How Rush Limbaugh Invented Donald Trump
Rush Limbaugh’s death this week, at seventy, of lung cancer, closes the book on more than a quarter century of conservative media defined by Limbaugh and his friend Roger Ailes, the Fox News chairman and C.E.O., who died in 2017. Before Donald Trump’s entry into Republican politics, and even before Fox began dominating the cable airwaves, in the late nineties, Limbaugh had an unparalleled ability to rile up the Republican base and move the Party closer to his vision of pure Reaganism. That vision consisted of lower taxes and less regulation, opposition to abortion, and an aggressive posture abroad—the so-called “three-legged stool” of the Ronald Reagan coalition. For decades, this was Limbaugh’s mantra, with an emphasis on tax cuts. But his embrace of Trump in his final years, and his willingness to subsume his conservatism into the cult of one man, offered a different view of Limbaugh. He finished his career less as a leader of the Republican Party than as simply another Trump follower.
Limbaugh, who was born to a prominent Missouri Republican family, began his broadcast career in his teens, and landed a spot on Sacramento radio, in 1984. Four years later, “The Rush Limbaugh Show” went national, beaming from New York’s WABC. (It remained his flagship station for most of his career, although Limbaugh eventually moved to Florida.) Averse to taking callers—that was often reserved for Fridays—Limbaugh had a remarkable ability to sustain a monologue, with only the commercials as breaks, for virtually the full three hours that his show aired each day. (Trump’s ability to command the microphone for an astonishing amount of time is the only comparable example I can think of, but Limbaugh, unlike the former President, could stay remarkably focussed.) He would often start a show by informing his listeners about his “stack” of clippings—usually news articles and alerts—and find ways to connect them to some overarching point he wanted to make, which often had to do with the magical effects of tax cuts on the economy, and the wastefulness of the federal government. “If Thomas Jefferson thought taxation without representations was bad, he should see how it is with representation,” he once said.
As he got older and richer, he was fond of half-jokingly talking about his wealth and success. He boasted of “talent on loan from God,” and once stated, “I can’t even destroy myself. I’ve tried a couple times myself and it doesn’t work. I’m literally indestructible.” Like Trump, who enjoys informing audiences about his Ivy League education and telling them that he has better things to do than come to their rallies, Limbaugh relished the fact that those vaunted tax cuts he always talked up were going to people like himself.
An endless stream of articles and books over the past five years have wrestled with the question of how Trump was able to pull off his particular act, appealing to audiences that didn’t attend any college, let alone one in the Ivy League. Limbaugh’s success offers a clue. His radio program was home to Club for Growth bromides about the beauty of the private sector, but it also had another side, which consisted largely of bigotry. This was a man who featured a segment called “aids Updates,” in which he mockingly read the names of victims of the disease to the sounds of Dionne Warwick. He said that feminism was invented to “allow unattractive women easier access to the mainstream of society.” He uttered too many racist comments to count, but displayed a special hostility toward Barack Obama. “In Obama’s America, the white kids now get beat up with the Black kids cheering,” he once said.
Limbaugh, like Trump, never seemed particularly passionate about conservative Christian causes. He took the “right” positions on abortion and gay marriage, but had an early insight that to much of his audience cultural grievances mattered more. One can argue that mocking aids victims and coming out strongly against gay marriage are both forms of bigotry. But many people who have unsavory political views do not make a habit—or a career—out of personal cruelty. In a Limbaugh monologue from 2013 on gay marriage, he stated, “A lot of people have no personal animus against gay people at all. It’s, instead, a, um, genuine, I don’t know, love, respect, for the things they believe define this country as great.” He wasn’t describing himself, and you could tell his heart wasn’t in it. Compare that to comments such as “There are a bunch of really crafty guys out there who probably, in the normal course of events, can’t get women to look at ’em. And they’ve decided, you know what? I’m gonna go be tranny.” The conviction was in the vitriol.
And yet, as much as Limbaugh was willing to lie to his audience about the details of Obamacare—he even claimed it would increase the divorce rate—he did seem to have a kernel of principle in his fealty to low taxes, less regulation, and free markets. Thus, Limbaugh could have viewed the rise of Trump in two ways. One would have been to say that here was someone who didn’t care at all about movement conservatism; who probably only dimly knew who William F. Buckley, Jr., was; who broke with right-wing orthodoxy on trade and tariffs; and who had no vision of capitalism beyond its usefulness in making him richer and more famous. The other way was to view Trump as someone who had the same catalogue of resentments as Limbaugh did, and—perhaps more importantly—was hated by the same people.
Limbaugh didn’t wait long before making his decision: he was all in. By early 2016, he was defending Trump daily, and, perhaps more significantly, striking the same rhetorical tones. “The Republican Party doesn’t like the Republican base,” he said, in January of that year, explaining that élitism was the establishment’s reason for opposing Trump. If Trump’s takeover of the G.O.P. revealed the degree to which cultural resentment mattered more to conservative voters than any single issue, Limbaugh’s journey served as an exemplar of this fact. When Trump took a stance that Limbaugh would have once objected to—such as imposing new tariffs—Limbaugh simply changed his opinion and backed Trump.
Limbaugh’s appeasement, or worse, of Trump raises the question of how much control he ever wielded in the Party. Limbaugh’s influence was at times overstated. His favored candidates did not necessarily win primaries—witness his failure to derail John McCain, in 2008—and his ability to steer voters was probably always less than what was assumed. But if he didn’t always have direct power, his role in laying the cultural groundwork for Trump cannot be understated. The Republicans never became the vehicle of pure economic libertarianism and fealty to conservative ideas that Limbaugh may have once hoped, but they did become a party that Limbaugh could love.
