Welcome to POLITICO’s West Wing Playbook, your guide to the people and power centers in the Biden administration. With help from Allie Bice. Send tips | Subscribe here | Email Alex | Email Max Ask any Democratic operative these days, including some who work in the Biden White House, about the Twitter account they find most noxious and you’re likely to get the same answer. @RNCResearch — the handle for the Republican National Committee to sling mud, tar opponents, and try to shape news cycles — is perhaps the purest distillation of GOP politics in the DONALD TRUMP era. And that’s for good reason. The conservatives behind the feed deliberately took a page from the Trump war room when charting out how they wanted to attack President JOE BIDEN at the start of his term last year: Flood the zone and bully opponents. The early goal, one RNC official recalled, was to be dog-on-a-bone aggressive in an effort to boot Biden out of his political honeymoon. The brass eagerly complied. “You are speaking my language,” the official recounted telling a colleague when they talked about having a truly pugnacious account early last year. “That’s exactly what I want to do.” The RNC says its account has played a role in knocking Biden down multiple pegs. But its hostile approach has not always been synonymous with accuracy. Over the course of the Biden presidency, the account, which has more than 242,000 followers and about 30 GOP dedicated researchers who contribute to it, has occasionally been hit by the arrows it’s tried to sling. This week, @RNCResearch highlighted a clip of Biden struggling to put on his jacket in the wind — an otherwise innocuous moment that led to complaints of triviality. The account also featured a snippet of the president asking Kentucky Gov. ANDY BESHEAR for permission to speak. The idea was to frame Biden as a pushover. Many observers noticed a president acting polite. In April, @RNCResearch claimed Biden was pooped on by a bird at an indoor event in Iowa. The Daily Mail ran with the story. But a Des Moines Register photographer in Menlo, Iowa, noted the president’s jacket was actually stained by distillers grains. The same month, when Biden stood alongside his ATF director STEVE DETTELBACH and joked that he “was responsible for the weather,” @RNCResearch tweeted that Dettelbach is Jewish, implying the president was adopting antisemitic tropes. In July, @RNCResearch asked whether Biden, during a climate change speech, had just announced he has cancer. The Washington Post’s Fact Checker, GLENN KESSLER, called the tweet “dumb” because Biden’s medical report has long disclosed the removal of non-melanoma skin cancers before he was president. All told, West Wing Playbook counted roughly a dozen fact-checks of the account — including by PolitiFact, CNN and WaPo — that have found claims wrong or misleading. Rather than own up to the inaccuracies, the team behind @RNCResearch has sometimes sought to stop being called out for them. DANIEL DALE, CNN’s fact checker, said in January the account blocked him after he followed it. They’ve also accused those who complain about them of having misplaced priorities. “If only the Biden White House and Democrats were focused on real issues instead of spending their day whining about an RNC Twitter account,” said RNC spokesperson EMMA VAUGHN. “Do your jobs.” To a degree the account, with its attention-grabbing and bellicose offerings, has become a reflection of the current age of personality politics and hyperpartisanship. Its critics find it bewildering, the stuff of trolls. “It’s like they handed the keys over to some nihilist teenage shitposters who wanted to see how fast they could get reporters to discount everything they say,” a Biden campaign alum told West Wing Playbook. “They think crowing about intentionally lying makes them tough when it really just worsens the feedback loop.” But for all the eyebrows they raise, the individuals behind @RNCResearch believe they’ve had the impact they set out for, and that Biden — through act and action — has helped them do it. The account takes credit for advancing an image of Biden as the modern day Mr. Magoo, the elderly bumbling cartoon character. “The philosophy is, how we are getting a message out there that convinces people to vote Republican,” TOMMY PIGOTT, the RNC’s rapid response director, who helps manage the account, told West Wing Playbook. And it’s not just Biden who they’re targeting. They also take credit for getting inside the head of White House press secretary KARINE JEAN-PIERRE. Last month, the @RNCResearch account released a video of Jean-Pierre saying “I don’t have anything” 100 times when she didn’t have an answer for reporters. That was on a Tuesday. Two days later, Breitbart White House reporter CHARLIE SPIERING noticed she had stopped using that phrase. “We’re not out there to get high video counts,” explained ZACH PARKINSON, the RNC’s deputy communications director and an alum of the Trump campaign and White House. “It’s to push sound messaging.” Biden allies, understandably, were not impressed. “Republicans desperately lying and manipulating videos are a tell,” said AMMAR MOUSSA, a Democratic National Committee spokesperson, suggesting the Biden barbs were an attempt to hide GOP shortfalls. “They can’t defend their extreme agenda to put Medicare on the chopping block and sell middle class families out to Big Pharma. They tried this for two years and all it got them was 81 million Americans voting for President Biden in the White House.” MESSAGE US — Are you GREG FOSTER , a White House records management analyst? We want to hear from you! And we’ll keep you anonymous if you’d like. Or if you think we missed something in today’s edition, let us know and we may include it tomorrow. Email us at westwingtips@politico.com.
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