How to Test Negative for Stupid, page 11
And the media? They didn’t just dislike Trump. They despised him. Still do. They sneered at the people who supported him but never stopped to ask why he had their support in the first place. People weren’t just voting for Trump. They were sending a message: We’re tired of the jackassery. We’re tired of the ruling class screwing everything up and blaming us for noticing.
Yes, Trump has an untamed mouth. Yes, he exists loudly. Yes, he says things that even I wouldn’t say (and don’t believe). And yes, he’ll reach over with a straw and drink your milkshake if he thinks you are an enemy. But people didn’t want a saint. They wanted a warrior. They wanted someone stronger than bear’s breath. Someone who wouldn’t tiptoe around the press, who wouldn’t kiss the ring of the establishment. Someone who would throw a grenade into the poisonous still waters of the swamp and see what crawled out.
While we’re on the subject, a lot of people don’t realize how funny Trump can be. Not just in public, but in private.
I remember riding with him to a fundraiser in New Orleans this past year, just days before his first (and only) debate with Joe Biden. The debate was on Trump-averse CNN, with Jake Tapper and Dana Bash as the moderators. Trump shook his head and said, “Kennedy, I’ve got to go up against Tapper, Bash, and Biden. It’s going to be two and a half against one.”
Another time, in the Cabinet Room of the White House, I was sitting with Trump and Secretary of the Treasury Steve Mnuchin, talking about the extraordinary measures we had to take to save the economy during COVID. The conversation turned to Federal Reserve Chairman Jay Powell, whom Trump never liked because Powell wouldn’t take direction from him. Trump blamed Mnuchin for recommending him.
After a while, I finally said, “Mr. President, Jay Powell saved the world economy.” I explained how every country in the world was terrified after COVID hit, dumping assets and scrambling for U.S. dollars, and Powell had calmed the entire global financial system with what’s called a currency swap line.
Mnuchin just sat there beaming. Trump listened, nodded, and said, “I hear you, Kennedy. I still don’t agree with him. But I’ll admit he gets the award for Most Improved Player.”
I also remember when, right after Trump’s second inauguration, Elon Musk had started auditing the federal government’s books at Trump’s direction. Trump’s newly minted Department of Government Efficiency, which Musk led and named DOGE, was uncovering all sorts of wasteful spending, or what I call spending porn. I called Trump and said, “Mr. President, some of the media are doing a good job covering the waste you’ve found, but others refuse to talk about it. Why don’t you hold a press conference and just start listing everything, one item of waste after another? Bring Rubio with you. He’s good at explaining stuff. I’d also bring Musk, but you need to lead.”
Trump thought for a second and said, “That’s a good idea. I’m going to do it. By the way, isn’t Elon something? You know he’s on the cusp. You know what I mean by that, don’t you, Kennedy?”
“Yes, I do, Mr. President.”
Then he said, “I really like Elon. He’s different. One time during the campaign, I was giving a speech at a rally, and I noticed the crowd wasn’t looking at me. I turned around, and Elon was doing jumping jacks behind me while I was talking. I had to tell him to cut it out. Man, he’s something.”
Trump was his usual self that evening at the New Orleans fundraiser. He gave one of his stream-of-consciousness speeches, which appears undisciplined but is not, and I stood there thinking about him. Here’s a guy who’s seventy-eight years old. He doesn’t really exercise, except for golf, and even then he uses a cart. He’ll eat anything that won’t eat him first, with a bias toward Big Macs. I don’t know how many Diet Cokes he drinks in a day. He sleeps maybe four hours a night.
One time, after a rally he asked me to attend with him, we got into the presidential limousine, and I noticed something—he had sweated through his undershirt, his shirt, and his entire suit coat. The man just kept going. Through the lawsuits, the investigations, the indictments, the media attacks—he never stopped.
By the end of that night of the New Orleans fundraiser, I had an instinctive feeling that Trump was going to win the White House again. I figured he could beat Biden, and if Biden didn’t run, I was pretty sure he’d beat Kamala.
At the time, I didn’t even know there would be two assassination attempts against his life.
People don’t want to be led by leaders who talk and look down to them. They don’t want to be told that all whites are racist and all minorities are victims. They don’t want to be divied up by race at all. They don’t want to be told that they are terrible people for using a gas stove. That they are antiscience for asking questions. That they are selfish for wanting to keep more of their paychecks. And they sure don’t want to be led by people who tell them to just send all of the money and all of their freedom to Washington and shut up.
Trump ran against all of that. And he won. Twice.
He won because he understood that too much of the system only works for the insiders. That too many people at the top are getting bailouts, too many at the bottom are getting handouts, and the people in the middle get the bill. He won because he understood that millions of Americans feel like strangers in their own country. That the governing class is worried more about their problems than those of the voters who elected them. He won because Hillary and Kamala kept finding new ways to be stupid, and there weren’t enough childless cat people to bail them out. He won because, in both of his elections, he represented hope, while his opponents represented more hurt. And he won because he figured out from the jump that what disturbs Washington makes most Americans rapturously happy.
Trump disturbed the hell out of the syndicate called Washington and its five families: the entrenched politicians, the bureaucrats, the media, the academics, and the corporate phonies.
And if you think he’s disturbing them now, you should have seen him back in late 2016, when he and I were preparing to go to Washington for the first time.
* * *
About ten days before my runoff for senator (you remember I had a December runoff), I learned that President-elect Trump had been thinking about me, although not quite as much as I (and the rest of the country) had been thinking about him. He endorsed me and then called me personally to ask if he could come down to Louisiana and do a rally in support of my campaign. I agreed.
I mean, of course I agreed. I’d never met him, but the man was the president-elect of the United States. I wasn’t going to say no to him.
Still, I was uneasy. I was polling ahead of my opponent, Democrat Foster Campbell, by about twenty points, so I didn’t want to do anything to cause a commotion. My campaign staff talked to the president-elect’s staff, and we agreed that Trump would fly into the Baton Rouge airport and speak in a large hangar the night before the Saturday election. If something went wrong, I figured, with the election the next day, there wouldn’t be much time for the media to report it.
As I waited for him in the bitter cold of an airplane hangar my campaign had rented, looking out at a swarm of several thousand people with more waiting to get in, I wasn’t sure what to expect. National media were running around like ants in a sugar bowl, which meant that if anything squirrelly happened, it would happen on camera.
I repeat, I had never met Donald Trump. I’d seen him on TV, of course; clearly, he did not try to hide his weird. In other words, I had no idea what the president-elect was going to say or do when he got onstage. My anxiety only increased when we were told he was going to be about forty-five minutes late. But no one left, and the crowd didn’t even seem to be bothered by it. Finally, the newly elected President Trump arrived. He and I shook hands and visited a few minutes before he took the stage, but we really didn’t get much time to talk. All I could do was stand and watch as he strode up to the podium, waved to the crowd, and began to deliver a speech in a style he’d later call “the weave,” a combination of warnings about what’s wrong in America, stories that may or may not seem pertinent, and announcements about his plans. Trump thanked me, thanked the people of Louisiana, invited me up onstage and asked the voters to elect me, and then launched into a wholly improvised speech about the things he talked about in his campaign. He even spent ten minutes chastising the media, calling them everything but a wanker, to use a British term. The crowd loved it. I started to relax. Then, at some point toward the end of the speech, he started talking about Time magazine, which had just named him Person of the Year. “How many of you think it ought to be ‘Man of the Year’ instead of ‘Person of the Year’?” he asked. That unnerved the hell out of me. I wanted female votes as much as I wanted male votes, but the crowd roared and nothing much came of it in the press.
After the speech, President Trump and I spoke briefly again. Naturally, I thanked him for coming. A professional photographer was there, and the president then began posing for individual photographs with various dignitaries. We call these “clicks” in the business. The line for a photograph was as long as King Kong’s arm, and toward the end, Trump was getting tired. We were down to the last twenty or so photographs when I heard the president-elect call an aide over and tell him, “Look, I’m beat. And by the way, who are these last twenty people?” “They are the electors, sir,” the aide said. Trump replied, “What’s an elector?” “They vote for you in the Electoral College, and that’s how you become president of the United States,” the aide said. Trump perked up, put on a smile, and happily finished the final twenty photographs.
Finally, the Trump visit ended and the president-elect left on his plane. After months, I had nothing left on my campaign schedule except to go vote. My get-out-to-vote effort was in full swing and did not depend on me. The cake was baked. I felt good about my chances and assumed that the visit from Trump would help. I was correct. The next day, I beat my opponent like he had stolen my dog, 61–39 percent. Just about what my polls had predicted the last two weeks of my campaign. I had finally attained the office for which I had run twice before without success. I was going to be a United States senator. I was proof of the old adage that failure is not losing; it’s giving up.
On the night of my victory, I celebrated at the economical Embassy Suites hotel in Baton Rouge with family, campaign staff, a few hundred friends and supporters, and, predictably, the media. I couldn’t help but notice that not a single other prominent elected official in Louisiana bothered to attend. Fine by me. Maybe someday the insiders will like me. Maybe someday donkeys will fly too.
Not long after I won, I saw President Trump again in Washington, and we reminisced on his visit to Louisiana. The way he told the story, I was not twenty points ahead, but twenty points behind before he gave his speech in Baton Rouge, the night before the election, and it was his speech and endorsement that put me over the top. Just last year, when we were riding together to the fundraiser in New Orleans I mentioned earlier, Trump told me the story again. This time I was down by twenty-five points before he flew down and saved me. I’ve never corrected the president. I know it wouldn’t do any good, and besides, I’ve learned to take the president seriously but not literally, as they say.
Seven
New in Town
Your first term in the United States Senate is like starting any new job. You come in with a rookie class. Mine included Democrats Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, Kamala Harris of California, Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, and Chris Van Hollen of Maryland. On the Republican side, there was Todd Young of Indiana and, of course, myself.
There’s a brief orientation for the entire class, which I missed because of my late runoff election. Eventually they gave me my own, though “orientation” might be a generous term. It was one day and only marginally beneficial. I still had to ask my Louisiana colleague and friend Senator Bill Cassidy (an honorable man if there ever was one) where the closest men’s room to the Senate floor was. The truth is, when you’re elected to the United States Senate, you’re pretty much on your own from day one.
I had to hire staff, both in Washington and back home. I had to pick an office in D.C.—an exercise in humility since offices are assigned based on seniority, meaning the best ones go to the people who have been around the longest. I had to find a place to live. And I had to learn the peculiar traditions of the Senate, such as the rule that only water and milk can be consumed on the Senate floor. The water made sense. The milk? No one seemed to have a good answer for that. “It’s just always been that way,” I was told.
From the very beginning, it was obvious that the Senate—and Washington, D.C., for that matter—had been thoroughly disrupted. “In shock” might be a better way to put it. Donald Trump was about to take office. Nobody knew what to expect.
Almost immediately, I started hearing rumblings in the halls of Congress: Russian President Vladimir Putin had manipulated the election to help Trump win. It didn’t make much sense to me. I had just run in that same election, and I never saw or felt anything like that. I figured the rumors would die down in a few weeks, things would return to normal, and we’d all find a way to work together.
I was naive.
I learned pretty fast that in Washington, D.C., normal is just a setting on the clothes dryer.
* * *
For the first few months of 2017, as I struggled to find my footing in the United States Senate, the Democratic Party, most of the media, the left-leaning think tanks, the academics, and most of the bureaucrats—in short, all the permanent Washington types—commenced an all-out assault on the man who just won the White House. They accused him of everything except abandoning his children to wolves. I’d been in politics for a while; I’d seen its dark side. But in all my years, watching the mudslinging in Louisiana politics, I’d never seen anything like this. Rather than fading, the rumors of Russian manipulation of the election escalated from Russia meddled in the election to Trump actively colluded with Russia to win the election. Now the Russia collusion narrative took center stage and became an obsession, particularly with the media. For them, it was like Will Smith slapped Chris Rock every day. A manic frenzy. Every morning there was a new story, usually quoting anonymous sources. And because I like to read, I consumed almost every one of them. I was skeptical. My mother did not raise a fool, and if she did it was one of my brothers. You didn’t have to be a senior at Caltech to see that the reporting had a casual relationship with facts. It was almost all hyperbole and, as I said, anonymous sources. Terms like Steele dossier, pee tape, and FISA warrant may seem today like relics from another era, but back in my early days in the Senate, unsubstantiated rumors about these and other topics were accepted doctrine in Washington, D.C.
It was around this time that I first began noticing just how thoroughly some of my Democratic colleagues had lost perspective. When the topic was Trump, everything they served up came with a side order of crazy. The politicians weren’t alone. The media, which had always leaned left, was in many ways worse than the Democrats. This time they took a hard left and kept driving. In giving up any attempt at objectivity or impartiality, they became an unrecognizable shell of their former selves. This media bias had, of course, been advancing in the American media for a while, but now it exploded. Young journalists (and many old ones too) saw themselves as part of the resistance, a loose coalition of educated people who had little in common other than their utter disdain for Donald Trump. I’m not sure many of them appreciated that historically, the term resistance has been reserved for small bands of rebels operating in countries under foreign occupation, not a group of people who are upset about the outcome of a close election. Even after many years of seeing firsthand how ruthless politics could be in my home state, I was surprised at the vitriol that the media directed at President Trump and anyone who supported him. And the reporters were so smug about it. It made me want to stick my head in an oven.
Not that I didn’t have experience with media chauvinism. Once, in my second Senate race, when I was running against incumbent Senator Mary Landrieu, a reporter for the New Orleans Times-Picayune sat me down and said, “Kennedy, I know we’ve known each other for a long time, but I have orders to really bust you up in this campaign.” And he did. That reporter, now deceased, was telling me that he had received a directive—one he intended to comply with—to do everything he could to see that Landrieu was reelected and that I was beaten soundly. I think he thought he was doing me a favor or maybe he just felt guilty, but the whole thing triggered my gag reflex. I mean, pass me the sick bucket. I had seen this deterioration in the media for years, but to hear it spoken out loud disgusted me.
In Washington, things only got worse. We now know that Hillary Clinton and her campaign manufactured fake evidence of Trump collusion with Russia (the Steele dossier) and then fed it to the FBI, the rest of the Justice Department, and the media, which sucked it up like a Hoover Deluxe and then used that “evidence” to claim election fraud without investigating the facts. It’s no wonder the folks at The New York Times were so shocked, according to one insider account, when Special Counsel Robert Mueller dropped a report showing no evidence of collusion, but the facts didn’t matter. All that seemed to matter was emotion. So many journalists, especially young ones who were taught to feel contempt for America when they should feel gratitude and considered an angry Swedish teenager an icon, were pissed that Hillary Clinton lost and that Donald Trump had won. Trump simply triggered them in every way.
There may also be other explanations. For one thing, Trump undermined the business model that the legacy media had grown fat and happy on. Cable and network news for years had had a growing monopoly as the internet devoured print media like a light snack, and while many of the TV folks were privately (and publicly, as time went on) contemptuous of Trump, they covered him because they wanted the ratings. Trump needed them too. They used each other for the same reason—to get attention. But Trump also adroitly used social media, particularly Twitter. Network television, cable TV, and, naturally, newspapers resented it. As journalist and Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan once said, what’s good for cable news is often bad for America and humanity.
