CHAPTER 11
LIMBAUGH’S FLOP
There go the people. I must follow them, for I am their leader.*
ALTHOUGH HE INSISTED FOR months that he was not supporting Trump’s presidential bid, few figures in the Right’s media ecosystem did more to enable the billionaire’s rise than Rush Limbaugh. There were other, more unhinged voices peddling conspiracy theories and outrage. But along with Fox News, Breitbart, and Drudge, Limbaugh was the loudest and most influential voice setting the table for a voter insurrection. Repeatedly, he warned his listeners about the dire and imminent threat posed to the nation’s liberties by the “elites” of both parties.
In December 2015, Limbaugh stoked the fires of conservative outrage after Republicans agreed to a budget deal that even supporters regarded as a “crap sandwich.” Citing the GOP victories of 2010 and 2014, Limbaugh declared that voters had “elected Republicans to stop this.” But despite the Republican wins, Limbaugh said, “It hasn’t made any difference at all. It is as though Nancy Pelosi’s still running the House and Harry Reid is still running the Senate.” He continued:
Betrayed is not even the word here. What has happened here is worse than betrayal, and betrayal’s pretty bad, but it’s worse than that. This was out and out in our face lying. From the campaigns to individual statements made about the philosophical approach Republicans had to all this spending. There is no Republican Party. You know, we don’t even need a Republican Party if they’re going to do this. You know just elect Democrats, disband the Republican Party and let the Democrats run it because that’s what’s happening anyway.1
Limbaugh argued that the “betrayal” effectively made the case for Trump’s candidacy.
And these same Republican leaders doing this can’t for the life of them figure out why Donald Trump has all the support that he has? They really cannot figure this out? Repeated stabs in the back like this, which have been going on for years, combined with Obama’s policy destruction of this country is what has given rise to Donald Trump. If Donald Trump didn’t exist and if the Republican Party actually does want to win someday, they’d have to invent him.
This was, of course, the sort of rhetoric that had become familiar from the Right’s outrage machines, a mélange of hype and misleading statements about what the GOP had actually accomplished and what was politically possible. But it had also become the accepted narrative in the Limbaugh/Hannity/Fox News/Drudge/Ingraham/Breitbart media echo chamber, as it fueled distrust of the GOP establishment.
Limbaugh’s role was decisive here. Since the early 1990s, Limbaugh had been a dominant force in the conservative media. In 1992, with his reelection clearly in trouble, President George H. W. Bush invited Limbaugh and Roger Ailes, who was then the producer of his (now defunct) television show to visit the White House. During the visit, as Limbaugh frequently recounted afterward, the president of the United States had carried his bag. “The scene on the White House lawn,” historian Nicole Hemmer observed, “illustrated just how different the second generation of conservative media activists was from the first: they were profitable, popular, and powerful, wielding influence that reached far beyond the conservative movement.…”2*
After Republicans swept into control of Congress in 1994, Limbaugh was named an honorary member of the GOP House caucus and presented with a button proclaiming him “The Majority Maker.” Former congressman Vin Weber declared: “Rush is as responsible for what happened here as much as anyone.” Polling data seemed to back that up; voters who listened to talk radio for ten or more hours a week had pulled the lever for Republican candidates by a three-to-one margin.3
For years, Limbaugh was a leading enforcer of conservative orthodoxy and ideological purity, which made his ideological pirouette in recent years so remarkable. His reversals also tracked with the ongoing transformation of the conservative movement.
In mid-2015, Limbaugh touted the candidacy of Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, only to dump him (as did Matt Drudge) as he pivoted to Trump. The timing, as media critic John Ziegler noted, was critical. If the conservative gatekeepers had wanted to abort the campaign of the “least conservative Republican presidential aspirant in living memory” (in the words of Yuval Levin, editor of National Affairs), this was perhaps the final moment. “Trump’s campaign was like a rocket ship where the most perilous moments are during liftoff,” Ziegler wrote. “If the conservative base had not accepted him a serious or credible candidate, then he would have quickly crashed and burned because, without traction, the media oxygen which would fuel his flight would have immediately evaporated.”4
To be sure, Limbaugh continued to insist that he was neutral, and would occasionally say positive things about other candidates, including Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. Other hosts were more enthusiastic, as Sean Hannity morphed into a gushing fan boy. In contrast, Limbaugh’s posture was more nuanced; but from the fall of 2015 onward, Limbaugh became Trump’s primary enabler. What followed were months of painful and tortured rationalizations as he defended Trump’s gaffes and tried to explain why he—the voice of conservatism for a generation—was now willing to abandon one conservative principle after another.
VULNERABLE RUSH
The obvious questions here are: What happened to Rush Limbaugh? Was he leading or following? And did his vulnerability in the marketplace make it impossible for him to push against the populist tide? These are intriguing questions, because it is possible to argue that Limbaugh’s turning point may have come four years earlier, when he took to the airwaves to call a young woman who had testified in favor of free contraceptives “a slut” and “prostitute.” By attacking Georgetown student Sandra Fluke in such grotesque terms, said radio analyst Darryl Parks, Limbaugh broke a cardinal rule of radio: “Don’t beat up on a woman, and don’t beat up on a [young person].” Even four years after the incident, which prompted a large-scale boycott of his show, Politico reported that “reams of advertisers still won’t touch him.”5
Limbaugh’s performance was tone-deaf on several levels. Fluke had testified before Congress that insurance coverage for birth control should be mandated as a matter of right. This was an argument that conservatives should have relished, pointing out the inflated sense of entitlement on display in Fluke’s testimony. Specifically, Fluke was called on by Democrats to argue that her school, Georgetown, should be compelled by law to offer contraceptive drugs without any co-pays, even though the Catholic university was morally opposed to artificial birth control. But then Limbaugh weighed in and turned a potentially teachable moment into a cringe-worthy fiasco. For three days, he mocked and demeaned the young woman. On his February 29, 2012, show, Limbaugh riffed:
What does it say about the college co-ed Susan Fluke [sic], who goes before a congressional committee and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex, what does that make her? It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex. She’s having so much sex she can’t afford the contraception. She wants you and me and the taxpayers to pay her to have sex. What does that make us? We’re the pimps. (interruption) The johns? We would be the johns? No! We’re not the johns. (interruption) Yeah, that’s right. Pimp’s not the right word. Okay, so she’s not a slut. She’s “round heeled.” I take it back.6
The next day, Limbaugh offered what he said was a “compromise” to contraception coverage: buying “all the women at Georgetown University as much aspirin to put between their knees as possible.” On the show, he imitated a crying baby’s voice, saying: “I’m going broke having sex. I need government to provide me condoms and contraception. It’s not fair.”* Limbaugh then doubled down:
Ms. Fluke, have you ever heard of not having sex? Have you ever heard of not having sex so often?
So, Ms. Fluke and the rest of you feminazis, here’s the deal. If we are going to pay for your contraceptives, and thus pay for you to have sex, we want something for it, and I’ll tell you what it is. We want you to post the videos online so we can all watch.7
Limbaugh went on to suggest that the young law student was “having so much sex, it’s amazing she can still walk,” and continued on to suggest that Georgetown should establish a “Wilt Chamberlain scholarship … exclusively for women.” Limbaugh told his audience that Fluke was “a woman who is happily presenting herself as an immoral, baseless, no-purpose-to-her-life woman. She wants all the sex in the world whenever she wants it, all the time, no consequences. No responsibility for her behavior.”
On March 2, Limbaugh came back to the subject, saying that mandating that insurance companies cover contraception is “no different than if somebody knocked on my door that I don’t know and said, ‘You know what? I’m out of money. I can’t afford birth-control pills, and I’m supposed to have sex with three guys tonight.’”8
The reaction to Limbaugh’s language was intense and immediate. Sandra Fluke became an instant martyr and Limbaugh’s career began to implode. On March 3, President Obama called Fluke personally to offer his support. Realizing that he had gone too far, Limbaugh issued a public apology of sorts, explaining that his shtick was intended to illustrate “the absurd with absurdity,” but admitted that he “chose the wrong words.” He insisted that he “did not mean a personal attack on Ms. Fluke,” despite mocking her as a slut and a prostitute. “My choice of words was not the best,” his statement said, “and in the attempt to be humorous, I created a national stir. I sincerely apologize to Ms. Fluke for the insulting word choices.”9*
Fluke did not accept Limbaugh’s apology, saying she didn’t think his statement “changes anything, and especially when that statement is issued when he’s under significant pressure from his sponsors who have begun to pull their support from the show. I think any woman who has ever been called these types of names is [shocked] at first.” She called his attacks “an attempt to silence me, to silence the millions of women and the men who support them who have been speaking out about this issue.…”10
The aftermath was brutal. Despite his apology, Limbaugh’s show was hit with a boycott and a significant loss of revenue. “Dozens of companies, including Netflix, JCPenney and Sears, announced they would boycott Limbaugh’s show,” reported Politico in 2016. “Most have yet to return. And the increasing popularity of platforms like Twitter, which can be used to stoke outrage and promote boycotts, makes it highly unlikely they ever will.”11
Limbaugh had crossed a crucial line. “Limbaugh’s verbal abuse of Sandra Fluke set a new kind of low,” said conservative pundit David Frum. “I can’t recall anything as brutal, ugly and deliberate ever being said by such a prominent person and so emphatically repeated. This was not a case of a bad ‘word choice.’ It was a brutally sexualized accusation, against a specific person, prolonged over three days.”12 But, by and large, the reaction from GOP leaders was muted and formulaic. The incident was an opportunity for conservatives to draw a line, but mostly they refused. It was similar to the tests they would repeatedly fail over the next four years. George Will noted that the lack of reaction “was depressing because what it indicates is that the Republican leaders are afraid of Rush Limbaugh. They want to bomb Iran, but they’re afraid of Rush Limbaugh.”13
All of this was a prelude to what would happen in 2015–2016. Perhaps not surprisingly, neither Limbaugh nor Fox News (which was embroiled in its own sexual harassments scandals) thought allegations that Trump harassed women were politically disqualifying.
How badly was Limbaugh hurt by the firestorm over Sandra Fluke? In 2008, when he renewed his mega-contract with Clear Channel for a staggering $400 million, the size of the deal was widely reported and touted. Four years later, the deal was renewed without fanfare and without financial details.14 In the meantime, Limbaugh’s radio show had been bumped from prime stations in major markets like Boston, New York, Los Angeles, and Indianapolis, often shunted off to smaller, lower-powered and lower-rated spots on the dial.15 In Boston, Limbaugh’s show was demoted to a station that ranked twenty-third in the market, with a paltry 0.2 share of the radio market, “just two tenths of a point away from a DNS or ‘did not show,’” according to radio analyst Darryl Parks. In Los Angeles, Rush was pulled from the talk powerhouse KFI-AM, and moved to a station with a 0.4 share of the market. “Years ago, Rush Limbaugh could make or break a news/talk station,” he said. “But, that was many years ago and is no longer the case.”16
During one awkward period of the 2016 campaign, when Limbaugh admitted that he had actually not believed some of the things he had previously said, he offered this explanation for his mission:
I am a radio guy. I do a radio program. And my success here is defined by radio and broadcast business metrics, not political. It never has been defined by political metrics, I’ve never wanted it to be. I have always said countless times, my success is not determined by who wins elections. That doesn’t mean I’m not interested, doesn’t mean I have vested interests, but I’m a radio guy.17
As he had repeatedly said over the last two decades, Limbaugh didn’t measure his success by whether or not his side won elections, what mattered was his “business metrics.” It was a remarkably candid acknowledgment.
But Limbaugh’s slide also made him vulnerable, especially to the many new voices all vying to be the next big thing on the Right. The dynamic here was market segmentation, as more and more broadcasters fought over a relatively small and perhaps shrinking audience. As syndicated talk show host Michael Medved explained, talk radio worked this way: “In this environment, you have something of a rush to be outrageous, to be on the fringe, because what you’re desperately competing for is P-1 listeners [the most regular loyal and hard core portion of the audience]. And the percentage of people on the fringe who are P-1 is quite high.”18 The pressure was increased by demographic realties that were well understood by anyone in the business. As influential as talk radio was, its audience skewed older (about two thirds were older than fifty) and was overwhelmingly white, and now Limbaugh’s show was losing both stations and revenue. Writer John Avlon anticipated Limbaugh’s dilemma when he noted that many hosts “become prisoners of their own shtick,” because if they softened or wavered, “they will be called traitors by the tribe they have cultivated.” As competition intensified, they could “only move in one direction: further out into the extremes.”19
After the Fluke controversy, Limbaugh was no longer impregnable; he could not risk being outflanked on the Right by angry populist voices or labeled a part of the “establishment.” In the new media landscape, things move fast and Limbaugh was a savvy enough entrepreneur to understand how quickly media brands can fade or be jostled aside. With his audience aging and shrinking, the reality from a business perspective was that Limbaugh could simply not afford to stand against the populist tide. So he didn’t, and neither did most of the other national hosts.
THE TALK RADIO CANDIDATE
Some of the radio talk hosts who enabled Trump’s rise may have waxed enthusiastic about the billionaire simply in order to block an establishment candidate like Jeb Bush (hoping to later pivot again to a more conservative candidate like Cruz). But many were clearly taken with the New York mogul’s brash, take-no-prisoners approach. In any case, there was clearly a symbiotic relationship between Trump and the Right media. One of the savviest observers of the phenomenon was Jon Favreau, a former Obama speechwriter who recognized that Trump’s candidacy was the apotheosis of right-wing media culture. In an essay entitled “Longtime Listener, First-Time Candidate,” Favreau pinpointed Trump’s central appeal to the talkers: “He won by doing a fairly good impression of a right-wing media celebrity.”20
Every issue, every conspiracy, every applause line has been ripped from their websites, radio shows, and television programs. It’s why he became America’s most prominent birther. It’s why he floated rumors that Ted Cruz’s dad killed JFK, and that Hillary Clinton killed Vince Foster. It’s why he talks the way he does about Mexicans and Muslims and women and African Americans. It’s why he’s been able to get
away with knowing little to nothing about policy or government or world affairs—because Trump, like any good talking head, only speaks ,in chyrons and clauses and some-people-are-sayings.
As a talk show host myself, for years I had pushed back against the charge that talk radio was simply about entertainment, outrage, and anger. I made an effort to talk about issues and struggled to find ways to repackage conservative and free-market ideas in fresh and understandable terms. Other hosts did as well, notably Hugh Hewitt, Dennis Prager, Michael Medved, as well as many of the other local hosts. But this was clearly not the norm for many of the loudest voices. Favreau noted that Trump had learned some key lessons from studying the Right media:
These outlets have long been labeled the “conservative media,” but they don’t spend much time discussing tax cuts, free trade, entitlement reform, or school choice. They’re not weighing market-based solutions to urban poverty or debating the future of neoconservative foreign policy.… They have a lot more in common with the National Enquirer than they do with the National Review.
Notably, shows like Limbaugh’s also talked a lot about “winning,” often claiming without much evidence that the country was overwhelmingly conservative and that conservative ideas would always win if they were given a chance. This always struck me as both circular and lazy thinking. After the GOP’s crushing defeat in 2008, I wrote a piece called “The End of Limbaughism,” which pointed out that conservatism is not the same as populism. By its nature, conservatism flies in the face of popular ideas and culture. Because it has firm, occasionally hard-nosed principles, it has to push against the fierce headwinds of both fashion and history.
How the Right Lost Its Mind Page 14