If I had to pinpoint a single moment that foreshadowed the rise, and ultimate victory, of Donald Trump, I would choose June 10, 2014. That was the day a little-known economics professor defeated the Republican House majority leader Eric Cantor in a primary challenge. It had never happened before in American history. Not a single member of the media or political Establishment saw it coming. Yet Dave Brat’s victory didn’t come out of nowhere. It was actually a logical outcome after years of a Republican leadership that had grown smug, insulated, and totally out of touch with the concerns of its own grass roots.
In early 2014, when filmmaker and Virginia native Ron Maxwell initially brought Dave Brat to my attention, I was skeptical for the obvious reasons. I’d never heard of him and didn’t know anyone who had. But Maxwell, a conservative populist, had done his homework and tilled the ground for several months before I ever entered the picture. Brat appeared on my show several times over the last four and a half months of the campaign. Although we had yet to meet in person, I found him to be humble, courageous, and smart.
Meanwhile, Brat was doing precisely what I had urged interested Americans to do 10 years earlier in my book Power to the People—get involved, run for office, and pursue policies that give power back to the people. In 2009, the Tea Party—the first authentically populist movement on the right in decades—emerged in response to Obama’s reckless bailouts and gained strength after the passage of Obamacare. Although the Tea Party helped elect a number of people to Congress, it was still a minority within the GOP. Undaunted by the very imposing barricade of Establishment money and power that lay before him, Brat took his case directly to the people. Most aspiring politicians would have been scared off by Eric Cantor’s staff of 23, or the $5.4 million he had to spend on advertising. But not Brat. He had a team of two and had raised only $200,000. It was Dave versus Goliath. “They don’t take me seriously,” he told me a few months before primary day. “And right now, that’s just the way I like it.”
His drive and determination were inspiring. Disorganized and small in representation, the Tea Party movement had wandered since the 2010 midterm elections, and Brat’s brainy fearlessness was exactly what it needed. Besides, I reasoned, how will we ever save America from a corrupt, unresponsive, ineffective federal government if we don’t support those with real talent who are willing to stick their necks out and challenge the status quo? Even if Brat could come within striking distance of Cantor, that could spur other independent, strong conservatives to challenge lame incumbents across the country. Such were my thoughts as I weighed whether to throw in with the underdog.
On June 3, 2014, a Tuesday night, my producer, Julia Hahn, another business associate, and I made the two-and-a-half-hour drive from Washington to the leafy Virginia town of Glen Allen to support Dave Brat. The Republican primary vote for Virginia’s 7th Congressional District was just a week away, but as we rolled up to the Dominion Club, none of us knew what to expect. Incredibly, not a single national Tea Party group had given Brat any financial support, although the local Richmond Tea Party had endorsed him. The polls showed Cantor ahead by 25–30 points, and he was getting big money air cover in the form of ads from powerhouse lobbying groups like the American Chemistry Council, the Chamber of Commerce, and the National Association of Realtors.
“Let’s hope people actually show up tonight besides some snarky reporters,” I told Julia, who personally took it upon herself to make my appearance happen. I wondered to myself whether the whole thing was a bridge too far—a total waste of time. We were doing the round-trip in one day, after my three-hour radio show and an appearance on Fox & Friends.I should be home eating dinner with the kids, I thought.
But then as we approached the club’s driveway, we saw the cars—hundreds of them—lined up, spilling out of the parking lots. The moment we walked into the lobby, I was overjoyed that we had made the effort.
The “Brat Pack” was out in full force.
“Thank you for coming, Laura!” chirped a 40-something woman standing in the hallway with her teenage daughter. “Dave Brat is the MAN!” someone else blurted out. “Our boy’s gonna win!” exclaimed a man who introduced himself as “just a plain old farmer.” He had come at the last minute after learning about the rally from his neighbor. A few were wearing “Can’t stand Cantor” buttons; most were just neatly dressed, everyday middle-class Americans.
“We got him right where we want him,” Brat insisted, in reference to the incumbent Cantor, at what was our first face-to-face meeting. I laughed, and wondered if I would be that optimistic were I in his shoes. Tan, with his sandy brown hair combed back, in wire-rimmed glasses, Brat had the look of an all-American prepster. His smile was real and reassuring.
More than the average politician, Brat understood the urgent need to “disrupt” the old GOP hierarchy. Fundamental, conservative change would not be possible in Washington, unless and until the Establishment in both parties was exposed and defeated. For decades, on key issues, they had been in an alliance of convenience, working against the interests of everyday Americans. On no issue was this collusion more apparent than “immigration reform” (aka amnesty).
Over the years, I’ve developed a pretty accurate rule of thumb for judging the conservatism of Republican politicians. If they refuse multiple requests to appear on my radio show, they’re usually up to no good. Case in point: Eric Cantor. Majority Leader Cantor had turned down several invitations from my bookers to join us on air to discuss his 2013 legislation misleadingly known as The Kids Act. It was essentially his version of President Obama’s DREAM Act and would have given a path to legalization to illegal immigrants brought here as children. Cantor thought he could dodge the tough questions by simply avoiding them. That told me a lot. Apparently it was that same aloof, “I-don’t-need-to-answer-to-anyone” attitude that rubbed the voters of the 7th Congressional District the wrong way, as well.
In the final week before the June 10 primary, we covered the race every day on radio. I begged Glenn Beck to get involved and to his credit he did, by interviewing Brat on his popular radio show. Radio host Mark Levin had been in the pro-Brat camp for some time and was also extremely influential. Likewise, the populist website Breitbart played a critical role in this historic primary by covering the race and the issues motivating Brat’s challenge. As for the rest of the media—many of the same people and institutions that look down on talk radio and conservative websites—they barely touched on the race at all.
On June 10, after my radio show wrapped up at noon, I said a silent prayer for a surprise Brat victory. If he could pull off this sneak attack against Cantor and the big corporatist forces that backed him, anything was possible. None of my staff would take bets on the outcome. We were all too nervous.
Later that night, I was celebrating my son Dmitri’s sixth birthday at the home of a close family friend. Through dinner and cake, I didn’t have my cell phone handy. I was so focused on his big day, I had put Brat’s big night out of my mind. Their home telephone rang. It was one of my friends—a Brat supporter. “Where have you been? We’ve been trying to reach you! He won! He won! Dave won!”
“Yes!!” I screamed, with a mouth full of frosting, still sitting at the dining room table. Those gathered must have thought I’d hit the lottery. I ran for my phone where the texts and emails were pouring in. Not long thereafter, I was on Fox News’ special coverage of Cantor’s loss.
“He really just didn’t have very much money, but what he did have was a lot of heart,” I said of Brat, in a telephone interview with Megyn Kelly. “I think there will be a lot of people out there saying this could be the beginning of something really big for the Republican Party.”
Fox News political analyst Brit Hume disagreed, and he was not alone among conservative commentators in expressing dismay over Brat’s massive upset of the GOP Old Guard.
The margin is amazing. . . . The conventional wisdom on this . . . that this is bad news long term for the Republicans and great news for Democrats. It is argued by some that immigration reform now will never pass with Republicans who were very much chastened by what happened to Eric Cantor. So that’s dead for now. That means that Republicans will go forward into the 2016 election without their name associated with immigration reform, which will make it very difficult for any Republican to become president.
Or so he thought.
Every news outlet in America reported on Brat’s unprecedented victory. “[O]ne of the most stunning primary election upsets in congressional history,” wrote TheNew York Times.1 “The loss wasn’t just big, it was historic,” said NBC News.2TheWashington Post called it “a historic electoral surprise that left the GOP in chaos.”3
As for Cantor himself, he had little to say on election night except that he “came up short.”4 (According to TheWashington Post, he was so confident on Election Day that he was hanging out with lobbyists at the Starbucks on Capitol Hill.)5 When approached leaving a DC Italian restaurant the night his heir apparent crashed and burned, Speaker John Boehner had no comment.
Other GOP bigwigs seemed intent on spinning the Brat victory as a one-off. The party’s 2012 presidential nominee Mitt Romney dismissed the notion that the Cantor defeat was a harbinger of change to come in the GOP. “I know it’s our inclination to look at races and suggest that somehow a national movement is causing what occurs,” he told NBC’s David Gregory.6 When asked specifically whether a rising conservative populism was in the air, Romney batted away the suggestion, noting that the Republican senator Lindsey Graham, disliked intensely by the Tea Party, easily won his primary challenge in South Carolina. To his credit, he did cite the frustration of voters on the immigration issue as a driving force in the race.
Contrary to what many pundits and “Wall Street Journal” Republicans claimed in the aftermath, Cantor’s support for immigration amnesty was a major factor in his loss. Brat pounded that theme relentlessly, along with Cantor’s cozy relationship with K Street and his overall disregard of the concerns of his constituents. The six-term congressman had become everything that the Tea Party and other grassroots conservatives hated about the GOP.
The Sunday after the primary, I was part of the ABC panel to discuss the Cantor primary loss. Eric Cantor was on the panel before us. Saying little of interest, he still didn’t seem to fathom why he lost. Zero insights. When his segment was over, he exited the studio out of a side door to avoid crossing paths with me.
“Objectively thinking, I really believe it was the beginning of everything that followed—and led directly to Donald Trump,” Ron Maxwell posited.
Although Tea Party groups launched other primary challenges against Establishment GOP candidates in 2014 and weren’t successful, it didn’t matter. Brat’s win was cataclysmic—and gave encouragement to conservative-populist activists coast to coast. For the first time, they had proof positive that the Establishment doesn’t always win.
One year later, Donald Trump crashed the Republican Party when he announced his presidential bid. Even Cantor’s defeat hadn’t prepared the Establishment for the possibility that their grip on the GOP was weakening. Yet given the voters’ building discontent with Republican politics as usual, they should have seen Trump coming.
His populist counter-insurgency campaign was brash and bold, and entirely predictable after years of failed GOP and Democrat efforts to grow our economy and put America on the right track. If the people were mad enough to oust a sitting majority leader, anything was possible.
The Populist Movement Made It Possible
The force behind Dave Brat’s victory was populism—the belief that people should have power instead of ceding it to elites. Americans are used to left-versus-right political disagreements, like judicial activism versus judicial restraint, union versus nonunion. Populists understand that there’s a top and a bottom, too. The Establishment—composed of powerful elites on both the left and the right—does not trust individuals to make decisions for themselves. Instead, they believe Washington “experts” and bureaucrats must fill the void. Populists believe individuals should have more control over their own lives.
Presidential candidates invoke the populist style because it connects with working people. Except for Reagan, all modern presidents of both parties campaigned as populists but governed as globalists. Populism isn’t new. It arose in the 1890s when the so-called robber barons—businessmen who gained wealth and influence through unethical business practices—amassed power that hurt workers. Populists revolted and formed a short-lived national People’s Party. Its platform was essentially left-wing. It was pro-labor and anti-capitalist and was especially hostile to banks and railroads. That party effectively merged with the Democrats in 1896 and ultimately disappeared in 1908. But the populist style—with its emphasis on the commonsense wisdom of the working class—remained a potent force that Democrats and Republicans both co-opted for years to come.
Because populism is not an ideology, it often appears with a descriptor, like “progressive populism” or “conservative populism.” On the left side of the political spectrum, progressive populism wraps big government schemes in the guise of populism. Bill Clinton’s Arkansas everyman populist style ultimately gave way to disastrous globalist trade deals; Obama’s “hope and change” morphed into a historic growth in government power. In 2016, Establishment Media tried to portray Bernie Sanders as a “left-wing populist.” In reality, of course, Sanders was little more than a socialist retread. Nevertheless, he ran an impressive campaign—one that managed to draw massive crowds of over 20,000. (It’s amazing what promising young kids free college tuition can do!)
On the surface, Sanders seemed to agree with Donald Trump’s populist opposition to bad trade deals, foreign interventionism, and Wall Street corruption. But on domestic issues, Sanders’s proposals were the same old failed big government power grabs and massive tax gambits that are antithetical to economic freedom. As President Reagan put it, “as government expands, liberty contracts.” Instead of returning power to the people, Sanders’s plans would have squelched workers’ wealth and freedom. Still, the fact that a man of Sanders’s age could be a thorn in Hillary Clinton’s side was just as much a compliment to him as a sign that Clinton’s candidacy was deeply flawed.
By contrast, conservativism and populism overlap in their opposition to “big things”—big government, big international organizations, big media, big business cronyism. These distant, uncaring entities rob people of decision making and ignore their interests. Pat Buchanan and Donald Trump summarized conservative populism best when each vowed to put “America first.”
Conservative populists tend to support a policy of economic nationalism—people-centered economic policies that put the nation and its workers first. They oppose a massive national debt because it weakens America and makes its citizens beholden to lenders. They also believe high taxes are bad because they sap workers’ wages and economic freedom. Similarly, they are against huge trade deals and international organizations like the World Trade Organization because they take power out of the hands of voters and give it to a far-away and often hostile global elite.
In foreign affairs, conservative populists oppose broad military interventionism and believe military force should only be used when American interests are threatened. Populism’s critics like to toss around the term “isolationism” to dismiss populist foreign policy, but that doesn’t describe any populist I’ve ever known. Throughout the Cold War, populists were among the strongest voices opposing Soviet communism. At the same time, they believe squandering the nation’s wealth and blood on unwinnable wars and nation-building is unwise. Instead, they support a pragmatic foreign policy based on achieving “peace through strength” by maintaining a strong military and using it prudently.
If all this sounds familiar that’s because conservative-populist Ronald Reagan remade American politics with his two landslide presidential victories in 1980 and 1984. The populist movement that propelled Reagan into office came roaring back in 2016 to produce the most stunning political victory in American history.
This is the story of how a man with zero political experience overcame the Establishment in both parties and a hostile press to capture the presidency. It’s also a book about how a lot of us who supported Ronald Reagan, and who worked together for decades, came to disagree so strongly over the next steps for this country.
There is also a caution here. Trump’s victory was only the beginning. The forces he overcame during the campaign have now created a barricade to block his—and the people’s—agenda permanently. Choreographed and well-funded protests, endless investigations, and a slow-walking of his agenda on Capitol Hill have reinforced the barricades to real reform. To overcome this, the president will have to avoid the mistakes of his predecessors and remain close to the principles and people that got him elected. Donald Trump in his gut understands Americans better than most “experts” who have spent their lives in politics.
Despite conventional wisdom (or whatever it’s calling itself today), Trump didn’t win because of “free air time” or because he hosted TheApprentice.
He didn’t win because of his tweets.
He didn’t win because he is a celebrity.
He didn’t win because of FBI director James Comey.
He didn’t win because the Democratic National Committee was hacked.
He didn’t even win because Hillary was a lousy candidate and a worse campaigner.
Trump won because his message of economic nationalism and a less-interventionist foreign policy reflects the will of the people. He won because he vowed (à la Buchanan) to put America first again. He won because both parties had gotten fat off the status quo, while many in the middle were being squeezed. He won because he was not a politician, but a self-made outsider who fearlessly called out the collusion among politicians, the media, and even big business. He won because Americans had had it—with Washington’s failed promises, with political correctness, with open borders, and with career politicians, consultants, pollsters, and pundits.
In the end, voters in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Ohio didn’t care about his rough language. They cared about saving their country and knew the only way to do it was to elect a renegade—a disruptor—someone who owed the Old Guard nothing. Ironically, that someone was a Manhattan billionaire. Donald Trump won because on the biggest issues of the day, he had the guts to stand with the “silent majority.” Just like Dave Brat and Ronald Reagan before him—he was right and his opponents were wrong.
The elites had been blindsided before—by Reagan’s 1980 election. Many in the party dismissed him as well. He was just an actor. He was “too divisive.” Remember, after he narrowly lost the GOP nomination in 1976, Reagan came back in 1980 and won big. Southern states that had been Democrat strongholds for decades flipped to the GOP. An anti-Establishment conservative who was almost 70 years old was just the breath of fresh air our country and political system needed.
Sound familiar?
The conservative-populist movement that powered Ronald Reagan to historic landslide victories reemerged in 2016. Against all odds, the people rose up and propelled Donald Trump to the presidency. It did not happen in a vacuum. Indeed, as this book reveals, the forces that aligned and made his victory possible had been gathering for decades as Establishment elites in both parties accumulated ever-increasing power for themselves. Time will tell whether Donald Trump can clear all the barricades in front of him, make good on his promise to drain the swamp, and return power back to the people. Either way, the conservative-populist movement proved it will remain a dynamic and powerful force for years to come.
