When the event ended, and Scott opened Twitter and spotted the comment, he felt defeated. “Uh probably because I helped write the bill for the past year, have multiple provisions included, got multiple Senators on board over the last week and have worked on tax reform my entire time in Congress,” he responded. “But if you’d rather just see my skin color, pls feel free.”
The senator had more to say—so much more. He was weary of being targeted, weary of being the Republican spokesman on race, weary of trying to thread an impossible needle in the era of Trump.
Still, he held back. For all the flowery talk of how he represented a breakthrough—the first African American ever to serve in both chambers of Congress—Scott had begun to realize he was no such thing. He would always be a “prop” for his party. But the next wave of black Republicans wouldn’t have to be—not if he did his job and did it well, conducting himself with dignity and turning the other cheek to his abusers. Generations of Scotts had suffered and sacrificed to send a cotton picker’s grandson to the halls of Congress. Now it was his turn.
“I’ve been frustrated. And angry. Man,” Scott says, his voice trembling. “It’s too easy to be angry. And too natural. And also, too unproductive for me. But I get it. I get it. I’m not at a point where my grandfather was. He could say nothing. He had to eat his anger. Or the next generation, who harnessed their anger and led marches. I’m on the inside track. I have a very different responsibility. It cannot be about me.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
January 2018
“I said, ‘That’s Eva Perón. That’s Evita.’”
TEMPERATURES HAD PLUNGED INTO THE SINGLE DIGITS AND CAMP David was coated with a fresh snowfall when they huddled inside a secure meeting room on Saturday morning. Donald Trump had arrived at the presidential retreat in Maryland one day earlier, along with members of the congressional Republican leadership, to chart the party’s legislative priorities for the coming year. Now the leaders had joined Trump for a partial meeting of his cabinet, including Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, CIA director Mike Pompeo, and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis. Notably absent was Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who remained chained up inside the president’s doghouse for the trespass of recusing himself from the Russia probe.
There were other disloyalties weighing on Trump that weekend. Friday had seen the official release of Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, which used salacious stories to paint the president as a narcissistic nitwit whose administration was drowning in its own incompetence. Despite Wolff’s carelessness with basic facts and his prior reputation as someone of lax journalistic standards, the book nonetheless contained enough accuracies to throw the White House into a panic. Most bothersome to Trump were quotes attributed to Steve Bannon, his former chief strategist, who told Wolff that Trump Jr.’s meeting with the Russian lawyer in June 2016 was “treasonous” and “unpatriotic,” predicting, “They’re going to crack Don Junior like an egg on national TV.” Bannon, having returned to the helm at Breitbart after leaving the White House, did not dispute these quotes.
Trump was in a tizzy. On Thursday night, with excerpts of the book trickling out, the president tweeted of Wolff’s work, “Full of lies, misrepresentations and sources that don’t exist. Look at this guy’s past and watch what happens to him and Sloppy Steve!”
On Friday morning, Trump tweeted again about “Sloppy Steve Bannon,” this time in reference to how the megadonor Robert Mercer and his daughter, Rebekah, had publicly severed their relationship with Bannon as a result of his remarks in Fire and Fury.
Then, late on Friday night, Trump tweeted again: “Michael Wolff is a total loser who made up stories in order to sell this really boring and untruthful book. He used Sloppy Steve Bannon, who cried when he got fired and begged for his job. Now Sloppy Steve has been dumped like a dog by almost everyone. Too bad!”
The GOP leaders worried about Trump’s state of mind. To a man, they had spent the past year trying their best to ignore the president’s Twitter feed, wanting plausible deniability when reporters inevitably asked for comment on Trump’s latest social media salvo. But many of his statements were impossible to miss. Just a few days earlier, the president had tweeted, “North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un just stated that the ‘Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times.’ Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!”
Republicans in Congress had been feeling a sudden rush of optimism as they turned the calendar to 2018. After sputtering for much of Trump’s first year in office, energizing the base of the Democratic Party in a way that no Democratic politician seemed capable of, Republicans had secured a momentous victory in the twilight of 2017. When the president signed the new tax law into effect a few days before Christmas, Republicans went home for the holiday recess feeling equal parts elation and relief. No longer would their constituents skewer them for failing to do their part to Make America Great Again; no longer could the Democrats paint them as dysfunctional and unproductive. (Dysfunctional? Sure. Unproductive? Not anymore.)
Thanks to an initial burst of glowing headlines (businesses making new hires, corporations giving out bonuses) tax reform looked like a political winner. House Republicans hoped it could be a majority-saver. A new president’s party often takes a pounding in his first midterm election, an average loss of 32 House seats, and Democrats needed a net gain of just 23 to win back the chamber. Given the visceral surge of energy and the considerable financial support flowing to a large supply of high-caliber Democratic challengers, Republicans were fighting an uphill battle to keep the majority.
The tax bill, Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell felt, represented their chance at salvation. Kevin McCarthy showed Trump polling during their Friday meeting at Camp David to demonstrate the party’s months-long declining popularity, particularly among college-educated suburbanites, and argued that these same voters would be most rewarding of tax reform. “We have something to run on now,” the Speaker told Trump. They all took turns urging the president to keep the country’s attention trained on the benefits of their shiny new tax law.
It was hopeless. For Trump, the political concept of “message discipline” meant nothing more than listening to the very advice he’d ignored all the way en route to the White House. Besides, he didn’t much care about the tax law. It was a policy accomplishment, surely, but the president was more consumed with the personal: allegations of collusion with the Russians in 2016, mounting chatter in the media about his fitness for office, and now, damning remarks from a supposedly staunch ally about his family’s potential criminality.
On Saturday morning, as they prepared for their meeting with Trump, some of the Republican leaders and agency heads were alerted by their aides to a barrage of sunrise tweets from the president. At 7:19 a.m., he began: “Now that Russian collusion, after one year of intense study, has proven to be a total hoax on the American public, the Democrats and their lapdogs, the Fake News Mainstream Media, are taking out the old Ronald Reagan playbook and screaming mental stability and intelligence . . . Actually, throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart. Crooked Hillary Clinton also played these cards very hard and, as everyone knows, went down in flames. I went from VERY successful businessman, to top T.V. Star . . . to President of the United States (on my first try). I think that would qualify as not smart, but genius . . . and a very stable genius at that!”