FEVER SWAMP
New York • London
© 2016 by Richard North Patterson
Cover credit info: Design and illustration © Walker Cahall
First published in the United States by Quercus in 2017
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e-ISBN 978-1-68144-163-4
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016956580
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For the next generation,
Shannon, Brooke, Katherine, Adam and Chase
And the next,
Finley, Soren, and Miles
Contents
Foreword
Introduction
PART I
Plutocrats, Birthers, Climate Deniers, a Reality Star, a Socialist from Vermont, a Scrum of Candidates Killing Each Other, and an Entire Political Party Gone Mad
The Faux Humility of Dr. Ben Carson
The Shallow Salesmanship of Carly Fiorina
Marco Rubio’s Empty Suit
Ted Cruz: The Lone Stranger
The Biden Dilemma
The Paradox of Bernie Sanders
Trump’s Character Is His Fate
Debating Hillary Clinton
Plutocrats and Their Pets
The GOP’s Faith-Based Climate
Fun Questions for the Next GOP Debate
The GOP’s Tax Warfare
Ted Cruz’s Holiday Spirit
The GOP Establishment’s Not So Happy New Year
Dog Whistles and Hypocrisy: The GOP’s Selective Birthers
PART II
Primaries, Guns, the Court, Bernie vs. Hillary, the Rise of Trump, and the Collapse of the GOP Establishment
The Rise of the Unfit: Trump, Cruz, and Rubio
Hillary, Bernie, and the Future of the Court
The GOP’s Super Doomsday
The GOP’s Morning After
The GOP’s Strongman Syndrome
An Open Letter to My Republican Friends
Partners in Death: The GOP and the NRA
The Reckoning of 2016: The Supreme Court and Reproductive Rights
The Sound and Fury of Donald Trump
Closing Polls and Slamming Doors: John Roberts’s Race-Based Agenda
Why Bernie Lost—and What to Do about It
PART III
The Donald, Hillary, Narcissism, Racism, Political Insanity, and the Surprising Fatefulness of Two Conventions
Why Hillary Clinton
Too Sick to Lead: The Lethal Personality Disorder of Donald Trump
From Golden Boy to Fool’s Gold: The Decline of Paul Ryan
The 2016 Veepstakes: Who Will Trump and Clinton Choose?
Kidnapped by a Narcissist: The GOP’s Stockholm Syndrome
The GOP Reaps the Whirlwind: Racism, Nativism, Xenophobia—And Donald Trump
Leading the Lemmings: The GOP’s Idiot King Marches on Cleveland
A Tale of Two Conventions: Hillary Versus the Man on Horseback
America Meets Hillary Clinton
PART IV
Russian Hackers, a Media Awakening, Videotapes, Charges of Groping, Claims of Voter Fraud, Three Debates, a Dogged Democrat, and a GOP Candidate Cracking Up Until an FBI Director Throws Him a Lifeline
Coming This Fall: The Sublime Revenge of Barack Obama
The Fateful August of Donald J. Trump
Trump 3.0: Pivoting in Quicksand
Public Disservice: The Media and Hillary Clinton
Clinton vs. Trump: Black Swans and Perfect Storms
Turning Point: Judging the Great Debate
Losing It: Donald Trump’s Public Crack-Up
Beyond Debate: The Squalid Meltdown of Donald Trump
Apocalypse Soon: Imagining President Trump
Making America Hate Again: Trump’s War on Civil Society
Hillary Clinton’s Final Test
PART V
The Last Very Scary Days, an Election Filled with Dread, and an Extremely Sober National Reckoning
The Imperative of Voting for Hillary Clinton
Where Does America Go Now?: A Farewell Letter to My Readers
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Annotations
Foreword
Sometime near the end of the 2016 US presidential campaign—I think it was at the end of the third debate—I publicly suggested that if the Founding Fathers in Philadelphia had found themselves watching the proceedings, they might well have said, “You know what? Let’s call the whole thing off.” A race that often seemed soaked in bile, that raised accusations of sexual, political, financial, and governmental misconduct, left even the most optimistic campaign watchers wondering if something had gone seriously wrong with the body politic, the mechanisms of American self-government, or both.
Given the dyspeptic mood that had engulfed so many citizens by campaign’s end, there is one obvious question a book like this raises: Why in God’s name would anyone want to revisit this train wreck of a campaign?
Well, it turns out there are compelling answers to this question.
First, just as real train wrecks require a thorough, detailed investigation, so does the metaphorical wreck of a campaign. How did one of our great political parties, offering a platoon’s worth of experienced, credentialed candidates, wind up with the most manifestly unfit nominee in the 165-year history of our current two-party system? How did our mass media, so conditioned to self-congratulatory back-patting about its “speak truth to power” role, open its airwaves to (literally) a few billon dollars worth of free publicity before finally deploying its resources to shine a light on the temperament, character, biography, and veracity of one Donald Trump? Why did the other major party clear the field for the “obvious” nominee and why was there such discontent with that choice that a back-bench, seventy-four-year-old, self-proclaimed socialist US senator from Vermont managed to come within a relative hairbreadth of upending Hillary Clinton?
These are questions that go to the heart of what has happened to our politics, and their consequentiality alone demands our attention. But in this case, the overriding reason for journeying back into the recent past is the nature of your guide.
I first discovered Richard North Patterson—if that’s the right word for my relatively late encounter with a writer whose books have sold well into the millions—by picking up one of his books at the airport before a transcontinental flight. It was Protect and Defend, and it was set in the world of big-time politics. My defenses immediately went up. As someone who spent his life working in and then covering politics, I had developed an abiding suspicion of “political” novels; most, I had concluded, were writ
ten by people whose grasp of politics was roughly equivalent to my skill at microsurgery.
So I was surprised—and then delighted—to discover that Patterson had a grasp of politics and government that would have done any journalist proud. His characters, and the story itself, reflected a rich understanding of both issues and process. I went out and picked up an armful of Patterson’s other novels, which reflected that same sure-handed grasp of our system.
I later learned why. Patterson, who was trained as a lawyer, researched his novels intensely. He read, he interviewed, he immersed himself in the issues he was covering so that—unlike so many other writers—he was actually describing a plausible account of what might happen.
So when he decided to write about the 2016 campaign, he brought with him two critical tools: first, he knew the terrain; second, because of his analytical and novelistic skills, he was able to go deeper into questions of policy and character than 99 percent of working journalists. In this journey, Patterson makes no pretense of impartiality. He is an ardent liberal, and none of the Republican candidates he scrutinizes escape some withering assessments. But it’s critical to understand that he has deep respect for many in the Republican Party, ranging from the first President Bush to John McCain. And that’s what gives his account such moral force. It is because he has seen the Republican Party nominate good, decent, credentialed candidates (if burdened by what he would see as bad ideas) that Patterson can recount, with mounting disbelief and shock, the surrender of the party to a mountebank. This respect for the GOP gives him the authority to examine Trump not just from a political perspective, but from the perspective of character—specifically, a character hobbled by serious disorders.
Patterson also had the advantage of working in what for him was a new medium: digital publishing. He came late to the world of computers, smartphones, PDAs, and the like. He is a writer who prefers the pen, a reader who prefers the feel of dead trees. But in writing for The Huffington Post, Patterson was freed from the limits of space. A newspaper or magazine might have told him: “eight hundred words, tops.” In the digital universe, Patterson was able to offer far more detailed arguments about what he was seeing—what the journalistic community now calls “deep dives.” As you read through this account of what happened, you will find yourself encountering an observation or an argument that makes his account that much richer.
Finally, Patterson has folded into this book something all too rarely seen in such works: a reassessment of his original reporting. Throughout these essays are marginal notes that point to what he got right—and, more impressively—what he got wrong, and why. (He was, for example, convinced that the Republican Party would at some point defend itself against a hostile takeover; to his—and my—astonishment, the institutional wing of the party proved itself a paper tiger, paralyzed by the constituencies it had encouraged to embrace the scorched-earth approach to politics Trump embodied.)
All this may not make for reassuring reading; that’s all to the good. It’s not just political operatives or journalists who need to learn the painful lessons of the 2016 election. It’s all of us—as citizens—who need to grasp what happened, and why.
You’ll find no better resource than the book you’re holding in your hands.
JEFF GREENFIELD is an award-winning television journalist and author focusing on politics, media, and culture. In the course of his career, he served as a senior political correspondent for CBS, a senior analyst for CNN, and a political and media analyst for ABC News.
He has also authored or co-authored 13 books and written for Time Magazine, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, National Lampoon, Harper’s Magazine, and Slate, among other publications.
—Jeff Greenfield, November 2016
Introduction
In August 2016, on a beautiful summer day, instead of going out I found myself watching Donald Trump on television, his hue a bright tangerine, promising to cut my taxes “bigly.”
How bigly, I wondered, my bemusement at his syntactical flexibility overcome by astonishment: at an age where one is conscious that each wasted hour moves you one hour closer to death, I was deliberately expending precious oxygen on the poverty of language and thought emanating from a narcissist. Then I remembered that I was suffering so that others would not—specifically, by bearing witness to what was, by far, the most bizarre and unpredictable presidential campaign in the memory of anyone under the age of, say, two hundred.
Worse, no one had asked me to—I was a volunteer. I wasn’t even a journalist; I was a novelist. So why was a guy who made up stuff for a living writing about a campaign you couldn’t make up? And why in the world was I doing this to myself?
The real answer was: How could I not?
In my view, this was the most consequential election of my lifetime—for multiple reasons. The country was gripped by a great contagion: insecurity, confusion, fear. The leading candidates, both controversial, offered radically different visions and solutions. And one of them was so unusual no one quite knew what to make of him—or why so many people were willing to gamble on someone so untested and unbound.
Over the years, as an incident of my career as a novelist, I had written numerous opinion pieces on political issues. To my great pleasure, The Huffington Post offered me the chance to write a column every week and, if I liked, more often. So I set out to write as well as I could about American politics through the election of 2016, trying to capture every aspect of this fascinating, troubling, and fateful campaign saga—including what it said about who we have become and where we are going.
No small project. But I realized that I came to it armed with some helpful, if unorthodox, qualifications.
One was sheer enthusiasm. This fresh ambition, I recalled, had also been my first ambition as a writer. Under the pressure of career and family, I set the idea aside. But now, given a second chance, I realized how much I wanted to do this, and do it well. And, forty-plus years later, I had a bit more game.
For one thing, seventeen years as a lawyer—I understood the ins and outs of law, including Supreme Court opinions on such salient subjects as abortion and voting rights. Pretty useful given that these issues were integral to the campaign, and that the future of the Supreme Court was hanging in the balance.
Even more useful was that, out of professional necessity, I had immersed myself in the world of politics. As a novelist, I had written several political novels that depended on grasping that world and the sensibility of those who lived there—presidents, legislators, staffers, reporters, pundits, strategists, and consultants. To get things right I had interviewed—quite literally—hundreds of them.
Along the way, I had come to know figures like George H. W. Bush, Ted Kennedy, and John McCain. On one memorable day Bob Dole gave me a master class on how to defeat a Supreme Court nominee, and Bill Clinton, then president, had countered with a learned tutorial on how to save one. While everything they told me enriched my understanding, nothing we discussed was for attribution. So I had a perspective on their lives and thoughts sometimes foreclosed to journalists.
So, too, with the other habitués of politics in every segment of the business. If I had a question or an opinion to test out, there were people I could call—then and now. Over time, I couldn’t help but develop my own theories about politics.
Two examples became particularly germane to 2016. One was the perception, which for years I’d thrust on any Republican pro who would listen, that the party was made up of factions—the donor class, Chamber of Commerce types, Tea Party dead-enders, frustrated evangelicals, and the restive whites who increasingly comprise the party’s voting base—whose interests were irreconcilable. In particular, I insisted that the party’s ideology was tailored to its donor class, not its legions of discontented white folks.
So I started this project expecting the crack-up that, nonetheless, came with astonishing speed. By the end of 2015, with beginner’s luck, I was guessing in print that Donald Trump or Ted Cruz would be t
he GOP nominee, and that no white knight would rescue the party establishment.
Nor did the rise of Bernie Sanders seem all that mysterious. 2008 had made it clear that Hillary Clinton was vulnerable and there was an underserved constituency on the Democratic left awaiting a candidate in 2016. The question was whether Sanders could go all the way despite his weakness with the minorities who had helped propel Barack Obama. I thought not—a judgment that prevented me from overreading a truly impressive showing by Sanders and his millions of contributors and admirers.
But perhaps most helpful in this strange and unsettling year was three decades spent as a novelist. Essential to this was the study of character—including motivation and psychology and how they played out under the pressure of events. If anything, the crucible of high-stakes politics magnifies the importance of who the candidates are as people. In my youth, Richard Nixon exemplified this for us all. But never was a focus on character more essential than during the campaign of 2016.
It was jammed with interesting characters to write about—the candidates themselves. And some of them seemed quite peculiar. From the outset, it was apparent that Ben Carson’s logic train was more than a bit unusual, and that Ted Cruz, to put it gently, was inadequately socialized even by the standards of politics. But they paled by comparison. For Donald Trump was someone special—a man driven by an inner landscape that transcended the normal analytic boxes of issues, strategy, or demographic appeal.
Reporters operating within the standard rules could report dubious statements by a candidate as they occurred. They could note individual incidents that suggested a lack of empathy, or obliviousness about what the presidency actually required. They could record moments of self-involvement, or unreasoning defensiveness, or irresponsible rhetoric. But what does it mean when all these characteristics—and more—repeatedly converge in a single human being?
And so those writing about the campaign were presented with uncomfortable but pivotal questions. With respect to Donald Trump, did the traditions of journalistic restraint and objectivity risk normalizing the abnormal? Were the usual methods of political reportage, focused on reporting and analyzing events as they occur, sufficient to this highly unusual candidate or to the volatile environment in which he arose?
Fever Swamp: A Journey Through the Strange Neverland of the 2016 Presidential Race Page 1