* * *
Hammond sobered up after he retired in March of 2016. He spent months just sitting in his home, trying to process what had happened.
Hammond didn’t have much to complain about, personally. He retired with his full pension—$3,000 a month—plus Social Security. His two daughters were grown and happy, and he visited with them frequently. He was remarried and happy. What made him sad was thinking of the IBU members he’d left behind. He had joined a raucous, militant union, and he had left a splintered, moribund union. And what he saw at the IBU seemed to be happening across the country.
“I think that we kind of fucked ourselves, to tell you the truth,” Hammond said in his living room, near a big window that let in soft light and offered a view of imposing cedar trees and rolling green grass. “I think that our forefathers—just using that [warehouse] as an example—worked their asses off to get these great contracts and stuff. And then got these great jobs for their kids, and nephews, and little brothers, and stuff like that. And we had all this: Work forty hours a week. Work five days a week. If you worked Saturday and Sunday it was time and a half for Saturday and double time for Sunday. And all that great stuff, you know?
“And we came in, us kids of theirs, and just pissed it away. We just took it all for granted that this was ours.”
* * *
During the final months of 2016, the members of the IBU turned their attention to another election, for president of the United States. The real estate magnate, reality television star, and Republican candidate Donald Trump campaigned tirelessly throughout the fall. He settled on a consistent theme: the election was rigged. It was controlled by dishonest forces that were allied against working families. And Hillary Clinton, “Crooked Hillary,” was the face of a thieving elite.
This story line resonated with many IBU members, like David Franzen. For all his adult life, Franzen had been hitting the “Democrat” button when he voted, but his life did not seem to be improving in material ways. His union told him to vote for Hillary, and for the first time, he wasn’t going to listen.
Trump’s candidacy was also disrupting Charles Koch’s plans. In April of 2015, Charles Koch had given a rare interview to USA Today to outline his political strategy for 2016. Koch planned to be more engaged than usual in Republican politics. His donor network would, for the first time, give money to influence the field of Republican primary candidates. The network planned to spend $900 million, an amount that rivaled the Republican National Committee’s spending. Roughly one-third would be donated directly to candidates, with the rest going toward “educational” efforts and other activities. Koch told USA Today that his network had selected five contenders who might win the money: Wisconsin’s governor, Scott Walker; Florida’s former governor Jeb Bush; and three US senators: the libertarian-leaning Rand Paul and conservatives Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio.
Koch had carefully set up the game table. Then Trump came along and flipped it over. Over several months, Trump forced every candidate backed by Charles Koch out of the race. To everyone’s surprise, Donald Trump became the frontrunner. Rather than back a losing candidate, or risk failure if he confronted Trump directly, Koch retreated to the margins of political attention. On November 8, 2016, Donald Trump won the presidential election. His victory rested on Hillary Clinton’s collapse in a group of heavily unionized states that Democrats referred to as the “Blue Wall”: Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.
In many ways, Donald Trump posed a greater political threat to Charles Koch’s political agenda than Barack Obama. Trump was not seeking to fight American conservatism as much as he sought to transform it from the inside. Charles Koch tried to bend the Republican party toward a libertarian view; now Donald Trump was bending it toward a nationalist, populist philosophy that Charles Koch found abhorrent. Trump’s policies aimed to benefit specific populations of Americans, rather than to solely limit government interventions in the marketplace.
Shortly after Trump’s election, congressional Republicans scurried to reorient themselves around Trumpism. Many Congress members knew that Trump won their home districts with more votes than they had. They were not about to oppose him. If Donald Trump was president for eight years, it would almost certainly abolish Charles Koch’s political project. The Republican Party would be the party of Trump, not Hayek or von Mises. Koch Industries’ retreat from the 2016 election cycle had been well publicized, and members of the Trump administration were quick to point out that the Koch network’s political influence was diminishing, almost certainly for good.
Charles Koch took a different point of view. He was conditioned to thrive in volatile environments. He thought about the long term, and tended to avoid the wall of noise and media controversy that emanated from the White House each day. Charles Koch worked on a longer political horizon and that gave him an advantage. He had spent more than forty years building a densely connected network of political operatives and institutions in the nation’s capital. Donald Trump had not.
When Trump arrived in Washington, Charles Koch was ready.
* * *
I. Appending an R, for registered trademark, to MBM seems to be the preferred style for Koch Industries executives. Charles Koch used the abbreviation in his own writing, and it also appeared in internal memos.
II. The “tail” of a paper roll is the last section of paper that flaps loose, like the outside tab of paper on a toilet paper roll.
CHAPTER 24
* * *
Burning
(2017–2018)
Springtime came early to the nation’s capital in 2017. In early February, the air was unseasonably warm and the trees were starting to get their buds. Brightly colored flowers bloomed in Lafayette Square park, just north of the White House, with early tulips pushing up from their beds and cherry trees frosting themselves with pink and white blossoms. In the suburbs, the forsythia exploded in vibrant yellow flowers and the redbud trees were covered in purple. The riotous colors of spring, usually celebrated in the capital city, were out of place and disquieting, like flashing signals on a dashboard. Across the country, springtime arrived weeks early, with the zone of blooming advancing farther north than usual. The election year of 2016 was the hottest year on Earth since reliable record keeping began around 1880. NASA compared Earth’s average surface temperatures against a period in the mid-1990s, and found the average temperature rose steadily each year. Sixteen of the seventeen warmest years on record occurred after 2001, peaking in 2016. Eight of twelve months in 2016 broke records as the hottest months ever recorded. Scientists at NASA did not dispute what caused the warming. It was “a change driven largely by increased carbon dioxide and other human-made emissions into the atmosphere,” the agency said. In the winter of 2017, carbon concentrations in the atmosphere reached 407 parts per million, far past the limit where most scientists considered radical climate change unavoidable.
The political seasons in Washington, DC, were being disrupted as well. On January 20 Donald J. Trump stood on the grand dais in the shadow of the Capitol dome, put his hand on the Bible, and took the president’s oath. No candidate in US history had risen to the White House like the real estate mogul had done. He was backed by no party, supported by no discernable outside interests, and had no previous experience in government or military service. The usually stable networks of political influence were torn apart in 2017. No one knew who was in or out of Trump’s political circle. No one knew what he really wanted—what was hyperbole and what was an actual campaign platform. The lobbyists at Koch Companies Public Sector and other companies had adapted to political shocks before, but this time was different. The Trump administration saw itself as a revolutionary force, independent of both political parties. One person close to the administration, and who also had been close to the Koch’s political operations, said that the Trump administration viewed Washington, DC, as a chessboard on which three opponents were doing battle. One opponent (and the weakest) was the Democratic establishment: “Team D.” Another was the Republican establishment: “Team R.” Finally, there was the Trump administration, “Team T,” which planned to beat everyone else.