Everything Trump Touches Dies

by Rick Wilson

  Being a goddamned degenerate pussy-grabber with a lifetime of adultery, venality, and dishonesty is not, to my knowledge, one of the core tenets of the Christian faith. I can’t find it in either the Old or New Testament, and I’m not sure which book of the Apocrypha the “pussy grabber” exception comes in, but as noted earlier, I’m no biblical scholar.

  Trump has opened entirely new theological avenues. Until now, forgiveness was always available, as long as repentance was in the mix. There is literally not one aspect of Trump’s behavior as a citizen, a husband, and as a man that shows the slightest scintilla of repentance for anything, ever.

  It used to be that supporting candidates who backed abortion, ever, was a permanent stain, a terminal moral and political disqualifier, and made one an ally of industrialized infanticide. Now? Mirabile dictu! Trump gave Schumer, Pelosi, and Hillary Clinton hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years. No big deal. It’s the Divine Miracle of Amnesia!

  After Trump entered the race, evangelicals were strangely incurious about his history with abortion, for he had been staunchly pro-abortion until 2016. Our oppo researcher dug up a telling quote from a 2016 interview with Maureen Dowd. When asked by the New York Times columnist if, during his swinging bachelor days in New York City, he had ever been involved with someone who had an abortion, Trump sneeringly replied, “Such an interesting question. So what’s your next question?”

  One last note on abortion is relevant to a story told to me before Trump joined the race. A close friend of Trump’s, one of his most passionate defenders today, explained to me why Trump would never enter the presidential contest by telling me, “The last conversation Trump ever has with one of his girls is when she calls and says, ‘Don, I’m late.’ Or when he gets bored with her. At that point, Cohen and his people take over. NDA, payout, go away. It’s all in Cohen’s office. He can’t have that come out.” This was well before Stormy Daniels was a household name.

  The Cohen in question is, of course, Michael Cohen, the now-notorious sleaze consigliere for Trump’s wandering hands and penis. Imagine being a man who spends many of his waking moments working to cover up, pay off, intimidate, and silence women. Given that Cohen’s degree from a strip-mall law school may not be good for much else, I guess we can’t begrudge him the work, but Cohen became famous in 2018 when the aforementioned system for handling Trump’s version of bimbo eruptions became public knowledge, and his role in the notorious Stormy Daniels affair reduced him to a national laughingstock.

  Evangelicals have been a core part of the Republican coalition since the 1970s, but the era of Trump makes it perfectly clear that they have no problem at all with big, intrusive government powers and executive orders being deployed to shape social policies they find desirable. Trump understood how to parlay their sense of beleaguered social and political inferiority into a message claiming that he would aggressively pursue their ends even if it meant ignoring that pesky Constitution and the will of the people.

  Barack Obama kicked our ass down the street twice by growing the Democrat coalition. It’s a zero-sum game, and every gain for them is a loss for us. It’s a cliché, but you grow by addition, always and only. Too much of the evangelical political agenda became associated with exclusion, alienation, and a disconnection with the society at large.

  Changing hearts and minds in a society that has passed them by on many issues is boring and hard work. They’d rather compromise with a candidate who will nominate their preferred judges than uphold their values. Instead of working to change society through moral suasion, exemplars of faith, or even just better communications, they’d rather trust the federal government in the hands of Donald Trump to deliver their desired social end states. Call me crazy, but I thought that was the other team’s modus operandi.

  Evangelicals are the dead-enders of the Trump world, a phenomenon explained by both demographics and geographic distribution; the southern and Midwestern states where they live are Trump country, writ large. He is their Golden Calf, and the leaders of the Evangelical movement repeat daily, “This is your god, who brought you up from Egypt.”

  Despite being a majority in the American religious landscape, they continue to feel as if they’re under constant attack from secular culture, the media, and the government. They’ve lost battles in the court of public opinion over gay marriage that had been a core part of their messaging since Anita Bryant in the 1970s. Trump brilliantly plays that sense of alienation, promising as he always does to be their avenger—a flawed vessel for their agenda, but their vessel nonetheless.

  What to Expect When You’re Working for Trump

  (A Tragedy in Five Acts)

  – ACT IV –

  Uh-oh.

  Now you’ve done it.

  You were just trying to be on the team and promote the MAGA message. You punched all the “This President is so amazing” buttons your press aide got from Sarah and Kellyanne. You tugged your forelock, subsumed your ego, and promised bigly successes across the board.

  Then the question came out of left field and you made a huge, devastating mistake; you actually answered it. You damn fool.

  Mueller? Russian sanctions? Climate change? The tax bill? The ludicrous plan to build a Wall? It doesn’t matter what it was; it’s that your statement got attention . . . more attention than the president did that day.

  Now you’re sitting in the dark in your Georgetown town house, plowing down your third Olde Ocelot on the rocks, feeling as if gravity has switched off and your career is about to end in a blaze of Twitter fury from The Donald. You sleep fitfully, if at all.

  In the morning, though, the reviews are good. It seems like you actually did something right for an administration that needs all the wins it can get. You get a little bounce in your step until a new, icy realization settles in your gut.

  There is only one star in this firmament, and that star is Donald Trump. The favorable attention about how smart, insightful, driven, strategic, or effective you are is rage-bait for Trump, and even if you don’t end up on the receiving end of his fury that day, the second you become a star for even one moment longer than the president, the game starts to wind down.

  4

  * * *

  THAT’S WHY YOU GOT TRUMP

  DEAR DEMOCRATS: THIS CHAPTER IS for you. Sure, my Republican and independent readers may still glean some amusement or information from it, but I hope you’ll pay attention. Here’s the truth: Democrats are bad at politics.

  No, really. You’re holistically bad at politics both on election day and in the cut-and-thrust of Washington, and your lack of skills is often Trump’s best ally. This chapter will look at why that is true and give you a bit of unsolicited advice. Because you really, really need it.

  You’ll object, I know. You’ll race right to the fact that Barack Obama beat the GOP in two blowout national elections, and you’re right. By all means, rest on those laurels, but how have you done since then?

  It’s been a goddamned train wreck, and you need to face that. Since 2008, you lost a presidential race to Donald Trump. Donald Fucking Trump. You’ve lost 11 governor’s mansions and 12 Senate seats, reflecting the post-Trump wins of Ralph Northam in Virginia and Doug Jones in Alabama. You lost 69 seats in the House of Representatives.

  Most important, you’ve lost almost 1,100 seats in state legislatures, which largely control the redistricting process and which produce the “farm team” candidates who will run in the future. They help build the local and state party cadres of activists and volunteers who knock on doors, make calls, and do the grunt work of the campaigns. Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, memes, and the other modern appurtenances of campaigning are necessary, but not necessarily sufficient.

  Trump hatred is good fuel for your voters, but it’s not quite enough to get you over the hump and into the majority again. You need to buckle down, get the data, targeting, and operational things right again before you’ll win back even part of what we took from you. You’ll have to run candidates
who don’t fit the top-down standards of Upper West Side Democrats.

  Let’s have some real talk about Hillary Clinton: she was a catastrophically terrible, horrible, crap-tier candidate, and she always has been. Democrats will sputter about her accomplishments, her stature, her work as a senator and secretary of state and still look away from the hard truth of politics: sometimes politicians have the Gift; sometimes they don’t. Hillary never did. Not once. Not for a moment. Her campaign team mastered one trick; the elite media psychological warfare game that blinded the press to just how god-awful she was as a candidate.

  I watched the birth of Hillary Clinton’s elected political career. It wasn’t pretty. As the communications strategist in Rudy Giuliani’s doomed U.S. Senate race against Hillary in 1999 and into the spring of 2000, when Giuliani left the race, I had a ringside seat.

  It was the terrible aftermath of the Monica Lewinsky scandal that put Hillary in contention for the seat. Her position as the Wronged Woman came screaming out of every focus group we conducted. New Yorkers, seeing her as a feminist champion (an arguable point, but we’ll fight that out another time), were ready to give her a chance because Bill had treated her so execrably. We also knew the voters of New York thought she wasn’t particularly relatable, credible, or engaging.

  She had one stroke of political luck in her entire life: Rudy’s (ahem) troubled marriage to Donna Hanover had been Page Six and gossip fodder for years. In early 2000 it collapsed in a public, messy wreck that kept the campaign team in a state of spin frenzy in an attempt to shut down a story that had been a long time in coming. Rudy’s bad news got much, much worse; after being diagnosed with prostate cancer, he withdrew from the race.

  Rudy’s replacement was the affable but doomed Rick Lazio, who ran an affable but doomed campaign. It was never even close to being a serious competition. You can’t beat a celebrity without a celebrity, and Rudy was the only person who could have defeated her. Hillary could have run the remainder of the race from a hot tub and won. She phoned in her 2006 reelection and got her head handed to her by Barack Obama in 2008. We know how 2016 ended.

  Hillary’s unnatural affect and clunky style never worked. She operated from behind a brittle shell of caution, overthinking, scar tissue, and the gnawing fear that a dead hooker would turn up in Bill’s bedroom. I know this will anger Hillary fans, but inertia alone is not enough to win the White House, and that was what drove more than a few voters to back her. Never a gifted, graceful, or natural speaker, Hillary’s constant mental self-auditing was always visible: “I will now run Human Interaction Subroutine 54.1, warm smile followed by sincere chuckle.”

  Without using the phrase “first woman president,” try to name the actual predicates of Hillary’s campaign. Unless you’re an HRC campaign insider, you can’t. There was never a there there for most voters outside of the usual partisan autopilot. She was a Democrat, and tribal gravity being what it is, she ran up the numbers any generic Democratic candidate would.

  Some of you will object, saying, “But she won the popular vote!” Yes, she did, but those aren’t the rules of the game, whether you like it or not. Democrats have long enjoyed the Blue Wall in the Electoral College, in which California, New York, Massachusetts, and a handful of other large liberal states give them a handy edge, but just as Bill Clinton famously “picked the lock” on the GOP’s Reagan and Bush–era Electoral College map, Hillary took that advantage for granted in Wisconsin and elsewhere.

  While we’re on the subject of the GOP’s secret weapons, I’ll name another: Nancy Pelosi. Nancy Pelosi may raise a metric crap-ton of money for the Democrats, but she sets the rest of America’s teeth on edge. Ever wonder why we stuck her in candidate and SuperPAC ads against you until Trump came along? Because it worked for a long, long time; only Trump has made her more palatable.

  Nancy Pelosi doesn’t test well with focus groups, to put it mildly. Before my liberal friends howl, this isn’t sexism. It’s long-term, observed data from dozens of focus groups and surveys over the years. She scans as harsh, shrill, partisan, and out of touch to Republicans and—importantly—an enormous swath of independents. We used her against you because she’s a convenient shorthand for the things many Americans see as culturally and socially disconnected from their lives. It’s not nice, but it is politics. She has also, to put it bluntly, lost a step in the past few years. The rest of the House and Senate Democratic leadership isn’t much better. I know you all love Aunt Nancy, but it’s time for her to retire to a farm upstate after you win the majority in the fall of 2018. The Democrats desperately need a younger, smoother, smarter set of public faces for their party if they’re going to compete. In a perfect world, we’d be fighting over policy and not worrying about appearances. This is quite clearly not a perfect world.

  Middle America scans the cliché New York–Boston–San Francisco liberal sneer as a judgment on their lives, their values, their faith, and their culture. Do the great unwashed sometimes deserve it? Sure. Would it help expand the brand if you didn’t rub things in their face that may be normal in Berkeley but repulsive in Middle America? More than you think.

  The siren song of “the first” is the Democratic Party’s greatest temptation. The First Woman. The First African American. The First One-Legged Furry Aficionado. You love the branding of shattering the blah blah blah. Sorry, my eyes glazed over.

  Stop it. When it’s a genuine first—someone who has put in the work, done their time in the vineyard, made the long crawl up the political mountain—their accomplishments should speak for themselves. Recruit candidates who have done things in the world, built businesses, fought in our wars, accomplished something more than doofy do-gooderism at nonprofits. Think “best,” not “first.” Too often “the first” comes across as a novelty more than substance.

  Just as I’ve called down the fire on my party for adopting an ideological monoculture after 2010 and their current cult-like devotion to Trump juche, you need some tough love. Another reason we took over 1,100 legislative seats from you over the past 15 years is your top-down ideology. Florida is not Vermont. Michigan is not Wyoming. New York is not North Carolina. As long as you insist on a single set of national standards for your party candidates, you limit the regions, states, and districts in which you can effectively compete.

  If every Democrat has to be adamantly pro-abortion and can never, ever even begin to express a moral qualm about the subject, you’re going to have trouble reaching meaningful chunks of the Catholic electorate and Protestant evangelicals. Even in cases where the Democrats could pick up seats with a pro-life candidate, the party, its allies, and its leadership will almost always pick a losing pro-abortion candidate instead. Government-funded drive-through abortion on demand at the end of the third trimester is a great message in Manhattan and Seattle. For the Pittsburgh suburbs and among conservative Catholic Democrats in Wisconsin? Not so much.

  Abortion also becomes one of the definitional characteristics of what it means to be a Democrat. For your base, that works, but you keep missing the nuance. Americans are divided on the issue but have reached a broad if tacit social compromise: tolerance for the practice, but with a sea of moral qualms and conditions.

  And yes, I’ve done work for pro-abortion Republicans in places where a pro-life GOPer would never survive. We had to fight inside our party primaries to win, so you’re not alone in facing this kind of compromise.

  If you’re mad at me for touching on one of your most sacred cows, you might want to get a glass of Chardonnay before reading the next section. Yes, ideological rigidity on abortion costs you votes in the aggregate outside of coastal enclaves, but it’s nothing at all compared to guns.

  Do you want to know how we beat you, over and over and over? This is going to sting for my Democratic friends, but one of the easiest ways for people on my side to disqualify you with large chunks of American voters is the subject of guns. I know, for you gun control is a central article of the liberal faith.

  I kn
ow that Parkland convinced you that Everything Changed. As telegenic as the Parkland kids are, guns are wired into America’s DNA in a way they, and you, don’t grasp.

  I’m not saying you don’t come at it from a well-meaning perspective or reasons that seem perfectly cogent in your head. You see violence caused by people and ascribe it to the tool they used. You genuinely believe that you can regulate it away. Bless your hearts. You genuinely think gun control is a winner at the polls and a decisive voting issue. It’s not. Gun control and gun violence make it into the top 10 of any Most Important Problem polling question panel for about a minute after a tragedy like Parkland, then fall back to where they usually live: in the 1 to 5% range. Jobs, the economy, the direction of the nation, and national security still drive voter decisions. Gun control hasn’t, and doesn’t.

  Most of you don’t understand guns and the role they play in America’s culture away from the coasts. You can’t grasp that the millions and millions of Americans who own guns, hunt, shoot for sport or pleasure, or carry for self-defense hear your attacks on guns as attacks on them. Most of you Democrats still don’t realize the way you speak about guns is a signifier of political hostility to Americans who long ago made up their minds on the matter. You conflate them with the people who commit these crimes, and you do it constantly, tendentiously, and with the worst goddamned nanny-state condescension.

  In an ironic twist, about 35% of the 1.4 million people in Florida who have a concealed-carry permit are Democrats. You guys don’t even understand your own base.