![]() ![]() ![]() And I moved to California and I started a family. And that period went on for a little while where I was still kind of doing some stuff - but also still kind of getting up to my old skullduggery ways and also trying to maybe think about separating from the party. And I kind of pivoted from that into basically a depression after the 2016 election where I didn’t know what to do with myself. To use a sports cliche, I felt like I left it all on the field in 2016 - I did my part, a lot of people I looked up to let me down, the country let me down, and that I fought the good fight. Kruse: When did you know you had to engage in this sort of full accounting? As far back as early 2016? After November of 2016? And so I guess in short that’s why I had to do a full accounting of my own actions to feel good about writing a book that judged other people’s actions. Obviously, I’ve had various degrees of distance with the party for five years, six years now, so I just really felt like that would not have addressed the real desire within me to fully account for what my role was, and what my friends’ roles were, and where we parted ways, and what might have been a counterfactual history where I would’ve been as complicit as them.Īs I say in the book, the first half is really kind of a look back at what I did and what people I worked with did to lay the groundwork for Trump, and then kind of the second half is my explanation of why I think most of the people that I worked with stuck around when I bailed. Miller: I felt like I had to write the first part of the book, which was: What was my responsibility? There was a temptation to write the kind of book that was … the 10 douchiest MAGA grifters, you know? Just a jeremiad against the party. Kruse: So, because of that, did you have to write this book? I do not mean it like inflation is our fault, or that any discrete policy outcome was our fault, but the political environment that Donald Trump rose from wouldn’t have happened had we not behaved the way we did. Tim Miller: I meant that the people in the Republican consulting class, the Republican establishment in the conservative media ecosystem were necessary if not sufficient for Donald Trump to take over the party, for the degradation of our political discourse, and for this very tumultuous political world that we live in. For those who have not yet read this book, what do you mean by that? Michael Kruse: “America never would’ve gotten into this mess if it weren’t for me and my friends.” That’s the first sentence. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. And for her to go full Trump to such a degree that she was organizing the rally on January 6, and for me to go where I went, I had to understand what happened.” “Caroline was one of me,” Miller told me. Want to read more stories like this? POLITICO Weekend delivers gripping reads, smart analysis and a bit of high-minded fun every Friday. 6, 2021, that led to the ransacking at the Capitol. So, definitely, does the tequila-fueled coda in Santa Monica with Caroline Wren, his good friend turned Trump fundraiser turned “VIP Advisor” for the rally on Jan. The meeting in Georgetown with Alyssa Farah - where the daughter of a longtime boss of a far-right website attempts to explain her evolution from not voting for Trump in 2016 to working in his administration to now vowing to do everything she can to make sure he doesn’t return to the White House - makes the book worth the read. Miller is both confessor and priest, albeit one with an open bar tab. Because in several cases he did get face-to-face personal. The dish he doles out about Lindsey Graham, Reince Priebus, Sean Spicer, Josh Holmes, Elise Stefanik and more feels less like drive-by scuttlebutt and more face-to-face personal. But this confessional tone gives the book its distinctive oomph and affords Miller the license to dissect with mordant wit the many varieties of rationalization that his colleagues in the GOP employed to justify their fealty, even servility, to Trump. It made him, he says, a “championship-level” compartmentalizer. What distinguishes Miller’s book from many other insider accounts is his willingness to put his own behavior under the microscope, specifically how as a closeted gay man he was able to ignore the sometimes-explicit homophobia of his clients to help push the parts of their agenda he found more palatable. ![]()
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