Speaker 1: Today we're going to be speaking with Tim Miller, who's a writer and political
consultant, the author of Why We Did It A Travelog From the Republican Road to Hell.
And his show is also available on Snapchat and is called Not My Party.
Tim, great having you on. I really appreciate it. Speaker 3: David. I've seen you on the YouTube
scene feeding you to me, so. Speaker 1: Oh, that's good.
Speaker 3: That's meant to be. Speaker 1: This is usually right wing stuff
is fed to left wingers, but I like to see the opposite happening a little bit. So, I mean,
okay, just to kind of like orient our audience. Sure. You are not on the Trump train, for lack of
a better term, but I think it would be interesting to hear about when did you start to think that the
Republican Party was going in a direction that you didn't like that didn't make sense to your values?
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, this is you're hinting at the regrets part of the book, the way we did it.
We as important were there because I'm included in we even though I bailed on Trump the minute he
went down that escalator, bailed on on the idea that I would support him. But as I look back on
it, one of my first jobs in politics is I was the Iowa spokesperson for John McCain during the 2008
primary. And so I was obviously the lead off, kick off the caucus states is a very important kind of
role. I was excited about the role and the types of people that were showing up to the John McCain
town hall so that we would have the kind of questions that he was getting over and over about
their concerns about the invasion at the southern border and, you know, globalists. And then after
superhighway, this was a conspiracy theory back at the time that never came to pass. I don't
know if you noticed, we never did get that NAFTA superhighway right. These folks would come and and
I started to get a sense that, oh, man, I maybe like the people that make up this party, you know,
have a set of values that are separate from mine. Then obviously, McCain goes on to take this. Take
Sarah Palin. PALIN The rallies the Palin rallies were were very much a proto example of these Trump
rallies. Right. Of of people shouting about Barack Hussein Obama and being a muslim. And so, you
know, I kind of rationalized that and justified it because I still like John McCain and still
believed in his political program, which was quite different than Donald Trump's political program.
And I was ambitious. You know, I wanted to continue to be successful in my career. And so I
think that using a few different rationalizations, I kind of blocked out the fact that I in
retrospect, I really saw this all coming in 2007. Speaker 1: Yeah. And what's interesting about that
is there's this viral moment where at some event, I don't remember where it was. This woman asks
John McCain, you know, not even really asked, just sort of says, like, I think Obama is a muslim.
And McCain says, no, he's not. He's an American and he's just someone with whom
I have political differences. So that was sort of the type of signal you're talking about here.
Speaker 3: For sure. And it helped me justify staying with John McCain. Right there is like
sometimes people on the left want to be like the party was always corrupted, it was always racist,
was always horrible. And it's like, well, there were elements that that is true, right? But that
also leadership does matter. And having somebody at the top of the ticket who would say, no, ma'am,
that is not true. Having someone at the top of the ticket during McCain's concession speech,
he was graceful. He was getting booed when he said, we all need to unite behind the new
president and give us our support. He gets booed by the crowd. So you can see this tension right
between somebody who's trying to be a leader and a statesman who has some conservative values and
a reactionary political base that's looking for someone to feed their grievance. The base got what
they wanted, you know, about eight years later. Speaker 1: So what were the issues that to you
are the important political issues that that make you or made you a Republican? Like is it is it
taxation? Is it regulation? What what is it? Speaker 3: Yeah. I hate to be a cliché,
but I was always one of these people who was kind of socially liberal. You know, though,
the word pro-life is getting mangled these days. What does that mean? Like. You know,
I believe there should be some restrictions on abortion out of my abortion position. Right.
Because sort of Bill Clinton in 1992, then the current pro-life position. But but besides that,
I was very socially liberal. And yeah, I think the government a lot of times gets in the way
of of economic growth, of prosperity in our society. I'm obviously a capitalist.
I think that America as a force can play a force for good in the world. You know, I think this is
frankly more of a Joe Biden point of view these days than it is a Donald Trump point of view. But,
you know, I do believe in American power and influence over overseas. And, you know,
I believe that America was the shining city on the hill where we should be welcoming people
from throughout the world and that they can have their opportunity to take the blessings of the
of the country. That was like a core Republican view as I was growing up. Right. In the eighties
and nineties. Right? Yeah. Reagan and Bush were very liberal on immigration. And, you know, they
spoke to American greatness and believing in the American experiment. A lot of times I look at the
left and say, oh, they're down talking America. You know, they want to change what is good about
the country. And so that is kind of what had me falling on the Republican side, despite the fact
that I obviously had disagreements with parts of the nativist wing of the party on immigration.
I'm gay. We even talked about that. Obviously, on gay marriage and those issues. I disagreed
and I came to disagree with the more extreme views, even on economic issues that were,
you know, that the Tea Party, you know, and the, you know, shutting down the government, you know,
we can never raise taxes on anyone making over 400,000 and some of these extreme economic
views. I've sort of come around to the center. Speaker 1: So it seems clear that now there are
lots of folks who are sincerely Trump supporters, and then there are some folks on the Republican
side who are overtly anti-Trump. And then there's sort of like the suspicion, which I think we've
we've learned is true, that there are people who are kind of publicly Trump supporters, but really
privately they are not. Can you talk about like early when it became clear Trump was
becoming the nominee? What was your experience of those kind of three groups? And maybe the
third one is really the most interesting, the ones who publicly are still defending him,
but public privately, rather did not like him. Speaker 3: Yeah, the third group I think is the
most interesting group. And that's who the book focuses on. Right? I don't I sort of hated all
the NeverTrump books that wanted to make us seem like the heroes to me. They didn't think we were
heroes. Trump was manifestly unfit and corrupt and dangerous and racist. And it's like I did the
obvious thing, in my opinion, the genuine Trump supporters. I think there's an interesting book
to be written about them, right? This is a real streak within our country right now. I saw that.
Of course, we talked about it at these Iowa events. People who are genuinely nativists,
genuine protectionist, want to change kind of this the way that, you know, the post-World War
two kind of American set up set up of America's role in the world. The third group, though,
is one who agrees with me on everything but but basically wanted to continue on with their
political career. Or maybe they don't agree with me on everything. I think that the Liz Cheney,
Elise Stefanik is a good example of this, right? Liz Cheney is far more conservative than me on
social issues, on foreign policy. Even Elise Stefanik and I work together. She's one of the
chapters in the book. She and I were RINO Squish Moderate Republicans, right? She believes climate
change is real. She believes in gay marriage. She wanted a liberal immigration policy,
but she also believed in lower taxes and a strong America overseas. Well, Elise Stefanik is now the
one who is rising within the party and not Liz Cheney, because she is willing to go along with
the cult right allies. And Liz Cheney wasn't so so in that third group. You know what shocked me?
It did not shock me that Trump took over the party. I like I said in oh seven, I got a hint
that something like this could happen. It did. What shocked me was just to a person how almost
everyone I had worked with ended up going along with it. And I would have these dinners and these
breakfasts, these tortured drinks where people would explain, you know, all of their rationales.
And so what I tried to explore in the book is all these different rationales, the ones that are
ridiculous, the ones that are remarkable, the ones that are kind of in the ballpark of defensible
and try to adjudicate how it was that these people, I think, who are the central
villains, essentially, of the book and of our time, came to decide to do what they did because
Trump couldn't have gotten power just with the true believers. Right? There aren't enough of
them. He had to win over that third group. Right? Speaker 1: Who strikes you as a sort of faking it
type Republican right now of the people that are kind of in the public eye defending Trump?
Speaker 3: Well, most of them. And Elise Avila, I guess I just talked about at least
with Kevin with Kevin McCarthy. You know, I saw I write in the book about Lindsey Graham.
You know, Lindsey Graham and I, he supported Shadows, Jeb's communications director. We
spent a lot of time together. You know, he would call me all the time ranting about Donald Trump,
how much he hated him. Like one night I couldn't get away from him because he was
drinking all this chardonnay, ranting about how Trump is a racist and a bigot. So is he
faking it now or I don't know if faking it is the right word. I think that he's come around
to believing that the thing that he cares about the most is access to power and and that he can
deal with Trump's flaws in exchange for what he thinks he's getting, which is influence,
access to power. I don't know if he's faking it so much as he's just his calculation has changed.
But I think most of the political strategists and class, which is which is what I talk about,
are, you know, at some level, you know, not it would be if they all let's just put it this way,
pretty much everybody in the establishment, in the Republican Party, if they could
snap their fingers and have a magic genie appear and say Donald Trump is just going to disappear
from the face of the planet and Ron DeSantis is going to take over the party, they all would snap
their fingers in a second wave. Oh, well. Speaker 1: So let me talk about that. Yeah,
that was going to be my next question in terms of like what's the path out of this? Because the
interesting thing about you mentioning DeSantis is when I think about John McCain and Mitt Romney,
DeSantis seems way more like Trump than like any of them. So I'm kind of interested in
the path out of this Trumpist nightmare on the Republican side. Does it have to be someone
like DeSantis, who I almost see as like a slightly less incompetent version of Trump,
but close to as dangerous? Is that just by necessity, what it has to be? Or is there a
way to get back to someone like a mitt Romney who seems so comparatively benign right now? Yeah.
Speaker 3: There's no path back to the benign. I mean, at least in the short term. Here's the thing
that Donald Trump gave these the people this is a bottom up problem, not a top down problem. And the
book is about people's moral sacrifices. Right. And how they went along with somebody that they.
That was clown Ashley. Corrupt, right? Yeah. Just for their own power. So. So that part, you know,
they're complicit. But what is the core issue here is that is that what voters want is someone
that's going to channel their grievance and their rage and their hate for the left, for elites,
for the media, for, you know, whatever people who are expressing their gender identity in different
ways. Like their hatred for whoever that is, they want someone to channel that. That's what they
care about, not policies. This is the difference from the Dem base and the Republican base. Like
there may be some people on the Dem base of extreme views, but they have actual policies
that they want to see enacted. The Republican base just want somebody to channel their grievance.
And so, okay, if that's what these voters want, they're never going to they're not turning back
to anyone like Mitt Romney after Donald Trump gave them what they could have. Like for a while,
they're like, oh, I hold my nose for John McCain because this is the best we can do. We need
somebody like this to win. Now they have come to realize, no, we can win with someone, that that
shares are cruelty and our hatred. And so why would we go back to Mitt Romney? They
never would. And so, no, I think that there's a possible chance for somebody who is a like
a Boris Johnson type. I wouldn't call that benign. I think that is our best hope. Right.
Somebody who can fake the grievance stuff, you know, and throw people a little bit of red meat,
you know, with some cultural resentments, which Boris was good at. But, but like on the
policy side of things is like was basically, you know, kind of like a center, right nationalist,
you know, not not exactly the kind of person I would want. Not like a classically liberal
conservative, but I think it's possible that someone like that could appear. But no,
the DeSantis mold is the way the party is going, for sure. Or maybe even worse, honestly,
maybe even Tucker or something to that effect. Speaker 1: Well, in looking at some of these
recent Trump rallies and CPAC, what gets the most applause is the overtly homophobic and transphobic
stuff. Like in watching CPAC. The crowd was kind of dead until Ted Cruz ridiculed pronouns
and I don't remember who it was talked about trans women in sports like the applause lines
where the homophobic transphobic applause lines. Trump now tells the story about the weightlifting
and the swimmer. You know, it's this every single rally, it's the same stories.
Is that surprising to see that kind of resurface? Speaker 3: I wouldn't say so. It's disappointing
because look, we all play these games like in my head. I felt like the gay rights march was
going forward and we, those of us on the pro-gay rights side were winning. And so, you know, that
it wasn't you know, by the time I really came into politics, like the writing was on the wall, like
the March for To Progress was marching forward. And thank thank you to all the people that did
that fight before we got there. But. But I should have said we should have known that there would
be backsliding. Right. The times these people, their hatred, their cruelty, they didn't go away.
You know, a lot of times the Republicans get caricatured as, like, being so stupid
that they don't know what they're doing. They're they're strategic. They're tactical. If you listen
to focus groups, Republican voters, they didn't change their mind on gay marriage. They're just
like, well, this is a loser for us, right? It's not worth fighting it right now. Right. It's a
political loser. We're going to go win on other issues. That's why they moved on to the trans
stuff right now with the with what DeSantis is doing in the schools that don't say gay,
the pronouns, the tramp, the trans sports, they're emboldened again. They're like,
wait a minute, no, this can be a winner. We can bring our you know, we can otherize them and
attack them. And that can be a political winner for us again. So we're going to do that. And so
so while I think the good natured side of me was hoping that this stuff was passed, I don't
think it should be surprising because it's not like these people died. They're all still here.
All the people that still did, you know, that were for anti-gay marriage initiatives in 2004.
Most of them are still around. Right. So, you know, it's not as that as if all of their views
changed. They just made a political calculation. Speaker 1: So the Snapchat show, not my party. I
don't even understand Snapchat. Like I'm on tick tock, tick tock. I get and we're doing well and
tick tock. My sister is on Snapchat. She says it's really like the hub for people who are a little
bit younger than me. Yeah. How did this develop? Speaker 3: Well, basically, it's a snapshot of
these shows and it's mostly for 13 to 24 year olds. Right. Who are on it, essentially. And and
they had like Ben SHAPIRO, you know, and they had like super left stuff. Maybe like you're not on
there, but some of your competitors are the left. Speaker 1: Nate's right,
the actual socialists, not like actual soldiers. Speaker 3: So the Snapchat folks came to me like,
we need, like somebody in the middle, like, besides Charlie Kirk and AOC, right? Like we need
to serve this audience because there are a lot of teens out there still kind of working their way
through their political identity. And so I tried to offer a show once a week post on Thursdays on
Snapchat. It's just 4 minutes. It's fun, it's fast and it's like, Hey, here's a look at the
news and here's a look at what's happening in politics. We talked about the student loan thing.
And and I don't I hate to say balance because I'm not trying to do this fake centrist. Oh,
on the one hand on the other hand thing. But it's like we're heterodox, right? Like, I don't every
once in a while, I still agree with the Republican on something. Right. But I'm not MAGA. You know,
I'm not going to tell you exactly what you want to hear every week. And so I hear a lot from
kids in college who appreciate the show because they're like, man on campus. Everyone is either,
you know, in the K in the K high or a social justice warrior or a mega. And I don't fit that.
And I think that a lot of people feel that way, and so they're trying to navigate through their
views. And so I think the fact that I've been cast out from the Republican Party gives me a chance to
have the freedom to just kind of tell people and give people an honest look at what's happening.
Speaker 1: Well, I got to get on that Snapchat. I've got to figure out what's going on on there.
Speaker 3: The show your show would do well. Speaker 1: I should really sample some some
clips on there. It's an interesting idea, actually. Tim's show is not my party on Snapchat.
The book is Why We Did It A Travelog From the Republican Road to Hell. We've been speaking
with Tim Miller. Tim, thank you so much. Speaker 3: David Thanks, brother.