American Carnage

by Tim Alberta

  There were no provocative tweets, no divisive rhetorical salvos aimed at Sanders or anyone else. (The Vermont senator said he was “sickened” upon hearing of Hodgkinson’s devotion, and said on the Senate floor, “Real change can only come about through nonviolent action.”) The only unusual part of Trump’s response was his fixation, in discussions with doctors at the hospital and later with Scalise himself, on the size of the bullet. There was also the question he posed to friends and aides in the days following the shooting. “Should we do gun control?” the president asked. “Steve can lead the way. He’s got street credibility now.”

  ADMINISTRATION OFFICIALS WERE MYSTIFIED AT TIMES SUCH AS THIS. The incident had shown that Trump had the capacity for calm, the feeling for normalcy, when the circumstances so demanded. Still, they wondered why the president refused to carry himself like this regularly; why his handling of the Scalise shooting was the exception and not the rule.

  For much of 2017, Trump’s top aides, as well as the rest of Republican Washington, found themselves twitching every time their smartphones twinkled to life. The president had used Twitter during the campaign to rewrite the rules of mass communication in politics, circumventing the media gatekeepers and reaching tens of millions of people instantly. But Trump’s social media addiction was proving debilitating to his presidency. Like clockwork, his impulsive rants distracted from the White House’s efforts to advance its agenda. Most administrations do whatever possible to avoid controversy; Trump specialized in creating it.

  Though White House officials joked constantly about stealing his smartphone or changing the password—really, they weren’t joking at all—nothing could be done to stop the president from tweeting. The pleas from his staff did no good. He told friends that without Twitter, he never would have won the presidency to begin with; now he told aides that without Twitter, his presidency would be derailed by a hostile press corps. Ironically, both his friends and his aides believed the greatest threat to his presidency was Twitter itself.

  While enduring nightmares of self-implicating tweets and dreading the morning ritual of checking to see what the president had already posted, Trump’s aides looked forward to one period of relative peace: Sunday afternoons. It was then that the president went golfing, leaving his smartphone behind. (Trump, who savaged his predecessor for golfing on the job, would play roughly twice the number of rounds as Obama in his first two years in office.)

  The president’s staffers lived in fear of one thing: bad weather. Some spent Saturday nights praying for clear skies the next day, knowing a tweet-free afternoon would give them a window of uninterrupted tranquility, time to spend with their families and decompress from a job known to be demanding under the most normal of circumstances.

  “Rainy Sunday afternoons,” Priebus told Ryan, “are the devil’s play shop.”

  Of all the president’s men, Priebus was the most fatigued. He had been a doormat from day one. Trump emasculated him, calling him “Reincey” and bad-mouthing him behind his back. Ryan, his longtime friend, who had expected a close alliance with the chief of staff, learned quickly that Priebus had no power in the White House, and he went around him to engage Trump directly.

  Priebus did his best to exert authority. He would declare key meetings off-limits to certain staffers and stand guard at the Oval Office doorway, wary of unannounced visitors. But it was of no use: People poured in past him, and meetings spilled over with uninvited guests. Omarosa Manigault, a former contestant on The Apprentice whom Trump had brought into the administration to serve in part as a liaison to the black community, did little work that anyone ever saw but proved adroit at finding her way into ultra-important conversations in the West Wing. It later paid off: She had been secretly recording them to gather material for a tell-all book.

  There was no structure, nothing resembling an organized commercial enterprise, much less a disciplined presidency. The West Wing was the Wild West—strangers roaming free, Trump springing new surprises on his staff at every turn, meetings running hours behind schedule, Secret Service agents scrambling to keep wanderers out of the Oval Office. Priebus aimed to stick near the president whenever possible, fearful that his influence was diminished by every moment he was not by Trump’s side. Yet he also had a White House to run, and spent his days sprinting between meetings, unable to trust many of the people whom he should have been delegating to. Friends compared the chief of staff to a battlefield medic hustling between patients but never able to stop the bleeding.

  It wasn’t working for anyone. Despite his own penchant for such commotion, the president knew he needed an infusion of order. As for Priebus? He just needed a nap and a cold Miller Lite.

  Spicer could tell that the chief’s days were numbered. After a rocky and bizarre tenure as White House press secretary, the former RNC flack had stepped down on July 21. His exit owed in part to the hiring of a hot-blooded political neophyte named Anthony Scaramucci as White House communications director, an addition that Priebus vigorously opposed. It was his last battle as chief of staff—and unsurprisingly, it was a losing one.

  A week later, on July 28, Priebus was replaced by John Kelly, the retired four-star Marine general who had previously run the Department of Homeland Security. In firing his chief of staff and the party chairman who’d helped him get elected, Trump was severing his last major tie to the Republican establishment. Looking around at the president’s inner circle, one saw Scaramucci, who had previously donated to Obama and Hillary Clinton; Bannon, who had used Breitbart to try to burn the GOP to the ground; National Economic Council director Gary Cohn, a lifelong Democrat; the director of strategic communications, Hope Hicks, who had zero history with GOP politics; and Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, a pair of self-professed Manhattan progressives. Of Trump’s closest advisers, only Pence had any association with the Republican Party.

  The staff makeover was only beginning.

  One day before the chief of staff’s departure, the New Yorker reported on a phone call between Scaramucci and Ryan Lizza, one of its reporters, in which the White House communications director went on an expletive-laden tirade.8 During the conversation, Scaramucci called Priebus “a fucking paranoid schizophrenic” and said of the president’s chief strategist, “I’m not Steve Bannon, I’m not trying to suck my own cock. I’m not trying to build my own brand off the fucking strength of the President. I’m here to serve the country.”

  The White House communications director was promptly fired—after six days on the job.

  Capping an extraordinary stretch, a few weeks after Scaramucci’s dismissal, Trump fired Bannon. The president had long since grown tired of his taste for celebrity: the endless string of out-of-school interviews, the Saturday Night Live sketch depicting him as the Grim Reaper, and most recently, the book Devil’s Bargain, by journalist Joshua Green, painting Bannon as the president’s puppeteer.

  When Kelly took over as the new White House chief of staff, his first priority was to jettison Bannon, whom he viewed as a destabilizing force inside the government and a self-promoting clown to boot. Trump acted swiftly on his new chief’s recommendation.

  For a moment—for his first few weeks on the job, really—it appeared that Kelly was equipped to finally bring order to the White House. It wouldn’t last.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  August 2017

  “God made me black on purpose.”

  THE MURDER OF NINE BLACK PARISHIONERS INSIDE THEIR CHARLESTON church in June 2015—by a white gunman, Dylann Roof, who told police he wanted to start a race war—marked a genuine inflection point in the American argument over race, culture, and politics.

  South Carolina’s subsequent removal of the Confederate flag from its statehouse grounds, spearheaded by Governor Nikki Haley, triggered a sweeping campaign to purge the nation of symbols that spoke to the dark echoes of its past. These efforts were concentrated in the South. All across Old Dixie, tributes to Confederate soldiers and their causes remained ubiquitous 150 y
ears after the surrender at Appomattox. Coinciding with the ascent of Donald Trump, the fault lines were drawn: Some Americans argued that radicals were attempting to erase the nation’s rich and complex heritage; other Americans argued that radicals were attempting to preserve the nation’s historical architecture of oppression.

  The conflict came to a head in Charlottesville, Virginia.

  A neatly manicured city, home to Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello plantation and the pristine campus of the University of Virginia, Charlottesville was an unlikely backdrop for race rioting. Yet the proposed removal of Robert E. Lee’s statue from Lee Park—the city council had voted to rename it Emancipation Park—was becoming a fight of the utmost symbolic importance. In the heart of the Confederacy, in a settlement built by a slave-owning (and slave-impregnating) president of the United States, the South’s most famous general still sat high atop the city on his bronze steed, daring the forces of progress to topple him.

  Charlottesville had braced for a planned demonstration the weekend of August 12, nicknamed “Unite the Right,” meant as a rallying point for the scattered cells of white supremacists and neo-Nazis nationwide. Counterprotesters from around the country mobilized quickly, descending on Charlottesville. With the city’s police and government officials in preparation mode, a group of several hundred right-wing demonstrators staged a surprise march through the UVA campus, hoisting torches and shouting racist slogans. Video of the event, captured with chilling precision by Vice News, showed them chanting, “You will not replace us! Jews will not replace us!” It was an ode to the theory that a Jewish-dictated demographic makeover of the United States was meant to dilute the power of the white race.

  At the end of a chaotic Saturday full of skirmishes for which the local law enforcement was visibly underprepared, tragedy struck. A twenty-year-old Nazi sympathizer from Ohio, James Alex Fields, rammed his Dodge Challenger into a crowd of counterprotesters downtown. The terrorist attack injured twenty-eight people and killed Heather Heyer, a thrity-two-year-old waitress and paralegal.

  The demonstrators drawn to Charlottesville represented disparate cogs of an ideological machine—one emboldened by the election of the forty-fifth president. They were neo-Nazis, neo-Confederates, right-wing militia members, and Klansmen. The former grand wizard of the KKK, David Duke, was among other white supremacist luminaires in attendance. “We are determined to take our country back,” Duke said at the rally. “We are gonna fulfill the promises of Donald Trump.”

  The collection of counterprotesters was more diverse. There were interfaith leaders, locking arms and singing hymns. There were college kids and faculty members. There were local residents. There were members of Black Lives Matter, the nascent organization that used aggressive nonviolent tactics (such as street demonstrations and “die-ins”) to combat police brutality. Problematically, there were also disciples of Antifa (“antifascist”), a conglomeration of groups, some with a history of inciting violence.

  Two hours after Fields plowed his car into a throng of people, Trump delivered prepared remarks from his golf club in New Jersey. “We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence”—he looked up from his script—“on many sides. On many sides.”

  The president also urged the country to “come together as one,” saying, “The hate and division must stop.” But these remarks were peripheral to his opening statement, which had drawn a moral equivalence between the white supremacists marching in Charlottesville and the counterprotesters opposed to their ideology. Horrified by Trump’s language, Republicans raced to condemn him, strafing the White House with an unprecedented barrage of criticism.

  “We should call evil by its name,” Utah senator Orrin Hatch tweeted. “My brother didn’t give his life fighting Hitler for Nazi ideas to go unchallenged here at home.”

  The White House tried to put out the fire, issuing a statement on Sunday that read, “The President said very strongly in his statement yesterday that he condemns all forms of violence, bigotry, and hatred. Of course that includes white supremacists, KKK Neo-Nazi and all extremist groups.”

  But this would not suffice. After collecting decades’ worth of racial baggage and running a campaign during which he insulted Mexicans, called for banning Muslims from the country, and played footsie with extremists, Trump would need to clean up this mess himself.

  He tried. “Racism is evil,” the president said on Monday, August 14, during an impromptu appearance before the White House press corps. “And those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans.”

  But less than twenty-four hours later, on Tuesday, the fifteenth, he reverted to form. Facing a scrum of reporters inside Trump Tower, the president defended his original remarks from Sunday, repeating his assertion of “blame on both sides.” He also lashed out at the media, which he claimed had unfairly attacked the rally’s participants. “Not all of those people were neo-Nazis, believe me. Not all of those people were white supremacists by any stretch,” he said. Saying there had been “very fine people on both sides,” Trump argued that the campaign to remove Confederate monuments was an attempt to “change history.”

  The outpouring of anger was nearly unparalleled, likely bested only by the reactions to the Access Hollywood recording. Dozens of elected Republican officials past and present condemned Trump’s rhetoric and called on him to emphasize, once and for all, that there were no “very fine people” marching with torches in Charlottesville.

  One voice pierced the din of familiar outrage that had come to shadow Trump. “What we want to see from our president is clarity and moral authority,” Tim Scott, the Senate’s lone black Republican, told Vice News.1 “And that moral authority is compromised when Tuesday happened.”

  HAVING BEEN DEPLOYED AS A “PROP” BY HOUSE REPUBLICANS AFTER his election in 2010, and having heard the grumblings about being an affirmative-action hire following his appointment to the Senate in 2012, Scott was determined to avoid being defined by his blackness. In the absence of words, the new senator tried to lead with actions. He assembled one of the most diverse offices on Capitol Hill, led by his black, single-mother chief of staff. He also poured time and resources into mentoring programs in distressed communities back home.

  But his silence on cultural events became deafening. “Scott has said little on the racial controversies and civil rights issues of the last four years, from the killings of Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis to the death of Michael Brown and the explosion of anger and rage in Ferguson,” Jamelle Bouie wrote in Slate in November 2014.2 Soon enough, circumstances made the senator’s reticence unsustainable.

  In April 2015, Walter Scott (no relation) was fatally shot in the back by a policeman in North Charleston. Shaken by the hometown incident, the senator called for the officer’s prosecution. (In 2017, he introduced the Walter Scott Notification Act, which would create a database of police shootings.)

  Ten weeks after Walter Scott’s murder, Roof opened fire at Emanuel AME Church. Scott delivered an emotional address on the Senate floor. (“God cares for His people,” he said, quoting the son of one of the victims he had spoken with. “God still lives.”)

  The next summer, in July 2016, amid another rash of police shootings, Scott returned to the Senate floor. In a spellbinding speech, the senator described how he had been victimized by racial profiling—pulled over in his car seven times in one year as an elected official, and twice forced to show identification to Capitol Police despite wearing his members-only Senate pin.

  In a town filled with empty rhetoric, Scott’s remarks got everyone’s attention. Democrats applauded the GOP senator’s courage. Older, white Republicans found themselves guilt-ridden by their colleague’s story. There was no turning back for Scott. He had never wanted to be identified as the Black Republican. But there was too much at stake and too few voices in
his party capable of speaking to the moment.

  “We have a significant percentage of people in this country who feel they’re treated differently because of their background or their color. And we need to talk about it,” says Rubio, Scott’s close friend. “No one else could have done that. No one else could have given that speech.”

  Every Republican lawmaker was bound to walk a tightrope when Trump took office, forced to weigh their moral and philosophical objections to him against fears of losing influence in Washington and support back home. But nobody had it worse than Scott. Any rebuke of the president would expose him to lunacy from the right; he became a frequent target of menacing calls and messages, with a Georgia man arrested for threatening to kill him. (“He said he wanted to be the next Dylann Roof,” Scott says.) But biting his tongue when it came to Trump’s behavior opened Scott to unyielding vitriol from the left, with accusations of being an “Uncle Tom” or worse. When one Twitter user called him a “house nigga” in early 2017, after his vote to confirm Jeff Sessions as attorney general, Scott tweeted back a one-word reply: “Senate.”

  In the age of Trump, the senator from South Carolina came to terms with an uncomfortable truth: The fixation on his color was a feature, not a bug. No matter his achievements or aspirations, Scott was sentenced to exist in America’s collective political subconscious as a black man first and everything else second.

  The senator did, however, come to see a silver lining. A deeply religious individual who twice nearly pursued preaching as his vocation, he rejected the notion that Trump had been chosen by the Almighty. But Scott did believe that he himself had been chosen, placed in a unique position at a unique time in history, to help “the American family” navigate some “painful, ugly, embarrassing” conversations about race and other combustible subjects that had simmered for generations.