On Thursday night, Mulvaney, the OMB director who had been deputized as a bridge between the administration and his former Freedom Caucus bandmates, stood before the House Republican Conference and issued an ultimatum: Trump was ready to move on from health care after Friday’s vote. It was a timeless negotiation tactic, and one that didn’t work very well. Republicans walked out of the meeting chuckling about Mulvaney, whom they’d known as a whiny backbencher, now lording it over them with such a threat.
The next morning, March 24, Trump made a final attempt to bully the conservatives into submission. “The irony is that the Freedom Caucus, which is very pro-life and against Planned Parenthood, allows P.P. to continue if they stop this plan!” the president tweeted. It didn’t work; if anything, it may have backfired, just like his singling out of Meadows three days earlier. The conservatives certainly feared Trump, but if they were to suddenly switch their positions after a tweet on the morning of the vote, the president would own them for good.
It wasn’t just the conservatives who sank Ryan’s effort. By the time the Speaker arrived at the White House for an emergency meeting with Trump that afternoon, more than two dozen moderate and centrist members were also opposed. Lawmakers care about policy and process, and between the two, there was no clear upside in backing Ryan’s bill. It left too many people without coverage and failed to drive down premiums; it had been hastily rewritten to accommodate changes and felt rushed for no good reason. Nearly seven years to the day after Boehner gave his “Hell no!” speech protesting the forced passage of Obamacare, a bill that was discussed, debated, and dissected for over a year, House Republicans were attempting to pass a replacement that they had introduced eighteen days earlier.
While Ryan met with Trump, the Freedom Caucus members filed into a private room at the Capitol Hill Club. They wanted to plot their next move in secret; to avoid leaks, no aides or White House officials were told of their location. Not long after they had gathered, however, the door flung open and in marched Pence accompanied by Priebus. Neither man was smiling. The vice president pleaded with his fellow Tea Partiers to reconsider their opposition.
“I was the Freedom Caucus before the Freedom Caucus existed,” Pence told them, his voice rising, letting loose an uncharacteristic flash of anger. “Don’t try to tell me this bill isn’t conservative enough.”
Pence then abruptly stormed out. Several of the members, grown men, broke into tears, fearful less of disappointing the vice president than of winding up on the business end of a Trump tweet.
Inside the Oval Office, Ryan explained that his team lacked the votes to pass the bill and wanted to pull it from the floor to avoid an embarrassing defeat. But the president wanted the vote to proceed, telling the Speaker that the GOP dissenters should be publicly shamed for their disloyalty to the party. Ryan talked him down, arguing that it was early in the Congress, that they would need those members’ votes down the line. Trump conceded the point, though it didn’t stop him from doing some shaming of his own. Feeling personally betrayed by Meadows, Jordan, and Labrador, the president called them out by name in a tweet the following week, and also posted a separate message encouraging the defeat of Freedom Caucus members in 2018. All across Washington, card-carrying members of the GOP establishment were elated.
Returning to Capitol Hill from his meeting with Trump, the Speaker canceled the vote and informed reporters in a somber press conference that Obamacare remained “the law of the land.” He sighed, adding that the House GOP was still learning how to be a “governing body.”16
It was a revelation. Despite controlling the White House and both chambers of Congress, the Republican Party was no more cohesive than it had been while out of power.
Watching the party implode from a new and unique vantage point, his home on the back nine of Wetherington Golf and Country Club in suburban Cincinnati, John Boehner felt one part liberated and one part guilty.
He certainly didn’t miss the day-to-day shenanigans of Capitol Hill, and he was somewhat amused by how Trump had deepened the party’s paralysis. “Dysfunction is a relative term,” the former Speaker said that spring. “Right now, it looks like I was a genius.”
But Boehner was worried for Ryan. The new Speaker had never wanted the job to begin with, and now he found himself buffeted by the same forces of factionalism within the conference, all while dealing with a deeply incompetent White House. Boehner didn’t like the way things were headed, not for the institutions of government and certainly not for the GOP. Asked what he thought historians were going to make of his legacy, and that which he had bequeathed to Ryan, Boehner replied, “They’ll be talking about the end of the two-party system.”
The policy hopes of the unified Republican government rested on Ryan’s shoulders. He was the man with the charts, having wowed everyone at Trump Tower in December with a detailed presentation of target dates and vote estimates for executing the party’s legislative agenda.
Thus far, however, things had not exactly gone according to plan—and Ryan bore the blame.
Shortly after the House GOP’s health care bill failed, Boehner received a text message from his close friend George W. Bush. They were always “two peas in the same pod,” as Boehner says, a pair of even-keeled gents who didn’t take themselves too seriously. When Bush, while still in office, refused to join the exclusive Burning Tree Club in Washington, due to the optics of golfing someplace where women weren’t allowed, Boehner told the president, “You’re a pussy.” Years later, when Bush left the White House and became a member, promising the Speaker that he was going to whup his ass on the course, Boehner responded, “You’re still a pussy.”
“Hey. Are you still talking to Ryan?” Bush texted Boehner. “Are you giving him advice?”
“Yeah,” Boehner typed back. “If he calls, I give him advice.”
“He needs to call you more,” Bush replied.
THINGS WERE GOING NO SMOOTHER ELSEWHERE IN THE GOVERNMENT. While health care was hogging the domestic policymaking spotlight, Washington was increasingly fixated on a drama of international intrigue: Russia’s meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
On March 2, Trump’s attorney general, Jeff Sessions, recused himself from any investigation into Russia’s interference in the election, citing conflicts of interest given his once-undisclosed contacts with the Russian ambassador in 2016. Trump was incensed. He had expected Sessions, as the nation’s top law enforcement official, to double as his personal protector. Allegations of collusion with the Russian government during the campaign, and the corollary talk that his presidency was illegitimate and potentially compromised, were gnawing at the president.
Two days later, still stewing over Sessions’s recusal and raging about a “deep state” of government bureaucrats angling to take him down, Trump rose early at Mar-a-Lago. It was Saturday morning and there was no staff around. Clicking on his television and finding the previous night’s edition of Special Report on Fox News, the president was stunned to hear a discussion between Bret Baier and Speaker Ryan about a “report” that accused the Obama administration of wiretapping Trump Tower the previous summer. Baier seemed uncertain of the report’s specifics, and Ryan appeared visibly baffled by the questioning.