But the trouble began the very first day, when a journalist asked the senator if he still thought the United States should phase out aid to Israel given the recent violence in the region. Rand immediately became defensive. “I haven’t really proposed that in the past,” he asserted, before accusing the reporter of misrepresenting his position. The truth, of course, was that cutting aid to Israel—and every other foreign country—had been part of his platform for years. But that had been before he was begging neocon millionaires for super PAC donations every week. In any case, Rand’s answer to the Israel question was widely reported in the news media as a flip-flop.
The next day, Rand was sitting down to dinner at a lakeside tiki bar with King when a couple of young immigration activists confronted the Republican duo—with cameras rolling. Rand politely shook their hands, but when one of the activists began peppering King with questions about his hard-line immigration positions, the senator jumped to his feet and scurried away—leaving his hamburger untouched, and his congressional comrade to fend for himself in what soon became a hostile debate with the activist. When the video of the exchange hit the Internet, Rand was widely mocked for appearing to flee in fear of an opinionated Latina immigrant. (In fact, one of his aides would later tell me, he was fleeing King, because he didn’t want to get caught sitting next to the congressman in case he said something xenophobic.)
As Rand completed his tour of Iowa, he was forced to contend with an endless stream of conservative voters who seemed delirious with cases of impeachment fever. In recent months it had become en vogue on the Far Right to argue that President Obama had so brazenly abused his powers that he deserved to be tossed out of office. Now, everywhere he went, Rand was fielding questions from conservatives who wanted to know when he planned to get the president impeached for his crimes against the Constitution.
Rand had no interest in associating himself with the crackpot impeachment movement. It was laced with all the strands of grievance, anger, paranoia, and prejudice that he knew alienated young voters and minorities from the GOP. At the same time, there was something he couldn’t quite place about the impeachment buzz. While he knew that a couple of Republican officials had floated the idea, the vast majority of the party’s leaders—and, for that matter, most of the big right-leaning media outlets—had ignored or rejected the idea. So where was it coming from? Who was fueling it so efficiently? Why wouldn’t it go away?
The answers to those questions—and the source of many of the Republican Party’s most acute electoral problems—lay deep in the right-wing fever swamps.
Chapter Fourteen
Into the Fever Swamps
Donald Trump was on a roll. He could feel it. Hunched like an ape over the podium at the January 2014 Politics and Eggs forum, the billionaire was regaling a room full of New Hampshire Republicans—Biggest crowd they ever got… HUGE crowd!—with a killer story about the beginning of his long-running hit reality show, The Apprentice, and all the losers who predicted it wouldn’t succeed. He told them about the pathetic TV critic who said it would flop because women viewers wouldn’t like him. And then he told them about the “biggest agent in Hollywood” who tried to make him pay four million bucks as commission even though the guy had strongly advised against the project. And then, finally, Trump arrived at his iconic, crowd-pleasing catchphrase—the one thing that never failed to make his audiences go nuts.
“Let’s say the agent’s name was Jim…” Trump said, teeing it up.
He paused a beat, and then, with great gusto: “I told him, ‘Jim? You’re fired!’”
And sure enough, the few hundred Granite State politicos gathered that morning at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics did laugh at the line—but the response was different somehow. Muted. Distracted… polite. Trump, caught off guard, hurriedly moved along to a new subject.
He spent the rest of the hour aiming his rambling remarks at the reporters in the back of the room—peppering his speech with Twitter-tailored bursts of bravado (“I wish I would have run [in 2012] because I would have won!”) and provocatively bizarre opinions (“Whether you liked Saddam or not, he used to kill terrorists”).
But no matter what Trump threw at them, every time he glanced back at the press section he saw the same bored gaggle of blank-faced cameramen and sleepy local reporters. They were chatting with one another… swiping at their iPhones… ignoring him. Him! The Donald! Try as he might, he just couldn’t seem to set off the same sort of frenzy he had routinely generated in the news media during the 2012 election, back when he had thundered onto the national stage during the Republican primaries with the unparalleled media instincts of the best-paid reality TV personality of all time—and bombastically declared he was very seriously considering tossing his hat in the ring.
This wasn’t anything new for Trump. He had been publicly flirting with a presidential bid on and off for a quarter century, since he first collaborated with a New Hampshire Republican activist named Mike Dunbar to launch a “Draft Trump” campaign in 1987. After a single speech at a Portsmouth restaurant prompted a spasm of national press coverage, the pathological attention seeker was hooked—thus beginning a decades-long career in political noisemaking that would gobble up thousands of journalistic man-hours as he continually pretended to consider running for office before inevitably bailing out.
To make sure the cameras stayed on him in 2011, Trump pulled his most effective political stunt yet by embarking on a months-long crusade to expose the “cover-up” of Barack Obama’s true birthplace. The fringe conspiracy theory to which he was adding his bellicose baritone held that Obama and his backers had colluded to conceal his secret Kenyan nationality in order to be constitutionally eligible for the presidency. The rumors were actually rooted in the contentious 2008 Democratic primaries, when rabid Hillary Clinton supporters lit up online message boards and furiously forwarded chain emails with subject lines like “Obama May Be Illegal to Be Elected President!” The idea was promptly discredited when the Obama campaign released a certificate of live birth proving he was born in Hawaii—but ever since 2008, the theory had lived on among a strain of right-wing proponents known as “birthers,” who donned virtual tinfoil hats and gathered in online bunkers to compare notes and peel back new layers of the “conspiracy.”
Trump aggressively championed the nutty notion everywhere he went, demanding to see the president’s real birth certificate, and claiming that he had dispatched investigators to Hawaii to unearth the truth. “You won’t believe what they’re finding!” he declared. Ever the showman, he eventually tried to up the ante by publicly offering to donate $5 million to a charity of Obama’s choice if he would release his college transcripts and passport paperwork. The performance proved irresistible to TV news bookers for its outrageous entertainment value—but to many conservatives it had a ring of truth to it. In April 2011, after beating the birther drum for months, Trump had climbed to the top of a GOP primary poll—and, along the way, turned what had once been an Internet conspiracy theory into a political litmus test for millions of conservatives. The same poll that found Trump leading the primary pack also reported that a full 23 percent of Republican voters would not even entertain voting for a candidate who clearly stated that Obama was born in the United States.
Those were the days.
To Trump’s deepening dismay, many in the political press now seemed impervious to his hint dropping about future political plans. For the past few weeks, his focus had been on fanning speculation that he might run for governor of New York later in 2014—but after spending an entire morning glad-handing students, activists, politicos, and reporters in Manchester, no one seemed even remotely interested.
“They didn’t ask one question about running for governor,” Trump lamented to his yes-men in the SUV after the event, as he slathered on hand sanitizer. “They didn’t care.”
There was a tense moment of silence before the driver offered, “They probably think you’re already past that.”
“That’s interesting,” he said, raising his voice so that everyone in the car was listening. “Did you hear what he said? He said they think I’m past that. I can’t tell you how many people have said that to me. They say, ‘What are you doing running for governor?’” he said. “It’s a good point.”
The notion that he was simply too big—too presidential—for a measly job in the Albany statehouse had temporarily cheered him. But the morale boost only provided a brief respite from Trump’s slow-burning sense of panic. It wasn’t that he lacked for attention. He still had his reality show (TREMENDOUS hit show!), and NBC was still paying him an A-list salary (BIG money… more than Jennifer Aniston got!). And he still roamed the world in a protective bubble of adoring mini-Trumps who functioned as automated affirmation dispensers. But even amid all the “Yes, Mr. Trump”s and “You were great, Mr. Trump”s, he could still hear the din of guffaws from the political class and party establishment—and it was driving him crazy.
This was The Donald in winter. He didn’t just want attention from the TV-watching masses, or praise from people on his payroll: he wanted respect from serious people. He deserved it. Needed it. Lusted after it as though it were a long-legged Slavic supermodel. And so, as his SUV wound through the snowy streets of Manchester this January morning, he decided to return a phone call from the one news outfit that actually treated him with the seriousness he deserved.
He announced from the passenger seat that he was ready for the call, and soon one of his aides had punched the number for Breitbart News reporter Matt Boyle into Trump’s flip phone. (He preferred the ancient model because he liked how the shape placed the speaker closer to his mouth.) He spent a few minutes answering questions about serious policy issues—and, to his relief, his political plans—and a couple hours later, the site would blast out its all-caps “exclusive”: “TRUMP: SELECT COMMITTEE NEEDED TO INVESTIGATE BENGHAZI SCANDAL.”
Boyle was a rising star of the far-right Web, where Breitbart served, for a fringe of the conservative blogosphere, to set the agenda, introduce new narratives, and shape the common wisdom within a narrow, hyperaggrieved class of conservative activists. During the 2013 immigration debate, Boyle had been the lead reporter pushing both the “Marcophone” myth and the Menendez hooker scandal, and if there was any confusion as to why his site never published corrections on those stories, one needed only to look at its unofficial mission statement, comprising a hashtag and three letters: #WAR.
The site was only the most recent incarnation of an ideological fever swamp that had long festered in American conservatism—from the John Birch Society newsletters of the seventies and eighties, to the AM talk radio shows of the nineties, to the chat rooms and email chain letters around the turn of the millennium and the vibrant, frenzied blogosphere of amateur muckrakers and conspiracy hobbyists in the mid-2000s. The fever swamps were where like-minded kooks, crazies, and radicals mined the news for world events, and then twisted and redisseminated them in service of their dogmas and in opposition to their foes.
These sorts of delusional fringes existed on both sides of the political spectrum, and they tended to thrive when their respective parties were out of power. In the conservative fever swamps of the nineties, a decades-old investigation into Bill and Hillary Clinton’s finances turned into a fanatical conviction that the First Couple had pursued a massive cover-up of past corruption, leaving a trail of corpses in their wake. During George W. Bush’s presidency, the left-wing fever swamps teemed with crazed speculation about the White House orchestrating terrorist attacks on American soil. And in the Tea Party fever swamps of the Obama era—which comprised a corps of professionalized, well-funded websites—crusading swamp warriors fought to purge the GOP of ideological traitors, while also flooding social media with rumors of Sharia law in suburbia, or a fast-approaching “race war” in America targeting whites, or secret crimes committed by the president that called for his impeachment.
Since 2012, the GOP’s presidential aspirants and ambitious reformers had been forced to navigate one fever swamp flare-up after another as they tried to implement their grand visions. There was the right-wing backlash that helped sink Marco Rubio’s immigration bill with misinformation; the pressure to pander, causing Bobby Jindal to back off on his “stupid party” critique; the libertarian trolling from Ron Paul’s guttersnipes that got in the way of Rand’s outreach efforts; and of course Cruz’s crusade—powered by the engine of the fringe—to defund Obamacare or shut down Washington trying.
But for Trump, the fever swamps were a place where he could still get the respect and validation he thirsted for in the political realm—all he had to do was put on a show for them. By and large, GOP leaders at the time weren’t very worried about Trump’s little torch-juggling act. Some of them even thought it was better for him to spend his time entertaining a tiny online fringe composed entirely of pixels and plasma—it made it that much easier to keep him away from the party’s main stage and its serious actors.
But as it would turn out, the party elders were vastly underestimating the degree to which the viral fever had already spread from the online swamps and into significant swaths of the Republican base. And though no one in the party or the media realized it in the winter of 2014, Trump was doing more than putting on a frivolous performance. He was assuming command of a riled-up and surprisingly powerful army of avatars that he would soon begin dispatching to harass the establishment losers who had wronged him, derail the coming 2016 primaries—and, more immediately, try to take me down.
On that cold morning in January 2014, I had arranged to interview Trump on the flight back to New York after the Politics and Eggs summit. So when his speech was over, I squeezed into the SUV with Trump and four of his well-dressed yes-men, and we set off for the nearby runway where his $100 million private jet was idling. On our way there, the pilot called to report that a blizzard was shutting down LaGuardia Airport. Schedules were rearranged, flight plans rerouted, and before I had time to think it through, I was strapped in with a gold-plated seat belt in Trump’s 757 as we soared toward our new destination: Palm Beach, Florida, home to the billionaire’s sprawling beachside compound, Mar-a-Lago.
As we ascended, the large flat-screen TV in my section of the plane, which was connected to the one in the bedroom to which Trump had retired, flipped back and forth between Fox News and MSNBC, as he searched for coverage of his New Hampshire visit. But The Donald was nowhere to be found, and after about an hour the channel stopped changing. He had given up and gone to sleep.
My interview with Trump took place later that day in Mar-a-Lago’s “living room,” a cavernous, ornate structure located at the center of the 17-acre estate, with big chandeliers and high gold ceilings. After showing off the place for a while, Trump led me to a dimly lit den off the main room with walnut-paneled walls and a large portrait of a young, sweater-clad Trump staring down at us. Trump sat slouched in his chair at the other side of a small circular table. He was sporting an uncharacteristic open collar that gave his thick neck, orange-dyed noggin, and famous mane a certain disproportion to his body that called to mind a celebrity bobblehead.
Our conversation started out fine, but soon Trump began veering off into fevered discourses on forged birth certificates and presidential cover-ups, and no matter how many different questions I asked, he kept finding ways to maneuver back to the subject. After a few minutes of ranting along these lines, he seemed to realize he was losing my attention, so he began speaking in a slower, more deliberate manner in order to connect the dots for me. “We have seen a book of [Obama’s] as a young man that said he was from Kenya, okay?” Trump said, pausing to squint at me. “The publisher of the book said at first, ‘Well, that’s what he told us.’ But then they said, ‘No, that was a typographical error.’ But you know what a typographical error is?”
I couldn’t quite tell whether the question was rhetorical, so I said nothing, which apparently he took as a c
ue to explain typographical errors.
“That’s when you put an s at the end of a word because you—”
I nodded.
“You understand that,” Trump said, waving a hand. “So, he has a book where he says he is from Kenya and they say that’s a typographical error? I have a whole theory on it and I’m pretty sure it was right…”
As he launched into his probably-right theory, I listened to him relitigate and relive the whole 2012 birther episode. I realized he was trying to deliver an encore performance—hoping, perhaps, that if he could just get me and my colleagues in the press interested again, he would be catapulted back into political relevance.
“What do you think of the critics who say all the birther stuff was racially based?” I asked, deciding to humor him. “Was it?”
“No,” Trump replied emphatically. “Not at all.”
He paused, seeming to consider what vein he should continue in, before landing on his old standby: incendiary.
“Don’t forget,” he said. “Obama called Bill Clinton a racist, and Clinton has never forgiven him for it. Every time someone disagrees with Obama he calls them a racist, so there have been many people called a racist. But it never stuck in my case at all.
“You know why it never stuck?” he asked. “I am so not a racist, it’s incredible.”
Eventually, he moved on to other subjects, and before the interview ended, Trump shared with me his philosophy of how to treat fans. He said that Michael Jordan (“a friend of mine”) was often dismissive when people approached him asking for autographs. Not Trump. “You know, it’s a lot of work to smile for an hour and a half,” he told me, recalling the people who had surrounded him in New Hampshire earlier that morning asking for pictures and autographs. “At the same time, I always say to myself, how would it be if I stood there and there was nobody wanting it? That wouldn’t be so nice either.”
The Wilderness Page 25