InsideSources

Donald Trump’s primary campaign relied heavily on data from a former analytics outfit behind President Barack Obama’s legendary 2008 campaign — data the firm didn’t know Trump was using, according to a former campaign official.

Matt Braynard, president of the Braynard Group and the former head of Trump’s data operation, said during a panel at the Republican National Convention Tuesday the campaign relied almost exclusively on data from Haystaq DNA to target voters.

According to the company’s website, Haystaq “pioneered the predictive analytics that helped the Obama campaign make history in 2008.”

Braynard said the company contracted to use the data through a third party without Haystaq’s knowledge, and that Haystaq data “drove practically all of our decisions and our strategy.”

While other campaigns during the 2016 Republican primary focused on mobilizing the known base of conservative voters identified from past voting history, Braynard said the Trump outfit focused on finding a wholly untapped base of potential voters already endeared to Trump, and simply “pestered the hell out of them into the voting booth.”

“We did no persuasion on the candidate, we just got them to vote,” Braynard told a panel in Cleveland. “One hundred percent of this campaign was put on unlikely voters.”

Braynard said Trump’s boisterous nature in making his issues known allowed the campaign focus less on educating known voters about his stances and more on identifying “people who liked Mr. Trump outside of the likely voter universe,” and educating them on how and when to vote.

Using Haystaq data the campaign was able to build a deep psychological profile to identify disenfranchised voters “rich in the wisdom of the Old Testament” with “a very unnuanced view of the world,” described by Braynard as realistically aligning with Trump’s own views about fraying national security in the U.S.

“This is a worldview, not a demographic,” Braynard said. “We vastly outpaced every other campaign in the primary combined.”

Trump largely dismissed the role of data and analytics earlier this year, saying Obama’s lauded digital grassroots efforts in 2008 and 2012 were overrated, and that like himself, Obama’s success was more based on his personal popularity than on a bustling data operation.

Braynard agreed that Trump’s media magnetism “made our job easy,” and that data analytics don’t drive a campaign, but said they can make up the crucial 1 to 3 percent gap in close races.

“That’s an important two or three points in a state like Iowa,” added Chris Wilson, who headed up data for Ted Cruz’s campaign.

Zac Moffatt, who worked on data for Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign, said that many Republicans, like Trump, are still skeptical of data’s role in campaign strategy, and said many are content to submit a post on Facebook and let the internet do the rest.

“Some people in the party don’t believe data is as important as it is,” Moffatt said.

He added that for many in the crowded 2016 GOP primary field, simply running the 2004 Bush-Cheney playbook hurt them, and that Trump’s small staff and flat organizational structure allowed the campaign to move quickly and react to the changing field.

Wilson pointed out that while Republicans have only four to five analytics firms on their side, Democrats have upwards of 16 or 17.

Former chief digital strategist for the Republican National Committee Mindy Finn said after the party’s crushing White House losses in 2008 and 2012, the RNC committed to building a better data operation. She said the party has found recruiting talent from Silicon Valley difficult, since many in the tech sector politically align more closely with Democrats.

Finn, who helped boost the success of the #NeverTrump movement on Twitter, said data can’t guarantee a particular victor in 2016.

“Data will only take you so far,” she said.

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Though more political campaigns have a larger online presence than ever in 2016, voters have less opportunity than ever to interact with those campaigns, according to a study out Monday from the Pew Research Center.

As the campaigns of Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton have demonstrated, social media is king in online campaigns in 2016, but the way each candidate approaches their sizable audiences on Twitter and Facebook are markedly different, with neither leaving room for a large degree of interactivity with voters.

Clinton’s campaign “has almost entirely bypassed the news media” according to the study, with 80 percent of the URLs in her Facebook posts linking back to campaign pages “which mimic the look and feel of a digital news publisher, but [are] oriented around original content produced in-house.”

By contrast, 78 percent of Trump’s links connect followers to news media sites. Both candidates displayed similar patterns on Twitter.

While Sanders fell in the middle, none of the three offer comment sections on their websites or tools for creating individual fundraising pages — both popularly used in Pew’s 16-year timeline of online presidential campaigns. Also absent are opportunities for supporters to join voter constituency groups, which President Obama offered 18 of in 2012 and former Gov. Mitt Romney nine — still down from the 20 offered by Obama and Sen. John McCain in 2008.

Supporters options for interacting with 2016 campaigns on their websites are limited to donations, email updates and volunteer signups, with only Sanders offering scripts for those willing to take the initiative to make donation calls on their own.

Though the nature of social media is interactive, that nature has not emerged in presidential campaigns. During the three-week study in May there were almost no re-shares on Facebook of follower content by candidates, and only two of every ten tweets by candidates on Twitter were retweets.

Trump stands alone in this category with 78 percent of his retweets originating from members of the public, compared to 2 percent of Sanders’ and none of Clinton’s. Trump’s inclusion of the public in this regard tops even Obama’s in 2012 — considered along with 2008 the hallmark of digital grassroots campaigning — of 3 percent. None of Romney’s originated from the general public in 2012.

That doesn’t mean Trump is ahead or even on par with the digital tide. During an event in Cleveland Monday discussing the various candidates’ digital campaigns — less than two miles from the 2016 Republican National Convention — Deep Root Analytics’ Sara Fagen said Trump, who famously discounted analytics at the start of his campaign, has missed major opportunities that could make the 10 or 20,000-vote difference in key battleground states.

Fagen, who pioneered political micro-targeting during the 2004 Bush-Cheny reelection campaign, said candidates in the recent past have used major announcements like vice presidential picks as list-building opportunities, with Obama using text messaging to gather cell phone numbers in 2008 and Romney using it to encourage supporters to download the campaign app in 2012.

“Donald Trump did nothing,” Fagen said. “He sent out a tweet, but nothing to enhance his ability to re-communicate with people, which I think was a big mistake.”

Google senior counsel Lee Dunn, who worked on the McCain campaign in 2008, said 2016 will be remembered as the year of mobile and video, and that going forward, she expects campaigns will be investing heavily in data from analytics firms and targeting voters through both broad and individualized campaigns.

“YouTube has more people on its platform every day than those people who are watching ‘Dancing with the Stars’ and the Super Bowl combined,” Dunn said, adding that more users accessed the platform on smartphones than on desktop computers in 2016. “That’s just setting the world on fire.”

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Call it the establishment striking back.

District of Columbia Republicans, including members of Washington’s much-maligned political class, on Saturday rejected presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump, choosing Florida Sen. Marco Rubio in their inside-the-Beltway primary.

Rubio won with 37.3 percent of the vote, followed by Ohio Gov. John Kasich with 35.54 and Trump, the billionaire business mogul, with 13.77. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who has famously alienated official Washington, finished last of the four with 12.36.

Of D.C.’s 19 delegates, Rubio received 10 and Kasich collected nine.

“It’s not surprising. In D.C. they want presidential candidates with clear policy proposals and experience,” D.C. Republican Party Executive Director Patrick Mara told reporters after results were announced. “Other than that, I guess, yeah, they’re establishment.”

A total of 2,839 Republicans voted at the primary’s single precinct, the luxury Loews Madison Hotel just blocks from the White House. That’s about 10 percent of the 27,000 D.C. residents registered with the GOP in a city of more than 600,000. Some waited for over three hours to vote, standing in a line stretching for blocks toward 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

“It shows how significant this election is,” Mara said.

The primary capped 24 hours that saw two frightening episodes at Trump rallies. The mogul’s supporters and protesters clashed violently on Friday at a Chicago event Trump skipped at the last minute. Then on Saturday, a man rushed the stage before being subdued by security at an Ohio campaign stop. Many of Trump’s critics, including his fellow GOP candidates, said he bears responsibility for inciting these incidents with violent rhetoric.

Strong anti-Trump sentiment was on display Saturday at the Loews Madison, particularly at a #NeverTrump table manned on the hotel’s second floor by two veterans of President George W. Bush’s White House: Chief of Staff Joshua Bolton and Deputy Press Secretary Tony Fratto.

Saying Trump has attacked all five freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment, Fratto told InsideSources it’s fair to call the mogul a fascist — and many other choice words. “I think he’s a racist,” Fratto said. “I think he’s bigoted. I think he’s xenophobic. Are there other words I’m missing?”

The sentiment didn’t go over well with Trump supporters.

“I think that’s very extremist,” David Eisen said when asked about the fascism accusations. “In 2004, [some critics said] Bush was a fascist. You can easily throw a term around.”

Eisen, who worked a Trump table wearing a hat with the mogul’s campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again,” told InsideSources he doesn’t blame his candidate for violence at rallies. In fact, he applauded Trump for not attending the Friday event, where he said the scuffles were an organized effort by protesters.

“If there’s going to be people looking for fights and that kind of stuff, looking to drown out the candidate at his own rally, you know, it’s a poor reflection on politics,” Eisen said.

He did acknowledge that Trump attracted violence because “he’s the most controversial” of the White House hopefuls, but said he’s unconcerned.

“He has has rallies that are 10, 20 times the size of everyone else’s rallies,” Eisen said of Trump. “At the end of the day, you’re going to get some bad apples in any bunch. … It’s a sheer numbers game.”

Fratto, unsurprisingly, had a different take, specifically about Chicago.

“I thought it was pretty ugly,” he said. “When you have a candidate that’s out there inciting physical violence between people attending events, that’s what you’re going to see. If he’s not going to take responsibility for it, it’s probably only going to get worse.”

Fratto called Trump “not a guy who’s going to beat [Democratic presidential front-runner] Hillary Clinton” and voiced the objection of many Republicans that the mogul isn’t truly conservative. He said the Republican Party needs to return to its principles of free-market economics and limited government, neither of which Trump represents.

“It took a number of years to get to this point,” Fratto said. “It’s probably going to take a number of years to fix and restore what the party is. That’s not going to happen overnight, and there’s probably going to be a lot of upset people along the way.”

Some of the people it might upset are those Fratto wants to purge from its ranks. He said the GOP, “through a number of election cycles now, has been willing to accept the support of people who only have in common with the Republican Party their hatred of President Obama.” Asked if this hatred was based on the race of the first black president, he said he couldn’t say.

The 19 D.C. GOP delegates will travel to the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, July 18-21.

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In the latest of many firsts in this presidential election, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are now united in their populist anger — at Oreo cookies.

Oreo-maker Nabisco is under fire from the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, the Democratic front-runner and a top Sanders surrogate, all of whom have recently attacked the company’s plan to send hundreds of American jobs to Mexico.

The worst assault yet came Sunday, which, in a terrible twist of fate for “America’s Favorite Cookie,” happened to be National Oreo Day, when Clinton called out Nabisco in the middle of a nationally televised debate.

The backstory of the confectionery conflict began last summer, when the snack manufacturer, which also makes Chips Ahoy!, Ritz Crackers, Triscuits and Wheat Thins as part of the global Mondelēz International corporation, announced it was laying off 600 employees at its Chicago factory and investing over $130 million in its Salinas, Mexico, plant.

Mondelēz reported the changes would save $46 million annually, noting that at least 300 Chicago layoffs would have occurred even if the money had gone to Illinois.

But in an era of economic anxiety, leading White House hopefuls are casting Nabisco as an outsourcing villain — just another greedy corporation putting the screws to American workers.

Trump kicked things off when he began declaring regularly that he’s “never eating Oreos again” after Nabisco’s actions.

The unconventional billionaire — ironically, a former pitchman for the cookie — owned Oreos as a campaign issue for more than half a year, until Sanders’ head of labor outreach weighed in last Wednesday.

At a rally outside the Chicago factory, Sanders backer Larry Cohen called the layoffs an “all-too-typical story about greed.” The former Communications Workers of America president said jobs were being lost “for no reason except higher profits,” according to the neighborhood news website DNAinfo.

“Wherever the wages are cheaper, that’s where they go,” he said. “When does it stop? And the real question is, when do we stop it?”

Hillary Clinton says she has a plan to do just that, and this week the former secretary of state debuted new anti-Nabisco rhetoric with clear echoes of Trump. During Sunday’s Democratic debate in Flint, Michigan, she said, “You know, when a company decides to leave like Nabisco is leaving, and they have gotten tax benefits from Chicago and Illinois to stay there, I will claw back the benefits. They will have to pay them back if they are leaving a place that actually invested in them.”

Mondelēz isn’t the only manufacturer pulling out of Chicago — some observers have called the exodus of jobs “a flood” — but the comments from presidential contenders have put the company in the spotlight.

The whole saga has been a headache for Laurie Guzzinati, the Mondelēz spokeswoman who’s done damage control since Trump’s initial remarks.

On Tuesday, she told InsideSources the Republican front-runner’s discussion of Nabisco has been filled with inaccuracies. The company is not closing its Chicago plant as Trump has claimed, and many cookies and crackers will continue to be made there.

“Oreo cookies will not be made in that Chicago bakery facility, [but] we will continue to make Oreo cookies at a number of our other manufacturing facilities in the U.S.,” Guzzinati said. She also said Nabisco is axing 600 jobs, not 1,200 as Trump has said.

Asked about Clinton’s plan to “claw back” benefits from companies that “decide to leave,” Guzzinati was quick to say, “We’re not leaving. The Chicago bakery continues to remain open. The Chicago bakery continues to remain an important part of our network.”

As for paying back taxpayers, Nabisco’s Chicago biscuit bakery has not received an “any tax incentives or credits of any material value,” Guzzinati said. However, she did acknowledge the facility is part of a standard “enterprise zone” meant to incentivize businesses.

Mondelēz may not be thrilled to be fending off attacks from presidential candidates, especially on the week Oreo celebrates its 104th birthday. But the candidates’ statements are heartening to union organizers still hoping to fight the layoffs.

Ron Baker, a spokesman for the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union Local 300, told InsideSources “there’s a change in the wind out there.”

Baker said Mondelēz wanted extraordinary worker concessions — 60 percent of employee wages and benefits — to keep Oreo production in Chicago. He called moving the labor to Mexico, with its $4-a-day minimum wage, “nothing more than stretching margins at the expense of people that work for pennies on the dollar.”

Baker is skeptical of Trump: “He may say he’ll never eat another Oreo or that it’s bad [jobs] went to Mexico, but the truth is he’s not talking about his clothing line that’s made there.”

But the labor leader is glad so many candidates are focused on the Chicago situation. He said his union has made no endorsement in the presidential race.

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Some of America’s leading anti-abortion activists are struggling to embrace presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, a politician who ostensibly converted to their cause but continues to praise the nation’s largest abortion provider.

Speaking to InsideSources at a Wednesday demonstration outside the Supreme Court, the activists reacted to Trump’s comments from one day earlier, when he said Planned Parenthood “has done very good work … for millions of women.”

The Manhattan business mogul, who called himself “very pro-choice” and even supported late-term abortion in 1999, has said he now opposes the controversial procedure and government funding for it. But that didn’t stop him from defending Planned Parenthood on Tuesday, dismissing criticism from “so-called conservatives.”

“I’ve had thousands of letters from women that have been helped,” he said. “And this wasn’t a setup. This was people writing letters. I’m going to be really good for women. I’m going to be good for women’s health issues.”

Trump’s stance was met with a mix of apprehension, distrust and outright demoralization on the part of pro-life activists, gathered outside the nation’s highest court as it considered a major case on regulation of abortion clinics.

Asked if she was confident the mogul would oppose abortion rights in the White House, National Right to Life Political Director Karen Cross initially said only, “I pray that he would. We have to take him at his word.”

When InsideSources noted that she didn’t sound particularly confident, Cross replied, “I don’t know how to answer that. I’m sorry.”

Another Right to Life staff member then intervened in the conversation, reminding his colleague that Trump had pledged to sign anti-abortion legislation if it arrived on his desk. “Absolutely,” Cross said quickly, turning back to InsideSources. “I feel confident in that, so you could change that.”

Other activists on the courthouse steps made no effort to mask their concern.

“We’re not comfortable with Trump, because we don’t believe he’s really pro-life,” said Missy Stone, national field director for Students for Life.

Stone talked openly about coworkers agonizing over the Trump, whose Planned Parenthood support infuriates them. Acknowledging her candor about the situation, she smiled and said, “These are not the talking points.”

Stone’s predicament is easy to understand. Supporting a pro-abortion rights Democrat is a nonstarter, but sitting out an election isn’t an option. She’s telling her voters “to do what they’re comfortable with morally.”

“It’s just going to be tough no matter how it goes,” Stone said. “There’s not a good answer on this, and it’s very unsettling.”

Among Wednesday’s demonstrators not formally affiliated with advocacy groups, there was evidence that both sides of the abortion debate see Trump as dishonest.

“I think he’s actually pro-choice,” said Washington, D.C., resident Lauren Haigler, who supports abortion rights.

“He’d probably do whatever benefited him most, which is the opposite of what you want in a leader,” said Jessie Sebbo of Atlanta, Georgia, a fellow abortion supporter who came dressed in a pink and purple uterus costume.

The question is whether Republican voters will actually punish Trump for his position. He frightens Washingtonian Donna Bethell, but she’s more scared of Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton. Bethel said she believes the former first lady is a criminal. Given the choice between the two, in spite of the abortion issue, Bethell told InsideSources she’ll support Trump.

“A madman or a crook,” she said with a look of bemusement. “What a choice.”

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The Carson campaign sent out word Tuesday afternoon that the doctor is calling for a private meeting of the five remaining GOP presidential candidates before Thursday night’s debate in Detroit to discuss striking a more civil tone.

Here’s the release:

Dr. Ben Carson Calls for a Meeting of all Five GOP Presidential                                     Candidates Prior to the Upcoming Debate in Detroit

Alexandria, Virginia, — March 1, 2016 – Concerned with the lack of civility currently being displayed in the race for the GOP presidential nomination, Dr. Ben Carson is personally calling for a private meeting of all of the candidates in Detroit, Michigan before the FOX News GOP debate scheduled this Thursday, March 3, 2016.

“The American People deserve so much more from the candidates who are seeking the most powerful position in the free world, and I share their concern that this race has taken a turn for the worse, to the point of embarrassment on the world stage,” said Dr. Carson. “A house divided cannot stand, and it is imperative the Republican Party exhibit unity by the candidates coming together with a pledge to talk about the many serious problems facing our country, instead of personally attacking each other.”

“If we are to defeat our democratic opponent in the general election this November, we must reach an agreement together each other that we will not succumb to the media’s desire for a fight on the stage in Detroit,” Dr. Carson added. “I am confident that the five remaining candidates can rise above the sophomoric attacks of past encounters and have a serious discussion about substantive issues and how we will lead our nation forward toward a more prosperous and secure future. America’s children and grandchildren are depending on us to fight for them and future generations, not fight each other.”

Today, Dr. Carson began reaching out to each candidate personally by phone in the hopes that this meeting can occur in the hours before the debate later this week.

Carson’s entreaty comes as mocking insults among the Republican front-runners Donald Trump, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio have devolved on the campaign trail to a level rarely if ever seen in a presidential race.

Trump at one point this week staggered about behind a lectern splashing water from a plastic bottle in what was apparently an exaggerated physical satire of one of the seminal moments from Rubio’s political career.

The Florida senator, meanwhile, seems to have decided to match the front-runner insult for insult, making jokes on the trail about Trump urinating on himself.

With Donald Trump and Ted Cruz each doubling down on the “deport-them-all” approach to illegal immigration ahead of the Super Tuesday primaries, one Washington think tank is warning that deporting 11.3 million people would trigger a recession.

According to a new report from the American Action Forum, the Trump and Cruz plans — each Republican presidential candidate has said all undocumented immigrants in the country must leave the country — would cost between $400 billion to $600 billion over 20 years, would reduce the size of the economy by a recession-level 5.7 percent and would lower the gross domestic product by $1.4 trillion.

Those calculations are based on the federal government maximizing deportations for the next two decades at current funding levels for enforcement officers, courts and transportation — which works out to about 400,000 deportations a year.

Trump has said he’d get the job done in two years, fast-tracking deportations at a pace of more than 15,000 per day — an expedited process that would require a massive expansion of the country’s immigration and deportation process, according to the AAF, a center-right think tank run by former Congressional Budget Office director Doug Holtz-Eakin.

The additional cost to the federal budget would be dwarfed by the $1 trillion the move would cost the U.S. economy, according to the AAF report — a collapse that would feel like the Great Recession all over again.

“The steep decline in the labor force would cause the economy [to] decline sharply. At the end of 2018, the economy would be 5.7 percent smaller than it would be if the government did not remove all undocumented immigrants,” reads the report, released Sunday. “For purposes of comparison, note that the decline in real GDP during the Great Recession was quite similar — 6.3 percent.”

Fully enforcing current immigration law and deporting 11.3 million in only two years, as Trump has proposed, would be, according to the AAF, a “monumental task that would require an unprecedented expansion in U.S. immigration enforcement personnel and infrastructure.”

“I think it’s a process that can take 18 months to two years if properly handled,” the New York billionaire said in September.

Trump repeated during last week’s GOP debate in Houston that if he is elected, “They will go out. They will come back — some will come back, the best, through a process. They have to come back legally. They have to come back through a process, and it may not be a very quick process.”

Trump’s rival for the GOP presidential nomination, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, has also called for deporting anyone in the country illegally without regard to how long the person has lived in the U.S. Cruz dismissed the Trump plan to let “some” come back as “amnesty.”

Deporting 11.3 million in two years instead of 20 years — even if 20 percent of the undocumented leave the country voluntarily — ramps up costs considerably, according to the AAF.

The nonprofit’s report details what an expedited mass deportation would look like:

• Federal immigration apprehension personnel would increase from 4,800 to almost 90,600.

• In federal detention facilities, bed spaces would have to increase from 34,000 to over 348,800.

• The number of attorneys required to legally process the undocumented would have to increase from 1,430 to over 32,400.

• The U.S. government would have to charter a minimum of 17,300 flights and 30,700 bus trips per year to transport immigrants back to to their country of origin.

Boris and The Donald. They have more in common than unruly hair.

London Mayor Boris Johnson has effectively anointed himself the leader of the campaign to end Britain’s membership in the European Union as a means to becoming prime minister. Donald Trump, real estate mogul and all-round loudmouth, has definitively assumed the title of front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination after winning another set of caucuses.

Americans who didn’t know Trump before — were there that many? — have had a chance during the presidential campaign to familiarize themselves with the man who denies he combs his hair over. The blond, mop-topped Johnson — he can credibly claim his distinctive hair is hereditary — isn’t a household name like Trump, or nearly as wealthy (few are). But he’s got more in common with the New York billionaire than many, Britons especially, might realize — or care to admit.

Both Trump and Johnson now have their moment, thanks to shameless opportunism, a keen sense of timing and a political environment that their current political parties shaped for years.

The 51-year-old Johnson can seem the embodiment of those British adjectives that make Americans chuckle when applied to a country brimming with aristocrats. But he is not barmy or batty, nor dotty, nor daffy.

“Boris Johnson: The Irresistible Rise,” a phenomenal, intimate look at the London mayor from the dean of British documentary filmmakers, Michael Cockerell, turns Johnson’s nutso public persona inside out to reveal a fiercely ambitious politician whose interest in sensible public policy is entirely coincidental. The bicycle-sharing system in downtown London became “Boris Bikes” after the London mayor took a wobbly ride on one. He got stuck on a zip line while waving the Union Jack. He hosted the world at the 2012 London Olympics. And he always manages to play the entertaining, endearing fool.

“As a general tactic in life, it is often useful to give the slight impression that you are deliberately pretending not to know what is going on,” Johnson told Cockerell.

Watching the antics of BoJo — the tabloid name that rhymes with “bozo” is entirely fitting — you find yourself searching for his basic humanity, and coming up short. If, in watching Trump, you can’t find much to redeem the constant stream of malice coming out of that unique, round-lipped snarl, with Johnson you look for something besides his enduring smirk. A question for both of them: Does your moral center extend beyond yourself?

Johnson has jumped into the fight over the future of the U.K. as the de-facto leader of “leave” faction, the group advocating Britain’s departure from the 28-nation European Union on the grounds that it pays too much for too little, that migrants come in and soak up British welfare benefits, and that — Johnson’s line — “Britons need self-rule.” It’s a line that sounds as much Irish Republican Army as John Locke. Johnson and his countrymen will vote on the question on June 23.

There isn’t much economic rationale for cutting the rest of Europe loose. One estimate predicts a 6 percent shrinkage of British GDP, the equivalent of a harrowing recession, even if spread out a few years. The country would have to negotiate new trade agreements with virtually every country in the world. Britain’s vaunted financial center in London wouldn’t have the access to European markets it has long taken for granted.

The irony of Johnson’s move is that he knows Brussels, the seat of the European Union, far better than most British politicians. He was a journalist there for the Daily Telegraph, a conservative London broadsheet whose readers ate up the mockery of the EU that Johnson gleefully delivered. He spoke heavily accented French with an excrement-eating grin while penning stories about — alleged — EU rules that required one-size-fits-all condoms, and classified snails as fish. (His reporting, Johnson grudgingly admitted in the documentary, was “a little bit over-egged.”)

Yet those stories helped put Britain where it is, choosing between the EU and a scatty, half-baked plan to go it alone. For years, the conservative press has hurled a steady stream of criticism at the EU, not all of it dignified.

The Conservatives, the party of Johnson and Prime Minister David Cameron, have always been split on the subject, with a good chunk wanting to leave the EU. Their skepticism became a campaign calling card, which over time made it fashionable to disparage the EU even if, in the end, you might find it a useful organization. Just as the Republican Party teed up Trump’s anti-immigrant message, Johnson’s own conservatives created the opening for him to assume leadership of the anti-EU camp.

A victory for Johnson’s camp in four months would knock Cameron out of 10 Downing Street lickety-split, since the prime minister — an old chum of Johnson’s at Eton, the famous prep school — has staked his career on winning the referendum. That would leave the leadership of the Conservatives in disarray at a time when Boris Johnson is Britain’s most popular politician.

Perhaps the main difference between Trump and Johnson in their aspirations is the system. Trump needs to win a nomination, and a general election. BoJo, who cannily took a seat in Parliament alongside the mayoral gig, must only win his party’s leadership; with a Conservative majority in the House of Commons, he would be elected prime minister.

Does he want to be prime minister? He abjures the possibility, but in Cockerell’s documentary, analogizes to the rough-and-tumble world of rugby that the toffs of Eton know so well: “If the ball came loose from the back of a scrum …”

Judge Maryanne Trump Barry has been called a “radical pro-abortion extremist” by Ted Cruz, but in 2006, Donald Trump’s older sister offered glowing praise of a then-Supreme Court nominee many now consider the court’s most dependable conservative.

Appearing on Capitol Hill before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Barry praised Samuel Alito, then a colleague on the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, as “a man of remarkable intellectual gifts.”

Alito, she told senators, “set a standard of excellence that was contagious, his commitment to doing the right thing, never playing fast and loose with the record, never taking a short cut, his emphasis on first-rate work, his fundamental decency.”

“You have heard the most glowing things said about Sam as a colleague on our court. I embrace every glowing statement,” she testified. “Let me just conclude with this … He is a man with impeccable legal credentials. He is a fair-minded man, a modest man, a humble man, and he reveres the rule of law.”

Alito faced significant opposition at the time from Senate Democrats concerned about a 1985 memo in which he wrote, “The Constitution does not protect a right to an abortion.”

Since joining the court a decade ago, Alito has dependably sided with conservative colleagues, including as part of the Court’s 5-4 majority in 2007 upholding the ban on partial-birth abortions. Last month, the Constitutional Accountability Center’s Tom Donnelly and Brianne Gordo, looking back on Alito’s career on the high court, concluded in The Atlantic that “there’s no one to the right of Alito on the current Court.”

With the unexpected weekend death of Justice Antonin Scalia, the Supreme Court has become the hottest issue on the Republican presidential campaign trail, with Sen. Ted Cruz questioning whether conservatives can trust Trump on abortion and gun rights.

“A vote for Donald Trump is a vote to write the Second Amendment out of the Bill of Rights,” Cruz told reporters before a rally Monday. The Texas senator, who is trailing in the polls ahead of Saturday’s GOP primary in South Carolina, has cited Trump’s older sister Barry as an example of the type of judge to expect from Trump.

Cruz has zeroed in on the 78-year-old Barry, a Reagan appointee promoted to the Third Circuit by Bill Clinton, for a majority opinion she wrote in 2000 affirming a lower court’s decision to overturn New Jersey’s ban on late-term abortions. (Alito, who was also part of that majority ruling, has come under fire himself from abortion opponents who think he hasn’t done enough.)

“Even among liberal judges that position is extreme and Donald said his extreme abortion-supporting sister would make a terrific Supreme Court justice,” he said.

Trump, 69, told Bloomberg in August his sister would make a “phenomenal” Supreme Court justice: “Well, I don’t want to mention names, I think it’s inappropriate to mention names, certainly at this stage so early … I have a sister who’s on the Court of Appeals and she’s fantastic. I think she would be phenomenal. I think she would be one of the best. But frankly, uh, I think she — we’ll have to rule that out now, at least temporarily. But I do have a sister who’s very smart and a very good person.”

Since then, he’s continued to praise his sister, but in a rarity for the billionaire GOP presidential front-runner, he has backpedaled somewhat from his original remark.

“Just so you understand, I said it jokingly,” Trump told “This Week” on Sunday. “My sister’s a brilliant person, known as a brilliant person, but it’s obviously a conflict.”