American Carnage

by Tim Alberta

  Justin Amash was one such person. Things had come full circle: Once considered annoying and eccentric for his principle-driven votes against the GOP leadership, the Michigan libertarian was one of the only lawmakers in the Republican Party remaining true to those principles—and one of the few willing to diagnose what was happening to conservatism in the era of Trump.

  “THEY BELIEVE IN A COSMIC BATTLE BETWEEN THE RIGHT AND THE left, good and evil, and they think any criticism of Trump is helping the other side,” Amash said. “So, they’re willing to do whatever they need to. If that means going on Fox News and lying through their teeth about Trump, so be it.”

  The Michigan congressman was sitting in his office, the lights dimmed, C-SPAN flickering on a muted television. A few days had passed since the Helsinki summit, and Amash was still grappling with the subsequent defense mounted by his colleagues. The Freedom Caucus had shown signs of internal strain in Trump’s first two years at the wheel, but this felt like a breaking point.

  Amash had watched for the past eighteen months as his fellow House conservatives used their seats on key committees (Judiciary, Oversight) to wage a partisan war on Trump’s behalf, neglecting the nonpartisan duties of checking and balancing assigned to the legislative branch and assuming a protective posture on behalf of the executive. Amash understood the anxieties about Democratic overreach and unchecked bureaucrats in the “deep state” going rogue out of political opposition to the president. He also shared the belief, held by many of Trump’s defenders on Capitol Hill, that surveillance powers had been abused in proximity to the government’s handling of the Trump-Russia case. But it was painful to watch his friends, his Freedom Caucus comrades, sacrifice their integrity in the service of shielding the White House from scrutiny it plainly deserved.

  “Have you watched these committee hearings? They’re all theater. Then they go on Fox News and continue their performance. And then they go home and say privately, ‘Trump’s such an idiot,’ but the Fox News hit is all that matters,” Amash said. “We’ve all fallen into tribes, and when they praise the president, they get instant gratification from their tribe.”

  He continues: “I think they’re hurting themselves and they’re hurting the country when they do this stuff. It’s fine to say good things about Trump when you agree with him. I think Gorsuch could prove to be one of the best Supreme Court justices we’ve ever had. I agree with Trump on a number of regulatory issues. I agree with him when he’s cut taxes—just not when he raised taxes by imposing tariffs. . . . But a lot of them have just fallen in line. And it’s upsetting. It affects personal relationships. They are so obsessed with defending Trump, and the Russia stuff—I mean, they complain about the left being obsessed with Russia, but they’re even worse. And it gets in the way of discussions on anything else. It makes it hard to relate. I can’t understand it.”

  In a way, it was easy to understand. Politicians act out of self-preservation. For congressional Republicans—most of whom face no general election threat in their districts and all of whom fear Trump’s fervent following in the party’s base—the surest way to keep their power and enhance their influence was to stand by the Dear Leader.

  Far easier than remaining intellectually consistent, applying critical thinking to the president’s words and deeds regardless of party affiliation, was to enlist as one of his surrogates. The trappings of Trump’s propaganda ministry were substantial: regular Fox News appearances, rides on Air Force One, invitations to the White House, phone calls with the leader of the free world. Many a GOP lawmaker fell prey to these perks. But none more odiously than Matt Gaetz.

  Elected to Congress in 2016, Gaetz quickly distinguished himself as the Trumpiest lawmaker on Capitol Hill. He tried to hit a populist, anti-politician note out of the gate, announcing repeatedly at a press conference in 2017, “I don’t speak Washington.” (Gaetz’s father, the former president of the Florida Senate, was instrumental in procuring the congressional seat for his son.) The rookie Republican quickly realized that his path to prominence wound through the good graces of Trump, and he set about becoming the president’s most pugilistic supporter in Congress: railing against the “deep state” on Fox News, calling for Mueller’s firing, even likening the special counsel’s investigation to a “coup d’état.” Before long, Gaetz was riding on Air Force One to Florida with the president and giving introductory remarks at an event.

  In January 2018, Gaetz brought as his guest to the State of the Union address an alt-right troll and Holocaust denier, Charles Johnson, who, among his other claims to fame, helped raise crowdsourced money for the neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer. This resulted in a brief hiatus from Fox News, but Gaetz was back before long, more frequently and more artificially bronzed than ever before, alternating between calling Mueller’s probe a “witch hunt” and questioning the lack of investigations into the corruption of the Obama administration.

  By the summer of 2018, Gaetz was on the president’s speed-dialing list, talking with him regularly by phone and receiving constant feedback after his Fox News hits. This was not enough. The Florida congressman grew upset during one meeting with staff from the White House’s Office for Legislative Affairs, dressing them down for not recognizing his “special relationship” with Trump. Gaetz argued that he should be getting more one-on-one time with the president. Not long after, he was aboard Air Force One for Trump’s latest trip to Florida.

  Gaetz had discovered a new path to power and influence for a freshman member of Congress. It was good for him but terrible for the institution of Congress—and for the Republican Party. “Matt Gaetz is not a legislator,” Ryan says, shaking his head. “He’s an entertainer.”

  Not everyone was so flamboyant as the Florida lawmaker. But then again, they didn’t need to be. To remain relevant in Trump’s GOP was to stick within his orbit. And to do so required little more than unyielding allegiance to the president. This meant never daring to oppose his policies, much less criticize him personally, all while defending him as a matter of instinct.

  In lieu of any serious, substantive checking of the administration by its coequal branch of government on Capitol Hill, a class of professional Trump critics emerged on the right. Some, such as attorney David French at National Review and longtime talk radio host Charlie Sykes at the Weekly Standard, were thoughtful and measured. But most of the professionals were virtue-signaling reactionaries whose hysteria was surpassed only by their social media followings. Whether done by Ana Navarro on CNN (a “Republican strategist” who had strategized on behalf of no campaign that anyone could recall) or Jennifer Rubin at the Washington Post (a once-interesting blogger whose censures had become predictable to the point of self-parody), slamming the president’s every syllable became a cottage industry with generous remuneration for those involved.

  Indeed, throughout the fratricidal post-Bush era, few things got more clicks or better ratings than Republican-on-Republican violence. This trend exploded in the age of Trump. Newspapers competed to run columns by conservative detractors of the administration; cable news programs hustled to book guests whose broadsides against the president from the right would validate their own from the left. The scent of such intraparty treachery was so alluring that late in the summer of 2018, the New York Times ran an anonymous op-ed, which claimed to be authored by a “senior official in the Trump administration,” that detailed how the president’s own aides were “trying to do what’s right even when Donald Trump won’t,” and said there had been secret discussions of involving the Twenty-Fifth Amendment to remove him from office.

  The unrelenting torrent of condemnation—from the media, from celebrities, from the left, even from members of his own party—made Trump value those all the more who were dependable and subservient, those he could count on to advance his interests and defend him at all costs. Nobody had learned this better than Mark Meadows.

  After the beating he took from Trump during the first, failed health care push in early 2017, the Freedom C
aucus chairman groveled his way back onto Trump’s good side. He stayed there by acting as the president’s spy on Capitol Hill, reporting back the latest gossip and spinning everything he and his friends were attempting to do as benefiting the White House (as opposed to betraying the MAGA agenda, as Ryan and his leadership team were doing). The permanent perch Meadows earned atop Trump’s shoulder was annoying even to the congressman’s allies in the West Wing. Staff would regularly see Meadows walking the hallways uninvited and unannounced; White House phone logs from one month in the summer showed Meadows calling Trump at least twice as frequently as any other lawmaker.

  This represented the apex of Meadows’s ascent—from obscure freshman, to Defund Obamacare leader, to Boehner slayer, to Freedom Caucus chairman, to Trump whisperer—in just five years. The advantages were abundant. The North Carolina congressman, an avowed enemy of “the swamp,” bought himself a lovely condo inside the Beltway and began living full-time in the DC suburbs. Rare was the exclusive party not attended by the congressman and his wife, sudden starlets of the capital’s cocktail circuit. Meadows had made it.

  Interestingly, despite all his earned goodwill, Meadows would not spend it standing up for one of his own members.

  In late June, after Mark Sanford’s loss in his South Carolina primary, Trump looked out over a meeting of the House Republican Conference and asked if Sanford was present. When members replied that he wasn’t, Trump began taunting the congressman, calling him “a nasty guy” and saying sarcastically, “I wanted to congratulate him on running a great race!” Groans filled the room. Sanford had become a popular figure, especially among conservatives, for his policy knowledge and his plainspoken approach. Nobody appreciated Trump’s routine.

  The next day, however, Trump tweeted: “Had a great meeting with the House GOP last night at the Capitol. They applauded and laughed loudly when I mentioned my experience with Mark Sanford. I have never been a fan of his!”

  Of course, nobody had laughed or applauded. The president was lying about an event to which there were more than two hundred witnesses.

  Several of Sanford’s colleagues in the Freedom Caucus came to his defense. Amash rebuked Trump in a tweet, calling out his “dazzling display of pettiness and insecurity.” Labrador said it was “just wrong” what Trump had done to Sanford. But there was no such condemnation from Meadows. Despite Trump’s continued insults of his colleague—including another shot at him while the Freedom Caucus was meeting one night—the group’s chairman would offer no rebuke of the president, saying only that Trump was acting on “bad political advice.”

  Amash could no longer stomach the group’s collective cowardice. Soon, he stopped attending the Freedom Caucus meetings and distanced himself from the organization he had cofounded.

  “These guys have all convinced themselves that to be successful and keep their jobs, they need to stand by Trump,” Amash said. “But Trump won’t stand with them as soon as he doesn’t need them. He’s not loyal. They’re very loyal to Trump, but the second he thinks it’s to his advantage to throw someone under the bus, he’ll be happy to do it.”

  Amash added, “It could be Mark Sanford today and Mark Meadows tomorrow.”

  THE SUMMER OF 2018 WASN’T EXACTLY A DAY AT THE BEACH FOR PRESIDENT Trump. The family-separation crisis and the Helsinki disaster already promised to be legacy-defining blunders, and a surge of energy on the left was building what political pundits called a “Blue Wave” that appeared increasingly likely to wipe out the House GOP’s majority in the fall elections.

  There was also continued turmoil in his administration. In July, the embattled chairman of the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, resigned. This marked the seventh departure of a cabinet official in eighteen months; for watchdogs in Washington, it was the longest overdue. Pruitt had insulted taxpayers in ways that would make Tom Price blush, spending tens of thousands of dollars on a twenty-four-hour security detail; renting a DC town house from an industry lobbyist’s wife for pennies on the dollar; taking private and first-class flights without approval; and building a soundproof phone booth in his office that cost $43,000, among other abuses.1 It was fair to consider the swamp not yet fully drained.

  Meanwhile, Trump was growing more preoccupied with the Mueller probe with each passing day, grousing to anyone who would listen about the alleged “deep state” and flying into profanity-laced rages about the orchestrated sabotage of his presidency. In the months of June, July, and August alone, Trump sent hundreds of tweets and retweets regarding the special counsel’s inquiry, more than three dozen of them mentioning Mueller by name.

  In one tweet, the president called the former FBI director, a decorated Marine Corps veteran who led missions in Vietnam before and after being shot in the leg, “Disgraced and discredited.” He compared him to Joseph McCarthy. He described him as “totally conflicted” because of the registered Democrats working under him on the investigation. (Mueller, a Republican, had served presidents of both parties.)

  For all the talk of a “witch hunt,” Mueller proved incredibly skilled at finding hats and brooms. By the middle of July, according to a Washington Post tally,2 the special counsel’s team had collected “187 criminal charges in active indictments or to which individuals have pleaded guilty,” while “another twenty-three counts against President Trump’s former deputy campaign manager Rick Gates were vacated when he agreed to cooperate with Mueller.” Additionally, thirty-two people and three businesses had been named in indictments or plea agreements, and Mueller had extracted “six guilty pleas from five defendants.” Among the charges: “52 counts of conspiracy of some kind . . . 113 criminal counts of aggravated identity theft or identity fraud . . . Four guilty pleas for making false statements.”

  The biggest threat to Trump, it was becoming clear, was Michael Cohen. At first, the president’s lawyer seemed unlikely to flip. Trump described him as a “good man” in the aftermath of the raid on his office. The two men talked by phone soon after. And Cohen said he would “rather jump out of a building than turn on Donald Trump.” Yet, as the summer wore on and Trump playfully evaded questions about a pardon, the building jump was looking more and more appealing.

  In mid-June, Cohen fired his existing legal team and brought on a new lawyer known for his deal-cutting prowess. A week later, Cohen resigned as the deputy finance chairman of the Republican National Committee, taking the opportunity to criticize Trump’s family-separation policy at the southern border. Any remaining doubts about his allegiance were erased in early July, when he told ABC News that his first loyalty was to the country—not the president.3

  On Tuesday, August 21, Cohen stood in a Manhattan courtroom and pleaded guilty to eight federal crimes: five counts of tax evasion, one count of making false statements to a financial institution, and two counts of campaign finance violations. On the latter two charges, Cohen testified that Trump—“Individual 1, who at that point had become the President of the United States,” in court parlance—had directed him to make payments to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal during the 2016 campaign to prevent them from disclosing past sexual relationships.

  The president’s lawyer was implicating him in a major federal crime, one that had nothing to do with the Russia investigation he obsessed over. But the day was just getting started.

  Minutes after Cohen fired his legal projectile, Manafort was found guilty on eight counts of tax fraud and bank fraud. The Virginia jury was unable to reach verdicts on ten other counts, resulting in mistrials, but it hardly mattered: Manafort was facing up to 240 years in prison, the severest conviction of a sitting president’s former aide since Watergate. Having gone big-game hunting, Mueller was beginning to mount some serious antlers on the walls of Washington.

  Rounding out a day unlike any other in recent political memory, Duncan Hunter, the California GOP congressman, was indicted on sixty counts of using campaign funds for personal purposes. Hunter had long been renowned as one of Capitol Hill’s shadiest cha
racters; stories of his hard partying and sexual exploits with staffers was the stuff of legend. He was also the second member of Congress to endorse Trump for president. As it so happened, the first, New York congressman Chris Collins, had been arrested by the FBI two weeks earlier and charged with insider trading.

  (Soon after, Trump rebuked Sessions and the Justice Department for bringing charges against the Republicans ahead of the November elections. “Two easy wins now in doubt because there is not enough time. Good job Jeff,” he tweeted. The law-and-order party’s leader was asking the attorney general to play goalie for his political allies.)

  The dazzling convergence of criminality surrounding Trump didn’t seem widely bothersome to Republicans on Capitol Hill. Perfunctory statements of being “troubled” by the developments notwithstanding, few members of the president’s party offered anything in the way of outward alarm at the events of August 21. Some, including John Cornyn of Texas, the second-ranking Senate Republican, even took the opportunity to point out that neither Cohen’s pleas nor Manafort’s convictions did anything to prove “collusion” with Russia.

  Predictably, the president’s base was even less cowed. Arriving in West Virginia that fateful Tuesday for an evening rally with the faithful, the president found himself surrounded by what could only be described as Fifth Avenue Republicans—the type who, as the president had once said, would stick by him even if he shot someone. The day’s historic events went unappreciated by many in the crowd who, upon Trump’s mention of Hillary Clinton, chanted, without an ounce of irony, “Lock her up! Lock her up! Lock her up!”

  Their devotion was not without explanation. Despite all the struggles and setbacks of recent months, the president had delivered on more promises. He had withdrawn from the Iran deal. He had officially relocated the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. He had brought North Korea to the negotiating table.