by Rick Wilson
Our effort to hold the conservative movement together by rejecting Trump as the nominee was the opening act. Those of us still standing, still able to wake up and not wonder where our souls have gone, oppose him as president not because we don’t like who he is, but for what he does and fails to do.
It is to this moment a resistance of people who genuinely believe in conservative ideas and oppose politics redolent with authoritarianism, anticonstitutionalism, and personality-cult fervor that has no place in our Republic. It isn’t just an aesthetic or a stylistic choice. It’s about the future of the nation and about the future of conservatism.
We couldn’t defeat Trump in 2016, but we refuse, no matter how much you throw at us, no matter how much venom and ire you pour down on us, to make those last compromises, to put this man and this mob ahead of this country.
We don’t love this mission, but we’re on it. Our Dunkirk may not be seen as a victory today in the era of raw, swaggering triumphalism and a hermetic personality cult, but it’s essential to the survival of conservatism and a principled Republican Party with a brain, a heart, and a spine.
We’ll fight because the risks Trump poses are too great, even if our own party brethren have sunk so deep in the comforting, expedient politics of the moment. We’ll remind them that freedom isn’t some easy birthright, some soft insurance policy that a Republican president could never compromise. They won’t like it. They won’t appreciate it. But we won’t stop. Unlike Trump’s collaborators, explainers, and excusers, we’ll keep Reagan’s words in mind:
Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it on to our children in the bloodstream. The only way they can inherit the freedom we have known is if we fight for it, protect it, defend it and then hand it to them with the well thought lessons of how they in their lifetime must do the same. And if you and I don’t do this, then you and I may well spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it once was like in America when men were free.2
Like the Guilty Men of Great Britain who sought peace at any price with Herr Hitler, the new establishment conservatives who seek Trump at any price to the country, the movement, and the party will have to contend with the stubborn, angry, determined minority of us who still stand for something more than Nielsen ratings and the Twitter fury of a game show host masquerading as a president. Perhaps none of us who remain on the right and still standing is a Churchill, but all of us believe this fight isn’t over, isn’t optional, and isn’t going to end without blood, sweat, toil, and tears.
Everything about Donald Trump’s presidency and character is a disaster for America. The victories Republicans think they have achieved are transitory and ephemeral and come at the cost of their principles and, probably, their immortal souls. He is a stain on the party, on conservatism, and on this country that won’t easily wash out.
Our goal is not simply to stop Trump’s excesses, corruptions, and degradations of what America is and should be. It is to stop the rise of another Trump from those who would follow in his footsteps, to kill in the political cradle those with better social skills but the same agenda of discord, division, and radical, anticonstitutional statism. Our goal should be to end the era of entertainment conservatism and to select candidates for their quality, not their celebrity.
If I hadn’t taken up this fight, I would be richer, still loved on the right, and able to stay in the same lane I’d been in for years as a partisan warrior who took up the fights of my tribe without a second thought. I could have kept my stable of clients, kept moving forward in a world where the compensation for discarding my principles had a lot of zeroes behind it.
The attacks on me, my family, and my clients were a cost I’ve paid in full for opposing Donald Trump from the right. There were days where I feared I’d lose everything in this battle, and yet some stubborn love of my country and my party kept me pushing forward. The oddest part of this battle is the feeling of liberation and serenity I have felt from the very start. When challenged once with the question “How’s that Never Trump thing going, Rick?” I replied, “Fabulously. I never have to defend a verbally incontinent, psychologically unbalanced, grotesquely ignorant failure who is reviled by his country, mocked by the rest of the world, and who embarrasses himself and the nation with every crude, impulsive act.”3
I have never been alone in this fight, and the support of friends on the right who are both openly and secretly opposed to Trump has consistently been a source of strength. The network of people who understand the risks and the dangers we face and are working tirelessly to oppose him is broader than Trump’s supporters know. (P.S. Don, some of them work in the White House.)
I sleep well at night and wake up ready to be in the fight every day, and with the certain knowledge that men and women of good faith on the right are in that fight with me.
Though there are days I miss the camaraderie of people I fought long and hard with in elections and policy battles for 30 years, the comfort of that tribal campfire has faded. The Republican Party I knew and loved now feels like an armed camp in a third-world nation, full of informers and enforcers all seeking to curry favor with the Maximum Leader. The cultlike edge is not a flavor of conservatism with which I will ever be comfortable.
I’ll leave you with another Churchill quote, as true today as it was then: “I have, myself, full confidence that if all do their duty, if nothing is neglected, and if the best arrangements are made, as they are being made, we shall prove ourselves once more able to defend our island home, to ride out the storm of war, and to outlive the menace of tyranny, if necessary for years, if necessary alone.”4
Also, Trump has tiny, tiny hands.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Any list of acknowledgments will necessarily miss family, friends, advisors, and leave people out whom I will later regret not including. In this day and age it will also sadly paint a target on the backs of anyone I list.
In my long political career I have been blessed to work with the very best in the business, and some of you are still behind enemy lines, so I don’t want you getting in trouble with the Trump Thought Police if I name you. I’ll send a fruit basket, and you all know who you are.
I want to thank my friend of long standing John Avlon for calling me after the 2016 election and pushing me to write about the new world of Trump for The Daily Beast. It started as catharsis, and now look where we are.
My Florida crew have been amazing, unwavering friends, through everything. If you’ve been in our kitchen or on our porch, drinking, eating, and talking too loud, you know who you are, and why I treasure you. Also, “something happened in the kitchen and I love you so much.”
My outstanding agent, Christy Fletcher at Fletcher and Company, made all this easier and more fun than I had any right to expect.
I also want to thank Mitchell Ivers, Jonathan Karp, Caitlyn Reuss, and Hannah Brown at Simon & Schuster for bringing this project to life, and offering me this tremendous opportunity.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
© MARY BETH TYSON
RICK WILSON is a seasoned Republican political strategist and consultant, infamous negative-ad maker, entertaining public speaker, frequent television talk-show guest, and widely published writer. His regular column with The Daily Beast is a must-read in the political community, and he’s been published in The Washington Post, Politico, The Hill, the Daily News (New York), The Spectator, The Federalist, Independent Journal Review, and others. He’s a frequent guest on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher and appears regularly on CNN, MSNBC, NPR, With Friends Like These, Cheddar, and the national networks.
Wilson lives in Tallahassee, Florida, with his wife, four dogs, and a nameless cat. They have two grown children.
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NOTES
1. Vichy Republicans
1. Lachlan Markay, Asawin Suebsaeng, Kimberly Dozier, and Spencer Ackerman, “White House ‘Enemies List’ Drove McMaster-Bannon Feud,” Daily Beast, 5 Aug. 2017. https://www.thedailybeast.com/white-house-enemies-list-drove-mcmasters-bannon-feud.
2. Chris Whipple, “ ‘Who Needs a Controversy over the Inauguration?’ Reince Priebus Opens Up about His Six Months of Magical Thinking,” The Hive, Mar. 2018, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/02/reince-priebus-opens-up-about-his-six-months-of-magical-thinking.
3. Molly Ball, “How Trump Humiliated Reince Priebus—and the Republican Party,” The Atlantic, retrieved 16 May 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/07/the-final-humiliation-of-reince-priebus/535368/.
4. Matt Fuller, “Paul Ryan Responds to Donald Trump’s Misogyny,” HuffPost, 7 Oct. 2016, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/paul-ryan-donald-trump-misogyny-silence_us_57f81f60e4b068ecb5de8a5c.
5. Hunter Walker, “Donald Trump May Be Helping Ted Cruz with His ‘Endgame,’ ” Business Insider, 27 Aug. 2015, http://www.businessinsider.com/donald-trump-may-help-ted-cruzs-endgame-2015-8.
6. “Trump Tells Christie: ‘Get on the Plane and Go Home,’ ” The Hill, 27 Feb. 2016, http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/271074-trump-tells-christie-get-in-the-plane-and-go-home.
7. Melissa Bell, “Newt Gingrich’s Lunar Colony Has Us Looking at the Moon,” Washington Post, 26 Jan. 2012, https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/blogpost/post/newt-gingrichs-lunar-colony-has-us-looking-at-the-moon/2012/01/26/gIQAYSffTQ_blog.html.
8. Nicole Hemmer, “The Conservative War on Liberal Media Has a Long History,” The Atlantic, 17 Jan. 2014, http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/01/the-conservative-war-on-liberal-media-has-a-long-history/283149/.
9. Michael Wolff, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House (Henry Holt and Co., New York: 2018).
10. Rupert Murdoch, Twitter, 18 July 2015, twitter.com/rupertmurdoch/status/622558129742573568?lang=en.
11. Tom Kludt, “Frenemies with Benefits: A Brief History of the Trump-Murdoch Relationship,” CNNMoney, 17 Jan. 2018, http://money.cnn.com/2018/01/17/media/rupert-murdoch-donald-trump/index.html.
12. Amy Chozick and Ashley Parker, “Titans Clash as Donald Trump’s Run Fuels His Feud with Rupert Murdoch,” New York Times, 22 July 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/22/us/politics/titans-clash-as-donald-trumps-run-fuels-his-feud-with-rupert-murdoch.html.
13. Sarah Ellison, “Inside the Final Days of Roger Ailes’s Reign at Fox News,” The Hive, 22 Sept. 2016, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/09/roger-ailes-fox-news-final-days.
14. Dan Senor, Twitter, 15 July 2016, https://twitter.com/dansenor/status/753994913830703104.
15. Alexander Burns and Maggie Haberman, “How Donald Trump Finally Settled on Mike Pence,” New York Times, 16 July 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/16/us/politics/mike-pence-donald-trump-vice-president.html.
16. Ralph Z. Hallow, “In CPAC Speech, Trump Hints of White House Bid,” Washington Times, 10 Feb. 2011, www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/feb/10/weighing-presidential-run-trump-make-cpac-debut/.
17. Matt Wilstein, “Palin and Trump Score More CPAC Speaking Time Than Paul, Rubio and Ryan,” Mediaite, 12 Mar. 2013, https://www.mediaite.com/online/palin-and-trump-score-more-cpac-speaking-time-than-paul-rubio-and-ryan/.
18. Matt Cover, “Donald Trump; Brought to You by the Party’s Professional Activists,” 23 March 2016, Opportunity Lives, retrieved 16 May 2018, http://opportunitylives.com/donald-trump-brought-to-you-by-the-gops-professional-activists/.
19. Matt Fuller, “Donald Trump and the Heritage Foundation: Friends with Benefits,” HuffPost, 10 Aug. 2016, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-heritage-foundation_us_57aa2d40e4b06e52746dfea9.
3. Running with the Devil
1. Rod Anderson, “Donald Trump’s Nonchalant Christianity,” Christian Post, 24 July 2015, https://www.christianpost.com/news/donald-trumps-nonchalant-christianity-141834/.
5. What We Lost with Trump
1. Henry Cabot Lodge, George Washington, the Man (Houghton Mifflin, 1917).
6. The Media
1. Andrew Marantz, “How ‘Fox & Friends’ Rewrites Trump’s Reality,” New Yorker, 15 Jan. 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/01/15/how-fox-and-friends-rewrites-trumps-reality.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Alan Rappeport, “Republicans Learn to Love Deficit Spending They Once Loathed,” New York Times, 8 Feb. 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/08/us/politics/republicans-spending-deficits-debt.html.
7. The Trump Base
1. “Why Economic Anxiety Is Driving Working Class Voters to ‘Trumpism,’ ” PBS News Hour, 24 Mar. 2016, http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/why-economic-anxiety-is-driving-working-class-voters-to-trumpism/.
2. Colin Grabow and Scott Lincicome, “The Many Myths of Reaganite Protectionism,” Cato Institute, 30 Nov. 2017, https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/many-myths-reaganite-protectionism.
3. “Trump Says ‘Pain’ from China Tariffs Will Make US ‘Much Stronger,’ ” The Hill, 6 Apr. 2018, http://thehill.com/policy/finance/381933-trump-says-pain-from-china-tariffs-will-make-us-much-stronger.
4. Tom Nichols, The Death of Expertise: The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).
5. Ann Oldenburg, “Donald Trump vs. Whoopi Goldberg on Obama Birth Certificate,” USA Today, 23 Mar. 2011, http://content.usatoday.com/communities/entertainment/post/2011/03/donald-trump-takes-on-whoopi-goldberg-over-obama-birth-certificate/1.
6. “Donald Trump Takes on Whoopi, ‘The View’ over Obama’s Birth Certificate,” Fox News Insider, 28 Mar. 2011, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfZixqYuL58.
7. Donald J. Trump, Twitter, 12 Mar. 2012, https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/179228808891731968.
8. Donald J. Trump, Twitter, 30 May 2012, https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/207875027008368640.
9. Donald J. Trump, Twitter, 12 Dec. 2013, https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/411247268763676673.
10. Donald J. Trump, Twitter, 16 Oct. 2016, https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/787699930718695425.
11. Donald J. Trump, Twitter, 17 Oct. 2016, https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/787995025527410688.
8. Limited Government
1. “Georgia Congressman Calls Obama Marxist, Warns of Dictatorship,” Politico, retrieved 5 June 2017, http://www.politico.com/blogs/scorecard/ (article removed).
2. “Executive Order: Border Security and Immigration Enforcement Improvements,” issued 25 Jan. 2017, White House, https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/01/25/executive-order-border-security-and-immigration-enforcement-improvements.
3. David Nakamura, “Trump Administration Moving Quickly to Build Up Nationwide Deportation Force,” Washington Post, 12 Apr. 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-administration-moving-quickly-to-build-up-nationwide-deportation-force/2017/04/12/7a7f59c2-1f87-11e7-be2a-3a1fb24d4671_story.html.
4. Lloyd Grove, “Coulter Hates ‘the Browning of America,’ ” Daily Beast, 26 May 2015, https://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/05/26/ann-coulter-on-the-browning-of-america.
5. “Ann Coulter Goes There: If Military Shoots One ‘Illegal’ at Border, ‘Maybe They’ll Learn,’ ” Mediate.com, 6 Apr. 2018.
6. “Fiscal Conservative Offers His Take on Trump’s Budget Proposal,” Morning Edition, NPR, 13 Feb. 2018, https://www.npr.org/2018/02/13/
585299056/fiscal-conservative-offers-his-take-on-trumps-budget-proposal.
7. Stan Collender, “Get Ready: Here Comes Yet Another BS* Budget Commission,” Forbes, 4 Mar. 2018, https://www.forbes.com/sites/stancollender/2018/03/04/get-ready-here-comes-yet-another-bs-budget-commission/.
8. “Transcript: Donald Trump’s Victory Speech,” New York Times, 10 Nov. 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/10/us/politics/trump-speech-transcript.html.
9. Marc Scribner, “The Great Infrastructure Myth,” Competitive Enterprise Institute, 10 Nov. 2016, https://cei.org/blog/great-infrastructure-myth.
10. Greg Jaffe and Damian Paletta, “Trump Plans to Ask for $716 Billion for National Defense in 2019—A Major Increase,” Washington Post, 26 Jan. 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/trump-plans-to-ask-for-716-billion-for-national-defense-in-2019—a-major-increase/2018/01/26/9d0e30e4-02a8-11e8-bb03-722769454f82_story.html.
11. Public Law 103-3, 5 Feb. 1993, https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/STATUTE-107/pdf/STATUTE-107-Pg6.pdf.
12. Seung Min Kim, “Ivanka, Rubio Find a New Project: Paid Family Leave,” Politico, 4 Feb. 2018, http://politi.co/2nAuqeQ.
13. “Solyndra Loan ‘Crony Capitalism at Its Worst,’ GOP Rep Says,” Fox News, 18 Sept. 2011, http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/09/18/solyndra-loan-crony-capitalism-at-its-worst-republican-says.html.
14. Michael Wolff, “Ringside with Steve Bannon at Trump Tower as the President-Elect’s Strategist Plots ‘An Entirely New Political Movement’ (Exclusive),” Hollywood Reporter, 18 Nov. 2016, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/steve-bannon-trump-tower-interview-trumps-strategist-plots-new-political-movement-948747.
