Fever Swamp: A Journey Through the Strange Neverland of the 2016 Presidential Race

by Richard North Patterson

  As a non-journalist who was writing opinion pieces, I was freer than most to frame my own answer. As you will see, beginning in the spring of 2016, I did.

  This did not provoke universal approval. Friends schooled in the admirable constraints of traditional journalism questioned, understandably, whether it was responsible to venture a psychological diagnosis of a candidate. But Trump’s own behavior made some sort of journalistic reckoning unavoidable.

  By late summer, prominent mainstays of conventional commentary were questioning his psychological stability. And in September major print and broadcast outlets began labeling his misstatements for what they were. For 2016 was the year in which the standard verities no longer seemed to suffice.

  One can, and should, view this with some unease. I surely do. For Trump presented the media with a terrible choice. Its reportage of Trump became fodder for his charge that the election was rigged against him. One of his many dubious gifts to us is sowing yet more distrust of the media and, within journalism itself, the question of how its role has changed.

  But this was only one issue among many that I was compelled to write about. Never in my lifetime, not even in 1968, had so many Americans been so insecure, alienated, and confused—and so bitterly opposed to so many of their fellow citizens. The campaign became a potent additive to this volatile mix of uncertainty and fear: of displacement, violence, terrorism, and “the other”—Muslims, Mexicans, minorities, and, yes, even Russian hackers. Few dared to imagine what would happen next—including whether the chief protagonist of this drama would crack up before our eyes, and what would become of us if he became our president.

  As I wrote, a metaphor occurred to me. With Trump as the principal agent of contagion, this campaign was becoming a fever swamp where lies blossomed, anger thrived, conspiracy theories mushroomed, and reason went to die. Like all of us, the principal figures of the campaign would have to navigate the swamp.

  These included Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Paul Ryan, Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina, and Mike Pence. Even more notable were Barack and Michelle Obama and, especially, Hillary Clinton. I wrote about them all, some extensively, for how they negotiated the swamp said much about who they were and what choices lay before us.

  For Clinton, this was a harrowing journey through emails, an FBI investigation, a bitter primary season, suspicions about her ethics, renewed scrutiny of her marriage, a daunting level of voter mistrust, and twenty-five years of attacks from all sides. Only in a year featuring Donald Trump would Clinton not be the central character. For whether and how she surmounted these difficulties said much about her resilience, discipline, and stamina—and whether enough Americans would come to trust her enough to select her over Trump.

  For the candidates, and all of us who watched, this gauntlet provided more surprises then anyone could imagine. Still, until close to the end I was convinced that Trump would lose—and said so.

  And then, eleven days before the election, a final shock—an ambiguous letter to Congress from FBI director James Comey about newly discovered emails, about whose contents he knew nothing, which nonetheless might bear on the FBI’s investigation of Clinton’s email practices. This single act set off a media avalanche, transforming the dynamic of the race, tarnishing the FBI’s reputation, and giving Trump a startling last-minute path to victory.

  We were living in truly dangerous times, and I was writing about them. So I tried to do that with as much insight, clarity, style, and, when appropriate, humor as I could muster. And, above all, I resolved to tell the truth as I saw it.

  This book contains my pieces precisely as I wrote them, week by week, with a few edits to avoid repeating points made in prior pieces. Where it is helpful to add additional detail or insight, or note subsequent events, I have done so through annotations. Taken together, these articles comprise a comprehensive narrative of the campaign.

  All in all, it was a remarkable journey, and I’m glad that I decided to take it. So I’m grateful to all the readers who accompanied me, and whose comments chastened, illuminated, or simply helped me keep on going. And I’m especially grateful to you, for reading this now.

  PART I

  Plutocrats, Birthers, Climate Deniers, a Reality Star, a Socialist from Vermont, a Scrum of Candidates Killing Each Other, and an Entire Political Party Gone Mad

  Sometime during the summer of 2015 I had a truly alarming perception: the Republican presidential debates resembled the bar scene from Star Wars.

  The characters were feral and scruffy. Menace hung in the air. Nothing anyone said made sense. It was like a transmission from an alternative galaxy. Mexicans were pouring over our borders; Muslims were celebrating 9/11; Obamacare was like slavery; the Chinese were occupying Syria. And an audience full of people who looked something like us—only a lot more Caucasian—were cheering wildly.

  One of the characters was orange and kept insulting everyone else. The only black man spoke largely in haiku; the only woman seemed mean as a snake. The young guy kept sweating and repeating himself. And the guy who looked like Joseph McCarthy sounded like a televangelist. Like the inmates of an insane asylum, all kept insisting they would be our next president.

  Scary.

  Worse, this was not a movie, and Donald Trump was not a sideshow but an increasingly serious candidate for the Republican nomination. Was he a meteor, or a death star, or the GOP’s great white hope? The question was not premature—though no votes would be cast until February, the great winnowing had already begun.

  A putative front runner, Scott Walker, vanished beneath the weight of his own weightlessness. Weighed down by establishment support, Jeb Bush languished in the doldrums. As Trump rose to the top, oddities like Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina nipped at his heels. Marco Rubio kept repeating the same origin speech, like a man whose perpetual Groundhog Day was the Fourth of July. Ever watchful, the predatory Ted Cruz lurked in Trump’s nativist slipstream.

  In the footlights swarmed rich donors unleashed by Citizens United, disconcerted by Trump and trying to pick winners in a political auction with public policy on the block. As always, they knew what they wanted—more. But for once they were confused about who could best give it to them.

  Offstage, terrorists murdered innocents at home and abroad. Millions of Americans feared losing their place, and the party establishment was losing its grip. And the GOP was afflicted by distemper so severe that the once powerful elephant threatened to become a multiheaded beast.

  In the chaos, Trump’s competitors jockeyed for second place, betting that Trump would implode all by himself. This had a considerable fascination of its own—the characters were interesting, their maneuvers complicated, and the fissures they exposed acute. As they stalked one another, their chosen enemies, tricks, and tactics kept on shifting. In the chaos, Trump remained untouched—even when, in debate after debate, he insulted his rivals in the most coarse and personal terms.

  Indeed, some of his competitors demeaned themselves by flattering him, hoping to inherit his support. Instead his lead in the polls burgeoned ever more, propelled by billions in free media, as the addled GOP establishment took refuge in delusional passivity. It was hard to pick what was most astonishing: that a man so ignorant and vulgar was the Republican front-runner; or that the vaunted GOP establishment was so completely feckless.

  So what did this portend—not just for the party, but the country?

  And what of the Democrats? In any other year, their drama would have been front and center—and for good reason. Was it truly possible that a septuagenarian loner would spur a mass movement so powerful that it would topple their presumptive nominee? Could Hillary Clinton—by sheer grit and persistence—overcome years of attacks, a generational divide, and her own mistakes? And would the party’s flawed but beloved vice president try one last time to seize the prize?

  Whatever the answers, the election of 2016 was poised to become the most surprising, strange, dramatic, and consequential election in livi
ng memory—a journey through a fever swamp we had never visited before.

  And the story was only beginning.

  The Faux Humility of Dr. Ben Carson

  SEPTEMBER 18, 2015

  In the fevered political moment captured so well by the second Republican presidential debate, Dr. Ben Carson has improbably emerged as the leading challenger to the improbable Donald Trump. Recently asked to distinguish himself from his rival, Dr. Carson humbly singled out his faith-based humility. One must assume that he equates humility with the disarming persona he once again displayed in debate on Wednesday evening—his soft-spoken manner seemingly detached from the conflict around him, his most memorable response a pleasing tribute to his hardworking mother.

  But that muted volume shrouds pronouncements that, in both their strangeness and self-certainty, are stunning even by Trumpian standards. For little in Dr. Carson’s campaign thus far suggests the slightest awareness of the feeble qualifications, rhetorical excess, and monumental self-regard he brings to his pursuit of the presidency.1

  His rise began at the 2013 National Prayer Breakfast. He began by noting: “My role model is Jesus,” a statement that might have given pause to a man less humble. With President Obama two seats away, he then proceeded to critique Obama’s health care plan and offer up his own. Even some evangelicals felt that he had hijacked a religious event with unseemly arrogance.

  But Carson knew better. He then went on television to criticize the president’s own remarks, saying that they made him “feel that perhaps we’re being betrayed, perhaps we don’t have a leader who feels the same thing as most of us do,” adding that “we will have another opportunity, coming up in 2016, looking at all the senators and congressmen who rabidly support this man.”

  With this, movement conservatives began urging him to seek the presidency. And, much like his role model, Dr. Carson was prepared to sacrifice himself for the higher good.

  His subsequent self-evaluations suggest why. “I’m ready for leadership on the world stage,” he has assured us, “not just sitting around waiting to see what other people do.” When asked about his lack of knowledge of that stage, he countered that “the most important thing is having a great brain”—his own, it would seem. After all, as he remarked in closing out the first debate, “I’m the only one [onstage] to separate Siamese twins.” That last statement, at least, is beyond peradventure.2

  On one level, this serene self-assurance is not wholly surprising. For a superb surgeon, which Dr. Carson surely was, self-confidence is a prerequisite. But it is an unsettling leap for a brain surgeon to suggest that staving off global disaster is not, well, brain surgery. And it is outright unnerving when this lofty self-concept is fused with the certainty on which fundamentalism so often rests—as recently illustrated by the Kentucky county clerk who rejected same-sex marriage applicants “on God’s authority.”

  Even in less dangerous times than these, one hopes for a president who, before making momentous decisions, consults not just God, but advisers with deep intelligence and experience—especially when that president is so inexperienced himself. But Carson’s tidy solution to the protean dangers posed by ISIS—that he would “order the military to destroy the group”—did not, to put it gently, seem to reflect a meaningful consultation with military experts, let alone a comprehension of the poisonous complexities of the Middle East. In this matter, as in others, divine inspiration should be infused with worldly wisdom.

  But there is disturbingly little sign of that in Dr. Carson. Think what one will about Obamacare, it is surely not “the worst thing that has happened in the United States since slavery.” However quiet Dr. Carson’s voice, he sounds more than a bit like Trump—not to mention un-Christian—when he suggests that President Obama is “sitting there saying, ‘These Americans are so stupid they’ll believe anything I say.’”

  It is passing strange for a man of science to disdain the scientific community by repudiating the theory of evolution, and labeling any discussion of man-made climate change “irrelevant.” And when his intellectual isolation propels the workings of his mind to interplanetary levels—asserting that Americans “live in a Gestapo age,” then paradoxically proposing a “covert division” of civil servants to spy on their fellow workers—one can only question the operating manual for this particular “great brain.”3

  Like Trump, Dr. Carson appeals to those for whom loathing of government suffices as policy; unlike Trump, he channels this rage through a mien of self-effacement that has religious resonance, deepening his appeal to evangelicals and others uncomfortable with bombast. But our long campaigns are as grueling as a marathon, as telling as a microscope—even now, the residue of this last debate may be of a candidate only tenuously connected to the larger discussion.4 In the end, even many of Dr. Carson’s would-be admirers may conclude that they have seen this man before—perhaps in an airport bar or on a park bench. He has a gentle demeanor, a kindly aura, a soft and pleasing voice. And then we come closer and realize that he is speaking in tongues.

  The Shallow Salesmanship of Carly Fiorina

  SEPTEMBER 20, 2015

  In the wake of Wednesday’s debate, Carly Fiorina has become the latest Republican meteor of the moment, trailing only Donald Trump in the most recent polling. Asked why by Chris Wallace, Fiorina argued that voters respond to her once they “know what I’ve done and, more importantly, what I will do”—citing her business skills as a negotiator. In both her self-assured delivery and its substance, this answer illuminates the paradox in Fiorina’s claim to world leadership.

  For Ms. Fiorina is of a very different stamp than her “outsider” peer group: Trump and Ben Carson. However unlikely it is that their skills preordain a successful presidency, Trump has made himself a billionaire, while Carson had a remarkable career as a surgeon. The irony of Fiorina’s rise is that far from reflecting success as a business executive, it stems from the presentational skills of a superior politician: polished delivery, rigorous message discipline, and the ability to assimilate facts, neatly packaged to please the party’s right-wing base.

  Thus the program she offers America includes shutting down the government to defund Planned Parenthood and disowning the nuclear agreement with Iran. In this, the past is prologue. For, as at Hewlett-Packard, her persona is that of a world-class salesperson whose gifts obscure glaring questions about her judgment and abilities.

  Beyond aggressively marketing herself as the female anti-Hillary, hardly a credential in itself, her candidacy rests solely on a tenure as CEO, which ended in her firing. By comparison to other business leaders who have run for president or pondered doing so—Wendell Willkie, Lee Iacocca, Ross Perot, and even Herman Cain—Fiorina’s record at Hewlett-Packard is less uplifting saga than dead weight, suggesting that she lacks the capacities essential in a successful president.

  The problem is not that she fired a lot of people—CEOs will do that, sometimes unavoidably. Rather, the prevailing narrative in the tech sector and beyond is that her tenure was marked by bad decisions, poor interpersonal relations, and a leadership style that placed self-promotion above the nitty-gritty of making HP work.

  To be fair, it is widely acknowledged that Fiorina arrived at a troubled company on the cusp of an industry-wide downturn. But it is also true that she left HP more troubled yet. Silicon Valley insiders describe a leader who was often manipulative, devious, and self-absorbed, focused on building a cult of personality blinding even in an era of celebrity CEOs.5

  The manifestations of such folies de grandeur abounded, from rock star entrances at annual meetings, to approving the hanging of her portrait at headquarters, to travel for personal appearances, even as HP descended into crisis. Equally significant, her frequently imperious manner and penchant for over-centralizing authority alienated colleagues, causing some of the more gifted to leave. This “cult of Carly,” said Roy Verley, HP’s former director of corporate communications, obscured that “[s]he didn’t know what she was doing, and co
uldn’t deliver in the process.”

  That judgment goes to the heart of Fiorina’s credentials, most prominently the centerpiece of her tenure, HP’s merger with Compaq. To be sure, she has her defenders, including those who argue that HP would have stalled regardless of who was CEO. But her insistence on negotiating a merger to jump-start the company’s growth precipitated what is widely viewed as a disaster. Despite her subsequent claim to have doubled the company’s size, its profits as a percentage of revenues fell sharply, its stock price plummeted far more than that of HP’s competitors, and the failure to smoothly merge the companies became a millstone, miring HP in the doldrums. In 2005, the HP board delivered its verdict on her skills as a negotiator and CEO—it fired her.6

  Within HP, her departure was greeted by an outburst of celebrations. The stock price rose dramatically. She became a staple of “worst CEO” lists. A Wall Street analyst delivered the common conclusion: “[N]obody liked Carly’s leadership all that much. The Street had lost all faith in her, and the market’s hope is that anyone will be better.”

  However harsh this sentiment may be, the record that engendered it is hardly an affirmative credential for her current and much more grand ambition. And it lends a tinny ring to Fiorina’s claim that she should be president because “I understand how the economy actually works.”

  But once again, she is selling herself superbly, tapping in to the magical thinking of those who believe that only an outsider can cure all the ills they attribute to traditional political leaders. But it is even more magical to imagine that, as president of the United States in uniquely complex and dangerous times, Fiorina will be transformed, succeeding where she failed as a mere corporate CEO. In assessing her performance in that job, her former colleague Roy Verley may have delivered the most devastating judgment of all: Fiorina, he says, is a “born politician.”7