MICHAEL STEELE
“It’s particularly disappointing when I see members of my party’s leadership sycophantically kowtow to an egomaniacal henchman who has one view of the world and that’s himself.”
“But you gotta deal with stupid. What the party’s gonna need when this is all said and done is a political enema. And I’m happy to deliver it.”
They gotta deal with me, baby. I ain’t going nowhere until I decide to go somewhere. And that’s how this works, I’ve been here since 1976.”
— -Michael Steele to Larry Wilmore, November 2020
In early December, Steele, the former chair of the Republican National Committee, could barely contain himself, his white-hot contempt bubbling over, as he addressed those who were feverishly donating to the president’s futile bid to overturn the 2020 election results.
He called these donors, “suckers,” while admonishing them.
The reported $170 million contributed thus far “ain’t going to no recount,” he said, but rather is being used to fund a so-called “leadership” PAC with loosely regulated spending rules.
“…The filthy lucre, the moolah, the geedis, no slippery guy named Slipp…”
The dough is going into Donald Trump’s pocket.
This irony wasn’t lost on Steele.
“The great little dirty part of this is Donald Trump right now is raising money at a faster rate to, sort of, steal the election than he did when he was trying to win the election,” Steele told MSNBC’s Joy Reid.
Yet Trump hasn’t wavered a bit in spewing those vitriolic, unrelenting, bald-faced lies, intended to convince his people that the election was being stolen from him.
“And that’s what people need to understand. All right?” Steele added. “He’s raising more money now than he did when he was actually running for the job that he’s now trying to say that they stole from him!
So, look, the grift is on, baby! It is just on. You need to understand it.”
In August 2020, Steele joined the Lincoln Project, a group of Republicans working to prevent Trump’s re-election.
A political analyst for MSNBC, Steele told the network’s Nicole Wallace at the time, “Today is the day where things should matter and you need to take stock of what matters to you — and the kind of leaders you want to lead in these moments.
And for me, it ain’t him.”
Steele was the first African-American to be elected to statewide office in Maryland, serving as the seventh lieutenant governor from 2003 to 2007.
He was also the first African-American to serve as the RNC’s chairman.
His tenure at the helm of the RNC lasted only two years, and at times, the surf was choppy.
Steele has not always been the smoothest of sailors.
But he is real.
“I get my role as a former national chairman. I get it, but I’m an American. I get my role as a former party leader. I’m still an American,” he continued with Wallace.
“And these things matter to me more than aligning myself with a party that has clearly decided it would rather be sycophantic than principled.”
Since leaving his position as RNC chair in 2011, Steele has evolved into one of Trump’s most prominent and vocal Republican critics.
And he doesn’t hold back.
When Trump expressed his exasperation, behind closed doors, with people coming to the U.S. from “shithole countries,” a description he was directing toward Haiti, El Salvador and some African nations, Steele branded him a “racist.”
“At this point,” Steele offered, “the evidence is incontrovertible, it’s right there.”
The fact that Trump, when discussing a potential immigration deal with lawmakers at the White House, suggested that the United States should bring in more immigrants from places like Norway instead, pretty much wrapped it up for Steele.
He described his relationship with the president thusly:
“[Trump doesn’t] talk to me anymore. That conversation stopped a while back because I wasn’t sycophantic…I wasn’t sitting there [saying], ‘here’s your towel sir, yes sir, no sir,’ that’s not how I play.
And if you come to the table that way with him, your chances of having a conversation ends abruptly.”
After the President endorsed Alabama Republican Senate nominee Roy Moore, who was accused of sexual misconduct by multiple women, Steele was quick to tweet, “America no longer has a moral compass under [Trump’s] ‘leadership.’”
And in 2016, Steele remarked during a dinner in San Francisco, “I will not be voting for Clinton. I will not be voting for Trump either,” explaining, [Trump has] “captured that racist underbelly, that frustration, that angry underbelly of American life and gave voice to that.”
(For emphasis he added, “I was damn near puking during the debates.”).
Rather prophetic, given the circumstances of today.
Allying himself with the Lincoln Project was a no-brainer for Steele, and it was profoundly impactful, according to Tara Setmayer, a senior advisor there and a CNN contributor.
“In the two decades I’ve known Michael Steele, he’s never been afraid to speak truth to power. As a former RNC chairman, Michael’s decision to join the Lincoln Project’s efforts to oust Trump and his enablers is a big deal.
It’s truly ‘country over party’ personified. Michael’s invaluable experience and brand of tell it like it is politics will fit right in on this pirate ship. Welcome aboard.”
In a way, Michael Steele defies assumptions.
Logic.
Being a member of the Grand Old Party for four decades is simply not interwoven through the legacy, a pundit on liberal-leaning MSNBC, would be likely to leave.
And even though his sister’s marriage to boxer Mike Tyson collapsed under the suffocating weight of the boxer’s profligate spending and widespread adultery, Steele remains close to the former heavyweight champion of the world.
“Mike’s a cool guy,” Steele believes. “I love him like a brother. We have respect for each other. Everybody knows his story and, like all of us, he’s got his angels, he’s got his devils.”
Steele knows the Republican party’s “angels” and “devils” better than most.
When he was elected the first Black chairman of the RNC, just ten days after Democrat Barack Obama was sworn in as America’s first Black president, conventional wisdom had it that the party recognized an urgent need to expand beyond its inexorably shrinking white base.
Yet a decade later, the party is dominated by a man who has emphatically denied the existence of systemic racism and is madly cheered by white supremacists.
So joining the Lincoln Project was not an easy decision for Steele to make.
“What brought me over to that point was a quote by Dr. [Martin Luther] King that really resonated with my heart and head at the same time; there’s that moment where you go, yeah, this is why.
Dr. King said: ‘Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about the things that matter.’
I asked myself, what are the things that matter to you?
It mattered that the president has openly said to us, I’m not going to accept the outcome of this election if I don’t win.
It matters to me what he’s done with the Postal Service to prevent Americans from accessing the ballot box.
I see this is the time for choosing, and the choice that unfortunately many in my party, particularly in the party leadership, have made is that they choose Trump.
They choose winning an election at all costs over the country and I think, as an American, I should be bigger than that.”
When you frame it like that, and you have a spine and some backbone, hard decision-making no longer represents a road fraught with peril.
You follow your heart, come what may.
[Editor’s Note: This piece was written by Mr. Kaplan in January 2021.]
