Republicans backed Donald Trump in 2016, changing the identity of the party. Republican strategist Tim Miller ( Timodc) explores this shift in his book 'Why We Did It: A Travelogue On The Republican Road To Hell.'
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.AdvertisementWhy We Did It: A Travelogue On The Republican Road To HellTim is a former Republican operative who defected from the party over his objections to Trump.
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 forand 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.
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. 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 thing that surprised me in a bad way was just how much resentment and interpersonal bitterness drove this. 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.
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,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.
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 okay, why are voters like that? That's a different book.
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.
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.
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