American Carnage

by Tim Alberta

  That same month, Scott had come under fire from the right for dealing the fatal blow to the nomination of a federal judge, Thomas Farr, who had a long record of disenfranchising African American voters. Predictably, when Scott chose to advance Farr’s nomination to a final vote (a procedural move that was in no way reflective of his verdict on Farr), he was met with standard vitriol from the left, with black leaders condemning him on social media and countless people piling on, calling him “Uncle Tom” and worse. When Scott killed Farr’s nomination a day later, there were few apologies to be found.

  While walking his impossible tightrope, Scott was inching closer to discovering the formula for moving Trump—and, in some sense, decoding the mystery of what made him tick.

  “Why would the president of the United States, a guy named Donald J. Trump, take this issue on? It ain’t because he’s racist. I think he’s doing it because he thinks it’s the right thing to do,” Scott said that month. “When you watch him on TV, it’s a presentation. When you sit down and talk with him, sometimes you move the needle. He’s not a guy that wants to be attacked. But if you come at him logically, I find that he takes time to listen. If you can get his attention and you’ve got something meaningful to say, he’ll listen to you.”

  There was one final hurdle to clear: Mitch McConnell.

  The Senate majority leader was much closer to Cotton’s worldview than Scott’s. Forever paranoid about his vulnerabilities on the right, McConnell privately worried that in the two years between passing a bill in 2018 and standing for reelection in 2020, all it would take was a single paroled criminal doing something heinous to end his career.

  Trump leaned on McConnell in early December, dismissing the majority leader’s claims that there was no time on the legislative calendar for such a vote, and implicitly threatening to make his life miserable if he hung the effort out to dry. Finally, on December 11, McConnell announced his support. After some final tinkering to ensure a maximum number of GOP votes, the bill passed the Senate a week later on a tally of 87 to 12.

  It was that rare moment of bonhomie in an age of bitter polarization. Off the Senate floor, Cory Booker, the young, black New Jersey Democrat, embraced Chuck Grassley, the old, white Iowa Republican.

  The bill cleared the House on December 20, by a margin of 358 to 36, and was swiftly signed into law. It was rightly viewed as one of the landmark bipartisan achievements of the twenty-first century and it would not have been possible without the active support of the president.

  This could have been the safe, feel-good high note that Trump chose to end the year on. Instead, with government funding set to expire on December 21, he decided to gamble.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  December 2018

  “We had Abraham Lincoln then.”

  STEVE SCALISE WAS PERCHED INSIDE THE CAPITOL HILL CLUB, ENJOYING a glass of red wine on a frosty winter’s night, when he was interrupted by a phone call. He hurried to answer: It was his former colleague and the new White House chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney.

  “The president is pissed,” Mulvaney told Scalise. “He feels like you guys sold him a bill of goods. He’s gonna veto this damn thing.”

  It was Wednesday, December 19, and Washington appeared peaceful—from a distance. Though the government was scheduled to run out of funding on Friday night, there were few outward signs of panic. For the past week, Republicans on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue seemed to believe that Trump would have no choice but to sign a short-term package to keep the government running into February. Democrats weren’t budging on President Trump’s request for north of $5 billion to construct a border wall; and even if House Republicans unified behind such a proposal, muscling it through the lower chamber in the twilight of their majority, it stood zero chance of passing the Senate. With these realities in mind, and against the backdrop of Trump preemptively accepting blame for a shutdown, the White House was resigned to the president approving a stopgap measure with just $1.6 billion allocated for border security purposes.

  By Wednesday evening, however, the president was worked into a lather. He had spent much of the day talking by phone with Jim Jordan and Mark Meadows. They had convinced Trump of something that was undoubtebly true: He had been played.

  Back in the spring, when Paul Ryan persuaded him not to veto the massive omnibus spending bill, the president had been promised that his border wall money would come later that year. It was vitally important to get the increased funding for the military while they could, Ryan said. (The Speaker was joined in this lobbying campaign by a new Montana congresswoman, who told the White House that short-term spending bills were endangering troops’ lives. Her name was Liz Cheney, the daughter of the former vice president and an heir to his interventionist foreign policy doctrine.)

  Now, with Democrats preparing to take over the House majority, there was one last chance to get that money for the border wall. Instead, Ryan was going home—knowing full well that funding would never, ever materialize—and Trump was getting stiffed.

  His wrath swelled as the day went on. Fuming that evening as he watched Freedom Caucus members rail on the House floor against the short-term funding bill, denouncing it as an affront to the president’s promises, Trump beckoned his advisers to the residence. He complained that Ryan had lied to him. Mulvaney was both inciting and sympathetic: The chief of staff knew what it was like to be strung along by the House leadership, told to live to fight another day only for that fight never to get picked. He encouraged Trump to stand his ground, to show Congress who was boss, to bend Washington to his will.

  The tipping point was Laura Ingraham. Having tuned in to Fox News for her 9:00 p.m. show, the president was mortified listening to the exchange between Ingraham and Jordan as they discussed the dearth of a border wall.

  “Jim Jordan, it is true, Congress hasn’t done its job on this particular issue,” she told him. “I think that not funding the wall is going to go down as one of the worst things to have happened to this administration—forget Mueller.”

  A moment later, Ingraham aired a clip from Rush Limbaugh’s talk radio show from earlier that day, in which Limbaugh compared Trump’s failure to build the wall to George H. W. Bush’s promise, “Read my lips: no new taxes.”

  Then, Jordan put the cherry on top. “Four times we promised them that we would build the wall and put it in the spending bill, and now we’re saying, ‘Oh, no, we’re going to kick it to February, when Pelosi’s going to be Speaker,” he said. “It’ll never happen. We’ve got to do it now.”

  As the president was watching, Meadows called yet again, urging Trump to issue a veto threat that would force Democrats to the negotiating table.

  It was at least Meadows’s fourth call that day; the Freedom Caucus chairman was using an old trick, phoning Trump late at night while he was in the residence and away from staff, hoping to persuade him of decisions that White House aides disagreed with. On this count, it didn’t matter. Mulvaney and Meadows were on the same page. As they spoke, Trump threw his hands in the air, letting fly an impressive string of expletive-deleted remarks about Ryan and Mitch McConnell, wondering how such a gutless party had ever gained power before he came along.

  Mulvaney was soon on the horn with Scalise, the House GOP’s designated vote-counter, warning him of the president’s tailspin. The majority whip quickly contacted both the Speaker and the House majority leader. He conveyed Mulvaney’s message and suggested that their plans to pass the stop-gap funding bill on Thursday might be derailed. Ryan and McCarthy did not share his concern. House Republicans, the two agreed, would not tolerate ending the year with a shutdown, especially after having been pummeled in the midterm elections.

  As the Senate passed its short-term measure that night, kicking it over to the House for a vote the next afternoon, Ryan went to bed confident and content. It had been a most memorable day: Earlier, inside the Library of Congress, the Speaker had delivered his farewell address, capping his twenty-year congressional
run. This was a part of his legacy-burnishing project, along with a widely lampooned six-part, taxpayer-funded video series documenting his career-long pursuit of tax reform.

  The point of the speech was threefold. First, Ryan hoped to validate his contributions to the institution, portraying himself as a crusader who sinned only in challenging the status quo. “I acknowledge plainly that my ambitions for entitlement reform have outpaced the political reality, and I consider this our greatest unfinished business,” he said, noting nevertheless, “I am darn proud of what we have achieved together to make this a stronger and more prosperous country.”

  Second, Ryan endeavored to elevate himself above the beleaguered state of American politics. He warned that “genuine disagreement” had given way to “intense distrust” in the age of social media and twenty-four-hour news cycles. “All of this gets amplified by technology, with an incentive structure that preys on people’s fears, and algorithms that play on anger,” he complained. “Outrage is a brand.”

  Lastly, most implicitly but most important, the Speaker sought separation from the candidate whose impulses he’d combated and the president whose behaviors he’d ignored. Promising that “our problems are solvable if our politics will allow it,” Ryan did not mention Trump by name, yet worked methodically toward persuading the audience that he, Ryan, should not be remembered in the context of the forty-fifth president. “I knew when I took this job, I would become a polarizing figure. It comes with the territory,” Ryan said. “But one thing I leave most proud of is that I like to think I am the same person now that I was when I arrived.”

  In the personal sense, this was true: Ryan was still the unfailingly polite, approachable, decent person he’d been all along, the guy House Democrats couldn’t bring themselves to dislike even as they accused his policies of killing Grandma.

  In the political sense, however, Ryan’s self-portrait was a mirage. The truth was, he had come to Congress as a Jack Kemp conservative and would depart as a Donald Trump Republican.

  It was more complicated than that, certainly. History requires shade and texture. But legacies are reductive by nature. And as the Speaker walked away, closing a messy and mesmerizing chapter in the party’s history, the harsh reality was that Ryan would be remembered more for enabling Trump’s mischief than for crafting a generational overhaul of the tax code.

  It was a political obituary of the Speaker’s own writing. His silence in the face of Trump’s indignities, and his observance of “exquisite presidential leadership,” a line that will live in infamy, would be less remarkable had he not first established himself as one of Congress’s good guys, someone whose sense of principle and civility informed his objections to the man in the first place.

  Back when he became Speaker, Ryan warned that the Republican Party’s internal fractures threatened to make legislating impossible. “We basically run a coalition government,” he complained, “without the efficiency of a parliamentary system.”

  This was the story of John Boehner’s Speakership, certainly. Yet those internecine breakages had largely receded during Ryan’s tenure. The party had fallen in line behind Trump; there was no real power struggle within the GOP of 2017 and 2018. This meant that when historians got to asking the obvious questions—How did the party of fiscal sanity become the party of the historic spending increases? How did the party of family values become the party of “grab ’em by the pussy”? How did the party of compassionate conservatism become the party of Muslim bans?—the answers would implicate not just Trump but Ryan as well.

  There would be no repairing the tattering of his image. In July of 2016, Ryan’s approval among Wisconsin’s likely voters was 50 percent favorable and 34 percent unfavorable, according to the Marquette University Law School poll.1 A month before the 2018 midterm elections, in a Marquette survey done with the same methodology, it had sunk to 41 percent favorable and 49 percent unfavorable.

  Politics are cyclical by nature. The war for the future of the Republican Party, he assured himself, would rage on. But in the short term, the battle for the GOP’s heart and soul was finished. Trump had won—and Ryan would be remembered as both victim and accomplice.

  WILLFULLY IGNORANT TO THE DETERIORATING PERCEPTIONS OF HIS reputation, Ryan was just as blind to the storm brewing inside the GOP conference.

  When the House Republicans gathered in the Capitol basement on the morning of Thursday, December 20, Ryan expected a meeting that would be standard for moments such as these: complaints from the conservatives, pushback from the center-right, assurances of lemonade-making from the leadership, and ultimately, no real change in the trajectory of events.

  The Speaker was mistaken.

  His members were out for blood, and it wasn’t just the conservatives. For more than an hour, one lawmaker after another stood up to make the case for funding the border wall. It wasn’t that all of them were on board with the policy; in fact, many of them were not. Yet they all had grown tired of being accused back home of not supporting the president. The last thing they needed was Trump accusing them of treason as they headed home for the holiday recess. If a shutdown amounted to coal in their stockings, a warlike tweet from the president was akin to the Christmas tree catching fire.

  There was every reason to fear such an onslaught. Over the past twelve hours, word had spread rapidly throughout the conference of Trump’s fury at being stuck with a short-term spending bill that wouldn’t fund his wall. Scalise had even warned members that the White House was asking for a copy of his “whip check,” an accounting of which way lawmakers were leaning on a vote. Trump was preparing to lash out at any House Republican who didn’t stand with him.

  If it wasn’t clear what needed to be done, Steve Womack’s speech erased any doubts. The Arkansas lawmaker was so low-key, so soft-spoken, that his colleagues weren’t sure they had ever heard him talk in the House GOP’s weekly meeting. This wasn’t surprising; it was the hard-liners who typically dominated the open-mic portion, and Womack, a longtime ally of the leadership, was nobody’s idea of a hard-liner.

  On this morning, however, Womack walked to the microphone with a simple message for his colleagues. “We’ve got to have this fight,” he said, “and we’ve got to have it now.”

  Much as with Boehner’s situation in the fall of 2013, Ryan was trapped: The Speaker would either be blamed for abandoning a core promise to the party’s base or vilified for leading the government into a shutdown. And no matter how little leverage Boehner had in those days, Ryan, whose career would expire in two weeks, now had even less. He was the lamest of ducks.

  As the House meeting broke up, lawmakers saw their phones sparkle to life with a Twitter alert. “When I begrudgingly signed the Omnibus Bill, I was promised the Wall and Border Security by leadership,” Trump wrote. “Would be done by end of year (NOW). It didn’t happen! We foolishly fight for Border Security for other countries—but not for our beloved U.S.A. Not good!”

  A few hours later, as the president convened a small summit of lawmakers at the White House, it struck everyone as a most fitting conclusion to the 115th Congress. For the past two years, there had been a tug-of-war for Trump’s political soul, pitting Ryan and McCarthy against Jordan and Meadows. Now all four of them, plus a handful of others, were huddled around a coffee table in the Oval Office, pleading their cases to the president.

  There wasn’t much suspense: They all recognized that Trump’s mind had been made up. As it became evident what he wanted them to do—vote on a bill authorizing $5 billion to build a wall on the southern border, then dare the Senate to reject it, somehow believing this would force Democrats to negotiate—the president’s staff jumped in on Ryan’s behalf. “This is absolutely crazy,” said Shahira Knight, the legislative affairs director, who commanded Trump’s respect. “It’s never going to work.”

  But the train had left the station. It was nothing if not poetic: Some of the same conservative agitators who had prodded Boehner into a shutdown five years earlier�
�Meadows, Jordan, Mulvaney—were back at it. At his winter home in Florida, the ex-Speaker was swirling a glass and cackling at the “legislative terrorists” he’d found unfit to serve in Congress who were now running the federal government.

  Later that night, after slapping together a bill that met the president’s demands, and juicing it with millions of dollars in disaster-relief funds to win over some skeptics, the House passed it by a tally of 217 to 185.

  Many senators had already left town for the holidays; now the House was expecting them to come back for a vote on their newly passed bill. They made plans to return, some moving more urgently than others. There was little point to this exercise: The House bill did not have the support of all fifty-one Republicans, much less the additional nine Democratic voters needed to surmount a filibuster. It stood no chance of passing the Senate, and everyone knew it.

  Trump made a game effort Friday afternoon to work the phones, trying to sell GOP senators on his master plan to squeeze funding out of red-state Democrats eager to avoid a shutdown over the issue of border security. But he was living in a fantasy land. Nothing resembling the $5.7 billion House package was going to be approved by the Senate. And given how the president had already bragged to America during the surreal Oval Office meeting with Pelosi and Schumer of his willingness to own the shutdown, Democrats weren’t fearful of taking the heat.

  As the clock struck midnight on Saturday, December 22, two things were apparent. First, this government shutdown was every bit as pointless as its Obamacare-inspired predecessor in 2013; neither one stood a chance of effecting the desired policy change. Second, this one was going to last a lot longer than seventeen days. With Democrats scheduled to seize control of the House on January 3—at which point their leverage would only increase—there was scant chance of a quick resolution. Both sides were digging in, understanding that the fight over Trump’s border wall was about a whole lot more.