The Wilderness

by McKay Coppins

  He staggered back to the other side of the room. Why was she speaking in third person? The voice began lashing out violently at the other students, cursing them one by one, exposing intimate secrets, and verbally assaulting them with a personal cruelty that was entirely out of character for Susan. In a frenzy, they fell to their knees and began chanting:

  “Satan, I command you to leave this room!”

  “Satan, I command you to leave this room!”

  Some of them started sobbing, while others cried out for “demons to leave in the name of Christ!”

  Just as they were ready to give up hope, a student leader from Campus Crusade for Christ burst into the room brandishing a crucifix. Someone had called the rival Christian club for advice, and now her presence gave the room energy to keep going. Drawing hope, Jindal reflexively began uttering the Hail Mary—a prayer he had never said before in his life. During his investigation of Catholicism, he had rejected doctrines concerning Mary because they seemed like a form of idolatry. Now, though, it was the only form of prayer he could manage to voice. He said it over and over again, until it became a chant.

  The crucifix seemed to have a calming influence on Susan, and her sister seized the opportunity to start reading verses from the Bible. “At first, Susan responded to biblical passages with curses and profanities,” Jindal later wrote. “[But] mixed in with her vile attacks were short and desperate pleas for help. In the same breath [that] she attacked Christ, the Bible’s authenticity, and everyone assembled in prayer, Susan would suddenly urge us to rescue her.”

  They encouraged Susan to read from the scriptures, but she choked on the sentence “Jesus is Lord.”

  “Jesus is L… L… L…” she tried.

  At last, a breakthrough: “Just as suddenly as she went into the trance, Susan suddenly reappeared and claimed, ‘Jesus is Lord.’ With an almost comical smile, Susan then looked up as if awakening from a deep sleep and asked, ‘Has something happened?’”

  The events of that night toppled the emotional barrier between Jindal and Susan. The next year, they traveled to Europe together as a couple, falling in love as they took in a Viennese opera and walked the streets of southern France.

  Jindal never fully came to terms with what happened that night, but it served to cement his faith in Catholicism and convince him of the reality of supernatural “spiritual warfare.” He also came away with a stronger conviction than ever that people should be free to worship and talk about their faith—no matter how far outside the mainstream it may be—without fear of retribution. Decades later, it would become the bedrock of his political career—and the driving force in his presidential campaign.

  On the night of February 13, 2014, Jindal walked out onto the stage at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library to deliver what had become a highly anticipated speech. In the two months since he had entered the fray of the Duck Dynasty battle, Jindal had become a heroic figure to many on the religious Right. Now he had come to California to issue a dire warning to believers everywhere.

  “The American people, whether they know it or not, are mired in a silent war,” Jindal declared. “It threatens the fabric of our communities, the health of our public square, and the endurance of our constitutional governance.”

  He continued, “The war is waged in our courts, and in the halls of political power. It is pursued with grim and relentless determination by a group of like-minded elites, determined to transform the country from a land sustained by faith into a land where faith is silenced, privatized, and circumscribed.”

  He predicted that it wouldn’t be long before liberals passed laws targeting churches that refused to perform same-sex marriage ceremonies, and he bemoaned the fact that religious business owners were being forced to violate their consciences by serving same-sex couples.

  “Under the Obama regime, the president and his allies are intentional in pursuing these conflicts from the perspective that you must sacrifice your most sacred beliefs to government the instant you start a business.”

  He also spoke up, once again, for the Duck Dynasty family.

  “I defended them because they have every right to speak their minds, however indelicately they may choose to do so. The modern Left in America is completely intolerant of the views of people of faith. They want a completely secular society where people of faith keep their views to themselves.”

  The 4,500-word address was deeply researched, carefully annotated, and thoroughly fact-checked—substantive enough to impress the elites in the room. But the thrust of the speech—its abundant combat metaphors, its description of sinister plotting within the “Obama regime”—was designed to stoke the righteous outrage of millions of aggrieved Christians. Jindal was aiming his message at social conservatives across the country who felt as though the modern GOP—with its sudden insecurity over not being on the “right side of history”—had abandoned them. He wanted them to know that in the governor of Louisiana, they had a champion.

  Jindal had always relished making rigorous, intellectual arguments in defense of his faith, and even though all this had started with a reality TV star popping off with some decidedly ignorant comments, his aides could tell he was enjoying this new role more than many would have guessed. “There is an elitist presumption in the Boston-to-DC corridor that you can’t really be smart and a Christian who believes these things,” one adviser later explained. “Bobby really enjoys taking that on. He says, ‘Throw me in that briar patch.’ I think some reporters look at him and say, ‘Okay, this guy’s really smart, I accept that,’ and in the back of their minds they’re thinking, ‘His parents are from India, so he’s probably good at math, too.’ But they forget something. He’s not from India. He’s from the Deep South. His faith is a big part of him.”

  More to the point, this new tack of his was working. For the first time in a long time, Jindal had conservatives buzzing, fawning, cheering—saying his name.

  PART III

  WANDERING

  Chapter Thirteen

  Coalition Building

  The drive from Jerusalem to the kibbutz by the Sea of Galilee was only supposed to take two hours. But then the rain started falling, and the flash floods started forming, and the hail pellets started ricocheting off the windshield, and before there was time to repent and petition Yahweh for deliverance, rockslides in the West Bank washed out the road, making it impossible to proceed. The chartered bus in which Rand Paul was riding was packed with enough Orthodox rabbis and evangelical ministers that a minor miracle wouldn’t have seemed entirely out of order—a parting of the stream, perhaps, or a small ark to float them across the sinkhole that blocked their path. But today the vengeful God of the Old Testament wanted his tribe to wander.

  As their luxury coach turned around and began its long, slow, winding detour, Rand was reminded briefly of the Bible camp his parents had sent him to as a kid, when the church’s rickety old bus would invariably break down and he and his fellow campers would wind up at a roadside Stuckey’s somewhere, gnawing on Pecan Log Rolls as they waited for the tow truck to arrive. Truth be told, Rand had felt at times during this little excursion to Israel as if he was participating in another obligatory display of prefab devotion—like teenage church camp, but with higher stakes and a nicer bus.

  The trip had been organized and paid for by David Lane, a former Bible salesman who now marshaled millions of born-again activists and clergy in the United States, and had made it his mission to yoke the GOP’s presidential aspirants to the religious Right as firmly as possible. But many of the conservative faith leaders Lane had invited on this trip were suspicious of the curly-haired libertarian in their company, particularly when it came to his views on Israel. Rand’s father, Ron, had spent much of his career in Congress and on the campaign trail raging against the bulletproof nature of America’s alliance with the Jewish state. As an avowed isolationist, Ron strongly opposed U.S. meddling in the Middle East, and as a fiscal libertarian he believed the American government had no
business sending tax dollars to its allies overseas. He was so outspoken over the years that some American Jewish leaders had branded him an anti-Semite. The younger Paul had not been quite so bellicose as his dad on this issue, but he had nonetheless called for putting an end to all U.S. foreign aid payments, including money that went to Israel.

  To the Republican Party’s hawkish donors and foreign policy luminaries—who widely viewed Israel as an essential partner in the global fight for Western ideals and free markets—Paul’s position amounted to political heresy. And to the party’s base of conservative Christians—who fervently believed that the establishment of Israel had been a divine fulfillment of biblical prophecy—his stance looked an awful lot like actual heresy.

  And so here Rand found himself, rolling slowly down a highway somewhere between the sepulcher Jesus escaped from and the water he walked on, trying to keep spirits high while a busload of cold, tired, hungry clergymen silently rendered their judgments of his apostasy. The tone of the trip had been mostly polite and positive up to this point, but now their two-hour bus tour had turned into seven, and some of the senator’s political aides worried that the fragile diplomacy in their little group was at risk of collapsing beneath the weight of frayed nerves and clashing ideologies.

  The tour guide, looking to brighten the mood, suggested a wholesome distraction. “How about a gospel tune?”

  But Rand had a different idea.

  “Do we have ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’?” he called out. “The Guns N’ Roses version?”

  No one on the bus knew whether he was serious at first, and some wondered whether a glam-rock ballad was appropriate for the occasion. But Rand, feeling punchy, wouldn’t let up.

  “Come on!” he shouted. “‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’!”

  Finally, the tour guide tinkered with the bus’s sound system until Axl Rose’s vocals began screeching out of the speakers.

  “There we go!” Rand exclaimed, before gleefully belting out the lyrics: Knock-knock-knockin’ on heaven’s doo-oo-oor!

  “We need to change the name of this bus,” Rand declared during a pause in his performance. “It’s not the David Lane Tour anymore. It’s the Plague Tour. We’ve got hail, we’ve got darkness—all we need now are the frogs!”

  Bleary-eyed rabbis and ministers dissolved into laughter, and as the high-pitched harmonic squeal of Slash’s guitar solo blared out of the speakers, their bus finally began its descent into the valley where the Sea of Galilee sat.

  It was a quintessential Rand Paul moment—unorthodox, irreverent, and a little bit goofy—but it succeeded precisely because of its eccentricity. By sheer force of personality, he had kept his little tribe together and shepherded them safely to the promised land, if only for a day. The question now was whether he could pull off the same trick for the entire Republican Party.

  The senator’s pilgrimage was one part of a far-reaching, and audacious, bid to answer the single most critical question that faced Republicans as they barreled haplessly toward 2016: how could they rebuild a winning national coalition of voters before the next presidential race?

  Every White House contender in the party had his own theory of the case—the GOP’s primary focus should be to close the gender gap, or convert more Latinos, or recapture the Midwestern blue-collar vote—but Rand’s idea was the most radical. He envisioned a Republican Party whose very molecular makeup was mutated beyond recognition, a party comprising the sort of motley crowds that used to turn up at his dad’s campaign rallies, where young, tree-hugging vegans stood side by side with middle-aged, jerky-chewing gun nuts because they both found something in the libertarian cause to cheer about. Rand believed the 2016 presidential primaries posed a once-in-a-generation chance to make this a reality.

  He knew that his idiosyncratic views meant he would never pass as an archetypal Republican candidate. He was not the Bible-thumper, or the businessman, or the war hero. But he believed that for every one of the disparate tribes in the GOP, there was at least one unique ingredient in his platform that was perfectly suited to their respective political palates. He just needed to give them a taste. This had been the rationale behind Rand’s Israel trip: to show the neocon elites and the evangelical Zionists in his party that even if they didn’t like his views on this issue, surely there was something else he could offer them.

  Ever since his 2013 drone filibuster, Rand had been working on a manifesto that detailed his vision for the “New GOP” he was trying to build. Many in the senator’s orbit had privately urged him to find a different ghostwriter for his upcoming book after the egregious cribbing in his last title set off a media firestorm. But Rand, defiant and loyal as ever, stuck with repentant plagiarist Doug Stafford as his chief scribe. Stafford labored over the manuscript as if it were his own masterpiece: researching, writing, rewriting, carefully—very carefully—compiling citations, submitting the drafts to Rand, and then starting all over again once the senator returned the pages with handwritten notes scribbled across the margins.

  One key passage that emerged from this process would eventually wind up in a chapter titled “Tree Hugger,” in which Rand iconoclastically identifies as a “crunchy conservative” and details his comically cursed efforts to grow a giant sequoia tree in his yard, before describing the subversively pluralistic party he hopes to build.

  The New GOP has a place for those who want to preserve and protect and provide for a cleaner, brighter future for our planet.

  In the New GOP, it will be okay to watch Jon Stewart or read Barbara Kingsolver, perhaps just not both in the same day. In the New GOP, it will be just as admirable to defend the Fourth Amendment as the Second Amendment.

  In the New GOP it is cool to compost, shop at the farmer’s market, and maybe, just maybe, okay to commit civil disobedience and drink raw milk transported across state lines… That’s the GOP I hope to lead.

  As soon as these paragraphs came together, they knew they’d found the section that book critics and political reporters would seize on. Rand’s plan was to time the release of the book, called Taking a Stand, to his presidential campaign kickoff, believing it would infuse his candidacy with a high-toned, and even historic, sense of mission that would make his rivals look like the small-ball partisans that they were. But as he entered 2014, Rand’s vision for a new kind of Republican Party suddenly became less abstract—and much more politically urgent.

  Ted Cruz had emerged from his failed crusade to dismantle Obamacare as a fully canonized conservative saint. Less than two weeks after the government shutdown ended, he was stoking presidential buzz in Iowa. Sitting at the head of a ballroom in Des Moines, the Texas senator had bowed his head reverently while a Republican activist pleaded with God to send more principled leaders like Cruz who were willing to “be crucified for their belief system.” Six hundred conservatives sang out their “Amen”s in unison—and just like that, the Tea Party had found its new hero.

  It now seemed clear that Rand’s 2016 presidential bid wouldn’t be able to count on the same alliance of Tea Party conservatives and libertarian activists that had swept him into the Senate. Cruz was leaving little doubt about his presidential aspirations, and he would likely siphon off substantial Tea Party support in the primaries. Rand would have to pesuade a new conservative constituency to unite with his grassroots libertarian fan club.

  But who?

  Inside the senator’s inner circle, a long-standing disagreement about 2016 strategy soon curdled into a bitter divide over how to respond to Cruz’s rise. On one side were the advisers who argued that Rand’s best bet was to bring conservative Christians into the libertarian fold. Stafford was a key proponent of this strategy, as was Rex Elsass, a cigar-chomping media consultant out of Ohio who had gotten enough born-again culture warriors elected over the years to buy himself a private jet. Their hypothesis was that the religious Right—with its unfashionable politics and growing estrangement from the party’s moderate elites—would relate to libertarians’ l
ong-held sense of persecution at the hands of the political class. Rand could win the nomination, they argued, by cobbling together a coalition of Republican outcasts and outsiders.

  But on the other side of the internal divide, Rand’s establishment emissaries were working fastidiously for over a year to build goodwill among the GOP’s megadonors and power brokers—and they balked at what some privately referred to as Stafford’s “Island of Misfit Toys” campaiga strategy. This camp of advisers—led by Olson, Jesse Benton, and Virginia-based GOP fixer Chris LaCivita—believed that Rand could win over the Republican Party’s business wing with his deep ideological commitment to tax cuts and deregulation, as well as his potentially game-changing appeal to younger voters. When it came to courting the denizens of the political establishment, Benton told me at the time, “It really helps that he doesn’t want a culture war.” But if Rand suddenly tried to transform himself into a fire-breathing family values crusader, he would instantly wipe out any inroads he had made with donors and party officials.

  As the debate raged inside Rand’s inner circle, the senator tried to broker peace by insisting he didn’t have to zero in on just one group of voters. After all, if his New GOP was ever going to be nationally dominant, it would need everyone—not just the tattooed libertarians, but the chinos-clad chamber of commerce crowd, and the evangelicals, and the Tea Partiers, and the left-leaning college kids, and probably a good portion of black and Latino voters as well. He was going peddle his pitch everywhere—and he was certain that, given the chance to lay out his vision, none would be able to resist his persuasive powers.

  With grand electoral conquest on his mind—and 2016 on the horizon—Rand hoisted the black sail of his pirate ship and headed for hostile political waters. And if he seemed overly confident in his mission, it was only because he had been here once before, just five years earlier.