by Tim Alberta
The crowd, having noticed Rubio’s rhetorical repeat, laughed and cheered.
It could have ended there. Instead, Rubio continued to engage him. After criticizing Christie’s handling of a recent snowstorm, Rubio, sounding like a malfunctioning robot, repeated himself a third time. “Here’s the bottom line: This notion that Barack Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing is just not true,” Rubio said. “He knows exactly what he’s doing.”
“There it is!” Christie blurted out, to the delight of the crowd. “The memorized twenty-five-second speech!”
Standing two lecterns away from Rubio, with only Trump between them, Cruz thought to himself, Ho-lee crap.
It was a truly unforgettable exchange; pundits dubbed it a “murder-suicide” likely to bury both campaigns. Rubio acquitted himself well for the remainder of the event. Yet he knew, walking offstage, that nobody would remember anything but his verbal glitch.
He had arrived in New Hampshire with the wind at his back, a second-place finish looking certain. Instead, Rubio’s debate performance doomed him. Over the ensuing seventy-two hours, his standing in the state collapsed. He placed an embarrassing fifth in the primary, taking just 11 percent of the vote.
Trump was dominant, taking 35 percent and leaving just 16 percent for John Kasich, the why-can’t-we-all-just-get-along Ohio governor, who capitalized on Rubio’s implosion to finish as the runner-up. Cruz, who was not thought to be competitive in New Hampshire, had a surprisingly strong third-place showing. Even Bush, whose campaign was on life support, finished narrowly ahead of Rubio.
It was little consolation that Rubio bested Christie, who promptly exited the race following his sixth-place showing. By finishing behind Kasich and Bush, both of whom claimed justification to carry on with their campaigns, Rubio saw the three-way contest in South Carolina slip through his fingers.
“Those thirty seconds or sixty seconds in New Hampshire,” Rubio says, shaking his head. “That was a big moment, because of that tactical mistake. Had we performed better in New Hampshire, the race could have gone on a different trajectory.”
A WEEK LATER, AS THE CAMPAIGN CONTINUED ON IN SUNNY SOUTH Carolina, a GOP operative named Marc Short arrived in bitter-cold Kansas for a meeting he hoped would turn the tide of the race.
Trump’s demolition of the field in New Hampshire had set off alarms across the right. What began as a joke—the prospect of The Donald as The Nominee—was suddenly a very real possibility. Rubio was mortally wounded. Kasich had no money or organizational muscle. Bush looked like the biggest flop in recent presidential memory. Of the remaining candidates, only Cruz appeared capable of thwarting Trump’s advance. This was cold comfort to the graybeards of the GOP establishment.
But it wasn’t just the party’s elite who were panicking. Short, the longtime consigliere to Mike Pence and now the president of Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce, the umbrella group in charge of political activities for the donor network led by Charles and David Koch, believed Trump embodied an existential threat to conservatism. Worried that he would soon be unstoppable, Short had led a small team to Koch Industries’ headquarters in Wichita to present a detailed plan for subduing the front-runner. What he needed was approval from Charles Koch to organize an eight-figure spending blitz against Trump on Super Tuesday, March 1, when eleven states would vote. Short hoped to hammer Trump in the states where he was most vulnerable, depriving him of delegates and undermining the narrative of his inevitability.
But there was an unwelcome surprise awaiting Short’s crew inside a conference room: A number of top executives and advisers from across the Koch enterprise had been invited to attend the meeting. They represented the so-called corporate side of Koch world, which had long warred with the “political side” of the empire, particularly over the consequences of the brothers’ campaign-related activities. One of America’s most valuable companies, Koch Industries, a producer of everything from toilet paper to jet fuel, was increasingly synonymous with the Koch brothers, a fact that worried their bean counters and stockholders. Facing protests, boycotts, and attacks on them by name from some of the country’s top Democratic officials, the brothers’ business associates grew antsier by the day.
There was another unexpected development in store: After Short presented his proposal, Charles, whose greenbacks and green light the political side was soliciting, asked his corporate lieutenants to cast an up-or-down vote. One by one, they voiced their opposition to going to war against Trump. Everyone figured that Charles would still have the last word, weighing the pros and cons of meddling in the race. Instead, he shrugged. The majority, he said, had spoken.
The verdict was indicative of what the Koch brothers’ allies described as a long-term “realignment” of resources, with their money and focus steered away from elections and toward a slew of the more intellectual, policy-oriented projects on which they had historically lavished their fortune. Charles, in particular, had grown exasperated with the lack of return on their mammoth investments in recent years, and was not keen to throw bad money after good.
In the short term, however, it meant losing their top political staffer. Short quit Freedom Partners within the week, going to work for Rubio’s campaign and gushing to Koch world staffers about “being in the fight” to stop Trump.
Meanwhile, the party’s leaders were also striking out. In the twenty-four hours immediately following the New Hampshire primary, a senior official with the Republican National Committee reached out to several prominent DC consultants, veterans of past presidential campaigns, to ask for help. The RNC official warned that Trump was becoming a runaway train. Something needed to be done, they said, and fast—without the national party’s fingerprints. Could they organize against him on the fly? Build a coalition of household names? Run TV ads? Raise money for an anti-Trump effort?
The consultants were aghast. It was the middle of February, two primary contests into the nominating season. The time to organize against Trump was months ago. No last-minute opposition campaign, led by Beltway political fixers, was going to derail him.
Stymied, party leaders took matters into their own hands. In just a few days, the candidates would convene for yet another debate, this one in Greenville, South Carolina, on February 13, one week before the state’s primary. Desperate to halt Trump’s momentum, the chairman of the South Carolina GOP, Matt Moore, colluded with top RNC brass, including communications director Sean Spicer and chief of staff Katie Walsh, to stack the debate hall in Greenville with Rubio supporters.
The resulting two-hour melee, moderated by CBS News, was even uglier than usual.
Trump was booed lustily and repeatedly, so much so that Google reported a 1,400 percent spike in searches for “Why are people booing?”13 The answers varied, but the loudest objections to the front-runner were voiced during his criticisms of George W. Bush. With the former president set to visit the state days later to campaign for his brother, the moderator, John Dickerson, asked about Trump’s comment in 2008 that Bush should have been impeached.
“George Bush made a mistake,” Trump said, fighting through waves of booing. “We all make mistakes. But that one was a beauty. We should have never been in Iraq. We have destabilized the Middle East. . . . They lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction. There were none. And they knew there were none.”14
It was an unthinkable statement for a Republican to make about the party’s last president, particularly in the veteran-heavy, pro-military Palmetto State. But Trump wasn’t done yet. After Jeb Bush responded—“While Donald Trump was building a reality TV show, my brother was building a security apparatus to keep us safe”—Trump went nuclear.
“The World Trade Center came down during your brother’s reign. Remember that,” Trump said.
Gasps could be heard in the auditorium.
It wasn’t the last confrontation of the night. When Cruz slammed Trump’s onetime advocacy for partial-birth abortion and his recent statement of support for the organiz
ation Planned Parenthood, Trump called him “the single biggest liar,” citing the Carson incident in Iowa. Cruz, in turn, reminded voters that Trump had compared Carson to a “child molester” earlier in the campaign. (On a positive note, Trump vowed to refrain from further vulgarities on the campaign trail, days after referring to Cruz as a “pussy.”15)
And then, at long last, Cruz and Rubio dropped the gloves for good.
After a heated back-and-forth regarding the 2013 immigration fight, with Cruz alleging that Rubio supported amnesty (he did) and Rubio accusing Cruz of supporting a dramatic increase in legal immigration (he did), the Texas senator seemed intent on scoring a personal point against his colleague from Florida. “Marco went on Univision in Spanish and said he would not rescind President Obama’s illegal executive amnesty on his first day in office,” Cruz said.
“I don’t know how he knows what I said on Univision,” Rubio shot back, “because he doesn’t speak Spanish.”
Red in the face, Cruz blurted out several lines of sloppy español as the crowd buzzed. The mutual contempt between them, simmering below the surface for years, was now on full display. Cruz believed Rubio was a phony conservative with few core convictions; Rubio saw Cruz as a craven opportunist who had forsaken the Hispanic community and his own heritage. Rubio’s insult was the political equivalent of the rap battle diss in the film 8 Mile, when the freestyler played by Eminem mocks his suburbanite opponent: “This guy’s a gangster? His real name’s Clarence!”
Despite the ad hominem pettiness that defined much of the debate, the stakes, for the party and the country, were suddenly even higher. Earlier in the day, Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia was found dead inside his room at a Texas hunting ranch. (Trump couldn’t help but wade into a new theater of conspiracy theorizing, telling one talk radio host of Scalia’s death, “They say they found a pillow on his face, which is a pretty unusual place to find a pillow.”16)
The Senate’s new majority leader, Mitch McConnell, had immediately announced that Republicans would not hold a vote to confirm a new justice in an election year. If he held to his word—a big if, in the minds of many conservatives—it wouldn’t just be the presidency hanging in the balance on November 8. It would be a Supreme Court seat, plus the likelihood of one or two more appointments.
The friendly debate had given Rubio a much-needed boost. Trump, on the other hand, walked off the stage in a fury. When the event ended, his campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, cursed out multiple RNC officials and threatened a boycott of future debates. With his post–New Hampshire autopsies now being put on pause, Rubio pulled out the stops, calling in the endorsements of Nikki Haley and Tim Scott.
It was no small decision for Haley. Widely considered prime vice-presidential material for whichever Republican won the nomination, she also harbored future White House ambitions of her own and was reluctant to pick sides in such an ugly primary. She initially demurred, promising both Jeb and George W. Bush that she would remain neutral. Ultimately, however, Haley felt an obligation, if not to her friend Rubio, then to the cause of defeating Trump by any means necessary. The governor had become outspoken in disavowing the GOP front-runner, telling friends that she feared he might destroy the party and do irreparable harm the the country.
“I wanted somebody,” Haley said when endorsing Rubio, “that was going to go and show my parents that the best decision they ever made was coming to America.”
The endorsements from Haley and Scott—as well as of Trey Gowdy, the popular congressman who chaired the Benghazi committee and was making life miserable for Hillary Clinton—breathed life into Rubio’s candidacy. For several days the crew of telegenic, next-generation conservatives barnstormed the state together, just the image Priebus had dreamed of when drafting the RNC’s autopsy.
But it wasn’t enough. Rubio finished second in South Carolina, taking 22 percent of the vote, but in a virtual tie with Cruz, whom he topped by a thousand votes. Trump beat them both by 10 percentage points.
Bush finished a distant fourth and promptly departed the race. It was an ignominious end for a candidate with dynastic riches but scant organic support; a candidate who suffered humiliations at the hands of both Trump and GOP voters, some of whom he asked to “please clap” in New Hampshire; a candidate whose super PAC had spent nearly $35 million attacking Rubio, according to ProPublica, and just $25,000 attacking Trump.
No Republican did more to criticize Trump during the primary than Bush. But no candidacy did more to symbolize the decline of the GOP and the ascent of its unlikely new torchbearer.
IT WAS DESPERATION TIME FOR RUBIO. HE HAD DECLARED HIS INTENTION to remain in the race until Florida’s primary on March 15. But a victory there was already looking unlikely, and it would be downright impossible if he didn’t score some points on Super Tuesday, March 1.
In their final chance to make a national impression before Super Tuesday, Rubio and Cruz formed a tag team during the February 25 debate in Houston, emptying a dump truck of opposition research against the front-runner.17 It might have come in handy, say, six months earlier: How Trump had defrauded students at a university bearing his name; how he had hired foreign workers, oftentimes illegals, ahead of Americans; how his ties and suits were made in Mexico and China; how he repeatedly mismanaged his companies into bankruptcy.
But the verbal drubbing of Trump in Houston was too little, too late. He was gaining altitude and growing more emboldened by the day.
At a rally in Nevada after his South Carolina win, Trump dialed up the rhetoric in reference to a protester being escorted out of the audience. “I love the old days. You know what they used to do to guys like that when they were in a place like this? They’d be carried out on a stretcher, folks,” Trump said. He added: “I’d like to punch him in the face.”18 (Weeks earlier, he’d offered to “pay the legal fees” of anyone willing to “knock the crap out of” a protester.19) Trump knocked the crap out of his opponents in Nevada, taking 46 percent of the vote.
Three days later, on February 26, Chris Christie, the New Jersey governor and former contender for the nomination, became the first prominent Republican official to endorse Trump. “New lesson kids,” Bush chief strategist David Kochel tweeted. “Sometimes, the best option for the fat kid is to just hand his lunch money over to the bully!”
Then, two days later, at a massive rally in Alabama ahead of the state’s Super Tuesday primary, Jeff Sessions became the first Republican senator to endorse Trump. “I told Donald Trump this isn’t a campaign, this is a movement,” Sessions declared from the stage. “Look at what’s happening. The American people are not happy with their government.”
That same week, Trump added another ally, albeit one with a much lower profile. Having recently finished managing her father’s presidential campaign, Sarah Huckabee Sanders was a seasoned strategist, a good communicator, and had a deep knowledge of the upcoming southern states. Despite the early wins, Trump’s campaign was still a fly-by-night operation. Sanders, after meeting with Trump aboard his campaign plane and agreeing to come on as a senior adviser, offered an injection of veteran savvy.
With the polls in the eleven Super Tuesday states showing little movement, and Trump on a glide path to the nomination, his rivals emptied out their ammunition lockers.
Cruz began hitting him on a topic that, strangely, had gone largely unmentioned during the GOP primary: Trump’s refusal to release his tax returns. Rubio, for his part, decided to break character in a fateful moment of attempted levity. During a February 28 rally in Virginia, Rubio (dubbed “Little Marco” by the GOP front-runner) decided to fight Dumpster fire with Dumpster fire. “I’ll admit he’s taller than me. He’s like 6'2", which is why I don’t understand why his hands are the size of someone who’s 5'2". Have you seen his hands?” Rubio asked, the audience delighting in his new routine.20
“And you know what they say about men with small hands?” Rubio continued, grinning. As the crowd hooted and hollered, the senator hedged, “
You can’t trust ’em! You can’t trust ’em!”
Rubio also observed, noting how Trump often teased him for sweating, “He doesn’t sweat because his pores are clogged from the spray-tan he uses. Donald is not gonna make America great, he’s gonna make America orange!”
The senator’s friends were horrified. He had spent the past decade-plus distinguishing himself as a serious, sober-minded policymaker with an inspiring life story to boot. Now he was getting into the mud with Trump, cracking jokes about the size of a rival candidate’s penis.
Super Tuesday offered no validation of Rubio’s newfound approach. Of the eleven states voting, Trump won seven and Cruz carried three while Rubio’s lone victory came in Minnesota, a race that was called so late in the night that it barely registered. The results did nothing to alter the broader trajectory of the race: Trump was on his way to becoming the GOP nominee, save for a dramatic intervening event.
Mitt Romney had one in mind.
He had spent months biting his tongue as it pertained to Trump. This was in part because he believed the party would rally around a strong alternative, and in part because he knew he wasn’t an ideal messenger, having accepted Trump’s endorsement in 2012, only to lose to the GOP’s bête noire in a race many thought winnable.
But Romney could no longer stay silent. In a speech at the University of Utah on March 3, he urged voters to act strategically in the months ahead by backing whichever candidate had the best chance to win their state—rather than voting their preference—in the hope of denying Trump the delegates needed to be nominated outright in Cleveland. The Republican nominee of 2012 was calling for a political conspiracy to facilitate a brokered convention in 2016.
He also denounced the GOP front-runner in the harshest terms imaginable. “Here’s what I know: Donald Trump is a phony, a fraud,” Romney said. “His promises are as worthless as a degree from Trump University. He’s playing members of the American public for suckers: He gets a free ride to the White House, and all we get is a lousy hat.”21