Fmr. RNC Spokesman on GOP’s Descent into Trumpism

WALTER ISAACSON, CORRESPONDENT: Thank you, Christiane and Tim Miller. Welcome to the show.

TIM MILLER, AUTHOR, “WHY WE DID IT”: Thanks Walter.

ISAACSON: This is a very personal book, your introspective, which is what I like. And it starts with your very first sentence. When you say America never would’ve gotten into this mess, if it weren’t for me and my friends, explain that.

MILLER: Yeah. Look, there have been a lot of books about the Trump era about all the craziness that happened behind the scenes about the why of you know, the geopolitical forces that could have led him there. But I, I felt like nobody had really grappled with the DC political class that went along with Trump to a much greater degree than I think anyone and that certainly that I anticipated. And, and, and I felt like I really wanted to reflect on, you know, I came out of Republican politics. I went to the Republican national committee was communications director for Jeb Bush. And I just, you know, I wanted to, to try to deal with why were all of my friends, why were all my former colleagues enabling of something that was so manifestly evil that they knew was evil, that they told me was evil in private. How did they justify it? And how did all of our behavior in the lead up to 2016 help pave the path for Trumpism. And so the book is kind of cut in those two halves, one half, looking back at my complicity from, you know, basically Palin all the way through Trump. And then the second half had those who stuck around after I bailed.

ISAACSON: Well, let’s talk about you first. You talk about your complicity. What led you down that path? And when did you realize you had crossed certain lines?

MILLER: Competitiveness is the answer love of the game, the game of politics you know, if we gave a name to the first half of the book, it would’ve been called “the game”. You know, I think everyone gets into politics. They have this, this earnestness about them, idealism but very quickly that turns, you know, for those of us on the campaign side, into this sort of jaded, you know, political gamesmanship, the horse race, the desire to win, to come up with clever tactics and strategies to defeat the other side. And so despite the fact that I was a pretty moderate Republican and had more in common with, you know Joe Manchin or a Kyrsten Sinema type of Democrat than I do with a far right tea party Republican, I’d put on the Jersey of the red team. And, and I started to focus on how can I help my team win, you know, more than I focused on, on caring about the public. And so, you know, I started this group called America Rising, which was an opposition research firm. And within two years, I’d gone from working on the presidential campaign of Jon Huntsman, the most moderate presidential candidate and Republican politics on, in the, in the past century, you know, to being a hatchet man that was trying to tear down the Democrats, any chance I got. And so I felt like that was in retrospect, something that I regret and just like this deep red line where I got so enamored with this game and being good at it and, and beating the other side that, that I kind of forgot about why I got into politics in the first place and the point of it. And, and just lastly, I don’t think it should be a surprise that if we all treat politics like a big game, that somebody who had a career as a game show host, you know, would’ve been better at manipulating the system in the media than all of us nerdy DC types. And, and so I do think that the way that we treated, the way we act and way we treated politics helped allow for Trump, you know, to take things over in, you know, in his nihilistic way.

ISAACSON: You know, you got so caught up in the game. I mean, you are a gay guy who ended up working for homophobic candidates. I mean, how did you square that?

MILLER: I compartmentalized it. I just didn’t think about it that much. I justified it. I thought, well, you know this candidate, I like more on this issue or that issue, but it was all BS. I was telling myself this story that allowed me to continue working in good conscience and not think about this major conflict I have. And the reason I got very personal talking about this and coming out and, and, and how I, I just locked this away in a compartment in my brain. And, and I felt like if I could explain to people how I justified that, how I worked for somebody that wanted to deny me the most important parts of my life, my husband, my child, my adopted child, like how easy then is it for somebody to justify working for somebody who, who the, the impact of their policy didn’t actually affect their lives, your privileged you know, educated, you know, a successful person, Trump’s policies didn’t really affect you. You know, it was all these more ephemeral things about the, the body politic and our democracy, and, you know it wouldn’t have been affected by border policies, his cruelty. So I felt like if I could explain why I did what I did, it would hopefully help shine a light on and not, not approve of by the way, not excuse, but just shine a light on how people rationalize it. In the hopes that maybe we can use that experience to, to help shake them free of their rationalizations in the way I was shaken free.

ISAACSON: One of the framing devices in your book is a woman named Caroline Wren, who was a really close friend of yours, a, you know, a deep confidant and you all worked for moderate Republican candidates for a long time. How did she go astray? And how did you kind of react to that?

MILLER: Yeah, so I, I became a never Trumper and left the party and and she went full in with Trump. She got this job working for the convention, the RNC convention, and then Trump wins the primary. So kind of by accident, she ends up working for Trump. And, and so slowly over time, we start to lose touch as I get more radically vocally anti-Trump and she gets more deep into his orbit. And so I wanted to try to figure out where we lost, where we parted ways and, and maybe see how I could shake her free.

ISAACSON: There’s a wonderful scene near the end of the book where you’re drinking. I think margaritas or tequila with her for hours on end, trying to figure out. And the one thing she won’t tell you is whether or not she believed Trump actually won the election. Describe those drinks for me.

MILLER: Well, you know, it was emotional, it’s personal, right? Our politics is deeply personal. We were such close friends. I knew there was a good person in there, and she’d flown to Germany on her own to help refugees during the refugee crisis. As you know, this isn’t a sociopath, there are some sociopaths around Trump. There’s some bigots. I knew that she wasn’t one. So now so, you know, we’re getting a little bit, a little bit drunk and going through all this. And she wouldn’t admit to me that, that, that Donald Trump had lost and you, I could tell she knew it. I saw the gleam in her eye. She just knew it, but she knew that if she admitted it in a book, then that could cause her to get cast out from Trump world. It’s you know, she knew not to break omerta. And the final moment when I really tried to break through to her is, you know, she kept saying to me, well, you don’t care about what these Trump voters think. And these are good people. And, and I do care. And, and I said to her, and that’s not true. Trump doesn’t care about these people. At January 6th, many of them have lives that have been ruined. There were Trump supporters who died that day. And I tried to break through to her and say that it was Donald Trump’s fault. And, and, and that he was the one who doesn’t care. But, she just has been, so, you know, caught up in defending her team and being part of this and being in the mix that, you know, despite having and people can read it, despite having maybe one moment where I thought I could break through. It’s just hard. You know, to crack these rationalizations.

ISAACSON: The theme of your book is a very large one. It ain’t just about politics. It’s one of the oldest in human history. I mean, philosophically takes it on in the play Antigone, which is why do people become collaborators? Why do they become enablers of things they know are bad? What were the different types of enablers or collaborators? This collaborationist mindset that we’re still fighting today that you found in your own party.

MILLER: Thanks, Walter. I’m glad you recognize that. I hope that I tried to write the book in such a way that it wasn’t just about politics, that people in other walks of life you know, people working for the big banks you know, before the market crashed or for oil companies, after a spill, that there, there would be some, you know connective tissue that maybe they could recognize themselves or their friends. So the main things were number one, demonization of the other side, they become so convinced that the other side is evil, that they, that they justify, you know, working for, you know, they don’t look at the log in their own eye. inertia, right? You have a job, you have a family, you have a career, and you’re just going up the up the ladder. It becomes hard to jump off the ladder, especially when it’s so tied to your identity. We’ve talked about com compartmentalization, this desire to be in the mix, desire to be around important, interesting things. The buzz of politics, the buzz of the game was, was another one ambition, pure ambition, you know, and money.

ISAACSON: You know, one of the people who’s absolutely devastated in your book and who I still don’t fully understand is Lindsay Graham. I mean, you rode alongside him. When you were working for Jeb Bush, he hated Trump. He would tell you that he spent hours in a bar telling you that. I don’t quite get what brought Lindsay Graham to be so disingenuous. Explain it to me.

MILLER: Yeah. I said as much as I hate Donald Trump and I hate Donald Trump, I don’t know if I talked to anybody that hated him more than Lindsay Graham back during 2016. I mean, he was going, he’d go on and on. He’d call me late into the night, talking about how horrible he was, how racist he was. How he was gonna ruin the country and the party. And there he is going along with him. The answer is this, there’s the, you know, the line in Hamilton about how you wanna be in the room where it happened. This is a disease in Washington. It’s an addiction, no different than a real drug addiction. the people in Washington wanna be at the top. People say that it’s power, but it’s actually down market from that. People, not everybody actually wants the power, because that comes with responsibility. They wanna be around power. They wanna be in the room where it happened. They wanna be on the right hand of the person, making the decision, trying to influence them. This is Lindsay, it’s the connective tissue through his whole career. Through John McCain all the way forward to Trump, he wanted to be in the mix. He was this guy who he was abandoned to a certain degree. As a kid, grew up in a bar. You know, he had risen to the heights of Washington power. And so it’s not that he doesn’t have philosophical beliefs. He does, but those are subordinate to his desire to, to be important, you know, to have influence. And so slowly but surely despite the fact that he saw Donald Trump for who he was, he justified it because he knew he could get invited into the golf cart. And that’s why I knew on January 6th, I knew. Cause I knew Lindsay that despite the fact that he said the right thing that day, that eventually he would come back.

ISAACSON: You have many categories of people who fall prey to being collaborators who won’t stand up for what they know is the truth. And one of those categories is striver. And I think you have Elise Stefanik the Congresswoman from upstate New York in that category, explain her trajectory.

MILLER: Yeah, probably the most disappointing and devastating of the whole book is Elise Stefanik. Elise Stefanik was Tim Miller. Honestly, we worked together on the autopsy in 2012. I decided to do political consulting. She decided to run for office. She ran on a pro you know, we need to deal with climate change pro gay rights. We need to be nice to immigrants, compassionate, conservative, future oriented Republican platform in 2014 through the Trump era into 2017, she still wouldn’t say his name. She tried to recruit other anti-Trump Republicans to run for Congress. Then in 2018, some things clicked. She realized that if she wanted power, that, that she couldn’t keep doing, she was doing. That people weren’t showing up to her events. She might have been able to stay in Congress, but she never was gonna be, you know, in leadership. She never was gonna have all the applause, but if she could go with Trump, that would happen. And so she dumped all the people that helped her get there. Someone she spoke at their wedding got fired for saying that she was going too far with Trumpism. They shared that story with me. And the sad part of this story is that it’s worked for her. I think she’s gonna be on the shortlist for VP if Trump runs again. I think she could be speaker of the house in, in the next five to 10 years, who knows maybe sooner, depending on what happens with Kevin McCarthy and, and it was just pure desire for power. And this was not someone that was MAGA at all. She saw Trump exactly for the, for the person that he was, she refused to even say his name. And yet now here, here, here she is on the cusp of, of potentially you know, a historic role in American democracy. It’s really sad.

ISAACSON: Your book is infested with a whole bunch of people who become collaborationists despite what they believe, Elise Stefanik, Dan Crenshaw, Lindsay Graham. And yet, if you look at the Republican party, I think I can count on one hand the number who have really not done that who have told, in fact, I might have three, three fingers left if I try to count it on one hand, why is it that more Republicans haven’t stood up for what you know, that they believe?

MILLER: You know, it comes down to the fact that this is a, this is a bottom up problem. I think that the justifications might be different for different people, but what, what really is driving all, this is that the voters, the Republican voters want Trumpism. That’s what they want. And, and so if you want to be a Republican in good standing, you have to give the voters what they want to a certain degree. You know, and I think that where people have gone wrong and what, where I’m critical and where people have have gone afield is by not using their own judgment by completely giving into the mob and every single thing from election conspiracies to vaccine conspiracies. But at some level, you know, if, if Republican voters want Trumpism, if you’re gonna be anti-Trump, then you’re gonna have the fate that Liz Cheney is about to have, which is lose a primary. And God love her. Thank God that Liz Cheney’s doing what she’s doing. But you know, I think that while we can explain all of the different types of complicity you know, the fundamental problem that undergirds all it is that is that what Republican voters in this country are looking for is somebody that’s gonna fight the left is the cruelty, the nativism. And, and, and that is, that is the element that I didn’t get into to in this book. Maybe that’s for a follow up book, that needs to be broken. If, if we’re gonna get things back on track.

ISAACSON: How and why have the Democrats and those on the left failed at taking on Trump and Trumpism?

MILLER: Yeah. two ways, in my opinion number one, I don’t think that there is a concerted effort to highlight just how extreme the Republican party is from the top down. There’s this almost Trump obsessiveness. If you look at the people that are running in governors races, Senate races, local levels of Republican politics, right now, they are so much more extreme. They make the tea party guys look like George HW Bush. I it is just the conspiracy mind, how far out they are. And somehow the Democrats are letting themselves get defined by the San Francisco school board, you know, and, or the craziest liberal. And yet the Republicans are not getting defined by these mainstream candidates running for governor in big states. So I, and part of that is messaging, part of that is media. And there’s a lot that goes into that. I think the Democrats need a concerted effort to define for the big middle of America, just how extreme the Republicans are. The other thing, this is easy to say for a former Republican, so I get it, but this is an existential threat. Trump is an existential threat, and I do wish the Democrats treated it as such. And when you have an existential threat in front of you, sometimes you need to make sacrifices and, and be willing to, you know, welcome more people into the fold and say, man, you know, I might not, you know, this might not be the perfect strategy or the perfect candidate, or the perfect policy, but that other guys are so bad. We’re gonna do whatever we can to kind of appeal to a broader part of the country. I don’t really see the Democrats doing that. And at times I assume kind of turning off the middle in various ways. So you know, look I voted for Joe Biden. I think on balance, the Democrats are clearly less extreme and, and a better option given the threat to Republicans. But I have some nitpicks with kind how they’re dealing with this threat.

ISAACSON: Your book ends with you saying that the road that brought us here has been very long and can the complexities that drove us down that road be mended?

MILLER: No, I mean, not mended. mended? no, that means, you know, permanently fixed, right. Or I guess you still have the scar, but it’s permanently fixed. I don’t think so. I think there are things that we can do to kind of bend hopefully the road back to rationality a little bit. I think Trump has some unique as I said, psychopathic behaviors that, that if he were to leave that, that, you know, we still would have these underlying problems that kinda led us to Trumpism, but I think that would help, at least in the short term, you know, put a bandaid on some of these problems to extend the metaphor. But like I said, the, the problem here is, is this underlying demand, this grievance that’s coming from Republican voters, the fact that their grievance is being stoked by conservative media, being stoked by the candidates themselves. It’s like creating this triangle of doom that’s radicalizing people more and more. that is gonna be really hard to reverse. And it’s gonna take a long time to reverse. It’s not just gonna happen overnight.

ISAACSON: Tim Miller. Thank you so much for joining us.

MILLER: Thank you Walter. It was my honor. Really appreciate you having me.