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Let It Burn!
Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank examines how the GOP got to where it is today, with some elected leaders and candidates still endorsing the lie that Trump won. His book is The Destructionists.
TERRY GROSS, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I am Terry Gross. In his new book, "The Destructionists: The Twenty-Five-Year Crack-Up Of The Republican Party," my guest, Dana Milbank, writes about how we got to where we are today. Some members of Congress and some of this year's Republican primary winners are election deniers that subscribe to conspiracy theories. One of Trump's major lies backed by conspiracy theories is that the 2020 election was stolen. His attempts to declare himself the winner led to the insurrection. In May of 2021, a poll by the Public Religion Research Institute found that 23% of Republicans agree that, quote, "the government, media and financial worlds in the U.S. are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child-sex trafficking operation," unquote.
Milbank's book looks back over the past 25 years, tracing the roots of today's political lies and conspiracy theories. He begins in 1994 with Newt Gingrich, then a Republican congressman from Georgia, leading his party to a landslide victory in the midterms with Republicans taking over the House and the Senate. It was known as the Republican Revolution. During the early months of that revolution, Milbank came to Washington, D.C., to cover Congress for The Wall Street Journal, and then he covered Bill Clinton's presidency and his impeachment for The New Republic. That led to becoming the White House correspondent for The Washington Post and covering George W. Bush's presidency. Milbank has been a political columnist at The Post for the past 17 years. His years covering Washington provided what he describes as a front-row seat for the worst show on earth - the crackup of the Republican Party and the resulting crackup of American democracy.
Dana Milbank, welcome back to FRESH AIR. I want to get your reaction to some of the comments that have been made as of this morning from Republicans about the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said that the Justice Department has, quote, "reached an intolerable state of weaponized politicization." And he said, Attorney General Garland, preserve your documents, and clear your calendar - implying that he's going to be subpoenaed if Republicans take over the House. Republican Senator Marco Rubio of Florida said that the raid was akin to political persecution seen in, quote, "third-world, Marxist dictatorships." Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who's seen as a rival to Trump in - possibly in the presidential primaries, said the raid of Mar-a-Lago is another escalation in the weaponization of federal agencies against the regime's political opponents while people like Hunter Biden get treated with kid gloves. Now, the regime is getting another 87 million IRS agents to wield against its adversaries? Banana Republic. Lauren Boebert, Republican congressman from Colorado, tweeted, you may not realize it yet, but they're coming for all of us.
DANA MILBANK: Yeah. It's really ominous, Terry. This is a dangerous time, and I am fearful for the country right now. It's even a step worse when you look at the pro-Trump social media channels. They're saying things like tomorrow is war. They will cry out in pain. When does the shooting start? And you have Fox News echoing these themes of police state and tyranny and regime and third-world authoritarianism. This has ominous reverberations from - as I've written in the book, going back a quarter century in this case. This is very similar to the rhetoric we heard leading up to the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 on conservative talk radio from members of Congress talking about the government coming to get them with tyranny, imposing a new world order, a revolution, black helicopters - very, very similar rhetoric.
It's also similar to the rhetoric we heard from the Tea Party in 2010 - you know, the famous don't retreat, reload from Sarah Palin that - talking about, you know, throwing bricks through the windows of Democratic lawmakers, again, talking about the tyranny and of what the government is trying to impose going after people, images of candidates shooting off guns, much as we're seeing now. So it doesn't take a whole lot where we are right now for things to get out of hand. We've seen rising violence from right-wing extremists. We really need our leaders - opinion leaders and lawmakers to step in and calm things down. But they're doing exactly the opposite, and they're pouring gasoline on the fire.
GROSS: You're referring to Republican leaders?
MILBANK: Yes. That's what they're doing right now. It's reckless rhetoric. It is turning people against the government, turning people against the FBI and the Justice Department. And it is only natural to expect that this is the kind of thing that will lead people to desperation and to take matters into their own hands.
GROSS: So you're fastening your seatbelt.
MILBANK: I am. Look, I mean, we've been in a dangerous period of time for some time now. But, you know, the people who really track the pro-Trump social media saying - are saying this is really the most ominous time since right before the Jan. 6th insurrection.
GROSS: So if you haven't been following the backstory, of course, you'd be upset that the former president's home was raided by the FBI. But the backstory includes that he had taken 15 boxes of documents home which he was not legally allowed to do. There were classified documents in there. They were confiscated in a previous raid. The assumption is that this raid was looking for more such documents that Trump mishandled, and that could possibly be a criminal offense.
MILBANK: Well, of course, you would be. And if you are watching Fox News and reading Breitbart News and you're stuck in a social media silo where you're only getting highly filtered views, you probably haven't heard a whole lot about Trump's abuses of classified information. It's really in the Justice Department and the Biden administration's interest to get out more information right now. It's in the public interest to know what's happened here.
You know, we generally operate on some presumption of good faith that the government doesn't do things willy-nilly. But there is no good faith among the Trump Republicans right now. And it's really - the onus is on Merrick Garland to get out and say why this was important, why this needed to be done. So they need to do their part to erase some of the mystery. Now, will that get through the filters at Fox News and Breitbart? Perhaps only to a limited extent. But it definitely is in the public interest to get more information out.
GROSS: Dana, let's get to your book, "The Destructionists: The Twenty-Five-Year Crack-Up Of The Republican Party." And let's start where your book starts - in the mid-'90s when Republican Congressman Newt Gingrich of Georgia became the House speaker and took the House in a more divisive direction than it had been. In fact, you describe him as having pioneered savage politics. What do you mean by that?
MILBANK: Well, when people first heard Newt Gingrich speak, you know, during the runup to the 1994 Republican Revolution, it was - in a way, he was replacing Bob Michel, who had been this genial World War II veteran, a leader of the House Republican minority for 14 years. He shepherded Ronald Reagan's agenda through the House, through Congress, with some success, but he was all about making deals, about compromise. And then, here came Newt, this bomb thrower, and he spoke with an entirely different language. And he - in fact, he recommended to his congressional peers, Republican peers and candidates, that they need to start talking about Democrats as traitors, as liars, as cheaters. So this was an entirely different way of talking about your opponent, your opponent as your enemy, as opposed to just being your opponent. It was a revolutionary, really, way of speaking in politics, certainly at the high level of politics. And after Republicans won in 1994, he became the speaker of the House and certainly never had a speaker of the House talking this way. And then suddenly this man was second in line to the presidency with a whole different language. And he actually said, the problem with Republicans is they haven't been nasty enough. That was Newt Gingrich's quote. And he said, we need to raise hell all the time. And that's exactly what he did. And today we are sort of living in that world that Newt Gingrich birthed in 1994.
GROSS: What are some of the political tactics that you think he pioneered that are still being used today?
MILBANK: Well, when we think back to - I mean, we look at our politics today, a series of government shutdowns, a series of showdowns over debt default, this whole notion of defeating the agenda to prove that your opponents have failed, there have always been, you know, obstruction and disagreement in politics. I don't want to pretend that there was a golden age when everybody got along. But before the 1994 revolution, there really weren't such things as shutdowns. Or if they'd happen, it would be over a technical issue. It would happen for a few days at a time. You know, Ronald Reagan said it's ludicrous to talk about jeopardizing the full faith and credit of the U.S. currency. So this was an entirely different thing.
