Thomas Massie, the Kentuckian who says he was excluded from the Freedom Caucus for being “too crazy conservative,” said it best in an interview with the Washington Examiner.2 “All this time, I thought they were voting for libertarian Republicans,” says Massie, who backed Ron Paul in 2012 and his son four years later. “But after some soul searching, I realized when they voted for Rand and Ron and me in these primaries, they weren’t voting for libertarian ideas—they were voting for the craziest son of a bitch in the race. And Donald Trump won best in class.”
Reaching that same conclusion in May 2016, Freedom Caucus members debated what could be done about it. Only one of their members had endorsed Trump in the primary: Scott DesJarlais, the physician who a few years earlier was discovered to have carried on sexual relationships with multiple patients and pressured both a mistress and an ex-wife to have abortions. (He was reelected multiple times thereafter.) His endorsement of Trump drew sneers from his colleagues, many of whom believed that neither man reflected the values of their club. But now DesJarlais was looking prophetical. One by one, the archconservatives who had spent the past five months snickering at Trump in their closed-door gatherings took turns announcing their support for his candidacy.
Tribal bitterness often lingers after party primaries. But the reflections on Trump’s conquest from leading right-wingers spoke to the extraordinary mistrust they felt for him—even as they endorsed him for the highest office in the land.
Nobody captured this mood better than Mick Mulvaney. “As a conservative, my confidence level in Trump doing the right thing is fairly low,” the South Carolina congressman said. He laughed. “But, hey, my confidence level in Hillary Clinton doing the wrong thing is fairly high!”
Mulvaney, the mouthiest of the conservative rebels, couldn’t help himself. He had supported Paul, the Kentucky senator. He would have settled for Cruz or Marco Rubio. He found the specter of Trump’s nomination laughable, though not necessarily unsettling. “Don’t worry, we’re not going to let a President Donald Trump dismantle the Bill of Rights,” Mulvaney said prior t the convention. “For five and a half years, every time we go to the floor and try and push back against an overreaching president, we get accused of being partisan at best and racist at worst. When we do it against a Republican president, maybe people will see that it was a principled objection in the first place.”
“It might actually be fun,” Mulvaney added, “being a strict constitutionalist congressman doing battle with a non-strict-constitutionalist Republican president.”
House conservatives would spend much of that spring and summer blaming the GOP’s establishment for enabling Trump’s victory. In one sense, this was fair. When presented with the dichotomy of Trump versus Cruz, many of the party’s graybeards, from John Boehner to Bob Dole, had voiced their preference for the former, believing that he could be controlled whereas Cruz could not. (“Crazy, I could deal with,” Boehner says. “But not pathological.”) Yet this obscured a more fundamental question: Why hadn’t the House hard-liners, the custodians of party purity, done more to thwart Trump’s rise in the first place?
Jordan, the two-time collegiate wrestling champion, had turned a roster of ragtag back-bench congressmen into a scrappy, disciplined, productive unit. His followers had mastered the use of technique and leverage to defeat opponents of superior size; lacking in seniority and campaign cash, the Freedom Caucus often outmaneuvered the rest of the majority, pushing leadership relentlessly to the right and refusing any compromise that would chafe the grass roots.
The group also had symbolic momentum. Two of its newer members, Warren Davidson of Ohio and Dave Brat of Virginia, occupied the seats once held by Boehner and Eric Cantor, respectively. The two most prominent casualties of the Tea Party era had each been replaced by members pledging allegiance to the Freedom Caucus.
But the House conservatives did nothing to slow Trump’s march to the nomination.
There had been no press conferences, no rallies on the Capitol lawn, no coordinated exercises with outside groups to signal opposition to the GOP front-runner. Half of the Freedom Caucus members had endorsed rival candidates, but the other half had endorsed no one at all. One of those who had remained neutral was Jordan. Watching Trump’s rise, he spent the summer of 2016 pondering not the failures of the past five months, but the failures of the past five years.
“The one thing I do reflect on is what could we, as a Republican Congress, have done differently to avoid creating this environment that was conducive to someone like Donald Trump becoming the nominee?” Jordan said in late June.
It was less than a month before the party’s convention, and Jordan and his fellow conservatives spoke of Trump’s nomination as a foregone conclusion. This was misleading. A faction of Republican activists and officials, under the banner of #NeverTrump, was organizing furiously ahead of the proceedings in Cleveland to defeat the GOP’s presumptive nominee. Their effort revolved around a change to the party’s rules, allowing delegates to vote their conscience rather than for the candidate to whom they were bound by their state’s results.
It was a long shot. But a number of respected conservatives, including Lee, the Utah senator, were involved in the plotting. They believed the reward of preventing Trump’s nomination was worth the risk of a backlash from his supporters.
The Freedom Caucus did not. Of its thirty-nine members, none would publicly support the rule change ahead of the convention.
“What people hate most about Washington is backroom deals, and that would be the ultimate backroom deal,” John Fleming, a Freedom Caucus board member, warned. “I think it would destroy the party.”
Mark Meadows, a former Cruz supporter, said prior to the convention that he was sympathetic to the #NeverTrump effort. Ultimately, however, he could not abide such an affront to his constituents.
“If I question their judgment on who they have as a nominee, I have to question their judgment on the fact that they continue to put me back in,” Meadows said. “That becomes very problematic when you think they’re smart in reelecting you but perhaps not as informed on a presidential nominee. So, you’ve got to trust the will of the people, even though sometimes you disagree with it.”
CRUZ HAD KEPT HIS HEAD DOWN EVER SINCE DEPARTING THE RACE. IN public settings, he projected stoicism, a certain peace about the result that kept questions at bay. Beneath the surface, however, he was boiling with resentment—toward his fellow senators for disowning him, toward Ben Carson for milking what should have been a one-day story, toward Marco Rubio for refusing to join his ticket, and toward Donald Trump for, well, everything.
Replaying the events of the previous year in his mind, Cruz grew only more upset with his adversary. Trump hadn’t been content to beat him politically; he had tried to butcher him personally. Calling him ineligible for the presidency? Suggesting that his wife was ugly? Implicating his father in the JFK assassination?
In Cruz’s mind, Trump had crossed lines that couldn’t be uncrossed. Nothing—certainly not some half-assed kumbaya session in DC—could change that. In preparing for his July 7 meeting with Trump, anticipating an invitation to speak in Cleveland, Cruz had gathered his kitchen cabinet of advisers and close friends. He believed there were three options: speak and endorse; speak and don’t endorse; or don’t speak at all.