American Carnage

by Tim Alberta

  “Two people were Senator Paul’s undoing in the presidential race,” says Chip Englander, his campaign manager. “Donald Trump and Jihadi John.”

  CRUZ WAS THE FIRST OF THE 2016 REPUBLICANS TO FORMALLY DECLARE his candidacy. Having spent the previous six months recruiting what would become regarded as the sharpest, most data-savvy team in the Republican field, he and his top lieutenants were stumped on the question of where to launch the campaign. Iowa was too obvious, campaign manager Jeff Roe warned on a final conference call. They discussed other options: Cruz’s hometown of Houston; historical sites around Texas; even the Reagan Library in California. As the call dragged on, one of Roe’s employees at Axiom Strategies in Missouri sent his boss an email: “You should do it at Liberty.”

  The line lit up with opinions. Liberty University, founded in Lynchburg, Virginia, by the late fundamentalist preacher Jerry Falwell in 1971, required students to attend convocation. This would provide Cruz a built-in audience of enthusiastic young people as the backdrop for his big announcement. But there was risk involved in launching at a university so associated with the Moral Majority. Some staffers argued that it would narrow Cruz’s appeal, backing him into a corner and forcing him to go all-in on Iowa.

  But Iowa was going to be a must-win anyway, and evangelicals were going to be his base. The campaign’s only choice was to embrace these realities. Weeks later, once more pacing the stage in his best Joel Osteen impersonation, Cruz declared on the campus of Liberty, “God has blessed America from the very beginning of this nation, and I believe God isn’t done with America yet.”

  In short order, a small constellation of super PACs was set up in support of his candidacy, and promptly brought in tens of millions of dollars, more than any Republican save for Bush.12 This was a shock to the Republican system. Cruz was the disruptor in chief on Capitol Hill, a reputation he clung to in campaigning for the presidency. In the summer of 2015, the Texas senator called McConnell a liar on the floor of the Senate, a spectacular breach of etiquette (even though McConnell had, in fact, misled Cruz and other senators about the reauthorization of the Export-Import Bank). In the not-distant past, a freshman would have been cast out into political purgatory for such an assault on the majority leader. Instead, Cruz was raising more money for his White House bid than his team knew what to do with.

  If all went according to plan, Cruz believed, he would meet Bush in the middle of the bracket, each of them having advanced through the preliminary rounds of the Republican tournament.

  But in the summer of 2015, only one candidate was shocking and aweing the primary competition—and it wasn’t Bush.

  ON, JUNE 15, INSIDE AN AUDITORIUM AT MIAMI DADE COLLEGE, BUSH jumped into the race by downplaying his dynastic connections—“It’s nobody’s turn,” he declared—and reinforcing his image as someone who could appeal to a cross-section of the electorate, just as the RNC’s autopsy had prescribed. “As a candidate, I intend to let everyone hear my message, including the many who can express their love of country in a different language,” Bush declared to what was, for a Republican event, a strikingly diverse audience.

  And then, he added in his fluent español, “Ayúdenos en tener una campaña que les da la bienvenida. Trabajen con nosotros por los valores que compartimos y para un gran futuro que es nuestro para construir para nosotros y nuestros hijos.”

  Translation: “Help us to have a campaign that welcomes you. Work with us for the values we share and for a great future that is ours to build for us and our children.”

  It wasn’t clear, however, which values Bush was referring to—or how widely they were shared in the new Republican Party.

  The next afternoon, thirteen hundred miles to the north, Trump descended into the lobby of his Fifth Avenue skyscraper on a gilded escalator, Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World” blaring in the background. The atmosphere could not have been more dissimilar to that at Bush’s rally. (Some of the supporters wearing “TRUMP” shirts were paid tourists brought in off the streets of Manhattan.) Also somewhat different was the material offered by the candidate.

  He made fun of Obama for playing so much golf. He noted how the recent Republicans to launch campaigns had “sweated like dogs” during their events, questioning how such people could defeat ISIS. He mocked Secretary of State John Kerry for breaking his leg in a bicycle accident.

  The speech was not without substance. “I will build a great, great wall on our southern border,” Trump declared, “and I’ll have Mexico pay for that wall.”

  It was the type of audacious promise that no elected official would dream of making. But Trump turned it into a staple of his campaign. Unlike most Republican politicians who took hardline positions on immigration as a matter of economic policy, arguing that the cheap labor depressed American wages, Trump primarily framed the influx of people as a threat to the nation’s security—and its identity.

  “The U.S. has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems,” Trump argued. “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”13

  His presidential run was three minutes old, and already Trump was undermining the last three years’ worth of Republican outreach to the Hispanic community.

  He didn’t think much of the RNC autopsy. “Big waste of money,” he scoffs. “I didn’t waste a lot of time reading it.” Instead, he was doing a different type of outreach.

  “Remember the first time you went to an ATM to withdraw cash and it asked whether you wanted it in English or Spanish? You had no idea how many Americans were outraged,” Boehner says. “People want to look at people who look like them. They want to live with people who talk like them. When Trump’s making all this noise, you can see who it was appealing to.”

  In the ensuing weeks, the newly declared candidate would draw tens of thousands of people to his campaign stops. He promised to turn the country around. He served up paeans to its past glories. He offered himself as the vanguard of a movement. “The silent majority is back!” Trump told an uproarious Phoenix crowd in July. “We’re going to take our country back!”14

  To many on the American right, this was the din of deliverance. Although the economy was continuing its steady reclamation, with unemployment dropping to 5.3 percent in June 2015, feelings of cultural unrest were growing more viscerally tangible. The European refugee crisis, which saw tens of thousands of Middle Easterners fleeing war-ravaged nations and spilling over the porous European borders, put conservatives on high alert. Obama’s stated goal of admitting ten thousand Syrian refugees into the United States was met with fierce resistance from House Republicans, fueled in part by a series of Islamic terrorist attacks in France.

  Conspicuously, there was no comparable sense of urgency around that time in response to teenager Freddie Gray dying at the hands of the Baltimore police department after suffering a nearly severed spinal cord in the back of a police van; or to Walter Scott being shot in the back by a South Carolina policeman who was caught on video planting a weapon on Scott’s body.

  Ten weeks after Scott’s murder, a twenty-one-year-old white man named Dylann Roof walked into the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston and joined its black parishioners for a Bible study. After nearly an hour with the group, Roof reached into his backpack, pulled out a .45-caliber pistol, and executed nine people, including the church’s pastor, state senator Clementa Pinckney. (“He was a giant of a man and a prince of a fella,” recalls his friend, Senator Tim Scott, who still saves the final text message he received from Pinckney.)

  South Carolina governor Nikki Haley promptly called for, and signed a bill mandating, the Confederate flag’s removal from the statehouse grounds. National Republicans lauded Haley’s leadership, but a scab had been opened over America’s oldes
t wounds: A CNN poll taken before the flag’s removal found 75 percent of southern whites described it as “a symbol of pride” while just 18 percent called it “a symbol of racism.”15

  The summer of conservative discontent climaxed on June 26, 2015, when the Supreme Court ruled 5–4 in the case of Obergefell v. Hodges to legalize same-sex marriage nationwide. Public opinion had shifted with such neck-breaking haste that the verdict was no surprise: In 2004, 60 percent of Americans opposed same-sex marriage, with just 31 percent approving, according to Pew. By 2014, the numbers were 52 percent approving and 40 percent opposed, an astonishing net swing of 41 points in the span of a decade.16

  The ruling lent a deeper conviction to the right’s sentiment of being under siege—from culture, from a changing country, and from government itself.

  MARK MEADOWS HAD NEVER QUITE FIT THE MOLD OF A FREEDOM CAUCUS radical. Unfailingly polite and winsome, with the faintest trace of a sweet-tea accent and his hand always on someone’s shoulder, the North Carolina congressman was as threatening as a sweater-clad kitten.

  He was conservative, sure, but nobody’s idea of a firebrand. When word leaked to the GOP leadership that Meadows had been involved in the plotting against Boehner in 2013—even though he ultimately did not oppose him—the brand-new lawmaker requested a meeting with the Speaker. “He’s on the couch, sitting across from me in my chair, and suddenly he slides off the couch, down onto his knees, and puts his hands together in front of his chest,” Boehner recalls. He says, ‘Mr. Speaker, will you please forgive me?’”

  Boehner’s chief of staff, Mike Sommers, who witnessed the encounter, said it was “the strangest behavior I had ever seen in Congress.”

  The Speaker, for his part, chalked it up to a “nervous new member who wanted to be liked.” Boehner told Meadows not to worry, that they were moving on.

  For a few months, House Republicans recall, Meadows kept his head down, doing little to draw attention to himself. But then came his letter that summer calling for the defunding of Obamacare. After opposing the Ryan-Murray budget compromise and joining the crew of restive conservatives who broke away from the Republican Study Committee the following year, Meadows decided to vote against Boehner’s reelection as speaker in 2015.

  “And then he sends me the most gracious note you’ll ever read, saying what an admirable job I’ve done as Speaker,” Boehner says, shaking his head in bewilderment. “I just figured he’s a schizophrenic.”

  There were other indications that Meadows was less politically genteel than he let on. In early 2015, Mark Walker, a former minister and a new Republican in the North Carolina delegation, was pulled aside by Meadows on the House floor. “You voted the wrong way,” Meadows told him. Walker was confused. On the bill before them, he had sided with Heritage Action, the default decision for an ambitious conservative. And yet Meadows, a Freedom Caucus cofounder, was voting the other way. After some persuasion, Walker changed his vote, believing Meadows knew something he didn’t. Instead, as it turned out, Meadows simply didn’t want his new colleague earning a better grade on the annual Heritage scorecard, a bit of subterfuge that did lasting damage to the relationship between the two lawmakers.

  Meadows wasn’t done making moves. After helping to establish the House Freedom Caucus, he and other conservatives threatened to block funding for the Department of Homeland Security unless GOP leaders defunded Obama’s programs protecting certain classes of illegal immigrants from deportation. Their stance was not unreasonable: Boehner had promised a forceful response if the White House continued making immigration law from the executive branch. “When you play with matches, you take the risk of burning yourself,” Boehner warned Obama during a press conference after the midterm elections. “He’s going to burn himself if he continues to go down this path.”17

  But months later, Boehner urged his conference to avoid a fight over DHS funding. When the conservatives cried foul and vowed to go their own way, the American Action Network, a powerful outside group staffed by Boehner loyalists, began targeting the likes of Meadows and Mulvaney with ads in their congressional districts accusing them of being “willing to put our security at risk by jeopardizing critical security funding.”18

  The Freedom Caucus went ballistic. Members began railing against big, bad General Boehner firing at his own foot soldiers. Their outrage was somewhat amusing: House conservatives had used Boehner as a punching bag for the past four years, taking shots at the Speaker for sport, yet were incensed whenever his leadership allies dared return fire.

  Meadows made a statement of protest by refusing to pay his dues to the National Republican Congressional Committee. He also began whispering to friends about orchestrating a new, and operationally different, coup against Boehner. Rather than wait for the official Speaker vote at the beginning of the next Congress, Meadows explained, they could use a parliamentary device to force a vote on Boehner whenever they wanted. The tactic, known as vacating the chair, was rarely used and unfamiliar to many of the conservatives. But it was simultaneously being studied by Massie, the Freedom Caucus outcast who had been researching the procedure for months. As spring turned to summer, Meadows and Massie began comparing notes.

  In Congress, the smallest legislative splashes can create the biggest waves. Such was the case in June, when Boehner moved to hold a vote on Trade Promotion Authority, or TPA, granting the president leeway to negotiate trade deals that would come to Congress for up-or-down approval. The issue was not thought to be controversial. Conservatives were free-traders, after all. Even Ted Cruz, whose right-wing antennae were better tuned than those of any Republican alive, had written a joint op-ed with Paul Ryan in April calling for speedy passage of TPA.

  But the House rebels wouldn’t fall in line: 34 of them voted to block a rule allowing for a vote on the legislation, forcing the leadership to rely on Democratic votes for passage—and prompting Boehner to strip Meadows of his subcommittee chairmanship.

  A long view of the policy issue shows that it marked an inflection point in the GOP’s relationship with trade. Trump had spent the last two years explicitly threatening to slap tariffs on China and Mexico and other commercial partners, something unheard of from any presidential hopeful in recent memory, much less a Republican. It moved the needle: When TPA came to the Senate for approval, Cruz voted no, shocking everyone in the chamber, including his closest allies.

  The backstory was simple enough: Cruz’s campaign had been poll-testing the issue and realized that he might suffer crippling blowback from blue-collar voters if he continued to support the agreement. This would be a far steeper price to pay, he decided, than a few weeks of headlines about flip-flopping and the inevitable furious phone call from Ryan, who wondered how Cruz could hang him out to dry on the issue. “It wasn’t good for me, it wasn’t good for the party,” Ryan recalls. “But it was good for Ted.”

  The Freedom Caucus’s defiance of Boehner, and the Speaker’s retaliation, represented a point of no return. Boehner tried to keep one step ahead of the conservatives. In July, for example, he called for a congressional investigation into Planned Parenthood after undercover videos showed a top-ranking official with the organization talking callously about the supply of aborted baby parts. (The videos implied that Planned Parenthood was illegally profiting from selling them; this was not the case, though the group’s leadership apologized for the tone taken by their employee.) Even in this instance, Boehner failed to capture the mood of his right flank: Conservatives wanted to promote the videos by showing them in House hearings, but the Speaker held back, worried that they would be sensationalizing the issue, especially given the legal challenges contending that the videos had been shot illegally.

  The relationship between the leadership and the conference’s right wing was no longer salvageable. The only question was what conservatives planned to do about it. Meadows wanted to go after Boehner immediately, forcing a vote that summer on the Speaker’s future. Having dissected the parliamentary maneuver with Massie,
each lawmaker had prepared a separate draft to file with the House clerk. They both had also sent copies to the outside groups by mid-July, needing air cover in the event of a guerrilla-style attack on the warlord himself.

  But the Freedom Caucus leadership was opposed. Calling an emergency meeting of the board, Jordan, the group’s chairman, told Meadows that the timing wasn’t right, that there was no organized opposition, that no alternative speaker had stepped forward, that the Freedom Caucus would suffer irreparable damage to its credibility by lunging at Boehner but failing to take him down. Labrador agreed. So did Mulvaney and Amash and the other board members present. Meadows was on an island. “We didn’t think it was the right timing,” Labrador said. “And we were trying to give Boehner an opportunity to change.”

  But Meadows would not budge. Whipping out his cell phone, he played a voice mail for the group. It had been left that morning by his son, Blake, who told his father how proud he was of him for standing on conviction, and quoted Theodore Roosevelt: “The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena . . . if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

  Meadows’s comrades were puzzled. They had never known him to act on rash emotion. But there was no stopping him. He was determined to file paperwork with the House clerk that would amount to an attempt on Boehner’s political life. What some of them didn’t realize was that Massie was standing at the ready to file his own version of the motion if Meadows didn’t follow through. That was a chance Meadows couldn’t take.

  Of course, what nobody knew—outside of Boehner’s three most trusted staffers—was that the Speaker had already settled on his exit date. After the midterm elections, Boehner would announce his retirement on his birthday, November 17.