Bad Politician: When Not Giving the Speech They Wanted Changed Everything
A new series for readers who want to survive politics, stay human in public life, and understand how quiet choices decide who stays, who walks away, and the leaders we all live with.
The beginning of the end of my time as a Republican arrived in a bright ballroom at the Filipino Community Center in Waipahu, Hawaii. It was August 2016, at our state’s party convention, and I was the youngest female party leader of any state legislature in the country. For months I had been navigating my colleagues’ embrace of then-candidate Donald Trump, and I couldn’t give the endorsement speech my colleagues were expecting. So I decided to do a Q&A with the delegates instead. It seemed like the best path forward.
It turned out to be my point of no return.
Before I tell you this story, I should explain why I’m telling it here. For most of my career, I tried to make sense of politics from the inside, where the pressure is constant, the choices rarely clean, and the costs personal. Stepping back has given me something I never had in office: perspective. So in a series of columns, beginning with this one, I will be writing about the political world we’ve built, how it changes people, and how we might do things differently. I hope these stories work as both field notes and a cautionary manual for anyone who might step into public life.
This is one of the moments that led me here.
I had paced my apartment for hours the night before, reciting the perils of delivering my official remarks, like someone on an old Nickelodeon game show might rehearse to avoid buckets of slime, ball pits, and flying foam barriers. My younger sister Sarah watched, offering reminders whenever I missed a trap.
Sarah was there for all the best and worst moments of my political career. She knew where the tripwires lay as well as I did. I needed to provide an update on the legislative session at the convention, where most participants were there to nominate Trump. There had already been a formal complaint lodged against me for criticizing his candidacy. I’d made more enemies since.
Now, all anyone wanted from me was a full-throated endorsement of the Republican nominee, something I knew I couldn’t give.
As the Republican leader of the Hawaii House of Representatives, I’d tried to carve a different path from Make America Great Again. I promised to work with Democrats where possible and to offer solutions, not just obstruction. I told my caucus that the country was going in the wrong direction, and that Trump’s candidacy was speeding it up. Hawaii often bucks national trends, and I believed we could do that again. My approach succeeded in the legislature but agitated most of my fellow Republicans.
In its most quotable form, this angst emerged on the House floor when Bob McDermott stood over me, red-faced, and shouted: “Be a fucking Republican!”
Bob is a former Marine and father of eight. His jocular persona often made up for his politics and penchant for bombast. I rank him high on the list of people I trusted most in the legislature, partly because he proved over and over that he’d always stab me in the front. He’s also the first person to help anyone who asks. Politics taught me that people are always mixed bags.
In an email to party leaders leading to the convention, Bob had started a new round of speculation that I was actively planning to switch parties. That wasn’t true. At that point I still believed what I’d told my friends and family two years earlier when my predecessor and one of my best friends asked me to switch parties with him: “It’s not over yet.”
I still believed we could change things.
“So just say that,” Sarah said, interrupting my downward spiral. “Tell them you still believe the party can and should change.”
It was an appealing thought. But I’d said the same thing at the last convention. This time, I knew that if I wasn’t praising Trump, no one would be listening. For better or worse, I settled on doing a Q&A from the stage. Radical transparency would, at the very least, shed light on the situation.
On the morning of the convention, my parents, Sarah, and my niece dressed in bright blue “Beth Fukumoto for State House” T-shirts and joined me in the ballroom-turned-convention hall.
They settled in at a round table in the back, prepared for either a long day or an early exit. My niece plugged her pink panda headphones into her pink silicone-encased Kindle, oblivious to the tension the rest of us felt as I stepped on stage.
Standing at the podium, I felt a tinge of grief as I looked out at the crowd decked out in red hats and shirts with the name of a nominee who embodied everything I’d tried to stop.
The faces looking back at me with contempt weren’t strangers. They were people who’d invested time, energy, and money into my campaign to unseat a Democratic incumbent because I’d given them hope that the Republican takeover sweeping the mainland could happen in Hawaii, too.
For them, nominating Trump was the continuation of that movement, a push toward more Republican victories. For me, it was the end. They had tolerated my centrist approach until Trump promised they could win without compromise or change.
“I know a lot of you have concerns about me,” I began. “So, instead of a speech, I thought we should just have a conversation.” I gestured at the microphone in the middle of the convention floor. “Whatever questions you have, just ask, and I’ll answer.”
The first question was so benign I don’t remember it clearly. It was something about a piece of legislation, and for a moment, I thought I might escape the next 15 minutes unscathed.
Next, someone asked simply, without any extra commentary, why I didn’t support Donald Trump. The question was cordial.
“I think he has a very narrow view of Republican values that I don’t share. We believe in opportunity for everyone. We should be a party for everyone. I want a party that will be successful here in Hawaii and make sure power isn’t just with a group of people who’ve been in the legislature forever,” I answered. “I just don’t see Donald Trump as someone who will help that cause.”
This audience had heard me speak enough times over the years to know it always came back to this. I ran because I wanted to take power from the people who had too much and give it to those who had none.
Repeating it here seemed to calm some, but not everyone. The crowd was starting to emit a guttural, disapproving hiss. The mood was shifting. But I was prepared.
“Last week, a group of third-graders visited me at the State Capitol,” I said. “I love when elementary students come to visit because they’re so candid. It’s a good gut check. And, if I ask them something, they’ll usually give me their parents’ opinions unfiltered.”
As expected, a few laughs scattered the room and the tension eased. One of the first hints people give you in politics is that talking about kids will always soften an audience. Another is that kids do, in fact, give you an accurate read of their parents’ opinions.
“So, after I showed them the House chambers and told them about my job, I asked if they had any questions. Like you, they asked me if I liked Donald Trump. I shrugged my shoulders and answered, ‘Not really.’ Then the little boy who asked me the question jumped up excitedly and agreed, ‘Yeah, he’s mean.’ And the other kids chimed in with the same comment. ‘He’s mean.’”
And just like that the boos began. Exposed to their colleagues’ hostility, the few moderates in the audience froze.
Our diplomatic party chair, Fritz Rohlfing, asked for calm. He didn’t get it. He came up behind me and moved to take the microphone so I could leave the stage. Instead, I gripped it tightly. We had a whole, wordless conversation in a fraction of a second. His eyes pleaded. I didn’t blink. He relented.
I turned back to the crowd. “Next question.”
What followed was a blur. People shouted statements disguised as questions, skipping the microphone altogether.
“You’re a stupid politician. Don’t you know you want a president that will bring out voters?”
The crowd laughed.
“I might be a bad politician,” I said, “but I’m an honest person.” More booing.
My niece looked up from her cartoons, wide-eyed. My parents sat tight-lipped. Sarah moved to the side of the room, standing tall in solidarity. I’d lost too much of the crowd.
They called for my resignation, urged me to switch parties.
At some point, my consciousness seemed to split. One part of me continued answering with defiance. Another part detached. Afterward, I had to piece together what I said from news articles and a YouTube video.
One reporter’s account was that “as the loud booing started,” I said, “I am not trying to change you, but I am trying to change it, I am trying to make room for people who have different opinions.” That sounds more articulate than I felt.
Mostly, I remember observing it all as if it were happening to someone else.
You can’t leave now, I told myself. You wanted a conversation. It’s just a little louder than you expected.
I was amused. It even seemed a little funny.
Then, I saw a man that people called Prophet saunter to the microphone, his bright red MAGA hat blending into the sea of red. I eyed him warily, knowing this roller-coaster of a convention was about to take its biggest plunge yet.
He was a faithful party attendee, memorable for his long white beard, booming voice, and insistence that we call him Prophet because he spoke on behalf of God. He was usually boisterous, bordering on belligerent, and he could only make the situation worse.
“We grew the party 50 percent off of this man,” he thundered, pointing to his MAGA hat and glowing with righteous indignation. “Why would you come against him?”
He smiled. “Now I like third-graders, but it’s gonna take them 15 years to vote.” The crowd responded with jeering laughter.
You were a fool to think this would end any other way, I chided myself.
“You’re right, you’re right,” I said aloud with a mild note of panic.
Pull it together. You sound defensive. They’ll think you’re scared.
I probably was.
The last question came from a statehouse candidate and an evangelical pastor who had always been kind to me. It was a relief to see his face at the front of the line.
“We’re looking for leadership,” he said mildly. I think he was trying to help. “It feels like you guys are part and parcel with the Democrats. … Even though you might not have much in common with him, he’s our nominee for President.
“Can you stand behind him?”
My heart sank. I’d counted on soft-spoken Christians. I’ll never understand how someone can preach a religion that teaches love above all, yet stand by the cruelty that took over our party. If he couldn’t see the problem, it was over.
He looked at me like I was the one who was lost. Like he was going to bring me back to the safety of the flock. A part of me will always crave that safety, but in that moment, I knew something had broken.
According to the news coverage, this is how it concluded:
“‘You can all boo me. The answer is I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m going to do about the President. I don’t like our nominee,’ Fukumoto said in the face of an audience growing so hostile that GOP Chairman Fritz Rohlfing had to call an end to the exchange.”
The last thing I heard as I left the stage was a woman claiming I was an agent of ISIS.
After the convention, the clips spread quickly. For years, I’d been known as a reasonable Republican, someone who negotiated compromises and stayed late to get consensus. Now, I was the woman booed by her own party for saying out loud what I’d always believed: that cruelty isn’t strength, and that winning doesn’t mean abandoning everyone who disagrees.
What I didn’t understand then was that the political moment I’d walked into — the red hats, the shouting, the demand that I “be a fucking Republican” — wasn’t just about me. It was the beginning of something that would swallow the party I grew up in, the one that taught me to work hard, debate honestly, and listen to my constituents.
I wasn’t the only one who felt the shift. Plenty of colleagues sensed it, too. But most convinced themselves it was temporary, or necessary, or something they could ignore until the winds changed back. For a while I told myself the same thing. Until I couldn’t.
Within a year, I would become one of the first elected Republicans to switch parties after Donald Trump’s inauguration. That choice cost me personal relationships, triggered angry phone calls from former supporters, and brought hate mail and death threats from across the country. I lost the identity I’d built since I was 20 — of being a “young Republican leader” and knowing where I fit in the ecosystem of politics. And after a while, staying in that position felt like trying to breathe underwater.
Eventually, I left office. Instead, I tried to change things from a distance: Teaching leadership to students who still believed change was possible. Coaching public officials to navigate pressure without losing themselves. Working on reforms to keep future leaders from the same traps and studying how systems fail and what it takes to rebuild them.
Slowly, I relearned how to care about politics without tying my sense of myself to surviving inside it.
And that’s the work I want to explore here – not the horse race or daily outrage, but the human side of public life. The part that determines whether people stay, whether they break, and what kind of leaders we end up with. I want to write for people trying to lead in their communities, or thinking about running for office, or simply trying to understand why politics feels so exhausting and what we can do about it.
As we go forward, this column will be about that quieter, harder work: the inner calculations, the emotional labor, the moments you decide whether to hold the line or redraw it. And the hope that there’s still something worth standing up for.
Beth Fukumoto served three terms in the Hawaiʻi House of Representatives and was the youngest woman in the U.S. to lead a major party in a legislature. She is one of The Renovator’s founding editors, a political columnist, and works with emerging public leaders in the U.S. and abroad.