In January 2009, Barack Obama became president with enormous political momentum.
Democrats controlled the White House.
They controlled the House.
They controlled the Senate.
Republicans had just lost another presidential election after George W. Bush left office deeply unpopular.
Once again, it would have been reasonable to look at an election result and conclude that American conservatism had been pushed backward.
Then something happened that didn't look much like the old conservative movement at first.
People started showing up.
At rallies.
At town halls.
At local meetings.
Some carried handmade signs.
Some had never been politically active before.
They were angry about bailouts, government spending, taxes and the growing role of the federal government.
And they were angry at Republicans too.
The movement became known as the Tea Party.
It would eventually change the Republican Party.
But it wasn't created in a Washington conference room.
And it wasn't purely spontaneous either.
The truth was messier.
And more important.
The anger was real
The Evidence → Tea Party protests and the 2009 recession
The financial crisis had shaken the country.
The Bush administration had approved the massive bank bailout known as TARP.
The economy was collapsing.
Then the Obama administration came in with a large economic stimulus package.
Government spending was exploding at the same time millions of people were losing jobs, homes and savings.
For some conservatives, the frustration had been building before Obama was elected.
Small online groups were already organizing around spending and the bank bailout.
Then, on February 19, 2009, CNBC commentator Rick Santelli delivered an angry television rant from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and suggested holding a “tea party” against the Obama administration's mortgage-relief proposal.
The phrase caught fire.
Local protests were already being discussed.
Now they had a name.
By late February, Tea Party events were being organized around the country.
Many of the people who showed up were not waiting for instructions from Washington.
They were organizing themselves.
That's important.
Because the Tea Party is sometimes described as though it was completely manufactured by wealthy conservative organizations.
That isn't supported by the evidence.
There was real anger.
Real local organizing.
Real people who were furious with Washington.
But something else was true at the same time.
Experienced political organizations recognized an opportunity.
The infrastructure was waiting
The Evidence → Research on the Tea Party and national organizations
One of the first national organizations to move aggressively was FreedomWorks.
Its chairman was Dick Armey.
That name matters.
Armey wasn't a newcomer to Republican politics.
He had been House majority leader during the Gingrich era.
The same Republican congressional revolution we followed in the last chapter.
Now, more than a decade later, he was running an outside advocacy organization.
FreedomWorks had staff.
Money.
Email lists.
Organizers.
Policy material.
Experience dealing with Congress.
And when local Tea Party activists appeared, FreedomWorks began giving them tools.
Its staff produced instructions explaining how to organize Tea Party events.
They helped activists secure speakers and permits.
They created online tools that allowed people planning protests in different cities to find one another.
By September 2009, FreedomWorks staff had handled much of the logistics for a large conservative march in Washington.
The organization didn't create the anger.
It helped give that anger direction.
That distinction matters.
Because something similar happened with Americans for Prosperity, another established conservative organization that provided speakers, organizing help, bus tours and other resources to local activists.
So the best description isn't:
grassroots
or
astroturf.
It was both more complicated and more interesting:
real grassroots energy meeting an existing political infrastructure that knew how to organize it.
And the activists didn't automatically trust Republicans
The Evidence → Research on the Tea Party and national organizations
This is another part of the story that can get lost.
The Tea Party was conservative.
But that didn't mean Tea Party activists were automatically loyal to the Republican Party.
Many blamed Republicans for the spending and deficits of the Bush years.
Dick Armey said openly in early 2010 that the Republican Party was essentially on probation with Tea Party activists.
That's important because the movement's target wasn't only:
defeat Democrats.
It was increasingly:
change Republicans.
And that meant primaries.
If a Republican senator or representative wasn't conservative enough, activists wanted someone else.
That created an opening for another figure who will eventually lead us straight into CPI.
Jim DeMint saw what was happening
The Evidence → DeMint backs Marco Rubio in 2009, Senate Conservatives Fund
Jim DeMint, a Republican senator from South Carolina, had already developed a reputation for challenging his own party's leadership.
He created the Senate Conservatives Fund to support conservative Senate candidates.
By 2009, while Tea Party groups were still forming, DeMint was already meeting with insurgent candidates and helping raise money for them.
One of them was Marco Rubio, who was challenging Republican Governor Charlie Crist in Florida's Senate primary.
Crist was the establishment favorite.
DeMint backed Rubio.
By late 2010, DeMint's Senate Conservatives Fund had raised millions of dollars for candidates including Rubio, Rand Paul, Mike Lee, Pat Toomey, Sharron Angle and others.
The strategy was straightforward.
Don't wait for Republican senators to become more conservative.
Elect different Republican senators.
That was not always good for the party's short-term electoral chances.
Some Tea Party candidates lost races Republicans might otherwise have won.
DeMint took enormous criticism from other Republicans for backing insurgents.
But several won.
Rubio.
Paul.
Lee.
Toomey.
And they didn't simply add Republican seats.
They changed the ideological balance inside the Republican conference.
This is an important shift in our story.
For decades, outside organizations had tried to influence Republican politicians.
Now movement conservatives were getting better at replacing Republican politicians they considered unreliable.
2010 changes Congress
The Evidence → 2010 election results
The Tea Party wave hit the November 2010 elections hard.
Republicans gained control of the House.
Tea Party-backed candidates won seats across the country.
The movement had gone from angry rallies in early 2009 to congressional seats in less than two years.
And almost immediately, outside organizations started telling the new members something important:
We're still watching you.
FreedomWorks organized an orientation for incoming lawmakers.
Americans for Prosperity held events reminding new Republicans about the promises they had made.
Activist organizations built tools that allowed supporters to track votes and pressure members of Congress between elections.
This wasn't:
Thanks for winning. See you in two years.
The movement wanted continued leverage after Election Day.
That is exactly the kind of institutional memory we've been following throughout this story.
Heritage makes an important change too
The Evidence → Heritage Action’s founding and inside-outside approach
Also in 2010, the Heritage Foundation created Heritage Action for America.
For nearly four decades, Heritage had primarily been a research organization.
It could develop conservative policy.
Heritage Action was designed to do something different.
It could lobby.
It could identify important congressional votes.
It could score lawmakers based on those votes.
It could organize grassroots activists.
Heritage Action describes its approach as an “inside-outside” strategy.
Inside Washington, staff work directly with members of Congress.
Outside Washington, organizers mobilize activists in lawmakers' home states and districts.
Both sides apply pressure at the same time.
Look at what has happened to the old Heritage model.
Originally:
Develop policy.
Now:
Develop policy + organize activists + pressure lawmakers + score the vote.
The movement wasn't merely asking Republicans to consider its ideas anymore.
It was building ways to punish them politically when they didn't.
Jim DeMint leaves the Senate
The Evidence → DeMint moves from the Senate to Heritage
Then DeMint made an unusual decision.
In December 2012, halfway through his second Senate term, he announced that he was resigning.
Not because he was leaving politics.
Because he was going to become president of the Heritage Foundation.
DeMint said he believed he could make a bigger difference outside Congress than inside it.
Think about that.
A United States senator voluntarily gives up his seat because he thinks an outside institution may provide more leverage.
That tells us something about how much the conservative movement had changed since Goldwater.
In 1964, the political campaign was the center.
By 2013, one of the movement's most prominent senators believed the institution outside government might be the more powerful position.
And DeMint brought the insurgent style with him.
Then came Obamacare
The Affordable Care Act had become one of the Tea Party movement's central targets.
By 2013, President Obama had been reelected.
Republicans controlled the House but not the Senate or White House.
Repealing the law through normal legislation was impossible.
A group of conservative lawmakers began pushing another strategy:
Use a must-pass government funding bill to force Obama to defund his own health-care law.
One of the House members circulating the defunding letter was a relatively new North Carolina congressman named Mark Meadows.
Heritage Action backed the effort aggressively.
It launched advertising against Republican-held districts, held town halls and told lawmakers the vote would count on its scorecard.
The legislation failed.
The federal government shut down for sixteen days.
Republicans took much of the public blame.
Even many Republicans considered the strategy disastrous.
But for our story, something more important had happened.
An outside organization had worked together with a bloc of conservative lawmakers to put enormous pressure on Republican leadership itself.
And several of the people involved are about to become central figures.
Mark Meadows
The Evidence → House Republicans form the Freedom Caucus
Meadows wasn't a nationally famous politician when he arrived in Congress in 2013.
But he was increasingly willing to challenge his own leadership.
That willingness mattered.
The old conservative movement had spent years trying to pressure Republican leaders from outside.
The Tea Party era had created enough members inside Congress to make something else possible:
an organized opposition inside the Republican majority.
In January 2015, nine Republican representatives announced the creation of a new group.
The House Freedom Caucus.
The founders included:
- Jim Jordan
- Mark Meadows
- Mick Mulvaney
- Ron DeSantis
- Justin Amash
- Raúl Labrador
- Matt Salmon
- Scott Garrett
- John Fleming
Their stated mission was to advance limited, constitutional government and give a voice to voters who felt Washington did not represent them.
Nine founders.
A small organization.
But it didn't need to be large.
A small group can have enormous leverage
The Evidence → The Freedom Caucus, Boehner and McCarthy
The mathematics of the House made the Freedom Caucus powerful.
Imagine Republican leadership needed nearly every Republican vote to pass legislation.
If 30 or 40 members acted together and refused to support a bill, leadership had a problem.
The members didn't need to control the Republican conference.
They only needed enough votes to deny leadership a majority.
That gave the group leverage far beyond its size.
The caucus developed an internal process under which a strong enough supermajority could sometimes bind members to vote together.
That made the threat credible.
Republican leaders couldn't simply peel off a few individual members.
The group could negotiate as a bloc.
The outside insurgency now had something new:
organized leverage inside Congress.
Then they used it against their own Speaker
The Evidence → The Freedom Caucus, Boehner and McCarthy
By 2015, Meadows was openly challenging House Speaker John Boehner.
He filed a resolution that could have forced a vote on removing Boehner from the speakership.
The House never voted on that particular resolution.
But the broader revolt mattered.
The Freedom Caucus had enough members to make governing increasingly difficult for Republican leadership.
In September 2015, Boehner announced that he would resign from Congress.
His expected successor, Kevin McCarthy, then withdrew from the race for Speaker after it became clear that he might not have enough support from the conservative bloc.
A political faction that barely existed a year earlier had helped destabilize the leadership of the United States House of Representatives.
That is real power.
Not because it controlled Congress.
Because it had learned how to use leverage.
And now look at the people
This is where our modern board begins to appear.
Mark Meadows
Tea Party-era congressman → Obamacare defunding fight → Freedom Caucus founder → later Freedom Caucus chairman.
Mick Mulvaney
Tea Party-era congressman → Freedom Caucus founder.
Jim Jordan
Freedom Caucus founder.
Ron DeSantis
Freedom Caucus founder.
Then another person is sitting just outside Congress:
Russ Vought.
Vought had spent years working in Republican congressional policy.
He had been executive director of the Republican Study Committee.
Then he joined Heritage Action, where he spent seven years as vice president.
So by the middle of the decade, Vought is part of the outside pressure operation while Meadows and his allies are building the inside congressional bloc.
They aren't one organization.
But they are working in the same political environment.
Inside and outside.
That phrase keeps appearing for a reason.
The insurgency wasn't taking over without resistance
Republican leaders hated much of this.
Business groups sometimes hated it.
Some conservative commentators thought the confrontational tactics were self-defeating.
Other Republicans argued that the Freedom Caucus seemed more interested in ideological purity than governing.
The Tea Party itself fractured.
FreedomWorks went through internal turmoil.
Some early Tea Party activists became disappointed with national organizations.
Candidates supported by insurgent groups lost elections.
The movement did not simply march from victory to victory.
That matters because our story isn't about an unstoppable machine.
It is about institutions learning from both success and failure.
And one lesson was becoming particularly clear.
Winning congressional seats still wasn't enough.
Conservative lawmakers could stop Republican leadership from doing things.
But blocking was easier than governing.
Eventually they would need control of the executive branch too.
Then something happened that almost none of these institutions had planned
Donald Trump ran for president.
He wasn't a product of Heritage.
He hadn't come through the Leadership Institute.
He hadn't been trained by GOPAC.
He wasn't a Federalist Society lawyer.
He hadn't spent years at the Republican Study Committee.
He wasn't a Tea Party organizer.
He wasn't even consistently conservative throughout his public life.
At first, much of the established conservative movement had no idea what to do with him.
Some opposed him intensely.
Some thought he would destroy the Republican Party.
Some eventually supported him reluctantly.
Others embraced him quickly.
And many ordinary Tea Party voters liked something about him that institutional conservatives had struggled to provide.
He seemed willing to fight.
Not negotiate.
Not manage.
Fight.
That instinct connected deeply with the political culture the Tea Party insurgency had helped produce.
But Trump also had something the movement institutions did not.
A national mass following centered on one person.
And the institutions had things Trump did not.
Policy.
Lawyers.
Potential appointees.
Experienced congressional allies.
A judicial network.
People who understood federal agencies.
When Trump won the Republican nomination in 2016, those two worlds had to decide what to do with each other.
Heritage was already preparing for whoever won
While the presidential campaign was unfolding, Heritage was doing something very familiar.
It was writing another Mandate for Leadership.
It produced a transition blueprint telling the next president what could be done immediately.
It was also working on personnel.
Heritage veterans Ed Feulner and Becky Norton Dunlop became involved in Trump's transition.
The basic model was now decades old:
Do the policy work before the election.
Find the people before the inauguration.
The candidate didn't need to have built the infrastructure personally.
He could inherit it.
And Jim DeMint is still there
DeMint ran Heritage through most of Trump's rise.
That matters because the institutional line is becoming unusually clear.
DeMint had helped elect Tea Party senators.
Then he left the Senate to run Heritage.
Heritage Action was working with the congressional insurgency.
The Freedom Caucus was challenging Republican leadership.
And now a populist outsider had captured the Republican presidential nomination.
A network built to move the Republican Party rightward was about to meet a candidate who had disrupted the party in a completely different way.
Nobody yet knew whether those forces would fit together.
But they were about to find out.
Then Trump won
The Evidence → The 2016 presidential election result
November 8, 2016.
Another election that seemed to reset American politics.
But once again, the most important story wasn't only who won.
It was what infrastructure existed when the winner arrived.
Trump would need thousands of people.
Cabinet officials.
Lawyers.
Policy experts.
Budget officials.
Regulators.
Judicial candidates.
Congressional allies.
People who knew where the levers of government actually were.
And many of those people already existed inside networks that had been building for decades.
The movement that began by saving Goldwater's donor names had accumulated something much more valuable than a mailing list.
It now had institutional memory.
And several people from the Tea Party insurgency were about to move from challenging government to running it.
Mick Mulvaney would go to the Office of Management and Budget.
Russ Vought would follow him there.
Mark Meadows would eventually become White House chief of staff.
Other movement conservatives would take positions throughout the administration.
But the relationship between Trump and this older institutional movement would not be simple.
They would fight.
They would compromise.
They would use each other.
They would change each other.
And by the end of Trump's first term, something new would have formed.
Not exactly the old conservative movement.
Not exactly Trump's personal movement either.
Something that contained pieces of both.
That is where the next chapter begins.