failing” Bossie and Bannon were referring to the loss of “parental values” among zeh hippies and Vietnam protestors. Bossie and Bannon also released the bizarre “Christian war film” Torchlight.

 

Diagnosis: Mostly a spineless, power-hungry and unscrupulous political navigator, but we think we have to assume that he actually believes at least some of the nonsense he produces, in copious amounts, deliberately to poison public debate. Since he is also one of the most powerful figures in the US, he definitely needs an entry.