Hey, y'all, I'm GRETCHEN S PURSER. And this is The Mess is Mine. the podcast where we talk about politics and faith and all the other messy stuff. Thanks for stopping by. Hi, everybody. Welcome to my very first podcast for the messes mine. I'm really excited about this little adventure, I had been fortunate enough to be asked to be a guest on crackers and grape juice podcast a couple of times, one before the election and one after. And it kind of gave me the notion that I have a little bit more to say about sort of my experiences at the corner of evangelicalism and republicanism, and kind of what that has yielded us in, in the country and in the party, which is, you know, a lot of trumpism. Really, there's a lot of cognitive dissonance, I think, in the Republican Party, and maybe just among the American people about exactly what we just have encountered, what we've been through, and what we're continuing to go through as a nation, I think there's certainly an upheaval, that's both social and political. I don't really think we've seen times like this before, in my lifetime, I know there was a lot of unrest and divide in the 60s and certainly after the Nixon administration, but we haven't seen anything like this, ever. And so I think it's important for us to kind of kind of break some of this stuff down and look at it and figure out how we process it. For me personally, because I spent my entire career in politics, I spent 20 years working for the Republican Party hits me a little closer to home, because I do feel some degree of culpability, not like I was in charge of, of it. But I did play a tiny role in getting us where we are today. By way of background, maybe you should just understand this I I was raised in Oklahoma, which is the buckle of the Bible Belt, and in a very evangelical town in a very conservative family. My granddad was an evangelical pastor, my dad was a lawyer in small town, very conservative. And so after college, it you know, it made sense that I would want to come to Washington and I came and I worked for my senator was the chairman of a campaign committee and I got started doing campaigns. And I was very, very fortunate over the years to, to be able to work for lots of senators and some governors, some House members, President, the House and Senate campaign committees, the Christian coalition, the Republican National Committee, it was all in line with the way it had been raised. And honestly, everything, just rolled one thing right into the other. It's so it seemed like it was a perfect fit. It seemed to me like evangelicals and Republicans were a match made in heaven. I just don't think that anymore. And that's not been an easy position for me to take. I mean, that's really looking at my entire 20 year career and thinking, Hmm, what do we do here?
And that's not to say it's all bad either. I, I really made some of my lifetime best friends in the Republican Party. And I worked for some amazing, wonderful people. In fact, I will say, I never worked for anyone, personally, that I did not think was a good person. And I think that's kind of my point here is that politics isn't all bad. Politicians aren't all bad. I think part of the reason that America has been willing to accept Donald Trump and his crass awfulness has been because we have just expected so little, we've decided that all politicians are crooked, and all politicians are liars. And so why not just go with the one that we feel like is the best fighter and that will tell us what we want to hear. And that's just not how this is all supposed to work. It's been a decade since I stepped off the stage, officially and into retirement. And it's really given me an opportunity to think about it, and watch what was unfolding and decide what I wanted to keep and what I wanted to get rid of much like going through my closet, right? I feel like I'm going through my political and mental closet. And so I'm inviting you to come along with me on that closet claim. And, you know, let's look at some things and decide what fits and what doesn't. You know, people seem so reluctant to change their minds these days, or say that they were wrong about something. And I feel like if I can look at my entire 20 years and go, I've changed my mind. I don't think that anymore. If I can do that. Maybe some other people can do that, too. It's kind of like it's just time for a reckoning. If we didn't see what happened the last couple years and think it's time to do a little reassessing of what we think is okay to do, then I don't even know where we are. But I do know that correction always comes from within. You know, it doesn't really matter what the democrats say about Donald Trump or about the Republican Party. It really matters what the republicans say about the Republican Party. So I'm not gonna sit here and say I have the answers. I feel like I spent Way too many years thinking I had
the answers. And now, what I have are a lot of questions. So I'm going to ask some questions. I'm going to tell some stories. I'm going to touch on the news of the day, I'm going to try to do it in such a way that people who aren't political junkies can find it interesting and worth their time. Because I know that not everybody lives and breathes this stuff. In fact, some of them are my very closest friends and family. So I have a funny story about that I was in Dallas, visiting my people, probably about four right before the 2016 election. And they were asking me, you know, my opinion, who I thought was going to win the election, and I think it was that point, it was down to Hillary and Trump. And I said, You know, I really, I really have this feeling that Hillary is gonna have a problem with Benghazi. And one of them put down her wineglass and kind of looked at me of her sunglasses, and she goes really? Well, who's Ben Ghazi? and I, oh, my gosh, I laughed so hard. I started laughing so hard, then they started laughing so hard. But the thing that was even funnier is, I don't really even think that they knew why they were laughing. And then I believe she said something like, well, if he's going to be a city, he shouldn't have a people name. Gotta love that girl. I think about that story sometimes, because it's a good reminder that not everybody is living and breathing this news. You know, lots of people get their news from Facebook, and the today show and their friends and family and their churches. And that's cool. I mean, there's nothing wrong with that. But I do think in today's climate, of disinformation, it's really important that all of us kind of double down on our insistence that facts are actually facts. And so that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to throw out some facts, I'm going to throw out some questions, I'm going to tell some stories, I'm going to try to do it in a way that will entertain my people. So on to the news, or the not the news, but just sort of updates. So there's basically three things I want to talk about today, two things already happened and one's about to happen.
The first is some polling data that I saw from Gallup last week, about the Republican Party and the direction that they want to go. And when I first saw it, I was I was excited, because well, frankly, I wasn't reading the polling data correctly. It was a first glance thing, but 63% of the Republican Party want to see want to see the Republican Party kind of form a new party, which was up 23 points from last September when they did that last time, which is a that's a huge number. And originally, I thought, okay, so all these people want to go back to being a classic conservative like, or at least a classic republican fiscal Republican Party. No. Turns out that's not it. 70% of those those people asked, want Donald Trump to remain the leader of the party. And 40% of those folks want to see the Republican Party go into more conservative direction, now I'm gonna, I'm gonna save that conservative thing for another time. Because there's nothing that's a that's a total disconnect. You can't be for Donald Trump and be for conservatism. Because those two things are at odds with each other. Donald Trump is not a conservative. Conservatives don't attack a free press. Conservatives don't say that our electoral system is corrupt. Conservatives don't encourage people to form an insurrection. That's not what conservatives do. We can talk about that some more another day, conservatives do things like balance, the budget, stuff like that.
Anyway, it appears that the vast majority of the Republican Party wants more, instead of looking at the last four years and being horrified like some of us, they're looking at the last four years, and they just want some more. They want more of whatever that was. And so that that really is bad, bad news for the Republican Party, and really, for the country, but especially for the party, because it's the math is just insurmountable. You cannot win national elections, by reducing your numbers because politics ultimately is a game of addition, not subtraction. So if you take people away, and you push people out, and you get more and more extreme, you're very, very extreme, very loyal group who would I don't know, like storm the Capitol and kill people on your behalf. Those people are not going to be enough to get you elected nationally. So
what you're going to end up with is you're going to end up with a lot of success in pockets of this country, but that is going to just further divide this country because nobody's willing to meet in the middle. It's troubling across the board, and it's very bad news for the republicans. It's not great news for the democrats either but we can talk about that another day. Second thing is kind of folds into this and I'll be quick about it. You know, rush limbaugh passed away and I'm never going to dog on somebody who passed away and certainly not from cancer. That said, you know, watching the response of the far right at rush limbaugh's death calling him a genius and a gift and all that. I don't disagree that he was a very talented gifted entertainer. But what he injected into the public discourse, you know, he came along, kind of simultaneous with Fox News and rush limbaugh was sort of the answer to all of the left wing media and and I was part of that when we used to laugh. during the Clinton years we called CNN, the clinton News Network, you couldn't get a fair shake we felt like and I think that used to be kind of true. I think that fox news didn't used to be quite as bombastic as they are now they used to have some degree of respect for some presentation of the truth.
Limbaugh might have started out by talking policy, but he moved pretty quickly to shock jock. He used to make fun of HIV, men dying of AIDS and play Dionne Warwick love songs, he called women who wanted contraception whores and say that he should be able to watch them have sex. And then there's all the stuff he said about feminazis which, if you grew up in my part of the world, you were terrified of being called a feminazi. Just because you secretly thought that maybe your worth was equal to that of a man. You go to great lengths to hide it, you'd laugh at stupid jokes and put up with all kinds of crap. Just because you wanted to be cool with it. And it was funny. Rush Limbaugh set women, especially conservative women, back decades, with this particular brand of cruelty, mockery, anger, outright lies, conspiracy theories, you can draw a direct line straight from Limbo to Donald Trump. giving him the Presidential Medal of Freedom is like giving the Nobel Peace Prize to Howard Stern. I just don't get that.
Last and Final thing, look for Donald Trump to be make a presentation at sea pack this weekend, which is a conservative political action committee. Usually that's where people go that are on their way up. In conservative circles. It's unprecedented for a president to make an appearance of this quickly after a defeat really anywhere in public. I mean, usually they kind of lay low for a couple years. It's just what's done. But we know that this guy's never done anything according to convention and evidently a huge part of his people like that. So watch for him to say something. He wants to stay relevant. He wants to stay the kingmaker he knows that his people want him to remain the kingmaker. So I suspect that he'll go there to adoring and cheering crowds, he needs to feed that ego. And we'll see what he has to say. Fun fact in case you missed it, the Supreme Court yesterday ruled that he must turn over his tax records that he has been successfully hiding for the past five years. So it'll be interesting to see if he brings that up at the conference, sort of to be a victim about it and talks about the witch hunt. Or if he just avoids the subject altogether. It probably continue to talk about how the election was stolen, he'll throw out some grievance language. Regardless, we know the folks over at sea pack aren't exactly going to give him a lot of hardball questions. He's just desperate to get back in the spotlight and back on the main stage. He's got to push himself back into relevance.
And you know, my son said to me today, he said, Why are we still even talking about Donald Trump? I mean, he's gone. But he ain't gone. And the truth is, I'm not sure it's even so much about Trump himself anymore, as it is about trumpism and the tripperz and the followers and the fact that this party is his This party is his and anyone who says it isn't is just is delusional This party is his until republicans decide to take it back from him. And they may I just hope there's enough left for them to to retrieve when it's all said and done.
So with that, I think Mr. Ghazi and I will sign off for today. Thank you for tuning in and joining me today. I hope everybody out there stay safe and has a great week.
