The Best People

by Alexander Nazaryan

  Donald Trump first spoke at CPAC in 2011, when it seemed like he might challenge Barack Obama in his attempt to win a second term (Trump had mused about a presidential run since the late 1980s, but had never taken the requisite steps). He came into the event knowing that many there favored libertarian representative Ron Paul, the aging but energetic Republican from Texas who was staunchly against the kinds of bloody, expensive military interventions George W. Bush had initiated in Afghanistan and Iraq. Though he had no record as a party activist, Trump lectured the base during his speech on the folly of aligning with Paul, who “just has zero chance of getting elected.” While he didn’t announce a run, Trump made a pitch remarkably similar to the one he would issue from the lobby of Trump Tower four and a half years later. “If I run and if I win, this country will be respected again,” he said, adding later, “Our country will be great again.”

  Paul easily won the 2011 CPAC straw poll, with Mitt Romney, the former Republican governor of Massachusetts and the eventual 2012 GOP nominee for president, earning second place. Trump—who’d been invited to CPAC by GOProud, a conservative gay group—failed to register as anything more than a sideshow.

  Trump kept returning to CPAC, like a persistent suitor determined to make his case. He came back in 2013 (“We have to take back our jobs from China”), 2014 (“With immigration, you better be smart, and you better be tough”), and 2015 (“Our roads are crumbling; everything’s crumbling”). He had become one of CPAC’s intermittently charming oddballs, punctuating a four-day procession of paeans to more guns and lower taxes with his freewheeling New York shtick, delighting the anti-abortion activists from Duluth or Dallas who knew not to take the reality television star seriously.

  After he announced his run for the presidency, some of the GOP grass roots remained suspicious, even as he seemed to be eliminating Republicans one by one on his way to the presidential nomination. Some attendees at CPAC 2016 decided they would stage a walkout of Trump’s speech; having learned of the plan, and apparently fearing embarrassment, he decided to campaign in Kansas and Florida instead.

  “He’s not a true conservative,” one attendee explained. Many in the GOP waited for the principled right to provide a final bulwark against Trump, to embrace a more moderate candidate like the junior senator from Texas, Ted Cruz. They kept waiting and waiting, but the moment never came.

  In 2017, CPAC took place just a month after Trump’s inauguration and was a purely celebratory affair. Trump remembered his first speech at the convention in 2011, “I love this place,” he said, even though “this place” had not always loved him.

  The centerpiece of the conference was an appearance by Steve Bannon, the chief executive of Trump’s campaign in its closing months and subsequently the president’s chief political strategist. With him on stage was Reince Priebus, the new chief of staff. The Bannon-Priebus CPAC duet was meant to tamp down rumors of West Wing squabbling and dysfunction, but also to show that an alliance had formed, finally, between Bannon’s nationalist forces and Priebus’s mainstream Republicans. It was all “phony,” one person formerly close to Bannon would later say dismissively, but it looked halfway believable at the time. Everyone was getting along in the White House, and the White House was getting along with Capitol Hill. The right was united, while the left remained in wounded disarray.

  Bannon and Priebus walked onto the stage to a standing ovation. “President Trump brought together the party and the conservative movement,” Priebus told the crowd. Bannon seemed to agree, but it wasn’t long before he resorted to his familiar pose of the pugnacious sage. “There’s a new political order that’s being formed out of this,” he said, contradicting the earlier suggestion of cohesion. Bannon was a warrior. True to form, he promised war.

  Among the new president’s main goals, Bannon said, would be “the deconstruction of the administrative state.” Some clapping followed, some whooping. Bannon smiled, continuing in that dark, insistent way of his. “If you look at these cabinet appointees,” he added a little bit later, “they were selected for a reason, and that is the deconstruction. The way the progressive left runs is if they can’t get it passed, they’re just going to put in some sort of regulation in an agency. That’s all going to be deconstructed and I think that that’s why this regulatory thing is so important.”

  Deconstructing the administrative state was not quite the same thing as draining the swamp, but if they were not identical twins, they were at least siblings. The swamp, which Trump invoked without ever defining, was the ill-defined membrane that had grown between the public sector and the industries that haunted its borders: the lobbyists, the contractors, the consultants, the media, the law, the defense-industrial complex, the nonprofits, the think tanks. And all these industries thrived because as the administrative state—that is, the federal government, in all its regulatory might—grew, it became ever more inefficient and unwieldy, the lithe prince grown into a fat king propped up by his servile court. Bannon wanted to banish the court, force the king onto a diet, make him lean again.

  Bannon was not wrong in his belief that government had grown into a beastly organism far beyond what the Founding Fathers envisioned. Some of that growth reflected westward expansion, as well as a population boom caused in part by immigration. But government also grew because it was deliberately grown by those in power.

  An adherent to the progressive movement of the early twentieth century, Woodrow Wilson pushed for an expansion of federal powers that accorded with modern views of what the fortunate owed their supposed inferiors.

  Government was not only to protect property rights, but to protect those being trampled on by factory bosses, slumlords, and bankers. Wilson oversaw the creation of the Federal Reserve System, the Federal Trade Commission, and the National Park Service, which quickly became hallmarks of the federal behemoth that, a century later, Bannon would yearn to dismantle.

  Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal dramatically expanded Washington’s role in domestic affairs with creations like Social Security, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Tennessee Valley Authority. World War II and the Cold War led to the rise of what Dwight D. Eisenhower would come to call “the military-industrial complex,” with contractors like Northrop Grumman and Boeing coming to dominate the defense industry, acting like a shadow Pentagon. Lyndon B. Johnson’s domestic program, the Great Society, was a broadening of the social welfare programs Roosevelt had started, this time with a particular sensitivity to racial inequality.

  Even as the government grew, the number of federal employees remained flat, having reached two million in the 1950s and staying there ever since. Some saw that stasis as little more than an illusion. In 2017, conservative commentator George F. Will argued that government has “dispersed to disguise its size.” Citing the research of Brookings Institution scholar John J. DiIulio Jr., Will estimated that if one were to add to the federal workforce state and municipal workers dependent on Washington for their employment, and also include contractors, the true number of government employees was actually fourteen million. This was the administrative state, splashing happily in the swamp.

  Just weeks after Trump announced his run for the presidency in June 2015, the musical Hamilton moved from the Public Theater to Broadway. As Trump obliterated his competitors in the Republican primary, Hamilton became a musical and cultural sensation. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s creation was celebrated as a paean to immigrants, multiculturalism, and the ascendancy of hip-hop as an art form. It was also a celebration of big government, albeit indirectly. Hamilton was a proponent of a centralized, powerful federal government. In the first of his The Federalist Papers essays, Hamilton praised an “enlightened zeal for the energy and efficiency of government” while warning against demagogues who would let loose a “torrent of angry and malignant passions.”

  Conservatives preferred another Founding Father, one whose views on federal power directly opposed Hamilton’s. They eagerly cited the limited-government philosophy
of Thomas Jefferson, whose ideal American was the gentleman farmer. In his 1801 inaugural address, Jefferson called for “a wise and frugal Government which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.”

  More than two centuries later, conservatives were still promising the same thing, convinced that if government receded, liberty would flourish. Liberty, in their conception, could endow people with a dignity that the regulatory state never could. Reagan’s experiment with trickle-down economics and George W. Bush’s pro-business agenda had not borne these ideas out, suggesting that people often craved more government, not less, even as they demanded that government act efficiently and responsibly. And yet the right clung to its sacred nostrum.

  Trump was not a scholar of Jefferson, nor a disciple of Reagan. As an enthusiastic but undisciplined builder of real estate, he frequently relied on the government, whether to seize properties by eminent domain, reap tax incentives in exchange for development, or to embrace the protections afforded by declaring bankruptcy. But political opportunity tended to make for quick converts, and by the presidential campaign of 2016, Trump was a zealous believer in the limited government cause.

  As presidential expert Elaine Kamarck saw it, Trump and Bannon had a “fundamentally monarchical” understanding of the presidency. “We fought an entire fucking revolution to get away from kings and queens and get to the rule of law,” she said derisively, still in disbelief two years after the presidential election where so many Americans had fallen for a vision contrary to the very notion of America. For all its unwieldiness, the administrative state enshrined and protected freedoms. As for the swamp, it was often just Americans exercising—however profitably or unwholesomely—their First Amendment right to petition the government.

  Kamarck had worked for the Clinton administration, and her office at the Brookings Institution was decorated with Democratic memorabilia: her in the West Wing, jumping for joy after the passage of a bill that would, as a matter of fact, help reduce the size of government; a poster for the 1988 Democratic National Convention in Atlanta, another showing 1984 vice presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro as Lady Liberty from Eugène Delacroix’s famous depiction of the French Revolution.

  Having worked on Clinton’s downsizing effort, Kamarck freely acknowledged that the federal bureaucracy had become a wild, unweeded garden. Yet she had nothing but contempt for those who wanted to swing the scythe without understanding what they were doing, what it was that they were aiming to slash. “The federal government is the most highly educated workforce in the world,” she said. “It’s no longer a government of clerks, filing away your social security records.”

  For conservatives, the unelected bureaucrat was a vastly more convenient symbol than the specialist—whether in tax law or nuclear waste—who could triple her earnings in the private sector but decided to stay in public service out of conviction and dedication, maybe even old-fashioned patriotism. The unelected bureaucrat was a creature of infinite entitlement and could thus be easily dispensed with for the sake of the republic.

  “It’s been forty years since these conservatives have been talking about shrinking government,” Kamarck said, growing animated and annoyed. “They don’t ever manage to do it.” Not managing to do it was, paradoxically, what allowed them to promise that they would. All they ever needed was four more years.

  Trump first made his most consequential campaign promise during a rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin, on October 18, at a time when Clinton was leading by six points and seemed destined for surefire victory. He used it again the next day in Colorado Springs, Colorado. “We’re going to end the government corruption,” Trump said after his opening remarks about local military bases, “and we’re going to drain the swamp in Washington, D.C.” He then recited a litany of accusations regarding Clinton and her use of a private email server. “This truly is many times worse than Watergate,” he said. “And we are going to put an end to it November eighth.”

  “Drain the swamp” became a popular refrain in the final weeks of the presidential race, shaping the campaign’s conclusion just as “Build the wall” had shaped its opening. But while talk of a border wall thrilled Trump, he was not animated by the swamp stuff. He said as much in an October 26 rally in Charlotte, North Carolina, in one of his unsettling bouts of honesty: “I said that about a week ago, and I didn’t like it that much, didn’t sound that great. And the whole world picked it up. Funny how things like that happen…So drain the swamp, I didn’t like it, now I love it, right?”

  In his final campaign stop in Grand Rapids, Michigan, just as polls were set to open nationwide on November 8, supporters chanted “Drain the swamp” along with that other, more sinister rallying cry of Trump rallies: “Lock her up.” “Drain the swamp” dovetailed perfectly with Trump’s complaints about a “rigged system” that was going to hand Clinton the election, thereby excusing what some said was going to be his historic, McGovern-sized defeat. He was going to lose precisely because he knew how much of a “disaster” Washington had become, because he knew who was responsible for it, because he was not afraid to call the malefactors out by name.

  At a rally earlier that October, he had warned that the United States was “controlled by a small handful of global special interests” that had fostered an “illusion of democracy.” It was dark stuff, the justification for a loss he must have felt coming as keenly as did the Clinton camp.

  In truth everyone felt it, even if some claimed they had known all along that Trump was going to win. The evening would be confirmation of what everyone had known all along. Across the country, journalists were ready to file their “Clinton Wins in Historic Romp” articles, in hopes of getting to bed at a decent hour. (I know, because I wrote two such articles myself, and have them somewhere on my laptop still.)

  Trump and his closest aides were at Trump Tower, watching the returns. The Trumps lived in a fifty-eighth-floor triplex (he claimed the tower had sixty-eight floors, but this was a bit of creative marketing), while the campaign headquarters were below: Bannon’s “crack den” on the fifth floor, in the same space where The Apprentice was once filmed, and the “war room” on the sixth floor (or, in Trump’s alternate universe, the fourteenth) where communication aides Andrew Surabian and Steven N. Cheung put out what media wildfires they could.

  Trump came down to watch as Bannon and another staffer analyzed the returns from Florida, which Bannon had predicted Trump was going to win. Then he went back up to the residence. Some of his top aides followed, and soon they were in the unusually cramped kitchen of the otherwise opulent penthouse, crowded around a small television set. At 9:18 p.m., the Detroit Free Press called Michigan for Clinton. This was a sign that her midwestern “firewall” was holding, however tenuously. It had been a tense night for the Democrats, more tense than it needed to be, but the whole affair had finally come to its predicted, predictable end.

  It took about an hour for the Michigan prediction to be discounted and reversed. People around Trump exploded in cheering. Some cried. But the more serious of Trump’s advisers were probably closer in feeling to their Democratic adversaries. “We were not jubilant,” Bannon would remember much later. He was talking about himself but also about the man who, in a matter of hours, would be the president-elect of the United States. Trump permitted a smile but otherwise refused to partake in the increasingly celebratory mood around him.

  “You could tell the wheels were spinning,” Bannon said. “It was reality.”

  Chapter 2

  “I Wipe My Ass with Their Thing”

  As the presidential election of 2016 neared, Jared Kushner, the husband of Ivanka Trump and one of Donald Trump’s most influential advisers, reached out to Aryeh B. Bourkoff, founder of LionTree, a Manhattan investment bank with interests in media and telecommunications. Kushner was not looking for funds to allow the T
rump campaign to buy more television ads, hire more staff, or perhaps start to close the seemingly intractable gap between Trump and Clinton in the polls.

  Kushner wanted Bourkoff’s help in “setting up a Trump television network after the presidential election in November,” reported the Financial Times, which broke news of the Kushner-Bourkoff talks. In the gentle, understated way of the British newspaper, the report allowed that “the approach suggests Mr. Kushner and the Republican candidate himself are thinking about how to capitalise on the populist movement that has sprung up around their campaign in the event of an election defeat.”

  Others were not nearly so circumspect. In the Atlantic magazine, Derek Thompson wrote an article headlined “Trump Is Finished. Trump TV Is Next.” To be fair, this made perfect sense. During the campaign, Trump hadn’t needed CNN or the Washington Post to talk to his loyal supporters. He did need Fox News, but the network needed him more. After the election, his base would crave the feeling of a Trump rally, only twenty-four hours a day, delivered to their phones and televisions, an outlet to relentlessly prosecute President Clinton on the very issues Trump had raised during the campaign: the off-site State Department email server, the handling of the Benghazi consulate attack in Libya, the inveterate greed of the Clinton Foundation, Bill Clinton’s treatment of women. He had promised to be their voice at the Republican National Convention. Their voice he would remain, for a modest subscription fee.