F*ck Silence Read online




  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Introduction: Opening Monologue

  Chapter 1: The Lies

  Chapter 2: The Constitution Breaker

  Chapter 3: The Constitution Breaker, Part Two

  Chapter 4: The Enemy of Democracy

  Chapter 5: The Cultist

  Chapter 6: The Narcissist

  Chapter 7: Fixing the Presidency

  Chapter 8: Fixing Conservatism

  Chapter 9: Fixing the Debt

  Chapter 10: Fixing Trade

  Chapter 11: Fixing Immigration

  Afterword: Closing Thoughts

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Introduction

  Opening Monologue

  Let’s get the boring part out of the way first. My name is Joe Walsh, and I don’t own a guitar.

  I was elected to Congress from a district in greater Chicago during the Tea Party wave in 2010. I ran as a freedom-loving, limited-government conservative. I voted like one when I was in office: against runaway spending and regulations that screwed over job creators and for lower taxes and free trade agreements I thought would help Americans through the toughest economy we faced since the Great Depression. I opposed Obamacare. I supported strong borders. I believed in following what the Constitution told the legislative branch to do (make the laws) and the executive branch to do (enforce the laws)—which meant that when a president tried to do Congress’s job, it was my duty to stand against him, regardless if he was a Democrat or a Republican. Those were my positions when the voters of the Illinois 8th Congressional District chose someone else to represent them in 2012. They were my positions when I hosted a nationally syndicated radio show between 2013 and 2019. And they are my positions today.

  This biographical stuff is usually saved for the jacket cover, I know. The reason I put it here is that I want you, the reader, to understand where I’m coming from when I make the arguments you’re about to read. President Donald Trump and I agree on some big issues. We both believe strongly that illegal immigration threatens our national security and strains our government. He made building a wall on the southern border a focus of his 2016 presidential campaign; I was for a border wall years before that election. He pledged to help unemployed workers in dilapidated manufacturing towns get back onto their feet—the very people who live in my backyard, in places such as Gary, Indiana, and Decatur, Illinois, and who called into my show to talk about an America that wasn’t as great for them as it used to be. Trump complained about a political system that was out of touch with ordinary folks, and he promised to get rid of the fancy assholes who ran it.

  That was all great. It was part of the reason that I voted for him—for disruption. But that vote wasn’t worth it if it means having a president who lies, bullies, abuses his power, places his vanity above the public interest, runs his administration like a cult, manipulates the laws for his personal benefit, befriends dictators while disavowing his own intelligence community, and fails in so many other ways—having nothing to do with being a member of one political party or another—to be a responsible steward of his office. Whether we intended to or not, this package of a little good and a ton of bad is what I and nearly 63 million other Americans voted into office. I believe now that this support was misplaced, and I want to explain to those 63 million why.

  I don’t believe I can do it by behaving like Trump, and I wouldn’t want to, either—by name-calling, mischaracterizing, exaggerating, and pitting people against each other. After all, if I truly believe that Donald Trump is a con man—and I do—then I myself was conned. I have to own that. But by owning it, I hope to lead others to the same realization—not by making them feel guilty about a politician they backed but by helping them understand the reality of who that politician is, what he’s done, and what history suggests he’ll continue to do. Sorting through all the information available to us about politics to find the truth of the matter is tough enough already. It’s difficult to use that information to help us make knowledgeable choices about our government. So I’d rather try to educate and persuade than lecture and condemn.

  What qualifies me to do this? Well, let’s start with what I’m not. I’m not a Democrat, so my criticisms aren’t just a cover for what I think about Donald Trump’s ideology. And I’m not a member of the media, a group that the people in Trump’s camp don’t trust to provide accurate news, especially about him. Republicans instinctively doubt the fairness of the mainstream press, and believe me, I get it. There are far more Democrats and liberals in newsrooms than there are Republicans and conservatives.1 That kind of imbalance means there are blind spots or even biases in coverage that disadvantage the Right—even if the majority of journalists are smart people putting in honest work, as I believe they are. But the Trump era has blown the idea of a skewed media out of proportion. This is a president who calls our free press a literal enemy of the people. It’s a cop-out to say he means that only for “fake news.” Unless you’re an outlet dedicated to propagandizing on his behalf, a commentator who arrives at a conclusion he likes, a friendly opinion host on a cable channel, or some internet personality who will fork over your shame, your spine, and your sensibility just for a retweet from @realDonaldTrump, you’re “fake news” in the eye of the president. It is every bit that black and white.

  What I offer instead is perspective: perspective as someone who voted for Donald Trump, who understands and has identified with his populist worldview, and who echoed the worst parts of his divisive and even bigoted rhetoric. In fact, I believe that I helped create this phenomenon in my own small way. I went on the radio to fight for the policies and the principles that I believed in. But oftentimes, during the course of waging this public fight, I went over the line: engaged in ugly personal attacks and participated in the very demagoguery of serious public policy matters that I call out today. I got caught up in the conservative media outrage machine—that motley crew of incendiaries for whom no “hot take” is ever scalding enough—to get listeners and internet “clicks.” This rhetoric, which is so widespread on the Right, partly led to the elevation of a man like Trump to the White House. He is the worst iteration of the politics of personal destruction. I want to help clean up the mess he made and prevent us from making another one like it ever again. I want to do this not to help me sleep easy at night or to ingratiate myself with the Left, “Never Trump,” or a clique of any kind, but to do the right thing. Because I have the good fortune and the opportunity to do it. I believe deep in my gut and in my head that Donald Trump has betrayed conservatives, crapped all over the rule of law, and damaged this country. And because of my background, I hope to be a credible source for making the argument.

  I can envision some of the criticism of this: Well, thanks for stating the obvious, Joe, but what are you going to do about it? First, it’s a mistake to assume that most of the public thinks it’s “obvious” that Trump is a threat, a real menace, to the nation. That especially goes for us conservatives, of course, many of whom get their news from sources that simply paper over the president’s unacceptable conduct. Most of the public don’t pay attention to Trump around the clock—but make no mistake, there are people who need to, because the president of the United States can change the world in an instant. I am not included in “most of the public.” I am part of an ecosystem in which reporters and pundits and provocateurs watch the president say something almost in real time, then react to it, determine its significance, and before we know it participate in the cycle all over again. Sometimes these flare-ups “make news” the way ordinary Americans are used to seeing it: one of the president’s tweets or comments out of the b
lue will become a story on a newspaper’s website or in print, on the radio, or during a television news broadcast. Sometimes they don’t. But these examples come so often and fade so quickly all the time that it’s easy to forget they ever happened.

  Second, it’s not always evident that the president’s acting out is dangerous or leads to a larger risk. Let’s take an example from the last year. Do you remember when Trump displayed a map in the Oval Office of Hurricane Dorian’s path that was edited with a Sharpie to make it look as though the storm was expected to strike Alabama? It happened during a string of days in early September 2019 when the president kept insisting that the hurricane was set to hit the state “much harder than anticipated.” If you don’t remember, I can hardly blame you. If you do, please bear with me—this’ll take only a minute. The president made his claim on the morning of September 1.2 He elaborated on it later that day, saying that Dorian “may get a little piece of a great place: It’s called Alabama. And Alabama could even be in for at least some very strong winds and something more than that, it could be. This just came up, unfortunately.”3 But the five most recent forecast tracks, between 5:00 p.m. EDT the previous day and 12 hours later predicted that the hurricane would take a northeasterly path along the Atlantic. The possible extremes for the storm’s center stretched east to west from hundreds of miles off the US coast to southeastern Georgia—a long way from Alabama.4 So maybe he was communicating some outdated information, or maybe he misinterpreted a map; the one he shared on Twitter from the National Hurricane Center the morning of September 1 showed that there was a 5 percent chance of tropical storm-force winds hitting a sliver of southeastern Alabama in the next five days. (I’m being generous here!) In any event, it wasn’t anything Trump couldn’t fix by saying “My bad” and deferring to the experts. There was no good reason for him to mistakenly alarm the good people of Dothan.

  Except one, apparently: to save face. He refused to say he was incorrect, and he refused to be corrected. Instead, he began sharing anything on Twitter he could find to prove he was right: a “spaghetti model” of the storm’s possible tracks dated August 28,5 a map of predicted winds dated August 30,6 a clip of a CNN meteorologist saying on the evening of August 28 that Dorian’s winds could eventually reach Alabama and Mississippi,7 each of which was outdated by September 1. The Sharpie-marked map should’ve been just the cherry on top. Except it wasn’t! The same day he put the map in front of the news cameras, September 5—by now Dorian was whipping South Carolina and bound for Canada—the White House released a statement attributed to Homeland Security and Counterterrorism Advisor Rear Admiral Peter Brown that read, in part, “The President’s comments [on September 1] were based on that morning’s Hurricane Dorian briefing, which included the possibility of tropical storm force winds in southeastern Alabama.”8 A day later, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released this statement: “From Wednesday, August 28, through Monday, September 2, the information provided by NOAA and the National Hurricane Center to President Trump and the wider public demonstrated that tropical-storm-force winds from Hurricane Dorian could impact Alabama.”9 Of course, those statements weren’t unsolicited. Using common sense here, we know that someone had to have asked for them. Believe the New York Times or not—and I do—President Trump ordered NOAA to cover for him, and the message was handed down to his acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, who handed it down to the secretary of commerce, Wilbur Ross, who handed it down to NOAA leadership.10

  Let’s put this into words that our Founding Fathers wouldn’t have: That’s fucking crazy, all right? It’s insane. It does not reflect the behavior of a rational human being, much less a stable president and administration. But some people in the corner of political media sympathetic to Trump tried to downplay the saga’s significance. One journalist said, “I must spend way too much time reporting [and] with unplugged people because I totally missed the [S]harpie story. Also I don’t know what the [S]harpie story is. I don’t care to know what the [S]harpie story is.”11 Several Republicans in Congress have often used this same kind of dismissiveness to say they don’t pay attention to the president’s Twitter feed, as if nothing he posts to it is of significance. (“I have a long-standing policy that I don’t comment on tweets,” said Senator Ted Cruz in response to reporters’ questions about a derogatory comment Trump had made toward several minority congresswomen, which pretty much captures the spirit of this kind of dodge.)12

  To get down to the questions, then: Why did any of this really matter? And should people disown the president just because he threw a days-long fit about his inaccurate assessment of a storm forecast? Look. If you’re a Republican, and your choices are to (a) swallow the childish, stubborn behavior of the person on your side of the aisle and get policy you like in exchange for it or (b) bail, risk empowering progressives, and get policy you don’t like, I understand how you could choose (a). It’s essentially the choice Republicans made in 2016. But what the last three years have revealed is that that wasn’t actually the choice. It wasn’t just about tolerating childish, stubborn behavior. To take it from the top: to justify his untrue statements that Hurricane Dorian was set to hit Alabama “much harder than anticipated” and that it could bring “at least some very strong winds and something more than that,” the president of the United States tweeted expired hurricane maps and a TV weather segment with old information, displayed a doctored storm track in front of a press gaggle in his office, and ordered his subordinates, including the head of a major government science agency, to misrepresent scientific data. Now . . .

  Let’s pretend for a second that this president doesn’t have a name or belong to a political party.

  Let’s pretend instead that he’s just an independent guy doing the job. Let’s call him “Bob.”

  Do you trust Bob to do the job of president?

  Do you trust him to put your interests before his if he will risk panicking Americans with false information about a natural disaster just so he can have an excuse to argue with the media?

  Do you trust him to give you the facts straight—about the effects of his trade policy, about how many new miles of border wall his administration has built, about an investigation into a foreign adversary’s meddling in our election—if he’ll bully his employees into lying about the weather?

  Do you trust him to give you the facts if the stakes are even higher, life and death, if already the stakes of a hurricane are exactly that?

  Do you trust Bob to perform the basic constitutional functions of his job? To uphold his oath? To “take care that the laws be faithfully executed”?

  Or is the reality that you can’t trust Bob even with a box of fucking markers?

  You’re going to read plenty of times throughout these pages that Donald Trump is unfit to be president. I mean it. But what do I mean? I mean he’s incapable of telling the truth and he’s incapable of putting the nation’s interests ahead of his own. We’ve seen this countless times these past three-plus years—we saw it in his refusal to acknowledge Russian interference in 2016, we saw it in his push to get China and Ukraine to interfere in the 2020 election, and we saw it in this stupid Sharpie story. While our fellow Americans in the Carolinas were getting pounded by a hurricane, all the president of the United States could talk about was how poorly he was being treated by the press. He made the story about him. Not the hurricane. All. About. Him. He cared more about salvaging his reputation than he cared about the Americans adversely affected by a natural disaster. This is who he is. It’s why he’s “unfit.”

  And it’s why this Sharpie business isn’t some trivial story. It’s not a story about the president having some fun with his foils in the media, sticking it to the libs, or behaving goofy over a nothingburger. It’s a story about a deeply unserious leader whose priority is saving his own skin and who will develop new, often unseemly or illegal ways to do it. This priority is at stark odds with his oath of office: “I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execut
e the Office of President of the United States.” And you know what? It’s okay if none of this is obvious right off the bat. Remember when I said it would take “only a minute” to lay out the stuff about Trump and Dorian? Whoops. Not that you were keeping count, but it took a couple thousand words. Explaining the full thrust of Trump’s conduct—just how long even one example drags on and the bizarre details of it—takes up a lot of time and space.

  So much that you could almost write a book about it.

  Chapter 1

  The Lies

  The doorman of the building where I hosted my radio show was an older, white-haired gentleman who always struck me as a good, interesting, educated guy. And he couldn’t stand Donald Trump. His reason, more or less: all Trump does is lie. One morning in May a couple of years ago, he was talking to a construction worker when I walked past. “Hey, Joe!” he called out to me. “Boy—you gonna rip into Trump today?” Trump had cooked up a phony scandal that week: that the FBI had planted a secret source inside his election campaign to spy on him. He had also sent a note to North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, lamenting that he was canceling a planned summit between them. “I felt a wonderful dialogue was building up between you and me, and ultimately, it is only that dialogue that matters,” he wrote to Kim. It was so pathetic it read as though he were backing out of a first date. “Someday, I look very much forward to meeting you.”

  So, sure, I felt there was plenty to “rip” Trump about.

  “Yeah, he always makes it interesting,” I told the doorman. But then this working-class construction dude chimed in. “I fuckin’ love him.”

  The doorman was taken aback. “All Trump does is lie!” he exclaimed.

  “Let me ask you a question,” the construction worker said. “What politician dudn’t lie?”

  That says it all, doesn’t it? You and I both know that virtually all politicians lie, fudge, or hedge to a degree. It’s the nature of the business. Sometimes it’s to frame a bit of data or a development that’s clearly bad news as if it were good news. That’s called spin. Sometimes it’s to misrepresent an opponent’s position to try winning a debate. That’s called campaign season. The Romans did it. The Founding Fathers did it. Hell, I’ve done it, not that I’m proud of it. Politicians have always told themselves that to achieve a greater good, it’s okay once in a while to tell a little lie. If the public ends up better off for it, who cares, right?