American Carnage

by Tim Alberta

  There was one final thing they needed: to hear Trump speak their language. The nominee’s Christian-ese was stiff and rehearsed, often laughably so. For as horrified as they were of a Clinton-controlled Supreme Court ruling on everything from abortion to guns to religious liberties, conservatives still harbored justified skepticism of Trump’s conversion. If they were going to turn a blind eye to his odious behavior in the name of Supreme Court appointments, they at least wanted assurance—real, heartfelt, unscripted assurance—that he would deliver.

  They got it in Sin City, of all places.

  During the third and final presidential debate in Las Vegas, on October 19, Trump hammered the significance of the high court. After praising the Heller decision, which protected the individual’s right to keep and bear arms, Trump pledged to appoint justices who would overturn the landmark ruling in Roe v. Wade that had legalized abortion.

  Then, he went even further. After Clinton defended her Senate vote protecting the practice of partial-birth abortion, Trump pounced. “If you go with what Hillary is saying, in the ninth month, you can take the baby and rip the baby out of the womb of the mother just prior to the birth of the baby,” he said.10 “Now, you can say that that’s okay. And Hillary can say that that’s okay. But it’s not okay with me.”

  It was a seminal moment in his candidacy. Ralph Reed, the longtime Christian conservative honcho and president of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, was effusive afterward. “Trump just sealed the deal with evangelicals,” he predicted.

  It was the consummating feat Trump needed, especially as it distracted from his otherwise lackluster debate performance, which included continued allegations of a “rigged election” and a sinister veiled threat not to accept the results of November 8.

  He was still the underdog. But two weeks after Access Hollywood threatened to kill his candidacy, Trump had life.

  Chapter Seventeen

  October 2016

  “Thank God.”

  WE SMACKED INTO THE RUNWAY AND FELT THE WHEELS CLAWING for traction on the rain-slicked tarmac. The Boeing 737 finally lurched to an ungraceful standstill, at which point we laughed and exchanged jokes. Mike Pence was grinning a minute later as he approached from the front of the plane. “Everybody okay?” he asked me and six other reporters.

  Yes, we replied, no big deal. Except that it was: The plane had slid off the runway altogether and sliced through a collapsible concrete track designed to stop us from spilling into the East River. Rescue vehicles were now screaming across LaGuardia’s tarmac, sirens blaring in the brisk October night; first responders would soon climb the back stairs and shout for us to evacuate immediately. “I didn’t realize it,” Pence told us of the accident, “until I saw mud on the front windows.”

  Alas, it was impossible to survey the wreckage from inside the plane.

  Such was the story of his final four weeks as Donald Trump’s running mate. The release of the Access Hollywood tape was a traumatic event for the VP nominee. He was initially inconsolable, retreating to Indiana, signaling to some friends that he might not stay with the campaign. Convinced by advisers that his only real option was to run through the tape—no pun intended—Pence dutifully resumed his role as Trump’s wing man.

  Soon, however, he went into a different sort of shell. Having emerged from hiding after forty-eight hours and spoken candidly with Trump, the VP nominee began to feel certain that his running mate—a man he’d prayed with, golfed with, become friends with—was genuinely contrite, was truly a different person than the one on the decade-old recording, yet was being victimized by a bloodthirsty liberal media.

  This conclusion afforded Pence the luxury of becoming willfully oblivious to perception. He ignored Trump’s critics and retreated deeper into the safe confines of the campaign’s echo chamber, blocking out the antagonism and gloom. After returning to the trail, he rarely interacted with the embedded reporters who traveled with him. In sporadic interviews, he responded to questions highlighting Trump’s behaviors and inaccuracies with a foreign gaze. Pence had insulated himself—from the possibility that Trump may have committed sexual assault; from the harshest critiques of his decision to join the GOP ticket; and from the reality that its defeat was likely.

  At a rally in Fort Dodge, Iowa, he began by saluting his “great, great friend,” the brazen race-baiter Congressman Steve King, who “does you proud every single day.” He closed as he always did, by alluding to Scripture: “I truly believe what’s been true for thousands of years is still true today,” Pence said. “As the ancient words say, if His people who are called by His name will humble themselves and pray . . . He will hear from heaven and He will heal this land.”

  Problem was, none of Pence’s traveling posse, a tight-knit group of loyalists, thought the GOP ticket had a prayer on November 8. It was nakedly apparent during my five days with them, on a swing through seven states in late October, that the VP nominee’s team had shifted its focus from winning the election to protecting the image and preserving the future ambitions of Pence.

  This was not especially surprising given that some of his top aides had been vehemently opposed to Trump in the first place. Marc Short, Pence’s longtime consigliere, was the Koch brothers’ lieutenant who quit after failing to convince them to finance an eight-figure assault on Trump; Nick Ayers, another trusted adviser, had warned Pence and his other clients throughout the primary season that Trump could bring down the entire party.

  As we idled on the runway in Fort Dodge, awaiting clearance for takeoff during a lengthy delay, Pence’s team ordered us off the plane, announcing that the VP nominee would quarterback an impromptu football game below. Pence led us away from the tarmac, positioning himself in front of a breathtaking backdrop of golden cornfields. As he cocked his arm to throw—sleeves rolled up, top of his shirt unbuttoned, tie loosened—you could smell his team salivating. This was a made-for-Iowa campaign commercial. Pence would be back, likely as the GOP front-runner, in a few short years.

  The one man on the plane with other plans, the one who believed Trump was going to be the next president of the United States, was Pence himself.

  The Indiana governor knew all too well the story of Dan Coats, his friend and fellow Hoosier. Back in 1992, Coats, a congressman, had joined then-Vice President Dan Quayle for a fly-around spanning the forty-eight hours before Election Day. When Coats climbed aboard the plane, Quayle told him, “It’s done. We’re going to lose. Bill Clinton is going to win. The next few days are going to be tough, and I just wanted someone here with me. I’m really glad you’re here.”

  Pence was speaking no such fatalism to his traveling companion, Congressman Jeb Hensarling. (Jeff Flake was . . . unavailable. The Arizona senator refused to attend any events for the GOP ticket. Once, when Pence visited a church in Mesa, a Phoenix suburb, the senator texted to remind him that he would be campaigning less than a mile from Flake’s home. “Can you help me trim some hedges?” Flake asked. Pence replied, “As long as we can carve ‘Trump-Pence’ in the hedge.” Flake texted him back: “Small hedge. Only have room for ‘Pence.’”)

  The VP nominee made a compelling case. Trump was going to win, Pence argued, not just because Clinton was a rotten candidate who would struggle to reassemble the Obama coalition, but because Trump represented an end to the party’s civil war. It was an odd sentiment; Trump was the most polarizing Republican at least since Barry Goldwater, and probably ever. But Pence wasn’t so much lauding his running mate’s ability to unite warring factions. Having watched “a Republican party that had lost its way” during the Bush administration, and witnessed the years of internecine conflict thereafter, Pence believed that Trump was mobilizing a base of voters that had been abandoned—“The forgotten people” Republicans were long unresponsive to.

  Trump’s strength, Pence continued, was derived from his very rejection of party orthodoxy. Even in the instances where this made the Indiana governor uncomfortable, such as with immigration and trade, he had begun
to see the political genius behind it. “I’ve supported virtually every free-trade agreement that’s ever come across my desk,” Pence said. “But I just found his arguments very persuasive.”

  As he came around to understanding and eventually defending Trump’s viewpoints, Pence also found himself convinced that the man himself was nothing like the outward caricature. He described how Trump had asked his wife, Karen, to lead a group prayer on several occasions, and insisted that Trump is a follower of Christ. “I respect the sincerity of his faith,” he said.

  This is when the BS detector starts to beep. Nobody who has spent time with Trump has ever walked away believing him to be a Christian. And, that aside, the notion of Trump being different when he’s away from the bright lights—laid back, gentlemanly, “even humble,” Pence joked—is mostly fantasy. If there ever had been a real distinction between his private self and his public persona, friends say, it receded from their view in 2016. While those who know Trump laud his humor and hospitality, they also say he is who he’s always been: someone who values professional utility over personal relationships in the people he deals with, someone who shows regret for nothing he says or does, and someone who prizes loyalty above every other characteristic.

  It’s certainly possible that Trump felt remorse for his words on that old recording. But he had no choice other than to tell Pence that he was remorseful. Without the VP nominee standing loyally by his side, the campaign would have been finished.

  “He took a little time. It’s okay. I understand. Many people did,” Trump says, acknowledging the letter Pence wrote him. “You know, a couple of days off, it didn’t make an impact on me. Because I had people who took a whole lifetime off.”

  Pence’s knee-jerk devotion to Trump upon his returning to the campaign trail was something to behold. Even some of his aides seemed uncomfortable with the degree to which Pence was going out of his way to profess his allegiance. It became problematic at one point in our conversation at 30,000 feet.

  When I asked whether he would support Ryan remaining as Speaker, a simple question, Pence hesitated. It was unexpected. They had been friends for years; Ryan had introduced him at the convention that summer, and when Trump initially declined to endorse Ryan in his primary, Pence made a rare public break with his running mate, telling Fox News, “I believe we need Paul Ryan in leadership in the Congress.” But in the time since, Ryan had denounced Trump after Access Hollywood, and Pence was visibly torn choosing between the two.

  He declined three times to state his support for Ryan, which sparked an easily avoided tempest when our interview published a week later. “My respect for Paul Ryan is boundless,” Pence said, repeating the phrase twice. “I’m not a member of the House Republican Conference anymore. I wouldn’t presume upon what the members of the conference choose.”

  Just over an hour later, our plane walloped the runway at LaGuardia. The head Secret Service agent leapt from his seat, handed over his firearm, and crouched next to Pence, who quickly assured him that everything was fine. The media frenzy was every bit as exaggerated, with news crews (even TMZ) trailing Pence, his team, and the reporters to our Manhattan hotel. The only development of consequence was that Pence’s plane would be garaged; in exchange, the next morning, we boarded a substitute aircraft that did not have Wi-Fi capabilities.

  As we dipped below the clouds, descending toward the runway in Bensalem, Pennsylvania, on the afternoon of October 28, there was a different sort of commotion toward the front of the plane. Advisers to Pence were whispering to one another in shocked, kid-on-Christmas-morning excitement. We had dropped low enough for the cell towers to activate internet signals, and the news was at once coursing through all our smartphones: FBI Director James Comey had sent a letter to Congress reopening the investigation into Clinton.

  “The big breaking news today, you may not have heard about standing in line, folks, is that we just learned that Hillary Clinton may have been a whole lot more than ‘extremely careless’ when it came to handling classified information,” Pence declared at his rally in Pennsylvania.

  His aides stood at the back of the crowd exchanging looks of comic bewilderment. Suddenly—and in some cases, for the very first time—they, too, believed Trump could win the presidency.

  THE SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE SAT ALONE IN THE DEN OF HIS TWO-STORY Georgian-style home in Janesville, Wisconsin, savoring a few fleeting moments of quiet.

  Election Day allowed him to dwell on the nightmare that had been the past year. First, he had accepted a job he never wanted, though he convinced himself it could be used for good. Then, he lost a struggle for the soul of his party to a demagogue with no experience in policy or governing. And now, Ryan had been told, Democrats would control the presidency for another four years. He had just concluded a series of phone calls with Priebus and other party elders. The exit polls released at 5:00 p.m. Eastern left no doubt: Trump was toast.

  Huddled around their laptops in Trump Tower, the nominee’s team felt blindsided. The data, collected for a consortium of major media outlets (the Associated Press, ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, CNN, and Fox News) suggested a blowout loss. It was impossible to dismiss these findings; the exit polling, based on surveys of more than twenty-four thousand voters nationwide, was generally thought to be reliable. Jared Kushner announced that he would call his father-in-law with the news.

  “Everybody thought at five o’clock that I had lost the election, because the exit polling came out. And they’re screaming, ‘Did you vote for Trump? Or did you vote for Crooked Hillary Clinton?’” Trump says, offering his theory of the case. “But a tremendous number came out and said, ‘It’s none of your business.’ Any of the ‘It’s none of your businesses’ voted for Trump.”

  The RNC had modeled numerous Election Day scenarios, all of them resulting in a Clinton victory. Splicing their data with the exit poll figures, party officials predicted to Ryan that Trump would win 220 electoral votes; the House GOP majority would be cut in half; and Senate Republicans would lose control of the upper chamber. It would be a massacre—exactly what Ryan had feared with Trump atop the ticket.

  He fumed in the backseat of his security detail’s SUV as it ferried him across town to the Holiday Inn, where his campaign was hosting a party for supporters. It had all been so preventable. The Speaker had spent his first months on the job crafting a sweeping policy agenda for the GOP, one that projected inclusion and optimism from a party not often associated with either. Ryan hoped it would be an inspiration for the party’s presidential field; instead, Trump sabotaged it by running a campaign based on fear and insecurity and exclusion. Boosted by unprecedented free media coverage and backed by millions of anti-establishment voters, Trump had successfully exploited the worst impulses of the electorate en route to winning the Republican nomination—and remaking the party in his own image.

  Seething inside a first-floor conference room at the Holiday Inn, Ryan plotted his revenge.

  Clinton’s victory carried a silver lining: Ryan would be liberated, once and for all, to forsake Trump and purge the Republican Party of his insidious influence. The Speaker would waste no time. With members of the national media assembled in Janesville, he would give a speech blasting Trump and turning the page on a dark chapter in GOP history. He would be free of Trump and so, too, would be his party. Ryan would be its leader for another four years, and a top priority would be erasing the remnants of Trumpism.

  Then the returns came in.

  THE CLOSING DAYS OF THE CAMPAIGN HAD NOT BEEN KIND TO CLINTON. Between Comey’s heavily criticized decision to make public the FBI’s reopening of an investigation involving her emails and the torrent of WikiLeaks’ hacked correspondences from Clinton’s top advisers, Trump’s misdeeds had faded from the front page.

  This seemed to many a mere Band-Aid, something that might help at the margins, keeping some Republican House and Senate candidates from being washed out of office in a wave. In the forty-eight hours prior to Election Day, two of Pr
iebus’s top lieutenants, Katie Walsh and Sean Spicer, launched a furious preemptive spin campaign, putting the impending loss squarely on Trump and absolving the RNC of responsibility for a wipeout of the party.

  And yet, the polls had been tightening for weeks—so much so that Priebus, who was famously stingy when it came to spending RNC money on television ads, bought airtime during Game 7 of the World Series in early November. (This earned him an earful from McConnell, who was still lobbying for party funds to be diverted away from Trump and toward competitive Senate races.)

  Though Clinton still staked a comfortable lead in most of the key battleground states, there were signs that Trump was closing fast in several of them. The Republican nominee was working on an inside straight: If he held all the states won by Mitt Romney in 2012, he would need 64 additional Electoral votes to win the presidency. This was not inconceivable; internal polls showed North Carolina, the toughest state to hold, was trending toward the GOP. And it just so happened that the four states Trump had spent the most time targeting—Pennsylvania (20), Ohio (18), Michigan (16), and Wisconsin (10)—offered exactly 64 between them. Ohio was already in the bag; so, too, was Iowa, an Obama state whose 6 Electoral votes would provide insurance in the event that Utah slipped away due to a third-party conservative’s effort there.

  The 2016 election was coming down to Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. All of them were overwhelmingly white (Michigan’s 2012 electorate was the most diverse of the three, at 77 percent white1). All of them were predominantly blue collar (a majority of voters in each of the three states lacked college degrees in 2012). None of them had been carried by the Republican Party in a presidential election since the 1980s.