shared his hard-edged approach to po-
litical combat. "Rick really taught me
everything," she told me. '1f you don't
engage people and try to pemwle them,
the other side will. n
As. the impeachment proceedings
began, Republicans for the Rule of Law
rolled out video ads that detailed with
biting humor the latest dc:vdopments
in the Ukraine saga. One ofLongwcll's
st2ff members, Barry Rubin, started a
Twitter account, fucussing on the Sen-
ate JudiciaryCommittx:e clmrman.called
Lindsey Graham's Fake Conscience.
Every day, he tweeted out old footage
of Graham, now arguably Trump's most
re1i2b1e Senate cheerleader, from his pre-
vious incarnations as a Trump basher
(in 2016) and as a House impeachment
manager against Bill Clinton (in 1999).
In one clip that went viral, Gmham talked
with great emotion about how much he
admired Joe Bidcn, the "nicest person"
in politics. Rubin posted it on Novem-
ber 21st, the day Graham's committee
began investigating Biden's dealings with
Ukraine, just as Trump had demanded.
The tweet said, 'WHATEVER YOU DO,
DO NOT WATCH THE VIDEO BELOW!!
IT WILL MAKE ME LOOK LIKE A MON-
STER." It has been viewed more than
one and a half million ti.mes.
Still, it proved impossi"ble to persuade
Republicans to vote for impeachment.
Longwell started out with a list of a few
do-am House members who she thought
might be persuaded to break with
Trump. Afu:r one week. ofhearings, the
list rapidly shrank. First to go was Elise
Stefanik, a Harvard-educated junior
member of the House Intclligmce Com-
mittee, who sarcastically questioned
witnesses and ranted about the Demo-
cratic-controlled process. "They just
Trumpify themselves immediately,"
Longwell said. Stefanik was soon doing
prime-time interviews on Fox News
with Sean Hannity and tweeting nasty
nicknames at her 2020 opponent, a
Democrat she disparaged as "Taxing
Tedra." Longwell likened the sudden
shifts of Stefanik and others to "the In-
vasion of the Body Snatchers."
F
or as long as she had been fighting
Trump, Longwell had been travel-
ling home to central Pennsylvania,
hoping to understand his appeal to Re-
publicans. After the public impeach-18 THE NEY ~MARCH 30, 2020ment hearings wrapped up, just before
Thanksgiving, we drove two and a half
hours from Washington to a storefront
in New Cwnberland, to find out if the
base was fazed by the Ukraine scandal.
Longwell grew up nearby, just outside
Dillsburg, a small town of fewer than
three thousand people. Her parents are
retired lawyers and still live there. Dills-
burg is conservative and Republican,
the kind of place where the local ele-
mentary school closes for the first day
of deer-hunting season. It went over-
whelmingly for Trump in 2016.
Since the swt of the Trump Presi-
dency, Longwell has conducted regular
focus groups ofhis voters from the area,
trying to figure out what might move
them to vote against him in 2020. The
groups almost always comprise middle-
class Republican women from the sub-
urbs and exurbs-the most Trump-
skcptical remaining part of the G.O.P.,
and the voters who may well decide the
President's fate in November. One Re-
publican who has been in many meet-
ings with Longwell was struck by the
personal nature of her project. Long-
well has often joked that she was se-
cretly doing this to convince her "par-
ents that they shouldn't be supporting
Trump, "the Republican told me. (Long-
well was reluctant to discuss her par-
ents, except to say that she didn't ask
her father if he had voted for Trump in
2016, "because I didn't want to know.")
At first, the two focus groups that
Longwell had convened for our visit
seemed to suggest that the President
was in more political trouble than we
had realized. The groups-all women,
all Trump voters with varying degrees
of regret about him-started out iden-
tically: when the moderator asked how
many thought the country was going
in the right direction, not a single hand
went up. The reason was their con-
cern about the President. In the sec-
ond group, a retired nurse said, "He
has ability, but he's a1&o a narcissistic
sociopath. And I voted for him! We
all did." (When she said this, Long-
well exclaimed from where we were
observing, behind a two-way mirror,
"We have a George!"-as in George
Conway, who had recently argued in
The.AtlantitthatTrump has narcissistic
personality disorder.) Others spoke of
the "degradation of the office of Pres-ident,n said that Trump was "just so
full of hate," and bemoaned his "flam-
boyant obnoxiousness." Everyone said
Trump's Twitter feed was a problem.
Two staKers from Longwell's team
who watched with us were encouraged,
but she warned them to wait for "the
turn." It soon became clear what she
meant The women didn't like Trump,
but they didn't like anyone else, either.
They didn't trust the media, and they
thought other politicians were just as bad
as the President. Although they could
not explain the details of the Ukraine
scandal---except for one woman who
had become an obsessive MSNBC
watcher-they thought impeachment
WllB costly and pointless.
Still, Longwell was not entirely dis-
couraged. Trump had won Pennsylva-
nia by only about forty thousand votes
in 2016; he would need these women to
vote for him again, and it was hard to
imagine that all of them would do so.
Before we left, the moderator asked the
second group whether they would con-
sider voting for a Democrat in 20.20.
Fm: of the nine said yes. "I'd vote for a
dog over Trump," one said. Then the
moderator asked who they thought
would win ifBiden was the Democratic
nominee. They all said Biden.T
hree weeks later, when the Dem-
ocratic majority in the House im-
peached Trump, all of Longwell's ini-
tial targets-among them Adam
Kinzinger, of Illinois; Will Hurd, of
Tex25; and Francis Rooney, ofFlorida-
voted no, along with every member of
the Republican caucus.
Longwell nevertheless kept her con-
trarian optimism, hoping that some new
rcvclation could shift the political mo-
mentum in the upcoming Senate trial.
"To me, the only thing that seemed like
it could would be witnesses, hearing
from people directly," she said. In the
fucus groups in Pccnsyiwnia, thcwmnen
had been shown a series of impeach-
ment-related ads, and panned all of them,
except for one pressing Trump to agree
to witnesses. ("What is Trump hi.ding?"
it asked, showing pictures of his advis-
ers with duct tape over their mouths.)
Longwell planned to pressure Sen-
ate Republicans to summon witnesses
whom Trump had blocked from testi-
fying in the House. She was aware that