Tim Miller - Why We Did It: A Travelogue from the Republican Road to Hell

A merica never would have gotten into this mess if it werent for me and my friends.

We were the normal Republicans. The pragmatic and practical. The adults in the room you hear so much about. Back in the early 2010s you might have found us networking with reporters at a bipartisan Bobby Vans happy hour. Or making you wait one more second for our attention while we typed out an urgent missive on our BlackBerry device. Or appearing as the token right-winger on some onanistic Beltway panel.

Our Facebook profile picture may have been a backstage shot with Paul Ryan in his half-zip pullover. On Twitter we delivered devilish barbs mocking the Democrats for their disarray, tongue often planted in cheek.

We worked at corporate affairs firms or in Boehner World. We were Republican campaign apparatchiks and former Bush officials you see on the tube. We were opposition party operatives in exile, thriving in the meretricious capital, anxiously anticipating the moment when it was our turn to be the brash Josh Lymans conducting brisk walk-and-talks in the White Houses hallowed halls.

We may have been partisans, but the puckish sort. The good ones, unlike those crazy, mouth-breathing ideologues. Sure, we had conservative impulses. Fancied tax cuts and protecting babies and cutting red tape and what have you. We repped murica in a jejune back-to-back world war champs kinda way and could cite chapter and verse of Reagans Liberty State Park homily declaring that our nations golden door was the last best hope of man on earth.

You wouldnt have confused us with populist revolutionaries. We wore pleated khakis, for Petes sake. (Well, I didnt, but generally speaking.) At the time, populist revolutionaries werent even really a thing in D.C., besides the weird tricornered-hat cosplayers on the National Mall whose votes we cultivated but kept at several arms distance from our day-to-day lives.

When the Trump Troubles began there wasnt a single one in our ranks who would have said they were in his corner. To a person we found him gauche, repellant, and beneath the dignity of the public service we bestowed with bumptious regard. We didnt take him seriously. We didnt watch The Apprentice. We didnt get off on the tears of immigrant children. And you wouldnt have caught us dead in one of those gaudy red baseball caps.

But, at first gradually and then suddenly, nearly all of us decided to go along. The same people who roasted Donald Trump as an incompetent menace in private served his rancid baloney in public when convenient. They continued to do so even after the mob he summoned stained the party and our ideals and the halls of the Capitol with their shit.

A few of us had tried to stand athwart the madness yelling stop before it was too late. Most tucked away their worries in a little box, easing their mind with a fanciful self-assurance that the Troubles would soon blow over. As they quietly acquiesced, others went whole hog, giddily swimming in his slop.

How did it all go to hell so fast? To what end did so many go along with something that had been anathema? And why didnt the insurrectionist denouement make them say enough to this carnage of our creation?

These were my people. I should know.

* * *

A week after the Capitol riot I was in my pandemic bed/office when the messages started to roll in. My husband was the first, sending a link to our core friend groups Lovelies text chain. The headline from the Associated Press: Records: Trump Allies Behind Rally That Ignited Capitol Riot.

Lots of Wren content, he wrote.

The physical response came before the reality of the news had really sunk in. My stomach turned, palms dampened, heart sank.

Wren was not just another in the endless parade of loathsome Trump cronies. She wasnt one of those former colleagues whom I had come to consider with a mix of disgust and aghastment as the years went by. Wren wasnt even Wren, to me.

She was Caroline. My friend. My campaign confidante. My concert buddy. Or, at least, she had been.

Then came another text and more cringing. According to the Wall Street Journal, Wren was named as a VIP Advisor on an attachment to the permit for the January 6, 2021, rally that preceded the deadly insurrection at the Capitol and she had worked on it with none other than InfoWars founder Alex Jones. The SMS that alerted me to this is still burned into my retinas. It read, Caroline Wren texting people that Alex Jones is actually nice is too much for me.

What in the actual fuck.

I reluctantly clicked. Despite being primed by that horrifying summary, the article itself managed to be more shocking than I anticipated.

In text messages Ms. Wren sent to another organizer and reviewed by the Journal, Ms. Wren defended Mr. Jones. I promise hes actually WAY nicer than he comes off.... Im hoping youll [sic] can become besties, Ms. Wren wrote.

The best you can say about those few dozen gobsmacking words is that it might be technically true that Alex Jones is way nicer than he comes off, given that he comes off as the acrid embodiment of everything that is wrong in our society. As for the possibility of becoming besties with him, well, even taking into account the most generous possible reading of that text, even recognizing that I had myself played footsie for professional purposes with similarly awful people, it is still hard to wrap ones mind around how a person could type that without becoming overwhelmed with revulsion at oneself. This is Alex Jones, after all. The human ass-pimple best known for defaming and harassing the mourning parents whose innocent little children had just been executed by a monster at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Just think of how warped and wicked you have to be to target, without any remorse, people coping with the most intense grief that can be imposed on a human being. Now my friend is in the newspaper, saying he isnt all that bad. That if people got to know him, they might be besties.

How am I supposed to comprehend that?

Later that day a reporter texted posing that very query. How {did} she fall prey to this deal? Just thirst?

I paused to consider it. Nine years earlier we had worked together on the campaign of the most moderate Republican presidential candidate of the twenty-first century. In the ensuing decade, we had become genuine friends. Not the type of D.C. friend that is really just a work acquaintance whom you make small talk with at happy hours. An actual friend. We went to see Portugal. The Man together, about a half decade before they were on the radio. Shed hassle me over text until I got out of bed to meet her for a drink because she was only in town for the night. We browned out at a club in Miami and in some dive bar in Columbia and at the 9:30 Club and in her basement and well... lots of places. I was invited to her yearly Wrenpalooza birthday party. Our closeness persisted even when we werent partying. She was the kind of friend with whom I would share private worries and fears that only a small group of people were privy to. I leaned on her when my husband and I were going through adoption troubles after our first attempt went south. And she on me when a relationship hit the skids.