In the age of Trump, the senator from South Carolina came to terms with an uncomfortable truth: The fixation on his color was a feature, not a bug. No matter his achievements or aspirations, Scott was sentenced to exist in America’s collective political subconscious as a black man first and everything else second.
The senator did, however, come to see a silver lining. A deeply religious individual who twice nearly pursued preaching as his vocation, he rejected the notion that Trump had been chosen by the Almighty. But Scott did believe that he himself had been chosen, placed in a unique position at a unique time in history, to help “the American family” navigate some “painful, ugly, embarrassing” conversations about race and other combustible subjects that had simmered for generations.
“God made me black on purpose. For a specific reason,” Scott says. “I am not pretending that this characteristic, this Earth suit that I’m in”—he pinches the skin of his arm—“isn’t being evaluated. It requires a response, or a reaction, to the situations at my level of government. I am fully aware of that. I just don’t want to play a game with it.”
Cerebral and deliberate, Scott was known in Congress to speak very little until he was sure there was something worth saying. His assertion that Trump had forfeited the “moral authority” of his office after Charlottesville, then, got everyone’s attention, including Trump’s.
Reached on his cellphone by the new press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the senator agreed to sit down with the president and explain his displeasure. What ensued inside the Oval Office a few days later was a lengthy, Scott-led seminar on America’s history of institutional racism and systemic discrimination. He talked of the socioeconomic hurdles facing young black men in his native streets of North Charleston. He described the hopelessness, the lack of opportunity, that had long suffocated the potential of minority youths in America. He told the story of his grandfather, Artis Ware, who left a segregated school in the third grade to pick cotton for fifty cents a day. Scott remembered his role model scouring the newspaper each morning, impressing upon his grandsons the importance of reading; it wasn’t until years later that Scott realized his grandfather was illiterate.
The White House, for its part, released a photo of Trump listening intently to a senator identified as “Tom Scott.”
Explaining that the resurgent racial tensions in America owed in part to anxieties over a dramatic cultural and demographic transition, Scott urged Trump not to prey on them.
“I know what fear looks like. I think fear typically comes with anger and hostility. You’re afraid that you’re losing something, that you won’t have something that you used to have,” Scott said later, looking back on Charlottesville. “I think people who march with torches—who want to resurrect a thankfully dead part of who we were—these are people who are afraid. Afraid of the changes happening in the country. Afraid of the other man who doesn’t look like them.”
Trump took all this in, rarely interrupting. “What can I do to be helpful?” he finally asked.
The senator was prepared with an answer. If Trump was getting a nice photo-op out of their meeting, Scott was going to get something, too.
AUGUST WAS AN UNPLEASANT TIME FOR REPUBLICAN LAWMAKERS. Charlottesville aside, the summer recess was filled with heated inquiries from irritated constituents wanting to know why, after seven years of promising, they still had not repealed and replaced the Affordable Care Act. There was no dodging the question, no spinning the answer. The GOP had once again failed to deliver on a core pledge to its voters, and legislators were shouldering far more blame than Trump. Whereas the president had installed a new Supreme Court justice and manufactured a bevy of unilateral wins from the executive branch, congressional Republicans had no major legislative accomplishment to show for their first eight months of unified government.
It was around this time that a new push, for a rewrite of the tax code, became the all-consuming obsession of the Republican Party.
There was no guarantee of success. In fact, lawmakers widely believed that making changes to America’s tax policy would be infinitely harder than altering its health care system. Whereas the Obamacare fight had implications for only certain people, groups, and industries, the tax code touched every aspect of life—and there were the lobbyists to prove it. Every deduction, every loophole, every footnote of the existing law was safeguarded by special interests.
But congressional Republicans had no choice. It wasn’t just that they needed to get results; it was that the party appeared to be in disrepair, with Trump’s performance increasingly a cause for alarm.
In the final four months of the year, the president pardoned the infamous Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, who had been convicted of criminal contempt; called North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un “Rocket Man” in a speech to the United Nations; attacked kneeling NFL players, advising owners to “Get that son of a bitch off the field right now!” during a speech in Alabama; ridiculed a Puerto Rico mayor who had criticized his administration’s ham-fisted response to Hurricane Maria, which killed some three thousand Americans; accepted the resignation of his first cabinet official, health and human services secretary Tom Price, who Politico revealed had traveled on private and government planes at a cost of more than $1 million to taxpayers; falsely accused Obama of not contacting the families of fallen troops; and feuded with a Democratic congresswoman over his condolence call to a soldier’s widow.
Trump also decided to publicly defend Roy Moore, the Alabama Senate nominee, against allegations of child molestation. Many Republican leaders were calling for Moore to quit the race; instead, buoyed by the president’s backing, he stayed in, losing to Democrat Doug Jones in bloody-red Alabama and cutting the GOP’s Senate majority to 51 seats.
BENEATH THE POLITICAL MAELSTROM, THE WHEELS OF CULTURAL INSURRECTION kept on turning.
In early October, the New York Times and the New Yorker published stories that detailed nearly thirty years of claims of rape and sexual misconduct against Hollywood filmmaking mogul Harvey Weinstein.3 Responding to these reports, which had long been an open secret in show business, women across the world joined a social media movement by tweeting a simple phrase to demonstrate the scope of the epidemic: “Me too.”
The floodgates thrown open, #MeToo triggered a cascade of accusations against some of America’s most prominent men. Among them were television host Charlie Rose; actor Kevin Spacey; comedian Louis C.K.; political journalist Mark Halperin; music mogul Russell Simmons; and Today show host Matt Lauer. Some of these men, and many dozens more, saw their careers irreparably ruined by their misdeeds.
The world of politics was not immune to this reckoning. For some lawmakers, Capitol Hill had long functioned as a frat house, teeming with attractive young women to keep them company while living away from their wives four nights a week. By the spring of 2018, seven male lawmakers had been accused of misconduct; five of them resigned, including Al Franken, the popular Minnesota senator, and John Conyers, the Detroit Democrat and Congress’s longest-serving member.
While speculation stalked the careers of many additional legislators on Capitol Hill, it was impossible to ignore the man on the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. More than a dozen women had come forward with accusations of sexual assault against Trump during the presidential campaign, charges that were freshly relevant in light of the #MeToo movement.