The Wilderness

  Begin Reading

  Table of Contents

  Photos

  Newsletters

  Copyright Page

  In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  For Annie

  A Note on Sourcing

  This book is based on more than three hundred interviews, conducted between November 2012 and September 2015, with elected officeholders, Republican Party officials, conservative movement leaders, media figures, top political operatives, consultants, activists, donors, and a wide range of family members, friends, and other confidants who have known the story’s principal subjects at various stages of their lives. My conversations with these people occasionally stretched on for hours, and certain key sources graciously spoke with me dozens of times over the course of this project. The majority of these interviews took place on the record, but some were granted on the strict condition of anonymity so that sources could candidly recount private conversations, provide behind-the-scenes details, and pass along other potentially sensitive information and insights. Wherever possible, their accounts were independently confirmed with notes, recordings, or interviews with other people who had knowledge of the given situations. In cases where substantive discrepancies existed between accounts, I worked to reconcile them through additional reporting and ultimately used my best judgment to provide the most accurate and complete version of events. (In a few instances, I have noted where a specific assertion is in dispute.)

  Where dialogue is quoted, it is based on the recollection of the speaker, or someone else who was present for the conversation. If sources could not remember or agree on the specific wording, I reconstructed the dialogue without using quotation marks. Similarly, the considerable sections of this book that portray the various subjects’ internal thoughts and feelings are based on descriptions from the subjects themselves, or from people in whom they confided; though my characterizations don’t comprise direct quotes, they represent a sincere effort to accurately and empathetically capture the subjects’ thinking.

  Finally, portions of this book are drawn from my reporting and published stories at BuzzFeed News, as well as from the work of many talented authors and journalists at other outlets. I have relied occasionally on the official memoirs of my subjects in order to collect biographical information and sort out narrative timelines, but in general I have treated these books like campaign documents, with all the journalistic skepticism such a category calls for. I certainly don’t claim to know these men and women better than they know themselves, but the pursuit of political power requires even the most straightforward strivers to sterilize their personal narratives—a process that too often conceals the untidy chapters, unsightly secrets, and off-message anxieties that make them interesting human beings. Among its other objectives, this book intends to tell those stories.

  Introduction

  The houselights in the campus auditorium fall. The audience grows quiet. A producer initiates the countdown—“… four… three… two…”—and at precisely 9 p.m. eastern time the cameras go hot.

  All at once, seventy million Americans are seeing the same tension-packed scene unfold in real time: Two commanding figures, both national celebrities loved and hated by millions, stride confidently toward each other from opposite ends of a vast, elaborately retrofitted stage. A white-hot glare beats down from the klieg lights above. A clamorous applause rises from the seats below. Thousands of reporters in a nearby gymnasium sit with their eyes glued to closed-circuit TVs, their twitchy fingers hovering over keyboards, preparing to chronicle every micromoment. The two figures meet in the middle of the stage and shake hands with the menacing intensity of cage fighters entering a match.

  It is October 2016. The presidential race is in its final, frenetic weeks. And the Republican nominee is about to go head-to-head with the Democratic candidate in the critical first debate of the general election.

  The stakes are high. Whoever wins the election will take office at a moment of uncommon uncertainty and upheaval in American life—tasked with setting the national agenda for the most contentious issues of the era, from racial injustice to religious freedom, from police accountability to privacy rights, from immigration to income inequality. The average age of the Supreme Court justices has now passed seventy, and the next president could plausibly make as many as four new appointments to the bench, on top of thousands of other appointments across the judiciary and executive branches—an almost unprecedented opportunity to shape American jurisprudence for decades to come. Abroad, the growing terrorist threat of the Islamic State and the geopolitical bullying of countries like Russia will present the new commander in chief with a host of life-and-death, war-and-peace decisions that could have lasting global repercussions. And back home, the outcome of the election will almost certainly make the difference between an Oval Office occupant who celebrates, solidifies, and builds upon President Obama’s liberal domestic policies and one who spends the next four years actively working to unspool his legacy.

  The choice facing the country is stark, its consequences far-reaching—and it could all hinge on what happens onstage over the next ninety minutes. Tonight, the eyes of the nation are fixed on those two figures planted behind their podiums.

  Who does the audience see?

  When that pivotal moment arrives on an early October night in 2016, the candidate who shakes hands with the Democratic nominee in front of seventy million people will have traveled an unprecedented path to get there. He will have fought off the largest field of Republican contenders in a century, vanquishing at least sixteen serious rivals in all. He will have raised enough money to dominate the most expensive presidential race in American history, with an expected price tag of $5 billion. He will have logged enough miles in flight on the campaign trail to circle the globe a dozen times.

  And he will have done it all amid the high-drama, high-octane clashes of ego and ideology that have raged inside the GOP—in cinematic public spectacles and clandestine cutthroat maneuvering—since the Republicans’ dizzying defeat on the night of the 2012 election.

  What follows is a chronicle of that once-in-a-generation battle over the future of the Republican Party, told through its most influential, provocative, and fascinating combatants—virtually all of whom hope to make it to that debate stage, and ultimately, the White House.

  PART I

  EXILE

  Chapter One

  The Exodus

  November 6, 2012—Election Day

  If ever there was a moment when Senator Rand Paul needed to make use of his God-given poker face—the small mouth that rested in a gently sloped, unreadable frown; the impassive, pale-blue eyes that betrayed no hint at his innermost thoughts—it was right now. This instant. This night. In this dimly lit, log-framed, antler-adorned restaurant function room in Bowling Green, Kentucky, with these crestfallen conservatives standing all around him.

  The national Republican Party was imploding on live television; dispatches from the calamity were being beamed in from Fox News headquarters and blasting out of TVs mounted on the walls of Montana Grille in Rand’s small hometown. Colorado going blue. North Carolina too close to call. Todd Akin getting pummeled in Missouri; Scott Brown down in Massachusetts. And then the contingent of local Republicans who had gathered to watch the returns fell silent as the candy-colored chyron delivered the doomsday headline:

/>   BARACK OBAMA REELECTED PRESIDENT

  Rand was the most senior Republican official in the room, and he knew all eyes were on him. The appropriate, senatorial thing to do here was to quietly broadcast his sober disappointment in a country gone astray; to nod in solidarity at the “Tough night”s and “What a shame”s; to express solemn regret that Americans were going to miss out on such a fine, righteous president as Willard Mitt Romney. It was not a pose that came naturally to Rand, but he had picked up a few things since his scrappy, successful Senate bid in 2010—enough that he knew how to play the part of the grown-up statesman, at least for an evening.

  And so the gentleman from Kentucky tightened his lips, clenched his jaw, and mustered every last ounce of self-discipline he had stored up over the course of his brief but educational time in Washington—and he managed to swallow any sign of the visceral glee that was secretly consuming him.

  It wasn’t that Rand took any pleasure in knowing that the socialist in the Oval Office would get another four years to ransack America’s liberties with his congressional comrades. That was, indeed, a shame. But the fact that Romney’s humiliating defeat might finally expose the GOP’s moneyed, Waspy, corporatist breed of country-club patricians for the frauds that they were—well, that was cause for celebration in the Paul household.

  For Rand, this was personal. As far back as he could remember, his family and friends had been getting their lunch money stolen by political bullies in the GOP who looked and behaved like Romney. Rand had been just thirteen years old when his family piled into a camper and drove north to the 1976 Republican National Convention in Kansas City—the site of a bitter, emotionally charged floor fight between President Gerald Ford’s well-heeled establishment princes and Ronald Reagan’s rowdy right-wing insurgents. As a newly elected libertarian congressman and head of the Texas delegation, Rand’s father, Ron, entered the weeklong fray as a frontline soldier in the Reagan revolution, and young Randy had watched, wide-eyed and appalled, as the GOP party bosses ruthlessly beat back—sometimes literally—the populists at the gate. He could still vividly remember, three and a half decades later, the image of Vice President Nelson Rockefeller snatching up a floor sign during a heated exchange and taking a swing at one of the Texas delegates. Ron and his fellow Reaganites fought back by relentlessly heckling the Ford family, who were perched in a private box above the Texas delegation. On the last night of the convention, after Ford had prevailed and won his party’s nomination, one of the president’s sons dumped garbage on the rabble-rousers below.

  As far as Rand was concerned, not much had changed since those polyester-clad combatants were fighting for the soul of the party inside Kemper Arena. Even as Ron Paul had emerged in the ensuing years as the philosopher-king of American libertarianism—marshaling a rambunctious grassroots movement as a serial protest candidate for the presidency—Rand observed a procession of entitled establishment Republicans seizing every opportunity to mock, deride, marginalize, and sneer at his father’s life’s work.

  A fastidious scorekeeper in a family that passed down grudges like prized heirlooms, Rand had taken note that many of the prominent Ford delegates back in ’76 grew up to be Kentucky good ol’ boys who fiercely opposed him in the 2010 Senate primary. His surprise tables-turning victory over those snoots had been among the greatest pleasures of his adult life.

  As for Romney himself, Rand had nothing personal against him—not really. The candidate had largely stayed out of his dad’s way during the 2012 presidential primaries, having apparently crunched the data and realized that he had little to gain by alienating a passionate bloc of libertarian voters like the Paulites. But Mitt’s opportunistic politeness did little to dampen the sheer, tribal satisfaction Rand felt as he watched the Massachusetts millionaire deliver a sad, hurried concession speech on TV. This was bigger than any one man. Over the past decade, establishment Republicans of Romney’s sort had helped run up a multitrillion-dollar federal deficit; sent American troops into a series of disastrous, unwinnable foreign wars; and allowed the government to expand—practically unchecked—to unprecedented size and power.

  Along the way, they had weakened a once-great party by shrinking the proverbial Republican tent to such a ludicrously small size that just about the only people who could fit under it were the five Romney sons and the job creators who sold them their skis. Over the past year Rand had stumped for both his dad, in the primaries, and Mitt, in the general, and he had been repeatedly struck by the differences between the crowds the two men drew. Unlike the veritable Glee cast of supporters who showed up at Ron Paul rallies—sporting tattoos and nose rings and gay pride buttons—Mitt’s campaign events had been populated by a tribe of aging, white, aggrieved conservatives who would never again get to elect a president on their own. If this hadn’t been clear before tonight, it was painfully obvious now. The only shot the party would have at rebuilding a winning national coalition was to shed its hawkish orthodoxies, shred its intolerant dogmas, and embrace a new libertarian future.

  Yes, the reckoning had finally arrived for the establishment bullies—and the picked-on Pauls, at long last, would be ascendant.

  Washington Republicans could scoff all they wanted at the kooky cast of misfits who plastered “Ron Paul Revolution” stickers across their pickup truck bumpers: they were going to have to deal with Rand now. And unlike his father, the Kentucky senator had no interest in running hopeless, quixotic campaigns in the name of principle, or in preaching to a choir of noisy activists who were playacting revolution. Rand was out for an actual revolution—a new party, an upended order. And he wouldn’t have to storm the gates to get there. He was going to walk in through the front door.

  West Miami, Florida

  Marco Rubio tried to make the best of his peaceful election night at home, but it was no use. He was bouncing and bobbing and brimming with enough pent-up energy to power Sun Life Stadium for an entire Dolphins season.

  In the last weeks of the race, few Republicans had worked harder, hustled faster, or put in longer hours to help Mitt Romney win the presidency. The young Florida senator had taken on such a full schedule of stumping that the Romney campaign had actually chartered a small plane to shepherd him around the country. Some days, Rubio worked longer hours than the pilots themselves, and he would end up waiting on a swing state runway as they brought in a new shift.

  But a couple of days before the election, his daughter had gotten injured in a minor golf cart accident and he left the campaign trail to attend to his family. Rubio had visions of spending the night playing Madden and intermittently checking his iPhone to keep tabs on the election, but of course it was a fantasy. He was now monitoring the news obsessively on multiple screens—jumping from channel to channel on the TV, refreshing his Twitter app, and furiously clicking through websites on his computer to see how the news was playing.

  And, as it turned out, the news was playing very well for Marco Rubio.

  The most immediate takeaway among the reporters and pundits skimming through exit-polling data was that Romney’s crushing defeat was in large part due to his abysmal showing among Latino voters. And as several Republican talking heads were now eagerly pointing out, it just so happened that their party had a youthful, dynamic, Spanish-speaking superstar just waiting to take center stage and begin rectifying Romney’s failures. In a succinct summary of the fast-gathering consensus in the conservative commentariat, George Will declared on ABC News, “If there’s a winner tonight, it’s the senator from Florida, Marco Rubio.” (The president had, apparently, slipped Will’s mind for the moment.)

  As he took in the coverage, Rubio was a bundle of competing impulses and conflicted emotions. On the one hand, the punditry was exhilarating—all these people were on television talking about him as the next president of the United States. Him! He couldn’t precisely remember the first time he pictured himself in the Oval Office, but it was a safe bet that it had happened prior to the first time he drove a car. Now he was actu
ally poised to get there.

  On the other hand, he was genuinely dismayed by how the election was ending. Four years earlier, Rubio had watched Barack Obama’s Grant Park victory speech from the studio of the local Miami Univision affiliate, where he worked as an on-air Republican analyst. He was no Obama supporter, of course, but as Rubio listened to him speak that night, he became so overwhelmed by the weight of the moment—and its meaning for the country—that he found himself fighting back tears. In the years since that hallucinatory evening, however, Rubio had lost all confidence in the president’s ability to unite Americans or, frankly, do anything that would seriously help his constituents. And though Rubio’s hard work on behalf of Romney that year had started out as an act of personal ambition, he had come to sincerely admire the nominee, believing he had the potential to be one of the country’s great presidents. That the majority of voters had rejected a man of such caliber in favor of Obama’s divisive politics and deceptive emotional appeals was deeply disappointing, even disturbing.

  But Rubio didn’t have it in him to mourn just now; it was time to look forward. He felt as though he needed to do something. But what? He couldn’t very well rush out of his house in search of a TV camera at this hour; he would look tactless, and overly ambitious. Yet he couldn’t stand the thought of just sitting here, cooped up at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac while the entire political world was talking about him.

  He fired off emails to his advisers, clamoring for a plan of action. He drafted and discarded statement after statement, press release after press release, in his head. He called up his longtime friend and aide Alberto Martinez, who had worked on Latino outreach for the Romney campaign and was now in Boston with his despairing colleagues. The two spent a few minutes on the phone glumly diagnosing the various reasons for the Republicans’ 2012 defeat. They vented about the Romney campaign’s operational failures and grumbled about the dishonesty of Obama’s winning message. But both men also agreed that their party faced a larger systemic weakness—and unless it was fixed, this country would never see another Republican elected president.