More than three dozen senior administration officials had either resigned or been fired in the president’s first fourteen months on the job. Tillerson was the fifth to exit in a span of five weeks.
The other recent departures included H. R. McMaster, the Army lieutenant general who was axed as Trump’s second national security adviser after repeated clashes with the president; Gary Cohn, the director of the National Economic Council, who quit after a dispute with Trump over his tariffs on steel and aluminum; Rob Porter, the staff secretary, who resigned amid public allegations of abuse from both ex-wives; and Hope Hicks, Porter’s girlfriend and a longtime aide to the president, who quit one day after an eight-hour testimony before the House Intelligence Committee in which she admitted to telling white lies on Trump’s behalf but pleaded ignorance of any Russian connections.
On the morning of Monday, April 9, the president’s circle shrank even smaller. FBI agents raided the offices of Michael Cohen, acting on a referral from none other than Mueller himself.
Trump had witnessed enough legal battles to recognize that this would end in one of two ways: Cohen would either take a legal bullet for him or turn state’s witness and leverage damaging information to reduce his own sentence. Enraged by the lawful looting of his attorney’s privileged materials, the president decided to weigh in on an active federal investigation.
“So, I just heard that they broke into the office of one of my personal attorneys,” Trump told reporters soon after reports of the raid surfaced. “It’s a disgraceful situation,” the president continued. “It’s a total witch hunt.”
After suggesting that he might fire Mueller, an atomic recourse that his lawyers, staffers, and allies uniformly warned against, Trump added of the Cohen situation, “It’s an attack on our country, in a true sense. It’s an attack on what we all stand for.”
During an interview on Fox News a few weeks later, the president’s new personal lawyer, former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, told Sean Hannity that Trump had reimbursed Cohen the $130,000 used to pay off the porn star. It was a dizzying admission, contradicting Trump’s past statements of knowing nothing about the hush money transaction and jolting Hannity, who appeared bewildered at having unwittingly made news on his program.
“We finally got our side of the story,” Giuliani told the Wall Street Journal after Hannity’s show aired. White Houses aides were apoplectic. Trump wasn’t angry; he was just mystified. Why the hell was Rudy always on television?
THE PRESIDENT’S PREOCCUPATION WITH QUESTIONS OF LOYALTY, ATTEMPTING to distinguish those people truly supportive of him from those cozying up for the sake of expedience, increasingly informed his dealings with Capitol Hill. As Republican lawmakers sidled up in search of favor or influence or professional gain, Trump eyed them warily, wondering who among them would remain steadfast if things went south.
Improbably, one person about whom the president had no such doubts was Paul Ryan.
Once upon a time, there had been few tougher Trump censors in the GOP than Ryan, who felt duty-bound to combat the Republican front-runner’s dark rhetoric and the party’s nativist drift. Yet there had hardly been anyone softer on Trump since Election Day 2016 than the Speaker, who, intent on delivering the policy promises made to voters, calculated that doing so meant ignoring the ad hominem savaging of private citizens, the payoffs to porn stars, the assaults on private businesses, the undermining of institutions, and the innumerable other acts for which Barack Obama would have been impaled by the right.
Theirs was a fragile marriage, no doubt, one born out of mutual practicality: Ryan needed a president to make his legislative dreams a reality, and Trump needed a Speaker to deliver wins as quickly as possible. In time, however, the alliance proved stronger than anyone in either camp could have anticipated. Ryan carefully avoided criticizing the president while offering frequent, elementary tutoring sessions on policy and process behind closed doors, grumbling about the task only to a handful of close friends; Trump reciprocated the Speaker’s restraint and spared him the sort of public shaming doled out to other top Republicans, including McConnell.
“I told myself, I gotta have a relationship with this guy to help him get his mind right,” Ryan recalls. “Because, I’m telling you, he didn’t know anything about government. So I thought, I can’t be his scold, like I was. . . . I wanted to scold him all the time. What I learned as I went on, to scratch that itch, I had to do it in private. So, I did it in private—all the time. And he actually ended up kind of appreciating it. We had more arguments with each other than pleasant conversations, over the last two years. And it never leaked.”
Encircled by loose-lipped self-promoters almost every waking moment, the president came to appreciate Ryan’s discretion. Knowing that their private discussions would remain private freed the two men to speak candidly in a way that Trump found refreshing. He also recognized that unlike many of the other Republicans kissing his ring, the Speaker had nowhere to climb; he was the second-most powerful man in Washington and hadn’t wanted that job to begin with. Even when the Speaker didn’t share his priorities, the president found himself more trusting of Ryan’s motives than those of most of the ambition-drunk politicos in DC. In spite of himself, Trump had come to like, and rely heavily on, a person whom he had once accused of trying to sabotage his campaign.
All this made it painful when Ryan called Trump, in the early hours of April 11, to inform the president that he would retire at year’s end.
Five months earlier, when Politico reported that Ryan was telling confidants of his decision to leave Congress, the president had reacted angrily, calling the Speaker to solicit assurances that no such departure would be made, that he would serve all four years of Trump’s first term. At the time, Ryan told the president what he wanted to hear. But privately, his mind was made up. He was ready to go home. When he explained the decision to Trump five months later, the president said he understood.
Ryan’s departure left a power vacuum in the congressional wing of the party. Kevin McCarthy, the heir apparent as majority leader, had failed once before to earn a promotion to Speaker; Steve Scalise, whom Trump had nicknamed “the Legend from Louisiana,” was now a household name with designs on the top job himself. Of course, Ryan’s retirement only lent to the perception that the midterm elections were shaping up to be ugly for Republicans—so ugly that there might not be a GOP Speaker in 2019.
Whether it was McCarthy or Scalise who wound up replacing Ryan atop the House GOP, they would follow in the Speaker’s footsteps, subverting their own political identities to appease Trump. It was his party now, without question or caveat.
THE PRE-TRUMP GOP HAD BEEN SPLINTERED ALONG ANY NUMBER OF asymmetrical boundaries: libertarians and neocons, evangelicals and cultural moderates, big-spending pragmatists and small-government purists. All these dichotomies existed within the broader construct of conservative versus moderate, or even outsider versus establishment, spurring incessant talk of a “Republican civil war” from 2008 to 2016.
But the civil war was over now—or, at least, the battle lines had shifted dramatically. Trump’s conquest effectively ended the squabbling that had defined the GOP in the post-Bush era, replacing disputes over policies and principles with a simpler question that spoke to the dueling identities in the party. “Are you with Trump or not?” said Corry Bliss, the executive director of the Congressional Leadership Fund, the super PAC charged with protecting the House GOP’s majority in 2018. “It’s not about ideology anymore. It’s only about Trump. Are you with him or are you against him? That’s the only thing that matters to voters in the Republican base.”