Chapter 14: On Board the Trump Train
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.
“I don't march with the tea party. But I'll tell you what, they have a good point, because when you see the kind of money that this country is – to use a horrible expression, Larry, I know you've never heard this – but that this country is pissing away, I can understand where they're coming from.” - Donald Trump, Larry King Live, April 15, 2009.
“When Donald Trump was blustering about Obama's birth certificate, he got a chuckle and an 'Atta boy' from some Tea Partiers, but no one seemed to take him seriously as a presidential contender.” - Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson, The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism (2011)
It took Donald Trump awhile to embrace the TEA Party, but once they became politically useful to him he was all-in, and many millions responded.
While he wasn't brash enough to march with the TEA Party at first, perhaps it was because Donald Trump was more willing to give Barack Obama a chance to enact his agenda. In the same interview with Larry King that I used as the pull quote to open this chapter, Trump praised Obama as doing the best he could with the situation:
Well, I really like him. I think that he's working very hard. He's trying to rebuild our reputation throughout the world. I mean, we really have lost a lot of reputation in the world. The previous administration was a total disaster, a total catastrophe.
And, you know, the world looks at us differently than they used to. And I think he's trying to restore our reputation within the world. And he was handed a pretty bad deck of cards. I mean, he was given a pretty tough situation.
And I'm not saying I agree with everything he's doing. I do agree with what they're doing with the banks. Whether they fund them or nationalize them, it doesn't matter, but you have to keep the banks going.1
Yet as the Obama presidency progressed, and Trump considered another bid for the Oval Office – he hinted at the task2 as early as 1987 and briefly made a run on the Reform Party ticket in 2000 before reconsidering a few months later (despite winning Reform Party primaries in Michigan and California)3 4 because he felt that party couldn't provide enough support – his tactic to gain more media attention for the 2012 campaign was that of bringing up Barack Obama's birth certificate, beginning with a March, 2011 interview with the ABC morning show Good Morning America from Trump Force One.5
Because Trump led off with the discredited “birther” issue, the so-called political experts and handicappers were the first to dismiss his chances for 2012. Journalist Christopher Byron wrote on the CNN website that “Trump has been playacting as a presidential contender for roughly the last 25 years, and behind each faux candidacy has been his desire to promote a specific moneymaking opportunity for himself.”6 Byron went on to point out several instances where Trump dropped such hints, from promoting his book The Art of the Deal, to his Celebrity Apprentice TV show, and a Presidential run being “a great way to raise the rents.”
Even his future opponents were skeptical: “I don't know if Donald Trump wants to be President,” said Chris Christie to ABC's Diane Sawyer. “I'll believe it when I see it.” Yet at the same time, the lead of the story was Trump's surging to second place in 2012 GOP polling.7 And Trump insisted he wasn't fooling around this time: “If I need $600 million, I can put up $600 million myself. That's a huge advantage over the other candidates.”8
But if there's anything we have learned about Donald Trump, it's that he is a very shrewd observer. One lesson likely learned from the events of 2011 was the impact the free media of the 24/7 news cycle could have on a potential White House run. Coming from the entertainment world, his audacious remarks – which seemed crazy from the perspective of political conventional wisdom – made as much of a splash on tabloid entertainment news sources such as Inside Edition9 or Entertainment Weekly10 as they did on the mainstream media. And surely he noticed, too, that when he was on one network, it became news on all the networks: who else would get plenty of CBS coverage for appearing on a Fox program?11
Observing all this as well was an audience which included a large segment of TEA Party supporters and sympathizers. Trump's coming-out party, as it were, with the TEA Party came in April, 2011 when he co-hosted a Tax Day Tea Party held by the South Florida Tea Party in Boca Raton. Introduced by then-Congressman Allen West, Trump held court for over 40 minutes in a stump speech (due to The Donald's celebrity status, it was a local TEA Party rally nationally covered by C-SPAN)12 to a crowd described by local leader Everett Wilkinson as very supportive: “In every poll the Tea Party had, Donald Trump came out number one,” he told CNN.13 And Trump expressed his appreciation of the TEA Party as well, telling them they “made Washington start thinking.”
Another sign that Trump was thinking and learning about politics through observation was his assertion to ABC's George Stephanopoulos that, “The problem with running as an Independent is that if I don’t win, it assures Barack Obama gets back in as President. Because I’m a very conservative guy. And I would I think take 99.9% of the votes away from the Republican Party, which I don’t want to do.”14 It was the same lesson the TEA Party learned the hard way with Doug Hoffman in 2009.
Trump's flirtation with a 2012 bid , however, lasted only a couple months until Byron's CNN premise came true: indeed it was time to insure Celebrity Apprentice would be on NBC's fall schedule and that he would be the host. Moreover, the abortive run was hard on the thin-skinned Trump, who told a New Hampshire audience, “Nobody said it was going to be easy, but I had no idea I would get hammered in the way I’ve been hammered the past few weeks.”15 Once again, the experts crowed, Donald Trump had “strung the country along.”16
While it's certain he has supporters who will swear up and down they figured this out all along – a former political colleague of mine brashly told our Central Committee that she thought Donald Trump should have run for President as far back as 1993, when she met him – no one could have known for sure that Trump would prove himself to be right when he predicted, “I maintain the strong conviction that if I were to run, I would be able to win the primary and ultimately, the general election.”17
With all these false starts in his past, it was natural to be a little skeptical of Donald Trump's intentions when he came down the escalator at Trump Tower to announce his latest Presidential bid on June 16, 2015. At that time, Trump joined a Republican field crowded with 11 seeking the nomination and among that group were a number of hopefuls already considered to be aligned with the TEA Party: Senators Ted Cruz of Texas and Rand Paul of Kentucky were chief contenders among the conservative and libertarian-minded, while evangelicals favored Dr. Ben Carson, 2008 candidate Mike Huckabee, and 2012 hopeful Rick Santorum.
Out of all the candidates, Trump seemed on the conventional wisdom surface to be one of the least attractive to those disaffected members of the TEA Party as he held a number of political positions that were anathema to rank-and-file members of various stripes: evangelicals didn't like his lengthy pro-choice stance,18 Second Amendment types weren't sure about his feelings on gun control,19 fiscal conservatives fretted that he wanted to leave entitlements alone,20 and everyone was on edge about a New York liberal who was friends with likely Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.21 (So friendly, in fact, that some saw Donald Trump's bid as a ploy to insure a Hillary Clinton presidency.)22 Trump's one saving grace was a hardline position on immigration – a subject that put onetime TEA Party darling Senator Marco Rubio on the outs with the mainstream of conservatives as part of the “Gang of Eight” in 2013 – but several other candidates were basically on the same page insofar as border security and avoiding amnesty.
In the words of “national Republican political strategist and media consultant” Rick Wilson:
Trump has been unforgivably wrong on every single issue in the conservative portfolio, and his current road-to-Damascus conversions on abortion, guns, taxes, religion, and immigration all have the air of the man up for parole promising that he’s changed his ways.23
In those respects Donald Trump was wrong for the conservatives politically, but remember once again that he had the one thing other candidates didn't: celebrity.
The average TEA Partier isn't all that much different than the average American: they are more or less in tune with popular culture, so having the familiarity with an audience who watched the various incarnations of The Apprentice he hosted and could easily picture Donald Trump as the guy telling those in the Beltway swamp “you're fired!” gave him a tremendous advantage. That celebrity factor also insured that, when it came to the ranks of Presidential candidates who were usually known only in their home state and perhaps among the tiny percentage of people who were political junkies nationwide, Trump would get the largest number of eyeballs in news coverage. To an even greater extent than his 2012 run, in short order once his 2016 campaign got underway Trump became the nightly lead story, sucking the air out from the other GOP efforts.
Subsequent events eventually revealed two key differences in Trump's 2012 and 2016 runs. Because Celebrity Apprentice had faded in popularity and at the time was not in a set position on the NBC schedule – the show did not air at all in the 2013-14 season and failed to secure good ratings in its return as a mid-season replacement in 2014-15 – it mattered less to Trump when the network opted to “re-evaluate” his position once he declared a run despite greenlighting another season earlier in 2015.24
That re-evaluation turned into a dismissal once Trump launched into his initial issue-based salvo. While the “birther” issue played to a certain segment of the voting public, it was more of a sideshow than a major issue on Americans' minds by the time Trump decided to give his 2012 run a go in the spring of 2011. On the other hand, the Obama administration's unpopular unilateral declaration of deferred action for both illegal aliens who had arrived as children and illegal alien parents who had had children who qualified for birthright citizenship (DACA and DAPA, respectively, which had the potential to grant de facto amnesty to 4 million undocumented immigrants)25 allowed Trump to make illegal immigration and border security his keystone campaign plank. Trump's brash language on the matter alienated the Hispanic lobby, which prevailed on NBC to cut ties with the Celebrity Apprentice host and cancel the upcoming broadcasts of both the Miss USA and Miss Universe pageants, which were jointly owned by Trump and NBC/Universal.26 But it made him a lot of fans where it counted, and Trump knew he could portray himself as a fighter against a liberal mainstream media conglomerate with maximum bravado:
If NBC is so weak and so foolish to not understand the serious illegal immigration problem in the United States, coupled with the horrendous and unfair trade deals we are making with Mexico, then their contract violating closure of Miss Universe/Miss USA will be determined in court. Furthermore, they will stand behind lying Brian Williams, but won't stand behind people that tell it like it is, as unpleasant as that may be.27
In one fell swoop, Donald Trump had set himself up as a leader on an important issue and a victim of political correctness by having his shows canceled by a major network. His campaign quickly climbed up the GOP presidential polls.
Moreover, with TEA Partiers organizing and operating under the belief they were the political outsiders in an era when everything was being handed down by fiat from the pen of Barack Obama, thousands of faceless bureaucrats, and a reckless Supreme Court, the idea of the ultimate political outsider and a man who carried the image of having succeeded “bigly” in the business world seemed to be just the type of guy to go into our nation's capital, kick ass, and take names. (Remember, in that regard he was already popular in 2012 – part of a business-oriented outsider phenomenon that also, to a smaller scale, explained the popularity of Herman Cain with the TEA Party that year.) Granted, immigration was a hot-button issue, but policy didn't matter as much as attitude, particularly when you compared Trump to the cold and calculating persona of Barack Obama – a personality somewhat at odds with his image among those in flyover country that he was a beta male at best.
So as summer turned to fall and Trump remained at the top of the GOP polls – aside from a brief surge from Ben Carson, Trump consistently led the Republican nominee polls after the summer of 2015 – those whose political fortunes were tied to the TEA Party had to make a choice. It was an invocation of the Buckley Rule: was Donald Trump really the most conservative candidate who could win? After poll upon standing-room rally upon being lead story on the news each night, many of the TEA Party insiders cast their lot with Trump in the belief he could be their meal ticket. One was Tea Party Patriots co-founder and later TPX head Amy Kremer, who joined up with what was then known as TrumPAC in January 2016. (The group would later become the Great America PAC, intended to “lengthen...Trump's coattails in races across America.”)28 Later Kremer would co-found the Women for Trump PAC, as moss was not allowed to grow under her feet.29
Standing across the great divide of the TEA Party were Trump skeptics, led by fellow TPP co-founder Jenny Beth Martin. At CPAC 2016 Martin made withering remarks about Donald Trump's campaign as a litany of conservative skepticism:
Donald Trump took a look at the political environment when he decided to run for President, and said to himself, “Self, that Tea Party is the thing for me!” So he took on one of the biggest issues that drives the Tea Party today, and did his best to make it his own. Since then, we’ve heard him say over and over again, “I love the Tea Party!” And he’s done his best to cloak himself in the garb of the Tea Party, taking on the Establishment.
(…)
But we need to speak some hard truths this morning. Because one of the candidates I just talked about isn’t really Tea Party at all. I know Donald Trump says he loves the Tea Party – but that’s not what it takes to be Tea Party.
If you want to be Tea Party, you have to love our country and you have to love our Constitution. And you have to be willing to fight for them above your own interests and put our freedom above your own interests.
Let me ask you a question – have you ever heard Donald Trump talk about the Constitution? I haven’t. Donald Trump stole a line from Ronald Reagan – he says he wants to make America great again.
Well, I’m going to borrow a line from Ronald Reagan – trust, but verify. And here’s what I have verified: Many of Donald Trump’s critics say he’s inconsistent.
(…)
Yes, he is inconsistent – if all you look at is the flip-flops on the issue positions. But if you look at his motivation for taking those positions, you’ll see that there is, in fact, a remarkable consistency – it’s the consistency of serving his own interests!
Because you can always count on this: On any given issue, at any given time, Donald Trump will take the position that serves his interest as he perceives it at the time.
(…)
Donald Trump is about love of himself. But the Tea Party is about love of country, and love of our Constitution.
I know you’re angry, and upset. I am, too. And I know Donald Trump is tapping into that anger. It’s a smart campaign strategy, because he makes it seem like he shares our frustrations, like he cares about fighting on our behalf. And when he says he wants to “make America great again,” we cheer – because we all believe America is great, and we appreciate what sounds like love of country on his part. It’s a seductive pitch, and I have several friends and colleagues who support him, even as I speak.
Here’s what I think: Donald Trump loves himself first, last, and in between. He loves himself more than the country. He loves himself more than the Constitution. He does not love you or me. He does not love the Tea Party. Donald Trump has no business thinking he’s Tea Party, and every Tea Party supporter who truly loves the Constitution should take that into account when casting their vote.
And why should you vote for Donald Trump, anyway? If you’re Tea Party, you’ve got a much better candidate to support – Ted Cruz!30
Furthermore, among those who were fervent about the purity of conservative principles in general (and, perhaps, by extension, those of the TEA Party in particular) there was a sentiment that the Trump campaign was the end of the TEA Party as we knew it. Taking to the space of Politico, Rich Lowry, editor at the venerable conservative outlet (and eventual bastion of #NeverTrump thought) National Review, explained:
If the grass-roots movement that (Bernie) Sanders has built will pressure Democrats all the way to the Philadelphia convention and beyond, Trump has arguably done more to pull the country’s politics leftward. He has, for now, managed to do what the Democrats and the media have been attempting for most of the Obama era: to kill off the tea party as a national force.
By dividing it, eclipsing it and making its animating concerns of limited government and constitutionalism into after-thoughts, Trump has neutered a heretofore potent vehicle against Big Government. With or without Sanders, the Democrats were going to drift in a more progressive direction. It was far from inevitable, though, that the Republican Party would de-emphasize its opposition to growth in the size of government. That is entirely the doing of Trump.31 (Emphasis mine.)
Yet, as I proclaimed in the last chapter, many of those who claimed TEA Party membership were concerned about two things: keeping their share of the goodies and sticking it to the Man in Washington. To that group of loyal voters, Donald Trump's tough talk was music to their ears.
So it wasn't the smoothest of rides for the Trump campaign, but as the remaining contenders stayed in the race believing that they should be the person who the rest of the Republican Party should coalesce around to defeat Trump they handed The Donald more and more victories by plurality once the votes began to be cast and delegates awarded. By the end of February, 2016 several key players who began in Iowa with high hopes were out: former candidates Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum were the first to go in the wake of the Iowa caucuses, followed by the disappointing campaign of Rand Paul. A week later after disheartening New Hampshire primary results they were joined on the sidelines by Carly Fiorina, Chris Christie, and the nonentity campaign of Jim Gilmore, with Jeb Bush throwing in the towel on February 20 after the South Carolina primary. Bush, ironically, was the first candidate Trump upstaged: Trump's announcement came the day after Jeb! formalized his entry.
This left Trump in the race with four others going into Super Tuesday on March 1: Ben Carson, whose campaign was basically on fumes at that point, and the much stronger positions of Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Ohio Governor John Kasich, whose campaign occupied the lane on the moderate Republican side of the track. As the primaries shifted to a mode of winner-take-all, the four-way opposition split insured Trump could win based on name and media recognition, often pulling less than 40 percent of the vote but getting 100 percent of the all-important delegates. (With the exception of a race no candidate appeared for in the Northern Mariana Islands – thus, almost strictly a contest based on name recognition – Trump didn't break 50 percent in a race outside his home state until the April 26 “Acela primary” in Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island. By that time it was a three-man race, as Rubio and Carson had long since withdrawn.)
While the TEA Party was all but finished as a political entity by this time, its name besmirched by the constant bombardment of media hit pieces (and conversely, a conservative “information silo”32 that simply preached to the choir without attracting a lot of new viewers), a lack of love from the establishment Republican Party, and the perception that the movement had finally run its course, there were still a number of voters and activists who once belonged there looking for a leader. And while a significant part of the TEA Party's problem in the campaigns of 2010 and – especially – 2012 was the lack of a strong, forceful leader that the rank-and-file could look up to, Donald Trump's populism was just what the doctor ordered for those former TEA Party supporters.33
So why Trump, and not some of the others? TEA Party denizens had been burned too many times by establishment Republican promises, even if they came out of the mouths of onetime TEA Party heroes like Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz. Rubio lost most of his TEA Party support when he backed the “Gang of Eight” immigration deal; however, many TEA Party members in Florida didn't trust him to begin with. “I wonder if he was ever listening or it was just a ploy to get votes…He says all the right things to the audience he needs, and we in Florida are no longer his audience. His new audience is national voters who might elect him president,”34 according to Lisa Becker, a TEA Party leader with a unique group called The Sisterhood of Mommy Patriots who told this to The Daily Beast. This was after Becker described herself as a “big fan” of Rubio before he was elected.
There was also a sad sense of what could have been. “If Marco Rubio had kept his promise to Florida voters and had gone (to the Senate) to oppose amnesty… Donald Trump wouldn’t even be in the race. It would be Marco Rubio up there, with the rest of the field trying to knock him out,” said Jack Oliver, legislative director of a group called Floridians for Immigration Enforcement.35
Conversely, Cruz was a TEA Party favorite but one that the faithful thought may have been a better fit where he was, or, in a dream conservative administration, the newest member of the Supreme Court. Perhaps Cruz's biggest sin, though, was simply running in a year when much of his potential support base said, in the words of American Majority founder Ned Ryun, “Cruz people feel they can work within the status quo, Trump people say screw the status quo, we’re sick of it.”36 After years of being kicked in the teeth by the political establishment, those who were TEA Party said enough was enough.
Their non-politician choice could have been Dr. Ben Carson, another long-tern recipient of a TEA Party draft movement since he criticized Barack Obama at the 2013 National Prayer Breakfast, with the President in attendance.37 While establishment Republicans blanched at Carson's comments, such as when he said he couldn't support a Muslim for President, TEA Party leaders understood the sentiment perfectly.38 But concerns over Carson's leadership ability and lack of business acumen eventually relegated his support to the more evangelical corners of the TEA Party. Perhaps Carson would be a great Surgeon General, they said, but he wasn't quite the candidate they wanted as President. (Carson eventually instead took the job of HUD Secretary, appointed by President Trump and confirmed in 2017.)
So despite their misgivings and perhaps a dose of the Reagan 80% rule – if your political ally advocates for 80 percent of what you stand for, you don't sweat the other 20 percent – many TEA Party participants gravitated from a movement without a leader to a leader without a movement; at least not the one the TEA Party was originally intended to be. Donald Trump was that leader, a man who said the right things and was unsullied by being inside the Beltway.
Yet to those looking at the TEA Party from the outside, Donald Trump was still an enigma; a square peg in a round hole. He certainly threw the race for a loop, as Molly Ball noted in The Atlantic:
This combination of Tea Party and establishment sensibilities explains why his rivals couldn’t stop Trump. They were stuck in the old mindset. Jeb Bush planned to run against a Tea Party candidate – someone like Cruz. Cruz thought he’d be up against an establishment candidate – someone like Bush. The two sides couldn’t agree on why Trump was bad: Did he have to be stopped because unlike Cruz, he wasn’t a true conservative, or because he would set back Bush’s efforts to reform and broaden the party?39
To be sure, establishment conservatives looked at Trump with horror, convinced he was a liberal Trojan horse bent on destroying the GOP. Even TPX's Sal Russo believed, in a Washington Examiner interview headlined “Tea Party sours on Donald Trump”:
Trump's message lacks the substantive seriousness and positive, uplifting vision required to turn anti-establishment agitators, like President Ronald Reagan, into winners at the ballot box.”40
Yet the Left correctly deduced Donald Trump was the TEA Party's “very own” presidential candidate. Why?
(P)erhaps the simplest explanation is the best: He relishes telling other people to go to hell. That's essentially what the Tea Party movement is all about. The Tea Party has no constructive agenda, just a desire to frustrate whatever Democratic and Republican leaders are trying to accomplish. It's anti-government, anti-politician, and anti-media.
So if Trump gets in a verbal scrape with a debate moderator or an elected official, he's a stand-in for Tea Party activists against the establishment. When he all but extends his middle finger to establishment types, he's reminding his supporters that he isn't of Washington. And when he comes under attack, they come under attack. That makes it very hard for his rivals to undermine him with his base.41
While a lot of the TEA Party rank-and-file was solidly in Trump's corner, though, some leaders were still seeking more ideological purity. One of those was Bill Pascoe, a Ted Cruz supporter purportedly representing the Tea Party Patriots, who expressed to NPR after a GOP primary debate the frustration other candidates had with Trump and the factor that flummoxed them so:
It seems to me that one of the things that's been going on for many months is that the critique against Donald Trump has been that he's inconsistent. And we saw some of that last night. We saw, in fact, as you just mentioned, the Fox News moderators talking about his flip-flops and making him watch video of his flip-flops. So the argument has been that he's inconsistent.
(…)
The fact that he is, in fact, remarkably consistent. You just have to know what to look for. He's inconsistent if you look at his flip-flops on the issues, but he's remarkably consistent if you go to the motivation for his flip-flops. The motivation is always the same, and that is that at any given time on any given issue, Donald Trump can be counted on to take the position that serves his own interests at that time.42
So let me remind you again of Jenny Beth Martin at CPAC 2016 – or, even better, of what Rick Wilson said, but adding his very next statement:
Trump has been unforgivably wrong on every single issue in the conservative portfolio, and his current road-to-Damascus conversions on abortion, guns, taxes, religion, and immigration all have the air of the man up for parole promising that he’s changed his ways. But his supporters simply don’t care. His appeal to them isn’t so much ideological as it is nihilistic.43 (Emphasis mine.)
Indeed, there was always a segment of the TEA Party that wanted to burn everything down. Perhaps once upon a time in the early days most of the others had the naive belief that they could change the system, but once again the broken promises were too much for them. More among this group moved into this camp once the establishment managed to con enough voters into nominating Mitt Romney in 2012, while the bitter clingers may have hung on until 2014, seething as TEA Party favorites for Senate seats were crushed by the establishment. Analyzing these dead-enders, conservative pundit Erick Erickson saw the support of Trump as their measure of revenge.
Drastic measures meant Trump. The conservatives, like Paul, Rubio and Cruz, could not be trusted because they were of Washington. That they had opposed Washington to varying degrees made no difference. The angry and paranoid concluded they were infected by establishmentarianism.44
But many who were in the TEA Party were simply looking for a winner, and Donald Trump exemplified that attitude. Amy Kremer was one of those Trump supporters.
(A) growing number of former tea party activists see (Donald Trump) as their new hope, noting that Republicans have failed to repeal Obamacare, stop illegal immigration or scale back Obama’s domestic spending programs.
“We’ve given the Republican Party a chance,” said Amy Kremer, a founding tea party leader who now backs Trump. “They would have never taken the House without the tea party. We gave them the Senate. What have they accomplished? They haven’t accomplished a damn thing.”45
Michigan TEA Party organizer Joan Fabiano remarked on further attractive elements Trump provided. Part of his appeal was being self-funded, but the issues he ran on in 2016 lined up well with the TEA Party. “People were ready for America First,” Fabiano told me.46 My reading of her description: Trump was a blue-collar billionaire outsider, if there was such a thing.
Texas TEA Party leader (and later Congressional candidate) Katrina Pearson was another Trump fan. Pearson actually supported Ted Cruz for his Senate seat and was backing him for president – until she met Donald Trump. Eventually she turned her backing to Trump, telling Politico, “Cruz would be a good president, but I think right now with all the hyperpartisanship in the country, I think Trump would be the better person to transition out of Obama. It would be a softer transition for some on the left. It would be a harder transition for some on the right.”47
Michael Johns, a unique early TEA Party leader in that he had experience inside the Beltway as (among other tasks) a speechwriter for President George H.W. Bush and policy analyst for the Heritage Foundation, was also a Trump backer. He explained why after speaking at a controversial appearance48 at Cornell University in February, 2018:
I defended Trump since very early on. First, I find it difficult that insider problems can be resolved by insiders. So the fact that he was an outsider was appealing. Second, he very clearly identified key issues that Republicans usually never touched, like trade agreement and illegal immigration, into tenants of his candidacy.49
I'll return to Johns' remarks in the next chapter since they were uttered in the midst of Trump's tenure in office, but suffice it to say that if insiders were split – Johns, Kremer, and Sarah Palin for Trump, Jenny Beth Martin and Christine O'Donnell for Ted Cruz – imagine what those looking in saw and felt. “The shifting alliances leave the impression the tea party is no longer a coalition joined by a common refrain – Taxed Enough Already – but silos of think-tank wonks, big-business conservatives and angry white voters who don’t speak the same language,”50 wrote Lisa Mascaro of the Los Angeles Times.
As the race went on and contenders withdrew, the divide between Cruz and Trump deepened and became a Republican cold war, intensifying further after the departure of Marco Rubio.
Trump has... split the Tea Party, perhaps irrevocably. The populist and free-market absolutist forces that came together to form the Tea Party turned severely at odds with one another, and daily fierce debates on Tea Party websites and on talk radio rage between supporters of Cruz and supporters of Trump. Cruz supporters argued in terms of fidelity to conservative principles: “Real conservatives have a message for the Trump campaign. We are conservatives first and then Republicans. We are Republicans because the party is allegedly the conservative party.”51
Meanwhile, the pundits argued whether it should be John Kasich or Ted Cruz who should drop out to make it a two-man race in order to stop Trump. Still fiddling while Rome burned.
That divide, which showed its initial fissures when Trump took the lead in the primary race, spread to all quarters of the conservative political world. Quoting Wilson again:
Every day, their enemies list grows longer: George Will, Megyn Kelly, Fox News, Glenn Beck, Charles Krauthammer, Karl Rove, Roger Ailes. All are marked and targeted by the Troll Party. I feel like I’m in good company, and frankly I’m proud to be included on their hit list.52
Glenn Beck is a good example of this “enemies list.” You may recall in the days of the TEA Party's formation Beck was an early cheerleader and promoter, but after a number of members of the group jumped on board the Trump Train, Beck was their fiercest critic.
I don’t think these are Tea Party people who are following him. Some of them may be, but I think these – I mean, you can’t – if you were a Tea Party person, then you were lying. You were lying. It was about Barack Obama being black. It was about him being a Democrat, because this guy is offering you many of the same things, as shallow as the same way.53
Beck soon found he had few remaining friends in the TEA Party. “Glenn Beck was not a part of the Tea Party movement. He took advantage of it, as many did, to catapult his career,”54 said Tea Party Nation founder Judson Phillips.
Once the GOP nomination was secured by Trump – despite a last-ditch effort to “Free the Delegates”55 – those on the winning side called on the losers to join them. But a segment of the TEA Party and other Republican voters remained resolutely #NeverTrump, in particular complaining about his lack of fundraising56 and “ground game” organization. Included on this list were a number of familiar names: former Presidential opponents Sen. Lindsay Graham and Ron Paul, libertarian-leaning Congressman Justin Amash of Michigan, TEA Party favorite Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska, former FreedomWorks leaders Matt Kibbe and Brendan Steinhauser, and media personalities Glenn Beck, Steve Deace, Erick Erickson, and, for most of the campaign, Mark Levin – although Levin changed his mind just before the election.57
But even as they lit into the #NeverTrumpers for forgetting the Supreme Court or being a vote for Hillary Clinton, it was up to the ragged remnants of the TEA Party to bring him the prize, and they were up to the task.58 TEA Party faith in Trump was justified when the Tea Party Patriots Citizens Fund endorsed him in late September,59 also promising to work on Senate races in Florida (Rubio), North Carolina (Richard Burr), Ohio (Rob Portman), and Pennsylvania (Pat Toomey). In that group, they went 5-for-5 as Trump won all those states and all four Senators stayed on.
After the Trump triumph the Tea Party Patriots – conveniently forgetting that their leadership accused Trump of being insincere and strongly backed his top primary opponent – were glad to claim credit and assure us they were still a viable force:
In addition to defeating the Big Government philosophy, another significant collateral “win” from this election is that it effectively mutes the Washington Establishment’s oft-repeated allegation that the tea party movement is dead.
The myth that the Tea Party movement has run its course and is on the decline is a convenient narrative, and a clever technique to dismiss and sideline an effective political opponent. After all, no one needs to take seriously a dormant or dead movement.
This election, however, is definitive proof not only of our ability to engage in political races and help the candidates win, but also affirms the broad popularity of our message and agenda.60
In recent years, the term “silo mentality” has become a buzzword, but it's one that seems quite apt at describing TEA Party support for Donald Trump. Let's go back to the beginning and again remind you the origins of the TEA Party were libertarian, in opposition to higher taxes and excessive government spending. At that point it didn't have a lot of adherents but those who followed the nascent movement were fiscal conservatives very interested in Constitutional government, or at the very least not passing on trillions of dollars in debt to their grandchildren.
As the number of TEA Parties grew and more people became interested in them, many also adopted the reflexive qualities of being in a Republican-based movement. Some of the new people were in a sinister but small subset of racists, while many more exhibited an unwillingness to believe (or shift away from) certain sources of news. In a manner of speaking that relates to the overall mentality, they were in an information silo.61
Reporting on the Obamacare bill was a good example of this, although it's hard to assign complete blame on average people not attuned to politics when the legislative sausage-making process created a bill that was larger than most big-city phone books. (Readers of a certain age will immediately relate; those under 30 will have to trust me on this one.) So many concepts, such as the “public option” and so-called “death panels,” went in and out of the bill and/or were proposed as amendments so quickly it was hard to keep track.
And then there were the tricks the Democrats used to pass the bill without risking a GOP filibuster once Scott Brown was elected to the Senate. For example, Obamacare supporters used a common Congressional ruse of what I call “hollowing out” a previously-passed House bill with a complete replacement by the Senate, then passing it and sending the revised bill back to the House for a vote. This technique gets around the Constitutional prohibition from spending bills originating in the Senate as they are only allowed to originate in the House. It's why the key Obamacare vote on Christmas Eve 2009 was in the Senate but the final bill came to President Obama from the House after passage the next March, after the Senate had placed reconciliation rules on the bill to pass it without the possibility of a filibuster.
Can a layman keep up with all that, let alone all the other bills Congress was considering? Since the answer was no, Joe Sixpack had to find sources he could trust, and having a similar worldview to his was a quick way of building trust. Unfortunately, those who created “fake news” understood this, too.
It bears mentioning that the protest movements on the other side of the aisle felt similarly disaffected by their small-d democratic process. While the powers-that-be in the Democrat Party already had a way to game their system through the use of superdelegates who weren't bound to state election results, they had decided as early as 2009 that, come 2016, it was going to be Hillary's turn – because it should have been Hillary's chance to break the so-called White House “glass ceiling” in 2008 before this “mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean”62 upstart named Barack Obama jumped the line. So no others needed apply for 2016, and except for Bernie Sanders they probably shouldn't have because they got zero traction in the race.
But that Sanders guy was a Pied Piper to a segment of voters otherwise disinterested in the Democrats and more enamored by the anarchists of Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and the remnants of Occupy Wall Street and various other haunts. Had the mainstream media been Republican-leaning instead of in the tank for Democrats in general and Hillary in particular, that segment of frustrated progressives may have carried Sanders over the top just as the TEA Party irregulars pushed Donald Trump past a group of talented, conservative Republicans who didn't have Trump's celebrity or reputation as unafraid to speak his mind even when politically imprudent.
Yet the press that promoted the Hillary vs. Trump matchup (in the case of Trump, with $2 billion in unearned media assistance in the Republican primaries63 that expanded to $5 billion by Election Day)64 as, in their interests, being both good for ratings and the best way to get Hillary elected – as Trump was the loosest of cannons – completely miscalculated the effect of the remnants of the TEA Party which, as they often assured us, was dead. This turned out to be a fatal mistake when you consider the Sanders progressives who were thrown under the bus by the mainstream Democrat Party and in their spite stayed home or voted for Green Party candidate Jill Stein.65 (Stein's votes could have flipped Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin into Clinton's column as the Green Party candidate outperformed Trump's victory margin in each of those jurisdictions. This would have allowed Clinton to eke out a narrow Electoral College win.)
Moreover, take a look at the states in the so-called Clinton firewall that collapsed, particularly Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and especially battle-tested Wisconsin, and you'll find surprising strength in their respective TEA Parties.66 Four of the five states had Republican governors as well, with Pennsylvania the exception (although they elected a GOP governor in 2010.) It turned out Trump exceeded his polling numbers in most of those states: in October all but Ohio were polling for Hillary.
Yet the signs were there. Looking at the respective primaries, Trump ran close behind Hillary in each of those states, except in Ohio where he defeated her outright (but lost to favorite son John Kasich.) Again with the exception of Pennsylvania, more Republicans than Democrats came out to the primary in each state, all of which had Democratic and Republican primaries simultaneously. Consider as well that Obama carried all five in 2012, so these people weren't as fired up about Mitt Romney.
Also worth pointing out: the polling that favored Hillary all along spawned the conventional wisdom that Donald Trump would lose, perhaps even in a Goldwater-style landslide. Even more promising was the idea they would finally be rid of this pesky TEA Party:
Nevertheless, even if organization, resources, and strong networks keep its various parts active for some time to come, it is hard to see the Tea Party as such hanging together for many more years. The 'Tea Party' label has become more ho-hum. Elites that find the label for electoral or policy struggles will downplay it during the general presidential contest in 2012. The greater limitation for the Tea Party is the age of its participants. Grassroots Tea Partiers are mostly older people whose activism will of necessity wane in coming years. GOP supporters and Fox viewers, too, are disproportionately from the ranks of older white Americans. Both the Tea Party grass roots, and key institutions surrounding it, must find ways to appeal to younger cohorts of Americans, who are more racially diverse, or their decline is assured.67
Even better, the leftist experts cheered that Trump's loss would force the Republican Party to “moderate or die.”68 Just like in the aftermath of 2012, though, some pundits believed there would be a pony hidden beneath all the manure: one RedState blogger believed the purge of populists from the GOP in the wake of a Hillary win (had things happened that way) may have benefited conservatism in the end:
Perhaps the only silver lining in Trump’s likely defeat is that the Republican Party and conservatism will move back to a more constitutionalist footing. We gave populism a chance and it failed besides giving us a flawed candidate.69
But when Trump didn't lose, it was noted (by researcher Elizabeth A. Yates, writing in the Washington Post) that, while he wasn't the ideal TEA Party president he at least played for the right team:
Trump is not a tea party president, but many tea party activists see his election as an opportunity to pursue an agenda unfettered by the establishment that has blocked their advances. “This was a great election,” explained one activist, “because it’s going to separate the herd,” eliminating “progressives” from the Republican Party.70
What it didn't appear to do was make a dent in the core issues of the TEA Party, as their diehard pro-Constitution remnants may look back in four to eight years and curse the Trump administration as a missed opportunity to truly rightsize government.
In the end, it took one of Trump's vanquished opponents a couple years to figure out his appeal. I have all the respect in the world for former Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, and after a year of a Trump presidency he analyzed it this way:
Many Trump voters are unapologetic social conservatives who reject secularism and multiculturalism while embracing patriotism. At the same time, they are economic populists. They want to cut federal funding for Planned Parenthood, but don’t share Paul Ryan’s eagerness to limit the growth of their Social Security and Medicare benefits. They don’t view Mr. Trump’s break from Republican orthodoxy on legal immigration and free trade as problematic. They cheer his denunciation of kneeling football players.
These voters suspect, with not inconsiderable evidence, that the GOP’s leaders have less in common with them than with the cultural elite. In their lifetimes, they have watched both parties, all three branches of government, and the popular culture move from embracing many of their core values to, at best, tolerating them.71
In fact, these were the TEA Party refugees who elevated Donald Trump to the highest office in the land (over Governor Jindal, among others.) But as it turned out, a significant part of the problem in the era of Trump was the Republican Congress the TEA Party helped to elect in 2010, 2012, and 2014. My next chapter moves forward to the Trump presidency and its failure to do what had been promised for seven years to TEA Party faithful: repeal Obamacare.
Notes - bearing in mind some of these links may now be dead ones:
1 http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0904/15/lkl.01.html
2 http://www.businessinsider.com/donald-trump-to-oprah-in-1988-win-president-2015-9
3 http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/presidential-campaign/256159-a-look-back-at-trumps-first-run
4 https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-last-time-trump-wrecked-a-party
5 https://www.politico.com/story/2011/03/donald-trump-birther-051473
6 https://web.archive.org/web/20160413052151/ http://www.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/04/19/byron.trump.president/index.html
7 https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/poll-donald-trump-catapults-place-2012-gop-field/story?id=13318814
8 https://www.politico.com/story/2011/03/donald-trump-birther-051473
9 One example of the entertainment media giving Trump free pixels: https://www.insideedition.com/headlines/2132-is-donald-trump-a-birther
10 And again: https://ew.com/article/2011/04/19/donald-trump-good-morning-america/
11 https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-oreilly-spar-over-birther-issue/
12 https://www.c-span.org/video/?299058-1/donald-trump-remarks
13 http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2011/04/05/trump-to-address-tea-party-rally-in-florida/
17 Ibid.
18 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/08/06/annotated-transcript-the-aug-6-gop-debate/ “They asked me a question as to pro-life or choice. And I said if you let it run, that I hate the concept of abortion. I hate the concept of abortion. And then since then, I've very much evolved. And what happened is friends of mine years ago were going to have a child, and it was going to be aborted. And it wasn't aborted. And that child today is a total superstar, a great, great child. And I saw that. And I saw other instances. And I am very, very proud to say that I am pro-life.”
19 http://www.ontheissues.org/celeb/Donald_Trump_Gun_Control.htm “I generally oppose gun control, but I support the ban on assault weapons and I support a slightly longer waiting period to purchase a gun. With today’s Internet technology we should be able to tell within 72-hours if a potential gun owner has a record.” Cited by site as coming from Trump's 2000 book The America We Deserve.
20 http://washington.cbslocal.com/2015/03/19/trump-says-his-business-experience-makes-him-the-best-candidate-to-reform-washington/ “I would make this country so rich that you wouldn’t have to cut it.”
21 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/08/06/annotated-transcript-the-aug-6-gop-debate/ Moderator Bret Baier: “Mr. Trump, it's not just your past support for single- payer health care. You've also supported a host of other liberal policies… you've also donated to several Democratic candidates, Hillary Clinton included, Nancy Pelosi. You explained away those donations saying you did that to get business-related favors.”
22 http://www.mcclatchydc.com/opinion/article88823407.html
23 https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-the-tea-party-got-hijacked-by-trumps-troll-party
24 https://money.cnn.com/2015/06/16/media/donald-trump-apprentice-nbc/
26 https://money.cnn.com/2015/06/29/media/donald-trump-nbc-ends-relationship/
27 https://money.cnn.com/2015/06/29/media/donald-trump-statement-nbc-brian-williams/index.html
28 https://www.politico.com/story/2016/03/jesse-benton-pro-trump-super-pac-220596
29 https://www.vox.com/2016/6/9/11893300/women-vote-trump-super-pac-donald-trump
30 https://www.teapartypatriots.org/news/tea-party-patriots-ceo-jenny-beth-martins-remarks-from-cpac/ It should be noted that the TEA Party Patriots Citizens Fund endorsed Cruz earlier that month.
31 https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/05/the-trump-sanders-two-step-213903
33 This is a nice “who's who” of Trump TEA Party supporters, at least at the point I chose to take the archive from – shortly before the election. https://web.archive.org/web/20161022091851/http://teapartyfortrump.org/
34 https://www.thedailybeast.com/tea-partiers-rage-against-rubio-2016
35 https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-tea-party-created-marco-rubio-now-they-can-take-him-out
36 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-trump-teaparty-idUSKCN0WH133
37
39 https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/05/did-the-tea-party-create-donald-trump/482004/
40 http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/tea-party-sours-on-donald-trump/article/2568552
41 https://www.vox.com/2015/8/7/9115493/tea-party-donald-trump
42 https://www.npr.org/2016/03/04/469149275/tea-party-patriots-stand-behind-sen-ted-cruz-for-president A bit of a misnomer, since TEA Party support was also there for Trump.
43 https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-the-tea-party-got-hijacked-by-trumps-troll-party
45 http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-trump-tea-party-divide-20160318-story.html
46 Notes from telephone conversation with Joan Fabiano, February 25, 2018.
47 https://www.politico.com/story/2015/11/donald-trump-katrina-pierson-216005
48 The snowflakes were offended that a TEA Party person would deign to speak at their university – so much so that the event had to become a private event lest the sponsor be stuck with a $2,000 tab for security against what turned out to be 15 protestors – a foreshadow of my final chapter. http://cornellsun.com/2017/02/15/students-protest-private-lecture-calling-it-a-safe-space-for-white-supremacy/
50 http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-trump-tea-party-divide-20160318-story.html
51 http://www.otheringandbelonging.org/trump-the-tea-party-the-republicans-and-the-other/ The quotes within are purportedly from Tea Party Nation's Judson Phillips, but the original links are dead.
52 https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-the-tea-party-got-hijacked-by-trumps-troll-party
55 http://www.renewamerica.com/article/160624
56 https://www.redstate.com/leon_h_wolf/2016/06/11/wont-believe-much-less-money-trump-raised-hillary
57 http://www.wnd.com/2016/05/see-list-of-98-top-republicans-who-refuse-to-back-trump/
58 Such as the TEA Party in the city of my birth. http://toledoteaparty.com/toledo-tea-party-volunteers-make-3000-calls-for-trump/
60 http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2016/11/12/how-tea-party-helped-trump-win-election.html
62 http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/01/31/biden.obama/
63 https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-2-billion-free-media_us_56e83410e4b065e2e3d75935
65 https://www.salon.com/2016/12/02/jill-stein-spoiled-the-2016-election-for-hillary-clinton/
66 http://www.irehr.org/2015/09/15/the-tea-party-movement-in-2015/
67 Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson: The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) p. 203.
68 Skocpol and Williamson, p. 215.
69 https://www.redstate.com/diary/davenj1/2016/10/27/bastardization-tea-party/
71 https://www.wsj.com/articles/trumps-style-is-his-substance-1518652786
Next Tuesday will continue my series with Chapter 15: Obamacare Entrenched.
In the meantime, you can buy the book or Buy Me a Coffee, since I have a page there now. And remember…