But it wasn’t until he finally, fully removed the veil that Republicans felt compelled to act. “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization—how did that language become offensive?” King said in an interview with the New York Times.
When it was published in January, the House of Representatives voted 424 to 1 in favor of rebuking King; the lone dissenter was a Democrat who wanted King formally censured. Meanwhile, the party’s leadership removed King from his committees. This would essentially make him useless to his constituents; not taking any chances, Iowa’s GOP leaders worked behind the scenes to promote a challenger in the upcoming 2020 primary, a state lawmaker with big donors and deep roots in the Fourth District.
But none of this guaranteed King’s defeat: At his first town hall meeting back home after the hullabaloo in Washington, he received a standing ovation.
THE SHUTDOWN WAS A FITTING CONCLUSION TO THE REPUBLICAN PARTY’S unified ownership of Washington—and a most appropriate beginning to the era of divided government.
“The Wall” had become such an all-eclipsing rhetorical commitment for Trump, both to his base and to the skeptics who questioned his ability to build it, that the president made little effort to understand the policy itself. Nobody who had studied the southern border, Republican or Democrat, thought a physical barrier across the entirety of it, or even much of it, made sense.
“A wall from sea to shining sea is the single most expensive and single least effective way to secure the border,” Will Hurd, the Republican congressman and former CIA agent, said after Trump took office.
Hurd would know: His district, stretching from San Antonio to El Paso, includes more of the U.S.-Mexico border, 820 miles, than that of any member of Congress. A national security hawk who studied and lived the border issue every day, Hurd reached the conclusion that a wall simply wasn’t going to work. Traffickers would tunnel under or climb over. There were a few urban stretches, perhaps forty or fifty miles in all, where see-through fencing would be effective and necessary. But a physical barrier wasn’t remotely the catchall solution Trump claimed it was.
What Hurd offered on behalf of experts on the ground: cutting-edge fiber optic cables and high-definition cameras across the border, monitored by a beefed-up border patrol, that would funnel the flow of drugs and migrants into the legal ports of entry. There, at border inspection stations, the federal government would invest billions of dollars in new technologies capable of screening for the people and products Washington wanted to keep out.
Even as Trump came to understand this argument, the White House preferred to push the dichotomy of The Wall, a symbolic contrast between Republicans who wanted to secure the border and Democrats who didn’t. This allowed the two parties to talk past each other, inflating resolvable differences while ignoring easily discovered common ground.
When conservative journalist Byron York pointed out the “supreme weirdness” of the shutdown, indicating the consensus around what many Republicans wanted (fencing in urban sectors, more boots on the ground, technology at ports of entry), George Conway, the Republican lawyer and husband of White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, responded, “Not weird at all. Trump is a master at alienating people he ought to be trying to, and should be able to, persuade. And that’s because he can’t make a coherent argument. He’s incompetent.”
Indeed, it should have been no problem for the president to sell Americans on these ideas, reminding them that Democrats once supported most of them. Instead, his hang-up on The Wall, a “manhood thing,” as Pelosi suggested to her colleagues, left him thrashing about as the shutdown dragged on. There was no happy ending possible. Trump had gone from promising that Mexico would pay for the Wall, to withholding paychecks from federal employees until the U.S. Congress promised to pay for the Wall.
In a meeting with Democratic leaders in the first week of January, Trump threatened to keep the government closed indefinitely—for months, maybe years—until he got his wall money. Then, speaking from the Rose Garden, he said he might declare a national emergency to procure funding for the project.
It was an absurd idea; aside from shattering the principles of limited government, such a maneuver would be immediately tied up in the courts. And, as some Republicans recognized, it was a slippery slope, constitutionally and otherwise. If a Republican president were to seize funding for the purpose of building a border wall, what was to stop a Democratic president from doing the same, but in pursuit of universal health care, or climate change regulation, or whatever else the left might demand?
Moreover, the idea was deeply insincere at an intellectual and ideological level. A national emergency is for emergency scenarios, addressing an urgent problem that can be addressed in no other way. For the previous two years, Republicans had controlled both chambers of Congress. There were a million ways in which appropriators could have shifted numbers around and delivered a steady stream of funding—for the wall, for other security measures, and for the “humanitarian crisis” Trump was now emphasizing. But they didn’t. It had never been an urgent priority for GOP lawmakers, and the president was too ineffectual to convince them otherwise. Now that they had incurred his wrath, many of those same lawmakers were signaling their support for an unprecedented power grab.
“Democrats continue to refuse to negotiate in good faith or appropriate any money for border barriers,” Meadows tweeted on January 11. “If they won’t compromise, POTUS should use asset forfeiture money or other discretionary fees to start construction. If not, he should declare a national emergency. It’s time.”
This was the Freedom Caucus chairman, a leader of the conservative wing of the pro-liberty, small-government party, urging the president to steal private property to build a wall.
Amazingly, Trump continued to listen to the people who had steered him into this cul-de-sac, Meadows and Mulvaney above the rest. One Republican whom Trump never spoke with throughout the crisis: Hurd. Despite being the only Republican from a border district, and representing more of it than anyone in Congress, the Texas lawmaker waited for a call that never came.
Years earlier, when Hurd left the CIA, he did so because of his outrage at the low caliber of people being sent to Congress. He met many of them while working as an agent, tasked with briefing lawmakers during their trips to the Middle East. Some didn’t understand the basic distinction between Sunni and Shia Muslims.
Hurd’s departure from the CIA confounded senior national security officials who saw in him a budding superstar. Robert Gates, the former defense secretary who served eight presidents of both parties, issued the first political endorsement of his entire life when Hurd ran for Congress, and suggested that he expected to see Hurd in the White House one day.
For the time being, however, Hurd was stuck dealing with the same low-caliber politicians—and none more so than Trump. This was the state of the modern GOP: As its president shut down the government because of an irrational fight over building a border wall, he did not bother to have a single conversation with the party’s lone border-district congressman and its foremost expert on the policies in dispute.
“We had twenty-five hundred furloughed workers at a food bank in San Antonio last week. I just served some more of them at a soup kitchen in DC,” Hurd said on January 23. “Here, at the seat of power in the free world, we’re forcing federal employees to eat at soup kitchens, while China just launched a mission to the dark side of the moon.”