by Tim Alberta
So, Ryan did precisely that, showering praise on the president-elect and acting as though they’d been allies from the get-go. Trump was gracious, willing to move past their beef (on the advice of Pence and Reince Priebus). But unlike Ryan, he couldn’t pretend that nothing had ever happened.
“Paul’s just a Boy Scout, that’s all,” Trump said to his wife unsolicited as they stood on the balcony, by way of explaining the past tensions between them. “He’s like, a religious guy.”
Ryan shrugged. “Well, I’m a devout Catholic.”
“Oh, you’re like Mike!” said Melania Trump.
Pence and Ryan exchanged looks. “Well, yeah, he’s Protestant,” the Speaker said. “But, you know, yeah.”
When Trump visited with Mitch McConnell later that afternoon, the conversation was more direct. “Did you think I was going to win?” the president-elect asked.
“No,” McConnell replied. “Frankly, I didn’t.”
Trump had a good laugh. Then the Senate majority leader got down to business. He and Ryan had already coordinated strategies to impress upon Trump that he would have a ready-made government on day one of his administration. The Speaker was handling the policy, putting together a comprehensive sequencing chart of the major legislative goals they would pursue over his first year in office. McConnell would be in the personnel business, running a tight ship in the Senate to confirm the new president’s appointees in an expedited fashion.
“The first thing on my list,” McConnell told Trump, “is judges.”
MICK MULVANEY’S FRIENDS IN THE HOUSE FREEDOM CAUCUS COULDN’T believe what they were hearing. It was the Monday night following Election Day, and lawmakers were trickling back into Washington to resume their congressional duties. The next day, House Republicans would hold closed-door elections to choose their leadership for the upcoming 115th Congress, and no real drama was expected.
Ryan had angered many of the members by abandoning Trump’s candidacy a month before the election. Some hoped the president-elect, after taking the stage just after 3:00 a.m. to give his victory speech, would suggesst retribution against the holier-than-thou Speaker of the House. When Trump did no such thing, the Freedom Caucus members watched for a smoke signal, expecting tacit permission to launch their revolt against Ryan.
But the Speaker was a step ahead of his adversaries. Even before the race was called, Ryan had moved swiftly to solidify his standing in Trump’s orbit.
Mulvaney was eager to do the same. The South Carolina congressman wore his ambition as subtly as a Mike Tyson tattoo. A lawyer with degrees from Georgetown, Harvard, and the University of North Carolina, Mulvaney, upon coming to Congress in 2011, made few doubt that he was the smartest man in Washington—and that he was destined for more than the House of Representatives. First, he had wanted the Senate seat vacated by Jim DeMint. When it went to Tim Scott, Mulvaney shifted his focus to running for governor at the end of Nikki Haley’s second term. Now, with Trump’s upset victory, Mulvaney’s plans had changed again. Having distinguished himself as one of the party’s fiercest fiscal hawks, winning admiration for his intellectual consistency even from those GOP elders who detested his ego, he set his sights on a dream job: director of the Office of Management and Budget.
He had not exactly been a Trump booster; between calling the nominee “a terrible human being” and suggesting House Republicans might be required to teach him about the Constitution, Mulvaney made a strong case to be excluded from the new administration. But the congressman was a close observer of Trump. Watching him, reading The Art of the Deal, studying his relationships, Mulvaney developed a theory of how to ingratiate himself. He would do what Ryan had done: Sell the president-elect on the value he brought to the team.
The only difficulty was, Mulvaney didn’t know how to approach Trump. So, he went to Ryan. Their conversation was transactional. Mulvaney detailed the plotting by Freedom Caucus members against the Speaker. Ryan asked for Mulvaney to nominate him for reelection in the House GOP’s upcoming meeting. In exchange, Ryan would talk to Pence, who had taken over the transition team, about bringing Mulvaney to Trump Tower.
As the Freedom Caucus board gathered for its preliminary briefing, held prior to the weekly meeting with the full membership, Jim Jordan, the group’s chairman, broke some awkward news: Mulvaney, a board member, would formally nominate Ryan for Speaker the next day. Some colleagues thought Jordan was joking; he assured them he was not. Word quickly spread to the entire group, and when Mulvaney, who was running late, finally entered the room, he was greeted with a chorus of angry expletives. When they demanded to know why he’d agreed to nominate Ryan, the cagey Mulvaney replied, “Because he asked me to.”
His comrades threw up their hands. “What else would you do if he asked you to?” Justin Amash, Mulvaney’s friend and a fellow board member, bellowed at him.
To the disgust of some House conservatives, Ryan was reelected in a near-unanimous vote of the conference one day later.1 (Thomas Massie, the Kentucky scamp, was the lone dissenter.) The melodrama was about more than just Ryan and his past squabbles with the president-elect; it spoke to something fundamental about how the insurgent forces in American politics had been emboldened by Trump’s ascent and were eager to capitalize on a moment of upheaval.
Beginning in the dawn hours of November 9, many Republicans came to believe they were entering a metamorphic period in the party’s history, one in which their loyalties and ideologies and dogmas could be scrambled and realigned. Conservatives in particular tended to believe this was a good thing, and rejoiced in the reality that Trump, while not philosophically flush with them in a few areas, nonetheless represented the culmination of their years-long jihad against the establishment.
Indeed, eight days after Trump’s victory, the Conservative Action Project, an umbrella group comprising the right’s most prominent activist leaders, held a celebratory gathering at the Ritz-Carlton in Tysons Corner, Virginia. Some of the attendees had been vehemently opposed to Trump throughout 2016. They were surprised to hear the Heritage Foundation’s president, Jim DeMint, talk about how the president-elect had finally unified the party; and they were downright stunned at the glowing remarks about Trump from Ed Meese, the former attorney general under Ronald Reagan and an icon in the conservative movement.
There was a similar giddiness pulsing through the veins of Republicans on Capitol Hill. Lawmakers who had been openly hostile to Trump’s candidacy were suddenly aglow at the prospects for the next four years. Even Ted Cruz was genuinely excited. He would forever nurse a grudge over the insults levied against his family, but the Texas senator wasn’t going to let his rivalry with the president-elect get in the way of steering the government sharply rightward. Thrilled by the GOP takeover of Washington, and facing his first reelection to the Senate in 2018, Cruz met with Trump in December and volunteered to be the president-elect’s battering ram in the new Congress, abandoning his identity as an intraparty instigator and adopting the role of party-line enforcer.
Most of the Republicans in Congress, including all the Tea Party products, had known nothing but the suppression of serving with a Democrat in the White House. Now awoken to the realities of an incoming Republican president and a unified Republican government, their reservations about Trump melted like snowcones in the Sahara.
AS FOR THE CONSERVATIVES WHO HAD HELD THEIR NOSES IN VOTING for Trump, well, they could be excused for feeling a sense of relief at his victory. As far and fast as the GOP had lurched to the right over the past several years, there were signs of an equal and opposite reaction on the left. Much of the angst over Trump’s victory was understandable, particularly within communities that felt threatened by the president-elect’s policies. Yet the broader cultural trajectory of progressivism was sufficiently startling to assure even the most reluctant Trump supporters that they had made the right call.
The month after the election, Lena Dunham, a leading feminist voice of the new left and creator, writer, and star of
HBO’s popular show Girls, recalled on her podcast how she had visited a Planned Parenthood clinic in Texas and felt guilty that she could not relate to the women she was speaking with there. The reason: She had never had an abortion. “Now, I can say that I still haven’t had an abortion,” Dunham said on the show, “but I wish I had.”2
It was Bill Clinton who called for abortion to be “safe, legal, and rare.” In 1996, the Democratic Party adopted a platform3 that sought to make abortions “less necessary” and “more rare,” concluding, “we respect the individual conscience of each American.” Twenty years later, Dunham, who was given a speaking slot at Hillary Clinton’s convention, was expressing regret at never having had an abortion.
At the turn of the century, the ranks of antiabortion Democrats in Congress numbered nearly fifty. By the time Trump won the presidency, they were seven and dwindling.
This reflected a hollowing out of the middle on myriad issues for which Republicans were not solely culpable. Obama had won the presidency by declaring marriage to be between one man and one woman. He had spent his first term deporting record numbers of illegal immigrants. He had refused to give the single-payer health care advocates a seat at the table when drafting Obamacare. All those positions were considered antiquated by the base of the new, post-Obama Democratic Party, and now that Hillary Clinton’s centrism was out of the way, it would drift even harder and hastier to the left.
America’s two parties were moving farther away from the middle in part because Americans of different party affiliations were moving further away from one another.
David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report newsletter uses an ingenious method to track the twin trends of ideological and geographical clustering in America. Using corporate brands as a proxy for the cultural tilt and socioeconomic profile of a given part of the country, Wasserman has concluded that the most likely brand to be found in a Republican county is Cracker Barrel while the most likely brand to be found in a Democratic county is Whole Foods.4
It makes perfect sense: Cracker Barrel restaurants are most often found in rural and exurban areas with less population density, less diversity, lower incomes, and lower education rates. These are the areas, on the whole, hit hardest by the transformation from a manufacturing economy to a tech-based economy; far more people are moving out than moving in.
Whole Foods grocery stores, meanwhile, tend to concentrate in upscale urban and suburban settings with diverse populations and high numbers of college graduates. These are the areas, on the whole, that have thrived in the postindustrial age, drawing mass migrations of new residents seeking jobs in high-skilled fields.
In 1992, the first year Wasserman tracked the results, Bill Clinton won 61 percent of counties nationwide that had a Whole Foods and 40 percent that had a Cracker Barrel. The 21-point “culture gap,” as Wasserman calls it, grew wider in every successive presidential election.
By 2000, the culture gap was 32 points: George W. Bush won 75 percent of Cracker Barrel counties and 43 percent of Whole Foods counties.
By 2008, the culture gap was 45 points: Barack Obama won 80 percent of Whole Foods counties and 35 percent of Cracker Barrel counties.
In 2016, Donald Trump won 76 percent of Cracker Barrel counties and just 22 percent of Whole Foods counties. The culture gap was 54 points.
FOR CONGRESSIONAL REPUBLICANS, THE ECSTASY OF THE MOMENT WAS inversely proportional to the expectations of the previous several months. They had spent so much time bracing for the aftermath of a Trump defeat that the sudden trappings of a Trump victory were exhilarating: staffing the administration, passing big bills, and of course, stocking the federal courts.
Conservatives had all the more cause to rejoice when Chris Christie was axed as the head of the transition team, apparent payback from the new crown prince, Jared Kushner, whose father had been prosecuted and sent to prison by Christie on tax-evasion charges years earlier. Christie was replaced by Pence. A longtime affiliate of Washington’s professional right, the vice president-elect was, in effect, starting the transition process from scratch and given broad latitude to fill critical positions in the cabinet and throughout the new government (with Trump’s perfunctory approval, of course). Pence did not disappoint conservatives. He tapped his old friend, Congressman Tom Price, to run Health and Human Services. He picked his fellow charter school champion Betsy DeVos, the GOP megadonor with no experience in the public schools, to lead the Education Department. And he saw to it that Mulvaney was given the keys to run OMB.
With much of the attention focused on the headliner appointments (secretary of state, attorney general), Pence was cunningly effective in leaving his imprint on the administration. Time and again, when loyalists came to him expecting a job in the VP’s immediate orbit, Pence surprised by asking them to fill a role elsewhere, one from which they could report back to him. To be an influential vice president, he would need eyes and ears across the government.
Previous opposition to Trump was not disqualifying. Marc Short, Pence’s closest adviser and the former Koch operative who had been bent on stopping the GOP front-runner, was named the White House’s director of legislative affairs. Certain allies who had Trump’s ear, including former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, were incensed that Short was given such a prominent position. Occasionally, Trump could be stirred by these concerns; for example, he nixed the hiring of former Bush 43 official Elliott Abrams as deputy secretary of state due to Abrams’s past critiques.5 But this was the exception. If Trump were to rule out every Republican who had combated him, the administration would cease to function for want of staffers.
Naturally, he reserved the right to have some fun with his former foes.
Stringing along the media, Trump delighted in tormenting Mitt Romney by dangling the job of secretary of state. Having taken a call from Pence while vacationing with his family in Hawaii, Romney raced back stateside to interview for the job. Trump was never going to give it to him. This was no “team of rivals” exercise; it was the continuation of a reality show, and in this episode, the host craved the spectacle of his most prominent detractor groveling at his throne. In a perfect distillation of this dynamic, a photo was taken of the two men during a dinner in which Romney was ostensibly interviewing for the position. Romney resembled someone caught on Candid Camera, his pursed lips and furrowed brow screaming mortification. Trump, seated next to him, wore a waggish grin and a thought bubble that read, Who’s the phony now?
There was another quality Trump craved in his appointees: They had to look the part. When it came to choosing a director of the Central Intelligence Agency, nobody auditioned quite like Mike Pompeo. The Kansas congressman, first in his class at West Point, had in his brief time in Washington made a strong impression on the full spectrum of his fellow Republicans. Built like an offensive lineman, with a barrel chest and thinning silver hair swept across his forehead, Pompeo was straight out of central casting. He came with a forceful recommendation from Pence, and the president-elect hired him on the spot after a meeting in New York. Trump had apparently forgotten all about the Kansas caucuses: the biting remarks from Pompeo, the stare-down from the wings of the stage. When Cruz’s campaign manager, Jeff Roe, called Kushner to have a laugh about it, Kushner put the call on speaker so Trump could hear. “No! That was him? We’ve got to take it back!” he cried. “This is what I get for letting Pence pick everyone!” (Trump did not take it back; Pompeo served as CIA director and later as secretary of state.)
Some of the president-elect’s appointments were products of patronage. Back in January 2016, South Carolina’s lieutenant governor, Henry McMaster, became the first statewide official in any of the three early-nominating states to endorse Trump. McMaster went all in, traveling with the campaign and becoming close to the future president, never wavering in his support. A few days after the election, Trump called McMaster and said, “Henry, what do you want? Name it.”
McMaster told him he wanted to be governor.
“Th
at’s it?” Trump replied. “Well, that should be easy. You’re already the lieutenant governor!”
McMaster explained that it wasn’t that simple. Elections were uncertain things. The only way to ensure his promotion would be for Nikki Haley to go away. Within days, seemingly out of left field, Trump announced Haley as his pick for ambassador to the United Nations. McMaster was sworn in on January 24.
The only thing that seemed to bother Trump during the transition was the occasional rejection of his job offers. The president-elect felt as though he were making knights of commoners, extending to them a prestige unattainable in other walks of life. In reality, many Republicans who interviewed for administration jobs knew they would be taking pay cuts to work tough, thankless jobs that carried the indelible stigma of serving under President Donald Trump. Most interviewees nonetheless found the fragrance of power too strong to resist. Of those who did not, Ken Blackwell’s rejection of Trump became the stuff of legend.
Formerly the mayor of Cincinnati and the Ohio secretary of state, Blackwell had spent decades as a shot caller in the conservative movement, serving on the boards of the Family Research Council and the National Rifle Association. When Pence took over for Christie, Blackwell jumped in as the head of the domestic transition team. As Trump hunted for a secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Blackwell was a natural fit. He had worked under a previous HUD secretary, Jack Kemp. He was experienced. He was knowledgeable. And he was, well, black. (Diversity was a stated goal in filling many positions, but none more so than at HUD.)
