CHAPTER FOURTEEN

MAY 2016

“Now that you’ve gone this far, there’s no going back.”

H
undreds of protesters, reporters, and unaffiliated gawk-
ers swarmed outside the offices of the Republican National Com-
mittee on First Street Southeast, a few short blocks from the Capitol.
The circus had come to town. As Donald Trump’s entourage pulled up,
sneaking him into a side entrance of the building, the gawkers gawked.
The reporters shouted questions. And the protesters hoisted signs:
“R.I.P. G.O.P.”
Inside the party headquarters, Paul Ryan stewed. This wasn’t what
he had signed up for. Trump had looked increasingly viable when the
new Speaker took over for John Boehner the previous October, but Ryan
never, ever, took seriously the prospect of the reality TV star winning his
party’s nomination. Everything Ryan knew about politics told him that
it couldn’t happen. Nervous nonetheless, he checked in often with his
old pal from Wisconsin, Reince Priebus, to make sure. Priebus’s answer
was steady throughout the summer and fall: “Not gonna happen.” Yet, as
the calendar turned to 2016, the chairman’s certitude softened. When
they talked just before Christmas, Priebus broke the news. Trump, he
told Ryan, might just win the nomination after all.
This sent the Speaker into a panic. Having been on the GOP ticket
four years prior, having seen the devastation wreaked by Mitt Romney’s
insularity, Ryan had returned to Congress a changed man. Everything
he had done, including accepting the promotion to Speaker, had been in
service of softening the GOP’s brand to reach a broader swath of a diver-
sifying nation. This would allow Republicans to win elections and sub-
sequently pass meaningful policy reforms.
Trump was dashing those dreams. Ryan had to remain neutral in the
race; as Speaker, he would be chairing the party’s convention later that

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 320 AMERICAN CARNAGE

summer. But as Trump’s momentum built, so, too, did Ryan’s naysay-
ing. He denounced Trump’s proposed Muslim ban, saying it’s “not what
this party stands for, and more importantly, it’s not what this country
stands for.”1 He slammed him for his strange hesitation in disavowing
David Duke and the KKK. He blasted him for suggesting there would be
“riots” in Cleveland if he were denied the nomination.2
As Ryan worked himself into a lather, whispering to Republican al-
lies about Trump’s instability and immorality, the GOP front-runner
was busy steamrolling the competition. By late April, Trump was al-
ready turning his attention to Hillary Clinton. “I think the only card she
has is the woman’s card. She has nothing else going. Frankly, if Hillary
Clinton were a man, I don’t think she would get 5 percent of the vote,”
Trump said. “The beautiful thing is, women don’t like her.”3
Ryan’s warnings about Trump—that he was exploiting voters’ fears;
thathe was using “identity politics” to turn working-class whites against
brown and black Americans; that he was ethically bankrupt and danger-
ously divisive—were shared by his peers in the governing class. But the
Republican primary voters felt differently. They had elevated the brash
political neophyte over a primary field that many party elders felt was
their deepest, strongest, and most diverse in at least a century.
The Speaker was not ready to follow the voters’ lead.
“I’m not there right now,” Ryan told CNN on May 5, two days after
Trump became the GOP’s de facto nominee. “I think what is required is
that we unify this party. And I think the bulk of the burden on unifying
the party will have to come from our presumptive nominee.”
Trump responded in a statement that read, “I am not ready to sup-
port Speaker Ryan’s agenda.” Trump also suggested that Ryan ought not
to serve as the convention’s chairman.
Ryan, in turn, offered to step down if Trump so requested. The Speak-
er’s performance was that of a political Hamlet, pondering the existen-
tial ramifications of subjugating himself to the evil new king.
It was against this backdrop, on May 12, that Trump arrived at RNC
headquarters. On the itinerary was a roundtable discussion with all the
GOP congressional leaders. But first, privately, Trump would meet with
Ryan and Priebus.

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 Chapter Fourteen 321

The party chairman was desperate to broker a truce. Sitting them

down in his office, Priebus tried to clear the air, talking of “party unity”
that could only come from the two men setting aside their differences.
Trump and Ryan, like a pair of high-schoolers called into the principal’s
office after fisticuffs, listened silently, recalcitrance written across their
faces. When Priebus finished, Ryan told Trump he wanted to show him
something. It was a PowerPoint presentation. The country was drown-
ing in red ink, Ryan explained, and could be saved from a debt tsunami
only by a reforming of the tax code and a restructuring of Social Security
and Medicaid. Flashing the first slide onto a monitor, Ryan prefaced his
remarks by clarifying the basic distinction between mandatory spend-
ing and discretionary spending.
After Ryan popped the second slide onto the monitor, Trump inter-
rupted him. “Okay, Paul, I get the point,” he said. “What’s next?”
Ryan was astonished. He shot a look at Priebus. The party chairman
avoided eye contact.
“The meeting was great,” Priebus tweeted a short while later, after
Trump convened with the larger group of congressional officials. “It was
a very positive step toward party unity.”
The Speaker played along. He told reporters that Trump had been
“warm and genuine” in their interactions. But Ryan, the last holdout
among the GOP’s elected leadership, remained cold to the idea of en-
dorsing the party’s presumptive nominee. Indeed, he still couldn’t get
his head around the fact that Trump was the party’s presumptive nomi-
nee. With all that baggage, after all those years of all those controversies,
how had no opposition research surfaced to sink his candidacy? And
what would happen if it finally did, just in time for the general election?

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