One person who did take Ocasio-Cortez seriously: Donald Trump.
Watching television in the White House earlier that summer with some of his political advisers, the president says he caught a glimpse of the Democratic insurgent on a cable news program. “I see a woman, a young woman, ranting and raving like a lunatic on a street corner, and I said, ‘That’s interesting, go back.’ It’s the wonder of TiVo, right? One of the great inventions of all time. And I say, ‘Go back, I want to see that again. Who was that?’”
Referring to his political advisers, Trump adds, “They say, ‘It doesn’t matter.’ You know, I’m watching with some pretty good professionals. Semi-good. None of them are too great.”
Watching the young woman—and learning that she was running against “a slob named Joe Crowley, who I’ve known for a long time, because I’m from Queens”—Trump became enamored. After soaking in her performance, Trump was starstruck. “I called her Eva Perón,” he recalls. “I said, ‘That’s Eva Perón. That’s Evita.’” (He places a comically exotic emphasis on the nickname: Ah-vih-tah.)
Trump says he told his team to call Crowley “and tell him he’s got himself a problem; he better get off his fat ass and start campaigning.”
The president says they laughed him off, promising him that Ocasio-Cortez had no chance. Later, when she won, he took the opportunity to remind everyone that they had similarly underestimated him.
“I’m very good at this stuff, believe it or not, even though I’ve only done it for a few years,” Trump says. “And I’m good at talent. I spotted talent. She’s got a certain talent.”
Crowley’s loss came four years to the month after Eric Cantor dropped his primary stunner to Tea Party activist Dave Brat. The symmetry of their expirations did not escape either of them. A few weeks after his defeat, Crowley paid Cantor a visit at his New York office to talk about life after Congress. (The former majority leader landed on his feet, making seven figures as an executive at a global investment firm.) The two men sat, once future Speakers of the House, exchanging their most unique condolences and comparing notes on the strange new realities of politics.
IF THE FIRST YEAR OF DONALD TRUMP’S TERM WITNESSED A PRESIDENT adapting to the philosophies of his party, the second year saw a party bending to the will, and the whims, of its president.
In early March, Trump had issued a sweeping set of tariffs on imported steel (25 percent) and aluminum (10 percent). Over the objections of a vocal minority of Republicans, the president said he was delivering on his promise to rejuvenate the American economy by overturning decades of free-market orthodoxy that had governed administrations of both parties. “Our factories were left to rot and to rust all over the place, thriving communities turned into ghost towns,” Trump announced at the White House. “That betrayal is now over.”
Though he initially exempted some of America’s closest allies—Canada, Mexico, and the European Union—Trump soon extended the tariffs to affect those nations as well. All of them issued reprisal tariffs, effectively neutralizing whatever net economic gain the president had hoped for. Meanwhile, the administration slapped a tariff of 25 percent on more than eight hundred categories of Chinese exports. This sparked a separate and more damaging trade war that escalated throughout 2018. China retaliated by hammering U.S. agriculture exports, forcing Trump eventually to issue federal assistance to suffering American farmers.
This was Republicanism circa 2018: government bailouts to alleviate the burden of state-sanctioned market intervention.
Despite this obvious affront to the doctrine of conservatism, few Republicans on Capitol Hill were itching for a fight with Trump. Some convinced themselves, or at least said publicly, that the president was playing the long game and needed lots of latitude to negotiate. Others grumbled in private about the calamities that could ensue but dared not cross Trump publicly.
The display of Pharisaism was staggering. It wasn’t simply that Trump was desecrating the GOP’s free-market principles; he was brazenly flexing his executive authority to do so. After eight years of mocking Obama’s “imperial presidency” and decrying his subjugation of the legislative branch, Republicans in Congress refused even to hold an up-or-down vote on their president’s unilateral remaking of American trade policy.
There were some exceptions. On the House side, Warren Davidson, the Ohio conservative, grew so agitated during a meeting with Trump’s two chief trade advisers, Peter Navarro and Larry Kudlow, that he flipped over a chair and stormed out of the meeting, cussing over his shoulder. While a passionate advocate of restructuring the nation’s trade agreements, Davidson, a former manufacturing executive, told anyone who would listen that Trump’s tactics were counterproductive and doing disproportionate harm to his own base.
“These are like the Trumpiest Trumpians, and they’re telling me, ‘We’re getting killed here,’” Davidson says of his constituents. “I’ve got one county that’s all [agriculture], 80 percent of them voted for Trump. . . . The administration is curious about how the aid for farmers is going over. So, I’m talking to this one guy back home, and he tells me, ‘You know, I’m glad they’re handing out Band-Aids, but I’d rather they just didn’t shoot me.’”
In the Senate, Tennessee’s Bob Corker distinguished himself as the loudest detractor of Trump’s approach to trade. “We should vote on tariffs. But they’re afraid. They don’t want to poke the bear. I get it. But this is where we should call a floor vote and back the White House into a corner.” When Corker and other senators pressed McConnell on this during a luncheon in the summer, urging him to at least call Trump and plead the party’s case on the detrimental nature of his tariffs, McConnell scoffed. “You can call him,” the Republican leader replied. “You want his phone number?”
When it came to intellectual consistency, an even greater departure for Trump-era Republicans was on spending and fiscal restraint.
Conservatives had renounced George W. Bush for his big-government policies. They had bloodied Obama for his bankrupting of America and tortured John Boehner for failing to stop it. Yet, in the spring of 2018, with the national debt having recently passed $21 trillion, Trump and his unified Republican government approved an omnibus bill that shattered Congress’s budget caps and represented one of the largest spending increases in American history.
There were no widespread demonstrations, no marches on the Capitol, no Tea Party rallies. Less than a decade removed from the street protests that lit the party’s populist fuse, scores of Republicans from that hard-charging 2010 class voted for more spending, more debt, and more government—without fear of consequence.
To their credit, some of the only lawmakers who lobbied Trump against the bill were House conservatives. In fact, the opposition campaign waged by the likes of Jim Jordan and Mark Meadows was so effective that Trump came to fear that the bill represented a betrayal of his base, what with its massive spending increases, barely any of which was for border security and none of which was going to the construction of the wall he had been promising. They urged him to veto the legislation.
On Thursday, March 22, the House of Representatives voted to approve the 2,232-page package less than twenty-four hours after GOP leaders unveiled it. The reason it passed? Republicans loaded the bill with record amounts of military spending to buy off defense hawks, and Democrats piled on generous increases to domestic discretionary programs to placate progressives. Freedom Caucus members, hoping to turn the president against the bill, complained to him that it did not provide funding to build his border wall and that it failed to defund Planned Parenthood, risking blowback from social conservatives. Buying these arguments, the president decided he would veto the spending bill—even though it would mean a government shutdown within forty-eight hours.