The Wilderness Page 3

  Ryan’s only job, meanwhile, was to square his considerable shoulders, jut out his photogenic jaw, and clap dutifully for the captain of their sunken ship. Not exactly heady work for the guy who had very recently been dubbed “the intellectual leader of the Republican Party.”

  But Ryan tried to shoo away the encroaching feelings of resentment and self-pity. No, he was happy to do whatever the campaign asked. Thrilled. Honored. Stoked.

  Pumped!

  From the moment he joined the ticket, Ryan had made a conscious choice that he would be a team player on this campaign, that he wouldn’t emit so much as a whiff of the ego and self-indulgence that Sarah Palin had used to derail John McCain’s 2008 presidential bid. No showboating, glory-hogging, grandstanding, game-changing, or rogue-going. He would execute the plays that Boston headquarters called for him with workmanlike efficiency and diligence. Though he could never publicly admit it, for fear of offending the stilettoed polemicist’s rabid fan base, Ryan’s guiding decision-making template throughout the campaign amounted to WWPD: What Wouldn’t Palin Do?

  When consultants suggested early on that Ryan trade in his baggy Brooks Brothers suits and oversize dress shirts for a less Beltway-inspired wardrobe, his first thought was of Sarah from Alaska’s infamous $150,000 shopping spree with the McCain campaign’s charge card. “I saw what happened to Palin and I was like, no way I’m letting the campaign buy me clothes,” he later recalled. “Besides, my clothes are fine!” (After a series of media reports mocked the excessive reams of gingham he was prone to wrapping himself in, Ryan eventually conceded that last point and invested in a few bicep-hugging polo shirts for the stump.)

  When he was given a set of talking points by the bosses in Boston, he recited them virtually word for word. When he was asked to head down to a Florida retirement community and paper over his signature entitlement reform proposals, he put on his best pair of khakis and brought along his mom as a stage prop. He had been the very definition of a line-toeing, low-maintenance running mate. Kept his head down, followed his orders.

  But tonight, the good soldier could no longer deny that he had some… let’s call them “frustrations”… with the way this campaign had been run. His thoughts weren’t fully formed yet, and certainly weren’t coherent enough for public consumption, but they were there all the same—gnawing at him.

  For instance, he was frustrated that Mitt had jealously guarded so much of himself from the voters that he allowed the Left to turn him into a Scooby-Doo cartoon villain. The Mitt Romney he had gotten to know personally during the campaign was an authentically decent, humble, service-minded man. Even funny, and a little weird in an endearing way. He watched Game of Thrones (though he didn’t care for all the nudity) and adopted a Southern twang to quote from his favorite movie, O Brother, Where Art Thou? But Mitt seemed so unwilling to reveal even the tiniest glimpse of his inner life that his trim, starched, clean-cut, gee-golly persona came off like cynical shtick—“the guy on top of the wedding cake,” as Ryan would later tell me. Just for display. Void of substance.

  Ryan was also frustrated by the Romney family’s baffling queasiness when it came to talking about their Mormon faith. When Ryan first began the vice presidential vetting process, he took his House colleague Utah representative Jason Chaffetz out for a long dinner and peppered the LDS convert with questions. Given how reticent the Romneys had been to engage the topic of their religion in the election so far, Ryan half expected that his chat with Chaffetz would reveal some sort of bizarre, Scientology-like belief system, but as far as he could tell it was fairly benign. More to the point, many of Mitt’s most humanizing stories occurred in the service of his church. Between the accounts of Brother Romney gently crafting wills for dying children at their bedside and his seemingly endless service as a volunteer bishop in the Boston area, there were enough good deeds to fill a veritable sequel to the Book of Acts. And yet Mitt was constantly skittish whenever the subject came up. Ryan eventually concluded that the nominee was nervous about becoming the public face of his global faith. “He sees it as his responsibility, and my guess is that it’s a responsibility he didn’t want,” Ryan later hypothesized to me. “You know, his campaign was going to come and go, but the impression of the church on the minds of Americans could be set for a generation if he screws up.”

  Still, would it have killed him to break out some of these deathbed ministry stories before the Obama campaign carpet bombed the swing states with ads making Mitt look like a plutocratic monster?

  More than anything, though, Ryan was deeply frustrated with how the campaign’s strategists had insisted on framing the 2012 election as a referendum on Obama, and not as a choice between two competing visions. Long before he was tapped as Mitt’s running mate, Ryan had written a series of idealistic memos to the candidate urging him to articulate an ambitious conservative agenda and take his case to voters who didn’t traditionally vote Republican. When Ryan eventually joined the ticket, many in the political world predicted that his presence would turn the election into a grand ideological battle. Ryan thought so, too. Inside the campaign, he argued vigorously to make the election about more than just listing the president’s myriad screwups. In one case, he lobbied the campaign to put out its own agenda for financial reform, and he had his staff working on a speech to introduce it. “They’re out there killing us, saying we just want to let Wall Street run wild,” Ryan argued to the campaign’s strategists.

  But his arguments fell on deaf ears: the game plan was all but chiseled in stone, and advocating for specific conservative policies was considered “off message.”

  “The strategy set, I focused on the job I had to do as a running mate,” he would later write. “I needed a good rollout, a good convention speech, and a good debate. Those were my duties.”

  But duty, Ryan was beginning to decide, was overrated.

  Shortly after midnight, Ryan followed Mitt and his entourage down to the ballroom, where disgruntled, half-drunk supporters were awaiting the concession speech. Romney’s remarks were brief, clocking in at four minutes and forty-eight seconds, but they included a shout-out to his running mate: “Besides my wife, Ann,” Mitt said to applause, “Paul is the best choice I’ve ever made.”

  But as Ryan shuffled onstage at the end of the speech to hug Mitt, clap, wave, hug his wife, clap, and wave some more—like a loyal labradoodle reflexively following commands—that potent cocktail of grievance, regret, and frustration continued to simmer just beneath the surface of his dutiful exterior. Paul Ryan was finished being brought to heel.

  Boston, Massachusetts

  Donald Trump didn’t stick around for the concession speech at the Westin. The instant he realized the election-night victory party to which he had been invited would instead be a hotel ballroom full of sad sacks wallowing in failure, the billionaire bolted the scene in a black SUV—fleeing Mitt Romney’s fast-approaching admission of defeat with the life-or-death urgency of an island villager trying to escape a tsunami. Publicly palling around with losers was bad for the brand. And for Trump, the brand was everything.

  Indeed, among the vast array of garishly expensive toys and trophies the real estate mogul had accumulated over the years—all glittering, and gold-plated, and conspicuously monogrammed—it was his phenomenally lucrative billionaire-for-the-blue-collar-masses brand that stood alone as the one possession Trump treated as truly priceless. He labored over it. Luxuriated in it. Prized it, polished it, and protected it from even the smallest blemishes. If there had ever been a time when Trump’s public persona was merely a shtick he performed to amuse the New York City tabloids, the caricature had long since come to consume him and define his business empire. It radiated off of the line of fat silk neckties and machine-washable French cuff shirts that filled his collection’s designated aisle at Macy’s. It sparkled in the giant gold lettering stamped across his eponymous hotels and skyscrapers. It permeated his illustrious and ever-growing list of self-awarded superlatives: Star of the NUMBE
R ONE show on TV! Author of the bestselling business book of ALL TIME! The most recognized man in the WHOLE world! (“It used to be Muhammad Ali, and now it’s me,” Trump once bragged to me, hastening to add that the legendary boxer was “a friend of mine, and all that stuff.”)

  That few of these boasts were, strictly speaking, true only added to Trump’s deliberately honed image as a brash, outspoken, rule-breaking billionaire—each rhetorical embellishment brightening the sheen of his flamboyant, diamond-encrusted brand.

  For most of the 2012 election cycle, Trump had channeled his talent for self-marketing toward politics—first as a right-wing noisemaker championing conspiracy theories about Obama, then as a potential presidential candidate, and finally as an unignorable campaign sideshow. He’d endorsed Romney because the guy seemed like the least pathetic candidate in the parade of primary contenders who’d trekked to Trump Tower in 2011 to kiss his ring. Mitt had at least built up a respectable little fortune for himself, even if he was just a small-time hedge fund guy, and even if Trump’s own net worth was—as he never tired of pointing out—many, many, MANY times greater. (As he would later take to bragging, “I have a Gucci store that’s worth more than Romney!”)

  But as the election wore on, Trump began to suspect that the Republican nominee’s campaign was filled with losers, weaklings, and idiots who had no idea how valuable The Donald’s support was to them. For example, when the billionaire had magnanimously offered to bestow his highly coveted endorsement at a flashy ceremony in his Las Vegas hotel—Number one in all of Nevada!—the national media flocked to the event. Trump could tell just by looking at the gaggle of assembled reporters that the turnout was unprecedented. Historic. HUGE. And yet, the Romney campaign didn’t have the first clue how to put on a show in front of all those cameras. Mitt only spent five minutes on stage, looking uncomfortable and squirrelish as he shook hands with Trump, and then scurried away to his campaign’s charter plane. (“Romney had a really shitty plane,” a chuckling Trump would later tell me. “Total piece of shit. Not presidential at all.”)

  This pattern had then repeated itself in the run-up to the 2012 Republican convention. As the event approached, everybody was demanding that Trump give a keynote speech in primetime. “People were writing me thousands of letters and emails, all going crazy!” he remembered. To satisfy these rabid, letter-writing multitudes he brought in a film crew—Really talented! Top award-winners!—to produce a convention video that revolved around Trump deploying his famous TV catchphrase against President Obama: “You’re fired!” When Trump saw the final product, he knew right away it was a guaranteed hit—maybe even a game-changer for the whole election. But what did Romney’s gutless campaign operatives do when he handed them pure primetime gold? They scrapped the whole thing, claiming it was “too controversial” to show at the convention. What a joke.

  Eventually, Trump arrived at the only logical explanation for these snubs: Romney was obviously worried he would look puny and small by comparison if he spent too much time next to The Donald. “He was afraid of me,” the billionaire would later conclude with a shrug. “His people didn’t even want him going in the same room with me because they thought he’d look secondary, and not like a presidential contender.”

  Now, as he raced toward Boston’s Logan Airport with his entourage, Trump wished he had never made the mistake of tarnishing his treasured brand with an unsightly smear of loserdom like Mitt Romney. “Trump doesn’t like to be associated with failure,” one of his aides would tell me the next day. “Trump’s a winner.”

  Still, electoral outcomes aside, Trump considered his 2012 foray into presidential politics a success. Not only had he repeatedly hijacked national news cycles with an increasingly incendiary succession of publicity stunts—an achievement of showmanship that he relished—he had also, along the way, built up a devoted following of die-hard fans on the conservative fringes of the Republican Party.

  This had come as a pleasant surprise to Trump. In business, his trademark aesthetic had long been tailored to appeal to a certain type of consumer. “If you have no education, and you work with your hands, you like him,” one of his aides explained to me. “It’s like, ‘Wow, if I was rich, that’s how I would live!’ The girls, the cars, the fancy suits. His ostentatiousness is appealing to them.” But it wasn’t until Trump (who had enthusiastically praised Obama just a few years earlier) reinvented himself as a right-wing populist that he realized his blunt, macho, shouty style was perfectly attuned to the mood in the conservative movement circa 2012. He found he was able to effortlessly channel the id of a certain subset of the GOP’s right-wing base—aggrieved nativists, fevered conspiracy theorists—simply by applying his regular routine to the art of Obama-bashing.

  Whereas the political class had increasingly turned up their noses at his antics over the course of the election, Trump’s new cheering section showered him with validation, and egged him on. They rooted for him when he pledged to uncover Obama’s true African birthplace and expose the president for the fraudulent foreigner that he was. And they reveled in his unrepentantly rude stream of insults directed at Obama and his lefty supporters.

  To Trump’s political booster club, he was more than just a reality TV star or an entertaining loudmouth or the owner of the world’s classiest hotels: he was a gutsy truth-teller. A model leader. Presidential material. Throughout the election, these fans had been a source of immense satisfaction—and consolation—for Trump. So what if the sniveling haters on Romney’s staff wanted to blow him off? These folks, he told himself, were his true target demo.

  And tonight he was going to give them a show.

  Trump arrived at the airport at around 11:00 p.m., and soon he was on board his private helicopter, barking out tweets for one of his yes-men to post under his name. Someone had informed him (wrongly) that Romney was going to win the popular vote while still losing the election, and in this Trump saw a perfect opportunity for outrage-mongering.

  The first tweet by @realDonaldTrump went out at 11:30 p.m.: “Let’s fight like hell and stop this great and disgusting injustice! The world is laughing at us.”

  Then, three minutes later: “This election is a total sham and a travesty. We are not a democracy!”

  And then: “More votes equals a loss… revolution!”

  Trump continued in this vein with several more tweets, each one whipping his followers into a frothier state of frenzy. His yes-man kept him briefed minute to minute on the reaction the rant was generating—Five thousand retweets on this one! Fifteen thousand on that one!—and the online hysteria pleased the billionaire. His fans were rallying; his haters were going nuts; and Trump was soaking up his last stolen spotlight of the 2012 presidential election.

  Amid all the vehement criticism, however, there was one comment that got under his skin. During a short segment that night about Trump’s attempts to foment revolution on Twitter, NBC News anchor Brian Williams briefly broke character from his usual on-air role as the affable, objective newsman to proclaim that Trump had “driven well past the last exit to relevance, and veered into something closer to irresponsible.”

  The put-down made Trump fume. His long-running reality show, The Apprentice, had brought in hundreds of millions of dollars to the same network that cut Williams’s paychecks—and this was how he got treated in return? He fired back with a barrage of tweets ripping Williams’s “totally boring” nightly newscast, taunting him over the lackluster ratings for his newsmagazine show, and snarling, “I hope NBC isn’t paying you too much.” But even after unloading on the anchor, he still found himself seething over the remark. “Irresponsible” Trump could live with—but irrelevant? He couldn’t let that go. And he wouldn’t let it stand.

  As Donald Trump ascended into the sky, raining down thunderous calls for mass political mutiny, the Republicans back on earth were forced to grapple with a disorienting new reality taking hold across the country that night. For the past four years, many in the GOP had dismissed Ob
ama’s 2008 election—and the historic surge of young, progressive, and minority voters he had inspired—as a one-time fluke made possible by an uncommonly charismatic candidate who’d hypnotized the country with savvy sloganeering. This theory had only been strengthened by the Tea Party wave of 2010 that flooded Congress with new conservative lawmakers. Now, however, the comforting illusion was crashing down around them. Republicans had just faced a weak Democratic incumbent, a disenchanted liberal base, and a national electorate restless over the languid economy—and still they had been pummelled. Their presidential nominee had lost every swing state but one, in some cases by historic margins. And though many would try to pin blame for the party’s defeat on Romney alone, the truth was that the Republican Senate candidates in almost every state had performed even worse than he had.

  Meanwhile, a flurry of election-night dispatches from culture war battlegrounds were bringing news of unexpected progressive victories. In Maine and Maryland, same-sex marriage won at the ballot box for the first time in the nation’s history. In Wisconsin, Tammy Baldwin became the first lesbian ever to get elected to the United States Senate. In Colorado and Washington, voters passed initiatives legalizing recreational pot use. This was no longer the same center-right country in which national elections were dominated by tough-on-crime, just-say-no, family-values conservatives. Cultural attitudes had evolved, demographics had changed, the electoral map had been redrawn—and the Grand Old Party was now indisputably in exile.

  As Republicans were thrust into the wilderness that night in November, consigned to a period of indefinite wandering, they found themselves without a Moses to point the way to the promised land. For the first time in more than forty years, the GOP had no consensus heir-apparent, no next-in-line standard-bearer, no revered party eminence around whom the nation’s Republicans would naturally coalesce. Indeed, with their party fracturing into a chaotic cluster of warring tribes, they were forced to confront the fact that there would be no foreordained figure coming down from the mountaintop to deliver them from disarray. Instead, a large and unruly cast of self-styled, tablet-toting prophets would emerge from the mayhem to vie fiercely for that mantle—each peddling his own vision for the party’s future; each preaching redemption for American conservatism; and each promising a path back to the presidency.