A surprising start, a surprising end: The polarizing political career of Devin Nunes
A 22-year-old Devin Nunes launched his political career running against an longtime incumbent for a seat on the College of the Sequoias school board.
In that 1996 race, Nunes campaigned on a message of “Save the farm,” a reference to the college’s agricultural campus. The slogan suggested it was in danger of closing. On the contrary, the college board was merely looking for a bigger location to move it to; there was never any intention to shut it down.
No matter. The incumbent lost, and Nunes learned a tactic that has worked for him to this day: Create panic among the voters, even if based on an untruth, and capitalize on it.
Six years later, Nunes took on two veteran GOP lawmakers in a run for Congress. He beat Jim Patterson and Mike Briggs, two Fresnans who split the vote in their area while Nunes captured the most ballots in the Tulare County part of the then 21st District. Nunes won and has been in Congress since.
Creating angst has been Nunes’ speciality. In more recent times, he has harangued against “socialist Democrats” led by Nancy Pelosi, the San Francisco Democrat and House speaker. He reviles liberals and the media and accuses them of working together to destroy traditional values. He darkly says there is a “deep state” of shadowy government officials seeking to defeat the GOP. Such a conspiracy became pronounced in Nunes’ world when Donald Trump was president. Nunes became one of the president’s chief supporters, regularly defending him against attacks he perceived in the “fake” news media.
Now Nunes is ready to become part of the media — of a sort. He will leave Congress by the end of this month to go work as chief executive officer of Trump Media and Technology Group.
As surprising as his entry into the elected world 25 years ago, so too is his exit from it. But Nunes could not find a more tailor-made opportunity; years ago The Bee recommended he go to work for then-President Trump. And the voters in Fresno and Tulare counties could not be more fortunate to have the prospect of new representation that might actually focus on their problems.
Nunes did not represent well
The Bee’s last record of a town hall meeting that Nunes held in person with constituents, without charging admission or having a select audience, was in August of 2009. Nunes convened the meeting to talk about health-care reform efforts. He told the gathering of 225 at Clovis East High School that he opposed the measures that would become Obamacare.
Over the years, as his profile in Congress grew with his developing seniority, Nunes became more Beltway oriented and less inclined to work on his district’s issues. He opposed Obamacare because he did not want to give a win to President Obama; never mind it would be a good health-care policy for the significant number of low-income people in his district. Opposing Democratic initiatives, regardless of the actual good they might do, became Nunes’ mode.
In Trump, Nunes met a political twin brother from a different mother. Both saw the world in conspiratorial terms. Both wanted to dominate at seemingly any cost. Good public policy was no longer the goal; having power was. And telling the truth was only necessary when it furthered their ends.
Conspiracy talk on Fox News
Ever since the 2002 election, The Bee’s Editorial Board had recommended Nunes to voters. But that ended in 2018 when he refused to meet with the Editorial Board while he was in the throes of defending Trump from the Mueller investigation into ties his campaign might have had with Russian operatives two years before.
Nunes had also voted in 2017 for a GOP-backed reversal of Obamacare. More than 70,000 people in his district of 760,000 would have lost health-care coverage if that had passed. And Nunes no longer made any pretense of wanting to work with Democrats on legislation; he was done with bipartisanship.
No, his chief interest became frequent appearances on Fox News where he could spin more conspiracy theories and rail against Trump’s critics.
Now Trump has hired Nunes to be CEO of the social media platform, Truth Social, and a video streaming service called TMTG Plus.
“As CEO of TMTG, he would be in charge of the upcoming social media platform Truth Social, hoping to go toe-to-toe with the likes of Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Parag Agrawal of Twitter,” noted The Verge in its report on the hiring.
Maybe all those years of not having town halls were spent learning computer code for this social media future.
Joking aside, Nunes will go down in San Joaquin Valley history as one of its most polarizing politicians with little to show for accomplishments. The potential to do good was great; the actual results were underwhelming.
This story was originally published December 8, 2021 at 5:00 AM.