by Tim Alberta
Even as Trump came to understand this argument, the White House preferred to push the dichotomy of The Wall, a symbolic contrast between Republicans who wanted to secure the border and Democrats who didn’t. This allowed the two parties to talk past each other, inflating resolvable differences while ignoring easily discovered common ground.
When conservative journalist Byron York pointed out the “supreme weirdness” of the shutdown, indicating the consensus around what many Republicans wanted (fencing in urban sectors, more boots on the ground, technology at ports of entry), George Conway, the Republican lawyer and husband of White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, responded, “Not weird at all. Trump is a master at alienating people he ought to be trying to, and should be able to, persuade. And that’s because he can’t make a coherent argument. He’s incompetent.”
Indeed, it should have been no problem for the president to sell Americans on these ideas, reminding them that Democrats once supported most of them. Instead, his hang-up on The Wall, a “manhood thing,” as Pelosi suggested to her colleagues, left him thrashing about as the shutdown dragged on. There was no happy ending possible. Trump had gone from promising that Mexico would pay for the Wall, to withholding paychecks from federal employees until the U.S. Congress promised to pay for the Wall.
In a meeting with Democratic leaders in the first week of January, Trump threatened to keep the government closed indefinitely—for months, maybe years—until he got his wall money. Then, speaking from the Rose Garden, he said he might declare a national emergency to procure funding for the project.
It was an absurd idea; aside from shattering the principles of limited government, such a maneuver would be immediately tied up in the courts. And, as some Republicans recognized, it was a slippery slope, constitutionally and otherwise. If a Republican president were to seize funding for the purpose of building a border wall, what was to stop a Democratic president from doing the same, but in pursuit of universal health care, or climate change regulation, or whatever else the left might demand?
Moreover, the idea was deeply insincere at an intellectual and ideological level. A national emergency is for emergency scenarios, addressing an urgent problem that can be addressed in no other way. For the previous two years, Republicans had controlled both chambers of Congress. There were a million ways in which appropriators could have shifted numbers around and delivered a steady stream of funding—for the wall, for other security measures, and for the “humanitarian crisis” Trump was now emphasizing. But they didn’t. It had never been an urgent priority for GOP lawmakers, and the president was too ineffectual to convince them otherwise. Now that they had incurred his wrath, many of those same lawmakers were signaling their support for an unprecedented power grab.
“Democrats continue to refuse to negotiate in good faith or appropriate any money for border barriers,” Meadows tweeted on January 11. “If they won’t compromise, POTUS should use asset forfeiture money or other discretionary fees to start construction. If not, he should declare a national emergency. It’s time.”
This was the Freedom Caucus chairman, a leader of the conservative wing of the pro-liberty, small-government party, urging the president to steal private property to build a wall.
Amazingly, Trump continued to listen to the people who had steered him into this cul-de-sac, Meadows and Mulvaney above the rest. One Republican whom Trump never spoke with throughout the crisis: Hurd. Despite being the only Republican from a border district, and representing more of it than anyone in Congress, the Texas lawmaker waited for a call that never came.
Years earlier, when Hurd left the CIA, he did so because of his outrage at the low caliber of people being sent to Congress. He met many of them while working as an agent, tasked with briefing lawmakers during their trips to the Middle East. Some didn’t understand the basic distinction between Sunni and Shia Muslims.
Hurd’s departure from the CIA confounded senior national security officials who saw in him a budding superstar. Robert Gates, the former defense secretary who served eight presidents of both parties, issued the first political endorsement of his entire life when Hurd ran for Congress, and suggested that he expected to see Hurd in the White House one day.
For the time being, however, Hurd was stuck dealing with the same low-caliber politicians—and none more so than Trump. This was the state of the modern GOP: As its president shut down the government because of an irrational fight over building a border wall, he did not bother to have a single conversation with the party’s lone border-district congressman and its foremost expert on the policies in dispute.
“We had twenty-five hundred furloughed workers at a food bank in San Antonio last week. I just served some more of them at a soup kitchen in DC,” Hurd said on January 23. “Here, at the seat of power in the free world, we’re forcing federal employees to eat at soup kitchens, while China just launched a mission to the dark side of the moon.”
THERE WAS AN ERA IN WHICH THE COUNTRY SEEMED CAPABLE OF DISTINGUISHING its policy battles from its cultural clashes; a time when not every newsworthy development, political or otherwise, was filtered through our preexisting worldviews; a recognition that people were defined far more by their personhood than by their party affiliation.
The appetite for this climate remained, as evidenced by the gusher of warm-and-fuzzy responses to the unlikely friendship struck up by George W. Bush and Michelle Obama.
But those days when the default was not to distrust peoples’ motives—when the notion of self-selecting into tribes that lived in the same places, shopped at the same stores, and watched the same news shows would have been preposterous—those days were gone.
More enduring than Trump’s appointment of judges, or his signing of a tax law, or his deregulating of the energy industry, would be his endorsement of America’s worst instincts. The levees were leaky long before he descended his gilded escalator, and certainly other bad actors contributed to the breakage. Yet it was Trump who used his office to flood the national consciousness with fear and contempt, with suspicion and resentment, with ad hominem insults and zero-sum arguments. In so doing, he not only enslaved one half of the country to his callousness, but successfully bade escalation from the other half, plunging all of America and its posterity deeper toward perdition.
Hollywood, naturally, couldn’t help but overplay its hand. Its leading men and women lectured on matters of morality while enabling the vilest of predators in their own industry. Comedian Kathy Griffin, the cohost of CNN’s New Year’s Eve coverage, posted an image of herself holding the fake, bloodied, decapitated head of Trump. Actor Johnny Depp asked aloud of one audience, “When was the last time an actor assassinated a president?” At award shows and galas and film festivals, the pilots of pop culture took turns savaging the president—and, his supporters felt, themselves by extension—in ways that further exacerbated the country’s circular firing squad.
Americans were so cantankerously immersing themselves in extraneous debates that the line between reality and parody began to blur. One such dispute broke out over the toxic masculinity addressed, and possibly exaggerated, in an ad from Gillette, the iconic shaving company. (To the future archeologists picking through the ruins of our society, yes, this actually happened.) Inverting the company’s traditional slogan from “The best a man can get” to “The best a man can be,” the razor empire earned tens of millions of views and sparked a social media cacophony with a spot calling on the male species to evolve. No more bullying. No more whistling at women. No more laughing at sexual humor. And no more . . . boys wrestling with each other in the backyard?
The American fireworks of social indignation were loud and lucent but short-lived, never allowing the aggrieved masses to linger on any given outrage. Sure enough, quicker than you could dial the Dollar Shave Club, a fresh controversy was engulfing the country. It had the three ingredients of a kiss-your-fingertips cultural casserole: race, testosterone, and Make America Great Again hats.
On the
evening of Friday, January 18, video emerged online of a strange confrontation from earlier that day. On the site of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, a group of white teenagers, many of them clad in the president’s iconic red baseball caps, encircled an old Native American man. His name was Nathan Phillips. As he sang and beat his drum, the kids whooped and chanted and danced. The video focused on one of them: Sixteen-year-old Nick Sandmann stood across from Phillips, their eyes locked on one another, Sandmann wearing a mysterious smirk.
Not long after, a second video swept through social media, this one of Phillips describing the events thereafter. “As I was singing, I heard them saying, ‘Build that wall! Build that wall!’” the Native elder said on camera, his voice choked with emotion. “This is indigenous land. We’re not supposed to have walls here.”
Judgments of the junior Klansmen were expeditious. By the next morning, America was ablaze. Not since Charlottesville, it seemed, had a story amassed so much attention in so little time. Click-hungry news outlets blasted out reports of the persecution, stressing how Phillips, a Native American and a Vietnam veteran, had been accosted by a gang of MAGA-clad teens, while a chorus of celebrities, journalists, politicians, and combinations thereof delivered their damning verdicts.
CNN’s chyron called attention to the “Heartbreaking Viral Video,” while the New York Times published a story headlined, “Boys in ‘Make America Great Again’ Hats Mob Native Elder at Indigenous Peoples March.”
The only problem: Nathan Phillips was lying. Nowhere in the hours of footage reviewed by hundreds of journalists could any of the teens be heard saying, “Build that wall!” And it turned out, he was not a Vietnam veteran, a fact that punctured his other principal claim to sympathy.
As more reporters actually did their job, it became obvious that the Covington Catholic kids had gotten screwed. Video clearly showed that, contrary to being racially charged predators, they were the ones preyed upon. The incident had begun with a confrontation between two other groups: Native American activists and members of the Black Hebrew Israelites, an extremist sect and known hate group. As the Covington students looked on, one of the Black Hebrew leaders started calling them “dirty-ass crackers” and threatening to “stick my foot in your little ass.” The provocation escalated, all of it one-sided: Black Hebrew members hurled vile insults at the teenagers, calling them “incest babies” and “future school shooters,” while mocking the pope (“faggot child-molester!”) and Trump (“Your president is a homosexual!”)
Granted permission by their chaperones to perform school-spirit chants in the face of the spewing hatred, the lads partook in some synchronized hooting. It was at this point that Phillips, trailed by his fellow indigenous activists, entered the fray, marching toward the students and pounding on his drum. When he came toe to toe with Sandmann, the sixteen-year-old did not move but merely stared straight ahead, wearing the smirk seen ’round the internet. Maybe he meant to intimidate Phillips; perhaps he was just paralyzed by the strangeness of the moment. Either way, the teenager showed zero sign of outward aggression. None of these facts mattered. Most of the do-gooders who impugned Covington Catholic and its students offered no apology. The fire-and-brimstone tweets would remain active, a testament to America’s unapologetic rush to judgment circa 2019.
It was all so uniquely Trumpian, a supposed atrocity so perfectly suited to the politics of his reign, that the serendipity went largely overlooked.
The president’s ascent had been invited by the right’s unresponsiveness to outrage; his ability to get away with political murder owed to the left’s gratuitous cries of wolf. Now, nearly one month into a government shutdown, America spent the weekend of January 18, 19, and 20 fixated on faux prejudice by some teenagers while the president of the United States was peddling the real thing.
THAT FRIDAY MORNING, HOURS BEFORE THE COVINGTON CATHOLICS came across the Black Hebrews, Trump fired off a tweet: “Border rancher: ‘We’ve found prayer rugs out here. It’s unreal.’” Linking to a story from the Washington Examiner, the president annotated his tweet thusly: “People coming across the Southern Border from many countries, some of which would be a big surprise.”
This was national security intelligence of epic proportions: Muslims, probably from Syria and Iraq and who knows where else, had traveled to Central America, made the arduous journey north into the United States, and finally crossed over, all the while keeping their prayer rugs in tow, only to clumsily leave them on the American side of the border. Now they were busted: An unknown reporter with the conservative Washington Examiner, citing a single unnamed rancher in New Mexico, had blown the story wide open—and the president was reading it.
There were no pictures of the prayer rugs in the Examiner story, a slight curiosity in the age of smartphone cameras. But Trump was not dissuaded, and for good reason. There had been photographic proof before; in the summer of 2014, Breitbart.com published a blockbuster: “MUSLIM PRAYER RUG FOUND ON ARIZONA BORDER BY INDEPENDENT AMERICAN SECURITY CONTRACTORS.” That article showed images of a “prayer rug,” prompting Texas’s lieutenant governor to give notice soon thereafter about Muslim paraphernalia being found on his side of the Rio Grande. He was taken seriously, even though the prayer rug looked a lot like an Adidas soccer jersey. (Upon further examination, it was, in fact, an Adidas soccer jersey.4)
Trump’s tweet was an affront to America herself: The president of the United States was warning citizens that Muslim prayer rugs were being found north of the border, a brazen bit of fearmongering aimed at gaining political advantage amid a legislative fight he was losing in humiliating fashion. The source he consulted before disseminating this information was not the FBI or the CIA or Homeland Security, but a single-sourced Washington Examiner piece with no names attached and no photos of the prayer rug in question.
There were no recriminations from his fellow Republicans for this wildly irresponsible statement. And frankly, even the complaints Democrats lodged seemed to slide quietly into the ether. Everyone had grown accustomed to the president casually floating conspiracy theories like a cabin-secluded uncle on a family email chain. This was just another time America would roll its eyes and move on. Besides, there was a race war at the Lincoln Memorial to worry about.
The tweet showed just how desperate Trump had become.
His shutdown was now the longest in U.S. history and there was not a flicker of light to be found in the tunnel. Democrats were holding fast, insisting that they would not negotiate while federal workers were held hostage; and Republicans on Capitol Hill were increasingly agitated, inwardly angry with themselves but outwardly seething at McConnell and McCarthy for having allowed the president to embarass the party like this.
As a last gasp, Trump offered a deal to Democrats: He would grant work permits to certain migrants for three years in exchange for wall funding. But Democrats had no reason to bite: They had all the leverage, and what the president was suggesting fell short of his own previous offers to extend permanent protections for DACA recipients. Accepting something less to end the shutdown, and thus allowing him to claim victory, made no sense politically or policy-wise.
When Pelosi unceremoniously rejected Trump’s offer, the dam broke inside the GOP. Senators confronted McConnell and told him in no uncertain terms that the shutdown needed to end; they were spinning their wheels in service of the president’s ego while eight hundred thousand federal workers and their families were panicking over the prospect of another missed paycheck.
The majority leader got the message. Assuring the White House that they had no cards left to play, McConnell convinced Trump that they could save face by reopening the government for three weeks. It would give both parties a negotiating window over border security and test whether Democrats were sincere about coming to the table once the government opened up. The president, beleaguered and showing the scantest hint of remorse over the fiasco, agreed.
On January 25, thirty-five days into the shutdown, Trump stood in the
Rose Garden and announced a deal to reopen the government for three weeks. “We really have no choice but to build a powerful wall or steel barrier,” he said. “If we don’t get a fair deal from Congress, the government will either shut down on February 15, or I will use the powers afforded to me under the laws and Constitution of the United States to address this emergency.”
The president was determined to project strength. But there was only weakness to be seen. Everyone watching knew the score. Trump had blinked, caved, folded, buckled, lost. The only person who seemed aloof to this reality was the master negotiator himself, the man who ran for president touting his reputation as a winner, a dealmaker, a driver of hard bargains, only to be repeatedly outsmarted by his oppositon once in office.
Later that night, watching television in the White House residence and growing enraged by the universal assessments of his defeat, Trump tweeted, “I wish people would read or listen to my words on the Border Wall. This was in no way a concession. It was taking care of millions of people who were getting badly hurt by the Shutdown with the understanding that in 21 days, if no deal is done, it’s off to the races!”
It was a most forgettable day for the president. That morning, Trump had awoken to news that Roger Stone, his political trickster and hatchet man, was the latest victim of Robert Mueller’s investigation. Arrested in the predawn hours at his Florida home, Stone was indicted by a federal grand jury on seven counts. They included obstructing the House Intelligence Committee’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election and lying about his communications with WikiLeaks and Trump campaign officials. Stone was also charged with intimidating a witness who was in contact with WikiLeaks’s leader, the Kremlin-backed Julian Assange, during the 2016 campaign.
Stone was being accused of the dirtiest word in Republican politics: collusion.