AS FOR THE CONSERVATIVES WHO HAD HELD THEIR NOSES IN VOTING for Trump, well, they could be excused for feeling a sense of relief at his victory. As far and fast as the GOP had lurched to the right over the past several years, there were signs of an equal and opposite reaction on the left. Much of the angst over Trump’s victory was understandable, particularly within communities that felt threatened by the president-elect’s policies. Yet the broader cultural trajectory of progressivism was sufficiently startling to assure even the most reluctant Trump supporters that they had made the right call.
The month after the election, Lena Dunham, a leading feminist voice of the new left and creator, writer, and star of HBO’s popular show Girls, recalled on her podcast how she had visited a Planned Parenthood clinic in Texas and felt guilty that she could not relate to the women she was speaking with there. The reason: She had never had an abortion. “Now, I can say that I still haven’t had an abortion,” Dunham said on the show, “but I wish I had.”2
It was Bill Clinton who called for abortion to be “safe, legal, and rare.” In 1996, the Democratic Party adopted a platform3 that sought to make abortions “less necessary” and “more rare,” concluding, “we respect the individual conscience of each American.” Twenty years later, Dunham, who was given a speaking slot at Hillary Clinton’s convention, was expressing regret at never having had an abortion.
At the turn of the century, the ranks of antiabortion Democrats in Congress numbered nearly fifty. By the time Trump won the presidency, they were seven and dwindling.
This reflected a hollowing out of the middle on myriad issues for which Republicans were not solely culpable. Obama had won the presidency by declaring marriage to be between one man and one woman. He had spent his first term deporting record numbers of illegal immigrants. He had refused to give the single-payer health care advocates a seat at the table when drafting Obamacare. All those positions were considered antiquated by the base of the new, post-Obama Democratic Party, and now that Hillary Clinton’s centrism was out of the way, it would drift even harder and hastier to the left.
America’s two parties were moving farther away from the middle in part because Americans of different party affiliations were moving further away from one another.
David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report newsletter uses an ingenious method to track the twin trends of ideological and geographical clustering in America. Using corporate brands as a proxy for the cultural tilt and socioeconomic profile of a given part of the country, Wasserman has concluded that the most likely brand to be found in a Republican county is Cracker Barrel while the most likely brand to be found in a Democratic county is Whole Foods.4
It makes perfect sense: Cracker Barrel restaurants are most often found in rural and exurban areas with less population density, less diversity, lower incomes, and lower education rates. These are the areas, on the whole, hit hardest by the transformation from a manufacturing economy to a tech-based economy; far more people are moving out than moving in.
Whole Foods grocery stores, meanwhile, tend to concentrate in upscale urban and suburban settings with diverse populations and high numbers of college graduates. These are the areas, on the whole, that have thrived in the postindustrial age, drawing mass migrations of new residents seeking jobs in high-skilled fields.
In 1992, the first year Wasserman tracked the results, Bill Clinton won 61 percent of counties nationwide that had a Whole Foods and 40 percent that had a Cracker Barrel. The 21-point “culture gap,” as Wasserman calls it, grew wider in every successive presidential election.
By 2000, the culture gap was 32 points: George W. Bush won 75 percent of Cracker Barrel counties and 43 percent of Whole Foods counties.
By 2008, the culture gap was 45 points: Barack Obama won 80 percent of Whole Foods counties and 35 percent of Cracker Barrel counties.
In 2016, Donald Trump won 76 percent of Cracker Barrel counties and just 22 percent of Whole Foods counties. The culture gap was 54 points.
FOR CONGRESSIONAL REPUBLICANS, THE ECSTASY OF THE MOMENT WAS inversely proportional to the expectations of the previous several months. They had spent so much time bracing for the aftermath of a Trump defeat that the sudden trappings of a Trump victory were exhilarating: staffing the administration, passing big bills, and of course, stocking the federal courts.
Conservatives had all the more cause to rejoice when Chris Christie was axed as the head of the transition team, apparent payback from the new crown prince, Jared Kushner, whose father had been prosecuted and sent to prison by Christie on tax-evasion charges years earlier. Christie was replaced by Pence. A longtime affiliate of Washington’s professional right, the vice president-elect was, in effect, starting the transition process from scratch and given broad latitude to fill critical positions in the cabinet and throughout the new government (with Trump’s perfunctory approval, of course). Pence did not disappoint conservatives. He tapped his old friend, Congressman Tom Price, to run Health and Human Services. He picked his fellow charter school champion Betsy DeVos, the GOP megadonor with no experience in the public schools, to lead the Education Department. And he saw to it that Mulvaney was given the keys to run OMB.
With much of the attention focused on the headliner appointments (secretary of state, attorney general), Pence was cunningly effective in leaving his imprint on the administration. Time and again, when loyalists came to him expecting a job in the VP’s immediate orbit, Pence surprised by asking them to fill a role elsewhere, one from which they could report back to him. To be an influential vice president, he would need eyes and ears across the government.
Previous opposition to Trump was not disqualifying. Marc Short, Pence’s closest adviser and the former Koch operative who had been bent on stopping the GOP front-runner, was named the White House’s director of legislative affairs. Certain allies who had Trump’s ear, including former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, were incensed that Short was given such a prominent position. Occasionally, Trump could be stirred by these concerns; for example, he nixed the hiring of former Bush 43 official Elliott Abrams as deputy secretary of state due to Abrams’s past critiques.5 But this was the exception. If Trump were to rule out every Republican who had combated him, the administration would cease to function for want of staffers.
Naturally, he reserved the right to have some fun with his former foes.
Stringing along the media, Trump delighted in tormenting Mitt Romney by dangling the job of secretary of state. Having taken a call from Pence while vacationing with his family in Hawaii, Romney raced back stateside to interview for the job. Trump was never going to give it to him. This was no “team of rivals” exercise; it was the continuation of a reality show, and in this episode, the host craved the spectacle of his most prominent detractor groveling at his throne. In a perfect distillation of this dynamic, a photo was taken of the two men during a dinner in which Romney was ostensibly interviewing for the position. Romney resembled someone caught on Candid Camera, his pursed lips and furrowed brow screaming mortification. Trump, seated next to him, wore a waggish grin and a thought bubble that read, Who’s the phony now?
There was another quality Trump craved in his appointees: They had to look the part. When it came to choosing a director of the Central Intelligence Agency, nobody auditioned quite like Mike Pompeo. The Kansas congressman, first in his class at West Point, had in his brief time in Washington made a strong impression on the full spectrum of his fellow Republicans. Built like an offensive lineman, with a barrel chest and thinning silver hair swept across his forehead, Pompeo was straight out of central casting. He came with a forceful recommendation from Pence, and the president-elect hired him on the spot after a meeting in New York. Trump had apparently forgotten all about the Kansas caucuses: the biting remarks from Pompeo, the stare-down from the wings of the stage. When Cruz’s campaign manager, Jeff Roe, called Kushner to have a laugh about it, Kushner put the call on speaker so Trump could hear. “No! That was him? We’ve got to take it back!” he cried. “This is what I get for letting Pence pick everyone!” (Trump did not take it back; Pompeo served as CIA director and later as secretary of state.)