They were ideological soul mates. Both ran conservative think tanks in their states in the 1990s; both had been elected to Congress in 2000, at one point occupying neighboring offices; both were lonely leaders of intraparty rebellions during the big-spending tenure of George W. Bush; both had left the House of Representatives in 2012 to run successfully for statewide office; and above all, both strove to be regarded as gentleman conservatives, known for a personal decency that infused their relationships and reputations in the nation’s capital.
And yet both men knew, in the summer of 2016, that their friendship might never be the same. Trump’s ascent would leave a wreckage of relationships in its wake—friends, neighbors, families divided—but there was no more dramatic divergence than that of Flake and Pence.
It began on the afternoon of July 7. Trump was visiting Washington for a series of meetings aimed at coalescing the party’s elected officials behind him: one with House Republicans, one with Senate Republicans, and a third, private conversation with Ted Cruz, who remained unsupportive of Trump two months after quitting the GOP race. The House meeting went swimmingly; the same rank-and-file renegades who had spilled John Boehner’s blood over a lack of conservative bona fides emerged spouting praise of Trump. And the Cruz sit-down was a qualified success: Though he wasn’t ready to endorse, he did accept an invitation to speak at the convention later that month.
It was Trump’s meeting with Senate Republicans that went off the rails. After some introductions and polite banter, the niceties came to a sudden halt when Trump singled out one of the senators, Flake, for having criticized his candidacy.
“Yes, I’m the other senator from Arizona, the one that wasn’t captured,” Flake responded, referring to Trump’s infamous attack on John McCain the previous summer. “I want to talk to you about statements like that.”
“You know, I haven’t been attacking you,” Trump snapped back. “But maybe I should be. Maybe I will.” He glowered at Flake, warning that his dissension would cost him his Senate seat.
“I’m not even up for reelection this cycle,” Flake snorted, rolling his eyes.
Flake had already decided he would not be attending the Republican National Convention in Cleveland beginning July 18. In fact, as Trump accosted him that day, the Arizona senator took comfort in knowing he wouldn’t be sitting in the convention hall as Trump completed his hostile takeover of the GOP. But his subsequent selection of Pence—which, Flake says, left him in a state of “shock”—forced the senator to reconsider. He wouldn’t just be turning his back on Trump and the GOP by shunning the convention; he would be betraying his dear friend.
Ultimately, it wasn’t enough to change Flake’s mind. He stayed away from Cleveland, in protest of Trump, while his old pal was crowned heir apparent.
For Flake, this was a matter of “principle over party.” He could understand why some Republicans might hold their noses and vote for Trump against Clinton as a lesser-of-two-evils choice. What he couldn’t understand was the categorical cheerleading of someone whose candidacy was antithetical to much of what modern conservatism was supposed to stand for. Both stylistically and substantively, Flake believed, Trump was poisoning the Republican Party. The senator would not blindly pledge his allegiance for the sake of winning one election.
This earned Flake no shortage of abuse from the right, including from many longtime allies. How ironic, they snickered, that Flake would lecture about fidelity to principle, given his own professional metamorphosis. Once a cutthroat conservative in the House, Flake had become just another wallflower Republican in the Senate, refusing to join the likes of Cruz and Mike Lee in ramming at the establishment’s barricades.
“We have had some enormous departures, some rather stark political divergences, with Jeff over the recent years,” Trent Franks, a former Arizona congressman and confidant to both Pence and Flake, said. “We’ve been disappointed with some of the things Jeff’s done.”
Flake knew he would face special criticism for breaking rank in 2016. “This wasn’t a situation where I woke up a month ago and thought, hey, I’m out of step with my party,” he said. “I was uncomfortable with Trump before he got in the race. And then on day one, it was Mexican rapists. And before that, over the past years, it was the birtherism, which I thought was just the most vile, rotten thing you could do to President Obama. And then he just seemed to carry forward from there.”
Franks, an original member of the House Freedom Caucus, had no such concerns. “As I’ve gotten to know the guy, I’ve seen a heart, and kind of a John Wayne valiance in him that is compelling to me,” he said of Trump. “I’m convinced he came along at a time when the country needed someone to punch government in the face.”
WHEN THE HOUSE FREEDOM CAUCUS FORMED IN 2015, TURBOCHARGING the anti-leadership engine once driven by the likes of Flake and Pence, its organizing principle was to speak on behalf of forgotten Americans. Jim Jordan, the group’s founding chairman, believed Washington worked on behalf of big entities (banks, corporations) and parochial interests (the poor and unemployed) but not the “second-shift workers” and “second-grade teachers” like the ones in his 88 percent white district, where only 18 percent of residents earned college degrees.1
This is not to suggest Jordan was racist, or even using racially coded language; he was simply speaking to the realities of north-central Ohio. Many of his white, working-class constituents felt that they were falling behind and that the federal government didn’t much care. This was a sentiment reflected in the membership of the Freedom Caucus: During the 114th Congress, spanning the years 2015 and 2016, the group had thirty-nine members. On the whole, their districts were 75 percent white (higher than the national average) and 27 percent college-educated (lower than the national average), according to data culled from The Almanac of American Politics.
Despite these demographic profiles, and their own stated mission to represent the forgotten voters of flyover country, the Freedom Caucus members had long trafficked in ideological orthodoxy. They believed this was what their constituents demanded: less spending, more trade, restructured entitlement programs, and above all, limited government.
And then Trump came along.
One Freedom Caucus member described the “oh shit” moment in the spring of 2016, when he and his comrades realized what was happening. Marauding across the country, Trump was delivering an anti-Washington message rooted not in any narrowly philosophical approach, but in the belief that politicians had failed voters. Back home, the conservatives saw their constituents responding in force, much as they had in 2010. But Trump was no Tea Party purist selling a small-government creed. He was selling outrage at the status quo.
Trump, they realized, had co-opted and broadened their message. He wasn’t merely attacking the establishment; he was attacking them. After promising major changes (repealing Obamacare, rolling back Dodd-Frank, reining in executive actions) and failing to deliver, they were now part of the broken political class Trump was railing against.
Watching in horror as he won more than two-thirds of their districts, the Freedom Caucus members, most of whom had endorsed either Cruz or Rand Paul, wondered how their voters could reconcile supporting a Tea Partier for Congress and a totalitarian for president.