“We’ve stopped talking to one another.”
WITH THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT REOPENED THREE WEEKS INTO THE new Congress, and cooler heads in both chambers prevailing to keep it open, President Trump found himself entering a period of relative calm. No Supreme Court vacancies to fill. No immediate geopolitical crises to confront. No signature policy initiatives to spearhead.
That left him to focus on his reelection efforts. Those efforts, in the opening months of 2019, included declaring a national emergency at the southern border and threatening to close it altogether if Mexico failed to stop illegal crossings; toying with a return to the brutal family-separation policy; proposing that all undocumented immigrants be forcibly sent to so-called sanctuary cities, a stunt that his own aides dismissed as absurd; firing his Homeland Security secretary and purging the department’s leadership; endorsing a contentious lower-court decision to invalidate the Affordable Care Act without any readied replacement plan; and responding to a series of controversial (arguably anti-Semitic) remarks from Ilhan Omar, a Muslim freshman congresswoman, by tweeting a video splicing clips of her speaking with footage of 9/11, accompanied by a caption: “WE WILL NEVER FORGET!”
Two common threads emerged. First, for Trump, these are all tried-and-true methods of mobilizing his supporters. The president’s renewed emphasis on that which galvanized conservatives in 2016—the dangers of immigration, the evils of Obamacare, the potency of us-versus-them nationalism—suggests that Trump’s reelection campaign will look and sound identical to his maiden bid four years earlier.
Second, with a few exceptions, Republicans in Congress did nothing to curb these policy decisions or rebuke the president’s behaviors.
Even in declaring his national emergency at the southern border to seize funding that Congress failed to appropriate—a patently unconstitutional power grab—Trump faced little resistance from the purported party of small government. A dozen Senate Republicans joined with Democrats to overturn the declaration, forcing Trump to issue the first veto of his administration. But the other forty-one Senate Republicans went along with Trump, compromising their credibility and inviting a future Democratic president to invoke similar powers to deal with gun violence or climate change or whatever else garners executive enthusiasms. In the case of those senators facing reelection in 2020, such as Thom Tillis, Ben Sasse, and McConnell himself, the reasoning was straightforward: They needed to stay in Trump’s good graces.
The elemental prerequisite for GOP lawmakers attempting to keep their job is to stay out of the president’s crosshairs, to avoid antagonizing his supporters back in their states and districts. This requires considerable sacrifices, chief among them ideological consistency. But it’s a small price to pay for another term with a salary of $174,000; fully funded trips around the world; sprawling staffs catering to their every whim; power-flexing appearances on cable television; black-tie dinners and top-dollar fund-raisers and seats at the table with some of the world’s most powerful and well-connected people.
In spite of this culture of allegiance within the Republican Party—enforced through fear, incentivized by proximity to power—Trump still had reason to look over his shoulder.
In late February, America was treated to seven hours of must-see TV when Michael Cohen, the president’s former lawyer, testified in front of the House Oversight Committee.
“I am ashamed because I know what Mr. Trump is,” Cohen said in his opening statement. “He is a racist. He is a con man. He is a cheat.”
The witness did not require much leading. Cohen presented as evidence a personal check from Trump, signed while in office as president, reimbursing him for the hush money paid to Stormy Daniels. He also alleged that Trump told him to lie about the timing of the Moscow building project; that Trump “knew from Roger Stone in advance about the WikiLeaks drop of emails” designed to hurt Hillary Clinton’s campaign; that Trump had prior knowledge of his son’s meeting with the Kremlin lawyer in the summer of 2016; and that Trump lied about his financials (and potentially committed tax fraud) in the pursuit of bank loans. Cohen also warned that if the president lost his bid for reelection, “there will never be a peaceful transition of power.”
Trump’s old admonitions were proving prophetic: The “fixer” was causing him a lot of problems.
Republicans on the panel did not challenge these accusations about the president’s conduct. In fact, they asked hardly any questions about Trump at all. Instead, they took turns attacking Cohen’s credibility, portraying him as a jilted, star-seeking grifter who was headed to jail for lying to Congress already.
They had every reason to do so: The witness was an admitted perjurer, someone whose testimony under normal circumstances wouldn’t be taken seriously. Yet these were not normal circumstances. And for all the reasons to remain skeptical of Cohen, here were powerful members of the legislative branch, presented by a witness with damning claims of misconduct by the head of the executive branch, showing not the slightest interest in examining them.
It was a chilling dereliction of duty. And it was rooted in the same motivation that Cohen says kept him shackled to Trump, doing his dirty work, for the previous decade: a fear of disloyalty.
“I did the same thing that you’re doing now for ten years. I protected Mr. Trump for ten years,” Cohen told the Republicans. “The more people that follow Mr. Trump as I did blindly are going to suffer the same consequences that I’m suffering.”
EXPLOSIVE AS IT WAS, COHEN’S TESTIMONY FAILED TO INFLICT TANGIBLE damage on the president. But it succeeded in further whetting Washington’s voracious appetite for something that could: Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election and Trump’s obstruction of the investigation thereof.
On March 22, 2019, twenty-two months following Mueller’s appointment, the special counsel delivered his report to the Justice Department. The person responsible for digesting it and producing a summary to the public: William Barr, the new attorney general who had been confirmed to the post just a month earlier. For his first two years in office, Trump complained incessantly that Jeff Sessions did not have his back politically. He would find no such fault with Barr.
After forty-eight hours of frenzied anticipation, the attorney general released a brief synopsis of the special counsel’s report. On the question of Russian meddling in 2016—and of potential collusion between Moscow and Trump’s team—Mueller’s findings were straightforward: “[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”
But on the secondary question, regarding Trump’s potential obstruction of justice, Mueller was strikingly less definitive. “[W]hile this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime,” the special counsel wrote, “it also does not exonerate him.”
Barr felt otherwise. After quoting Mueller’s assertion verbatim in his summary memo, the attorney general wrote that he and Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, “concluded that the evidence developed during the Special Counsel’s investigation is not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense.”