American Carnage

by Tim Alberta

  It was no accidental shift. The biggest donors in the Republican Party made it known in 2018 that they would not write checks if their money would be wasted on ads hawking an academic sort of conservatism: lower spending, rising debt and deficit, uncontrolled entitlement programs, etc. Instead, they wanted an emphasis on cultural issues: immigration, the national anthem, whatever worked. “These weren’t the activists. These were Wall Street types, the people who have spent years pleading with Republicans to avoid social issues and focus on the economy,” Chapman, the Heritage Action president, says. “And now, with Trump, they want us to do the exact opposite.”

  There was a method to the madness. Over at the Club for Growth, where tens of millions of dollars had been spent over the past decade promoting a purist fiscal conservatism, their market research showed there was no appetite in the electorate for lectures on economics. “In this cycle, if you aren’t talking about immigration and Trump, you aren’t going to pick up that conservative base vote,” says David McIntosh, the Club’s president. “I’ve had donors and board members say, ‘Why don’t we just keep running the ads that worked before, about spending?’ And I tell them because when we study it and poll it, it doesn’t work.”

  Chapman concurs. “All the polling we get back shows the fiscal issues are a complete wasteland,” he says. “And the donors know it.”

  “The Tea Party is gone. It doesn’t exist anymore. There just aren’t that many Republicans now who are that concerned about spending, about debt, about big government,” says Justin Amash, the Michigan congressman elected in the 2010 wave. “Many people today think Trump is fiscally conservative because they see his tweets, they listen to him talk about trade deficits, and people fall for it. A lot of people are thanking Trump for getting our debt and deficit under control because they have bad information.”

  Ahem. Bad information?

  “I think President Trump is one of a kind—you can’t replicate what he’s doing,” Amash says. “It requires you to not feel shame. Most people feel shame when they do or say something wrong, especially when it’s so public. The president feels comfortable saying two things that are completely contradictory in one sentence; or going to a rally and saying one thing and then holding a press conference and saying another. Most people aren’t comfortable doing that. But because he is, it gives him this superpower that other people don’t have.”

  Indeed, as the president’s improvised trade war punished a disproportionate number of his own supporters across Middle America that summer, he gave a speech in Kansas City aimed at convincing those voters that they were not, in fact, being hurt by his policies. “It’s all working out,” Trump said. “Just remember, what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”

  His words of reassurance could have been ripped straight from the pages of George Orwell’s 1984: “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

  THE FANATICAL DEVOTION TO TRUMP, OFTEN FOR FEAR OF REPRISALS from his cult following on the right, opened the GOP to attacks that were sometimes misleadingly simplistic.

  It became highly en vogue, particularly in the cesspool of social media, for liberals to mock Republican criticisms of Trump as empty rebukes that weren’t backed up by concrete actions to check the executive branch. (“Stop talking and DO something!” . . . “You have a vote!” . . . “Press releases are not oversight!” etc.)

  The most fashionable of these arguments went something like this: Republican X, who spoke out in opposition to Trump over Y, was not sincere because he voted with the president on Z. Popular targets for such attacks were those GOP lawmakers who showed the gumption of habitually offering rebukes of the administration: Ben Sasse, Bob Corker, and of course, Jeff Flake. “When it comes right down to the nitty gritty—to casting votes—Flake usually toes the presidential line,” columnist EJ Montini wrote in the Arizona Republic.5 “According to a statistical analysis by the website FiveThirtyEight, Flake casts votes for the Trump position 83.3 percent of the time. The outrage over the president is, for the most part, all talk.”

  Such critiques were, for the most part, reductive and disingenuous.

  When Trump entered office, he effectively contracted out all the policymaking decisions, the things that would require votes, to two people: Ryan and McConnell. They put forth a legislative agenda that, while arguably flawed on the policy front and hypocritical on the process front, was broadly consistent with a contemporary Republican platform: repealing Obamacare, cutting taxes, rebuilding the military, slashing regulations, reforming the Veterans Affairs department, and above all, confirming conservative judges to the federal courts.

  To support these items was to vote not for Trump’s position, but for the party’s orthodoxy. Expecting lawmakers to vote against their own policy interests to make a statement of disapproval about Trump was asking them to cut off their nose to spite their face.

  “What we have is a president who was willing to sign what we wanted done,” Corker says. “Now, the tax bill to me could have been better, I had trouble with it, and you know, it’s a bet on America, and we took that bet. But these things are what Republicans are: We believe in feeding the animal spirits of business. We believe in conservative judges. We believe in tax reform. And what we had was a president who was willing to sign those things into law. That was our agenda—it wasn’t his agenda.”

  But what of the president’s agenda? This is where the notion of craven acquiescence gains legitimacy. Whether it was his multiple attempts to implement a travel ban that he admitted on multiple occasions was targeted toward Muslims, or his signing of a morbidly obese spending bill, or his launching multiple trade wars that hurt the American worker, Trump’s abandonment of conservatism (“classical liberalism,” as it was once celebrated) was met with little resistance from the right. And many of those who did voice opposition were careful to couch it in support for the president himself, fearful of provoking the tweeter in chief.

  Perhaps the most egregious example of Republican silence in the face of Trumpism came in the late spring of 2018, when the administration decided, on the advice of policy adviser Stephen Miller and his former boss, Jeff Sessions, to enforce a “zero tolerance” policy at the southern border. Meant to deter families from crossing into the United States illegally, the program resulted in nearly two thousand migrant children being separated from their parents in one six-week stretch alone. The images of crying toddlers and abandoned youths being detained in chain link fence detention centers as their parents awaited sentencing were ghastly; worse was the bureaucratic ineptitude that caused months-long delays before some kids were reunited with their parents.

  As had become customary, certain elements of the media played into the president’s hand; at one point, a photograph of children sleeping in cages went viral online, annotated by journalists with sharp words for the White House, only for it to become clear that the photo had been taken when Obama was president. Such carelessness allowed Trump to falsely equate his enforcement with that of previous administrations and blame the opposition party for his manufactured crisis. “I hate the children being taken away,” the president said from the White House. “The Democrats have to change their law—that’s their law.”

  It was not their law. Previous presidents had used discretion to avoid splitting up families while adjudicating their cases; whereas Obama’s administration had detained kids who came on their own, Trump’s administration was actively separating children from their parents.

  Many Republicans, including some of the fiercest immigration hawks in Congress, were nauseated by the scenes unfolding on the southern border. But most of them dared not criticize Trump. He had weaponized the issue of immigration too effectively in the past; with the midterm elections fast approaching and the conservative base showing signs of complacency, the last thing vulnerable Republicans wanted was to be called “soft” or “weak” by the president. Only when t
he pressure on him grew crushing—from party leaders, faith-based groups, and his own political advisers—did Trump relent, signing an executive order to end the zero-tolerance experiment.

  The most lasting critiques of the president, and of his enablers, will extend far beyond policy. From the moment Trump took office, Republicans on Capitol Hill and throughout the administration would offer a common refrain: “Focus on what he does, not on what he says.” For all Trump’s bizarre behavior and inflammatory rhetoric, they explained, he was delivering on many policies for which the party had long hungered.

  But this argument conveniently obscured a self-evident reality about the role of the presidency. Trump, as the American chief executive, is both the head of government and the head of state. His behavior and his rhetoric, therefore, were every bit as relevant as his policies. In certain instances, what the president said was actually more meaningful than what he did.

  Take, for example, his relationship with Russia.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  July 2018

  “If that means going on Fox News and lying through their teeth about Trump, so be it.”

  DONALD TRUMP AND VLADIMIR PUTIN STOOD SIDE BY SIDE IN HELSINKI, Finland, facing the world in a spectacle of unprecedented intrigue and unrivaled indignity.

  Since his election, the American president had privately and publicly expressed doubts about Russia’s interference in the 2016 campaign. He grumbled that the entire story was an attempt to delegitimize his presidency, perhaps not appreciating the serendipity of suffering in such a manner after building his political brand on the foundation of delegitimizing his predecessor. Nine months prior to the Helsinki summit, after meeting with Putin on the sidelines of an economic forum in Asia, Trump told reporters, “He said he absolutely did not meddle in our election.”

  This parroting of Putin’s denial came after a unanimous assessment from the U.S. intelligence community, in a report compiled by the FBI, CIA, NSA, and Dan Coats, Trump’s own hand-picked director of national intelligence, that concluded with “high confidence” that Russia meddled in the campaign with the purpose of electing Trump. The Senate Intelligence Committee, chaired by a Republican, had reached the same conclusion. (The House Intelligence Committee, consumed by partisan grandstanding, could not reach consensus on whether the sky was blue.) And just three days before the Helsinki summit, the Justice Department indicted twelve Russian nationals as part of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. They stood accused of working at the Kremlin’s direction to hack Democratic emails and computer networks.

  Yet when Trump spoke from the stage in Helsinki, he refused to identify anything for which the Russian government should be punished. He chose instead to focus on Mueller’s “ridiculous” investigation, which he called a “witch hunt” that was preventing better relations between the two nations. When an American reporter, Jon Lemire, pressed him on whom he believed, Putin or his own intelligence officials, the U.S. president gave a response that will live in infamy.

  “They said they think it’s Russia. I have President Putin. He just said it’s not Russia,” Trump said. “I will say this: I don’t see any reason why it would be.”

  With that utterance, Trump, taking the word of the KGB thug turned Russian strongman over that of his own intelligence community, had emasculated America on the international stage. He had also lent credence to the theory that Moscow had kompromat on the U.S. president. After all, the president had just spent the previous week disparaging NATO allies—condemning Germany, belittling the British prime minister while visiting her country, and referring to the European Union as a “foe.” Why the accommodating treatment of Putin and his brutal, democracy-crushing, dissenter-slaying government?

  The episode was jarring for many Republicans.

  Some of the president’s most steadfast defenders slammed the performance. Newt Gingrich called it “the most serious mistake of his presidency,” and Fox News’s Brit Hume said it was “a lame response, to say the least.” Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell offered unequivocal support for the intel community’s findings without criticizing Trump by name. Dozens of other congressional Republicans offered harsher-than-usual rebukes. John McCain called it “one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory,” adding, “No prior president has ever abased himself more abjectly before a tyrant.” And Will Hurd, the Texas congressman who had spent nearly a decade overseas working undercover for the CIA, went a step further, tweeting, “I’ve seen Russian intelligence manipulate many people over my professional career and I never would have thought that the US President would become one of the ones getting played by old KGB hands.”

  Sitting in his office a few days later, Corker, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman, said it was necessary to place Trump’s Helsinki performance in the sweep of his upending of conservative Republican orthodoxy.

  “Let me just go through the four things I believe,” Corker said. “I believe that America is a force for good in the world, that the post–World War II institutions have been mostly very beneficial to the United States and our citizens; this president does not believe that. I believe that free trade has been an outstanding thing for the American people and for our country and for our GDP; this president is a protectionist. I believe the fiscal issues matter. He’s not even close to being a fiscal conservative. And lastly, I think the domestic institutions that are fundamental to our democracy are important. We are conservatives, we are traditionalists, we are people that hold those things up, even though every institution needs oversight and can be improved. We believe that these institutions have helped make America great. Not him. He’s willing to significantly undermine them if it benefits him politically.”

  There was one class of Republicans that approved of Trump’s buddy-buddy routine with Putin: the Freedom Caucus.

  In a Heritage-sponsored forum with some of the group’s members, one day after the Helsinki summit, the conservatives spent an hour taking turns slamming Obama for his weak approach to Putin; Hillary Clinton for her failed “reset” of relations with Russia; reporters for daring to question Trump’s belief in the U.S. intelligence community; and operatives of the “deep state” for attempting to undermine the president. (“The choice target was former CIA director John Brennan, who tweeted that Trump’s showing in Helsinki “exceeds the threshold of ‘high crimes & misdemeanors’” and was “nothing short of treasonous.”)

  “In order for something to be treasonous, it has to undermine who we are as a nation,” Mark Meadows said of Brennan’s charge. “I’ve never seen a press conference have that effect.”

  “Foreign policy-wise,” Jim Jordan said, “the trip to China last fall was good, the Korean summit was positive, the [North Korean] hostages have come home, there’s sanctions on Russia, the embassy is in Jerusalem, and we’re out of the Iran deal. So, overall, people are pretty darn pleased.”

  “What was I disappointed in? I thought it was really odd that a reporter in Helsinki, Finland, after a conclusion of a brief summit, would ask President Trump the question that triggered this whole odd reaction that the summit was a failure because President Trump did not castigate and attack Vladimir Putin,” said Andy Biggs of Arizona, blaming the “idiocy” of the media’s questions.

  “If I were the president,” added Andy Harris of Maryland, “I wouldn’t hold those press conferences anymore until the press decided to get serious about dealing with the world issues, as this president is. . . . It would have gotten [Trump] nowhere to get in Putin’s face with election-meddling. There is no evidence of any collusion, but this is the main story of the liberal press.”

  On they went, up and down the dais, uttering not a critical syllable of the president less than twenty-four hours after he publicly sided with Putin over the U.S. intelligence community. It was surreal. Having covered many of these lawmakers for years—long before the Freedom Caucus existed—I knew for certain that had Obama said the same thing Trump had,
they would have been preparing articles of impeachment.

  Finally, the spinning and evading became too much. I raised my hand and asked, giving them a final opportunity, if any of them had any problem whatsoever with what Trump had said.

  Davidson was the only one to speak up. “I think anybody that watched the press conference, including the president himself, would say that was not his finest hour,” the Ohio Republican said, measuring his words. “But we support the fact that the president was there on the stage having the press conference and having the dialogue. . . . We should judge more about the deeds and less about the words.”

  It was the day the Freedom Caucus forfeited its credibility.

  For much of the previous decade, House conservatives had been the most interesting members of Congress to cover. In an age of mindless tribalism, they were the independent thinkers, rejecting the party’s hierarchy and challenging a system that rewarded blind loyalty and reflexive partisanship. But since Trump came along, they had become the most reflexively partisan Republicans on Capitol Hill, routinely brushing off actions from the executive branch that under Obama would have prompted talk of constitutional crises.

  Walking out of the event in a daze, I ran into Matt Fuller, the Huffington Post reporter who had chronicled the rise of the Freedom Caucus closer than anyone. “That was the low point in my career covering Congress,” Fuller said. I nodded in agreement. Moments later, a staffer for one of the Freedom Caucus members approached, shaking his head. “What a joke,” he grumbled.

  Notably, some of the core Freedom Caucus members had not been in attendance. Raúl Labrador, one of the group’s cofounders, was absent, as was Mark Sanford, one of its leading voices. As it turned out, several members had deliberately skipped the event, not wanting to subject themselves to the humiliation incurred by their colleagues.