American Carnage

by Tim Alberta

  “It might actually be fun,” Mulvaney added, “being a strict constitutionalist congressman doing battle with a non-strict-constitutionalist Republican president.”

  House conservatives would spend much of that spring and summer blaming the GOP’s establishment for enabling Trump’s victory. In one sense, this was fair. When presented with the dichotomy of Trump versus Cruz, many of the party’s graybeards, from John Boehner to Bob Dole, had voiced their preference for the former, believing that he could be controlled whereas Cruz could not. (“Crazy, I could deal with,” Boehner says. “But not pathological.”) Yet this obscured a more fundamental question: Why hadn’t the House hard-liners, the custodians of party purity, done more to thwart Trump’s rise in the first place?

  Jordan, the two-time collegiate wrestling champion, had turned a roster of ragtag back-bench congressmen into a scrappy, disciplined, productive unit. His followers had mastered the use of technique and leverage to defeat opponents of superior size; lacking in seniority and campaign cash, the Freedom Caucus often outmaneuvered the rest of the majority, pushing leadership relentlessly to the right and refusing any compromise that would chafe the grass roots.

  The group also had symbolic momentum. Two of its newer members, Warren Davidson of Ohio and Dave Brat of Virginia, occupied the seats once held by Boehner and Eric Cantor, respectively. The two most prominent casualties of the Tea Party era had each been replaced by members pledging allegiance to the Freedom Caucus.

  But the House conservatives did nothing to slow Trump’s march to the nomination.

  There had been no press conferences, no rallies on the Capitol lawn, no coordinated exercises with outside groups to signal opposition to the GOP front-runner. Half of the Freedom Caucus members had endorsed rival candidates, but the other half had endorsed no one at all. One of those who had remained neutral was Jordan. Watching Trump’s rise, he spent the summer of 2016 pondering not the failures of the past five months, but the failures of the past five years.

  “The one thing I do reflect on is what could we, as a Republican Congress, have done differently to avoid creating this environment that was conducive to someone like Donald Trump becoming the nominee?” Jordan said in late June.

  It was less than a month before the party’s convention, and Jordan and his fellow conservatives spoke of Trump’s nomination as a foregone conclusion. This was misleading. A faction of Republican activists and officials, under the banner of #NeverTrump, was organizing furiously ahead of the proceedings in Cleveland to defeat the GOP’s presumptive nominee. Their effort revolved around a change to the party’s rules, allowing delegates to vote their conscience rather than for the candidate to whom they were bound by their state’s results.

  It was a long shot. But a number of respected conservatives, including Lee, the Utah senator, were involved in the plotting. They believed the reward of preventing Trump’s nomination was worth the risk of a backlash from his supporters.

  The Freedom Caucus did not. Of its thirty-nine members, none would publicly support the rule change ahead of the convention.

  “What people hate most about Washington is backroom deals, and that would be the ultimate backroom deal,” John Fleming, a Freedom Caucus board member, warned. “I think it would destroy the party.”

  Mark Meadows, a former Cruz supporter, said prior to the convention that he was sympathetic to the #NeverTrump effort. Ultimately, however, he could not abide such an affront to his constituents.

  “If I question their judgment on who they have as a nominee, I have to question their judgment on the fact that they continue to put me back in,” Meadows said. “That becomes very problematic when you think they’re smart in reelecting you but perhaps not as informed on a presidential nominee. So, you’ve got to trust the will of the people, even though sometimes you disagree with it.”

  CRUZ HAD KEPT HIS HEAD DOWN EVER SINCE DEPARTING THE RACE. IN public settings, he projected stoicism, a certain peace about the result that kept questions at bay. Beneath the surface, however, he was boiling with resentment—toward his fellow senators for disowning him, toward Ben Carson for milking what should have been a one-day story, toward Marco Rubio for refusing to join his ticket, and toward Donald Trump for, well, everything.

  Replaying the events of the previous year in his mind, Cruz grew only more upset with his adversary. Trump hadn’t been content to beat him politically; he had tried to butcher him personally. Calling him ineligible for the presidency? Suggesting that his wife was ugly? Implicating his father in the JFK assassination?

  In Cruz’s mind, Trump had crossed lines that couldn’t be uncrossed. Nothing—certainly not some half-assed kumbaya session in DC—could change that. In preparing for his July 7 meeting with Trump, anticipating an invitation to speak in Cleveland, Cruz had gathered his kitchen cabinet of advisers and close friends. He believed there were three options: speak and endorse; speak and don’t endorse; or don’t speak at all.

  Jeff Roe, Cruz’s campaign manager, disputed the premise. He told Cruz that giving a convention speech without endorsing the nominee could be disastrous. For a man who still harbored burning ambitions for the presidency, there was too much risk. Roe believed Cruz should speak and, at the very least, assure the convention delegates that he personally would be voting for Trump. But Roe was in the minority. Most of the members of Cruz’s inner circle, movement conservatives with decades of ideological skin in the game, were too acutely offended by Trump to entertain the possibility of an endorsement. They encouraged Cruz to accept the invitation to speak; once it arrived, they lobbied him to withhold his support for the nominee.

  It wasn’t a difficult decision for Cruz. While he usually hung on Roe’s advice, and had come to appreciate his manager’s pragmatic streak, he told his confidants that there was “no way in hell” he was prepared to subjugate himself to Trump in front of tens of millions of viewers. “History isn’t kind to the man who holds Mussolini’s jacket,” Cruz told friends while crafting his speech.

  The Republican nominee had insulted his wife, his father, his family. An endorsement would make Cruz look weak—and worse, it would make him look like the soulless, calculating swindler his detractors painted him as. He would not endorse Trump in Cleveland, and he was confident that the convention delegates would respect his decision.

  He was wrong.

  Cruz walked onto the stage Wednesday evening, July 20, to a thunderous ovation from the party faithful. It was the most anticipated speech of the convention, in prime time, and the packed house inside Quicken Loans Arena delivered a lengthy, raucous salute to the 2016 runner-up. The senator lifted a hand to the masses and nodded his head, basking in a moment that he believed should have been his and his alone.

  “I congratulate Donald Trump on winning the nomination,” Cruz said, earning booming applause.3 The audience expected an endorsement, and understandably so: It was inside that very arena, the previous August, where all the Republican candidates (save for Trump) had agreed that they would support the eventual nominee.

  Instead, it was the last time Cruz would mention Trump’s name. The senator’s address, which emphasized the theme of “freedom,” was sharp, steady, and well received until its closing minutes. “We deserve leaders who stand for principle, unite us all behind shared values, cast aside anger for love. That is the standard we should expect from everybody,” Cruz said.

  As the arena began to buzz, Cruz delivered two fateful lines. First: “And to those listening, please, don’t stay home in November.” The audience erupted with cheers. Then, Cruz added: “Stand and speak and vote your conscience. Vote for candidates up and down the ticket who you trust to defend our freedom and to be faithful to the Constitution.”

  It was a stunning turn of phrase. “Vote your conscience” had been the anti-Trump rallying cry all summer, only for Reince Priebus and his allies inside the RNC to crush the rebellion in Cleveland just days earlier—with Mike Lee, Cruz’s closest friend in the Senate, leading the l
ast gasp of the mutiny. Cruz would later swear that he didn’t appreciate the implications of his wording, but Trump’s supporters inside the convention hall weren’t about to give him the benefit of the doubt.

  Tipped off in advance by Paul Manafort, who had seen a copy of Cruz’s speech and knew he wouldn’t be endorsing, the sprawling New York delegation, which sat front and center in the arena due to Trump’s native son status, detonated with boos. The ruckus tore across the convention floor and climbed all the way up to the second and third decks.

  Meanwhile, Trump himself had just entered the arena on a cue from his staff, hoping to mess with Cruz by gawping at him from an offstage wing. Necks craned to see him. The decibel level spiked all the higher. For Trump, a longtime fan of professional wrestling, this was a page out of Vince McMahon’s playbook: the hero emerging just as the crowd turned against the villain.

  Cruz had four short paragraphs left in his speech, words that paid homage to his mother and father and to a slain Dallas police officer. But they were difficult to hear. It was anarchy on the convention floor: The heckiers became shriller and nastier; in response, pockets of Cruz loyalists began shouting back in a futile attempt to drown them out. Cruz continued on, voice shaky, as the noise swallowed him whole.

  When he had uttered his final words—“God bless each and every one of you, and may God bless the United States of America”—he was showered with deafening, cascading boos that seemed to rain all the way down from the rafters. The senator stepped away from the lectern yet remained on the stage for several moments, waving and smiling awkwardly, trying not to appear paralyzed by the unmitigated nightmare playing out before him. His wife, Heidi, had to be escorted off the convention floor by security officials concerned for her safety. The senator and his team quickly bunkered down in a hotel suite, assessing the extensive damage and plotting his next move.

  Back in February, standing inside a pole barn at the Iowa state fairgrounds, Cruz had previewed his acceptance speech: “This July, in Cleveland, you will hear these words spoken from the podium of the unified Republican convention,” he said. “‘Tonight, I want to say to every member of the Democratic Party who believes in limited government, in personal opportunity and the United States Constitution, and a safe and secure America, come home.’”4

  Nearly six months later, Cruz had the opportunity to heal divisions in the party and help create a “unified Republican convention” on behalf of his former rival. He declined. And it didn’t go over well.

  Several of Cruz’s biggest financial backers turned on him, saying the senator had broken the promise he had made to support the party’s nominee. Among them were Robert Mercer and his daughter, Rebekah, who had pumped more than $10 million into a flotilla of super PACs supporting Cruz.5 In a show of their anger, the media-shy Mercers upbraided Cruz in a statement to Maggie Haberman of the New York Times.6 The article quoted Kellyanne Conway, the pro-Cruz strategist turned Trump adviser, who said of the Mercers, “They supported Ted because they thought he was a man of his word who, like them, would place love of country over personal feelings or political ambition.”

  The morning after his convention speech, Cruz was booed and jeered by members of the Texas delegation when he arrived at their breakfast. They called him a liar and a sore loser. “I am not in the habit of supporting people who have attacked my wife and attacked my father,” Cruz told them. “And that pledge was not a blanket commitment that if you go slander and attack Heidi, then I’m not going to nonetheless come like a servile puppy dog and say, ‘Thank you very much for maligning my wife and maligning my father.’”

  It was a paradox: Never had Cruz been so authentic, yet never had he been so despised.

  FOR ALL TRUMP’S FAMILIARITY WITH SHOW BUSINESS, HIS CONVENTION wasn’t the smoothest production. There was plagiarism and pettifoggery; grudge matches and goonery; ugly exchanges and awkward embraces. Just hours before Trump took the stage to deliver his acceptance speech, a pro-Clinton super PAC obtained and leaked the transcript. It was a fitting capstone to a convention defined by the party’s squabbling disunity, enhanced by the Trump campaign’s disorganization and repeated political miscalculations.

  Ohio governor John Kasich’s decision to skip the convention prompted Manafort to open the festivities on Monday by accusing the home-state governor of “embarrassing” his constituents.7 But Kasich wasn’t alone in steering clear of Cleveland. Of the five living Republican presidential nominees, just one, Bob Dole, attended the convention. The notable absences of Mitt Romney, John McCain, and both Bush presidents set the tone for a week of intraparty bickering that came to a head with Cruz’s refusal to endorse Trump.

  For an hour and fifteen minutes on Thursday night, July 21, it was Trump who brought a modicum of normalcy to the proceedings. He delivered acceptance remarks that were smart and tightly scripted. Taking the stage wearing a luminous red tie, the nominee waved triumphantly as the delegates on the floor broke out into a chant: “Trump! Trump! Trump!”

  Stepping into character as America’s strongman, he cast President Obama as feckless and weak, blaming his administration for everything from the murders at the hands of illegal immigrants to the protests against law enforcement on city streets. “The crime and violence that today afflicts our nation will soon come to an end,” he said. “Beginning on January 20, 2017, safety will be restored.”8

  Trump also assailed Obama—and the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton—for sowing turmoil around the world. From the Iran nuclear deal to the nonenforcement of the Syrian “red line” to the killings of four Americans in Libya, the United States had been neutered on the international stage, he said. When Trump made mention of Benghazi, the crowd began to chant, “Lock her up!” A few nights earlier, from the same stage, retired general Michael Flynn joined in the chant, declaring of Clinton, “If I did a tenth of what she did, I would be in jail today!” But Trump, showing restraint, raised an index finger to silence the crowd. “Let’s defeat her in November,” he said. The audience roared.

  The Republican faithful got what they came for. Tony Ledbetter, a first-time delegate from Florida who had volunteered for Trump during the primary, said the GOP was united “except for a small minority of people” and that the party was better off without them. “Rubio, Bush, all these establishment insiders, I don’t care if they’re here,” Ledbetter said on the convention floor after Trump’s speech. “They can stay home—Romney and Kasich, too. This is not their Republican Party anymore.”

  Trump couldn’t resist taking a parting dig at his detractors. As his family joined him onstage, with red, white, and blue balloons falling from the rafters and confetti dancing through the air, a Rolling Stones tune began blasting over the loudspeakers.

  “You can’t always get what you want . . .”

  AS REPUBLICANS DEPARTED CLEVELAND, WATCHING FROM AFAR AS their Democratic counterparts gathered in Philadelphia, Trump could have found any number of weaknesses in the opposition to pick apart. He might have focused the country’s attention on Bernie Sanders getting stonewalled by the Democratic establishment; or on Hillary Clinton being outshone by the speeches given by Barack and Michelle Obama; or on the liberal base’s lukewarm reaction to her pick of Tim Kaine, the Virginia senator and committed Catholic with a pro-life past, as her running mate.

  Instead, Trump found himself feuding with a pair of Gold Star parents, Khizr and Ghazala Khan, whose Army captain son, Humayu Khan, had lost his life to a suicide bomber in Iraq. They were so offended by Trump’s rhetoric toward Muslims that they agreed to appear at the Democratic National Convention in late July. Paying tribute to his son, Khizr Khan waved his pocket-size copy of the Constitution and questioned whether the Republican nominee had ever read it. “Go look at the graves of brave patriots who died defending the United States of America,” Khan said. “You will see all faiths, genders, and ethnicities. You have sacrificed nothing and no one.”9

  His speech quickly became a viral news sensation. Trump could
not resist punching back. Appearing on ABC’s This Week, he observed that Khan was “very emotional” in his speech. Instead of leaving it there, the Republican nominee began to speculate as to why Khan’s wife, Ghazala, who stood silently next to her husband during his speech, had not said anything. Trump wondered aloud whether she was not allowed to speak, presumably because of subservient gender roles in the Muslim tradition.

  Just as with his earlier attacks on Judge Curiel, Trump found himself engulfed by criticisms from within his own party—from the likes of McCain, Romney, Lindsey Graham, and of course, Speaker Ryan.

  “As I have said on numerous occasions, a religious test for entering our country is not reflective of [our] fundamental values,” Ryan said. “Many Muslim Americans have served valiantly in our military, and made the ultimate sacrifice. Captain Khan was one such brave example. His sacrifice—and that of Khizr and Ghazala Khan—should always be honored. Period.”

  Trump seemed to take particular umbrage with Ryan’s rebuke. He threatened to withhold his support for the Speaker in his Wisconsin primary that August, and began saying positive things about Ryan’s challenger, an anti-Semitic buffoon named Paul Nehlen. (Trump, on the advice that he would look foolish when the Speaker prevailed in the primary, later issued a halfhearted endorsement. Ryan won 84 percent of the vote against Nehlen.)

  Fortunately for Republicans, they had not cornered the market on intraparty warfare. Days ahead of the Democratic convention, the website WikiLeaks—which was later shown to be working in concert with a Russian campaign to interfere in the U.S. elections—had dumped tens of thousands of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee. The emails showed, among other things, a clear preference for Clinton over Sanders among DNC staffers who were obligated to remain neutral. DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigned ahead of the convention and was replaced by vice chair Donna Brazile, who later confessed that the party committee had unethically conspired to aid Clinton in the primary.10