The Wilderness

by McKay Coppins

  His experience so far as a presumptive candidate had been marked by a vexing series of political setbacks and personal frustrations. Despite the initial success of his team’s much-hyped shock-and-awe crusade, he had largely failed to scare off prospective rivals and seize control of the Republican field as planned. Vast swaths of the conservative movement were responding to the threat of a 2016 Bush bid with DEFCON One levels of hysteria, while the right-wing media assailed him daily for his moderate stances on immigration and education with the sort of unbridled ferocity and moral fury they typically reserved for world-historic villains like Osama bin Laden, or Harry Reid. And even as wealthy Bush family loyalists continued to stock Jeb’s war chest with six-figure checks, he couldn’t seem to consolidate the support of party leaders the way his brother had been able to ahead of his own presidential bid.

  In April, after months of underwhelming poll numbers showed Jeb failing to live up to front-runner expectations, the New York Times ran an A1 story declaring his campaign “the juggernaut that wasn’t.”

  Jeb had hoped his aggressive backstage maneuvering at the beginning of the year would help him lock down the support of the party establishment early, thus enabling him to run an optimistic, high-toned campaign by the time he officially got in the race. Now, he was glumly resigned to the likelihood that the primaries would be a long-drawn-out, violent affair, and that winning would require systematically and mercilessly mowing down every last opponent standing in his way.

  To prepare for this new (and depressing) reality, Jeb ordered a last-minute shake-up of his political organization. A week before his official announcement, it was reported that David Kochel—the perennially cheerful Iowa strategist whom Jeb had poached from Mitt Romney by promising the job of campaign manager—was being shunted off to a “senior adviser” role in favor of a younger, elbow-throwing operative named Danny Diaz. When Jeb explained his decision to reporters, he touted Diaz, who was known for his proficiency in the campaign dark arts of “opposition research” (digging up dirt on opponents) and “rapid response” (churning out attack lines and talking points hour to hour), as a “grinder.” This was not the campaign Jeb had dreamed of running.

  The candidate’s mood was marred by other irritants as well. To get in shape for the race, he had put himself on the trendy Paleo diet, swearing off the Mexican chilaquiles and enchiladas that he so loved in favor of a rigid low-carb regimen designed to replicate Stone Age eating habits. The joy-killing onslaught of unsalted almonds and grilled chicken salad helped him shed forty pounds in six months, but it left him grouchy and constantly complaining about being hungry. “Perpetually starving to death is apparently the source of losing weight,” he joked at a Tallahassee fund-raiser, with just a tinge of bitterness.

  He was also growing increasingly resentful of the political reporters who kept trying to bait him into bashing his brother. Jeb had expected the press to pester him with questions about George’s polarizing presidential record, but from the outset of his 2016 bid he had vowed not to let the media’s gotcha games make him betray his deeply felt sense of family loyalty. He was on guard against this temptation every time he convened a press gaggle or sat down for an interview, and he could sometimes feel his body tense up and his words go wobbly when the subject of his brother came up. In May, this fierce fraternal fidelity crash-landed him in a campaign quagmire when Fox News host Megyn Kelly asked him about the Iraq War during an interview. “Knowing what we know now, would you have authorized the invasion?” she inquired.

  Jeb responded confidently in the affirmative, and then added feistily, “News flash to the world: if they’re trying to find places where there’s big space between me and my brother, this might not be one of those.”

  This seemingly unabashed defense of an unpopular war set off a frenzied round of bipartisan criticism. He tried backpedaling the next day, telling Sean Hannity he had “interpreted the question wrong.” But when given a chance to clarify his position, he said he didn’t want to engage in a “hypothetical”—a weak demurral that only intensified the outcry from pundits and critics demanding a straight answer. The furor made Jeb seethe with disdain for the media, who he suspected were fanning the flames not because they cared about his philosophy on military intervention, but because they wanted to gin up a juicy sibling feud. He refused to give them the satisfaction. Over four grueling days, he ducked and dodged and dithered on the Iraq question, fumbling through five different non-answers until finally Dubya called up Jeb and told him to knock it off.

  “Stop it with this shit,” the former president told his little brother. “Say whatever you have to say.”

  Jeb grudgingly relented, and at a campaign stop in Arizona he brought an end to the imbroglio by testily telling voters that “if we’re all supposed to answer hypothetical questions” now, then fine: “I would not have gone into Iraq.”

  The private phone call between Dubya and Jeb never made the news, but word traveled through the Bush family’s network of friends and allies, and those who knew the brothers best weren’t surprised. Jeb and George had not been especially close growing up, and they differed dramatically in style and temperament. But they were both the sons of George Herbert Walker and the grandsons of Prescott—members of a family that stood, in their minds, for seriousness and guts and real-deal leadership. The Republican Party was in chaos and its presidential field was being overrun by neophytes, lightweights, and political fame-seekers who were auditioning not for the White House but for radio shows and book deals. Bush 43 didn’t give a damn what his little brother said about him on the stump: what mattered was that Jebbie saved the GOP and became Bush 45.

  Jeb’s deeply held faith in his family and in his own innate presidential character was what gave him the strength to suffer through a campaign process that he found tedious and punishing. But it was also a source of immense consternation. Though the candidate publicly insisted he didn’t expect a coronation from his party, friends and confidants who talked to him about the race often came away with the impression that he couldn’t believe he wasn’t far ahead in the polls.

  Jeb spent the final days leading up to his campaign kickoff in Europe—hopscotching across the continent’s capitals with an American press corps in tow as he met with high-level foreign dignitaries and gave speeches and interviews that showed off his grasp of international affairs. The trip had been designed with the express purpose of contrasting his confidence and depth of knowledge with the relative unease and inexperience of his Republican rivals. “We wanted to show… that he is ready to be president on day one,” his spokesman Tim Miller told me. “There’s no learning curve.” But while Jeb’s maturity and intellect came through over the course of his five-day swing through Europe, so too did his sense of abject dread at the idea of running for president. He tried to stay “joyful” and on message, telling reporters in Berlin, “I’m excited about the prospects of this,” but he said it exhibiting roughly the same excitement of a person bracing for gallbladder surgery.

  Meanwhile, back in Florida, Jeb’s aides were hard at work prepping a campaign launch event they hoped would be so lively and fun and upbeat that it would puncture the cloud of existential gloom that was always hovering around their candidate. The advance team equipped the venue at Miami Dade College with festive flashing lights, and flanked the stage with towering signs displaying the campaign’s aggressively cheerful logo: “Jeb!” This iconography dated back to Bush’s gubernatorial years, but the punctuation seemed more necessary now than ever. Campaign staffers flooded the room with exclamation points—on stickers, on thunder sticks, on T-shirts and posters; some red, some white, and some upside down in celebration of the Spanish speakers in attendance. ¡Jeb!

  The campaign’s stagecraft was remarkably effective. By the time the event finally got under way on the afternoon of June 15th with a trim, energetic candidate bounding onto the stage—sporting a light-blue button-down shirt, a broad smile, and no necktie—he looked every bit the hap
py warrior he claimed to be. He told jokes, said a few lines in Spanish, and made news by setting an ambitious goal for the national economy: nineteen million new jobs and four percent growth. But the line that would make most every lede in the news reports following his speech came when he attempted to allay concerns about his dynastic entitlement.

  “I know that there are good people running for president. Quite a few in fact,” he said. “And not a one of us deserves the job by right of resume, party, seniority, family, or family narrative. It’s nobody’s turn. It’s everybody’s test, and it’s wide open—exactly as a contest for president should be.”

  In truth, the contest had turned out to be more “wide open” than Jeb would have liked. But he and his advisers were confident that any anxiety his party harbored with regard to crowning another Bush would fade once they studied him alongside his opponents. Republican primary voters had a long history of flirtation with firebrands and carnival barkers, but in the end they always nominated a grown-up as their presidential standard-bearer. And when Jeb looked around the GOP these days, he felt there were precious few grown-ups to be found.

  New York City

  One day later in midtown Manhattan, a golden-haired reality TV star strode across a gold-hued lobby, descended majestically down a gold-framed escalator, and took his place on a stage in front of eight American flags rimmed with gold tassels and affixed to flagpoles with golden bald eagles on top. Above him hung a large banner that spelled out his campaign slogan in uppercase letters and a blunt-force font: “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

  Donald J. Trump had come to the most fabulous of his many world-class eponymous skyscrapers to prove once and for all that the haters in the media, and the losers in the GOP, and the cheap-suit slobs in the DC political class were wrong about him… wrong about everything. Yes, The Donald was about to announce his candidacy for the United States presidency—and he was going to do it with all the fanfare money could buy.

  Squinting out proudly at the Trump Tower atrium packed with press and the balcony lined with cheering Trump-T-shirt wearers, the billionaire marveled, “That is some group of people! Thousands!… It’s an honor to have everybody here. This is beyond anybody’s expectations. There’s been no crowd like this.” He proceeded to catalog the logistical shortcomings of recent Republican campaign announcements and mock the candidates’ ineptitude. “How are they going to beat ISIS?” he scoffed. “I don’t think it’s going to happen.” But he elected not to mention the legwork that had gone into putting together this particular production.

  As it had turned out, assembling a crowd of sign-waving supporters for a Donald Trump campaign rally in Manhattan was a tricky task. A few days before the event, the billionaire’s team was reduced to putting out a casting call through a New York–based agency offering fifty bucks to background actors who were willing to wear Trump shirts, carry Trump posters, and cheer Trump on during his big announcement. (“We understand this is not a traditional ‘background job,’” the agency noted, “but we believe acting comes in all forms and this is inclusive of that school of thought.”)

  When the day of the announcement arrived, Trump aides in tailored suits spent the morning on the streets enticing New York City tourists to come take in the spectacle. “Only in New York!” one of The Donald’s aides was heard calling out. “Come inside and make some memories.” When an older couple showed interest, the aide informed them, “Price of admission is, you have to wear a shirt.”

  By showtime, Trump’s team had succeeded in cobbling together a crowd of a few hundred people. Some of them were actors earning paychecks, others were curious gawkers craning their necks to see a celebrity up close—but all of them were decked out in patriotic Trump swag, or holding up handmade signs that they had been given at the door. Who needed a genuine groundswell of grassroots support when you could buy the Astroturf version that looked just as good on TV?

  With the stage set, Trump spent the next hour ad-libbing his way through an irresistibly compelling rant on live television that proved almost impossible to tune out or turn away from. It didn’t matter that the rambling remarks had no discernible theme. Virtually every line that tumbled out of his mouth was packed with the potential to become its own miniature media controversy—ricocheting across Twitter, setting off TV news shoutfests, and creating an endless loop of visceral disagreement and emotionally charged debate.

  Trump on Islamic terrorists: “They’ve become rich. I’m in competition with them.”

  Trump on China “ripping off” the United States in trade negotiations: “It’s like, take the New England Patriots and Tom Brady and have them play your high school football team.”

  Trump on immigration: “When Mexico sends its people they’re not sending their best… [they] have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems to us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

  Eventually, he arrived at the purpose of the day’s performance. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he proclaimed, grandly extending his arm in a sweeping gesture, “I am officially running for president.”

  But even after he said the words, Trump’s intentions were the subject of widespread skepticism. Reporters punctuated their coverage of the event with caveats about his long history of political publicity stunts. Wishful thinkers in the Republican Party held out hope that this was just another short-lived charade; that he would refuse to file his FEC paperwork or be lured away by a lucrative TV contract. The truth, however, was that Trump had backed himself into a corner. He knew that the sort of attention he craved from the political world would never return unless he made good on his promise to run now.

  The Donald considered himself a man out of options—and in the weeks that followed, he behaved as such. Even as his incendiary diatribe about Mexican immigrants drew organized boycotts of his various business enterprises, he refused to back down. (“Somebody’s doing the raping!” he reasoned.) The resulting losses were much greater than he could have predicted. NBC dropped him as the host of Celebrity Apprentice, and canceled plans to air the Miss USA and Miss Universe pageants that he owned. Macy’s announced it would no longer carry his clothing line, and the PGA pulled a major tournament from his Los Angeles golf course. The brand that he had spent his life building was suddenly being robbed of its most visible platforms. And yet, at the same time, his polls were beginning to skyrocket. The combination proved to be darkly liberating for Trump: his high-wire act had no net, and he had no face-saving way out. He was going to give his all to this performance, and when he found himself in free fall, he would take as much of the party down with him as he could.

  As Donald Trump’s anarchic campaign grew increasingly unpredictable in the final weeks of the summer—with each provocation more inflammatory than the last, and each stunt more disruptive—the Republican Party appeared to be in an even worse state of disarray than on the night of its 2012 implosion. Its national debate had been hijacked by a reckless joyrider with nothing to lose and no concern whatsoever for the party’s future.

  Trump made no secret of his priorities. He repeatedly threatened that if he wasn’t “treated with respect” by the Republican establishment, he would drop out of the primaries and launch a third-party presidential bid—a move that would likely split the conservative vote and deliver the 2016 election to the Democrats. And when he faced partisan pressure to join the rest of the Republican field in promising to endorse whoever won the nomination, he emphatically refused. “Why should I give up that leverage?” he demanded. To GOP leaders, Trump had become like a menacing mobster patting the end of a baseball bat on his palm as he warned, “Nice little political party you got here. Be a shame if something happened to it.”

  His seemingly unstoppable surge in the polls so confounded pundits that it became common to the point of cliché to suggest that the normal “laws of political gravity” had been suspended for Trump. Blunders, outrages, flip-flops, and gaffes that
would have sent any other candidate into a tailspin had no effect when they were committed by Trump. During an onstage interview in Iowa, for example, he cavalierly criticized the military service of Republican senator John McCain, who had famously spent more than five years in a Vietnamese prison (while Trump used a series of deferments to avoid getting drafted). “He’s not a war hero,” Trump said of McCain. “He’s not a war hero. He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured.” The insult—which was directed, however unwittingly, not just at the senator but also all prisoners of war—drew instant condemnation from practically every prominent Republican in the country. Marco Rubio called it “offensive,” Jeb Bush called it “slanderous,” and Rick Perry called on Trump to drop out of the race. Instead, the billionaire refused to apologize and took another shot at McCain, whom he accused, unironically, of spending “too much time on television and not enough time doing his job.” When the dust settled, Trump had somehow ticked up several points in the polls.

  For months it continued like this for Trump. Explosive allegations about his personal life flared up and then fizzled out. Past sins against conservative orthodoxy were ignored or forgiven by voters. Even Fox News couldn’t seem to make a dent in Trump-mania. After Megyn Kelly spent the first Republican presidential debate hammering him with questions about his history of misogynistic statements and political promiscuity, Trump retaliated by suggesting that the host’s aggressive performance had been the result of her menstruating. The subsequent wrath from some of the biggest stars in conservative media did nothing to slow him down.

  Meanwhile, Trump’s talent for showmanship ensured that hardly a half hour passed on cable news all summer without his famous mug and more-famous pompadour filling the nation’s TV screens. As the daily Donald show sucked up media oxygen, the rest of the Republican presidential candidates were left desperately gasping for air. Chris Christie, the GOP’s other brash tough-talker, was relegated to a footnote. Ted Cruz, the Tea Party’s most beloved bomb-thrower, vanished from sight. When Ohio governor John Kasich entered the race in July with an optimistic speech touting his two-term record and calling for a return to national unity, the announcement was swiftly crowded out of the news cycle to make room for Trump, after he caustically responded to Lindsey Graham calling him a “jackass” by reading out the senator’s personal cell phone number at a campaign rally and urging attendees to “try it.”