American Carnage

by Tim Alberta

  One conservative favorite and possible 2016 contender wasn’t in attendance: Mike Pence.

  Like Rubio, he wasn’t keen to share a stage with King. Pence had, while in Congress, compiled a record of unquestioned conservatism on almost every issue—except that of immigration. Along with his dear friend Jeff Flake, Pence had pushed for a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants. He acknowledged the principled opposition from within his ideological and partisan tribes; what he could not suffer was the nakedly nativist instincts of some on the right who called themselves Christians while showing no compassion for some of the most vulnerable among us.

  Watching the debate unfold over the Gang of Eight’s bill in 2013, Pence felt fortunate to be hundreds of miles away. Congress was ugly, messy, perforated with career potholes. The governorship offered a cooler environment for doing the people’s business, and a cleaner path to the presidency. The problem was, Pence had struggled to find his footing in Indianapolis. He enjoyed the perks of being home, attending frequent NASCAR events and becoming friendly with Colts quarterback Andrew Luck over chats at their shared downtown barbershop. But after more than a decade in Congress, his 2013 reimmersion into Hoosier politics had been rocky.

  Mitch Daniels, Pence’s predecessor, had been arguably the most effective governor in the country. Adjusting to a new job was hard; securing policy wins that would distinguish him from Daniels and raise his profile ahead of a possible presidential run was even harder. Pence cut taxes to the extent possible; Daniels had already slashed them to historic lows. He invested heavily in K–12 education. And he worked out a compromise with the Obama administration to accept additional Medicaid funding, under the Affordable Care Act, on the condition that his plan include some conservative strictures.

  Yet these were not parade-inducing feats in the eyes of the GOP base. In fact, during a trip to Washington, Pence was frog-marched into the Heritage Foundation, where movement leaders demanded an explanation for why he had accepted Obamacare money at all. Meanwhile, Pence’s proposed formation of a state-run media service, JustIN, which would use taxpayer money to hire reporters and editors to publish news articles about government deeds, was met with so much ructious mockery that the idea was quickly scrapped.

  The governor very much wanted to run for president. His longtime pollster and adviser, Kellyanne Conway, stood ready to move her family to Indianapolis to help guide his campaign. But he needed a signature win. So, in early 2015, when Indiana Republicans began pushing legislation aimed at protecting religious liberties, an issue of urgency to the evangelical wing of the GOP base, Pence saw it as a no-brainer.

  The month after King’s shindig in Iowa, as the Indiana State Senate began considering the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, Pence joined a rally at the statehouse in support. The bill was rushed through the legislature and arrived on his desk by late March. Despite impassioned objections from Democrats, who claimed it would permit discrimination against gay Hoosiers, the governor signed it.

  All hell broke loose. Facing a sudden national uproar and an all-out revolt from the state’s business community, Pence agreed that the legislation needed fixing. But the changes that he agreed to didn’t satisfy either side: Liberals thought he hadn’t gone far enough to address the state-sanctioned discrimination, and conservatives thought the governor had caved on a fight of immense cultural and political importance.

  His closest allies marveled at how badly he’d mishandled the crisis. Pence had always been shrewd as a tactician and velvety smooth as a messenger, sidestepping the land mines that claimed so many politicians’ careers. But the religious liberty fight had been an unmitigated fiasco. Having kept a low profile for the first two years of his governorship, Pence found that his maiden venture into the national news ahead of a potential White House campaign in 2016 couldn’t have been more damaging. He looked weak, lubberly, indecisive, unprepared.

  He could forget about running for president. He would have a tough enough time running for reelection.

  JIM BRIDENSTINE HAD NO PATIENCE FOR TOUGH TALK. TWO YEARS EARLIER, in January 2013, he had stumbled upon a Keystone Cops mutiny of House Republicans pledging to remove John Boehner as the Speaker of the House. But nearly half of them got cold feet. It convinced Bridenstine and his fellow freshman agitator, Thomas Massie, that private assurances were no longer enough. If the rebels were going to oust Boehner, they told one another in 2014, the mutiny would have to come out of the shadows. By pledging their opposition to the Speaker in tweets or press releases or Facebook posts, the conspirators could be held accountable.

  Whatever traction this idea gained early in 2014, as House conservatives continued to sulk over their defeats the previous fall, vanished in the wake of Cantor’s stunning primary defeat. In one sense, Dave Brat’s win could have opened the revolutionary floodgates, prompting a total overhaul of the House GOP leadership. But that prospect was too daunting even for the unruliest renegades. They still didn’t trust Boehner, but with no obvious alternative, they weren’t prepared to thrust the House into chaos—at least, not yet.

  It was two days after Christmas Day 2014 when Massie, a curly-haired, MIT-educated inventor and robotics engineer who comported himself with a quirky impishness, pulled into a McDonald’s drive-through. He was stopping to buy breakfast for his sons on their way to a gun range. A sign hung on the talk box: “Next Speaker Please.” Massie tweeted a picture with an implicit reference to Boehner.6 It gained little attention at first—there had been no talk in recent months of any organized attempt to overthrow the Speaker—but a little while later, Massie’s phone chirped. “So,” Bridenstine asked him, “Are we gonna do this?”

  With the Speaker’s election just ten days away, Massie and Bridenstine flew into recruitment mode. They made the criteria clear: Unlike with the 2013 rebellion, this time anyone joining had to publicly declare his or her opposition to Boehner. The pledges started trickling in—a few and then a dozen, with the figure suddenly climbing toward twenty. There was another difference this time around: After consulting with the House Parliamentarian, Massie and Bridenstine decided they would put other members’ names into nomination for the Speakership. This was highly unusual; typically only the two party leaders are nominated at the beginning of the Speaker vote, and anyone dissenting is free to vote for whomever else they identify. By nominating Republicans not named “Boehner,” the rebels would rob weak-kneed conservatives of the excuse they had given to their constituents in 2013: that nobody was running against Boehner, so they had to back him.

  Louie Gohmert volunteered his services to Massie and Bridenstine, arguing that he could represent the symbolic alternative. Not wanting to hurt the overeager Texan’s feelings, but not wanting someone of his temperament as the face of the anti-Boehner movement, they promised to nominate Gohmert on the floor only if other Republicans stepped forward as well. This prompted Ted Yoho to volunteer—which didn’t exactly solve the problem. Finally, Massie and Bridenstine convinced Daniel Webster, a respected former Speaker of the Florida House, to allow himself to be nominated, lending fresh legitimacy to the cause.

  The January 2015 rebellion was most notable for whom it did not include: Raúl Labrador and Mick Mulvaney, two chief organizers of the 2013 effort, as well as Jim Jordan, the recognized leader of the House conservatives. At the beginning of the roll call vote, the most bullish expectations were that 20 members might oppose Boehner. But even as the nays surpassed that, Labrador and Mulvaney and Jordan didn’t budge.

  “You’re not organized enough. It’s too late,” Labrador told Massie. The Kentucky lawmaker was incensed. Other nervous conservatives, he believed, were holding back because Jordan and his friends were.

  Ultimately, it was another politician’s death that might have resurrected Boehner’s career: More than a dozen Democrats were out of town attending the funeral of former New York governor Mario Cuomo, lowering the total number of votes cast—thereby also lowering Boehner’s threshold for reaching a majority. Whe
reas the rebels would have needed 29 votes to force a second ballot in a fully populated House, that number now stretched high into the 30s. When the gavel fell, Boehner, watching on his office television while huffing cigarettes at a pace his friends had never seen, survived 25 defections to remain Speaker of the House.

  After four years of making life miserable for Boehner, some of the House’s most problematic members had decided to lay off—and in doing so, they incurred the fury of their constituents back home. Jordan, Labrador, and Mulvaney were inundated with angry phone calls and emails; Labrador alone received more than seven thousand negative comments on his Facebook page, he told friends. The animus they had stirred toward the Speaker, which was turbo-charged through the filters of talk radio and social media, had come back to haunt them.

  Luckily, they had a plan in the works that would satiate their voters’ bloodthirst and put Boehner back in the crosshairs.

  Months earlier, in a final attempt to reclaim control of the Republican Study Committee, with vows to rewrite its rules and restore its seditious reputation, Mulvaney had run for chairman. But he was defeated. Once again, the RSC’s bloated numbers had worked against the “hard-core” base, and once again, the leadership had played a role, whipping support for Bill Flores, a Texan and former oil-and-gas executive.

  It was a breaking point for the conservatives. Justin Amash’s group, the House Liberty Caucus, had served its purpose as a temporary bunker. But now they needed a new outfit—one committed to a certain ideology, yes, but even more so dedicated to tactics that would make them enemies of the Republican state. The group would need bylaws codifying their strategy of strength in numbers. They would need 29 members, enough so that if they voted as a bloc, they could defeat the leadership on any given vote—whether on a “rule” that dictated floor procedures or on the legislation itself.

  Weeks after the Speaker election, as House Republicans gathered in Hershey, Pennsylvania, for their annual retreat, a group of nine conservatives put the finishing touches on their new vehicle. All it needed was a name. After debating a host of dreadful suggestions, they settled on House Freedom Caucus because, as Mulvaney later told the New Yorker, “It was so generic and so universally awful that we had no reason to be against it.”

  Another name they jokingly considered was the Reasonable Nutjob Caucus. It was good for some laughs; members such as Mulvaney and Labrador had long defended themselves as more pragmatic than the party’s leaders gave them credit for. But the name also carried an implication: Not just anyone would be allowed in. The architects of the cabal, Jordan, Mulvaney, Labrador, Amash, and Mark Meadows, didn’t want the group defined by some of the louder and less thoughtful Republicans in their conference. That meant, at least initially, no Massie, no Michele Bachmann, no Steve King, and no matter how many times he asked, no Louie Gohmert.

  “They felt the conservatives needed a sensible effort—not a Thomas Massie/Louie Gohmert effort,” Massie says. “They told each other, ‘We’re not gonna let the crazy ones in.’”

  Massie had big plans of his own. A few days after the failed coup against Boehner, he hosted an academic from the Congressional Research Service in his office. He wanted to know about an obscure parliamentary maneuver known as “the motion to vacate the chair.”

  BUSH WAS THE FIRST HORSE OUT OF THE GATE—SORT OF.

  In December 2014, the consubstantial son and brother, respectively, of the last two Republican presidents announced the formation of Right to Rise PAC, which would serve as an exploratory committee and fund-raising vehicle for his own White House run. Campaign finance laws forbade coordination between candidates and their affiliated PACs; by withholding his official candidacy, Bush was able to work in concert with his new super PAC to raise unlimited sums of money from the country’s biggest donors. It was a post–Citizens United loophole that no presidential candidate had ever exploited, and Bush took full advantage, raising $100 million in a period of six months.7

  It was a breathtaking amount of coin to throw at someone who had yet to shake a hand or kiss a baby. Bush’s team took to dubbing their financial conquest “shock and awe,” a preemptive show of force meant to clear the primary field of potential foes. (Unfortunately, given its more recent applications, the term foreshadowed Bush’s woeful quagmire of a campaign.)

  The strategy worked at first: Romney, who had weighed a third campaign, saw much of his donor base defecting to Bush and announced that he would stay on the sidelines.

  But not everyone was so deterred. In fact, dollar signs notwithstanding, there wasn’t much to be daunted by. Bush had been an imposing figure in Florida, widely viewed as one of the most ruthlessly effective governors in America and a paragon of conservative policymaking. But he had left office nearly a decade ago—with his brother still in office, social media in its infancy, and the Tea Party’s emergence still several years off. The game had changed. There were always going to be concerns about fatigue with the family brand—hence “Jeb!” as his logo—but the more existential predicament for Bush was communicating with a GOP electorate that had been speaking a different language since he left office.

  Nobody understood this better than Rubio. The onetime Florida lawmaker had learned at Bush’s knee in Tallahassee, and the governor had helped him ascend to the most powerful office in the statehouse. When he became Speaker, Rubio was gifted a large, golden sword (that of Chang, “a great conservative warrior”) by Bush, who choked up in the House chamber during Rubio’s swearing-in ceremony, “I can’t think back on a time where I’ve ever been prouder to be a Republican, Marco.”8

  Despite those ties, Rubio saw Bush’s blind spots—his support for Common Core education standards, his moderation on certain social issues, his support for immigration reform that made his own efforts look tame by comparison—and knew that his old mentor would struggle to connect with the contemporary Republican base.

  Bush never saw him coming. Having locked up virtually all of Florida’s major donors and political colossi, not to mention having helped Rubio win his Senate race four years earlier, Bush spent the early months of 2015 dismissing speculation of a challenge from his apprentice. “Listen,” he told a group of Florida Republicans during a meeting in Washington, just after the New Year, “I really believe in my heart that Marco will not run against me.”

  It was a fundamental miscalculation—of the climate, of the party, and of Rubio himself. If the 2010 Senate campaign had taught Rubio anything, it was that old rules no longer applied. He had embarrassed Charlie Crist despite being told to wait his turn. Now friends in Florida were telling him the same thing. Rubio wasn’t hearing it. The senator believed himself to be a figure of Obamaesque proportions, someone uniquely suited to a new era of American politics, one where experience mattered less than raw talent.

  “I loved watching Michael Jordan play basketball, because he could do things with the basketball that were not teachable,” Whit Ayres, Rubio’s highly regarded pollster, told a group of reporters two weeks before his client announced for president. “Marco Rubio is the Michael Jordan of American politics.”9

  On April 13, inside the Freedom Tower in Miami, the Cuban American equivalent of Ellis Island, Rubio launched his candidacy by throwing thinly veiled haymakers at both Bush and Hillary Clinton, who had formally entered the race one day earlier.

  “Just yesterday, a leader from yesterday, began a campaign for president by promising to take us back to yesterday,” Rubio said, savoring the punch line as his crowd booed. “Yesterday is over. And we are never going back.” Cheers filled the building. “We Americans are proud of our history, but our country has always been about the future. Before us now is the opportunity to author the greatest chapter yet in the amazing story of America. But we can’t do that by going back to the leaders and ideas of the past. We must change the decisions we are making by changing the people who are making them.”

  It was the third launch, in as many weeks, by the Senate’s trifecta of talented freshmen.


  On April 7, Kentucky’s Rand Paul had announced his own campaign in Louisville, standing on the shoulders of his father’s efforts in 2008 and 2012. Promising to break up the stale intellectual duopoly in Washington, the younger Paul was less doctrinaire and more calculating than his dad while peddling a comparably nonconformist platform. Central to it was a renunciation of the GOP’s muscular foreign policy and a pledge to restrict America’s military adventurism abroad. This had been appealing to a war-weary nation (and party) in the years after Bush left office: With 9/11 fading in the rearview mirror, two wars dragging on in the Middle East, and the appetite for intervention continuing to diminish even among majorities of Republican voters, Paul had reason to feel confident that his candidacy would meet the moment.

  In July 2014, the RealClearPolitics average of national surveys showed Paul atop the Republican field.10 That same month, NBC News polls showed him leading in New Hampshire and tied for first place in Iowa.11 His presidential stock peaked with an August 2014 New York Times Magazine feature headlined, “Has the ‘Libertarian Moment’ Finally Arrived?”

  It had indeed—and it departed just as quickly. In the weeks after that piece was published, the Islamic State, or ISIS, which had announced the formation of a caliphate to govern Muslims worldwide, released videos depicting the beheading of two American journalists. With the spectacular savagery piercing Western consciousness—the executioner was dubbed “Jihadi John” by media outlets—Obama delivered a prime-time address in September pledging to “destroy” ISIS.

  Time magazine featured Paul on its cover the next month, naming him “The Most Interesting Man in Politics.” Intended to capture his rise, the story instead marked the onset of his decline. Paul had already dropped to 12 percent in the RCP national poll average, from 14 percent in July; by Christmas, he was at 9 percent. The crash continued throughout 2015, interrupted by only a fleeting bounce after his April campaign launch. In late July, he was below 6 percent, and by October, one year after Time’s cover, he hovered at just over 2 percent. Once considered a front-runner for the GOP nomination, Paul was a nonfactor before the first votes were cast.