WASHINGTON ― As President Barack Obama closes out the final months of his presidency, with Donald Trump and his spectacularly offensive take on American politics dominating every news cycle, the president is noting a bit of a shift in the Republican Party.
Obama keeps arguing that Trump is not an aberration of the GOP, but a product of it. And at an annual dinner for Ohio Democrats last Thursday night, Obama continued this theory by laying some of the blame on GOP leaders for “feeding their base all kinds of crazy for years.”
While conservative members of Congress were not exactly willing to accept that narrative, they were, surprisingly ― on the record, off the record and on background ― willing to go along with some of Obama’s thinking about Trump, the House Freedom Caucus, and the changes in the Republican Party.
In an interview with New York magazine earlier this month, Obama argued that early in his presidency, conservatives inside and outside of Congress vilified him so badly that they made gridlock and dysfunction with the president a staple of party purity, tainting his ability to work with Republicans for the rest of his terms.
And Obama seemed to place much of the blame on one person: Sarah Palin.
“I see a straight line from the announcement of Sarah Palin as the vice-presidential nominee to what we see today in Donald Trump, the emergence of the Freedom Caucus, the tea party, and the shift in the center of gravity for the Republican Party,” Obama said.
As Kansas Rep. Tim Huelskamp put it, “There’s a lot to unpack there.”
Huelskamp is exactly the type of Republican Obama speaks of so derisively. He’s a member of the Freedom Caucus, as well as the current Tea Party Caucus chairman, and he was even recently defeated in a primary, in part because some Republicans thought he was too conservative.
But for all the misgivings about a man who’s among the most hated Republicans inside of GOP leadership suites, Huelskamp is by no means out of the loop. He has a Ph.D. in political science from American University, and he read the New York magazine interview with Obama.
“The section where he talks about the Democrats who were willing to die on the sword for Obamacare?” Huelskamp said, geeking out over the interview. “How many Republicans would do the same? I think you’d be hard-pressed to find 20 Republicans.”
As fascinating as he found the piece, the one thing Huelskamp and every other Freedom Caucus member we talked to thought was totally off was that Obama would credit Palin for the populist backlash leading to Trump and their group.
“Where Obama is wrong is this: This disdain for the mainstream Republicans among conservative voters ― it’s not new,” Huelskamp said.
Most members don’t know when the anti-Washington animus imbuing their group meaningfully materialized, but they certainly would date it to before Sarah Palin ever arrived.
“He actually needs to take that line back to the late ‘60s when the conservative movement actually began,” Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.) told HuffPost.
Huelskamp also seemed to roughly concur with that timeline, pointing to the backlash against so-called “Rockefeller Republicans” in the ‘60s and ‘70s (referring to liberal Republicans in the mold of former New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, who later served as vice president under Gerald Ford).
Although other members weren’t willing to put an exact date on whatever has a rebalancing in the Republican Party, no one thought it was Palin’s doing.
“The frustration with Washington predates any one group or politician but comes from years of failed promises from elected officials,” Freedom Caucus chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) said.
Still, the most surprising element about asking Freedom Caucus members to comment on Obama’s thoughts was not how much they disagreed with the president. (If you needed a reminder of how much disdain these conservatives have for Obama, Duncan wanted us to be sure to include a line from him asking, “Could you draw a line from Marx through Roosevelt to Obama?”) The shock was how much they saw in common between Palin, their group and Trump.
Rep. Dave Brat, the Virginia Republican who famously took down former Majority Leader Eric Cantor in a primary in 2014, sees similarities between the issues that brought him to Congress and the issues that brought Trump the GOP nomination.
“It was definitely a precursor,” Brat said of his election. “I ran on similar themes that were narrower then but they’ve just blown up exponentially.”
First among those issues, as anyone who ever heard Laura Ingraham talk about the Brat-Cantor race knows well, is immigration. Brat demonstrated in stark terms that GOP leaders were a bit ahead of their voters on wanting immigration reform, and Brat was able to seize on that anger to mobilize Republican primary voters. (There were certainly a number of other issues unique to Brat’s race, but immigration was the central issue.)
Brat also thinks some of the anti-establishment themes present in his election are also dominant in the Freedom Caucus and Trump’s campaign.
“I was going to go up and challenge the system,” Brat said, “but Trump is big enough that he can break the system.”
Freedom Caucus members have garnered a reputation for their refusal to go along with GOP leaders, to say nothing of their distaste for working with Democrats and the president. But, as one Freedom Caucus member noted, the HFC has not been the most fertile ground for Trump support.
Rep. Scott DesJarlais (R-Tenn.) was the only HFC member to endorse Trump before he became the presumptive GOP nominee, and as this one member of the group noted, the HFC was generally split between Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.). “Our movement in the Freedom Caucus was not a Donald Trump movement,” the member said.
And yet, other HFC members were willing to accept similarities between the roots of their group and the roots of Trump.
“The continued appeasement of Obama spurred the rise of the Freedom Caucus, but it also spurred the rise of Donald Trump,” Duncan said.
Duncan added that many of the same frustrations leading to Trump brought members of the HFC to Congress in the first place, as well as motivated them to band together.
“The Freedom Caucus became a necessity when Congress and House leadership failed to do conservative things ― when they failed to actually land a punch or two on the progressive in the White House,” Duncan said.
What actually led to the Freedom Caucus is a much broader conversation. As Jordan, the group’s chairman, has put it numerous times, the Freedom Caucus is “about doing what you said you were going to do.”
Duncan attributed the group to voters “failing to see what they got for their money, so to speak,” after they elected large Republican majorities in 2010 and 2012.
And while Duncan noted that Trump support among the conservatives in the HFC was a bit mixed ― “I don’t think anybody in the Freedom Caucus believes 100 percent of what Donald Trump says” ― he could see some similarities between the HFC, Trump, the tea party and Palin. “The tea party is just a title for the broader conservative movement,” Duncan said.
Still, the misgivings about Trump are very real in the group. They’ve seen Republicans say they want to dismantle Obamacare and substantively address debt and spending, only to have Republicans turn around and approve more debt and more spending, and not even propose a health care law alternative.
Embodying the uneasiness, Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) said he couldn’t really make a judgment on Trump because the GOP nominee had never held a political office before. “If Barack Obama is right and Donald Trump proves to be like the House Freedom Caucus, then Trump will make a great president,” Brooks said.
But he said drawing comparisons between Trump and the HFC was premature.
“I hope Barack Obama is right, which is unusual for me,” Brooks said.