lost fighting a pair of Middle East quagmires, the devastation to America’s manufacturing sector wreaked by automation and outsourcing, the hoarding of corporate profits and the widening chasm of income equality, the declining faith in institutions ranging from the media to organized religion, the recklessness of the financial class, and the nation’s rapidly darkening ethnic complexion, voters had cause to question whether the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board truly had their best interests at heart.
The revolt was near. Not everyone could see it—and not all those who did took it seriously. Trump saw it. He took it seriously. And he became its voice, as the unlikeliest of insurgents, the commercial tycoon who cheated the little guy, who employed illegal workers, who made his products overseas, and who enhanced his inherited fortune through scams and fixers and lawsuits, railing against a shredded social contract from the gilded penthouse of his Manhattan skyscraper.
With the people taking to the streets, hoisting flags and chanting against the government—ostensibly in protest of spending, taxation, infringement of liberty—Trump stepped to the front lines of the cultural conflict. By securing a regular place on the airwaves of Fox News, by propagating lies about the president’s birthplace, by attacking the left in ways no leader of the Republican Party would dare consider, he adopted a movement, and a movement adopted him.
“The Tea Party was a very important event in the history of our country. And those people are still there. They haven’t changed their views,” Trump says. “The Tea Party still exists—except now it’s called Make America Great Again.”
His conquest of the right was sufficient to win the presidency. Yet the circumstances of his victory were freakish if not fluky. And the truth is, presidents of the United States come and go. Most are transitional, as historians have long observed. Only a select few are transformational. To be transformational, to durably alter the American identity, Trump would have to do more than bend conservatism to his will. He would have to redefine the Republican Party.
THE PRESIDENT IS RACING TOWARD A MINEFIELD.
His longtime lawyer Michael Cohen is preparing to testify in front of the House Oversight Committee, having already implicated Trump in several criminal conspiracies.
A special counsel’s dual-track investigation—of possible collusion between Trump’s campaign and the Russian government in 2016, and of whether the president obstructed that inquiry—is drawing to a close, with potentially ruinous consequences for himself, his administration, and his political and personal associates.
Finally, having reopened the government on a short-term basis, allowing congressional negotiators to go through the motions of pursuing a nonexistent compromise on border funding, he faces the specter of another shutdown in one week’s time. Sensing that a deal is improbable, Trump is preparing to take the unprecedented step of declaring a national emergency, redirecting other pools of money toward the construction of his promised wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. But the plan is fraught with peril; myriad legal challenges are certain, and congressional opposition could thwart the president’s end run around the legislative branch.
Whispers of impeachment gust through every corridor of the Capitol. Having retaken control of the House of Representatives in November, Democrats confront daily pressure, from the party’s base and from within their own ranks, to vote on Trump’s eviction from office.
It is the Republicans, however, who control the Senate. And only with a two-thirds vote of the upper chamber can Trump be removed. The president’s fate is in the hands of his own tribe.
“The Republican Party was in big trouble,” Trump says. “I brought the party back. The Republican Party is strong. The Republican Party is strong.”
He takes a long pause.
“They’ve got to remain faithful. And loyal.”
Chapter One
February 2008
“These isms are gonna eat us alive.”
SHE WAS SHAKEN WITH DISBELIEF, THEN ABLAZE WITH DEFIANCE, the churn of emotion ultimately yielding a pure, righteous fury. It was mere minutes until the pinnacle of her professional life: introducing her favored presidential candidate, in the heat of a contested Republican primary, at the Conservative Political Action Conference. This felt like an inflection point for the party, and Laura Ingraham, the acid-tongued radio host, had prepared accordingly. Worried that Republicans would succumb to nominating John McCain, the ideologically autonomous senator who had betrayed the right on everything from tax policy to campaign finance reform, Ingraham readied a blistering attack on the Grand Old Party’s front-runner and a final plea for voters to rally behind the true conservative in the race: Mitt Romney.
It mattered not that Romney was a Mormon, nor that he’d piloted a