by Rick Wilson
He tried to recruit a cadre of RNC operatives to the White House and to impose a paper flow and scheduling system on President Ungovernable. That worked out about as well as expected; the handful of RNC aides, congressional staffers, and Washington hands he brought in were shredded, ignored, and rolled over by the Chaos President. They were immediately the subject of endless leak campaigns to Breitbart and alt-right bloggers clinging to Trump’s world like pasty white lampreys.1 Priebus wasn’t Patient Zero for the Everything Trump Touches Dies effect, but he was the first of the DC political folks to go. For the Washington establishment, losing Reince hardly seemed like a loss at all; he’d been unable to deliver the certainty, structure, and compliance they desired. It was a sign in the age of Trump of Washington’s along-for-the-ride powerlessness that he sank without a trace and to few signs of regret from the people who counted on him to impose sanity on the Bedlam of 1600 Pennsylvania.
After departing the White House, Priebus returned to his law firm, started cooperating with the Mueller investigation, and slowly, painfully tried to reframe history. The Kenosha Ninja tried to cast himself as the hero of the piece, as all men do in retellings of their story. “No president has ever had to deal with so much so fast: a special counsel and an investigation into Russia and then subpoenas immediately, the media insanity—not to mention we were pushing out executive orders at record pace and trying to repeal and replace Obamacare right out of the gate,” he said.2
Oh, is that what it was, Reince? Self-delusion runs deep, and the desire to rewrite history is always with public men and women. Perhaps—and work with me here—Reince might have had a scintilla of self-awareness and a little self-deprecating appreciation for the fact that Donald Trump’s entire portfolio of problems weren’t some externality or deus ex swamp. Donald Trump created them, full stop.
The vital importance of a White House chief of staff who can handle the pressure, handle the principal, and handle the politics has never been clearer. If Priebus had come to this job in the ranks of the very best chiefs of staff in the past hundred years—Andy Card, Leon Panetta, Jim Baker—it could have been a different story.
However, Priebus was too weak to do the job and too blinded to know that the mistake he made at the beginning would destroy his career and reputation. His fellow Wisconsinite Charlie Sykes put it best: “I see him as kind of a tragic figure. What began as a matter of duty on his part—the decision to go all-in on Trump—ended with this scorchingly obscene humiliation. It’s sad, but it’s the result of choices he made. It’s not like he wasn’t warned.”3
PAUL RYAN
Paul Ryan’s enabling of Donald Trump is a tragedy for conservatives in three acts. Ryan is a genuinely bright, curious, thoughtful conservative of the Jack Kemp school. He was the end product of three generations of increasingly sharp conservatives who emerged from the long march to broad national Republican power. Ryan was a man who had the conservative movement wired into his very DNA and could articulate the principles of limited government, personal responsibility, fiscal discipline, balanced budgets, and strong national defense without the ugly, grating edge of a Newt Gingrich. He could fight and win legislative battles without the doofy passivity of a Dennis Hastert or a Bob Michael.
After rising to Speaker of the House, Ryan was selected in 2012 to serve as Mitt Romney’s running mate. The reaction in the conservative firmament was beyond rapturous. In what had to be the most insanely subspecialized example of Rule 34, Ryan was even the subject of erotic fanfic by conservative women. “My desires are unconventional . . . mostly reducing marginal tax rates.”
Paul Ryan was like a man created in a laboratory to sell conservatism and the Republican Party to the American people in the post-Obama era. Then he embraced and enabled Donald Trump.
I’ll grant you, Ryan’s love wasn’t as slobbering and over the top as many displayed. While he declined to endorse Trump with the usual ring- and ass-kissing demanded of others, he also never took steps as one of the most senior leaders in the party to signal to his caucus and to Republicans across the nation that Trump was as dangerous to the Republican Party as Ryan privately believed.
Trump didn’t like Ryan for failing to display the level of obsequious ass-kissing of, say, a Ted Cruz. Ryan didn’t dislike Trump enough to choke him out. Ryan assumed Hillary Clinton would win, and he didn’t want to inflame the restive Republican base any more than the talk radio screamers and online arsonists were about to do in the wake of the 2016 election. This was Ryan’s most consequential mistake.
When the infamous Access Hollywood “pussy grabber” story broke, Ryan put on a hangdog expression and said, “I am sickened by what I heard today. Women are to be championed and revered, not objectified. I hope Mr. Trump treats this situation with the seriousness it deserves and works to demonstrate to the country that he has greater respect for women than this clip suggests.”4
When I read that, I could hear my grandmother’s honey-dripping southern voice in my head saying, “Oh. Bless your heart.” Ryan then disinvited Trump from a Wisconsin Republican Party event and said he’d no longer defend Trump or campaign for him after the statements. I’m sure that stung a man incapable of feeling guilt or remorse of any kind. As we’ll discuss later, this was one of the ur-moments of the Ryan strategy of “furrowed brows and deep concern.”
By then the die was cast. Ryan had let Trump become so powerful in the Republican caucus that his fourth-quarter beefing had little impact. One close advisor to the Speaker told me that Ryan had played the game mainly to keep his restive, fractured caucus in line. That’s not the whole story, though.
Ryan wanted something, and he sacrificed his reputation to get it. More than life itself, Paul Ryan wanted a massive corporate tax cut and a sweeping set of entitlement reforms. His calculation had little to do with Trump, and everything to do with those two dreams. Like many men who see only one path to historical consequence, the Devil knows the one thing they desire above all else. The idea that Trump was the only way he’d achieve his goals corrupted Paul Ryan. The Speaker passed his tax bill, only to discover that it wasn’t the economic or political miracle he had imagined.
The tax bill, combined with the ludicrously overblown 2018 budget, left Ryan lost and clearly miserable. Both were masterworks of gigantic government giveaways, unfunded spending, massive debt and deficits, and a catalogue of crony capitalist freebies that would have Hayek spinning in his grave. He had foolishly allowed Devin Nunes to manipulate the probe of Russian interference into the U.S. elections into a Fox News ratings machine. A Ryan aide told me that he had allowed Nunes to run buck wild to keep the small but vocal Trumphadi caucus in line. He thought it was a valuable steam valve to relieve political pressure, but it was really a Get Out of Jail Free card for Trump and his associates hip deep in Russian influence.
It’s hard to reconcile the Paul Ryan who rose through the conservative and Republican ranks with the Paul Ryan who let Trump run rampant. He’ll have plenty of time in his retirement to contemplate his existential angst over what he enabled and how he allowed Donald Trump to destroy the Republican Party and the conservative principles he swore to protect.
TED CRUZ
Ah, Ted Cruz. Long a poster boy for the Purity Posse, Cruz was the alpha-dork Senate Conservatives Fund Texan elected in the wake of 2010. He came into the 2016 race with all the conservative purist cred in the world. He was the darling of the Mercer money clan, had talk radio singing hosannas on how he was the leader of a bold conservative tomorrow. All those qualities were in inverse proportion to his, um, less obvious personal and physical charms.
More than almost any other member of the 2016 field, Ted Cruz helped normalize Trump, burning his credibility to a toasty crisp. Cruz, who would later hear Trump accuse his father of complicity in the assassination of John F. Kennedy and stood meekly as Trump insulted Cruz’s wife. He told Fox News, “I like Donald Trump. I think he’s terrific, I think he’s brash, I think he speaks the truth.” Ted eve
n lost the support of his longtime sugar daddy, Robert Mercer, and nodded politely through it all. In 30 years of political life, I have never seen a politician engage in acts of greater self-abnegation and humiliation.
“Many of the Republican candidates have gone out of their way to take a two-by-four to Donald Trump. I think that’s a mistake,” Cruz told Tim Alberta of Politico.5 Now, Ted is a bright guy. There’s no question he’s much, much smarter than the average bear. However, like quite a few smart people, Cruz has a massive blind spot when it comes to playground bullies, which I’m sure has obtained for the entirety of his life. Trump saw him from the jump as a mark.
The Tragedy of Ted Cruz sounds like a Marlowe play. The Faustian bargain Cruz made in his efforts to win over Trump voters has reduced him from Republican Party rock star to something akin to a Trump World house pet: tolerated, occasionally praised, but mostly kept out of sight lest he soils the carpets. Ever ambitious and taken with his own perceived cleverness, Cruz still clings to two rather obvious dreams. The first is that of every man or woman who warms a seat in the Senate: the White House. The argument there is that he can be the thinking man’s Trump, a follow-on that smoothes the rough edges of nationalist populism and leads the nation into his glorious vision. His ambitions are boundless and obvious.
The other desire Cruz allies whisper is that he’s the logical choice for Trump’s next Supreme Court pick. However, if Cruz for one moment believes President Trump is going to put the son of the man who killed JFK on the Supreme Court, he’s got another thing coming. That’s held for Anthony Scaramucci.
CHRIS CHRISTIE
Chris Christie started political life as the great, pasty-white hope of the Acela Republicans. A moderate but tough-minded, shit-talking Republican with a stellar record as a prosecutor won the governor’s race in Blue Jersey, and the conservative world cheered. He rocked the same kind of confrontational swagger and sounded like his tough-talking counterpart across the Hudson, my old boss Rudy Giuliani, though as the heaviest presidential candidate since William Howard Taft, Christie looked like Giuliani ate another Giuliani.
It soon became clear that Christie’s role wasn’t to run a campaign for the presidency but to become Donald Trump’s hit-manatee. His greatest moments of notoriety in an otherwise featureless campaign came during the debates, where Christie heaved his massive snark at Marco Rubio and others, then stood like a well-fed dog, to bask in Trump’s approval.
A former chairman of the Republican Governors’ Association, Christie brought to the table more credibility than many. He helped normalize Trump, and as a Republican who won in a deep-blue state like New Jersey he could make the case that Trump could win there, and in the Northeast.
In February 2016 Christie abandoned his race for the White House and made public what had been obvious: he was in the tank for Trump all along. All Christie’s work for Trump ended as all sacrifices to Umber Moloch do; with humiliation and abandonment. He was never seriously considered for his dream job: attorney general of the United States. After an enthusiastic endorsement from Christie at an airport hangar rally, the most humiliating hot-mic moment imaginable gave Christie a preview of his coming irrelevance. When Christie finished his sweaty, bellowing intro, Trump leaned in and said, “Go get in the plane. Go home.”6
After torpedoing Marco and endorsing Trump, Governor Shinebox was dissed and dismissed by Trump and savaged inside Trump’s world by both Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner.
Christie is a lesson about just how little loyalty Trump displays and how little concern he has for the deadly political poison associating with him represents. The governor who helped normalize Trump and wreck his primary opponents ended his tenure in New Jersey with approval numbers approaching the single digits and a political career deader than that thing Trump calls his hair.
NEWT GINGRICH
Newt Gingrich, a man with a low tolerance for those he considers his intellectual inferiors (which is to say, everyone), was one of the grandest tigers in the conservative jungle. The architect of the famous Contract with America and generalissimo of the 1994 House takeover, Gingrich was a singular figure in the Republican rise to national power and a keeper of the holy tablets of economic conservatism. Without Gingrich, it’s arguable there would have been no Tea Party. Without Gingrich, the Fox News style of base-only messaging wouldn’t have become the defining style of the conservative caucus in the House. Gingrich helped usher in a broad, Republican-leaning fundraising establishment on K Street and helped popularize and professionalize a constellation of think tanks, associations, and consultants who extended the Republican gains of 1994.
Gingrich was a policy entrepreneur from the start, writing book after book of techno-optimistic conservative ideas. He was and is a frequent talking head on the Fox News channel, reaching millions. I remember reading his Window of Opportunity in the summer of 1984, wowed by his embrace of high technology, space travel, and industry and his leveraging America’s edge in the sciences to win the battle against state tyranny as embodied in the Soviet Union. Good times.
He had become a kind of Republican éminence grise, seen everywhere and with a hand in a hundred political pies. He was always the smartest guy in the room, even if it was only in his head, and he had a constant, persistent dedication to his own hustle and branding.
When it came to Trump, Gingrich started twerking faster than a five-buck stripper. He put his considerable conservative credibility and media skills to work Trumpsplaining how Donald’s apostasies to conservative policy and principle were just fine. His tireless defense of Trump left eyes rolling among those who knew him. As far as ideologies go, the men had nothing in common. Gingrich had one; Trump didn’t. The only similarity in the two men was a chain of broken wedding vows and bitter ex-wives.
Newt always had his detractors, and he’s blown it more than a few times by outplaying his coverage on issues like the Clinton impeachment, but he was a marquee conservative saying Donald Trump was one of us. To the Fox News demo and Republican base voters (but I repeat myself), this was a solid gold endorsement. He’s remained all-in, writing a book called Understanding Trump (no, it’s not a pop-up book) and becoming one of the leading voices supporting Trump on l’affaire russe.
Why did Newt do it? It’s a mystery why he walked away from every stated conservative belief for Trump, but he must have known he was the longest of long shots for the vice presidency, even though his allies floated the prospect to a few credulous reporters. He earned his keep, however, scoring the ambassadorship to the Holy See for his wife, making her the first Vulcan American to hold the post.
Who knows? Perhaps Newt’s lifelong ambition to be governor-general of the American Moon Base will finally come true.7 He’s got to rebuild his reputation somewhere.
ROGER AILES AND RUPERT MURDOCH
Roger Ailes died before he knew what he had wrought. His control of the Fox network was the single most powerful weapon in Trump’s media arsenal and remains so today, even after his death. Rupert Murdoch, the canniest media mogul of our time, wasn’t about to get in the way of the billion-dollar-a-year profit center Roger had built.
The political moment in which we find ourselves is a product of Roger Ailes. The overt echoes of Nixon’s 1968 campaign and administration are crisp and constant. Ailes understood the feelings of a middle class beset by change and built campaigns and messages to stoke the anxiety, outrage, and passions of an audience that wasn’t part of the coastal media, political, and economic elite. During Nixon’s 1968 campaign Ailes realized the political utility of casting the news media as the enemy of the American people and all the not-so-subtle codings embedded in that attack.
Roger’s genius for television was simply unrivaled. He was a rare combination of political and media skill, deeply understood America’s cultural divides, and intuitively sensed the rising social primacy of entertainment in our politics. It was Ailes who helped reshape Nixon’s disastrous 1960 television image of sweaty weirdo to 1968’s ima
ge of feisty scrapper for the Forgotten American. Ailes didn’t do it with policy; he did with the power of television.
It’s impossible to overstate the power of Ailes in shaping the conservative media ecosystem. He wasn’t just a singular genius in creating television; he understood it had replaced many of the other institutions that once mediated American politics. Roger wasn’t the first warrior in the long-running conservative enterprise to push back on the perception of a hostile, liberal media, but he was by any standard its most successful general.8 He found a market that was underserved and created a product that became a multibillion-dollar powerhouse on our political landscape.
Trump and Fox weren’t allies at the start of the campaign. Rupert Murdoch famously viewed Trump as nothing more than fodder for his tabloid media operations, like the New York Post, calling him a “phony” and later “a fucking idiot.”9 (Fact check: true.) After Trump’s infamous attack on Senator John McCain’s war record, Murdoch tweeted, “When is Donald Trump going to stop embarrassing his friends, let alone the whole country?”10
CNN journalist Tom Kludt called them “frenemies with benefits” and noted, “In Murdoch, Trump might see the man he aspires to be; mogul, patriarch of a closely held family empire, dinner party-host to the world’s elite.”11
Murdoch hit Trump hard, and Ailes rose to the defense of the network’s Megyn Kelly when Trump famously attacked her for bleeding from her . . . wherever.12 Murdoch touted support for Cruz, Rubio, Bush, and Carson in tweets in 2015, but to no avail. Even if Murdoch and Ailes had wanted to elect a different Republican, by late 2015 it was clear that the Fox audience was all in, and the emergent property of all pro-Trump voters was hatred and abandonment of anyone or anything in his way.
