Listening in, the Speaker was stunned to realize that the opposite was true: He had gone too far. Some members were furious that Ryan had dared to publicly condemn Trump. They felt he was abandoning the party by abandoning its nominee. In their eyes, he was waving a white flag of surrender.
They weren’t alone in this view. Just before noontime, the AP blasted out a bulletin: “House Speaker Paul Ryan is all but conceding Hillary Clinton will be the next president.” Soon after, Trump tweeted, “Paul Ryan should spend more time on balancing the budget, jobs and illegal immigration and not waste his time on fighting [the] Republican nominee.”
Ryan’s office rushed to clean up the perception of his comments, but it was too late. The grass roots were ablaze with indignation. Congressional phone lines exploded with irate GOP constituents calling for Ryan’s head. Some members privately began questioning the sustainability of his position atop the party; later in the month, when leaders scheduled Ryan’s internal speakership election, some pro-Trump lawmakers lobbied for the vote to be postponed, which would give them more time to assess whether Ryan should remain Speaker.
The Freedom Caucus sensed an opportunity. In a secret meeting later that month at Meadows’s downtown DC apartment, the group’s board members devised a plan to deny Ryan the 218 votes needed to retain his speakership. The strategy called for Jim Jordan to serve as the right’s sacrificial lamb, running against Ryan not to win, but to collect enough votes to force a second ballot. The idea was that Ryan, who talked often (and annoyingly, to some members) about how he’d never wanted the job to begin with, would step aside to avoid the spectacle. Conservatives had been searching for a Ryan alternative from outside their narrow ranks, someone who, unlike Jordan, could appeal to the rest of the conference. They decided that Mike Pompeo, the dry-witted defense hawk from Kansas, would be their top choice.
As Republicans schemed against their Speaker, the underlying assumption was that Trump would lose and the conservative base would be out for blood, resulting in an overthrow of Ryan. Either that, or Trump would win a shocking upset and kick the Speaker—“Our very weak and ineffective leader,” the nominee tweeted after their Access Hollywood altercation—to the curb. Either way, Ryan would be finished.
TRUMP’S DIAGNOSIS AFTER ACCESS HOLLYWOOD WAS TERMINAL—UNTIL IT wasn’t.
Public polls showed Trump collapsing in the two weeks following the Washington Post report, and those numbers squared with the internal data being collected by the Trump campaign. Yet after two weeks, his numbers began climbing back to where they had been previously, eventually plateauing and leveling off. He still trailed Clinton in the key states and was still hopelessly unpopular with the broader electorate, but it was remarkable nonetheless. The man nicknamed “Teflon Don,” who had weathered firestorms no other politician could have survived, had done it again. His candidacy was like a stress ball: No matter how hard the squeeze, it always returned to form.
The immortality of Trump, as demonstrated by his survival of Grab-’Em-by-the-Pussy-Gate, owed principally to three explanations.
The first was reflexive distrust of media. The overwhelming majority of conservative voters, even those not enamored of Trump in 2016, had come to see the press as a partisan combatant. Whether it was the paper-thin New York Times report7 insinuating John McCain’s affair with a lobbyist in 2008 or the countless petty pile-ons that dogged Romney in 2012, years of negative coverage had alienated Republican voters from the mainstream media. As a result, many on the right tuned out the traditional gatekeepers, preferring to get their information from Fox News or the conservative wing of the internet, places where critical coverage of Trump was hard to find. Among those conservatives who did still drink from the mainstream media’s well, there was a desensitization to outrage: After being told every other day that Trump’s latest infraction was calamitous, they became numb to the instances that really were.
Second, it was impossible to overstate the depth of disdain for Clinton on the right, even in an age of hysterical, hypertribal politics. That disdain had been cultivated for the past quarter century; there was no softening her image or persuading detractors to give her a fresh look. Trump may have been a shameless deviant, but in the eyes of conservatives, he was running against the first family of perversion. He may have been unethical, but so was she—hence his “Drain the Swamp!” motto, which became the closing chant at his October rallies. There was no sharp contrast for Democrats to draw. Trump was the most unpopular nominee in recent memory, but he was running against the second-most unpopular nominee in recent memory.
“We have perhaps two of the most flawed human beings running for president in the history of the country,” Mick Mulvaney said in South Carolina shortly before Election Day, in comments reported by The State newspaper.8 “Yes, I am supporting Donald Trump, but I’m doing so despite the fact that I think he’s a terrible human being.”
The third and most significant reason for Trump’s survival: the unflinching support of the Christian right. Where many evangelical leaders had once expressed an open contempt for the primary candidate, they became his staunchest, most faithful allies during the general election campaign—including in the aftermath of Access Hollywood. There were notable exceptions. On the evening of the tape’s release, Russell Moore, the head of the Southern Baptist Convention’s political arm, tweeted in response to his high-profile peers, “What a disgrace. What a scandal to the gospel of Jesus Christ and to the integrity of our witness. . . . The political Religious Right Establishment wonders why the evangelical next generation rejects their way. Today illustrates why.” The next day, after Trump defended his transgression as “just words,” Moore tweeted: “No contrition. ‘Just words.’ How any Christian leader is still standing behind this is just genuinely beyond my comprehension.”
But Moore was an outlier. In case after case, over the final five weeks of the election, prominent Christian leaders rallied around the Republican nominee. “The crude comments made by Donald J. Trump more than eleven years ago cannot be defended,” Franklin Graham, son of the famed evangelist Billy Graham, wrote on his Facebook page. “But the godless progressive agenda of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton likewise cannot be defended.” Added Jerry Falwell Jr., the other spiritual dynasty scion, “We’re never going to have a perfect candidate until Jesus Christ reigns forever on the throne.”
Their principal rationale in standing by Trump: the Supreme Court.
Judicial appointments traditionally have been a more effective rallying cry for the right than for the left; every four years, GOP officials and activists have endeavored to mobilize the base by describing a Supreme Court on the precipice of a liberal occupation. But 2016 was different. The death of conservative legal giant Antonin Scalia, and the subsequent decision by Mitch McConnell to block hearings on President Obama’s nominee, had placed the issue of Supreme Court appointments front and center unlike during any election in modern history. With an automatic appointment waiting to be filled, Justice Anthony Kennedy hinting at his pending departure, and a pair of other justices past the age of mandatory corporate retirement, conservatives believed the ends of a sympathetic high court justified the means of supporting Trump.