Fever Swamp: A Journey Through the Strange Neverland of the 2016 Presidential Race

by Richard North Patterson

  Second, can we defeat the scourge of terrorism while retaining our essential character? Trump stands for scapegoating American Muslims, barring refugees from abroad, curbing civil liberties at home, and employing torture abroad. But many Americans perceive that this will further disfigure the face we present to the world, and to each other, creating a breeding ground for terrorism both at home and abroad. The question is which vision of American resolve will prevail.

  Third, can we reopen the paths of opportunity enjoyed by prior generations? Trump promises fake solutions to real problems not yet addressed by either party. As jobs vanished, economic security diminished, and special interest money burgeoned, too many Americans—including the young—felt their optimism curdle into hopelessness and mistrust. The question is whether we can work to make our free market economy more inclusive and secure, or whether our political entropy will make still more American strangers to hope.

  Finally, will we passively allow climate change to choke the world we have received as an unearned yet priceless gift? Trump has added to our well of criminal ignorance by labeling climate science a “hoax.” Such irresponsibility is the price we pay for the cynical politics and mass disinformation that promotes our most selfish and short-sighted delusions. The question is whether Americans, at large, still possess the vision to imagine and shape the future.

  The past decades in our politics give us ample ground for skepticism; our fractious present gives us more. The GOP is splintered, and the Democrats are divided between progressive pragmatists and a newly empowered left. But the Republican Party now controls all three branches of government and must find, if it dares, a way forward more responsible than the shoddy demagoguery of our president-elect. In particular, leading Republicans in Congress must rise above their parochial political interests and recognize the weight of responsibility they must bear for keeping the country whole.

  Their performance over the last two decades—not to mention in this election—does not augur well for rational governance. Thus much depends on whether we as citizens can see each other, our country and ourselves, as worthy of much better—and demand that our elected officials do the same. For if we slink back into our corners, closing our eyes and our minds, our leaders will be no better.

  Despite all this, I continue to hope. I know too many Americans, of all origins and backgrounds, not to hope—which is why I chose to spend these last fourteen months as I have.

  I did this, of course, because I knew you were there. There is no better gift for a writer who cares about these things than readers who care just as much. As I set writing aside, at least for now, please know how grateful I am.

  With many thanks, and all good wishes in all things,

  Ric

  Epilogue

  What else to say?

  As the hours passed on Tuesday night, for many millions of Americans anticipation morphed into astonishment, foreboding into numbing disbelief. The oracles of cosmopolitan America had promised our first female president—an 84% favorite, the New York Times assured its readers early that evening. Four hours later, her prospects had shriveled to 7%.

  Donald Trump had blazed his trail through white America to the Rust Belt.

  Not even the Republican National Committee had imagined this—its internal projections, like those of the Clinton campaign, had Hillary Clinton becoming our 45th president. But the demographic foundation for the über-conventional wisdom had collapsed.

  The outcome was defined by race and class—but not in the way pollsters, prognosticators, and professionals had envisioned. The Obama coalition turned out to be just that—personal to Barack Obama. That black people and the young would taper off at the polls was expected. But the much-vaunted Latino surge never materialized in full force nor, among those who voted, was the split between parties much different than in 2012. And white college-educated women turned out for the louche Donald Trump in the same proportion as for the genteel Mitt Romney. In the end, party loyalty trumped feminism.

  So, too, did the raw emotion of Trump voters transcend the technological bells and whistles of Clinton’s turnout machine. To an unprecedented degree, rural and working-class whites flooded the polls to support the avatar of their frustrations. The engine of race was powerful indeed—answering Trump’s nativist call, white America had put a white man in the White House.

  For many whites, the right-wing parody of Clinton was indubitable fact. She was dishonest, corrupt, and, as damaging, symbolic of the elite who condescended to ordinary Americans from distant redoubts of privilege. The facts prized by cosmopolites meant nothing in Trumpworld; instead, the elite media were bent on destroying a man in whom his followers reposed their hopes. Trump would rebuild the country or, at least, take a wrecking ball to Washington—the smug and privileged would at last hear the outcry of those they flew over. Nothing else mattered.

  For Democrats, those final hours on Tuesday were wrenching—amidst their dismay, they clung to hope before resorting to blame. What Nancy Pelosi said that night is surely true: that in the campaign’s final days James Comey “became the leading Republican political operative in the country, wittingly or unwittingly.” It is indisputable that he changed the dynamic of the race; quite possible that he changed its outcome; intolerable to consider that the self-regard of a single man had made the singular Donald Trump president of the United States. But there Comey was, a boulder in history’s stream.

  Within the Clinton campaign, a bitter certainty prevailed that Comey had cost her the presidency. In a post-election call with donors, Clinton said that the FBI director had “stopped our momentum” and prevented her from ending the campaign with an optimistic closing argument. Prior to the Comey letter, internal polling showed Clinton ahead in all but two battleground states; in its wake came a fatal slippage. The break toward Trump was particularly marked among white suburban women, to whom Democratic pollsters attributed Clinton’s narrow losses in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin—Trump’s margin of victory in the electoral college.

  Still, there were multiple tributaries to Clinton’s defeat—not least an absence of passion among the voters she needed, including those traditionally affiliated with her party. Soon enough the dialogue among sharply divided Democrats will turn to fractious arguments about message and direction. Blame will be cast; conflicting lessons posed; a multiplicity of answers proposed—a process made more rancorous by the identity of the victor. But that was for later—Donald Trump had won, and there were rituals to observe.

  There was irony in this. For all of his inveighing against foreigners, it is Donald Trump who is alien to our traditions, indifferent to all but self. There is little doubt that, in defeat, he would have been graceless and divisive, inflicting further damage on our polity. He spared us this much by winning.

  So it fell to Hillary Clinton to begin the transfer of power. Though it was hard to watch—and surely wrenching to perform—she played her role well. “This is painful,” she acknowledged, “and it will be for a long time. But I still believe in America, and I always will. If you do, then you must accept this result, and then look to the future. Donald Trump is going to be our president. We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead.”

  She was more emotional than usual, and had more to say. For young women, she offered encouragement: “Never doubt that you are valuable, and powerful, and deserving of every chance in the world.” As for this passage, whatever its difficulties, “[t]he presidency . . . is bigger than any of us.”

  But she was big enough for the moment and, one knew, for the job she had hoped to win. So a hint of tragedy hung over the occasion.

  She was a flawed nominee, to be sure, and her mistakes fed the attack line that she was untrustworthy and ethically challenged. Many who saw only the public person thought that she was calculating and synthetic. But those who knew her knew better. And anyone who cared to look could see that she was smart, conscientious, resilient, and highly capable—tough enough to hold the office, an
d compassionate enough to use it to make lives better. In every job she ever had—even this last painful task—she did her utmost.

  But now she was done, and had passed the moment to Donald Trump.

  The speech written for him was sufficiently gracious in tone to fulfill the requirements of impending power. In one passage, Trump sounded a bit more like himself. “America,” he assured us, “will no longer settle for anything less than the best.” And there he was, standing before us.

  One could not help but think of the woman we had wasted and the man we had “settled for,” Barack Obama. For it had fallen to this president of peerless integrity and grace to welcome as his successor a man who trafficked in xenophobia and racism.

  Americans are “all rooting for his success,” Obama said of Trump before welcoming him to the White House. There he told Trump “I want to emphasize to you, Mr. President-elect, that we now are going to . . . do everything we can to help you succeed, because if you succeed, then the country succeeds.” Afterwards, Obama termed the meeting “excellent.”

  The president surely was. Together, he and Clinton had honored the rituals that are part of our healing, giving a veneer of normality to a wrenching transition. But they reminded us of who, and what, we are leaving behind, and who will take Obama’s place as president of the United States.

  Over the next few days and weeks, commentators will swath Trump in pieties about the grandeur of democracy, the majesty of peaceful transitions, and the power of the presidency to enlarge a man’s spirit. Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell will be full of plans, somehow certain that they can bend Trump to their purposes. New Republican vistas will open, plucked from the old conservative wish list—repealing Obamacare, reversing our commitment to combat climate change, abandoning the Iran nuclear deal, passing tax cuts for the wealthy, and appointing a Scalia clone to the Supreme Court.

  Unmentioned, one suspects, will be tariffs, starting trade wars and tearing up NAFTA, anathema to the GOP’s donor classes. Nor are Republicans in Congress enthused about term limits or infrastructure spending, a Trump proposal that would actually help create jobs for the struggling Americans who supported him. Ryan and his friends will hope, as many hope, that Trump is far less serious about his ideas than he is about himself. The risk they are running is that Trump will get his ideas and himself confused.

  But the presidency is fraught with risk—much of which involves the personal capacity of a president to respond to precipitous and unanticipated dangers. Think of John F. Kennedy and the Cuban missile crisis, then think of Donald Trump. By supporting his candidacy, with whatever ambivalence, the Republican Party has given us a combustible and erratic leader who is dangerous to them and, far more consequential, to us.

  His roster of cabinet hopefuls is ominous, for Donald Trump repels people of genuine talent and integrity. The cast of suspects is like watching a TV retrospective from the ‘80s, peopled by the often eccentric human oddities who clung to his campaign—aging white retreads, mediocrities, apparatchiks and loons: Rudy Giuliani, Newt Gingrich, Jeff Sessions, Reince Priebus, and the man who will be one heartbeat away, the oleaginous and spineless Mike Pence.

  For foreign policy advice in these perilous times, Trump will look to the frenzied hardliner, John Bolton—a man capable of frightening Dick Cheney—and the intemperate former general Mike Flynn, a close associate of the Russians who have been rooting Trump on. Alt-right racism will be represented in the White House by chief strategist Steve Bannon. The only man of color, the unfathomable Ben Carson, will likely never notice.

  When a president in desperate need of the best advice has recourse only to the worst, it will accentuate the worst in him. The man himself is dangerous enough.

  Though we are joined in common peril, one is tempted to think that, day-to-day, women will suffer most, and not simply because America chose a misogynist over a female. No doubt the repeal of Obamacare will mean a decline in women’s health, and Trump’s appointments to the Supreme Court will endanger women’s rights, whether with respect to workplace equity or reproductive choice. One can also think of minorities deprived of the right to vote, or immigrant families ripped apart by deportation, or refugees from tyranny denied admission to our once compassionate country, or American Muslims scapegoated as incipient terrorists.

  At least Trump has warned them of what to expect. What happens to the white Americans who placed their hope in his divisive bluster, only to discover that their lives, and the lives of their children, are even worse? And, should they care to notice, that their hero is surrounded by the very elite he warned them against—such as his presumptive candidates for Secretary of the Treasury, Wall Street figures like Steven Mnuchin, late of Goldman Sachs, or Jamie Dimon of J.P. Morgan. To whom do his embittered followers look then?

  But that is the price of electing a demagogue who sees other people only as pawns, and whose campaign was marked by a conscienceless cruelty. In the end, Trump coarsens his surroundings wherever he goes. And now a scared and angry minority of Americans have sent him to the White House.

  This is not a time for empty sentiment, or false hopes. Our president-elect is an ignorant and unstable seventy-year-old man with an unremediated personality disorder. That won’t change; nor will he. For the lesson Trump learned from us is that he alone, once again, is sufficient to all moments. He won, after all—in his mind, he always does.

  What else to say?

  We cannot let him win anymore. No matter what we do, his presidency will mark us. But what we can do—must do—is to stand up for the values Trump contravenes: the civic institutions he disdains, the civility he abjures, the inclusiveness he shuns, the rule of law he resents, the compassion he diminishes. We must do all we can to reach across the divides he widened to address the ills that he exploited. We must always remember that what makes America great is that which makes it good. And we must never forget who this man is, and what our country yet can be if we strive to make it so.

  RNP

  November 12, 2016

  Acknowledgments

  This book would not be one without the help and support of others.

  Arianna Huffington gave me the opportunity to write what I wanted about politics, every week for fourteen months on the front page of The Huffington Post. Without this as inspiration, nothing else would have happened. I can’t thank her enough.

  Many thanks, as well, to the people at HuffPost who shepherded every piece: Stuart Whatley, Bryan Maygers, Hayley Miller, and Alexandra Rosario Kelly. Week upon week they connected me with readers, which was all a writer could ever ask.

  My terrific publisher, Nathaniel Marunas, inspired this project and was tireless and creative in brainstorming how to turn weekly articles into a narrative of the campaign. This, and his interest in what I was doing, helped keep me pushing forward.

  My editor, Amelia Ayrelan Iuvino, helped to shape the narrative with a sharp and discerning eye, culling pieces that were less essential and pruning repetitious phrases and passages. It was with her considerable help that this became a book.

  Numerous people—some mentioned herein, some who wished to go unmentioned—helped sharpen my analysis. All made my pieces better.

  Finally, I’m very grateful to my wife, Nancy Clair, for all her understanding and encouragement of what was, at times, an around-the-clock undertaking. In so many ways, it is terrific to have a partner who is so caring and so smart.

  Annotations

  1. Even more remarkable is that this never changed. Thus Carson’s debate appearances—a portrait in incomprehension.

  2. And it was one of many moments where his statements provoked bewilderment and bemusement, as in his dubious claim to have nearly killed someone as a teenager.

  3. Among all of the habitués of the fever swamp, including Trump, Carson’s statements and behavior were often the least predictable and most bizarre.

  4. This continued throughout the debates. Even in the odd ménage of GOP contenders, Carson seemed to be deb
ating in his own space bubble.

  5. Privately, they often say much worse. I heard “sheer evil” more than once.

  6. It is telling that, in over a decade, Fiorina has never found another job as a corporate CEO.

  7. Though not a successful one. Her last gasp was an ignominious week as Ted Cruz’s putative running mate—spent a heartbeat away, as one humorist put it, from never becoming president.

  8. This persisted throughout the campaign. Rubio was a candidate without identity, with little to offer but hysterical denunciations of Barack Obama. Eventually, he was reduced to puerile jibes about Trump’s body parts, another candidate maddened by the fever.

  9. As the weeks wore on, his image as a candidate of the future—a youthful Latino American—became ever more threadbare. His slogan seemed to be: “I’m great political horseflesh.”

  10. After repeatedly denigrating the Senate and stating that he would never run for reelection, Rubio did precisely that—trampling the hopes of an old friend of his who was already running in the process.

  11. These qualities were a major component of Cruz’s failure. They were simply too obvious to ignore.

  12. One curiosity is why Cruz seems to revel in his oppositional persona. On one hand, Cruz is relentlessly tactical; the question is if his need to attack springs from something deeper.

  13. Not quite. But Trump prevailed in part because many establishment Republicans—especially Cruz’s senatorial colleagues—loathed Cruz even more. At least until, too late, they grasped the essence of Donald Trump.