American Carnage

by Tim Alberta

  Between the indictment of his longest-serving associate and his humiliating defeat at the hands of Pelosi, the president could be excused for feeling low. But his spirits were lifted in no time. The calls came in that night, from Meadows and McCarthy and several other sycophants, cheering Trump and telling him that everything would be fine.

  It was just another day in the Republican Party. If anyone was spooked, or distraught, or disgusted, they did their best to hide it.

  Some lawmakers were less practiced than others.

  Sitting in his new office that Friday afternoon, shortly after the president’s Rose Garden speech, Senator Mitt Romney appeared at a loss. He had devoted his life to order and discipline; the only trace of untidiness was the stack of unpacked boxes near his desk. Romney had dealt with Trump enough to know the inborn chaos he wrought, but nothing had prepared the senator for spending his first three weeks in Washington watching the president self-destruct.

  It was a job he could have had, Romney thought to himself. A job he should have had. A job he would have done with diligence and dignity.

  But there was no time to dwell on that. The freshman senator from Utah had work to do. Standing his ground—and standing up to Trump, when the circumstances warranted—would be easier said than done. Sending tweets and writing op-eds was easy; defying the president, in the face of grinding pressure from party leaders and major donors and voters back home, would be far more difficult. Romney had to tread carefully. Having sold himself as something of a white knight, swooping into Congress to restore balance to the Republican universe, he had two targets on his back: one for the Trump supporters poised to punish his disloyalty, the other for Trump adversaries eager to highlight his hypocrisy the instant he capitulated to Trump.

  Over the past decade, Romney had squeezed into different molds to meet different moments. Now he could find freedom in his true political identity—not the full-spectrum conservative or the out-of-touch elitist, but the sincere, pragmatic, well-intentioned statesman who sees that something is wrong and wants to help fix it. Success would be measured at the margins. He understood that. Romney didn’t come to the Senate believing he could save the Republican Party from itself. But he did take solace in knowing that his six-year term would end in 2024, meaning he would serve at least as long as Trump—and very likely outlast him.

  “He will not be president forever,” Romney said. “Are we changed forever? In some respects, yes. But we’re also going to change again. That’s why, in some respects, I think character matters are of such significance. Because policies come and go. But matters of honor, integrity, civility, respect, family orientation, respect for faith, respect for the Constitution—these things are enduring.”

  Romney had aged. His face was thinner, his presence less commanding, his majestic mane of hair noticeably grayer than it once was. But he still wore that placidly pained expression, the one from when he quit the presidential race at CPAC in 2008, suggesting that something was wrong, and that he had more to say about it.

  “Just remember, we’ve had serious divides in this country before,” Romney said, trying to sound reassuring. Then he chuckled. “But, you know, we had Abraham Lincoln then. Now . . .”

  The smile slowly vanished, his voice trailing off.

  Epilogue

  HE WEARS A WOOLEN BLUE VEST, A WEEK-OLD BEARD FLECKED WITH early hints of gray, and the look of a man liberated from the cruelest of confinements.

  Not long ago, Paul Ryan was the most powerful lawmaker in the United States. Now there is nothing left to denote his significance, just a plainclothes member of his Capitol Police detail leaning against the wall and chomping on a Jimmy Johns sandwich, waiting for his assignment to expire for good in another week. The former Speaker has been content to fade into relative anonymity. Everyone knows him here in Janesville, of course, but they’re past the point of treating him any better or worse because of it. Ryan can exhale. No more legislators to babysit; no more presidential Twitter tantrums to abide. He is now a full-time dad who can enjoy his kids’ high school years from the comforts of home while collecting six-figure honorariums for forty-five-minute speeches and plum stock options for the hardship of sitting on corporate boards.

  Yet Ryan is not at peace. Whatever relief he feels in retirement is tempered by the nagging sense that something is gravely amiss with the government, and the party, he left behind. Revel though he may in the “legal substance that stands a longer test of time”—a restructured tax code, a bigger military, a conservative judiciary—Ryan’s grimace gives him away. He knows the foundational tremors that have shaken Washington portend consequences farther reaching than any doubling of the standard deduction. Worse, try as he might to ignore his own agency in the poisoning of our body politic, Ryan knows he could have done more to supply antibodies.

  It’s this sense of guilt—or fear, perhaps a bit of both—that now animates the former speaker. Sitting in his political office, on the third floor of a brick building on Main Street in Janesville, Ryan attempts to diagnose what went wrong.

  “What people will think about, read about, which gets all the attention, is this wave of populism. This disruptive populism, which feeds off identity politics, is what’s harmful and hurtful and dark,” he says. “But it’s more of an indictment on culture and the deinstitutionalization of society. I think technology combined with moral relativism [has] basically blown up norms, including civility in civil society and moral truths. And it’s a weaponized system that tears at the institutions that have given us this free society we’ve enjoyed for over a couple hundred years.”

  Ryan believes “the real test of our generation” is to “figure out how to re-institutionalize and rebuild these guardrails.” This, he insists, cannot be achieved by government. Rather, it falls to the governed, the voters of all partisan affiliations who have shrugged off the coarsening of public life because it reflects their private realities.

  “We’ve gotten so numbed to it all,” Ryan says. “Not in government, but where we live our lives, we have a responsibility to try and rebuild. Don’t call a woman a ‘horse face.’ Don’t cheat on your wife. Don’t cheat on anything. Be a good person. Set a good example. And prop up other institutions that do the same. You know?”

  Americans may not want to hear these prescriptions from Ryan, believing that he was part of the problem rather than part of the solution. And he may not disagree: Indeed, a principal reason that Ryan quit is that he found it impossible to set that good example from inside Congress. The incentive structures are too warped, the allure of money and fame and self-preservation too powerful, for individuals to change the system from within. Things were trending in that direction long before Donald Trump moved in down Pennsylvania Avenue, and the hastening on his watch has rendered the modern Congress—and the modern GOP—a relic of its former self.

  “The old meritocracy is dead,” Ryan says. “You can leapfrog good deeds. You can leapfrog earning success. You can leapfrog being a good person, even, and shortcut your way toward the top of the political pile because you’re a better entertainer. You’re better on Twitter, you have better followers. Hits, clicks, eyeballs, ratings.”

  He continues, “There were a couple people who did it early, saw the curve, jumped it, tapped the vein. There were a million mini-me’s that said, ‘Well, shit, if this freshman senator from Texas can do it, I can do it. . . .’ And then you had the big gorilla of Donald Trump, the force that he is, just beat them all at the same game.”

  Regarding the new Democratic majority in the House, and its social-media sensation, freshman New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the former Speaker adds, “They’ve got this with AOC. They’ve got the same damn thing. It kind of concerns me. I mean, I sort of wish they were being the governing party and holding up standards. But they’re going to have the same problem we have.”

  Well, not necessarily. A renegade rank-and-file member of Congress is hardly the same as a renegade president. Moreover, it
’s an open question whether the Democratic Party is reborn in the populist, convention-shattering mold of Ocasio-Cortez. On the Republican side, that question has been asked and answered.

  For a long stretch of the 2016 campaign, Ryan refused to accept Trump’s takeover of the GOP. He traversed the stages of grief: denial (no way can Trump win), anger (“I called him a racist!”), bargaining (the RNC PowerPoint slides), and depression (“This is fatal,” he told Reince Priebus) before finally coming to terms with it. This resistance was grounded in a basic belief that the Republican Party was still his party.

  Looking back, Ryan says, he should have known better. Having considered the converging political, cultural, and socioeconomic events of the twenty-first century and reflected on them in the context of historical intraparty ideological swings, he recognizes now that the American right was primed, even overdue, for revolution.

  “Trumpism is a moment, a populist moment we’re in, that’s going to be here after Trump is gone. And that’s something that we’re gonna have to learn how to deal with,” Ryan says. “I’m a traditional conservative, and traditional conservatives are definitely not ascendant in the party right now. Trump’s clearly an indicator of that. But I remember in the early nineties, when I was working for [Jack] Kemp and [Bill] Bennett, we were called neocons back then. And neocons weren’t just guys who wanted to invade Iraq; neocons were free-trade, free-market, supply-siders who were also strong on national defense. And then there were the paleocons, which was the Pat Buchanan wing. And the paleocons were kind of what you have now: isolationist, protectionist, and kind of xenophobic, anti-immigrant.”

  He continues, “We called our wing ‘the growth wing,’ and we won for a good twenty years. And now their wing is winning. But it’s cyclical. We beat the paleocons in the early nineties; they’re beating us now.

  “The Reagan Republican wing beat the Rockefeller Republican wing,” Ryan shrugs. “And now the Trump wing beat the Reagan wing.”

  ELIZABETH WARREN TRIED TO PLAY THE GAME BY THE PRESIDENT’S rules.

  Haunted by her past habit of identifying in academia as a Native American and, more recently, by Trump’s jeering cries of “Pocahontas,” the Massachusetts senator hoped to neutralize the issue ahead of her campaign for the presidency. Weeks before the 2018 elections, Warren released the results of a Stanford DNA study revealing that she likely had an indigenous ancestor between six and ten generations back, making her anywhere from 1/64 to 1/1,024 Native American. The carefully choreographed rollout—a sleek web video, an exclusive in the Boston Globe—reflected a confidence among Warren and her political advisers that they would not only squash the controversy but wield it on the offensive against Trump.

  That confidence was sorely misplaced. At a moment of hypersensitivity on the American left regarding matters of identity, Warren’s move invited only more skepticism of her past claims—and of her contemporary political judgment. Progressive activists, particularly those of color, hammered her for conflating a genealogist’s statistic with a minority’s life experience. The Cherokee Nation, which Warren did not consult in advance, slammed her stunt as “inappropriate and wrong.” Media outlets that otherwise might have considered the story stale dug deeper; sure enough, days before her February campaign launch, the Washington Post unearthed a State Bar of Texas registration card from 1986 listing “American Indian” as Warren’s race, in her handwriting.

  By this point, Warren had already felt compelled to apologize—first to the Cherokee Nation, then to swarming reporters in the Capitol, and then to voters in Iowa on her pre-launch swing through the state. “I am not a person of color,” she said in Sioux City, responding to an irritated caucus-goer who demanded to know why Warren had given Trump “fodder” with the DNA test.

  (She wasn’t alone in seeking absolution. The opening act of the Democratic race featured a rotating confessional of candidates declaring their past transgressions: Joe Biden for his touchy-feely interactions and his labeling of Mike Pence as a “decent guy”; Kamala Harris for her tough-on-crime policies as a California prosecutor; Bernie Sanders for the sexual harassment complaints against some of his 2016 campaign staffers; Beto O’Rourke for his white privilege and for joking about his wife raising their kids while he campaigned.)

  The entire episode—Warren’s tone-deaf revelation, the backlash, and her apology—demonstrated once more the folly of fighting Trump on his own turf. A veritable graveyard of Republican presidential candidates stands in testament to his supremacy in the realm of the superficial.

  But the line between engaging Trump on substance and being sucked into the vulgarly personal is impossibly thin.

  Nearly all the Democratic 2020 hopefuls, for example, envision a more ambitious role for the government in health care than what Barack Obama created with the Affordable Care Act. And many of them support the idea of a single-payer system, eliminating the private insurance market entirely, a position that was considered fringe within the Democratic Party a few years ago. Meanwhile, most of the candidates have also embraced some combination of stances—free college, student loan forgiveness, third-trimester abortion access, reparations for slavery, voting rights for incarcerated felons—that are suddenly and controversially animating the Democratic base.

  These are signs of dwindling ideological diversity within the party. And it may not matter: Elections in modern America are won principally by mobilizing the base, not persuading the middle. There is ample reason to believe, then, that Democrats can reclaim the White House by pushing unapologetically leftward.

  There is also ample reason to believe that this plays right into Trump’s strategy. The president wants nothing more than to “put socialism on trial” in 2020, as Kellyanne Conway says, drawing the brightest possible distinction between the hammer-and-sickle Democrats and the stars-and-stripes Republicans. This isn’t about ideas. It’s about image. Trump is far less skilled at debating policy than he is at denigrating opponents; the more extreme their policies are perceived to be, the less work he has to do to combat them. It’s hard enough to defend a comprehensive government takeover of health care; it’s even harder while being slimed as ugly, dumb, or un-American. Keeping one’s focus is far easier aspired to than accomplished. Just as he lured Hillary Clinton into talking about “deplorables,” just as he baited Warren into releasing a DNA test, just as he provoked Biden into a macho war of words about physical toughness, Trump is planning to make a Democrat beat him at his own game, using the left’s political anger and ideological energy against its nominee. This is tactical but also deeply nihilistic: The president knows that even if he loses such a contest, his opponent does, too.

  “Within the Democratic Party, I think there is a big debate about how to deal with Trump because he has no boundaries,” says David Axelrod, Obama’s former chief strategist. “He’s willing to do anything and say anything to promote his interests. It’s a values-free politics; it’s an amoral politics. And so, there is this body of thought that you have to fight fire with fire and so on. But I worry that we’ll all be consumed in the conflagration.”

  TRUMPISM CAN BE UNDERSTOOD AS A CAUTIONARY TALE: THE CYNICISM and the belligerence, the political disruption and the societal wreckage, the heightened distrust of government and the lowered expectations among the governed. These are not the symptoms of a healthy governing entity. Given the toxicity of his time presiding over it, Trump may well be remembered as the president who destroyed the Republican Party.

  “Or maybe,” says Tony Perkins, the Family Research Council president and onetime Trump skeptic, “he’ll be remembered for saving it.”

  If that sounds crazy, consider the principal complaints about the prior iteration of the GOP. It was pacified. It was insular. It was disconnected from the concerns of everyday voters. It was fragile and apathetic and utterly without conviction.

  Enter Trump. He spoke in ways that channeled the angst of forgotten Americans. He campaigned in ways that exposed the impotence and indiffere
nce of the ruling class. And he governed in ways that were fearless, prioritizing with single-mindedness his commitments to the few rather than modulating in hopes of gaining approval from the many.

  “People were getting tired of the promises being broken. The party was damaged goods, and he has restored its credibility,” Perkins says. “Trump is one of the few politicians that I’ve seen who’s actually intent on keeping his promises.”

  Loath as Democrats will be to acknowledge it, this may be a blueprint. Over the past half century, progressives have repeatedly failed to effect the sweeping changes reflective of their designation. Even in the case of Obama, who remains enormously popular with the left-of-center electorate, many progressives believe his administration fell woefully short on the issues of immigration, climate change, foreign intervention, and even health care, despite his historic shifting of the public policy debate with the passage of the Affordable Care Act.

  Meanwhile, in his first two years, Trump has accomplished more for Republicans than any individual in three decades. Setting aside everything else—a tax law whose benefits are not fully demonstrated, a host of executive actions that can be easily unwound by a Democratic administration—Trump’s judicial appointments alone have altered the landscape of American life for a generation. As of April 2018, Trump had confirmed one hundred federal judges, far outpacing Obama at the same point in their presidencies. Trump’s rapid makeover of the judiciary included two associate justices of the Supreme Court, tipping its balance decidedly to the right, and also 20 percent of all seats on the federal appeals courts, as Bloomberg Law reported, a percentage that will climb ever higher throughout 2019 and 2020 thanks to a GOP-controlled Senate with lax confirmation procedures and little else to do legislatively.

  It is this “transformation of the courts,” as Mitch McConnell describes it, that rationalizes for many Republicans their backing of Trump. Even those who cringe at his autocratic mannerisms, who moan privately at his social media habits, who worry perpetually about the lasting damage done to national institutions and international relationships, see in him someone who has positioned conservatives for long-term victories on myriad issues that will come before the courts: on abortion, gun rights, immigration, religious expression, privacy, voting restrictions, environmental regulations, and virtually everything else that exists along the political fault lines of modern America. Given how bleak things looked for the GOP at the outset of Obama’s presidency, with his party in unified control of the government and every expectation that Democrats would be the party overseeing this sweeping judicial renaissance, Republicans will take it.