Will Trump Swallow the G.O.P. Whole?
Inside the identity crisis roiling the Republican Party.
By MARK LEIBOVICH
JUNE 21, 2016
Every week or so during the spring, I met with Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, at the party headquarters on Capitol Hill. We fell into a familiar routine. I would enter his office, usually chaperoned by Sean Spicer, the R.N.C.’s chief strategist and head of communications. Priebus has a healthy appreciation for gallows humor, which is not a bad thing for an R.N.C. chairman these days. “I haven’t started pouring Baileys in my cereal yet,” he says often enough that it has become a signature line. I would regularly break the ice with something sarcastic, like asking Priebus how his party’s Hispanic outreach program was going on the morning after the committee’s head of Hispanic outreach resigned rather than work another day for Donald Trump’s election. “The scent of party unity is in the air,” I said in May when Paul Ryan reported that he was “not there yet” on supporting Trump. “No, that’s incense,” Priebus said, pointing out that he had been burning some behind his desk.
As suits a man occupying what might be the toughest political job in America, Priebus does his best to stay availed of serene distractions. He plays jazz piano at home late at night and gazes into the 29-gallon saltwater fish tank that he keeps next to his desk. “You see that big eel?” Priebus asked one day, pointing out a black slithery creature on the bottom, before noting others. “That’s a yellow tang, hippo tang, a spotted puffer. There’s an anemone. An urchin. An orange clown fish.” He took a hunk of shrimp from a refrigerator and dangled it with a set of tongs into the water. A race to the bottom ensued as bits fell away and the fish vied for pieces of flesh. It was difficult to look away from the feeding frenzy. The big orange clown fish flailed at front and center. I asked Priebus if it reminded him of anyone. “That’s not funny,” he said with something between a slight grunt and chuckle.
No matter how much Trump has roiled the Republican water, it remained Priebus’s job to carry it. The presumed Republican nominee appears on many days to be at open war with the party that is about to nominate him. The entire campaign, meanwhile, has been a proxy battle for the proverbial “soul of the party” that has been escalating between the G.O.P.’s populist grass roots (captured by Trump) and “party leaders” (embodied by Priebus, the House speaker, Paul Ryan, and the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell). Is the G.O.P. now the “party of Trump”? Priebus bristles when people ask him this — or taunt him. I asked Priebus some variation on this question during each of my visits. “Donald Trump is Donald Trump,” Priebus says. “And the party is the party.”
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For a while this spring, it seemed possible to contain the earthquake. Trump showed flickering signs of “maturing” as a candidate, and Republicans seemed willing to “support the nominee,” if not endorse him. The “normalization” of Donald Trump became a media watchword, the idea that his daily affronts could be integrated into the routine paces of a quadrennial exercise. Formerly hostile primary opponents like Marco Rubio, Lindsey Graham, Bobby Jindal and Rick Perry all at various points said they would support Trump or were at least no longer (in Rubio’s case) deriding him as a “fraud,” “con man” and “lunatic” or (in Graham’s) a “race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot” or (in Jindal’s) a “madman who must be stopped” or (in Perry’s) a “barking carnival act.” I imagined Trump laughing at how easy it was to get Republicans to submit to him after he had savaged so many of them during the primaries. Actually there was no need to imagine because Trump was doing exactly that. “I’ve never seen people able to pivot like politicians,” he said at a rally in California in late May while boasting of his support from Perry. In an interview, I asked Trump if it was harder to flip politicians or the real estate people he has dealt with over the years. His smirk was audible over the phone. “Well, I’m not referring to any politicians in particular, but I’ve said many times that businesspeople are much tougher,” Trump said. “Politicians tend to be much more deceptive and deceiving and more willing to break a deal. But they are not as tough.”
Way, way more:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/26/magazine/will-trump-swallow-the-gop-whole.html?_r=0
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