No such luck. At 4:39 p.m., during a visit to the Pentagon, Trump signed an executive order that vowed to keep “radical Islamic terrorists out of the United States of America.” Effective immediately, anyone with an immigrant or nonimmigrant visa coming from seven majority-Muslim countries (Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen) was prohibited from entering the United States for 90 days.11 The order also banned all refugees worldwide from entering for 120 days and placed an indefinite ban on refugees from Syria, where millions of people were reported to have requested asylum into the United States to escape the civil war that had already claimed more than four hundred thousand lives.
Trump’s executive order provoked a furious backlash. Lawsuits were filed in numerous jurisdictions. Protests erupted at international airports all around the country. Democratic lawmakers, and a vocal minority of Republicans, excoriated the administration. Even those Republicans who supported the policy were alarmed by the process behind it, which had sown mass confusion and plunged the nation’s customs operations into chaos.
Conceived by Miller, the president’s far-right policy adviser, Trump’s executive order was impulsive and half-baked. There had been no vetting of the language by John Kelly, the retired four-star Marine general who was Trump’s secretary of homeland security, or Jim Mattis, the secretary of defense, or Rex Tillerson, the secretary of state. Not only had these cabinet heads not reviewed the executive order, but they had known practically nothing about it before the president’s signing. There had been no coordination from the White House communications shop, no soliciting of input, no answering of questions, no rehearsal of talking points. The secretaries and their staffs, as well as key congressional players, including leadership officials and chairmen of relevant committees, were left grasping for an understanding of the policy and an explanation of why it had been so hastily implemented.
Meanwhile, the nation’s airports were seized by turmoil. Customs agents had received conflicting directives on how to enforce the directive. Airplanes were landing, carrying visitors from the countries on the list, as the order was being distributed around the government. The confusion resulted in the detention of travelers arriving at U.S. airports in a number of major cities.
By Sunday, Republican critics of the administration were out in force. Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham issued a statement saying the policy “may do more to help terrorist recruitment than improve our security.”12
Congressman Will Hurd of Texas, a former undercover CIA officer, called the policy “the ultimate display of mistrust,” saying it would “erode our allies’ willingness to fight with us” against terrorism overseas.13
One person was conspicuously silent that weekend: Paul Ryan.
A botched policy like the so-called Muslim ban would dominate the legacy of any other administration. But in the age of Trump, bonfires of controversy burned hot and fast, their oxygen stolen by the inevitable next inferno. Two weeks after the executive order fiasco, Trump announced the forced resignation of Michael Flynn, his national security adviser. The cause? Flynn had lied to Vice President Pence and other administration officials about his conversations with the Russian ambassador during the transition. As if that weren’t enough scandal for one week, Trump asked James Comey the next day to shut down the investigation into Flynn’s web of misdeeds. “I hope you can let this go,” the president told the FBI director of his ongoing investigation.
Trump had campaigned as a managerial whiz who would surround himself with “the best people” and run the federal government like a high-functioning Fortune 500 company. Instead, he was proving to be a clumsy chief executive with a toxic weakness for staffing.
WHILE THE FRENZIED ACTIVITY AND BREAKNECK PACE OF THE NEWS cycle unnerved much of official Washington, the conservative base had cause for optimism. In his first thirty days, Trump had, among other things, withdrawn the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement, signed an executive order requiring that two existing regulations be eliminated for every new regulation adopted, and canceled a meeting with Mexico when its president reiterated that his country would not pay for Trump’s promised border wall.
Over the ensuing months, as concerns mounted on the right about the prospects for reforming the tax code, building the wall, and repealing Obamacare, Trump went above and beyond in delivering for one special constituency: evangelicals.
The president reinstated and toughened the Mexico City policy, which eliminates U.S. funding for international nongovernmental organizations that perform or promote abortions. He rescinded Obama’s protections for transgender students to use preferred bathrooms in public schools. He signed legislation that routs federal money away from Planned Parenthood. And he cut off funding to the UN Population Fund, which critics had long accused of supporting coercive abortions in China and other countries. He accomplished these items, and others, with the help of pro-life Christians whom Pence had stockpiled throughout the administration.
Trump also benefited from the vigorous assistance of Ted Cruz. The Texas senator had reinvented himself at the dawn of the Republican government as a team player, one freshly intent on torturing the opposing party rather than his own. In a Senate GOP luncheon that January, McConnell stood before the room beaming with pride, praising “the new Ted Cruz.”
“Look, Donald Trump was not my first choice to be president, but he’s who the American people elected,” Cruz says. “I faced a choice. I could choose to have my feelings hurt. He said some very tough things about me and my family. It would have been easy and natural for me to take my ball and go home. But I also think that wouldn’t have been doing the job I’ve been elected to. I’m not going to defend the indefensible, but I’m going to fight for principles and values that matter.”
The crown jewel of Trump’s presidency, in the eyes of conservatives, was Neil Gorsuch. On January 31, Trump nominated the archconservative federal appellate judge to replace the late Antonin Scalia on the U.S. Supreme Court, thrilling the full spectrum of the Republican Party and validating the decision made by so many conservatives the previous November to hold their noses and punch the GOP ticket.
“It was a leap of faith. Trump was untested,” Marjorie Dannenfelser, the antiabortion leader, said after the Gorsuch pick. “It became very hard to stand [by him]. But all that disruption, all that anxiety, all that tension—it was worth it. Because he has turned out to be a man of his word.”
Trump had kept a promise of monumental importance to his base. Now it was time for the GOP-controlled Congress to keep one of its own.
PRESIDENT TRUMP HAD HEARD ENOUGH ABOUT POLICY AND PROCESS. It was a Thursday afternoon, March 23, and members of the House Freedom Caucus were peppering the president with wonkish concerns about the American Health Care Act: language that would leave Obamacare’s “essential health benefits” in place; the community rating provision that limited what insurers could charge patients; and whether Speaker Paul Ryan’s supposed master plan was even feasible. Trump suddenly cut them off.
“Forget about the little shit,” the president said. “Let’s focus on the big picture here.”
The group of roughly thirty lawmakers, huddled around an immense conference table in the Cabinet Room of the White House, exchanged disapproving looks. For the past seventeen days, House Republicans had labored to unite around a health care bill that satisfied the complex and often conflicting demands of members representing different congressional districts and both poles of the party’s ideological spectrum. The president did not particularly care what the bill looked like. He just wanted a victory. As they talked, Trump emphasized the political ramifications of a defeat; specifically, he said, it would derail his first-term agenda and imperil his prospects for reelection in 2020.