by Tim Alberta
He went on: “That principled mind-set, and the service of our predecessors who possessed it, come to mind when I hear the Senate referred to as ‘The world’s greatest deliberative body.’ I’m not sure we can claim that distinction with a straight face today.”
The crux of his complaint, with McConnell and the health care push, was that the GOP had abandoned “regular order,” the process of writing bills in committees, debating them, allowing amendments to be offered, and then subjecting them to scrutiny on the floor of the Senate. McCain had spent three decades in the upper chamber advocating this practice of transparency. He was not going to forsake it in the twilight of his life. The Arizona senator announced that he would vote against the bill, and urged McConnell to start from scratch, working with Senate Democrats on a bipartisan solution.
McConnell did not heed this advice. After failing to advance the repeal-and-replace bill on July 25, and failing to pass a repeal-only bill on July 26, the Senate majority leader brought forth a new piece of legislation on July 27. (To be clear, the procedural hypocrisy here was gobsmacking: McConnell and other Republicans had spent the previous eight years accusing Democrats of shoving ill-considered legislation down the public’s throat, only to spend their first year in charge of Washington crafting laws in the dead of night and voting on them without hearings, markups, debates, polling, or input from constituents.)
Nicknamed “skinny repeal,” the newest legislation from McConnell represented a scaled-down version of the Senate’s earlier efforts. The contents were unimportant at this point: McConnell told Senate Republicans they simply needed to pass a health care bill, any health care bill, so that they could enter into conference committee negotiations with the House. At that point, they would worry about the final details.
Buying into this strategy, 49 of the 52 Republicans were in favor. Two were opposed: Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski and Maine’s Susan Collins. The deciding vote belonged to McCain. If he backed the effort, Pence, the constitutional tie-breaker, would approve passage of the bill. A conference committee would be created. Ryan and McConnell would craft a final product and have Trump throw the full weight of his presidency behind it. Obamacare repeal would be on the one-yard line, and Republicans, facing the fury of their voters, wouldn’t dare refuse to push it over the plane.
The senator from Arizona was nowhere to be found. He had disappeared from the chamber. As senators murmured of his whereabouts, McCain was on the phone with Ryan. He respected the young Speaker and wanted his commitment—his word—that the conference committee bill would be negotiated in the open and debated in the daylight, unlike the current bill before the Senate, which had been scraped together in a matter of hours and tossed onto the floor. Ryan promised him that it would be so. McCain, in turn, told Ryan he planned to vote yes.
It was midnight. Ryan called McConnell to confirm McCain’s support. “He’s good,” Ryan said. Thinking it was a done deal, the Speaker went to sleep.
A short while later, McCain walked onto the Senate floor. He chatted with Pence. He walked over to the Democrats’ side and held court. Then, after the final vote was called, McCain disappeared again. With all of Washington holding its collective breath, the Arizona senator reemerged, walked toward the clerk’s desk, and raised his hand flat in the air. He held it steady for several moments, then gave an emphatic thumbs-down.
Gasps filled the room as the aging senator turned and ambled to his desk. The Republican drive to repeal Obamacare was dead. McCain had preserved the legacy-defining achievement of the very man who had defeated him for the presidency.
THERE WAS PLENTY OF BLAME TO GO AROUND FOR REPUBLICANS’ FAILURE to deliver on the promise that had animated the party since the spring of 2010. Ryan had botched the rollout of the original bill. McConnell had been unprepared to act when the House passed its later version. Conservatives and moderates alike had failed to pressure their leadership to bring the process out of the shadows, fueling charges of hypocrisy from the left. And of course, McCain, a favorite scourge of the conservative base, had dealt the fatal blow to the repeal-and-replace crusade.
The one politician seemingly spared of all culpability in the eyes of Republican voters was Trump, whose approval rating with the base didn’t budge. Polling showed GOP voters blaming Congress, far more than the president, for the failure to repeal Obamacare.2 Reported vignettes from across the land revealed a grace period for a president who was predated by dysfunction in his party. “I really don’t think people are trying to help Trump,” Melinda James, a supporter from Broadview Heights, Ohio, told PBS after the failed House effort in March. “We need to unify. We need to give him a chance.”3
Trump had tilled the field for this. Having spent the past two years railing against do-nothing politicians who never follow through on their promises, the president walked into a win-win. If Republicans delivered, he would be hailed as the redeemer of the party; if Republicans fell short, he would be excused as a sympathetic figure, another victim of an undrainable swamp.
Leaning into the anti-politician sentiment that continued to buoy him, the president made a show of acting unilaterally to keep his commitments. In his first six months in office, he signed a flurry of executive orders touching on everything from energy regulations to religious liberty, abortion to deportation policy. He began filling the federal courts with conservative jurists, and his White House ran a professional operation overseeing the confirmation of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. Perhaps most visibly, he withdrew the United States from the Paris climate accord, a global-warming pact with other nations that Trump said threatened American economic sovereignty. “I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris,” he decreed.
From thirty thousand feet, and certainly from inside the Beltway, these developments were obscured by the president’s unpopularity. An ABC News/Washington Post poll in mid-July showed Trump’s approval rating at 36 percent, “the lowest six-month approval rating of any president in polls dating back 70 years.”4 And yet that same poll showed Trump’s approval rating at 90 percent among conservative Republicans.
In many ways, the new president’s flaws and failures—and the harsh judgments thereof—endeared him to the GOP base. Conservatives, and especially churchgoing Christians, could identify with someone dismissed by the political elite, disrespected by the mainstream media, delegitimized by the American left. Feeling ostracized in a culture that no longer reflected their core values or tolerated their most polarizing principles, the religious right came to feel a kinship with Trump that defied all reasonable expectations.
In early June, at the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s annual gathering in Washington, the president offered an extraordinary sentiment when pledging his continued support to Christian conservatives. “We’re under siege. You understand that,” Trump said. “But we will come out bigger and better and stronger than ever.”
It was a stroke of polysemantic genius from the president and his speechwriters. As heads nodded in agreement across the hotel ballroom, media outlets seized—as the White House knew they would—on the phrase, “We’re under siege.” After all, at that very moment, just six miles from where Trump was speaking, former FBI director James Comey was testifying under oath in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee about his unseemly interactions with the commander in chief. These were the tensest hours of Trump’s young presidency, and here he was, acknowledging a defensive posture. But he was also expressing solidarity with an audience that could relate to feeling victimized.
Of all the early surprises offered by the Trump presidency, none proved more enduring than his alliance with Christian conservatives. Trump thrived on transactional relationships, and in white evangelicals—81 percent of whom voted for him in 2016—he discovered an ideal trading partner. He would give them the policies and the access to authority that they longed for. In return, they would stand behind him unwaveringly. “Those fucking evangelicals,” Trump mused in a meeting with GOP lawmakers, smiling
and shaking his head at the depth of their devotion.
That he was not one of them was beside the point. “I’ve been at the White House for meetings more in the first four months of the Trump administration than I was during the entire Bush presidency,” Tony Perkins, the Family Research Council president, said that spring.
Ralph Reed, the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s chairman, put it thusly: “Jimmy Carter sat in the pew with us. But he never fought for us. Donald Trump fights. And he fights for us.”
Naturally, this marriage invited skepticism, if not outright scorn. It was Jesus who posed the question, “For what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul?” And yet many of his followers, students of a faith that stresses the eternal, not the ephemeral, pledged their uncritical allegiance to an earthly leader in exchange for political gratification. To vote for Trump as the lesser of two evils while holding him to a high standard in office was more than defensible; but those who stood indiscriminately supportive of him despite behaviors that would have been intolerable from a Democrat opened themselves to every charge of shameless opportunism.
“In my experience over the last thirty or so years of political life, there’s hardly any group in American politics that is as easily won over or seduced by power as Christians,” says Pete Wehner, a Trump critic and one of the prominent evangelicals who served in the Bush 43 White House.
The most frequent rebuttal from faith leaders supportive of Trump amounted to a fascinating concession: Their idyllic visions of virtuous leadership in government had been a mirage. They had railed against Bill Clinton’s philandering, but came to realize afterward that America was past the point of prioritizing morality in its leaders. The country was changing too much, too quickly, for their old expectations to be realistic. In 1976, Jerry Falwell had crucified Jimmy Carter for giving an interview to Playboy; forty years later, Jerry Falwell Jr. posed with Trump in front of a framed Playboy cover featuring a nearly nude woman. This was to be the new normal. “It’s not our job to choose the best Sunday school teacher, like Jimmy Carter was,” Falwell Jr. told CNN in 2016.5
In fairness, it wasn’t just the religious right revising its standards. This was a time of transition for conservatism writ large. The Tea Party insurgency had redrawn the battle lines inside the GOP. The Freedom Caucus had neutered the House Republican leadership. John Boehner and Eric Cantor had been pushed out of power. Mitch McConnell found his chamber increasingly ungovernable. In May, Jim DeMint was fired by the Heritage Foundation, concluding a ruinous experiment that had further sullied the think tank’s reputation. And Reince Priebus, the White House chief of staff who remained Trump’s strongest link to the party establishment, was on his way out.
That summer, having breakfast with a blissfully retired Boehner, I asked him whether the Republican Party could survive Trumpism. “There is no Rep—” He stopped himself.
There is no Republican Party?
He shrugged. “There is. But what does it even mean? Donald Trump’s not a Republican. He’s not a Democrat. He’s a populist.”
What Trump was demonstrating, however, is that political labels were less relevant than ever. And to the extent that they still mattered, their very definitions were changing.
Any doubts of this were erased by the Conservative Political Action Conference of 2017. One year earlier, there had been threats of a mass walkout if the GOP front-runner came to speak, leading Tump to cancel his appearance. Now, CPAC had turned into “TPAC,” as Kellyanne Conway told the audience to wild cheers. She was right. To attend the event was to witness an ideology conforming to an individual rather than the other way around. Trump brought down the house with a speech that made no mention of “liberty” or “constitution,” choosing instead to champion “our movement” as one that would embrace protectionist, cronyist, big-spending policies in the name of shielding Americans from the menace of a global economy.
Meanwhile, traditional mainstays such as Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio and Rand Paul were nowhere to be found. In their place was Steve Bannon hawking “economic nationalism” and his old media company, Breitbart (once banned from CPAC) sponsoring the event with its logo slapped across the stage. The event’s organizers had even invited Milo Yiannopoulos, the alt-right carnival barker with no serious claim to conservatism, to speak. (He was disinvited only after video surfaced of him making approving remarks about pedophilia.)
In certain respects, the conservative support for Trump was understandable. He had delivered on important promises. At the same time, he had done things—facilitating the Carrier deal in Indiana that smacked of government favoritism; bullying private corporations and individual citizens; asserting a moral equivalence between the U.S. government and Vladimir Putin’s—that would traditionally have put any politician in the conservative movement’s guillotine.
Trump did not suffer for these apostasies. And the best explanation wasn’t that voters were ignoring his rejections of Republican orthodoxy; it was that they accepted his rebranding of that orthodoxy. In a poll taken at the event, a full 86 percent of CPAC attendees approved of Trump’s job performance. Moreover, 80 percent agreed with the notion that he was “realigning” conservatism. “In many ways, Donald Trump is the conservative movement right now,” Jim McLaughlin, the Republican pollster who conducted the survey, announced to CPAC attendees. “And the conservative movement is Donald Trump.”
THE BASE’S DEVOTION TO TRUMP WAS LIKE BALM TO A PRESIDENCY covered in third-degree burns.
For all the upheaval of the first few months, nothing had prepared the White House for the hell unleashed by Trump’s firing of Comey and the subsequent appointment of Robert Mueller as the special counsel.
As the summer wore on, it became evident that Mueller was looking into not just Russia’s attempts to influence the presidential campaign, but also potential coordination between Trump team’s and the Kremlin. An assortment of criminal activities carried out by the president’s former associates, including Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, and an obscure policy adviser named George Papadopoulos, was bringing the investigation inside Trump’s campaign and inside his White House.
Even more threatening to the president, Mueller’s investigation was also circling his family.
On July 8, the New York Times reported that in June of 2016, Donald Trump Jr. had met with a Kremlin-linked lawyer at Trump Tower.6 Also present were Manafort and Jared Kushner. The story rocked the West Wing. The president, flying on Air Force One, dictated a statement saying the meeting had been about a Russian adoption program and nothing more. (Trump’s lawyers initially denied his involvement in issuing the statement, only to admit later his role in writing it.)
The next day, the Times followed up with a far bigger blockbuster: Trump Jr. had arranged the Tower meeting in response to promises of receiving dirt on Clinton from the Russian lawyer.7
On June 3, 2016—just as the general election campaign was commencing—Trump Jr. had received an email from one of his dad’s former Russian business associates. This person had been contacted by a Kremlin official who was offering information that “would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father,” the email read, adding, “This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”
Minutes later, Trump Jr. replied, “If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer.”
The White House had repeatedly and vehemently denied that there had been any contact in 2016 between Trump’s inner circle and the Russian government. And the president himself had claimed on numerous occasions that there was no evidence whatsoever to hint at collusion—or even an intent to collude. Suddenly, thanks to his son and namesake, there was reason to believe otherwise. Blood was in the water.
All the while, the White House was confronted with the normal volatility of running the country: judicial appointments and confirmations, votes on health c
are, legal challenges to the travel ban, a missile strike on Syria, and the continued military offensive against the Islamic State.
Republicans were also dealing with the continued trauma of a large-scale assassination attempt. On the morning of June 14, a gunman named James Hodgkinson opened fire at a baseball diamond in northern Virginia where House Republicans were practicing ahead of the annual congressional baseball game. Steve Scalise, the House majority whip, was playing second base. He thought a tractor had backfired. Instead, it was Hodgkinson, a liberal activist and Bernie Sanders campaign volunteer who kept a list of the Republicans he wanted to mow down, shooting at him with 7.62-caliber SKS semiautomatic rifle. (As intriguing as the thought experiment “Imagine if Obama did what Trump just did” was the question of “How would we react if a Ted Cruz devotee tried to murder a dozen House Democrats?”)
Scalise was hit. The bullet traveled through his hip, shattering the femur and wrecking the pelvis, with bullet fragments lodged in his muscle tissue and organs. As he crawled from the infield dirt into shallow right field, Scalise was bleeding to death. Four others were wounded, but Scalise’s situation was the direst. Once the shooter was neutralized—by Scalise’s security detail, who almost certainly prevented a massacre that morning—the other congressmen ran to their colleague from Louisiana. The first one to reach him was Brad Wenstrup, a little-known third-term Ohio lawmaker who had served as a combat medic in Afghanistan. Wenstrup tied a perfect tourniquet. It would later be credited with saving Scalise’s life. “When I got to the hospital, they said I was within a minute of death,” Scalise said.
Trump’s handling of the situation was strangely reassuring. He issued a standard statement saying, “We are deeply saddened by this tragedy.” He visited the hospital where Scalise and Capitol Police officer Crystal Griner were being treated. He and the First Lady spent a prolonged period of time with Scalise’s wife, Jennifer, whose husband was unconscious. He gave Scalise’s children a personal tour of the West Wing at the congressional picnic a week later.