by Tim Alberta
Ryan didn’t feel such preventative measures were necessary. And he was in a hurry, fearing that Trump was a ticking tweet-bomb, always one tantrum away from ruining the party’s best-laid plans. After days of drafting the bill in secretive locations at the Capitol—Senator Rand Paul exposed the absurdity by bringing reporters along as he hunted door to door for a copy14—the text was leaked, and then unceremoniously released, without any clearly coordinated media strategy between Ryan’s office and the White House. Conservatives around Washington, including some of the Speaker’s friends, were stunned. “The bill has had the worst rollout of any major piece of legislation in memory,” Rich Lowry, editor of National Review and a longtime Ryan ally, wrote in his Politico magazine column on March 15.
Leading health care experts on the right, such as Yuval Levin and Avik Roy, trashed the bill. Conservative outside groups and their media allies immediately branded it as “Obamacare Lite.” Only then did Ryan move to mitigate the damage, convening a group of conservative journalists in his office and doing interviews with the likes of Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham. But it was too little, too late.
At the heart of the opposition to Ryan’s effort was the fact that he was not pursuing a full repeal of the Affordable Care Act. This ignored the realities at hand. Republicans had, while Obama was still in office, voted to eliminate the law in its entirety. But that was a statement vote on something that stood no chance of being signed by Obama. Now that they controlled the government, the circumstances were more fraught. For starters, Republicans didn’t have a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate; they could only repeal the parts of the bill that touched on taxation, which required 50 votes through the reconciliation process. There were also the politics of the matter: voting to strip health coverage from millions of people, with no ready replacement, had been a whole lot easier to do when a presidential veto loomed as the backstop. Now there were real consequences to consider; it was no longer an empty ideological exercise.
As Ryan pushed to close ranks around his embattled legislation, he got little assistance from Trump. The president had never been keen to wade into the quagmire of health care, despite his promises on the campaign trail to get rid of Obama’s signature law. Some of his advisers encouraged him to start with a bipartisan infrastructure push; others thought he should secure money and begin construction on the border wall as quickly as possible.
But Ryan was insistent. Republicans had spent the better part of a decade promising to repeal and replace Obamacare, he told the president. They had no choice but to do this, and the closer they got to the midterm elections, the harder it would be for members to take such a difficult vote. “We get this done early,” Ryan warned Trump, “or we don’t get this done at all.”
THE PRESIDENT KEPT THE SPEAKER’S HEALTH CARE BILL AT ARM’S length for more than a week after its unveiling on March 6, offering a smattering of favorable remarks but never fully embracing it. Ryan’s rivals in the Freedom Caucus, sensing daylight between the president and the Speaker, moved quickly to exploit it.
In the middle of March, during a budget meeting at the White House, Mark Meadows and Jim Jordan repeatedly diverted the discussion to health care, much to the annoyance of Budget Committee chairwoman Diane Black. When the meeting broke, Meadows and Jordan swiftly sought an audience with the president to discuss Ryan’s bill. Trump granted them the meeting. The conservative ringleaders complained to the president that Ryan was presenting members with a take-it-or-leave-it proposition that was doing the entire party a disservice. Trump replied that he was open to negotiation and new ideas, and Meadows and Jordan left the White House believing they had pulled the president into their corner.
When word got back to Ryan that Trump had undercut him—saying he wasn’t married to the current product after Ryan had spent the past two weeks telling members he was—the Speaker boiled over. He had gone out of his way to maintain a solid working partnership with the president. He had looked the other way and had bitten his tongue time and again over the first two months of the administration, hoping to preserve his influence over policymaking. Ryan knew that chewing out Trump would be counterproductive. The way to persuade the president, he had concluded, was to frame things in a way that sounded beneficial for Trump—not necessarily for the country and certainly not for the party.
“The Freedom Caucus isn’t your ally,” the Speaker told the president, taking deep breaths. “I’m the one trying to help you get a win here. These guys will find a reason to vote against anything we produce.”
That weekend, a few days after their impromptu meeting at the White House, Meadows flew down to Florida to spend time with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, the president’s Florida resort. The Freedom Caucus chairman lobbied aggressively for changes to Ryan’s package, capping a week of wrangling about making alterations to the House bill. Trump eyed Meadows warily, remembering what Ryan had told him. By the end of the weekend, however, the president was on board, pledging to push for the conservative modifications.
But Ryan had learned another lesson in dealing with the president: Always be the last voice in his ear.
With Trump set to speak Tuesday morning at the House GOP conference meeting, Ryan spent Monday night working the president, reminding him of the fragile dynamics within the party, urging him to deliver the message that there would be no negotiating the details of the bill. When he rose to address the lawmakers, Trump had a simple message: There would be no further changes to the health care package. He expected Republicans to rally around Ryan’s version.
Meadows was dumbstruck. For months, he had boasted about his relationship with Trump; more than once, he had arranged for the president to call him during one of the weekly Freedom Caucus meetings, making a show of answering and thereby wowing a collection of members who had never enjoyed real proximity to power. Upon returning from Mar-a-Lago, Meadows had triumphantly informed them that Trump was on their side. Now they were all staring at him.
Suddenly, so, too, was the president. Implying that there would be consequences for disloyalty to the party, Trump called out the Freedom Caucus chairman by name. “Stand up, Mark,” he announced, half-smiling and half-leering at the congressman, who rose weak-kneed from his chair. “Mark, I’m gonna come after you if you don’t support us on this.” Then Trump turned to the rest of the room. “I think Mark Meadows will get on board.”
It was a crucial misreading of the North Carolina congressman’s situation. Months into his chairmanship, some of his colleagues in the Freedom Caucus still feared Meadows was too cozy with Trump and would hesitate to defy the White House. The health care fight was shaping up as a test of Meadows’s independence from Trump; the moment the president called him out, the Freedom Caucus chairman was boxed in. If he gave even an inch now, he would confirm the whispers of the skeptical members in his group.
Meadows, thoroughly chastened by Trump’s routine in the conference meeting, rushed to leave the room once it adjourned. But he was stopped by Patrick McHenry, his colleague in the North Carolina delegation and the leadership’s chief deputy whip. “He’s gonna come after you, Mark!” McHenry said, practically squealing with glee.
Meadows’s face, already flush, was now glowing red. “You’re not helping, Patrick!” he growled. He turned and took several steps away, leaving McHenry and a small crowd of gawkers gaping. They had never seen Meadows lose his customary cool.
Meadows spun back around. The creases in his brow had vanished; the amber in his cheeks was gone. Placing his hand on McHenry’s shoulder, he said, “But I still love you.” The onlookers, including several of the Freedom Caucus members, traded looks of incomprehension.
Back-channeling with the administration in the hope of changing the president’s mind, Meadows and Jordan landed what they thought was an invitation to the White House the next day, Wednesday, March 22. Instead, they found themselves hauled into the less-than-inspiring Executive Office Building for a pep rally with Pence, Priebus, Bannon, and other admini
stration staffers—but not the president himself. The Freedom Caucus members realized there would be no more negotiating. Pence tried to pump them up, saying the fight was theirs to win and that they needed to help Trump and Ryan score a victory for the new administration. The plea landed on deaf ears.
“You need to take one for the team, guys,” Bannon said, growling like a sergeant instructing a roomful of privates. “You have no choice but to vote for this bill.”
Joe Barton, a conservative elder statesman from Texas, couldn’t handle being lectured to by the likes of Bannon. “The last time someone ordered me to something, I was eighteen years old, and it was my daddy,” Barton told the chief strategist. “I didn’t listen to him, either.”
The room filled with uncomfortable silence. Bannon backed down and the meeting went on. (Barton eventually announced his support for the legislation; all told, Trump was responsible for moving upward of 10 votes over the course of the month.) After several hours, the members returned to the Capitol feeling frustrated. Several complained to Meadows that the meeting had been a waste of time and wondered if he had lost the president’s ear for good.
That night, however, the White House sent word to the Freedom Caucus that one thing they had been pushing—reforms to the “essential health benefits” provision under Title I of the Affordable Care Act—could be negotiated. Excitement spread throughout the group. But there was also confusion: Some members believed that such a concession would be enough to win their vote, while others felt it was only a step in the right direction. As they sought to clarify their internal disagreements, there was another meeting scheduled for the next morning, Thursday, March 23—this one at the White House and with the president himself.
Renewed with hope, Freedom Caucus members were once again promptly disappointed. The next day’s meeting was yet another “take one for the team” seminar. The atmosphere was friendly enough; the president had the group laughing with irrelevant riffs and stories of negotiations past. But it became clear, as soon as he made the “little shit” comment, that no serious changes were going to be made.
The problem was coming into focus. Trump possessed the requisite tools of a salesman; he had converted a handful of holdouts with late-night phone calls, using a blend of profane jokes, veiled threats, and appeals to loyalty. But the president was handicapped by his inherent disinterest in the specifics of the bill. He didn’t have a sufficient grasp of the policy, or of the legislative dynamics in Congress, to know what could or couldn’t pass.
Ryan, conversely, knew every nook and cranny of the legislative text. Having served as the chairman of two relevant committees—Budget, and Ways and Means—the Speaker was deeply versed in the details of his proposal. Unfortunately, he had no marketing skills to complement his command of the subject matter. He had alienated many of his members with his assertion of a “binary choice,” and not just the conservatives. As they drew closer to a scheduled vote in the House on Friday, a growing number of moderate Republicans signaled their opposition to the bill, expressing frustration that Ryan and his leadership team were cramming it down the conference’s throat.
As the reality of the bill’s likely defeat set in on Thursday afternoon, Trump’s team began to assign responsibility to Ryan, most notably feeding quotes to a New York Times story that questioned the Speaker’s approach.15 Ryan’s team was prepared for this. They had already begun pushing the blame toward Trump; subtly at first, calling him “the closer,” then more overtly, emphasizing that it was the president’s job to deliver the Freedom Caucus.
On Thursday night, Mulvaney, the OMB director who had been deputized as a bridge between the administration and his former Freedom Caucus bandmates, stood before the House Republican Conference and issued an ultimatum: Trump was ready to move on from health care after Friday’s vote. It was a timeless negotiation tactic, and one that didn’t work very well. Republicans walked out of the meeting chuckling about Mulvaney, whom they’d known as a whiny backbencher, now lording it over them with such a threat.
The next morning, March 24, Trump made a final attempt to bully the conservatives into submission. “The irony is that the Freedom Caucus, which is very pro-life and against Planned Parenthood, allows P.P. to continue if they stop this plan!” the president tweeted. It didn’t work; if anything, it may have backfired, just like his singling out of Meadows three days earlier. The conservatives certainly feared Trump, but if they were to suddenly switch their positions after a tweet on the morning of the vote, the president would own them for good.
It wasn’t just the conservatives who sank Ryan’s effort. By the time the Speaker arrived at the White House for an emergency meeting with Trump that afternoon, more than two dozen moderate and centrist members were also opposed. Lawmakers care about policy and process, and between the two, there was no clear upside in backing Ryan’s bill. It left too many people without coverage and failed to drive down premiums; it had been hastily rewritten to accommodate changes and felt rushed for no good reason. Nearly seven years to the day after Boehner gave his “Hell no!” speech protesting the forced passage of Obamacare, a bill that was discussed, debated, and dissected for over a year, House Republicans were attempting to pass a replacement that they had introduced eighteen days earlier.
While Ryan met with Trump, the Freedom Caucus members filed into a private room at the Capitol Hill Club. They wanted to plot their next move in secret; to avoid leaks, no aides or White House officials were told of their location. Not long after they had gathered, however, the door flung open and in marched Pence accompanied by Priebus. Neither man was smiling. The vice president pleaded with his fellow Tea Partiers to reconsider their opposition.
“I was the Freedom Caucus before the Freedom Caucus existed,” Pence told them, his voice rising, letting loose an uncharacteristic flash of anger. “Don’t try to tell me this bill isn’t conservative enough.”
Pence then abruptly stormed out. Several of the members, grown men, broke into tears, fearful less of disappointing the vice president than of winding up on the business end of a Trump tweet.
Inside the Oval Office, Ryan explained that his team lacked the votes to pass the bill and wanted to pull it from the floor to avoid an embarrassing defeat. But the president wanted the vote to proceed, telling the Speaker that the GOP dissenters should be publicly shamed for their disloyalty to the party. Ryan talked him down, arguing that it was early in the Congress, that they would need those members’ votes down the line. Trump conceded the point, though it didn’t stop him from doing some shaming of his own. Feeling personally betrayed by Meadows, Jordan, and Labrador, the president called them out by name in a tweet the following week, and also posted a separate message encouraging the defeat of Freedom Caucus members in 2018. All across Washington, card-carrying members of the GOP establishment were elated.
Returning to Capitol Hill from his meeting with Trump, the Speaker canceled the vote and informed reporters in a somber press conference that Obamacare remained “the law of the land.” He sighed, adding that the House GOP was still learning how to be a “governing body.”16
It was a revelation. Despite controlling the White House and both chambers of Congress, the Republican Party was no more cohesive than it had been while out of power.
Watching the party implode from a new and unique vantage point, his home on the back nine of Wetherington Golf and Country Club in suburban Cincinnati, John Boehner felt one part liberated and one part guilty.
He certainly didn’t miss the day-to-day shenanigans of Capitol Hill, and he was somewhat amused by how Trump had deepened the party’s paralysis. “Dysfunction is a relative term,” the former Speaker said that spring. “Right now, it looks like I was a genius.”
But Boehner was worried for Ryan. The new Speaker had never wanted the job to begin with, and now he found himself buffeted by the same forces of factionalism within the conference, all while dealing with a deeply incompetent White House. Boehner didn’t like the way things w
ere headed, not for the institutions of government and certainly not for the GOP. Asked what he thought historians were going to make of his legacy, and that which he had bequeathed to Ryan, Boehner replied, “They’ll be talking about the end of the two-party system.”
The policy hopes of the unified Republican government rested on Ryan’s shoulders. He was the man with the charts, having wowed everyone at Trump Tower in December with a detailed presentation of target dates and vote estimates for executing the party’s legislative agenda.
Thus far, however, things had not exactly gone according to plan—and Ryan bore the blame.
Shortly after the House GOP’s health care bill failed, Boehner received a text message from his close friend George W. Bush. They were always “two peas in the same pod,” as Boehner says, a pair of even-keeled gents who didn’t take themselves too seriously. When Bush, while still in office, refused to join the exclusive Burning Tree Club in Washington, due to the optics of golfing someplace where women weren’t allowed, Boehner told the president, “You’re a pussy.” Years later, when Bush left the White House and became a member, promising the Speaker that he was going to whup his ass on the course, Boehner responded, “You’re still a pussy.”
“Hey. Are you still talking to Ryan?” Bush texted Boehner. “Are you giving him advice?”
“Yeah,” Boehner typed back. “If he calls, I give him advice.”
“He needs to call you more,” Bush replied.
THINGS WERE GOING NO SMOOTHER ELSEWHERE IN THE GOVERNMENT. While health care was hogging the domestic policymaking spotlight, Washington was increasingly fixated on a drama of international intrigue: Russia’s meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.