American Carnage

by Tim Alberta

  He never got that chance.

  On the afternoon of July 28—Meadows’s birthday, and the last day before Congress adjourned for its August recess—the North Carolina congressman strolled up to the House clerk and handed over a piece of paper. The document claimed that Boehner had endeavored to “consolidate power and centralize decision-making,” while “diminishing the voice of the American People” and using his office to “punish Members who vote according to their conscience instead of the will of the Speaker.”19

  As Jordan and Labrador pulled Meadows aside, “raking him over the coals,” according to Massie, the Kentucky congressman leapt in with his congratulations. Contrary to what Jordan and Labrador thought, Massie and Meadows believed the timing of this ambush was perfect.

  “The leadership’s job was to keep 218 frogs in a wheelbarrow, but we were going into the August recess, and the wheelbarrow would be unguarded,” Massie explains. “Jim and Raúl were telling Mark, ‘Don’t put this on the Freedom Caucus.’ They didn’t want to be responsible. But now they take credit for it.”

  Boehner’s allies were out for blood. Ryan raced to the Speaker’s office, where he was joined by several like-minded members, all of them imploring Boehner to call up the motion and hold a vote immediately, that same day. It would be a show of strength, a middle finger to the Freedom Caucus, putting the right-wing absolutists in their place once and for all. But Boehner waved them off. He wanted to think. None of them realized that he was planning to leave in less than four months anyway. “All these Republicans were going to get crap at home for supporting me, only to have me leave soon after that,” Boehner recalls.

  Calling a private meeting the next day with some of the Freedom Caucus and Jedi Council members, Boehner and Jordan agreed that it made no sense to hold the vote before August, since the Republicans who supported him would spend the month getting pummeled in their districts. “He’s like, ‘I don’t want to make members take that vote,’” Ryan recalls Boehner saying. “Totally selfless. Always thinking about protecting the membership.”

  By going it alone, disregarding the wishes of his closest friends and confidants, Meadows had plunged the House of Representatives into turmoil and earned himself more media coverage than any second-term congressman in recent memory.

  “I don’t like being in the limelight,” he told a mob of reporters awaiting him off the House floor.

  THE FOLLOWING WEEK, THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE PACKED INTO THE Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland for quite possibly the most anticipated presidential debate in modern American history. Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, was thrilled to show off the historically diverse presidential field. No longer could the GOP be mocked as the party of old white men. There were two Cuban Americans, sons of immigrants both. There was a woman who’d run a Fortune 500 company. There was a black man. And there was an Indian American (although Bobby Jindal would reject that label, having made the rallying cry of his campaign a rejection of “hyphenated Americans”).

  When Fox News anchor Bret Baier opened the debate with a gimmick question, asking the candidates to raise their hand if they would not commit to supporting the eventual nominee of the party, Trump shot his arm into the air. “If I’m the nominee, I will pledge I will not run as an independent,” he said, drawing a robust round of boos from the Republican faithful.

  Suddenly, Priebus was reminded of his nightmare scenario. Ever since Romney’s loss to Obama, he had labored to get the Republican Party out of its own way—not just on policy, but on process. The 2012 primary had stretched on nearly five months and featured upwards of twenty debates and forums, an atmosphere of anarchy that took a brutal toll on the party’s general election readiness. Priebus had effected sweeping changes to the primary structure, most notably a condensed nominating calendar and half the number of debates. It was all in the service of producing a quality nominee as quickly as possible with minimal intraparty damage done.

  And then along came Trump.

  Priebus had initially laughed off the billionaire playboy’s candidacy. When young staffers at the RNC approached the chairman with concerns earlier that summer, Priebus rolled his eyes. “Donald Trump is never going to be our nominee.” But there was nothing funny about the situation now. Priebus still didn’t think Trump was going to win, but he was increasingly fretful of the damage he could do. The candidate’s insulting of immigrants, for instance, was negating hard-won public relations victories for the national party.

  In fairness, Trump was an equal-opportunity offender. A month into his campaign, he mocked John McCain for being shot down over Vietnam. “He’s not a war hero. He’s a war hero because he was captured,” Trump said during a forum in Iowa. “I like people who weren’t captured.” (Trump took five draft deferments, including one for bone spurs in his heel, and later boasted of spending those years avoiding sexually transmitted diseases, calling it “my personal Vietnam.”20) The POW comment was met with such anger from within the political class, including a rare on-record rebuke from Priebus, that Trump appeared mortally wounded.

  “When that happened, I thought, ‘Well, that’s it. He’s finished,’” Mitt Romney recalls of Trump’s remark. “I thought his campaign was over.” Romney pauses, then shakes his head: “There were several times I thought his campaign was over.”

  Instead, while his candidacy took shape in the summer and fall of 2015, Trump proved astonishingly resilient. As he made an art of scandalizing the Republican establishment with his ad hominem vilifications and general affronts to decency, Trump’s poll numbers climbed steadily upward, the traditional consequences for such behavior nowhere to be found.

  Meanwhile, for all the concerns about Trump sullying the GOP’s brand from within, Priebus worried more about the prospect of Trump destroying the party from without: If he ran as an independent, he would siphon away millions of conservative votes and hand Hillary Clinton the presidency. It would be Ross Perot all over again. Trump had already been making such noise, rightly suspecting that the GOP’s top officials might plot to sabotage him. Now, not sixty seconds into the first televised debate, with a record-shattering audience of twenty-four million viewers, he had threatened to leave the Republican Party.

  As the debate progressed, a different thought occurred to Republicans in Cleveland. Trump might not leave the GOP; Trump might take over the GOP.

  The booing of his very first response aside, the crowd seemed to be delighting in Trump—his shameless bragging, his sparring with the moderators, his unrepentant earthiness. He could do no wrong. When Megyn Kelly, then the reigning queen of Fox News, pressed Trump on his calling women “fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals,” and asked him about his history of degrading them with sexual innuendos, Trump interrupted, “Only Rosie O’Donnell.” The debate hall shook with laughter. A minute later, he added, “I think the big problem this country has is being politically correct.” The audience cheered.

  After the debate, Trump went on CNN and insinuated that Kelly’s hostile questioning was due to her menstrual cycle. “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her—wherever.” As with the McCain controversy, Trump didn’t flinch in the face of criticism. And as with the McCain controversy, he didn’t suffer from it one bit. The Republican front-runner was a lot of things, but he wasn’t apologetic. And the American political industry loved him for it.

  “Reince made some great reforms to the party and to the nominating process,” says Hugh Hewitt, the conservative radio host, who co-moderated several of the GOP debates. “But what he didn’t know was [that] of the seventeen candidates, one of them was an honest-to-goodness television star, who knew how to turn the primary into a reality TV show.”

  After the first debate, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce held a donor retreat in which Scott Reed, its senior political strategist, presented an impossible data set. Having crunched the statistics on social media to determine which of the GOP candidates was getting
the most attention, Reed’s group of data geeks determined that 82 percent of the online conversation revolved around Trump. The remainder amounted to digital bread crumbs for a few of his starving opponents.

  This was unnerving to party leaders. Trump had spent the opening months of his campaign mired in one firestorm after another, the severity of which would have been career-crushing for any other politician. Yet his poll numbers kept rising. Registering at just 6.5 percent in the RealClearPolitics national average one month before the debate, Trump had soared to 24.3 percent by the time Fox News hosted the clash in Cleveland. And nothing—certainly not his vulgar insult of Kelly—appeared capable of bending his trajectory downward.

  With a sprawling, historically large field of seventeen Republican contenders, Priebus and Fox News had agreed to limit the prime-time debate to the ten top-polling candidates, relegating the other seven to a “kids’ table” debate earlier in the day. Trump hated the even number of participants—“Because that meant two people were at the center,” he says—and personally lobbied Roger Ailes to change the number of people onstage to either nine or eleven.

  It was one favor that Fox News couldn’t do for him. When the survey averages were tabulated, Trump was in the pole position and Bush was positioned beside him, at center stage. They were the tallest, the best known, the highest-polling. But the similarities ended there.

  Trump was made for these moments, having spent decades mastering camera angles and production quality, distorting his expressions and gestures for maximum dramatic impact. He was having the time of his life.

  Bush was not. Awkward and reticent, with his six-foot-four frame coiling into itself due to poor posture, the former governor was already sore about having to compete with the Judas known as Rubio. Now he was forced to endure the indignity of sharing top billing with a man who had spent the last year mocking his family.

  Trump could read the repulsion on his rival’s face. At one commercial break, he turned to Bush. “Jeb, how you doing?” he asked.

  “I’m fine, Donald.”

  “So, where are you going after this?”

  “Headed to New York for some fund-raising events tomorrow.”

  Trump beamed. “You want a ride? I’ve got my plane here. We’re heading back tonight.”

  Bush stared blankly. “No. I’m good. We’ve got a ride.”

  “You sure?”

  Bush nodded briskly.

  “Okay. Let me know if you change your mind.”

  Trump, feet still positioned perfectly over his stage mark for the television cameras, turned toward his family in the front row and winked. It was a down payment on the space he would occupy inside Bush’s head for the duration of the campaign.

  Chapter Ten

  September 2015

  “We fed the beast that ate us.”

  FOR JOHN BOEHNER AND HIS TEAM, THERE HAD BEEN A MILLION LOGISTICAL hurdles to clear in preparing for the visit from Pope Francis: coordinating security logistics, arranging meetings by protocol, allotting space on the Capitol lawn for spectators, securing tickets for relatives and friends, including John Calipari, the University of Kentucky men’s basketball coach. Reared in Catholic pews, instructed in Catholic schools, guided by his Catholic faith, the Speaker had spent twenty-five years daydreaming of bringing the pope to address a joint session of Congress. It was finally happening.

  The Speaker also had a personal wish. He had asked if the supreme pontiff would baptize his one-year-old grandson. Vatican officials had gently denied the request, citing limitations in their scheduling.

  Yet now, standing just a few feet away inside the Speaker’s suite, with Boehner’s family assembled in front of him, Pope Francis was smiling down at the baby and asking his assistant for some water. Boehner began to sob uncontrollably. He looked to make sure a camera was trained toward the baby. He could already see the photo resting on the mantelpiece in his Ohio living room. Pope Francis received the glass of water . . . and then tipped it back, drinking every last drop. Boy, the Speaker thought to himself, you really are a Boner.

  But nothing, not even the Holy Father’s unwitting head fake, could ruin this day for Boehner.

  In an institution thriving on cynicism and spite, Francis’s visit offered an oasis. His speech, delivered in heavily accented English, had included ideological catnip for both parties. “We, the people of this continent, are not fearful of foreigners, because most of us were once foreigners,” Francis said, drawing booming applause from the Democrats. He then earned a rousing ovation from the Republicans: “The Golden Rule also reminds us of our responsibility to protect and defend human life at every stage of its development.”

  Still, partisanship did not rule the day. Boehner and Pelosi beamed at each other during the speech. Lawmakers of warring tribes snapped photos with one another and their families. Catholics of every gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and political affiliation gathered on the lawn outside Boehner’s balcony to catch a glimpse of Pope Francis and share with him a moment of prayer.

  “I never saw members happier than they were the day the pope was there. Democrats, Republicans, House, Senate—everybody was happy,” Boehner recalls of that sunny day in late September. “I looked up and thought, you know, it’s not going to get any better than this.”

  After the pope’s caravan had departed the Capitol, Boehner called Jim Jordan and three other Freedom Caucus members into his office. The Speaker had not yet brought up a vote on Mark Meadows’s motion to vacate the chair. He saw no reason to—not with his planned retirement in November. But now, with the sweetness of the day strumming his reflections on life and legacy, Boehner wanted to know: Did the rebels really still want a vote to throw him out?

  “We tried talking Mark out of it before the recess. We didn’t think the timing was appropriate,” Jordan explained. “But after everyone went home and got an earful about it, now everyone’s all fired up. There are more people ready to vote against you now than there were before.”

  Boehner nodded and let out a chuckle. He knew Jordan was telling the truth: With the outside groups, blogs, and talk radio shows firing on all anti-establishment cylinders since the moment Meadows filed his motion, August had not been kind to any Boehner-allied House Republicans. A swelling group of members would feel obligated to vote against the Speaker; it would represent a choice between saving their career or saving his. Boehner understood.

  What Jordan and the others didn’t know was that his job was never going to be in jeopardy. Earlier in the month, Boehner’s chief of staff, Mike Sommers, had written him a memo, titled “Save the Institution,” explaining that his survival would be ensured if Pelosi had Democratic members vote “present” when the motion came up, lowering his threshold of needed support. If Democrats cooperated, Boehner could win with a simple majority of Republican votes cast, which was never in doubt. The Speaker had broached the idea with Pelosi, and she agreed.

  “You can’t have thirty people in your caucus decide they’re going to vacate the chair,” Pelosi says. “He knew I had—not his back, but the institution’s back.”

  And yet this scheme never sat well with Boehner. He wanted to leave on his own terms, not hang around for a few extra months on the strength of Democratic votes, an outcome that would only exacerbate the party’s internecine tensions.

  The night of the pope’s address, the Speaker hosted dozens of friends and family members for a wine-soaked celebratory dinner at Trattoria Alberto, on Capitol Hill. Boehner then withdrew to his nearby apartment and told his wife, Debbie, that he was thinking of announcing his retirement in the morning. “And then I went to bed and slept eight hours. Like a baby. It was unbelievable.”

  After his customary breakfast at Pete’s Diner, the greasiest spoon on Capitol Hill, the next morning, “I looked at that statue of the Virgin Mary next to St. Peter’s Church and I decided, All right, today’s the day,” Boehner recalls.

  He was at peace. Strolling into the morning’s House GOP confe
rence meeting, the Speaker told his members that he would retire from Congress at the end of October, leaving a month for Republicans to choose his successor. Jaws hit the floor. Boehner had tipped off McCarthy just moments before stepping to the microphone—“Get ready,” he told him, grinning, “I’m out of here”—and the majority leader now wore the look of a defendant unexpectedly sentenced to death.

  But one thing nagged at Boehner: the perception that the Freedom Caucus, and particularly Jordan, whom he calls “a legislative terrorist,” and Meadows, whom he considered “Jordan’s puppet” and “a perfect fucking idiot,” had forced him out of Congress. So, he decided, when addressing an overflow press conference just after informing colleagues of his decision, to walk into the room singing, “Zip-a-dee-doo-dah, zip-a-dee-day, my oh my, what a wonderful day.”

  Boehner was not forced out—at least, not in any technical or parliamentary sense. And there is no question he felt unburdened by the decision finally to throw in the towel. But the singing routine masked the hurt he felt at the circumstances of his departure. “He was just kind of emotionally done,” recalls Anne Bradbury, Boehner’s floor director. “The fact that he felt like he’d given and given to the conference and the country, and this is how he was rewarded, when he didn’t want to be there anyway—” She stops herself. “It was very disheartening for him.”

  The president was stunned at the news. When the Speaker called him that morning, Obama pleaded with him to stay on the job. “Boehner, you can’t do this, man,” the president said.

  Boehner told him that there was no turning back.

  “I’m gonna miss you,” Obama said.

  “Mr. President,” Boehner replied, “yes, you are.”