McCain, meanwhile, had arranged for his former rivals Bush and Obama to deliver remarks. There was no shortage of symbolism in the two-time presidential candidate’s desire to be eulogized by the two men who had denied him the White House. When McCain spoke by phone with Obama a few months before his passing, and the forty-fourth president said that he would be honored to speak at his funeral, McCain described it to friends as one of the happiest moments of his life. It would be his parting message to America, he said, that patriotism has nothing to do with political affiliation.
Towering over the crowd from the cathedral’s raised pulpit, Obama recalled the famous moment from 2008 in which McCain scolded one of his supporters for suggesting that the Democratic nominee wasn’t an American. “I was grateful, but I wasn’t surprised,” Obama said. “He saw himself as defending America’s character, not just mine.”
Left loudly unsaid: Trump lying for years about Obama’s birthplace. Leaving nothing to interpretation, Obama added, “So much of our politics, our public life, our public discourse, can seem small and mean and petty, trafficking in bombast and insult and phony controversies and manufactured outrage. It’s a politics that pretends to be brave and tough but in fact is born of fear. John called on us to be bigger than that. He called on us to be better than that.”
The other man who bested McCain for the presidency, George W. Bush, could afford to be less direct. It was just a few months earlier that he (along with brother Jeb) had insisted that Trump not attend the funeral of their mother, the former First Lady Barbara Bush. Still, he, too, got his point across. “John was, above all, a man with a code,” Bush said, one who “lived by a set of public virtues,” “detested the abuse of power,” and “could not abide bigots and swaggering despots.” Alluding to one of his own conflicts with McCain, over the use of torture as an interrogation technique, Bush noted, “At various points throughout his long career, John confronted policies and practices that he believed were unworthy of his country. To the face of those in authority, John McCain would insist: We are better than this. America is better than this.”
Not that any of these critiques bothered Trump, who spent the morning of McCain’s funeral tweeting about deep-state sedition and Canadian trade exploitation before heading to his Northern Virginia golf club. There were, after all, disparate realities to consider: one inside the holy halls of the National Cathedral where powerful people mourned the death of decency, and another in the surrounding city where many of those same powerful people drove nails ever deeper into its coffin on a daily basis. Indeed, the contrast between the McCain Washington remembered in death (valiant, virtuous) and the McCain Washington loathed in life (warmongering, irascible) was something to behold.
And there was a greater juxtaposition still: this one between the virtue-signaling, convention-worshipping insiders of the capital and the mad-as-hell, burn-it-down voters in the provinces.
McCain’s funeral showed that Washington wasn’t Trump’s town. But it was still his country.
IN THE MIDDLE OF SEPTEMBER, WHITE HOUSE POLITICAL DIRECTOR Bill Stepien sat down in the presidential residence across from Trump and delivered a wake-up call.
Polling showed that Democratic voters were highly motivated ahead of the midterm elections, Stepien explained, while Republican voters were not—and Trump was feeding the complacency of his base by downplaying the threat in November. “Mr. President,” Stepien told him, “please stop saying ‘Red Wave.’”
Trump was perplexed. Having fully bought into the narrative of Republican invincibility, supported by boisterous crowds, a string of special election victories, and of course, his own experience defying the political prognosticators, the president thoroughly enjoyed turning the Democrats’ “Blue Wave” mantra on its head. He struggled to imagine any scenario in which the nation delivered a rebuke to his government. Sensing this, and playing to his ego, Stepien and senior administration officials encouraged Trump to mobilize Republicans by making the election all about him. “Tell them that you’re on the ballot,” Stepien urged the president.
There was another pressing imperative, something White House aides were pounding into Trump’s head as he prepared to travel the country campaigning on behalf of Senate candidates. “You cannot—absolutely cannot—attack Christine Blasey Ford,” Kellyanne Conway warned him.
Just around that time, what had once seemed a pro forma confirmation process for Brett Kavanaugh to replace Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court—tipping its balance rightward for years, perhaps decades, to come—was being derailed by bombshell accusations that Kavanaugh had attempted to rape Ford when the two were teenagers. The president’s allies knew restraint would not come easy: He had been accused during the 2016 campaign of sexual misconduct by at least fifteen women, and when Ford’s accusations surfaced, his first response in private was to liken Kavanaugh’s plight to his own.
To the shock of just about everyone at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Trump stayed on message. At his first public appearance following the twin talks from Stepien and Conway, he addressed the Kavanaugh situation with the most delicate touch imaginable. “Brett Kavanaugh, and I’m not saying anything about anybody else, Brett Kavanaugh is one of the finest human beings you will ever have the privilege of knowing or meeting,” the president said at a rally in Las Vegas. “So, we’ll let it play out, and I think everything is going to be just fine. This is a high-quality person,” he added. (Speaking to Sean Hannity before the rally, Trump did question why Ford’s story hadn’t been reported to the FBI “thirty-six years ago.”)
Similarly, the president showed discipline in deleting “Red Wave” from his midterm lexicon, agreeing to make the election a referendum on himself. “Get out in 2018,” he told a Missouri crowd a few days later, “because you are voting for me in 2018.”
This strategy would prove helpful to protecting and expanding the Senate majority. But it did nothing to slow the Democrats’ stampede toward control of the House. After two years of roller-coaster news cycles driven by a president who thrived on tumult and governed with a showman’s attention to shiny objects, Democrats were poised to regain the House majority by following a simple set of rules: Tailor the message to fit the district, talk about policy, and above all, don’t take Trump’s bait.
Whereas Trump sought to paint the opposition party as deviant radicals bent on the republic’s destruction, many of the most effective Democratic challengers were running as centrists, emphasizing their affection for guns and objection to the growing debt. And whereas Trump sought to make the election about himself, Democratic candidates were methodical in focusing the electorate’s energy on the alleged failures of his party: Republican tax reform that had exploded the deficit and disproportionately benefited the wealthy; Republican efforts to take away health care access from millions of people; and Republican politicians whose acquiescence to Trump had deepened the country’s partisan divide and further diminished its faith in government.
With the GOP expecting a full-frontal progressive assault on the president, leading Democrats—from Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, to Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chairman Ben Ray Luján, to the party’s biggest donors and elder statesmen—advised House candidates to run hyperlocal, nonhysterical campaigns that avoided Trump as much as possible while emphasizing independence from the national party. In dozens of cases, this meant pledging not to support Pelosi as Speaker.