Why We Did It audiobook

Trump is a psychotic monster. The author gets that and says that. The author speaks of three phases he went through. First, he saw politics as a game to manipulate the rubes and mislead with half- truths but most of all to get your blood riled up and click on Facebook memes and send five dollars to his preferred candidates and make you feel better because of the hate he was giving you. Then the second phase starts with John McCain who picked Sarah Palin. She marks the turning point when the stupid became real. She believed the non-sense she was spouting. “I’ve read about him, I can’t trust Obama, he’s an Arab”, Palin’s superfans would say as if Arabs and Muslims are one and the same, but when it comes to hate reason need not apply. The comment sections of World Net Daily, Breitbart News or the Wall Street Journal reflected who they really were, not the stories contained in the articles, but the raw hate, fear and uncertainty that they espoused in their comments and believe with their hearts not their heads. As Miller notes, Birtherism was perfect for Trump. It is racist to its core and it was within the fevered swampland of all comment sections. They shout ‘stop thinking and follow me’, they are all in on the joke while thinking that everyone else is the real rube and not them, because they know that Trump is saying what they feel. Trump is the psychotic monster and they are too, because it makes them feel good, they like the hate and they want to thrash anyone that is not them. Just say the words “Kamala Harris”, around a Republican. You’ll see them physically shake with anger and they’ll mumble something about her policies or beliefs or ‘thank you Brandon’, or ‘they are teaching our children CRT (critical race theory)’. Read the comment sections on their sites, they hate without restriction. That is who they are. Tolerance is not a suicide pact. We don’t have to be tolerant of fascists who want to destroy democracy and only support equality for their privileged group. We are close to losing the republic and they honestly believe the election was not a fair and free election because they feel Democrats cheat. Trump tells them how to think and they tell Trump how to think. The mob is not possessed by a demon they are a demon and are entwined with Trump. Democracy is at stake.The third phase the author shows is how the enablers convinced themselves that Trump is for the best. They can’t quit Trump because they love him so. He makes them feel good with the hate he engenders. Trump is a psychotic monster and they are pathological. Trump makes them feel good about themselves and his deplorables love him all the more for it. Trump is not unique. He is not a Svengali. They love the hate, the fear, the uncertainty and the doubt that he sows. The mob creates him and they are the mob. Palin had that ability too. Re-watch ‘Game Changer’, most Republicans will see Palin as the hero, not the foe. There is one story that Miller says that I want to repeat. Steve Schmidt foisted Palin on McCain and that’s not the worst of it, he was more than willing to support Mr. Starbucks (Howard Schultz) for president even if the most likely result was to siphon votes from Biden and re-elect Trump in the process. Miller said wisely that Schmidt would have created generational wealth for Schmidt and in the process destroyed the country. I like Schmidt as much as the next person because he articulates my dislike against Trump and his fascism better than almost anyone, but I realize that he can’t be trusted. It is not a game I want to participate in. The New York Times sees the politics as a game. It is not. The headline two days ago (6/2022) ‘Supreme Court hands Biden a loss on EPA ruling’. My god, it is not politics, the country was handed a loss on dealing with pollution. It is not a game! The election was a fair and free election and Trump tried to instigate a violent overthrow of the country. It is not a game. Democracy is at stake. Call Trump the psychotic monster that he is and every single person that supports him for the danger that they are enabling. Miller gets it and definitely is warning us against what is currently happening. I almost universally hate books written explaining the evil that Trump is because they miss the real story. Miller’s book is a pleasant counter to that genre of books. Democracy might not survive and Trump is a special threat because he is a psychotic monster and Miller does a good job at explaining how dangerous Trump is and the pernicious game that is being played at our expense.

A funny, profane, and often insightful memoir-ish book from Tim Miller, a vehement anti-Trumper who worked on a variety of GOP campaigns in the 2000s and 2010s. Miller is a pretty moderate Republican (in fact, it is often hard to see what makes him remotely conservative) and a gay man (not all that uncommon in GOP campaign worker circles). He's a true political addict and creature of the swamp, but he had the personal character and moral fortitude to separate himself from Trumpism and then become one of its strongest public critics.The first third of the book is a political memoir, and the rest of it is a series of profiles of different GOP pols who mostly ended up siding with Trump and serving his ends. Miller is brilliant at unpacking the rationalizations, excuses, and mental mechanisms these people used to justify their actions: compartmentalization (as a gay man working for the GOP, Miller was good at this), declaring that the Left or Clinton or whoever is worse, having no other identity or social circle to fall back on besides being a Republican, being stuck in the conservative media echo-chamber, the "junior Messiah complex" in which you convince yourself that whoever would fill your role would probably be even worse so you might as well serve the administration, the "adults in the room" theorem in which you say "well I'm a responsible adult who can restrain the crazy," wanting to be "in the game" politically speaking, wanting to be important, money, and just pure ambition. A lot of this just comes down to character, intelligence, and self-understanding: can you recognize a scam when you see it? Would you tolerate this behavior coming from the Left? Are you only looking at the evidence you want to see?What makes Miller special as a narrator is that he knows all of these people and has now broken away from most of them, but he also has indulged in almost all of these rationalizations at one point or another. He's also not really a liberal, so it's not a liberal critique that just confirms all of my personal biases. He makes a great point that people like him (and Jeb, Romney, McCain, etc) long thought that they could run an essentially sane party with an increasingly insane base and media as long as they threw the crazies a bone here and there (kind of a macro-version of the "adults in the room" theorem). In one great metaphor, they believed they could put forward a balanced diet with occasional bursts of sugar. What was really happening is that a very DC or big city-centric, well educated, often socially moderate party elite was becoming disconnected from an increasingly angry base. Trump sniffed out that disjunct and exploited it to the hilt. It was candy for dinner every night, a full-on plunge into conspiracy, magical thinking, rage politics, nihilism, and every other bad ism you can think of. Once he took over and proved he could win and "fight," the vast majority of the establishment got on board.There is one area that I disagree with Miller. While I absolutely loathe Trump, it is not insane for conservatives to vote for him. No other Republican would have stood a chance in 2016 or 2020. They had tried the more moderate route in 08 and 12 and been crushed. What Trump brought to the table was the ability to get people who think that all politics is B.S. to actually care about politics and to show up and vote. Without tapping into that element, the GOP was screwed. Sorry to the authors of the 2013 GOP autopsy (Miller was one of them), but warmed-over centrism wasn't going to fire up the base. Plus, voting for Trump got conservatives of all kinds a bunch of legislation they wanted, a non-stop triggering of the libs, and domination of the Supreme Court that will last decades and has already had huge returns such as the Dobbs case. This is something the anti-Trump movement (everyone from the Lincoln Project to the Democratic Party) needs to grapple with in a way they haven't so far: if Trump or Trumpism is (seemingly) the only way to win, and winning has high stakes, then why should people of conservative leanings not pinch their noses and vote for him, or just embrace the stink altogether? This is a great book for the political junkie type, but I would love to hear Miller's answer to that question.

Review to come.

If you wonder why formerly respectable Republicans abandoned their principles to slavishly follow Trump, this is the book you are looking for. It’s brutally honest and he spares no one, including himself.It’s also a touching and insightful portrait of a man coming to terms with his own sexuality. I didn’t expect to be so moved, but it is one of the highlights of the book.

Tim Miller is a gifted writer and makes the horrifying and devastating actually kind of hilarious.

In 2012 Barack Obama was re-elected to the presidency over a moderate (by today's standards) Republican candidate. After that election, the Republican party conducted what they called an "autopsy" to look at where their brand had lost popularity with normal Americans and what could be done about it. Tim Miller, who took part in that autopsy, lays out some of the recommendations that they came up with including paying more attention to the need of marginalized groups and people of color, while avoiding racist and sexist content that turned people off. Needless to say, the recommendations of that autopsy went unheeded and by 2016 the party went full MAGA, emphasizing white grievance as its path back to power. What happened? How did the "adults" in the room who had formed the backbone of the party for generations give way to the extremist, conspiracy-minded candidates that dominate today? Why We Did It is the story of how it happened. Tim Miller is a former Republican operative who worked on many Republican political campaigns including Mitt Romney's 2012 run and Jeb Bush's 2016 run. He broke with the Republican party in 2016 over its nomination of Donald Trump and became dismayed at how so many friends and former colleagues rationalized their support of a man many saw as unfit for the presidency. In this book he describes his own journey and interviews several others who are still wrapped up in the MAGA story. Many people treat their work and personal lives separately, compartmentalizing the ugly parts of their work into a series of rationalizations that allow them to sleep at night. Miller, who is gay, had to compartmentalize his sexual identity while working for a party that routinely bashed gay and lesbian people. His political leanings were admittedly "squishy", as he calls them, but he felt most at home with Republican politicians and campaign workers. Miller had no trouble latching up with moderate Republicans until the party went full MAGA, and now he spends his time lamenting on what went wrong. The Republican autopsy of 2012 went against many of the sacred cows that the party had built up. Rather than moderate their positions to gain votes, Donald Trump arrived on the scene to make that adjustment seem unnecessary. He supercharged white grievance with coded messages against Mexicans, Muslims, Blacks, Gays, and any other out group that he could use to enrage his base. It worked. This book isn't so much about Trump or his failings, but more about how the people who knew better went along with it anyway. We all have to make similar accommodations to unpleasantness and unfairness in our everyday lives given the imperfect world that surrounds us. The fascinating question that we all have to confront is- how much moral hazard are we willing to go along with to get what we want? So here is a list of some of the types of enablers that Miller encountered. He names names like Reince Priebus, Lindsay Graham, and Elise Stefanik, but the stories of the mental gymnastics involved are bigger than any one group of people.1- Messiahs. These were the people who saw themselves as counterweights to Trump's craziness. They worked in the administration hoping to temper some of Trump's worst excesses, and had some success in that. But they never publicly opposed Trump, and their presence only made Trump look more normal.2- Demonizers. Democrats and Liberals are bad, evil, and out to destroy America. For those who take these beliefs to heart, any behavior, no matter how reprehensible, is justified.3- LOL nothing matters Republicans. Fatalistic and cynical, these people went about their business believing that everybody is screwed already and nothing they do will change that. Politics is meaningless, so what the hell?4- Tribalist Trolls. Tribal identity is everything with these people. Anything your tribe does is inherently good, and anything competing tribes do is inherently bad.5- Strivers. Blind ambition was nothing new during the Trump years, but those who wanted to reach higher office, fame, and power knew they had to cater to the MAGA crowd, Fox News, and the Trump administration.6- Compartmentalizers. These folks went about their business with blinders on, avoiding the news and tucking bad Trump thoughts deep down in a box in the corner of their brain. Miller goes into great detail about people that he knew who fell into these strategies and more to get through the Trump years with a clear conscience. Many of the rationales above could apply to any party at any time, including Democrats, but the author focuses on his own disturbing experiences with the Republican party of 2020, which seems to have thrown out many of its previous principles to accommodate a new way of doing things. I've always hoped that government employees kept the notion of public service as primary, and that politicians in a democracy would remain accountable to the people who vote them in. I'm not so sure this is true anymore. Books like this confirm my suspicions that the entire system has been corrupted by money, extremism, religious dogma, power, fame, and bucketloads of money. Miller talks about "The Game", an inside joke among political types everywhere that nothing matters except winning. Here is a quote that stuck with me: "Something you didn't hear much from players in the Game was self-doubt over whether the political tactics they were employing might hurt the people they were purporting to serve. So, the practitioners of politics could easily dismiss moralistic or technical concerns by throwing down their trump card: "It's all part of the Game."- Policy doesn't actually add up? Who cares, part of the Game- Attack on your opponent not in good faith? Part of the Game: make them defend it.- Getting an endorsement from someone popular but repugnant? Game- Raising money from people you suspect to be corrupt? Game.- Spam emailing supporters with hysterical messages about how their five dollars are needed to prevent the evildoers from stealing everything that mattered to them? That's how the Game is played." Normally I don't like books about politics or politicians as they are depressingly predictable and rarely insightful. This one seemed different, as it spills open the culture of winning at any price that consumes our media and political worlds. I strongly believe that any healthy society needs to look at both the conservative and liberal sides of things. It's basic Yin and Yang, and any nation that drifts too far to the left or right risks losing its grip with reality. Liberals are supposed to point out unfairness while putting forth new ideas, while conservatives are supposed to defend the status quo and reinforce rules and order. In today's America, money, religion, conservative media, and racism have supercharged those on the right to believe that they are under siege and that the other side is pure evil. The left has its issues too, but they pale in comparison. For those who follow politics this book will have juicy stories about recognizable names and how hypocritical and shameless they were. After the events of January 6th, where for a brief few moments it looked like we were all coming back together to renounce this kind of insanity. But by February, things were back to the way they were and America could be facing something even worse in future election cycles. But in my mind the best value of this book goes beyond the Republican mess of 2020. It exposes a culture that's devoid of values, and if we ever want to return to the noble intentions of the Founding Fathers and the many great people who followed, we need to see this ugliness for exactly what it is and call it out whenever we can.

Miller is refreshingly honest and self aware which makes his damning conclusions about Trump enablers hit that much harder. Similar in theme to Stuart Steven’s, “It was all a Lie” but Tim comes from a place of anger instead of sorrow which makes this a more bracing and in some ways more entertaining read. (Although I enjoyed Stuart’s book as well)

This is one of the best books I've read in awhile, and I don't say that lightly. I dove into this Republican confessional after a condensed article about the "types of Trump enablers" was published by Politico, and I was hooked. This is the story of someone who was always a Never Trumper, but it's a tale of someone who was on the inside: someone who saw the GOP fall apart, someone who has known the worst of the enablers, and someone who clearly blames himself for how the party became what it is today.Tim Miller is a gay man and a former Republican strategist, and this is his "travelogue" through a different kind of coming out: the experience of the Never Trumper. How did a demagogue who bragged about assaulting women, taunted a war hero and a disabled reporter, and alleged voter fraud during the primary and the general election become the Republican nominee? Miller traces his life as a "squishy RINO" to tell this story, and where the aftermath of the so-called Republican Autopsy failed.This book is so strong because it depicts the real people — fueled by anger, money, and myriad other factors — who made the Trump administration happen. I loved this book because it was a human story. Unlike almost every other piece of political nonfiction I read, it made me laugh. I felt for, and related to, its author. After all, as Miller writes, "It is always, always Veep, not House of Cards."

Are you wondering how we got into this mess? Are you trying to understand the motives of legions of people who have created a cult around the former President? Would you like to pull your family and friends away from a gaping maw of paranoid insanity, yet fear there is nothing you can do for them? This author has some insights, as he once was instrumental in helping to create the gaping maw. Miller is a former Republican political operative who schmoozed his way up the DC food chain, and has lots of war stories to tell about the things he saw and engaged in. The author got his start at Berman & Co., which, with seed money from Big Tobacco, has created a constellation of lobby groups to ensure its corporate clients are free to conduct business without any pesky ethics considerations getting in the way. [Wonder why animal welfare on US factory farms remains abysmal, and even voter-approved reforms almost always get kneecapped before they go into practice? Berman & Co. has long been there to lend a helping hand to animal abuse, as well as pollution, public health risks, and other corporate bad behavior.]And, yeah, it’s pretty much all downhill from there. But Miller names names, and he’s not afraid to say the quiet parts aloud, as others have noted, and this book is an important contribution to the discussion of the modern political era.

I’m a little bit of a political junkie and have been looking forward to reading this book by Tim Miller for quite some time. I’ve always found his interviews on the Bulwark podcast to be interesting, intelligent and insightful mixed with just the right amount of humor and self-deprecation. This book reflected all the things I enjoy about him plus gave me some clarification about why things in our country are the way they are today. A side note…I’m super glad I read this on my Kindle because I had to search the dictionary many times while I read this book. Let’s just say I learned a lot of new, big words!! Lol!

So right thereI found in you someone who finally got it on paper. I had tried for the last 6 years to understand the what people saw in that shithead, but I think you got it right. Thanks for sharing.ill.

Miller’s book is different from other books purporting to tell the inside story of the Trump White House. Rather than power-brokers, Miller’s world are the PR flacks, money-raisers, opposition researchers and other foot soldiers who populate political campaigns. Miller knows that world well having spent twenty years as a GOP operative working for the John McCain, Jeb Bush and Jon Huntsman presidential campaigns. But he refused to work for Donald Trump.Written in High Hipster, Miller describes the descent many of his peers took from Never Trumpers to outright Trump minions willing to ignore, rationalize or even promote Donald Trump’s worst impulses. How did it happen? Miller spent hours, occasionally days, speaking with friends and associates--many now former--who abandoned earlier loyalties and principles for a seat on the Trump train. There were many reasons. The “LOL Nothing Matters Republicans” were so cynical they didn’t care. The Nerd Revengers were looking for validation wherever they found it. The Little Mixes just had to be in the game. Miller provides many unflinching examples. Reince Priebus was a shameless brown-noser. Sean “Sphincter” Spicer craved validation. Lindsey Graham just wanted to be on the golf cart next to Trump. Many of his political operative peers just needed a job, and by the end were willing to claim the election was stolen to keep it.An underlying thread in the book is Miller’s transition out of the closet into a proud and openly gay man. It may be the only success he recounts in this interesting and highly recommended book

The Most Entertaining Political Book of All Time!Tim Miller combines his unique insight into Republican party politics with his gift for authentic, witty writing to create a book only he could write! You are guaranteed a belly laugh within 5 minutes of starting the book. If you appreciate humility, integrity, humor, and schadenfreude, this is the book for you!

The title explains exactly what this book sets out to tell us - Why they did it. It was fascinating and frustrating and very straight-forward.The writing was quite good, and I actually highlighted many words that I had to look up; I'd give an example but I've already returned the ebook as there was a line of people waiting for it.This is a very human, practical story of how and why people who may have considered themselves "principled" participated in the Trump administration and still support him today, even after January 6th.