This is a column that I have had kicking around in my head for several weeks now. My writing process isn't built on speed, obviously. I won't even get into how slowly I type despite having been a professional writer for so long. My hot mess typing skills bring shame upon my family.
Almost from the moment that I co-founded the Los Angeles Tea Party in 2009, I was telling people that the success of the movement wouldn't have anything to do with its continued existence in its original form in the years to come. What I meant was that the rallies and the speeches were all well and good for a few years in order to get things going, but that would have to transition to more mundane political activism after a while.
The nuts and bolts of political activism aren't glamorous. Knocking on doors, working the phones, and distributing campaign materials are grunt work, but it's the grunts who make any successful political machine hum. The consultants who gouge campaigns for zillions of dollars to workshop slogans and send out snail mail will insist that they're the real magic in any campaign. After forty-plus years of activism, I can assure you that consultants have more of a burst-appendix role than beating-heart functionality when it comes to campaigning.
Fortunately, a lot of the Tea Party people did go into essential activism, doing things like volunteering for campaigns and becoming committeemen and women for their county Republican parties.
Changing a party from within is slow work. In the Tea Party heyday, we spent more time butting heads with the GOP establishment than with the Democrats. The "Harumph!" Republicans in D.C. have always been status quo fetishists who live in fear of change. If they'd had their druthers, the Bush/McConnell/Romney uniparty dream would have already ruined the Republic.
Enter one Donald John Trump. It wasn't apparent at the time that he entered the race in 2015, but he would become the spark that ignited a flame that fired up beleaguered conservative activists (the Obama years felt like they went on forever) and began burning the uniparty weeds that were choking the Republican Party.
It took some time, but those of us who were on the frontlines during the Tea Party era began to realize that Trump was the anti-politician, blow-up-the-moribund-Republican-norms kind of guy we'd been waiting for. As his first term unfolded, it was the Tea Party types who were most vocal with our support. Proving that everything that's old is new again, it was — and still is — the political consultant class that was the cornerstone of the Never Trump movement.
Yeah, I really, really, don't like Republican consultants.
As President Trump was preparing to embark upon his second term, I began getting the old Tea Party vibe again. Four days into 2023, I wrote that I was all-in on a scorched-earth second Trump term. As he assembled the Trump 47 team last fall it quickly became apparent that he was all-in on one too.
He was embracing outsiders who freaked out the GOP establishment types. He had zero you-know-whats to give about what Bush-era Republicans and the Democrats' flying monkeys in the mainstream media thought about his ambitious, America-first agenda. In the ramp-up to Inauguration Day, it was OG Tea Party types like me who were cheering the loudest.
Even his nomination of Marco Rubio to be Secretary of State evoked the early Tea Party movement days. Many of my conservative friends and colleagues bristled at that because of Rubio's unfortunate participation in the 2013 "Gang of Eight" immigration reform fiasco. I had gotten over that a long time ago for a couple of reasons, the first being that I never expect politicians to be perfect. The big reason, however, was that I always blamed John McCain for that more than Rubio. In Senate years, Rubio was still a newbie, and McCain was the Elder of the Village who held too much sway.
My gut told me that Rubio would be great at State, and he's working out well so far.
Back in 2010, Rubio was the first outsider candidate that the Tea Party movement got behind. He entered the GOP primary for Senate as a huge underdog to Florida's incumbent Republican governor, Charlie Crist. The GOP establishment — with a generous assist from leftists in the media — insisted that the upstart Rubio would fracture the Republican vote and allow the third candidate in the primary, Kendrick Meek, to win and then get shellacked in the general election. It was going to be Rubio's fault that the Dems would pick up a seemingly safe Republican seat. At the time, I wrote about some of that for what was then Andrew Breitbart's Big Government site.
Propelled by Tea Party grassroots support, Rubio eventually erased, then curb-stomped, Crist's double-digit lead in the primary.
From 2009-2012, my Tea Party movement friends and I were the conservative outsiders who desperately wanted to shake up the Republican Party. Our primary goal was to make it get its spending house in order. We were also pushing hard for education and border policy reform. Any of that sound familiar?
President Trump may be in his second term in the Oval Office, but he will always be an outsider. Even better, as I wrote in a recent column, he is an outsider with the ultimate insider access. So far, everything he's doing with that access is eliciting an exhausted "Finally" from those of us who were swinging for the fences 16 years ago.
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