Chapo Trap House - Seeking a Fren Episode 4 Teaser - Operation Anti-Obama

Episode Date: January 1, 2025

Felix looks at Steve Bannon’s origins, plus anti-Obama hysteria pushing the GOP to the right in the 2012 primaries in this clip from Episode 4 of his series “Seeking a Fren for the End of the World.” The full episode and rest of the series are available for subscribers at patreon.com/chapotraphouse.

Lieutenant, you think he'll take the city? Intercut, Coriolanus on Harley, with Ovidius. Ovidius. All yield to him, the press, Whitey, the color O'Risto cracks of his own set. Only the trash is weak, and I think he'll view them as birds do fish and take them as his do. He served the Hood, but lost it. Close on, Coriolanus, riding hell-bent into the wind. Orphidaeus off-screen. Whether from bad choice, pride, or the inability to move from war to peace, it made him feared

and hated by the media. That was a reenactment from Steve Bannon's screenplay, The Thing I Am, a hip hop musical that transposes Shakespeare's Quirillianus onto the 1992 LA riots. Shockingly, this was not a right-wing take on Hamilton, but a screenplay that Bannon wrote in the 1990s. If you thought Jake Tapper's rock war era minstrel show Gang Banging in Media Land was bad, well, it still is. But think of this as a necessary prequel to that seminal work. This shit is really funny, so let's reenact another line. Agrippa crosses to Brutus and grabs his crotch.

Agrippa. Hey, motherfucker, you. What you think you? As the great dick of this assembly. Brutus. Did you call me a... Agrippa. A dick.

Brutus. You motherfucker. Agrippa grabs Brutus' crotch a second time. Opening scene from Steve Bannon's unsold 1990s screenplay for a hip-hop musical, The Thing I Am. The Great Bannon Myth is one of the great liberal origin stories of the Trump years. A social media mastermind that harnessed internet trolls into electing Donald Trump. It's a bad story for a lot of reasons, and one of them is that it gives the man himself

far too much credit. Bannon is not an ales-esque genius attack dog, and he's definitely not a Paul Weyrich for the information age. He's just a very common type in the conservative media sphere. The failed creative. Bannon had tried and failed to break into Hollywood, the same story as Jeremy Boring, Chris Ruffo, and so many other resentful mediocrities who mistook their lack of talent for Hueck-esque persecution.

This burning resentment and reflexive contrarianism would be the light that led the American right through the darkness of Obama's second term, a paradoxical time when conservatism was clearly on the rise yet seemed less dominant than ever. Of course, to get there in the first place, President Obama needed to win a second term. Stopping such a thing from happening had become the ultimate mission of the Obama-era right ever since he was inaugurated, and as the 2012 election came into view, they began to believe that his defeat had become all but a given. This was, of course, for obvious reasons.

The sluggish economic recovery, Obama's flagging personal popularity, and their historic success in 2010. But it wasn't just that. An important thing to understand about how conservatives understood Obama during his first term is that they were never, ever willing to admit that he ever truly appealed to people. All of his successes had to be the result of public relations trickery and the media putting its thumb on the scale. To admit anything otherwise would be to say that America was fundamentally anything other

than a center-right country. And to them, this was utterly inconceivable. By itself, this may not seem all that peculiar. Everyone, no matter what ideology they have, wants to believe that their beliefs are popular and capable of appealing to people. But as Obama's first term went on, the rights believed in its own ultimate victory as not being just the kind of comforting story all partisans tell themselves. It became an unbreakable article of faith, one that served as the prison through which they understood almost everything about America, from its origins to its present.

It was evident in how their new Tea Party movement connected itself to the country's founding myth through its very name. It was evident in the internet-driven birther movement, which refused to accept that someone like Obama could even be American at all, and it was evident in the 2012 presidential primaries, where the Overton window made its biggest shift to the right in generations. While the Mavericks nomination in 2008 was the Rhino movement's biggest success since the USS Liberty incident, his ascendancy would end up coming at the worst possible time. Instead of dictating the direction and tone of the party, they ended up on the hook for a generational route.

Any attempts at pointing out how McCain actually led the race before the start of the financial crisis would be crushed by the right simple comforting narrative, that America rejected him because he was too moderate. Their autopsy of Bush Jr.'s failures would be identical. To them, all his failures could be explained by the fact that his reckless deficit spending and support for immigration reform broke from true conservatism.

So when the 2012 Republican primaries took shape, they would be defined by the right's confidence in ultimate victory. Leaving the field from the very beginning was former Massachusetts governor and 2008 runner-up Mitt Romney, a man who is now incorrectly typecast as a lifelong rhino, but was at the time solidly on the party's right. We mentioned back in episode 2 that he managed to secure Paul Weyrich's deathbed endorsement

in his bid against McCain in 2008, but even that very big nod only just scratched the surface of how much far-right support he had that year. Once the rest of the field fell out of frame and the race was reduced to a two-man contest between the worst A4 Skyhawk pilot in the entire Navy and the only true son of Kolob in American politics, Rush Limbaugh and the rest of conservative talk radio's heavy hitters threw their support behind Romney. Leaving right-wing elected officials, from former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum to the then-sitting fascist sheriff Joe Arpaio, would lend their support to him, too.

Of course, much of this support was highly qualified. Jonah Goldberg, for instance, channeled Sean McElwain in the pages of National Review and made the hilariously contorted argument that Romney would actually be better for social conservatives than Bush because his past flip-flops would force him to quote-unquote prove himself while in office. Most others confronted with his record, which included claims to be both pro-choice and supportive of quote-unquote full equality for gays and lesbians during his various campaigns in Massachusetts, were forced to make similar hedges.

At the same time though, some of the right's biggest gatekeepers found themselves willing to totally look past Romney's background and give the former governor a full-throated endorsement for 08. Rush, for example, didn't advertise Mitt as just the lesser evil relative to Comrade McLean. He described him as a candidate on our side who does embody all three legs of the conservative stool, those being foreign policy, fiscal conservatism, and yes, social conservatism. Others like Joe Arpaio went even further. For his part, America's toughest sheriff threw himself so far into the Romney campaign

that he was named its Arizona campaign chair. While these efforts would fail to secure him victory in 2008, they would be the entire reason why Romney would end up with the second place finish that set him up as 2012's early frontrunner. This was a major win for right-wing media, and it would only become more extensive with time. Once the primaries began, none of the members of the party's center who could have credibly attempted such a bid would even try.

Lifelong media darling Condi Rice, having rebuffed efforts to draft her for the 2008 campaign, didn't even hint at a run against Obama for years later. Midway through 2011, Roger Ailes would extensively lobby General David Petraeus to enter the race, reportedly even considering resigning from Vox to head his potential campaign, backed, of course, by Rupert Murdoch's checkbook. But Petraeus would turn him down, officially removing himself from consideration when he accepted Obama's offer to serve as CIA director. In the end, the only member of the party to challenge Romney from the center would be

REO speedwagon stand John Huntsman, an obscure former Utah governor whose choice in 2009 to serve as Obama's ambassador to China rendered his bid dead on arrival. As such, the ultimate ideological outcome of the 2012 primaries was decided very early on. It would be either the darling of talk radio from 2008, or it would be someone even further to his right. From the outset, this presented a major opportunity for Romney. By now, the establishment was solidly on his side. So if he could manage to get the media

figures who were on his side four years prior to stay in his corner, he would be untouchable, the presumptive nominee before a single vote had been cast. Unfortunately for him, however, this would not come to pass. With no McCain-esque threat from the center moving and nobody on the right taking the possibility of an Obama second term seriously, the right-wing media world would make an early decision that Mitt 2012 wasn't nearly worth settling for Rush Limbaugh only a few years removed for the full episode subscribe at patreon.com Chappell Trap house would now flatly declare him not a conservative Heading into what they in the words of dredge alley Laura Ingram, considered to be a gimme election, he and his compatriots clearly desired someone else.