by Rick Wilson
When I was 18, people called me Donald Trump. When he was 18, @BarackObama was Barry Soweto. Weird.7
I want to see @BarackObama’s college records to see how he listed his place of birth in the application.8
The capstone of the crazy, and a peak moment of Trump’s birtherism, came when Loretta Fuddy, the head of Hawaii’s Department of Health, was killed in a small plane crash. Fuddy had verified for the world that Barack Obama’s birth certificate wasn’t the product of some decades-old plot to hide his birth in Kenya but a perfectly routine matter. Of course, Trump put the most lurid spin on her death, tweeting, “How amazing, the State Health Director who verified copies of Obama’s ‘birth certificate’ died in plane crash today. All others lived.”9
As a side note, I was the among the first (if not the first) GOP consultant to call out the birther bullshit. It took my opposition researcher three phone calls in 2008 to confirm the existence of the birth certificate and the newspaper article announcing his birth. It was always a dumb conspiracy, and Trump was always its most aggressive and mulishly stubborn advocate.
THREE MILLION ZOMBIES
Once upon a time, our firm was hired by an advocacy group called True the Vote. It was a rising force in the conservative landscape during the late Obama era, including playing a starring role in the Obama-era IRS targeting of conservative groups. When my associate Ryan Wiggins and I came on board, we treated it like any other political public relations client and went to work learning the ropes of their advocacy needs and their operation.
The sole predicate of True the Vote was that millions upon millions of illegal votes are cast in every election and that voter fraud is a rampant problem across the nation, which gives Democrats, the architects of this broad and systemic problem, an unspeakable electoral advantage.
Just like lawyers fighting for their clients, Ryan and I were ready to swing for the fences for ours. I’m sure if you dug through my Twitter archive and press statements, you’d find us doing just that.
At least at first. You see, there was just one problem. As the leading voter fraud prevention group in the country, True the Vote couldn’t provide enough data to make a convincing case even for us, far less to paint a picture of a massive conspiracy to push illegal voters to the polls.
Sure, they had some individual pissant cases they could point to, but nothing broader than some one-off local yokel stories. Voter fraud, like voter suppression, does exist, but not at scale. It’s a onesie-twosie precinct-level problem, not a dark and sinister Soros-Hillary–gray alien plot to subvert democracy.
I tell you the story of my True the Vote experience because, of course, Donald Trump believes that his popular vote loss against Crooked Hillary couldn’t be because he’s a morally loathsome jackhole. It must have been some kind of conspiracy against him to steal the votes he bigly deserved. Thus began the oft-repeated Trumpian lie of 3 million illegal voters. Before the election, Trump and his allies claimed that millions of illegal aliens, dead people, criminals, and other undesirables would be out in force, all marshaled by Hillary’s chthonic allies.
Before the 2016 election, when the numbers, common sense, and political landscape all indicated a Clinton victory, Trump’s drama-queen tweets looked like a combination of preloss martyrdom and raving paranoia:
The election is absolutely being rigged by the dishonest and distorted media pushing Crooked Hillary—but also at many polling places—sad.10
Of course there is large-scale voter fraud happening on and before election day. Why do Republican leaders deny what is going on? So naive!11
Even after his victory, Trump continued to sell his followers the myth that the 3 million Americans who voted for Clinton were the political undead. Amazingly, his followers continued to buy the conspiracy wholesale, even as the voter fraud commission Trump established fell under its own weight.
TED’S DAD
I touched on this a bit earlier when I profiled how Ted Cruz was one of Donald Trump’s most important enablers. The dumbest smart guy in the race, Cruz not only let Trump call his wife ugly but could barely muster a coherent response to an attack never before seen in American politics—a presidential candidate accusing another presidential candidate’s father of having played a role in the assassination of another president.
In our “dogs and fleas” department, you won’t be surprised to find the origin of this particular theory came from the fevered mind of Roger Stone, who had—by the merest coincidence, I’m sure—a book out around that time about the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
The influence of Roger Stone, Roy Cohn’s Mini-me, on Trump over the decades is one explanation for Trump’s embrace of conspiracy; rather than politics, Stone’s product in the past two decades has been a string of books about the “Bush Crime Family” and how JFK was killed by LBJ and how the Clintons have left a string of dead bodies in their wake.
Trump’s natural instinct for propaganda is coupled with his love of conspiracy; dark forces acting to stop him from fulfilling the promise of MAGA, be they in the FBI, the media, or the Bavarian Illuminati. Roger went from appearing on the cable networks rather frequently as a showy but entertaining political hack to appearing on Infowars wearing a black beret and engaging in spittle-flecked old-man rants about getting the Deep State off his lawn.
Conspiracy politics are engaging. They’re a way to get to a unified truth for people uncomfortable with the chaos and messiness of the real world. They offer some hint of an esoteric truth to explain the mundane and to enlighten those without the discipline to learn more about the mechanical details of politics, economics, and society. The rise of highly discrete, self-reinforcing and -selecting social media platforms and channels makes it easier than ever to have ideas that are patently absurd become the defining truths and public character of political parties and movements.
As a rule, conspiracies are hard to sustain. The old adage that three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead is consistently true, and in politics, where the currency is information and gossip, even one might be too many. Conspiracies are even harder to manage when you’re stupid, as the Trump team proves every day.
Since projection is the sincerest form of flattery in Trumplandia, the idea that the insidious Never Trump movement is constantly stirring hatred of the president is a constant. I wish. Believe me, I’d love it if the secret Never Trump meetings looked like the get-together in Eyes Wide Shut. Who doesn’t love a good cloak-and-mask orgy in a New York mansion while you’re manipulating the secret levers of power?
As I said at the beginning of this chapter, I know I’m not supposed to make fun of Trump’s base voters, but between their cultish worship of Trump, their abandonment of conservative principles, and their headlong embrace of batshit conspiracies, they make it all too easy.
Inside the Oval Office
(A Comedy in Five Acts)
– ACT IV –
One by one, they’re all gone. Spicer. Bannon. Gorka. The Mooch. Sure, Jared and Ivanka are still around, but most days they keep to themselves. You’d liked Tillerson and Price and Dearborn, and it had been cool meeting a real-life celebrity like Omarosa. The place just kept slowly emptying out. You’d been able to move up to a slightly larger closet.
The president, perhaps twice or even four times a week, would call or summon you to the Oval. Once, you heard Hope Hicks hiss into her phone, “He’s talking to his pet again.” Soon, she was gone too. You tried to give the president good advice, when he asked for it, but most of the time he didn’t ask. He just talked. And talked. And talked.
It was in the spring of 2018 when you noticed something you’d tried to avoid for a long time: Donald Trump wasn’t just a little off kilter. He wasn’t just different. As much as you loved him and your job at the White House, it was frightening to see him up close; unfocused, agitated, and as much as you hated to admit it, delusional.
You didn’t have the heart to tell him that the Wall wasn’t “already over 3,000 m
iles long” or that Robert Mueller had never been a high priest in a satanic child cannibalism ring based in the Target store in Alexandria, Virgina. Maybe the GDP wasn’t up 41 percent, as the president claimed.
Was it Mueller? Russia? Maybe. Was it Stormy Daniels? Almost certainly; he talked about her “bangability” with you time and again, counseling you to follow the old “Grab ’em” strategy he’d perfected over the decades. You didn’t have time to get your dry cleaning, much less date. Finally, the grim day arrived. John Kelly resigned. Jim Mattis took a walk. Almost none of the original cabinet remained. Zinke’s perp walk had shocked no one except POTUS. The corruption cases mounted, the domestic policy achievements fell flat, and 2019 looked bleak as hell.
The House fell in the Fall of 2018’s electoral sweep by Democrats. The Senate was a tie. The idea of getting the president out on the stump for his reelection campaign kept being deferred, ostensibly because the president was so busy, but in reality because he was so broken and crazy.
The Mueller investigation ground on and on, with a broken White House now largely abandoned. The elections of the fall of 2018 made it clear there wouldn’t be much more MAGA agenda.
Melania had been out on a permanent Be Best tour, and had been romantically linked to the head of her security detail. The president hardly seemed to care, or even remember her. All he could talk about was Mueller.
Then, abruptly, the president looked up and said, “Fartknocker, I don’t think you’re cut out for this job. I asked you to save America, and all you’ve done is betray me.”
You don’t know where it came from. You thought everything was fine. You’d done your best to clean up the messes the old members of the cabinet and executive branch appointees had left behind. You realize something right then; he’s loyal to nothing, and to no one.
8
* * *
LIMITED GOVERNMENT
AS A YOUNGER CONSERVATIVE, I tried many times to unwind some college liberal for conflating conservatism with fascism. “Conservatives aren’t fascists,” I’d say in slow, nonthreatening tones as I reached for a rock. “Fascists believe in government control of the state and of the economy. We believe in limiting the power of government and in free markets, individual liberty, and the rule of law.”
On the other side of the equation, our libertarian friends used to basically pretend we could burn the entire enterprise of government to the ground and let a jolly wave of pure, cleansing anarchocapitalist fire set things right.
Of course, neither extreme was correct about mainstream limited-government conservatism, but we were largely in the sweet spot. We didn’t want the government getting much bigger, but we didn’t want grannies wrestling rats in the street for scraps of food, either.
Looking back on Republican presidents since Nixon, we see one hallmark in their campaign rhetoric and in their governance: a caution over the size, scope, cost, and power of government. None of them was perfect at restraining its growth (the Department of Homeland Security and George W. Bush’s Medicare expansion stand as two particularly painful examples), but fans of an expanded state would be hard-pressed to see Reagan, George H. W. Bush, or George W. Bush embracing massive expansions in federal power without compelling reasons. After a beat-down in the 1994 elections, even Bill Clinton famously said, “The era of big government is over.”
The defining ethos of limited-government conservatism still recognized the legitimate role of government and the powers of the state. The broad conservative consensus was that while the government is generally inefficient, slow, clumsy, dumb, overly intrusive, chock-full of layabouts, and has god-awful design sensibilities, there are areas for which the family, churches, social institutions, the market, and local government simply can’t scale. No one expects Topeka, Kansas, to field a nuclear deterrent or Rhode Island to administer its own postal system.
So much for that argument in the era of Trump.
Generations of Republican candidates for House, Senate, governor, and local offices argued that government’s size, power, and impact on everyday Americans was a pernicious danger to the Republic. Donald Trump erased that from the Republican vocabulary in a matter of months. Those in office who still believe government can be too big keep silent when President Statist pushes for a bigger, more intrusive state.
The GOP is now the party of big government, and it’s all Trump’s fault.
Like so many would-be and actual autocrats, Trump believes in an expanded state and putting the power of an expanded federal government to work for his political ends. He’s also been surrounded at various times by a group of remoras that includes Steve Bannon, Michael Anton, Peter Navarro, Wilbur Ross, Larry Kudlow, and Stephen Miller, all of whom seem perfectly delighted to expand government power, as long as they’re using it to carry out their nationalist-populist agenda.
In his first State of the Union speech, Trump called for a massive infrastructure bill, an affordable child care plan, trade restrictions, a border wall, and allowing governors “flexibility” to expand Medicare. If that last sounds familiar, it’s what Obamacare did most effectively: gave states enormous tranches of money to spend like drunken sailors on shore leave.
“Compassionate conservatives” sought to turn the power of government to accomplish conservative ends while shrinking its numerous deleterious side effects. The thought that we could use government to aid the truly needy while moving people toward laudable goals like improved education outcomes, homeownership, and community service may not have been libertarian perfection, but it was at least a middle ground in the political space in which we really live, not Randian, not Fabian. The Troll Party of Trump has no hesitation in using the power of government to bring their fantasy economic and social policies to life. Trump has done more to destroy limited-government conservatism than George Soros could have accomplished in a thousand years.
This is where Trump’s rhetorical hypnosis went to work. The message was no longer “Conservatives like me will restrain the power and scale of government.” Now the message was “I’m going to expand government to fuck over the people you hate.” This was the underlying Bannon-Anton-Miller Axis of Assholes’ nationalism in its true form: “We’re going to put the all-powerful state to work punishing those who have caused your grievances.”
For all their objections to the “administrative state,” it turns out that Trump’s merry band of arsonists are perfectly happy to use the power of government to punish their enemies and to appease their base. If government is, as Ronald Reagan put it, “the enemy of liberty,” then Trump’s base has turned that idea on its head; now the government is the enemy of whoever the base hates most.
Reagan also spoke to generations of Republicans and conservatives when he said in 1986, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’ ” For the Trump team, the new message is “I’m from the government, and I’m here to punish the people you hate.”
WE HATE BIG GOVERNMENT, EXCEPT WHEN IT’S GETTIN’ THE MESSICANS
In the 2008 presidential election, Barack Obama said in a July 2 speech something that set Republicans howling in paranoia and fury: “We cannot rely only on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives we’ve set. We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded.” The quote was, of course, taken wildly out of context, but it didn’t stop talk-radio hosts from losing their damn minds over it for days, and it didn’t take long for members of Congress to follow suit.
Representative Paul Broun, a Republican from Georgia, spoke for many on the conservative side when he said, “That’s exactly what Hitler did in Nazi Germany and it’s exactly what the Soviet Union did. When he’s proposing to have a national security force that’s answering to him, that is as strong as the U.S. military, he’s showing me signs of being Marxist.”1
Contrast this with the Republican-cheering of Trump’s national
deportation force. A favorite trope of the 2016 campaign, Trump declared war on immigrants from his first speech as a candidate, and his promises to deport 11 to 14 million illegal immigrants was a singular hit with his base. As opposed to Obama’s imagined—and never implemented—civilian national security force, Trump’s team moved quickly to deliver on his promise to put the power of the state to work to Make America Less Hispanic.
Trump immediately signed Executive Order 13767 to kick off the immigration and deportation crackdown he repeatedly, tiresomely promised his base.2 Almost immediately the party of small government was pushing to vastly expand the size of the Customs and Border Patrol, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the Department of Homeland Security.
It was also all-in on expanding private prison contracts to house those arrested in the deportation effort and bellowed about how soon Trump would build his border wall.3 These not so subtle efforts were a signal to his alt-right and less savory supporters that he was going to prevent the one future that makes Mark Krikorian, Mickey Kaus, and Ann Coulter wake up in a cold sweat, the infamous “browning of America.”4 By the spring of 2018, however, Trump’s promises to build the Wall had flopped like a branded Trump Tower in some third-world craptocracy. Time and again he’d tweet about the Wall, only to blow it when Congress presented spending bills in which a smarter, more canny president might have made a deal and delivered on his signature promise in the first year. Sad!
Trump had to do something to relieve the pressure. For a hot minute, he tried to fund the Wall through the Department of Defense budget, only to be schooled on the appropriations process. He then ordered 4,000 national guard troops to the border. This move was a lot less than it seemed; Presidents Bush and Obama both had deployed U.S. forces to support ICE and Customs. His followers, though, including the odious Ann Coulter, hoped that American troops would soon be shooting Mexican migrants as they crossed into the United States. On the Lars Larson radio program, Coulter said, “If you shoot one to encourage the others, maybe they’ll learn.”5
