American Carnage

by Tim Alberta

  Except that Flynn wasn’t unbeholden. After feuding with Obama administration officials and being forced into early retirement in 2014, Flynn launched a consulting firm that soon won contracts with companies linked to the Russian government. Taking a cursory glance at the general’s workload since joining the private sector, Trump’s lawyers warned that Flynn’s ties to the Kremlin would be deadly for a campaign already accused of being pro-Putin. Flynn was out.

  By the Fourth of July, it was apparent that Trump had only three choices: Pence, Gingrich, and Corker. Then, a day later, Corker withdrew from consideration.

  The Tennessee senator, a mannerly southerner and chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, had been circumspect about Trump since their first meeting back in May. Arriving at the candidate’s skyscraper, Corker, he later told friends, thought the entire spectacle odd: the characters milling around, the corded rope guarding Trump’s magazine covers like priceless artifacts, the candidate’s insistence on sitting behind his desk for their entire conversation, a gesture that Corker found uncouth.

  Still, Corker, like many who encounter Trump, was strangely charmed. And like many Republicans coming to grips with his perch atop the party in the middle of 2016, he craved influence over the campaign. He began communicating regularly with Trump, offering advice on matters of international affairs and providing feedback on foreign policy–themed remarks given by the candidate. By June, Corker’s team had submitted vetting paperwork to Trump’s legal team. Then, on July 5, he was summoned to New York for an official interview and a joint campaign trip with Trump to Raleigh, North Carolina.

  But even before the plane departed for Raleigh that afternoon, Corker knew he wasn’t the right fit. Trump needed someone more political—and more loyal. When Corker broke the news, while the plane was taxiing on the runway of LaGuardia, Trump took it well; he, too, thought it a poor pairing. One problem remained: Trump’s aides wanted Corker to introduce him in Raleigh. Corker told Trump that it was a bad idea. “I’m not auditioning. I’m not going out on that stage,” the senator said. “It will look like I’m auditioning for a job that we both know I’m not going to do.”

  Swarming to insecurity like a fly to dung, Trump delighted in calling Corker onto the stage in North Carolina despite the senator’s repeated demurrals. But this small victory moved Trump no closer to naming a running mate. With the GOP convention less than two weeks away, its presumptive nominee was down to two choices: Gingrich and Pence.

  IT WAS 8:30 P.M. ON JULY 12 IN WESTFIELD, INDIANA, WHEN PENCE launched into his tryout. With six days until the start of the convention, and three days until Trump’s self-imposed deadline to name a running mate, Pence sought to answer the whispered questions of whether he possessed the intestinal fortitude for what was shaping up to be a nasty, low-down, watch-through-the-slits-in-your-fingers campaign.

  “To paraphrase the director of the FBI,” Pence declared, “I think it would be extremely careless to elect Hillary Clinton.”15 The crowd ate it up. Their governor, basking in the noise, then introduced “the next president of the United States of America, Donald J. Trump.”

  Trump climbed onto the stage with a satisfied smile, mouthing “wow” and pointing to Pence. Concluding his speech nearly an hour later, Trump said, “I don’t know whether he’s gonna be your governor or your vice president—who the hell knows?”

  Such uncertainty didn’t sit well with Manafort. He was adamantly opposed to Gingrich as the nominee, believing his loud mouth and self-important streak would become a distraction to a campaign already swimming in such traits. But he had yet to convince Trump, who arrived in Indiana that Tuesday night with lingering doubts about Pence’s toughness.

  As the rally drew to a close, Manafort pulled a rabbit from his hat. After coordinating with the candidate’s traveling personnel and offering a few modest bribes, he informed Trump that his plane was suffering “mechanical problems.” They would have to stay the night in Indiana.

  Meanwhile, Manafort schemed with Kushner, who booked a flight into Indianapolis along with Ivanka, Don Jr., and Eric Trump, as well as with Pence’s top advisers. They were to make certain that the governor capitalized on the additional time. Pence promptly invited the extended Trump clan to breakfast the next morning at the governor’s mansion.

  With news crews camped outside on the lawn, the Pences and Trumps broke pastries and sipped coffee inside the Tudor-style edifice. Sensing his final opportunity, Pence, as the New York Times reported, “delivered an uncharacteristically impassioned monologue,” describing to the Trump family “his personal distaste for Hillary Clinton and her husband, the former president, and spoke of feeling disgusted at what he called the corruption of the 1990s.”16

  A short while later, with the “mechanical problems” fixed, Trump was wheels up to New York. He was still unsure of whom to choose, but the candidate’s children were not. With Manafort and Kushner egging them on, they made the hard sell. Pence was deferential. He would attract evangelicals. He was polished. And he looked the part—an invaluable asset in the eyes of their father.

  Finally, after another twenty-four hours of unceasing cajolery, Trump was convinced—or, as convinced as he was ever going to be.

  His campaign flew Pence to New Jersey on Thursday night and then ferried him to a Manhattan hotel. As Pence settled in, with reports surfacing that he would be announced the next day, Trump went on Fox News and said he hadn’t made his “final, final decision.” Pence chuckled and turned off the television; this seemed like some last-minute showbiz suspense. Except that it wasn’t. Trump, in California for a fund-raiser, was furious after learning that Pence’s trip to New York had been leaked—apparently by Manafort, in an attempt to lock in the selection. Stranded on the West Coast, away from the action in Trump Tower, the candidate spent much of the night on the phone with his friends and family, agonizing over the circumstances and complaining that he felt “backed into a corner” by Manafort. He even took a call from Christie, who made an emotional closing argument for himself.

  Trump bought himself some time by pushing back the formal announcement of his running mate until Saturday. This was out of respect for the victims in Nice, France, where an ISIS-inspired jihadist had rammed a truck into a crowd celebrating Bastille Day, killing eighty-six and injuring hundreds more. But with reports swirling of his uncertainty over the VP selection, Trump decided on a plot twist.

  Flying back from California on Friday morning, he tweeted, “I am pleased to announce that I have chosen Governor Mike Pence as my Vice Presidential running mate. News conference tomorrow at 11:00 a.m.”

  It was the unlikeliest of pairings, and arguably the smartest political decision Trump ever made. “Pence was exactly what he needed, because he was the antithesis of Trump: a solid Christian conservative who the evangelicals loved,” says John Boehner, who had handpicked Pence to join his own leadership team years earlier. “And Pence needed Trump. Here’s a guy who’s about to lose his reelection, then Trump picks him, puts him on the ticket, and gets him out of his troubles in Indiana. He’s been a loyal soldier ever since Trump threw him that lifeline.”

  On Saturday the sixteenth of July, in front of a friendly audience in New York City, Trump spent nearly half an hour introducing his ticket mate, though much of the homily had nothing to do with Pence. Trump did make sure to mention how the Indiana governor hadn’t endorsed him a few months earlier, noting that it was due to pressure from donors and GOP hacks scared of his candidacy. He then devoted a considerable stretch of time to recounting his primary conquests, detailing his methodical destruction of the Republican primary field.

  Somewhere amid the soliloquy, Trump stopped himself. “One of the big reasons I chose Mike is party unity,” he said. “I have to be honest.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  July 2016

  “Stand and speak and vote your conscience.”

  NINE DAYS BEFORE HE ANNOUNCED HIS CHOICE OF MIKE PENCE IN the name of “party unity,” D
onald Trump found himself locked in a tense verbal confrontation with a Republican senator. His name was Jeff Flake, and for the past fifteen years he had been Pence’s closest friend in politics.

  They were ideological soul mates. Both ran conservative think tanks in their states in the 1990s; both had been elected to Congress in 2000, at one point occupying neighboring offices; both were lonely leaders of intraparty rebellions during the big-spending tenure of George W. Bush; both had left the House of Representatives in 2012 to run successfully for statewide office; and above all, both strove to be regarded as gentleman conservatives, known for a personal decency that infused their relationships and reputations in the nation’s capital.

  And yet both men knew, in the summer of 2016, that their friendship might never be the same. Trump’s ascent would leave a wreckage of relationships in its wake—friends, neighbors, families divided—but there was no more dramatic divergence than that of Flake and Pence.

  It began on the afternoon of July 7. Trump was visiting Washington for a series of meetings aimed at coalescing the party’s elected officials behind him: one with House Republicans, one with Senate Republicans, and a third, private conversation with Ted Cruz, who remained unsupportive of Trump two months after quitting the GOP race. The House meeting went swimmingly; the same rank-and-file renegades who had spilled John Boehner’s blood over a lack of conservative bona fides emerged spouting praise of Trump. And the Cruz sit-down was a qualified success: Though he wasn’t ready to endorse, he did accept an invitation to speak at the convention later that month.

  It was Trump’s meeting with Senate Republicans that went off the rails. After some introductions and polite banter, the niceties came to a sudden halt when Trump singled out one of the senators, Flake, for having criticized his candidacy.

  “Yes, I’m the other senator from Arizona, the one that wasn’t captured,” Flake responded, referring to Trump’s infamous attack on John McCain the previous summer. “I want to talk to you about statements like that.”

  “You know, I haven’t been attacking you,” Trump snapped back. “But maybe I should be. Maybe I will.” He glowered at Flake, warning that his dissension would cost him his Senate seat.

  “I’m not even up for reelection this cycle,” Flake snorted, rolling his eyes.

  Flake had already decided he would not be attending the Republican National Convention in Cleveland beginning July 18. In fact, as Trump accosted him that day, the Arizona senator took comfort in knowing he wouldn’t be sitting in the convention hall as Trump completed his hostile takeover of the GOP. But his subsequent selection of Pence—which, Flake says, left him in a state of “shock”—forced the senator to reconsider. He wouldn’t just be turning his back on Trump and the GOP by shunning the convention; he would be betraying his dear friend.

  Ultimately, it wasn’t enough to change Flake’s mind. He stayed away from Cleveland, in protest of Trump, while his old pal was crowned heir apparent.

  For Flake, this was a matter of “principle over party.” He could understand why some Republicans might hold their noses and vote for Trump against Clinton as a lesser-of-two-evils choice. What he couldn’t understand was the categorical cheerleading of someone whose candidacy was antithetical to much of what modern conservatism was supposed to stand for. Both stylistically and substantively, Flake believed, Trump was poisoning the Republican Party. The senator would not blindly pledge his allegiance for the sake of winning one election.

  This earned Flake no shortage of abuse from the right, including from many longtime allies. How ironic, they snickered, that Flake would lecture about fidelity to principle, given his own professional metamorphosis. Once a cutthroat conservative in the House, Flake had become just another wallflower Republican in the Senate, refusing to join the likes of Cruz and Mike Lee in ramming at the establishment’s barricades.

  “We have had some enormous departures, some rather stark political divergences, with Jeff over the recent years,” Trent Franks, a former Arizona congressman and confidant to both Pence and Flake, said. “We’ve been disappointed with some of the things Jeff’s done.”

  Flake knew he would face special criticism for breaking rank in 2016. “This wasn’t a situation where I woke up a month ago and thought, hey, I’m out of step with my party,” he said. “I was uncomfortable with Trump before he got in the race. And then on day one, it was Mexican rapists. And before that, over the past years, it was the birtherism, which I thought was just the most vile, rotten thing you could do to President Obama. And then he just seemed to carry forward from there.”

  Franks, an original member of the House Freedom Caucus, had no such concerns. “As I’ve gotten to know the guy, I’ve seen a heart, and kind of a John Wayne valiance in him that is compelling to me,” he said of Trump. “I’m convinced he came along at a time when the country needed someone to punch government in the face.”

  WHEN THE HOUSE FREEDOM CAUCUS FORMED IN 2015, TURBOCHARGING the anti-leadership engine once driven by the likes of Flake and Pence, its organizing principle was to speak on behalf of forgotten Americans. Jim Jordan, the group’s founding chairman, believed Washington worked on behalf of big entities (banks, corporations) and parochial interests (the poor and unemployed) but not the “second-shift workers” and “second-grade teachers” like the ones in his 88 percent white district, where only 18 percent of residents earned college degrees.1

  This is not to suggest Jordan was racist, or even using racially coded language; he was simply speaking to the realities of north-central Ohio. Many of his white, working-class constituents felt that they were falling behind and that the federal government didn’t much care. This was a sentiment reflected in the membership of the Freedom Caucus: During the 114th Congress, spanning the years 2015 and 2016, the group had thirty-nine members. On the whole, their districts were 75 percent white (higher than the national average) and 27 percent college-educated (lower than the national average), according to data culled from The Almanac of American Politics.

  Despite these demographic profiles, and their own stated mission to represent the forgotten voters of flyover country, the Freedom Caucus members had long trafficked in ideological orthodoxy. They believed this was what their constituents demanded: less spending, more trade, restructured entitlement programs, and above all, limited government.

  And then Trump came along.

  One Freedom Caucus member described the “oh shit” moment in the spring of 2016, when he and his comrades realized what was happening. Marauding across the country, Trump was delivering an anti-Washington message rooted not in any narrowly philosophical approach, but in the belief that politicians had failed voters. Back home, the conservatives saw their constituents responding in force, much as they had in 2010. But Trump was no Tea Party purist selling a small-government creed. He was selling outrage at the status quo.

  Trump, they realized, had co-opted and broadened their message. He wasn’t merely attacking the establishment; he was attacking them. After promising major changes (repealing Obamacare, rolling back Dodd-Frank, reining in executive actions) and failing to deliver, they were now part of the broken political class Trump was railing against.

  Watching in horror as he won more than two-thirds of their districts, the Freedom Caucus members, most of whom had endorsed either Cruz or Rand Paul, wondered how their voters could reconcile supporting a Tea Partier for Congress and a totalitarian for president.

  Thomas Massie, the Kentuckian who says he was excluded from the Freedom Caucus for being “too crazy conservative,” said it best in an interview with the Washington Examiner.2 “All this time, I thought they were voting for libertarian Republicans,” says Massie, who backed Ron Paul in 2012 and his son four years later. “But after some soul searching, I realized when they voted for Rand and Ron and me in these primaries, they weren’t voting for libertarian ideas—they were voting for the craziest son of a bitch in the race. And Donald Trump won best in class.”

  Reaching that s
ame conclusion in May 2016, Freedom Caucus members debated what could be done about it. Only one of their members had endorsed Trump in the primary: Scott DesJarlais, the physician who a few years earlier was discovered to have carried on sexual relationships with multiple patients and pressured both a mistress and an ex-wife to have abortions. (He was reelected multiple times thereafter.) His endorsement of Trump drew sneers from his colleagues, many of whom believed that neither man reflected the values of their club. But now DesJarlais was looking prophetical. One by one, the archconservatives who had spent the past five months snickering at Trump in their closed-door gatherings took turns announcing their support for his candidacy.

  Tribal bitterness often lingers after party primaries. But the reflections on Trump’s conquest from leading right-wingers spoke to the extraordinary mistrust they felt for him—even as they endorsed him for the highest office in the land.

  Nobody captured this mood better than Mick Mulvaney. “As a conservative, my confidence level in Trump doing the right thing is fairly low,” the South Carolina congressman said. He laughed. “But, hey, my confidence level in Hillary Clinton doing the wrong thing is fairly high!”

  Mulvaney, the mouthiest of the conservative rebels, couldn’t help himself. He had supported Paul, the Kentucky senator. He would have settled for Cruz or Marco Rubio. He found the specter of Trump’s nomination laughable, though not necessarily unsettling. “Don’t worry, we’re not going to let a President Donald Trump dismantle the Bill of Rights,” Mulvaney said prior t the convention. “For five and a half years, every time we go to the floor and try and push back against an overreaching president, we get accused of being partisan at best and racist at worst. When we do it against a Republican president, maybe people will see that it was a principled objection in the first place.”