If Robby Starbuck is aggrieved because former President Donald Trump endorsed his rival in the race for the Republican nomination in Tennessee’s 5th Congressional District, he’s not saying so.
Only when the matter was raised by a reporter did the 32-year-old, first-time candidate concede the least bit of disappointment that Trump backed former State Department official Morgan Ortagus, who, like Starbuck, is a relative newcomer to Nashville.
“Obviously, I wish I would have gotten the endorsement because I think I’ve earned it,” Starbuck told the Washington Examiner in a telephone interview. “I’ve been an unwavering supporter of his agenda.”
So what does Starbuck think happened? Trump, he said, “got bad advice” from his advisers. “He’s human.”
Besides, Starbuck said, loyalty to Trump’s “America First” agenda matters more than personal loyalty to the former president.
“President Trump did amazing, amazing work. He’s the best president of my lifetime,” he said. “But my time is better spent looking to the future. The agenda is more important than any one person. We need people to carry on ideas, not carry on a person.”
Starbuck is part of a new wave of conservative populists who have entered Republican politics since 2016, inspired and encouraged by the rise of the 45th president and his takeover of the GOP.
In the previous era, defined by President Ronald Reagan, Republican candidates would focus their sales pitch with promises to slash income taxes, maintain American global dominance, and defend traditional family values. Starbuck may or may not intend to do all of that. But time and again during his conversation with the Washington Examiner, he returned to the distinctly populist theme of so-called corporate and special interests that he claims has a stranglehold on politicians of both parties in Washington, saying he decided to run for the House do something about it.
“I was very disenchanted with the representatives we have in Congress,” Starbuck said. “We need more people doing this for ideological reasons and not power-motivated or special-interest reasons.”
Starbuck did not spare his fellow Republicans from this critique.
“We still have the problem of people running who are career politicians and about the special-interest ties and money that can be made [in Washington] either during or after their term,” he said. “They’re happy to take money from Big Tech and Big Pharma and do their bidding. That’s an issue, and it’s not what our founders intended.”
Starbuck is a native of Southern California who moved to Tennessee about three years ago with his wife and three children. The Republican previously worked as a producer, writer, and director in Hollywood, with several film and music video credits to his name between 2010 and 2019, according to the entertainment industry tracking website IMDB. The work dried up, Starbuck said, after he “came out” as an outspoken conservative. Since then, Starbuck has worked in real estate and real estate investment.
Starbuck’s combative politics were inherited from his mother and her side of his family. She came to the United States from Cuba, having fled the brutal island regime of Fidel Castro after the communist dictator’s “revolutionaries” confiscated the family’s possessions, presumably for the state. For many Cuban Americans, politics is not just a topic of discussion at the dinner table, but a vocation. That, in part, explains Starbuck’s activism.
The other explanation is what he describes as a sincere anxiety that the U.S. is headed down the road to Cuban-style authoritarianism. Pressed to elaborate, Starbuck pointed to censorship of conservatives by social media platforms and other technology firms and the resulting fear of speaking out, coronavirus vaccine mandates, the proliferation of illegal immigration at the southern border without corresponding deportations, and a collaboration between major corporations, such as pharmaceutical companies, and the government. It’s a “form of left-wing fascism,” Starbuck said, in which the private sector is “fused” with the state, producing a “new form of power.”
“The warning signs I was trained to look out for are things I’ve seen in my own country,” he added. “I didn’t want to be one of those people, 20 to 30 years down the line, who hadn’t stood up.”
