Everything Trump Touches Dies

by Rick Wilson

  Moments later, everyone in the line ahead of you is staring at their phones. Those who aren’t are dragging their handsets out of purses and pockets.

  At 6:01, the president sends out a tweet saying “Crooked Hillary, who could not win an election due to LOW STAMINA now directs a witch hunt against me! Ironic! Crooked Hillary is the witch! Get on your broom and ride back to Mueller (MR WITCHHUNT).” Several more follow, and your guts turn to water. By the time you’re in your office, it’s on every network.

  Sarah Sanders stands in the door of your office, heaving. “You little shit. He says you wrote that tweet.” She’s livid, her eyes practically rolling and her nostrils flaring.

  “He called me about . . .”

  She interrupts, “I know he called you. He told me. I can tell you one thing, after the shit with Spicer and Scaramucci, I’m still here and they’re not. I’ll survive you, too. I’d better not hear any leaks about how you’re the new wonder boy.”

  She won’t listen to your innocent explanation, and you know you’ve made an enemy without trying.

  You’ve been on a couple trips now, and a reporters are starting to wonder who you are. It’s awkward, because the truth is that reporters terrify you. You know people around you leak—a lot. That weird little Wolff guy is always in Bannon’s office. Reporters are everywhere in this White House, and it’s obvious that it won’t go well in the end.

  So you keep your mouth shut.

  7

  * * *

  THE TRUMP BASE

  FOR TRUMP, HIS FAMOUS “I love the poorly educated” line was a throwaway, but for those of us watching the Trump Party’s metastatic growth in the summer and fall of 2015 and early 2016 it was blindingly obvious. As much as Trump apologists want to gussy it up with some pseudo-intellectual cruft, the hot core of Trumpism is a group of Americans who are the perfect marks for a con man like Trump: anxious over economic and social status markers in a changing world. Sure, they’re looking for a place for both their anger and uncertainty to be heard, but they’re also looking for someone to blame.

  If there’s a sharper critique of America’s failed education system than the breathless, mindless Trump voter, I can’t name it. Given the dumbing-down of the American educational system in the past fifty years, graduating from high school now means you can draw air in and out of your lungs. Schools are long on feelings and short on critical thinking, to say nothing of civics, economics, or reading comprehension. It’s not a point of pride any longer. The weaknesses, vagaries, and generally terrible nature of our alleged education system is a longer topic for another time, but where was Trump’s support strongest? You guessed it.

  You know the rest, and since base demographics are partly political destiny, the demos tell the story. Trump supporters are older, whiter, less educated, and more southern and Midwestern than the mean, and their income ranks in the average range. They love God, television, and Fox News.

  Economic anxiety and stagnation are two of the ostensible drivers of Trump Party membership. “The poor get everything for free and the rich get all the tax breaks”1 in many ways perfectly captures the Troll Party belief set. They’re not entirely wrong, but quite a lot of “the poor getting things for free” applies to them. Food stamps, disability, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security dependence aren’t exactly foreign concepts to many Trump voters.

  It speaks to the fact that Trump’s notorious base is impervious to reason and immune to irony and is still a deep mystery to many who aren’t Trump supporters. They are willful, petulant, and full of pointless defiance. They’ve become defined by an obsession with Trump as the sole remedy for the offenses imposed on them by a rotating cast of villains and evildoers. In the process, they’ve become easy marks for every flavor of conspiratorial lunacy and gimcrack appeals to their worst instincts.

  I know I’m not supposed to mock Trump’s base. It’s elitist, and cruel, and . . . oh, who am I kidding? Honestly, at this point, it’s almost a moral imperative to slap the stupid out of them. So I’ll dispense with the brief, obligatory nod to their hard workin’, God-fearin’, ’merican salt-of-the-earth values and return swiftly to being an elitist asshole. Because, by God, they’ve earned it.

  There’s an entire journalistic enterprise these days trying to tell people who don’t sit in trailers all day watching reality television whilst shoveling down corn syrup–and-soy-based salty-sweet Walmart-brand bacon-cheese snax into their maws about how the Other America is the Only Real America. As a corner of political anthropology, it’s fascinating, but it’s been repurposed as an excuse for Trumpism, including its most hateful pathologies.

  We’re supposed to be the “no excuses” Daddy party, remember? Imagine your teenager says, “Dad, I’m going to get a lip piercing and some fierce face tattoos.” A responsible parent says, “Whoa, back on that, kiddo. This is an unwise life decision.” When your teenage daughter says, “Dad, I know I’m only fourteen, but Roy says age is just a number, and he’s, like, a judge, and he’s thirty-two, and I love him,” the correct response is not to nod in approval but to reach for a shotgun.

  So Trump’s base voters shouldn’t get a free pass from the right lane. They don’t get a pat on the head because of bullshit “economic anxiety” or NAFTA or whatever other ouchies they got from the brown people and the robots they think took their jobs. They don’t get to scream about welfare queens and then sit idly shoveling down Oxycontin like candy while waiting for their EBT cards to recharge and their disability checks to hit. They don’t get to bitch about triggered, liberal snowflake social justice warriors while nursing a set of grievances that lead them to spittle-flecked outrage at the slightest challenge to their worldview.

  This isn’t simply some elitist rant. It’s the tough, parental love that Fox and talk radio never gave them. It’s the switch to the backside when they start quoting Infowars unironically, something that might have corrected the conspiracy craziness a lot earlier in the process. The political correctness culture that makes so much of the left utterly fucking insufferable is all about punishing wrong thoughts. Sadly, the Trump right is just as intolerant of people who vary from their narrow set of beliefs and values as the most fervent Social Justice Warrior on the left. They’re just as dedicated to suppressing speech they dislike; ask Michelle Wolff or any NFL player who took a knee to protest police misconduct.

  It’s not the top-level values of the Middle American voters who came out for Trump that bother me. It’s their contradictions, moral blindness, and embrace of the tantrum over the idea and rage over principle. I’m not blaming them entirely, either. Like many others in the professional political class, I missed a huge signal in their behavior and their affect. We always thought of conservatives as having a certain level-headed, rational underpinning.

  We were so, so wrong.

  Fanatical MAGA voters who elected Trump are more like Obama voters than we wanted to admit. We should have seen this coming because people like me helped grow them as a political force. Let’s get this mea culpa out of the way: After the 2010 elections, we learned to motivate and activate Tea Party voters, even for candidates who weren’t perfect fits for Tea Party purists. We knew they were out there, and we identified them, targeted them, and motivated them.

  We just didn’t understand they weren’t waiting for a conservative revolution. They were instead waiting for a strongman, a caudillo, a Saddam.

  They didn’t really care about fiscal conservatism. These were “conservatives” unmoved by arguments about the debt, the deficit, or the Constitution. They didn’t really care about reducing the size of government. In the end, they were just angry at a changing America, a changing economy, and at people who didn’t look or sound like them. Fed by Fox News, talk radio, and weaponized Facebook feeds custom-designed to engorge their feelings of fury, resentment, and impotence, they were looking at a world that was evolving socially, technologically, and politically at a Kurzweilian rate.

  In short, those voters we g
roomed since 2010 were perfect marks for Donald Trump, political con man of the century: pissed off, hair-trigger, and punitive as hell.

  One early-warning sign, like the faint radar echoes presaging a bomber attack, came early on in the Trump campaign. It was in the form of a single picture the great news photographer Mark Wallheiser took at a Trump rally in Mobile, Alabama, on August 22, 2015. You know the one; Trump supporters, wild-eyed and hypnotized, reaching across a rope line to touch The Donald.

  Even controlling for the fact the rally was in Mobile, that look of cultlike devotion and the intensity of the crowd should have been a clearer signal. Yes, the elite GOP’s instant not-our-kind-dear reaction was in part our insularity, but . . . that look. That sign. One woman was holding her child with an expression that said: “I offer my infant as a sacrifice to you, Lord Trump. Devour him at your leisure.”

  In many long years in politics, I’ve never seen that look for any Republican candidate, ever. I’d seen something close to it in the eyes of Obama’s fans, most certainly, but even for candidates with passionate followings that white-hot I-won’t-be-ignored bunny-boiler cray is like a political unicorn. Marco had his fans, as did Scott Walker, Jeb Bush, and Ben Carson. Even Ted Cruz had his . . . oh, never mind. The Paulites were famous for a certain kind of, shall we say, overly dedicated fan mostly of the late-twenties still-a-virgin libertarian variety. This was new territory.

  The obsession with Trump was crazy-ex-girlfriend multiple-restraining-orders loony, and for a while it was fun to ignore it, to write it off as the reddest red-staters fanboying the celebrity candidate they knew so well from TV. The rallies, the stage show, the hats, the pure, unadulterated fanaticism wasn’t simply about the election itself; it was about a decoupling of the Republican Party from ideas and ideals and its new attachment to the Dear Leader. We didn’t see it coming soon enough.

  We should have taken the illness more seriously, like the people who know that the bite on the hand is the first sign of the zombie apocalypse. Deal with it fast, or everyone is going to end up in a mindless, undead cannibalistic rage. The post-thought Trump supporter made the most rabid Obama fandom look tepid in comparison.

  For all our mockery and indifference, we didn’t see that there is a deep strain in American political life that isn’t seeking party rigor or ideological purity or even an independent iconoclast but the safe reinforcement of the pack of people just as pissed off as they are. We underestimated the deep human psychological need to be part of a movement based not on hope but on channeling the comments section of the nuttiest blogs.

  That’s what Trump gave them. He was an avatar for their anger, their impotence, and their blamestorming for everything wrong in their world. For once in their shallow, sad, TV-inflected lives they felt like they were the cool kids. That picture said it all; Trump was offering himself up not only as the avatar for their anger with the existing administration but as something more, something protean and dangerous.

  As the months of 2015 dragged on, I came to realize that Obama and Trump fanatics were two sides of the same personality-cult coin. The cognitive dissonance between what the Trump faction hated about Obama and what they loved about Donald was notable, and after Trump’s victory, even more striking in that Obama’s fans seemed pretty happy just to elect him. They weren’t, as a rule, even angrier after the election. The odd parallels in fanaticism are striking.

  Trump fans hated Obama’s cult-like followers, with their mindless stares of adoration, their impervious barrier between emotion and reason, and their instant fury when confronted with the facts about his record, his history, or his philosophy.

  They reviled “Hope” as shallow and superficial but embraced “MAGA” with gusto. The conservative conceit of being the party with a robust philosophical underpinning from Burke to Buckley was guilty of the same kind of shallow love of a stunt-casting celebrity candidate that they mocked in the Democrats of 2008.

  Conservatives at the time despised Obama’s obviously empty promises to credulous, low-information voters on the left and the center. They loved it from Trump and still do.

  They furiously blasted Obama for soft-pedaling his positions on single-payer health care, gay marriage, gun control, and abortion to get elected, and that the media let him slide on a catalogue of political sins. Trump fans took this to an entirely new level.

  They mocked Obama’s promises of millions of new jobs in the clean energy sector but adored Trump’s gauzy, anachronistic promises to bring back millions of jobs in dead industries like coal, buggy whips, and witch-finding.

  They hated how Obama rode into office on the wave of constant attention from the mainstream media. They loathed how the press played along with his game, draining the life out of every other candidate by describing him as an inevitable juggernaut, an unstoppable political force, and a game-changer who was tapping into something deep and powerful in American political life. Bless their deplorable little hearts, they loved it from Trump.

  They hated how Obama’s naive ignorance of the real and brutal world of international affairs was papered over by his hollow promises to make the world respect the United States again. But Trump’s Russia-inflected win, nuclear brinkmanship, and diplomacy-free MAGA-with-MOABs? Beloved.

  They hated Obama’s casual disdain for people who weren’t from a major city where, you know, all the rich, smart, educated, liberal people like him live. But they loved it from Trump. Trump is about as Heartland America as I am a Lapp reindeer hunter.

  They hated Obama’s elite credentialism and how he wielded his Harvard and Columbia degrees to browbeat his aspiring-class opponents from outside the meritocracy and how he used them to cow an already docile press. But they loved it from President Best Mind, who bellowed his alleged Wharton credentials every chance he got.

  As much as Republicans hated when Obama slipped and had a smug expression that felt like he was mocking the stupidity of the unwashed, they loved Trump’s sneering japery.

  Republicans hated Obama’s cadre of glassy-eyed, creepy advisors, with their combination of over-the-edge ideological fervor and dead-ender stares of adoration for the Glorious Leader. But they loved the misfit-toy collection of weirdos, former golf caddies, Russian-tied sleazeball consultants, reporter-punching thug campaign managers, dissipated bullshit artists, and Pepe Army sleeper-cell members who followed in Trump’s wake.

  They hated Obama’s support for bailouts, too-big-to-fail, and heavy-handed, taxpayer-funded government intervention in industries, but they loved it from Trump, a man promising to keep his boot on the throat of companies that didn’t cooperate with his America First agenda.

  They hated Obama’s comfy alliance with Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and the odious Clinton family enterprise, but they shrugged at Trump’s lifetime of donations to the most liberal Democrats in the country.

  They hated Obama’s cavalier disdain for private property rights, but they loved it from Trump. “He’s a businessman” was the universal cry to excuse any sin.

  Everything that set their teeth on edge, raised their hackles, and made them loathe Barack Obama is there in Donald Trump. Every aspect of the con game Obama played on America in 2008—the obsessive focus on one base issue (for Obama the war in Iraq; for Trump, immigration), the cult-like obsession, the instant attacks on apostates, the willful ignorance of his history and his beliefs—is present in Trump.

  Everything they despised in Obama’s political character and behavior they love from Trump.

  Part of Trump’s dark appeal struck on the common idea that only he could redress the wrongs of the past and only he could avenge them. The future they experienced was one of international dangers on every side, domestic upheavals, cultural and social fluidity, and endless, savage economic destruction. They saw Wall Street and Washington as ravenous, heartless, and hungry for their last scraps of self-worth and net worth.

  The master con man saw what the marks wanted and gave it to them. Over and over, he framed arguments about �
�the way things used to be.” In his beer-hall style rallies, Trump talked about “knocking the hell” out of people. His was the language of the brawler safely behind the cordon of security, but it was effective nevertheless.

  Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon smoothed out the rhetorical edges on the nostalgia campaign, seamlessly merging with their vision of nationalist populism. Trump soon promised a return to coal mines, steel mills, ironworks, town criers, and the village blacksmith. While most modern presidents looked back 20 or perhaps 30 years in their retrospective visions, Trump took it all the way back to the ’50s.

  Mostly the 1850s.

  It was irresistible to people raised in a climate of rapid change and fed a constant stream of “the liberals are destroying you” cable news.More than any presidential candidate in the past, Trump let them speak their hatreds aloud. It was Muslims. It was the crafty Mexican army of immigrants, coming to take their jobs, pillage their suburbs, flood their streets with taco trucks, and impregnate their womenfolk. It was the Chinese, implacable and inscrutable. He left it to his alt-right allies to whisper in the darkness, “It’s the Jews. It’s the blacks.”

  His base loved it. They ate it up with a spoon. If Trump had proposed repealing child labor laws to allow kids to mine coal, they would have roared their approval at sending the little tykes down-pit with hammers and pickaxes.

  Trump promised his base a world where they could all go back to the 1950s, where a high school graduate could get a job down at the local steel mill that would support a family. It was a cruel lie, and he knew it. He promised a return to American manufacturing prowess not based on innovation, disruption, and competition but by using trade deals and immigration policy and in which Washington picked winners and losers. He promised punitive measures against anyone who resisted.

  The unsubtle code (and let’s be honest, Trump voters don’t really do subtle) was that America would be safer, whiter, straighter, more Christian. We’d be isolated from the evils of the world by walls and warriors. It was one of the most striking and dishonest sales pitches in American political history, and that includes William Howard Taft’s promise to fight an MMA match with Elihu Root to settle the Ballinger-Pinchot affair.