The Wilderness

by McKay Coppins

  The mood at the scene was personified by the party’s most anarchic and unpredictable figure: Donald Trump. The billionaire’s aides spent the day walking the halls and passing out postcard-size photos of a young Trump shaking hands with Ronald Reagan. When his turn came to speak, he hunched confidently over the podium and drew loud cheers by musing, “The last thing we need is another Bush.” He also said he was “seriously thinking” of running for president in 2016, but it was the dig at Jeb (and the audience’s supportive reaction) that made headlines. When it came to Trump, the press knew better than to treat his claims about future political plans as news. After twenty-five years of the same charade, there were few people left anywhere in the political world who believed he was sincere. He was a sideshow to be gawked at, not taken seriously.

  By now Trump knew this was how many in the news media and politics viewed him. But with the official start of the 2016 campaign season only months away, he was resolved to prove the jealous losers wrong.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  The Promised Land

  Lynchburg, Virginia

  As Ted Cruz roved the arena stage at the world’s largest evangelical Christian university on the morning of March 23, 2015, he implored the ten thousand patriots gathered before him to do something he had been asking of the conservative movement for the past three years: use their imaginations.

  “I want to ask each of you to imagine,” Cruz intoned. “Imagine millions of courageous conservatives all across America, rising up together to say in unison, ‘We demand our liberty!’”

  The patriots in the audience cheered—and Cruz proceeded to spend the next twenty minutes making their imaginations run wild.

  “Imagine abolishing the IRS…”

  “Imagine repealing every word of Common Core…”

  “Imagine a federal government that works to defend the sanctity of human life,” and “uphold the sacrament of marriage,” and “defeat radical Islamic terrorism,” and “finally, finally, finally secure the borders!”

  “Imagine,” Cruz said, “millions of people of faith all across America coming out to the polls and voting our values.”

  More to the point, imagine them voting for Ted Cruz.

  “I believe in you,” he finally told the patriots. “I believe in the power of millions of courageous conservatives rising up to reignite the promise of America. And that is why today I am announcing that I’m running for president of the United States.”

  With that, the Tea Party torchbearer from Texas became the first Republican candidate to charge into the presidential field—officially launching the momentous 2016 Republican contest from one of the country’s most storied staging grounds in the conservative culture wars.

  Liberty University had immediately stood out to Cruz’s aides when they were scouting locations for the announcement. It was a short three-and-a-half-hour drive from Washington, which would ensure strong turnout from the political press, and because Cruz would be speaking at a mandatory campus assembly, he was guaranteed an audience of ten thousand God-fearing, right-leaning students who risked academic—and possibly celestial—reprimands if they tried to disrupt the event. (The school’s strict rules forbade unapproved demonstrations of any kind, as well as dancing, cursing, kissing, and hugging members of the opposite sex for longer than three seconds.) Drawing a supportive crowd that large was difficult for even the most galvanizing political figures, and it often required weeks of organizing and many thousands of dollars. Here Cruz was being handed the striking, made-for-TV campaign backdrop free of charge and effort.

  Most important, though, the setting sent a strong signal to the religious elements of Cruz’s right-wing base. Founded in 1971 by conservative Christian icon Jerry Falwell, who proudly nicknamed the school “Bible Boot Camp,” Liberty was built on an unabashed mission to train and send forth battalions of born-again foot soldiers in the fight against encroaching secularism and moral perversion in America. Accordingly, many of the students were training for careers in politics, media, law, and the ministry—a campus full of mini-Cruzes. When the candidate’s office had asked the university administration if they could hold the event there, the president was so thrilled that he bumped a scheduled visit from Virginia’s sitting Democratic governor to clear the calendar.

  As with every other stage Cruz had performed on over the years—from the small-town VFWs to the Senate floor—the candidate put on a compelling show at Liberty. He roamed the stage freely, sermonizing without notes or a teleprompter about the need for a religious revival and populist revolution in America. As a crescendo of clamorous applause reached its climax, he planted his feet, stretched out his arms, and opened his palms, letting the adoration wash over him.

  To some who had gotten to know Cruz earlier in his career, the onstage display was puzzling. “He was never particularly religious as far as I knew,” said one aide who worked closely with him in the Texas solicitor general’s office. “I’m not even sure he went to church.” To others, it was a masterful performance of a part Cruz had been carefully rehearsing for years. One Republican consultant who had worked on his 2012 Senate campaign told me the arms-out-palms-opened pose was something Cruz had picked up from watching the 1980s televangelist Jimmy Swaggart: it was meant to convey that he was “drawing spiritual energy from the crowd.”

  Did Cruz actually believe in this divine phenomenon? The question was beside the point. What had always mattered to Cruz was what they believed—the bright-eyed evangelical students and the riled-up Tea Party activists, the put-out military veterans and the Breitbart-reading birthers, and all the other patriots who felt alienated by the Washington cartel and ignored by the establishment bosses. Cruz’s political power came from capturing their imaginations, convincing them their wildest dreams could come true, and then converting the uncommon fervor that followed into daring, dramatic, destiny-bending action.

  Or at least phone numbers for his campaign contact list.

  “If you’re ready to join a grassroots army across this nation, coming together and standing for liberty,” Cruz said at his speech’s climactic conclusion, “I’m going to ask you to break a rule here today and to take out your cell phones, and to text the word ‘constitution’ to the number 33733.”

  A brief, confused silence fell over the arena, followed by a ripple of nervous laughter.

  “Once again,” Cruz reiterated. “Text ‘constitution’ to 33733. God’s blessing has been on America from the very beginning of this nation, and I believe God isn’t done with America yet.”

  Louisville, Kentucky

  Two weeks later, more than a thousand people filed into a cavernous ballroom at the Galt House convention center in downtown Louisville to see Rand Paul kick off his presidential bid.

  And they did get to see that happen, eventually—but not before first being subjected to an hour and a half of watching a determinedly diverse, painstakingly assembled parade of preachers, speakers, students, singers, lobbyists, and libertarians take turns at the podium. Each person stood beneath a large banner unveiling a new all-caps campaign slogan, designed to cater to the libertarian movement with its first line and the mainstream party with its second.

  DEFEAT THE WASHINGTON MACHINE UNLEASH THE AMERICAN DREAM

  The program had been carefully planned to highlight Rand’s maverick coalition-building efforts over the past couple of years, and each speaker had a story to tell about how the candidate had won him or her over. There was the doctor who had gone on a mission trip with the senator, performing eye surgery on poor children with him in Guatemala. And the college conservative who said she had never seen her liberal classmates respond so enthusiastically to a Republican politician as they did to Rand. And the local black preacher who said he was a lifelong Democrat and former Obama supporter who now considered himself an Independent, proclaiming, “I am telling every Independent it is time to run out here and run with Senator Rand Paul!”

  When it finally came time to introduce th
e candidate himself, Kelley Paul delivered some brief, heartfelt remarks, recalling that when Rand had first approached her about his wish to run for Senate, she responded, “I can’t believe you’re doing this to me.” Onstage, the story had an obligatory happy ending, with Kelley concluding that everything had worked out better than she possibly could have imagined, and that her family was now exhilarated by the prospect of the election. Offstage, though, the public scrutiny inherent in participating in a presidential race would continue to put strain on their family. Just weeks after her husband hit the campaign trail, their oldest son would be cited for driving under the influence. An old mug shot would resurface; another rash of headlines would follow. “That was her worst nightmare, and it happened right away,” one family friend would lament to me.

  But at this moment, and on this stage, there was a campaign to launch, and a Washington machine to defeat, and a libertarian takeover to execute, and a “New GOP” to build. So Kelley finished her remarks and introduced her husband. Cheers rang out from the floor and music blasted from the speakers as the smiling-and-waving candidate appeared. While Rand basked in the applause, Kelley tried to slink off the stage—but before she could get away, Rand placed two hands on her shoulders and gently twisted her back toward the audience. She stood next to him for a few seconds, doing her best impression of a campaign wife, and the moment the gravitational pull weakened, she broke away and hurried toward the backstage stairs, her smile melting away before she was out of view.

  “I have a message!” Rand bellowed from the podium. “A message that is loud and clear and does not mince words. We have come to take our country back!”

  As the Kentucky senator went on to deliver the speech he had been waiting to give for much of his adult life, his parents sat in the row of seats behind him on the stage, fully visible to the audience, press, and TV cameras. His mother, Carol, beamed throughout the performance, repeatedly joining the crowd to interrupt her son with supportive soccer mom applause. Ron sat quietly through the entire speech. Not smiling. Not clapping. Not even once—at least not as far as Rand’s aides could tell from where they were watching on the floor.

  The younger Paul’s advisers would have liked the old man to show at least a little enthusiasm, but they also believed that the wedge between father and son could help Rand’s 2016 chances. If he was going to win over the moderate elements of the Republican establishment, he couldn’t have his dad showing up at campaign stops and spouting off about the gold standard, or legalizing heroin, or any of his other politically untenable positions. For the announcement event, Ron had been invited to attend but asked not to speak—and as the campaign got under way in the spring of 2015, there were no plans for the libertarian lion to join his son on the trail at all.

  But the Pauls’ political estrangement was not to last. In months that followed, Rand’s grand vision of a diverse, broad-based coalition of Republican voters fell flat, his candidacy greeted with outright hostility by many in the GOP. (On the day he entered the race, a well-funded neoconservative group launched a million-dollar ad blitz attacking his support for the United States’ nuclear negotiations with Iran as “wrong and dangerous.”) As his poll numbers sank and the cast of candidates grew, Rand was forced to retreat back to the libertarian niche his father had once occupied—and by the end of the summer, Ron was ready to officially endorse his son for president. In a campaign fund-raising email sent to supporters, the elder Paul wrote, “If you want to know what I really think about my son, Rand, then don’t listen to our national media… [they like] to play this little game where they pit us, or certain views, against each other. Don’t fall for it. They’re trying to manufacture storylines at liberty’s expense.” A few days later, Rand returned the affection with his own campaign fundraising email. “Please join me in wishing my dad a very happy birthday,” he wrote, linking to a digital card for Ron. “And after you add your name, please chip in a contribution of $20.16 so I can continue to spread the message of Liberty…”

  Miami, Florida

  When Marco Rubio and his obsessively media-conscious aides set out to plan the senator’s presidential announcement, they aimed for exactly the opposite of Rand Paul’s long-winded, overly indulgent marathon of videos, speeches, and tributes. As far as Terry Sullivan was concerned, these events shouldn’t be about excising family demons or paving the way for the future of some academic philosophical movement. They were television commercials, plain and simple—and ones they didn’t have to pay for. So, with Rubio’s go-ahead, Sullivan and the rest of the campaign-in-waiting got to work on perfecting the choreography for the kickoff.

  Given Rubio’s otherworldly gift for oratory, they wanted to get his speech in front of the largest possible number of Republican-primary-voting eyeballs. So, naturally, they called up Fox News. The producers at the network’s 6 p.m. newscast, Special Report with Bret Baier, said they would be interested in broadcasting the speech live. Sullivan asked how long Fox would be likely to stay on the candidate before cutting away, and the answer came back: thirteen minutes. So Rubio’s speechwriters were instructed to keep it to precisely twelve (to leave time for applause).

  For the location, they selected Miami’s Freedom Tower, the building through which Cuban exiles were first shuffled when they arrived in the States half a century earlier. The symbolism of the setting had the potential to be truly powerful, driving home Rubio’s immigrant roots and presenting him as an Obama-like embodiment of the American dream. But his advisers also knew that the power of that message would be sharply undermined if the so-called DREAMer activists who had been harassing Rubio ever since he backed away from the immigration bill in 2013 managed to infiltrate the event and interrupt it. With the stakes—and likely viewership—so high, they needed to ensure that no one got in who didn’t belong there. And so a handful of low-level campaign staffers were deputized for a special project. The mission: vet every single one of the thousand or so attendees who had RSVP’d for the event.

  In the weeks leading up to Rubio’s announcement, his staffers pored over Facebook pages, Instagram accounts, public records, and page upon page of Google searches, looking for hints that some of the attendees might not be on the level. There weren’t many hard-and-fast rules, but there was one major red flag the staffers were told to look for: attendees who weren’t American citizens. In the end, the vetting mission worked. When the day of the announcement arrived, activists marched around outside the Freedom Tower, chanting, “Undocumented! Unafraid!” But inside the room, the audience of well-dressed politicos, donors, and supporters was unanimously pro-Rubio.

  For all the savvy stagecraft and careful choreography, the event was a sincerely personal one for the candidate. Standing inside the Freedom Tower, he couldn’t help but think of his parents. His father had died of cancer while Rubio was running for Senate, just eight weeks before the election. The candidate had done his best to be there for his dad in the end, carving out precious days from the campaign calendar to take him to the doctor and sit with him through chemotherapy treatments. But when he died, Rubio had taken only a couple of days off to bury him before returning to the trail. He knew his political success was a tremendous source of pride for his father—an immigrant who had spent his entire life juggling demanding and unexciting jobs so that his kids could have every opportunity possible. Now, thanks to those sacrifices, Rubio was here announcing his candidacy for president of the United States.

  The day before Rubio’s announcement, Hillary Clinton had officially declared her long-anticipated bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, and many pundits had speculated that she would overshadow the young Florida senator. But Rubio took advantage of the generational contrast with Clinton as he presented himself and his campaign as symbols of America’s future. “Now, just yesterday, a leader from yesterday began a campaign for president by promising to take us back to yesterday,” Rubio said, in a line that would be played and replayed on TV nonstop for days to come.

  H
e paused for a moment and flashed a slight smirk, before concluding. “Yesterday is over.”

  Miami, Florida

  As the day of his campaign kickoff pep rally approached, Jeb Bush was a man sorely lacking in pep. It had been barely six months since he started actively working toward a presidential bid—far less time than most of his fellow candidates—but already the unpleasantness of the ordeal was wearing on him. Each passing day seemed to bring with it a new indignity to endure: a frivolous photo-op, a pride-swallowing fund-raising call, yet another interminable grip-and-grin in New Hampshire where he spent more time posing for selfies with voters than he did talking about the issues he cared about. Before long, Jeb was privately complaining that his only respite from the mind-numbing monotony of the trail came when some ill-informed voter confronted him with a new Internet-fueled conspiracy theory or false piece of political propaganda that he hadn’t heard before. He knew there wasn’t really any point in trying to set these people straight—but sometimes he felt like it was the only workout his brain got all day. At least some part of this has to be intellectually stimulating, he grumbled to his aides.

  As he slogged toward the summer, Jeb found it increasingly difficult to conceal his crankiness and boredom. All year, he had been telling interviewers that his decision about whether to run would ultimately come down to a personal question: “Can I do it joyfully?” But now that he was finally about to enter the race, joylessness seemed to waft off of him wherever he went. His advisers tried to perk up his performance with stylistic tips: smile more, dial back the sarcasm, add some brio to the stump. But it was no use. His problem wasn’t a matter of improving aesthetics: Jeb was simply miserable most of the time.