Ritchie's campaign team

The Richards campaign is the Republican presidential operation of Senator Jeffrey Richards, and it functions as the primary antagonist force of the 2020 election cycle in the novel. Its significance lies not in any policy platform but in its orchestration of a sweeping conspiracy to surveil, hack, and publicly out First Son Alex Claremont-Diaz and Prince Henry in a desperate attempt to defeat President Ellen Claremont. The campaign's actions transform a private romance into a national security and political crisis, and its eventual exposure as the architect of the Waterloo Letters scandal becomes the defining scandal of the race, one that ultimately backfires and helps secure the president's reelection.

Nature and Structure

The Richards campaign is depicted as a ruthlessly professional political machine, one that treats the acquisition and weaponization of private information as a standard campaign tactic. Its leadership includes Nilsen, the campaign manager, who is identified as a key figure in the conspiracy. The campaign's methods are revealed to be elaborate and layered, involving a chain of intermediaries designed to obscure its direct involvement. According to Nora Holleran's investigation, Richards hired a firm, which in turn hired the hackers who obtained the surveillance tapes from the Beekman hotel and the photographers who followed Alex. A separate third party was then engaged to purchase all the gathered material and resell it to the Daily Mail. This structure of back channels, go-between firms, and fake names created a digital paper trail that Nora describes as sufficient for a federal investigation, one that could subpoena the financial records connecting the campaign to the operation.

The Conspiracy Against Alex and Henry

The campaign's central operation is a coordinated effort to induce a sex scandal. It began after Alex left the campaign, as Nora states directly: "Richards outed you, Alex. As soon as you left the campaign, it started." The campaign's hired hackers breached the private email server used by White House residents, lifting the intimate correspondence between Alex and Henry. They also obtained security camera footage from the lobby of the Beekman hotel from the night of the DNC, and long-range lens photographs of the couple, including a shot of them kissing in the back seat of a car behind a cafe, captured through the windshield. This material was then packaged and sold to the British tabloid, which published it under the banner "QUEEN HENRY!" with the headline "INSIDE THE PRINCE'S GAY AFFAIR WITH THE FIRST SON OF THE UNITED STATES!" The campaign's goal was to use the revelation of the affair to damage President Claremont's standing on issues of international relations and homosexuality, and to raise questions about the security of the private server itself.

Public Attacks and Agenda Setting

The campaign's public strategy was to frame the private scandal as a matter of presidential fitness and national security. Senator Richards held a press conference in which he expressed extreme concern about the private email server, asking what kind of information was being disseminated on it and asserting that American voters had a right to know everything else for which the server may have been used. This line of attack was designed to shift the narrative from the First Son's private life to a purported failure of the president's administration. The campaign also leaked that it had tapped an Independent senator, Stanley Connor, for its prospective cabinet, a move that put pressure on the Claremont team. In the days leading up to the DNC, the campaign's tactics contributed to a fraught political atmosphere, with the polls not looking great for the president and the Richards team's messaging dominating the news cycle.

Exposure and Collapse

The conspiracy began to unravel when Nora Holleran, using a code she wrote to sift through hundreds of thousands of emails, uncovered the digital paper trail connecting the campaign to the surveillance and the leak. The evidence included an email between two people discussing a photo of Alex in Henry's bedroom, with one noting that "Nilsen says that's not nearly clear enough" and that "the P" would not pay for "Bigfoot sightings," directly implicating the campaign manager. The Washington Post then broke the story, confirmed by an anonymous source on the Richards campaign, that Jeffrey Richards and his high-ranking staffers had orchestrated the plan to have Alex stalked, surveilled, hacked, and outed. The final blow came when Senator Rafael Luna, who had been secretly working within the campaign, tweeted that he was parting ways with it, an act that confirmed his role as the source of the leak and led commentator Oliver Westbrook to call him "perhaps the unlikeliest hero of the 2020 presidential race." The campaign's scheme, designed to destroy the president's chances, instead became the evidence of a hostile act of conspiracy against a sitting president, with a federal investigation anticipated once Richards lost the election.