This barely scratched the surface. An avalanche of endorsements was forthcoming from conservative leaders, including James Dobson, founder and chairman emeritus of Focus on the Family; Ken Cuccinelli of the Senate Conservatives Fund; and from Perkins himself, among a chorus of other right-wing rainmakers.
The conservative movement, in its official capacity, had unified. Now, if only there were an “establishment” champion for them to face off against.
FOR ALL THE LAWLESSNESS THAT GOVERNED THE 2016 REPUBLICAN campaign, two rules were constant: Trump was the front-runner, and nothing could be done about it.
A telling example came during the December 15 debate in Las Vegas, between Trump and Hugh Hewitt, the conservative radio host who was co-moderating. The pair had a complicated history: Trump had appeared often on Hewitt’s show, going back to the spring of 2015, but Hewitt always seemed to stump him with policy questions.
A few months earlier, when Hewitt had asked Trump about the Quds Force, Iran’s guerrilla military unit, Trump responded by talking about the mistreatment of the Kurds.12 He later claimed he’d misheard Hewitt’s question. But this made no sense: Hewitt had begun by mentioning the Quds’s leader, General Qasem Soleimani, a name frequently in the news at that time. There had been no mix-up. Trump was simply unschooled.
The candidate had blamed Hewitt for the blunder, brushing him off as a “third-rate radio host” on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. (The treadmill-viewing choice of official Washington, Morning Joe offered comforting quarter to the GOP front-runner for a long time before serving as a group therapy session during his presidency.)
Privately, Trump was seething. He could deal with garden-variety indignities; the man owed much of his fame to assessing the business acumen of Gary Busey and Meat Loaf on The Apprentice. But being made to look stupid was intolerable. Trump had dialed Hewitt the next day in a rage. “Don’t be fucking around with me like that!” he screamed.
Meanwhile, Trump’s campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, petitioned the RNC to have Hewitt removed as a co-moderator of future debates. No such luck.
When the Vegas debate rolled around three months later, Hewitt decided to test Trump in a different way. He would ask the candidate about a subject they had covered previously on his radio show: the nuclear triad, America’s ability to launch atomic attacks from the air, land, and sea. Trump hadn’t been familiar with the terminology the first time Hewitt asked; the radio host wondered whether he would be now.
In response to Hewitt’s question, Trump produced ninety seconds’ worth of word salad about the importance of nuclear weapons. When Hewitt pressed him, asking which leg of the triad he considered the most crucial, Trump flailed. “To me, nuclear is just, the power, the devastation, is very important to me,” he replied.
Since the conclusion of World War II, global order has been administered via the threat of nuclear warfare. But Trump, in applying for the job of controlling the largest stockpile on the planet, was blatantly illiterate as to its usage. Making this all the more unforgivable to Hewitt was the fact that he’d asked Trump about the subject months earlier. “He wasn’t motivated by what he didn’t know,” the radio host recalls.
He threw the follow-up to Rubio, expecting him to savage the GOP front-runner for his witlessness. Instead, Rubio offered viewers a gentle tutorial on America’s nuclear capabilities.
“Marco treated it like a Sunday school class instead of looking at [Trump] and saying, ‘You’re running for president. How do you not know what the nuclear triad is?’” Hewitt says. “He could have embarrassed him, but Trump bluffed his way through it. He bluffed his way through the entire campaign.”
On the sidelines of the debate, during an intermission, Priebus walked over to a friend. “Now if only someone would ask him the difference between Sunni and Shia,” the chairman whispered.
IF TRUMP’S INADVERTENT IGNORANCE OF POLICY BASICS WASN’T GOING to hurt him, then why would his deliberate contravening of political norms?
This was the question Republicans were forced to grapple with as 2015 came to a close. It wasn’t just that his rivals’ attacks on him had backfired, or that voters didn’t seem to care that he lacked a basic understanding of certain issues. What made Trump’s enemies most nervous, what exasperated them and kept them up at night, was how he could get away with saying whatever he wanted.
Examples of this in the first six months of his campaign already numbered too many to count. But few were as audacious as his praise for Vladimir Putin.
Trump had hinted in the past at his respect for the Russian strongman, having felt a bond with him over their shared disdain for Obama and Hillary Clinton. In November, the GOP front-runner told Face the Nation of Putin, “I think that I would probably get along with him very well. And I don’t think you’d be having the kind of problems that you’re having right now.”13
These comments seemed harmless enough at the time. A month later, however, the long-distance brotherhood was in full bloom.
“He is a bright and talented person without any doubt,” Putin said during a year-end press conference, according to Russian state media. He called Trump “an outstanding and talented personality” and described him as “the absolute leader of the presidential race.”14
Trump, ever a sucker for a compliment, responded in kind. “It is always a great honor to be so nicely complimented by a man so highly respected within his own country and beyond,” he said in a statement.
The next day, on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Trump shrugged off the Kremlin’s brutal reputation: suppressing homosexuals, torturing prisoners, murdering journalists and political dissidents. “He’s running his country. And at least he’s a leader, unlike what we have in this country,” the candidate said. “I think our country does plenty of killing also.”15
This constituted a radical break with traditional American foreign policy and its emphasis on denouncing autocrats and promoting democracy. It was also a sharp departure from recent Republican dogma. Echoing the tough-on-Russia rhetoric of Mitt Romney four years earlier, the other GOP hopefuls took turns calling Putin a “gangster” and a “KGB thug.” Outraged at Trump’s remarks, Romney tweeted, “Important distinction: thug Putin kills journalists and opponents; our presidents kill terrorists and enemy combatants.”
Thinking, wishing, hoping that this time, finally, his insufferable nemesis had jumped the shark, Bush told CNN, “To get praise from Vladimir Putin is not going to help Donald Trump.”16
He was wrong.
What Bush and his Republican peers failed to understand was the degree to which Putin had become an appealing figure for many on the American right—not for the particulars of his government’s cruelty, necessarily, but rather, for the masculinity he radiated in such sharp contrast to his U.S. counterpart.
This was happening long before Trump began singing the Russian leader’s praises. Back in September 2013, Marin Cogan wrote in National Journal magazine17 about the cult following Putin was amassing on the American right with his macho exploits: tranquilizing a tiger, hunting a gray whale with a crossbow, riding war horses, catching gigantic fish. He was always shirtless and never afraid, Rooseveltian testosterone oozing out of every pore.