WASHINGTON — Few people outside Houston had heard of Dan Crenshaw until a few days after he won a seat in Congress, when Saturday Night Live made him the butt of a tasteless joke about his eye patch.
The controversy brought rare attention to a freshman who hadn’t even taken office. But he doesn’t want that, or his combat injury as a Navy SEAL, to define him.
“You don’t have to get blown up to have perspective in life,” he told The Dallas Morning News.
The Houston Republican has enjoyed a stature that few in Congress achieve so quickly, making waves on social media during talk show appearances and publishing his first book last month.
The 36-year-old is even mentioned as a potential candidate for president in 2024, with just 18 months in office under his belt. Crenshaw says he hasn’t put much thought into such “flattering” rumors, staying focused on fulfilling a politician’s duty to serve as a leader.
“Your job as a representative is to lead on political fronts, on legislative fronts, on culture fronts, all of those,” he said. “[My book] is definitely a cultural guidebook; this does lay out a vision for what I believe American culture should aspire to.”
Crenshaw’s book, Fortitude: American Resilience in the Era of Outrage, reads as a memoir, a political analysis and a self-improvement guide squeezed into a 400-page argument for how an everyday American should act in society.
It comes highly recommended. President Donald Trump urged his Twitter followers to read it last week, calling him “a fantastic guy,” though the book is notably silent on Trump.
That’s intentional, Crenshaw said, to keep it from becoming too political.
“Each chapter is a lesson and a way of thinking about hardship, a way of thinking about how you should live with purpose, how you should feel accountability, how you should feel duty, how you should challenge yourself,” he said. “I want you to come away with concrete lessons you can implement in your daily life, but also deeper, philosophical lessons.”
Much of his worldview is informed by his decade as a SEAL, particularly his struggle to regain his vision after he was wounded by an improvised explosive device blast in Afghanistan in 2012.
Doctors saved his left eye after weeks of blindness and several risky surgeries, but he lost his right eye.
The eye patch he usually wears in public has made him hard to miss at the Capitol.
At SNL, it inspired comic Pete Davidson to quip that he looked like a “hit man in a porno movie” — a joke that fell so flat, the show invited Crenshaw to appear the following week to tamp down the uproar.
The joke itself, Crenshaw admits in his book, was “pretty funny.” What he took issue with was Davidson roasting him and other Republicans as “gross people,” and making light of being wounded in war.
“It was dismissive and clearly an indication that the reason behind my ‘gross look’ didn’t really matter,” Crenshaw wrote. “What really mattered was my political affiliation and therefore all bets were off, all decency eschewed, because this was about winning a battle in the culture war.”
Crenshaw forgave Davidson on the next week’s episode, a turning point that may have saved the young comedian’s job while also providing a windfall of attention for himself.
“Redemption prevailed,” he wrote.
In his book, Crenshaw laments “outrage culture” causing a “moral decay” of American society. He offers a guide to achieving the “mental fortitude” that citizens need to overcome this decay, in his view, with lessons on perspective, perseverance and character.
“I wonder how a generation shaped by the comforts of victimhood culture, unaccustomed to adversity and allergic to sacrifice, with less and less desire to preserve our values and way of life, will react when we are faced with the next great war, or depression, or civil conflict,” Crenshaw wrote, before a pandemic hurled the world into a flash recession. “We can’t even be sure of their reaction to offensive Halloween costumes, let alone invading armies.”
Crenshaw acknowledged the decay may be more “surface level” as America weathers the coronavirus pandemic.
“On the ground, I'm not seeing people running around with their hair on fire,” he said. “However, on Twitter, it certainly does seem like people are running around with their hair on fire. I want to believe that Americans are being as Americans often are, as pioneers, resilient, with a `we can take on anything’ mentality. I do think that still represents a vast majority of Americans, and if it doesn't, we’re screwed.”
An entire chapter is dedicated to the run-in with Davidson. He and Crenshaw put on a show of unity, cracking jokes and burying the hatchet on live late night TV before millions of viewers.
“Americans can forgive one another. We can remember what brings us together,” Crenshaw said at the time.
He was still a relative newcomer to politics then, having taken a medical retirement from the Navy in 2016. He completed a master’s in public administration at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government in 2017.
Months later, Houston Republican Rep. Ted Poe announced his retirement after seven terms. Crenshaw jumped into the race a week later.
He barely made the top two in a nine-candidate primary, but he won the runoff decisively and then beat his Democratic opponent with 53% of the vote in a district that had become increasingly competitive in recent years.
Since then, Crenshaw has become a GOP darling and Democratic boogeyman. He was part of a small group of Republican lawmakers who met last week with Trump in the State Dining Room of the White House.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the campaign arm of the House Democrats, is targeting his district in November, slamming Crenshaw over his “attempts to make himself a meme-worthy conservative superstar” since coming into office.
“What I’ve strived to do since that moment is define myself differently than just the 15 minutes of fame on Saturday Night Live,” Crenshaw said.
Still, he’s hardly nonpartisan.
Crenshaw has lately been slamming Democrats over their demands for a fourth massive coronavirus relief package, accusing them of trying to stoke anger against Republicans for refusing to go along with additional funding for hospitals and testing and calling for the end of stay-at-home orders across the country.
“It’s really unbelievable,” he said. “When you’re on the inside like I am and know what’s really going on and you watch how effective they are at public manipulation. I just can’t even believe it.”
While he casts the Democrats’ allegations about Republican indifference as manipulation of public opinion, he’s more sympathetic to the anger seen at pro-Trump demonstrations where protesters pressure governors to lift stay-home orders.
"There’s a difference between outrage culture and righteous indignation and righteous outrage. I’m not saying never be mad at something, I am saying funnel your anger in productive, smart ways, and not everybody is capable of doing that,” he said.
Crenshaw has made an effective spokesperson for the GOP in a viral video call clash last month with HBO’s Real Time host Bill Maher over the Trump administration’s handling of the pandemic and, in recent days, using his social media profile to ramp up pressure to reopen the country.
“I don’t live up to those principals in my book perfectly, and I never claim I do,” he said, adding that his worldview isn’t entirely “black and white, and not everything is about President Trump.”
