Epilogue
DESPITE DONALD TRUMP’S CALL FOR AMERICANS TO “come together as one united people,” the fault lines that led to his presidency only widened more over his first year in office.
In one sense, the fracturing of the United States would have continued apace no matter who was in the White House. Trump had been, in many ways, the result of trends decades in the making; he was ultimately more of a product of a polarized political environment and an increasingly hard-edged media climate than a producer of it. And indeed, many of the new president’s early moves—from a cabinet cobbled together from Republican office holders, conservative businessmen, and senior military figures to the appointment of conservative justice Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court; from a systematic campaign to deregulate business on through the attempted repeal of Obamacare and the successful passage of a massive new tax cut—were ones that virtually any Republican administration would have initiated, and ones that Democrats and others on the left would just as likely have criticized.
And indeed, in some ways, the early days of the Trump administration seemed a mere continuation of the earlier back-and-forth between Democratic and Republican partisans. As the centerpiece of his first hundred days, the new president sought to repeal the Affordable Care Act and fulfill a longtime Republican campaign promise. But as soon as he began his legislative campaign to undo the centerpiece of Obama’s legacy, opponents mobilized throughout the nation. One group of former Democratic congressional staffers, who called themselves Indivisible, self-consciously adopted the tools of the Tea Party to block the legislation. They had seen how effective conservatives had been in waging a scorched-earth resistance when Obama was president and now sought to turn the tables. Accordingly, they organized at the local level, put pressure on members in their home districts, and used social media campaigns and television-friendly protests to protect the ACA. Drawing broad support, Indivisible and its allies were ultimately successful in stalling the repeal bill. Trump was undaunted, however. Just as Indivisible looked back to the Tea Party for inspiration, Trump took another page from the conservative playbook by borrowing tactics used by Ronald Reagan, relying on administrative subterfuge to undermine the law instead. By allowing the program to be poorly implemented and then inserting a repeal of the individual mandate into separate legislation for a massive corporate tax cut, Trump succeeded in undercutting the law in significant fashion. In all, the back-and-forth over the ACA seemed quite similar to past political disputes and divisions.
Likewise, in economic policy, Trump again seemed to replicate many traditional Republican approaches. Initially, the new president signaled that he would depart from past practices and look to lift up those who had increasingly fallen behind in an era of ever-increasing economic inequality. “The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer,” Trump announced in his inaugural address. “I will fight for you with every breath in my body, and I will never let you down.” Making good on a campaign promise, the new administration quickly acted to draw down American involvement in free-trade agreements, which Trump had repeatedly claimed hurt American workers. With the portion of the American labor force represented by unions half of what it had been in the early 1980s, the nation’s workforce seemed receptive to anyone willing to champion their needs. Within days in office, he pulled the United States out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and discussed leaving NAFTA as well. More significantly, Trump embraced a new system of tariffs, arguing that the move was needed to defend American industries from unfair foreign competition. Economists noted that such actions might prompt retaliatory measures from economic competitors like China, and that an ensuing trade war would imperil US exports and thereby actually hurt American workers, but the president waved away their concerns. Such moves went against the grain of the GOP’s economic orthodoxy, but the centerpiece of Trump’s economic agenda—a massive tax cut, with the bulk of the relief going to corporations and individuals in the top bracket—remained firmly in the mainstream of Republican politics. After some false starts, the Republican Congress passed the tax cut in December 2017. Among other things, the new law lowered the top tax rate, slashed corporate tax rates from 35 to 21 percent, and set the estate tax to expire in six years. As many economists noted, the tax cut significantly benefited the wealthiest and would thus only widen the gap in income inequality. “As for Trump’s forgotten people,” one account of the tax plan concluded, “they are still left behind.” 1
But in more fundamental ways, the Trump administration, like the Trump campaign, represented a stark departure from the norms of American politics and government. The new president thrived on drawing out the tensions in American life, engaging in what Richard Nixon’s aides had long ago championed as “the politics of positive polarization.” From the moment of his inaugural address—with its invocation of a chaotic state of “American carnage”—the chief executive made it clear that he had no intention of dialing down the confrontational tone of the campaign or “acting presidential,” as many observers assumed he would. President Trump remained a man who had made his name in the world of reality television and tabloid journalism, and he conducted his presidency accordingly. A consummate promoter, he understood that in a media climate with competing outlets, the lines between reality and fiction were constantly blurred, with an insatiable demand for content. Social media, in particular, loomed large for him. (“I doubt I would be here if it weren’t for social media, to be honest with you,” he told Fox Business Channel in a 2017 interview. It was a vital way to “get the word out.”) Throughout his first year, the president continued to send out a barrage of messages via Twitter that continually captured the attention of social media and, through it, dictated the 24/7 cycles of cable news. With dramatic, controversial, and pointed messages, Trump routinely set the agenda for national debate and discussion, moving the conversation from one controversy to another in rapid, often exhausting succession. Through both intentional acts of provocation and unintentional missteps, his new administration and its allies in the media worked to aggravate the fault lines running through modern America, particularly in the divisive issues of gender, immigration, race, and guns.2
The lines of gender were the first to explode. On January 21, 2017, more than a half million Americans took part in the Women’s March on Washington, a protest that dwarfed the inaugural crowds in the city the day before and, indeed, represented the single largest demonstration ever in DC. Similar marches took place in major cities and small towns across the country that same day, involving an estimated 4.2 million Americans, plus millions more worldwide. In a defiant tone, many marchers wore pink knitted hats with cat ears, styled as “pussyhats,” in a callback to the president’s infamous Access Hollywood comments. These Women’s Marches signaled the emergence of a renewed movement of engaged women who resolved now to make their voices heard, not just in opposition to the administration but also in response to a wider range of incidents of sexual discrimination, harassment, and assault. The emotions and energy from the marches did not dissipate, but rather flowed into other arenas of American society. Notably, in October 2017, accusations of sexual misconduct by Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein inspired many other women to break their silence about similar incidents they had endured, in what came to be known as the #MeToo movement, named after the viral Twitter hashtag that launched it. As credible accusations accrued, several prominent men in the realm of media and politics found themselves toppled from positions of power in rapid-fire succession over the ensuing months. On November 29, NBC announced that longtime cohost of the popular Today show, Matt Lauer, had been fired after accusations of sexual misconduct; the very next day, Minnesota Public Radio fired iconic humorist Garrison Keillor on similar grounds. In politics, the phenomenon transcended party lines. Pressured by his fellow Democrats, Minnesota Senator Al Franken announced his resignation from office on December 7, while Alabama Republican Roy Moore, the frontrunner for a special election to the Sen
ate, lost in a stunning upset after nine women leveled accusations against him. Taking stock of the reckoning the #MeToo movement had wrought, Time named “The Silence Breakers” its 2017 Person of the Year.3
As the women’s movement gained strength over the course of 2017, so too did new lines of resistance over the administration’s immigration policies. On January 27, the president issued an executive order banning the entry of citizens from Libya, Iran, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen for ninety days. In response to what opponents termed a “Muslim ban,” mass protests sprang up at airports across the country on January 28. Occurring only a week after the Women’s Marches, these protests by tens of thousands signaled that resistance to the administration might be the new norm. The president’s approach to the crisis likewise set a new pattern. After a federal court temporarily blocked the order, Trump took to Twitter to lash out at the “so-called judge” for making a ruling that was “ridiculous and will be overturned!” Defying earlier predictions that he would ease off social media once in office, Trump increasingly relied on it as a way to respond rapidly (and critics argued, rashly) to unfolding events and to rally his supporters to his side. However, his use of Twitter in the travel ban controversy showed that social media could be a double-edged sword. Several courts soon cited details from Trump’s tweets to dispel the government’s official rationales for a revised ban, striking it down again.4
Much as the “Muslim ban” proved divisive, so were the administration’s actions against undocumented immigrants. A centerpiece of the Trump campaign had been the candidate’s repeated pledge to build an “impenetrable, physical, tall, powerful, beautiful southern border wall” and, just as important, his promise that “I will make Mexico pay for that wall. Mark my words.” Despite Trump’s insistence, Mexico immediately made it clear it would not pay for the wall, prompting the president to search for domestic sources instead. Immigration groups, however, mobilized to make it difficult for the president to take action unilaterally. Members of Congress from regions that were not blood red on electoral maps worried about the consequences of moving away from the themes of diversity and pluralism that had marked the nation for decades. As a result, even though Trump’s own party controlled both houses in Congress, he was unable to secure any funding for the border wall for much of 2017, ultimately securing only a fraction of the estimated total cost in a 2018 omnibus budget bill. Undaunted, he then proposed in a tweet that because “our Military is again rich,” the nation should “Build WALL through M!” (Two advisors explained that “M” stood for “military.”)5
As the border wall remained out of reach, the Trump White House turned its attention to undocumented immigrants already inside the nation’s borders. Between January and September 2017, the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) ramped up its activity in significant ways, arresting nearly 110,000 people suspected of illegal immigration, a 42 percent increase over the same span in the previous year. Despite the surge in arrests, the number of deportations actually decreased in comparison to the prior year. Nevertheless, the new wave of arrests made their mark, especially when suspects in highly publicized cases were picked up at their churches or at their children’s schools. On top of the arrests, the Trump Justice Department announced in September 2017 that it would end the policy of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), an Obama-era executive program that had allowed undocumented immigrants who had entered the United States as children to stay. The end of DACA suddenly placed some 800,000 recipients, known as “Dreamers,” at risk of being deported in several months, unless Congress could work out a legislative solution. None seemed imminent.6
As the administration accelerated its campaigns against undocumented immigrants, white nationalists in the “alt right” became increasingly emboldened. During a weekend in August 2017, these groups gathered for a large “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. On Friday night, hundreds of young white men marched with torches through town to the campus rotunda, shouting Nazi slogans like “blood and soil!” and “Jews will not replace us!” Encountering a smaller group of black counterprotesters around a statue of Thomas Jefferson, the alt-right marchers taunted them with a cry of “white lives matter” before trading punches. The next day, the scene turned even uglier, as white nationalists gathered downtown with shields and clubs while small groups of militiamen, taking advantage of Virginia’s open-carry law, arrived with long rifles. Though the police finally intervened and dispersed the crowd, violence nevertheless broke out when one alt-right protester intentionally drove a car into a procession of counterprotesters, wounding several and killing one. Rather than condemning white nationalists for the rally and their role in the violence, President Trump insisted that there were “some very fine people” in the ranks of the alt-right protesters and that “both sides” deserved blame for the deadly confrontations.7 The rising nationalist forces inside the United States were part of an international phenomenon that took hold across the Western world, including Britain, Germany, and Italy. Much like America, these nations, and others, turned inward, with growing protests against immigration, international alliances, and transnational economic institutions.
Beyond Charlottesville, the nation as a whole continued to be consumed by violence, as the occurrences of mass shootings increased at an alarming rate. “Of the 30 deadliest shootings in the US dating back to 1949,” CNN reported in November 2017, “ 18 have occurred in the last 10 years. Two of the five deadliest took place in just the last 35 days.” On October 1, a gunman armed with more than two dozen weapons, including fourteen semiautomatic rifles, opened fire on a Las Vegas music festival, killing fifty-eight and wounding more than five hundred. Then, on November 5, another gunman armed with a semiautomatic rifle walked into a small church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, and murdered twenty-six worshippers there. The dull drumbeat of smaller mass shootings continued—six dead at an elementary school in California, five killed at a carwash in Pennsylvania—before another large-scale event sparked a new response. On Valentine’s Day 2018, a former student returned to his high school in Parkland, Florida, with a semiautomatic rifle, killing seventeen students and teachers and wounding another seventeen. While prior mass shootings led to little lasting public reaction, this one soon seemed different. Within days, student survivors launched a new activist movement, the Never Again campaign, with calls for stricter background checks for gun buyers and a plan for a nationwide protest. Part of a generation raised on social media and skilled at engaging publicly, several of the students took their campaign directly to cable news programs, personalizing the gun control movement and propelling it forward with previously unseen focus and force. On March 24, 2018, the March for Our Lives movement they launched unfolded with sizable rallies across the country, involving more than two million Americans at roughly eight hundred marches nationwide. Though Congress proved unresponsive to the calls for gun reform once again, the state of Florida passed legislation that imposed gun control laws there, prompting a court challenge by the NRA.8
While the new administration found itself assailed by critics on all these fronts, the most serious—and most divisive—threat to the Trump White House came in the form of a deepening investigation into the presidential campaign. Confronted by both congressional and FBI investigations into whether Russia had intervened in the election, the president abruptly fired FBI director James Comey in May 2017. The White House initially claimed Comey had been fired for his poor handling of the Clinton email investigation, but soon President Trump admitted in an interview that the Russia investigation lay at the heart of it all. “When I decided to just do it,” he told NBC’s Lester Holt, “I said to myself, I said ‘you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story, it’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should have won.’ ” As a result, the Department of Justice felt obligated to respond. Attorney General Jeff Sessions had already recused himself from the matter, due to his own dissembling ove
r contacts with Russia during the election, so Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein led the way, appointing a special prosecutor, former FBI director Robert Mueller, to conduct his own investigation. Working with a team of experienced federal investigators, Mueller quickly levied indictments against Russian nationals and even secured guilty pleas from several prominent members of the Trump inner circle, including former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and campaign manager Paul Manafort. As the investigation intensified, Trump undertook a blistering campaign to undercut its legitimacy. He accused several FBI officials, including some lifelong Republicans, of trying to bring him down because they had secretly supported Hillary Clinton. After criticizing FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe on Twitter, Trump had him fired too, just days before his planned retirement. In reaction, an angry McCabe told reporters: “This is a part of an effort to discredit me as a witness” in the investigation into the Comey firing. Meanwhile, Trump assailed investigative journalists for producing what he called “fake news” and accused the government’s own intelligence agencies of spreading inaccurate information as well.9
As Trump dug in, large numbers of Republicans rallied around him. The congressional investigation by the House Intelligence Committee, led by Representative Devin Nunes, a staunch Trump ally who had served on the administration’s transition team, seemed little interested in probing the darker corners of the Russia scandal. When, in March 2018, Nunes proposed closing the House inquiry, without even interviewing any of the individuals already indicted by Mueller, it was clear the inquiry was little more than an effort at partisan public relations. “I want [the House investigation] to end, because we have gone off the rails of being able to objectively do our job,” Representative Tom Rooney (R-Florida) told the press, adding that he had “finally come to the realization that we are not going to put together any kind of a bipartisan product.” Within weeks, the House Intelligence Committee showed how polarized Congress had become. Casting aside the unanimous conclusions of the intelligence community that Russia had, in fact, intervened in the election with the intent of aiding the Trump campaign, the GOP majority shut down the investigation, asserting that it had found “no evidence of collusion, coordination or conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russians.” 10
Fault Lines Page 44
