by Tim Alberta
Six months after that episode, Tillerson condemned Russia for its poisoning of an ex-Russian spy and his daughter with a military-grade nerve agent, calling the attack in England “a really egregious act” that “clearly” had been ordered by the Kremlin. The next morning, Trump fired Tillerson via Twitter.
More than three dozen senior administration officials had either resigned or been fired in the president’s first fourteen months on the job. Tillerson was the fifth to exit in a span of five weeks.
The other recent departures included H. R. McMaster, the Army lieutenant general who was axed as Trump’s second national security adviser after repeated clashes with the president; Gary Cohn, the director of the National Economic Council, who quit after a dispute with Trump over his tariffs on steel and aluminum; Rob Porter, the staff secretary, who resigned amid public allegations of abuse from both ex-wives; and Hope Hicks, Porter’s girlfriend and a longtime aide to the president, who quit one day after an eight-hour testimony before the House Intelligence Committee in which she admitted to telling white lies on Trump’s behalf but pleaded ignorance of any Russian connections.
On the morning of Monday, April 9, the president’s circle shrank even smaller. FBI agents raided the offices of Michael Cohen, acting on a referral from none other than Mueller himself.
Trump had witnessed enough legal battles to recognize that this would end in one of two ways: Cohen would either take a legal bullet for him or turn state’s witness and leverage damaging information to reduce his own sentence. Enraged by the lawful looting of his attorney’s privileged materials, the president decided to weigh in on an active federal investigation.
“So, I just heard that they broke into the office of one of my personal attorneys,” Trump told reporters soon after reports of the raid surfaced. “It’s a disgraceful situation,” the president continued. “It’s a total witch hunt.”
After suggesting that he might fire Mueller, an atomic recourse that his lawyers, staffers, and allies uniformly warned against, Trump added of the Cohen situation, “It’s an attack on our country, in a true sense. It’s an attack on what we all stand for.”
During an interview on Fox News a few weeks later, the president’s new personal lawyer, former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, told Sean Hannity that Trump had reimbursed Cohen the $130,000 used to pay off the porn star. It was a dizzying admission, contradicting Trump’s past statements of knowing nothing about the hush money transaction and jolting Hannity, who appeared bewildered at having unwittingly made news on his program.
“We finally got our side of the story,” Giuliani told the Wall Street Journal after Hannity’s show aired. White Houses aides were apoplectic. Trump wasn’t angry; he was just mystified. Why the hell was Rudy always on television?
THE PRESIDENT’S PREOCCUPATION WITH QUESTIONS OF LOYALTY, ATTEMPTING to distinguish those people truly supportive of him from those cozying up for the sake of expedience, increasingly informed his dealings with Capitol Hill. As Republican lawmakers sidled up in search of favor or influence or professional gain, Trump eyed them warily, wondering who among them would remain steadfast if things went south.
Improbably, one person about whom the president had no such doubts was Paul Ryan.
Once upon a time, there had been few tougher Trump censors in the GOP than Ryan, who felt duty-bound to combat the Republican front-runner’s dark rhetoric and the party’s nativist drift. Yet there had hardly been anyone softer on Trump since Election Day 2016 than the Speaker, who, intent on delivering the policy promises made to voters, calculated that doing so meant ignoring the ad hominem savaging of private citizens, the payoffs to porn stars, the assaults on private businesses, the undermining of institutions, and the innumerable other acts for which Barack Obama would have been impaled by the right.
Theirs was a fragile marriage, no doubt, one born out of mutual practicality: Ryan needed a president to make his legislative dreams a reality, and Trump needed a Speaker to deliver wins as quickly as possible. In time, however, the alliance proved stronger than anyone in either camp could have anticipated. Ryan carefully avoided criticizing the president while offering frequent, elementary tutoring sessions on policy and process behind closed doors, grumbling about the task only to a handful of close friends; Trump reciprocated the Speaker’s restraint and spared him the sort of public shaming doled out to other top Republicans, including McConnell.
“I told myself, I gotta have a relationship with this guy to help him get his mind right,” Ryan recalls. “Because, I’m telling you, he didn’t know anything about government. So I thought, I can’t be his scold, like I was. . . . I wanted to scold him all the time. What I learned as I went on, to scratch that itch, I had to do it in private. So, I did it in private—all the time. And he actually ended up kind of appreciating it. We had more arguments with each other than pleasant conversations, over the last two years. And it never leaked.”
Encircled by loose-lipped self-promoters almost every waking moment, the president came to appreciate Ryan’s discretion. Knowing that their private discussions would remain private freed the two men to speak candidly in a way that Trump found refreshing. He also recognized that unlike many of the other Republicans kissing his ring, the Speaker had nowhere to climb; he was the second-most powerful man in Washington and hadn’t wanted that job to begin with. Even when the Speaker didn’t share his priorities, the president found himself more trusting of Ryan’s motives than those of most of the ambition-drunk politicos in DC. In spite of himself, Trump had come to like, and rely heavily on, a person whom he had once accused of trying to sabotage his campaign.
All this made it painful when Ryan called Trump, in the early hours of April 11, to inform the president that he would retire at year’s end.
Five months earlier, when Politico reported that Ryan was telling confidants of his decision to leave Congress, the president had reacted angrily, calling the Speaker to solicit assurances that no such departure would be made, that he would serve all four years of Trump’s first term. At the time, Ryan told the president what he wanted to hear. But privately, his mind was made up. He was ready to go home. When he explained the decision to Trump five months later, the president said he understood.
Ryan’s departure left a power vacuum in the congressional wing of the party. Kevin McCarthy, the heir apparent as majority leader, had failed once before to earn a promotion to Speaker; Steve Scalise, whom Trump had nicknamed “the Legend from Louisiana,” was now a household name with designs on the top job himself. Of course, Ryan’s retirement only lent to the perception that the midterm elections were shaping up to be ugly for Republicans—so ugly that there might not be a GOP Speaker in 2019.
Whether it was McCarthy or Scalise who wound up replacing Ryan atop the House GOP, they would follow in the Speaker’s footsteps, subverting their own political identities to appease Trump. It was his party now, without question or caveat.
THE PRE-TRUMP GOP HAD BEEN SPLINTERED ALONG ANY NUMBER OF asymmetrical boundaries: libertarians and neocons, evangelicals and cultural moderates, big-spending pragmatists and small-government purists. All these dichotomies existed within the broader construct of conservative versus moderate, or even outsider versus establishment, spurring incessant talk of a “Republican civil war” from 2008 to 2016.
But the civil war was over now—or, at least, the battle lines had shifted dramatically. Trump’s conquest effectively ended the squabbling that had defined the GOP in the post-Bush era, replacing disputes over policies and principles with a simpler question that spoke to the dueling identities in the party. “Are you with Trump or not?” said Corry Bliss, the executive director of the Congressional Leadership Fund, the super PAC charged with protecting the House GOP’s majority in 2018. “It’s not about ideology anymore. It’s only about Trump. Are you with him or are you against him? That’s the only thing that matters to voters in the Republican base.”
This dynamic played right into the president’s o
bsession with loyalty; even most of the Republicans in the latter camp had no choice but to block any daylight between themselves and the president, fearful as they were of alienating his cultlike following among their own constituents. If there was space for an anti-Trump Republican to flourish in federal races, nobody running in the party’s 2018 primaries had found it. Seeing this, and watching the political gymnastics of onetime critics now claiming true allegiance to Trumpism, the president relished his role of kingmaker.
In the Florida governor’s race, Adam Putnam, a former congressman and the state’s agriculture commissioner, was leading the Republican primary by 7 points in his internal polling. That was until Trump endorsed his opponent, Congressman Ron DeSantis, a graduate of Yale and Harvard Law School who had worked as a JAG Corps prosecutor before deploying to Iraq during the troop surge as a legal attaché for a team of Navy SEALs. (Trump, a sucker for a good résumé, backed DeSantis after a brief courtship.) The next poll conducted by Putnam’s campaign showed him down 11 points. “An eighteen-point swing in the space of a few weeks,” says Terry Nelson, a veteran GOP consultant working for Putnam. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Ever.”
Not everyone was lucky enough to land Trump’s support. Diane Black, the Tennessee congresswoman, was running in a crowded GOP primary to become the state’s governor. During a meeting with several House Republicans in the Cabinet Room early in 2018, she pulled the president aside. “You really need to endorse me,” she told him, stabbing a finger at his chest. Trump found her rude and presumptuous. “She got in my personal space,” he told aides afterward. “Big mistake.” The White House Office of Political Affairs threw a bone, having Mike Pence endorse her. But Black kept at it, badgering the White House political director, Bill Stepien, for a presidential vote of confidence. Stepien asked an intern to aggregate a full record of everything Black had ever said about Trump, good and bad. The list was printed out and carried over to the Oval Office. Trump scanned the document, picking out the negative remarks, then pulled out a Sharpie. “Diane,” he wrote. “This is NOT good!” He furiously underlined the word “NOT,” then asked Stepien to hand-deliver the document to Black.
It was a similar story in the Idaho governor’s race. Raúl Labrador, the congressman and Freedom Caucus cofounder, touted his alliance with Trump during the Republican primary, but the president’s official endorsement had yet to surface. One of Labrador’s opponents, Lieutenant Governor Brad Little, employed consultants who heard that the congressman’s friends (namely, Mick Mulvaney) were putting the squeeze on Trump to endorse Labrador. Certain that such a development would tip the race against them, Little’s team cut a highlight reel that showed Labrador criticizing the president and sent it to the Political Affairs shop, hoping it would reach Stepien. Instead, the video made it all the way to the president, who upon seeing it resolved once and for all not to intervene on the congressman’s behalf. After Little won the GOP primary, he received a phone call from Trump. “I can’t believe all these people wanted me to endorse Labrador. Why would I do that?” the president said. “He said a lot of nasty things about me. He’s a really nasty guy.”
In one case, Trump endorsed as a means of punishment. Having heard that Minnesota congressman Erik Paulsen was distancing himself from the White House in the hope of holding his seat in the Twin Cities’ suburbs, the president stewed and asked that the political shop send a tweet of support for Paulsen—thereby sabotaging the moderate Republican’s efforts. When his aides demurred, Trump sent the tweet himself, issuing a “Strong Endorsement!” of the congressman in a late-night post that left Paulsen fuming and his Democratic opponent giddy.
No single result gave Trump as much satisfaction as that of the Republican primary in South Carolina’s First District. Having made promises of retribution against the GOP incumbent, Mark Sanford, the president itched to announce his support for Katie Arrington, who was running as a Trump-inspired populist and highlighting Sanford’s critiques of the president. White House aides were vehemently opposed to the idea: Sanford was going to win, they told him, and when he did, Trump would look weak and ineffectual.
The president stood down, but he kept tabs on the race. Sanford had taken Arrington for granted. The congressman’s numbers in the district had dipped, and the contest tightened as he hoarded campaign cash instead of unloading on his challenger. On the day of the primary, flying back from Singapore aboard Air Force One, Trump decided to roll the dice. “Mark Sanford has been very unhelpful to me in my campaign to MAGA. He is MIA and nothing but trouble. He is better off in Argentina,” the president tweeted, referencing Sanford’s transnational affair. “I fully endorse Katie Arrington for Congress in SC, a state I love. She is tough on crime and will continue our fight to lower taxes. VOTE Katie!”
Sanford’s friends in the Freedom Caucus were livid. “He’s one of the most principled, consistent, and conservative members of Congress I’ve ever known,” Congressman Justin Amash tweeted in response to Trump. “And unlike you, Mark has shown humility in his role and a desire to be a better man than he was the day before.”
When the ballots were tallied that night, Arrington finished with 50.5 percent of the vote, just clear of the 50 percent needed to avoid a runoff. She had edged Sanford by the narrowest of margins, and Trump’s last-minute tweet, which her team immediately turned into a robocall and blasted around the district, was very likely responsible.
Just as in the case of Arizona senator Jeff Flake, whose denunciations of the president sent him to an early retirement, Trump had foretold the demise of one of his harshest intraparty critics. Sanford and Flake, two longtime conservative stalwarts with deep philosophical moorings and voting records well to the right of most Republicans in Congress, were exiled from the GOP for the high crime of dissenting from its new leader.
THE REPUBLICAN PARTY WAS NOT ALONE IN ITS REVOLUTIONARY CONVULSIONS.
Joe Crowley woke up on June 27 harboring aspirations of becoming the next Speaker of the House. As the fourth-ranking House Democrat, the congressman from Queens had spent years building alliances across his caucus and collecting favors to cash in. Whereas the number two and number three Democrats, Steny Hoyer and Jim Clyburn, were septuagenarians who offered no generational change, Crowley was a sprightly fifty-six years old. He was also a skilled straddler of the party’s ideological divides, trusted and well liked by both moderates and liberals. With younger and newer members demanding a leadership change atop the party, Crowley was a virtual lock to succeed Pelosi one day as the top House Democrat—and a decent bet to become Speaker of the House with a Democratic takeover in November.
By night’s end, however, Crowley was a household name for a very different reason. In an upset that shook Washington and foreshadowed the trajectory of its minority party, Crowley lost his primary in New York’s Fourteenth District to a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. Her name was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She was twenty-eight years old, a bartender, and a first-time candidate who had volunteered for Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign.
Leaning into the calls on the left for a dramatic makeover of the Democratic Party, Ocasio-Cortez used her youth, Latina heritage, and insurgent message to gain a cult following among progressives in the final months of her challenge to Crowley. Even then, and with a swelling number of liberal organizations and activist leaders supporting her, few took the rookie’s candidacy seriously. A biographical video that she published on social media drew nearly a million views online, yet the New York Times ignored the contest in its own backyard.
One person who did take Ocasio-Cortez seriously: Donald Trump.
Watching television in the White House earlier that summer with some of his political advisers, the president says he caught a glimpse of the Democratic insurgent on a cable news program. “I see a woman, a young woman, ranting and raving like a lunatic on a street corner, and I said, ‘That’s interesting, go back.’ It’s the wonder of TiVo, right? One of the great inventions of all t
ime. And I say, ‘Go back, I want to see that again. Who was that?’”
Referring to his political advisers, Trump adds, “They say, ‘It doesn’t matter.’ You know, I’m watching with some pretty good professionals. Semi-good. None of them are too great.”
Watching the young woman—and learning that she was running against “a slob named Joe Crowley, who I’ve known for a long time, because I’m from Queens”—Trump became enamored. After soaking in her performance, Trump was starstruck. “I called her Eva Perón,” he recalls. “I said, ‘That’s Eva Perón. That’s Evita.’” (He places a comically exotic emphasis on the nickname: Ah-vih-tah.)
Trump says he told his team to call Crowley “and tell him he’s got himself a problem; he better get off his fat ass and start campaigning.”
The president says they laughed him off, promising him that Ocasio-Cortez had no chance. Later, when she won, he took the opportunity to remind everyone that they had similarly underestimated him.
“I’m very good at this stuff, believe it or not, even though I’ve only done it for a few years,” Trump says. “And I’m good at talent. I spotted talent. She’s got a certain talent.”
Crowley’s loss came four years to the month after Eric Cantor dropped his primary stunner to Tea Party activist Dave Brat. The symmetry of their expirations did not escape either of them. A few weeks after his defeat, Crowley paid Cantor a visit at his New York office to talk about life after Congress. (The former majority leader landed on his feet, making seven figures as an executive at a global investment firm.) The two men sat, once future Speakers of the House, exchanging their most unique condolences and comparing notes on the strange new realities of politics.
IF THE FIRST YEAR OF DONALD TRUMP’S TERM WITNESSED A PRESIDENT adapting to the philosophies of his party, the second year saw a party bending to the will, and the whims, of its president.