American Carnage

by Tim Alberta

  Labrador found it all a bit unnerving. But he, too, had reason for caution. The congressman was preparing to run for governor of Idaho in 2018, and he couldn’t afford a nasty tiff with Trump.

  Against this backdrop, the reactions to Trump’s first domestic policy splash were telling.

  In December, the incoming administration made a show of offering Carrier, the heating and air-conditioning giant, $7 million in tax breaks and incentives to keep roughly a thousand jobs in Pence’s home state of Indiana. Ten months earlier, just days after Trump won the New Hampshire primary, a viral video taken by a Carrier employee in Indiana showed a corporate executive announcing to hundreds of employees that their jobs were being shipped to Mexico. Trump had seized on the video and now saw an obvious opening to deliver on a symbolic promise to protect American workers.

  The Carrier deal was a clear example of the “crony capitalism” conservatives had railed against, and part of a propaganda campaign in which Trump attempted to demonstrate before taking office that his election was already benefiting the domestic workforce. Yet the response from Republican leaders, including Ryan, who for years had warned that the government should not pick winners and losers, was to celebrate the deal. Most conservative leaders kept quiet, too. One notable exception was Sarah Palin, who, scoring points for intellectual seriousness, criticized Trump and Pence. Within the Freedom Caucus, the only vocal critic was Amash. “More corporate welfare and cronyism,” the Michigan congressman tweeted. “Equal protection is denied when one company receives favors at the expense of everyone else in Indiana.”

  David McIntosh, the Club for Growth president and former Indiana congressman who had been Pence’s friend for two decades, said the Carrier deal set “a terrible precedent.” Having listened in disbelief as Pence defended the deal, saying the free market had failed to protect Hoosier workers from their jobs being shipped overseas, McIntosh began to question whether Pence would be true north in the administration. “What I saw him do during the campaign was kind of reinterpret ‘Make America Great Again’ into a list of conservative initiatives,” McIntosh recalled. “The Carrier thing was disappointing because he didn’t do that, and it kind of seemed like they were giving up on the free market and talking about tariffs instead.”

  McIntosh hoped that Carrier would be a “one-off thing,” but there was evidence suggesting otherwise. Ten days after the election, Bannon put the party on notice in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter. “We’re going to build an entirely new political movement,” he boasted. “The conservatives are going to go crazy. I’m the guy pushing a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan. With negative interest rates throughout the world, it’s the greatest opportunity to rebuild everything. Ship yards, iron works, get them all jacked up. We’re just going to throw it up against the wall and see if it sticks. It will be as exciting as the 1930s, greater than the Reagan revolution—conservatives, plus populists, in an economic nationalist movement.”10

  Bannon was correct that traditional conservatives wouldn’t support the agenda he described. But in the era of Trump, the very definition of conservatism was up for grabs. Populism had become the new buzzword on the right; a few days after the election, Jordan made repeated references to “populist-conservative policy,” advocating the suddenly chic notion of a marriage between Trump’s Everyman appeal and the Tea Party’s ideological exactitude.

  Yet it was never clear that such a merger was even possible. “Populism as an ideology is not ideological,” Arthur Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute, said before Trump took office. “Populism basically says, ‘There’s a parade coming down the street and I’d better get out there because I’m their leader.’”

  Trump’s threat to penalize companies that shipped jobs overseas might have excited a blue-collar worker in rural, red America, but the idea was fundamentally incompatible with the precepts preached by the elected Republican who represented that worker’s district. The politician in question might agonize over the violation of conservative orthodoxy, but when regular people are forced to choose between their livelihoods and a set of abstract principles, it’s a no-brainer. To that point: If Pence, who was once arguably the most ideological Republican in Congress, could be persuaded by Trump to stop supporting multinational trade deals while offering tax breaks to Carrier, it wasn’t hard to imagine Republican lawmakers writ large adapting to a new and different mandate from their constituents.

  To combat this, Ryan had a plan: He would pack the GOP government’s schedule so full that Trump wouldn’t have time to deviate from party orthodoxy.

  In mid-December, the Speaker arrived at Trump Tower carrying a Gantt chart with a meticulously detailed agenda for the year ahead. With the help of McConnell, Ryan had laid out on paper the policy initiatives, the key players, and the deadlines that would guide the GOP’s lawmaking process in 2017. He spent nearly three hours walking Trump and his senior staff through the chart, and to his surprise, the president-elect was engaged throughout.

  Bannon, no fan of Ryan’s, spoke up to warn the president-elect of what he was committing to. “You realize that if you sign onto this, this is what we’ll be doing for the next year,” he said.

  “I got it, I got it,” Trump replied. He looked at Ryan and shrugged. “Okay. Let’s do it.”

  FOR MUCH OF THE YEAR PRIOR TO TRUMP’S ELECTION, JOURNALISTS, donors, lobbyists, and political professions had heard rumblings of the candidate’s shady association with Russia. The thrust of the speculation centered on his business dealings—namely, the attempt to build a Trump Tower in Moscow—and on the notion that he was hiding his tax returns because they would show a pattern of bribes and kickbacks involving foreign nationals. The theory of a Trump-Kremlin nexus was further fueled by his litany of head-snappingly suspicious comments, such as when he declared at a July 2016 press conference, “I will tell you this, Russia: If you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find [Clinton’s] 30,000 emails that are missing.”

  Trump aides knew that reporters and political rivals were investigating these questions. What they didn’t know was that a former British MI6 agent, Christopher Steele, was secretly compiling a dossier of intelligence reports on Russia’s relationship with Trump.

  A respected veteran of undercover operations in Moscow, Steele had been contracted twice by the American political research firm Fusion GPS. The first time, in October 2015, his work was underwritten by the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative media outlet financed by Republican megadonor Paul Singer, a patron of Rubio’s campaign. The second time, in April 2016, Steele’s services were purchased through Fusion GPS by a lawyer working on behalf of Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee. In both cases, Steele’s objective was the same: getting to the bottom of the Trump-Russia connection.

  What Steele’s sources told him was so startling that he contacted American law enforcement to pass along the intelligence: Trump was in the pocket of Moscow. The Republican nominee’s team, Steele’s sources said, was actively coordinating with the Russian government, which had compromising information to wield against Trump. According to sworn testimony by Fusion GPS employees and interviews given by Steele’s associates, he believed his findings constituted a national security threat, hence his decision to share them with old counterparts in U.S. intelligence.11

  As Steele’s warning slowly worked its way through the American law enforcement apparatus, then-CIA director John Brennan was busy launching his own investigation into the Republican nominee’s ties to Russia. He suspected that the Kremlin was not just interfering in the U.S. election but was actively boosting Trump, possibly with assistance from the Republican nominee’s campaign.

  Despite mounting speculation around Washington about the existence of these inquiries, nothing was made public prior to Election Day. Democrats would later groan that Obama had bottled up the news of Brennan’s probe, fearing the optics of a politically motivated leak that would fuel Trump’s theorizing about a “r
igged election.”

  On January 10, ten days before Trump was to take office, CNN reported that both he and Obama had been briefed on classified documents that “included allegations that Russian operatives claim to have compromising personal and financial information” on Trump.12

  CNN did not publish the allegations, but BuzzFeed did.

  Among the other findings in his dossier, Steele reported that Russia had been “cultivating, supporting, and assisting” Trump for at least five years; that his team had accepted “a regular flow of intelligence from the Kremlin” on his political opponents; that several of Trump’s lieutenants had acted as intermediaries; and that the Russian government possessed compromising information, or kompromat, on Trump himself.

  At the heart of the kompromat were allegations of “perverted sexual acts” that had been recorded by the Russian government. One particularly salacious claim was that back in 2013, while staying in the presidential suite of the Ritz-Carlton in Moscow, Trump had paid Russian prostitutes to urinate on a bed that the Obamas had slept in.

  Trump, for his part, seemed more bemused than angry by the details of the Steele Dossier. “Does anyone really believe that story?” the president-elect said at a January 11 press conference. “I’m also very much of a germaphobe, by the way.”13

  Trump’s team was less sanguine. On the evening BuzzFeed published the dossier, Priebus and Bannon cornered Michael Cohen inside the president-elect’s personal office on the twenty-sixth floor of Trump Tower. The dossier reported that Cohen had in August 2016 met with “Kremlin officials” in Prague on behalf of Trump to discuss coordinated efforts against Clinton. It was mortally dangerous intelligence, if true—and Priebus and Bannon thought it might very well be.

  Priebus, a trained lawyer, sat Cohen down and began deposing him. It was a vivid scene, with members of the transition team frozen outside the office watching the confrontation unfold. Priebus interrogated Cohen on his specific whereabouts for the entire month of August 2016, and demanded to know every country he’d ever visited in Europe. Cohen grew increasingly heated during the exchange, swearing that he had never been to Prague in his entire life.

  “Prove it,” Priebus said. “Go get your passport and show us.”

  Cohen, a tenant of Trump Tower, obliged them. Returning a short time later with his passport, he handed it to Priebus. There was no stamp from the Czech Republic.

  Priebus, Bannon, and other top incoming White House officials were satisfied that Cohen was telling the truth. But they remained deeply wary of him. Everyone who had spent time around Trump had heard him complain about the recklessness of his personal lawyer. “Michael’s supposed to be the ‘fixer,’” Trump liked to say. “But he causes more problems than he fixes.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  January 2017

  “Did you see my tweets?”

  THE WEATHER WAS ALL TOO APPROPRIATE. WHEREAS EIGHT YEARS earlier vivid sunshine had illuminated Barack Obama’s inaugural address, storm clouds moved in over Washington as Donald Trump took the oath of office to become America’s forty-fifth president. Not a minute into his speech, the skies dimmed and rain began to fall. His would be fairly described as the angriest, the gloomiest, the most ominous inaugural address ever delivered.

  “Today, we are not merely transferring power from one administration to another or from one party to another, but we are transferring power from Washington, D.C., and giving it back to you, the people,” Trump declared.1

  “The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer. Everyone is listening to you now. You came by the tens of millions to become part of a historic movement, the likes of which the world has never seen before.”

  Trump continued, “Americans want great schools for their children, safe neighborhoods for their families, and good jobs for themselves. These are just and reasonable demands of righteous people and a righteous public. But for too many of our citizens, a different reality exists. Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation; an education system flush with cash but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge; and the crime and the gangs and the drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential.

  “This American carnage,” the president said, “stops right here and stops right now.”

  TRUMP COULD BE EXCUSED FOR NOT DIVING INTO POLICY SPECIFICS IN an inaugural address. But the sweeping condemnations and blanket pronouncements were startling given the lack of nuance. While he no doubt connected with many Americans on an emotional level, the intellectual corruption of his remarks was breathtaking.

  As of January 2017, violent crime rates had dropped precipitously from their modern high in 1991.2 More people had jobs in the United States than ever before. Inflation-adjusted wages were higher than at any point in the country’s history. The United States remained the wealthiest nation in the world by gross domestic product. And while there certainly were some “rusted-out factories” blighting the landscape of middle America, the manufacturing sector had come roaring back in the years since the Great Recession. As of 2017, U.S. manufacturing exports were at an all-time high, thanks in no small part to the Bush-Obama bailout of Detroit’s automakers, which had more than doubled their exports between 2009 and 2014.3

  Other key sections of the president’s speech were similarly lacking in context.

  When he decried “the very sad depletion of our military,” Trump failed to mention the role of the Republican-authorized sequestration cuts, preferred by conservatives to the alternative of a major budget compromise with the White House that could have raised tax revenues by closing loopholes for the wealthiest earners only.

  When he said, “Protection will lead to great prosperity and strength,” warning against “the ravages of other countries making our products, stealing our companies, and destroying our jobs,” Trump denied not just his personal history of developing products overseas, but also the net benefits of international commerce. Global prosperity had contributed tremendously to American wealth, and while trade deals had hurt a certain segment of the population, they were hardly the chief driver of domestic job loss. In December 2016, the Financial Times reported that of the estimated 5.6 million manufacturing jobs lost between 2000 and 2010, “85 percent of these jobs losses are actually attributable to technological change—largely automation—rather than international trade.”4

  And when he said, “We have defended other nations’ borders while refusing to defend our own,” Trump ignored the fact that Obama deported more illegal immigrants than any president in U.S. history and “more than the sum of all the presidents of the 20th century,” according to ABC News.5 Also missing: the history of how conservatives rejected the 2013 Senate bill, which offered an unprecedented influx of border agents, without offering any alternative in the House. Neither party had been innocent when it came to playing politics with immigration.

  Trump was selling plenty of evocative sound bites but few fact-based assessments—and even fewer practical solutions.

  The speech was, however, coherent in presenting a worldview that had remained consistent from the moment Trump first began flirting with a White House bid three decades earlier. “From this day forward, a new vision will govern our land. From this day forward, it’s going to be only America first,” the president said. “Every decision on trade, on taxes, on immigration, on foreign affairs will be made to benefit American workers and American families.”

  The phrase “America First,” the rallying cry of noninterventionists resisting entry into World War II, had been off-limits in the generations since due to its anti-Semitic intimations. The speech was crafted by Steve Bannon as well as Trump’s incoming policy adviser, Stephen Miller, who had been a longtime immigration staffer to Jeff Sessions. Deftly, Miller inserted a phrase to rebut interpretations of xenophobia: “When you open your heart to patriotism
, there is no room for prejudice.” Yet given the rhetoric of Trump’s campaign, his associations with the likes of Alex Jones and the alt-right, and his incessant pitting of Americans versus non-Americans, it rang somewhat hollow.

  Sitting on the dais behind the newly inaugurated president, George W. Bush couldn’t help but hear the “isms” he had warned of eight years earlier: isolationism, protectionism, nativism.

  When the speech concluded, Bush made his way off the stage. “That was some weird shit,” he said aloud, according to journalist Yashar Ali.6 (Bush’s spokesman did not dispute the report.)

  It was a sentiment shared by many on the dais—not just the Democrats whom Trump had spent the past year bashing (Obama, Bill Clinton, and Hillary Clinton, whose demeanor during her assailant’s inauguration was the stuff of hostage videos), but also the Republicans who had been encouraged by Trump’s post-election performance. They had heard him talk of unity in the wee hours of November 9. They had watched him assemble a generally respected cabinet. They were cautiously optimistic, on the eve of the inauguration, that the incoming president would feel the weight of his office, abandon his trademark bombast, and adopt a more thoughtful, deliberative approach.

  And then came “American carnage.”

  Trump would not be relinquishing his penchant for provocation—or his appetite for conflict. It wasn’t outwardly apparent at first. He floated through his first hours on the job: After finishing the inaugural address, speaking to a VIP luncheon inside the Capitol (feeling so magnanimous that he singled out Hillary Clinton for a standing ovation), and completing the parade down Pennsylvania Avenue, the new president had been paralyzed by wonder upon entering the Oval Office for the first time. “Wow,” he said to Reince Priebus, turning in circles and glancing from carpet to ceiling. “Can you believe it?”