You’ve probably never heard of Saul Arrogo, but, like the wind, you’ve seen what he can do. An idiosyncratic billionaire with a penchant for humor, he goes by many names, but Saul Arrogo is how I met him.
Under the reasonable request that he review this article before it went to print, I was granted an exclusive interview with this largely unknown man. I pulled into his West Texas estate feeling only a little out of place in my 10-year-old Ford, but thankful I had worn a bolo tie and tucked in my button-down. I was welcomed by Mrs. Arrogo, a small-framed woman who, as I got to know her, I could imagine being the centering joy of any room. Mr. Arrogo allowed me to call him Saul and was a Santa Claus type, heavy with rosy cheeks but lacking a beard. His jet black hair was combed to the side hastily but not unprofessionally. Both Arrogos were in their sixties and wore genuine smiles and business casual clothes.
Mrs. Arrogo guided me down a long hallway with five furnished rooms on either side. The open doors revealed living spaces and bedrooms. The hallway was adorned with crystal lamps and colorful wallpaper, tasteful and not embarrassed to be hanging in 2022.
Saul’s office had a desk close to the far wall, which doubled as a bookcase, large bay windows to the right, and a couch and three chairs intentionally placed around the room. On the walls were many colorful posters. One was a picture of a young Steve Martin playing the banjo with an arrow “through” his head. Another was a hand-signed campaign “Hope” poster of President Obama’s portrait in red, white, and blue. A 3x5 photo of Saul and Obama was stuck in the bottom right corner. The other posters were literal memes whose references and captions were inside jokes I didn’t understand until I had the following conversation with Saul.
“I’ve been doing some research and found you and your aliases on bank statements and as a proxy for co-signing legislation. What’s your connection to these papers and the Democratic Party?” I asked as I handed him some scans of the official documents.
Saul frowned, skimming over the papers. “Well, what do you make of it?”
I hadn’t meant to sound accusatory, so I shifted in my seat and tried to come off as the earnest journalist I was. “It seems like you have a lot of sway among Dems. It’s strange I’ve never heard of you before this. I’ve found traces of you for three decades now, and they took me a while to find and connect to you.”
“Yes,” he beamed. “That was the intention. It’s time to hang up the hat and move on to the next stage of life.”
“So what kind of stuff were you involved in?”
“To take you all the way back would take a few hours. Frankly, I don’t want to have to feed you lunch, so I’ll keep it short. I started off working on Wall Street and, from there, made connections in D.C.”
With an ego curiously not unlike that of Donald J. Trump’s, Saul name-dropped his friends on Capitol Hill and in New York and Silicon Valley as if he were a relative sharing family drama, where I would have been expected to know everyone named.
“I never wanted to be on the public stage, but I liked seeing how it worked behind the scenes. Have you spent any time on the Hill?”
“Yes, I’ve interviewed a handful of Congress members and lived in D.C. for two years during graduate school.”
“Then you know - D.C. is run by interns and 30-year-old alcoholics. Everyone the public sees on TV is just good at being on camera. They have a winnable face and personality, but they’re just shells of their former selves when they were eager graduates. Top of their class for sure, but the swamp has put them through the wringer.”
“That’s pretty cynical, but I see your point,” I followed.
Saul told me that he befriended interns and legislative assistants, few of whom had the life experience to know better, and made promises and agreements, mentoring them in a way that led him to be seen as a bipartisan leader. Essentially all he had to do was look the part. This was something Saul had been good at for his whole life.
He had an ever-working mind from his youth but didn’t realize how he could use it to influence others until college. Appearing older than he was, he was soon schmoozing in the professors’ lounge, learning the ins and outs of the college, its administration, and the strengths and weaknesses of his own professors. He kept a journal of all the alibis he had to maintain and spent as much time studying that as he did his coursework. Saul had the foresight to know that his was an invaluable skill that could be used for anything. Though unmatched, he had the conviction for using it for good rather than cause damage.
“So many people have told me what they imagine it’d be like to be married to Saul,” Mrs. Arrogo shared. “No offense, honey, but there’s a lot less to you than people experience.”
Saul laughed. “Yes, they say there’s a mystique about me. The truth is, I can carry multiple timelines around in my head and process outcomes quicker than most people see the step right in front of them. It’s never been a burden for me, only a source of entertainment. When I started working my way through the halls of Congress, I had some close calls when I would double book meetings or when others thought I was my own twin. But I always found a way to iron these out. I learned from them and never made the same mistake twice.”
He soon garnered enough trust and respect on the Hill to receive a personal invitation from then-President, Bill Clinton.
“Bill said, ‘I want you to work for me. My friends in the Senate have told me your influence on the Hill, and it’s an asset I don’t want to pass up.’ Now, I’d always been my own man. I couldn’t care less about which policy affects what group for better or for worse. I would’ve taken 41 [George H.W. Bush] up on it, but he never called me,” Saul said, either unaware or not caring just how smug that sounded.
As outlandish as it seemed, I had no reason to doubt Saul. I was sitting in his home, a residence splendid enough that one would naturally assume the owner would be tight with the country’s wealthiest. On top of that, I had handed him a dozen documents proving his connections to D.C. bigwigs, and I had more research in my office. I began to question why Saul agreed to this interview.
“Bill wanted me to sway public opinion. If I was able to influence the smartest kids on the Hill, surely I could get the attention of voters,” Saul explained. “So, I worked with the speechwriters and PR teams of party leadership. We knew television producers and shaped the format of newscasts and commercial lineup. Of course, we didn’t have a 100% success rate, but we stirred the pot enough to get Clinton re-elected.”
Saul’s career continued steadily through Bush 43’s terms, most notably raising the opinion that the country should never have gone to war. But the Obama years are when Saul’s efforts really started to pay off.
“An absolutely brilliant legislative assistant, Lindsay Veller, shared with me the idea of what she called identity politics. ‘If we can get people to collect themselves in blocs, we can address a whole demographic of people at one time while considering them as one person,’ she told me,” Saul told me. “So we worked with the idea, building on it, and started to disseminate the concept into American culture.”
Soon enough, critics of Obama’s policies hailed him for his place in history as the nation’s first black president. It kept the attention away from any unfavorable actions he was making and gave him a comfortable approval rating.
Then, as the candidates in the 2016 presidential campaign boiled down, Secretary Clinton’s team reached out to Saul. He was informed of Trump’s dirty laundry, loose ends, and skeletons. Saul assembled a team from his own connections.
In hindsight, Saul wishes he had teamed with Senator Bernie Sanders. He didn’t like Hillary and wasn’t interested in muckraking. But, he’s since concluded that Sanders’ democratic socialism wouldn’t have struck a chord with 2016 voters in the way it did in the 2020 primaries, so Saul’s efforts would have been in vain anyway. The unexpected win by Trump in 2016 told Saul a lot about America. In many ways, Trump became an institutionalized foil to Saul.
The speed at which identity politics was becoming prominent was faster than Saul or Veller ever imagined. Trump’s polarizing behavior fractured the public’s self-conception so that it was near impossible not to have an us-versus-them mentality when talking politics. The nation was in the perfect position for Saul’s goals at the time.
To Saul, Trump’s behavior had always been laughable. But he realized he couldn’t underestimate the president. After all, he had been elected. But on January 23, 2017, the Monday after Inauguration Day, Saul brought a new tone to his office. There was a crazed lightness about him. His staff laughed nervously but eager to hear what Saul had to say.
“I told them, ‘We had a great time with Barack. We served him well, and he returned the favors. I started my career with Bill [Clinton] and saw greater success with him and Obama than I did during the Bush Administration. Trump is a different kind of Republican. He’s a little erratic, a little off the wall. Perhaps unpredictable. So for the next four to eight years, I want to have some fun. Hillary was a ----- to work for, and I’m sick of manipulating for others’ political gain. I want to see in the world what I’ve made happen - not what some puppet paid me to make happen.”
Saul seemed a little heated reliving this memory.
“People left me for that speech. They were nervous about their own future and their convictions clashing with where I wanted to go. The good ones stayed, though. They saw the mission in it. To change public perception as a joke. That’s the thing. This was all supposed to be funny.’”
At that, Saul rose from his seat. He paced around the room, and Mrs. Arrogo watched him as a caretaker does their client, anticipating a violent outburst. I fortified my seated position and listened to Saul, giving him eye contact to let him know I was listening, that I would write his side of the story. But he didn’t return my attention.
“World affairs were too big for us to mold, so we focused our efforts domestically.” I relaxed as I saw the red leave his face, and Mrs. Arrogo began to listen with love instead of vigilance. “Then when the pandemic started, you know, the world had been a complete ----show. By that point, I was done with Trump. I didn’t care what he was tweeting or what he said about me. I steered my staff toward what I call high-tier trolling. Everything we did was to provoke the president and his party. We just wanted to make it to the 2020 election and get a Democrat in. Admittedly, we went too far at times. But we had fun with it. And that was all I cared about.”
I wanted specifics, and my face must have shown that because Saul continued.
“We didn’t mess with the COVID stuff; Trump was doing that on his own. So the things that were going on at the same time - the BLM riots, Amy Coney Barrett’s hearing, ----ing with pronouns, the assault on the Capitol building, all that ---, we swayed public opinion.”
Though she hadn’t consulted with him first, Saul had been especially proud of Senator Hirono’s ad-libbed announcement that sexual preference was an archaic and offensive term.
“Since the LGBTQ community made themselves the next frontier in civil rights, that’s where identity politics has really helped us troll. We use their logic, which I admit is hard to follow on the outside because it shifts daily, to confuse the right to no end. Remember when Congressman Emanuel Cleaver ended a prayer with, ‘amen and awomen’?” Saul asked me.
I had to reach deep into my memory to recall that story, which had just barely blipped on my radar at that time.
“Evangelicals went wild over that! It made no sense for Cleaver to create that vocabulary, but it really got the GOP’s goat, which is what I was going for,” Saul laughed. “People would hear these headlines and say, ‘You can’t make this stuff up!’ But we did.”
Beyond this, Saul’s motives remained a mystery. Mrs. Arrogo may be the only one who can understand the way and why of his mind. After decades of deception and ulterior motives, it would take more than the three hours I had with him to get more answers and stories.
But Saul hadn’t been a brick wall that day. This was his first public interview about his career. So I wondered why Saul wanted to “out” himself now. Not wanting to downplay my credibility, I tried to match his personality with an ego of my own.
“I appreciate your willingness to speak to me about all this today. As you know, this publication has millions of American readers a day, so this interview won’t go unnoticed. My reports are also regularly featured on the front page and one of our highest rated columns. But I wondered - why now? At the beginning, you said, ‘It’s time to hang up the hat.’ What exactly are you retiring from, and what are your plans for the future?”
“As a last hoorah, I’ve got something planned for April 1 this year. But you’ll have to wait to know more. Besides that, I realized that some of the things we’ve done have had a destructive impact on people’s lives. I guess my conscience caught up with me, and I’ve seen that this high-tier trolling isn’t the healthiest hobby to have personally. I’ve enjoyed it, but it’s harder to deal with all the people I have in motion simultaneously than it used to be. I’d rather just enjoy my wife’s company and our properties. We’ve got some plans to travel out of the country,” Saul looked at his watch, “but now it’s time for lunch and for you to leave.”