by Rick Wilson
I pity them. They’ve bet their honor, careers, and reputations on a man and a mob, not on a nation, a Constitution, a system of ideals, and a conservative temperament. I understand their defensive, pissy rage. That anger they feel each time we remind them of the gulf between conservatism and Trumpism is the pain of their souls trying to reenter their bodies.
There are three big reasons I’m writing this book.
First, when I look at what’s become of the Republican Party, the conservative movement, and the United States, I feel like I’m visiting some dark, alternate universe. The party of Lincoln and Reagan and the movement of Burke and Buckley have been hijacked by a new strain of politics that is as dangerous as it is ludicrous: nationalist populism. I am a conservative who believes that the law and the Constitution must limit and bound the powers of the state. I believe in the power of law, not the power of the mob. I believe leaders are the servants of the people, not the contrary.
The current direction of Trumpist Republicanism is ideologically and philosophically repulsive to genuine conservatives. The adoption of the authoritarian statism designed by Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, and their alt-right fellow travelers and embodied by Donald Trump should terrify the right. Instead, they’re merrily on board with a lunatic with delusions of godhood, abandoning every principle they ever fought for and replacing them with L’état, c’est Trump.
There are a lot of books on the market decrying Trump from the left. Trump and Trumpism need a critique from the right that isn’t just a long swoon and a reach for the smelling salts. I’ve forgotten more about conservative policy and philosophy than Trump will ever know and that the New Establishment has abandoned. Sure, I want to save the Republic from Trump and Trumpism, but I don’t mind telling members of my party and movement to fuck themselves on the way there.
I’ll admit I am also driven to write this book by a stirring bit of guilt. I’ve spent a career electing Republicans, defending the conservative movement and philosophy, and fixing the messes made by all-too-human elected officials. I am the guy you call when it’s time to run the ads that end the campaign, in part because my skin is thick enough to endure the inevitable screeching and rending of garments that come when it’s time to wade into the fight. You call me when you’re in the back of the police car outside the shady massage parlor and you have to be on the floor of Congress to vote in 24 hours. I’m not some hand-wringing do-gooder, and if you’ve fought either by my side or against me, you know I’m down to scrap.
I helped fill that chest freezer full of red meat to throw out to the Republican base when the going got tough, often reducing the entire argument to the tactics of a single election-winning message, a single attack ad, a single oppo drop. And no, Democrats, don’t get smug and morally superior; your team has our analogues, and your base loves the mirror-image red meat itself. I’m not here to apologize for leaving your candidates in smoking, radioactive craters.
Yes, I was part of dumbing-down the arguments, creating the Frankenstein monster of the post-2008 base, hoping that we could achieve the big goals of the movement that consisted—we thought—of more than just the Palin-Trump Axis of Idiocy. The old big tent of the GOP was always a rambling circus with evangelicals, foreign policy and national security conservatives, economic freedom warriors, and constitutionalists, all living in relative harmony. We knew the money came from one part of the coalition, the grassroots energy from another, the media heat from yet another. It was imperfect, but in the long march from the 1980s to today, we grew by thousands of elected officials all over the country.
The creature that emerged after Sarah Palin crawled from the political Hellmouth in 2008 kept growing, hungry not for policy victories that realigned the regulatory state, but for liberal tears, atavistic stompy-foot rages, and purity over performance. Her folksy charm became a furious whine, and the base of the party followed that tone.
In work for campaigns, associations, corporate clients with skin in the game of politics, and a constellation of SuperPACs, we fed the monster and trained it. I know how patronizing that sounds, the thought that we could activate and—call it what it is—manipulate voters. Well, we did. As the tools of data, targeting, and analytics improved, we got very, very good at it.
We kept feeding the monster. We rewarded its darkest impulses. We brought it out when the time was right. The portfolio of messages, political rhetoric, and communications venues we built constituted a suite of powerful political tools.
The tools of politics, like all tools, are morally agnostic. A scalpel in the hands of a doctor is a tool. A scalpel in the hands of a serial killer is a horror. Rational adults in both parties used the tools of persuasion, elections, and communications developed by other rational adults inside broad lanes.
Then Trump came along. We lost control of those tools, the party, and the movement. The monster is out of its cage, and its new trainers (both here and in Russia) encourage only its dumbest, darkest, most capricious, cruel, and violent behaviors. This book is, I hope, one of a number of poison darts in the neck of the monster.
The problem in writing this book is time; every day brings some new outrage, scandal, excess, or moment of historic dumbassery by this president. That said, deadlines wait for no man, so I trust you’ll pardon this volume for not chronicling every moment of President Death Touch’s misrule.
Let’s get started.
PART ONE
* * *
THE ROAD TO THIS SHITSHOW
What to Expect When You’re Working for Trump
(A Tragedy in Five Acts)
– ACT I –
It all starts out so well.
You’re going to join the Trump administration. You’re on the team. You’re Steve Bannon or Rex Tillerson or Scott Pruitt or John Kelly or Michael Cohen. You’re Reince Priebus or Jared Kushner, or even Ivanka. Perhaps you’re someone lower in the food chain, and you’re going to show those RINOs who’s the boss now.
You’re a breath of fresh air in a fetid, corrupt hellhole only Donald Trump can reform. Donald Trump loves you, and his 50 million followers love you through the associative magic of Twitter. You bask in his reflected glory. You’re on the starting line. Even if you were skeptical at first, you’re swept up in the charisma and the adoration. Nothing can go wrong.
Donald Trump couldn’t be more complimentary, and the Trumpcentric new right media draws you as a towering hero of our times, a giant in the constellation of warrior princes and shield maidens surrounding the savior of America. Even the conservative press who were skeptical of Trump’s temperament opine, “Well at least we’ve got people like X in the administration. He’s so solid and so smart. Just imagine what he’ll get done.”
After all, Trump beat everyone (maybe even you) in the Republican Primary. He beat the hated mainstream media. He beat Hillary Freaking Clinton. Trump doesn’t play by the rules, and neither will you. Democratic critics are like mosquitoes.
There’s a champagne brunch with your lobbying firm partners the Sunday after you’re nominated. Everyone is flush with victory, and you’re feeling like everyone is going to do well (that profit-sharing plan still holds while you’re on leave from the firm, after all) while doing good for the country. You love this president, and this opportunity, and all the things it’s going to do for your career.
You’re going to Make America Great Again.
1
* * *
VICHY REPUBLICANS
SOME SAY DONALD TRUMP IS the price this nation IS paying for too many years of partisan bickering and division. Some say ’Merica’s forgotten workin’ men rose up in a single, inchoate scream of rage at a system that for too long provided them with nothing but empty promises, bad trade deals, and government-subsidized carbs. Some claim it’s from a generation weaned on talk radio, Fox News, and the comments sections of a million Tea Party websites. Some say it’s a sign of a merciless God testing us to the breaking point.
I still think it’s because we didn’
t let that old gypsy woman vote when she couldn’t produce a photo ID back in 2012.
All those reasons fall short of the mark, though, don’t they? By now, it should be clear that Trump’s election was a sign of the coming Apocalypse, soon to be followed by a rain of blood, seven years of darkness, and a plague of frogs. That may be exaggerating slightly, but we do have a plague of Pepes, the cartoon frog meme that is a favorite symbol of Trump’s alt-reich fan base, and there’s an odds-on chance that our grandchildren will hear this tale while hunched over guttering fires in the ruins of a radioactive Mad Max–style hellscape.
The Trumpian heroic narrative is simple; powerful alpha male warrior descends golden escalator. Forgotten Americans rise, don red helmets. Evil sorceress Hillary is defeated in single combat. Great feasting and rejoicing by the unwashed masses follows. Swamp is drained and all live MAGA ever after.
The truth is, as you might imagine, more prosaic, more horrible, and more human.
The mythology of Donald Trump’s rise to the Oval Office is rich in Trump-aggrandizing explanations that ignore the enablers, normalizers, media fellators, ideological arsonists, and moral ciphers who make up Washington’s and New York’s political and media culture. They’re the proximate reasons Trump was able to overcome the field of almost a dozen serious Republicans, and Ben Carson.
No, MAGA-hat fans, you didn’t simply rise in your mighty millions and elect The Donald all by your deplorable selves. You had help, much of it from the very elites you so revile. (“Revile” means hate. Sorry. I know you’re in an oxy stupor much of the time, so I’ll try to move slowly and not use big words.)
Yes, Trump’s election shocked the world, but the forces, conditions, and players who enabled and empowered Trump’s rise to the Republican nomination and the presidency have been with us all along. They’re perfectly explicable, if honestly embarrassing, to the world’s longest-running democracy.
For all that Trump voters claim to hate the swamp and the coastal elites who populate it, they owe the reptile-American population a note of thanks. The hated New York, DC, and media elites helped Trump more than they’ll admit. I’ll leave Russia’s role in the 2016 campaign to the many outstanding books on the topic, and to that Mueller fellow.
It was the cable networks (and no, not just Fox), the elite media, inert major donors, a monied horde of lobbyists, and the professional conservative activists who ditched principle for revenue, clicks, ratings, and transitory influence. They enabled, empowered, and elected Trump and continue to do so with their rolling coverage of his every presidential distraction strategy.
Without a particular confluence of their attention, resources, and focus, the Trump clown show would have been like every other kooky email chain forwarded by your mom or the contents of some narrow-gauge but high-cray Facebook group like Tea Party Patriots Against the Soros Moon Base. (I know you’re about to search Facebook for TPPASM. The question isn’t whether that’s a real group. The telling factor is that in this era you think it could be.)
The swamp played its role and does to this day; Washington’s culture is nothing if not resilient, adaptable, and resistant to change. I lived in it for years and watched it grind down the most idealistic people into the venal, smug, insular elites America loves to loathe. Washington is the drug-resistant syphilis of political climates, largely impervious to treatment and highly contagious. Donald Trump may have infected Washington with his own nationalist STD, but Washington returned the favor.
In early 2015 the DC political class of lobbyists, staffers, associations, think tanks, and the rest of the Washington ecosystem viewed Donald Trump as a political impossibility. He was the vulgar clown prancing and bellowing on the national stage, but never for a moment someone they could take seriously. The Old Order money liked Jeb Bush. The optimists liked Marco Rubio, the purists Ted Cruz. The 348 GOP candidates on the campaign trail, on the early debate stages, in the political scrum that was the 2016 GOP primary were almost all experienced, successful, and well-staffed. They were, by and large, Serious People. It was the quality of that divided field that let the political version of Gresham’s law sweep Trump into a position where Washington and national Republicans made the most consequential and destructive compromises in modern political history.
As the election progressed, it took an array of insiders from the GOP and the conservative movement to legitimize and normalize Trump for the Republican base voter beyond the howling edge of the Fox viewership. These men and women were Vichy Republicans, eager to shred their principles for a chance to touch the fringe of Trump’s golden wig, eager to bask in the celebrity glow of his spray tan.
Some Vichy Hall of Famers aren’t people you might directly associate with the Old Guard, Locust Valley Lockjaw Republican elite. Oh, no indeed.
Many were the purest of the Purity Posse. You know, the “we’d-rather-have-a-pure-minority-than-a-squishy-majority” types. These were conservative stalwarts dedicated to purging the RINOs, the impure, the accommodationists, the compromisers, and anyone who would vary from the Limbaughian-Levinist doctrine. (I made that up, but you can imagine seeing it in a history book about some schism in early socialist thought.) The people in Washington’s elite conservative political circles who looked down on Republicans who tried actually to govern and to live in the real world of political give-and-take were some of the first to let go of their alleged principles when Trump came calling. His skill at causing others to abase and destroy their reputation is peerless.
There’s so much blame to go around, it’s hard to know where to start, but the Vichy Republicans needed one man in a key position to become their Marshal Pétain. They needed one man to ensure the Trump takeover of the GOP, no matter the cost. They found him in the wee form of Reince Priebus.
REINCE PRIEBUS
Historians will recognize Reince Priebus as the man who could have killed the Trump virus early. Instead, he incubated it. He kept feeding it nutrients when he should have been killing it with bleach and hot, cleansing fire.
Reince Priebus is a man so inoffensive, so meek, so self-effacing, and seemingly hammered most of the time that his judgment on Trump led to a series of mistakes, missteps, capitulations, pratfalls, and bad reads of the political terrain that legitimized Trump for far too many mainstream Republicans. Mr. Wisconsin Nice was ultimately the Marshal Pétain of the GOP.
Not long after Trump entered the race, Priebus feared Trump would bolt the party, run as an independent, and wreck the GOP’s chances against Hillary Clinton. He absurdly believed that if he convinced Trump to sign a GOP loyalty pledge, Trump would support the party after he lost the primary and that the oath would moderate some of Red Hat Don’s more grotesque excesses.
So Priebus went to Trump Tower with a cheesy parchment that looked like it was extracted from a bin of discount award certificates at Office Depot and run through a knockoff-brand inkjet printer and had Trump sign it. The chairman of the party of Lincoln got rolled like a rube off the cheap bus to Atlantic City on a Friday night. What Reince saw as a solemn oath, Trump saw as a reality-TV stunt.
I know what you’re thinking. Had Reince been recently thawed from a cryogenic chamber, deep in the Earth? Was he part of some religious cult that forbids television? Could he not read? How could anyone have missed Donald Trump’s famous disregard for contracts, agreements, debts, obligations, commitments, payment schedules, and marital vows? How could anyone not suffering from a diet of lead paint chips and head trauma possibly believe that one gimcrack piece of paper would constrain Trump in any way at all?
Well, Reince Priebus did, and party tribalism, Russian information warfare, and Hillary Clinton’s inept campaigning took it from there. He was too trapped in the ichor of Trump’s smarmy world to escape it. The fixed smile and dead eyes Reince showed at every event weren’t an affirmation of his decision; they were a cry for help. Reince kept playing Tina to Trump’s Ike, knowing Trump had played him and knowing Trump loathed him.
I remembe
r seeing Priebus at one of the last of the 2016 primary debates in Miami. I took my son into the spin room to watch the festivities, and there he was: a rictus grin, a thousand-yard stare, the certain knowledge that Trump was going to be the nominee and he’d done nothing to stop it.
Could he have stopped it? Yes, at four or five different inflection points. Did he want to? Perhaps.
Perhaps a strong chairman with a clear vision for the future of the party could have. But here’s a dirty little secret of national political party chairs: they generally suck at their jobs, and Reince fell under even that low bar. In the era of SuperPACs, powerful House, Senate, and governors’ committees, and independent expenditures, their role has become disintermediated and minimized. They’re largely a conduit to sluice money around the campaign finance system. There was a reason I used to joke that I wanted Debbie Wasserman Schultz to be Democratic National Committee head for 1,000 years, and it wasn’t because I found her to be politically intimidating or effective.
Few party chairs leave a meaningful legacy, though, for good or ill. Reince, however, will be remembered as the man who sold the GOP to Trump on the cheap. To his ironic credit, Priebus had ordered the infamous post-2012 Republican autopsy report, which called on the GOP to modernize, approach Hispanic voters differently, and reform itself.
Reince was later briefly “rewarded” by being given the thankless position of White House chief of staff. To date, the shortest-serving chief of staff in modern times, he survived less than six months of grueling, internecine battles for which he was entirely overmatched. By the end, between Donald Trump’s Twitter sprees, Steve Bannon’s private and public warfare with him, Jared and Ivanka’s class disdain, and an unmanageable White House, Reince was utterly broken.