American Carnage

by Tim Alberta

  But the genie could not fit back into the bottle. Over the ensuing seventy-two hours, Trump began hurling a hodgepodge of insults. He questioned the authenticity of Cruz’s faith, telling a rally in Iowa that “not a lot of evangelicals come out of Cuba, in all fairness.”4 He accused Cruz of being in the pocket of big oil and slammed his flip-flopping on ethanol subsidies. And he told Fox News, “I don’t think he’s qualified to be president,” saying that Cruz carried himself “like a little bit of a maniac” in the Senate.5 (Apropos of nothing, it was around this time that Trump said that Hillary Clinton “got schlonged” by Barack Obama in the 2008 primary.6)

  Cruz held back. Having moved to the top of the polls in Iowa, a confrontation with Trump seemed less than ideal. But it soon became apparent that unilateral disarmament was not practical. As the calendar turned to 2016, Trump intensified his attacks, questioning whether Cruz, born in Canada to an American mother, was qualified for the presidency.

  Cruz replied to the Birther 2.0 routine by tweeting a clip from Happy Days, suggesting that Trump had jumped the shark. When it became clear that he hadn’t—that the front-runner was gaining ground in Iowa with his insinuations—Cruz finally decided to return fire.

  “Donald comes from New York and he embodies New York values,” Cruz told a New Hampshire radio host on January 12, finally snapping a seven-month streak of playing nice with the GOP front-runner.7 “The Donald seems to be a little bit rattled.” Cruz repeated these rehearsed lines that night on Megyn Kelly’s Fox News program.

  By the time the remaining candidates gathered in South Carolina for a debate on January 14, all other story lines were considered side dishes to the delicious, long-awaited main course of Trump versus Cruz. And it did not disappoint.

  “Back in September, my friend Donald said he had his lawyer look at this from every which way and there was no issue there. There was nothing to this ‘birther’ issue,” Cruz announced on the stage. “Since September, the Constitution hasn’t changed. But the poll numbers have.”8

  The crowd roared with approval. When the moderators pressed Trump on why he was now raising the issue against Cruz, he could only shrug, “Because he’s doing a little bit better.”

  Trump would soon have his revenge. When the moderators asked Cruz to explain his cryptic references to “New York values,” he responded, “Most people know exactly what New York values are,” adding that “not a lot of conservatives come out of Manhattan.” Trump was visibly offended by the remark and delivered a devastating counterattack. Standing at an adjacent lectern, he recalled the spirit of New Yorkers in the aftermath of September 11 as a point of national pride. Cruz himself was forced to applaud, and when Trump charged that Cruz’s comments were “insulting,” the Texas senator did not raise an objection. It was Trump’s finest debate showing to date, and Cruz’s worst.

  It wasn’t the only tough moment for Cruz. After a prolonged back-and-forth with Rubio over the 2013 immigration bill, a dispute that had become increasingly heated between the two senators, Rubio unloaded on Cruz. He accused the Texan of sticking a finger in the wind not only on immigration, but also on ethanol subsidies and national security, saying he had joined with Rand Paul and Bernie Sanders in voting for a defense budget that slashes military spending. “That is not consistent conservatism,” Rubio said. “That is political calculation.”

  Cruz smirked. “I appreciate you dumping your oppo research file on the debate stage,” he said.

  The sparring between Cruz and Rubio would make for compelling melodrama in the months ahead. But more than eleven million people had tuned in on this occasion to watch the clash of the titans: Trump versus Cruz. It was clear now, with three weeks remaining until the Iowa caucuses, that the gloves were off. “I guess,” Trump told CNN following the debate, “the bromance is over.”

  WHAT WOULD THE 2016 REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTIAL RACE HAVE looked like without Trump?

  The January 28 debate in Iowa, the final gathering of the candidates before votes were cast, offered a glimpse into this alternative history. Because Fox News was hosting, and due to the bad “blood” still lingering with Megyn Kelly, Trump skipped the event, choosing instead to hold a rally for veterans just down the road, in Des Moines.

  The debate was undeniably duller without him: fewer outbursts, fewer eyeballs, fewer clicks. For the journalistic establishment’s eternal virtue-signaling about all things Trump, in truth, it had grown reliant on him. Its most trusted properties and personalities spent the campaign milking him like a cash cow, starving the other candidates of oxygen at pivotal junctures in the race. “I didn’t anticipate that Trump would receive over three billion dollars in free media. There is no precedent for that in the history of the United States of America,” Cruz says. “Our campaign raised over ninety-one million, which is the most any Republican primary candidate for president has ever raised. Ninety-one million is a ton of money, unless you’re facing three billion of free media on the other side.”

  As then-CBS executive chairman and CEO Les Moonves observed during Trump’s ascent, “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”9

  Trump may have been wise to stay away that night. Even as his support swelled among a base of populist supporters—including Sarah Palin, who flew to Iowa and gave a memorably strange speech endorsing him—a general panic over his viability was beginning to blanket portions of the American right. Days before the debate, National Review, the esteemed publication of conservative opinion, had announced a special issue of its magazine, “AGAINST TRUMP,” featuring some two dozen essays from leading conservatives voicing their resistance to the Republican front-runner. It was the first real showing of organized opposition to Trump, and it came as a surprise even to some employees of the publication. (At the time, I was National Review’s chief political correspondent, reporting on the straight news of the race, and I was informed of the issue just hours before it published online.)

  Cruz assumed the role of archvillain on stage in Trump’s absence, reasserting his preeminence as a provocateur and reminding voters of his legend as the original outsider. His audition as leading man, while beneficial in certain respects, also invited an unprecedented amount of dogpiling. Seemingly everyone on stage took a turn swinging at the Texas senator. It was a favorite pastime in Iowa of late.

  For months, Cruz’s bus had been shadowed through the state by an RV owned by America’s Renewable Future, a group targeting his opposition to ethanol subsidies. Then, in mid-January, the New York Times reported that Cruz had not disclosed loans from Citibank and Goldman Sachs (where his wife, Heidi, worked) that helped fund his 2012 Senate race.10 His opponents pounced on the chance to expose Cruz, the self-styled populist hero, as a privileged insider. Less than a week later Palin flew into Iowa to endorse Trump; that same day, January 19, legendary Iowa governor Terry Branstad said of Cruz, “I think it would be a big mistake for Iowa to support him.”

  Worse yet, he was also coming under attack from evangelicals. After Politico reported that Cruz told a New York fund-raiser that opposing same-sex marriage would not be a top priority,11 Rick Santorum’s campaign said Cruz “makes Mitt Romney and John Kerry look consistent.” When BuzzFeed reported that he tithed nowhere near the biblical 10 percent rate, a pro-Huckabee group ran a TV ad in Iowa labeling Cruz a “phony” Christian.

  And then there was Trump.

  The front-runner had continued to stage attacks on Cruz: his citizenship, his poor relationships on Capitol Hill, his sweetheart loans for the 2012 campaign. Yet none of this seemed terribly personal—at least, not by Trump’s standards—until late January. In preparation for a major address to Liberty University, the nation’s largest Christian college, Trump asked Tony Perkins for some pointers. Perkins provided a few suggestions, including a verse he jotted down as “2 Corinthians 3:17.” (“Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.”)

  When Trump pronounced the book as “Two Corinthians,” drawing
laughter from the audience and spawning coverage of his manifest lack of scriptural intimacy, he was furious at Perkins, calling a day later to chew him out for the lack of clarity. But when Perkins endorsed Cruz less than a week later, Trump’s ire turned toward the candidate himself, believing the entire affair had been an orchestrated act of sabotage.

  Trump grew more certain of this when Cruz’s allies began using the “Two Corinthians” mishap to mock him in the final days before the Iowa caucuses. One of the offenders, evangelical figurehead Bob Vander Plaats, president of an Iowa group called the Family Leader, used an appearance with Cruz to excoriate Trump’s lack of Christian virtue.

  “You know,” Trump told one Iowa official, “these so-called Christians hanging around with Ted are some real pieces of shit.”

  Cruz was similarly at his wit’s end with Trump. The night before the Des Moines debate, Cruz scalded his “narcissistic, self-involved” rival during a local pro-life rally. At dinner with friends afterward, the Texas senator vented his frustrations in uncommonly blunt fashion. “If you’re a faithful person, if you believe that Jesus Christ died for your sins, emerged from the grave three days later, and gives eternal life, and you’re supporting Donald Trump,” Cruz told his friends, “I think there’s something fundamentally wrong with you.”

  These tensions built to a crescendo in the campaign’s final days. Trump’s decision to skip the debate placed Cruz at center stage, subject to two hours of attacks. The next day’s Des Moines Register led with a headline that summed up the weeks of persecution: “ROUGH NIGHT FOR CRUZ.”

  Which made it all the more impressive when Cruz won the Iowa caucuses on February 1.

  It was a testament to the campaign’s stellar organization and top-notch data analytics program, which mined the state’s GOP electorate for its most receptive voters and then swamped them with microtargeted ads, mailers, and phone calls. That said, even Cruz’s data gurus had low-balled voter turnout. Four years prior, a record-breaking number of Iowans (121,503) had voted in the Republican caucuses. All the campaigns were banking on a sharp uptick this time around: 135,000, or even 150,000, perhaps. The craziest, most bullish estimates reached 175,000.

  When all the votes were tallied, nearly 187,000 Iowans participated in the GOP caucuses.12

  Cruz captured 27.6 percent of the vote; Trump finished second with 24.3 percent; and Rubio took third with 23.1 percent. No other candidate reached the double digits.

  For Cruz, Iowa represented more vindication than victory. Once dismissed as a quixotic candidate, only later to be told that his financial and organizational strength would be wasted because of Trump’s all-eclipsing presence, Cruz believed his caucus triumph represented a breakthrough: a win for the most hated politician in the party and a loss for the front-runner who talked of nothing but winning. On a stage inside the state fairgrounds that night, Cruz looked beyond Iowa, way beyond Iowa, going so far as to preview portions of a speech he intended to give later that year when accepting the Republican nomination in Cleveland.

  But his success did not come without controversy.

  Seventeen minutes before the caucuses were called to order at locations all around Iowa, a CNN reporter tweeted the news that Carson was headed home to Florida after the caucuses instead of traveling on to New Hampshire and South Carolina. The cable network immediately picked up the story and ran with it, suggesting that Carson was suspending his campaign. Having set up a sophisticated instant-alert system with their volunteers and precinct captains across the state, Cruz’s team blasted out a message informing them that Carson was quitting the race and urging them to “inform any Carson caucus-goers” to vote for Cruz instead.

  Carson finished with 9.3 percent of the vote, roughly equivalent to his recent polling in Iowa, but he blamed Cruz for his defeat. On a phone call the next day, Carson asked for a public apology; Cruz issued one immediately. Carson wasn’t satisfied. Over the next week he tortured Cruz, portraying his opponent as conniving and untrustworthy. Carson knew he was not going to win the nomination. But he felt a newfound resolve to prevent Cruz from winning it.

  In this, he made a powerful new ally: Trump.

  The front-runner had long suspected Cruz of playing dirty tricks, and now he had solid proof. After boarding his plane at the Des Moines airport, Trump placed a phone call to Jeff Kaufmann, the Iowa GOP chairman who had just declared Cruz the winner.

  “You know what the Cruz people did. They threw the vote,” Trump told Kaufmann. “I think you need to publicly disavow the result.”

  Kaufmann told Trump he couldn’t do that. It would be another black eye for Iowa, four years after the party mistakenly declared Mitt Romney the winner over Rick Santorum.

  A long silence. “You should disavow the result,” Trump said. “Think about it, will you?”

  RUBIO WAS ROUNDLY RIDICULED FOR DELIVERING WHAT SOUNDED LIKE a victory speech after his third-place finish in Iowa. But in some ways, he had won: Presidential politics are all about narratives and expectations, and Rubio captured 23 percent of the vote, just 1 point behind Trump, in a state where polls had projected him in the mid-teens. More important, his next-closest competitor was Carson, at 9 percent. Huckabee and Santorum quit the race after Iowa, freeing up more voters, and Rubio’s rivals in the establishment lane had become afterthoughts.

  The polling in New Hampshire reflected this new reality. Rubio, who for weeks had been stuck in the low teens in a five-way cluster with Bush, Christie, Cruz, and Ohio governor John Kasich, suddenly broke out. Several reputable surveys showed Rubio jumping to 17, 18, and 19 percent in the immediate aftermath of Iowa’s caucuses, establishing clear separation from the non-Trump pack.

  Heading into the February 6 debate in Manchester, on a Saturday evening three days before the state’s primary, Rubio was positioned to complete step two of the process: a second-place finish that would send his centrist rivals packing and set up the three-way contest in South Carolina that Rubio’s team craved.

  The governor of New Jersey had other ideas.

  Christie had once been the hottest commodity in Republican politics. His upset victory in 2009 had injected vitality and personality into a party woefully short on both. His truculent style and larger-than-life aura were a perfect fit for the state; when a group of top GOP donors pleaded with him to run for president in 2012, Christie refused, saying there was more work to be done in New Jersey. He did it well, reforming the state’s pension structure and winning multiple fights with the teachers’ unions, earning himself approval ratings that topped 70 percent. After his deft handling of Superstorm Sandy, Christie coasted to reelection in 2013 by 22 points—in one of America’s bluest states—and was positioned as a top-tier contender for the presidency in 2016.

  And then came “Bridgegate.” Many local Democratic officials endorsed Christie in his 2013 reelection bid; one who did not was Mark Sokolich, the mayor of Fort Lee. In retaliation, a top Christie aide emailed one of the governor’s allies at the Port Authority: “Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee.” On the first day of school that September, the Port Authority unexpectedly shut down multiple road lanes on the New Jersey side of the George Washington Bridge, causing mass delays and prompting an investigation that exposed the administration’s plans for political retribution. Christie was never proved to have had knowledge of the scheme, but the scandal engulfed his second term, sinking his approval ratings and his presidential prospects.

  Once considered a favorite in New Hampshire, leading some of the earliest surveys taken in 2013 and 2014, Christie had been reduced to also-ran status by February 2016. He did not break single digits in any poll of the state in the final four weeks before primary day, and in part, he blamed Rubio, whose super PAC had dropped millions of dollars slamming his record.

  Christie was not going to win New Hampshire—or the Republican nomination—but he could still take Rubio down with him.

  Rubio’s greatest vulnerability was his protective casing. Despite the obse
rvable political gifts, his candidacy was carefully stage-managed. Not only did his campaign keep him under wraps, but everything he said and did seemed carefully rehearsed. His remarks about biography, policy matters, and political disputes were often streamlined down to the syllable. Being “on message” is vital to campaigns, but Rubio grew disciplined to the point of absurdity. His insularity and highly mechanical messaging had become a subject of fascination in the political world, not just for reporters but also for rival campaigns.

  Christie telegraphed his coming attacks on Rubio in the February 6 debate, and when the lights went on he wasted no time prosecuting his case that the forty-four-year-old first-term senator was not prepared for the presidency. Responding to Christie’s charge that he shared Obama’s meager qualifications, Rubio offered a practiced rebuttal, arguing that Obama’s inexperience had not kept him from effecting a calculated makeover of American government. “Let’s dispel once and for all with this fiction that Barack Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing,” Rubio warned. “He knows exactly what he’s doing. Barack Obama is undertaking a systematic effort to change this country, to make America more like the rest of the world.”

  When Christie responded by pressing the Obama comparison, warning voters “not to make the same mistake we made eight years ago,” Rubio returned fire by highlighting New Jersey’s credit downgrades. Then, curiously, he repeated his earlier remark almost verbatim. “Let’s dispel with this fiction that Barack Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing. He knows exactly what he’s doing,” Rubio said. “He is trying to change this country. He wants America to become more like the rest of the world.”

  Christie turned to the audience. “That’s what Washington, DC, does,” he announced. “The drive-by shot at the beginning with incorrect and incomplete information and then the memorized twenty-five-second speech that is exactly what his advisers gave him.”