The president’s lawyer was implicating him in a major federal crime, one that had nothing to do with the Russia investigation he obsessed over. But the day was just getting started.
Minutes after Cohen fired his legal projectile, Manafort was found guilty on eight counts of tax fraud and bank fraud. The Virginia jury was unable to reach verdicts on ten other counts, resulting in mistrials, but it hardly mattered: Manafort was facing up to 240 years in prison, the severest conviction of a sitting president’s former aide since Watergate. Having gone big-game hunting, Mueller was beginning to mount some serious antlers on the walls of Washington.
Rounding out a day unlike any other in recent political memory, Duncan Hunter, the California GOP congressman, was indicted on sixty counts of using campaign funds for personal purposes. Hunter had long been renowned as one of Capitol Hill’s shadiest characters; stories of his hard partying and sexual exploits with staffers was the stuff of legend. He was also the second member of Congress to endorse Trump for president. As it so happened, the first, New York congressman Chris Collins, had been arrested by the FBI two weeks earlier and charged with insider trading.
(Soon after, Trump rebuked Sessions and the Justice Department for bringing charges against the Republicans ahead of the November elections. “Two easy wins now in doubt because there is not enough time. Good job Jeff,” he tweeted. The law-and-order party’s leader was asking the attorney general to play goalie for his political allies.)
The dazzling convergence of criminality surrounding Trump didn’t seem widely bothersome to Republicans on Capitol Hill. Perfunctory statements of being “troubled” by the developments notwithstanding, few members of the president’s party offered anything in the way of outward alarm at the events of August 21. Some, including John Cornyn of Texas, the second-ranking Senate Republican, even took the opportunity to point out that neither Cohen’s pleas nor Manafort’s convictions did anything to prove “collusion” with Russia.
Predictably, the president’s base was even less cowed. Arriving in West Virginia that fateful Tuesday for an evening rally with the faithful, the president found himself surrounded by what could only be described as Fifth Avenue Republicans—the type who, as the president had once said, would stick by him even if he shot someone. The day’s historic events went unappreciated by many in the crowd who, upon Trump’s mention of Hillary Clinton, chanted, without an ounce of irony, “Lock her up! Lock her up! Lock her up!”
Their devotion was not without explanation. Despite all the struggles and setbacks of recent months, the president had delivered on more promises. He had withdrawn from the Iran deal. He had officially relocated the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. He had brought North Korea to the negotiating table.
And most important, he had nominated another conservative to the Supreme Court. The retirement of Anthony Kennedy, the court’s longtime swing vote on so many major decisions, had handed the new president a second appointment in as many years. Consulting once more with his conservative allies in Congress and his advisers at the Federalist Society, Trump had nominated an experienced judge with strong legal credentials and unquestioned conservative bona fides: Brett Kavanaugh.
Chapter Twenty-Four
September 2018
“We are better than this. America is better than this.”
IT WAS A SEND-OFF BEFITTING A TITAN OF THE REPUBLIC: THE FLAG-DRAPED coffin, the bagpipes, the angelic chorus, the stained-glass windows, and the gothic pillared arches encasing a sanctuary of some three thousand luminaries bidding a final farewell.
John McCain, the senator and statesman and prisoner of war who had spent five and half years in the Hanoi Hilton after refusing early release, had succumbed to cancer. He was eighty-one.
The Saturday-morning service, on September 1 at the National Cathedral, paid a grand homage to McCain. But it also felt like a memorial for Washington itself, a capital city that under President Trump no longer seemed capable, as the famed “maverick” was, of balancing fights with friendships, of divorcing disagreement from disrespect, of recognizing the basic difference between opponents and enemies.
With organ notes echoing throughout the cavernous complex before the ceremony, they mingled and shook hands and scanned the room for More Important People as they might at any black-tie affair. Former presidents and vice presidents elicited camera clicks. Senators compared notes with ambassadors. Military officials and government wise men and media personalities craned their necks. Jared and Ivanka held court with perfect strangers. The commotion outside—police escorts, a procession of black Cadillacs, hundreds of congressmen and senators being bused in, all with onlookers lining the surrounding sidewalks—made it a quintessentially DC occasion, a marriage of exclusivity and self-importance. The only thing missing from this meeting of official Washington was the chief executive of official Washington.
The president’s absence testified to his rivalry with McCain; they had blistered one another relentlessly, in public and in private, ever since Trump infamously mocked the senator for having been captured while flying a combat mission in Vietnam. More fundamentally, though, Trump’s absence reflected his tormented relationship with a town that purports to revere the virtues he was accused of lacking: courage, prudence, service, conviction, wisdom, humility, forgiveness, honor, and above all, a patriotism that transcends tribalism.
Trump could not be held solely responsible for the fractured nature of modern American politics. McCain’s idyllic Washington, one defined by ferocious battles waged with mutual goodwill, had long been on life support. For much of Bill Clinton’s presidency, and accelerating through the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, the electorate and its representatives were hardened by a combination of class warfare, zero-sum legislating, and cultural polarization that invited Trump’s ascent. Having pulled the plug—and smothered the better angels of our nature with a pillow for good measure—the president found himself at once disinvited from a singular Washington gathering and yet dominating its consciousness.
The elephant in the room was the president not in the room.
Though his name was never mentioned, the eulogists invoked Trump with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer. It was only eleven minutes into the service when Meghan McCain launched the opening salvo with an emotional tribute to her father. “We gather here to mourn the passing of American greatness—the real thing, not cheap rhetoric from men who will never come near the sacrifice he gave so willingly, nor the opportunistic appropriation of those who lived lives of comfort and privilege while he suffered and served.”
Ten minutes later, choking back tears, she added, “The America of John McCain has no need to be made great again, because America was always great.”
The applause was at first tepid, and then thunderous; she was the only one of the five speakers to be so interrupted. Each of the subsequent eulogists lauded McCain in a manner that, even if unintentionally, contributed to what became a ceaseless rebuke of his party’s current leader.
This was all very much by design. McCain had planned his memorial down to the last detail, making clear that Trump was not to be invited. When the president learned of this from Kushner, his son-in-law, who had been tipped off by McCain’s son-in-law, the conservative writer Ben Domenech, Trump projected nonchalance. Yet he privately seethed at the affront and remained so bothered by it that he refused to lower the White House flag to half-staff when the senator died. Only after spirited lobbying from the likes of Mike Pence and John Kelly did the president relent, ordering the flag lowered at what appeared to be the lone place in Washington where it wasn’t already.