Democrats prefer Republicans out of power, which is to say, gelded. President George W. Bush is spoken of today by his former opponents with fondness. Why, he even sat next to Ellen DeGeneres at a Cowboys game! It’s easy to forget that the Left tried to tar him as a fascist and called him “Bushitler.” He was hated and vilified when in office. As former Bush speechwriter Matt Latimer recounts, Hurricane Katrina deaths were blamed on Bush’s racism, war crimes in Abu Ghraib on his military viciousness, and his indulgence of Russian adventurism in the nation of Georgia on his being too friendly to Putin. Meanwhile, the Bush White House barely fought back, accepting the inevitability of the “respectable” media calling the shots and framing the arguments. Allow the Democrats to control the frame and they’ll hang you every time.
But the times they are a-changing, and Trump’s pugnacity in calling out the “fake news” media is his most powerful move—and a key to his enduring popularity. I know reporters, even left-wing ones, who will rethink their stories or try harder if faced with criticism by the president. Trump never surrenders the frame.
And on perhaps the most consequential issue, stoic fortitude is never likely to call into question our unconstitutional, unending wars. Fortitude—tragically, frustratingly, and almost admirably—always seems to lead to the conclusion that the only honorable course in a military quagmire is to stick it out, whether that means we’re in Afghanistan another twenty years or pretending that Iraq is just another couple billion dollars away from becoming a flourishing democracy.
We conservatives have often been suckers for the argument that any criticism of neoconservative adventurism is a failure to “support the troops.” That’s passive acceptance of the status quo at its worst, and it gets a lot of people killed, including the troops we claim to honor.
You have to have a certain stubborn and even rebellious curiosity about these things—these policies, foreign or domestic, that have been sold to us as permanent and sacred. And these days you have to be a Firebrand to defy a deeply tortured status quo. Fortitude might have been the appropriate conservative attitude had it swept into office a President McCain, Romney, Bush, or Kasich. But under President Trump what we need is something more blazing and spirited. Fortitude means more of the same, and the same currently sucks.
For a new generation of Republican leaders to prove that President Trump isn’t just a one-off, a quirk with a fleeting cult of personality, there will be a need for an animated, organized populism in our country. Not a lazy assumption that conservative values will carry the day so long as we keep saluting the flag and loving the system, or at least accepting it as given.
Washington is a corrupt place full of corrupt ambitions where few deeds serve the public. Conservative fortitude is never going to stop or even slow the corrupt machine. It’s too complex to be stopped by sadly shaking our heads on national TV at anyone unpatriotic or socialist. We need to aggressively point out the countless ways Americans are being ripped off and tyrannized. We need radical and even (rhetorically) violent truth-telling in the marketplace of ideas, not the old conservative soft sell. If the Right is to prevail, it will need to start competing.
Populism can achieve this in a way the genteel wisdom of the average Bush-era country club Republican no longer can. The mindset of idle retirees is fine for idle retirees, but it won’t triumph in the arena against leftists who have every major institution in our society on their side. Fighters cannot abide by the Marquess of Queensberry Rules when matched against an angry pack of rabid hyenas. Those with fortitude quietly internalize their pain. They sometimes have a high tolerance for it but a low capacity to inflict it on others.
You are in a fight when facing the Left, not a Kennedy School seminar where afterward you will all get foreign beers and celebrate how you’ve arrived. Every day they are coming for you. You must first come for them. Our Founders called for energy in the executive, not fortitude—toughness in the arena, not grace under pressure. Donald Trump has high energy; Jeb Bush has low energy. Donald Trump is president. These things happen for a reason. Energy is also contagious in a way that fortitude is not.
The most dangerous thing about the do-your-duty form of conservative stoicism is that it tends to mean following orders and (famously) waiting your turn. That’s an admirable quality in an actual frontline soldier but a formula for disaster in a society full of millions of citizens yearning for genuine leadership. We should raise a ruckus the technocrats can’t understand or control. Remind them who’s really in charge after all. Time to become a Firebrand.
This book is your invitation to the front lines of our fight. Join me with ideas, energy, images, and stories. This is not my chronological diary. You can watch me on television for that. This is how we prevail with joy—and exactly how an exciting president is leading the way against all odds.
This is not a book for those who want to grin and bear it. This book is about winning, winning so much you get sick of it. After all, isn’t that what you were promised?
CHAPTER THREE
THE RUSSIA HOAX
December 9, 2017
Air Force One, en route to MAGA rally in Pensacola.
“Gaetz, what do your constituents think of this Russia bullshit?”
I was prepared for the question because my friend and one of
