Meanwhile, in his first two years, Trump has accomplished more for Republicans than any individual in three decades. Setting aside everything else—a tax law whose benefits are not fully demonstrated, a host of executive actions that can be easily unwound by a Democratic administration—Trump’s judicial appointments alone have altered the landscape of American life for a generation. As of April 2018, Trump had confirmed one hundred federal judges, far outpacing Obama at the same point in their presidencies. Trump’s rapid makeover of the judiciary included two associate justices of the Supreme Court, tipping its balance decidedly to the right, and also 20 percent of all seats on the federal appeals courts, as Bloomberg Law reported, a percentage that will climb ever higher throughout 2019 and 2020 thanks to a GOP-controlled Senate with lax confirmation procedures and little else to do legislatively.
It is this “transformation of the courts,” as Mitch McConnell describes it, that rationalizes for many Republicans their backing of Trump. Even those who cringe at his autocratic mannerisms, who moan privately at his social media habits, who worry perpetually about the lasting damage done to national institutions and international relationships, see in him someone who has positioned conservatives for long-term victories on myriad issues that will come before the courts: on abortion, gun rights, immigration, religious expression, privacy, voting restrictions, environmental regulations, and virtually everything else that exists along the political fault lines of modern America. Given how bleak things looked for the GOP at the outset of Obama’s presidency, with his party in unified control of the government and every expectation that Democrats would be the party overseeing this sweeping judicial renaissance, Republicans will take it.
“You have to remember, it was a pretty grim situation at the beginning of this ten-year period,” McConnell says. “When I woke up the morning after Election Night 2016, I thought to myself, ‘These opportunities don’t come along very often. Let’s see how we can maximize it.’”
Republicans have, in many ways, maximized their opportunity with Trump. But at what cost?
THE DANGER IN POLITICAL SPASMS TRANSCENDS PARTISAN CONFLICT. What we see in Trump’s America is not just two parties repelling one another, but their voters living and thinking and communicating in ways alien to the other side.
Marco Rubio has been preoccupied with this phenomenon since departing the 2016 race. Retroactively analyzing, as all the candidates have, what he missed and what could have been done to counter the appeal of Trump, the Florida senator worries that government-sanctioned polarization has dissolved the nation’s basic sense of community.
“Twenty years ago, you and I might disagree strongly on politics, but we’re on the board of the same PTA, and our kids go to the same school, they play on the same sports teams, and we go to the same church on Sunday. I knew you as a whole person,” Rubio says. “Today, we increasingly know people only by their political views—or we just don’t know people unlike [us] at all. And that’s particularly pronounced in urban-suburban settings, where you have people who live blocks away from each other but know very little or nothing about each other. And in fact, they have stereotypes about one another that just reinforce it. You add to that the fact that they don’t interact socially, they don’t interact socioeconomically, they don’t interact culturally, they might not even be consuming the same news and information, and the result is you have people living right next to each other who are complete and total strangers.”
Rubio says he did not appreciate the depths of our national tribalism until he ran a national campaign. Knowing what he knows now, he wishes he spent more time discussing it, appealing to Americans to step out of their silos and repair the societal bonds necessary for government to begin functioning again. At this stage, he worries, it may be too late.
“History didn’t begin in 2001, but for the purposes of this [discussion] it did. Because if 9/11 happened today, I’m not convinced our reaction as a nation would be the same,” Rubio says. “If 9/11 happened today, unfortunately, one of the first things you would hear is the assignment of blame through a political lens. People would need some theory as to why this happened. And that’s true of any major event: hurricanes, school shootings, pandemics. The immediate reaction is we need a political villain. And so, 9/11 was that last unique period of time.”
John Boehner offers a similar analysis. If anything, as dark as it sounds, the former Speaker believes it may take something worse than 9/11 to snap the country out of its self-hatred.
“At some point we’re going to have to realize we’re Americans first, and Democrats and Republicans and conservatives and liberals second. The country is more important than what each of the parties believe in,” he says. “It’s going to take an intervening event for Americans to realize that.”
An intervening event?
“Something cataclysmic,” Boehner responds, gazing upward.
It has been argued that politics is downstream from culture; that elected officials govern in a way that reflects the rhythms of society itself. This is undeniably true. Politicians are reactionaries, not leaders. They achieve and maintain power by responding to public opinion, not by driving it.
Still, it’s difficult to see America finding its way out of this predicament of mass polarization without government setting an example. Boehner likes to say that Congress is “nothing more than a slice of America,” an institution comprising “some of the smartest people” in the country and “some of the dumbest,” “some of the nicest people” and “some that are Nazis.” Because of this, lawmakers are every bit as ghettoized as the people and places they represent, projecting onto Congress the anxieties and divisions that stir their constituents back home.
Biden, who spent three and a half decades in the U.S. Senate before becoming vice president, recalls the glory days that predated social media and talk radio and cable news programming. Back then, Biden says, lawmakers in both parties understood that socializing across the aisle was a significant part of doing their jobs. “It was an era that allowed us to get so much done, because we actually got to know one another,” he says. “We got to know each other’s families; we got to know all about each other. When you know somebody it’s awful hard to dislike them, even when you fundamentally disagree with them. . . . When you know, God forbid, that their wife is going through a bout with breast cancer. Or their son has a serious addiction problem. Or their daughter just lost a baby. You know what I mean? It’s hard.”
He remembers the day his rose-tinted version of Washington ceased to exist.
“At the end of the last year of the administration, I decided to go up to the private senators’ dining room just to sit and have lunch with some of my Republican friends and Democratic friends,” Biden says. “And as I walked in—I realized it doesn’t exist anymore. There’s no place for Republican and Democratic senators to sit down and eat together. I’m being literal. There used to be two dining rooms: The dining room I can take you into as a guest, and the dining room only a senator can walk into. It had two great big conference tables and a buffet. It’s gone.”
Biden barks out a question—“What the hell’s happening, man?”—before answering it himself.