In recent years, one of the most important events on a prospective Republican presidential candidate’s calendar was the RedState Gathering, a summer convention for conservative activists from across the nation. Its host was Erick Erickson, a round-faced, redheaded former election lawyer and city councilman in Macon, Ga., who began blogging in 2004 on a site called RedState.com.
Erickson, who is now 41, is a conservative absolutist who made his name in the mid-2000s by “blowing up” — in the Twitter parlance he jovially employs — Republican leaders he viewed as insufficiently principled. In 2005, he played a role in torpedoing the Supreme Court nomination of the White House counsel Harriet Miers, publishing damaging admissions from White House sources that Miers had not been properly vetted. Five years later, he chided the National Rifle Association for being too willing to compromise, labeling it “a weak little girl of an organization.” He was a sharp-tongued critic of John McCain and Mitt Romney during their presidential runs, characterizing the former as “an angry old jackass” and the latter as “the Harriet Miers of 2012.”
Along the way, Erickson became one of the new kingmakers of the Tea Party-era G.O.P. A little-known Florida legislator and Senate hopeful named Marco Rubio reached out to him in 2009 when he was at 3 percent in the polls. A former Texas solicitor general, Ted Cruz, did the same in 2011. Rick Perry announced his 2012 presidential candidacy at Erickson’s gathering. By 2015, a number of the coming cycle’s aspirants — Rubio, Cruz, Perry and Bobby Jindal — had given him their personal cellphone numbers, and he had traded emails with Jeb Bush. And two months before that August’s convention in Atlanta, a New York-based Republican consultant named Sam Nunberg reached out to Erickson to ask if he could accommodate one more speaker: Donald Trump.
Erickson watched coverage of Trump’s stream-of-consciousness announcement at Trump Tower on June 16 and was not particularly impressed. On the syndicated radio show he broadcasts from Atlanta, he offered his assessment with a dismissive chuckle: “I guess he’s ready to be spoiler, not president.” He had met Trump once before, in July 2011, when he visited the 26th floor of Trump Tower to interview the businessman and reality-TV-show star. Trump had spent the past few months flirting with a presidential run only to decide, as he told Erickson that day, “I have a great show that’s a big success, and it’s hard to say, ‘I’m gonna leave two hours of prime-time television in order to get beat up by people that don’t know what they’re doing.’ ”
The hourlong conversation struck Erickson as pleasant but unmemorable. What did stick with him was their exchange as he was leaving Trump Tower. “Trump asked me if I played golf,” Erickson told me recently. “And I said, ‘Yeah, I’m terrible.’ ” Then, he said, Trump asked if he would be interested in coming to Trump’s golf-club in West Palm Beach, Fla., to play. “I’m very flattered — I’ve never been to West Palm Beach before,” Erickson recalled. “Several times, his office reached out. So finally I asked my wife, ‘What do you think this is about?’ She said, ‘He wants to own your soul.’ So I never went.”
Erickson did not see much of a political future for Trump, but he imagined that he might be good for ticket sales, if nothing else, at the RedState Gathering. He informed Nunberg that Trump could have a slot on the convention’s second day.
The evening before he was to speak in Atlanta, Trump went on CNN and denounced the Fox News host Megyn Kelly for her sharp questioning of him during a recent debate, speculating that Kelly had “blood coming out of her wherever.” When Erickson saw the footage that evening, he called Trump’s campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, and rescinded Trump’s invitation on the grounds that he would be too much of a distraction. “And that was that,” Erickson would later recall with a sheepish grin. “Until the next day, when he’s blowing me up.”
On Twitter, Trump called Erickson “a major sleaze and buffoon” and said that the “small crowds” at the gathering were due to his absence. Trump’s supporters soon piled on. This was to be expected, but what surprised Erickson were the attacks from people he regarded as his fellow bomb-throwers in the conservative revolution. On Twitter, the talk-radio host and Fox News commentator Laura Ingraham mocked “JebState.” The author and right-wing provocateur Ann Coulter brought up some of Erickson’s own crass utterances, like his characterization of the former Supreme Court justice David Souter in 2009 as a “goat-[expletive] child molester.” The next week, 30,000 readers of Erickson’s email newsletter canceled their subscriptions.
Erickson dug in, writing that Trump was “out of his depth” and lacking in “common decency.” But he was drowned out by Trump sympathizers with even bigger audiences than his own, like The Drudge Report and the online outlet Breitbart. It was one of the first salvos in what would open up in the year that followed into a civil war within the conservative media, dividing some of the loudest voices on the right. Days earlier, Erickson had unimpeachable credentials in the conservative movement. But by crossing Trump, he was now, in the eyes of his former allies, “a tool of the establishment.”
The conservative media has always been a playground for outsize personalities with even more outsize political ambitions. The National Review founder William F. Buckley fashioned much of the intellectual genetic code of the Reagan Revolution, while also writing fringe groups like the John Birch Society out of the conservative movement and, for good measure, running for mayor of New York against the liberal Republican John Lindsay. In 1996, the former Nixon media consultant Roger Ailes brought his attack-dog ethos to Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News channel and built the network into a transformational power in Republican politics before his fall this year amid accusations of sexual harassment.
But alongside the institution-builders like Buckley and Ailes, the conservative-media landscape has also produced a class of rowdy entrepreneurs who wield their influence in more personal, protean ways. The godfathers mostly came to power in the 1990s: Clinton-administration antagonists like Rush Limbaugh, who began broadcasting nationally in 1988 and became talk radio’s hegemonic power in the Clinton years, and Matt Drudge, who started his pioneering Drudge Report online in 1996.
If these figures defied the stuffy ceremony of the East Coast think tanks, opinion journals and bow-tied columnists who traditionally defined the conservative intelligentsia, they rarely challenged the ideological principles of conservatism as they had existed since the Reagan era: small government, low taxes, hawkish foreign policy and traditional social values. What they mostly did was provide the Republican Party with a set of exceptionally loud megaphones, which liberals have often envied and tried unsuccessfully to emulate. Conservative talk radio and Fox News now collectively reach an audience of as many as 50 million — most of them elderly white Republicans with a high likelihood of turning out in election years. And this isn’t even counting the like-minded online outlets that have flourished during the Obama years, thanks to a growing internet-media economy and a presidency, particularly in the case of the Affordable Care Act, that gave conservatives common cause.
Then came Trump. In a sense, the divide that he has opened up among conservative media figures is simply a function of the heartburn his ascent has caused among Republicans more generally, pitting voter against voter, congressman against congressman, Bob Dole against the Bushes. Some conservative media outlets threw themselves behind Trump from the beginning, explaining away his more radioactive statements and his uneven-at-best record as a conservative. Breitbart, whose former chairman, Steve Bannon, is now Trump’s chief strategist, was an ardent early supporter, breathlessly covering Trump’s ascent in the polls and his smackdowns of “low energy” Jeb Bush and “little Marco” Rubio. But as Trump expanded into more sacrosanct targets — Fox News’s Kelly, George W. Bush’s performance in the war on terror and Cruz — the dissenting chorus among conservatism’s dons grew louder. The Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer warned in December that Trump “has managed to steer the entire G.O.P. campaign into absurdities.” His Post colleague George Will predicted that a Trump nomination would mean the loss of conservatism “as a constant presence in U.S. politics.” The Weekly Standard editor William Kristol floated the idea of a new “non-Trump non-Clinton party.” And on the eve of the Iowa caucus, National Review devoted an entire issue to a single topic: “Against Trump.”
Since Trump clinched the nomination, the dividing lines have become starker, the individual dilemmas more agonizing. Mark Levin, an influential talk-radio host, complains that among conservative commentators, Trump’s message is endlessly repeated by what he derisively refers to as “the Rockettes.” But Levin, too, recently announced to his listeners that he intends to vote for Trump, if only to prevent another Clinton presidency. As he put it to me, “I’m not going to be throwing confetti in the air if Trump wins,” adding that he viewed the candidate as “a liberal with some conservative viewpoints that he’s not terribly reliable at sticking to.”
Others — Sean Hannity, Ingraham, the former Reagan official and “The Book of Virtues” author William Bennett — have thrown in for Trump with a brio that strikes some in the business as unseemly. “Look, we’re in the opinion business, but there’s a distinction between that and being a Sean Hannity fanboy,” the Milwaukee-based talk-radio host Charlie Sykes told me. “It’s been genuinely stunning to watch how they’ve become tools of his campaign and rationalizing everything he’s done.”
“For 20 years I’ve been saying how it’s not true that talk radio is all about ratings and we don’t believe what we say,” he went on. “Then you watch how the media types rolled over for him. Obviously Donald Trump is very good for ratings, and at some point it’s hard not to conclude they decided the Trump train was the gravy train. I’ve been thoroughly disillusioned, and I’m not alone in that. It’s like watching ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’: Oh, my God, they got another one!”
When Trump declared his candidacy in June 2015, the part of his announcement speech that most clearly foreshadowed the campaign to come had to do with immigration. “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” he told the crowd at Trump Tower. “They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”
The line struck Sykes as awfully familiar when he heard it. A month before, he had run a segment with Ann Coulter, who had just published her 11th book, an anti-immigration screed titled “¡Adios, America!” Sykes was well aware of Coulter’s views, but he was taken aback when she began a riff on Mexican rapists surging into the United States (a subject that takes up an entire chapter of “¡Adios, America!”). “I remember looking at my producer and going, ‘Wow, this is rather extraordinary,’ ” he told me. “When Trump used that line, I instantly recognized it as Ann Coulter’s.”
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rpasea 1 day ago
This article describes the vast right wing conspiracy Hillary referred to very well. Frightening to say the least and a hint of the...
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It's absolutely delicious to watch the alt-right media and the GOP commit suppoku. Banzai!http://www.cagle...
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There is indeed an intellectual civil war, of sorts, in right-wing circles--it's a continuation of the famed battle between...
In fact, Corey Lewandowski had reached out to Coulter for advice in the run-up to Trump’s announcement speech. The address Trump delivered on June 16 bore no resemblance to his prepared text, which contained a mere two sentences about immigration. Instead, he ad-libbed what Coulter today calls “the Mexican rapist speech that won my heart.” When Trump’s remarks provoked fury, Lewandowski called Coulter for backup. Three days later, she went on HBO’s “Real Time With Bill Maher” and, amid shrieks of laughter from the audience, predicted that Trump was the Republican candidate most likely to win the presidency.
One evening this past March, Trump received Coulter at Mar-a-Lago, his estate-turned-club in Palm Beach. Though in recent years the two had developed a rapport on Twitter, she had met him face to face only once before he declared his candidacy, a lunch date at Trump Tower in 2011. Over lunch, Trump gave Coulter the impression that he had read her books. He also gave her a few items from his wife’s line of costume jewelry and told Coulter, who keeps a house in Palm Beach, that she was welcome to use the pool at Mar-a-Lago anytime.
The golf resort was the chief staging ground for Trump’s charm offensives against the conservative media. Many of its members have visited at Trump’s invitation in recent years, joining the resident Gatsby for steak and lobster on the patio, where Trump squints and appears to listen intently while his guests dispense political wisdom — though it is never clear whether he is actually interested in it, simply flattering his guests or sizing them up. When I dined with him on the patio this spring, Trump asked me eagerly about how I liked his odds in the election. Later, on the campaign trail, I watched him solicit the same counsel from random stragglers on the rope line.
Coulter, at any rate, appeared immune to the whole routine. A week earlier, Trump bragged during a Republican presidential debate in Detroit that “there’s no problem” with the size of his penis. On the patio, Coulter told the candidate that no one wanted to hear about his endowment. She told Lewandowski that he should buy a dozen teleprompters and put them in every room of Trump’s house until he learned how to use them. Reminding Trump that she had been his earliest and most dedicated advocate, she told him: “I’m the only one losing money trying to put you in the White House. You’re going to listen to me.”
This appeal to the bottom line seemed to tweak Trump’s conscience. He gave Coulter an open invitation to Mar-a-Lago, waiving the $100,000 membership fee. The following evening at the next Republican debate, he exhibited considerably more restraint, for which Coulter, with characteristic modesty, claims credit. “Coulter delivers!” she told me.
Some of Trump’s supporters within the conservative media are attracted to his actual positions on issues. One is his trade policy, on which many media personalities on the right are considerably more populist and protectionist than Republican Party leaders and Chamber of Commerce boosters. Throughout Obama’s presidency, Laura Ingraham has warned of China’s predations: “The trade war is on, and we’re losing it,” she has often said. For others, Trump’s assurance that he will appoint Antonin Scalia-like conservatives to the Supreme Court is reason enough for their support.
But Trump also simply fulfills the ineffable urge many have to, as Michael Needham, the chief executive of the conservative policy group Heritage Action for America, puts it, “punch Washington in the face.” This is true for Coulter, who, in her newly published paean to the candidate, “In Trump We Trust,” writes that Trump is fit for the presidency not in spite of his crudeness but because of it: “Only someone who brags about his airline’s seatbelt buckles being made of solid gold would have the balls to do what Trump is doing.”
But what really sold Coulter on Trump, she told me, was his hard line on immigration. Coulter told me that she had never given the issue much thought during her childhood in New Canaan, Conn., and her student days at Cornell. Then in 1992, the British-American journalist Peter Brimelow wrote a 14,000-word essay for National Review titled “Time to Rethink Immigration?” which would later become a sort of ur-text for today’s alt-right, the ascendant white-nationalist movement that has found its champion in Trump. Brimelow cast the current wave of American immigrants in dismal terms: less skilled, less European, less assimilated, less law-abiding and less Republican than the previous newcomers. Coulter, who was 31 and a law clerk at the time, remembers reading it and thinking, “Oh, my gosh, I’ve been completely lied to!”
Twenty-four years later, Coulter helped formulate Trump’s immigration-policy position, which she hailed on Twitter as “the greatest political document since the Magna Carta.” (Her additional tweet on the subject — “I don’t care if @realDonaldTrump wants to perform abortions in the White House after this immigration policy paper” — prompted Mark Levin to tweet back, “These have to be among the most pathetic comments of anyone in a long time.”)
Coulter has not always gotten her way with the candidate. At Mar-a-Lago that evening in March, she lobbied unsuccessfully for him to pick as his running mate Kris Kobach, the secretary of state of Kansas, who is credited with selling Mitt Romney on “self-deportation.” And her book tour for “In Trump We Trust” hit a momentary snag when Trump told Sean Hannity that he would be open to “softening” his immigration stance, though Coulter chose to believe that, as she told me, “it was Hannity badgering him.”
Still, she has become the Trump campaign’s most unrepentant brawler. When Khzir Khan, the Pakistani-American father of a U.S. Army captain who was killed in combat in Iraq, spoke critically of Trump at the Democratic National Convention, Coulter wrote on Twitter: “You know what this convention really needed: An angry Muslim with a thick accent like Fareed Zacaria[sic].”
That tweet provoked disgust from fellow conservatives, among them Erick Erickson, who tweeted: “What a terrible thing to say about a man whose son died for this country.” When I reminded Coulter of Erickson’s scolding, she let out a hearty laugh. “I always hated him,” she said. “This is one of the fantastic things. In any political movement, there are many people you think are losers and dorks, but your friends talk you into liking them, because they’re on our side. Now all of those people are out.”
Sighing, she said, “Trump has made my life better in so many ways.”
You will not find copies of “¡Adios, America!” or “In Trump We Trust” on any of the many bookshelves in the home of the Washington Post columnist George Will. A week after Ted Cruz dropped out of the Republican presidential race in early May, Will and his wife, Mari, a Republican political consultant, gave a catered dinner party for Cruz and his wife, Heidi. The other guests were conservative donors, activists and journalists, along with their spouses. The Wills have been hosting these off-the-record encounters with political celebrities at their Maryland home for decades. In early 2009, Will’s fellow conservative columnists gathered there to meet Obama a week before his inauguration.
Among the guests that evening in May was Laura Ingraham. Ingraham is of proudly working-class heritage — her mother was a waitress for almost 30 years and her father owned and operated a Coin-a-Matic carwash — and does not share Will’s reverence for decorum. She was an early defender of Trump’s willingness to say things “no one else is saying.” While interviewing Cruz on her radio show six weeks before the Wills’ party, she interrupted him to mock his Harvard Law degree. Still, Cruz knew that his political future relied on conservative opinion-makers like Ingraham, and it was at his request that the Wills included her in the party.
Over cocktails, the Cruzes spoke fondly of their experiences on the campaign trail, and the other guests listened politely, mindful of Cruz’s recent humiliating defeat. Then midway through dinner, at a table set with glasses once used by Abraham Lincoln, Ingraham insisted that Cruz needed to throw his weight behind the man who had branded him “Lyin’ Ted.” “If you don’t endorse him, where does that leave you?” she said. “You don’t have the public and you don’t have the establishment. How can you be a leader of the conservative movement?”
Cruz amiably replied that such a decision did not have to be made right away. Others at the table joined in to defend him, but Ingraham would hear nothing of it. “You can’t want Hillary Clinton elected,” she goaded him.
Will sat fuming silently. “She was quite animated,” he would later recall. Cruz refused to offer his support to Trump that night or in the weeks to follow. Speaking at the Republican convention on July 20 moments before Cruz was to do the same, Ingraham taunted him: “We should all, even all you boys with wounded feelings and bruised egos — and we love you, we love you — but you must honor the pledge to support Donald Trump now, tonight!” The following morning on her radio show, Ingraham declared that Cruz’s refusal to endorse had “effectively ended his political career.”
Will was no more persuaded by Ingraham than Cruz was. The first and only time Will met Trump was in March 1995, when, at Trump’s invitation, he gave a speech at Mar-a-Lago. Years later on Twitter, Trump would ascribe Will’s harsh view of him to Will’s having “totally bombed” with his performance that night. Will told me: “He started telling this story: ‘The reason Will doesn’t like me is I invited him to give a speech at Mar-a-Lago, and I knew it was going to be boring, so I waited out on the patio.’ Which raises two questions. First, if he knew it was going to be that boring, why did he invite me? And second, who would be the guy with the orange hair sitting in the front row?”
Erickson, who is now 41, is a conservative absolutist who made his name in the mid-2000s by “blowing up” — in the Twitter parlance he jovially employs — Republican leaders he viewed as insufficiently principled. In 2005, he played a role in torpedoing the Supreme Court nomination of the White House counsel Harriet Miers, publishing damaging admissions from White House sources that Miers had not been properly vetted. Five years later, he chided the National Rifle Association for being too willing to compromise, labeling it “a weak little girl of an organization.” He was a sharp-tongued critic of John McCain and Mitt Romney during their presidential runs, characterizing the former as “an angry old jackass” and the latter as “the Harriet Miers of 2012.”
Along the way, Erickson became one of the new kingmakers of the Tea Party-era G.O.P. A little-known Florida legislator and Senate hopeful named Marco Rubio reached out to him in 2009 when he was at 3 percent in the polls. A former Texas solicitor general, Ted Cruz, did the same in 2011. Rick Perry announced his 2012 presidential candidacy at Erickson’s gathering. By 2015, a number of the coming cycle’s aspirants — Rubio, Cruz, Perry and Bobby Jindal — had given him their personal cellphone numbers, and he had traded emails with Jeb Bush. And two months before that August’s convention in Atlanta, a New York-based Republican consultant named Sam Nunberg reached out to Erickson to ask if he could accommodate one more speaker: Donald Trump.
Erickson watched coverage of Trump’s stream-of-consciousness announcement at Trump Tower on June 16 and was not particularly impressed. On the syndicated radio show he broadcasts from Atlanta, he offered his assessment with a dismissive chuckle: “I guess he’s ready to be spoiler, not president.” He had met Trump once before, in July 2011, when he visited the 26th floor of Trump Tower to interview the businessman and reality-TV-show star. Trump had spent the past few months flirting with a presidential run only to decide, as he told Erickson that day, “I have a great show that’s a big success, and it’s hard to say, ‘I’m gonna leave two hours of prime-time television in order to get beat up by people that don’t know what they’re doing.’ ”
The hourlong conversation struck Erickson as pleasant but unmemorable. What did stick with him was their exchange as he was leaving Trump Tower. “Trump asked me if I played golf,” Erickson told me recently. “And I said, ‘Yeah, I’m terrible.’ ” Then, he said, Trump asked if he would be interested in coming to Trump’s golf-club in West Palm Beach, Fla., to play. “I’m very flattered — I’ve never been to West Palm Beach before,” Erickson recalled. “Several times, his office reached out. So finally I asked my wife, ‘What do you think this is about?’ She said, ‘He wants to own your soul.’ So I never went.”
Erickson did not see much of a political future for Trump, but he imagined that he might be good for ticket sales, if nothing else, at the RedState Gathering. He informed Nunberg that Trump could have a slot on the convention’s second day.
The evening before he was to speak in Atlanta, Trump went on CNN and denounced the Fox News host Megyn Kelly for her sharp questioning of him during a recent debate, speculating that Kelly had “blood coming out of her wherever.” When Erickson saw the footage that evening, he called Trump’s campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, and rescinded Trump’s invitation on the grounds that he would be too much of a distraction. “And that was that,” Erickson would later recall with a sheepish grin. “Until the next day, when he’s blowing me up.”
On Twitter, Trump called Erickson “a major sleaze and buffoon” and said that the “small crowds” at the gathering were due to his absence. Trump’s supporters soon piled on. This was to be expected, but what surprised Erickson were the attacks from people he regarded as his fellow bomb-throwers in the conservative revolution. On Twitter, the talk-radio host and Fox News commentator Laura Ingraham mocked “JebState.” The author and right-wing provocateur Ann Coulter brought up some of Erickson’s own crass utterances, like his characterization of the former Supreme Court justice David Souter in 2009 as a “goat-[expletive] child molester.” The next week, 30,000 readers of Erickson’s email newsletter canceled their subscriptions.
Erickson dug in, writing that Trump was “out of his depth” and lacking in “common decency.” But he was drowned out by Trump sympathizers with even bigger audiences than his own, like The Drudge Report and the online outlet Breitbart. It was one of the first salvos in what would open up in the year that followed into a civil war within the conservative media, dividing some of the loudest voices on the right. Days earlier, Erickson had unimpeachable credentials in the conservative movement. But by crossing Trump, he was now, in the eyes of his former allies, “a tool of the establishment.”
The conservative media has always been a playground for outsize personalities with even more outsize political ambitions. The National Review founder William F. Buckley fashioned much of the intellectual genetic code of the Reagan Revolution, while also writing fringe groups like the John Birch Society out of the conservative movement and, for good measure, running for mayor of New York against the liberal Republican John Lindsay. In 1996, the former Nixon media consultant Roger Ailes brought his attack-dog ethos to Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News channel and built the network into a transformational power in Republican politics before his fall this year amid accusations of sexual harassment.
But alongside the institution-builders like Buckley and Ailes, the conservative-media landscape has also produced a class of rowdy entrepreneurs who wield their influence in more personal, protean ways. The godfathers mostly came to power in the 1990s: Clinton-administration antagonists like Rush Limbaugh, who began broadcasting nationally in 1988 and became talk radio’s hegemonic power in the Clinton years, and Matt Drudge, who started his pioneering Drudge Report online in 1996.
If these figures defied the stuffy ceremony of the East Coast think tanks, opinion journals and bow-tied columnists who traditionally defined the conservative intelligentsia, they rarely challenged the ideological principles of conservatism as they had existed since the Reagan era: small government, low taxes, hawkish foreign policy and traditional social values. What they mostly did was provide the Republican Party with a set of exceptionally loud megaphones, which liberals have often envied and tried unsuccessfully to emulate. Conservative talk radio and Fox News now collectively reach an audience of as many as 50 million — most of them elderly white Republicans with a high likelihood of turning out in election years. And this isn’t even counting the like-minded online outlets that have flourished during the Obama years, thanks to a growing internet-media economy and a presidency, particularly in the case of the Affordable Care Act, that gave conservatives common cause.
Then came Trump. In a sense, the divide that he has opened up among conservative media figures is simply a function of the heartburn his ascent has caused among Republicans more generally, pitting voter against voter, congressman against congressman, Bob Dole against the Bushes. Some conservative media outlets threw themselves behind Trump from the beginning, explaining away his more radioactive statements and his uneven-at-best record as a conservative. Breitbart, whose former chairman, Steve Bannon, is now Trump’s chief strategist, was an ardent early supporter, breathlessly covering Trump’s ascent in the polls and his smackdowns of “low energy” Jeb Bush and “little Marco” Rubio. But as Trump expanded into more sacrosanct targets — Fox News’s Kelly, George W. Bush’s performance in the war on terror and Cruz — the dissenting chorus among conservatism’s dons grew louder. The Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer warned in December that Trump “has managed to steer the entire G.O.P. campaign into absurdities.” His Post colleague George Will predicted that a Trump nomination would mean the loss of conservatism “as a constant presence in U.S. politics.” The Weekly Standard editor William Kristol floated the idea of a new “non-Trump non-Clinton party.” And on the eve of the Iowa caucus, National Review devoted an entire issue to a single topic: “Against Trump.”
Since Trump clinched the nomination, the dividing lines have become starker, the individual dilemmas more agonizing. Mark Levin, an influential talk-radio host, complains that among conservative commentators, Trump’s message is endlessly repeated by what he derisively refers to as “the Rockettes.” But Levin, too, recently announced to his listeners that he intends to vote for Trump, if only to prevent another Clinton presidency. As he put it to me, “I’m not going to be throwing confetti in the air if Trump wins,” adding that he viewed the candidate as “a liberal with some conservative viewpoints that he’s not terribly reliable at sticking to.”
Others — Sean Hannity, Ingraham, the former Reagan official and “The Book of Virtues” author William Bennett — have thrown in for Trump with a brio that strikes some in the business as unseemly. “Look, we’re in the opinion business, but there’s a distinction between that and being a Sean Hannity fanboy,” the Milwaukee-based talk-radio host Charlie Sykes told me. “It’s been genuinely stunning to watch how they’ve become tools of his campaign and rationalizing everything he’s done.”
“For 20 years I’ve been saying how it’s not true that talk radio is all about ratings and we don’t believe what we say,” he went on. “Then you watch how the media types rolled over for him. Obviously Donald Trump is very good for ratings, and at some point it’s hard not to conclude they decided the Trump train was the gravy train. I’ve been thoroughly disillusioned, and I’m not alone in that. It’s like watching ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’: Oh, my God, they got another one!”
When Trump declared his candidacy in June 2015, the part of his announcement speech that most clearly foreshadowed the campaign to come had to do with immigration. “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” he told the crowd at Trump Tower. “They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”
The line struck Sykes as awfully familiar when he heard it. A month before, he had run a segment with Ann Coulter, who had just published her 11th book, an anti-immigration screed titled “¡Adios, America!” Sykes was well aware of Coulter’s views, but he was taken aback when she began a riff on Mexican rapists surging into the United States (a subject that takes up an entire chapter of “¡Adios, America!”). “I remember looking at my producer and going, ‘Wow, this is rather extraordinary,’ ” he told me. “When Trump used that line, I instantly recognized it as Ann Coulter’s.”
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rpasea 1 day ago
This article describes the vast right wing conspiracy Hillary referred to very well. Frightening to say the least and a hint of the...
opinionsareus0 1 day ago
It's absolutely delicious to watch the alt-right media and the GOP commit suppoku. Banzai!http://www.cagle...
Paul Fallavollita 1 day ago
There is indeed an intellectual civil war, of sorts, in right-wing circles--it's a continuation of the famed battle between...
In fact, Corey Lewandowski had reached out to Coulter for advice in the run-up to Trump’s announcement speech. The address Trump delivered on June 16 bore no resemblance to his prepared text, which contained a mere two sentences about immigration. Instead, he ad-libbed what Coulter today calls “the Mexican rapist speech that won my heart.” When Trump’s remarks provoked fury, Lewandowski called Coulter for backup. Three days later, she went on HBO’s “Real Time With Bill Maher” and, amid shrieks of laughter from the audience, predicted that Trump was the Republican candidate most likely to win the presidency.
One evening this past March, Trump received Coulter at Mar-a-Lago, his estate-turned-club in Palm Beach. Though in recent years the two had developed a rapport on Twitter, she had met him face to face only once before he declared his candidacy, a lunch date at Trump Tower in 2011. Over lunch, Trump gave Coulter the impression that he had read her books. He also gave her a few items from his wife’s line of costume jewelry and told Coulter, who keeps a house in Palm Beach, that she was welcome to use the pool at Mar-a-Lago anytime.
The golf resort was the chief staging ground for Trump’s charm offensives against the conservative media. Many of its members have visited at Trump’s invitation in recent years, joining the resident Gatsby for steak and lobster on the patio, where Trump squints and appears to listen intently while his guests dispense political wisdom — though it is never clear whether he is actually interested in it, simply flattering his guests or sizing them up. When I dined with him on the patio this spring, Trump asked me eagerly about how I liked his odds in the election. Later, on the campaign trail, I watched him solicit the same counsel from random stragglers on the rope line.
Coulter, at any rate, appeared immune to the whole routine. A week earlier, Trump bragged during a Republican presidential debate in Detroit that “there’s no problem” with the size of his penis. On the patio, Coulter told the candidate that no one wanted to hear about his endowment. She told Lewandowski that he should buy a dozen teleprompters and put them in every room of Trump’s house until he learned how to use them. Reminding Trump that she had been his earliest and most dedicated advocate, she told him: “I’m the only one losing money trying to put you in the White House. You’re going to listen to me.”
This appeal to the bottom line seemed to tweak Trump’s conscience. He gave Coulter an open invitation to Mar-a-Lago, waiving the $100,000 membership fee. The following evening at the next Republican debate, he exhibited considerably more restraint, for which Coulter, with characteristic modesty, claims credit. “Coulter delivers!” she told me.
Some of Trump’s supporters within the conservative media are attracted to his actual positions on issues. One is his trade policy, on which many media personalities on the right are considerably more populist and protectionist than Republican Party leaders and Chamber of Commerce boosters. Throughout Obama’s presidency, Laura Ingraham has warned of China’s predations: “The trade war is on, and we’re losing it,” she has often said. For others, Trump’s assurance that he will appoint Antonin Scalia-like conservatives to the Supreme Court is reason enough for their support.
But Trump also simply fulfills the ineffable urge many have to, as Michael Needham, the chief executive of the conservative policy group Heritage Action for America, puts it, “punch Washington in the face.” This is true for Coulter, who, in her newly published paean to the candidate, “In Trump We Trust,” writes that Trump is fit for the presidency not in spite of his crudeness but because of it: “Only someone who brags about his airline’s seatbelt buckles being made of solid gold would have the balls to do what Trump is doing.”
But what really sold Coulter on Trump, she told me, was his hard line on immigration. Coulter told me that she had never given the issue much thought during her childhood in New Canaan, Conn., and her student days at Cornell. Then in 1992, the British-American journalist Peter Brimelow wrote a 14,000-word essay for National Review titled “Time to Rethink Immigration?” which would later become a sort of ur-text for today’s alt-right, the ascendant white-nationalist movement that has found its champion in Trump. Brimelow cast the current wave of American immigrants in dismal terms: less skilled, less European, less assimilated, less law-abiding and less Republican than the previous newcomers. Coulter, who was 31 and a law clerk at the time, remembers reading it and thinking, “Oh, my gosh, I’ve been completely lied to!”
Twenty-four years later, Coulter helped formulate Trump’s immigration-policy position, which she hailed on Twitter as “the greatest political document since the Magna Carta.” (Her additional tweet on the subject — “I don’t care if @realDonaldTrump wants to perform abortions in the White House after this immigration policy paper” — prompted Mark Levin to tweet back, “These have to be among the most pathetic comments of anyone in a long time.”)
Coulter has not always gotten her way with the candidate. At Mar-a-Lago that evening in March, she lobbied unsuccessfully for him to pick as his running mate Kris Kobach, the secretary of state of Kansas, who is credited with selling Mitt Romney on “self-deportation.” And her book tour for “In Trump We Trust” hit a momentary snag when Trump told Sean Hannity that he would be open to “softening” his immigration stance, though Coulter chose to believe that, as she told me, “it was Hannity badgering him.”
Still, she has become the Trump campaign’s most unrepentant brawler. When Khzir Khan, the Pakistani-American father of a U.S. Army captain who was killed in combat in Iraq, spoke critically of Trump at the Democratic National Convention, Coulter wrote on Twitter: “You know what this convention really needed: An angry Muslim with a thick accent like Fareed Zacaria[sic].”
That tweet provoked disgust from fellow conservatives, among them Erick Erickson, who tweeted: “What a terrible thing to say about a man whose son died for this country.” When I reminded Coulter of Erickson’s scolding, she let out a hearty laugh. “I always hated him,” she said. “This is one of the fantastic things. In any political movement, there are many people you think are losers and dorks, but your friends talk you into liking them, because they’re on our side. Now all of those people are out.”
Sighing, she said, “Trump has made my life better in so many ways.”
You will not find copies of “¡Adios, America!” or “In Trump We Trust” on any of the many bookshelves in the home of the Washington Post columnist George Will. A week after Ted Cruz dropped out of the Republican presidential race in early May, Will and his wife, Mari, a Republican political consultant, gave a catered dinner party for Cruz and his wife, Heidi. The other guests were conservative donors, activists and journalists, along with their spouses. The Wills have been hosting these off-the-record encounters with political celebrities at their Maryland home for decades. In early 2009, Will’s fellow conservative columnists gathered there to meet Obama a week before his inauguration.
Among the guests that evening in May was Laura Ingraham. Ingraham is of proudly working-class heritage — her mother was a waitress for almost 30 years and her father owned and operated a Coin-a-Matic carwash — and does not share Will’s reverence for decorum. She was an early defender of Trump’s willingness to say things “no one else is saying.” While interviewing Cruz on her radio show six weeks before the Wills’ party, she interrupted him to mock his Harvard Law degree. Still, Cruz knew that his political future relied on conservative opinion-makers like Ingraham, and it was at his request that the Wills included her in the party.
Over cocktails, the Cruzes spoke fondly of their experiences on the campaign trail, and the other guests listened politely, mindful of Cruz’s recent humiliating defeat. Then midway through dinner, at a table set with glasses once used by Abraham Lincoln, Ingraham insisted that Cruz needed to throw his weight behind the man who had branded him “Lyin’ Ted.” “If you don’t endorse him, where does that leave you?” she said. “You don’t have the public and you don’t have the establishment. How can you be a leader of the conservative movement?”
Cruz amiably replied that such a decision did not have to be made right away. Others at the table joined in to defend him, but Ingraham would hear nothing of it. “You can’t want Hillary Clinton elected,” she goaded him.
Will sat fuming silently. “She was quite animated,” he would later recall. Cruz refused to offer his support to Trump that night or in the weeks to follow. Speaking at the Republican convention on July 20 moments before Cruz was to do the same, Ingraham taunted him: “We should all, even all you boys with wounded feelings and bruised egos — and we love you, we love you — but you must honor the pledge to support Donald Trump now, tonight!” The following morning on her radio show, Ingraham declared that Cruz’s refusal to endorse had “effectively ended his political career.”
Will was no more persuaded by Ingraham than Cruz was. The first and only time Will met Trump was in March 1995, when, at Trump’s invitation, he gave a speech at Mar-a-Lago. Years later on Twitter, Trump would ascribe Will’s harsh view of him to Will’s having “totally bombed” with his performance that night. Will told me: “He started telling this story: ‘The reason Will doesn’t like me is I invited him to give a speech at Mar-a-Lago, and I knew it was going to be boring, so I waited out on the patio.’ Which raises two questions. First, if he knew it was going to be that boring, why did he invite me? And second, who would be the guy with the orange hair sitting in the front row?”