For the party’s Trump skeptics, there was plenty of dark humor. When a friend texted South Carolina’s governor, Nikki Haley, expressing dismay at the night’s outcome, she replied, “Cheer up. We just won the governor’s races in Vermont, Indiana, and North Dakota.”
Watching the returns down in Florida, Marco Rubio couldn’t help but think that America was getting the president she deserved. “If our culture was as outraged by this stuff as some in the press seem to be, he wouldn’t have been elected. It wouldn’t have worked,” Rubio says. “If people put this all on Donald Trump, they’re making a big mistake. All you have to do is spend five minutes on Twitter and see some of the things that prominent people write about each other to realize this is the era we’ve entered into.” (Having won reelection to the Senate, Rubio phoned Chris Christie to thank his old nemesis for making him a much-improved debater.)
As the granular details of the election’s result came into focus, Republicans commenced a spirited debate that proved impossible to resolve.
Had Trump, by virtue of running up the score among working-class whites and flipping three “Blue Wall” states, shown that he was the only Republican capable of reaching 270 Electoral votes? Or had Clinton, thanks to her underperforming vis-à-vis Obama in urban areas and her failure to mobilize the Democratic base in Middle America, demonstrated that any Republican could have won the White House in 2016?
“It’s hard to imagine that anybody else we nominated would have had the same kind of connection with working-class voters who, as Hillbilly Elegy pretty well laid out, felt that life had dealt them a bad hand,” says McConnell, referencing the 2016 memoir by J. D. Vance about socioeconomic decline in Appalachia. “President Trump obviously was able to appeal to working-class people in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, and he caught that lightning in a bottle. I’m not sure anybody else we nominated could have done that.”
“They say anybody could beat her, yet we barely did, and we did with a candidate who uniquely spoke to people in northern Wisconsin and western Pennsylvania and mid-Michigan like none of the other sixteen candidates could have,” Priebus says. “So, while people can wring their hands all day long about the nomination of Donald Trump, it turned out he was about the only person who could have won that race—even against a very weak Hillary Clinton.”
The problem with such analyses is that they rely heavily on Trump’s appeal to the white working class while ignoring other demographic groups with whom a less polarizing Republican nominee might have fared far better. While a Ted Cruz or a Marco Rubio or a John Kasich might not have done as well with Trump’s core demographic, would they not have compensated by dramatically outperforming him among minorities and suburbanites and college-educated women, thus winning the same states (and possibly more), just with a different electoral coalition?
“He was running against somebody who was detested. We’ve never had an election in which one out of every five voters thought neither candidate was qualified by temperament or experience to be president. We’ve never had an election in which one out of every five voters who vote for a candidate doesn’t like them,” says Karl Rove. “It all came down to change. If you thought the country was headed in the right direction, you voted for her. But if you thought we were on the wrong track, you voted for him. And that was all tribal.”
John Boehner, who says his former golfing buddy “never, ever expected to win” the White House, is more absolute. “The only Republican who Hillary Clinton possibly could have beaten was Donald Trump, and the only Democrat that Trump possibly could have beaten was Clinton,” Boehner says. “Joe Biden would have run circles around him. Marco Rubio would have run circles around her.” (“Three hundred and thirty million Americans,” Boehner says of Trump and Clinton, sighing, “and we got those two.”)
Boehner’s successor in Congress, the Freedom Caucus member Warren Davidson, says he doubts that another Republican nominee could have won Ohio by an 8-point margin. But he believes that the raw numbers belie the disquiet many voters had to surmount before backing Trump—and the sense of compulsion they felt because of his opponent.
Davidson recalls talking with a young woman at his church who was eligible to vote for the first time. She was raised conservative and could never cast her ballot for Clinton. Yet she felt guilty about the idea of supporting Trump. Davidson told her that he personally viewed the election as “a binary choice,” and urged her to pray about the decision.
Seeing her soon after the election, Davidson asked what verdict she had reached. “I prayed about it a lot. I got in the booth and prayed some more,” she told him. “I voted for Trump. And then I prayed again to ask God’s forgiveness.”
RYAN HAD PHONED TRUMP AFTER WISCONSIN OF ALL STATES DELIVERED the final verdict, the congratulatory call a blur of exhilaration and bafflement and trepidation.
He faced a legacy-shaping decision that night: Stay true to himself and step down as Speaker, or muzzle himself and serve alongside the new president. It was not a difficult choice. This was Ryan’s chance to actually achieve the things he had spent decades fantasizing about. All those long commutes, all those nights missing family dinners and his kids’ games and school events, would be worth it. Even if that meant getting in bed with the likes of Trump and Steve Bannon. Even if that meant accommodating behavior from a Republican president that he would never tolerate from a Democrat.
Then and there, Ryan knew what needed to be done. Having spent his entire adult life chasing the impossible goals of rewriting the tax code and reforming entitlement programs, here was his opening. He could now serve as Speaker of the House in a unified Republican government and pursue his legislative destiny—if only he were willing to go silent on Trump, beginning that night in Janesville. There would be no speech. There would be no more public blistering of Trump, period.
His friends called it “Paul’s deal with the devil.” And Ryan, like most Republicans, did not think twice about making it.
Chapter Eighteen
November 2016
“You don’t have to worry about my street credibility.”
THE FOUR OF THEM STOOD ON THE SPEAKER’S BALCONY, GAZING OUT over the National Mall, pointing to some of the landmarks and making awkward small talk. In just over two months, Paul Ryan announced to the group, Donald Trump would stand in that very spot and be inaugurated as the forty-fifth president of the United States. He and his wife, Melania, took it all in. Mike Pence, the vice president-elect, wore the smile of a lottery winner.
Ryan hadn’t slept one wink on Election Night. Instead, he lay in bed coming to grips with the arrangement he was about to enter into. “I felt a major onset of responsibility to help the institutions survive,” Ryan recalls. “So, from the next day on, my mantra was ‘Only one person can be Speaker of the House. I’m not a pundit, I’m not a think-tanker. Our job from now on is to build up the country’s antibodies, . . . to have the guardrails up, to drive the car down the middle of the road, and don’t let the car go off into the ditch.’”
Prior to the November 10 meeting, the Speaker shared with several friends that he planned to start by clearing the air, explaining to Trump why he had denounced him after Access Hollywood. They cut Ryan off: That was a terrible idea. He stood nothing to gain by reminding Trump, a known scorekeeper, of their past quarrels. Focus on the future, Ryan’s friends warned him. Pretend the past didn’t happen. Emphasize all the good things you can do for him. Kiss the ring, if necessary. To stand a chance of prospering in the new, post–November 8 Republican Party, one had to play the game by Trump’s rules.