Exclusive — Jeremy Peters: Breitbart-Style Republicans Have the Winning Playbook

Author Jeremy Peters spoke with Breitbart News about his new book, Insurgency: How Republicans Lost Their Party and Got Everything They Ever Wanted, and said Republicans who embody the Breitbart culture have “the playbook that wins.”

Peters appeared on Breitbart News Saturday, hosted by Breitbart political editor Matthew Boyle.

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Peters mentioned that his book is a chronological story of how the new, Trump-like American First Republican Party began.

According to Peters, the core, grassroots Republican voter has always flocked to an “insurgent candidate.” Peters pointed to Pat Buchanan, former Republican presidential candidate, as the earliest architect of today’s Republican Party. Buchanan called for a fence at the southern border and talked about the crime illegal immigrants were committing nearly twenty years before the rise of former President Donald Trump.

“What Pat Buchanan did back then would carry through,” Peters said. “It’s a pretty straight line from what Pat Buchanan said and did and the policies he referred to as America First and Donald Trump. I mean, he talked about people who had been killed by undocumented immigrants, so it was kind of like an early version of the Angel Mom movement. He talked about, you know, the need to keep American jobs here instead of shipping them overseas. And most importantly, and I think people kind of forget this about Pat Buchanan. He was very anti-affirmative action.”

The conversation then shifted to former Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, whose story is vital in Peters’s book. Peters explained that the story of Trump’s MAGA movement could not have been told without Sarah Palin.

Peters talked about a portion of his book that focuses on Palin and how Palin was urged to run for president in 2012 by people such as Steve Bannon, Peter Schweizer, and Dave Bossie, who would later become President Trump surrogates.

“They went down to Scottsdale and tried to convince Palin to run for president,” Peters said. “They put together a whole presentation, and I detail this in the book, the way that they said to her, ‘look, the 2012 cast of Republican candidates are basically a bunch of cover bands, and you are the true rock star.’”

Peters noted that failed presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s team feared a Palin candidacy because of a “Not-Mitt” phenomenon.

“There was this phenomenon I described, and Mitt Romney’s advisers it identified as the ‘not-Mitt’ phenomenon, where it was just anyone but Mitt was appealing to these conservative voters who didn’t like the kind of old model of Republican politics that he represented where he would say things like, ‘corporations are people my friend.’ I mean, talk about an anti-populist message if there ever was one,” he said.

Boyle noted Romney’s loss to former President Barack Obama sowed the seeds for the rise of Trump due to Obama’s failed policies implemented during his second term. He also pointed out the impact Breitbart News founder Andrew Breitbart had on the way Republican candidates deal with corporate media.

Boyle also mentioned that Scott Brown’s embrace of a tough-on-immigration stance during his 2014 run for U.S. Senate in New Hampshire laid the groundwork for Trump’s eventual 2016 run for president.

Peters agreed with Boyle, saying that Brown’s 2014 campaign “was such a pivotal moment in the turning point from the Republican Party away from this kind of pro-corporate cut taxes, trickle down economics, rising tide lifts all boats policy, and towards something that was more friendly to the working class.”

“Without that shift away, without the recognition that these policies that the Republican Party had stood for for decades, had no constituency anymore, you don’t get a candidate like Donald Trump,” Peters added.

Boyle mentioned that although Brown’s campaign was unsuccessful, it permanently changed the way Republican politicians would campaign going forward. He pointed out that Brown’s hardline stance on immigration came just after 14 Senate Republicans supported the “Gang of Eight” amnesty bill, of which only five remain in office and of those who do remain, they would “never vote for that bill again.”

“Now, if you listen to any Republican candidate out there, they’re going to tout this Trumpian Breitbartian line on immigration, they’re not going to split from that,” Boyle said.

Peters touched on the “autopsy” establishment Republicans completed after the 2012 loss that mentioned immigration reform would be a key way to earn support from Hispanic voters.

“I have another scene in the book around that era, where you have Paul Ryan, who coming off of his defeat with Mitt Romney in 2012, goes back to Washington and says, ‘We don’t have an entry point to Hispanic voters, so we need to pass immigration.’ Well, as I detail in the book, they had, the Republican National Committee, in their own data in the surveys that they commissioned for this autopsy, stats showing them that immigration reform was not a cure-all for Hispanics and that Hispanics needed something else they needed a pro-worker message. And that pro-worker message really at the time was something that was only being uttered by the likes of, you know, you and your colleagues at Breitbart, Jeff Sessions, Stephen Miller, and eventually Donald Trump,” he said.

Boyle then highlighted Tennessee as a perfect example of Trump’s impact on the Republican Party.

“When Trump came into office, the two U.S. senators were Bob Corker and Lamar Alexander from Tennessee. Both of them voted, by the way, for the Gang of Eight amnesty bill,” he said. “Now the two U.S. senators from Tennessee are Marsha Blackburn and Bill Hagerty, both of whom would absolutely never vote for that and are actually fighters for America First.”

He also touched on how Biden’s presidency is similar to Obama’s second term, in that the perfect storm of failed policies between foreign policy, inflation, and the border crisis are brewing towards another Trump run for the White House.

Peters agreed with Boyle’s assessment and said voters would likely think Trump is more competent and in control than they viewed him in the 2020 election.

According to Peters, Biden’s failures “helps Trump because Trump’s whole thing was, his big Achilles heel was that he didn’t look competent. He didn’t look in control in 2020.”

“And some voters, a lot of them that voted for Trump the first time rolled the dice on Biden. I don’t know how many of them are going to do that again, unless things really turn around in the economy and foreign policy for Biden,” Peters added.

He also elaborated more on the title of his book, Insurgency: How Republicans Lost Their Party and Got Everything They Ever Wanted. Peters said establishment Republicans such as Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) looked over Trump’s personality because he governed effectively and brought the conservative movement multiple victories.

“Whatever Mitch McConnell, privately, and all these other kinds of establishment Republicans thought about Trump, they were able to look past it, because the policies worked. The Supreme Court is now decidedly conservative, and people give Trump a pass, and I think that for the most part, they continue to do that because I think the core Trump voter is somebody who thinks, you know, ‘my country’s slipping away from me. I’m one election away from not recognizing the type of country that I live in anymore,’” he said.

Boyle said he does not believe the Republican Party will ever go back in the other direction and asked Peters what he thought about that.

Peters ended the interview discussing how the modern Republican Party has embodied the fighting spirit that Andrew Breitbart had, which is “the playbook that wins.”

“I think that what Breitbart embodies about the modern Republican Party is this no apologies, don’t hold back culture, where you know, it’s bare-knuckled, it’s in your face. And Republicans who maybe aren’t comfortable with that type of aggression have now come around to see that that’s the playbook that wins,” he said.

“And guys like Andrew Breitbart always understood that voters love a fighter, and they love a bit of performance too, because, you know, Andrew was, he was a polemicist. He was a performer. He was polarizing, but he was ultimately like an entertaining guide. And that’s what people saw in Trump,” Peters continued.

“A lot of these successful, populist conservative candidates are at heart really good at captivating an audience and making them laugh and also making them mad. And you don’t see that from guys like Mitt Romney,” he added.

“That’s why going back to our conversation about 2012 Romney didn’t do well in those debates, the voters didn’t like what they were seeing because a guy like Newt Gingrich taking a cue from the Andrew Breitbart playbook knew how to rip the other guy’s face off,” Peters said.

“And that’s what people want to see done on the debate stage and now the candidates who can do that are the candidates who are succeeding in today’s Republican Party,” Peters concluded.

Breitbart News Saturday airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 from 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. Eastern.