So, Ryan did precisely that, showering praise on the president-elect and acting as though they’d been allies from the get-go. Trump was gracious, willing to move past their beef (on the advice of Pence and Reince Priebus). But unlike Ryan, he couldn’t pretend that nothing had ever happened.
“Paul’s just a Boy Scout, that’s all,” Trump said to his wife unsolicited as they stood on the balcony, by way of explaining the past tensions between them. “He’s like, a religious guy.”
Ryan shrugged. “Well, I’m a devout Catholic.”
“Oh, you’re like Mike!” said Melania Trump.
Pence and Ryan exchanged looks. “Well, yeah, he’s Protestant,” the Speaker said. “But, you know, yeah.”
When Trump visited with Mitch McConnell later that afternoon, the conversation was more direct. “Did you think I was going to win?” the president-elect asked.
“No,” McConnell replied. “Frankly, I didn’t.”
Trump had a good laugh. Then the Senate majority leader got down to business. He and Ryan had already coordinated strategies to impress upon Trump that he would have a ready-made government on day one of his administration. The Speaker was handling the policy, putting together a comprehensive sequencing chart of the major legislative goals they would pursue over his first year in office. McConnell would be in the personnel business, running a tight ship in the Senate to confirm the new president’s appointees in an expedited fashion.
“The first thing on my list,” McConnell told Trump, “is judges.”
MICK MULVANEY’S FRIENDS IN THE HOUSE FREEDOM CAUCUS COULDN’T believe what they were hearing. It was the Monday night following Election Day, and lawmakers were trickling back into Washington to resume their congressional duties. The next day, House Republicans would hold closed-door elections to choose their leadership for the upcoming 115th Congress, and no real drama was expected.
Ryan had angered many of the members by abandoning Trump’s candidacy a month before the election. Some hoped the president-elect, after taking the stage just after 3:00 a.m. to give his victory speech, would suggesst retribution against the holier-than-thou Speaker of the House. When Trump did no such thing, the Freedom Caucus members watched for a smoke signal, expecting tacit permission to launch their revolt against Ryan.
But the Speaker was a step ahead of his adversaries. Even before the race was called, Ryan had moved swiftly to solidify his standing in Trump’s orbit.
Mulvaney was eager to do the same. The South Carolina congressman wore his ambition as subtly as a Mike Tyson tattoo. A lawyer with degrees from Georgetown, Harvard, and the University of North Carolina, Mulvaney, upon coming to Congress in 2011, made few doubt that he was the smartest man in Washington—and that he was destined for more than the House of Representatives. First, he had wanted the Senate seat vacated by Jim DeMint. When it went to Tim Scott, Mulvaney shifted his focus to running for governor at the end of Nikki Haley’s second term. Now, with Trump’s upset victory, Mulvaney’s plans had changed again. Having distinguished himself as one of the party’s fiercest fiscal hawks, winning admiration for his intellectual consistency even from those GOP elders who detested his ego, he set his sights on a dream job: director of the Office of Management and Budget.
He had not exactly been a Trump booster; between calling the nominee “a terrible human being” and suggesting House Republicans might be required to teach him about the Constitution, Mulvaney made a strong case to be excluded from the new administration. But the congressman was a close observer of Trump. Watching him, reading The Art of the Deal, studying his relationships, Mulvaney developed a theory of how to ingratiate himself. He would do what Ryan had done: Sell the president-elect on the value he brought to the team.
The only difficulty was, Mulvaney didn’t know how to approach Trump. So, he went to Ryan. Their conversation was transactional. Mulvaney detailed the plotting by Freedom Caucus members against the Speaker. Ryan asked for Mulvaney to nominate him for reelection in the House GOP’s upcoming meeting. In exchange, Ryan would talk to Pence, who had taken over the transition team, about bringing Mulvaney to Trump Tower.
As the Freedom Caucus board gathered for its preliminary briefing, held prior to the weekly meeting with the full membership, Jim Jordan, the group’s chairman, broke some awkward news: Mulvaney, a board member, would formally nominate Ryan for Speaker the next day. Some colleagues thought Jordan was joking; he assured them he was not. Word quickly spread to the entire group, and when Mulvaney, who was running late, finally entered the room, he was greeted with a chorus of angry expletives. When they demanded to know why he’d agreed to nominate Ryan, the cagey Mulvaney replied, “Because he asked me to.”
His comrades threw up their hands. “What else would you do if he asked you to?” Justin Amash, Mulvaney’s friend and a fellow board member, bellowed at him.
To the disgust of some House conservatives, Ryan was reelected in a near-unanimous vote of the conference one day later.1 (Thomas Massie, the Kentucky scamp, was the lone dissenter.) The melodrama was about more than just Ryan and his past squabbles with the president-elect; it spoke to something fundamental about how the insurgent forces in American politics had been emboldened by Trump’s ascent and were eager to capitalize on a moment of upheaval.
Beginning in the dawn hours of November 9, many Republicans came to believe they were entering a metamorphic period in the party’s history, one in which their loyalties and ideologies and dogmas could be scrambled and realigned. Conservatives in particular tended to believe this was a good thing, and rejoiced in the reality that Trump, while not philosophically flush with them in a few areas, nonetheless represented the culmination of their years-long jihad against the establishment.
Indeed, eight days after Trump’s victory, the Conservative Action Project, an umbrella group comprising the right’s most prominent activist leaders, held a celebratory gathering at the Ritz-Carlton in Tysons Corner, Virginia. Some of the attendees had been vehemently opposed to Trump throughout 2016. They were surprised to hear the Heritage Foundation’s president, Jim DeMint, talk about how the president-elect had finally unified the party; and they were downright stunned at the glowing remarks about Trump from Ed Meese, the former attorney general under Ronald Reagan and an icon in the conservative movement.
There was a similar giddiness pulsing through the veins of Republicans on Capitol Hill. Lawmakers who had been openly hostile to Trump’s candidacy were suddenly aglow at the prospects for the next four years. Even Ted Cruz was genuinely excited. He would forever nurse a grudge over the insults levied against his family, but the Texas senator wasn’t going to let his rivalry with the president-elect get in the way of steering the government sharply rightward. Thrilled by the GOP takeover of Washington, and facing his first reelection to the Senate in 2018, Cruz met with Trump in December and volunteered to be the president-elect’s battering ram in the new Congress, abandoning his identity as an intraparty instigator and adopting the role of party-line enforcer.
Most of the Republicans in Congress, including all the Tea Party products, had known nothing but the suppression of serving with a Democrat in the White House. Now awoken to the realities of an incoming Republican president and a unified Republican government, their reservations about Trump melted like snowcones in the Sahara.