His words of reassurance could have been ripped straight from the pages of George Orwell’s 1984: “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
THE FANATICAL DEVOTION TO TRUMP, OFTEN FOR FEAR OF REPRISALS from his cult following on the right, opened the GOP to attacks that were sometimes misleadingly simplistic.
It became highly en vogue, particularly in the cesspool of social media, for liberals to mock Republican criticisms of Trump as empty rebukes that weren’t backed up by concrete actions to check the executive branch. (“Stop talking and DO something!” . . . “You have a vote!” . . . “Press releases are not oversight!” etc.)
The most fashionable of these arguments went something like this: Republican X, who spoke out in opposition to Trump over Y, was not sincere because he voted with the president on Z. Popular targets for such attacks were those GOP lawmakers who showed the gumption of habitually offering rebukes of the administration: Ben Sasse, Bob Corker, and of course, Jeff Flake. “When it comes right down to the nitty gritty—to casting votes—Flake usually toes the presidential line,” columnist EJ Montini wrote in the Arizona Republic.5 “According to a statistical analysis by the website FiveThirtyEight, Flake casts votes for the Trump position 83.3 percent of the time. The outrage over the president is, for the most part, all talk.”
Such critiques were, for the most part, reductive and disingenuous.
When Trump entered office, he effectively contracted out all the policymaking decisions, the things that would require votes, to two people: Ryan and McConnell. They put forth a legislative agenda that, while arguably flawed on the policy front and hypocritical on the process front, was broadly consistent with a contemporary Republican platform: repealing Obamacare, cutting taxes, rebuilding the military, slashing regulations, reforming the Veterans Affairs department, and above all, confirming conservative judges to the federal courts.
To support these items was to vote not for Trump’s position, but for the party’s orthodoxy. Expecting lawmakers to vote against their own policy interests to make a statement of disapproval about Trump was asking them to cut off their nose to spite their face.
“What we have is a president who was willing to sign what we wanted done,” Corker says. “Now, the tax bill to me could have been better, I had trouble with it, and you know, it’s a bet on America, and we took that bet. But these things are what Republicans are: We believe in feeding the animal spirits of business. We believe in conservative judges. We believe in tax reform. And what we had was a president who was willing to sign those things into law. That was our agenda—it wasn’t his agenda.”
But what of the president’s agenda? This is where the notion of craven acquiescence gains legitimacy. Whether it was his multiple attempts to implement a travel ban that he admitted on multiple occasions was targeted toward Muslims, or his signing of a morbidly obese spending bill, or his launching multiple trade wars that hurt the American worker, Trump’s abandonment of conservatism (“classical liberalism,” as it was once celebrated) was met with little resistance from the right. And many of those who did voice opposition were careful to couch it in support for the president himself, fearful of provoking the tweeter in chief.
Perhaps the most egregious example of Republican silence in the face of Trumpism came in the late spring of 2018, when the administration decided, on the advice of policy adviser Stephen Miller and his former boss, Jeff Sessions, to enforce a “zero tolerance” policy at the southern border. Meant to deter families from crossing into the United States illegally, the program resulted in nearly two thousand migrant children being separated from their parents in one six-week stretch alone. The images of crying toddlers and abandoned youths being detained in chain link fence detention centers as their parents awaited sentencing were ghastly; worse was the bureaucratic ineptitude that caused months-long delays before some kids were reunited with their parents.
As had become customary, certain elements of the media played into the president’s hand; at one point, a photograph of children sleeping in cages went viral online, annotated by journalists with sharp words for the White House, only for it to become clear that the photo had been taken when Obama was president. Such carelessness allowed Trump to falsely equate his enforcement with that of previous administrations and blame the opposition party for his manufactured crisis. “I hate the children being taken away,” the president said from the White House. “The Democrats have to change their law—that’s their law.”
It was not their law. Previous presidents had used discretion to avoid splitting up families while adjudicating their cases; whereas Obama’s administration had detained kids who came on their own, Trump’s administration was actively separating children from their parents.
Many Republicans, including some of the fiercest immigration hawks in Congress, were nauseated by the scenes unfolding on the southern border. But most of them dared not criticize Trump. He had weaponized the issue of immigration too effectively in the past; with the midterm elections fast approaching and the conservative base showing signs of complacency, the last thing vulnerable Republicans wanted was to be called “soft” or “weak” by the president. Only when the pressure on him grew crushing—from party leaders, faith-based groups, and his own political advisers—did Trump relent, signing an executive order to end the zero-tolerance experiment.
The most lasting critiques of the president, and of his enablers, will extend far beyond policy. From the moment Trump took office, Republicans on Capitol Hill and throughout the administration would offer a common refrain: “Focus on what he does, not on what he says.” For all Trump’s bizarre behavior and inflammatory rhetoric, they explained, he was delivering on many policies for which the party had long hungered.
But this argument conveniently obscured a self-evident reality about the role of the presidency. Trump, as the American chief executive, is both the head of government and the head of state. His behavior and his rhetoric, therefore, were every bit as relevant as his policies. In certain instances, what the president said was actually more meaningful than what he did.
Take, for example, his relationship with Russia.
Chapter Twenty-Three
July 2018
“If that means going on Fox News and lying through their teeth about Trump, so be it.”
DONALD TRUMP AND VLADIMIR PUTIN STOOD SIDE BY SIDE IN HELSINKI, Finland, facing the world in a spectacle of unprecedented intrigue and unrivaled indignity.
Since his election, the American president had privately and publicly expressed doubts about Russia’s interference in the 2016 campaign. He grumbled that the entire story was an attempt to delegitimize his presidency, perhaps not appreciating the serendipity of suffering in such a manner after building his political brand on the foundation of delegitimizing his predecessor. Nine months prior to the Helsinki summit, after meeting with Putin on the sidelines of an economic forum in Asia, Trump told reporters, “He said he absolutely did not meddle in our election.”
This parroting of Putin’s denial came after a unanimous assessment from the U.S. intelligence community, in a report compiled by the FBI, CIA, NSA, and Dan Coats, Trump’s own hand-picked director of national intelligence, that concluded with “high confidence” that Russia meddled in the campaign with the purpose of electing Trump. The Senate Intelligence Committee, chaired by a Republican, had reached the same conclusion. (The House Intelligence Committee, consumed by partisan grandstanding, could not reach consensus on whether the sky was blue.) And just three days before the Helsinki summit, the Justice Department indicted twelve Russian nationals as part of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. They stood accused of working at the Kremlin’s direction to hack Democratic emails and computer networks.