The Demise of the Moderate Republican

yan Costello came to Washington the old-fashioned way. Growing up in Chester County, Pennsylvania, in a family of educators, he imagined government service to be like the Norman Rockwell   painting   of a farmer standing up at a town-hall meeting: a noble calling. By the time Costello turned twenty-one, in 1997, he wanted to be a congressman. He was elected the township supervisor of West Chester, Pennsylvania, while he was at Villanova law school; then he became the Chester County recorder of deeds, then a county commissioner, and then a commission chairman. This was the kind of solid ladder that an ambitious young Republican, in the tidy suburbs west of Philadelphia, climbed in order to reach for bigger things. In 2014, after the Republican incumbent in Pennsylvania’s Sixth Congressional District announced his retirement, Costello—at thirty-seven, the heir apparent—ran for his seat, and coasted to victory.

Costello is tall and slim, with a prominent nose and slick black hair, easygoing and conscientious. When he smiles, he looks about twenty-five years old. Upon entering Congress, he focussed not on publicizing himself but on mastering policy and raising money for colleagues. He played shortstop on the Republican congressional baseball team. He became a member of the Tuesday Group, fifty or so moderate Republicans who meet weekly, and later joined the Problem Solvers Caucus—a few dozen centrists, evenly drawn from both parties, who work together on legislation. Costello supported stronger background checks for gun purchases and voted against a Republican bill that would require states to recognize concealed-carry permits issued by any other state. He made environmental protection a top priority and, among other things, championed the Paris climate accord. He was rated the ninth most bipartisan member of Congress.

At the same time, he was a loyal part of the House Republican majority, in good standing with the Party’s leaders, especially the Speaker,   Paul Ryan , whom he admired for his optimism and for his ability to express disagreement respectfully. Costello wasn’t a hard-core libertarian like Ryan, but he believed that prosperity and opportunity sprang from limited government. He spent his first term doing everything necessary to get a seat on the Energy and Commerce Committee. In time, he hoped to become a committee chairman.

During the 2016 campaign, he promised to support his party’s Presidential nominee. None of the candidates he endorsed—first   Jeb Bush , then   Marco Rubio , and finally   John Kasich —could figure out how to defeat   Donald Trump . When the “Access Hollywood” tape was released, Costello said that Trump’s comments were “atrocious, disrespectful towards women,” and “incredibly inappropriate for someone who wants to lead our country.” In November, he cast a reluctant vote for him anyway.

“And then Trump gets elected,” Costello said recently, at a coffee shop in West Chester. “And the norms of politics all just blow up, and you’re trying to figure out how to orient yourself when the rules don’t apply anymore, and you’re allowed to say and do things which used to be disqualifying.” At first, Costello expected the President to temper his behavior and allow the experienced professionals in the White House—like the chief of staff,   Reince Priebus —to guide the Administration. Now that Costello was on the Energy and Commerce Committee, he wanted to work on helping government policy catch up with advances in renewable energy, technology, and health-care delivery. Instead, he found himself swamped with questions about   Stormy Daniels   and “ very fine people on both sides. ” He didn’t know how to navigate the Trump era, in which rage constantly emanated from both the left and the right. Being a moderate Republican put him squarely in everyone’s sights.

The protests began immediately. Two Saturdays after Trump’s Inauguration, Costello spent the day at home, playing with his young son, and it wasn’t until late that he heard about Trump’s   ban   on travellers from seven Muslim-majority countries. On Costello’s Facebook page, angry comments against the ban were piling up. He issued a split-the-difference statement that recommended both tighter screening and exceptions for green-card holders. He was a moderate on social issues having to do with race, gender, and religion—he voted to prohibit federal contractors from discriminating against gay people—but these weren’t the subjects that he wanted to focus on in Washington. Trump’s Muslim ban and the intense reaction to it caught him completely by surprise.

In the spring of 2017, hundreds of demonstrators besieged Costello’s West Chester office to protest the Republican effort to repeal   Obamacare , an effort that he opposed; later that year, there were more protests over the tax bill, which he supported. (“This is going to kill his kids!” one demonstrator shouted about the tax bill; then, hearing her own words, she added, “The debt, the debt.”) Costello realized that moderates like him were being targeted by the progressive organization Indivisible and other groups that had risen up in opposition to Trump. “These groups don’t go to the red parts of Alabama or even Pennsylvania,” Costello told me. “They’re going to purple, and they’re going to beat up on people like me, ’cause we’re the vulnerable ones, and that’s how you take back the House.”

As Democrats berated him for complicity, Republicans attacked him for disloyalty. After Costello condemned Trump for his comments on the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville—in a Pennsylvania newspaper, he wrote of “how unbelievably poorly our President has failed”—a constituent at a town-hall meeting stood up and called him a coward for bashing a President from his own party. “What about the fact that I’m an elected member of Congress?” Costello replied. “I represent seven hundred and five thousand people.   All   of you sent me to Washington. Even if you don’t vote for me, I’m still there to represent you. I should get your input on how I’m going to vote, I should get your feedback, I should hear all sides of an issue. But once I vote, or when I’m asked for my opinion, I should give my honest opinion—and if you don’t like it that’s fine, you can criticize me for it, but I also shouldn’t not offer my honest opinion because I’m afraid that some political party or some person is not going to like what I have to say, right? You want me to be honest with you so that you can honestly evaluate me as your member of Congress.”

The Republican representative Charlie Dent, of Pennsylvania—Costello’s colleague in the Tuesday Group, and a friend of his—had refused to vote for Trump, and had been so outspoken in his criticism of the President that it became all he was known for. Costello said, “I don’t call myself an ‘anti-Trump Republican’—it’s not my thing. I’ll speak out about something if I disagree, but I don’t wish to be defined by that.” Questions about the President’s character, he felt, were distractions from the real business of governing. Costello denounced the separation of migrant families at the   border —“The Administration owns this policy, and it is offensive that they are trying to shift blame to others”—but he also lamented that the controversy was overshadowing stories about strong economic growth. The most popular approach among Republicans was to ignore Trump’s behavior. Costello told me, “I did this at times, I’m going to be honest with you—‘O.K., he tweeted. That doesn’t have anything to do with how I voted, that doesn’t have anything to do with the business I spoke at today, or with the constituents I met. So why should I have to jump in   that   pond?’ ”

Yet Costello couldn’t let every Presidential grotesquerie pass by, even if his constituents cared far more about increasing medical-research funding than about   Mika Brzezinski’s face-lift . There were certain depths of degradation to which the President of the United States should not be allowed to sink. Costello tried to choose his shots carefully, often going with his gut. Nothing disgusted him more than Trump’s   press conference   with Vladimir Putin, in Helsinki in July, and a tweet, two weeks later, that   insulted LeBron James’s intelligence . If the President wanted to go after Chuck Schumer or Nancy Pelosi, they were fair game, but Costello felt that James—who had just founded a public school in the inner city of Akron—was “an exceptional role model.” When Trump was reported to have derided, at a White House meeting, what he called “ shithole countries, ” Costello waited a day before responding. He told me that he first wanted to confirm the story with members of Congress who had been there. Meanwhile, a constituent named Shari Gehman Nyles wrote, on Costello’s Facebook page, “Your silence is noted. It’s going on 17+ hours since trump’s offensive, racist comments. Unless you break with your party/president you/GOP will be seen as fully complicit with everything trump says and does.” Six hours later, Costello posted a statement on Facebook. He proudly described missionary work that his in-laws had done in Haiti—one of the countries Trump had mocked—and asked the President to apologize for his “inappropriate, unfortunate, and offensive” remarks. To which Shannon Browne, another constituent, replied, “Are you going to act to formally censure the president for his comments? Or will this be forgotten about until the next horrific thing he says, tomorrow or Tuesday or whenever?”

Costello felt that, no matter what he did, it wasn’t enough for one side or the other—any nuance was taken for phonyness. He didn’t want to be a lonely voice like   Jeff Flake , the Arizona senator, who last year published a book bemoaning the moral and intellectual state of the Republican Party, and almost immediately had to announce his retirement. Costello was at the beginning of a promising career in Congress, and he had no desire for political martyrdom. And yet, given the wholesale capitulation to Trump by Party officials in Washington and around the country, he was a popular guest on CNN and MSNBC, which were always in search of a rare independent-minded Republican. Fox News booked him, too. One day, he was invited to appear on Laura Ingraham’s show, and   a producer mentioned that he would be asked about Judge   Roy Moore , the Alabama Senate candidate accused of making sexual advances toward minors. Costello told the producer that he opposed Moore. The subject didn’t come up on the air, and it was the last time he appeared on the network. (A representative for Fox News said that Costello wasn’t blackballed.)

While we were talking in the West Chester coffee shop, Costello looked at a news alert on his phone: Trump had refused to allow the word “hero” in a press release on the   death of John McCain . “I will give you a real-time challenge,” Costello said. “Did that actually happen?” The   report , from the Washington   Post , was based on anonymous sources, and no one at the White House had confirmed it. “If you’re asked, ‘How do you feel about the White House doing that?,’ you can either avoid it, because you don’t know for certain. You can just say, ‘I think Senator McCain is a hero,’ and walk to your next appointment. Or do you make a point of saying, ‘The way the President has spoken about McCain in the past has been deplorable, and I think his unwillingness to reflect upon what he means to our country and what he embodies is a real lost opportunity. I’m really bothered that he’s unwilling to, like, be the better man’?”

Costello would have given reporters the harsher quote—after confirming the facts. But, he noted, any delay would have exposed him to the charge of being “another Republican dodging the tough question.” Costello went on, “I know what the argument is, I know what the rebuttal is, I know what the counter-argument is! I can go eighteen levels deep on this.”x.

In February, the non-stop hostility led him to abandon his Facebook page. Children in his neighborhood came up and asked him, incredulously, “You work for Trump?” He tried to teach them about the separation of powers. The political danger came from the right, but the vitriol was more personal on the left. One man from West Chester, a banker, left a series of obscene voice mails: “Mr. Costello, impeach the motherfucker, or, if you don’t have the vertebrae to do that, resign”; “You fucking asshole! Pay for the tax cuts to corporations and to the one-per-cent wealthy, and cut my benefits that I paid into the system for out of my wages? You are inhumane, other than being a fucking idiot. . . . And if I go bankrupt you’re going down with me, and your family will go down with me, too.”

In June, 2017, Costello was supposed to attend a morning baseball practice before Congress’s annual charity game, but he just missed his ride. At the ballpark, a gunman   opened fire   from behind the third-base dugout, critically wounding the Majority Whip, Representative Steve Scalise, of Louisiana, and several others. The shooter, who was killed by police officers, was a Bernie Sanders supporter who had become enraged with Trump and wanted to target Republican politicians. If Costello had made the practice, he would have been standing in the line of fire, at shortstop. The incident shook him deeply. He had long ago stopped seeing politics as a Rockwell painting, but now the anger and the violence seemed inescapable—even on a baseball diamond.

“It’s   fucked up ,” Costello said. “I think the far left and the far right look at people like me, and they say we’re the problem. And I actually think, No, we’re the answer. But what you hear and what you get is just ugliness toward you.”

There was a limit to what Costello would say—or even think. Perhaps because the nastiness directed at him came mainly from the left, he didn’t acknowledge that the most dangerous commentary came from the right, and from the top. He never suggested that Trump’s routine attacks on decency—his depictions of immigrants and Muslims as sinister invaders; his mockery of everyone from disabled reporters to sexual-assault victims—added up to something more consequential than any piece of legislation. Costello was slow to admit that Trump threatened the country’s democratic institutions and corrupted its most basic values. He never implicated his own party in this corruption, either as passive supporters or as active participants. He insisted on viewing Trump as a short-term tactical problem. If the Democrats swung too far to the left, driving suburban voters back to moderate Republicans like him, the Party could return to its center-right traditions and leave behind the freak show of the Trump Presidency. Costello worried about the Republican Party’s shrinking base, not about the state of its soul. He never talked about the judgment of history.

This willfully narrow perspective made him typical of Republican politicians. At the moment, they are the only Americans in a position to check the President’s abuses of power, and the least likely Americans to do so. It’s tempting to analyze each officeholder’s approach to the Trump era as a matter of individual character. Paul Ryan stands behind the President and shrugs off the media’s questions with his good-natured grin.   Mitch McConnell   says nothing and accumulates power with his cobra stare.   Ted Cruz   veers from insulting Trump to hugging him.   Bob Corker   makes statesmanlike speeches on the Senate floor—David against President Goliath—and then votes against his principles. But degrees of dissent don’t amount to much amid the structural pressures of Congress.

I   asked Costello whether the House leadership strong-armed members into voting with the President. It wasn’t that simple, he said, telling me the story of the attempt to repeal Obamacare. Costello had read the bill twice, and knew it cold, and wasn’t sure that he could support it; his main concern was that it would fail to limit premium increases for people with preëxisting conditions. In March, 2017, Costello was summoned, with a dozen other wavering Republicans, to the Oval Office. The President, ill-informed and unengaged, paid little attention when Costello talked about the danger that the bill posed to essential health benefits. (Two days later, at a second White House meeting, Trump warned Charlie Dent, who had declared his opposition to the bill, “If this goes down, I’m going to blame you. It’ll be your fault—you’re going to take down tax reform and you’ll destroy the Republican Party. I’ll just be cutting ribbons and going to parades.”) Back at the House, Scalise, the Republican Whip, implored Costello, “What do you need to see done? This is an important vote.” In the end, Costello was one of twenty House Republicans who voted against repeal. He received complaints from large donors, and other members of Energy and Commerce were upset with him, but no leaders threatened or punished him. He was given a pass—with the understanding that few passes were allowed.

Dent, who would have faced a difficult campaign this year, retired in May, during his seventh term. He told me, “There used to be an understanding that the members in the reliably safe districts were expected to put up the difficult votes all the time”—that is, cast votes that might not be popular with their conservative supporters. “The members in the marginal swing districts”—like Dent’s and Costello’s—“were given a pass from time to time, because they had to, in order to survive.” But in 2010 the Tea Party movement, and the growing extremism of the conservative base, began threatening centrist Republicans with primary challenges from the right. These days, the Republican leadership has to placate the three dozen members of the far-right Freedom Caucus, who vote as a bloc and are perpetually spoiling to overthrow the Speaker if he deviates from a highly partisan orthodoxy. It’s the moderates who have to fall on their swords.

During the government shutdown in the fall of 2013, Dent begged   John Boehner , then the Speaker of the House, to allow a vote on whether to end the shutdown, which was hurting Dent in his district. Boehner asked him to tough it out—he didn’t want to force members from deep-red districts, who might get challenged from the right in their next primary, to face a vote. Dent, who had to worry about the general election as well as the primary, asked, “John, why are their races more important than mine?” Within two years, Boehner was gone anyway, the victim of a mutiny by the same ultra-conservative House members he’d protected during the shutdown.

The Tuesday Group is about the same size as the Freedom Caucus, but it is far less cohesive, which allows the Republican leadership to isolate each of its members. “People like me—you can pick us off one at a time,” Costello said. “We might all be centrists, but we’re centrists for different reasons. Some might be more pro-environment, some are more pro-labor.” The Freedom Caucus holds the real power in Congress. Voting discipline, once imposed by whips and committee chairmen, is now enforced by the most extreme conservatives in the House, and by the activist base and the right-wing media, which can intimidate members of Congress with primary challenges and orchestrated attacks. The deadliest threat of all comes from the President, who ended the career of Representative Mark Sanford, a critical-minded conservative from South Carolina, with a single contemptuous tweet a few hours before the polls closed on primary night in June: “Mark Sanford has been very unhelpful to me in my campaign to   maga . He is   mia   and nothing but trouble.” I asked Dent why more Republican members of Congress hadn’t raised their voices against Trump. “I can answer in one word,” he said. “Fear.”

This atmosphere contributed to the early retirement of not only Flake but also Bob Corker and a host of House members. The exit sign liberated them to speak out more: Corker called Trump “an utterly untruthful President.” But this freedom rarely translated into action. Costello complained to me that Democrats expect Republicans to vote against policies they’ve always favored, such as tax cuts, just to prove their political courage. He had a point—but there are other ways to hold Trump accountable. No Republican in Congress has moved to censure the President, or subpoena his tax returns, or investigate his conflicts of interest.

A lone member of the House has little power, but in the Senate, which is almost evenly divided between the parties, the opposite is true. Norman Ornstein, the political scientist and congressional analyst, pointed out that individuals like Flake, Corker,   Susan Collins , and   Lisa Murkowski   hold immense clout. Just two senators could inform McConnell that they wouldn’t vote to confirm any judges until he brought to the Senate floor a bill shielding Mueller’s investigation from White House sabotage—and McConnell would have to bring the bill. Despite having this leverage, Ornstein said, “not one of them has used it for   anything .” Even senators on their way out “don’t change their behavior at all.”

Ornstein often finds himself thinking about the last scene in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” when James Stewart collapses on the floor of the Senate at the end of an exhausting filibuster against a corrupt senator. Claude Rains, the target of Stewart’s speech, suddenly cries out, “Every word that that boy said is the truth! . . . I am not fit for office! I am not fit for any place of honor or trust! Expel me, not that boy!”

“Will there be a Claude Rains?” Ornstein asked. “Not likely.”

If party discipline and political self-interest don’t fully explain the behavior of the congressional majority, something else must—tribal cohesion, fear of being shunned. Costello refused to quote Republican colleagues by name to me, or to say a bad word about any of them. Although he was appalled by right-wing attacks on the intelligence agencies and on the Mueller investigation, when I asked him about the chief conspiracy-monger— Devin Nunes , the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, who has lobbed wild accusations about an F.B.I. plot to destroy Trump—Costello said that he didn’t know enough about Nunes’s claims to assess their validity. He simply said, “I know Devin, I like Devin.” Meanwhile, he sharply criticized such Democrats as Senators   Cory Booker   and Kirsten Gillibrand for “prejudging” the guilt of   Brett Kavanaugh before Christine Blasey Ford had even testified.