by Tim Alberta
Having worked on the issue since his arrival in Congress in 2011, and bringing a wealth of real-world experience from his career as a successful insurance salesman, Scott labored for months to align the conflicting visions of his colleagues. He sat at the intersection of the ideological tribes, someone trusted by both conservatives and centrists alike. Time and again, throughout the fall of 2017, Scott was tasked by McConnell with putting out the latest fire that threatened to engulf the entire effort. He became the indispensable actor among Senate Republicans.
As he brokered settlements between his colleagues, Scott had but one priority himself: “Opportunity Zones.”
A few years earlier, Scott had gotten to know Sean Parker, cofounder of the Napster music streaming service and the original president of Facebook. Parker described to the senator a pair of problems that he saw as interrelated: a staggering amount of capital sitting on the sidelines of the economy, and an uneven recovery in which investments rarely found their way to the communities most in need. The government, Parker argued, should offer incentives for venture capitalists and entrepreneurs to invest in Opportunity Zones, blighted areas (determined by poverty level and median household income) desperate for economic renewal.
Scott was sold. Working with his friend, Democratic senator Cory Booker, and with a bipartisan group of lawmakers in both chambers, Scott led the charge to incorporate the policy into the GOP’s tax bill.
But he needed an ally. Influential as he was in the tax reform negotiations, Scott did not have the juice to strongarm the Senate into adopting a policy that few of his colleagues were familiar with. Securing the Opportunity Zones would require a lot of weight to be thrown around. He had just the person in mind.
“Well,” the senator had replied to the president during their post-Charlottesville conversation. “You can support the Investing in Opportunity Act.”
Trump wasn’t familiar with the policy, but he gave Scott his word that he would support it—and he did. The president endorsed the legislation the very next day and remained loyal until it became law as part of the GOP’s tax reform package.
Scott was exuberant. So was Ryan. The final, compromise legislation passed through both chambers of Congress in mid-December. No Democrat in either the House or the Senate voted for it, a sign of the polarized climate but also of the GOP’s lack of outreach across the aisle. (Tax cuts aren’t exactly a tough sell in purple states, but there was virtually no pressure placed on vulnerable Democrats to support the Republican bill.) The partisan nature of the end product didn’t much bother Scott or Ryan. Both had notched crowning, legacy-making victories.
When Republicans gathered on the South Lawn of the White House on December 20 to celebrate their triumph, Ryan stepped to the lectern and uttered one of the defining observances of his speakership. “Something this big, something this generational, something this profound,” he declared, “could not have been done without exquisite presidential leadership.”
Throughout the ceremony, Scott stood right next to Ryan, flanking the president. The extent of his influence was on full display. But that’s not what everyone saw. Just minutes before Trump invited Scott to speak at the lectern, Andy Ostroy, a HuffPost blogger, tweeted, “What a shocker . . . there’s ONE black person there and sure enough they have him standing right next to the mic like a manipulated prop. Way to go @SenatorTimScott.”
When the event ended, and Scott opened Twitter and spotted the comment, he felt defeated. “Uh probably because I helped write the bill for the past year, have multiple provisions included, got multiple Senators on board over the last week and have worked on tax reform my entire time in Congress,” he responded. “But if you’d rather just see my skin color, pls feel free.”
The senator had more to say—so much more. He was weary of being targeted, weary of being the Republican spokesman on race, weary of trying to thread an impossible needle in the era of Trump.
Still, he held back. For all the flowery talk of how he represented a breakthrough—the first African American ever to serve in both chambers of Congress—Scott had begun to realize he was no such thing. He would always be a “prop” for his party. But the next wave of black Republicans wouldn’t have to be—not if he did his job and did it well, conducting himself with dignity and turning the other cheek to his abusers. Generations of Scotts had suffered and sacrificed to send a cotton picker’s grandson to the halls of Congress. Now it was his turn.
“I’ve been frustrated. And angry. Man,” Scott says, his voice trembling. “It’s too easy to be angry. And too natural. And also, too unproductive for me. But I get it. I get it. I’m not at a point where my grandfather was. He could say nothing. He had to eat his anger. Or the next generation, who harnessed their anger and led marches. I’m on the inside track. I have a very different responsibility. It cannot be about me.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
January 2018
“I said, ‘That’s Eva Perón. That’s Evita.’”
TEMPERATURES HAD PLUNGED INTO THE SINGLE DIGITS AND CAMP David was coated with a fresh snowfall when they huddled inside a secure meeting room on Saturday morning. Donald Trump had arrived at the presidential retreat in Maryland one day earlier, along with members of the congressional Republican leadership, to chart the party’s legislative priorities for the coming year. Now the leaders had joined Trump for a partial meeting of his cabinet, including Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, CIA director Mike Pompeo, and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis. Notably absent was Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who remained chained up inside the president’s doghouse for the trespass of recusing himself from the Russia probe.
There were other disloyalties weighing on Trump that weekend. Friday had seen the official release of Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, which used salacious stories to paint the president as a narcissistic nitwit whose administration was drowning in its own incompetence. Despite Wolff’s carelessness with basic facts and his prior reputation as someone of lax journalistic standards, the book nonetheless contained enough accuracies to throw the White House into a panic. Most bothersome to Trump were quotes attributed to Steve Bannon, his former chief strategist, who told Wolff that Trump Jr.’s meeting with the Russian lawyer in June 2016 was “treasonous” and “unpatriotic,” predicting, “They’re going to crack Don Junior like an egg on national TV.” Bannon, having returned to the helm at Breitbart after leaving the White House, did not dispute these quotes.
Trump was in a tizzy. On Thursday night, with excerpts of the book trickling out, the president tweeted of Wolff’s work, “Full of lies, misrepresentations and sources that don’t exist. Look at this guy’s past and watch what happens to him and Sloppy Steve!”
On Friday morning, Trump tweeted again about “Sloppy Steve Bannon,” this time in reference to how the megadonor Robert Mercer and his daughter, Rebekah, had publicly severed their relationship with Bannon as a result of his remarks in Fire and Fury.
Then, late on Friday night, Trump tweeted again: “Michael Wolff is a total loser who made up stories in order to sell this really boring and untruthful book. He used Sloppy Steve Bannon, who cried when he got fired and begged for his job. Now Sloppy Steve has been dumped like a dog by almost everyone. Too bad!”
The GOP leaders worried about Trump’s state of mind. To a man, they had spent the past year trying their best to ignore the president’s Twitter feed, wanting plausible deniability when reporters inevitably asked for comment on Trump’s latest social media salvo. But many of his statements were impossible to miss. Just a few days earlier, the president had tweeted, “North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un just stated that the ‘Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times.’ Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!”
Republicans in Congress had been feeling a sudden rush of optimism as they turned the calendar to 2018. After sputtering
for much of Trump’s first year in office, energizing the base of the Democratic Party in a way that no Democratic politician seemed capable of, Republicans had secured a momentous victory in the twilight of 2017. When the president signed the new tax law into effect a few days before Christmas, Republicans went home for the holiday recess feeling equal parts elation and relief. No longer would their constituents skewer them for failing to do their part to Make America Great Again; no longer could the Democrats paint them as dysfunctional and unproductive. (Dysfunctional? Sure. Unproductive? Not anymore.)
Thanks to an initial burst of glowing headlines (businesses making new hires, corporations giving out bonuses) tax reform looked like a political winner. House Republicans hoped it could be a majority-saver. A new president’s party often takes a pounding in his first midterm election, an average loss of 32 House seats, and Democrats needed a net gain of just 23 to win back the chamber. Given the visceral surge of energy and the considerable financial support flowing to a large supply of high-caliber Democratic challengers, Republicans were fighting an uphill battle to keep the majority.
The tax bill, Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell felt, represented their chance at salvation. Kevin McCarthy showed Trump polling during their Friday meeting at Camp David to demonstrate the party’s months-long declining popularity, particularly among college-educated suburbanites, and argued that these same voters would be most rewarding of tax reform. “We have something to run on now,” the Speaker told Trump. They all took turns urging the president to keep the country’s attention trained on the benefits of their shiny new tax law.
It was hopeless. For Trump, the political concept of “message discipline” meant nothing more than listening to the very advice he’d ignored all the way en route to the White House. Besides, he didn’t much care about the tax law. It was a policy accomplishment, surely, but the president was more consumed with the personal: allegations of collusion with the Russians in 2016, mounting chatter in the media about his fitness for office, and now, damning remarks from a supposedly staunch ally about his family’s potential criminality.
On Saturday morning, as they prepared for their meeting with Trump, some of the Republican leaders and agency heads were alerted by their aides to a barrage of sunrise tweets from the president. At 7:19 a.m., he began: “Now that Russian collusion, after one year of intense study, has proven to be a total hoax on the American public, the Democrats and their lapdogs, the Fake News Mainstream Media, are taking out the old Ronald Reagan playbook and screaming mental stability and intelligence . . . Actually, throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart. Crooked Hillary Clinton also played these cards very hard and, as everyone knows, went down in flames. I went from VERY successful businessman, to top T.V. Star . . . to President of the United States (on my first try). I think that would qualify as not smart, but genius . . . and a very stable genius at that!”
The tweets were the elephant in the room when everyone gathered a short while later around a colossal conference table. Trump seemed his typical self, no more or less animated than usual. He was relatively engaged during remarks from several of the cabinet secretaries and seemed exceptionally interested by a classified briefing from Mattis on clashes with ISIS fighters. As the Pentagon chief spoke, the president scribbled wildly on a sheet of paper in front of him, all the while nodding and looking up to make eye contact. The others in the room took this as an encouraging sign: The Pentagon had released a report just weeks earlier claiming that ISIS had lost 98 percent of its territory.
When Mattis finished, the president lifted the piece of paper while gesturing, just high enough for several people to see it. He had drawn a flight of bullet points on the page, all of them underneath an all-caps header that was clearly visible: “SLOPPY STEVE.”
THE WHITE HOUSE HAD GROWN ADEPT AT WEATHERING RHETORIC-BASED storms, with Trump showing a breathtaking capacity for turning the page on statements that would have been definitional for any other president. Whether it was his boasting about the size of his nuclear button, or calling himself “a very stable genius,” or questioning an immigration policy that would allow people from “shithole countries” like Haiti into the United States, Trump spent the first month of 2018 defying conventions in the same way he had throughout his first year in office—and paying no real political price for it.
It was a different story when it came to the outward, existential threats to his presidency. Try as he might, Trump could not counter or distract from the growing perception of unscrupulous, and possibly unlawful, activity emanating from his inner circle. For much of 2017, this had been narrowly focused on the twin questions of collusion with Russia and obstruction of justice in his dealings with (and eventual firing of) FBI Director James Comey. But 2018 brought a different and potentially more damaging set of revelations.
On January 12, the Wall Street Journal reported that Michael Cohen, the president’s longtime attorney and fixer, had paid $130,000 to a pornographic film star during the 2016 campaign to prevent her from sharing details of their past romance.1 Stephanie Clifford, who went by the professional name of Stormy Daniels, alleged that she and Trump had had sexual intercourse soon after meeting at a celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe back in 2006—when the future president was newly married to Melania Trump, who had just birthed the couple’s first child.
The story was ground-shaking. The moral implications of Trump cheating on his new wife with a porn star aside, the reported outlay of hush money would represent a flagrant violation of federal campaign finance laws. The Journal was reporting that Cohen had paid off Daniels in October 2016, the same month Trump’s candidacy went on life support due to the Access Hollywood tape. If true, the Republican nominee’s campaign had bought the silence of someone whose disclosures could have altered the outcome of the presidential election.
The White House denied the report. So did Cohen, who provided a signed statement from Clifford that read, “Rumors that I have received hush money from Donald Trump are completely false.” Yet, the next month, in a statement to the New York Times, Cohen admitted that he had paid the porn star $130,000—and insisted that it came out of his own pocket.2 “Neither the Trump Organization nor the Trump campaign was a party to the transaction with Ms. Clifford,” Cohen said, “and neither reimbursed me for the payment, either directly or indirectly.”
This was a lie—one of many that would come back to torment both Trump and his associates.
Then, in March, both Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal, the former Playboy model whose own story had been bought and buried by Trump’s friends at the National Enquirer, sued to invalidate the nondisclosure agreements they had signed. (Cohen had played a role in negotiating both.) Topping it all off, at month’s end, Daniels appeared on 60 Minutes. She gave a highly credible account of the unprotected sexual intercourse she had with Trump in 2006 and told of how, five years later, after sharing her story with the gossip magazine In Touch, a man approached her with a physical threat: “Leave Trump alone.”
Trump didn’t take the bait—at least not right away. “So much Fake News. Never been more voluminous or more inaccurate,” the president tweeted the morning after 60 Minutes aired. “But through it all, our country is doing great!”
TRUMP WAS NOT DOING GREAT.
The First Lady was seething at the humiliations suffered by the Stormy Daniels discoveries, he confided to friends. Far more bothersome, the president’s children were being pulled into Mueller’s probe, and his legal team seemed more concerned with each passing day about the scope of the special counsel’s investigation. For all aggravations Russia-related, Trump held one person responsible: Jeff Sessions.
Once a darling to the president’s team—Sessions was the first senator to endorse his 2016 campaign—the attorney general had become Trump’s enemy number one since recusing himself from the Russia inquiry. (According to the New York Times, Trump asked White House counsel Don McGahn to lobby Sessio
ns against the recusal and “erupted in anger” when Sessions would not comply, “saying he needed his attorney general to protect him.”3) When Mueller was installed as the special counsel, a direct result of Trump’s firing of Comey, the president made Sessions his whipping boy: mocking his southern drawl, tweeting insults at him, and telling reporters that he never should have chosen the former Alabama senator to lead the Justice Department. On at least two occasions Trump requested his attorney general’s resignation only to be convinced by White House aides that Sessions’s dismissal would only compound his myriad legal problems.
Sessions wasn’t the only cabinet member who had taken up residence on Trump’s bad side.
Rex Tillerson had come to annoy the president in ways big and small. Trump found the secretary of state to be dreary and slothful; not far, he laughed with friends, from the “low energy” caricature he’d slapped on Jeb Bush. Because of Tillerson’s deliberate speaking style, Trump joked about the secretary of state being slow, and was therefore bemused at reports of Tillerson calling him not just “a moron” but a “fucking moron.”
“I think it’s fake news, but if he did that, I guess we’ll have to compare IQ tests,” Trump told Forbes magazine in response to the alleged quote. “And I can tell you who is going to win.” (Tillerson never denied the reports.)
Increasingly isolated from the White House and removed from decision-making processes—to the extent that such processes existed—Tillerson found himself hopelessly out of sync with Trump. In the fall of 2017, the secretary of state told reporters that the United States was looking to negotiate with North Korea; one day later, the president tweeted, “I told Rex Tillerson, our wonderful Secretary of State, that he is wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man . . . Save your energy Rex, we’ll do what has to be done!”