Mark Salter, the most prominent and most defiant Republican to announce his support of Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump, thinks the 2016 campaign could literally — no joke — drive the billionaire developer insane.

Salter, one of Sen. John McCain’s top aides during the 2008 campaign and the co-author of his books, spent the final few doomed weeks of the race against Barack Obama in a glum fog — knowing his boss, buddy and alter ego would lose, and badly. It was a rotten experience, but Salter, the guest on POLITICO’s “Off Message” podcast this week, sees in Trump’s rise (and potential fall) a sliver of redemption for McCain, with the possibility of paying back Trump for disrespecting his hero.


Eight years ago, McCain was stoic and self-deprecating in defeat — one of the few fringe benefits of having endured the far greater trials of near-death in a Hanoi prison. But Salter thinks Trump, who infamously mocked McCain for getting “captured,” will melt like fontina in a fondue pot in the glare of the general election when he realizes he can’t beat Clinton.

“He’s going to lose, and I think he’s got kind of an unstable personality to begin with,” Salter told me last week, a couple of days after sparking a minifrenzy by tweeting that his loathing for Trump had metamorphosed into — gasp — support for Clinton. Hashtag: #Imwithher.

Salter, sitting in his writer’s warren/office in Old Town Alexandria in Virginia, said he wouldn’t venture a guess on Trump’s mental state. Then he smiled and went right ahead. “I think he could come apart, you know, in some kind of visible way,” the 61-year-old Salter said. “I think that's quite possible. ... I'm not a psychiatrist, but there is something wrong with [the] guy.”

On Sunday, Clinton told “Face the Nation” host John Dickerson that she’s had “a lot of outreach” from Republicans interested in possibly defecting to her side. So far, however, they have been keeping their apostasy to themselves, apart from the occasional wayward Koch brother and a handful of centrists like Salter.

Ambivalence is likely to be a bigger problem than outright desertion for Trump this fall. With leading conservatives like House Speaker Paul Ryan urging a watchful waiting period before endorsing Trump, many Republicans are predicting depressed turnout in the general election. GOP money men are focusing their efforts on saving the Senate and — incredibly — the House from Trump blowback, and some senators are already talking about capitulating and green-lighting Obama’s Supreme Court pick, Merrick Garland.

For his part, Salter confesses he’s not entirely sold on Clinton despite his tweet; he’s gotten a lot of encouraging emails from fellow Republicans, albeit few offers to join him, and plenty of hate from pro-Trump trolls.

“I’m sure 10 minutes into Hillary Clinton’s inaugural address I’ll sort of be disappointed,” he cautions. “[But] her foreign policy would probably be a modest to maybe substantial improvement over the incumbent. ... I’ve never voted for a Democrat for president in my life. But she is the more conservative choice and the least reckless one. She won’t — or at least she hasn’t said that she would — take the U.S. out of NATO. She hasn’t encouraged other nations to get their own nuclear weapons. She hasn’t threatened to slap a 45 percent tariff on imported goods.”

But it all might be for naught: If a good third-party candidate pops up, he might jump.

When I ask Salter whether there’s anything Trump could do to change his mind, he laughs. “He’d have to have a brain transplant.”

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When McCain talks about Trump, you can see the little drill instructor inside his head screaming for him to show restraint. The Arizona senator's response to the diss from Trump — who sat out Vietnam with educational deferments, followed by the discovery of a bone spur in his foot — was tempered, and the worst he’s said about the reality star so far this cycle is that Trump will hurt him with Hispanic voters. Arizona’s junior senator, Jeff Flake, has taken a much harder line — saying he simply can’t endorse someone who backs a policy as “nutty” as the Mexican border wall.

Salter, whose career has consisted of a three-decade McCain mind-meld, suggests McCain is a little less diplomatic about the GOP front-runner in private but will only hint at his friend’s pique with the “captured” crack. “I talked to him when that happened and, you know, I'm sure it irritated him,” said Salter, who viewed the comment as a net positive in McCain’s reelection campaign because it reminded voters the 79-year-old incumbent is a war hero. “I said to him, ‘Well, if we’re going to spend the weekend talking about John McCain, the POW, it’s fine.’”

Salter? He hates Trump with the intense passion of a man who wants to return a sucker punch delivered to his best friend. “He’s just an asshole,” said Salter of Trump. “I mean, you don't want a guy like that for a neighbor, for a friend, for a member of your church, for a colleague, for a boss. You wouldn’t want — really, you wouldn’t — you know, if he had a flat tire, you wouldn’t pull over and offer to help.”

McCain, he told me, doesn’t view Trump as a draft dodger — but Salter has no trouble making that connection himself. “Trump’s sort of breezy, which is galling, given his own lack of military service,” says Salter, who has written several books about McCain and other service members who were killed or grievously wounded under fire. “[Trump] said he was waging his own personal Vietnam, you know, avoiding venereal disease. So yeah, it just shows you what a vainglorious, foolish, ignorant, low-character, bum of a guy Trump is.”

Speechwriters have a tendency to bend their rhetorical tendencies to the will of the boss (in a telling passage of a much-discussed New York Times Magazine profile last weekend, Obama speechwriter and foreign policy aide Ben Rhodes remarked, “I don’t know anymore where I begin and Obama ends”). It works the other way ’round with Salter, whose unmistakable writing voice has had a profound impact on McCain’s oratory. Left to his own devices, McCain, the son and grandson of decorated Navy officers, speaks in the clipped jargon of the dreadnought gentry — punchy, profane, with the impatience of a flyboy waiting under the wing for the refueling crew to finish. Salter gives him elevation, a loftier, etched-in-marble style uncommon in modern politics — owing more to Roman generals or to military historians like John Keegan than the focus-grouped word salad served up by most Senate offices or presidential scribes.

Salter is gloomy and self-dismissive (his Twitter motto is “I used to almost be somebody”) but he takes deep pride in his collaborations with McCain, especially their books together and the senator’s 1993 commencement speech at the Naval Academy, which hangs in a triptych next to Salter’s desk. “It took longer than usual. Usually, it's pretty quick with him, because we’d been doing it a long time,” he told me, his voice choked with emotion. “He was involved in every paragraph of it. ... I think we got — we were close right from the go, jump. You know, we just have similar personalities.”

For all Salter’s criticism of Trump, McCain’s team faced similar blowback for tapping Sarah Palin (who pulled a reverse-Trump, morphing into a reality star after running for office), a candidate he now acknowledges was unfit for the nation’s second-highest office.

“We did rush the vet,” he says of the whirlwind, last-minute decision pushed by McCain campaign manager Steve Schmidt — and seconded by Salter.

“Do you think you opened the door a crack for a Trump-type candidate because of Palin?” I asked him.

A pause. “Maybe,” Salter says. “Maybe a little.”

