The Bulwark’s Tim Miller – a former Jeb Bush guy turned very excellent and witty podcaster – is out this morning with a personal oral history of his time in Trump’s spin room following the Philadelphia debate and all the schadenfreude he felt watching the meltdown. The best excerpt comes early:
Just after Trump’s lame spin-room performance, I encountered a former Trump spokesman, Tim Murtaugh, a onetime establishment type I knew a little bit. He was huddled closely with one of the Washington Examiner’s MAGA content generators, Byron York.
I leaned over and observed that Murtaugh had found a friendly voice. “Byron will write you something good,” I said. As Murtaugh grimaced at me, York grunted out “Fuck you.”
Further down Miller describes encountering Lindsey Graham adding more context to the tweet Miller posted late Tuesday in which Graham had called the debate a “disaster” and that Trump’s prep team should be fired. Miller writes that Lindsey had actually exploded at him at first, for having approched him by asking “whether the debate made him more likely to come back around to our shared anti-Trump view from the glory days of 2016. Getting red-faced, the senator lashed out at me, saying I should be ‘ashamed’ for opposing Trump.” Lindsey then came around and made the admission it was a shitshow and that Trump was unprepared, giving Miller a fist bump before parting ways.
Being the newsman he is, Miller then asked Rapey McForehead for comment:
Later I asked Matt Gaetz, who was sporting Trump Force One tennis shoes, what he thought about Graham’s call for his head – after all, Gaetz was part of the team that supposedly prepared Trump for the debate. In the spin room, Gaetz managed to do what Trump had been unable to do the entire night: avoid the bait and pivot to his message, before eventually relenting that sometimes he thinks Graham should be fired as well – “usually when he’s trying to start wars.”
Miller writes that after that exchange with Gaetz, “the opportunities to engage with MAGA surrogates became thin. Vivek, Tulsi, and RFK were swarmed by a kettle of vultures too thick for me to break through. The rest were too pathetic to contemplate speaking to,” leading him to wander over to the Harris team’s spin room, where Gavin Newsom was leading a “KAM-A-LA” chant.