by Tim Alberta
Conservatives were less gracious. That morning, in a speech to the Values Voter Summit in Washington, an activist confab organized by the Family Research Council, Marco Rubio broke the news of Boehner’s retirement during his speech. The crowd leapt to its feet, roaring with a brutishness straight from the ancient Roman Colosseum.
Seated at a conference table in Coral Gables, Florida, that same morning, Jeb Bush saw yet the latest sign of an anti-establishment revolution—hardly the sort of environment conducive to his winning the presidency. But that wasn’t his first reaction to Boehner’s decision. Glancing across the table at Eric Cantor, the co-chairman of his Virginia campaign, Bush remarked that in a normal world, Cantor would be preparing to assume the Speakership.
As if he needed reminding.
TRUMP HAD EVERY REASON TO RAISE HIS HAND IN CLEVELAND.
The truth was, from the moment he stepped onto his golden escalator in the middle of June, Republican Party leaders had privately plotted against him. Senior members of Congress, governors, major donors, influential lobbyists, and many top conservative activists—all of them wanted to take Trump out. Nowhere was the cunning more concentrated than inside the Republican National Committee.
Having spent the past three years working to fortify the GOP’s electoral vulnerabilities and safeguard it from another humiliating November defeat, Reince Priebus’s members urged him to move swiftly to distance the party from Trump. Their trepidation was understandable: Trump was not a Republican. He had held positions for decades that ran counter to party orthodoxy: pro-choice, antiwar, pro-universal health care. He had also donated considerable sums of money to Democratic politicians, an apostasy that would have spelled doom for most any aspiring Republican in most any race, all the way down to city council.
But getting rid of Trump wasn’t so simple. Parties are inherently open entities; there were no formalized rules governing the qualities, characteristics, or policy stances required to run for office as a Republican or a Democrat. No practical mechanism existed for shunning Trump from the GOP or forbidding him from identifying as a member thereof. Certainly, there were ways to stack the deck against him. But what made this problematic was Trump’s knowledge of the plotting going on inside the party—and his repeated public warnings that he would run as an independent in 2016 and bury the Republicans’ chances if, in fact, he felt they were sabotaging him.
All this put Priebus in an impossible position. He didn’t want Trump to be the Republican Party’s nominee for president. But he was convinced it could never happen anyway—“Not in a million years,” he told friends—and saw no wisdom in alienating someone with the pop celebrity of Kim Kardashian and the political etiquette of Joseph McCarthy.
Two of Priebus’s lieutenants, chief of staff Katie Walsh and communications director Sean Spicer, were appalled by Trump and urged the chairman to undermine his candidacy before it gained more steam. A number of senior RNC members pushed the idea of banning Trump from the debates altogether, with the justification that he had no history of identifying with the party. Spicer, a longtime GOP flack who was running point on the debate arrangements with the TV networks, endorsed this argument. But Priebus refused. What kept the chairman up at night wasn’t the prospect of Trump winning the primary, but of him demolishing the party—in 2016 and perhaps for years to come—with an independent bid.
After months of delicate discussions with party elders across the country, Priebus settled on the safest solution he could think of: a loyalty pledge. All the candidates running for president would be asked to sign their names to a piece of paper stating their promise to support the eventual Republican nominee. Several state parties already required presidential candidates to sign a similar document when filing paperwork to qualify for the ballot,1 which provided Priebus with plausible deniability that he was singling out Trump.
He was, of course, and everyone knew it. But instead of backing Trump into a corner, the move increased his leverage exponentially. Here he was, a first-time candidate for office, and the RNC chairman was improvising new guidelines in the hope of mitigating the risk he posed to the party.
Trump could hardly believe it. His running as an independent was as realistic as his promise to make Mexico pay for a border wall. Assembling the manpower to clear procedural hurdles and qualify for enough state ballots to be relevant to the general election would cost upward of $10 million. And time was of the essence; deadlines loomed early the following year, while many states had “sore loser” laws that banned a losing primary candidate from running as an independent. Trump was aware of these restrictions, having been briefed on the nightmarish logistics of running a third-party race, and he had zero intention of actually following through.
But Priebus couldn’t take any chances.
Spooked by the opening act of the Cleveland debate, the chairman spent the next several weeks back-channeling with Trump about his willingness to sign a loyalty pledge. The document, Priebus told him, was as much about protecting Trump as protecting the party: Many of his Republican rivals would be irate if Trump won the nomination, Priebus pointed out, but they would be duty-bound to support him by signing their names.
Trump, who had earned a fortune negotiating deals far more intricate than this, strung Priebus along, savoring the sight of the chairman squirming in angst over the indecision of the party’s unwelcome guest. At last, with the second GOP debate approaching in California, Trump told Priebus he would sign the pledge, on one condition. Priebus needed to come to New York. Trump was too busy, he told the chairman, to come to Washington.
Priebus was thrilled. His allies were not. It struck them as a power play. Trump believed he had cornered the GOP, and now he wanted to prove it to the political world. “Don’t do this, Reince,” Matt Moore, the South Carolina GOP chairman, told his friend. (South Carolina’s loyalty pledge was a template for the RNC’s certificate.) “You’re the party boss. Make him come to DC and sign it. Then go out to the cameras and declare victory.”
But Priebus did not share this concern. It was a distinction without a difference, he argued. Whether the pledge was signed on Fifth Avenue or on Capitol Hill, all that mattered was Trump agreeing not to run as an independent.
Priebus raced to New York on September 3 and watched as Trump autographed a document with the RNC’s insignia and handed it back. The candidate then shooed Priebus out a back door of Trump Tower and went down to address the media by himself. “The RNC has treated me with great respect,” Trump told a packed press conference.2
The irony was nothing short of sublime. For the past several years, conservative malcontents in the activist and media classes had branded anyone they disagreed with a RINO, Republican in Name Only. Now they were falling for a presidential candidate who had spent decades as a Democrat, who had donated generously to liberal causes, who had hosted Bill and Hillary Clinton at his wedding, and whose only connection to the Republican Party was his name on a piece of paper.
As Trump danced in the end zone and Priebus sipped a frosty Miller Lite on his train ride back to Washington, I spoke to John Ryder, the RNC’s general counsel, to ask whether the pledge was legally binding. “Uhhh, legally binding?” he responded. “No. No. I think it’s politically binding.”
Ryder wouldn’t elaborate on what he meant by that. But two things were obvious. First, the pledge wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on. Second, and more consequentially, Trump had outmaneuvered the Republican Party. By drumming up a month’s worth of reality TV–style suspense over his empty threat to flee the GOP, he had starved his opponents of oxygen in the press, elevated his own brand above that of the party’s, and scared the RNC chairman into making accommodations that no candidate could rightly expect.
TRUMP WAS STILL SMILING LATER THAT MONTH WHEN THE REPUBLICAN candidates met for their second debate, at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley. Once again, Trump’s deficiencies and offenses were manifest. And once again, they did nothing to damage his stand
ing. His poll numbers continued to climb after an evening spent dominating the cameras and the conversation. He called Rand Paul ugly. He called Carly Fiorina beautiful—by way of defending himself for having previously called her ugly. He called Jeb Bush “low energy.” And, as would become custom, he refused to back down. Having recently suggested that Bush would have had different immigration policies had he not married a Mexican woman, Trump scoffed at Bush’s attempt to force an apology.
It was a clarifying moment. In the run-up to the debate, Bush’s senior advisers, worried that the candidate’s Charmin-soft caricature was killing him, wondered aloud whether Bush should physically confront Trump; not necessarily punching the bully in the nose, but intimating a threat with his body language, mustering outrage over Trump’s insult of his wife. Instead, Bush’s approach had all the confidence of a puny kid whose father—or older brother—had just trained him to throw his first punch. (Trump would later recall his surprise at how Bush had barely raised his voice over the affront to his wife.)
After his two feeble attempts to force an apology failed—“I won’t do that, because I did nothing wrong,” Trump said, adding that he’d heard “phenomenal things” about Columba Bush—the scion of America’s premier political dynasty turned almost helplessly to the cameras and framed the discussion in more transcendent terms.
“We’re at a crossroads right now: Are we going to take the Reagan approach? The hopeful, optimistic approach?” Bush asked the audience. “Or the Donald Trump approach? The approach that says that everything is bad, that everything is coming to an end?”
THIS QUESTION ANSWERED ITSELF. THE COUNTRY WAS NOT FEELING terribly hopeful or optimistic, and truth be told, the sour mood owed as much to one candidate’s demonizing as to another candidate’s sermonizing. The reason Trump was able to get away with calling his rivals ugly, with insulting prisoners of war, with belittling women and using vulgar language, was that Americans, particularly conservatives, were becoming numb to the outrage culture.
On that very same night, just after the California debate concluded, the season premiere of South Park harvested this zeitgeist with flawless hilarity. The animated show, which follows the lives of a group of foul-mouthed elementary school kids, opened its nineteenth season with the introduction of a new villain, “PC Principal.”
Militant and overbearing, with a puffed-out chest and a brimming list of grievances, PC Principal bullies the children who possess anything other than fully enlightened views of the world. In the first episode,3 PC Principal punishes anyone in South Park who dares describe Caitlyn Jenner as anything less than “stunning and brave.”
Recruiting a like-minded army of young, white social-justice warriors, PC Principal sets out to reeducate South Park. What the show captured brilliantly was how the paroxysm of virtue-signaling had choked our capacity for engaging those with whom we disagree; how the fear of offending had diminished our ability to talk honestly and laugh openly. (Months earlier, Jerry Seinfeld made headlines by announcing that he no longer performed stand-up comedy shows on college campuses because of the students’ sensitivities.)
Against this backdrop, Trump’s talent for afflicting offense, and his aversion to apologizing, made him a demigod to portions of the population.
What South Park fans might have missed was the show’s subtler criticism of what had yielded the social-justice mentality in the first place: institutional racism and economic inequality, compassionless individuality and consequence-free bigotry. Indeed, the show lampoons the supercilious nature of the left and the reactionary nature of the right with equal effectiveness: In the season’s second episode, as a teacher at South Park Elementary launches a presidential campaign based on building a wall to keep out Canadian immigrants, PC Principal forces the school’s faculty to take “Canadian-language” classes to better serve their vulnerable migrant population.
The political guile of Trump was in reducing these nuanced and necessarily complex debates to their lowest common denominator. Taking the blanket complaint of “political correctness” and weaponizing it, he discovered that there was everything to gain from challenging the pearl-clutching ethos of the progressive base—even when he went too far.
That fall, Trump surprised exactly no one by affirming his support for the nickname of Washington’s professional football team. For the past several years, the left had waged an unrelenting assault on the name “Redskins,” calling it insensitive to Native Americans. In the spring of 2014, some months after Obama used his bully pulpit to call for the name to be changed,4 fifty senators (none of them Republican) sent a letter to NFL commissioner Roger Goodell urging him to take action.5 They called the team’s name “a racial slur” and asserted that “Indian Country has spoken clearly on this issue.”
In fact, to the extent that Native Americans had weighed in, a body of polling, research, and interviews suggested that most of them fell somewhere between indifferent and supportive. The previous fall, when the Redskins hosted a group of Navajo code talkers at a home game, honoring their World War II service with a ceremony on the field, the group’s vice president, Roy Hawthorne, told the Associated Press, “My opinion is that’s a name that not only the team should keep, but that’s a name that’s American.”6
As with all things Trump-related, however, this proved to be a slippery slope. Emboldened by being on the winning side of this issue, the GOP front-runner saw no downside to pushing the envelope.
Within a few months, he was targeting Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts senator who, despite her obvious whiteness, had claimed Native American identity in her rise through academia. Trump settled on a sobriquet for Warren, one that might have been mildly offensive to the right had it not elicited such disproportionate wrath from the left: “Pocahontas.”
PAUL RYAN WAS HOLED UP IN HIS OFFICE ON A CRISP THURSDAY MORNING in early October, tapping final revisions into a document on his computer, when the phone rang. It was the majority leader.
“Hey, just finishing up the speech,” Ryan told Kevin McCarthy. In a few hours, Republicans were expected to choose McCarthy, in an internal vote, to succeed Boehner as Speaker of the House. Ryan had volunteered to deliver remarks and formally place his friend’s name into nomination. “What’s up?”
Around that same time, Boehner pounded the gavel inside the mostly empty lower chamber, opening the House for business. Then he walked off the podium, through a swinging door, and into the Speaker’s lobby, a hallway decorated with monarchic portraits of his predecessors. Waiting for him, whispering furiously, were his chief of staff and McCarthy’s chief of staff. “Uh-oh,” Boehner responded. “He doesn’t have the votes?”
It was a surprise only in the sense that McCarthy was running unopposed. Yet no one could claim to be shocked at his sudden collapse: McCarthy was hardly an inspired choice for the most powerful position in Congress.
A gregarious Californian with an easy laugh and a perfectly coifed swatch of silver hair, he enjoyed strong personal bonds across the Republican Conference. And he was universally respected as an electoral sage with a mental Rolodex of districts, voting histories, and demographic trends. But serving as Speaker of the House requires more than relationships and political knowledge; the job demands intuition and temperance, unwaveringly sound judgment and coolness under fire. McCarthy’s possession of these attributes was shaky at best.
Just recently, he had boasted on Fox News that the House GOP’s probe into the Benghazi attacks had damaged Hillary Clinton’s presidential prospects—after two years of Republicans denying any partisan motivation behind the committee’s work. It was precisely this sort of unmoored loudmouthery McCarthy’s associates worried about. And it wasn’t their only concern.
For several years, rumors had percolated inside the House about an extramarital adventure involving McCarthy and a colleague, Renee Ellmers of North Carolina.7 McCarthy denied the affair, as did Ellmers, though somewhat less vigorously. Their colleagues weren’t sure what to believe. “
I never bought it. I thought she was nutty,” Boehner says. “She had this fixation on Kevin.”
But McCarthy’s biggest problem was the Freedom Caucus. After more than four years of living under the thumb of Boehner, conservatives weren’t going to robotically promote the next in line. To win their support, they told McCarthy, they would need concessions—ideally, a seat at the leadership table for one of their own.
This was an impossible ask. Jordan was loathed by much of the House GOP for his seek-and-destroy tactics; he would never receive the votes for majority leader or even majority whip. Meadows was despised for his treatment of Boehner. None of their Freedom Caucus comrades was well known or well liked enough to stand a chance, either.
Hoping for an unlikely assist, McCarthy placed a call to Ted Cruz, explaining his untenable position with House conservatives and wondering if the Tea Party favorite might weigh in on his behalf or at least not do something to derail his unsteady candidacy. Cruz vowed neutrality, nothing more or less. It was a window into the dizzying, upside-down world of GOP politics: The man poised to become Speaker of the House believed his fate could be determined by a freshman senator.
When McCarthy suggested a compromise to Jordan, offering to put forth Trey Gowdy, the popular South Carolinian who chaired the Benghazi committee, as his majority leader, the Freedom Caucus balked. If not a leadership position, Jordan told McCarthy, conservatives might settle for an infusion of their members onto the Steering Committee, an influential panel that appoints chairmen and hands down committee assignments. When McCarthy told him that he could not deliver on this, Jordan made it clear that a sufficient number of Freedom Caucus members would block his promotion to the speakership.
“It’s not going to happen, Paul,” McCarthy told his friend over the phone.
Ryan knew what was coming next. McCarthy made the case that Ryan should step up and become Speaker, arguing that he was the only Republican capable of uniting the conference, a sentiment echoed throughout his conversations with colleagues over the following week. Ryan was not interested in the job, and everyone knew it. He had insisted to Boehner and others, after Cantor’s loss in the summer of 2014, that he would “never” be Speaker. Now he was repeating himself to McCarthy.