The next morning, Kasich headed for the Columbus airport. He had back-to-back fund-raisers scheduled in Washington. Sitting on the runway, however, he experienced an abrupt change of heart. “Screw it,” he told his traveling companions. He wanted to drop out of the race, too.
When Cruz learned of Kasich’s decision, the color went out of his face. He looked gravely ill for the day’s remainder. Two friends who were with the senator worried for his health.
Reflecting on the campaign in its final hours, Cruz believed he had been done in by two incidents he would give anything to have back: the perceived cheating against Carson in Iowa and Rubio’s refusal to form a ticket in early March. Now there was a third: Kasich’s bluff in California. The trilogy of regrets would haunt Cruz in the months, and years, to come.
As Kasich walked off his plane in Columbus, and Cruz rued the hand of providence back home in Houston, their opponent celebrated with friends and family in New York City.
Reince Priebus called to offer congratulations. Donald J. Trump would be the Republican Party’s nominee for president in 2016.
Chapter Fourteen
May 2016
“Now that you’ve gone this far, there’s no going back.”
HUNDREDS OF PROTESTERS, REPORTERS, AND UNAFFILIATED GAWKERS swarmed outside the offices of the Republican National Committee on First Street Southeast, a few short blocks from the Capitol. The circus had come to town. As Donald Trump’s entourage pulled up, sneaking him into a side entrance of the building, the gawkers gawked. The reporters shouted questions. And the protesters hoisted signs: “R.I.P. G.O.P.”
Inside the party headquarters, Paul Ryan stewed. This wasn’t what he had signed up for. Trump had looked increasingly viable when the new Speaker took over for John Boehner the previous October, but Ryan never, ever, took seriously the prospect of the reality TV star winning his party’s nomination. Everything Ryan knew about politics told him that it couldn’t happen. Nervous nonetheless, he checked in often with his old pal from Wisconsin, Reince Priebus, to make sure. Priebus’s answer was steady throughout the summer and fall: “Not gonna happen.” Yet, as the calendar turned to 2016, the chairman’s certitude softened. When they talked just before Christmas, Priebus broke the news. Trump, he told Ryan, might just win the nomination after all.
This sent the Speaker into a panic. Having been on the GOP ticket four years prior, having seen the devastation wreaked by Mitt Romney’s insularity, Ryan had returned to Congress a changed man. Everything he had done, including accepting the promotion to Speaker, had been in service of softening the GOP’s brand to reach a broader swath of a diversifying nation. This would allow Republicans to win elections and subsequently pass meaningful policy reforms.
Trump was dashing those dreams. Ryan had to remain neutral in the race; as Speaker, he would be chairing the party’s convention later that summer. But as Trump’s momentum built, so, too, did Ryan’s naysaying. He denounced Trump’s proposed Muslim ban, saying it’s “not what this party stands for, and more importantly, it’s not what this country stands for.”1 He slammed him for his strange hesitation in disavowing David Duke and the KKK. He blasted him for suggesting there would be “riots” in Cleveland if he were denied the nomination.2
As Ryan worked himself into a lather, whispering to Republican allies about Trump’s instability and immorality, the GOP front-runner was busy steamrolling the competition. By late April, Trump was already turning his attention to Hillary Clinton. “I think the only card she has is the woman’s card. She has nothing else going. Frankly, if Hillary Clinton were a man, I don’t think she would get 5 percent of the vote,” Trump said. “The beautiful thing is, women don’t like her.”3
Ryan’s warnings about Trump—that he was exploiting voters’ fears; that he was using “identity politics” to turn working-class whites against brown and black Americans; that he was ethically bankrupt and dangerously divisive—were shared by his peers in the governing class. But the Republican primary voters felt differently. They had elevated the brash political neophyte over a primary field that many party elders felt was their deepest, strongest, and most diverse in at least a century.
The Speaker was not ready to follow the voters’ lead.
“I’m not there right now,” Ryan told CNN on May 5, two days after Trump became the GOP’s de facto nominee. “I think what is required is that we unify this party. And I think the bulk of the burden on unifying the party will have to come from our presumptive nominee.”
Trump responded in a statement that read, “I am not ready to support Speaker Ryan’s agenda.” Trump also suggested that Ryan ought not to serve as the convention’s chairman.
Ryan, in turn, offered to step down if Trump so requested. The Speaker’s performance was that of a political Hamlet, pondering the existential ramifications of subjugating himself to the evil new king.
It was against this backdrop, on May 12, that Trump arrived at RNC headquarters. On the itinerary was a roundtable discussion with all the GOP congressional leaders. But first, privately, Trump would meet with Ryan and Priebus.
The party chairman was desperate to broker a truce. Sitting them down in his office, Priebus tried to clear the air, talking of “party unity” that could only come from the two men setting aside their differences. Trump and Ryan, like a pair of high-schoolers called into the principal’s office after fisticuffs, listened silently, recalcitrance written across their faces. When Priebus finished, Ryan told Trump he wanted to show him something. It was a PowerPoint presentation. The country was drowning in red ink, Ryan explained, and could be saved from a debt tsunami only by a reforming of the tax code and a restructuring of Social Security and Medicaid. Flashing the first slide onto a monitor, Ryan prefaced his remarks by clarifying the basic distinction between mandatory spending and discretionary spending.
After Ryan popped the second slide onto the monitor, Trump interrupted him. “Okay, Paul, I get the point,” he said. “What’s next?”
Ryan was astonished. He shot a look at Priebus. The party chairman avoided eye contact.
“The meeting was great,” Priebus tweeted a short while later, after Trump convened with the larger group of congressional officials. “It was a very positive step toward party unity.”
The Speaker played along. He told reporters that Trump had been “warm and genuine” in their interactions. But Ryan, the last holdout among the GOP’s elected leadership, remained cold to the idea of endorsing the party’s presumptive nominee. Indeed, he still couldn’t get his head around the fact that Trump was the party’s presumptive nominee. With all that baggage, after all those years of all those controversies, how had no opposition research surfaced to sink his candidacy? And what would happen if it finally did, just in time for the general election?
TRUMP DIDN’T LIKE RYAN. HE FOUND THE SPEAKER DULL AND SUPERCILIOUS, “a fucking Boy Scout,” as he told friends after the meeting. But the party’s new standard-bearer was not averse to being schooled by the GOP establishment. Trump did not suffer from a lack of teachability; he simply preferred to dictate the flow of information, rather than be dictated to. Lengthy briefings and conference calls were never a staple of his executive style. He favored an aggressive, inquisitive approach, learning about issues, and about people, with rapid-fire questioning, consuming what he needed from the answers and discarding the rest.