A case study in conversion: how Laura Ingraham went from principled conservative to Kool-Aid-guzzling Trumpist

I don't know that it satisfies my curiosity completely, but Anne Applebaum's piece at The Atlantic today goes a long way toward answering my questions about why Laura Ingraham enthusiastically hopped on the Trump train pretty much from the moment the Very Stable Genius descended the escalator.

She brings an insider's perspective:

It was cocktail hour on the opening day of the new, Republican-dominated Congress, and the long, chandelier-lighted parlor of David Brock’s town house in Georgetown was filling up with exuberant young conservatives fresh from events on the Hill.”

That was the opening sentence, in 1995, of a New York Times Magazine cover story called “The Counter Counterculture.” The author was the late James Atlas, and one by one, he introduced a series of characters. There was young David Brooks, then of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page. There was Brock himself, best known at the time for his vicious investigations into the personal affairs of President Bill Clinton. There was David Frum—now a writer for The Atlantic—and his wife, Danielle Crittenden, with whom, years later, I co-wrote a Polish cookbook.

There are amusing details—expensive Georgetown restaurants where educated conservative elites pour scorn upon educated liberal elites—but the tone of the article was not negative. It included a parade of other names and short profiles: Bill Kristol, John Podhoretz, Roger Kimball, Dinesh D’Souza. I knew most of them at the time the article appeared. I was then working in London for The Spectator, a conservative political magazine, and my relationship to this group was that of a foreign cousin who visited from time to time and inspired mild interest, but never quite made it to the inner circle. I wrote occasionally for The Weekly Standard, edited by Kristol; for TheNew Criterion, edited by Kimball; and once for the Independent Women’s Quarterly, then edited by, among others, Crittenden.

I also knew, slightly, a woman whose appearance, in a leopard-skin miniskirt, was the most notable thing about the magazine’s cover photograph: Laura Ingraham, who had been a clerk to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and was then an attorney at a tony law firm. In the penultimate paragraph Atlas finds himself, near midnight, “careering through the streets of downtown Washington with Brock in Ingraham’s military-green Land Rover at 60 miles an hour looking for an open bar while the music of Buckwheat Zydeco blasted over the stereo.”

As someone who only knows what Ingraham is about through consuming her radio, television and website output through the years, I know that I started seeing signs that she might not hold up as a spokesperson for basic conservatism. Some if it was a matter of demeanor. The infectious Type-A way she engaged life became a little tiresome. She started to seem nervous in television appearances, like her mind was already halfway on whatever she was going to do next. The way she'd describe ordinary interactions with people in her daily life hinted at an imperiousness that did not leave a good impression.

Back to Applebaum's piece, I wonder if she doesn't depict a little too much of a clean break between the optimism of Reagan-era conservatism and the sense of foreboding that has permeated conservatism in more recent times. Concern for the set of issues that we now deem as constituting the culture war was already there.

But she is probably onto something when she discerns a rising sense among a lot of conservatives that means outside what's Constitutionally available were going to be needed to wage that war:

Since the 1990s, we had gone in radically different directions. She had left the law, drifted into the world of conservative media, and tried for a long time to get her own television show. Though these early attempts all failed, she eventually had a popular talk-radio program. I was a guest on the program a couple of times, once after the Russian invasion of the nation of Georgia, in 2008. Listening again to the conversation—the magic of the internet ensures that no sound bite is ever lost—I was struck by how consistent it was with the optimistic conservatism of the ’90s. Ingraham was still talking about America’s power to do good, America’s ability to push back against the Russian threat. But she was already groping for something else. During our conversation, she quoted from an article by Pat Buchanan, one of her mentors, who had repeatedly railed against the pointlessness of any American relationship with Georgia, an aspiring democracy, and lauded Russia, a country he imagined to be more “Christian” than his own.

The reference was a hint at other changes. At some point in the intervening years, her Reaganite optimism slowly hardened into something better described as a form of apocalyptic pessimism. This can be found in much of what she says and writes nowadays: America is doomed, Europe is doomed, Western civilization is doomed—and immigration, political correctness, transgenderism, the culture, the establishment, the left, and the “Dems” are responsible. Some of what she sees is real. The so-called cancel culture on the internet, the extremism that sometimes flares up on university campuses and newsrooms, and the exaggerated claims of those who practice identity politics are a political and cultural problem that will require real bravery to fight. But it is no longer clear that she thinks these forms of left-wing extremism can be fought using normal democratic politics. In 2019, she had Buchanan himself on her show and put the point to him directly: “Is Western civilization, as we understood it, actually hanging in the balance? I think you could actually make a very strong argument that it is tipping over the cliff.” Like Buchanan, she has also become doubtful about whether America could or should play any role in the world. And no wonder: If America is not exceptional but degenerate, why would you expect it to achieve anything outside its borders?

Applebaum points up the irony with which a 2007 Ingraham speech is fraught:

few elements of ingraham’s trajectory remain mysterious. One is her frequent invocation of moral values, Christian values, personal values. During a 2007 speech, she told a group in Dallas that “without virtue there is no America. Without virtue we will be ruled by tyrants.” She then listed those virtues: “honor, courage, selflessness, sacrifice, hard work, personal responsibility, respect for elders, respect for the vulnerable.” None of these virtues can be ascribed to Donald Trump. More complicated is her participation in the opprobrium that the president heaps on all immigrants, and her own fears that legal immigration has undermined “the America we know and love.” Ingraham herself has three adopted children—all immigrants.

And Applebaum does an admirable deep dig into the possible reasons for Ingraham signing on so unwaveringly to Trumpism:

I don’t know how she explains these contradictions to herself, because Ingraham wouldn’t speak with me when I tried to ask. She answered one email and then went silent. But there are clues. Some mutual friends point out that she is a convert to Catholicism, and a breast-cancer survivor who is deeply religious: She told one of them that “the only man who never disappointed me was Jesus.” The willpower required to survive in the cutthroat world of right-wing media—especially at Fox News, where female stars were often pressured to sleep with their bosses—should not be underestimated. This combination of personal experiences gives a messianic edge to some of her public remarks. In that same 2007 speech, she spoke about her religious conversion. If it weren’t for her faith, she said, “I wouldn’t be here . . . I probably wouldn’t be alive.” That was why, she said, she fought to save America from the godless: “If we lose faith in God, as a country—we lose our country.”

Professional ambition, the oldest excuse in the world, is part of the story too. Partly thanks to Trump, and her connection to Trump, Ingraham finally got her own prime-time Fox television show, with a salary to match. She has secured interviews with him at key moments, during which she poses only flattering questions. (“By the way, congratulations on your polling numbers,” she told him while interviewing him on the anniversary of D-Day.) But I don’t think, for someone as intelligent as Ingraham, that this is the full explanation. She ran a radio show throughout the many years in which Fox didn’t give her a television program, and I believe she will go back to running a radio show if it ever cancels her program. As in the case of so many biographies, picking apart the personal and the political is a fool’s game.

There are some clues to her thinking from other times and other places. The Polish writer Jacek Trznadel has described what it felt like, in Stalinist Poland, to be a loud advocate for the regime and to doubt it at the same time. “I was shouting from a tribune at some university meeting in Wrocław, and simultaneously felt panicked at the thought of myself shouting . . . I told myself I was trying to convince [the crowd] by shouting, but in reality I was trying to convince myself.” For some people, loud advocacy of Trump helps to cover up the deep doubt and even shame they feel about their support for Trump. It’s not enough to express tepid approval of a president who is corrupting the White House and destroying America’s alliances and inflicting economic catastrophe on the country:  You have to shout if you want to convince yourself as well as others. You have to exaggerate your feelings if you are to make them believable.

Applebaum's piece includes one concrete anecdote that further points up the irony of Ingraham's conversion:

She has known Trump since the ’90s; they once went on a date, though apparently that didn’t go well—she found him pompous. (“He needs two separate cars, one for himself and one for his hair,” she told some mutual friends.) 

Ingraham should have contemplated her impression of the VSG as pompous more deeply. It is the trait that has led to his present juncture (low poll numbers, a panicked campaign staff, a barrage of unflattering books about him). And the implications are far greater than an off-putting personality. There's foreign policy, for instance. Some serious repair is going to be needed in the wake of the way Trump has routinely insulted the leaders of our closest allies.

Applebaum's piece is a valuable contribution to our understanding of the damage that the Trump phenomenon has done to conservatism. One conclusion seems clear, to me at least: The real deal needs more vigorous defense than ever.