American Carnage

by Tim Alberta

  Everything was perfect—until he learned of the crowd-size comparisons.

  Days earlier, the incoming president had predicted “an unbelievable, perhaps record-setting turnout.” But while Obama’s 2009 inauguration had been record-setting; Trump’s had not. Obama’s crowd had swelled to some 1.8 million people; using the most generous estimate, Trump’s was one-third that size.

  The new president could not suffer this indignity. On the occasion of his coronation, the man who had once felt compelled to vouch for the size of his penis during a televised debate would not stand for unfavorable comparisons to his reviled predecessor.

  The next day, in what the White House called his first official act in office, the president visited CIA headquarters in Virginia. It was meant as an olive branch: Trump had frequently derided the intelligence community, including ten days earlier, when he compared American spies to Nazis for their role in disseminating the Steele Dossier. The president was met with applause upon his arrival, and he was careful to emphasize his support for the CIA and its officials. But his appearance went off the rails thereafter. Standing in front of the agency’s sacred memorial to its fallen officers, Trump boasted of his election win, bashed the media for its coverage of him, and claimed that his crowd a day earlier had surpassed one million people.7

  Meanwhile, Trump asked his new press secretary, Sean Spicer, to go even further.

  Spicer was a curious choice to be the administration’s mouthpiece. As much as any official in the party, he had objected to and actively opposed the new president’s ascent. Even after Trump won the primary and Priebus worked to rally the GOP apparatus behind him, Spicer remained cool to the prospect of associating with the presumptive nominee. He did not trust Trump or any of the characters around him. More than once during the campaign, Spicer warned people heading to Trump Tower for meetings to watch what they said; he believed the inside of the building was wiretapped. (Whether he thought the recordings were made by the candidate himself or by the government investigating a possible crime was unclear.)

  Spicer’s tepidness was not a state secret. During the transition, some of Trump’s allies took to calling Spicer a “November Ninth Republican” or a member of the “November Ninth Club,” in reference to those longtime skeptics who were reborn as loyalists the day after the election. Trump knew this. Also, as a stickler for appearances, he wasn’t big on the idea of putting a short, pale, provincially dressed party hack in front of the world’s cameras as his emissary. But the pickings were slim. None of the television veterans Trump envisioned in the role wanted to work for him. Kellyanne Conway thought the job beneath her erstwhile status as campaign manager. And Sarah Huckabee Sanders didn’t have enough experience in front of the cameras.

  Trump reluctantly agreed to install Priebus’s longtime spokesman. The president, however, told friends that he would be watching carefully to gauge the depth of Spicer’s allegiance. When the crowd-size dispute grabbed headlines, Trump saw a perfect opportunity to test his new flack. He wanted Spicer to issue a definitive, on-camera statement from the White House press podium declaring the 2017 inauguration to be the biggest in U.S. history.

  This struck many in the West Wing as an unequivocally awful idea. The administration was less than twenty-four hours old. It was a pointless and losing fight to pick, Priebus told Trump. Shouldn’t they be concentrating their energies elsewhere?

  Trump was adamant, giving Spicer the chance to prove himself. Confronting the White House press corps for the first time, on the evening of Saturday, January 21, Spicer proclaimed, “This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the globe.”8

  Priebus was across the street. With loads of his extended family flying in from Greece to witness the inauguration, he and his wife seized the occasion to have her baptized in the Greek Orthodox Church. Having already been late to the ceremony, Priebus tried to shut out all distractions at the dinner reception afterward. It wasn’t until some of the other attendees, including Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, eyes transfixed on their smartphones, alerted him that Priebus caught wind of what was happening at the White House.

  Wearing an ill-fitting pinstriped suit and sonorous bags under his eyes, Spicer barked his nearly six-minute statement, spawning a devastating Saturday Night Live parody featuring actress Melissa McCarthy. One day into his presidency, Trump had chosen to squander the White House’s capital on a decidedly unimportant and easily disproven argument. It set a troubling tone: Trump had lied and misrepresented facts at an astonishing clip on the campaign trail, and his administration, it appeared, would treat the truth with similar disregard.

  That same day, as the president girded for a clash over crowd sizes, the “Women’s March” attracted more than half a million protesters to Washington in a show of opposition to Trump. Hundreds of thousands of women were also demonstrating in cities around the country (and around the world), an unprecedented show of antagonism toward the one-day-old administration.9

  Then, on day three, Kellyanne Conway went on NBC’s Meet the Press. The winning campaign manager had wanted the chief of staff’s job but had settled on the title of “counselor to the president.” Instead of counseling Trump, it was her duty to clean up a needless mess of his making. The host, Chuck Todd, asked why Trump had asked Spicer to “utter a falsehood” in his first statement from the White House press podium.

  “You’re saying it’s a falsehood,” Conway responded. “Sean Spicer, our press secretary, gave . . .” She hesitated. “Alternative facts.”

  Finally, on the fourth day of his presidency, Trump used his first meeting with congressional leaders to complain that he would have won the popular vote had it not been for some three to five million ballots being cast illegally. The baseless claim drew a fresh round of harsh media coverage; election officials around the country, both Republican and Democratic, said there had been no indications of meaningful voter fraud, much less on a massive scale.

  By any metric, this was a baneful start for the new administration.

  IT WAS LATE ON FRIDAY AFTERNOON, AND A WEARY WASHINGTON WAS looking forward to the weekend. The first seven days of Trump’s presidency had been no calmer than his seventeen months as a candidate. With an approval rating of 45 percent in January 2017, Trump was the most unpopular new president in modern American history, according to Gallup.10 It would not rise based on the week’s developments: the Women’s March, the politicized appearance at the CIA, the lies about crowd size, the “alternative facts.” Everyone, including and especially the members of his administration, needed to catch their breath.

  No such luck. At 4:39 p.m., during a visit to the Pentagon, Trump signed an executive order that vowed to keep “radical Islamic terrorists out of the United States of America.” Effective immediately, anyone with an immigrant or nonimmigrant visa coming from seven majority-Muslim countries (Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen) was prohibited from entering the United States for 90 days.11 The order also banned all refugees worldwide from entering for 120 days and placed an indefinite ban on refugees from Syria, where millions of people were reported to have requested asylum into the United States to escape the civil war that had already claimed more than four hundred thousand lives.

  Trump’s executive order provoked a furious backlash. Lawsuits were filed in numerous jurisdictions. Protests erupted at international airports all around the country. Democratic lawmakers, and a vocal minority of Republicans, excoriated the administration. Even those Republicans who supported the policy were alarmed by the process behind it, which had sown mass confusion and plunged the nation’s customs operations into chaos.

  Conceived by Miller, the president’s far-right policy adviser, Trump’s executive order was impulsive and half-baked. There had been no vetting of the language by John Kelly, the retired four-star Marine general who was Trump’s secretary of homeland security, or Jim Mattis, the secretary of defense, or Rex Tillerson, the secretary of
state. Not only had these cabinet heads not reviewed the executive order, but they had known practically nothing about it before the president’s signing. There had been no coordination from the White House communications shop, no soliciting of input, no answering of questions, no rehearsal of talking points. The secretaries and their staffs, as well as key congressional players, including leadership officials and chairmen of relevant committees, were left grasping for an understanding of the policy and an explanation of why it had been so hastily implemented.

  Meanwhile, the nation’s airports were seized by turmoil. Customs agents had received conflicting directives on how to enforce the directive. Airplanes were landing, carrying visitors from the countries on the list, as the order was being distributed around the government. The confusion resulted in the detention of travelers arriving at U.S. airports in a number of major cities.

  By Sunday, Republican critics of the administration were out in force. Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham issued a statement saying the policy “may do more to help terrorist recruitment than improve our security.”12

  Congressman Will Hurd of Texas, a former undercover CIA officer, called the policy “the ultimate display of mistrust,” saying it would “erode our allies’ willingness to fight with us” against terrorism overseas.13

  One person was conspicuously silent that weekend: Paul Ryan.

  A botched policy like the so-called Muslim ban would dominate the legacy of any other administration. But in the age of Trump, bonfires of controversy burned hot and fast, their oxygen stolen by the inevitable next inferno. Two weeks after the executive order fiasco, Trump announced the forced resignation of Michael Flynn, his national security adviser. The cause? Flynn had lied to Vice President Pence and other administration officials about his conversations with the Russian ambassador during the transition. As if that weren’t enough scandal for one week, Trump asked James Comey the next day to shut down the investigation into Flynn’s web of misdeeds. “I hope you can let this go,” the president told the FBI director of his ongoing investigation.

  Trump had campaigned as a managerial whiz who would surround himself with “the best people” and run the federal government like a high-functioning Fortune 500 company. Instead, he was proving to be a clumsy chief executive with a toxic weakness for staffing.

  WHILE THE FRENZIED ACTIVITY AND BREAKNECK PACE OF THE NEWS cycle unnerved much of official Washington, the conservative base had cause for optimism. In his first thirty days, Trump had, among other things, withdrawn the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement, signed an executive order requiring that two existing regulations be eliminated for every new regulation adopted, and canceled a meeting with Mexico when its president reiterated that his country would not pay for Trump’s promised border wall.

  Over the ensuing months, as concerns mounted on the right about the prospects for reforming the tax code, building the wall, and repealing Obamacare, Trump went above and beyond in delivering for one special constituency: evangelicals.

  The president reinstated and toughened the Mexico City policy, which eliminates U.S. funding for international nongovernmental organizations that perform or promote abortions. He rescinded Obama’s protections for transgender students to use preferred bathrooms in public schools. He signed legislation that routs federal money away from Planned Parenthood. And he cut off funding to the UN Population Fund, which critics had long accused of supporting coercive abortions in China and other countries. He accomplished these items, and others, with the help of pro-life Christians whom Pence had stockpiled throughout the administration.

  Trump also benefited from the vigorous assistance of Ted Cruz. The Texas senator had reinvented himself at the dawn of the Republican government as a team player, one freshly intent on torturing the opposing party rather than his own. In a Senate GOP luncheon that January, McConnell stood before the room beaming with pride, praising “the new Ted Cruz.”

  “Look, Donald Trump was not my first choice to be president, but he’s who the American people elected,” Cruz says. “I faced a choice. I could choose to have my feelings hurt. He said some very tough things about me and my family. It would have been easy and natural for me to take my ball and go home. But I also think that wouldn’t have been doing the job I’ve been elected to. I’m not going to defend the indefensible, but I’m going to fight for principles and values that matter.”

  The crown jewel of Trump’s presidency, in the eyes of conservatives, was Neil Gorsuch. On January 31, Trump nominated the archconservative federal appellate judge to replace the late Antonin Scalia on the U.S. Supreme Court, thrilling the full spectrum of the Republican Party and validating the decision made by so many conservatives the previous November to hold their noses and punch the GOP ticket.

  “It was a leap of faith. Trump was untested,” Marjorie Dannenfelser, the antiabortion leader, said after the Gorsuch pick. “It became very hard to stand [by him]. But all that disruption, all that anxiety, all that tension—it was worth it. Because he has turned out to be a man of his word.”

  Trump had kept a promise of monumental importance to his base. Now it was time for the GOP-controlled Congress to keep one of its own.

  PRESIDENT TRUMP HAD HEARD ENOUGH ABOUT POLICY AND PROCESS. It was a Thursday afternoon, March 23, and members of the House Freedom Caucus were peppering the president with wonkish concerns about the American Health Care Act: language that would leave Obamacare’s “essential health benefits” in place; the community rating provision that limited what insurers could charge patients; and whether Speaker Paul Ryan’s supposed master plan was even feasible. Trump suddenly cut them off.

  “Forget about the little shit,” the president said. “Let’s focus on the big picture here.”

  The group of roughly thirty lawmakers, huddled around an immense conference table in the Cabinet Room of the White House, exchanged disapproving looks. For the past seventeen days, House Republicans had labored to unite around a health care bill that satisfied the complex and often conflicting demands of members representing different congressional districts and both poles of the party’s ideological spectrum. The president did not particularly care what the bill looked like. He just wanted a victory. As they talked, Trump emphasized the political ramifications of a defeat; specifically, he said, it would derail his first-term agenda and imperil his prospects for reelection in 2020.

  The lawmakers nodded and said they understood. They knew that Trump was not a policy maven but were disturbed by his dismissiveness nonetheless. For many of the members, the “little shit” meant the details that could make or break their support for the bill—and have far-reaching implications for their constituents and the country.

  “We’re talking about one-fifth of our economy,” Mark Sanford, the South Carolina congressman, scoffed after the meeting.

  Of the president’s hecklers in the GOP, none had become as truculent as Sanford. Once an ascendant superstar and the party’s most compelling contender for its 2012 nomination, the South Carolina governor’s career was set ablaze in 2009 by an extramarital romance that was discovered while he claimed to be hiking the Appalachian Trail. Sanford would later suggest, somewhat astoundingly, that he hoped to get caught in the affair because of his reluctance to seek the presidency. “I’ve oftentimes wondered,” he said, “was there some weird subconscious element that just wanted to derail the train and get off the train?”

  Sanford’s career in politics seemed finished. And then, a butterfly flapped its wings; Jim DeMint resigned from the Senate, Tim Scott was appointed to succeed him, and a special election was held to replace Scott in South Carolina’s First District, formerly represented by none other than Sanford. After winning back his old seat, Sanford haunted Trump throughout the campaign, calling for the release of his tax returns and questioning his knowledge of the Constitution. Three weeks into the new president’s term, Sanford could no longer hold back.

  During an interview in his office, he
described how Trump “represents the antithesis, or the undoing, of everything I thought I knew about politics, preparation, and life.” Sanford added, “All of a sudden a guy comes along where facts don’t matter? Look, we’re in the business of crafting and refining our arguments that are hopefully based on the truth. Truth matters. Not hyperbole, not wild suggestion, but actual truth.”

  Sanford knew these comments might cost him his job. “I’m a dead man walking,” he said, smiling. “If you’ve already been dead, you don’t fear it as much.”

  Sure enough, the following month, after the Freedom Caucus meeting with Trump, Mick Mulvaney pulled Sanford aside. “The president wants me to let you know,” he told his friend, “that he’s going to take you out next year.”

  While many of the Freedom Caucus members shared Sanford’s concerns, few were so bold as to air them publicly. Besides, in their fight over health care, Trump wasn’t the problem. For all their frustration with the mixed messages and strategic ineptness coming out of the White House, conservatives didn’t blame the president for their predicament. They blamed Ryan.

  The Speaker had approached the health care effort with all the finesse of a forklift operator. Believing that House Republicans were uniformly supportive of the policy sketches in his “Better Way” agenda, which Ryan had promoted as the blueprint for a Republican government, he rushed headlong into drafting the American Health Care Act without the consultation of his conference—or any advice from the think tanks, lobby shops, activist groups, and media outlets that would render judgments of the legislation sooner or later. It seemed a no-brainer to proactively meet with these interests, answer their questions, accept their criticisms, and preempt any attacks on the legislation itself. Republicans had spent seven years promising to repeal and replace Obamacare; a few weeks of selling the product wouldn’t hurt one bit.