by Tim Alberta
“You have to remember, it was a pretty grim situation at the beginning of this ten-year period,” McConnell says. “When I woke up the morning after Election Night 2016, I thought to myself, ‘These opportunities don’t come along very often. Let’s see how we can maximize it.’”
Republicans have, in many ways, maximized their opportunity with Trump. But at what cost?
THE DANGER IN POLITICAL SPASMS TRANSCENDS PARTISAN CONFLICT. What we see in Trump’s America is not just two parties repelling one another, but their voters living and thinking and communicating in ways alien to the other side.
Marco Rubio has been preoccupied with this phenomenon since departing the 2016 race. Retroactively analyzing, as all the candidates have, what he missed and what could have been done to counter the appeal of Trump, the Florida senator worries that government-sanctioned polarization has dissolved the nation’s basic sense of community.
“Twenty years ago, you and I might disagree strongly on politics, but we’re on the board of the same PTA, and our kids go to the same school, they play on the same sports teams, and we go to the same church on Sunday. I knew you as a whole person,” Rubio says. “Today, we increasingly know people only by their political views—or we just don’t know people unlike [us] at all. And that’s particularly pronounced in urban-suburban settings, where you have people who live blocks away from each other but know very little or nothing about each other. And in fact, they have stereotypes about one another that just reinforce it. You add to that the fact that they don’t interact socially, they don’t interact socioeconomically, they don’t interact culturally, they might not even be consuming the same news and information, and the result is you have people living right next to each other who are complete and total strangers.”
Rubio says he did not appreciate the depths of our national tribalism until he ran a national campaign. Knowing what he knows now, he wishes he spent more time discussing it, appealing to Americans to step out of their silos and repair the societal bonds necessary for government to begin functioning again. At this stage, he worries, it may be too late.
“History didn’t begin in 2001, but for the purposes of this [discussion] it did. Because if 9/11 happened today, I’m not convinced our reaction as a nation would be the same,” Rubio says. “If 9/11 happened today, unfortunately, one of the first things you would hear is the assignment of blame through a political lens. People would need some theory as to why this happened. And that’s true of any major event: hurricanes, school shootings, pandemics. The immediate reaction is we need a political villain. And so, 9/11 was that last unique period of time.”
John Boehner offers a similar analysis. If anything, as dark as it sounds, the former Speaker believes it may take something worse than 9/11 to snap the country out of its self-hatred.
“At some point we’re going to have to realize we’re Americans first, and Democrats and Republicans and conservatives and liberals second. The country is more important than what each of the parties believe in,” he says. “It’s going to take an intervening event for Americans to realize that.”
An intervening event?
“Something cataclysmic,” Boehner responds, gazing upward.
It has been argued that politics is downstream from culture; that elected officials govern in a way that reflects the rhythms of society itself. This is undeniably true. Politicians are reactionaries, not leaders. They achieve and maintain power by responding to public opinion, not by driving it.
Still, it’s difficult to see America finding its way out of this predicament of mass polarization without government setting an example. Boehner likes to say that Congress is “nothing more than a slice of America,” an institution comprising “some of the smartest people” in the country and “some of the dumbest,” “some of the nicest people” and “some that are Nazis.” Because of this, lawmakers are every bit as ghettoized as the people and places they represent, projecting onto Congress the anxieties and divisions that stir their constituents back home.
Biden, who spent three and a half decades in the U.S. Senate before becoming vice president, recalls the glory days that predated social media and talk radio and cable news programming. Back then, Biden says, lawmakers in both parties understood that socializing across the aisle was a significant part of doing their jobs. “It was an era that allowed us to get so much done, because we actually got to know one another,” he says. “We got to know each other’s families; we got to know all about each other. When you know somebody it’s awful hard to dislike them, even when you fundamentally disagree with them. . . . When you know, God forbid, that their wife is going through a bout with breast cancer. Or their son has a serious addiction problem. Or their daughter just lost a baby. You know what I mean? It’s hard.”
He remembers the day his rose-tinted version of Washington ceased to exist.
“At the end of the last year of the administration, I decided to go up to the private senators’ dining room just to sit and have lunch with some of my Republican friends and Democratic friends,” Biden says. “And as I walked in—I realized it doesn’t exist anymore. There’s no place for Republican and Democratic senators to sit down and eat together. I’m being literal. There used to be two dining rooms: The dining room I can take you into as a guest, and the dining room only a senator can walk into. It had two great big conference tables and a buffet. It’s gone.”
Biden barks out a question—“What the hell’s happening, man?”—before answering it himself.
“We’ve stopped talking to one another.”
WITH THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT REOPENED THREE WEEKS INTO THE new Congress, and cooler heads in both chambers prevailing to keep it open, President Trump found himself entering a period of relative calm. No Supreme Court vacancies to fill. No immediate geopolitical crises to confront. No signature policy initiatives to spearhead.
That left him to focus on his reelection efforts. Those efforts, in the opening months of 2019, included declaring a national emergency at the southern border and threatening to close it altogether if Mexico failed to stop illegal crossings; toying with a return to the brutal family-separation policy; proposing that all undocumented immigrants be forcibly sent to so-called sanctuary cities, a stunt that his own aides dismissed as absurd; firing his Homeland Security secretary and purging the department’s leadership; endorsing a contentious lower-court decision to invalidate the Affordable Care Act without any readied replacement plan; and responding to a series of controversial (arguably anti-Semitic) remarks from Ilhan Omar, a Muslim freshman congresswoman, by tweeting a video splicing clips of her speaking with footage of 9/11, accompanied by a caption: “WE WILL NEVER FORGET!”
Two common threads emerged. First, for Trump, these are all tried-and-true methods of mobilizing his supporters. The president’s renewed emphasis on that which galvanized conservatives in 2016—the dangers of immigration, the evils of Obamacare, the potency of us-versus-them nationalism—suggests that Trump’s reelection campaign will look and sound identical to his maiden bid four years earlier.
Second, with a few exceptions, Republicans in Congress did nothing to curb these policy decisions or rebuke the president’s behaviors.
Even in declaring his national emergency at the southern border to seize funding that Congress failed to appropriate—a patently unconstitutional power grab—Trump faced little resistance from the purported party of small government. A dozen Senate Republicans joined with Democrats to overturn the declaration, forcing Trump to issue the first veto of his administration. But the other forty-one Senate Republicans went along with Trump, compromising their credibility and inviting a future Democratic president to invoke similar powers to deal with gun violence or climate change or whatever else garners executive enthusiasms. In the case of those senators facing reelection in 2020, such as Thom Tillis, Ben Sasse, and McConnell himself, the reasoning was straightforward: They needed to stay in Trump’s good graces.
The elemental prerequisite for G
OP lawmakers attempting to keep their job is to stay out of the president’s crosshairs, to avoid antagonizing his supporters back in their states and districts. This requires considerable sacrifices, chief among them ideological consistency. But it’s a small price to pay for another term with a salary of $174,000; fully funded trips around the world; sprawling staffs catering to their every whim; power-flexing appearances on cable television; black-tie dinners and top-dollar fund-raisers and seats at the table with some of the world’s most powerful and well-connected people.
In spite of this culture of allegiance within the Republican Party—enforced through fear, incentivized by proximity to power—Trump still had reason to look over his shoulder.
In late February, America was treated to seven hours of must-see TV when Michael Cohen, the president’s former lawyer, testified in front of the House Oversight Committee.
“I am ashamed because I know what Mr. Trump is,” Cohen said in his opening statement. “He is a racist. He is a con man. He is a cheat.”
The witness did not require much leading. Cohen presented as evidence a personal check from Trump, signed while in office as president, reimbursing him for the hush money paid to Stormy Daniels. He also alleged that Trump told him to lie about the timing of the Moscow building project; that Trump “knew from Roger Stone in advance about the WikiLeaks drop of emails” designed to hurt Hillary Clinton’s campaign; that Trump had prior knowledge of his son’s meeting with the Kremlin lawyer in the summer of 2016; and that Trump lied about his financials (and potentially committed tax fraud) in the pursuit of bank loans. Cohen also warned that if the president lost his bid for reelection, “there will never be a peaceful transition of power.”
Trump’s old admonitions were proving prophetic: The “fixer” was causing him a lot of problems.
Republicans on the panel did not challenge these accusations about the president’s conduct. In fact, they asked hardly any questions about Trump at all. Instead, they took turns attacking Cohen’s credibility, portraying him as a jilted, star-seeking grifter who was headed to jail for lying to Congress already.
They had every reason to do so: The witness was an admitted perjurer, someone whose testimony under normal circumstances wouldn’t be taken seriously. Yet these were not normal circumstances. And for all the reasons to remain skeptical of Cohen, here were powerful members of the legislative branch, presented by a witness with damning claims of misconduct by the head of the executive branch, showing not the slightest interest in examining them.
It was a chilling dereliction of duty. And it was rooted in the same motivation that Cohen says kept him shackled to Trump, doing his dirty work, for the previous decade: a fear of disloyalty.
“I did the same thing that you’re doing now for ten years. I protected Mr. Trump for ten years,” Cohen told the Republicans. “The more people that follow Mr. Trump as I did blindly are going to suffer the same consequences that I’m suffering.”
EXPLOSIVE AS IT WAS, COHEN’S TESTIMONY FAILED TO INFLICT TANGIBLE damage on the president. But it succeeded in further whetting Washington’s voracious appetite for something that could: Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election and Trump’s obstruction of the investigation thereof.
On March 22, 2019, twenty-two months following Mueller’s appointment, the special counsel delivered his report to the Justice Department. The person responsible for digesting it and producing a summary to the public: William Barr, the new attorney general who had been confirmed to the post just a month earlier. For his first two years in office, Trump complained incessantly that Jeff Sessions did not have his back politically. He would find no such fault with Barr.
After forty-eight hours of frenzied anticipation, the attorney general released a brief synopsis of the special counsel’s report. On the question of Russian meddling in 2016—and of potential collusion between Moscow and Trump’s team—Mueller’s findings were straightforward: “[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”
But on the secondary question, regarding Trump’s potential obstruction of justice, Mueller was strikingly less definitive. “[W]hile this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime,” the special counsel wrote, “it also does not exonerate him.”
Barr felt otherwise. After quoting Mueller’s assertion verbatim in his summary memo, the attorney general wrote that he and Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, “concluded that the evidence developed during the Special Counsel’s investigation is not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense.”
The upshot was predictable. “No Collusion, No Obstruction, Complete and Total EXONERATION,” the president tweeted that afternoon. “KEEP AMERICA GREAT!”
Widespread confusion over what the special counsel had uncovered, on top of the seemingly warring conclusions reached by Mueller and Barr, prompted an outcry for the Justice Department to release the entire report. It grew deafening when sources close to the special counsel’s office told the New York Times and the Washington Post that Barr’s summary did not reflect Mueller’s product. (Unbenownst at the time, Mueller himself wrote a letter to Barr complaining that the attorney general’s summary “did not fully capture the context, nature and substance” of the investigation, as the Washington Post later reported.)
The release of the full, lightly redacted special counsel’s report, on the morning of April 18, 2019, could rightly be considered a watershed in presidential history. Drawn from hundreds of under-oath interviews and thousands of documents, digital files, and other investigatory receipts, Mueller’s 448-page report portrayed an administration built on corruption and deceit. It illuminated in jaw-dropping detail the web of lies woven by Trump and his team, the chaos and paranoia consuming the White House throughout Mueller’s investigation, and the president’s multiple efforts to impede its advance.
The probe found that while no Trump campaign officials engaged in a criminal conspiracy with Russia, they were “receptive” to offers of assistance from Moscow—and in fact expected help to arrive.
Mueller found no smoking gun to prove that collusion occurred. There was attempted collusion, as with Trump Jr.’s meeting the Kremlin-linked lawyer after promises of dirt on Clinton (and Roger Stone communicating with WikiLeaks), but not actual collusion. It was a similar story on the question of obstruction.
According to the report, when then–attorney general Jeff Sessions informed the president of the special counsel’s appointment in May 2017, Trump responded, “Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my presidency. I’m fucked.”
The president’s obsessive fear of Mueller’s inquiry prompted him on several occasions to try to thwart it. He pleaded with Sessions to “unrecuse” himself from the Russia probe and redirect the Justice Department’s attention toward investigating Hillary Clinton. He asked his former campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, to strong-arm Sessions into denouncing the special counsel’s investigation. He instructed the White House counsel, Don McGahn, to have Mueller fired.
Had Trump’s subordinates not defied these requests, he almost surely would have been charged with obstructing justice. It was the ultimate of ironies: Surrounded by people who wielded deception as a political shield, Trump was likely spared a criminal referral by their refusal to heed his instruction.
“The president’s efforts to influence the investigation were mostly unsuccessful,” Mueller wrote, “but that is largely because the persons who surrounded the president declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests.”
THE SCANDALOUS NATURE OF THE REPORT—“EVEN AS A LONGTIME, quite open critic of Donald Trump,” observed National Review’s David French, “I was surprised at the sheer scope, scale, and brazenness of the lies, falsehoods, and misdirections detailed by the Special Counsel’s Office”—put congressional Democr
ats in an impossible position.
Launching impeachment proceedings would be a surefire way to energize and unify the Republican Party coming off a thumping in 2018 and heading into a difficult reelection in 2020. Then again, some decisions should transcend politics, and constitutional impeachment exists for a reason: to consider the removal of a president who has engaged in conduct, criminal or otherwise, that is detrimental to the republic.
The argument was somewhat academic. President Trump was not going to be expelled from office—at least, not while Republicans controlled the U.S. Senate.
Even Mitt Romney, who issued the sharpest post-Mueller rebuke of any Senate Republican—“I am sickened at the extent and pervasiveness of dishonesty and misdirection by individuals in the highest office of the land, including the President”—said it was time for Congress to move on. Predictably, as Romney’s GOP colleagues hung him out to dry with their silence, he came under withering attack from the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Mike Huckabee, and other high-profile Trump apologists.
In this sense, Mueller’s report offered a verdict not just on the integrity of President Trump but on the soul of his Republican Party. No matter what turns up—in the congressional hearings probing Trump’s financial entanglements, in the Southern District of New York’s examination of wrongdoing outside Mueller’s purview—the GOP had committed itself to a fully binary view of politics that safeguards Trump’s survival. This was justified not by adherence to principle but by addiction to power: the power to hold office, the power to make laws and influence government, the power to appoint judges, the power to project ideology onto the culture at large, and the power to deny such powers to an opposing party.