Catching wind of this, John Kelly, the chief of staff, called Ryan and urged him to get to the White House, pronto. The Speaker arrived to find Trump in the East Wing residence. Fully briefed on the Freedom Caucus’s efforts, Ryan and Kelly arranged for the White House to block incoming phone calls from Jordan and Meadows. Then, the Speaker sat down with the president and launched into an urgent defense of the spending bill: It provided the major funding increase for military personnel and operations that he had long sought, and in order to secure that victory, Republicans had to give Democrats concessions in order for the bill to pass the Senate.
Trump wasn’t satisfied. Namely, he wanted to know, where was his money for the border wall? Ryan told the president that they were getting a down payment, roughly $1.5 billion, and that they would get more later. A veto of the legislation, he warned, would only set them back.
Trump still wasn’t convinced. He told Ryan he would probably veto the legislation. The Speaker exploded in anger, and a yelling match ensued. When each man had uncorked on the other—cathartic, surely, for them both—Trump told Ryan he would sign the bill on one condition: that Ryan give him room to build the suspense on Friday morning before announcing his blessing later in the day.
Sure enough, the next morning, Trump tweeted, “I am considering a VETO” and complained that his “BORDER WALL” was not being fully funded. By afternoon he was signing the spending bill at the White House, even as he called it “crazy,” insisted that “nobody read it,” and promised, “I will never sign another bill like this again.”
Passage of the giant spending package signaled a defeat for the forces of small-government austerity that had been ascendant in the years predating Trump. It also completed an evolution within Ryan’s own career. Once the party’s most celebrated fiscal conservative, the Speaker had found religion on defense spending after his experience on the national ticket in 2012. He returned to Congress determined to help rebuild the military, even if it meant further ballooning the debt and the deficit. Ryan could find ways to rationalize his 2003 vote for the Medicare prescription drug benefit, or for the TARP bailout in 2008, but with his championing of the 2018 omnibus package the Speaker had willfully forfeited his reputation as a fiscal hawk.
This, on top of watching him turn a blind eye to Trump’s ignominies, was too much for Ryan’s friends and allies around Washington to bear. The Speaker’s career was unfolding like a play in three acts. The first, from his election to Congress in 1998 until his vice-presidential run in 2012, starred the pushy, unpledged ideologue. The second, from that 2012 campaign until Trump’s victory in November 2016, featured a more seasoned, mature legislator who sought compromise where necessary and felt obligated to enhance the party’s image.
The third act, from Trump’s election until Ryan’s retirement from Congress, would not offer the happy ending he had once envisioned. His legacy would be defined by the fulfilment of a Faustian bargain in which he sold his soul to Trump in exchange for policy wins. The tragedy was, in the eyes of Ryan’s friends, that those wins, from tax reform to the omnibus bill, weren’t remotely worth the damage to his reputation. “He made a calculation that to get through the policies he cares about meant that he had to muzzle himself at certain times—many times—when it came to things that Trump said and did,” says Pete Wehner, Ryan’s longtime friend and former colleague at Jack Kemp’s think tank. “I think it was an anguished time for him.”
Of course, Pence had cut this very same deal with the devil—and was all the more insufferable in his observance thereof. The vice president, once among the most intellectually sovereign voices in all of Washington, had so pitifully subjugated himself to Trump that some of his longtime friends were left to wonder (only half-jokingly) whether the president had blackmail on him.
Pence’s talent for bootlicking—he was nicknamed “the Bobblehead” by Republicans on Capitol Hill for his solemn nodding routine whenever Trump spoke—were at their most obscene during meetings at the White House. After Trump would open the floor to Pence, aides would suppress grins as the vice president offered his opening tribute to the president, exhausting his storehouse of superlatives and leaving the other attendees to wonder whether they, too, were expected to kneel.
The vice presidency is a supporting role. Being a team player is part of the job description. And Pence, a fervently religious man, draws from his faith, and from the military tradition in his family, a belief in “submission” and “servant leadership.”4 Yet there is a difference between submission and spinelessness; between deference and dereliction; between servitude and slavery. Nobody expected Pence to make a show of publicly rebelling against the president. What they did expect was a token of intellectual and ideological consistency rather than unabashed allegiance to all things Trump. Yet this was too much to ask.
In May 2018, the vice president visited Arizona for an event promoting the GOP’s new tax law. In the audience he spotted Joe Arpaio, the recently pardoned convict and former sheriff of Maricopa County, who was now mounting a MAGA-inspired run for U.S. Senate. “A great friend of this president, a tireless champion of strong borders and the rule of law,” Pence declared. “Sheriff Joe Arpaio, I’m honored to have you here.”
To be clear: For the seat being vacated by his former best friend Jeff Flake, whose criticisms of the president made him unelectable after a career of conservativism by any objective metric, Pence was implicitly endorsing a man who had boasted of detaining Mexicans accused of no crime; run brutal prison camps that were allegedly responsible for men’s deaths and women’s miscarriages; and arrested journalists in the middle of the night for writing negative words about him. This, while calling him “a tireless champion” of “the rule of law.”
It was perfectly in keeping with Pence’s character in the Trump Show, and it was becoming too much for the vice president’s onetime admirers to bear.
Of the growing critiques of Pence, the most blistering belonged to George Will, the preeminent conservative pundit. Writing in the Washington Post, Will recalled how the vice president “flew to Indiana so they could walk out of an Indianapolis Colts football game, thereby demonstrating that football players kneeling during the national anthem are intolerable to someone of Pence’s refined sense of right and wrong.” He asked, “what was the practicality in Pence’s disregard of the facts about Arpaio? His pandering had no purpose beyond serving Pence’s vocation, which is to ingratiate himself with his audience of the moment.” And he said Pence’s conduct “clarifies this year’s elections: Vote Republican to ratify groveling as governing.”
Will concluded, “Trump is what he is, a floundering, inarticulate jumble of gnawing insecurities and not-at-all compensating vanities, which is pathetic. Pence is what he has chosen to be, which is horrifying.”
THE EVOLUTIONS OF PENCE AND RYAN DID NOT OCCUR IN A VACUUM. AS each man mutated to fit the age of Trump, so, too, did conservatism.
Jim DeMint’s ouster from the Heritage Foundation had been the first domino to fall, triggering a sequence of reformation and realignment within the conservative movement.
The board of directors at Heritage, irate over the sullying of their once-venerable institution’s brand, appointed Kay Coles James as the new president. If they wanted a sharp stylistic break from DeMint, then James, an alumna of the Bush 43 administration, was the perfect choice. Where DeMint was reactionary and doctrinaire, James was deliberate and studied. Moreover, whereas DeMint said Obama “took race back to the sixties” and blamed the Democrats for not putting “racism behind us,” James, a black woman, said after taking over Heritage, “I don’t think the Republican Party has ever had an honest conversation about race. And before we move forward, we need to have that conversation.”