On October 9, twenty-eight days before the midterm elections, Nikki Haley, Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, and one of the longer-serving and brighter lights of the Trump White House, announced her resignation, effective at the end of the year.
Since she was not leaving immediately, there would be no practical difference between announcing this plan on November 7, the day after the midterms, rather than now. The effective difference, however, was that her announcement became part of the campaign narrative—the negative narrative. During an election season in which Donald Trump was scaring off the nation’s college-educated women, the most visible woman in the administration—outside of Trump’s own daughter—was choosing this moment to say she was packing up.
Haley’s resignation would be one of the closing impressions of the campaign. She had not even supplied enough warning for the White House to name, with fanfare and smiles, a replacement who might lighten the shadow of her exit. The always-scrambling White House staff now had to scramble even more than usual: somehow they had to embrace her resignation so as not to appear surprised or, indeed, openly dissed by it.
The solution was to have her make the announcement in the Oval Office. Haley resisted, forcing the White House to insist, or beg, that she show up in the West Wing. But, in fact, the optics favored her, not the White House. She was so important and so valued that she was not dismissed in a tweet, as so many others had been. (Even those who quit were usually then fired in a tweet.) Instead, she was fawned over by the president in the Oval. And yet she was quitting. You didn’t quit this president, he fired you. But now, here—Trump bore a stunned and helpless look as he heaped flattery on her during the staged announcement—he was being dumped. “Hopefully you’ll be coming back sometime,” he said lamely, “maybe in a different capacity, you can have your pick…”
An Indian American who was the first woman to be elected governor of South Carolina, the forty-six-year-old Haley—who had, prior to Trump’s election, expressed only distaste for him—was Ivanka Trump’s personal recruit into her father’s largely white male White House. Haley’s drive, even among the driven, was already a marvel in Republican Party circles. She told Trump she wanted to be secretary of state. In their initial meeting, she proudly proclaimed her great success, and singular experience, in foreign negotiations: she had persuaded the Germans to put a Mercedes-Benz plant in South Carolina. Trump, usually annoyed by people who spoke up for themselves, seemed charmed by her zeal and not at all bothered by her lack of experience. And unlike many of the others he was interviewing for foreign policy posts, Haley wasn’t trying to school him. Secretary of state might be a reach for her first job in foreign policy, but Trump was happy to appoint her as ambassador to the UN.
Connoisseurs of political talent enumerated Haley’s skills: she was a quick study, she could read a room, she was fast on her feet, and she combined charisma with toughness. What’s more, she was a demographic godsend for the GOP, one of the very few party leaders who broke the Republican mold.
By sending her to the UN, Trump had not only given her national standing and instant foreign policy credentials, he had advantageously relocated her to New York, the country’s media and finance capital. Political handicappers began to compare Nikki Haley in New York to Richard Nixon in New York. After his defeat in the 1962 California gubernatorial race, Nixon had moved to Manhattan and, in preparation for a future nobody thought he would have, ingratiated himself with the rich and powerful.
Haley, the quick study, mastered the UN and then mastered the social circuit. She was soon on a first-name basis with Wall Street movers and with the city’s power-women strata. In an administration where everyone was tainted by Trump, she used her geographic distance from him, and her ease with the mainstream establishment, to become the contrast gainer, the un-Trump administration figure. Curiously, while almost everybody else in Trump’s White House spoke bitterly about him, both privately and not so privately, Haley became noted for her restraint. Or, perhaps more pointedly, she seemed to go out of her way not to talk about him. Her political skills were widely noted: for the small circle of Republican leaders and donors actively trying to strategize a future beyond Donald Trump—the Defending Democracy Together group—Haley had become possibility A.
As Haley settled into her high-profile job and quickly found ways to raise that profile even higher, Trump seemed uncertain about what to make of her. Should he be grateful or suspicious? He spent one Mar-a-Lago weekend in the spring of 2018 polling people on whether he should fire her, while at the same time praising her as the only person in his administration to get good press. The latter was also, obviously, a reason to fire her—she was getting too much attention.
On the most basic level, Trump had no game with executive women. In his orbit, women were either functionaries who tended to him—like Hope Hicks in the White House or Rhona Graff, his Trump Organization secretary and aide-de-camp—or arm candy, like his wife and his daughter. He could compare Haley only to … himself. He was fascinated by details of her 2010 race for governor, when she survived accusations by two men who said they had been her lovers. Her survival, he judged, was like his own after the pussy-tape catastrophe.
In the fall of 2017, Trump told multiple confidants that Haley had given him a blow job—his words. What was true here is that this was what he had said; it was a species of his famous locker-room talk. What was far from certain was that what he had said was true, and few around him gave it much credence.
Haley was enraged by reports of a relationship with Trump, adamantly denying that there was any truth whatsoever to this suggestion. In New York, she had become friendly with several high-profile Republican women who were themselves bitterly opposed to Trump. Now, part of their discussions focused on how Haley could avoid the damage that Trump might surely do to her—not only through her association with him, but as a result of his reflexive need to drag down everyone around him.
By the beginning of Trump’s second year as president, Haley had settled on her strategy: carefully but persistently, she would declare her independence. Where so many others in the Republican Party had been cowed by Trump, or were resigned to him, or petulant in the face of him, Haley was determined to think beyond him.
In April 2018 Haley came out in the open. She had pushed for new sanctions on Russia for its role in recent Syrian chemical attacks. The president, urged on by Ivanka as well as Haley and others in the administration, signed off on the plan, and Haley announced it on Face the Nation. But then the president—ever second-guessing any move that was critical toward Russia—reversed course and insisted that Haley had to take it back. She refused. At the president’s instigation, Larry Kudlow, the new White House economic adviser, was sent to make the correction and, in a comment to reporters, put the blame squarely on Haley: “There might have been some momentary confusion about that.”
The most basic Trump White House operating rule was that nobody could talk back to the president—ever, in any sense. If you did, or even if it seemed like you wanted to, you instantly became an enemy or nonperson to Trump. So clear was his inability to take any criticism or to participate in any honest argument about policy that the attempt was almost never made. (Even if you believed you had to say no to something Trump was insisting on, you had to say yes and then trust that, given his short attention span and the White House’s chronic disorganization, the issue would at some point disappear.) John Kelly, early in his tenure, had missed this memo and suffered endlessly for it. Even Jim Mattis, as he became more and more disaffected, kept a reliable poker face. Mike Pompeo, Trump’s most trusted member of the cabinet, settled into a constant grovel.
Haley, like everyone else in the White House, was well aware that Kudlow had spoken for the president. Yet she quickly delivered a resounding reproof to Kudlow’s comment: “With all due respect, I don’t get confused.” And then she insisted that the White House make Kudlow publicly apologize to her.
Although Trump regularly became irritated by or bored with the people around him, or contemptuous of them, or tired of them, or jealous of them, this was perhaps the first time he seemed to fear one of his own people. “What does she want?” he kept asking friends and advisers. Haley had gotten under his skin, instead of him getting under hers.
Now, in the final weeks of perhaps the most intensely fought midterm elections in history—a bitter contest likely to come down to how many Republican women the party could hold—Haley, the designated queen of Republican women, by resigning for no known reason at the most damaging time imaginable, effectively announced that she no longer stood with the president. It seemed that her express purpose, which Trump was now helpless to counter, was very much to hurt him. Her resignation was hard to read as anything else but a message that said, “Don’t vote for him.”
If your pitch was to the Republican establishment, if your goal was to return to the mainstream from the lost cause of Trumpism, if your ambition was to be the leader and embodiment of the Republican reformation, then this was how you did it: with steel and grace. This was how you announced you were running for president. This is how you saved yourself from the ignominy suffered by every other ex-Trumper and, to boot, set yourself up to get a multimillion-dollar book deal, and corporate board seats, and rich consulting gigs.
On October 18, nine days after she announced her resignation and less than three weeks before the midterms, Haley headlined the Al Smith Dinner in New York City. “It’s amazing how Nikki Haley has exited this administration with such dignity,” said the master of ceremonies in his introduction of her to an audience that included New York governor Andrew Cuomo, Mayor Bill de Blasio, former mayor Michael Bloomberg, Senator Chuck Schumer, former secretary of state Henry Kissinger, and the Wall Street financier Stephen Schwarzman. This annual dinner is a showcase for political talent: on display for all to see is your deftness, acuity, charm, and cunning, plus the great admiration the donor class has for you. In 2016, Trump’s own turn as headliner at the dinner had been a disaster; unable to joke about himself, he merely dropped stink bombs on Hillary Clinton. Now, Haley, adroitly landing jokes on Trump, presented herself as a kind of presidential Disney princess—generous, embracing, kind, and, as well, pleasantly sharp and funny.
Joking that Trump had offered her advice about what to say at the dinner, Haley commented that he told her to “just brag about my accomplishments.” Then, referencing the president’s recent and widely criticized performance at the United Nations, she said: “It really killed at the UN, I’ve got to tell you.” She dead-panned that when Trump learned of her Indian background, “he asked me if I was from the same tribe as Elizabeth Warren,” the Massachusetts senator whose claims of Native American ancestry he regularly ridiculed. But it was Haley’s closing and most pointed rebuke of the president that brought the house down: “In our toxic political environment, I’ve heard some people in both parties describe their opponents as enemies or evil. In America, our political opponents are not evil.”
The president, watching the coverage of her performance, seemed uncertain about how he had come off. In calls to friends, he polled them about whether they thought her jokes were funny and remarked on her “department-store gown.”
Bannon was no fan of Haley’s. He found her to be a reliable water carrier of Republican establishment pieties—“not an original thought in that head.” But he couldn’t help admiring her. “She understands what nobody else seems to,” said Bannon. “The odds of Trump not making it are very high. So plan accordingly.”
Bannon believed that not only did Haley’s carefully choreographed departure provide further indication of the problems the party would have with college-educated women on November 6, but that losing Haley was a precursor to the party’s loss of just about everyone with an education. This was uncharted territory for an American political party but, reflecting an essential tenet of Trumpist strategy, you nevertheless doubled down on it. “Here we are, the party of the peasants,” said Bannon, not unhappily.
Now, Bannon understood, Trump needed his own exogenous event to fire up the base. Et voilà: cometh the caravan.
On October 12, a group of more than two hundred Hondurans (estimates seemed to range from two hundred to one thousand) set out from the town of San Pedro Sula, heading for Mexico and the United States. Most claimed to be fleeing lawlessness and gang violence; upon arriving in the United States, they hoped to be granted asylum.
As the caravan began moving north, Bannon flew to Mexico City to address a conference of hedge funders who were brought together every year by Niall Ferguson, the British historian, writer, and conservative commentator. The trip also gave Bannon an opportunity to seek out information about the man who would soon become Mexico’s new president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a left-wing populist poised to challenge Trump, the right-wing populist. (“A stoic guy, incorruptible, the former mayor of Mexico City,” commented Bannon. “Never took a nickel—first guy in Mexico never to take a nickel—lives in a tiny little house, fire-breathing populist, the real thing, whose entire campaign is, ‘I’m the guy to stand up to Donald Trump.’”) One developing aspect of this anticipated face-off was a potential border confrontation, and during his trip to Mexico Bannon was alerted to the gathering caravan and to Mexico’s inclination to let it cross its borders.
Bannon, in constant touch with the conservative media, became a primary purveyor of the caravan narrative. To Bannon the story line was perfectly familiar: he was an admirer of the 1973 French right-wing cult classic The Camp of the Saints, by Jean Raspail, a xenophobic, end-of-civilization novel in which hundreds of ships ferry third-world immigrants to France. As the ships reach Gibraltar, the French president sends troops south to stop them—to no avail.
The idea behind the caravan was that immigrants traveling en masse were safer than they would be on a lone trek. By yourself or with just your family, you were an easy target for criminal organizations and the police; furthermore, you were too often dependent on unscrupulous smugglers. But significant numbers would provide some security, media attention, some power. They would also provide the conservative media with a seeming onslaught of alarming images on the eve of the midterms.
In the ensuing days, the caravan grew to more than a thousand travelers—or refugees, or invaders, depending on your point of view. Hannity and Fox took formal notice of the caravan on October 13, the president three days later. Trump posted seventeen tweets on October 16, most of them directly on message, from insults aimed at Elizabeth Warren, to warnings about unaccompanied minors at the border, to a continued defense of the Saudi Crown Prince, to a slap at Stormy Daniels, to attacking the FBI and the “Fake dossier.” But to this group of familiar targets he now added the caravan.
The United States has strongly informed the President of Honduras that if the large Caravan of people heading to the U.S. is not stopped and brought back to Honduras, no more money or aid will be given to Honduras, effective immediately!
We have today informed the countries of Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador that if they allow their citizens, or others, to journey through their borders and up to the United States, with the intention of entering our country illegally, all payments made to them will STOP (END)!
Anybody entering the United States illegally will be arrested and detained, prior to being sent back to their country!
Bannon had focused Hannity on the caravan story, and now Hannity had focused the president.
For Trump and his most dedicated confederates there was only one truly reliable issue: illegal immigration. In Trump’s short political history, the issue had never failed to inspire and activate core voters.
The caravan was a Trump-Fox-Bannon play. Every other part of the Republican spectrum was all but writing off the party’s ability to hold the House. But the Trump-Fox-Bannon alliance held a different view, and their October surprise was to double down on their most potent issue.
The National Republican Congressional Committee and the Congressional Leadership Fund were continuing to put resources into swing-state moderates like Barbara Comstock, a mainstream party favorite in a tight race in Virginia. They behaved as if Trump did not exist and this election cycle continued to be just business as usual. The Trump camp, meanwhile, was pushing the immigration issue in a way that might alienate even many mainstream Republican voters.
Bannon was unrepentant. “The establishment party has Nikki Haley, and we have Donald Trump and the caravan—not ideal, perhaps, but you work with what you have.” By now it was obvious that the Democrats would be turning out in big numbers (early voting had already started in some states), and Bannon believed that it was critical to boost conservative—or, more specifically, deplorable—turnout.
The caravan offered only a binary narrative. You could believe the Trump version of the story: an invasion was headed this way, gaining strength and violent passion as it progressed, and it was supported by insidious forces such as George Soros. Or you could see Trump as a desperate propagandizer, with, even for him, a shamelessly flimsy story, one that was transparent in its efforts to manipulate the dangerous and toxic emotions of people inclined to regard it as true.
The Trump political team would shortly triple down on its closing theme with a nationally aired ad so racially charged that even Fox News, after several airings, declined to run it further. The spot featured Luis Bracamontes, a strangely ebullient murderer who laughed dementedly and boasted about killing cops—more Saturday Night Live than a realistic and threatening figure. Brad Parscale bragged about how cheaply he had produced it; the president was annoyed about not being featured in it.
Thematically, the president’s obsession with the caravan, and the deep hatreds that provided the issue’s subtext, seemed of a piece with two other October surprises. On October 22, pipe bombs began to be delivered to people and media organizations that Trump had regularly singled out as his enemies. Four days later, fifty-six-year-old Cesar Sayoc, a Florida resident, was arrested and charged with mailing the packages. Sayoc, a cultish follower of the president, seemed to satisfy every anti-Trumper’s certainty and every swing voter’s fear of who the ultimate deplorable might be. With a foreclosed house, bumper stickers such as CNN SUCKS covering the windows of the white van in which he lived, and a menacing Trump-devoted social media account, Sayoc seemed to draw a sharp dividing line, with rational middle-class Americans on one side and bitter MAGA supporters on the other.
Then, on October 27, eleven days before the elections, a gunman opened fire on the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh during Saturday morning services, killing eleven and injuring seven. The gunman, forty-six-year-old Robert Gregory Bowers, an anti-Semite who was active on social media, had been aroused by the president’s talk of the caravan heading to the United States. “I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered,” Bowers posted shortly before the attack. “Screw your optics, I’m going in.”
The central questions of Trump’s new politics seemed ever clearer: How far could he push nativist pride and revitalized bigotry? Could he find enough secret, and not so secret, supporters to challenge the liberal idea of a reconstructed modern world? Or was the modern sensibility, the educated sensibility, the multicultural world now ingrained in pop culture, an adequate bulwark against him?
Before Trump’s arrival in the political arena, even Republican dog whistles had arguably become less bigoted; the party’s political art had instead focused on how to send a class message while being able to deny a racial message. But Trump, first as a candidate and now as president, was behaving in ways that might otherwise have seemed inconceivable and self-defeating for a national American politician. He was inviting himself to be branded a racist. Indeed, this was the question that pursued him: Was he, in fact, a racist?
Everybody asked it. Not just Trump’s enemies, but the people closest to him. In a world in which racism had become a catchall of attitudes and behaviors, his allies often made excuses for him. The liberals call anyone who disagrees with them a racist. But in the White House itself, staffers debated about what, actually, was in his heart.
Bannon, too, had given the issue considerable thought. Trump probably wasn’t an anti-Semite, Bannon concluded. But he was much less confident that Trump wasn’t a racist. He had not heard Trump use the N-word but could easily imagine him doing so.
Trump, speaking about his choice of women, had once told Tucker Carlson that he liked a “little chocolate in his diet.”
Trump himself told a story about being ridiculed by friends for sleeping with a black woman. But the morning after, he had looked at himself in the mirror and was reassured that nothing had changed—he was still the Trumpster. He offered this anecdote to show that he was not a racist.
That Trump did not forthrightly disavow racism and racists, that he kept leaving open the issue, that it was his daughter who had to personally assure people that, honestly, he wasn’t a racist, left it, days before the election, as a rosebud riddle. Was he one?