New York Magazine - USA (2019-09-16)

(Antfer) #1

12 new york | september 16–29, 2019


intelligencer


The Situation
at Home

According to
the most
recent Post and
Courier–
Change
Research
poll, just two
percent of
GOP voters
in South
Carolina say
they would vote
for Sanford
in the primary.

dard for its actors to refuse to go away, judgment of the elec-
torate be damned. Once you’ve sipped from the well of the
swamp, you never leave the party for long. That’s true even
if Washington is more like the Donner Party these days. Or
maybe it’s more true now because striving to hang on can so
easily be sold as a fight to save the republic—or some shred
of it, anyway.
It was getting darker, and Sanford, wearing Levi’s crusted
with grass and dirt and paint, sat down on a bench overlook-
ing the water. “I keep waiting for somebody else to do it,” he
said. “Nobody else goes, they keep calling.”
The only Republicans primarying Trump were the for-
mer governor of Massachusetts best known for joining the
Libertarian Party ticket with Gary Johnson in 2016 and a
one-term tea-party congressman from Illinois best known
for tweeting nearly as much as the president. “Finally,”
Sanford said, “you’re like, Okay, I’ll roll the grenade down
the aisle.”
Sanford’s sure he’s not going to get elected president. It
would be “delusional” to think otherwise, and he’s not that.
He hasn’t bothered with formal polling. “You will lose to
Donald Trump. That’s what it will tell you,” he said. You just
have to look at the history of primary challenges to sitting
presidents to know that. “It’s not to say it was not worth-
while, because in some cases it completely changed, or par-
tially changed, the debate,” he said. And he knows Trump
and his supporters will continue to harass him over the scan-
dal from ten years ago—seeing no irony in their selective
outrage over a man’s extramarital curricula. He encountered
some Trump supporters recently at a barbecue with Vice-
President Mike Pence. When they saw him, they chanted,
“Take a hike! Take a hike! Take a hike! Trump! Trump!
Trump!” He laughed as he recalled this.
He crossed his leg and absentmindedly picked at the nail
of his big toe. “I don’t mind going into hostile environments
to test ideas and to talk to people. I don’t mind that at all,”
he said. “I happen to believe the Republican Party will be
stronger if we have a debate about what it means to be a
Republican. Right now, there’s a robust debate on the Dem-
ocratic side on what it means to be a Democrat and ‘What
are our hopes and values and dreams?’ and all those sorts
of things. While on the Republican side, it’s simply sun,
moon, and stars revolve around Donald Trump.”
Unlike Walsh, a Trump voter turned Never Trumper
whose platform is a reaction to the existential threat Trump
poses to the GOP and the country broadly, Sanford has a
single issue on his platform (the national debt) and implied
exhaustion, or boredom, with the entire subject of the cur-
rent president—sort of like, Is it really necessary that we
talk about this guy all of the damn time? “As bad as he is, he
doesn’t have the capacity to sink our republic. Where we’re
going in terms of the debts and the deficit issue has the
capacity to sink our republic,” Sanford said.
“You got 20-plus Democrats, and Joe Walsh and Bill Weld
as well, who will tell you all the character flaws of Trump,” he
continued. “I mean, I don’t think that that’s new news.”
A man walking by called out to him.
“What do you say, Mark? You gonna do it?”
“I don’t know. Trying to figure it out!”
“You gotta do it, man!”
“We’ll see!”
“You gotta do it!”
Sanford smiled. “Have a good one,” he said.
“You’ve got my vote!” ■

Others breezed past, unaware or uninterested in the man
whom the president was, in fact, tweeting about at that
very moment.
“Can you believe it? I’m at 94 percent approval in the
Republican Party, and have Three Stooges running against
me. One is ‘Mr. Appalachian Trail’ who was actually in
Argentina for bad reasons ...,” Donald Trump wrote.
It can rarely be said that Trump is right, but on this he is,
almost: Among Republicans, he maintains sky-high levels
of support, though not the 94 percent he claims. According
to Gallup, 88 percent of Republicans assess him favorably.
When you talk to reluctant Trump voters—not the maga-
hat-wearing rallygoers but rich white people—they cite the
Supreme Court and tax reform as enough justification for
their position; that whatever damage he has wrought, these
victories denied to conservatives during eight years of
Barack Obama are worth it. And besides, many of them
think this will all be short-lived. Why bother trying to help
a Joe Walsh or a Bill Weld when Trump will probably be
defeated in the general?
Which again raises the question of who deserves more
ridicule: the Republicans brimming with cynicism or
those who believe they can change the future of the party.
Sanford is a conservative from the more innocent time of,
like, a few years ago, before Trump and the cultlike creed
of his loyal fans supplanted Establishment Republican
orthodoxy. News of his candidacy has been welcomed by
some of his fellow travelers: Jennifer Rubin, the Washing-
tonPost columnist, said she felt “relief ” to hear what San-
ford has to say. He could be, as the headline read, “the last
chance” for their party. In the New York Times,Liz Mair,
a “Never Trump” operative, called him “the biggest
Republican threat to Trump.” These assessments are
undercut by the reality that the Republican National
Committee and the state parties seem intent on guarding
against legitimate challenges to an internally popular
president. There is just one GOP debate scheduled so far,
hosted by Business Insider. Trump won’t be attending.
South Carolina, Kansas, Nevada, and Arizona have can-
celed their nominating contests ahead of the October fil-
ing deadline. And the GOP primary polling, of course, is
bleak. A Boston Herald–FPU survey released on Septem-
ber 11 has Trump up 85 points over Weld (3 percent) and
Walsh (one percent).
But Sanford, the former governor who was more recently
a congressman from South Carolina, doesn’t think he has
much to lose. His last years as governor were mired in scan-
dal after he went off the radar to visit his girlfriend in Argen-
tina for several days in 2009—which wouldn’t have been a
problem except for the fact that he had a wife, and a state to
run, and nobody knew where the hell he was. His staff told
reporters he’d said something about going to hike the Appa-
lachian Trail, which is the only detail that has really stuck
after all this time. Still, he was elected to Congress in 2013
and elected again and then again. He lost his seat after last
fall’s primary with an assist from Trump, who endorsed
Sanford’s opponent and called him “unhelpful to me in my
campaign to maga.”
Sanford retreated for a while. He taught a course at the
University of Chicago. But people kept approaching him, he
said, with this crazy idea. At first, he dismissed it. But after a
while, after “some people I respect and trust” were the ones
doing the calling, “I began to break through.”
As different as American politics is now, it remains stan-

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