Every Republican In Congress Deserves Trump-- Weaponizing His Own Toxicity Against Them

Erik Paulsen is a mainstream conservative who won his suburban Twin Cities seat (MN-03) in 2008 when Jim Ramstadt resigned. Previously Paulsen had served as the majority leader of the Minnesota House of Representatives. Although the 2008 race was tough-- Paulsen beating Democrat Ashwin Madia 48.5% to 40.9%-- he sailed through his reelection bids... until he got on the wrong side of Señor Trumpanzee. I'll get to that in a minute.

The district-- west, north and south of Minneapolis-- had gone from red to purple during Paulsen's tenure, Obama winning it both time, albeit narrowly. When Paulsen was first elected the PVI was R+1. Now it is D+1. Paulsen's voting record was garden variety GOP but his district had been getting more and more moderate and extreme conservatism was a foreign ideology by 2016. Caucus day was a disaster for conservatives that year. Bernie didn't just overwhelmingly beat Hillary (61.7% to 38.3%) but his 126,229 votes beat all 3 of the top Republican vote getters combined:

• Rubio- 41,397
• Cruz- 33,181
• Trumpanzee- 24,473

Paulsen still managed to win in 2016-- 223,077 (56.7%) to 169,243 (43.0%) with relative ease but Trump was a major drag in the Minneapolis suburbs. Hillary beat him in the district by over 9 points, 50.8% to 41.4% Going into 2018, Paulsen was worried. He raised $5,778,480 and spent $5,862,137. And the NRCC was worried too. They were defending incumbents everywhere but they felt good about Paulsen and put $2,292,761 into the race and directed the Congressional Leadership Fund SuperPAC to put in another $946,202 and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to spend a quarter million on Paulsen's behalf. The Koch brothers put in another $150,000 + and all kinds of right-wing groups came to Paulsen's defense, from the NRA and Defending Main Street to a bunch of fringe anti-Choice groups. The DCCC had saddled itself with a right-of-center rich guy with nothing to to attract anyone except one thing: "I'm not Trump and Paulsen is." Fighting for his political life, Paulsen tried distancing himself from Trump. In the end, the Dem, Dean Phillips, pulverized him, 202,402 (55.6%) to 160,838 (44.2%).

But there's more to it than just that. Remember, Trump is very unpopular is the Minneapolis suburbs-- and he knew it. In fact, Nathan Gonzales explained how Trump weaponized that unpopularity-- to get even with Paulsen. Gonzales wrote that "Trump still won’t publicly admit he was a significant factor in Republicans’ loss of the House in 2018. But a behind-the-scenes moment captured in a new book suggests he is more politically self-aware than he leads on. We know that Trump doesn’t admit mistakes or commit sins. It’s not in his personality or good for his brand to acknowledge any weakness. But, according to Politico’s Tim Alberta, the president endorsed a vulnerable member of Congress in an intentional effort to weaken his candidacy." Yep... Paulsen. Every Republican deserves this fate.

In one case, Trump endorsed as a means of punishment. Having heard that Minnesota congressman Erik Paulsen was distancing himself from the White House in the hope of holding his seat in the Twin Cities’ suburbs, the president stewed and asked that the political shop send a tweet of support for Paulsen-- thereby sabotaging the moderate Republican’s efforts,” according to an excerpt in Alberta’s new book American Carnage, shared with Axios.

“When his aides demurred, Trump sent the tweet himself, issuing a ‘Strong Endorsement!’ of the congressman in a late-night post that left Paulsen fuming and his Democratic opponent giddy.”

...Trump’s involvement in Paulsen’s 3rd District race consisted of a single tweet and the congressman lost by a dozen points. If the president had done an event for him, Paulsen would probably have lost by a larger margin.

...[Generally] Trump also didn’t even try (or was successfully deterred) to wade into less friendly territory where he was toxic. Twenty-two of 25 Republican members in districts Hillary Clinton carried lost reelection last cycle. By limiting his visits to friendly territory, the president was essentially padding his personal win-loss record. It’s like Alabama’s football team scheduling Mercer, Fresno State and Western Carolina.

...While Trump might have a more nuanced idea of his political standing than previously advertised, the bottom line is that he believes Republicans had a successful midterm election with his help. And that will lead the president to talk more about immigration and replicate his strategy from 2018 to 2020.

Trump is talking about campaigning heavily is Minnesota in 2020. This will be a dream come true for Tom Bakk, minority leader of the state Senate. The state has a Democratic governor and Democratic Party-controlled state House. What they really want to do now is flip the Senate. As of today, there are 35 Republicans and 32 Democrats in the state Senate. All 67 seats in the chamber  are up for election in 2020 and if Democrats have a net gain of just 2 seats they'll control the chamber. "Jeremy [Miller, the Senate President] and Paul [Gazelka, the majority leader] are both very worried," a friend of mine in the legislature told me this morning... We'll probably take 3 or 4 seats but if Trump starts spending a lot of time in the state... the sky's the limit. A couple of those rallies he does before election day and half a dozen seats are going to flip. He's our not-so-secret weapon."

I Can't Wait To Read American Carnage

On Saturday, Lloyd Green reviewed Tim Alberta's new book, American Carnage for The Guardian. He referred to it as "compelling, alarming and scoop-heavy history." Trump's obsessive attacks on Paul Ryan this week, guaranteed the book all the coverage it would need to put it into the top of the charts when it's released on Tuesday.

Like the deity on the sixth day of creation, Donald Trump has recast the Republican party in his own image. Aggrieved and belligerent is the new normal. The soul of the party has migrated from the sun belt to the Bible belt, from the suburbs to rural America, from a message suffused with upward arc to one brimming with resentment.

The 45th president has won the hearts and minds of the faithful while turning off the rest of America. According to a recent poll, Trump has garnered the approval of seven in eight Republicans even as he trails Megan Rapinoe, the star of the champion US women’s soccer team, 42%-41%. All this despite an economy that moves forward.

Tim Alberta, Politico’s chief political correspondent, has written a masterful must-read. Across 600-plus pages, he chronicles more than a decade of transformation and turmoil within what was once but is no longer the party of Abraham Lincoln.

Over the past half-century, the GOP has dramatically changed. New England and New York’s tony bedroom communities are now Democratic. The old Confederacy is a contiguous sea of Republican red. In the 2018 midterms, the GOP captured 9% of the black vote. In 1972, they got twice that.

Subtitled On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump, American Carnage delivers a lively tick-tock on how the party moved from George W Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” to the jagged contours of Maga. Trump emerges as the vehicle and voice of white evangelicals and white Americans without a four-year degree, the operative word being “white.”

Alberta is mindful that the winds of proto-Trumpism were present before Bush had left office. In his telling, Sarah Palin-- who once bragged of her husband and herself: “He’s got the rifle, I’ve got the rack”-- was a harbinger of a post-Bush world.

American Carnage records Karl Rove, Bush’s political brain, branding Palin “vacuous” and evidencing a Republican tropism toward “wanting people who would throw bombs and blow things up.” While Trump was the “ultimate expression” of that impulse, Rove says, Palin was an “early warning bell.”

As framed by Paul Ryan, the former House speaker and 2012 vice-presidential candidate: “The Reagan Republican wing beat the Rockefeller Republican wing. And now the Trump wing beat the Reagan wing.” Against the backdrop of failure in Iraq, the Great Recession, displacement and globalization, Trump delivered “hope” to voters Hillary Clinton discounted as deplorable.

Alberta’s storytelling is bolstered by his access to powers that be and were. Trump, Ryan and John Boehner, another ex-speaker, all go on the record. American Carnage is filled with scoop. It is an exercise in a pulling back the curtain, not breathlessness.

For example, Alberta lets us know the fix was in at Fox News for Trump during the Republican primaries, in a manner akin to the Democratic National Committee putting its thumb on the scales for Clinton. Ted Cruz, Texas’ grating junior senator, never had a real chance with the network built by the late Roger Ailes.

One Fox staffer told Cruz: “We’re not allowed to say anything positive about you on the air.” Or, as Cruz put it after Ailes’ death in 2017: “I think it was Roger’s dying wish to elect Donald Trump president.” Alberta lets us know that Ailes believed Barack Obama “really was a Muslim who really had been born outside the United States.”

American Carnage also crystalizes Trump’s own penchant for eavesdropping. In early 2012, as the primaries were heating up, Matt Rhoades, Mitt Romney’s campaign manager, met with Michael Cohen, Trump’s then consigliere who is now a resident of a federal correctional facility. They discussed the prospect of Trump meeting Romney. Alberta lays out what happened next: “Cohen was suddenly interrupted by a voice crackling over a speakerphone on the table. It was Trump. He had been listening the entire time …”

In describing the 2012 race, Alberta conveys the mistaken belief held by Romney’s team that that he would win based upon pre-election polling. American Carnage, however, makes no mention of a poll circulated on the Saturday night before the election by Alex Gage, which showed Obama with at least 300 electoral votes. Gage was a veteran of the Bush 2004 re-election effort and Romney’s 2008 campaign. His then wife, Katie Packer, was Romney’s deputy campaign manager.

Alberta sheds light on Trump’s thinly reported May 2016 meeting with Rove. Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s then campaign manager, called the get-together “good” without saying more. American Carnage brings color and detail.

Trump appears both ignorant of the realities of the electoral map and appreciative of the tutorial. The two men review Trump’s path to an electoral college majority, Rove correcting his eager but pride-filled pupil. Trump poses the possibility of winning California, New York and Oregon, only to be shot down. The last time any of those states went Republican was more than 30 years ago.

Rove explains that Iowa, Pennsylvania and West Virginia are winnable if the campaign husbands its time and energy. Trump turns to Steve Wynn, a casino magnate subsequently felled by allegations of sexual misconduct, and exclaims: “Why aren’t people in my campaign talking to me about this?”

Alberta makes clear that Trump was the only candidate capable of harnessing populist fury into something more than a collection of raw emotions. Clinton’s worship at the altars of identity politics and political correctness helped cost her the election, just as Trump’s lack of a filter endeared him to his base.

Although Clinton finished with nearly 3 million more votes, Trump sits in the Oval Office. As Alberta observes, authenticity remains in high demand, more so than reality.

Trump is embattled but far from despairing. “I fucking love this job,” he “howls” to no one in particular, backstage at a rally in Columbia, Missouri, in November 2018.

He knows he is transformative.

“Honestly,” Trump tells Alberta. “Can there even be a question?”