openpolitics.com

Since the candidate clinched the nomination,
the green room has become a chilly place.

.. Erickson, who is now 41, is a conservative absolutist who made his name in the mid-2000s by “blowing up” — in the Twitter parlance he jovially employs — Republican leaders he viewed as insufficiently principled.

.. Five years later, he chided the National Rifle Association for being too willing to compromise, labeling it “a weak little girl of an organization.”

.. By 2015, a number of the coming cycle’s aspirants — Rubio, Cruz, Perry and Bobby Jindal — had given him their personal cellphone numbers, and he had traded emails with Jeb Bush.

.. Days earlier, Erickson had unimpeachable credentials in the conservative movement. But by crossing Trump, he was now, in the eyes of his former allies, “a tool of the establishment.”

.. But alongside the institution-builders like Buckley and Ailes, the conservative-media landscape has also produced a class of rowdy entrepreneurs who wield their influence in more personal, protean ways.

.. The godfathers mostly came to power in the 1990s: Clinton-administration antagonists like Rush Limbaugh

.. they rarely challenged the ideological principles

.. What they mostly did was provide the Republican Party with a set of exceptionally loud megaphones

.. “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” he told the crowd at Trump Tower. “They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”

The line struck Sykes as awfully familiar when he heard it.

.. “When Trump used that line, I instantly recognized it as Ann Coulter’s.”

.. . She told Lewandowski that he should buy a dozen teleprompters and put them in every room of Trump’s house until he learned how to use them.

.. Some of Trump’s supporters within the conservative media are attracted to his actual positions on issues. One is his trade policy

.. But Trump also simply fulfills the ineffable urge many have to, as Michael Needham, the chief executive of the conservative policy group Heritage Action for America, puts it, “punch Washington in the face.”

.. Then in 1992, the British-American journalist Peter Brimelow wrote a 14,000-word essay for National Review titled “Time to Rethink Immigration?” which would later become a sort of ur-text for today’s alt-right, the ascendant white-nationalist movement that has found its champion in Trump.

.. Brimelow cast the current wave of American immigrants in dismal terms: less skilled, less European, less assimilated, less law-abiding and less Republican than the previous newcomers

.. Twenty-four years later, Coulter helped formulate Trump’s immigration-policy position, which she hailed on Twitter as “the greatest political document since the Magna Carta.”

.. Her additional tweet on the subject — “I don’t care if @realDonaldTrump wants to perform abortions in the White House after this immigration policy paper”

.. Still, she has become the Trump campaign’s most unrepentant brawler.

.. “I don’t use the word ‘frightening’ often,” he told me. “But it’s frightening to know this person” — Trump — “would have the nuclear-launch codes. The world is getting really dangerous. His friend Mr. Putin is dismantling a nation in the center of Europe. Some trigger-happy captain of a Chinese boat with ship-to-ship missiles might make a mistake in the next three years near the Spratly Islands. All kinds of things can go wrong. And the idea that this guy will be asked to respond in a sober, firm way? My goodness.”

.. More than 2.4 million weekly viewers and 13 million listeners have witnessed Hannity sticking his neck out on behalf of a first-time politician and sometime Republican who has voiced support for Planned Parenthood while vowing to limit America’s military footprint and shred trade deals that the G.O.P. has backed for decades.

.. I have my own place — on the other Florida coast, in Naples,” he said.

.. “Donald Trump, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly all share the same resentment that they will never be accepted into Manhattan’s polite society no matter what they do.” (Trump is from Queens; Hannity and O’Reilly are from Long Island.)

.. No presidential candidate in history, Hannity told me, understands television better than Trump — “not even close.” On this score, I couldn’t disagree.

.. He stage-manages the on-set lighting. He is not only on speaking terms with every network chief executive but also knows their booking agents.

.. I told Jared at one point: ‘Jared, your father-in-law listens to me more when I’m attacking him on television than when I’m trying to convince him to be rational for the sake of the party.’ I think he’s a creature of TV.”

.. The prospect of getting in on the ground floor of a Trump administration that is short on policy ideas and disdainful of old Washington hands amounts to a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. By employing the Breitbart publisher Steve Bannon, and by including both Ingraham and Roger Ailes in his debate preparations, Trump has implicitly encouraged the conservative media to consider itself part of the campaign team.

.. Hannity’s service to the Trump campaign well exceeds that of ritually bashing Clinton and giving Trump free airtime. He has offered private strategic advice to the campaign. The same Trump confidant told me of at least one instance in which Hannity drafted an unsolicited memo outlining the message Trump should offer after the Orlando nightclub shooting in June.

.. Taken alone, George Will or even National Review might have little impact on Trump’s standing in the race, Hannity argued, but “cumulatively they do. I can look at the poll numbers. If you go back to a month ago, he was garnering 73 percent of the Republican vote. The most recent, I think he had 88 percent. He needs to get to 93.” And the key to the last 5 percent might very well lie with the noisy holdouts, like Erick Erickson.

.. “1 Corinthians is very explicit,” he told me. “If someone holds one’s self out to be a Christian and doesn’t behave that way, Christians are supposed to judge him. This is a guy who’s bragged about his affairs.”

This was Erickson’s principal argument during the debate. Trump was not merely a sinner, he said, but a gleefully unrepentant one

.. Erickson’s debating partner, the conservative activist Bill Wichterman, argued that Trump appealed to the worst in America: His bullying, his lying and his bigotry were “corrosive to our national character.” Erickson could testify to this. At one point, he was receiving as many as 300 emails a day from Trump supporters.

.. “I’ve never had Obama or Romney or McCain or Clinton supporters come to my home or send me nasty letters,” he said.

.. “I do think there are a lot of people that have just concluded that this is it — that if we don’t get the election right, the country’s over,” he said. As to where they might have gotten that idea, Erickson knew the answer. It was the apocalyptic hymn sung by talk-radio hosts like his friend and mentor Rush Limbaugh, whose show Erickson once guest-hosted

.. This February, Limbaugh, who has applauded Trump without endorsing him outright, posed to Erickson the question of whether a commentator should try to act as “the guardian of what it means to be a conservative.” In effect, the legend of talk radio was laying down an unwritten commandment of the trade, which applies as well to cable TV: Do not attempt to lead your following.

.. On his own radio show, Erickson found that the more he denounced Trump, the more female listeners he picked up.

.. “I have to admit that while I may view Hillary Clinton’s campaign as anti-American, I view Donald Trump’s campaign as un-American. … While I see Clinton as having no virtue, I see Donald Trump corrupting the virtuous and fostering hatred, racism and dangerous strains of nationalism.”