Rand Paul had a question for President Obama. An oddly specific, plainly incendiary, deeply weird hypothetical question that probably would have been laughed off by most reasonable adults as silly and paranoid if not for the chilling fact that, so far, no one in the White House was giving him a straight answer.
The question went like this: does the president believe he has the authority to unilaterally send a military drone to kill an American citizen sitting in a café in San Francisco?
Rand had first posed a version of this question—along with several other queries about the legality of the U.S. drone program—in a letter to Obama’s nominee for CIA director, John Brennan. Since taking office, the president had dramatically expanded the use of military drones in the Middle East as a ruthlessly efficient weapon to seek out and destroy enemy combatants, while posing minimal risk to the U.S. soldiers who piloted the aircrafts from the safety of stateside military bases. The program had been called into question, however, when it was revealed that the administration had used a drone to assassinate Anwar al-Awlaki, a United States citizen believed to be working as a recruiter for Al-Qaeda in Yemen. While Rand knew his café drone strike hypothetical was provocative, he believed the clandestine al-Awlaki operation raised serious and alarming questions. If the president felt he had the authority to order a military hit job on an American citizen abroad without even the pretense of due process, what was to stop him from doing the same to a target who resided in San Francisco, or Houston—or his own Kentucky hometown of Bowling Green, for that matter?
Twelve days after sending his letter to Brennan, Rand received a blithe, dismissive note from Attorney General Eric Holder that confirmed all of Rand’s worst suspicions about this arrogant administration and its reckless disregard for civil liberties. “The U.S. government has not carried out drone strikes in the United States and has no intention of doing so,” Holder wrote, before cavalierly dropping in a mushroom cloud–size caveat. “It is possible, I suppose, to imagine an extraordinary circumstance in which it would be necessary and appropriate… for the president to authorize the military to use lethal force within the territory of the United States.” But if something like that ever happened, Holder assured Rand, “I would examine the particular facts and circumstances before advising the president on the scope of his authority.”
He knew what Holder really meant to say: Sit down, shut up, and let the grown-ups handle national security, kid.
Rand found the response outrageous in its ambiguity: Holder was suggesting that the executive branch had the right to summarily assassinate American citizens on U.S. soil without a jury trial or even an arrest warrant. And yet, the scandalized senator had a hunch that few would take note of this creeping tyranny. After all, he had been interrogating the legality of the drone program for months already—writing little-noticed op-eds, and ranting to half-interested colleagues in Congress—and for the most part, the reaction from official Washington had been radio silence.
So at 11:47 a.m. on March 6, 2013, the junior senator from Kentucky stood up at his desk on the Senate floor and started to make some noise.
“I rise today to begin to filibuster John Brennan’s nomination to the CIA,” Rand declared from the well of the Senate, prompting puzzled looks from a few of the lawmakers and reporters in attendance. “I will speak as long as it takes, until the alarm is sounded from coast to coast that our Constitution is important, that your rights to trial by jury are precious… I don’t rise to oppose John Brennan’s nomination simply for the person. I rise today for the principle.”
For all the grandiose trappings of the performance, the filibuster had been a spur-of-the-moment thing. A mischievous What if? tossed out to an aide during his drive to the Capitol just that morning; a stroke of luck that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid had left a window open by not ending debate earlier in the day; a last-second impulse to actually go through with it and seize the floor.
Now, here was Rand—with no plan, no snacks, few notes, and a pair of terribly uncomfortable shoes on his feet—declaring to all the world that he would not sit down until he had made his point.
But in the ensuing hours, as the filibuster proceeded to draw manic national media coverage—spawning a Twitter hashtag, #StandwithRand, that would become the tagline for the senator’s political rise—it was soon obvious that Rand was doing much more than demanding clarity on a single pet issue. With every sentence he uttered, he was redrawing the battle lines in America’s decadelong, Bush-era debate over national security and civil liberties. Here was a conservative Republican accusing a liberal Democratic president of recklessly abandoning constitutional principle in the name of fighting terrorism—an astounding role reversal from the politics of the recent past.
The irony wasn’t lost on Rand, who noted early on in the filibuster, “Obama of 2007 would be down here with me.”
While the script flipping made for great TV, Rand’s high-profile crusade set off a chaotic, off-camera scramble inside his own party. In well-appointed offices across Capitol Hill and in governor’s mansions across America, Republican politicians eyeing 2016 were huddling with advisers, poring over polling data, and obsessively monitoring coverage of the filibuster—struggling to gain their footing in this suddenly shifting landscape. Time was of the essence, and they needed now to make a bet on the new politics of national security: Should they get in on the ground floor of this risky ideological start-up and hope to strike it rich, or pay their dues at the conglomerate of hawkish neoconservatism and patiently climb the ladder?
Utah senator Mike Lee was the first to make a move. A political outsider who had ridden into Congress on the Tea Party wave of 2010, he felt little obligation to toe the party line, or defend the GOP’s win-at-all-costs approach to the War on Terror. As a constitutional lawyer with a libertarian bent, he was well versed in the issues at hand and knew he could bring some firepower to Rand’s fight against executive overreach. (And as long as the executive in question was a Democrat, Lee felt certain his red-state constituents wouldn’t object.) Plus, as one of his aides would later tell me, Lee had long harbored a romantic, little-boy-like fantasy of standing up in the Senate and heroically lending his voice to a righteous filibuster. Watching the spectacle unfold from his office, he felt a pang of urgency. When else would he get this chance?
At the top of the filibuster’s fourth hour, the Utahn walked onto the Senate floor and asked his colleague from Kentucky to yield for a “question.” Rand consented, and Lee proceeded to deliver a five-thousand-word lecture on the rule of law and the Fourteenth Amendment—a childhood dream come true.
Ted Cruz was another early ally. The Texan had been sworn in only six weeks earlier, and he had yet to make a speech on the Senate floor. But he knew a Tea Party rainmaker when he saw one, and he had no doubt that this little show would be a hit on the right; he only wished he’d thought of it first. In preparation for his cameo, Cruz asked an aide to print out a list of #StandwithRand tweets that he could read on the floor—nothing too angry or crazy, just general rah-rah stuff. This was Rand’s big night; if Cruz had to hold the pom-poms for a few minutes, he could live with that. But as he reviewed the effusive messages from legions of conservative activists on Twitter, Cruz was struck by just how much appetite there was in the movement for big, gutsy, high-stakes, hashtag-able moments like this one. Something to keep in mind.
With coverage of the spectacle reaching a fever pitch by hour nine, a parade of conservative House members marched into the gallery to show their silent support, while a number of Rand’s Republican Senate colleagues began joining him on the floor.
Some of the senators were less fluent in this newly elevated issue than others, and at times the filibuster took on a theater of the absurd quality. Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin spent several minutes rambling about Senate dysfunction and the national debt before feebly attempting to get back to the point—a comically bad attempt at improv that drew comparisons on Twitter to Steve Carell’s dunce-like character in Anchorman. (“Senator Johnson has just voted ‘I love lamp,’” tweeted journalist Jeremy Scahill.) Marco Rubio, meanwhile, detailed how Democrats had changed their tune on drones ever since Obama got into the White House, bending some Jay-Z lyrics almost to the point of breaking in the process. “It’s funny what seven days can change,” Rubio said, quoting the rapper. “It was all good just a week ago.”
At one point, when Rand got hungry, he sent an aide to raid the communal candy drawer that had been kept in the back row of the Senate since the 1960s, and as he spoke, he struggled to keep the sticky gobs of chewed caramel from spilling out of his mouth.
But the off-kilter moments of weirdness only made the event a bigger media sensation, which in turn increased pressure on other Republicans to join in. Even Mitch McConnell—the Senate Minority Leader who had worked feverishly during the 2010 Kentucky primary to defeat Rand—materialized on the floor before it was over.
By the time Rand’s bladder forced him to call it quits, just shy of the thirteen-hour mark, there was no question that he had won. His stunt forced the Obama administration to clarify its position on U.S. drone policy. Within hours of the filibuster’s finale, Holder would send a snippy follow-up letter answering the senator’s original question with one word: “No.” What’s more, Rand had successfully cajoled almost every Republican in the Senate into joining his libertarian crusade, at least for the day. And even though Democratic lawmakers had chosen to skip the filibuster and provide partisan cover to the White House instead, Rand’s performance had elicited an outpouring of online support from principled progressives who were alarmed by how Obama was carrying on the terrorist-fighting policies of the previous president. Two American political fringes—the libertarians and the left-wingers—were uniting in common cause, and dragging the entrenched elements of the DC establishment along with them.
Rand felt triumphant. For once, it didn’t matter what the old-guard goons of Washington thought of him, or his ideas, or his dad. They now had no choice but to recognize him as a powerful new force in the Republican Party—a troublemaker, yes, but one to be reckoned with.
In the endless loop of filibuster footage that would dominate cable news in the days to come, one scene remained planted in Rand’s memory. He had been standing for about seven hours when he noticed Republican senator Mark Kirk wobbling down the aisle in his direction. Kirk had only recently returned to Washington after suffering a stroke, and even with his cane he almost lost balance on his way to Rand’s desk. When he arrived he set down two objects: an apple and a thermos of hot tea. The gesture was a reference to the 1939 movie Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, whose idealistic titular character embarks on a filibuster to protest DC corruption. Kirk didn’t say a word. He just tapped two fingers on the top of the thermos and wobbled back out of the chamber.
The thermos thing really pissed off John McCain. Seriously? We were going to compare this guy to an iconic symbol of commonsense American populism? Give me a break.
Though he’d mostly tried to ignore the filibuster, McCain had caught portions of Rand’s performance from his office on the Hill—and he was disgusted with the whole affair. This junior senator, Ron Paul’s kid, had been in Washington all of about ten minutes, and he was already deigning to tell people like him—veterans of Congress, veterans of war—that they were wrong about how to keep America safe? The longer it went on and the more he saw his colleagues bow to the media pressure, the more irritated McCain was. Surely Rand meant well. He had his convictions, and that was fine. But with this nonsense about drone attacks and San Francisco cafés, he had concocted a preposterous life-and-death hypothetical scenario—and gotten a bunch of Republicans to pay faddish deference to it—when here in the real world there were serious, real-life threats being levied against America and its interests every day. McCain had no intention of keeping quiet about it.
The next day, he delivered a rebuttal on the Senate floor, reading from a Wall Street Journal editorial that called Rand’s filibuster a stunt meant to “fire up impressionable libertarian kids in their college dorms.” But he reserved his true feelings for an interview with the Huffington Post later that day. Asked what he thought about Rand and his fellow libertarian-leaning lawmakers, McCain paused for a few seconds, contemplating just how far he should go. “It’s always the wacko birds on [the] right and left that get the media megaphone,” he grumbled, adding that the filibuster had done “a disservice to a lot of Americans by making them believe that somehow they’re in danger from their government. They’re not.”
When Rand was asked later that day to respond to the “wacko birds” dig, he went with the fail-safe statesman pose that he’d been practicing ever since he got elected: disappointed by his colleague’s discourtesy, saddened by the toxic tone of Washington.
“You know, I think he’s just on the wrong side of history, and on the wrong side of this argument, really,” Rand told Mike Huckabee in a radio interview. “I treat Senator McCain with respect. I don’t think I always get the same in return.”
But in truth, Rand was delighted by McCain’s name-calling. He’d had a number of big wins over the past twenty-four hours, from reframing the national debate over drones to unofficially launching his 2016 presidential campaign with a disruptive tsunami of bipartisan support. But driving McCain—smug, self-certain, perpetually wrong Old Man McCain—to such an intemperate outburst of public grumpiness felt so psychically satisfying that it almost trumped everything else. He had just trolled the entire GOP establishment, and they were finally losing their cool.
He couldn’t wait to do it again.
When Kristy Ditzler arrived on campus at Baylor University in the fall of 1982, she felt as though she had crash-landed on an alien planet. She was a feminist, a liberal, an eighteen-year-old freshman who had been Berkeley-bound until an injury late in her high school career nixed a swimming scholarship at Cal and sent her scrambling to find a new collegiate landing pad. But almost immediately after enrolling at the Waco, Texas, school, she regretted her decision.
Baylor in the eighties was a deeply conservative place, steeped in devout Baptist culture and old-fashioned gender politics. Coeds were expected to wear skirts to football games; dancing was strictly forbidden; and students of the opposite sex were banned from one another’s dorm rooms at all times, with the exception of closely monitored Sunday afternoon visiting hours, when the doors were to stay open and the God-fearing students were to remain upright and vertical. “I walked into this totally unknown universe where I was being told I was a bad person because I wouldn’t go to Bible study on Thursdays,” Ditzler later told me. Feeling isolated and alone, she almost bailed on the school altogether.
Then she met Randy Paul.
Short and lean, with untidy curls sprouting from the top of his head, the sophomore biology student caught Ditzler’s attention with his wry sense of humor and affection for irreverence. They met at swim practice, where Randy and his best friend and teammate, George, spent time in between laps cracking jokes about the school’s pharisaical rules and the sheeplike born-again students who fanatically clung to them. Ditzler was relieved to find a couple of kindred spirits on campus. “They were very different from the typical Baylor students,” she remembered, adding that Randy “saved me from dropping out.”
George and Randy enjoyed brainstorming creative, absurdist ways to subvert campus culture, and for Ditzler, watching them plot their mischief and mayhem often felt like witnessing a live bullfight: it was fun and frightening and charged with the intoxicating sense that anything could happen. George played the role of matador in these bull sessions, always waving some new stunt or prank he’d concocted in front of Randy to get his attention. It didn’t always work. Randy, the quieter, more studious of the two, was opposed, on principle, to Baylor’s cookie-cutter Christianity and dictatorial administration, but he was not always enthused by silly high jinks.
When George did get him to charge, however, there was no telling how it might end. “They were both scary bright,” said Ditzler, and when they latched on to some new piece of devilry, they’d go back and forth—eyes lit up, voices rising—as they dared each other to keep pushing the scheme further. “George would start it, then Randy would add in his ideas,” Ditzler recalled. “He was the tagalong, George was the mastermind.”
Not all of George’s ideas were winners. One night, when they were freshmen, he came up with a flimsy, five-beers-in plot to dig up the time capsule buried at the center of campus. Instead, they drunkenly knocked over the monument on top of the capsule, and had to flee the scene. When the act of vandalism became front-page news in Baylor’s student paper, with various clubs pointing fingers at one another, Randy and George kept quiet and pledged never to speak of the night again.
At his best, though, George was a masterful performance artist. “He was very high-energy,” said Ditzler. “If he was going to do something, he was going to be flamboyant about it.” When she mentioned one day to George that the rat she had been training all semester in a class was going to be killed and dissected by the biology department, he proposed an emergency rescue mission. They dressed in all black, smeared dark paint on their faces, and broke into the lab in the middle of the night to retrieve the white rodent. “I don’t know how he figured out how to get past the lock,” Ditzler said. “That was just his thing: make a lot of drama where there is none.”
But there was also something strange—even mysterious—about her two new friends. Shortly after meeting them, Ditzler realized she had actually known George many years earlier, when they were kids in the same car pool in suburban Houston. Back then, though, his name was George Schauerte; now he was going by George Paul. Curious and confused, Ditzler began asking around about George’s name—but the answer she kept getting from friends and teammates only deepened the intrigue. “The only explanation anyone would give me was that Randy was so cool, and they were so close, that George had decided to change his [last] name to Paul,” she recalled. (That Paul used to be George’s middle name hardly solved the puzzle for her, especially once she learned that he had actually gone to the trouble of making the name change legal.)
There were other riddles, too. Ditzler started noticing, as she spent more time with them, that Randy and George would often disappear together without explanation. Whenever she confronted them about it, they’d offer vague pretexts and quickly change the subject. Then there was the question of their curiously celibate social lives. Despite their routine mockery of Baylor’s chastity police, neither of them ever seemed to be getting any action. Eventually, Ditzler came to the only logical conclusion she could think of: “I thought they were a gay couple.”
She eventually disposed of this notion when George started dating one of her roommates, but three decades later she would continue to wonder aloud why “Randy did not ever date anyone.”
Ditzler finally did discover the true reason for all their sneaking around—and though it didn’t involve a torrid love affair, it would still rank George and Randy among Baylor’s biggest sinners.
Unbeknownst to most of their classmates, Randy and George were members of a notorious secret society on campus called the NoZe Brotherhood. Founded in 1924 to make fun of Baylor’s fraternities, the organization had evolved over the years into a rowdy rotating cast of mischief-makers and blasphemers who delighted in stuffing their school’s sacred cows into meat grinders. “It was about making fun of Baylor and Baptists and… being iconoclastic,” said John Green, who was one of Randy’s fellow NoZemen. “It appealed to people who didn’t fit the traditional Baptist mold, or people who came in that way and were sort of warped while they were there.”
The mission of the NoZe Brotherhood was to tweak, troll, irk, rattle, and rile Baylor’s administration, and offend the school’s more humorless students. As Green would later put it, “We aspired to blasphemy.” And, in fact, they were so successful on that front that shortly before Randy was initiated, the university’s president booted the group from campus, calling it “lewd, crude, and grossly sacrilegious.” Word went out across the school: any student discovered to be a NoZe brother would be automatically expelled.
For Randy and George, the heightened stakes only made it more fun. Driven underground, the NoZe brothers would disguise themselves in Groucho Marx glasses and parade across campus performing elaborate, outlandish stunts. After beauty-queen-cum-culture-warrior Anita Bryant famously condemned oral sex as sinful, the NoZe brothers marched around carrying an enormous picture of Bryant with a cutout circle where her mouth was supposed to be. And when Baylor officials tried to get the liquor license pulled from a local sandwich shop on the grounds that it was too close to campus, the NoZemen showed up with a homemade surveyor’s scope and a rope created from rags, belts, and wadded-up American flags. They made a big show of measuring the distance between the restaurant and a campus building before declaring that a meltdown had occurred, “resulting in the expulsion of hot air and dangerous and even toxic levels of Christian atmosphere.”
Sometimes the cops would get called on them. Sometimes the cops would show up. And when that happened, the merry band of heretics would joyously scatter—laughing and panting and doubling over as they made their escape.
One favorite NoZe tradition was making up derisive renditions of cherished gospel tunes, like the song “Give Me That Old Time Religion,” which they rewrote, replacing “the Hebrew children” in the lyrics with evolutionary descendants of Neanderthals:
It was good enough for Cro-Magnon man,
It was good enough for Cro-Magnon man,
It was good enough for Cro-Magnon man,
It’s good enough for me!
During Randy’s time in the NoZe, he and his brothers channeled much of their creative energies into a satiric newspaper, The Rope, designed to parody and provoke their conservative Christian classmates. (A handful of excerpts from the paper later surfaced during Rand’s 2010 Senate race, but the entirety of the archives weren’t dredged up until a source provided them to me.) Among the paper’s more incendiary items: a story about an eighty-three-year-old man from California admitting he wrote the Bible on a lark (“I don’t know what all the fuss is about; I mean, I’m no Tolkien”), a first-person essay in which a teenage Jesus complains that Mary is stepping out on his dad with the Holy Spirit (complete with racist kicker: “Most guys named Jesus don’t even know who their father is!”), and a piece dryly lampooning a policy that required underage girls to get parental consent before acquiring birth control (“[This] will effectively end the practice of teenage sex in the United States”).
The articles were printed without bylines, leaving it unclear which pieces, if any, Randy was directly responsible for. But several of his Baylor buddies would later tell me that he wrote with some frequency for The Rope, and his mug even appeared on the cover of a 1983 issue—albeit masked by a giant fake nose.
Randy fit in comfortably with the troublemaking smart-asses that populated the NoZe Brotherhood, happily joining them as they looked for new lines to cross, new reverences to trample. When they talked about girls on campus, they referred to them as “hairy legs”; the ones who slept with them were upgraded to “Fortunates.” They tried to one-up one another with obscure, in-joke nicknames—Randy was SpoonNoze, named after Lysander Spooner, a nineteenth-century antislavery anarchist who was idolized by libertarians—and at the end of each year, they threw a big, boozy underground party with the cash they made selling advertisements in The Rope. (For a while, the paper’s back page was dominated by an ad offering a “Baylor special” at a local strip club: “Remember, at Two Minnies, every night is family night.”)
But while the NoZe Brotherhood was a natural habitat for a nonconformist like Randy, what he took away from his time there had little to do with its disrespect for power structures—he already got plenty of that at home. By the time he got to Baylor, Randy’s combative, crusading congressman dad had already taught him the importance of picking principled fights with the powers that be; what he learned from George and the other NoZe brothers was what a win could often look like. Their game wasn’t circulating earnest petitions and participating in debates with square-jawed student body presidents. Instead, they aimed to ruffle and offend, to rile and inflame. And when they extracted the unflattering reactions they were looking for from their born-again Baylor targets—flustered and angry and comically indignant—they declared victory. The source of the NoZe brothers’ sense of superiority came from their ability to handle their opponents’ feelings like Play-Doh.
Randy was never on the same page, politically, as his fellow hellhound comrades at Baylor—most of them were left-wingers—but he related to them on a deeper level. “We knew he was kind of a right-wing nutjob,” recalled Green, who was present at Randy’s initiatory “unrush.” “He fit in with us because he was antiauthoritarian.”
Indeed, if there was one belief that united all NoZe brothers, it was the conviction that they were the enlightened few, the freethinkers, the ones who could look outside the cave and see the world as it was, and who now had a responsibility to drag their unseeing peers up the rough ascent, the steep way up, and never stop until they reached the light of the sun. (Randy was hardly the first NoZe know-it-all to commit a bit of Plato to memory.)
Looking through those Groucho glasses, it was plain as day that the established social order at Baylor was a farce—and that it fell to them to expose it.
At the start of the 1983 winter semester, Baylor pulled the plug on its swim program and filled its pool with cement. While Ditzler brooded over losing her campus sanctuary, George and Randy went searching for distraction, and began spending more time on pot-fueled NoZe adventures. “I was the one who was clearly bitter and suffering,” Ditzler said later. “They seemed happy and fun.” In particular, she noticed that Randy was getting much more into the spirit of the Baylor baiting. Lacking a more productive hobby, he no longer needed much prodding from George to join in on the antics.
Without daily swim practice, Ditzler drifted apart from Randy and George. She moved to an apartment off campus, where they would visit her sporadically. Then, one day, there was an unexpected knock at her door, and she found Randy and George standing on her front steps, holding a bandanna. They asked her to blindfold herself—which she did—and then proceeded to engage in a sort of mock kidnapping ritual. They stuffed her in their car and drove her to an apartment that reeked of weed, with army tents set up on the floor and clothes piled to the ceiling. “I had heard of guys from the NoZe Brotherhood who would do all their shopping at the Goodwill—wear the clothes a few times and then throw them in some apartment,” she told me later. “I thought maybe that’s where I was.” Randy and George tried to get her to take bong hits with them, and when she declined, they put her back in the car and drove her to a countryside creek outside of town. There, on the bank of the stream, they commanded her to bow down to their god, the “Aqua Buddha.”
They never hung out again after that, and soon afterward Randy disappeared from campus without a goodbye. (Ditzler would later learn that he scored high enough on the MCATs to get into Duke without graduating from Baylor.) She didn’t bother to keep track of Randy or George, and forgot all about the incident.
But the memory of that strange afternoon returned one day twenty-seven years later when, flipping through channels, Ditzler spotted her old pal Randy on CNN, running for Senate. He was wearing a blue blazer and a power tie—dressed up as if he was going as a Republican for Halloween—and he was delivering some laughably earnest spiel about God, country, and Constitution. Even weirder, the news anchor kept calling him “Rand.” It was all so ludicrously out of character that she wouldn’t have been surprised to find out the campaign was an elaborate NoZe brothers reunion prank.
Ditzler tried to remember the last time she’d seen Randy, and that’s when it came back to her: the image of her curly-haired friend, giddy and weird and probably stoned, shouting out nonsensical things about the Aqua Buddha. “It was like, whoa, you must have changed overnight,” she remembered thinking. “Or did we ever really know you?”
But after getting over the initial shock of Randy’s new act, Ditzler began paying closer attention to what he was up to. She caught the highlights of his big anti-drone filibuster, and occasionally came across news stories about him picking fights with other Republicans. She was a Democrat, and no aficionada of internal GOP politics, but every so often when she watched him on TV she could catch familiar glimpses of her friend.
“He always made fun of people for following,” she said, looking back on their college days. “He made fun of people for not thinking for themselves. He made fun of their beliefs… and he provoked people to cause them to question their beliefs.” Ditzler continued to believe that his whole flag-shrouded Republican routine was canned, but in at least one way the guy in the new suit was still the same old Randy.
“I guess that’s the only thing that’s consistent now with the person I knew,” she said. “He still provokes people.”
Rand would deploy his trademark provocation at many fellow Republicans as he elbowed and needled his way toward the 2016 presidential race—but few targets would prove more irresistible to him than the governor of New Jersey.
What a bunch of pansies.
It was July 25, 2013, and Chris Christie was sitting at the far end of a row of Republican governors on the Aspen Meadows campus, a playground in the Rocky Mountains for the socially conscious rich and the thought leaders flown in to entertain them every summer at the Aspen Ideas Festival. Tonight’s production was a panel, moderated by gregarious New York Times reporter Jonathan Martin, featuring four conservative state executives and prospective 2016 candidates. The open-collared governors had spent most of the evening complimenting one another and chatting affably about the policy innovations they were pursuing in their respective states. But for his final question, Martin noted a front-page story in his own paper that day reporting that a surprising number of congressional Republicans, led by Rand Paul, had voted with Democrats to crack down on the NSA’s recently exposed domestic surveillance program.
“Is your party becoming more libertarian?” Martin asked the governors.
Christie, his massive frame wrapped in a pink oxford shirt, watched in disgust as, one by one, each of his fellow governors punted on the question. Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal drawled that the libertarian surge in the party was “a good thing,” and then quickly pivoted away to some boilerplate Obama bashing. Wisconsin’s Scott Walker talked about how a “shift overall in the party” toward libertarianism might help the GOP reach younger voters like his college-age son. Indiana’s Mike Pence sunnily called the national security debate being driven by libertarians “healthy.”
Pansies.
It would fall to Christie, the truth-telling, no-nonsense New Jersey honcho, to put the libertarian rabble-rousers in their place, and stop this silly faux movement in its tracks before they actually managed to put American lives in danger.
“As a former prosecutor who was appointed by President George W. Bush on September tenth, two thousand and one, I just want us to be really cautious,” Christie began, “because this strain of libertarianism that’s going through both parties right now and making big headlines, I think, is a very dangerous thought.”
Christie continued, his voice gathering intensity as he worked up a nice, frothy righteous indignation. “I think what we as a country have to decide is, do we have amnesia? ’Cause I don’t. And I remember what we felt like on September twelfth, two thousand and one.” He was really on a roll now. “And as the governor now of a state that lost the second most people on 9/11 besides the state of New York, and still seeing those families, Jon? I love all these esoteric debates that people are getting in…”
Martin, realizing that he was one quick follow-up away from a huge political headline, interrupted Christie’s monologue.
“Senator Rand Paul, for example?” Martin asked.
Christie briefly considered restraint. “Listen, you can name any number of people who’ve engaged in it,” he started, before deciding, Screw restraint. “And he’s one of ’em.”
“I mean, these esoteric, intellectual debates.” He paused for a moment, as though overwhelmed by the sheer repulsiveness of all the esotericism. “I want them to come to New Jersey and sit across from the widows and the orphans and have that conversation. And they won’t, because that’s a much tougher conversation to have.”
The panel ended a few minutes later, and in between handshakes with attendees, Martin hurriedly tapped out an email on his Black-Berry and fired it off to Doug Stafford, Rand Paul’s top adviser.
In the Republican civil war, Chris Christie had just unleashed an unprovoked broadside aimed at libertarians. And Martin wanted to know: how was Rand going to retaliate?
By the time Rand’s advisers in Washington got Martin’s email and figured out exactly what Christie had said, it was after 10 p.m. and no one particularly felt like waking up the senator to bring news that the big man from the Garden State had called him a terrorist-loving sissy. Martin was pressing them for an on-the-record quote to run in his Times story, but they said they would have to hold their fire until they got Rand’s go-ahead.
He wouldn’t need much convincing.
For Rand, finding Christie’s comments in his inbox the next morning was like Christmas in July. He’d been riding high ever since his filibuster earlier that year, but the June revelations in The Guardian and the Washington Post that the NSA was secretly collecting millions of Americans’ phone records and emails had turned Rand into a political prophet of sorts. The tidal wave of national outrage that followed the exposés had only buoyed Rand’s fight against the hawks in his party, and it had solidified his status as a top tier 2016 prospect. In fact, the same day Christie launched his attack in Aspen, a highly publicized poll showed Rand surging to first place in the field of likely Republican candidates.
Now, this tough-talking oaf from New Jersey was trying to pick a fight with him over the very issue that was fueling the libertarian ascent? It was just too good to be true.
Rand green-lit the counterattack, and by 9:30 a.m. he was calling out the governor by name on Twitter:
“Christie worries about the dangers of freedom. I worry about the danger of losing that freedom. Spying without warrants is unconstitutional.”
As Rand’s inner circle brainstormed fresh quotes to feed the frenzied political press corps, Stafford suggested using lyrics from a Bruce Springsteen song to tweak Christie, who was famously obsessed with the Boss. After a bit of Googling, they landed on a perfect verse in the 2007 anti-Bush rocker “Long Walk Home.” Some on the team thought the quote should be attributed to Rand, but the senator’s Springsteen expertise was meager, and there was a concern that he might come off as a poser. In the end, Stafford, the resident E Street Band enthusiast, put his name on it. “In the words of the governor’s favorite lyricist, ‘You know that flag flying over the courthouse? Means certain things are set in stone. Who we are, what we’ll do, and what we won’t,’” Stafford was quoted as saying.
According to Washington’s traditional rules of engagement for such things, this was considered a proportional response—and a more prudent, polite politician might have ended the spat there. But Rand was just getting started.
At a fund-raiser in Nashville that Sunday, Rand took another swipe at Christie and his ideological allies in the GOP. “They’re precisely the same people who are unwilling to cut the spending, and they’re, ‘Gimme, gimme, gimme—give me all my money now,’” Paul said, referring to the federal funding New Jersey had received after Hurricane Sandy ravaged the state in 2012. “Those are the people who are bankrupting the government and not letting enough money be left over for national defense.” Rand was betting this line of attack would drive Christie berserk. The governor’s leadership in the storm’s aftermath had been the crowning achievement of his first term, and Rand figured that invoking the hurricane was a surefire way to get under his skin.
Rand leaned on his talent for trolling again when New York congressman Peter King tried to get in on the action by comparing Rand on CNN to “the antiwar, left-wing Democrats of the nineteen sixties that nominated George McGovern and destroyed their party for almost twenty years.” Rand’s pithy comeback on Twitter was notable for both its complete lack of context and its pitch-perfect attempt to turn the flag-waving New York neocon into a sputtering mass of outrage and hurt feelings:
“Peter King, from Dem wing of GOP, wants to send ur $ to places who burn our flag. I don’t.”
(Rand was comparing his own ideological opposition to all U.S. foreign aid spending to King’s more mainstream support for the funding. That Rand would eventually have to walk back his position didn’t matter in the heat of battle, and certainly not in the universe of 140-character rejoinders.)
Political gawkers marveled at Rand’s deliberate, almost gleeful efforts to stretch out the high-profile intraparty feud for as long as possible. Describing the political rationale later, Stafford would tell me, “We don’t look for fights, but if we are attacked, we will go in with overwhelming force, and then get out fast. Just like Rand’s foreign policy.”
But if Rand seemed especially feisty during the Christie feud, there was a reason. Earlier in the summer, Rand had attended a summit hosted by Mitt Romney for big-time Republican donors and politicos in Park City, Utah. The event was Romney’s way of staying involved in the fight over the future of the GOP, and it attracted future 2016 candidates from across the party who didn’t want to miss out on face time with Republican moneymen. Mingling for the weekend in the smoky cigar rooms and steamy saunas of the high-end Stein Eriksen Lodge, Rand had gotten one of his first sustained, up close looks at his party’s neocon elites in their natural habitat—and what he saw didn’t exactly fill him with newfound respect for the crowd.
He had been dragged to the gathering by Trygve Olson, a Republican operative who straddled the gap between the party’s establishment and its right wing. The two men had first gotten to know each other in 2010, when Olson was dispatched by GOP officials in Washington to make sure Rand—the surprise Tea Party victor in Kentucky’s hotly contested U.S. Senate primary that year—didn’t blow it in the general election. Republicans in DC were, then as now, deeply wary of the libertarian newcomer, and it was easy to see why. He was an ophthalmologist by trade who spoke in a creaky voice, and exhibited all the charisma of a parking lot attendant. He was in possession of perhaps the least statesmanlike patch of hair in modern political history—an unruly nest of golden curls that seemed existentially resistant to the taming powers of hair product—and his wardrobe was proudly defiant of regulatory overreach by the fashion-industrial complex. Most damningly, he shared a surname with the kookiest gadfly in the Republican Party. At the time, his campaign was being run by two outsiders that few in the GOP establishment knew or trusted: Jesse Benton, a young Paul family loyalist who was married to the candidate’s niece, and Stafford, a former jewelry salesman who worked at a conservative antiunion group. Olson’s assignment was to provide some adult supervision to the operation—but he soon hit it off with Rand. Olson, a foul-mouthed hockey player and CrossFit enthusiast, admired the candidate’s pugnacious streak, and ever since the 2010 race he had been a friend and informal adviser to the senator, acting as a sort of ambassador to the GOP gentry that Rand so disdained.
Rand knew that if he was serious about 2016, he would have to spend some unpleasant time hobnobbing with the party pooh-bahs, and so he begrudgingly followed Olson to the retreat in the Wasatch mountains. But by the time the weekend was over, Rand was more convinced than ever that these people—many of them architects of the most costly wars in American history—were, among other things, prissy little wimps. For him, the summit’s most telling moment came when Dan Senor, who had once served as the Bush administration’s chief spokesman for the Iraq War, went skeet shooting with Paul Ryan, and word got around that it was Senor’s first time ever using a gun. Afterward, Rand morbidly joked with aides about the namby-pamby neocons who had never before handled a firearm or bruised their knuckles but had no problem sending planeloads of teenagers into Middle Eastern war zones.
“So many of the neocons in our party, they think they’re the great defenders of the military,” Rand would later complain to me in an interview. “They think, ‘Oh, the soldiers must love me because I want to be involved in war.’” The truth, Rand firmly believed, was that most members of the military were not eager to fight. “They will. They volunteered, and they’re the most patriotic of our young people. But they’re not excited about war. They want to go to war if it’s the thing they have to do to defend our country… We could sit in a room with ten GIs and their young wives, or vice versa, and their young husbands, and ask them about it. It’s not a chess game to them. It’s like, ‘My husband’s been four times, and still has his arms and legs. I don’t want him to go a fifth time’… I think the people eager for war in my party, and the people eager to send troops in to feed people in the Democratic Party, they don’t know exactly what it’s like because only a very small sliver of our society are fighting these wars. And I think, really, more politicians ought to sit down at the dining room table with our soldiers and just ask them about it.”
Beneath all the trolling and the back-of-the-napkin political calculation, this was really what drove Rand to keep hitting Christie. It was one thing for John McCain to publicly ridicule him—the old guy had earned the right to be wrong during his five and a half years of torture and abuse in a North Vietnamese prison camp. But when Rand looked at Christie, he saw an entire class of well-fed, self-satisfied GOP elites who had never seen combat, but still shamelessly wrapped themselves in the flag and used grieving widows and dead soldiers to assert moral superiority. If one of those hypocrites wanted to start a fight with him, he wasn’t going to pull his punches.
By the Monday following Christie’s remarks in Aspen, Rand could feel the momentum gathering behind him, and he was having a blast. He soaked up every withering word of an editorial in the right-leaning New Hampshire Union Leader—an influential force in presidential primaries given its state’s first-in-the-nation status—that was going viral in the political world. “If Christie is saying, as he seems to be, that the state should be empowered to take any measures it deems necessary to protect against terror attacks—without any concern for the ‘esoteric, intellectual debates’ over civil liberties—then he is the radical extremist, not Rand Paul,” the editors hissed.
While Rand giddily plotted his next move, Olson worried that the whole thing was getting out of hand. If the barrage didn’t stop soon, Rand would risk squandering any credibility he had built up with GOP brass by coming off like an immature, overzealous board game player who keeps obnoxiously gloating as he piles tiny plastic houses on Park Place. They were still two and a half years out from the presidential primaries, after all: didn’t Rand know that they were only playing for Monopoly money at this point?
Olson had worked in the past with Christie’s chief political adviser, Mike DuHaime, and he was confident that the two could broker a cease-fire. But when he brought the idea to Rand’s team, Stafford and Benton replied that the senator was having way too much fun to call a truce now.
You can try, they told Olson. But there’s no point. Rand isn’t going to stop.
That night, Rand went on Fox News to continue the Christie pile-on. “It’s really, I think, kind of sad and cheap that he would use the cloak of 9/11 victims to say, ‘Oh, I’m the only one who cares about these victims,’” he told Sean Hannity. “Hogwash!” Rand went on to repeat his “gimme, gimme, gimme” line—slipping into a faint New Jersey accent as he delivered it—and made sure not to get off the air without some more custom-tailored goading. “[Christie] may have heard that, you know, the Republican Party is on life support in the Northeast,” he said. “Republicans are in danger of becoming an endangered species. So, it’s not real smart for Republicans to be attacking Republicans.”
The next day, Christie finally took the bait. At a news conference announcing homeowner grants for New Jersey residents affected by Sandy, the governor said he had nothing personal against Rand, but added that if the senator had a problem with his blunt style, “he can just get in line.” Christie went on to note that New Jersey taxpayers sent more money to Washington than the state got back, and suggested, “If Senator Paul wants to start looking at where he’s going to cut spending to afford defense, maybe he should start looking at the pork barrel spending he brings home to Kentucky… But I doubt he would. Because most Washington politicians only care about bringing home the bacon so that they can get reelected.”
Success!
Rand was elated. After hammering away at Christie for four straight days, he had finally lulled his target back into the fracas. As he mulled how to swat back, Rand had an idea. Some of his more weak-stomached aides might not like it, but it was just too good to pass up.
That afternoon, he went on CNN, and Wolf Blitzer asked him about Christie’s accusation of pork barrel spending.
Not even bothering to contain a smirk, Rand quipped, “This is the king of bacon talking about bacon.”
Chris Christie.
The king of bacon.
How could anyone pass that up?
The CNN clip went viral instantly, as bloggers and tweeters feverishly spread the news that the junior senator from Kentucky just went there. In his ongoing high-wire act of political provocation, Rand Paul had just shown the world that he did not consider fat jokes to be off-limits.
But while Rand was quite pleased with his little act of mischief, it was clear to his inner circle that things had gone too far. “It’s time to move on,” Olson insisted in an email to the senator. Rand relented with a shrug, and Olson was finally sent to negotiate a truce with the Christie team. But he found them much less interested in the olive branch than they might have been twenty-four hours earlier.
Christie, who had quietly undergone lap band surgery earlier in the year and was steadily losing weight, thought the joke was outrageous, and deemed Rand to be an even bigger joke than he had realized. What started out as a substantive, life-and-death debate over America’s national security had devolved, thanks to Rand, into a puerile crack about his weight that any dull-witted third grader could have come up with.
The next day, Rand went on Fox News and invited Christie to have a beer with him. “It’s gotten a little too personal,” Rand said, in a maddeningly phony tone of reconciliation. “So let’s kiss and make up.”
But Christie was finished dealing with this ridiculous person. He was never going to be buddies with Rand, and he had no interest in engaging in the Kabuki theater of party unity. “I’m not offended by Senator Paul calling me names. I think it’s juvenile, but I’m not offended by it,” he told a radio station that same day. Asked whether he would take up Rand on the beer, Christie replied sharply, “I really don’t have time for that at the moment.”
For Rand, the fight with Christie had been thrilling and, he believed, important. Sure, the Washington handwringers would fret about the trivialization of American politics and express longing for a Great Debate worthy of a Great Nation. But Rand wasn’t interested in dryly outlining his arguments on C-SPAN and letting history decide whether he was right. To him, this was more than a mild-mannered contest of policy positions; it was a revolution. In the race toward 2016, Rand would employ every tactic necessary to triumph in this high-stakes battle of ideas, no matter how unorthodox or unsavory or mean. Fat baiting, Twitter trolling, thirteen-hour filibusters—all of it was fair game, and he would return to the methods again and again in the coming years.
Rand wasn’t playing for Monopoly money. For the first time in his life, it looked as if the fates might actually be conspiring to create a true libertarian movement in the Republican Party—and Rand was standing at the head of the line, poised to usher in the new order.