Jonathan Chait sat down the with the president recently and gave us another peek inside the empty big back of fcks to give that the president has been toting around for a couple of years now. It's a deep look inside one of the most creative and captivating minds ever to sit in that oval-shaped dungeon at the far end of Pennsylvania Avenue.

(Can I pre-order the memoir now?)

If nothing else, the president's musings on the nature of his political opposition should put to rest forever the notion that the president doesn't understand the forces lined up against him. From New York:

When I came into office, my working assumption was that because we were in crisis, and the crisis had begun on the Republicans' watch, that there would be a window in which they would feel obliged to cooperate on a common effort to dig us out of this massive hole. Probably the moment in which I realized that the Republican leadership intended to take a different tack was actually as we were shaping the stimulus bill, and I vividly remember having prepared a basic proposal that had a variety of components. We had tax cuts; we had funding for the states so that teachers wouldn't be laid off and firefighters and so forth; we had an infrastructure component. We felt, I think, that as an opening proposal, it was ambitious but needed and that we would begin negotiations with the Republicans and they would show us things that they thought also needed to happen. On the drive up to Capitol Hill to meet with the House Republican Caucus, John Boehner released a press statement saying that they were opposed to the stimulus. At that point we didn't even actually have a stimulus bill drawn up, and we hadn't meant to talk about it. And I think we realized at that point what proved to be the case in that first year and that second year was a calculation based on what turned out to be pretty smart politics but really bad for the country: If they cooperated with me, then that would validate our efforts. If they were able to maintain uniform opposition to whatever I proposed, that would send a signal to the public of gridlock, dysfunction, and that would help them win seats in the midterms. It was that second strategy that they pursued with great discipline. It established the dynamic for not just my presidency but for a much sharper party-line approach to managing both the House and the Senate that I think is going to have consequences for years to come.

It can be argued, and it has been, that the president trusted for too long in the good faith of the Republicans in Congress. (Myself? I thought 30 seconds was too long, but I understand that opinions on the topic vary.) I think the president's fundamental error lies in the fact that he fails to appreciate how far the prion disease of movement conservatism had progressed in the Republican party by the time he took office.

It was really strange, but at that point, Limbaugh had been much clearer about wanting to see me fail and had, I think, communicated that very clearly to his listeners. Fox News' coverage had already started to drift in that direction, and what you realized during the course of the first six, eight, ten months of the administration was that the attitudes, the moods that I think Sarah Palin had captured during the election increasingly were representative of the Republican activist base, its core. It might not have been representative of Republicans across the country, but it meant that John Boehner or Mitch McConnell had to worry about that mood inside their party that felt that, No, we shouldn't cooperate with Obama, we shouldn't cooperate with Democrats; that it represents compromise, weakness, and that the broader character of America is at stake, regardless of whatever policy arguments might be made.

All due respect to the president, but he came around when the symptoms of the prion disease had become so visible that you'd have to have been a cable news pundit or Hugh Hewitt not to notice it. The party first ate the monkeybrains in the late 1970s, when the Southern strategy born in the 1960s came to full fruition by shoving the party's centers of power south and west. (Sidney Blumenthal's The Rise of the Counter-Establishment remains the ur-text.) By that point, the party had integrated into itself the emotional and political rubble of American apartheid so successfully that it was beginning to be able to roll back the achievements of the Civil Rights Movement.

(We have had two Chief Justices of the Supreme Court in the past 30 years. Both of them were appointed by Republican presidents. Both of them first made their conservative bones by seeking to roll back the Voting Rights Act, which the second of them has succeeded in doing.)

At the same time, the party allied itself with a vocal and politically active splinter of American Evangelical Protestantism. This allowed some of the wilder notions of American 20th Century conservativism to sneak back into Republican politics through the chapel doors. William F. Buckley didn't read the Birchers all the way out of the party. They remained close enough that Jerry Falwell could pray them back into it.

Since then, the progression has been steady and obvious, and a lot of it pre-dates the elevation of Sarah Palin to whatever place she currently occupies in our political life. Willful self-destructive stubbornness in the Congress was obvious when the Republicans took themselves completely over the cliff in the Terri Schiavo case. Republican leaders committed themselves to obstructing Bill Clinton as quickly and as publicly as they did the current president. (As I recall, Bob Dole was particularly outspoken in this regard.) Five years ago next month, Mark Warren and I drove up to Chappaqua for an interview with Clinton, and I think his take on what has happened to the Republican Party is a little bit more true to the history than the one in which the current president believes.

ESQUIRE: You stress that the antigovernment movement has been a long march. Are we now living through the inevitable conclusion of that long march? Was it headed this way all along, or was there a moment when the Republicans could have turned away from the anti-intellectual, antiscience, no-tax-increases-of-any-kind kind of thing? Was there a turning point where they could have said, We can be antigovernment to an extent, but we're not going to go off the cliff?

CLINTON: They could have done it if they hadn't turned on the first President Bush. Because Reagan, you know, since he enacted that massive tax cut in '81, they cut him some slack when he clawed back by 40 percent of it and signed the Social Security Commission's recommendation. And they cut him some slack because it was working — because it was the first time we'd ever run permanent deficits and that ignited a long stimulus. But if they'd stayed with President Bush in '92, they were in a place where they would always be to the right of the Democrats, but they were still basically a science-based, reality-based party. President Bush had signed some things — the Clean Air Act — which were very, very good. And the Americans with Disabilities Act. But he was conservative. He vetoed the Brady Bill — he gave in to the NRA — and he vetoed the Family and Medical Leave Act. But at least we were all sort of in a range of debate.

Obviously, I would trace it back further even than Clinton does, but there's no question that Pat Buchanan's bloody primary campaign against an incumbent Republican president who was pretty much the walking embodiment of the old Republican establishment brought to the fore a number of forces—xenophobia, racism, protectionism—that have powered the rise of Donald Trump. Buchanan cut up the elder President Bush so thoroughly that, by January of 1992, it was hard to believe that, six months earlier, Bush had been so popular that he'd scared off all the putative Democratic superstars except the governor of a small Southern state who was sharp enough to see down the road.

To me, the great failure of the elite political media in this election is not that they somehow "normalized" Donald Trump. Hell, the man is the nominee of one of the only two political parties we have decided to allow ourselves. The great failure in this year's coverage is the failure to attach Trump to the Republican Party as the logical—nay, inevitable—product of three decades of deliberate political and policy choices. If El Caudillo del Mar-A-Lago augurs in, this is going to enable the Republicans to claim that he was an aberration, and not a creature of their own, decades in the making.

That ensures that, sooner or later, we're going to confront a Donald Trump who is a better politician and who doesn't talk about his dick on the debate stage. That is a chilling prospect.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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