by Tim Alberta
In early March, Trump had issued a sweeping set of tariffs on imported steel (25 percent) and aluminum (10 percent). Over the objections of a vocal minority of Republicans, the president said he was delivering on his promise to rejuvenate the American economy by overturning decades of free-market orthodoxy that had governed administrations of both parties. “Our factories were left to rot and to rust all over the place, thriving communities turned into ghost towns,” Trump announced at the White House. “That betrayal is now over.”
Though he initially exempted some of America’s closest allies—Canada, Mexico, and the European Union—Trump soon extended the tariffs to affect those nations as well. All of them issued reprisal tariffs, effectively neutralizing whatever net economic gain the president had hoped for. Meanwhile, the administration slapped a tariff of 25 percent on more than eight hundred categories of Chinese exports. This sparked a separate and more damaging trade war that escalated throughout 2018. China retaliated by hammering U.S. agriculture exports, forcing Trump eventually to issue federal assistance to suffering American farmers.
This was Republicanism circa 2018: government bailouts to alleviate the burden of state-sanctioned market intervention.
Despite this obvious affront to the doctrine of conservatism, few Republicans on Capitol Hill were itching for a fight with Trump. Some convinced themselves, or at least said publicly, that the president was playing the long game and needed lots of latitude to negotiate. Others grumbled in private about the calamities that could ensue but dared not cross Trump publicly.
The display of Pharisaism was staggering. It wasn’t simply that Trump was desecrating the GOP’s free-market principles; he was brazenly flexing his executive authority to do so. After eight years of mocking Obama’s “imperial presidency” and decrying his subjugation of the legislative branch, Republicans in Congress refused even to hold an up-or-down vote on their president’s unilateral remaking of American trade policy.
There were some exceptions. On the House side, Warren Davidson, the Ohio conservative, grew so agitated during a meeting with Trump’s two chief trade advisers, Peter Navarro and Larry Kudlow, that he flipped over a chair and stormed out of the meeting, cussing over his shoulder. While a passionate advocate of restructuring the nation’s trade agreements, Davidson, a former manufacturing executive, told anyone who would listen that Trump’s tactics were counterproductive and doing disproportionate harm to his own base.
“These are like the Trumpiest Trumpians, and they’re telling me, ‘We’re getting killed here,’” Davidson says of his constituents. “I’ve got one county that’s all [agriculture], 80 percent of them voted for Trump. . . . The administration is curious about how the aid for farmers is going over. So, I’m talking to this one guy back home, and he tells me, ‘You know, I’m glad they’re handing out Band-Aids, but I’d rather they just didn’t shoot me.’”
In the Senate, Tennessee’s Bob Corker distinguished himself as the loudest detractor of Trump’s approach to trade. “We should vote on tariffs. But they’re afraid. They don’t want to poke the bear. I get it. But this is where we should call a floor vote and back the White House into a corner.” When Corker and other senators pressed McConnell on this during a luncheon in the summer, urging him to at least call Trump and plead the party’s case on the detrimental nature of his tariffs, McConnell scoffed. “You can call him,” the Republican leader replied. “You want his phone number?”
When it came to intellectual consistency, an even greater departure for Trump-era Republicans was on spending and fiscal restraint.
Conservatives had renounced George W. Bush for his big-government policies. They had bloodied Obama for his bankrupting of America and tortured John Boehner for failing to stop it. Yet, in the spring of 2018, with the national debt having recently passed $21 trillion, Trump and his unified Republican government approved an omnibus bill that shattered Congress’s budget caps and represented one of the largest spending increases in American history.
There were no widespread demonstrations, no marches on the Capitol, no Tea Party rallies. Less than a decade removed from the street protests that lit the party’s populist fuse, scores of Republicans from that hard-charging 2010 class voted for more spending, more debt, and more government—without fear of consequence.
To their credit, some of the only lawmakers who lobbied Trump against the bill were House conservatives. In fact, the opposition campaign waged by the likes of Jim Jordan and Mark Meadows was so effective that Trump came to fear that the bill represented a betrayal of his base, what with its massive spending increases, barely any of which was for border security and none of which was going to the construction of the wall he had been promising. They urged him to veto the legislation.
On Thursday, March 22, the House of Representatives voted to approve the 2,232-page package less than twenty-four hours after GOP leaders unveiled it. The reason it passed? Republicans loaded the bill with record amounts of military spending to buy off defense hawks, and Democrats piled on generous increases to domestic discretionary programs to placate progressives. Freedom Caucus members, hoping to turn the president against the bill, complained to him that it did not provide funding to build his border wall and that it failed to defund Planned Parenthood, risking blowback from social conservatives. Buying these arguments, the president decided he would veto the spending bill—even though it would mean a government shutdown within forty-eight hours.
Catching wind of this, John Kelly, the chief of staff, called Ryan and urged him to get to the White House, pronto. The Speaker arrived to find Trump in the East Wing residence. Fully briefed on the Freedom Caucus’s efforts, Ryan and Kelly arranged for the White House to block incoming phone calls from Jordan and Meadows. Then, the Speaker sat down with the president and launched into an urgent defense of the spending bill: It provided the major funding increase for military personnel and operations that he had long sought, and in order to secure that victory, Republicans had to give Democrats concessions in order for the bill to pass the Senate.
Trump wasn’t satisfied. Namely, he wanted to know, where was his money for the border wall? Ryan told the president that they were getting a down payment, roughly $1.5 billion, and that they would get more later. A veto of the legislation, he warned, would only set them back.
Trump still wasn’t convinced. He told Ryan he would probably veto the legislation. The Speaker exploded in anger, and a yelling match ensued. When each man had uncorked on the other—cathartic, surely, for them both—Trump told Ryan he would sign the bill on one condition: that Ryan give him room to build the suspense on Friday morning before announcing his blessing later in the day.
Sure enough, the next morning, Trump tweeted, “I am considering a VETO” and complained that his “BORDER WALL” was not being fully funded. By afternoon he was signing the spending bill at the White House, even as he called it “crazy,” insisted that “nobody read it,” and promised, “I will never sign another bill like this again.”
Passage of the giant spending package signaled a defeat for the forces of small-government austerity that had been ascendant in the years predating Trump. It also completed an evolution within Ryan’s own career. Once the party’s most celebrated fiscal conservative, the Speaker had found religion on defense spending after his experience on the national ticket in 2012. He returned to Congress determined to help rebuild the military, even if it meant further ballooning the debt and the deficit. Ryan could find ways to rationalize his 2003 vote for the Medicare prescription drug benefit, or for the TARP bailout in 2008, but with his championing of the 2018 omnibus package the Speaker had willfully forfeited his reputation as a fiscal hawk.
This, on top of watching him turn a blind eye to Trump’s ignominies, was too much for Ryan’s friends and allies around Washington to bear. The Speaker’s career was unfolding like a play in three acts. The first, from his election to Congress in 1998 until his vice-presidential run in 2012, starred the pushy, unpledged i
deologue. The second, from that 2012 campaign until Trump’s victory in November 2016, featured a more seasoned, mature legislator who sought compromise where necessary and felt obligated to enhance the party’s image.
The third act, from Trump’s election until Ryan’s retirement from Congress, would not offer the happy ending he had once envisioned. His legacy would be defined by the fulfilment of a Faustian bargain in which he sold his soul to Trump in exchange for policy wins. The tragedy was, in the eyes of Ryan’s friends, that those wins, from tax reform to the omnibus bill, weren’t remotely worth the damage to his reputation. “He made a calculation that to get through the policies he cares about meant that he had to muzzle himself at certain times—many times—when it came to things that Trump said and did,” says Pete Wehner, Ryan’s longtime friend and former colleague at Jack Kemp’s think tank. “I think it was an anguished time for him.”
Of course, Pence had cut this very same deal with the devil—and was all the more insufferable in his observance thereof. The vice president, once among the most intellectually sovereign voices in all of Washington, had so pitifully subjugated himself to Trump that some of his longtime friends were left to wonder (only half-jokingly) whether the president had blackmail on him.
Pence’s talent for bootlicking—he was nicknamed “the Bobblehead” by Republicans on Capitol Hill for his solemn nodding routine whenever Trump spoke—were at their most obscene during meetings at the White House. After Trump would open the floor to Pence, aides would suppress grins as the vice president offered his opening tribute to the president, exhausting his storehouse of superlatives and leaving the other attendees to wonder whether they, too, were expected to kneel.
The vice presidency is a supporting role. Being a team player is part of the job description. And Pence, a fervently religious man, draws from his faith, and from the military tradition in his family, a belief in “submission” and “servant leadership.”4 Yet there is a difference between submission and spinelessness; between deference and dereliction; between servitude and slavery. Nobody expected Pence to make a show of publicly rebelling against the president. What they did expect was a token of intellectual and ideological consistency rather than unabashed allegiance to all things Trump. Yet this was too much to ask.
In May 2018, the vice president visited Arizona for an event promoting the GOP’s new tax law. In the audience he spotted Joe Arpaio, the recently pardoned convict and former sheriff of Maricopa County, who was now mounting a MAGA-inspired run for U.S. Senate. “A great friend of this president, a tireless champion of strong borders and the rule of law,” Pence declared. “Sheriff Joe Arpaio, I’m honored to have you here.”
To be clear: For the seat being vacated by his former best friend Jeff Flake, whose criticisms of the president made him unelectable after a career of conservativism by any objective metric, Pence was implicitly endorsing a man who had boasted of detaining Mexicans accused of no crime; run brutal prison camps that were allegedly responsible for men’s deaths and women’s miscarriages; and arrested journalists in the middle of the night for writing negative words about him. This, while calling him “a tireless champion” of “the rule of law.”
It was perfectly in keeping with Pence’s character in the Trump Show, and it was becoming too much for the vice president’s onetime admirers to bear.
Of the growing critiques of Pence, the most blistering belonged to George Will, the preeminent conservative pundit. Writing in the Washington Post, Will recalled how the vice president “flew to Indiana so they could walk out of an Indianapolis Colts football game, thereby demonstrating that football players kneeling during the national anthem are intolerable to someone of Pence’s refined sense of right and wrong.” He asked, “what was the practicality in Pence’s disregard of the facts about Arpaio? His pandering had no purpose beyond serving Pence’s vocation, which is to ingratiate himself with his audience of the moment.” And he said Pence’s conduct “clarifies this year’s elections: Vote Republican to ratify groveling as governing.”
Will concluded, “Trump is what he is, a floundering, inarticulate jumble of gnawing insecurities and not-at-all compensating vanities, which is pathetic. Pence is what he has chosen to be, which is horrifying.”
THE EVOLUTIONS OF PENCE AND RYAN DID NOT OCCUR IN A VACUUM. AS each man mutated to fit the age of Trump, so, too, did conservatism.
Jim DeMint’s ouster from the Heritage Foundation had been the first domino to fall, triggering a sequence of reformation and realignment within the conservative movement.
The board of directors at Heritage, irate over the sullying of their once-venerable institution’s brand, appointed Kay Coles James as the new president. If they wanted a sharp stylistic break from DeMint, then James, an alumna of the Bush 43 administration, was the perfect choice. Where DeMint was reactionary and doctrinaire, James was deliberate and studied. Moreover, whereas DeMint said Obama “took race back to the sixties” and blamed the Democrats for not putting “racism behind us,” James, a black woman, said after taking over Heritage, “I don’t think the Republican Party has ever had an honest conversation about race. And before we move forward, we need to have that conversation.”
The problem with her appointment, to many on the right, was that it felt like an overcorrection: that Heritage was so consumed with rehabilitating its image and restoring its scholarly reputation that it would relinquish its mission to hold GOP elected officials accountable for their votes.
James was sending conflicting signals. One day she would assure hard-core conservative allies of her mandate to be nonpolitical, calling out the Trump administration for its forsaking of principle. The next day she would be currying favor with the administration, hoping to preserve influence like everyone else in DC. When James met with the new White House director of legislative affairs, Shahira Knight, the Heritage president kicked off the conversation by assuring Knight that Heritage was “working hard to win the president a second term.”
Nobody was peddling the narrative of Heritage’s unreliability harder than DeMint himself. Having been banished from the think tank, its former president assembled his core team of right-wing agitators to launch a new organization, the Conservative Partnership Institute. They went around town whispering to Heritage donors that the group had lost its nerve; that it was going soft to make nice with the establishment; that James was not a fighter for the movement; that she’s a nice lady known for midday naps more than nighttime raids. This campaign was effective: Even before its official launch, DeMint’s new venture was stealing major financiers away from Heritage, which led to an internal panic about James’s capacity for going toe to toe with her predecessor.
The changes inside Heritage were encapsulated by the changes inside its lobbying arm, Heritage Action. For the previous eight years, the president of Heritage Action, Mike Needham, had made himself the most hated man on Capitol Hill. Constantly picking fights that Republicans couldn’t win, and then fund-raising off their defeats, Needham became persona non grata even to some of the most conservative lawmakers in Congress. They viewed him, and his organization, as a parasite leeching off the anger toward the political class that Heritage was actively fueling. Not long after DeMint’s departure as the think tank’s president, Needham was relieved of his duties at Heritage Action. He was replaced by its COO, Tim Chapman, a well-liked veteran of the conservative movement who had a reputation for collegiality and coalition building.
But one of Chapman’s first initiatives, spending money to help protect vulnerable moderate Republicans in their 2018 elections (on the theory that conservatives could make gains only if the GOP continued to hold its majorities), drew wailing and gnashing of teeth from the right. Veteran activists denounced Heritage in meetings. Big movement donors called, threatening to cancel their checks. Mark Meadows, the Freedom Caucus chairman, told several Heritage officials in a meeting that summer that he wouldn’t stick his neck out for them “given this new reputation of yours, and given
that I’ve got my own reputation to worry about.”
Needham, meanwhile, was finding religion. Official Washington was stunned when he joined Marco Rubio as the senator’s chief of staff. No entity had brutalized him during the 2013 Gang of Eight fight like Heritage Action, often with attacks that were deeply personal. Now Rubio was hiring the gunner who had manned the heavy weaponry against him.
This looked, on the surface, to be a marriage of mutual necessity: Rubio needed to rebuild his street cred with conservatives, while Needham needed to repair his relationships with the Capitol Hill establishment. But there was something deeper at work. In the final months of DeMint’s tenure, Needham had begun questioning the direction of Heritage and whether their absolutist approach of years past had backfired—and whether it was responsible for Trumpism. Joining one of the weekly conservative meetings for the first time since joining Rubio’s staff, Needham’s longtime comrades asked what the biggest surprise was in his new role. He replied that he had learned the importance, politically and economically, of sugar subsidies in Florida. He was laughed out of the room. Email in-boxes around Washington exploded with tales of how Needham had sold out. One of his longtime friends, worried about what he’d heard, called and teased Rubio’s new chief of staff about going soft. “You know,” Needham told him. “I’m not sure that the guy you think I am, the guy Washington thinks I am, really exists anymore.”
This upheaval within the conservative movement occurred during a midterm election season that was unlike any in memory. Democratic challengers were out-raising Republican incumbents in record numbers, most of them smartly steering clear of Trump-related hysteria and focusing their campaigns on kitchen table issues: health care, jobs, economic inequality. Republicans, on the other side, were running unrecognizable campaigns, having largely ditched the ultraconservative messaging techniques of elections past and branding themselves as Trump loyalists playing to the issues that animated his base.