If you choose to believe Roger Stone, he is arguably the most important man in modern American politics.
The Netflix documentary “Get Me Roger Stone” gives him credit for the elections of George W. Bush and Donald Trump. The film also examines how Stone pioneered using political action committees for negative campaigning and how he was one of the first prominent campaign aides to cash in through lobbying.
“Let me ask you: Is it more brilliant and impressive to influence world events or to stand on the periphery of world events and yet get recorded as having influenced world events?” Daily Caller co-founder Tucker Carlson asks during the documentary. “Maybe the latter.”
Giving Stone credit for Bush’s election could be a bit much, but through his mastery of the dark arts of politics, he has certainly shaped the world in which we live in. Michael Caputo, who has been described as a Stone protege, says during the documentary that Stone “knows how to do the triple bank shot that nobody knows how to do.”
This quote from Caputo comes after investigative reporter Wayne Barrett, who Stone called “a piece of human excrement posing as a human being” after his death, explains his belief that Stone orchestrated the implosion of the Reform Party in the 2000 presidential election. Barrett claims Stone recruited Pat Buchanan into the race, and then got Donald Trump to flirt with a run, in which Trump claimed that Buchanan was a Nazi sympathizer.
Bush wouldn’t have won without the destruction of the third party, according to Barrett. Stone says coyly in the film, “After the Reform Party cost the Republicans the White House in 92′, again in 96’…yeah I may have played some role in derailing them as a party.”
Throughout the documentary, viewers are treated to a lesson in “Stone’s Rules,” one of which is “past is fucking prologue.” In context, this is Nixon’s “Silent Majority,” “Reagan Democrats,” and Stone pushing Trump to run for president since 1988. This, of course, is all the lead up to Trump’s upset 2016 victory.
Whether Stone was fired from the Trump campaign or if he quit, the 2016 election was certainly an embodiment of Stone’s style of politics. Trump accused Ted Cruz’s father of being involved in the Kennedy assassination (Stone is a prominent conspiracy theorist on the matter), the National Enquirer accused Cruz of having extramarital affairs (Stone is the only person on the record in the story), and Trump himself tweeted out a link to Stone’s book “The Clintons’ War on Women.”
Stone mentioned to me before the presidential debates that a great move by Trump would be having Bill Clinton’s alleged sexual assault victims sit in the audience. Trump would end up doing this. “We are in the age of Stone,” the operative proclaims at the end of the movie.
The documentary and his actions make “dirty trickster” the first phrase in people’s heads when they think of Stone. His message to viewers who will “loathe” him? “I revel in your hatred because if I weren’t effective you wouldn’t hate me.”