A few months ago, Matt Schlapp, the
former White House political director under President George W. Bush, walked
into a cocktail party and tried to join a conversation with Republican
consultants he has known for years.
“The conversation quickly ended,”
Schlapp, the chairman of the nation’s oldest conservative grassroots
organization, told The Hill in a recent interview. “Everyone looked down at
their expensive loafers.”
“I hadn’t had that happen to me in a
professional setting before,” he added. “It’s one of those moments when you
wonder, ‘Hey, do I have something on my face?’”
Schlapp’s decision to support Donald
Trump for president has cost him friends in Washington’s elite
Republican circles. Invitations he would normally receive no longer arrive. The
vibe he says he’s getting is: “You’re out of the club.”
He’s hardly alone. Old allies in
Washington and across the establishment Northeast are no longer on
speaking terms because one backs Trump and the other loathes the nominee.
Divisions have run so deep in some cases that they could take years
to heal.
The fallout
Mike DuHaime has witnessed what
Schlapp is living through on a larger scale.
DuHaime is the top political adviser
to New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. In late February, Christie became one of the
first Republican leaders to endorse Trump.
The fallout was brutal.
Christie got publicly trashed by the GOP establishment. His
endorsement was called “disgusting” by former Bush
aide Tony Fratto. Former Mitt Romney adviser Ryan Williams accused
Christie of “kissing Donald Trump’s boots.”
The governor was excoriated in a public letter by
his former finance co-chair, Meg Whitman, who now supports Hillary
Clinton, and ridiculed on Twitter for alleged indignities including
fetching Trump’s McDonald’s order. (Christie disputes the McDonald’s
story.)
“There aren’t a lot of people with
the courage to go up to his face,” DuHaime said of the attacks on Christie. “A
lot of the vitriol has come from people who are extraordinarily brave on
Twitter.”
Outside the professional political
class, however, Christie gets treated warmly, according to DuHaime.
That contrast between Beltway
iciness and a warm reception in "real America" is an experience
commonly described by Trump-backers in the party.
Two worlds
Sen. David Perdue, among the
most full-throated Trump supporters on Capitol Hill, says the positive
reactions he gets in his home state of Georgia are unrecognizable from what he
hears inside the Beltway.
Perdue hasn’t lost any Washington
friendships over Trump — mainly because he was never close to many of the Trump
rejecters in the first place.
He believes many veteran Republicans
in D.C. can’t relate to political outsiders, “therefore, anybody who’s in the
Republican caucus here that’s pulling for Trump is a little bit seen as
askew," Perdue said. "And the reason is, he’s not of
Washington."
“Well, you know what? Neither am I,”
added Perdue, who like Trump, came to politics late in life after running
large companies and is now the only Fortune 500 CEO in Congress.
Another Trump loyalist to feel that
divide is Jeffrey Lord, a veteran of the Reagan administration and a Trump
campaign surrogate on CNN.
Home in Pennsylvania, people who’ve
seen Lord on TV stop him in the grocery store and say nice things about
Trump.
When Lord attended the glitzy White
House Correspondents’ Dinner, however, he got a different reception.
A Republican from a prominent think
tank — Lord won’t say who — attacked Lord, telling him
he’d “betrayed conservatism and Ronald Reagan” by supporting Trump.
Lord said the title of a Hollywood
tell-all book, "You’ll Never Eat Lunch in this Town
Again," describes the sensation he now feels when he visits the
town he once called home.
Washington's political culture
On May 3, Ari Fleischer,
the White House press secretary under Bush from 2001 to 2003, tweeted: “There's a lot
about Donald Trump that I don't like, but I'll vote for Trump over Hillary any
day.”
A former colleague of Fleischer’s,
Fratto, the Bush aide who criticized Christie’s support, replied in a tweet: “Then we don’t have
anything to say to each other.”
Fratto told The New York Times that
Fleischer’s betrayal was “unforgivable.”
“You were the White House
spokesperson when Trump said the president lied the country into the death and
maiming of people unnecessarily,” he told the Times of Fleischer. “How can Ari
be OK with that?”
Asked about Fratto’s reaction,
Fleischer told The Hill, “I’ll always have something to say to Tony, whether
Tony wants to say anything to me or not.”
Fleischer believes these deeply
personal reactions are peculiar to Washington. Now he lives in New York and
works in sports consulting, where he doesn’t lose friends over
political differences.
“One of the most wonderful things
about being outside of Washington is people differ on politics but have a
lot more important and other things to talk about,” Fleischer said.
“I just think it’s important,” he
added, “not to let a political difference, even over Donald Trump or Hillary
Clinton, rise to the level of personal rancor.
“Isn’t that what’s wrong with the system?”
Coping mechanisms
So open is the contempt for Trump
within certain D.C. Republican circles that some have calculated that it's
better for their careers if they keep their support for Trump a secret.
A senior House Republican staffer
who works for a committee chairman doesn’t tell his colleagues that he likes
Trump or that he has informally advised the campaign.
“Basically nobody knows what I’ve
done,” said the staffer, who asked for anonymity for fear of the
impact his views could have on his career. “It's not something I talk about
openly at work, because there are a lot of strong feelings, still, among the
staff. People talk openly against the guy.”
He worries it might harm his
reputation if colleagues discover he's a major fan of Trump.
“I always felt that I would be
viewed in a different light,” he said. “I think they would have pegged me as
being ... all the things the media has said about Trump. That he was a racist,
a misogynist, a xenophobe.”
Over drinks with colleagues after
hours, however, the staffer is finding a growing number of colleagues who also
secretly like Trump.
“It’s kind of like you’re doing this
little weird sort of dance around it,” he said. “You haven’t admitted to them
that you’re supporting the guy and they haven’t admitted to you that they
really like the guy.
“And you get to the point where
you’ll say, ‘I kind of like what he says about this.’ And they’ll say, ‘Well I
kind of like that too!’”
Lawmakers immune
Perhaps the only Beltway politicos
who aren't losing friendships over Trump are lawmakers themselves.
None of the Republican congressmen
interviewed for this article said their support for Trump had ruined
friendships on Capitol Hill.
“I have good friends of mine in
Congress that have come out publicly and said no [to Trump], and our
discussions are quite frank,” said Rep. Bill Shuster (R-Pa.), chairman of
the powerful House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure.
“And I keep telling them, just think
about the Supreme Court when you go in there and you don’t pull that lever for
Trump.”
Rep. Brian Babin (R-Texas) has
similar experiences.
“I hear some colleagues saying,
‘Well he’s not a true conservative ... he insults people,'” he said. Babin
responds that Trump makes mistakes because he’s not a politician, “and you
don’t have to be a politician to recognize the problems this country
faces.”
One reason these pro-Trump lawmakers
don’t get attacked to their faces might be that they’re imposing characters
themselves.
“I’m known to be a little bit of a maverick,”
said Rep. Tom Marino (R-Pa.), an early Trump backer.
Marino's response to skeptical
colleagues: “Well, how’s it been going the last 30 years?”
Putting the party back together
Schlapp attributes a lot of the
anger to wounded pride within a consultant class that failed to grasp the Trump
phenomenon.
“If you are someone who spent your
whole professional life making predictions, selling your reputation for
understanding politics,” he said, “I think this gets to the core of their pride
and ego.”
Schlapp, Bush’s former aide, said
the message voters are sending — that Washington is broken and that the people
running Washington are not listening — “gets to be a very personal message if
you’re living in those zip codes.”
He hopes when this election is over,
whether Trump wins or loses, establishment Republicans can reconcile with Trump
supporters.
In the meantime, Schlapp and his
wife face an awkward stretch until Election Day.
“I can’t tell you the number of
nights that we’ve looked at each other and kind of felt a bit lonely,” he said,
laughing.
“It’s personal. It’s painful. It’s
people you grew up with,” he added. “In politics, you make these really great,
deep friendships because you work long hours and it’s about issues that are
important.
“When those relationships break,
it’s really heartbreaking."
“But it also motivates you to say:
There’s a lot on the line, and a lot of emotion involved,” he
added. “And screw it, you’ve gotta do what’s right.”
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