This dynamic played right into the president’s obsession with loyalty; even most of the Republicans in the latter camp had no choice but to block any daylight between themselves and the president, fearful as they were of alienating his cultlike following among their own constituents. If there was space for an anti-Trump Republican to flourish in federal races, nobody running in the party’s 2018 primaries had found it. Seeing this, and watching the political gymnastics of onetime critics now claiming true allegiance to Trumpism, the president relished his role of kingmaker.
In the Florida governor’s race, Adam Putnam, a former congressman and the state’s agriculture commissioner, was leading the Republican primary by 7 points in his internal polling. That was until Trump endorsed his opponent, Congressman Ron DeSantis, a graduate of Yale and Harvard Law School who had worked as a JAG Corps prosecutor before deploying to Iraq during the troop surge as a legal attaché for a team of Navy SEALs. (Trump, a sucker for a good résumé, backed DeSantis after a brief courtship.) The next poll conducted by Putnam’s campaign showed him down 11 points. “An eighteen-point swing in the space of a few weeks,” says Terry Nelson, a veteran GOP consultant working for Putnam. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Ever.”
Not everyone was lucky enough to land Trump’s support. Diane Black, the Tennessee congresswoman, was running in a crowded GOP primary to become the state’s governor. During a meeting with several House Republicans in the Cabinet Room early in 2018, she pulled the president aside. “You really need to endorse me,” she told him, stabbing a finger at his chest. Trump found her rude and presumptuous. “She got in my personal space,” he told aides afterward. “Big mistake.” The White House Office of Political Affairs threw a bone, having Mike Pence endorse her. But Black kept at it, badgering the White House political director, Bill Stepien, for a presidential vote of confidence. Stepien asked an intern to aggregate a full record of everything Black had ever said about Trump, good and bad. The list was printed out and carried over to the Oval Office. Trump scanned the document, picking out the negative remarks, then pulled out a Sharpie. “Diane,” he wrote. “This is NOT good!” He furiously underlined the word “NOT,” then asked Stepien to hand-deliver the document to Black.
It was a similar story in the Idaho governor’s race. Raúl Labrador, the congressman and Freedom Caucus cofounder, touted his alliance with Trump during the Republican primary, but the president’s official endorsement had yet to surface. One of Labrador’s opponents, Lieutenant Governor Brad Little, employed consultants who heard that the congressman’s friends (namely, Mick Mulvaney) were putting the squeeze on Trump to endorse Labrador. Certain that such a development would tip the race against them, Little’s team cut a highlight reel that showed Labrador criticizing the president and sent it to the Political Affairs shop, hoping it would reach Stepien. Instead, the video made it all the way to the president, who upon seeing it resolved once and for all not to intervene on the congressman’s behalf. After Little won the GOP primary, he received a phone call from Trump. “I can’t believe all these people wanted me to endorse Labrador. Why would I do that?” the president said. “He said a lot of nasty things about me. He’s a really nasty guy.”
In one case, Trump endorsed as a means of punishment. Having heard that Minnesota congressman Erik Paulsen was distancing himself from the White House in the hope of holding his seat in the Twin Cities’ suburbs, the president stewed and asked that the political shop send a tweet of support for Paulsen—thereby sabotaging the moderate Republican’s efforts. When his aides demurred, Trump sent the tweet himself, issuing a “Strong Endorsement!” of the congressman in a late-night post that left Paulsen fuming and his Democratic opponent giddy.
No single result gave Trump as much satisfaction as that of the Republican primary in South Carolina’s First District. Having made promises of retribution against the GOP incumbent, Mark Sanford, the president itched to announce his support for Katie Arrington, who was running as a Trump-inspired populist and highlighting Sanford’s critiques of the president. White House aides were vehemently opposed to the idea: Sanford was going to win, they told him, and when he did, Trump would look weak and ineffectual.
The president stood down, but he kept tabs on the race. Sanford had taken Arrington for granted. The congressman’s numbers in the district had dipped, and the contest tightened as he hoarded campaign cash instead of unloading on his challenger. On the day of the primary, flying back from Singapore aboard Air Force One, Trump decided to roll the dice. “Mark Sanford has been very unhelpful to me in my campaign to MAGA. He is MIA and nothing but trouble. He is better off in Argentina,” the president tweeted, referencing Sanford’s transnational affair. “I fully endorse Katie Arrington for Congress in SC, a state I love. She is tough on crime and will continue our fight to lower taxes. VOTE Katie!”
Sanford’s friends in the Freedom Caucus were livid. “He’s one of the most principled, consistent, and conservative members of Congress I’ve ever known,” Congressman Justin Amash tweeted in response to Trump. “And unlike you, Mark has shown humility in his role and a desire to be a better man than he was the day before.”
When the ballots were tallied that night, Arrington finished with 50.5 percent of the vote, just clear of the 50 percent needed to avoid a runoff. She had edged Sanford by the narrowest of margins, and Trump’s last-minute tweet, which her team immediately turned into a robocall and blasted around the district, was very likely responsible.
Just as in the case of Arizona senator Jeff Flake, whose denunciations of the president sent him to an early retirement, Trump had foretold the demise of one of his harshest intraparty critics. Sanford and Flake, two longtime conservative stalwarts with deep philosophical moorings and voting records well to the right of most Republicans in Congress, were exiled from the GOP for the high crime of dissenting from its new leader.
THE REPUBLICAN PARTY WAS NOT ALONE IN ITS REVOLUTIONARY CONVULSIONS.
Joe Crowley woke up on June 27 harboring aspirations of becoming the next Speaker of the House. As the fourth-ranking House Democrat, the congressman from Queens had spent years building alliances across his caucus and collecting favors to cash in. Whereas the number two and number three Democrats, Steny Hoyer and Jim Clyburn, were septuagenarians who offered no generational change, Crowley was a sprightly fifty-six years old. He was also a skilled straddler of the party’s ideological divides, trusted and well liked by both moderates and liberals. With younger and newer members demanding a leadership change atop the party, Crowley was a virtual lock to succeed Pelosi one day as the top House Democrat—and a decent bet to become Speaker of the House with a Democratic takeover in November.
By night’s end, however, Crowley was a household name for a very different reason. In an upset that shook Washington and foreshadowed the trajectory of its minority party, Crowley lost his primary in New York’s Fourteenth District to a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. Her name was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She was twenty-eight years old, a bartender, and a first-time candidate who had volunteered for Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign.
Leaning into the calls on the left for a dramatic makeover of the Democratic Party, Ocasio-Cortez used her youth, Latina heritage, and insurgent message to gain a cult following among progressives in the final months of her challenge to Crowley. Even then, and with a swelling number of liberal organizations and activist leaders supporting her, few took the rookie’s candidacy seriously. A biographical video that she published on social media drew nearly a million views online, yet the New York Times ignored the contest in its own backyard.