by Rick Wilson
His four-word response by text message was “Yeah. Fuck me, right?”
Men like my friend aren’t uncommon in the major donor community. Some are so wealthy that Trump’s actual net worth was a rounding error to them, but they weren’t as a rule bold enough to put their money on the line to defeat him. A few still comfort themselves with the knowledge that the tax bill will pad their bottom lines nicely. Some hope that someday, somehow he’ll stop tweeting and won’t get us into a nuclear war.
Many still quietly regret their inaction. Those who don’t yet, will.
THE REPUBLICAN CONSULTING CLASS
As a Republican consultant for over 30 years now, I don’t expect you to love me. Honestly, I expect you to think of me as being morally ambiguous, politically opportunistic, vicious, spiteful, and committed to my bottom line before anything good or wholesome. Spoiler: mostly true. This has never been a business—particularly my former niche of campaign advertising—informed merely by a deep sense of wonder at the miracle of our Republic. Just win, baby.
As consultants, we’re supposed to be a few steps ahead of the curve. We’re paid to put knowledge and foresight about the secret desires of voters into action, and to play a strategic game for our candidates and clients over a span of years. Perhaps it’s a sign that I’ve become as jaded as a Vegas stripper that even I was stunned by how the Republican consulting community went from being almost universally opposed to Trump, and operating with the ability to see where he’d lead the party, to cheerleading for Trump as the next messiah, proclaiming his glory to their clients.
A lot of them are smart enough to know better and are more engaged with the actual issues so that it’s hard for them to simply play dumb, pretending Trump isn’t a liability. Those folks knew from the jump that Trump wasn’t one of them, and never would be. They knew a flag of convenience when they saw one; they simply didn’t give a damn.
It’s a question that’s haunted me since their collapse in the era of Trump: Were they faking then? Or are they faking now? Is the mere course of “Just win, baby” expedience for the election cycle, or is there ever a point where they say “No mas”?
From all of the Vichy Republicans, Trump demanded a fundamental compromise. He demanded they look back on their records of 10 or 20 or 30 years in public life and say, “What I really meant was . . .” and then launch into a gusher of praise for Donald Trump.
He demanded they bend and bend until their bones snapped, pretending on friendly conservative media outlets like Fox that Trump’s actions, character, and policies are from the mainstream of conservative thought, and ranting about fake news to the rest of the media. In the campaign, they enabled Trump. In government, it’s more of the same, just louder and dumber. They’ve engaged in an Orwellian erasure of what conservatism represents. We have always been at war wth East Asia.
Perhaps all of this gave the Vichy Republicans and their allies a moment’s pause from time to time, but most seem to have turned in their principles at the door.
What to Expect When You’re Working for Trump
(A Tragedy in Five Acts)
– ACT II –
You breeze through your confirmation hearings, greased by Mitch McConnell’s desire to avoid angering the Tweeter In Chief. Democratic critics are like mosquitoes: small and annoying but of little consequence.
You didn’t really have to do much more than show up. Hell, you thought it would be easy, but not this easy. The few perfunctory questions from the Republicans were mostly about how much you loved them and they loved you. The Democrats were a little harder, but really, you were back at the BLT Prime restaurant in the Trump Hotel by 5 p.m.
Everyone’s there. Scaramucci, holding court. Reince and Walsh and their old-guard types are at a table, all consumed by their iPhones. Kellyanne. Bannon being Bannon, sitting in a booth with that creepy little beanbag Matt Boyle. Spicer already looks like he’s had a couple, but wouldn’t you? Damn mainstream media. Jared and Ivanka breezed in and out again after a single sugar-free Cosmo each. You don’t know Don Jr. well yet, but you also don’t want to interrupt him when he’s chatting up a frankly spectacular blonde who sure as hell isn’t from Washington.
You like it. It’s the New Establishment of Donald Trump’s Washington. These are the people you’ll fight side by side with for the next eight years. Your old business partners from your lobbying firm are there every night, in the same booth, with a rotating cast of luminaries from Trump’s orbit. They’re bringing in so much business, and you’re happy to play the role of the Big Man. Your aide, who is probably too smart for her own good, tells you this is like the Algonquin Hotel of the Trump era, and you wonder what she meant. You think she’s being sarcastic and you don’t like it, but this is a night to celebrate.
You knock back a last Pappy Van Winkle, say your good-nights, and roll out. Tomorrow morning, that big black Suburban with government plates is going to roll up in front of the house you bought in Georgetown to appease your latest wife and take you to your office.
It’s time to get shit done.
2
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FURROWED BROWS AND DEEP CONCERN
BY NOW YOU’VE ALL BECOME familiar with the cata-logue of Republican excuses for Donald Trump. You’ve watched them politely look away from Trump’s excesses, missteps, racist asides, and other lunacies and utter excuses of such spectacular banality that it takes a moment to process how truly mendacious their words are in the face of reality.
Trump has broken some essential political survival mechanism in Republican elected officials, and it’s hard to see how many of them will recover; over and over Republicans have failed a basic political common sense test on Trump. The excuses they make for him are so out of proportion to the reaction he deserves. In the face of incompetence, they display indifference. In the face of corruption, they engage in epic whataboutism. In the face of instability, they blame inexperience.
To understand how Trump has changed the GOP for the worse, it’s important to recognize the tribal divisions inside the Republican Party today. The following typology should help:
A TYPOLOGY OF CONGRESSIONAL REPUBLICANS
1. The True Believers
While the GOP base is still largely positive about Donald Trump, the actual number of fire-breathing, 24/7 members of the Trumphadi caucus is astonishingly small. The True Believers in Trumpism overlap heavily (and ironically) with the Freedom Caucus, the group of hard-right Republicans who claim to believe in limited government, personal freedom, balanced budgets, and the elimination of debt and deficits. These are the Steve Kings, Mark Meadowses, Devin Nuneses, and Jim Jordans of the world.
I could write more about them, but honestly, they’re tendentious and boring and will be the first up against the wall, come the Revolution.
2. The Opportunists
In the Senate Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham play Trump’s game in pursuit of their own ends. Both men have agenda items they want to move: in McConnell’s case on the economic front, and in Graham’s on foreign policy. They’re both entirely aware of who and what Trump is and quite overtly play to his weaknesses to keep him out of their knitting. Their praise of Trump isn’t some esoteric mystery; it’s a cost of doing business and a way of distracting the Toddler in Chief with shiny objects.
There are a dozen opportunists in the House Trump camp, young, full of hustle, eager to get on Fox News. They only look like the aforementioned True Believers. They’re not; these guys are conning the con man. One example is Matt Gaetz of northwestern Florida’s 1st Congressional District. You’ve seen Matt on a hundred cable news shows. Young, dark haired, and slowly going to seed, he looks like a frat boy wearing his father’s suit.
Matt comes from a political family; his father was president of the Florida Senate, and Matt served in the Florida House from the tender age of 22. He has an eye for the main chance and a nose in the wind.
As full-time Trump cheer squad members, Matt and others have worked the Con M
an in Chief like champions, playing to his vanity, giving Fox News the kind of pro-Trump talking head action money can’t buy, but it rings more than a little hollow. The ambitions of the Opportunist class are vividly apparent. In the meantime, Matt and the others are harvesting cash from building out their email lists of the credulous Trump fan base.
3. The Cowards
Every week at least a couple members of Congress call me as their father confessor to admit their sins and avow their hatred of Trump. They are publicly loyal to Trump for three reasons: FOMT, FOTB, and BTP. These three acronyms explain all of their behavior.
FOMT: FEAR OF MEAN TWEETS Donald Trump’s superpower is his ability to turn his 50 million social media followers into an unguided, deafening weapon against anyone he targets. Folks like Jeff Flake, Ben Sasse, Dean Heller, and others who have been attacked by Donald Trump on social media find their phone lines jammed, their email inboxes filled with poorly capitalized and grammatically disastrous screeds, their social media accounts flooded with Trump memes, and their ability to communicate suppressed in a tidal wave of hate and death threats. The fear of Trump tweeting a member of Congress with an attack is ever present and terrifies them into silence.
FOTB: FEAR OF TRUMP’S BASE Somewhere along the line, members of the Trump base became objects of terror to members of Congress. One congressman told me of a moment when he was mildly critical of Trump in a town hall meeting, and within minutes people were posting threats to his Facebook page, blowing up his phone, and mentioning how they hoped he’d support Mr. Trump (the “Mr.” is always a tell) because otherwise how would the congressman’s kids grow up without a father?
These aren’t Republicans as we once knew them. They’re more feral, more fierce, and wildly less conservative. The narrow line between statism and conservatism is in the rearview mirror of their ratty, clapped-out beaters. They’re angry at everything, all the time, and they increasingly believe in vivid conspiracy theories that members of Congress with an ounce of sense won’t touch with a ten-foot pole.
BTP: BUT THE PRIMARY! The fear that Donald Trump will cause a Trumpcentric primary challenger to run against an incumbent Republican member is constant and sharp. When Steve Bannon was still in the Trump orbit, he was promising to field Trumpish challengers to every Republican running for Senate, save Ted Cruz. Members have told me over and over that they live in terror of one tweet from Trump praising some nutcase, causing their primary to become a reality-TV show called Who’s More Trump?
The Cowards are by far the majority in the Republican caucus; even as they defend him publicly, they loathe him privately. Many of them are part of a large number of 2018 retirements. If you’re ever looking for Profiles in Chickenshit, these members are your finest exemplars.
4. The Rationalizers
You’ve heard all the variations: “We’ve gotta pass X.” “He’s new to this.” “That’s just Trump tweeting. We’ll work it out in private.” “He’s not a typical politician.” “He’s settling into the job.” Those excuses are as common as they are untrue.
The Rationalizers’ permissive parent style of governing works about as well as letting your kid subsist on a diet of cookie dough and television. Kids need discipline, and when Donald Trump’s Rationalizers talk about his unfocused, childlike behavior, it’s never with any parental firmness or authority. “I wish he’d stop tweeting so much” is the equivalent of “Little Donald is so bright, but I wish he’d focus in class.” “The president isn’t a conventional politician” translates as “We hope Donnie will channel his creativity, and stop setting fires and dissecting roadkill in the kitchen.”
Paul Ryan was the leader of the Rationalizer caucus, desperately trying to derive order from Trump’s chaos. Ryan wanted to manage Trump so that he and the GOP caucus could run on the tax cut, the economy, and infrastructure. All of these messages went out the window, and Ryan owns his share of the blame. Too often he behaved as if he were some deferential junior VP at a Trump resort and not the leader of the House of Representatives in a coequal branch of government. The idea, popular among the Rationalizers, that a diet of their ass-kissing and deference would make Trump a normal president who responded to normal political cues was always a mistake.
5. The Retirees
Retirement frees Republican members to speak the truth—and boy do they ever. It’s a damn shame they had to wait until they declared they were done with leadership to speak the awful truths about Trump, but it’s also a small reminder that some conservatives still believe in something more than the Maximum Leader.
Jeff Flake’s amazing floor speech on the risks of Trump was roundly mocked in the Trump-right media but will go down in history as a moment when, under terrible pressure, an American politician took the hard road, told the truth, and called out a member of his party.
When it comes to trifling chickenhawk no-account pudknockers like Donald Trump, John McCain left his last fucks on the floor of the Hanoi Hilton. In an era where political heroes are thin on the ground, McCain’s almost never pulled a punch with Trump, and even in the twilight of his life, McCain is still swinging for the fences. Trump’s attacks on McCain fall flat because one man is a hero to millions, the other only in his own mind. After his diagnosis of brain cancer in the fall of 2017, McCain’s light has been fading, but his fire and fight never did.
Even Trey Gowdy, Chairman of the House Oversight Committee and scourge of Hillary Clinton’s role in the Benghazi attack, was born again hard after announcing his retirement. Gowdy, once a hero of the Trump right and the Fox News set, became anathema when he finally called bullshit on the White House’s lawlessness and chaos.
THE FIVE STAGES OF TRUMPSPLAINING
Imagine a world where Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama sat in a White House meeting and casually brought up a willingness to ban assault weapons, belittled fellow party members for being afraid of the National Rifle Association, and just threw out the idea of bypassing due process to seize firearms.
What would happen? I’ll tell you what would happen. The GOP, every conservative publication, and every single Republican member of Congress would be tearing their damn hair out. The wailing and lamentation would shatter the heavens.
But Trump did all those things on February 28, 2018, when he sat in a Cabinet Room gun control roundtable in the wake of the Parkland, Florida, school shooting. It was a moment Second Amendment advocates and NRA supporters were waiting for; they had worked their hearts out for their guy, and with the most consequential push for sweeping gun control in a generation, they needed him to stand firm on their issue.
So, of course, gun-rights advocates, NRA members, and rank-and-file conservatives were aghast when Trump ran into the waiting arms of Dianne Feinstein and other pro–gun control advocates. Shocker, I know. The man he claimed to be on the campaign trail—a rigid, uncompromising fighter for the Second Amendment—disappeared. Even Breitbart News, the house organ of Trumpism, ran a “Trump the Gun Grabber” headline. A few days later, Democrats who thought they could touch Fecal Midas and get away with it were disappointed when he flipped on gun control again and did virtually nothing.
This weathervane political positioning caused the same kind of whiplash for Republicans during the disastrous Obamacare repeal fight; in that debacle, the president described one version of the congressional GOP repeal plan as “mean” while berating Republican members of the Senate and House via Twitter and calling legislative audibles at the worst possible moments.
It again happened over DACA, the Obama-era executive order protecting the American-born children of illegal aliens from deportation; the build-the-Wall-and-ship-them-home version of Donald Trump sat in a room full of legislators and said he’d support the “clean DACA bill,” sans border security provisions. White House advisor and immigration hawk Stephen Miller looked as if he was about to crap out a kitten, and House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy had to correct the president sharply. For just a brief moment, Senate Minority Leader Charles S
chumer and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi probably couldn’t believe their luck. Pelosi must have been thinking, “He can’t be this stupid.” Trust me, Nancy, he is that stupid. Until Republicans’ apoplectic responses penetrated even Trump’s consciousness, Trump was ready to make a deal right that minute.
Trump is a creature almost preternaturally aware of the media climate around him and of the shifting moods of the public. In event after event, he is obviously influenced by what he sees on television. For him, ideology and philosophy do not mediate politics; television mediates politics. More specifically, television is the only place where the coverage of any crisis, story, or issue reflects on his mental brand image. He thinks he is, or at least should be, the star of every story.
These examples are hardly unique, and they certainly don’t cover every single time that Donald Trump opened his mouth and blew up his party or conservative orthodoxy during his campaign and first year in office. Even more corrosive is the rhetorical, ideological, and political gymnastics required of Republican leaders, conservative media, and the conservative movement every time Trump straps verbal Semtex to his body and hits the detonator. He’s President Hold My Beer Watch This, and everyone stands riveted to the spot, waiting for the calamity.
Stage 1. “Oops, I Pooped Myself”
This is how it always begins.
Trump verbally soils himself in public with an embarrassing statement, lunatic theory, early morning golden-toilet tweet, or throwaway line he thinks will make him look good on the next round of cable news coverage. He does this because he sees everything through the narrow, blinkered framework of his role as a reality-TV game show host and pitchman, but everyone, friend or foe, still seems surprised, every time. He never seems to realize the impact of his words, the damage he’s about to cause, or the mess he forces others to clean up.
