American Carnage

by Tim Alberta

  Waking up to these realities on November 7, Republicans found that no amount of spinning their Senate and gubernatorial wins could mask the three-front war awaiting them in 2020. Democrats were converting the suburbs into political garrisons. They were reasserting themselves in the Rust Belt states, demonstrating the limits of a strategy banking on big margins with working-class whites. And they were creeping closer to parity in three states, Texas, Arizona, and Georgia, that would surely be contested by the party’s nominee in all future presidential races.

  AS TRUMP PREPARED FOR HIS POSTELECTION PRESS CONFERENCE THAT Wednesday morning, studying the names of his fallen GOP detractors, he envisioned the ways in which he could use the loss to tighten his grip on the party. Many of the defeated Republicans, he told his staff, had been disloyal to him; they deserved to lose. Only by embracing his nationalist, America First policies, he said—and by backing him up in his guerrilla war against the media, the Democrats, and the conventions of Washington—would the Republican Party prosper.

  Contemplating the inflection point offered by the midterm results, Trump realized there was good news and bad news.

  He had purged the party of perhaps his two most outspoken GOP critics, Arizona senator Jeff Flake and South Carolina congressman Mark Sanford. Despite both those seats being lost to the Democrats, the president took comfort in knowing he was free of those grandstanding, grating, self-righteous traitors who lived to criticize his every utterance.

  The bad news: A newly elected Republican was on his way to Washington and intent on filling their shoes. He had little patience for Trump, he told friends, and would not hesitate to police him. He had finally won his first federal campaign after three unsuccessful attempts. He was the incoming junior senator from Utah: Mitt Romney.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  November 2018

  “Some have adapted. And I haven’t.”

  LAST NIGHT THE REPUBLICAN PARTY DEFIED HISTORY,” PROCLAIMED the president of the United States.

  Standing before an overflow audience inside the White House on the afternoon of November 7, his royal-blue tie shimmering and his spray tan exceptionally robust, Donald Trump delivered a postelection press conference the likes of which Americans had never seen.

  For an hour and twenty-seven minutes, the president held forth on topics ranging from his popularity among minorities (“I have the best numbers with African American and Hispanic Americans that I’ve ever had before”) to the annexation of Crimea (he blamed Barack Obama instead of Vladimir Putin) to his refusal to release his tax returns (“They’re extremely complex, people wouldn’t understand them”).

  Primarily, the appearance was designed as one-part end zone dance and one-part exoneration tour, as he took credit for the contests Republicans had won and distanced himself from those they had lost. Noting how GOP candidates had prevailed in nine of the eleven places he’d visited recently—races picked by his team specifically because of their high likelihood of victory—Trump concluded, “This vigorous campaigning stopped the Blue Wave that they talked about.”

  Arguing that the odds were stacked against the House GOP due to so many members retiring, without mentioning that plenty of those retirements owed to what lawmakers labeled “Trump fatigue” in Capitol Hill vernacular, the president congratulated those Republicans who had won their elections by remaining loyal to him.

  As for the others?

  “You had some that decided to ‘Let’s stay away. Let’s stay away.’ They did very poorly,” the president said. “I’m not sure that I should be happy or sad. But I feel just fine about it.”

  Trump, the titular head of the Republican Party, then proceeded to namecheck and mock those House Republicans who had campaigned on their own independent brands and who had lost in districts where the president’s unpopularity made winning with an R next to one’s name all but impossible.

  “Carlos . . . Cue-bella.”

  Trump could not pronounce the name of the Miami-area Republican, Carlos Curbelo, one of the GOP’s brightest young stars, whose good standing at home was insufficient in the age of Trump.

  “Mike Coffman. Too bad, Mike.”

  Now he was mocking the Colorado congressman, an Army and Marine Corps veteran, who was widely regarded as one of Congress’s hardest workers, having taught himself new languages to converse with the constituents in his rapidly diversifying district.

  The president continued: “Mia Love.”

  Trump stopped himself, noting his estranged relationship with the black Utah Republican. “Mia Love gave me no love. And she lost,” he said. “Too bad. Sorry about that, Mia.”

  He went on: “Barbara Comstock was another one. I think she could have won that race, but she didn’t want to have any embrace. For that, I don’t blame her. But she—she lost. Substantially lost. Peter Roskam didn’t want the embrace. Erik Paulsen didn’t want the embrace.”

  After running through his list, Trump paused to reflect on these intraparty traitors.

  “Those are some of the people that, you know, decided for their own reason not to embrace—whether it’s me or what we stand for,” he said. “But what we stand for meant a lot to most people. And we’ve had tremendous support, and tremendous support in the Republican Party. Among the biggest support in the history of the party. I’ve actually heard, at 93 percent, it’s a record. But I won’t say that, because who knows?”

  IT WASN’T QUITE A RECORD, BUT TRUMP WAS RIGHT: HE WAS MORE POPULAR with his party’s voters than any president in modern history at the two-year mark, save for George W. Bush’s 97 percent approval rating in the aftermath of 9/11. Gallup showed Trump at 88 percent, ahead of Obama at 85 percent, George H. W. Bush at 84 percent, Richard Nixon at 79 percent, Ronald Reagan at 76 percent, Bill Clinton at 75 percent, and Jimmy Carter at 62 percent.1

  But there was one critical difference: Donald Trump’s party lost 40 House seats in 2018, whereas George W. Bush’s party gained 8 House seats in 2002.

  How was this possible? The only mathematical explanation: The party itself was contracting.

  In polling, party affiliation is a state of mind, something that is elastic from year to year (and, in this age, from day to day). Fewer voters were identifying as Republicans—or, at least, as Trump Republicans—when pollsters contacted them. It was possible for Trump to maintain a high approval rating with self-identified Republicans while his party was being decimated in red congressional districts because a rising number of voters were vacating their GOP affiliation.

  The proof? Consider polling from the Congressional Leadership Fund, the super PAC charged with keeping the House under Republican control. The organization raised and spent roughly $160 million for the election cycle, with an enormous investment in survey work to understand the voters in the dozens of districts they competed in. Every single one of the House Republicans called out by Trump in his postelection press conference (and many more) had higher favorability ratings in their districts as of late October than did the president. And while Trump polled well with GOP voters, the “Generic Republican” option outpaced him on the survey ballots in these districts. For many members—Comstock in Northern Virginia, Coffman in metropolitan Denver, Paulsen in the Twin Cities—Trump’s mid-30s favorability was the result of his alienating their suburban, right-of-center voters. It proved insurmountable, despite his support among conservatives.

  Just as Trump wrote these members off, so, too, did the professional right wing. “The squishy members who lost their races were the ones who didn’t embrace the conservative agenda,” David McIntosh, the Club for Growth president, declared at a press conference. David Bozell, the leader of ForAmerica, another activist group, agreed: “Republicans shed a lot of dead weight last night.”

  Setting aside the fact that most of the aforementioned House Republicans voted with Trump north of 90 percent of the time, and that several self-styled conservatives also lost their races, the dismissiveness was surprising. Two years in the majority had allowed
Republicans to accomplish at least some of what they had campaigned on; now, heading into the minority, some on the right seemed strangely enthused about embracing the old Jim DeMint mantra of 30 purists being better than 60 pragmatists.

  It simply made no sense.

  “Politics are about addition and multiplication, not subtraction and division,” as Mississippi governor Haley Barbour used to say. The activist right could be forgiven for ignoring this advice. But of all people, Trump, who stitched together an unlikely coalition en route to winning the White House, would seem to appreciate the imperative of big-tent politics. Instead, all he cared about were displays of loyalty or lack thereof.

  One election result pleased the president above all others. “In Jeff Flake’s case, it’s me, pure and simple. I retired him,” Trump boasted on November 7. “I’m very proud of it. I did the country a great service.”

  Democrats flipped two GOP Senate seats in 2018. One of them was Flake’s in Arizona.

  His onetime best friend, Mike Pence, sat a few feet away as the president spoke. The two congressmen used to call each other “Butch” and “Sundance,” nicknames earned from when they would burst through the swinging doors of the House chamber to register their objection to a Bush-era big-spending proposal. When Flake, on his twentieth wedding anniversary, got stuck in Washington for a busy week of votes, Pence helped fly Flake’s wife to DC and arranged a surprise dinner for them on the rooftop of the W Hotel.

  Now, as Trump took occasion to spit on his old partner’s grave, Pence started straight ahead. If he was angry or upset or bewildered at what the president was saying, he certainly wouldn’t, and couldn’t, show it.

  “Mike is intensely loyal. That’s a virtue. And he has never uttered to me one syllable of disagreement with the president, and frankly I admire him for that,” Flake says. “We’ve taken different paths, but I’m not trying to suggest that mine is a more virtuous path than his. He’s in a position with considerably more power than I have. And there’s something to be said for that. If he can influence the president in a positive direction, then maybe that was a wise choice.”

  Flake acknowledges that he has changed; that he is not the same hard-line, insurgent-styled conservative he once was. “But the bigger change was the party, which used to be the party of limited government, economic freedom, individual responsibility, free trade,” he says. “It has become a more nationalist, nativist, anti-immigration party. That’s an unfamiliar standard for most of us. Some have adapted. And I haven’t.”

  THE ADMINISTRATION WAS CONTINUING TO BLEED PERSONNEL. MOST notably, back in October, UN ambassador Nikki Haley had abruptly announced her departure. She said all the right things, denying ambitions to challenge Trump in 2020 and saying she simply needed a break, but the perception was reality: The president had lost one of the more respected, competent members of his government.

  Jeff Sessions, to the surprise of no one, was the first casualty following the midterms. The attorney general’s firing had been a long time coming, having been browbeaten both in public and in private ever since his recusal from the Russia investigation. Sessions wasn’t the last to go. By the end of December, a trio of cabinet officials had announced their exits. The first was Ryan Zinke, the secretary of the interior, who faced at least eighteen federal inquiries into his conduct, according to a tally from the left-leaning watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. He drained himself from the swamp to avoid imminent congressional investigations into his activity once Democrats took control of the House.

  The second major departure was that of John Kelly. The White House chief of staff had introduced a modicum of structure and discipline in his early days on the job, impressing the president’s friends and giving West Wing staffers fleeting optimism of a change in course. But Kelly had quickly become overwhelmed by Trump’s insatiable appetite for disruption. By the fall of 2018, he was disappearing from the White House for lengthy stretches of the day, telling aides only that he was headed to the gym.

  As it became clear that Kelly would leave, the search for his replacement turned into something of an open casting call. Mark Meadows publicly lobbied for the job, calling in every favor he could muster, but the president—warned by several friends of the Freedom Caucus leader’s star-seeking ways—turned him down. Trump favored Mike Pence’s chief of staff, Nick Ayers, a young operative known for his tactical shrewdness and ethical slipperiness. Ayers had, at Pence’s instruction, allied himself with Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump in order to influence the president. This irked West Wing insiders; they called him “Tricky Nicky” and traded whispers about his financial entanglements that the press would feast upon.2 (He was a multimillionaire in his twenties, having started and then stepped away from lucrative consulting firms whose clients now enjoyed the conspicuous support of Trump.) Sensing the risks, Ayers pulled his name from consideration.

  After other options were considered, one was left standing: Mick Mulvaney. Having moonlighted as the interim boss at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, taking a wrecking ball to the watchdog agency while simultaneously running the Office of Management and Budget, the former Tea Party congressman had impressed Trump with his tenacity and his talent for multitasking. The president named Mulvaney, who’d joked about safeguarding the Constitution from Trump and had once called him “a terrible human being,” as acting chief of staff.

  The final resignation—and to official Washington, the most disturbing—was that of Jim Mattis.

  More than anyone else in the federal government, the defense secretary had provided peace of mind to those worried that Trump’s worst instincts could prove calamitous. The legendary Marine general had also offered a voice of reason in unreasonable times. In an interview with the New Yorker after taking over the Pentagon, when asked to cite his biggest concern on the job, he replied, “The lack of political unity in America. The lack of a fundamental friendliness. It seems like an awful lot of people in America and around the world feel spiritually and personally alienated, whether it be from organized religion or from local community school districts or from their governments.”3

  Weeks after the Charlottesville clashes left the nation shaken and the president’s own party seething at his response, the defense secretary encountered a group of military officers during a trip to Jordan. “You’re a great example for our country right now. It’s got some problems. You know it and I know it,” Mattis told them. “You just hold the line, my fine young soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines. You just hold the line until our country gets back to understanding and respecting each other and being friendly to one another.”

  On December 19, 2018, Mattis released a videotaped Christmas message to his armed forces. The next day, he abruptly announced his resignation—a stunning rebuke to Trump’s decision, made over the objections of virtually everyone in the administration, to withdraw all America’s troops from Syria. (“If Obama had done this, we would be going nuts right now,” said Lindsey Graham. This was a strong statement given his unmatched metamorphosis from bruising Trump critic to bald-faced Trump apologist.)

  The president, for his part, declared, “We have won against ISIS,” a hyperbolic assertion that no member of either party agreed with.

  “My views on treating allies with respect and also being clear-eyed about both malign actors and strategic competitors are strongly held and informed by over four decades of immersion in these issues,” Mattis wrote in his resignation letter to Trump. “Because you have the right to have a Secretary of Defense whose views are better aligned with yours on these and other subjects, I believe it is right for me to step down from my position.”

  Mattis named his departure date of February 28. The president, infuriated by the glowing tributes to the Pentagon chief on television, announced on Twitter that he would be relieved two months earlier.

  The turnover in Trump’s administration had been nothing short of staggering: In addition to dozens of lower-level officials, he h
ad lost two chiefs of staff, two national security advisers, an EPA administrator, a health and human services secretary, an interior secretary, a secretary of defense, and a secretary of state. (After Rex Tillerson criticized the president in December 2018, Trump tweeted that his former secretary of state was “dumb as a rock” and “lazy as hell.”)

  The previous fall, Bob Corker, the GOP chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, had said that three men—Mattis, Kelly, and Tillerson—“Help separate our country from chaos.” At the dawn of Trump’s third year in office, all of them were gone.

  “This is like the second half of the second term of a presidency,” Paul Ryan said of the administration’s staff exodus, “except it’s the second year of this presidency.”

  Ryan, who was himself heading for retirement at year’s end, felt a heightened level of anxiety over leaving Washington. He had developed close relationships with Mattis and Kelly, talking with them frequently to strategize on ways to insulate the government against Trump’s impulses. Now, scanning the administration for moderating influences, he saw far fewer of them. He also saw a president who was harder to influence than he once was.

  “Those of us around him really helped to stop him from making bad decisions. All the time,” Ryan says. “It worked pretty well. He was really deferential and kind of learning the ropes. I think now . . . he sort of feels like he knows the job. He’s got it all figured out. He’s comfortable in it. And so he’s more listening to his own counsel.”

  Ryan adds, “We helped him make much better decisions, which were contrary to kind of what his knee-jerk reaction was. Now I think he’s making some of those knee-jerk reactions.”