Trump’s ultimate yes man: how Devin Nunes embraced the role he was long accused
For the first and perhaps the only time in his pugnacious political career, the California congressman and noted Trump apologist Devin Nunes is inspiring some kind of unanimity across party lines.
When news broke on Monday that Nunes was retiring from Congress to become chief executive of the fledgling Trump Media & Technology Group, nobody on the left or the right doubted he’d landed where he belonged. After 19 years as a reliably rock-ribbed Republican legislator, Nunes told his supporters that he wasn’t giving up on fighting his political enemies, just “pursuing it by other means” – and for once those enemies took him at his word.
Even Kevin McCarthy, the top-ranking Republican in the House of Representatives and a fellow Californian, failed to raise any hackles when he said in a statement that nobody was better prepared than Nunes to lead an alternative to America’s tech and media giants. Nunes, after all, has spent years filing lawsuits against Twitter, the Washington Post, and a clutch of other media companies that he, and Trump, consider to be part of a “propaganda machine” for the Democrats.
In many ways, Nunes is embracing the role his detractors have long accused him of playing, as Trump’s ultimate yes man. Early in the Trump presidency, leading Democrats fumed that he was walking away from his grave responsibilities as chair of the House intelligence committee to be Trump’s “stooge” and “fixer”. Now, though, he is walking away from Congress to serve Trump, without pretending that anything else is at stake.
Both sides also broadly agree that Nunes’s surprise career move is a sign of the times. A generation ago, no politician of either party would have given up on the prospect of chairing the House ways and means committee, a job that would have been Nunes’s for the taking if the Republicans were to win next year’s congressional midterms. The position is often described as the best in Washington, because of the sweeping power it grants over a wide range of policy issues.
Nunes, however, appears to have calculated that in today’s Republican party the real power lies not in committee but in proximity to the former president, who remains the GOP’s undisputed kingmaker and may harbor ambitions to be more than that as the 2024 presidential election draws closer.
Nunes went out his way, while intelligence committee chair, to clear Trump of accusations of collusion with Russia during the 2016 presidential campaign and promptly turned around to investigate the FBI’s reasons for looking into the matter in the first place. Trump rewarded him with a presidential Medal of Freedom, praising his “fortitude to take on the media, the FBI, the intelligence community, the Democrat party, foreign spies, and the full power of the Deep State”.
Nunes, 48, is in many ways a poster child for the notion that, in today’s politics, extreme partisanship pays. While his unwavering allegiance to Trump and frequent spouting of freewheeling conspiracy theories caused his popularity in the agricultural district he represents in California’s…
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