Americana: When did you realize that there was no longer a place for FreedomWorks’ work?
Adam Brandon: For me, it was personal. I was at that institution for 20 years. I bled for that institution. To close it was just heartbreaking. But FreedomWorks was very much a product of the Reagan consensus, the three-legged stool. There were the fiscal people like us. There were the social conservatives. There were the military hawks. We had our tensions with everybody within that stool, but we managed to try to hold it all together. Barack Obama’s re-election, in retrospect, was the end of that.
After Obama won the election, the House Freedom Caucus was formed. I thought that would be the successor organization to the Tea Party, but Trump came with such force and changed the agenda. I give credit to Steve Bannon and his tactics, and I give credit to Oren Cass and his philosophy. The classical liberal, libertarian wing of the party just didn’t fit anymore.
And the activist base has changed. The activists who were Tea Party people in their 60s 15 years ago are now 80. They’re no longer active. The new people coming into the movement are MAGA. They have completely different issues, and the whole discussion about fiscal discipline just evaporated. What has this party done in terms of repealing Obamacare? What has it done in terms of spending? What has it done in terms of the REINS Act? All of those core issues that we were working on were gone.
Americana: When Trump won, how confident were you that one of those core policies, repealing Obamacare, would be implemented?
Adam Brandon: I remember talking to a couple of senators. They said, remember we had the repeal bill that passed, landed on Obama’s desk and then was vetoed? The Senate parliamentarian essentially said if you change the date and a few other things here, you could put this on the table and pass it. And then when President Trump gets from his end of Pennsylvania Avenue to the other, this could be the first thing he signs.
Then nothing happened. It was just completely abandoned. Now you can argue about repeal or replace, but the campaign promise was to replace Obamacare. It was Mitch McConnell who said tear it out root and branch. It was never serious. I’m an advocate of entitlement reform and spending, and the fact that there is no Republican health care plan right now – do you know of one? Have you seen one?
Americana: Why is debt, which played a big role in the formation of the Tea Party and the 2012 election, no longer a factor?
Adam Brandon: Two things have happened. First, we’ve been talking about debt and deficits for 20 years and sounding like Chicken Little. We’re talking about the negative impacts, but people aren’t feeling them yet. If you look at rising interest rates now, we’re seeing the first signs of, hey, wait a minute, here are the first chunks of the sky actually falling. But that was a while ago.
Second, there was the Trump cash giveaways. At the very beginning of COVID, according to our poll, 70% of people opposed direct cash giveaways. When Trump came out in favor of them, 70% of people started supporting free cash giveaways. I think the effect of free money was that it was easier to talk about cultural issues than economic ones. But when people see the spending but don’t benefit from it, that provides an opportunity for rebalancing.
At FreedomWorks, we had a program to support this debt and deficit commission. We held events all over the country about the debt and its causes. You would sit in an auditorium with 150, 200 activists and put up pie charts and show that illegal immigration funding and Ukraine funding are literally rounding errors. The room just went silent. Thank God the young generation coming up is very serious about sensible policy.
Americana: What events at the organizational level have shown you that this trend is declining?
Adam Brandon: There is a life cycle for an activist. When you recruit someone, they are not going to stay with you forever. You have to constantly give them something to do and they have to feel like their work is moving the ball forward.
There’s a method of making port, the solera method. You take a barrel of old wine, a barrel of medium-aged wine and a barrel of new wine and mix them together. We used the same method with activists. You’re always trying to bring old and new people together. And it became more and more difficult to find that balance. Staying competitive became more and more a question of theater and less a question of diving deeper into these issues.
Trump basically said, look, I’m your leader. They’re after me because I’m protecting you. It evolved into, well, we don’t have to go door to door because we have Donald Trump fighting for us. The whole concept of recruiting people for activism has become much more difficult because of it.
Americana: Does FreedomWorks get credit for anything Trump did?
Adam Brandon: I’m glad about the First Step Act. If you want to abolish the administrative state, you can fight the growth of the regulatory state – Trump has done that – but unless Congress does its job, the Leviathan will not be tamed.
