Despite an inundation of books about former President Donald Trump’s White House, including many from those who worked with him in the Oval Office, little has been published describing what Capitol Hill looked like during the former president’s tenure. Former Minnesota Rep. Jason Lewis’s new book, Party Animal: The Truth About President Trump, Power Politics & the Partisan Press, is among the first to fill that void.
Some readers may recognize Lewis as an occasional guest host for the late Rush Limbaugh’s radio show. (Others may have begun listening to Lewis’s own radio show in Minnesota more than 20 years ago.)
A “child of the ’60s,” Lewis wrote, “I was always grateful for the grown-ups in the room who remained steadfast during that tumultuous decade.”
That era set the stage for Lewis’s evolution into a conservative talk radio host and subsequent election to Congress, for which his book provides a bird’s-eye view. Like Trump, Lewis served just one term, entering office in January 2017. But as he highlights in detail, those first two years of the Trump presidency were the most significant since the early years of the Reagan administration. As Lewis noted, “The Reagan Revolution brought in 33 new GOP House members in 1980 — before it lost 26 in the 1982 midterms. But it was in those first two years, not unlike President Trump’s, that so much good got done.”
Indeed, the 115th Congress was the most productive in recent memory, passing about a thousand bills, many of them transformative — from tax reform to deregulation. Lawmakers would have repealed Obamacare in toto were it not for the late Sen. John McCain (R-AZ). Thanks to his assistance, Democrats narrowly, if briefly, snatched victory from the jaws of defeat in that battle — partially contributing to their victory in the 2018 midterm elections, when they took 41 House seats back.
Alternating between anecdotes that illustrate both serious and lighthearted aspects of life as an elected official, Lewis also partially addresses a question that many voters often wonder: Do elected officials read the messages they receive from voters? The answer, it turns out, is sometimes “yes.” Recalling the text message response from one voter his campaign had addressed as “Joanna” in a fundraising message, Lewis recounted, “A rather amusing text came back: I’m not Joanna. I’m a nickel and dime contributor. Someone on your campaign, staffers playing a joke on you. Either that or Joanna is a big contributor or has big boobs. Considering your wife, I’d go with the former.’
“My wife, thankfully, took it as a compliment,” Lewis said.
Of course, you may think that a one-term congressman from Minnesota doesn’t have much to say until you realize the book isn’t just about the achievements of the 115th Congress. It’s a tour of three consecutive, crazy campaign cycles, culminating in Lewis’s 2020 Senate run alongside Trump’s campaign in a state under the simultaneous spell of mass rioting and COVID-19 lockdowns.
The contradiction that year between scenes of anarchy in the state’s flagship cities and Trump administration officials who advised lockdowns for everyone else could explain, in part, why Trump lost the state by 7 percentage points — 5 points worse than his performance in 2016. As Lewis noted, “Trump’s only mistake was listening too intently to the so-called epidemiological experts, who were eager to hand out lockdown hall passes to anarchist protestors and their favorite liberal officeholders.”
His biggest concern, however, was how quickly Minnesota exported its chaos to the rest of the country.
“In the span of just a few years,” Lewis wrote, “people went from asking me, ‘What’s happening in beautiful Minnesota?’ to ‘What the hell happened in Minnesota?’ The arson and looting in the spring of 2020 caused over $500 million in damages, with some 1,500 buildings across the Twin City metro area affected. Ground Zero was an Auto Zone in south Minneapolis, and that quickly escalated across the river to the Midway neighborhood of St. Paul, where one of my own staffers was forced to evacuate. There were many reasons for the chaos that erupted in 2020, but when all was said and done, Minneapolis and much of the Twin Cities would never be the same.”
He also suggests that people take a lesson from Minnesota in girding themselves for the battle with left-wing agitators in the days ahead, noting that they have become more dogmatic than they were in the days of his youth. “They aren’t just carrying pictures of Mao anymore,” Lewis wrote. “Nor do they want a debate about the Constitution; they want a debate on whether we should keep it. The Left today doesn’t hide a platform based on contempt for the West or their love of socialism — it’s what they run on.”
Rudy Takala is a political analyst who has worked as an editor or reporter in newsrooms that include Fox News, Mediaite, the Hill, the Daily Caller, and the Washington Examiner.
