by Rick Wilson
Ailes and Murdoch weren’t about to compromise shareholder value for something as inconsequential as the White House. They rode the wave, deciding to profit from the nation’s loss. The audience of the largest cable news network in the nation generated more than $1 billion in profit in 2016, and nothing was going to stand in the way of that.
Once Fox was put in service to Trump, the game was over for the other Republican candidates. The House That Rupert Built would under Ailes and his successors become Trump TV, providing him with instant, fawning coverage, 24/7 live shots, and a well-watched evening lineup that shouted itself hoarse in support of The Donald. It was an in-kind political contribution worth billions. Who cared whether they believed a word of it? Their audience took it, as the kids say, both seriously and literally.
It’s a tautological question as to whether the Fox audience of today coalesced around Trump’s political momentum or the political momentum of Trump coalesced the Fox audience. In the end, the leadership of the network was stuck in a prison with a version of the Watchmen’s Rorschach: “I’m not trapped in here with you. You’re trapped in here with me.”
Before his death, Ailes was forced out of Fox News for a decades-long, endemic pattern of sexual harassment, an early play in the #MeToo movement. The legal mess is a story in and of itself, but Ailes managed to leave behind a cadre of key deputies who continue the status quo at the network.13 That status quo is all Trump, all the time.
MIKE PENCE
For a man who was once referred to as saying Donald Trump would be unacceptable as president, Mike Pence came around to Esoteric Trumpism in a big way.14
Pence was a safety blanket for Christian conservatives, as far right as any governor has ever been, and for Indiana, it worked. Long a staple of the conservative movement, he combined generic central-casting politician looks, rigid ideological purity across the board, and the personality of a basket of wet laundry. For all the ideological boxes he checked, Mike Pence lacked even a politician’s contrived passion when it came to the fieriest debates.
A reliable back-bencher for his first few years in the House, he served from 1988 until 2011, rising to lead the GOP conference. He made friends, quietly. He just . . . was. A quick campaign for governor of Indiana in 2012 and easy reelection in 2016 meant Pence was a man people talked about because he’d punched every résumé ticket in order, but not as some shooting star in the GOP world. Sure, Pence signed the most strict abortion law in the country, as well as the controversial and later-reversed Religious Freedom Restoration Act, but on one was beating down his door to run for national office. Pence is also part of the New Reefer Madness crowd, a strict drug warrior who fought to take away judicial discretion in drug sentencing in cases in Indiana. Calling Pence a stern, Daddy Party conservative barely scratches the surface.
And yet, being a man who wears his moral qualifications on his sleeve—he famously will not spend time alone with a woman other than his wife, even in a professional setting—Pence found himself lured into the Trump campaign’s orbit by none other than Paul Manafort. How did one of the slimiest creatures in the DC Swamp earn the God Squad seal of approval and win over Mike Pence as Donald Trump’s running mate?
After a typical Trump reality-TV selection process—Will Chris Christie get a rose? Will Rudy stay on the Island? Will feisty Newt Gingrich flip over a table?—Manafort’s machinations played out, leaving Pence the last man standing. There was more a sense of resignation and inevitability than joy.
In just two paragraphs of the New York Times coverage of the Pence selection the reporters managed to use the words “workmanlike,” “sturdy,” “dependable,” and “standard.”15 It was a sign that the First Showman was going to be the star of the show and Pence would be the understudy relegated to Midwestern dinner theater.
Pence spoke fluent, perfect conservative like a native because he was one. Trump would always be the fat, loud, crass American tourist bellowing, “co-mo say dee-chay gluteno free-o?” Presidency or not, he will never truly understand the signals and signifiers of the conservative movement. In contrast, Pence was a relief to evangelicals, social conservatives, and Washington insiders. He was . . . safe.
Pence’s hopes of being a true star in the Trump White House were quickly dashed. His utility extended to breaking ties in the U.S. Senate and the usual VP duties of weddings, campaign appearances, and funerals. Because of Trump’s enormous, delicate ego, Pence has been forced to recalibrate the role of vice president. I missed the part in Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution about kissing the president’s ass 24/7, but apparently Pence found it.
CPAC
If you’re not a conservative, it will be hard to understand just how important the American Conservative Union and the Conservative Political Action Committee annual conference was to the movement. I use the term “was” advisedly, because as soon as the CPAC leadership got a hit of Trumpism, it deviated from literally every value it had worked for over the long march and embraced him with vigor.
Let me give you a quick and dirty look at CPAC before we go too much further. A conference of conservatives may sound to the layperson like some boring God Squad event where middle-aged dudes in suits sit in seminars about the benefits of entitlement reform on long-term sovereign debt loads. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Lest any of you think that conservatives believe in no sex before or outside of marriage, CPAC is a place where young conservatives go to engage in some mindless, consequence-free fucking. People there are rather more likely to be swiping on Tinder than reading National Review. It’s a place where the m4m Craigslist ads suddenly pop with lines like “Clean-cut free-market conservative seeks dirty liberal bear.” It’s the Rumspringa for Hillsdale students, Young Republicans, College Republicans, and conservative activists from across the nation.
CPAC and the ACU were always in a scramble for the unicorn intersection of American politics and celebrity. They were always seeking celebrity special guests that could draw a crowd. Arnold Schwarzenegger was about the pinnacle of celebrity at the conference until CPAC’s majordomo Matt Schlapp decided to bring Trump in 2011. It was both a preview of Trump’s campaign to come and an early warning signal of the deathwatch of the GOP.16 Trump combined a few things that the CPAC audience loved: fuck-you swagger, a confrontational attitude, and an entertaining show.
I’m sure the first outing was a win-win for the host of a popular reality-TV game show and the ACU. He was a good draw, but no one thought he was really part of the conservative movement. At the grassroots, this was an era when the Ron Paul CPAC machine could still stack a straw poll, and when the conservative movement was flush with the 2010 victory.
When Trump returned in 2013, he and Sarah Palin had longer speaking times and better slots on the schedule than Paul Ryan, Marco Rubio, or Rand Paul, all of whom were at the time considered the future of the GOP.17 It was another missed signal that the entertainment wing of the GOP was going to do everything it could to put crowd-pleasing yahoos front-and-center at CPAC’s annual conclave.
The conservative apparatus was infected with Trumpism for a host of reasons, but in a blistering essay in March 2016, Matt Cover hit the essential blunder of the entertainment wing and the CPAC conservatives right on the head:
To aid their growing grassroots campaign, [conservative] Movement leaders began inviting Donald Trump into the fold, giving him prime speaking slots at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) and other grassroots events. They hoped to leverage Trump’s celebrity and rhetorical skill to help push their message into the broader media environment. It would prove a disastrous blunder.
Trump, ever the narcissist and self-promoter, stole the Movement’s intra-party revolution away from Cruz and his Washington allies. Trump’s superior celebrity and mastery of modern media have allowed him to seize on the ignorance created by the Movement’s phony “anti-Establishment” campaign.
He has, with frightening skill, channeled the misplaced
frustration and mistrust carefully sown over the past seven years by Movement organizations and entertainers.18
The rest of the professional conservative establishment, from Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform to the Heritage Foundation, group after group, abandoned any pretense of adhering to their formerly held beliefs and became cheerleaders for Trump.19 Did some see this as an uncomfortable bow to the inevitable? Surely. The small-dollar donors to these groups were always more fringe and less sophisticated than their Washington leadership. They watched the Fox coverage, saw their social media landscape, and decided that embracing Trump and nationalist populism would, at the least, let them live to fight another day.
LOBBYISTS
It must be the broad masochistic streak among lobbyists that keeps legions of dominatrices in business in Washington, DC. For all their disdain of Trump as a clown, a joke, and a human train wreck, they sat quietly at first as he dumped his vitriol on them.
At the beginning of the 2016 election campaign most of them expected a Hillary win, and even Republicans didn’t see that outcome as the end of the world. Hillary was explicable. She was transactional. She was, in short, their dream date. At a minimum, they could scare the hell out of their clients with Hillary, leading to higher fees and bigger battles. They could work around (or even quietly with) Hillary, monetizing the threat she posed to their clients, dragging out legislative fights year after profitable year.
As Trump’s ego, shallow understanding of the world as it exists beyond the Fox & Friends bubble, and obvious, full-frontal venality became clear, they sensed that if Trump did make it to the Oval Office, it would be a golden age on K Street. The man was crony capitalism in human form and subject to the kind of flattery in which the lobbying community excels.
If you’ve spent much time around lobbyists, you know the spiel: “Why, yes, Donald! You are the tallest, most handsome, smartest man in the room, and this room on your beautiful Trump-branded property (which I will use for all future meetings) is the classiest and most elegant room I’ve ever seen. Is that real gold? So luxurious! Sex with my wife? Feel free!” In short, they recognized that Trump might be a master con man, but his tells, blind spots, ego needs, and vanity could put them in the driver’s seat.
So as much as Trump insulted and demeaned Washington’s Republican swamp dwellers and promised to crush their lives and incomes, these masters of passive-aggressive behavior bowed meekly and slipped their necks into the leash the moment he was nominated. They were “topping from the bottom” with Trump, but he didn’t understand how they played him and still doesn’t.
This transition wasn’t as difficult for the lobbying community as you might think. Lobbyists have seen the ebb and flow of political power in DC for generations and switched smoothly when a majority party becomes a minority party, or even when the ideological temperature warms or cools. They’re supposed to do this; their job is to advocate for their clients with the people in power.
Many of them do have ideological foundations and long-term party affiliation, but it was understandable, if a little frustrating, to see people who months before were shoveling money to Hillary or Jeb or Marco or Ted suddenly become born again Trumpers, their bespoke MAGA hats resting uncomfortably on their $400 haircuts. With majorities in the House and the Senate, they saw that the path to success was to strap on the rhetorical and financial knee pads and worship at the foot of the Orange One.
These people are a million miles from the lives and experiences of the average Trump voter, and they’re precisely the kind of lifelong politicians and corrupt insiders whom residents of Trump Nation blame for everything from illegal immigration to Obamacare to the return of Zima. The DC types suddenly hoisting overpriced cocktails in the Trump Hotel hadn’t changed their views; they’d just raised a flag of convenience with a golden T in its center.
Could they have turned their considerable resources and energies to defeating Trump? Absolutely. Their clients are the lifeblood of major donor money and command many billions. They could have darkened the sky with the ashes of the Trump campaign in the early primary if they’d chosen to do so.
Instead, they advised their clients in corporate America to hold their fire. They sat quietly and watched the world burn.
MAJOR DONORS
The major donor community too could have stopped Donald Trump in 2015. It would have cost them almost nothing. If they’d chosen to hammer Trump with ads, early and often, the spring primary elections of 2016 might have looked a lot different.
Instead, they played the dumbest game of political calculus I’ve ever seen. I witnessed this line of thinking iterated among a dozen megadonor conversations and email chains within days of Trump’s descent down the gold-plated escalator in Trump Tower. It went something like this:
“Well, I’m with Jeb now, but we’re going to wait to hit Trump until he takes out Marco.”
“Well, I’m with Marco, but we’re going to wait until he takes out Jeb and Ted.”
“Well, I’m with Ted now, but if we attack Trump we’re really attacking the voters Ted needs to beat Marco.”
On and on it went, reductive as hell and dumber than dirt. Most legitimately believed Trump would self-destruct and their chosen candidate would rise. In fairness, we all thought Trump’s self-destructive tendencies would end him. But in my case, I knew he needed a push off the ledge. Sadly, I’m not a billionaire (I know, right? It’s a source of constant frustration) and couldn’t fund a national ad effort against Trump.
The people who could elected to sit on their hands.
Some donors worried that Trump would target them personally. Some worried their brands or businesses would suffer when a man with tens of millions of rabid Twitter followers turned his ire on them with his weapon of choice: ragetweets.
They were right about that, but for the wrong reasons. His social media attacks were powerful but ultimately inconsequential to corporate bottom lines. They also thought that if they poked the Orange Bear he’d become so enraged that he’d outspend their candidates by putting his own money in the race. That’s where they got it really, really wrong.
There has always been a single, central signifier in the myth of Donald Trump, whether as a developer, a casino operator, a reality-TV host, a branding pitchman, or a presidential candidate: the idea that Trump is wealthy to the tune of his oft-claimed $10 billion. His branding depended on it, no matter how many Not Our Kind, Dear and Not Quite Our Class signals his vulgar affect sent to people with real money.
Everyone believed it. Hell, even I believed it. Combined with Trump’s utter lack of transparency regarding his fantasy finances and his refusal to release his tax returns, even wealthy megadonors had little to go on. Forbes was skeptical, calling out Trump’s financial bullshitting, but political professionals neglected to perform due diligence and simply assumed he could bring serious cash to the game.
By August 2015 I was working to convince major donors of Trump’s long-term, existential threat to the country and the party. We thought he would be a destructive force and likely throw the race to Hillary Clinton.
One moment from that period sticks with me as a turning point in my thinking about Trump’s money: a major Wall Street donor—a hedge fund manager who had survived 2008, 2000, and 1987 looking like a genius—laughed when I told him we’d need to mount a serious and fully funded effort to take on Trump if he chose to self-fund.
My friend scoffed at the very idea that Trump was worth even a quarter of the mythical $10 billion, much less that he was liquid to the tune of more than $200 million. “He’s not a billionaire. I’m a billionaire. He’s a clown living on credit.”
However, in a year of voter disenchantment and outsider cachet, the mythic tales of Trump’s business prowess and his alleged wealth deeply impressed his fans and even convinced many Republican megadonors that Trump was an unalloyed business success, a man of global financial consequence uncorrupted by the venal horrors of the campaign finance system.
The specter of Trump’s money haunted the other presidential candidates in the Gang of Seventeen, who largely and until far too late pulled their punches, lest he unleash a media firestorm paid for from his pocket. That fear of Trump’s resources sent Reince Priebus scurrying like a terrified Hobbit to the Barad-dûr of the Trump empire to beg the Orange Lord to sign a pledge that he wouldn’t run as a third-party candidate. The thought that Trump could easily fund a third-party bid was a cheap form of political blackmail against the donors and the candidates, and it worked. It was a classic Trump con.
Aside from a few newsworthy catches like Sheldon Adelson, Trump the candidate never managed to convince the donor class that he should have their support. After his election, of course, the money rolled in, and the donors who despised and mocked Trump were quick to write checks to the inaugural committee.
Almost to a man, they loathe Trump with gusto. I went back to review a memo I sent to donors in July 2015. In it, I warned, “We can spend a few million now to stop Trump, tens of millions if we wait until the Fall of 2015 or hundreds of millions in the Spring of 2016 . . . or just wait until he destroys the GOP and [we will spend] several billion to rebuild our party brand and to undo the damage a generation of far-left governance will cause. Your call.” When I saw a six-figure donation to the Trump Inaugural Committee from a major donor with a robust dislike of Trump, I tweaked him in a playful email with a copy of that memo attached.
