The Lies Republicans Tell Themselves
Support for Trumpism, like support for Nazism, is built on a edifice of self-deception, as former GOP campaign guru Tim Miller’s new book makes clear
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If you’ve ever wondered how so many professional Republicans, people who work in politics on a daily basis, have justified their support for Donald Trump and the larger miasma of manipulation, prejudice, lying, cruelty and incompetence that is Trumpism, make time for Tim Miller’s book Why We Did It.
Miller is one who got away. After cutting his teeth as an Iowa staffer on John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign, serving as press secretary for Jon Huntsman’s 2012 presidential bid, working for the Republican National Committee as its 2012 liaison to the Mitt Romney campaign, and then joining former Florida Governor Jeb Bush in his ill-fated 2016 presidential run, Miller never closed ranks behind Trump. In 2017, he made waves by supporting Doug Jones, the Democratic candidate for the US Senate, and in 2020 he co-founded Republican Voters Against Trump, one of a constellation of never-Trumper efforts. In Why We Did It, which is both a highly entertaining memoir of Miller’s own trajectory down and out of the bowels of the GOP and a sincere effort at penance, he explores how hard it was for him to break from his professional world as well as the many reasons why so many of his peers have found themselves cozy nooks inside the putrescent folds of the Jabba the Hutt that is TrumpWorld.
As a Jew and the child of a Holocaust survivor, I’ve long wondered why so many German Jews didn’t flee Nazi Germany when they had a chance during the mid-1930s. I have also pondered why so many “ordinary” Germans acquiesced to or embraced Nazism. After reading Victor Klemperer’s dairy I Will Bear Witness, which chronicles how a middle-aged Jewish academic married to a non-Jew (and thus semi-protected from some of the worst anti-Jewish laws) experienced those years, I came to understand that for many German Jews leaving their mother country just seemed like the worst option. They would be abandoning the only home they knew, they would be unable to work in their chosen field (Klemperer was a professor of Romance Languages at the University of Dresden until the Nazis prevented people of Jewish…
