The Last Republican President?

The last (relatively) bloodless presidential primary for the GOP came in 2000, when George W. Bush won the nomination by quietly unifying religious conservatives, fiscal conservatives, and defense hawks. Yet the warning signs of the coming crackup would soon arrive. Soon after his inauguration, conflicts over tax cuts and demands to end stem cell research broke out. Trying to cut government programs, Bush quickly lost his Senate majority when Senator Jim Jeffords left the party to caucus with the Democrats. When 9/11 changed the country’s concerns from a weak domestic economy to national security, Bush passed a second tax cut and ignored his campaign promise to strengthen social security. Taking advantage of a rising wave of concern about the flow of large corporate donations into the two national parties, Senators John McCain and Russ Feingold crafted the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act. The bill attempted to end the power of major donors to influence candidates and parties, and remove the advantage enjoyed by men like Bush and his deep-pocketed connections. However, driving money out of the parties gave big donors more influence, ambitious candidates more ways to make waves, and legislative leaders fewer ways to protect the Republican brand. It fueled the rise of uncompromising single-issue candidates, increased the power of lobbyists, and weakened party leaders in both the House and Senate. Changing campaign finance regulations pushed the party to the right and turned compromise and bipartisanship into four-letter words.

Young Guns and Billionaires

Chapter 2 examines how the Republican Party’s crackup evolved over the course of Barack Obama’s two terms as president. As divided as the GOP may have been after the 2008 presidential election, its major donors were linked in their opposition to Obama. For the first time since McCain-Feingold, the full force of conservative wealth in America was united against healthcare reform and any spending to revive the perilous economy, rescue the auto industry, or provide relief for mortgage holders. The election of the first African American president made it easy for conservative commentators on talk radio and Fox News to call Obama’s healthcare plan “reparations.” This stoked racial resentment and boosted the plans of wealthy industrialists Charles and David Koch to move Republicans further to the right. Their main organization, Americans for Prosperity, raised hundreds of millions of dollars yearly and quietly provided training, infrastructure, and funding for many of the “spontaneous” Tea Party groups that helped restore Republican control of Congress. Donors may not have been willing to give millions of dollars for compromise, but the slash-and-burn tactics of the Tea Party became a catastrophic example of overreach. The 2012 presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, got caught up in a party tilting ever more to the right; he was only given financial support for his campaign against Obama when he renounced his Massachusetts healthcare program—the model for Obamacare—and put Ryan on his ticket.

Conclusion

The final chapter contextualizes past crackups in both parties and explains why this time is different. As shown in case studies about Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, and Bill Clinton, it has been possible for candidates to create a new party synthesis that papers over the divides between those defending the current orthodoxy and those trying to shift direction. This time is different because the institutions that evolved over the last two centuries for controlling the power of those in charge of the national government are no longer adequate to the challenge. Each Republican Speaker of the House since 2000 has had less ability to develop consensus as more and more representatives are financed by groups unwilling to compromise. Despite the rampant anti-partyism saturating our public discussions, it is precisely the ability of parties to work within their diverse interests and find common ground for legislation that is essential to the future of the United States. Rebuilding the parties will require strengthening party legislative leaders, doing more screening of presidential candidates, and changing IRS regulations to prevent major donors from hiding their identity and the motives behind their ads.

Introduction

In 2016, a businessman so discredited that he could no longer get a casino license or borrow money from an American bank was elected president of the United States of America. How did this happen? It is easy to mock and ridicule Donald Trump as if he is the problem. In fact, he is a symptom of a much larger issue that has been bedeviling the GOP for nearly two decades: an intraparty crackup of massive proportions. “Crackup” here refers to a breakdown of the fragile alliances between coalitions within a party that prevents its leaders from developing goals they can deliver on when they control the White House and majorities in the House and Senate. This introductory chapter explains why party crackups are inevitable in a federal system with national money and local primaries. But this is the first time—for either party—that no group within the party could create a synthesis of old orthodoxies and new realities that altered the party’s direction enough to build a new consensus. The straw that broke the elephant’s back is the unintended—yet predictable—consequence of changes in campaign finance (popularly known as the McCain-Feingold bill) and the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling. These changes limited the party of legislative leaders to reach intraparty consensus and bargain with the other party. The combination has stripped the parties of most of their power to enforce any collective responsibility on their legislative colleagues, or upon a president from their own party.

Strongmen Don’t Pivot

Chapter 5 focuses on the 2016 general election. Having conquered the GOP’s best and brightest in the primary, Donald Trump had no interest in compromises; his version of unity was allowing Republican politicians and party officials a chance to accept his terms. Why compromise with the elites he had vilified before his roaring crowds? No matter what mainstream media thought of his racism, sexism, and bluster, there was a whole online system of nativists and nationalists occupying the ideological space to the right of Fox News who were more than happy to promote Trump, unfiltered. He won support from major evangelical leaders when, without hedging or caution, he became the first presidential candidate to flat-out promise “pro-life” judges. The GOP establishment—horrified by Trump’s campaign but scared of his rabid following—stayed largely silent. When Hillary Clinton let loose about the “deplorables” who liked Trump’s intolerance, it became a defiant note of pride among the whites she attacked, and proof she did not care about their economic woes. Trump doubled down on his nativist populism, aided by timely releases of hacked DNC e-mails by WikiLeaks and the reopening of an FBI investigation into Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server. On Election Day, the unimaginable occurred.

The Republicans Pivot

President Trump’s inaugural speech, a dark vision of “American carnage,” foreshadowed the administration to come. He considered presidential power a monetizable asset to convert into a family fortune, and the GOP—in unified control of Congress but deeply divided as a party—needed him and his voters so much that they exercised only minimal checks and balances. Chapter 6 charts the tempestuous relationship between the president and GOP leaders during a term marked by chaos in the White House and complicity in Congress. Despite a fervent desire to disrupt government, Trump’s West Wing staff was woefully unprepared for the task. In two years of unified control, the one major accomplishment was a massive tax cut for the top 1 percent of the country. His trade wars damaged exports, bankrupted farmers, and hurt American steel producers. His preferences for dictators rattled NATO and set back efforts to control North Korea and Iran. The GOP could not even repeal Obamacare, let alone replace it with something better. Republicans were blown out in the midterm election, losing control of the House, but they maintained their loyalty to Trump, forsaking the rule of law in favor of the rule of public opinion, and acquitting him of impeachment charges in the Senate without calling a single witness. However, the self-inflicted wounds from Trump’s administration were nothing compared to his abdication of leadership in the face of a true global crisis: COVID-19. Soon, the country with the world’s best science and medicine had the most cases and the most deaths in the world.

The Great Wall of Mexico

Ted Cruz appeared to be in the driver’s seat in the race for the 2016 GOP nomination. He won the backing of key evangelical groups and his message also appealed to nonreligious Tea Party members. He was backed by three billionaires and large numbers of small donors. Then he ran into the “Great Wall of Mexico.” Chapter 4 illustrates how the entire GOP establishment was so discredited from overpromising and underdelivering that an outsider like Donald Trump—bragging about his money while attacking everyone else as corrupt—attracted record crowds and a cult-like following to his “identity festivals.” His “birther” claims about President Obama won him a large following among people who didn’t want to accept a nonwhite president. He was the only candidate with a solution to the immigration stalemate—deportation—and the only one to propose taxing the rich to protect Social Security and Medicare. Trump wasn’t the first to come up with these ideas—nearly every single proposal he made had been made earlier by other Republicans—but he was the first to recognize the anger in the GOP’s voting base, and to take Ted Cruz’s incendiary tactics to an even greater extreme.

Ted Cruz Crashes the Party

Mitt Romney’s defeat in 2012 stunned the GOP establishment. Their shock showed how out of touch the party was with its own base. The Republican National Committee commissioned a study to identify the party’s barriers to growth, which found that single women and young voters were turned off by Republican positions on abortion, gay rights, and climate change, while Hispanics were repelled by opposition to immigration reform. At the same time, the report gently raised the threat to the party from the power of the (unnamed) Koch network, stating that “centralized authority in the hands of a few people is dangerous.” The GOP donor class of billionaires and multimillionaires favored ideological purity over incremental progress, and could outspend and outorganize the party when they found the right, uncompromising candidates. House and Senate GOP leaders were steadily losing control of their caucuses, and no one understood how much damage could be inflicted on the party by someone willing to savage colleagues to further themselves. Thanks to newly elected Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, a political firebrand out for himself no matter the cost, they were about to find out. Senator Marco Rubio, a darling of the party’s establishment, saw his attempts to craft an immigration reform bill destroyed by Cruz—who described undocumented immigrants as “undocumented Democrats.” Cruz then engineered a disastrous government shutdown and became one of the most reviled members of the Senate, even as he gained the admiration of social conservatives and became a role model for their children.