Late one night about six months into Donald Trump’s first term, John McCain stepped on to the Senate floor and with a dramatic thumbs-down gesture dealt the president his first major legislative setback by defeating an attempt by his fellow Republicans to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
It was the last major political effort of the Arizona senator, who would die the following year from brain cancer, but his no vote would not have been effective had he not been joined by fellow Republicans Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska – who gives that incident, and many other brushes with Trump, a prominent place in Far from Home, the memoir she released on Tuesday.
“Susan and I did smile wryly about the laurels he received for that one vote – which came only after the two of us had already taken the heat for many days for standing up against the party on our own,” Murkowski writes.
About halfway through her fourth full term representing the largest state in the union, Murkowski has chosen this moment to release a memoir documenting her years as a politically moderate politician who repeatedly stood up to the president who transformed modern rightwing politics in the United States.
There’s a good case to be made that Murkowski, and Alaskans at large, have a unique perspective when it comes to the political changes he has wrought.
Alaska is the state that elected as governor Sarah Palin, whose chant of “drill, baby, drill” has essentially become US government policy under the second Trump administration. It was a hotbed of the Tea Party movement, whose candidate Joe Miller managed to defeat Murkowski in the 2010 Republican Senate primary only for her to win the general election through a historic write-in campaign.
Its voters backed Trump three times straight, but Murkowski refrained – in her memoir, she reveals that in 2016, she wrote in Ohio’s Republican governor, John Kasich, a fellow moderate. Later, she would be one of seven Republican senators to vote for Trump’s conviction after the January 6 insurrection.
Murkowski is no Democrat – despite helping to keep the Affordable Care Act on the books, she did not vote for it in the first place nor much else of what Barack Obama and fellow Democrat Joe Biden proposed during their terms. She acknowledges the peril of the climate crisis, but has supported opening the Arctic national wildlife refuge to drilling, as well as the Willow oil project.
But much of Murkowski’s focus in Far from Home is on navigating the crises the country faced during the Trump era, such as his two impeachments, the Covid-19 pandemic and his attempts to overturn the 2020 election – which often pitched her against him, to the extent that he backed an unsuccessful challenger in 2022.
“It’s not like I highlighted things that were going on in the Trump administration or that directly tied to Trump, so much as they’re events in recent political memory that were very significant issues. And what I’m trying to share is my thought process and how I approached some really hard things,” the senator told the Guardian by phone from her Washington DC residence as she took a break from making rhubarb crisp.
Yet she acknowledges that Trump’s dominance of rightwing politics – it’s now been 10 years since he began his political career by riding down a golden escalator in his New York tower to make a speech calling Mexicans rapists – has left a mark on the world’s oldest democracy.
“I’ve been in the Senate now for 22 years, and I have never been either asked so many questions about, you know, do you feel like our democracy is secure? Do you feel that these are threats to democracy? Never, never, have I felt this, this intensity on the security of our democracy. So I do think that we are in a different place,” she said.
All signs point to more difficult choices ahead for the senator, who was appointed in 2002, with much controversy, by her father, Governor Frank Murkowski, to a Senate seat he had recently vacated.
Though she is a member of the 53-strong Senate Republican conference, in April, she publicly acknowledged that “we are all afraid,” and “retaliation is real” – comments that have been interpreted by many as a sign that the senator now personally fears the consequences of crossing Trump. She downplayed that conclusion to the Guardian, saying that she was rather trying to empathize with a room of non-profit employees in Anchorage who had seen their organizations’ funding slashed haphazardly by the new administration.
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Murkowski, however, believes that there can be only so much fear and uncertainty that the public can handle, pointing to the recent No Kings protests: “There’s a difference between asserting as much power as you are authorized, and then … kind of pushing the envelope and seeing if there’s even more, if you can go even beyond that. And is the court going to check me? Is the legislative branch going to check me? And your question is, how much will the public tolerate? And I think we’re starting to see that.”
Her solution? “This is where I think we in Congress need to make sure that not only are we keeping the executive in check, but that we are doing our job. We’re doing what the constitution requires of us.”
Murkowski pointed to two opportunities for that oversight: a vote that could happen this week on a war powers resolution to restrict Trump’s ability to further bomb Iran, and, separately, on a White House proposal to slash $9.4bn in funds appropriated for foreign aid programs and public broadcasters. After Trump ordered airstrikes against Tehran’s nuclear program over the weekend, Murkowski wrote: “We must remember that Congress alone holds the constitutional power to authorize war.”
Much of the Senate’s focus right now is being taken up by negotiations over the “one big beautiful bill”, Trump and the Republicans’ marquee legislation that would extend tax cuts, create new ones and fund ramped-up immigration enforcement, while slashing the social safety net and sunsetting clean energy tax credits created under Biden.
The latter was intended to address the climate crisis, which Murkowski views as a threat to her state – she even begins her book with a visit to Newtok, an Alaskan village being swallowed by climate crisis-driven erosion. In April, she was one of four Republican senators to sign a letter opposing the “full-scale repeal” of the tax credits. (She declined to say how she would vote on the bill.)
Trump is pushing for it to reach his desk by the Fourth of July Independence Day holiday, but Murkowski described that demand as unrealistic. The peril, she said, was passing an imperfect bill that sets the public against the GOP – and leads to them losing their congressional majorities in next year’s midterm elections.
“It’s all about making sure that we’ve got the best policy, not for Republicans, not for Democrats, but the best policy for the people in this country,” Murkowski said. “And if we take the time to do that and deliver that, not necessarily tie ourselves to an arbitrary date to just get there as quickly as we can, but so that we can actually deliver good policy, I think then that’s rewarded by the voters when they feel that you did the work of the people.”
