by Tim Alberta
THE SUNSET OF 2018 PRESENTED A DIFFERENT SET OF CHALLENGES FOR Trump.
The October death of Jamal Khashoggi, a self-exiled Saudi journalist writing for the Washington Post and living in America when he disappeared during a visit to Istanbul, had turned into a test of the president’s diplomatic and geopolitical priorities. After a lengthy investigation, it was the consensus of U.S. and Turkish intelligence that Khashoggi had been strangled and dismembered inside the Saudi consulate—at the direction of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the successor to the Saudi throne and a frequent target of Khashoggi’s critiques.
This posed a dilemma to Trump’s transactional foreign policy doctrine. The crown prince had become an ally of Kushner’s and was instrumental in approving a major arms-sale deal in 2017. The butchering of Khashoggi fit the description of a flagrant international offense for which Washington would traditionally have imposed consequences. Instead, Trump decided to cast doubt on the intelligence findings and declined to give the Saudis even a rhetorical slap on the wrist, willfully ceding America’s role as a symbolic guardian of human rights.
Just as the furor over Khashoggi was subsiding, like a game of presidential Whack-a-Crisis, another problem popped up: Michael Cohen was back in federal court with a fresh batch of incriminating testimony.
On November 29, the president’s former lawyer pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about the plans to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. Contrary to his sworn testimony to congressional investigators, Cohen said the Moscow project was being negotiated well into the summer of 2016—with Trump’s awareness and involvement. This meant the GOP front-runner had been pursuing a commercial interest in Russia while he was publicly praising Putin and arguing to end Obama’s sanctions against the country, all while the Kremlin was waging a sophisticated misinformation campaign aimed at helping him win the presidency.
Trump, aka “Individual 1,” accused his onetime fixer of being “weak” for cutting a deal with Mueller in pursuit of a reduced sentence. Indeed, not long after, the special counsel recommended no prison time for Cohen due to his extensive cooperation. But the Southern District of New York felt differently: Cohen was sentenced to three years for the hush money payments to Daniels and, in a separate case, for lying about the Trump Tower Moscow project.
As if Trump didn’t have enough to worry about, the one thing that had buoyed him throughout his first two years in office—a booming economy—was showing signs of weakness.
In the fourth quarter of 2018, the Dow and the S&P 500 dropped nearly 12 percent and 14 percent, respectively, while the NASDAQ plunged 17.5 percent in the same period. The final month of the year capped this bearish run: Both the Dow and the S&P 500 plunged by roughly 9 percent, their worst Decembers since 1931. When all was said and done, 2018 was the worst year for the markets since 2008.
This was irksome to a president who had long used the bull markets as a crutch. And while there was blame to go around for the decline—fears of inflation, tech companies facing scrutiny and enhanced regulation—the country’s political volatility was undoubtedly a contributor. Trump’s game of chicken with China was proving counterproductive: In December, the Commerce Department announced that the U.S. trade deficit had increased to a ten-year high of $55.5 billion, thanks to soybean exports plummeting and imports of consumer goods spiking. The trade deficit had widened for six consecutive months, and much of the damage was being done by China; in November, its trade surplus with the United States reached a record high of $35.6 billion.
Meanwhile, in late November, Trump was incensed to learn that General Motors was slashing 15 percent of its salaried workforce—up to 14,800 jobs—and shuttering five plants. The brunt of the impact would be felt in Ohio and Michigan, two of his Rust Belt strongholds. In the summer of 2017, Trump had promised a raucous crowd in Youngstown, Ohio, that their lost factory jobs were coming back. “Don’t move!” the president told them. “Don’t sell your house!” Now, little more than a year later, GM was closing its iconic Lordstown Assembly plant in neighboring Warren, Ohio, robbing the area of more than 1,400 jobs.
“I told her, I’m not happy,” Trump told reporters of his conversation with GM’s CEO, Mary Barra. “The United States saved General Motors, and for her to take that company out of Ohio is not good.” In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, he talked even tougher. “They better damn well open a new plant [in Ohio] very quickly,” Trump said. “I told them, ‘You’re playing around with the wrong person.’”4
Trump was speaking as a president and not a businessman. The reason GM needed a taxpayer bailout to begin with was that it had become bloated with legacy costs and blind to the evolution of the market, producing cars nobody wanted at prices their foreign competitors could beat. If GM was to avoid another bankruptcy, visionary decisions had to be made: eliminating a host of poor-selling smaller cars, doubling down on SUVs, and investing heavily in electric and self-driving vehicles. In business, the short-term pain of such decisions is meant to yield long-term gains, building a stronger company that can hire more workers.
The other dynamic Trump seemed to be ignoring, willfully or otherwise, was the role his own policies had played in decisions such as these. GM had warned, earlier in the year, that his tariffs on imported steel would cost the company $1 billion. Ford Motor Company had said the same. And Harley-Davidson announced back in June that it was moving some of its operations overseas due to the crushing cost of Trump’s tariffs, prompting the president to call for a boycott of the motorcycle manufacturer.
It wasn’t surprising that the president’s interventions in the market didn’t work; even in Indiana, where Trump and Pence had made a show of swooping in to rescue Carrier workers with the aid of billions of dollars in state tax incentives, the company continued to jettison jobs throughout 2017 and 2018 as its operations moved to Mexico. “I feel betrayed and deceived—as if President Trump used my pain, and the pain of working-class America, simply to win political points,” Quinton Franklin, a laid-off Carrier worker, wrote in a piece for Vox.5
What was surprising: the silence of conservatives as the American president bullied and threatened private businesses that were making him look bad politically.
IT WAS THE BEST OF PUBLIC SERVICE, IT WAS THE WORST OF PUBLIC SERVICE.
In early December, America mourned the passing of former president George H. W. Bush, a son of privilege who enlisted as a fighter pilot, was shot down over the Pacific, and became the patriarch of America’s premier political dynasty, all while serving in roles ranging from CIA director to chairman of the Republican National Committee. Like John McCain, the elder Bush had planned his funeral service with precision; but unlike the senator, the former president was insistent on Donald Trump attending. There was no debate to be had: Whatever problems anyone in the family or in the party had with him, the commander in chief would be welcome at his service. This was a final act of class and grace, symbolizing a life spent in service to noblesse oblige.
Less than a week after Bush’s funeral brought fond memories of a functional era in politics, Americans were jolted out of their daydream by the spectacle of December 11.
It was supposed to be a three-minute “spray,” with reporters and cameramen from the news networks catching a quick glimpse of the meeting inside the Oval Office. In their first formal sit-down since the midterm, the president and vice president were hosting the top Democrats in Congress, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer. Customarily, the president would offer a few words, something about looking forward to a productive dialogue, and then the media would be shooed from the room so the principals could get down to the business of governing.
Instead, viewers were treated to something that resembled a cold-open Saturday Night Live skit. With Trump rocking energetically on the edge of his seat, Pelosi flapping her arm while speaking in short bursts, Schumer failing to suppress his mischievous grin, and Pence observing a solemn vow of silence, the body language was entertaining on its own. And then there was the discourse.
When Pelosi mentioned how House Republicans were packing up their offices after their losses, Trump spoke over her. “And we’ve gained in the Senate. Nancy. We’ve gained in the Senate,” he said. “Excuse me. Did we win the Senate? We won the Senate.”
Schumer turned to reporters. “When the president brags that he won North Dakota and Indiana, he’s in real trouble,” he said, leaning back, visibly satisfied with himself.
Trump shrugged, cocking his head sideways and looking confused by the insult. “I did. We did win North Dakota and Indiana.”
Comparing electoral win-loss records was not the ostensible purpose of the meeting, of course. Washington was careening toward another shutdown: Government funding was due to expire on December 21, and with the Democrats soon to assume control of the House, the president saw this as his final chance to win funding for his promised wall on the southern border. He had already signed certain spending bills into law, but others awaited votes in Congress; one was for the Department of Homeland Security, which would spearhead any wall-building project. Trump was demanding $5 billion. Pelosi and Schumer had already made clear that they wouldn’t give a penny more than the $1.3 billion already allocated.
Believing he could rattle his foes under the bright lights, Trump deliberately let the reporters and cameras linger in the room. He pressed his case for border wall funding, claiming that construction was already under way—“A lot of the wall is built”—and accusing Democrats of obstructing Republicans on a project that they had once supported. (It was true that many Democrats had voted for border wall funding in previous Congresses. It was not true that Trump’s wall had progressed as promised; in Texas and California, a few dozen miles of fence were being put up, the same type of barrier built under previous administrations.)
The televised scrum could hardly have been more helpful to the Democrats and more harmful to Trump. For starters, the president rattled off a series of easily disproved untruths—that the wall was already under construction, for instance, and that his administration “caught 10 terrorists over the last very short period of time” at the southern border. (There was zero evidence found to substantiate this; Trump’s own State Department had previously reported that there was “no credible information that any member of a terrorist group has traveled through Mexico to gain access to the United States.”6)
On top of that, the president strengthened the internal standing of Pelosi. Dozens of House Democrats had campaigned on a promise not to support her return to the Speakership, and in the weeks following Election Day she had worked tirelessly to extinguish any insurrection in the conference. Younger Democrats whispered doubts about the seventy-eight-year-old Pelosi’s agility and acuity, probing for vulnerabilities they might exploit to force her from power. Yet those doubts were erased as she went toe to toe with Trump on his turf.
Most consequentially, Trump did what every modern politician, from Ted Cruz to Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich to Tip O’Neill, had labored to avoid: He accepted the blame for a government shutdown.
Goaded by Schumer, a fellow tough-talking New Yorker who had studied the art of getting under the president’s skin, Trump said that he was so committed to building the wall that he would shut down the government if his funding failed to materialize. “You know what I’ll say? Yes. If we don’t get what we want, one way or the other, whether it’s through you, through the military, through anything you want to call, I will shut down the government,” Trump said.
“Okay. Fair enough,” Schumer said, looking like the cat that had feasted on a whole flock of canaries. “We disagree. We disagree.”
Trump’s face grew more colorful, his tone sharper, his torso bending so aggressively off his chair that he might have fallen into Schumer’s lap.
“I am proud to shut down the government for border security, Chuck. Because the people of this country don’t want criminals and people that have lots of problems—and drugs—pouring into our country. So, I will take the mantle. I will be the one to shut it down. I’m not going to blame you for it.”
BURSTING THROUGH THE DEEP, OVERBEARING DARKNESS CAME THE faintest hint of light. In the waning days of the 115th Congress, after two years of ruthless polarization and petty score-settling between the two parties, something was happening. It was not a small something; in fact, it was a very big something, something so big, something so important, that it had been unthinkable not long before. Republicans and Democrats were teaming up to pass, on a bipartisan basis, a sweeping, significant piece of legislation. And no one deserved more credit than Trump.
For years, idealists and romantics spanning the partisan spectrum had dared imagine the day in which Congress might finally correct one of its grievous errors: the tough-on-crime legislation of the 1980s and ’90s that had led to an explosion in the U.S. prison population. With the onset of mandatory-minimum sentencing and three-strike laws, America had swept up a generation of nonviolent drug offenders, a wildly disproportionate number of them black, into a penal system making lots of profits and doing little rehabilitating.
Subsequent administrations nibbled around the edges of the problem: Bush signed his prisoner reentry program into law in 2008, and Obama passed a law reducing the disparity in sentences between crack and powder cocaine. Yet these policies did little to address the systemic failures of the criminal justice apparatus: the Third World conditions, the absence of training for societal reintegration, the lack of discretion for judges in sentencing drug-related cases, and the financial incentives to build new prisons rather than keep old inmates from returning.
By 2016, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, more than two million people were incarcerated in the United States.7 A bipartisan coalition had emerged during the twilight of the Obama years to push a massive criminal justice reform bill, but it was doomed to failure for a simple reason: Conservative Republicans were reluctant to align themselves with Obama on legislation that could be portrayed as soft on crime. With the election of Trump, a self-described “law and order” candidate, the prospects for reviving the effort looked bleak.
Instead, ever so quietly, the coalition expanded during the new president’s first year in office. It was an unlikely crew of conspirators: In the Senate, Democrat Dick Durbin worked alongside Republicans Chuck Grassley and Mike Lee, while on the outside, the Koch brothers teamed with the ACLU and the Center for American Progress. The linchpin: Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, who gained a passion for the issue after his father was imprisoned on tax evasion charges.
Kushner didn’t exactly have a track record of accomplishment. He had taken on a laughably heavy portfolio, everything from leading the newly created Office of American Innovation, to spearheading a strategy to combat the opioid epidemic, to brokering a peace agreement between the Israelis and the Palestinians. (All in a day’s work for a thirty-something with zero government experience.)
And yet, halfway through the second year of Trump’s presidency, there were continued signs of progress. The most apparent: Trump’s decision in June to commute the sentence of a sixty-three-year-old woman, Alice Johnson, who was two decades into a life sentence for narcotics distribution.
The president’s move came after a meeting with Kim Kardashian, the reality TV starlet and wife of Kanye West, that was widely panned in Washington as something of a publicity stunt. Yet the rendezvous had been strategically arranged by Kushner. After inviting Kardashian into the Oval Office to hear more about Johnson’s case, Trump found himself agreeing that she should receive clemency. Kushner took this as a clear indication, he told his allies on Capitol Hill afterward, that the president could be persuaded of their broader reform efforts.
Several obstacles remained: John Kelly, a hard-boiled military man who shared much of Trump’s sensibilities on law enforcement, had cautioned against loosening sentencing laws. So had Sessions—though, as Kushner calculated, the attorney general’s disapproval was likely a net positive given Trump’s loathing for the man.
And then there was Tom Cotton. The Arkansas senator, a Harvard Law grad and retired Army captain who had seen tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, was Congress’s most vocal opponent of the criminal justice overhaul. He spent the summer and fall of 2018 warning any Republican who would listen that they would get “Willie Hortoned” in their future campaigns by voting to let convicts out early, a reference to the infamous race-baiting ad used against Michael Dukakis in 1988.
Cotton’s resistance vexed Kushner and his allies on Capitol Hill. The president, ever a fan of glimmering résumés, had been smitten with Cotton since meeting him in 2015, and the Arkansas senator was one of the few lawmakers who truly had the president’s ear. Of all the people susceptible to concerns of being portrayed as soft on crime, the reformers figured, none was more likely to buy Cotton’s argument than Trump.
It was a genuine shock, then, when in mid-November the president decided to throw his weight behind the First Step Act. The legislation, scaled back somewhat from the Obama-era effort, would enhance rehabilitation programs for current and former prisoners, provide new funding for antirecidivism initiatives, give judges more discretion in sentencing, reduce certain mandatory-minimum terms, and improve the conditions inside the penal system itself, including an expansion of employment programs.
“Americans from across the political spectrum can unite around prison-reform legislation that will reduce crime while giving our fellow citizens a chance at redemption,” Trump announced at the White House. “It’s the right thing to do. It’s the right thing to do.”
Standing behind the president, once again, was Senator Tim Scott. Just as he had a year earlier with the push for “Opportunity Zones” in the tax bill, Scott leveraged his complex alliance with Trump to lobby for the criminal justice legislation.
It was the latest evolution in the schizophrenic relationship between the Republican Party’s lone black senator and the man he carefully referred to as its “racially insensitive” president.