American Carnage

by Tim Alberta

  Lawmakers were told to stand at the ready; a sudden call might come with news of a breakthrough in the negotiations. They scoffed and raced to the airports, hopping flights back home to celebrate the holidays.

  The only person stuck in Washington was Trump. Convinced by aides that it would look bad if he left for Mar-a-Lago while tens of thousands of federal employees were being furloughed, the president remained in the White House, spending his days watching Fox News and dialing friends, asking when they thought the Democrats would cave.

  IN AMERICA’S TWO-PARTY SYSTEM, ECONOMIC VITALITY HAS TRADITIONALLY acted as the fulcrum for its political swings. When the economy performs well under the president’s party, the opposing party is compelled toward the middle; when the economy suffers under the president’s party, the opposing party is free to drift toward its base. These rules are not absolute. But particularly in the previous century, the ideological adventurism of a party occurred while out of power and during times of economic turmoil: Democrats in response to Hoover, Republicans in response to Carter, and, in a case historians will study for centuries, Republicans in response to Obama.

  How, then, to characterize the Democrats’ response to Trump?

  To observe the 2018 election season was to witness the party out of power struggling with its very identity, torn between two diverging paths forward. One was to straddle the center, targeting independents and disaffected moderate Republicans. The other was to push unapologetically leftward, courting the energy and activism of the progressive left.

  There was no right or wrong answer; in many cases, the calculus depended on the district and its constituencies. But at the dawn of the 116th Congress, with the forty new Democratic members arriving on Capitol Hill, it became apparent that something would have to give.

  Consider two incoming members of Michigan’s delegation: In the Thirteenth District, a safely blue stronghold anchored in west Detroit, Rashida Tlaib ran on a platform of abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, pursuing a single-payer health care system, and cutting off foreign aid to Israel. (In 2018, Tlaib was one of the first two Muslim women elected to Congress.) An attorney and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, Tlaib offered a distinct vision for the opposition party.

  Twenty minutes away, in Michigan’s Eighth District, a longtime Republican lock stretching from Detroit’s affluent suburbs westward toward Lansing, Elissa Slotkin offered another. A former CIA analyst who grew up on a farm, Slotkin defeated GOP incumbent Mike Bishop by running as a “midwestern Democrat,” emphasizing her support for gun rights, opposition to single-payer health care, and eagerness to secure the southern border, albeit not with a big, beautiful wall.

  The weekend before the election, at a rally in Lansing, Slotkin described the ways in which she was ready to work with Trump.

  The day she was sworn in, at a party hosted by the group MoveOn, Tlaib declared, “We’re gonna go in there and impeach the motherfucker.”

  There could be no splitting the baby. Even if in agreement on certain issues, this pair of Michigan lawmakers shared as much of a common purpose as Boehner and Jordan, the once-neighboring Ohio Republicans.

  The majority-makers were those Democrats like Slotkin, and Jason Crow of Colorado, and Dean Phillips of Minnesota. These freshmen, and others, flipped suburban, culturally moderate GOP districts by presenting themselves as pragmatic centrists. But if the previous ten years had taught Washington anything, it was that the louder, more ideological voices rise to the top.

  Not surprisingly, as the new House majority settled in, it was the likes of Tlaib and her fellow Democratic Socialist, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who dominated the conversation about the party’s direction. Ocasio-Cortez was especially effective in moving the Overton window, more so than any incoming Democratic lawmaker in at least a generation if not much longer. After Ocasio-Cortez was ridiculed for suggesting a top tax rate of 70 percent on a narrow slice of multimillionaire earners, a number of public polls showed widespread support for the idea, including among Trump’s own blue-collar supporters.2

  “She’s got talent. Now, that’s the good news,” Trump says of Ocasio-Cortez. “The bad news: She doesn’t know anything. She’s got a good sense—an ‘it’ factor, which is pretty good, but she knows nothing. She knows nothing. But with time, she has real potential.”

  Other Republicans were less sanguine at seeing the Democratic Party lurch leftward in response to the GOP’s decade-long drift toward the right. “What I hope is that thirty years from now, your children are reading that this was an aberration,” Bob Corker, the Tennessee senator, said before leaving office. “But as of now, I am worried both sides of the political aisle are moving toward unacceptable extremes—Republicans toward authoritarianism by not appropriately pushing back on executive overreach and Democrats toward socialism.”

  It’s imperative to assess Trump not as the cause of a revolutionary political climate, but as its consequence; the forty-fifth president’s election was the by-product of a cultural, technological, and socioeconomic convulsion that bred disparate yet interconnected strands of populism on both the right (Tea Party) and the left (Occupy Wall Street). Maybe those fatigued Americans pulling for moderate Democrats to take things back to “normal” are fooling themselves. Maybe there’s no “normal” to which America can return.

  The tactical case for Democrats to hug the middle, in the short term, is the Electoral College: Trump’s path to reelection is even narrower than it was in 2016. Once-competitive states such as Virginia and Colorado are off the map; and even states that he carried, such as Arizona and North Carolina, might prove difficult to hold. Trump’s strategy is centered on the same trio of Rust Belt states that won him the presidency: Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Without one, he’s in trouble; without two of them, he’s almost certainly defeated; without all three, there is no scenario for his reelection.

  Recognizing this, Democrats such as Slotkin and Phillips came into office with a message: The party didn’t need to veer far left, abandoning the persuadables in Middle America that they won over in 2018. It didn’t need to run up its margins in blue states to take back the White House.

  “In Michigan, I know a lot of people who voted for Barack Obama and then voted for Donald Trump. And they tell me, ‘You know, my life hasn’t gotten better from Bill Clinton, George Bush, Barack Obama. I’m like a stage-four cancer patient, and Donald Trump is my experimental chemo,” Slotkin says. “We need to hear that as Democrats. A lot of people felt like, last cycle, that Donald Trump was the only one talking about the issues that dominate their lives: their job, how much money they make. . . . If we can’t address those things, we’re not going to win. We don’t deserve the Midwest vote if we can’t talk about those things.”

  It sounds good in theory. But the gravitational pull of a party’s base can render resistance futile. Phillips, who flipped the suburban Twin Cities district held by Republicans since 1960, said on the Sunday before the election that he wouldn’t vote for Pelosi as Speaker—in part to push back against the stereotype of Democrats a coastal party.

  And yet, on January 3, in the first vote of their congressional careers, Phillips and numerous other freshmen Democrats supported Pelosi’s return to the speakership. In fairness, nobody was running against her, and the promised wave of widespread opposition never materialized. Still, the decision of some Democrats to renege on a core campaign promise in the opening hours of the new Congress reflected the same instinct toward self-preservation that over the previous decade had eroded the institution and left voters feeling cheated by politicians.

  “No one here is pure. Every group has their own agenda. When new people come to Congress and ask for my advice, I tell them to do what they told their voters they were going to do,” says Raúl Labrador, the retiring Freedom Caucus congressman whose time on the front lines of the Republican civil war holds valuable lessons for the Democrats.

  “As long as you keep your promises, you’
ll at least have your integrity. I think some people lose their soul here. This is a place that just sucks your soul. It takes everything from you.”

  WHATEVER RELIEF REPUBLICANS FELT AT SEEING THE LEFTWARD TRAJECTORY of the opposition party, Democrats were just as elated to witness the GOP’s lack of course correction after its mauling in the midterms.

  Heads fully submerged in the sand, leading Republicans rejected the notion of a widespread political reorientation in the age of Trump, insisting that the 2018 results foretold no long-term threat to the party. This was voiced most naïvely by Tom Emmer, the new chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, who told National Journal after the election, “There’s a narrative that people are trying to build out there that somehow there’s been this shift, this political realignment in the suburbs. That’s not true. It isn’t there.”

  To be clear: It was true. It was there.

  Just as the 2010 election saw the purging of Congress’s “Blue Dogs,” coinciding with Democrats losing their foothold in rural America, 2018 saw the annihilation of Congress’s moderate Republicans, coinciding with the GOP’s presence fading in the suburbs from coast to coast. This was the definition of a realignment: Democrats flipped two-thirds of the GOP-held House seats with the highest median incomes, according to the Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman, while flipping just 6 percent of the GOP-held seats with the lowest median incomes.3 When the final results had been tabulated, Republicans were left representing just two of the thirty congressional districts with the most college degrees.

  For anyone doubting the ramifications of this, or the reality of a “Blue Wave” in 2018, consider that Democrats won nearly 9 million more total votes in House elections than Republicans, breaking the record set in the post-Watergate midterm of 1974.

  The GOP’s pain was felt far beyond the Beltway. Democrats flipped 7 governor’s mansions, 7 legislative chambers, and nearly 400 state legislative seats. The vast majority of these victories were on the strength of a mass resurgence in America’s metropolitan expanses.

  In Wisconsin, for example, Governor Scott Walker lost his bid for a third term by a single percentage point—after winning by 6 points in 2014. The reason: While his performance improved in the rural middle and northern parts of the state, his numbers dropped by double digits in the suburbs of Milwaukee and Madison.

  The implications were straightforward. Republicans already faced an existential threat because of their anemic support from minority voters, and specifically Hispanics, the fastest-growing bloc of the electorate. In a presidential contest, bleeding the support of college-educated white suburbanites to boot would make the party’s electoral math unworkable.

  The GOP’s challenge wouldn’t be just with suburbanites writ large, but with women in particular. And its dismal performance among female voters could not be distinguished from its exclusion of female lawmakers: The new Congress convening in 2019 saw a record-setting 102 women serving in the House—but just 13 were Republicans. That number was nearly cut in half from the previous Congress, when 23 women served in the House GOP.

  This was a challenge that Elise Stefanik, one of the party’s young standouts, was desperate to address. Leading the NRCC’s recruitment efforts for the 2018 election, Stefanik, a former Bush administration official representing upstate New York, found it “very, very difficult to recruit women candidates” to run for Congress. “This was a problem pre-Trump, and it’s going to be a problem post-Trump,” she said, “Although, it’s been exacerbated by the president’s rhetoric.”

  Stefanik knew, however, that her party’s problems run deeper than its showing with any single demographic group. The congresswoman was witnessing in real time the outgrowth of the “isms” that her former boss, President Bush, once warned of. “There will be a post-Trump era,” she said. “And I think there’s going to be a new generation of voices in the Republican Party that push back on some of the trends we’ve been seeing—the isolationist, anti-trade, anti-intellectualism trends that are not moving us in the right direction.”

  The old generation might have its say, too.

  On New Year’s Day, forty-eight hours before he was sworn in to serve his freshman term, Senator-elect Mitt Romney penned an op-ed in the Washington Post that sent shockwaves through the capital city. Explaining that while he agreed with many of Trump’s policy decisions, and declaring that he would not “comment on every tweet or fault,” Romney warned, “With the nation so divided, resentful and angry, presidential leadership in qualities of character is indispensable. And it is in this province where the incumbent’s shortfall has been most glaring.”

  Trump was disgusted. He recalls a conversation with Romney, during the interview for secretary of state, when he told him, “if only you spent the same energy” against Obama in 2012 as he had opposing Trump in 2016, he would have won the presidency for himself. “But he only wants to play hardball against me,” Trump says, rolling his eyes. “Romney had too much respect for Obama.”

  Trump scolded the incoming senator on Twitter, urging Romney to be a “TEAM player” and help Republicans “WIN!” But for Romney, winning wasn’t merely about legislative conquests and electoral triumphs; it was about the government projecting moral leadership, providing an example of comity and dignity for the rest of the country to follow.

  For some, these notions were long since irrelevant. To support Trump meant to ignore or justify all that he said and did—period.

  This continued to manifest itself most entertainingly on the religious right. As the government shutdown spilled into January, Robert Jeffress, the Dallas pastor who had railed against Romney’s Mormonism in 2008 and 2012, told Fox News that the president’s tactics were warranted because “The Bible says even heaven itself is going to have a wall around it.” Around that same time, Jerry Falwell Jr. told the Washington Post Magazine that it was a “distortion” to say America “should be loving and forgiving” because Jesus taught such things. “In the heavenly kingdom the responsibility is to treat others as you’d like to be treated,” Falwell Jr. said. “In the earthly kingdom, the responsibility is to choose leaders who will do what’s best for your country.”

  Not all churchgoers and committed Christians were so unblushingly apologetic for Trump. But over his first two years in office, no group had debased itself quite like their foremost clerics.

  “These evangelical [leaders] are the biggest phonies of all,” says Michael Steele, the former party chairman. “These are the people who spent the last forty years telling everyone how to live, who to love, what to think about morality. And then this motherfucker comes along defiling the White House and disrespecting God’s children at every turn, but it’s cool, because he gave them two Supreme Court justices. They got their thirty pieces of silver.”

  There were indicators of progress inside the GOP, however halting and long overdue.

  In the middle of January, as the shutdown raged on, McCarthy took a step that should have been taken years earlier: stripping Steve King of his committee assignments.

  The Iowa congressman had been making thinly veiled racist comments for at least a decade. And his rhetoric had grown that much bolder since the election of Trump: speaking of “cultural suicide by demographic transformation”; meeting with members of a far-right, Nazi-founded Austrian party; endorsing a self-avowed white nationalist for mayor of Toronto; and warning, “We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.”

  But it wasn’t until he finally, fully removed the veil that Republicans felt compelled to act. “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization—how did that language become offensive?” King said in an interview with the New York Times.

  When it was published in January, the House of Representatives voted 424 to 1 in favor of rebuking King; the lone dissenter was a Democrat who wanted King formally censured. Meanwhile, the party’s leadership removed King from his committees. This would essentially make him useless to his consti
tuents; not taking any chances, Iowa’s GOP leaders worked behind the scenes to promote a challenger in the upcoming 2020 primary, a state lawmaker with big donors and deep roots in the Fourth District.

  But none of this guaranteed King’s defeat: At his first town hall meeting back home after the hullabaloo in Washington, he received a standing ovation.

  THE SHUTDOWN WAS A FITTING CONCLUSION TO THE REPUBLICAN PARTY’S unified ownership of Washington—and a most appropriate beginning to the era of divided government.

  “The Wall” had become such an all-eclipsing rhetorical commitment for Trump, both to his base and to the skeptics who questioned his ability to build it, that the president made little effort to understand the policy itself. Nobody who had studied the southern border, Republican or Democrat, thought a physical barrier across the entirety of it, or even much of it, made sense.

  “A wall from sea to shining sea is the single most expensive and single least effective way to secure the border,” Will Hurd, the Republican congressman and former CIA agent, said after Trump took office.

  Hurd would know: His district, stretching from San Antonio to El Paso, includes more of the U.S.-Mexico border, 820 miles, than that of any member of Congress. A national security hawk who studied and lived the border issue every day, Hurd reached the conclusion that a wall simply wasn’t going to work. Traffickers would tunnel under or climb over. There were a few urban stretches, perhaps forty or fifty miles in all, where see-through fencing would be effective and necessary. But a physical barrier wasn’t remotely the catchall solution Trump claimed it was.

  What Hurd offered on behalf of experts on the ground: cutting-edge fiber optic cables and high-definition cameras across the border, monitored by a beefed-up border patrol, that would funnel the flow of drugs and migrants into the legal ports of entry. There, at border inspection stations, the federal government would invest billions of dollars in new technologies capable of screening for the people and products Washington wanted to keep out.