Support for Trumpism, like support for Nazism, is built on a edifice of self-deception, as former GOP campaign guru Tim Miller’s new book makes clear
If you’ve ever wondered how so many professional Republicans, people who work in politics on a daily basis, have justified their support for Donald Trump and the larger miasma of manipulation, prejudice, lying, cruelty and incompetence that is Trumpism, make time for Tim Miller’s book Why We Did It.
Miller is one who got away. After cutting his teeth as an Iowa staffer on John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign, serving as press secretary for Jon Huntsman’s 2012 presidential bid, working for the Republican National Committee as its 2012 liaison to the Mitt Romney campaign, and then joining former Florida Governor Jeb Bush in his ill-fated 2016 presidential run, Miller never closed ranks behind Trump. In 2017, he made waves by supporting Doug Jones, the Democratic candidate for the US Senate, and in 2020 he co-founded Republican Voters Against Trump, one of a constellation of never-Trumper efforts. In Why We Did It, which is both a highly entertaining memoir of Miller’s own trajectory down and out of the bowels of the GOP and a sincere effort at penance, he explores how hard it was for him to break from his professional world as well as the many reasons why so many of his peers have found themselves cozy nooks inside the putrescent folds of the Jabba the Hutt that is TrumpWorld.
As a Jew and the child of a Holocaust survivor, I’ve long wondered why so many German Jews didn’t flee Nazi Germany when they had a chance during the mid-1930s. I have also pondered why so many “ordinary” Germans acquiesced to or embraced Nazism. After reading Victor Klemperer’s dairy I Will Bear Witness, which chronicles how a middle-aged Jewish academic married to a non-Jew (and thus semi-protected from some of the worst anti-Jewish laws) experienced those years, I came to understand that for many German Jews leaving their mother country just seemed like the worst option. They would be abandoning the only home they knew, they would be unable to work in their chosen field (Klemperer was a professor of Romance Languages at the University of Dresden until the Nazis prevented people of Jewish heritage from teaching), and they would be completely dependent on distant family. Plus, they believed it was only a matter of time before a coup deposed Hitler. And, most poignantly, they were regularly buoyed by small kindnesses from fellow Germans. Despite the Nazi terror and the ever-present risk of being informed on, some Germans helped the Klemperers and occasionally people in the street would press extra ration tickets into their hands. Life for him and his wife in Dresden, even after they were forced out of their own home and into crowded housing just for Jews, was somehow bearable almost until the end.
As for why so many Germans became Nazis, the answers vary. Some were already deeply anti-Semitic, so blaming Jews for Germany’s ills felt normal. Racism and eugenics weren’t unique to early twentieth century Germany, either — many of the Nazis’ ideas about the superiority of the Aryan race and the inferiority of Jews and Blacks came from England and the United States. Adolf Hitler praised the US Congress for passing the 1924 National Origins Act, which sought to protect white America from darker-skinned immigrants, and his book Mein Kampf was clearly influenced by the antisemitic American geneticist Madison Grant, whose theories led the US Supreme Court to upheld the eugenic sterilization of “imbeciles” in 1927.
But the hard truth is most Germans embraced Nazism because they liked it, or because they were conformists, and — this is crucial — because they didn’t know what else they could do. As journalist Milton Mayer discovered in his 1954 book, They Thought They Were Free, the ordinary people he interviewed after the war — among them a tailor, a cabinetmaker, an unemployed salesman, a baker, a bill collector, a teacher and a policeman — had heard rumors of terrible atrocities taking place against Jews and others. But they tended to dismiss them as enemy propaganda. Moreover, as Mayer wrote, “Who wants to investigate the reports? Who is ‘looking for trouble’? Who will be the first to undertake (and how undertake it?) to track down the suspicion of governmental wrongdoing under a governmental dictatorship, to occupy himself, in times of turmoil and in wartime with evils, real or rumored, that are wholly outside his own life, outside his own circle, and above all, outside his own power?”
Millions joined the Nazi Party in 1933 of their own free will, Mayer notes, but he points out that “men joined the Party to get a job or to hold a job or to get a better job or to save themselves from getting a worse job, or to get a contract or to hold a contract, a customer, a client, a patient.” Mayer suggests that in the same way that professionals in America might join the American Bar Association or American Medical Association while not agreeing with all their formal policies, Germans became Nazi party members but not necessarily violent ideologues. At the same time, Mayer notes, many also “wanted Germany purified” of all the politicians and the corruption they believed was endemic across the political class. And they wanted to make Germany great again after the humiliation of losing World War One.
So how does Miller explain why so many Republicans have stood by Trump? He offers a menagerie of answers, or, in one of the many hilarious turns of phrase that peppers his book, a “binder full of complicity.” It starts with a refusal to break with the terms of the political game they thought they were in, which for many involved years of managing to keep the Republican base just fired up enough with red-meat lines about their opponents to win elections while not every letting the rubes get their hands on steering wheel. “It’s all part of the Game,” he writes. “Policy white paper doesn’t actually add up? Who cares, part of the Game. Attack on your opponent isn’t exactly in good faith? Part of the Game; make them defend it. Getting an endorsement from someone popular but repugnant? Game. Raising money from people you suspect to be corrupt? Game. Spam-emailing supporters with hysterical messages about how their five dollars is needed to prevent the evil-doers from stealing everything that ever mattered to them? That’s how the Game is placed.” The ethical vacuousness at the heart of professional Republican political practice is the starting point for the decline into Trumpism. (Of course, it’s possible that every professional field in America is similarly pocked with ethical holes but that’s a topic for a different essay.)
“Tell people that their country is being stolen from them long enough, and they take it seriously, even if most of the people writing and approving the text don’t. And so it shouldn’t have been that much of a surprise that eventually some of those reading these end-times warnings would come to Washington with pitchforks and gallows.” And zip-ties, Miller might have added. The Big Lie, that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, is rooted in soil polluted for decades by convenient lying about seemingly smaller things.
Still, Miller describes eleven discrete personality types that together enabled the rise and consolidation of Trumpism:
— Messiahs and Junior Messiahs: These are people who took posts in the Trump Administration, including high ones in the White House, claiming that what they did was justified because of all the bad actions they prevented. Miller has little sympathy for them, especially as none of them had the courage to speak out against Trump when their voices might have carried weight, or done the single most influential they could do to stop him, which was endorse his opponent.
— Demonizers: People who decided that the left, the media, Big Tech, social justice warriors et al were much more evil and that Trump was a “human fuck-you to the bastards.”
— LOL Nothing Matters Republicans: People who were already used to defending the indefensible from years of trench work in Republican campaigns, or who believe that nothing matters because the decline of the West or the apocalypse is coming anyway.
— Tribalist Trolls: Like the Demonizers, people who just see everything in terms of whether it is good for their side or not.
— Strivers: Arguably the least interesting group, these people were like those who joined the Nazi party because they were just trying to advance their careers.
— Little Mixes: People who yearn to be “in the room where it happens,” like Senator Lindsey Graham, who flipped from vociferous opposition to Trump to obsequious fawning.
— Peter Principle Disprovers: “Hacks and maroons” who would never gotten close to the Oval Office in any other administration but under Trump “were not going to miss their opportunity to experience the heights of American power and governance just because a malignant ass pimple was behind the Resolute Desk.” Miller is a wonderful writer, have I mentioned that?
— Nerd Revengers: People who got teased or marginalized in high school now getting their chance to seem cool.
— Inert Team Players: Company men and women so loyally Republican that they couldn’t imagine being anything else.
— Compartmentalizers: In some ways this is one of the most interesting of Miller’s subgroups, because he includes himself in it (having done a modest amount of work in 2017 on behalf of Trump’s nominee to run the Environmental Protection Agency, former energy lobbyist Scott Pruitt). These people kept doing their jobs while trying to psychologically check out as much as possible about the implications of helping Trump.
— Cartel Crashers: People who took advantage of the Trump years to line their pockets, the already greedy and grifty.
Writing Why We Did It is ultimately Miller’s way of confronting himself and his peers over something that, frankly, still isn’t even half over. He faces this in the book’s last chapter, where he tries and fails to get a former friend, Caroline Wren, to admit that as a VIP Advisor to the January 6th rally that became a riot, working hand in hand with Infowars founder and human scumbag Alex Jones, and managing a town house reception that feted the likes of Bernie Kerik and Rudy Giuliani, she had blood on her hands. Miller shares their conversation almost verbatim. “I don’t think fifty million people are mindless idiots,” Wren says to Miller. “I agree,” he replies. “Donald Trump lied to them….He knows he lost. He’s a child….He always said he’d never admit he’s gonna lose. [Ashli Babbitt is] dead because he’s a baby.” Wren replies, in a whisper, “I don’t think that.”
Miller offers this closer: “Caroline has been sucked in by the cult. She is obsessed with Trump and adores him, as incommodious as that many seem. She’s the masochistic follower who feels a compulsion to be tested, abused, and forced to prove they are deserving of the leader’s love over and over and over again. And like many of our parents and grandparents and friends, she’s become unreachable, thanks to consuming petty grievances and an impenetrable media bubble.”
Why don’t more Republicans follow Miller and leave the fold? Why didn’t more Jews leave Germany? Why did so many Germans become Nazis? Because humans are fallible and cautious, and easily convince themselves of things that aren’t true. They can be led into fascism as easily as they can be led out, but someone else has to do the leading. Only the complete defeat of Nazism and the destruction of Germany convinced the German people to build a wall in their minds against fascism, the same way it convinced most Jews of the need for an independent state of their own that could be their ultimate protector when the rest of the world did little to help them.
Now in America we are seeing the same kind of organized resentment and intolerance that led to Nazism take hold among millions of ordinary Americans as well as many of their leaders. What is different now is that we have the benefit of knowing, in ways that the Jewish and non-Jewish Germans of the 1930s alike did not, where this leads. Tim Miller’s own story shows that Republicans can make a different choice. Had more Germans spoken up then like he is now, perhaps things there would never have gone so bad. At least now we know how to choose.