American Carnage

by Tim Alberta

  And most important, he had nominated another conservative to the Supreme Court. The retirement of Anthony Kennedy, the court’s longtime swing vote on so many major decisions, had handed the new president a second appointment in as many years. Consulting once more with his conservative allies in Congress and his advisers at the Federalist Society, Trump had nominated an experienced judge with strong legal credentials and unquestioned conservative bona fides: Brett Kavanaugh.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  September 2018

  “We are better than this. America is better than this.”

  IT WAS A SEND-OFF BEFITTING A TITAN OF THE REPUBLIC: THE FLAG-DRAPED coffin, the bagpipes, the angelic chorus, the stained-glass windows, and the gothic pillared arches encasing a sanctuary of some three thousand luminaries bidding a final farewell.

  John McCain, the senator and statesman and prisoner of war who had spent five and half years in the Hanoi Hilton after refusing early release, had succumbed to cancer. He was eighty-one.

  The Saturday-morning service, on September 1 at the National Cathedral, paid a grand homage to McCain. But it also felt like a memorial for Washington itself, a capital city that under President Trump no longer seemed capable, as the famed “maverick” was, of balancing fights with friendships, of divorcing disagreement from disrespect, of recognizing the basic difference between opponents and enemies.

  With organ notes echoing throughout the cavernous complex before the ceremony, they mingled and shook hands and scanned the room for More Important People as they might at any black-tie affair. Former presidents and vice presidents elicited camera clicks. Senators compared notes with ambassadors. Military officials and government wise men and media personalities craned their necks. Jared and Ivanka held court with perfect strangers. The commotion outside—police escorts, a procession of black Cadillacs, hundreds of congressmen and senators being bused in, all with onlookers lining the surrounding sidewalks—made it a quintessentially DC occasion, a marriage of exclusivity and self-importance. The only thing missing from this meeting of official Washington was the chief executive of official Washington.

  The president’s absence testified to his rivalry with McCain; they had blistered one another relentlessly, in public and in private, ever since Trump infamously mocked the senator for having been captured while flying a combat mission in Vietnam. More fundamentally, though, Trump’s absence reflected his tormented relationship with a town that purports to revere the virtues he was accused of lacking: courage, prudence, service, conviction, wisdom, humility, forgiveness, honor, and above all, a patriotism that transcends tribalism.

  Trump could not be held solely responsible for the fractured nature of modern American politics. McCain’s idyllic Washington, one defined by ferocious battles waged with mutual goodwill, had long been on life support. For much of Bill Clinton’s presidency, and accelerating through the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, the electorate and its representatives were hardened by a combination of class warfare, zero-sum legislating, and cultural polarization that invited Trump’s ascent. Having pulled the plug—and smothered the better angels of our nature with a pillow for good measure—the president found himself at once disinvited from a singular Washington gathering and yet dominating its consciousness.

  The elephant in the room was the president not in the room.

  Though his name was never mentioned, the eulogists invoked Trump with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer. It was only eleven minutes into the service when Meghan McCain launched the opening salvo with an emotional tribute to her father. “We gather here to mourn the passing of American greatness—the real thing, not cheap rhetoric from men who will never come near the sacrifice he gave so willingly, nor the opportunistic appropriation of those who lived lives of comfort and privilege while he suffered and served.”

  Ten minutes later, choking back tears, she added, “The America of John McCain has no need to be made great again, because America was always great.”

  The applause was at first tepid, and then thunderous; she was the only one of the five speakers to be so interrupted. Each of the subsequent eulogists lauded McCain in a manner that, even if unintentionally, contributed to what became a ceaseless rebuke of his party’s current leader.

  This was all very much by design. McCain had planned his memorial down to the last detail, making clear that Trump was not to be invited. When the president learned of this from Kushner, his son-in-law, who had been tipped off by McCain’s son-in-law, the conservative writer Ben Domenech, Trump projected nonchalance. Yet he privately seethed at the affront and remained so bothered by it that he refused to lower the White House flag to half-staff when the senator died. Only after spirited lobbying from the likes of Mike Pence and John Kelly did the president relent, ordering the flag lowered at what appeared to be the lone place in Washington where it wasn’t already.

  McCain, meanwhile, had arranged for his former rivals Bush and Obama to deliver remarks. There was no shortage of symbolism in the two-time presidential candidate’s desire to be eulogized by the two men who had denied him the White House. When McCain spoke by phone with Obama a few months before his passing, and the forty-fourth president said that he would be honored to speak at his funeral, McCain described it to friends as one of the happiest moments of his life. It would be his parting message to America, he said, that patriotism has nothing to do with political affiliation.

  Towering over the crowd from the cathedral’s raised pulpit, Obama recalled the famous moment from 2008 in which McCain scolded one of his supporters for suggesting that the Democratic nominee wasn’t an American. “I was grateful, but I wasn’t surprised,” Obama said. “He saw himself as defending America’s character, not just mine.”

  Left loudly unsaid: Trump lying for years about Obama’s birthplace. Leaving nothing to interpretation, Obama added, “So much of our politics, our public life, our public discourse, can seem small and mean and petty, trafficking in bombast and insult and phony controversies and manufactured outrage. It’s a politics that pretends to be brave and tough but in fact is born of fear. John called on us to be bigger than that. He called on us to be better than that.”

  The other man who bested McCain for the presidency, George W. Bush, could afford to be less direct. It was just a few months earlier that he (along with brother Jeb) had insisted that Trump not attend the funeral of their mother, the former First Lady Barbara Bush. Still, he, too, got his point across. “John was, above all, a man with a code,” Bush said, one who “lived by a set of public virtues,” “detested the abuse of power,” and “could not abide bigots and swaggering despots.” Alluding to one of his own conflicts with McCain, over the use of torture as an interrogation technique, Bush noted, “At various points throughout his long career, John confronted policies and practices that he believed were unworthy of his country. To the face of those in authority, John McCain would insist: We are better than this. America is better than this.”

  Not that any of these critiques bothered Trump, who spent the morning of McCain’s funeral tweeting about deep-state sedition and Canadian trade exploitation before heading to his Northern Virginia golf club. There were, after all, disparate realities to consider: one inside the holy halls of the National Cathedral where powerful people mourned the death of decency, and another in the surrounding city where many of those same powerful people drove nails ever deeper into its coffin on a daily basis. Indeed, the contrast between the McCain Washington remembered in death (valiant, virtuous) and the McCain Washington loathed in life (warmongering, irascible) was something to behold.

  And there was a greater juxtaposition still: this one between the virtue-signaling, convention-worshipping insiders of the capital and the mad-as-hell, burn-it-down voters in the provinces.

  McCain’s funeral showed that Washington wasn’t Trump’s town. But it was still his country.

  IN THE MIDDLE OF SEPTEMBER, WHITE HOUSE POLITICAL DIRECTOR Bill Stepien sat down in the presi
dential residence across from Trump and delivered a wake-up call.

  Polling showed that Democratic voters were highly motivated ahead of the midterm elections, Stepien explained, while Republican voters were not—and Trump was feeding the complacency of his base by downplaying the threat in November. “Mr. President,” Stepien told him, “please stop saying ‘Red Wave.’”

  Trump was perplexed. Having fully bought into the narrative of Republican invincibility, supported by boisterous crowds, a string of special election victories, and of course, his own experience defying the political prognosticators, the president thoroughly enjoyed turning the Democrats’ “Blue Wave” mantra on its head. He struggled to imagine any scenario in which the nation delivered a rebuke to his government. Sensing this, and playing to his ego, Stepien and senior administration officials encouraged Trump to mobilize Republicans by making the election all about him. “Tell them that you’re on the ballot,” Stepien urged the president.

  There was another pressing imperative, something White House aides were pounding into Trump’s head as he prepared to travel the country campaigning on behalf of Senate candidates. “You cannot—absolutely cannot—attack Christine Blasey Ford,” Kellyanne Conway warned him.

  Just around that time, what had once seemed a pro forma confirmation process for Brett Kavanaugh to replace Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court—tipping its balance rightward for years, perhaps decades, to come—was being derailed by bombshell accusations that Kavanaugh had attempted to rape Ford when the two were teenagers. The president’s allies knew restraint would not come easy: He had been accused during the 2016 campaign of sexual misconduct by at least fifteen women, and when Ford’s accusations surfaced, his first response in private was to liken Kavanaugh’s plight to his own.

  To the shock of just about everyone at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Trump stayed on message. At his first public appearance following the twin talks from Stepien and Conway, he addressed the Kavanaugh situation with the most delicate touch imaginable. “Brett Kavanaugh, and I’m not saying anything about anybody else, Brett Kavanaugh is one of the finest human beings you will ever have the privilege of knowing or meeting,” the president said at a rally in Las Vegas. “So, we’ll let it play out, and I think everything is going to be just fine. This is a high-quality person,” he added. (Speaking to Sean Hannity before the rally, Trump did question why Ford’s story hadn’t been reported to the FBI “thirty-six years ago.”)

  Similarly, the president showed discipline in deleting “Red Wave” from his midterm lexicon, agreeing to make the election a referendum on himself. “Get out in 2018,” he told a Missouri crowd a few days later, “because you are voting for me in 2018.”

  This strategy would prove helpful to protecting and expanding the Senate majority. But it did nothing to slow the Democrats’ stampede toward control of the House. After two years of roller-coaster news cycles driven by a president who thrived on tumult and governed with a showman’s attention to shiny objects, Democrats were poised to regain the House majority by following a simple set of rules: Tailor the message to fit the district, talk about policy, and above all, don’t take Trump’s bait.

  Whereas Trump sought to paint the opposition party as deviant radicals bent on the republic’s destruction, many of the most effective Democratic challengers were running as centrists, emphasizing their affection for guns and objection to the growing debt. And whereas Trump sought to make the election about himself, Democratic candidates were methodical in focusing the electorate’s energy on the alleged failures of his party: Republican tax reform that had exploded the deficit and disproportionately benefited the wealthy; Republican efforts to take away health care access from millions of people; and Republican politicians whose acquiescence to Trump had deepened the country’s partisan divide and further diminished its faith in government.

  With the GOP expecting a full-frontal progressive assault on the president, leading Democrats—from Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, to Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chairman Ben Ray Luján, to the party’s biggest donors and elder statesmen—advised House candidates to run hyperlocal, nonhysterical campaigns that avoided Trump as much as possible while emphasizing independence from the national party. In dozens of cases, this meant pledging not to support Pelosi as Speaker.

  It was working. All around the country, in supposedly safely red districts where Republicans had gone unchallenged for years, Democratic recruits had put the incumbents back on their heels.

  The money and enthusiasm on the left had also scared dozens of other GOP incumbents into retirement, weakening the party’s defenses. Of the forty-four districts vacated by Republicans who retired, resigned, or sought higher office, Democrats aggressively targeted half of them.

  The most notable Republican to call it quits was Ryan, who nonetheless insisted on serving through the year’s end to help protect the majority. The decision to stay as a lame-duck Speaker irked some in the party and uncorked a gusher of internal gossip. Kevin McCarthy felt exposed by the decision, believing that his best chance to succeed Ryan in the next Congress was to have a running start; sensing the same thing, allies of Steve Scalise whispered about McCarthy’s vulnerabilities and suggested a stealth campaign to leapfrog him.

  The tension among all three leadership officials, and their staffs, filled the water cooler talks on Capitol Hill that summer, especially as McCarthy and Scalise each jockeyed to find ground on the other man’s right flank. (McCarthy aired radio ads in numerous congressional districts promoting his legislation to build a border wall, vexing local Republicans in tough races who were being outspent and didn’t get so much as a shout-out from the majority leader while he was talking to their constituents.)

  Ultimately, the concerns about Ryan sticking around were unfounded—he raised a record $200 million for the party in his time as Speaker—though his departure fed the narrative of Republicans surrendering in 2018. “There are a few folks that I tried to [convince] to stay in that didn’t stay in,” Steve Stivers, the Ohio congressman and chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, told Politico in late August. This qualified as the understatement of the cycle.

  Stivers was no one’s idea of a political powerhouse. In fact, he had become an expert at removing himself from GOP Christmas card lists. The previous fall, after Steve Bannon had left the White House and begun boasting of creating a shadow party to take down the establishment, the NRCC chairman traveled to Bannon’s Capitol Hill town house—which doubles as Breitbart.com headquarters—and threw himself at Bannon’s mercy, pleading with him not to target already vulnerable House moderates.

  It was a bizarre maneuver, strategically and otherwise. The fact was, for all Bannon’s talk, he had zero apparatus for actually recruiting and funding challengers to Republican incumbents. There was no money, no organization—just Bannon in all his rumpled, self-aggrandizing glory. Yet here was the NRCC chairman kissing the ring, and extracting promises from Bannon that his cabal would target only McConnell and his Senate members, not House incumbents.

  McConnell nearly had a coronary when he heard of the meeting. Calling Ryan, who had no previous knowledge of Stivers’s plans (and was himself irritated), the majority leader told the Speaker that Stivers was about to be persona non grata to the whole of the Republican Party.

  Stivers got the message, but his performance as the campaign committee’s leader was widely viewed as ineffectual bordering on incompetent. A record number of House Republicans had retired, and though much of that was due to expiring committee chairmanships and general Trump fatigue, Stivers was seen as part of the problem, rather than part of the solution.

  It was time for the GOP to triage, cutting off doomed incumbents and steering its resources to those who still had a chance. Stivers wasn’t helping things. It wasn’t just that he was forced to make tough decisions; it was that some of his decisions were plainly idiotic. For instance, Barbara Comstock, a popular Virginia Republican representing the
DC suburbs, had been trailing by double digits in every poll of the race throughout the entire summer. Yet the NRCC was continuing to pump money into her race, eventually spending $5 million on a seat that nobody believed could be held. (Comstock wound up losing by 12 points.)

  Meanwhile, Kevin Yoder, a Republican representing the Kansas City suburbs, was running the best campaign of his career—and fighting hopelessly uphill in a district that Clinton had won in 2016. Brimming with frustration one Sunday in September, Yoder placed a phone call to Stivers. Word had just gotten out that the NRCC would be cutting $1.2 million in TV spending from his district, essentially conceding defeat. Yoder had learned of the development from press reports, not from the committee.

  “When people ask me what I think of you, I can’t decide whether to tell them you’re a fucking idiot or a fucking liar,” Yoder growled at Stivers. “But now I think you’re both.”

  “TWO WORDS ARE GOING TO DEFINE THE NIGHT OF THE 2018 ELECTION in the next three weeks. One is ‘Kavanaugh’ and the other is ‘caravan,’” Newt Gingrich told Sean Hannity. “I think the American people are going to reject both the way they treated Kavanaugh and the way they are dealing with the border, and I think those will end up being the reasons the Republicans keep the House and dramatically increase the number of senators they have.”

  It was the evening of October 17, twenty days before the midterm election, and as usual, the president of the United States was tuned in to Fox News. He loved what he was hearing.

  Trump had all but pulled a hamstring taking victory laps since Kavanaugh was confirmed to the Supreme Court at the beginning of October. Moreover, just one day earlier, the president had tweeted about the “Caravan of people heading to the U.S.” from Honduras. Now the conservative propaganda monster was following his lead on both.

  The caravan issue was easily exploitable. Trump had threatened to cut off foreign aid to countries that did not thwart the advance of the estimated several thousand people moving through Guatemala toward the U.S. border. Caravans in Central America were nothing new; large groups of migrants have long banded together, traveling both north and south to escape violence and poverty. Earlier that year, in fact, a large caravan had been broken up by the Mexican government at its northern border. But this was different: With signs of complacency in the GOP base and immigration still its animating concern, Trump saw the latest mass migrant group as a prime political foil.