The Destructionists: The Twenty-Five Year Crack-Up of the Republican Party

Also by Dana Milbank

Homo Politicus

Tears of a Clown

O Is for Obama

Smashmouth

Copyright © 2022 by Dana Milbank

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

www.doubleday.com

DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

Cover photographs: (clockwise from upper left) Ron Adar / Shutterstock; Saul Loeb / AFP; Jeff Siner / The Charlotte Observer; Nicholas Kamm / AFP; Dave Einsel; Ramin Talaie / Corbis; all Getty Images

Cover design by John Fontana

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Milbank, Dana, author.

Title: The destructionists : the twenty-five-year crack-up of the Republican Party / by Dana Milbank.

Description: First Edition. | New York : Doubleday, 2022. | Includes index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022005056 (print) | LCCN 2022005057 (ebook) | ISBN 9780385548137 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780385548144 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Republican Party (U.S. : 1854– )—History—20th century. | Republican Party (U.S. : 1854– )—History—21st century. | Political corruption—United States—History—20th century. | Political corruption—United States—History—21st century.

Classification: LCC JK2356 .M55 2022 (print) | LCC JK2356 (ebook) | DDC 324.273409—dc23/eng/20220225

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2022005056

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2022005057

Ebook ISBN 9780385548144

ep_prh_6.0_148814534_c0_r2

For my daughter, Paola,

And my stepchildren,

Sadie and Jasper

And they shall rebuild the old ruins.

—ISAIAH 61:4

I wish we had been able to obstruct more.

—MITCH MCCONNELL

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1   Shooting at Melons

Chapter 2   Personal Destruction

Chapter 3   A Dysfunctional Family

Chapter 4   Black Helicopters

Chapter 5   Swift Boating

Chapter 6   Culture of Deception

Chapter 7   A Heckuva Job

Chapter 8   Bridges to Nowhere

Chapter 9   A Deep-Seated Hatred of White People

Chapter 10 Death Panels

Chapter 11 Don’t Retreat—Reload

Chapter 12 Wacko Birds and RINOs

Chapter 13 Truth Isn’t Truth

Chapter 14 Very Fine People

Chapter 15 Sabotage

Chapter 16 Trial by Combat

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

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Introduction

It began where it ended, on the West Front of the United States Capitol.

On January 6, 2021, a mob incited by President Donald Trump smashed barriers, overpowered police, and stormed the steps of the Capitol on the side of the Rotunda facing the Washington Monument across the Mall. The insurrectionists scaled the scaffolding that had been erected on the West Front for President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration en route to sacking the U.S. seat of government for the first time since the War of 1812.

Sent with instructions from Trump to fight like hell and a call from Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani for trial by combat, the mob halted Congress’s certification of Biden’s victory, sending lawmakers fleeing for their lives and hiding under desks. At least seven people died in the riot and its aftermath, and more than 140 police were hurt. Some 800 insurrectionists, many with ties to white supremacist or violent extremist groups, faced charges.

The bloody coup attempt shocked the nation. But a sober view of history might have lessened the shock. For the seeds of sedition had been planted earlier—twenty-six years earlier—in that same spot on the West Front of the Capitol.

On September 27, 1994, more than three hundred Republican members of Congress and congressional candidates gathered where the insurrectionists would one day scale the scaffolding. But on this sunny morning, they assembled for a nonviolent transfer of power.

Bob Michel, the unfailingly genial leader of the House Republican minority for the previous fourteen years, had successfully ushered Ronald Reagan’s agenda through the House. But he had now been forced into retirement by a rising bomb thrower who threatened to oust Michel as GOP leader if he didn’t quit.

Newt Gingrich had almost nothing in common with the man he pushed out. Michel was a portrait of civility and decency, a World War II combat veteran who knew that his political opponents were not his enemies and that politics was the art of compromise. Gingrich, by contrast, rose to prominence by forcing the resignation of a Democratic speaker of the House on what began as mostly false allegations, by smearing another Democratic speaker with personal innuendo, and by routinely thwarting Michel’s attempts to negotiate with Democrats. He had avoided service in Vietnam and regarded Democrats as the enemy, impugning their patriotism and otherwise savaging them nightly on the House floor for the benefit of C-SPAN viewers.

My friends, I’ll not be able to be with you when you enter that promised land of having that long-sought-after majority control of the House of Representatives, Michel said that morning to the gathered Republicans, who were within striking distance of a majority for the first time in forty years. I can only stand with you today and see that vision from afar.

Minutes later, that vision took on a distinctly dystopian hue.

Newt! Newt! Newt! Newt! the candidates and lawmakers chanted. They waved miniature American flags. A pudgy fifty-one-year-old with a helmet of gray hair approached the lectern.

The fact is that America is in trouble, Gingrich declared. It is impossible to maintain American civilization with 12-year-olds having babies, 15-year-olds killing each other, 17-year-olds dying of AIDS and 18-year-olds getting diplomas they can’t even read. This is a crisis of our entire civilization, and within a half mile of this building these conditions happen in our nation’s capital, and they happen in every major city, and they happen in West Virginia and they happen in most Indian reservations and across this country. (The areas mentioned were all Democratic strongholds.)

The pejoratives piled up in Gingrich’s shouted, finger-wagging harangue: Collapsing…Failed so totally…Worried about their jobs…Worried about their safety…Trust broke down…Out of touch…Wasteful…Dumb…Ineffective…Out of balance…Malaise…Drug dealers…Pimps…Prostitution…Crime…Barbarism…Devastation…Human tragedy…Chaos and poverty.

Recognize that if America fails our children will live on a dark and bloody planet, Gingrich told them.

Somewhere in this catalogue of catastrophe, Gingrich signed the Contract with America, a ten-point legislative agenda proposing a balanced budget amendment, congressional term limits, and other reforms. We have become in danger of losing our own civilization, Gingrich warned. Today, on these steps, we offer this contract as a first step towards renewing American civilization.

Americans had seldom heard a politician talk this way, and certainly not a speaker of the House. But that’s what Gingrich became after the GOP’s landslide victory in the Republican Revolution of 1994. The Contract with America made little headway—only three relatively minor provisions (paperwork reduction!) became law—but the rise of Gingrich and his shock troops fundamentally altered American government for a generation and counting, and set the United States on a course toward the ruinous politics of today.

The epic government failures of the last quarter century can all be traced back to Gingrich and the savage politics he pioneered: three impeachments; two botched wars and a botched pandemic response; several government shutdowns; a sevenfold increase in the federal debt; a market collapse and the Great Recession; and failure to address crucial matters such as climate change, inequality, and immigration. It’s no wonder that there has been a wholesale loss of faith in American democracy.

Today, Americans’ confidence in virtually all the pillars of a free society—Congress, the presidency, the Supreme Court, public schools, the media—has declined from where it was in 1994. One of America’s two major political parties has embraced the Big Lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump, and they have convinced two thirds of Republican voters—tens of millions of people—to accept this democracy-killing fiction. A ferocious, racialized, and sometimes violent partisanship has consumed us. White nationalist and antigovernment violence is spreading, and a significant chunk of the country is living in a parallel universe of alternative facts and conspiracy theories.

The CIA’s Political Instability Task Force ranks countries from the most autocratic (–10) to the most democratic (+10) to predict the likelihood of civil war. Using the same data series, political scientist Barbara Walter, who served on the CIA task force during the Trump years, calculated that the United States had dropped from +10 before Trump’s rise to +5, its lowest since 1801. The United States is now technically an anocracy—somewhere between a democracy and an autocracy—after a precipitous decline that puts us at greatly increased risk of civil war. We are closer to civil war than any of us would like to believe, Walter writes in her 2022 book, How Civil Wars Start.

Or maybe the war has already begun. To use one measure, in October 2020, the Department of Homeland Security—Trump’s Department of Homeland Security—concluded that white supremacist violence was the most persistent and lethal threat in the homeland. A study by the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and International Studies found that white supremacists and like-minded extremists conducted 67 percent of terrorist plots and attacks in the United States in 2020, compared to 20 percent by anarchist, antifascist, and like-minded extremists. In one such case, members of an antigovernment paramilitary group allegedly plotted to kidnap the Democratic governor of Michigan.

How did we get into this mess? What led us from the moment when Republicans waved miniature flags with Bob Michel on the Capitol steps to the moment, a quarter century later, when Republicans in that same place used flagpoles bearing the American flag to beat police officers and smash windows? This book answers these questions—and in so doing, I hope, provides clues that can eventually help rebuild what we’ve lost. As I write this, in early 2022, six in ten Republicans say the 2020 election was fraudulent, and 40 percent think political violence can be acceptable, a Washington Post–University of Maryland poll just found. A Post tally found that at least 163 Republicans who have embraced Trump’s election lies are running in 2022 to become senators, governors, or other statewide officials who would have sway over the administration of elections. At least five candidates for the House were at the Capitol during the January 6 insurrection and at least twelve of the top Republican House prospects have accepted the Big Lie. Embrace of Trump’s lie has become the primary prerequisite for winning Republican primaries.

Congressional Republican leaders have abandoned any attempt to punish, or even contradict, rank-and-file lawmakers who fantasize publicly about killing elected Democratic officials. Virtually the entire GOP boycotted events commemorating the first anniversary of the January 6 attack on the Capitol, and some elected Republicans have joined the likes of Fox News’s Tucker Carlson in suggesting that the insurrection was a false flag operation perpetrated by the FBI.

Republican lawmakers and opinion leaders, amplified by Fox News, have overwhelmingly succeeded in deterring their followers from getting the Covid-19 vaccine by promoting disinformation about imagined dangers of the inoculations. As a result, the Covid death rate in the most pro-Trump decile of America (as measured by counties’ vote share for Trump in 2020) is now nearly six times the death rate in the most anti-Trump decile. The GOP has become a death cult.

While Republican lawmakers have refused to censure the violent or anti-Semitic words of their peers, those Republicans who dared to vote for a bipartisan infrastructure bill have been branded traitors. Republican officials have made a pariah of Representative Liz Cheney, a Wyoming Republican and daughter of the former vice president, as punishment for Cheney’s rejection of Trump’s election lie. Since Trump departed office, Republicans in Congress have been fighting to rewrite the history of the January 6 insurrection as a normal tourist visit in which the insurrectionists were the victims and the police were the villains. Republicans killed a bipartisan commission to examine the attack and boycotted a House committee assigned the same task. The Republican National Committee approved a resolution that referred to the insurrection as legitimate political discourse.

States under Republican control have undertaken dramatic efforts to impose new voting restrictions in ways that disproportionately disenfranchise voters of color. A dozen GOP-controlled states have enacted legislation giving partisan figures more control over the counting and reporting of votes.

Some Republican lawmakers proposed an America First Caucus to protect Anglo-Saxon political traditions against immigrants who are putting the unique identity of the United States at risk. Republican members of Congress have been refusing security sweeps and mask requirements, brandishing guns on Capitol Hill, and adding warnings of bloodshed to their continued false claims of election fraud. Two House Republican lawmakers in February participated in a conference tied to white supremacists.

This has real-world impact. After a 73 percent rise in hate crimes against Asian Americans in 2020 (when Trump spoke of the Kung Flu and the China virus), violence continued with a massacre of mostly Asian Americans at Atlanta-area massage parlors. Ferocious anti-mask activists have become antivaccine activists, leading to threats and actual violence against health care workers, flight attendants, and others. Republicans’ focus on the phantom menace of critical race theory has provoked threats and violence at school boards across the country, leading the National School Boards Association to plead for help from the FBI. Ten Black people in Buffalo, New York, were killed by a gunman motivated by the racist Great Replacement conspiracy theory—a theory promoted by, among others, third-ranking House Republican leader Elise Stefanik, Fox News’s Carlson, and Gingrich.

Much has been made of the polarization in American politics, and it’s true that moderates are a vanishing breed. But the problem isn’t polarization. The problem is that one of our two major political parties has ceased good-faith participation in the democratic process. Of course there are instances of violence, disinformation, racism, and corruption among Democrats and the political left, but the scale isn’t at all comparable. Only one party fomented a bloody insurrection in the Capitol and even after that voted in large numbers (139 House Republicans, a two-thirds majority) to overturn the will of the voters in the 2020 election. Only one party is embracing violence. Only one party has been promulgating a web of conspiracy theories in place of facts. Only one party is trying to restrict voting and discredit elections. Only one party is stoking animosity toward minorities and immigrants. Only one party is sabotaging the norms and institutions of American government.

Admittedly, I’m partisan—not for Democrats but for democrats. At the moment, they are one and the same. Republicans have become an authoritarian faction fighting democracy. There’s a perfectly logical, if deeply cynical, reason for this. Democracy is working against Republicans. In the eight presidential contests since 1988, the GOP candidate has won the popular vote only once, in 2004.

As the United States approaches majority-minority status (the white population, 76 percent of the country in 1990, is now 58 percent and will drop below 50 percent around 2045) Republicans have chosen to become the voice of white people, particularly those without college degrees, who fear the loss of their way of life in a multicultural America. White grievance and white fear drive Republican identity more than any other factor—and drive the tribalism and dysfunction in the U.S. political system.

There are many other contributing factors to the crack-up of the party. Concurrent with the rise of Newt Gingrich was the rise of Rush Limbaugh and conservative talk radio, followed by the rise of Fox News, followed by the advent of social media. Combined, they created a media environment that allows Republican politicians and their voters to seal themselves in an echo chamber of alternative facts. Globally, south-to-north migration has ignited nationalist movements around the world and given rise to a new era of autocrats. The disappearance of the Greatest Generation, tempered by war, gave rise to a new generation of cultural warriors who came of age during Vietnam; by the end of Biden’s current term, the country will have been led by baby boomers for thirty-two years.

But the biggest cause by far is race. The parties re-sorted themselves after the epochal changes of the 1960s, which expanded civil rights, voting rights, and immigration, and the Republican Party made the fateful decision to pursue Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy of appealing to white voters alienated by racial progress. In the years that followed, a new generation of Republicans took the politics of racial resentment to a new level and fused it with a new style of partisan warfare and dishonesty. This book describes how a few of these unprincipled leaders—Gingrich, Lee Atwater, Tom DeLay, Karl Rove, Mitch McConnell, Sarah Palin, Rudy Giuliani, and others—repeatedly put short-term self-interest ahead of the national interest. These are the people who broke American democracy.

This book will show that Donald Trump didn’t create this noxious environment. He isn’t some hideous orange Venus emerging from the shell. Rather, he is a monster the Republicans created over a quarter century. He is a symptom of their illness, not the cause. Whatever else he is, Trump is a brilliant opportunist; he saw the direction the Republican Party was heading in, and the former pro-choice advocate of universal health care reinvented himself to give Republicans what they wanted. Sadly, because Trump is merely a reflection of the sickness in the GOP, the problem won’t go away when—if?—he does.

Before the Big Lie about the 2020 election, Republicans fabricated libels about Obamacare death panels, the false accusation that Saddam Hussein perpetrated 9/11, and an endless stream of conspiracy theories holding that Bill and Hillary Clinton were nothing short of serial killers.

Before the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, there was the Brooks Brothers Riot at the Miami-Dade elections board in November 2000, and a siege of the Capitol to intimidate lawmakers in March 2010.

A quarter century before Trump Republicans spread rampant disinformation about Covid-19, Newt Gingrich began the crusade against science by abolishing Congress’s Office of Technology Assessment.

Before Trump rose to power on a tide of vulgar insults, future Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh penned an obscene, sexually explicit line of questioning for Bill Clinton.

Before the antigovernment MAGA (Make America Great Again) rallies, there were the rage-filled Tea Party town halls of 2010 and the Republican Revolutionaries of 1994, advised by Gingrich to call Democrats traitors, sick, and corrupt.

Before Trump and his aides contorted the Electoral College to justify an attempted coup, Republican lawmakers contorted their constitutional authority to justify impeaching a president for lying about oral sex.

Before the shutdowns of 2018 and 2019 were the Republican-engineered shutdowns of 2013, 1996, and 1995.

Before the sedition of 2021 was the unpatriotic smearing of Senator Max Cleland, who lost three limbs fighting for his country, as an abettor of Osama bin Laden.

Before Republicans endorsed Russian propaganda about Ukraine during Trump’s impeachment trial, there was Darrell Issa’s false claim that Hillary Clinton ordered the military not to help besieged Americans in Benghazi, Helen Chenoweth’s paranoia about the government’s black helicopters, and Dan Burton shooting a melon to prove a Clinton aide was murdered.

Before Trump Republicans made common cause with QAnon and the Proud Boys, earlier Republicans cozied up to the antigovernment militia movements of the mid-1990s and 2010s and stood with rancher Cliven Bundy in his armed standoff with the U.S. government.

Before Trump spoke of immigrants as rapists and murderers and told Democratic congresswomen of color to go back to other countries, Republicans joined the effort to portray President Barack Obama as an African-born Muslim and embraced the racist pronouncements of Limbaugh, Pat Buchanan, and Steve King.

I aim to show how extensively Republicans and their allied donors, media outlets, and interest groups have been pulling at the threads of democracy and of civil society for the last quarter century—making the current unraveling inevitable.

The Trump phenomenon cannot be understood without its many antecedents explored in these pages: the Vince Foster murder, Ken Starr’s smut, the violence of the militia movement, the lies that started the Iraq War, the use of the War on Terror to impugn Democrats’ patriotism, the racism of the Birther movement, the antigovernment rage of the Tea Party, the lies about the Affordable Care Act, the politicization of the Supreme Court from Bush v. Gore to Citizens United—and much more. This is a story I have been telling, in one form or other, since I came to Washington in 1995, during the early months of the Republican Revolution. I began as a young congressional correspondent for The Wall Street Journal. I later covered Bill Clinton’s presidency, and his impeachment, for The New Republic. I covered George W. Bush’s presidency as a White House correspondent for The Washington Post, and I’ve been writing a column about political Washington for the last sixteen years. This has provided me a front-row seat for the worst show on earth: the crack-up of the Republican Party, and the resulting crack-up of American democracy.

This book contains four roughly equal sections: the Clinton presidency (defined by the slashing style of Gingrich), the George W. Bush presidency (defined by the dishonesty of Karl Rove), the Obama presidency (during which democratic norms were assaulted from within by Mitch McConnell and without by Sarah Palin), and, finally, the ruin of the (still ongoing) Trump era. Interwoven throughout are the four ways in which Republicans have been hacking away at the foundations of democracy and civil society for a quarter century: their war on truth, their growing exploitation of racism and white supremacy, their sabotage of the institutions and norms of government, and their dehumanizing of opponents and stoking of violence.

In the process, they became the Destructionists: they destroyed truth, they destroyed decency, they destroyed patriotism, they destroyed national unity, they destroyed racial progress, they destroyed domestic stability, and they destroyed the world’s oldest democracy.

—

BACK IN OCTOBER 2015, Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican presidential nominee, spoke to a group of Georgetown University students about the man who would become the 2016 Republican presidential nominee.

Donald Trump will not be the nominee, Romney said with confidence, because when all is said and done, the American people usually do the right thing. He went on: I know there’s some skunks in any endeavor—business, politics—and they get most of the visibility, but there are also some really good people. The American people are a very good people and by and large find people of similar character to elect to the highest office in the land.

Romney read to the students from a cautionary letter John Adams wrote to the political philosopher John Taylor in 1814. Remember, the nation’s second president wrote, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.

This notion, that American democracy would someday murder itself, was very much on the minds of the founders. In his farewell address, George Washington warned of a moment when cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.

James Madison, the author of the Constitution, wrote in Federalist 55 that the survival of American democracy would depend on character: As there is a degree of depravity in mankind…so there are other qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence. Republican government presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form.

We’ve beaten the odds, Romney told the Georgetown students that day, in part because we’ve had, I think, people of real character who have led our country as presidents…and the American people have risen to the occasion time and again and have in fact then elected good people.

I was so sure Romney was right that I wrote a column that day saying I would eat the page on which this column is printed if Trump won the Republican nomination. And so, in May 2016, I sat down to a meal of newspaper-smoked Wagyu steak, fried fish wrapped in buttermilk-soaked newspaper, grilled newspaper guacamole, ground newspaper dumplings, and grilled newspaper falafel.

I had bet on the wisdom of the American voter, predicting that 2016 won’t be the year American democracy murders itself. I had to eat my words.

Romney soon found himself a pariah in his own party. So did John McCain, the 2008 Republican nominee. And George W. Bush, the 2000 and 2004 nominee. Ronald Reagan, were he alive, would have been likewise excommunicated.

There is no Republican Party. There’s a Trump Party, former Republican House speaker John Boehner, who retired as Trump seized control of the GOP, said in May 2018. The Republican Party is kind of taking a nap somewhere.

But Boehner, who was one of Gingrich’s lieutenants in 1994, knows better. This isn’t a nap. The Republican Party, as we knew it, is dead.

For a quarter century, Republican officials invited Trump’s takeover of the party by trafficking in conspiracy theories, welcoming white nationalists, sabotaging the engines of government, and winking at violence. And in the process, they murdered democracy.

CHAPTER 1

Shooting at Melons

At the start of the Civil War, Union troops built Fort Marcy, on a ridge above the Potomac in Northern Virginia, as one of the fortifications ringing Washington to protect the capital from Confederate attack. The Union commander, General George McClellan, named it for his father-in-law and chief of staff, Randolph Marcy. Its earthworks measured up to eighteen feet thick in parts, and it bristled with three howitzers and eighteen field guns, defending the Chain Bridge river crossing below.

In the end, Fort Marcy wound up seeing no major action in the Civil War. But more than a century later, it became the site of the first shot in another conflict: the Republican Party’s war on truth.

The afternoon of July 20, 1993, brought the kind of oppressive weather that keeps almost everybody indoors: a high of 96 degrees and near 100 percent humidity. But sometime after the lunch hour, a gray Honda Accord with Arkansas plates, heading westbound on the George Washington Memorial Parkway, pulled off at Fort Marcy, now a national park. A man in his late forties, lanky and nearly six feet five inches tall, emerged from the Honda wearing a white dress shirt, gray dress pants, and black dress shoes. He left his sports jacket and his swan-pattern tie folded on the passenger seat, and he pocketed the car keys.

The man proceeded to walk uphill some eight hundred feet from the parking lot to the walls of the old fort, then continued to the second of two vintage 12-pound howitzers on display. Stopping on the steeply sloping earthworks just below the old cannon, the man pulled from his pants pocket an antique Colt .38 revolver. He put the barrel of the gun in his mouth and, with his right thumb, squeezed the trigger.

Hours later, after the man’s body had been discovered by a passerby, U.S. Park Police searching the Honda found, under the suit jacket, the man’s White House identification. The deceased was Vince Foster, the deputy White House counsel and personal friend of President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Clinton.

Foster’s death was a tragic suicide. Since moving to Washington with the new administration, Foster had been battered in the press, particularly in the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal, for his role in various penny-ante scandals of the first year of the Clinton presidency that ultimately amounted to nothing. Four days before his death, Foster broke down in tears at dinner with his wife and talked of resigning. He also told his sister he was depressed, and she gave him the names of three psychiatrists (the list was found in his wallet), and he tried to reach one of them but got an answering machine. The day before his death, he called his doctor in Little Rock and complained of stress, anorexia, and insomnia, and he received a prescription for an antidepressant.

Investigators deduced that the gun was an eighty-year-old model he had inherited from his father. He transported it in an oven mitt, found in his car’s glove compartment. Forensic evidence—gunshot residue on his hands, a mark on his thumb matching the trigger rebound, no indication of struggle—overwhelmingly pointed to suicide. And there was a note—torn into twenty-seven pieces, it was found in his briefcase, which he had left at the office.

I made mistakes from ignorance, inexperience and overwork, it said. I did not knowingly violate any law or standard of conduct. He listed various grievances—The GOP has lied…. The public will never believe the innocence of the Clintons and their loyal staff. The WSJ editors lie without consequence—and ended with this: I was not meant for the job or the spotlight of public life in Washington. Here ruining people is considered sport.

Alas for Foster, even death offered no relief from that sport. Republicans were about to ruin him—posthumously.

Almost exactly a year after Foster’s suicide, Dan Burton, a Republican congressman from Indiana and a close ally of Republican whip Newt Gingrich, stood in the well of the House of Representatives, giving an hour-long special order speech.

His purpose: to make the case that Vince Foster had been murdered. His proof: Burton shot a melon in his backyard.

The precise identity of the gourd Burton shot is a matter of some dispute. It has been identified, variously, as a watermelon, a pumpkin, and a cantaloupe. But this much is clear: Burton had used the fruit as a stand-in for Foster’s head—a head-like thing, he called it—to prove that it’s impossible Foster shot himself at Fort Marcy and nobody heard the gunshot.

We, at my house, with a homicide detective, tried to re-create a head and fired a .38 inch barrel into that, to see if the sound could be heard from 100 yards away, Burton declared on the House floor. Even though there was an earth mover moving around in the background, making all kinds of racket, you could hear the bullet clearly.

Investigators of Foster’s death found the lack of witnesses reporting a gunshot unsurprising: the strip of woods, with infrequent foot traffic, lies between the parkway and another busy road. But Burton took the unheard gunshot as evidence that Foster had been murdered at a different location, rolled up in a carpet, and carried in broad daylight uphill to the fort, with care being taken to hold the six-foot-four-and-a-half-inch corpse upright to keep the blood off his clothing.

He died under very mysterious circumstances, Burton told the House. His body was moved. There is no question about it. Burton suggested that the gun was planted in Foster’s hand and that the torn note was planted in his briefcase. Burton floated the possibility of a secret entrance to the park, and killers hiding in the trees. He asserted that there is a connection between Foster’s death and probes of the Clintons’ finances. And the scores of federal agents who investigated were trying to cover up the facts.

This was, of course, pure madness. The Park Police, investigating with the FBI and the Justice Department, found no evidence of foul play and concluded that the condition of the scene, the medical examiner’s findings and the information gathered clearly indicate that Mr. Foster committed suicide.

Independent counsel Robert Fiske, who had been appointed to probe the Clintons’ finances, undertook his own investigation of Foster’s death, using FBI resources and expert pathologists. He found that the overwhelming weight of the evidence compels the conclusion…that Vincent Foster committed suicide in Fort Marcy Park on July 20, 1993.

The top Republican on the Government Operations Committee, William Clinger, did a third investigation and concluded that Foster died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the mouth while at Fort Marcy Park.

A bipartisan Senate committee undertook a fourth probe and declared that the evidence overwhelmingly supports the conclusion that Foster died in Fort Marcy Park from a self-inflicted gun shot wound.

Clinger, closing his probe, said he hoped his findings would put to rest any lingering questions regarding the events of July 20, 1993. He lamented: Perhaps the unexpected death of any high government official will needlessly bring cries of conspiracy from many in our society. That is unfortunate.

There have always been conspiracy theories in politics. For decades after John F. Kennedy’s assassination, some still claimed there was a second gunman on the grassy knoll. But with Foster’s suicide, something new and different happened. This time, the conspiracy theories were promoted by wealthy interests in the Republican Party and allied right-wing media platforms, and embraced by the highest officials in the Republican Party.

Even after four separate, independent probes reached the same conclusion of suicide, Newt Gingrich, who had become speaker of the House in January 1995, threw the weight of the speakership behind the Vince Foster conspiracy theory.

There’s something that doesn’t fit about this whole case and the way it’s been handled, Gingrich proclaimed in July 1995. As for Foster’s suicide, I’m not convinced he didn’t. I’m just not convinced he did.

I just don’t accept it, he said of the repeated findings of suicide. I believe there are plausible grounds to wonder what happened and very real grounds to wonder why it was investigated so badly.

So Gingrich stoked the lie, which had already been four times disproven. A few months later, he would name none other than Dan Burton, of murdered melon fame, to replace the retiring Clinger as chairman of the House Operations Committee, which Republicans renamed the House Committee on Oversight and Reform and stocked with new, plenary investigative powers.

Why would the man second in line to the presidency publicly endorse an obvious lie? Well, if you were conspiracy minded, you might have observed that one of the largest contributors to Gingrich’s political action committee, GOPAC, was billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife, who funded the Arkansas Project solely to dig dirt on the Clintons. A chunk of the hundreds of millions of dollars he spent on conservative causes went to groups promoting conspiracy theories about Foster’s death. His Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, which he founded in 1992, was a leading promoter of the Foster fiction. He called Foster’s death the Rosetta stone to the Clinton administration. Bill Clinton, Scaife alleged to George magazine in 1998, can order people done away with at his will…. God there must be 60 people who have died mysteriously.

Scaife in 1995 hired right-wing journalist Christopher Ruddy, who had touted Foster conspiracy theories for the New York Post, to do the same for his Tribune-Review. Three years later, the two men would launch Newsmax, a disreputable right-wing website, and Ruddy would go on to become a friend and informal adviser to another born conspiracy theorist: Donald J. Trump.

The new genre of conservative talk radio, which traces its origins to 1988, when provocateur Rush Limbaugh’s AM radio show went national, fueled the Foster lies. After a financial newsletter made the fantastic and baseless claim that Foster’s corpse had been moved from an apartment in Virginia, Limbaugh upped the ante, telling his nationwide radio audience that the newsletter had reported that Foster was murdered in an apartment owned by Hillary Clinton.

As Newsweek reported at the time, after Limbaugh’s broadcast, stock and bond prices tumbled—the Dow dropped nearly 23 points…. Elaine Garzarelli, the highly regarded Lehman Brothers market analyst who predicted the 1987 crash, said that European traders were particularly spooked by the Foster case. ‘They were afraid Hillary Clinton was involved in a murder,’ she said.

One day in the summer of 1995, two lawyers in the Clinton White House, Chris Lehane and Mark Fabiani, tried to figure out the origins of the constant stream of Vince Foster allegations. Lehane later wrote:

Online we found early versions of chat rooms, postings and other information showing there was an entire cottage industry devoted to discussing conspiracy theories relating to Foster’s death, including numerous online reports of people claiming to have seen him. Those reports would be picked up by so-called news sources that most Americans at the time had never heard of—conservative outlets such as Eagle Publishing’s Human Events or Richard Mellon Scaife’s Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. From there, the story would migrate to right-leaning outlets we were familiar with, such as the New York Post, the Washington Times, and the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal—all before eventually ending up in the mainstream press.

They assembled their findings in a 332-page report—the basis for what Hillary Clinton would famously describe as this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president.

The wild theories also captured the imagination of a thirty-year-old lawyer working in the independent counsel’s office: Brett Kavanaugh. The future Trump appointee to the Supreme Court had secured a job on the staff of Ken Starr, the fiercely partisan prosecutor who replaced Fiske and made it his office’s mission to run a rolling investigation of any allegation made against the Clintons.

We are currently investigating Vincent Foster’s death to determine, among other things, whether he was murdered in violation of federal criminal law, Kavanaugh wrote to his colleagues in a March 24, 1995, memo obtained years later by my Washington Post colleague Michael Kranish and shared with me.

Kavanaugh admitted that the absurd claims weren’t part of Starr’s mandate, but, he argued, we have received allegations that Mr. Foster’s death related to President and Mrs. Clinton’s involvement in the Whitewater financial dealings that Starr was investigating. The allegations were that Foster was murdered, or killed himself, because of the Clintons’ financial dealings and what he knew about them. Based on such allegations, Starr should launch a full-fledged investigation of Mr. Foster’s death.

Where did these allegations come from? Kavanaugh’s files showed that he was referring to the conspiracy theories promoted by Ruddy, by right-wing media critic Reed Irvine, and by a British writer who had claimed that the Oklahoma City bombing by right-wing militants was really a botched FBI plot.

Kavanaugh, naturally, knew that the probe he promoted was nonsense. I am satisfied that Foster was sufficiently discouraged or depressed to commit suicide, he wrote in a June 1995 memo. I base my conclusion on the fact that Foster was found with a list of three psychiatrists in his wallet, the fact that Foster obtained a prescription on July 19 for an anti-depressant, and the many witness interviews describing his state of mind in the days and weeks preceding his death.

But he would spend the next two years investigating—and thereby legitimizing—all the ludicrous claims: that Foster had an affair with Hillary Clinton; that blond hairs found on Foster’s clothing (Hillary’s?) were suspicious; that Foster was being blackmailed by Israel’s Mossad over a secret Swiss bank account; and that the White House had covered it all up. He kept a prurient discrepancy list in his files, with items such as large semen stain in the decedent’s underwear.

In October 1997, after two more years of anguish for Foster’s family, Starr would issue a report affirming precisely what the previous four investigations had found about Foster’s suicide. Kavanaugh and Starr, like Gingrich and virtually anybody else paying attention, had to have known the truth all along. But they also had to recognize that stringing out another investigation for two more years would give those who weren’t paying attention the impression that something sinister had happened in the Clinton White House.

A poll done by Time and CNN in 1995 found that despite the numerous probes ruling Foster’s death a suicide, only 35 percent of adults were convinced that Foster had really killed himself. Republican leaders and allied media figures had discovered that if they embraced a fringe conspiracy theory, they could convince millions to believe a lie. Vince Foster’s suicide gave them a prototype.

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THE VINCE FOSTER LIE was big and audacious, but it employed the same techniques Gingrich had used to get to Congress in 1978 and then to lead the Republicans to a majority sixteen years later: proclaiming falsehoods with righteous certainty.

Gingrich won election to Congress on a lie. After two unsuccessful tries in 1974 and 1976, he finally succeeded, with a campaign that falsely accused his opponent, Virginia Shapard, of violating campaign finance laws. He also accused his opponent of breaking up her family. Newt will take his family to Washington and keep them together, one of Gingrich’s ads announced. Virginia will go to Washington and leave her husband and children in the care of a nanny. As it happened, Gingrich was carrying on multiple affairs at the time and divorced his wife two years later.

The Gingrich approach seems to have gone beyond vigor and into demagoguery and plain lying, The Atlanta Journal Constitution editorialized in 1978, after endorsing Gingrich in ’74 and ’76. We regret that his campaign strategy has been of such a low order that we cannot consider extending our support this third bid for election. The paper said his imagination seems to be running away with him.

He gained prominence in Congress based on another deception. C-SPAN began televising House proceedings in 1979 as Gingrich arrived. He quickly realized that because the TV cameras filmed only those who were speaking, the viewers wouldn’t know the chamber was otherwise empty. He used this to pose rhetorical challenges to Democrats, accusing them of disloyalty and communist sympathies—and used the silence in the chamber as evidence that they had no response. Gingrich later told The Washington Post: Without C-SPAN, without talk radio shows, without all the alternative media, I don’t think we’d have won [control of Congress].

Gingrich voted for a congressional pay raise, then campaigned against Democrats for supporting it. Gingrich campaigned against Democrats for overdrawing their accounts in the House bank, even though he had made twenty-two overdrafts himself. He proposed a mandate requiring individuals to have health insurance, then later attacked Democrats for proposing the same. He succeeded in killing a comprehensive lobbying reform bill in 1994 by falsely claiming that violators might go to jail; it contained no criminal penalties. In an extraordinary moment of projection, Gingrich declared in 1995 that for Bill Clinton, the truth is transactional.

One of Gingrich’s early acts as speaker was to abolish Congress’s nonpartisan Office of Technology Assessment in 1995. The office, which had existed since 1972, provided Congress with competent, unbiased information concerning the physical, biological, economic, social and political effects of policy options. He saved all of $20 million a year eliminating the office, the first in a long series of moves to purge the federal government of expertise. The facts had become expendable.

Gingrich once remarked that he felt he was drowning as speaker because I couldn’t do what I did differently, which is to tell the truth as I understand it. It’s not the truth, he readily admitted. The truth is known by God and the rest of us seek it.

Gingrich’s idea of truth was indeed something he did differently; it was not the truth but what he thought should be the truth. The truth as I understand it (later reformulated during the Trump administration as alternative facts or truth impressions) and the denial that there is objective truth were how Gingrich gave himself permission to lie.

Gingrich’s Republican Revolution of 1994 succeeded in part because of more deception. The Christian Coalition, a religious-right group given start-up funds by the Republican National Committee and backed by televangelist and former presidential candidate Pat Robertson, launched a stealth campaign to tag Democrats in key House races with all manner of falsehood: they supported obscene art, or a national school board, or abortion on demand, or promoting homosexuality to schoolchildren. The tax-exempt nonprofit shipped 20 million "voter