“The good people like us are leaving California because of all that—the influx of immigrants, many of them illegal, who are getting state ID cards, welfare benefits, and other government programs, and not even assimilating,” Stauffacher, a Navy veteran, said. “And now it’s happening here. This state is up for grabs. The entire country is changing because they’re letting people in who will only vote for Democrats.”
This is what “Make America Great Again” conveyed to many voters. Others heard a message that was altogether different—not an identity-based message, but an anti-elitist screed, or a populist call for government reform. The genius of the catchphrase, and what made Trump’s candidacy so effective, was its seamless weaving of the personal and cultural into the political and socioeconomic. His was a canopy of discontent under which the grudging masses could congregate to air their grievances about a nation they no longer recognized and a government they no longer trusted.
“The country’s morals have changed,” Helen Best, a retired cardiac technician, said outside a Republican campaign event in her native North Carolina a few weeks before Election Day 2016. “People say it’s just a changing of the times. But why do we need to change at all?”
AS UNEASY AS REINCE PRIEBUS FELT WITNESSING TRUMP’S ASCENT, the party chairman couldn’t help but marvel at the way voters responded to him. It was unlike anything he had seen in a quarter century of Republican politics. Priebus had consulted the best pollsters and strategists about broadening the GOP’s socioeconomic appeal; in his native Wisconsin, he was always vexed at seeing rural, religious, blue-collar voters side with an increasingly urban, coastal Democratic Party. Trump offered a revelation: These voters were far less likely to respond to policy arguments than they were to emotional appeals aimed at their long-simmering sense of grievance, displacement, and marginalization.
“Everyone told them that they needed to shut up, that their views weren’t culturally proper anymore, that society is moving in a direction that they don’t fit into,” Priebus says. “And then, Donald Trump comes along and starts saying the same things they’ve been thinking, and suddenly it’s okay again. There’s just this feeling among people, among classes, that have felt left behind, not heard, ridiculed, pushed down upon. And he became their vehicle.”
During a speech in Burlington, Iowa, in late October 2015, just before Ryan assumed the speakership, Trump drew thunderous ovations from a capacity crowd when promising to punish illegal immigrants, confront China, shred existing trade deals, and pummel the elites funding the campaigns of Bush and Hillary Clinton. But the biggest applause line of the event came when Trump pledged, extemporaneously, to end the so-called “war on Christmas” waged by Obama and his cabal of secularists.
“I’m a good Christian, Okay? Remember that,” Trump said, smirking. “And I told you about Christmas—I guarantee if I become president we’re going to be saying ‘Merry Christmas’ at every store!”3 (The merits of his anti-“Happy Holidays” shtick aside, Trump’s assertion of spiritual aptitude was puzzling. Months earlier, he boasted that he had never asked God for forgiveness, the central tenet of the Christian faith.4)
Trump would soon accelerate the cultural-political warfare to levels yet unseen. After terrorists in Paris killed more than 130 people and injured another 400 during coordinated attacks in November, Trump called for a government database tracking Muslims in the United States while monitoring activities inside mosques. In the past, Trump had repeatedly spread the false story that “thousands” of New Jersey Muslims were celebrating after the 9/11 attacks. (Mocking a disabled New York Times reporter who corrected his version of events, Trump curled his hand and jerked his arm around, saying, “The poor guy, you’ve gotta see this guy.”5)
The following month, in the aftermath of an Islamic-inspired terrorist attack that killed fourteen people in San Bernardino, California, the Republican front-runner’s campaign issued a statement that read, “Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.”
Bush said Trump had become “unhinged.” Rubio described the idea as “outlandish.”6 Mike Pence, the Indiana governor, called the proposed ban “offensive and unconstitutional.”7
That same month, Trump told Fox and Friends that he would order the American military to kill terrorists’ family members in order to defeat ISIS. Dismissing the implications of violating international law, Trump blamed the United States for “fighting a very politically correct war.”8
The Pentagon warned that Trump’s rhetoric would boost the recruiting efforts of ISIS and other terrorist groups, fueling the group’s narrative of a zero-sum clash between followers of Islam and their Crusader enemies in America.
As if intentionally pushing the limits to see what else he could get away with, Trump in December joined the InfoWars program hosted by Alex Jones, the country’s most prominent conspiracy theorist. Jones existed so far outside the mainstream of American political thought that party officials thought it was an elaborate prank when they heard that Trump was going on the program. But it wasn’t. “Your reputation is amazing,” Trump told Jones. “I will not let you down.”9
The “reputation” to which Trump referred? Jones had built a cultlike following on the fringes of the internet by proclaiming that September 11 was an inside job, as was the Oklahoma City bombing, both of them “false flags” choreographed by the U.S. government to expand its tyrannical powers. Jones had also insisted that nobody was killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012; that the first-graders slaughtered in their classroom and buried by their parents were child actors.
None of this seemed to bother Trump; he was told by Roger Stone, his longtime henchman and a veteran tinfoil hat wearer, that he had a huge following among the InfoWars audience. (Conspiracy theorizing wasn’t limited to the fringes of the right, as proved by the birther movement, and later, the Fox News–fueled nonsense that a DNC staffer named Seth Rich had been murdered because he’d been the source of a massive email leak.) To most anyone with a brain and a soul, Jones was a demonic influence. To Trump, he was someone who could help him win the presidency, what with his “amazing” reputation.
Yet none of this—the buddy act with Jones, the proposed Muslim ban, the idea of committing war crimes—damaged Trump’s candidacy. From the middle of November though the end of December, he jumped from 24 percent to 37 percent in the RealClearPolitics average.
RYAN WAS STRUGGLING TO MAKE SENSE OF HIS NEW JOB. EVERYTHING had been so much easier when he was in the policy business: numbers, legislative text, committee hearings. Now he was in the personnel business. And while he had some appreciation for the challenges his predecessor had faced, the scope of instability inside the conference, and the party, didn’t fully dawn on him until he’d moved into the Speaker’s suite.
Ryan was miserable almost from the very start. He had given up his dream job chairing the Ways and Means Committee. He was refereeing near-daily disputes among various factions inside the conference. He likened himself to a prisoner some days, and other days to a teacher at a day care center. “Just getting people to agree on how to do things that are in their own interest is hard to do. Getting people to agree, getting to consensus, on things that are basic and axiomatic, is really hard to do,” Ryan said. “You need more of a degree in psychology than you need in economics.”