Photo: Charlie Neibergall/AP
It’s yet another token of the chaotic beginning of the second Trump administration that the confirmation of Mike Huckabee to serve as U.S. Ambassador to Israel received little or no attention beyond the ranks of those mostly focused on Middle Eastern affairs. The Senate quietly okayed him on a near party-line vote (the intensely pro-Israeli Democratic Senator John Fetterman broke ranks to support him) on Thursday.
When Huckabee’s appointment was first announced back in early December, it was mostly interpreted as a sign that any vestige of U.S. support for a two-state solution of the Israeli-Palenstinian conflict was totally dead, since Huck has been opposing it throughout his entire career in national politics. But then Trump moved the goalposts by announcing his bizarre proposal to turn Gaza into a high-end resort, after which old-school Islamophobic support for Israeli settler extremism just wasn’t notable any more. So it wasn’t that newsworthy that the administration was sending as an ambassador to that war-torn part of the world a man who viewed the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory as simply the reassertion of a deed to exclusive possession of “Judea and Samaria” (the biblical name for the original territory of the Northern and Southern Kingdoms of Israel) that God Almighty had given to his chosen people 3,500 years ago. Tough luck for the people that lived in the West Bank or Gaza right now: deeds are deeds.
But his new gig aside, Mike Huckabee’s soft landing as ambassador to a country where he had been leading conservative Christian tour groups (over 100) for years completed a remarkable trajectory for a man who was once a serious contender for the presidency itself. Some younger Americans may never have heard of Huck, or might consider him a relic from a long-lost pre-Trump era of Republican politics (even though he’s nine years younger than Trump). But in significant ways he was a MAGA predecessor who paved the way for Trump’s accession to power. Here’s a look back at how:
Huck the populist
Huckabee’s 2008 presidential candidacy was a lot more successful than expected, beginning with his upset win over Mitt Romney and John McCain in the Iowa Caucuses. He fell short in the end, mostly because he just wasn’t very good at fundraising and got caught up in a demolition derby that only the universally known war hero McCain was able to survive. But in a sign of how rigid Reagan-style conservatism had become as the 21st-century began, Huck got a reputation as a “populist,” mostly because he sparred with the old-line fiscal hawks of the Club for Growth (which Huckabee called the “Club for Greed”), didn’t pledge allegiance to globalization, and had unorthodox views on taxes (backing the cultish “Fair Tax,” a perennially popular item on right-wing talk radio). Most of all, he didn’t celebrate wealth as an end in itself, which made him an advocate of “class warfare” according to his conservative critics.
Huck’s “populism,” sense of humor, and breezy style that included frequent music performances with his bass guitar made him a mainstream media favorite, despite views on social issues that should have horrified cosmopolitan types. So he did precede Trump in refusing lockstep ideological positions and campaigning as something on an entertainer.
Huck the messianic figure
Mike Huckabee was probably the most popular national Republican politician between George W. Bush and Donald Trump among conservative evangelical voters. That’s not surprising, notwithstanding his popularity among secular media folk. He was (and is) a career Southern Baptist minister who did not dissent from the Christian Right on any major issue of public policy. He was particularly hard-line on abortion, referring to legalized abortion as a “Holocaust” on more than one occasion. In his landmark 2008 campaign he appealed to grassroots conservative Christians who didn’t share the opportunism of Christian Right leaders who backed better-financed candidates like Fred Thompson (the candidate of the National Right to Life Committee), Mitt Romney (backed by Christian Right warhorse Paul Weyrich) and Rudy Giuliani (endorsed by Pat Robertson). In this respect, too, Huckabee was a populist alternative, and did much better at the ballot box than previous preacher-politicians like Robertson.
Conservative evangelicals didn’t really have a candidate in 2012 (when Huckabee passed up running), and by 2016, when Huck did run again, their leaders mostly backed Ted Cruz and then the people in the pews fell deeply in love with Trump, a romance that has endured.
Huck the nativist
When Huckabee started running for president in 2007, Republican opinion on immigration mostly followed the lead of George W. Bush and John McCain, who favored what was known as “comprehensive immigration reform” but that nativists denounced as “amnesty” because it allowed undocumented immigrants to stick around and even become citizens. Huckabee sharply differed from the consensus, opposing “amnesty” and even flirting with (and later embracing) elimination of birthright citizenship. He even signed onto a anti-amnesty “pledge” drafted by Stephen Miller’s old boss and future Trump Attorney General Jeff Sessions. He (and to some extent Mitt Romney in 2012) demonstrated to future candidates like Trump there was a big constituency associated with hostility to “open borders.”
Huck the redundant
By the time Huckabee ran for president again in 2016, he had lost his head start along the trail he blazed for a new style of post-Reagan conservative. I happened to be in Iowa reporting on his final campaign stop in that sad and doomed candidacy, calling Huck the “once-popular populist:”
[Huckabee] was the runaway winner in the caucuses eight years ago….[H]e did everything he could to position himself as a “populist” candidate with strong conservative evangelical support this time around. But then Donald Trump showed up and ate half his lunch while Ted Cruz ate the other half.
At the age of 60, his time had passed.
Huck the MAGA dad
Before his ambassadorial appointment, Mike Huckabee’s most notable contribution to the Trump cause was his daughter, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a fixture in his own campaigns who became the 45th president’s most-respected press secretary by a good margin. She went on to win (with relatively little opposition) the office her father had occupied for a decade, the governorship of Arkansas, where she is often rumored to be planning a future presidential campaign of her own (she’s only 42 at present). Now they are both laboring in the same MAGA vineyard, albeit thousands of miles apart. But Huck the elder undoubtedly wonders now and then what might have been.
