by Tim Alberta
“I dealt with it every day. Every. Single. Day,” Boehner says. “I went on TV and said, ‘Hawaii released the birth certificate; that’s good enough for me.’ I got my ass chewed out for weeks. You would have thought I was Satan himself.”
He adds, “There was at least a couple dozen members who believed it. These are members of Congress, but they aren’t in this world by themselves. Once upon a time, they would have belonged to the fringe. They weren’t the fringe anymore.”
“It wasn’t just in the conference. It was at home,” says Cantor. “I mean, we would encounter groups of people who absolutely took that to be the truth: [Obama] was not an American, he was a Muslim. . . . There was this rumor mongering, and frankly, I think, a racist play for votes.”
Polling throughout Obama’s presidency would reveal large numbers of Republican voters harboring stubborn doubts about his citizenship: 41 percent in a 2010 CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey; 43 percent in 2011, per Gallup; 61 percent in 2015, according to Public Policy Polling; and 72 percent in 2016, as found in an NBC News/SurveyMonkey poll.
Birtherism aside, the reality was that Republicans simply did not like Obama, and for many of them, civility was synonymous with surrender. Boehner learned this the hard way. When he and the president played a round of golf together in June 2011, along with Biden and Ohio governor John Kasich, the blowback was so furious from conservatives—on talk radio, in Boehner’s district, even in Congress—that he knew immediately it could never happen again.
“There were actually people who came in, Republican leaders of committees who would sit and say, ‘Mr. President, my being here is an act of courage. Do you realize how much damage it does to me to sit with you?’” Biden recalls. His voice pinches with anger. “Can you imagine saying that to a president? Well, that was said. That was said by more than two people I can name. And so, John got ripped for doing what the Congress and the president are supposed to do, which is actually see if they can collaborate for the public good. But as the Republican Party became more and more radicalized in the House, John was getting the living devil beaten out of him.”
Indeed, this was a strange new world for the Speaker. Boehner had played his share of hardball politics as a lieutenant to Newt Gingrich in the 1990s, an era of vicious political tribalism in its own right. But he had also watched Gingrich strike significant deals with his nemesis, President Bill Clinton. So, when signs mounted in 2011 of a conservative rebellion fermenting inside his conference, Boehner was dismissive. He knew what these hard-charging freshmen wanted, because he’d been in their shoes.
This was a costly misreading of his members. Much had changed since Boehner came to Congress in 1990—the inception of Fox News, the proliferation of super PACs, the decline of trust in government and institutions, the election of a black president—and the Republican Party had evolved accordingly. By the time Boehner came to terms with this transformation, it was too late.
“He thought of himself as someone who was of the Tea Party mentality before the Tea Party was a thing,” says Anne Bradbury, who served as Boehner’s floor director, one of the top staff positions in Congress. “So, I think there were some assumptions made that he got these people, and that they would see he was one of them. But that really never came together.”
OBAMA TRIED TO PUT AN END TO THE INSANITY ON APRIL 27, 2011.
Without advance notice, the White House posted a long-form version of the president’s birth certificate online. Suspicion of Obama’s citizenship had percolated on the outskirts of the internet since 2008, when his campaign released a copy of the standard “certification of live birth” issued by Hawaii. Imaginations ran wild on the right for the next three years. A new breed of desperado, emboldened by the digital age, took to the internet spreading varying claims of the document’s fraudulence. No amount of testimony otherwise—from government officials, genealogical researchers, even conservative pundits—could kill the conspiracy theory. Only by releasing his long-form certificate, the doubters said, could Obama prove himself legitimate.
The president was loath to lend validity to the debate. His sudden decision to share the document caught Washington sleeping, as broadcast networks scrambled to interrupt programming with the news bulletin.5 “We do not have time for this kind of silliness,” Obama said inside the White House Briefing Room. “We’ve got better stuff to do. I’ve got better stuff to do.”
The annoyance in his voice was reserved for one heckler above the rest, the man whose image was now being shown in a split screen next to Obama on the cable channels: Donald J. Trump.
The sixty-four-year-old billionaire, a real estate mogul and star of NBC’s hit show The Apprentice, had been a fixture of American pop culture for decades. His brand was lent to books and beauty pageants, his name splayed garishly across buildings, commodities, and golf courses. The son of a successful Queens developer, Trump carried a perpetual sense of insecurity in regard to the Manhattan nobility and was determined to make noise with his money, investing in schemes and projects befitting his flamboyant persona. Standing six foot three, with a vulgar New York brogue and his trademark mane of tumid blond, Trump rarely lacked for attention.
He was a latecomer to the birther movement. In fact, he had first commented publicly on Obama’s citizenship just a month earlier, during an interview with ABC’s Good Morning America. Trump called the circumstances surrounding Obama’s birthplace “very strange,” adding, “The reason I have a little doubt—just a little—is because he grew up and nobody knew him.”6
This was not true. Obama’s upbringing on the big island was thoroughly documented by friends and family members, not to mention verified by journalists and academics. But that didn’t stop Trump from peddling falsehoods, with increasing certainty, in the days that followed. On ABC’s The View, he asked, “Why doesn’t he show his birth certificate? There’s something on that birth certificate that he doesn’t like.” On Fox News, he said Obama “spent millions of dollars trying to get away from this issue.” On Laura Ingraham’s radio show, he said of the certificate, “Somebody told me . . . that where it says ‘religion,’ it might have ‘Muslim.’” And on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Trump announced that Obama’s “grandmother in Kenya said, ‘Oh, no, he was born in Kenya, and I was there, and I witnessed the birth.’ Now, she’s on tape. I think that tape’s going to be produced fairly soon.”
In fact, the tape features Obama’s grandmother stating repeatedly that she did not witness the future president’s birth because it occurred in Hawaii and she lived in Kenya. But facts had never stood in the way of conservatives’ theorizing about Obama’s shadowy past: How he was raised by his radical father (who actually had abandoned the family when his son was two years old); how he inherited an anticolonial bias from living in Kenya (he spent part of his childhood in Indonesia after his mother remarried); how he was a Muslim (despite being baptized in 1998 and writing extensively about accepting Christ after being raised by his nonbelieving grandparents).
Trump would later claim that he never truly believed that Obama was born outside the United States. But Boehner, a frequent golfing buddy, says Trump absolutely did. “Oh yes. Oh yes. He wouldn’t have spent the money to send people to Hawaii and do the investigation if he didn’t believe it.”
Trump’s true beliefs, his intentions, his motivations—none of it really mattered. The fact of it was, he could say whatever he felt like, whenever he felt like it, and suffer no consequences. He was a superstar, a brand-name television personality who had spent decades mastering the game of media manipulation. He didn’t care if what he said about the president of the United States was unintelligible or factually inaccurate; it would be covered and covered widely.
This was America circa 2011, a nation seduced by celebrity and blissfully unaware of the cancerous effects. That year, another reality television personality, Kim Kardashian, whose career was launched by her role in a leaked sex tape, married basketball player Kris Humphries (not her costar
in said tape) in a televised ceremony that drew north of four million viewers.7 When the couple filed for divorce seventy-two days later, it was reported that they profited off their nuptials, having sold their wedding photos to People magazine for $1.5 million in addition to receiving the substantial TV royalties. (This, more than any activism on the left, made the case for gay marriage.)
Trump was one of the few people alive who could compete for ratings with the Kardashians. Not coincidentally, the surge of controversy—and publicity—surrounding his birther gambit accompanied the news that Trump was considering a presidential run. Again.
He first flirted with a bid for the White House in 1987, after publishing his best-selling book The Art of the Deal. Trump’s message over the next three decades would prove fairly consistent—and in certain cases, quite prescient.
“I’d make our allies pay their fair share,” he told Oprah Winfrey in 1988. “I think people are tired of seeing the United States ripped off.”
Two years later, talking to Playboy about the president, Trump said, “I like George [H. W.] Bush very much and support him and always will. But I disagree with him when he talks of a kinder, gentler America. I think if this country gets any kinder or gentler, it’s literally going to cease to exist.” (In that same interview, he predicted, “The working guy would elect me. He likes me.”)
And in 1999, he told Larry King, “I think that nobody’s really hitting it right. The Democrats are too far left. . . . The Republicans are too far right. I don’t think anybody’s hitting the chord.”
Trump came closest to pulling the trigger in 2000. Encouraged by former professional wrestler Jesse “The Body” Ventura’s winning Minnesota’s governorship as a member of the Reform Party, Trump launched an exploratory committee and changed his party registration in October 1999. Testing the waters, he described himself as “very pro-choice” and “very liberal when it comes to health care.”8 He also called for tighter immigration restrictions and new trade deals. Perhaps most memorable was his feverish five-month assault on Pat Buchanan, the populist favorite who challenged Bush in the 1992 GOP primary and was now running for the Reform nomination. Trump called the “anti-Semite” Buchanan a “Hitler-lover” who “doesn’t like the blacks” and “doesn’t like the gays.”9 Before dropping his candidacy in February 2000, Trump warned of Buchanan’s alleged extremism, “We must recognize bigotry and prejudice and defeat it wherever it appears.”10
Eleven years later, Trump would do something wildly out of character: apologize. Placing a telephone call to Buchanan one day, out of the blue, he told his former rival that he had been wrong to label him a racist. He even asked for forgiveness. Buchanan was stunned.
It was around the time of the Buchanan call, of course, that Trump was kicking off his birther crusade—and pondering once more a campaign for the presidency.
The prospect of Trump running in 2012 jolted the GOP. The expected Republican field was doing little to excite conservatives; Mitt Romney, the right-wing darling of 2008 and the presumed 2012 front-runner, was bleeding support thanks to the attention Obamacare had drawn to the program he had piloted in Massachusetts. Against this backdrop, Trump sent shudders through the party establishment when he accepted an invitation to address the Conservative Political Action Conference in February 2011.
This marked his first appearance at the annual carnival of politics and culture. Entering to the song “Money, Money, Money,” Trump fed the roaring masses with a formula that would later become all too familiar: attack, boast, promise. “I like Ron Paul. I think he is a good guy,” Trump said of the libertarian icon. “But, honestly, he just has zero chance of getting elected.” Trump reveled in the boos from Paul’s college-age supporters. “Tactics and strategy are involved in any form of leadership,” he went on. “I’m well acquainted with both. I’m also well-acquainted with winning, and that’s what this country needs right now: winning.” Finally, offering the guarantee of his presidency, Trump pledged, “Our country will be great again.”
Less celebrated were the remarks given a night later by Mitch Daniels, the Indiana governor, who was weighing a presidential bid of his own. Having once called for a “truce” on social issues in order to focus on America’s fiscal decline—eliciting jeers from the evangelical right—Daniels pleaded with the nation to unify around the sacrifices needed to make America solvent, delivering one of the more compelling speeches by a Republican in the twenty-first century.
“We face an enemy, lethal to liberty and even more implacable than those America has defeated before,” Daniels said.11 “We cannot deter it; there is no countervailing danger we can pose. We cannot negotiate with it, any more than with an iceberg or a Great White. I refer, of course, to the debts our nation has amassed for itself over decades of indulgence. It is the new Red Menace, this time consisting of ink. We can debate its origins endlessly and search for villains on ideological grounds, but the reality is pure arithmetic. No enterprise, small or large, public or private, can remain self-governing, let alone successful, so deeply in hock to others as we are about to be.”
Warning his fellow Republicans against pursuing the mutually assured destruction offered by the party’s ascendant right flank, Daniels concluded, “Purity in martyrdom is for suicide bombers.”
The Indiana governor had offered a vision, one grounded in realism and reasonableness, that elevated common purpose over cultural warfare. But few chose to see it. Trump’s alternative, a loud, swaggering, confrontational bravado, was a better fit for the Republican base. It was a clearer diagnosis of the country’s condition. And it was a sexier story for reporters to write.
Within a few months, Daniels ended his consideration of a presidential run and his speech was swept into the dustbin of history by the incessant coverage of Trump versus Obama. It came to a crescendo in late April, at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, with Trump in attendance as a guest of the Washington Post. Obama used the president’s traditional stand-up routine to skewer Trump, mockingly acknowledging his “credentials and breadth of experience.” As the crowded ballroom turned in his direction, journalists whooping with approval, Trump stared straight ahead. He would have the last laugh.
A PROMISE IS THE MOST DANGEROUS THING IN POLITICS.
George H. W. Bush lost a second term after going back on his famous guarantee, “Read my lips: no new taxes.” Lyndon Baines Johnson knew better than to seek reelection after reneging on his assurances that he would not send troops to Vietnam. In the case of House Republicans, their “Pledge to America” of 2010 became a liability the moment they assumed the majority.
The failure to deliver on their single biggest promise, repealing the Affordable Care Act, would come to shape the contemporary party’s legacy. But it was, in the early going, the GOP’s struggle with some of the smaller objectives that set a foreboding tone. The notion of cutting $100 billion from the budget in year one, for instance, was plainly impossible; the fiscal year was already halfway over by the time the numbers could be crunched, and the Democrats were never going to rubber-stamp such a steep reduction. No asterisk was attached to that particular guarantee when Republicans made it, however, and conservatives were justifiably irate when Boehner and his team attempted to explain the fine print of why such a cut wasn’t possible.
That initial fight over the $100 billion cut was a watershed. As the new members pressured leadership to keep the promise, it dawned on them that the promise wasn’t meant to be kept. This realization is what began sorting Republicans into two distinct camps: one, representing a vast majority, that observed Boehner’s message about the realities of governing and resigned themselves to a lemonade-making pragmatism; the other, representing a vocal minority, that dismissed Boehner’s call for teamwork and rebelled, convinced that brawling in pursuit of the unattainable was better than accepting half-measures.
It was a catch-22. Republican leaders envisioned using their majority to demonstrate the party’s capacity for smart, r
esponsible governance, but they had won their majority by mobilizing the conservative base around patently unrealistic promises. They had set themselves up for failure.
“It was two years’ worth of vitriol and venom pointed toward Obama, and once in the majority, they thought we’re going to fix it all. And we were the ones who ratcheted that up—’We can set it straight if you just give us the majority,’” Cantor says. “From conservative radio to the blogosphere to cable TV, the expectations rose to a point where it was just unmanageable.”
Cantor adds, “For those who wanted to suggest that Republicans weren’t fighting hard enough, it was really foolish to think that you were going to beat Obama into submission to abandon everything he stood for—including the bill with his name on it.”
Jordan, the conservative ringleader, calls this a cop-out. Using his chairmanship of the RSC to agitate endlessly against Boehner, Cantor, and the perceived passivity of the GOP leadership, Jordan concedes that some of the party’s stated objectives were doomed to failure. “But the fact is we made a promise to the voters, and we didn’t even try,” he complains. “All too often we would do the wimpy thing. We would try to have the debate, it would last twenty-four hours, and then it’s like, ‘Oh well, we just can’t get it done.’”
Cantor, more than anyone, was at the nexus of this divergence. He was younger and more ideological than Boehner, a fact that did not escape anyone in the conference, including the Speaker. Cantor had personally recruited many of the 2010 candidates and sympathized with their desire to fight, to show their constituents they had done everything possible to get results. Yet the second in command had to be cautious. Undermining Boehner would only fuel the perception of a rivalry between them, plunging the party into deeper polarity. Moreover, as their majority took shape, Cantor found himself increasingly sensitive to Boehner’s plight and dismayed by the Tea Party’s tactics.