In certain respects, the conservative support for Trump was understandable. He had delivered on important promises. At the same time, he had done things—facilitating the Carrier deal in Indiana that smacked of government favoritism; bullying private corporations and individual citizens; asserting a moral equivalence between the U.S. government and Vladimir Putin’s—that would traditionally have put any politician in the conservative movement’s guillotine.
Trump did not suffer for these apostasies. And the best explanation wasn’t that voters were ignoring his rejections of Republican orthodoxy; it was that they accepted his rebranding of that orthodoxy. In a poll taken at the event, a full 86 percent of CPAC attendees approved of Trump’s job performance. Moreover, 80 percent agreed with the notion that he was “realigning” conservatism. “In many ways, Donald Trump is the conservative movement right now,” Jim McLaughlin, the Republican pollster who conducted the survey, announced to CPAC attendees. “And the conservative movement is Donald Trump.”
THE BASE’S DEVOTION TO TRUMP WAS LIKE BALM TO A PRESIDENCY covered in third-degree burns.
For all the upheaval of the first few months, nothing had prepared the White House for the hell unleashed by Trump’s firing of Comey and the subsequent appointment of Robert Mueller as the special counsel.
As the summer wore on, it became evident that Mueller was looking into not just Russia’s attempts to influence the presidential campaign, but also potential coordination between Trump team’s and the Kremlin. An assortment of criminal activities carried out by the president’s former associates, including Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, and an obscure policy adviser named George Papadopoulos, was bringing the investigation inside Trump’s campaign and inside his White House.
Even more threatening to the president, Mueller’s investigation was also circling his family.
On July 8, the New York Times reported that in June of 2016, Donald Trump Jr. had met with a Kremlin-linked lawyer at Trump Tower.6 Also present were Manafort and Jared Kushner. The story rocked the West Wing. The president, flying on Air Force One, dictated a statement saying the meeting had been about a Russian adoption program and nothing more. (Trump’s lawyers initially denied his involvement in issuing the statement, only to admit later his role in writing it.)
The next day, the Times followed up with a far bigger blockbuster: Trump Jr. had arranged the Tower meeting in response to promises of receiving dirt on Clinton from the Russian lawyer.7
On June 3, 2016—just as the general election campaign was commencing—Trump Jr. had received an email from one of his dad’s former Russian business associates. This person had been contacted by a Kremlin official who was offering information that “would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father,” the email read, adding, “This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”
Minutes later, Trump Jr. replied, “If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer.”
The White House had repeatedly and vehemently denied that there had been any contact in 2016 between Trump’s inner circle and the Russian government. And the president himself had claimed on numerous occasions that there was no evidence whatsoever to hint at collusion—or even an intent to collude. Suddenly, thanks to his son and namesake, there was reason to believe otherwise. Blood was in the water.
All the while, the White House was confronted with the normal volatility of running the country: judicial appointments and confirmations, votes on health care, legal challenges to the travel ban, a missile strike on Syria, and the continued military offensive against the Islamic State.
Republicans were also dealing with the continued trauma of a large-scale assassination attempt. On the morning of June 14, a gunman named James Hodgkinson opened fire at a baseball diamond in northern Virginia where House Republicans were practicing ahead of the annual congressional baseball game. Steve Scalise, the House majority whip, was playing second base. He thought a tractor had backfired. Instead, it was Hodgkinson, a liberal activist and Bernie Sanders campaign volunteer who kept a list of the Republicans he wanted to mow down, shooting at him with 7.62-caliber SKS semiautomatic rifle. (As intriguing as the thought experiment “Imagine if Obama did what Trump just did” was the question of “How would we react if a Ted Cruz devotee tried to murder a dozen House Democrats?”)
Scalise was hit. The bullet traveled through his hip, shattering the femur and wrecking the pelvis, with bullet fragments lodged in his muscle tissue and organs. As he crawled from the infield dirt into shallow right field, Scalise was bleeding to death. Four others were wounded, but Scalise’s situation was the direst. Once the shooter was neutralized—by Scalise’s security detail, who almost certainly prevented a massacre that morning—the other congressmen ran to their colleague from Louisiana. The first one to reach him was Brad Wenstrup, a little-known third-term Ohio lawmaker who had served as a combat medic in Afghanistan. Wenstrup tied a perfect tourniquet. It would later be credited with saving Scalise’s life. “When I got to the hospital, they said I was within a minute of death,” Scalise said.
Trump’s handling of the situation was strangely reassuring. He issued a standard statement saying, “We are deeply saddened by this tragedy.” He visited the hospital where Scalise and Capitol Police officer Crystal Griner were being treated. He and the First Lady spent a prolonged period of time with Scalise’s wife, Jennifer, whose husband was unconscious. He gave Scalise’s children a personal tour of the West Wing at the congressional picnic a week later.
There were no provocative tweets, no divisive rhetorical salvos aimed at Sanders or anyone else. (The Vermont senator said he was “sickened” upon hearing of Hodgkinson’s devotion, and said on the Senate floor, “Real change can only come about through nonviolent action.”) The only unusual part of Trump’s response was his fixation, in discussions with doctors at the hospital and later with Scalise himself, on the size of the bullet. There was also the question he posed to friends and aides in the days following the shooting. “Should we do gun control?” the president asked. “Steve can lead the way. He’s got street credibility now.”
ADMINISTRATION OFFICIALS WERE MYSTIFIED AT TIMES SUCH AS THIS. The incident had shown that Trump had the capacity for calm, the feeling for normalcy, when the circumstances so demanded. Still, they wondered why the president refused to carry himself like this regularly; why his handling of the Scalise shooting was the exception and not the rule.
For much of 2017, Trump’s top aides, as well as the rest of Republican Washington, found themselves twitching every time their smartphones twinkled to life. The president had used Twitter during the campaign to rewrite the rules of mass communication in politics, circumventing the media gatekeepers and reaching tens of millions of people instantly. But Trump’s social media addiction was proving debilitating to his presidency. Like clockwork, his impulsive rants distracted from the White House’s efforts to advance its agenda. Most administrations do whatever possible to avoid controversy; Trump specialized in creating it.
Though White House officials joked constantly about stealing his smartphone or changing the password—really, they weren’t joking at all—nothing could be done to stop the president from tweeting. The pleas from his staff did no good. He told friends that without Twitter, he never would have won the presidency to begin with; now he told aides that without Twitter, his presidency would be derailed by a hostile press corps. Ironically, both his friends and his aides believed the greatest threat to his presidency was Twitter itself.