Former Republican political operative Tim Miller answers the question no one else has fully grappled with: Why did normal people go along with the worst of Trumpism?
Why We Did It begins and ends with the story of his friendship with the Republican fund-raiser Caroline Wren, a fellow 'socially liberal millennial,' who worked with Miller on McCain’s 2008 campaign but more recently made a star turn as a Trump adviser subpoenaed by the panel investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol...Wren’s motivations don’t turn out to be particularly complex; she herself admits that her politics have always had less to do with the finer details of governing than the more cultish aspects of personality...When pushed to explain what drew her to Trump, whose policies she says repulsed her, Wren rails against smug progressives driving around in their Priuses and forcing everyone to drink out of paper straws...She felt intensely annoyed by their self-satisfaction and hypocrisy...She liked Trump because of what she calls his 'scorch-the-earth mode'...This 'animus,' Miller says, seems to have been the necessary condition for converting his 'reluctant peers' into Trump supporters...I recommend reading Why We Did It alongside It Was All a Lie (2020), by Stuart Stevens, another 'what happened' book by a former Republican operative...Stevens comes across as thoughtful, deliberative, reflective; Miller comes across as clever, a little bit mean, extremely profane...Stevens captures how the Republican Party spent decades cultivating grievances that it didn’t plan to do anything about, while Miller captures the consequent emotional valence, with its 'unseriousness and cruelty'...Both books are absorbing; neither is particularly hopeful.
A former GOP operative explores possible reasons why so many of his peers fell for Trumpism...While delivering a carefully argued account of how things went awry, Miller is unsparing in his descriptions of latter-day GOP figures such as Elise Stefanik, who 'made a conscious choice to go all-in with her own personal Voldemort because she came to recognize that her popularity, fundraising, and ability to rise within the party would benefit'; and Corey Lewandowski, 'a shriveled skin-flute-looking man with no appreciable skills outside of recognizing the popularity of unrestrained Trumpism'...At once sobering and entertaining, a eulogy for a GOP run amok.
'America never would have gotten into this mess if it weren’t for me and my friends,' writes former Republican operative Miller in this anguished yet entertaining exposé of the party’s enthrallment to Donald Trump...Reflecting on his early experiences as a PR consultant and spokesman for John McCain’s 2007 Republican primary campaign, Miller admits that in an era when success 'was so often removed from political beliefs,' he 'ma[de] allowances' for Republican opposition to gay marriage, despite being a closeted gay man himself at the time...Comparing the 'brainteasers I was playing with my closeted self' to the mental gymnastics of mainstream Republicans who hopped on the Trump bandwagon, Miller also documents the 'informal working relationship' he developed with Breitbart cofounder Steve Bannon...Witty prose, colorful anecdotes, and copious insider details make this a worthwhile dissection of how Republican 'Never Trumpers' got pushed aside.
