Trump’s Napalm Politics? They Began With Newt
Gingrich wrote the
playbook for it all. The nastiness, the contempt for norms, the transformation
of political opponents into enemies.
Opinion
columnist
·
June 28, 2020
Approximately one billion news cycles
ago — which is to say, on June 9 — a businesswoman named Marjorie Taylor Greene
finished first in the Republican primary in Georgia’s deeply conservative 14th
Congressional District, northwest of Atlanta, which means that after a runoff
she’s all but assured a seat in the House of Representatives next year.
Unfortunately, she is a cheerful bigot
and conspiracy-theory fluffernutter. She subscribes to QAnon, the far-right fever dream that says Donald Trump
is under siege from a cabal of deep-state saboteurs, some of whom run a
pedophile ring; she says African-Americans are being held back primarily by
“gangs.” (She’s left behind a contrail of unsavory videos through
cyberspace, if you’d care to Google.)
The House Republican leadership
is trying to distance itself from this woman, as if
she belongs to some other party from a faraway galaxy. She doesn’t. Her
politics are Trumpism distilled. And Trumpism itself isn’t a style and
philosophy that began in 2016, with Trump’s election, or even in 2010, with the
Tea Party. It began 40-odd years ago, in Greene’s own state, with the election
of a different politician just two districts over.
I’m talking about Newt. You really
could argue that today’s napalm politics began with Newt.
The
normalization of personal destruction. The contempt for custom. The
media-baiting, the annihilation of bipartisan comity, the delegitimizing of
institutions.
“Gingrich had planted; Trump had
reaped,” writes the Princeton historian Julian Zelizer in the prologue to
his forthcoming book, “Burning Down the House: Newt
Gingrich, the Fall of a Speaker, and the Rise of a New Republican Party.”
I recently read Zelizer’s book with
morbid fascination. My first real job in journalism was as a reporter for the
The Hill newspaper the year it launched, in 1994, which happened to be the same
year Republicans won control of the House, overturning four decades of
Democratic rule. (I wrote nothing memorable that day, but I did come up with
our banner headline: “It’s Reigning Republicans.”)
Gingrich became speaker the following
January. It was a stunning development. Previous speakers, no matter how
partisan they were, tended to work, lunch and even drink across the aisle. The only kind of
cocktails Gingrich was partial to were Molotovs.
He conceived of governing as war.
Democrats were not merely to be defeated ideologically. They were to be
immolated.
Even
as an inexperienced kid, I could see his ascension was bad news. Looking back,
the parallels between then and now couldn’t be clearer.
Democrats were devastated that a man
with so much malignity and anger in his heart could suddenly be at the helm;
but in Republicans, Gingrich had a cult.
Gingrich despised the mainstream press,
breaking with tradition and giving valuable real estate over in the
Capitol to conservative,
nativist-populist radio hosts who spoke loudly and carried a
big schtick, just as Trump gives coveted space to the servile One
America News Network.
Gingrich was my introduction to
Orwellian newspeak. He had this tic of starting every other paragraph with
“frankly” and then telling a lie; it was his poker tell. Falsehoods and
hyperbole came as naturally to him as smirking. He freely trafficked in conspiracy theories.
His PAC circulated a pamphlet for aspiring politicians who wished “to speak
like Newt.” It advised them to repeat a long list of words to describe
Democrats, including sick, pathetic, corrupt.
Like Trump, Gingrich was a
thrice-married womanizer who’d somehow seduced the evangelicals. He too had a
skyscraping ego, nursed grudges as if they were newborns, and lacked impulse
control. In 1995, Bill Clinton made him sit in the back of Air Force One; he
responded with a tantrum and shut down the government, prompting The New York
Daily News to run a cartoon cover of
him in a diaper under the headline “Cry Baby.”
Gingrich turned the politics of white
racial grievance into an art form. They may have started with Nixon’s Southern
Strategy, but Gingrich actually came from the South. He intuited the
backlash to globalization, to affirmation action; the culture teemed with
stories about white men under siege. (Including the Michael Douglas movie “Falling Down,” about a divorced, unemployed defense
contractor’s descent into armed madness.) It wasn’t long before 1994 became
known as “The Year of the Angry White
Male.”
Most of Zelizer’s book is about
Gingrich’s Javert-like quest to bring down the House speaker, Jim Wright, for
his shady ethics. (Gingrich succeeded, only to later be reprimanded and fined for his own ethical
breaches.) Zelizer never mentions individual parallels to Trump once he starts
telling Gingrich’s story, which is clever, because there’s no need. They hop
off the page like frogs.
But
the one that stands out, the one that goosepimples me even as I type, is this:
Gingrich was the first true reality TV politician. He understood that the
C-Span cameras didn’t have to be a passively recording set of eyes. You could
operatically perform for them. Early in his career, Gingrich staged a coordinated
attack on House Democrats that drew so much fury from Speaker Tip O’Neill it
earned him time on the evening news. “I’m famous,” he crowed.
“Conflict
equals exposure equals power,” became one of his favorite sayings. Which may as
well be the motto of reality television. And Trump.
Assuming
she wins in November, Marjorie Taylor Greene will likely be relegated to the
margins of her caucus. But if Gingrich — and Trump — have taught us anything,
it’s that there’s no telling where the last exit is on the loonytown expressway
to extremism; we know only that the guardrails get lower with each passing
mile. “These are the depths to which we’ve descended,” Zelizer told me in a
phone call. “No one ever thinks that an outlier will one day be the party’s
future.”
