by Tim Alberta
It was more fight than Romney had ever shown against Obama, a fact that Trump and his acolytes used to paint the 2012 nominee as a weak-kneed traitor to the party.
But to Romney there was a qualitative difference: Trump was doing and saying things that Obama had never done or said. This wasn’t about the party, Romney told his friends. It was about the country. Some warned him against it nonetheless; they worried that he would look duplicitous, especially when he declined to make any mention in his remarks of having accepted Trump’s endorsement four years earlier.
Romney didn’t much care. “I felt he was taking advantage of those who are racially insensitive or worse. And that led me to say, I’ve got to speak out now. I can’t just be on the sidelines,” he says. “I know not a lot of people pay attention to the former nominee, who doesn’t even have a political office right now. But for me, for my family, for my grandkids, I didn’t want them to say, ‘Hey, where were you when this was going on?’”
The verdict among senior Republicans was unanimous: Romney had strengthened Trump. Having never channeled the cultural and economic frustrations of the party’s base, Romney did nothing but demonstrate a familiar tone-deafness by attacking the man who was succeeding where he had failed.
Trump seemed to sense as much. The evening of Romney’s speech, the GOP front-runner was in a jovial mood upon arriving in downtown Detroit for a Fox News–sponsored debate. It would be Trump’s first face-to-face with Megyn Kelly since their dust-up in August, and his first encounter with Rubio since the comments about his spray tan and his “small hands.” Walking up to Rubio backstage before the event, Trump spread his fingers and thrust his palm toward his rival’s face. “Look at these,” he grinned. “What are you talking about? My hands are not small!”
When the lights went on, the entire opening sequence was a fever dream. Trump began by calling Romney “an embarrassment” who was trying to remain “relevant.”22 He was then asked to renounce, after initially failing to do so in a recent CNN interview, the Ku Klux Klan. (He obliged: “I totally disavow the Ku Klux Klan.”) Finally, after Rubio was asked to explain his recent detour to Gutterville, Trump jumped in. “He referred to my hands—‘If they’re small, something else must be small,’” Trump said, mimicking Rubio. “I guarantee you there’s no problem. I guarantee.”
That was just the first five minutes.
Jamie Johnson, an Iowa GOP official and activist, tweeted during the debate, “My party is committing suicide on national television.”
RUBIO’S CAMPAIGN WAS BUILT ON NARRATIVE AND MOMENTUM, A house of straw that was pitifully staved by the gale-force winds of Trumpism. Unlike Cruz, who was anchored by a sprawling, disciplined field organization, Rubio had nothing to fall back on during rough patches in the campaign. He was, by every metric, more likeable, more relatable, more personally popular than his rival senator. But Cruz was running a tactically superior campaign.
The Kansas caucuses, held on Super Saturday, crystallized the shortcomings of Rubio’s candidacy. He secured the endorsements of the state’s major players, ranging from Senator Pat Roberts, an establishment mainstay; to Governor Sam Brownback, a Baptist-turned-Catholic social conservative stalwart; to Congressman Mike Pompeo, a Tea Party favorite whom conservatives had tried to recruit to run against John Boehner for Speaker. Yet Rubio had virtually no ground game in Kansas.
For Cruz, the opposite was true; he boasted no name-brand backers but owned the best organization in the state, an especially important advantage in caucus contests where participation is lower. The result was predictable: Cruz won Kansas with 48 percent of the vote, followed by Trump at 23 percent and Rubio at 17 percent.
It was not for a lack of trying on Pompeo’s part. On caucus day, inside a convention center adjacent to a voting site, the congressman took the stage in front of thousands of caucus-goers and ripped into both Trump and Cruz. He accused Trump of being immoral and possessing dictator-like qualities that were dangerous to the country; he dismissed Cruz as a legislative thespian, someone more interested in stealing the spotlight than governing the country. Listening backstage, Trump turned to Jeff Roe, Cruz’s campaign manager, and asked, “Who the hell is that?”
Roe replied that it was a congressman named Mike Pompeo. “Should we go put a scare into him?” Trump asked.
The two men walked to the opposite wings of the stage. There they stood—Trump, well over six feet tall with a world-famous scowl; Roe, every bit of three hundred pounds, with a hitman’s goatee—shooting daggers at the congressman as he spoke, hoping to throw him off his game. (Pompeo, a former Army officer who graduated first in his class at West Point, was not rattled.)
Rubio went scoreless on Super Saturday, with Trump and Cruz splitting the four contests. As the losses mounted, and the life drained from his campaign, Rubio made an impassioned final plea. “Every movement in human history that has been built on a foundation of anger and fear has been cataclysmic in the end,” he warned voters in Kansas. In Idaho, he added, “Don’t give into the fear. Do not allow the conservative movement to be defined as anger.”
And yet, anger was the currency of the campaign. It was a reality that Rubio himself had acknowledged and attempted, in his own milder manner, to harness. “Every traditional institution in America is failing you,” he had told voters in Kansas, according to the AP, naming “the media . . . higher education . . . big business . . . and, by the way . . . your politicians and your political parties.”
What Rubio took pains to avoid discussing during the 2016 campaign was how immigration played into that anger, and how his role in the Gang of Eight may have doomed his candidacy from the jump. Having retreated from his support for comprehensive immigration reform, Rubio chose during the primary to promote incremental efforts that would achieve the same result but in piecemeal fashion. This seemed, to him, a decent way of modulating his brand without actually changing his position. He still supported a path to citizenship, even though he wouldn’t have uttered that phrase for all the Cuban coffee in Miami.
Try as he might, Rubio could never escape the scarlet letter of the Gang of Eight. Interestingly, though, his theory that Republican voters were broadly sympathetic to his views on immigration—more so than to those of the Steve King/Jeff Sessions wing of the party—was validated by the election data.
In twenty-five of the twenty-six states with exit polling, Republican primary voters ranked immigration dead last among the list of concerns, behind jobs and the economy, government spending, and terrorism. And in eighteen of the twenty states where the question was asked, a majority of GOP voters preferred legalization for undocumented immigrants as opposed to mass deportation.
Rubio had long argued in private that the loudest voices in the party were driving the argument on immigration and that those voices were not representative of the party’s electorate as a whole. The data collected during the GOP primary, in the midst of Trump’s rise, suggested he was right.
If Trump miscalibrated slightly on immigration, he was directly over the target on another issue of national métier and economic identity: trade.
The GOP had spent the past half century assuming that its voters viewed free trade as a positive, both for themselves and for the country in aggregate. With a few notable exceptions (Pat Buchanan, Ross Perot), the party had embraced the onset of globalism as an economic boon to the world’s largest economy. But the twin phenomena of outsourcing and automation, on top of the broader transition to a tech-based economy and the lack of retraining programs for a generation of workers who had never earned college degrees, created a political powder keg. In 2016, it exploded.
The most visible evidence came from the Michigan primary on March 8. Trump won the GOP contest easily, taking 37 percent to Cruz’s 25 percent with scraps for Rubio and Kasich. According to exit polls, half of GOP voters there were whites without a college degree; Trump dominated, winning 46 percent of them. On a key question for that demographic, a majority of all Michigan GOP vote
rs (55 percent) said trade with other nations “takes away U.S. jobs.” Trump won 45 percent of those respondents, compared to Cruz’s 22 percent.23
Even more fascinating was the result on the Democratic side: Bernie Sanders, who trailed in Michigan polls by more than 20 points, stunned Clinton in the biggest upset of their primary battle, edging her by some 20,000 votes. A plurality of Michigan’s Democratic electorate, 36 percent, were whites without a college degree; Clinton lost those voters badly to Sanders, 58 percent to 41 percent. An even bigger majority than in the GOP primary said that trading with other countries “takes away U.S. jobs,” and Sanders won those voters by double digits, once again claiming 58 percent to Clinton’s 41 percent.24
Taken together, these outcomes revealed not just the shifting political landscape but the unique opportunity for Trump to win the presidency. As the primary season progressed, voters in nearly every state across industrial middle America echoed their brethren in Michigan, telling exit pollsters that trade was doing more harm than good to the American economy.
These states—Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin—were thought to be Democratic locks, having not voted for a Republican presidential candidate since 1988. Yet, with Trump’s Michigan triumph, and the polling on trade and other issues of economic nationalism, a once-faint sketch was coming into focus: The GOP, with Trump as its nominee, could redraw the electoral map in 2016.
CRUZ WAS RUNNING OUT OF TIME. HE WAS FALLING FURTHER BEHIND IN the delegate count, and despite his public insistence to the contrary, there was little evidence that he would win a one-on-one duel with Trump. Having once envisioned a “natural arc” to Trump’s campaign, Cruz later adjusted his prognosis to set a ceiling of 20 percent on his rival’s support. And then 25 percent. And then 30. And then 35.
By early March, with Trump clearing 40 percent in multiple nominating contests, it was clear that something radical needed to happen, and quickly, to prevent him from running away with the nomination. That’s when an idea took root among Cruz’s staff: a ticket with Rubio. The Florida senator was treading water and heading for a certain exit after losing Florida; what would happen if he teamed up with Cruz, running as his vice-presidential-pick-in-waiting?
Cruz was lukewarm to the idea. The two senators had a strained relationship, and the last several months, including Rubio’s jab about not speaking Spanish, had been especially spiteful. But his outlook brightened upon seeing the polling. According to numbers compiled by Cruz’s gold-standard data analytics team, a Cruz-Rubio ticket would demolish Trump in head-to-head competition in the remaining primaries, often winning more than 60 percent of the vote.
Cruz’s pollster, Chris Wilson, called Utah senator Mike Lee to share the campaign’s findings. Lee had not endorsed in the primary; he was close friends with both Cruz and Rubio. Reviewing the data, Lee sprang into action. He called dozens of hotels in the Miami area, needing one with an underground parking garage and an elevator that could ferry guests directly up to a private suite. Upon securing such an arrangement, at the Hilton Miami Downtown, Lee called Rubio to set up a meeting for March 9, one day before the Republican debate in nearby Coral Gables. He then informed Cruz that Rubio had agreed to a secretive sit-down at five o’clock that afternoon. Cruz cleared his campaign schedule and held his breath.
When the day arrived, several hours before the scheduled meeting, Lee received a text from Rubio. He did not feel right about the situation. The meeting was off.
The Utah senator, sitting in the hotel suite with his wife, was dejected. He viewed Trump as a threat to every principle he had entered public life to protect, and believed that the only way to defeat him, at this point, was if his two friends joined forces. With Rubio no longer interested, Lee grabbed hotel stationery and began sketching out his endorsement of Cruz, which he would announce the next morning. He was the first senator to endorse the Texan, an indication of Cruz’s popularity among his colleagues. It was a fatal blow to Rubio—endorsing a nemesis on his home turf less than a week before the Florida primary—but Lee felt his friend had left him no choice.
Rubio says it “wasn’t a serious consideration” to form a ticket with Cruz on top. “Mike, at the end, saw two friends running,” Rubio says. “If I wasn’t going to be president, there comes a point at the end of the campaign when you’ve invested almost two years of your life into it. The last thing you’re looking forward to is now joining up on the ticket with somebody else you were just competing with. It was a zero percent chance that that was going to happen.”
Cruz, for his part, still wonders what might have been.
“I believe it would have broken the race open. It would have been decisive in terms of winning, and for the life of me, I will never understand why Marco didn’t come to that meeting,” he says.
“When I lay awake at night frustrated about 2016, that night is the moment I go back to most often. I actually kick myself that I didn’t go literally beat on his hotel room and talk to him,” Cruz says. “I never had the chance to even talk to him.”
The next evening, as the candidates and their teams arrived at the South Florida venue for what would be the final primary debate of 2016, a physical tension filled the air. Lee, having greeted Rubio, stuck close to Cruz’s entourage. Rubio’s crew gave him the cold shoulder. And Trump, taking it all in with childlike glee, eventually made his way over to Lee. “Hey,” he said, grabbing the Utah senator by the arms. “Good luck with that endorsement.”
The debate did nothing to alter the inevitable. On March 15, Trump trounced Rubio in the Florida primary, winning 46 percent of the vote to the home-state senator’s 27 percent and driving him from the presidential race.
“It is clear that while we’re on the right side, this year we will not be on the winning side,” Rubio told a crowd of several hundred supporters at Florida International University. Rubio used his closing remarks to condemn the GOP front-runner (though not by name) for using “fear” to “prey upon” the insecurities of voters.
It was the end of a brief and underwhelming era. Rubio, the brightest star in the GOP galaxy on whom the hopes of so many in the party’s establishment rested, was done. The “Republican Savior” had fallen short of messianic. “Michael Jordan” had missed his shot.
Having promised not to run for reelection to the Senate in 2016, Rubio appeared to be on his way out of politics—maybe even permanently. It would have made for an anticlimactic ending to a career that had held such promise just a few years earlier. Eventually, however, at the prodding of Mitch McConnell, and after a shooter killed forty-nine people at a gay nightclub in Orlando that June, Rubio changed his mind. He reentered the race to keep his Senate seat, all but clearing the Republican primary field and cruising to a second term that November.
As for the presidential primary field—and with due respect to Kasich, who won Ohio’s primary on March 15, gaining token justification to keep campaigning—it was now down to two: Trump and Cruz.
Chapter Thirteen
March 2016
“I think it was Roger’s dying wish to elect Donald Trump president.”
SCOTT REED DIDN’T RECOGNIZE THE NUMBER BLINKING ON HIS CELL phone screen. But there was no mistaking the gruff, gravelly voice on the other end of the line: It belonged to Paul Manafort.
A native of New Britain, Connecticut, where his extended clan was best known for its sprawling construction enterprise, the young Manafort grew up obsessed with the other family business: politics. He helped his father win three terms as the town’s mayor, earned his undergraduate and law degrees at Georgetown University, and landed a job in the Gerald Ford administration soon thereafter.
Manafort caught his break in 1976, when the former California governor Ronald Reagan challenged Ford in the GOP presidential primary. Enlisted to help protect Ford’s delegates from defecting to Reagan at the contested convention, he proved so effective that he was tasked with corralling the entire Northeast delegation. His role in sealing the nomination for Ford turn
ed Manafort into a major player. In 1980, he partnered with veteran GOP operatives Charlie Black and Roger Stone to found the lobbying giant Black, Manafort and Stone, a firm described by Time magazine as “the ultimate supermarket of influence peddling.”1
It was Stone, the Nixon-era hatchet man, who in the mid-1980s introduced Manafort to his friend, the New York real estate scion Donald J. Trump. At that time, Manafort’s star was rising rapidly inside the GOP: He helped to elect Reagan twice, then George H. W. Bush in 1988. When Kansas senator Bob Dole won the Republican nomination in 1996, Manafort was charged with running the convention.
It was in this capacity that Manafort worked side by side with Reed, Dole’s campaign manager, a fellow northeasterner with a similar taste for fine suits and expensive cocktails. They had known each other since Reagan’s reelection campaign in 1984, but Reed eyed his old friend warily. He had heard all the stories, including the one about Manafort’s lifestyle turning lavish after millions of dollars in Filipino government money, illegally earmarked for Reagan’s reelection campaign and allegedly funneled through Manafort’s consulting firm, never surfaced in the United States.2
Twenty years after their work for Dole, Manafort was calling Reed, the senior political strategist at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, to break some news: He was taking a job with Trump.
Reed was dumbfounded. Manafort certainly didn’t need the money: Between the legal revenues and the offshore bank accounts stuffed with proceeds from his underhanded work on behalf of dodgy despots, including the pro-Russian leader of Ukraine, he was easily worth many millions of dollars. And though Manafort had always been a gambler, teaming with Trump struck Reed as a dicey bet. All the candidate’s unforeseen successes in 2016 had come in spite of a functional campaign.