Blame Me for the GOP

I was there. I should have done more.

For decades, I worked as a Republican media consultant. I helped elect Republican governors and Senators in over half the country. I worked in the Bob Dole campaign, the George W. Bush 2000 and 2004 campaigns, and the Mitt Romney campaigns of 2008 and 2012.

A lot of people were wrong about the 2016 presidential race, but it’s difficult to find anyone more wrong than me. I didn’t think Donald Trump would win the primary and when he did, I thought he’d lose the general. After he won, I found myself asking how it was that I didn’t see this darkness and hate and more painfully, why did I not do more to stop it.

I have Republican friends from the Bush-Romney days who like to assert that Donald Trump hijacked our old party. I’d like to believe that but it strikes me as absurd. When the hijacker on the plane announces that the plane is going to Cuba, no one stands up and cheers. Yet Donald Trump is overwhelmingly the most popular figure in the Republican Party. That’s the response to a savior, not a hijacker.

No, the only logical conclusion is that Donald Trump revealed the Republican party. When I wrote, It Was All A Lie: How The Republican Party Became Donald Trump, I was careful not to blame others. There is a trope of Washington books “if only they had listened to me.” I couldn’t write that book. They did listen to me. I helped elect more of them than anybody. When I joined the Republican Party, I was drawn to its then-avowed belief in personal responsibility. That turned out to be nothing more than a marketing slogan, but I believed it then and do now.

So I opened It Was All A Lie by writing, “Blame me.” I was there and looked the other way. That regret will haunt me for the rest of my life. I can’t undo those years, but now I work with The Lincoln Project using the skills I developed to help create the monster that became Trumpism to defeat this evil.

Watching my old party take a pornographic glee in building concentration camps and kidnapping women and children, I reflected on what I had written in 2020 about the party. I would have hoped that by now, there would be reasons to be more hopeful about the party. But as is always the pattern with extremist hate movements, it has only become darker.

Perspective is always a great value in moments of crisis and I thought it would be useful to share some of what I wrote in 2020. Ask yourself if I was too pessimistic. I’d like to think I was. But I can’t.

From It Was All A Lie: How The Republican Party Became Donald Trump:

These are not evil people. Live next door to most of them, and they will be good neighbors who help out when they can, laugh at your jokes, cheer for sports teams you both love. This was my tribe. I did not think them perfect; no man may be a hero to his valet or political consultant. I never pretended to see even glimmers of greatness in most of them, but I did hold out for an assumption of decency. They have proven me wrong, and the sadness I feel is difficult to express. No one wanted this moral test, but most of my tribe have failed it.

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… A few years ago, it was possible to read a professional hate website like Breitbart and sort of chuckle that this was the odd corner of the political universe where the weirdos and freaks hung out to share grievances. Now that can be said of the national Republican Party.

The White House welcomes and empowers those on the right who peddle conspiracy theories and religious and racial bigotry on the internet. Strange, angry freaks like Sebastian Gorka and Stephen Miller are celebrated, not shunned. Across the country almost every state party is now dominated by the angry and aggrieved who seem to believe the purpose of our politics is to make America at last safe for white people.

These are the new segregationists, who have convinced themselves they are fighting a just war to defend the values of ‘our way of life.’ They are unified by a shared vision of America not as a just force to help equalize the worst impulses of society but rather as a heavy mace they can use to club the future into submission. They will and do lie and swear they are trying to ‘save America,’ but what dark force in politics has not argued some noble purpose to justify its betrayals of decency?

In today’s Republican Party, a George W. Bush would be crushed by a Sean Hannity, whose growing body and seemingly enlarging head respond to lies like Pinocchio’s nose. The Trump Republican Party has abandoned any pretense of kindness or compassion as a desirable human quality. All his life Donald Trump has seen these as weaknesses, not virtues worthy of aspiration. Now so it is with the Republican Party.

So how does this change? Only through defeat and desperation. Any appeal to country over party has long been proven as ineffective as a Texas governor organizing days of prayer for rain. What must be understood is that these Republicans like what they are championing. They like being the voice of white America. It is impossible to move them by any appeal to patriotism because they see themselves as putting patriotism first when they fight for their misguided vision of America. The party will only change when its desire to revel in its worst instincts is challenged by its fear of losing power.

There will be a role for a white party for a long time in America, but it will soon not be a party that can win national elections, and perhaps that will force the party to adapt. But that will take a long time, and history tells us that once those in power legitimize hate, it is difficult to manage.

There has always been a market for hate in America, but it’s never been the dominant market. But we’ve never had a major party led by a man so consumed with hate and so deeply broken. There have been the Father Coughlin–like figures before, but Father Coughlin was never president. Donald Trump did not change the Republican Party as much as he gave the party permission to reveal its true self. The Lindsey Grahams of the world have not changed. We are only now seeing who they always were, freed from any need to pretend.

The Republican Party has many weapons it will use to fight to remain in power. But it seems clear that embracing change will not be among them. Even though the party has all but abandoned any pretense of a moral justification for its existence except to defeat Democrats, it remains the official party of a white governing class in America, and with that comes tremendous money and power that will be employed to defend the party.”

… Donald Trump has served a useful purpose by exposing the deep flaws of a major American political party. Like a heavy truck driven over a bridge on the edge of collapse, Trump has made it impossible to ignore the long-developing fault lines and failures of the Republican Party.

A party rooted in decency and values does not embrace the vicious hate that Donald Trump peddles as patriotism. But the Republican Party did and does. This moment should signal a day of reckoning for the party and all who claim it as a political identity. Will it? I’m not hopeful. Better than most, I know the seductive lure of believing what you prefer to believe and ignoring the obvious truth.

What the Republican Party must realize is that it needs America more than America needs the party. And the America it needs is the one that is 320 million Americans and growing, a country of immigrants and less white every day: the real America, not the gauzy Shangri-La of suburban bliss that never existed. I’d like to say I believe the party I spent so many years fighting for could rise to that challenge. But that would be a lie, and there have been too many lies for too long.