The Wilderness

by McKay Coppins

  “Everyone who works for Ron hates Rand,” one of the few operatives who stayed close to both Pauls told me. And while Ron may not have shared his loyalists’ animosity toward his son, he could have shut down their trolling any time he wanted to. He didn’t.

  Rand, meanwhile, surrounded himself with political pros whose explicit mission was to save the senator from following in his father’s footsteps. Many of Rand’s advisers had worked for Ron in the past, and while they admired his philosophy, they were all too aware of the self-defeating instincts and politically poisonous ideas that might be lurking in Rand’s genetic inheritance.

  To protect the senator from his own Paulian pathologies, they tried to institute safeguards. For a time, they kept his Twitter password locked away in a filing cabinet, available to only a select group of trusted staffers and hidden from the senator himself. Whenever Rand wanted to tweet something, he would have to send the proposed message to Stafford or another aide. Ostensibly, the process was put in place to give Rand plausible deniability in the unlikely case of a hack or an Anthony Weiner–esque misfire by someone with access to the account. But his social media guardians were also filtering for crazy talk that sounded too much like dear old Dad.

  Their concerns weren’t unfounded: when Rand used his non-password-protected mouth to communicate, he had a conversational habit of sliding into far-fetched speculation in a manner that could come off as weird and a little nutty, rather than good-natured and gossipy. Once during an off-the-record chat over drinks with a few Washington reporters, the senator matter-of-factly informed them that Hillary Clinton was not going to run for president in 2016.

  How do you know? the puzzled journalists asked.

  “Because I’m an ophthalmologist and I know what those glasses mean,” he said, apparently referring to the eyeglasses Clinton briefly wore after suffering a concussion in 2012.

  The reporters pressed him to elaborate, but he would only respond by instructing them, somewhat mysteriously, to “Google it.” When they did, they found an outlandish right-wing rumor—widely debunked by mainstream news outlets—that cited Clinton’s glasses as proof that she was concealing serious brain damage. Conspiracy theories, it appeared, were a Paul family pastime.

  Inside Rand’s circle, the senator’s father was treated like a kook who needed to be carefully handled. His status as a libertarian cult hero made it necessary for Rand’s team to maintain at least an illusion of reverence, lest they further damage their already tenuous relationship with grassroots libertarians. But behind closed doors, Rand’s aides generally talked about Ron in terms ranging from irritation and wariness to outright mockery and derision.

  One of Rand’s strategists even speculated that Ron might have Asperger’s syndrome, citing his bizarre interpersonal style and his apparent inability to make friends over the course of his long career on Capitol Hill. And a senior staffer in Rand’s Senate office said that after years of trying to dissect the father-son dynamic, he was left stupefied by Ron’s antagonism toward his son’s career.

  “He should be proud of Rand, but he’s not,” the staffer said. “It’s a really weird relationship.”

  The growing political chasm between his dad and himself took a personal toll on Rand. For his entire life, he had idolized his father and labored ceaselessly for his approval. When he went to medical school he chose his dad’s alma mater; when he got engaged he asked his dad to serve as his best man. In the dedication to one of his books, Rand wrote, “From the age of eleven, I followed my father everywhere. I listened to every speech and interview, thousands of them. Are individualists born or nurtured? I think I was both.” If, as the pop psychologists like to say, every man is motivated by either defiance of his father or a desire to make him proud, Rand was firmly in with the second lot. They were different people, of course, with distinct sets of opinions and beliefs. But they shared the same foundational philosophy—and when Rand decided to go into politics, he was inspired, in part, by the chance to light up the American sky with the flame his father had first lit.

  Of course, to achieve that kind of mainstream influence, Rand had to create some political distance between himself and his dad’s world—fire a family friend here, scrub his website of a libertarian reading list there. He didn’t like doing this stuff. In fact, it often left him feeling conflicted and guilty and defensive. But he thought of these as relatively small compromises—not betrayals, but bricks being laid in a monument to his father’s ideas. Surely Dad could understand that—right?

  Neither of the Paul men was particularly chatty, and there wasn’t much soul baring during their occasional phone calls, but most of the time Rand sensed that his father understood and appreciated what he was doing. Then Rockwell or one of the other kamikaze libertarians in his dad’s inner circle would fire off a passive-aggressive tweet or mouth off in an interview, and Rand would have to consciously ward off the wounded feeling that he had let down his dad. “It’s hurtful,” said one of Rand’s aides, describing how the senator reacted to the hostility from Ron’s corner.

  The relationship appeared volatile enough that by the end of 2013, more than one of Rand’s aides believed that he and his father would be estranged if not for the need to keep up appearances.

  When I asked Rand’s older brother, Ronnie, one day about the apparent rift in the House of Paul, he acknowledged that the political differences between his dad and his brother had grown sharper recently, but insisted that they weren’t the source of any family drama. His dad, he said, was an ideological visionary, while his brother was effectively an incrementalist. “But they are both going to the same place.” The day we spoke, Ronnie’s daughter was preparing to get married at a ceremony in Lake Jackson. He said, “At the end of the day, Rand’ll be there for the wedding, and we’ll all be together. We’ll talk about gardens, and who’s the best golfer… They’re father and son. They always have been, always will be.”

  Nonetheless, the cold war between the two Paul camps eventually grew so combustible that Rand’s office dispatched Jesse Benton to talk to Ron about toning things down. Benton was working full-time for Rand by this point, but after serving on two of Ron’s presidential campaigns (and marrying one of his granddaughters along the way) he was considered the most logical envoy.

  Benton knew they would never be able to muzzle Ron, but he thought if he could persuade the old man to keep his public commentary restricted to policy rather than politics—and call off the Paulite freedom fighters, who were actively working to sabotage Rand—they could avoid a full-out nuclear war between the two sides.

  Already, some in Rand’s orbit were discussing how they might manufacture a “Sister Souljah moment” for the senator—politico-speak that referred to a well-known incident in 1992 when Bill Clinton sharply denounced a controversial rapper to signal his break with the Far Left. Though no one brought it up with Rand because they knew how personally he took the politics of the paternal, some on his team believed there would come a moment in 2016—maybe in the primary, maybe in the general election—when he would have to publicly and ruthlessly repudiate his dad in order to win.

  Benton dreaded the idea of such a clash—if for no other reason than the agonizing awkwardness it would cause at his in-laws’ family reunions—and he was eager to do what he could to de-escalate the conflict. But he also knew that no matter what he did, the nuclear option wasn’t coming off the table anytime soon.

  “If we thought it was an insurmountable problem, we would shut it down,” Benton said of Ron. “But for now, we think we can deal with it.” Besides, as Rand was about to discover, the political hazards lurking outside of his family were much more dangerous to his presidential prospects.

  Late one day in November 2013, Rand stood surrounded by a coterie of confidants in his Capitol Hill office, engulfed in a crisis with the potential to end his career. The senator was sputtering and spitting and sliding into incoherence as he ranted about the bias and bad faith of the character assassins
in the media who were behind this latest unjust assault on his integrity. He was incensed. Furious. Filled with righteous, red-hot rage. And then suddenly, in a fleeting moment of clarity, the words came to him: hacks and haters.

  Hacks and haters! Yes, that’s exactly what these reporters were! A bunch of partisan, no-talent hacks and hopelessly blinkered haters hell-bent on destroying him—and he was going to go on TV and call them out for it.

  For the first time in his young political life, Rand Paul was backed into a corner, and he was going to fight his way out the only way he knew how: by closing his eyes and wildly swinging his fists.

  It had all started a few nights earlier—October 28—on Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC show. Earlier that day, Rand had given a speech about abortion at the evangelical Liberty University that included a lengthy plot description of the futuristic sci-fi movie Gattaca. “In the not-too-distant future, eugenics is common and DNA plays a primary role in determining your social class,” Rand had explained, before warning that America’s culture of elective abortion might lead to a similarly dystopian future. What Maddow and her producers had discovered was that that line—and many more that followed it—was copied practically verbatim from the Wikipedia entry for Gattaca. A grinning Maddow had reported the case of plagiarism with discernible amusement and glee, and closed the segment by pronouncing, “Rand Paul wants to be president. But right now, he’s just lifting whole sections of this Wikipedia page, hoping that nobody’s going to notice, and he can call it his speech.”

  Across the East River from Maddow’s Manhattan studio, Andrew Kaczynski—a political reporter at BuzzFeed with a preternatural talent for Internet sleuthing—noticed. He watched the segment and immediately wondered if the copy-and-paste job was the senator’s first offense. Sitting on a couch in his third-floor walk-up in Queens, it took Kaczynski less than an hour to find a second Rand Paul speech that contained text snatched from Wikipedia. (This one, a June address on immigration, had lifted the wording of the plot summary for the 1988 drama Stand and Deliver.) BuzzFeed published Kaczynski’s story the next day, and a media frenzy quickly ensued.

  Rand’s office tried, futilely, to kill the controversy in the cradle, calling the allegations “trivial” and claiming it was all just a disagreement over footnoting. But it was no use. For all the sins that were tolerated in the political world, plagiarism was considered all but unpardonable. In 1987, when it was revealed that Joe Biden had knocked off parts of a speech from a British prime ministerial candidate, he had to drop out of the Democratic presidential primary in disgrace—and it took him the better part of two decades before he was ready to reenter the presidential arena.

  But while Rand’s advisers understood the seriousness of the charges, the senator himself was convinced he was the victim of a fevered witch hunt. He thought the evidence of his supposed lapse in ethics was outrageously thin and nitpicky. He’d been recapping movie plots in these speeches, not reciting Tolstoy and calling the words his own. He felt certain that if he could just explain this in a neutral setting, his attackers’ petty animus and partisanship would be laid bare.

  Yet when Rand tried defending himself along these lines in an interview with Fusion’s Jorge Ramos a couple of days into Wikigate, he got nowhere. Reporters were still calling, pundits were still bloviating, and his political enemies in both parties were still calling him a thief and a liar. On Thursday, three days after Maddow’s first segment, Politico got in on the action with a story alleging that the senator’s 2013 State of the Union response included language stolen from an Associated Press report.

  The higher the volume got on his critics’ attacks, the more indignant Rand became. Was he seriously supposed to sit sheepishly by as the corrupt, careerist frauds in the political press passed moral judgment on him? When was the last time any of these venal mercenaries stood up for anything other than their own hides? They could call him crazy or radical or dangerous all they wanted—the Pauls were used to such name-calling from the media establishment—but nobody was going to call him unprincipled. By the end of the week, he was so consumed with outrage that he could hardly wait to get on TV and call out the reporters who were pushing this preposterous story. If they wanted a fight, he would give them one.

  “I’m not the biggest guy, but when someone is attacking my honesty, whether it’s a fistfight or a duel, I’m not going to let them get away with it,” Rand told one adviser, who was left half wondering if the senator planned to start showing up at newsrooms with his dukes up.

  Rand announced to his staff that he was going to take down these pathetic bullies during his Sunday morning appearance on ABC’s This Week, and since the language he wanted to use wasn’t FCC approved, “hacks and haters” was the line to beat.

  As his boss blustered, Doug Stafford was beginning to panic. More than any other person in Rand’s office—including Rand himself—Stafford was responsible for the writing that appeared under the senator’s name. Rand, an acid-tongued iconoclast with dogma-defying ideas and a penchant for picking on members of his own party, was constantly in demand—which meant Stafford was constantly writing for him. He wrote at home and on weekends, in between meetings and during dull conference calls, on trains and planes and all throughout the long daily commute from and to his far-flung Virginia suburb. From speeches to essays to op-eds to books, Stafford was in charge of it all—and his corner cutting was now costing them.

  He knew that Rand, loyal to a fault as he was, would never out him as the in-house plagiarist. “This stuff went out under my name,” the senator had insisted when someone suggested fingering a staff scapegoat. But Stafford was queasy about Rand’s plan to go on TV and practically dare the press to dig through every word he’d ever written. Still, he felt powerless to stop him. Those in Rand’s inner circle had never seen their boss quite like this before—so flustered and foolhardy and emotional. They got the sense that trying to talk him down would be akin to hurling their bodies onto the Union Station tracks to stop a speeding Amtrak train.

  Searching for advice, Stafford invited Trygve Olson into the meeting where they were discussing the senator’s planned response, and asked what he thought of the “hacks and haters” line.

  Olson said it would be a risky move.

  “Look, if this is all that’s out there, then you can put that out,” he told Stafford. “But if there’s more plagiarism out there, whether it’s in a book or anywhere else, it’s gonna be a huge fucking problem. It’s going to be just brutal for you.”

  As if on cue, the night before Rand’s scheduled interview with This Week, Kaczynski posted a new story at BuzzFeed revealing that three whole pages of the book Rand cowrote with Stafford, Government Bullies, were lifted word for word from a 2003 Heritage Foundation study. The book’s endnotes cited the study—which dealt with regulatory overreach in lobster harvesting—but made no effort to indicate that the 1,318 words themselves weren’t Rand’s own.

  The new revelation only further inflamed Rand. The next morning, he went on TV as planned, claiming he was “being unfairly targeted by a bunch of hacks and haters,” and declaring, “I take it as an insult, and I will not lie down and say people can call me dishonest or misleading… If dueling were legal in Kentucky, if they keep it up, it’d be [a] duel challenge.”

  While the gentleman from Kentucky publicly challenged him and his Fourth Estate colleagues to a life-and-death gun battle, Kaczynski was busy loading every word he could find of the senator’s into a plagiarism-detecting software commonly used in publishing and academia. Red flags were popping up all over the place. On Monday, Kaczynski posted a story revealing that sections of an op-ed Rand had written for the Washington Times about drug sentencing reform were taken without attribution from a similar article in The Week magazine. The cribbing was egregious enough that the editor of the conservative Times told Stafford that they would have to cancel the regular column Rand had been writing for them. No hard feelings, the editor said, but we do have standards to uphold.<
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  By now Stafford was freaking out. They could no longer argue that this plagiarism nonsense was just the petty obsession of a few ax-grinders. A key ideological media ally—and, frankly, not one known for its Olympian editorial quality—was running away from the senator because of columns everyone in Rand World knew he had written.

  In an act of desperation, Stafford asked Olson, who used to hang out with BuzzFeed’s editor in chief, Ben Smith, when they were both twentysomethings living in eastern Europe, to persuade his buddy to call off Kaczynski.

  But Olson was no longer inclined to clean up Stafford’s messes for him. As much as he liked Rand, he had grown fed up with the calamitous incompetence that kept tumbling out of his office—and he didn’t feel like coddling any of the culprits. He reminded Stafford that he’d warned him not to let Rand go on the attack if there was a chance more plagiarism might surface, and that they did it anyway. Anyone with half a brain could see this was a legitimate story, and he wasn’t going to play along in this embarrassing pageant of mendacity by acting as though it was all an unfair media conspiracy.

  “I don’t have to be a seventh-grade English teacher to tell you that stuff was lifted, and this is plagiarism,” Olson told Stafford sharply.

  Eventually, the coverage did subside (though not until after vast amounts of additional plagiarism were exposed in Government Bullies).

  Desperate to get past the scandal, Rand’s advisers persuaded him to grit his teeth and publicly promise to be more diligent about citations going forward. But Rand remained convinced that he had been unjustly singled out, and he didn’t try to mask his bitterness during interviews. Describing the new speechwriting process his office would implement, he told the New York Times, “What we are going to do from here forward, if it will make people leave me the hell alone, is we’re going to do them like college papers.” Later, while complaining to the National Review about the coverage of the plagiarism story, he griped, “It annoys the hell out of me. I feel like if I could just go to detention after school for a couple days, then everything would be okay. But do I have to be in detention for the rest of my career?”