“Cover your stinger!” read the foil wrapper of the condom I had acquired in the Key West Airport. The smiling yellow and black flying insect pictured was taunting me. He wouldn’t be so happy if he had spent the night bickering with my date at Irish Kevin’s.
I still wince whenever I hear my Secret Service unofficial code name—“Bumble Bee.”
Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee, indeed.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Two Parties, One Scam
December 22, 2018
The White House. Private residence. Government shutdown strategy lunch.
“Mr. President, if you’d like, I can thumbnail this for you.”
Vice President Pence understands how Washington works, having risen in the ranks in the House of Representatives before becoming Indiana’s governor. He always strives to provide helpful insight. It was time to cut a deal with Sen. Schumer and the Democrats and end the shutdown, he reasoned. We needed a bipartisan deal. We needed the deal more than we needed the wall, political asylum reform, or internal enforcement of immigration laws at scale. Other smart establishment thinkers were quick to agree, and ultimately, so did President Trump. The president’s decision weeks later to end the shutdown without every dime of border security money he rightly requested was one of the very few dips in his historically durable approval rating.
For populist conservatives, the frustration is that the energy that drives our movement doesn’t always convert into the bold policy decisions American greatness demands.
It wasn’t supposed to go this way. Immigration hard-liners Reps. Mark Meadows, Jim Jordan, Andy Biggs, and I had gone to the White House to convince the president to hold firm and hold out if necessary. After all, we felt border security was an essential function of government that has been ignored by both parties for far too long. Nobody was chanting “Build the bipartisan consensus!” at any MAGA rally I’ve attended. Maybe that is because the Trump movement is energized by the need to make things different and better—not keep them the same. President Trump is a Firebrand because he is so rarely satisfied with anything short of America’s best. Bipartisanship is too often the opposite of reform or improvement.
Comedian George Carlin said, “The word ‘bipartisan’ usually means some larger-than-usual deception is being carried out.” I’m sure that was true in Carlin’s heyday, though now bipartisanship is the all-too-usual mechanism of deception—the standard way of selling out the country to fuel the largesse of Washington and the greed of its managers. The special interests love a system that demands bipartisanship to get things done. That way, exploitation looks like peaceful coexistence and real change looks like inappropriate partisanship. As the Senate functions today, just one person can have significant ability to block meaningful legislation. It is the tyranny of the minority and D.C. loves it—because the real majority outside of Washington doesn’t like the politicians and gets even more suspicious when a handful of them appear to be gumming up the works of the government’s usual functioning. That’s an unfortunate misconception on the public’s part because much of business as usual in Washington is highly destructive.
The greatest opportunity we have as Americans to fight back against the corrupt uniparty is the Trump presidency. Candidate Trump had little reverence for how things had been done before. When Trump was booed at debates, he made a point to call out the lobbyists and establishment hacks who fill the debate halls. Trump will never be part of the uniparty because he may be the first American politician to successfully run against it as a foil. Trump campaign strategist Steve Bannon put it succinctly: “We made Hillary Clinton the defender of the corrupt status quo.” Stagecraft is statecraft.
President Trump wasn’t just attacking the uniparty power brokers on the Left—he pushes back on his own administration’s dogmas more than any president in American history. We have a champion and an opportunity here, though overcoming the power structure of D.C. means facing strong headwinds.
There are strong bipartisan majorities in favor of accumulating national debt, creating new entitlements, irresponsibly printing money, bowing to Big Tech, invading faraway lands, and importing cheap illegal labor. Bipartisanship gave us trade deals that sold out American workers for multinational corporations and a limp-wristed China policy. It allowed our higher education institutions to trick teenagers into accepting a life of indebtedness for worthless degrees. The worst things our government has done to our own people have been delivered through unholy cooperation. This is the agenda of the uniparty, and it must be stopped.
Both parties have an interest in keeping things almost exactly as they are. Sure, they’ll try to press an advantage against the other side, maybe catch the wave of a big popular cause sweeping the nation once in a while. But for the most part, they fear that a true political upheaval could disrupt their luncheons, campaign donations, speaking schedules, and staffing needs. They’ve got it pretty good. Why risk messing that up?
The inertia of Permanent Washington doesn’t uniquely benefit Republicans or Democrats in a zero-sum game against one another. It benefits most those corruptible officials willing to work across party lines to screw all Americans.
Keep rubber-stamping those continuing budget resolutions and voting with your party on the big votes, then writing triumphant—or angrily defeated—press releases about it to the folks back home, as if you really worked up a sweat about it all, and the odds are you can stay here for years. You won’t need to change and grow, and the government won’t change much, either, though it will gradually grow, like an obese person without the will to change their eating habits.
If coasting like this means not daring to make any big changes in a country that badly needs them, well, that’s a shame, but first things first, and each member can tell himself, “It’s not my fault.” There are 535 of us here, and I do what I can, sometimes. It’d be nice if the whole system got fixed, if each member thinks at one time or
