The problem with her appointment, to many on the right, was that it felt like an overcorrection: that Heritage was so consumed with rehabilitating its image and restoring its scholarly reputation that it would relinquish its mission to hold GOP elected officials accountable for their votes.
James was sending conflicting signals. One day she would assure hard-core conservative allies of her mandate to be nonpolitical, calling out the Trump administration for its forsaking of principle. The next day she would be currying favor with the administration, hoping to preserve influence like everyone else in DC. When James met with the new White House director of legislative affairs, Shahira Knight, the Heritage president kicked off the conversation by assuring Knight that Heritage was “working hard to win the president a second term.”
Nobody was peddling the narrative of Heritage’s unreliability harder than DeMint himself. Having been banished from the think tank, its former president assembled his core team of right-wing agitators to launch a new organization, the Conservative Partnership Institute. They went around town whispering to Heritage donors that the group had lost its nerve; that it was going soft to make nice with the establishment; that James was not a fighter for the movement; that she’s a nice lady known for midday naps more than nighttime raids. This campaign was effective: Even before its official launch, DeMint’s new venture was stealing major financiers away from Heritage, which led to an internal panic about James’s capacity for going toe to toe with her predecessor.
The changes inside Heritage were encapsulated by the changes inside its lobbying arm, Heritage Action. For the previous eight years, the president of Heritage Action, Mike Needham, had made himself the most hated man on Capitol Hill. Constantly picking fights that Republicans couldn’t win, and then fund-raising off their defeats, Needham became persona non grata even to some of the most conservative lawmakers in Congress. They viewed him, and his organization, as a parasite leeching off the anger toward the political class that Heritage was actively fueling. Not long after DeMint’s departure as the think tank’s president, Needham was relieved of his duties at Heritage Action. He was replaced by its COO, Tim Chapman, a well-liked veteran of the conservative movement who had a reputation for collegiality and coalition building.
But one of Chapman’s first initiatives, spending money to help protect vulnerable moderate Republicans in their 2018 elections (on the theory that conservatives could make gains only if the GOP continued to hold its majorities), drew wailing and gnashing of teeth from the right. Veteran activists denounced Heritage in meetings. Big movement donors called, threatening to cancel their checks. Mark Meadows, the Freedom Caucus chairman, told several Heritage officials in a meeting that summer that he wouldn’t stick his neck out for them “given this new reputation of yours, and given that I’ve got my own reputation to worry about.”
Needham, meanwhile, was finding religion. Official Washington was stunned when he joined Marco Rubio as the senator’s chief of staff. No entity had brutalized him during the 2013 Gang of Eight fight like Heritage Action, often with attacks that were deeply personal. Now Rubio was hiring the gunner who had manned the heavy weaponry against him.
This looked, on the surface, to be a marriage of mutual necessity: Rubio needed to rebuild his street cred with conservatives, while Needham needed to repair his relationships with the Capitol Hill establishment. But there was something deeper at work. In the final months of DeMint’s tenure, Needham had begun questioning the direction of Heritage and whether their absolutist approach of years past had backfired—and whether it was responsible for Trumpism. Joining one of the weekly conservative meetings for the first time since joining Rubio’s staff, Needham’s longtime comrades asked what the biggest surprise was in his new role. He replied that he had learned the importance, politically and economically, of sugar subsidies in Florida. He was laughed out of the room. Email in-boxes around Washington exploded with tales of how Needham had sold out. One of his longtime friends, worried about what he’d heard, called and teased Rubio’s new chief of staff about going soft. “You know,” Needham told him. “I’m not sure that the guy you think I am, the guy Washington thinks I am, really exists anymore.”
This upheaval within the conservative movement occurred during a midterm election season that was unlike any in memory. Democratic challengers were out-raising Republican incumbents in record numbers, most of them smartly steering clear of Trump-related hysteria and focusing their campaigns on kitchen table issues: health care, jobs, economic inequality. Republicans, on the other side, were running unrecognizable campaigns, having largely ditched the ultraconservative messaging techniques of elections past and branding themselves as Trump loyalists playing to the issues that animated his base.
It was no accidental shift. The biggest donors in the Republican Party made it known in 2018 that they would not write checks if their money would be wasted on ads hawking an academic sort of conservatism: lower spending, rising debt and deficit, uncontrolled entitlement programs, etc. Instead, they wanted an emphasis on cultural issues: immigration, the national anthem, whatever worked. “These weren’t the activists. These were Wall Street types, the people who have spent years pleading with Republicans to avoid social issues and focus on the economy,” Chapman, the Heritage Action president, says. “And now, with Trump, they want us to do the exact opposite.”
There was a method to the madness. Over at the Club for Growth, where tens of millions of dollars had been spent over the past decade promoting a purist fiscal conservatism, their market research showed there was no appetite in the electorate for lectures on economics. “In this cycle, if you aren’t talking about immigration and Trump, you aren’t going to pick up that conservative base vote,” says David McIntosh, the Club’s president. “I’ve had donors and board members say, ‘Why don’t we just keep running the ads that worked before, about spending?’ And I tell them because when we study it and poll it, it doesn’t work.”
Chapman concurs. “All the polling we get back shows the fiscal issues are a complete wasteland,” he says. “And the donors know it.”
“The Tea Party is gone. It doesn’t exist anymore. There just aren’t that many Republicans now who are that concerned about spending, about debt, about big government,” says Justin Amash, the Michigan congressman elected in the 2010 wave. “Many people today think Trump is fiscally conservative because they see his tweets, they listen to him talk about trade deficits, and people fall for it. A lot of people are thanking Trump for getting our debt and deficit under control because they have bad information.”
Ahem. Bad information?
“I think President Trump is one of a kind—you can’t replicate what he’s doing,” Amash says. “It requires you to not feel shame. Most people feel shame when they do or say something wrong, especially when it’s so public. The president feels comfortable saying two things that are completely contradictory in one sentence; or going to a rally and saying one thing and then holding a press conference and saying another. Most people aren’t comfortable doing that. But because he is, it gives him this superpower that other people don’t have.”
Indeed, as the president’s improvised trade war punished a disproportionate number of his own supporters across Middle America that summer, he gave a speech in Kansas City aimed at convincing those voters that they were not, in fact, being hurt by his policies. “It’s all working out,” Trump said. “Just remember, what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”