‘All these core things we worked on were gone’: A Tea Party leader reflects on the MAGA makeover

Four months ago, the small government campaign group FreedomWorks shut down. It had organized hundreds of thousands of new conservative activists in the early Tea Party years. It lost market share in the Trump years, as the new president failed to repeal the Affordable Care Act and spent trillions of dollars on COVID relief.

Adam Brandon, the last president of FreedomWorks, began building a new project, which will try to organize millennial and Gen Z voters who feel alienated by two populist major parties. Before launching it, he talked with Americana about the end of FreedomWorks and the movement that MAGA replaced.

Americana: When did you realize that there wasn’t space anymore for what FreedomWorks was doing?

Adam Brandon: It was personal for me. I was at this institution for 20 years. I bled for the institution. Shutting it down was just gut wrenching. But FreedomWorks was very much a product of the Reagan consensus, the three-legged stool. You had your fiscal guys like us. You had your social conservatives. You had your military hawks. We’ve had our tensions with each within that stool, but we managed to try and keep it together. Barack Obama’s re-election, in retrospect, was the end of that.

After Obama won, you had the foundation of the House Freedom Caucus. I thought that was going to be the Tea Party’s legacy organization, and Trump came on with such a vengeance and changed the agenda. I credit Steve Bannon and his tactics, and I credit Oren Cass and his philosophy. The classical liberal, libertarian wing of the party just didn’t fit anymore.

And the activist base changed. The activists who were Tea Party folks 15 years ago, in their 60s; well, now they’re 80. They’re not active anymore. The new people coming into the movement are MAGA. They have a very different issue set, and the whole conversation about fiscal discipline just evaporated. What was this party doing about Obamacare repeal? What was it doing about spending? What was it doing about the REINS Act? All these core things we worked on were gone.

Americana: When Trump won, how confident were you that one of those core things, Obamacare repeal, would get done?

Adam Brandon: I remember a conversation I had with a couple senators. They were like: You remember, we had the repeal bill that passed, went to Obama’s desk, got vetoed? The Senate parliamentarian basically says, if you change the date and a couple other things here, you could put this down on the floor and pass it. And then when President Trump gets from his end of Pennsylvania Avenue to the other one, this could be the first thing that he signs.

Then nothing happened. It was just completely abandoned. Now you could quibble with repeal or replace, but the campaign promise was to replace Obamacare. It was Mitch McConnell who said, rip it up, root and branch. It was never serious. I’m an entitlement reform and spending guy, and the fact that there’s no Republican healthcare plan now — are you aware of one? Have you seen one?

Americana: Why did the debt, which mattered a lot in Tea Party organizing and the 2012 races, stop mattering?

Adam Brandon: Two things happened. Number one, we’ve been talking about debt and deficits for 20 years, and sound like Chicken Little. We talk about the bad effects of this and people don’t feel it yet. Now, if you look at interest rates rising, we’re starting to see the first ripple of: Hey, wait a second, here’s the first chunks of the sky that actually are falling. But it had been a while.

Second, you had the Trump cash handouts. At the very beginning of COVID, in our polling, 70% of people were against direct handouts. Once Trump came out for them, 70% of people started supporting free cash handouts. I think the effect of free money was that it was easier to talk about cultural issues than it was to talk about economic issues. But when people see the spending, but don’t get the benefit, that creates the opportunity for re-alignment.

At FreedomWorks, we had a program to support this debt and deficit commission. We were doing events around the country about the debt and what drives it. You’d be in an auditorium with 150, 200 activists, you start putting up the pie charts, and you’re showing that illegal immigration funding and Ukraine funding are literal rounding errors. The room would just go silent. Thank God this younger generation that’s coming up is very serious about sensible policy.

Americana: What was happening at the organizing level that told you how this was fading?

Adam Brandon: There’s a life cycle for an activist. When you recruit someone, they aren’t going to stay with you forever. You’ve got to give them things to do constantly, and they’ve got to feel like what they’re doing is moving the ball forward.

So, there’s a way you make port wine called the Solera method. You have one barrel of old, one barrel of middle aged, and one barrel of new, and you blend them together. We did the same method with activists. You’re always trying to bring in new and your old people together. And striking that balance just became harder and harder. Staying competitive was becoming more about theater and less about digging into these deeper issues.

Trump basically said: Look, I’m your leader. They’re after me because I’m protecting you. That trickled down to: Well, we don’t have to go door to door, because we’ve got Donald Trump fighting for us. The whole concept of recruiting people into activism just became much more difficult.

Americana: Does FreedomWorks get credit for anything that Trump did?

Adam Brandon: I’m happy about the First Step Act. When you look at dismantling the administrative state, you can attack the growth of the regulatory state — Trump did — but until Congress does its job, you know, Leviathan is not going to be tamed.