And yet, halfway through the second year of Trump’s presidency, there were continued signs of progress. The most apparent: Trump’s decision in June to commute the sentence of a sixty-three-year-old woman, Alice Johnson, who was two decades into a life sentence for narcotics distribution.
The president’s move came after a meeting with Kim Kardashian, the reality TV starlet and wife of Kanye West, that was widely panned in Washington as something of a publicity stunt. Yet the rendezvous had been strategically arranged by Kushner. After inviting Kardashian into the Oval Office to hear more about Johnson’s case, Trump found himself agreeing that she should receive clemency. Kushner took this as a clear indication, he told his allies on Capitol Hill afterward, that the president could be persuaded of their broader reform efforts.
Several obstacles remained: John Kelly, a hard-boiled military man who shared much of Trump’s sensibilities on law enforcement, had cautioned against loosening sentencing laws. So had Sessions—though, as Kushner calculated, the attorney general’s disapproval was likely a net positive given Trump’s loathing for the man.
And then there was Tom Cotton. The Arkansas senator, a Harvard Law grad and retired Army captain who had seen tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, was Congress’s most vocal opponent of the criminal justice overhaul. He spent the summer and fall of 2018 warning any Republican who would listen that they would get “Willie Hortoned” in their future campaigns by voting to let convicts out early, a reference to the infamous race-baiting ad used against Michael Dukakis in 1988.
Cotton’s resistance vexed Kushner and his allies on Capitol Hill. The president, ever a fan of glimmering résumés, had been smitten with Cotton since meeting him in 2015, and the Arkansas senator was one of the few lawmakers who truly had the president’s ear. Of all the people susceptible to concerns of being portrayed as soft on crime, the reformers figured, none was more likely to buy Cotton’s argument than Trump.
It was a genuine shock, then, when in mid-November the president decided to throw his weight behind the First Step Act. The legislation, scaled back somewhat from the Obama-era effort, would enhance rehabilitation programs for current and former prisoners, provide new funding for antirecidivism initiatives, give judges more discretion in sentencing, reduce certain mandatory-minimum terms, and improve the conditions inside the penal system itself, including an expansion of employment programs.
“Americans from across the political spectrum can unite around prison-reform legislation that will reduce crime while giving our fellow citizens a chance at redemption,” Trump announced at the White House. “It’s the right thing to do. It’s the right thing to do.”
Standing behind the president, once again, was Senator Tim Scott. Just as he had a year earlier with the push for “Opportunity Zones” in the tax bill, Scott leveraged his complex alliance with Trump to lobby for the criminal justice legislation.
It was the latest evolution in the schizophrenic relationship between the Republican Party’s lone black senator and the man he carefully referred to as its “racially insensitive” president.
That same month, Scott had come under fire from the right for dealing the fatal blow to the nomination of a federal judge, Thomas Farr, who had a long record of disenfranchising African American voters. Predictably, when Scott chose to advance Farr’s nomination to a final vote (a procedural move that was in no way reflective of his verdict on Farr), he was met with standard vitriol from the left, with black leaders condemning him on social media and countless people piling on, calling him “Uncle Tom” and worse. When Scott killed Farr’s nomination a day later, there were few apologies to be found.
While walking his impossible tightrope, Scott was inching closer to discovering the formula for moving Trump—and, in some sense, decoding the mystery of what made him tick.
“Why would the president of the United States, a guy named Donald J. Trump, take this issue on? It ain’t because he’s racist. I think he’s doing it because he thinks it’s the right thing to do,” Scott said that month. “When you watch him on TV, it’s a presentation. When you sit down and talk with him, sometimes you move the needle. He’s not a guy that wants to be attacked. But if you come at him logically, I find that he takes time to listen. If you can get his attention and you’ve got something meaningful to say, he’ll listen to you.”
There was one final hurdle to clear: Mitch McConnell.
The Senate majority leader was much closer to Cotton’s worldview than Scott’s. Forever paranoid about his vulnerabilities on the right, McConnell privately worried that in the two years between passing a bill in 2018 and standing for reelection in 2020, all it would take was a single paroled criminal doing something heinous to end his career.
Trump leaned on McConnell in early December, dismissing the majority leader’s claims that there was no time on the legislative calendar for such a vote, and implicitly threatening to make his life miserable if he hung the effort out to dry. Finally, on December 11, McConnell announced his support. After some final tinkering to ensure a maximum number of GOP votes, the bill passed the Senate a week later on a tally of 87 to 12.
It was that rare moment of bonhomie in an age of bitter polarization. Off the Senate floor, Cory Booker, the young, black New Jersey Democrat, embraced Chuck Grassley, the old, white Iowa Republican.
The bill cleared the House on December 20, by a margin of 358 to 36, and was swiftly signed into law. It was rightly viewed as one of the landmark bipartisan achievements of the twenty-first century and it would not have been possible without the active support of the president.
This could have been the safe, feel-good high note that Trump chose to end the year on. Instead, with government funding set to expire on December 21, he decided to gamble.
Chapter Twenty-Six
December 2018
“We had Abraham Lincoln then.”
STEVE SCALISE WAS PERCHED INSIDE THE CAPITOL HILL CLUB, ENJOYING a glass of red wine on a frosty winter’s night, when he was interrupted by a phone call. He hurried to answer: It was his former colleague and the new White House chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney.
“The president is pissed,” Mulvaney told Scalise. “He feels like you guys sold him a bill of goods. He’s gonna veto this damn thing.”
It was Wednesday, December 19, and Washington appeared peaceful—from a distance. Though the government was scheduled to run out of funding on Friday night, there were few outward signs of panic. For the past week, Republicans on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue seemed to believe that Trump would have no choice but to sign a short-term package to keep the government running into February. Democrats weren’t budging on President Trump’s request for north of $5 billion to construct a border wall; and even if House Republicans unified behind such a proposal, muscling it through the lower chamber in the twilight of their majority, it stood zero chance of passing the Senate. With these realities in mind, and against the backdrop of Trump preemptively accepting blame for a shutdown, the White House was resigned to the president approving a stopgap measure with just $1.6 billion allocated for border security purposes.
By Wednesday evening, however, the president was worked into a lather. He had spent much of the day talking by phone with Jim Jordan and Mark Meadows. They had convinced Trump of something that was undoubtebly true: He had been played.