Falling in line

Wisconsin’s GOP dances to Trump’s beat

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Isthmus Cover Stories

Four years ago, conservative lawyer Rick Esenberg was having none of Donald Trump.

It was months before the Iowa caucuses would kick off the 2016 primaries, but Trump was already sucking up all the oxygen in the battle over which Republican would represent the party in the presidential race.

“The man is an embarrassment,” Esenberg wrote on his personal blog in August 2015. He dismissed the real estate mogul-turned-reality-TV-star’s campaign style as “playground bullying” and predicted a rapid fall in popularity.

 “Trump does worse in two-way match-ups than almost anyone in the GOP field, and he will never get more support than what he has now. Sixty-two percent of the public say that they wouldn’t vote for him under any circumstance. And the support he has will erode.”

Today, Esenberg, who is the founder and leader of the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, a conservative-libertarian law firm, doesn’t run away from those and other criticisms of the man who defied his predictions and went on to win the presidency. On the air and in print in the year leading up to the election, “I was pretty harsh on candidate Trump,” he tells Isthmus.

But for all his scorn, Esenberg drew a line. “I never said I was a ‘Never-Trumper,’” he says. And on election day, he cast his ballot for the playground bully rather than Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton.

Either candidate was “a very unfortunate choice,” he says now. But he never considered picking a third-party challenger or skipping the line at the top of the ballot. “I believe presidential elections are binary choices. The only way you can refuse to choose is if you think your choice doesn’t matter.”

Three years later, Esenberg still isn’t crazy about Trump. The president’s behavior in office has lived up — or down — to his prediction that it “would damage the conservative brand,” he says. Among many other things, he thinks the president was wrong to use a state-of-emergency declaration in order to single-handedly move funds from the military budget to help pay for his vaunted wall on the Mexican border.

“I don’t think Donald Trump is that serious about a lot of the things that he says. He’s serious about trade and immigration and very little else,” Esenberg says. “And so, he tweets a lot of stupid classless and vulgar things, but it doesn’t really translate to any kind of action.”

But he dismisses graver existential assessments of the man he voted for. “I think there’s a lot of exaggeration that goes on,” says Esenberg. “What Trump is and what he does — I don’t think that he is a threat to the constitutional order.”

Esenberg isn’t alone in coming around. Wisconsin was once seen as a final bulwark against Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party in the 2016 primaries. Since then, Wisconsin Republicans have lined up solidly and enthusiastically behind him.

This isn’t a shocking turn of events — it’s standard for lawmakers and party faithful to stand behind a president who leads their party.

“Usually what happens is the party of the president starts looking more like the president than what the party looked like before that person became president,” says UW-Madison political scientist Mike Wagner. “So increasingly, the Republican party is Donald Trump’s Republican party.”

But when the GOP leader is as polarizing and controversial as Donald Trump, what does that mean for the party that controls the state Senate and Assembly and represents roughly half of the state’s voters?

Some conservatives, who now view themselves as exiles from the GOP, see state party leaders embracing the Trump style and adopting positions that would have been heretical a couple of years ago.

Ed Wall, who served as secretary of the Department of Corrections under Walker from 2012 to 2016, when he was fired, sees Trump “just smashing his way through everything,” and state Republican leaders are embracing a similar strategy.

“He doesn’t care about norms, he doesn’t care about history,” Wall says. “You’re seeing more and more Republicans at the state level turning into nasty brawlers.”

Once upon a time, Wisconsin GOP leaders were nearly united in their attempts to block Trump’s path to the oval office.

Gov. Scott Walker aborted his own presidential bid before the first primary, framing it as a principled stand against Trump.

“I am being called to lead by helping clear the field in this race so that a positive, conservative message can rise to the top of the field,” Walker said. “I encourage other Republican presidential candidates to consider doing the same, so that the voters can focus on a limited number of candidates who can offer a positive, conservative alternative to the current front-runner” — pointedly omitting Trump’s name in his statement.

Months later, in the April 5, 2016, presidential primary, Wisconsin Republicans, by a 48-35 percent margin, snubbed Trump in favor of U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), whom Walker endorsed. According to exit polls, 38 percent of Republican voters said Trump “scared” them.

Cruz crowed that his Wisconsin win would mark a “turning point” that would let him overtake Trump. Republican South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham — at the time a harsh Trump critic — tweeted his congratulations to Cruz with the same sentiment. Political reporters suggested the result could lead to a brokered Republican convention that would shove Trump aside.

Instead, Trump swept the 16 remaining primaries to secure the nomination. “We’re on the Trump Train now,” state Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald famously told reporters just one month after the Wisconsin vote and the day after Cruz suspended his campaign.

Ignoring Trump’s mockery during the Wisconsin primary (“We sent him packing like a little boy,” Trump had sneered of Walker on a talk radio show a few months before), Walker joined the endorsement, declaring his former rival “clearly better than Hillary Clinton for a variety of reasons.”

In the years since, there’s been little daylight between any of the state’s Republican leaders and the president. They’ve shared platforms and echoed administration talking points on everything from the Affordable Care Act to immigration policy, while rarely distancing themselves from particularly egregious Trump comments.

When then-state Sen. Leah Vukmir squared off against Kevin Nicholson for the Republican nomination to challenge Democrat Tammy Baldwin’s reelection to the U.S. Senate last year, both declared fealty to Trump. Vukmir won, then lost soundly to Baldwin in November.

News accounts and interviews hint that at least some Republican lawmakers chafe at Trump’s grip on their own party, but it’s generally kept behind the scenes. The Hill To Die On, a recent book about the 2018 midterm elections, claims that Wisconsin’s other top Republican politician, Paul Ryan, when he was speaker of the House had at least one closed-door shouting match with Trump over immigration policy.

Yet, Guardian reviewer Lloyd Green wrote, in the book’s telling, “Ryan repeatedly criticizes Trump in private but wilts in public, a prisoner to his caucus, donors and self-image.”

In embracing Trump, many Republicans have strayed far from party orthodoxy. The president has rejected formerly sacrosanct notions on free trade and allegations of his sexual misconduct would seem at odds with the values of white evangelical Christians, as many as 80 percent of whom voted for him.

Occasionally Republican lawmakers will part company with the president. But no Wisconsin Republican official has followed the example of Michigan Congressman Justin Amash, to date the only lawmaker in his party to call for Trump’s impeachment in the wake of the report by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. And just last week, Amash — facing a primary threat in 2020 — announced he was leaving the Republican party.

That, too, isn’t surprising, Wagner says. “It’s typical that members of a party who are most critical of changes that a leader brings often have the word ‘former’ in front of  their title.”

Republican officeholders who stand up to Trump, Wagner adds,  “can expect a tweetstorm against them, they can expect being called out at public rallies and seeing the fruits of that played over and over again on cable television.”

The most outspoken Trump critics among self-proclaimed conservatives — Republicans, or ex-Republicans in Wisconsin — fit the pattern Wagner describes.

The one with the highest profile is Charlie Sykes. As a talk radio host for WTMJ-AM 620 in Milwaukee, Sykes, along with his radio rival Mark Belling, provided an on-air platform that helped catapult Walker from state representative to Milwaukee County executive and later to governor.

Sykes criticized Trump throughout the 2016 campaign and didn’t stop after the Wisconsin primary. In November, he voted for independent Evan McMullin, promoted as an anti-Trump alternative for conservatives unwilling to vote Democrat.

And at the end of 2016, he became a former talk show host, leaving the station; he subsequently exited two other platforms through which he helped shaped and marshal conservative Republican media influence: The Wisconsin Public Research Institute magazine Wisconsin Interest (now renamed Diggings with the transformation of WPRI into the Badger Institute) and the website Right Wisconsin.

Now he edits The Bulwark, an opinion website affiliated with the Defending Democracy Together Institute, launched by Bill Kristol and other anti-Trump conservatives.

Sykes says “the nativism, the phobia, the attitude towards women, the character issues involving deception, his isolationism, his willingness to play the race card, his support for protectionism,” set him squarely against Trump from the start. “What was really disorienting of course was that many of his views were sort of a funhouse mirror distortion of what had been mainstream conservatism. But he made it all dumber and cruder and more extreme.”

Watching how Trump and the GOP governed deepened his doubts. Take the Trump administration’s $1.5-trillion tax cut late 2017. For years, Sykes acknowledges, “I had supported every tax cut that ever came along” — while all the while signal-boosting self-styled GOP deficit hawks. “I probably had Paul Ryan on my show 100 times, I had [Sen.] Ron Johnson on my show — how many times? — talking about the debt crisis, the deficits, the existential threat that posed. And then to watch them pass this tax cut, which has the effect of exploding the deficit and the debt and just walk away from it — that’s disconcerting.”

Sykes may be one of the most visible GOP defectors, but he’s not alone.

Former Sen. Dale Schultz — who in his last years in office defied Walker with votes against Act 10, the law that stripped most public workers’ collective bargaining rights, and against a high-profile bill relaxing mining regulations — hasn’t forsworn his Republican identity, but describes his political allegiance to “the party of Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt and Eisenhower and President Reagan.” Polarization goes far beyond Trump, he says, although he hears anecdotally of former Republicans driven away from the party by the president.

In the 2018 election, Schultz endorsed Democrat Tony Evers. In retirement, he promotes bipartisanship and campaign finance reform and campaigns with retired Democratic Sen. Tim Cullen for legislative redistricting reform. “I’m proud of the fact that I have longtime friends in the Democratic party,” he says.

Wall has been alarmed to see Wisconsin Republicans beginning to act more and more like Trump.

Although he describes himself more as an independent, he has generally voted “on the conservative side of things.” After being fired as the Department of Corrections secretary in 2016, Wall wrote a tell-all book critical of Walker and GOP Attorney General Brad Schimel. In some ways, he sees Walker’s leadership as a model for how Trump has governed.

“It went from a representative government, where they had to talk and they had to negotiate things, to more of a dictatorship. That bothered me as a taxpayer and a voter,” says Wall, who characterized the prevailing sentiment as being, “We won and we’re going to shove everything down your throat.”

Under Trump, that impulse has grown, Wall says. “Look at Vos and Fitzgerald” —  Assembly Speaker Robin Vos and state Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald.  “They feel empowered by an electorate that sees something in Donald Trump.”

Pointing to how the Republican-controlled legislature stripped Evers’ powers in the lame-duck session just before Walker left office, Wall says: “This is essentially the Republican Party saying, ‘We don’t accept the last election.’ They are acting as if they’re governing now. They’re tightening control.”

Isthmus contacted Vos’s office for comment on June 4 and was directed to send an email to his aide, Kit Beyer. Beyer has not responded to three email requests for an interview.

U.S. Rep. Glenn Grothman is one of Wisconsin’s longest serving GOP lawmakers, having spent some 20 years in the state Legislature before winning a seat in Congress in 2014. He takes issue with Trump’s style, but has no problem with the president’s substance.

“I wish Donald Trump would not tweet quite as much,” Grothman tells Isthmus. “I’ve been very vocal about that with him privately as well as publicly. I think that hurts him unnecessarily.

“Sometimes he exaggerates facts and sometimes he certainly comes across as unpresidential,” adds Grothman, who is from Glenbeulah. “And that unnecessarily hurts him and hurts the whole Republican team. But that was true four years ago, and he won anyway. And for the good of the country, I hope the people look at the issues more than the personality.”

Meanwhile, the congressman adopts Trump’s framing that the situation at the border is an emergency, and condemns Evers’ decision early in his term to call back Wisconsin National Guard troops from the Mexican border. “I don’t think Tony Evers would have won if he had been honest with the Wisconsin public” about his plan to take that action, Grothman says. “And I think the more that this extremism comes out it could be a problem for the Democrats.”

In an April 2019 survey, Charles Franklin at the Marquette University Law School found most Wisconsin Republicans — 88 percent — are happy with Trump. Meanwhile, 95 percent of Democrats disapproved of Trump, while independents were split, with 45 percent approving and 49 percent disapproving.

Overall 52 percent of those responding disapproved of Trump and 44 percent approved. “It’s not like overwhelming disapproval,” says Aaron Weinschenk, a political scientist at UW-Green Bay “It’s sort of mixed overall, which you can expect, given the closeness of the election results here in Wisconsin.”

Weinschenk studies partisanship, voter behavior, the influence of campaigns, and the contrasts between rank-and-file party members’ attitudes and those of the political elite.

Given how much Trump breaks from traditional social and political norms of the GOP, Weinschenk says “it is pretty amazing how few people have really truly rejected him and been pretty critical within the party.”

But he doesn’t believe that the party will be Trump’s forever. “Parties are able to resurrect themselves and change course and reverse their image,” Weinschenk says. “Parties have gone through all kinds of scandals and horrible leaders before and we still have the Democratic and Republican parties.”

So far, however, the most vocal dissenters — Sykes and the rest — have failed to marshal the sort of following that could spark a real GOP split. There are no signs of an insurgent challenge; the two people who so far have hinted at running for governor in 2022 are content to support Trump or change the subject: Walker and Sen. Ron Johnson, the highest-ranking GOP officeholder, in the state.

And Sykes, even as he distances himself from the Republicans, says he has no interest in going over to the Democrats, who, he says, are “moving left at the same time the Republicans are moving right. There’s got to be some place for people who are sort of center-right or center-left. I’m just not sure where it is.”

But he doesn’t predict a “shift back to the broad middle” at this point. “I think there’s the possibility of this spiraling extremism of politics, this incivility of language that just keeps escalating. It’s not all Trump any more. Someday Trump will leave office. But this alternative reality universe and hyper tribalization of politics — that’s not going to disappear when he disappears from the stage. This is a period of real turmoil, and I worry about that.”

Rick Esenberg allows the possibility of a schism between adherents of “post-Reagan conservatism” and a movement that is more strongly nationalistic and less committed to limited government.

Yet he also suggests Brian Hagedorn’s surprise win in the April race for state Supreme Court (where elections have increasingly been nonpartisan only on paper) shows Republicans still command broader loyalty in Wisconsin than Trump might. In the face of criticism about his anti-gay views and other allegations of extremism, Hagedorn “stuck to his guns,” Esenberg says. “He did it in a very non-Trumpy way. He wasn’t bombastic.” Hagedorn won suburban as well as rural voters —  “and he did it in the post-Charlie-Sykes era.”

There are a few former Republicans who have had enough, however.

Joe Britt, a one-time loyal Republican working as a legislative aide and in other capacities, took to Twitter last fall to renounce the party because of Trump and its failure to stand up to him. In an interview with Isthmus at the time, Britt, who also backed Evers (and now has a post in the governor’s administration), said Walker governed as a “proto-Trump, zealously serving his largest campaign donors, catering generally to his most vocal supporters, and mostly ignoring the rest of the state.”

Britt now describes himself politically as “still independent, and inclined to vote for Democrats where possible.”

And he’s pessimistic about the likelihood of his old party turning its back on Trump. “I see no evidence of any national Republican reform movement,” he writes in a recent email message. “None, zero, an absolute goose egg.”