For virtually all of my adult life, I have been a registered independent. But a month ago, I finally decided it was time to take a side. I became a Republican.
The Washington Post
March 5, 2024 at 6:00 a.m. EST
Dana
Milbank poses with his new voter registration card in front of the D.C.
elections office’s U.S. and D.C. flags. The Washington Post has
redacted personal information from this image. (Washington Post
illustration; Dana Milbank; iStock)
My friend Ben suggested it. Pointing out that Trump finished a distant third in D.C. in 2016 to Marco Rubio and John Kasich, he argued that this might be the only primary Trump loses in 2024 — and that we could be a part of it.
That’s exactly how it played out. Haley dealt Trump his first defeat this weekend with 63 percent of the total in the D.C. GOP primary to Trump’s 33 percent — and mine was one of the 1,274 votes she got. As Republicans in 15 states go to the polls in the Super Tuesday primaries, I can only hope that the timeless political maxim holds: As goes the District of Columbia, so goes the nation.
Voting in the D.C. GOP primary was easy. I just had to switch my party registration three weeks before the primary. But if I was going to register as a Republican, it was only right that I should start acting Republican. And so began my month of living Republicanly. I ate like a Republican, slept like a Republican, shopped like a Republican. I watched TV like a Republican and spent my leisure time like a Republican. And I rooted against Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce of the Kansas City Chiefs in the Super Bowl, cheering instead for the 49ers and their Trumpy defensive end Nick Bosa.
Enjoying the novelty of my new affiliation, I began working in phrases such as “As the only Republican in the room...” This became a problem when I regaled some out-of-town visitors with tales of my Republican exploits, only to discover, too late, that they were real Republicans and did not engage in such pursuits ironically.
Ben and I met on the morning of Jan. 29 at the D.C. Board of Elections offices near Nats Park in Southeast. Ben, styling himself a Chamber of Commerce Republican, wore a suit and a reddish tie for his conversion. I’m more of a Deplorable, so I opted for jeans and a T-shirt. The clerk gave us forms and clipboards, we filled in our details, and, a few minutes later, he returned and handed me my new voter registration card.
Reg. No.: 230075549
Party: REP
We posed for photos with our new cards in front of the elections office’s U.S. and D.C. flags — then we celebrated our change in status with a very Republican meal: We went for an Original Chicken Sandwich and a milkshake at Chick-fil-A.
It remained to be seen whether I could rest easy as a Republican, and this is where Mike Lindell came in. The MyPillow founder is in a bad way, after his election lies led retailers to drop him and caused a $5 million arbitration award against him. I helped him out of arrears by purchasing a Mike Lindell Patriotic Roll & GoAnywhere Pillow & Case for $14.99 after getting 50 percent off for entering a promotional code for the “Sean Hannity Specials.” This appeared to have been identical to the discounts offered for the “Sebastian Gorka Specials,” the “Dan Bongino Specials” and the “Warroom Bannon Flash Sale.”
My pillow arrived 10 days later, as flimsy as Trump’s legal arguments. The pillowcase features an image of Lindell holding a flag in his right hand and the Constitution in his left. It came with not one but two Bible-verse inserts and promotions for “Ashwagandha gummies,” “natural teeth whitener” and other things the election denier is now hawking to make ends meet. And I was sure to need my pillow after experiencing the free gift (“$20 value”) I also received: a download of Lindell’s audiobook.
Well rested, I drove my gas-powered car out to Harrisonburg, Va., for the Showmasters Gun Show. I paid my $9, got a bull’s eye hand stamp and plunged into the cavernous exhibit hall at the Rockingham County Fairgrounds. Here, I was definitely home among my fellow Republicans.
I perused booths selling knives, handguns, rifles, shotguns, wilderness survival kits, 25-year-shelf-life food, a couple of Republican candidates for Senate and a plan to call a constitutional convention. At one booth, operated by the Massanutten Patriots, a woman invited me to the group’s upcoming meeting about “election integrity.”
“First AR?” a man at another display asked me as I looked warily at his offering of military-style weapons. “If you’re looking to defend life and home, this is your gun.”
For those looking to offend rather than defend, there was also an arsenal of stickers, magnets, caps, T-shirts and dog tags with aggressive messages: “Traitor Joe.” “Pedo Joe.” “China Joe will never be my president.” “Make RINOs extinct.” “Waterboarding Instructor.” There were Confederate flags, Christian-nationalist flags and Three Percenter emblems.
I couldn’t justify paying $699 for the bulletproof sculpture one guy was selling for target practice: a silhouette of a cowboy, with red bullseyes on his chest and his head, as well as blue, anatomically accurate genitals. The one with Bigfoot giving the middle finger was even more out of reach at $1,650. So I bought a refrigerator magnet instead that announced, “I support Donald Trump. I love freedom. I drink beer. I eat meat. I own guns. I protect my family. If you don’t like it move.”
I found many more potential items for my new Republican lifestyle at a Virginia branch of Hobby Lobby, the craft empire founded by an evangelical Christian that successfully fought at the Supreme Court to deny birth control coverage to its employees. There were acres of beads, baubles, sparkles and stickers, and scores of framed posters and panels quoting scripture.
Strolling to the sound of soft guitar music and the scent of potpourri, I perused the motorsports-themed section (“There’s No Day Like Race Day”) and the firearms-themed section, where one wall display with crossing handguns announced “We Don’t Call 911.” Bullets formed the 11 in 911. Another announced: “God, Guns & Guts Made America Free (Let’s Keep It That Way).”
Amid the prodigious quantity of Bibles, crosses and prayer fragments were books offering political advice, including “Jesus Politics: How to Win Back the Soul of America,” and “The Theft of America’s Soul: Blowing the Lid Off the Lies That Are Destroying Our Country.” There was a framed poster of the Constitution and one with a Ronald Reagan quotation. I passed those up, instead going home with an item from the pro-police display, a house-shaped piece of table decor, made in China, with the message “In This House We Back the Blue.”
Millions of such purchases made Hobby Lobby founder David Green a billionaire, and he used his money to launch the Museum of the Bible in D.C. It was there that the new House speaker, Mike Johnson (R-La.), spoke in December to a Christian-nationalist organization, telling attendees, as Rolling Stone reported, that his election as speaker was a “Red Sea moment” in which God chose him to be the Republicans’ Moses.
My own visit to the Museum of the Bible was less revelatory. Ben and I shelled out $29.99 apiece for the privilege of touring the main collection but declined to pay the extra $9.99 for a virtual-reality tour of Israel. The collection is a bit depleted, because the museum was found to be in possession of various forgeries and ill-gotten artifacts. But we toured a faux stone village of Nazareth, where the Disney-style experience included a costumed woman who sprinkled in a word or two of Hebrew. A film in the Galilee Theater (presented by the TV series “The Chosen”) showed Jesus performing the Miraculous Catch of Fish.
We checked out the restaurant, called Manna, the cafe, called Milk and Honey, and the gift shop, where BibleOpoly and a Franklin Graham book were among the offerings. I participated in a survey and learned that I was in a tiny minority of museumgoers to disagree with the statement “There is a threat to religious freedom in America.” Still, as a Republican, I found that the museum was maddeningly ecumenical and apolitical. There was nothing about God tapping Johnson as Moses!
Weary from our exertions, Ben and I retired to a sports bar to watch NASCAR on Fox. It was a dazzling race, at the Atlanta Motor Speedway, beginning with a 16-car pileup on the second lap and ending, 258 laps later, in a three-way photo finish. The cars were pushing 200 mph. The ads, for Just for Men beard dye and COPD medication, suggested the typical NASCAR viewer moves rather more slowly. My one disappointment: Brandon Brown was not among the drivers, so we could not chant “Let’s go Brandon!” from our barstools.
Ben bought each of us a Republican-In-Name-Only tattoo (temporary, like our party affiliation) of a rhinoceros wearing a suit and smoking a pipe. But the truth is most D.C. Republicans are what MAGA Republicans would disparage as RINOs. The D.C. GOP’s annual dinner, held this year on Feb. 21, is called the Lincoln-Douglass Gala — named for former Southeast D.C. resident Frederick Douglass, not Stephen A. Douglas.
D.C. Republicans are a wealthy and well-educated set, and when I showed up to cast my ballot in the primary, I was the only person in the place wearing camo gear. The party is so tiny in Democratic D.C. that the election had only one polling place: the high-end Madison Hotel downtown. There was absolutely no early voting allowed, a strict voter ID requirement was imposed — they are, after all Republicans — but inside the polling place, there were two tables of Haley campaign swag and not a sign of anything MAGA. I got my paper ballot, darkened the Haley circle, slid it into the electronic reader and proudly slapped on my “I Voted” sticker.
And then, a pleasant surprise: Finding a long line of my fellow Republicans on one side of the hotel lobby, I learned from them that Haley herself was in town — and about to speak at a rally in a ballroom upstairs! I joined the line, accepting an “I Pick Nikki” sticker and another showing a chicken with orange hair and red tie that said “Trump is too chicken to debate.”
There were many big-shot reporters in the room — the Atlantic’s Mark Leibovich, NBC’s Ali Vitali, USA Today’s Francesca Chambers — and, offering myself as a Haley voter, I granted interviews to Politico’s Natalie Allison and Slate’s Ben Jacobs. “Just found the typical D.C. @nikkihaley voter and did a man on the street interview,” Jacobs tweeted out with a photo of me.
But the gag ended when Haley started talking to the packed house. Her words reminded me why I had become a Republican in the first place, and it had nothing to do with MyPillow.
Haley spoke about Trump’s recent threat that anyone supporting her “is barred permanently from MAGA.” The crowd cheered at the notion of being barred from MAGA.
These were my kind of Republicans!
Haley also mentioned Trump’s recent suggestion that he “would stand with Putin and encourage him to invade our allies.” The crowd booed.
“Trump would side with a dictator who kills his political opponents,” she went on. “Trump would side with a tyrant who arrests American journalists and holds them hostage. Trump’s going to side with a madman who’s made no bones about the fact that he wants to destroy America. And he’s going to side with him over the allies that stood with us after 9/11?”
Soon after this, a man in the crowd shouted: “He cannot win a general election! It’s madness!”
“Maybe Donald Trump is the problem,” Haley said to a big cheer.
The D.C. Republicans in that room were, in a genuine sense, my fellow partisans. They are from the roughly 30 percent of Republican voters who want to cure the party of its MAGA sickness. A healthy Republican Party is essential for America, if we are to get back to a time when we can fight about issues without savaging our democratic principles, and each other. In this, we are very much on the same side.
Haley’s closing lines offered hope for a cure to the “stress and anxiety and depression” that have overtaken the country in the Trump era and a return to “normal.”
“Can you imagine a country where we could sit down at the dinner table and not have a political fight?” she asked. “Can you imagine a country where we could strongly disagree and not hate each other over it? That’s where we want to go.”
That’s exactly where I want to go. As I left the ballroom, a Haley volunteer saw my “I voted” sticker and said, “Thanks for voting!” I smiled.
I’m now back to being a registered independent. But in that moment, I felt proud to be a Nikki Haley Republican.