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I would be a Republican if they would. Which means that I like the Barry Goldwater Republican Party, even the Reagan Republican Party. I want a mean old man to watch my money. I don’t want a Republican to be funny. I don’t want him to be charming.

That’s Bill Maher from 1999. Maher’s point was that Republicans don’t have to be anything more than what they’ve always been. Indeed, in the 1990s Democrats aped GOP talking points—low taxes, tough on crime, deport illegals. The “brand” was solid.

But somewhere along the line, Republicans decided to get wacky. I’m not being figurative; I mean literally wild-eyed and wacky. Bug-eyed nutcases like MTG and Boebert and Lake. And, frankly, Trump too.

And yes, I know, Democrats are wacky too. Don’t waste my time telling me that, because my point is that Republicans used to have as their baseline “We’re the stable ones.”

With everyone calling everyone “weird” on Twitter (Dems call MAGAs “weird,” so MAGAs counter with “no you’re weird” and it becomes this pointless back-and-forth that nobody enjoys but the participants), I do think there’s merit in asking how we got so far from “a mean old man to watch my money.”

I blame peanut butter. Because peanut butter started the whole damn thing.

William F. Buckley always held that stodgy conservatives—and heaven knows he was one of those—need one relatable factor, a tiny touch of whimsy to humanize them to Joe Nosepicker who can’t speak Latin and never read de Tocqueville. Something that could make the blue-collar bums go, “A-huh-huh-huh, I likes dat too.”

Buckley chose peanut butter. In between writing about economics and communism and the eternal war between God and Satan for the human soul, Buckley would pen a cutesy-poo piece about his love of peanut butter.

“Jif: Credo esse delectamentum.”

Buckley’s acolyte George Will carried on the tradition, choosing baseball as his “humanizing” element (leading to one of SNL’s most underappreciated sketches).

Ronald Reagan, close friends with Buckley and Will, had jelly beans, a cute little fetish that helped offset the malicious leftist smear that he was a madman gunning to blow up the earth. Reagan always struck the perfect balance between being funny and amiable while remaining serious on issues (he’d been a lot more stern and humorless as California governor, later adapting his style to what worked nationally).

Still, those “humanizing touches” were no-harm-done. Who doesn’t like jelly beans, baseball, and peanut butter?

So far so good.

Then we get to the ’90s and Rush Limbaugh (yes, I know, his show was first syndicated in 1988; don’t waste my time). Limbaugh wanted to move even further from Buckley stodginess, and peanut butter wasn’t gonna do it. Neither was OxyContin (yes, I know, that came later in his career; don’t waste my fucking time). Limbaugh decided that the “anti-stodge” factor required far more overt wackiness, like nutty humor and Dr. Demento-style songs, which you never saw on Firing Line (“Pisces capitibus, pisces capitibus, roly-poly pisces capitibus”).

It proved a massively successful formula. Successful beyond measure. It put peanut butter to shame. My mom was an old-school Depression-era FDR Democrat, and I remember her listening to Limbaugh in 1991 and laughing, and being like, “I thought he’d be some fire-breathing demagogue, but he’s actually funny!”

Limbaugh’s balance of unapologetic conservative commentary and un-stodgy zaniness dominated the airwaves during the Clinton era.

Then came 9/11 and between that and the need to cheer pointless ground wars with a straight face, conservative wackiness took a breather.

At least something good came from Iraq.

Then Obama got elected. And that’s when shit started going sideways for the right.

There were easily explicable reasons for Obama’s win. The Great Recession, the disastrous Bush wars (I’m unconvinced that any Republican could’ve won in 2008), McCain’s failure to communicate a solid conservative alternative. But following the loss, panicked Republicans acted as panicked people always do: poorly. If panicked humans didn’t lose their minds, nobody would ever get trampled in a crowd stampede.

And I want to point out that by this time I was a part of that scene, a player in the Gary Sinise/Clint Eastwood/Kelsey Grammer Hollywood conservative Friends of Abe org. So I’m speaking from firsthand observations here, not idle speculation.

The rightists I worked with got lost in their own fantasies that Obama was fringe, that he was an Indonesian gay Muslim communist crack-smoking noncitizen married to a man. If a koo-koo-bananas guy with a wacky name could beat war hero McCain, then wacky must be what the public wants. Today’s rightists love to ignore Occam’s razor; it’s practically their defining trait. Recession, McCain’s weak campaign, constant media boosting of Obama, and unpopular wars (let’s not forget that Bush’s daddy was defeated by a minor recession after having won a popular war, so why should it be a surprise that a major recession plus unpopular wars could defeat a Republican?)—that’s the Occam reason Obama won in 2008. But the jittery GOPs I worked with jumped to “A wacky guy won—we need to be wackier!”

In fact, Obama never presented as wacky. He was always button-down and proper. But way too many of the GOPs I knew were like, “If America elected a crazy communist revolutionary named Barack Obama, we need to run a bug-eyed ghetto ho named Malakalaka Bungobakaba.”

I can’t stress enough how important it was at Friends of Abe, when we’d host everyone from Michael Steele (then RNC chief) to John Boehner to Dick Cheney, to show off how we were “nutty-ing up” the GOP. “Look at us! Conservatives can do funny dances and wear funny outfits and play metal on the geeee-tarrrrrr. See, that makes us relatable!”

And soon you had Glenn Beck in lederhosen dancing around on TV, Andrew Breitbart doing pirouettes on Rollerblades (yes, he used to do that) and dousing himself in water in a Flashdance routine on Fox (yes, he did that, too) and Roger Simon with PJTV (“see, we’re in our PAJAMAS! It’s wacky and relatable”) and every conservative going on Red Eye to show how they could be endearingly goofy.

I’m not running down Red Eye; it was a great show. It gave Amy Schumer her start.

Wait, then I WILL run down Red Eye…fuck those guys.

The Koch brothers put everybody in Revolutionary War outfits for their Tea Party events.

Wacky!

And come the 2010 midterms, we began to see the early signs of MAGA insanity as zany candidates were chosen in the primaries over viable ones. Like, remember the “witchy woman” from Delaware? At least Tea Partiers rejected the charge. These days, MAGAs happily elect Hispanic Santeria queens.

When Romney, arguably the least wacky candidate in my lifetime (for him, even peanut butter is a forbidden sin of indulgence), lost—that clinched it. The die was cast. The next GOP candidate was going to have to be “offbeat” in some manner. The ground was tilled for Trump before Trump even knew he was running.

Now, I’ve written about this before, in my many columns ripping Trump right from the start, but most of my GOP buddies in 2015/2016 responded not to his platform but to his personality. These were people I’d known for years who never once expressed an interest in immigration. The voters responded to Trump’s platform, but the activist base (as opposed to the voter base) responded to his personality, his quips, his insults.

When Trump won, the activists took it the wrong way, just as they took Obama’s win the wrong way. Once again ignoring Occam (Trump won because of his immigration platform and Hillary’s unpopularity), the activists convinced themselves that the voters were as into Trump for the personality, quips, and insults as they were.

Don’t take my word for it. Former Trump speechwriter Darren Beattie admitted it. In the same interview in which he called me “an ugly dumb guy, a trash individual with a petty soul,” Beattie declared:

The things that made Trump great or at least unique, it’s not the policy proposals, but personality. I would be willing to bet anything that if you get Trump supporters, you say, “Oh, Trump said this, Trump said this,” within reasonable parameters, they would support it if Trump supported it. There’s not an ideological fixation, and Trump is a function of that.

What started as a way to detach from the “mean old man to watch my money” stereotype in order to attract voters backfired. It has not attracted voters—wacky MAGAs have suffered one loss after another in state and local races (even Boebert was about to get slaughtered in her district had she not relocated). Rather, wackiness has activated the worst elements of the far-right. Remember (and I mean that—remember this as we get close to November): DeSantis, a skilled executive, was rejected in what pathetically passed for a primary season this year because he lacked “personality.” MAGAs want a Moloch fighter (again, remember that Trump routinely posted on Truth Social about “fighting Moloch”), an insult comic, a guy who says kooky shit. No button-down boring dudes allowed in this club. DeSantis didn’t even have the common courtesy to eat a jelly bean.

Forget Occam’s razor. MAGAs follow Moloch’s Razor.

And whether we like it or not, MAGA got its way and them dice’ll be rolled in November. We’ll see.

You know Trump’s batshit insane Truth Social post last week about Biden storming the convention to take back the nomination? You think Trump’s gonna stop doing that over the next three months?

Please. His base eats it up, so expect him to ramp it up.

Election 2024: wacky vs. cackly.

What a time to be an American.

Last week I was watching a newly uploaded clip from 1992 on David Letterman’s YouTube channel. Letterman was doing a bit where he chose a new (purposely comical) campaign slogan for the presidential candidates. He tried it with Bush, who wouldn’t take part. But Bill Clinton got on the phone from a campaign stop in Houston to hear the new slogan. Clinton was loose and personable, but here he was, on a wacky show, and sure, he didn’t come off as stodgy, but during the conversation with Letterman, he mentioned that he was in Houston working on ways to bring down the national crime rate, which, in 1992 as now, was a huge concern.

It was a skilled balance of being not-stodgy but still issue-focused, even when on a comedy show.

GOPs are becoming increasingly less capable of such balance. And I’m not the only one noticing. Though I generally don’t care for memes, this viral one from a week ago sums it up beautifully, how Republicans in swing districts feel the baffling need to go CA-RAAAAAAZY!

Again, we have to ask ourselves how the hell we got here.

Buckley, if I see you on the other side, I’m gonna take that jar of Jif and stick it between your pearly gates.