American Carnage

by Tim Alberta

IF TRUMP’S INADVERTENT IGNORANCE OF POLICY BASICS WASN’T GOING to hurt him, then why would his deliberate contravening of political norms?

  This was the question Republicans were forced to grapple with as 2015 came to a close. It wasn’t just that his rivals’ attacks on him had backfired, or that voters didn’t seem to care that he lacked a basic understanding of certain issues. What made Trump’s enemies most nervous, what exasperated them and kept them up at night, was how he could get away with saying whatever he wanted.

  Examples of this in the first six months of his campaign already numbered too many to count. But few were as audacious as his praise for Vladimir Putin.

  Trump had hinted in the past at his respect for the Russian strongman, having felt a bond with him over their shared disdain for Obama and Hillary Clinton. In November, the GOP front-runner told Face the Nation of Putin, “I think that I would probably get along with him very well. And I don’t think you’d be having the kind of problems that you’re having right now.”13

  These comments seemed harmless enough at the time. A month later, however, the long-distance brotherhood was in full bloom.

  “He is a bright and talented person without any doubt,” Putin said during a year-end press conference, according to Russian state media. He called Trump “an outstanding and talented personality” and described him as “the absolute leader of the presidential race.”14

  Trump, ever a sucker for a compliment, responded in kind. “It is always a great honor to be so nicely complimented by a man so highly respected within his own country and beyond,” he said in a statement.

  The next day, on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Trump shrugged off the Kremlin’s brutal reputation: suppressing homosexuals, torturing prisoners, murdering journalists and political dissidents. “He’s running his country. And at least he’s a leader, unlike what we have in this country,” the candidate said. “I think our country does plenty of killing also.”15

  This constituted a radical break with traditional American foreign policy and its emphasis on denouncing autocrats and promoting democracy. It was also a sharp departure from recent Republican dogma. Echoing the tough-on-Russia rhetoric of Mitt Romney four years earlier, the other GOP hopefuls took turns calling Putin a “gangster” and a “KGB thug.” Outraged at Trump’s remarks, Romney tweeted, “Important distinction: thug Putin kills journalists and opponents; our presidents kill terrorists and enemy combatants.”

  Thinking, wishing, hoping that this time, finally, his insufferable nemesis had jumped the shark, Bush told CNN, “To get praise from Vladimir Putin is not going to help Donald Trump.”16

  He was wrong.

  What Bush and his Republican peers failed to understand was the degree to which Putin had become an appealing figure for many on the American right—not for the particulars of his government’s cruelty, necessarily, but rather, for the masculinity he radiated in such sharp contrast to his U.S. counterpart.

  This was happening long before Trump began singing the Russian leader’s praises. Back in September 2013, Marin Cogan wrote in National Journal magazine17 about the cult following Putin was amassing on the American right with his macho exploits: tranquilizing a tiger, hunting a gray whale with a crossbow, riding war horses, catching gigantic fish. He was always shirtless and never afraid, Rooseveltian testosterone oozing out of every pore.

  Cogan noted how, on popular websites such as Cracked and theChive, slideshows of Putin’s legend were labeled “The World’s Craziest Badass” and “The Real Life Most Interesting Man in the World,” drawing millions of eyeballs and enhancing the reputation of Russian’s tyrant among a certain segment of red-blooded American males.

  Observing this very phenomenon in early 2014, the conservative author Victor Davis Hanson wrote, “Obama’s subordinates violate the law by going after the communications of a Fox reporter’s parents; Putin himself threatens to cut off the testicles of a rude journalist.”18

  Still, Trump’s insistence on toadying to the virile Russian tyrant was strange, even for Trump. The GOP nominee had freely shunned European allies, talked tough on China and Japan, and emasculated America’s two intracontinental allies. Yet he was going out of his way to avoid any utterance of negativity about Vladimir Putin. Nobody knew quite what to make of it.

  On ABC’s This Week, when host George Stephanopoulos raised the allegations of Putin murdering his opponents, the GOP front-runner grew defensive.

  “Have you been able to prove that? Do you know the names of the reporters he has killed?” Trump responded.19 “He’s always denied it. It’s never been proven that he’s killed anybody. So, you know, you’re supposed to be innocent until proven guilty. At least, in our country.”

  Chapter Twelve

  January 2016

  “My party is committing suicide on national television.”

  CUPPING HIS HAND, PALM FACING DOWNWARD, ROTATING IT FROM nine o’clock to three o’clock, Ted Cruz would reassure them, “There’s a natural arc to Donald Trump’s candidacy.” It was the same speech he had been giving—to friends, staffers, donors, anyone who would listen, really—since June 16, 2015, the day Trump descended his gilded escalator in Manhattan.

  Cruz had come to Washington intent on making enemies, using his first two years in Congress to compile an unrivaled record of aggression toward the political class and its conventions. Yet he could no longer be considered the preeminent instigator in the GOP field. Trump offered the same arsenious approach as Cruz but without the professional constraints. Cruz was still a politician, after all, one who had to worry about long-term career prospects and constituents back in Texas even while chasing the presidency. His opponent was free of such concerns. Anything Cruz said, Trump could say with triple the bombast; anything Cruz did, Trump could do more aggressively, more emphatically, more audaciously. If Cruz was bringing a knife to the Republican primary fight, Trump was packing a nuclear-tipped bazooka.

  This distressed the senator’s allies. Believing that his capacity for winning the nomination stemmed from his distinction as the insurgent in the race, some urged Cruz to confront Trump head-on, calling attention to his decades of commentary that strayed from conservative orthodoxy. The senator had accumulated ample credibility on the right as an equal-opportunity truth teller, someone unafraid to reveal the ideological doublespeak practiced by the most powerful members of his own party. Why not, having turned the right against the likes of Marco Rubio and Mitch McConnell, do the same to Donald Trump?

  Because, Cruz believed, Trump was not built to last. His poll numbers would rise with the tide of free media, but once political gravity took hold and the news coverage exploited his obvious lack of preparation for the job, Trump would suffer a mass defection of supporters. They would be looking for the next-best wrecking ball to swing at Washington, and Cruz would be their obvious choice.

  Trump’s candidacy was fanning the flames of the very anti-establishment mood Cruz needed to win the nomination and ultimately the White House. There was nothing to be gained by attacking someone who was “renting” his supporters, Cruz argued, especially when Trump had shown a proficiency for emasculating whichever rival (Rand Paul, Jeb Bush, Rick Perry) had dared to engage him.

  “I like Donald Trump. I’m glad he’s in the race. I think he is having many beneficial effects on the race,” Cruz had said that summer. “He is attracting significant crowds and significant passion of people who are ticked off at Washington, fed up with politicians who say one thing and do another. The last thing I want to do is have a bunch of Washington politicians insulting and condescending to these hardworking Americans who are rightly and understandably frustrated with the direction this country is going.”

  Cruz added, “Many of the Republican candidates have gone out of their way to take a two-by-four to Donald Trump. I think that’s a mistake. I have deliberately declined to do so, and indeed have bent over backward to sing his praises.”

  That strategy made sense—for a time.

  With seve
nteen candidates in the field, and weaker prey such as Mike Huckabee and Jeb Bush to target, Cruz could afford to be patient. Many Republicans believed, in the summer and fall of 2015, that Trump’s campaign was a publicity stunt; that he was generating huge ratings to promote his hotels, particularly his new project in Washington, and feed his business ego; that he would never actually compete in Iowa or New Hampshire, much less go the distance and win the party’s nomination. It was defensible, then, for Cruz to focus his fire elsewhere. “There are seasons to a campaign,” he told his allies. “We will deal with Trump if and when necessary.”

  The problem with Cruz’s approach was that it undermined his own brand. He was a brawler, but also a dispenser of brutal honesty, someone whose word could be taken to the bank. (“TrusTed,” his campaign banners read.) Cruz didn’t just lay off Trump; he spent the months of June through December lavishing praise on his opponent in the hope of seducing the supporters whom Cruz believed would not, could not, ultimately pull the lever for such a man. But many conservative voters didn’t see the Trump whom Cruz saw, a soulless, philosophically hollow showman. They saw a brash renegade taking on a broken system on their behalf, someone whose credibility had been vouched for by leading figures on the right, including Cruz himself.

  In mid-December, Cruz spoke to me at length about his team’s considered outlook of the race: He believed he would win the Iowa caucuses, and predicted that Rubio, who had become the favorite to emerge from the “moderate lane,” would need to win the New Hampshire primary to keep pace. Never once did Cruz mention Trump’s name; it was as though the front-runner could be wished out of existence.

  This was telling. Despite a race that was unconventional in every sense, Cruz was clinging to his original, most conventional view of it. He took to reminding anxious donors and friends that America had never elected someone with neither political experience nor military experience. Despite the media’s obsession with Trump, Cruz insisted, the primary contest would still come down to a collision between an establishment favorite and a conservative favorite, with Trump’s supporters abandoning him long before that day arrived.

  Trump knew better. “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and wouldn’t lose any voters, okay?” he said in Iowa the following month. “It’s like, incredible.”

  NOBODY KNEW WHAT TO MAKE OF RUBIO’S CAMPAIGN.

  As a candidate, he was the total package: intelligence, personal magnetism, stirring oratory, policy chops, a gripping biography, and a message that could unite the GOP’s disparate factions. But his campaign did little to accentuate these strengths. For much of 2015, while most of his Republican rivals stumped their way across the early states, Rubio was nowhere to be found. He had enjoyed a solid bounce from his mid-April launch, but he was doing nothing to build on it. Rubio spent much of the summer avoiding voters so conspicuously that opposing campaign officials would ask reporters of his whereabouts. Officially, Rubio aides claimed that he was on fund-raising swings. And yet, for the entire third quarter of 2015, he raised less than $6 million,1 a haul dwarfed by those of Bush, Cruz, and Ben Carson. Even Carly Fiorina had raised more.

  At the same time, news clips piled up detailing Rubio’s poor attendance record in the Senate. Stories alleged that he’d missed half his committee meetings; others claimed he had the Senate’s worst voting record. The South Florida Sun-Sentinel demanded his resignation in an editorial.2 The “truant senator” narrative, combined with his absences from the trail and his lackluster fund-raising numbers, flummoxed friend and foe alike. If he wasn’t barnstorming across the early states, and he wasn’t collecting campaign dough, and he wasn’t voting in the Senate, what exactly was he doing?

  Rubio’s absenteeism was especially baffling in Iowa, where GOP officials wondered why he wasn’t making a play for the swaths of center-right voters desperate for an alternative to Trump and Cruz. But Rubio’s team, reluctant to raise expectations in any given state, kept playing hard-to-get. By the time Thanksgiving arrived, frustrations were boiling over. Prominent Republicans scolded Rubio in private for his failure to organize in the Hawkeye State, as stories abounded of his team missing easy opportunities to reach voters: The time a line of people waited for him after an event, while his field staffers ate pizza backstage; the appearance he canceled at a major evangelical gathering for no apparent reason; the Saturday he spent in Iowa watching football with his state chairman, Jack Whitver, rather than holding public events.

  In response to the uproar, Rubio’s campaign manager, Terry Sullivan, told the New York Times, “More people in Iowa see Marco on Fox and Friends than see Marco when he is in Iowa.”

  This only made things worse. Rubio had been dogged by criticisms that he was running his campaign from a television studio; now his campaign manager was confirming it. However tone-deaf Sullivan’s remark may have been, it contained no small kernel of truth. The unwritten rules of presidential campaigning were being rewritten in real time. In the four decades since the modern nominating system was canonized—Iowa, New Hampshire, then South Carolina—candidates had endeavored to achieve as much face time with voters as possible: coffee shops, high school gymnasiums, church sanctuaries, and, when in Iowa, Pizza Ranch restaurants.

  But Trump, equipped with universal name identification and unceasing media coverage, was atop the polls despite shaking fewer hands—“I’m a total germaphobe,” he explained—than anyone in the three early states could remember. On top of this, candidates who did spend lots of time on the ground and who did boast booming field organizations, such as Bush, had nothing to show for it. Studying their surroundings, Rubio’s team made the calculation that their time and money would be better spent on television than on ground operations.

  It appeared good enough for third place in Iowa. That would be good enough to earn a ticket to New Hampshire. But then what? As the voting season neared, Rubio’s team continued to blanch publicly and privately at the basic question of what its path to victory looked like. “To win the nomination, you have to win states,” Stuart Stevens, Romney’s 2012 chief strategist, says. “I love Rubio and I love his guys . . . but my question for them was always: Where are you going to win?”

  The dam broke in January. The Rubio brain trust had outlined an unconventional sequence in which Rubio would place third in Iowa, second in New Hampshire, and first in South Carolina. Nicknamed “3–2-1,” the strategy banked on a rapid winnowing of the field. Rubio’s team felt that a third-place finish in Iowa, ahead of establishment-friendly competitors such as Bush, Chris Christie, and John Kasich, would vault him ahead of the pack in New Hampshire. If he finished second to Trump there, he could consolidate the center-right vote, which, added to his share of conservatives, would give him a winning plurality in the three-man race with Trump and Cruz in South Carolina.

  By designating South Carolina as their must-win state, Rubio’s team was investing in a home game. Much of the candidate’s high command either hailed from or had deep connections to the Palmetto State; Jim DeMint, the former senator, had brought Rubio there with such frequency during his 2010 campaign that the underdog candidate became an adopted son. Rubio also had trip aces up his sleeve, three waiting high-profile endorsements in the state, national figures all: Governor Nikki Haley, Senator Tim Scott, and Congressman Trey Gowdy.

  Rubio and Scott had developed a particularly close kinship in the Senate, joining each other for Bible studies and pickup basketball games. Rubio had brought his family to Scott’s church in Charleston; Scott had backed Rubio during the darkest moments of the Gang of Eight affair. Now, as Rubio’s endgame finally came into focus, he found himself sharing a stage with Scott at a feel-good Republican event that only Reince Priebus could love.

  It was January 9, and Scott was teaming with Paul Ryan to cohost a “Poverty Summit” in Columbia, South Carolina. Staged as a nontraditional conversation about conservative solutions to socioeconomic immobility, Ryan and Scott strained to display a GOP that cared about bu
ilding trust with minority communities more than walls along the southern border. One by one, the presidential hopefuls took the stage to discuss the plight of poor Americans, offering commentary rarely if ever heard in contemporary Republican politics.

  Rubio was thoroughly in his element, peddling his up-by-the-bootstraps biography and pitching a forward-looking vision of conservatism that made the regular suspects swoon. Arthur Brooks, the brilliant president of the American Enterprise Institute, called the event “a new day for the Republican Party and the conservative movement.” Mika Brzezinski, the cohost of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, who took part in a panel discussion, remarked, “This is a Republican Party that can win the White House.”

  Two candidates declined to attend: Trump and Cruz.

  The symmetry was inescapable. A year earlier, Congressman Steve King had unofficially kicked off the 2016 Republican primary by hosting an event dominated by red-meat rhetoric that showed the hardline impulses of the party. Rubio had refused to go, not wanting to identify with King, and Trump and Cruz had won rave reviews. Now, a year later, with the voting soon to begin, Rubio had distinguished himself at an event designed to showcase the GOP’s softer side. But Trump and Cruz, not wanting to identify with Ryan, had refused to attend.

  It would soon become clear which version of the party Republican voters preferred.

  THE TRUCE BETWEEN TRUMP AND CRUZ COULD NOT HOLD FOREVER. The physics of a presidential campaign would not allow it: Two candidates, occupying the same space, are bound to collide. When they finally did, it was unlike anything the Republican Party had ever witnessed.

  Their rivalry began in earnest with a New York Times story in December that reported that Cruz had questioned the “judgment” of both Trump and Ben Carson during a private fund-raiser in Manhattan.3 Cruz objected to the reporting, prompting the Times to release audio of his remarks. This was validation for Trump, who had been predicting that Cruz would soon start attacking him. Cruz quickly tried to pull back. On December 11, as Trump began needling him with tweets, Cruz sent a tweet of his own: “The Establishment’s only hope: Trump & me in a cage match. Sorry to disappoint—@realDonaldTrump is terrific.”