Image: Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Prescott Valley, Arizona (photo: Gage Skidmore)

Why We Did It: A Travelogue from the Republican Road to Hell

A new book by Festival writer Tim Miller comes out on June 28. Miller, a former Republican political operative, anwers the question no one else has fully grappled with: why did normal people go along with the worst of Trumpism?

“When the history of this era is written, the dominant question will likely be, How did this happen? Tim Miller’s Why We Did It offers a crucial insider’s answer to that question. This is a big, important book. Read it.” —Stuart Stevens

As one of the strategists behind the famous 2012 RNC “autopsy,” Miller conducts his own forensic study on the pungent carcass of the party he used to love, cutting into all the hubris, ambition, idiocy, desperation and self-deception for everyone to see. In a bracingly honest reflection on both his own past work for the Republican Party and the contortions of his former peers in the GOP establishment, Miller draws a straight line between the actions of the 2000s GOP to the Republican political class’s Trumpian takeover, including the horrors of January 6th.

From ruminations on the mental jujitsu that allowed him as a gay man to justify becoming a hitman for homophobes, to astonishingly raw interviews with former colleagues who jumped on the Trump Train, Miller diagrams the flattering and delusional stories GOP operatives tell themselves so they can sleep at night. With a humorous touch, he reveals Reince Priebus’ neediness, Sean Spicer’s desperation, Elise Stefanik and Chris Christie’s raw ambition and his close friends’ submission to a MAGA psychosis.

“Miller, a millennial who started working in Republican politics when he was 16, depicts himself as someone who was so preoccupied with “the Game” that for years he gave little thought to the degraded culture that his bare-knuckle tactics helped perpetuate.” —The New York Times

Why We Did It is a vital, darkly satirical warning that all the narcissistic justifications that got us to this place still thrive within the Republican party, which means they will continue to make the same mistakes and political calculations that got us here, with disastrous consequences for the nation.

Tim Miller is writer-at-large for The Bulwark and a political consultant. He was the communications director for Jeb Bush’s 2016 presidential campaign and the spokesman for the Republican National Committee during Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign. He will appear at the 2023 RMWF.