| EVERYTHING TRUMP TOUCHES DIES A Republican Strategist Gets Real About the Worst President Ever Rick Wilson New York: Free Press, August 2018 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
|||
| ISBN-13 978-1-9821-0312-5 | ||||
| ISBN-10 1-9821-0312-4 | 326pp. | HC | $27.00 | |
Republican consultant Wilson begins this book with broadside blasts at everyone on the Republican side who contributed to the selection of Trump as the GOP candidate for president in 2016. The individuals and groups named are: Reince Priebus; Paul Ryan; Ted Cruz; Chris Christie; Newt Gingrich; Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch; Mike Pence; CPAC; lobbyists; major donors; and the Republican consulting class. And being an insider and a veteran of 30 years in Republican campaigns, he is in a position to blast them in detail.
He also gifts us with a five-act scenario called What to Expect When You're Working for Trump which precisely captures the sycophancy required and the angst that inevitably results.
But then comes Chapter 4, in which Wilson tells us that Democrats are bad at politics. In the context of the 2016 election, this boils down to him saying that Hillary Clinton is horrible at campaigning. He acknowledges the facts of Russian interference, James Comey's "October surprise," and the media fawning over Trump — but suggests that Mrs. Clinton's unlikability and her party's sense that she was entitled to the presidency were the primary factors in her loss. Reminded that she won the popular vote by three million, he points out that it was members of the Electoral College in three states where Mrs. Clinton didn't campaign that put Trump over the top. He goes on to advise that next time Democrats should pick a candidate with a record of accomplishments. Hillary Clinton doesn't have a record of accomplishments?
So let me see if I've got this straight: Hillary Clinton is such a bad campaigner that she won by a total of 3 million popular votes in the states where she did campaign, but in three heartland states where she didn't campaign, Trump — a man with no experience in politics, dubious business acumen, and a defective character to boot — squeaked out narrow victories? Sorry, I don't buy it. I think Wilson underestimates the influence of those other factors.
Chapter 4 also includes advice on policy. And policy boils down to abortion and guns, which Wilson — like any doctrinaire Republican, it must be said — treats as black-and-white issues. These two quotes from the book drive the point home:
"If every Democrat has to be adamantly pro-abortion and can never, ever even begin to express a moral qualm about the subject, you're going to have trouble reaching meaningful chunks of the Catholic electorate and Protestant evangelicals. Even in cases where the Democrats pick up seats with a prolife candidate, the party, its allies, and its leadership will almost always pick a losing pro-abortion candidate instead. Government-funded drive-through abortion on demand at the end of the third trimester is a great message in Manhattan and Seattle. For the Pittsburgh suburbs and among conservative Catholic Democrats in Wisconsin? Not so much." – Page 73 |
"Most of you don't understand guns and the role they play in America's culture away from the coasts. You can't grasp that millions of Americans who own guns, hunt, shoot for sport or pleasure, or carry for self-defense hear your attacks on guns as attacks on them. Most of you Democrats still don't realize that the way you speak about guns is a signifier of political hostility to Americans who long ago made up their minds on the matter. You conflate them with the people who commit these crimes, and you do it constantly, tendentiously, and with the worst goddamned nanny-state condescension." – Page 74 |
So per Wilson's analysis, in order to win, we Democrats have to give up our advocacy of baby-killing and gun-grabbing. I doubt he would agree that putting it so baldly truly reflects his positions, but that is the essence of how he describes them in this chapter. And both are straw-man arguments I frequently encounter online.
To be fair, he does give some good advice at the end of the chapter, saying that Trump has trashed the conservative respect for fiscal discipline and thereby given Democrats a ready-made issue with which to score points.
The remainder of the book, Part Two through Part Four, delves into Trump's many failures of policy and goes on to describe many of the prominent people who are or were part of his team. Wilson begins with the grown-ups — Kelly, Tillerson and Mattis — then descends the ladder through family members, cabinet picks like Pruitt, Ross, and Zinke to Kellyanne and Sarah and the Fox News cheerleaders for Trump. Suffice it to say that few of them receive a favorable treatment from Wilson.1
These last three parts of the book also feature scenarios of work in the White House (with a soupçon of sexual innuendo regarding Jared and Ivanka) and a set of imagined future intercepts purportedly provided by Wikileaks. All of these struck me as over the top.
In the last part of the book, Wilson looks at the near future. He points out that Trump, as well as being a disaster at governing, is "electoral poison." He examines a number of representative contests: Roy Moore's loss in Alabama, the Republican failures of Ed Gillespie to become governor in Virginia, Rick Baker's loss in the St. Petersburg, Florida mayoral race, and Rick Saccone's wipeout in Pennsylvania's 18th district. He argues convincingly that the common factor in all these was too close an embrace of Trump — and that Saccone suffered the worst.
"Then Saccone got the Trump Rally for which he'd been waiting. You know . . . a rally. How could poor Saccone not have seen how this would end? Instead of making a political case for his candidate, Trump stood on stage for 70 long minutes doing his usual Borscht Belt Mussolini shtick, bellowing, strutting, and doing everything but grabbing his sack on stage. It was a disaster, and Trump only mentioned Saccone in passing in the last moments of the event. The spectacle was for Trump's needy ego, not to elect another Republican." – Page 283 |
Except for the relatively obscure (to me) Rick Baker, whom Wilson describes as an outstanding mayor with genuine respect for the black community of St. Petersburg, these Republicans were not the best of candidates — and that goes double for Moore.2 But, yes, embracing The Donald clearly did them no good.
Despite the over-the-top scenarios I mentioned, and his reflexive straw-man arguments in Chapter 4, Wilson has done a great job with this book. It's wordier than it needs to be, and there are a few typos. I won't mark it down for any of those. His research is thorough, and thoroughly end-noted. The one thing I might lower its score for is the lack of an index, and I make assumption that this lack is due to a tight publication schedule. So I'll give it full marks. However, without an index I can't consider it a keeper. Perhaps the paperback will have one.
To contact Chris Winter, send email to this address.