This marked his first appearance at the annual carnival of politics and culture. Entering to the song “Money, Money, Money,” Trump fed the roaring masses with a formula that would later become all too familiar: attack, boast, promise. “I like Ron Paul. I think he is a good guy,” Trump said of the libertarian icon. “But, honestly, he just has zero chance of getting elected.” Trump reveled in the boos from Paul’s college-age supporters. “Tactics and strategy are involved in any form of leadership,” he went on. “I’m well acquainted with both. I’m also well-acquainted with winning, and that’s what this country needs right now: winning.” Finally, offering the guarantee of his presidency, Trump pledged, “Our country will be great again.”
Less celebrated were the remarks given a night later by Mitch Daniels, the Indiana governor, who was weighing a presidential bid of his own. Having once called for a “truce” on social issues in order to focus on America’s fiscal decline—eliciting jeers from the evangelical right—Daniels pleaded with the nation to unify around the sacrifices needed to make America solvent, delivering one of the more compelling speeches by a Republican in the twenty-first century.
“We face an enemy, lethal to liberty and even more implacable than those America has defeated before,” Daniels said.11 “We cannot deter it; there is no countervailing danger we can pose. We cannot negotiate with it, any more than with an iceberg or a Great White. I refer, of course, to the debts our nation has amassed for itself over decades of indulgence. It is the new Red Menace, this time consisting of ink. We can debate its origins endlessly and search for villains on ideological grounds, but the reality is pure arithmetic. No enterprise, small or large, public or private, can remain self-governing, let alone successful, so deeply in hock to others as we are about to be.”
Warning his fellow Republicans against pursuing the mutually assured destruction offered by the party’s ascendant right flank, Daniels concluded, “Purity in martyrdom is for suicide bombers.”
The Indiana governor had offered a vision, one grounded in realism and reasonableness, that elevated common purpose over cultural warfare. But few chose to see it. Trump’s alternative, a loud, swaggering, confrontational bravado, was a better fit for the Republican base. It was a clearer diagnosis of the country’s condition. And it was a sexier story for reporters to write.
Within a few months, Daniels ended his consideration of a presidential run and his speech was swept into the dustbin of history by the incessant coverage of Trump versus Obama. It came to a crescendo in late April, at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, with Trump in attendance as a guest of the Washington Post. Obama used the president’s traditional stand-up routine to skewer Trump, mockingly acknowledging his “credentials and breadth of experience.” As the crowded ballroom turned in his direction, journalists whooping with approval, Trump stared straight ahead. He would have the last laugh.
A PROMISE IS THE MOST DANGEROUS THING IN POLITICS.
George H. W. Bush lost a second term after going back on his famous guarantee, “Read my lips: no new taxes.” Lyndon Baines Johnson knew better than to seek reelection after reneging on his assurances that he would not send troops to Vietnam. In the case of House Republicans, their “Pledge to America” of 2010 became a liability the moment they assumed the majority.
The failure to deliver on their single biggest promise, repealing the Affordable Care Act, would come to shape the contemporary party’s legacy. But it was, in the early going, the GOP’s struggle with some of the smaller objectives that set a foreboding tone. The notion of cutting $100 billion from the budget in year one, for instance, was plainly impossible; the fiscal year was already halfway over by the time the numbers could be crunched, and the Democrats were never going to rubber-stamp such a steep reduction. No asterisk was attached to that particular guarantee when Republicans made it, however, and conservatives were justifiably irate when Boehner and his team attempted to explain the fine print of why such a cut wasn’t possible.
That initial fight over the $100 billion cut was a watershed. As the new members pressured leadership to keep the promise, it dawned on them that the promise wasn’t meant to be kept. This realization is what began sorting Republicans into two distinct camps: one, representing a vast majority, that observed Boehner’s message about the realities of governing and resigned themselves to a lemonade-making pragmatism; the other, representing a vocal minority, that dismissed Boehner’s call for teamwork and rebelled, convinced that brawling in pursuit of the unattainable was better than accepting half-measures.
It was a catch-22. Republican leaders envisioned using their majority to demonstrate the party’s capacity for smart, responsible governance, but they had won their majority by mobilizing the conservative base around patently unrealistic promises. They had set themselves up for failure.
“It was two years’ worth of vitriol and venom pointed toward Obama, and once in the majority, they thought we’re going to fix it all. And we were the ones who ratcheted that up—’We can set it straight if you just give us the majority,’” Cantor says. “From conservative radio to the blogosphere to cable TV, the expectations rose to a point where it was just unmanageable.”
Cantor adds, “For those who wanted to suggest that Republicans weren’t fighting hard enough, it was really foolish to think that you were going to beat Obama into submission to abandon everything he stood for—including the bill with his name on it.”
Jordan, the conservative ringleader, calls this a cop-out. Using his chairmanship of the RSC to agitate endlessly against Boehner, Cantor, and the perceived passivity of the GOP leadership, Jordan concedes that some of the party’s stated objectives were doomed to failure. “But the fact is we made a promise to the voters, and we didn’t even try,” he complains. “All too often we would do the wimpy thing. We would try to have the debate, it would last twenty-four hours, and then it’s like, ‘Oh well, we just can’t get it done.’”
Cantor, more than anyone, was at the nexus of this divergence. He was younger and more ideological than Boehner, a fact that did not escape anyone in the conference, including the Speaker. Cantor had personally recruited many of the 2010 candidates and sympathized with their desire to fight, to show their constituents they had done everything possible to get results. Yet the second in command had to be cautious. Undermining Boehner would only fuel the perception of a rivalry between them, plunging the party into deeper polarity. Moreover, as their majority took shape, Cantor found himself increasingly sensitive to Boehner’s plight and dismayed by the Tea Party’s tactics.
“The demands were fine in theory, but put into practice, it just didn’t work,” he says. “Conservatism was always about trying to effect some progress toward limiting the reach of government. It wasn’t being a revolutionary to light it on fire and burn it down to rebuild it. But somehow, that’s what the definition of ‘conservative’ became.”
AS CONGRESS HURTLED TOWARD AN AUGUST DEADLINE TO RAISE THE debt ceiling, a borrowing limit that directs the Treasury Department’s payment of costs already incurred, fratricide was beginning to consume the House GOP. It owed to a self-inflicted strategic wound: Republicans had, upon taking the majority, waived the “Gephardt Rule” that had long allowed the debt ceiling to be raised in pro forma fashion. At the time, Boehner’s team had encouraged the rank and file to view the debt ceiling vote as a leverage point in dealing with Obama. This advice proved costly.