The Great Divide: Story of the 2016 US Presidential Race

By Howard Harrison

The Great Divide: Story of the 2016 US Presidential Race takes readers on a tour of one of the most unusual, controversial, and compelling elections in history. It starts in June 2015 when billionaire real estate mogul and reality TV star Donald Trump joins a crowded field of Republican candidates and soon vaults to No. 1 in the polls. It ends with a result that shocks the world. In between, readers will enjoy a play-by-play (or blow-by-blow) account of all the events that made headlines during the campaign. Written in real time, the story captures each event as it occurred, up through the election. You will read about Bernie Sanders reigniting 1960s liberalism, Hillary Clinton's e-mails, the Supreme Court vacancy, the "Stop Trump" movement, terrorist attacks, rally violence, Muslim bans, Mexican walls, and more. The book also explores the issues that have created such a polarized electorate.
Specific story lines abound:
• An anti-abortion group infiltrates Planned Parenthood and shoots a covert video of an official discussing the "sale of baby body parts," leading GOP candidates to condemn Planned Parenthood and to call for an end to its federal funding.
• The United States and other world powers sign a nuclear deal with Iran that is denounced by Republicans universally and by some Democrats.
• Several GOP candidates support a county clerk in Kentucky who refuses to issue marriage licenses to gay couples because it conflicts with her religion.
• The Islamic State downs a Russian passenger jet, kills 130 people in Paris, and influences an attack in San Bernardino, all in the last months of 2015.
• Candidates spar over how to stop terrorism, with some suggesting a religious test to determine who can come to America.
• As the first female presidential nominee of a major party, Hillary Clinton gets grilled on Benghazi; her e-mails, speeches, honesty, voice, and stamina; her husband's behavior; and other issues.
• The death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia exposes the partisan divide at its starkest when Congressional Republicans refuse to consider any replacement nominated by President Obama.
• The GOP forms a "Stop Trump" faction, believing Trump is not really a Republican.
• Russians allegedly try to influence the election by hacking Democrats' e-mails.
• A dozen women accuse Trump of sexual assault, and he denies all charges.
These are just some of the events that made the 2016 US presidential race one sure to be discussed and dissected for years. They are all here in The Great Divide.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Sep 21, 2020
• ISBN: 9781098326388

Book preview

Epilogue

Prologue

The 2016 U.S. presidential race was one of the most compelling and controversial in history. You had a Republican nominee who was called a racist, narcissist, chauvinist, misogynist, homophobe, xenophobe, demagogue, blowhard, con man and worse – and this from members of his own party! Yet Republicans voted for him anyway because to them it didn’t matter if it was Donald Trump or Donald Duck running for president; he would still be better than a Democrat.

As a lifelong Democrat myself, I get it. Most Democrats don’t think much of Republicans’ political views either. That is why to most of us it didn’t matter if our candidate was Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders or Colonel Sanders. But still, there are worse traits a person can have than different political views. So why are we, as a nation, so polarized? Or as comedian Jerry Seinfeld might say, So, what’s with all the hate? But it isn’t funny.

I Googled the word liberal in the Urban Dictionary. I knew we all hated each other. I just didn’t know how much. Here are some of the definitions I found, edited just slightly for length:

•An EXTREME liberal is the WORST type of person. They brainwash people then convince you their pre-made views are open-minded. They tell you to hate Republicans and everyone who thinks differently than you. They are first to throw around the word racist but abuse minorities. They look for a group, typically blacks or Hispanics, and convince them they are nothing and need the liberals to survive then exploit them for political power .

•Left-wing idiots of America, they claim to love the country, yet bash any actions taken by the government to protect our nation. They say they love freedom but will be the first to deny any action that spreads freedom in the world. Their main philosophy is protecting people’s rights and they do this by bashing Christianity, calling it an infringement of people’s freedom, although they will grant freedom to rapists, murderers, child molesters, etc., thus endangering people. With liberals in control, anarchy would occur .

•Opponents of the death penalty for those most deserving of death, advocates of abortion for those most deserving of life .

•These idiots are trying to redefine the real definition of marriage (man and woman) into man and man, in an attempt to make being gay seem normal .

•Liberals support welfare programs but in time this creates more unemployment as a lazy generation of welfare recipients is created. Sadly, the media brainwashes more and more Americans into the liberal cause. Unfortunately, the majority of young people are liberals .

•Empowers government to enslave its people with high taxes to support extravagant and unnecessary (not to mention unconstitutional) social programs destructive to both the work ethic among the lower class, and the incentive to innovate and succeed among the upper class .

•Liberals punish those in our society who work hard and are successful .

•Moral elitists who look down with disdain upon the traditional values and faith in the Creator that made this nation the greatest in history. They view those who hold The Faith as unenlightened and unsophisticated .

•Hypocrites who preach tolerance of all, then openly mock and ridicule Republicans/Christians, deniers of global warming, and others who disagree with them .

•They favor discrimination against white males whom they blame for all of society’s ills (like driving minorities and the lower class to lives of poverty and incarceration) and advocate affirmative action, which furthers the racial discrimination that they claim to have fought to end .

•They advocate elimination of poverty, yet vehemently oppose teaching people how not to become poor: WORK HARD, GET AN EDUCATION and KEEP YOUR LEGS CLOSED TILL MARRIAGE .

•Pot smoking hippies and Bill Clinton .

That last one I would take as a compliment, but you get the idea. There is a lot of hate out there. There are accusations of evil motives behind honest policy differences. There is defensiveness about religion and resentment of welfare. Hey, these things are important – but why is there so much hate and vitriol?

I was curious to see how all of this would play out in the 2016 election. Republicans just hated President Obama. Now he would be leaving office and I imagined Republicans would be peeing in their pants with excitement over the chance to get one of their own back in the White House. I’d written on politics before but I never fancied myself a political writer. I am a journalist and storyteller. I thought this election would make a great story.

Americans are divided like never before. Of course, it is hard to coexist peacefully when you have a political system that pits two sides against each other so fiercely. Our two-party system boils down a myriad of disparate beliefs into two monolithic entities that define who you are and compete like they’re trying to win the Super Bowl – but without the sportsmanship, disparaging each other at every turn. As kids we were taught, It’s not whether you win or lose but how you play the game. American politics is like sportsmanship in the Bizarro World. It’s not how you play the game but whether you win or lose.

The Democratic and Republican parties are like teams, and you always root for your team. You may not like the manager, the front office or the players in a given year but you still want them to win. Unfortunately, politics is dirtier than sports and there are only two teams. How can we stand united as a country when our own system tears us apart? The 2016 U.S. presidential race laid bare this division in all its ugliness. It unearthed significant division within the parties as well, raising the question of whether a voting public that grows more diverse by the day can continue to be properly represented by just two major political parties.

But how different are we, really? In December 2015, the PBS television show Finding Your Roots revealed that conservative political talk show host Bill O’Reilly and liberal political talk show host Bill Maher are distantly related. I guess we all are if you go back far enough, but the news angle here was how ironic it was that two people so different could be related. But what’s so different about the two Bills besides their political views? Anyway, it reminded me that we have more in common than our political climate would lead us to believe.

Not to get too deep on you – I am a child of the ‘60s – but we really are all in this together, folks. We are all pioneers of mankind. As a species, we are quite primitive. Dinosaurs roamed the earth for more than 60 million years. Man has been around maybe 200,000 years, and I’m counting cavemen in this number. Does anyone think we’ll make it as long as the dinosaurs? The point is that despite our vast technological achievements we are still in our infancy.

As pioneers of mankind, we settled in different regions, came up with different religions, developed different skin tones and learned different languages. We’ve done a lot to separate ourselves from each other. We’re not advanced enough yet to embrace these differences. Instead they have fostered division and hate. Future generations will shake their heads at our ignorance.

As for the political divisiveness in America – what I call the Great Divide – the 2016 presidential race taught us that there is no limit to the contempt our two parties have for each other, and unfortunately this seems to have bled into the populace. It is almost surreal to look back now and see how dark the campaign was. I wrote this book in real time, describing events as they occurred, not knowing what the outcome would be. I tried to convey developments in the race and the reactions they elicited as they were at the time, with limited analysis based on hindsight. Historians will have a field day analyzing this election. I just wanted to tell a story – and man, this one practically wrote itself. So strap on your seat belts, folks, and take your Dramamine. This is not for the squeamish.

P A R T   O N E

The Early Campaign

CHAPTER 1

Summer of Trump

The past two and a half decades had not been good for Republicans. First, there had been the successful Bill Clinton presidency from 1992 to 2000. Clinton inherited a record budget deficit from Republican predecessors Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush and left us eight years later with a record budget surplus.

This would have been a good thing except Clinton was a Democrat. Republicans had done everything possible to take him down. They had finally impeached him for lying about an extramarital affair with a White House intern, but Clinton had come out of it more popular than ever, as many people blamed Republicans for wasting millions of dollars on what was perceived as a partisan witch hunt.

In 2000, the Grand Old Party got lucky. Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore, who had been vice president under Clinton, made a grave miscalculation. He tried to disassociate himself from Clinton on the campaign trail because of Clinton’s philandering rather than ride the coattails of a popular, outgoing president. Gore actually (and obviously) even made a point of avoiding saying Clinton’s name.

Most Democratic voters didn’t give a hoot about Clinton’s infidelity. Gore came off as wooden and disingenuous. In a race that shouldn’t have been close, the Supreme Court ended up waving off a recount in Florida and awarded the election to George W. Bush in a 5-4 vote.

The GOP ruled the White House for the next eight years. Unfortunately, Bush’s presidency is viewed, even by Republicans, as one of the worst in history. The GOP’s own website called him one of the least popular commanders in chief in the nation’s history. First, 9/11 happened on his watch. Then he started an unprovoked war in Iraq that cost thousands of lives, destroyed the economy, and laid the groundwork for what morphed into the terrorist group the Islamic State.

Then in 2008 came Republicans’ ultimate nightmare: Barack Hussein Obama. Some Republicans stressed Obama’s middle name during the election campaign so their constituents might think he was a foreigner or Muslim or maybe even a terrorist! At the very least, Obama was a Democrat and African American and, because of those two, perceived to be very liberal—reason enough to hate.

Republicans put up no less than Arizona Senator John McCain, one of the most respected people in the party, to run against Obama in 2008. McCain might have won, too, had it not been for his selection of former Alaska governor Sarah Palin as his running mate. Palin’s inadequacy for office spooked even the staunchest Republicans.

The GOP made gains in Congress during Obama’s presidency. In 2010, it won control of the House and in 2014, the Senate, but divisions within the party kept Republicans from getting much done even with majorities in both halls of Congress.

The 2016 election offered fresh hope. Republicans had a chance to take back the White House while maintaining their majorities in the House and Senate. By June 2015, no less than 17 Republicans had thrown their hats into the ring in hopes of becoming the GOP’s 2016 presidential nominee.

The latest entrant in the race was an outsider to the party and to politics in general. Billionaire real estate mogul and television personality Donald Trump had never held public office. He had made his fortune developing major building projects in New York City. As a master self-promoter, he became a media celebrity in the world’s largest media market. When the real estate boom went bust, he filed for bankruptcy, only to come back stronger than ever, including starring in his own hit reality TV show, The Apprentice.

Trump was not wed to mainstream Republican positions. He had supported Democrats in the past. He didn’t have detailed policies. He was arrogant, bombastic, and politically incorrect—and reveled in it. He also had bad hair. Despite these things, however—or perhaps because of them—Trump appealed to legions of disenfranchised Republicans. People dissatisfied with the state of the country or the state of their lives railed against those in authority, and Trump railed with them. The people running things are stupid, and, according to Trump, he and he alone had the smarts and balls to fix it, whatever it was.

Immediately upon announcing his candidacy, Trump soared to second place in the polls among the GOP hopefuls. The leader at the time was former Florida governor Jeb Bush, brother of George W. If Jeb thought his brother would be a thorn in his side on the campaign trail … well, he hadn’t seen anything yet.

Trump introduced his candidacy with a scathing indictment of illegal Mexican immigrants, characterizing them as drug runners and rapists. He contended that the Mexican government orchestrated illegal immigration by purposely sending its least-desirable citizens across the border. He said he wanted to build a wall along the border to keep them out.

Trump had scant evidence to back up his claims that Mexicans who enter the country illegally are a major source of crime. Most came for jobs. But Trump had tapped into a deep, visceral discontent among working-class whites who were unhappy with the direction of the country. Illegal immigrants are taking your jobs and raping your women, Trump’s words implied.

Taking a hard stand on immigration was just one example of how Trump would leverage the country’s frustration with government to his advantage. Many Americans felt there was too much bureaucracy and emphasis on political correctness. Trump was not a politician. He clearly didn’t care about political correctness. He was a billionaire businessman who knew how to get shit done. Surely he’d be more effective than these squishy politicians. Trump fed into this mind-set, and people ate it up.

You might think with a candidate this strong and popular with the voting public, Republicans would be jubilant, but they weren’t. Trump was divisive. He was polarizing. While his tough talk energized a portion of the GOP’s base, others in the party worried that it would render him unelectable in a general election. Of course, this early in the campaign—still a year and a half before the 2016 election—few people actually expected Trump to end up being the Republican presidential nominee.

The biggest loser in Trump mania was Jeb Bush, who most represented the Republican establishment. He and Trump were polar opposites in personality if not politics. Stuffy and conservative, Bush seemed like a downright wallflower next to Trump. It didn’t take long for Trump to leapfrog Bush in the polls.

All the GOP candidates were now gunning for Trump. Funny thing was, the more they tried to turn his incendiary comments against him, the more his poll numbers seemed to rise. To the average Joe Republican, this guy spoke their language. He would kick some ass. He was fearless. No holds barred.

In fact, Trump’s resiliency proved to be truly remarkable. About a month after insulting Mexicans and the Mexican government, Trump had the audacity to question the heroism of John McCain as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. He’s not a war hero, Trump said. He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured.

Okay, now he was done, right? Disparaging a veteran? Disparaging John McCain? Even Democrats respected John McCain. As a navy pilot in Vietnam, McCain had been shot down by the Vietcong. He was tortured and held captive for more than five years. He could have been released earlier but had declined because he did not want to abandon his fellow POWs.

Trump, in contrast, never served in Vietnam. He received a deferment. This does not make him a bad person. But you’d think it would give him zero credibility to call out a POW.

Nearly all the other Republican presidential candidates condemned Trump’s remarks. Former Texas governor Rick Perry and Florida Senator Marco Rubio said Trump should be disqualified from the race. Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus issued a statement saying, There is no place in our party or our country for comments that disparage those who have served honorably.

McCain called on Trump to apologize, not to him personally but to the families of all POWs. Trump refused. Then he criticized McCain’s work in Congress for not doing enough for veterans.

Trump’s poll numbers still didn’t suffer. What would he have to do or say for Republican voters to turn on him? That remained to be seen. Soon all of the other GOP candidates would get their chance to confront Trump directly. The first Republican debate was scheduled for August 6, 2015.

CHAPTER 2

Sale of Baby Body Parts

On July 14, 2015, antiabortion activists released a video in which a high-level official from Planned Parenthood is seen and heard discussing the rather gruesome subject of harvesting organs from aborted fetuses for use in scientific research. The official thought she was talking to representatives of a medical biologics company called Biomax Procurement Services, but she was actually talking to actors posing as employees of the bogus company.

The fake employees were participating in an undercover sting operation orchestrated by an antiabortion group called (ironically) the Center for Medical Progress. The video was shot covertly to try to entrap the Planned Parenthood official into revealing potentially illegal activities—including what the group described as the sale of baby body parts.

Planned Parenthood is one of the nation’s leading providers of women’s health services. About 60 locally governed Planned Parenthood affiliates operate roughly 700 community health centers nationwide. Planned Parenthood’s main areas of focus are preventing unwanted pregnancies through contraception and family planning, reducing the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, and screening for cervical and other cancers. Some of their clinics also perform legal abortions, which accounts for about 3 percent of Planned Parenthood’s services.

Federal law prohibits the sale of human fetal tissue for profit. Tissue donation is allowed, however, with the mother’s consent. According to Planned Parenthood, many women seeking abortions want some good to come out of the experience and feel better knowing they could be helping others through donation of fetal tissue. In the secretly taped video, however, the Planned Parenthood official refers to levels of reimbursement that affiliate clinics might receive for such donations. To the activists, this was a gotcha moment.

Planned Parenthood claimed the reimbursements were simply to cover the clinics’ costs of procuring and distributing the tissue for appropriate research purposes, which is legal. Nonetheless, because of the attention brought to this subject by the video they said they would stop accepting such payments in the future. The Center for Medical Progress called this an admission of guilt.

In the video, the Planned Parenthood official also appeared to suggest that some abortion procedures might be modified in an effort to yield more intact organs, though federal law prohibits altering the timing or method of an abortion for such purposes.

In addition to the potential illegalities, the video portrayed a rather cavalier attitude on the part of the Planned Parenthood official, who sipped wine while chatting informally with the phony biomedical representatives, not knowing she was being recorded. Viscerally, it all seemed inhumane and ghoulish.

Of course, that was the idea. The covert video was designed to discredit Planned Parenthood and to turn public opinion further against abortion heading into the presidential race.

Planned Parenthood characterized the Center for Medical Progress as a group of extremists who have intimidated women and doctors for years in their agenda to ban abortion. Nonetheless, Republicans pounced, calling for a federal probe and defunding of Planned Parenthood.

Government funding represented more than a third of Planned Parenthood’s $1.3 billion annual budget. Private donations made up the rest. Some Republicans demanded that defunding Planned Parenthood be a condition for approval of the next U.S. budget, threatening to shut down the government if they didn’t get their way. They had used such a tactic in 2013 to try to repeal the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. It didn’t work – Obamacare wasn’t repealed – and the public was enraged that Republicans shut down the government over it.

In addition to abortions making up just 3 percent of Planned Parenthood’s services, donation of fetal tissue for research was conducted in only three states: California, Oregon, and Washington. Most federal funding for Planned Parenthood was used to reimburse Medicaid patients (i.e., indigent patients) for cancer screenings, contraception, and other services. Such funds could not be used for abortions except in rare circumstances.

Abortion is a divisive issue and is split pretty cleanly along party lines. Democrats are generally pro-choice and Republicans pro-life. The two political parties give each point of view a place to live and demonize the other side. Many people vote based on this one issue, it is so important to them.

If there is one thing we all agree on, it is that abortions are bad. No one is pro-abortion. People who are pro-life consider abortion murder and would like to see Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion, overturned. People who are pro-choice believe in a woman’s right to terminate an unwanted pregnancy but it is never a happy decision.

Short of criminalizing abortion, pro-life advocates promote laws that make it less convenient or restrict the circumstances under which a woman can have an abortion. Organizations like Planned Parenthood seek to reduce abortions by preventing unwanted pregnancies through family planning and birth control.

It is interesting that many people who are pro-life are also pro-gun, pro-war, and pro-capital punishment. There seems to be some inconsistency there regarding the sanctity of human life, which is the whole underpinning of the pro-life argument. If you can set conditions on when killing someone is okay (an intruder, an enemy of war, or a convicted murderer) and when it is not (an unborn fetus), then not all human life is totally sacred. The disagreement is on the conditions.

I understand women wanting the right to end an unwanted pregnancy, but I have a harder time understanding the other side. No one is forcing anyone to have an abortion, yet pro-life advocates would force a woman to take a baby to term.

The Planned Parenthood video reignited the abortion issue, but it wasn’t likely to be a point of contention in the first GOP debate. Only one of the candidates—former New York governor George Pataki—was on record as being pro-choice, and even he supported defunding Planned Parenthood. The Planned Parenthood video would serve more to give Republicans something else to bash Democrats about, which was really their favorite pastime, than to attack each other on, and they were about to be tossed a fresh piece of red meat.

CHAPTER 3

Diplomacy versus War

On July 15, 2015, the United States and five other world powers—Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and China—agreed to a deal with Iran that would lift longstanding economic sanctions in exchange for Iran curbing its nuclear activities. The agreement would prevent Iran from being able to build a nuclear weapon for at least 10 years and would allow UN inspectors to monitor compliance with the deal’s terms. Sanctions could be reinstated if Iran violated those terms.

If Iran did not violate the terms, it would be able to resume selling its oil on the open market and gain access to about $100 billion in frozen assets. The deal also would end a 2010 UN arms embargo banning Iran from buying or selling conventional arms and ballistic missiles. Under the new agreement, the arms embargo would lift in five years, and the missile embargo in eight.

Naturally, Republicans jumped all over the deal. So did Israel. So did some Democrats. They criticized the Obama administration for giving up too much for too little in return. Providing any kind of relief to Iran—sponsor of terrorism, supporter of Syrian President Bashar Assad, and enemy of Israel—felt unseemly. Enriching Iran financially and strengthening it militarily seemed insane.

Iran maintained that it would use its newfound prosperity for domestic improvements to provide for a populace that had suffered years of isolation and economic starvation. Detractors feared Iran would funnel the money to terrorist allies in Syria, Yemen, Lebanon, and elsewhere, adding to current unrest in the region, and ultimately resume its pursuit of nuclear weapons.

As in any negotiation, there was give and take. The United States also was not negotiating unilaterally with Iran but in concert with five other nations. Iran’s demand to end the UN arms embargo wasn’t something the United States wanted to do, but Russia was in favor so it could then sell arms to Iran. The best the United States could do was to insist that the embargo not be lifted for at least five years.

Obama wanted to completely dismantle Iran’s nuclear infrastructure and end its production of enriched uranium. Instead, he settled for cutting Iran’s uranium stockpile and reducing its number of uranium-enriching centrifuges more than Iran had wanted. Iran agreed to give UN inspectors access to its nuclear sites and scientists but demanded and got a requirement for 24 hours’ notice.

There was plenty not to like about this deal and the concessions that were made. Iran was a dangerous influence in the world, and generally not aligned with U.S. interests. The country was regaining significant financial resources and the ability to buy, in five years, the most sophisticated conventional weapons out there, then, in three more years, ballistic missiles. Still, despite these valid concerns, some of the rhetoric criticizing the deal was hyperbolic.

The worst agreement in U.S. diplomatic history, declared one conservative columnist, who lamented that ten years of painstaking sanctions will vanish overnight, irretrievably.

These sanctions devalued Iran’s currency by 73 percent, froze Iranian accounts in foreign banks, crippled the Iranian oil and banking sectors and tanked Iran’s economy, boasted Republican Senator Mark Kirk of Illinois. Now, he said, the agreement with Iran [paved] the rogue regime’s path to a nuclear weapon and [set] up a nuclear arms race in the Middle East.

I believe you’ve been fleeced, Republican Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee told Secretary of State John Kerry, who had helped negotiate the deal.

House Speaker John Boehner called the deal wrong for our national security and wrong for our country.

The Republican presidential candidates weren’t much more restrained. Jeb Bush called the deal appeasement. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker said it was one of Obama’s worst diplomatic failures. Even Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, the least hawkish of the GOP hopefuls, was against the pact.

Florida Senator Marco Rubio might have been the best, hyperbolically speaking. First he chided that a third-rate autocracy has now been given equality with a world power, the United States of America. Later, he implied that if he were elected president, he wouldn’t abide by the deal. The next president is under no legal or moral obligation to live up to it, he said.

Obama said the only alternative to the deal was war. He contended that the risk of a nuclear-armed Iran outweighed any other factors. He said monitoring would ensure that every pathway to a nuclear weapon was denied. This deal is not based on trust, he said. It is based on verification.

The president vowed to veto any legislation in Congress to scuttle the accord, saying it would be irresponsible to walk away from this deal, given its endorsement by all the other countries and the negative repercussions that would ensue.

In the Iranian capital of Tehran, citizens poured into the streets to celebrate the deal. For them, the sanctions had caused severe hardships. These were the people who had been lost in the hostile actions of countries. Of course, Republicans said the partying in the streets was proof that the United States had gotten a bad deal.

The Iran nuclear agreement was sure to come up at the first Republican debate, scheduled for August 6, 2015. All the GOP candidates felt the accord was bad for America and would bring it up to blast Obama, insisting that if they were president, they would not have signed the deal.

I am not qualified to assess whether the United States could have gotten a better deal or if we’d have been better off with no deal. Neither were the Republican candidates. Their statements were pure conjecture. The economic sanctions, though making life miserable for the Iranian people, didn’t seem to be slowing Iran’s uranium-enrichment program; history has shown limited effectiveness of sanctions in influencing a country’s policies.

When you get down to it, however, the details of the deal didn’t really matter. Republicans would condemn it simply because Obama had agreed to it. They would condemn it because Republicans love to accuse Democrats of being soft—soft on defense, soft on crime, soft on welfare cheats, and so on. Republicans view themselves as the military party and treat Democrats like the 98-pound weakling at the beach before he discovered Charles Atlas.

This machismo is an accepted plank of the Republican message and has been for some time. I remember that when Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, he got elected in large part because Iran—the same country we had just acquiesced to on this nuclear deal—had embarrassed the United States by storming our embassy, taking several dozen American hostages, and holding the hostages for more than a year. On the campaign trail, Reagan had said that if it happened on his watch, there would be no more Iran. He got elected in a landslide over incumbent Jimmy Carter. Iran released the hostages the day Reagan was inaugurated. The man was a hero.

Given Reagan’s threat about annihilating Iran and his pledge to increase our military might to regain lost respect in the world, I feared this guy would start World War III. This was unsettling so soon after Vietnam, but he turned out to be okay. I think he actually did strengthen us militarily and renew a sense of pride in the country.

Today, of course, Reagan would be a Democrat. That’s how far right his party has moved since 1980.

The point is that Republicans like to thump their chests, rattle their sabers, and call Democrats sissies. This would surely come out in the debate when discussing the Iran deal.

The broader issue perhaps is the concept of diplomacy versus war. Diplomacy sometimes requires making concessions to people you think are scumbags to achieve a greater good. Many Republicans portray this as weakness and think we should use our position as the greatest military power on earth to impose our will.

Since we introduced the world to nuclear weapons in 1945, every U.S. president has negotiated nuclear-arms agreements with hostile adversaries, such as North Korea and the former Soviet Union. Were they all wimps for sitting down at the table and making trade-offs with these regimes? Like Obama, they were lambasted for making bad and potentially dangerous deals, but reducing the threat of nuclear war superseded all other concerns.

Either the issue of Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon is resolved diplomatically through negotiation or it’s resolved through force, through war, Obama said. Those are the options.

We should not have to compromise with anyone, I could just hear any one of the 17 Republican candidates for president bellowing in the upcoming debate. We’re the United Fucking States of America. Do you want to step outside?

The debate would be an opportunity for each candidate to show America how tough he (or she, in the case of former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina) was. The candidates could state what additional conditions they would have insisted on in the Iran deal. They could explain how they would have achieved those concessions. They could say whether they would even negotiate with a country like Iran.

Whatever they said, it would be a chance to take shots at Obama and the Democrats on foreign policy, the GOP’s specialty. It might even usurp the selling of baby body parts.

CHAPTER 4

Blood Coming out of Her Wherever

On Thursday, August 6, 2015, the crowd was slow in arriving at Quicken Loans Arena but eventually filled the 5,000 best seats. Most were there just to see the main event, which started at 9 p.m. The preliminary event, scheduled for 5 p.m., was for diehards only.

Quicken Loans Arena is best known as home to LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers of the National Basketball Association, but tonight’s crowd was not there to watch basketball. They were there to watch the 16 other candidates for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination try to gain ground on the surprising leader in the early polls, Donald Trump.

It was questionable going into the debate how interested people were in the 2016 election so early in the campaign, but thanks largely to Trump and the whirlwind his unconventional style was stirring, a record 24 million viewers tuned in to the Fox News telecast—three times more than for any previous primary debate, and the largest audience ever for a non-sports cable TV event.

The field of candidates was too large for one debate, so there were two debates. The 10 candidates with the highest national poll numbers qualified for the main debate. The lower seven jousted in a preliminary bout. The field (alphabetically) looked like this:

Main Debate

Jeb Bush—Former Governor, Florida

Ben Carson—Retired Neurosurgeon

Chris Christie—Governor, New Jersey

Ted Cruz—US Senator, Texas

Mike Huckabee—Former Governor, Arkansas

John Kasich—Governor, Ohio

Rand Paul—US Senator, Kentucky

Marco Rubio—US Senator, Florida

Donald Trump—Real Estate Developer and Television Personality

Scott Walker—Governor, Wisconsin

Preliminary Debate

Carly Fiorina—Former CEO, Hewlett-Packard

Jim Gilmore—Former Governor, Virginia

Lindsey Graham—US Senator, South Carolina

Bobby Jindal—Governor, Louisiana

George Pataki—Former Governor, New York

Rick Perry—Former Governor, Texas

Rick Santorum—Former US Senator, Pennsylvania

In both debates, the partisan Republican crowd cheered anything that was anti-Democrat, anti-Hillary Clinton, or anti-Barack Obama. At times, it sounded more like the crowd for a Jerry Springer or Maury Povich show (not to disparage Mr. Springer or Mr. Povich). America would soon learn that this was the new normal for presidential debates, at least on the Republican side.

Among the also-rans, Carly Fiorina distinguished herself the most by talking tough on national defense. Like all the candidates, she trashed the Iran nuclear deal, but she was the only one to promise that on her first day in office, she would tell Iran the deal was off and would insist on new conditions before lifting economic sanctions.

In the main debate, Rand Paul and Chris Christie got into a meaningless snit over government surveillance. Then Paul chided Christie for hugging President Obama when the president had visited New Jersey after Hurricane Sandy—the insinuation being that Republicans were supposed to hate Obama, not hug him.

Mike Huckabee, a favorite of evangelical Christians, was first to attack Planned Parenthood for selling tissue from aborted fetuses like parts to a Buick, but all the candidates—including the only pro-choice member of the