This is a long, detailed, dense read about what happened to the Republican party. I highly encourage the entire thing (noting that very little of it, actually, is about the possibility of following Germany's path).
You’re from the world of political consultants. I think of you as a kind of political cowboy, a craftsman of political storytelling. And I always thought consultants were more interested in strategy than rigid beliefs. And to some degree, you copped to that, in the book. But at some point, you hit some kind of moral rock bottom. Was there a moment? What was the revelation?
Yeah, sure, about ten o’clock on election night in 2016 when Trump won. Look, I was a consultant. I was about winning. But I also believed that there was a core set of beliefs that, say, 90% of the party would have agreed on, were fundamental, definitional, nonnegotiable for the Republican Party: personal responsibility, character counts, strong on Russia, deficit matters, fiscal sanity, free trade, strongly pro-legal immigration. These were fundamental, nonnegotiable bedrock principles that define what it was to be a Republican. So, Trump is not that, the party now has drifted away from those. The party is actively against each of those. We are the character-doesn’t-count party. We are to the left of Bernie Sanders on trade, as far as I can figure out any coherent policy to it. We’re [Vladimir] Putin’s poodle. And so, then you say, How does anybody abandon deeply held beliefs in three, four years? and I think the answer is you don’t. It just means you didn’t deeply hold them.
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It’s hard to be self-critical of why it is we’ve lost a popular vote every year since ’88, except 2004. And the answers were pretty obvious but still important to state: the need to appeal to more nonwhites, the need to appeal to younger voters, the need to appeal to more women, particularly single women. What’s interesting though is these are now presented not just as political necessities but as a moral mandate, that if you deserve to be the governing party of this big, confusing, loud, changing country, you need to reflect these things. So, everybody agreed and nodded. And then we got to Donald Trump and we just threw it all out the window kind of like an audible sigh of relief, like thank God, we don’t have to pretend we actually care about this stuff. We can still just win with white people. And it just exposes how completely phony it was. I think Trump looked at the Republican Party with sort of an animal instinct and realized that this is a group of weak people who don’t really believe in anything, except winning, except power. And if I can give them power, they will allow me to be whatever I want to be. And I think he was right.
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In [1993], Bill Clinton proposes a tax increase. It passes by one vote. At the time, every Republican predicted economic Armageddon. This was a time when Dr. Kevorkian was a popular cultural figure, the assisted suicide doctor, and they refer to it as a Kevorkian tax increase. So, I made a million ads about that. And we won every race in 1994 on that message. Guess what? We were wrong. It helped launch one of the greatest periods of economic expansion and growth in the history of the country. And Clinton was the last president to wrestle the deficit to some sort of standstill. So, I think you have to learn from facts. I think that there’s been a deeply flawed economic theory at the heart of a lot of Republican economics.
Trump ran the way we used to accuse Democrats of running. We used to accuse Democrats of saying, You believe that there’s a finite amount of wealth in the country and that we need to focus on how to divide that wealth. We would say, No, there’s not. We can grow. There’s an infinite amount here. And we should focus on how best to expand that.
Trump ran on the pretense that to be born in America is to be a victim, that you’re a sucker, that there are these powerful forces out there that are taking advantage of you. It’s a complete reversal of “to be born in the Reagan era was to win life’s lottery—you’re the luckiest person in the world. You’re an American.” For Trump, you’re a chump. And [he’s] going to go out and even the score for you, buddy. It’s a weaponization of white grievance.
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Your dad’s not going to be going to a football game. It’s dangerous for him to go shopping. Donald Trump has made the world more dangerous for your father in a very tangible, real [way]. It didn’t have to be this way. It’s not this way in Canada. If your dad goes across the border to Ottawa, he’s going to be a lot safer. And it’s not genetic. It’s government. And it’s not conservative or liberal. It is the combination of the anti-intellectualism, the anti-education elements of the Republican Party, and the anti-elite elements of the Republican Party, so-called, that have culminated in this toxic brew that is killing tens of thousands of Americans. I mean, more Americans are going to die because of this combination of political beliefs than major wars. This virus [is] attacking Americans. And Donald Trump is making it a lot worse, and we all know this. But Republicans won’t even stand up to defend America.
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Courage is getting out of the boat when the guy in front of you gets shot. And they don’t have the courage to stand up to some fat, ridiculous imbecile from Queens. And it’s shameful. It should be their legacy. They are killing their neighbors to defend Donald Trump. I’m very comfortable calling Trump a traitor because I really think he is against America, what it means to be an American. I don’t think these Republican politicians—I know a lot of them, I helped elect a lot of them, they’re good people. If you’re stranded on the side of the road with a flat tire, they’d stop and help you in a heartbeat. If they lived next door to you, they’d be a really good neighbor. They’re not mean people. But there’s something here that has been a complete collapse of responsibility that they had to defend democracy in America. And they failed.
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“You know the thing about this democracy is somebody has to be willing to lose.” What happened with Republicans is that, to believe that if Hillary Clinton is elected the country is lost, you’re really not an American. You really don’t believe in America. When somebody like Matt Schlapp goes out and says, “We have to save this country. These people are going to destroy the country,” they’re not Americans. Personally, I don’t think they really believe this. But if you don’t believe that America can survive the election of a former secretary of state, a U.S. senator, you think America is some sort of fragile paper-mache creation, not a flourishing democracy that benefits from diversity.
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I think there’s really three parties now in America: there’s two parties in the Democratic Party and then there’s a Conservative Party and the Republican Party. I don’t think the Republican Party is going to be very relevant for a long time. I think we’re at a period when we’re going to be in for center-left government. Probably that center-left government goes too far at some point and some logically coherent, moral, and intellectually defensible center-right opposition will emerge. But it’s not going to happen with these clowns like Josh Hawley and [Ted] Cruz. These are people who have made themselves ridiculous. Nikki Haley praising Charlie Kirk. These are people that faced a moment and the moment defeated them. I can’t tell you who it will be.
