But there was still something shocking, and more than a little heartbreaking, about the sight of a seventy-five-year-old man abandoning everything he had ever stood for in order to speed up the process of rubberstamping Trump’s cabinet picks.
A half century ago, when some Republicans began to toy with a strategy of abandoning their party’s historic commitment to civil rights, John Sherman Cooper warned of the absolute amorality of the compromise. “In the long run, such a position will destroy the Republican Party, and worse, it will do a great wrong because it will be supporting the denial of the constitutional and human rights of our citizens.”
Mitch McConnell knew Cooper was right when the late senator from Kentucky uttered those words. Undoubtedly, Mitch McConnell knows them to be right today. Yet, he has abandoned his mentor’s “profile in courage” politics to join in the shameful servicing of Donald Trump’s retrograde presidency.
John Sherman Cooper would be horrified by his former intern’s infamy, and by the transformation of the “Party of Lincoln” into the “Party of Trump.”
— 22 —
PARTY BOY
Paul Ryan
Speaker of the House
House Speaker Paul Ryan told the House Republican Caucus just one month before the 2016 presidential election that Donald Trump’s shocking comments about women, as recorded on the infamous Access Hollywood tape, were “not anywhere in keeping with our party’s principles and values.”
“There are basically two things that I want to make really clear, as for myself as your Speaker,” Ryan explained, in what was supposed to be a private conference call with members of the House Republican Caucus. “I am not going to defend Donald Trump—not now, not in the future. As you probably heard, I disinvited him from my first congressional district GOP event this weekend—a thing I do every year. And I’m not going to be campaigning with him over the next 30 days.”
So that was it. Ryan and Trump were over and done with. The speaker stood his ground. Firmly. Unapologetically. For the better part of two weeks.
Then Ryan cheerfully announced that he had not just cast an early ballot for Trump, but that he was urging fellow Republicans to do the same.
“I stand where I’ve stood all fall and all summer,” Ryan chirped on the Fox News show Fox and Friends. “In fact I already voted here in Janesville for our nominee last week in early voting. We need to support our entire Republican ticket.”
Then Ryan went on to rip the Democratic nominee and to speak with considerable passion about the absolute necessity of electing a Republican Congress and a Republican president.
Once again, as he had throughout the 2016 campaign, Ryan delivered for Trump at precisely the point when Trump needed an establishment Republican to step up. For Trump, the critical final struggle of the 2016 race involved the work of getting Republicans who had soured on their nominee to “come home” to the GOP ticket. And Paul Ryan was the chief wrangler.
Despite his occasional protestations to the contrary, despite the dippy media storyline that imagined again and again and again that Ryan might break with the nominee and stand strong for the historic Republican values that the billionaire populist so ardently assaulted, the speaker invariably put party loyalties ahead of principles. He did so during the campaign. He did so during the transition. He did so when he got 217 House Republicans to back a scheme to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act that Trump claimed—disingenuously, as it would never survive Senate scrutiny—as the first real legislative achievement of his presidency.
This is the essential understanding with regard to Paul Ryan: he will never stand up to Trump when it matters. Never. Paul Ryan will sacrifice any principle, any ideal, on the altar of his own ambition. And now his ambition is wedded with the Trump presidency that Ryan, to a greater extent than any other Republican, made possible. That was good for Trump when he needed Ryan to keep Republican voters in line at the close of the 2016 campaign, and that is good now for Ryan because an ill-prepared and unfocused president is ripe for manipulation by one of Capitol Hill’s slyest self-promoters.
Paul Ryan wants very much to be recognized as the adult at the kids’ table that his Republican Party has become. No one in the party works harder to curry the favor of the print and broadcast outlets that have for the better part of a decade formed an amen corner for the House Speaker.
Ryan endeavors to portray himself as a diligent public servant who simply wants to do the heavy lifting required to reform government and the economy, even if his “reforms” consistently involve shaping budgets and rewriting tax codes to favor the interests of the billionaires, bankers and corporate CEOs who donate so generously to the many campaign funds he manages.
Since he arrived on Capitol Hill more than a quarter century ago, Paul Ryan’s heaviest lifting is always on behalf of Paul Ryan’s personal ambition. Though he frequently portrays himself as an unwilling participant in the power politics of DC, Ryan invariably ends up as a vice presidential nominee, a powerful committee chair or the Speaker of the House. That does not happen by chance. That happens because no one in contemporary American politics claws and clutches and compromises more consistently in pursuit of personal power than Paul Ryan.
Ryan’s power extends from the success or failure of the Republican Party that will be led for the foreseeable future by Donald Trump. So, for the foreseeable future, Ryan is going to be Trump’s man on the hill. No doubt about it. No questions asked. As Washington’s most determined political careerist, Paul Ryan knows that when the political winds shift he must shift with them. Still, the man’s cynicism can be breathtaking.
The House Speaker pitches himself as a high priest, speaking unfortunate truths about debts and deficits; as the unforgiving foe of social spending who would willingly sacrifice Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid as we know them in order to achieve debt reduction. Ryan has branded himself well in Republican circles, so well that he has parlayed himself into contention for the key committee chairmanships, the speakership and a place on a national ticket. The congressman from Wisconsin inspires confidence among Republicans by pitching himself as the champion of an old-school Republican agenda of fiscal responsibility and balanced budgets.
But Ryan is nothing of the sort. He’s actually a hypocritical big spender—at least when Wall Street, the insurance industry and the military-industrial complex call. More like Trump than he might want to admit, Ryan has been a steady voter for unconscionable health care policies, unsustainable bailouts of big banks, unfunded mandates and unnecessary wars. Few members of Congress have run up such very big tabs while doing so little to figure out how to pay the piper.
“Congressman Paul Ryan can grandstand about the debt all he wants, but at the end of the day, Ryan is a root cause of many of the financial issues our country faces today,” explained Rob Zerban, a local official in Ryan’s home district who challenged the congressman several years ago. “From supporting two unfunded wars, to dumping millions of senior citizens into the Medicare Part D ‘donut hole’ while tying the hands of the government to negotiate prescription drug prices, and from fighting for subsidies for Big Oil that his family personally benefits from, to supporting the unfunded Bush tax cuts for his wealthiest campaign contributors, Paul Ryan’s hypocrisy is astounding.”
Ryan’s scorching cynicism grew ever more astounding as Trump elbowed his way into contention for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016.
Everything that anyone needed to know about how Ryan would relate to Trump, as a candidate and as a president, was revealed in the fall of 2015, when Trump called for a “total and complete shutdown” of Muslims entering the United States. That was a stunning expression of the xenophobia and bigotry that had always existed on the fringe of the Republican Party but that Trump threatened to bring into its mainstream.
Paul Ryan, as the supposed adult in a room full of immature and belligerent Republicans, had a clear duty. He was the Speaker of the House, the party’s imme
diate former nominee for vice president and a frequently boomed prospect for the presidency himself. Ryan possessed both the authority and the stature to a draw a line in the sand and declare that responsible Republicans were on one side and Donald Trump was on the other.
Yet, after Trump called for a religious test that was broadly recognized as unconstitutional, after Trump made advocacy for indiscriminate discrimination central to his candidacy, Ryan provided nothing in the way of leadership.
Rather, Ryan played the part of the indulgent parent talking about a troublesome child.
“Normally, I do not comment on what’s going on in the presidential election. I will take an exception today,” Ryan said on December 8, 2015, as a firestorm rose regarding Trump’s crude extremism. “This is not conservatism. What was proposed yesterday is not what this party stands for. And, more importantly, it’s not what this country stands for,” Ryan told a Capitol Hill news conference. “Not only are there many Muslims serving in our armed forces dying for this country, there are Muslims serving right here in the House working every day to uphold and to defend the Constitution.”
All true. And it was clear Ryan was talking about Trump, even if the Speaker lacked the wherewithal to call out the billionaire by name.
There can be no question that millions of Muslims are proud Americans, that they serve honorably in the military and Congress. Nor can there be any question that, as Ryan noted: “Some of our best and biggest allies in this struggle and fight against radical Islamic terror are Muslims—the vast, vast, vast majority of whom are peaceful, who believe in pluralism, freedom, democracy, individual rights.”
There can be no question that Trump’s religious-test bigotry is at odds with the basic premises of the U.S. Constitution and what this country has stood for at its best. That was true in the fall of 2015, and that was still true in the early days of 2017, when Trump signed an executive order that was read as a Muslim ban.
In the fall of 2015, however, there was significant uncertainty about whether Trump’s extremism was at odds with what the Republican Party was coming to stand for—as the party’s base was rallying around Trump in the fall of 2015, and as the party’s establishment continued to provide him with forums to promote discrimination against people based on their religion and national origin.
This was where Ryan needed to step up. This was where he needed to say that conservatives could not accept Donald Trump, that Republicans could not support Donald Trump, that the Republican Party could not aid and abet Donald Trump’s bigotry, and could no longer entertain the notion of making him its 2016 nominee.
Unfortunately, Ryan lacked the courage to break with Trump.
Asked at a point when Trump might still have been stopped if he would support Trump if the billionaire was nominated by the party as its 2016 candidate, Ryan responded: “I’m going to support whoever the Republican nominee is and I’m going to stand up for what I believe in as I do that.”
So, just to be clear, Ryan griped that Trump was not advocating for conservatism. Ryan griped that Trump did not represent what the Republican Party stood for. But Ryan would back Trump for president of the United States. That was not a break with Trump. That was Ryan providing Trump with precisely the cover the presidential contender needed at a critical point in the campaign—cover of the same sort Ryan would later provide when Republicans drafted their party platform, when they gathered for a convention the Speaker chaired and when they rallied behind their nominee in November.
Nothing aided and abetted Trump more as he sought the Republican nomination than Ryan’s constant signaling that, even if Trump made Republican elites uncomfortable, the party’s supposedly sober and responsible leaders would stand for Trump if he was nominated.
Ryan’s words and deeds identified Trump as a troublesome but acceptable, controversial but legitimate candidate. And that was all that Trump needed, in the primary season, and in the fall to pull the party together sufficiently to prevail.
In Ryan’s home state of Wisconsin, one of the three states that broke partisan pattern and backed the Republican presidential nominee in 2016 (thus providing the electoral votes that were required to secure the presidency), Trump won by less than 23,000 votes. If just 11,500 votes had shifted, Wisconsin could have gone to Hillary Clinton. With similar shifts in Michigan and Pennsylvania, a Trump presidency could have been averted.
But Paul Ryan made sure that did not happen. He told Republicans they could and should vote for Trump, again and again and again. While principled Republicans rejected Trump during the campaign, and continue to stand up to him now, Ryan cleared the way for the billionaire—not because the Wisconsinite liked Trump but because, as a fiercely sectarian political careerist, Ryan never has and never will put the best interest of his country ahead of the immediate demands of partisanship—and of Paul Ryan.
— 23 —
COMPLICIT
Ivanka Trump, First Daughter, and
Jared Kushner, First Son-in-Law
The comforting notion that even cynical citizens allow themselves when assessing an authoritarian, extreme or merely cruel regime is the suggestion that a thuggish leader’s wife or daughter or in-law or extended family member might somehow temper the worst impulses of the strongman. The notion is global (think “Evita”), but it is especially popular in the United States. This is where the myth machinery of media and politics strains to reimagine particular members of particular first families as quiet heroes ever at the ready to intervene on behalf of reason in otherwise unreasonable White Houses. This is about much more than First Ladies taking on charitable and educational duties, or children of presidents presenting themselves as wholesome freethinkers. This is about policy making, and unmaking; about the prospects for averting disasters and slyly advancing agendas.
Whole books are written on the topic. Plays are penned. Movies are made. There is just one problem.
The “moderating influence” argument has always required a suspension of disbelief and an embrace of false hope that can border on delusion.
So it was that Americans were constantly reminded of former First Lady Barbara Bush’s pro-choice leanings, even as President George H. W. Bush packed the courts with anti-choice jurists. So it was that First Daughter Jenna Bush’s internship with UNICEF was portrayed as good news, even as George W. Bush was pursuing foreign (and domestic) policies that were unhealthy for children and other living things.
So it is that Ivanka Marie Trump, the daughter of Donald Trump’s first marriage to Ivana Marie Zelníc˘ková, has emerged, with her husband, Jared Kushner, as a supposed agent of influence on behalf of liberal humanity in the shadowy recesses of Steve Bannon’s West Wing. “Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner Said to Have Helped Thwart L.G.B.T. Rights Rollback,” announces the New York Times headline. “In Closed-Door Climate Showdown, It’s Jared and Ivanka vs. Bannon and Pruitt,” announces Foreign Policy magazine. The Washington Times reports: “Donald Trump unveils child-care policy influenced by Ivanka Trump.” CNBC reveals a paid-family leave push with the headline “Ivanka Trump has found a cause to champion—and Democrats love it.”
Why, it’s almost too good to be true! Because, of course, it is too good to be true.
A few weeks into the Trump interregnum, Slate’s Christina Cauterucci actually wrote what everyone else had been thinking: “Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, have been the subjects of so many ‘leaks’ pushing the narrative that they’re common-sense forces of conscience in the White House, it’s hard to imagine the ‘leaks’ could come from any source other than Trump and Kushner themselves.”
Ivanka Trump is all about branding: “With her intelligence, business savvy and style, Ivanka Trump has ensured that the board room is never the board room on ‘The Apprentice,’” a breathless profile from a decade ago began. “And now, with a sexy and revealing cover and photo layout for Stuff magazine, Ivanka lives up to the title, ‘World’s Sexiest Boss!’” Ivanka has sold jewelry and clothing, shoes, purs
es and expensive perfumes (with a “floral-oriental composition [that] has a touch of luminous fruity notes and flirtatious spices making the whole fragrant story even more exciting,” coos Fragrantica). She has occupied the boardroom, on The Apprentice and in real life, developing a persona as the smart daughter who is trusted (and favored) by her father over a pair of sons who, “although outshone in many ways by their sister Ivanka,” serve as the figurehead head honchos of their father’s business empire during a period when Vanity Fair says “he won’t be letting go easily, or anytime soon.”
“The Trump Sons,” screams the headline, “are expanding like crazy but swear it’s totally legal.” Unlike Ivanka, who is constantly telling tales about conversations with “My Father,” Donald Trump Jr. says: “I basically have zero contact with him at this point.” But a more realistic review of the relationship came on Saturday Night Live where, several weeks into Trump’s presidency, an actor playing Donald Jr. announced: “Bottom line is, the only people making decisions regarding the Trump organization are Eric and myself.” The actor playing Eric Trump interrupted to announce: “And Dad.”
Ivanka Trump, the Trump child who matters, says she will “no longer be involved with the management or operations of the Trump Organization.” Her “Ivanka” branded business operations are now in what even her lawyer admits is a murky trust—she’s still got “veto power” over decisions and as her lawyer put it: “She has the conflicts that derive from the ownership of this brand.” Those conflicts aren’t going away, for Ivanka or for husband Jared, who in mid-May faced scrutiny after it was revealed that members of his family exploited their White House connection to solicit Chinese investors. Jared will always be the bigger embarrassment, but Ivanka will always be the bigger deal when it comes to the Trump White House. She’s made sure of that.