Trump's record is now 1-4 in elections. Yet a hard rump of the GOP still supports him including evangelicals. How did a twice divorced, four time bankrupt, philanderer come to dominate one of the two political parties in the US. We provide our thoughts.
Trump's record is now 1-4 in elections. Yet a hard rump of the GOP still supports him including evangelicals. How did a twice divorced, four time bankrupt, philanderer come to dominate one of the two political parties in the US. We provide our thoughts.
The Reagan Reaction and the Road to Trump
December 2022
For every complex problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.
H. L. Mencken
An article penned on Nov 5, 2014, entitled “Breaking down the 2014 Republican wave,” published by PBS, noted the scale of the GOP victory that year, “Republicans clean up — even in purple states: Last night was a huge night for Republicans. They took back the Senate, netting nine seats; they won 247 House seats which was the most seats for the Republicans since 1931; and they gained two governor seats, which was unexpected. But, make no mistake; Democrats can’t dismiss these results as just a product of midterm fundamentals and a bad map. Republicans not only won in the red states, where Mitt Romney won in 2012, which could have been enough to take control of the Senate, but they also won in purple states and places President Barack Obama won. The GOP won Senate races in Colorado, Iowa, and North Carolina — and lost very narrowly in Virginia; it won governors’ races in Florida, Illinois (the president’s home state), Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, and Wisconsin; and, in the House, they made inroads in the Northeast, where they had zero House members before last night, winning races in New Hampshire, New York and possibly Maine.” And this was just the national election; in state elections, Republicans won a net gain of two gubernatorial seats and flipped control of ten legislative chambers. In addition, various other state, territorial, and local elections and referendums were held throughout the year. As a result, they would control more state houses than at any time since 1928.
It was just 18 months later, after this momentous victory, that the Republican party turned to a twice-divorced, four-time bankrupt businessman/reality TV host who boasted of grabbing women’s genitalia, got into feuds with the likes of Rosie O’Donnell, and only recently, had become a Republican. Donald Trump would win the election against arguably the worst retail politician in the past 50 years. And even then, he did not win a majority of the popular vote relying on 100,000 voters in three key states.
After 2016, Trump would preside over a blue wave election in 2018, the loss of the presidency in 2020, the loss of the Senate in 2021, and 2022, a midterm disaster. With the democrat’s wounded by inflation, crime, foreign policy after the Afghanistan withdrawal, immigration, educational issues, and a host of other things, and a president with a rating in the high-30s, the cycle was set up for something mirroring 2014. Instead, the Democrats gained a Senate seat and barely lost the House.
In a piece published this month by the National Reviews’ Charles W. Cooke called the “Great Republican Freak Out,” the author attempts to get at the heart of this dichotomy between the winning formula of 2014 and the turn to Trump a short time later. Cooke puts the date of the GOP’s current debacle in 2013, right after the presidential election of 2012 in which Barack Obama beat Mitt Romney. “October 2013 was when the GOP’s healthy mistrust of its establishment was transmuted into irrational disdain when voters’ reasonable fear of losing turned into panic and defeatism when the party’s imperative strain of optimism gave way to talk of “Flight 93” and of “American carnage.” October 2013 was when the nihilism began.”
Cooke notes that though the Romney loss was disappointing, it was hardly a surprise, “The presidential election of 2012 was perhaps the most misunderstood plebiscite in modern American history. Considered from 30,000 feet, it was not especially peculiar that the Republican candidate lost. Politics is cyclical, and in 2012, the Democrats were still firmly within their cycle. The GOP had the presidency for twelve years, between 1980 and 1992. The Democrats had it between 1992 and 2000. The Republicans had it between 2000 and 2008. And, with their win in 2012, the Democrats ensured that they would keep it from 2008 to 2016. As had been the case from 1992 to 2000, when Bill Clinton was their avatar, the candidate that the Democrats ran in 2008 and 2012, Barack Obama, was superbly talented and would have proved tough to beat in any year. Given the financial crisis, dissatisfaction with the war in Iraq, and voters’ generalized fatigue with the GOP, 2008 was tougher still. But 2012 was no gimme, and so it proved.
Despite this, the loss provoked a mass freak-out across almost every segment of the party. Panicked, the Republican establishment decided that the problem must have been that the Republican candidate, Mitt Romney, was too tough on illegal immigration and that the party didn’t slice and dice the electorate enough to appeal directly to minorities. Furious, the Republican base submitted that the problem had been that their candidate was not sharp-elbowed enough to appeal to truly conservative voters — who, they suggested, had stayed home en masse. Both were wrong.
Worse yet, these wrong conclusions reinforced each other. The establishment’s conclusion that it needed to surrender more easily on issues that were important to the base led to the base’s concluding that it must never, ever give in on anything, irrespective of the details. The result was the 2013 government shutdown, during which the establishment infuriated the base by blithely dismissing its concerns, and the base infuriated the establishment by insisting that if Republicans simply shouted loud enough, President Obama would agree to repeal his presidency in full.”
Given the state of the GOP and of Obama in 2014, there was still enough momentum for core GOP positions to win. In 2010, the GOP provided an embarrassing slate of candidates that included the likes of Wiccan member (that would be a witch cult) Christine O’Donnell in Delaware or Sharon Angle in Nevada. The 2014 winning candidates included Thom Tillis in North Carolina, Jodi Ernest in Iowa, Tom Cotton in Arkansas, and Steve Daines in Montana. In every one of these cases, four key aspects prevail; they were true conservatives, not recent converts like Trump; they had run and won previous offices prior to their Senate runs, yes seasoning helps, they were not table-pounding populists, and they were (relatively for a politician) normal. These were the templated type of Republicans who could win both in deep red states such as Alabama but even more importantly, purplish states such as North Carolina and Iowa.
Yet as Cooke writes the lesson from this victory in 2014 was to put a word on it, odd “voters concluded that . . . the GOP couldn’t win, and didn’t want to win. Why? Beats me.” Cooke provides a grand narrative but does not provide a reason aside from the shruggy “beats me.”
I want to posit the reason of how got here. We have arrived at a state of affairs in which a party owning the White House and another holding Congress refuses to work with each other, far more concerned with being preventive rather than inventive. Cooke begins his narrative in 2012 with Romney’s win, but I am going back further, 42 years, in fact, before the victory of Bill Clinton over George HW Bush. I would begin my narrative with the election of faithful conservative Ronald Reagan in 1980 and his landslide reelection in 1984.
To get to the Reagan reaction, I will need to go further back, all the way to 1901. With the advent of the progressive era and three consecutive progressive presidents in the person of Theodore Roosevelt, William Taft, and then the uber progressive, Woodrow Wilson.
Their implementation of progressivism was the beginning of progressive orthodoxy, not the end. Despite the interim of conservatives Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge, the gradual expansion of government began apace with Hebert Hoover and then was on greased rails with Franklin Roosevelt. Harry S Truman and quasi–Republican Dwight Eisenhower did little to retard this progress nor were they even willing
Between FDR and Reagan, there were three GOP Presidents. Eisenhower, who was not philosophically conservative; Nixon, who founded the EPA and imposed price controls; and Gerald Ford, in many ways an ineffectual president. And then there was Ronald Reagan.
Reagan was the first genuinely conservative president since Calvin Coolidge and the first president in one hundred years who questioned the role of government. Reagan famously stated, “The top 9 most terrifying words in the English Language are: I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”
It was not just Reagan’s conservative philosophy but how the public viewed him. Policy-wise, Reagan was not that different from 1964 GOP standard bearer Barry Goldwater, but where Goldwater was buried in a historic landslide, Reagan was the one, in 1984, who did the burying. It is nearly impossible as a writer in 2022 to consider that Reagan won California, Illinois, and New York State. With the election of HW Bush in 1988, another historic moment was reached. In the 20th century, only three presidents served nearly two full terms and saw their successors elected. FDR and Theodor Roosevelt, with Reagan being the third. Note the difference in the views of those first two and Reagan.
With the Reagan election in 1980, something broke among the progressive, liberal, Democratic party mindset. In 1988 they were willing to sacrifice Gary Hart to a sex scandal but were comfortable with philanderer Bill Clinton just four years later. In the 1988 election, they supported Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis but, 20 years later, were willing to go all in on Illinois Senator Barack Obama. For nearly 80 years, the progressive worldview, adding the Federal Reserve and innumerable regulatory bodies to the executive branch, Social Security and Medicare, a half dozen new executive departments and the EPA. It was during this period where the ”shadow government” as Jonah Goldberg calls it, came into being. Why not the fourth branch? Because a department such as the SEC, can regulate, judge and fine, the latter being taxation by another name. This is not a fourth branch, this is all the branches, a government unto itself. And from the great Depression to 1980, it went largely unquestioned by anyone who mattered, including GOP presidents.
But Reagan represented an existential threat to how they saw government, and after the election of 1988, they would do anything, support anybody, to break the conservative movement and regain traction,
But first, before we get a manifestation of the Reagan reaction, I would like to mention how midterm contests, which should be as important as presidential ones, are the b team of elections. Midterm wins are great, but much of the best case today is focused on the preventative, not to write legislation or drive policy goals but to prevent the other side from doing so. It is hard to get excited with a platform of “I will promise lots and lots of obstruction!” Yeah team. Tip O’Neil conceding the White House to Reagan and then exploring ways to work with a GOP executive have gone the way of rotary phones and parachute pants.
And we focus on the presidents in a way in which representatives and even Senators will never garner. In the popular Netflix series The Crown, time after time, when newly crowned Queen Elizabeth wishes to do something, she is thwarted by the government. Whether it be where she lives to her last name, she has little agency, which is the point of the show, to show the anachronism of the modern British monarchy. In the late 20th century, being Queen of England was a trap, not a privilege or something a reasonably sane person would desire though one gets to live in palaces, be driven everywhere, and command a certain odd respect. But what is lacking, at least in this telling, is agency.
Now in fairness, is the Crown historically accurate? It is not wholly because there are several moments between characters we could not possibly know about—conversations between Elizabeth and her husband Phillip or her sister Margaret.
Even if this were based on their recollections, which it is not, that would also be sketchy. I have been married for over 25 years, and my wife could provide chapter and verse of badly recollected marital moments.
The other interesting aspect of the Crown is how much happens outside Elizabeth’s control or knowledge. The show has to continually pivot to the doings of prime ministers or external events to complete its narrative. Yet the entertainment digest Variety states, “According to the streamer’s figures, the show’s fifth season was viewed for 107.39 million hours following its premiere on Nov 9, and is in the Top 10 in 88 countries. In addition, the show also reached No. 1 in 37 countries, including the UK, US, Canada, Australia, Germany, Italy, and France.”
The obsession with the royals is mirrored by our heads of state, who, as it happens, also wield real power. So it was a natural thing that the office of the president would accrue attention as it focuses on a single person with more authority than any one member of Congress or anyone sitting justice of the US Supreme Court.
The Founding Fathers were afraid of this very thing. In an article by Ray Raphael on the debate over the executive at the Constitutional Convention. First, there was a debate about whether the executive is chosen by Congress, similar to the parliamentarian system in the United Kingdom, where the ruling party chooses the Prime Minister. Then there was even a debate about whether there should be one person given the fear of a tyrant. “FRIDAY JUN 1 1787: The Committee of the whole proceeded to Resolution 7th “that a national Executive be instituted, to be chosen by the national Legislature. The first speaker to the resolution, Charles Pinckney of South Carolina, said he favored a “vigorous Executive,” but not with powers that extended “to peace & war &c.” He feared that “would render the Executive a monarchy, of the worst kind, to wit an elective one.” Other delegates no doubt shared this concern, yet before addressing what executive powers might be, they took up one essential question that was on all their minds. From Madison’s notes: “MR. WILSON moved that the executive consists of a single person.” Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, Charles’s cousin, seconded and clarified the motion — “National Executive,” he said. Some of the Founders favored a three-person executive, again, to keep power divided.
As with so much of the founder’s debates, their visions, and fears, proved prescient. Jefferson, president number 3, nearly doubled the size of the country with a stroke of the pen. Madison, president number 4, fought the first post-Revolutionary war with a conspicuously mixed performance as Commander in Chief. One of the participants in the war, Andrew Jackson, more clearly defined and expanded the role of the executive. But it was Lincoln, during the course of the American Civil War, suspending Habeus Corpus, jailing journalists, and overseeing a vast military apparatus of hundreds of thousands of soldiers who gave the first glimpse of the imperial presidency. But Lincoln was facing the existential crisis of disunion. Teddy Roosevelt and especially Woodrow Wilson faced no such situation but expanded the office anyway. And we do not have time to explore FDR and LBJ fully but suffice it to say that by the mid to late 20th century, power had inextricably shifted from legislator to executive, and even more so, to the departments of the executive as that shadow government.
And then there are the media. When Lincoln debated Douglas in the late 1850s, they attracted the crowds and the press in a way that the sitting president, Buchanan, could not. But the Illinois Senate seat, not the presidency, was a prize for the winner. The politics, and media, were local.
The advent of radio, a medium perfectly calibrated for FDR, helped shift the power. And Kennedy and Reagan, masters of the small screen known as TV. We will get to the latest information consumption media (if you can call it that), social media, later in the podcast. But, in the mid-2010s, the presidency was the focus which is why presidential elections always have a higher turnout than midterms.
And now a morality tale. Presidents having affairs, or multiple ones, over the course of their terms is common. Granted, the nature of one wishing to be a politician, living a life depending on the approval and affections of a small or vast body of people, is unique. Most people, from the waiter to the computer tech to the podcaster, want approval; that is human nature. But to seek it out, year after year, is a different thing. Yet we have also had most presidents live a monogamous life. From Washington to Obama, we have had presidents whose loyalty to their spouses was part of their character. But we have also had Jefferson, Harding, FDR, and notably, Kennedy all having shall we say looser morals.
Yet when it came to Bill Clinton, three things were different. First, the advent of ubiquitous media meant that a president could not get away with actions in the 1990s that could be covered up in the 1960s, much less circa 1800. Another distinction of Clinton was the sheer brazen attitude he took. And finally, his wife, Hillary Clinton’s public and private involvement in managing these affairs. In 1992, candidate Clinton’s wife, Hillary, acknowledged his affairs in a 60 minutes interview calling it marital “wrongdoing.” But Hillary Clinton was not content with mere defense. As noted by New York Times writer Meghan Twohey, “privately, she embraced the Clinton campaign’s aggressive strategy of counterattack: Women who claimed to have had sexual encounters with Mr. Clinton would become targets of digging and discrediting — tactics that women’s rights advocates frequently denounce. In the matter of Gennifer Flowers, one of Clinton’s affair accusers, “The campaign hired a private investigator with a bare-knuckles reputation who embarked on a mission, as he put it in a memo, to impugn Ms. Flowers’s “character and veracity until she is destroyed beyond all recognition.” His advisors much more crudely coined by Betsey Wright, a lobbyist for US president Bill Clinton as “bimbo eruptions.”
That was before his election. During the presidency, he carried on an affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky including scurrilous details of them cavorting within the Oval Office. In addition to the affair, the relationship involved a power dynamic regarding their positions within the government and their ages. FDR carried on with crown princess Martha of Norway, who was in her late 30s. Marilyn Monroe would have been 34 at the time of any supposed affair with JFK. Lewinski was 21. And of this affair, there was a blanket, angry denial by Bill Cliton in January 1998, Hillary Clinton blaming a right wing conspiracy, followed by prevarications and complete acknowledgment by August.
It was not just the affair. The Clintons carried more baggage than United Airlines. Before the presidency, Whitewater, Rumpelstiltskin like Cattle future trades in which $10,000 magically became $100,000, and Gennifer Flowers. After the election, Travelgate, Vince Foster’s death, Paula Jones, and the aforementioned Lewinski. And through it all the party that ejected Gary Hart rallied behind Clinton, and his wife.
It was not as if previous presidents had always been moral paragons before Bill Clinton. Harding also conducted a sordid affair. Reagan was a divorcee. And, of course, there was Richard Nixon. But there was a certain respect for the office and respect for the norms that went with it.
It is not a coincidence that Bill Clinton was the first baby boomer president that came with two key aspects: he brought with him a moral compass forged in the 1960s, and he was the first president to be married to a woman with her own presidential ambitions. This last statement might seem like having spouses with such aspirations is a detriment. Not in a successful marriage, it would not. Women’s empowerment is a net positive but not an absolute good.
Hillary Clinton had a more significant stake in the success of the Clinton presidency, for her own ambitions, than she did for her marriage, and if the office is denigrated so that she could later occupy it, so be it.
Clinton removed whatever vestige of morality clung to the presidency. Trump was twice divorced. On a Hollywood access tape, he openly boasted about grabbing women’s genitalia at a beauty pageant. He did not cover up his elicit affairs; he boasted about them. Hart was seen as a possible Democratic candidate for the presidency. However, he was derailed after being caught with a younger woman on board the aptly named Monkey Business.
Thirty years later, a presidential candidate would get sued by an adult porn star named Stormy Daniels, and it was dismissed by much of the Republican right, including many evangelicals. A lot of this could be seen as the changing mores of the electorate, but also keep in mind that after Clinton, twice elected and ending his second term with a 56% approval rating, made it okay to be a vulgar cad.
What Clinton did in terms of morality, Obama did with governance. In a previous podcast entitled The Promise and the Promised Land, I spoke of how Barack Obama’s 2004 keynote address made a promise to the American people. In this speech, he stated that there was not a white America, a black America, or a brown America; it was the United States of America. The promise was evident. Elect an African American, a representative of less than 13% of the population, and we can put the stain of slavery, Jim Crow, and anti-black prejudice behind us.
The problem was that by Obama’s election in 2008, the electorate may have been ready to move forward, but not Obama nor the Democratic party. There was just too much power in identity politics. By 2008 too many constituencies, from activists to academicians to simple race baiters, had too high a stake in racism. If an alien super race landed on Earth and could remove all racism from our hearts and minds, too many such as Te Nehisi Coates, Al Sharpton, and Barack Obama himself, would have sent them on their way. Keep your mystical powers; racism drives fear and loathing, and both drive votes.
It was not just this stance on racism but Obama’s governing style. He passed his signature bill, one that would affect a fifth of the economy and tens of millions of health plans, on a lie. he repeatedly stated about keeping your doctor under his Affordable Care Act, knowing that was not true. He consistently used straw men to paint the Republican Party as downright villains in a way that Reagan would not have dreamed of. Reagan condemned the Democrats for their beliefs in government, for being too solicitous to criminals, and for being soft on the Soviets. Whether one agrees or disagrees with these stances, Democrats do believe in government, they think the police have too much power, and they felt that cowboy Reagan was going to start World War III. So there was nothing they would deny. But Obama once said, “Republicans want you to have dirty air and dirty water.” This was, again, an outright lie. Opposing an overly regulative EPA is not the same as wanting people to drink sludge.
The IRS scandal was an institution affecting every American life, and Obama’s Lois Lerner used it as a cudgel to deny Conservative groups nonprofit status while allowing similar liberal groups the same. One IRS for me and one for thee.
And after the elections of 2010, where Obama lost the House, and 2014, where he lost the Senate, he claimed he would govern with “a pen and a phone.” In other words, he would bypass the entire constitutional system and govern as a quasi-monarch.
Clinton made it easy for a president to be immoral, and Obama made it easy for subsequent presidents to be duplicitous, unconstitutional, and unscrupulous, especially in the light of the GOP members they defeated. The message to the right was clear; nice guys finish second in a two-person race.
Was the GOP foolish for letting the Democrats dictate the game? Yes, but they ran moral characters like war hero McCain and happily married Mitt Romney. During the telling second debate with Obama, after winning the first, Romney allowed Candy Crawley, a supposed debate moderator, to begin arguing Obama’s side of the debate. I remember nearly yelling at the screen that he should call her out and say something like Barack, having this moderator help tag team with you won’t work; my positions are better than both of yours. Nice guy Romney did nothing like that. He would have thought it rude. In the same election Joe Biden acted like, well Joe Biden, in a debate with VP Candidate Paul Ryan.
Part of this irony is that Clinton and Obama had what the other lacked. When Clinton saw his own red wave in 1994, he pivoted to a more conservative approach and jettisoned his health care reform. Later he ended welfare programs, signed the free trade NAFTA agreement, balancing the budget, and claimed that the era of big government was over. This is not to say that Clinton was some conservative in democratic clothing. He strengthened unions and did not cut taxes.
But he listened to the elections and responded accordingly. On the other hand, Obama doubled in similar situations in 2010 and 2014. Do voters want a more conservative approach? Screw ’em was the Obama sentiment.
Obama is smug, cunning, arrogant and wildly overrated as an intellectual, but he is also a consummate family man. His conduct regarding his wife and family is exemplary. Contrast that with Clinton’s behavior. And though I think Michelle Obama has her own, secret, presidential aspirations, and would govern to the left of her leftist husband, her conduct as first lady was in marked contrast to Hillary Clinton. No, two for the price of one in the Obama White House.
With these types of narratives, it is always challenging to know when to begin. We could go back to Reagan. More than any president, he temporarily broke the Wilson/FDR/LBJ paradigm of ever-expanding government. To the Democrats, Obama was the Reagan antidote.
Or we could go back to Nixon, the only president to resign the office in disgrace (though Wilson should have been the first). But after Nixon, there were four presidents, including two Bushes as Republican presidents.
And Nixon was a prominent figure on the national stage for 20 years before his first election in 1968. He also could point to foreign policy accomplishments that were lauded despite the disgrace of Watergate. And of that scandal itself, it was Nixon’s cover-up that led to his resignation. He did not order nor knew of the break-in. With the likes of Ford and Carter, both boy scout-type presidents (when being a boy scout was a positive), the Nixon stain was partially cleaned up.
But note that in 2016, the party of Reagan and HW Bush chose Donald Trump as its standard bearer. A man whose personal life has been documented here. Were his actual policy positions controversial? His policy legacies were tax cuts, lower regulations, and a conservative SCOTUS. But his personal conduct; firing cabinet secretaries through tweets, denigrating his opponents with names that would make a fourth-grade bully pause belittled the importance of the office he held.
And finally, there are the media again. I have noted how radio with FDR and TV with Reagan went hand in glove. But even these addresses required time. A brief 10-minute address still requires nearly 1,000 words. But with Trump, a man with little to no policy prescriptions, social media is a perfect match. And not just the briefness of it on platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, but the sheer ugliness of the genre. I made a point the other day on Twitter about how NPR treated Chick Fil A differently from Patagonia and was told STFU (if you do not know those initials, you are in a better place than me, and I will not illuminate).
It was noted that Roosevelt was not the best stump speaker, but he was perfect for radio as Trump is ideal for social media. But Trump did not happen in a vacuum. After Obama betrayed his promise and governed in a seeming despotic form, and after Clintonian morals, Trump’s personal life was ignored, and some of the worse aspects of his conduct were seen as strengths, not deficiencies.
Democrats in 1992 were able to embrace Clinton’s immorality in a way they were not able to do in 1988 with Hart. They were willing to back Obama despite knowing (or ignoring) that a future GOP president would govern similarly And what Democrats propose the GOP copies. Expand government, and the GOP follows. Use SCOTUS to bypass Congress? What the Democrats did in the 1970s, the GOP does in the 2020s. And so the GOP electorate believed that power was the thing to the point where even Evangelicals voted in solid numbers for Trump. In so many ways, from his denigration to members of his party to the acidic approach to the office to faux masculinity (Reagan withstood being shot and joked about it, Trump gets criticized and acts like a hurt 4-year-old girl), the two are very different. But the most significant difference is their view of America. For Trump, America is full of gullible idiots susceptible to his populist excrement.
For Reagan, America was the beacon of goodness, the shining city on the hill.
Social Media may have been the venue, but were it not for the left’s reaction to Reagan, resulting in Clinton’s denigration of the morals of the office, and Obama’s grasp at its more imperialist tendencies, Trump would not have happened.