by Tim Alberta
Nobody said a word. Trump’s many loyalists who had gathered—his children, Hicks, Bannon, Conway, Christie, Bossie, Giuliani—were shocked by the blunt assessment. Yet none was eager to push back on it. When Trump went around the room, asking what people thought his chances were, he heard a lot of throat-clearing. Even Bannon, who made it a habit of always saying “one hundred percent” whenever Trump asked the question, dodged it this time.
Trump tried humor. “So, what’s the good news?” he said.
Nobody laughed.
The meeting lasted another thirty minutes, most of which was spent pushing Trump to sit for an interview that afternoon with David Muir of ABC News. His team said it would be best to discuss the comments fully, and repent for them, ahead of the debate. Trump agreed and the meeting broke up. But then he abruptly changed his mind. Complaining that he would look “weak” by subjecting himself to a journalist whose sole purpose would be extracting as many apologies as possible, he told Hicks the ABC interview was off.
The Republican Party was going to live or die with Trump; if his team couldn’t persuade him to do a network television interview, they certainly weren’t going to convince him to step aside as the nominee. Whatever fantasies of a Pence-Rice ticket danced through the heads of party elders were officially dashed on Saturday afternoon. “The media and establishment want me out of the race so badly,” Trump tweeted. “I WILL NEVER DROP OUT OF THE RACE, WILL NEVER LET MY SUPPORTERS DOWN! #MAGA.”
Pence himself was nowhere to be found. Ryan had asked his old friend to attend the Saturday rally in his district in lieu of Trump. Pence had accepted. Accommodations were made; a Secret Service checkpoint, waved off at the news of Trump’s disinvitation, was re-erected outside the event in Elkhorn, Wisconsin. But then Pence didn’t show up. There was no notice, no courtesy call from the VP nominee’s staff. Ryan dialed his old friend’s cell number and got voice mail. Pence was AWOL.
Instead of returning Trump’s calls, or Ryan’s calls, or flying to his friend’s district, the Indiana governor spent Saturday at home. He mostly prayed with his wife, Karen. She was apoplectic, warning her husband that she would no longer appear in public if he carried on as Trump’s running mate. He, in turn, hinted to his advisers that his time on the trail might be up. Feeling moved to communicate his inner anguish, Pence wrote Trump a letter describing what hearing that audio had done to him and his wife. When two of Trump’s advisers learned of the letter, they worried they had seen the last of his running mate.
Meanwhile, Ryan was left to fly solo in Elkhorn—no Trump, no Pence, and no Priebus.
“There is a bit of an elephant in the room,” the Speaker said, taking the stage in Wisconsin.5 He referenced his statement from the previous day and how “troubling” the situation was. Then, announcing that he wasn’t there to talk about said elephant, Ryan pivoted to his homily about “ideas” and “conservative principles” and his vision for being a “proposition party.”
But it was hard to hear over the boos. Chanting the nominee’s name, Trump’s supporters in the audience heckled Ryan throughout his speech. “Shame on you!” they shouted.
THE WOMEN FLANKED TRUMP, TWO OF THEM ON EACH SIDE, SEATED BEHIND rectangular folding tables draped in olive fabric. The small conference room, on the campus of Washington University in St. Louis, was barren save for the tables, some black coffee mugs, bottles of water, and an American flag. Reporters rushed into the room. Cameras started rolling. Jaws hit the floor.
It was less than two hours until the start of the October 9 presidential debate, a spectacle that would draw tens of millions of eyeballs, and the GOP nominee was putting on a surprise pregame show. Without advance warning, Trump held an impromptu press conference alongside a group of women who had publicly accused Bill Clinton of sexual misconduct.
There had been speculation for months that he could invite one of the former president’s accusers to a debate, perhaps having them sit in the front row to unnerve Clinton’s wife. Trump’s campaign always dismissed the rumors. Priebus, who joined Trump on the flight to St. Louis to help with last-minute debate prep, had heard nothing about the planned stunt; the only gossip from the plane ride was Trump railing against Giuliani’s performance on the Sunday shows, yelling repeatedly through the cabin, “What the fuck is Rudy doing? Get this guy off the television!”
Inside the debate hall, when co-moderators Anderson Cooper and Martha Raddatz introduced them, Trump and Clinton entered from opposite wings of the auditorium looking steeled for a street fight. They approached one another, only to stop abruptly and stand several feet apart. There would be no handshake—a first, it was believed, in the annals of presidential debating.
After a schoolteacher in attendance asked the opening question, about whether the candidates felt they were modeling good behavior for the nation’s children, Cooper sensed a natural segue to ask about Trump’s remarks. The Republican nominee offered an answer rehearsed again and again on the plane ride from New York: “I’m not proud of it,” he said, “but this is locker room talk.” Pressed on what his comments meant, Trump replied, “I have great respect for women. Nobody has more respect for women than I do.” There were audible groans from the audience.
When the moderators turned to Clinton, she, like Trump, commenced with a clearly practiced soliloquy. “With prior Republican nominees for president, I disagreed with them . . . but I never questioned their fitness to serve,” Clinton said. “Donald Trump is different.”
Trump attacked and counterattacked throughout, bringing up Bill Clinton’s history of being “abusive to women” and aggressively prosecuting Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of state, an issue he had failed to raise during the first debate. “If I win,” Trump declared, “I am going to instruct my attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation. Because there have never been so many lies, so much deception.”
“Everything he just said was absolutely false,” Clinton responded when given the floor, adding, “It’s just awfully good that someone with the temperament of Donald Trump is not in charge of the law in our country.”
“Because you’d be in jail,” Trump shot back. Some audience members gasped. Others cheered.
When the moderators asked Clinton to explain, given her statements about some Trump supporters being “deplorables” who are “irredeemable,” how she could unite the country, she expressed some remorse. “My argument is not with his supporters,” Clinton said of her opponent, “it’s with him.”
“She has tremendous hate in her heart,” Trump replied.
It was, without question, the ugliest and most vitriolic presidential debate in the mass-communication era. And it was exactly what Trump needed. Facing pressure unlike any White House hopeful in memory, the Republican nominee didn’t just get off the mat; he came up swinging. “What were the odds? Like fifty-fifty, will he show up?” Trump says. “That debate won me the election.”
RYAN FELT VALIDATED BY THE ACCESS HOLLYWOOD TAPE, EVEN AS HIS worst fears were being realized.
It was nearing the one-year anniversary of his swearing-in as Speaker of the House, and he’d spent much of that time sounding the alarms about Trump. He worried about an opposition research attack that could cripple the nominee and do serious collateral damage to the party. In fact, it almost seemed inevitable. Trump had been in the public eye for decades and rarely missed an opportunity to raise eyebrows. He was a regular guest on shock jock Howard Stern’s radio show, often to discuss the female anatomy. He had been “roasted” in the crudest of terms on Comedy Central. And there had long been talk that Trump, between owning the Miss Universe pageant and starring in NBC’s The Apprentice, had left a documented trail of raunchy talk and devious behavior.
The Access Hollywood tape didn’t just present a crisis for Trump’s candidacy. It threatened to torpedo Republicans down the ballot in contests across the country. All throughout the weekend, McConnell lobbied Priebus to redirect the RNC’s ca
sh earmarked for the presidential race toward his Senate campaigns. His argument: If they didn’t maintain their majority in the Senate, President Hillary Clinton would remake the federal courts for a generation.
Ryan wanted to take more dramatic action. On an emergency leadership conference call, the day of the St. Louis debate, Ryan floated the idea of withdrawing his endorsement of Trump. He would kill their majority, the Speaker said; cutting him off might be their best hope of saving the House. It was Kevin McCarthy, the majority leader and Trump’s favored member of the GOP leadership, who talked Ryan down. Withdrawing their support, McCarthy argued, would backfire by depressing turnout in Trump-friendly districts and states.
Ryan found himself agreeing. He would not go so far as to renounce his endorsement of Trump. He would, however, tell members that he planned to do nothing to help the nominee over the final month of the campaign, focusing solely on protecting their House majority. And he would advise them to do what they felt was best to survive in their districts, whether that meant defending Trump or running away from him.
On Monday morning, October 10, Ryan convened a conference call with all 246 House Republicans. According to audio that was later leaked to Breitbart.com—a sign of how Ryan’s far-right members reacted—the Speaker said of Trump, “His comments are not anywhere in keeping with our party’s principles and values. There are basically two things that I want to make really clear, as for myself as your Speaker. I am not going to defend Donald Trump—not now, not in the future.”6
Ryan added, “Look, you guys know I have real concerns with our nominee. I hope you appreciate that I’m doing what I think is best for you, the members, not what’s best for me. . . . I talked to a bunch of you over the last seventy-two hours and here is basically my takeaway. To everyone on this call, this is going to be a turbulent month. Many of you on this call are facing tough reelections. Some of you are not. But with respect to Donald Trump, I would encourage you to do what you think is best and do what you feel you need to do.”
As the Speaker finished, stepping back to let his members weigh in, he felt uneasy. Ryan had wanted to unendorse Trump; McCarthy had convinced him not to. Now Ryan worried that he hadn’t gone far enough, that his members would be upset about his merely saying he would no longer defend Trump.
Listening in, the Speaker was stunned to realize that the opposite was true: He had gone too far. Some members were furious that Ryan had dared to publicly condemn Trump. They felt he was abandoning the party by abandoning its nominee. In their eyes, he was waving a white flag of surrender.
They weren’t alone in this view. Just before noontime, the AP blasted out a bulletin: “House Speaker Paul Ryan is all but conceding Hillary Clinton will be the next president.” Soon after, Trump tweeted, “Paul Ryan should spend more time on balancing the budget, jobs and illegal immigration and not waste his time on fighting [the] Republican nominee.”
Ryan’s office rushed to clean up the perception of his comments, but it was too late. The grass roots were ablaze with indignation. Congressional phone lines exploded with irate GOP constituents calling for Ryan’s head. Some members privately began questioning the sustainability of his position atop the party; later in the month, when leaders scheduled Ryan’s internal speakership election, some pro-Trump lawmakers lobbied for the vote to be postponed, which would give them more time to assess whether Ryan should remain Speaker.
The Freedom Caucus sensed an opportunity. In a secret meeting later that month at Meadows’s downtown DC apartment, the group’s board members devised a plan to deny Ryan the 218 votes needed to retain his speakership. The strategy called for Jim Jordan to serve as the right’s sacrificial lamb, running against Ryan not to win, but to collect enough votes to force a second ballot. The idea was that Ryan, who talked often (and annoyingly, to some members) about how he’d never wanted the job to begin with, would step aside to avoid the spectacle. Conservatives had been searching for a Ryan alternative from outside their narrow ranks, someone who, unlike Jordan, could appeal to the rest of the conference. They decided that Mike Pompeo, the dry-witted defense hawk from Kansas, would be their top choice.
As Republicans schemed against their Speaker, the underlying assumption was that Trump would lose and the conservative base would be out for blood, resulting in an overthrow of Ryan. Either that, or Trump would win a shocking upset and kick the Speaker—“Our very weak and ineffective leader,” the nominee tweeted after their Access Hollywood altercation—to the curb. Either way, Ryan would be finished.
TRUMP’S DIAGNOSIS AFTER ACCESS HOLLYWOOD WAS TERMINAL—UNTIL IT wasn’t.
Public polls showed Trump collapsing in the two weeks following the Washington Post report, and those numbers squared with the internal data being collected by the Trump campaign. Yet after two weeks, his numbers began climbing back to where they had been previously, eventually plateauing and leveling off. He still trailed Clinton in the key states and was still hopelessly unpopular with the broader electorate, but it was remarkable nonetheless. The man nicknamed “Teflon Don,” who had weathered firestorms no other politician could have survived, had done it again. His candidacy was like a stress ball: No matter how hard the squeeze, it always returned to form.
The immortality of Trump, as demonstrated by his survival of Grab-’Em-by-the-Pussy-Gate, owed principally to three explanations.
The first was reflexive distrust of media. The overwhelming majority of conservative voters, even those not enamored of Trump in 2016, had come to see the press as a partisan combatant. Whether it was the paper-thin New York Times report7 insinuating John McCain’s affair with a lobbyist in 2008 or the countless petty pile-ons that dogged Romney in 2012, years of negative coverage had alienated Republican voters from the mainstream media. As a result, many on the right tuned out the traditional gatekeepers, preferring to get their information from Fox News or the conservative wing of the internet, places where critical coverage of Trump was hard to find. Among those conservatives who did still drink from the mainstream media’s well, there was a desensitization to outrage: After being told every other day that Trump’s latest infraction was calamitous, they became numb to the instances that really were.
Second, it was impossible to overstate the depth of disdain for Clinton on the right, even in an age of hysterical, hypertribal politics. That disdain had been cultivated for the past quarter century; there was no softening her image or persuading detractors to give her a fresh look. Trump may have been a shameless deviant, but in the eyes of conservatives, he was running against the first family of perversion. He may have been unethical, but so was she—hence his “Drain the Swamp!” motto, which became the closing chant at his October rallies. There was no sharp contrast for Democrats to draw. Trump was the most unpopular nominee in recent memory, but he was running against the second-most unpopular nominee in recent memory.
“We have perhaps two of the most flawed human beings running for president in the history of the country,” Mick Mulvaney said in South Carolina shortly before Election Day, in comments reported by The State newspaper.8 “Yes, I am supporting Donald Trump, but I’m doing so despite the fact that I think he’s a terrible human being.”
The third and most significant reason for Trump’s survival: the unflinching support of the Christian right. Where many evangelical leaders had once expressed an open contempt for the primary candidate, they became his staunchest, most faithful allies during the general election campaign—including in the aftermath of Access Hollywood. There were notable exceptions. On the evening of the tape’s release, Russell Moore, the head of the Southern Baptist Convention’s political arm, tweeted in response to his high-profile peers, “What a disgrace. What a scandal to the gospel of Jesus Christ and to the integrity of our witness. . . . The political Religious Right Establishment wonders why the evangelical next generation rejects their way. Today illustrates why.” The next day, after Trump defended his transgression as “just words,” Moore tweeted: “No contrition.
‘Just words.’ How any Christian leader is still standing behind this is just genuinely beyond my comprehension.”
But Moore was an outlier. In case after case, over the final five weeks of the election, prominent Christian leaders rallied around the Republican nominee. “The crude comments made by Donald J. Trump more than eleven years ago cannot be defended,” Franklin Graham, son of the famed evangelist Billy Graham, wrote on his Facebook page. “But the godless progressive agenda of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton likewise cannot be defended.” Added Jerry Falwell Jr., the other spiritual dynasty scion, “We’re never going to have a perfect candidate until Jesus Christ reigns forever on the throne.”
Their principal rationale in standing by Trump: the Supreme Court.
Judicial appointments traditionally have been a more effective rallying cry for the right than for the left; every four years, GOP officials and activists have endeavored to mobilize the base by describing a Supreme Court on the precipice of a liberal occupation. But 2016 was different. The death of conservative legal giant Antonin Scalia, and the subsequent decision by Mitch McConnell to block hearings on President Obama’s nominee, had placed the issue of Supreme Court appointments front and center unlike during any election in modern history. With an automatic appointment waiting to be filled, Justice Anthony Kennedy hinting at his pending departure, and a pair of other justices past the age of mandatory corporate retirement, conservatives believed the ends of a sympathetic high court justified the means of supporting Trump.
As Hugh Hewitt, the radio host and constitutional law professor who’d butted heads with Trump, had written in the Washington Examiner that summer, “It’s the Supreme Court, stupid!”9
To the credit of the political newcomer, Trump possessed an innate understanding of this constituency’s control over his destiny. If white Christian turned out to vote en masse, he had a chance to upset Clinton; if they didn’t, he would be roadkill. This explains the speech at Liberty University, the summit in New York City, the release of two lists of Supreme Court candidates, the formation of a faith-based advisory board, and the selection of Pence as his running mate.