Chapter 13: Looking from Across the Aisle
As part of my TEA Party +15 celebration I am serializing my 2019 book The Rise and Fall of the TEA Party. A chapter will appear each Tuesday until the 15th anniversary on February 27, 2024.
“Eventually, the Republican Party will either moderate or die, but not quickly. The after-effects of the Tea Party disruption will continue to weaken the GOP – and will also bedevil American government and politics for some time to come.” - Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson, The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism (2011)
It's not a stretch to say that the opposition to Barack Obama saw him in a far different light than his supporters did. In that same manner, those who didn't see eye to eye with the TEA Party – especially from the Left – generally portrayed it in the most negative terms possible. Borrowing from the Rules for Radicals playbook they so often used, progressives didn't hesitate to ridicule the TEA Party, then freeze their target, personalize it, polarize it, and make the TEA Party try to live to the set of rules the Left believed they had. Hypocrisy, Astroturf, and racism were the watchwords assigned by liberals to this new threat to their hegemony.
That's not to say they didn't have something of a case in each of these instances, though. The Left was wrong about a lot of what the TEA Party was about, but at times a small subset of members was all the exception progressives needed to claim they proved the rule.
For example, leftist critics of the TEA Party have always had a field day pointing out what they considered the biggest element of hypocrisy in the movement: grousing about lower taxes and overbearing government while being the beneficiaries of same. Take this example from a Rand Paul rally that featured the firebrand rantings of Sarah Palin, as related by Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone:
After Palin wraps up, I race to the parking lot in search of departing Medicare-motor-scooter conservatives. I come upon an elderly couple, Janice and David Wheelock, who are fairly itching to share their views.
"I'm anti-spending and anti-government," crows David, as scooter-bound Janice looks on. "The welfare state is out of control."
"OK," I say. "And what do you do for a living?"
"Me?" he says proudly. "Oh, I'm a property appraiser. Have been my whole life."
I frown. "Are either of you on Medicare?"
Silence: Then Janice, a nice enough woman, it seems, slowly raises her hand, offering a faint smile, as if to say, You got me!
"Let me get this straight," I say to David. "You've been picking up a check from the government for decades, as a tax assessor, and your wife is on Medicare. How can you complain about the welfare state?"
"Well," he says, "there's a lot of people on welfare who don't deserve it. Too many people are living off the government."
"But," I protest, "you live off the government. And have been your whole life!"
"Yeah," he says, "but I don't make very much." Vast forests have already been sacrificed to the public debate about the Tea Party: what it is, what it means, where it's going. But after lengthy study of the phenomenon, I've concluded that the whole miserable narrative boils down to one stark fact: They're full of shit. All of them. At the voter level, the Tea Party is a movement that purports to be furious about government spending – only the reality is that the vast majority of its members are former Bush supporters who yawned through two terms of record deficits and spent the past two electoral cycles frothing not about spending but about John Kerry's medals and Barack Obama's Sixties associations. The average Tea Partier is sincerely against government spending – with the exception of the money spent on them.1 (Italics in original.)
I'm not writing this book to teach people about Saul Alinsky, but this passage seemed to my “know enough to be dangerous” eye to be a very textbook usage of his tactics. Yet for a leftist writing this in fall of 2010, it turned out Taibbi wasn't a half-bad prophet:
The Tea Party today is being pitched in the media as this great threat to the GOP; in reality, the Tea Party is the GOP. What few elements of the movement aren't yet under the control of the Republican Party soon will be, and even if a few genuine Tea Party candidates sneak through, it's only a matter of time before the uprising as a whole gets castrated, just like every grass-roots movement does in this country. Its leaders will be bought off and sucked into the two-party bureaucracy, where its platform will be whittled down until the only things left are those that the GOP's campaign contributors want anyway: top-bracket tax breaks, free trade and financial deregulation.
The rest of it – the sweeping cuts to federal spending, the clampdown on bailouts, the rollback of Roe v. Wade – will die on the vine as one Tea Party leader after another gets seduced by the Republican Party and retrained for the revolutionary cause of voting down taxes for Goldman Sachs executives.2
It was a prediction only a cynic could love, but that seems to be the problem with our political system overall, doesn't it? There's no doubt the protests of David and Janice Wheelock – the couple who “don't make very much” – would be replicated in some way, shape, manner, or form by thousands who participated in the TEA Party demanding government spending be slashed but still expecting every dime they were due from Uncle Sam in Social Security and Medicare simply because America “owed” them. After all, they explained, it was the government keeping their account that they had paid into the system for their entire working lives. (Never mind these programs were Ponzi-like systems doomed to fail, but collapsing long after the TEA Party faithful left the scene – leaving their progeny holding the bag and the bills due.) This was the argument of writer Jonathan Chait:
The image of a mass army of principled constitutionalists agitating to carry out Paul Ryan’s domestic-policy vision, while irresistibly useful as conservative propaganda, was a fantasy all along. The backlash against Obamacare did not rest upon any abstract theory about the role of the state. It drew its power from the fear that subsidized (private) insurance would come at the expense of the (single-payer) health care that old people love.3
Perhaps this was true for the Baby Boomer generation, but there were enough people who could envision health care done in the style of your local Department of Motor Vehicles to make them think twice. Obamacare also came out just a couple short years after the VA facilities scandal at the former Walter Reed Army Medical Center4 – not to be confused with the more recent VA waiting list scandal.
Anyway, the Left occasionally swerved into a point: to many TEA Party participants, it was always the invisible “other” who could take the cut, particularly illegal aliens or the younger generation that would have time to set up other means of supporting themselves in their golden years but would also have to pay the freight as the Baby Boomers aged gracefully on the fruits of the labor of those same young workers.
Not so fast, said TEA Party leadership. They were willing to make sacrifices:
We… travel around the nation and have the privilege of speaking with literally thousands of Tea Party Patriots. Sometimes we are at events with thousands of people, and sometimes just sitting around the table in a coffee shop. But wherever we go, we always talk to people about the issue of entitlement spending. We always ask if they are willing to make the personal sacrifices necessary to save the nation. The answer is always a resounding yes.5
For more gloom and doom, you could ask William John Cox, who wrote at Counterpunch about attendees at the 2011 Tea Party Patriots American Policy Summit:
More than anything else that can be said, the (Tea Party) Patriots are fearful. They fear the loss of the quality of life they and their parents enjoyed following World War II; however, they also believe that the unions who led the battle for the wages and benefits they received are becoming too powerful. They fear the influx of immigrants and the loss of “American” jobs; however, they overlook that every single one of them is either an immigrant or the descendant of immigrants. They fear the loss of the moral values they were raised with; however, they are quick to deny others the choices they have had the freedom to make.
Those who join the Tea Party Patriots could be your parents, the veteran next door, the Little League coach, or the guy at the hardware store. They are hard-working, conservative, self-sufficient people who are afraid for the future of their families and their way of life. Having been empowered by the rewards of their efforts, they now feel helpless to confront the forces that threaten them. They feel compelled to do something, anything, to defend their beliefs. They are drawn to the Tea Party to meet like-minded patriotic people and to “make a difference.”6
Now stop and think about this a minute. Cox makes a whole lot of assumptions about what brought about the world we live in now, but fails to consider all of this occurred within a longstanding political system that allowed for it to happen. It was a system that the TEA Party felt was under threat from a President and Congress elected by just a plurality of adult Americans who bought the promise of “fundamental change” without knowing – or even caring about – the actual details. Certainly the TEA Party was skewed toward an older generation, but perhaps it was their wisdom and experience about what worked in the world that drove them to protest. Maybe they even cared about their grandchildren despite the fact the kids weren't down with the more straight-laced morals of the older generation.
The same goes for Detroit Free Press columnist Brian Dickerson, who treated his assignment to cover a TEA Party “powwow” in the rural Michigan town of Mt. Pleasant almost like a safari excursion where he had to endure hanging out with the state's redneck population. His conclusions after a lengthy report:
I'm sympathetic to many of the tea party's grievances. Like everyone I've spoken to at the PowWow, I feel profoundly alienated from a political process in which successful candidates in both parties serve at the pleasure of lobbyists and undisclosed mega-donors.
It's the remedies tea party conservatives embrace that make me nervous. I still don't understand how the liberty whose loss they feel so acutely would be enhanced by denying so many outside the devout Christian elect a place at the American table.7
The passage becomes even more interesting as years go by and those who are devout Christians actually have lost their liberty to express and live out their beliefs. (While it steps far afield from the TEA Party, a good book to consider on that persecution topic is Erick Erickson and Bill Blankschaen's You Will Be Made to Care: The War on Faith, Family, and Your Freedom to Believe.) However, as Taibbi, Cox, Dickerson, and many other critics of the TEA Party have rightly pointed out – perhaps less so in the case of Cox, though, since the causation of the circumstances he brought up wasn't always correlated with the items he chose to assume the TEA Party blamed them on – intellectual consistency wasn't exactly the TEA Party's long suit.
However, that sort of standard of consistency is difficult to attain in a system of government where its continued success depends on the balance of a number of factors: even our Founding Fathers, who defiantly told the world “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” had to concede that point to assure the completion of the Constitution and placate the factions representing certain regions of the nascent United States who were concerned about their representation in the new republic. Thus, our Constitution originally mandated that certain men were only worth three-fifths of a person and could be bought and sold as property. This fragile contradiction could not long stand, and to finally rectify it brought us to war less than a century later.
As a whole, though, the system of government created by our Constitution and doggedly defended by the TEA Party was the foundation for a republic that's the most wealthy and powerful the world has known – yet one where anyone from the poorest man to the millionaire have the same rights to speak out, contact their representatives, and vote.
This assumed, though, that the TEA Party denizens actually understood the Constitution. One left-tilting pair begged to differ on this point:
Despite their fondness for the Founding Fathers, Tea Party members we met did not make any reference to the intellectual battles and political compromises out of which the Constitution and its subsequent amendments were forged, let alone to the fact the key Founders were Deists, far from any brand of evangelical fundamentalism. Nor did they realize the extent to which some of the positions Tea Partiers now espouse bear a close resemblance to those of the Anti-Federalists – the folks the Founders were countering in their effort to establish sufficient federal authority to ensure a truly United States. The Tea Partiers we met did not show any awareness that they are echoing arguments made by the Nullifiers and Secessionists before and during the U.S. Civil War, or that their stress on 'state's rights' is eerily reminiscent of dead-ender white opposition to Civil Rights laws in the 1960s.8
Despite that perception – and the lack of indication of the knowledge that the Bill of Rights was added to the Constitution in order to assuage, in part, the concerns of the Anti-Federalists – the point objectors missed was that the TEA Party had a lot of the right ideals even if not every participant supported every plank on the imaginary TEA Party platform. Obviously there's a state of tension between the “role of government” purist who would eliminate all federal entitlement programs as not being Constitutionally valid vs. the hypocrite who points out that the federal government made a promise to generations of Americans to take care of them in their old age and that promise should be kept, Constitutional or not.
That struggle of ideas is but one portion of the cat-herding that made it difficult for the TEA Party to have a lasting impact. To the extent the assertion smacks of hypocrisy, there was no shortage of contradictions in the TEA Party. Total fealty to principle would be nice, but in any large group that's impossible – just ask the radical environmentalist progressives what they think of their fellow Democrat Party travelers in the unions, for example.
Corollary to that argument, though, is the political landscape which has been carved out for Americans like Mount Rushmore over the last 150 years, since the demise of the Whig Party before the Civil War. In that span Americans have grudgingly adopted a two-party political system, as dozens of other parties have tried and failed to make a lasting dent in the political process. A few recent examples:
Over the last quarter-century the Reform Party briefly evolved from a vehicle enabling Ross Perot to run for President in 1996 (he ran as a true independent with no party affiliation in 1992) to a third party that scored a significant victory when Jesse Ventura won the 1998 Minnesota gubernatorial race. “Though (the Reform Party) could not be called a true ideological forerunner of the Tea Party movement, it did foreshadow a kind of widespread dissatisfaction with the existing political power structure,”9 said Michael Patrick Leahy. Evidence of that assertion: Donald Trump briefly sought the Reform Party's Presidential nomination in 2000 before taking advantage of that dissatisfaction as a renegade, populist Republican 15 years later. Party infighting, however, has significantly damaged the Reform Party to a point where it's lost all-important ballot access in most states.
More consistent on the modern-day Presidential ballot are the Libertarian Party and the Green Party. Both were in the news quite a bit in 2016 as former New Mexico Governor and Republican-turned-Libertarian Gary Johnson and Green Party standard-bearer Jill Stein were presented as alternatives to two unpopular major-party presidential candidates. But on Election Day they only combined to collect 4.3% of the overall vote, and this is for political parties that have been at it since 1971 and 1984, respectively. Their electoral victories have been few and far between, and always at the local or state legislative level.
The minor party that's perhaps closest to the classic TEA Party platform of fiscal responsibility, limited government, and free markets is the Constitution Party, which has been in existence since 1992. But even though 2016 was its high-water mark as far as vote gathering goes, a lack of ballot access in many states doomed it to barely 200,000 votes nationwide – less than 2/10 of 1%. Certainly there are more who support the Constitution, but the long-standing duopoly of parties means compromises have to be made.
Moreover, as I recounted in Chapter 4, the brief TEA Party dalliance with third-party candidate Doug Hoffman in the NY-23 race was probably convincing enough to dissuade them from trying to create their own political version of the Tea Party, which would run into the same problems with ballot access that most of these other third parties have faced. Certainly a truly political Tea Party could have the most pure platform, but what good would it do if their candidates couldn't get on the ballot to win elections?
After the Hoffman debacle, the TEA Party quickly figured out this truth:
To the Tea Party movement, the idea of supporting Republicans was only moderately less distasteful than supporting Democrats. But we knew that if we had “gone rogue” and launched a third-party challenge, we would have split the conservative vote and handed perpetual power to the Democratic Party, at a time when that party's most radical members already had full control over Congress and the presidency.10
So it turned out that most TEA Party regulars either maintained their original Republican Party registration or kept their unaffiliated status but voted Republican as they could. “It had been nearly ten years since I had given up on being a Republican and had registered to vote under the party affiliation 'decline to state,' said Mark Meckler of TPP. “In disgust, I had abandoned the politicians who had themselves abandoned the values to which I held true.”11 And because the timing of its rise coincided with the nadir of the Republican Party based on electoral wipeouts in both 2006 and 2008, the TEA Party attracted a host of organizations who hoped to use the energized public for their political ends – as detailed elsewhere in this tome, chief among them were FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity. Once inside-the-Beltway lobbyists came on board, it was only a matter of time (read: nanoseconds) before the Astroturf accusations would fly. And once those lobbying groups climbed on board, coming right up their rear would be the Republican Party, because they were in desperate straits.
Thus, the TEA Party endured the criticism of being simply a Republican front group, which was only true to the extent that most who participated in the protests already had their political home in the GOP. Authors Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson studied a number of TEA Party groups for their book The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism and observed the following:
Tea Party supporters overwhelmingly vote for Republicans, especially in general elections where Democrats might otherwise win. But not all of them will call themselves Republicans; they might say they are “Independents” and mean either that they are more conservative than they think the Republican Party is, or, far less commonly, they are center-right people who lean toward the GOP. Labels are complicated by the fact that many Tea Partiers are skeptical, even scornful, of “establishment” Republicans.12
(…)
When Tea Partiers are faced at the polls with a choice of Republican versus Democrat, the latter can “fuhgettaboddit.” Even when Tea Partiers wish they had better, more conservative alternatives to whatever GOP candidates are on the ballot in general election contests, most are savvy enough voters to know they do not want to help the Democrats. Our interviewees did not think a third party was a good idea, even if they distrusted and disliked their local version of the GOP organizational “establishment,” which they usually do.13
In other words, the silent majority began to speak out again. Skocpol and Williamson wrote a valuable book in that they studied the makeup of TEA Party supporters and found out what election results confirmed: at its prime the TEA Party was largely made up of inactive Republicans who became excited by the GOP again because, by gosh, there were politicians actually paying attention to THEIR needs. After all, TEA Party denizens saw how Democrats catered and flip-flopped to appease whoever their faction du jour was (one day it would be blacks, then the next union members, a day later it was the gay lobby's turn, then environmentalists, then women, Latino voters in turn, and so forth ad nauseum) so why not enjoy their day in the sun and demand the change they sought?
On a similar note, the Left often also demands to know why these protests didn't start under George W. Bush – after all, he put the nation trillions of dollars in debt himself and dismantled the capitalist-based system to save the overall economy. The team of Meckler and Martin answer this charge succinctly:
Only after the government seized control over our banks, our mortgages, our cars, our insurance, and took dead aim at controlling our health – our very lives – along with one-sixth of the entire U.S. economy, while going into debt for more money than all of us produce in an entire year – only then did we rise up in the second American revolution: the modern-day Tea Party movement.14 (Emphasis in original.)
The TEA Party didn't begin as Astroturf and never was that sort of movement at heart. But those corporate interests sure could collect a lot of money and make certain favored individuals and interests a nice living.
(T)he 'mass movement' portrayal overlooks the fact that the Tea Party, understood in its entirety, includes media hosts and wealthy political action committees, plus national advocacy groups and self-proclaimed spokespersons – elites that wield many millions of dollars in political contributions and appear all over the media claiming to speak for grassroots activists who certainly have not elected them, and to whom they are not accountable.15
It was that portion made up of Astroturf and grifters that turned a lot of people off to the TEA Party in the end.
A look at the Left's criticism of the TEA Party, though, would not be complete without the playing of the race card. One good example I ran across comes from the Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights (IREHR), which claimed the following in a 2015 report it prepared for the NAACP:
At every opportunity, Tea Party leaders have denied they are “racist.” Yet, expressions of the Tea Party’s persistent problem with race abound, and have been exhaustively documented. They include the waving of the Confederate battle flag at rallies around the country. Tea Party groups have engaged in the rhetoric of Jim Crow with ceaseless chatter about secession and nullification. Tea Party leaders have minimized of horrors of slavery (like when Ben Carson declared that Obamacare was “the worst thing that has happened since slavery”). Pro-Confederate references to the Civil War as the “War of Northern Aggression” and “the War to Enslave the States,” can be heard on Tea Party stages and read on Tea Party websites. A popular Tea Party curriculum on The Making of America even refers to African-American children as “pickaninnies,” claims that the treatment of slaves was “humane,” and that “the economic system of slavery chained the slave owners almost as much as the slaves.”16
The strange thing about this particular passage was that, in a lengthy report with nearly sixty endnotes, not one of those quotes and accusations was ever backed up with its own note. As I have pointed out elsewhere in this volume, it's naive to think that no one with racially hostile feelings was ever attracted to the TEA Party, but as I also noted back in Chapter 5: when the Left had a perfect opportunity to cash in on Andrew Breitbart's pledge of a $10,000 donation to the United Negro College Fund for proof of racist remarks at an Obamacare protest in 2010, they could not do so.17 But like so much “investigative reporting” done by the Left on the TEA Party as a whole, the IREHR narrative can be quickly shot full of holes.
First of all, one doesn't have to be proud of their Southern heritage to wave a Confederate battle flag at a rally – even though the instance from which they use the photograph wasn't a TEA Party rally but the 2013 Million Vet March protesting the closing of the World War II Memorial during the government shutdown.18 After all, what better way is there to equate a cause with racism than with that, ahem, false flag? (It also seems a bit odd that the bearer of said flag was far younger than most of the peers in that march. Again, correlation is not causation, but I'm just sayin'.)
It should also be stated for the record that the IREHR report quoted the black Dr. Ben Carson, but left out the context where he added, “And (Obamacare) is in a way, it is slavery in a way, because it is making all of us subservient to the government, and it was never about health care. It was about control.”19 Put in context, the slavery reference makes more perfect sense. (Carson, by the way, was already in the running for the White House at the time this report came out. Could the writers of the report have been afraid of a conservative black man in the Oval Office to follow our most liberal occupant?)
As a population, the TEA Party wasn't as racially diverse as the general population, but this fact by itself would not make the TEA Party racist. If anything, their goal was a more colorblind society in the vein of Dr. Martin Luther King, and that ran the TEA Party afoul of those who still believed the black race needed special assistance to get by (and would reward those benefactors with their votes.) It only took about a year for the NAACP to get the message from their allies in the mainstream media that condemnation was in order, and once the message was received the NAACP was docile enough to comply. “(T)he NAACP says, a number of Tea Party members think that issues of importance to African Americans get too much attention,” wrote CNN's Shannon Travis.20 But, one may ask, how can quotas and set-asides for a particular race or gender be squared up with the declaration that “all men are created equal?” The TEA Party advocated equality of opportunity because no government can guarantee equality of outcome, even at the point of a rifle.
Is it possible the racist element of society saw the TEA Party as a lifeline because it was the only group actively opposing the policies of our first black president? If you look at it through the lens of growing a white nationalist movement, the TEA Party was probably not the right place to go because it was mainly a population that was already set in their ways. Certainly they would complain about the excesses brought on by some pieces of the civil rights movement, such as affirmative action quotas for hiring and advancement, but the Generation X members of the TEA Party also raised arguably the most colorblind generation our nation has known with the Millennials.
Not only that, many within the TEA Party were hypersensitive to the charge of racism, so much so that they were often called upon to police their own ranks:
The Tea Party needs evangelicals not just from a numbers perspective to affect change but the movement would be well served if evangelicals rose to the occasion to state unequivocally that any hint of racism will not be tolerated at these rallies or otherwise. Granted, evangelicals can't play hall monitor at all the rallies, but the hint of racism speaks to the larger need of evangelicals using their moderating influence to help shoo away the extreme elements of certain Tea Party members.21
So the “racist” argument basically came down to opposition of policies that were put in place by a black president as well as the standard TEA Partier reaction to criminal activities resulting in the deaths of black men: neither Trayvon Robinson, who George Zimmerman shot in self-defense in a Florida incident, nor Ferguson, Missouri resident Michael Brown, killed in the street by a white police officer after Brown attempted to disarm him, elicited a great deal of sympathy from TEA Party regulars. In contrast, they especially came down on the side of Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson.
Coupled with their opposition to illegal immigration, the strong law-and-order stand of the TEA Party easily explains their reverence for the Constitution as the ultimate in American legal authority, second only to the absolute authority of the Bible. Since the Left tends to believe in a “living” Constitution and often refers to the Bible as a work of fiction or folklore, it's no wonder they don't get the TEA Party.
While it's not exclusive to those who followed the TEA Party by any means, those who were adherents are more likely to appreciate the closing sentences of this chapter as a final criticism of the Left.
Fifty-six men signed the Declaration of Independence, and in doing so pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to the cause. Fortunately or not, the creators of the TEA Party had to endure no violent revolution; then again their rewards were nowhere near as great either – instead of a nation which has managed to survive for nearly 250 years, they had a political season that faded into the rubric of a corrupt political party then morphed into their backing for Donald Trump – a guy who said the right things, even if the planning and follow-through left something to be desired.
Notes - bearing in mind some of these links may now be dead ones:
1 http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/matt-taibbi-on-the-tea-party-20100928
2 Ibid.
3 http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/05/donald-trump-is-the-tea-party.html
4 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/17/AR2007021701172.html The former VA facility closed in 2011.
5 Mark Meckler and Jenny Beth Martin: Tea Party Patriots: The Second American Revolution (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2012) p. 61-62.
6 https://www.counterpunch.org/2011/03/08/who-are-the-tea-party-patriots/
8 Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson: The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 50.
9 Michael Patrick Leahy: Covenant of Liberty: The Ideological Origins of the Tea Party Movement (New York: Broadside Books, 2012) p. 216.
10 Meckler and Martin, p. 65.
11 Meckler and Martin, p. 5.
12 Skocpol and Williamson, p. 27.
13 Skocpol and Williamson, p. 28-29.
14 Meckler and Martin, p. 32.
15 Skocpol and Williamson, p.11.
16 http://www.irehr.org/2015/09/15/the-tea-party-movement-in-2015/
17 http://michellemalkin.com/2010/03/26/andrew-breitbart-offers-10000-to-united-negro-college-fund/
21 David Brody: The Teavangelicals: The Inside Story of How The Evangelicals and The Tea Party are Taking Back America (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2012) p. 97.
Next Tuesday will continue my series with Chapter 14: On Board the Trump Train.
In the meantime, you can buy the book or Buy Me a Coffee, since I have a page there now. And remember…