March 1, 2022
Author of the Washington Post's widely read "Washington Sketch" column, Milbank aims to clobber the political shenanigans of all comers. Here he focuses on the Republican Party, drawing a straight line from Newt Gingrich's Contract with America to the January 6, 2021, insurrection and decrying the white supremacists, conspiracy theorists, and authoritarians swamping the party of Lincoln.
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May 16, 2022
Washington Post opinion columnist Milbank (Tears of a Clown) delivers an excoriating history of the Republican Party from Newt Gingrich’s rise to speaker of the House in 1994 to the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection. Alleging that Gingrich’s “savage politics” set the stage for Trumpism, Milbank spotlights episodes in which Republican officials, party donors, and their media allies spread conspiracy theories, embraced violence, stoked racial animosity, and “sabotag the norms and institutions of American government.” These include independent counsel Ken Starr’s sprawling investigations of the Clintons, the use of false evidence to justify the Iraq War, and the “birther” movement. Milbank stuffs the narrative with precise and persuasive details, noting, for instance, that Republican lawyer and future Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh spent two years investigating White House counsel Vince Foster’s death in 1993, despite admitting at the outset that he believed Foster had killed himself. Elsewhere, Milbank recounts the “swift boating” of Democratic candidate John Kerry in the 2004 presidential race and the spreading of false accusations that the Affordable Care Act would lead to “death panels.” Though readers may balk at some of Milbank’s more outré attacks, such as calling the Republican Party a “death cult,” he makes a convincing and well-documented case. Liberals will be incensed. Agent: Raphael Sagalyn, ICM Partners.
June 15, 2022
Washington Post columnist Milbank locates the origins of the Jan. 6 insurrection in a GOP pivot 25 years earlier."Before the antigovernment MAGA...rallies, there were the rage-filled Tea Party town halls of 2010 and the Republican Revolutionaries of 1994, advised by [Newt] Gingrich to call Democrats 'traitors,' 'sick,' and 'corrupt.' " As the author reminds us, at the time, Gingrich was briefly the speaker of the House of Representatives. Among Milbank's rogues' gallery are other figures familiar to us today, including Roe v. Wade opponent Brett Kavanaugh, who cut his teeth with a lingeringly obscene line of questioning of Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal and "worked closely with cranks" to try to prove the Clintons' role in Vince Foster's notorious suicide. By Milbank's account, the GOP's assault on science, education, and democracy itself began with Gingrich's cynical "contract with America," only a couple of whose planks were ever made law--the most lasting a paperwork reduction act. Perhaps ugliest of all was Gingrich's dog-whistling insistence on racist politics that pitted blue-collar and rural Whites against their imagined enemies, namely people of color. Gingrich and company were not above slandering their own, as with the assault on John McCain's character in a campaign largely engineered by Karl Rove, who believed that "squandering national unity and politicizing war would win Bush seats." That war, in Iraq, was driven by a habit of lying that Donald Trump would raise to an art form. Lou Dobbs, Rush Limbaugh, and others amplified the lies. Meanwhile, even though former Speaker of the House John Boehner glumly observes, "There is no Republican Party. There's a Trump Party," the losing actors of yore are back, with Gingrich now serving as an adviser to Republican House leader Kevin McCarthy. "The man who started American politics down the road to destruction," writes Milbank, "is returning to see his work completed."A well-researched, dispiriting dissection of politics that lends a genealogy to homegrown authoritarianism.
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