Trump escaped the #MeToo tsunami, aided partially by the scale of accusations sweeping across industries and trashing the reputations of innumerable other men. But he could not rid of himself of another existential threat: Robert Mueller.
As the year drew toward closure, indictments and guilty pleas were piling up in the special counsel’s investigation, with four of the president’s associates caught up in the Russia probe. Two of the catches were particularly big fish. Michael Flynn, the president’s original national security adviser, pleaded guilty of making false statements to the FBI. And Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort was indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of conspiracy against the United States. (Manafort had told his old friend, Scott Reed, that everything he would be doing for Trump would be legal. That may have been true; but by joining the campaign, Manafort unwittingly exposed his past criminality to the scrutiny of the special counsel’s office.)
The sense of downward spiral, politically and otherwise, further emboldened some of the president’s critics within the party. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called Trump “a moron” after a meeting at the Pentagon with top national security officials, according to NBC News, a report that Tillerson did not deny. Senator Bob Corker, the Foreign Relations Committee chairman whom Trump had considered for his vice-presidential pick, likened the White House to an “adult day care center” and told the New York Times that the president’s actions could set the nation “on the path to World War III.”
Around that same time, in mid-October, a most unexpected voice chimed in with censures of his own: George W. Bush.
Having remained dutifully silent on political matters throughout all eight years of Obama’s presidency, Bush was struggling to bite his tongue in the opening months of Trump’s first term. He had never been terribly bothered by the attacks on himself and his family; there was no personal grudge keeping him up at night. What Bush could not stomach—what he found increasingly intolerable, he told friends—was the president of the United States using his office to demonize immigrants, abuse his political opponents, and divide the nation for partisan gain.
After nine months of stewing, Bush broke his silence. Noting how “bigotry seems emboldened” and how “our politics seems more vulnerable to conspiracy theories and outright fabrication,” the former Republican president delivered a speech in New York City that landed like an asteroid on Washington.
“Bullying and prejudice in our public life sets a national tone, provides permission for cruelty and bigotry, and compromises the moral education of children. The only way to pass along civic values is to first live up to them,” Bush said. “Our identity as a nation, unlike other nations, is not determined by geography or ethnicity, by soil or blood. This means that people from every race, religion, ethnicity can be full and equally American. It means that bigotry and white supremacy, in any form, is blasphemy against the American creed.”
His audience erupted with applause. Bush never said Trump’s name. He didn’t need to. Everyone who heard the remarks understood their purpose and their gravity. It was no longer just a bunch of liberal Democrats and biased journalists accusing the Republican president of gross misconduct; it was the previous Republican president.
Less than a week later, Jeff Flake, Trump’s original foil in the Senate, announced that he would not seek reelection in 2018. Trump’s prophecy had come true: Flake’s dissent had tanked his poll numbers back home. Still, like Bush, he wasn’t going quietly into the night.
“Reckless, outrageous, and undignified behavior has become excused as telling it like it is when it is actually just reckless, outrageous, and undignified,” Flake said when announcing his retirement on the Senate floor. “And when such behavior emanates from the top of our government, it is something else. It is dangerous to a democracy.”
All this was beginning to take its toll. The president’s numbers trended sharply downward in late 2017, with a number of polls showing his approval rating dropping below the 40 percent mark. One such survey, from ABC News and the Washington Post in November, pegged Trump at an anemic of 37 percent.4 Tellingly, however, 91 percent of his voters said they approved of his job performance.
The president was continuing to throw bones to his base: ending the DACA program that protected undocumented minors from deportation, issuing a new travel ban as previous iterations made their way through the courts, and, in December, moving the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, fulfilling a campaign promise of spiritual significance to his evangelical Christian supporters, many of whom believe the “eternal capital” of God’s chosen nation will be the site of the Messiah’s return.
But there was still no landmark legislative victory to show for Trump’s presidency and for the Republican Party’s total control of government. The clock was ticking. Only a few months remained until the calendar turned to 2018, an election year, during which Congress would be hard-pressed to pass anything big.
To the shock of just about everyone on Capitol Hill, tax reform wound up being a breeze—relatively speaking.
With enormous pressure to produce, and without the emotional baggage of the health care fight—it’s easier to cut someone’s taxes than take away their health insurance—Republicans defied all expectations in passing a significant overhaul of the tax code through both the House and the Senate and putting it on the president’s desk before Christmas.
None of this was to say the bill made for good policy. If anything, even as they rushed it through Congress—once again taking a number of expedited votes, once again violating the promises of “regular order” made by the party’s leaders—Republicans never seemed enamored of the bill itself. It would deliver the disproportionate bulk of its benefits to corporations and the wealthy, undermining Trump’s pledge of targeted relief for the middle class. It would offer less assistance to working families than many in the party hoped; Rubio had to hold the legislation hostage just to receive the slightest bump in the child tax credit.
Most distressing to conservatives, the bill would blow an enormous hole in the deficit, according to numerous nonpartisan projections. Republicans responded by pushing the disproven theory that economic growth would make up for the lost revenue by slashing rates for businesses and top earners, but the math was never going to add up. An analysis from the Joint Committee on Taxation showed that the GOP tax bill would add $1 trillion to deficits, after accounting for estimated growth.5
This presented something of an intellectual quandary for the party. A milestone legislative win was desperately needed, and it was now within their grasp. But the bill was nothing what many of them had envisioned when Ryan described harpooning his white whale of tax reform. Even as the Speaker muscled it through the House, he recognized that the bill did more cutting than reforming. There would be the same number of tax brackets and many of the same loopholes; there would be no filling out one’s tax returns on a postcard, as the party had once advertised.
Still, Ryan felt an urgency unlike any in his career. For the past quarter century, since his days as a think tank staffer working for Jack Kemp, his dream had been to rewrite the tax code. However imperfect, this legislation represented their best chance in three decades to do so.