It’s clear that Bill Stepien takes pride in his professional reputation, integrity, and abilities. He testified before the January 6 Committee that “there was a great deal wrong with the campaign,” 115 days before election day, when he stepped into the role of campaign manager for Trump’s 2020 reelection bid. “Most of my time was spent fixing the things that could be fixed with 115 days left in the campaign.”
It’s also clear that he conforms to the image of campaign consultant as hired gun. Trump, McCain, Bush, and Christie may or may not share conservative principles – it’s all the same to him. So long as the clients have an ‘R’ after their names. He’s there to run a professional campaign, and to fix things if necessary, for Republican candidates.
Stepien draws a contrast between (presumably ‘normal’) candidates who acknowledge reality and follow conventional democratic norms, and his candidate during the 2020 presidential race – who insisted against all evidence that he had won an election that he lost and whose cries of fraud have convinced more than half of the GOP's base voters of this lie. Here’s how Stepien describes the two camps in the White House after Trump’s thumping by Biden in November 2020:
I didn't mind being categorized. There were two groups of them. We called them kind of my team and Rudy's team. I — I didn't mind being characterized as being part of Team Normal, as — as reporters, you know, kind of started to do around that point in time. You know, I said, you know, hours ago, early on, that, you know, I've — I've been doing this for a long time, 25 years, and I've spanned, you know, political ideologies from Trump to McCain to Bush to Christie, you know.
And, you know, I can work under a lot of circumstances for a lot of varied, you know, candidates and politicians. But a situation where — and I think along the way I've built up a pretty good — I hope a good reputation for being honest and — and professional, and I — I didn't think what was happening was necessarily honest or professional at that point in time. So, again, that led to me stepping away.
But notice how quietly he stepped away (or seemed to). In Josh Dawsey’s words, “He was stepping away at the time behind the scenes but didn't necessarily want it reported as so publicly, and didn't want it widely known.”
He was stepping away at the time behind the scenes but didn't necessarily want it reported as so publicly, and didn't want it widely known. https://t.co/81wxCL9YQA
— Josh Dawsey (@jdawsey1) June 13, 2022
Why ever not? January 6, 2021 was nearly a year and a half ago. Why hasn't Stepien spoken out until now? Stepien takes care to separate himself rhetorically from Team Rudy. He wants no (public) association with Giuliani's crazed cast, featuring John Eastman, Peter Navarro, Steve Bannon, et al., all working feverishly on behalf of Donald Trump’s undemocratic, illegal, unconstitutional attempts to stay in office after losing the election. None of this was normal. And Stepien appears to embrace the normal (not the authoritarian), though he claimed to be stepping away in secret.
Why in secret? Why stay silent?
Because two upfront choices were untenable from a professional point of view. Choice A: joining Team Rudy. Choice B: publicly opposing Team Rudy (and the Republican President of the United States). Here’s the bottom line – an old fashioned bottom line punctuated with dollar signs: Both choice A and choice B would have been bad for business. Better to not go there, not to either place.
Team Normal means business as usual. It was -- is -- better to fade into the background, not drawing any attention to oneself, and continuing to profit from the big lie. This don't rock the boat approach makes sense. It is hard to deny from a strictly financial point of view, from personal self-interest, that this is the rational choice. This counts for normal in today's Republican Party.
Some have criticized Stepien (and others) for not speaking out until after Trump conned the grassroots of the Grand Old Party, inspired countless undemocratic actions and authoritarian candidates across the country after January 6. Tim Miller suggests that Stepien wasn't on Team Normal, he was on Team Coup. That's because by choosing to stay silent he allowed the big lie to metastasize throughout the Republican Party. He understood what was going on and he decided to shrug it off.
Michelle Cottle suggests that Stepien was on Team Chicken, because "he slunk away, coat collar flipped up and hat brim pulled low in the hopes that no one would notice him fleeing the spiraling freak show to which he had sold his services and his soul. And he has since taken pains to stay on Mr. Trump’s good side ..."
Bess Levin, who concurs that Stepien continues to profit off Trump's big lie, provides more ugly details:
Stepien’s National Public Affairs firm is currently being paid $10,000 a month from Trump’s Save America PAC, and since May 2021, has received $130,000 from the group, plus another $90,562 from Trump’s “reconfigured presidential campaign,” according to a HuffPost analysis of Federal Election Commission filings. On top of that, Stepien’s firm has received a whopping $1.2 million from various Republicans working overtime to spread Trump’s big lie, including $190,488 from Harriet Hageman, who is attempting to unseat Representative Liz Cheney in Wyoming’s August Republican primary.
Despite no longer being a full-time Trump employee, Stepien nevertheless spends a significant chunk of his time continuing to do Trump’s bidding. According to HuffPost, the Republican strategist’s work is to “coordinate Trump’s political strategy, including Trump’s efforts to defeat candidates who challenge his false claim that the election was stolen from him or, worse, voted to impeach him for inciting the Jan. 6 attack.” Each week, Stepien reportedly participates in an hour-long conference call with top aides to the ex-president like Dan Scavino and Miller, as well as Donald Trump Jr. “He’s trying to tell the world he quit,” a Trump adviser told reporters S.V. Date and Jennifer Bendery. “He has been on every call since Jan. 6. He gets paid every month to do that…. I mean, come on, man.” Twelve out of Stepien’s 15 other clients running for Congress are major proponents of Trump’s big lie, including Hagemen, who told CNN in September, “I think that there are legitimate questions about what happened during the 2020 election.
Look more closely at Stepien's testimony and we don't hear opposition to Trump's big lie, or to his authoritarianism. He just doesn't want to talk about it. Only a House subpoena drew him out. (To oppose it would have been tantamount to joining Team Rudy.) He conceded during his testimony a preference for normal politics, but didn't reject the authoritarian turn of the Republican Party. That might have lost him clients.
Stepien has a lot of company on Team Normal. The professionals who surrounded Trump for four years, who wished to preserve their livelihoods, enjoy the respect of their fellow professionals, provide for their families, build nest eggs to live comfortably into retirement and to pass onto their children have overwhelmingly stayed silent.
So too the Republican men and women, on the whole, in the House and the Senate, and in statehouses, and county seats, and school boards, and so on all across the country. Many -- far too many -- have opted, of course, to join the crazies, the election deniers, the open authoritarians ready to reject democratic institutions. But most have both kept a (public) distance from Team Rudy and stayed silent.
Most prominent among the folks in this camp is Bill Barr, who did Trump's bidding time after time. In June 2020, after Trump had been railing for months about the fraud that would accompany mail-in ballots in November, Barr helpfully offered a new conspiracy theory: the danger of foreign interference in our election. Without a shred of evidence, he defended this fanciful speculation by appealing to "common sense." This was rejected by election officials (“It is absolutely not the case that someone could create a multitude of ballots and in some way infuse them or inject them into the system without detection”) and election experts ("Of all the ridiculous schemes that have been floated by the President or AG Barr for how mail-in ballot fraud could affect the election, the possibility of a foreign entity swaying election by mailing fraudulent absentee ballots is the most ludicrous") alike.
Barr persisted until a point when it seemed that Trump's lie about a stolen election was more likely to be an anchor around the necks of Republican candidates in competitive elections, than a winning strategy to get out the base vote (as Mitch McConnell, with an anxious eye on Georgia, was well aware).
Dahlia Lithwick mocks Bill Barr's testimony (which was damning to Trump, but provided a most convenient escape hatch from responsibility for Barr), during which the former AG:
But of course insurrection isn't silly; it's deadly serious. And Barr was onboard with Trump until he wasn't. And when he wasn't, he decided to pretend that it was all a big joke.
It is not, of course. Moreover, Barr is still on the Trump train: prepared to vote for him again.
That's what Team Normal looks like in today's GOP: business as usual (with an unspoken embrace of authoritarianism).