There Is Nothing for You Here, page 25
The day before I was to start my new job, my daughter came down with one of those short, sharp stomach bugs that has you gripping the porcelain for twenty-four hours. At one point she had thrown up on me. Late at night I went out to grab some Gatorade and other supplies for her from a local pharmacy. In the dark, I bashed myself in the face with the door to the car trunk, cutting and bruising the side of my right eye. By the time the morning came around, I hadn’t had a wink of sleep and was completely exhausted. I consoled myself that I would be in an orientation session and security briefings and wouldn’t, hopefully, have to do too much more than endure.
In my befuddlement, I left my work shoes in a bag by the door as I laced up my sneakers to dash to the Metro. Partway through the orientation session, someone came to pull me out. General McMaster needed me to go with him to the Oval Office to brief the president on the terrorist attack on the St. Petersburg Metro. Trump was going to make a condolence call to President Putin.
What terrorist attack? I was completely out of the loop. With everything going on at home, I had not checked the news. I had been locked in a room since I got in the White House. A staffer from General McMaster’s office gave me a quick rundown. There was no time for anything more.
I racked my brains for something to say—there had previously been attacks on the Moscow Metro, but this was a first for St. Petersburg. It was Putin’s hometown, so he would take the attack personally. I would keep whatever I said simple and straightforward; it wasn’t as if I had much more information to impart anyway.
I only fully processed that I was wearing sneakers as I was running over to the West Wing. It was too late to find a pair of shoes. For his part, McMaster was unperturbed. This was a man who had presided over a significant tank battle in Iraq and was now contending with political firefights in the White House. Women in sneakers were the least of his problems. He just told me to stick close to him and make sure, when we sat down, that my feet were out of the president’s sightline, either under my chair or pressed against the Resolute Desk.
President Trump didn’t even look up when we came in. He was scribbling something with a Sharpie on a piece of paper on the desk. He had his arm around it, so I couldn’t see what it was. I presumed some notes to prepare for the call.
General McMaster made a brief introduction and turned to me for my quick summary about the significance of the attack. Still no acknowledgment. Zero interest in who had come in with his national security adviser. As Trump picked up the phone and made the call, his gaze flicked across us for a moment. I barely registered. He relayed his condolences to Putin, noting how personal this must be for him—the first terrorist attack on his home city. Small victory for my point. And that was that.
We were about to get up to go when the president’s daughter Ivanka wafted into the room wearing an elaborately lacy two-piece white outfit and alarmingly high stiletto heels, as if she were off to a gala rather than another day at the office. Ivanka sat down right beside me, immediately taking in my black sneakers, which I had failed to conceal under the chair, and flashing me a look of surprise.
I was busted. During a break in the afternoon, I went out to buy a pair of shoes to keep in my office at all times. Yet again my wardrobe was going to be an issue—and a potential impediment to doing my job. By now, at least, I was not completely surprised.
After my failure to imprint on the first day, K. T. made a valiant attempt to reintroduce me to the president a week or so later. Again it fell totally flat.
The president was slated to sign a treaty formally approving the accession of the Balkan country of Montenegro to NATO. I had no role in this achievement and had merely inherited the end result as part of my portfolio. Nonetheless, K. T. and I and the NSC staff who had worked on the accession were to stand beside Trump as he affixed his signature to the official document. There would be a photograph. It was a historic moment for Montenegro and NATO.
K. T. bustled me into the office slightly ahead of the rest of the group. Trump was wrapping up a meeting with some of his cabinet members, who were sitting on the two sofas and a row of chairs in front of the desk. The room felt very full. All eyes were on us. What did we want?
Taking it all in her stride, K. T. drew me to the side of the Resolute Desk. “Mr. President, this is Dr. Fiona Hill, your new Russia adviser. She’s written the best book on Putin.”
Now Trump looked at me, but not with much interest. “Rex is doing Russia,” he said pointedly. Rex Tillerson, the former CEO of ExxonMobil and new secretary of state, gave me a slight smile. We had met in passing at a conference. “He’s done billion-dollar energy deals with Putin,” said the president. “So what do you think, is he a nice man, Putin? Am I going to like him?” I never got to respond, as the cabinet members got up to leave. The rest of the group was ushered in for the photo.
The absurdity of the situation, and the president’s dim view of me, quickly sank in. Just who was I? Who made me an expert on Putin? What could I possibly have to say? I had written a book. “Rex” had been in charge of the world’s largest oil company, in action, doing deals in Russia and all around the world. Trump wanted to do a deal with the Russians too—on nuclear weapons and arms control. Who was he going to listen to, Rex or some woman?
It turned out that Trump was genuinely fixated on arms control and the unfinished business of the U.S.-Soviet negotiations conducted by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev in the 1980s after the Euromissile war scare. This was the very issue that had drawn me into studying Russian in 1984, and the 1988 Gorbachev-Reagan summit had started me off on my American journey. K. T., General Kellogg, and I had talked about the president’s interest in our early discussions. Trump wanted his moment alone with Putin to work his deal-making magic. They had thought I could help to put things in context, given my direct experiences and insights into both Russia and Putin since the 1980s. But judging from that encounter in the Oval, Trump was not going to be receptive.
Eighties Man
The Trump White House was a man’s world—predominantly one man’s world—and Trump was a very familiar type for me. In many respects he was not that much of a surprise in the way that he acted and interacted with people, apart from the fact that he was the American president. He was definitely and unabashedly a 1980s man in his approach to life and politics.
Being an eighties man was something that Donald Trump talked about in meetings, as he constantly referred back to the era. Having been born right after the Second World War, in 1946, as part of the baby boomer generation, Trump had been in his thirties and forties in the 1980s. He was hitting both his stride and his peak. The 1980s were the period when he fully emerged into the national and international spotlight as a celebrity businessman with presidential aspirations, drawing attention to himself in magazine interviews and with paid advertisements in major U.S. newspapers that offered his political pronouncements on domestic and foreign affairs.
I might have been in the North East of England and at St. Andrews in that period, but I hadn’t been living under a rock. I knew exactly who Donald Trump was. I had read about him for years as well as watched him on TV—in cameos in movies like Home Alone 2 and later on The Apprentice. What did surprise me in real life was that he hadn’t really changed his worldview since the 1980s, even after all the things that had happened in the years since.
Nearly two decades into the twenty-first century, Trump remained obsessed with the various challenges to America’s power that had begun in the 1980s—the military competition with the Soviet Union and the economic rise of Asian countries, first Japan and now China. He was also steeped in the era’s debates over the merits of free markets and global trade versus protectionism. Trump definitely came down on the side of protectionism. In addition to being an eighties man, he referred to himself as “Tariff Man.” Trump wanted to slap tariffs on everything from Chinese steel to German cars, theoretically at least, to boost U.S. industry. He often commented in meetings on how long he had been waiting to do this.
Back in the 1980s, Trump had proffered himself as Reagan’s arms control negotiator in magazine interviews. He had bragged that he could easily reach a deal if he just got the chance to sit down with Gorbachev. In 1990 he told Playboy Magazine that nuclear war was the “ultimate catastrophe” and he personally wanted to do something about it. He had been sixteen during the trauma of the Cuban missile crisis in the 1960s and had then had to contemplate the rerun of a war scare in the 1980s. Trump had an uncle who was a nuclear physicist at MIT, so by some process of family and genetic osmosis, he believed he already fully understood the issue. And he was convinced that his business experience and personal charisma would sway Gorbachev and any subsequent Soviet or Russian leader into agreeing to reduce or even eliminate weapons. During a visit by Mikhail Gorbachev to New York in 1988, Trump made a well-documented but fruitless effort to secure a meeting.
Now that he was president, Trump saw his chance to finish off the 1980s. He would sit down with Putin and finally conclude the elusive big U.S.-Russian arms control deal. Although journalists and other commentators focused more on Trump’s ripping up international deals, especially those that former U.S. presidents like Barack Obama had made, Trump really wanted to put his personal stamp on this one. In meetings with other world leaders, he would stress his view that nuclear weapons were the critical global security issue, surpassing climate change and everything else on the list of official talking points. This also framed his particular interests in Iran and North Korea during his tenure.
I obviously had some sympathy for President Trump’s views on nuclear war and his desire to conclude an arms control deal, given my own preoccupations with the threat in my teenage years. I too was shaped by the events of the 1980s and the policies of its leaders, although more directly, of course, by Margaret Thatcher than by Ronald Reagan.
The shadows of Thatcher and Reagan loomed especially large in the Trump White House. Both had believed in strong executive power and in the authority of the executive, the leader at the top. Donald Trump believed in this too. The 1980s had marked the loss of faith in the state in both the UK and the U.S. and the search for a one-off leader to fill in the gap. The 1980s thus helped set the stage for the style of leadership that Trump embraced for himself when he won the presidential race in 2016. The 1980s were the “me, me, me” era. They were in many respects already verging toward the hyper-personalized. Trump became the extreme example of this three decades later.
As far as I could see, though, in my direct encounters, Trump was weaker in character than Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Reagan had had a sunnier, more optimistic, can-do disposition. Thatcher had had an iron will and unwavering principles. Trump was individualistic to the point of being obsessed—first with himself and then with his family, which, of course, is just an extension of self. Trump was selfish to his core and had the most fragile ego of anyone I had encountered to date. Everything and everyone was seen through his eyes in terms of how their interactions reflected on him and what they said about him. I didn’t make this harsh assessment ahead of time, but it became glaringly obvious seeing him in action and through discussions with other NSC staff and White House officials.
The Secretary
My next encounter with the president came on May 2, 2017. It was disastrous. Only a month in, it could easily have marked the end of my tenure at the NSC. I fully anticipated being sacked in the aftermath and joining the roster of officials who were removed in those early days and throughout Trump’s presidency with increasing alacrity.
The occasion was another scheduled call with Putin. In those days Trump took his calls from the Resolute Desk. Later he would do many alone from his residence in the White House. There was a lot of jostling by cabinet officials as well as other senior directors and West Wing officials to get into the Oval for these early calls, hoping to catch the president afterward to press their personal agendas. It made it challenging for those of us who actually needed to be close to the action.
Syria and its ongoing civil war were the primary focus for this call. On April 7, in my very first week on the job, the president had ordered retaliatory U.S. missile strikes against a Syrian military airbase after the government launched a chemical weapons attack against civilians in opposition-held towns. Russia had intervened in the civil war in 2015 in support of Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad and was clearly not happy with the U.S. action. There had been some tense public exchanges in the interim, but this would be the first direct contact between the American and Russia presidents since the missile strike.
The NSC staff had prepared talking points and a bland prewritten press release referencing the call. One of the Russia directors, Charlie Bergen, was scheduled to accompany me and General McMaster into the Oval, but the two Middle East senior directors, Derek Harvey and Joel Rayburn, pulled rank. They insisted on going and wanted to take the lead. Charlie was pushed off into a listening room elsewhere in the West Wing complex. Only I made it into Trump’s presence.
When we got into the office, Rex Tillerson and his chief of staff, Margaret Peterlin, were already there. The secretary of state was sitting in one of two chairs right in front of the Resolute Desk, and Margaret was discreetly off to one side. McMaster took the other chair. Derek and Joel pressed ahead of me to take two other strategically placed chairs behind them. I was left wondering where to place myself when Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, came in and sat down on one of the sofas.
I was surprised, and a bit thrown off. Ivanka and Jared were both senior advisers, but I had had no idea they would be sitting in on the Putin call. It wasn’t exactly their remit, but obviously this call was going to be a family affair. I quickly sat on the other sofa, opposite them and alongside Steve Charon, the staffer from the Executive Secretariat who was managing and patching the phone call through the White House Situation Room as well as liaising with the State Department interpreter and the Russians on the other end.
This was generally not a good day for me. Less than a week before the call, I had developed an infection. My doctor put me on a short course of antibiotics. I had a reaction to the medication and was feeling particularly unwell—slightly dizzy and nauseous, with a pounding headache. Again, however, the president took little notice of me, or anyone else for that matter. He was completely uninterested in the meeting preparation. He just wanted to get on with the call and speak to Putin.
I figured I should concentrate on keeping myself together and taking good notes: listening carefully to what Putin had to say and how he was saying it and how the whole conversation was being translated on both sides. After years of observing Putin and studying Russian, I knew how deliberate he was in his speech and the way he presented things. I was the only Russian-speaker in the room. Surely the president and others might be interested in discussing what Putin was emphasizing. Was there something missing in the moment from the translation? And what in particular should I follow up on afterward with General McMaster? I was completely overthinking everything.
The call began. The president was listening on his phone, with the rest of us on speakerphone. The volume was soft. It was hard to hear. I was straining to catch everything, my headache increasing in intensity. I scribbled notes to myself of pertinent things to flag for the others. Then it was over. President Trump professed great satisfaction with the call. It was good—good tone, good vibe. Putin seemed calm, measured, friendly even. Ivanka and Jared concurred. I was not so sure. That might be the impression from the translator and the translation, yes, but I had detected more menace in what Putin had to say. There were some issues that we should pay attention to. I was gathering my thoughts as best I could through my headache to interject, but the president was now busy with the press release. He didn’t want to discuss the call, even with Tillerson and McMaster. He had no interest in the substance at all, just the fact that he had a “good” call with Putin and that Ivanka and Jared had agreed. The whole thing was slightly surreal.
Then Trump wanted to rewrite the press release in his own words. He was dictating some changes. I didn’t have a copy. My colleague, Charlie, had all the prep materials and he was in the listening room. I didn’t know the drill. There had been no prior discussion on how things might unfold in the Oval and who would do what.
There was an exchange between the president and McMaster that I didn’t catch. Then the president raised his voice: “Well, can she do it? Can she go type it up and bring it back?” She? I thought. What? What just happened? Only then did I realize Trump was talking about me. “She” could only be me. There were three shes in the room, and the she in question was certainly not Ivanka and unlikely to be Margaret Peterlin. Suddenly he was practically yelling— “Hey, darlin’, are you listening? Are you paying attention?”
I looked up. I actually wasn’t. Classic deer-in-the-headlights moment. No one said anything. McMaster and Tillerson were both looking at me directly. Derek and Joel were glaring. Margaret was examining her shoes. I did not make eye contact with Ivanka and Jared, but I could tell they were also staring at me. The president clearly thought I was part of the Executive Secretariat, and in fact I was sitting next to Steve Charon beside the phone, so it was an easy mistake. He wanted me to type up the revised press release.
I hesitated just a little too long. I thought at least someone might tell him who I was, introduce me again, or even help me out a bit with the next steps. McMaster was now holding out the press release with the president’s edits all over it. I jumped up, grabbing my notebook and my pens, and took the paper. I hadn’t prepared the press release. I had had no idea I would be asked to do this. I was still finding my way around and figuring things out. I didn’t have enough information or experience in that moment to be creative. What was I supposed to do? Where was I supposed to type it? Charlie would have known what to do, but he was somewhere else in the building. I could see the president’s executive assistant, Madeleine Westerhout, at her desk just outside the Oval. I hadn’t met her, but perhaps she could help. I dashed into her office. She was friendly and offered her computer. I didn’t know where to find the file. Neither did she. Now what?
