Inside Donald Trump’s Total Meltdown

Time

The call to gather went out Sunday morning, arriving on cell phones before many of the pastors had left their congregations. These 23 men and three women, all members of Donald Trump’s evangelical advisory council, had long ago signed on to pray for his vision for the nation. But now a scandalous recording from Access Hollywood was threatening to blow up the prayer circle.

From California to Florida, members of the group joined a late-afternoon emergency conference call on Oct. 9 to ponder the ugly spectacle of a 59-year-old man boasting about trying to seduce a married woman, forcing himself on others and getting away with it all because he was “a star.” It had to be an awkward moment for the faithful: Trump was bragging about sexual assault. “Grab them by the ...,” the Republican nominee for President, now 70, was heard saying. “You can do anything.”

Seeking guidance in Scripture, they found a Bible abounding in useful scoundrels. One participant on the call noted that Jesus had befriended tax collectors and sinners. Another invoked the Old Testament figure Nehemiah, who served a pagan king, Cyrus of Persia, but leveraged the relationship to accomplish the holy mission of rebuilding the ancient walls of Jerusalem. Even an imperfect ruler might be the means to a righteous end.

And so the panel overwhelmingly stuck with the sinner, according to four people on the call. It was Hillary Clinton, not Trump, who worried them. “Can anybody say she is morally superior to Donald Trump? I don’t think so,” said Dallas megachurch pastor Robert Jeffress, days later. “This election is not about Donald Trump’s past, it is about America’s future.”

This cold calculation induced cringes among many of their fellow church leaders. The editors of Christianity Today, a leading voice of evangelicals founded by Billy Graham, weighed whether it would profit the movement to gain the world at the cost of its soul. “Trump has been, his whole adult life, an idolater,” the magazine intoned, “and a singularly unrepentant one.”

As the 2016 campaign moved into its final weeks, Trump had put the whole country on the rack alongside the Christian conservatives, stretching the sinews of American politics to the breaking point. While some voters were tugged toward the wincing sophistry of the conference call, a larger number pulled disgustedly into the ranks of #nevertrump. The candidate himself was consumed by petty grudges. The furor over the leaked recording seemed to liberate him. Free of the “shackles”–his own tweeted word–Trump reduced his campaign to a primal grunt.

It sounded, at times, like the last gasp of the angry white man. Trump threatened to throw his opponent in jail, bragged of avoiding income taxes and peddled an empty conspiracy theory about undocumented immigrants’ being given voter-registration cards. He insisted he was right to stoke the racial tensions of New York City during the Central Park jogger drama in the 1990s, refusing to accept the DNA proof that he had the case wrong. He promoted a fiction that Muslim friends of the San Bernardino, Calif., terrorists knew their plans but failed to alert authorities, and he injected a crude Russian propaganda effort into one of his rallies without a care about its inaccuracy. Another tape (it wasn’t easy keeping track) caught him agreeing as a radio shock jock labeled his daughter Ivanka “a piece of ...” Having congratulated himself for keeping the first presidential debate slightly above the muck, in Round 2 he plunged into the wallow, deflecting attention from his own vulgarity by saddling Clinton with the alleged sexual sins of her husband and trying to seat Bill Clinton’s accusers in the front row.

Trump once said on the campaign trail that he would approve of torture as President, “even if it doesn’t work.” With four weeks left to Election Day, he seemed to be testing the proposition on the public. Unshackled, he flirted with unhinged and erased the emollient line between a campaign aimed at the base and one intended to debase.

But others could no longer stay silent. “Enough!” insisted former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, calling on Trump to withdraw. “Offensive and despicable,” declared Utah Governor Gary Herbert. “I cannot and will not vote for Donald Trump,” said Governor Robert Bentley of Alabama.

The Trump campaign, party insiders admit, could do irreparable damage to a generation of prospects by rendering them enablers. Rivals for the nomination, like Texas Senator Ted Cruz, had cozied up to him until they realized it was too late. Elected officials had hesitated to oppose him lest they rouse his army of pitchfork populists. Many of the leaders of the religious right repeatedly blessed a candidate who bats 0 for 3 on the biblical injunction to do justice, love mercy and walk humbly. Barring a last-minute surprise, Trump is on track to lose his race. The question now is whether he’ll destroy the party’s congressional majorities as well.

“It’s us against the world,” declared a digital ad from the Trump campaign on the morning after the debate. But it wasn’t clear whether his main foe in the final month would be Clinton or Republican officials. After his incendiary debate performance, he turned on Ryan and company with a gas can and lighter in hand. “Disloyal R’s are far more difficult than Crooked Hillary,” Trump tweeted of the fleeing Republicans. “They come at you from all sides. They don’t know how to win–I will teach them!” Almost immediately, his fans took up the chorus: Trump loyalists circulated a rumor that Establishment Republicans were behind the leak to the Washington Post of the disastrous tape. [...]

A veteran party official who has watched the party go from conservative to crazy during Trump’s rise says the saddest part of the conflict is how predictable it was. “We have been warning the party that this was the likely outcome. You can’t fix what is at the core of a person’s character,” says the official, who opposed Trump from the beginning. “This is who he is. And now it’s who we as Republicans are, because we went along with it.”

The day after the nastiest presidential debate in modern memory, Trump traveled to Wilkes-Barre, Pa., for one of his trademark rallies. At events like this, Trump’s excesses are celebrated or forgiven, and his provocations are championed as bravery. In the year of the first female major-party nominee, T-shirts are emblazoned with vulgar words for the female anatomy. Vendors hawk Hillary for Prison buttons. The rhetoric is even more acidic. “She’s a murderer, she’s a liar. You name it, she’s done it,” says Neil McNamara, who drove from New York to join the thousands thronging the arena. Trump is happy to indulge their fever. “‘Lock her up’ is right!” Trump hollered from his podium as the crowd chanted a favorite refrain.[...]

He hid nothing of himself as he stormed through the primaries; the man on the Access tape was entirely consistent with the crude and bullying Trump of last autumn and spring. He had long been a proud womanizer whose affairs have often made tabloid headlines–he frequently leaked the details himself–and he had no problem boasting about his manhood at a presidential debate. Could anyone truly be surprised that he privately bragged about groping strangers and trying to bed married women, and explained it away as “locker-room talk”?

Which is why the statements of outrage from fleeing Republicans struck Trump allies as entirely disingenuous. The tape was catalytic not because it showed a new Trump but because it made clear that the old Trump is the only Trump this election is going to see. (Trump’s initial response to the tape’s release was not a full-throated apology but a hedged “I apologize if anyone was offended.”) The Access tape snuffed the wan but cherished hopes of GOP mainstreamers that a more sober and responsible version of the candidate would emerge in the final act of the tragedy.

In this gerrymandered age, most elected Republicans hail from districts where victory is possible without the support of Muslims or Mexicans or African Americans or any of the other ethnic and cultural groups named by Trump as part of the nation’s problem. But the GOP cannot survive without white married women, who are reliable members of their coalition. Tagged by Democrats with waging a “war on women,” endangered Republicans heard in Trump’s lewd rhetoric an existential threat. Of all the candidate’s combustible comments, “clearly this one crossed a certain kind of a line,” says Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. “It smacked of a predatory aggressiveness.”[...]

For the Clinton campaign, the danger was premature gloating. The former Secretary of State, Senator and First Lady remains a wooden candidate whom many Americans say they don’t trust. Hackers, believed by U.S. intelligence experts to be linked to Vladimir Putin, have tapped the email accounts of top Clinton aides, and there’s no telling when the flow of stolen documents and embarrassing revelations will dry up. Indeed, were it not for the Trump meltdown, Clinton would have endured a rough week of her own. As the nation gawked at Trump’s crass words, Clinton’s own private admissions were laid bare by WikiLeaks’ release of a top adviser’s correspondence. Among the disclosures were partial transcripts of past paid speeches, which suggested that her public agenda deviated from her private opinions and revealed her dream of “a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders.” Her senior advisers have no choice but to bet that more–and maybe worse–is on its way.[...]

Religious conservatives, who for decades defined themselves as “values voters,” will now have to explain why they lined up behind a thrice-married playboy who once said he had never asked God for forgiveness. Samuel Rodriguez Jr., president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, says Trump has exposed the disconnect between evangelicals’ words and their political deeds. Russell Moore, the president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s public-policy arm, says church leaders lost credibility when they cast their lot with Trump. “This has been traumatic for the Republic, and traumatic for the church,” says Moore, one of the top evangelicals to oppose Trump from the beginning. “It is going to take years and years and years to recover and rebuild.”[...]