American Carnage

by Tim Alberta

  On March 2, Trump’s attorney general, Jeff Sessions, recused himself from any investigation into Russia’s interference in the election, citing conflicts of interest given his once-undisclosed contacts with the Russian ambassador in 2016. Trump was incensed. He had expected Sessions, as the nation’s top law enforcement official, to double as his personal protector. Allegations of collusion with the Russian government during the campaign, and the corollary talk that his presidency was illegitimate and potentially compromised, were gnawing at the president.

  Two days later, still stewing over Sessions’s recusal and raging about a “deep state” of government bureaucrats angling to take him down, Trump rose early at Mar-a-Lago. It was Saturday morning and there was no staff around. Clicking on his television and finding the previous night’s edition of Special Report on Fox News, the president was stunned to hear a discussion between Bret Baier and Speaker Ryan about a “report” that accused the Obama administration of wiretapping Trump Tower the previous summer. Baier seemed uncertain of the report’s specifics, and Ryan appeared visibly baffled by the questioning.

  Trump raced to his phone. “Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!” the president tweeted. He followed up: “How low has President Obama gone to [tap] my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!”

  Five minutes later, at 6:40 in the morning, the president dialed Priebus. The chief of staff, hoping for an uneventful weekend with Trump out of town, was jolted out of his sleep. “Did you see my tweets?” came an excited voice on the other end.

  Priebus leapt from his bed and opened Twitter on his iPhone, quickly finding Trump’s pair of statements.

  “Who told you this?” he asked the president.

  “It’s all over the place,” Trump replied. “Listen to this!”

  The president, a longtime fan of the TiVo recording device, rewound and played for Priebus the Special Report clip, a muddled exchange that offered nothing but confusion for most viewers.

  “See! Did you hear that?” Trump asked Priebus.

  It wasn’t unusual for the president to begin his day with predawn tweets inspired by whatever he had seen or heard on Fox News, making Fox and Friends the most influential bit of programming in the world. Priebus could live with that. It was unusual, however, for the president to publicly accuse his predecessor of spying on him—without a shred of evidence to support the allegation.

  The chief of staff felt sick. He hung up and called Ryan in Wisconsin. He was an hour behind, in the central time zone, and still asleep. “Paul, what the hell is going on?” Priebus asked. “What the hell is he talking about?”

  Ryan, too, jumped out of bed and located the president’s tweet. When Priebus explained that Trump’s charge against Obama was based on the Baier clip, Ryan burst into maniacal, almost punch-drunk laughter. “I didn’t even know what Bret was talking about,” the Speaker exhaled. “I just BS’d my way through the question!”

  It was a needed moment of levity for Ryan, but Priebus couldn’t find the humor.

  APRIL BROUGHT A BRIEF INTERLUDE OF TRANQUILITY. BUT THE MONTH of May saw fireworks the likes of which Americans hadn’t witnessed since Watergate.

  At the beginning of the month, Trump told his top aides that he’d made up his mind: He wanted to fire James Comey. They warned him that this was a very bad idea; that the FBI was investigating Russia’s alleged meddling in the 2016 election, a probe that would be looking closely at him, his family, and his campaign. Firing Comey would make the president look suspicious. But Trump didn’t care. In fact, it was Comey’s very handling of the Russia case that irked him: Three times, the president claimed, Comey had assured him privately that he was not personally being investigated (which the FBI director later confirmed in congressional testimony), and yet he refused to say so publicly.

  Desperate to stop Trump from acting impetuously, Priebus and White House counsel Don McGahn persuaded him to wait until at least getting an opinion from Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general who was overseeing the Russia inquiry. They felt certain that Rosenstein, an even-keeled career prosecutor, would help them talk the president down. Instead, when he arrived in the Oval Office, Rosenstein blindsided them by agreeing with Trump: Comey deserved to be fired, he said, based on his handling of the Clinton email investigation in 2016.

  Trump sacked Comey on May 9, publicly citing Rosenstein’s reasoning for doing so. Senior White House officials, including Pence himself, insisted to reporters that Trump had acted on the recommendation of Sessions and Rosenstein. They swore up and down that the president’s decision had nothing to do with the Russia probe. Trump, however, would quickly undermine those claims—and sabotage his own stated rationale for dismissing the FBI director.

  In the Oval Office a day later, Trump hosted two top Russian officials, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. The president called Comey “a real nut job,” according to the New York Times,17 and told them of the FBI probe, “I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.” (Trump also disclosed highly classified information about an operation targeting the Islamic State, according to the Washington Post.18 The only photos of the meeting were shared by a Russian state photographer; no American media were permitted.)

  The next day, May 11, the president continued to stray from his original story. Sitting down with Lester Holt of NBC News, Trump said of the Comey firing, “In fact, when I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said, ‘You know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story, it’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should have won.’”

  Trump then committed a presidency-defining mistake the next day. Fittingly, it started with a tweet.

  “James Comey better hope that there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!” the president wrote on the morning of May 12.

  Trump would later admit that he possessed no such tapes. But that wasn’t the point anymore. Prompted by the tweet, Comey, who had written contemporaneous memos after his meetings with the president, shared the memos with a law professor friend, authorizing him to leak them to the press. Comey’s goal was to trigger the appointment of a special counsel to continue the investigation into Russian meddling. The ploy worked. One day after the New York Times published a story detailing Comey’s claims about the president’s request for lenient treatment of Flynn, raising questions about obstruction of justice, Rosenstein named a special counsel.19

  Robert Mueller, the highly respected former FBI director who had served under Presidents Obama and George W. Bush, wouldn’t merely be picking up where previous investigators had left off. He would be expanding the probe into places it might never have ventured before.

  Trump’s impulsive dismissal of the FBI director, his self-contradictory statements, and his taunting tweets had conjured a nightmare that would haunt the first term of his presidency.

  Chapter Twenty

  June 2017

  “Rainy Sunday afternoons are the devil’s play shop.”

  MEAN.

  That’s how the Republican president of the United States described the Republican House majority’s hard-fought legislation to finally, at long last, deliver on the seven-year promise of repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act: “Mean.”

  Facing the wrath of the base following the March 24 debacle, with Fox News and conservative talk radio leading the way in lampooning a congressional party that was ruining Donald Trump’s prospects for a successful presidency, Republicans got their act together. And it started with Mike Pence.

  From the moment Trump picked him, through the first few months of 2017, the vice president had been all but invisible in the parade of palace intrigue stories detailing the rivalries, alliances, backstabbing, self-promoting, and stock watching inside Trump’s reality TV–inspired White Hous
e. That was no accident: Pence had gathered his team, first after the VP announcement and then once more on the eve of the inauguration, and warned them that the spotlight belonged to Trump. Leaking, speaking out of turn, or doing anything to upstage the president, he said, would not be tolerated.

  All the while, Pence got busy piloting the administration in ways few vice presidents ever had. Unlike the other West Wingers who nurtured narratives of their own indispensability—Steve Bannon, Jared Kushner, Kellyanne Conway, among others—it was the vice president who pulled the levers during the early months of 2017. Pence figured prominently in Trump’s selection of Gorsuch for the Supreme Court. He convinced the president to take specific actions on abortion and religious liberty. He stocked the cabinet agencies with longtime allies and kindred spirits. And he said nothing about any of it, deflecting all credit to the commander in chief. Whereas Bannon had put a target on his own back, giving countless interviews and even appearing on the cover of Time in early 2017 (“The Great Manipulator”), Pence understood how to survive and thrive in the Trump White House: Get the job done and avoid all acclaim in the process. The boss’s ego allowed for nothing else.

  Trump quickly came to trust his second in command above all others, prizing Pence’s unwavering fidelity and discretion. And yet the vice president’s camp continued to operate in a continual state of apprehension, having been handed enormous latitude by a president known for his insecurities and his acute sensitivity to being overshadowed. Ken Blackwell, who ran the domestic policy wing of Pence’s transition team, put it this way in early 2017: “Mike Pence has a very full and complex portfolio in his briefcase. And he has to carry it like there’s a bottle of nitroglycerin inside.”

  Pence had spent the final days of March coaxing the president in private conversations. The vice president explained to Trump, ever so gingerly, that while he didn’t want to second-guess his decision to move on from health care, it would hurt him politically. Republicans on the Hill, Pence said, would be eager to negotiate after the backlash from their constituents. He asked for permission to spearhead a new repeal-and-replace effort. And he assured the president, in so doing, of the myriad benefits it would have for him.

  Pence had learned the same lesson as Ryan: Trump responds to what’s good for Trump.

  With the president’s blessing, Pence met with warring factions of the House GOP—the Freedom Caucus and the moderate “Tuesday Group”—to pitch them on his proposal. It would allow states to opt out of certain Obamacare requirements. The debate over what insurance plans would be required to offer had been a sticking point in past negotiations, and Pence’s idea was a waiver to give states flexibility.

  Both sides expressed interest. Pence’s office drafted language, and he got busy selling it to both tribes—first, Mark Meadows and his Freedom Caucus, and then, in a separate meeting, to New Jersey congressman Tom MacArthur, the leader of the Tuesday Group. After a joint gathering to iron out details, Pence had one request: He asked them to stop referring to the idea as the “Pence amendment.” He didn’t want or need any recognition.

  Sure enough, the compromise on state-based waivers became known as the “MacArthur amendment,” and it led to the House of Representatives passing the American Health Care Act on May 4. Trump was ecstatic. Calling Ryan to congratulate him, the president told the Speaker, “Paul, you’re not a Boy Scout anymore. Not in my book.”

  Ryan was taken aback, finally realizing that it had never been a term of endearment to begin with. “It’s like a dupe, a stupid person,” Ryan says, rolling his eyes. “Boy Scouts are stupid because they don’t cut corners, they’re not lethal, they’re not killers.”

  The mood was festive in the Rose Garden a few hours later as House Republicans assembled behind the president for a celebratory press conference. Rarely had Trump seemed to enjoy his new job. But that afternoon, with the smell of his first significant presidential victory wafting through the springtime air, was an exception.

  “How am I doing? Am I doing okay?” he said, laughing. “I’m president. Heh! Hey, I’m president!”

  Pence kicked off the victory lap, which lasted nearly forty minutes and included speeches from no fewer than ten people, with a simple message. “Welcome to the beginning of the end of Obamacare,” the vice president declared.

  It was a tad premature.

  ALMOST IMMEDIATELY, REPUBLICAN SENATORS SIGNALED THEIR OPPOSITION to the House legislation. Mitch McConnell announced that he and his colleagues would devise their own health care bill, with the aim of merging it with the House version in a conference committee down the road. Trump was mystified by this. The intricacies of the legislative process and the complexities of the interchamber relationship—any aspect of governance that did not fit neatly into a tabloid headline, really—did not interest him. All he knew was that House Republicans had finally passed a bill repealing Obamacare, and now his advisers were telling him it wasn’t good enough for Senate Republicans. No wonder everyone hates Congress, the president groaned.

  McConnell hadn’t invested much energy in the anti-Obamacare effort up until that point. For one thing, privately, he saw the benefits of the Affordable Care Action back home in Kentucky. The uninsured rate there had plummeted over the past six years thanks to the law’s Medicaid expansion, a provision that had become enormously popular in the deep-red state.1 The success stories in Kentucky were so plentiful that the new governor, Republican Matt Bevin, decided to leave the state’s Obamacare-driven Medicaid program alone after promising its demise as a candidate.

  More to the point, McConnell had believed it was highly unlikely that House Republicans would pass a bill. There was no point driving into a legislative cul-de-sac, he told colleagues, when there were dozens of federal judicial vacancies in front of them waiting to be filled. When the House version passed, and Trump relayed his displeasure to McConnell at not having the Senate prepared to immediately follow suit, the majority leader scrambled to get to work.

  The Senate’s bill-drafting process made the House’s look honest by comparison. In the nearly seven weeks between House passage on May 4 and the Senate GOP leadership’s release of its bill on June 22, hardly a soul on Capitol Hill outside of McConnell and his staff knew what was being written. This was infuriating to many of the rank-and-file senators, particularly conservatives such as Ted Cruz and Mike Lee, who felt the party was being hypocritical given its vilification of the process behind Obamacare. (“This massive piece of legislation that seeks to restructure one-sixth of our economy is being written behind closed doors, without input from anyone, in an effort to jam it past not just the Senate but the American people,” McConnell had told reporters in December 2009.)

  One person who didn’t seem to mind was Trump. The president made it clear to McConnell and his team that his only concern was the end result. The process was unimportant, and frankly, so, too, was the policy. Having heard from liberal friends who decried the House legislation as hostile to low-income Americans, Trump had only one request for the senators as they fashioned their version. “We need to be more generous, add more money to help the people. We need to have heart,” Trump told senators over lunch at the White House, CNN reported. “Their bill is just mean.”

  But the Senate bill wasn’t exactly warm and fuzzy. While less draconian than the House version in some respects—offering more in subsidies to the working poor, for instance—it also made steep cuts to Medicaid while ending the Obamacare tax hikes used to pay for it, amounting to a windfall for the wealthy while millions of working-class Americans stood to lose coverage.

  There was something for everyone to dislike in the legislation. Promptly, a bloc of conservatives voiced their opposition, followed by a chorus of centrist Republicans. The bill was going nowhere fast. Having originally scheduled a vote before the July Fourth recess, without any committee hearings or extended floor debate, McConnell was forced to postpone any such action into July due to schisms in his party.

  Things didn’t ge
t any easier after the recess. Republicans spent the first three weeks of July bickering over changes to the bill, only to discover that any alteration that gained two votes was costing them three. The balancing act appeared impossible. At one point, McConnell threw up his hands and declared the “replace” part of their mission dead, announcing that Senate Republicans would vote on a repeal-only bill. (For a man touted as the canniest governmental operator since Pericles, it was something of a reputation-deflating summer.)

  McConnell’s decision only fanned the internal angst. His colleagues trashed the notion of giving up—or of stripping coverage from millions of Americans without offering a substitute. The GOP leadership went back to the drawing board, soliciting final suggestions for a modified bill. Finally, on July 25, McConnell directed the Senate to begin debate on legislation to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act.

  Enter the Hollywood scriptwriters.

  Earlier in the month, John McCain, who’d been missing from the Senate due to what his office described as eye surgery, announced that he had cancer. It was glioblastoma, the same lethal brain tumor that had killed his friend Ted Kennedy. Washington was shaken by the news. There was no spinning what it meant. McCain, the man who seemed immortal after surviving five and half brutal years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, was going to die soon.

  Returning to the Capitol for the first time since his diagnosis, McCain stormed the Senate floor with the last major speech of his distinguished career.

  “Our responsibilities are important, vitally important, to the continued success of our Republic. And our arcane rules and customs are deliberately intended to require broad cooperation to function well at all,” McCain said. “The most revered members of this institution accepted the necessity of compromise in order to make incremental progress on solving America’s problems and to defend her from her adversaries.”