No Republican did more to criticize Trump during the primary than Bush. But no candidacy did more to symbolize the decline of the GOP and the ascent of its unlikely new torchbearer.
IT WAS DESPERATION TIME FOR RUBIO. HE HAD DECLARED HIS INTENTION to remain in the race until Florida’s primary on March 15. But a victory there was already looking unlikely, and it would be downright impossible if he didn’t score some points on Super Tuesday, March 1.
In their final chance to make a national impression before Super Tuesday, Rubio and Cruz formed a tag team during the February 25 debate in Houston, emptying a dump truck of opposition research against the front-runner.17 It might have come in handy, say, six months earlier: How Trump had defrauded students at a university bearing his name; how he had hired foreign workers, oftentimes illegals, ahead of Americans; how his ties and suits were made in Mexico and China; how he repeatedly mismanaged his companies into bankruptcy.
But the verbal drubbing of Trump in Houston was too little, too late. He was gaining altitude and growing more emboldened by the day.
At a rally in Nevada after his South Carolina win, Trump dialed up the rhetoric in reference to a protester being escorted out of the audience. “I love the old days. You know what they used to do to guys like that when they were in a place like this? They’d be carried out on a stretcher, folks,” Trump said. He added: “I’d like to punch him in the face.”18 (Weeks earlier, he’d offered to “pay the legal fees” of anyone willing to “knock the crap out of” a protester.19) Trump knocked the crap out of his opponents in Nevada, taking 46 percent of the vote.
Three days later, on February 26, Chris Christie, the New Jersey governor and former contender for the nomination, became the first prominent Republican official to endorse Trump. “New lesson kids,” Bush chief strategist David Kochel tweeted. “Sometimes, the best option for the fat kid is to just hand his lunch money over to the bully!”
Then, two days later, at a massive rally in Alabama ahead of the state’s Super Tuesday primary, Jeff Sessions became the first Republican senator to endorse Trump. “I told Donald Trump this isn’t a campaign, this is a movement,” Sessions declared from the stage. “Look at what’s happening. The American people are not happy with their government.”
That same week, Trump added another ally, albeit one with a much lower profile. Having recently finished managing her father’s presidential campaign, Sarah Huckabee Sanders was a seasoned strategist, a good communicator, and had a deep knowledge of the upcoming southern states. Despite the early wins, Trump’s campaign was still a fly-by-night operation. Sanders, after meeting with Trump aboard his campaign plane and agreeing to come on as a senior adviser, offered an injection of veteran savvy.
With the polls in the eleven Super Tuesday states showing little movement, and Trump on a glide path to the nomination, his rivals emptied out their ammunition lockers.
Cruz began hitting him on a topic that, strangely, had gone largely unmentioned during the GOP primary: Trump’s refusal to release his tax returns. Rubio, for his part, decided to break character in a fateful moment of attempted levity. During a February 28 rally in Virginia, Rubio (dubbed “Little Marco” by the GOP front-runner) decided to fight Dumpster fire with Dumpster fire. “I’ll admit he’s taller than me. He’s like 6'2", which is why I don’t understand why his hands are the size of someone who’s 5'2". Have you seen his hands?” Rubio asked, the audience delighting in his new routine.20
“And you know what they say about men with small hands?” Rubio continued, grinning. As the crowd hooted and hollered, the senator hedged, “You can’t trust ’em! You can’t trust ’em!”
Rubio also observed, noting how Trump often teased him for sweating, “He doesn’t sweat because his pores are clogged from the spray-tan he uses. Donald is not gonna make America great, he’s gonna make America orange!”
The senator’s friends were horrified. He had spent the past decade-plus distinguishing himself as a serious, sober-minded policymaker with an inspiring life story to boot. Now he was getting into the mud with Trump, cracking jokes about the size of a rival candidate’s penis.
Super Tuesday offered no validation of Rubio’s newfound approach. Of the eleven states voting, Trump won seven and Cruz carried three while Rubio’s lone victory came in Minnesota, a race that was called so late in the night that it barely registered. The results did nothing to alter the broader trajectory of the race: Trump was on his way to becoming the GOP nominee, save for a dramatic intervening event.
Mitt Romney had one in mind.
He had spent months biting his tongue as it pertained to Trump. This was in part because he believed the party would rally around a strong alternative, and in part because he knew he wasn’t an ideal messenger, having accepted Trump’s endorsement in 2012, only to lose to the GOP’s bête noire in a race many thought winnable.
But Romney could no longer stay silent. In a speech at the University of Utah on March 3, he urged voters to act strategically in the months ahead by backing whichever candidate had the best chance to win their state—rather than voting their preference—in the hope of denying Trump the delegates needed to be nominated outright in Cleveland. The Republican nominee of 2012 was calling for a political conspiracy to facilitate a brokered convention in 2016.
He also denounced the GOP front-runner in the harshest terms imaginable. “Here’s what I know: Donald Trump is a phony, a fraud,” Romney said. “His promises are as worthless as a degree from Trump University. He’s playing members of the American public for suckers: He gets a free ride to the White House, and all we get is a lousy hat.”21
It was more fight than Romney had ever shown against Obama, a fact that Trump and his acolytes used to paint the 2012 nominee as a weak-kneed traitor to the party.
But to Romney there was a qualitative difference: Trump was doing and saying things that Obama had never done or said. This wasn’t about the party, Romney told his friends. It was about the country. Some warned him against it nonetheless; they worried that he would look duplicitous, especially when he declined to make any mention in his remarks of having accepted Trump’s endorsement four years earlier.
Romney didn’t much care. “I felt he was taking advantage of those who are racially insensitive or worse. And that led me to say, I’ve got to speak out now. I can’t just be on the sidelines,” he says. “I know not a lot of people pay attention to the former nominee, who doesn’t even have a political office right now. But for me, for my family, for my grandkids, I didn’t want them to say, ‘Hey, where were you when this was going on?’”
The verdict among senior Republicans was unanimous: Romney had strengthened Trump. Having never channeled the cultural and economic frustrations of the party’s base, Romney did nothing but demonstrate a familiar tone-deafness by attacking the man who was succeeding where he had failed.
Trump seemed to sense as much. The evening of Romney’s speech, the GOP front-runner was in a jovial mood upon arriving in downtown Detroit for a Fox News–sponsored debate. It would be Trump’s first face-to-face with Megyn Kelly since their dust-up in August, and his first encounter with Rubio since the comments about his spray tan and his “small hands.” Walking up to Rubio backstage before the event, Trump spread his fingers and thrust his palm toward his rival’s face. “Look at these,” he grinned. “What are you talking about? My hands are not small!”