As the Pensacola News Journal’s Andy Marlette would observe following one of the 2016 debates that sent me to Congress:
As far as sheer debate talent and readiness, nobody is close to Gaetz. That’s not an endorsement or a criticism of other candidates. But as the saying goes, the guy just has mad skills. I don’t know if he’s more Steph Curry or LeBron James, but he’s that good when it comes to rhetorical game time. He even inspired Sen. Evers to refer to him as a “slick-tongued lawyer” at one point. Gaetz seems to have the rare ability to speak almost as quickly as he can think, which would get most folks in deep, deep trouble. But whether you agree with his politics or not, watching Gaetz on the debate stage, you’ve got to admit that the guy is playing ball at a higher level than most.
Firebrands win elections. I’ve never lost.
Now that voters had given Republicans what we had always asked for—unified control of the government—I was there to capitalize on Trump’s victory and shake things up. But I couldn’t fight for anyone from the rafters. I couldn’t even hear. I would need to fight for a better seat before restoring anything.
Little did we know at the time that the battle for the presidency was already underway and it called for the best brawlers we had.
To the charge that I’m a young man in a hurry, I plead guilty. But, thank God, America’s oldest and greatest president is young at heart. He expects you to have sharp elbows if you want to secure a seat at his table. Earn your spot and fight to keep it, or you’re fired! And no, you won’t be invited back next season. “I’m not here to make friends,” every reality TV star tells us. Neither was I. I had a job to do.
Not that I—or Donald Trump—had a Rolodex full of Beltway friends when we both traded the Florida swamp for D.C. And just like the gators in Florida, some of these slithering swamp creatures had seemingly spent millennia adapting to the sludge, only to face what now threatened to be an extinction-level event.
It’s easy to enjoy that moment when those who had taken shots at candidate Trump during the campaign had to swallow the fact that he was president. They likely fretted that #NeverTrump would turn to #NeverHired—or #SoonFired by their constituents. With millions of voters behind him, Trump’s ratings were huuuuge. You dared not turn off your phone lest you missed his tweeting, which seemed equal parts executive order and savage taunt.
It has become fashionable to say that you wish the president would stop tweeting, but tweeting is communicating and communicating is governing. Had Donald Trump found a way to short-circuit politics, the way he seemed to short-circuit the politicians?
By his nature, Trump is a disrupter and a rebel. Yet even the most disruptive political leader faces huge, almost immovable obstacles in Washington, D.C. The Trump Train can get derailed despite its conductor’s best efforts.
In fact, the Washington establishment had already decided how it would thwart our little revolution. Even before his inauguration, the Democrats leaked intelligence about the Trump campaign’s purported ties to Russia. Rep. Maxine Waters had suggested that the 2016 election process was so tainted by Russian interference that we must deny the certification of the electoral college decision. The establishment, which for months had claimed that Trump had dangerous authoritarian impulses, turned out to be quite ready to declare the election null and void.
Trump’s message was threatening precisely because it was so popular. The real danger in the minds of the Democrats and their mainstream media allies wasn’t hackers from Russia but Trump’s message to America: the idea that we could create a new conception of the public good based on sound money, strong borders, national pride, and respect for values founded in faith and tradition. No more big-shot politicians and corporatists wheelin’ and dealin’!
Nor would the Democrats argue their side. Their strategy wasn’t going to involve policy debates about Obamacare, the tax code, and so forth but an attempt to undermine the messenger. Trump is an illegitimate president, they claimed, and he did not lawfully hold the office. Perhaps after watching Trump feed fifteen Republican primary opponents into the political woodchipper, the radical Left chose personal destruction over policy. The way to defeat Trump, they concluded, was to be as crass and hyperbolic as they mistakenly judged him to be.
After countless elections involving voting by the dead, bogus “October surprise” revelations, or coordination with transnational corporations and foreign political movements, this particular election was not up to the establishment’s standards and had to be immediately overturned. The precise reasons would keep morphing over the next three years, as one invented argument after another crashed against the rocks of reality.
If they could get away with nullifying Trump’s election, though, who’s really in charge in Washington, D.C.? Might it be those same powerful figures seated so prominently at the inaugural that day? Is the deep state actually quite near and in plain sight? I wonder how many were thinking, “We’ll tolerate this interloper and the populists who arrived with him—for now. Those we can’t coopt we can undermine and ultimately destroy.”
Almost as soon as we stepped off the inaugural stage, many powerful Washingtonians—including some Republicans and nonpartisan professional bureaucrats—would sign on to the anti-Trump bandwagon. They were quite accustomed to “waiting out” a shift in the political winds. Washington is full of “apolitical” professionals who are convinced that democracy is a formality and that true patriotism lies in maintaining their power as wise stewards of the political apparatus so that they can go on making decisions for the rest of us.
Republicans and Democrats, while bickering for show, had long since joined forces to invade everywhere militarily, invite everyone to immigrate, and impoverish Anytown, USA, by forging complicated insider trade deals that drain our economy and leave our towns and our
