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Tim Miller was a top aide to Jeb Bush during the former Florida governors 2016 presidential campaign. A Republican insider in the heart of the D.C. political sphere, Miller spent countless hours doing opposition research to smear Democrats.

Miller also worked for Sen. John McCain and was a spokesperson for the National Republican Party. After working for numerous Republican campaigns, Miller separated himself from other conservatives after the rise of Donald Trump. He was also a senior advisor for the anti-Trump group Our Principles PAC.

Nowadays, Miller spends his time as a writer for The Bulwark, a center-right leaning publication, and as a contributor to MSNBC. Miller has burned many of the bridges he once had with other Republican operatives, but he was able to get enough out of his former friends and colleagues to write his new book, Why We Did It: A Travelogue from the Republican Road to Hell.

Miller, who recently visited St. Paul as part of a national book tour, wrote Why We Did It as a form of self-described atonement for his complicity in allowing Republican extremism particularly support for Trump to grow. The subjects of his book are mostly Republican political staffers, candidates and conservative members of the media what Miller describes as the political class.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What I wanted to do was to get at why people who knew better collaborated even when they knew Trump was dangerous. Why did they continue to enable him? We all kind of think we know, with certain things like power and money, but just understanding the psyche of the Republican political class in Washington.

I thought it was important as we move forward, unfortunately, because he might run again. Since I was one of them and knew all these people personally and was at some level also complicit in the things that led to Trump, I thought I could maybe have a unique ability to analyze that so folks could better understand the motivations how people went along with this crazy nonsense.

Well the saddest conclusion, actually, is that a lot of people went along with Trump for reasons that are much more banal than your worst expectations. In some ways thats nice. To think that not everybody is a sociopath and a bigot, but it just makes you feel like, Man, we could have prevented this. We could have stopped this if people just had a little bit of courage in their convictions and more gumption.

A lot of these people went along with Trump for very basic reasons. Inertia. They compartmentalize the bad things and ignore them so they dont have to deal with it. The fact that people go along with someone like Trump is just because they didnt want to take a career risk. Or they were annoyed that the media was nicer to the Democrats. I mean, thats pretty pathetic, and I think that was kind of a revelation for a lot of my interviews with my former colleagues.

I was always a moderate Republican, but this is why I feel like Im partially complicit. A lot of those of us who would want to encourage Republicans to channel their better angels just went right along with it when we were channeling the darker angels as well. I was a communications person and a lot of times my job was to stir up animus against the left. Some of the times it was legitimate. Other times it was hyperbole.

That kind of hypocrisy, that kind of behavior in service to wanting to win and serve only to advance my career I look back on that with a lot of regret and I think thats part of the culture in Washington. This is politics. Everybody has to do what they gotta do, and that was wrong. Sometimes you need to be more of a turd in the punchbowl when people or an organization are doing the wrong thing. In Republican politics in particular, theres just nobody who does that. When you understand that culture, you kind of understand why they went along with Donald Trump. People have gotten very used to making arguments and advancing arguments that they didnt really believe but that they knew would stir up the base vote.

I saw it all. I saw that the party was appealing to these really dark elements. But its like the old (Godfather) line: Every time you think youre out, they just pull you back in. I kept getting sucked back in. Sometimes for earnest reasons, sometimes for bad reasons, like career ambition. I dont know that there was one moment, but obviously Trump getting in kind of shook me. I was opposed to Trump. Probably by the end of Trumps first year I was like, This is it for me. I cant be a part of this at all. Then I felt like I have a responsibility to try to have a little bit of atonement here and do some advocacy and journalism about the state of affairs.

Ive been wrong about a lot, but I was right about one thing. Very disturbingly right, which was that almost everybody who had gone along with Trump up to Jan. 6 would get back on board with him. I know a lot of people thought that was going to be a big breaking point, but most of them went and got back on board. The reason why I felt I knew that was gonna happen was because I understood their motivations for why they were there in the first place. They had gotten on board with Trump, not because they liked Trump or believed that he was ethical or even good, but because they wanted to keep moving up the career ladder. They wanted access to power.

My goal is just for people to understand all these people as humans. That isnt my way of trying to make people empathize with them, because I really think theyre the villains of the book, honestly. But if were ever going to stop this continuing complicity with evil things, we need to figure out how to get people to walk away from the darkness. You cant get people to walk away until you figure out why theyre there in the first place.

See more here:
Q&A with Republican operative turned never-Trumper Tim Miller - Minnesota Reformer