There would be no repairing the tattering of his image. In July of 2016, Ryan’s approval among Wisconsin’s likely voters was 50 percent favorable and 34 percent unfavorable, according to the Marquette University Law School poll.1 A month before the 2018 midterm elections, in a Marquette survey done with the same methodology, it had sunk to 41 percent favorable and 49 percent unfavorable.
Politics are cyclical by nature. The war for the future of the Republican Party, he assured himself, would rage on. But in the short term, the battle for the GOP’s heart and soul was finished. Trump had won—and Ryan would be remembered as both victim and accomplice.
WILLFULLY IGNORANT TO THE DETERIORATING PERCEPTIONS OF HIS reputation, Ryan was just as blind to the storm brewing inside the GOP conference.
When the House Republicans gathered in the Capitol basement on the morning of Thursday, December 20, Ryan expected a meeting that would be standard for moments such as these: complaints from the conservatives, pushback from the center-right, assurances of lemonade-making from the leadership, and ultimately, no real change in the trajectory of events.
The Speaker was mistaken.
His members were out for blood, and it wasn’t just the conservatives. For more than an hour, one lawmaker after another stood up to make the case for funding the border wall. It wasn’t that all of them were on board with the policy; in fact, many of them were not. Yet they all had grown tired of being accused back home of not supporting the president. The last thing they needed was Trump accusing them of treason as they headed home for the holiday recess. If a shutdown amounted to coal in their stockings, a warlike tweet from the president was akin to the Christmas tree catching fire.
There was every reason to fear such an onslaught. Over the past twelve hours, word had spread rapidly throughout the conference of Trump’s fury at being stuck with a short-term spending bill that wouldn’t fund his wall. Scalise had even warned members that the White House was asking for a copy of his “whip check,” an accounting of which way lawmakers were leaning on a vote. Trump was preparing to lash out at any House Republican who didn’t stand with him.
If it wasn’t clear what needed to be done, Steve Womack’s speech erased any doubts. The Arkansas lawmaker was so low-key, so soft-spoken, that his colleagues weren’t sure they had ever heard him talk in the House GOP’s weekly meeting. This wasn’t surprising; it was the hard-liners who typically dominated the open-mic portion, and Womack, a longtime ally of the leadership, was nobody’s idea of a hard-liner.
On this morning, however, Womack walked to the microphone with a simple message for his colleagues. “We’ve got to have this fight,” he said, “and we’ve got to have it now.”
Much as with Boehner’s situation in the fall of 2013, Ryan was trapped: The Speaker would either be blamed for abandoning a core promise to the party’s base or vilified for leading the government into a shutdown. And no matter how little leverage Boehner had in those days, Ryan, whose career would expire in two weeks, now had even less. He was the lamest of ducks.
As the House meeting broke up, lawmakers saw their phones sparkle to life with a Twitter alert. “When I begrudgingly signed the Omnibus Bill, I was promised the Wall and Border Security by leadership,” Trump wrote. “Would be done by end of year (NOW). It didn’t happen! We foolishly fight for Border Security for other countries—but not for our beloved U.S.A. Not good!”
A few hours later, as the president convened a small summit of lawmakers at the White House, it struck everyone as a most fitting conclusion to the 115th Congress. For the past two years, there had been a tug-of-war for Trump’s political soul, pitting Ryan and McCarthy against Jordan and Meadows. Now all four of them, plus a handful of others, were huddled around a coffee table in the Oval Office, pleading their cases to the president.
There wasn’t much suspense: They all recognized that Trump’s mind had been made up. As it became evident what he wanted them to do—vote on a bill authorizing $5 billion to build a wall on the southern border, then dare the Senate to reject it, somehow believing this would force Democrats to negotiate—the president’s staff jumped in on Ryan’s behalf. “This is absolutely crazy,” said Shahira Knight, the legislative affairs director, who commanded Trump’s respect. “It’s never going to work.”
But the train had left the station. It was nothing if not poetic: Some of the same conservative agitators who had prodded Boehner into a shutdown five years earlier—Meadows, Jordan, Mulvaney—were back at it. At his winter home in Florida, the ex-Speaker was swirling a glass and cackling at the “legislative terrorists” he’d found unfit to serve in Congress who were now running the federal government.
Later that night, after slapping together a bill that met the president’s demands, and juicing it with millions of dollars in disaster-relief funds to win over some skeptics, the House passed it by a tally of 217 to 185.
Many senators had already left town for the holidays; now the House was expecting them to come back for a vote on their newly passed bill. They made plans to return, some moving more urgently than others. There was little point to this exercise: The House bill did not have the support of all fifty-one Republicans, much less the additional nine Democratic voters needed to surmount a filibuster. It stood no chance of passing the Senate, and everyone knew it.
Trump made a game effort Friday afternoon to work the phones, trying to sell GOP senators on his master plan to squeeze funding out of red-state Democrats eager to avoid a shutdown over the issue of border security. But he was living in a fantasy land. Nothing resembling the $5.7 billion House package was going to be approved by the Senate. And given how the president had already bragged to America during the surreal Oval Office meeting with Pelosi and Schumer of his willingness to own the shutdown, Democrats weren’t fearful of taking the heat.
As the clock struck midnight on Saturday, December 22, two things were apparent. First, this government shutdown was every bit as pointless as its Obamacare-inspired predecessor in 2013; neither one stood a chance of effecting the desired policy change. Second, this one was going to last a lot longer than seventeen days. With Democrats scheduled to seize control of the House on January 3—at which point their leverage would only increase—there was scant chance of a quick resolution. Both sides were digging in, understanding that the fight over Trump’s border wall was about a whole lot more.
Lawmakers were told to stand at the ready; a sudden call might come with news of a breakthrough in the negotiations. They scoffed and raced to the airports, hopping flights back home to celebrate the holidays.
The only person stuck in Washington was Trump. Convinced by aides that it would look bad if he left for Mar-a-Lago while tens of thousands of federal employees were being furloughed, the president remained in the White House, spending his days watching Fox News and dialing friends, asking when they thought the Democrats would cave.
IN AMERICA’S TWO-PARTY SYSTEM, ECONOMIC VITALITY HAS TRADITIONALLY acted as the fulcrum for its political swings. When the economy performs well under the president’s party, the opposing party is compelled toward the middle; when the economy suffers under the president’s party, the opposing party is free to drift toward its base. These rules are not absolute. But particularly in the previous century, the ideological adventurism of a party occurred while out of power and during times of economic turmoil: Democrats in response to Hoover, Republicans in response to Carter, and, in a case historians will study for centuries, Republicans in response to Obama.