As longtime readers of this blog know, my opinion of former RNC chair Michael Steele is that he's rather a grifting hustlebuck who will take pretty much any side of any issue depending on which way the wind is blowing and who is covering his tab.
Let's face it, no one would know who Michael Steele is if Barack Obama hadn't been elected president in 2008. He'd have gone down in the history books as another minor politician who's political career stalled out on the middle rungs of state government, and who went on to do occasional Fox News hits, sit on corporate boards and maybe teach poly sci at a state university.
Not a bad life.
But instead, Barack Obama was elected president of the United States in November of 2008, and was inaugurated on January 20, 2009. Ten days later, on January 30, 2009, the manifestly racist Republic National Committee elected Steele as its party chairman because they desperately needed to pretend that they weren't a manifestly racist organization.
To be blunt, GOP bigots needed a black face fronting for their party, and Steele was only too happy to take the job.
If you follow Illinois politics you may have noticed the striking similarities between the national GOP's panicked election of Steele just days after Obama was inaugurated in 2009, the Illinois GOP's panicked nomination of an out-of-state lunatic named Alan Keyes to run against Obama the Illinois 2004 Senate election.
In March 2004, Illinois Republican primary voters nominated Jack Ryan (not that one) as their choice to run against Obama in the Fall, but a late-breaking sex scandal caused him to step down.
Illinois election law allows party leaders (not voters) to fill the vacancy, and as Obama was already building momentum, several prominent GOP leaders declined the party's invitation to get their asses kicked in November. So they imported Keyes from Maryland, who proceeded to lose in an absolute blowout, pulling just 27% of the vote compared to to Obama's 70%.
And the rest, as they say, is history.
So when the national GOP also brought in a black bit player from Maryland to be the face of the party...well, let's just say no one here was terribly surprised.
Now, as a time-saver and to spare my sore arm, I'm going to grab this short explainer from my blog from a few years ago. 2021 to be exact:
But above all, Michael Steele is a black man who has spent his entire adult life flacking for an explicitly racist American Fascist Party. And in the long shadow of Donald John Trump, this is what him especially interesting to me. Because his flailing, back-peddling, excuse-making mush-mouth double-talk about why he remained loyal to the GOP -- how he could be the chair of the party, and why he still retains his party membership as it was turning itself into a racist monster machine capable of producing a Trump -- is a distilled version of all the excuse-laden "We never knew!" gibberish that is now the mother tongue of the Never Trumpers.
It was not so very long ago that Steele, while acknowledging that the GOP may have had a long and problematic history on the subject of race, still insisted that, as party chairman, he drove the bigots out of the GOP like St. Patrick drove the snakes out of Ireland. And it was only after he was cruelly betrayed and deposed that all of them in their millions came running back to the Party of Limbaugh.
All of that is, of course, bullshit and everyone knows it, which is why things get especially surreal when Steele shows up in a different venue, such as a Lincoln Project podcast with Stuart Stevens entitled "The Republican Party's Original Sin". After a long and accurate disquisition from Stevens about race being the GOP's original sin...Steele not only agrees, but goes into greater historical detail.
Suddenly, instead of the hero who drove the bigots out of the GOP and swept the party back to power in 2010, Steele reimagines himself as a noble, doomed Cassandra who warned party leaders that putting a black guy at the head of the party "wouldn't do jack". That without fundamental reform at the precinct level the party would never change, but the party has refused the advice and recommendations of noble, doomed Cassandras like Steele who have tried to point this out the them.
Then he launches into a long recitation of the history of the GOP which is just surreal.
We hear about "Barry Goldwater and his embrace of segregation".
And Richard Nixon and "his embrace of a Southern Strategy."
And "My political hero, even, Ronald Reagan, starting his presidential campaign in the worst, god-forsaken, racist hole in Mississippi." Did the GOP think that "black folks were gonna sit there and not pay any attention to that?"
I dunno, Mr. Steele. You sure as shit didn't pay any attention to it. In fact, you made such a successful cottage industry out of not paying attention to it that eventually that racist dung-heap of a party hired you to front for them.
Steele is a hall-of-famer for filling up the space between commercials with circular, card-palming gibberish, but having said all of that (and so much more over the years) I do appreciate that, during his latest guest appearance on The Bulwark, Steele took pains to specify that it wasn't just "the voters" who are to blame for Trump, but explicitly the 78 million who voted for him for the third time in 2024:
There was this:
Steele: At the end of the day, I put it on us because they are reflection of who we are, the American people. 70... at least 78 million of us decided let's do this shit again. After everything we knew, after everything we saw, they got hung up on the cost of, you know, a piece of bread, or tank of gas or whatever ... whatever they wanted to make up about Joe Biden that they didn't like.
Steele: It's sad but it's still bad, because remember 78 million people put him back in power.
That being said, when he and Tim Miller meandered over to the subject of Byron Donald, I about fell out of my chair.
Steele: [Trump] doesn't want to be reminded of his failures of leadership and his capacity to be anything other than a racist. He doesn't want to be reminded of that. And he likes the coloring that guys like Hegseth give him to sort of put a veneer on it to whitewash it. That's why they're taking, you know, black history and stripping it down. We don't want to talk about slavery.
So, let me find a negro that's going to go out and... and parrot that. Byron Donald, right? And... and... and make and make me feel good about my racism. He makes a whole lot of white folks feel good about themselves. As I just said,
he does not hold the mirror up. He does not reflect back to them the the culture from which he comes uh to say, "This is part of your his history as much as anything else. Why are you trying to wipe it out?
Honestly, as many times as I've seen it, when I run across this species of Republican switcheroo in the wild, it still leaves me a little dizzy. Seeing sorta-former Republicans who used to make a living doing something despicable (and which they refuse to acknowledged ever happened)... now making a living trying to shame a current Republican for making a living doing exactly the same fucking thing.
Like something out of an Edgar Allan Poe short story, you can almost hear the muffled screams of whatever little self-awareness Steele keeps locked up in some underground vault as it slowly suffocates in the cold, dark ground.
Oh, and one thing more.
A regular feature on Never Trump podcasts is the Victory Lap Segment. A few self-congratulatory minutes devoted to reminding everyone who is listening that they and only they were right all along. That they and only they warned about Trump early on, but did anyone listen? Nooooo. And look what happened.
Miller: So, I just I just want to start with like you and me have to kind of reflect this morning, right? I mean, you know, we're out. Okay. We were never Trump from the jump, you know. And we were... we... we warned people. We said that we don't think this is going to go well. You can't trust this guy...
Steele: Yeah, you know, I... I thought about that too, Tim, and I thought about it a lot and I came to the uh conclusion that I'm the only one who's got his shit tight right. The rest of these motherfuckers they don't know. I have no idea what the fucker they think they doing, but they have ruined a once great party. They have they are in the throes of taking down um uh a great nation.
Then, later...
Steele: And yet now folks are sitting around going, "Well, I just didn't know. I I didn't... I didn't realize." Bitch, please! We told your ass back in 2013, 14, and 15.
Miller: We told you. Yeah.
Steele: We watched Marco Rubio get his ass handed to him on a stage uh in 2016 by a guy who was at 2% in the polls at the time.
Miller: Yeah.
Steele: So, yeah, Tim, here we are. Um I'm still in it. You... you got out. I'm still in it. That's because I'm high on something. I... I should sell whatever it is because..
Miller: Yeah, that's cathartic to review. I guess I would just say we warned them all, but I don't know about you. Um I... I... I want to come on and just kind of do a victory lamp and be like, "Hell yeah, I was really right." And I was right. We can just we just kind of say that I was right. And I do like to text my MAGA friends sometimes and remind them that I'm right when I wake up in the morning and I'm feeling a little feisty. But, um, it is it's kind of even worse than I thought...
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