Prologue
SPEAK LIKE NEWT
On the evening of July 13, 2016, the former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich marched through the hallways of an Indianapolis television studio as he prepared to appear live on Fox News. The past twenty-four hours had been a whirlwind. The Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump, was seriously considering naming Gingrich his vice presidential running mate. Gingrich loved being back in the spotlight; to him, the thrill of politics was like a narcotic.
Suddenly Gingrich had a chance to return to the heights of power he had missed since his Republican colleagues had pressured him to step down as Speaker of the House, one of the most influential positions in Washington, back in November 1998. His downfall had been sudden, amid the climactic days of President Bill Clinton’s impeachment, only four years after Gingrich had led the Republicans to take control of the House of Representatives for the first time since 1954. Following his dramatic departure from Congress, Gingrich experienced many professional ups and downs. The best of times came when he offered commentary on Fox News or filled the role of resident policy wonk at the conservative Heritage Foundation. He also enjoyed earning money as a consultant.1 But his disappointment was palpable when his 2012 bid for the Republican presidential nomination fell flat, bested by the former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, the smooth patrician to Gingrich’s feisty populist.
But now Donald Trump might be offering Gingrich, who turned seventy-three that June, one last chance to step back into the center of power. Many experts argued that Gingrich had a pretty good shot at winning the vice presidential sweepstakes. His sexual past paled in comparison to the exploits of “The Donald” during his adventurous years in New York City. Gingrich was also one of the few senior figures in the Republican Party whom Trump had not knocked to his knees. The former Speaker exuded the kind of gravitas that the reality TV star lacked, displaying an easy fluency in public policy and foreign affairs. He also had an instinct for partisan warfare unequaled by almost any Republican besides Trump.
Moreover, Gingrich’s competitors were flawed. The New Jersey governor, Chris Christie, had been damaged by a scandal about a manufactured traffic jam back in the Garden State. The Alabama senator Jeff Sessions seemed so much like a hard-line southern reactionary that he would instantly kill any hope that Trump could win over northern and midwestern independents. And the Indiana governor, Mike Pence, with his choirboy demeanor, felt much too boring a pick for the former star of The Apprentice, with his appetite for sensation and sizzle.
Gingrich was to be interviewed that night by Sean Hannity, the pugnacious Fox host whose tough-guy persona attracted a passionate right-wing audience. The day of the Fox interview, Trump had met with Gingrich in a two-thousand-square-foot penthouse suite at the Conrad hotel, a posh five-star high-rise in downtown Indianapolis. Trump had intended to fly back to New York the previous evening after attending a rally with Governor Pence, but a flat tire on the airplane had grounded him overnight. Hannity, a close friend and ally of both Trump and Gingrich, had secretly allowed the former Speaker to fly on his private jet to Indianapolis to make sure that their scheduled meeting took place.
For about two and a half hours, Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and children Eric, Donald Jr., and Ivanka sat in as the presumptive Republican nominee and the former Speaker held a free-flowing conversation about the role of the vice president, relations with Capitol Hill, and the many issues facing America after Barack Obama’s presidency. Gingrich found Trump exhilarating, a fresh voice who would not be muted by the ostensible experts. The last great Republican firebrand saw the new one as a kindred spirit, one who shared Gingrich’s ruthless and defiant attitude toward political convention and his mastery of the media.
That night Gingrich strode through the usually sleepy local studio; all the campaign activity had amped up the station’s energy level, but having Gingrich on-site created a pronounced buzz. He was one of the rare former members of Congress who was recognized on the streets. Walking through the studios, Gingrich looked to some on the newsroom staff more like the overweight college professor he had been in his early years, lost in his own thoughts, than someone who might soon be next in line for the presidency. Although he was wearing the classic outfit of the Washington male politician—a dark suit with a royal blue shirt and a red power tie—Gingrich didn’t have the normal polish. His suit was a little too boxy; its occupant was slightly rumpled.
Gingrich didn’t care: this was the look that he had nurtured since entering politics thirty-seven years earlier as a young congressman from Georgia. He liked that his colleagues thought of him as the man with the big ideas, the intellectual turned politician. He had used that image to intimidate his opponents into submission, whatever the issue being debated. It was rare that Gingrich, with his trademark smirk, didn’t seem to think that he was 100 percent correct about the topic being discussed. While he looked as if he might fit naturally in a seminar room, deep down Gingrich had the take-no-prisoners mentality of the toughest partisan figures who had ever served on Capitol Hill. He had practically written the handbook on cutthroat congressional tactics and spinning the media for partisan advantage; indeed, during his speakership, conservatives had literally circulated a memo on how to “speak like Newt.”
As the makeup artist finished powdering his face and the production crew attached a small microphone to his lapel, Gingrich had good reason to feel that Trump would never have become the nominee without him. It wasn’t just that Gingrich had been a loyal supporter throughout the primaries but also that the unlikely, unorthodox, nativist populist campaign Trump had mounted, which aimed to tear down the political leaders of both parties and to destabilize the entire U.S. political system, was Gingrich’s creation. Trump’s media-centered strategy and his determination to capitalize on public distrust of Washington were the same weapons that Gingrich had deployed upon his arrival on Capitol Hill, when he went after the Democratic majority in the 1980s.
Like Trump, Gingrich believed that anything was possible in politics. He hated it when colleagues told him that things were always going to be the way they were—especially when they said that Republicans would always be the country’s minority party. When Ronald Reagan was president from 1981 to 1989, Gingrich had worked diligently as a backbencher to remake the Republican Party’s then-staid, country-club, business-oriented brand into something far more hard hitting and confrontational. He committed himself to being a foot soldier in the Reagan Revolution. His goal: shove the national policy agenda to the right and wrest power away from the Democrats who had controlled the House for three decades. To almost everyone, it was a pipe dream.
But Gingrich came to the House in 1979 from a Georgia district that had been reliably Democratic for generations. He had won, and so could others in his party if they played by new rules, which he himself would invent. Gingrich promoted a style of smashmouth combat aimed at delegitimizing his opponents by whatever means possible. Politics, as he saw it, was like warfare. The only way to win a battle, he decided, was to unleash the full fury of one’s firepower on the foe. Now Trump was using the same approach on his way to the presidency.
The camera light flashed on in the Indianapolis newsroom, and the interview began. Listening to Hannity’s voice through his earpiece, Gingrich jumped into the discussion with verve. As the Fox anchor offered the Georgian friendly questions about his meeting with Trump and his vice presidential prospects, Gingrich turned up the wattage. Speaking in his familiar professorial style, Gingrich launched a fusillade of persuasion, listing the obvious similarities between himself and Trump that would make them ideal partners: “I’m an outsider, I’m oriented toward moving the great base of the party, communicating big ideas, being on television.” Gingrich paused to mutter that he probably shouldn’t say what he was thinking aloud, then connected the dots between his own congressional career and Trump’s presidential campaign: “Look, in many ways, Donald Trump is like a pirate. He’s outside the normal system, he gets things done, he’s bold, he’s actually like a figure out of a movie. In a lot of ways, my entire career has been a little bit like a pirate. I’ve taken on the establishment of both parties, [I’m] very prepared to fight in the media.”
Then Gingrich took the conversation with Hannity in an unexpected direction. As much as he wanted the job, Gingrich said, he could not resist pointing out why he might not be the best selection. Displaying his trademark audacity, on the eve of this historic decision, he pointed Trump toward Gingrich’s second choice: Mike Pence. Trump would have to decide whether he wanted a “two-pirate ticket,” Gingrich said. If Trump didn’t want to run with such a like-minded person, Pence might be better as a stabilizing force. This admission appeared to take Hannity by surprise, but it was classic Gingrich: he had always tended to say exactly what was on his mind, for better or worse.
After the interview ended and the crew removed his mic, Gingrich walked out of the studio. Whatever the next few days brought, he could feel as though he had won. Trump was thriving in the political world that Gingrich had created. Gingrich would always be Michelangelo to Trump’s David.
In Gingrich’s world, Republicans practiced a ruthless style of partisanship that ignored the conventional norms of Washington and continually tested how far politicians could go in bending government institutions to suit their partisan purposes. Republicans went for the head wound, as Trump’s adviser Steve Bannon said, when Democrats were having pillow fights.2 The new GOP goal was not to negotiate or legislate but to do everything necessary to maintain partisan power. If it was politically useful to engage in behavior that could destroy the possibility of governance, which rendered bipartisanship impossible and would unfairly decimate their opponents’ reputations, then so be it. Gingrich-era Republicans were willing to enter into alliances of convenience with extremists who trafficked in reactionary populism, nativism, and racial backlash. The party kept counting on Gingrich’s media-centered strategy, tailoring its actions and statements to push the national conversation in its favor, even if that depended on mixing fact and fiction and practicing a new, brass-knuckles politics of smear.3
The style of partisanship that Gingrich popularized supplanted the bipartisan norms of the committee era of Congress (1930s–1960s) as well as the responsible partisanship that had been promoted as an alternative by Watergate-era reformers (1970s), when leaders and the rank and file were loyal to their party agenda while still adhering to formal and informal rules of governance. Gingrich’s approach to partisanship was an entirely different beast. Nothing and nobody was sacrosanct.
To be sure, this was not the first time in American history that conditions on Capitol Hill bottomed out. Congress had been through numerous periods of vicious partisanship, such as the decades leading up to the Civil War, when relations disintegrated so badly that bloody altercations on the floors of the House and the Senate were regular occurrences until the government broke down into total dysfunction.4 While Gingrich’s era of partisanship did not witness outright physical violence between members, what did take root was the normalization of a no-holds-barred style of partisan warfare where the career of every politician was seen as expendable and where it was fair game to shatter routine legislative processes in pursuit of power, even when there was not an issue as monumental as slavery on the table. In Gingrich’s era, a crippling form of partisanship came to permanently define how elected officials dealt with almost every issue, ranging from who should lead the parties to mundane budgeting matters to decisions over war and peace.
Before Gingrich could help midwife the new American politics, he had to sweep the old order aside. His rise to power dates back to a tumultuous twenty-nine-month period from January 1987 to May 1989, when, as a relatively junior congressman within the minority party, he brought down one of the most powerful people in Washington—the Democratic Speaker of the House, Jim Wright. The brutal battle shocked Washington and forever transformed American politics. In two hundred years of House history, Wright was the first Speaker to be forced to resign. Gingrich’s campaign against Wright for allegedly violating ethics rules that Congress had imposed in the aftermath of Watergate turned the forty-five-year-old Georgian from a reckless bomb-thrower whom most Republican leaders kept at arm’s length to one of the party’s top national leaders. He secured a leadership position as a result of his efforts. Nobody took Gingrich lightly after he brought down the Speaker.
As the brash young 1980s maverick with the chubby baby face and the helmet of prematurely graying hair, Gingrich had a central insight: the transformational changes of the Watergate era—with stricter rules to constrain the power of elected officials and congressional reforms that opened up Congress to public scrutiny—could be used to fundamentally destabilize the entire political establishment and benefit insurgents, including Republicans. President Richard Nixon had resigned in August 1974, but Democrats were not immune to new forces that exposed politics to the harsh light of the media. Inspired by The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein, and Ben Bradlee, a new generation of journalists arrived in Washington determined to uncover official wrongdoing. None of them wanted to miss the next big scandal. And many of the new reforms prohibited activities once considered normal.
Even before Gingrich won his first election, he realized that the well-intentioned post-Watergate reforms, written with the help of idealistic newcomers to Congress known as the Watergate Babies, could be deployed against the entrenched Democratic majority. Ethics codes, televised floor proceedings, rules empowering rank-and-file members of Congress—all could be used by an increasingly assertive Republican caucus to take control of the House. The arena now became establishment versus outsider, not just liberal versus conservative. It would become a winning formula.
Gingrich also saw that the congressional Democrats were vulnerable even as they seemed to be at the peak of their power. Since 1932, the Democrats had dominated the Hill with few exceptions (including interludes in 1947–1949 and 1953–1955), and Watergate had led to an even bigger surge in their numbers. But power had its pitfalls. A corrosive network of private money, lobbyists, and interest groups surrounded legislators, creating a web of nebulous relationships that looked bad to a distrustful public. When Speaker Tip O’Neill retired in 1986 and was replaced by Wright, Gingrich pegged the new Speaker as a sitting duck.
Wright, the son of a populist Democrat, viewed politics through the lens of 1955, the year that he arrived in Washington. Filled with grandiose ambitions, the Texan joined a Democratic establishment that had been shaped by President Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal. For Wright, politics was about legislating effectively and about members keeping their districts happy, whether by helping constituents with federal agencies or by directing federal largesse toward local businesses to create jobs for the electorate. That had been a winning formula for decades, one that propelled Wright to reelection again and again. Even after Reagan’s landslide victory in 1980, Wright and the House Democrats were still in the saddle.
But when he was elected Speaker, Wright didn’t comprehend how profoundly Vietnam and Watergate had shattered trust in government and destabilized the leaders of both parties. The war and the scandal produced sweeping reforms that changed the way Congress worked: leaders were more vulnerable, the process was more open, and every member had to abide by stricter rules of behavior. The old rules of governing no longer applied. Wright didn’t see that the people in Washington had changed too. The investigative journalists, the good-government reformers, the special prosecutors, the renegade legislators—they were as much a part of the establishment as the party leaders and the cigar-chomping lobbyists. And these ragtag upstarts could make or break a career and, as it turned out, damage an entire political party in the process.
By the time he launched his crusade against the Speaker in 1987, Gingrich had come to understand that in the modern media era politics was as much about perception as substance. The way journalists framed a story and the narratives they crafted about an issue could be as powerful as the facts. From the first day he set foot on the floor of the House in 1979, Gingrich had been peddling a tale about the illegitimacy of the Democratic majority, and he found that he was not alone within his party; after Wright’s first day as Speaker in January 1987, Gingrich made the villain of that tale the corrupt Texan now leading the House Democrats.
Gingrich’s House colleagues—an earlier, less brazen brand of Republicans—might not have understood that the way a politician spun a story often determined the outcome of a struggle. But Gingrich did. As an erstwhile historian at a west Georgia college, with a Ph.D. from Tulane University, he knew that good storytelling mattered. Gingrich would throw out an argument or an accusation, let an idea circulate in the media ecosystem, and when his critics pounced, he would turn their words against them. For Gingrich, the central battle was shaping the way voters conceived of the basic problem at hand. First Gingrich made Wright the embodiment of the House’s ills; then Gingrich drove him to resign; then Gingrich took his majority and his gavel.
When the Republicans gained control of Congress in 1994, Gingrich would emerge as their leader, the avatar of a new generation of Republicans who were more aggressive, more partisan, and less restrained by traditional norms. Before Wright stepped down, the Speaker warned his colleagues to avoid the “mindless cannibalism” that the intensification of partisan warfare would bring. He was too late. Drawn to power, emboldened by success, the Republican Party embraced Gingrich’s politics. Most of the GOP acted as though the destruction of Speaker Wright proved that shattering the rules of an institution could be an effective way to seize political power. Gingrich’s generation, in turn, would spawn their own successors with the Tea Party in 2010.
These Young Turks, who won their seats in a backlash against President Barack Obama, were willing to do whatever was necessary to win. When Republicans threatened to trigger a global economic meltdown by sending the U.S. government into default over a spending dispute with President Obama, the Utah representative Jason Chaffetz told reporters that he realized that his leadership’s willingness “to let a default happen” was “a negotiating chip, and said he didn’t mind at all.”5 Tea Party Republicans thrived in a partisan universe that revolved around Roger Ailes’s media empire; Fox News played to a zealous crowd of voters who rarely bucked the party line.
In the end, Trump decided that two pirates were indeed too much for one ticket. He considered having Gingrich as his running mate but concluded that Governor Pence brought more to the ticket. Pence had been Manafort’s strong preference, as he feared that Gingrich would be too much of a distraction.6 Unlike Gingrich, Pence would serve as a bridge between his campaign and evangelical voters who were distrustful of the thrice-married, testosterone-filled reality television star. Pence was a good-looking, media-savvy, disciplined politician, one who would not steal the spotlight away from his attention-seeking boss.
Gingrich could live with Trump’s decision. He had come to believe that Trump was a transformative figure, and he didn’t want to do anything to get in his way. He could take pride in watching the 2016 presidential election, which confirmed that his political style and Republican politics had become one.
On Inauguration Day, January 20, 2017, Gingrich was downright giddy, exuding the same sense of excitement as a young boy entering a stadium to see his favorite sports team. At 10:18 A.M., Gingrich strode into the capital with his fellow former Speaker John Boehner, who was boasting to colleagues that he was “texting buddies” with the president-elect. With his wife, Callista, by his side, Gingrich walked through the crowd, stopping to schmooze with some of the Republican Party’s stars, including Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who was photographed attentively listening to the Georgian. Wearing a dark overcoat, Gingrich appeared to thoroughly enjoy playing the role of senior statesman. The atmosphere reminded him of the day when Ronald Reagan took the oath of office thirty-six years earlier. Trump, now America’s forty-fifth president, delivered a bleak inaugural address on the west front of the Capitol, sketching a portrait of a nation in crisis and vowing, “This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.” Gingrich loved it. He called the speech “decisive and impressive—delivered slowly, firmly and with conviction. . . . It was exactly the message Americans needed to hear.”7
Although Gingrich did not become part of Trump’s cabinet, the former Speaker emerged as one of the president’s chief supporters in the media—in some ways, the forum Gingrich had long felt was most meaningful. Gingrich had been playing to the television cameras for his entire career, and he would now devote his energy to “developing the agenda, pushing the agenda, explaining the agenda.”8 As Trump took the helm, Gingrich appeared frequently on conservative television and radio programs to pontificate about why the liberal establishment had it all wrong about this maverick president. He even published Understanding Trump, a vigorous treatise explaining why Trump was a historic figure. “It is astonishing to me, as a historian,” Gingrich wrote, “how the elite media and much of the political establishment refuse to try to understand Donald Trump. They have been so rabidly opposed to him, so ideologically committed to left-wing values, and so terrified of the future that they haven’t stopped and considered how extraordinary his success has been. President Trump is one of the most remarkable individuals to ever occupy the White House.”9
Gingrich had planted; Trump had reaped. The rise of Gingrich’s merciless version of the Republican Party was inextricably linked to the fall of Speaker Wright. Gingrich perfected his new style of partisan politics through the successful crusade against the powerful Texan. In the process, he elevated himself from the backbench to the party leadership. He persuaded a growing number of Republicans to embrace his raucous ways, by weaponizing ethics rules and manipulating well-meaning journalists. Slowly but surely, starting right after Ronald Reagan left office, the Grand Old Party started to look more and more like Newt.
The cataclysmic political battle between Wright and Gingrich had been an epic struggle between the old Washington and the new, and the new Washington would prevail. The new Washington was rougher, less stable, and far more ruthless. In the new Washington, almost anything was permissible. In partisan politics, it was almost impossible to go too far. We can date precisely the moment when our toxic political environment was born: Speaker Wright’s downfall in 1989.10