American Carnage

by Tim Alberta

  “God made me black on purpose. For a specific reason,” Scott says. “I am not pretending that this characteristic, this Earth suit that I’m in”—he pinches the skin of his arm—“isn’t being evaluated. It requires a response, or a reaction, to the situations at my level of government. I am fully aware of that. I just don’t want to play a game with it.”

  Cerebral and deliberate, Scott was known in Congress to speak very little until he was sure there was something worth saying. His assertion that Trump had forfeited the “moral authority” of his office after Charlottesville, then, got everyone’s attention, including Trump’s.

  Reached on his cellphone by the new press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the senator agreed to sit down with the president and explain his displeasure. What ensued inside the Oval Office a few days later was a lengthy, Scott-led seminar on America’s history of institutional racism and systemic discrimination. He talked of the socioeconomic hurdles facing young black men in his native streets of North Charleston. He described the hopelessness, the lack of opportunity, that had long suffocated the potential of minority youths in America. He told the story of his grandfather, Artis Ware, who left a segregated school in the third grade to pick cotton for fifty cents a day. Scott remembered his role model scouring the newspaper each morning, impressing upon his grandsons the importance of reading; it wasn’t until years later that Scott realized his grandfather was illiterate.

  The White House, for its part, released a photo of Trump listening intently to a senator identified as “Tom Scott.”

  Explaining that the resurgent racial tensions in America owed in part to anxieties over a dramatic cultural and demographic transition, Scott urged Trump not to prey on them.

  “I know what fear looks like. I think fear typically comes with anger and hostility. You’re afraid that you’re losing something, that you won’t have something that you used to have,” Scott said later, looking back on Charlottesville. “I think people who march with torches—who want to resurrect a thankfully dead part of who we were—these are people who are afraid. Afraid of the changes happening in the country. Afraid of the other man who doesn’t look like them.”

  Trump took all this in, rarely interrupting. “What can I do to be helpful?” he finally asked.

  The senator was prepared with an answer. If Trump was getting a nice photo-op out of their meeting, Scott was going to get something, too.

  AUGUST WAS AN UNPLEASANT TIME FOR REPUBLICAN LAWMAKERS. Charlottesville aside, the summer recess was filled with heated inquiries from irritated constituents wanting to know why, after seven years of promising, they still had not repealed and replaced the Affordable Care Act. There was no dodging the question, no spinning the answer. The GOP had once again failed to deliver on a core pledge to its voters, and legislators were shouldering far more blame than Trump. Whereas the president had installed a new Supreme Court justice and manufactured a bevy of unilateral wins from the executive branch, congressional Republicans had no major legislative accomplishment to show for their first eight months of unified government.

  It was around this time that a new push, for a rewrite of the tax code, became the all-consuming obsession of the Republican Party.

  There was no guarantee of success. In fact, lawmakers widely believed that making changes to America’s tax policy would be infinitely harder than altering its health care system. Whereas the Obamacare fight had implications for only certain people, groups, and industries, the tax code touched every aspect of life—and there were the lobbyists to prove it. Every deduction, every loophole, every footnote of the existing law was safeguarded by special interests.

  But congressional Republicans had no choice. It wasn’t just that they needed to get results; it was that the party appeared to be in disrepair, with Trump’s performance increasingly a cause for alarm.

  In the final four months of the year, the president pardoned the infamous Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, who had been convicted of criminal contempt; called North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un “Rocket Man” in a speech to the United Nations; attacked kneeling NFL players, advising owners to “Get that son of a bitch off the field right now!” during a speech in Alabama; ridiculed a Puerto Rico mayor who had criticized his administration’s ham-fisted response to Hurricane Maria, which killed some three thousand Americans; accepted the resignation of his first cabinet official, health and human services secretary Tom Price, who Politico revealed had traveled on private and government planes at a cost of more than $1 million to taxpayers; falsely accused Obama of not contacting the families of fallen troops; and feuded with a Democratic congresswoman over his condolence call to a soldier’s widow.

  Trump also decided to publicly defend Roy Moore, the Alabama Senate nominee, against allegations of child molestation. Many Republican leaders were calling for Moore to quit the race; instead, buoyed by the president’s backing, he stayed in, losing to Democrat Doug Jones in bloody-red Alabama and cutting the GOP’s Senate majority to 51 seats.

  BENEATH THE POLITICAL MAELSTROM, THE WHEELS OF CULTURAL INSURRECTION kept on turning.

  In early October, the New York Times and the New Yorker published stories that detailed nearly thirty years of claims of rape and sexual misconduct against Hollywood filmmaking mogul Harvey Weinstein.3 Responding to these reports, which had long been an open secret in show business, women across the world joined a social media movement by tweeting a simple phrase to demonstrate the scope of the epidemic: “Me too.”

  The floodgates thrown open, #MeToo triggered a cascade of accusations against some of America’s most prominent men. Among them were television host Charlie Rose; actor Kevin Spacey; comedian Louis C.K.; political journalist Mark Halperin; music mogul Russell Simmons; and Today show host Matt Lauer. Some of these men, and many dozens more, saw their careers irreparably ruined by their misdeeds.

  The world of politics was not immune to this reckoning. For some lawmakers, Capitol Hill had long functioned as a frat house, teeming with attractive young women to keep them company while living away from their wives four nights a week. By the spring of 2018, seven male lawmakers had been accused of misconduct; five of them resigned, including Al Franken, the popular Minnesota senator, and John Conyers, the Detroit Democrat and Congress’s longest-serving member.

  While speculation stalked the careers of many additional legislators on Capitol Hill, it was impossible to ignore the man on the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. More than a dozen women had come forward with accusations of sexual assault against Trump during the presidential campaign, charges that were freshly relevant in light of the #MeToo movement.

  Trump escaped the #MeToo tsunami, aided partially by the scale of accusations sweeping across industries and trashing the reputations of innumerable other men. But he could not rid of himself of another existential threat: Robert Mueller.

  As the year drew toward closure, indictments and guilty pleas were piling up in the special counsel’s investigation, with four of the president’s associates caught up in the Russia probe. Two of the catches were particularly big fish. Michael Flynn, the president’s original national security adviser, pleaded guilty of making false statements to the FBI. And Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort was indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of conspiracy against the United States. (Manafort had told his old friend, Scott Reed, that everything he would be doing for Trump would be legal. That may have been true; but by joining the campaign, Manafort unwittingly exposed his past criminality to the scrutiny of the special counsel’s office.)

  The sense of downward spiral, politically and otherwise, further emboldened some of the president’s critics within the party. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called Trump “a moron” after a meeting at the Pentagon with top national security officials, according to NBC News, a report that Tillerson did not deny. Senator Bob Corker, the Foreign Relations Committee chairman whom Trump had considered for his vice-presidential pick, likened the White House to an “adult day ca
re center” and told the New York Times that the president’s actions could set the nation “on the path to World War III.”

  Around that same time, in mid-October, a most unexpected voice chimed in with censures of his own: George W. Bush.

  Having remained dutifully silent on political matters throughout all eight years of Obama’s presidency, Bush was struggling to bite his tongue in the opening months of Trump’s first term. He had never been terribly bothered by the attacks on himself and his family; there was no personal grudge keeping him up at night. What Bush could not stomach—what he found increasingly intolerable, he told friends—was the president of the United States using his office to demonize immigrants, abuse his political opponents, and divide the nation for partisan gain.

  After nine months of stewing, Bush broke his silence. Noting how “bigotry seems emboldened” and how “our politics seems more vulnerable to conspiracy theories and outright fabrication,” the former Republican president delivered a speech in New York City that landed like an asteroid on Washington.

  “Bullying and prejudice in our public life sets a national tone, provides permission for cruelty and bigotry, and compromises the moral education of children. The only way to pass along civic values is to first live up to them,” Bush said. “Our identity as a nation, unlike other nations, is not determined by geography or ethnicity, by soil or blood. This means that people from every race, religion, ethnicity can be full and equally American. It means that bigotry and white supremacy, in any form, is blasphemy against the American creed.”

  His audience erupted with applause. Bush never said Trump’s name. He didn’t need to. Everyone who heard the remarks understood their purpose and their gravity. It was no longer just a bunch of liberal Democrats and biased journalists accusing the Republican president of gross misconduct; it was the previous Republican president.

  Less than a week later, Jeff Flake, Trump’s original foil in the Senate, announced that he would not seek reelection in 2018. Trump’s prophecy had come true: Flake’s dissent had tanked his poll numbers back home. Still, like Bush, he wasn’t going quietly into the night.

  “Reckless, outrageous, and undignified behavior has become excused as telling it like it is when it is actually just reckless, outrageous, and undignified,” Flake said when announcing his retirement on the Senate floor. “And when such behavior emanates from the top of our government, it is something else. It is dangerous to a democracy.”

  All this was beginning to take its toll. The president’s numbers trended sharply downward in late 2017, with a number of polls showing his approval rating dropping below the 40 percent mark. One such survey, from ABC News and the Washington Post in November, pegged Trump at an anemic of 37 percent.4 Tellingly, however, 91 percent of his voters said they approved of his job performance.

  The president was continuing to throw bones to his base: ending the DACA program that protected undocumented minors from deportation, issuing a new travel ban as previous iterations made their way through the courts, and, in December, moving the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, fulfilling a campaign promise of spiritual significance to his evangelical Christian supporters, many of whom believe the “eternal capital” of God’s chosen nation will be the site of the Messiah’s return.

  But there was still no landmark legislative victory to show for Trump’s presidency and for the Republican Party’s total control of government. The clock was ticking. Only a few months remained until the calendar turned to 2018, an election year, during which Congress would be hard-pressed to pass anything big.

  To the shock of just about everyone on Capitol Hill, tax reform wound up being a breeze—relatively speaking.

  With enormous pressure to produce, and without the emotional baggage of the health care fight—it’s easier to cut someone’s taxes than take away their health insurance—Republicans defied all expectations in passing a significant overhaul of the tax code through both the House and the Senate and putting it on the president’s desk before Christmas.

  None of this was to say the bill made for good policy. If anything, even as they rushed it through Congress—once again taking a number of expedited votes, once again violating the promises of “regular order” made by the party’s leaders—Republicans never seemed enamored of the bill itself. It would deliver the disproportionate bulk of its benefits to corporations and the wealthy, undermining Trump’s pledge of targeted relief for the middle class. It would offer less assistance to working families than many in the party hoped; Rubio had to hold the legislation hostage just to receive the slightest bump in the child tax credit.

  Most distressing to conservatives, the bill would blow an enormous hole in the deficit, according to numerous nonpartisan projections. Republicans responded by pushing the disproven theory that economic growth would make up for the lost revenue by slashing rates for businesses and top earners, but the math was never going to add up. An analysis from the Joint Committee on Taxation showed that the GOP tax bill would add $1 trillion to deficits, after accounting for estimated growth.5

  This presented something of an intellectual quandary for the party. A milestone legislative win was desperately needed, and it was now within their grasp. But the bill was nothing what many of them had envisioned when Ryan described harpooning his white whale of tax reform. Even as the Speaker muscled it through the House, he recognized that the bill did more cutting than reforming. There would be the same number of tax brackets and many of the same loopholes; there would be no filling out one’s tax returns on a postcard, as the party had once advertised.

  Still, Ryan felt an urgency unlike any in his career. For the past quarter century, since his days as a think tank staffer working for Jack Kemp, his dream had been to rewrite the tax code. However imperfect, this legislation represented their best chance in three decades to do so.

  The Speaker knew that his legacy was on the line, and it wasn’t just about tax reform. For the past year, he had justified his silence in the face of Trump’s behavior as means to an end. Determining that public confrontations would only result in deeper intraparty fractures that would stall policymaking efforts, Ryan restrained himself. The executive branch had already gone off the rails, he told colleagues; they would gain nothing by turning the legislative branch into a comparable circus.

  Yet this was a profoundly naïve perspective. In the House under Ryan’s stewardship, the only thing missing were the bearded ladies. The already-fraught relationships between the parties—leaders, key committee personnel, rank-and-file members—became irreperable. Norms of process and procedure, already neglected, deteriorated to an unrecognizable degree. The House Intelligence Committee, once a paragon of congressional maturity, had devolved into a schoolyard taunting contest. The chairman, Devin Nunes of California, had turned one of Capitol Hill’s most esteemed panels into a partisan food fight. (Not that no one saw this coming; Nunes had once referred to a colleague of Arab descent, Michigan’s antiwar congressman Justin Amash, as “al-Qaeda’s best friend in Congress.”) By the time Ryan stepped in to address the dysfunction of Nunes’s committee, the institutional damage had been done.

  The Speaker simply could not afford to let tax reform fail. As strange as the conditions were, they were ripe for success. And as cynical as he knew it was, Ryan had come to view Trump’s manic activity as advantageous to a rushed legislative process that would have received far more scrutiny had the president of the United States not been tweeting his vendettas before sunrise. If they couldn’t muscle a bill through under these circumstances, Ryan figured, it was never going to happen.

  Ryan seized control of the process in the House, angering members of the Ways and Means Committee, who complained that they didn’t see legislative text until just days before voting on it. The complaints echoed those from the original Obamacare push: The Speaker was running the House like an autocrat, ignoring the input of members and breaking the very vows he had made when ascending to the position. “He’s more controlli
ng than Boehner . . . and I voted against John Boehner and worked with Mark Meadows to vacate the chair,” Walter Jones, a frumpy older congressman from North Carolina, said during the tax reform campaign. “I’m very dissatisfied. I’ve been here twenty-two years, and this is the most closed shop I’ve ever seen.”

  Ryan heard the criticism. He also heard the rumors that the Freedom Caucus, feeling increasingly disenfranchised, was discussing another overthrow of another Speaker. But he paid these distractions no mind. Because for Ryan, in the fall of 2017, there were only two things worth thinking about: tax reform and retirement.

  He was sick of Congress, tired of spending five days a week away from his family, and most of all, fed up with babysitting Trump. His solid working relationship with the president had done nothing to convince him of the man’s suitability for the office he held; rather, Ryan had become a professional counter to ten, convincing himself each morning anew of the counterproductive nature of a pissing match with the commander in chief. Sitting in the Speaker’s office, knowing the institutional chaos that would flow from a game of chicken between the two most powerful officeholders in the federal government, Ryan had convinced himself that it was better in the long term, even if emasculating and hypocritical in the short term, to keep his composure with Trump.

  The two men had developed a surprisingly strong working relationship, thanks largely to this acquiescence from Ryan in the pursuit of policy victories. But the Speaker shuddered at the thought of sticking around for 2019 and 2020, when Trump would be actively running for a second term. The idea of enduring another Trump election cycle was nauseating to Ryan. Retirement was the only escape hatch. What better way to go, he thought to himself, than with a signature tax reform law?

  ACROSS THE CAPITOL, FOUR REPUBLICANS WERE RESPONSIBLE FOR drafting and redrafting the Senate version of the tax bill. But it was Tim Scott, the South Carolinian, who emerged as the key player.