by Rick Wilson
GOVERN LIKE GROWN-UPS
Trump’s raging, vulgarian insult-comic shtick wore thin for most Americans during the campaign. Many more reached their limit in his first year. For too many Republicans, the desire to emulate Trump as a play to the base was all too tempting.
The House Clown Caucus of Devin Nunes, Matt Gaetz, Steve King, and others turned the formerly staid GOP into a party of derision. From the Oval Office on down, future Republicans need to consciously, mindfully conduct themselves with dignity, probity, and care. The old, abandoned face of politics that emphasized smarts, seriousness, and stature needs a comeback over the Trumpian politics-as-professional-wrestling model.
Decorum is boring, and manners are passé in the Brave New Trump World, but behaving in a way that isn’t deliberately asinine and vulgar might—even for a moment—let Americans look at Republican politicians as leaders and not conspiracy-addled clowns intent on showing their asses at every turn.
Congress has become so paralyzed with its ideological rigor mortis that Americans are right to believe Washington is a place where good ideas go to die. We might start by getting back to regular order in the House and Senate, passing a budget every year, and governing like adults. Voters look at Congress as immature, messy, ineffective, and pointless, and the current crop under Trump is doing little to change that.
Both the House and Senate leadership must also discipline their members in areas ranging from ethics to affect. The majority leader and speaker have tremendous power. It’s important they start to use it to impose a necessary dose of maturity and gravitas in both bodies.
KILL CRONY CAPITALISM
As a party, we’ve talked a great game for a long time about ending crony capitalism, the reviled system by which battalions of lobbyists advocate for tweaks to federal law and regulations for the specific benefit of their corporate clients. From the virtuous to the skeezy, from Big Corn to Big Tech to Big Sugar to Big Banks, American corporations have learned that market dominance and guaranteed profits can be ensured with Big Lobbying.
Americans know and feel that the deck is stacked against them when it comes to Washington offering the biggest, wealthiest, and most irresponsible players the power to define markets, protect themselves from risk, and leave taxpayers with the bill.
It’s time to stop it. Picking winners and losers in the American economy was derided under Obama and Clinton but has become an article of faith in Trumpian economic nationalism. If we believe in free markets, it’s long past time to hit the brakes on corporations using Congress to ensure their bottom lines, executive pensions, market positions, and supply chains.
STOP FIGHTING THE LAST WARS
Americans have made up their minds on gay marriage. They’re fine with it, and that’s not going to change in any foreseeable future. As a conservative, I don’t want the state to decide who can and can’t get married, but ironically there are still Republican leaders who believe that gay marriage and gay adoption are moral horrors so extreme that government must stop them. They’re a shrinking number, but it’s time to tell the evangelical cohort in the GOP that since they’ve shown their true colors by giving Donald Trump a series of mulligans on his porn-star-screwing, pussy-grabbing, serially adulterous life, they’ve lost their moral authority to scream at the rest of us.
Americans have also decided that they’re fine with marijuana. The states have made up their minds and gotten to work taxing, regulating, and prospering from medical and recreational marijuana. The GOP needs to end the War on Drugs absurdity that costs billions, incarcerates far too many, and profits no one except the booming private prison industry.
EPILOGUE
* * *
POST-TRUMP AMERICA
THERE ARE TWO PATHS FORWARD in our politics: A big Reset or a Mad Max political hellscape. I don’t know yet which one is going to happen.
THE MAD MAX OUTCOME
Let’s get the bad news out of the way first. As poorly as Trumpism scales, and as strongly as it repels most people who have a conscience, there is something attractive about casting off the boring strictures and structures for those who think this is their one shot at permanent, transformative power. This is how authoritarian regimes boot up: the self-fulfilling idea “This is our one shot, and damn the rules.” The slope is slippery, the descent is fast, and the regimes that slip away from democracy and freedom do it a little at a time, and then all at once. You’ll pardon me for being skeptical after the past two years that any meaningful firewall exists in the corridors of Washington power to stop the transition from America to something . . . darker.
Always plan for the worst, prepare for the crash, expect the disaster, and be ready for Murphy’s law to obtain in any political crisis. A plan beats no plan, every time, and even if it’s a plan for the end of the GOP and conservatism as we know it, it’s a useful exercise to wargame out the worst case.
Join me for a quick tour of American politics in October 2024. Trump himself died of a massive stroke in December the year before. Sarah Huckabee Sanders insisted to the press for months that the president had not died after eating two buckets of KFC and slugging down a magnum of gravy, but leaked photos from Barron Trump’s iPhone XII disproved this.
Donald Trump Jr., the current Republican nominee, had replaced Mike Pence as vice president shortly after the 2020 election and had been named president after his father’s death. As an aside, Pence was happy to finally leave the White House and spend more time with Mother and the Pence Center for People Who Are Totally Straight and Don’t Need Anyone Assuming Their Anxiety About Gay People Means They’re Curious about the Touch of the Same Sex.
Don Jr.’s campaign eschewed the trappings of the traditional race. Relying on rallies closed to the media but broadcast on the Trump TV network, Fox, and Facebook Live, the younger Trump’s campaign enraged the press. He had become an even more inflammatory social media presence than his father. Media outlets opposing Trump had increasingly come under pressure from all sides, including a slow increase of political violence against reporters from publications considered hostile to the White House.
The worship of Donald Trump the Elder by his small but intense core had taken on a religious fervor. Trump supporters recounted miracles of how Don Jr.’s father’s touch healed scrofula, restored sight in the blind, raised the dead, and generated miraculous meals of overdone steaks and Filet-O-Fish.
From 2016 until 2024 the Republican Party and the conservative movement had slowly become entirely defined by Trump and Trump juche. Wrote one conservative opinion leader on the pages of the recently merged Breitbart-Federalist–Gateway Pundit site, “Those laws and principles that made the GOP so impotent and weak are for a nation that is impotent and weak. Loyalty to the Leader, the Party, and the State are now the principles that define conservatism.”
Another wrote, “We were too cautious about embracing strong state power and a dominant executive. We know Trump’s leadership has saved America and Trumpism is the future. It needs a powerful government to match a powerful man’s legacy. Even our ‘allies’ in Congress hid their cuckish cowardice behind a phony love of their ‘coequal’ branch. If they want to be coequal, they should run for president.”
Articles like “Is It Time to Kill the Cucks? (Politically)” and “Trump Poll Shows Trump Voters View Trump as Greatest President in History of World Because MAGA Hillary for Prison” proliferated. Sarah Huckabee Sander’s Pepe the Frog lapel pin caused quite a stir.
Conservative media outlets had fallen, one by one, as they had been bought out, sued to death by the Peter Thiels of the world, or seen their audiences slip into the warm embrace of stupid. Republicans cheered the end of legal accountability for the president and viewed the ruthless will to power and a boundless sense of outrage as the only metrics of leadership.
Trump found, and Americans learned, that there was nothing he could do that struck the conscience of congressional Republicans. There was nothing he couldn’t escape by stoking resentments agai
nst either the news media or the hated Establishment. While scandal after scandal built around Trump, it seemed only to harden the resolve of his legions of fans and his diminished cadre of congressional allies.
As Mueller’s probe put Trump associates and family members in jail for both obstruction of justice and conspiracy, they screamed louder about Hillary’s emails and Uranium One. Though Manafort, Stone, Cohen, and others were left to die in jail, Jared had been pardoned after 11 months of his sentence, after his father-in-law had sufficient time to “comfort” Ivanka.
Evangelicals confronted with Stormy Daniels, various baby mama dramas, and then a string of other Trump affairs with porn stars, escorts, models, and other women shrugged and offered mulligan after mulligan. Melania’s departure from the White House, and the return of Hope Hicks, this time as First Lady, in the weeks before his death left them gushing about how Donald Trump truly loves the institution of marriage.
The slow-motion divorce from the mainstream of American politics with the adoption of Trumpism was an electoral death wish for the GOP. Democrats dominated the U.S. House, and Speaker Pelosi at age 84 still clung to office, frankly intimidating in her robot exoskeleton. Democrats had gained back vast power in the states as GOP legislative offices fell.
African Americans, traditionally a lost cause for the GOP, became even more so, their GOP support numbers in the 2% range. Trump Jr. continued his father’s flirtations with the alt-right, and few forgave his remark that Richard Spencer “had a lot of good in him” after the white nationalist had been found dead of autoerotic asphyxiation while wearing an SS uniform and a tutu.
Hispanics built a Wall, all right, an electoral wall in a dozen states that switched from Republican to Democratic control. California, Oregon, and Washington had seceded from the nation in all but name, largely ignoring Federal law on marijuana, immigration, and the environment. The 2018–2021 Trade War, $6-a-gallon gas, and sky-high health insurance premiums left the economy reeling.
A rising tide of slightly less liberal centrist Democrats took seats in the Midwest and the suburbs of major cities throughout the Deep South. They were propelled there by a wave of educated women fleeing the GOP for good. Educated men were following quickly, leaving the Party of Lincoln as the Party of the GED. Millennials, long a target of every political interest, were displaying solidly Democratic voting behavior.
The people who clung to Trump ran the Republican Party, though. Their desire to defeat Democrats after three consecutive legislative beat-downs was nowhere near as passionate as their hatred for anyone even slightly Trump-skeptical. The Trump cadre’s atavistic lust for the purge, the long knives, the broken glass, the savage blog post, and the whiff of grapeshot led to many moderate GOP elected officials caucusing as independents. Others fled for third parties, a small but fast-growing contingent on the American political landscape.
Primary elections became heated contests as to which candidate had been with Trump sooner and more passionately. Trump stamps and MAGA tattoos were a frequent sight, and the number of candidates who had named their children Donald, Ivanka, Eric, and Melania was remarkable. Candidates stopped pledging allegiance to tired things like the flag and the Constitution, and instead pledged to always serve the Trump agenda and their undying loyalty to Trump and his family. Violent altercations were increasingly common.
Bob Mueller’s death in mysterious circumstances just after he indicted Erik Prince and Steve Bannon remains unexplained. Jim Comey’s disappearance, a wave of assassinations of media personalities, and the plane crash that killed Rick Wilson and Bill Kristol raised eyebrows, but were mostly greeted by Fox headlines celebrating the end of a last few noisy voices critical of The Trump Dynasty.
THE BIG RESET
I do know that for all the trauma, stress, pain, humiliation, embarrassment, and bad hair role-modeling Trump has given this nation, there are many reasons to remain militantly optimistic about our future. America’s political immune system is resilient, but we often have to hit the highest fever, the worst pain, and the deepest shock before the T-cells of our values, history, and national character kick in.
I continue to believe that in the future Trump will be viewed as an aberration, a deviation from an arc of history that has produced leaders who, however flawed, were eventually constrained by a basic, deeply wired respect for the nation, the Constitution, and the rule of law. After all, even Nixon chose not to destroy the nation.
I believe that we’ve entered an era in which the policies of both parties, particularly in economics, are overcome by events, swept aside by technology, and joyously and painfully disrupted. No, Republicans aren’t getting a million coal miners going down-pit again. No, Democrats, you’re not going to get a massive technocracy telling me what kind of toilet paper and lightbulbs I should use.
I believe that the cranky, geriatric conservatism of the post-2010 era—oppositional, increasingly comfortable with racial hostility, closed to the world, revanchist, and addled by conspiracy—is a deviation from, not an alteration of conservative principles. Some of the conservative movement’s “leaders”—a term now fraught with images of weakness, compromise, and hypocrisy—will need to be exiled or at the least parked for a time in some kind of political lazaretto until they see the error of their ways.
I believe there’s so much to be done, so many challenges, and so much more to achieve as a nation in a complex world because the demise of Trumpism is as inevitable as it is desirable. It’s a 19th-century political movement in the era of technological and social uplift that was unimaginable a few decades ago.
Being such an acid-tongued bastard, it sometimes gets lost that it’s not simply that I hate Donald Trump. It’s not simply that I loathe his status as a shit-tier human in every measurable axis and think he’s a stain on the presidency. It’s that I love this big, messy, chaotic experiment we call America. It’s because deep in my heart, I know that the country I love is tougher and vastly better than he is and, when called to its higher purpose, always answers.
We’ve almost blown it a dozen times in history, but some providential hand steers us away from the cliff. We’ve been hit hard by foreign powers—Pearl Harbor, 9/11, the Russian information war of 2016, and Milli Vanilli in the 1980s—but we always rally. We always recover. We always rise from the wreckage. Churchill was right: Americans will always do the right thing after exhausting every other option.
Trump is a problem we’ll be a long time in solving. The damage to our institutions, our hopes, and our reputation in the world won’t be undone overnight or with a few sweet words. It will take work and commitment from people on the conservative side of the equation to admit and rectify the dangerous flirtation with authoritarian statism Trump represents.
It’s not impossible. Far from it; it’s vital.
On the eve of the Civil War, Ulysses S. Grant wrote his father, then living in the South, a brief letter. At that moment, South Carolina had seceded from the Union and Fort Sumter had been fired upon. The cataclysm of the War between the States was upon us.
At a dark moment of my own just after election day in 2016, a mentor reminded me of Grant’s letter. One paragraph struck and comforted me then, as it does now:
Whatever may have been my political opinions before, I have but one sentiment now. That is, we have a Government, and laws and a flag, and they must all be sustained. There are but two parties now, traitors and patriots, and I want hereafter to be ranked with the latter, and I trust, the stronger party. I do not know but you may be placed in an awkward position, and a dangerous one pecuniarily, but costs cannot now be counted. My advice would be to leave where you are if you are not safe with the views you entertain. I would never stultify my opinion for the sake of a little security.1
Resistance on the right to Trump isn’t just out of stubbornness. It would be easy to say conservatism will survive under the moral and political disaster that is Donald Trump, but it wouldn’t be honest to do so. Team MAGA and the Trump GOP wou
ld love for us to shut up and let the world burn.
The Never Trump movement was catalyzed in the 2016 election, but it exists today for a bigger purpose; we’ve committed to conservative, constitutional leadership for the future. We reject an all-powerful state, whether it’s in the hands of a leftist technocrat or a bright-orange alt-right-curious neofascist. That’s the core of Never Trump that Trump’s fans don’t understand. It isn’t just that we loathe him personally (though that’s easy to do with his horror-show affect); it’s that we reject his core political tendency of authoritarian statism.
Every day that passes gives us additional evidence of how much Trump believes he can govern not under the Constitution and laws of this nation but by fits of pique, fiat, diktat, and by force of will. He either doesn’t understand or doesn’t respect the separation of powers and the structure of government the Founders built.
Never Trump was intended as a kind of Dunkirk for principled Republicans and conservatives. In the short term, the evacuation of Dunkirk was a victory for the Germans; they rolled into Paris unopposed on June 14, 1940. They controlled Europe until 1944. The French government capitulated, and the Vichy regime, led by Marshal Pétain, collaborated with the Nazis at every level, including playing their role in the arrest, deportation, and murder of Jews.
I know, I know. The clickservatives reading this are huffing and ready to scream that I’m violating Godwin’s law and that the analogy between the GOP and Vichy is too much. Tough shit. Your willing blindness to the slippery slope of history when it comes to authoritarianism and the prospect of it in this nation disqualifies you from the discussion.
Collaboration with evil comes in many forms: grudging, tacit, overt, and enthusiastic. France experienced all those variations of cooperation with the evil of the Nazi regime. Charles de Gaulle, the Free French, and the Resistance never faltered, never accepted the Pétain regime, and never stopped fighting to recover their nation. Their privations were long, and sacrifices many.
