Everything Trump Touches Dies

by Rick Wilson

  Richard Spencer saw Trump as a pathway for his more clean-cut, suit-and-tie Nazism to enter the political mainstream, but Spencer was simply a more polished turd than the usual beer-gut-and-man-boobs Klan types. His tweeds couldn’t disguise his calls for a white ethnostate. Naturally, he elided the tricky little details of that idea when he told Vice, “Our dream is a new society, an ethno-state that would be a gathering point for all Europeans. It would be a new society based on very different ideals than, say, the Declaration of Independence.”12

  Spencer’s “Hail Trump” moment marked the end of his dreams of being the godfather of an intellectually compelling and effective white supremacist movement. Discredited and discarded, Spencer is just one more of the bottom feeders Trump attracted, embraced, and abandoned. At that same rally, Spencer said, “No one will honor us for losing gracefully. No one mourns the great crimes committed against us. For us, it is conquer or die.”13 It would be the latter.

  Social media platforms finally woke up to the game and started to use their power to marginalize and ghettoize people who advocate deporting, killing, or expelling a majority of their customer base. Social media also exposed their singular weakness, even as they felt they could grow in power under “God Emperor Trump”: the vast majority of the movement is forced to remain anonymous. They believe this gives them the power to shitpost, edgelord, and meme a white nation-state into being. What it actually demonstrates is their marginal status, political weakness, and soft jawlines.

  Their wailing and lamentations over being “deplatformed” never cease to amuse me. Richard Spencer, alt-right oppo researcher Chuck “Rage Furby” Johnson, Milo, and the rest being tossed off platforms like Twitter, YouTube, PayPal, GoFundMe, and other platforms results in screaming fits about their First Amendment rights being violated, demonstrating they understand neither the Constitution nor private property. Pardon me if private companies don’t want to be associated with your scuzzy little Hitler cosplay club, boys.

  When fighting back against racism in the real world, the best thing is to put it on camera, and that’s what the American media did. Alt-righters saw themselves as shock troops in a movement at least tacitly blessed by Donald Trump. They saw the endless nudge-and-wink of his approval, felt his love whenever he ranted about Walls or immigrants. They expected he knew he was one of their own on some level and believed the white revolution was upon them.

  The reality of their pathetic lives and position was a painful wakeup call. They’re not Aryan warriors for the most part; they’re pudgy white boys from lower-middle-class suburbs who couldn’t find a woman’s clitoris with a GPS and a magnifying glass. They’re not a Kampfbund. They’re a chat room on Discord or a bunch of surly drunks shit-talking about the black guy hitting on the white girls in their favorite sports bar.

  As they became exposed, largely due to infighting within the alt-right itself, we saw over and over that these were hardly Mensch und Sonne models. They were much more likely to own an anime waifu body pillow than a chainsaw. When “Ricky Vaughn,” one of the alt-right’s vocal Trump fanboys and notorious trolls, was revealed to be one Douglas Mackey, we didn’t see a rippling Aryan Adonis but a balding, soft-featured, whippet-human hybrid who had been unemployed for two years.

  Tough-talking alt-right leader Andrew Auernheimer, also known as “weev,” is a former convict who went full white-supremacist while in prison. Publisher of the Daily Stormer neo-Nazi website, Auernheimer once begged of Trump, “Please, Donald Trump, kill the Jews, down to the last woman and child. Leave nothing left of the Jewish menace. It is all on you, my glorious leader.”14 Today the Daily Stormer can be found only on the dark web, and Auernheimer’s paper-thin legal defense that he’s only calling for a new genocide “for the lulz” has made him an international fugitive.

  Their reeking, terrible virgin anger is the same kind of thing we’ve seen in terrorist profiles the world over—angry, lonely, awkward young men told their lack of sex, happiness, and prosperity is from the Evil Other: the Jew, the American, the immigrant, the woman who won’t fuck them, the religious apostate. When the torch-bearing Citronella ISIS boys show up in their khakis and white polo shirts, we see a Western version of the black track-suited terrorists toting AK-47s who litter the Middle East and South Asia.

  By the middle of 2018, the alt-right had fallen victim to their own exposure and elevation by Donald Trump. In all its themes, variations, and subgroups, the alt-right is like a species of political cockroach; sunlight kills them. Trump gave them the confidence to come out into the light, but the moment the world saw them for what they are, the response was to spray them and stomp them back into the shadows.

  PART FOUR

  * * *

  AFTER TRUMP

  16

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  BUT GORSUCH

  WHEN MY DAUGHTER WAS SMALL, part of the deal we made if she was to get a pony of her own was that she’d do her part of the barn chores, including mucking out stalls. Ponies are a good lesson in hard work for kids, and one of our favorite jokes was “Keep digging. There’s a pony under all that manure.”

  Trump supporters keep digging through the manure pile of this administration, hoping to find that pony. This quest is a constant, thankless task, in part because Donald Trump keeps producing more chaos and fewer accomplishments than they expected.

  The tiresome, Sisyphean defense of Trump by his mob of yahoos is one thing. They’re here for the spectacle, the show of a presidential chimpanzee throwing his feces. They’re the Idiocracy cosplayers. Trump could eat a live baby on national television, and their only reaction would be “Well, Obummer was such a Kenyan cuck he’d never eat a baby! MAGA!”

  Conservative writers, activists, and thinkers most certainly know better but continue to rely on a two-word mantra you’ve heard over and over: “But Gorsuch.”

  It’s their mantra as they struggle to fit Trump’s behavior into a coherent mental framework, stretching and twisting their standards, compromising their principles, eliding every outrage, and ignoring the endemic corruption, grotesque mismanagement, and shit-tier judgment he displays. “But Gorsuch” is a tell, a sign of a mental struggle to justify Trump.

  They’re digging through a pyramid-size pile of manure trying to find the pony underneath, and it just doesn’t work. The list of actual conservative accomplishments in the Trump administration that aren’t ephemeral, intangible, or marred with other and undesirable secondary effects is pretty damn short.

  At the end of his first year in office, the White House released a list of 81 accomplishments, which is pretty standard fare for most administrations. Very few took the form of “Congress passed, and the president signed the following law.” Most of them were policy, executive orders, or unconnected to the administration’s actual actions.

  This leaves them three primary lines of defense: Gorsuch, the tax bill, and the stock market. It’s less to go on than you think.

  Neil Gorsuch is a noted jurist, a smart man, and a demonstrated conservative thinker. We should know; he came up through the Federalist Society system where folks on my side of the ideological ledger have done a great job of building up an infrastructure to nominate and install conservatives on the federal bench. It’s one of the hidden triumphs of the conservative movement.

  Donald Trump had nothing to do with choosing Gorsuch for the empty seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. Gorsuch doesn’t reflect Trump’s principles, ideas, or philosophy. As Trump has no principles, ideas, or philosophy beyond his narcissism and self-regard, how could he?

  Gorsuch was a name on the list given to him by Mitch McConnell, not a choice derived from this president’s knowledge, preferences, or ideology. Trump has no judicial philosophy of his own and, in fact, had praised his hyperliberal pro-abortion sister for a role on the federal bench, which was problematic given both the nepotism aspect and that she’s to the left of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

  That list was used as a talisman in 2016 to prevent nervous conservatives fr
om wandering off the Trump reservation. The irony is, conservatives could have had a Gorsuch, and other judges of the same desirable conservative stripe, with a lot less drama from a Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, or Ted Cruz.

  What about the deregulation battle? Isn’t Trump engaged in a regulatory war against the hated liberal bureaucracy? Yes and no. The cuts to regulations in some departments may well be desirable. Some are not. Three problems exist on this front. First, those changes are temporary. The next president can, with the stroke of a pen, restore the old regulations, or do worse. Second, the changes so far seem driven by an arbitrary set of demands from corporate sponsors, lobbyists, and industries in good odor with Team Trump. Odd, but I thought Republicans were against picking winners and losers.

  Third, they’re rule changes, and rule changes are inferior to laws. Passing a law, which takes negotiation, compromise, brains, discipline, and engagement with the actual issues is well beyond Donald Trump’s intellectual ken.

  Trump’s reliance on executive orders is precisely as weak as President “Pen and a Phone” Barack Obama’s were. Bragging about something that the next president can wipe away in an instant is a dangerous and pathetic path if you’re looking to make a lasting and substantive change in Washington, DC. The inability to focus and work on passing legislation is an ongoing weakness of this administration, and so the cheerleading for these outcomes is inevitably going to be short-lived.

  Also, if and when the Democrats take the House and Senate, Republicans should expect a tidal wave of new laws seeking to overturn policies where Trump had attempted to use executive orders. A majority of Democrats in even one chamber will lead to inevitable veto fights, burning more of Trump’s already limited political capital, and sink Washington deeper into a sea of political entropy.

  Further, many of Trump’s executive order–driven “accomplishments” aren’t exactly sterling examples of conservative economic policy. Trade tariffs, coal subsidies, and a variety of other big-government economic nostrums pushed by Trump and his cadre of economically illiterate advisors are edging the United States toward a disastrous international economic order where the rest of the world sees us as a target, not a market.

  What about the 2017 tax bill? Isn’t it a towering Republican win, a brand-new conservative approach to . . . oh, who am I kidding? It’s a honking corporate tax cut. It’s a bill written by lobbyists for a tier of wealthy corporate and high-net-worth clients, a triumph of the Washington ecosystem of lobbying and paid advocacy.

  It’s, well, big. That’s something, right? Congress raced the bill through the House and Senate in seven short weeks and kept Trump far, far away.

  While sold as providing “Trump bonuses” to workers, the vast majority of the tax savings realized by American corporations flowed into buying back stock, improving their cash positions, and executive compensation. I’m no economist, and I’m not even going to argue whether those things have an upside; they do, but at the upper rates and in small numbers of voters.

  What I am, however, is a careful watcher from behind the glass of hundreds of focus groups, and what I saw in March 2018 should chill the GOP. In a focus group conducted in a purple, Midwestern state the target audience for the tax cut’s PR message sat around a table, and while they liked the bill in a broad, general way, the economic worry had already returned. Sure, they preferred lower taxes to higher in a broad sense but didn’t put much faith that this bill would profoundly change their lives. The continued belief that Washington was working for lobbyists and special interests blunted the bill’s political uplift.

  Public polling showed high-income earners were delighted with the tax cut, and middle-class voters, well, not as much. Only 25% said they’d seen a boost in their paycheck as a result of the tax law. Of that 25%, 58% said it made them more likely to support the GOP. That’s 14.5%, and while necessary, it isn’t necessarily sufficient.

  The idea that the bill would provide such a tangible sense of benefit and a concomitant political push for the GOP wasn’t wrong, but it also wasn’t enough to offset the negatives Donald Trump had imposed on the GOP. Even “Trump bonuses” appearing in paychecks—and they were more than the Democrats spun and less than the Republicans promised—didn’t change the broader political calculus.

  The other mistake the GOP made was believing that the tax bill guarantees the stock market’s eternal, upward trajectory. The market had largely already priced in the tax cut to its performance for the year before the bill passed in Congress. It was baked in the proverbial cake.

  Republicans took the tax bill’s political upsides for granted, despite the fact that it blows a trillion-dollar hole in the deficit and presumes ludicrously high growth rates, and while the corporate rate reductions are permanent, the individual tax rate reductions are temporary. It’s chock-full of cherry-picked goodies for specific industries, like the carried-interest loophole, and ends local and state tax deductions.

  There’s a cost to bad policy. There’s a cost to government where the executive either ignores, bypasses, or intimidates the legislative branch into doing his bidding. Part of the short-shortsightedness and magical thinking of the Trump era is this idea that there will never be another Democratic president or a Democratic majority in the House or Senate.

  Someday a Democrat in the Oval Office who combines an ambition to expand government power will run wild with executive power, and Republicans will be caught slack-jawed and stunned. We looked away and giggled with glee as Trump ran roughshod over the balance of powers and the limits of executive authority, and we’ll pay for it down the line.

  That we haven’t achieved conservative perfection in government with any president before Trump is a feature, not a bug in the dysfunction of today’s GOP and conservative base. No, we didn’t deliver the perfect wish list of the further edges of our coalition in any spot. The foreign policy hawks didn’t get trillion-dollar defense budgets. The social conservatives didn’t get a ban on abortion, gay marriage, or Fifty Shades of Grey. The small-government guys didn’t get reductions in government to the point they could drown it in a bathtub. Trump isn’t going to deliver those things either, and what his supporters never understand is that he doesn’t want to.

  Trump turned on its head the old paradigm of liberals wanting to grow government and conservatives wanting to constrain it. The “But Gorsuch” premise comes down to one dangerous thought: that Trump is worth all of the excesses, deviations, and risks to the movement, the party, and the country. As Trump’s departures from conservative ideology leave consistent conservatives reeling, his evident personal instability becomes more marked. He’s not growing into the job, and scandals of his own creation have paralyzed his agenda. It’s difficult to see how the trade-off is worth it.

  Do Gorsuch and a handful of court nominations make up for the seemingly enormous, looming political costs? Do a few regulatory rollbacks compensate for setting a new precedent for the broad use of executive power? Does having an ongoing war with the media offset losing female, and suburban voters in record numbers? Does “he fights” make up for the fact that when he enters the discussion the result is more likely “we lose”?

  Does Trump’s campaign to weaponize and expand federal power against immigrants offset the fact that we are permanently scarring the reputation of this country and our party with Hispanics of every description?

  Does a tax bill offset the damage done to race relations and the permanent alienation of African Americans from the GOP? There may be good people on both sides in Trump’s mind, but in the minds of minority voters, the game is over.

  Do Trump’s shallow, dick-measuring juvenile feuds with everyone who has ever looked at him cross-eyed make America look more or less like a nation led by a serious person? Does Trump’s obedience to and bizarre love affair with Vladimir Putin make our country look stronger, or weaker? Does the glaringly overt culture of corruption designed to enrich Trump and his family make foreign powers think that we’re incorruptib
le or that there’s a gigantic For Sale sign on the forehead of the leader of the free world?

  Life is full of trade-offs. Life is full of compromises. The best shouldn’t be the enemy of the good. The differences in perception between Trump voters and people who live on this plane of reality are stark. Trump fans view every statement, tweet, speech fragment, and half-formed word-fart out of Trump’s mouth as a final, permanent, brilliantly conceived and executed policy. His critics on the right wonder about how the expansion of state power and his role as our first modern president with genuinely authoritarian inclinations plays out in the long haul. His fans believe Trump already built the Wall, the economy will never be better, and the only thing we have to fear is Robot Hillary 2020 and the fake news media.

  The Democrats, never strong on irony, are finally feeling the sting of worry about expanded government under Trump after decades dreaming of an all-powerful do-gooder technocracy, where Nanny Sam subsumes the rights of the states and individuals. In the strangest, most backhand way, they might learn a lesson about being careful what you wish for in this world.

  A conservative Supreme Court is an important and significant victory, but if it’s the last major victory before sweeping Democratic gains, the costs to the party and to the conservative movement may be steeper than we’ve yet imagined. I think about who will weigh those costs in the future, and I find it hard to imagine anyone saying, “But Trump.”

  17

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  TRUMP IS ELECTORAL POISON

  DONALD TRUMP IS ELECTORAL POISON. I know I’m taking a bit of a gamble saying that, as this book will go to print before the 2018 elections, and externalities, Democratic Party incompetence, zombie apocalypses, and other factors may conspire to bite me on my predictive ass. Still, the signs and portents of a Democratic-wave election are building, and have been by the day. Donald Trump’s approval ratings are somewhere above genital warts and below every other president in modern history, so that’s nice.