Scrapbook friend Mike Murphy, the political consultant extraordinaire whose travails at the end of the Jeb Bush campaign were memorably chronicled in these pages by Matt Labash (“Debriefing Mike Murphy,” March 28 / April 4, 2016), has of late been hosting a wildly popular podcast called Radio Free GOP. Each week Murphy provides color commentary on the presidential race and interviews political personalities, getting their take on the election and why they chose this insane profession in the first place. Agree or disagree, Murphy’s analysis is thoughtful, entertaining, and, shall we say, quite vivid.
Here, for example, is Murphy’s description of Team Trump:
Trump doesn’t really have wise staffers. He has these kind of yes-men around him and women who try to nudge him in the right direction. I think Kellyanne [Conway] does to the extent of her abilities do that. But there isn’t really a strong staff with a strong campaign or any of the mechanics we normally have. There’s a traveling advance show and King Trump atop it all doing pretty much whatever he wants. So the idea that the media often has that “Oh, this will be the week the staff gets him on track. He’s going to pivot.” And how many times we hear that? All that stuff—it’s a fantasy based on what they’ve seen on other, more normal campaigns. You gotta remember the Trump staff are people who’ve never worked at the big time in American politics. Now that often isn’t the worst thing. You get fresh thinking with new people. But this staff is akin to, well, look. Let’s say here in Los Angeles, where our current undisclosed location is, we were to go out into the bright sunlight and take a little drive over to the San Fernando Valley, which is the headquarters of the mighty porn industry. And we were to pull up at, say, Vivid Video and climb to the second floor of their warehouse, ask for the person in charge, and say, “Hey, pornmeister. Guess what? You’re now the president of Warner Brothers.” Oh boy, the pornmeister would be happy. “Finally, they figured it out! I’ve been wanting that job. They’re finally going for some real talent—not those fools who think they know how to run a movie studio.” And the happy pornmeister would decamp to Warner Brothers and immediately make the world’s first $500 million porno film. So that’s the Trump campaign.
And that was just the intro. For more, go to radiofreegop.com.
