by Rick Wilson
I can hear your objections already. “What about Parkland? Las Vegas? Sandy Hook? What about . . . ?” I get it. No one thinks crazy people should own guns, including the staunchest NRA member. I’m not arguing policy with you. I’m telling you what the real politics are, and they’re not what you think. First, you’re fooling absolutely no one with the phrase “sensible gun safety.” We all know perfectly well that phrase came out of a focus group. You say that, and red state voters hear “gun confiscation.” You conflate criminals and the insane with lawful gun owners and users, and you can’t imagine why my side doesn’t think you’re reasonable. Let me use an esoteric, technical polling phrase for you: Americans fucking love guns.
Your position on guns is poison to one group you might consider winning once in a while: almost every white male in the country over the age of 35.
Democrats also miss a key element of the NRA debate. You can hate the NRA and call it a domestic terrorist organization all you want, but unlike Moms Demand Action, they deliver something for candidates beyond campaign cash; they deliver committed, passionate, single-issue, do-or-die voters. They organize, they do the hard work of campaigning, they mobilize. It’s not about their money; it’s their effort and turnout.
Democrats are missing a massive market opportunity in the era of Trump, one that could move votes and donations that could rebuild their party. It’ll take some work, but there is a clear pathway for the Democrats to become the party of fiscal sanity, probity, and responsibility.
I find it hard to write those words, but it’s true. Under Trump, the GOP wholly abandoned any pretense that we cared about the debt, the deficits, or borrowing trillions of dollars to fund our political wish list. Fiscal conservatism is a dead letter in my party, and there’s very little stopping the Democrats from picking up the mantle. We once roundly mocked the Democrats as the liberal “Free Shit” party, but with Trump writing checks like a drunken sailor blowing his entire paycheck on hookers in Olongapo after three months at sea, we’ve lost that privilege.
All you have to do is face down your own Free Shit Caucus. Looking at you, Bernie Sanders. Democrats ended their years in the wilderness with Bill Clinton, who ran as an economic and political centrist. He pushed the party to the right, and in the famous formulation of James Carville, “picked the electoral lock.” The economic future of the country is going to be radically different than the recent past; there’s an opportunity, for Democrats bold enough to move back in the center of the economic spectrum.
The Republicans certainly have abandoned it.
What to Expect When You’re Working for Trump
(A Tragedy in Five Acts)
– ACT V –
You’re not naive. You’ve been to the rodeo a time or two, and you know DC is filled with crafty, shitty people who hate your success. What you didn’t expect was that the friendly fire now raining down on you was going to come from inside the White House.
What you didn’t count on was that every faction inside the White House would be leaking about you, shitting you out to every reporter with Signal or Confide. Jared hates you, though he keeps giving you these weird come-hither looks in cabinet meetings. Ivanka hates you because Jared keeps giving you the aforementioned looks. Kelly hates you because he’s mad at the world. Miller hates you because you look like a meal he could digest for a week after he unhinges his snake jaw.
What you really didn’t expect was that the president himself would get on the phone at night with Maggie or Jonathan or Michael and crap all over you. You can imagine him, stalking around the residence, his sweaty, doll-size hand gripping his phone while sniffing out, “Say ‘The president has lost confidence in him.’ Yeah. Do that.”
Now comes the moment you’ve been dreading. You know the hammer is coming, but you hope against hope that Trump won’t humiliate you.
Then, there it is. The tweet. You read it through a narrow, gray tunnel as your vision constricts. You’re out.
You know what happens next: the people who loved you yesterday will now rip you to shreds. Reading Breitbart’s headlines about you (to say nothing of the comments section) is like watching a pack of wild dogs tear apart the corpse of your reputation. You know Tucker and Laura and Sean and Rush—once such good friends—will blame you, not Trump.
It can’t get worse. Then it does.
A story breaks about your departure, and as you watch the White House Press Room briefing, Sarah Huckabee Sanders responds to a question about you with “Well, we didn’t really know him that well. He was never the president’s first choice for that position. He was barely part of Cabinet meetings. The only time I recall seeing him was when he was getting coffee for other people. He might have been just a volunteer. We really didn’t get a sense he was that important to the president.”
You blindly fumble for the remote control as you feel yourself disappearing, fading out of memory, a ghost of the Washington you thought had changed forever.
Calls and emails to people who loved you just days ago go unreturned. You didn’t get the book deal your wife hoped for. You can’t get Fox to return your calls about being a contributor. Your old partners at your lobbying firm or PR shop or PAC are cagey, offering to get dinner “one night soon, somewhere away from downtown so we can talk.”
This is rock bottom, right? Wrong.
As you’re sitting in your office packing your few belongings into a shipping box, your soon-to-be-ex-assistant pings your intercom. “Sir, it’s Mr. Mueller’s office on line two. It’s urgent.”
You realize that asshole Rick Wilson was right all along: Everything Trump touches dies.
PART TWO
* * *
VICTIMS OF THE CURSE
Inside the Oval Office
(A Comedy in Five Acts)
– ACT ONE –
You hate the idea at first that this is all one big reality television show, but it doesn’t take too many weeks to see that’s just what it is. You really wish you’d watched more of The Apprentice when it was on. You’d try to catch up, but as a very young White House staffer it’s honestly just too much of your limited six hours a day of downtime.
Lord knows, you’re grateful to be working here. You know that previous White Houses were stacked with Harvard, Yale, and Princeton types, and as a recent graduate from the University of Alabama, getting this chance was more than you could have dreamed. Luckily, your momma’s cousin’s best friend met Mike Huckabee at Seaside one summer and that got you a VIP invite to the big rally in Mobile and you met Mister Lewandowski and off you went. You’d done an internship with Jeff Sessions when he was in the Senate, and somehow that was good enough to get you here. It sure wasn’t your 3.1 GPA.
Maybe it was just luck. Your daddy’s car dealership meant he was always a solid donor, and he liked Mr. Trump from the start. That didn’t hurt. They seem real sensitive around here to who was with the president early, and who joined the Trump Train later.
Your moment comes early, when POTUS himself is outside the Oval, yelling at Sean Spicer. “Don’t you own a goddamned dark suit? Where do you buy suits like that, Walmart?” You’re walking down the hallway with papers for Mr. Priebus, and trying to not make eye contact, but POTUS eyes you from head to toe. He approves.
“See, Sean? See?” he squawks, glaring at you. “What’s your name?”
You tell him, barely squeezing out you name, “John Fairhope, Mr. President.”
“See, Sean? Antelope here wears a dark suit with a good tie. You look like a fucking schlub,” the leader of the free world says angrily. Spicer’s eyes are dead, his skin pale and beaded with sweat. You try really, really hard not to breathe.
The president swings his gaze to you again and says, “Where do you work, Tone Loc?”
You stammer out, “I’m working in the chief of staff’s office as a deputy assistant for . . .”
He interrupts, “Not anymore!”
Your life just changed.
You don’t know it yet, but n
ot for the better.
5
* * *
WHAT WE LOST WITH TRUMP
DONALD TRUMP IS A TERRIBLE president. That’s not an aesthetic judgment. That’s not a partisan judgment. It’s a simple tally of his incompetence, recklessness, and the costs he’s imposing on the nation he was elected to lead.
I’m not talking about the usual Washington problems, but the bigger, more sweeping costs we face as a nation. The predicate of Never Trump wasn’t simply that he couldn’t be president; it was that he shouldn’t be president. A brief look at the tally of our diminished state follows.
LEADERSHIP
Presidential leadership has that ineffable, know-it-when-you-see-it quality, a quicksilver property that ebbs and flows with the arc of lives and fortunes of the men who hold the highest office in the land. It’s either there, or it isn’t.
We saw it in George Washington, not just in the battles he waged and won and the example he set as a leader, but in his dignified departure from power and his return to Mount Vernon after sacrificing so much for so long. He led during the time of our greatest early adversity and never let the power of office or position overtake him.
Sometimes it’s a determination to do the right thing, damn the consequences, the anger, and dissent it will cause. Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation almost ended his presidency, and eventually cost him his life, but he never wavered. He led in word and action, demanding incalculable sacrifice to prevent incalculable harm to the Republic.
It was John F. Kennedy’s call rallying a nation facing down communism, that “we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”
It was Ronald Reagan, standing tall and resolute before the Brandenburg Gate, rapping out the cadences of the end of 70 years of Soviet oppression, confident that our way of life, our values, and our system were superior to communism.
It’s FDR in the well of the House, dragging a nation from the opiate stupor of comfortable isolationism and unleashing our military and industrial might in a devastating war to end the threat of Nazism, fascism, and Japanese militarism.
It doesn’t always come from a crafted, perfect speech.
Sometimes it’s a haggard, strained George W. Bush mounting a fire truck in the smoking ruins of the World Trade Center, throwing his arm around a firefighter and telling a grieving, angry nation, “I can hear you! The rest of the world hears you! And the people—and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.”
These are just a handful of examples in the long, brilliant catalogue of American presidential leadership. Their styles were different, but all were grounded in our national character. Their leadership skills rose to meet the responsibilities of the office.
Leadership takes two things Donald Trump notoriously and evidently lacks: character and an ability to engage in political acts that go beyond oneself. He is almost completely obsessed with the spectacle of Trump, the performative presidency that is about his ratings, his appearance, his coverage. These are small, shallow things and anathema to selfless national leadership.
To be sure, every president has pondered his legacy and his role in history. They are still human, after all. But Donald Trump ponders only how Fox & Friends covers the previous day. Presidential leadership has never before been about tweeting, preening, or boasting. It hasn’t been an endless exercise in self-fellation, until now.
DIGNITY
Who could have imagined that a man of Donald Trump’s spectacular vulgarity, vanity, and gimcrack gold-leaf aesthetic would turn out to be a president without a shred of dignity? Who would have thought a man with a grasp of history derived solely from movies and television would be unable to channel the wonder and power of this nation in times of crisis?
Who could imagine that a serial adulterer with a desperate need to have his manhood validated and who engaged in a string of risible, sleazy affairs would become an international laughingstock?
Who could have foreseen that the faux billionaire up to his ample ass in debt to God knows who would look at the White House as a way to nickel-and-dime the taxpayers and the GOP into bumping up his revenue stream at his hotels and golf courses?
Spoiler: everyone, ever.
Those of you who hoped the awesome power and majesty of the presidency would draw Trump away from decades of tawdry, low behavior were in for a rude surprise. George Washington embodied presidential dignity in a way that was transferred by some providential magic to almost every man who has held the highest office. Not so with Trump.
Henry Cabot Lodge once wrote of our first president:
Washington cared as little for vain shows as any man who ever lived, but he had the highest sense of personal dignity, and of the dignity of his cause and country. Neither should be allowed to suffer in his hands. He appreciated the effect on mankind of forms and titles, and with unerring judgment he insisted on what he knew to be of real value. It is one of the earliest examples of the dignity and good taste which were of such inestimable value to his country.1
Donald Trump is like a monster from the laboratory of a jackass mad scientist, built to represent the perfect antithesis of Washington’s example. In almost every aspect of his demeanor, speech, and affect, Trump is a clownish figure, a deserved magnet for mockery. From his absurd hair construct to his ludicrous ego to his pathetic, whiny need to have his alpha-male status affirmed every moment, Trump is the least dignified president since William Howard Taft held a Jell-O-wrestling contest on the South Lawn.
His Liberace-meets-Saddam decorating style has always screamed out “Not Quite Our Class, Dear,” and his personality is the very opposite of commander-in-chief material. Trump is the living, shitty embodiment of a culture that’s more Real Housewives and less Shining City on a Hill.
No man is perfect in this regard, but even by the standards of today, Donald Trump’s grasping, horrid ego reduces him to a clownish figure, easily, eminently, and, most important, deservedly mockable. He is always too conscious of how he looks on the small screen of the television rather than the vast stage of the world; everything about him screams need, insecurity, false bravado.
Why does dignity matter in the president? Because at some point in every administration, history comes knocking. Tragedy strikes. The nation looks to the man they elected to lead them and whispers, “Now what?” Large and small, natural disasters, terrorist attacks, crises require a president to be a moral leader, to guide, to heal, to comfort, to direct the painful energies of a hurt nation into a positive direction. Trump can’t stop looking in the mirror, a self-obsessed Narcissus in a fright wig.
TRUTH AND FACTS
Post-truth American politics goes beyond the traditional best-spin model of political communications both parties have embraced for generations. Setting the Trump campaign’s endless torrent of bullshit aside for a moment, the tragedy of a presidency and a party that will argue endlessly and fruitlessly about basic, incontestable facts is a truly terrible sign of the corrosive nature of this man and his machine.
I’ve been behind the glass watching enough focus groups to know that very few Americans trust anyone in Washington. Their hatred of politicians is transpartisan. Their baseline position is that Washington is full of lying liars who lie. Trump took that to levels no one could have imagined before, and we’re going to regret it at home and abroad.
On the domestic front, no one in Washington trusts Donald Trump, not even his staff, his allies in Congress, and certainly not anyone else in the legislative or political process. He’s a serial liar of such infamy that any promise he makes is known at once to be conditional, ephemeral, and deniable.
More Americans believe Donald Trump is dishonest than believe that of any president since Nixon; roughly two-thirds of Americans view him as being untrustworthy across almost all survey data sources. That’s hardly a distinction any resident of the Oval Office desires.
Leadership demands trust. Trust that the president will keep his word, do as he promises, and deliver on commitments. Donald Trump, the Münchhausen of presidents, is a notorious serial liar and fabulist. He is a man who has boasted about his own dishonesty in life, marriage, and business.
VISION
Describe Trump’s vision for America without using a slogan. I’ll wait.
You might argue that Trump has a kind of negative vision, a mental landscape of threats, horrors, imagined enemies, Fox News bogeymen, and other members of his nightmare closet, but beyond his infamous, vague catchphrase “MAGA,” there’s not much to latch on to when it comes to presidential vision. His base quite evidently loves having their fear centers endlessly stimulated by his constant drip of apocalyptic, conspiratorial rhetoric, and revels in triggering the snowflake libtard RINOs, but Trump’s actual vision for America is a dimwitted slogan, not a plan. “Make America Great Again” is a retrospective, pessimistic throwaway, a callback to an imagined past. It’s superficial boob-bait that isn’t matched up against a plan, a program, or a vision beyond L’état, c’est Trump.
Left or right, most presidents have some kind of end point, some shape of the American landscape they want to see. It’s the fundamental programming layer of their plans, policies, and rhetoric. Trump’s MAGA line is as dazzlingly superficial as the rest of his mental processes, and aside from a Wall to stop Mexicans and some form of amorphous swamp-draining, you’d be hard-pressed to lay out a Trump doctrine. Domestically, it’s a mishmash of news of the week. Internationally, Make America Great Again is translated as “Cede American leadership to Russia.”