Archive for the ‘Republican’ Category
Donald Trump won Republicans over in 2016 as he loses them in 2022 : NPR
Then-President Donald Trump listens as Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., speaks at Fort Drum, N.Y., in a file photo. Hans Pennink/AP hide caption
Then-President Donald Trump listens as Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., speaks at Fort Drum, N.Y., in a file photo.
It can be easy to forget how many of Donald Trump's loudest allies once had nothing but insults for the man. Lindsey Graham is one. There's New York Rep. Elise Stefanik. Ohio Sen.-elect J.D. Vance and Wyoming Rep.-elect Harriet Hageman both opposed Trump before accepting his endorsements.
Despite Trump's clear power, though, there are signs of weakness: many of his endorsees lost in the midterms. A majority of Republican voters want someone else as the nominee in 2024. And then there's the fact he is the subject of multiple high-level investigations at the moment.
All of which raises a big question for the GOP: is Trump still the leader of the party?
That made this the perfect time to talk to Tim Miller, author of Why We Did It: A Travelogue On The Republican Road To Hell our latest selection for the NPR Politics Podcast Book Club.
Tim is a former Republican operative who defected from the party over his objections to Trump. His book is a Washington insider's exploration of how the Republican elite fell in line under Trump, despite many of them privately claiming they opposed him.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Danielle Kurtzleben: Let's start with I suppose a pretty D.C. question I'm going to ask you for your resume. Tell us about your background in Republican politics. What were you doing up until Trump's election, and what are you doing now?
Tim Miller: I grew up in Colorado, and I started as a young high school kid being a political nerd. And I just had the privilege and the luck to have a neighbor that was friends with a guy that was running for governor his name was Bill Owens. And so in the summer, when other kids had to flip burgers or whatever, I went and interned on his campaign. He ends up winning a really, really close race that just kind of got me hooked on politics.
I end up getting to go to the governor's office, and my task is to read his mail and sift through all the crazy letters that get sent to the governor's office.
I [began] working on campaigns in a bunch of states, leading up to being a spokesperson on John McCain's Iowa presidential campaign. From there, I worked on a bunch of what would now be extinct, moderate RINO Republican presidential campaigns. [I was] a spokesperson for Jon Huntsman in 2012. And then after he lost, I begged my way into representing Mitt [Romney] at the RNC during the general election.
Then in 2016, I was communications director for Jeb Bush's campaign before speaking for the first kind of Republicans against Trump PAC, which was called Our Principles PAC.
And then, I don't know if you recall, but Donald Trump ends up winning, and I have a life crisis. Since then, I have been writing I wrote for The Bulwark and other places. And I also was political director for Republican Voters Against Trump, which is a project aimed at getting Republicans to vote for Joe Biden in 2020.
DK: You write early on that you knew this book would be cathartic for some liberals to just read a dunkfest on top Trump officials. What were you hoping people would get from this book, if not just the joy of dunks?
TM: I want to caveat that that was actually the original idea for the book, was to just tomahawk dunk on everyone. An agent came to me and said, "I think you'd be really good at this book." You know, "Write 'the ten slimiest grifters in Republican Washington' or whatever, and we'll sell a million copies."
That didn't feel like that was going to be satisfying for me on the writing side of things. And so while there is a little bit of that for sure, what I really wanted to do was focus more on the gray areas.
I jumped over a couple of things, going over my resume, things that I'm less proud of: as a gay Republican, how I worked for candidates that opposed the most important thing in my life right now my husband and child.
[I wanted to] write about the people who saw the danger and went along with it anyway and tried to explore why they did, and I tried to explore why I got as far down that path as I did, even though I peeled off.
DK: Well, let's get into that you were on the Trump payroll for a bit. You at one point advised Scott Pruitt in his bid to become EPA administrator. So in terms of answering the question of "Why We Did It," what can you say about the motivations of D.C. Republican insiders and also of yourself at the time?
TM: Of course there's a money element to this and power, but it's not just that, right? I think "power" in particular is a little bit of a misnomer. There are a handful of people that like to wield power in Washington, but power comes with responsibility. Power has downsides.
Being around power is great to [insiders]. That is, I think, really a driving force for a lot of people. They just want to be in the golf cart with Trump, in Lindsey Graham's case, or they want to be in the back row of a room where they can go home for Thanksgiving and tell their family. This is the drug in D.C.
For myself, one thing that I talked about was these two elements of inertia and identity. You get into a career, you're mid-level, and then all of a sudden you start to feel kind of icky about it. And then it's like, well, what do I do now?
The Scott Pruitt situation was that for me. Trump had won. This had been my whole life, being a Republican spokesperson or researcher. And I knew [Pruitt]. I didn't know him that well, but he called me and he's like, "Hey, will you prep me for this job?" And I took it just because I was in a crisis I was like, "I don't know what I'm going to do. Am I going to have a job?"
And then I also think that there is the identity element about this, which is particularly in Washington, but increasingly, in a concerning fashion, everybody who posts about politics on the internet politics becomes part of people's identity.
In Washington, you have people that Republican is who they are. The people that went to their wedding are all Republican operatives. The bar they go to is the Republican bar. Their poker night is Republican poker night. They have a kids' playgroup with other people who are Republican operatives. It's hard then to just say, "I'm not this anymore."
The thing that surprised me in a bad way was just how much resentment and interpersonal bitterness drove this.
DK: Oh, yeah. The animosity among Republican voters towards Democrats and among many Democrats towards Republicans is just huge. And you're saying that that negative partisanship is reflected among the Republican ruling class.
TM: For sure. I say this not as a compliment to myself, by the way this is a self-criticism but I saw this as a little bit of kayfabe, which is this wrestling term of performative anger. Like, Hulk Hogan wasn't really mad at Andre the Giant I'm showing my age with that reference. But it was fake.
When I was at the RNC as the spokesperson, my job was basically to criticize the Obama campaign. The Obama campaign spokespeople at the time Ben LaBolt and Liz Smith are friends of mine. Like, we'd go out and drink and trash-talk each other. To me, it was performative, and so that's how I was processing things. I was assuming that everyone was on my level.
And what I came to find out is that they really weren't, and that this bitterness towards Obama, [there was] an element of race to it for sure. But more than that, I think that for a lot of the people in the political class, it was this resentment that he got treated so well, that he was the golden child in the media and that everyone loved him and that their candidates didn't get treated as well.
And then in the Trump years, this just gets on steroids. What I thought was performative fighting between the parties, among many, many, many of my colleagues actually became a driving, motivating force.
One guy said to me directly, "Tim, I'm a white guy, and with all of this woke nonsense and with my wife's friends calling me racist for working for Republicans and all this criticism, all this heat I have to take, I'm not up for jobs. And it just leaves me no choice but to just think about the one or two things I agree with [the Trump administration] on and just focus on that."
What I came to find out is that that guy really represented the private thoughts of a lot of Republicans.
DK: There's another motivation that I want to drill into. There are two categories of Republicans you call the messiahs and the junior messiahs. And these are people who told themselves and others that they took Trump administration jobs because they were afraid of who would do it otherwise that, hey, at least I can be the adult in the room. You do not buy this argument. Why not?
TM: I don't. I think it's the toughest category, because at some level, are we lucky that H.R. McMaster was national security adviser instead of Michael Flynn? Clearly. So it's hard to kind of begrudge H.R. McMaster on the one hand.
On the other hand, their actions after they took the job all of those people who said that they went into the White House because it was better them than someone else their actions kind of betrayed that they really had other motivations.
I say that because if it was true that these people went in because they just felt like they had this duty to country and that it was better them in public service than someone else, then they would have supported Joe Biden in 2020. But none of them really came out and said, "no, we need to stop this person." And that would have been the logical next step of somebody that was going in really to save the country.
DK: Throughout your book, it feels like voters are always right at the edge of the picture. I'm thinking about Iowa voters pushing John McCain in 2008 to be tougher on immigration. Or you talk about the formerly moderate New York representative, Elise Stefanik, who justified becoming Trumpier by saying, "well, I'm just doing what voters want." So my question is, you blame a lot of Republican elites for falling in with Trump do you feel similarly towards voters?
I don't. I'm of two minds about the voters. One is that I do think they are the ones that are driving this. And my book is about the cowardice of the collaborators. The Republican ruling class would have been happy to go along with a more benevolent person to just continue their access to power, but they went along with the more dangerous and bigoted nativist route, because that's what the voters wanted. And OK, why are voters like that? That's a different book.
I think that the voters have a lot of real reasons why they were upset. I mean, some people are bigots out there for sure. But I think the Republican ruling class didn't listen to [voters'] concerns. I write about the autopsy, which I worked on in 2012. I mean, a lot of Republican voters were mad about the Iraq war, were mad about the hollowing-out of their communities.
We didn't do anything to try to address that. We didn't challenge Republican orthodoxies on any issues, and Trump did. So I think it makes sense that those voters were attracted to Trump. He was offering them something different.
And one of the chapters in the book is [about] the political media class the conservative media in particular. It shouldn't be that surprising that if someone is every minute getting a text message or an email or a tweet or a Facebook post about how their country is being stolen from them, that they would want to support radical ends to fix that.
I try to have grace towards voters and people in my life that have gotten swept up in this. And I think that we have, in a representative democracy, an obligation of the people at the top of the funnel to resist people's worst impulses. There was nobody that did that. And that is why those folks are the negative characters in my book.
DK: You mentioned the autopsy you helped write the report the RNC released after Mitt Romney lost in 2012, telling the party how to have longer-term success. A lot of it was about working harder to appeal to nonwhite and women voters. Trump certainly did not fit that bill ... and listener Rachel Gershman was wondering in our Facebook group, "Does the autopsy have any relevance now?"
TM: Not really. It has relevance as an insight into what the Republican political class, left our own devices, actually wanted. So I think that it's interesting in that regard.
I think there's a lot of reasons to think maybe an autopsy vision of the Republican Party might have worked. Hillary Clinton was a flawed candidate, partially because of that conservative media complex the hyperbole and lies that she was targeted with but she also had some flaws that she brought upon herself.
Could a candidate that was more moderate on immigration and believed in climate change could someone with Elise Stefanik's 2014 platform of believing we should deal with climate change and and supporting gay marriage, could that person have beaten Hillary Clinton? I think maybe, yeah, probably.
But because Trump won, that created this mindset within the Republican Party, especially after McCain and Romney had lost, that this kind of populist, nativist, working class path is the way for Republicans to win national elections again.
DK: One other thing I wanted to ask about is being a gay Republican. You write about the mental tap dancing you did to support a party that just didn't support gay people like you. I'm wondering if you could tell us how that experience affected how you saw your fellow Republicans do their own sort of tap dancing as they tried to justify their allegiance to Trump.
TM: I spent a lot of time thinking about this because there are obviously limits to any parallel. But I think that there are a lot of parallels.
I look back with regrets on not being more vocal on gay rights matters, on not drawing a bright red line around the types of candidates that I would work for. Part of the reason why I did it when I think back about my own rationalizations was, I felt like the arc of the gay history was bending towards justice, to steal a phrase I felt like we were already on this trajectory, and so why should I ruin my career over it?
I also used these same kind of rationalizations of, Oh, the other side's not perfect, too. I mean, in 2008, Obama won't say he's for gay marriage and everybody knows he privately is. You can talk yourself into the fact that, you know, "the other side is not perfect on this either. And so why should I worry about it?"
All of these rationalizations happened, and with the benefit of some distance and with Trump kind of shaking me out of this kind of mindset, I looked back on that and thought, "Man, I don't think I was seeing myself clearly." So when Trump came around, I saw those same machinations happening in my colleagues.
I think the other thing that happened is that whole identity question that I talked about earlier. I was probably the visible gay Republican spokesperson for a while. So I had been through this people seeing me in a different way and having to deal with that kind of identity change. And so, I think that it made it less hard for me to do it when Trump came around. I also had those mistakes that I could look back on and say, "I'm not going to make this mistake again."
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Donald Trump won Republicans over in 2016 as he loses them in 2022 : NPR
Can Any Republican Rival Take Down Donald Trump? – The New Yorker
- Can Any Republican Rival Take Down Donald Trump? The New Yorker
- 2024 Republican rivals put Trump on notice - POLITICO POLITICO
- 'Window-shopping' GOP elites weigh Trump -- and the alternatives -- at high-profile Vegas gathering CNN
- Analysis: As Republicans look to 2024, jockeying to take on Trump begins Reuters
- A Crowd of Possible Trump Rivals Renews G.O.P. Fears of a Divided Field The New York Times
- View Full Coverage on Google News
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Can Any Republican Rival Take Down Donald Trump? - The New Yorker
Republicans looking for gains with Latinos have lots of catching up to do on TV – POLITICO
A Washington Post/Ipsos poll released Friday found Hispanic voters still favor Democrats overall, but the gap between the two parties has narrowed since 2018, while significant differences remain among Hispanic and Latino voters based on factors such as age and religion.
From doing this for 32 years, Ive never seen more races in play to control Congress and the Senate where Latinos now have a large population that will over-index the outcome, said Democratic strategist Chuck Rocha, who frequently coordinates with firms to create Latino-oriented advertising. The decision to make a Spanish-language ad is now being driven by the concentration of our population and some of the most important and critical races.
Spanish-language advertising still accounts for a tiny share of overall political spending on TV and radio around 2.5 percent overall for Democrats and 1 percent for Republicans since the start of 2021, AdImpact data show.
Since Labor Day, candidates and outside groups have released Spanish-language TV or radio ads in more than two dozen House districts along with each of the most competitive Senate races.
The key topics are familiar: Inflation, jobs and the economy have consistently polled as some of the top issues that Latinos care about, even as newer topics like gun control and abortion have entered the fray in recent months. Democrats Spanish-language ads most frequently hammer on jobs and the economy followed by abortion, while crime is the most common topic from Republicans.
The themes are often similar across languages in a given campaign. Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) has run ads on the issue of abortion in both English and Spanish, releasing a Spanish-language spot emphasizing the risk to women with pregnancy complications and victims of sexual assault and an English-language one that features a female doctor saying women need to be able to make their own decisions.
Two September ads from Sen. Mark Kellys (D-Ariz.) campaign show the nuances of making similar ads targeted across demographics. Both focus on quotes from Republican Blake Masters, framed around the idea that the candidates words matter. But the English version shows clips of Masters bashing U.S. military leadership, denying womens pay inequities and proposing privatizing Social Security, while the Spanish version highlights and translates his comments criticizing legal immigration and paths to citizenship.
Most Spanish Senate ads airing since Labor Day have been unique, meaning they were not dubbed from an existing English spot. But on the House side, more than two-thirds were originally in English and dubbed with a direct Spanish counterpart.
Most House broadcast ads in Spanish also started airing later in the year, while some Senate campaigns have been broadcasting bilingual ads since the spring.
Senate candidates and committees have more resources to spend and have been working with more Latino senior operatives, Latino consultants told POLITICO, while more white-majority firms are involved in the smaller races seeing more dubbing of English ads.
The one-size-fits-all approach some campaigns use to dub their English ads wont work across states with different Latino subcultures, from subject matter to regional dialects of choice, they added.
You can increase the spending and you can increase the outreach, but if the message is not resonating with folks thats not the correct messenger, said Gabriela Cid, a Spanish language messaging adviser at Equis Research, a progressive Latino-focused firm. Its important to involve people that understand the Latino community, people that can speak Spanish and can cater to our people.
And Rocha added that the more carefully planned Spanish-language advertising in several states is helping candidates up and down the Democratic ticket.
In Nevada and Pennsylvania, Democratic congressional candidates are doing better there with Latinos because the Senate is carrying the water, Rocha said. In states like Texas, New Mexico or California where theres not a Senate race, and theres not been a ton of statewide Spanish TV, you see the congressional candidates lagging because theres been no communication to the community.
The lack of broad, consistent Spanish advertising may have an effect on Spanish-dominant voters, though they make up less than a fifth of the wider Hispanic electorate.
Almost 40 percent of Latinos cant say which party cares more about them, according to a September recommendations report from Equis and that effect is more pronounced among Spanish-dominant speakers. Slightly lower proportions are still undecided on which candidate theyll support in Pennsylvania, Texas and North Carolina, the report found.
Spanish-dominant voters have also expressed less motivation to cast a ballot than English-dominant ones, though they are still more likely to support Democratic candidates, according to one UnidosUS July poll. The smaller Spanish-dominant portion of the Latino electorate still makes up a noteworthy percentage in states where both Republicans and Democrats aim to gain ground, like Arizona and Texas. And engaging Spanish-dominant voters means looping in people eager to be involved in the democratic process, Cid said.
Democrats have generally outspent Republicans on Spanish-language media in past election cycles, although Republicans made gains in some areas led by South Florida and South Texas. While a majority of Latino voters still favor Democrats in 2020 and in recent polling, the movement was enough to convince some Republican groups that had not previously invested in Hispanic outreach to do so for the first time.
Club for Growth Action launched a major Spanish-language ad buy in Nevada last week, targeting Cortez Masto the countrys first Latina senator on the issue of crime, echoing similar attacks from other Republican groups both in Nevada and other major Senate races. The incumbent Democrat praised radicals associated with defund the police, the ad notes in Spanish, with the phrase defund the police still in English. The group plans to address inflation in a second Spanish-language ad, Club for Growth president David McIntosh told POLITICO, and will spend a total of around $2.5 million by Election Day.
It was the super PACs first Spanish-language ad buy. Club for Growths 501(c)(4) nonprofit arm first ran ads in Spanish earlier this year focused on the Supreme Court, criticizing Bidens promise to nominate a Black woman to the highest judgeship, highlighting qualified Hispanic judges and accusing the president of radical racial politics.
I looked at the last election and the Supreme Court nomination that Biden made. Democrats basically sent a signal to Latinos that they were a stepchild in the Democratic coalition and that Biden was only going to promote Black people into office, McIntosh said. That gave me the idea of, Lets check and see if Latino voters are open to moving into the Republican coalition.
Even with the PACs large buy, Democrats still have a spending advantage on Spanish-language media in Nevada, having spent nearly $8 million on the Senate race there since the start of this year compared to $1.7 million for Republicans. Democrats have similarly put forward more resources in other races, including spending more than $200,000 on Spanish-language radio ads in Pennsylvania to boost John Fetterman.
The exception: Florida, where Republican Sen. Marco Rubio has far outspent his Democratic challenger Val Demings on Spanish-language media.
Though efforts across the country this year have been stronger and earlier than previous cycles, Equis Researchs Cid said, only the results will show whether Spanish-language advertising has paid off with Latino voters.
I do think there is always going to be a need to do more, and its not enough yet, she said. This can be a learning lesson for the next cycle We wont know until Election Day if those efforts manifest in a way that well be happy with.
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Republicans looking for gains with Latinos have lots of catching up to do on TV - POLITICO
Republicans are trying to win by spreading three false talking points. Heres the truth – The Guardian US
Republicans are telling three lies they hope will swing the midterms. They involve crime, inflation, and taxes. Heres what Republicans are claiming, followed by the facts.
This is pure rubbish. Rising crime rates are due to the proliferation of guns, which Republicans refuse to control.
Here are the facts:
While violent crime rose 28% from 2019 to 2020, gun homicides rose 35%. States that have weakened gun laws have seen gun crime surge. Clearly, a major driver of the national increase in violence is the easy availability of guns.
The violence cant be explained by any of the Republican talking points about soft-on-crime Democrats.
Lack of police funding? Baloney. Democratic-run major cities spend 38% more on policing per person than Republican-run cities, and 80% of the largest cities increased police funding from 2019 to 2022.
Criminal justice reforms? Wrong. Data shows that wherever bail reforms have been implemented, re-arrest rates remain stable. Data from major cities shows no connection between the policies of progressive prosecutors and changes in crime rates.
Research has repeatedly shown that crime is rising faster in Republican, Trump-supporting states. The thinktank Third Way found that in 2020, per capita murder rates were 40% higher in states won by Trump than in those won by Joe Biden.
Lets be clear: its been Republican policies that have made it easier for people to get and carry guns. Republicans are lying about the real cause of rising crime to protect their patrons gun manufacturers.
Baloney. The major cause of the current inflation is the global post-pandemic shortage of all sorts of things, coupled with Putins war in Ukraine and Chinas lockdowns.
The major domestic cause of the current inflation is big corporations that have been taking advantage of inflation by raising their prices higher than their increasing costs.
Here are the facts:
Inflation cant be explained by any of the Republican talking points.
Bidens spending? Rubbish again. That cant be causing our current inflation because inflation has broken out everywhere around the world, often at much higher rates than in the US.
Besides, heavy spending by the US government began in 2020, before the Biden administration, in order to protect Americans and the economy from the ravages of Covid-19 and it was necessary.
American workers getting wage increases? Wages cant be pushing inflation because wages have been increasing at a slower pace than prices leaving most workers worse off.
The biggest domestic culprits are big corporations using inflation as an excuse to raise prices above their own cost increases, resulting in near-record profits.
US corporate profits are at the highest margins since 1950 while consumers are paying through the nose.
Lets be clear: the biggest domestic cause of inflation is corporate power. Republicans are lying about this to protect their big corporate patrons.
Nonsense. The IRS wont be going after the middle class. It will be going after ultra-wealthy tax cheats.
Here are the facts:
The Inflation Reduction Act, passed in July, provides funding to begin to get IRS staffing back to what it was before 2010, after which Republicans diminished staff by roughly 30%, despite increases since then in the number of Americans filing tax returns.
The extra staff are needed to boost efforts against high-end tax evasion which is more difficult to root out, because the ultra-wealthy hire squads of accountants and tax attorneys to hide their taxable incomes.
The treasury department and the IRS have made it clear that audit rates for households earning $400,000 or under will remain the same.
Lets be clear: the IRS needs extra resources to go after rich tax cheats. Republicans are lying about what the IRS will do with the new funding to protect their ultra-wealthy patrons.
None of these three lies is as brazen and damaging as Trumps big lie. But theyre all being used by Republican candidates in these last weeks before the midterms.
Know the truth and share it.
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Republicans are trying to win by spreading three false talking points. Heres the truth - The Guardian US