American Carnage

by Tim Alberta

  Pacing briskly through Statuary Hall en route to his office suite, Boehner placed his first call to Jo-Marie St. Martin, his general counsel. Boehner was worried that if word leaked of McCarthy’s withdrawal, and if they knew how to manipulate the bylaws, conservatives could seize control of the meeting and nominate anyone they wished. Under Robert’s Rules of Order, the conference could be forced into an interminable number of voting rounds until someone emerged with a majority. “I was not gonna let that happen,” Boehner says.

  The House GOP meeting began with a prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance. Then, the conference chair, Cathy McMorris Rogers, recognized McCarthy, whom everyone in the room, save for Boehner and Ryan, was expecting to make his closing pitch for the job. Instead, McCarthy offered a tearful exit from the race.

  Boehner immediately asked for recognition from the chair. “I move to adjourn,” he shouted, nodding to McMorris Rogers to bang the gavel. Before anyone knew what had hit them, the meeting was over. McCarthy was out, and Ryan was making a beeline out of the room and toward his office, avoiding the media throngs sure to descend on him after learning the news.

  Boehner, lighting a cigarette as he returned to his office, was preparing to pull out the stops. McCarthy had been right about one thing: Ryan was the only House Republican who could unify the party. Now, Boehner felt, he had a responsibility to help Ryan see that.

  For the next twelve days, Ryan’s phone did not stop ringing. First, it was Boehner, explaining the situation and impressing upon his old friend that he had no choice in the matter—the party needed him. Then it was Mitt Romney, his former running mate, saying much the same. Then it was Priebus, his longtime pal and fellow Wisconsinite. Then it was a chorus of senators, lobbyists, donors, think-tankers, all the allies he’d compiled over two decades in Washington.

  At one point, Ryan turned his phone off, disappeared into the woods outside Janesville by himself, wielding a bow and arrow, crouching in a cramped tree stand for nearly an entire day. When he switched the phone back on, it buzzed once more. The voice on the other end belonged to Cardinal Timothy Dolan, archbishop of New York and president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, telling Ryan of his obligation to serve at a moment of national uncertainty. Ryan, an observant Catholic, was vexed and bemused.

  He called Boehner. “You son of a bitch,” he told the Speaker. “You sicced Dolan on me?”

  “Yes, I did,” Boehner replied. “And I’ll have the pope calling your sorry ass next if you don’t smarten up.”

  Ryan sighed. His opposition to serving in a leadership position was rooted in family: The congressman had lost his father at fifty-five, and neither his grandfather nor his great-grandfather had lived to see sixty. Ryan also carried tremendous guilt about living away from his wife and three young children, not to mention his brother and wife and their kids, who lived a few blocks away, on top of a bevy of cousins and family friends in Janesville. The town had always been his refuge; he already spent Mondays through Fridays in Washington and had no appetite for jet-setting the country in his spare time, giving speeches and shaking down donors.

  But what if he didn’t have to? Ryan convened a call with his top advisers and told them he would consider the job with two conditions: that he be given weekends to spend with his family and that the whole of the House GOP support his candidacy. Having watched the Freedom Caucus heap abuse on Boehner, Ryan would not step into the job unless its members were on record with their support of him.

  This ultimatum irked some members in the Freedom Caucus. Seeing their leverage slip away, Raúl Labrador and Justin Amash implored their colleagues to keep a poker face. They would demand a summit with Ryan, airing their gripes pertaining to Boehner’s closed-off legislative process and his punitive tendencies.

  Some of their comrades agreed, but others arched an eyebrow. The group had effectively driven Boehner out of town; now they were going to play hardball with Ryan, the closest thing to an ideological soul mate any of them could imagine holding the Speaker’s gavel?

  The summit was anticlimactic. Ryan shared the conservatives’ frustration with how the House had been run and pledged to restore balance between the chamber’s powerful chairmen and its back-bench members. A small clique of hard-liners decided to hold out, but a supermajority of the Freedom Caucus, roughly 30 of its three dozen members, swore their support to Ryan.8

  Boehner did his best to provide a smooth transition for his successor. A web of thorny legislation awaited action in late 2015: a debt ceiling deadline, an unresolved budget to keep the government open, and a fight to strip funding from Planned Parenthood, among other items. Boehner promised Ryan he would “clear the barn,” legislative-speak for passing a sweeping set of bills to provide a clean slate for the new Speaker. It was cathartic for Boehner. Not only would he be pissing off the conservatives for a final time, but he would also have a chance to unload on Obama, who had different ideas for handling the fall’s agenda.

  On a conference call with the president and Mitch McConnell one week before his departure, Boehner recalls Obama voicing his displeasure with the Speaker’s preferred path before venturing into one of his patented homilies. Boehner held the phone away from his ear for several moments, gesturing to his staff to bring him an ashtray. When he listened back in, Obama was still going.

  “I waited three, four, five minutes, and finally I said, ‘Mr. President, I didn’t get on this goddamn phone call to listen to you lecture me one more time!’” Boehner recalls. “Then I hung up. I’m sure McConnell was shitting in his pants.”

  An hour later, Boehner’s staff informed him that an agreement was in place with the Senate and the White House.

  Watching from across the Capitol, McConnell mourned his counterpart’s departure while rejoicing at his opportunity to lead a more civilized institution. “I don’t have the luxury of having some kind of philosophical purity test, and I’ve never tried to have one. But it is noteworthy, we don’t have a Freedom Caucus in the Senate,” McConnell says. “I think we play well with others—almost all of us. Our members are more pragmatic because they just have broader constituencies, whereas, in the House, obviously that’s sometimes quite different.”

  On October 29, Ryan was elected Speaker of the House, and Boehner was sent into the sunset with a prolonged standing ovation, tears streaming down his face as he walked to the back of the chamber to witness the coronation of his successor.

  Boehner was leaving a complex legacy. As a young House member, he had been instrumental in cleaning up Congress. As a committee chairman, he had written and ushered through one of the premier policies of the Bush administration. And as Speaker, Boehner had accomplished more than the conservatives would ever give him credit for: securing meaningful spending cuts under a Democratic president; protecting the overwhelming majority of Americans from a tax hike; banning earmarks and keeping them banned despite the negotiating leverage it robbed him of; and his proudest accomplishment, fixing a nagging problem with the Medicare payment formula that could produce nearly $3 trillion in savings over the ensuing three decades.9

  Yet these will be overshadowed by posterity’s more existential observations: That Boehner’s twenty-five years in Washington saw the dissolution of a party, the vandalizing of a government, the splintering of a nation. That Boehner watched as the GOP transformed from the party of George H. W. Bush into the party of Donald Trump. That Boehner funded and helped recruit a class of majority-makers who drove him from office and destabilized the Congress he cares deeply about.

  The triumph of John Boehner was that he achieved reform and ascended to the speakership while rising above the uncompromising dogma of both parties. The tragedy is that he came to Congress an insurgent only to be swallowed by the insurgency, and that he wasted momentous opportunities, as with the shutdown and immigration battles of 2013, to lead in a way that might have quelled it.

  Mike Sommers, the Speaker’s chief of staff, says it best: “We fed the beast that ate us.”


  Chapter Eleven

  October 2015

  “When I listen to Donald Trump, I hear the America I grew up in.”

  WHEN PAUL RYAN ACCEPTED HIS PROMOTION TO SPEAKER, A JOB HE did not want, leading a party and an institution that were increasingly ungovernable, a principal justification was the chance he saw to spearhead an intellectual renaissance in the GOP.

  Republicans had once prided themselves on belonging to the “party of ideas,” as Obama had himself described the Reagan-era GOP while running for president in 2008.1 But the buzz of Reaganism had long since turned into a hangover. And the new Speaker, a politician whose values were alchemized in a conservative think tank, sensed an opening.

  Ryan had never gotten over the Republican ticket’s loss in 2012. The race was eminently winnable, what with the fundamentals of slow economic growth, lagging public confidence, and mediocre approval ratings for the president. Ryan felt certain that the reason Mitt Romney had failed to turn Barack Obama into Jimmy Carter 2.0 was that, unlike Reagan, Romney (and the party) lacked a sharp, contrasting vision to offer the country. “It taught me that you have to run campaigns on ideas, and you have to make them really clear choices,” Ryan recalls.

  At the outset of Obama’s second term, some on the right undertook a serious effort at reinvention. Against a blank canvas of introspection, a bloc of thoughtful reform conservatives emerged with a new agenda, earnest and cerebral and prescient in identifying the blind spots of the modern GOP. They were dubbed “Reformicons,” and their quarterback was Yuval Levin, a former Bush 43 adviser who in his thirties launched a quarterly journal called National Affairs that became the handbook of the brainiac right.

  Levin and a loosely affiliated squadron of academics, think-tankers, journalists, and political strategists designed a fleet of forward-looking free-market solutions that shared a simple premise: that the post-Reagan GOP had become reflexively servile to corporations and the wealthy and no longer offered much to the middle- and working-class Americans left behind by the forces of globalization, deindustrialization, and an uneven recovery from the Great Recession. It was, at its core, the same critique that would drive Trump to see political gold in the “American carnage” of hardscrabble towns battered by decades of economic dislocation.

  “Reaganism arose to deal with barriers to prosperity being put up by an overly aggressive, interventionist government, and obviously there are still such barriers in the way,” Levin says. “But what we have now more obviously is the breakdown of fundamental institutions, from the family and community, to the very nature of the workplace for a lot of Americans.”

  His crew’s ideas were provocative and compelling: tax reform centered on child tax credits to benefit working families and earned-income credits to incentivize work; eliminating subsidies across the board to level the playing field for little guys competing with Big Business; overhauling the immigration system to prioritize high-skilled labor; and limiting, perhaps temporarily halting, the inflow of low-skilled workers.

  They gained a critical mass of media attention with op-eds, speeches, and policy conferences in 2013 and 2014. For the first time in two decades, there was authentic energy penetrating the party’s political class, if not its blue-collar base, that could be traced to new intellectual experimentation rather than old ideological rhetoric.

  In Congress, the Reformicons found natural allies in the GOP’s swelling crowd of Gen X legislators who felt a certain detachment from establishment orthodoxy. Chief among them was Ryan, now the highest-ranking official in the Republican Party. He knew he might not stay on top for long; he certainly hoped that the next president would be a Republican. But more specifically, he hoped that the next president would be a Republican willing to challenge the status quo.

  Surveying the GOP presidential field and seeing several like-minded individuals—Bush, Rubio, and even Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, less a conservative visionary than an accomplished agitator—Ryan knew that his speakership, in partnership with one of them as president, could result in a policy revolution for a party stuck in the 1980s.

  So, he seized the Speaker’s gavel and got to work, crafting a comprehensive set of proposals on poverty, health care, and taxation that Republicans could run on in 2016, and that could serve as a ready-made agenda for whichever kindred spirit won the White House.

  And then, as Ryan so delicately puts it, “Donald Trump sort of overtook things.”

  IT WASN’T MERELY THAT TRUMP HAD ESTABLISHED A COMFORTABLE lead in virtually every national poll of the Republican primary. It was that he was driving the conversation and dominating the media coverage like no presidential candidate America had ever seen. Every interview, every press conference, every early morning tweet or late-night leak from his campaign blocked out the sun.

  Trump had spent decades manipulating the New York City tabloids like a puppeteer. Now the candidate was doing likewise to the political press corps. Nightly newscasts worked him into every show. Cable networks carried nearly all his campaign events live. Even the Sunday shows, hallowed for their self-important equanimity, got in on the act, allowing Trump to call into the programs rather than appear on set—something unheard of for any other politician.

  When the primary contest had concluded, independent estimates suggested that Trump had received more than $3 billion in free media coverage. And he did not let it go to waste.

  It has often been said that Trump has no core ideology, that he is a man without conviction. This is dangerously false. Any casual examination of Trump’s writings and remarks going back three decades reveals an opportunist who, while fluid in partisan affiliation and most of his policy positions, cleaves to a few bedrock beliefs. They revolve around the notion that globalization is irredeemably injurious to American society; more specifically, that unrestricted levels of immigration, uneven trade deals, and unchecked foreign cheating have undermined the American business and the American worker.

  None of these arguments, in isolation, is necessarily wrong or even wrongheaded. Indeed, Trump’s ascent in 2015 was a confirmation of the novel, systemic problems plaguing much of the electorate and the failure of both parties to advance relevant solutions for addressing them.

  Yet his policies, rather than leaning forward into the challenges posed in a hyperconnected new century, suggested turning back the clock, looking inward in the hope of returning America to familiar terrain rather than daring to discover the uncharted. Trump spoke like the CEO of an aging conglomerate bereft of new ideas, one that recycles vintage labeling to inspire nostalgia instead of creating new products to attract the next generation of consumers.

  The marketing campaign was called “Make America Great Again.” And it sold like hotcakes—particularly when printed on his iconic red baseball cap.

  “When I listen to Donald Trump, I hear the America I grew up in. He wants to make things like they used to be,” Pam McKinney said outside a Trump rally in Arizona in 2016. She and her husband, Lee Stauffacher, had recently moved there to escape the “welfare state” of California.

  “Where I grew up, in the San Joaquin Valley, it was a good, solid community, but it fell apart when the government started pandering to all of these immigrants who don’t understand our culture and don’t want to assimilate,” she said. McKinney stiffened. “I’m okay with immigrants as long as they’re legal. But they need to assimilate to our culture. They can have their culture at home. In public, you’re an American. They’re celebrating their own holidays instead of ours.”

  She continued: “I was born in the fifties, when women stayed at home and men went to work and houses and cars were affordable. We had manufacturing jobs, good jobs. We used to farm in the San Joaquin Valley. It was called the Bread Bowl of America. Now we get our fruits and vegetables from South America. I remember praying in school, but then that got stopped, too. Trump gives us a chance to take things back.”

  America during the rise of the forty-fifth president was witnessing a sweeping
and unprecedented demographic transformation, becoming younger, better educated, more diverse, more urban, more secular, and more dependent on a globalized economy. These trends showed no sign of reversal, hence the RNC project attempting to recalibrate a party that had long depended on older, white, rural, working-class, religious voters. The biggest driver of America’s change was the ethnic diversification of the electorate and its political implications.

  California became a majority-minority state at the turn of the century. By 2016, whites were 38 percent of its population and dwindling;2 in turn, the GOP became extinct. McKinney and Stauffacher fled to Arizona, only to feel a sense of déjà vu: Over the past twenty-five years, the state’s Hispanic population had nearly tripled, and whites had gone from 74 percent of the population to 56 percent. Minorities would be the majority by 2022, and Democrats planned to end the GOP’s monopoly on the state. (Clinton’s campaign would spend millions in Arizona while all but ignoring the traditional Democratic stronghold of Wisconsin.)

  “The good people like us are leaving California because of all that—the influx of immigrants, many of them illegal, who are getting state ID cards, welfare benefits, and other government programs, and not even assimilating,” Stauffacher, a Navy veteran, said. “And now it’s happening here. This state is up for grabs. The entire country is changing because they’re letting people in who will only vote for Democrats.”

  This is what “Make America Great Again” conveyed to many voters. Others heard a message that was altogether different—not an identity-based message, but an anti-elitist screed, or a populist call for government reform. The genius of the catchphrase, and what made Trump’s candidacy so effective, was its seamless weaving of the personal and cultural into the political and socioeconomic. His was a canopy of discontent under which the grudging masses could congregate to air their grievances about a nation they no longer recognized and a government they no longer trusted.