All the while, Meadows nestled closer to the center of power. He introduced himself to Trump and his team, and by fall was campaigning with him regularly during the GOP nominee’s trips to his battleground state. It was during these visits that Meadows became acquainted with Bannon. The two men could not have been more different; Bannon was hyper and disheveled, Meadows equable and polished. But Bannon respected what Meadows and Jordan had built with the Freedom Caucus. More important, the two men had a common enemy: Ryan.
As Ryan celebrated the placement of his close friend as White House chief of staff, Meadows toasted his ally’s selection as the president’s senior counselor and chief strategist.
The alliances had formed, spanning both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue: It would be Ryan and Priebus, the establishment insiders, versus Meadows and Bannon, the populist outsiders.
WHEN MICK MULVANEY WAS NAMED DIRECTOR OF OMB, THE POWERFUL agency that supervises and coordinates the government’s financial planning, Freedom Caucus members—and Ryan, notably—issued statements lauding Mulvaney’s selection as a sign of Trump’s commitment to fiscal responsibility.
That was one way of looking at it. Another way: Trump had sidelined one of the House’s most outspoken conservatives, someone who repeatedly stood up to Republican leadership, thereby weakening potential intraparty resistance to his administration’s initiatives.
Republicans had spent the past eight years complaining of executive overreach and abuses of power by the Democratic administration. They referred to Obama as “an imperial president,” a continuation of the Bush-era expansion of executive authority that showed little regard for the primacy of the legislative branch. They pledged, after Trump’s election, to reassert themselves as an aggressive check and balance on the new administration in hopes of a return to limited government. “We saw Republicans stray away from the core principles during the Bush 43 presidency,” Texas congressman Bill Flores, the outgoing chairman of the Republican Study Committee, warned during a December forum at the American Enterprise Institute.
But as Trump prepared to take office, the question wasn’t whether he would stray from the party’s core principles. It was whether he would redefine them altogether.
This presented something of an early existential challenge to the Freedom Caucus. They worried about standing up to Trump, but they also wondered whether his election was an implicit rebuke to their own hard-line philosophical stances. Conservatives had learned a hard lesson over the previous year: Anger at Washington was not a mandate for ideological purity. This was apparent in Trump’s rise, but also in the elimination of one of their own.
Since the dawn of the Tea Party, no primary challenger had defeated a Republican incumbent by running to their left. That changed in 2016: Tim Huelskamp, a leading instigator of the 2010 class, lost his seat to obstetrician Roger Marshall, who campaigned on the message that Huelskamp was representing a rigid ideology rather than the people of Kansas. This had been preventable: In the agriculturally dependent “Big First” district, Huelskamp had made himself vulnerable by voting against the Farm Bill in 2013—after he’d already been kicked off the Agriculture Committee for other protest votes.9 Marshall, who promised to make the government more responsive to the interests of the district, beat Huelskamp by 13 points, a giant margin against an incumbent with no ethical or legal baggage.
The episode put a scare into conservatives. They saw establishment Republicans emboldened after claiming their first Freedom Caucus scalp and wondered who would be targeted next. Sensing opportunity, Meadows convinced Jordan to step aside as chairman of the Freedom Caucus. Its members had little cash in their campaign accounts and were therefore susceptible to primary challenges from better-financed, establishment-backed candidates; Jordan was persuaded to throw himself into growing the House Freedom Fund, his leadership PAC, with the aim of defending those members.
That left Meadows at the controls of the Freedom Caucus. It was the culmination of a meteoric rise. Feted as the man who felled John Boehner, Meadows became a cult celebrity on the right, keynoting dinners and receiving awards. Four years after arriving in DC as an obscure businessman turned realtor from rural North Carolina, he was the incoming president’s conservative point man on Capitol Hill and the chairman of Congress’s most influential faction.
Not everyone in the Freedom Caucus thought this was a positive development. Raúl Labrador and Justin Amash, two founding board members, raised repeated concerns about Meadows’s coziness with the president-elect and questioned how aggressively the chairman would position the group to Trump’s right. They were also wary of Meadows’s proximity to Bannon; some of the members believed both men to be more interested in celebrity than conservatism. Three weeks after the election, there was a shouting match between Meadows and some of his members during a Freedom Caucus meeting. The reason: Breitbart had published a story with the headline “Exclusive—Rep. Mark Meadows: House Conservatives Ready on Day One to Help Donald Trump.”
The issue wasn’t merely about whether Meadows had the stomach for a principled fight with the new administration. It was about the tactical orientation of the Freedom Caucus, a group that had been founded on the notion of placing ideological consistency ahead of partisan unity. Meadows was taking over the group at a time of transition. Mulvaney was gone; so, too, were board members Scott Garrett, who had lost his New Jersey seat in November, and John Fleming, who lost his bid for Louisiana Senate. Meanwhile, an incoming board member, Dave Brat, the Eric Cantor slayer, was nicknamed “Bratbart,” for his love of the far-right website and his determination to stay in its good graces.
Labrador found it all a bit unnerving. But he, too, had reason for caution. The congressman was preparing to run for governor of Idaho in 2018, and he couldn’t afford a nasty tiff with Trump.
Against this backdrop, the reactions to Trump’s first domestic policy splash were telling.
In December, the incoming administration made a show of offering Carrier, the heating and air-conditioning giant, $7 million in tax breaks and incentives to keep roughly a thousand jobs in Pence’s home state of Indiana. Ten months earlier, just days after Trump won the New Hampshire primary, a viral video taken by a Carrier employee in Indiana showed a corporate executive announcing to hundreds of employees that their jobs were being shipped to Mexico. Trump had seized on the video and now saw an obvious opening to deliver on a symbolic promise to protect American workers.
The Carrier deal was a clear example of the “crony capitalism” conservatives had railed against, and part of a propaganda campaign in which Trump attempted to demonstrate before taking office that his election was already benefiting the domestic workforce. Yet the response from Republican leaders, including Ryan, who for years had warned that the government should not pick winners and losers, was to celebrate the deal. Most conservative leaders kept quiet, too. One notable exception was Sarah Palin, who, scoring points for intellectual seriousness, criticized Trump and Pence. Within the Freedom Caucus, the only vocal critic was Amash. “More corporate welfare and cronyism,” the Michigan congressman tweeted. “Equal protection is denied when one company receives favors at the expense of everyone else in Indiana.”
David McIntosh, the Club for Growth president and former Indiana congressman who had been Pence’s friend for two decades, said the Carrier deal set “a terrible precedent.” Having listened in disbelief as Pence defended the deal, saying the free market had failed to protect Hoosier workers from their jobs being shipped overseas, McIntosh began to question whether Pence would be true north in the administration. “What I saw him do during the campaign was kind of reinterpret ‘Make America Great Again’ into a list of conservative initiatives,” McIntosh recalled. “The Carrier thing was disappointing because he didn’t do that, and it kind of seemed like they were giving up on the free market and talking about tariffs instead.”