Lynchburg, Virginia
As Ted Cruz roved the arena stage at the world’s largest evangelical Christian university on the morning of March 23, 2015, he implored the ten thousand patriots gathered before him to do something he had been asking of the conservative movement for the past three years: use their imaginations.
“I want to ask each of you to imagine,” Cruz intoned. “Imagine millions of courageous conservatives all across America, rising up together to say in unison, ‘We demand our liberty!’”
The patriots in the audience cheered—and Cruz proceeded to spend the next twenty minutes making their imaginations run wild.
“Imagine abolishing the IRS…”
“Imagine repealing every word of Common Core…”
“Imagine a federal government that works to defend the sanctity of human life,” and “uphold the sacrament of marriage,” and “defeat radical Islamic terrorism,” and “finally, finally, finally secure the borders!”
“Imagine,” Cruz said, “millions of people of faith all across America coming out to the polls and voting our values.”
More to the point, imagine them voting for Ted Cruz.
“I believe in you,” he finally told the patriots. “I believe in the power of millions of courageous conservatives rising up to reignite the promise of America. And that is why today I am announcing that I’m running for president of the United States.”
With that, the Tea Party torchbearer from Texas became the first Republican candidate to charge into the presidential field—officially launching the momentous 2016 Republican contest from one of the country’s most storied staging grounds in the conservative culture wars.
Liberty University had immediately stood out to Cruz’s aides when they were scouting locations for the announcement. It was a short three-and-a-half-hour drive from Washington, which would ensure strong turnout from the political press, and because Cruz would be speaking at a mandatory campus assembly, he was guaranteed an audience of ten thousand God-fearing, right-leaning students who risked academic—and possibly celestial—reprimands if they tried to disrupt the event. (The school’s strict rules forbade unapproved demonstrations of any kind, as well as dancing, cursing, kissing, and hugging members of the opposite sex for longer than three seconds.) Drawing a supportive crowd that large was difficult for even the most galvanizing political figures, and it often required weeks of organizing and many thousands of dollars. Here Cruz was being handed the striking, made-for-TV campaign backdrop free of charge and effort.
Most important, though, the setting sent a strong signal to the religious elements of Cruz’s right-wing base. Founded in 1971 by conservative Christian icon Jerry Falwell, who proudly nicknamed the school “Bible Boot Camp,” Liberty was built on an unabashed mission to train and send forth battalions of born-again foot soldiers in the fight against encroaching secularism and moral perversion in America. Accordingly, many of the students were training for careers in politics, media, law, and the ministry—a campus full of mini-Cruzes. When the candidate’s office had asked the university administration if they could hold the event there, the president was so thrilled that he bumped a scheduled visit from Virginia’s sitting Democratic governor to clear the calendar.
As with every other stage Cruz had performed on over the years—from the small-town VFWs to the Senate floor—the candidate put on a compelling show at Liberty. He roamed the stage freely, sermonizing without notes or a teleprompter about the need for a religious revival and populist revolution in America. As a crescendo of clamorous applause reached its climax, he planted his feet, stretched out his arms, and opened his palms, letting the adoration wash over him.
To some who had gotten to know Cruz earlier in his career, the onstage display was puzzling. “He was never particularly religious as far as I knew,” said one aide who worked closely with him in the Texas solicitor general’s office. “I’m not even sure he went to church.” To others, it was a masterful performance of a part Cruz had been carefully rehearsing for years. One Republican consultant who had worked on his 2012 Senate campaign told me the arms-out-palms-opened pose was something Cruz had picked up from watching the 1980s televangelist Jimmy Swaggart: it was meant to convey that he was “drawing spiritual energy from the crowd.”
Did Cruz actually believe in this divine phenomenon? The question was beside the point. What had always mattered to Cruz was what they believed—the bright-eyed evangelical students and the riled-up Tea Party activists, the put-out military veterans and the Breitbart-reading birthers, and all the other patriots who felt alienated by the Washington cartel and ignored by the establishment bosses. Cruz’s political power came from capturing their imaginations, convincing them their wildest dreams could come true, and then converting the uncommon fervor that followed into daring, dramatic, destiny-bending action.
Or at least phone numbers for his campaign contact list.
“If you’re ready to join a grassroots army across this nation, coming together and standing for liberty,” Cruz said at his speech’s climactic conclusion, “I’m going to ask you to break a rule here today and to take out your cell phones, and to text the word ‘constitution’ to the number 33733.”
A brief, confused silence fell over the arena, followed by a ripple of nervous laughter.
“Once again,” Cruz reiterated. “Text ‘constitution’ to 33733. God’s blessing has been on America from the very beginning of this nation, and I believe God isn’t done with America yet.”
Louisville, Kentucky
Two weeks later, more than a thousand people filed into a cavernous ballroom at the Galt House convention center in downtown Louisville to see Rand Paul kick off his presidential bid.
And they did get to see that happen, eventually—but not before first being subjected to an hour and a half of watching a determinedly diverse, painstakingly assembled parade of preachers, speakers, students, singers, lobbyists, and libertarians take turns at the podium. Each person stood beneath a large banner unveiling a new all-caps campaign slogan, designed to cater to the libertarian movement with its first line and the mainstream party with its second.
DEFEAT THE WASHINGTON MACHINE UNLEASH THE AMERICAN DREAM
The program had been carefully planned to highlight Rand’s maverick coalition-building efforts over the past couple of years, and each speaker had a story to tell about how the candidate had won him or her over. There was the doctor who had gone on a mission trip with the senator, performing eye surgery on poor children with him in Guatemala. And the college conservative who said she had never seen her liberal classmates respond so enthusiastically to a Republican politician as they did to Rand. And the local black preacher who said he was a lifelong Democrat and former Obama supporter who now considered himself an Independent, proclaiming, “I am telling every Independent it is time to run out here and run with Senator Rand Paul!”
When it finally came time to introduce the candidate himself, Kelley Paul delivered some brief, heartfelt remarks, recalling that when Rand had first approached her about his wish to run for Senate, she responded, “I can’t believe you’re doing this to me.” Onstage, the story had an obligatory happy ending, with Kelley concluding that everything had worked out better than she possibly could have imagined, and that her family was now exhilarated by the prospect of the election. Offstage, though, the public scrutiny inherent in participating in a presidential race would continue to put strain on their family. Just weeks after her husband hit the campaign trail, their oldest son would be cited for driving under the influence. An old mug shot would resurface; another rash of headlines would follow. “That was her worst nightmare, and it happened right away,” one family friend would lament to me.
But at this moment, and on this stage, there was a campaign to launch, and a Washington machine to defeat, and a libertarian takeover to execute, and a “New GOP” to build. So Kelley finished her remarks and introduced her husband. Cheers rang out from the floor and music blasted from the speakers as the smiling-and-waving candidate appeared. While Rand basked in the applause, Kelley tried to slink off the stage—but before she could get away, Rand placed two hands on her shoulders and gently twisted her back toward the audience. She stood next to him for a few seconds, doing her best impression of a campaign wife, and the moment the gravitational pull weakened, she broke away and hurried toward the backstage stairs, her smile melting away before she was out of view.
“I have a message!” Rand bellowed from the podium. “A message that is loud and clear and does not mince words. We have come to take our country back!”
As the Kentucky senator went on to deliver the speech he had been waiting to give for much of his adult life, his parents sat in the row of seats behind him on the stage, fully visible to the audience, press, and TV cameras. His mother, Carol, beamed throughout the performance, repeatedly joining the crowd to interrupt her son with supportive soccer mom applause. Ron sat quietly through the entire speech. Not smiling. Not clapping. Not even once—at least not as far as Rand’s aides could tell from where they were watching on the floor.
The younger Paul’s advisers would have liked the old man to show at least a little enthusiasm, but they also believed that the wedge between father and son could help Rand’s 2016 chances. If he was going to win over the moderate elements of the Republican establishment, he couldn’t have his dad showing up at campaign stops and spouting off about the gold standard, or legalizing heroin, or any of his other politically untenable positions. For the announcement event, Ron had been invited to attend but asked not to speak—and as the campaign got under way in the spring of 2015, there were no plans for the libertarian lion to join his son on the trail at all.
But the Pauls’ political estrangement was not to last. In months that followed, Rand’s grand vision of a diverse, broad-based coalition of Republican voters fell flat, his candidacy greeted with outright hostility by many in the GOP. (On the day he entered the race, a well-funded neoconservative group launched a million-dollar ad blitz attacking his support for the United States’ nuclear negotiations with Iran as “wrong and dangerous.”) As his poll numbers sank and the cast of candidates grew, Rand was forced to retreat back to the libertarian niche his father had once occupied—and by the end of the summer, Ron was ready to officially endorse his son for president. In a campaign fund-raising email sent to supporters, the elder Paul wrote, “If you want to know what I really think about my son, Rand, then don’t listen to our national media… [they like] to play this little game where they pit us, or certain views, against each other. Don’t fall for it. They’re trying to manufacture storylines at liberty’s expense.” A few days later, Rand returned the affection with his own campaign fundraising email. “Please join me in wishing my dad a very happy birthday,” he wrote, linking to a digital card for Ron. “And after you add your name, please chip in a contribution of $20.16 so I can continue to spread the message of Liberty…”
Miami, Florida
When Marco Rubio and his obsessively media-conscious aides set out to plan the senator’s presidential announcement, they aimed for exactly the opposite of Rand Paul’s long-winded, overly indulgent marathon of videos, speeches, and tributes. As far as Terry Sullivan was concerned, these events shouldn’t be about excising family demons or paving the way for the future of some academic philosophical movement. They were television commercials, plain and simple—and ones they didn’t have to pay for. So, with Rubio’s go-ahead, Sullivan and the rest of the campaign-in-waiting got to work on perfecting the choreography for the kickoff.
Given Rubio’s otherworldly gift for oratory, they wanted to get his speech in front of the largest possible number of Republican-primary-voting eyeballs. So, naturally, they called up Fox News. The producers at the network’s 6 p.m. newscast, Special Report with Bret Baier, said they would be interested in broadcasting the speech live. Sullivan asked how long Fox would be likely to stay on the candidate before cutting away, and the answer came back: thirteen minutes. So Rubio’s speechwriters were instructed to keep it to precisely twelve (to leave time for applause).
For the location, they selected Miami’s Freedom Tower, the building through which Cuban exiles were first shuffled when they arrived in the States half a century earlier. The symbolism of the setting had the potential to be truly powerful, driving home Rubio’s immigrant roots and presenting him as an Obama-like embodiment of the American dream. But his advisers also knew that the power of that message would be sharply undermined if the so-called DREAMer activists who had been harassing Rubio ever since he backed away from the immigration bill in 2013 managed to infiltrate the event and interrupt it. With the stakes—and likely viewership—so high, they needed to ensure that no one got in who didn’t belong there. And so a handful of low-level campaign staffers were deputized for a special project. The mission: vet every single one of the thousand or so attendees who had RSVP’d for the event.
In the weeks leading up to Rubio’s announcement, his staffers pored over Facebook pages, Instagram accounts, public records, and page upon page of Google searches, looking for hints that some of the attendees might not be on the level. There weren’t many hard-and-fast rules, but there was one major red flag the staffers were told to look for: attendees who weren’t American citizens. In the end, the vetting mission worked. When the day of the announcement arrived, activists marched around outside the Freedom Tower, chanting, “Undocumented! Unafraid!” But inside the room, the audience of well-dressed politicos, donors, and supporters was unanimously pro-Rubio.
For all the savvy stagecraft and careful choreography, the event was a sincerely personal one for the candidate. Standing inside the Freedom Tower, he couldn’t help but think of his parents. His father had died of cancer while Rubio was running for Senate, just eight weeks before the election. The candidate had done his best to be there for his dad in the end, carving out precious days from the campaign calendar to take him to the doctor and sit with him through chemotherapy treatments. But when he died, Rubio had taken only a couple of days off to bury him before returning to the trail. He knew his political success was a tremendous source of pride for his father—an immigrant who had spent his entire life juggling demanding and unexciting jobs so that his kids could have every opportunity possible. Now, thanks to those sacrifices, Rubio was here announcing his candidacy for president of the United States.
The day before Rubio’s announcement, Hillary Clinton had officially declared her long-anticipated bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, and many pundits had speculated that she would overshadow the young Florida senator. But Rubio took advantage of the generational contrast with Clinton as he presented himself and his campaign as symbols of America’s future. “Now, just yesterday, a leader from yesterday began a campaign for president by promising to take us back to yesterday,” Rubio said, in a line that would be played and replayed on TV nonstop for days to come.
He paused for a moment and flashed a slight smirk, before concluding. “Yesterday is over.”
Miami, Florida
As the day of his campaign kickoff pep rally approached, Jeb Bush was a man sorely lacking in pep. It had been barely six months since he started actively working toward a presidential bid—far less time than most of his fellow candidates—but already the unpleasantness of the ordeal was wearing on him. Each passing day seemed to bring with it a new indignity to endure: a frivolous photo-op, a pride-swallowing fund-raising call, yet another interminable grip-and-grin in New Hampshire where he spent more time posing for selfies with voters than he did talking about the issues he cared about. Before long, Jeb was privately complaining that his only respite from the mind-numbing monotony of the trail came when some ill-informed voter confronted him with a new Internet-fueled conspiracy theory or false piece of political propaganda that he hadn’t heard before. He knew there wasn’t really any point in trying to set these people straight—but sometimes he felt like it was the only workout his brain got all day. At least some part of this has to be intellectually stimulating, he grumbled to his aides.
As he slogged toward the summer, Jeb found it increasingly difficult to conceal his crankiness and boredom. All year, he had been telling interviewers that his decision about whether to run would ultimately come down to a personal question: “Can I do it joyfully?” But now that he was finally about to enter the race, joylessness seemed to waft off of him wherever he went. His advisers tried to perk up his performance with stylistic tips: smile more, dial back the sarcasm, add some brio to the stump. But it was no use. His problem wasn’t a matter of improving aesthetics: Jeb was simply miserable most of the time.
His experience so far as a presumptive candidate had been marked by a vexing series of political setbacks and personal frustrations. Despite the initial success of his team’s much-hyped shock-and-awe crusade, he had largely failed to scare off prospective rivals and seize control of the Republican field as planned. Vast swaths of the conservative movement were responding to the threat of a 2016 Bush bid with DEFCON One levels of hysteria, while the right-wing media assailed him daily for his moderate stances on immigration and education with the sort of unbridled ferocity and moral fury they typically reserved for world-historic villains like Osama bin Laden, or Harry Reid. And even as wealthy Bush family loyalists continued to stock Jeb’s war chest with six-figure checks, he couldn’t seem to consolidate the support of party leaders the way his brother had been able to ahead of his own presidential bid.
In April, after months of underwhelming poll numbers showed Jeb failing to live up to front-runner expectations, the New York Times ran an A1 story declaring his campaign “the juggernaut that wasn’t.”
Jeb had hoped his aggressive backstage maneuvering at the beginning of the year would help him lock down the support of the party establishment early, thus enabling him to run an optimistic, high-toned campaign by the time he officially got in the race. Now, he was glumly resigned to the likelihood that the primaries would be a long-drawn-out, violent affair, and that winning would require systematically and mercilessly mowing down every last opponent standing in his way.
To prepare for this new (and depressing) reality, Jeb ordered a last-minute shake-up of his political organization. A week before his official announcement, it was reported that David Kochel—the perennially cheerful Iowa strategist whom Jeb had poached from Mitt Romney by promising the job of campaign manager—was being shunted off to a “senior adviser” role in favor of a younger, elbow-throwing operative named Danny Diaz. When Jeb explained his decision to reporters, he touted Diaz, who was known for his proficiency in the campaign dark arts of “opposition research” (digging up dirt on opponents) and “rapid response” (churning out attack lines and talking points hour to hour), as a “grinder.” This was not the campaign Jeb had dreamed of running.
The candidate’s mood was marred by other irritants as well. To get in shape for the race, he had put himself on the trendy Paleo diet, swearing off the Mexican chilaquiles and enchiladas that he so loved in favor of a rigid low-carb regimen designed to replicate Stone Age eating habits. The joy-killing onslaught of unsalted almonds and grilled chicken salad helped him shed forty pounds in six months, but it left him grouchy and constantly complaining about being hungry. “Perpetually starving to death is apparently the source of losing weight,” he joked at a Tallahassee fund-raiser, with just a tinge of bitterness.
He was also growing increasingly resentful of the political reporters who kept trying to bait him into bashing his brother. Jeb had expected the press to pester him with questions about George’s polarizing presidential record, but from the outset of his 2016 bid he had vowed not to let the media’s gotcha games make him betray his deeply felt sense of family loyalty. He was on guard against this temptation every time he convened a press gaggle or sat down for an interview, and he could sometimes feel his body tense up and his words go wobbly when the subject of his brother came up. In May, this fierce fraternal fidelity crash-landed him in a campaign quagmire when Fox News host Megyn Kelly asked him about the Iraq War during an interview. “Knowing what we know now, would you have authorized the invasion?” she inquired.
Jeb responded confidently in the affirmative, and then added feistily, “News flash to the world: if they’re trying to find places where there’s big space between me and my brother, this might not be one of those.”
This seemingly unabashed defense of an unpopular war set off a frenzied round of bipartisan criticism. He tried backpedaling the next day, telling Sean Hannity he had “interpreted the question wrong.” But when given a chance to clarify his position, he said he didn’t want to engage in a “hypothetical”—a weak demurral that only intensified the outcry from pundits and critics demanding a straight answer. The furor made Jeb seethe with disdain for the media, who he suspected were fanning the flames not because they cared about his philosophy on military intervention, but because they wanted to gin up a juicy sibling feud. He refused to give them the satisfaction. Over four grueling days, he ducked and dodged and dithered on the Iraq question, fumbling through five different non-answers until finally Dubya called up Jeb and told him to knock it off.
“Stop it with this shit,” the former president told his little brother. “Say whatever you have to say.”
Jeb grudgingly relented, and at a campaign stop in Arizona he brought an end to the imbroglio by testily telling voters that “if we’re all supposed to answer hypothetical questions” now, then fine: “I would not have gone into Iraq.”
The private phone call between Dubya and Jeb never made the news, but word traveled through the Bush family’s network of friends and allies, and those who knew the brothers best weren’t surprised. Jeb and George had not been especially close growing up, and they differed dramatically in style and temperament. But they were both the sons of George Herbert Walker and the grandsons of Prescott—members of a family that stood, in their minds, for seriousness and guts and real-deal leadership. The Republican Party was in chaos and its presidential field was being overrun by neophytes, lightweights, and political fame-seekers who were auditioning not for the White House but for radio shows and book deals. Bush 43 didn’t give a damn what his little brother said about him on the stump: what mattered was that Jebbie saved the GOP and became Bush 45.
Jeb’s deeply held faith in his family and in his own innate presidential character was what gave him the strength to suffer through a campaign process that he found tedious and punishing. But it was also a source of immense consternation. Though the candidate publicly insisted he didn’t expect a coronation from his party, friends and confidants who talked to him about the race often came away with the impression that he couldn’t believe he wasn’t far ahead in the polls.
Jeb spent the final days leading up to his campaign kickoff in Europe—hopscotching across the continent’s capitals with an American press corps in tow as he met with high-level foreign dignitaries and gave speeches and interviews that showed off his grasp of international affairs. The trip had been designed with the express purpose of contrasting his confidence and depth of knowledge with the relative unease and inexperience of his Republican rivals. “We wanted to show… that he is ready to be president on day one,” his spokesman Tim Miller told me. “There’s no learning curve.” But while Jeb’s maturity and intellect came through over the course of his five-day swing through Europe, so too did his sense of abject dread at the idea of running for president. He tried to stay “joyful” and on message, telling reporters in Berlin, “I’m excited about the prospects of this,” but he said it exhibiting roughly the same excitement of a person bracing for gallbladder surgery.
Meanwhile, back in Florida, Jeb’s aides were hard at work prepping a campaign launch event they hoped would be so lively and fun and upbeat that it would puncture the cloud of existential gloom that was always hovering around their candidate. The advance team equipped the venue at Miami Dade College with festive flashing lights, and flanked the stage with towering signs displaying the campaign’s aggressively cheerful logo: “Jeb!” This iconography dated back to Bush’s gubernatorial years, but the punctuation seemed more necessary now than ever. Campaign staffers flooded the room with exclamation points—on stickers, on thunder sticks, on T-shirts and posters; some red, some white, and some upside down in celebration of the Spanish speakers in attendance. ¡Jeb!
The campaign’s stagecraft was remarkably effective. By the time the event finally got under way on the afternoon of June 15th with a trim, energetic candidate bounding onto the stage—sporting a light-blue button-down shirt, a broad smile, and no necktie—he looked every bit the happy warrior he claimed to be. He told jokes, said a few lines in Spanish, and made news by setting an ambitious goal for the national economy: nineteen million new jobs and four percent growth. But the line that would make most every lede in the news reports following his speech came when he attempted to allay concerns about his dynastic entitlement.
“I know that there are good people running for president. Quite a few in fact,” he said. “And not a one of us deserves the job by right of resume, party, seniority, family, or family narrative. It’s nobody’s turn. It’s everybody’s test, and it’s wide open—exactly as a contest for president should be.”
In truth, the contest had turned out to be more “wide open” than Jeb would have liked. But he and his advisers were confident that any anxiety his party harbored with regard to crowning another Bush would fade once they studied him alongside his opponents. Republican primary voters had a long history of flirtation with firebrands and carnival barkers, but in the end they always nominated a grown-up as their presidential standard-bearer. And when Jeb looked around the GOP these days, he felt there were precious few grown-ups to be found.
New York City
One day later in midtown Manhattan, a golden-haired reality TV star strode across a gold-hued lobby, descended majestically down a gold-framed escalator, and took his place on a stage in front of eight American flags rimmed with gold tassels and affixed to flagpoles with golden bald eagles on top. Above him hung a large banner that spelled out his campaign slogan in uppercase letters and a blunt-force font: “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
Donald J. Trump had come to the most fabulous of his many world-class eponymous skyscrapers to prove once and for all that the haters in the media, and the losers in the GOP, and the cheap-suit slobs in the DC political class were wrong about him… wrong about everything. Yes, The Donald was about to announce his candidacy for the United States presidency—and he was going to do it with all the fanfare money could buy.
Squinting out proudly at the Trump Tower atrium packed with press and the balcony lined with cheering Trump-T-shirt wearers, the billionaire marveled, “That is some group of people! Thousands!… It’s an honor to have everybody here. This is beyond anybody’s expectations. There’s been no crowd like this.” He proceeded to catalog the logistical shortcomings of recent Republican campaign announcements and mock the candidates’ ineptitude. “How are they going to beat ISIS?” he scoffed. “I don’t think it’s going to happen.” But he elected not to mention the legwork that had gone into putting together this particular production.
As it had turned out, assembling a crowd of sign-waving supporters for a Donald Trump campaign rally in Manhattan was a tricky task. A few days before the event, the billionaire’s team was reduced to putting out a casting call through a New York–based agency offering fifty bucks to background actors who were willing to wear Trump shirts, carry Trump posters, and cheer Trump on during his big announcement. (“We understand this is not a traditional ‘background job,’” the agency noted, “but we believe acting comes in all forms and this is inclusive of that school of thought.”)
When the day of the announcement arrived, Trump aides in tailored suits spent the morning on the streets enticing New York City tourists to come take in the spectacle. “Only in New York!” one of The Donald’s aides was heard calling out. “Come inside and make some memories.” When an older couple showed interest, the aide informed them, “Price of admission is, you have to wear a shirt.”
By showtime, Trump’s team had succeeded in cobbling together a crowd of a few hundred people. Some of them were actors earning paychecks, others were curious gawkers craning their necks to see a celebrity up close—but all of them were decked out in patriotic Trump swag, or holding up handmade signs that they had been given at the door. Who needed a genuine groundswell of grassroots support when you could buy the Astroturf version that looked just as good on TV?
With the stage set, Trump spent the next hour ad-libbing his way through an irresistibly compelling rant on live television that proved almost impossible to tune out or turn away from. It didn’t matter that the rambling remarks had no discernible theme. Virtually every line that tumbled out of his mouth was packed with the potential to become its own miniature media controversy—ricocheting across Twitter, setting off TV news shoutfests, and creating an endless loop of visceral disagreement and emotionally charged debate.
Trump on Islamic terrorists: “They’ve become rich. I’m in competition with them.”
Trump on China “ripping off” the United States in trade negotiations: “It’s like, take the New England Patriots and Tom Brady and have them play your high school football team.”
Trump on immigration: “When Mexico sends its people they’re not sending their best… [they] have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems to us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
Eventually, he arrived at the purpose of the day’s performance. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he proclaimed, grandly extending his arm in a sweeping gesture, “I am officially running for president.”
But even after he said the words, Trump’s intentions were the subject of widespread skepticism. Reporters punctuated their coverage of the event with caveats about his long history of political publicity stunts. Wishful thinkers in the Republican Party held out hope that this was just another short-lived charade; that he would refuse to file his FEC paperwork or be lured away by a lucrative TV contract. The truth, however, was that Trump had backed himself into a corner. He knew that the sort of attention he craved from the political world would never return unless he made good on his promise to run now.
The Donald considered himself a man out of options—and in the weeks that followed, he behaved as such. Even as his incendiary diatribe about Mexican immigrants drew organized boycotts of his various business enterprises, he refused to back down. (“Somebody’s doing the raping!” he reasoned.) The resulting losses were much greater than he could have predicted. NBC dropped him as the host of Celebrity Apprentice, and canceled plans to air the Miss USA and Miss Universe pageants that he owned. Macy’s announced it would no longer carry his clothing line, and the PGA pulled a major tournament from his Los Angeles golf course. The brand that he had spent his life building was suddenly being robbed of its most visible platforms. And yet, at the same time, his polls were beginning to skyrocket. The combination proved to be darkly liberating for Trump: his high-wire act had no net, and he had no face-saving way out. He was going to give his all to this performance, and when he found himself in free fall, he would take as much of the party down with him as he could.
As Donald Trump’s anarchic campaign grew increasingly unpredictable in the final weeks of the summer—with each provocation more inflammatory than the last, and each stunt more disruptive—the Republican Party appeared to be in an even worse state of disarray than on the night of its 2012 implosion. Its national debate had been hijacked by a reckless joyrider with nothing to lose and no concern whatsoever for the party’s future.
Trump made no secret of his priorities. He repeatedly threatened that if he wasn’t “treated with respect” by the Republican establishment, he would drop out of the primaries and launch a third-party presidential bid—a move that would likely split the conservative vote and deliver the 2016 election to the Democrats. And when he faced partisan pressure to join the rest of the Republican field in promising to endorse whoever won the nomination, he emphatically refused. “Why should I give up that leverage?” he demanded. To GOP leaders, Trump had become like a menacing mobster patting the end of a baseball bat on his palm as he warned, “Nice little political party you got here. Be a shame if something happened to it.”
His seemingly unstoppable surge in the polls so confounded pundits that it became common to the point of cliché to suggest that the normal “laws of political gravity” had been suspended for Trump. Blunders, outrages, flip-flops, and gaffes that would have sent any other candidate into a tailspin had no effect when they were committed by Trump. During an onstage interview in Iowa, for example, he cavalierly criticized the military service of Republican senator John McCain, who had famously spent more than five years in a Vietnamese prison (while Trump used a series of deferments to avoid getting drafted). “He’s not a war hero,” Trump said of McCain. “He’s not a war hero. He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured.” The insult—which was directed, however unwittingly, not just at the senator but also all prisoners of war—drew instant condemnation from practically every prominent Republican in the country. Marco Rubio called it “offensive,” Jeb Bush called it “slanderous,” and Rick Perry called on Trump to drop out of the race. Instead, the billionaire refused to apologize and took another shot at McCain, whom he accused, unironically, of spending “too much time on television and not enough time doing his job.” When the dust settled, Trump had somehow ticked up several points in the polls.
For months it continued like this for Trump. Explosive allegations about his personal life flared up and then fizzled out. Past sins against conservative orthodoxy were ignored or forgiven by voters. Even Fox News couldn’t seem to make a dent in Trump-mania. After Megyn Kelly spent the first Republican presidential debate hammering him with questions about his history of misogynistic statements and political promiscuity, Trump retaliated by suggesting that the host’s aggressive performance had been the result of her menstruating. The subsequent wrath from some of the biggest stars in conservative media did nothing to slow him down.
Meanwhile, Trump’s talent for showmanship ensured that hardly a half hour passed on cable news all summer without his famous mug and more-famous pompadour filling the nation’s TV screens. As the daily Donald show sucked up media oxygen, the rest of the Republican presidential candidates were left desperately gasping for air. Chris Christie, the GOP’s other brash tough-talker, was relegated to a footnote. Ted Cruz, the Tea Party’s most beloved bomb-thrower, vanished from sight. When Ohio governor John Kasich entered the race in July with an optimistic speech touting his two-term record and calling for a return to national unity, the announcement was swiftly crowded out of the news cycle to make room for Trump, after he caustically responded to Lindsey Graham calling him a “jackass” by reading out the senator’s personal cell phone number at a campaign rally and urging attendees to “try it.”
These provocations were so prolific—and mesmerizing—that CNN Tonight host Don Lemon began a regular tongue-in-cheek segment that he called “The Day in Trump.” But not everyone in the media was amused. “I swear, he is going to start throwing midgets at Velcro walls to keep us paying attention,” one CNN producer griped to me. “It’s Donald Trump’s reality show, and we’re all just living in it.”
Several Republican contenders were reduced to wild antics and silly stunts to compete for airtime. Graham, who was running his own long-shot presidential bid, turned his feud with Trump into a viral video that showed him using blenders, knives, and blowtorches to violently destroy his cell phone. Rand Paul sought to remind the electorate of his existence by lighting the federal tax code on fire (literally) and posting the footage online. But compared to The Donald—whose madcap, larger-than-life persona had been honed over decades of disciplined method acting and careful attention to craft—the other candidates’ routines seemed forced, or just hopelessly small.
This was especially true in the case of Scott Walker, whose galvanizing breakout speech to Iowa activists in January felt like an eternity ago in those mad, hot, hallucinatory days of summer. As much as he tried, the governor couldn’t seem to recapture the same adrenaline-charged excitement he had exhibited onstage in Des Moines. And to many conservatives, his wholesome image as a church-going, football-loving, suburb-dwelling everyman paled in comparison to the visceral escapist fantasy that The Donald’s campaign offered. Walker was the guy you wanted to have a beer with. Trump was the guy who bought the brewery, fired and deported the illegal immigrants working there, and then took off in his private helicopter, making an up-yours gesture in Mexico’s general direction as he ascended into the sky. By mid-August, Walker was falling fast in the polls, and promising his jittery donors that he was going to “step it up” and start competing harder with Trump.
Theories abounded to explain how a reality TV loudmouth, who just months earlier had been forced to fill out his first campaign event with paid actors, was now managing to cast such a powerful spell over the Republican base. Some chalked up his popularity to a perishable blip of celebrity fascination. Others theorized that the billionaire’s lack of reliance on the donor class freed him to jettison the elements of the Republican platform that appealed primarily to the wealthy and focus solely on issues that resonated with middle-class conservatives. (Trump, for his part, modestly explained the phenomenon as the rise of “the silent majority.”) But even as he filled football stadiums with tens of thousands of supporters, some of his most hard-core followers still hailed from the right-wing fever swamps—a reality that was illustrated in midsummer when pro-Trump Twitter trolls began attacking his Republican rivals and critics by branding them #cuckservatives. That the term (a portmanteau of “cuckold” and “conservative”) originated in a dark “alt right” message board for white supremacists was largely lost on the thousands of Trump fans who used it simply to describe Republicans they believed had sold out the conservative cause—but the buzzword’s viral spread during the summer of Trump demonstrated again how much influence a tiny, poisonous fringe could wield when a fractured party lacked a unifying leader.
For all the chaos Donald Trump had wrought, the fact remained that he could flame out at any moment—as most in the GOP still believed was inevitable—and it wouldn’t change the reality that after three years of exile and wandering in the wilderness, the Republican Party still had not found its Moses. There was no consensus political figure poised to unite the party by sheer force of will and personality, no single compelling visionary who had captured the imaginations of Republicans from all quarters.
In the wilderness, the traditional taxonomy had crumbled. Old ideologies were renamed, old names were redefined, and countless words had been written in a futile attempt to negotiate a universal vocabulary. Neoconservatives, neoliberals, libertarians, libertarian populists, reform conservatives, compassionate conservatives, right wing, business wing, moderate mainstream, Tea Party extreme—the disagreement over what all these labels meant and stood for had become so fierce as to render them useless.
And while the party had, indeed, spent the past few years divided into a chaotic cluster of competing tribes, the allegiances were still always evolving, battle lines ever shifting, and new fronts presenting themselves every day. From Iran to immigration to drones to race to drugs, provocative questions and unpredictable world events lay buried like land mines in the desert, poised to explode at any given moment—scattering conservatives who would then re-form in new tribes.
In this landscape of constant change, of myriad debates and fickle alliances, of sound bite news, of pundits and polls, of fast rises and faster falls, perhaps only one thing would remain recognizably the same: in the grand tradition of American politics, the fight for the future of the Republican Party, the nomination, and ultimately the presidency itself would be defined by a clash of egos and personalities, as a record class of self-styled prophets fought its way through the commotion, all promising to lead America’s conservatives back to the promised land, and then lasting as long as they could.