by Tim Alberta
But it was unsustainable. Between the lives and treasure lost fighting a pair of Middle East quagmires, the devastation to America’s manufacturing sector wreaked by automation and outsourcing, the hoarding of corporate profits and the widening chasm of income equality, the declining faith in institutions ranging from the media to organized religion, the recklessness of the financial class, and the nation’s rapidly darkening ethnic complexion, voters had cause to question whether the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board truly had their best interests at heart.
The revolt was near. Not everyone could see it—and not all those who did took it seriously. Trump saw it. He took it seriously. And he became its voice, as the unlikeliest of insurgents, the commercial tycoon who cheated the little guy, who employed illegal workers, who made his products overseas, and who enhanced his inherited fortune through scams and fixers and lawsuits, railing against a shredded social contract from the gilded penthouse of his Manhattan skyscraper.
With the people taking to the streets, hoisting flags and chanting against the government—ostensibly in protest of spending, taxation, infringement of liberty—Trump stepped to the front lines of the cultural conflict. By securing a regular place on the airwaves of Fox News, by propagating lies about the president’s birthplace, by attacking the left in ways no leader of the Republican Party would dare consider, he adopted a movement, and a movement adopted him.
“The Tea Party was a very important event in the history of our country. And those people are still there. They haven’t changed their views,” Trump says. “The Tea Party still exists—except now it’s called Make America Great Again.”
His conquest of the right was sufficient to win the presidency. Yet the circumstances of his victory were freakish if not fluky. And the truth is, presidents of the United States come and go. Most are transitional, as historians have long observed. Only a select few are transformational. To be transformational, to durably alter the American identity, Trump would have to do more than bend conservatism to his will. He would have to redefine the Republican Party.
THE PRESIDENT IS RACING TOWARD A MINEFIELD.
His longtime lawyer Michael Cohen is preparing to testify in front of the House Oversight Committee, having already implicated Trump in several criminal conspiracies.
A special counsel’s dual-track investigation—of possible collusion between Trump’s campaign and the Russian government in 2016, and of whether the president obstructed that inquiry—is drawing to a close, with potentially ruinous consequences for himself, his administration, and his political and personal associates.
Finally, having reopened the government on a short-term basis, allowing congressional negotiators to go through the motions of pursuing a nonexistent compromise on border funding, he faces the specter of another shutdown in one week’s time. Sensing that a deal is improbable, Trump is preparing to take the unprecedented step of declaring a national emergency, redirecting other pools of money toward the construction of his promised wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. But the plan is fraught with peril; myriad legal challenges are certain, and congressional opposition could thwart the president’s end run around the legislative branch.
Whispers of impeachment gust through every corridor of the Capitol. Having retaken control of the House of Representatives in November, Democrats confront daily pressure, from the party’s base and from within their own ranks, to vote on Trump’s eviction from office.
It is the Republicans, however, who control the Senate. And only with a two-thirds vote of the upper chamber can Trump be removed. The president’s fate is in the hands of his own tribe.
“The Republican Party was in big trouble,” Trump says. “I brought the party back. The Republican Party is strong. The Republican Party is strong.”
He takes a long pause.
“They’ve got to remain faithful. And loyal.”
Chapter One
February 2008
“These isms are gonna eat us alive.”
SHE WAS SHAKEN WITH DISBELIEF, THEN ABLAZE WITH DEFIANCE, the churn of emotion ultimately yielding a pure, righteous fury. It was mere minutes until the pinnacle of her professional life: introducing her favored presidential candidate, in the heat of a contested Republican primary, at the Conservative Political Action Conference. This felt like an inflection point for the party, and Laura Ingraham, the acid-tongued radio host, had prepared accordingly. Worried that Republicans would succumb to nominating John McCain, the ideologically autonomous senator who had betrayed the right on everything from tax policy to campaign finance reform, Ingraham readied a blistering attack on the Grand Old Party’s front-runner and a final plea for voters to rally behind the true conservative in the race: Mitt Romney.
It mattered not that Romney was a Mormon, nor that he’d piloted a controversial program in Massachusetts requiring individuals to buy health insurance, nor that he was an opportunistic centrist with shape-shifting views on abortion and gay rights. The conservative movement, and the loudest voices on talk radio—Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, and Ingraham herself—had fallen for the former governor.
Everything about Romney screamed presidential: his elegant wife, his five strapping sons, his vintage jawline, his flawless coif of black with flecks of silver distinguishing his temples. He was a wealthy business guru who had created tens of thousands of jobs. He was a technocrat and a turnaround specialist, having rescued the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics from financial ruin. He was a fiscal messiah who preached the gospel of free markets and low taxes and deregulation.
And for whatever his faults, Romney was strong when it came to McCain’s greatest weakness: immigration.
McCain had long been viewed warily by the right wing of the Republican Party. While celebrated for his Vietnam heroism—he spent five and a half years as a prisoner of war in the Hanoi Hilton, refusing the early release offered due to his father’s rank as a four-star admiral1—the Arizona senator reveled in deviating from party orthodoxy. He opposed his onetime rival George W. Bush’s tax cuts after losing to him in the GOP primary of 2000. He decried the administration’s use of torture and advocated for closing the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay. He teamed with Wisconsin Democrat Russ Feingold to rewrite the nation’s campaign finance laws, undermining the GOP’s structural cash advantages. On a personal level, McCain could be gruff and churlish, prone to angry outbursts that left colleagues questioning his steadiness. “The thought of his being president sends a cold chill down my spine,” Senator Thad Cochran of Mississippi, a Republican, told the Boston Globe in 2008. “He is erratic. He is hotheaded. He loses his temper, and he worries me.”2
But McCain’s unforgivable sin came in 2007. Along with the “Liberal Lion,” Ted Kennedy, he led the charge in Congress to pass Bush’s comprehensive immigration reform plan—including a path to citizenship for millions of illegal residents. The fallout was devastating. McCain took a beating from the right, which, combined with the early mismanagement of his 2008 campaign, nearly ended his second bid for the White House before it began.
Even as his pirate ship of a campaign steadied, and McCain climbed back into contention, his vulnerability was all the more exposed. Republican candidates had expected the 2008 primary fight to revolve around two issues: the domestic economy and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. There was no shortage of discussion and debate on these topics. Yet more visceral for GOP voters, especially those in the lily-white early-nominating states of Iowa and New Hampshire, was immigration. The fear was that by offering “amnesty” to millions of foreign-born intruders, Republicans threatened to destabilize the economy while staining the American social fabric.
During a town hall meeting in New Hampshire in the late summer of 2007, McCain grew exasperated upon hearing yet another voter raise concerns about Mexican immigrants endangering her community. “Ma’am, you live in New Hampshire. We’re two thousand miles from the southern border,” the senator said. “What are you worried about, a bunch of angry Fre
nch Canadians?”
McCain’s traveling staff, which due to financial troubles had been pared back to campaign manager Rick Davis and a few local organizers, howled at the remark. But as they spoke afterward, McCain warned Davis that the issue could derail his candidacy. “If we’re going to get this in New Hampshire,” McCain said, “we’re going to get this everywhere.”
The rival campaigns reached a similar conclusion and began to recalibrate, seeking tougher tones to channel the ire of their electorate. Fortunately for McCain, many of his opponents were ill equipped to attack him on the issue: Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor, was a longtime friend and an immigration dove himself; former Arkansas governor and onetime Baptist minister Mike Huckabee had a similarly soft record; Texas congressman Ron Paul’s libertarian worldview called for a free flow of goods and people; and former senator Fred Thompson, like the rest of the field, lacked the viability to inflict damage on McCain.
The exception was Romney. He methodically chiseled away at McCain’s immigration record, painting him as a career politician oblivious to the plight of working Americans. The irony, in retrospect, is that Romney now realizes that the churning resentment among voters had far less to do with people coming in than it did with jobs going out—something he and other Republicans spent little time discussing, having accepted as canon the political infallibility of free markets.
“It was evident that certain industries would be substantially affected and harmed on a disproportionate basis—the auto industry, mining, metals—[and] the argument was, well, in the long run this is all good for the country, and as a nation we’ll do better,” Romney says. “I think the evidence is that as a nation we did do better. But if you’re working in an auto factory in Detroit you’re not doing better, and if you’re working in Ohio or Indiana for a car factory or a steel factory, you’re not doing better. Your life has been devastated. You had a home, a community. Suddenly the community becomes almost a ghost town. You can’t sell your home because who wants to buy a home in Lordstown, Ohio, when GM pulls out and there’s just no one else moving in? These people are very angry, and the elites, Republicans and Democrats in power, didn’t do anything about it, and didn’t really think about what the implications would be for those disproportionately affected. So, people were very angry—and continue to be angry.”
Convinced that immigration was the galvanic issue of the race, Romney didn’t limit his attacks to McCain. He savaged Huckabee as well, hoping to undermine the preacher’s down-home populism. The former Arkansas governor had fought for illegal minors in the state to qualify for college scholarships, inspired by the story of a local high school valedictorian who was brought to the United States when he was four years old. “If a cop pulls over a car for speeding, he gives the ticket to the dad, not to the kid in the backseat,” Huckabee says. “I wanted this kid to go to college and become a doctor and pay taxes, rather than just have him pick tomatoes while the government subsidizes him for the rest of his life.”
Things got especially testy in Iowa. With McCain skipping the evangelical-laden caucuses to train his efforts on New Hampshire, where he had legendarily revived his 2000 primary bid, Romney and Huckabee escalated their attacks on one another down the home stretch, each man sensing that a victory in the Hawkeye State was their only springboard to capture the party’s nomination. Romney’s operation was cutthroat: Several former staffers recall handing out flyers in Iowa with a picture of the Mexican consulate in Little Rock, Arkansas, asking why Governor Huckabee had permitted so many Mexicans to work illegally in poultry factories.
“There were a lot of things Romney’s people should have apologized for. We were constantly putting out fires that his people were starting,” Huckabee says. “I had never seen a more disingenuous campaign in trying to portray somebody who was anything but conservative as more conservative than everyone else on the stage. It was truly laughable.”
While losing ground thanks to Romney’s sustained assault, Huckabee reached into his own bag of tricks. Speaking with a reporter from the New York Times Magazine in December, Huckabee asked, “Don’t Mormons believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers?”3
This was the last election in which social media would not play a dominant role—and yet even still, Huckabee’s quote went viral, dumping kerosene on the fire already burning in Iowa. He quickly apologized to Romney; ten years later, Huckabee still insists the comment was born out of ignorance rather than animus. Either way, it played into a whisper campaign that sought to cast his rival’s Mormon faith in a suspicious light. And in the closing days of the Iowa race, Huckabee ran a now-famous television ad in which he spoke directly to the camera in front of a Christmas tree, framed by the corner of a white bookshelf that gave the unambiguous appearance of a cross.4 This, paired with his remark to the Times, struck no one as coincidental, given the outsize influence Christian voters held over the outcome of the Iowa caucuses.
Ultimately, the sequence played out perfectly for McCain: Huckabee won Iowa, weakening Romney, whose loss of momentum allowed McCain to win New Hampshire and South Carolina. With Romney starved of an early-state victory, Huckabee strapped for cash, Giuliani exiting after a poor performance in Florida, and the other fringe candidates a nonfactor, it was McCain’s nomination to lose.
But Romney would not quit. Pouring millions of his own fortune into the campaign, he hung around, amassing enough delegates to remain mathematically alive and stirring an eleventh-hour optimism on the right that McCain could be defeated. Romney’s speech to CPAC on February 7, then, was meant to commence a last stand, rallying the conservative troops against the reviled front-runner.
Instead, with the endgame increasingly apparent, and his political future to consider, Romney sat down on the eve of the event and crafted a withdrawal speech.
Nobody told Ingraham. When Romney’s director of conservative outreach, Gary Marx, picked her up for the event, the radio host still believed she was calling for the storming of McCain. Informed that Romney was quitting, Ingraham looked puzzled at first, the news not fully registering. She then became agitated, promising Marx and other Romney staffers that she would change his mind. “If none of you can convince him, I will,” she huffed. Confronting Romney backstage at the event, Ingraham pleaded with him to reconsider. To no avail: The candidate said his mind was made up. Ingraham looked volcanic. Romney’s aides wondered whether it was a good idea to send her out onstage.
Minutes later, Ingraham strode to the lectern inside the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington. She appeared visibly torn between delivering the scorched-earth speech she had prepared and giving the decaffeinated version the party now needed. “I don’t think it’s enough to say that you were a foot soldier in the Reagan revolution,” she said, mocking McCain’s claim to the Gipper mantle. “I think the question is, what have you been doing for conservatism lately?”
The crowd roared lustily. With both McCain and Huckabee set to speak after Romney at CPAC, and attendees still unaware that their champion was about to quit, Ingraham, dressed for a funeral in her black jacket, dark blouse, and cross necklace, announced, “He is a national security conservative. He is a proud social conservative. And he is a fiscal conservative. In other words, Mitt Romney is the conservative’s conservative.”
The boy band–shrieking welcome of Romney onto the stage quickly dissolved into a bad breakup melancholy at the realization of the news he’d come to share. “If I fight on, in my campaign, all the way to the convention”—he was drowned out by cheers. Romney looked as though he were putting the family dog to sleep. It was a pained expression, his lips pursed, his eyes betraying the fact that he was sincerely concerned about the state of the country and had a whole lot more to say about it.
“I want you to know, I have given this a lot of thought,” Romney said. “I would forestall the launch of a national campaign, and, frankly, I would make it easier for Senator Clinton or Obama to win.” Cries of protest now filled the ballroom. “Frankly
, in this time of war, I simply cannot let my campaign be a part of aiding a surrender to terror.”
When McCain arrived at the event two hours later, his coronation as the now-presumptive Republican nominee was interrupted by boos and jeers. “Many of you have disagreed strongly with some positions I have taken in recent years. I understand that,” McCain said. “I might not agree with it, but I respect it for the principled position it is. And it is my sincere hope that even if you believe I have occasionally erred in my reasoning as a fellow conservative, you will still allow that I have, in many ways important to all of us, maintained the record of a conservative.”
The next morning, the two biggest news stories in America were McCain clinching the GOP nomination and pop star Britney Spears leaving a mental hospital. Both were subjects of popular psychoanalysis; in the case of McCain, the question was whether he could possibly placate conservatives. It wouldn’t be easy. As right-wing author and provocateur Ann Coulter had told Fox News host Sean Hannity days earlier, “If he’s our candidate, then Hillary is going to be our girl, Sean, because she’s more conservative than he is.”5
When Bill O’Reilly hosted Ingraham on his Fox News show, hours after her performance at CPAC, he asked whether the hard-liners on talk radio would now cease their bludgeoning of McCain. Ingraham protested, saying their critiques had been substantive and demanding evidence to the contrary.
“They call him ‘Juan,’” O’Reilly replied.
IF THE RIGHT’S LOVE AFFAIR WITH ROMNEY MIGHT HAVE BEEN FOR lack of a better option, then its loathing of McCain owed in part to frustrations with the man they called “Dubya.”