Tim Miller and I come from the same tribe, as former Republicans who have left the party. But Tim’s story is longer and more interesting: He was inside the GOP-messaging machinery, and worked for several candidates. (I worked for a Republican in the Senate, but I was never part of a campaign.) Tim was also a gay man in a party with a pretty strong anti-gay streak. He described his journey out of both the sexual and political closets, and his emergence as a dedicated opponent of Donald Trump and his movement, in his new book, Why We Did It. The book’s now a best seller, and it didn’t need one more review from me. Instead, I thought I’d just impose on Tim for an interview, to which he consented.
As one of the OG Never Trumpers, I still have a pebble in my shoe about the people who stayed and supported Trump. Although I think I understand them, part of me just can’t grasp that level of soulless opportunism. That’s where I began my conversation with Tim.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Tom Nichols: Tim, I kept getting a kind of vertigo reading Why We Did It. I felt like the character in the old Terry Gilliam movie Brazil, a sane and ordinary man who accepts it as completely normal to live in a world of dysfunctional lunacy. Did you have that experience while writing it? Did you sit back and say: “I can’t believe I just wrote this sentence as a true thing that happened.” I mean, 10 years ago, you’d have had a hard time selling this as a parody.
Tim Miller: Well, for example, I write in the book that Breitbart reporter Matt Boyle “is such a ludicrous character that if he had emanated from the imagination of a Hollywood liberal trying to cast a conservative blog boy in a movie, a fair observer would think the result was too over the top.” Isn’t that also true about much of what’s happened since 2014? The most preposterous liberal projection about who “we” (broadly speaking) were turned out to be reality.
Nichols: Yeah. I wince that some of the over-the-top accusations about us, as conservatives, turned out to be true.
Miller: That is hard to come to terms with, for sure, especially because that realization lives side-by-side with the fact that those of us on the inside really should’ve seen all of this madness coming, at least by the late aughts. It was there in the response to Sarah Palin and the demands that John McCain attack Barack Obama’s pastor. It was there in birtherism. It was there in the Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain boomlets. Yet those of us who deemed ourselves the “responsible ones” rationalized all of that as just some weird outliers.
So, yeah, throughout the writing process, I was wrapping my brain around the competing facts that what happened to the party and the country was too insanely stupid to believe, but also that we should have seen the insanity coming. I felt like a lot of people stopped at the first observation and then wiped their hands of responsibility. I thought that was too convenient. The fact is, we are to blame for allowing it to spiral out of control. That does create a sense of vertigo for folks who are willing to accept it.
Nichols: Throughout the book, you tell us about your ongoing discussions with a GOP staffer, your friend and former colleague, a young woman named Caroline Wren. I admit I still don’t get her. She seems very concerned about doing good, about being a volunteer, and helping others. As you note, at one point in her life she flies off to Europe to help refugees, and seems very earnest. But what it seems like she’s really all about is being involved in something that’s interesting to her.
That seems, to me, to be just another flavor of narcissism. Am I missing something about her and others like her? It feels to me as if they stayed on with Trump because they seem to think they’re just too precious to live an ordinary life with its usual ups and downs.
Miller: Narcissism is a defining fault of a lot of the characters in the book. Including me!
I write about the people who went along with Trump because they want to either be “in the mix” or they feel like they are needed to “save America” from the really bad people, or they are butthurt about perceived slights, or they are ambitious. That’s all narcissism. So I don’t think it’s wrong to say Caroline succumbed to that. What I tried to get at was understanding how someone like her navigated the obvious contradiction between “I care about others” and “I also love Trump.” What were the specific rationalizations she grasped to make that compute in her brain? It’s easy to just decide that everyone who went along with Trump is a sociopath or a narcissist and a bigot and then not think about it anymore.
Nichols: Not gonna lie, I’ve made that decision many times.
Miller: But humans have complicated motivations, and if there’s any chance of pulling any of these folks out of their complicity, there’s value in understanding those motivations. I think if you look at Alyssa [Farah, the former director of White House strategic communications], for example, in the penultimate chapter, she’s the only character besides me who bails on Trump. And her reasons are interesting and complex. There’s also an element of narcissism in them, but that’s okay. As far as I’m concerned, if people decide that they will get off the Trump Train and part of the reason is that they are afraid their kids will hate them, or because of the impact on their reputation if they stick with him, then okay, I’ll take that! I don’t need every convert to be completely pure of heart.
Nichols: Neither do I, and I chafe at the people on the left who demand that we retroactively disavow all of conservatism back to Lincoln because of Trump, which is just silly.
Miller: Yeah, I don’t know that “conservatism,” as in respect for institutions and history or Oakeshottian prudence or however you want to define it, is fundamentally flawed. Nor is classical liberalism.
Nichols: But I want to press you for a moment on narcissism. I mean, hey, I share that problem, although truly narcissistic people never think of themselves that way. To put it more gently, let’s just stipulate that anyone who goes into politics or writing (or even teaching?) has some, ah, overly developed extroversion. But there’s something weird going on, even by the narcissistic standards of politics.
Miller: Overly developed extroversion! Love that generous assessment of us.
Nichols: Well, you know, it’s a personality type, right? But let me try this on you: Cynicism in politics used to be funneled through partisan filters. I met people in Washington over the years who were sons of bitches, but they believed in certain things, even if you could shave the edges here and there. I rarely met anyone—okay, maybe a few—who believed in absolutely nothing, or who could, like Caroline, go from caring about refugees one day to working for someone like Trump the next.
And I don’t think this is limited to one party: It feels like everyone is just filling in spaces on a college application now. You know? I can’t get my arms around it, but I kept thinking of it while reading the book.
Miller: There is a nihilism in this that connects to narcissism in an especially dangerous manner, but at this point I’d say that this is something that really only manifests itself within the GOP. I don’t believe it was always that way. About half the book is on how people working in the GOP became like this, but a short version goes like this:
There was a big disconnect between what GOP party elites wanted and what their voters wanted. So, to do well in GOP politics, you had to do a certain amount of pretending when it came to cultural issues. That kind of pretending becomes muscle memory. Then a buffoon like Trump takes over the party, and rather than fall back on whatever principles once got them into politics, people just keep on pretending—and then they become resentful not at Trump, but at the people who call them out on it.
The result is an ethos best described as “LOL Nothing Matters” Republicanism, which I believe your old colleague from The Federalist Ben Domenech coined. These Republican operatives and their affiliated social-media hacks have decided that they are just players in a big game. The left-wing elites are bad, and nothing matters except taking them down a peg. In that reframed view of the world, Donald Trump can be seen as almost a good thing.
Nichols: Well, there’s definitely an obsessiveness about playing gotcha. Trump is burning the Constitution, but they’re focused on totally owning! someone at CNN or The New York Times or MSNBC. It’s weirdly adolescent.
But look, are we making too much of the “gap” here? I think most of us in the party knew that the distance between the GOP elites and the rank and file was growing. (I think that's true for Democrats, too, which is why a party that should be romping among the working class is all bunged up over student loans.) Don’t parties have a duty to educate, or is that elitist? I seem to recall as a young guy in the 1980s that the GOP made me a more informed partisan by saying “This is what free trade means. This is why foreign policy matters.” I remember Ronald Reagan doing 30 minutes on national television, with charts and graphs, about defense spending and announcing SDI. I can’t imagine that happening now.
Is this just the Foxification of everything? I notice that Fox doesn’t play a large role in your book; was this a choice?
Miller: Briefly on the Democrats: I do think a disconnect is developing between Democratic staffers and the base, but it is in the other direction. The staffers are more progressive and idealistic, and many of the voters are more pragmatic. That’s why Eric Adams beat Maya Wiley [in the New York City mayoral race] and Joe Biden beat Liz Warren. That’s a different dynamic that presents its own issues.
But no, I don’t think it’s elitist to say that parties have a duty to educate, and obviously, that’s not what the GOP was doing in the 1990s and 2000s, except maybe when it comes to Ryanomics. The problem that I see in hindsight is that a lot of the GOP elites didn’t actually care about their voters or their legitimate grievances at all.
Nichols: Man, do I hate that whole “legitimate grievances” line of argument.
Miller: But it’s true. We ignored those issues and fed them red meat about the left that further enraged and radicalized them. Maybe had we actually listened to base voters when it came to Iraq, for example, we could’ve tempered their desire to blow everything up with Trump. Or maybe that wouldn’t have worked and the forces of globalism and social disruption would’ve led us here inevitably anyway. But we won’t know, because we never really tried.
Nichols: I think it wouldn’t have mattered, but I completely agree that we didn’t even bother to try. Throwing hunks of steaming red meat out there was just easier, especially after guys like Newt Gingrich showed that it works.
But what about Fox?
Miller: There’s no better example of the red-meat strategy than Fox. It’s all audience service, all the time, with no attempts to inject some reality into their viewers’ diets. There are no attempts to challenge Republican leaders about the ways they’ve been failing their own voters. You could do a whole parallel book to mine from the vantage point of somebody like Shep Smith trying to navigate the ever expanding crazy over there. I didn’t talk much about it, because I wanted to focus on people and characters I knew personally, and whose motivations I think I understand, so I used the online-media types (such as Breitbart, Daily Caller, etc.) as the avatars instead.
But I did include one Fox anecdote that I think basically sums it all up. I had a meeting with Fox executives sometime in 2013. They were obsessed with conspiracies about Hillary Clinton being a murderer or a lesbian or secretly ill or whatever, and they were totally uninterested in the more boring but tangible [opposition] research we were trying to offer. Which brings us back to how this unseriousness and narcissism and nihilism was all there before Trump even came down the escalator. He just was able to channel it for his own ends. He gave those Fox suits exactly what they wanted, even if it was all BS.
Nichols: I’m trying to think of some positive note for an ending here, and I’ve got nothing. Bill Kristol thinks the Republican Party is now unreformable. Do you agree?
Miller: I think the GOP needed to attract a lot of people who weren’t only “conservative” in the cultural-resentment sense, and for a while it did, but that changed years ago. The media organs and political campaigns that were built to attract people with those resentments and appeal to those kinds of voters resulted in a fundamentally flawed party. And in retrospect the monster we created was inevitably going to lead to something like this once the guardrails broke down. So I share Bill’s view that the institution is not fixable.
Nichols: That makes three of us. Thanks, Tim.