Everything Trump Touches Dies

A Republican Strategist Gets Real About the Worst President Ever

Rick Wilson

• Publisher: Free Press
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781982103156
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

From Rick Wilson—longtime Republican strategist, political commentator, Daily Beast contributor—the #1 New York Times bestseller about the disease that is destroying the conservative movement and burning down the GOP: Trumpism. Includes an all-new chapter analyzing Trump's impact on the 2018 elections. In the #1 New York Times bestselling Everything Trump Touches Dies, political campaign strategist and commentator Rick Wilson delivers "a searingly honest, bitingly funny, comprehensive answer to the question we find ourselves asking most mornings: 'What the hell is going on?' ( Chicago Tribune ). The Guardian hails Everything Trump Touches Dies, saying it gives, "more unvarnished truths about Donald Trump than anyone else in the American political establishment has offered. Wilson never holds back." Rick mercilessly exposes the damage Trump has done to the country, to the Republican Party, and to the conservative movement that has abandoned its principles for the worst President in American history.Wilson unblinkingly dismantles Trump's deceptions and the illusions to which his supporters cling, shedding light on the guilty parties who empower and enable Trump in Washington and in the media. He calls out the race-war dead-enders who hitched a ride with Trump, the alt-right basement dwellers who worship him, and the social conservatives who looked the other way. Publishers Weekly calls it, "a scathing, profane, unflinching, and laugh-out-loud funny rebuke of Donald Trump and his presidency."No left-winger, Wilson is a lifelong conservative who delivers his withering critique of Trump from the right. A leader of the Never Trump movement, he warned from the start that Trump would destroy the lives and reputations of everyone in his orbit, and Everything Trump Touches Dies is a deft chronicle the tragicomic political story of our time. From the early campaign days through the shock of election night, to the inconceivable train-wreck of Trump's first year. Rick Wilson provides not only an insightful analysis of the Trump administration, but also an optimistic path forward for the GOP, the conservative movement, and the country. "Hilarious, smartly written, and usually spot-on" ( Kirkus Reviews ), Everything Trump Touches Dies is perfect for those on either side of the aisle who need a dose of unvarnished reality, a good laugh, a strong cocktail, and a return to sanity in American politics.

PART ONE

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THE ROAD TO THIS SHITSHOW

What to Expect When You’re Working for Trump

(A Tragedy in Five Acts)

– ACT I –

It all starts out so well.

You’re going to join the Trump administration. You’re on the team. You’re Steve Bannon or Rex Tillerson or Scott Pruitt or John Kelly or Michael Cohen. You’re Reince Priebus or Jared Kushner, or even Ivanka. Perhaps you’re someone lower in the food chain, and you’re going to show those RINOs who’s the boss now.

You’re a breath of fresh air in a fetid, corrupt hellhole only Donald Trump can reform. Donald Trump loves you, and his 50 million followers love you through the associative magic of Twitter. You bask in his reflected glory. You’re on the starting line. Even if you were skeptical at first, you’re swept up in the charisma and the adoration. Nothing can go wrong.

Donald Trump couldn’t be more complimentary, and the Trumpcentric new right media draws you as a towering hero of our times, a giant in the constellation of warrior princes and shield maidens surrounding the savior of America. Even the conservative press who were skeptical of Trump’s temperament opine, “Well at least we’ve got people like X in the administration. He’s so solid and so smart. Just imagine what he’ll get done.”

After all, Trump beat everyone (maybe even you) in the Republican Primary. He beat the hated mainstream media. He beat Hillary Freaking Clinton. Trump doesn’t play by the rules, and neither will you. Democratic critics are like mosquitoes.

There’s a champagne brunch with your lobbying firm partners the Sunday after you’re nominated. Everyone is flush with victory, and you’re feeling like everyone is going to do well (that profit-sharing plan still holds while you’re on leave from the firm, after all) while doing good for the country. You love this president, and this opportunity, and all the things it’s going to do for your career.

You’re going to Make America Great Again.

1

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VICHY REPUBLICANS

SOME SAY DONALD TRUMP IS the price this nation IS paying for too many years of partisan bickering and division. Some say ’Merica’s forgotten workin’ men rose up in a single, inchoate scream of rage at a system that for too long provided them with nothing but empty promises, bad trade deals, and government-subsidized carbs. Some claim it’s from a generation weaned on talk radio, Fox News, and the comments sections of a million Tea Party websites. Some say it’s a sign of a merciless God testing us to the breaking point.

I still think it’s because we didn’t let that old gypsy woman vote when she couldn’t produce a photo ID back in 2012.

All those reasons fall short of the mark, though, don’t they? By now, it should be clear that Trump’s election was a sign of the coming Apocalypse, soon to be followed by a rain of blood, seven years of darkness, and a plague of frogs. That may be exaggerating slightly, but we do have a plague of Pepes, the cartoon frog meme that is a favorite symbol of Trump’s alt-reich fan base, and there’s an odds-on chance that our grandchildren will hear this tale while hunched over guttering fires in the ruins of a radioactive Mad Max–style hellscape.

The Trumpian heroic narrative is simple; powerful alpha male warrior descends golden escalator. Forgotten Americans rise, don red helmets. Evil sorceress Hillary is defeated in single combat. Great feasting and rejoicing by the unwashed masses follows. Swamp is drained and all live MAGA ever after.

The truth is, as you might imagine, more prosaic, more horrible, and more human.

The mythology of Donald Trump’s rise to the Oval Office is rich in Trump-aggrandizing explanations that ignore the enablers, normalizers, media fellators, ideological arsonists, and moral ciphers who make up Washington’s and New York’s political and media culture. They’re the proximate reasons Trump was able to overcome the field of almost a dozen serious Republicans, and Ben Carson.

No, MAGA-hat fans, you didn’t simply rise in your mighty millions and elect The Donald all by your deplorable selves. You had help, much of it from the very elites you so revile. (“Revile” means hate. Sorry. I know you’re in an oxy stupor much of the time, so I’ll try to move slowly and not use big words.)

Yes, Trump’s election shocked the world, but the forces, conditions, and players who enabled and empowered Trump’s rise to the Republican nomination and the presidency have been with us all along. They’re perfectly explicable, if honestly embarrassing, to the world’s longest-running democracy.

For all that Trump voters claim to hate the swamp and the coastal elites who populate it, they owe the reptile-American population a note of thanks. The hated New York, DC, and media elites helped Trump more than they’ll admit. I’ll leave Russia’s role in the 2016 campaign to the many outstanding books on the topic, and to that Mueller fellow.

It was the cable networks (and no, not just Fox), the elite media, inert major donors, a monied horde of lobbyists, and the professional conservative activists who ditched principle for revenue, clicks, ratings, and transitory influence. They enabled, empowered, and elected Trump and continue to do so with their rolling coverage of his every presidential distraction strategy.

Without a particular confluence of their attention, resources, and focus, the Trump clown show would have been like every other kooky email chain forwarded by your mom or the contents of some narrow-gauge but high-cray Facebook group like Tea Party Patriots Against the Soros Moon Base. (I know you’re about to search Facebook for TPPASM. The question isn’t whether that’s a real group. The telling factor is that in this era you think it could be.)

The swamp played its role and does to this day; Washington’s culture is nothing if not resilient, adaptable, and resistant to change. I lived in it for years and watched it grind down the most idealistic people into the venal, smug, insular elites America loves to loathe. Washington is the drug-resistant syphilis of political climates, largely impervious to treatment and highly contagious. Donald Trump may have infected Washington with his own nationalist STD, but Washington returned the favor.

In early 2015 the DC political class of lobbyists, staffers, associations, think tanks, and the rest of the Washington ecosystem viewed Donald Trump as a political impossibility. He was the vulgar clown prancing and bellowing on the national stage, but never for a moment someone they could take seriously. The Old Order money liked Jeb Bush. The optimists liked Marco Rubio, the purists Ted Cruz. The 348 GOP candidates on the campaign trail, on the early debate stages, in the political scrum that was the 2016 GOP primary were almost all experienced, successful, and well-staffed. They were, by and large, Serious People. It was the quality of that divided field that let the political version of Gresham’s law sweep Trump into a position where Washington and national Republicans made the most consequential and destructive compromises in modern political history.

As the election progressed, it took an array of insiders from the GOP and the conservative movement to legitimize and normalize Trump for the Republican base voter beyond the howling edge of the Fox viewership. These men and women were Vichy Republicans, eager to shred their principles for a chance to touch the fringe of Trump’s golden wig, eager to bask in the celebrity glow of his spray tan.

Some Vichy Hall of Famers aren’t people you might directly associate with the Old Guard, Locust Valley Lockjaw Republican elite. Oh, no indeed.

Many were the purest of the Purity Posse. You know, the “we’d-rather-have-a-pure-minority-than-a-squishy-majority” types. These were conservative stalwarts dedicated to purging the RINOs, the impure, the accommodationists, the compromisers, and anyone who would vary from the Limbaughian-Levinist doctrine. (I made that up, but you can imagine seeing it in a history book about some schism in early socialist thought.) The people in Washington’s elite conservative political circles who looked down on Republicans who tried actually to govern and to live in the real world of political give-and-take were some of the first to let go of their alleged principles when Trump came calling. His skill at causing others to abase and destroy their reputation is peerless.

There’s so much blame to go around, it’s hard to know where to start, but the Vichy Republicans needed one man in a key position to become their Marshal Pétain. They needed one man to ensure the Trump takeover of the GOP, no matter the cost. They found him in the wee form of Reince Priebus.

REINCE PRIEBUS

Historians will recognize Reince Priebus as the man who could have killed the Trump virus early. Instead, he incubated it. He kept feeding it nutrients when he should have been killing it with bleach and hot, cleansing fire.

Reince Priebus is a man so inoffensive, so meek, so self-effacing, and seemingly hammered most of the time that his judgment on Trump led to a series of mistakes, missteps, capitulations, pratfalls, and bad reads of the political terrain that legitimized Trump for far too many mainstream Republicans. Mr. Wisconsin Nice was ultimately the Marshal Pétain of the GOP.

Not long after Trump entered the race, Priebus feared Trump would bolt the party, run as an independent, and wreck the GOP’s chances against Hillary Clinton. He absurdly believed that if he convinced Trump to sign a GOP loyalty pledge, Trump would support the party after he lost the primary and that the oath would moderate some of Red Hat Don’s more grotesque excesses.

So Priebus went to Trump Tower with a cheesy parchment that looked like it was extracted from a bin of discount award certificates at Office Depot and run through a knockoff-brand inkjet printer and had Trump sign it. The chairman of the party of Lincoln got rolled like a rube off the cheap bus to Atlantic City on a Friday night. What Reince saw as a solemn oath, Trump saw as a reality-TV stunt.

I know what you’re thinking. Had Reince been recently thawed from a cryogenic chamber, deep in the Earth? Was he part of some religious cult that forbids television? Could he not read? How could anyone have missed Donald Trump’s famous disregard for contracts, agreements, debts, obligations, commitments, payment schedules, and marital vows? How could anyone not suffering from a diet of lead paint chips and head trauma possibly believe that one gimcrack piece of paper would constrain Trump in any way at all?

Well, Reince Priebus did, and party tribalism, Russian information warfare, and Hillary Clinton’s inept campaigning took it from there. He was too trapped in the ichor of Trump’s smarmy world to escape it. The fixed smile and dead eyes Reince showed at every event weren’t an affirmation of his decision; they were a cry for help. Reince kept playing Tina to Trump’s Ike, knowing Trump had played him and knowing Trump loathed him.

I remember seeing Priebus at one of the last of the 2016 primary debates in Miami. I took my son into the spin room to watch the festivities, and there he was: a rictus grin, a thousand-yard stare, the certain knowledge that Trump was going to be the nominee and he’d done nothing to stop it.

Could he have stopped it? Yes, at four or five different inflection points. Did he want to? Perhaps.

Perhaps a strong chairman with a clear vision for the future of the party could have. But here’s a dirty little secret of national political party chairs: they generally suck at their jobs, and Reince fell under even that low bar. In the era of SuperPACs, powerful House, Senate, and governors’ committees, and independent expenditures, their role has become disintermediated and minimized. They’re largely a conduit to sluice money around the campaign finance system. There was a reason I used to joke that I wanted Debbie Wasserman Schultz to be Democratic National Committee head for 1,000 years, and it wasn’t because I found her to be politically intimidating or effective.

Few party chairs leave a meaningful legacy, though, for good or ill. Reince, however, will be remembered as the man who sold the GOP to Trump on the cheap. To his ironic credit, Priebus had ordered the infamous post-2012 Republican autopsy report, which called on the GOP to modernize, approach Hispanic voters differently, and reform itself.

Reince was later briefly “rewarded” by being given the thankless position of White House chief of staff. To date, the shortest-serving chief of staff in modern times, he survived less than six months of grueling, internecine battles for which he was entirely overmatched. By the end, between Donald Trump’s Twitter sprees, Steve Bannon’s private and public warfare with him, Jared and Ivanka’s class disdain, and an unmanageable White House, Reince was utterly broken.

He tried to recruit a cadre of RNC operatives to the White House and to impose a paper flow and scheduling system on President Ungovernable. That worked out about as well as expected; the handful of RNC aides, congressional staffers, and Washington hands he brought in were shredded, ignored, and rolled over by the Chaos President. They were immediately the subject of endless leak campaigns to Breitbart and alt-right bloggers clinging to Trump’s world like pasty white lampreys.¹ Priebus wasn’t Patient Zero for the Everything Trump Touches Dies effect, but he was the first of the DC political folks to go. For the Washington establishment, losing Reince hardly seemed like a loss at all; he’d been unable to deliver the certainty, structure, and compliance they desired. It was a sign in the age of Trump of Washington’s along-for-the-ride powerlessness that he sank without a trace and to few signs of regret from the people who counted on him to impose sanity on the Bedlam of 1600 Pennsylvania.

After departing the White House, Priebus returned to his law firm, started cooperating with the Mueller investigation, and slowly, painfully tried to reframe history. The Kenosha Ninja tried to cast himself as the hero of the piece, as all men do in retellings of their story. “No president has ever had to deal with so much so fast: a special counsel and an investigation into Russia and then subpoenas immediately, the media insanity—not to mention we were pushing out executive orders at record pace and trying to repeal and replace Obamacare right out of the gate,” he said.²

Oh, is that what it was, Reince? Self-delusion runs deep, and the desire to rewrite history is always with public men and women. Perhaps—and work with me here—Reince might have had a scintilla of self-awareness and a little self-deprecating appreciation for the fact that Donald Trump’s entire portfolio of problems weren’t some externality or deus ex swamp. Donald Trump created them, full stop.

The vital importance of a White House chief of staff who can handle the pressure, handle the principal, and handle the politics has never been clearer. If Priebus had come to this job in the ranks of the very best chiefs of staff in the past hundred years—Andy Card, Leon Panetta, Jim Baker—it could have been a different story.

However, Priebus was too weak to do the job and too blinded to know that the mistake he made at the beginning would destroy his career and reputation. His fellow Wisconsinite Charlie Sykes put it best: “I see him as kind of a tragic figure. What began as a matter of duty on his part—the decision to go all-in on Trump—ended with this scorch...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Introduction: Everything Trump Touches Dies
• Part One: The Road to this Shitshow
• Part Two: Victims of the Curse
• Part Three: Surrounded by Villains
• Part Four: After Trump
• Epilogue: Post-Trump America
• A Note on the Paperback Edition
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Notes
• Copyright